Dead Man Running (18 page)

Birds weren't the only stuffed animals lurking in the plastic jungle, he saw. A troop of monkeys hung from the trees and a silverback gorilla was hunched in the gloom, its jaws frozen open in a silent scream. This exhibit must have been designed to mimic the extinct flora and fauna of central Africa.

Unnerved by the glass eyes of the animals, Six crossed the rest of the bridge quickly. The wall on the far side of the room was daubed in camouflage-green paint. It took Six a moment to find the double doors that led to the next room. He twisted the handles and pushed through.

There was almost no light in here. All Six could see were dim red outlines, which vanished and reappeared every few seconds as the hidden light source flicked on and off. Six crept forwards, hands outstretched so as not to bump into anything.

‘Ten?' he called.

Silence. And then a distant moan.

Six strained his ears against the void. Had that been Ten? Or the undead, who might be shambling through the darkness towards him right now?

He kept moving.

One of the outlines seemed to be a table. As Six got closer, he felt his way across it and found a number of heavy objects – hammers, saws and a power drill. Not a table, then. A workbench.

Another moan. Nearer now – had Six moved closer to the source, or had it moved closer to him?

He could now see the blinking light. It was a button on the wall, possibly a light switch. If he used it, he might be able to see. But anything else that was in here would be able to see him, too.

There was a crashing sound from somewhere else in the base. The Revived were coming. He didn't have time to fumble aimlessly through the darkness. He hit the switch. The lights clicked on. It took Six's eyes a split second to adjust, and then he gasped.

Ten was strapped to a table, arms and legs spread-eagled like da Vinci's
Man
. The table was encrusted with dried blood. Neat rows of puncture wounds lined his forearms, biceps, calves and one of his thighs. The wounds had all been cauterised into dark scabs of scar tissue.

Six turned back to look at the workbench. The power drill was spattered with blood. Lerke – or someone working for him – had been using it to drill holes in Ten's limbs.

‘Six,' Ten whispered. His face was pale and waxy. ‘Is that you?'

Six started unbuckling the straps. ‘What was he trying to do to you?'

‘Wanted to know about security,' Ten said. ‘At the Deck.'

Torture, Six thought. ‘What did you tell him?'

Ten gritted his teeth. ‘Nothing.'

‘Not bad work, Agent Ten,' Six said, trying not to show how worried he was. Could Ten survive injuries like this? Could anyone? He popped the last buckle and stepped back. ‘Can you walk?'

Ten groaned as he pulled himself into a sitting position. He put his feet on the ground and winced. ‘I can stagger,' he said.

‘No time for that,' Six said. ‘I'll have to carry you.'

‘Why don't we have time?'

‘Because in eight minutes the Deck is going to blow this place up.'

‘Why would –' Ten stared. ‘Why are you holding a severed head?'

‘Best weapon I could find,' Six said. ‘Let's go.'

He heaved Ten over his shoulder like a rolled-up carpet and ran back towards the door.

The jungle was as still and silent as before. Six carried Ten through the trees, towards the bridge –

And then he saw that there was no bridge. The river was gone too – chunks of glass and shattered wood lay on the floor below.

Six remembered the crash he'd heard. Had the Revived done this?

An ear-splitting roar exploded out of the darkness.

‘What the hell was that?' Ten hissed.

‘Trouble,' Six said.

There was a silhouette slouching through the gloom of the river bed. Something big. Something enormous.

If Lerke could reanimate the dead, Six thought, why would he stick only to humans?

The gorilla looked up at him. Its glass eyes glowed red. Six could faintly see the camera lenses behind them, spinning as they zoomed in on him. Could he outrun a charging gorilla? Maybe. Could he do it while carrying Ten? Definitely not.

‘There's a door,' he said, putting Ten on the ground. ‘On the other side of this room. Go through it and wait for me. I'll keep the gorilla busy.'

‘Are you crazy?' Ten demanded. ‘That thing's huge!'

The gorilla roared again, exposing teeth like ice picks.

‘Go!' Six shouted, and threw himself into the abyss.

CONVERGENCE

Six had read somewhere that the best way to survive a gorilla attack was to adopt a submissive posture – stay low, avoid eye contact, keep your head bowed. If the gorilla came within reach, stroke its fur, as though looking for nits.

But this wasn't a gorilla. This was a robot in a gorilla's body. Six didn't know what it had been programmed to do, but he doubted that grooming would stop it. Right now, it was unnaturally still, crouched on the fake river bed like an exhibit. Its massive domed skull was tilted towards Six as though it was preparing to headbutt him.

Six's heart was pounding. Maybe it's been switched off, he thought. Maybe someone –

The gorilla exploded into motion, charging at Six like a train which had skipped the rails. Its gigantic hands thumped against the floor as it ran.

Six stayed in a crouch. He had to dive out of the way, but if he moved too early, the gorilla could change its trajectory and crush him.

It was less than a metre away from him when he launched himself sideways. He rolled with the impact as he landed and felt an enormous hand swipe at his foot – but he was clear. The gorilla hadn't been able to grab him.

He scrambled to his feet and turned to face the beast again. It was bashing its fists against the ground in blind fury as it turned its head from side to side, looking for Six. Clearly some of its animal instincts were intact.

‘Hey!' Six yelled. He couldn't let the gorilla spot Ten, who wouldn't be able to outrun it. ‘I'm over here!'

The gorilla whirled around and snorted like an enraged bull.

‘Come and get me!' Six said. He could hear his voice wobbling with fear, but he thought that didn't matter, as long as he was making noise.

The gorilla charged again. A tonne of muscle hurtled towards Six.

This time he jumped straight up. His feet came perilously close to the monster's snapping jaws before he landed on its back. He gripped the fur between its shoulderblades with one hand and used the other to bash the severed head against the back of the gorilla's skull as hard as he could, over and over again.

The gorilla bellowed, but the sound was angry rather than pained. It twisted one of its arms backwards, trying to grab Six. Six ducked out of reach and kept whacking at the gorilla's head.

Crack!
For a moment Six thought he'd successfully fractured the gorilla's skull – then he saw that the brow of the human head had caved in.

There goes my only weapon, he thought.

The gorilla crouched on all fours and shook itself like a wet rottweiler. Six lost his grip on its fur and was thrown into the trees.

One of the branches hit him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him and reopening his wounds. He grabbed at the branch before he could fall back into the river bed and lifted himself up onto it.

Looking around, Six couldn't see Ten anywhere. He must have made it to the engine room.

He's safe, Six thought. For the next four minutes, anyway. But what's going to happen to me?

The gorilla spotted Six in the tree and thudded its fists against its chest. Soon it was bounding towards the base and Six was clambering desperately towards the ceiling.

He felt the tree shake as the gorilla hit it and started climbing. Six was very nimble, but with his wounded hand and bleeding chest, he had no hope of staying out of the gorilla's reach for long.

But he didn't need to. There was something up above that could save him, if only he could get high enough. Branch after branch wobbled in his grip. He was now six or seven metres above the river bed and the broken glass – if he fell, he was dead. He'd never recover in time to stop the gorilla from pulverising him.

A roar from below told him that the monster was gaining on him. Six looked up. He was getting closer and closer to the light of the false moon. Four more branches and he would make it. He jumped from one, gripped the next. One of the stuffed monkeys leered at him from a nearby clump of leaves.

The tree trunk was starting to sway. It wasn't built to hold the gorilla's weight. The higher the beast got, the more likely the tree was to topple.

Just a little further! Six thought.

He grabbed another branch, lifted himself, and reached up towards the shining spotlight which represented the moon. He could hear the gorilla snuffling and feel its cold breath on his ankle.

Six grabbed the power cable leading to the spotlight. His plan had been to strip the wires, tear one end loose and stab the gorilla with the electrified copper. But there was no time. The gorilla was right behind him.

As its giant hand closed around his leg, Six sank his teeth into the power cable. The electricity exploded inside his skull like a hand grenade. The startled shrieking of the gorilla was drowned out by a buzzing in his ears. It felt like wasps were trapped under his eardrums. His jaw tightened involuntarily around the cable as the shock wreaked havoc on his reflexes.

Intense as the pain was, the gorilla was more affected than he was by the current. Six had no electronic components to fry. The gorilla's hand was crushing his calf muscle against the bone, apparently unable to let go. Six could smell its fur starting to smoulder.

The spotlight flickered and died as the circuit-breaker tripped. The gorilla let go of him and plummeted to the floor, where it hit the ground with a tremendous
boom
. Six regained motor control just quickly enough to grab one of the branches and swing from it.

There was no time to rest. Three minutes until the bomb landed.

‘What's in there?' Ten demanded, pointing at the door tied closed with the fire blanket. Something was still banging on it from the other side.

‘Undead soldiers,' Six said. He picked up one of the detonate-on-impact sleeves and started carefully sliding the lump of C-4 into it.

One of his hands wasn't working properly. Every time he tried to close it into a fist, his fingers would stop halfway, as though there were an invisible stress-ball in his grasp. Nerve damage from the electricity, he guessed. Probably permanent. No time to worry about it now.

‘So we're trapped,' Ten was saying.

‘Not for long,' Six said, holding up the bomb.

Ten's eyes widened. ‘We can't blast our way out! We'll drown!'

‘We're not blasting our way out of the facility,' Six said. He peered down into the pit where the seismic sensor would be. ‘We're blasting the facility out of the way of the Deck's bomb.'

‘
That
bomb,' Ten said, pointing at the C-4, ‘is nowhere near big enough to move a whole underwater base.'

‘No,' Six agreed. ‘But it's big enough to destroy the foundations and trigger a volcanic eruption.' And he dropped the C-4 into the darkness.

‘What are you doing?' Ten cried, lunging forwards to look into the pit.

Six was already trying to close the lid. It was incredibly heavy. ‘Help me,' he wheezed.

Ten gripped the reinforced lead and heaved. He moaned as the holes in his arms stretched open, starting to bleed again. Between the two of them, they managed to swing it shut. There was an enormous bolt on the side – Six closed it.

‘What do you mean, “volcano”?' Ten asked, panting.

‘That lid,' Six said, ‘is reinforced lead, designed to seal off the tunnel if there's an eruption. There'd be no point having a lid like that if the rest of the base isn't protected, because the lava would just break through the floor. So I figured I could –'

Boom
. The cables rattled against the walls as the C-4 exploded, somewhere far below. Judging by the delay, Six thought, it must have gone off almost two kilometres beneath us.

The battery fizzled as its connection to the seismic sensor was cut off. The lights faded away to nothing.

Ten's voice echoed in the blackness: ‘Now what?'

‘Now nothing,' Six said. ‘We wait.'

‘For a bomb to hit the base from above, or lava to hit it from below?'

‘Whichever comes first,' Six said. ‘Hopefully lava.' He estimated that they had about sixty seconds to go.

There was a flurry of bangs from the door Six had just come in through. He remembered Nai's words –
electric shocks temporarily disable them.

Very temporarily, he thought. That gorilla sounds wide awake.

‘How strong is that door?' Ten asked.

‘Very,' Six said. ‘But that doesn't matter much, since it's not locked.'

‘Let's hope it can't figure out how doorhandles work.'

The gorilla roared outside. It seemed less and less likely to Six that he was going to survive this. An hour ago, he thought, I was in bed. I thought my name was Tom and it was the year 2011. If Lerke hadn't missed the implant in my arm, would I still be there?

He turned to look at Ten. ‘I'm sorry I thought you were a serial killer,' he said.

Ten exhaled. ‘Well, that's my fault. I should have thought about how things would seem to you.'

Bang. Bang.

‘Why did King think you were missing?' Six asked.

‘I
was
missing,' Ten said, ‘as far as he was concerned. My orders came –'

Six interrupted him. ‘I can
see
you,' he said.

Ten was bathed in a soft red glow. ‘Where's the light coming from?' he asked.

Six looked back at the lid over the pit and saw that the metal was now a translucent orange. The lava must be right underneath it.

Harry could feel himself disappearing, large chunks at a time.

The temperature gauges on the fridges had all shorted out in response to an extreme blast of heat. There was no more power replenishing the battery. The hard drive Harry was on was eroding as its circuitry overheated.

He was losing consciousness as his processing power dwindled away. The laptop that had been his prison was melting. But having observed fragments of footage from the facility's security cameras and scraps of data from the facility's radar, Harry was still lucid enough to work out what must have happened.

Agent Six triggered a volcano, he thought. To move the base, before that approaching helicopter arrives.

As a piece of software, Harry did not fear death. He did not feel pain as his wires curled and popped in the flames. There was no sadness in knowing that in mere seconds he would no longer exist.

But just because he had the time, he started performing a final calculation. He compared the heat of the lava to the strength of the floor, and the velocity of the helicopter to the distance it had left to travel. Would Agent Six and his companion survive?

Harry's brain melted before he could find the answer.

‘Uh, Six,' Ten said. ‘It's starting to get warm in here.'

He was right. Sweat was already pouring into Six's eyes. There was nothing in here to protect them from the heat, except maybe the fire blanket. And if he untied that, the undead would flood in.

The red glow was spreading outwards from the lid, illuminating more and more of the metal floor. Defeated by the hatch, the lava was looking for somewhere else to go. Six's bare feet were starting to burn.