Extinction Game (16 page)

‘And does Bramnik know this goes on?’ I asked.

‘Almost certainly,’ said Nadia. ‘Although he seems to prefer to turn a blind eye.’

‘So who gets the contraband?’ I asked. ‘And what does Wallace get back?’

Nadia grinned lasciviously. ‘Let’s just say there’s a couple of women among Bramnik’s staff who don’t mind granting certain
favours
in return for the right
goods.’

‘So Wallace was . . .’

‘Yeah.’ She nodded, then twisted around to regard Oskar. ‘And not just Wallace.’

I glanced back at Oskar and saw the smirk vanish from his face. He peered out of the window as if he had developed a sudden deep fascination with our surroundings.

‘What kind of items?’ I asked.

‘Whisky – certainly not the home-brew variety Yuichi comes up with,’ she said. ‘Cigars, some electronic goods. Stuff like that, all from alternates we’ve been
exploring.’

‘But surely they can get those things themselves back on the Authority’s own alternate?’ I asked.

‘Apparently not, if the girls on Bramnik’s staff are prepared to put out for it,’ said Nadia. ‘Makes you wonder just what it’s like over on their own alternate,
doesn’t it?’

Nadia guided the vehicle down an incline below the ruined bridge, our passage raising a high plume of water as the SUV made its way across the shallow water. Then she steered up the other bank
and back onto the road on the far side of the motorway bridge.

Up ahead, Casey gunned his engine, and his SUV shot forward, bouncing as it climbed onto a road. He put his arm out the window and gave us the finger. Beside me, I saw Nadia’s mouth
tighten, while Oskar giggled from the rear.

‘Fucking asshole,’ muttered Nadia.

Up ahead, the other SUV had almost vanished from sight. They were headed east, us to the west.

‘This is the first I heard of any of this,’ I said.

‘Greenbrooke tried to force a crackdown. Bramnik got Wallace released in short order following his arrest, but by the time we got him back, it was clear that the Patriots had banged him up
pretty good. Wallace claimed he’d been tortured.’

I stared at her, aghast. ‘
Tortured
him? For what, stealing a couple of bottles of booze?’

‘Not quite.’ Nadia shook her head. ‘Some alternates we visit are more technologically developed than the ones most of us come from. That means there’s all kinds of
advanced technology just lying around, asking to be taken. That’s what the Patriots accused him of trying to smuggle back to the island. To be honest, they’re not entirely wrong in
wanting to stamp on it. Sometimes you can’t be sure what’s safe to bring back, and what isn’t. Depending on where you’re going or where you’ve been, sometimes
there’s a strict quarantine procedure, and that covers more than just technology.’ She glanced at me as she drove. ‘As you know.’

‘And he does this kind of thing a lot?’

‘The man has sticky fingers,’ Nadia replied. ‘I don’t know if it’s kleptomania or the expression of some childhood trauma, but try not to leave anything lying
around where he can grab it.’

‘So whatever they did to him, it was bad enough to turn him into an alcoholic?’

She shrugged. ‘He was on that road anyway. I think they just hurried him along a little bit.’ She pulled up at an intersection. I saw a row of shops with apartments above, their
windows smashed and open to the elements. The wind sighed around us.

Nadia handed me the map. ‘Here. You’re the navigator.’

‘Sure.’ I tried not to show how nervous I really was.

We drove on through deserted streets and across cracked and overgrown tarmac for another twenty minutes, while I told Nadia where to take each turn as we followed the strange,
zigzagging routes through the city.

By now we were close enough to the first Hive that I could see just how rough edged and patchy looking its exterior really was. What on Earth, I wondered, lay within? Did people live in there?
Or something else?

‘These people,’ I asked. ‘The bee-brains. Do they still look like human beings?’

‘Pretty much,’ she said, looking distracted as she peered ahead, slowing a little as we reached another intersection. ‘Okay, we’re still where we’re supposed to be.
That’s all well and good.’

I glanced at a street sign in Portuguese, then thought I saw something moving up at the next intersection. I told Nadia, and she pulled to a stop, before taking a pair of binoculars from the
dashboard and peering ahead.

‘Trouble?’ asked Oskar.

‘Probably not,’ said Nadia. ‘I don’t see anything, so might just have been a lone . . . wait, no. I see them now. Hoo boy. A lot of them, too.’

I licked suddenly dry lips. ‘What do we do? Take a different route?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. Long as we keep our distance, they’re going to act like they don’t even know we’re here.’ She put the binoculars back
down. ‘But we might have to wait a little while until they’ve passed through.’

‘What are they doing?’

‘Fixing that thing up,’ she said, nodding through the windscreen at the Hive. ‘It’s built out of scraps of stuff from all over. You can see bee-brains hammering buildings
apart all over the place. Best thing to do is wait until they’re gone, like I said. Here,’ she said, handing me the binoculars. ‘Look and learn.’

I lifted them to my eyes and saw maybe a couple of dozen bedraggled-looking figures making their way across the intersection ahead. The majority were naked or wore rags that barely clung to
their flesh. There were men and women of all ages, but no children. Every one of them was carrying something – bricks, or bits of rubble, and in some cases what looked to me like crude
home-made tools. Any one of them could have glanced up and seen us immediately, less than a few dozen metres farther down the road. None of them did. They looked, I thought, like people walking in
their sleep.

‘Do they know what they’re doing?’ I asked. ‘I mean, are they consciously aware?’

She shook her head. ‘Not according to Winifred, no. She’s the expert on this stuff.’

‘They’re not really human,’ said Oskar from behind me. ‘There’s a reason they’re called bee-brains. Don’t get any ideas that you can communicate with
them in any way. They can get pretty vicious at close enough range.’

A breeze stirred the air outside, and a few of the creatures came to a stumbling halt. One thickset fellow, his filthy face partly shrouded by a scraggly tangle of hair, looked up and towards
us, then staggered in our direction a few paces before coming to a halt. His eyes were black, with hardly any white showing, every trace of humanity gone.

‘Let me see that,’ said Nadia, snatching the binoculars back. She stared silently ahead for several seconds. One or two other bee-brains had also come to a halt, swaying their heads
as if they were sniffing at the air.

The breeze died down. All of a sudden they appeared to lose interest in us and began to shuffle off after the rest.

‘Well,’ said Nadia, lowering the glasses from her face, ‘if that ain’t a first. Did you see that, Oskar?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It was almost like they were looking our way.’

‘Could be coincidence,’ she said. ‘Them being completely brain dead and all.’

‘They don’t
look
that dangerous,’ I said.

‘There are three of us,’ said Nadia, ‘and a couple billion of them scattered all over this alternate. That means they win any fight by a knockout, even before they get in the
ring.’

The last of the bee-brains moved out of sight. I felt my skin prickle at the thought of the people those strange, shambling figures had once been. I felt the irrational urge to breathe
shallowly, as if it might protect me from a whole cornucopia of imagined airborne infections.

‘Here we go,’ said Nadia, putting the SUV into first gear. We trundled slowly forwards and across the now deserted intersection.

Nadia pulled a walkie-talkie out of the glove compartment and handed it back to Oskar. ‘Check in with Casey and the rest,’ she said. ‘See about getting an update from base
camp, see if the recon drones have spotted anything unusual. I don’t like the way those bee-brains were acting.’

I studied the map while Nadia navigated us past a number of abandoned vehicles blocking the road, before we accelerated towards an on-ramp that linked to an elevated motorway. Soon, we rose
above the dark waters of a river that cut through the heart of the city. She slowed as we approached a row of vehicles that looked to have been arranged in a deliberate barricade across the
motorway, carefully edging the SUV between an overturned bus and the edge of the bridge. I caught sight again of the river below, which, according to the map spread across my knees, was called the
Pinheiros.

‘Hey,’ said Oskar from behind me, jiggling the walkie-talkie. ‘I’ve been trying to get through, but I can’t.’

‘Not at all?’ asked Nadia.

‘Nope.’ He turned the walkie-talkie upside down and poked at its battery compartment. ‘Don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Maybe there’s some kind of
interference.’

‘Christ,’ muttered Nadia. ‘Last thing we need is yet more problems.’

‘Problems?’ I asked. ‘Why do you people never talk about anything but things going wrong?’

Nadia pursed her lips and didn’t answer, which worried me even more.

Just past its apex, the elevated motorway was level with the upper floors of a multi-storey car park. Once we were past the blockade, I saw with a start that the building was crowded with
thousands of figures milling around within.

I craned my neck to get a better look as we accelerated away from the barricade, seeing a mob of several dozen bee-brains working together to roll a single, huge lump of concrete and steel off
the edge of a parapet. A car followed just moments later from the next storey up, and I watched as the rusted wreck went tumbling out of sight. Then the building was gone, lost in the distance
behind us.

Nadia guided us towards an off-ramp leading down to the city on the far side of the river. I caught sight of hundreds more bee-brains forming a long, twisting column that wound through streets
and across intersections. It looked as if its point of origin was the nearby Hive.

I felt sickened but also awed by everything I had so far witnessed. I trembled at the thought of all those people – former people, at any rate – crammed together inside that vast
structure. I fought back a horrible image of being carried, kicking and screaming, deep within the Hive’s vast maw . . .

I pressed one hand against the dashboard in front of me, tasting sour bile at the back of my throat. My heart thudded spasmodically inside my chest.

‘You okay?’ asked Nadia.

‘I’m fine.’

She gave me a look as if she knew exactly what was going through my mind.

‘I think we should take a vote,’ she said suddenly. ‘We’re out of touch with the other team and we got unexpected attention from the locals. Do we keep going or
not?’

‘Turn back,’ said Oskar without hesitation. ‘I’ve been having a bad feeling about this trip right from the start.’

‘Is that what you want to do?’ I asked Nadia. ‘Turn back?’

‘I’m just saying that having your communications conk out on you is far from being a good thing. And I’ve never seen or heard of the bee-brains reacting like they just
did.’

‘I thought there was a risk of attack if we got too close to them. Wouldn’t that explain it?’

‘We weren’t close enough to trigger a reaction,’ she said, looking at me. ‘At least, not based on previous experience.’

‘Maybe it should be your decision,’ I said. ‘You’re in charge, right?’

She nodded. ‘I am. But that doesn’t mean neither of you get a say in the matter. We’re a democracy in here.’

‘You still have the aerial reconnaissance?’ I asked, meaning the drones.

‘They’re no use to us,’ snapped Oskar. ‘All the data in the world isn’t any use unless we can talk to base to get that airborne intel. You see?’

‘But
they
can still see where we are, using the drones, even if we can’t talk to them, right?’ I asked.

‘That’s still no—’ Oskar began.

‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Nadia said suddenly, and quickly pulled up by the side of the motorway, just past the exit sign for the off-ramp. ‘Oskar,’ she said,
pushing open the door on her side and climbing out, ‘dig out the flares, will you?’

Oskar reached around into the rear compartment of the SUV, unzipping one of the numerous large canvas bags there. He rummaged around inside, then pulled out a flare pistol along with several
flares of different colours. He pushed his door open and passed it all out to Nadia.

I got out as well, too full of nervous energy to sit in the car one moment longer than I had to. I stepped over to the rail at the side of the off-ramp and peered down at the conga line of
former humanity snaking through distant streets. Even from a couple of kilometres distance, I could hear the massed shuffling of their feet.

I looked back, in the direction of the multi-storey car park. I could make out the distant echo of hundreds of crude tools hammering at its walls.

I turned back to see Nadia load a flare into the gun before aiming straight up and pulling the trigger. The flare shot high into the air, then exploded into a tiny white star, drifting in the
wind before quickly fading.

‘Remember your training?’ Nadia asked, stepping back over to me.

‘A white flare means our comms are down, but we’re otherwise fine,’ I replied.

‘Very good.’ She nodded. ‘You
were
listening. Now all we have to do is wait and see if they send up an orange flare. If it’s orange, we turn around and head on
home. White means we keep going.’

‘What do you think it’ll be?’ I asked.

‘White,’ she said immediately. ‘I don’t have any doubts about that, not unless something’s seriously wrong.’

She glanced to the south, and I followed her gaze to see a second white flare rise above the dark green foliage, on the far side of the wrecked bridge and the reservoir.

Oskar snarled something I couldn’t make out, and pulled his head back inside the car.