Terminal (46 page)

‘Okay,' Jiggs said, lifting the sheet aside. He peeled back a large rectangle of bandage-like material that was across Will's body. There was a massive incision all the way from the boy's breastbone to his midriff, held together with monstrous black stitches that looked as though if you cut them he would simply burst open. And then there were the tubes running from inside the incision.

‘Oh,' Will said. He hadn't expected it to be so dramatic.

‘Yes, and I apologise that the incision isn't neater, but I only had my old pocket knife on me at the time,' Jiggs said.

Will looked up at him, but the man was smiling.

‘Only kidding,' Jiggs laughed. ‘You're going to have one blinder of a scar there to show the girls wh—,' he added, catching himself as he realised how Will must be feeling about Elliott.

Jiggs put the bandage back in place, then laid the sheet over Will again. ‘Actually, old man, you're a bit of a rarity, because as far as we know, nobody else who's been impregnated by the Styx has ever survived.'

‘Why doesn't that make me feel any better?' Will said.

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty-one

^‘
T
here she is! Kill the little bitch!' Hermione screeched, trying to get up at the same time as jabbing one of her pincers in Elliott's direction.

The combination of the ever-burning sun and the incredibly fertile soil at the centre of the world meant that the bare earth in the fields around the tower hadn't remained bare for long. It was covered with a green baize of grass, new shoots and tiny unfurling fronds. And dotted over this, like so many black skittles, the Styx had suddenly appeared when they'd been transported from the surface.

‘Get her!' Hermione yelled. Most of the Styx were completely disoriented and in the same state as she was, falling onto all fours as they'd materialised in a blur of crimson. But it didn't take the resilient and toughened Limiters more than a few seconds to pull themselves together. Many already had their rifles to their shoulders.

They opened fire, the rounds striking the tower around Elliott. She was only too aware that Eddie and his former Limiters would be out there somewhere in the field too. They were hopelessly outnumbered by the other Styx, and obvious targets.

By bringing the trident down on the ground outside St Paul's, not only had Elliott thwarted Hermione's plan to send out the Armagi into the rest of the world, but she'd also passed an effective death sentence on her father. Elliott told herself that she'd had no alternative. And wherever he was in that plain of green, there was absolutely nothing she could do for him right now – she didn't even have her rifle with her.

But it wasn't the only death sentence that Elliott had dished out. Hermione and Rebecca Two, along with every other member of the Styx race, were all going to be dead in a matter of days. None of them had been inoculated against the supervirus that was still present in the inner world.

Straining her eyes as she tried to find her father, Elliott remained in the entrance to the tower, standing there in a shepherd-like pose, the trident resting on the ground by her side.

Although she showed no fear as more rifle shots began to land around her, she wasn't going to push her luck, not while she still had a task she needed to complete.

‘Kill that half-breed!' Hermione wailed again, falling as she tried to run towards the girl.

Elliott merely gave the Styx woman a small bow of the head, then took a step back into the tower. As the door whisked shut, the pile of rocks that Will had thought were a safeguard against it doing precisely that were immediately pulverised.

As Elliott began towards the lift, she took a moment to look around the entrance chamber. After she and Will had gone, the bushman had evidently lingered on in the tower for a while, from the remains of all the fires he'd lit inside it. There were small piles of burnt roots beside which Elliott could see
the husks of locusts and a couple of bird skulls. And some of the New Germanian brothers' equipment was still stacked against the walls, but there was nothing to show that they themselves had been there recently.

The lift took her up the tower, but she had to climb the stairs to reach the very top level. She immediately went to the podium in the middle of the space and stepped up onto it, moving towards the largest plinth in the centre. Taking a quick breath, she held the trident at arm's length, directly over it.

As she lowered the trident and the tip of the shaft made contact with the plinth, she saw concentric ripples spread out across its smooth and very solid surface. The effect was identical to what happens when a stone hits calm water. Elliott blinked, not believing her eyes, but in the next instant something even more outlandish happened. She was forced to let go of the trident altogether, because it was being pulled into the plinth and absorbed back into the fabric of the tower itself. A few moments later, only the prongs of the trident remained, then they too dipped below the surface of the plinth. Elliott touched the plinth, feeling where the trident had vanished, and how the surface was completely solid again.

For a while she stood looking at the plinth and the rest of the level around her, but nothing seemed to be different.

The very first time Elliott had been there, she'd told Will something was wrong, something was missing. Now that the sceptre was finally back where it should be, all her pent-up fatigue hit her. She tried to take a step but her legs buckled and she sagged against the plinth, grabbing it for support.

Elliott had completed the quest that she hadn't understood in the beginning, and that she'd had no option but to
complete. From the moment that she'd initiated the chain of events after touching the trident symbol in the pyramid, the blood she shared with the ancestors of the Styx had seen to that. She'd been under the spell of a genetic behavioural pattern that had removed her free will as surely as if she'd been a robot following its programming.

Programming to find and restore the trident to its rightful place.

Although nothing appeared to have changed inside the tower, there was a change outside it of which Elliott was only too aware. In the huge voids deep in the mantle of the planet – not just the zero-gravity belt that she and her friends had travelled across, but numerous others – the crystal belts had sprung into life. As the spheres in them rotated faster and faster, they gave off an intense light, far brighter than the triboluminescence Dr Burrows had correctly identified.

And they also began to generate enormous amounts of energy.

For these spheres were the source of propulsion that had brought the Earth into orbit around the sun.

Finally, after so very long, they had been activated again.

The insides of the cavities around the spheres glowed with grids of blue light in patterns that only one person in the whole world – Jiggs – had noticed after the nuclear explosion in the pore.

But as if sleeping giants had been roused from their deep slumbers, no human could do anything to stop the spheres' immense power.

And this power was being put to use.

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty-two

T
here were periods of intense activity at the hospital as fleets of vehicles arrived with survivors, most of whom – one of the nurses had told Will – were being treated for malnutrition or exposure. He heard them being wheeled along the corridor outside at all hours of the day, and caught glimpses of the soldiers who seemed to be running everything.

As he recovered from his operation, Will had been quite happy to lie in bed and rest. But during one of the lulls in which there was complete quiet in the place and he'd been staring absently up at the ceiling, he was roused from his torpor. The door to his room nudged open a few inches as if a breeze had swept down the corridor. He kept watching just in case someone was about to come in to visit him. ‘Jiggs – is that you?' he asked, wondering if it was the man with the ability to render himself almost invisible.

But there was no one there, and Will mumbled, ‘I'm going doolally,' feeling rather foolish.

Then the strangest thing happened.

With a scrabbling noise on the lino, a cat's head poked up over Will's feet at the end of the bed.

‘Bartleby!' Will exclaimed, truly believing he was seeing a ghost. The Hunter sniffed inquisitively at him, then put his snout down and began to scamper around the room. The animal was clearly detecting all sorts of new and interesting Topsoil smells that he hadn't encountered before.

‘Not quite,' Mrs Burrows said, as she entered the room with the First Officer in tow. ‘But it is one of his kittens.'

‘Kitten? He's huge!' Will said, beaming at his mother. He was delighted to see her after what felt so long.

‘And how's my son doing?' Mrs Burrows came over to Will and gave him a hug. ‘Jiggs said you're mending well after your op.'

‘Yes, we hear you've had the battle of your lives up here,' the First Officer said, taking Will's hand in his huge ham of a fist and shaking it.

Bartleby Kitten, or just Bartleby, as the First Officer called him because it was easier, immediately took to Will and climbed up on his bed. The Hunter obviously wanted to play, as he rolled on his back and began to cuff Will with his oversized paws.

‘God, it really could be Bartleby,' Will said. ‘He looks identical.' The cat had noticed the translucent tubes poking out from under Will's blanket and was chewing on one of them. ‘No, not that!' Will told the cat quickly, trying to push him away.

Mrs Burrows ushered the kitten off the bed, then began to chat to Will, telling him about how she and the First Officer were spending all their time up in Highfield, where many of the Colonists were helping with a clean-up operation, and where many of them had already chosen to relocate. ‘The ironic thing is that – in a roundabout way – the prophecies
written in the Book of Catastrophes have come true,' Mrs Burrows told Will. ‘The Colonists
have
got the surface to themselves again. There's an empty town just waiting for those who want to go Topsoil. Because there's nobody left alive in Highfield.'

‘Nobody at all? They're
all
dead?' Will asked quietly.

There was a knock at the door and Parry entered.

‘You're looking better, my lad,' he said, before asking Mrs Burrows and the First Officer if they would mind giving him some time to speak alone with Will.

‘They've set up a makeshift canteen on the ground floor,' Parry suggested. ‘If you ask at reception, they'll tell you where it is.'

‘Don't worry, I think I can find it,' Mrs Burrows replied, tapping her nose as she winked at Will. She and the First Officer shuffled out, leaving Bartleby asleep on Will's bed, his legs in the air.

‘Jiggs told me that you're Prime Minister now,' Will said, giving Parry a smile. ‘Does that mean I have to call you sir or something?'

Parry raised his eyebrows. ‘Hardly – and when did you ever show me any respect anyway?' He gave a shrug. ‘Besides, I'm only PM for just as long as it takes them to find someone from the old Cabinet to do the job.'

Parry glanced through the window as another helicopter came into land. ‘The emergency aid is starting to arrive from the international community now that the risk has been removed,' he said.

‘Has it, though?' Will asked. ‘Is it true that not a single Styx has been left Topsoil, or anyone who had any Styx blood in them, like Elliott?'

Parry's expression turned sad and for a second he looked away. ‘Yes, it's true. There's not one of them left, so I suppose we won in the end, but we lost some good people in the process,' he said. ‘Elliott, of course, but also Eddie and his team.' Parry sighed. ‘And then there's what happened to Chester …'

‘And Drake … I'm so sorry about Drake,' Will said quietly, as he realised he needed to say something about Parry's son to him. And Will also didn't feel strong enough yet to think about the loss of his friend.