The Rig (16 page)

‘How do you know who I am?'

Anderson spat on the front of his cage, a globule of blood and spit, and began to draw patterns on the glass. ‘How do
you
know who I am?'

‘I told him, Carl,' Tristan said, and stepped forwards next to Drake.

‘Hey, lil' Mikey Tristan,' Anderson said, still running figure eights back and forth on the glass in his blood. ‘What you doing down here? They didn't give you the magical juice too, did they?'

‘No, Carl,' Tristan said softly. ‘I came to get you out –'

‘Not the right time for that,' Anderson said, and winked at Drake. ‘Besides, you really don't want to let me out. No, no.'

Tristan's voice was a whisper. ‘Why?'

‘Why? Oh, because I'll rip your heart out of your chest with my bare hands.'

Tristan paled and took a quick step back.

Drake didn't know what was worse – the threat, which he believed Anderson more than capable of carrying out, or the hopelessly
sane
tone in which he delivered it.

‘But thank you for the thought. I always liked you, Mike. You didn't belong in a place like this.' Anderson cocked his head and looked like he was listening to something no one else could hear. ‘And you'll need that kindness with what's to come.' His eyes flared. ‘Oh yes, oh yes. I'd steer clear of Red here, by the way. She'll only break your heart.'

Irene opened her mouth to say something, considered, then pursed her lips.

‘Daddy's little girl, this one,' Anderson said, and burst out laughing. He slammed his forehead against the glass.

Irene gasped and turned away. Drake could see tears in her eyes as she stepped back out of the cone of light above the cage.

‘How much of that blue stuff did they give you?' Drake asked.

Anderson sniffed and rubbed his eyes, leaving bloody smears on his cheeks. ‘Too much, you know. About ten teaspoons. They gave Grey the same. He comes down here and taunts me sometimes. Not so much lately. It's getting to him, too … he's gonna be like me soon.'

Tristan put his hand on the latch of the cage, a determined expression on his face. Anderson grinned and crossed his arms.

‘Come on,' Drake said. ‘We can't help him now.'

With a sigh, Tristan let go of the lock.

‘Stay safe, Mikey,' Anderson said. He pressed his bloody hand against the glass and winked. ‘Don't let the bastards get you down! Nine-five-four,
I don't wanna be here any more
!'

His laughter echoed down the corridor as they moved on, away from the cages of dead and insane things. A new set of metal stairs soon led up to the network of walkways that crisscrossed the facility. Drake and the others headed up and to the left, following the yellow pipes overhead.

‘I can smell the ocean,' he said, after a few minutes. The walkway led to a concrete ramp with runners built into the floor for transporting something, most likely crates of the Crystal-X. Moving silently but quickly, Drake, Irene and Tristan ran down the ramp and into an open, brightly lit area.

The space was as large as a warehouse, and piled high with Alliance-crested crates, shipping containers and drilling equipment. As opposed to the equipment up on the Rig, the drill bits and machinery looked shiny and new – like they were ready to be used. Drake tried to lift the bolts on a few of the crates to have a look at what was inside, perhaps something useful, but they were locked tight. Across the warehouse were a row of three pools, and floating in each one was a triangular-shaped vessel.

Drake headed over that way, a surge of excitement rising in his chest.

The pools were of cold, dark sea water, which meant they went down and, given the craft floating in the water, probably led outside into the ocean. The vessels were small, about the size of the old Mini Coopers – Drake had grown up wanting one of those – with a tinted windshield and single seat visible amidst a myriad of controls and display screens. Attached to the nose of each craft were circular drilling bits and metal claws.

‘This is how they mine the rock,' Tristan said.

‘Do you think …?' Drake shook his head. He saw visions of stealing one of these sleek, matte-black mining submarines and escaping the metal prison once and for all. ‘No, I don't even know how to get inside the bloody things.'

‘Look over there,' Irene said, pointing away to the left at the far side of the warehouse. ‘Through that door there's another walkway. Want to keep looking?'

Drake nodded.

The narrow walkway led out of the mining warehouse and into another space, smaller this time, with large windows framing the reef of glowing meteorite. Pale blue light flooded the space, rippling across the floor in gentle waves. The walkway, suspended two metres above the floor, was built over a tank of water that descended down into the rock ridge, much like the mini-subs back in the mining warehouse.

Dark shadows swam just below the surface of that blue water, and Irene grasped Drake's arm and breathed in sharply as they walked over the tank. Something was alive and swimming down there. ‘What are they?' she whispered.

A sharp, grey fin, riddled with scars, pierced the surface of the water, as silent as the night, and dipped back under.

‘Sharks,' Tristan whispered. ‘That was a shark.'

‘Let's get off this walkway,' Drake said. A set of stairs curved around and down and brought them alongside the edge of the tank. The same shadows swam along the glass, back and forth. At least two of the creatures knew they were there, and were interested.

More crates were scattered about this room, separated from the mining warehouse by the walkway and twin sets of massive roller doors. These weren't as secure as the crates in the previous room and Drake began unlatching the locks and peering inside, looking for anything that might be of use. A weapon of some sort, perhaps, or a pair of angel wings and a map back to the mainland. The first box was empty.

‘Have a look through those crates,' Drake told Irene and Tristan, unlatching the next crate along. ‘See if there's anything that we can …'

His voice trailed away as he got a look at the contents of the second crate. Something, he wasn't sure what, began screaming in the back of his head. A low, desperate wail that made him shiver and want to cry all at once.

Drake did neither.

Doctor Lambros was in the second crate. Vaguely, he heard Irene gasp and Tristan stifle a small cry.

A tiny trickle of blood ran down from her nose, over her lips, and had dried on her chin. Little spots had fallen onto the collar of her white blouse. If not for the blood and the colour of her skin, Drake could have pretended she was sleeping.

He was looking at a corpse.

Doctor Acacia Lambros was dead. Vicious bruising covered her neck like a purple scarf.

Drake, Irene, and Tristan stood silent for a long moment. They were all thinking the same thing – they were looking at
murder
.

For the second time inside twenty-four hours, Drake's entire outlook on the world had changed. He knew the people running the Rig were mean, even cruel, but this was something else.
Evil
, his mind whispered, and for lack of a better word, Drake agreed. What was happening here was evil.

And has to be stopped.

Experiments on inmates. Murdering people to keep them quiet. Did the Alliance, did Lucien Whitmore, know what was happening here?
Not the gritty details, not all of them, but he knows
. Of course he did.

‘I liked her.' Drake took a deep breath and wished he hadn't. The smell from the crate was none too fresh. ‘God, how can they do this?'

Drake recalled lying in his bunk some nights ago, unable to sleep and thinking about the difference between justice and vengeance. Looking at poor Doctor Lambros, her life snuffed out long before her time, he thought again on where the line was drawn.
Justice … or vengeance?

Right then, Drake felt like a touch of both.

With nothing else for it, he resealed the crate and sighed. They could do nothing to help Acacia Lambros now.
But one day …
Drake swore. He would see whoever did this punished. Although he had no proof, his mind kept picturing Brand, his hands around her neck as he choked the life out of her. Had he done it down here? Or up in her office?

That broken picture frame from the wall behind her desk …

‘Are you okay?' Irene asked gently.

Drake nodded. ‘Well, at least we know what we're up against now.
Really
up against. Once and for all, the kind of people we're dealing with here.'

‘Let's go,' Tristan said. ‘I don't want to look in the rest of these crates, and there's nothing more we can do down here.'

Drake agreed. He'd been hoping for something, something to help him escape, but short of absorbing a mineral that would turn him insane or trying to pilot a submersible drilling craft, he'd come up empty.

They walked back around the tank and climbed up the stairs onto the steel walkway, feeling defeated.

‘
What the –?'
a gruff voice snapped.

Drake, Irene, and Tristan froze – like a trio of deer caught in headlights.

Standing on the walkway over the tank was a familiar face. Officer Hall, armed and in full body armour, stared at them in shock. Hall made a sound somewhere between a startled cry and a grunt of surprise and reached for his radio.

‘Was it you?' Drake spat, and ran at Hall as the guard swung his rifle up to fire. ‘
Did you kill her?
'

Drake tackled Hall and they wrestled on the walkway over the shark tank. The guard hit the railing, his rifle fell from his hands, and the momentum of Drake's tackle carried them both up and over the railing.

They fell into the tank trading blows, Hall gripping Drake's hair and Drake with a hand around the guard's neck. Drake struck the water and felt a thousand tiny needles pierce his lungs. He let go of Hall and gasped, shock ripping through his every nerve. The water was ice cold.

Something large and heavy brushed past his leg.

Drake licked the salt water from his lips. Hard shots of fear slid down his throat, as something else slammed into his leg. Hall was spluttering in the water away to his left, under the walkway. The guard's eyes were wide, bulging out of his head. A fin broke the surface of the tank between Drake and Hall, and the two humans far out of their depth locked eyes for a terrible moment.

Hall turned and swam for the tank's edge as another fin surfaced, along with about two metres of dark, grey skin. A single, black eye – speckled with red stars, like a lump of burning coal – stared at Drake, and a jaw of razor-sharp teeth opened wide.

He turned and swam, knowing he couldn't make the edge before –

A pair of hands seized Drake by his sodden collar. He looked up and saw Tristan dangling almost upside down, bent at the waist over the walkway's edge, with Irene clutching his legs. Together, they hauled Drake up and out of the water and back under the railing just as a red-eyed shark cut through the space between him and Hall.

The guard didn't even have time to scream before he was pulled under the frothing water.

Dripping wet, shivering and breathing hard, Drake chanced a look back over the railing and saw nothing but dark, churning water turning a slow shade of crimson. He looked away, sick to his stomach.
That could've been me …

‘The shark got him,' Tristan breathed. ‘Oh God, he's dead. The shark, the shark, the shark –'

Irene clapped her hand over his mouth and whispered fiercely, ‘
Shut up!
All that made a hell of a lot of noise. We have to move and get out of here.
Someone will be coming
.'

Drake agreed, and Tristan, as pale as a ghost, could do nothing but follow. Before he left the walkway over the tank, Drake picked up Hall's fallen rifle and slung the weapon's strap over his shoulder. He didn't know much about using the damn thing, but he thought point and shoot would work just fine, if they encountered anyone else.

Is it loaded with knockout darts or actual bullets?

For a second, he didn't care. The monsters down here were not the sharks or the boy locked away in a cage. No, the monsters down here had killed Doctor Lambros, had driven the animals and Carl Anderson insane.
How many other bodies have they disposed of, deep below the ocean, never to be seen again?

But he did care, really. Drake knew he was not a killer. If he'd had the chance, he would've tried to pull Hall from the shark tank.

‘I think we've seen enough tonight,' Irene said. ‘We should try and get back up to the Rig.'

‘They're going to notice he's missing,' Drake said, speaking almost to himself as they ran past crates, along walkways, heading down under the labs again. ‘Not right away, but they'll notice Hall's missing. Then what?'

I have to get off the Rig.

17

Escape

Once again, Drake and Irene made it back up and out of the Crystal-X facility without being discovered. Tristan followed almost numbly in their wake, keeping his thoughts to himself. His eyes were wide and terrified as they sat bathed in torchlight in the old control room on the eastern platform.

Drake spun slowly on his swivel chair, Hall's rifle resting on his lap. He'd been fiddling with it for the last five minutes and had figured out how to eject the magazine – a clip of twelve stunning darts.
Non-lethal
, he remembered Brand saying.
More's the pity.

‘So what are we going to do?' Irene asked.

Drake slammed the magazine back into the rifle. He played with the safety tab on the side of the weapon, and then put it down on the desk of old monitors out of his hands, in case he accidentally shot himself or his allies.

Tristan sighed and wrapped his arms around himself. ‘I can't spend the next five years here, not now, I … I won't be able to look any of them in the eye. They'll know I know.'

Drake had stripped down to his boxer shorts. His jumpsuit was still soaked through from the dip in the shark tank. He tried hard to suppress cool shivers, but he was freezing. The lens of the torch was warm and he kept pressing his fingers against the plastic.

‘Short of swimming, I have no idea how we could escape the Rig,' Irene said, casting a quick glance at Drake. ‘You're supposed to be good at this, Will. What have you got?'

‘A canoe made of soap and shenanigans …' he muttered, staring into the bright light of the torch. He thought of Doctor Lambros alone in the dark down below with nothing but bloodthirsty sharks for company.
Someone, somewhere, will be missing her … A husband? A child?

‘Which means nothing,' Tristan said, sighing into his hands. ‘He's got nothing, Irene.'

‘Well,' Irene bit her lip, ‘what if we could get word out about what they're doing here? We need a phone or access to a computer in the control tower or …' She trailed away, shaking her head.

‘Who would believe it? Who would we tell? It's all Alliance-owned out there. They control the media. They control everything, even governments.' Tristan laughed bitterly. ‘And what would we say?'

‘I'm just thinking aloud here,' Irene snapped. ‘We can't just sit –'

‘Face it, Irene,' Tristan replied, colour rising in his cheeks. ‘We're stuck here, and we just better hope we can make it through the rest of our sentences without –'

‘This place will get us killed!'

‘Keep your voice
down
!'

‘Don't tell me what to do, you little –'

Drake stood up and stretched his limbs, which had become stiff from the cold. Irene and Tristan turned to look at him, and he smiled sadly. ‘Have I ever told you,' he said, ‘what I did to get sent to prison in the first place?'

Neither of his companions said anything. They looked at each other, shrugged, and shook their heads.

‘Well, I don't like talking about it … bit of a long story.' Drake shivered. ‘But, given that you're so sure the Alliance can't be beaten, Tristan, I might as well share my long story.'

‘Will, I –'

‘Shut up and listen. I'm only going to say this once.' Drake sat back down and crossed his arms over his bare chest. He could feel his heart beating, warm and true, against the cold. Taking a deep breath, he began, ‘You remember a few years ago, that “miracle pill” that could practically cure most types of leukaemia?'

Tristan and Irene shared another glance. The looks on their faces suggested they were wondering if he had gone mad, and what pills had to do with the price of anything.

Still, Tristan nodded and clicked his fingers. ‘Yeah. Something … Det …? Detrol …?'

Drake nodded. ‘Close, mate. Detrolazyne-V.'

‘What about it?' Irene asked.

‘My mother is sick. Very sick.' Drake shrugged, as if to say ‘you can't change the weather'. ‘About two years ago, she was dying. It's just been me and her since I was little, and there was no way we could afford that pill. You know the National Health Service in Britain collapsed seven years back, in 2018, and became privatised. I was only seven when it happened, didn't understand what that meant at the time, but I'll give you three guesses who bought it.'

‘Alliance Systems, of course,' Tristan said, and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

‘Bastards,' Irene muttered.

‘Right,' Drake said. ‘Since then healthcare in the UK, much like the prisons, I guess, has been a numbers game. My mum and I just didn't add up to the Alliance. She was diagnosed on the NHS, and once the Alliance took over she couldn't get insurance – pre-existing conditions aren't covered, you know. Not unless you got money, and we never did. Anyway, the doctors couldn't make her better. Just comfortable. Her sickness had advanced so far that she had maybe, at best, three months.'

Irene pulled Drake's hand from his crossed arms and gave it a squeeze. ‘And with the medicine? The … Detrolazyne?'

‘
Years.
' Drake stressed the word. ‘In some cases, with bone-marrow transplants, even complete remission.'

Tristan shared a glance with Irene. ‘So you stole it.'

‘So I stole it, yes, and burned down four Alliance warehouses getting away. Heh, my first escape. So you see, mate, the Alliance can be beat. If you're willing to take a few risks.' Drake sniffed. ‘At least, that's an easy way of looking at it. I didn't just torch a few buildings. I also put a policeman in the hospital. They caught up with me near Trafalgar Square on the way home and I punched him. It sometimes only takes one punch … He hit his head on the kerb. Lucky he didn't die. I … I really wish that hadn't happened.'

‘You were just trying to help your mum,' Tristan said. ‘I mean, well …'

‘How many wrongs make a right, mate?'

Irene scoffed. ‘The Alliance wrongs good people every day, like your mother. Or … or turns good people into bad people.' She wasn't talking about Drake, and he knew it.

‘The Alliance is scum,' Drake spat, slamming his fist into his palm. ‘You know what I saw in that warehouse? Shelves
full
of Detrolazyne! Miles and miles of these little white boxes that could save my mother's life. Hell, I only needed one box.'

‘Is she … did she get better?' Irene asked.

‘She was too sick to see me sentenced in London and sent to Trennimax a few weeks later. But the night I stole the drugs, she was bedridden at home, hooked up to all these medicine bags and painkillers, so I gave her the pills and moved her next door. I don't know if she even knew what was happening. Nanna Vera lived there, next door. She's not my real grandmother, but she looked after me growing up when Mum was at work. She hid her when the police came knocking for me later that night. I went rather quietly, given the mess I'd caused.'

‘But your mum, Will,' Tristan said. ‘What happened?'

Drake took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘She got better. The pills did the trick.'

‘Fantastic!' Irene hugged him hard, sending them both spinning on the swivel chair.

‘Yes, I bought her time.' Drake gently pulled Irene's arms off him and smiled sadly. ‘I was sentenced to two years in Trennimax. Five months into that, she sent me a letter.'

Irene slumped. ‘Oh no …'

‘Yeah, the cancer was back.' Drake sighed. ‘One course, one box of the pills wasn't enough to crush it completely. She told me a year, maybe eighteen months, if she was lucky. That was fourteen months ago. I haven't heard from her since. Whether she sent me letters or not, I haven't been getting them.'

‘You think the Alliance has been destroying them?' Tristan asked.

‘Maybe. Who knows for sure? No outside contact allowed on the Rig, you know that. I tried calling once while I was on the run from Cedarwood, but no one answered. Perhaps my mum died … but I don't think so. I think the Alliance is cruel enough to
tell
me if she died. And cruel enough to withhold any letters she sent me if still alive. I've gotta look at it that way, I guess.'

Tristan nodded. ‘Where the Alliance is concerned, that's probably the best way to look at it.'

‘That's why you've been escaping,' Irene said. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, but her eyes looked awful shiny. ‘You're trying to get back to London, to your mother, and what? Steal more pills?'

‘Got it in one, Miss Finlay.' Drake gazed through the porthole window of their hideaway, out at the clear night sky and the bright stars. The storm clouds had fled, cascading now over the horizon. ‘And I've got four months, maybe, to do just that or it won't matter any more. I …'

Drake's voice caught and he took a moment not to let it show. The ocean was a dark, unfathomable blanket, and as much a cage as the Rig itself.
How I hate it.
If – no,
when
– he made it off this platform, Drake would happily never see such endless water again.

He cleared his throat and turned to face Irene and Tristan.

‘I don't want my mother to die alone and afraid,' he said. ‘The Alliance has taken a lot from me, from the whole world, but it
does not get to have that
!'