The Terminus (14 page)

“Belinda! Our
time’s come! I
have
the tablet! We can move on!”

She remained
rooted to the spot, but remembered the grey building and the warden’s words...
about going back there if she failed to obey the Chairman. Slowly, she moved
one foot forwards. Then Gary
reappeared in her head. She swivelled abruptly and ran back towards the
regimented rows of the unbrained.

“GARY!”
she screamed, shoving aside surfacers, knocking a few to the ground. Tears
streamed her cheeks. She had no idea what this meant, for with childhood
memories erased crying was an unfamiliar experience, yet the tears flowed and
as she ran she screamed his name over and over and over:

“GARY!
GARY! GARY!”

She ran
towards the grey building. Why, she had no idea. She’d seen what went on
inside. Perhaps there was nowhere else to run to? Another crowd of zombie
surfacers had just been disgorged from a shuttle-pod and were being marshalled
into lines by a heavy. Beetie wondered whether she’d already seen the brute but
couldn’t quite remember where. He caught sight of her. She stood out so clearly
in her yellow and gold and blue dress, the only person running.

“BELINDA!
STOP, GIRL!” he shouted.

But she ran
on. She didn’t think to remove those high-heeled shoes that slowed her down;
only to stay with the boy in her head and escape from the Chairman. She ran
round the side of the grey block, away from the surfacers, to a smaller, empty
courtyard at the back. A dead end! A high wall separated the Hatcheries from
the Terminus, and a huge silver tube emerged from the building, above a door,
and continued on through the Terminus wall. Beetie stopped. Behind her was the
larger courtyard from where she’d run and where, in the distance, girls in
colourful frocks sat on benches and the warden and the Chairman stood looking
at her trapped like a frightened animal. She had no possible means of escape
and ‘God’ waited and watched with eager delight whilst the heavy giving chase
closed in on his quarry.

***

The boys
halted at the end of the corridor in front of windowed swing doors, doors that
muffled the voices beyond, and they stared in a state of shock at the scene on
the other side of the blood-smeared door windows.

“What the
heck…?” began Mike. Gary slapped a
hand over his friend’s mouth.

They beheld a
vast hall, its ceiling low and criss-crossed by a network of large silver
pipes. Like merging streams flowing into one large river, all the pipes joined
a single tube, some two metres in diameter, which coursed the length of the
hall and disappeared through the wall at the far end above another door. Resembling
lianas dangling from a tropical rain forest canopy, tangles of narrow black
tubes hung from the silver pipes, attached to living heads on the slabs below.

Row upon row
of white slabs, two to three metres apart, stretched to the opposite end of the
hall. Hundreds of them… and on each lay a surfacer. Those close to the door
were clearly alive for they moved spasmodically; an arm here, a leg there, even
a slight turn of a head, and on all heads silver helmets had been fitted snugly
over pudding-basin haircuts, each festooned with dials and buttons. Flashing
blue and orange lights, they resembled grotesquely twinkling Christmas
decorations as the connecting black tubes twirled and danced in response to
whatever was being extracted from the victims on the slabs. Eyes looked blankly
at the two boys, sending shivers down Gary’s
spine. He’d grown accustomed to the surfacers’ bland expressions, but the
horror of seeing dead eyes on living faces far exceeded anything he could have
imagined.

“Oh my God!”
whispered Mike through Gary’s
fingers.

Gary,
however, was both horrified and intrigued. He tried to understand what on earth
was going on.
Something
being harvested from the
surfacers’ heads?
What, he had no idea, but he now knew the grim purpose
behind keeping alive all those zombies in twenty-third century London.
The Agenda needed them for whatever was being planned in the Terminus and the
Pentatron Tablet was vital to the whole exercise; Beetie too, apparently.

The voices
came from two large muscular men in blue tracksuits with rolled-up sleeves,
half-way down the hall. Each hovered over a surfacer on a slab, in jocular
conversation with the other. These bruisers were no ‘ordinary’ surfacers; they
had their wits about them as they brandished machete-like knives, and…
oh
God
… they began to cut off the surfacers’ clothes and…

Gary closed
his eyes when one of the brutes hacked off a moving arm from the ‘corpse’ he’d
been working on…‘corpse’, for his victim was both dead and alive. The helmet,
removed from the man’s head, hung free on the end of a black tube which no
longer jumped and jerked like those still attached to bodies. Gary
re-opened his eyes, glancing sideways at Mike who seemed transfixed by the
gore.

In the hall,
the heavy briefly studied the twitching, severed arm before chucking it
callously into a crate and setting to work on the victim’s other arm. Beyond,
other slabs were covered with blood and detached body parts whilst beside them
crates had been filled with hacked-off limbs, used heads and entrails.

Despite his
disgust, Gary marvelled at the
macabre dance of twirling liana tubes as ‘something’ was sucked from the heads
of still-living bodies. A third door, half-way down the hall, opened and a
further dozen surfacers entered with two more heavies who grabbed and flung
them onto empty slabs as they would with hunks of dead meat. Helmets were
attached, and once again the lianas did their snake-dance as a mysterious
energy was removed from the surfacers’ heads.

Gary and Mike
shared the same thought: to turn and run like hell, but this was no longer an
option because of another sound coming from the dark end of the corridor. Mike
had already smelt the familiar odour, but now the throaty chatter-chatter of
gee-rats and the scuffle of their large feet was unmistakable. The boys turned
and mag-stunned the chisel-toothed heads as soon as they appeared, but nothing
happened. Either terror had thrown their aim way off the mark, or these
particular rats had been rendered immune to magnetic forces. Gary and Mike,
choosing Plan Z, pushed through into the hall, startling the blood-splattered
heavies engrossed in their grizzly task and idle jokes. Thank God, the
mag-stunners worked on
them
. When the gee-rats burst into the hall, the
boys ran on towards the frozen brutes. Gary
tugged at a machete, but the man’s grip proved too strong. He managed to free
the other’s weapon and hurried on to catch up with Mike. The remaining heavies
who’d been herding a fresh intake of live surfacers yelled at the boys and gave
chase but were soon engulfed by the swarm of gee-rats spreading out across the
hall. The creatures appeared to have lost interest in Gary and Mike as they
downed the heavies then set to work on recumbent surfacers, dead and ‘living’ –
piercing screams confirming the ‘living’ to be alive.

On catching up
with Mike, Gary experienced a great
surge of warmth for his friend who stood waiting patiently by the door beneath
the silver tube. The boy didn’t
have
to do all of this... believe in Gary’s
bizarre story, help him to rescue Beetie and save London
of the future…
and
take a load of flak from himself to boot.

“Better get
the hell outa here!” Mike said.

“Thanks,
Mike,” Gary mumbled as they’d burst
through the door out into a small courtyard. “You’re the very best! Look, why don’t
you...?”

Gary
froze. He was about to suggest his friend climb up on his shoulders and onto
the silver tube connecting the grey building to the Terminus wall, where he
could lie stretched out, partially hidden, whilst
he
searched the place
for Beetie, when he spied a small figure standing alone, staring at him; a girl
in a colourful yellow, gold and blue flared dress. Wearing blue high-heeled
shoes, she appeared bizarrely out of place and plainly petrified. He barely
recognised her, she looked so different, for her hair was now down below her
shoulders, beautifully styled and decorated with a blue hair band. But Beetie
had been the only blonde he’d seen in the future. All the others on the surface
and in the Retreat had black, brown or red hair. Also, even from that distance,
he could discern the girl’s eyes. No one else in the world, past, present or
future, had eyes the colour of
Meconopsis betonificifolia
... the
Himalayan Blue Poppy.

“BEETIE?”
Gary
called, before taking off at full pelt towards the girl, still clutching the
machete.

She hesitated,
turning to look behind her as if Gary
had been calling out someone else’s name.

“BEETIE!
IT’S ME! GARY!”

Still she
didn’t move. From around the corner, a heavy appeared… a clone of those brutes
in the grey building who’d been hacking at the surfacers. From two directions
they, Gary and the heavy, sprinted towards the stationary girl.

“RUN,
BEETIE! FOR GOD’S SAKE, RUN!” the boy
shrieked.

The girl began
to run in his direction.

“GARY!”
she shouted. “GARY!”

The heavy
pursuing her pulled out something from his pocket. A mag-stunner? The brute was
gaining on Beetie and a movie-like sequence followed, as if one second of fast
action had been slow-motioned into a prolonged episode of Hollywood
footage. About twenty feet separated Beetie from Gary.
Fear distorted the girl’s face streaked with eye-shadow-stained tear trails
that merged with her vivid red smeared lips. As the man aimed his mag-stunner,
and in an explosion of fury, Gary
raised the machete above his head and flung it at the brute with a force he’d
never have thought possible. The weapon seemed to whirl and hover in the air
for an age, though in reality must hit the man, point forwards, in a fraction
of a second, slicing into his broad chest, cutting him to the ground. Beetie
ran on, sobbing, into Gary’s arms.
For a moment the boy held her close, not quite knowing what to do.

“You’re okay,
Beetie!” he reassured, stroking her hair as he watched life jerk free from the
felled heavy.

Gary
turned. Mike was standing statue-like, staring at him, one arm outstretched and
holding a mag-stunner.

“Oh shit!” he
exclaimed. “Take off those stupid shoes, Beetie!”

Beetie frowned
and peered down at her feet.

“BLOODY TAKE
’EM OFF!” he shouted.

Fresh tears appeared
in the corners of her eyes. Ashamed for swearing and shouting at her, he saw
the girl was changed... probably doped.

What the
hell have they done to her?

“I’ll help
you,” he said gently, reaching down and easing off her shoes. “Now we’d better
run. Just don’t let go!” he added, grabbing the girl’s hand.

They sprinted
towards Mike and the grey building but another heavy, the one who’d mag-stunned
Mike, was only metres from Gary’s
frozen friend. Too late! Split-second decision-making: Gary
could never reach Mike in time, not even if he were to let go of Beetie and run
on ahead. He stuck with his priority… to get Beetie out of this nightmare.
Only one pair of time-specs?
No time to figure out whether
his theory about molecular blending and two people time-travelling together was
true. He’d come back later for Mike who, anyway, was ace at fending for
himself. The Agenda
needed
Beetie, Teeth
wanted
her… and he,
Gary,
loved
her.

Has the
bastard already done the unspeakable?

All these
thoughts twirled in his head as, lifting the girl tightly about the waist with
one arm, his cheek pressed firmly against hers, he reached for
the specs with his free hand and slipped them off,
praying to the real God that he would be proved correct. At the same time
Beetie began hitting him on the chest, trying to push him away.

“Let go, let
go!” she cried out. “What are you doing to me?”

Gary
only released his hold on her when they found themselves standing in the car
park of the Stanmore Scientific Laboratories in 2013
.
He grinned, insanely happy to feast his eyes on her presence, oblivious to
curious onlookers. A girl dressed for a night out, shoeless, her face a mess of
tears and make-up, beating a strange-looking boy with her fists?

“Is he
bothering you?” a woman asked as she emerged from her car. “If he is, I’ll…”

Beetie stopped
hitting Gary and shook her head.

“Who is this
boy?”

“Gary,”
she answered quietly. “Gary was in
my head when the Chairman told me what he’d do to me in the Terminus… and...”

“Thank you,
but please don’t worry,” interrupted Gary.
“She’s had an awful time. I have to get her home.” He paused. “Her name’s
Beetie,” he added, proudly.

“Beetie!
Not
Belinda! Of course! Yes, yes… I’m
Beetie,” agreed the girl.

“I’ll be
taking her home, see. She’ll be okay. I promise.”

The woman
stared at Beetie, uncertain.

“
Our
chairman? At SSL?”

Gary
smiled.

“Year 2213,”
he explained. “I’ll kill the bastard if he’s harmed her, but if you don’t mind
I’d better take her home now. This way, Beetie.” He took the girl by the hand
and led her out of the car park, past the security guard, towards Stanmore
underground station. “Gonna have to buy you some shoes,” he said.
“Can’t go about
London
barefoot.”

“London?
That word... it means something to me. Same as being Beetie does.”

Gary
stopped and gazed at her. He used his handkerchief to clean up her face. She
let him do this, but when he tried to stroke her cheeks she pushed his hand
away.