A City Called Smoke: The Territory 2 (25 page)

In front of them was another set of double doors.

“‘B2-Vaccine Drone Storage,’” Squid read.

As he approached, the doors opened, sliding back like magic into the walls. Behind the doors was an enormous space. Many rows of metallic shelves rose right up to the high ceiling. As they walked between the shelves it reminded Squid a little of the armory at the Rock, but instead of the walls being lined with swords and rifles they were lined with cylindrical objects, each about the size of a football. There were hundreds of them, thousands maybe.

“They’re birds,” Nim said, and Squid saw that he was right. Each of the objects was a shining silver cylinder, pointed at one end with a tail at the other, and flexible silver wings folded along the body. Squid reached out and lifted one from the shelf. It was lighter than he thought it would be and cold; not a real bird but some sort of machine built to look like a bird.

“These are the weapons that will defeat the ghouls?” Nim asked.

Squid tried to remember the parts of Fiona’s information that he’d understood. “Airborne dispersal,” he said. “They must fly into the ghouls, or attack them from the air.”

“How do we make them work?”

Squid turned the bird over in his hands, looking for any sort of controls, but there were none that he could see. Then, on the underside of the cylinder he saw a small protruding nozzle and a single silver button. He pressed it. It clicked. Immediately the wings of the bird extended and began to flap. Squid, startled, dropped the bird. It fell toward the ground but began pumping its wings enough that it flew, circling around and rising up above them in the tight space.

“Wow,” said Nim. “It’s alive.”

“No,” Squid said, smiling. “It’s a machine, but that makes it even more incredible.”

Squid almost expected the bird to let out some sort of eagle-like cry as it turned above their heads. He saw the pointed end, the head, turn, as if it were watching them as it flew. A fine mist began spraying forcefully out from the nozzle on the bird’s belly. Something like droplets of water began falling down over Squid and Nim, covering them. They couldn’t help but breathe it in. Both of them coughed and waved their hands, wiping their eyes and faces.

“What is it?” Nim said. “Is it using the weapon against us?”

Squid tried to calm himself. He looked at his hands as the drops of fine liquid fell. They hit his skin and seemed to be absorbed. It didn’t hurt. His skin wasn’t turning red. He could still breathe perfectly fine.

“I don’t think it works against us,” he said. “It must only work against the ghouls.”

Nim stopped and looked up at the bird. He closed his eyes as the droplets fell on his face. He smiled.

“What?” Squid asked. “What is it?”

“It’s rain,” Nim said. He opened his eyes and turned to look at Squid, still smiling. “The Storm Man’s rain.” Nim slapped his hands onto Squid’s shoulders, holding him, his grin wider than Squid had ever seen it. “This is it!” he said. “It’s you, Squid. You’re the Storm Man. You found the rain that will wash away the ghouls.”

“We don’t even know if it works yet,” Squid said, but still, he was smiling too. Nim’s joy was infectious.

Nim smiled. “How about we try one?”

As the bird they had set in flight came to land on the floor, folding its wings back in along its side, Squid and Nim grabbed a metal bird each off the shelf and hurried back the way they’d come, up the elevator and toward the main entry to the dome. As they passed the glass panel that held Fiona Squid turned to look at her.

“Thank you, Fiona,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” Fiona said, her voice cheerful, happy, Squid thought, that someone had finally come after so many hundreds of years to take the weapon that should have been used so long ago. “Have a nice day.”

When they reached the door in the opaque walls of the dome they stopped. The shadows of the ghouls could be seen moving outside, knocking and scratching, their shapes blurred and twisted through the white glass.

“How do we do this?” Nim said, looking to Squid for guidance. Squid watched the shapes of the ghouls. There were probably hundreds of them out there pressing themselves up against the glass, trying futilely to break through. This dome had stood for hundreds of years, though; Squid didn’t think it would be breaking any time soon.

“I think we open the door and quickly throw the birds,” Squid said, “and hope the rain kills them quickly.”

“They’ll come in,” Nim said. “We won’t be able to stop them.”

Squid’s mouth twisted to one side in thought.

“All right,” Squid said, “this is what we’ll do. I’ll open the door and throw mine. You hold on to yours and let it go in here, that way any ghouls that get through will be killed too.”

Nim nodded.

“Okay,” Squid said, his heart beginning to pound. He pointed to the panel on the right of the door, a green button identical to the one outside. “You get ready to press that.”

Nim did so, moving over to the side of the door, his hand hovering over the panel. Squid took a few steps back. He held the bird aloft in his hand, angled so he could hit the silver button on the bottom. He took a deep breath. He couldn’t believe he was about to open the door and let the ghouls come streaming in here. But it was okay, he told himself, because this would work. They had found the weapon. This would destroy them.

“Now,” he said, and Nim’s hand hit the green panel. The doors hissed and slid open to reveal the screeching snarling faces of the first row of ghouls. They tumbled in, losing their balance as the door suddenly disappeared from in front of them. The ghouls behind them began their stuttering motions forward, reaching out with their dusty, decomposed limbs. As always Squid tried not to look at their faces, tried not to see the way the flesh had receded back around their eyes, tried not to see the way their lips had all but rotted, revealing gray-black gums and broken teeth, tried not to see the holes that had once been noses. Most of all he tried not to think that they had once been people.

Squid pressed the silver button on the bottom of the bird. There was a click. As before, a soft whirring came from inside and the wings expanded, unfolding and stretching as if this was a real creature waking up from hundreds of years of sleep. The wings began to flap and Squid felt the weight of the bird lighten on his palm. The ghouls came pouring into the dome and Squid threw the bird toward the gap in the door above their heads. It spread its wings and then flew through the doorway. Squid watched for a fraction of a second, wanting to see if it was going to work. He felt a split second of relief as he saw the misty water spraying down over those ghouls still outside, then his focus returned to the twenty or thirty ghouls who had already managed to fight their way inside.

“Shut the doors!” Squid yelled to Nim.

The dome doors began to close. Any relief he may have felt evaporated as the doors closed on the mass of ghouls forcing their way in and stopped. He saw Nim hit the button again and again. The doors opened and closed, opened and closed, but each time became stuck on the swarming, stuttering stack of ghouls that continued to force their way in. The doors weren’t going to close.

“The bird, Nim,” Squid said, quickening his backward steps. “Throw the bird and run back to the elevator.”

Nim clicked the button on the bottom of the bird and threw it. It circled up and flew around above them. The fine drizzling rain began to fall around them as more ghouls scrambled inside the dome, heading for Squid and Nim as they ran for the elevator. As they drew near, Squid turned and looked over his shoulder.

The ghouls were still coming in their endless halting, jerking walk, passing through the mist as if it were nothing. They didn’t even notice it. It certainly wasn’t causing them to drop to the ground or explode or turn back into humans or any of the things Squid had thought it might have done to them. It seemed to have no effect at all.

“It doesn’t work,” Squid said despairingly. “It doesn’t work.”

“It has to,” Nim said. “Maybe we just need more birds. You’re the Storm Man, Squid, I know you are. You’re going to save us.”

Nim drew his sword and faced the ghouls, which were only ten feet away now and coming closer like an unstoppable flood, like the dust storm, like the end that Squid had seemed to dodge time and time again but now realized was inevitable.

“Get into the elevator,” Nim said. “I’ll hold them off as long as I can. Get more vaccine. Find something. I know you are supposed to do this.”

“We’ve done something wrong,” Squid said. “It should have worked. We’ve come all this way.” He realized he was shouting, with tears in his eyes and tightness in his throat. “Why didn’t it work?!”

“Squid!” Nim turned to him. “You can do this, go!”

Squid turned and began heading for the elevator, but he turned back. He couldn’t let Nim do this. He couldn’t let another person sacrifice himself so that he could just fail yet again. The first of the ghouls had reached Nim. He hacked at them, spun and sliced, unrefined and untrained with the sword but with a brutal anger and determination that seemed to be working, but Squid could see it wouldn’t be long until they overwhelmed him, swarmed around him just as they always did with everyone. He turned back toward Nim.

“Nim!” he called. “Come on, we can go together!”

Squid reached Nim as the Nomad boy was backing away from the ghouls, cutting at them as he went, desperately holding them back.

“No, Squid,” Nim said. “Go!”

“I’m not leaving you,” Squid yelled back at him. “I’m not!”

Squid reached out and grabbed Nim’s arm, ready to pull him along with him, not willing to let him stay and fight when there was a chance they could both survive. As he did so a ghoul lunged forward. And as if time had slowed to a crawl, as if every second lasted a minute, an hour, forever, Squid watched as the ghoul closed its mouth on his arm. For a moment Squid wondered what that sound was, a different scream from the screeching of the ghouls, then he realized it was his own scream. Fiery pain blasted up his arm as the ghoul’s teeth sank into his flesh. He felt the suction begin. The ghoul made a hissing sound as it pulled the moisture from his arm and into its dry throat. He felt the skin around the bite harden, wither and shrink. The sound of Nim’s shouting punctuated the shock.

“No!” he was saying. “Squid!”

But Squid couldn’t look away. Another ghoul, fighting with the first for purchase, latched onto his arm as well. Another bite. As if one wasn’t enough to turn him into one of them. Other ghouls came from the side. He turned his head to see one, a girl, bite down on him from behind and begin sucking at his shoulder. He dropped to his knees and the ghouls dropped down with him. He was aware of more coming, more ghouls making their way to the feast. His mouth felt dry. His skin felt hard all over as if any movement would cause it to crack and break. He fell forward onto his face. Was that Nim still shouting at him? It might have been, but it didn’t matter now. He wanted to think of someone else, a girl, someone he had lost, but suddenly he couldn’t remember. He wished he could. He felt like she had been important to him, but then he couldn’t remember his own name either. Someone had said that to him once; when you’re bitten by a ghoul you became one of them, a creature without a name. With more pain spreading across his body he closed his eyes. He could feel himself being emptied. He was going to become one of them and there was nothing he could do about it. But right now he just wanted to sleep. So he did.

I would have thought that once an author publishes their second book they’d have all the gushy acknowledgements out of their system. Apparently I was wrong because I feel the need, and I want, to thank everyone all over again.

Thank you to Holly and Eli for continued love and support. Being an author is impossible without it. Mum, Dad, Paul, Karen, Amy, Josh, Ryan and Taylor, and the rest of my extended family, thank you for your love and support also.

Thanks to Sianon, Jason, Seb and Cat for your insightful early draft reading.

To the Momentum team, Joel, Tara (you'll be missed), Patrick and now Ashley (welcome), thank you for your continued encouragement and all the work that goes into this book behind the scenes. Thank you again to Brianne for your editing prowess, which continues to help me shape the Territory series into something even better, and thank you for finding those dumb mistakes I make and don’t see, no matter how many times I read the manuscript. Working in publishing can seem thankless sometimes, I’m sure, but know that I am always grateful for your work.

I was very excited about this book because not only do I think it’s a better book than
A Town Called Dust
– and ensuring you live up to your first book is always remarkably nerve-wracking as a second-time author – but also because when you publish your second book you get your membership card to the Secret Author’s Guild. They also tell you the password to get past the doorkeeper into the Hall of Arcane Words where they keep all the good ideas, so thank you to the Secret Author’s Guild for that.

Most of all, if you’ve stuck around this long, I want to thank you, the reader. Thank you for picking up this book and continuing with the adventures of Squid and Lynn. I do this because I love it, but I also do it for you. Novels happen as a partnership between the author and the reader, so thank you for letting your head be home to my characters for a little while. I appreciate it more than you know and I hope you’ll join me for more of this in the future.

Justin Woolley has been writing stories since he could first scrawl with a crayon. When he was six years old he wrote his first book, a 300-word pirate epic in unreadable handwriting called “The Ghost Ship”. He promptly declared that he was now an author and didn't need to go to school. Despite being informed that this was, in fact, not the case, he continued to make things up and write them down.

Today he is the author of the Territory series, a trilogy of dystopian novels including
A Town Called Dust
,
A City Called Smoke
, and the series’ soon to be released conclusion,
A World of Ash
.

In his other life Justin has been an engineer, a teacher, and at one stage even a magician. His handwriting has not improved.