Dead Man Running (16 page)

‘
Get out!
' I shrieked, and she stood up. Retreated towards the doorway.

‘I'll come back later, okay?' she stammered between sobs. ‘I love you, baby.' And then she was gone.

Teeth clenched, I gripped the blankets and pulled them the rest of the way off my body. Every inch was a war. When my legs were exposed, I slid them sideways towards the edge of the mattress.

I knew that I wouldn't be able to stand unsupported. I was too weak. So I grabbed the mobility pole with the IV bags hanging from it and hauled myself up that way. It took almost a minute. I was dizzy – every muscle in my body was already trembling with exhaustion. But I had to get to that window.

I let my feet fall to the floor. Lifted each one an inch or two, with tremendous effort. There was no going back now. I wouldn't be able to pull my legs back up into bed. Both hands on the mobility pole, I heaved myself up onto my feet. Right away I almost fell, my legs threatening to collapse under me like they were made of sand, but I held on, and soon I was balanced shakily on both feet.

‘Six months of physical therapy,' I grunted. ‘Not likely.'

One step. Two. The wheels of the mobility pole squeaked.

I sucked in a deep breath, trying to recharge my aching muscles. Muscles which could barely carry my own weight, let alone anybody else's. Muscles which, perhaps, had never been anything more than human.

Nine steps. Ten. I was nearly at the window. And I was already seeing just what I'd been afraid of.

Trees. Tall, green, impossible. Narrow footpaths were woven between them, and other patients were walking slowly through, dragging their mobility poles. As I watched, a bird – of a species I happened to know was long extinct – alighted on one of the poles and squawked with complaint as the owner shook it off.

As I reached the window, I saw that the hospital was on the edge of some kind of nature reserve – another extinct concept. Beyond the trees I could see a chain-link fence and then more trees, denser, stretching all the way to –

A
beach
? I stared. The forest thinned out as it approached a bank of sand dunes, and behind them I could see waves crashing down on the shore.

No Seawall. No rising oceans. No fog.

The catheter slipped from my arm as I lost my balance and fell. My knee smacked against the ground and I landed on my palms. Blood trickled down my forearm and swelled into a puddle on the floor.

It was true. All of it. I was not Six of Hearts. There had never been any such person. I was Tom, awakened after six years of sleep . . .

And I'd just been really rude to my mother.

PSYCHOANALYSIS

‘Most people don't dream when they're out,' Erist said. ‘But of those who do, superhero dreams aren't exactly rare.'

She was sitting by the window, elbows resting on her knees. A notepad and pencil lay on the chair beside her. She rarely picked them up – I think she could tell that it made me uncomfortable.

‘This is probably because a superhero persona lends itself to several other common dream themes,' she said. ‘Falling, being chased, hiding . . . any of this sound familiar?'

I nodded. I'd told her about Six of Hearts, but no specifics about what had happened to him. It seemed I didn't have to.

‘So would it be fair to call it a nightmare?'

I nodded again.

‘Your memory loss doesn't stem from brain damage,' she said. ‘I can tell that, because you do remember things, but only after you've been reminded.'

‘So what's wrong with me?' I asked.

Erist looked like she was choosing her words very carefully. ‘I don't mean to alarm you, but when a patient doesn't have brain damage and can't remember something, it's usually because they don't want to.'

‘But I
do
want to.'

‘Consciously, yes. Unconsciously, your brain might be trying to protect you from a traumatic event. Your nightmares – Six of Hearts, ChaoSonic, the Deck – could be your subconscious mind trying to deal with whatever happened to you.'

I felt a tightness grow inside my chest. ‘What kind of traumatic event?'

‘I don't know,' Erist said. ‘But your dreams may provide some clues. Did you have a sense of how old you were?'

‘Almost seventeen,' I said, frowning. ‘Wait – how old am I?'

‘You're twenty-two. You were sixteen when you had your accident, so it's no surprise that you were about that age in the dream. If you had been younger, that might have given us a hint as to how old you were when whatever it is you're blocking happened.'

‘What about the motorcycle accident?' I asked. ‘Couldn't that be the traumatic event?'

‘Unlikely,' Erist said. ‘You told me you remember that, right?'

I did have vague memories of it – the screeching tyres, the blue smoke, the car rushing towards me like a runaway train.

‘Whatever the event is,' Erist continued, ‘it's something you're
still
blocking. Once you accept it, all your other memories should come back.'

‘What if they don't? What if they never do?'

‘Don't worry about that. People will be happy to remind you of things. Most amnesiacs go on to live completely normal lives. Okay?'

I fiddled with the corner of my sheet.

‘Does anyone stand out from the dreams?' Erist asked. ‘Maybe someone who hurt you, or someone you felt threatened by?'

‘Zombies,' I said.

She smiled. I'd told her about them before. ‘Besides that,' she said. ‘The zombies are a group, so they're likely to represent a concept rather than a person. Are there any individuals who stood out?'

‘Nai,' I said. ‘My sister.'

‘Well, you don't have a sister,' Erist said. ‘But she might be an analogy for someone else. What did she do to you in the dream?'

‘She killed me,' I said.

‘That's a pretty clear –' Erist glanced down at her beeper. I hadn't heard it make a sound – she must have switched it to vibrate.

‘Damn it,' she said. ‘Hold that thought, okay? We'll pick this up later.'

She left. I stared out the window at the swaying treetops. I was still uneasy about this new world, but I couldn't wait to go outside. I wondered what those trees would smell like.

The wound on my arm had been treated immediately, but now there was an itchy scab under the bandage. I had my fingers underneath it, rubbing at the irritated flesh, when I felt a lump.

It didn't quite feel like a pimple – slightly bigger, slightly deeper. It was like a bubble of something, trapped under my skin. I squeezed it, to test its firmness, and it disappeared.

I prodded my arm, looking for it again. But there was no sign it had ever been there.

There's a tracking device in you – you should be able to feel it under the skin.

My blood ran cold. But that had never happened. King had never given me a transmitter. He'd never existed.

Then what the hell did I just crush?

The beeping sound accelerated as my heart sped up. But when I looked up at the monitor, the EKG was gone. Instead, seven words had appeared on the screen:

You have been lied to, Agent Six.

The fear felt like ice-cold water dripping onto my skull.

I tugged the bandage off and looked at my arm. Right next to the scab from the old IV there was a faint dot. Exactly where King had injected me.

Was I dreaming? Was this real?

I pulled off the bedsheets, tore my hospital gown and examined my naked body. My scars were still gone. But when I rubbed my fingers furiously over the places where they used to be, I could feel a slightly greasy substance there. I examined my fingertips. Makeup. My old wounds had been painted over.

I climbed out of bed and pulled the IV drip out of my arm. Standing up was much easier this time. The strength in my muscles seemed to be rapidly returning.

There's also an epinephrine capsule inside the device, so you should get an energy boost when it pops.

I stared out the window at the trees, the birds, the sand. All so real.

Picking up my mobility pole, I hefted it like a javelin. And then I threw it as hard as I could. The window shattered, and the mobility pole clanged against the wall behind it. There was no window – just blank concrete. I looked down at the broken shards of glass, in which I could see parts of the grass and the sand and the sea. Dark now. No electrical current to light them. Holograms. The IV bag lay nearby, leaking clear liquid over the floor.

The blood was filled with a mixture of cyclobenzaprine, which is a muscle relaxant, and ketamine, which is a dissociative anaesthetic. It would have made the subject weak, confused, impaired his memory, made him psychologically suggestible
 . . .

This wasn't a real hospital. Erist wasn't a real doctor. I'd been poisoned, just like Nadel Panuros. Suddenly it made sense, the way he'd been pinching himself on the train – he too had been convinced that his life was a dream.

This had all been a lie, designed to trick me into believing that I wasn't Six of Hearts, and it had worked.

I picked up one of the shards – the glass was thick enough and sharp enough to function as a weapon. A little bird glittered in a tree within it.

Running over to the door, I rattled the handle. Locked. So what? I grabbed the mobility pole and hurled it at the window leading to the corridor. It smashed. I broke off the jagged spikes of glass around the edges and clambered through the venetian blinds.

Out here, there was no sign that I was in a hospital. Steel girders held up the cement ceiling. Industrial pipes lined the walls. How cleverly they'd kept me inside my room:

There are some reporters downstairs –

Absolutely not.

It's not up to you. How do you feel about it, Tom?

Every pipe had a pressure valve on it. They all gave the same reading: almost three
thousand
kilopascals.

I'm still in Surabaya, I realised. This is an underwater base.

King's voice echoed through my mind:
Squeeze the device until it bursts, and we'll drop a bomb. You'll have sixty minutes to get away.

It had been four minutes since I'd crushed the transmitter. I had fifty-six to get out of here before this place was blown to smithereens.

Six was still creeping through the corridors of the underwater base when the alarm sounded – a deafening buzzer which grated against his senses at two-second intervals.

Erist must have returned to his room and found the broken hologram and window. Pretty soon everyone in this base would be hunting him. Nurse Nguyen, Doctor O'Connell and the woman who'd pretended to be his mother, plus however many reanimated corpses were down here.

He'd been hoping to find some dive gear before they knew he was out. Now he'd have to deal with whoever was sent to guard it.

Footsteps. Six tilted his head, listened.

Three people. No, four, approaching at a run from somewhere up ahead. Six scanned the wall for somewhere to hide.

A flashing light caught his eye, near the floor. Looking closer, Six saw a small maintenance hatch in the wall beside it. He pulled it open, slithered into the darkness, and propped it back up so it was only slightly ajar.

The light stopped flashing, making Six think that it had been switched on just to get his attention. He thought of the message that had appeared on the EKG – who was helping him?

He pushed his glass shard through the gap between the hatch and the wall, and twisted it sideways so he could see who was approaching in the reflection. It was the actors – Erist, Nguyen, O'Connell and ‘Mum'. The last looked different. It took Six a moment to realise her eyes had changed colour. She must have been wearing contact lenses before so as to look more like him.

‘We'll still get the rest of the money, right?' she panted.

‘I'll be happy just to get out of here,' Nguyen replied.

‘I'll have your share, then.'

‘If the old man decides it's our fault the kid figured it out,' Erist said, ‘then I doubt any of us is getting paid.'

‘Our fault? We did everything right!'

‘Doesn't matter,' Nguyen said. ‘He's so crazy that . . .' His voice faded away as they rounded the corner and disappeared.

Who is ‘he'? Six wondered. And why did he want to trick me into thinking I was somebody else?

Maybe he wants to keep me distracted. Maybe there's something happening on the surface, something he doesn't want me to see. But if that's the case, why wake me up at all? Why not leave me unconscious?

Six rose to his hands and knees and crawled into the darkness of the maintenance shaft. He now had less than forty minutes to get out of here before the bomb fell.

Fortunately, he knew the base couldn't be very large. Anything this far below the ocean's surface needed to be able to withstand enormous amounts of pressure, so there couldn't be much space inside. Besides, he'd already figured out that it was deriving its power from the Deck's seismic sensor, and that wouldn't produce enough to run a large operation.

He figured the base could have a maximum of fifteen rooms. He'd already examined a shared bathroom, deserted, and a control room filled with pressure sensors and sonar readouts, also deserted. Excluding his fake hospital room, that left at most twelve rooms to search.

There was a second floor beneath the one Six had been locked up on. He could see the rooms through the gratings as he crawled over them. Below him right now there was an engine room in which a vineyard of cables trailed down from the walls into a massive battery. There was a box marked
blasting kit
on the wall beside a red plastic pouch marked
fire blanket
. In the floor next to the battery there was a hollow tunnel. Presumably it stretched all the way down to the Earth's mantle, where the seismic sensor was monitoring the vibrations of the tectonic plates and temperature fluctuations in the hot magma around it.

I could shut this whole place down, Six thought. All I'd have to do is unplug that battery, and then they'd have no light, no heat, no air purification. They'd be forced to evacuate.

But for all he knew, there were electric pumps keeping the water out of the base. Shutting down the battery might cause an instant flood, drowning everyone inside, himself included.

There was no sign of any dive gear in the engine room. Six thought about climbing down and taking the blasting kit, but it didn't look very portable, and he couldn't imagine any circumstances under which an explosion down here would be to his advantage. He kept crawling. Eleven rooms to go.

The next room he crawled over seemed to be some kind of storage area. Almost a hundred metal boxes lined the walls and lay in rows along the floor. Some of them were open, exposing cushioned interiors that bristled with straps – apparently the intended contents were fragile.

If Six was going to find what he needed anywhere, it would be here. He braced one hand against the ceiling and pressed the other against the grille. The frame creaked and snapped. Six reached down and caught the falling grate, preventing a noisy crashlanding.

He dropped to the ground. Listened. Nothing moved in the darkness.

On closer inspection, the boxes were attached to the floor and walls by power cables. Perhaps they were designed to transport electrical equipment which needed to be kept charged, although Six couldn't see any sockets on the inside of the open boxes. He found one of the closed ones and lifted the lid.

The cold washed over him like liquid nitrogen and a soft mist spilled out onto the floor. These boxes were refrigerated. Six waved the mist away – and then gasped.