Havoc (24 page)

‘Shut up! Ever seen anyone die of a nerve agent?'

‘Christ, Jono!'

‘Thought not. Watch closely then.'

CHAPTER 32

I switched off the intercom to Jono so he couldn't hear me and covered the cc-eye
so he couldn't see me, then said to Lanya, ‘Go find a biohazard suit. They must have
an emergency one in there somewhere.'

‘What are you doing?' she asked.

‘Calling the cavalry.'

‘The what?'

‘Just go!'

I switched the intercom between Jono and me back on and heard him saying, ‘Uncover
that camera!'

I was hunting through the multi-device I'd taken earlier in the day searching for
a comms contact for Dash
.
I could hear Jono clattering about, swearing under his
breath. It sounded like he'd discovered that he couldn't simply plug a cannister
of nerve gas into the relevant airvent and flick a switch. File that under hope:
faint but real.

I found
Bannister, Ashleigh
at last and started to type a message to her. But where
the hell were we? The Marsh and its stupid anonymous buildings.

I closed my eyes and went back to the path we'd walked down, saw the building as we came to
it, saw the door that Jono opened: there was a number above it—a code instead of
a sign for whatever happened in that building. Got it. Typed:
Store 36C–P1, Level
G minus 2. Speed or death. Seriously. N.
Pressed SEND. Prayed.

‘Uncover that camera,' yelled Jono.

Speed or death
was a game we had played at Tornmoor—its real name was probably something
like Tactical Training Exercise No. 48. But we didn't know then that the security
services ran the school—all we knew was that they came every year to recruit the
best of the senior students—Jono, for example, and Dash.

In fact, there was nothing tactical about that game; it was just brute speed over
an impromptu obstacle course through the buildings and grounds of the school. If
you didn't make it in time you were ‘dead'. As the game went on the time for each
run got shorter and shorter—everyone was ‘dead' by the end.

I looked through the glass to see what Lanya was doing, but I couldn't see the whole
room and I couldn't see her. I typed a second, longer message to Dash and talked
to Jono.

‘You want to burn your entire career on a single act
of revenge? Nothing happened
between Fy and me. We helped each other out, that's all.'

Lanya appeared at my window. I turned off comms to Jono.

‘I found a cupboard,' she said. ‘It's got a symbol on it, could be a bio-suit, but
it's locked.'

‘Okay,' I said. ‘I'll try and find a code for it.'

I dived into the multi-device again and switched Jono back on.

‘Remember chemistry class?' he was saying. ‘Remember nerve agents?'

Yes, I remembered nerve agents. But they were just fodder for assessment then.

‘Remember what they do to people? Are you listening to me?'

‘Yes, I'm listening.'

‘I found them. The nerve agent cannisters. I found where they're stored, and I'm
going to get one. Don't go away!'

I wasn't sure whether to believe him. I'd been hearing a lot of keyboard activity
up there. With luck, he needed a code he didn't have to get what he wanted. Same
as me.

I went back to the multi, trawling through layers of the Marsh: departments, operations,
special projects. I shut out everything else: Jono crowing upstairs, Lanya standing
staunch on the other side of the door, Dash running—please God, running—this way.
I shut it all out
and searched for this room on the multi. For the location of the
emergency suit inside the cabinet inside the room. For the code that would unlock
it. It had to be there. Every problem-solving, code-breaking, proof-finding effort
I'd ever made I poured into the search for that code.

I couldn't find it.

As far as the multi was concerned the room Lanya was in didn't exist. The emergency
cabinet didn't exist. The bio-suit inside it didn't exist. Lanya put a hand on the
glass.

‘Nik, I can't wait for you. I'm going up there.'

She'd pulled a fire extinguisher off the wall and was wrapping it in a sheet she'd
found.

‘What are you doing?' I said.

She stood up. ‘Making a harness. Gonna climb a cage and smash that window.'

I looked up at the window, thought it would be reinforced glass, but didn't say so.

She hauled on her makeshift sheet harness and strapped the extinguisher to her back,
adjusted it, tightened it.

‘I know,' she said. ‘It'll be reinforced, maybe even bullet proof. But d'you think
he knows that? Even if he does, d'you think he'll risk it?' She looked at me—bright,
fierce, so beautiful—and smiled. ‘Wish me luck!'

I laughed, despite it all.

‘Hey!' yelled Jono. ‘I'm back! Look!' We both looked
up to see him holding a small
cannister. ‘Here it is!'

Lanya ran for the cage directly beneath the window and started to scramble up it.
She was halfway there before Jono noticed what she was doing and then even he stopped
to watch her. She reached the top, hauled herself onto it and crawled carefully across
the mesh until she could stand up and almost look him in the eye. She took off the
harness and tied the extinguisher into it so she could swing it at him.

The grin left Jono's face. They stood glaring at each other, daring each other.

‘I'll do it,' he said.

‘You'll die,' I said.

‘So will she.'

Keep talking, I thought. Never my strong point.

‘Did you calibrate the canister size to the room size?' I said.

No answer.

I bet you didn't, I thought. I had no idea if it mattered—probably the canister was
easily big enough for a lethal contamination of the whole room, but I was chasing
any nanosecond of doubt and delay I could catch.

‘Fuck you,' he said. ‘Say your prayers.'

CHAPTER 33

I yelled something wordless and desperate.

Jono yelled too, but not at me. Dash's voice came through the intercom.

‘Stand down, Jono! Jono! Stand down or I will shoot you.'

‘You're a joke,' he sneered.

‘You think?' she said. The intercom blared a wild burst of static and Jono yelped
a short, sharp scream.

I heard Dash again, crisp, all business.

‘Nik? He's down. Are you there?'

I breathed. ‘Yes,' my voice shaken loose in my throat.

‘Speed or death! For real this time. You won't believe the obstacle course out there
right now.' She paused and peered through the window. ‘What is this place? What's
going on?'

‘Let me in there.'

‘Hold on.'

‘Now, Dash!'

‘In a second. I'm looking for the door release.'

She was poring over what must have been a console and peering into the room.

‘Did you shoot him?' I asked.

‘No, tasered. I've cuffed him and he won't move for a while.'

Lanya had left the sheet and the fire extinguisher on the top of the cage and was
climbing down.

I kicked the door. ‘Dash! Hurry up.'

‘All right, all right! There! Go!'

The lock clicked, the door slid and I ran into a wall of warm air so stale and stinking
it made me gag. The room was a festering sore: lines of cages reached up to the level
of the observation window whose white rectangle of light outshone the dim fluoro
tubes way above our heads. The air was rank with disinfectant, sweat and sewage and
something else: the sweet stink I'd known in Moldam—bodies decomposing in the heat.

Lanya had reached the floor and sagged into a crouch, head bowed. She was shaking
and breathing hard. I crouched beside her, lifted the braids off her face. They were
dripping with sweat.

She turned away. ‘Gonna throw up.'

She took a deep breath, held it, blew it out, shuddering. She turned back to me.

‘No. I'm all right.' She gave me a bleak almost-smile and started to get to her feet.
I put out a hand to help but she turned away. ‘No. Don't touch me.'

‘Hey.'

‘I'm okay, but…' Her eyes were dark and wide and dazed. Her face shone with sweat
and she was clinging to the wire of the cage to stay upright. ‘They're all dead.
I called to them and none of them moved. I tried not to touch them, but I had to
see. Their skin is all bruises and their eyes…their eyes are full of blood—'

She stopped to catch her breath.

‘Take it easy,' I said. ‘We're getting out of here now.'

‘No, you don't understand.' Her voice was shaking. ‘They've been shot.'

‘Jesus. What?'

‘A bullet to the head, every one of them. Someone must have panicked when the looting
started, they couldn't let infected people get outside. They're sick with something
terrible, or they were. This is what's coming to Moldam, Nik! That agent—the one
who brought me here—that's what he told me.'

‘Stop. Take my hand.'

She shook her head. ‘I've been in here for hours—I've breathed the air and bent over
bodies and touched that sheet. The sickness will be in me now. You can't touch me.
You mustn't.'

‘At least let's get out of here?'

She nodded and let go of the cage, but then swayed where she stood and began to fold.

I caught her as she fell and held her while she vomited a stream of something pale
and thin; she spat the last of it out, gasping, and wiped her mouth. She was shivering
in short spasms and breathing with effort. I turned her towards me, put her head
on my shoulder and held her.

It was whole minutes before she stopped shaking. Then she lifted her head to look
at me. I kissed her forehead and, lightly, her lips.

She pulled back and whispered, ‘Why did you do that? What if I'm sick?'

‘Why do you think? Can you stand?'

She nodded, and we left the room at last, but for a long time after that my skin
crawled with the heat and stink of it.

Upstairs, the observation area was empty—Dash had taken Jono away. The room wasn't
much wider than its window and only half a dozen paces deep; it seemed that its sole
purpose was as a place to watch lab rats perform and/or die. A bank of screens and
controls took up half the space beneath the window, a table with chairs the other
half. There was also a large paper shredder at the back with a pile of shreds underneath
it and its red light blinking. Someone had been busy. I sat down at the console:
the computer was logged in—thank you, Jono—and gave me access to much more than I'd
got from the multi-device.
I hunted through the system looking for anything that
might point us in the direction of the vaccine, preferably roomfuls of the stuff
that would be enough for us and all of Moldam. Lanya leaned against the desk beside
me, watching my face.

‘Suppose I'm infected,' she said. ‘You could be too, now.'

‘Like it was your fault you ended up in there?'

I went back to the screen. ‘Look at this. It's a map of this place. But now what?
Labs? Would they keep the vaccine in labs? Or storerooms? What about storerooms attached
to labs? Or storerooms miles away from labs to hide them better? Or,' I sat back,
‘none of the above because it's all so freakin' secret that only Frieda knows for
sure?'

‘What good's a vaccine if we're already sick?'

‘If we get it early enough—Raffael told me—if we get it early enough, we stand a
good chance of not dying.'

She studied me, not believing. ‘Do you know anything about the symptoms?' She was
back looking down at the bodies.

I shook my head. ‘Don't look at them.'

I still couldn't find anything on the stupid system. I hunted round in the console
drawer and found a pen and a scrappy notepad that looked like it had lost most of
its pages to the shredder. I started jotting down the room codes, looking for patterns,
but that gave me nothing. I
tried tracking people who'd logged in to the observation
room over the last seven days. Frieda had visited three days before. Had she then
gone off to gloat in private over her store of vaccines? No, it looked like she'd
gone back to her office. Who else had been in? Not that many people—half a dozen
or so, including Jono who'd come with Frieda, but not Dash. Frieda's Operation Havoc
was looking like a close-kept secret.

Lanya was watching over my shoulder. When I sat back, thinking I'd reached a dead
end, she said, ‘All right. At least we have something to work with.'

‘We do? What?'

Her voice began to lighten and lift as she got into problem-solving mode. ‘We—you
and me—are now something that Frieda hasn't planned for. Havoc on the loose.'

I looked at her. ‘That's true.'

Dash came through the door. ‘All done. He's locked up. I'll go back and get him when
he's good and quiet.' She peered out the observation window, frowning. ‘What is this
place?'

‘You really don't know?' I said.

‘Never been here.' She picked up the cannister Jono had been waving around and read
the label on it. Her eyebrows shot up. ‘This really is nerve gas. You weren't kidding.'
She looked out the window again. ‘What's in the cages?'

‘You mean who,' I said.

‘What?'

‘Don't be dim,' I said. ‘What do you think the Marsh is for?'

She darted me a look of alarm and disbelief and then walked along the window trying
to get a better view below. ‘Is that true? Are there people down there? I mean—'

‘Yes,' said Lanya. ‘People. And yes, they're dead.'