Terminal (45 page)

‘I don't know,' Eddie replied. He had his hand raised in front of him, his fingers splayed.

As Parry watched, it was as if Eddie was blurred, vibrating, like a piece of film when it's out of the sprocket but still running through a projector. And on the roof around Parry the same thing was happening to Eddie's men.

And to Rebecca Two.

And to Hermione.

And to Elliott.

But Elliott had been prepared for it.

Glancing up, she saw Stephanie approaching from the pedestrian subway, Martha's knife still in her hand.

‘I think someone's coming to see you,' she said to Will, but not vindictively.

‘No, stay. Please,' Will said weakly, trying to hold on to Elliott.

‘I can't. Anyway, you wouldn't want me like this,' Elliott said, her insect limbs twitching behind her.

‘I don't care. I …' Will trailed off, barely conscious as his hands slipped from Elliott.

‘Goodbye, Will,' she said softly to him, leaning over him to kiss him on the forehead. Then she turned from the Bentley and took a few steps across the pavement. She was peering up at the top of the building where her father and Parry were.

‘Dad!' she shouted at the top of her voice.

‘Here,' Danforth said, offering her his headset.

She took it from him and quickly put it on.

‘Dad, can you hear me?' she asked.

‘Elliott,' he acknowledged, waving from the edge of the roof.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘It was all or nothing,' she said, staring up at him. ‘If I hadn't activated the recall, it would have all been over anyway, not just for us, but for the rest of the planet too.' She shook her head, her expression sad. ‘There wasn't anything else I could do.'

‘Well, you did it, Elliott. You stopped it,' Eddie said, brimming with pride for his daughter. There was a pause before he asked, ‘
Recall?
'

Elliott never replied.

She, her father, and every Styx on the surface of the Earth began to blur out in a haze of red.

They were simply vanishing into thin air.

‘Rebecca!' Captain Franz shouted desperately from the back of the Bentley. Sensing that something was happening to her, the Styx twin had stepped from the car, then promptly begun to disappear. The New Germanian threw himself at where Rebecca Two had been, trying to clutch at her as the
red blur faded away. But for all the good it did him, he might as well have been trying to catch smoke. As there was nothing to stop him, he fell on his face, sliding in the oily mess left by the Armagi, and then he just lay there, sobbing uncontrollably.

And other than his sobs, there was nothing but a stunned silence all around the cathedral.

 

 

 

Chapter Twenty

A
s Will came to, he found he was lying in bed. A real bed, with a mattress and a pillow, and the feel of starched sheets against his skin. And there was pain, lots of it, mostly in his stomach and chest.

He let out a groan, not because of how he felt, but because he needed to know that he was really awake. Then he groaned again, louder this time, and managed to open his eyes. He had a glimpse of sunlight through a window, and at the same time became aware of someone sitting beside him in a chair. Whoever it was, they were holding his hand. They were speaking to him, but he couldn't hear what they were saying.

‘Elliott?' he asked, trying to see.

And then he thought that he could make out the shadowy outline of a second person behind the first. ‘Chester … is that you, Chester?'

‘It's just me, Steph,' came the reply, and after a moment, ‘and …. no, Chester isn't here.'

It took Will a few seconds to process this. Then he managed to open his eyes again and focus on her. Her red hair was clean and perfect, and she was smiling. She radiated
beauty, just like she had when he'd first met her on Parry's estate. It felt to Will as though he'd gone back in time.

‘Oh, hi,' he said, pretending to cough so he had an excuse to pull his hand away from her. ‘Where's Elliott?' he asked croakily. His mouth was chronically dry, so he began to reach towards the jug and plastic cup on the bedside cabinet.

‘Water?' she anticipated. ‘Let me get you some. You must be, like, so thirsty.'

He tried to sit up to take the glass from her, but the stabbing pain in his abdomen put a stop to that.

‘No,' she said, ‘you mustn't try to move.'

With Stephanie's assistance, Will drank the water greedily. ‘Where am I?' he asked between mouthfuls.

‘Hospital. They've got it working again. They've even got the electricity back on now, but they hadn't when they did your operation here.'

‘Operation?' he repeated, the water going down the wrong way and making him cough, for real this time. ‘Why, what did they do to me?'

Then it started to come back to him. He remembered the Armagi and Hermione, and then – but only very vaguely – what happened on the bonnet of the black Bentley.

‘Look, I should let Parry know you're awake. All right?' Stephanie said. She seemed in a hurry to leave the room.

It wasn't Parry that appeared a few moments later, but someone else. Will was rather startled as he hadn't heard anyone come in, and all of a sudden there was a man standing at the end of the bed.

‘How are you doing, Will?' Jiggs asked.

‘Who are you? Will asked, narrowing his eyes at the unfamiliar figure, with his unkempt beard and grubby-looking
fatigues. ‘You're not a doctor, are you? Where's Parry?'

‘He'll be here soon. And no, I'm not a doctor,' Jiggs laughed. ‘I forget that you and I haven't really met before, not formally. I'm Jiggs. You might have seen me before, but it would have been just for a moment … on the edge of the pore in the inner world.'

Will didn't answer.

‘It's funny – I know you so well, but you don't know me. I came on that mission to seal the inner world off, with you and Drake and Sweeney and the rest of the team, and the time I'm talking about is when I ambushed a pair of Limiters,' Jiggs said, trying to help Will out. ‘Don't you remember at all? I took out the first Limiter with a …' Jiggs made a slashing motion across his throat, ‘and carried the second one over into the pore with me.'

Will was squinting at the rather nondescript man with his darting, alert eyes. ‘Oh, yes,
Jiggs
. Of course. You're the invisible man,' he said. ‘Hello.'

They shook hands, which was a little peculiar after all that they'd been through at the same time, but not quite together.

‘I've spoken to Parry and he's on his way,' Jiggs said. ‘He's got his work cut out for him right now. You know he's filling in as Prime Minister in the emergency government until they can get things back on track.'

Will was staring through the window, feeling somewhat detached from everything. ‘More of it is coming back to me … more of what happened at the end,' he said quietly. ‘She's gone, hasn't she?'

‘Yes, Elliott, and all the Styx – they sort of disappeared,' Jiggs confirmed.

‘She told me she was going away. And, unless I've dreamt
it, she had …' Will wasn't sure how to put it, so he tried to indicate a pair of insect legs by pointing behind his head.

‘She did. When she was in the tank with Drake and me, she complained about pain in her neck. But it never occurred to me that …' Jiggs trailed off.

‘And Drake?' Will asked all of a sudden. ‘I heard his voice after that Styx woman dragged me out of the car, and then …. were there shots?'

Jiggs nodded. ‘That was it for Drakey, I'm sorry to say. But he'd been so badly irradiated when the bomb in the pore went off, he didn't have much time left anyway.'

Shaking his head slowly, Will didn't speak for a second. ‘And what about Chester?' he asked, very reluctantly, because he thought he already knew the answer. Otherwise his friend would have been there at his bedside too.

Jiggs shifted uneasily as he answered. ‘No, he didn't make it either. I'm afraid he was set on a collision course with Danforth. You see, the death of Chester's parents was never intended and very unfortunate. But Danforth was no traitor. Far from it. In his out-there, superclever-supercrazy mind, he'd figured we were on a hiding to nothing, and had cooked up a plan so he could infiltrate the Styx. And it worked, up to a point.'

Will was silent for a moment. ‘So did Danforth kill him?'

‘No, surprisingly enough, it was Martha.'

‘Martha!' Will said with surprise.

‘Yes. She turned up with a bevy of Brights as her personal escort-cum-hit squad. Seems Chester and Martha went off together, but then had a falling-out. You should ask Danforth or Stephanie about it – they were both there when it happened.'

‘That's just terrible. Poor Chester,' Will said. He could hardly bring himself to think about the loss of his friend. ‘It was because of me that he got into all this in the first place,' Will added, almost in a whisper.

‘Don't do that to yourself,' Jiggs said firmly. ‘You can't beat yourself up over him. The way it played out with the Styx, not one of us was safe. Nobody knows yet precisely how many casualties this country has suffered, but it runs into the millions.'

A twin-bladed helicopter thundered past the building, so close that the windows vibrated. Jiggs was grateful for the opportunity to change the subject as he turned to see the large palette of crates strung below the aircraft on ropes. ‘Good – that looks like more medical supplies for us. The Americans are here in force now, and bending over backwards to be helpful,' he said. ‘Considering they were seconds away from blowing us all to kingdom come with a nuclear strike, I suppose it's the least they can do.'

‘Nuclear strike? Really?' Will echoed. ‘I missed so much,' he said again. ‘After the Armagi got me.'

‘Only to be expected,' Jiggs said. ‘They wouldn't exactly have handled you with kid gloves. And, besides, Hermione needed you out of it when she shoved those Armagi larvae down your gullet.'

‘So I really had those things in me?' Will said with a shiver, glancing down at his stomach.

‘Yes, and I was first on the scene. I had no option but to …' Jiggs hesitated.

‘Please. I want to know,' Will urged him.

Jiggs was still hesitant. ‘Maybe it would be insensitive of me to tell you anything more. Are you really sure you want all the gory details?'

‘Don't worry,' Will said, trying to smile but achieving something more akin to a grimace. ‘After what I've been put through over the last couple of years, I'm not sure anything much can get to me now.'

‘Righty ho,' Jiggs said. ‘Well, I figured I had to take immediate action after Bug Lady impregnated you outside St Paul's, and I was the nearest person with any sort of medical training.'

‘I was choking a lot, wasn't I?' Will whispered, putting a hand to his throat.

‘You were,' Jiggs confirmed. ‘And after the grubs were deposited inside you, your body quickly began to shut down, so I filled you up with morphine. The golden rule with any major trauma like that is to medicate immediately against the shock.'

‘I think I sort of remember … it was beginning to hurt like hell, and Elliott was with me too, wasn't she?' Will said.

Jiggs nodded. ‘For a while. Anyway, we had to operate on you, there and then, in a tent on the forecourt of St Paul's. We had no option but to act quickly because we had no way of knowing if the grubs had hatched out of the egg sac or not, or even if they were still in you.'

Jiggs held his hand sideways to Will to emphasise the point he was about to make. ‘You see, there seems to have been a dividing line between the Styx, who magically did a disappearing act, and the Armagi, who degraded into a rather foul-smelling, fishy mass.'

Will pulled a face.

‘Anyway, I opened you up pretty sharpish, and found that the grubs had all died, but not before they'd begun to feed. So I located and removed each of them, stopped the bleeding and
patched you up the best I could. Then you were evac-ed here in a chopper, where a doctor opened you up again. You see, the dead grubs had degraded in you, leaving behind not just organic matter but other chemicals – enzymes, I suppose – which had to be painstakingly swabbed out, because we didn't know what effect they might have.'

‘So I'm okay now?' Will asked.

‘The doctor believes so. Although you're not quite out of the woods yet. There's always a risk of infection, which is why you're dosed to the gills with antibiotics, and he's left some drains in place.'

Jiggs pointed at the clear plastic tubes that hung over the side of Will's mattress.

‘They come from me? Can I see?' the boy asked, peering down at his front.

Jiggs blew through his lips. ‘Are you sure you want to?'

Will nodded.