Reaper's Legacy: Book Two (Toxic City) (18 page)

“No,” he said. “I dreamed that I would never die. Who are you?”

“So you're a ghost. I'm Nomad.”

“I've heard of you. And I don't think there's a name for what I am. My dream keeps me alive, and everything I was, apart from my body, persists here.”

“Where is that body?”

“Gone.”

“Lucy-Anne looks for you.”

He glanced away.

“She thinks you're still alive. She says you're all she has left. Your parents are dead.”

Andrew blinked at something out of sight.

“You should come with me. Talk to her.”

He looked back at her, faded eyes flickering, but remained silent.

Nomad sighed, deciding to change tack. “What were you doing in there?”

“Hiding. Why aren't you hiding too?”

“Why should I hide?”

“Because the end is close.” He walked down closer to her, and she could almost see through him. “Surely you of all people can feel it?” he asked.

“Tell me, Andrew.”

“If you promise not to tell her about me,” he said. “I don't want her to know me like this. Lucy-Anne. Lucy-Anne.” He seemed sad as he tried her name, perhaps for the first time in years.

“I promise,” Nomad said. “Though perhaps she will dream the truth from me.”

He pointed down at a fallen stone across the hillside. “I crawled there. Among my remains you'll find…something to give her. My sweet sister.”

Then he closed his eyes and told her the terrible truth.

It took Jack a few moments to gather himself. Dust motes hung in the air and the sound of his breathing seemed echoless, lifeless. Even the taint of Nomad in his mouth seemed old and strangely lifeless. Then he crawled to the edge of the stack of three containers and scrambled carefully to the ground.

Around the corner, he saw Fleeter already running past Sparky and the others.

“Wait!” Jack called, but it was like shouting underwater. So he ran instead, only glancing at his two frozen friends as he dashed by. Jenna's eyes were half-closed in a slow, long blink, and Sparky's were turned to the left, looking right at Jack.
He knows I'll be passing by
, Jack thought. It was strange, feeling his friend's eyes upon him yet knowing he could not see. Of all the powers Jack had tapped into, this was the most staggering. He felt a moment of awed terror at what he was doing, and an intense, shattering certainty that all this was very, very wrong. But he could not stop now.

Everything depended on the next few moments.

Jack caught up with Fleeter as she paused by one of the Chopper vehicles. He grabbed her arm tightly, and when she looked back she was grinning, looking down at his hand with eyes wide, excited. He wondered whether she had done anything other than murder during her slowed-down existence, then shook the idea away.

“You're slow,” she said. “Come on. Not long.”

“We've got—”

“Got to be quick,” she finished for him. She nodded back at Sparky and the others. “They might only have seconds.”

“But the Choppers have dropped their weapons.” And it was true. The soldiers all looked confused and shaken, probably in the middle of wondering why they had suddenly dropped their machine guns.

“Not all of them,” Fleeter said. “Only the ones he could see.” She nodded up at the surrounding piled containers where they had seen a sniper, and where more might be hiding.

They ran. Across the rough concrete, past the Land Rovers and two vans, and as they approached the larger of the container arrangements Jack had a sudden pang of terror. What would they find inside? He hoped his mother and Emily. But he could not help fearing the worst.

Fleeter paused by a couple of wooden boxes that had been laid to form steps.

“What?” Jack asked.

“Door,” she said, pointing up. The side of the container was swathed in canvas, but a sheet of it was pinned aside, showing the gleaming bottom third of a metal doorway formed in the unit's wall. “More than meets the eye.”

“You can open it?” he asked.

“Dunno. You got a special finger-shaped-like-a-key power, Jack?”

Jack ignored her and stepped up to the door, shifting the canvas aside and searching for a handle. He found it, pushed down, and was surprised when the door clicked open.

“Oh, that's careless,” Fleeter whispered. She climbed the boxes to stand close beside him. “We won't have long. Opening the door will cause a storm inside at their speed, because the pressures will rapidly change. Then they'll just start shooting.” Fleeter's previous
flippancy had vanished and now she was all seriousness. Jack should have been pleased. But the shock of what was revealed as Jack hauled the door open excluded anything else

The connected units still formed several compartments, with a corridor running along one side. They were staring now into the corridor and the first compartment, and it was an operating theatre. At least that was what Jack thought at first. But closer examination revealed greater, more terrible detail, and it was only Fleeter's hand against his back that prevented him from tumbling back down the impromptu steps.

Oh no, oh no, oh no
, he thought, and the terror of what he saw conjured images that strove to still his heart and steal every ounce of determination and resolve he had. Operating theatres were clean, caring places, their sterile atmospheres filled with good intentions and positive thoughts. There might be blood, but it was quickly mopped up. There would be tools that looked severe and even grotesque, but they would be perfectly, caringly manufactured to make lives better. Not to take lives. Not to torture.

The operating table was a slab of metal with a drainage channel around all four sides, pipes venting into several large plastic containers beneath the table. They were opaque, but Jack could still see that they were half-filled with a dark fluid. Blood also still smeared the table and was splashed across the floor, drying in boot-print patterns. Along the far wall was a metal counter propped on thin legs, and it was scattered with an array of tools. He could make out several saws of varying sizes, heavy knives, scalpels, and a couple of chunky devices with thick springs and wide clamps. Other were beyond identifying. Some of the tools looked all too familiar from his father's work shed at home, and the room took another leap away from being an operating theatre. This was a dissection suite.

A man dressed in jeans and a canvas jacket was bent over by the
head of the table. He was picking something up from the floor and depositing it in a bag, the bag already bulging with other things. He was almost motionless, and the slowness of his movement—as invisible as the shifting minute hand of a clock—gave the scene a strangely fluid property.

Other things in the bag
, Jack thought, still struggling to comprehend the awfulness of this, and some of those things could have belonged to Emily or his mother. Because as he stepped inside to get a better view of the torture chamber, he could see the pink fleshiness of the object in the man's hand.

“We should kill him,” Fleeter breathed, and Jack wanted to, more than anything else right then—more than rescuing his family, if they were still alive; more than doing something good and strong that might help London's survivors find a safer, calmer future—he wanted to kill this man. But as Fleeter crossed the room, stepping over blood and moving more gracefully than Jack had yet seen, reality hit home.

“Fleeter,” he said, his voice deadened by whatever enabled them to do this. “The girl.”

Jack turned from that awful room and walked along the corridor. It ran the length of the four containers, and he could see three more doors leading off to the right into other, smaller rooms, as well as one at the end. There was also a woman in the corridor. She was pushing her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, her other hand resting on the door handle closest to Jack as she prepared to enter.

And see what?
he thought, heart racing.
What are these bastards doing here?
But he knew very well. This was vivisection.

He planted his hand on the woman's chest and shoved her aside. She felt strange to the touch, her chest almost solid, yet not quite mannequin-hard. Her expression did not alter, but as she bounded from the wall and slid along the floor the effect of the impact was
dreadful. Her right arm was crushed slowly, violently around her body, shoulder popping, and as her hand glanced from her face her nails opened ugly gashes across her nose and over her forehead. Even though in Jack's view she moved normally, in her reality the impact would have been impossibly rapid and brutal. He hoped he had not killed her. But he didn't care enough to check.

Fleeter was behind him as he shoved the handle down on the metal door and shoved it open.

It was a store room. All four walls of the container were lined with shelving, and eighty percent of the shelves contained glass sample jars. They were strapped in for safety. Their contents were not easily identifiable.

“Bastards,” Fleeter said.

“How many people?” Jack wondered. There must have been two hundred jars there. “How can they…?”

“What, justify this?”

Jack nodded, but he already knew the answer. “They don't have to,” he said. “As far as the world knows, London is filled with monsters.”

“Camp H certainly is,” Fleeter said. “Come on. The girl.”

They stepped over the woman sprawled in the corridor—her expression changing infinitely slowly from mildly distracted, to shocked and agonised—and kicked open the next door. The room was filled with equipment, tools, and a heavily stocked weapon rack. Fleeter grabbed a pistol and several magazines and offered them to Jack, but he shook his head. She raised an eyebrow.

“It wasn't an invitation,” she said.

Jack took the gun. She pointed briefly at the switch above the trigger. “Safety. And there's one in the handle, squeeze that when you're shooting.”

The next room was a bathroom, and then the corridor ended
with another door. Fleeter went to kick it open but Jack held up his hand, one finger raised.

He half-closed his eyes and cruised his star-scape of potential, realising even as he tried that he had yet to employ one talent whilst already using another. His awareness of Fleeter and his surroundings diminished, and he probed outwards, projecting his senses through the metal door and into the room beyond. There were three warm sensations in there. Jack closed in and merged his own senses with the first—

He smells coffee, thick and bitter; hears a long, low moan, and realises it is someone else in mid-sentence, their words slowed to an impossible crawl; sees two women across from him, one of them biting into a bar of chocolate, the other open-mouthed as she speaks, both cradling guns across their laps, the room lined with computers and wheeled chairs, a map on one wall, screens buzzing mid-flash. And in that other person's mind which is more alien than Jack could have possibly imagined, a frozen image of what its owner would rather be doing right now. The stilled thought includes both women across from him.

Jack notices the grille in the wall behind the women, then, and the shadow outlined beyond. There is a weak light in that smaller room. When Jack shifts his perception he touches upon an incredible, tortured mind, and the pain within is—

—Jack pulled back through the door to himself, shivering as he reined in his senses. He panted heavily, rubbing his hands across his eyes as if that might clear him of another person's distress and wretchedness.

“What?” Fleeter asked.

“Horrible,” Jack said. “The poor girl, the poor…”

Fleeter shoved him against the door. “What?”

“Three Choppers. Control room. The girl's in a smaller room…a cell…and she's—”

Fleeter slammed the handle down and entered the room. Jack went to follow but slumped against the cold doorframe, watching helplessly as Fleeter shoved the two women aside. When they struck the desks and floor, blood flowed. She tried the door but it was locked and bolted. When she glanced back at Jack, he was already moving towards her.

“Stand back.” He concentrated, and the two heavy hinges glowed red, white, then dripped and melted. Fleeter pulled the door again, and sweat flushed down Jack's face as he concentrated some more. Then the door squealed open, molten metal pattering across the floor. Smoke hung lazily in the air.

And Jack saw the girl, who was no girl at all. She must have been eighteen. Pretty once, perhaps, now she was restrained by ropes tied around her arms and legs, her emaciated body wrapped in shapeless clothing, dark hair knotted and dirty. A waste bucket sat beneath her seat, and it was the indignity of this more than anything that stirred Jack's rage. He'd seen body parts and blood, jars filled with dissected brains and other organs, and the evidence of the slaughter carried out here in the name of science—or perhaps simply in the name of fear and hate—was incontrovertible. But seeing this poor girl and the bucket she had to piss in brought it all home.

“Bastards!” he shouted. Fleeter glanced at him, her usual manic grin absent. She pulled a flick-knife from her pocket and sliced through the ropes. Then she lifted a thinner strand and held it up for him to see.

“What?” Jack asked.

“Drugging her.”

“Cut it.”

Fleeter did so, and as the girl slumped slowly onto her seat, the pipe started to swing away, dripping a hazy fluid across the floor. She moved to her own time, and Jack had plenty of time to catch her before she fell.

“Won't it kill her moving her at our speed?” he asked. “She doesn't have what we have.”

“It'll hurt her,” Fleeter said. “But we need to get her back through there. Just be careful not to bump her against anything.”

Jack glanced behind at the three guards. Fleeter had shoved them all aside, and now they sprawled on the floor, still gradually shifting from the staggering impacts her contact had subjected them to. Maybe they were dead; right then, Jack did not care. He hated them enough to kill them himself, but every second they had was precious.

“Give me a moment, then bring her,” Fleeter said. Her voice had grown serious, and in her eyes Jack saw his own rage reflected. At the sight of the girl she'd lost some of her aimless anger, and now her fury was defined.

“Fleeter…” But she was gone, across the room and out into the corridor. He could have called her back. Could have prevented her from doing what he knew she was about to do. But his own fury held his voice, and as he lifted the poor girl into his arms he heard a sound like paper tearing.

Fleeter was waiting for him back at the door into the container. Jack only glanced into the torture room, and barely winced slightly at the sight of the man and his slashed throat. She'd used the same knife that had freed the girl, and there was some justice in that. But Jack was also unsettled that the sight of murder troubled him so little.