Terminal (3 page)

Reaching the large float under the surviving wing, Jiggs braced himself against it, then with a push of his legs directed himself at a door on which
Emergency Exit
had been stencilled. He tugged on the handle. It refused to open, so he used his handgun to shoot out the lock and hinges. With another tug, the door came away with a burst of rust. Jiggs allowed it to float off, then entered the aircraft with Drake.

Although the windows amazingly weren't broken in this section of the seaplane, everything was damp inside – the fabric of the seats and the carpet almost rotted completely away and covered with a grey slime. In one of the rows Jiggs spied two skeletons. Their bony arms were clasped around each other and from the way their skulls were touching, there was no question they'd been in a final embrace at the moment of death.

‘I'd have done the same,' Jiggs confided to them.

But he didn't have time to examine what else was in there
as he gently laid Drake on the floor and set about tending to him. Battlefield triage was nothing new to Jiggs. Slipping Drake's Bergen off and removing the booster tied to his wrist, he methodically catalogued the areas that needed attention. Having worked his way along each of Drake's limbs and then the trunk of his body, he quickly found the injury to his shoulder.

‘That's no burn. That's a bullet wound,' he mumbled to himself, then glanced at the welts on Drake's head and the charred areas of his combats, which would need to be carefully removed to assess the damage to the tissue beneath them. ‘But it's probably the least of our problems.'

He scanned the cabin around him as he voiced his concerns out loud. ‘Major trauma from third-degree burns … huge risk of infection from this septic environment … and unless there are any supplies here, just my medikit to work with.' He rolled up his sleeves. ‘Hey ho,' he whispered grimly. ‘Off to work we go.'

If Drake had any hope of pulling through, at least he was in capable hands. Jiggs was highly proficient in field medicine. In some of the places he'd been sent – often the middle of nowhere – he'd frequently been called upon to use his skills to save both himself and those around him.

But now Jiggs suddenly noticed his patient had stopped breathing.

‘No, you don't, old man. You're not going to die on me.' He leant over and gave Drake mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. ‘Not today,' he said, as he began to thump his chest to get his heart beating again. ‘Not on my watch.'

 

 

P
ART
O
NE

Aftermath

 

 

 

Chapter One

S
chraack!

The small skull split open under Will's boot, the hollow sound resounding through the empty New Germanian street. Will hadn't been looking where he was treading as he'd moved towards the pavement, and had completely failed to notice the diminutive skeleton stretched out in the gutter.

‘Oh … my … good … God,' Will swallowed as he stood over the skeleton, which had to have been that of a child. Although very little brain tissue remained inside the skull, the sight of the empty pupal casings spilling out was horrifying. The climate of this inner world with its ever-burning sun couldn't have been more favourable for the armies of voracious flies, which had stripped the flesh from the human skeletons in a matter of weeks. Eight weeks to be precise. And stripped it so efficiently that the stench of decay that once hung over the dead city had almost completely vanished.

Everywhere Will looked there were sun-bleached bones, mostly poking from crumpled clothes. Since the virus had also killed off all the mammals that would normally have scavenged on the remains, the bodies had lain undisturbed, still
precisely where they had fallen.

Undisturbed except for the carrion-feeding birds. Avian species had been spared by the virus, and a little further along the road Will spotted two fat crows playing tug of war over something beside a discarded hat. They didn't bother to move until he was almost on them.

‘Get away!' he shouted, aiming his foot at them. Beating their greasy black wings and giving ugly calls, they grudgingly took to the air.

Will saw what the crows had been fighting over. On the tarmac was a human eyeball, so desiccated and discoloured it resembled a rotten plum.

He couldn't stop himself from staring at the eyeball as it stared accusingly back at him, its ragged optic nerve strung out behind it like a tail, as though it was some kind of new animal.

‘This is so wrong,' Will whispered, suddenly overwhelmed by all the signs of death around him. People had clearly left their homes in their thousands to gather here in the centre of the city, where they'd succumbed to the virus. They must have been desperately hoping that their government was going to do something to save them from the disease that could cause death in as little as twenty-four hours.

‘Hey, dozy, what is it?' Elliott shouted. Finding that Will hadn't followed her into the large department store they'd been heading towards, she'd reappeared through the shattered glass of one of the doors.

‘
We
did this,' he managed to reply. ‘We're to blame for all this.'

‘We never meant for it to come to this,' Elliott said, as she surveyed the bodies.

Of course Will knew that Elliott was right; Sweeney must have accidentally broken the test tube Drake had given him. It was never the intention to actually release the deadly virus. But it didn't make Will feel any better about what he was seeing.

Elliott shrugged. ‘They were doomed anyway. Most of them had been Darklit. Sooner or later, they'd have ended up as either hosts or food for the Phase.' She was silent for a moment. ‘Perhaps this is better, Will. Perhaps we did them a favour.'

He began towards her, shaking his head slowly. ‘That's difficult to believe.'

As soon as they were inside the shop, Will stopped to take in the fountain – a large bronze dolphin in the centre of a circular pool set into the marble floor. Although the water had long since stopped spouting from the mouth of the dolphin, both it and the polished marble floors gave the impression of incredible affluence from a bygone age on the outer surface.

‘This was quite some shop,' Will said.

‘Those people obviously thought so,' Elliott agreed, as she left Will peering around at the cadavers on the floor, some with bags crammed full of items still clutched in their skeletal arms.

‘They must have known things were bad, but even so they were grabbing whatever they could,' he said, as he poked one of the bags with the barrel of his Sten and expensive-looking lipsticks and face creams spilled from it. He laughed, though emptily. ‘They were even stealing make-up!'

‘Come over here. You've got to see this!' Elliott shouted, her voice resounding through the huge main hall.

‘Wow,' Will said. There was an imposing statue at the end
of the hall, on either side of which a pair of staircases swept up to the other levels of the shop. The statue, which was a good fifty feet in height, was of a woman dressed in a toga and proudly displaying a cornucopia of fruit.

But what stopped Will in his tracks was the enormous smoked glass dome that served as the roof of the hall. In wonder he craned his head back to take it all in. Without anyone around to keep it clean, wind-borne grit was already building up at the edges of the dome and encroaching on the glass, but the effect was still breathtaking.

Will lowered his gaze from the dome, taking in the other floors on the way down, where he could just about make out all the different goods on display there.

‘This place is ginormous – like Harrods or something. Where do we start?' he asked. He stepped over to a counter and wiped the layer of dust from its surface to peer at the range of meerschaum pipes arranged on crumpled velvet. Then he leant over the counter as he examined the showcases behind it. The glass doors had been wrenched off, and many brands of cigarettes he'd never heard of were inside. ‘
Lande Mokri Superb. Sulima
,' he read, scanning along the row of old-fashioned packets. ‘
Joltams, Pyramide.'
Then he noticed a dead body slumped by the base of the showcase, dressed in a pinstripe suit and with a packet still held tightly in its dried-out hand. ‘Tch, tch!' Will said, wagging a finger. ‘Those things will kill you, you know,' he admonished the corpse.

‘We can get everything we need here,' Elliott called from another counter where she'd helped herself to two umbrellas – essential items in this world where the weather had only two defaults: blinding sunshine or fierce monsoons that descended with no warning at all. ‘Will, what do you reckon's through
there?' she asked, indicating a row of doors along the side of the hall with signs above them proclaiming
Lebensmittelabteilung.

‘One way to find out,' he replied, already making straight for the nearest pair of doors and pushing them open.

If the reek of rotten food wasn't disgusting enough, the maelstrom of flies that Will and Elliott's entrance stirred up would have deterred most people from entering. But not Elliott.

‘Must be something we can take?' she asked, despite the fact that the flies were everywhere in the food hall.

As Will waved the teeming bluebottles away from his face, he caught glimpses of the different counters selling cheese, food and meat, their once-chilled displays now a mass of putrefaction and writhing with maggots. And not only was the once-pristine white-tiled floor smeared with filth, it was also littered with the remains of dead rats. They'd obviously thought they were on to a good thing until the virus had finished them off too.

‘Oh, God, let's just get out of here!' Will yelled, frantically swatting the flies away from him.

‘But there's tinned food over th—' Elliott was shouting and pointing, as a fly shot straight into her mouth.

‘No way. We can get our supplies somewhere else,' Will insisted, as he and Elliott stumbled back through the doors, which swung shut, sealing them off from the stench and insects again. Except for the one lodged at the back of Elliott's throat.

‘Fly,' she wheezed, pointing at her mouth. She was coughing and making noises like a cat trying to bring up a fur ball.

She looked so comical that Will began to chuckle. ‘Is that tasty?' he asked. Then he couldn't help himself, doubling up with laughter. This didn't amuse Elliott in the slightest, her face flushed from all the coughing.

‘It's not funny, you creep,' she managed to get out between all the coughing. Then she gulped loudly and grimaced. ‘Yuck. I think I swallowed it.'

‘Well, you did say we needed more meat in our diet,' Will quipped.

Then she too was laughing and coughing and thrusting the stock of her long rifle at him, as he backed away, pretending to be terrified by her attack.

‘Hey, spider woman, be careful with that, will you!' he yelled, as he sidestepped yet again, only just managing to avoid her rifle.

Will realised immediately what he'd said. They'd had the misfortune of meeting Vane, one of the Styx women, when they'd been ambushed at the top of the pore.

Even the Styx themselves hadn't known the reason for it, but this inner world had energised Vane, enabling her to restart the Phase. But it was more than just that; it had allowed her to produce Styx Warrior Class larvae in numbers that were off the scale. But, as a consequence, Vane had begun to resemble a hideously bloated arachnid. And given Elliott's parentage, it wasn't surprising that she was particularly sensitive whenever the subject came up, to the extent that she and Will rarely discussed it.

Elliott was standing very still with her rifle still poised in mid-air, her expression stony. ‘What did you just say?' she demanded.

‘I … I … that … that came out wrong,' Will gabbled. He took a hasty step back as Elliott's expression turned thunderous.

‘Spider woman?' she growled. ‘Just because I've got Styx blood in me doesn't mean I'm suddenly going to turn into one
of those monsters.'