The Apocalypse Club (26 page)

“She thought it was some sort of warning, so she disappeared again. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”

“She was probably right,” Max said. “Killing you would just have pissed her off. Probably badly enough that they’d end up having to kill her, too. But if they kill somebody else, not you but close to you, it lets the target know that their actions will impact innocent third parties. Fear usually brings them back into line.”

“You really got the hang of this stuff, huh?”

“Anyway, after that, they transferred me to the HIT squad. It’s their elite, high-priority target acquisition team. There’s one guy they’ve been looking for basically for as long as GDI’s been in existence. He’s target number one. The top of the most-wanted list. This was the kind of assignment I’d been waiting for, and when I saw the target, I knew I had a major advantage.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Max said, “I’d met him before.”

“It’s not me, is it?”

Max laughs. “No. Hate to burst your bubble, but they didn’t care about you all that much. Of course, that’ll probably change after today.”

This is not what I want to hear. “Why? What happens after today?”

Max stands up. “Come on. We really should get going. We’ve already stayed here for longer than we should.”

“Where are we going?”

Max smiles. “To see a man about the end of the world. Ready to finish what we started?”

W
e ran through the forest for about 20 minutes until we reached a back road where Max had left a beat-up looking motorcycle hidden behind a thick row of bushes. I was already a little tired from my previous hike and still not 100% after being tranquilized, so I held things up a couple of times by collapsing against a tree and demanding more time to appreciate the simple things, like breathing.

“How out of shape are you?” Max complained after the second stop. “This is a Sunday stroll in the park! Try running a hundred miles at night with a fifty-pound block of concrete on your back.”

“Why in the hell would I want to try either of those things?” I gasped.

“It’s probably your diet. You know those beef jerky things have ninety-eight per cent of your daily saturated fat?”

“Only ninety-eight? Where in the hell am I going to get the other two per cent?”

“Get off your ass, Francine. We don’t have all day, here.”

Max quickly checked the bike to make sure that it hadn’t been tampered with before throwing a leg over and motioning for me to climb on behind him.

“But I don’t have a helmet,” I pointed out.

“So don’t fall off.”

Max fired up the engine, which was so quiet that at first I thought the bike had failed to start. I had only been on a motorcycle once before. It was a dirt bike that belonged to my cousin. I experienced a misunderstanding between the clutch and third gear and drove it through a fence into his parents’ pool after sitting on it for less than 30 seconds. I have never been asked to sit on a motorcycle again until now. The engine was so quiet that I figured it was probably a scooter. Scooters didn’t go very fast. How bad would it be if I fell off? Probably no worse than falling off my bike when I was a kid. Painful, but not fatal. I climbed on.

The sun was starting to go down. Max put on a pair of goggles that made an electronic clicking noise.

“Are those night vision?” I asked.

Max nodded. I was about to comment that his new night vision setup was a lot better than the chip clip binoculars he had used the last time, but he dropped the bike into gear and pulled out before I could say anything.

It wasn’t a scooter.

I had never actually done more than 100 miles per hour before, especially not on the back of a nearly silent motorbike shooting down a winding forest road in the dark. After less than a minute, Max slowed and pulled over to the side of the road.

“Do you mind not screaming in my ear like that?”

“I was screaming?” I said. I had honestly been totally unaware of the fact. Not surprised, just unaware.

“The whole point of stealth is to pass undetected,” Max said. “Hence the whisper-mode engine and night vision. You understand how screaming ‘Holy shit help me I am going to dieeeee!!’ at a hundred and forty decibels during an otherwise stealth operation might compromise the stealth aspect of said operation, right?”

“Sorry, Max.”

“All right. Let’s try this again.”

We pulled back out onto the road. I did my best to keep my mouth and my eyes shut. Based on the direction of the rapidly disappearing sun, I guessed that we were going north, but there were so many twists and turns in the road that it was hard to tell. Plus, if I looked up, I felt a sudden urge to vomit, and I figured Max would appreciate that even less than the screaming, so I stopped doing it. The sky was completely black and the air sharply cooler by the time we stopped a couple of hours later.

“Where are we?” I asked, happy to get off. My legs were stiff and my arm muscles in a permanent state of cramp after holding onto Max’s midsection for dear life.

“Closer,” Max said, rolling the bike to the side of the road and hiding it behind a large boulder. The landscape was much rockier here and trees were few and far between. It occurred to me that I had never been this far north before.

“Closer?” I said. “What are we using next? A jetpack? A space shuttle? I have to say that I think I’m ready for just about anything at this point.”

“Then walking will seem like a pleasant alternative,” Max said. “Follow me.”

He adjusted his goggles and started moving quickly over the jagged rocks. Following him was not easy. I didn’t have the benefit of night vision and the moon was hidden behind the clouds, so I usually only noticed a hole or a rock when I stepped in or tripped over it. The only pair of shoes I had that were even vaguely suitable for hiking was an old pair of work shoes with a hole in the heel that let in water. I had forgotten about that when I’d picked them for this trip and I was cursing myself for that oversight now. Max, of course, was moving over the terrain like a mountain goat.

“Where the hell are we going?” I asked, stubbing my toe on a large rock that I (surprise!) didn’t see.

“That way,” Max said, pointing in the direction we were walking.

At first, I thought he was just being facetious, and I was about to open my mouth to say as much when the clouds parted for a moment and I saw that he was actually pointing to the entrance to a cave. I’m not hysterically claustrophobic, but the thought of climbing into a dark cave at night made me hysterically claustrophobic.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “Who are we going to see? Batman?”

Max ignored me and kept moving. When we reached the entrance to the cave, he told me to grab hold of the back of his shirt and not let go until instructed otherwise.

“What happens if I let go by accident?”

“You’ll have an accident.”

We stepped into the cave. The air was sharply cooler. The floor angled down at almost 45 degrees, making it extremely difficult to maintain my footing without leaning back, which meant I pulled on Max’s shirt and slowed him down.

“Would you stop doing that?” Max said. “You’re slowing us down.”

“Easy for you to say, Mister Night Vision,” I said. “I can’t see a fucking thing. If I fall into a crevasse, I’m going to come back in another life and push your sorry ass right in next to my bones.”

“Just because we’re friends doesn’t mean I want to be buried on top of you, but it’s a touching sentiment.”

“Yeah? Well, if I do slip and I don’t let go, then that means I’m dragging you down with me.”

The floor levelled off so sharply that I nearly tripped over my own weight, the same way I would have done had I been expecting a stair that wasn’t there. I heard a familiar electronic click as Max disengaged the night vision goggles.

“Just a few more steps,” he said.

That was all we managed before lights flicked on over our heads. They started as dim as candles and slowly increased in power until we could see where we were. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that the cave was quite narrow – only as wide as a single-car garage at most. In front of us was a heavy steel door blocking the way.

“What is this?” I asked, amazed.

“The old mine,” Max asked. “As you can see, it was further away than we thought. We couldn’t read a map to save our asses back then.”

“So does that mean there’s a Weather Station near here?”

Max nodded. “Less than two miles north. If it was daylight, you’d be able to see it no problem.”

“Then what are we doing here? Shouldn’t we get as far away from it as possible?”

“Sometimes the best place to hide is right under their noses,” Max said. “But our friend knows that better than just about anyone.”

“Friend?”

Max walked up to the door and punched in a six-digit code. There was a click as the lock gave way and the door popped open a foot. Max pulled it open the rest of the way and motioned me inside. Not sure that I wanted to go, but not exactly sure what else to do, either, I stepped forward.

“Good evening, Mister Simms.”

I recognized the man standing on the other side of the door immediately. He was dressed differently and his hair wasn’t quite as wild as it had been the last time I saw him, but other than that he looked exactly the same. He didn’t appear to have aged a day in fifteen years.

“Lord High Shitty Shorts!” I gasped.

The man laughed. “Yes, our mutual acquaintance, Sergeant Hernandez, advised me that the two of you had bequeathed me this name after our last meeting. Not at all flattering, but it is amusing. Heaven knows I have been called less salubrious things in my time.”

I heard a thunk as Max closed the door behind us. This was followed by a beep and a clank as some sort of locking mechanism moved back into place.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Where are we?”

The man nodded a greeting to Max and then looked back at me. “My name is Lord Tristan Holroyd Smythe. I am a graduate of Cambridge and a Fellow of the Royal Society. This place in which you are standing has been my home for the last few years.”

I looked around. The walls were the rough stone walls of the cave, but I could see wires and pipes snaking along them at knee level. Cables ran up the walls to fluorescent lights attached to the ceiling.

“I remember you,” I said. “You pointed some sort of spear gun at me all those years ago. Said something crazy about using it to deter polar bears or something.”

He nodded. “That was its original purpose.”

“You haven’t aged at all,” I said. “You look exactly the same as you did when we saw you that day. What? Fifteen years ago?”

“An unfortunate side effect of my research.”

“Unfortunate?” I said. “I know people who would kill to look fifteen years younger!”

“Oh and they do, believe me,” the man said. “As many people as necessary and a great deal more, come to that. That is the primary reason why you find me where I am today. Five years ago, your friend, Sergeant Hernandez here, was part of a unit sent on a mission to kill me. Happily for all concerned, he elected not to carry out that mission, although I have absolutely no doubt that they would have been completely successful if he had not decided to disregard that order and help steer them in the wrong direction.”

“Why would Max be sent on a mission to kill you?” I asked. “You’re just some crazy old man running around in the woods with a spear gun. You might be a threat to squirrels and the occasional hiker, but beyond that, I don’t see much of a national security red flag flying over your head.”

The man smiled thinly. “Oh, I am old. In fact, a great deal older than you might possibly suspect, but I like to think that I still have most of my wits about me. I have never been adjudicated mentally unbalanced, although you may reconsider your opinion on the matter when you hear the story I have to tell you. Believe me on one point, however: I would not be hiding in a cave deep in the northern wilderness if somebody didn’t believe me to be a threat. And in this case, that somebody is the most powerful of them all.”

The most powerful single person I was aware of was the president of the United States, but I had a distinct feeling that he was probably talking about somebody else.

“Okay.”

“You don’t believe me?” he said.

“I’ve seen tornadoes drop out of the sky like they were ordered online,” I said. “One of them killed my parents. No matter what you have to say, it can’t be any crazier than that.”

He walked up and looked me in the eye. How old was he? It was impossible to guess. At a glance, he looked no older than 40, but his eyes seemed a whole lot older.

“You may have cause to re-evaluate your hypothesis before we’re done,” he said. “But that’s what the entire scientific process is all about. You have a theory. One you simply believe, in your guts, to be correct. And you proceed from there. The truth may disagree with you, but I’m afraid there is absolutely no arguing with it. It brings even the grandest theories and greatest minds crashing to the firmament eventually.”

“I suppose it does,” I said. “Uh, what should I call you by the way? Lord Smythe? Your lordship? I’ve never met an actual lord before.”

He laughed. “Call me Tristan. I have about as much use for my peerage as it does for me.”

“And yet you still introduce yourself that way.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “I really should stop doing that. I get to introduce myself so rarely these days that I’m afraid it rather became something that I got out of the habit of doing.”

“That’s understandable. Living in a cave, I don’t imagine that you get many people knocking on the door trying to sell you aluminum siding or duct cleaning.”

He walked around me and leaned toward Max. “How much does he know?”

Max grinned and looked at me. “Practically nothing.”

Tristan nodded thoughtfully. “Then best to start at the beginning. Come with me, Mister Simms. I have much to tell you and little time to tell the tale, for I fear that our enemies are already well at work. Nevertheless, it is a tale that must be told if we are to proceed as anything approaching a united front.”