Doomsday, page 6
Berrin heard his own warning in his ears. Be patient. He should stop her, but at the same time he knew Olanda was right and, instead of arguing, the best thing he could do was help her.
He crawled across the floor to the window and stole a brief look himself. ‘The Gadge is looking away. Do it now!’
Without hesitating, Olanda stepped to the open window, took aim and sent the bolt on its way. Berrin poked his head above the sill as soon as she pulled the trigger. The deadly missile had only fifty metres to travel. It couldn’t have been in the air for more than a fraction of a second, yet to the pair watching its journey seemed to last a lifetime.
Then the impact, bringing a gasp from both of them. The bolt struck the Gadge all right, but only a glancing blow, gouging a hunk of flesh from the creature’s shoulder. In three measured movements, each taking a mere second, the Gadge looked at his damaged shoulder, touched at the blood with his clawed fingers, then looked up at the building in search of the enemy who had fired the shot. Staring down at him from a second-storey window were two horrified faces.
‘The basement, quickly!’ said Berrin, and this time Olanda followed closely on his heels. But it had been reckless to shoot from so high and Berrin knew it. He stopped suddenly in the stairwell. ‘The Gadge will be waiting for us on the ground floor. We can’t get back to the access hole in the basement. We’ll have to escape another way.’
‘Fire escape,’ said Olanda, and moments later they had burst into the open and were jumping three steps at a time down the metal staircase on the outside of the building. As they reached the street Olanda dropped the crossbow. There was no time to snatch it up again. The Gadge had already emerged from the ground floor and spotted them.
‘Back along the street. Run!’ Berrin shouted. They rounded a corner just as a burst of gunfire loosened chips of brickwork from the wall behind them.
‘Where can we go?’ Olanda said.
‘I don’t know. Anywhere that gets us away from that machine gun.’
Another spray of bullets churned up the ground in a deadly straight line that hurried towards them. They dived sideways as it passed, then jumped to their feet again. Around another corner and down a laneway …
‘I don’t like this,’ called Berrin, slowing his pace. ‘I can’t see a way out at the end.’
There was no way out. The pair searched frantically around them, but buildings rose up on all sides. Olanda tried the nearest door, but it was a fire escape and wouldn’t open from the outside. So were those Berrin managed to reach before the Gadge appeared around the corner. The creature saw immediately that they were trapped and, instead of blazing away from a distance, started towards them to improve his aim.
‘Thought you’d kill me with your crossbow, did you?’ he growled. Blood matted the fur from shoulder to elbow on his left arm. ‘You’ll pay for that.’
He came close enough to be sure he wouldn’t miss. As Berrin and Olanda clutched each other in a final embrace, the Gadge raised the gun to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel.
ELEVEN
Rebellion
BRAVE THOUGH BERRIN WAS, he couldn’t bear to look into the barrel of the gun that would end his life. So he closed his eyes, which was why he didn’t see the brick. Olanda, on the other hand, was determined to stare death in the face, right down to the last second, and so she witnessed the extraordinary moment that saved them.
As the Gadge stood with the weapon to his shoulder, something came sailing out of the first-storey window above him. A rock, Olanda thought at first. Only later did she see it was a brick.
The brick smacked the Gadge on his injured shoulder. It didn’t hurt him any more than the bolt from her crossbow had done, but it was enough to make him drop the machine gun. Instead of picking the gun up instantly, he turned to see who had thrown the brick. That mistake cost him dearly.
While he was roaring in outrage and scanning the windows for the culprit, doors on both sides of the narrow lane burst open. Five grown-ups charged out of each, some of them men, some women, all wielding either a length of wood, or an iron bar, or simply another brick.
The Gadge was leaning down to pick up his machine gun so he reacted slowly, or perhaps he simply couldn’t imagine that a team of humans would dare to take on a beast that could kill with a swipe of his vicious claws. In the end, he didn’t harm a single one of them. His attackers were onto him in a deadly swarm, the first blow smashing into his arm as he grasped for the weapon. The second cracked his head. The third brought him to his knees.
After that, Berrin and Olanda turned away, daring to look only when the lane had fallen silent. By then the Gadge lay dead and his gun rested in the arms of a man who stood over the bloodstained body. The rebellion of the grown-ups had begun.
‘Who are you?’ asked the man holding the Gadge’s gun. ‘What are you doing running free like this? It’s not safe. There’s going to be a lot of fighting. You’d be better off back out of the way until it’s over.’
‘But we’re Rats,’ Olanda protested.
‘Yes, and you certainly look it,’ said a woman, screwing her face into a grimace of disapproval. ‘You’re filthy, and those clothes are nothing but rags.’
Berrin and Olanda exchanged a bewildered glance. ‘That’s because we’ve been living underground, in the storm-water pipes,’ said Berrin. ‘That was the only place we could survive.’ He began to explain how children like him had been living in the tunnels for years, but the grown-ups didn’t seem interested, or else they thought Berrin was making it all up.
‘We’ve been the only resistance to Malig Tumora and his terrible schemes,’ said Berrin, trying to make them understand.
‘We’re the resistance now,’ said the leader. ‘The control Malig Tumora had over our minds seems to have stopped. We don’t know how he was doing it, but —’
‘Flowers,’ said Olanda.
‘What?’
‘Millions of purple flowers. They gave off a strange scent that took over your minds and made you —’
The grown-ups laughed at her.
‘But it’s true, and Berrin here was the one who destroyed them.’
‘Flowers! Don’t be ridiculous,’ said the leader. ‘Now come on, we can’t stand around here. We’ve got a gun now. We can use it to get hold of more weapons until we’re a kind of army. Then there’s a man we all want to find — Malig Tumora.’
‘Malig Tumora’s not a man any more,’ said Berrin. ‘He’s a computer.’
The grown-ups had begun to move off, but at this they turned around to stare at Berrin again. Some laughed, as they’d done at mention of the purple flowers. Others looked uncertain.
‘The real Malig Tumora was killed by the computer he built to be just like him,’ Berrin went on. ‘It’s huge. Takes up three storeys of a big black building called the Obsidian.’
‘Look, boy, I don’t know where you come up with these fanciful ideas, but it’s got to stop, do you understand?’ The man carrying the gun turned to a woman at the edge of the group. ‘Lucy, take charge of these two kids, would you. Keep them behind us and make sure they don’t get in the way.’
Berrin was ready to give them a blast. They were no better than the grown-ups he’d met in the countryside when he, Olanda, Dorian and Aden had gone searching for the special moths. To them, children needed protection and did whatever they were told. The Rats weren’t that kind of children, certainly not Berrin and Olanda.
Olanda put her hand on Berrin’s arm and took him aside. ‘Don’t bother arguing, they’re not going to listen.’
‘But we’re going to be part of this final battle, whether the grown-ups like it or not,’ he seethed. ‘And we’ll fight in our own way too.’
‘You’re right, but if we stay with them for a while we’ll find out how many other grown-ups are willing to fight.’ Olanda winked at him then glanced at the woman named Lucy who had been assigned to watch over them. The poor thing’s eyes were darting everywhere in terror. ‘Once we’re ready to get away, she certainly won’t stop us.’
THROUGH THE REST OF that day Berrin and Olanda prowled the city streets with the rag-tag troop of adults. Their leader might have dismissed the two children as helpless and a little crazy, but in other ways he seemed sensible and cautious. Gadges still controlled the city and barely an hour went by when they didn’t spot a patrol in the distance. The grown-ups kept out of their way by using the many abandoned buildings, moving on to the next one only when the leader was certain it was safe.
By late in the afternoon, they were all becoming hungry. ‘We need a few scouts to go searching for food,’ the leader announced, and when he had three volunteers he sent them off in different directions. The rest settled into a darkened basement for the night and waited for them to return.
‘What happened to the other children?’ Lucy asked now that she could relax a little. ‘I had two girls about your age when Malig Tumora took over. They would be much older now, I suppose. They’d be grown women.’
The idea surprised her and she began to weep for her daughters’ lost childhood. ‘Who looked after them?’
‘The Dfx,’ Olanda told her, making no attempt to hide the bitterness in her voice. ‘Unless they escaped like Berrin and I did, all children lived together, in dormers, hundreds of them with their beds in rows, if they were lucky enough to have a bed. Anyone who broke the rules too often was called a Non-Cooperative Being.’
‘That doesn’t sound quite … human,’ said Lucy.
‘It wasn’t,’ Berrin replied. ‘Non-Cop Bs were fed to the animals who roam the streets.’
This brought gasps from the grown-ups.
‘They let you die, just because you misbehaved!’ Lucy slipped an arm around each of the children. ‘You poor things,’ she soothed.
Berrin felt the warmth of her body pressed against his. His first instinct was to pull away, as Olanda had already done, but there was something about this touch that comforted him.
Others came to question them after this. ‘Did many of the children die in the dormers?’
‘Did they keep you clean? Did you have enough to eat?’
‘What happened when you grew too big?’
Berrin and Olanda answered these questions as best they could, leaving out the worst of what had happened to spare the grown-ups pain.
Before long, the questions began to focus on particular children. ‘Did you know a boy named Harlen, or Alice or Harry?’
Berrin and Olanda could only shake their heads and remain silent, until one man asked, ‘What about a girl with blonde hair down to her waist?’
Olanda couldn’t stand it any more and answered bluntly, ‘The Dfx cut our hair short. The only reason we’ve got longer hair is because we escaped ages ago.’
They couldn’t hide the truth then, and the more they told of how the Dfx had treated them, the angrier the grown-ups became. ‘Malig Tumora is a monster. Wait till we get our hands on him.’
WHEN THE SUN ROSE over a new day two of the scouts came back, each with a handful of new recruits they’d met along the way, but nothing to eat. They brought bad news about the third man who had gone in search of food.
‘We heard gunfire and saw him fall. A Gadge kicked at his body but he didn’t move.’
This was a reminder that death could be waiting around the corner for any of them and, added to their growing hunger, made them more desperate. They began to move through the city again, searching for more grown-ups who were shaking off the effects of the purple flower. Another twenty had joined them before noon.
‘There are too many now,’ Berrin tried to tell the leader. ‘We should split up into smaller groups.’ But the man wouldn’t listen.
Then a familiar face joined the swelling numbers and Berrin and Olanda forgot all about the dangers, for a minute, at least.
‘Dorian!’ cried Olanda, rushing to greet a girl many centimetres taller than herself. ‘Is it really you?’
They hadn’t seen Dorian since she had led them on the perilous journey to Mount Windenbeck where they found the moths. Instead of returning with them, she had stayed behind to help a man named Jones organise the disheartened bunch of grown-ups who had escaped into the countryside.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Berrin. ‘Where’s Jones?’
‘He’s on his way to a place called Museum.’
Her two-person audience looked at her blankly. ‘What’s that?’
‘I’m not sure either. It sounds like a place full of old junk from what he told me, but Jones says there’s something there that can blow up the glasshouses and destroy the flowers.’
When Berrin explained that the flowers had already been destroyed, Dorian danced a jig with them. ‘That’s why all these grown-ups are free,’ she realised. ‘This is it, this is the day we’ve always hoped for. Doomsday! If we’re going to beat Malig Tumora, it has to be now.’
‘So what is this thing Jones has gone to get?’ Berrin asked. ‘If it can blow things up, it might be useful anyway.’
‘It’s a tank.’
‘What, for holding lots of water? What use is that?’ snapped Olanda.
Dorian shrugged and tried to explain what little she knew. ‘That’s what I thought too, but maybe there’s another kind of tank. Jones seems to think it’s a powerful weapon, anyway. He said the tank in the Museum might still work and he knows where to get ammunition for it too. He sent me to find you, so you can help me break in and have the ammunition ready when he arrives with the tank.’
Olanda didn’t know what a tank was any more than Berrin did, but she recognised the mounting excitement. ‘Isn’t it fantastic, Berrin. The real fighting is about to begin. If all the grown-ups join in then nothing will stop them. They’ll take over the whole city. I can hardly believe it. It’s nearly over.’
Berrin dared let himself hope the same thing, but for him the struggle wouldn’t be over until he had dug down into the earth and released Ferdinand from his tomb. He daydreamed that his parents would be there with him, at that same moment. He remembered the feeling when Lucy had put her arms around him and wished it had been his own mother. He was fighting for that human touch as well as the city’s freedom.
His dream was shattered by loud barking from the end of the street. ‘Rhino Dogs!’ Olanda cried, and moments later three of the grotesque creatures bounded around the corner and galloped towards them.
Rhino Dogs weren’t related to the rhinoceros at all. In fact, Malig Tumora had combined the genes of large dogs with those of a shiny black beetle to enhance the creatures’ sense of smell. Rhino Dogs were mostly harmless but they did have a vicious-looking horn jutting up from their snouts and that was enough for the leader. He raised his gun and felled them one after the other.
‘We have to get away from here,’ Berrin shouted to the grown-ups. ‘Quickly, run!’
‘There’s no need now,’ the leader answered. ‘Look, I’ve killed all three.’
‘You don’t understand. The Gadges use Rhino Dogs to sniff you out. They listen for the barking. Believe me, they’ll be here any second.’
But he was just a child. What would he know? The grown-ups didn’t believe him. They went forward in an inquisitive group to look at the dead Rhino Dogs. An uneasy instinct made the three children back away from the mass of grown-ups. They had withdrawn about twenty metres when the Gadges opened fire.
A dozen grown-ups immediately fell dead. ‘Run!’ came the cry at last.
Many were too startled to respond. Lucy, the gentle, frightened woman who had tried to embrace them, froze in fear until a bullet sent her crashing to the hard surface of the road. There she seemed frozen all over again, this time in death. By then, Berrin, Olanda and Dorian were heading for the only safety they knew — an access hole in the road ahead that would get them underground.
They reached it in a matter of seconds, but the heavy metal disc covering the hole was jammed in place. By the time they had levered it free with their swords, a Gadge was almost on them. With his machine gun he could have mowed them down easily, but for some reason he threw the gun aside and rushed towards them on four legs like the wolf that he was.
This gave the fugitives one last chance. Olanda jumped through, then Dorian, and once she had disappeared into the darkness, Berrin dived head-first after her, even though he might well break his neck when he landed on the hard concrete of the pipe below.
But he didn’t break his neck. He didn’t hit the concrete at all. His head made it through the opening, and his shoulders and even his hips, but before his legs dropped to safety, the Gadge lunged forward and caught him by the foot. As quickly as he had dived, Berrin was wrenched backwards.
‘Got you,’ snarled the Gadge, tossing him into the air like a doll and catching him by the front of his filthy shirt on the way down. With his free hand, the creature removed Berrin’s sword and tossed it aside. Then he pressed his snout into Berrin’s face and let his foul breath smother the boy’s features. ‘Yes, you’re the one. I thought I recognised you, otherwise you’d be riddled with bullets already. There’s someone wants a few answers about what’s happening and you’re the one who’s going to give them. Come on, you’re going to see Malig Tumora.’
TWELVE
The Obsidian
THOUGH HE WAS ALMOST certainly going to his death, Berrin couldn’t stop himself looking around and taking in every detail of what was happening in the city. The unfortunate band of fighters who had rescued him and Olanda earlier might be dead, but other, better organised gangs were starting to make their mark. The sound of gunfire echoed through the streets, punctuated occasionally by an explosion. The city was now as dangerous for a Gadge as it was for human beings.
Berrin’s captor knew it too. He snarled and snorted and threw Berrin around roughly whenever he had to hurry to avoid being spotted by a troop of grown-ups, who looked surprisingly well-armed. There was something else too, something Berrin had never detected in a Gadge before: fear.
