Bite Risk, page 20
The sweating man licks his lips. ‘Yes, but… it seems there were others we missed.’ He glances at me. ‘His mother, for one. She didn’t buy the idea that Dora ate the kids. And she found some of our reports under the boy’s mattress. She’s gone round causing trouble.’
My ears prick up. ‘Mum? What about my mum?’ It’s been a while since I went missing. I don’t even want to think about what she’s been through.
The man ignores me and keeps talking to Doctor Smith. ‘The gossip they started went further than we anticipated. It seems to have precipitated some sort of crisis in Tremorglade. And…’ He swallows. ‘We’ve picked up some chatter locally, about real-life werewolves being hidden behind the wall.’
‘Locally? People are talking here in Hastaville?’
He nods, scared.
‘That’s not possible. These three were monitored the entire time. They can’t possibly have got word out here.’ Doctor Smith looks furious. She snaps back round to glare at the three of us, as though expecting us to be sorry about it. ‘I don’t know how you did this. But if it’s true, their blood will be on your hands. Not mine.’
Judging by Ingrid and Elena’s faces, they have no more idea than me about how we did it, either. There’s a buzz and a hiss as the nearest door slides open and someone in a full hazmat suit, complete with helmet, bundles through clumsily, knocking into a desk and causing a pile of papers to scatter to the floor.
‘Ah, here’s your escort back to your rooms. Just as well. I need to sort this mess out.’ Then she does a double take, noticing what the guard is wearing, and I can practically see the last strand of her temper break. ‘How many times must I say this, people?’ She raises her voice to address the entire room. ‘Look at me – I’m no more Immutable than any of you, but you don’t see me shying away, do you?’ Turning back to the new arrival, she puts her hands on her hips. ‘Take off that suit right now before you break something. Did nobody read my email? Hazmat suits are to be worn in isolation areas only. For the last time: these children are not infectious.’
The hapless guard bows in apology, unclips the helmet and uses both hands to take it off.
Time stops. I feel my heart stutter and then soar out of my body.
‘They’re not. But what about me?’
Pedro runs his fingers through his sweaty fringe, grins and drops the helmet. It rolls across the floor and comes to a halt just by Doctor Smith’s shiny shoes.
I scream in delight and rush to hug him. Elena and Ingrid are close behind. He laughs as we all pile on.
There’s another scream, louder than mine. It goes on and on.
From somewhere behind us comes another scream, and another, spreading like ripples through the room. The scrape of chairs being pulled back, feet running.
From Pedro’s clunky embrace, somewhere in his armpit, I squeeze my face round to look back at Doctor Smith.
I’m not sure exactly how I’d describe the emotions that seem to be taking her over. But if she could study her own feelings right now, she’d probably call them ‘fascinating’. Her mouth is open wide, lip bloody and already puffing up from Ingrid’s kick, but I can’t tell if any sound is coming out. It merges with the chaos.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Doctor Smith can’t seem to get a grip. It’s the first time I’ve watched someone scream themselves not only hoarse but literally blue in the face. When Ingrid approaches her to try to calm her down, touching her arm, she starts hissing, cursing and writhing, and backs off into the far corner of the room, where she sinks to the floor and continues to wail. We leave her to it for the time being.
‘Get those things off their necks,’ Pedro demands of a couple of workers hanging around nearby. Oddly, they jump to it, looking like they’re in total shock. I guess they’re used to following orders, and they’re certainly not getting any more from Doctor Smith.
As they apply various numbing chemicals and loosen the devices on our necks, we listen to Pedro’s story.
He’s been out for two months – an anonymous stranger found long after dawn, wandering naked and seriously injured, washed up on the riverbank, taken to hospital to recover from his wounds. He couldn’t get anyone to listen to his wild stories, at first. He thought they were messing with him when they said they’d never heard of Rippers. They thought he’d lost his mind.
Very quickly it became clear that to free Tremorglade, he had to find a way into the heart of Sequest. He made it his mission to get hired and, being the charmer that he is, soon enough he was taken on as security, wearing a fake moustache and beard to avoid detection. It’s amazing how a bit of facial hair could trick a load of people who are supposedly experts in a virus that causes it to sprout all over the body. He barricaded himself inside an abandoned warehouse so that he could safely Turn without causing panic and risking capture or being shot. During the daytime, he’s been observing the workings at Sequest HQ, looking for a chance to sabotage the system, and nights have been spent on the internet, posting anonymously on crank sites, sharing the truth about Tremorglade.
Of course, rumours aren’t the only thing he’s been spreading. That crafty virus will already have made its way silently across the entire city, probably much further. Next full moon, a lot of people are going to get hairy for the first time.
It’s not Pedro’s fault. By the time he realized, it was already far too late. You don’t need to try to spread corpus pilori.
Doctor Smith knew what it meant, the moment she recognized Pedro. I’m totally dazed – a few minutes ago we were doomed to spend eternity locked in a cell, and now everyone else is staring down their inevitable future as Rippers. Elena, Ingrid and I can barely take our eyes off Pedro, for fear he might disappear again. But he looks more solid than he’s ever been – strong and defiant.
A few of the staff are still hanging around, looking scared. A couple are sitting at their desks, sobbing quietly. One is positioning and repositioning a photo on Righteous Rippers, over and over again. Security guards tried to stop people leaving at first, to quarantine the room, but got trampled in the rush. It’s an instinctive thing, I suppose. It will probably take a while for them to grasp that it’s pointless. Leave, don’t leave – it’s all the same. Corpus pilori is already inside them.
* * *
Elena, Pedro and Ingrid grill one of the more co-operative senior staff about how we keep Tremorglade’s essential functions going until we can get it opened up. With no one running Sequest’s systems, there will be no deliveries in, and everything will shut down. If we don’t get control shortly, they’ll run out of medicine, food, crucial supplies. It’s going to take a while to break our town open.
As they talk, my eye falls on something happening at the other side of the room. Doctor Smith is no longer wailing. She’s busy at a console. Something about the intent way she’s typing makes me uneasy.
As I approach, she pushes back her chair.
‘What’s that?’
The smile is back, though it’s a hard, spiteful one. ‘You’ve destroyed our world. It’s only fair to repay the compliment. Harold will understand. The captain goes down with his ship.’
The screen in front of Doctor Smith shows a bunch of code that I don’t understand. But from her look of triumph, I already know what she’s done.
* * *
Pedro shuts Doctor Smith in my fake bedroom, to stop her interfering any further. In the end, when she knew she’d lost, and she had the chance to finally do the right thing, she picked revenge instead. Maybe she spent so much time trying to observe the effects of hatred and find ways to weaponize it, it was too tempting not to put it into practice.
Apparently, the launch is automatic now. The drone is only small – about the size of a football, with its fatal load hidden inside – and will take just over an hour to reach its target, at which point it will run out of fuel, and fall to the ground, detonating on impact. Everyone going about their business will just drop dead. The town silent.
Pedro is sweating as he thumps the console in frustration. ‘Without Doctor Smith’s personal passcode, it can’t be brought back. We’re locked out of its controls.’
Elena is crying. ‘There must be something we can do.’
He’s racking his brains, we all are, but it seems hopeless. Then Ingrid grabs one of the staffers nearby, the one who’s still repositioning photos on Righteous Rippers.
‘Hey, you have drones, right? Can we access those?’
The woman blinks at her. ‘Y-yes. Top floor. They take off from the roof.’
Ingrid turns to Pedro. ‘Right. So we send their fastest one after it, intercept it.’
But he shakes his head. ‘No. If we knock it out of the sky, it still goes off as soon as it hits the ground.’
Then I remember Doctor Adebayo. ‘Hey,’ I ask the woman. ‘You have drones that can take a passenger, right?’
She nods. ‘Two-person reconnaissance copters. We normally use them for trips around the walls.’
‘And they’re fast? Faster than that… bomb drone? We could catch it?’
‘I… I don’t know about that. It’s not my area.’ She shrugs, turning back to Righteous Rippers as though she’s got important videos to be faking, rather than saving thousands of lives. She’s on autopilot, her brain taking a back seat.
‘Pedro,’ I say, ‘you can control it from here, right? I’ll be inside. What if you fly it right up next to the drone, and I’ll grab it out of the sky?’
He makes a What? face but it fades as he gets thinking. ‘Actually… it might be possible.’
‘I’ll go as well,’ Elena declares, and starts bundling me towards the lifts.
‘No, sis,’ Pedro says. ‘I can’t keep an eye on everything at the same time – the drone path and the copter controls. I need you here.’
Ingrid is next to me like a shot. ‘I’ll come.’
For a moment I think Elena’s going to argue. We don’t have time. The drone’s been gone ten minutes – we can all see its blob moving on the screen, heading slowly but steadily on its murderous course. But then she nods. ‘Do it.’
* * *
Ingrid and I have to shout to be heard over the propellers. The sliding doors are open on both sides, and the wind rushes through, buffeting our hair, whipping the words from our mouths. There are no controls inside the copter – it’s designed to be flown entirely remotely.
Through our earpieces, Pedro tells us the distance we still have to cover – the good news is, we’re gaining on the drone. The bad news is it’s going to be tight. Once we pull alongside, we’ll only have a few seconds to grab it.
We’re quite close before we see it – it’s just as small as Pedro said, a silvery sphere glinting in the sunlight, slightly lower than we are under a blur of propellers. Pedro deftly manoeuvres us so it’s directly to my left, a few metres away.
‘Just a bit more,’ I say, unclipping my seatbelt and grabbing the door, ready to reach for it.
Pedro curses through the radio. ‘It won’t let me! The copter’s crash sensors won’t allow me to get you any closer. Can’t you reach it from there?’
I clamber carefully out of my seat to sit on the edge, my left foot on the metal skid underneath the copter. As my head leaves the safety of the interior, I immediately feel a tug upwards, my hair getting sucked towards the rotors. I duck reflexively, grabbing tight to the top of the door, and feel the copter jerk slightly, tipping towards the trees. Ingrid squeals in warning but it quickly rights itself. The drone flies parallel alongside. It’s hard to tell with the noise of the copter and the wind, but I feel like the drone sounds quieter now. Like it’s running out of juice.
Experimentally, I stretch out my arm. A hand’s width short. If I try, I might just be able to touch it, but that could easily knock it out of the sky. I need to be closer, to get a hand right under it, to be sure.
Pedro’s voice crackles through the radio, static cutting him off intermittently. ‘Guys… you… about twenty seconds… it’s… or never.’
I pull my other leg outside so both feet rest on the skid, and stand up slowly, grabbing the top of the door with one hand. Just need to not let go.
‘Um, can you hold onto me?’
Ingrid sees what I’m doing and her eyes widen. She starts to clamber over to the seat I’ve vacated to reach for me, but as her weight comes to the same side, the copter lurches. My feet leave the rail as it tips, and for a moment all that prevents me taking flight is my sweaty white-knuckle grip on the edge of the door.
Ingrid throws herself back over the other side, there’s another lurch, my legs thump hard against the body of the copter, and I scrabble wildly until I feel the rail under my feet again.
‘It’s too much with you hanging off outside, Sel. I’ve got to stay here or it’s unbalanced.’ She leans out her side and holds tight. ‘Try now.’
Below us, the treetops swaying like waves on a green ocean are suddenly gone, and there are houses instead. Familiar streets. Tiled roofs. Tiny figures moving, stopping as their faces lift up at the sound of the copter.
‘Ten seconds!’
There’s a sputtering from the bomb drone, and as I watch, the blur of its propellers resolves into solid shapes as they begin to slow.
Seconds stretch out. The fingernails of my right hand dig into the tight space where a strip of metal meets the door edge, my left hand reaches for the space under the drone, palm up. Every sinew in my body is pulling, my neck muscles straining. I bring my hand up underneath, gently. Millimetres away, I can feel its warmth, the electronics inside whirring. My skin makes contact, and then it’s in my palm, fingertips curled round the smooth bottom edge, just as the propellers on top sputter and die. I’m bringing it in.
And then my wrist cramps, holding onto the top of the door.
Pain shoots down my arm and I cry out, cheeks bitten so hard I taste blood, in an effort not to let go. But my muscles betray me. My fingernails are sliding along the top edge of the door, losing grip. And then they’re grasping at air, and I’m tipping outwards. I start to lose the drone from my left hand, and instinctively bring the other one round so I’m gripping it in both. I don’t know why – it doesn’t matter. We’re both on our way to the ground. Maybe if I wrap my body around it, it won’t go off when I land.
I see it all in slow motion, as my head and chest swing downwards. There’s a crowd in the street below, faces upturned, mouths open. I’m right over the school, ironically. An image flashes into my brain – everyone standing round my squished corpse on the playground, Ms Boateng saying, ‘Well, at least he finally made an impact.’
And then there’s a massive jolt as my foot catches on something; it feels like every bone in my body is yanked out of its socket, and the drone starts to leap out of my arms, but I reflexively squeeze hard with my elbows and somehow keep hold of it. The copter whines horribly in protest at being almost on its side. Hanging upside down, I look up: the loop of the seatbelt is hanging out of the door, hooked round my ankle.
Slowly, the copter rights itself again.
‘What’s going—’ comes Pedro’s panicked voice in my ear. ‘Did you—’ Then he must get a glimpse from one of the onboard cameras because he swears very loudly. ‘I see you. Gonna bring—back. Just… hang on—’
I have no other plans.
There’s an electronic buzz as the seatbelt starts to wind itself in, taking me with it, then a hand grabs my ankle, helps pull me up.
‘Got him,’ says Ingrid, letting go of the seatbelt lever and dragging me the rest of the way in until I’m lying across the footwell. ‘Here, give me that,’ she says, trying to take the drone so I can get myself onto the seat. But I don’t seem to be able to let go. My arms are locked round it, trembling with exhaustion and adrenaline.
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘I want to see Mum.’
EPILOGUE THREE MONTHS LATER
I’m locking up again.
I stand on tiptoes to grab the metal shutter and pull it down, click the padlock and give it a little rattle to check.
Mum’s bakery closes an hour before dusk on Howl night – we don’t call it Confinement anymore. Sequest knew all along that, when not being tortured by infrasound, when they’re not afraid, Rippers don’t have a lot of interest in attacking anyone. Which is just as well, because no one had time to prepare. So there are no cages. In that sense, the world outside Tremorglade is the same as it ever was. In other ways… not so much. I suppose you might call this time a Disruption.
The shop’s only been open a couple of days but it’s doing really well – everyone loves Mum’s cinnamon-and-raisin whirls, her wholemeal loaves and her doughnuts, airy-light and sparkling with sugar. After everything changed, she decided she wanted to make some changes of her own. Now that the road’s fully open, she gets customers from Hastaville, and even further afield. Tourists. They step off the bus, blinking like moles emerging into sunlight, staring at everything. We stare right back.
I know things aren’t easy out there. Sure, we’ve had to adjust here too, but outside… well, there’s been a lot more to get your heads around.
Part of me wonders if things would have been any different if you had known about Tremorglade before. Would you have kept us in there anyway, when the alternative was… well, this? Would you have shut your eyes and pretended not to see?
I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. And when that doesn’t work, I just choose not to think about it.
Because the world needs our support. And I don’t just mean the doughnuts.
Harold Poulter and his cronies might once have been the experts on our condition, but we’re the ones who know it best. Sequest is being ‘cleaned up and repurposed’ now – Doctor Smith is in prison awaiting trial, along with a load of other senior staff – and the fresh faces say they’re trying to make things right. I don’t know if I believe that, but we have no choice but to rely on them to help clear up the messes Sequest made. Because it looks like Tremorglade isn’t the only secret project they were working on.
