Reaper's Legacy

“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.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN OUT WITH THE OLD

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