Contagion

shallowly, willing himself not to puke up everything else.

“Gross,” Sparky said.

“You slap me hard enough?” Jack asked.

“Hey, gotta take the opportunities given to me. You’re lucky I don’t carry a hammer.”

“Thanks, mate.”

“Yeah. Well.” Sparky’s voice barely hid his concern, and Jack looked up, making an effort to smile. It was difficult.

“What did you see?” Rhali asked. She was sitting on a bench, looking weak and drained. He wondered whether he had taken anything from her.

“They…” Jack paused, knowing that they were all listening, but unable for a moment to continue. “They’ll still human, deep inside, though barely. Still have their loves and lives, hopes and fears. And yet…so different. Changed so much. And it hurts them.”

“Good!” Lucy-Anne said. Her blank expression did not change, though her voice was filled with venom.

“They can’t help what they’ve become,” Jack said. “And they’re doing their best. To survive. To find the bomb, and stop it.”

“They know where it is?” Sparky asked.

Jack nodded. “South of here, across the river. I saw their destination, and I think I recognised it. Visited it with school a few years back. Imperial War Museum.”

“So they’re all going there to stop it,” Jenna said.

“To try.” Jack nodded and stood up, looking across the silent, dying city. “They barely have a concept of outside. London is their only home now, and they’re doing their best to save it.”

“Can they?” Jenna asked. “I mean, those women we saw didn’t seem, I dunno…intelligent.”

“I saw gargoyle people,” Lucy-Anne said. “Trying to fly. They had claws. And a woman like a dog, pissing against a tree. A man like a monkey. And the worm.” She looked up, but her expression did not change. “There was the worm that ate Rook.”

“So he is gone,” Jack said softly.

“I dreamed him well again, but it still took him in the end. I dream the future. Change it. And it only changes back again.” She frowned and ran her hand through her short hair. “I think that’s what happens, at least.”

“Did they kill your brother too?” Sparky asked gently. His own brother was dead in London, and Lucy-Anne would know that. Such loss was something else that had forged their friendship.

“Oh no, Andrew’s still…he’s still around.” She glanced around the boat as if expecting him to appear. “He said he dreamed himself alive, so when he did die, he didn’t quite go.”

“He’s a ghost?” Jenna asked.

“I guess.” Lucy-Anne fingered a chain around her neck, looking out across the river.

Jack had seen so much that he had little trouble believing in ghosts. But right now, wherever or whatever Andrew was did not matter.

“Knowing where it is doesn’t help us much,” he said. He looked at Fleeter sitting at the bow of the boat. She had been taking all this in without comment, smiling her annoying smile. “You’re sure Miller’s still at Camp H?”

“No,” she said. “It was just an idea.”

Jack felt anger rising, but he drove it down. He needed calmness now more than ever.

“Fifteen minutes,” Breezer said. “We’ll know soon enough, one way or another.”

CHAPTER SEVEN TEN

The bodies were still there. The ruin of Camp H seemed untouched since the brief, terrible battle of the day before, and the scene had a familiarity that made Jack’s skin crawl. The metal containers in which Miller and the Choppers had made their base—a prison and vivisection centre for the Irregulars and Superiors they managed to capture—were crushed by the forces unleashed upon them. Several dead soldiers lay alongside one container, and scattered across the clearing in the container park were fifteen or twenty more corpses. It was difficult to tell exactly how many—Jack had seen them frozen by the Superior he’d helped rescue, then shattered into pieces by his father’s deadly whisper. Those pieces had now thawed. Carrion birds were feeding on them, and he could see the red streaks across the concrete where some had been dragged away during the night.

Miller sat in his wheelchair beside the ruined prison container. He was alone, and at first glance Jack couldn’t tell whether he was alive. But he reached out with his mind and touched upon the chaos of Miller’s thoughts, and as they emerged from between containers, the madman’s eyes were upon them. He’d gathered dead soldiers’ jackets across his lap, around his shoulders and over his head. He was huddled down in his chair. Jack could only see a small pale spread of skin, and the glimmer of one eye. He might have been the Emperor from Star Wars, but if so he ruled a doomed empire.

“Stay on your toes,” Jack said. “Rhali?”

“I think we’re alone now,” she said.

“Could be a song there, somewhere,” Sparky quipped.

Jack led the way. Breezer came with him, and behind them were Sparky, Jenna and Rhali.

Fleeter had flipped out as soon as they’d moored and left the boat, saying that she was going to scout the way ahead. Jack hadn’t even bothered trying to call her back. She had her own agenda.

“That’s far enough!” Miller called. There was something wrong with his voice; a growl, rough-edged.

Jack laughed. “What, Miller? Have you got us covered?”

“Monsters,” Miller muttered. His words echoed from the container piles around Camp H.

“Yeah, right,” Rhali said. “We’re the monsters.” Her voice was quiet. But there was fear and fury there, and Jack had never heard her so alive.

“I said that’s far enough!”

Jack and his companions stopped.

“Why?” Jack asked.

“I don’t want to be seen,” Miller said.

“What did he do to you this time?”

“Your father, you mean?”

“Reaper,” Jack said. “He’s no longer my father.”

“Oh, he is, boy. And you’ve got it in you too. I can see it in your eyes, the way you stand. You’re dripping with power, and when you use it, you’ll become a monster as well.”

Jack tried to blink away the memory of those three Choppers he’d killed. He was afraid Miller might see it.

“Why aren’t you dead?” Rhali spat.

“I am!” Miller laughed. It was a horrible, high giggle, made more dreadful because his body and wrapped clothing barely moved at all.

“We don’t have time to piss around, here,” Jack said quietly. He started walking forward again, trying not to see the human parts scattered around his feet, and trying not to remember the terrible things he had seen inside those containers. In the larger collection of containers, the research rooms where the unfortunates had been dissected and stored. And in the smaller unit, the prison where they’d kept those due for experimentation. Monstrous. Almost unthinkable. And the man responsible for all of it was this wretched thing before him.

Jack’s anger rose again. He’d already held a gun to this bastard’s head and refrained from pulling the trigger. But he had greater weapons than guns.

Far greater.

“Stay back!” Miller said. A hand emerged from the clothing, palm out. Two fingers were missing, their stumps ragged and wet.

Jack stopped. “I can help you.” The idea of fixing some of Miller’s wounds was reprehensible. Yet even thinking that way gave Jack a sense of inner peace. I’m better than him, he thought. But