long as my arm and the telephone extensions of each. Someone had ringed one of the entries in green ink, with the bored assiduousness of someone who was tired of being asked for the same department over and over.
Towards the end, I guessed, as The Cull turned the city outside into a ghost town, the phones would never have stopped ringing.
Fl 34. Ext 34033. Epidemiology.
'Right,' I said.
'You found what you been looking for?' Nate grunted, trying not to look too interested. He'd been pretty good so far, I supposed, at not asking out loud what the hell I'd dragged him into. He'd got his payment. He'd got his protection, and a little sliver of fame as the guy who's with the stranger. He was doing okay, and the Clergy hadn't tried to kill him yet.
But you could see it in his eyes. The curiosity was killing him.
I wondered if I should take him with me.
But.
Something not quite right…
Still that sensation of disquiet. His eyes twinkled over his soggy dogend, his teeth sparkled with every smile. He cooked a fine rat. He told a fine story. He looked a clown and acted a clown, and his shaky-handed approach to medicine had saved my life at least twice. Nothing to dislike about the guy, right?
Right.
But no. No. Something not right.
Something besides this new twitchy, sweaty routine he was going through, something besides the weird behaviour since yesterday.
A little tentacle of memory uncurled. A voice cut-through with exhaustion and inebriation, curdled with heavy breathing and fresh sweat.
Bella.
I only knew her a couple of weeks. Planning for the airport, mostly. Getting provisions, working out where to hit, how to get through, who to target. Mostly.
Except the one night we got smashed on whatever brain-killing homebrew the local survivors had been cooking up in their bathtub stills. Lost track of our conversation.
Ended up fucking on the bar in the abandoned pub we'd been using as home.
Even off my face, even after five years of hardcore celibacy, even in a world as careless and repercussion-free as this one, the guilt!
Didn't matter, in the end. We fell asleep all cuddled-up on the trapdoor behind the bar, and as I dozed-off I got confused and kept kissing her forehead, like she was someone else. And she started telling me things. Stuff I hadn't asked about, hadn't expressed any interest in. Stuff I barely bothered to listen to.
When she was finished there was a long silence, then she said:
'Doesn't matter. Not your problem. But that's why I'm going.'
Back on the fifth floor of the United Nations Secretariat building, with people shouting and dying outside, I turned to Nate and said:
'Go help the others. Find the kids. Look everywhere.'
He stared at me like I was mad. Half relieved, half terrified.
'But…' He waved a hand, searching for the right words. 'Why, man? Ain't like you care. Ain't like you expect 'em to find anything. Why the sudden ch…'
Doesn't matter, she'd said, sweat making the grime on her face streak and run. Not your problem.
I snapped. Just a little.
'Fucksakes, Nate! Just fucking… Just…'
His eyes bugged. I looked away.
Took a breath.
'Just… Just go help them, will you? Please? I'm going upstairs. Might be dangerous. Just give them a hand.'
Outside, a fireball licked at the edges of the building and blew-in the rest of the windows, letting in the screams from outside. Nate grunted.
I started to climb the stairs.
From the thirty-fourth floor I couldn't even see the fight outside. This high up, the green-glass windows were all intact, and I couldn't hope to angle my vision down to the base of the tower without bashing my head in the process.
I was sweating heavily, by the time I arrived. Not a good sign. Since The Cull robbed us all of a functioning power grid, elevators had been a survivor's wet dream. Judging from the lack of empty food cans and discarded sleeping-mats, very few Clergy goons had taken the trouble to come this high. Even the walls were mostly free of nonsensical graffiti, and any plundering of office supplies appeared to have been more a matter of overturning desks and causing a mess, than looking for useful stuff. If I'm honest, as I climbed the stairs I was quietly entertaining the suspicion that sooner or later I'd come across floor-after-floor of children, packed together in tiny bunks, poring over mass-produced bibles and reciting the day's lessons like good little acolytes.
Bella's words, getting to me.
'Not your problem.'
It's a funny thing, convincing a horde that something was a lie whilst dimly suspecting it might just be true. I guess, deep down inside – maybe – there was a little bit of me expecting that the scavs would find their kids. Behind the carefully maintained disinterest, behind the rock-solid focus on my own goals (Don't you fucking give up, soldier!), it was lurking there like an irritating little piece of humanity.
The looks in the eyes of the women, standing outside the gates last night.
The way Malice rocked her child to sleep in the midst of the Wheels Mart, knowing she had four more years before the little mite was whisked away.
The edge in Bella's voice.
Was it so unlikely that they'd find them, after all?
Why did the Clergy want the kids, if not for their grand future-shaping scheme? Why fly the little buggers in from overseas, from all over the bloody world, if not to train them in the ways of the Lord, to fill their heads with destiny-based-bollocks? It's not like the Clergy were running a secret sportswear sweatshop, or mass-producing child meat pies…
No. They had to be here somewhere, somewhere inside the compound, hidden away.
But not here. Not a soul. Just the dim moonlight through thick plate glass, a morass of overturned desks and stalwart filing cabinets, and endless silence.
I started searching.
Once or twice I heard voices from the stairwell, torches wobbling in the gloom, puddles of hard light wafting past walls and windows. I froze every time, hands reaching for the M16, convinced they'd followed me. They knew what I was after.
Then they went clattering past – upwards – and were lost to the endless silence. I half-wondered what was on the roof that was so bloody important, then rammed my head into another heap of cluttered files and forgot all about it.
I found it forty minutes later.
Tucked away in a chrome cabinet (locked, but fortunately not bullet-proof), inserted between vile-green separators like the most unimportant thing on earth, rammed between bulging files marked PAL-, PAM-, PAO-, PAP-, it was a slender, unremarkable thing. A faded project-report, listing funding allocations, resources, classification levels, diplomatic passes, locations, and personnel.
I had to sit down.
Take a breath.
Look away. Out across the dark landscape and that brightening patch of sky to the east, promising – eventually – a new sun.
Then I looked back and re-read the title: PROJECT PANDORA
It made me shiver, which is quite a thing to admit when you've spent most of your adult life killing people in secret.
