Extinction Game (42 page)

‘Haden, wait. I . . .’

I blinked and looked around. My position had changed. I was once again standing with my foot just inches from the tripwire.

I stepped back again, darting my head around wildly. There was no sign of Haden.

It was as if the whole universe had suffered some glitch and reset itself; as if Haden had never really been there.

And yet, when I looked down at my open hand, the envelope was still grasped in it.

I squatted down on my haunches back at the mouth of the alley and pulled the envelope open with trembling hands. Inside I found a single sheet of paper with nine names scrawled in neat, cursive
handwriting: Chloe, Randall, Selwyn, Winifred, Yuichi, Rozalia, Oskar, Wallace and, finally, my own. Below each, Haden had written out a series of numbers and letters that were clearly transfer
coordinates.

I swallowed, my mouth suddenly desperately dry. My mind kept trying to reject everything that had happened in just the last minute or two. I had a hard time accepting even the reality of the
envelope. Somehow I managed to slide the sheet back inside the envelope before pushing it deep into a pocket where I was sure it would not be lost.

I stepped carefully over the tripwire, with no lack of trepidation, and continued on my way down the length of the alley. When I came to the next street, I looked around and saw a rear entrance
to the laboratories. I hustled up some steps to the frame of a smashed-in door and stepped through to a foyer, my rifle at the ready.

Now I knew just what to look out for, I had no trouble spotting a second tripwire. I moved with extreme caution, stepping over the wire and continuing deeper into the building.

I found myself surrounded by empty doorways. I swung my rifle from side to side, half expecting Casey to come charging out of one of them with guns blazing. I was met only by silence. I saw the
mouth of a corridor, extending deep within the building, most of its length lost in darkness.

I heard a rattling sound from the other side of the foyer and twisted around, bringing my rifle to bear. An empty beer can rolled across the floor before bumping into a wall and coming to a
stop.

Too late, I realized my mistake.

I turned. Casey emerged from the shadows, bringing the butt of his rifle crashing down on my head. The foyer tumbled around me, darkness limning the edges of my vision.

‘Too fucking easy, mate,’ I heard Casey say, before the darkness swallowed me up.

‘C’mon. Get up.’

A hand slapped my cheek. Something warm and liquid hit my face and I spluttered, rolling forward and onto my knees, the taste of brackish water on my lips. I blinked my eyes open, my head
feeling as if it had been stuffed with old rags, and quickly discovered that my hands were cuffed together in front of me.

I was lying on the floor in a windowless room, most probably a basement. Buckets and mops stood in one corner next to stacks of dusty office supplies. A water bowl sat on the floor, along with a
folded blanket on which Lucky must have slept. An unlit furnace stood in another corner, along with a portable battery-powered generator that hummed quietly to itself. A cord emerged from a tangle
of wires at the rear of the generator, reaching up to a single caged light bulb suspended from a ceiling hook. Wooden steps led up the side of the far wall to a door, while just beneath the steps
stood a portable video camera mounted on a tripod, its lens pointing towards me.

I was far from surprised to see that most of the basement floor was taken up by a circle of field-pillars. The usual laptop sat next to the portable transfer stage, its screensaver morphing into
abstract shapes.

But none of this drew my attention as much as the steel cage placed in the precise centre of the stage. The cage was just large enough to contain the crumpled form of a man, curled up in a
foetal position and nearly invisible beneath the hordes of bees that otherwise filled the cage. Their angry, muted buzzing seemed to fill the room. It wasn’t until I looked closer and saw the
glass lining the inside of the cage that I understood why the bees couldn’t escape. As for the figure within, it looked as if it might be a member of a night patrol – one of the
creatures that had killed Nadia.

Casey appeared from somewhere behind me and stepped towards the cage, a rifle held loosely in one hand. He carefully tapped at the bars of the cage with the rifle’s barrel, and the
creature within jerked in response. Its head lifted in the exact same manner as a disturbed sleeper.

I just barely caught a glimpse of dead eyes and an open mouth through the maelstrom of swarming insects. Horror gripped me as yet more bees came surging out of the depths of the creature’s
throat. I turned away from the sight, feeling sick to my stomach.

Casey stepped back over to stand before me. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are a massive fucking pain in the arse.’

‘Go to hell,’ I managed to rasp.

Casey just chuckled, and raised his free hand. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’

‘What?’

‘I want to know if you’re concussed or not.’

‘Why don’t you go fuck yourse—’

He stepped forward, kicking me hard enough in the gut to drive the wind out of me. I scrabbled back against the wall as best I could.

‘How. Many. Fingers?’

I lifted my cuffed hands with the middle finger of each raised.

Casey laughed. ‘Very droll. And your name?’

I opened my mouth to voice another complaint, then realized there was no point. ‘Jerry Beche,’ I said with a sigh.

‘Good.’ He turned, making his way over to the video camera beneath the steps. ‘There’s not much point to the conversation we’re going to have if you’re not in
full possession of your faculties.’ I watched as he leaned down to peer through its lens at me, then made some kind of adjustment.

‘Casey . . . whatever you’re planning, and I have a pretty good idea what it is, you need to stop. Wallace told us everything.’

He looked up at me, and I saw a flash of anger. ‘Knew I should have just put a bullet through the silly fucker’s head, instead of wasting time with matches.’ He leaned back
down, peering through the camera once more and made a final adjustment. ‘So what exactly did he tell you?’

‘That you’re going to try and wipe out the Authority because they lied to us about retirement.’

‘And you think that’s the only reason? You can’t think of a whole list of them yourself, even after being among us for as short a time as you have?’

‘Casey . . .’

‘I hear you, I hear you. What do you think I’m going to do: walk over there, uncuff you and beg your forgiveness? Fuck that.’ He stood back, as if satisfied. ‘Thing is,
Jerry, I’m really not sure why you
want
me to stop.’

‘Because you’re out of your fucking mind, that’s why. You killed Nadia, you killed the other Jerry, and if Wallace isn’t dead yet from his injuries, he will be soon
enough.’

‘Wow.’ He put his hands on his hips. ‘You really
have
figured it all out, haven’t you?’

‘There’s not much we don’t know, Casey. You were working for the Patriots and you betrayed them. Everyone else knows where we are, and whatever happens to me, they’re
going to come after you even harder.’

He shook his head in apparent disbelief. ‘I sincerely doubt that. The crazy thing is, you should be thanking me. You ever think about that? If it wasn’t for me, you’d never
have been rescued – did that ever cross your mind?’ he tapped at his chest. ‘If I hadn’t been forced to prevent the
first
Jerry from screwing everything up, you
– and by
you
, I mean the person sitting right there, in front of me – would still be rotting away on some dead alternate. If it wasn’t for me, you’d never have had
a chance at a new life with the rest of us.’

I gaped at him. ‘So basically,’ I said, ‘we’re supposed to be
grateful
for you murdering anyone who gets in your way?’

‘Goddammit, Jerry,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you understand that the Authority don’t give a shit about any of us? And yet here you are, treating me like
I’m
the bad guy here. What the hell would
you
have done?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, and glanced towards the cage. ‘One thing I’m sure of, though, is that if you go ahead with this, you’re putting all of our lives
in jeopardy, yours included.’

‘How the hell do you figure that out?’

‘What’s left if you wipe out the Authority? Nothing but that island, and nowhere to go from there but a bunch of extinct alternates.’

‘But at least we’ll be free,’ Casey replied with unexpected fervour, ‘instead of being worked until we drop, or something kills us on some under-equipped mission.
We’re little better than slaves, except you’re all so fucking grateful for your chains.’

‘Why are you filming all this, Casey? So you can justify yourself to the rest of them?’

His expression soured, and I knew I had guessed right. ‘Here’s another question right back at you. Why is it that the Authority are so hell-bent on getting us to recover the kind of
information or weapons that could be used to destroy whole worlds? Like those damn bee-brains. Didn’t you ever wonder what possible reason they could have, even to come to this goddam
alternate?’

‘Fine,’ I admitted after a moment. ‘I don’t know. I wish I did.’

‘Yeah. Ever notice there’s a
lot
you don’t know?’ he growled. ‘Maybe you should ask
him
,’ and he nodded towards the cage.

I frowned, watching as he lifted the camera from its tripod and carried it towards the cage, pressing its lens close up against the bars, aiming it at the figure within, still obscured by the
thousands of bees crawling all over it.

‘C’mon, Jerry,’ Casey chided me. ‘Don’t you recognize who it is? Get a little closer. Take a look.’

I stared at him, terrified of what he might be planning to do. Moving cautiously, I pushed myself up onto my knees and shuffled a few inches closer to the cage, my bound hands before me.

Casey gave the bars of the cage a good hard kick, and I saw the figure within flinch, then sit up. Its head twisted from side to side, coming closer to the glass, and I finally got a good look
at who it was.

Greenbrooke.

‘What did you . . . how . . .’ I stammered.

‘I kidnapped him, I think is the word you’re looking for,’ said Casey, stepping back over to the tripod and replacing the camera on its mount.

I remembered seeing all those Patriot agents, roaming the island, and how I had assumed they were looking only for Casey’s hidden transfer stage. Maybe, I thought, they hadn’t just
been looking for the stage. Maybe they’d been trying to find Greenbrooke as well.

‘Don’t feel pity for him,’ said Casey. ‘He told me what I needed to know, and then I stuck him in there. He’ll be a walking plague vector when I send him over to
the Authority’s alternate, him and those bees.’ He cocked his head at me. ‘Don’t you want to know just what he told me?’

I stared down at my feet, too frightened to meet Casey’s eyes.

Casey shrugged when I didn’t answer, and continued regardless. ‘Turns out there was a nuclear war where the Authority came from,’ he said. ‘All the way back in their
Eighties. Not some two-minute affair, either; seems it dragged on for some decades, long into the Nineties, with the US fighting Soviet detachments all over South America. Seems like democracy took
a distinct step back during all this. Want to know why they call themselves “the Authority”? It’s short for “Provisional Civil Authority for the Emergency”.’

He walked across the basement, staring back in at Greenbrooke for a moment before continuing. ‘Over there, the CIA was replaced by the Patriots, the nearest thing their America ever had to
the Gestapo. Then all of a sudden,’ he said, turning back to look at me and waving one hand as if it were holding a magic wand, ‘they stumble across this abandoned transfer stage,
somewhere in the Bolivian jungle when they’re supposed to be hunting Cuban troops.’

I looked back up at him. ‘I know half of this already,’ I said. ‘Wallace told me, so you can shut the hell up.’

‘So did he mention the way the original stage-builders abandoned their bases, destroying all their computers and most of their records before disappearing?’ I nodded. ‘The only
reason I can see why they’d have done any such thing,’ he continued, ‘is because they were afraid of something – something they encountered while they were exploring all
those alternate realities themselves. At first I thought maybe that’s why the Authority wanted to find such terrible weapons – because they were afraid they might run into whatever it
is that scared the stage-builders so bad.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘But the real reason, it turns out, is hardly so noble. No, the reason Greenbrooke and his Patriot cronies pushed as
hard as they did for the Pathfinder project to focus on weapons acquisition was so they could beat the Soviets in their own alternate into submission.’

‘You’re certain of this?’

‘I wish I wasn’t, but I am. You see, Jerry, the Authority are what you get when you let people like Greenbrooke run things. Bleak, austere and absolutely devoid of hope or
freedom.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve been to their world, just briefly. You should see it: endless black skies, people scurrying from door to door to avoid the freezing cold,
streets full of empty, barren shops. From what I saw, I’m guessing there must have been a hell of a big die-off once the nukes started to fly. Fact is, they’re already dead, or will be
soon, anyway. You can see it in their faces; it’s a real privilege for some of them to be assigned to our island, did you know that? Warm skies, clean air, sunshine.’

‘If the Authority’s alternate is so cold,’ I said, ‘the bees’ll just die, won’t they?’

He shook his head. ‘These aren’t your regular garden-issue insects,’ he said. ‘Remember – they were designed as a weapon. The only way you can take those things out
is with a flamethrower. Cold doesn’t matter to them.’ He nodded at Greenbrooke. ‘And even if it does, they’re quite good at finding somewhere nice and warm to live,
wouldn’t you say?’ He stabbed at his chest with one thumb. ‘Now listen to me. We’re the victims. The people running the Authority are the same kind of people who decimated
our own alternates. Didn’t you dream of finding those people and killing them? Well, I’ve got a chance to do just that, and I’m not giving it up.’