Читать книгу Underdogs - Chris Bonnello - Страница 12

Half an hour had passed. Ewan had barely stopped running since they had escaped Luton, and it was difficult to run and talk at the same time.

‘Alex,’ he barked into the phone, ‘you know what Oakenfold means to us, right? The guys at home won’t like the news.’

Ewan knew he was using the other students’ fears to mask his own. The very thought of breaking such sensitive news terrified him. But he didn’t need Alex to know he was terrified.

‘Mate, they’re already struggling with the missile attack on New London. Losing an already-abandoned school isn’t going to add much stress.’

‘Is that meant to be some kind of comfort?’

‘It’s meant to be the truth.’

Alex Ginelli was hardly a sensitive guy, and he had no empathy for teenagers with special ed backgrounds. The twenty-two-year-old from Brighton had been brought up in a different world, where places like Oakenfold Special School were safely hidden away from the rest of society. And even in the world he inhabited, he kept himself far away from most people emotionally. Alex put on a distinct lone wolf persona, and it showed so strongly that it was probably a part of his real personality too. But it meant he had an outside perspective in most situations, and Ewan reluctantly admitted it was useful at times. Alex had certainly been in his element during their last mission, sheltering alone in a bungalow until the others were ready to escape. Without his self-isolating approach to combat, perhaps he would never have been able to help Ewan, Kate and Jack escape New London alive.

‘Look mate,’ Alex continued, ‘I’ll head home and pass on the news to McCormick. If you’re sure I can abandon comms.’

‘We’re only an hour away, and the hard bit’s over. Go and tell him.’

‘Got it. You’ve probably used up your three minutes of untraceable time, so I’m hanging up before Grant ends up finding you. Interrogate Shannon about the attack, though. She may know what’s going on in Daddy’s world.’

Without another word, Alex was gone. Ewan removed his phone battery, and slowed himself down.

‘You OK?’ Shannon asked from behind.

‘Alex is passing on the news.’

‘So we can stop running now?’

‘If you like.’

Once he was at walking speed, Ewan looked at his surroundings for the first time. His vision had been fixed to the road like a blinkered racehorse, and he had relied on Shannon to watch out for patrols. The countryside was as pretty as always, and that annoyed him. His own world was in a mess, full of missile attacks and school invasions, and the rest of the world had the audacity to act as if nothing was wrong.

‘So what do we know about the missiles?’ Shannon asked.

‘Basically nothing,’ Ewan gasped. ‘Could have been an attack by one country or a bunch of countries. The question is why they’d bother.’

‘Because my dad’s a megalomaniacal dictator who destroyed Britain as we know it?’

‘I’m talking about the Cerberus system. Your dad promised the British government that it would make Britain almost invincible to long-range attacks. That’s how he got them to go along with whatever he wanted.’

‘Almost invincible,’ said Shannon. ‘I guess that explains it.’

Ewan rested a hand against the nearest road sign. He was more tired than he wanted to admit.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘With Cerberus, he’s almost invincible,’ Shannon explained. ‘Missiles can’t touch him, and any planes dropping bombs would just get shot down. The only way he could lose is by a land invasion.’

‘A land invasion with enough soldiers to scale Citadel walls and fight back a million clones on their way to Floor A?’

‘Technically possible, I guess,’ answered Shannon with a shrug. ‘But with AME, he’ll be actually invincible. The world believes this is the last opportunity they’ll ever have to bring him down, and a one in a million chance is better than a zero in a million chance. Maybe somewhere right now, someone’s trying a land invasion that’s failing just as badly.’

Ewan wiped the sweat from his forehead.

‘And they chose today because…’

‘Because my father must be close. He’ll have sped everything up after your break-in.’

‘And we’ve no idea how long we have,’ Ewan whispered. ‘Weeks, days, hours—’

‘Four days,’ interrupted Shannon. ‘We’ll have until midnight on the twentieth.’

Ewan stared into Shannon’s face, and found her as worried as him.

‘One year from Takeover Day,’ he muttered. ‘I didn’t think your father was the sentimental type.’

‘May twentieth is his birthday. It’s pride, not sentiment.’

Ewan rolled his eyes, and restarted his walk home.

The rest of the journey passed in silence. The less they talked the faster they could move, and the more time Ewan could spend with his thoughts.

He had hoped they would be productive thoughts, but they weren’t. They were chaotic ones that cycled through his brain, growing bigger and bigger as they went. The thoughts themselves never changed: his brain repeated the exact same phrases, but said them louder each time until they became his whole universe. Grant took Oakenfold. Grant took Oakenfold. GRANT TOOK OAKENFOLD.

Over the course of his life, Ewan had tried numerous strategies to break the cycle and set his brain back on track, and the most effective one had been finding a distraction. After a childhood of being told distractions were bad, it seemed strange that they worked so well for him in times of anxiety. (Of course, adults commanding him to avoid them had only forced him to do the opposite.)

Ewan found a suitable distraction, in the form of his mentor’s face pictured in his mind’s eye. Dr Joseph McCormick, the anchoring figure of stability for Ewan and the rest of the Underdogs, who had turned him little by little from an impulse-driven violent child to someone vaguely capable of doing things well. Ewan pictured everything about McCormick: his glasses that magnified the calmness in his eyes, the hair that wore thinner on his scalp, and that warm smile that he seemed to wear no matter what mood Ewan was in. The mere image of that face in Ewan’s mind helped him to steady his breathing, and before long he could start to refocus on his long march home.

It was almost midday when he and Shannon got to the trapdoor, and a short walk through a narrow tunnel led them to the cellar entrance to Spitfire’s Rise.

Ewan let Shannon through the door first. Partly out of respect, and partly so she would not see him glancing at the Memorial Wall on his way past. The name of Charlie Coleman still looked out of place: Ewan’s old classmate and Temper Twin, with whom he had shared troubled times at Oakenfold and heroic adventures at Spitfire’s Rise, now reduced to two words on a slab of dead people’s names.

Gazing at his best friend’s name felt like staring at the sun, so Ewan distracted himself with the cellar’s other contents. Namely the weapons and combat tools on their respective shelves, and the doors to the other two underground tunnels to neighbouring houses: one which led to the room where they kept their electricity generator, and the other which led to their makeshift farm where they grew their freshest food.

As Ewan and Shannon climbed the stairs, they began to hear gasps and high-pitched voices from inside the house. Ewan had predicted his friends’ reactions well; the news about Oakenfold must have been painful for them too. But their shouts were even more panicked than he had imagined. It was not worried conversation coming from the Underdogs: it was mass hysteria. He and Shannon scrambled to the top of the stairs, and burst through the door to the living room.

The collapsed body of Dr Joseph McCormick lay on the carpet, unmoving.