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Battle Lines. Will Hill
Читать онлайн.Название Battle Lines
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007354528
Автор произведения Will Hill
Жанр Детская проза
Издательство HarperCollins
The blood-soaked patient, who had torn Ben’s neighbour’s lip from his face as though it was nothing, had run headlong into the back of the car. There was a bright spray of blood across the rear window at the point of impact. The car leapt forward and Ben saw the man lying in the road; he seemed to have knocked himself out. But, as he looked at the fallen patient, he caught sight of something else that almost stopped his heart.
Dark shapes were dropping steadily into the courtyard, before moving quickly towards the gate. Ben pressed the window’s button again and, over the howl of the siren, he could hear, very faintly, the crunch of breaking glass and a low, swelling roar, like the noise made by a pack of animals. He was still looking in the rear-view mirror as the car accelerated through the outer gate and down the hill; as a result, he didn’t see the glow of blue and red emerging from around the sharp bend in front of them.
Andy Myers gritted his teeth and pressed his foot down more firmly on the accelerator. The siren was deafening, even from inside the car; the old vehicle’s windows and doors were not as airtight as they had once been, and the sound was so loud the windows might as well have been rolled down. He was looking forward to finding out from the duty nurse exactly what was going on, radioing it in, and getting back to bed. There was a cricket match at noon and he was already glumly aware that very few of the club’s players were going to be rested and at their best.
He turned the wheel gently, sending the car neatly round the bend that would take him on to the final approach to the hospital. Then everything in front of him was blinding light, and he had the briefest of moments to wonder where it was coming from before the Range Rover slammed into his car head-on.
“Look out!” screamed Charlie Walsh, the words mangled by his missing lower lip.
Ben dragged his gaze away from the rear-view mirror, aware that something had moved at the edges of his vision. Then red and blue light filled the windscreen, there was a sickening crunch of metal, and everything went black.
Ben emerged into a world of chaos.
His eyes flickered open and pain shot through his head as the siren pounded into it. Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned to look at Charlie Walsh.
His neighbour hung in his seat belt, his head lowered, his eyes closed. His face was covered in blood and a ridge of swelling was already beginning to rise across his forehead. As Ben watched, a small bubble of blood inflated and popped in Charlie’s ruined mouth, followed by a second, and a third.
He’s alive, he thought. Thank God.
Ben looked down at himself and felt relief wash over him; the big car’s roll cage had held. There was a bulge behind the pedals where the engine block had been forced back by the collision, but it had not broken through; it would have crushed the lower half of his body to jelly if it had. Blood was falling steadily from his nose and he could see the dent in the dashboard where he must have been thrown against it. His head thumped with pain and he found he couldn’t think straight; he tried, but the thoughts drifted away from him, as insubstantial as smoke on the wind. He reached out with a shaking hand and opened the car door. He made to get out, but a sheet of agony bloomed up from his left ankle, and he screamed. Ben looked down, and saw that his foot was twisted almost ninety degrees to one side. The sight was so alien, so terrible, that he vomited into his lap, unable to stop himself.
Ben fumbled his mobile phone out of his pocket and dialled Maggie’s number. He knew he should phone the police, but for some reason he felt unwilling to do so. Something had happened before the crash, although he wasn’t sure what it was. Had there been another car? Had he hit another car? He held the phone to his ear as he peered through the broken windscreen. There were pieces of metal strewn across the road. He leant further forward, dimly aware that the car seemed to be higher than usual, that his view of the road was different, and saw a twisted hunk of metal lying beneath his front wheels. Ben stared at it blankly, until his eyes picked out a smashed pair of lights sticking out of the wreckage, one red, one blue, and everything flooded back to him.
The hospital, the man, Charlie Walsh’s lip, the police car and—
He froze.
Oh God. The patients. The breaking glass. Behind me.
The siren screamed and roared, and he could hear Maggie’s voice shouting down the phone, but could not make his mouth work to answer her. He forced himself to look into the rear-view mirror and saw a red glow descending the hill towards him, a pulsing, shifting mass of crimson that seemed to originate from a hundred pairs of glowing points of light.
“Run,” he croaked into the phone. “Take Isla and run.”
1
THE NEXT GENERATION
Jamie Carpenter was so focused on the violence playing out before him that he didn’t notice his console’s message tone until the third beep.
“Take five,” he called, pulling the metal rectangle from its loop on his belt, and heard two simultaneous groans of relief. Jamie thumbed READ on the console’s touch screen, and read the short message that appeared.
NS303-67-J/LIVE_BRIEFING/OR/ASAP
The message was simple, but it still caused Jamie a momentary pang of sorrow. It was an order for him to immediately attend a briefing in the Ops Room, similar to dozens of other orders that had appeared on his console’s screen in the months since he had arrived in the Loop, the classified base that was the heart of Department 19. But this one had been sent only to him; his Operator number was there on the screen in black and white. The previous orders had almost all been sent with the prefix G-17, the Operational Squad that he had led until a month or so ago, the squad that had comprised himself, Larissa Kinley and Kate Randall.
Their squad had been disbanded in the aftermath of Valeri Rusmanov’s attack on the Loop, so that their combined experience could be put to wider use helping the Department heal and rebuild. It had been one of Interim Director Cal Holmwood’s first commands, and although it was one that Jamie understood, it had still felt like the three of them were being punished for being good at what they did. Holmwood had assured them that that was not the case, but how they felt was ultimately of little importance: it was an order and they would follow it.
“Sir?”
The voice trembled, and Jamie looked up from his console. He was sitting on a bench at the edge of the Playground, the wide circular room on Level F of the Loop in which generations of Operators had been trained, sweating and bleeding on its hard shiny floor. For the last fifteen years or so, the room had been the domain of Terry, the tall, barrel-chested instructor who was standing in the middle of the gleaming floor with his hands folded across his chest. But it was not he who had spoken; the voice belonged to John Morton, who was slumped on the ground and looking over at Jamie with wide eyes.
Morton was breathing heavily and bleeding from half a dozen places, most seriously from where the instructor’s weathered knuckles had split his bottom lip open. He was sat on the floor, his legs crossed, his arms resting on his knees, his face so pale that Jamie thought he might be on the verge of throwing up. The blood from his lip was dripping steadily, pooling between his legs.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” replied Jamie. “I have to head upstairs for a bit.”
“Everything OK, sir?” asked a second voice, and Jamie turned his head towards its source. Sitting apart from Morton was a dark-haired woman whose name was Lizzy Ellison. She was almost as pale as Morton and she too was bleeding, from a wide cut above her left eye and from somewhere inside her mouth, but her voice was steady.
“Fine,” said Jamie,