Tim Lebbon - Contagion

He was also mourning his lost father, a period of renewed grief that had lasted for two years. And he felt terrible about leaving his dear friends. But thinking too much about them might undo him, and jeopardise everything he was trying to do. He had a plan and he was determined to see it through, because if he did not then it would have all been for nothing. The pain, the suffering and death. He could not let that happen.

He would not.

So he did his best to leave that Jack of grief and sadness behind, and the one who approached the museum was a new, simpler Jack. A young man with a mission, shorn of thoughts that might distract. He had become a memory with a purpose.

The scenario awaiting them was strange and troubling, but he tried not to waste too much time to wonder. The things surrounding the museum—frozen in the moment where they sat, lay, ran, flew, crawled—were amazing and terrifying. Jack walked quickly past them. The air was heavy and still, but sometimes he still caught a whiff of animal scents, unnatural and unknown.

“Hurry,” he said. Nomad had been falling behind, and he’d not wanted to risk a look back. He feared that acknowledging her slowness would give her the excuse to stop, and they had so much further to go.

“I…” Nomad said. “I think…coming from here, to help Lucy-Anne…I dug deep, used everything.”

Jack had to stop then, and he turned to confront Nomad. He was shocked at the change that had come over her. Still ethereal and mysterious, she was tainted now with smears of blood from her nose and the corners of her eyes. She looked lessened. The blood made her seem more human. “You’re Nomad. You’re the First Vector, Angelina Walker, the cause of all this!”

Nomad nodded without any sign of regret. “Yes. But I am…weaker.”

“Not now!” Jack said. “Come on. Come on, just a few more minutes, get me into—”

“You go,” she said. Her eyes changed then, seeming to glaze over with something darker. She staggered forwards, reaching for the museum’s perimeter fence, but Jack caught her before she fell. “You go on. I can’t stay like this. The illness…is in me as well. It has been for some time, but I’ve been denying it. Too late, Jack. But you’re strong enough.”

“No!” Jack said. “I need your help. I’m not as strong as you think.” But he lied. Desperate, anxious to get inside, still he needed Nomad with him. But not only for her help. He needed her because he could not let her escape London. Not with what she had inside, that potential for contagion. He was ready to remain here to keep his own infection contained, so he could never let her go.

He checked the time, and wondered how accurate the timer on the bomb might be.

Without warning Nomad flipped back, and Jack had to follow. The world came to life around them. Movement, sound, smells, much of it unnatural and strange. Jack grabbed Nomad’s arm and ran.

Through the gates into the museum grounds, and something came at them from the left. Jack raised a hand to halt it, but the shape skidded to a stop and backed off. Other creatures moved aside. Perhaps these amazing, wretched things were scared of Nomad. Maybe they perceived some kind of hope in their sudden arrival.

Or perhaps it was simply that they had already eaten.

Nomad ran with him, grunting at every footfall. She was more human than he had ever known her.

“The doors?” Jack asked.

“Safe,” she said. “The traps begin inside.”

Jack knew it was a terrible risk, but he used Reaper’s power to grunt the doors open. They fell back, hinges twisted and lock shattered, and he and Nomad ran inside. He had no wish to give those creatures time to rethink, so he skidded on the marble floor, turned, and breathed a gush of white flame at the opened doors. Glass cracked and shattered in the inner vestibule walls, and the flames lit the area as bright as daytime.

Jack shoved forward with both hands, feeling his power surge through the air and catch the doors, slamming them against the darkness of London. He kept them closed and melted their hinges, twisting the lock back into place and melting it into one piece. It might not withstand a sustained assault. But it would have to do.

“Show me,” he said to Nomad. She was staring at him with those glazed eyes, and he saw the respect and wonder. But he could not pander to that. “Show me!”

“This way,” she said. He followed her into the main hall where machines of war stood on pristine plinths or hung from the ceiling. She held up a hand and they came to a halt. She pointed. In the darkness Jack saw the fine tendrils of lasers crisscrossing the large space, and the glimmer of trip wires. Then she touched his arm and pointed at the hulking shadow of a tank at the other end of the hall.

There , she said in his mind.

Jack could see that she was getting worse. That did not concern him now. It would help when the time came.

“We don’t need to get too close,” he said.

She was looking at him wide-eyed. “I’ve brought you as far as I can,” she whispered. “I can’t stay here, Jack. I know you must, and I won’t change that. But what I have is too precious and it has to be preserved.”

“No.”

“Yes. It has to be spread.”

“No! It’s not precious. It’s poisonous . And you’re staying here with me.”

Every scrap of her illness—the weakness, the blood, the distant glaze to her eyes—vanished in an instant. She seemed to expand as she took in one huge breath, and Jack wondered at the effort and energies it took to drive down that sickness.

“Nomad—” he began, but then she turned and ran for the doors.

He followed. The bomb behind, Nomad in front, both were terribly destructive, but Nomad was probably worse. The bomb could end London and all the history of that great character city. Nomad, and the contagion she carried, would change the world. Some of the change might be good, but the possibility was too great that much of it would be bad. In London she had been her own person, but out there in the wider world, she would be precious. Sought-after. Jack tried not to imagine Nomad weaponised. He tried not to imagine an army of a thousand Reapers.

She shoved at the doors and they flexed in their frames, creaking and breaking. Jack dipped into her mind and broke her link with the doors. She stumbled forward, as if a great barrier had been removed before her.

“You’d dare enter my mind?” she asked.

“Please listen to—”

Nomad shimmered and Jack flipped just as she did. He recovered from the familiar shock just in time to catch a fist to his face. A real flesh and blood fist, knuckles grinding across his nose and opening wounds that had only recently stopped bleeding.

He dulled the pain that melted into his skull, skipped through the universe she had planted within him, and then that red pulsing star of contagion seemed to expand and surge at him, seeking his touch and the gift of release. It exuded both vigour and sickness, and he veered away.

But it had given him an idea. Inside him was this alien thing, and inside Nomad there might be something similar. Or some one .

As Nomad smashed open the doors and they spilled to the floor, Jack knelt behind her and concentrated hard. She’d raised a much heavier barrier, but she still did not quite understand that everything she could do had also been given to him. He circled the barrier, observing, and then drove down and into it, hauling himself through. Before she could do anything he was drifting into her own universe of potential.

The shock at entering her mind almost froze him. Her place of talents was so different from his. It was colder, for a start. The stars more distant, the spaces in between so vast, more hollow, more empty. There was no personality to this place, and that made finding what he wanted that much easier.