Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

Zack stopped, turned and looked her square in the eye. “Emma. Hey. Look at me. No matter how bad it gets, I will not leave you, okay? I will not leave you. Either we get out of this together or we go down together.”

She nodded weakly. “Thanks.”

Zack looked up at the rim of the trench above them. “We gotta get topside. I don’t know which way we’re going anymore—”

“How sweet,” a nasty voice said from somewhere very near.

The dense foggy air made it sound uncomfortably close. “ ‘Either we get out of this together or we go down together.’ Brave words . . . Zack.”

Zack spun, searching for the owner of the voice, but he saw nothing except the empty trench reaching away into the fog.

Emma’s eyes went wide. “They’re in the trenches . . .”

“The name’s Willy,” the voice said. “Bad Willy. Because I have a very bad willy. See, I just love to get acquainted with the ladies even when they don’t want to get acquainted with me. And I must say,” he cooed menacingly, “I just love the sound of your voice . . . Emma.”

Zack and Emma exchanged horrified glances.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are . . .” Bad Willy’s voice sang a moment before Zack heard—very close—the chk-chk of a safety being unlocked.

Zack picked up Bertie by his carry handle. In the thick silence, he worried that the whirring of Bertie’s electric motor might give their position away.

“This way!” Zack whispered as he pulled Emma around another corner, just as a terrifying roar shook the air and a gigantic shaggy polar bear filled the muddy alleyway in front of them.

It reared on its hind legs, rising to its full fourteen-foot height, opening its jaws to reveal a set of fearsome fangs as it bellowed in pure animal rage.

Like the bears in the lab, this bear’s coat was shaggy and matted and filthy. Its eyes were wild, deranged, infuriated.

Zack pushed Emma backward, putting himself between her and the bear. But it was no use. With startling speed, the massive white creature dropped onto all fours and launched itself at them and Zack could only shut his eyes and wait for the end . . .

. . . ONLY nothing happened.

He opened his eyes, to find himself looking into the rapidly dilating nostrils of the bear from a distance of three inches.

Its foul hot breath washed over his face.

Only then did Zack realize that the animal’s nose was twitching, sniffing: sniffing him.

With a rude grunt, the bear jerked away from Zack, all interest in him abruptly and inexplicably lost.

“Why is it—?” Emma said in a hushed voice.

“I don’t—” Zack whispered, but then he realized that he did know why.

It was the bear repellent. The bizarre spray-on aerosol that he’d been forced to bring with him on their trip. He’d sprayed it onto all his clothes out of pure scientific obligation, in the event that he encountered a polar bear, but until now no such encounter had occurred.

“Score one for the polar bear repellent,” he said softly.

But then the bear roared again, louder than before, and it lunged at them again and Zack had a terrifying thought that he’d been wrong and that the stupid bear repellent didn’t work at all but before he knew what was happening, the bear leapt clear over him and Emma, launching itself at the four armed men who had just rounded the corner behind them!

Bad Willy and three of his men.

The bear did not pause as it fell upon Willy’s point man: it thumped him to the ground and had already ripped out his throat by the time Bad Willy recovered his wits and opened fire, blowing the bear away in a storm of gunfire. The bear dropped to the ground with a heavy thud.

But the distraction had been enough for Zack and Emma to glimpse Bad Willy—he was a short man with wiry, sinewy muscles, a bald head and a bony, hollow face. A silver chain hung suspended between a piercing in his left eyebrow and a ring in his left nostril.

For a brief, fleeting moment, Zack and Bad Willy locked eyes.

Zack froze.

Willy grinned.

And raised his gun.

“Bertie, fire !” Zack said, still gripping Bertie in his hand like a suitcase.

The little robot opened fire with its machine gun. Zack hadn’t aimed at all and the spray of gunfire was totally wild.

Willy’s men dived for cover, but not before Zack’s blaze of robot gunfire had taken out the man standing beside Willy. He went flying backward, convulsing horribly. The roving burst then found Bad Willy and the right side of his head exploded with blood and Bad Willy screamed before falling to the ground.

Zack’s eyes went wide at the sight, and the thought, of what he had just done.

He yelled “Bertie! Cease fire!” and started running again, hauling Emma along.

Rounding the next corner, they saw Mother kneeling atop a trench wall, waving to them and reaching down with her hand.

A minute later, as Mother hauled them out of the trench, Zack heard a familiar nasal voice call out:

“Zacky-boy! Oh, Zacky-boy! You shot off my fucking ear, you little piece of no good ratshit! I am going to hunt you down, you candy-ass fuck, and the tasty Emma, too, and when I do, I am going to tie you up, rip your eyelids off and make you watch me fuck her to death! You hear me, Zacky!”

A cruel cackle echoed out from the fog-enshrouded trenches.

“You’re just making new friends everywhere you go, aren’t you, Science Boy?” Mother said. “Come on.”

Then they were off, racing through the underwater section of the walk-way, covered by Schofield’s sniper fire.

The three of them joined the others inside the cube-shaped building at the southern end of the Stadium.

Like the office building at the northern end, it bored through Bear Islet’s high volcanic cone, its cracked, frost-covered windows looking north over the Stadium and south at the one remaining islet that lay between them and Dragon Island.

Once Mother, Zack and Emma were safely at his side, Schofield looked southward.

Beneath him, a decrepit pontoon bridge connected Bear Islet to the next islet—the final islet bore a warehouse-sized building on its back; beyond the warehouse, on higher ground, Schofield saw a cable car station whose long swooping cable stretched up to reach Dragon Island.

It was one way to get to Dragon Island, but there was another one nearby: halfway along the pontoon bridge that joined the two islets was a second and longer pontoon bridge that branched away at right angles from the main one. This second bridge stretched eastward, where it met a large, rust-covered, corrugated-iron shed that had been built into the base of the nearest cliff, on the edge of the bay, on Dragon Island itself. Two towering industrial-sized gantry elevators ran up and down the face of the cliff, having once serviced the shed.

“Dr. Ivanov,” Schofield said, “the pontoon bridge or the cable car?”

“We call that last islet ‘Acid Islet,’” Ivanov said, “as it houses a substantial acid research laboratory. Its cable car, however, is very old—it was built when this facility was originally constructed back in 1985. It works but it is rarely used these days. The extreme cold has always made it quite unreliable, which is why the pontoon bridge was built in 1990. The bridge is newer and would definitely be faster.”

“Faster is better,” Schofield said, eyeing the elevators at the end of the pontoon bridge.

He checked his watch: 10:26 A.M. God, had it only been twenty-six minutes since they’d blasted into the Bear Lab?

At his feet lay the bodies of five members of the Army of Thieves, dressed in their stolen Marine Corps parkas. Crouching beside one of the corpses, Schofield pulled off the man’s helmet and goggles. An ordered series of tattoos ran down the side of his throat: images of a Russian ship, the letters “USMC,” a building with “Moskva” written over it.