Tooth and Nail Page 4

  ‘No, Joseph,’ came a muffled yell, ‘I will not do that to you!’

  Well, he’s still awake at least.

  The relief when McCormick had woken up on the living room floor had nearly reduced Ewan to tears. The man had tried to get to his feet too early, and a flurry of hands had struggled to keep him upright as he stood. Ewan’s memories of what had happened next were a blur, but Lorraine had sat McCormick on the sofa and asked a bunch of questions. Most of his answers had been along the lines of ‘don’t worry, I’m fine’. At some point he had been helped up the stairs to the clinic, with a full pint of water in his hand.

  McCormick did not appear to be in immediate danger, but people didn’t collapse without reason. And as Kate so often said, the worst part of any worry was not knowing the truth.

  ‘I don’t care about the chain of command,’ Lorraine continued, ‘and you bloody well know it. I’m the woman with the scalpel, I decide where it goes!’

  Ewan was used to Lorraine being blunt and uncompromising. But this wasn’t defiance. It was fear, just like his own.

  ‘What’s she talking about?’ asked Thomas at his side, his little nose pushed against the wall and his voice unusually wavy by his regular chirpy standards.

  Ewan shushed him. The nine-year-old’s anxiety may have been more visible, but it was no more severe than Ewan’s. Ewan was just better at pretending not to be frightened.

  ‘Scalpel?’ asked Raj. ‘She’s not thinking of operating, is she?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Ewan, ‘because people keep bloody talking.’

  That shut everyone up.

  Of all the people in the room, the lad with the Asperger’s diagnosis was the only one who knew what to do. Jack Hopper was as quiet as a dead church mouse, with one hand cupping his ear against the wall and his eyes forming their strongest expression of concentration. Once in a while he even brushed his dishevelled hair away from his ear. Every sound wave mattered.

  Ewan imitated Jack’s pose, and hoped it would reveal some extra words.

  ‘What you’re asking is terrifying,’ Lorraine continued. ‘I can’t put it any… no, it’s not my personal fears getting in the way of the greater good! I’m not that selfish! The greatest good is keeping you alive, and cutting you open would…’

  A pause, and inaudible words from McCormick.

  ‘Then go out there and see what they think!’ Lorraine yelled. ‘If this goes like I think it will, they’ll lose the most important figure in their lives!’

  McCormick spoke again. He muttered something about ‘defeating the object’.

  ‘Is McCormick going to die?!’ wailed Thomas. Ewan decided it was the wrong time to shush him.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. Hardly the reassurance the boy would have wanted, but it was against Ewan’s nature to make false promises.

  ‘He’ll be fine, don’t worry,’ said Raj with a smile. Ewan bit his lip, but said nothing.

  Whatever else McCormick said, nobody had heard it, not even Jack. Even in moments of intense emotion, even with a friend as close as Lorraine losing herself in front of him, his voice never rose. The only clue that he had finished was that Lorraine started to talk again.

  ‘Of course I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’ve had friends die in this room. I watched Callum die when his insulin ran out, and Roy with his cancer. I’m not cutting you up for anything, and especially not for you to go and get yourself killed in battle!’

  The last couple of words distracted Ewan from remembering thirteen-year-old Callum Turner’s existence. It had been a long year, and even at Oakenfold they hadn’t talked much.

  Battle? He’s not…

  ‘Lorraine can operate, right?’ asked Thomas. ‘Wasn’t that her job in the old days?’

  ‘She was a nurse, not a surgeon,’ said Raj. ‘Massive difference.’

  ‘…Do operations hurt?’

  ‘Not really. They put you to sleep first. I had an operation on my spine when I was twelve, and I didn’t feel a—’

  ‘Shh.’

  Silence fell again, but it was too late. Lorraine had started to sob, and her voice became a whisper.

  Ewan had never seen Lorraine cry, but had heard her a couple of times. Most recently when Roy had passed away, from a type of stomach cancer that could have been dealt with easily in a real hospital. She had not been seen outside the clinic for two or three days after that.

  But she never really talked about her troubles. Ewan wondered whether this habit came from the fact that her housemates were often her patients too. Lorraine had gone for so many years hiding her emotions while on the wards that perhaps she naturally hid them at Spitfire’s Rise.

  But it must have been more complicated than that. Emotions always were.

  Because Roy had been her friend. Just about the only man her age to have made it to Spitfire’s Rise. And underneath her bossy exterior, she probably cared about the teenagers a great deal. She had certainly cared about Shannon when they first met.

  Maybe she sees herself as more than ‘ the nurse ’ . She has responsibility over who lives and who dies here . The pressure on her is enormous, and she ’s probably already crushed by the memories of people she couldn’t save.

  No wonder she doesn’t want to operate on McCormick.

  *

  According to Ewan’s watch, only two hours had passed. He had to check Kate’s watch at his side to make sure his batteries weren’t dying.

  Lorraine had surfaced long enough to shout the words ‘meeting, downstairs’ into the boys’ bedroom, and allowed the news to spread by itself. The living room was full now: ten people in total. All the surviving residents of Spitfire’s Rise minus the two in the clinic.

  Ewan looked across the remaining Underdogs. It was rare to see all of them in the same room at the same time, and with so many Oakenfold students together it almost felt like being in a classroom again. Alex was perhaps the least comfortable person present, the only twenty-something in a room where nobody else had reached eighteen.

  Suddenly, the unexpected happened. Dr McCormick, who had been face-down and unconscious on the same carpet hours earlier, walked into the living room with a broad smile. Perhaps he had misjudged the atmosphere, or maybe he was trying to reassure people. Either way, the rest of the Underdogs had no idea how to react. Thomas had his hands up as if ready to applaud. Silent Simon had his jaw gaped open, his breathing audible. Raj shifted forwards to the edge of his seat as if being closer would help him to hear. Lazy Gracie gave the most generic reaction possible, trying to blend in with everyone else. Mark looked up in vague curiosity, either unaffected by the day’s events or pretending to be.

  ‘Afternoon,’ McCormick said softly. ‘First things first, I’m feeling much better and you don’t need to worry.’

  ‘Cough-cough-load-of-rubbish-cough,’ said Jack. A ruder set of words had crossed Ewan’s mind, but he chose not to say them.

  ‘But you obviously deserve an explanation,’ McCormick continued, without offering Jack any response. ‘My cyst has been acting up. I’ve had it in my abdomen for the last thirty years, and normally the pain is bearable. That said, my lifestyle hasn’t exactly been healthy this last year, and something-or-other must have changed in there.’

  ‘Is there a… more scientific explanation?’ asked Alex.

  ‘I’m a mathematician, not a biologist. Even Lorraine is struggling, but we both agree I’m better off without it inside me.’

  Concerned faces in the crowd began to look at each other. A couple looked at Ewan, as if he could do anything. They only reminded him of his own powerlessness, and as with everything else in life that lay beyond his control, it grated horribly against his nerves.

  ‘Didn’t sound like you were agreeing,’ said Raj.

  ‘We didn’t agree on how to get it out, as I’m assuming you heard. Lorraine’s idea was to hold out until the end of the war, and leave it to a real surgeon once we have hospitals again. But I think that’s just avoid
ing the issue. In the end, we came to an agreement. Anyway, this meeting isn’t about me. There are more urgent matters at hand.’

  Ewan blinked himself back to reality. For several minutes, he had forgotten anything existed outside of McCormick and his health issues. The man leaned back against the nearest wall, the way he sometimes did when yielding the floor to another speaker.

  ‘Kate,’ he said, ‘could you describe what you saw this morning?’

  ‘We’ve been told already,’ muttered Gracie.

  ‘In multiple conversations, with varying details, from different people. Let’s all be told the same thing. Go on, Kate.’

  Kate shuffled forward to the front of her sofa, hands clasped as if in prayer.

  ‘Raj and I saw a bunch of missiles flying towards New London. The Cerberus system destroyed them before they got there. But it means—’

  ‘If they wanted to wipe out Grant,’ Alex interrupted, ‘they should have just detonated a nuclear device in the upper atmosphere and caused an electromagnetic pulse. Would have fried all their circuits forever.’

  ‘You watched too many movies in the old world,’ Jack interrupted, flicking his fingers together to aid his thinking – ‘stimming’, as he called it. ‘If an EMP attack were close enough to affect their circuits, it’d be close enough to just wipe out—’

  ‘Alex, Jack, let her finish,’ Ewan said. He noticed a little smile of gratitude on Kate’s face.

  ‘So none of the missiles got through,’ she continued, ‘but it means someone’s declared war on Grant. Might be more than one country, we don’t know. That’s it, really.’

  The room fell quiet, until Ewan noticed McCormick nodding at someone behind him. When he turned, Shannon had lifted a finger to speak.

  She repeated everything she had told Ewan on their journey home: how nobody with any sense would attack her father unless the task would become literally impossible later. With AME just days from being operational, the world had launched a last-gasp attack on her father. And they had failed.

  Naturally, the conversation led to the test centre at Oakenfold. The other teenagers – Ewan’s last surviving free schoolmates – looked understandably emotional. For some of them, that building had been the one place in the world where life had made sense. Where Silent Simon had been treated as more than just ‘the Down’s kid’, and recognised for the pleasant, nonverbally sociable person he was. Where Gracie had been more than the girl with Global Development Delay, and people tried to meet her halfway rather than judge her. The place that had accommodated Jack after his suicide attempts. The reactions on their faces reflected the love they had all had for Oakenfold Special School.

  Going by the lack of surprise on his face, McCormick still remembered everything he had been told about the matter that morning. That surprised Ewan. His collapse could only have been an hour or so after Alex had broken the news to him.

  When Shannon ran out of words, McCormick took centre stage again.

  ‘If Shannon is right about the deadline being midnight on the twentieth, this doesn’t leave us much time. So make no mistake – this will be an intense few days, involving two missions. The first will be a visit to Oakenfold, to learn as much as we can about Atmospheric Metallurgic Excitation. How it works, how the shield is activated, and most importantly how to destroy it. The strike team will consist of—’

  ‘No,’ said Mark. ‘You don’t get to decide this one.’

  Most of the room shot surprised glances at Mark, who sat in his usual pose but with his hands noticeably tense. Ewan wasn’t surprised at the interruption at all: if Mark hadn’t done it, he would have spoken up himself.

  ‘This is our school they’ve taken over,’ Mark continued. ‘It’s us who should take it back. Besides, we’re the ones who know the place. We know its layout and its weak points better than any of Grant’s people. There’s only one strike team that can possibly do this.’ He pointed his index finger at each former student in clockwise order. ‘Raj, Gracie, Simon, Jack, Kate, Ewan, and me. We’ll be doing this one.’

  The room looked back at McCormick who, in true McCormick fashion, was smiling.

  ‘I absolutely agree,’ he said. ‘You’ve named the exact line-up I had in mind. My suggestion is that you all get some rest now, because you’ll be setting out tonight and striking in the early hours of tomorrow morning. This leaves Alex and Shannon on comms, as Lorraine and I will be, er, unavailable. She’ll start her operation as soon as you leave, so by the time you’re home tomorrow I should be awake again. And on the night of the nineteenth I’ll be ready for action.’

  McCormick had said his final sentence with an air of optimism, but it was met with a deathly silence.

  He’d better not be saying what I think he’s saying…

  ‘Ready for action?’ asked Raj.

  ‘Yes, on the nineteenth we’ll need to find a way into New London, then raid the upper floors and wipe out every trace of AME we find. It’s a tall order, I know, and it’ll take place higher up in New London than we’ve ever reached before. But if we don’t manage it, we lose the war.’

  ‘But you?’ asked Raj again. ‘You, ready for action? No disrespect but… how old are you, seventy?’

  ‘Sixty-four.’

  ‘Oh, that’s OK then.’

  ‘I’ve been to New London before,’ said McCormick. ‘Just once, but I’ve been. Besides, the kings of old were always on the battlefield for the conflicts that won or lost their wars. It was expected of them. Even in World War Two, the generals joined their privates on the D-Day beaches. It wasn’t like the leaders of today who watch drones on TV from thousands of miles away.’

  Ewan could feel rage and helplessness creeping into his mind, and his eyes began to twitch as if tempted to cry. Thomas, who must have been daydreaming through McCormick’s words, laughed about something to do with generals and their privates.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Alex, clearly not sorry at all, ‘but there’s a reason kings and generals don’t go into combat now. By the time they’re sixty-four they know they’re past it.’

  ‘Lorraine thinks so too, unless I have my cyst removed. I was lucky enough to get through that mission in December without it bothering me inside the Citadel, but I haven’t risked going back since. And it’s touch and go whether I’ll even be better in time, so the sooner it’s taken out, the better.’

  Ewan had no idea what ‘touch and go’ was supposed to mean, but he found himself hoping that McCormick would have a very, very slow recovery. A whole week in the clinic would be worth it to keep the old man away from New London, from the thousands of clones that would try to kill him, and from Oliver Roth. Half a year in bed would be worth it.

  He had not thought about that December mission since it had happened, but it had been bloody scary at the time. McCormick had left the house with Mark, Sally and Rachael, all of whom had been Oakenfold students, and none of whom Ewan had trusted to keep him safe. (As if to prove Ewan’s point, to date McCormick had outlived two of them.) Since Ewan himself was still recovering from an ammo raid, he had been left at Spitfire’s Rise with nothing but his fears to keep him company. McCormick had eventually returned, unharmed against the odds but in tremendous pain thanks to that cyst. And once he had arrived home, he had returned to the sight of Ewan smashing up the boys’ bedroom from anxiety.

  Ewan brought himself back to the present. He had spent so much time dealing with his own reaction that he had not thought to look at his friends. When he lifted his head from his knees, he found Simon even shakier than normal, Raj’s hands clasped as if in prayer, Jack’s fingers buried in his dishevelled hair and Lazy Gracie actually giving a damn. No wonder Lorraine hadn’t turned up to the meeting.

  ‘What the hell makes you think Lorraine’s qualified to perform operations?’ asked Mark.

  ‘What makes any of us qualified soldiers? In these times, we take what we can get. Lorraine’s surgical performance may make the difference between us destroying the AME project and us losin
g the war, and I can’t think of anyone I’d trust with the task more than her. So on the nineteenth, barring any unexpected injuries, the strike team will consist of myself, Ewan, and at least two others… who I’ll decide later.’

  Depending on who’s still alive after Oakenfold…

  ‘If I can bring more than four of us I will,’ McCormick continued, ‘but it looks doubtful given my entry plan. We can hardly use the water treatment centre again, so I’ve had to think outside the box. Any questions?’

  Nobody asked a question. Not even about his entry plan. Ewan suspected nobody felt able to, and they were all as stunned as him.

  ‘Then I’m calling this meeting to a close,’ McCormick finished. ‘Oakenfold students, I know you’ll have a lot on your minds, but try to spend today in the most relaxed way you can.’

  McCormick’s smile was warm and sympathetic as the room’s population started to gradually shift. Ewan sat still the longest, and was the only one to notice McCormick’s changing expression as his teammates left. The warm smile dropped, and his eyes grew wide.

  McCormick was as scared as everyone else.

  Chapter 4

  McCormick opened the door to the cellar and descended the steps with a hand on the bannister. His feet were trembling too much for him to trust his balance. When he arrived in the cellar, which doubled as the Underdogs’ armoury, he saw Ewan already prepared. Clothes, weapons, everything. The assembly time was ten o’clock that night, another five minutes away. But knowing Ewan, he must have wanted some time away from the others. For a leader, he needed a lot of moments to himself.

  McCormick could not see Ewan’s face as it fixated on the Memorial Wall, now twenty-one names long. The dead Underdogs had outnumbered the living for a while.