The Tomorrow Code Page 14

  “He’s still got his eye on us,” Tane whispered, covering his mouth with his hand in case Santa could read lips.

  “You’d better watch out,” Rebecca said quietly.

  “What? Why?” Tane hissed urgently.

  “You’d better not cry…”

  “Cry?” Tane stared at his friend in confusion.

  “Got it,” said Rebecca, picking up a couple of small metal objects out of a plastic tray. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Cry?” Tane asked again.

  Rebecca laughed gaily and sang in Tane’s ear, “He’s making a list and checking it twice; he’s gonna find out who’s naughty and nice…”

  Tane groaned and punched Rebecca lightly on the arm.

  For all her frivolity, though, he noticed that her hands were shaking as she handed over the money at the counter.

  Fatboy swept into the curb in the Wrangler as they emerged from the electronics shop. They swung on board, Rebecca in the front, Tane in the back, and Fatboy pulled out again in a seamless maneuver.

  He handed a newspaper to Rebecca as he steered carefully around a family of four lugging two long plastic kayaks across the parking area.

  “Made the front page!”

  Rebecca looked at it and wordlessly handed it back to Tane.

  HUNT CONTINUES FOR TEENAGERS, the headline blared over the police drawings of him and Rebecca. Rebecca’s was a reasonable resemblance, he thought, but his picture looked like an axe-murderer.

  Rebecca had dyed her hair jet black since the escape from the soldiers and had started wearing a cap. It was summer, so they all wore sunglasses. All in all, Tane didn’t think they were in any danger of being recognized by a passing stranger. But what if one of their school friends recognized the pictures?

  “What do we do?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Fatboy replied immediately. “It doesn’t change a thing. They’ll never recognize Rebecca from a picture like that, although yours is a pretty good likeness.”

  “Bite me,” Tane said.

  The Wrangler was an open-top jeep, which would have seemed like a lot of fun on such a lovely, sunstruck day. But it made Tane feel elevated and conspicuous. There was nothing to hide behind.

  They sat silently in a queue to get out of the car park. Tane pretended to rest his face on his hand to shield himself from an elderly couple in an old Volvo in the next lane.

  “The worst thing is feeling like a criminal all the time,” he said, almost to himself, “when we haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “I know what you mean,” Rebecca said in a small voice, and Tane thought, not for the first time, that she was a lot more fragile than she was making out. She had that tired, heavy look about her again. Perhaps she felt that she, of all of them, had the most to lose.

  The car radio was tuned to a news talk station.

  “Any news on the plague?” Tane asked.

  “Nothing,” Fatboy replied. “Quarantine zone is still in place, apparently, but there’s been no other reports.”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way,” Tane said.

  SILENT NIGHT

  A strange fog rolled through the streets of New Zealand’s northernmost city—Whangarei—on the night before Christmas, blanketing the city. Streets that were usually full of festivity and Christmas Eve revelers became unusually, deathly silent.

  By morning, not a creature was stirring in the city of nearly fifty thousand people, except for the birds in the trees and the small animals of the undergrowth; the pets, now howling and yowling for their owners; a few farm animals; and, of course, the occasional mouse.

  WHITE CHRISTMAS

  Sleep in heavenly peace

  Sleep in heavenly peace.

  —Josef Mohr, “Silent Night”

  Crawford landed the Sikorsky MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter in the middle of the main road, touching down with a gentle sigh.

  Crowe was out before the engine had even been switched off, ducking his head against the wash from the rotors.

  He stopped next to his second in command, Big “Mandy” Manderson, and stared to the north. His shoulder itched and he absently reached up to scratch it, realizing the futility only as his finger connected with the solid Kevlar of his armored combat biosuit. The suit was black. It was a positive-pressure suit, so even if it was damaged, the higher air pressure inside would keep pathogens from getting in. Scientists in biohazard labs wore positive-pressure suits but the air pressure was about the only similarity. Crowe’s suit, and those of his team, were made of bulletproof Kevlar with ceramic chest and stomach plates. They were not only protection from germs, but also protection against human germs with guns. For all that, it was lightweight and about as comfortable as a black combat biosuit could be.

  “Still think it’s terrorists?” Mandy asked in his slow Southern drawl.

  Crowe didn’t answer.

  It was dark. The sun was still hiding a couple of hours away behind the forests and the ocean to the east, but even so, all over New Zealand, excited children would be waking up—with that natural, internal alarm clock that kids have on Christmas morning—and eagerly unwrapping presents.

  Except in Whangarei.

  Crowe stood in the middle of the road and looked at the fog. He had never seen a fog quite like it before. The edge of it was so well defined that it looked as if you could walk up to it and touch it. It was as if a puffy cumulus cloud had dropped from the sky and settled on the road in front of him.

  A road sign just in front of the fog was perfectly clear, but everything behind it was blanketed in white. WHANGAREI 2 KM the sign announced.

  The calls to emergency services had started at eleven the previous night. The local police station had gone off the air, so police officers from surrounding areas had rushed to the scene. They had reported seeing the fog; then their radios had fallen silent.

  “What did you find out?” Mandy asked.

  Specialist First Class Evans, the unit’s newest and youngest recruit, appeared at his side, holding a bunch of large-scale photographs. “The satellite images you asked for,” he said, handing them over to Crowe.

  Crowe flicked through them quickly. They were in series, with a date/time stamp at the top of each photograph in black computer lettering. The photos themselves were grainy black-and-white weather satellite images showing the top of the North Island of New Zealand.

  “There it is,” Crowe said, pointing to a small fuzzy spot on one of the photos. “That’s the fog over Motukiekie.”

  He flicked forward a couple of photos. “Here it is moving south, across the water.”

  He looked up at Manderson. “It comes inland here, to the east of Russell, but misses Russell, Paihia, Kawakawa, and travels through the Russell forest, then down the coastline through this area here. What is this area?”

  “Mainly forests and farmland,” Mandy said, consulting a map.

  “Okay, it rolls over the top of this small town here, Hikurangi, and ends up in Whangarei.”

  Crawford joined them, the rotors of the Knighthawk slowly winding down behind them.

  Crowe pursed his lips and nodded, then looked up. “Any luck finding those kids?”

  Mandy shook his head. “No leads as yet. The local guys are currently reviewing the security camera footage from the lab. Going back a couple of weeks. See if the cameras noticed anything suspicious in the days leading up to the…accident.”

  “What about the days when the scientists disappeared? What do the cameras show on those days?”

  “Nothing. Not a thing. The image is completely fogged for a couple of days. Some kind of jamming equipment perhaps.”

  Crowe looked at the high bank of fog a short way up the highway and said nothing.

  Manderson straightened up to his full height and stood next to Crowe, facing the mist. He said, “Something’s been worrying me, Stony.”

  Crowe said nothing but looked at the big man.

  Manderson continued, “How did those kids get from
their submarine onto the island without us noticing?”

  “They swam.” Crowe frowned.

  Manderson shook his head. “Crawford was overhead in the helicopter the whole time. He would have seen them on the heat-scope.”

  Crawford said, “I saw nothing until they appeared at the end of the wharf.”

  “Underwater!” Crowe realized.

  “But they had no air tanks when we picked them up,” Manderson noted.

  Crowe said, “Get some men back to the island. Search around the wharf.”

  Evans said suddenly, “Skipper, the mist!”

  Crowe swung around back to the wall of fog in front of them. It was glowing.

  “What the hell…?” Manderson drawled.

  Crowe wasted no time. “All teams, seal masks and get up here now. Set your fields of fire and kill zones. Be ready for anything.”

  Jackboots sounded all around them as the members of Red and Blue Teams fanned out across the road, dropping to one knee or even lying on the roadway, their special-issue XM8 automatic weapons trained on the glowing mist.

  The glow slowly split in two and gradually resolved itself into two distinct lights, brightly luminescent in the mist.

  “It’s a car!” Crawford said.

  “No,” Crowe said, “the lights are too large, too far apart. It’s a truck.”

  It was crawling toward them. Just rolling slowly forward through the mist. The lights brightened, yard by yard.

  The dark bulk of the truck gradually materialized through the ethereal white clouds. It was big, an eighteen-wheeler.

  The long snout of the truck now poked its way out of the wall of the edge of the fog. The name SLIPSTREAM WARRIOR was painted in bold lettering across the front of the hood.

  “Hold your fire,” Crowe called. “We may have a survivor.”

  At a painfully slow crawl, the big truck rolled forward out of the fog, past the WHANGAREI sign, and gathered momentum down a short slope before a small bridge across a stream. It was no more than fifty or sixty yards in front of them now.

  “They’re not in a hurry, are they,” Evans murmured.

  “Stay alert,” Crowe ordered.

  As it turned out, there was no need. For alertness. The truck failed to take the small bridge on a mild bend in the highway. It never turned. It never tried to turn. It just rolled forward in a dead straight line and hit the railing of the bridge on an angle.

  The concrete wall of the bridge disintegrated under the impact of the massive truck, and the juggernaut toppled slowly off the side of the bridge and crashed down, nose-first, into the small stream below.

  The back wheels of the cab and the large trailer remained on the highway. The wheels of the truck continued to grind for a few seconds; then it stalled with a huge shudder that ran through the body of the truck like that of a dying animal and was still.

  “Crawford, Manderson,” Crowe said tersely, “check it out.”

  The two men ran in a crouch over to the dead body of the beast, sliding down the embankment beside the bridge and peering in through the shattered windshield of the truck.

  “It’s empty.” Crawford’s voice sounded in his earpiece. “No driver.”

  “Stranger and stranger,” Crowe said.

  “Around here, if you ask me, ‘strange’ is pretty normal,” Manderson said.

  Crawford spoke again, his voice suddenly low and serious. “Crowe, you’d better come and look at this.”

  “Evans, don’t take your eyes off that fog,” Crowe said, running across to the edge of the broken bridge. Crawford and Manderson were crouched over something on the bank of the stream. Crawford turned and looked up at him, and then he could see past the man, to the object they were crouching over. It was a body.

  Crowe slithered down the embankment and splashed through the stream to where the other two crouched. His heart wrenched. It was the body of a small boy, half in the water, faceup in the mud. The body was covered in mud, and it was incredible that even the eagle-eyed Crawford had spotted it.

  The boy couldn’t have been more than four. It was all Crowe could do to say, “Get the body back to the lab.”

  Manderson said, “Let me do it,” and Crowe remembered that Mandy had a five-year-old son of his own. More than any of the others, he would be feeling the anguish of the little boy’s death.

  Manderson stowed his weapon and carefully, respectfully, worked his hands into the mud underneath the neck and knees of the tiny body. He lifted and the body came free of the mud with a sucking sound.

  The boy opened his eyes, took one look at Manderson’s black suit and face mask, and screamed his little lungs out.

  A police doctor went back in the ambulance with the boy. They still called him “the boy” because he had been unable to tell them his name.

  He had done nothing but scream until the ambulance had arrived. The U.S. Army Bioterrorism Response Force soldiers in their black combat biosuits must have looked a fearsome sight to a half-drowned, terrified four-year-old.

  So far, he was the only known survivor of the calamity that had embraced the city, but as an eyewitness he was useless. Only two coherent words had come from the terrified little boy the entire time, and they made little or no sense at all.

  “Jerryfish,” the boy had screamed over and over. “Jerryfish! Jerryfish!” and “Snowmen!”

  The “jerryfish” was the most confusing. It seemed he was saying “jellyfish,” but there was no rationale in that. Jellyfish were saltwater creatures and the boy had been found in a freshwater stream.

  But the word “snowmen” had Crowe worried. A white biosuit could be mistaken for a snowman, particularly by a young boy. If he had seen terrorists in biosuits, that could well explain the “snowmen.”

  “It’s starting to drift,” Manderson noted.

  Already the WHANGAREI road sign had disappeared into the maw of the mist.

  “I noticed,” Crowe replied. “It’s coming south. Get the men ready to evac.”

  “A bit strange, don’t you think?”

  “Strange, why?”

  Manderson looked at him oddly. “The breeze is nor’east, Stony.”

  Crowe peered up at the leaves on the branches of some nearby trees. It was true, he realized with a profound horror. The fog was coming south.

  But the wind was blowing the other way.

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY

  It was half past nine in the morning. On Christmas Day.

  The Christmas tree sat in the corner of the middle lounge, the largest of the three. It was a tall tree, perfectly shaped in the traditional Christmas tree cone, with deep green needles—or were they leaves?—and a dark wooden trunk scored with the intricate and random patterns of bark. It was a luxurious tree—vibrant, exciting, larger than life—that embodied the spirit of Christmas in its very form.

  And it was made in China, according to the not-quite-covered-up sticker on its base. Aluminum, fiberglass, and plastic, if you cared to read the small print.

  “Be there in a moment,” Tane’s mum called cheerily from the kitchen, busy with some final putting-away.

  They had all helped clear away the remnants and dishes of the champagne breakfast, which was a Christmas morning tradition in the Williams household and happened before the presents were opened. They all helped; that was part of the tradition also. Even Rebecca.

  It was the first time that Rebecca had spent Christmas morning at Tane’s house. Her mum’s cousin had come and picked her up, but Rebecca had asked to go to Tane’s and nobody had minded.

  Tane thought it was strange to be having a day of celebration with all that was going on—quarantine zones, kidnappings, nationwide police hunts, and so on—but it seemed even stranger not to celebrate Christmas, and certainly it would have raised some tricky questions with his mum and dad if they had decided not to show up.

  His mum wandered in at last from the dining room and found an empty armchair.

  “Right, then,” she said. “Who’s the youngest
?”

  That was another Williams family tradition. The youngest person would play Santa Claus and hand out the presents to the others, starting from the oldest person. As there were no grandparents or young cousins this time, that made his dad the oldest and Tane the youngest. Rebecca shared his birthday, but she had been born in the morning and Tane had been born in the evening.

  Tane didn’t answer. He was too busy watching the spider. It was a big one. Not huge like an Avondale spider or a tarantula, but big enough to be scary. It was brown with an elongated body and thick, sectional legs. It had woven an intricate web in the corner of one of the large picture windows of the middle lounge, a tightly woven web, almost honeycomb in appearance, with many layers of strands on top of other layers.

  The spider was quivering, shaking. He had never seen a spider do that before. A thin band of white crossed over the dark brown body. It struggled to move, and he suddenly realized what was happening. The spider had become trapped in its own web.

  “Tane’s the youngest,” Rebecca said brightly, showing no sign of the worry that must surely be festering inside.

  Tane hunted in the pile of brightly wrapped parcels until he found something with his dad’s name on it.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said jovially, making a bit of a performance of the handover. His dad grinned and snatched it off him, scanning the tag to see who it was from and ripping off the paper with gusto. It was a book, the latest John Grisham thriller, from his uncle in Wellington.

  His dad laughed now, for no real reason. Just the joy of the day.

  If only he knew!

  Tane was already rummaging for a present for his mum. His mind was elsewhere, though, and he skipped over one a couple of times before noticing it.

  He found a present for Fatboy from Rebecca, and then one for Rebecca, from Fatboy.

  Fatboy’s present to Rebecca was a silver necklace. Tane didn’t look at it too closely, but it looked expensive. Still, with over a million dollars still earning them interest in their trust account, what was money anyway? It was the thought that counted, and he hoped that Rebecca would realize the effort that had gone into the present Tane had chosen for her—the chess set.