The Tomorrow Code Page 22

  She took his offered money and said, “Please drive on to the next window.”

  The young man at the next window handed them their food, and as they pulled out, Tane and Fatboy looked at each other in amazement.

  The whole transaction had been so utterly commonplace that for a moment Tane wondered if he was dreaming the rest of it all, the fog, the antibodies, and that the normalcy, the insanity of the fast-food outlet was really the reality, in an insane world.

  But they passed a number of boarded-up houses, eyes peering suspiciously out at them through gaps in the planks, and the nightmare proved to be real once again.

  The world is doing a pretty good job of saving itself.

  Even in these strangest and most desperate of times, some Maori protocol was observed. As a pakeha—a non-Maori—Rebecca needed permission from the tribal elders to enter the sacred ground of the Maori meeting ground. That duly came, although they dispensed with the traditional welcome. There was some discussion over Xena, but she, also, was eventually allowed to trot along beside Rebecca, holding her hand.

  His father and mother were in the big meeting hall along with at least a hundred others of the tribe. Tane was acutely aware that Rebecca was the only pakeha there.

  It was a tall, timbered, high-roofed hall, lined with traditional carvings, representations of their ancestors. It was dim inside, even under normal circumstances, but now the meager light of the white-hatted electric bulbs scattered around the ceiling was swallowed up by the black plastic sheeting that was taped around each of the windows.

  It might stop the fog, Tane thought, but it wouldn’t stop them.

  His mother screamed when she saw them. A mixture of fear, delight, and relief. She hugged Tane, and his father hugged Fatboy just as fiercely. Then she hugged Fatboy and Tane’s father embraced him. Both his parents were crying and trying to talk about visits from the police and the fog all at once. Then his mother hugged Rebecca, and after an initial hesitation Rebecca’s arms crept around his mother and held on tightly for a surprisingly long time.

  Xena scrambled over to a chair at the side of the hall. A group of children surrounded her, laughing and playing with her.

  After a few moments, the outpouring of emotion started to get a bit uncomfortable for Tane, but it was still another ten minutes before he could get a word in.

  Rebecca joined them then, and his dad made a small circle of chairs at one end of the hall for them to sit in.

  The others ignored them, lost in their own soft conversations and dramas.

  Over the next hour, as the twilight dripped away into darkness, they told his father and mother everything. They started with Lake Sunnyvale and left out nothing of importance up to their trip home with Private Shaw.

  There was silence for a long while after that. The light from the bulbs skimmed across the faces of the carvings cleaving deep shadows out of the somber expressions.

  Fatboy and Tane knew not to speak, and Rebecca seemed to have nothing to say.

  His dad drew in a long slow breath after a while and looked deeply into each of their eyes in turn.

  The silence lengthened until Tane broke it. “There are places for you on the submarine. You can hide out with us until the fog passes over.”

  His father looked at his mother, and Tane saw a small shake of the head pass between them. His father gestured around at the room. Children jumped and danced around the chimpanzee, with happy faces, unknowing of the terror that approached. A young couple with a newborn baby sat, just out of earshot, lost in each other and the child. Three old women, dressed in black with matching black headscarves, sat a few feet away, toothlessly chewing up every word.

  “You would have us leave, and yet our family, our whanau, stay?” His father shook his head.

  Tane said heavily, “Then you must run. The meeting hall won’t protect you.”

  Fatboy said, “Get every car you can get, or buses if you can find them. Load everyone up and head south as fast and as far as you can.”

  “It’s a sturdy old building,” his father said doubtfully.

  “We have seen these creatures up close,” Tane said, struggling to stop himself from crying out in exasperation. “You have to run, or everyone here will die!”

  His father closed his eyes. His mother reached out and took his hand in hers.

  His father asked, “Can this thing be stopped? Now that it has started?”

  Tane shook his head uncertainly, but Fatboy nodded.

  “Rebecca thinks there may be a way,” he said.

  They all looked at her, her eyes on the floor, her shoulders hunched as if carrying a heavy load. She was, Tane thought. She had been carrying her burden for too long now.

  “Maybe it’s for the best. From a purely scientific point of view,” she said, “once we humans are gone, this planet will be able to heal itself, and then when it is healthy once again, maybe in millions of years’ time, the human race can start over. Like a forest fire, cleaning out the congestion and decay, so new life can sprout amid the ashes.”

  Tane started to argue, but his father held up a hand for silence. “You really believe we are a disease,” he said.

  Rebecca stared at the floor. “A biologist would describe us as a plague.”

  There was a piano against the far wall of the hall, near the entrance. Xena struggled for a moment with Rebecca to be let loose, and then ran across to the piano, with a crowd of children trailing her like the tail of a comet. She jumped up onto the seat and began to hammer tunelessly at the keys. She looked around as if expecting applause.

  His father stood and crossed to Rebecca. He placed a hand under her chin and lifted her head up to meet his. “Maybe in this new age, what you say has some truth, but it was not always so.”

  “I know,” Rebecca responded, a tear welling up in the corner of her eye.

  His father watched her silently for a moment.

  “Do you understand the meaning of ‘Kaitiakitanga’?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Not really.”

  His father smiled. “You pakeha believe that land belongs to people. But we Maori believe that people belong to the land. We are tangata whenua—people of the land. It is our privilege, not our right, and with it comes a great responsibility: Kaitiakitanga.”

  All were silent now, watching his father. Tane found his eyes wandering around the carvings of the ancestors that guarded the walls of the meeting house. He had a very real sense that they were watching him back.

  His father said, “For thousands of years, we Maori have guarded and protected our environment. Replenished and replaced what we used. But then the pakeha came to our land. We kaitiaki who should have stood up to the pakeha, who should have defended Papatuanuku—the Earth Mother—did not. Our voices fell silent.”

  “Then you agree,” Rebecca said slowly. “Mankind must be destroyed before it destroys its host.”

  “No.” His father’s voice was soft, little more than the breath of an infant, and yet somehow carried such intensity that the carvings of the ancestors seemed to quiver and come to life, carrying his words to all corners of the room. “We are a part of nature, creatures of Papatuanuku. Greed and stupidity are the disease, not us.”

  The rest of the room had gathered around now, listening to the conversation.

  “We can’t go back!” Rebecca cried out against him. “You cannot reverse a mutation. Human beings can’t go back to living in villages and farming kumara!”

  “We cannot.” His father smiled sadly. “But we can learn to live with the trees and the lakes, the mountains and the seas, the fish and the animals, as family, as whanau, not as invaders, conquerors!”

  There was a silence, and a breeze crept into the hall from outside, rustling the black plastic sheeting and reminding Tane that time was growing short.

  “What can we do?” he asked quietly.

  “What you know you must do,” his father said, and repeated it. “What you know you must.”

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nbsp; He sighed. “We live in a Western society, so we adopt Western ways, but we have never forgotten our culture.”

  “I have,” Tane said painfully. “I have forgotten.”

  My people. My culture. My whakapapa.

  His father was silent for a moment. “No, son. You are Tane Williams, son of Rangitira Williams, grandson of Hemi Te Awa of the great Tuhoe tribe of Aotearoa. You have not forgotten your whakapapa, because you cannot forget. You have merely closed your eyes for a moment. And now they are open.” He placed a hand on Tane’s shoulder. “You will face this challenge, find a way to defeat it, then show the rest of the world’s people the way forward. The way of the kaitiaki.

  “You will lead the people, all of the world’s people, into a new age. Te Kenehi Tuarua—the second genesis. You must teach the ways of kaitiakitanga if the world is to survive. We must all become kaitiaki.”

  He turned from Tane and addressed the room, “They call me a disease, but I am not. I am a child of the land. I am tangata whenua. I am a spiritual guardian of the Earth Mother. I am kaitiaki!”

  There was a silence, and Tane felt that ancient spirits were repeating his father’s words, whispering them to one another.

  Fatboy rose and placed his hand on his father’s arm. From an inside pocket in his jacket, he produced the patu pounamu, the greenstone club their parents had given each of them at Christmas. He pressed it against his heart. “Neither am I an illness. I am tangata whenua. I am kaitiaki.”

  There was a murmuring amongst the gathered crowd that subsided only when Tane rose, a little awkwardly, to his feet. He spoke quietly but his voice was clear.

  “I, too, am tangata whenua. I am kaitiaki.” The room seemed to fade into blackness around him, and he looked only into the face of his father.

  “I am Maori.”

  NEW YEAR’S EVE

  The first whispering tendrils of mist crept over the ridges of the Albany hills just after nine p.m., sifting down through the tree blanket or slithering down the main highway that cut through the bush of the hillside.

  It was New Year’s Eve. The last day of the year. Some said the last day of all years.

  That might be true, Crowe thought, watching the mist creep toward him on the video monitor, if they couldn’t stop it here and now.

  The mist flowed up to and over the camera, a small metal box stuck in the middle of the highway, near the top of the hill, turning everything to white. He switched to another camera, about halfway up the hill, and saw the mist just starting to writhe around a corner of the highway, far ahead.

  In addition to the ground cameras, they had three helicopters operating, well above the puffy cumulus top of the fog, feeding images back to the control center.

  Crowe picked up a radio. “The fog has crossed the hilltop,” he said tersely. “Time to light it up.”

  Around him, the control center, just three hundred feet behind their main defensive line, was buzzing with activity. NZ Army and SAS officers were barking orders, running here and there, answering phones and radios. The battle for Auckland was commencing.

  Lucy Southwell’s voice came back to him on the radio. She sounded scared but calm. “Stony, we’ve had a lot of problems trying to evacuate Auckland. We are still trying to get people out. You have got to stop that fog, or at least slow it down. If it keeps going at the rate it’s going, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die!”

  Crowe turned and looked at Manderson standing next to him but said nothing.

  Manderson smiled. “Let’s show these fluffy white teddy bears who they’re messing with.”

  Flight Lieutenant John Ramirez was already in the cockpit of his FA18 Super Hornet fighter-bomber with the canopy sealed when the order came through his headset. He acknowledged immediately and gave a brief wave to the ground staff who were preparing for takeoff. The rest of his wing were already lowering their canopies and would follow him off the deck at intervals of just a few seconds.

  The USS Abraham Lincoln was sailing a steady fifteen knots into the light breeze, to assist with the takeoffs. Once airborne, the flight to Auckland would take less than ten minutes.

  On a hand signal from outside, he fired up his engines, turning night into day behind the jet, but held in place still by the steely grasp of the aircraft carrier.

  All the planes had names. Some of the pilots named their planes after girls, like in the old bomber days. There was the Mary-Lou and the Barbara-Ann. Others gave their planes macho names, full of bravado, like Sky Warrior or Grim Reaper.

  Ramirez’s plane was Deus ex Machina. Most of his fellow pilots had no idea what it meant. Some thought it was Hispanic, like Ramirez. It wasn’t Spanish, though; it was Greek. Deus ex Machina. The God from the Machine.

  Ramirez had majored in literature. In the ancient Greek plays, the hero would often get himself into all sorts of drama and strife, only to have it all solved, just in the nick of time, by a god, who would be lowered onto the stage by an elaborate piece of equipment. The God from the Machine would intervene, just when all looked lost, and save the day for the hero.

  That was his role, Ramirez felt, and he had named his plane for it. When ground troops were under threat, his wing of close ground-support fighter-bombers would be called in to save the day.

  Today he had a mixture of high-explosive and incendiary napalm bombs attached under his wings. Someone, or something, was in for a very hot time in Auckland tonight.

  The launch officer raised a hand above his head, then brought it sweeping down. Ramirez punched in his after-burners as the launch wire exploded forward, catapulting the fighter down the short runway of the carrier.

  The acceleration rammed him back in his seat. It was a volatile adrenaline thrill that no roller-coaster ride could ever come close to simulating. He would miss it, he thought, when he was too old to fly and rotated off onto some boring desk job somewhere.

  The edge of the carrier flashed past, and the plane dipped fractionally, then caught itself and he arced upward to the left. The other five planes of his wing were off the deck in quick succession, forming up on his wing tips. The six planes seemed as one as they banked around toward the dark coast ahead of them.

  Tell me your troubles, Ramirez thought, confess me your sins, for here comes the God from the Machine.

  Fatboy’s motorcycle was still parked on the gray concrete pad by the side of the house, where he had left it that morning. Had it been just one day? Tane realized that it had. It seemed like an eternity of time had passed since Fatboy had set out with the Chronophone.

  The house was in darkness, except, unsurprisingly, for the flickering blue glow from an upstairs window.

  They had driven back from the Marae in his dad’s Jeep Cherokee. The roads were increasingly impassable, and the sturdy four-wheel-drive Jeep seemed like a better bet if they had to go across fields or shoulder other vehicles out of the way.

  Rebecca hadn’t said a word the entire trip. She had just sat there, thinking. Tane felt that she was making a momentous decision and left her alone to make it.

  His own mind was filled with the image of his mother and father, standing at the carved wooden gates of the Marae, facing the fear, facing an uncertain future, in the embrace of their people, their whanau. He wondered if he would ever see them again and thought that he would not.

  They entered the house quietly, so as not to alarm Rebecca’s mum.

  Rebecca’s room was unchanged from when they had left it. The hole in the wall where the window used to be, the torn drapes, and the glass and wood splinters spread throughout the room. Even the paper was still on the printer.

  FTBYDNTGO.WTRBLSTMPS.DSVLETHM.

  SLTABS.DNTABSRB.

  Rebecca looked at the message a long time, and finally sighed. “MPs, macrophages. ABs are antibodies.”

  “Water blast,” Tane said. “High-pressure water.”

  “I think so,” Rebecca said. “The macrophages are made of some kind of spongy tissue. Bullets don’t affect t
hem; they just punch straight through. But a pressurized jet of water would cut them to pieces and dissolve them.”

  “SLT?” Fatboy asked.

  “My guess is salt,” Rebecca replied. “I thought it meant that the antibodies can’t absorb salt, but that makes no sense. But what we do know is that if you crush an antibody, it just gets absorbed back into the mist. Then the mist probably just makes a new one. So no matter how many you destroy, there are just as many attacking you a few minutes later.”

  “But salt stops them being absorbed,” Tane worked out slowly.

  “It’s only a guess. But I suspect that salt, on that slimy surface, would alter the chemical structure of the creature, and that would stop it being absorbed.”

  Fatboy said, “So once you kill them, they stay dead!”

  “Something like that.”

  Fatboy said, “We need to tell Crowe.”

  “What about the Chronophone?” Rebecca asked.

  Tane asked, “What about the Möbius?”

  “I can get back to the Skytower and install the Chronophone,” Fatboy said. “I’ll be able to squeeze into the city on the bike.”

  “No,” Rebecca said. “I think you should both go to the Skytower. That has to take priority. I’ll try and raise Crowe on the portable radio.”

  “Do you think he’ll listen?” Tane said.

  She just shrugged.

  There was a long drawn-out scream from the skies above them, rising, then dropping away as the sound passed overhead.

  Xena screeched in fright and leaped into Rebecca’s arms.

  Rebecca looked up. “What was that?”

  “A jet,” Tane said, “moving fast.”

  “More than one,” Fatboy said. “Sounded like fighters.”

  “Oh crap,” Tane breathed. “It’s already started.”

  As if to confirm his analysis, a sound of distant thunder rolled in from the north. Through the smashed window, the skies lit up with brilliant flashes.