Grasping the gas mask by one of its two filters, he held it high above his head and looped the straps around the door handle. The rubber gripped the smooth metal, and with the tiniest of clicks the door unlatched. Jake had to throw out a hand to stop himself falling backwards as his weight was no longer supported by it.

Using his hands to help him shuffle around once more, he faced the door and pushed it all the way open. He collected up the torch from the floor, clicked it on, and aimed the beam inside.

Twenty-One

FROM HER POSITION on the tender platform, it was evident to Lucya that the raft contained only three people long before it reached the Spirit of Arcadia. What was less obvious was who was missing. The three men clad in black neoprene all looked much alike from a distance. Two of them were rowing, propelling the little craft along at quite a speed. The third sat in the middle, nursing some kind of trunk as if it was the most precious cargo ever carried.

By the time they were fifty metres away, her worst fears were confirmed. Jake was not with them. She realised with horror that this was the news Chuck had been trying to tell her on the bridge, before Erica had interrupted.

“What’s happened? Where’s Jake?” she screamed across the water, desperate to know.

Someone shouted back, but the wind carried their voice away from the ship and towards land, making it impossible to hear what they were saying.

“Where is he? What have you done with him? Where’s Jake?” She was tearing at her hair, frustration choking at her.

The little raft seemed to take forever to close the distance to the ship. When finally it touched the platform, Ewan jumped off and grabbed her, shaking her to try and calm her down.

“He’s okay, Lucya, Jake is okay. He’s at the base.”

“What? Why? Why did you leave him there?”

By then, Vardy and Eric were hauling the machine onto the platform. Vardy looked on, concerned.

“Ewan, that’s not entirely the truth now, is it?”

“Where is he, Vardy?” Lucya demanded. “Tell me now!”

“Ewan is right, he’s on the base. But he isn’t alright, not really.”

“He hasn’t…he’s…the virus?” She looked at the three men. Ewan nodded, looking at his feet. “Then why the hell did you leave him there? He should be here! He needs medical attention! We have to go and get him!” She made for the raft, as if to go and retrieve him herself.

Vardy blocked her path. “Lucya, he asked us to leave him there.”

She stared at him, unblinking, processing this information. “I don’t believe it, you’re lying! You must be lying! Why would he do that?”

“It’s true,” Ewan said gently. “He insisted. I wanted to bring him back, but he said he’d only slow us down. He said the machine was more important.”

Lucya fell to her knees. The tears that she had shed for Erica, tears that had only just dried on her face, were joined by fresh tears as she sobbed on the little platform. She knew that it was exactly what Jake would have said. She knew he would sacrifice himself to help the rest of the ship.

Ewan knelt down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, we’re going back for him. I promised I would go back for him.”

“Then let’s go, now!”

“No,” Vardy said. “There’s nothing to be gained by risking another trip over there unless we have a cure. If we can’t make the vaccine work, Jake is dead anyway. I’m sorry to sound harsh, but that’s the reality. If we have a vaccine, then by all means take it to him and bring him back.”

“I’m not waiting, I’m going to find him, on my own if I have to!” Lucya pushed past Ewan and put one foot in the raft. She got no further, as Ewan turned and grabbed her, and Eric helped him pull her back.

“Lucya, you can’t go. You need protection; the ash will kill you as soon as you set foot on the land. Russell is right. Let him make his cure, and then I promise you and I will go and find Jake.”

• • •

Jake looked around the room, bewildered. For a minute, he was convinced that the tunnel must have led him round in a long loop, because he found himself back in Vardy’s lab. Except, he realised, it wasn’t Vardy’s lab at all. It was a perfect duplicate, a mirror image. There were the same long benches loaded with equipment. The same dormitory, office space, and kitchen area. Everything was identical, just back to front. And as Jake noted with some satisfaction, the equipment was the same as in Vardy’s lab, with one important difference. In this room, there were four Heimat Brinkdolph Gemini 5001 machines.

He considered how he could draw the attention of the submariners to these machines. If he was dead by the time they came back, he wouldn’t be able to tell them they were there. He was, however, confident that they would look for him when they returned and found he wasn’t where they had left him. That meant there was a way of ensuring they got the message.

He shuffled over to a huge dry-erase board that took up most of one wall. A plastic beaker attached to it by means of magnets was filled with markers. He gave the beaker a whack with his torch and several of the pens fell to the floor. He selected a bright green colour, and proceeded to write across his own chest: “2nd Lab, More 5001 Machines.”

Happy that the others would locate the additional means of production for their remedy whether he was alive or not, he was ready to continue his search of level four.

Shifting around on his bottom was somewhat impractical, and required that he travelled backwards, but he found it preferable to dragging himself along on his chest. So it was by that same means that he returned to the tunnel, grabbing his gas mask in passing, and continued his journey.

Progress was slow, and it took him more than fifteen minutes to reach the next door, by which time he was completely exhausted. Only the constant urge to explore, to discover what lay just a little further along, kept him going. Lucya had once remarked that it was that urge, that never-ending desire to see what was around the next corner, that had made the British turn such a large proportion of the map pink. She believed every Brit was a sailor and an explorer at heart, although Jake vehemently disagreed. He smiled to himself as he thought that maybe she’d been right all along. “Just a few more metres,” he told himself. And then he’d seen the second door ahead, picked out in the glow of his torchlight, and he knew he had to get at least that far.

Opening this one was much easier now that he had an established method. Once again, with his back to the door, he flipped the rubber straps of his mask over the handle and pulled.

The room beyond felt different to the labs when he shuffled in. The noise of his body dragging across the floor echoed a little. Something, somewhere, was dripping. It was the first sound not of his own making that he had heard since the other men had left, and it sent a shiver down his spine. Something else was different too. Off to his left was a small, glowing red light, like a bloodshot eye watching him in the darkness.

His torch battery was almost completely drained, so it was impossible to see what, if anything, the light was attached to. The more he tried to focus on it, the more it seemed to float away from him, teasing him. He shook his head, trying to see more clearly. The virus was making it harder to think straight, and the paralysis in his legs was starting to turn to pain.

Jake shuffled towards the tiny red glow, feeling in front of him as he went. His torch beam, now barely brighter than the red eye itself, illuminated the area just enough to see that the light was built into a metal panel. It looked a lot like the panels in the control room on board HMS Ambush: beige, dull, utilitarian. Next to the light was a handle covered with red plastic. Underneath was an engraved label that read: “Emergency Use Only.”