‘To honour those who gave everything they had,’ said McCormick, ‘we will give everything we have. To honour the dead we will free the living, united by our differences.’
‘United,’ came the response. But it sounded different to normal.
Some of the students, including Mark and Raj, had said it emphatically. Like they were preparing for a fight to take their whole world back. Ewan and Kate had barely whispered, and McCormick noticed that their eyes had glanced towards him. They were afraid of what would happen to him once they left.
It was an unusual feeling, having his worries reciprocated. Normally when his soldiers left, he would hope and pray that he was not saying a final goodbye to any of them. This time his young fighters feared the same for him too.
Nine Underdogs went into the exit tunnel, with not one word spoken between them. Simon gave a worried look towards McCormick, and Raj gave a hopeful thumbs up. Gracie looked like she was trying to avoid the sight of him altogether. They were gone a moment later, leaving McCormick in a Spitfire’s Rise he did not recognise: one that lay completely silent.
In order to break that silence, the first place he visited was the living room. Thomas was there, spread out on the empty sofa with his face buried into the backrest. He should have been in bed an hour earlier, but McCormick didn’t mind. The boy had spent the entire day processing the news of the operation, and still needed more time.
‘Thomas,’ he said.
‘What?’ came the nine-year-old’s whisper.
‘I’m going to the clinic in a few minutes. I just thought I’d say good night.’
‘Good night.’
There was no expression in Thomas’ voice. He was giving the response expected of him; the next line in the script.
Once in a while, he would leap at McCormick and cling onto him like some kind of cuddly leech, keeping his thin arms wrapped around his chest until he had been told to let go at least three times. It was problematic for an ageing man, but on principle McCormick never objected. At that moment, a hug attack from Thomas would have been most welcome. McCormick was frightened. More frightened than he wanted any of his Underdogs to know.
But there would be no hugs that day. Thomas, like most of the crowd in the cellar, despised him that day. McCormick sighed, and walked to the foot of the stairs.
‘I love you, Thomas. And I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Mum used to say that.’
It wasn’t worth pushing the issue. McCormick left the living room and made his way up the stairs.
If only to delay the inevitable, he opened the trapdoor to the attic and pulled down the ladder. There must have been enough time to see Barbara.
He would forever be thankful to his old friend Polly for letting him lodge in her house after Barbara’s death. She couldn’t possibly have predicted her home would become a place like Spitfire’s Rise. McCormick’s most treasured possessions had been in Polly’s attic long before Takeover Day, just metres above a houseful of people who had no idea he had any prior link to the house at all.
He found the cardboard box in its place next to the boiler and, as always, picked out the Anglesey honeymoon photo first.
When he knelt down to grab it, his arm brushed past a second cardboard box. Momentarily distracted, he checked inside it to see if the envelopes were still there, and counted eleven as expected. He wondered how many would remain when the time came to hand them out.
He brought his attention back to his late wife. There was surprisingly little to say to her. On the brink of going under the knife, in a house where all the occupants were angry with him, only one topic came to mind.
‘That’s the worst thing about leadership, Barb,’ he began. ‘They can train you to teach, and they can train you to guide people. But they can never train you to deal with the loneliness.’
He kissed the part of the photo which held Barbara’s face, and returned it to the cardboard box. Once it was back in place, he had run out of excuses. It was time to face Lorraine.
*
Lorraine could be an intimidating person, but never more so than now. McCormick lay flat on the clinic bed wearing nothing but his underwear, as the Underdogs’ nurse marched to and fro across the clinic in an understandably foul mood.
She opened the top drawer of a dulled filing cabinet that had once held McCormick’s student assessment data. Now it held Lorraine’s emergency medical supplies, some of it in sealed jars that had dusted over from months of idle storage. Lorraine’s hand emerged with an unused bottle of clear liquid, and she readied her syringe.
‘I never thought I’d use expired drugs on a patient,’ she mumbled with a weak tremor.
McCormick had a couple of humorous comebacks in mind, mainly about how he never paid attention to use-by dates on food. But he knew the process would be more tolerable if he only spoke when asked a question.
‘So how much do you weigh?’ she asked.
‘Still eighty-four kilograms.’
‘Not eighty-three or eighty-five?’
‘Well, we might have all weakened the springs on the scales by weighing ourselves too much,’ he said with a chuckle.
‘Do you definitely weigh eighty-four kilograms?’
‘Yes. I do. So one kilogram makes a difference, does it?’
‘If you give the wrong amount of anaesthetic to a patient, you could kill them. If you give a child an adult’s dose they won’t wake up. I have to calculate how much to give you based on your age, height, weight, body mass index and general state of health, and I can’t afford to get it wrong. A teaspoon too much will cause permanent brain damage.’
She poked the syringe through the bottle’s foil cap, and spent nearly a whole minute measuring the correct amount, tapping the syringe to get any bubbles to the top, then squirting and re-measuring. Eventually she seemed satisfied, and turned to McCormick with the loaded syringe.
‘And all of this,’ she continued, ‘so you can go running around in New London and probably get yourself killed!’
‘If I get killed and we destroy the AME project… I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s a win. An extremely good one.’
‘It’ll be a better win if the shield dies and you don’t.’
‘Obviously,’ said McCormick, suppressing the nerves in his voice. ‘And that’s the result I’m aiming for. I don’t want to die, Lorraine. I want to go out on the nineteenth, run around and shoot clones, get out alive and make it home again. But that involves risk, as war always does.’
‘Has it occurred to you that you’ll be under the same roof as Nicholas Grant? Marshall and Pearce? Oliver Roth? And just days after an operation?’
‘It’s crossed my mind,’ McCormick answered, staring up to the ceiling to avoid Lorraine’s glare. ‘But have you read the AME report? It’s terrifying. I have to be there for this, Lorraine. I can’t just sit at comms while the young ones do the dying. That’s what cowards and presidents do.’
‘There’s no shame in recognising your limits.’
‘No, but there’s shame in accepting them.’
Lorraine did not reply, and McCormick breathed a sigh of relief. Tired of conversation, and fatigued from debating the issue, he stretched out his right arm and invited the needle towards his skin. The inside of his lower arm was still dotted with miniscule scars from forty years of blood donations. He was no stranger to needles.