Before Alex Two could steady himself, Jack’s best idea was a head-butt to the face – his helmet cracking into the clone’s forehead – and then throwing the weight of his whole body against the clone until it slammed against the wall.
To his right, the wounded Alex One batted his hand around the stairs in search of his dropped submachine gun.
‘Gracie! Bloody help me!’
Jack wrapped one arm around Alex Two’s neck, ignoring the punches to every part of him the clone could reach, and tried to seize his weapon with desperate fingers. The angry clone wrestled back with both hands, a struggle Jack would definitely lose. Jack checked for a clear run to his left, forced all of his strength into the arm wrapped around his enemy’s throat, and charged towards the window.
Alex Two’s forehead shattered the glass, and formed several jagged edges that scoured the face that followed. There were no screams from the clone’s missing vocal cords, but his mouth opened wide and the rest of his body twitched in pain. Before his adrenalin peaked, Jack used his newfound strength to hold the injured clone in place. Alex Two fought with all his power to bring his head back into the living room, but could not stop Jack from squeezing his fingers into his collar and carving his neck back and forth against the broken glass.
The wall beneath the window painted itself red, and the clone’s resistance grew weak. Jack turned just in time to see Alex One’s submachine gun pointed in his direction, before his last enemy was shot dead by a flurry of bullets from Gracie above.
‘Are you alright?’ she asked from the top of the stairs.
‘Yeah,’ said Jack as Alex One toppled down the staircase, ‘peachy, thanks.’
Jack double-checked each of the three bodies in turn to make sure they were dead, and found that against the odds, he and Gracie really had won.
‘And I thought sharing a house with one Alex was difficult,’ he muttered, as he tended to the cuts in his forehead. Head-butting a clone with glass wounds to its face had not been his brightest idea.
‘What do we do now?’ asked Gracie.
‘We call comms, describe everything we’ve seen, and tell the real Alex he’s no longer special and unique. After that, we get out of here. Hundreds of thousands of houses between Oakenfold and New London, and this is where they searched.’
‘Just our luck,’ said Gracie.
‘It’s never luck,’ came a voice at the front door.
Gracie’s announcement had been right. After two and a half hours of waiting, Ewan had finally found his way to Lemsford.
‘You’ve got a theory?’ Jack asked him.
‘You’re the logical one,’ Ewan answered, looking across the bodies on the floor. ‘Three clones found their way to this particular house, and all three of them were modelled on someone who’s been there before. What’s the most likely explanation?’
‘That they share some of Alex’s memories.’
Ewan’s eyes stared piercingly into Jack’s, filled with anger.
‘So where else do they know the way to?’
Chapter 11
By the time Ewan reached Spitfire’s Rise, it was breakfast time on May 18th. Less than forty-eight hours until Nicholas Grant’s birthday, the anniversary of Takeover Day, the rise of the AME shield, and the end of their chances of winning the war.
Jack and Gracie followed him through the trapdoor, and endured the silent journey through the tunnel to the armoury.
In my head, I ’ d hoped all seven of us would return together.
Oh, who am I kidding ? The whole thing was a trap from the start. We were always going to end up separated. Even Raj’s death wasn’t that surprising when you think about it. Bloody tragic, but not surprising.
When he opened the door into the armoury, Thomas was sat next to the Memorial Wall.
On most days, opening the door to Thomas was like coming home to an overexcited Labrador. But that morning the boy rose to his feet like a tired old man, the excitement gone from him.
Does he already know about Raj? Or is this about something else?
What happened on the operating table?
Thomas ambled up to Ewan and gave him a soft hug, followed by Jack and even Gracie in turn.
‘You OK, Thomas?’ asked Jack.
The boy shrugged.
‘Is McCormick alive?’ Ewan asked.
‘He’s OK,’ Thomas replied, offering no further details.
Ewan glanced at the Memorial Wall, and found the name of Raj Singh already chiselled beneath Charlie’s. That may have explained Thomas’ mood, but Ewan’s patience was too low for uncertainties. He headed for the steps up to the house, and was met on the ground floor by Mark and Simon on the living room sofas.
‘Where’s Kate?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry, we all lived,’ replied Mark. ‘She won’t be leaving her room for a while though.’
‘Mc—’
He didn’t have time to finish the word, as the man had already heard his voice and walked in from the kitchen. Joseph McCormick was alive, well, and smiling.
‘Ewan!’ he said with a wavy, uncharacteristically emotional voice, ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you again.’
‘Me too, sir,’ Ewan gasped.
‘No hugs I’m afraid. My abdomen’s been cauterised together by a soldering iron, so I’d rather not go squishing things around. Nonetheless,’ he finished, holding out one hand in a shaking position, ‘it’s good to have you home.’
Ewan shook McCormick’s hand, but avoided the warm smile on his face. There were already too many troubled thoughts running through his mind, and the joy of seeing his surrogate grandfather’s smile would cause enough internal conflict for tears to flow.
‘How’s Lorraine?’
‘She needs time,’ McCormick answered, reaching into his pocket and drawing out a small plastic bag. ‘Now, want to see something disgusting?’
‘Well I’ve not slept since I watched Raj get his spine blown out, and his body land on the school car park in a thousand pieces. But sure, impress me.’
Ewan was trying so hard to hide his disgust at McCormick’s actions: the risks the man had put himself through, and his plan to put himself at even more risk by joining the next strike team. But even when Ewan tried to mask his emotions, he was transparent. McCormick apologised for his clumsy language, with genuine regret in his voice, and held out the plastic bag. An ugly whitish-reddish sac lay inside, about half the size of Ewan’s thumb. The large cyst that had kept McCormick safe in Spitfire’s Rise was now outside his body, like a leash that had been unclipped from an irresponsible dog.
Clearly he didn’t learn his lesson in December. The cyst wasn’t the only reason he struggled in New London the first time .
‘Any damage to your stomach?’
‘Abdomen. Here it is.’
Jack, Gracie and Thomas walked into the living room just as McCormick raised his shirt. Gracie slapped her hands over her face, the idea of a grown man’s belly just too much for her.
The mark wasn’t quite as horrible as Ewan had predicted. It was certainly bigger – spread across more than half his abdomen – but it made sense that the cut would have to be bigger than the cyst itself. The burn marks from the soldering iron had left a canyon of thickened red mess: skin that looked hard to the touch, like overdone beef.