The Terminus Read online

  “Thank you,” said Mike politely, holding open the door.

  “Oh… thank you,” she graciously insisted. “What…?”

  “Sorry, can’t talk. Timed experiment!”

  Mike slipped inside, followed by Gary who shut the door firmly behind him. They found themselves at the end of a long, brightly-lit corridor lined with glass-windowed doors. However, the present day layout of the place was of no interest to Gary. He couldn’t care less what now went on in the Stanmore Scientific Laboratories.

  “Okay?” Gary checked before adjusting the diaphragms on both specs to the pre-set distant future as marked.

  “Yeah!” agreed Mike. “Hope you’re right about those sodding marks. Could be an execution squad waiting for us at the other end!”

  Anxious not to make one false move and lose Beetie forever, Gary hesitated. Suppose Mike was right and someone other than God had made those marks? Teeth, for example? To fool him? Worse than an execution squad, perhaps they’d arrive to discover whatever was to happen to Beetie had already happened.

  Oh God!

  They slipped on the time-specs and reappeared together, two hundred years later, using technology that spanned time from the initial few trilliseconds after the Big Bang to an infinitely remote point in the future.

  Same corridor, same grey building but now dangerously dark and different, for an overwhelming sense of evil pervaded the place; their nostrils even detected it in the smell of the dank, heavy air.

  “Man, this place is creepy!” muttered Mike.

  Mag-stunners at the ready, they edged slowly forwards along the corridor. The deathly silence was not one of solitude or emptiness but that of a snake or spider about to strike at some unsuspecting prey. They were aware of something watching… hidden eyes, hidden cameras, perhaps like the one that trapped Beetie in a silvery net before she got shuttle-podded off to this God-awful hell.

  “The smell,” whispered Mike, right behind Gary. “It’s like the stink in those underground tunnels where you nearly got gobbled up by gee-rats.”

  “Shhhh!”

  The corridor ended in a T-junction. In one direction, blackness; in the other, dim lighting and the unmistakable sound of voices. Gary raised his eyebrows, Mike nodded, and they continued on towards the brightness and the voices.

  ***

  Beetie followed the warden out of the blue building into the courtyard packed with surfacers lined up in neat rows facing the grey block. The woman pushed them aside to make way, meeting no resistance. Had Beetie poked one on the nose she’d probably have got the same docile, unquestioning response. Their blank faces terrified the girl as she followed in the wake of the warden. She remembered nothing of surfacers in the streets above the Retreat.

  At the far end of the courtyard was a vacant space along the edge of which, in front of a high wall, sat girls in colourful dresses like hers, barefoot and with beautiful hairstyles, their faces also blank. Everything seemed wrong: those girls, her empty head, the warden and her cruelty, the Chairman, his toothy grin, his poetry, and… oh Gary, that awful lesson! Gary, please don’t let him do that to me!

  But could she be sure about Gary being real? She began to doubt that secret flicker of hope. Maybe the boy in her head was only the remnant of a passing dream… a delicious stain that they’d been unable to remove from her cleansed brain?

  Beetie halted when she spotted the Chairman. She recognised him at once: his large head and his teeth, although he appeared shorter than she’d imagined and even uglier. She could not go through with what he’d promised to do to her. Not even for all those beautiful things she’d been shown on her computer screen: the mountains, waterfalls and flowers. He ogled her, his teeth mocking from behind a cruel grin. Her legs refused to move any closer for she couldn’t bear to be even one step nearer the monster. He called her by that other name... the wrong one, the one they all used here.

  “Belinda! Our time’s come! I have the tablet! We can move on!”

  She remained rooted to the spot, but remembered the grey building and the warden’s words... about going back there if she failed to obey the Chairman. Slowly, she moved one foot forwards. Then Gary reappeared in her head. She swivelled abruptly and ran back towards the regimented rows of the unbrained.

  “GARY!” she screamed, shoving aside surfacers, knocking a few to the ground. Tears streamed her cheeks. She had no idea what this meant, for with childhood memories erased crying was an unfamiliar experience, yet the tears flowed and as she ran she screamed his name over and over and over:

  “GARY! GARY! GARY!”

  She ran towards the grey building. Why, she had no idea. She’d seen what went on inside. Perhaps there was nowhere else to run to? Another crowd of zombie surfacers had just been disgorged from a shuttle-pod and were being marshalled into lines by a heavy. Beetie wondered whether she’d already seen the brute but couldn’t quite remember where. He caught sight of her. She stood out so clearly in her yellow and gold and blue dress, the only person running.

  “BELINDA! STOP, GIRL!” he shouted.

  But she ran on. She didn’t think to remove those high-heeled shoes that slowed her down; only to stay with the boy in her head and escape from the Chairman. She ran round the side of the grey block, away from the surfacers, to a smaller, empty courtyard at the back. A dead end! A high wall separated the Hatcheries from the Terminus, and a huge silver tube emerged from the building, above a door, and continued on through the Terminus wall. Beetie stopped. Behind her was the larger courtyard from where she’d run and where, in the distance, girls in colourful frocks sat on benches and the warden and the Chairman stood looking at her trapped like a frightened animal. She had no possible means of escape and ‘God’ waited and watched with eager delight whilst the heavy giving chase closed in on his quarry.

  ***

  The boys halted at the end of the corridor in front of windowed swing doors, doors that muffled the voices beyond, and they stared in a state of shock at the scene on the other side of the blood-smeared door windows.

  “What the heck…?” began Mike. Gary slapped a hand over his friend’s mouth.

  They beheld a vast hall, its ceiling low and criss-crossed by a network of large silver pipes. Like merging streams flowing into one large river, all the pipes joined a single tube, some two metres in diameter, which coursed the length of the hall and disappeared through the wall at the far end above another door. Resembling lianas dangling from a tropical rain forest canopy, tangles of narrow black tubes hung from the silver pipes, attached to living heads on the slabs below.

  Row upon row of white slabs, two to three metres apart, stretched to the opposite end of the hall. Hundreds of them… and on each lay a surfacer. Those close to the door were clearly alive for they moved spasmodically; an arm here, a leg there, even a slight turn of a head, and on all heads silver helmets had been fitted snugly over pudding-basin haircuts, each festooned with dials and buttons. Flashing blue and orange lights, they resembled grotesquely twinkling Christmas decorations as the connecting black tubes twirled and danced in response to whatever was being extracted from the victims on the slabs. Eyes looked blankly at the two boys, sending shivers down Gary’s spine. He’d grown accustomed to the surfacers’ bland expressions, but the horror of seeing dead eyes on living faces far exceeded anything he could have imagined.

  “Oh my God!” whispered Mike through Gary’s fingers.

  Gary, however, was both horrified and intrigued. He tried to understand what on earth was going on. Something being harvested from the surfacers’ heads? What, he had no idea, but he now knew the grim purpose behind keeping alive all those zombies in twenty-third century London. The Agenda needed them for whatever was being planned in the Terminus and the Pentatron Tablet was vital to the whole exercise; Beetie too, apparently.

  The voices came from two large muscular men in blue tracksuits with rolled-up sleeves, half-way down the hall. Each hovered over a surfacer on a slab, in jocular conversation with the
other. These bruisers were no ‘ordinary’ surfacers; they had their wits about them as they brandished machete-like knives, and… oh God… they began to cut off the surfacers’ clothes and…

  Gary closed his eyes when one of the brutes hacked off a moving arm from the ‘corpse’ he’d been working on…‘corpse’, for his victim was both dead and alive. The helmet, removed from the man’s head, hung free on the end of a black tube which no longer jumped and jerked like those still attached to bodies. Gary re-opened his eyes, glancing sideways at Mike who seemed transfixed by the gore.

  In the hall, the heavy briefly studied the twitching, severed arm before chucking it callously into a crate and setting to work on the victim’s other arm. Beyond, other slabs were covered with blood and detached body parts whilst beside them crates had been filled with hacked-off limbs, used heads and entrails.

  Despite his disgust, Gary marvelled at the macabre dance of twirling liana tubes as ‘something’ was sucked from the heads of still-living bodies. A third door, half-way down the hall, opened and a further dozen surfacers entered with two more heavies who grabbed and flung them onto empty slabs as they would with hunks of dead meat. Helmets were attached, and once again the lianas did their snake-dance as a mysterious energy was removed from the surfacers’ heads.

  Gary and Mike shared the same thought: to turn and run like hell, but this was no longer an option because of another sound coming from the dark end of the corridor. Mike had already smelt the familiar odour, but now the throaty chatter-chatter of gee-rats and the scuffle of their large feet was unmistakable. The boys turned and mag-stunned the chisel-toothed heads as soon as they appeared, but nothing happened. Either terror had thrown their aim way off the mark, or these particular rats had been rendered immune to magnetic forces. Gary and Mike, choosing Plan Z, pushed through into the hall, startling the blood-splattered heavies engrossed in their grizzly task and idle jokes. Thank God, the mag-stunners worked on them. When the gee-rats burst into the hall, the boys ran on towards the frozen brutes. Gary tugged at a machete, but the man’s grip proved too strong. He managed to free the other’s weapon and hurried on to catch up with Mike. The remaining heavies who’d been herding a fresh intake of live surfacers yelled at the boys and gave chase but were soon engulfed by the swarm of gee-rats spreading out across the hall. The creatures appeared to have lost interest in Gary and Mike as they downed the heavies then set to work on recumbent surfacers, dead and ‘living’ – piercing screams confirming the ‘living’ to be alive.

  On catching up with Mike, Gary experienced a great surge of warmth for his friend who stood waiting patiently by the door beneath the silver tube. The boy didn’t have to do all of this... believe in Gary’s bizarre story, help him to rescue Beetie and save London of the future… and take a load of flak from himself to boot.

  “Better get the hell outa here!” Mike said.

  “Thanks, Mike,” Gary mumbled as they’d burst through the door out into a small courtyard. “You’re the very best! Look, why don’t you...?”

  Gary froze. He was about to suggest his friend climb up on his shoulders and onto the silver tube connecting the grey building to the Terminus wall, where he could lie stretched out, partially hidden, whilst he searched the place for Beetie, when he spied a small figure standing alone, staring at him; a girl in a colourful yellow, gold and blue flared dress. Wearing blue high-heeled shoes, she appeared bizarrely out of place and plainly petrified. He barely recognised her, she looked so different, for her hair was now down below her shoulders, beautifully styled and decorated with a blue hair band. But Beetie had been the only blonde he’d seen in the future. All the others on the surface and in the Retreat had black, brown or red hair. Also, even from that distance, he could discern the girl’s eyes. No one else in the world, past, present or future, had eyes the colour of Meconopsis betonificifolia... the Himalayan Blue Poppy.

  “BEETIE?” Gary called, before taking off at full pelt towards the girl, still clutching the machete.

  She hesitated, turning to look behind her as if Gary had been calling out someone else’s name.

  “BEETIE! IT’S ME! GARY!”

  Still she didn’t move. From around the corner, a heavy appeared… a clone of those brutes in the grey building who’d been hacking at the surfacers. From two directions they, Gary and the heavy, sprinted towards the stationary girl.

  “RUN, BEETIE! FOR GOD’S SAKE, RUN!” the boy shrieked.

  The girl began to run in his direction.

  “GARY!” she shouted. “GARY!”

  The heavy pursuing her pulled out something from his pocket. A mag-stunner? The brute was gaining on Beetie and a movie-like sequence followed, as if one second of fast action had been slow-motioned into a prolonged episode of Hollywood footage. About twenty feet separated Beetie from Gary. Fear distorted the girl’s face streaked with eye-shadow-stained tear trails that merged with her vivid red smeared lips. As the man aimed his mag-stunner, and in an explosion of fury, Gary raised the machete above his head and flung it at the brute with a force he’d never have thought possible. The weapon seemed to whirl and hover in the air for an age, though in reality must hit the man, point forwards, in a fraction of a second, slicing into his broad chest, cutting him to the ground. Beetie ran on, sobbing, into Gary’s arms. For a moment the boy held her close, not quite knowing what to do.

  “You’re okay, Beetie!” he reassured, stroking her hair as he watched life jerk free from the felled heavy.

  Gary turned. Mike was standing statue-like, staring at him, one arm outstretched and holding a mag-stunner.

  “Oh shit!” he exclaimed. “Take off those stupid shoes, Beetie!”

  Beetie frowned and peered down at her feet.

  “BLOODY TAKE ’EM OFF!” he shouted.

  Fresh tears appeared in the corners of her eyes. Ashamed for swearing and shouting at her, he saw the girl was changed... probably doped.

  What the hell have they done to her?

  “I’ll help you,” he said gently, reaching down and easing off her shoes. “Now we’d better run. Just don’t let go!” he added, grabbing the girl’s hand.

  They sprinted towards Mike and the grey building but another heavy, the one who’d mag-stunned Mike, was only metres from Gary’s frozen friend. Too late! Split-second decision-making: Gary could never reach Mike in time, not even if he were to let go of Beetie and run on ahead. He stuck with his priority… to get Beetie out of this nightmare. Only one pair of time-specs? No time to figure out whether his theory about molecular blending and two people time-travelling together was true. He’d come back later for Mike who, anyway, was ace at fending for himself. The Agenda needed Beetie, Teeth wanted her… and he, Gary, loved her.

  Has the bastard already done the unspeakable?

  All these thoughts twirled in his head as, lifting the girl tightly about the waist with one arm, his cheek pressed firmly against hers, he reached for the specs with his free hand and slipped them off, praying to the real God that he would be proved correct. At the same time Beetie began hitting him on the chest, trying to push him away.

  “Let go, let go!” she cried out. “What are you doing to me?”

  Gary only released his hold on her when they found themselves standing in the car park of the Stanmore Scientific Laboratories in 2013. He grinned, insanely happy to feast his eyes on her presence, oblivious to curious onlookers. A girl dressed for a night out, shoeless, her face a mess of tears and make-up, beating a strange-looking boy with her fists?

  “Is he bothering you?” a woman asked as she emerged from her car. “If he is, I’ll…”

  Beetie stopped hitting Gary and shook her head.

  “Who is this boy?”

  “Gary,” she answered quietly. “Gary was in my head when the Chairman told me what he’d do to me in the Terminus… and...”

  “Thank you, but please don’t worry,” interrupted Gary. “She’s had an awful time. I have to get her home.” He paused. “Her name’s
Beetie,” he added, proudly.

  “Beetie! Not Belinda! Of course! Yes, yes… I’m Beetie,” agreed the girl.

  “I’ll be taking her home, see. She’ll be okay. I promise.”

  The woman stared at Beetie, uncertain.

  “Our chairman? At SSL?”

  Gary smiled.

  “Year 2213,” he explained. “I’ll kill the bastard if he’s harmed her, but if you don’t mind I’d better take her home now. This way, Beetie.” He took the girl by the hand and led her out of the car park, past the security guard, towards Stanmore underground station. “Gonna have to buy you some shoes,” he said. “Can’t go about London barefoot.”

  “London? That word... it means something to me. Same as being Beetie does.”

  Gary stopped and gazed at her. He used his handkerchief to clean up her face. She let him do this, but when he tried to stroke her cheeks she pushed his hand away.

  “What did they do to you? Did Teeth touch you up? Harm you?”

  But Beetie stared blankly at him.

  “Who are you?” she asked after few moments. “Why were you in my head all the time in the Hatcheries?”

  “I… I’m Gary. Like you told the woman. Don’t you remember a thing? The Retreat? Where we shared a cell? Arthry… the double-crossing bastard… and your brother, Blinker? Can’t you recall cutting my hair? Mike and I call it a Beetie-cut.”

  The girl’s strained expression informed Gary she was trying so hard to bring back whatever had been wiped from her brain. Maybe some of their time together was still inside that pretty head... the kiss, perhaps?

  “Did you really remember my name?” Gary asked.

  “The Chairman told me. I couldn’t get your face and voice out of my mind… not even after all the things they kept doing.”