Juggernaut

They reached the tunnel entrance. Scattered planks and beams. A skeletal creature broken and limbless on the track.

Jabril helped unhitched the quad bike and set it upright. Lucy straddled the bike and gunned the engine. Amanda rode pillion.

Jabril gave Lucy his pistol. He pulled Raphael’s machete from the upturned trailer and gave it to Amanda.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Get out of here.’

Tyres spat dirt as the bike pulled away.

A figure in a red boiler suit lurking between box cars.

‘Hey,’ shouted Jabril. His voice echoed down the mine tunnel. ‘Hey, over here.’

Jabril jumped on a flatbed wagon. He took a flare from his pocket and struck the cap. It fizzed purple.

‘Hey. You there.’

Two figures shuffled from shadow and moved towards him.

‘Yes. That’s right.’

Jabril ran the length of three rail cars, then jumped down to the track.

‘Come on. That’s right.’

He backed deeper into tunnel darkness. The foul, rotting creatures stumbled in pursuit.

Jabril threw down the flare. It spluttered at his feet.

He took the key fob detonator from his pocket.

‘Come on, you poor bastards,’ he murmured wearily. ‘I think we all deserve a little sleep.’

The infected men shambled towards him, arms outstretched.

Jabril psyched himself to press the button.

‘Let’s bring this nightmare to a close.’

It should have been a moment of epiphany. His last seconds on earth. Last sights, last sounds. Last thoughts, last memories. But Jabril was tired and just wanted to die.

Teeth sank into his neck. Jabril dropped the fob and twisted free. He turned. Haq, chewing a mouthful of flesh.

Jabril sank to his knees clutching the pulsing wound in his neck. Blood bubbled between his fingers. A spreading, glistening stain across the shoulder of his linen suit.

He was seized by grasping hands. He kicked the jostling creatures. Nails tore his suit, dug into his flesh. One of the infected prisoners broke teeth as he gnawed the hook at the end of Jabril’s right arm.

Jabril shook himself free. He raked rail-shingle as he scrabbled for the fob. He snagged the keyring with his prosthetic hook.

He gripped the fob in the bloody fingers of his left hand.

He pressed the button.

Charges blew deep in the tunnels. Timber props instantly reduced to whirling splinters. Passageways filled with fire, rock-dust and tumbling rubble.

Spilt paperwork in the ammunition store instantly crisped and carbonised by inferno heat.

Drums of ethylene and formaldehyde stacked beneath Spektr burst and filled the cavern with fire. The orbiter was briefly lifted from its rail-car bed as if it were performing a vertical take-off, borne upward by a wave of flame.

The polythene bio-dome shrivelled. The scaffold frame collapsed.

The lab units were ripped apart by a series of vicious internal blasts, and crushed flat by a thousand tons of falling rock.

The main tunnel collapsed, ore wagons and box cars pulverised by an avalanche of limestone.

Jabril, and the soldiers that tore at his flesh, winked out of existence in a millisecond of concussive heat.

Fuel

Gaunt pulled back the throttle and hit the brake. The train slowed to a halt. The motor shuddered and died. They felt the shunt and clank of carriages jolting to a stop behind them.

They were at the mouth of the ravine, the point where the high canyon walls opened out into the wide valley basin.

Voss stood on the locomotive walkway. He watched a broiling wave of smoke and rock-dust sweep down the tight ravine towards him.

He stepped inside the cab and closed the slide door. The train was engulfed in a thick dust cloud. Nothing beyond the windows but swirling vapour.

‘Jabril pressed the button,’ said Voss. ‘Guess he was trying to bring the canyon down on us or something.’

‘So your friends are gone,’ said Gaunt. ‘Just you and me now.’

The swirling dust slowly dissipated, sunlight slowly filtering into the cab as the haze began to clear.

Gaunt took binoculars from his backpack and scanned the valley through the side window of the cab. He surveyed the burned-out convoy, and the austere ruins of the citadel.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Voss. ‘Plenty of those fuckers out there. Chilled, for the time being, but it won’t take much to get them riled. A hornets’ nest, just waiting to be stirred.’

‘You want to walk through open desert in fifty-degree heat? Fuck that. Jabril made it, but he got lucky. We can ride this thing home. All we have to do is get some gas in the tank.’

Faint radio crackle. Voss took the sat phone from his backpack. He adjusted volume.

American voice:

‘Roger that, Angel Flight. We have your TAC visual. Holding at nineteen thousand feet.’

‘Who are they?’ asked Voss.

‘Encrypted frequency. Must be the plane. We can eavesdrop on their radio traffic. They’re requesting clearance to over-fly the US carrier group in the Gulf of Oman, as they move up the Saudi coast.’

‘Sure you can’t talk sense into them?’