‘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.
‘Just… promise me you’re not looking for trouble,’ said Lorraine.
‘I promise I’m doing the right thing. That’s enough.’
‘No, it’s not. If I do this, you have a duty to keep yourself alive and uncaptured!’
McCormick gave a warm smile. Their two principled minds had done nothing but clash ever since his collapse, but beneath their differences they were the closest of friends.
‘I’ll do everything I can to stay out of trouble,’ he said. ‘And believe me, I won’t just be doing it for you. I’ve got my own vested interest in staying alive!’
Lorraine took a deep breath, and in the seconds it took to find a vein and insert the needle, McCormick tried to forget the enormity of the operation. His friend was using expired anaesthetics to send him to sleep, and then she was going to carve him open with a sharpened kitchen knife. All this without any surgical training, and a selection of memories that remained from her nursing years. And at the end of it all, there was the soldering iron that lay at the back of the room. The very sight of it made him shudder. When the time came…
A prick in his arm caught his attention, and he turned his head just in time to see the last of the colourless fluid vanishing into him. McCormick’s nervous system began to numb itself, and his last conscious sight was of Lorraine’s eyes as she began to cry.
Chapter 5
A year and a half ago, during one of his worse meltdowns, Ewan had found a way to escape Oakenfold. It had been a ridiculous strategy: in his unthinking rage he had run outside, lumbered up to the gate and just pressed the buzzer – an idea which the rational Ewan would never have considered. The receptionist assumed it was a class heading out for a PE lesson, and had buzzed him out without checking the CCTV screen.
It had taken the rest of the day for anyone to find him. Maybe they had assumed he had run into Harpenden to take a bus somewhere, but Ewan hadn’t been stupid enough to surround himself with the general public. All he needed to do – all he had the mental strength to do – was find a hiding spot on a nearby hill that overlooked the school, and stay there until transport home arrived at the end of the day. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Once he had calmed down and