Project Wormhole

Chapter 2

Daniel’s second day on the run, and Renton caught up with him.

It wasn’t surprising really, when he had time to think about it later, sitting in the police station and waiting for Renton to come and collect him. As resourceful as Daniel was, he had never run away before.

And it was a whole new experience.

After only one night of sleeping rough, passers-by had begun to notice the fifteen-year-old boy who seemed to have nowhere to go. Daniel knew he was attracting attention, he knew that people were looking at him, wondering if he had a home to go to. Despite wishing that he had the superpower of invisibility, Daniel remained annoyingly visible to anyone who glanced in his direction.

Even so, it might have gone no further than a few enquiries as to his safety, and ended there. But Renton had contacts everywhere.

Everywhere.

Daniel sometimes pictured Renton as a big, fat, gnarly spider skulking in the middle of a huge web. Try as you might, there was no way of flying under, around, or through the web. And as soon as you were caught in Renton’s tendrils, he was after you. All he needed was that little tremor, that tiny disturbance in his antennae, and he was after you.

So when Daniel saw the police car pull up, he knew the game was finished. The big man would be on his way to get him, and that was that.

The station was smart, brightly lit, and humming with efficiency. The child protection officer assigned to him was pleasant and kind. Her name was Abby, and she was slim and tanned and athletic looking. In her spare time, she said, she was a kick boxer. She bought him a burger and fries and a huge bottle of cola. Later that day she brought him some comics, Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Attack Zone! and Ben 10. He threw the Ben 10 comic to one side, that was for younger kids. But after an afternoon of rereading the other comics until he thought he might know them off by heart, and with nothing else to do, he picked it up and read that one too.

Spider-ManThe Fantastic FourAttack Zone!Ben 10Ben 10Apart from Abby, he was pretty much ignored by everyone. He supposed it wasn’t that strange seeing a fifteen-year-old in a police station in a city the size of Birmingham. This was the first time he’d had any contact with the police. There had been police community visits to his school, of course, and he vaguely remembered being taken to an open day at the local station by his mother when he was very young. Not that he could imagine his mother ever doing anything like that. If it involved leaving the house, sometimes just even leaving the safety of her bedroom, then Daniel’s mother would not do it.

Perhaps she had been different back then, back when Daniel was just a toddler, still in nappies. Perhaps everything had been different, better even.

Not anymore. Things had been wrong for a long time, and then she died and everything got worse.

Daniel wiped roughly at his eyes and swallowed back the tears. She had been gone almost a year now, and he had promised himself he wasn’t going to cry over her anymore. His mother had abandoned him, and his father was abandoning him too, and he had made a promise to himself that he was going to look out for himself from now on.

A shadow fell across him, blocking out the light. He looked up.

Renton.

Renton was a huge, muscular brute of a man, crammed into a suit and tie to make him look respectable. This had the opposite effect, making him look even more like a thug. His head was shaven, and he wore dark glasses all the time. He had been a boxer once, and he had a squashed nose and huge, broad hands and thick fingers. He was head of security for an American company, IntelliCorps, and he spoke in a thick, New York accent.

When Daniel’s father had started making the big leaps of logic in his work, and important people started taking notice, Martin Atherton was headhunted by IntelliCorps. This was around the time Daniel’s mother died. Consumed with grief, Daniel’s father refused to relocate to the USA and so the company relocated a section of its work to England. That was how important they considered him. But along with the workforce came the security, including Renton.

Daniel hated him.

He was scared of him, too.

They checked out of the police station. Daniel could tell the desk officer didn’t much like the look of Renton, and neither did Abby, who had accompanied them down to reception. But there was nothing either of them could do. Renton was Daniel’s father’s official representative here, all his documents had checked out, as had the telephone calls the desk officer had made to verify his identity.

Abby said goodbye, giving Daniel a brief hug and whispering, “Take care, okay?” into his ear. Daniel clung to her for a moment, suddenly on the brink of tears again, ready to ask her for help, to ask her to stop Renton from taking him back.

But then she was distracted by an officer next to her.

“Hey, did you see that?” he said, pointing at the large screen TV mounted behind the check-in desk.

There was a flurry of movement as people stood and moved to see the screen better.

“What is that, a film?”

“No, it’s the news.”

“You’re kidding me!”

“Who’s got the remote? Can we put the sound on?”

Daniel craned his head to see what they were talking about, but Renton bustled him out before he had a chance to see.

There was a car waiting for them outside, a huge beast with blacked-out windows. Renton sat in the back with Daniel. They drove to the airport where there was a plane waiting to take them back up to RAF Spadeadam.

The rain had begun pelting down in hard, fat drops when they boarded the jet. Daniel and Renton ran across the short space between the private departure lounge and the waiting plane, Daniel with his jacket pulled over his head. By the time they got on board, they were drenched.

It was a small, private jet, only him and Renton and the pilots on board. Renton sat on one side of the aisle, Daniel on the other. He had nothing to say to Renton, who rarely spoke, except to bark out instructions, or scold him for not moving fast enough.

Daniel peeled off his jacket and dropped it on the floor. He sat in a window seat and gazed out at the grey tarmac of the runway, awash with rainwater.

“Pick the jacket up,” Renton growled.

Daniel looked up at him, ready to defy him, to make some snappy comeback which might make him feel a bit better. But one look at Renton wiping rainwater off his shaven head, and staring at him with eyes hidden behind dark glasses, and Daniel picked up the jacket.

The pilot stepped through the door leading to the flight cabin. He was holding a clipboard and a pen, and standing next to Renton he looked puny and small, like a piece of driftwood waiting to be snapped in half.

“Hello, I’m Mike Halston, your pilot today,” he said. He held out his hand to shake.

Renton looked at the hand, and ignored it.

“We’re leaving now,” he said.

It wasn’t a question.

“Um, yes,” the pilot replied, flustered, and lowering his hand. “There’s a storm front moving in, but as we aren’t flying too far, we’ll be all right. It might mean a slight delay for myself and the co-pilot returning, but as this is a single trip for you, that’s nothing for you to worry about.”

“That’s right, it isn’t,” Renton said. “Let’s get going then and stop wasting time.”

Without another word, Halston turned and re-entered the cockpit, shutting the door behind him. Renton settled his bulk into the seat opposite Daniel and looked out of his rain-streaked window. Daniel sighed. This was always the security man’s way. He looked like a bull, and he acted like one too.

The jet’s interior was luxurious. There were six seats, three on either side of a wide aisle. The seats were large and comfortable. Beside the pilot’s cabin door was a flat panel TV screen, currently dormant, its dark screen reflecting a ghostly image of Daniel and Renton in their seats. Daniel thought about asking if it could be switched on, but decided against it. He knew Renton would not agree to it simply because he had asked.

The engines roared to life and minutes later the jet was taxiing to the runway. Daniel strapped his seatbelt on. Nobody had come out and told him to do so, which surprised him. Perhaps the pilot was so annoyed with Renton’s attitude that he wasn’t going to bother with health and safety protocols today. Daniel glanced across the aisle. Renton hadn’t bothered with his seatbelt, it lay dangling from his chair, the strap swinging slowly with the movement of the plane.

Daniel closed his eyes and took a deep breath. This was it then. A short flight back to the north, to the Lake District. They would land at RAF Spadeadam, where they would be met by a car and taken straight back to Sellafield.

Back to his father.

The note of the engine changed, increasing in power, and they began speeding up. Daniel gripped the sides of his seat. He always hated taking off. Once in the air, he would be fine, but take-off and landing released butterflies in his stomach. The jet’s speed increased, and they were magically lifting from the earth and climbing into the grey, leaden sky.

Daniel opened his eyes. He looked out of his window, down at the ground disappearing below them, the rain quickly obscuring its features and landmarks. The weather matched the young boy’s mood. He was fifteen years old, he should have been at school, messing around with his friends, having the time of his life.

These are the happiest days of your life, his mother had once said to him, in one of her rare, lucid moments. And he had been happy once.

These are the happiest days of your lifeBut not anymore. Not since his mother had died, and especially not since the move to Sellafield. If these were the happiest days of his life, then he thought his adult years would be a t*****e beyond endurance.

Suddenly Daniel was snapped out of his reverie by a bright flash of lightning, illuminating the jet’s interior and freezing its image in his mind like a photograph. A massive roar of thunder exploded around the jet, and Daniel clapped his hands over his ears until it died away.

“What the hell was that?” Renton said. He still hadn’t strapped the belt on, but his hands gripped the seat’s arm rests.

Another flash of lightning engulfed the plane. With an electrical fizzing noise, the jet bucked and lurched. Daniel’s stomach flipped and rolled over, and he saw Renton hurled from his seat and hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. The boy looked out of his window, waiting anxiously for the thunder. He threw his arms over his head as this time the thunder swallowed them up, the cabin shaking as it rolled around them like a huge beast, toying with them before it leapt in for the kill.

Finally, the thunder faded away and Renton clambered to his feet.

“What’s that smell?” he said.

Daniel could smell it too, like electrical components burning, an acrid smoky odour.

“Strap yourselves in right now!” the pilot shouted over the intercom. “We’re heading back down!”

Renton scrambled for his seat as the plane bucked again and went into a nosedive. The big man had been reaching for the seat, his fingers almost touching it, when he fell and slid along the length of the cabin floor. The jet’s engines screamed in overdrive as they plummeted to the ground, invisible now in the dull grey cloud surrounding them.

Daniel clung to the seat, the belt holding him in tight, and screwed his eyes shut. We’re going to die! They hadn’t been that long in the air before the lightning hit them. Surely they hadn’t climbed very high, but it seemed as if they had been in this nosedive forever. The cabin shook violently until it seemed it would tear apart under the force of the shaking. Over the roar of the engines, Daniel heard Renton screaming.

We’re going to die!Another intense flash of lightning illuminated the cabin, followed quickly by several more short bursts. The effect was of a stop motion film. Daniel saw Renton struggling to his feet, only to topple over again, his face twisted in fear. A hostess trolley had broken open and plastic glasses, drinks cans, napkins and packets of biscuits flew around the cabin, raining down on the head of security, who was now cowering with his hands over his head.

In the last burst of lightning, Daniel looked out of his window, his eyes widening in horror. If he had consciously thought about it, he would have accepted that their situation could be no worse than it was. They were all in serious trouble and, depending upon the pilot’s skill and a huge amount of luck, they were most likely about to die. But now, as he stared out of the plane’s window, his stomach dropped and on a subconscious level, he realised they were in far worse trouble than he had thought. Frozen like a photograph in the last burst of lightning, a reptilian creature clung onto a damaged section of wing, its claws embedded on the plane’s surface.

Daniel threw his hands over his head as another clap of thunder exploded around them, the jet vibrating and juddering enough to rip it apart. When the boy looked up again, he could just see the wing in the grey light, but there was no creature clinging to it.

Before he had time to wonder if he had imagined it, they slammed into solid ground, and Daniel’s whole world exploded in his face.