THE BATTLE FOR AUCKLAND

Tane rode on the back of Fatboy’s motorcycle with the cool night breeze on his face and the touch of Rebecca on his lips.

She had been strangely calm as they had come down the stairs from her mother’s room. Strangely accepting.

Fatboy had given him the backpack containing the Chronophone and handed him a spare helmet, but before he could put it on, Rebecca had been in his arms, her hands around his neck.

She wasn’t crying. In fact, she had seemed stronger, more determined than before. She had spoken quietly, her lips right next to his ear. “What I said this morning, about not knowing you, it wasn’t true. I wanted to hurt you. I was angry.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Tane had put his hands on her arms.

He’d said, “You were right to be angry. I was stupid.”

“You weren’t stupid; you were hurt. I knew that and I should have accepted it.”

Tane had started to say something, but she had put a finger on his lips to hush him.

She’d said, “I’ve known you all my life. I’ve always known you. I will always know you. But I’m not strong.”

Tane began, “You’re the strongest—”

She hushed him again and said, “I’m not strong. But you make me strong.”

Then her lips had brushed in passing against his, and the engine of the Jeep had roared and she was gone.

Tane had looked up a little guiltily at Fatboy, but there was no anger on his brother’s face, just a quiet smile.

I will always know you.

For the first time, right then, it had occurred to Tane that he might never see her again.

The engine of the Harley gave its usual throaty chuckle, and Fatboy swerved in between two deserted cars and up the motorway on-ramp, heading toward the city.

The motorway was clogged with cars, all of them deserted. The owners, unable to go forward or backward, had simply left their vehicles and their belongings and either started walking south or had gone back to their homes.

Fatboy had to pick his path carefully. The cars ramming their way down the motorway had not kept in nice straight lanes but had zigged and zagged all over the road.

A couple of times they found themselves in a dead end in the maze of vehicles and had to get off and push the heavy bike backward in order to try a different route.

It was eleven o’clock by the time they made it as far as spaghetti junction—the main motorway interchange.

The going was easier after that. Most of the traffic was heading south. Heading back north into the city, there were fewer cars. Bigger gaps. They made good time up between the lines of abandoned vehicles.

Not entirely abandoned.

From more than a couple of cars, frightened faces stared out at them as they glided past. Either not knowing what to do or too afraid to do it, or both.

As they got closer, they could see several small fires burning in the city center.

Once they were off the motorway and into the city, the avalanche of abandoned cars disappeared. This was the northern side of the city. Anyone in their right minds was on the southern side, trying to get on the Southern Motorway.

As they came off the flyover onto Nelson Street, a gang of drunken youths in a brand-new Mercedes convertible swung out of the darkness and tried to sideswipe them.

A skinny kid standing up on the backseat threw a bottle at them, but it just shattered on the road behind them.

Fatboy calmly accelerated away from them, swerving around abandoned vehicles, the side pegs scraping on the ground. The Mercedes engine roared as it gave chase.

A bus was parked sideways across the road at the intersection with Victoria Street, and two cars were tangled together in a smash on the other side of it. Fatboy gunned the bike through the gap, and Tane heard a satisfying screech of brakes behind them as the driver of the Mercedes realized his car couldn’t fit where the bike could.

A small block of shops was burning fiercely just across the road from the Skytower, the flames brighter than the surrounding streetlights, burning back the darkness of the central city street. Looters, or vandals, Tane thought. It seemed that antibodies and macrophages were not the only dangers in Auckland city this night.

Left unattended, the fire would quickly spread to nearby buildings, and the whole city center could soon be ablaze. A massive funeral pyre for Auckland. But even as they swung around the corner by the entrance to the Skytower casino, they could see red flashing lights arriving from the opposite direction and a fire engine rolled smoothly to a stop in the middle of the road. It was a pumper, with a roof-mounted water nozzle. The crew quickly and efficiently set to work.

Fatboy pulled the Harley up outside the main doors to the casino. The huge glass doors were shut, and a quick shake by Tane ascertained that they were locked as well.

The casino never shut. But it was shut now. Inside, only the massive water feature, a thin sheet of water cascading two stories down a sheer glass plate, showed any signs of life. The lights that never went out, were out. The gaming rooms above them were silent.

Tane got back on and Fatboy gunned the bike past the busy fire crew, around the corner, and down the concrete ramp into the underground car park.

The barrier arms were down, but the Harley squeezed past, just, and Fatboy kicked down the stand of the bike right outside the main elevators.

“We have to go up to the lobby,” he said, “then down the escalator to the base of the Skytower itself.”

“I hope the elevators are still working,” Tane said.

And they were.

The radio produced nothing but static.

Manderson had said it was tuned to the right frequency, but when she pressed the CALL button and released it, all she got was a loud squawk. Had they knocked the frequency knob somehow? She desperately tried every setting on the radio as she drove, her eyes flicking between the road and the radio. What she had to tell them would help; it might even turn the battle. But only if they had enough time to use the information.

It was slow going. It wasn’t far to the naval base, as the crow flies, and if she’d had a boat, she could have cut straight across the harbor and been there in a matter of minutes.

But traveling by road meant heading north and then cutting back east through Greenhithe and Albany. And that proved to be a circuitous maze of blocked roads.

She played with the knobs on the radio as she maneuvered the Jeep through the constricted streets, and by the time she had reached the motorway overpass, she had managed to get through to the command center.

It was Manderson who answered the radio. “I thought I told you to hide away somewhere nice and deep,” he drawled.

Rebecca stopped on the overpass and looked north toward the upper harbor highway. Along its length, Rebecca could see lights moving, vehicles, and soldiers with flashlights. There was no second line of defense. The line was just too long. It stretched from the beach at Mairangi Bay along through Albany and Greenhithe, all the way out to West Harbor.

If the line was breached, then Auckland was lost.

A flight of jets screamed just over her head, and the hillside in the distance, already blazing, flared like the sun for a brief second. A shock wave rattled the car windows a moment later. In that flash, though, she saw the reason for all the activity around her. The terror of Auckland.

In the flash of the incendiary bombs, she saw the long white cloud of the fog, stretching down the hillside, engulfing the North Harbor stadium and rolling forward toward them.

“I have to talk to Stony,” she said urgently.

“He’s busy,” Manderson said. “If we don’t stop this fog, or at least slow it down for a few hours, Auckland is going to become the biggest catastrophe the world has ever seen.”

“I can help,” Rebecca insisted.

“He really is too busy. We’ve had lab results come in on the chemical composition of the fog, so there’s a lot of pressure to come up with some answers.”

Rebecca could see that arguing was just going to waste a lot of time and produce no result. She said instead, “You can’t shoot them. The…creatures.”

“We know,” Manderson said curtly.

“You can’t shoot them and you can’t blow them up.”

“Not true. We’ve been knocking the stuffing out of those things for the last half hour. Claymore mines, rockets, mortars, you name it, we’re chucking it at them.”

“Hasn’t stopped them coming, though, has it,” Rebecca remarked.

“What are you saying?”

“You blow them up and the fog just reclaims them. They just get absorbed back, and the fog starts building another one. All you’re doing is slowing them down.”

There was a silence on the other end of the radio as Manderson thought about that. “You got a solution, or just a problem.”

Rebecca said, “You need water, and lots of it. Water blasters. Fire hoses, if you can get them. They’re soft. High-pressure water will cut right through them, and the water dissolves the material they’re made of. It’ll just run away into storm water drains and out into the ocean. That’s the other thing. Salt. Spray salt, or even salt water on them and it alters the chemical structure of their bodies. Antib…the small ones as well as the big ones.”

Manderson smiled and said, “You call them what you like. Are you sure about this?”

“Pretty much. Have you got any better suggestions?”

Mandy just said, “You just get somewhere safe. I’ll get your information to the boss. He’ll listen to me.”

Rebecca said, “I hope so.”

Tane and Fatboy emerged from the top of the last flight of stairs and stumbled out onto the observation deck of the Skytower. The tower elevators had been locked down. Protected by touch-pad security panels to which they did not know the combinations. The alternative was the stairs, and even that door had been locked, but a set of chairs had made a worthwhile battering ram, and they had been up the first flight in record time.

By the time they had reached the twentieth flight, the vigor was gone and it had just become a long hard slog. Made harder by the thought that this was just the start of the journey up to the peak of the tower. Fatboy took the heavy Chronophone, for which Tane was incredibly grateful. Even on the motorcycle, it had cut into his shoulders through the narrow nylon straps of Rebecca’s schoolbag. Climbing twenty stories with that weight on your back seemed impossible, yet Fatboy carried it indefatigably.

From the observation deck, they could see the entire central city, the darkness, the scattered fires burning in vacant buildings. Here and there, the lights of a car roamed the urban wasteland.

In the north, across the harbor and behind a dark ridge in the distance, the furious fires of technology were burning against the inexorable forces of Mother Nature. The low clouds were punctuated again and again by the thunderclaps of bombs.

The moon was rising in the sky now, and from the height of the Skytower they could see the fog itself, smothering the hillside north of Albany. It stretched as far to the east, toward the east coast beaches, and as far to the west, toward West Harbor and Kumeu, as they could see.

It took them a while to find the next set of stairs, leading from the observation deck up to the Sky Deck, the upper observation deck. That door, fortunately, was not locked.

Tane offered to take the Chronophone up the next section, and to his surprise, Fatboy agreed. It must have been taking more out of him than Tane had thought. He hadn’t complained, though.

The next ten flights of stairs were far more grueling with the weight on his back crushing down on his knees and his leg muscles with every step until finally they came out onto the Sky Deck.

Another door. Locked. Fatboy had brought a screwdriver and forced the lock with that. Tane shone a flashlight up inside the shaft. A metal ladder led straight upward.

The many flights of stairs had been lit by emergency lighting. Here there was none. The only light inside the narrow shaft was the dull glow of moonlight through the open door at the bottom of the ladders and from Tane’s flashlight.

Fatboy lifted the backpack from his shoulders, and Tane breathed a small sigh of relief.

He gripped the ladder tightly. At least the staircases had been safe. Here it would take only one missed rung from one tired leg, and he would be lying at the bottom of the shaft with broken bones, or worse.

Above him Fatboy seemed as tireless as ever. Hand, foot, hand, foot. There seemed to be no end to the succession of metal rungs.

There was. But that only proved to be a small landing, and the start of the next ladder, on the opposite side of the shaft.

The sides of the Skytower were squeezing in on them all the time now as they neared the top.

Tane tried not to think too much of the last section. That would be the hardest. That was up another ladder. On the outside of the tower.