Tunnels 06 - Terminal

Chester isn’t here.’
    It took Will a few seconds to process this. Then he managed to open his eyes again and focus on her. Her red hair was clean and perfect, and she was smiling. She radiatedbeauty, just like she had when he’d first met her on Parry’s estate. It felt to Will as though he’d gone back in time.
    ‘Oh, hi,’ he said, pretending to cough so he had an excuse to pull his hand away from her. ‘Where’s Elliott?’ he asked croakily. His mouth was chronically dry, so he began to reach towards the jug and plastic cup on the bedside cabinet.
    ‘Water?’ she anticipated. ‘Let me get you some. You must be, like, so thirsty.’
    He tried to sit up to take the glass from her, but the stabbing pain in his abdomen put a stop to that.
    ‘No,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t try to move.’
    With Stephanie’s assistance, Will drank the water greedily. ‘Where am I?’ he asked between mouthfuls.
    ‘Hospital. They’ve got it working again. They’ve even got the electricity back on now, but they hadn’t when they did your operation here.’
    ‘Operation?’ he repeated, the water going down the wrong way and making him cough, for real this time. ‘Why, what did they do to me?’
    Then it started to come back to him. He remembered the Armagi and Hermione, and then – but only very vaguely – what happened on the bonnet of the black Bentley.
    ‘Look, I should let Parry know you’re awake. All right?’ Stephanie said. She seemed in a hurry to leave the room.
    It wasn’t Parry that appeared a few moments later, but someone else. Will was rather startled as he hadn’t heard anyone come in, and all of a sudden there was a man standing at the end of the bed.
    ‘How are you doing, Will?’ Jiggs asked.
    ‘Who are you? Will asked, narrowing his eyes at the unfamiliar figure, with his unkempt beard and grubby-lookingfatigues. ‘You’re not a doctor, are you? Where’s Parry?’
    ‘He’ll be here soon. And no, I’m not a doctor,’ Jiggs laughed. ‘I forget that you and I haven’t really met before, not formally. I’m Jiggs. You might have seen me before, but it would have been just for a moment … on the edge of the pore in the inner world.’
    Will didn’t answer.
    ‘It’s funny – I know you so well, but you don’t know me. I came on that mission to seal the inner world off, with you and Drake and Sweeney and the rest of the team, and the time I’m talking about is when I ambushed a pair of Limiters,’ Jiggs said, trying to help Will out. ‘Don’t you remember at all? I took out the first Limiter with a …’ Jiggs made a slashing motion across his throat, ‘and carried the second one over into the pore with me.’
    Will was squinting at the rather nondescript man with his darting, alert eyes. ‘Oh, yes, Jiggs . Of course. You’re the invisible man,’ he said. ‘Hello.’
    They shook hands, which was a little peculiar after all that they’d been through at the same time, but not quite together.
    ‘I’ve spoken to Parry and he’s on his way,’ Jiggs said. ‘He’s got his work cut out for him right now. You know he’s filling in as Prime Minister in the emergency government until they can get things back on track.’
    Will was staring through the window, feeling somewhat detached from everything. ‘More of it is coming back to me … more of what happened at the end,’ he said quietly. ‘She’s gone, hasn’t she?’
    ‘Yes, Elliott, and all the Styx – they sort of disappeared,’ Jiggs confirmed.
    ‘She told me she was going away. And, unless I’ve dreamtit, she had …’ Will wasn’t sure how to put it, so he tried to indicate a pair of insect legs by pointing behind his head.
    ‘She did. When she was in the tank with Drake and me, she complained about pain in her neck. But it never occurred to me that …’ Jiggs trailed off.
    ‘And Drake?’ Will asked all of a sudden. ‘I heard his voice after that Styx woman dragged me out of the car, and then …. were there shots?’
    Jiggs nodded. ‘That was it for Drakey, I’m sorry to say. But he’d been so badly irradiated when the bomb in the pore went off, he didn’t have much time left anyway.’
    Shaking his head slowly, Will didn’t speak for a second. ‘And what about Chester?’ he asked, very reluctantly, because he thought he already knew the answer. Otherwise his friend would have been there at his bedside too.
    Jiggs shifted uneasily as he answered. ‘No, he didn’t make it either. I’m