Tunnels 06 - Terminal

at the purple lights, even Karl here.’ He ruffled the boy’s hair.
    Will exchanged a glance with Elliott, who was frowning.
    ‘That’s not good news. We need to deal with whatever they’ve implanted in you,’ she said, putting into words precisely what Will was thinking.
    ‘You can do that?’ Jürgen asked. ‘How? And why?’
    ‘I’ve got a piece of kit in my Bergen that was developed to neutralise the Dark Light,’ Will replied, referring to the Purger. ‘What they put in your head might be dangerous for you, or anyone with you. I was programmed to chuck myself off anything high enough to kill me.’
    ‘I see,’ Jürgen said with a nod. ‘Then we should deal with that later, but first there’s a more pressing matter to address.’ He steered Will and Elliott into a room crammed with medical equipment. A man looked up from his microscope. ‘ Guten Tag, ’ he said.
    ‘English, Werner, you need to speak in English,’ Jürgen reminded him.
    Although Werner had his brother’s blue eyes and similar features, he was taller and far thinner. He was obviously the elder of the two, his blond hair very patchy on his scalp.
    ‘Okay, in English,’ he said.
    ‘You need some of our blood?’ Will asked.
    ‘That’s right. I’ve been working to identify the viral bodies so I can isolate them,’ Werner explained, inclining his head at the microscope. ‘So far I haven’t been successful.’ Then he got to his feet and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. ‘You see, this ward you’re in was established because there was always the spectre of a new bacterium or viral strain seeping into our world from the surface. And because we would lack any natural resistance to it, it was feared that it might rip through the population. This plague that struck us was too virulent forour doctors to do anything in time.’
    ‘But you know how to prepare a vaccine from our blood?’ Will asked.
    Werner nodded. ‘The antigens in you will mean that I have a ready-made vaccine to inoculate us, and any other survivors we find, against the plague.’ He asked Will and Elliott to sit down, then used syringes to extract samples of blood from each of them. He told them that once he’d prepared the vaccine, either he or his brother would test it out first because if it went wrong then they couldn’t both afford to be incapacitated at the same time.
    ‘That’ll be me then … the guineafowl,’ Jürgen said, nodding sanguinely.
    ‘I think it’s guinea pig ,’ Will corrected him.
    ‘So you don’t need us any longer? Elliott asked.
    ‘No, but if you’re agreeable, would you mind staying until we know the vaccine is viable? I might need some more samples,’ Werner said. ‘What’s the English expression – better safe than sorry.’
    ‘Okay … but how long do you want us to stick around?’ Will asked, eager to leave the city and return to their base in the jungle.
    ‘Forty-eight hours maximum,’ Werner replied, already taking their blood samples over to a centrifuge as he began his work.
    Jürgen escorted Will and Elliott from the laboratory and down a corridor, past several doors. ‘We have some rooms for you along here.’ He indicated the right-hand side of the corridor. ‘These are all isolation rooms, self-contained living quarters with their own distinct air filtration so you can remove your masks in them to eat and drink.’
    They’d passed several of these isolation rooms when Will caught sight of something through the inspection window in one of the doors that made him pull up sharply.
    ‘I don’t believe it!’ he exclaimed as he saw the figure perched on the edge of the sleeping cot, its skin rough and whorled like the bark of an old tree. ‘That’s a bushman, isn’t it? How did you get him to come here?’
    ‘I’ve never seen one alive before,’ Elliott said, going to the window to peer in.
    The bushman had his head towards her, his small brown eyes the only recognisable human feature until he opened his mouth and she saw his pink tongue. He appeared to be saying something.
    ‘But why is he here?’ Will pressed Jürgen.
    ‘I was one of a small team in the Institute of Antiquities that have been working with the indigenous population – or the tribespeople, as we refer to them – for the last decade,’ Jürgen replied. ‘We established contact on an expedition and kept it from the military, who had it in their minds that they were hostile. Actually they had no idea what was in that