Day of the Predator - Alex Scarrow [29]
‘Yes, we’re in the correct place all right,’ whispered Liam. He watched them coming towards them, the man turning to talk to the group, gesturing emphatically with his hands. Liam gently closed the door until it clicked. ‘They’re just coming up now. We can tag along on the end,’ he whispered.
He waited until the muted sound of the man’s droning voice and the shuffle and slap of trainers on the polished linoleum floor passed them by before he cracked the door open again and peeked out. The last kids in the school party were just ahead, three blonde-haired girls deeply involved in a mumbled conversation, clearly too interested in chatting to each other to even pretend to be listening to the guide up front.
‘Now!’ Liam mouthed, and stepped out behind them, Becks swiftly following.
He fell in step at the back of the group and when one of the girls casually glanced back over her shoulder he quickly managed to mimic the laid-back swagger of one of the boys up ahead.
‘Oh,’ said the girl. ‘Thought we were, like, you know, the last.’
Liam shrugged and smiled. ‘Guess, like, not,’ he replied, doing his best to bury the Irish in his voice.
Her gaze lingered a moment longer, a flickering smile for him. Then she turned back round and was back to gossiping in a conspiratorial murmur with the other two again.
Liam puffed out a silent gasp of relief. It looked like they’d jumped the first hurdle – successfully sneaking on to the back of the tour party and managing to pass themselves off as yet two more kids who might actually have preferred a trip to Disneyland or Universal Studios than wandering around a bunch of clinically clean corridors. He grinned at Becks and then almost immediately wished he hadn’t. The smile she returned gave him that weird flip-flopping sensation in his stomach again.
Liam, you daft idiot … It’s just Bob in a dress, for crying out loud!
He wished Sal could have found some other clothes for the support unit, something baggy, drab and unflattering. And why a wig with hair like that? Why that colour? He’d always loved that copper red. His first crush at school, Mary O’Donnell, she’d had hair that bewitching colour of fiery red.
Oh, saints preserve me … she’s just a meat robot, so she is.
CHAPTER 17
2015, Texas
‘And here we are!’ announced Mr Kelly to the group. ‘We’re about to enter the central reactor containment area. The whole experimental chamber is surrounded by an electro-magnetic field to filter out possible interference from all manner of electronic devices. Basically, we’re going to be walking inside a giant electro-magnet. So if you kids have any iPods, laptops, iPhones or memory cards with data on you’d rather not lose, may I suggest you place them on the table here before we step through?’ he said, indicating a table beside a pair of thick metal doors.
Liam watched with amusement as virtually every student sighed and then proceeded to reach into their rucksacks to pull out all manner of shiny metal and plastic gadgets and gizmos.
Eventually done, Mr Kelly tapped an entry code on to the large metal doors and he smiled expectantly as they swung slowly inwards.
At last, the gaggle of teenagers in his charge seemed to be shaken out of their torpid state of disinterest. A shared gasp rippled among them as their eyes swept up to take in the large spherical chamber, seemingly constructed entirely out of football-sized ball-bearings.
‘As you can see, the entire chamber is lined with charged magnets, which act as a completely impenetrable barrier for any sort of FM radio signals, WiFi signals, electrical currents, atmospheric static and so on, the sort of things that can affect our readings from the test runs.’
He led them into the spherical chamber along a raised walkway, towards a platform thirty feet in diameter. Mr Kelly pointed towards a rather less