Numbers 3: Infinity Read Online Free PDF Page A

itself.
    It’s extraordinary, a split second of pain and despair and rage and panic. I’ve never felt anything like it. I can’t explain, except it feels like death from the outside in, every surface screaming, with scraping, gnawing, piercing pain all over his body, and death from the inside out, every cell collapsing, all coming together in a white point of agony.
    I want to look away, to break away from his pain, but there’s something else. His number shimmers in my head. The more I try and get a fix on it, the more it dances in andout of focus, light and dark all mixed up. There one minute, gone the next.
    The whole thing – the death, the shimmering – makes me feel giddy. The ground’s shifting underneath my feet.
    ‘Adam,’ Saul says. ‘Sit down. Have a drink.’
    ‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘but I don’t. Drink. That stuff.’
    I do sit down, though. Ain’t got much choice – my legs have turned to jelly.
    Saul nods at the other two men, and they melt away into the darkness.
    ‘You took some finding,’ Saul says. He sits down next to me, reaches out for the whisky bottle and swigs the dregs.
    I’m concentrating on my breathing, trying to control the panic that’s washing through me.
    Who is this man? What sort of death could feel like that?
    ‘Why were you looking?’ I say, my voice higher than I want it to be. ‘What do you want me for?’
    ‘I’ve come to take you away from all this.’
    It’s like there’s a hand clutching at my throat. I told Sarah. I told her. They’re after me and they want to take me away.
    ‘Take me? Where? Why?’
    ‘We work for the government. We’re putting this country back on track. We need people like you, Adam. Strong people. People who can lead. Gifted people.’
    That throws me.
    ‘Gifted,’ I say, trying out the word for size. Nobody’s ever called me gifted before. ‘But the government don’t want to know,’ I say. ‘I tried to tell them two years ago and they tried to shut me up, to silence me.’
    ‘They arrested you.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘For murder.’
    ‘But I didn’t do it! I was being framed. I didn’t kill nobody.’
    I’m properly scared now. Whoever this guy is, whatever he is, he knows a lot about me. Too much.
    ‘That was then. Things are different now. We want your help.’
    ‘What help could I be now? I already told everyone the end was coming – and it came.’
    ‘But it’s not the end, Adam,’ he explains. ‘It’s the start, the start of a new world where people like you are listened to, respected, valued. You can make a difference.’
    I don’t know what to say. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘People listened to you before. They started getting out of London. They’ll listen to you again. You can be a figurehead. Where you see danger, you can warn people – get them away from areas that are going to flood, out of buildings that are going to collapse. You can get children to feeding stations. You can help, Adam. You can help us rebuild this country.’
    I don’t believe him. Why would the people that tried to silence me before want my help now?
    ‘It took you long enough to find me. I’m chipped. You could’ve picked me up any time you liked.’
    ‘We’ve been putting the information infrastructure back together. The software, the systems. We had the drones but we couldn’t communicate with them. We can now. We’ve got phones, too – a basic network up and running again. We’re piecing things back together, back how they used to be, but we need people like you.’
    ‘I want to help people, of course I do, but—’
    ‘You don’t have to live like this,’ he carries on as if I hadn’t said anything. ‘You don’t have to live the way this lot do, sitting in the dirt like savages. Your kids don’t have to gohungry or cold. They don’t have to be ill.’
    ‘What d’you mean?’
    ‘There are places with electricity, heat, food, medicine.’
    ‘In England?’
    ‘England, Scotland, Wales. There are pockets of