Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  He shook his head.

  ‘I’m standing mute.’ He sounded petulant.

  ‘I’m your fucking wife.’

  Dougie was devastated. Torn between his morals, and his heart. Morality lost.

  ‘I love you,’ said Dougie; and for a moment, just a moment, his eyes were damp with tears.

  Chapter 23

  Three years later.

  It was Sunday the eighth of June, 2014.

  Battle of London Day.

  One day after the Occlusion when, for a whole hour, the sky was filled by flying demonic creatures who blacked out the sun and turned day into night.

  For nearly eighteen hours, demons had been stalking the streets of London, waging war with humanity. Four Breaches took place on Occlusion day in the city of London. Four irruptions of the damned and demonkind.

  After the first bewildering hours of chaos, the fightback began. The British Army had established a defensive position along the entire circular length of the M25 motorway. Inside that cordon, battle raged all day and night on Friday the seventh of June. A day later, the war was continuing.

  Dougie put the riot helmet on and felt like a spaceman. He’d not been in uniform for years, and he’d never done riot duty even then. But it was all hands on deck today.

  ‘Right lads,’ said Phil Matthews, and opened the van doors.

  Phil jumped out first. Then two more Whitechapel lads. Then three armed response officers, then Dougie. He landed briskly on the tarmac of the road and looked around.

  They were in Camberwell Green, at the junction with Denmark Hill and Camberwell Church Street, just across from the Camberwell Green Surgery. He and his fellow riot squad officers fanned out.

  Every cop in London was on duty this day.

  ‘Fucking mad,’ said Phil Matthews, looking around.

  Phil and Dougie had been pals for years. They’d played rugby together. They’d got drunk together. They’d even played rugby while drunk together, and had repented at leisure.

  ‘Let’s tool up,’ said Wayne Anderson. He was the DCI, Dougie’s boss at Whitechapel nick, where Dougie had transferred to from Peckham, after the business with Joe Jacobs. Wayne was grey-haired, world-weary, whipcord lean in a way that betrayed him as a fanatical cyclist. His eyes glittered at the prospect of battle.

  They pushed their way through the mob of armoured riot police who were milling about as if they were in a mosh pit. ‘Space yourselves out, for fuck’s sake!’ Dougie roared. The coppers started to space themselves out.

  In the middle of the junction, splayed across the road, were two armoured trucks with gun racks in the back. Pairs of black-clad SCO19 officers were handing out Heckler and Koch automatic rifles and gangster-style Uzi machine pistols and Glock semi-automatic handguns to police officers who’d never handled a firearm in their lives.

  Earlier that day, Dougie had been told, all the prisoners in all the police stations in London had been released. The jails were empty too, so that the prison officers could join the police and army presence.

  Out on the street, Yardies and East End Faces and Yakuza gangsters and Chinese Triad gang members were on patrol and openly carrying weapons, including ceremonial swords. Today the Gangs of London and the Filth were on the same side.

  All the soldiers in the London barracks had been mobilised, including the Queen’s Household Cavalry. On the news bulletins it had looked like an Olympic opening ceremony as Royal soldiers with golden breast plates and silver-scabbarded swords trotted their proud horses down the Mall next to camo’d infantry in fatigues.

  Phil and Wayne and Dougie reached the nearer van, and stood at the arse end of the queue for guns. The sun was bright. They were carrying their heavy helmets now. Dougie mopped the sweat off his brow with a paper tissue.

  ‘Who’s in charge of this fucking shambles?’ he said after some considerable time.

  ‘Oi,’ said one of the patrolling SCO19 officers, reprovingly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stay in line, sunshine.’

  A moment elapsed.

  Then Dougie walked out of the queue. ‘You, you and you,’ said Dougie, touching copper arms at random. ‘Go to the front of the queue, grab some guns, walk along the line and pass them out. Three guns each, three packs of ammo, hand ’em out, run back to the van. Chop chop. I’ve seen better organisation in a fucking Starbuck’s.’

  The man in black heard this and stiffened. He walked across and stood up close to Dougie.

  ‘Every gun has to be signed for,’ he growled. ‘I don’t know who the fuck you –’

  Dougie smiled, all charm. ‘Don’t talk bollocks, man. We’ll all be dead by end of play. We don’t need any more fucking paperwork.’ His tone was mild, his authority total.

  It helped that he was half a foot taller than the authorised firearms officer.

  The man in black blinked. There was a puzzled look in his eyes. He backed away. That made Dougie look even taller.

  The man in black cleared his throat.

  ‘Do as the man says,’ he ordered brusquely, and the three cops Dougie had picked ran to the van. Within minutes, the queue for guns became self-organising.

  ‘Nice one,’ conceded Phil. He was used to Dougie’s ways. Dougie shrugged.

  Dougie was one of the last to get tooled up. He took a handgun, a submachine gun, and a bandolier of grenades. He felt like a drug lord, and he kind of liked it. ‘Where’s Silver Command?’ he asked.

  ‘On its way,’ an AFO grunted. They were so heavily armoured and visored, they all looked alike.

  ‘And what’s your name?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Tell me your name or I’ll pick you up by your ankles and shake you,’ Dougie advised him.

  The AFO was a big man, gym trained, a killer with a gun. But Dougie had a way of intimidating even men tougher than him: and this guy was a long way from that.

  ‘Sergeant Barry Clifton,’ he admitted.

  ‘Good man, that’s the attitude. I’m DI Douglas Randall, Whitechapel CID, on temporary secondment to your wretched apology for a riot squad. Right now, it’s evident to anyone who is not drooling in the final throes of dementia that Superintendent Nettleby has either a) got caught up on some other urgent call or b) is a useless cunt who has forgotten to establish any kind of chain of command in this great fucking mob of an army. So, until he arrives and wrests control from you, thus proving the falsity of b), you’re in fucking charge of everyone who is here, no matter what their rank, okay?’

  Clifton blinked; shocked; awed; taking it.

  ‘Sergeant Clifton, I suggest you get your troops in position. Tip some cars over and use them as sangars. Put snipers up high. Make sure everyone who has a gun can fire a gun. Treat this just as you would any siege scenario, but bear in mind that we are the ones under siege.’ Dougie was beaming now. ‘Let’s face it, man, this is a headless fucking chicken of an army. If we do have to die, let’s not die like wankers, eh?’

  Dougie stopped talking. Waited for a response.

  Sergeant Clifton spoke into his radio, calmly: ‘All units from Sergeant John Clifton, SCO19, Leman Street. I am now assuming operational responsibility for this entire operation. We have between ten and twenty SCO19 officers on the scene at present by my guesstimate, and each of you will take active command of a stick of twenty to thirty riot officers. Take positions, space yourselves out, remember we are expecting the enemy from our east but don’t leave our flanks or rear exposed. I want snipers on all floors and the roofs of the surrounding buildings, and get someone up that tower, the whatever it is.’

  ‘It’s a surgery, it used to be a bank,’ Dougie advised him.

  Clifton withered him with a look. Dougie took the rebuke, with a half-hidden smile.

  ‘Weapons training drill to commence ad lib,’ Clifton continued into his radio. ‘I want a sitrep every ten minutes. Out.’

  ‘That’s the ticket,’ said Dougie, smiling.

  Skip back nineteen hours.


  ‘Look!’ Angela called. Dougie stepped out into the garden. It was twelve noon exactly. He stared up and saw black clouds swirling in the sky, in fast-moving patterns like oil flowing. It was getting darker. And it was cold; as bitterly cold as a winter’s day, even though it was early June.

  ‘This is it?’ said Angela.

  ‘This is it,’ Dougie said.

  ‘Solar eclipse?’

  ‘Yeah. The sun eclipsed by – whatever. Creatures.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Millions. Billions. To fill the sky like that –’

  ‘The Occlusion. That’s what they’re calling it. The End of Days.’

  Dougie could see stars; the sun was obscured entirely but there were still clear patches of sky left, and the stars and the moon shone through the gaps.

  ‘That’s bullshit. All that apocalypse stuff, it’s –’

  ‘Is it? These are not aliens, you know. It’s not mass psychosis. It’s – this. Creatures from –’

  ‘Another dimension. I read twelve articles on it and a Wikipedia page. They’re from another dimension,’ Dougie insisted.

  ‘Bollocks! That’s just a bunch of clever-arsed smarty-pants being in bloody denial! That’s just – you have to call this stuff what it really is, Doug. There’s no point lying to ourselves. You’ve seen these bloody creatures on the telly. You’ve seen the – horns. And the other stuff. They’re - it’s Hell. It’s an invasion from Hell.’

  The sky got blacker.

  By 12.05pm it was pitch black: blacker than any night has ever been. All the cars in the capital stopped driving. All planes were grounded.

  Dougie held Angela in his arms. She wept.

  After a while she stopped weeping.

  They were engulfed in total blackness; and almost total silence. Dogs did not bark. Birds did not sing. There was no traffic. The trains were all stopped in stations. Televisions and radios were switched off. Two streets away a mobile phone rang, and it was like a gunshot.

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ he said softly.

  ‘Let’s stay here.’

  ‘It’ll be warmer. We can turn the light on.’

  ‘I’d rather stay here.’

  ‘You know I love you?’

  ‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’

  ‘I said - ‘

  ‘Yeah yeah. I heard.’ Her voice seemed louder, in the darkness of the day. ‘Oh fuck, Dougie. Fuck fuck fuck. Who’d have thought it, eh?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  After an hour the clouds dispersed and the invasion of Earth by Hell began in earnest.

  Memories of his shared moments of terror with Angela stalked Dougie’s mind, as he and Phil and Wayne marched along Peckham Road. Looking for a good place to make their last stand.

  Eventually they joined a line of armed officers outside a pawnbrokers, next to a shop called Herbal Source.

  Like all the other cops on duty, Dougie’s gun was loaded with silver bullets, crudely made en masse by armies of steel workers who had melted down truck loads of commandeered silver in vats. Once the bullets were moulded, each had been blessed by a priest trained in the rites of exorcism. These bullets had proved to be far more effective than standard ordnance. But it took at least a dozen such bullets to slay a single enemy soldier. So in practical terms, they stood not a chance.

  The enemy were now, they had been told over their radios, marching south and north and east and west, from their point of origin out of a vast chasm in the ground in Central Peckham.

  Occasionally Dougie saw Catholic priests in their black robes walking like shadows along the ranks of the riot police, administering the last rites in advance. Insane.

  Dougie waited. He was ready for death.

  He waited some more. Nothing happened.

  After an hour Dougie and most of his mates took off their helmets. It was far too hot to stand around with those bloody visors on.

  Every now and then a new streak of white daubed the sky as a fighter plane shot past.

  After two hours, jackets came off. The defending army stretched the length of Peckham Road, and on to Peckham High Street; down Peckham Rye; then curved round on to East Dulwich Road and Grove Vale; then up Dog Kennel Hill and on to Denmark Hill, before joining up the circle back at Camberwell Green.

  The British Army had fought valiantly for a day and a night against the creatures emerging from the Peckham Breach. Thrice they had prevailed, blowing the monsters into pieces. But overnight the fragmented demons had grown back and were stronger than ever. Silver missiles had been used to some effect in the early hours. But the army were running short of such missiles. And it was predicted that the troops would have to withdraw soon, with the ground troops retreating by transport helicopter to beyond the M25. And when that happened, the thin blue line of police officers would be all that was left to protect London from the marauding army.

  The rumour was, that had already happened. The Army had evacuated London; they were on their own.

  But no one knew for sure. There were no news bulletins. The senior officers at the scene weren’t being briefed. And after hours of being camped up at Camberwell Green, Dougie and his fellow officers had still not caught a glimpse of their adversary.

  Dougie found it hard, they all found it hard, to sustain a mood of imminent doom.

  So he phoned Angela for a natter, and she was in a surprisingly good mood too. There were no demons sighted in East London yet, which was where Angela and Dougie were living. And so Dougie began to dare to hope.

  Dougie and Phil and Wayne took part in an impromptu sing-song that rippled along the police line; that cheered them all up. Phil had a beautiful tenor voice. Wayne had a soft baritone. Dougie had a low bass range with many of the notes missing.

  Someone broke into a sports shop and stole a load of footballs, and impromptu pitches were created in the middle of the road, with helmets for goalposts.

  Locals organised trays of hot tea and cakes. Dougie was offered sex by at least a dozen horny girls, some of them posh birds, some chavs, all of them desperate for one final fuck. He said no, but he was tempted.

  The battle buses were rocking as less scrupulous riot cops took advantage of their opportunity. There were male groupies too, for the female cops. An equal opportunities orgy to mark the end of days.

  Attack helicopters and air force jets hovered loudly above them from time to time, before racing off to patrol another area.

  News came through via Facebook that the Army had lost an entire regiment in Tottenham Court Road but reinforcements were pouring in from other barracks in the UK.

  Someone else posted a Facebook story saying that ten more Breaches had appeared, but that a regiment of angels had joined the fray and were winning. That prompted a bout of cheering. Someone else started a story that leprechauns had invaded Oxford Street.

  By this point it was evident that all information arriving by text or tweet had to be treated with caution, for someone was surely making this shit up. Dougie made a few calls, and confirmed to his own satisfaction that the situation was in fact unchanged. There were four Breaches, many creatures from another dimension aka ‘Hell’ were invading, and our side were losing.

  Finally the Silver Command vehicle drove past, on the final leg of its long journey around the thin blue circle of Walworth and Peckham. There was a weary cheer.

  It carried on driving. The cheers died down.

  Someone produced a bottle of whisky and handed it to Dougie and that slipped down nicely.

  Seven hours had passed. The Silver Command control van came round again, and this time it stopped, just in front of the park. Superintendent Nettleby got out. He was a short bustling man in his late 30s, who in Dougie’s view didn’t have either the balls or the experience for such a command role. He peered around nervously at the riot troops. Then he got back in his van and stayed there.

  Wanker, thought Dougie.

  A couple of PCs figured out there was an off licence behind one of the b
oarded-up windows. So the boards were ripped off and the windows were smashed open and booze was passed around. A party atmosphere prevailed. Dougie drank most of a bottle of good red wine on top of the whisky he’d had earlier, and felt better for it. Why die sober?

  Eight hours had passed.

  A few of the lads had iPods and were listening to podcasts of comedy shows, or to rock music. Two heavily armoured coppers started to dance, to the rhythm of a tune they sang themselves. They were carapaced like beetles but one was a bloke and one was a girl, and they observed their dancing positions to perfection.

  Nine hours had passed. The police line was completely ragged now. Some of the drunker cops were sleeping it off. The battle buses continued to rock with passion. Mothers sat in their front gardens cradling their children and crying.

  Then a car pulled up and three men in suits, with long grey beards, got out. They looked around, glaring, then strode across to the Silver Command van, and banged on the door.

  Eventually Superintendent Nettleby stumbled out, looking considerably the worse for wear. Much muttering and murmuring and waving of hands between the grey-beards and the tired and emotional Nettleby ensued. All of it observed by Dougie and the other riot cops.

  Eventually, Nettleby took the grey bearded men into the Silver Command van. Dougie and the other cops stared at the van, wondering what was happening inside.

  After twenty-nine minutes, the grey-beards and Nettleby emerged. The grey-beards got into their car, and drove off. Nettleby was left behind, pale-faced and wobbly on his legs,

  Finally, after ten and a half hours, the riot squad was stood down. Nettleby, Silver Commander for Walworth and Peckham on Battle of London Day, gave a short speech to the assembled throng:

  ‘I am able to inform you, um, that the final outcome of today’s battle is this. We have won, the danger has been averted. The enemy are confined to various defined areas of the city according to a negotiated peace settlement. In short, London has been saved,’ he said. ‘Just don’t ask me how.’

  ‘How?’ cried a voice.

  Nettleby – who despite his relative inexperience had until this day had been renowned as one of the most unflappable officers in the force - responded with an look of utter despair. ‘They say,’ he announced, ‘it’s all down to warlocks.’