“You’re right. I could have kept you at bay with the threat of using them. That’s why you’ve been so eager to get your hands on them. Probably to use them as your own leverage against China and Russia. I hear they’ve become quite friendly recently.”
“Ja! And they no doubt have nuclear weapons of their own.”
“Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to try and put out a fire by starting a bigger fire. Klein’s nuclear warheads are gone. They will never kill anybody. I’ll never be tempted to fire them at you and kill your innocent citizens. I won’t be brought down to your level, Capri. New Hope is no threat to the German Confederation. The only thing you have to gain here is an ally, if you want it.”
Capri hissed. “Our radars have detected multiple jet signatures over the English Channel. Is it true? Has Klein really disarmed?”
Klein answered, still on the line. “I am glad to be free of the wretched things. They are zunk to the bottom of the sea.”
“Heaven’s above. I can hardly believe what I am dealing with. You people are fools.”
“We are people who just want to live in peace, Capri. Will you take that away from us?”
“No. You have proven that you are fiercely independent, and that is no problem providing you remain on your island. The German Confederation offers friendship and alliance to the people of New Hope, and recognises its sovereignty over the former British Isles. Remain peaceful or said alliance will end.”
Maddy looked at James, barely able to keep from gushing with happiness. She kept her cool and finished the call. “The people of New Hope thank you. Best health to the German people, and cheers to you, Capri.”
“Ja! Auf wiedersehen.”
Maddy switched off the radio and threw herself into James’s arms. “Commander Tosco, did I really just do that?”
“Spokeswoman Maddy, I believe you just did.”
She smothered him in kisses and then stepped back. There was no benefit in getting excited. She had to stay focused. “Do you believe Capri will keep to his word?”
James shrugged. “We’ll spread the good news of our newly acquired friendship on the airwaves. Capri needs his people to respect his decisions, so he won’t attack an ally without cause. We just have to play nice and be friends like we said we would. Capri’s biggest concern is competition, and he has enough of that with China and Russia. He doesn’t need any distractions.”
Maddy shuddered at the mention of China and Russia, mainly because she knew so little about what was going on there. “Do you think they’ll ever go to war? After all that’s happened?”
“No, I don’t. I think it’s a land grab, and eventually the chips will fall where they may. The worst we’ll get is a cold war. No man wants to be the first to fire a bullet at his fellow man after we survived extinction. History has taught us too much to see sense in war, and the demons taught us too much to see sense in killing. Whether men like Capri realise it or not, mankind has changed. We are fearless warriors, and yet every one of us yearns for peace. It’ll take time for us to figure everything out, but I think you just proved that there’s hope for us all.”
Maddy frowned at him. “How did I prove that?”
“You just stopped a war with nothing but words. You formed an alliance without giving anything away. You made a friend of an enemy. No one can control the actions of others, but we can decide who we want to be, and you just decided who we are.”
“And who are we?”
“The good guys. Let’s never be anything else.”
“Cheers to that!” She rubbed her tired eyes and moaned. Tiredness existed in every cell of her body, and all she wanted to do was sleep, but there would be time for that later. “Okay, James. Take me to this pond you found. I need to clear my head.”
James offered his arm. “If the lady would accompany me.”
“A lady would be thrilled.” Maddy took her lover’s arm and they headed for the door. Outside, New Hope awaited them.
“Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“On wrongs swift vengeance waits.”
– Alexander Pope
Prologue
Bodies packed the observation room of the Oceanic Super Collider. Scientists and engineers squeezed together, shoulder to shoulder, inside the glass bubble overlooking the vast tunnels below—a 24 mile circuit hidden beneath the Australian Outback. The OSC facility was cutting edge. Six square-miles and possessing a High Luminosity Hadron Collider that even CERN lacked. That was the point. Tired of being left behind by European and United States science elite, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines banded together to create the OSC—the largest, most expensive science facility in the world. Its creation had near bankrupted many of the countries involved, but the pride and possibilities it presented were worth it. The calibre of international students already flooding to the University of Melbourne immediately boosted the country’s intellectual population, and donations from the private sector increased all the time. Australia had formed its very own burgeoning Silicon Valley, full of tech start-ups and research companies. The future had switched hemispheres.
And today history would be made. The OSC would fire two extremely dense ionic beams at each other and record the resulting collision with eighteen different sensors. Anything could happen. They might create a stable black hole—with all the possibilities that brought—or even discover a new particle to make the Higgs Bosun a forgettable footnote in the history of Physics. Today’s results might be a precursor to quantum power, and give the host countries an invaluable patent that would quadruple their GDP. Australia might not have led any great wars or invented the Internet, but today it would cement itself at the forefront of human discovery. It was going to make itself heard.
Lead Scientist, Chester Shepard, adjusted his spectacles and waved an arm at his chief engineer. “Initiate the run.”
The room grew silent. Four dozen eyes stretched wide. Anxious breaths held. The room a schoolyard of grinning children. Beneath their feet the glass floor shimmered—a delicate tremble at first, but growing to a fierce vibration that threw them off-balance. It was like standing on the skin of a drum. The excited scientists giggled and widened their stances to keep upright.
An almighty whine accompanied the shaking of the room, the sound of a million parts working in unison. A mechanical dragon breathing fire—the fire of scientific discovery.
They were about to change the world.
“Look,” someone said, pointing a finger at the tunnels below. “What is that?”
“Is that supposed to happen?”
“No, that is definitely not supposed to happen.”
“Oh no…”
“Out of the way,” said Shepard. “Move!” The lead scientist shook his head in confusion at what he saw. A confused scientist could be good or bad. It could signal the start of a quest of discovery, like Isaac Newton wondering why an insolent apple had fallen on his head. Or it might be a bad omen, like a sudden bump against the Titanic’s hull on its maiden voyage. Scientists yearned to understand and control; a confused scientist was a scientist without control. “Damn it! Halt the experiment. Something has gone wrong.”
Smoke filled the tunnels, destroying the positivity in the observation room. Dreams dead in an instant.
The chief engineer halted the experiment. The mechanical whirring puttered out and the dragon went back to sleep. People slumped against the walls and groaned.
“Okay, people,” said Shepherd, taking off his spectacles and polishing them with the tail of his lab coat. “We’ll assess things and see where we stand, but there is no reason to lose heart. No scientist ever walked a straight path to discovery. Humanity's destiny has always been a meandering zig-zag. Each obstacle in the road gives us a tiny glimpse at the mysteries of our world—and how to overcome them. This is our first obstacle, my friends, and it won’t be our last, but each one will move us closer to victo
ry. We will revisit this day; you have my word.”
The disheartened scientists lifted their heads. Some mumbled agreement. Today was just a bad day soon forgotten.
“I’ll get a team down there to check the damage,” said the chief engineer. “I’ve got the extractors running to get that smoke cleared. Crikey, what a bloody mess.”
Shepherd gave the man a withering stare. “Your job is to keep things running, Cecil. I trust you'll repair anything broken and allow us to correct today's unfortunate misfire. There's no point regretting what has already passed. Tomorrow is a new day.”
The chief engineer nodded his understanding and headed out of the room, unlocking the magnetic locks and leaving the room open. The scientists began shuffling out.
“What’s happened to the floor?” someone asked as Shepherd headed towards the exit himself. The woman pointing was Karen Paul, his Quantum Theorist. He glanced at her feet where she pointed. A frown found its way to his eyebrows.
Something was happening in the tunnels below their feet.
“It’s moving,” somebody said. “It… It looks sticky, like tar.”
Shepherd shoved one of his assistants aside to get a look at the patch of glass floor behind her. Clinging to the surface of the glass, something grey and viscous moved. Grew. The odd stain was growing, creeping along the bottom of the glass, like blood seeping into carpet fibres.
“What the hell is going on?” Shepherd asked to no one in particular. His confusion had reached an apex. Either he turned the corner towards understanding or would careen, screaming, into the gutter.
Crack!
Everyone in the room spread out against the glass walls, as a circle opened between them as they stared at the transparent floor. Shepherd, however, remained in the centre of the room. The smoke cleared in the tunnels as the extractor fans did their work, but the electronic catacomb grew dim as the lights flickered and died.
What was happening?
Crack!
The glass floor shook.
“It’s going to give way,” someone yelled. “We need to get the hell out.”
The grey tar continued spreading, covering the underside of the entire glass floor now. A dull droning sound came from somewhere—or perhaps from everywhere—and a silvery cobweb scratched itself into the patch of glass directly beneath Shepherd’s feet. It was enough to finally make him move back towards the wall with the others.
“Jesus Christ,” came a muted voice belonging to the chief engineer in the tunnels. Shepherd turned. He glanced out of the window and spotted the man struggling on the floor. The lights behind the chief engineer were still lit, but the ones in front of him had blinked out. The grey substance clinging to the underside of the glass floor also seemed to be clinging to the engineer's legs in the tunnels. When the man tried to sit up, Shepherd saw the terrified expression on his face.
“Everybody out!” Shepherd screamed. “Evacuate!”
The room burst to life, screams and yells bouncing off the glass walls. People threw themselves at the exit, but it was only a single-body wide door and people pushed and panicked. Shepherd shouted at them to remain orderly, but fear of the unknown drove them to irrationality. Fear of the unknown was a scientist’s motivator, but it was no longer their muse today. Today that fear terrified them like chickens before a wolf. Even Shepherd struggled to put one shaking foot in front of the other.
Was the facility about to blow up?
What kind of chemical reaction was taking place?
Craaack!
The floor opened in a chasm, the glass shattering into a thousand pieces.
But no one fell to the tunnels below.
The grey substance remained in place, floating where before it had clung to the bottom of the glass. The shards of glass seemed to sink into it, dissolving.
No, Shepherd thought, frowning.
The glass shards transformed into the same tar-like substance that was spreading everywhere. The tar wasn’t growing: everything it touched was adding to it. And Shepherd realised he was standing in it.
His feet rested atop the viscous blanket as though it was a carpeted floor. It was soft.
He tried to lift his foot but couldn't.
The tar held it.
A dozen panicked colleagues were also trapped by the alien substance and Shepherd could taste their fear. His inner caveman broke free and fought furiously to escape. But it was no good. His feet refused to budge. His shoes had gone—turned into tar.
What of his feet inside those shoes? Were they also being consumed?
Shepherd experienced no pain, and neither did anyone else by the sound of it. His colleague's cries were of fear, not agony. He sensed something in his lower extremities, but it was dull and far away—perhaps an itching. What Shepherd felt most was that he felt nothing. He tried to wiggle his toes, but it was if they had never existed.
Shepherd twisted his hips and managed to stare at the tunnels below. Dozens more lights had extinguished and the chief engineer was nowhere to be seen. A creeping river of sludge covered all.
Shepherd glanced down and saw that his shins and knees were no longer part of him. They had become tar. “What have we done?” he whispered.
Shepherd was covered by the black, sticky stuff, and it changed everything it touched. The grey river flowed up his legs toward his groin, and it was then he finally felt something. As his genitalia turned to thick sludge, Shepherd became nauseous. His body burned as his organs ceased operating—or disappeared completely. Others in the room screamed too, so hard that their vocal chords snapped and ruined voice boxes emitted strangled shrieks.
The agony started. A chorus of pain.
The entire team of the OSC was being eaten alive, consumed by a blanket of death.
Shepherd spewed a mouthful of blood against the glass window that was already half-consumed by tar. The room grew dark. The tunnels below were a solid river of choking sludge.
The world closed in.
Shepherd shook his head as his organs liquefied and darkness overtook him. My God. What have we done?
Endings
A stifled cough punctuated the silence. The world was shedding its cancerous skin and you took it with you everywhere. Black dust covered everything. A person could no longer ever be clean.
Finn gazed at the bundle of blankets hiding his dead sister—no one made coffins anymore, so covering her in an old duvet was the best they could do—and winced when he spotted a damp patch where her face should be. He’d always thought of a corpse as being a dry thing. The truth was different. Dead things were moist.
His sister was moist.
Rotting.
Finn’s sister had been placed in the living room—where the television used to be—so they could all be together when the end came. The presence of a corpse was no longer morbid, it was mundane. A simple part of life—what little remained of it.
Finn turned from his sister’s resting place and glanced at his ma. The old girl gazed numbly, her face grey and expressionless. She held a frail hand against her mouth as she fought off another cough and seemed satisfied when it went away. In the old world she would have been wailing in a church after the loss of her child, but death was too commonplace now for melodrama. A billion mothers had lost their children. She was not special. Death was coming to claim them all—a withered old man with palm outstretched, ready to give the final handshake. Finn considered his sister might have been lucky to escape humanity’s last choking breaths.
If you can call being brutalised and murdered lucky.
Finn clenched his fists, ignoring the pain of knuckles once broken as a younger man. His mother seemed to sense his anger and moved her gaze towards him. She did not smile, but gave a tiny nod telling him she was still present. A weaker woman would be lost to madness, but his ma was cursed with an unbreakable spirit. No respite of insanity for her.
Or for Finn.
Clive put a hand on Finn’s stiff back and handed him a tumbler full of whiske
y. “Enjoy it, brother, because there’s no more left. I’d pop the shop, but it’s not there no more.”
Finn smiled at the joke. The nearby corner shop went up in flames days ago but had dropped its shutters long before. The only way to get anything anymore was to take it, find it, or bargain for it.
Take it, thought Finn grimly. Like someone took my sister.
I should have been here. I should have been looking after her. My little sis.
Finn and Marie had not been close since they were kids—she had moved with the family to London in the early nineties, while Finn stayed behind in Belfast, an eighteen-year-old with a chip on his shoulder (a perfect recruit for the IRA)—but he felt her loss like a blade in his chest. He had always felt like he would have time—time to reconnect with his family later and to settle down when he was ready. He realised now how much of his life he had sacrificed to fighting. Northern Ireland didn't even exist anymore, so it had all been for nothing anyway. His homeland was a blackened, lifeless husk just like the rest of the globe.
All that remained of Finn’s world now were the people inside the cramped living room. It was a home he’d never been part of, yet, looking around at the old heirlooms and ancient photographs, it felt like he belonged. Atop the mantelpiece stood the horse figurine he’d had made at school. It still bore the hairline fracture where a toddling Marie got hold of it and dropped it on the old kitchen tiles back in Belfast.
Back when they had all been together.
This might not have been Finn's home for the past twenty years, but it was his home now. His mother, his brother, and him—a killer and the loving family he turned away from—awaiting the end of the world.
Finn had chosen a life of hate.
And it had cost him so much.
He downed the whiskey despite his brother's warning it would be his last, unwilling to draw out the agony with tentative sips. Whiskey deserved a chance to work, and even now he sensed its warmness spreading through his legs.
Hell on Earth- the Complete Series Box Set Page 172