by Heide Goody
Outside, in a paved area in front of a car park, the soldiers had gathered dozens of people from the supermarket. The sky above crackled with a sheet of light that washed over everything. There were noises on the warm breeze, unhappy sounds from far away.
“Does this little girl belong to anyone?” called out the soldier who held her.
There were mutters and whimpers from the people lined up outside the shop, but no other reply.
“You stand there,” said the soldier and thrust Prudence into a gap between two women. “You! Stay where you are!” he barked at a man further along.
“I weren’t doing nothing wrong!” the man replied.
“Step back! Step back!” A rifle was raised.
One of the women gripped Prudence’s shoulder. It wasn’t a reassuring grip. Prudence could feel the woman’s fear vibrating through her.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I need you all to turn around and face the wall,” commanded another voice. This one didn’t bark. It spoke with loud self-assurance, with the assumption it was going to be obeyed. “Face the wall. This is for your own good.”
“What’s going on?” someone called out.
“All will be explained,” said the commanding one. “Face the wall. That’s right. You too.”
Prudence was one of the last to turn. The soldiers didn’t seem so focused on her, only on the adults. The commanding soldier pressed his hand to a device at his chest. He said something rapidly and the only words Prudence could make out were “Tesco’s Shirley” and Prudence wasn’t sure if “Tescos Shirley” was the soldier’s name. He signed off, nodded grimly and raised his rifle to aim at the gathered shoppers. The other soldiers did likewise.
The commander, Tescos Shirley, caught her looking.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is really for your own good. The things that are coming…”
There was a crash by the entrance to the shop. A soldier staggered out, tumbling a pile of shopping baskets before him. “There! It’s there!” he shouted, pointing at a darting shadow.
Shoppers turned. Some saw the guns. Some began to raise their voices in frightened protest. Half the soldiers had turned to see what the darting thing was.
In the momentary confusion, Prudence ran. She ran towards the darker area of the car park off to the right. There were further shouts, then the soldiers opened fire. As well the bang of gunfire, there was the duller, more frightening sound of bullets striking the walls.
Prudence ducked, or maybe fell, picturing bullets slamming into the wall above her. She pushed herself on into the dark and around the corner of the building. There was a small triangle of car park, then a tall hedge and fence. She ran blindly into the hedge, hoping for a way through, finding one where hedge and fence met. A rough post scraped against her arm. It was a hot, dragging sensation, and she knew it would hurt a lot later.
Gunfire followed her. She pushed right through and surfaced, gasping, by the side of a house on a quiet street. There was an alley between the houses opposite, and a narrow gate framed in the light from beyond.
Something, a soldier perhaps, thrashed and grunted in the gap between the hedge and the fence.
“Come—It’s for your own good— Nnh.”
Prudence ran for the gate. Stones on the tarmac road stung her bare feet. She hit the gate and bounced off, her head reeling. She found the latch, lifted it and ran through. There was a large open space beyond, a few trees here and there, and rows of irregular stone markers jutting out of the ground. Gravestones. A cemetery.
With thoughts of soldiers who might still be chasing after her, Prudence ran along the perimeter and found a spreading bush in which to hide. She hunkered down among the prickly branches and took out the walkie-talkie. She pressed the button.
“Mum. Mum, it’s me. I’m in a graveyard and they’re chasing me.”
She released the button. The walkie-talkie made a light hissing sound but nothing else happened. She pressed the button again.
“Mum. Mum, it’s me. Can I speak to my mum please?”
Nothing but a quiet static hiss.
She wondered if she was doing it wrong. There were a couple of twiddly knobs on the top, and a dial with numbers. But her mum had shown her how to use it: press the button and talk.
“I need to talk to my mum. I need help.”
02:45am
Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas awoke.
The light fixed to the concrete ceiling above was bright, a clean white light unlike any in Hath-No. She scrunched her eyes up and put her arm in front of her face.
“Hey, bab,” said a woman’s voice nearby. “It’s okay. I’m here.”
Ap Shallas lay on a soft, yielding surface: a bed. Air, cooler and thinner than the soupy atmosphere of Hath-No, washed across her face. And Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas was breathing it; not just breathing it but drawing sustenance from it.
“Ye-hurgech bal… oxygen ghon dikraa,” she murmured.
“You’re breathing just fine,” said the woman.
Ap Shallas shook her head. She felt the softness of the pillow beneath her. “Peneth xar chor av-a boa hauh.”
“Everyone breathes, bab,” replied the woman.
Ap Shallas opened her eyes fully, blinked against the light and sat up.
“Easy now,” said the woman.
The woman wore a spotty blouse and carefully styled black hair with little kiss curls. The frivolity of her clothes and the preciseness of her hair appeared at odds with the weary and anxious hypervigilance on the woman’s face, but ap Shallas was not used to reading human expressions and did not put much stock in her own analysis.
“It’s me,” said the woman. “Lois. Remember?”
Ap Shallas did remember. The woman’s name was Lois Wheeler. She worked as the receptionist at the Birmingham consular mission to the Venislarn. Ap Shallas remembered these as clear facts, statements without emotional content. It was a distant memory, possibly something ap Shallas had read or written a long time ago.
Ap Shallas swung her legs off the bed. They were thin limbs with little brown feet. The long bones of her feet were clearly visible through the skin, radiating spokes from leg to toes. Ap Shallas flexed her toes. She had not seen them in aeons. It came as something of a surprise to find she had them at all.
“Kaeron.”
“Pardon?” said Lois.
Ap Shallas struggled for the word. “Toes.”
“Er, yes,” said Lois. “All there, Mrs Grey.”
Ap Shallas pushed herself from the bed, tottered only for a moment, and stood. She and Lois were in a small windowless chamber. There was the bed, a counter with a ceramic basin set into it, and a mirror above. There were two doors. One was closed and the other led to a square chamber with a larger ceramic basin plumbed into the floor. The name and function of that basin eluded ap Shallas in a way that caused her disproportionate annoyance.
“Toilet!” she blurted at last.
“You need the loo?” said Lois, arms out to assist her.
Ap Shallas made a dismissive puffing sound. Ap Shallas had no need for toilets. She had not eaten or drunk in an eternity. There was nothing inside her to expel.
She moved across to the counter and, with her hand on the surface to support her, looked in the mirror. A strange creature gazed back. There was almost nothing of its shape or outer appearance that she recognised, although there was a glimmer of life and familiarity in the sunken eyes.
Ap Shallas put a hand to her face and followed the contours of lines and wrinkles.
“Reward for long service,” she said, recalling something someone had said a long time ago.
“You all right, Vivian?” said Lois.
Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas looked at her and then back to the woman in the mirror. “Mrs Vivian Grey?”
“That’s right. You do remember who you are, don’t you?”
The question hurt her profoundly. Ap Shallas remembered Mrs Vivian Grey. Mrs Vivian Grey was a woman, an Earth human. Vivian had live
d for little over half a century, maybe half of that time in service to the consular mission. And then Vivian had fallen into Leng space, to hell. From the plains of hell to the fortress of Hath-No had been but a fleeting episode, a transition, and then Vivian had become the scribe of Hath-No, briefly under the service of Bakhan Sand and then alone, the author of the Bloody Big Book, an unknowable infinite age as Yoth-Kreylah ap Shallas.
To identify her as Vivian Grey was a nonsense. Vivian Grey was a speck of time and matter at the start of her existence, a characterless sperm, an egg. Ap Shallas knew Vivian Grey, but she could hardly be Vivian Grey.
“Skex au thuein?” she asked.
“Your book?” Lois nodded. “Professor Omar has it.”
“Daen’re so!” she snapped. “Yeh’a shyuata!”
“Sure, bab, sure,” said Lois. “I’ll get it. And what was the other thing?”
Ap Shallas stared at her fingertips. Useless soft round fingertips, not the tools she had wielded for an eternity.
“Pens!” she enunciated in the alien language of English. “I haven’t finished the book yet!”
* * *
Nina and Pupfish walked towards the residential streets that climbed the hill away from Spaghetti Junction. Nina had stripped off her soaked Georgian coat and left it at the roadside.
Buildings all around them were smouldering and crushed, as if a giant flaming monster had trodden a path through this neighbourhood, but the streets were quiet. It was a warm night but Nina stood by the burning ruin of a building to drive some of the damp from her dress.
Pupfish took off his baseball jacket and held it out to dry.
“I thought you didn’t mind being wet,” said Nina.
“This is an authentic Ralph Lauren copy,” he said. “Allana bought it for me.”
Nina jerked her chin. She didn’t want to talk about boyfriends and girlfriends. “Do you know how far away Sutton Park is?”
“Never been there,” he said with a shrug. “Ggh! Never been outside the motorway.”
“Really?”
She looked at her phone for directions. The phone was working, had survived the crash and the swim, but it was picking up no phone or data signal at all.
There was a petrol station on the other side of the road. Nina walked over to it, sidestepping the spots of flaming wreckage here and there. A young man with a hipster man-bun on his head stood at the night counter.
“How do I get to Sutton Park from here?” she asked him.
“We operate a no-smoking policy for our retail premises,” he murmured emotionlessly. “I told them that the safety of our customers is the most important thing to us.”
Nina glanced over her shoulder at the smoking plastic ruins of the forecourt. “You did a great job. Now, I need to get to Sutton Park. How do I do that?”
“Do you want to buy a map book?” he asked.
“A map? In a book? Are you from history?”
“You may as well take the map book,” he said in that dead tone. He pushed it underneath the glass screen.
“Thank you.” Nina took the book. “Can I have some chocolate Minstrels as well, please? Actually, what I really wanted to know is whether there’s any way of getting to Sutton Park that’s quicker than walking.”
“Don’t know that I would be making unnecessary journeys. Conditions are a bit dangerous.”
“Believe me when I say that this is a necessary journey.”
“You could take a car, I see quite a few that seem to have lost their drivers.” He pointed outside to the forecourt, which was a wasteland of crushed cars. Some of those towards the edge might have been driveable.
“What if I don’t know how to drive?” said Nina.
“Take one that is an automatic, maybe?”
“Automatic is not the same as self-driving, is it?” Nina had been caught out by these weasel words before.
“You can probably manage stop, go and steering if you’ve ever been on the dodgems.”
“Huh. Maybe.”
“Or someone has left their moped,” he said, pointing.
Nina saw the abandoned moped. “The minstrels then, my good man.”
He turned to pull a bag of chocolates off the rack behind him. As he did, she saw that his hipster man-bun was not a bun at all. A hairy creature had plugged itself into the back of his open skull. Wire-thin needle limbs pumped up and down into his brain cavity, steering him.
“Here,” he said. “Was I helpful? Did I do well?”
“Oh, fabulous,” said Nina. She moved away swiftly, only then seeing dozens of other hairy balls with needle legs walking in a leisurely manner across the forecourt towards her.
“Pupfish!” she called in a deliberately controlled voice. “To the moped, please!”
“What?” said the samakha on the pavement.
“Moped! Now!”
She speed-walked to the moped. Nina was no expert, but this looked like one of those old lady mopeds that was only one step up from a mobility scooter. She could sense Pupfish was as clueless as she was when it came to cars.
“I’m driving,” she said, straddling the seat.
She found the unhurried threat of hairy brain spiders was an excellent tutor, and in no time had it turned on and was accelerating away. With the weight of Pupfish on the back climbing the hill, the moped barely made walking pace. Once they had reached the peak, it sped up a little.
It turned out to be a sound choice when they reached a crater in the road. It had obliterated both carriageways and a row of houses. They paused at the edge to take a look.
“I can’t see the bottom,” said Pupfish.
Nina wondered if it was made by something massive falling from above, or something massive emerging from below. They skirted the hole using the remaining strip of pavement and drove on towards Sutton.
02:54am
Crouched in the bush, Prudence looked out across the cemetery. She could see the tombstones in clear silhouette, even though the night was not black as she had expected. A shimmering light covered everything. It shifted and pooled in the sky above. The way it rippled made Prudence feel like she was underwater, that she was being held under something. Its colour refused to resolve itself in her mind. If she had to pinpoint it, she would say its nearest approximation was pink. But it was certainly not pink, nor any shade of it. Wisps of light gathered where the light was thickest and brightest, touching down on the ground like lazy unhurried lightning. Where it met the earth, the grass twitched and wriggled at its touch.
A leaf stroked Prudence’s cheek. She shuddered at the accidental contact, standing and moving away from the bush. As the light moved in the sky, the bush seemed to move with it, but it was just a trick of light and shadow.
A voice cried from across the cemetery. “Help! I need help!”
It was a child’s voice. Automatically, Prudence went towards it.
“Help! They’re chasing me!”
She moved swiftly. The grass was warm and scratchy on her feet. The voice sounded close, clearly audible against the background sounds of a crackling sky, occasional gunfire and the fainter shouts of violence and fear, but she could not see the child. The voice appeared to be coming from beyond a large sagging tree with dangling limbs.
“I need help! They’re chasing me!”
Prudence looked about but could see no pursuers. Ahead, streamers of lazy lightning touched down in the tops of the tree. The limp dangling limbs of the tree swayed softly in the wind.
“Help!”
The voice was very close but Prudence couldn’t see the girl. It sounded like a girl. She cupped her hands to her mouth. “Where are you?”
“Where are you?” the girl called back.
Possibly she was hiding in the cover of the tree. Prudence ran forward. The thin dangling limbs of the tree hung low and she reached a hand up to brush them aside.
“Get back, brainless morsel!” yelled Steve.
Prudence looked round. The tiny cloth man was skipping
and jumping across the ground towards her.
“Steve! I—”
A tree limb, thinner than string, wrapped itself around Prudence’s wrist. She gasped and pulled away. It tightened automatically.
“Ah! It’s got me!” she shouted, instinctively.
“It’s got me!” cried the girl’s voice in response.
More tree limbs, lifted by a wind Prudence could not feel, drifted towards her. She felt a sharp fear, but also a profound sense of stupidity – that she could be snared by a brainless tree. She pulled, but the tendril round her wrist held firm. Other branches tugged at the hem of her T-shirt dress.
She yelped at a touch on her heel and the back of her leg. It was Steve, scrambling up her. He rose up over her shoulder, tottered unsteadily down the length of her arm and, with precision, jabbed the tip of his pencil-spear into the narrow strip of tree flesh digging into her wrist.
“Your mother will not be pleased if I only bring home your corpse!” he spat. The tree abruptly let go of Prudence, as if he had found a nerve.
She fell on her bottom. As the other tendrils whipped out to get her, she scooted back, crabbing out of reach. She coughed and panted, staring alternately between the flailing tree and the raw red mark on her wrist. She hissed as sensation and pain came back to her.
“I thought you were dead,” she said.
Steve crowed with laughter. “Kill Steve the Destroyer? Pah!” He did a little jig and a smooth moonwalk in the leaf mulch. “I am Qulsteyvan the Destroyer, ex-outrider of the entourage of Prein, former emissary of the shattered realms and once loyal servant to the blind gods of Suler’au Sukram! Takes a lot to kill the likes of me!” He slapped his flower-patterned lower half. “And I think these might be my lucky legs. Bulletproof!”
“That’s nice,” said Prudence.
“There’s nothing to fear, it’s just a tree,” came a man’s voice from the tree.
“Hang on, I’m gonna take a selfie,” said a woman’s voice.
Shapes moved in the upper portions of the tree. Round, wet, dripping shapes, held in place by the branches. A human foot dangled floppily.