Instead, the blade ripped flesh as it slid down his arm before slamming against his shoulder blade. Hunter was driven to his knees in pain, but he used it to focus his mind. As the barbarian came at him again, Hunter ripped open his knapsack, pulled out one of his few remaining explosives and hurled it. It was stupid to release it so close to him, but it was a last resort.
The explosive hit the barbarian in the middle of his stomach and he dissolved in a mist of meat and bone. Hunter was thrown backwards ten feet, and when he clawed his way back to vertical his head was ringing. He muttered, ‘Take that, you bastard.’
There was no time to glean even a glimmer of satisfaction. Ranks of purple-misted enemy moved towards the forest, bristling with weapons and filled with a mute, mechanistic savagery. But as Hunter ran back into the cover of the trees, he saw a sight that hit hard. On the tree line, Bradley stopped firing his SA80 and let the weapon fall slowly to his side. In his face was a dismal acceptance of the worst that life had to offer. Hunter knew he had succumbed to the waves of despair that washed off the enemy. A tremble ran through Bradley; the gun fell from his hand.
Hunter yelled a warning, but Bradley was transfixed by a tall, thin figure, almost majestic with its golden skin and long hair blowing in the breeze. The god languorously raised a hand with an arrow protruding from the wrist bone, and then drove it into Bradley’s throat.
Hunter was horrified to see that Bradley even bared his throat slightly for the killing blow. Blood spouted from the wound and bubbled from Bradley’s mouth as he choked and bucked and went down on his knees. The enemy withdrew the arrow with a ripping sound, then grabbed Bradley’s head and twisted sharply.
Still holding Bradley’s sagging head, his killer leaned forward, mouth wide, and exhaled forcefully. Purple mist rushed out of him and with a life of its own flowed into Bradley, into his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his mouth. Within a second, Bradley began to mutate. Bones shattered and twisted, breaking through his flesh. Though dead, Bradley reached out one twitching hand to grasp his SA80. When his fingers closed around the handle, his skin and bone flowed like oil, merging with the weapon.
Seconds after he had died, Bradley was standing next to the god that had killed him, moving with the same mechanical tread into the forest to search for his former comrades.
Hunter searched through the trees for the others, cursing to himself. How could you hope to defeat a force that could turn even your own fallen to their ends? The more they killed, the stronger they got; they didn’t feel, they didn’t think; their only purpose was to destroy.
Hunter needed to get this information back to the General, but as he sprinted through the trees, Ormston staggered into his path. The transformation that had overcome him was unnerving: his face was drained of all blood, and his constant shivering revealed a man terrified of his own shadow. ‘They’ve got Clevis,’ he said with a voice like a bird in flight.
All Hunter’s training told him he should not be distracted from getting the vital intelligence back to his commanding officer, but he couldn’t get Clevis’s frightened face out of his mind; the boy still had an innocence that Hunter barely remembered, but knew was worth saving.
‘Show me,’ he said.
Ormston looked sickened at the prospect. Instead, he pointed back through the trees and then zigzagged away frantically. Hunter knew Ormston wouldn’t get far in his state of panic.
Behind him, the enemy crashed through the thick vegetation at the forest’s edge. Drawing a knife from his boot, Hunter moved stealthily away from them in the direction Ormston had indicated. He soon spotted movement deep in the shadows amongst the pines. With his breath clouding in the freezing air, he hid behind a tree to steady himself before proceeding on his belly through a thick carpet of fern. Some kind of strange structure stood nearby.
Raising himself up slightly to get a better look, Hunter saw something that looked like a doorway constructed out of meat, yet it seemed to have grown out of the spongy vegetable matter of the forest floor. When he looked through it, he was shocked to see stars gleaming in alien constellations, planets circling seething suns that had never been glimpsed by human eyes.
He recoiled sharply. It felt as though something was looking back at him, peeling his flesh and bone aside to get deep into the core of his mind. The sensation made his skin crawl. Looking around, he saw other similar gates situated randomly at other points in the immediate vicinity.
A cry rang out — he recognised the voice as Clevis’s. Hunter moved as quickly as he could without revealing himself and came upon a scene that was even more shocking than anything he had yet seen.
A thing completely constructed out of bone was clutching Spencer, who flailed wildly. His skeleton was being drawn out of him, easing through skin and muscle as if they had the substance of water. A pile of shapeless black skin lay nearby, which Hunter took to be the remains of Coop, and within a few seconds Spencer’s pink skin landed next to it with a sickening plop.
With a disgusting flourish, the bone-thing absorbed Spencer’s red-stained skeleton into its own mass. When it had finished, Hunter could see Spencer’s vacant orbits staring hollowly out of the centre of the monster’s chest.
The bone-thing, which was larger and more terrifying than any of the enemy Hunter had witnessed so far, was not alone in the gloom of the forest. Other equally imposing figures stalked around the area in ritualistic patterns, as though they were drawing invisible lines on the ground. Hunter saw something that was alive with forest birds, their flapping, twitching bodies forming a kind of skin. Another figure was made out of snakes, frogs, newts and other lizards and amphibians, green and slick, catching the light as it moved. The third had larger woodland animals wrapped into its frame, rabbits, foxes, mice, squirrels wriggling as if they were trying to break free from an invisible cage. And it was this one that dragged Clevis behind it as though he was a spoiled child refusing to go to school.
Hunter had a split second to weigh the situation. He was smart enough to know that any attempt to save Clevis was hopeless, yet even so he leaped towards the animal-thing with a wish and prayer. His only hope was that the fury of his attack would allow Clevis to break free and that in the confusion they could both escape into the undergrowth. But when he plunged his blade into the depths of the snapping, snarling mass of fur to no effect, he knew the game was up.
The animal-thing turned towards him and stared with eyes made up of the multiple orbs of the creatures it possessed, and then reached mouse-fingers for Hunter’s face.
‘Hunter!’ Clevis cried tearfully. ‘Get me out of here!’
Hunter wrenched his knife free and staggered backwards. A buzzing arose behind him.
The animal-thing saw Hunter’s interest in Clevis and dragged the youth forward. There was no sadistic glee or malice; it acted with the neutrality of someone brushing away a minor distraction, dragging Clevis in tight against its chest where the fox and badger heads snapped and tore at his flesh. Clevis’s cries were muffled by the fur, but Hunter could see his eyes swivel towards him, pleading.
Hunter attempted another attack, but the buzzing was all around him now, and before he could move he felt a seething at his neck that grew tighter and held him fast. He could only watch as Clevis’s features were torn apart, his lifeless body leaving a red smear as it slid down the animal-thing’s torso to the ground.
Choking, Hunter was lifted effortlessly off the ground and turned around. The source of the buzzing was now apparent. The thing that held him was made of insects, in the same way that the others had used other kinds of natural matter to give them corporeal form. The insect-thing withdrew its grip, but Hunter was still magically suspended in the air.
It stood before him, eight feet tall at least. As it surveyed him, once again there was no recognisable emotion, not even curiosity. Hunter had trouble focusing on the creature, for its body was such a writhing mass of insects that its outline appeared permanently blurred through movement: bees, flies, wasps,
gnats, beetles, roaches, all these and more crawled and wriggled, burrowing or attempting to take flight without ever being able to leave the creature’s gravity.
Hunter stared into its insectile eyes and got the same feeling he had experienced staring through the meat-doorway: an alien intelligence travelling back along his line of vision to examine his own mind forensically.
The insect-thing held out one hand, palm upwards, and a swarm of insects rose off it, sweeping towards Hunter. He closed his eyes, turned his head away, but they enveloped his head, forcing their way into his nostrils and through his clenched lips. The buzzing filled him, followed by the sickening sensation of crawling creatures working their way into his nasal passages.
He fought the urge to choke and vomit, and then suddenly all sensation was lost. His consciousness was circumscribed by the insectile buzzing, inside him, outside, everywhere.
And then he wasn’t there at all.
Insects crawled around the edges of his vision, but he knew that it was not his eyes but his mind that was examining the fractured hallucinatory images he could see. It took a second or two for him to realise that the creature was attempting some form of communication, but it was so inhuman that there was no frame of reference. The images shattered, twisted out of shape, moved from incomprehensible alien forms to pictures he could almost recognise. It felt as if he was tuning across the wavelengths to find a channel he could understand.
The process came to a halt with an image of a wasp as big as a bus nestled in a strange, irregular landscape that appeared to be made out of the same kind of meat as the doorways. It buzzed up and down the scale, insistently, distractedly, but the meaning was lost to him.
Yet some form of comprehension began to grow deep in his subconscious. A power as big as the universe had become aware of humanity. Its nature, if that was the right word, was to oppose life, not only in its form, but also in its essence: what it meant in terms of positivity, advancement, connectivity, hope, goodness — all the things that on his better days Hunter dreamed life really was about.
This power, this Anti-Life, was a gulf of nothingness that went on for ever, yet could be constrained on the head of a pin. Trying to comprehend what it really was made Hunter feel sick. He forced his thoughts to move on, but before he left the subject he realised its motivation: the eradication of everything it was not. The Anti-Life could not rest until humanity was gone or circumscribed. A name came and went, not from the thing itself, but from somewhere without: the Void.
And so it had come to Earth, acting through agents and generals and outriders who prepared the way for its ultimate ascension. Again, Hunter discovered names that existed somewhere, but did not come from the Void itself. The zombie-things that leaked purple mist were called the Lament-Brood.
The five creatures he had come across in the forest were the Void’s generals, leading the charge against humanity. They had no form in and of themselves; they were ideas, nothing more, clothing themselves in the matter of the physical world, negativity given shape and identity. The Lord of Bones, the Lord of Birds, the Lord of Lizards, the Lord of Flesh. And above them all, the force that would see humanity wiped away — the King of Insects.
Hunter was not a religious man, but childhood images of Satan haunted him; here, he felt, was true evil: dispassionate, relentless, capable of causing death on a grand scale, without any meaning at all. A quote came to him from a Sunday School class: Revelation 19:19 — ‘Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army.’
The giant wasp’s message was clear: there was no hope, it really was all over and the world was about to be remade in the image of Anti-Life. Hunter tried to imagine what that would be like, but all he kept coming back to were those self-same childhood lessons, with their talk of hell and burning souls.
The wasp was so huge that it could not take flight and so it pulled itself forward obscenely on its spindly legs, until its head filled Hunter’s vision and he could see himself reflected a thousand times in its multifaceted eyes. The wasp opened its maw wide, trailing strands of sticky acids, and lunged. The stinking, wet dark closed about Hunter hard and he was sucked in and down.
And then he was hovering in the air once more before the King of Insects, wasps and flies crawling all over his skin, across his eyes and lips, skittering legs and wings setting his nerve endings afire as revulsion filled him. It felt as if his time had come and he was pleased at how calm he felt. Those who kill for a living think about death a great deal. He had once seen a man plead, sobbing, offering to give up his girlfriend in his place, even though he knew it would do no good. Hunter had always hoped he would be brave enough to go with dignity.
But instead of delivering the killing blow, the King of Insects twisted its outstretched hand and then snapped it shut. Hunter felt a squirming in his belly, rising up his spine, growing faster until it reached the back of his head, and then he shot out of himself as if strapped to a rocket.
Hovering somehow amongst the tree branches, he looked down to see his body still hanging in the air before the King of Insects. A second later, an irresistible urge drove him up through the trees and into the grey sky. Hunter felt simultaneously detached and queasy, as though he was in a dream on the verge of turning into a nightmare. Far below in the blasted valley, hundreds of scattered enemy corpses formed fractal patterns in the thick snow. Gliding forward over the next ridge, he caught the familiar wisps of purple mist drifting in the wind. It had just started to snow again, adding to the otherworldly ambience.
But when he had a clear view of the white landscape, raw emotions broke through his detachment. It was carnage, worse than any battlefield he had ever seen. The Lament-Brood were a purple-edged wave swamping the feeble ranks of the army. Guns cut them apart, but it took at least fifty rounds, and as quickly as one fell, six others took their place. The enemy were brutally efficient. Rusted swords cleaved heads, hacked off arms, left trails of steaming entrails in the churned, red snow. Spears rammed through flimsy skin and muscle, arrows plunged into eye sockets. The despair the Lament-Brood engendered was a weapon in itself, and many soldiers simply laid down their arms to have their bones snapped and life extinguished by dead but powerful hands.
It was a rout beyond any defeat the army could have envisioned. As fast as men fell, they were brought back to unnatural life to swell the ranks of the enemy, going on to kill their friends and colleagues with vigour. Explosions roared flames and gouts of smoke high into the air as ammunition was detonated and batteries overrun. Fire raged in several of the tanks in the front line. There were no tactics, no weapons that would make any difference. It was only a matter of time.
And just as that thought entered Hunter’s head, choppers carrying the General and other COs rose up behind the lines. A retreat had been ordered, but it was too disorganised to be effective. Men tried to pull back, but the Lament-Brood kept coming, picking them off as they fled.
It’s all over, Hunter thought, dimly grateful for the remaining detachment that still swathed him.
One final shell was loosed into the sky before the enemy swamped the lines. It rushed towards Hunter, passed through him and came down beyond the ridge. When the explosion resonated all around, he suddenly felt as if a rope at his waist had been tied to a speeding car. Yanked backwards, he flew over the valley and down towards the forest, now blazing from the strike which had impacted right at the point where his body had been suspended.
Chapter Seven
Night falls in the dreaming City
‘ Heaven cannot brook two suns, nor Earth two masters.’
Alexander the Great
There are times when the world feels like an irritating distraction, even when buildings are collapsing, blood is flowing and people are crying about the end of the world. Some things are more important. Hal understood that clearly as he made his way along the corridors of Queen’s College. All he could think about was t
he kiss Samantha had shared with Hunter, how it had been a whole conversation in a single moment, a complex communion of secret yearnings, confused romance, hope, worry, sexual attraction.
It had made him realise that those who live their lives in their heads, as he did, made it easy to deceive themselves. The imagination is a trickster, he thought, tempting with illusions to drag you off the path so he can laugh uproariously at your rude awakening.
In his mind, Samantha had always been the one who would save him from his mundane existence. And now there was no hope of that ever happening. Lost in his dreams he might have been, but he was a pragmatist when faced with harsh reality. He felt colder than the unnatural winter outside, as though every thought he had was laced with frost. So cold that he felt he would turn to ice, then slowly melt away when the thaw came.
Reid’s department filled a vast complex of rooms, all sealed, all silent; a place of unspeakable secrets that gave no hint of their existence; of quiet suggestions that turned the mind to horror; of the brush of fingertips at midnight.
Hal was met by an underling at the entrance to the sanctum sanctorum and led into an area he had never visited before and had never thought he would. He was finally shown into a room with a security system that exceeded anything Hal had seen throughout the extremely secure offices of Government. Reid waited within, talking in hushed tones to Dennis Kirkham. With a troubled expression, the chief scientist examined a sword suspended in a holding frame.
‘Ah, here he is,’ Reid exclaimed when he saw Hal. ‘Will you excuse us, Mister Kirkham? Business.’
Kirkham disappeared in the silent manner that always characterised his comings and goings, and Reid came over to Hal with a faint swagger. To Hal, Reid always appeared to be on stage pretending to be some spy he had seen in a sixties movie; he had charisma, and cool, and a touch of arrogance, but it felt as if it was all hanging loosely over someone else entirely.
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