by Jon Jacks
It reminded them of Bonniville.
‘I hope we’re not too late.’
Chrissy stroked her gun, telling herself that this time she had to be prepared for the violent thrusts of its recoil. She also had to avoid a panicked shot that, being too early, too badly aimed, wouldn’t bring down the beast. The trick was to calm your fears, to wait – then take their head off with a point-blank blast.
She hoped Si realised that’s the only way a beast could be halted in its tracks. Just in case she forgot who he was and attacked him.
They had already come across the odd beast. But, by staying to the centre of the widest roads, they had so far avoided being taken completely by surprise.
The beast had invariably charged towards them, only for Si to expertly swerve past. If he believed he could get away with it, Si would simply smash the colossal weight and momentum of the hurtling jeep into the monster’s side, sending him bowling away with a badly gashed leg. In one instance, a beast was sent toppling head over heels over the jeep itself.
A blast from Chrissy’s gun had prevented another beast from leaping into Si’s side of the jeep. She had to take the shot while leaning over the back of her seat, firing over his shoulder. Another blast had taken the leg off a chiasmus who had swung down on them from a tall street lamp, sending him rolling uncontrollably across the road behind them.
The closer they drew towards the mayor’s house, however, the narrower and more winding the roads became. It forced Si to slow down a little. Even so, Chrissy had to cling on tightly as Si threw the jeep around wending corners, refusing to slow down so much it might leave them open to an unexpected attack.
The attack, when it came, was successful because it was totally unexpected by both them and beasts alike.
A large group of chiasmus had gathered in a street, picking over their latest spoils. They weren’t looking for Chrissy and Si and their jeep. They weren’t even aware of their existence until they heard the thundering of the heavily overworked engine. They swapped eager glances, recognising the sound of new, fresh prey.
The jeep violently swung around the corner just behind them. It briefly skittered across the road as Si wrenched at the wheel to regain full control.
Si saw the chiasmus languidly scattered across the road. Momentarily tempted to slam down hard on the jeep’s brakes, he retained enough presence of mind somewhere amongst his panic to realise that this would only end in a stalled, surrounded jeep. So, instead, he slammed down hard on the accelerator.
The jeep ploughed angrily into the beasts.
With heavy crump after heavy crump, the jeep smacked again and again into hard flesh and muscle. Some beasts were sent spinning aside, while others seemed to simply crumple, disappearing beneath the whirling wheels. The jeep’s canvas cover was ripped in two as a beast sent flying over its top reached out with grasping talons.
Striking such massive creatures, the jeep was taking a fearsome battering, the metal itself denting and warping with each blow. It bounced chaotically over the formidable bodies vanishing beneath its wheels, there being little give or softness in such heavily muscled creatures.
Even though badly injured, these creatures disappearing beneath the wheels swung out with massive fists, punching holes in the underside. Others frenziedly clutched at the chassis and the spinning axles. They began to slow the vehicle, using their own bodies as dead, dragging weights.
The beasts Si had almost managed to leave behind were intelligent enough to see their chance. They rushed towards the slowing jeep.
Chrissy swung out of the side of the jeep. She blasted one of the beasts clinging to the underside, at last making him give up his hold. She blasted another as it tried to leap on the jeep’s rear. Swiftly and expertly, she reloaded, even though she knew it was ultimately hopeless.
‘There’s too many of them, Si!’
‘Don’t change Chrissy,’ Si pleaded. ‘Don’t change! Better we die like this, together. Even you can’t save us now.’
*
Chapter 43
The sky high above them flickered with coruscating light. The flickering became orbs of flame, of gold and silver.
The spheres of blinding light rushed down towards the earth. They struck hard like miniature volcanic explosions amongst the charging beasts. The creatures howled and growled in frustration and pain, reeling back from the ferociously hacking angelic knights.
Chrissy leant low out of the jeep’s side, poking her gun’s barrel beneath the chassis. She fired directly into the face of a beast that had grasped and slowed the axle. He dropped to the floor. With a whirr of thanks, the axle spun once more, the jeep gratefully leaping forward.
With a second blast, she took off the arms of an already sorely wounded beast, removing the final drag to the jeep’s movement.
‘Go, go,’ she yelled at Si. Sitting up in her seat once more, she deftly reloaded her gun.
As Si made the jeep leap with unbounded joy once more, Chrissy glanced back at the warring angels and beasts. As before, some of the beasts seemed to be ignoring the striking swords and lances, daring every now and again to try to break through the angelic line holding them back.
Even worse, though, was that some of the angelic knights seemed to be simply blinking out of existence. One minute they were there, fighting bravely; the next, they and their surrounding orb of light had just winked out, as if they had never really been there in the first place.
‘You don’t have much time: these are the last of us.’
‘Jial!’
Just as abruptly as the knights were vanishing, Jial had appeared in the jeep’s rear seat. She grinned, but it was half a grimace too, like a sign that she was suffering pain. When she spoke, her voice was also a little gruff, with a trembling harshness.
‘Later, later,’ Jial spluttered breathlessly, shrugging off with a smile Chrissy’s attempt to lean over the seats and hug her. ‘Don’t let their sacrifice be in vain!’
Chrissy looked towards the wavering angelic line once more.
For the first time, she realised with surprise that a mounted St Michial was amongst them, wondering how she could have missed him.
As if abruptly aware that Chrissy was watching him, he turned his horse around to face the rapidly fleeing jeep.
As he had earlier, he raised his sword against his face in salute
Then he too blinked out of existence.
*
Chapter 44
The mayor’s house had been boarded up. The windows were covered with thick planks, the door with a metal sheet that had been quickly and haphazardly hammered and bolted into place.
It would have been nigh on impossible to break into if someone hadn’t already done it for them. The boarding across a window had been smashed as if it were little more than rotten driftwood.
‘A beast?’ Si asked unnecessarily,
They all recognised that only a beast could possess such effortless strength to so easily shatter those thick planks of wood.
The jeep gave a choke of relief as Si switched off the throbbing engine. It exhaled a breath of steam and dark smoke. It was a wreck, battered beyond all recognition that it had been a proud, sparkling military vehicle only a day earlier.
They slipped out of their seats, Jial briefly taking to the air and landing alongside an ecstatic Chrissy.
The girls hungrily hugged each other, cried in their happiness to be together again. But Chrissy sensed a frailty in Jial she had never experienced before. She even wondered if Jial had tried to hide that she flinched a little as they’d embraced. It briefly felt as if Jial was going to faint in her arms, either from agony or dizziness.
‘Jial…?’
Chrissy stepped back, looking quizzically into Jial’s eyes for an answer, for the truth.
Jial merely grinned once more. That half grimace, half smile that had worried Chrissy so in the first place.
‘I’m okay – come on, we need to do this!’
She took
Chrissy’s hand, pulling her after her with an exuberant giggle. She rushed across the lawn towards the window with the broken boarding.
Si frowned at Jial’s eagerness. What was wrong with her? It wasn’t like her to be so careless, especially when Chrissy’s life was in danger.
‘Be careful! The beast who broke in earlier might still be in there.’
He reached back into the jeep for the gun and a few boxes of ammunition.
With a deft kick of her stockinged feet, and letting go of Chrissy’s hand, Jial flew in through the hole in the shattered boards. She expertly furled her wings across her back as she slipped between the wood’s jagged edges.
Landing gently on the carpeted floor, she glanced quickly about the room. She hissed back through the hole that it was clear in here and was safe for them to climb through.
Chrissy and Si had to help each other to pass through the shattered boarding. Fortunately they managed it easily enough, even though they were attempting to achieve it as quietly as possible. Even though, too, there was a second layer of smashed boarding, this time similar to the metallic shutters they had seen gracefully fall into place in Si’s home, the shattered steel shards splaying open like an immense, blooming tulip.
Inside, the room was somewhat surprisingly pristine, harking back to a Hermon of easy living and peaceful lives. An elegant dining table was draped with a brilliantly white tablecloth, upon which ceramic ornaments and a graceful candle lamp had been tastefully set out. Oil paintings of country scenes and seascapes graced the walls. There was an ever bigger framed photograph of Emma with her parents, all three of them smiling into the camera.
The hall lying just beyond the dining room through a single doorway, however, was ominously splattered with blood. A faded, chalk silhouette signified where one of the beast’s victims had fallen. Male, adult, Chrissy surmised, going by its size and shape.
Emma’s father, the mayor.
The floor creaked with every step they took across it. They cringed, wishing there were some way of quietening its readiness to announce their presence. Jial strode slightly ahead of them, the first to enter the next room, once again making sure it was empty before signalling the others to follow.
This room was as blood spattered as the hall, but there were no chalk silhouettes. These were in the fourth room they entered. There were two of them: one laid half across a large leather sofa, the second incongruously seated against the wall next to a shattered display cabinet.
Emma and her mother.
‘Where will it be, this switch?’ Chrissy whispered.
She didn’t want to think of how her friend had ended up as nothing more than a chalk image drawn on a wall.
Si urgently grabbed her by the shoulder, indicating with a finger placed against his pursed lips that she needed to be perfectly quite. He placed an open palm by his ear: listen!
Chrissy listened.
Somewhere, farther within the house, wood squeaked.
*
‘We have to go on.’
Placing a hand against her rapidly beating heart, and briefly closing her eyes, Chrissy steadied herself.
‘That’s why we’re here: our parents, remember?’
Si nodded in agreement. He pressed the butt of the gun against his hip, letting the barrel swing out before him as he made his way into the next room as silently as possible. Thankfully, this room was free of the splattering of blood despoiling the other rooms.
As before, Jial had gone on slightly ahead, quickly inspecting the room to ensure there were no surprises waiting for them. But Si had noted once again that she seemed a little dazed, even a little unsteady, despite the way her feet hovered over the floor. He was no longer sure they could completely trust her judgement.
‘Clear,’ he hissed back behind him to Chrissy, having reassured himself that it was safe for her to enter.
Chrissy stepped into the room.
From the corner of the room, from the depths of a large wardrobe, there came a shocked gasp, a heavy exhalation of previously strenuously held breath.
Si instinctively and swiftly brought the gun up to his shoulder, aiming it at the wardrobe.
‘No!’
Jial placed her hand against the gun’s barrel. She glared at Si as if expecting the power of her eyes alone to be enough to command him not to fire.
With an irate glower in reply, Si only partially lowered the gun. His protest that this was crazy, dangerous, remained on his grimly set lips.
‘I don’t think it’s a chiasmus,’ Jial whispered calmly.
‘Chrissy?’
The quaking, terrified voice came from the wardrobe. Through a tightly latticed section of the wardrobe’s doors, Chrissy could just make out the glitter of frightened eyes, staring out from its interior darkness.
One of the doors half swung open. A haggard figure, a girl, stepped out.
‘Emma?’ Chrissy asked unsurely.
*
Chapter 45
Chrissy rushed forward towards her friend.
Just in time, too, because Emma almost fainted into her arms. Her whole body crumpled, as if with relief or due to hunger
Putting his gun down, Si dragged a simple wooden chair away from a wall, positioning it where they could help Emma sit on it.
‘Emma! We thought you were dead!’ Chrissy breathed excitedly.
‘I should be, I should be.’
Emma managed a tired smirk. She seemed drunk, maybe a little crazed. With wild, enflamed eyes, she reached out to take Chrissy’s hand.
‘You won’t believe me – you won’t believe what happened here. No one would. That’s why I’ve had to hide. They think I did it Chrissy. They think I killed Mom and Dad and Judith.’
‘Judith? Your friend Judith Green? She was here too?’
Releasing Chrissy’s hand, Emma began to nervously twist a gold ring on her finger.
‘Yes, yes; I don’t know why she was here, why she’d called round. I can’t remember asking her round. She…she looked so bad, her clothes ripped off. It was hard to tell it was her: but I knew, I recognised her hair, because she always copied my styles. You see, she was killed by…by…’
Her voiced drifted off. Her eyes edgily flitted about the room, as if anxious that someone might be listening in.
‘By a monster!’
Chrissy nodded: yes, she understood, that made sense.
‘You believe me?’ Emma snapped back slightly in surprise. ‘I tell you a monster attacked me, and you believe me?’
She sounded incredulous. She chuckled at the foolishness of it all.
‘We believe you,’ Si said soothingly.
Emma took Chrissy’s hands in hers again.
‘Good, good; because it’s true! I never used to believe in monsters!’
She was almost childlike in her demure stance and way of talking.
‘I wanted to believe in fairies. That was nice: believing in fairies, wasn’t it? But I thought, no, fairies don’t exist – they’re just silly myths, legends.’
Freeing her hands once more, she twisted her ring again. This time Chrissy recognised its similarity to Si’s ring of fairy gold.
‘But Chrissy, Chrissy; I thought the same about monsters. And now I’ve seen a monster. It killed my Mom and Dad and my friend. And perhaps, Chrissy, perhaps if I’d believed in fairies earlier, they’d have protected us from the monster!’
Chrissy tenderly took Emma’s hands in hers, gripping them gently and reassuringly.
‘I know this is painful to have to think about it again, Emma, but – can you remember if this monster bit you?’
Unseen by Emma, Si swapped a knowing glance with Chrissy. Judith had been the chiasmus who had attacked the family. And Emma, probably in a doomed attempt to protect her parents, had briefly transformed into a chiasmus too. Just as Chrissy had back in Bonniville.
Her eyes wide with bafflement, Emma briefly seemed to be considering Chrissy’s query. Then she shook her head.
<
br /> ‘I don’t think so. But I can’t remember much about it all. Dad screamed, out in the hall, telling us to run. Then the monster came for me and Mom. But I must’ve been knocked out, because when I woke up everyone was dead. Poor Judith as well: perhaps she’d heard the screams, and rushed in to help. The monster didn’t kill me, because the police came. But when they saw all the bodies, and saw me covered in blood – and I was naked, all my clothes torn off by the monster – they didn’t recognise me. They’d thought I’d killed everyone. They shouted at me, tried to catch me. But I ran away. I hid and didn’t dare come back until I knew they’d gone. They’d boarded up the house, but I was angry: I needed food and clothes. I can’t remember how I did it, but I got back in somehow. I just remember sort of waking up in front of the family portrait. For a moment, I even weirdly fooled myself that Mom and Dad were alive again: that everything had been a terrible dream.’
Emma didn’t hear it, of course, but both Chrissy and Si were aware that Jial seemed to be failing in her obvious attempts to hold back a spluttering cough. Stranger still, Si thought, she appeared to be unnaturally, almost magically, leaning and resting against an invisible object.
‘So you’ve been hiding here since then?’ Chrissy asked Emma, who nodded in reply. ‘And no one came back? No one came looking for – for a switch?’
Emma seemed taken aback.
‘You know about the switch?’
She stared curiously at both Chrissy and Si. They both nodded: Yes, they knew of the switch.
‘But…but Dad said even I wasn’t supposed to know about the switch. He said no one should touch it. It’s hidden, but I came across it by accident–’
‘You know where it is?’ Chrissy couldn’t restrain her sense of excitement.
‘Please, Emma, we need to know where it is,’ Si pleaded. ‘It’s very important.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Emma rose languidly, even a little dreamily, from her seat. She began to lead the way back towards the other rooms. ‘It’s normally locked, of course, but when they came, they left it open–’
‘They? Who left it open Emma?’
‘The men and women who came to save the children.’