Cronix

by James Hider

  He couldn’t think of anything to say, still shocked at this unexpected discovery. Shareen mistook his silence for reluctance, and clung defensively to the package of Cronix meat. “What, changed your mind then? Or are you thinking this is poetic justice? An Eternal who did all those terrible things to those kit kids gets her come-uppance and ends up here, a dying whore?”

  “No,” he stammered, though the thought had crossed his mind. “I’m just surprised that Lola didn’t tell me you were here…”

  “Why would she? She always hated me.” She lifted up the package of meat and sniffed it greedily, then smiled. “But that doesn’t matter. You’ve got an itch, and I know how to scratch it.”

  She leaned over and slipped her hand on his thigh. He stared down at the bony fingers in horror, then turned and fled without a word.

  ***

  The still days of summer’s end passed in nameless succession. Without calendars, no one knew what day or even month it might be. No one really cared either. Lola was ashamed to admit she could not even say what day her daughter’s birthday was, although she was sure it had been around September, so they decided to celebrate with a small bonfire and dancing. The girl’s many friends came, adults and kids, and she danced to the beat of animal-skin drums round the fire with Uxmith, an orphan boy whom she had befriended and who was always trailed by his mute little brother, Boo. Oriente had been shocked to hear from Pris that Ux, as he was commonly known, was one of a gang of boys who ventured outside the walls at night to cut wood from saplings for arrows, as well as collect firewood. The kids received extra rations as a reward, which meant their near-suicidal trips were officially sanctioned. When Oriente had raised the matter with Hencock, the former inspector was unapologetic.

  “Without a ready supply of arrows, the Cronix would have overrun this place long ago and everyone would have died. We can’t get the right wood inside the fort: it has to be fresh oak, ash, pine, none of which grow inside the perimeter. The kids can move more easily than us through the woods, they’re smaller and stealthier. And we need the men on the walls. It’s logical.”

  He shrugged: a matter of survival, even if three of Ux’s friends had been killed and eaten while foraging.

  Ux was a plucky kid, lean and tan with a thick mop of chestnut hair. Like most of the children in the castle, he was small for his age. Their diet did not favor growth spurts. When Oriente asked him if he was scared during his forays, he just shrugged like the question was academic. Of course he was scared. But like Hencock said, there was no choice. As Oriente watched the boy dance wildly with Pris in the fire's glow, then collapse breathless and gigging, he wondered how many times the boy could defy the odds in the woods, and he wished again for some way out.

  He wandered away from the gathering, into the pitch black lee of a rampart. Looking up at the stars that peeked through the scattered clouds, the giant muttered an incantation of sorts.

  “What is it you want of me? Tell me, goddamit.”

  There was no answer, so he slowly walked back to the festivities and stared at the doomed young dancers.

  ***

  But when the sign came, just two days later, he was unprepared. They all were.

  The night watch was drawing to a close, and the guards on the walls were yawning, already dreaming of straw mattresses and sleep. None of them had paid much attention these days – the Cronix steered clear of the walls now, thanks to Oriente. A white blanket of mist hung over the meadows, speaking of colder nights to come.

  Oriente was sitting outside the guardhouse, back to the wall, wondering where he could find some more substantial clothing if he was to face a cold winter here. The guards had built a fire in the guardhouse hearth, and one of his comrades was recalling how temperatures had dropped well below freezing the year before. Disease, hunger and cold had carried off more than forty people.

  He was snapped out of his thoughts by a strangled hollering from the wall.

  “Out there! Oh good god, they’re here. They’re here!”

  Oriente was on his feet in an instant, knife in hand. He looked out over the walls and his breath stopped.

  There, standing in the mist, were thousands upon thousands of Cronix, stock still and facing the castle.

  “Good lord,” stammered Old Walt. “This is it. This is really it.”

  The old hunter started sobbing. Oriente paid him no heed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the endless ranks of Cronix that appeared to be almost part of the mist, all of them staring at the wall, as though directly at him.

  He pulled the sagging old man to his feet. “Walt, go and fetch Hencock. Now.” He pushed him towards the steps. The Cronix still had not moved.

  The former DPP inspector came panting up the stone steps minutes later, wearing a frayed suit jacket against the cold. It appeared grotesquely out of place on his bare torso. He limped as fast as he could to the parapet and stood in silence, his jaw dangling in shock.

  “Hencock,” Oriente said. “Sound the general alarm. Get everyone we have up here. They haven’t moved for the last ten minutes or so. We may have time. Go on, fetch everyone you can.”

  The inspector did not move. Oriente shook his shoulder but he remained rooted to the spot.

  “Come on, Inspector, we haven’t much time.”

  Hencock shook his head. “There’s no point,” he whispered. “Look at them. We can’t do anything. This is it. It’s over.” He turned and gave Oriente a hollow look. “Let them sleep,” he said. “It’s too early.”

  “Hencock!” Oriente slapped him across the face, not hard, but enough to bring color to his cheek. “We have to fight them. This is the only place we’ll have a chance. If we can’t hold them here we can go to the keep, but that’s a death trap. Get as many people as you can here, and get a detail to start moving supplies to the keep.”

  The ex-commissioner limped off without answering, an automaton barely warmed up in the cold morning. Oriente stared out again at the mass of misplaced souls before him, and for the first time asked himself why they were just standing there. If they were going to overrun them, why not just charge? For the first time since he had seen the hordes, the imminence of death seemed to recede an inch or two.

  People were drifting on to the walls by now, letting out wails and sobs as they arrived. Everyone was rousing neighbors, families, friends, and all were all headed here, in groups or on their own. There were prayers floating up above the humans on the ramparts, hushed goodbyes and tearful embraces.

  “This is it, then,” said a short man at Oriente’s side, nodding his head. “Well, guess it had to come some time.”

  “Better now than in the winter,” said a taller man by his side. “Least this way we don’t have to freeze our balls off first.” Weak laughter rose from the group.

  “Come on, you bastards,” shouted a defiant youth a little further down the wall, to a chorus of hushes and shhhhs. But still, the Cronix mass did not move.

  An hour passed. Birds started singing off in the woods. The call of nature dragged away people who had stumbled straight out of their sleep: when they returned, they seemed almost surprised that the Cronix were still there, as though they had been a bad dream that might have faded away after their morning ablutions.

  Hencock returned, more composed now than he had been on the initial shock. “What the hell are they doing?”

  He looked to Oriente for a possible answer, but the giant shook his head. “They seem to be waiting for something,” he said. “Like something's controlling them...”

  He snapped his fingers. Hencock peered expectantly at him, but was rewarded only with a brisk “Stay here” as Oriente ran off into the castle.

  Lola’s room was away from the main living quarters, a round chamber in a corner tower. No one had gone to wake her, and as Oriente marched through the castle grounds, his mind was tormented by the idea that had come to him on the wall: it was he had summoned this nightmarish scenario into being.

  If the god-like cre
ature in the Orbiter was controlling the Cronix, implanting orders in their vacant minds, then it could only be doing so through the chips in their heads. And Oriente had also been reanimated with a chip in his head, linking him to the godhead. And two nights ago, at Pris’s birthday dance, he had pleaded for a sign …

  This was the sign.

  Pris was sleepily plodding across the dirt lot outside the keep, heading out to meet Oriente from his night shift. She squinted at all the people running around at so early an hour.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, yawning. “Did you bring any pig?”

  Oriente scooped her up and ran with her in his arms up to Lola’s room. She woke up as soon as he burst in.

  “Get everything you have,” he told her. “Whatever clothes, food, mementoes you have, pack it all up. We’re leaving. Now. Pris, run and get Ux and Boo, and meet us at the guardhouse as soon as you can.”

  Lola did not even bother asking any questions, just dressed, grabbed her meager possessions and the few nuts and dried berries she had begun hoarding for winter. The little group was back on the wall within fifteen minutes.

  Hencock was still there, issuing orders and overseeing a group of men heaping piles of rocks to hurl at the invaders. Oriente looked out over the walls: the mist had almost cleared, revealing the Cronix mass in all its majesty. There must have been close to 10,000 of them out there, all staring as though mesmerized at the ramparts.

  “Thank god you’re back,” said Hencock. “Listen, we’ve got the night watch posted at the most vulnerable spots and squads of rock throwers positioned at the points where…”

  He fell silent as Oriente shook his head. Hencock suddenly noticed that Lola was carrying a hemp sack, a tortoise-shell comb sticking out the top.

  “I know what they want,” Oriente told the inspector. “They want me to go out there.”

  There was a stunned silence from the group around Hencock. “Are you insane? They’ll rip you to pieces, Ranger or not…”

  “I don’t think so,” Oriente interrupted. “In fact, I think they’ll let me pass.”

  “Why? What makes you so sure?”

  “An act of faith,” said Oriente. “Listen, Hencock, I’ve become a liability to you here.”

  He realized he could say no more in front of these people. He grabbed the inspector and pulled him away. “I need to speak to you alone.” The rest of the group stared, crestfallen, as the giant dragged their leader into the smoky guardroom and closed the door.

  “Listen, you remember what Tilloch told me? That there are a few emergency fallback centers scattered around the globe, that would allow the Eternals to repopulate the Earth even if some catastrophe swept away the entire population? Well, one of them is in the southwest of England, a place called Glastonbury. Buried deep inside a hill that the ancient druids worshiped as sacred. Tilloch believed that this newborn deity wants me to go there, to guard it. But I think it wants me to block it off.”

  Hencock’s face went blank. “Why would it want you to do that? And anyway, I thought it didn’t know what it wants?”

  “It’s developing. And very fast. My job is to second guess it. And I think it wants to stop people ever returning to Earth.”

  Hencock looked horrified. Their only chance of escape was for the downloads to start working again, for Eternals to come back and redeem them from this horror.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because humans are its brain cells. Every bored Eternal who wanders into the mood pools makes it a little bit smarter, better able to survive. If the Eternals ever started coming back here for any reason, it’d be like god getting Alzheimer’s. It would simply cease to be.”

  Hencock fell silent. “But you can’t be sure,” he eventually said.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” replied the giant.

  “And you’d risk Lola’s life? I presume the little girl is going with you too?”

  “If we stay here, we’re all dead anyway. Look out there. If I don't go, it's going to send these monsters swarming over your walls any minute. Better this way. Then maybe we all have a chance.”

  “What about us?” Hencock said, a desperate plea in his voice. “I mean, it doesn’t matter so much for me and the other Immortals, but there’s a lot of people who will really die here.”

  Oriente shook his head. “I have no idea what it plans for you. At best, it doesn’t care about you. At worst, it may want anyone who remembers the old ways dead. You saw how many Cronix there are out there. They must have been summoned from across the whole of southern England. The wildlife round here could never sustain so many of them. They must be starving…”

  He stopped, realizing where that line of reasoning would lead: there was only one possible food source here for so many Cronix.

  The spirit seemed to have ebbed out of the old inspector. “Oh Jesus, I can’t tell them that. Can you imagine…”

  Oriente stood up, stopping to avoid hitting his head on the low stone ceiling. “Listen, time is running out. I have no idea when they might storm the ramparts. I have to go now. Tell the people...I don't know, tell them I've gone to bring help, to find a more secure refugee. Tell them anything. Just don’t tell them the truth.”

  He was about to open the door when Hencock grabbed his arm. “But you can’t leave. You’re the prophet, aren’t you? How can you abandon your people?”

  Oriente stared at his gaunt face. “I’m not sure if I’m meant to be a prophet for you people, inspector, or for those things out there. I fear the monsters may be my flock.”

  ***

  A group of ragged defenders were waiting, expectantly, on the ramparts as the two men stepped out. Lola was there too, clutching Pris by the hand. Uxmith was holding the girl’s other hand, and his little brother Boo was slung on his back, arms clasped round his neck. Oriente was surprised to see Shareen standing next to Lola.

  “She wants to come too,” Lola said.

  “You sure, Shareen?” Oriente felt uneasy at the idea. He had no idea how safe it would be to take extras bodies through that terrifying mass beyond the walls. Shareen swallowed, then nodded. “You always seem to get by,” she said, her voice raspy. “Maybe you’re blessed. May as well throw in my lot with you. Besides,” she added with an uncertain smile at Lola, “why should she get to be the fucking chosen one?”

  “Okay,” Oriente said. He held out his hand and she took it. They started down the stairs.

  “Wait, you’re leaving us?” shouted a woman, who from her faded good looks must have once been an Eternal. It struck him now how vain the term had been.

  A murmur rippled through the crowd. Oriente stopped on the stone steps, his little band of travelers huddled around him. He shouted so the people lining the walls could hear him.

  “People of London,” he said. “I have come to believe that my presence here is a danger to you all, that the Cronix will attack this place if I stay here any longer. On my last hunting trip I captured a scold, one of the more sentient of these creatures. She told me the Cronix believe I am a great leader to them, and that I am being held captive here against my will. They have come this day to free me. If I go to them, I believe they will leave and you will be safe.”

  He surprised himself with his own sudden inspiration. He looked to Hencock on the wall above. The inspector nodded, his face ashen. “Open the gate,” he yelled, and raised his hand in a gesture of farewell.

  “And may god be merciful to you,” Oriente shouted to the confused, frightened defenders of Arundel, although he knew he was actually addressing the all-powerful creature birthed by the Orbiter.

  He turned, and the group walked across the courtyard to where a watchman stood holding the wooden gate ajar. Up on the walls, the boy who had played the drum at Pris’s birthday party started a slow, solemn beat, as though accompanying them to the gallows.

  “Are we going to die?” asked Pris, voice shaking. Before he could answer Ux piped up. “No Pris, we’re going to be alright.” Or
iente turned and smiled at the boy, then stepped through the open gate.

  The sight stopped him in his tracks. He felt the skin beneath his right eye twitch: his old tic had was back. Instinctively, he tried to put up a hand to steady it, but it was being clutched by Lola.

  At ground level, the wall of Cronix seemed impenetrable, stretching as far as the eye could see. He remembered the crowds of embalmed figures arrayed around the giant statue of Fitch on Epsom Downs, the unease they had always instilled. It was as if those soulless statues had come to life, and for the first time since he had returned to Earth he was afraid. Not just for himself, but for the poor stragglers whose lives he was about to entrust to an uncertain deity. If his nerve was buckling, how petrified must his companions be?

  He turned to them. Lola was staring at him for some sign of reassurance. Pris had buried her face in her mother’s side, trembling uncontrollably. Ux just stared straight ahead – he had swung Boo round to his chest, so the infant could not see what lay ahead. Shareen was making a gurgling sound, her eyes bulging and her fingers digging into to Ux’s shoulder. They all appeared ready to turn and flee back to the relative safety of the castle. Above them, on the walls, the crowds peered down, dismayed at losing their hero, yet even more horrified at what the little group was about to attempt.

  “Come on,” barked Oriente. “Stick close and don’t stray, not even an inch.”

  He felt fingers hooking themselves into the waistband of his kilt, and the group started to shuffle out into the open meadow, towards the solid ranks of the Cronix. Oriente could feel dried stems of grass breaking under his bare feet, the small fingers of women and children pressing against his flesh, and he realized that they were probably all about to die a terrible death.

  With their awkward, crab-like steps, it seemed to take an eternity before they closed in on the front line of creatures. At fifty yards, he could see their faces clearly, beautiful worn visages, blank of all expression, eyes fixed on the approaching figures, like dogs watching food going into their master’s mouth. He heard Shareen muttering a prayer against imminent extinction, a steady ohgodohgodohgod that numbed her mind against doing the impossible. Lola’s breathing was ragged, Pris’s crying a pitch below hysteria. They were about to cross the threshold of blind panic.