The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D.'s Christmas Carol

by Darren Humphries

  “No, I’m not David,” I told her. “I don’t know who David is. I do know who you are though.”

  “Oh,” she asked curiously, “and who am I?”

  “You’re Veronika Bevilacqua, head of the Agency Menagerie.”

  She frowned, which I found surprising. After all, she ought to have been more familiar with who she was than I was. She’d had more years of practice.

  “Bevilacqua? I haven’t gone by that name in several years now. Nor have I been U.N.D.E.A.D.’s zookeeper for some time. My name is Veronika Ward,” she told me to much the same effect as if she had slapped me across the face with a wet fish (minus the lingering aftersmell).

  “Ward?” was pretty much all that I could manage to say.

  “You should be familiar with the name,” she said, coming closer to examine me, “since it belongs to the man whose face you’re wearing. The question is to what end?”

  “I am not wearing anyone’s face,” I insisted. “This is my face. It’s the one that I was born with. You can ask my mother ... if you can find her.”

  She frowned again at that. Not many people are aware of the situation surrounding my mother and it was unlikely that a mere imposter would be aware of it. There are creatures, however, that can take your memories as well as your face.

  “Look, there is no way that I can prove to you who I am,” I told her, “and you appear to have strong reasons to believe that I am not who I appear to be ...”

  “My husband is dead,” she informed me flatly, bringing out the figurative wet fish again for a further slapping.

  Husband?

  Dead?

  These were not two words that I had ever considered using about myself. One I had no real objection to and the other was inevitable, but I had considered them both to be a long way off in my future.

  “When?” I asked, shocked.

  “Three years ago,” she was surprised into telling me. “When the demons banded together and broke open the Agency cells, my husband was in the vanguard of the Resistance.”

  “Demons banded together?” I repeated numbly. “They opened the cells?”

  Veronika walked all around me, sizing me up from all angles, “The reproduction is remarkable. You are just as he was in the early days. Before...”

  “Before what?” I was eager to know.

  “I do not know what this game is that you are playing, but I do not have the time for it,” she dismissed me. “Take him away and kill him.”

  “You need me to face Yule!” I said desperately as the soldiers grabbed my arms.

  “Wait!” Veronika ordered, turning back toward me. “What do you know of Yule?”

  “He’s the one that you’re fighting. He’s the one behind all of this. He created this whole situation, this whole world. It’s a bubble universe, an alternate reality created for my benefit, or rather in order to test me.”

  “Test you?”

  “Preferably to destruction, from his point of view. A demon in the very season of his greatest power has created this future for me to die in, but he’s only a demon and there are limits to his power,” my mind was racing, looking for ways to convince her of a remarkably unlikely truth. “What is happening with the other units in the North?”

  “You think that I am going to tell you that?” she asked, astonished at what she saw as an obvious tactic. “Come in here with my dead husband’s face and I’ll tell you all my secrets? Is that what you think?”

  “You don’t know, do you?” I asked, seeing through her bravado to the truth beneath. “You haven’t had any contact from them for a long time. What about France, down that way,” I pointed in that direction, “any word from them? America? Germany?”

  Her face was eloquent enough.

  “No contact from anyone. How likely is that?” I asked, pressing. “What about new arrivals? Your men were surprised to find me, but there must be survivors wandering about out there? A whole population of lost, frightened people looking for help and not one of them ever shows up on your doorstep? How likely is that?”

  “I deal with what I can see,” she said, but her eyes were clouded with doubt. “I have no time for anything else.”

  “Then you should make the time,” a voice said from the entrance to the tent. It was the voice of Mikhail Kirov who I had known as the head of the Agency’s research and development arm Qoppa Branch, but the voice was the only thing about him that I recognised. Firstly, he was seated in a wheelchair and there was nothing where his legs had been. One arm was encased in metal and moved jerkily as though he was having muscle spasms. His head was shaved and all manner of wires projected out through the bare skull, running to various boxes of electronics located about the wheelchair. “He is telling the truth, or at least what he believes it to be.”

  “Oh, so now you can read minds?” I asked archly.

  “Yes,” was his perfectly serious response. “To a small degree. Enough to know that you believe what you are saying. You actually believe that you are Veronika’s husband.”

  “No,” I corrected him. “At least not yet. I mean to say that I come from a time before any of this could possibly have happened,” I waved at the tunnel in general. Locking eyes with Veronika, I told her, “We are just starting out living together. Working things out as we go.”

  Her face softened for a moment, “I remember those times.”

  “Do you?” I asked. “Do you remember that first Christmas?”

  “I do,” she said and smiled slightly.

  “Do you remember the second?” I asked. “Do you remember what I bought you? Do you remember what we did?”

  She frowned.

  “Think about details. Anything. Something specific,” I pressed her. “You can’t can you? That’s because I come from the time of that first Christmas and so Yule can populate your mind with my memories, but he can’t use what I have yet to experience. Yes, he can create this scenario, but the details... It’s all about the details.”

  “You believe him?” she asked Kirov.

  “It is a workable hypothesis from the known facts,” he replied.

  “I suppose that stranger things have happened,” Veronika commented.

  “Really?” I asked. “When?”

  “Assuming this to be true, then where does that leave us?” she asked, dismissing the attendant soldiers as an afterthought.

  “You say that this is Yule’s world?” Kirov asked, trundling over to join us.

  “It’s his challenge,” I confirmed. “I have to overcome three spirits, or demons, one in my past, one in my present and one in my future.”

  “Or a future of his creation,” Kirov amended. “The future has not happened. You cannot visit it.”

  “I was really hoping to avoid a lecture on time mechanics,” I said plaintively.

  “We can assume that the demon here will come after you then?” the scientist continued.

  “I’m surprised it hasn’t already,” I said honestly, “and I’m kind of fed up of reacting to this situation. I want to take the offensive for a change.”

  “Being offensive always was one of your talents,” Veronika quipped and I noted that she seemed to have accepted me for who I was.

  “If you’re around when this thing comes after me then you’ll all be in danger, so you want me as far away from you as you can get. I’ve been put here to go up against this demon, so that’s what I’m going to do. All you have to do is point the way.”

  “You’d never get close,” Kirov informed me with certainty. “The Horned One has a base set up in a quarry in Hertfordshire. There are hundreds of lesser demons defending it. An army couldn’t take it. Trust me, we know. One man would not stand a chance.”

  “If I understand things correctly, in your world view we are all just constructs from your mind and if you lose then we will all be wiped out when you die,” Veronika pointed out. “Correct?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “And if you win then the demon is killed and this un
iverse, along with all of us, ceases to exist,” she continued. “Correct?”

  “Yes,” I admitted again, rather more uncomfortably.

  “That is not much of a choice,” she pointed out.

  “I’m sorry, but I didn’t make the rules here. The only other option is to lock me up somewhere and keep hiding in this hole until the demon descends on you and ...”

  “Kills us all,” she finished the sentence for me. “There seems to be a recurring motif.”

  “That it sucks to be you? Yes, I noticed that. The only comfort I can offer is that when it’s over either way this world and this suffering will be finished and I can prevent it from ever happening,” I offered. It wasn’t much, but I didn’t have anything else to go with. “And hey, if I’m wrong then all you’ve lost is one nutter who happened to look like your husband.”

  “For this to work you will need our help. We all go or none of us goes,” Veronika said, looking into my eyes, searching for some sign to help her make the right decision. “Do you have some sort of crazy suicidal plan?”

  “That does seem to be my modus operandi doesn’t it?” I agreed. “That depends on what this quarry is like and what you have lying around in here.”

  What they had was a jetpack; an honest to goodness (and actually works without burning your legs off) jetpack. It came with a protective helmet and an instruction manual that started with the words ‘If in doubt, do not use’. Hardly the most encouraging opening line.

  “Are you sure about that?” Veronika asked, pointing to the other package that I had selected out of the stores.

  “Not one little bit,” I told her. We were momentarily alone in the command tent with the plans of the Horned One’s compound in Hertfordshire laid out on the table in front of us. The other commanders had been sent off to organise the forces left to the Resistance for one last operation. “Tell me about this David.”

  The request surprised her and even in the low light I could see her eyes soften and shine a bit more as they moistened. She did not let a tear fall, though. This version of Veronika was older and her innate toughness had been tempered into an iron-willed control. She was, though, unmistakeably my Veronika.

  “I’m not sure that I should,” she said. “This is your future after all.”

  “If Mikhail was here I’m sure that he would point out that it is only one possible future, although it would take him a great many more words and probably a few diagrams as well,” I replied.

  “David was my son,” she revealed. After a few moments she added “Our son.”

  Though I had been expecting something like that it still came as a blow because of the word...

  “Was?”

  “He died,” Veronika reported sadly, but with an edge of anger that you could have used to cut timber. “In the early days after the cells were opened the Agency set up protective zones. The one we were in was attacked and... Well, he died and I got this,” she ran a finger along her scar. “There isn’t a day ...”

  “No, there isn’t,” I interrupted her, not being able to bear seeing her like this. I have seen many of her moods and felt the strength of her spirit on more than one occasion, but I had never thought to see her soul so crushed. I couldn’t take away her pain (and she wouldn’t want me to if I could), but I could at least stop reminding her of it. Though I could rationalise that this wasn’t real, that it was all some sort of play created by Yule to make me dance to his tune, the flood of feelings that was crashing through me was only too real., “and there won’t be another, I promise. I would have liked to have seen him.”

  Veronika reached into the breast pocket of her fatigues and brought out a crumpled piece of paper. It was an inkjet printout of a mobile phone photograph. The quality wasn’t great, but I could clearly make out the face of the young boy shading his eyes from the sun and smiling at whoever took the picture. He looked a very great deal like the boy who I had met backstage so very recently (or such a long time ago). How was it possible for me to feel astonishment, delight, pride, loss … each one distinctly and yet mashed together in a terrible tsunami? One thing I did know, though, was that these emotions were leading me to hate and my hate was very definitely going to lead to someone else’s suffering.

  “He was very much like you,” Veronika said fondly, folding the paper back up and putting it back into her pocket. “And if what you say is true he may well be so again.”

  I did not know what to say. I had no words to convey the whirl of emotions that seeing the boy’s face had stirred up in me. There was no unfeeling quip for a moment like this. It isn’t often that a man gets to look on the face of the son he may one day have (at least not outside of television science fiction shows where it happens all the time).

  “Thank you,” was all I could manage and it seemed so very little despite how much I invested in it.

  Veronika turned all serious and businesslike, the moment of intimacy past, “You need to know about the Horned One.”

  “I do,” I agreed and allowed the flame of hatred to burn coldly, “If I am to kill him.”

  The Horned One, she told me, was Yule himself, the Winter God of Northern Lands. Of all the demons that had been loosed upon the world in this little shadow play, he was the most powerful. There was not a weapon that had been able to touch him. When he had waded into battle with his troops, nothing had been able to stand against him. Eyewitnesses had described him as a giant with the head of a stag. He was crowned with antlers and walked on the cloven hooves of a deer, but he fought with the hands of a man. He wielded magic, however, with the power of a god.

  Which was a bit of a problem.

  It has to be said about jetpacks that as a mode of transport they’re pretty rubbish. For one thing, when you put them on they’re really heavy. For another, they make more noise than a crowd of Spurs FC supporters cheering an Arsenal own goal. They corner with the ease of the average comet and have the same braking characteristics as a cannonball. They are, however, enormous fun and the closest that the human race has come to unaided flight. Many attempts have been made at spells that allow people to fly, but they all suffered roughly the same design flaws as Icarus’ wings. Finally, all experimentation had been halted by the International Aviation Authority after yet another hopeful inventor got sucked into a passenger airliner’s engine over Milan. Military research continues in supersecret conditions, of course, but the most recent Agency reports into the ongoing programmes suggest that they have created more impact craters in various deserts than working prototypes.

  I could see the whole battle laid out below me as I streaked across above the fighting on twin tails of fire. The sheer exhilaration of speed and freedom was drowned out by the apprehension of fuel supply eruptions or abrupt connections with solid surfaces. I had no training in using the bloody thing, so I wasn’t about to try anything fancy like loops or corkscrew turns. It was all I could do to keep going in a straight line toward my objective.

  The human forces struck at dusk. It is more traditional to attack at dawn, but we were making a personal statement of rebellion, so dusk it was. Armoured Personnel Carriers struck both flanks of the encampment in unison, opening up with their large calibre guns firing explosive-tipped rounds. The invisibility spells they had been cloaked with were rendered useless as soon as the first shots were fired, but at least they had gotten us within firing range. The unsuspecting demons were caught by surprise and reacted poorly. Just as they were gathering to deliver a devastating magical response the remnants of human air power dropped their own stealth spells and every last bomb that they had. The ranks of demons were annihilated by a combination of high-explosives, fire and nails. The nail bombs had been my idea. I find that there are few magical defences against a hail of bits of metal travelling at nearly supersonic speeds.

  The carnage was terrifying, but it was all on the enemy’s side, so I didn’t worry about it.

  The element of surprise had been used up, though, and now the defenders reacted. Fireballs
and lightning bolts streaked across the darkening sky, creating a beautiful and deadly pyrotechnic show that brought down three of the bombers before they beat a hasty retreat. Demons of all kinds raced out of the entrance to the main complex that had been constructed in the heart of the quarry. They threw themselves at the attackers with little thought for their own safety (or anything else since the average intelligence of infantry demons is kept low to ensure that they don’t mind being used as cannon fodder). They weren’t ever going to win on tactics as they swarmed out of the excavation toward the humans, but they were easily going to win on numbers.

  As the last of them streamed into the night, I ignited the fires of the jetpack and aimed myself at the access point from which they had all just exited. The aerial battle had already been won and so all of the enemy’s attention had been placed on the ground assault troops. There were no countermeasures launched against me, which was just as well because any evasive manoeuvres that I had been forced to attempt would have surely manoeuvred me evasively straight into the ground. A few demons looked up at me in surprise and one with surprisingly strong legs even leaped up at me, getting my boot in its face as reward, but I flashed unopposed across the compound.

  Now came the tricky bit. At the last moment, I turned the jetpack skyward and released the harness coupling it to my body. As it raced up into the night sky, I followed a parabolic arc aimed at the entry into the enemy stronghold. As upward curve became downward plunge, I took out what looked like a gun and fired at the wall/floor interface that I was rapidly approaching. Pellets of concentrated foam flew out of the gun, expanding and reacting with the air. By the time that they hit the concrete, they had ballooned together into a spongy mass the size of a couple of mattresses. I hit the foam and it compacted beneath me, bleeding away my speed and turning a bone-mashing impact into a bone-jarring deceleration. Unfortunately, I had hit the protective mass whilst inverted and tumbled out onto my head.