“After a fashion, I suppose,” Spring-Heeled Jack butted in.
The Preacher looked at him sourly. “You can take that off.” He pointed at the vigilante’s mask.
“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
“What are you? You look like the Devil.”
“Do you believe I am the Devil?” Jack challenged.
“Don’t be ridiculous! I have encountered the spawn of Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, and they are far more terrifying than you!”
“Her name’s Miranda,” Ulysses said.
“Miranda?” The Preacher was caught off-guard for a moment.
“His absolution. We’re on a rescue mission,” Ulysses added. “A young girl was taken by the locusts and carried over the wall into this no man’s land of yours.”
“A child you say?”
“She’s only eleven years old,” the vigilante said.
“Then you do seek absolution.” The Preacher looked from Jack to Ulysses, and back again with a needling stare. “If the girl is still alive she will be in the hive.”
“The hive?” Ulysses asked. “Where’s that?”
“Why, within the desecrated house of our Lord, of course,” the Preacher said, an unsettling smile spreading across his face.
“Then if that is where she is, we must be on our way,” Ulysses said. “Now, if you’ll just excuse us.”
Nimrod rose to his feet, taking up his fishbowl helmet again.
“To enter the hive is to step through the gates of death,” the Preacher told them.
“Right you are then,” said Ulysses. “So, like I said, if you’d just like to point us to the nearest exit we’ll be on our way.”
“You’re not going in there, just the three of you.”
“Well, yes, as it happens.” Ulysses was beginning to lose his patience with the priest. “Unless you’re offering to come with us, that is.”
“But of course.”
“I thought not, so just point us to the–” Ulysses broke off. “You’re what?”
“I am offering to come with you.”
“But–”
“The road to salvation is long and hard,” the Preacher explained, “and we are all of us sinners. A man can only earn the right to enter the kingdom of heaven by accomplishing good deeds and our place there is not yet assured.” He took in his congregation with a sweeping gesture. “But, if it be the Lord’s will, it will be soon.”
“What do you mean?” Jack asked.
“We are being tested but the Lord has seen fit to provide us with the opportunity to redeem ourselves.”
There was another shout of “Amen!” and weapons were raised and shaken in excited vindication.
“And with your coming into the wilderness the Lord has given us a sign. Tonight we strike back against the locusts, at the heart of the hive. And during our time in purgatory, on our own personal journey through the valley of the shadow of death, we have not been idle. We have been making ready, preparing the way of the Lord.”
Ulysses shot anxious glances between the rabble-rousing fire and brimstone Preacher, his rabble-roused faithful flock and Nimrod and Jack.
“What precisely did you have in mind?”
“‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord.’ And we have been truly blessed. For God has granted us the instrument of his vengeance.”
“Instrument of his vengeance?” Ulysses looked at the Preacher with horror, but the priest seemed too caught up in his own rapturous vision to notice. “You mean you have a secret weapon?”
“There is nothing secret about it,” the Preacher said, smiling as if he were addressing a simpleton. “And now you have brought us the means of delivering God’s vengeance into the heart of the hive, the very pit of demons itself.”
“We have?” Jack said.
Preternatural awareness flared at the back of Ulysses’ brain, a split second before he heard the piston footstep of the droid.
He spun round, even though he already knew what he was going to see.
The Limehouse Golem loomed large before him. Ulysses wasn’t sure whether he felt relieved or horrified to see the monstrous automaton. It bodywork was stained with a dried crust of goo and ichor and its ceramic armour bore the scars of its battle with the insects.
“You went back for it,” Jack said, with almost fatherly concern, much to Ulysses’ chagrin.
“No,” the Preacher corrected him. “It found its own way here. It followed you home.”
CHAPTER SIX
The New Queen of England
THE RESCUE PARTY and the Preacher’s faithful flock stopped at the bottom of another rusted iron ladder.
Down here in the darkness Ulysses was glad of his helmet; it helped mask the effluent smell of the sewers, which brought back unpleasant memories of the wretched Professor Galapagos, the degenerating lizards and the trout-faced fishman.
He looked up into the gloom of the shaft above his head. “This is the place?”
“This is it,” the Preacher confirmed.
“You’re sure about that?”
The Preacher smiled broadly in the lamplight, the extremes of light and shadow giving him an almost demonic appearance. “Oh, I’m sure.”
At the rear of the procession of the faithful, with a hiss of escaping steam, the golem-droid came to a halt. Ulysses noticed that it was carrying something; something large and spherical, covered by a tarpaulin.
They had not met anything on their way through the labyrinthine tunnels. It was certainly much safer moving around underground. If they had tried to approach the cathedral-hive from above ground, they would have had to contend with the full might of the hive’s soldier caste.
It was incredible, really. Within the space of only a few weeks, creatures that had been created simultaneously from a whole cross-section of the populace living and working within the St Paul’s area, had stabilized genetically. They had become a recognisable sub-species of giant insect, even forming into different castes very much as one would expect to see inside a termite nest.
As well as the highly aggressive soldier caste, made up of larger, and particularly lethal, wingless specimens, armed with viciously strong crushing mandibles, and the winged hunter caste, Ulysses supposed there must be a worker caste that maintained the hive. He found himself wondering what the queen of such a colony would be like.
Ulysses turned his gaze from the vertical shaft above him to the Preacher.
“After you,” he said with a wave of his rubber-gloved hand.
IF ULYSSES HADN’T already known that the nest had been constructed inside the church of St Paul’s itself, he would have been hard-pressed to see that that was where they were now.
The longer he stared at the towering structures all around him, the more he could convince himself that it was just about recognisable as London’s greatest church building, despite the locusts’ desecration.
The Preacher had been as good as his word, leading the way from the sewers into the crypts beneath the cathedral. The first thing he had done on entering the mucus-encrusted walls of the catacombs was to take a machete from under his cassock and gut the first drone they ran into, taking it apart with savage glee. Then, splattered with the sticky white mess of the insect’s innards, he had extracted some grotesquely quivering internal organ or other, the faithful taking it in turns to smear their clothes, and even their skin, with the vile stuff that oozed from the horrid receptacle.
“To mask our natural odour,” he said as he passed the slime sac to Ulysses and his companions. “With this covering you the locusts will believe that you are one of their own.”
And so, reluctantly, that was how they had penetrated the hive.
From the crypt they entered the main body of the church and it was there that they came upon the locust drones in greater numbers than ever before. They edged their way forwards, following the assured example of the God-fearing Preacher, who boldly led his flock where angels now feared to tread.
Ul
ysses’ first instinct upon meeting the insects was to freeze, his second to turn his flame-thrower upon the drones and burn the lot of them within their sacrilegious nest. But they were right inside the hive now, and such a course of action would have been nothing less than suicidal. The locusts would have stripped the flesh from their bones, just as surely as their Biblical counterparts had devoured the crops of Egypt all those millennia before.
And so Ulysses, Nimrod and Spring-Heeled Jack had continued to follow the Preacher and his flock as they made their way deeper into the church, towards the heart of the hive.
The interior of the cathedral had been completely transformed by the gigantic insects. Sir Christopher Wren’s remarkable, beautifully-wrought designs paled in comparison to the pillars and galleries raised by the locusts that buried the former beneath tons of compacted earth, chewed pews and saliva-gummed paper.
They passed countless worker drones, coming within only a few feet of them on more than one occasion as they crept slowly and silently forwards, always moving in the direction of the high altar. The insects were busily occupied with maintaining the structure of the hive and tending to the hundreds upon hundreds of soft white eggs that filled the twisting terraces and tunnels.
Ulysses gazed at the egg-filled hollows and galleries that rose up in tiers like the stalls of a choir before him. “There must be thousands of the things,” he said, in an appalled whisper.
“There are,” the Preacher confirmed. “‘They covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt.’”
The Preacher scanned the galleries of the cathedral-hive. “The queen must be nearby.”
The Preacher beckoned them forwards, squeezing past a pillar plastered with regurgitated hymnals; the massive column one of the four great pillars that supported the cathedral’s remarkable dome.
Ulysses looked at the Preacher suspiciously. “Have you been here before?”
The wild-haired cleric turned, his face contorted in silent anger, a callused finger on his lips. With his other hand he pointed dome-wards.
Ulysses, Jack and Nimrod looked up as one. The dandy was forced to swallow hard as he felt his gorge rise.
“Meet the new Queen of England,” the Preacher said. “For if we fail in our endeavour this day that is surely what she will become.”
The abomination filled the space that lay below Wren’s desecrated dome. Lying atop a mound of excretion-glued church furniture, and what were undoubtedly human remains, hanging within a cradle of solidified mucus strings, the queen was little more than a massive egg-laying abdomen. The part of the creature that was recognisable as one of the ‘changed’ insects writhed, as if in pain, whilst being continually fed by an endless chain of her faithful subjects.
But by far the larger part was little more than a swollen sac of undulating, white, boneless flesh. As wide as a locomotive carriage and twice as long, the distended abdomen was coiled in on itself within the void beneath the dome. Even as the horrified rescuers watched, a new egg was pushed from the sagging sphincter of the ovipositor. It was immediately collected and carried away by a waiting drone, the worker setting off to find a safe resting place elsewhere within the hive; the next locust in line preparing to take the next egg.
An endless chain of locust drones waited on the queen at either end, an endless stream of slave-insects feeding her tasty morsels plucked from the ruins of St Paul’s so that she might continue to lay more and more eggs, the whole process driven by the sole instinctive need to perpetuate the locust species.
“Sir,” Nimrod whispered at Ulysses’ shoulder, “if all those eggs hatch...”
“I know, the locusts will swarm and fall upon London in an apocalyptic re-enactment of the Eighth Plague of Egypt.”
“Our purpose is clear,” the Preacher suddenly declared. “The abomination and her unholy brood must burn in the purifying fires of God’s holy retribution!”
“I agree!” Ulysses joined him in his rabble-rousing as the insects became aware of their presence within the hive. Unstrapping the Smith and Winchester from his back, he passed the flame-thrower to the priest. “Here, take this.”
The Preacher accepted the proffered weapon with a quizzical expression on his face.
“Where are you going?”
“We have to find the girl. But you have your own holy work to be about, and that will give you a headstart. The queen must die. Long live the Queen!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Revelation
“THIS WAY,” SPRING-HEELED Jack said and set off up the echoing stairs.
Ulysses tensed for the hundredth time, wondering if the sound would alert the locusts, despite the measures they had taken to mask their presence. He shot anxious glances both up and down the broad spiralling staircase that led from the ground floor of the cathedral to the Whispering Gallery at the bottom of St Paul’s magnificent dome.
A worker drone suddenly appeared around the turn of the stair. Ulysses, Nimrod and the vigilante pressed their backs flat against the wall. The creature passed first Jack, then Ulysses, and then the three rescuers heard a fiery bellow as the Preacher unleashed the full fury of Ulysses’ borrowed flame-thrower on the nest.
The drone halted abruptly. Its head arched back, antennae rippling as it sniffed the air. A pheromone warning had been sent informing every locust within the cathedral that the hive was under attack. And then the locust was gone, moving at a canter as it continued on its way down the spiralling staircase, moving as fast as a six-legged thoroughbred.
“Come on,” Jack goaded the others as he began to take the steps two at a time, his cape flowing behind him, “there’s no time to waste. We have to find the girl.”
Taking several more striding steps, Ulysses found himself at the entrance to the world famous Whispering Gallery. Only it looked nothing like the interior of the dome that St Paul’s was famous for. Now it was the locusts’ larder.
The inside skin of the dome – that had once been adorned by the most marvellous paintings – was now plastered with more masticated paper, fabric, earth and mucus; all mixed together by the worker drones.
Locked within the mud and paper walls of the larder, like flies trapped in amber, were the insects’ victims. There were cats and dogs and all manner of birdlife; the occasional flutter of a wing or pained yowl alerting the rescuers to the horrible truth that the locusts’ queen obviously liked her prey to be served up warm.
But worst of all were the alcoves containing human beings. Everywhere Ulysses looked he saw pale, drawn faces, peering out from the cells of the prisons in which they had been secured.
“There!” Jack called out, pointing to the other side of the gallery. “There’s the girl!”
Ulysses started moving, hurrying after the vigilante, Nimrod bringing up the rear. The vigilante had done well to recognise the child, given that her hair was plastered with hardened mucus and only her face was visible within the horrid crust.
The three rescuers made their way around the gallery ledge, the late afternoon sunlight pouring in through the high windows painting the faces of those trapped within the larder wall, giving them the appearance of cherubic angels.
The gallery was eerily deserted, the Preacher’s attack on the hive obviously impelling the drones to rally against the enemy, instinct informing the insects that their priority was to safeguard the queen and her offspring, the blood royal, and, thereby, the future of the colony.
Ulysses glanced down over the railing of the walkway. He could see the queen, writhing as if in torment, as a host of drones came to her aid; swarming all over her, cutting through the concrete-hard mucus-strings holding her in place with scissoring mandibles. They were freeing her from her constraints, presumably to move her to safety.
Seeing the drones scuttling all over the qu
een body’s only impressed upon Ulysses how big the locusts’ monarch was. Even without the egg-producing sac she was still twice the size of even the largest of her soldier bodyguards. God alone knew what she had been before the transforming rain fell on London.
The orange glow of an explosion illuminated her monstrous majesty for a moment as the Preacher and his crusading soldiers of Christ set to work purging the hive. And was he imagining things, or could Ulysses really hear a bellowed exorcism taking place below them within the nave of the church?
“Help me get her down.” Spring-Heeled Jack was struggling to free the child from the larder wall, tugging at the mucoid crust with his gauntleted hands. The vigilante extending his talon-blades with a flick of his wrists the dandy pulled away great pieces of the sticky crust.
And then Victor Gallowglass’s daughter was free. She moaned softly as the vigilante lifted her down and laid her gently over his shoulder.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“What about the others?” Nimrod asked.
“We leave them.”
“We can’t do that,” Ulysses’ manservant said in utter disbelief.
“I can, and I will,” the vigilante declaimed. “I came for the girl, nothing more.”
“Nimrod’s right,” Ulysses interjected. “You’ve got a lot to learn about being a hero if you’re ready to leave these poor bastards to, what would appear to be, a fate worse than death.”
Another explosion rocked the cathedral dome.
“Take the girl and leave, if you want. Victor Gallowglass will be grateful, I’m sure, but I for one – and Nimrod, for another – cannot simply leave everyone else to burn in the fires of hell that our new acquaintances are unleashing down there. Come on, old boy, let’s get to work. We haven’t got much time.”
The vigilante watched, stunned into inaction, the girl limp over his shoulder, as the dandy and his manservant set about ripping down more of the hardened mucus shell, encasing the locusts’ victims.
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