They all look up and Sharon cries, ‘Stanly!’
I look around. There are no cars on this street, apart from my mum’s, and for one ridiculous second I think can’t smash it, I’ll get in trouble.
Did that thought really just cross my mind?
It’s been a strange day.
I reach out, pick the car up and lift it off the ground. ‘Get away from that thing!’ I yell. Sharon and Eddie pass on the instruction and the crowd gratefully disperses, and I wrap my mum’s car up with my brain and hurl it with as much force as I can muster . . . and in it goes, splitting the beast’s side, penetrating its belly or whichever essential bit of it I’ve ruptured. Luminous multicoloured fluids start spurting out, decorating the street, and the creature bellows in agony and tries to crawl away, but it can’t, it’s too badly hurt. Connor and Skank resume firing at it and the crowd set upon it with their own weapons while I land bumpily and run over to Sharon and Eddie. They both wrap me up in a steel embrace that crushes my breathing, but I don’t care, relief washes over me: something might at least momentarily be all right.
‘You’re safe,’ Eddie whispers.
‘Fine,’ I choke. ‘You?’
‘Yeah. You know you made me admit that I secretly wanted to do all this superhero-y ass-kicking business? Is it all right if I take it all back?’
‘Yes.’
The embrace breaks and he looks me up and down. ‘What happened to you?’
‘They captured me.’ I don’t really want to go into specifics. ‘But I escaped.’
‘And the, uh, uniform?’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Um . . . yeah. I tried to break in again. Didn’t go that well.’
‘It really doesn’t suit you.’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Little short for a stormtrooper, eh?’ I smile weakly, and he shakes his head and offers the distant evolutionary precursor of a smile in return. ‘What about you guys?’ I ask.
‘We’ve been hiding out,’ says Eddie. ‘We thought we might go and try again, destroy the machines, but . . .’
‘We were wrong,’ I say. ‘The Angel Group weren’t trying to open a doorway. They were trying to close it.’
‘What?’ Eddie’s face is a portrait of disbelief and shock.
‘We screwed up,’ I say. ‘I screwed up.’ Saying it makes it sink in in a way it hadn’t before. In the midst of this maelstrom of bloody, impossible mayhem, I feel the full weight of what I’ve done. Laying into Alex before made it feel almost better, like I wasn’t responsible, but now . . . ‘We should go,’ I say. ‘There’s stuff to do . . . people to help.’ Eddie nods. ‘Where’s Daryl?’ I ask.
Eddie and Sharon exchange looks. ‘I’m not sure,’ says Sharon. ‘When everything went wrong at the second site, Connor and I got separated from Freeman . . . then when Skank and Daryl found us and told us what happened, Daryl said he was going to find him. Find Freeman, I mean. Find a way of getting you out . . . we haven’t seen either of them since.’
Oh God.
Daryl . . .
‘He’ll be fine,’ I say. ‘He . . . he’ll be all right. He can handle monsters.’
Please can he be all right.
Unless he was in on . . .
NO.
No. He wasn’t in on this. There’s no way.
He’s betrayed you before—
NO. SHUT UP BRAIN.
Connor and Skank hurry over. ‘Stanly,’ says Skank. ‘You all right?’
‘Same as always.’
‘That bad, huh?’
I smile. ‘You?’
‘Five by five.’
‘Connor,’ I say. ‘You OK?’
‘Honestly,’ says Connor, reloading his guns, ‘I have been better.’
‘I know the feeling.’ I tell them about the beast in Regent’s Park. No-one looks particularly keen, understandably. ‘I don’t know how we actually fix this,’ I say. ‘Smith said there was a plan B at one point, but it doesn’t seem . . . anyway. For the moment, I think we’re just going to have to try and kill as many monsters as possible.’
Eddie and Sharon nod. Connor shrugs, which is as good as a nod. Skank cocks his shotgun, which I take as a yes. ‘Cool,’ I say. ‘Hold on.’ I think grab, I think steady, and I fly. Up into the fiery sky, over the dying buildings. Even now the sensation of flying gives me a molecule of comfort, and I hold on to that. I don’t wallow, I don’t indulge, I don’t overdo it, I don’t try to convince myself that things really are going to be OK. But like Lauren’s pat on the shoulder before, every little helps.
Except it doesn’t really. Because now we pass over a building and see Regent’s Park . . . or the place formerly known as Regent’s Park . . . and I stop us dead in the air.
Oh.
Enormous isn’t big enough. Gigantic isn’t big enough. This thing must be nearly a quarter of a mile in diameter, a bulbous, pulsating green dome ringed by a hundred tentacles as thick as ancient trees, and at the centre is a huge round mouth, a chasm full of chainsaw teeth, each one as long as two people. It’s trying to haul itself out of the massive crater it’s lying in – oh God there’s more of it, this is just the head. It roars again and I feel like I might spontaneously combust because that would be preferable to sharing a universe with this thing. A line of tanks is converging, looking comically tiny. We hang in the air and I look over at Eddie. ‘Um. So. What d’ya reckon?’
‘If I said I haven’t got the faintest inkling of a clue and would kind of like to curl up in a ball and cry, would you hold it against me?’
‘Not at all.’
‘What the hell do we attack?’ says Connor. ‘It’s . . . it’s so . . .’
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! A barrage of fiery tiger coughs as the tanks launch their first rounds. The projectiles hit the beast’s great green bulk and it bellows and shakes, causing another tremor that reduces several nearby buildings to piles of dust and ruined concrete. As the smoke clears I see that the monster’s flesh is blackened but unbroken and it lashes out with a retaliatory tentacle, swatting a tank and propelling it spinning through the air like a little toy. It crashes down in a car park, demolishing several cars. Sharon narrows her eyes, concentrates and sends both of her lampposts towards the beast like orange-tipped javelins; one impacts against it and bounces off, the other goes straight into its mouth and is effortlessly ground into powder by the monster’s teeth. The tanks fire again, uselessly.
‘Stanly!’
I look down. An open-top army truck has pulled up and a number of soldiers jump out . . . along with Lauren. ‘Thought you weren’t coming?’ I call.
‘I changed my mind!’ she yells. ‘And now . . . I kind of wish I hadn’t!’
‘I’m bringing you up!’ I think towards her and lift her up to meet us, and there is a bizarre exchange of nods. Oh yeah, hi, how are you, how’ve you been, nice to see you, oh, monsters, yeah, totally, yeah apocalypse, yeah, well bye then . . .
What are we going to do?
What. The. HELL. Are—
‘Take us over the top of it,’ says Skank, suddenly. ‘Over its mouth.’
‘You’re joking!’ says Connor. ‘Over that mouth?’
‘Only weak point as far as I can see. If Stanly is absolutely certain he won’t accidentally drop any of us into the jaws of hideous doom, I think it might be a workable strategy.’
‘I’m certain,’ I say. I have to be.
‘Oh God,’ says Sharon. She closes her eyes for a second, then opens them and nods decisively. ‘OK then. Fine.’ She brings her one remaining lamppost back above her head.
‘Worth a try,’ says Eddie, doing an admirable job of keeping his voice level. ‘I guess.’ He reaches into his jacket and pulls out the sawn-off shotgun I took from Connor and Sharon’s safe about fifty years ago.
‘Lauren?’ I ask.
She nods her head an
d speaks inside mine. (Please don’t drop us.)
I try a reassuring smile and nod. It feels a bit silly.
OK.
Up we go.
I take us higher and fly us towards the monstrosity, trying to ignore the webs of lightning above our heads. The rain is really heavy now, hot rather than warm, and more angry blasts rend the air as the tanks fire again, arcs of light curving gracefully over the forest of flapping tentacles and exploding around the mouth. It shudders and roars and everything shakes. I lift us up again as a tentacle whirls past, too close for comfort, then fly above the whirlpool of blades, allowing Skank, Eddie and Connor to aim their guns and let rip. Bullets ricochet off monstrous teeth, shedding sparks, some find their way through and strike flesh and it screams again, letting loose gusts of wet, stinking breath. I just concentrate on keeping us all in the air. Lauren is summoning everything she can from the ground around the monster and launching it into its hellish maw, bits of twisted metal and concrete blocks and burning wreckage, and Sharon javelins her lamppost in. It disappears briefly, then the monster burps it back up and it slices towards us. Sharon catches it with her mind and sends it down again, and Lauren drops a whole car – ah, car-throwin’ buddy – but the monster obliterates it. ‘This isn’t working!’ yells Eddie.
It really isn’t.
The tanks fire again. Pointless. Completely pointless. Why can’t they just . . .
Aha.
‘I’m sending you all down to the ground,’ I say.
‘What?’ asks Eddie. ‘But—’
‘Trust me.’ I think go, ignoring their various protestations, and fly them back and away from the mouth, safely down through the tentacles. Then I turn my focus to one of the tanks, beckoning the vehicle. It obediently leaves the floor and comes towards me, and I hope the occupants understand the plan I’m formulating and don’t try to blow me out of the air. I bring the tank right up next to me then tilt it downwards so the gun is pointing directly into the monster’s mouth. I sneak a glance at my friends and see they’re keeping the tentacles occupied with bullets and improvised projectiles. ‘FIRE!’ I yell, amplifying my voice with my powers and hoping it reaches the soldiers inside the tank. ‘BLOODY FIRE, NOW!’
BLAM! A fireball launches straight into the mouth, blowing apart hundreds of teeth and exploding deep within. The monster belches a pillar of fire and I feel myself and the tank hurtling away from it, through the air, propelled by a hot shockwave. I’m spinning over and over, I can’t tell what’s up and what’s down, all I can hear are explosions and roaring, all I can do is try and slow myself down and hope for the best. ‘Oof.’ I hit the ground and bounce and hit it again and roll, and somehow end up in a sitting position on a carpet of broken glass, staring at the monster as it writhes and roars in agony. Its tentacles are going berserk and I see another tank flying up, and another, but I’m not doing it . . . Lauren? Sharon? Yes! The two of them are standing a way away from me, looking up, and tanks are firing and firing into the monster’s infinite belly, hollowing it out. Now Leon appears out of the darkness and raises a tank of his own, blasting and blasting, and the creature is dying, I can see it, I can hear it, I can smell it, I can feel it. It’s nearly finished. Another blast and a new roaring scream, desperate now rather than angry, and Eddie turns towards me, grinning. ‘Well, looks like I didn’t kill Leon after—’
THUMP. A spasming tentacle hits him with the force of a speeding truck and he flies away from me, far away, too far for me to see. ‘Eddie!’ I yell. ‘EDDIE!’ I jump to my feet, run and take off, closely followed by Connor, who is sprinting as fast as I can fly towards the husk of a gutted building where I think Eddie must have fallen. I drop to my feet and run over crunching rubble, and I can see him now, I can see his arm, yes, yes—
—no—
I stop, as does Connor. Eddie is lying on the ground, eyes closed, his face a mess of blood, his arms and legs at the wrong angles. I stumble over to him, the screams of the defeated beast fading away, absorbed into useless frequencies, fall to my knees next to my cousin and reach out to take his hand. Limp, completely limp. I think open your eyes but he doesn’t obey. I look at his chest but there is no breath, and I think breathe, but he doesn’t obey. I think open your eyes, breathe, breathe, BREATHE, I’m thinking the words and screaming them, although I can hardly hear myself, and I can hear that Connor is talking to me but I can’t hear what he’s saying, unimportant words of some kind, I’m too busy to listen, busy thinking, because I think things and they happen, that’s how all this works, I think them and that makes them true, so when I think live, bloody live Eddie, LIVE you bastard, breathe, breathe, breathe, open your eyes, and when I scream for him to OPEN HIS FUCKING EYES RIGHT NOW, he should, he should do what I say. But he doesn’t. Why won’t he do what I tell him? I’m sobbing into his neck, shaking him, my tears pouring into his blood, crystal and crimson making a mosaic on his skin, but he won’t breathe.. He won’t open his eyes. He just lies there like an old doll. Like he’s forgotten himself. He’s forgotten how to live. How? How can anyone forget how to live? I don’t understand.
‘Come back.’ I’m whispering. I can hear my whisper above my screaming. My screaming? Is it mine? Or am I just whispering? Whose name is that? Stanly? ‘Stanly.’ Connor’s voice. ‘Stanly, he’s gone.’
NO.
‘He’s dead, Stanly.’ Connor might also be crying. I’m not sure. It’s hard to discern individual sounds. A million miles away there might be one more roar, and then multiple reverberations as all those lifeless tentacles come crashing down. That might be what’s happening. I think I can hear Sharon’s voice too. I think she might be there. I think she might be crying too. I think . . .
I don’t know what I’m thinking.
I’m thinking he’s dead.
I’m thinking he’s really dead.
And if I think it . . .
That means it’s true.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
SOMEONE SPEAKS, AN unfamiliar voice, clear and cold, cutting right through the deafening silence. ‘We must continue.’
Somehow I’m standing up again. My body turns itself around and I look where everyone is looking, at the source of the voice. Leon. He regards me, face inscrutable, hands behind his back, sword in its sheath. ‘What?’ I feel myself ask.
‘We must continue.’ I think he might be French. ‘More to kill.’
‘You don’t tell us what to do.’ Connor’s voice is a low growl.
‘It does not matter,’ Leon said. ‘Friends, enemies. Does not matter now. There are more to kill.’
‘I’m not just going to leave him here.’ It’s me speaking again. My own voice is strangled, guttural, but childish in comparison to Connor’s. I’m not sure why I’m comparing them. I . . .
‘Stanly . . .’ Sharon’s voice?
‘You must.’ Leon.
‘No.’ I lunge at him and feel him try to stop me, freeze me in the air as he did before, but I’m not going to let him, not now. I send a mental punch in his direction that knocks him backwards but he doesn’t look at all rattled, he just comes at me with a kick that I barely dodge, feeling the wind across the side of my head. I try to bring my leg around to trip him up but the manoeuvre is far too clumsy and his foot slams into the back of my head with such force that my vision fragments and I nearly topple over. I don’t let myself, though, instinct kicks in and I fly up over his next two attacks, landing behind him and visualising twin chains of glowing thought that wrap around his arms, pinning them to his sides. His sword rises from its scabbard but I think snap, shattering the blade like glass, then I think over and he’s down, pinned to the floor. I hold him there and suddenly, as though abruptly tuning to a new station, I register all the other voices. Sharon crying no, Connor yelling for me to stop, Skank saying this isn’t helping, for God’s sake. Lauren is there too, but she’s not speaking. Just looking at me, at Eddie, her face
so full of sorrow, grief, grief for me, because I’ve lost . . . no, no, no, NO.
No.
I look down at Leon and I can feel emotion, real emotion. He’s angry. It comes off him like red steam. ‘So you do feel.’ I really don’t sound like myself. Connor moves to pull me away, Sharon is trying to use her powers, but I’m blocking them all. Nobody’s getting near me if I don’t want them to.
‘Yes,’ says Leon. ‘But I do not let emotions control me. You do. You will not survive this.’
‘I’m not leaving Eddie.’
‘You have to.’
‘No I don’t.’ I tighten my grip on him. ‘Maybe I’ll kill you, huh? Balance it out a bit? Kill you like Eddie should have?’ I start to constrict his breathing, and he gags.
‘Stanly, STOP!’ cries Sharon.
‘You . . . must . . .’ chokes Leon. ‘The city is—’
‘Doomed,’ I say.
‘No,’ says Connor. More lightning strikes nearby, bathing us in crackling heat. Somewhere, something explodes. Something’s always exploding. That’s the way things are now.
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ I say.
‘We took that thing down.’ Sharon’s voice shakes, her face is wet with tears, but she points firmly towards the dead giant. ‘We killed it. We can—’
‘They’ll keep coming,’ I say. ‘Millions of them. Never stopping. Never ever. And there’ll be worse ones that that. So much worse.’ As if to hammer home my point, another tremor comes, shaking the abused earth with malignant joy. Leon struggles but I keep him flat and helpless with my wrath. ‘We can’t just keep fighting them. It’s pointless. They’ll wear us down and then kill us. Like . . .’ I look at Eddie and my vision blurs, and I find that I can’t say his name.
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