Brett puffed contentedly on his cigar. ‘Well – I guess it’s been a privilege getting to know you, Cogwheel.’
‘Reciprocated with bells on,’ Cogwheel hiccupped.
‘Aw – what the heck! You want me to open another bottle?’
‘Sounds like an idea.’
Brett reached back so Bull could pass him one of the two bottles remaining in the crate. He laid it in his lap for a moment while he took a thoughtful drag on his cigar, held the smoke in for too long and ended up coughing smoke out of both nostrils. His eyes watered as he uncapped the new bottle and took a swig. ‘Don’t know about you guys, but I sure as hell didn’t figure we’d end up here.’
Cogwheel shook his head. ‘We can head out, if that’s what you chaps want. All we have to do is decide a direction.’
‘What do you say – we toss a dollar?’
‘We don’t have a dollar.’
Bull’s slurring voice from the belly of the Pig: ‘Would a button do?’
‘Sure! Why not – but we got to decide which is heads and which is tails.’
Cogwheel said: ‘Flat versus curved?’
‘Sounds good to me. You call it, buddy.’
Cogwheel sneezed, then wiped his nose with his sleeve. ‘Curved is the Rose. Flat we hit the smoky blue distance!’
The button spun.
Brett looked at it: ‘Smoky blue it is!’
Sharkey’s voice singing to the Bob Marley tune: ‘Don’t worry about a t’ing. One more pulse and de roof’s coming in.’
This provoked laughter from Bull. ‘Hey, Brett, don’t forget me and Sharkey back here when you’re doling out them cigars.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, fellas.’ Brett passed a handful of cigars back into the gloom. ‘We got all we need of whiskey up front, so the last bottle is yours.’
‘Cheers!’
Brett passed Cogwheel the new bottle for a final swig before starting up the heavy engines. He spoke thoughtfully: ‘You heard about the famous Roman philosopher, Seneca – what happened when he was coming back into Rome out of retirement in the country, and he heard that Nero had given him the death sentence?’
Cogwheel hesitated, the bottle to his lips. ‘No – what happened?’
‘He hugged his wife and friends and told them to moderate their grief by giving some thought to the lessons of philosophy.’
Cogwheel choked with laughter on his swig.
‘You okay there, buddy?’
‘Yeah – that’s a great story. I’ll tell you what, Brett. When this is over, I’m heading for the life of a busker.’
‘No change there,’ muttered Cal, accepting the bottle tossed his way by Sharkey. He spurned the cigars, opting for his usual self-roll.
Nan and Mark waved away both bottle and cigars. Nan was complaining aloud to anybody who cared to listen: ‘You men realise that the atmosphere in this vehicle is lethal.’
Her words provoked several belly laughs. Cogwheel said: ‘There was something additional and utterly profound I meant to say. But in the excitement of thinking about it I’ve forgotten what it was.’
Cal said, ‘Good!’
They were moving out of the dilapidated garage. Cogwheel’s erratic driving snagged the near-side door jamb, collapsing the entrance arch on his way out of it. This brought about a slow-motion implosion of the entire rickety building, which provoked another round of belly laughs and cheering.
The Rose’s wall of radiant heat hit them as they emerged and they argued whether it would be best to open or close every window. A perspiring Cogwheel leaned his cigar-holding arm on the frame of the fully lowered driver’s window. ‘I’ve worked it out in my mind. There are things going for me, man.’
‘Cogwheel, shut the fuck up.’ Cal’s eyes wandered to where Tajh’s remains were wrapped up in a tarpaulin.
They were putting some distance now between them and the collapsed garage. But since the drunken Cogwheel had no real sense of direction to aim for, they might have been driving around in circles. Nobody really cared. Cogwheel looked over his shoulder at Cal, who was staring out of the nearside wide open porthole at the looming monstrosity. ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘The way I see it, you could look upon the busking as a political statement. You’re not really asking people to give you money. You just sit there next to this cloth cap wearing an intelligent look on your face and the interaction invites a conversation. What passer-by wouldn’t want to engage by tossing a donation into the cap?’
‘Cut the crap!’
The heat, and the polluted atmosphere, was making a number of people cough. Cogwheel sniffed. ‘All I’m saying is that it has surreal possibilities.’
Cal muttered: ‘You haven’t got a cap.’
‘I’ll fuckingwell knit one then. So there’s me busking alongside my gorgeous knitted cap.’
‘You can’t knit.’
‘I’ll learn how to. I’ll teach myself the knitting. I’ll pick a good pattern too. Design, colour – lots of colour. I’ll knit it to the shape of a cloth cap. Then I’ll take care placing it on the floor facing up. I can think of a dozen metaphors for that upended knitted cap with its big mouth wide open. It will suggest the need to feed it, but at the same time there’s no obligation to feed it. The decision – whether or not to feed it – is the prerogative of the passer-by. That’s the surreal twist of the situation. Though conversation would be welcome, no words need to be spoken. The art would function just as well at the level of an ambiguous silence.’
The cigars and whiskey had made the rounds back to the ambiguously silent Padraig. He took a swig out of the bottle, which caused his eyes to water. Outside the vehicle the whistling of a new pulse began. The cyclone of wind was rising, whipping up dirt, bricks and rubble, rattling the bodywork. They argued all over again whether or not they should close the flaps and portholes – but this would probably bake them with the heat.
Brett warned Cogwheel: ‘Head thataway. You’re wandering too close to the thing.’
‘Okay, boss!’
Mark stared out of the portside porthole at the flaring monstrosity that had become of the Rose. The missile attack that had killed Tajh had failed to destroy it. If anything, it had made the situation worse. The monstrosity had swallowed up the explosion, and that suggested that any further missile attacks would be counterproductive. But no-one among the crew thought the military leaders would share that opinion.
Mark accepted the bottle from Padraig and took a modest swig. He had no real liking for neat whiskey, but he shared the despair that was eating at the crew.
From those fragmented communications overnight they knew that President Harvey was in touch with other world leaders. Parts of Moscow, Paris, Berlin and Rome had already been destroyed by fire. The chaos had invaded Asia, provoking Australia and New Zealand to offer military cooperation with China, India, Japan and a wide raft of other countries. There had been a continuing series of meetings at the UN. Everybody throughout the world was watching what was happening in London. The experts all agreed that the Black Rose was the root cause of the cataclysm. The solar flare was the visible manifestation of its threat. Even as Mark stared at the monolith, building up towards a new gargantuan pulse, he knew, as did every other member of the crew, that a new attack was inevitable.
‘Hey, Sharkey,’ Cogwheel called back over his shoulder, ‘you dextrous with those Celtic style armband tattoos?’
Cal swore at Cogwheel and told him to button it. ‘Brett, can you see if you can open some line of communication with Resistance HQ?’
Cogwheel asked him: ‘What’s the point?’
‘We need to know what the fuck is happening.’
Brett tried his luck with a console resting on his lap. ‘No luck for now, Cal. We’re too close to the Rose to pick up anything but static.’
‘Cogwheel – put your foot on it,’ Cal
growled. ‘And Brett, keep on trying.’
The vehicle shook with the rumble of the new wave from the Rose. Mark squeezed Nan’s hand. A crackling flame ran over the face of the Rose, provoking a static electricity that raised the hairs on their heads even at a distance of more than a mile. The cyclone erupted and the debris slammed into the Pig again. Mark rammed the porthole shut, then put his arm around Nan, waiting for the pulse to abate. They sped on as another thunderous detonation shook the ground under the vehicle. Brett’s crates tumbled around the interior while outside large chunks of rubble battered against the walls and roof of the Pig.
Cal shouted: ‘That one – that wasn’t a pulse.’
They threw open the flaps and portholes to witness a screaming volley of missiles pass overhead and slam into the Rose. They heard the distant thundering of what sounded like heavy artillery.
Cal shouted: ‘That can’t be Seebox. It’s General Chatwyn! The Resistance is attacking the Rose.’
Cogwheel hesitated, looking back over his shoulder at Cal: ‘What do we do?’
‘We bloodywell join them,’ Cal whooped.
The crew broke out into a wild burst of cheering.
Brett was looking up at the huge monolith where numerous different explosions marked the impact of high explosive shells. Brett whooped: ‘C’mon Cogwheel. Speed it up. We’ve got to see if we can get a message through to them.’
Cogwheel threw his stogie out of the window. ‘Oh, dear. I suspect I’m a little above the drink drive limit.’
As Cogwheel spun the wheel, directing the Pig westwards, the horizon ahead of them became a mass of explosions and flames. It had to be a battle between the Resistance and Seebox’s cordon. Brett howled, ‘Yee-hah! We’re gonna hit those S.O.B.’s from behind.’ He was still fiddling with a digital console on his knee when a voice broke through the static. A voice but no picture . . .
‘This is Brett Lee Travis speaking for the crew of the Mamma Pig. We’re asking for battle instructions from General Chatwyn.’
‘Caution . . . Mamma Pig. I repeat, caution – tactical incoming!’
‘What the fuck . . .!’
Everybody was shouting at once, including a bewildered Cogwheel, who was tugging at Brett’s arm. ‘What was that?’
Brett was slapping at sparks running over the console and onto his lap from where he had dropped the lit cigar out of his lips. ‘Holy shit!’
The vehicle was still thundering towards the blazing western horizon.
‘What is it?’
‘Whoooaaaaa! Cogwheel – you got to slow her down! Get us down into that there dip!’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Get down into it – and then swing the Pig around.’
‘Why?’
‘We got a minute or two, as I figure it. We gotta put the guillotine in the path of the expanding wave.’
‘What?’
‘Do it, buddy! We’re maybe two miles away from a tactical nuclear strike.’
People were falling over crates, and one another, as they dived for the floor in the wheeling vehicle. Everybody was shouting or screaming at once, slamming the shutters closed on every window. There was a vision of Brett reaching forward to close the windscreen flaps ahead of him. Then the flash . . . so brilliant it turned everything into a negative, white to black, black to white, with a blood red halo outlining every pallid face. Then the shockwave and the colossal impact of a tsunami of expanding force. It lifted the front of the pig a foot off the ground, then dumped it back with a shattering crash, then it shoved it careening backwards. They screeched in a zig-zag, with Cogwheel fighting to regain control of the wheel. They heard the gearbox disintegrate. And still the expanding wave drove them backwards, slewing the vehicle a distance of something like fifty yards through debris, broken walls, wrecked vehicles, until at last they came to a jolting halt against something immovable. But the noise didn’t stop. Their ears were still shredded by a pandemonium of thunder.
Mark heard people cursing and groaning. Cal’s shout: ‘Anybody seriously injured?’
Cogwheel wheezing: ‘One suspected dead – me!’
They were too shocked to move for several minutes. Then, when they opened the flaps and portholes they could see nothing because of the dust storm. Mark was the first to exit a porthole, falling out of it at a crazy angle onto the wind-whipped stony ground. His vision was blurred and blotchy, as if he had stared into the noonday sun. There was a high-pitched ringing in his ears, a dizziness within his head. The ground below him was spinning. It was a struggle to get to his feet in the battering cyclone of wind, which was ripping at his clothes. He glanced over to where the rear of the Pig was impaled on a girder sticking out of the concrete of a ruined silo. He realised: I can’t hear a thing!
‘Oh, god!’ he panted for breath.
He forced himself to look back in through the porthole. The steel was too hot to keep his hands pressed against it.
‘Nan – you and Padraig all right?’
He thought he heard some reply, though it might have been his imagination. Then Nan’s face appeared at the open porthole and the long bony hands of Padraig assisted her out into Mark’s own hands. He whispered: ‘Thank goodness!’ He helped her down and then back to her feet. They supported one another.
She spoke to him, mind-to-mind:
But she was shaking her head. Her finger was pointing to the sky. There he too saw stars, stars spiralling and wheeling around them in the gale-torn sky.
They turned as one to face the Black Rose. Where it had been, a gigantic sphere made up of myriad bolts of lightning now expanded: reds, purples, ultramarine, blues, greens and yellows extended and metamorphosed across the sphere moment by moment. There was a wall of solid lightning several miles in diameter and it continued to thunder and crackle without cease. It was the most terrifying vision Mark had ever witnessed.
He was beginning to hear the wind now, a howling of a thousand banshees that he would have preferred to have remained deaf to. Brett was helping Cogwheel down out of the driver’s side of the cab. The hoist of the Pig was clearly broken.
‘Why aren’t we dead?’ Mark was looking to Nan, who looked as confused and uncertain as he did.
‘I don’t know.’
Padraig was also emerging from the ruined Pig, helped by Bull and Sharkey. But he was too shattered to stand. They helped him sit in the dirt against one of the wheels, his breath emerging in slow long sighs. Mark and Nan sat down beside him and comforted him. Padraig was attempting to speak, his voice breathless and little above a whisper, but Mark had to put his ear close to Padraig’s mouth to hear him:
‘They made a mistake . . . attacking it with a nuclear missile. It fed on it. The Tyrant must have predicted they would do so. It was a . . . a trap.’
‘Cal – did you hear?’
‘Why?’ Cal’s teeth were gritted with anger. ‘Why the hell would anybody want to be attacked with a tactical nuclear weapon?’
‘I think, for some reason, it must have needed the energy.’
‘For what purpose?’
Nan looked up into the expanding sphere of lightning. Prongs were reaching out into the air around it, as if it were consuming everything about it. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘to gain entry to the Fáil.’
A cowled figure manifested a short distance away from the apex of the guillotine blade of the Mamma Pig. It was kneeling, with its head lowered, facing the monstrosity that had evolved from the Rose.
‘What the fuck . . .?’ Cal breathed huskily.
Nobody answered.
‘Is that thing real?’
Mark stumbled out onto the wind-blown ground, his head reeling with dizziness as he approached the kneeling figure. He stared down into its shrouded face, which was grey in colour, with eyes closed.
‘Who – or what – are you?’
The whispered reply, mind-to-mind, startled Mark. He was even more startled when those eyes opened to meet his own, confronting him with reflecting mirrors. ‘Why are you here?’
The reply took Mark’s breath away. He looked at Nan, who must have heard the exchange oraculum-to-oraculum. ‘Does that mean that our world is about to end?’
Mark heard cries of astonishment from behind him. When he turned around, his head still spinning with shock, he saw that still more stars were descending out of the sky. He stood there, transfixed, as a stream of knowledge expanded in his brain. He felt a presence calling him. Nan was running forward to join him, throwing herself into his arms, her own arms around his neck, hugging him close.
She said: ‘The Temple Ship is calling us.’
‘The Ship?’
‘Yes!’
He had only seconds to bid goodbye to Cal and the others. He didn’t know what words to say to them. He didn’t know if the Earth would survive the calamity of the expanding monstrosity that had grown out of the Black Rose.
Even as he hesitated a shadow fell on him. The Temple Ship had descended to no more than a hundred feet above them, colossal, in its great raptor manifestation. Mark spoke to Nan: ‘Somehow we have to find a way to make contact with the others. We must join Mo and Alan and Kate.’
‘Through the Ship?’
‘Yes – through the Ship!’
Time was running out for them. Cal and the crew were staring at him, open-mouthed.
‘Padraig,’ Mark called out to him. He saw the elderly head rise, the lips in the lined face were smiling back. ‘Come with us.’
The hoary old head shook. ‘No, thank you all the same. My work is not yet done.’
Mark felt a void expand in his chest. The emptiness was so great it felt as if a universe would not fill it. A mind was enfolding his, enfolding both his and Nan’s. They were drowning in the prescience. No time to think anymore.
The Return of the Arinn Page 37