The 13th Horseman

by Barry Hutchison

  Cautiously, he raised a hand and touched one finger against the glow. A gasp of pain burst through his beard as he drew his arm sharply back. He shook his hand around and clenched it into a fist a few times, never taking his eye off the glow.

  “Some kind of magic barrier,” he said.

  “What, like a force field?” Drake asked. He pulled away from Pest and hobbled over to War. “Can you break through it?”

  “I can barely even touch it,” the big man replied.

  A sudden scream from within the school cut Drake off before he could say anything else. He looked up to the first floor, and caught a brief glimpse of Mel at the window, before a shadow appeared behind her and she was dragged back into the room.

  “We have to do something!” Drake yelped. “We have to—”

  The Earth trembled beneath his feet. On the other side of the force field, the horses neighed and stamped their hooves against the concrete.

  A low rumble shook the ground, making them all stagger away from the glowing blue barrier.

  “Can I just make it clear,” Famine said, “that that wasn’t me?”

  “Earthquake?” Pest asked. “That’s one of the signs! It’s one of the signs of the Apocalypse. Oh, God, what if we’re wrong? What if this really is the end?”

  The ground vibrated again. From inside the barrier there was the sound of falling rubble. Narrow cracks began to split the pavement beneath the horsemen’s feet.

  “It’s not an earthquake,” War said grimly. He followed the lines of the cracks. They led all the way back to the school.

  “Then what is it?” Drake asked. He was still looking up at the window on the first floor, and so he was the first to notice when it started to move. With a crack of snapping concrete, the extension on the front of the school building began to rise slowly up, revealing an enormous chrome construction below.

  “What... What is that?” Drake muttered, his eyes following the first storey window as it rose higher and higher into the air, revealing more and more of the metal shape beneath it. “What’s happening?”

  War groaned. “Something bloody spectacular.”

  UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, Drake had never seen a real robot before. But it was safe to say that over the past few days, he’d seen more than his share.

  But he had a nagging suspicion that the one before him now would be the last one he ever saw.

  It rose from the Earth, like a slow-moving rocket with a school balanced on top. Drake didn’t realise what it was at first, not until the arms tore their way free of their concrete surround, and hands the size of Panzer tanks helped lift the rest of the metal body out from within the ground.

  With a whinny of panic, War and Pest’s horses bolted. They leaped at the barrier, passing through without any problem, just as the first of the giant robot’s feet smashed down on to the ruined tarmac.

  Metal groaned as the robot drew itself up to its full, towering height. The dull aluminium cladding of the extension fell away, revealing a head that was the same chrome colour as the rest of the body.

  All four horsemen leaned back to look up at the machine. It stood around eighty metres in height, and fifteen or twenty across the shoulders. Decades of dust and soil crumbled away as it held its train-carriage-sized arms out to its sides and stretched its steel tendons.

  “There’s something you don’t see every day,” Famine said. He took half a sandwich from beneath a roll of flab, sniffed it cautiously, then began to chew. “What’s the plan, then? We running away?”

  “No,” said Drake firmly. “We’re not running away.”

  “Thank God for that, my feet are killing me,” Famine said. He finished his sandwich. “So, what do we do?”

  “The horses got out,” Drake said. “Maybe the barrier’s gone?”

  He took a step towards it, only for War to pull him back. “Or, it means things on the inside can get out, but not the other way round.” He pointed to a spot just a few centimetres in front of Drake’s face. A faint blue light flickered in the air. “It hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  “This is it, then,” Pestilence whispered. “This is how the world ends.”

  Famine shoved a handful of popcorn into his mouth. “I’ll be honest, I did not see this one coming.”

  “One giant robot doesn’t make an Apocalypse,” War said. “Let’s just see what happens next.”

  “No, we have to do something now. Mel’s up there,” Drake said. “We have to...”

  His voice fell away. He cocked his head, listening to something he couldn’t be sure he had actually heard.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Pest.

  “I thought I... There,” Drake said quietly. “Did you hear that?”

  “What?” said Famine, chewing thoughtfully. “That buzzing noise?”

  “Yeah,” said Drake, and at that, the sky went dark.

  None of them saw where the billowing mass of silver bodies came from. It was just seconds between the moment Drake heard them and the moment they blocked out the sun. It took even less time for them to swoop down and begin their attack.

  There were thousands of them – tens of thousands – each one just eight or nine centimetres long. They came in on metal wings, with pin-like teeth snapping hungrily at everything in their path.

  The horsemen were suddenly lost in a cloud of chittering robo-bugs. War swung with his sword. It sparked as a dozen metal bodies ricocheted like bullets off the blade. Drake saw them crash to the ground.

  “Grasshoppers?” he said, shouting to make himself heard above the buzzing of mechanical wings. “A swarm of grasshoppers?”

  “They’re not grasshoppers, they’re locusts,” Pest cried, in a voice bordering on hysteria. He ducked, as his leather hat was lost to the throng of bodies. “And it’s not a swarm. It’s a plague. Don’t you see? It’s another sign!”

  “Techno-magic mumbo jumbo,” War spat, swinging with his sword again and bringing down a few more bugs. “That’s all. They’re not real signs – he’s doing them himself. He’s trying to—”

  A tightly packed section of the swarm, or plague, or whatever it was, hit War’s chestplate with the force of a cannonball. He stumbled back, struggling for balance, before a second attack took him down.

  Drake reached out a hand, but the wings and the teeth and the sleek metal bodies were a hurricane around him, preventing him from moving. He snapped the hood of the robe up over his head and kept low, trying to avoid the locusts, but they were suddenly on his back, their weight forcing him to his knees.

  He clawed at the locusts in his hair and saw Famine go down beneath an even bigger pile of winged bodies. War was lying on his back on the ground, punching and kicking, but the things were moving too fast, and there were too many of them, and there was nothing, Drake realised, that they could do.

  Through the haze of silver he saw Pest open his mouth, but the horseman’s scream was drowned out by the din around them. Pestilence was still on his feet, but only barely. His legs were a heaving mass of silver. His leather jacket was intact, but the clothes beneath it were ragged and torn. He staggered, thrashing around, his eyes wide and panicked and darting from bug to bug to bug as they closed in on him.

  “Get off!” Pest’s cry was so shrill Drake heard it even above the angry drone of the insects. “Get off, get off, get off !”

  Drake saw Pest’s gloves go up in flames. The smell of burning rubber hit the back of his throat, as green gas sprayed out from Pestilence’s fingertips.

  Pest stopped screaming. Even the plague seemed to quieten a fraction, as the green fog began to form shapes in the air. They were hazy and indistinct at first, but then the shapes took form. They became tiny numbers, ones and zeroes in the air, circling round and round just beyond Pestilence’s reach.

  A locust whipped through the cloud of digits and instantly began to fall. From his knees, Drake followed the bug’s flight until it clattered on the ground. Another crashed down beside it. Then another, and another.


  When Drake looked back up, the air was filled with ones and zeroes. They floated through the swarm, slowly at first, but gaining purpose with each bug they hit.

  Another sound replaced the droning of wings. It was the sound of hail on a tin roof, a rattling drumbeat as thousands of metal insects left the sky and arrived, quite abruptly, on the ground.

  The weight on Drake’s back fell away. He got to his feet just as War jumped up. The final few locusts clattered to Earth, leaving a great big question hanging in the air.

  “What the bloody Hell did you do?” War asked, as he picked robo-bugs from his beard. “I mean, not that I’m complaining.”

  Pest stared at his hands. He stared at them as if they were loaded weapons, and he couldn’t quite remember where the safety catch was.

  “I have absolutely no idea,” he admitted quietly. “It felt like, like a cold or a flu or something.”

  “It was a virus,” Drake said. Realising it even as the words left his lips. “You made a computer virus.”

  “A computer virus?” Pest raised his eyebrows. “What’s one of them, then?”

  But Drake was already looking up at the giant robot, and at the force field that stood between them and it. “I’ll explain later,” he said. “We have to get in there and stop that thing.”

  War sheathed his sword. “Right,” he said. “But we can’t get in.”

  “So, what do we do?” mumbled Famine. He held one of the locusts between finger and thumb, and gave it a cautious sniff.

  “There’s got to be some way. We have to find a way in. We have to...”

  Drake’s voice fell away. He knew, in that moment, what he had to do. “I’m Death,” he said, as if realising it for the first time. “I’m Death.”

  “We know,” Pest said. “You’re preaching to the converted there.”

  “No, I mean I’m Death.” He looked way up at the school building, shimmering faintly through the force field. “And Death can go anywhere.”

  He took five purposeful paces backwards, like a footballer preparing to take a penalty kick. “Death can go anywhere,” he said, more quietly this time, and for his own benefit.

  “You sure about this?” War asked him.

  A large part of Drake’s brain wasn’t sure about this in the slightest, but a small part of it was more certain than it had ever been in its entire life. If he could keep that small part away from the more sceptical larger part for the next twenty seconds or so, everything would almost certainly be fine.

  “I can do this,” he said. He focused his attention on the mystical barrier, and repeated the words over and over like a mantra. “Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere.”

  He kept chanting as he ran those few paces, picking up speed with every step.

  “Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere.”

  The Robe of Sorrows fluttered as he sped towards the force field, still muttering those four words over and over below his breath, faster and faster, like the clattering of a train on the tracks.

  “Death can go anywhere Death can go anywhere Death can go anywhere.”

  He did not close his eyes as the glowing blue wall raced up to meet him. He didn’t so much as flinch, even though he very much wanted to. Flinching, he knew, would mean he thought he was about to hit something, and for his idea to work, he had to keep that thought out of his head.

  As he approached the barrier, he didn’t even jump. Jumping would imply an obstacle in his path, and there were no obstacles in his path. At least, that’s what he wanted that little part of his brain to continue believing.

  But instinct proved too strong to resist, and Drake raised his arms in front of his face just as he was about to smack into the force-field wall.

  Or rather, that’s what he thought was about to happen. In reality, he had run straight through it several paces previously, and was now recoiling in terror from a figment of his own imagination.

  “You did it,” Pestilence cried. He clapped his gloved hands together, making a muted thuck-thuck-thuck sound. “You got through the barrier.”

  “What? Did I?” Drake asked. “I mean, yeah. No problem.”

  “Well done!” Famine said. “I think I’ll have a nice bun to celebrate.” He reached under another fat fold and pulled out something that didn’t look very nice. Or, indeed, like a bun.

  “Oh, aye, brilliant,” War said. “Now what?”

  Drake leaned back and looked up at the school building, teetering eighty metres above him on the colossal robot’s shoulders.

  “I need to get up to... Wait,” he said. “What’s it doing?” As he was speaking, one of the chrome giant’s arms had begun to move. It rose straight out in front of it, then stopped at a forty-five degree angle to the body. Fingers the size of telephone boxes unfolded, and the metal palm of the robot’s hand glowed with a swirling white light.

  “I don’t like the look of that,” Pestilence fretted. He stood behind War, although even this move didn’t do much to reassure him.

  “What is it?” asked Famine.

  As if in answer to the question, the slumbering bodies of the children and police around them began to glow a vibrant shade of blue. Drake watched, hypnotised by the electric glow that now surrounded every one of the sleeping people.

  “What’s that light?” he asked, getting as close to the barrier as he could without risking stepping back through.

  “It’s like a big swirling vortex thingy,” Pest declared, with the air of authority normally reserved for someone who has at least a vague idea of what they’re on about.

  “Not that light – that light,” said Drake. He pointed down to the people on the ground, who were now lit up like a particularly blue Christmas tree.

  War, Pestilence and Famine regarded the figures at their feet. They leaned in closer for a better look.

  “What light?” Pest said eventually.

  “You can’t see that?” Drake asked. The lights had become so bright they had merged into one near-blinding glow. “They’re all lit up blue.”

  “Souls,” War said gravely. “My guess is you’re seeing their souls. It’s something only Death can do.”

  Drake felt sick. “So, that means, what? He’s killing them?”

  War’s eyes went from sleeping body to sleeping body, as if trying to picture them as Drake saw them. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “He must be. Unless... What else did that robot-teacher fella say to you? What did he tell you about his plans?”

  “Nothing,” Drake said. “Just said he was going to get his strength back, and then he was going to do something spectacular.”

  The part of War’s face that Drake could see went pale. “Aw, no,” he said. “Aw, no.”

  “What is it?” Drake asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s only one way he can get his strength back.”

  “How?”

  Drake instinctively ducked, as one of the blue lights became a sphere the size of a bowling-ball, and rocketed upwards past his head. He turned and followed it with its gaze as it was sucked towards the swirling vortex in the palm of the giant robot’s hand, like fluff towards a vacuum cleaner, or rugby players to an Indian restaurant.

  The ball vanished into the twirling white light, just as two others launched up from the ground at Drake’s back.

  “Their life force. Their souls,” War said. “He’s going to eat their souls.”

  “Ugh, that’s disgusting,” Famine spat. The others turned to look at him. “What?” he said, returning their glares. “Even I have to draw the line somewhere.”

  “Get your backside up there,” War said, oblivious to the balls of light streaking past him with increasing regularity. “You have to take him out before he can power himself back up.”

  “What’ll happen if he does?”

  War clenched his jaw. “Anything he wants. Stop him, or Armageddon’s happening right here, right now, signs or no bloody signs.”

&nbs
p; Drake nodded his understanding. “Right,” he said, looking up. “Um... how do I get up there?”

  “You managed the walking-through-walls thing, so you can manage the horse,” War told him. “Whistle. Summon it. Call forth the steed of Death.”

  He was right, Drake knew. It was now or never. This was his moment.

  Curling his index finger and thumb once again, he placed them just inside his mouth, and he blew.

  Pffffffffff.

  “Bugger all,” War said, with a not-entirely-surprised sigh.

  Drake tried again, but War was quick to stop him. “You’re wasting time, and, frankly, you’re embarrassing yourself,” he told him. “Practise later. Now, get your fingers out of your mouth and start climbing.”

  “Climbing?” Drake said, but even as he spoke the word, he realised he had no other choice. Mel was up there, in danger. And then there was the whole end-of-the-world thing too. “I’ll try to find a way to shut off the shield. When I do, take the robot down. Stop it hurting anyone, or worse.”

  With the flickering glow of stolen souls dancing eerily around him, Drake raced over to the robot’s foot, found a handhold, and slowly, steadily began to climb.

  DRAKE FELT LIKE Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk, only he wasn’t climbing the beanstalk, he was climbing the giant himself.

  The metal used in the robot’s construction was smooth, but the surface itself wasn’t. It was crisscrossed with cables and pitted with rivets. The hexagonal heads of bolts stuck out regularly along the machine’s entire length. The effect was like a ladder, reaching all the way up from the ground to the head, far, far above.

  He reached for the next handhold, a length of steel cable running almost horizontally across the mechanical thigh. His fingertips found it, brushed against the rough surface, then missed completely as the cable began to move.

  No, not the cable, Drake realised. The entire leg.

  He felt himself sliding, slipping, swinging left as the leg slowly raised to the right. Frantically, he jammed his foot against a protruding rivet and his knuckles turned white as his grip tightened on the bolt he was clinging to.