No Man's World: Omnibus

by Pat Kelleher

  The clearing surrounding the temple was white, as if someone had draped a fine muslin sheet over everything. It was like a thick white cobweb. Through it, taut, swollen bulbs had fruited. It seemed as alien to the surrounding vegetation as that did to the flora of Earth, and that, thought Tulliver, was saying something.

  The Urmen, fleeing the electrical discharge in the temple, had run straight into the deadly carpet. The fruiting bulbs exploded, enveloping them in yellowish clouds. They coughed and choked, gasping for breath in the noxious plumes, clawing at their throats.

  “Christ! Gas! Gas! Gas!” cried Gutsy, peering out of a loophole in the wall.

  “It’s not gas, it’s spores,” yelled Nellie.

  By now, the Tommies were at the loopholes, peering out as stray bolts of energy crackled out at the wall of the temple around them. They fumbled at their chests for their PH gas hoods, pulled them over their heads and tucked them into their collars. With their circular mica eyepieces and short red rubber non-return valves, they looked as alien as anything else there.

  The Urmen of the Ruanach succumbed to the spore clouds and fell to the ground, where the gossamer fine carpet of mycelia advanced inexorably over their bodies, and the spores that they had inhaled sprouted from their mouths and noses, choking them.

  The fast-spreading network of living threads made short work of their bodies. It desiccated them before the Tommies’ eyes, and the mummified remains split open with dry cracking noises as more fruiting bodies rose from them.

  Atkins hurried from one loophole to another. The carpet of threads was creeping towards the temple. “Whatever it is, it’s surrounding us,” he called out.

  “I knew this was a bad place,” said Napoo, a bandanna of cloth round his face against the spores.

  Everson stood at the temple doors, revolver in hand. “Evans, Jellicoe,” he called out. “Fall back! Get inside.” Everson turned to the others. “The rest of you, stand to!”

  Mercy and Pot Shot hared through the doors, slammed them shut and rested against them with relief.

  “One minute it wasn’t there, the next it’s sprouting up through the ground. What the hell is that?” heaved Mercy through his gas hood.

  Pot Shot turned towards him with an exaggerated movement so he could see him though his eyepieces. “Don’t you ever get tired of asking that question?”

  “Around here?” queried Mercy. “Half the time it’s the only sane question worth asking.” He arched his back, pushing himself off the door, and ran in a low stoop along behind the rest of the section and the tank crew at the loopholes, stopping only to duck and yelp as a venomous electrical tongue lashed out from the rocks, snapping indolently at the wall above him. He took his place next to them, and Pot Shot appeared by his side.

  Outside, drifting in from the jungle, a yellowish spore mist was rising and a vague shadowy shape moved with it, coalescing into a ghost-like grey figure that stepped lethargically from the trees.

  “Huns!” yelled Cyril, glancing back into the temple from the loophole. “It’s bloody Huns!”

  Risking a whiplash of energy, Jack launched himself up to the loophole and peered out across the shrouded clearing. “Huns?” Then he saw. It had been an easy mistake for Cyril to make. Too often, in a pale dawn, they had seen the grey-clad Huns creeping towards them.

  This, though, was no Hun. Thin and cadaverous, its skin was grey and sunken, its ill-fitting serge uniform scarcely visible beneath a dusting of fine threads. Wrinkled, puckered growths, like some sort of cankers, distorted the shape of its head and right arm and half its chest. The figure moved clumsily, as if trying to maintain its balance was an effort. This was a misshapen travesty of a man, an obscene mockery of a Tommy.

  Nellie recognised the sight, too.

  “Mathers!” she cried though her gas hood. “But that’s impossible. We saw him swept away.”

  “It’s wearing puttees. It’s not an officer,” said Atkins, peering out. “That’s Talbot, one of the tank salvage party.”

  “Jeffries has woken the dead to do his bidding!” cried Tonkins.

  “Can he really do that? Bring back the dead?” asked Cecil, his voice tremulous with fear.

  “It’s the kind of diabolical thing he probably would do,” said Mercy.

  “Well, the last time we saw Talbot, he weren’t actually dead,” said Gutsy.

  “Maybe so, but he doesn’t look well,” admitted Mercy.

  “I’ll give you that.”

  Mercy and Pot Shot fired at him. The bullets tore through Talbot’s body, the initial force throwing his shoulder back and twisting him off balance momentarily as he recoiled from the impact, but he remained standing. Motes of grey spore dust swirled in the air around him from the impact.

  Mercy looked back over his shoulder. “Well if he wasn’t dead then, I’d say he is now.”

  “No!” came the muffled cry from one of the tankers. “It does no good. You’ll just spread the spores. We tried it. You can’t bomb them, shoot them, or burn them without spreading spores. There’s no way to stop them!”

  The gaunt, grey-faced soldier turned towards them and watched implacably.

  “He’s possessed by the same thing that Mathers was,” said Nellie.

  From out of the spore mist, other emaciated forms appeared to surround the temple, each one a shambling mockery of a Broughtonthwaite Mate, each one laced with a fine filigree of mycelia and deformed by cankers. It was the rest of Corporal Talbot’s salvage party.

  “Talbot, stand down!” cried Everson through his gas respirator.

  The cadaverous corporal and his grey men stood immobile. From their feet, thin, pernicious threads began to advance across and through the soil, joining with the carpet spreading from the dead Urmen, weaving its way toward the temple.

  ATKINS LOOKED ON with revulsion. Since he’d volunteered and been shipped over to France, death was something he’d lived with daily. For Christ’s sake, his own pal had just died. On the Somme, you couldn’t escape from death and decay; everywhere you looked there were bodies, English, Belgian, German, French. The stench of rotting corpses filled the air, but there was at least some comfort in that. As the old trench song went, ‘When you’re dead, they stop your pay.’ Dead was dead. But this? This was abominable. It appalled him. The fact that they knew these men repulsed him even more. There was Hume, Owen, Fletcher, Banks, Preston, Mitchell, Walker and Hardiman. It was like some sick joke Jeffries might play, reanimating the dead to serve his own evil ends. In some way he wished it were. But this was just nature, some kind of hellish mould that animated their bodies. It had taken them over, while all the time feeding on their flesh in order to sustain itself, even as it used them to migrate to look for new hosts, new food.

  Now it had found them.

  STANDING WITH HIS back to the wall, beside a loophole, revolver in hand, Tulliver glimpsed the shine in the centre of the temple again between the rocks. It grew brighter, shining as though the air was threadbare and worn.

  “Down!” he warned.

  Behind them, the two halves of the meteorite spat out bolts of energy. “Jesus!” Mercy ducked as another buzzing arc of energy whipped the wall over his head and dragged itself upwards towards the apex of the dome. “Talk about a rock and a hard place—no offence, Padre.”

  The padre, hunched against the wall, clutching his Bible, shook his gas-hooded head. “None taken.”

  “By George! It’s stopping!” said Reggie, peering through his loophole at the surrounding white carpet.

  The creeping deathly white shroud had slowed and petered out six yards from the temple, like melted snow. The grey mould-ridden men waited.

  “Why, what’s holding it back? They’ve killed enough Urmen. What are they waiting for?”

  Tulliver barked another warning. “Stay down!”

  The Tommies hugged the earth as, overhead, bolts whipped and snapped.

  “Bloody hell, it’s worse than a barrage of whizz-bangs!”

  Mercy
shrugged. “It’s all just stuff in the end,” he said as he hunkered down on his haunches, his head under his arms as if he expected a rain of dirt and shrapnel, the default position for a soldier under barrage.

  “Bloody good job we aren’t wearing our splash masks,” said Wally, as an arc of lightning brushed the wall above his head.

  Outside, another flash went off. This time it must have been very near. The thunder was almost on top of them. Atkins felt it reverberate through the walls of the temple.

  “Jesus, that was close!”

  “Quite takes me back to the Somme,” bellowed Gazette through his gas hood. “Ah, the good old days!”

  Atkins saw the field of fungus convulse and shrivel in the presence of the lightning, and the grey men recoil. He looked at where the carpet of mould stopped, in a circle around the temple. He turned around and glanced at the Heart of Croatoan, the space between the two halves sparking half heartedly, as if the discharge was dissipating.

  “It’s the telluric energy,” he said. “That’s what’s holding it at bay.”

  “And if we stay in here, the same energy might kill us,” said Everson grimly.

  AT THE CANYON, having sent, and received, a message from Lieutenant Everson in the crater, Buckley found himself regarded in a new light. The ability to press some technological advance on this world seemed like a triumph of sorts, as though they had managed to bend this alien nature to their will.

  As a reward, Sergeant Dixon had him manning a permanent, if precarious, listening post atop the scree slope at the base of the exposed wall. For a job that required quiet, the last few hours of distant booms from beyond the canyon didn’t make his job any easier. They echoed off the canyon’s walls, rebounding in a constant barrage of noise and flashes.

  Dixon tramped loudly and carelessly up the scree slope, hoping for more news. Buckley frowned at him and held up a finger for quiet. Dixon curled his lip and said nothing, waiting impatiently.

  Without warning, Buckley ripped the earphones from his head with a yelp of pain as a high-pitched howl threatened to burst his eardrums.

  Arcs of energy began to lash from the metal, rolling over the surface of the wall, spitting and hissing like an angry cat, until they danced and flickered out over the top of the scree slope, sending Dixon tumbling back arse over tit.

  Buckley disconnected his equipment, lugged it behind a boulder, and prayed.

  A bolt of lightning burst up the wall and exploded through the top of the canyon with a clap that echoed round it for what seemed minutes. It crazed briefly up into the sky, starkly illuminating the canyon, causing the blue-green lichen blisters scattered across the canyon rocks to burst in showers of glutinous acid that hissed as they etched speckled pits into the surrounding rocks.

  Dixon looked up at Buckley, apoplectic with rage. “What have you done, lad? What the bloody hell have you done?”

  “It wasn’t me, Sarn’t,” said Buckley, looking down at the sergeant in alarm. “It wasn’t me.”

  THEY HAD TO leave the temple. Atkins watched the telluric energy flicker and spit round the walls above them, the arcs becoming weaker and fainter. “Isn’t there any way we can channel this telluric energy, direct it somehow?” he asked.

  “I don’t see how,” said Mercy. “Even if we could get near the rocks, how do we move them?”

  “We don’t even know what generates it,” said Pot Shot.

  “Oh, that’ll be you and your books again, will it?” snapped Mercy.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Nellie snapped at them.

  Tonkins said something, but the thick flannel of his gas hood muffled it.

  Riley jabbed his elbow into Tonkin’s ribs. “Speak up, lad. They didn’t hear you through your gas hood.”

  Awkwardly, Tonkins raised his hand, cleared his throat. “It’s only electricity,” he said, emboldened by Riley’s encouragement.

  Fifteen pairs of blank mica eyes turned to stare at him. Their unblinking glares unnerved him until Riley urged him on, kicking his foot. “We—we don’t need the rock for that,” he added quietly.

  Everson clapped his hands and pointed at the signalmen. “You’re right, Private. Riley. Tonkins. You wanted to test those electric lances in the field. Now’s your chance.”

  “Well done, lad,” muttered Riley with pride.

  “They will work, won’t they?” asked Tonkins.

  “Our bits I’m sure about,” said Riley shrugging heavily for effect to compensate for his gas hood as he dragged the kitbags towards them. “The Chatt stuff, not so much.”

  They pulled the two jerry-rigged Chatt backpacks from the kitbags, along with the electric lances attached to them by insulated cable.

  “You can’t be serious!” said Hepton. “You’re putting our lives in the hands of a pair of Iddy Umpties?”

  Everson turned on his heels. Even through his gas mask, his tone was hard. “Mr Hepton. Entire divisions have often depended on Signals. The lives of every member of this battalion have depended on Signals. Their work, under dangerous conditions, has saved countless lives, so if you have any complaints I suggest you keep them to yourself, if you get that message.”

  Tonkins ran a hand over the smooth clay battery backpack, checking for damage.

  “You ready?” asked Riley, setting his pack between his legs and gripping it with his knees.

  Tonkins nodded and did the same.

  “Good lad.”

  They began cranking the magneto telephone crank handles set in the back; the clay battery packs whirred as the charges began to build.

  “How long?” asked Everson.

  “We’re going as fast as we can, sir,” said Riley, frantically turning the small crank handle. “Some Chatts generate a natural bioelectrical charge that they can store. We have to do it manually.”

  Atkins peered out of the loophole and watched as the Urmen bodies beyond desiccated further, crumbling to dust before his eyes.

  Outside, the telluric discharges no longer preventing their advance, the grey men shuffled closer, dragging swathes of white filaments along with them as they moved. They stopped at the boundary where the mycelia had stopped, unable or unwilling to advance further. The inert carpet of fungus at their feet began to grow once again, its mycelia threading its way towards the temple.

  “It looks like we’re out of time!” said Atkins.

  “Tulliver, anything?” asked Everson.

  Tulliver glanced out of the corner of his eye at the boulders. He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Without the telluric discharge from the meteor to hold it in check, the web of fungus continued its relentless advance towards the temple.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Corporal,” said Everson impatiently, as he watched Riley.

  The fevered whirr of the magnetos filled the air with an insect buzz as the two men wound the handles for all they were worth. Tonkins resorted to short bursts of frenzied turning, stopping once in a while for a few seconds to catch his breath.

  “That should be enough,” said Riley, standing up and trying to shake some life into his cramped hand. Beside him, Tonkins eased himself up onto unsteady legs, like a newborn foal.

  “Right,” said Riley, picking up the attached electric lances. “I’m going to need four volunteers, two to fire and two to wind the crank handle and recharge the battery. It’s a bit like a Flammenwerfer, you see, where you have to keep pumping.”

  Everson flicked out a finger. “Atkins, Evans, Tonkins, Blood.”

  Mercy and Gutsy shouldered their rifles and fell in by the signalmen, taking Atkins’ and Tonkins’ knapsacks for them.

  Riley lifted a clay backpack and slipped the webbing straps over Atkins’ shoulders, and helped Tonkins follow suit. Atkins hefted the unfamiliar lance, connected by cable to the backpack.

  “Atkins, Evans, I want you at the van,” said Everson. “Tonkins, Blood, you’ll have to bring up the rear.”

  Both men nodded with slow exaggerated movements from
under their gas hoods to show they understood.

  Nellie wrapped bandages round the face of the young injured Urman to protect him from the spores. She called to the Urman guide huddling sullenly against the wall. “Napoo,” she asked. “Can you help the padre carry this young lad?”

  “His name’s Tarak,” said Alfie, through his gas hood.

  Napoo, seeing the brand burn on Tarak’s chest, shook his head and backed away.

  “Napoo, it’s not his fault. It was an accident.”

  “He is cursed!”

  “He will be if we don’t help him!”

  Nellie gave the book she had prised from Tarak to Everson, who told Mercy to pack it in his knapsack.

  The padre and a reluctant Napoo lifted the now semi-conscious Tarak between them.

  Either side of the temple door, the tank crew and the Black Hand Gang readied themselves.

  “Walk and keep walking.” said Everson. “Stay close, don’t get separated. Hold your fire. Don’t shoot at them, don’t use bombs.”

  Mercy stood by the doors with Atkins.

  “Check you can turn the crank handle,” said Riley. “Never really tried it in battlefield conditions.”

  Mercy glanced around in his hood, and Atkins smirked under his. He could tell Mercy was embarrassed. He gave the handle a tentative crank.

  “You’ll have to do it faster than that!” scolded Riley.

  There was a peculiar hacking from under Pot Shot’s gas hood. He was laughing. “It’s what your right arm’s for!”

  TULLIVER PULLED OPEN the temple doors. The sky outside, just beyond the crater, had worn through and seemed almost black. If he shifted his eyes, its normal colour reasserted itself, as if some after-image danced in the corner of his vision. “Wait!” he called out.

  A tremendous flash of light and a deep sonorous boom that he could feel in his bones drowned out any response. It set off a frenzy of whipperwills somewhere overhead as a concussive blast of wind swept over the jungle.

  Before them, the advancing carpet quivered and almost seemed to ebb, and the grey mould-ridden cadavers cowered from the harsh flash.