by Tim Lebbon
Peer stared through the window, trying to tie down exactly how things were different but finding it all but impossible. It was the sum of the parts, a thousand minute alterations which combined to form an oblique picture of reality. The old reality, at least. The trees grew slanted, as though the earth had moved suddenly, tensioning the trunks against their fixed points in the sky. The air above the river was hazy, bright, sunlight reflecting through thin layers of moisture to hide the wispy clouds higher up. The shrubs planted between parking bays had a threatening sharpness about them, promising gashed flesh and rashed skin if one approached too close.
Birds no longer flustered and fought over stale crusts. They gave the impression of rooting and eating merely to waste time, divert attention away from themselves…
Peer snorted. Now she was being stupid.
“I’ve always loved nature,” Blane had said. “Always felt I was an integral part of it. A puzzle piece that only truly fitted in when I was away from humanity and their fake constructs. That puzzle’s changed, and I haven’t. I don’t fit any more. Tell the truth, I don’t think any of us do.”
None of us fit, Peer thought. We’re all rejects. Nature’s refuse. Damaged goods.
Jenny, with her broken neck. The burning town, blasting its human history at the sky in a thousand tons of ash. The skinhead, belying his image, dead in the road, eaten.
In a way, the thought seemed to fit everything together.
Peer smiled.
The little dead girl smiles. Her mother smiles back, distant and preoccupied. The little girl feels sad.
They are sitting on a cloud high above the patchwork countryside. Houses are tiny, cars almost invisible. A river snakes its way between hillocks and higher ground, its ten million year trail obvious and wondrous from this height, almost spelling secrets. The little girl thinks of times long ago, when all manner of creature must have wondered the land and drank from the river as it wore its path through soil and rock.
Her mother stands and walks to the edge of the cloud. The little girl follows, not wanting to leave her mother’s side in case she suddenly turns to find her gone.
They both look down, down, and see an aeroplane passing by far below. She thinks of waving to it, but suddenly wonders whether anyone would see her anyway. She is dead, after all.
She turns to her mother but she has gone, vanishing straight through the cloud and drifting slowly Earthward. The little girl jumps up and down, but the cloud is impenetrable to her. She thinks she sees a rainbow, but then the clouds turn black, ready for rain. All colour is washed away.
She wants to cry for her mother, but she cannot find her voice. It has hidden itself well.
As she stands, she feels something beneath her feet. There is an explosion in the cloud and something dark and gleaming bursts up through the insubstantial floor. A chain, dressed in hooks and blades, whispering death at the sky.
It whips around her neck. It does not hurt because she is dead, but when it starts to tug her to the edge she begins to panic. Her mother has gone, true, but she had floated. The little girl knows that she would not float. She would fall. She would plummet, reach terminal velocity and pass it in an impossible desire to bury her dead little body deep under the ground.
The chain rattles and jerks, the cruel barbs snagging on her windpipe and spine, hauling her closer and closer to the edge. She holds on, but her heels skim across the cloud as if it is ice cream.
She is plucked over the edge.
She tumbles as she falls, glancing back at the cloud. The underside is dark with whipping, writhing chains. Millions of them.
She finds her voice and screams.
Not real.
She is going to hit the ground, make her own grave.
Not real. Wake up now! Peer, wake! You’re needed. More than anything…
Something tickles her ear, something other than the air storming by. Like a voice, a whisper in a hurricane.
Wake…
She jerked awake. Someone shouted. Then a scream.
She’d hit! Impact! She was dead!
“Peer, wake up!”
She sat upright, looked back at Paul and Holly where they were reaching over their seats.
“Christ Peer!” Holly gasped. “Christ. One minute you were there, the next your head hit the table. Asleep. Christ.”
“I was falling,” Peer said. “You saved me Paul. Thanks. You saved me.” But she thought it was more than Paul’s shaking and Holly’s shouting that had woken her up.
There was a sudden row behind them, running feet and June’s voice calling out in fear.
“We have to leave!” Blane shouted. He skidded to a stop. “What’s wrong?”
“Peer was asleep,” Paul said.
“Sleepy head,” Mary laughed.
“We have to leave,” Blane repeated.
“Dead bodies,” June panted. “Lots of them. Twenty, thirty. In the plant room.”
Paul shrugged. Yesterday, this would have shocked him to the core. Now he needed more. They had all seen so many dead bodies already, that he knew there must be more.
“Not the same,” Blane continued. “They’ve been murdered. Some have their throats slit. Others … their heads are crushed.”
“Oh God!” Holly said. “What if the people who did it-”
“That’s why we’re leaving, now!” Blane hissed. “Come on!”
The six of them moved through the restaurant, each with their own thoughts, each looking a different way. They reached the foyer without incident, Peer still stunned.
June reached the doors first. They slid open as she approached.
Outside, a bird sang.
The light vanished.
19. The Nature of Things
Fay had watched from afar when Mary and the bitch-woman first met Blane’s group. She had seen their stunned reaction to the animal attack, giggled at the woman’s hesitancy when Mary called her back to the car. So you should be worried, bitch. Wait until Mary knows the time is right, when I tell her. Then you’ll wish you’d gone with the others. Too late to worry then.
She had watched them leave and then skipped across the acres of mud to the river’s edge. The water was rough today, as though revelling in a world no longer dominated by humankind, but she had run across the river bed where the movement was less violent.
There had been a group of people in the services. They had stared at her in surprise at first, then shock. Then, when she moved at them, fear. But none of them had been fast enough, fattened as they were on the lethargy of modern life, and only one or two had put up token resistance. It was like stamping on ants, except less cruel.
She had to have a clean stage for her play. Nobody else could be allowed to intervene. And besides, their pathetic bodies would leave another signal and move things forward.
By the time the three cars reached the services Fay was sitting comfortably behind a screen of shrubs at the edge of the car park, chewing hungrily, and needlessly, on a still struggling pigeon.
Plants withered and shrunk around her, but only because she willed it so. If she wished, they would simply continue in their slow, inevitable transmutations, twisting into some bastardised idea of their former selves. She was merely a catalyst for the power of ruin and change previously unleashed; but even that was enough to enjoy.
She liked the smell of decay. She loved the tickle of dead leaves scratching her skin in the springtime. The taste of the pigeon, rancid and askew, was Heaven on her tongue. She shivered in ecstasy, just to see what it felt like.
The stench of death wafted from the building; fresh fear, newly opened bodies. She hoped the group would see it in all its terrible detail. Blane deserved it.
The cars drew up outside the building and they went inside. Blane led, with the tall black man and the bitch-woman following. Another woman next, then Mary and that ridiculous dog she’d adopted. The final woman paused, looked around for a while, scanning the grounds for movement. Fay ached to be seen, to
give a fleeting glimpse. But not here; now was not the time. Now it was time for something else, a little game, a play in the big match.
Time to throw another spanner in the works.
You, Fay thought, looking at the woman, grinning. Standing there with your hands on your arrogant hips, tits thrust out. Bet you want some of his cock, don’t you, shoved deep into you while he squeezes those tits, gnaws your neck. Don’t you? Don’t you?
The woman turned to watch Paul enter the building. She ran her hand through her short hair and followed them in.
Yes, you do. But who’s to say you’ll get out alive?
Fay remained in position for two hours. She could see the group through the restaurant window, arguing, disputing, spending pointless time planning their route when it was she who would steer them until it was time for Blane and his bitch to learn the truth. Then, soon after they knew, it would matter no more. Mary would take the woman, and Blane … that was up to him. If he was as strong as he had been in the past, he would accept Fay and everything that was happening. There was really no denying or escaping it. But weak, as he now seemed to be … lessened, drained …
… maybe he would have to go too.
The birds had begun to gather. At first even Fay was surprised, because she was exerting no influence. But then she realised that things were progressing quickly, and the ruin had set in deeply in this area. The fact pleased her, but also frightened her a little. There was still some of her old self inside, despairing at what was happening, mourning the loss of so much. But her new self – the better, improved, evolved portion of her old soul – loved the idea she had become. She was a great idea. The thought pleased her, the analogy amused her. She would have to remember that for when she finally confronted Blane.
She grinned, enjoying the sight as thousands of birds of all shapes, sizes and varieties alighted silently on the roof of the service buildings. Canny they were, too, sending a handful of their number down to the ground to divert the attention of those inside with the usual, boring routine. The roof was soon covered with a living, fluttering carpet of life, vying for space, arguing and pecking at one another, waiting for the doors to open, looking for a signal from those down below. They could smell the people inside, perhaps the dead ones as well as the living.
So the birds gathered, and soon Fay began to wonder which one would be the first through the doors. She had no doubt that some of them would escape, because Blane was with them. No matter how much he had forgotten, or chose to forget, he still had power. Perhaps one or two of them would stay there, dead, torn up, but that was just the nature of things. The nature of the new nature.
Fay stroked the chains on her face, feeling the tiny tug at her insides as she did so. She relished the idea of revealing what they held. She loved the thought of Blane seeing the final, inextricable truth. His face. His eyes.
The foyer doors opened.
A woman stepped through. She paused for an instant, as if sensing what was to come. But fate gave her no more time to think. Like a huge black sheet waved from one end to the other, the birds lifted from the roof. If there had been a sort of order in their patient wait, it vanished now that the waiting was over. They plunged headlong at the door, twisting and spinning down around the roof overhang and smothering the woman, like dirty water spinning into a plughole. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands, forcing their way into the opening, with thousands more battering their brains out on the glass walls on either side, feathers flying, many of them peeling back and coming around for a second run when they realised that their way in was blocked.
Fay frowned.
From this distance the services resembled a giant bees’ nest, with the workers humming around the opening. The foyer was literally full of birds, and now they were impacting with the inside of the windows as well as the outside, washing it red with blood and brains. A drift of dead birds soon built up around the opening, piled against the glass like stained snow.
Fay scratched at her chin, drawing blood. There were so many of them, more than she had expected. The ruin was advancing quickly.
Blane had to survive.
She left her hiding place, the time for concealment now passed. Several birds approached her, crying angrily into the hot sky. She hissed impatiently and they fell with a patter to the tarmac, wings twitching in death. She walked, then ran towards the violence. The main entrance was a maelstrom of swirling, diving, crashing and dying birds, the windows now so obscured with their blood and feathers that she could no longer see inside.
Blane must survive. Surely he would not let something like this finish him? Not now, not while the great match was still being played. Surely nature would not be so unkind?
But then, Fay knew that it would. She knew how, and why, and when it would stop, and she became scared for the first time in a long, long while. She had never been alone. Blane had always been there, whether he knew it or not. She didn’t know how she could face things, not without him, however remote they now were from each other.
She closed her eyes, concentrating. She felt sick. The chains pulled at her temples, stroked the inside of her stomach and moved the load they carried there. She squeezed her fists tight, feeling the ruin roiling haphazardly around her, trying to catch some of its manic energy and then letting it go again, boosted, amplified into a sudden wave instead of a steady background noise.
She hissed. Her front teeth broke and scattered on the pavement. Replacements began to grow instantly, but older, yellower, dulled by the ruin she too was experiencing.
The cacophony of the attack ceased. It was replaced with the sound of thousands of birds dying in one instant, dropping to the ground, twitching uselessly as their final breaths were suffocated out by those above them.
Fay turned, sighed and ran. Within seconds she was away from the car park and running aimlessly out into the fields. The way she had used to run with Blane.
Once again, silence reigned.
20. Toys
Peer heard the mechanical hiss of the outer doors open.
Above her head, outside, she sensed a weight. A living, breathing mass, pressing down, pushing back, compressing the air with its multitudinous life force. The confusion she felt over her strange dream vanished instantly, swept away by the intense dread which flooded her system like an injected drug. Knowledge was clear and true to her then, but a terrible knowledge, a certainty that death was mere seconds away. She did not want to become the little dead girl; she did not want to feel that lost.
June stepped through the doors. Peer saw the birds scattered across the parking lot look up as one; heard the loud call as they opened their beaks in unison.
Across the foyer there was a toilet door. Ten steps. “Run!” she shouted. She did not have time for more.
As the deluge roared through the open doors she turned and headed for the male toilet, grabbing Holly’s hand and hauling her along.
The wall of birds hit them, flowing warmly around them, beaks lancing at their skin like sharpened hail. Peer closed her eyes and tried to scream, but something entered her mouth and jabbed at her tongue. It tasted of stale bed linen. She gagged, unable to dislodge the creature, and she eventually bit down hard to clear her airway. She vomited as she ran, feeling warmth splash down her front. Claws scraped across her scalp like a hundred uncut nails, moving down onto her face and neck, searching for her eyes. She pressed one forearm across her face. Things caught on her ears and lips, ripping them and spitting blood into the air.
Blane saw the sky darkening and knew exactly what was happening. “Run”, a voice called from behind him, but it was too late. He saw the first wave sweep into June, and the second it took them to pass her by gave him time to fall to his knees, arms crossed over his head in an attitude of pious prayer. He heard a scream from June; only brief, because it was quickly muffled. The wall of bodies hit him, forcing him over onto his back.
“No!” he screamed, teeth gritted. There must be something he could do
. He felt there had to be something. But whatever it was, panic swallowed it. He kept shouting until he felt the first exploratory beaks jabbing at his chin and cheeks, then he press his lips tightly together. All over his body, hard beaks jabbed and tore. In places they felt like needles, puncturing his hide then searching for virgin skin to do so again. Sometimes, when a larger bird like a crow or pigeon was the culprit, the pounding remained in the same place. Wounds were opened and widened, and Blane had the sickening vision of being eaten alive.
Run where? he thought. He used his feet to turn on the floor, then started forcing himself along the slippery surface – made more so by spilled blood and bird shit – towards where he remembered the toilets to be. Should be doing something, he kept thinking, but the thought itself was alien and strange.
The noise was tremendous. Blane was reminded of how the kids in the village had used to tape playing cards into the spokes of their bike wheels to produce a snapping, humming sound. This was like a thousand bikes, a cacophony of explosive wing beats and impact thuds as birds dashed themselves against walls or windows. Intermingled in this were other noises, even more ominous; the scraping of claws and beaks across hard surfaces; the insistent wet smacking of birds hitting bodies; moans and shouts, muffled by protective limbs or intrusive, pecking bodies.
He hit something. At first it did not move, and he wondered who else was dead. Then a voice came through the noise.
“Who?”
“Blane.”
“Paul.”
They were economic with their words; the birds were wild with their beaks, seeking any opening.
Blane nudged against Paul, pushing him towards the wall. “Move!” Something big scampered over him and he groaned in dismay. Badger? Fox? Heavy jaws snapped several times in the air around his face, and he wondered why he felt no pain. Then he risked a glimpse – just quickly – and saw Spike with matted feathers and blood on his mouth. The dog moved away snapping, growling, spinning, howling as beaks and claws found their mark. There was Spike, but where was Mary?