by Tim Flanagan
The network of tunnels and caves was becoming overcrowded and the growth the creatures had done so far had used up all of their energy reserves leaving them hungry and restless. A primal instinct instructed them that it was time to leave the nest in search of food. The first dark shadow pulled itself through the hole, its body covered in a protective frothy slime, and lay on the grass beneath a gravestone. The silent night air was broken by a sucking noise that rattled from the breathing holes around the creature's body as it drew in air. A black leathery membrane slid up revealing a single clouded eye that twitched rapidly as it took in its surroundings. It slowly pulled itself up into a kneeling position then thrust a skeletal claw into the soft belly of a rat that had cowered against a mossy stone tomb. The rat wriggled, trying to work itself free from the yellow hooked nail it was skewered on, but without success. The black creature lifted the rat closer to its eye, intrigued as well as amused by the little animal, but the hunter in it knew that this animal was a source of food. It pushed the rat into its circular mouth that was rimmed with small hook like teeth then let out a breathy screech that cut through the night air like a fingernail being pulled down a blackboard.
A second and then a third creature followed.
Before long the graveyard was covered by a small army of identical creatures, black and leathery and covered in a silver-like slime.
Some of the creatures began to experiment with walking and coordination, lurching in the direction of the small cottages further upriver from the graveyard.
Others waited with their outstretched arms allowed the fragile skin that joined their arms to their body's time to dry, like a grotesque butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. Eventually they began beating their arms, slowly at first, feeling the resistance of the wind, but then faster until their bodies began to lift gently off the ground.
As it was early evening, some people were still out and about in Parsley Bottom. Tom and his girlfriend, Emma, were sitting on a wooden bench facing the park watching their friends play on the swings and slides; it was the only chance the teenagers got to use the playground once the little children had gone home. Tom laughed loudly as his friend nearly fell off the swing as it arced high into the air. Emma rested her head gently on Tom’s shoulder and looked up into the night sky, trying to work out the different constellations of stars. The swings seemed to be a lot squeakier tonight than normal, or so she thought.
Suddenly Emma sat upright with a confused look on her face, squinting as she tried to examine the sky.
‘What is it?' asked Tom.
‘Nothing,' replied Emma, who dismissed the shape she had seen in the sky. 'Probably just a bat.'
Neither of them noticed the dark creatures that swept down from above to pluck them effortlessly off the bench. Tom managed to hold onto the arm of the bench as he was pulled rapidly into the sky, but its weight made him drop it to the ground. It was only then that his friends looked over to where Tom and Emma had been sitting and saw the bench overturned and empty. But they didn’t have any time to wonder where their friends had gone as they quickly became the next victims to the night.
Slowly, the children’s swings in the park squeaked backwards and forwards until they came to a halt all on their own, the seats empty.
In another part of town two women stumbled out of a restaurant, arm in arm and laughing loudly. They walked down a narrow road enclosed on both sides by houses and only wide enough for one car to drive down. Pippa had gone out that night to celebrate her birthday with a few friends, one of which, Beth, was now helping to take her home. The road widened into a small square with parking down the centre. Beth reached inside a small handbag, took her car keys out and pressed the central locking button on the key fob. The orange hazard lights flashed and the doors unlocked. Beth opened her door ready to get in but then noticed that Pippa was now sitting on the road clutching her ankle.
‘What are you doing there?' shouted Beth, leaving the car door open as she walked over to her friend.
‘I’ve broken the heel of my shoe.’ Pippa pointed over to a small grate at the side of the road. The narrow heel on her shoe was wedged in the gap between two of the metal bars. 'I think I might have twisted my ankle.'
All of their movements were being watched with some curiosity from above by creatures that until now were unfamiliar with humans, but they recognised an animal when it was vulnerable and they knew that she could not run and would be an easy target.
‘Come on,’ encouraged Beth as she helped Pippa onto her good foot so that she could hop slowly towards the car.
Once the two girls got themselves inside the car, a dark shadow struck, desperately consuming the source of meat. The car shook from side to side; Beth and Pippa had no chance of escape.
All through the night the creatures feasted on any animal they came across; dogs, cats, cows, sheep and humans, they didn’t mind which, it was just a source of food to them. Hundreds of creatures swamped Parsley Bottom during the night. People disappeared without a trace and homes with open windows were raided leaving nothing more than a slimy mess behind.
The assault on Parsley Bottom was just a small part of what happened across the rest of England on the same night. A new predator was lurking in the sky, fixed on an unchanging mission to feed its body and survive.
28. Running into Danger
After Coldred and Seward had left, Steven and Georgia ordered dinner from the bar in the pub and were now sitting on the bed going over what the two men from MI6 had told them. Georgia couldn’t believe that an alien bacteria had developed freely on the planet into a living creature and was surviving. She thought back to what Seward had said: 'Mankind has not had a predator since the age of dinosaurs. Until now.’
'We must act quickly,’ Steven had said to the others, but they didn’t seem to feel the same degree of urgency that he did. ‘People need to be warned!’
'As we already said, mass vaccination will be used to prevent infection from the bacteria. But, the unknown part is what to do once they reach the creature stage.’
‘I already have some of my team working on the creature Miss Brown brought to us,’ informed Coldred. ‘We are trying to develop some form of equipment that emits ultra violet light, as well as chemical weapons but it’s still early days.’
‘We also don’t know how the creature will change as it grows. It could quickly adapt to any weapons we might use, which would eventually make them useless. At the moment we are resorting to conventional equipment such as guns and incendiary weapons. But the biggest challenge we face is that we don’t know how many creatures actually exist. At the rate of growth we saw in the laboratory there could already be hundreds if not thousands in this area alone.'
'How can we find them?' Steven had asked.
'They don’t appear to be warm-blooded animals so they won’t show up on any heat-sensitive cameras. We have to physically look for them with our eyes, but we can’t bring in the army to do it. We would have to evacuate the whole village and prevent anyone coming in or out whilst we search. Unfortunately, this would create too much publicity and media attention. Once again we need to do things discretely to prevent panic and chaos.' Seward paused, ‘your role in this has now changed. We want you and Miss Brown to start searching for the creatures. We will give you weapons and additional boxes of antibiotics.' He laid a black case onto the desk, flicked the metal clasps and showed them two hand-guns embedded within a foam interior, together with several additional ammunition clips and two boxes of antibiotics.
'But, sir, I wouldn’t know where to start looking?' protested Steven.
'The arm that was found has been identified as being from a security guard that went missing from one of the factories up river from where you found it, start there. Locate the biggest concentrations of creatures then we can send in small teams of soldiers to exterminate them.’
‘What does Sir Adam think?' asked Steven, who had noticed that his superior hadn’t joined the other two men on their tr
ip from London.
There was an uncomfortable silence in the room as the two men looked at each other.
‘Sir Adam’s body was pulled from the Thames this morning. He drowned,’ Seward explained. ‘He was seen walking across Tower Bridge last night and an anonymous witness rang the Metropolitan Police saying they saw a man jump.’
Steven was stunned. He hadn’t thought that Sir Adam was the sort of person who would have taken his own life. Especially now that alien life had been found on the planet, something he had been searching for his whole life and was as desperate to discover as Steven was. Something didn’t seem quite right. He recalled his commanders warning about not trusting the other two men and wondered if they had anything to do with his unexpected death.
As they sat on the bed picking at the food in front of them, their thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a frantic scream from somewhere outside the pub. Steven jumped up and went over to the window but couldn’t see anyone. As he scanned up and down the road he noticed dark shapes flying in the sky then diving at random intervals towards the ground.
‘Georgia,’ Steven said nervously, ‘come and look.’
As she came to the window they saw a man from the bar walking out onto the green to see where the scream came from. As he stood looking around he failed to notice a black skeletal creature swoop down and grab him by his shoulders. The man’s scream was soon muffled by the black figure as it folded itself around the man’s head to begin the process of digesting.
‘It’s one of the creatures,’ Georgia stuttered in disbelief.
‘We have to do something,’ said Steven as he took a gun from the case that Seward had given him. The other gun, cartridges and antibiotics, he stuffed into Georgia’s bag and swung it over his shoulder.
‘Come on,’ he said, trying to encourage Georgia to move from the spot she seemed stuck to, ‘apart from us no one else knows about the creatures and the danger they're in. We have to help them.’
She had never felt as insecure as she had done in the last two days and was glad to have Steven to talk to, but what she had just seen terrified her so much that she wanted to close the curtains and try to forget what she had become involved in. Steven pushed her coat into her hand and pulled her away from the window.
As they walked down stairs to the bar, Steven had a gun ready in case one of the creatures had already entered the building, but the bar was empty. The only thing they could hear was the gentle squeak of the metal sign outside that hung above the front door as it rocked in the breeze.
Georgia held tightly onto Steven’s hand as they walked towards the door.
‘Come on,’ Steven said, breaking the silence.
He pushed gently on the door until it opened just a little. At first all he could see was the grass in front of the pub as well as Georgia’s now familiar black car but there was so much about the scene that didn’t look right. He could count at least two cars that had crashed into each other, one engine smoking, another completely crumpled. There were muddy tyre marks scarring the grass and some plants and flowers that had been uprooted were now spread across the road. For as far as he could see there was chaos and destruction.
He looked up and down the road checking for creatures, but there were none he could see except for some shadows in the distance darting erratically in the sky.
As Steven pushed the door open some more, it became jammed against something.
Looking around the door he could see that one of the hanging baskets had fallen, preventing the door from fully opening. Steven cautiously squeezed himself through the opening and checked once again in all directions before stepping out of the pub. He then moved the basket from behind the door so he could open it fully and allow Georgia to follow.
Walking onto the grass in front of the pub gave Steven a good vantage point to look from. In every direction there seemed to be something out of place. Trees had been knocked down or were bent at peculiar angles. House windows were smashed. In the distance he could hear more screams and lights in houses being turned on as curious people looked to see where the noise was coming from.
Some spots of rain began to fall, but nothing would wash away the scene around them. A storm was brewing and the air felt electric and alive.
Steven ran to the nearest car that had crashed or been left abandoned and looked through the smashed window. There was no one sitting behind the driver’s wheel, just a single shoe left abandoned on the seat. There were two long scratches running down the length of the roof, and above where the driver should have been, the metal of the roof had been prized open like the lid from a can of beans.
‘Look at this!' Steven shouted to Georgia who seemed to have been glued to the pavement in front of the pub door. He had now leant closer to the car and was loosening something from between two pieces of metal around the roof.
He walked over to show Georgia.
‘It must be a claw from one of the creatures. Coldred was right, the one that you took to London this morning was just a baby; they’ve developed into something a lot bigger and deadlier,’ he said showing her what was in his hand. It was about as long as his little finger and curved and pointed whilst at the thicker end it was untidy and ragged like it had been pulled out of something.
‘What if they come back?' Georgia asked as she continued to look around her for more creatures.
‘Look over there!' Steven pointed excitedly towards a figure he could see sitting inside one of the cars further up the road.
‘Hello!’ he shouted, jogging down the road. As he got nearer to the car, he could hear the gentle hum of the engine still running.
‘Hello,’ he tried again, ‘are you alright?’ The person sitting in the driver’s seat didn’t move. Her hands were gripped around the steering wheel. Now that he was nearer to the car, Steven could see that although the person’s eyes were staring straight ahead of her; she wasn’t blinking. He realised that the lady was probably dead.
Steven tried the door handle, but it was locked. Looking around him he found a brick on the road that must have become loose from the impact of a car against a stone wall and used it to break the window. He then reached in, unlocked the door from the inside, took the keys out of the ignition and placed his fingers on the lady’s neck. He waited for several seconds but couldn't feel the faintest beat of a pulse.
‘Is she dead?' asked Georgia reluctantly.
‘Yes. Probably had a heart attack out of fear. Look how her hands are gripped around the steering wheel.’
Suddenly the night air was shattered by an explosion near to them. A jumble of black skin fell from the sky and landed on the roof of the car they were looking in making Georgia scream in surprise. Steven instinctively looked up for other creatures before turning to where the explosion came from.
A man was now approaching them from within the wooded area on the other side of the road. He had a green waxed jacket on and some thick sturdy walking boots, but most menacingly of all, the smoking barrel of a shotgun was pointing in their direction.
‘You shouldn’t be out on the streets. Those things are everywhere,’ he said, still walking towards Steven and Georgia. ‘You better get under cover and quickly, the sound of gunfire will make them curious. There are others coming this way.’ He swung his shotgun up into the sky, using it to point at some more black shadows that were now flapping their way towards them.
A creature landed on the pavement beside the car, Georgia screamed and together all three of them backed away towards the other side of the road. More shot flew from the barrel of the stranger’s gun creating a hole in the body of the creature.
‘Into the wood. The trees will give us cover.’
As the gun fire still echoed across the sky, they turned and ran into the woodland and away from the creatures that now descended on the crashed car, feeding on the bodies of the two other creatures as well as the dead woman at the wheel.
29. Bishops Green Station
Joe suddenly woke up with a sta
rt. He was still tightly gripping the cloth that covered the Silver Bough, but it kept feeling like the cloth was sliding over the shiny surface of the pipe, almost like it wanted to get out. It took him a few moments to remember where he was, but as his brain started to orientate itself, he realised that although he was inside a train carriage, the train was no longer moving. He looked over to Max and Scarlet - they were still asleep, but Edgar was nowhere to be seen. Looking out the window next to him, Joe could only see his reflection, but through the windows on the other side of the carriage he could see a couple of lamps lighting up a small station house. A few people walked along the platform talking to others whilst further along the platform, underneath a hanging clock, he could see Edgar talking to the station master.
The engine of the train appeared to be completely turned off, no hum vibrated through the wheels of the carriage and the overhead lights appeared to be dim and probably running off a back-up battery. Joe waited patiently enjoying the peace and quiet.
‘Looks like we might be stuck here for a while,’ whispered Edgar to Joe as he walked down the centre of the carriage towards him, ‘there’s some sort of communication problem.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The driver can’t get any response from Harrogate Station. We can’t approach the station if they don’t know we’re coming, there could be other trains waiting, or maybe there's been an accident. We have to sit here and wait whilst they keep trying.’
‘How long have we got to wait?' said the sleepy voice of Scarlet who opened her eyes at the sound of Edgar’s voice.