by Glenn Cooper
The pedestrian zone beside the shopping centre was deserted. Heath and his men were bunched, waiting for their attackers to arrive. They had fought many soldiers in the past, usually in accidental skirmishes. The king’s men didn’t like coming out at night to challenge rovers, but these soldiers were different.
There was a buzzing sound overhead. Heath saw the small flying machine with four rotor blades. It swooped low but not low enough for him to swat it with one of his knives.
He looked to his east toward the High Street and told the men to retreat in that direction but the flying machine followed, hovering at no more than twenty feet above the ground.
Inside the armored personnel carrier Sergeant Ferguson alerted Lieutenant Venables to what he was seeing on his laptop. The drone operator back on the bridge was tracking activity in the shopping district and uploading the feed.
“Have a look at this,” the sergeant said.
Venables glanced down and as a sign of his interest, snatched the computer away for a better look. Illuminated in the floodlit pedestrian promenade was a group of men fleeing from the drone. They were dressed in shabby, archaic garb and they were brandishing knives.
“Command,” Venables said into his headset, “are you seeing this?”
His commanding officer at the MOD in Whitehall replied, “We have it. Stand by while we analyze. How close are you?”
“Two hundred yards.”
“Right. Hold your position and stand by.”
“What is it, Sarge?” Private Saunders asked.
“An assembly of hostiles, by the look of them,” Ferguson said.
“We going to engage?”
“Not for me to say, is it?” the sergeant replied.
Ben Wellington was beside John Camp in the back seat of his Jaguar when his phone rang. The two of them were on the way back to MI5 from their meeting with the queen. King Henry was on his way to an MI5 safe house in the Hampshire countryside with a contingent of security staff, doctors, and nurses, one bewildered royal butler, a few trusted palace housekeepers, and one very willing minder, Professor Gough. Ben listened to the caller and retrieved his tablet computer from his briefcase.
He passed the tablet over to John and said, “This is real-time MOD drone footage from Leatherhead. What do you make of this lot?”
John shook his head. “Rovers.”
“Are you certain?”
“I’ll peg it at ninety-nine percent. All of them have at least one knife, a lot of them two. They hold them pointed down, like rovers do, best for downward thrusts. And see the way they’re running. It’s like they’re gliding. They’re confident runners, especially at night.”
Ben thanked him and spoke into his phone. “First off, we believe with a very high level of probability that these are Hellers, not members of the local populace. Second, we believe, also with a very high probability that they are the most dangerous sort of Hellers. These men are predatory killers. Yes, I would absolutely endorse that course of action. Of course. I’ll maintain visual contact and remain on the line.”
Lieutenant Venables announced, “We’ve been cleared to engage the enemy. Sergeant, we’ll be rolling up on them. We’ll dismount with a fifty-yard buffer and on my mark we will open fire. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Saunders whispered to the private next to him, “’Bout fucking time we kicked some alien arse.”
The rovers kept running away from the drone and the Marine armored personnel carrier that had come into view. Heath shouted for his men to stop when the vehicle stopped and soldiers spilled out.
Heath was outside the Victorian redbrick Leatherhead Institute on the High Street. “Are you ready to fight them?” he shouted to his men.
The men raised their knives and gave off blood-curdling cries.
“Let ’em come,” Monk yelled. “There’s not many of them. We’ll strip their flesh from their bones.”
Lieutenant Venables raised his hand and gave the order to fire.
The video feed on Ben’s tablet had no sound.
John watched the drone’s-eye-view of 5.56mm NATO ammo thudding into rover torsos and heads. The rover who seemed to be in charge was directing the others with frantic waves of his arms before taking multiple hits to his chest and crumpling.
Monk fell to his knees beside Heath then rose in anger and charged the Marines. He made it only a few strides before he was cut down.
John passed the tablet back to Ben and said, “You don’t know how many times I wanted to rake those bastards with automatic fire.”
Venables ordered a cease fire and led his commandos toward the immobile bodies littering the pavement. The first rover they stood over was dead from a headshot. The next one was still alive, just barely, with two bullet holes through the lungs. It was Heath who stared up at the soldiers and mouthed a “fuck you.”
“What are our orders?” the sergeant asked Venables.
Venables asked the same question into his headset and the reply came from Whitehall: no medics, no prisoners.
The lieutenant answered his sergeant by dipping the barrel of his rifle and firing a round between Heath’s eyes. The rest of the squad didn’t require further instructions. They went about their grim business delivering coup de grâces until all the bodies were still.
“Doesn’t seem sporting,” Ben said, looking away from his tablet.
“They’re rovers,” John said. “They …”
“I know all about them,” Ben said. “I had my own dealings.”
“Anyway, they’re already dead.”
In one instant Heath was staring down the barrel of a rifle, and in the next he was lying on his back in the center of a rank town, the Leatherhead of Hell. The rovers who preceded him were already upright, shifting about in stunned silence.
Monk offered a hand and pulled Heath to his feet.
“Seems we’re back where we belong,” Monk said. “It were good while it lasted.”
“Bloody good,” Heath said, checking for injury. “Last I saw of you, your head had a large hole in it.”
“Did it now?”
“All the lads back?”
Monk looked around. “Not all. Only the ones with us when the soldiers opened fire.”
“They had some rum old guns, didn’t they?” Heath said admiringly.
“That they did. Now what?”
Heath shook his head. “I don’t know why we were sent back to the land of the living and I don’t know why we’re back in this shithole. I suppose we’ll just have to carry on doing what we do,” Heath said. “Let’s go back to our camp and take it from there.”
“Come on, lads,” Monk shouted. “Fun’s over. Heath wants us back to the woods.”
Fifty rovers began walking toward the forest.
Heath thought his eyes were playing a trick on him. Or maybe it was just the blackness of the night. One by one his men seemed to be disappearing. Monk saw it too and he left Heath’s side and cackling, plunged forward.
Heath was alone.
Behind him was the town.
Ahead of him, darkness.
Without hesitation he stepped forward.
“What are we to do with all these bodies?” Sergeant Ferguson asked.
“Not our problem,” the lieutenant answered. “We’re to proceed to the helo crash site and check for survivors.”
John noticed it out of the corner of his eye on Ben’s tablet lying on the armrest between the two men. The drone was hovering overhead showing the soldiers milling over the scattered corpses.
“Jesus.”
The rovers were back, running toward the unaware soldiers.
“Do you have comms with the Marines?” John said.
In alarm, Ben said he didn’t and started to ring Whitehall.
Private Saunders heard something and looked up just in time to see a rush of rovers upon him, punching, kicking and gouging. He smelled their vile odor as he tried to raise his weapon. He saw his knife getting s
natched from its sheath and felt the cold steel getting thrust into his chest.
The last thing Lieutenant Venables heard was the sharp warning from Whitehall command in his headset before Heath took him down from behind, ripped his helmet off, and sank his teeth into his neck.
6
The two of them were running on coffee and adrenaline but their fatigue was palpable.
“Look, let’s try to keep this short so you can get some sleep,” Ben said.
They were in a briefing room at Thames House, MI5 headquarters in London. Through the windows they could see a passing barge motor down the Thames and traffic backed up on the Embankment. From their perch everything seemed normal enough.
John and Emily assured Ben that they were fine but Ben repeated that he would get them back to Dartford as soon as possible.
As other MI5 operatives filed into the room John whispered to Emily, “You do look like shit, you know. You’ve got to rest.”
She replied with a weak smile. “You look worse. We’ll sleep soon.”
“Right. Let’s begin,” Ben said. “The situation on the ground has clearly shifted in the past few hours and we need to make some hard decisions. The prime minister and the Cobra group will be meeting within the hour and I’ll have to provide our recommendations. So with that, Eva, could you catch us all up?”
Eva Mendel was the MI5 analyst responsible for Ministry of Defense liaison. An efficient, emotionless woman, she was crisp and to the point.
“I’ll start with Leatherhead,” she said. “Has anyone not seen the drone footage of the attack on the Marines? Fine, in that case, no need to show it again. The Hellers, rovers, whatever we choose to call them, were eliminated by the lads from 3 Commando only to reappear very much, quote-unquote alive, a short distance away with tragic consequences. The MOD has not sent in any further troops but all remote footage confirms without any doubt that there were no survivors on our side. In Dartford, Sevenoaks, and Upminster we haven’t had occasion to witness the phenomenon of terminated Hellers reappearing but within the past hour we have witnessed this. Again, what you’ll see is drone footage with thermal imaging, starting with Sevenoaks in the vicinity of the Belmeade School.”
The large monitor at the front of the room showed a dark empty playing field from a height of approximately one hundred feet. Initially the field was empty. Then a bright image of a person appeared. The person stood still for several seconds then began running in one direction before stopping and reversing course. Then two more people appeared and the first person joined them. A minute passed and five more individuals popped into view. The group of eight then proceeded to the evacuated school building and seemed to force entry.
“This is not good,” John mumbled.
“As far as we can tell,” Mendel said, “these individuals are still inside the school and no more have appeared. Now for Dartford. You’ll recognize the grounds of the MAAC facility, also fully evacuated as of early this afternoon. I’d draw your attention to the tennis court.”
The security lights were blazing all around the laboratory complex so the thermal imaging on the drone camera was disabled. The tennis court was fully lit. Three people spontaneously appeared near the net then ran toward the chain-link fence and tried to get out. After a while, one of them found the door and the three of them ran off into the darkness.
“We’ve seen no more activity at Dartford. And finally, this is Upminster, at a housing estate off Litchfield Terrace. The area was completely evacuated and sealed off but we have detected this group of six individuals going in and out of vacant dwellings.”
“Are you sure these aren’t returning residents or vandals from outlying areas?” Ben asked.
“We can’t be certain,” Mendel said.
“Rewind to the place you can see them walking under the street lamp,” John said. “Can you zoom in on them there?”
Mendel found the spot, froze the footage and magnified and enhanced the image.
“You see their clothes?” John said. “They didn’t buy them at Marks and Spencer. They’re rough. They’re Heller clothes.”
“That was our working assumption,” Mendel said. “I think that’s all I have. Any questions?”
Emily asked, “Have you detected anything similar at the previous hot spots in South Ockendon and Iver?”
“No, nothing there,” Mendel said.
Ben thanked her and said, “Dr. Loughty, I think we need to have your view on what’s happening.”
Emily started by shaking her head mournfully. “I see this as a very worrying development, very worrying indeed. As you know, previously it took a restart of the collider to generate nodal activity.” She saw the blank looks around the table and added, “We’re calling the areas of contact between our dimension and theirs, nodes. So far, including today’s activity, there have been six known nodes—Dartford, South Ockendon, Iver, Leatherhead, Sevenoaks, and Upminster. Tonight the collider is quite dormant and we’ve seen bi-directional transfers at three of the nodes.”
“Bi-directional?” Ben asked. “I don’t believe we’ve seen any of our people disappear.”
“Your downed helicopter,” John said. “I know you haven’t been able to put boots on the ground but I’ll venture to say you’re not going to find bodies in the wreckage.”
“You think the crew wound up over there?” Ben asked.
“I do. And if I’m right, they found themselves up in the air with no place to go but down.”
“Christ,” Ben said.
“I agree with John,” Emily said. “The helicopter probably flew into a node, lost its crew and crashed. It’s not appropriate to call them nodes any longer. They’re hyper-nodes or hot zones, perhaps. They’re no longer transitory and associated with collider activity. That means we can’t simply block the channels between our dimensions by mothballing the MAAC. We have to find a different way to plug them permanently.”
Ben said, “My understanding is that the panel of experts we convened had no answer.”
“I haven’t had a chance to speak with any of them personally and all my key people were caught up in the Dartford transfer this morning. I’ll take your statement at face value and just say this: the most important expert on strangelets, Paul Loomis, told me he knows how to put an end to this.”
One of the officials at the end of the table said, “Well, let’s hear him out. Where is he?”
“He’s in Hell,” Emily said. “And that’s why I need to go back and find him.”
“Do you know where he is?” Ben asked.
“Roughly,” John said. “It won’t be easy to extract him, but with the right manpower and a little luck it’s doable. The longer we wait, the more chance he’ll have moved or worse, gotten hurt in a war that’s on full boil.”
“In the meanwhile we’re going to need a strategy to contain Hellers coming through these hot zones,” Mendel said.
“It’s going to be difficult,” Emily said. “It’s possible that the instability of the hot zones is going to increase.”
“Meaning what?” Ben asked.
“The affected zones will get larger,” she said. “If you cordon off Leatherhead, for example, it’s possible that those manning the cordon will wind up within the zone, transported to the other side.”
“We can’t just let the Hellers out to run amok in London,” Mendel said.
“No, of course not,” Ben said. “We’ll have to set a protective cordon somewhere and monitor closely for signs of a widening problem.”
“It’s going to be harder than you think,” John said. “The word is going to get out over there. Hellers are going to want to escape and make their way back to the land of milk and honey. The hot zones are going to get flooded and over-run. If the army shoots at them, fires off missiles, whatever, we’re going to see the same thing we saw on the drone footage. The Hellers are going to reappear. And if we repeat the exercise, all we’re going to have is a pile of Heller bodies—maybe multiple copies of the sam
e bodies—and they’re going to keep coming. Eventually, they’re going to over-run your defenses.”
“Then what,” Ben said, throwing his hands up as he said, “do we just throw up our hands and surrender?”
“Not what I’m suggesting,” John said. “We’ve got to stop them on the other side. We’ve got to stop them in Hell.”
Ben arched his eyebrows. “How do you propose to do that?”
“With some brave men and the help of someone I haven’t talked to in a long time.”
Emily ran a finger over John’s dinette table and showed him the dust.
“The guy who does the cleaning’s been out of town.” John said. He cracked two cans of cold beer, gave her one, and the two of them collapsed on the sofa where she sipped and he gulped.
Emily said, “This is a nightmare.”
“Yeah, it’s bad. Do you really think Paul Loomis has the answer?”
“I take him at his word. Why would he have lied?”
“I wish we had more than that to go on. I don’t …”
She put her finger to his lips to quiet him. “I know. I know you don’t want me to go,” she said. “But you know that this has gone from bad to worse. Paul and I speak the same language. Whatever his idea is, I’ll be able to understand it and translate it into action.”
John gently pulled her finger away. “That was your dust finger,” he said. “Want me to run you a bath?”
“I’m too exhausted to want one and too dirty to say no.”
While she soaked in the tub, John stared at his telephone. He couldn’t remember the last time he rang the number but he didn’t need to look it up. It was the first phone number he’d ever learned; up until he went to college it was his own.