The Dire Earth: A Novella (The Dire Earth Cycle)

by Jason M. Hough

  Sam ran the gap between a bus and a smashed pickup. She glanced back in time to see the diseased chasing her funnel through the space. A few of them, at least. Most scrambled over the vehicles. Still others fanned around to either side. Persistent bastards, she had to give them that.

  Movement to the right caught her eye. In the gaps between a row of two-story condominiums she saw something that made her almost crash.

  Standing on top of a row of abandoned cars were people. Normal people. Fifty or more, just standing there. Some held weapons; rifles, shovels, even cricket bats. And all of them, she realized, were cheering. Cheering for her.

  There are plenty of ways you can hurt a man, Freddy Mercury crooned from the speaker, and bring him to the ground.

  “Preach it, brother,” Sam said, sighting on another diseased. This one was just standing in the middle of the road, laughing maniacally as some of them were prone to do. Sam’s blast took out the former-woman’s legs below the knee. She fell forward, still laughing.

  Sam leaned again, trailing a line of sparks with the tip of her shotgun. Three rounds left. The line of people—actual sane human-fucking-beings—was still two hundred meters off, across a wide avenue. Sam twisted the accelerator and crouched over the handlebars as the bike surged forward, caps screaming with release. She shot the gap between two buildings. At the far end a wooden fence had been knocked down, forming a natural ramp. She grinned and plowed toward it.

  The bike sailed into the air. She lifted the shotgun over her head and let out a triumphant shout to the line of people watching her. They roared in appreciation, a sound that filled her with a strange and sudden joy.

  Sam saw the corpse too late.

  The body lay just beyond the fence, halfway in the road. It had been run over by a car, from the look of it, and she was about to add a motorcycle to the poor thing’s fate.

  Her rear tire landed on the dead man’s back and slid out to the left. Sam fought it for an instant and then knew the folly of it. She eased her hands and thighs off the bike and let it fly out from under her, metal screeching on the hot asphalt. Sam hit the ground a split second later, her thigh scraping along the baked hardpan. She slid for a few meters and felt blinding hot pain all along her leg as the road tore through her denim pants, flesh, then muscle. Somehow she managed to turn the slide into a roll. Her shotgun clattered away.

  Those along the line to the west emitted a gasp.

  The ancient portable radio emitted a few last triumphant notes before shattering as the motorcycle slammed into the burned husk of a taxicab.

  Sam could hear the animals now, skittering through the alley and over the wooden slab of fence. Grunting with agony she somehow managed to push herself to a shaky stand. She started to limp toward the line of people. They were across four lanes of road, and none seemed willing to rush to her aid.

  “Help me, you pricks!” she shouted, voice cracking from the sting that burned along her leg.

  None of them moved. Not a goddamn inch.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she shouted. They were shouting back, but with so many voices she could understand none. Their tone implied only one message: Run.

  She hobbled instead. Sam remembered her pistol then. Taken from a dead policeman outside East Palmerston. She fished it from the holster at her side and aimed behind her. The gun thudded against her palm with each echoing crack of a round fired. The first two creatures over the fallen barricade fell. The third she missed, but it tripped on its fallen packmates and landed awkwardly. Sam took careful aim and put a round in its skull.

  More appeared in the alleyway. Still others began to filter through from other passages to either side.

  Sam fired until the pistol had no more bullets to offer. She almost threw it, but thought better of the idea and kept it in her grip instead.

  Fifty meters now. She tried to run but couldn’t. The jog she could manage would never work, she realized with growing fear. Not unless—

  The gunfire that erupted from the line of onlookers made her heart sing. Especially given the fact that they weren’t shooting at her. “I’m going to make it,” she said aloud. “I’m going to make it.”

  She raised her arms above her head as she moved, eyes skyward, grinning in relief. Far above the fray, she spotted an aircraft soaring, its engines adding to the cacophony of the weapons fire.

  _

  A long, worrying silence followed first contact with the tower. Skyler set the aircraft to circle, bleeding altitude instead of fuel. With each trip around he caught a glimpse of the Australian coastline. Somewhere to the east, hidden in a haze of rain, Darwin and its space elevator waited.

  Finally the radio crackled. “Dutch Cargo, you’re clear to approach.”

  Skadz tapped Skyler’s shoulder. “Dutch Cargo?”

  “That’s what our transponder broadcasts on the civilian band.”

  “Worst name ever, mate. Gotta do something about that.”

  “Who cares?” Skyler replied. “They’re letting us land, that’s the important part.” He increased power to the engines, simultaneously ending their downward spiral and leveling off. Then he mumbled acknowledgment to the tower at Nightcliff. “Ten minutes until we’re down.”

  Skadz offered a hunk of naan to Skyler and groaned at the refusal before munching loudly on the crust. He chewed thoughtfully for a time as the ocean below drew nearer.

  “Valkyrie,” Skadz said. “That’s a proper name for an aircraft. Phoenix. Nighthawk. Fuckin’… Angel of Death.”

  “A bit epic for a Dutch transport,” Skyler said.

  “Military transport!”

  “Still.”

  Skadz gave a kick to Skyler’s chair, a most annoying habit. “C’mon, mate. Anything’s an improvement. Dutch fucking Cargo. Jesus.”

  “How about Melville?”

  The eyebrow, impossibly, rose higher. “What? Are you joking? Have you heard a bloody word I said?”

  “It’s a fine name,” Skyler said. “My grandfather’s, after the author—”

  “I know who fucking Melville is. People are going to think we’re talking about a damned whale.”

  “She does sort of resemble one.” Skyler shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “A winged whale, anyway. It’s a fine name. Professional. Respectable. Besides, billions of people have died. I don’t think we, as persons immune to this horror, should come riding in on the name ‘Angel of Death.’ ”

  Skadz teetered on the verge of a profane rant. “Honestly, mate, I can’t tell when you’re joking or serious.”

  A blip appeared on the main nav display. Darwin’s liftport, a designated no-fly zone by international agreement, slid onto the screen as a glowing red circle. Skyler nudged the flight stick until the line that marked his predicted path cut right through the center. Warnings about possible use-of-force lit up the top and bottom of the display, and a high chirp began to quietly ping through the cabin. Skyler ignored it all and locked in the landing option. Seconds later the acknowledgment came back, and the red circle changed to green. He relaxed a bit then. Altitude continued to fall, under a thousand meters now. Whitecaps drifted on the azure ocean beneath him, their intensity growing where they traced the Australian coastline. From this height the world looked pretty normal.

  “Last chance, I guess,” Skadz said.

  “Last chance for what?”

  “To have the planet Earth to ourselves. We can go anywhere, mate. The world is literally our fucking oyster.”

  “We’ve talked about this.…”

  “I know, I know. I’m just saying. In case you’re having second thoughts.”

  “I’m not.”

  Skadz squirmed noisily in his seat, something he did constantly when he was actually in it. He’d spent at least half the flight aft in the cargo bay, pacing. Not much of a co-pilot, Skyler thought, though of course the man had never been anything more than a civilian passenger on a commercial plane before last week.

  The two of them couldn
’t be more different. Skadz, a Jamaican-born Londoner who described what he did for a living as “a little of this, a little of that” had been in Amsterdam enjoying the coffeehouse culture when SUBS hit. Street-smart and resourceful under the mess of dreadlocks that spilled from his head, he was not exactly the type of person Skyler would have befriended under normal circumstances. But company was company and that counted for a lot right now. Not so much, perhaps, once they landed, though Skyler kept that thought to himself.

  Ahead, a line began to manifest along the window. A hairline crack, he thought at first, until he moved his head to get a better look and his brain worked out the perspective. The line was very far away. The space elevator. Despite everything he knew about it, proximity to the alien device still caught the breath in his throat.

  It went from the horizon up to the limit of Skyler’s view at a ten-degree angle, disorienting in the same way the Leaning Tower in Pisa left visitors off balance. As he stared at the vague, finely drawn line, he could see little blobs along its length. Red lights winked at regular intervals from each.

  A minute later the city began to take shape. Skyler saw the densely packed skyscrapers first. Crowded around the base of the cord were gleaming towers of glass, almost all built in the twelve years since the Elevator arrived. Their heights tapered off rapidly from there, giving way to squat warehouses and low-rent apartments, and finally slums. Docu-sensories had been made about the city’s explosion of growth resulting in the appearance of the alien artifact, and though Skyler remembered few details he could almost hear the narrator’s description of stratification that had occurred. The poor and uneducated living at the edges. Next were the skilled workers who filled factories, warehouses, and modest condominiums. Then came the powerful, the wealthy. Corporate headquarters and surprisingly large embassies. Huge hotels and luxury apartments. Finally, the Platz-owned land around the Elevator itself, marked by modest low buildings that created a buffer between the sentinel high-rise towers and the liftport, which marked the exact point where the Elevator connected to the ground.

  He could see it now. A single conical tower matching the cord’s off-kilter angle, rising to match the height of the tallest skyscrapers, which surrounded it like a crowd of anxious onlookers. Warning beacons formed orange-red dotted lines along the tower’s length and in regular rings around its girth, before giving way to support structures that obscured the very bottom.

  As instructed he kept a wide circle around the tower, only tightening his turn once on the eastern side of the city. Suburbs made up the landscape below.

  Skyler eased back on the thrust as individual buildings came into view. Motion began to manifest on the ground. Vehicles and then people. For a few seconds it looked normal, like any other city stirring to life with the sunrise.

  The western shoreline slid past, off to the right. A smattering of boats were anchored some distance away from the jagged boulders that met the sea. Farther south, a huge messy flotilla crowded the bay. Thousands of boats that must have raced here ahead of the infection. Fires burned on some of them. Skyler shook his head at the chaos and continued his circuit to the eastern part of Darwin, as instructed.

  “Look at that,” Skadz said. “Below us.”

  Through the glass footwell, Skyler saw nothing but the antlike movement of people. On this side of the city no rain fell at the moment, and they were out in droves. It took him a second to realize there was a strange abrupt end to the activity, right along the edge of the line of buildings. Hundreds of people were crowded along this invisible border.

  As Skyler watched, a lone motorcycle rider raced toward this line. A few dozen people chased the bike, clearly diseased from the primal way they moved. The rider sailed through an alley, took a jump, and landed badly. Skyler winced as the person slid along the ground and tumbled.

  “That Sheila might be like us,” Skadz observed. “Coming in from the outside.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Skyler said. He’d come across a few of the diseased that still seemed capable of intelligent behavior, to an extent, anyway. Riding a motorcycle seemed beyond that aptitude, but who knew for sure? Still, he found some hope in his co-pilot’s words.

  The scene slid behind them as they entered the central part of the city.

  “Holy shit,” Skadz whispered.

  The streets approaching Nightcliff were packed with vehicles, but few were moving. Most were dark, some just burned-out shells. And people—Jesus, the people—were everywhere. Leaning in through broken windows, wrenching away wheels and body panels. They were clustered into gangs; some were visibly embroiled in combat with others or even themselves.

  Shadowed forms rushed in and out of broken shop windows, arms full of anything they could carry, backs hunched over at a constant barrage from above. Objects of nearly every shape and size rained down, pelting those on the street below.

  “What are they throwing from the windows?” Skyler asked, not really expecting an answer.

  “Anything they can’t eat, burn, or trade,” Skadz replied.

  Skyler considered that. “Driving away the refugees.”

  “That, or just clearing space for ’em. I guess we better hope for that.”

  They watched in silence as the area called Nightcliff drew near. Skyler could see the landing pad now, blissfully free of looters. The only people he saw within a few hundred meters of it were soldiers and police, many wearing riot gear. Checkpoints marked each intersection, at least the ones Skyler could see, in a rough circle around the Elevator complex. Farther out they became roadblocks. Some were made from portable barricades, others from vehicles stacked on top of each other by nearby loading cranes. A few were simply walls of armed and armored people, looking out instead of in, lit in haunting yellows and oranges by trash fires and the odd road flare.

  “I’d call this a nightmare,” Skyler said, “but compared to Abu Dhabi …”

  “Yeah.” Skadz shifted in his seat again. “Turf wars, looting, your basic hooligan shit. It’s like Birmingham after a right and proper football contest. I call that a welcome change, though I wouldn’t mind a little law and order the closer we get to that pad.”

  Skyler focused on the landing site. The VTOL pads were four concrete disks, arranged in a curved layout around a massive fixed-base loading crane and flanked on either side by caged electrical junctions that no doubt provided capacitor spooling services. Broad, flat warehouses ringed the yard at a safe distance.

  He guided the craft along what seemed like a natural path between buildings toward the landing area. Off to his left a sprawling mansion came into view. White and angular, the opulent villa looked wholly out of place next to all the service-oriented buildings.

  “Wave to Neil,” Skadz said, imparting a mock cheer in his tone.

  Skyler kept his hands at the controls.

  His co-pilot smirked, the way only a street urchin could at such a display of wealth amid so much ugliness. “Think the old goat is inside, trying to make sense of all this?”

  Skyler shook his head. “I’d guess he’s up above, riding things out. I would be.”

  The radio crackled. “Dutch Cargo, hold position there, please.”

  With a slight yank, Skyler leveled the bulky aircraft out into a hover at fifty meters altitude. A high-pitched whine surged from the straining ultracapacitors, loud even against the howling thrust of air being pushed through the craft’s massive ducted fans. His eyes danced toward the cap level readout. Just 5 percent remaining; a hover would burn through that in ten minutes. His hands began to sweat, but he kept them firmly on the stick and throttle. “Dutch Cargo, holding. What’s the problem, Nightcliff?”

  “Unidentified ground vehicle approaching,” came the reply. “As a precaution we advise you back off to five hundred meters and await further instructions.”

  Skyler glanced over his shoulder at Skadz. “I don’t think we have the cap for it.”

  “Tell them, mate, not me,” Skadz said.

  “Nigh
tcliff, we’re low on charge. A second approach would be—”

  The rapid blinking of muzzle flashes below killed the words in his mouth. Through the footwell window he could see the soldiers swarming toward the south end of the landing area, taking up positions along the main arterial road that approached from the southwest. Vehicles and barricades alike dotted the avenue. How a ground vehicle could “approach” through that mess Skyler had no idea.

  Then he saw it, and understood.

  Large steel plates had been welded to the front of the thing, forming a wedge. The tires were similarly hidden beneath improvised armor. Whatever the original truck had been, it was clearly powerfully built. As Skyler watched it knocked a streetcar aside like it was no more than a toy. Sparks flew from the plated nose of the thing as the guards’ barrage peppered the surface. The bullets did absolutely nothing.

  “See that?” Skadz asked.

  “Yes,” Skyler managed.

  “They’re not going to stop it.”

  The same thought had just flitted through Skyler’s mind. Whatever the driver’s intent … on a whim Skyler flipped the radio to the local police band. The cockpit filled with frantic chatter immediately.

  “… Going for the base …”

  “… AP ineffective. Repeat, piercing rounds ineffective.”

  “Conserve ammo, there are civilians—”

  “Everyone shut the fuck up!”

  Skyler winced, despite himself. That last voice, though shrill, imparted a commander’s tone.

  The voice went on. “This is Blackfield. We’ve got grenades ready here. They will not reach the Elevator tower under any circumstances. I don’t care if we all need to lie down in front of it. Rally on my position in case any malcontents get out of that thing when it pops.”

  “Belay that,” a new voice said. “This is Chief Constable Braithwaite. If the intruder is packed with explosives and you set it off inside Nightcliff—”