The Ironclad Prophecy

by Kelleher, Pat

  Only they weren’t clouds. From up here, that much was clear now. Tulliver could see what those on the ground couldn’t. The danger wasn’t yet over because the stampede was never the threat. It was what caused it that was the real threat.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Into Your Dugout and Say Your Prayers...”

  EVERSON FOCUSED HIS binoculars on the storm front and felt a hoarfrost of fear creep down his spine. He adjusted the focus and blurred shadows sharpened into a moment of confusing detail. He lowered the field glasses to get context and quickly raised them again, panning across the rapidly advancing cloud front. He passed the glasses to Hobson, soliciting the Platoon Sergeant’s opinion. “What do you make of it?”

  With no other hint, Hobson took the glasses. “Bloody hell!” he spat, adding a hasty, “sir.”

  It could have been a great armada of blimps, dirigibles of enormous size, driven along by the wind. There seemed to be no source of motive power. Was this the cause of the stampede? Some kind of air force? If it was a fleet, it threatened to fill the sky.

  “What are they, some kind of Zeppelins? Some sort of foreign airship?”

  “Maybe, sir. No, wait, they’re...”

  “They are the Kreothe,” said a voice, filled with horror and realisation. It was Poilus. “The great drifting sky shoals of Kreothe. Huge airborne creatures that live on the winds, never coming to earth.”

  “Thank God,” said Everson with relief. “You had me worried there for a minute.”

  “And so you should be,” said Poilus, looking at the approaching things in wonder. “The Kreothe may live in the air, but they feed on the ground. They come, blown by the winds, by the breath of GarSuleth. They have not passed this way in generations. I have only known them exist in tales the elders tell of older times. The last time they passed this way, our clan were still Khungarrii urmen, safe in Khungarr.”

  “Sir?” Hobson knocked Everson on the upper arm with the back of his hand as he held out the binoculars. “I think he’s right. It’s not over yet. You’d better take another look...”

  Everson did.

  What they had mistaken for a cloud front or a zeppelin fleet was, in fact, thousands of individual creatures, of varying sizes, floating from gas sacs, hundreds of feet in the air. Their progress was calm and measured, and above all silent. It was impossible not to be impressed by the things as they crowded the wide sky in their slow stately progress above the veldt. Air sac followed air sac in a mass of varying sizes; from huge towering majestic creatures that appeared, to Everson’s imagination, like the old bulls of the shoal, to skittish flimsy little things, like younglings.

  Great long thick tendrils, hundreds of feet long, hung from the creatures, dragging along the veldt, dredging for food.

  Everson watched, almost spellbound, as tentacles caught animals up, lifting their catches into the air, before handing them over to the shorter fronds that clustered around the bodies protruding below the great air sacs. These, it seemed, were great prehensile tongues, that seemed to taste the creature’s food before it ingested it. Everson knew many creatures on this planet were inedible or, perhaps, had defences against such predation. This was obviously the Kreothe way of countering that, testing it perhaps, before drawing it up into pulsing mouth tubes and into the belly of yet another swelling.

  Everson watched, in horrified fascination, the great bull Kreothe at the head of the shoal grazing languidly, as they drifted inexorably towards the encampment. He was reminded of seeing an elephant at feeding time or, perhaps, a Portuguese Man-o’-war, as he once did as a young boy, preserved for display in a newly opened museum wing donated by his father.

  He had seen enough. “So this is why the Khungarrii vanished. They didn’t want to be caught out in the open under these things.” He looked at Hobson. “How long have we got, do you reckon?”

  Hobson pursed his lips and squinted. “Judging by the wind speed, maybe ten to fifteen minutes?”

  “Here we go again,” muttered Everson as he started to give orders.

  There was a roar as Tulliver flew low over the trenches, waggling his wings to attract their attention. Everson looked up and saw Maddocks, the observer, pointing back towards the approaching Kreothe. A warning.

  The plane circled. Everson waved to show he understood. Tulliver pointed to his machine gun, and then at the Kreothe, and headed out to meet them.

  Everson grunted an acknowledgement as he turned his attention to the various runners who were now appearing, ordering all but a small defensive force into the deep dugouts. “We can’t fight these things. I’ve no idea how. All we can do is try and warn them off. Keep any more damage to a minimum.”

  The translucent gas sacs of the oncoming Kreothe cast a peculiar light as the sunlight filtered through them, and the sky began to darken.

  IN THE BIRD Cage, Townsend, Miller and the other shell-shock victims stumbled out of the dugout, determined, like Jones before them, to escape their confinement again at any cost. Everson said he couldn’t spare extra men to guard them. Nurse Bell, Sister Fenton and Padre Rand found themselves unequal to the task.

  “What’s got into them, sister?” asked the Padre, his arms wide, trying to block one man from reaching the fence, as if he were playing British Bulldogs.

  “I don’t know, Padre,” said Sister Fenton, as she struggled to keep hold of one man. “They seemed docile and compliant until the wind changed and now, I don’t know, they seem compelled to escape their confinement. Oh!” Flailing about, the man smacked the Sister across the face with the back of his hand, barely aware that he had done so. She recoiled in shock and he broke free and joined the surge for the fence.

  The padre watched those escaping patients, already out of the compound, dash over the trench bridges towards a section of trampled barbed wire entanglement beyond.

  Townsend and the others stumbled out past the mangled bodies of tripodgiraffes and gurduin.

  Edith darted back past the Padre after the straying men.

  “Nurse, No!” he yelled.

  “Nurse Bell!” cried Sister Fenton.

  “They don’t know what they’re doing!” she called back. “Somebody has to help them!”

  QUICKLY REALISING THAT she was right, Padre Rand let out a brief growl of frustration. He could not, should not, leave them while there was still a chance. The parable of the shepherd and the lost sheep and all that.

  For years, he’d told that allegory from his cold pulpit in St Chad’s. They were words meant to mollify and soothe, one of many platitudes he issued daily to his congregation. The words lulled him as well, and there, in his parish, he slept. There were no great hardships for him to face, no great tests of faith. The shepherd slept as his flock wandered blithely into a new century and towards the precipice.

  It was the Great War that awoke him, to find his flock in jeopardy, physically and morally, and awoke him to the meaning of the words. The true meaning. Having to live by those words he had stood by for so many years, to put himself to the test. Armed with only the small black leather-bound bible that enshrined those words, and the conviction in his heart that they must be true, he set out to steer his flock through the valley of darkness.

  There, in the dark fastness of that valley, he came across evil. And there the words failed him. And he had been afraid. In Khungarr, with Jeffries, the Khungarrii put him through a ritual. It had felt like a personal test: his faith, and that of Jeffries’ obscene beliefs, versus theirs. His God against theirs, and his had proved wanting. No, not his God, his faith. His faith, for one brief instance, had failed him and he was almost lost. There, he had suffered tormenting visions that challenged and tested him and found him wanting, while Jeffries had shrugged it off. Memory of the visions faded, like a bad dream he could not recall. He struggled to put it behind him, convincing himself that it was nothing more than a drug-induced delirium. Recently, the visions had tried to surface again, haunting his nights and clawing at his mind, like an itch he cou
ldn’t scratch. Every day became a battle to keep it at bay because he didn’t have the courage to face it.

  However, here and now, on this damned and God-forsaken world, he would screw his courage to the sticking place. Here and now, he would place his faith in his God, as Abraham had done.

  He ran after Nurse Bell.

  BEYOND THE FRONT trench, past the few remaining poppies that had survived the stampede, the shell-shocked now clambered over the bodies of trampled beasts, and the barbed wire, to the cat calls and jeers of the soldiers in the trenches.

  Edith ran after them.

  “Wait! Townsend, Miller!”

  The men, neither helping one another nor hindering, each hell-bent on some personal goal, pushed forwards, free of the defences now, out into the veldt.

  Edith followed, scrambling over the burst and blood-slicked carcasses of the beasts bridging the wire.

  The veldt before her was a scene of ruin and devastation. The ground had been churned beneath thousands of hooves, pock-marking the surface.

  The stacked pyramids of Khungarrii dead lay tumbled, and the funeral balls crushed, exposing chitinous limbs and vacant alien faces embedded in the shattered clay.

  The earthworks had been toppled and yet more animals lay dead in some of the Khungarrii excavated holes.

  If one squinted, it could almost be the Somme.

  Here and there, a few of the mesmerised Khungarrii still survived. Most were injured, but several, that Edith could see, were remarkably unscathed. They stood motionless and patient in their enigmatic vigil.

  Padre Rand caught up with her, a couple of orderlies and Sister Fenton hot on his heels.

  Once clear of the entrenchments, on open ground, the shell-shocked men simply stopped, joining the surviving Khungarrii. They stood waiting as one might expect a commuter to wait, in expectation of an imminent train or motor omnibus, and with as little concern.

  By now, the wind was carrying the slow stately procession of Kreothe towards them. No sound issued from the great creatures, at least any sound that she could hear. They were silent, like clouds. She heard only the abruptly terminated screams of the beasts plundered from the plain, as the huge tendrils plucked the animals into the sky. Padre Rand saw in them the false gods of this world, cold, unheeding, and uncommunicative.

  There were twenty-seven men who, for whatever reason, stood waiting patiently, motivated by some unfathomable compulsion to be there. Only five people had ventured out to help them.

  As the great air-shoal of the Kreothe drifted closer, the curtain of tendrils hanging below worked industriously, plucking the veldt clean, and lifting the creatures to taste them, before depositing them into their tubular maws, from where they were sucked into their huge digestive nodules. Every now and again, they rejected some creatures and let them drop the hundreds of feet to the ground, where they impacted with dull thuds and explosions of fluids and offal. It sounded, to Padre Rand, like those first big, fat, wet drops of a summer shower.

  Bell, almost hysterical with desperation now, yanked at Townsend’s tunic with unprofessional urgency. “Townsend!” she screamed, looking up at the great creatures gliding towards them. Their sheer size was apparent now. Getting no reaction, she slapped him across the face. For a brief moment, she thought she noticed a reaction before it faded, replaced by the emotionless mask once more. “Townsend!” she slapped him again.

  His eyes flicked towards her ever so briefly.

  “Help me,” he said, a frail whisper barely escaping his lips. Then he was lost again, leaving only a tear sliding haltingly down his face.

  She put a hand to his cheek and wiped it way with her thumb, then gave a startled yelp. A shadow moved on the back of his neck beneath his collarless shirt. The swelling pulsed briefly and she thought she saw a dark shadow, as if something moved under the taut blister of skin. She blinked. The swelling looked much as it had done over the last two days. Maybe she had imagined it.

  The Kreothe were close now, almost overhead. She had to crane her neck to look up at them.

  “We can’t stay here!” said Stanton the orderly. “We have to go!”

  “But the men!”

  “We can’t do anything for them.”

  “We can. We must!”

  She took hold of Townsend’s arm and pulled at him. Reluctantly he began to move with her, like a recalcitrant child.

  “Stanton, take another one. Padre, help us!”

  The Padre ran forwards and grabbed the nearest man.

  “Come with me, my son.” He met with no resistance, but no help either.

  Stanton threw his man over his shoulder and staggered back towards the trenches. He got into trouble trying to negotiate the bridge of dead animals over the barbed wire. One or two men came out of the trenches and sprinted towards him to help him with his patient.

  Edith ducked under Townsend’s arm to take his weight. As she stood up and braced herself, she glanced back over her shoulder and regretted it.

  Above them, like huge towering cumulonimbus clouds, the gas-bloated Kreothe drifted with a sedate grace while underneath the tendrils groped, picked and plucked rapaciously.

  They plucked the first of the shell-shocked, a tendril wrapping around him and lifting him into the air. Edith watched with mounting horror. By some method she could not discern, the man’s body proceeded to unfold like the petals of a flower, bright and wet and red, like the poppies that populated the ground below, exposing his innards as the poppy petals unfurled to expose their stamen. It was as if he were being peeled or flayed as he ascended into the sky in some otherworldly sacrament.

  Others were being plucked now, like matured fruit, ascending to waiting tongue tendrils where flocks of carrion things snatched and tore at them before they were directed into the soft wet waiting maws of the mouth tubes.

  Stumbling under Townsend’s dead weight, Edith realised, with a sickening lurch, that they weren’t going to make it.

  “BELL! BELL!”

  Edith looked about at the sound of her name. She saw Sister Fenton calling to her from the opening of one of the Khungarrii delvings.

  “Get in quick,” said Sister Fenton, holding out her hand to take Townsend. Edith pushed him down the hole and, with only a brief glance over her shoulder, followed. The delving was about twenty feet deep and sloped down at a gentle angle. The Padre was down there with two other shell-shocked soldiers, Miller and Jones. The group huddled as far down the sloping tunnel as they could.

  “Keep still,” said Fenton in a low voice, as if afraid they might be heard.

  One tendril dragged across the opening, throwing the burrow into darkness. Its tip probed the entrance, sending loose clods of earth and slips of soil slithering down into the hole. It began feeling its way down. Then it was gone, drawn away by the ever drifting air sacs above.

  “I can’t look,” said Sister Fenton, turning her face from the hole. But a terrible fascination drew Edith’s gaze back to the circle of sky before her, striated now by passing tendrils.

  Overcome by an unquenchable desire, Townsend struggled and jerked a little and Bell tried to calm him, but he worked free of Edith’s grasp, scrambling desperately for the light, and stood momentarily at the entrance, offering himself.

  “Townsend!” Edith started after him.

  “No!” Sister Fenton held her, and firmly forbade her from going after him. All she could do was watch as a dredging tendril found him, and after a tentative caress, caught him up and drew him into the air.

  “He’s gone, Nurse, but we still have two more we might save,” said Fenton. Edith swallowed her grief and her anger, set her face for the practicalities of her craft, and nodded. Their job was to assist the living.

  “Yes, Sister.”

  In bleak resignation, Edith sat huddled with the others, waiting for the ordeal to be over, the tunnel lit by stroboscopic flickers of light and shadow as the moving forest of tendrils coasted past. There, more than in the dugout, she knew something of th
e fear these men must have felt under constant barrages that numbed the mind and pummelled the senses, until there was nowhere a man might take refuge from the shattering conditions outside, or from himself within.

  As she weakened, Padre Rand seemed to draw strength from the trial and began muttering prayers; not meek prayers, begging to be spared from this tortuous test, but rather of strength, asking for the fortitude to bear it. It seemed to Edith as if his faith was an old, much loved, but discarded coat that he had newly rediscovered and was trying on again for size, and found it still fitted.

  LIEUTENANT TULLIVER NEEDED to get his Sopwith 1½ Strutter above the shoal of Kreothe drifting implacably towards them and, given the rapidity with which they were approaching, he needed to gain height fast.

  They were flying at a thousand feet, but still hadn’t cleared the height of the great voluminous air sacs that kept the creatures aloft. The sun had disappeared, blocked out by the Kreothe that now filled the sky above them, and it filtered through their translucent bodies, casting a weird green twilight on everything below. It was like flying in the vaulted nave of some obscene flesh-built cathedral, the tentacles dropping down like clusters of gargantuan columns. There was nothing to do but fly through them until they could find a way up.

  Several smaller Kreothe drifted by beneath them. Tulliver glanced down past his fuselage as they slipped by a hundred feet below. They looked for all the world like misshapen kite balloons, and he could deal with balloons.

  First, he had to avoid the death-dealing tentacles as they found themselves weaving through a forest of the things.

  Tulliver glanced up through the transparent pane in the upper wing above him. Overhead he could see the underside of the mammoth air sacs of a great Kreothe. It bulged with several huge fleshy globules and growths. One cyst-like swelling resembled a large udder from which extruded three slick, wet lipless mouths. A circle of long tongue-like members surrounded each one of them, one of which was feeding a flayed lump of raw wet flesh into an open maw. Tulliver noticed scraps of khaki serge uniform hanging from it as a flock of dark green winged creatures gathered round it, squawking and tearing at the offal, like gulls in a trawler’s wake.