Frank disregarded her words and made a statement in lieu of a reply. ‘The explosions are getting nearer, enemy activity is becoming more localized.’
‘Frank. Frank, did you hear what I said?’
Frank lowered his field glasses and carried on looking anyway.
‘Frank, you’ve got to let go. You probably could see further without those glasses, you know. This, all this,’ and she swept an encompassing hand across the trench, ‘it’s what you choose.’
Frank turned and looked at her with the first trace of hopelessness she had witnessed in him. He looked like Jake now, just a lost, frightened little boy, and his voice trembled. ‘But it was my command, my command. Those men were my responsibility. They need somewhere, don’t they? Somewhere to come back to? I’m not ready to give that up.’
Alex rose and tramped through the mud to face the soldier. ‘Is that it, Frank? Is that what all this is about, your sense of duty?’
‘Alexandra, please don’t belittle me. You have no concept of my sense of duty.’
‘I’m not belittling you, Frank. In my time I was a fire fighter,’ and Frank looked puzzled, which made Alex smile. ‘Yes, Francis, women fight fires and rescue people, even rescue men.’
Alex’s smile must have been infectious because it almost caught the corners of Frank’s mouth too and he said, ‘I can believe you would rescue men, Alex, yes, I can.’
Alex playfully struck Frank’s shoulder and said, ‘Hey, times have changed, Francis!’ But then she became more morose as she continued, ‘But what I’m trying to say is I know about responsibility, Frank. I lost a friend in a fire and for a long time I blamed myself. He was under my command, he was my responsibility and I failed him and he died.’
‘I am sure that if there was any way for you to save this man, you of all people would have done it, Alex.’
‘In much the same way I am sure you equally behaved with honor.’
‘Touché, Alexandra,’ smiled Frank, and without warning Alex hugged the man, somehow managing to almost dispel his one hundred and twenty nine years of sorrow, hurt and pain. And despite himself, and against every innate instinct he nurtured, Frank embraced Alex and felt solace and comfort replace all those ruinous emotions that had fed on his soul for such a long, long time.
Alex held him like he was her child and the need in her to do that was very close to the surface, but she did not feel she was using the soldier as a surrogate for Jake and she sensed his unrequited need to be held. Not held by a lover, for she was almost certain Frank had not been granted the time in his life to enjoy many of those pleasures, but held by a mother. Held close as she stroked his hair and told him everything would be fine now.
And so they stood in the trench for what seemed like hours, Alex repeating the same consoling words again and again and Frank listening to them, until the sounds of the explosions grew too loud and incessant to be ignored any more. Frank pulled away from Alex and moved onto the firing step of the trench and whispered, ‘Dear God, no.’
Within seconds Alex was next to him. She intended to speak, but the words that formed in her throat evaporated before they could reach her mouth. The area that lay beyond this side of the trench was suffused with a glaring light that killed shadow and edged everything with harsh, brutal lines. Alex struggled to adjust her eyes to the severe luminosity, even though she told herself she was resisting abilities she knew she now possessed.
By allowing her vision time to adapt, she was still trying to convince herself she was alive and that she could repel all of this by simply denying it. In the same way Frank does, she thought.
The light source was a huge orb, hanging low in the sky. Alex had thought it the sun at first. She realized now that she had not even looked beyond the trench. Ever since she had “awoken,” she had not taken notice of weather conditions. Her human mind assured her that day followed night, followed day and that weather just happened, so she had not needed to look. It was obvious that whatever conditions prevailed in the trench would be mirrored outside of it, was it not? But now, standing on the firing step and letting the scenes outside the trench filter through the haze of heat that rippled down from the sky and up from the baked earth, she was awestruck.
The orb was not the sun. There was no sun. She peered back over her shoulder at the interior of the trench. They had been walking through a light, warm drizzle since her last sleep. She had relinquished the concept of phases of the day and merely thought of the passage of time as periods between sleep. She felt comfortable sleeping, but was aware that it was probably unnecessary. But she could not give up that habitual behavior just yet, otherwise life would be one long day, like it was for Frank. That made her feel sad and she ached somewhere deep inside. It was still raining in the trench and the light was modest, with a thin film of dank mist thrown across the channel. Alex could actually decipher where the sheets of rain ended and let her hand balance halfway into the cool dry air beyond.
Alex tolerated the brightness of the orb and visually dissected the giant sphere. It hung in the sky, gently rocking back and forth, and possibly a mile high, swaying like a colossal chandelier. But now Alex saw it was actually suspended on a gargantuan chain, each link the dimensions of a skyscraper, one end of the chain disappearing into the centre of the orb and the other disappearing into infinity. Hundreds of smaller chains were draped from the globe and these stretched for miles and miles before being consumed by the land. The orb itself gave off a brittle radiance that swathed everything in yellow-white and bleached out the colors of the day, and Alex had the odd feeling it was turned on each day and duly turned off when someone decided it was night. Alex tried to remember if it had actually been dark recently, but could not recall.
From each subsidiary chain dangled thousands of beings, like moving, existing lines of decorations, a bracelet adorned with living charms. Some hung by their neck, others by their torsos or limbs and others simply held on grimly. The hapless forms suspended nearer to the source of the light were fused into the chain where it glowed hot, integrated with the links. Now her gaze fell on the scene below, which was illuminated by the boiling circle in the firmament.
The landscape was alive with a sinister, sprawling black stain of vague and indistinguishable content, moving across the ground and consuming the space between itself and the trench ferociously. At intervals one of the things gripping the chain would fall, to be consumed by the living, seething shape. At other times, and more chillingly, a thing from the higher end of the chain would fall away, tearing and ripping its body where it was bonded to the metal of the chain and plummeting incomplete to the ground far below. Slowly Alex realized the shifting shape was a huge mass of creatures, swarming like an immense army of ants, teaming, rushing and cascading over the terrain, seemingly without purpose.
Alex focused, using her eyes like the lens of a powerful camera, and saw that the beings had been painfully synthesized from merging humanoid bodies with animals and machines. This disquieting horde of soulless shells, deformed, blighted, impaired and racked with mental and physical anguish flowed forward slowly, loosely forming the ranks of a monstrous army of freaks. Alex felt pity and revulsion in equal measures as she witnessed the appalling multitude falling forward. The momentum created meant that often those at the forefront of the torrent were trampled underfoot and compacted and compressed into mangled lumps of bloodied flesh.
Alex found it difficult to determine the nature of the different creatures. They seemed impossibly twisted and disfigured, making a swell of bodies that resembled a single tide of limbs and heads with very little means of differentiating between the individual members of the group. Alex saw human legs, carcass-like and rotting, propelling engineered torsos that were rusted and battered. Some of the atrocities were limb-less and some were guided by perennially staring eyes, held aloft on bloody stalks of tissue. Giraffe proportioned legs galloped at speed bellowing thick, black smoke from tubular attachments. The bodies sliced away horizontally to c
reate a hollow area that was still awash with the innards of the original beast. And this cavity now served as transport for a dozen small machines of indeterminate nature. Alex thought these machines to be cheering but when she looked closely she identified human heads attached to these mechanisms, heads that screamed and twisted as if subjected to torture.
And everywhere the giant spiders. The bulbous, black bodies were distended, eye-less, smooth and wet with a lubricant that oozed from the place where eyes should have been housed. Bloodless veins bulged like marble pillars beneath the taut skin and ten-foot-long spindly legs, picked their way over the masses. Yet the arachnid limbs were mechanical, with gleaming silver apparatus obvious where the skin was at its thinnest and each was tipped with wickedly sharp points and covered in razor-sharp barbed wire hair. The bladed legs sliced and punctured the members of the contingent beneath, dismembering and decapitating as they scurried and scampered. The mouth was a horrific slice cut into what Alex supposed was the face of the monster, and rows of small dagger-like teeth were revealed when the flesh was peeled back in an evil contortion of muscle and sinew.
Alex looked at Frank and breathed, ‘What the hell is this?’
Frank did not return her look but answered, ‘You have answered your own question, Alexandra.’
‘No Alex, this isn’t Hell. This is someone’s version of Hell. These wretched souls are being manipulated, kept from moving onto other states, or even from making their own destinies. That’s why the machine keeps everything like this, until it can return to Earth and unleash this madness there. Then it will be content to watch its play-mates destroy everything, feeding on the energy created!’
‘This machine, Alex. You really believe my own father was involved in its birth, its creation? And you believe he is involved in its plans?’
Alex turned from the spectacle on the plains and faced Frank. ‘Your father was a good man, Francis, and he loved you and your mother, but when he lost you to the war and your mother to her grief, he was bitterly lonely and sad. The machine is an extension of that. I think it is fuelled by all his despair, his hopelessness. And it’s recreating it here. But it thinks the despair and hopelessness it can wreak on Earth will help it grow. And it’s probably right, Francis.’
‘But my father…’
‘Is probably our only hope now.’
Frank turned his attention back to the plains. The things that fell from the orb’s chains would periodically hit one or two of the monstrous army. The distance they fell meant that they hit the things on the ground at an accelerated velocity, pummeling and crushing them into pulp. Alex looked further afield to where the landscape gently sloped upwards to the base of a range of imposing mountains. Everything was grey, old and wilted, faded by time as pages are parched and made decrepit by the passage of time. The mountains sprawled away forever, as there was no horizon for them to disappear over and Alex felt sadness as immeasurable as those peaks and summits as she recalled the first time she had seen the mountains beyond the asylum.
Then she caught movement on a plateau near the crest of one lofty range. A huge marble altar had been raised on a naturally flat, stone shelf on the side of the mountain there, and Alex could distinguish more of the humanoids positioned around it. The table was oval shaped and fully twenty feet in width. The things gathered around it seemed to fall into two castes. There were a number of dwarfish beings, twenty or maybe thirty in total, with pot doll faces, demoniacally contorted as they raced in and out of the second group of beings.
The second group was huddled around the table, and appeared largely unaware of the presence of the hurrying smaller life forms. These creatures were seven or eight feet tall and made Alex think of the man in black. They were thin, stooped, shrouded and bloodlessly pale. Where flesh protruded from their adornments, it was skeletal, white and bony, and evidently their great age had wrought changes in their body’s constitution. The fingers of the long, thin hands were fused together to form a tapered stump, maybe a foot long and petering out into a snake-like tip, that squirmed of its own volition. The features that were visible were wasted and corrupt, tumors and calluses festering in the absence of a nose and mouth.
They assumed an attitude of rank over the first group when their paths crossed, swiping the mutated dwarfs out of their way with a flick of their tentacle-like appendages. These tall, bent, antique beasts reminded Frank of generals, safe behind the front lines and conducting the slaughter from the comfort of their map rooms, as he himself had witnessed when delivering reports to headquarters so many years ago. The image was strengthened and made more plausible by the articles strewn on the table, replicas of the masses that thronged on the plains below. Only these representations were also alive, miniature creatures that cowered, frightened and ignorant, on the stone tabletop. The generals bickered and squabbled over maneuvers and drank flagons of a red, clotted liquid that spilled from their ravaged mouths.
Occasionally, a general would slam its white, squirming elongated arm against the tabletop, crushing minute forms, bones snapping like dead twigs, and causing an uproar of howling amongst the busy dwarfs, enlivened and excited by the act. One of the generals, an exceptionally tall creature concealed in a blood red cloak, moved towards the edge of the precipice and held aloft what resembled a staff, made from something white and bleached. Alex realized it was a spine and that it was still subject to involuntary spasms. The general threw back the hood of its red gown and its head was revealed, swollen and cracked, as if blasted by fire, the flesh burnt and molten. Its jaw fell open and extended towards its chest like a preying snake, dislocated and gaping obscenely.
It then unleashed a sound, the like of which Alex had never experienced before, a shriek so desolate and empty, it felt like a blow rather than a noise. It was the sound of despair, of futility and death, the sound of the end of things, amplified through the wails of thousands. Alex recoiled. It was as if every sadness, every fear and death of hope she could imagine was encapsulated in that cry, and the army on the plains below roared in response, their frenzy increasing as their ranks seemed to swell. It was impossible to accurately judge the number now, but Alex estimated it at tens of thousands.
The generals gathered around the table became more and more agitated, thrashing their mutated limbs across the table, scattering the tiny life forms, some of which fell from the stone altar to be snapped up by the dwarfs and eaten by the handful. As if herded, the masses on the plains surged forward and the sky turned blood red as the orb dimmed. The army moved en masse, brushed by an invisible force, tumbling and rolling forward like leaves. The noise became a thunder, deep and ground shaking, as if an identical multitude moved beneath the plains, as well as above, and the land seemed to buckle under the pressure.
Then the explosions resumed. Until now they had been sporadic and at least half a mile distant, but now they hit the ground fewer than two hundred yards away from the parapet of the trench. Frank slid down into the belly of the trench and pulled Alex’s leg by the calf, but Alex resisted.
‘I have to see this, Frank, I have to.’
‘For the love of God, Alex, we have to go, now!’ Frank turned to estimate how quickly they could evacuate the trench from the opposite bank, but when he turned back Alex had gone. In her place, his leg still held by Frank’s hand, was the young soldier that had climbed out of the trench over a century before. The boy cut down mercilessly by enemy fire. Frank stepped back, letting go of the soldier’s leg and stumbling into the swamp that formed the bottom of the trench.
The young soldier smiled just as he had on that day and repeated Alex’s words, ‘I have to see this, Frank, I have to.’
This time Frank did not hesitate and he regained his feet and flung himself at the young man, knocking him from the firing step and into the mud, screaming as he grappled with the soldier, ‘Not this time! This time you keep your bloody head down!’
Frank was sitting across the man’s chest and both of them had already begun sinking int
o the mire. A huge explosion shook the ground barely twenty feet from the trench and the blast wave reached into the trench, plucked Frank from where he knelt and tossed him against the far wall, like a discarded doll. Alex crawled from the sludge where Frank had pinned her down. She knew she probably could have taken his head off with one well-aimed blow, but she had realized Frank was hallucinating, reliving some pivotal point in his life.
Another shell burst, fifteen feet from the lip of the trench, and this time Alex was slammed against the hardened earth and wooden slats of the trench wall. She came to rest next to Frank. She immediately saw he was unconscious, and her own head pounded where it had hit a length of wood. The guns were finding their range now and a flash of white light dowsed the dim, gloomy heart of the trench, as the ground was rocked again.
The shelling was indiscriminate though and shell after shell rained down on the advancing army as the cannons searched for their prey. Decimating as the missiles were, they did little to reduce the thrust of the horde. Then as Alex’s senses cleared, half a dozen creatures appeared on the parapet of the trench. They were repulsive deformations, skinless and abhorrent, with the gleam of their bones shining through the mucus membrane that sheathed their forms. Each one had a hollow, transparent metal spine that protruded and supported a network, busily transporting black liquid to different parts of the body, keeping it coated in an oily film. They each carried bows, carved from bone and loaded with black arrows that appeared to be fashioned from the barbs of an animal.
Before Alex could react, an arrow pierced her left thigh and another embedded in her shoulder. The pain was intense, even when she tried to block it out. But already she was standing and searching the trench floor for a weapon. She was shocked at her response, instead of cowering and accepting her fate she was fighting back, and she fully understood the desire to reach her child was now fuelling her actions. As another arrow flew past her cheek and the first two monsters began to slip and slide into the trench, Alex stumbled upon a discarded bayonet.
Spawn of Man Page 19