Alex’s older brother, Ben, had been killed in action on the Sino-Russian border in 2031, having already fought in the Iranian wars of the mid-2020s. It had become apparent to Ben during the Iranian wars that any conflict involving the Western Alliance would rely less and less upon up-close and dirty infantry work, due to the staggering advancement in remote technology, such as drone crafts, remote land vehicles and multiple launch mobile weapons: so, he terminated his commission. Then like many others of his generation, he took his skills and sold them to the highest bidder. In this instance to the Russians. The Sino-Russian border conflict offered lucrative rewards for mercenaries from the Western Alliance, but sadly a Chinese sniper’s bullet ripped through Ben’s heart, just three days before his contract expired and he was due to come home.
Ben survived two days and was given sectional heart replacement treatment, but died in a coma whilst Alex held his hand on a virtual link from the U.K. When Alex was young and Ben was home on leave he had taught her how to throw a knife. She was not very adept at it but she knew the rudiments and the science of the weight distribution.
The membranous film covering the closest creatures did not look very robust. Still, she doubted she could do much damage and maybe a wound was the best she could hope for. Alex brushed aside a stray lock of unruly auburn hair and judged the distance between herself and the advancing monster. She adjusted her stance to allow her aim to stay in line with the thing’s throat and allowed it to move two steps closer whilst she visualized the trajectory. Then she hurled the blade at the creature.
As soon as she began the throwing action she was stunned at the rapidity with which the bayonet was propelled. She felt the muscles in her new arm flex and spring, impelled by her replaced shoulder joint, and the blade flashed as a blur towards the monstrous being. The bayonet leveled and entered the creature’s throat like it was driven by pistons, at precisely the point where it hit the correct aspect of its rotation, slicing through the meat of the thing’s neck and bursting out of the lower portion of the back of its skull. It was still travelling at speed when it lodged squarely in the centre of the second creature’s forehead.
At that second, a projectile smashed into the parapet of the trench, ten feet further down the line, and the shock tore the four creatures at the summit of the trench to pieces, spraying Alex with a jellied secretion that tasted of petrol and smelt like raw meat. The sky turned blood red as the orb dimmed and then Alex heard hundreds of voices, vaguely mechanical but hoarse and imbued with pain. The voices were getting closer, being herded towards the trench as if they were cattle, tumbling and rolling forward. Then they seemed further away as Alex slid out of consciousness. The teeming throng at the lip of the trench blocked what illumination the failing orb afforded and Alex’s own diminishing field of vision, as she slowly became aware of only blackness and then nothing.
Chapter Twenty-Two
2036. October, Sunday. 11.10 a.m.
When Andrews opened his eyes he thought he had descended into Hell. The grey was everywhere now, but it had a red tint and Andrews imagined it was blood that had been daubed. Everything was altered and made abstract, even the floors and walls were no longer aligned. It was as if Andrews had wandered into a sinister version of a fun house. And Robert was gone.
Andrews quickly looked around for his revolver, feeling his jacket simultaneously, but he could not locate the weapon. He looked down the corridor and saw the tears that had appeared mid-air moments before he had lost consciousness. There were wet footprints leading from each of the phenomena, large and trailing a deep red jellied substance. He assumed he hadn’t held enough interest for whatever aberrations had spewed from the ruptures, as the footprints skirted the area his body had occupied and then carried on down the corridor and across the main reception hall.
The tears remained open, gaping like slashes in bruised meat, dripping a slimy green paste that instantly corroded the floor, fizzing and vaporizing upon contact and leaving small craters in its wake. Andrews noticed a trolley pushed against the right-hand wall of the corridor ahead. He was still thirty feet away from the top of that corridor, where it opened onto the main reception hall, which he would then have to cross in order to arrive at the door of the study and ultimately the cellar. The trolley was the standard hospital variety, used to transport patients around the facility, but it had not been there before the openings appeared. Andrews could only assume it had come through one of the tears along with the other things.
There was a white sheet on the trolley and Andrews was sent back to images of the night his wife and child had died. The same blanket hiding the remains of his wife and son, as if they were something to be ashamed of. He felt his blood run cold and his legs became heavy, as his stomach suddenly felt entirely filled with aching emptiness. Andrews had decided to push on and at least get to the main hall before he reviewed his situation. He assumed circumstances had contrived to force Robert into unilateral action and hoped he was already in the cellar and still alive.
Andrews spotted the gun, it was covered in the green gunk and before he had a chance to check himself, he had retrieved it. The slime burnt the top layer of skin from his hand, turning it into plastic-looking peelings that dripped wax-like onto the floor, but Andrews did not let go of the weapon. He moved parallel to the trolley and inspected it more closely. At first glance Andrews had thought the covers arranged haphazardly, but then he had noted how they almost assumed the definition of a person, a somewhat haphazardly constructed person. There was a faint rasping noise coming from below the cover and Andrews realized with dread that the shape of the blanket was not caused by random folds, but by whatever lay beneath.
The thing under the covers must have been deformed judging by the contours, and there were small sodden patches of fresh blood distributed over the cover. There was another moan, dry and desperate, and Andrews’ hand reached tentatively for the sheet. He felt like he was standing on the highest ledge of a skyscraper, looking over the edge and goading himself to step into oblivion, as he pulled the cover back. Andrews had been present at plenty of crime scenes and had witnessed most forms of depravity, exercised by many types of depraved individuals, but the occupant of the trolley touched on new levels of brutality. The man was viscously lacerated and torn, every inch of his body ripped, hacked and sliced. Lumps of his flesh were absent and at other points bones protruded or skin was so aggressively inflamed that it was difficult to distinguish between dried blood and deep red swellings.
The man had evidently undergone surgical procedures, as a large area of his torso bore massive, exaggerated stitching, the thread resembling the consistency of rope rather than twine. When Andrews leaned closer, he saw that a second ribcage had been carefully implanted, grafted onto the original skeleton so that it sat like a bony fist, unclenched inside the skin. The covering skin was stretched so tightly that the superimposed rib cage threatened to burst outwards, like a large skeletal spider forcing its escape from a fleshy tomb. Andrews drew back and looked at the man’s face and his heart jolted in his chest like a misfiring engine.
The man’s face was blank. But it was not that there was an absence of emotion, but rather the absence of features. The eyes and nose had been removed and replaced with skin, although it was possible to see the suggestion of the sockets and cavities by the inclination of the new flesh. The lips were missing too, but there still existed an incision where the mouth should be, revealing the teeth and gums in their entirety. The man’s teeth were a permanently gnashing set of razors, gnawing and chattering at high speed, as if stripping meat from invisible bones. As Andrews recoiled further, the head rose slightly and twisted so the barren face aimed the terrible incisors at him, still snapping incessantly and apparently eager to rip into Andrews’ throat.
Blood jetted in small springs now, as stitches burst, firstly around the head, then the shoulders and then sickeningly around the back and waist. Andrews backed away further, as he realized the man was actually stitched t
o the mattress on the trolley. A feeling of static electricity and a hot, numbing sensation pricked at his back where he entered the periphery of one of the tears that hung in the corridor. Blood now soaked the trolley’s mattress and Andrews could see the man’s skin still on table, like a flesh shadow or a scene of the crime outline where chalk had been replaced by the victim’s peeled flesh.
Andrews raised his gun and screamed, ‘Stay away from me!’
But the man had recovered a lethal-looking scalpel from a kidney-shaped tray that was attached to the trolley, and was hacking at the stitches that secured his legs to the mattress. Andrews fired twice, each bullet hitting the man in the chest, roughly where his heart should have been located.
Andrews took one more step backwards and stiffened as a wave of energy reached out from the tear and coursed through his body. His eyes closed momentarily and he felt his heartbeat begin to race, then slow. Then he snapped back into reality and saw that the man had freed one leg and was frantically sawing at the stitches restraining his second leg.
Andrews emptied two more rounds into the man’s torso. The blood and tissue, leaking and spurting from the sawn stitches, had soaked the mattress now, and it looked like the man had been reclining on a bed of mashed, red roses. Andrews turned to face the tear and was immersed in a warm film of blue-white light that deadened the nerve endings in his entire body. The gun slipped from his hand and clattered on the tiled floor, dancing on its barrel for a second, before falling flat, pointing at the man.
A familiar sound filled Andrews’ head and although the noises that pervaded the corridor were the sounds of the greyness and the screams of the man on the trolley, Andrews heard something else, something only he could perceive. Like the whisper of an angel. Stephen Andrews heard his wife and child calling his name, not the electronic and thinly human sound caught by his CCI, but the warm, sweet voices of his lost family. Behind and all around Andrews the tears were giving birth to the revitalized dead, disgorging them like vomit as they plunged into this world.
But all Andrews was aware of were the voices, his wife pleading, ‘Don’t let it be in vain, Stephen. So cold. So far away and alone.’
And his son, ‘Daddy, help us, don’t leave us again, please, Daddy.’
And he was oblivious to the man finally releasing himself from his confinement and staggering from the trolley. The man tightened its grip on the scalpel and took more unwieldy, cumbersome steps, but the effect of motion, after such a long period of immobility, was devastating. The exposed back, now stripped of its skin, began to discard organs and they slipped out in sack-like parcels, splashing onto the floor like newborn animals. The trolley bore testimony to the man’s recent occupancy, as a perfect outline of skin now lay stitched into the material of the mattress.
The man moved on though, trailing entrails and innards, in a putrid wake that plotted its progress across the corridor. Andrews let the force of the tear draw him, and the delicate process of removing his soul from his Earthly vitality began. Multitudes of soulless dead shells now swarmed through the tears as the man from the trolley moved within four feet of Andrews’ unguarded back. Andrews felt serenity, fulfillment, ecstasy and a shedding of all pain and concerns, but he did not feel the first slice of the scalpel as it was drawn across his throat, or the blade as it entered his heart again and again, as he was beyond that now. Then his body fell forward and downward into the tear as his essence shot upwards and away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
At first Andrews felt as if he was tumbling through the air, plummeting slowly towards an unknown fate. He slowly completed turn after turn in a vast nothingness. Although he could not see anything in any direction, he sensed the only limitations to the void were his perceptions of distance. There was no smell, no sound and no taste. It was the absence of things, the sum of what is left when everything is taken away. Andrews reached out and he noted there was not even the passage of air around his fingertips as he fell.
Then the preconceptions he held, based on, and created by, physical sciences, melted away and he realized there was no direction, no gravity, no pull or attraction and he was merely turning. Or everything else was turning and he was motionless? His mind seemed electrified and the inside of his head felt like it was being inflated, his consciousness rushing to occupy the expanding space. It felt to Andrews like his brain had been subject to a twenty miles per hour speed restriction and now it was racing forward at tremendous velocities. Concepts, ideas, thoughts, dreams, imaginings, notions and beliefs crowded in on his awareness, like a busy station platform, each pushing and shouting to board the last train out of reality.
Then Andrews realized he held his eyes shut tight. He endured in the brief fragment of time that exists before you have to open your eyes and face the monsters. The little piece of eternity that allows you one last piece of solace before you look under your bed and come face to face with the demon clown with a six-inch blade and bloody intent. But when his eyes opened nothing changed.
Andrews remembered swimming in a warm and placid sea. He had swum too far from the beach and had turned and begun his return journey when a current grabbed him. He remembered the panic rising from the pit of his stomach, a sudden rush of cold adrenaline fuelling his muscles and alerting his nervous system. The surge of water flowing beneath him had begun to take him further out to sea, as he fought against its pull. He had realized he was being led further and further out to sea, like a small child taken by the hand, and powerless against the wicked old witch that was stealing it.
The swirling undercurrent had eventually thrown a lasso around Andrews’ ankles and dragged him down and he had given up struggling as he sank through the water. He recalled a sudden rush of calm as the antagonizing eddies stabilized his body and held him fast in a vortex eight feet below the water’s surface. Then his eyes had closed as his lungs had begun to fill. And as the water level rose within his lungs, all the panic and fear were simultaneously forced from his body, leaving him bereft of all negativity.
Back then, Andrews had lost consciousness, but had somehow been pulled from the water by a rescue team that had been alerted to his situation. But that feeling of sheer contentment and resignation had stayed below the surface. But unlike back then, he had never been able to pull it from his own depths, as he had been pulled from the sea. He remembered the sensation as gratifying at an intensely and immensely spiritual level. A feeling of pure acceptance of fate and where it had taken you. And above that even, a feeling of security, the water buoying and supporting him in a womb of protection, as his core began ascension.
All those thoughts and memories hit Andrews now and that never forgotten but always inaccessible bundle of emotions suddenly began to suffuse and saturate his senses. Andrews became increasingly aware of his surroundings acquiring substance, of the nothingness transforming into warm, tranquil waters that he drifted through, some way below the surface. The water was heated from above by shafts of sunlight that pierced the water in broad beams, like the wakes of bullets. Shoals of many colored fish rushed past him now, as he turned and gently rolled through the pale blue liquid.
There was no bitter taste when Andrews let the water swim into his mouth and he found he did not require oxygen once his lungs were full of the fluid. Then as his senses flooded with a contentment that would have verged on sexual in another time and place, Andrews opened his arms wide and gave over completely to the phenomenon. His mind now seemed to be distancing itself from his body. Was this the reverse of the birthing process? Was this event the essence of an individual detaching itself from the physical state?
Andrews could distinguish two paths before him. His body seemed to be retreating, or was his mind moving forward? The entrances to the paths were both spherical gateways of water, within the water Andrews floated in. They were constituted of a more excited film of water. One was light blue with splashes of white creasing the surface and one was incredibly black and swirled in small whirlpools that looked like hundr
eds of swirling storm clouds. Andrews looked back at his body one more time and it was spinning slowly, as if adrift in space. Its hand reached out towards him imploringly, but Andrews could see the eyes were empty now.
Andrews marveled at how sight without eyes seemed almost identical to vision with them. But layers appeared to present themselves above and beneath the definition of things. Auras and subtle fields of color existed around outlines. And Andrews was strangely aware of interpreting his surroundings in unique ways, of seeing their sounds and the feel of their surfaces. It was if he were temporarily interfaced with the things he saw and was communicating with their core rather than observing them.
Andrews looked back towards the two gateways. Slender tendrils of black water were now snaking from the black entrance. They slipped through the water but remained separated from it and like ghostly fingers they reached for him. Voices filled his head, voices that cajoled, promised, comforted and pleaded. As he found himself magnetized by the dark gateway, the black strands of liquid closed around Andrews. And although he was almost certain he did not possess a physical body now, the sensation was of being clasped in a giant iron fist. The positive emotions that had proliferated in Andrews’ being now seemed to be souring and were injected with moods as black as the strands.
The voices became shriller, as if afraid they would not be heard or comprehended. ‘Come to us, Martin, come into us. Let us swallow you and erase all the pain and confusion. In us, you will find oblivion. In us, is the meaning of all things, Martin. All uncertainty will dissolve. We will fill your soul with silence and you will fear no more. Let it all go, Martin, let life fall from you now. Time will leave but you will always remember the way you feel now. Regret can be cleansed, Martin, you only need the memory of how life feels, and you will be defined by its absence. Come to us, Martin.
Spawn of Man Page 20