Flesh tentacles and lightning bolts? That is not even close to being fair.
I start running. Just running. I don’t have a destination. I just run round and round. And Clyde keeps trying to kill me. So I keep firing. It’s easy now. Easy to feel no remorse. Easy enough to point and shoot. It’s just impossible to hit him.
Lightning crackles behind me. The flesh tentacle wheels around in an arc toward me. Less than a second to think. Adrenaline takes over. I jam my legs out, slide over the floor as flesh whips over me, the breeze ruffling my hair. And if Clyde hadn’t needed to stop shooting lightning bolts at me to avoid frying himself I’d be cooked medium-rare right here and now.
I can’t win this. I’m just delaying the inevitable. And, to make matters worse, my running in circles has managed to get Clyde’s ever-spreading derrière between me and the door. So apparently, I’m not even delaying the inevitable quite as much as I’d hoped.
I throw myself behind cover—cower behind a chunk of humming machinery. Have to be careful not to touch it in case he shocks the whole thing. At least it isn’t bloody raining. Then I’d be gone as soon as I trod in a puddle.
Electricity. It all comes down to electricity. And I can’t disrupt the power source before he drops the spell unless I want to turn us all into so much meat mist. But I can’t shoot him until the spell has no power source.
I can’t disrupt the power source.
I can’t...
I can’t...
Grow a pair.
What would Kurt Russell do?
Oh sod it.
I shoot the metal casing in front of me. It’s hardly like I have an over-flowing platter of choices anyway. I hear the bullet smashing around inside. The thrum of machinery chokes and then with a crackle of smoke and a burst of flame it dies. Something whirs around and smashes into the casing, denting it.
There is an ungodly popping sound from the vicinity of Clyde. The light, the lightning—for a moment it flickers.
“Fuck!” Clyde’s voice.
I reload the gun, sight on some more machinery, fire off two bullets. Another snap, crackle, and scream.
“What the fuck are you doing?” There’s a narrow edge of panic in Clyde’s electric voice.
I have to back away from the machinery I was crouched behind. The flame leaking from the bullet hole is jetting out more insistently now. I catch sight of something else critical-looking and shoot at that as well.
There is a grunt of pain and I can smell burning meat.
“It’s too late!” The Progeny sounds furious, like Sly Stallone’s Tango preaching the rules to Kurt Russell’s Cash.
“Too late for me,” I say. “I’m gone either way. It’s just whether you come with me or not.” And I’ve got to think that Clyde, that my friend, would rather die than go on like this.
I open fire again. And something really goes this time. Something detonates inside the machine. The casing deforms massively, metal ballooning out, looking like some art nouveau sculpture. Wires flicker out of jagged holes spitting sparks. The lightning storm flickers again. The Progeny screams again.
“Fuck!”
“You were always going to die,” I tell him. I tell it. “It’s the end of the world.”
Drop the spell. Drop it. Please drop the spell.
I can’t see anything else to shoot, so I stand up.
Clyde is getting crispy around the edges. One of the electrical wires has burned a hole through his spreading skin.
There are several important-looking chunks of metal beyond his bulk. I sight them down the barrel of the trigger.
“Think you can hit me before I pull the trigger?”
His white eyes regard me. They seem hollow, utterly hollow.
Drop the spell. Please, just drop the spell.
But he doesn’t, so I fire.
Clyde screams. And the lightning storm dies. Just vanishes. The tear in the world healed as machinery explodes.
I turn, blind in the sudden darkness, and I’ve got to do this faster than he can think. I’ve got to move faster than thought. And I know I can’t really do it, but it’s my only chance. Firing into the after-image of his blazing eyes.
And maybe there is something left of Clyde in there. Maybe he still does have a scrap of control. Maybe that’s why he didn’t kill us all when we were lying there unconscious in the office before he stole Ophelia away.
Maybe not.
But the bullet goes through, and in the light of the muzzle flare I see it take my friend in the jaw and drive whatever is left of his brain out through the back of his skull.
61
I help Shaw to her feet in the blue glow of dying Progeny eggs. Tabitha sits against the back wall of the room and sobs.
“The Feeders are still here,” Shaw says. “No more are coming through, but they’re still here.”
And I know it. I can feel it. That sense of pressure from above, that counter-intuitive sense of being pulled up while I’m being crushed—it’s growing. The shrieks of the building’s mortar and rivets are growing.
“Ophelia’s stopping the Dreamers from sending them away.” I’m stating the obvious, but it still feels far too much like offering a death sentence on a twelve-year-old girl.
Shaw can’t quite meet my eye.
“So what now?” I ask. Dodging responsibility.
“Tabitha,” Shaw says. Dodging it just as nimbly.
We both help her off the floor. When she’s on her feet she punches me in the jaw. There’s not much strength in it but it still makes the room spin. I don’t have anything left to take the punch with. I’m a watch in need of winding.
“He’s dead,” she says. “You killed him.”
“I know,” I say. I don’t deny it. It’s not really deniable.
“The Progeny killed him,” Shaw says. “Arthur just did what needed to be done.”
“There was another way!” Tabitha sprays blood when she shouts. “We needed more time. We needed to try harder. We needed to—”
“There was no time.” Shaw catches Tabitha by the shoulders. “He was trying to kill us. To kill you.”
It’s true, but Tabitha’s not really in a state to deal with the truth. She’s like me on the rooftop after Alison... after that. But instead of finding rage she just sags in on herself. The tears come harder now.
Shaw takes her in her arms, holds her while she lets it out.
I turn away, uncomfortable and unsure of myself, unsure of how I feel. Part of me wants to join Tabitha, to mourn. Part of me wants to scream at Clyde’s remains, to demand he tell me how he could be so stupid as to get himself infected. Ask him why he made me do this.
Shit.
Shit.
I just killed my friend.
The Progeny killed my friend.
I killed my friend.
I don’t know. I just want it to stop. I just want the Feeder to take us all. I just want it all to stop.
I stare at Clyde. I could have told him about feeling this way. And now he’s gone. I could have told Alison about it. She’s gone too.
Maybe I could tell Shaw. Maybe. But she’s comforting Tabitha. And that’s comfort that needs to be given.
“You silly bastard,” I say to Clyde’s corpse. “You stupid, silly bastard.”
God, he’s even still got that mask from back in Peru around what’s left of his shoulder.
I’m going to miss him.
I bite back tears, turn away.
The mask!
I turn back. Holy pants, and holy shit, and oh my God... No. No, it’s too long a shot. It’s way too long. But, imagine. Just imagine.
It’s hope.
I run toward the mask, run over his body. My feet slip on the expansive wasteland of his spilling offal. I stumble and then I’m crawling on all fours across him. Thick veins squirm away beneath my palms. I feel like gagging.
“Arthur?” Shaw’s voice calls out from behind me. “Arthur, what the hell are you—”
“G
et off him!” Tabitha’s shriek cuts through. “Get off him, you murderous bastard!”
“The mask,” I say. “He overwrote the monk. He put his own personality on the mask. He’s in the mask. An extra copy. That’s what he said.”
I’m holding it now, a concave wooden oval. Leather straps tangled in tendrils of flesh. I pull, and at first the flesh resists, but then some of it tears and some of it just gives, and with a rip and slight spray of blood and fat, it comes free.
“No...” The word slides out of Shaw. But she’s not sure.
Nothing from Tabitha. She just watches me in utter silence. Her whole body is rigid. But the tears have stopped.
I make my way back across Clyde’s dead body. In the distance something explodes. A pipe suddenly lifts off the floor and flies up through the hole Clyde’s lightning storm blew through the roof.
I kneel down next to the comatose body of the runner. Tabitha is still watching me, still silent. I can’t tell if she’s on the verge of hugging me or castrating me. Maybe she can’t tell either.
I turn the runner onto his back, the narrow, effete face staring blankly up. His chest rises and falls, quick shallow breaths.
“Wait,” Shaw says.
Tabitha’s head snaps to stare at her boss. She’s wound so tight she’s at her breaking point.
“In Peru this happened, right?” Shaw says. “In the temple.”
“Yes,” I say.
“So he could have been infected then. Whatever’s in there could be a Progeny too.”
I drum my fingers on the plain wood of the mask, try to mull that over, try to be rational. When was he infected? Was it before I came on the scene? Was it in Olsted’s apartment? Was it outside the Peruvian temple?
Outside the temple, surely.
Surely.
That was the moment, wasn’t it? When he talked me into summoning the Dreamers. It couldn’t have been before Olsted’s—otherwise why would the Progeny have been chasing him? Unless... misdirection? There’s been so much of it.
I don’t know. I can’t know.
But I have to decide. I have to make a decision I’m going to stick with.
I put the mask on the runner.
We hold our collective breath.
Nothing happens.
We wait.
And still nothing happens.
“Come on,” Tabitha says. “Come on, you idiot. Come out of there.”
Nothing.
And then... something. I can’t tell what it is at first. Something subtle. And then, I realize it’s the breathing. It’s gone deeper, more regular. Then the head shifts, just slightly to the side. Then—
“Aaaaaaah!” The runner’s body suddenly convulses. His arms fly out wildly, his legs kick. His hands come slamming down on his chest with a great wracking cough. The hands keep working up and down the torso, almost a patting motion, as if trying to work out the shape of the body.
“What in God’s name...?” It’s not Clyde’s voice. Not exactly. There’s a breathy quality to it, and it’s a little higher. But the intonation, the pattern of the words— that’s right.
“What in the blazes of blue is happening?” the voice behind the mask says. “What’s going on with my body? Why isn’t this my body?”
There’s rising panic in the voice.
“What’s wrong with my body?”
“Clyde?” I say. “Clyde?”
His head snaps to look at me. Just wood. Just a mask. And there’s nothing there to recognize because there can’t be anything to recognize.
And then he’s obscured from me as Tabitha jumps on him. She’s soothing him, and kissing him, kissing the wood of the mask, kissing the hands that aren’t really Clyde’s, that he moves as if he’s some out-of-practice puppeteer. But the questions, the confusion, the joy he’s clearly feeling as Tabitha’s lips press against him...
“It’s him,” I say to Shaw. “It’s Clyde.” She comes and stands next to me. We’re awkwardly close. But... well, shit, we just brought our friend back from the dead. We just bloody resurrected someone here. I put my arm around her.
Hell yeah.
62
“What’s going on?” Clyde asks when Tabitha finally climbs off him. “I really... I don’t understand anything.” He sits up. Then he sees the ruins of his own body sitting across the room from him, and that sets him off again, sets Tabitha to soothing him again.
Above our heads, part of the ceiling tears away.
“We don’t have time for this,” Shaw says.
And she’s right.
“Clyde,” I say. “Clyde, please listen to me.” I try to get between him and Tabitha with the minimum of success. I don’t push too hard. I’d be less than charitable toward the guy who got between me and my resurrected sweetheart too.
“What is it?” he says.
“The Progeny took you,” I say. “In Peru. You’re the mask. The mask you made. You’re the copy.”
Clyde’s hands come up. They trace the wood of the mask. He moans, keeps on moaning, the pitch of it sliding up toward a place called hysteria.
“Please, Clyde. I need you to hold it together. We all need it.” Tabitha whispers and soothes some more. But I need him to get this. We really don’t have much time.
“The Feeders are here,” I say to him. “They infected you and made you summon them here. The Dreamers should have bounced the Feeders from reality but they didn’t. You... you... when you were infected... you pulled the Dreamers onto our plane of reality... And...” I pause, try to think of a way to soften the blows, but there is none, and there’s still no time, so I just plunge on. “Ophelia is a Dreamer too,” I say. “The Progeny-you kidnapped her. She’s here. She’s been infected. And she’s stopping the Dreamers from getting rid of the Feeders.”
I pause, look up at the sky. And there’s smoke everywhere, but I can still feel the Feeder up there, still feel the jibber-jabber of madness that it inspires in the back of my head. Clyde’s eyeless face looks up, following the direction of my gaze.
“It’s destroying this place,” I say. “Everything. It’s destroying everything.”
Clyde takes a moment. And who knows what he can make out of that. It’s a lot to drop on a guy—that he’s just a copy of himself, just a mask on a man. That’d probably crack me in two right there.
Clyde lowers his head, looks at me, then Shaw, then Tabitha. He looks at Tabitha the longest.
“You’re kissing me,” he says to her.
“I’m not going to stop,” says Tabitha.
“It was during the whole Progeny thing,” I say. It’s a longer story than that, but I don’t really know it.
Clyde shrugs. A familiar movement on the unfamiliar body that makes me smile more than seems appropriate at the end of the world.
“Seems worth living for,” he says. Then he heaves himself up. He’s a head taller than me now. I have to tilt my head to look up at him.
“We should probably go stop all this then, shouldn’t we?” he says. He pauses. “I’ll need batteries.”
I cross over the corpse once more. Clyde looks away, and I can’t really blame him. I have a hard enough time watching myself on video. Watching someone looting my corpse could definitely be defined as being a bit too much.
His tweed jacket is ripped and half-embroiled in reams of skin but I manage to wrestle a fistful of AAs and Ds out of the exposed pockets.
“Where’s Kayla?” Clyde asks, as I work. Probably a good moment to change the subject.
“She’s our next stop,” says Shaw.
63
We find stairs up to the first floor, but we don’t find the first floor. It’s gone. The walls are stumps of brick, and concrete, and steel. Everything’s gone. The entire village of Didcot is gone. I can see half of it suspended in the air above our heads, slowly rising.
“Oh my....” Clyde says. He looms, gaunt and elfin above me. Blond hair billows upwards around the wooden mask. “That’s not good.”
I
’m only just listening. I’m trying to stop my eyes from traveling up, up, up. It’s like the force of the thing is drawing them skywards. I can see... I can see... I don’t know what I can see. A skyscape of skin. I reach up a hand to it. It could be miles away, it could be inches. Can I touch it? Can I go to it? My feet feel light.
“Arthur!” Shaw’s voice snaps through the delirium. I feel hot and cold at the same time, like there’s some fever working its way through me.
“Keep it together,” she speaks softly.
On the horizon I see a hill tear itself in two. The whole top of the hill just gives up and goes up. Trees, houses, fields. All going up. And I’ve got to keep it together while the whole world is falling apart.
“There,” Clyde points.
Standing like a lone finger giving the world an irreverent salute is a single cooling tower.
“Go,” Shaw barks. We follow. The familiar thrum of feet, and heart, and breath. Except everything is more ragged now. Our pace is slower than before. All except Clyde. His new limbs seem to naturally flow faster and faster, a torrent of movement that carries him further and further ahead of us.
“Brakes,” I hear him yell. “Where are the bloody brakes on this body?”
I almost smile. Which is about when the ground splits in two.
A great fissure runs across the asphalt in front of me. Gravel pours down into the abrupt abyss. I leap—a mad hurdle—and I make it, because, well, even I can hurdle a split that’s only six inches wide, but I glance back and already the gap’s a foot across. And there are others. All over the expanse of ground, great cracks are running in every direction, as if the world has suddenly developed a scaly hide.
I keep running. Keep my head down. And then the ground beneath me lurches, cracks. I’m thrown to my knees. We’re all on our knees. The ground lurches again. I’m on all fours. Tabitha is sprawled on her back. The ground is tilting madly. I can’t see Clyde over the lip of the tilting ground.
Another lurch and then I see him. Below us.
A chunk of blacktop has torn itself free from the ground, dribbling gravel downwards. We are floating up toward the Feeder. Other chunks of earth are rising next to us. The air is filled with them. The whole parking lot becomes unstable, rising into the air. Some pieces slower, some faster. Clyde’s chunk is slower than ours. He’s pinwheeling his arms at us.
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