by Mark Walden
He carefully unslung his pack from his back, ignoring the pain in his side, and assessed the damaged contents. He had enough rations for a couple of days and a rudimentary first-aid kit, but, besides a simple bivouac kit, that was pretty much all that had survived the fall. His radio was smashed to pieces and his rifle was nowhere to be seen. He felt for the holster at his waist and was relieved to touch the reassuringly cold metal of the handgun that was still clipped inside it. It was quiet outside, but that didn’t mean he was alone. The hideous creatures that had chased them up on to the roof could still be anywhere, and so he was very relieved to find himself not completely unarmed. He gathered up the remnants of his pack before moving quietly towards the front of the bus. The dawn light was growing brighter, but the snow that covered the windows made it impossible to see anything. He thumped the windscreen a couple of times, trying to dislodge some of the snow, but it was firmly frozen in place.
‘Well, I can’t stay here,’ Sam said to himself. He looked around for a second before spotting the emergency manual-release lever above the bus’s folding doors. He pulled it, and there was a clunk from inside the wall. Sam slid his fingers between the black rubber seals in the centre of the door and pulled. The pain that shot up his side was excruciating, making him feel faint for a second, but he had to get the doors open. He took a deep breath and pulled again, but it was no good. The doors wouldn’t budge. It was either the weight of snow piled up against them or else the long-neglected locking mechanism had simply jammed. He needed something to lever the doors open, but a quick inspection of the abandoned bags around the bus revealed no suitable tools. He looked up at the shattered skylight, but there was no way he was climbing back up through there with the injury in his side. There was only one option. He walked to the front of the bus and pulled the pistol from his holster, levelling it at the windscreen. The sound of the shot was bound to attract attention, but that was a chance he would have to take. He wasn’t going to starve to death trapped inside this thing. His finger tensed on the trigger.
‘You idiot,’ Sam said to himself, releasing the pressure on the trigger and lowering his gun. He slid the pistol back into its holster and then pulled the black leather glove off his right hand. The golden skin beneath gleamed in the pale morning light. Sam concentrated for a second and his hand slowly reformed, morphing into a long rod with a sharpened end. He slid the newly formed tool between the doors and used it to lever them apart with a groan of corroded gears. He concentrated again and the bar reformed into the shape of an axe, which Sam swung into the frozen snow beyond the doors, carving himself an exit while ignoring the protesting jolts of pain from his side.
A few minutes later he broke through and pale sunlight streamed into the bus’s interior. He continued to hack at the snow until he’d made a hole big enough to squeeze through. He took a breath and willed his hand back into its original shape, the liquid metal flowing and reforming into fingers and a thumb. He pulled the glove back over his metallic hand and took the pistol from his holster once more before squeezing through the gap and out into the daylight.
The street outside was quiet. The only sign that remained of the hideous creatures from the previous night were hundreds of hand and footprints in the snow. Sam tried to take in the sheer number of tracks that surrounded him, but it was obvious even to the untrained eye that there had been hundreds, maybe thousands of the creatures outside when he fell. He realised that he and his friends had had no idea what they were walking into, and that lack of information had very nearly cost them their lives.
‘Still might, kiddo,’ he said to himself quietly, looking down the broad snow-covered road ahead of him. He had to find shelter before the creatures came back. He didn’t relish the thought of a second encounter with them.
As he walked down Prince’s Street, he considered his options. He had to find some way of communicating with the others – that much was obvious. The fact that they weren’t already there looking for him told him that they must have made the not unreasonable assumption that he was dead. The only way he was going to be able to tell them otherwise was if he somehow managed to get his hands on a radio, and that meant finding the source of the mysterious transmission that they had come here to investigate in the first place.
Sam walked on, alert to the slightest sound, but the city was as quiet as a grave. He hoped that might mean that the creatures were nocturnal, but he knew that was a dangerous assumption. Regardless, he was not going to be out on the street come nightfall – that much he did know. He had maybe seven or eight hours before it got dark and before that he needed to get a better view of the city. He looked up at the castle perched on top of its massive plug of volcanic rock and decided that was his next stop. It would afford him a good view of the centre of the city and would also give him somewhere to hole up for the night if necessary.
He continued down the street, the blanket of snow covering the abandoned relics of humanity’s previous existence. In some ways that was better than having to see the signs of his former life, but it also gave him the acute sense that there was a great deal hidden just below the surface of the city. Whatever the creatures were that had attacked them the previous night, they were like nothing the Voidborn had thrown at them before. He tried not to dwell on their humanoid appearance; if they had indeed once been people, no shred of their humanity now remained.
Sam turned off the broad thoroughfare and down a street that led past the railway station, crossing the bridge over the tracks and heading up the sloping streets to the castle. He followed the cobbled road uphill, trying to ignore the fresh footprints in the snow all around him. The further he travelled the more obvious it became that the things that had been hunting them the previous night must have numbered in their thousands. Every street was covered in their tracks.
‘So where are they now?’ Sam muttered to himself. It wasn’t like the Voidborn to hide – they had no reason to, after all. So why did the city feel as if it had been abandoned?
Soon he arrived at the arched gate that was the main entrance to the castle. The imposing structure loomed over him, looking much larger than it had from the streets below. He passed under the arch and through the shattered remains of the heavy wooden gate that had presumably once sealed the entrance. He continued upwards, heading through the second gatehouse and into the open courtyard beyond.
What he saw there was hard to believe.
Scattered around were the twisted shells of smashed Hunters and the gutted remains of several Grendels, all covered in a layer of snow. He had never seen anything like it. The Voidborn looked as if they’d been ripped to pieces. The burnt-out hulk of a drop-ship lay in what had once been a grand-looking building on the other side of the area. The broad trail of destruction leading to the impact point made it clear that something had brought down the alien vessel, but there was no obvious indication what.
Sam unclipped his holster and pulled out his gun. Something about the grisly scene made him extremely nervous. Judging by the layer of snow that covered the wreckage, it had been several days at least since whatever had taken place here, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. He walked up to the nearest fallen Hunter and rolled it over with his foot. The silvery skin of the creature was slashed in several places and the thick green slime that was the nearest thing the Voidborn had to blood had congealed in a large puddle beneath it.
He knelt down beside the Hunter and examined the tears in the Drone’s skin more carefully, realising that the wounds looked exactly like claw marks. He realised that there was only one possible explanation. The creatures that had attacked them the previous night had done this. That made no sense. If the creatures were Voidborn, why had they attacked their own? Sam shook his head; it was just one more unanswered question to add to the ever-growing pile. He began to stand up, but suddenly felt something cold and sharp press against the back of his neck.
‘Drop it,’ a girl’s voice said behind him.
Sam slowly placed his pis
tol on the ground.
‘Stand,’ the voice said, and Sam slowly got to his feet. He turned round and let out an involuntary gasp. The girl standing opposite him, knife raised, looked about the same age as him, but that was where the similarities ended. Her skin was pale and covered in the same thick black veins as the creatures that had attacked them the previous night, and each of her fingers was tipped by a translucent claw. Her eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses and she was wearing a black top with its hood pulled up over her head.
‘Who are you?’ the girl asked. ‘And what are you doing here?’
‘My name’s Sam,’ he replied, keeping his open palms out to his sides in what he hoped was a non-threatening gesture. ‘I’m sort of lost.’
‘You got that right,’ the girl replied. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
‘I know,’ Sam replied. ‘I’m trying to find a way home.’
‘And where’s that exactly?’ she asked, knife still raised.
‘London,’ Sam replied, ‘I’m from London.’
The girl didn’t speak for a moment. She just stood there and studied him.
‘Where are the others?’ she eventually asked.
‘What others?’ Sam replied.
‘Don’t treat me like an idiot,’ the girl replied. ‘I’ve been following you since you reached the city. I saw them leave on board one of those things.’ She gestured towards the downed drop-ship. ‘Only realised that you’d been left behind when you emerged from your hidey-hole this morning. You were lucky. Never seen anyone get away from the Vore before.’
‘The Vore?’ Sam said. ‘Is that what you call those things?’
‘Aye, it’s short for carnivore,’ the girl replied, ‘and trust me when I say that’s an appropriate name. Problem is that right now you’re standing right on top of the biggest nest of them in the city. So I’m going to suggest we get out of here before they wake up. Stay in front of me and don’t try anything.’ She gestured towards the gatehouse that led back outside. ‘Go on.’
‘I’m not going to hurt you, you know,’ Sam said as she picked his pistol up from the ground and tucked it into the back of her jeans.
‘You’re right,’ she replied, ‘you’re not.’
She followed him back on to the street outside and together they began to walk down the hill, the girl staying several metres behind Sam at all times.
‘Where are we going?’ Sam asked after a couple of minutes of walking in silence.
‘Anywhere but here,’ the girl replied. ‘It’s only a few more hours till sunset, and when the Vore catch your scent – and they will catch your scent – they’ll hunt you relentlessly until you’re dead.’
‘How far away do we have to get?’ Sam asked, glancing nervously up at the sky.
‘A few kilometres out from the nest at least,’ the girl replied.
‘They can’t really track us from that far away, can they?’ Sam asked.
‘Oh, they can and they will,’ the girl replied. ‘How do you think I found you and your friends in the first place? One of the perks of my . . . condition.’
‘What happened to you?’ Sam said. ‘If you don’t mind me asking.’
‘I have no idea,’ the girl replied. ‘I woke up alone in an empty warehouse looking like this. That was a couple of months ago. Since then I’ve been concentrating on staying alive.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Sam said. ‘So what happened to the Voidborn?’
‘The what?’ the girl replied.
‘The aliens, those things that were scattered all over the courtyard back there,’ Sam explained. ‘They’re called the Voidborn. They’ve taken the entire planet and enslaved nearly everyone. There are just a few of us trying to fight back. That’s why we were here in the first place, looking for any other people who might still have their free will.’
‘So why are you working with them?’ the girl asked. ‘I saw the ship your friends left in.’
‘We’re not working with the Voidborn,’ Sam said. ‘We managed to capture one of their Motherships and now it’s under our control.’
‘How did you pull that off?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ the girl replied.
Over the next half hour Sam recounted the story of his desperate fight to survive after the initial Voidborn invasion and his subsequent recruitment by the resistance and their victory in London. When he had finished, the girl said nothing for several minutes.
‘So I was one of these Sleepers for nearly two years,’ the girl said, struggling to wrap her head around what he had just told her. Sam realised that when she had awoken there wouldn’t have been anything to tell this girl how much time had passed while she’d been a Voidborn slave.
‘I’m afraid so,’ Sam replied. ‘We’ve tried to wake the Sleepers in London, but it didn’t work. As far as we know, you’re the only person who’s ever woken from the Voidborn sleep.’
‘Yeah, well you might have noticed I’m not quite the girl I used to be,’ she replied. ‘That could have something to do with it.’
‘We have people working on waking everyone back in London,’ Sam said. ‘If we could contact my friends, you could come back with us and maybe they can do something to help you.’
‘Not terribly keen on the idea of being a lab rat,’ the girl replied. ‘Let’s just concentrate on getting you out of here in one piece for now.’
Sam gave a quick nod. She was right – they had other priorities right now.
‘Can I ask your name?’ Sam asked after a couple more minutes of walking in silence.
‘Maggie,’ the girl replied, ‘but you can call me Mag – everyone does, or should I say did.’
‘So you’ve not seen any sign of the Voidborn?’ Sam asked.
‘Other than those few you saw in the castle courtyard, no,’ Mag replied. ‘Oh, and that big ship floating above the castle on the day of the invasion.’
Stirling had been right, Sam thought to himself. There had been a Mothership here. So where had it gone and, more to the point, when and why had it left?
‘We need to move faster,’ Mag said, glancing up at the sky. ‘I want to be further away from the main nest before it gets dark.’
As the sun began to set, they found themselves walking through a quiet suburb of the city. Sam had got very used to the night’s cloak of darkness being an ally over the past couple of years, but here it was something to fear. Mag had finally sheathed her knife just a few minutes earlier, having obviously decided that Sam did not pose much of a threat, though she had not returned his gun. Sam didn’t ask for it back, not wanting to do anything to jeopardise what little trust she might have in him.
‘We should shelter for the night in one of these houses,’ Mag said, looking at the comfortable detached homes that surrounded them, sniffing the air. ‘I don’t think there are any Vore around here, but we’d still be better off staying out of the open.’
‘I could do with resting for a while anyway,’ Sam said. The wound in his side was throbbing. He needed to clean it and apply a fresh dressing if he wanted to reduce the chances of infection.
‘That one looks good,’ he said, pointing at a slightly larger house that was set further back from the road than the others. The wide expanse of lawn that surrounded the house would give anyone on watch good sight lines.
Mag gave a quick nod and the pair of them walked up the long driveway leading to the front door. The heavy wooden door was firmly locked.
‘I’ll try round the back,’ Sam said.
‘No need,’ Mag said. She grabbed the door handle and pushed, shattering the doorframe around the lock effortlessly. ‘Not just a pretty face,’ she added, holding the door open for Sam. Clearly it was not just her appearance that she shared with the Vore, but at least some of their inhuman strength too. Sam realised that if he had attacked her she would have been able to subdue him effortlessly.
As they entered the gloomy hallway of the house, M
ag removed the sunglasses that she had been wearing all day and Sam finally saw her jet-black eyes. She caught him staring at her and gave him a slight smile.
‘Not a fan of bright lights any more, I’m afraid,’ Mag said, pulling back her hood to reveal her long, white hair. ‘At least it can’t kill me like it can the Vore.’
‘So that’s why they don’t hunt during the day,’ Sam said. ‘They can’t.’
‘Exactly,’ Mag replied. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can find anything to eat.’
They headed deeper into the house and Sam struggled to find his way through the darkened rooms, arms outstretched to avoid walking into anything. Mag was clearly having no such problems, suited as she obviously was to a nocturnal life. She found the large open-plan kitchen at the back of the house and rooted through the drawers and cupboards. After a minute or two there was the sound of someone striking a match and Mag lit a large church candle on the counter top.
‘Thanks,’ Sam said as he sat down on one of the high stools at the breakfast bar. ‘Not as good in the dark as you are.’
Mag placed a couple of cans of apricots on the counter and a tin of corned beef. They ate in silence for the next couple of minutes.
‘I haven’t thanked you,’ Sam said as he ate a spoonful of syrup-covered apricot.
‘For what?’ Mag asked.
‘For getting me out of the city centre,’ Sam replied. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, I might have just holed up for the night somewhere near that nest. I’d have made pretty easy pickings if it hadn’t been for you.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Mag said. ‘I’ve seen what those things can do to people. It’s not pretty.’
‘What people?’ Sam asked with a frown. ‘I thought you said that you’d never found any sleepers in the city.’
‘The soldiers,’ Mag said. ‘They used to come into the city at night, but the Vore soon put a stop to that.’