by Simon Clark
‘If one of those babies hits us we’ll know about it,’ I murmured.
Kate looked at me. ‘Shall we go back the way we came and head round the other side of the hill?’
‘We can’t spare the time. We need to find Stephen before they start hallucinating like crazy and begin killing each other. Watch it, Kate.’
A child’s skull cracked down into the black ash an arm’s length away and shattered with a crunching sound.
‘What’s causing it?’ Kate asked.
‘I’ve seen something like it before. See that plume of smoke coming from the other side of the hill?’
‘I see it.’
‘There’s probably a gas vent broken out through a cemetery. The force of the explosions is throwing out the skulls. Most are landing across there to the left. If we move further over to the right, down the hillside, we should be able to avoid being hit.’
‘It’s raining skulls; there’s lightning; there’s no people; not one blade of grass. Black desert as far as you can see.’ Kate looked round, the light breeze blowing out her long hair in strands. She shook her head and when she spoke again I heard the note of despair in her voice. ‘We’ve died and gone to Hell, haven’t we?’
I hugged her. ‘Christ knows, it seems like that sometimes. But once we make it to the ship we’ll—’
‘The ship? Do you think an island in the South Seas is going to welcome a batch of refugees with open arms?’
‘I don’t know, Kate, really I don’t. But you’ve got to keep hoping.’
She sighed. ‘I guess. Are you thirsty?’
I nodded. ‘We’ll have to be sparing with the water. Fresh water springs are going to be few and far between.’
After a sip of water from my bottle we pushed on. Silent lightning flickered amongst the clouds that since midday had killed the sun. We’d reached the hills and now followed the top of a high ridge that should take us to the route of the old Roman road that Stephen, Jesus and the others were following west.
Kate was right about the countryside looking like Hell now. Blanketed by the black ashfall, burnt, split open, cratered by subterranean gas blasts, it looked a bleak, forbidding place. Dotted through the black fields were the burnt stumps of trees, some with skeletal branches. A kilometre away lay a cluster of burnt-out farmworkers’ cottages.
Mixed in with the black ash our feet crunched through were hundreds of bones, the skulls of sheep, birds, cats, dogs—and of people, of course, plenty of people. Some of the skulls had been smashed open so desperate survivors could gobble out the brains.
Bizarrely, a grandfather clock stood in the middle of the field, its hands jammed at ten to two, the pendulum frozen. What desperate soul had been driven to carry the thing this far? And why?
As we walked I glanced back. Fairburn lay back out of sight in the distance. The breeze stirred up dust devils that would follow us like the lost souls of the dead.
Kate glanced back. ‘You don’t see any Greys?’
‘No. I can suppress them now I know they’re not really there.’
‘What have you seen?’
‘Our footprints. See them? Two lines running back over the hills?’
‘If the footprints are all we leave behind here I’ll be happy, won’t you?’
I nodded, then gave a grim smile. ‘Those tracks reminded me of some fossilized footprints found in Africa.’
‘Oh, I think I remember those. We had to write about them for a school project.’
‘Me too. I remember drawing the footprints, then writing the description in blue felt tip underneath. Hell, I can still remember what I wrote: A TRAIL OF FOOTPRINTS PROBABLY MADE BY UPRIGHT WALKING ANCESTORS OF MAN, NAMELY AUSTRALOPITHECUS AFARENSIS DISCOVERED IN LAETOLI, TANZANIA. THE PRINTS WERE FOSSILIZED IN VOLCANIC ASH 3.6 MILLION YEARS AGO. THEY SHOW TWO ADULTS WITH A CHILD WALKING BEHIND THEM:
She smiled. ‘Well remembered.’
‘Yeah, for what good it’ll do us now. School taught us how to live within that old structure known as civilization. If I’d known then what I know now I wouldn’t have revised so hard for my damned exams.’ Despite myself I laughed, then glanced back at the trail of footprints we’d made in the ash. ‘Do you think those will last 3.6 million years, Kate?’
‘No doubt about it, Rick Kennedy. And what’s more there’ll be some poor kid in the dun and distant future writing his homework essay about them: Fossilized footprints found in ash, dating back to the Holocene epoch. Probably made by the male and female of the long extinct species homo sapiens.’
I smiled. ‘And our student will speculate: Perhaps we can surmise the two creatures were mates. We can imagine, maybe, from the closeness of the prints, that they held hands as they walked.’
We were babbling nonsense. At that moment I think we had to. Every now and again another skull would hit the ground with such force that it exploded in splinters of bone, scattering of teeth. To my right a landslip had torn open the hill, exposing a coal seam which blazed with a powerful roaring sound.
We had to babble. We had to make jokes.
Otherwise we’d have gone mad, right there in the black heart of what had to be nothing less than Hell.
In the valley bottom half a dozen vent holes screamed as flammable gas superheated by the baking earth found an exit. The screams were surprisingly human-sounding. More than once I had to stop and check with my binoculars that there really was no one down there being seared by the jets of flame.
We walked faster. The grit ejected high into the air by the gas vents drizzled down on us like a fine black snow.
Ben had given us dust masks. We pulled these up over our mouths and noses. Then we walked faster. Feet crunching that arid carpet of ash and burnt bone.
‘Hear that noise?’ Kate asked, voice muffled by the mask.
‘Sound like sharp explosions?’
‘Those are the ones. Know what they are?’
I shook my head.
‘Brontides,’ she said, ‘they usually herald the start of earthquake activity.’
‘All the more reason to keep moving. The whole of the ground here must be a mass of fault lines grinding away at each other.’
‘That means a lot of electricity in the rock, too. Watch out for hallucinations.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I can handle them.’
‘Don’t get too confident, Rick.’
‘Trust me.’ I paused to look at the map. ‘We need to head for the saddlebacked hill over there. I think we should keep as much to the high ground as possible.’
‘Why?’
‘I know we’ve seen no genuine volcanoes here yet, but I’d bet you a fish-and-chip supper that there’s a Hell of a lot of volcanic gases spewing out of those vents.’
‘That means carbon monoxide. It’ll lie low in the valley bottoms.’
‘And the stuffs fucking lethal.’
Kate looked up at the sky. Cloud lumbered overhead. Lightning flickered. ‘It’ll be night in an hour. You don’t propose walking through that,’ she nodded at the black desert, ‘in complete darkness?’
‘We need to reach Stephen as quickly as we can.’ I pulled the dust mask down from my face. ‘But we’d probably end up falling down one of those damn fire pits or something. See that farmhouse on the side of the hill? We’ll spend the night there, then make an early start in the morning. With luck we’ll catch up with Stephen by the end of tomorrow.’
‘With luck,’ she said with a sigh, ‘with a whole lot of luck.’ She was right. We would need a lot of luck—whole heaps of the stuff. And just when we needed the luck, that’s when it started running out fast.
Chapter 116
I awoke with a start. Sweat pricked my eyes. Lightning flashes pulsed through the window to light the kitchen of the abandoned farmhouse like a strobe. I sat up in my sleeping-bag. Kate’s sleeping-bag was empty.
My hand brushed the stone kitchen floor; it was warmed by the heat conducted from the baking earth beneath it. My rifle? Where was m
y rifle?
More pulses of light—bluish and vivid.
Hell, where was Kate?
My heart beat hard.
‘Kate?’
No lightning now. Only complete darkness.
‘Kate? Kate, where are you!’
Lightning flash.
The darkness gone.
And I saw it.
The Grey Man.
It reared up from the floor where it had been crouching.
Waiting.
Hell, what had it done to Kate?
The Grey Man.
The voice in my head clamoured again: Rick. It’s only a hallucination. The rocks beneath the farmhouse are moving, they are grating together to produce that hallucinogenic electrical field; it’s interfering with the natural electrical activity in your brain. The grey creature isn’t really there, it’s not real, it’s—
HELL, LIKE FUCK IT ISN’T!!!!
I reached out…touched its leg.
I felt hard muscle.
Ben was wrong.
The Grey Men were real.
Where the hell was Kate?
What had it done to her?
Panicky, I kicked my way out of the sleeping-bag, leapt to my feet.
The big grey head of the beast turned to me. The eyes, blood-red and ghastly, fucking ghastly, locked onto mine. They screamed hatred at me. And this weird alien hunger. The monster was evil, sheer fucking evil.
It wanted my blood.
It lifted its grey arms, snarled. The hands hooked into claws. In the flashing light of the electric storm I could even see the black fingernails. They were chipped and cracked as if they’d clawed a thousand human faces from their skulls.
I launched myself at it, punching at that grey face.
The cheekbones were as hard as concrete, but I punched and punched, until the skin across my knuckles bled.
It tried to shove me back.
I gripped it by that mane of loose black hair that ran along the ridge of bone at the top of its head.
‘What have you done to Kate?’
I pulled at the mane, swung it off balance, then crashed it against the wall.
‘What have you done to Kate?’
I punched.
‘Kate!’
Punched again. Blood from my cut fist smeared the grey face.
‘You fucking monster! If you’ve hurt her I’ll rip you in half!’
The Grey Man had taken some hard punches. It leaned back against the wall. The bloody red eyes dulled to a brown. I drove more full-blooded punches into its stomach.
Christ. I punched again. The belly felt amazingly soft. I punched again and again. It screamed.
‘Rick…Rick…’
‘That’s Kate! What have you done with her?’
I punched the monster repeatedly as I yelled.
‘Where’s Kate?’
‘Rick…’
I could hear her voice. But I couldn’t see her. Perhaps another one of the grey monsters was torturing her in the next room. I punched it on the cheekbone. It screamed. A surprisingly high-pitched scream that came from a throat that was as thick as a bull’s.
‘Rick! I love you…please…I ugh! I love you…please, pl—ah! Don’t hit me. Not there! NOT THERE!’
Screams.
Bastard. I swung a kick high.
‘Ahhh! Rick…God, I love you, Rick. Kiss me, kiss me. Kiss me like—uph! Hotel…remember the hotel. Remember kissing me…Oh! Oh! Oh! Rick…please, not that. NOT THAT! Murr-ooh-oh-oh…ohhhh…’
Weeping.
The beast was weakening. If I could find a stick to use as a club. Better still, my rifle.
Blow its fucking head off, blow it to fucking paradise.
I punched again at the face.
‘Rick…Rick…I love you…’
Rick?
The voice came from the monster.
The monster knew my name…
In God’s name, how? How—
Jesus Christ.
As I fought the creature, my face was slammed up close to that great bony head, set with two almond-shaped eyes now fading to brown. But even as I gripped its black mane in one hand, then brought my other fist up, ready to beat at its eyes in the hope of blinding it, the grey face just evaporated; it just wasn’t there anymore.
Instead, there was Kate.
Chapter 117
Later, I’d remember how I’d stared at Kate in horror. My eyes bulging so much they watered. I couldn’t believe the awful thing I’d done to her.
I held her beautiful hair in my right hand.
My left hand, bunched tight into a fist, so tight the veins stood out; my knuckles, slick with blood, were raised high, ready to beat down hard into her lovely face.
Her face…
My stomach turned. I wanted to vomit.
I’d punched her so hard her face was a mass of grazes that made the skin look like raw meat. Her left eyebrow leaked blood from a crack in the skin. Her lips were swelling so much they looked as if they’d been stung by bees.
I let go of her hair in horror. She sagged back against the wall, her head dropping loosely forward, her hair tumbling down over her bare breasts that were mottling with a dozen bruises.
She was completely naked. I saw more injuries on her legs. Fresh grazes stood out redly amongst the dozen or more older scratches made when she was alone in the church.
A complete…a total horror gripped me.
I’d done that?
I’d seen her as a Grey Man, then fought her tooth and nail until she was half dead.
I panted hard from the exertion of the ferocious beating I’d hammered out onto the girl I loved; who I’d die for.
Stunned by the horror of what I’d done, I turned to stare out of the window.
Lightning flashed, illuminating tracts of the burntlands.
I saw my face reflected there in the glass. It was hot, red, sweaty.
Christ, I’d sunk everything in hammering the life out of her.
I shook my head, flicking droplets of sweat from my fringe. Then I was looking round for something on the floor.
‘Rick.’ Her voice was weak. ‘Rick. It’s not your fault. What are you doing?’
I kept looking.
‘Rick stop it. Whatever you’re going to do—don’t. Not your fault…you didn’t know…’
What was I looking for?
Christ, right then I was looking for the rifle. If I’d found it I’d have blown out my fucking brains.
My self-disgust was total.
Kate walked unsteadily towards me. Her eyes bled tears; the long hair swung down over those cruelly bruised breasts.
‘Not your fault,’ she kept saying. ‘You were asleep. You were hallucinating before you opened your eyes. You weren’t to know.’
‘I—I…’ I couldn’t speak. I wanted to scream, then just run from the farmhouse barefoot. I wanted to run and run across that smouldering wasteland. Lose myself out there, then curl up and die alone amid the ash.
‘Come here, love.’ Tenderly she reached out. ‘It’s all right. I love you. I know you didn’t mean it.’
She hugged me from behind. The tips of her bare breasts lightly touched my bare back. I felt her kissing my shoulder blades, then the back of my neck.
She said in a low, trembling voice, ‘I woke. I could see you were in the grip of the hallucination. I managed to hide the rifles in the cupboard across there. Then, as I walked back across the room to you, I saw your face. Your eyes…they were so strange: the irises and pupils had shrunk to dots…nothing but black dots…you looked terrified and angry all at the same time. Then you attacked me. I kept telling you I loved you. Kept repeating your name…Rick. Rick. Rick. I love you. I had to keep saying that. I couldn’t resist you, either. I knew I mustn’t fight back because that would only have made you more determined to fight me.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘So I had to stand there…passively…and allow you to punch me. Those punches seemed to go on forever. But I knew if I said yo
ur name enough I’d reach you.’
I shuddered.
‘There…it’s all right, Rick. Everything’s all right.’
‘Christ…I nearly killed you…look at your face!’
She pulled me round to face her and slid her arms around my waist. Kissing me on the lips, she spoke softly. ‘It’s important you know what happened in case it happens again. It might be me next time. I might have the rifle. I know once you’re in the grip of the hallucination you’d do anything. You could kill your own mother.’
‘Kate…Jesus wept. I couldn’t stop myself. I thought…I really thought you were one of those things. It was so real…so fucking real.’
‘I know, that’s why we must reach Stephen and warn him.’
I couldn’t stop shaking. ‘Kate…maybe it’d be safer if you went on alone.’
‘No. We must travel together. And we must fight this thing together. The key is to stay as relaxed as possible.’
‘Relaxed…’ I buried my face in her hair and gave a bitter laugh.
‘Yes, relaxed.’
‘Christ, easier said than done.’
‘There are ways.’ She smiled up at me through blood and tears.
‘I couldn’t, Kate. Not after what I’ve done tonight.’
‘Yes, you can. Make love to me. Now.’
‘But…Hell…I remember kicking you.’
She smiled again; somehow, incredibly, it didn’t seem forced. ‘Rick, I’m tougher than you think.’
I kissed her gently on her swollen lips.
‘Now,’ she said, managing to sound composed. ‘Lie down on the blanket. You’re dripping with sweat. I’ll rub you with the towel.’
I lay down, watching her face as she rubbed my skin. I saw her eyes searching my body, seeing my bruises and scratches.
I closed my eyes as she began to kiss me. Her lips felt deliriously cool on my chest, stomach and legs.
I squeezed my eyes shut as she let out a deep sigh.
But there was no pain in that sigh. Only a blend of pleasure and deep, deep relief.
I realized the truth. After the fight she needed this sexual bonding again. She needed to prove to herself as much as to me that I really was in the grip of delusion when I’d beaten her. That my fury wasn’t directed at her, Kate Robinson, but at some nameless monster which my hallucinating mind had wrongly told me had manifested itself in the kitchen.