The Beauty of Destruction

by Gavin G. Smith

  Beth was suddenly aware of just how itchy her skin was. She scratched at it.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked, the unpleasant sensation distracting her for a moment from everything else that was happening.

  ‘It’s sporing,’ du Bois told her. ‘It’s trying to make new life. The itching is your body’s defences warring with it, protecting you.’

  They heard raised voices, cries of terror and the sound of breaking glass, then an agonised scream followed by more of the same.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Beth demanded. Despite all the strangeness she had seen, she was struggling to understand what was happening. She couldn’t stop anger creeping into her voice.

  ‘I don’t know. All the phones started ringing at once. If I had to guess, it was some sort of attack on the communications infrastructure.’

  ‘Portsmouth’s?’ Beth asked, almost hopefully.

  ‘The world’s,’ du Bois told her. He was no longer holding her up. He was checking all around them, his carbine at the ready.

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ Beth said in a small voice. Du Bois saw some figures moving on the other side of the now-flooded boating pond. He sighted on them with the carbine and then lowered it. They were too far away to be any real threat. He glanced back to Beth.

  ‘Yes you do. It means that anyone who answered their phone when it rang was subject to the attack. I think they were driven insane.’

  ‘But that could be—’ she started.

  ‘We need to go,’ he told her, and started wading back towards Alhambra Road where the Range Rover had been parked. Beth didn’t move.

  ‘Go where?’ she demanded. ‘Everything’s fucked, isn’t it?’ Du Bois turned back towards her, still looking around. ‘I mean, you’ve just told me that the whole fucking world’s been driven mad … right?’ She sat down in the water. It practically came up to her neck. ‘And the only thing that’s stopping whatever it is that’s growing out of everyone else is the little machines inside us, right?’

  ‘We don’t have time—’ du Bois started.

  ‘Wrong! We’ve got all the fucking time! Because unless I’ve misunderstood, it’s the end of the world, right? And the only people not going to be affected by these … these spores are people like you! Well, I’m sorry, but that means a world entirely populated by either the mad or wankers!’

  For a moment Beth thought she saw du Bois’s resolve falter. Then his face hardened again.

  ‘Your sister has gone, and that means the only hope humanity has at all is in the genetic sample I took from her. That sample is in the hands of the Do As You Please clan. They are a group of psychopathic children who use the same kind of technology that runs through your body to turn people into their fantasy playthings. They tried to take your sister, they tried to kill us, they turned all those people into their slaves and made us kill them. Even if we are all doomed I will not have them profit from our fall.’ He all but spat the word ‘fall’.

  Beth opened her mouth to argue but as she did something occurred to her, and with it guilt.

  ‘Maude and Uday!’ she said, standing up.

  They had seen the people warping and shifting as they made their way back to the Range Rover. Human bodies as cocoons consumed in the act of birthing. Flesh ran and flowed, distended mouths were frozen in silent screams.

  ‘Will these work?’ Beth had asked quietly, referring to the recently soaked guns du Bois had loaned her. She felt like her gorge should be rising, that panic should overwhelm her, but instead she felt strangely and artificially calm; sedated yet somehow still aware.

  ‘Not reliably,’ du Bois said, intent on checking the local areas, his SA58 FAL carbine at the ready. As they made their way down the flooded, narrow Alhambra Road, away from the now-submerged beach, they could see more of the locals staggering, sliding into the water as the new forms tried to pull themselves free of their host flesh.

  ‘Is it an invasion?’ Beth asked.

  Du Bois considered this. ‘More like an infection,’ he said, sparing a look of contempt for the dead thief floating in the water close to where they’d left the Range Rover.

  Beth climbed into the passenger seat. The door had been torn off by one of the creatures that had accompanied the cult when they had come for her sister on the motorway. Du Bois sighted his weapon on some of the transforming locals who were close to the vehicle. Beth could hear the sounds of violence in the distance. She felt numb. Du Bois handed her the carbine and climbed into the Range Rover, starting it up. With trained precision Beth checked and then readied the weapon. Du Bois put two magazines within easy reach. There was an explosion in the distance. Beth looked around, her eyes freshly wet.

  The water had come as far north as Campbell Road. The Range Rover was creating a wake with its passage as they turned into the tree-lined street. One of the locals, a new face growing out of his own, staggered towards the open passenger side and Beth kicked him away with a look of distaste.

  As they had passed through Clarendon Road, and then Albert Road, the two main shopping areas in Southsea, what they had seen looked halfway between a riot and the shell-shocked aftermath of a bombing. Parts of the city were already burning. Some people appeared to have been driven to violence, either against themselves or others. Many, however, just seemed to be wandering in a fugue state, waiting for the spores to infect them. Beth felt like her skin was on fire. She had noticed du Bois scratching his skin red-raw as he drove, though it healed moments later. He looked even gaunter now.

  Beth clambered out of the four-wheel-drive, splashing into the water, carbine at the ready, swinging it round to cover the closest of the once-people. She’d put the two extra magazines into the pockets of her sodden combat trousers.

  ‘They will be infected,’ du Bois said quietly as he climbed out of the other side of the Range Rover.

  ‘We don’t know that,’ Beth said through gritted teeth.

  ‘Even if they haven’t been so far, they have phones, don’t they?’

  Beth blinked back tears. She heard two suppressed shots. She glanced back at du Bois. Both the hopper-mounted, shrouded, snub-nosed .38s were in his hands. He had shot one of the creatures as it slithered too close to him. There was something serpentine about the new birth.

  ‘You people have to kill everything, don’t you?’

  Blue eyes met her own. She couldn’t read his expression but he followed as she went into the four-storey townhouse.

  They had fused. Uday and Maude had become mother and father to one organism. Beth had turned away and fled the lounge. Even among the agonised, twisted flesh, even after the assault on their minds, somehow Beth was sure she had seen an accusatory look in Uday’s remaining dark eye. Beth’s family had been a curse to both of them and yet they had been kind, they had befriended her despite what her sister had done to Maude. They were just two students who hadn’t seemed to ask much of the world.

  She squeezed her eyes tightly closed. Information came unbidden to her, information she had effectively been programmed with. She opened her eyes. She could see du Bois through the doorway into the lounge, raising one of his arms. He was about to execute them. Put them out of their misery.

  ‘Wait!’ Beth cried. Du Bois didn’t look at her but he didn’t fire either. ‘Your phone, you can record their consciousness.’ It was information she had assimilated from the vast data packets du Bois had sent her when he had needed her help to fight the DAYP in Old Portsmouth. He hadn’t had time to edit the information and had sent her pretty much everything. She knew that the phones du Bois and people like him carried were capable of whole brain emulation. They used a mixture of electromagnetic resonance scanning, infrared light pulses and infrasound to map and record a brain, effectively downloading a copy of the original human consciousness. ‘You also have access to cloning facilities, don’t you?’

  Du Bois hesitated. Suddenly he looked tired.

  ‘Even if there are any Circle facilities left, it’s not that simpl
e, and they certainly wouldn’t allow them to be used for this.’

  ‘Are they not valuable enough?’ Beth demanded.

  ‘No,’ he said simply. Beth glared at him. ‘Do you want me to lie to you?’

  ‘Fine. We can still record them, right?’

  This time du Bois sighed. ‘It’s not them any more. Even if they have minds left the spores will have corrupted them and the human consciousness is a complex thing, it takes petabytes of data, and that’s assuming my phone hasn’t been corrupted.’

  ‘Please,’ Beth said very quietly from the hall. She still could not bear to go back into the lounge. She watched as du Bois lowered his arm. She tried to ignore the wet ripping noises coming from the fused bodies. It looked like du Bois was studying the thing that Uday and Maude had become. Finally he nodded and took his phone out. Beth actually sagged from the relief. She pushed open the door to one of the bedrooms and went to sit on the bed.

  ‘No,’ du Bois said. ‘The world has just become infinitely more violent and you have soaked all my weapons in the salt effluent of the Solent. They need to be stripped down and cleaned. Take the carbine with you and keep it near. This is going to take a while.’

  Beth opened her mouth to argue and then closed it again. She walked out of the bedroom and left the flat.

  It was busy work. Beth had known that. They would almost certainly need the weapons but she was sure that du Bois had asked her to do this to keep her mind off her friends. The problem was it didn’t. She had stripped down the Accurised Colt .45 first. She had done it practically unconsciously. Her fingers seemed to move of their own accord, the practiced movements of a military veteran unlearned, a technological cheat. It was something else she found herself feeling absurdly guilty about. She had heard du Bois tell McGurk that the .45 had been a present from an officer in Delta Force, who she now knew were an American special forces unit.

  As she stripped and cleaned the .45 calibre Heckler & Koch UMP sub-machine gun in the back seat of the Range Rover she felt like she was going through the motions. She knew that trying to record Maude and Uday’s consciousness was clutching at straws. She had always wondered why people bothered in post-apocalyptic films. When everything and everyone was gone, when existence was beyond miserable, what exactly were you living for? Was the simple urge to exist that strong?

  As she finished reassembling the UMP, she glanced across the street. There was a man in a raincoat watching her. He looked sad somehow. The side of his face was bubbling but he showed no sign of feeling the pain. She stopped and looked over at him. He was a little older than her. He had the kind of dishevelled attractiveness that she used to like, or at least he would have if his face stopped moving of its own accord. Their eyes met. His hand came up to the bubbling flesh on his face. Beth wondered who he had been before things so utterly beyond his control had fucked his life. She looked away first and pretended to busy herself with the Benelli M1014 semi-automatic shotgun. He had gone when she looked up again.

  Beth felt something hit the Range Rover, rocking it. She climbed out, bringing the butt of the carbine to her shoulder as she did so. Something rolled in the muddy water, an indeterminate form in a caul-like membrane. She raised the carbine to her shoulder and sighted on the thing, but lowered the weapon again. The gunshot would bring du Bois running and she wanted him to concentrate on the job in hand. She knew there was a suppressor for the carbine and the UMP somewhere in the vehicle, but she also knew that even suppressed guns weren’t as quiet as they were made out to be in films. She slung the carbine and drew her great-grandfather’s bayonet. She stood on the thing, pushing it under the dirty water, then, bending down, she pushed the bayonet into its centre mass. It writhed but the only noise from it was a low squeal that sounded like air escaping from cooking meat. Some of the dark fluids that leaked out of it into the water looked a little like blood. She straightened up and looked in disgust at the ichor covering her bayonet. Then she looked around the road. She could see more of the horrific transformations going on in the street, and in the houses as she looked through the windows. It was only then that she wondered why she had killed the creature.

  Du Bois was standing on the other side of the Range Rover looking at her. Again she could not make out his expression.

  ‘Did you do it?’ Beth asked. Du Bois nodded. ‘I need pr—’

  ‘I did it!’ he snapped. ‘For what it’s worth.’ Beth regarded him. It didn’t seem like he was lying but she suspected that meant nothing. ‘You can either trust me or not.’ Something in his voice told Beth that he wanted her to believe him. She just nodded. Maude and Uday’s continued existence was something she needed to cling to. ‘Are you ready?’

  There was no question of her not accompanying him. ‘I need a few minutes to sort out the shotgun,’ she told him.

  Du Bois nodded. He picked up the UMP and went round to the open concealed weapon cabinet in the vehicle’s boot. He changed the magazine. Beth knew he was loading it with subsonic rounds. He affixed a long tubular suppressor to the SMG. It made sense; less chance of drawing attention to them.

  As Beth stripped down and cleaned the shotgun, she wondered if her dad was alive. He had been weak and ill. She hoped that he had answered the phone when it rang and the shock of whatever had screamed at him had killed him. It was probably the kindest fate that this brave new world had for her father.

  Du Bois only had to kill one more of the things before they were ready to go.

  She was belted into her seat, one foot on the Range Rover’s running rail, weapon at the ready. It reminded her of footage she had seen of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this was Hampshire. She was still soaked to the skin but the cold and the wet didn’t seem to bother her any more.

  The roads were carnage, multiple pile-ups and crashes everywhere. Physically and mentally damaged people wandering the tarmac. More than one of them had thrown themselves at the Range Rover. She guessed that many hadn’t answered their phones while driving, but enough had to have caused chaos.

  Du Bois used the Range Rover’s off-road capability to avoid the worst of it where he could, and the vehicle’s power and armoured weight to shunt cars out of the way when he couldn’t. Beth tried not to think too much about the bleeding, staggering people wandering between mangled, often burning wreckage. It had all gone so quickly. She had lived in Bradford during more than one riot. Civilisation had seemed little more than a surface façade to her, and prison had confirmed this. Alien entities or not, somehow this devastation didn’t seem to surprise her as much as it should. She still found herself blinking back tears. Trying not to think about the few genuine friends she had in Bradford. She felt du Bois look over at her but he didn’t say anything. Instead he concentrated on driving the Range Rover up a grass verge on the side of the northbound A3 to avoid a tangled mess of cars and an articulated lorry.

  A small convoy of military vehicles drove past them heading south on the other side of the dual carriageway. She knew they would be of no use.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  There had been some military presence in the ugly red-brick town of Aldershot. People who hadn’t been able to access phones for one reason or another, Beth guessed. They were very jumpy and had nearly fired on the Range Rover but there was almost a sense of order in the old military town. There were also bodies in the street. Du Bois had shown them the special forces warrant card he carried and they had been allowed through. He had to talk his way through several more checkpoints as nobody was risking using radio, or any other form of electronic communications. Each time Beth had found herself subconsciously ready to fire if it looked like the situation was about to turn nasty.

  They were driving across the runway at Farnborough Airport. She could make out figures on the runway. They appeared to be wandering aimlessly across the concrete. In the distance they could make out the wreck of a civilian C-130 Hercules transport plane. Beth hadn’t seen any more plane wreckage but she had to assume that if the entire c
ommunications structure of the planet had been compromised, then thousands upon thousands of planes all over the world must have crashed. The areas surrounding airports would look like battlefields. Even with all the technology expanding her mental capacities she was struggling to deal with the scale of what had happened.

  ‘Don’t think about it,’ du Bois told her, reading her mind. ‘Concentrate on the task at hand.’

  ‘You used to be a soldier, didn’t you?’ Beth said.

  ‘A very long time ago.’ Beth had to strain to hear him.

  Du Bois steered the Range Rover into one of the smaller hangars on the edge of the airfield. It was empty. She saw du Bois visibly sag in his seat.

  ‘An aircraft?’ she asked.

  ‘A suborbital transport. We could have been in America before the DAYP.’

  Absurdly the idea of travelling to America seemed even more extraordinary than what was happening all around her. ‘Surely all this has messed them up as well.’ Perhaps her sister’s all-important genetic material was already at the bottom of the Atlantic.

  ‘They have access to the same kind of protection we do. But until we know for sure we have to behave as if there is still hope.’

  ‘The thing in the Solent, it did all this?’ Beth asked. The question seemed to trouble du Bois. It seemed there were things that he didn’t want to think about either. ‘It didn’t, I don’t know, it didn’t feel all that malevolent.’

  ‘There are others. If they’ve …’

  Beth looked at him expectantly but he did not continue. ‘Can you think of a good reason not to tell me everything?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply and then took his phone out of his pocket.

  ‘Wait, what the fuck are you—’ Beth protested, but du Bois switched it on. The hangar was filled with the sound of electronic screaming too loud to be coming out of a normal phone’s speaker. Beth clamped her hands to her ears. There was a feminine quality to the sound. Du Bois, grimacing, switched the phone off.