The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller

by Smitherd, Luke

  I was breathing in short gasps, almost hyperventilating, as I tried to work out what could have happened. Was it shock that had caused it? Had I been hit by something, attacked maybe? The other thing that was rattling around frantically in my head was the thought of being scooped, that the biggest story of my entire career—a story that would possibly be the biggest of anyone’s career—had slipped through my fingers whilst I was having a nice nap on a ring road flyover. I rushed to the railings. The Stone Man was long gone, and it was clear that he had indeed stayed on the same trajectory; the small unit of apartments on the other side of the ring road was partially collapsed, with several people sitting by the roadside wrapped in blankets. The chopper was gone too, obviously prioritising its observation mission over collapsing men on flyovers. Two ambulances were at the scene though, and a few people in fluorescent clothing were picking through the rubble, waving handheld devices. When I saw the headgear they were wearing more clearly, I realised that their bright clothes were yellow hazmat suits. Beyond all that, in the distance, the sky was filled with smoke, and I could see several choppers hovering near the black haze in the sky. There was so much noise coming from that direction, a cacophony of different chaotic sounds that I will never forget.

  I pulled out my phone as I felt gingerly along the back of my head and the sides of my face; there appeared to be no bumps on my skull, but there were what felt like small scratches on my left cheek that stung when I touched them. I paid them no heed and unlocked my phone, going straight to my contacts book. I’d always stored the relevant numbers for national news outlets in the hopeful but unlikely belief that I might come across something on a national news level (and had even submitted pieces to them from time to time, but had gotten nowhere) but even though I had a hollow, sickening, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach because I knew it was probably too late, I thought I’d try anyway. If nothing else, I had the pictures, and they had to be worth something. I dialled the Sun, and when I just got a beeping sound, I looked at the screen. Call failed. I tried again, and got the same result, and again with all the other numbers. I had full signal on the handset, yet I was getting nowhere, just as if I were trying to place a mobile call at midnight on New Year’s Eve. This was getting bigger by the minute, and I was missing the whole damn thing. I decided to head towards the smoke.

  As I ran across the flyover and down the steps on the opposite side of the ring road, my thoughts raced back to the fact that I’d passed out like that. Why the hell did that happen? I wondered wildly if the military had tried some sort of gas, or a new kind of weapon to halt the Stone Man that had somehow had an effect on me as well. I didn’t like the idea of that. Plus, this headache was worrying. I had no painful spots or bumps on my skull, so I didn’t think I’d damaged my brain significantly, but it was a deep, full headache, unlike anything I’d had before. Not more painful, just a feeling like it was surrounding my whole skull. It made my eyes squint slightly, darkening the already darkened buildings around me even further. The sun was dipping fast.

  I ran around the ruined apartment building, trying not to catch the eyes of the people sitting on the kerb. One was covered in dried blood, staring straight ahead, glassy eyed, whilst another was weeping hysterically. From what I could see in the air up ahead, it didn’t look like the destruction was stopping anytime soon; there would be more of this. I think of that moment often, seeing the looks on those people’s faces as I sprinted away, as they cried for their loved ones and their ruined homes, as I ran after the story and worried about getting beaten to the punch. Even now, I know that I would have done the same.

  I don’t remember much about that sprint towards the smoke, as so much of it was simply more carnage and rubble. After a while, it lost its shock value, and I had a job to do. I have certain stand-out images of it in my head, of course, but they are only there as glimpses. The headache didn’t help, forcing me to focus on just putting one foot in front of the other to get to my destination as quickly as possible. You have to remember, this was sheer chaos; it didn’t even feel like it was really happening, as it was hard enough simply taking in the concept of a walking man made of stone. By comparison, emergency vehicles and ruined buildings were nothing out of the ordinary.

  Memories: a fire engine freeing seven or eight people from a tree that they’d jumped into to get clear of their ruined building, the lower floors partially destroyed and blocked. A nursery completely flattened, the children fortunately all gathered safely on the lawn, already over the shock of the destruction and trying to play as staff counted heads and told them to stand still. A beautiful Porsche squashed down the middle, its owner sitting and sobbing helplessly by the side of the road in the arms of his girlfriend. A paramedic tending to a dying old man, who lay gasping clutching at his chest. A bus that had been concertinaed by a Stone Man-sized object that was no longer there, people still trapped on board as rescue crews cut an exit into it with an oxyacetylene torch. Bloodied people. Exposed wires fizzing and giving off sparks. Traffic, so much completely stationary traffic, horns blaring and filling the air and adding to the siren sounds and helicopter whirrs. The drivers all shouting; some people wanting to get out of the city, some wanting to see what was happening, others wanting to get home to either check on their loved ones or check if their home was there at all. And worst of all, at two separate locations, TV news crews. I’d missed it.

  I was absolutely devastated, even moaning out loud as I pulled up at the sight of the first OB van, but already my mind was ticking over as usual, shutting down in the mechanical process of analysis rather than feeling. Going over the ways this could be salvaged.

  At this stage, no one could have stills of the Stone Man in early motion as I had, or at least as many. Could they? No one seemed to be taking still shots as it first started to actually walk; they’d all been too stunned. And I was the only one, at least as far as the ring road, that had kept pace with it, although it was perfectly feasible that someone else could have done the same whilst I was unconscious on the flyover. But the odds were good that, providing most people that saw it during that time were amateurs, they would have gone for the standard mobile phone mp4, shooting moving video. Good for TV, yes, but I had stills of a higher resolution that would look far better when blown up on the news. Stations would still be interested in both. Here’s some early footage … and here’s a clear close-up. It wasn’t the strongest argument, but it was relevant.

  One thing I do remember is feeling completely and totally physically fucked. The running became a jog, the jog became a wheezing walk, and the walk became a stop-start, hobbling, sweating farce. My fitness, as I suspected earlier, was a joke. The stitch that developed in my side soon turned into a barbed blade, and my breath tasted of metal. I was red faced and wincing, and that, combined with my headache, made it a nightmare. I’d also had some time to do a bit of maths as I ran, and I’d come to a rather worrying conclusion. It was now some time past seven in the evening. I’d reached Millennium Place sometime before five, and it wasn’t long after that the Stone Man had started walking; it was only a few minutes after that I’d passed out. Simple maths said that if the Stone Man had been travelling at normal walking pace—which to my knowledge was about three miles an hour—and I’d been unconscious for at least two, then it was already good six miles away. Although I might be able to catch up if I had the endurance, it was clear that I didn’t. Plus, by this stage, I think it was safe to assume that it now had a fairly heavy police or military tail of its own, and I wasn’t going to get close enough to get any good footage. I’d seen police blockages along the way, and even if there had been only those, there were enough destroyed vehicles and pileups causing dense traffic that getting a taxi to collect me in the first place—let alone one that would be able to get me ahead of the Stone Man—was out of the question. I was out of the loop.

  I stopped and dropped my head to my knees, both to gasp in more air and as a gesture of extreme frustration and disappointment. The
camera stills would have to do, and I would have to hope for the best, but at the same time I was also gutted at the unfairness of it all. I’d been there at the start. I was one of the first to see it, and the only one of those who were there to properly follow it. Now I was playing catch up with everybody else. Why the fuck had I passed out? At least if it had been my fault I could have accepted it as being my fault, but this was just ridiculously unfair. Another potential career break, foiled by the Fates. I stood there, gasping in air, and felt the sweat pouring down my back and legs. To say the least, I was pissed off.

  “Fuuuuuuckkkk!” I screamed to the sky, catching only the briefest and mildest of attention from those around me; I would not have been the only person they had seen screaming or cursing in dismay that day, and many of those people would have had better reasons than I did. I was in the middle of an urban residential area now, rows of terraced houses with a fresh gap on either side where one home on each row had been demolished. Several cars were crushed, and one was somehow on fire; I didn’t know if that was the Stone Man’s doing or some local chavs trying to get in on the action. The sun had dropped even farther in the sky by now, and the light had dropped to dusk level, but I could still very easily see the various people stood in small clusters in the street as they frantically swapped witness accounts and discussed theories. Only one ambulance was here, its crew ferrying someone across the street on a gurney, breathing through an oxygen mask. The flaming car made the place feel even more like a warzone.

  As I stood there, angry and wondering what to do next, the injustice of the situation hit me afresh, and as I balled up my fists I looked for something to throw. Perfectly, a foot or two away from me, there were some bricks lying on the kerb, formerly part of the now-ruined garden wall behind them. I seized one and, without really thinking, threw it straight through the cracked windscreen of a nearby partially flattened car. It obliterated the glass with a deeply satisfying smash. The satisfaction only lasted for a moment, however, as a kid across the street pointed my actions out to one of his friends. The friend looked at the windscreen, looked at me, then immediately flew towards the nearest house shouting DAD! DAD! I decided it was time to get out of there as quickly as possible. Summoning the last reserves of energy I had, I sprinted off down the street.

  ***

  Once I was at a comfortable distance from my previous position, I found myself in a similar street with a convenience store on the corner. It had a small wall outside, which to my exhausted, embarrassed body looked like a heavenly place to rest after buying a much-needed drink. I was, by now, ridiculously thirsty. I definitely had cash on me—I’d been aware of my wallet banging against my hip with every jogging step—so I went inside. The place was clean, small, and wonderfully cool thanks to the air-conditioning. The young Asian guy behind the counter briefly turned and nodded as I entered, then went back to staring at the TV on the wall, which was of course showing the news. You can probably guess what the story was.

  I was still not even close to being over losing the biggest break of my career (this despite having long ago learned an almost unhealthy level of cynicism where my career was concerned) and seeing the distant helicopter images on the screen stung me deeply, but I pushed those thoughts aside and asked the shop assistant if he could turn the sound up. Like everyone, regardless of anything else, I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I’d tried my phone repeatedly during my run, and every time the result was the same. Dead network. Even now I wonder if someone had seen to that, and that maybe it wasn’t because of frantic callers jamming the network. I don’t know. I’m generally a lot more suspicious of that kind of thing these days, since I saw the way they handled things after the Second Arrival. The guy behind the counter didn’t take his eyes off the screen, or even acknowledge that I’d spoken, but he did pick up the remote and increase the volume.

  The image was distant but unmistakable. In the centre of the screen, the Stone Man could clearly be seen making its way across a field. By the looks of the area, it seemed that my roughly-six-miles-ahead prediction was about right; the Stone Man seemed to be some way out of central Coventry by now, heading across rural land that the TV confirmed would lead into Nuneaton. It was bizarre, seeing the Stone Man relentlessly plough onward via the tiny TV screen, after seeing its miraculous walking up close. As we watched, it smashed effortlessly through a large fence, and then the shot cut to footage of a crushed JCB excavator in an urban setting. Apparently, they’d tried to pick the Stone Man up in the scoop. It hadn’t worked; it was evident from the way the JCB was flattened into the ground, scoop and all, that the Stone Man had been somehow too heavy (how much could a JCB lift? Surely the Stone Man wasn’t that heavy; surely pavement couldn’t support that kind of weight without shattering entirely?) or had basically walked straight up and over the machine. I leaned on the metal counter as the report continued, thoughts of tiredness or thirst temporarily forgotten. Across the bottom of the screen there was a tracker bar, relaying snippets of the media frenzy that had begun whilst I was sleeping through what would soon become the biggest news event of the decade, and would later become the biggest occurrence in human history. But even I had temporarily stopped thinking about my own heartbreaking career miss; the revelations in the report were just too big to let me dwell on such things.

  The military had apparently calculated its trajectory, and (although they were currently keeping its actual estimated path secret from the media so as to avert panic in the areas the Stone Man was heading for) police were evacuating populated areas in its immediate line of approach with, they said, an extremely large window of time to clear further areas should the need arise. The relatively low speed at which the statue (they called it a statue; this lasted until I cemented the Stone Man name with the media) was moving, they said, allowed for plenty of time to react for any changes in trajectory, and to ‘allow for any necessary further evacuations should our preventative measures, currently being implemented, fail at this point in time’. These were all quotes from earlier statements by various authorities. No interviews were being granted. These quotes were taken before the first ‘preventative measure’ had been implemented. As it then turned out, the timing of my arrival at the shop couldn’t have been any better.

  Later, I would see the whole footage from the actual fighter jet’s camera, but on that day all I had was the video that was being shown to the rest of the world; from the TV’s speakers I heard the sudden roar of fighter jets as they performed their first pass at breathtaking speed (loud even over the sound of the news helicopter’s rotors, a roar even at such great distance). Obviously the government were taking this extremely seriously; they’d hadn’t wasted time in despatching the air force. Immediately after the scream of the jets, there was the near-simultaneous boom of the just-launched Hellfire missiles as they ploughed into the Stone Man’s back, exploding with a devastating flash and an eruption of earth and debris that suddenly obscured the Stone Man from view.

  Both myself and the Asian guy behind the counter jumped. This feed was live now, and the attack—presumably the first ‘preventative measure’—had been unannounced. Neither of us said anything, and so we stood in silence as we stared at the cloud of vaporised earth that hung in the air where the Stone Man had been. We waited for it to clear, wondering if there would be nothing left but a pile of rubble, or a still-standing Stone Man. Before the cloud dissipated, we had our answer; the Stone Man became visible as it walked out from behind the haze of dirt, still travelling at the same pace, apparently completely unhindered by the strike. It didn’t even appear marked, other than the bits of earth and grass that stuck to its back, blending in nicely with the plaster dust that still adorned its surface here and there. Neither of us seemed to notice the reporter’s frantic commentary. We were too stunned, or at least I was. This was starting to look more serious than anyone had previously thought.

  Without taking my eyes off the screen, I fumbled around with my right hand until I found the han
dle to open the fridge next to the counter. I grabbed the first can I could find, pulled it out, and reached into my pocket with my left hand to fish out a coin. I put it on the counter with no idea what denomination it was; the shop assistant picked it up and put it on top of the cash register without a word. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen either. I popped the can’s ring pull and took a swig. It was fucking Dr Pepper. It would have to do.

  The tracker across the bottom of the screen changed, and now it showed a statement from the US. The Americans wanted to know what the UK’s next response was going to be to contain ‘this threat’, and offered their assistance and support, as well as echoing the UK government’s request for whichever individual or group was behind this to come forward and make themselves known. Pointless grandstanding from the Yanks, but it brought on that sinking feeling yet again; that sensation of somehow knowing that this was the beginning of something very big, and very bad. I started to glance around the store. I decided that I wasn’t going anywhere for a while, and, thirst now quenched, I wanted a proper goddamn drink.

  As I looked on the shelf just above and to the left of the counter, where the harder stuff lay, I noticed the footage on the TV had changed. Presumably due to a temporary lack of action on the live feed, the news had switched to a quick recap montage of the story so far, presumably for people coming to it fresh. A lot of it was footage I had seen firsthand; grainy footage of the Stone Man walking through the transport museum (another fist of bitter resentment slammed into my guts) followed by shots of the aftermath of its journey through the post office depot and the car hire company. Then there were shots of other damage it had caused. That was when I nearly fainted all over again, and this time I would actually know the reason. Shock. My knees actually started to buckle, but I grabbed the counter to support myself, making the shop assistant jump again.