I let out a rush of air, trying to pump myself up, but I was even more nervous now. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Then I just thought Fuck it, thought somehow replaced by pure action, and grabbed Paul’s hand tight, bracing myself as I did so. I closed my eyes.
There was no change whatsoever.
I opened one eye, and saw Paul doing the same. He clearly had nothing either.
“Shit …”
His shoulders dropped, as did mine, but he didn’t let go of my hand. Instead, he shook it.
“Well,” he said with a sad shrug, “before things get all crazy again … nice to see you, mate.”
I nodded, and clapped him on the shoulder in a rare moment of instinctive physical contact from me—I could see that he’d meant what he said, and I wanted him to know that the feeling was mutual—but I was crestfallen. Amazingly, there was no relief; now I knew that guilt wasn’t an issue, all I could think of was what I’d just become. Whatever connection I had to the Stone Man, it was now gone, or this was a different Stone Man altogether. I felt empty. I was convinced that I was probably going to be discredited, but even if that didn’t happen … I was surplus to requirements here. If there were answers to be found, they weren’t going to come from me; I wasn’t going to be the guy who solved the mystery. Effectively, I was nobody, because whoever did find out the truth, they would far outclass the guy who was there before them. They would be today’s news, the new golden boy or girl, and although my money was going nowhere, I realised that what I cared about were the trappings of being a media darling. I knew it … and I didn’t care. In that moment, any thoughts of the moral implications of wanting to be a hunter again didn’t even penetrate, and all I could see was my social status slipping away, potentially replaced by a newcomer. I felt panic.
You can judge me. Just remember, you haven’t tried it. Whatever you might think of it, see if you get to try it, and then see if you want to give it up, however false it might be. Hell, maybe you would, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just a shallow prick. I don’t care. You owe me, so fuck you. You all owe me.
Anyway.
I quickly tried to think of anything that was different. Could I still be in the loop, could I think of anything that had changed? If I could, I might be able to fix it. What had changed …
I sat on the nearest table and let my legs swing, lost in thought.
“Still nothing,” said Straub, and it wasn’t a question. Everyone else in the room visibly deflated, and tension was replaced by angry disappointment.
“Wait, wait,” I said, staring at the floor and waving a hand. “Let me think …” David was pulling out his walkie and shaking his head.
“It’s okay, Andy,” he said, using a lightly sarcastic tone as he put the walkie to his mouth, “we have some of the finest scientific minds in the world to do that for us, so we’re all right on that front. Thanks, though.” He pushed the button. “R7B, prep for helicopter pickup immediately, transport to Coventry ASAP.” The voice on the other end responded, and he pointed the walkie’s aerial in our direction. “We’re leaving in two minutes.” He turned to Straub. “I think this is a waste of time. It’s obviously not the same one.”
“What’s a waste of time?” asked Paul. I got the feeling that he’d dealt with David already today, and didn’t like him either.
“Second plan, if this didn’t work,” said Straub, answering for David. She sounded gutted, as if she had run out of options. “Authorised when you were getting nothing on the way over here, a last-ditch check. We get you near Caementum again, see if it makes any difference. Have to try it, at least.” She pointed to a door in the back wall. “There’s a toilet through there, and I’d advise using it if you haven’t been recently. Bird’ll be ready any second, and God knows when you’re going to get another chance to go.”
Paul grunted, and headed towards the door Straub had pointed to. The combination of my intense nerves and the mention of the toilet loosened something in my bladder. I realised I couldn’t remember when I’d last gone … it had been at the start of the flight over. Being someone who makes a rule of never passing up a chance for a piss (you really do never know when you’re gonna get the chance to go when you’re in an urban environment), I held up a finger.
“Am I all right to go as well?”
I saw David scowl, but Straub ignored him.
“You’re not under arrest, Mr Pointer,” she sighed. “You’re helping us, and this isn’t a classroom, contrary to appearances. Go, but be quick.”
I entered the toilet just as the cubicle door shut behind Paul, which was fine by me. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable stood at the urinal with my cock out next to another man. Most people seem to just accept it as the done thing, but I’ve always been inherently aware of the actual reality of the situation. Same as communal showers; just not for me. This is one confusing social situation where for once I feel like I’m the one with the problem, though.
We both urinated in silence, and the only sound was liquid hitting porcelain. It felt awkward for me, though, and as ever, I felt an almost panicked compulsion to break the silence. This time I managed to think of something, and it was a genuine question.
“How’ve you been? I have to say … you’re not looking the same.”
I small snort came from the cubicle.
“You noticed, eh?” Paul said, his voice echoing slightly off the tiled walls. “Like I said … I haven’t been sleeping well. Life at home hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses, to be honest.”
“No?”
“Nope. The Mrs doesn’t get much sleep now, ’cos of me at night. I get … well … I get more nightmares now, to tell you the truth. Bad ones.” He was saying it in as lighthearted a way as he could manage, but again I knew better, the truth more clear in his words than he realised. “So after a bit it started to, y’know … frazzle her nerves a bit. Lost her patience with me after a while.”
“Patience with you doing what?”
There was a pause, and a small sigh.
“I dunno … I’ve not really been … myself, so much. I’ve missed a lot of work. Signed myself off as sick for a few weeks. Just couldn’t face going in, you know.” He paused, and then continued. “I’ve been moping about a lot, if I’m honest. Been finding it hard to go out. She was good about it at first, but … she gets frustrated sometimes. I suppose I don’t really blame her.”
There was silence again, as if he wanted me to give my opinion, but I was thinking about my own situation. I’d had nightmares, but what had happened with Patrick had clearly taken its toll far more on Paul than it had with me. For the umpteenth time in my life, I felt a darkness in myself and wondered what the hell was wrong with me. Okay, medically, I knew, but that knowledge doesn’t help when you’re made to feel like a robot. Even in that moment, I should have been thinking about Paul, about what he was saying, but there I was, internalising again. I pulled my thoughts together.
“Have you seen anyone?” I asked, trying to make some kind of supportive response. I was trying. Isn’t that worth something? “Have you thought about getting helllllllllll—” My jaw suddenly stuck, and I held that last syllable as my entire body cramped up and I fell sideways. There was a white flash as my head hit the tiles, and I heard a corresponding bang from inside the cubicle. I was dimly aware that it had come from Paul falling bodily against the plastic cubicle wall.
Something was happening, that much was clear, but at that moment in time my main concern was not swallowing my tongue. No Shaun here to jam a wooden spoon between my jaws today, as my teeth ground painfully together and spittle ran from the left hand corner of my mouth. I remember thinking faintly that I’d been very lucky; I’d been milliseconds away from zipping up my fly. If it had hit at that moment, there could have been some major complications.
My knees were drawn up into my chest, and my head and shoulders pulled down towards them so much that they touched my forehead. It was like my entire body was trying to
draw inside itself, as the pull kicked into me properly with intense force. It was all over me, expanding inside my bones, and then suddenly, behind the darkness of my screwed-up eyelids, a light seemed to grow. Here we go, I thought, and I was right. Emerging slowly into view, I saw a face.
It hung there just like before, but just as it fully arrived it became another, then another, too quick to see anything other than a flash of skin. Then back to the first one, too fast to make any of them out, their features and outlines so faint that at the speed they were switching they just became a blur of flesh and hair. One of the faces belonged to a woman, I thought I could see that much.
I can vividly remember there being a loud snapping sound this time, and then it all passed. I was lying on the tiled floor, soaked right through to my suit with sweat, and I could hear Paul breathing heavily as he pulled himself to his feet.
“Andy?” he gasped, fiddling with the catch on the cubicle door.
“Yes, fine, fine,” I croaked back, realising my throat was now sore and dry. “You see that?”
“It was crazy,” he said breathily, emerging from the cubicle. Like me, his clothing was dark with sweat. “It was just this … mess … I can’t really describe—shit, have you seen your eye?”
I got up shakily and turned to the mirror, and then cried out in surprise. My right eye was totally bloodshot. I looked like something out of a horror film.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” said Paul earnestly, trying to reassure me. “That shit heals, I know. It’ll go.” I forced myself away from the mirror and turned back to Paul, noticing the change in the pull. The first time it was all over my body, but singular, focused. Today, it had been without direction, without any sense of purpose. Now it seemed different again, like it was focused, yes, but …
“Does it feel the same as last time to you?” I asked Paul, and he looked down, trying to focus.
“No …” he said, uncertain. “It’s like … it’s harder to pick out. Can you tell which direction it is? There’s … uh … it’s going different ways?”
He was right. That was exactly what it felt like.
“Something’s changed,” I said, and was immediately proved right as Straub burst through the door.
“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted. She looked, for the first time, as if she were no longer in control of herself. Something had definitely happened. “Get a move on! We’re delaying the chopper, you have to get on those maps now and see if anything’s different—” She cut off abruptly, our appearance finally penetrating her fury. Looking at my bloodshot eye, she said, “Something changed, hasn’t it? Did you detect it? Can you feel it now?”
“Wait, what the hell’s happened out there?” asked Paul, bewildered. It had been a very intense two minutes.
“I think we know why you weren’t getting anything,” said Straub, hurriedly leading us back into the other room, where both David and the two civilians were jabbering frantically into walkies or telephones and hammering at computers. “It was waiting.”
“Waiting? What for?” I asked, my blood running cold, but I thought I already knew.
“Backup. It’s not alone. There are two more of them. And they’re different.”
***
Chapter Seven: Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad, A Dressing Down From David, The Sergeant, and A Very Unpleasant Trip To Birmingham
***
People went nuts. If things were bad before, this time it was far worse. If had just been the Stone Man alone, it might have died down quicker, but the panic and hysteria started in Coventry and spread like wildfire. Plus, the destruction before had been immense, but now it would spread in three directions, or perhaps become one solid wall of moving implacability. The concept was terrifying.
All the Internet theorists already believed that the Stone Man had caused Patrick’s reported ‘heart attack’, intentionally or otherwise. They said either the force that powered it, or the strange stone-like material that its extraterrestrial body was constructed out of, was fatal to whichever human it had selected, simply by standing in their presence. Some believed that whoever sent the Stone Man was threatened from afar by the existence of its particular victim, that its creators knew something about the human gene that we didn’t, and that they felt that Patrick could not be allowed to breed and create more like himself. Some fringe elements believed that Patrick was really an undercover alien, tracked down and executed by the Stone Man’s vengeful owners. The theories were endless.
The one unifying through line in all of them, however, was that intentionally or otherwise, to be the Stone Man’s target meant death. Everyone—even the politicians, reluctantly, as they had to be—was in open agreement on this. And that fact made it even more terrible during the Second Arrival when, across both traditional and social media, an immediate and forceful cry went up around the world:
Who are the Stone Men here for, and how do we find these people?
***
We were led at a run to Paul’s previous computer terminal, when an idea struck me. I grabbed Straub’s arm.
“Before, I visualised it,” I said, blood rushing in my veins whilst the pull tried to drag me simultaneously in what I now knew were three separate directions. “I could see it, walking across the map, like in a computer game. I think I might need to see the new pair to be able to do that.”
Straub didn’t say a word, and instead waved her hand at a soldier who’d been holding a tablet PC up for one of the civilians, waiting patiently as they barked responses into their phone. The soldier hurried over, despite the civilians’ protests (these ended sharply as soon as the civilian saw that the soldier had moved under Straub’s orders) and Straub took the tablet from him. She thrust it into my hands, and I saw the now-familiar shot of the Stone Man standing in Millennium Place. But as I already knew, it had brought company. Behind it, seen via the slightly grainy Internet feed being shot from above, I saw the two new Stone Men … even forewarned, I was shocked that these were indeed different.
The basic design was the same as the original—the tapered hands, the slightly elongated head, the rough, rocky surface and the gentle bend at the waist—but most notably, these were bigger. If the original had been around eight feet, these were closer to ten. And even more curiously, they were a different colour. The original was still its dark, greyish-brown colour, a fact that was even more clear now; all of the dust that had been surrounding it the last time I saw it was gone. Someone or something had given it a rubdown.
The new ones—albeit in a dim, washed out kind of way—were a pale, sickly blue.
I don’t know why—maybe it was their size making them appear even more destructive and unstoppable, maybe it was the colour, maybe it the was the knowledge that they were here to remove parts of someone’s body, and couldn’t be stopped until they had—but seeing them there, motionless in the centre of Millennium Place on that cool October afternoon … it scared the crap out of me.
“Jesus …” said Paul. I’d seen enough, and pushed the tablet away.
“Right, got it,” I muttered, and moved over to the computer screen and sat down, feeling uneasy, but not about whether or not I could work my magic this time. I knew I could; the incident in the toilet had made that clear enough. I didn’t have time to enjoy or consider what I was actually doing in my reacquired role, or think about the bigger picture involved. Already, there had been another switch, and the job at hand meant that I just had to get on with it.
On the screen was a map of the UK. The PC functions were unnecessary, I knew; even if we zoomed in, we wouldn’t get a clearer image of where the target was. At this range, just like before with the normal map, I couldn’t be any more accurate. We would have the rough area, and we would have to travel there, but this time we had extremely rapid transport.
“You got this?” said Paul, leaning on the back of my chair. I thought about it; it might be different with three.
“Um … I don’t know,” I said, head whirling.
“Put your hand on my shoulder and concentrate or something. Think of the original Stone Man. We’ll do him first.”
Paul did as he was told, and as he did so I suddenly froze, half-expecting the jolt like our first meeting, and with no time to warn him … but it didn’t come. It seemed that once the circuit was complete, it was complete for good. Letting out a sigh, I looked at the map as I tried to picture the first Stone Man’s solid bulk in my head, mentally putting it in Coventry on the screen before me.
Almost immediately, and far more quickly than before, the monitor disappeared and I was seeing the UK from above, with the moving seas again surrounding it. It was incredible, yet effortless and natural at the same time; of course I could see the UK like this, it was just a question of shifting perspective. I saw that now. Whilst I saw the Stone Man stood still, my finger—not my whole hand this time, my finger, as with Paul’s boost I could be more specific—raised of its own accord and travelled north again, fast at first, covering hundreds of miles. This target was a lot further north than Sheffield. It passed the border into Scotland, slowed down around Edinburgh … and stopped.
“Edinburgh,” I whispered, and Straub immediately pointed at the nearest soldier, who started whispering into their walkie.
“Can you zoom in? Get us an address?” she asked, and I shook my head and shushed her.
“Paul,” I said, feeling calm and focused now. “Think of the one on the left, the first blue one. Can you see it? Focus on them?”
“Got it,” said Paul, equally quietly. We were working in sync, feeling our way together. The Stone Man on the UK image before my eyes was now switched, it’s larger, pale blue companion taking its place. This time, my finger barely moved.
“Birmingham,” I said.
“Thank Christ,” breathed Straub, “minimal damage at that range.”
“The other one now, please, Paul,” I said, taking a deep breath before the final attempt.
The Stone Man - A Science Fiction Thriller Page 28