Better the Devil

by Mike Wild

  Barely any effect at all, and Verse was not the only one to curse. Jesus, they'd thought the rippers were bad.

  It was time to face facts. Their traps and guns were proving to be as ineffectual as they'd feared, and the golems were probably going to make it to the surface, like it or not.

  They had to pull back and hope that Ravne and Farrow, and the reanimates had managed to identify and locate the cardinals. Better yet, that Brand had managed to activate the weapons Ness had told them about.

  Before they did, they had one last card up their sleeve.

  "Mr. Ness," Verse prompted.

  The Scotsman nodded. The two charges that they had managed to remove from Capek's explosive cascade had been positioned near the mouths of the Tom and Harry tunnels, at the apex of their crow's foot divergence from the junction, and had been primed to blow upwards. With a little luck, they'd bring down the roof right on top of these bastards.

  Ness pushed a hand-held remote, once.

  Tom detonated with a boom that shook the tunnel hardest yet, blasting a billowing cloud of dust and concrete at the golems and buckling a beam in the roof that brought tons of debris tumbling down. The golems roared as the rockfall began to bury them in mid-stride. Now it was Harry's turn to finish the job.

  Ness pushed his remote a second time.

  But Harry failed to go off.

  "Caps must be loose," Ness said.

  "Dammit!" Hannah cried after a second, and ran into the dustcloud towards the faulty device. Verse protested - shapes still moved in there - but he knew that it would do no good. He knew also that this was the first blow that had had any effect, and had he been quick enough he'd have done the same in her stead.

  Miraculously, his partner made it, job done and almost back with him in a matter of seconds.

  Almost.

  At the very last moment a golem reared up out of the fallen rock and swiped at her with a massive bludgeoning arm. Although she dodged desperately - had the arm made contact she'd be dead - the arm struck the stack of sleepers behind which they'd taken cover earlier.

  The uppermost sleeper was sent flying into the air as if it were no more than a matchstick, hit Hannah and brought her down. The young American lay groaning, her legs pinned beneath its weight. The golem heaved itself from the rocks and moved towards her.

  Verse immediately tried to leap to her aid, but Ness held him back.

  "Dinnae be a bloody fool, man... look."

  Verse looked. They knew that Capek intended to use the golems to spread the Formless One's chaos throughout the city, but so far had not witnessed how this might occur. Now they knew. The sleepers the golems had struck had not just been dislodged by the blow, they had been smeared and smudged and warped into shapes that they were not before - the same kind of remapping that had occurred at the Eye. In other words, it was with the golems' own destructive power that they would bring chaos to London.

  If one blow from their fists could do this to the sleepers, then what would it do to a human body?

  Verse broke away from the Scotsman. There was no way he was going to let Hannah die that way.

  But even as he moved it was too late. The golem itself had moved with surprising speed and was already looming over Hannah's prone form, its football-sized fist poised and ready to smash down into her face.

  Verse could see her struggling to free herself from beneath the malformed sleeper, teeth bared, staring it in the eyes.

  No... God, Hannah, no.

  He jolted his gaze in the direction of a sudden growing whine, then staggered back as a beam of orange energy lanced through the dust-filled air. His gaze jolted back to the golem, and he saw the neat round hole that was punched through its skull and out through its forehead.

  Hannah freed herself from under the sleeper and rolled.

  Mouth wide with shock, the golem fell where she had lain.

  As the ground shook from its sudden and unexpected demise, an exhausted-looking Jonathan Brand staggered into view.

  Ness stared at the academic as he cradled one golem gun and sagged beneath the weight of three more slung over his shoulders. "Fook me, you did it," he said. "Those babies actually work."

  "Nice shooting, Brainiac," Hannah said.

  Brand smiled wryly and passed her the golem gun he had just used. "I told you I was no good with guns," he said. "I was aiming for its heart."

  Verse moved over to him and unslung the rest of the prototype weapons from his shoulders, passing one each to Ness and Jenny, then familiarising himself with the one he kept. Now that Hannah was safe his mind had returned to the job at hand and he stared back down the tunnel at the half-buried golem, already moving in the rubble. "You might be no good with guns, but we are," he said, hefting the bulky weapon. "So what say we have ourselves a clay pigeon shoot?"

  Brand placed his hand on the gun and shook his head. "No. They have a limited charge - I'm not sure how much, but probably not enough to stop all of the golems down here. We need to conserve the charge for above, in case we need to protect the cardinals."

  "Aye, reet," Ness said. There was a whine, and he fired a beam that took off one of the golem's arms. He frowned and adjusted his grip. "The same cardinals ye havnae a bleedin' clue aboot if ah'm no' mistaken."

  "Ness, please," Brand insisted.

  Verse lowered his own gun. "The good doctor is correct," he rumbled. "Perhaps for the moment we should find out what information Mr. Ravne has for us."

  "Makes sense," Hannah agreed. She slapped the side of her weapon. "If necessary we can drain these things dead later."

  Ness hesitated and sighed in frustration. Then he jabbed his thumb down on his hand held remote and stared as the explosive in Harry tunnel blew. "Tha' should buy us some shootin' time," he said, resignedly. "Less go."

  The five of them retreated through the tunnels to the Dead of London's chamber, where they found Ravne's reanimate gestalt apparently just at the end of their seer session. All of them - Farrow, Mary, Meg and the others - looked exhausted.

  But they had produced a result.

  "The four cardinals," Ravne informed them all. "In other words, four distinct directions on the face of a compass."

  "My God, of course," Brand breathed. "Cardinal points."

  Ravne nodded. "In this case, four locations approximately north, south, east and west of Capek's excavation. Cleopatra's Needle, Lambeth Palace, the Queen Victoria Memorial, and Tower Bridge."

  Ness frowned. "Las' time ah looked ah didnae notice any o' them havin' an on switch," he said.

  "They don't, but each construction contains a warding crystal implanted by Emmanuel Konterman in 1945. Crystals that will activate during any attempt at remapping by the unformed."

  "And what do these crystals do?" Jenny asked.

  "That the reanimates could not see, but they do need to be protected."

  "Ah dinnae see why," Ness questioned. "Ah mean if these things are automatic..."

  "Somehow Capek knows about them," Ravne cut in, flatly. "Perhaps the result of a memory in which the original Konterman had already theorised upon their existence. I have no doubt that Capek will make their destruction by the golems his immediate priority."

  "Jeezus," Hannah said. "That'll spread the golems across most of central London."

  "So much for containment," Verse exclaimed, and whistled. "We're going to need to deploy people at each site and-"

  The priest stopped, aware that Ness was already at the door to the chamber. "Ah'll tek the Vic Memorial," he said, and then stared pointedly at Brand. "Can ah shoot the bastards noo?"

  The academic stared back, swallowed hard, and then nodded. "Yes, Mr. Ness," he said softly. "You have my permission to lock and load."

  Chapter Nineteen

  The golems emerged onto the surface half an hour later, their three exit tunnels disgorging first ten, then twenty, then fifty of the behemoths in various areas of the centre of London. In all, a hundred and fifty of them made up their unnatural army. />
  They moved through the streets like giants.

  It was easy to comprehend why, over half a century earlier, the Ministry of Defence had felt these things would be fully capable of repelling a Nazi threat.

  Except, of course, there was no Nazi threat, not any more. There were only civilians. Very soon after the golems began to emerge, there were considerably fewer civilians than there had been half an hour before, and the number of casualties was growing by the second.

  Under the control of the Formless One - and by the insane will of the madman Conrad Capek - the golems had but one role in their artificial lives. They were walking bulldozers, wrecking balls that were utterly indiscriminate in their destruction.

  Everything before them became an obstacle to be removed: statues. cars. buildings. anything, in fact, that lay between themselves and their primary goals, the cardinals.

  The men, women and children who died were nothing more than obstacles that tried to flee.

  As horrendous as this was, the damage they inflicted was far more than physical. Far worse than physical. The march of the golems as they headed out towards each point of the compass left wakes that were visible not only as half-razed structures, wrecked vehicles and bloody, battered corpses, but also as a growing cancer in the form of the phenomenon seen at the Eye. A distorted otherness spread from each point of impact and within its grey pall corrupted and twisted, and remapped everything that the golems attacked.

  Everything they attacked.

  Ness had seen the carnage of more wars than he cared to count, but he had never seen anything to match this, and as he yomped his way towards his chosen cardinal it soon became apparent that, as had been the case at the Eye, the ones who were dying today were the lucky ones.

  Almost as loud as the sounds of demolition, an endless screaming and wailing filled the streets, and more than once the Scotsman came across shapes that crawled or dragged themselves along the pavement towards him, pleading for his help, with bodies or faces grotesquely malformed by contact with the golems, and, under the influence of the Unformed, changing further as he watched. He could not help but recall his own agony as he had suffered the early stages of remapping at the Eye and, while he had survived, it was clear that these people were victims of a more powerful force. There was no hope for them. They were already too far gone.

  He did the only thing he could to ease their suffering - he put bullets through their brains.

  They were the first killings in a long time that gave him no pleasure at all.

  A stunned and dishevelled policeman watched him deliver one fatal shot, and for a second Ness thought the man was going to challenge him - perhaps even that he had recognised him as the fugitive he was - but in an exchange of glances it became clear the officer grasped the truth of the situation. Whatever was going on here, the normal rules didn't apply, and might never apply again. What he had seen was simply what had had to be done.

  Ness considered his silent witness for a second. Facing the same dilemma that he had at Exham, the soldier in him baulked at the idea of abandoning the mortally wounded on the battlefield. But he knew there was no way he could put every victim in his path out of their misery - it was a waste of time and bullets. Ineffectual as it made him feel, he had his own task to concentrate on.

  It went against the grain, but wha' the hell, he thought.

  The fookin' thing was next ter useless agin the golems, anyhow.

  He handed the policeman the pistol with a nod - for those who need it - and carried on his way.

  Across town, Hannah Chapter shared the Scot's sense of frustration. Making her way towards her own cardinal location, Lambeth Palace, the young American frowned as in street after street she came across the aftermath of the golems' march, a swathe of devastation that despite their best efforts the emergency services had failed to halt in any way. Police cars, fire engines and ambulances stood skewed or overturned at various junctions she crossed, and while the surviving members of their crews did what they could for the countless injured and dying, many, many more were already far beyond their help. Hannah knew there could be no blame attached for their failure to protect the general population of the city - the nature, the suddenness and the scale of this invasion must to them have been nothing less than overwhelming, and she could see it reflected in their stunned expressions and eyes.

  For once, she felt as Ness felt and itched to take revenge for the deaths caused, by using the Brown's Gas gun on the golem contingent she could see marching on into the distance, but that would bring only short term satisfaction, she knew, as well as risking compromising the whole reason for her heading to the cardinal in the first place. She had to conserve the charges. In the end, she did what she could for the agonised and mutated driver of an equally mutated paramedic van, sideswiped by a golem fist and then, like the Scotsman, moved on.

  Verse, meanwhile, heading towards the cardinal embedded at Tower Bridge, had an altogether different reason to be frustrated. The ex-priest had always thought it remarkable how, in times of crisis, otherwise lifelong non-believers had a tendency to turn to God and his agents, and today he was facing a city full of them. He had actually debated hiding the large crucifix he had strung around his neck, but that would mean denying everything that he was and he simply could not do that. Consequently, his own journey was interrupted time and again by victims who demanded words of comfort or explanations, or even last rites for their loved ones as they lay bent and dying before him. It was not these poor people who frustrated him - in fact he tended to as many as he could as best he could - but rather his absolute inability to give any explanation of the horrors affecting them. How, he wondered, could he possibly offer God's comfort when they were dying at the hands of the only thing in creation that had nothing to do with Him at all?

  Of the four of them, only Jenny Simmons was not deeply troubled by what she saw - and in truth the demoness within her found it all rather fascinating.

  She gazed out across the Thames, from her position next to Cleopatra's Needle, at the fires and the dustclouds, and the spreading grey of the Unformed as its golem-generated tendrils snaked in four directions across the city. In fact, the grey pall had become less tendril-like in the past few minutes, the more damage that occurred filling the spaces between them like a depression filled with water, and in turn creating a circle that had begun to expand about its centre. It had already reached this opposite bank of the river, and Jenny felt as if she were standing on the shore of a dark and stormy sea, chaos lapping at her toes.

  Golems were approaching across Waterloo Bridge.

  In a few minutes the fight would begin.

  The demoness turned and stared at the monument she was here to protect, the hieroglyph-inscribed obelisk thrusting above her in carved ignorance of the pivotal role that it, along with its three counterparts, was about to play in the future of the city. Could it actually, she mused, prevent the coming changes when it had already seen so many other places swept away with the dust of time? Syene, Heliopolis, Ancient Alexandria, she thought. She had known all three places - she had been at Syene when this thing had been quarried from the ground - but they were all gone now, changed forever. Was this just another place that it would watch die with its ancient hieroglyphic eyes?

  Certainly, nothing much seemed to be happening. Whatever the hell this damned embedded crystal was meant to do, she thought, now might be a good time. Useless piece of...

  The demoness booted the ancient obelisk, hard, and something inside began to glow golden brown.

  She knew immediately that the glow had nothing to do with her kick.

  Under her feet she could feel the north bank of the river quaking with golem footfalls.

  In other words, the Unformed had arrived.

  With a curse as ancient as the obelisk, Jenny hefted her golem gun from her shoulder ready to defend the cardinal and, as she did, three more of the experimental weapons were similarly hefted in the hands of Ness, Chapter and Verse. Beh
ind them, their own crystals had begun, respectively, to glow blue, orange, and white.

  Planted defiantly before the Victoria Memorial, outside Buckingham Palace, the Scotsman gobbed on the ground and waited as the charges in his gun grew with a whine, then with a whoop fired down the Mall, along which the golems approached. A lancing beam of orange energy took down one, two, three of their front line as it scythed across their chests, and then, having bought himself a second, Ness aimed more carefully, head shots dropping four more of those who came behind. The targeted golems collapsed with deep, unearthly moans. As he continued to fire, Ness was barely aware of the Royal Family being evacuated from the big house to his rear. As their armoured entourage swept around the front of the memorial and away up Constitution Hill, though he appeared to curtsey he was in fact simply kneeling to get a shot in under one of their rather inconvenient chassis. He gave a rolling wave to the shocked looking woman in the hat and cackled, beginning to enjoy himself. The gun in his hands thrummed.

  At Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Hannah Chapter adopted a slightly different tack to Ness's instant kills, though not entirely by choice. The golem gun was already a little too heavy for a frame that was much slighter than Ness or Verse's - and less demoniacally possessed than Simmons's - and she was having trouble maintaining her horizontal aim when the gun was idle, let alone when its compressed gas chamber recoiled. So it was that most of her shots served not to kill the golems but to amputate some if not all of their lower halves. The method was just as effective in preventing them from reaching the crystal that glowed above her in the arch of the gatehouse, but it did make her feel incompetent and girly, and she didn't like that at all. To rectify matters, she scanned the gardens as she fought, her gaze settling eventually on a large plant pot by a bench a few metres behind her. Backing up, Hannah booted the thing over and then quickly upended it before slamming the golem gun down on its base-become-top. Still weighted by most of its soil, it made the perfect pivot. Now that's more like it, she thought - one home-made machine gun nest. As she resumed her firing - this time aiming right between the eyes - she thought how very appropriate the name of the place she was making her stand was, because Lambeth - from loamhithe - meant muddy landing place, and she was fully intending to make sure that as many of these mud-made bastards as possible landed here hard.