“Wait, when did—”
“My love, you have to listen. I’m sorry, but there’s no time. Bad Fish knows some esoteric stuff and he owes me a favour. Well, no, he doesn’t. I’m kind of blackmailing him, but the point is he will do this for me. As soon as I sense him—”
“Kaaro, this is invasive,” says Bad Fish. He appears in a white gown, bulging at the belly, as bewildered as Aminat.
“Aminat’s in a tight spot. Do something about it and you’ll never hear from me again.” Kaaro goes quiet and starts scratching his forepaws.
“What ails you, my lady?” asks Bad Fish.
Aminat points. “Giant potted plant, eats flesh, kills aliens, and impervious to everything we have, probably about to kill me.”
Bad Fish turns around, looks at every aspect of the scene in front of him, strokes his chin. “You still have that ID hack I did for you?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“All right. I need five minutes, and I don’t know if what I plan will work, but you’ll need to stay alive for a bit. Can you run?”
“I can, but I won’t. I’m not going to spend my last hours on Earth running from anyone or anything. I can fight for five minutes.”
“That’ll have to do. Good luck, Aminat. Kaaro, fuck you as usual.”
“You have done a good kind thing, Bad Fish. I’ll buy you a present, with wrapping and a bow and everything.” The gryphon seems to purr. “Aminat—”
“I’m not talking to you,” says Aminat. “Let’s go. Crank this baby up again.”
“I love you,” says Kaaro.
“Shut up. Crank.”
Time speeds up again.
Right.
Aminat builds a fort of supplies, using only what she can understand or is trained to use. The rest she uses as crude mechanical barriers, praying that nothing explodes or sprays noxious chemicals in her face. She works steadily, hearing the beating of wings and noting how far away the sounds are. She turns and lifts a gun at the same time. This cherub is lacking a head, but has all six wings and thorny limbs flailing towards her as if falling rather than flying. She fires at it, and the super-dense bola tangles up the wings, bringing it down to the ground in a dead drop.
It struggles against the cable, and seems to be tearing off parts of itself in order to still come at Aminat. She switches guns and shoots white phosphorus. She does not have the time to see if it was effective as two more cherubs descend, too fast for her to draw a bead. She waits, and when the first is within a foot, she slams the rifle stock against it, which seems to stun it into disorganised movement. The second one is on her before she can swing back.
Its embrace is like fire, latching on to Aminat and tearing her skin where the armour is absent. She does not scream. She breathes away the panic as she has been taught. It is like being surrounded by a rainforest, and there seem to be leaves, vines and thorns everywhere, trying to kill her. She draws her hunting knife and begins to slash, range limited at first, and the wood-like parts do not sever, but slowly, she gets freer, enough to grab a sidearm with a Magnum load. Covered in sap and blood, she slashes and blasts her way free. Still they writhe at her feet. Still more come.
She drops remote-control charges at intervals and backs away. When the cherubs descend she activates the charges and flattens herself. Limbs of grass and bough scatter in all directions.
Still they come, spawning from the Beynon, smelling of rot.
Damn it, there are turrets, but she doesn’t know how to use them. Where the fuck is that miracle from Bad Fish?
The mind behind the plant is aware of Aminat now, as the sporadic spawning stops and a concentrated front of cherubs advances on her. Dozens. Absolutely no way to fight them in the open like this.
“Bad Fish, you asshole, what the fuck are you waiting for?” But she fires at the wall of green anyway, realising that there is a narrow window of survival here, but not knowing if she can fit herself in it. “Shit, I’m going to die here. Shit.”
The change in the air is pleasurable at first. It becomes warmer, and an electromagnetic change tugs at the body hair. There is gooseflesh, a feeling of an angel tickling the front of the brain, an impulse to laugh, a bubbling of the urine in the bladder. Or maybe Aminat imagines all of this while fighting homicidal plant proxies.
The plant, its leaves, vines, stems and flying cherubs, the drones and COBs above it, all glow golden yellow, then turn black, then fly apart in the wind, an ash shower being all that remains.
The cherubs Aminat is holding at bay stop fighting, become confused, and move without purpose, enlivened but mindless. She leaves them where they writhe and scuttles forward to get a closer look at the place where the plant was, to be sure it is indeed dead and gone. Her phone rings.
“Are you still alive?” asks Bad Fish.
“What the hell was that?”
“Ha-ha, I’m so glad you’re here. Kaaro would have killed me. That, darling, is a particle weapon from the Nautilus. Did it work, or do I need to fire again? It’ll take longer to charge, like thirty minutes or so.”
Aminat brushes ash off the tip of her nose. “No, we’re good here.”
“Glad to hear that. If you’re ever in Lagos…”
Aminat sits cross-legged at the edge of the destruction zone. She is silent, but it is a loud silence, deafening. Her heart feels bald, shorn of all emotion, useful only for pumping cold blood through her exhaustion. She is unsure of where her body is, or where the Earth is moving her to, or why she is.
How long she stays she does not know, or recall later during debrief, but she does know that it ends with the cracks of lightning coming from the remnants of the biodome.
“Alyssa.”
Chapter Forty
Alyssa
I know who I am. My name is Alyssa.
Alyssa knows everything.
This is her walking on her street to her home. This is her walking into the dome, stepping over corpses of fools and innocents, slipping, regaining her footing, slipping again.
This is high, high, above the clouds, on board the space station, opening hatches, preparing and charging weapons to strike down enemies.
This is a homeless man called Anthony Salerno in London being dissected by an entity he will never comprehend.
This is Alyssa cold inside the dome, unperturbed, looking for the paths to the deeper parts of the alien.
This is Rosewater full of people like her, Homians with human skins, happy, fulfilled, living again, contemplating renaming Earth.
This is the roll-up coiled in the ground, pining after her dead mate. She will be dead in a month from the grief, worms will eat her, and her stench will cause genteel noses to protest, but such magnificence deserves a last unsubtle hurrah, and the people must endure and even celebrate her putrefaction.
This is Alyssa fucking a surprised Mark.
This is Alyssa being told to dial the power down, to be more circumspect, to avoid alarming the humans, to be measured in her implementations. She says, “I refuse.”
This is Alyssa walking down a dark hole inside Wormwood, climbing, stumbling, skinning her knees.
On a rowboat, on muddy brown water, Aminat says, “The reason we get floods is the sky god, Olorun, did not take permission from the god of the waters, Olokun, before letting Obatala create land. In her anger she tries to wash all the land away.”
Inside Wormwood, there is a level of dead floaters, all hanging in the air by their bladders, looking like seahorses. Alyssa goes deeper still, where everything is moist and rotten, and the miasma is not breathable, and darkness prevails.
This is Alyssa irritated at the inequality of life.
This is Alyssa in the regeneration chamber, with the dead and half-formed Anthonys. Here is the penultimate Anthony, where he came to die. Here is the last Anthony, dead aborning. He has no skin. All of him is a skeleton embedded in the flesh of Wormwood, a few ligaments stringing one bone to another, and some drying mucus. Beyond this chamber is the place for
the first Anthony. Withered, shrunken in flexion like a burn victim, with an open skull and nervous tissue stretching from his brain to the walls and beyond. A few of the connections have detached. Alyssa knows that this connection is not functional, but is more symbolic of the bond between man and alien. All the connections needed can be made through the xenosphere.
“Here I am,” says Alyssa. “More Homian than human. Let’s do this thing.”
Here is Alyssa on Home, before it died, cataloguing empty cities and villages on her home continent. It is interesting to her that she now identifies as female, an adjustment to Earth, and that she now identifies as Alyssa, an adjustment to humanity. On Home she did not wish to live in space and was one of the last. She likes to think she was the last, but there is no way of knowing.
This is Alyssa receiving the first neuro-tentacle from Wormwood. The pain is unlike anything she has ever experienced, except maybe childbirth. The electrocution pulls at her individual nerve fibres, flowing to her spine, then rising into her brain where it explodes. And yet it is brief, because as soon as it hits the brain, Wormwood switches off her sensory cortex, and she feels nothing. The alien remembers the last time it had to do this, knows it hurts, and does not wish to cause suffering.
I know you now, says Wormwood. Welcome.
“I’m happy to be here,” says Alyssa. Her voice echoes in the chamber.
Do you want to rebuild the dome?
“There will be no dome, my friend. Follow my lead. I can see everything. Oh, this is good, this is fantastic.”
Anthony would—
“I am not Anthony, my friend. I am different.”
Alyssa sees the full xenosphere for the first time, and the battle at the heart of it. She sees a giant, a fairy, a dog and a gryphon fighting Wormwood’s nemesis, and losing. Here is her friend Aminat, on the outside, contacting another. Here is salvation from space, striking down the evil plant in an instant.
This is Alyssa in an ecstasy of power, all the restraint removed with the plant.
“So much more… it’s impossible…”
First, there are intruders in the sky and on land. She should warn them, but she chooses not to. She splits and expands the north and south ganglia, spreads them out all over the city, a network, then she protrudes new pylons, dozens, hundreds.
This is Alyssa playing with her child. Mark takes a plastic toy out of the oven where the child has deposited it. They laugh, all three of them.
This is the destruction of the invaders of Rosewater. She wants them out of her city, and they stand out, smelling like dead rats, running like cockroaches. She drops all of the drones and they fall like perverse rain, blackened. The planes fall harder, burn longer.
Chapter Forty-One
Jacques
Lora lowers Jack into the chair after his shower. He likes that she is neither disgusted nor impressed. He wonders if there’s been a change in how she deals with him since Walter’s death. She helps wheel him into the room where Hannah waits. Lora leaves and Hannah hands him cream to apply to his stump. Citric monohydrate, methyl hydroxybenzoate, some other shit, he no longer cares. She does not flinch, but he has seen the looks on her face at various times. It is quite an adjustment for her. They have not had sex since the attack. While he grooms, Lora comes back.
“Taiwo is here. He wants to talk.”
Taiwo is in fatigues, but he has several bright medals pinned to his chest. Only God knows where he got them from since Jack didn’t award them. He is considerably fatter than when Jack last saw him. He is also looking jolly. Behind him, there are four minions, armed with rifles and jacked on amphetamines.
“Mr. Mayor,” he says.
“Not for much longer. You look well.”
“You do not.”
“What do you want, Taiwo?”
“Courtesy call, really. I see there are barbarians at the gate.”
“You don’t seem worried.”
“I’m not. Your little war has been good for me. I’m a decorated war hero and a free man. Rich, too, because business boomed.”
“That won’t make a difference when the Nigerian troops string you up.” Most of Rosewater’s soldiers had dumped their uniforms and slunk back to hidey-holes.
“Oh, I’m not going to get strung up.”
“Taiwo, again, what do you want?”
“I have a way out. You were square and honourable with me. I’ll be the same way. Come with me. I’ll take you and your family along.”
Jack is touched, in spite of everything. “Wow. I never expected this from you.”
“Let’s make haste. I’ll get you new ID chips and passports.”
“I’m not going,” says Jack.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. I told you when we started this journey, there is no life for me outside Rosewater. I wasn’t kidding. I’m not going anywhere, but you will take Hannah and Lora for me.”
Taiwo shrugs. “Okay, get the illustrious Mrs. Jacques and let’s go.”
“I’m not leaving you, sir,” says Lora.
“Do I have to give you an order?”
“My job is to assist you. It looks like you still need assistance.”
“You will be assisting me by looking after my family, Lora.” He does not know whether this will sway her.
“This loyalty is touching and I may shed a tear when I’m in Majorca, but I am leaving. Now or never.” Taiwo signals to his people.
“Give me twenty minutes to say goodbye to my wife,” says Jack, and he swivels towards the quarters.
“You have five,” shouts Taiwo, but it is without venom, and Jack knows he will wait thirty minutes if need be.
In the room, he starts to apply cream to his ulcers and broach the topic with Hannah, when he double takes. The ulcers seem… smaller.
“Hannah…” He can barely speak. He points.
As they both watch, the ulcers dry up, then the skin from the edges grows towards the centre of each one, leaving a small dot of scar tissue which is itself dissipated within minutes.
“What is…?” Hannah is as confused as he is.
“This, my darling wife, is us getting back in business. Lora! Get the motherfucking president on the phone. I have to tell him directly to fuck himself with a small yam or a large potato.”
It is as he thought. The healing means the alien is back in play, and Jack can see from the hologram that those people have somehow killed the plant. The dome is not only open, but the edge of it appears to be spreading in real time. The vegetation springs back up, with shrubs, trees and creeper plants crawling out of any random collection of moist soil. Ivy grows over buildings, spouting flowers on its way. More ganglia have popped up all around the city and invaders retreat or are destroyed. Rosewater denizens are out on the street dancing, knowing healing like they have before, and celebrating.
They did it, those rag-tag assholes.
“Majorca can wait,” says Taiwo. “I think we can build a tropical, tax-free paradise right here.”
“Let’s just call it tax-friendly for now,” says Jack. “You should go home, or wherever you have decided to stay. I have people to disappoint.”
The Tired are already calling, but Jack has no interest in talking to them just yet. He makes calls to Femi and tries to connect with her away team, but he cannot reach any of them. Dahun and his crew are out of contact. He starts to get multiple, enraged text messages from the president again, but strangely, no phone call.
Lora stares at him like this was his plan all along.
“What?” he asks.
“It’s like you always say, Mr. Mayor. Skill, hard work and competence will only take you so far. Luck is the final ingredient for success.”
“Did I say that?”
“Multiple times.”
“Fine. I’ll take the credit, then.”
“Good. Are you in the mood to speak with the president?”
“Can you reach him?”
“I’ve had him on hold for
thirteen minutes.”
Ah.
He looks at the last text from the president.
It’s a photograph of a penis.
Jack says, “Let’s keep him on hold for a little while longer.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Aminat
Aminat can still run.
In spite of the upheaval and the crowds in the street, she follows a phantom, a transparent image of the hellhound who seems to want her to follow. As soon as she is almost on him, Yaro turns a corner and runs.
He stops at a building and disappears.
“Don’t let him be dead, don’t let him be dead,” Aminat says or thinks.
She dashes up the stairs to get to Kaaro who she can feel in her mind. She breaks into the room and is confronted with a room full of reanimates, although she knows he is still in there. They are passive, so she pulls three out of the room to make space, then she starts pushing them out of her way. When they are too slow she uses a hip toss and over-arm throw to speed things up. She hears the dog yapping after a few moments.
“Kaaro!”
She finds him huddled in a corner, awake but weak, mumbling, alive. She crouches and covers him in kisses. He stinks of dried sweat and his clothes are crusty, but she clutches him all the same. She even pets the mongrel.
“What are we…? Hi…” says Kaaro.
“Hi,” says Aminat. “Send your drones away.”
“Why?”
Aminat steps out of her fatigues. “Why do you think?”
Later, they walk hand in hand through the celebrating crowds. Aminat’s injuries hurt more, but she doesn’t mind. The dried blood can stay until she gets back to base. Wounds probably need suturing too. Discarded soldiers’ uniforms line the streets, and there seem to be more reanimates than ever. There are no dead lying on the ground, and Aminat knows Alyssa has succeeded. People scramble for drones and COBs, maybe as souvenirs. In the air, flakes of ash from the Beynon float about. Soft mossy substance underfoot, not terrestrial, at least not originally. Femi was right: the real war is with the aliens. Some people, singing, come along and hug them both, then depart with joy. The very air seems sweeter, but that must be an illusion, surely.
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