Authors: Terry Farricker
Catherine Williams began to weep as she became detached from the events that were befalling her. The creature with the human head had approached her and she had felt panic turn to numbness as it had continued to console her with its velvet voice, lying her on the ground and unbuttoning her coat and garments dexterously with the exposed skeletal fingers of its left hand.
‘Now, my dear, this procedure is very straightforward and requires no pain control. We will soon have those diseased, useless parts out, don’t you worry your pretty little head about that,’ and Pierre used the saw to adroitly cut Catherine from sternum to neck with such power that the breastbone collapsed under the pressure.
Catherine gasped once as Pierre removed her lungs and lay them, still quivering, in pools of blood and fluid by the side of her head. Her head flopped to one side and the floundering organ filled her vision and she thought of a crashed and broken air balloon as death began to rob her of her senses until there was nothing left.
Akeno’s eyes closed and that one minuscule action coincided with the spreading of the grey disease in a pall across the globe. Everywhere there was electricity, the creatures also existed; herding, slaughtering, torturing, culling and preparing mankind. Sucking the life force from him to preserve their new tenure on the Earth.
Chapter Twenty-One
There was no way of calculating the amount of time Alex and Frank had spent travelling through the trench system, or the distance they had covered during that period. When Frank spoke of his experiences, he recounted events that to him seemed days or even hours ago. He recalled conversations with comrades who had been dead for over a century, as if they had just happened. Alex began to fear that Frank had been here for maybe two hundred years and she herself had been here for a century. How could she guess the duration, if time was not assembled from measurable linear material?
But hadn’t the man in black told her that if she found the connection to the institute, Robert would be at the other end of the link, indicating a correlation between events on Earth in 2036 and events in the afterlife? Frank walked in front, his kit bag across his back and the rifle in his hands. They trudged through the mud and the wind whipped into the gully, bouncing from the sides of the trench as it rolled coldly across the two travelers, yet the rain was as warm as wax dripping from a candle. The two extremes only affected Alex when she decided to allow that. When she was cold she chose to notice the warmth of the rain and when she began to perspire she would permit the bite of the wind to freshen her skin.
Alex became more and more intrigued by the passage of time the longer they journeyed. Sometimes they walked non-stop in silence for what must have been two or three days, if time was being quantified in its earthly values, and yet there was no fatigue, weariness, boredom or tedium. At other times, Alex would suddenly feel complete and utter exhaustion, as if she had been injected with a serum of tranquilizers and sedatives, and she had to quickly crouch down and support herself against the wall of the trench. Still there were other occasions where her veins were on fire with a raw exhilaration and even the brief eddies of air that sprang from the confined movement of wind up and down the trench would make her flesh tense and her muscles coil like steel rope.
At intervals Frank would stop and use the field glasses slung around his neck to scan the country beyond the trench system. The line of the trench curled away into the distance, forever, like a heavy black line scrawled on a sheet of paper that rolled out into infinity. There was not even the glimmer of attainability that a horizon would afford, because there was no horizon. The landscape simply existed with no boundaries, no borders and no vanishing point. The extent to which you could view it was restricted only by your own powers of vision.
During a break, and whilst Frank took another look at the land beyond their trench, Alex sat and wondered again about her circumstances. She was drinking water from a field flask, but she was not thirsty, she was wiping sweat from her brow, but she was not actually hot and she stretched and flexed muscles that did not ache. Yet in a flash she could induce all these states. It was as if she needed to feel them every now and then to convince herself she was still Alex Douglas. In the same way she pressed her hand to her chest and experienced her own heartbeat to reassure herself, knowing she was not brave enough yet to tamper with that small detail. Frank on the other hand seemed to have given up on his humanity. He had chosen his existence like a coat, a garment that adorned him and concealed everything that had once been the man.
Alex watched Frank for a long time before she finally spoke. ‘Frank, this isn’t your war anymore.’
Frank disregarded her words and made a statement in lieu of a reply. ‘The explosions are getting nearer, enemy activity is becoming more localized.’
‘Frank. Frank, did you hear what I said?’
Frank lowered his field glasses and carried on looking anyway.
‘Frank, you’ve got to let go. You probably could see further without those glasses, you know. This, all this,’ and she swept an encompassing hand across the trench, ‘it’s what you choose.’
Frank turned and looked at her with the first trace of hopelessness she had witnessed in him. He looked like Jake now, just a lost, frightened little boy, and his voice trembled. ‘But it was my command, my command. Those men were my responsibility. They need somewhere, don’t they? Somewhere to come back to? I’m not ready to give that up.’
Alex rose and tramped through the mud to face the soldier. ‘Is that it, Frank? Is that what all this is about, your sense of duty?’
‘Alexandra, please don’t belittle me. You have no concept of my sense of duty.’
‘I’m not belittling you, Frank. In my time I was a fire fighter,’ and Frank looked puzzled, which made Alex smile. ‘Yes, Francis, women fight fires and rescue people, even rescue men.’
Alex’s smile must have been infectious because it almost caught the corners of Frank’s mouth too and he said, ‘I can believe you would rescue men, Alex, yes, I can.’
Alex playfully struck Frank’s shoulder and said, ‘Hey, times have changed, Francis!’ But then she became more morose as she continued, ‘But what I’m trying to say is I know about responsibility, Frank. I lost a friend in a fire and for a long time I blamed myself. He was under my command, he was my responsibility and I failed him and he died.’
‘I am sure that if there was any way for you to save this man, you of all people would have done it, Alex.’
‘In much the same way I am sure you equally behaved with honor.’
‘Touché, Alexandra,’ smiled Frank, and without warning Alex hugged the man, somehow managing to almost dispel his one hundred and twenty nine years of sorrow, hurt and pain. And despite himself, and against every innate instinct he nurtured, Frank embraced Alex and felt solace and comfort replace all those ruinous emotions that had fed on his soul for such a long, long time.
Alex held him like he was her child and the need in her to do that was very close to the surface, but she did not feel she was using the soldier as a surrogate for Jake and she sensed his unrequited need to be held. Not held by a lover, for she was almost certain Frank had not been granted the time in his life to enjoy many of those pleasures, but held by a mother. Held close as she stroked his hair and told him everything would be fine now.
And so they stood in the trench for what seemed like hours, Alex repeating the same consoling words again and again and Frank listening to them, until the sounds of the explosions grew too loud and incessant to be ignored any more. Frank pulled away from Alex and moved onto the firing step of the trench and whispered, ‘Dear God, no.’
Within seconds Alex was next to him. She intended to speak, but the words that formed in her throat evaporated before they could reach her mouth. The area that lay beyond this side of the trench was suffused with a glaring light that killed shadow and edged everything with harsh, brutal lines. Alex struggled to adjust her eyes to the severe luminosity, even though she told herself she was resisting abilities she knew she now possessed.
By allowing her vision time to adapt, she was still trying to convince herself she was alive and that she could repel all of this by simply denying it.
In the same way
Frank does
, she thought.
The light source was a huge orb, hanging low in the sky. Alex had thought it the sun at first. She realized now that she had not even looked beyond the trench. Ever since she had “awoken,” she had not taken notice of weather conditions. Her human mind assured her that day followed night, followed day and that weather just happened, so she had not needed to look. It was obvious that whatever conditions prevailed in the trench would be mirrored outside of it, was it not? But now, standing on the firing step and letting the scenes outside the trench filter through the haze of heat that rippled down from the sky and up from the baked earth, she was awestruck.
The orb was not the sun. There was no sun. She peered back over her shoulder at the interior of the trench. They had been walking through a light, warm drizzle since her last sleep. She had relinquished the concept of phases of the day and merely thought of the passage of time as periods between sleep. She felt comfortable sleeping, but was aware that it was probably unnecessary. But she could not give up that habitual behavior just yet, otherwise life would be one long day, like it was for Frank. That made her feel sad and she ached somewhere deep inside. It was still raining in the trench and the light was modest, with a thin film of dank mist thrown across the channel. Alex could actually decipher where the sheets of rain ended and let her hand balance halfway into the cool dry air beyond.
Alex tolerated the brightness of the orb and visually dissected the giant sphere. It hung in the sky, gently rocking back and forth, and possibly a mile high, swaying like a colossal chandelier. But now Alex saw it was actually suspended on a gargantuan chain, each link the dimensions of a skyscraper, one end of the chain disappearing into the centre of the orb and the other disappearing into infinity. Hundreds of smaller chains were draped from the globe and these stretched for miles and miles before being consumed by the land. The orb itself gave off a brittle radiance that swathed everything in yellow-white and bleached out the colors of the day, and Alex had the odd feeling it was turned on each day and duly turned off when someone decided it was night. Alex tried to remember if it had actually been dark recently, but could not recall.
From each subsidiary chain dangled thousands of beings, like moving, existing lines of decorations, a bracelet adorned with living charms. Some hung by their neck, others by their torsos or limbs and others simply held on grimly. The hapless forms suspended nearer to the source of the light were fused into the chain where it glowed hot, integrated with the links. Now her gaze fell on the scene below, which was illuminated by the boiling circle in the firmament.
The landscape was alive with a sinister, sprawling black stain of vague and indistinguishable content, moving across the ground and consuming the space between itself and the trench ferociously. At intervals one of the things gripping the chain would fall, to be consumed by the living, seething shape. At other times, and more chillingly, a thing from the higher end of the chain would fall away, tearing and ripping its body where it was bonded to the metal of the chain and plummeting incomplete to the ground far below. Slowly Alex realized the shifting shape was a huge mass of creatures, swarming like an immense army of ants, teaming, rushing and cascading over the terrain, seemingly without purpose.
Alex focused, using her eyes like the lens of a powerful camera, and saw that the beings had been painfully synthesized from merging humanoid bodies with animals and machines. This disquieting horde of soulless shells, deformed, blighted, impaired and racked with mental and physical anguish flowed forward slowly, loosely forming the ranks of a monstrous army of freaks. Alex felt pity and revulsion in equal measures as she witnessed the appalling multitude falling forward. The momentum created meant that often those at the forefront of the torrent were trampled underfoot and compacted and compressed into mangled lumps of bloodied flesh.
Alex found it difficult to determine the nature of the different creatures. They seemed impossibly twisted and disfigured, making a swell of bodies that resembled a single tide of limbs and heads with very little means of differentiating between the individual members of the group. Alex saw human legs, carcass-like and rotting, propelling engineered torsos that were rusted and battered. Some of the atrocities were limb-less and some were guided by perennially staring eyes, held aloft on bloody stalks of tissue. Giraffe proportioned legs galloped at speed bellowing thick, black smoke from tubular attachments. The bodies sliced away horizontally to create a hollow area that was still awash with the innards of the original beast. And this cavity now served as transport for a dozen small machines of indeterminate nature. Alex thought these machines to be cheering but when she looked closely she identified human heads attached to these mechanisms, heads that screamed and twisted as if subjected to torture.
And everywhere the giant spiders. The bulbous, black bodies were distended, eye-less, smooth and wet with a lubricant that oozed from the place where eyes should have been housed. Bloodless veins bulged like marble pillars beneath the taut skin and ten-foot-long spindly legs, picked their way over the masses. Yet the arachnid limbs were mechanical, with gleaming silver apparatus obvious where the skin was at its thinnest and each was tipped with wickedly sharp points and covered in razor-sharp barbed wire hair. The bladed legs sliced and punctured the members of the contingent beneath, dismembering and decapitating as they scurried and scampered. The mouth was a horrific slice cut into what Alex supposed was the face of the monster, and rows of small dagger-like teeth were revealed when the flesh was peeled back in an evil contortion of muscle and sinew.
Alex looked at Frank and breathed, ‘What the hell is this?’
Frank did not return her look but answered, ‘You have answered your own question, Alexandra.’
‘No Alex, this isn’t Hell. This is someone’s version of Hell. These wretched souls are being manipulated, kept from moving onto other states, or even from making their own destinies. That’s why the machine keeps everything like this, until it can return to Earth and unleash this madness there. Then it will be content to watch its play-mates destroy everything, feeding on the energy created!’
‘This machine, Alex. You really believe my own father was involved in its birth, its creation? And you believe he
is
involved in its plans?’
Alex turned from the spectacle on the plains and faced Frank. ‘Your father was a good man, Francis, and he loved you and your mother, but when he lost you to the war and your mother to her grief, he was bitterly lonely and sad. The machine is an extension of that. I think it is fuelled by all his despair, his hopelessness. And it’s recreating it here. But it thinks the despair and hopelessness it can wreak on Earth will help it grow. And it’s probably right, Francis.’