Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

“Cheevers is pretty hopeful,” McCulloch said. “About letting you do it.”

  “It’ll be ready in a bit,” Sophia said. “I told her she should call the resin process Gilroyfication. She laughed but like she didn’t get it. You’ve seen it. The pieces. The light.”

  Her face changed and McCulloch looked where she was looking. Led by a police car, two official-looking black cars picked slowly along the track. Two men and two women in suits got out of the front car. From the car behind came three students McCulloch half-recognized, and then Paddick.

  He was in overalls—dig clothes. Sophia ran toward him and he glanced at her and away again. He spoke to his government minders and walked quickly toward the dig. The police got in Sophia’s way.

  “What the fuck’s he doing here?” she shouted.

  McCulloch grabbed one of the civil servants. “What is this?”

  “Who are you?” the man said.

  “A mate of Gilroy’s. What’s Paddick doing? You need to hold him off, mate. You know Alan Cheevers? He’s Gilroy’s law. He’s talking to Budd. This girl’s going to get permission to dig this up as soon as it’s good to go.”

  “Is that so? Well, I’ve just come from Budd’s office and that’s why we’re here. With Gilroy a fugitive there’s a certain urgency, everyone agrees. Including Cheevers.”

  “So what you doing? Let her in.”

  “Oh it’s coming up, but we’re hardly going to let one of Gilroy’s do it, are we?” the man said. “That’s why Paddick’s here.”

  Sophia hollered curses. “Stop him! Fucking intruder! It’s him you should be arresting!”

  Deep in the dirt, illuminated by floodlights, Paddick and three of his students dug around a clotted-looking, muddy shape.

  “That’s ours! That’s the prof’s! She found it.”

  The rough outline of a human body. It was not in the boxer’s pose typical of those who died in heat: it lay fully extended like a diver. Its arms and legs were still hidden in the earth, hands shoved into a piled-up mound where something was yet to be uncovered.

  “I’m begging you,” Sophia said. “I know this stuff better than anyone except the prof. Way better than him. It’s not ready. Don’t you understand? It hasn’t been long enough. You have to wait.”

  Paddick cranked the lights up. He dug faster, scooping out ground from around the body quickly enough that his students looked alarmed. He started to brush the shape clean.

  “That’s way too hard,” Sophia shouted.

  One of the ministry women remonstrated with him but Paddick paid no attention. He picked clots of earth from the body, he wiped it with a cloth, showing the clear resin.

  What he was uncovering was a woman.

  Paddick rubbed her midriff so hard one of his own students shouted at him. The arc light shone into the uncovered perspex and the whole area around the dig shone. Paddick wrestled with the body, sending scintilla everywhere.

  There was too much light. The gemlike flaws, the shards of color in the body-shape glowed. It was thick with them. They were scattered through the figure, with the dead bodies of beetles and mice, little stones, the tips of roots.

  Paddick wiped the clear face clean, and gave a scream and stepped back in shock.

  “Jesus,” Sophia gasped.

  Paddick’s students gazed.

  McCulloch’s mouth went dry.

  The cast glinted. The moment stretched. The vectors of the find like glass on glass, it was hard to parse the gasping face as a face, let alone a specific one. But still everyone stared at the harsh transparent features between Paddick’s hands. The lined and angled contours, the aquiline jut of a nose.

  Light poured from it. The thing shone.

  “She’s not ready,” Sophia said. Not loud, but McCulloch could hear her.

  Paddick gripped the figure. One of the women from the Ministry of Antiquities jumped into the hole and shouted for help, tried to wrestle him away, but he kept yanking hard on what was uncovered.

  And the resin was not yet set, and the woman-shape started to bend at the waist as if in pain.

  Paddick pressed furiously on the face as if to make sense of it. Those features, so precise, so familiar moments before, began to sink as if at a vacuum within. They distorted into an ugly and incomprehensible mask. Unrecognizable as anyone, and barely as a human.

  The figure twisted. Light still shone, the glimmers glowed, but they diminished as the body-shape twisted and contracted like a toy on the fire. Its hands and feet stayed in the earth as if tethered. McCulloch could barely watch.

  The glow of colors went out. The thing was not a crystal person any more: it was a horrible nothing full of dead bugs like currants in a bun.

  The police went in at last and pulled Paddick away. He was staring, looking as if he had changed his mind. The hole filled with people struggling to rescue the find as it sagged.

  McCulloch turned away and came out from under the tarpaulin and did not look back. He stood by his old car and looked up at a night with no moon.

  “You fucking bastard,” he heard Sophia shout.

  He breathed deep and tried to slow his heart and watched the constellations and remembered recognizing Orion’s Belt for the first time, in the sky over a London cemetery, where he, a wistful teenager, had gone to smoke.

  For two days after the excavation McCulloch did not answer or make any phone calls.

  The police announced an island-wide search. Gilroy was not found. Then or ever.

  He spoke to no one. There would be stories of the professor’s disappearance. They would become more and more embellished. McCulloch did not want to hear.

  On the second night he went back to the edge of the sea. The quietest and darkest part of the shore he could find. He sat on pebbles with his toes in the waves.

  Surely the flow must have pushed the dead into the surf, and cooked them. Set in the cold water while they moldered into ooze. Surely the shallows around the island must be punctuated with hidden hollows, he thought, body-holes full of seawater and ragworms.

  McCulloch did not have caller ID, so he picked up his phone at last. It had been three days. It was Cheevers.

  “Where’ve you been, man?” Cheevers said. “Have you heard from Will or Sophia?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe we got there after all the confusion. The thing was more or less just a blob by the time Will and I turned up! But you, you saw it. I saw you didn’t have to make a statement, lucky you, I think everyone involved has agreed to draw a line under this particular shitshow. What did it look like?”

  “… I can’t. I can’t describe it.”

  “They poured some solvent on it which melted it right down to get out whatever was inside. Right now they’re arguing about whether or not Paddick’s fit to stand trial. I don’t think there’s any way he’ll be found not sane.”

  “What’ll he get?”

  “Destruction of Antiquities … Maybe six months? We know he’s got someone on his side, he won’t go down very long.”

  “Yeah, he has. Got people on his side. Just how curious were you to see that thing?”

  “Care to expand?” Cheevers said after a moment.

  “Ministry bloke said you agreed he should dig the thing out.” McCulloch could hear Cheevers’s breath. “That true?”

  “No. All I said was it was urgent it come out.”

  “After they decided he should do it.”

  “That was a fait accompli. You should have seen them when they got word Gilroy had disappeared out of her cell—”

  McCulloch rang off.

  The phone rang every couple of days. If it was Cheevers McCulloch did not know. He did not answer or check his messages, or go to Coney Island or do anything but sit behind his counter half the day and drive in the lowest uplands into the evenings.

  Three weeks after the woman was uncovered and ruined, Sophia came into the shop.

  She was dressed more formally than he had ever seen. Almost prim. McCulloch
felt a wash of care that disarmed him. He controlled his smile, made it cautious. She smiled back.

  “Wasn’t expecting to see you,” he said.

  “Come to say goodbye,” she said. “I’m going to London tomorrow. Will’s gone already. He went on Friday. Some of the others … Well, Charlotte went a couple of weeks ago.”

  “Right,” McCulloch said. “Good luck.” They were both silent, and after a while he grimaced theatrically. “I’m sorry that it’s all been a bit …”

  “Yeah. You know they kept the half-bloke and that arm. You should go to the museum. They’re there. I was talking to the curator, and she said they’re going to shine spotlights through them. That could look pretty great if they do. You heard what they decided about the resin in the end—?”

  “I heard.”

  There was nothing toxic in it. The government had ruled that it could be used again.

  “Remember?” she said, and looked at him closely. “I remember what it looked like all the time. Don’t you?”

  “Course.” They were silent a while.

  “You didn’t see it after,” she said. “I got up close. You were gone.” She shook her head. “People are going to get used to seeing them cast like that. They won’t look like jewels any more.”

  “I sort of thought the opposite; that they always would.”

  Sophia considered. “That would be nice.” She hesitated. “Thanks. It was nice of you to help. After the first time we came in, anyway.” She even grinned. “If you count extortion as less than nice, then you weren’t that nice that first time.”

  “Who is?” he said. “Sorry about Gilroy. I know you liked her. Both of you, I mean.”

  Sophia met his eyes and her own eyes narrowed. She looked quizzical, almost amused.

  “Really?” Sophia said. “Oh, I think she did OK.

  “And ‘liked’ her?” She shrugged. “Will was in a bit of a state afterwards, I suppose that’s true. Me?” She shrugged again. “I respected her. Learned a lot. I don’t know what you’d say I felt about her.”

  She bought a key ring, like Will had done. A plastic figure of a dead alien cast in plaster. McCulloch tried to give it to her but she said no and gave him money. Sophia had the door open when he called her back.

  “Hey,” he said. “What was the other thing you found? Next to—the woman?” She said nothing, and showed nothing on her face. “Come on, I was right there. That cast Paddick messed up was pointing towards a big mound of mud. Something you hadn’t uncovered yet. Did you?”

  “Yes. We hadn’t filled that hole yet.”

  “Were they not connected?”

  “Good question. That’s not a hundred percent clear. When we did fill it we weren’t allowed to use the resin, obviously, so we did it with plaster. Old school. We dug it out and, yeah, it was right up by where she’d been. The woman you saw. You remember her hands?” She held hers out as if straining to reach something. “In the earth? It was like she wanted to touch what we found. If it was anything.”

  “If?”

  “Yeah. You can’t always tell. That happens sometimes. The ground moves about, hollows appear just naturally. There are a million weird holes everywhere. You pour stuff in, you never know what shape it’s going to make. What’s going to come up. What we got was big and sprawly and opened out, like with chambers, and a bunch of what might’ve been wings and arms and legs, or might’ve been rat tunnels, or might’ve been nothing. Might’ve been just holes.”

  “Did you keep it?” McCulloch said at last.

  “Someone did, maybe.”

  Fiorelli and his workers must have erred on the side of caution. After their first uncovering, they must have filled all manner of random chasms, made cast after cast of the shapes left between slabs of straining earth. They were doubtless all destroyed, those statues of impossibilities, spindly crevice-spiders, Giacometti burrow-people in plaster.

  “Whatever it was, if it was anything, it looked like she was holding on to it, or trying to,” Sophia said. “Holding its hand.”

  She walked to the front of the shop. She could be wearing any necklace or bracelet beneath her high-necked long-sleeved clothes. McCulloch looked up and watched her go in the rounded security mirror, her body distorted into something wide and shining.

  “Even if it didn’t have one,” he said. Even if there was nothing there.

  Sophia turned in the doorway. She said, “Just like she was holding its hand.”

  THE CRAWL

  A TRAILER

  0:00–0:04

  Blackness. Slow, labored breathing builds into a death rattle.

  Voice-over, elderly female (A): “We lost the world.”

  0:05–0:09

  Series of fixed-camera shots of cities destroyed, deserted but for wind. The urban images become interspersed with close-ups of wounds and dead flesh.

  Voice-over, A: “To the dead.”

  0:10–0:13

  An overgrown yard crowded with rotting corpses. They shamble.

  At the furthest corner of the lot, something hidden in the weeds snatches a zombie and pulls it down and out of sight.

  0:14–0:16

  Young man (Y) runs through charred remains of an art gallery. A mob of bloody dead run after him.

  0:17

  Blackness. Sound of wet explosion.

  0:18

  Y has turned, is staring at a swamp of decaying blood, all that is left of his pursuers.

  Voice-over, A: “We’re all prey to something.”

  0:19–0:21

  Interior, a broken-down shack. Unkempt men and women surround Y. He says, “They were taken!”

  A young woman says, “By what?”

  0:22–0:28

  Montage of zombies. Some shuffle, some run. Every one of them is taken, yanked into the shadows by something unseen.

  Voice-over, A: “First they walked. Then they ran. Now it’s a new phase.”

  0:29–0:33

  Close-up, a dead man’s face. Camera pulls back. He is one of many zombies in a city square. They crawl toward the camera.

  They do not crawl on their knees but on their toes and their knuckles or fingertips or the palms of their hands. They move at odds with their own bodies, like humans raised by spiders.

  0:34–0:35

  Director card.

  0:36

  A dead hand slowly lowers a gavel.

  0:37–0:39

  A schoolroom. We see the elderly woman, A, for the first time. She speaks to survivors.

  She says, “Life adapts.”

  0:40–0:44

  Voice-over, A: “So does death.”

  A lone zombie on the flat roof of a tower. Looks down at humans on the street. Grabs its own solar plexus with both hands.

  Cut to humans below. Drop of blood hits one man’s shoulder. He looks up.

  The zombie flies overhead, descending, dripping, its arms outstretched, tugging its own rib cage apart and its bones and skin taut, making them wings.

  0:45

  A bat crawls across cement on the points of its folded wings and its stubby feet.

  Voice-over, A: “There are new ways to be.”

  0:46–0:49

  A man staggers in a book-lined library. A zombie clings to him with all its limbs, biting his chest. It stares at him. It is sutured to him. The stitches go through both their flesh and clothes.

  0:50–0:52

  A cellar packed with fresh corpses, knee-deep in oil. A fat nozzle descends the stairs and gushes, slowly filling the room and covering the motionless dead.

  0:53–0:54

  The hand continues to lower the hammer.

  Voice-over, unknown man (B)’s voice: “A different collective.”

  0:55–1:00

  A montage of crawling zombies, alone and in groups, in many different locations. Some chase living humans, some chase standing zombies. The crawlers tear their quarries apart.

  Voice-over, A: “The dead who walk and us, we’re both a problem.” />
  1:01–1:04

  A zombie crawls vertically, gripping the wall of an elevator shaft in ruined hands. The shot pans: human survivors stand, oblivious, by the open door one floor above.

  Voice-over, A: “Something’s taking care of it.”

  1:05–1:08

  The dead hand touches the hammer to the wood at last. It makes a tiny click.

  1:09–1:14

  Survivors in an aircraft hangar, by a broken drone. There is growling. Dark smoke pours from the drone’s engine.

  Cut to a control room. A dead drone pilot watches them on monitors, blasts the jet with one hand. Pull back: he has been stitched spread-eagled throughout the room, a flesh web.

  1:15–1:18

  Y hefts heavy hydraulic spreaders. There are fragments of the dead around him. He whispers, “They didn’t come back …”

  1:19–1:23

  Night. A factory. Its windows are lit from within and we glimpse grotesque silhouettes.

  Voice-over, B: “We haven’t got there, yet.”

  1:24–1:27

  Close-up of the face of the young woman who spoke at 0:20. She is newly dead.

  Voice-over, A: “What wouldn’t rage? We’re eggs that don’t want to hatch.”

  The corpse opens her eyes.

  1:28

  Blackness.

  Voice-over, A: “We knew it was war …”

  1:29–1:33

  A bridge over a river. Two zombies kiss so hard their faces distort as they shove into each other. Behind them, a violent battle between crawling and standing dead.

  1:34–1:37

  A ruined office. The clicking of a keyboard.

  A young female voice off-camera: “Someone’s at work.”

  1:38–1:41

  A dark room. A group of long-dead corpses sit, quite still, around a table.

  At one seat is a living man, shivering with cold. He pushes a sheaf of papers forward, as if for consideration.

  1:42–1:45

  A rocky hillside. Hundreds of zombies crawl into the entrance of an old mine.

  Voice-over, A: “… Not that it was civil war.”

  1:46–1:49

  Night. Zombies stand motionless by a wire fence. Beyond it are rough edgelands that are rapidly becoming invisible.

  Voice-over, A: “Between the second dead …”

  1:50–1:55