Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  The Harvesters were men, or had been before the sickness curdled their looks and minds and they took to mixing mechanical bolt-ons with the living flesh they stole from others. Over their shoulders they carried giant keep-nets. In the folds of long leather kilts they kept weapons – serrated blades and keratin-shelled Sone guns. Warrior-like in their black armour, they moved noiselessly over the pale land.

  Pig iron furnaces littered the hills like demon eyes. Inbetween, the housing pods were scattered. Slathered with a plaster of lime-kiln dust mixed with clay from the north-west hills, the barrows resisted the rain. But they were vulnerable as snails’ shells to the footfall of the Harvesters.

  Except, the dry leathered bodies of the old and the furnace workers were not to the invaders’ taste. Their eyes were on closer quarry – the large lime-choked building with a bell tower.

  The boy pressed his face into the monitor mask located alongside the meshed hatch. Words filtered out into the passage, the voice tinny and distorted.

  “Thank you, Sam. I’m pressing the buzzer to let you in.”

  He pulled away from the chilled metal. Weak daylight flooded his corneas. The thin rasp of the buzzer sounded. He grasped the handle of the heavy dividing door – reinforced on the inside with wavy sheets of pig iron and thick wooden buttresses – and entered the main lobby of the school.

  “Late again, Sam?” The secretary, Ms Christchurch, put her head around the door of her office. Ms Christchurch had a wide smile that showed her gums, bright red hair that fell lankly around her shoulders, and a tendency to seem smaller than the rest of the teachers and staff at Ridgeway.

  He nodded. “My mother got a frickentickle in her throat. Couldn’t walk me here and I’d already missed the Sledge.”

  Ms Christchurch smiled. Her eyes flitted between the boy and the handgun she was polishing. “Never known you catch the school bus, Sam. As for your mother, you ought to get her some elm syrup. Has she ever seen you to school?”

  Sam scratched his hairline, chasing a louse. “Sometime maybe.” He undid the heavy layers of blanket and sealskin that had protected him from the acid rain and shook them off like a dog. Then he slumped off down the corridor in the direction of his classroom, dragging the heavy layers of outerwear behind him.

  The room was silent but for the knocks and sighs of steaming water in the radiators. Each child sat spine-straight and alert. Overhead, a large gas lamp gave off its insubstantial glow. Rain attacked the high windows like tiny beating fists.

  “Burrow down. Lock up. Don’t make a sound,” repeated the class in unison.

  “Again,” said the headmaster, Mr Gower. A dry scab of a man.

  “Burrow down. Lock up…”

  “Sam Devises!” Mr Gower looked over his half-moon glasses.

  The children broke off.

  Sam stared down the barrel of a blackboard eraser.

  “I suppose you have no need to fear the Harvesters.” Mr Gower reared. “I suppose they won’t have use for your skin, your fat, your organs.”

  Sam stared back. The headmaster sucked in his cheeks. He retracted the eraser and presented the boy with a folder.

  “Since you were last to class and so clearly well versed in what to do should the bastards break in, you can take the register to Ms Christchurch.”

  The front door to Ridgeway School softly unclicked. Wind swept into the passage like a biblical flood, scooping up all that lay in its path: dried mud, skeletal leaves, the odour of not-quite-clean. The door drew to.

  Bluze did not trust the sound. This was how they came, too quietly, where the children and parents brrr’d against the cold or coughed or squabbled.

  The mesh at the hatch was woven on a slant which enabled her to see out but prevented those outside from looking in. She depressed a slim iron lever to one side of her desk. A set of kick steps smoothly unfolded. She climbed them and stood on the desk, feet ledged between the paper-stack and the large irons of the press. Her fingers moved as lightly over the munitions rig as they had over the typewriter ball. She selected a pair of ear defenders: tiny, tight-fitting shells secured by a thin black harness that fed across the forehead and looped in tight around the back of the head. The pockets of the utility vest she wore were already packed with cartridges and spark dust. She snatched up a couple of sawn-offs, packed in the fat magazines, crossed her arms behind her head and packed the ammo down into her back harness. The hand gun she’d polished earlier went into a hip holster. A bowie knife slotted in at the side seam of the utility vest. A brace of thin black sparklers clicked into the sprung brackets to form an ‘X’ over her chest.

  Pinning up her knee-length skirt at either hip in a well-practised series of folds and garter snaps, she kicked on steel toecaps around her blue buckled biker boots and leapt off the table in a backwards somersault.

  She yanked out the voice funnel alongside the window hatch.

  “Face to the mask,” she barked.

  Ten seconds later there had been no response from the other side of the mesh. A Harvester would trigger the mask’s magnetism, the quantity of metal additives to their flesh signalling them as the flesh-warriors they were.

  Bluze checked the grip of her ear defenders. They were snug. Blood roared inside her head like a hurricane. She eased up to the grid and peeped through. At first she saw nothing but the empty corridor. Then a huge shadow blocked the greater part of her view. She got an impression of other figures, but, before she could focus in, she felt a sharp tug on her arm.

  She spun around and brought her handgun up under the chin of the boy, Sam. The kid didn’t blink, just offered his class register. Bluze put a finger to her lips. Placing the folder in its correct tray on the desk, she slid open a drawer and retrieved a spare pair of ear defenders.

  “Put these on,” she mouthed. The Harvesters were clearly opting to save their Sone weapons until they were closer to their prey, else the boy would be twitching on the ground, mouth frothing.

  Sam put the ear defenders on. He’d the look of a kid who had lived so long with fear that he’d developed a thick skin against it.

  She pointed at a large red dial on the wall.

  The kid nodded and she lifted him up by the waist. She watched him struggle to unhook the wind handle, felt the soft expulsion of air from his chest as he grunted and revolved the alarm dial. Bluze knew the signal would filter out silently through the building while triggering a stopcock on the gas feed to each lamp to plunge the school into semi-darkness. Valves in the radiators would open, releasing a steady blast of hot steam to fill each classroom with its own early morning mist. Harvesters were used to the acid rainfall outside, but the sickness cramped their joints in the steamy heat.

  As for the children, they would be donning their ear plugs, crawling into the individual panic rooms of their lock-ups, and bolting the door to each metre-sized cube on the inside. Then silence would fall and the waiting would begin.

  She didn’t have time to get the boy safely back to class. He’d have to take his chance in the tiny reception office.

  “Harvesters,” she mouthed and pointed to the mesh. The kid followed her finger. “You stay here.” She mimed the instruction with absurd emphasis.

  No reaction appeared to mean agreement as far as the seven year old was concerned. Bluze peered through the mesh again – just as a Harvester brought his face to the magnetic mask and broke it in two with a head-butt. Seconds later, shockwaves off a crushed semtex strip knocked Bluze sideways. She clutched the boy to her; he felt stiff in her embrace. She thrust him away.

  “Stay here,” she mouthed.

  Bluze slid up to the door and opened it. The corridor was dusty from the blast, and empty. No doubt, the Harvesters had retreated as far away as possible while the blast punched in the dividing door. She ducked out into the dust, pulling the door to behind her.

  Reaching over her shoulders, she drew the sawn-offs, pressed her back against the wall and glanced left then right. Her stoppered ears threatened to
play havoc with her balance. But better to deal with that potential disability than fall victim to the Sone gun and end up on her back.

  She saw the shapes of the Harvesters forming through the dust cloud. Running down the corridor to where it hooked a sharp right, she leapt onto a rickety chair and up on top of a locker cabinet. Biker boots planted firmly on the sheet steel, she swung the automatic 12 gauge sawn-offs up in unison.

  The Harvesters materialised. Seven of them, by her quick head count. Half living-scarecrow, half reanimated, the men pressed towards her. She peeled off a dozen shots, striking an arm, a shoulder blade, a cheekbone. The red flashes as the AA shot landed told her that she had hit metal mostly. But one brute took a canon-punch to the face; the patched flesh tearing back to reveal bone and welded metal. Bluze fired another couple of shots in the direction of that one. The head ricocheted back at a distorted neck angle.

  But the others were on her now. Six devils who’d cut the flesh from others to re-patch their acid-scorched skulls and upper backs. They were broad, made so by the metal grafted under and on top of their human bones. Their height was just as sinister; they rose up and retracted on long, spindle limbs like human spiders.

  Two drew their serrated blades and lunged for her. Bluze raced to the end of the lockers, thrusting off with one foot at the last second. She leaped upwards. A ceiling tile popped as she slammed a fist into it. Grasping the iron framework either side, she levered herself up inside the false ceiling.

  Her breath came in tight, agonising bursts. A blade shot up into the ceiling space; she bucked backwards, only to roll sideways when a second point broke through and swiftly withdrew.

  Their interest in her was short-lived. Bluze knew the Harvesters had come for the children, lured by the possibility of those young bodies with their fresh living cells and bone growth. Adults were an irritant, best ignored or despatched with no more care than a child tearing off a butterfly’s wings.

  The Harvesters headed for the first classroom. Bluze knew she would need to get closer yet retain her higher ground in order to take them out.

  Sam stood in the office. He slipped off the ear protectors. They were uncomfortable, plus they brought to mind dark crevices where a child might sleep unnoticed. He discarded them.

  Standing in the room, he noticed mist seeping under the door. A small window in the door had escaped the lime-wash. Through it, he saw an atmosphere of steam and dust that reminded him of fog out on the hills and the spill of rain.

  He considered trying to reach the handle of the alarm again. It had been fun to turn the dial around and around. He’d pictured the children scrabbling past their desks like mice desperate to escape an overflowing drain, and how the teachers had donned ear protectors and run away to the staff room, leaving the young boxed up and alone. This was the first time he’d experienced a harvest free of the constraints of his own one-metre cube.

  He gripped the door handle and stepped out into the corridor. Either side of the narrow passageway, radiators piped a continual flow of steam. They fizzed slightly under the effort, water knock-knocking inside their tin ribs.

  Sam turned and walked down the corridor towards the first classroom. His view was obscured by the false mist and he drew up sharply. A Harvester occupied the space ahead, pinned steel craning out from beneath a long leather kilt. The not-quite-man started to shrink down; Sam felt the space between them growing smaller.

  Now he saw there was no head to the thing, only flopping neck threads and arms that clawed just short of him.

  Sam crouched down and lay flat on the floor. Drops of burning water splashed onto him from the ceiling. Condensing steam. He inched slowly forward, beneath the reach of the swaying headless carcass.

  Bluze moved across the framework of the false ceiling in a crab-like motion. The classrooms had the original vaulted ceilings, her only option being to scoop out the two tiles directly next to the doorway, hook her legs over the metal bars and propel her body down. She prayed to all that was holy that she survived to swing back up.

  Stowing the sawn-offs at her back, she uncrossed the two black sparklers from their harness at her chest. Tucking them into one palm, she slid the opposite hand into a pocket of her utility vest and nipped out two precious packets. Spark dust was expensive but effective, possessing the same magnetic signifiers as the monitor mask. She fed the packets into the batons, used two fingers to press in the load springs and flipped the ignition switch. A tiny spark appeared at the tip of each baton. She held them carefully away from her body, took a deep breath and dropped.

  Legs hooked over the frame, she swung upside-down at the open doorway and fired the sparklers with a splatter-gun approach. Harvesters recoiled from their efforts to prised open the boltholes where the children hid. Hands clutched at their Frankenstein’s monster faces. Spark dust. A cloud-mass of nanites that grouped together to form centimetre-long metal grubs that attached themselves to the Harvesters’ metal nips and tucks, then found the soft connecting flesh and began to burrow in. If the Harvesters were swift, they could peel the grubs off and squash them underfoot like swollen leeches.

  Two of the invaders drove through the pain to attack her. The first bled from one eye. She saw grubs inching in at a plate stitched beneath the eye socket, and felt a wave of revulsion. The distraction gave the man the chance to attack. He drove his blade into her shoulder and dragged it free. Bluze gasped, lost her leg hold and crashed down onto the floor.

  She flipped onto her hands, spine bowing, and landed, hopping back a couple of steps. The two Harvesters bucked against the agonies of the spark dust, but carried on coming. The slash of their blades had brute strength but lacked skill. She ducked, drew her bowie knife out the seam of her utility vest and volleyed. Tucking in tight under the first brute’s underarm, she scored the blade along the tender flesh. Immediately, she faced the second monster. Again she used the knife. The spark dust grubs acted as a dye, indicating the weak spots. She bowed back to avoid the tremendous swing of the Harvester’s blade, stood up straight and slid her knife in quickly at the neck sinews. The grubs crept in at the open flesh. She abandoned the two Harvesters to those drilling mites. They were walking dead men.

  Through the steam, she saw one of the monsters work his serrated blade into the door seal of the first of the miniature panic rooms. The spark dust must have disintegrated; it was a temporal weapon that dissolved two minutes after impact. She considered loading her two remaining packets into the sparklers. Better to save them and take the creature out by hand, she decided. She started to stride towards him, bowie knife dancing like a silver fish in that sea of half-light. Her breath caught as a colossus stepped across her path.

  The Harvester was a witch’s poppet stitched from different shades of skin. Leather strips crisscrossed the length of each arm, mummifying them. In place of hair, long black feathers were grafted to his skull. Half of the face had melted back to the bone. Small riveted steel sheets covered the remainder of the face, like scales.

  He had a Sone Gun trained on her. She looked down. A tiny red dot danced over her chest.

  Bluze felt a crush of nausea as the sonic waves hit. She fell off to the side, her hands clawing until she found and collapsed against the wall. The sound blast was repelled by her ear protectors, but the noise still managed to assault her at a cellular level. Her head swam. Shapes loomed.

  Get back up, Bluze demanded of herself. Make your legs carry you before the monsters use their blades. She felt them closing in. Flesh and metal warriors with minds like ice. She had to get control back. She had to fight to save herself.

  Bluze strained to see past the billowing white. The shapes were gone. Her mind quietened. Steam drifted.

  She pressed her palms against the moist wall and stood up. It terrified her to think of the Harvesters having moved on to the classroom belonging to Ridgeway’s five to seven year olds. She remembered Sam. A strange child. Stiff as an armful of frozen washing when she’d lifted him up. She hoped he endured
back in her office.

  The bulky figure that materialised through the mist had Bluze reach over her shoulders for the sawn-offs. She froze mid-act as the figure took on the vaguely feminine aspect of the dinner lady, Mrs Moon. The woman carried a meat cleaver in one hand, a Harvester’s head suspended by the hair in the other. Bluze was used to seeing the woman waddling through school, some decapitated animal clutched to her breast like a ragdoll. The sight of Mrs Moon in possession of a human head seemed perversely acceptable.

  The woman performed a grand mime of taking off a pair of imaginary ear protectors. Bluze caught on. Begrudgingly she held one headphone out from an ear.

  “Mrs Moon?”

  “Bastard Harvester tried to muck in with my beasts,” said the woman with bright-eyed excitement. “Maybe he fancied plucking himself a new pair of eyebrows or cooking up stew. Either way, he’s dead now.” Mrs Moon grinned ghoulishly. Shaking the head at Bluze, she added, “You can take them ear plates off. The nasties and their Sone guns are out of range. Saw the lot shuffle off to Mr Gower’s classroom.”

  Despite the dinner lady’s reassurance, Bluze desperately wanted to keep her ear defenders in place. But closing off her hearing was resulting in an increasing sense of claustrophobia. Plus, it was easier to stalk the enemy when she was in possession of all five senses.

  “I’ve got to catch them up,” she said.

  Mrs Moon tossed the Harvester’s head off into the cloudy atmosphere. She placed a hand on Bluze’s undamaged shoulder, fingers gripping in.

  “Funny how it’s left to a bit like you to save the babies. We ain’t about to see Mr Gower risking his neck out here.” She released Bluze and scrubbed her hand around her fleshy chin. “Our headmaster’s too scared the Harvesters will tear his pretty face. Truth of it, as you and I have witnessed, is the nasties’ll let grownups alone if there’s young ‘uns to be had.” She leant in conspiratorially. Her breath stank of straw and vinegar. “But you and I, we ain’t going to let it unravel like that.”