This Rage of Echoes

by Simon Clark

  The man approved. ‘People don’t want a kind god, they need angry, vengeful gods. They’ll love you even more for what you’re doing to them.’

  My shoe cracked against a grey head. ‘Shut your mouth. I’m not their god.’

  ‘Oh, but you are. As I said they’ll kill for you, die for you, but they won’t obey you.’ Smiling so much his face wound oozed pus, he approached me. ‘This is the plan. We’ll take you somewhere safe. Then in a day or two when you’re rested we’ll bring ordinary men and women to you. You’ll put your hands on their heads as if you’re blessing them. They will of course turn into copies of you in a matter of hours. That way you – and us, your disciples – will inherit the earth.’

  From my vantage point high on the back of the truck I noticed what the man and his vermin hoard hadn’t. Eve and the others must have been so concerned about my non-return that they’d followed me into the valley. Now they were uphill in the centre of the road. They’d seen the Echomen clustered tight around the truck. What had to be a big downside for me is that they couldn’t differentiate between the real, bona fide Mason Konrad and the swarm of copies. For them I was just another member of the mob. A hundred yards away the commandos deployed the bipod legs of the green tube that contained the anti-tank missile. Whether they intended it for defence or for attack I didn’t wait to find out.

  I shoulder-charged a woman who carried Ruth’s blood-soaked head. She fell back on to the crowd below; they were so tightly packed that she slammed on to crammed shoulders and heads without falling through to the pavement. I jumped, landing with both my feet on her soft belly, then with the Echomen’s upturned faces gazing adoringly at me I ran across them. The soles of my shoes slapped down on to noses, foreheads, mouths, leaving a bruised mess behind me. Using the tightly packed heads as stepping stones, I bounded toward the wall, hopped on to it, then raced back the way I came.

  Not ten seconds too soon, either. From a hundred yards away the tube spat the rocket. A ball of fire crackled through the air dragging the wire behind it that allowed the soldier to control its flight. With neat precision the missile slammed into the truck’s cab. The explosion sent a blast of hot air into my back. But I kept running. I only glanced back when I knew my balance was sure. Behind me, the truck had become a fireball. Hemmed in by the confines of the high walls a hundred or more of the creatures must have died, consumed by burning fuel from the truck as much as killed by the detonation of the anti-tank warhead.

  ‘They want a vengeful god, they want a vengeful god …’ This I panted, as I raced back to Eve, Madeline and the rest. By now the surviving Echomen surged back up the hill to wreak their revenge on their attackers. The firepower of even just that small group had a formidable effect. Sub-machine-guns rained a flurry of red tracer at the men and women as they ran along the channel formed by the walls. Bullets struck them with sufficient force to kill the ones in the lead, then pass through their bodies to take the lives of those who followed.

  When I felt the slipstream of bullets tugging at my hair I realized that running along the top of the wall was about as sensible as my headlong dive on to the back of the truck earlier. I leapt down to the meadow side of the wall, then I sprinted at a tangent away from the road as the guns flung hot metal faster than the speed of sound into the faces of the monsters.

  A bullet snapped by my ear. Fifty yards away Eve drew back the bolt of the rifle then snapped off another round at me. It gouged earth near my feet.

  ‘Eve!’

  The next time she took a shot I anticipated her aim would be dead on the nail. I flung myself into the long grass as she fired. The bullet seared the air where my chest had been a second before.

  ‘Eve.’ I raised myself on one arm to wave with the other. ‘Eve, don’t shoot, it’s me.’

  Of course it’s me, I all but shouted at myself. But then all the hundreds streaming up the hill toward Eve and her squad are versions of me also. She can’t tell the difference between flesh and blood brother and bogus look-alike.

  A bullet cracked through grass-stalks just above my head, showering me with gobs of green pulp. I rolled to one side then knelt up.

  ‘Eve, don’t shoot.’

  My sister aimed, squeezed the trigger. At that moment Madeline ran in front of her, shouting. She’d realized that the genuine me occupied Eve’s gunsights. Eve fired. Madeline clutched her side, her knees sagging. But she still pointed toward me and I knew she was shouting at them not to fire at me. That here was Mason Konrad. The real deal. Not fake, not a copy. Eve gripped her rifle in one hand, its muzzle pointing upward; with her free hand she beckoned furiously.

  ‘Mason,’ she yelled. ‘Hurry! Before they get here!’

  A second later I bounded to my feet then raced up through the meadow toward where they stood on the roadway. Meanwhile, the commandos and Ulric still poured a stream of gunfire down at the advancing Echomen. One man fired a grenade that felled ten of the monsters. Sometimes the death toll was so great at the front of the mob it formed an obstacle in the roadway, they had to clamber over the bullet ravaged corpses so they could continue.

  By the time I reached the group Eve had begun to help Madeline to her feet. Madeline winced with pain. Her face had become bloodlessly pale. She pressed her hand against her hip where Eve’s bullet had caught her.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Eve said. ‘It’s just nicked the flesh; you’ll be all right.’

  The compassion in Eve’s voice caught me by surprise. I had to look at my sister a second time.

  Eve gave a grim smile. ‘You heard right. I do care about your friend. Madeline really is on our side.’

  Ulric warned. ‘Fall back. We can only slow them down. We need to regain the cover of the forest.’

  I shook my head. ‘Not this time. I’m going to call for reinforcements.’

  They looked at me with open mouths as if I’d gone crazy.

  ‘If it doesn’t work, save yourselves … or at least try. Eve? Will you take care of Madeline and the child?’

  Eve didn’t know what I planned, but the look in her eye told me she trusted me. Whatever I did next would be fine by her. ‘OK.’ I held up my hand. ‘Stop firing. I’m going to meet this bunch halfway.’

  With that I walked back down the hill toward them. Here it is. My last card. I knew that with the same kind of clarity as the sun shining down into the valley. If it worked, that is. If it didn’t, I doubted if I’d have time to reflect on what a funny little life we have. A few years of events, ambitions, planning, some set-backs, some successes … and then what? Like I said, no time to dwell on it, nor the quality of our lifetime. Ahead of me, the man strode up the road with that shining crater in his face. By chance, or destiny, he’d survived the gunfire unscathed. Behind him came his army. They wanted blood. This time it might even be mine.

  chapter 46

  The sun had risen high enough in the sky to deliver a beefy slug. Its heat struck me in the back of the neck as I walked down the road to meet the mass of ME. A thousand Mason Konrad copies advanced along the road. Behind me Eve, Madeline, Ulric, Kirk and the commandos watched in silence. In a moment that might be symbolic of nothing or everything a black cat ran across the stretch of road that separated me from the guy with the crater face and his murdering hoard.

  When we were twenty yards apart the man stopped. Those following stopped abruptly, too. I saw that most had been wounded either in this or earlier conflicts, or had been subject to the sadistic experiments. Shrapnel wounds studded their faces. From other parts of their bodies sharp pieces of metal jutted that reflected the sunlight. There were survivors from the school building back in Tanshelf. Six-inch nails protruded from faces and limbs. For some reason this mutant faction of the human race had been driven to test themselves to destruction. Now they needed their ranks replenishing. Clearly, they expected me to ‘infect’ regular human beings, so they turned Echo, too.

  I might not have started this ‘epidemic’ of random cloning deliberately, but at th
at moment I knew if I had a single remaining purpose in life it was to stop them. Stop them dead. Stop them forever.

  And what did I have left in my arsenal? Yes indeed. My secret weapon.

  The man with the ruined face that oozed pus fixed his gaze on me. ‘If you come with us now,’ he said, ‘I promise that your friends won’t come to any harm.’

  I shook my head. ‘No deal.’ A ripple spread through the mob, they were ready to charge. ‘Wait.’ I held up my hand.

  ‘They won’t obey you,’ the man warned.

  ‘I think they’ll be interested in what I’m going to do next.’ The mass of eyes locked on me with a searing intensity. ‘Someone visited me in that cell you kept me in. Remember? You sent the boy to photograph the individual at my home. But it wasn’t curiosity that ate you up it was fear. Because I’ve got a friend who terrifies you. Only you don’t know why.’

  ‘Mason, that doesn’t matter any more. We’ve got what we need – you.’

  I smiled at the monsters. ‘Too late. I’ve called him. He’s already on his way. Can’t you feel it in the air? You can sense his presence growing here, can’t you? Put out your tongues.’ I laughed. ‘You can taste it, can’t you?’

  What now? I asked myself. Do I put on a show of summoning my childhood imaginary friend? How would it sound if I called out, ‘Come now, Natsaf-Ty, keeper of the sacred crocodiles.’ Wouldn’t that be too much like a conjuror’s stage act? Or do I force myself to picture him standing there on the road between us? But what can an imaginary friend do? If he’s only a sort of dream that exists inside my head. For some reason this thought process that creates Natsaf-Ty disturbs the Echomen. But can it have any real destructive force? Once they’ve recovered from their initial shock they might simply carry me off to be the equivalent of their queen bee to duplicate more of their kind. In that case Eve and the rest will soon be dead.

  ‘What are you waiting for, Natsaf-Ty?’ I called the words into the air. ‘Aren’t you going to show yourself to us? Just like you used to when I was ten years old?’

  The sun blazed down; the intensity of it felt like hot metal pressed against my skin. Insects buzzed amongst wildflowers at the side of the road. Crows circled overhead; black cross-shaped things floating through a blue sky.

  ‘Come on. What are you waiting for?’ My throat had become as dry as the dusty road. ‘Show yourself, Natsaf-Ty …’ I planned to smile; to demonstrate my coolness, that I was in control of the situation, but the realization forcing itself on me was: here I am, one man facing a hoard of killers with no Plan B and Plan A falling apart by the second.

  The Echomen began to move forward. Mere seconds from now they’d rip apart Eve and the rest just as they’d butchered Ruth and Dianna. My voice rose louder, ‘When I was a child … when my life was in ruins, you came and got me through it. You weren’t even real, but I loved you.’ I closed my eyes. What more could I do? Natsaf-Ty was where he always had been in reality: back in the glass display case in Tanshelf Museum. An empty shell of a corpse in a bandage loincloth to be joked over by school kids. He only ever lived in the imagination of an unhappy child, one Mason Konrad, who was being bullied into the ground by other kids at school, and whose family had begun to disintegrate as his mother couldn’t afford the upkeep of their home.

  ‘PLEASE!’ Memories rolled back of Mason Konrad, the child, sitting at the top of the stairs. The other kids had ripped my books, then punched me to the ground. My mother had sobbed herself to sleep with a pile of unpaid bills on the bedside table. Eve had been three years old. She’d been too young to understand what had happened but trauma is contagious. Painful sores had broken out on her eyelids. She’d stopped eating; Mom and me watched the flesh fall away.

  Now, here in the sunlit valley, the man with the hole in his face had walked to within ten feet of me. ‘Come with us,’ he murmured. ‘Promise me you won’t look back at your old friends. After all, you’ve got us now.’

  I glanced over my shoulder. Eve stood with her eyes on me. She helped support Madeline. Ulric and the others watched, too.

  ‘I tried.’ My voice came as a whisper. ‘Believe me, I tried.’

  I turned back to the creatures who’d stolen my face. A mask they could hide behind as they slaughtered innocent men, women and children.

  Then a change came into the world. For a moment I didn’t know what had happened. I listened. Where had the noise of the insects gone? The heat of the sun simply vanished. A cold breath touched the back of my neck. Shivers ran down my spine. The mob noticed something, too. They stopped advancing. The man with the gaping wound in his cheek looked around him as if expecting to see some threat.

  At last I felt a smile steal across my face. ‘He’s here. Are you ready for him?’

  The sun threw shadows across the road, yet one of the shadows appeared red rather than black. I willed myself to see it as the ancient mummy, the same dry figure with cracks in its face, tip of the tongue protruding through the lips only …

  … only it wasn’t quite like that this time. The red figure appeared as an indistinct pillar between the mob and myself. Once more they moved but it came as a ripple of heads as if they tried to advance on me but couldn’t move their feet. They had the same reaction as the boy back at the house when he’d panicked in the presence of Natsaf-Ty. They didn’t look directly at the figure. Instead their eyes had a searching quality: they scanned the air above the figure and then to each side as if they were dimly aware of some huge, but only partly visible object in front of them. I heard the quickening breath as fear crept through their nervous systems. Above me, the sun dulled until it resembled a disk of brown foil pasted on to the sky. And what had been a flawless blue sky degenerated into a smeary purple dome that rested on the hills. As this change took place the temperature cooled until my breath misted the air. And as a mist rolled from the meadows into the road the sun became a yet gloomier ghost of its former self. However, the red figure in front of me grew correspondingly brighter. Within seconds it appeared to be lit from within but it still hadn’t formed the lines of the familiar figure that manifested on the stairs at home. As the world darkened around me, and the Echomen became indistinct shadows that were paralysed by terror, I found the telepathic link that I’d experienced before working itself into my mind. A throb started in my forehead. When I blinked it seemed as if I looked at the lone figure of Mason Konrad standing on the road. I saw through the eyes of the Echomen. That throb inside my skull was the throb of their emotions and the pain of their wounds fused into a pulse of ‘feeling’ that had no trace of rational thought. I sensed their brute nature – they were driven by instinct to conquer. Pain or despair or grief at losing one of their own kind would be alien to them. All that mattered was their lust to overwhelm the human race.

  I moved closer to the luminous red figure in front of me. It had become the brightest object in sight.

  Then I did something I’ve never done in my life before. I reached out my hand and touched the figure that I’d always known as Natsaf-Ty. Only at that moment did I understand I’d been wrong all this time. My juvenile imagination had willed myself to see this pillar of red light as the Egyptian mummy from the museum. Maybe that had been the only way I could form a relationship with what I was beginning to see clearly for the very first time.

  The moment my fingertip made contact with the body of red light was the moment we moved outside the world I’d always known.

  chapter 47

  Vertigo. That sensation engulfed me as I stood there in the road. Vertigo … falling … a drop into an abyss that had no bottom to stop me plunging down and down and down …

  The vertigo wrenched my mind inside out, making me want to grab for anything to halt the plummet into a dark void, yet there was nothing to catch hold of. For me, the vertigo scrambled my thoughts into that panic-stricken sense of suddenly falling from a high place. But the impressions feeding into my head from the Echomen were of a terror amplified by the vertigo they experienced. T
hey felt the descent multiplied a thousand times as much as I did. So this is what horrified them when they were in the presence of Natsaf-Ty. An overwhelming impression that the earth had split open beneath their feet to swallow them into a bottomless pit. An elevator descent of surreal intensity. A hundred white-knuckle theme-park rides mated with the downward swoop of a plane dropping like a stone when it hits an air pocket.

  Only here there were no seatbelts to fasten, no bars on the funfair death-ride car to grip. This was the scream-your-lungs-bloody plummet into the Grand Canyon of the universe.

  But still I didn’t tumble out of control. When my eyes focused I saw I stood alongside Natsaf-Ty. Just for a second that column of red light became my imaginary friend of yore. A rust-coloured Egyptian mummy with closed eyes. He turned his head so he could ‘look’ at me in that uncanny way of his – as if he’d read every thought that had roamed through my mind ever since I’d been born.

  What I’d taken to be air blasting past me now seemed more like some force streaming through me. A hurricane blast of particles that roared through my blood, flesh and bones.

  ‘Mason! What have you done?’

  I blinked. We were still standing there in a group as before. Me, with the red figure in the middle, then the Echoman with the rotten crater in his face, then the hundreds of clone creatures tightly packed together, clinging to one another. Only now they were locked in a paralysis of terror; their faces, which were copies of mine, were the epitome of panic, eyes frozen wide open. The man with the ruined face was the only one who appeared able to speak. Speak? What exploded from his mouth was a panic-driven yell.