Invaders From Beyond

by Colin Sinclair

  “This isn’t my natural inclination,” Pleasance begins. “This hands-on stuff is left to... lesser lights, if you will, in the commune of the One.”

  There it is again. First of equals and all that. I don’t ask how there can be differences if they’re all one. Perhaps it’s like how your hands are different from your feet, but still part of the same body?

  “I’m a strategist, a tactician, a deep thinker.” He’s strutting now. I suspect the typical Garden World drone isn’t the sort of audience he appreciates.

  “We are an old race. Ancient, with our seeded brethren resting under earth for millennia uncounted, cast out from our distant home, adrift in the starlit void.”

  “Yesss.” Kelvin’s voice is stage-whisper loud. “I knew they were from space.”

  Pleasance frowns at Kelvin, and then continues. “Abandoned in the vastness, our quintessence lies in earth. Each seeding-pod a living being, gathers to others as required, attuning to the surroundings, adapting to the breath and pulse of the living planet. We find suitable vessels from the local lifeforms, and then we blend.”

  Parasites, is what I’m thinking. Ticks under the skin; worms in the brain. They must have a limited individual intelligence or consciousness, perhaps something hive-like for the heavy lifting? What I say is, “An infinitely variable and connected race. Sharing a better Eden?”

  “You do understand,” Pleasance says. He seems pleased.

  “We’ve had our success and failures over the long centuries,” he continues. “We’ve had our setbacks. It’s a simple enough matter to connect with a human”—he almost chokes on the word—“but often the results are variable. Even with long periods of preparation and absorption, control and longevity issues remain.”

  “So you decided to build your own?”

  Behind Pleasance, the plant folk are lowering Jost’s body into the vat, letting him drop, closing the lid.

  “Indeed,” Pleasance says.

  “Your idea,” I tell him.

  “Yes.”

  I give a little bow of the head.

  “You will all take part,” Pleasance says.

  “And the options are, uh, communion with the pods, or—”

  “Your life force, your viable constituents being utilised more broadly,” Pleasance explained. “Broken down and prepared in the machinery of new creation; living on in spirit, as you people say.”

  I lie down on the floor.

  “Begging isn’t necessary.” Pleasance sounds confused. “We desire acceptance.”

  I wave a hand at the others, point to the floor. They seem to get it.

  Nothing happens.

  The Garden World staff stands around and looks at us in silence.

  “I look forward,” Pleasance is saying, hesitantly, “to experiencing many more of these human quirks.”

  The world explodes.

  34

  WHAT JOST TOLD me:

  “You’re going to lose,” is what he said. “They have weight of numbers and no concern for their own wellbeing. I think they can afford to waste lives in pursuit of victory. In tactical terms, that’s a major plus.”

  Not what I’d wanted to hear, but that was pretty much the tone of the evening, wasn’t it?

  “Here’s what we’re going to do about it,” Jost said.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  Jost, ex-army, not much of a life and very little to do in the evenings, had taken up a hobby during his time at Brackett’s.

  Improvised explosive devices.

  Well, why not?

  He’d started with flares and flash-bangs, just keeping his hand in as it were, but pretty soon he’d found some old Chinese fireworks that Brackett had bought and abandoned unsold. That’s when things kicked off.

  By the time of the war with the plant-folk, he was up to making his own blast bombs and had started experimenting with plastique; because of course.

  To be honest, I think if the plants hadn’t got him he might have gone up in a puff of smoke at some point anyway.

  Some of this I’m just guessing at. When he told me about it he was kind of pressed for time, and had more important things to talk about. Like how I was going to deliver the bomb.

  “They’re going to shove me in that vat you mentioned,” he said. “They don’t like things to go to waste. From what you told me, it sounds like a processing system. Recycling.”

  That seemed like a reasonable idea. Well, not reasonable, but not unexpected.

  “The device’ll work on a timer. It’s set at five minutes or so and it’s too late to go fiddling with any of that—unless you want to raw button it at the last moment? No, better not...”

  Not sure what he was talking about there. But I got the general gist of things. He handed me a phone. “No use for calling out—they’re jamming the mobile networks anyway—but I’ve dug out the insides a little and set up a three-button combo to work the Bluetooth. It’ll give the nod to the detonator and you’re good to go. Rock-and-roll.”

  I nodded my understanding.

  “Should work fine close up,” he said. “All you have to do is get the stuff in place.”

  That all-you-have-to-do part is the bit where I get to cut open the dead body of a close friend—hole was already there, he said with a broken laugh, gave me a head start—then I had to pack the insides with a bomb and tape the whole mess up so no-one notices.

  “I can’t do that,” I told him. “It’s—disrespectful. Awful. I just—”

  “What happens if you don’t do this?” he’d said. “If you let them win, what happens to you? What sort of world will they create, eh?”

  “There must be another way—”

  “Name it,” he told me. “Explain it to me now, and then when the time comes you can do that instead. Otherwise—”

  A cough, a bubble of blood.

  “Okay.” I looked him in the eyes. “Your way.”

  “Kind of a Trojan corpse, right,” Jost had said.

  One of the best or worst puns ever; I can’t tell which.

  “It’ll destroy the machinery for definite. Beyond that I don’t know.” Jost gave a painful shrug. “Cause fire, create mayhem. Here’s hoping.”

  He patted me on the shoulder.

  “You may still die,” he’d warned me. “But you’ll punch a hole right through their immediate plans. That’s a victory of a sort, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  After that there wasn’t much else to say.

  I waited for Jost to die—had to check a few times, just to make sure—and then I did as he asked.

  IT WORKS BETTER than expected.

  Like a charm, really; a grotesque, disordered charm of havoc.

  The mulching vat detonates up and outwards in a fury of metal fragments. There’s a cascade of green soup and a scattering of strange lumps. The Garden World staff standing around are cut down by scything shards of metal.

  I lose sight of Pleasance in the chaos.

  I’d expected to be dead at this point, but apart from ringing ears and a coating of dust and wet debris, I appear to be okay.

  The smell has not improved.

  Am I okay? Is this some sort of post-fatal-injury final spark of—

  Secondary explosions ripple through a line of nearby cylinders, shelving rattles in place, and the whole building shudders around us like it’s straining to escape.

  “We need to leave,” I’m shouting.

  “No shit,” Chas replies. Maybe; I can’t hear over the roaring in my head.

  He’s dragging Kelvin to her feet. Helping up Francis, who seems to be wounded. The store room is filling with smoke and edged with flame.

  Etty takes my hand.

  Pleasance grabs hold of her other arm. There’s a bit of tug-of-war that I don’t much enjoy.

  Etty is shouting at Pleasance. He’s shrieking about... I don’t know what. It’s difficult to tell, as his face is a scarlet travesty and his jaw seems to be broken. There might be a splinter of metal, jutti
ng from one darkened oozing eyeball.

  I try kicking at him but he’s having none of it.

  It’s a struggle to get a breath in here. Everything is going grey. My vision’s starting to blur at the edges; it was wonky to begin with the medication Chas gave me earlier, but this isn’t good at all.

  Pleasance is still holding on. Tattered tendrils of thorny stems are edging out from under his tattered suit sleeve, starting to curl around Etty’s arm; she’s alternating trying to break his grip and slamming her fist into the side of his head. I go to kick again and he pulls me off balance. Etty loses her hold on me as I stumble.

  I need a weapon.

  I struggle to my feet again, looking at Etty. She’s shouting something about me being a weed. That’s very unfair.

  Oh, wait...

  Pleasance is doing an open-mouthed, crawling-pod-of-chaos thing, trying to force his face towards Etty’s. I fumble my injured hand into a jacket pocket and find the packet of weed-killer Etty stuck in their earlier. Seems like years ago.

  I have to bite the top off.

  Dig in with my teeth, tear and twist and hope I don’t get too much of it on me and then I squeeze it into Pleasance’s wide, broken mouth and the ugly thing that’s crawling out of him. He squeals and jerks back from Etty, wailing, gurgling and flailing. I grab Etty and we dance back out of his reach.

  I’m about to run for it, but Pleasance is still standing, staggering forward, looking for a way out. I point to a flatbed trolley, and Etty and I grab hold.

  We take a run at Pleasance and plough into him, use the weight of the trolley to force him back into the smoke and flames. The stench is awful but we stay to watch him burn; witness the crusted lumps of ashes falling to the floor. Make sure he’s very-very dead.

  Then we leg it.

  Chas and Kelvin and Francis are waiting outside in the clean air. I can hear sirens in the distance.

  35

  THE COVER-UP STARTS almost at once.

  Police cars arrive first, then a few ambulances. The cops take some confused initial statements while paramedics tend to our wounds. Fire crews reach the site and split into two teams, to deal with the Garden World situation and the smaller secondary blaze at Brackett’s.

  The brigade are getting set up with breathing apparatus and following standard Persons Reported procedures, when several Army trucks appear and platoons of troops in hazardous-materials gear disembark at the double and begin to cordon off the whole area.

  A discussion over protocol and jurisdiction develops—I think; hard to tell when we’re so far out of the picture—and then a mobile hospital arrives to take over the task of dealing with our injuries.

  The police withdraw to counter any attempted press or public encroachment through the cordon, and the ambulances drive off to other calls. The fire brigade are permitted to tackle the blaze at Garden World, but they’re not cleared to enter the building. Someone mentions chemical weapons from the Second World War.

  There’s a lot more uniforms on site as day begins to dawn.

  We’re separated by the Army and held in individual sealed rooms—white inflatable bubbles with clear panels and plastic airlock doors—which all look very medical. The doctors wear full biohazard containment suits—pumped full of air for positive pressure—and come bouncing across the soft flooring to peer into my eyes, check my tongue and ask pointed questions like, “Do you have any open wounds that might have been infected by the Active?”

  I can hear the capital A.

  When I ask what an Active is, they ignore me. I show them my injured hand and they remove the dressings. They shine a coloured light on it and take samples. Then they dress it back up again and bound away out of the room.

  This happens three times.

  After a while everything overwhelms me and I have to get some sleep.

  THEY LET US go in the early afternoon the following day.

  That report about old chemical weapons is all over the news, and we’ve all been instructed that this is the story.

  The government know it’s not true, though. They make us sign things, tell us they’ll be keeping a close watch on us for a few months. Years? It wasn’t clear.

  They’ve offered Kelvin a job. Science advisor for a special intelligence service that engages with Emergent and Active Threats; that’s an Active, then. They don’t specify what it all means. I think there are other forms to sign if you want to know that stuff.

  They asked if I want to come and help the government, in an advisory capacity, on account of my extensive first-hand knowledge and my two-thirds of an advanced science degree. I said “Yes” even before they’d finished talking.

  They’re building a biotechnology research centre on the old Garden World site. It appears that the Pleasance mob didn’t pick this place by chance. The ground had been well-seeded by his kind. The specialists are going to be looking very closely, taking samples and running batteries of tests. Helpful to know about the high-frequency signal that attracts the pods, right? Part of why they want Kelvin, I guess.

  Clone showed up the day after the disaster, soot covered and a little smoke damaged, but otherwise intact. He’d lit the blue touch paper and scarpered down some long forgotten tunnels into the darkness. Crawled out when the fuss died down. He remains quite upset about his plants and how they tried to kill him.

  Francis is in a secluded military hospital; resting comfortably, Kelvin says, and watching endless Star Trek.

  Chas decided he was better off back in medical training, climbing the ziggurat.

  “Enough slumming it with you freaks,” is how he put it. I think he meant well.

  I’M STILL AT Brackett’s for the moment. These governmental types don’t want any sudden moves. “Maintain the façade,” they said. There’s talk about incorporating the garden centre as a front for their boots-on-the-ground operations.

  Being tangentially connected to a chemical accident isn’t the short cut to fame and fortune you might expect. I think if the alien business had been revealed, I might have got more television time. As it is, I appeared—somewhat wild-eyed and dishevelled—on a brief local news item, nothing to trouble the nationals, and my parents got in touch with the requisite level of concern. Offered to help out with whatever, and right then I realised I didn’t need their help. We remain on good terms, for the moment.

  Mrs Brackett is now in charge of things—she’s a successful businesswoman, had been happy to let her husband run his little garden centre hobby shop—and she doesn’t seem cut up about Mr Brackett’s death.

  She has big plans. Plans that involve a lot less dodgy side-dealing. Having an in with the security services has got to be a plus.

  The reconstruction work at Brackett’s and across the road has already started, and we’ve contracted a food van to park up and help out with providing lunches and morning coffees for the workmen. Etty says we should open a café. Mrs Brackett is considering it.

  The shop does seem busier now—although not so busy that we can’t spend the odd afternoon digging through the burnt wreckage in the basement tunnels, or cleaning out smoke-damaged office equipment—and Mrs Brackett seems to think this area is on the up again.

  Standing at station one on a Saturday morning, I’m not so sure. Can’t imagine the Army and intelligence sorts will be buying a lot of flowering shrubs.

  It’s odd to still be here after all that’s happened, but sometimes it’s nice to see a familiar face.

  “Mrs Tennyson,” I say, bright and breezy. “However can I help today?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COLIN SINCLAIR HAS spent what seems like forever writing things and stuff. Some of it has even seen the light of day. Most recently, he provided settings, background material and short fiction for Broken Rooms, an alternate-worlds tabletop roleplaying game with thirteen flavours of apocalypse. One of Colin's ever-so-short stories is in the Fox Spirit Books “Guardians” anthology and another appears in volume two of their epic "Girl at the End o
f the World" collection. His favourite word is indolent. He often wonders if his bio should have jokes.

  BLIGHTERS

  TIM MAJOR

  1

  THEM BLIGHTERS ARE fucking everywhere.

  Lee’s on the door of my local, the Beast. He’s arguing with some guy wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon Blighter on it, a star-shaped explosion at its arse-end, over the words NATO shot first. Just like everyone else, Blighter-T-shirt guy’s totally shitfaced. He don’t want to take no for an answer, but the Beast’s full to bursting.

  Lee lets me in because we used to be mates. I slap him on the back but he turns it into a hug. His puffer jacket squeezes up against me like massive inflatable ribs.

  “Happy new year, Becky, yeah?” Lee says.

  It’s freezing and my hands are back in my pockets.

  “Yeah,” I say without looking at him properly.

  Lee hops from foot to foot, clapping his hands to stay warm and looking like a mental gym teacher. Two more punters show up, breathing white clouds in the dark. Lee tells them sorry, we’re all full up.

  Inside the pub, it’s foggy with booze, and the windows are covered with swear-words written in the condensation.

  It’s rammed in here. In a few seconds I’m so hot I could puke. I lose my coat on a seat in the corner. All the other lasses I can see are tarted up, but I’m just wearing Dad’s Queen Tour ’75 shirt, the same one I slept in last night. I don’t own a dress.

  Most people are hanging around in twos but there are some bigger groups, full of types that wouldn’t normally be seen dead in here. They probably figured the Beast weren’t going to be packed to the rafters like pubs down on Kendal High Street, but they was wrong. Bloody New Year’s.

  I do ip-dip-dip to pick a group at random. There’s a knack to this. The trick is to hang around near the edge and just laugh when they all laugh. There are six of them already, so who’ll mind another one, especially if they’re a livewire like me?