Max Gilbert

by Simon Clark

  "Soap powder? I thought we were going to burn them, not clean them."

  "The soap powder slows down the rate of burn. It also sticks to whatever it touches. A direct hit and those bastards will burn and burn. Chris, will you siphon more petrol out of the car? Half a bucketful'll be fine."

  Chris walked across to the car carrying the zinc bucket together with a length of plastic tubing. Christ, he thought, I came here to open a hotel. Here I am getting ready for a bloody war.

  Around the courtyard the villagers were making preparations for the battle to come.

  They all knew what had happened. They knew that the Saf Dar, although they weren't mortal, bled and died.

  Now there was a sense of nervous exhilaration running around the building. They were going to hit back.

  Chris watched his son helping Tony line up empty bottles on a table. He felt hope flow back into him again. Soon life should return to normal. (Should he say God willing? Which god willed it anyway? Tony Gateman's pagan god which even now was getting ready to lean over this little rock-slab of an island and slurp up his/ her/its fix of human emotion? Christ, there was plenty of that about.) He allowed himself a smile.

  He returned to his job, the strong smell of petrol making his eyes water. He sucked at the pipe, squinting downward to see the clear liquid slide up the tube.

  "How we going?" asked Tony, squatting down beside him. There was an unlit cigar in his mouth. "Don't worry, old son. I'm not going to light it." He took it out of his mouth and looked at it as if it was a dog turd. "Disgusting things ... Funny, isn't it. How stress makes us revert to infantile behavior. All the Hodgson boys want to do is eat. The Reverend Reed sucks away at his gin bottle like a baby. He must have five bottles in that briefcase of his. This ..." He put the cigar in his mouth. "An infantile craving, you know. Something to suck. It's just a substitute for my mother's tit."

  "Tony, if you don't mind me saying so, you're taking a cynical view of what we're doing."

  "Me? Cynical? Whatever gave you that idea?"

  "From your own lips, Tony. You said you were the world's greatest cynical bastard." Chris looked hard at Tony. "Do you think we've got a chance? After all, Mark blew a hole right through one of those things."

  "You've got every chance, son. I'm not going to pour cold water on all this."

  "But?"

  "But ... But life's all been turned inside out. What we've got here is like running a car on a weak mixture of two-stroke ... then suddenly we slam in some superhigh-octane mixture. We saw what happened to Wainwright. And you and I saw what he became. Youmentioned the goldfish. Have you seen it lately? It's changing all right. You can see hard lumps pressing through from under the skin; I think it's really--"

  "Tony, I know something weird's happening here. You think this old pagan god thing's going to put in a personal appearance. But do you think it will? And if it does, will it have any effect on us?"

  "Chris, you've seen the phenomena. Christ Almighty ... This thing is so powerful it's made death redundant. You see what it's done? An animal dies. Out goes the old life force, but this thing rams in some of its own high-octane life. This kind of life is what nuclear energy is to a poxy parafin lamp. You saw those things on the beach the other night, Chris. Once they were ordinary people. Wainwright. Fox. A boy. Fishermen. Now they are so full of life they are bursting at the seams."

  "Okay, Tony. I believe you. But look at ordinary, everyday nature. If you stand back and look at that objectively that's as weird as buggery. If someone said a lump of rock two hundred thousand miles away had the power to lift millions of tons of water twenty feet in the air, you'd think they were crackers. But the moon does it twice a day. We don't call it magic, we call it tides. Tons of water are dumped by the sky all over the world. Not a miracle-rain. Invisible forces can slam a door shut. Not ghosts-wind. A natural force can light up the sky at night and blast a tree to smithereens. Lightning. Enormously powerful forces, but they're not supernatural." He took a deep breath. "Look, Tony. Whatever's happening is extraordinary. But perhaps we're just encountering some natural phenomenon that nobody's witnessed before."

  "Hey, man. Are you drilling for that gas or what?" called Mark. "Your wife and I are making napalm over here."

  "Coming." He climbed to his feet.

  Tony said nothing, but Chris noticed the man's expression. Maybe he needed to believe in a pagan god that came to look after its flock.

  The Saf Dar would not come.

  Had they learnt their lesson? Chris watched them. They squatted on the causeway, the sea rolling around their chests, staring expressionlessly at the sea-fort.

  "Do you think they'll get close enough?" asked Ruth, putting her arms around him.

  "You sound like a right little bloodthirsty warrior."

  "I just want to get rid of them, Chris. I'm sick of all these people here. I'm sick of being a prisoner in this building."

  "The Saf Dar seem short on common sense. They're like hungry dogs around the back door of a butcher's. They can't keep away. When they do ..." He shrugged. "We'll get back to normal."

  Normal? He wondered what Ruth would consider normal. He found himself wondering if she'd want to leave. No. He couldn't believe that. They loved the place. He glanced back at the sea-fort, gloomy in the evening mist. When he looked at the great expanse of building, his mind ran ahead, planning how the place would look when it was completed.

  Hugging his wife, he gazed out over the sea. He didn't see the Saf Dar's alien stare; he saw only his dream of the future. And it was a good dream.

  "People pile!" shouted David as Ruth and Chris lay on the double bed in the caravan.

  "Shh ..." whispered Ruth. "Remember there are other people trying to get to sleep."

  Chris smiled. "Quick people pile, then."

  David jumped on top of Chris, his head lightly butting into Chris's chin. This was one of David's favorite games. People pile. It consisted of Chris at the bottom, Ruth next, then David sitting, kneeling or standing on top of her.

  "People pile," laughed David. "Come on, Mum. You next. I'll sit on your head."

  "You won't. You weigh a ton these days. Just lie down across your dad's chest and we'll cuddle."

  "All right, then. Can we leave the light on and talk before switching it off?"

  "You don't switch off a candle, you blow it out."

  David looked at the candle that lit the caravan bedroom with a yellow light and filled it with odd wavering shadows. "When are we going to get 'lectric back again?"

  "Soon. There's a fault with the power station. When they fix that we'll get the electric back."

  "And the water?"

  "Yes."

  "Will all those people go back to their own houses then?"

  "They will, David. This is just temporary."

  David snuggled his head against Ruth's face.

  "We'll blow out the candle now, David. We've got a lot to do tomorrow."

  David put his arm around his mother's neck and hugged her.

  "All right, then ..." he murmured drowsily. "I'm going to go to sleep now. Love you."

  "Love you." She leaned across to the bedside table and blew out the candle.

  They would need a good night's sleep. Because tomorrow they were going to fight a war.

  Three hours later Chris awoke. He lay for a further forty minutes struggling to sleep again. In the end he slid on his leather jacket and left the caravan, guided by the same kind of urge that drives you to stare at wrecked cars beside motorways.

  He climbed the steps to the top of the wall and looked out. Enough moonlight seeped through the mist to reveal them as they arrived. One by one across the beach from the depths of the darkness beyond.

  At first they were just fuzzy shapes in the mist. He could almost believe they were just people approaching the sea-fort during some midnight walk. As they grew nearer their outlines hardened, revealing more and more details, until he could no longer con himself into believing they were human.


  His mouth dry, he glanced about the beach for the Saf Dar. Although he couldn't see them, he knew they were there somewhere. Probably sat in that weird Red Indian warrior way further up the beach in the mist.

  Now, walking slowly toward the sea-fort in a semicircle, were the pathetic figures he'd seen the night before.

  The Fox twins, one grossly fat, the other scarecrow-thin; Wainwright, the dirty rag of a bandage around his neck, dark red growths like bunches of Burgundy grapes hanging loosely from the gash in his face.

  Chris zipped his leather jacket up to his throat and hugged himself.

  They were changing.

  Growing worse.

  There were more of them now. Two dozen men and the boy. Drowned or killed at sea anything from a few hours to fifty years ago. Their bodies changing, hour by hour. The massive life force that electrified their once-dead flesh swelled their limbs and distorted their faces. Worse things were happening too.

  He chewed his lip. He needed to see this. These bastard sights. They were like razor blades peeling away his outer civilized layer, the nicey-nice Mr Stainforth, who didn't push into queues or swear at old ladies (not to their faces, anyway); peel all that artificial civilized society crap away to expose the primal man. The man who would do anything to anyone, no matter how savage or bestial, to ensure that he and his family survived. Nice men don't kill.

  Nice men don't sacrifice what they love. That thought had been planted by Gateman earlier. What would a man two thousand years ago have done, faced with this?

  He knew. The man would have gone to his wife and taken the little dark-eyed boy from her arms; he would have dressed him in his best clothes, told him he was special, that he loved him; then he would have laid him across the stone, picked up the bronze axe, and-

  He blinked. Coldness trickled down one cheek. Shit, Tony Gateman, I bet you can sell fucking condoms to the Pope.

  The figures were closer now. They stood in a long line in front of him, staring at the sea-fort.

  Again he saw that these things were not kept alive in some insipid way, like geriatrics on a life-support machine. No, these things were alive with a vibrant, forceful rush of energy.

  He watched the figures. Concentrating on every detail of the distorted bodies to rip away the civilized exterior that had encased him like a shell nearly all his life.

  He had to turn back the clock to allow that blood of his warrior ancestors to flow through his veins. He had to learn to hate in a full-blooded way. And channel that hate into a force he could use. This would be a battle for survival.

  Their swollen bodies looked as if they would rip the skin that tried to contain them. Hugely enlarged hearts pounded ferociously against their chests like engines. Their naked chests shuddered with the concussions. Where a body had been damaged that crude rush of energy had healed it with tumorous growths. Red tomato cancers ballooned from eye sockets where eyes had been torn away. There, a shattered mouth had been repaired by a protruding flesh balloon.

  Some of the older corpses had mingled with shellfish and seaweed until you could not tell where the man ended and where the flotsam and jetsam of the sea began.

  One, a large barrel-chested man who could have been a ship's captain, stood nearer than the rest.

  His chest, as white as milk, was covered with narrow slits in the skin. The slits were probably as long as a thumb. As Chris watched, the slits slowly parted. Pushing through them from inside the man's chest to the outside came twenty or so hard, dark tips.

  Chris clenched his jaw until it ached.

  The dark objects being forced outward by the internal pressures were mussel shells. Hard. Blue-black. They must have been anchored to the man's rib cage and periodically squeezed through the skin slits, further and further until the shells protruded proud of the skin like rows of long black nipples. A coating of fine mucus gave them an oily gloss that gleamed in the moonlight.

  Then the shells would crack open to expose the pale morsels of salty flesh inside. A moment later they closed and withdrew into the man's chest.

  Each time the mussel shells protruded through the man's skin, his face split into an agonized grimace as if he were being tortured with hot pieces of metal. But no sound came from the raw mouth.

  Chris's face burned. His head rolled. Sometimes he didn't even know if he was standing on the wall watching them, or barefoot in the sand, looking up at the man on the wall, feeling the terror and the pain. And all the time the gnawing need, the naked want... to GO HOME.

  ... GO HOME ...

  Just run and run. But the Saf Dar, in their bright red skins, forced us ...

  Chris's mind blurred. ...

  ... the Saf Dar in their bright red skins forced us to come here, to stand on the beach, pain ripping and exploding through our bodies, pain gnawing like rats at our testicles. ... Ohhh, the burning skin, the burning skin on our bodies ...

  They'll let us go

  GO HOME

  when we smash down the doors of the house on the beach, pull out the people inside, like soft fruit from a tree. Then we give the Saf Dar what they want, the people from the house on the beach, then we-

  WE GO HOME.

  We need love.

  Love us! Love us! Love us! Kiss this burning skin on my body.

  Chris dimly recognized blows hitting his body. He struck out with his fists. They smacked against hard stone.

  He opened his eyes. He'd blacked out and fallen down on the walkway. His stomach churned; the sweat sliding down his face turned icy. And he felt... Christ, he felt like shit.

  Legs trembling, he pulled himself to his feet and walked unsteadily down to the caravan.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Tense, Mark Faust called down to them: "Here they come."

  Chris followed Ruth up the stone steps to the top of the wall.

  He glanced around at the others. Mark stood looking out over the wall, the loaded shotgun resting over his shoulder, looking every inch the Wild West frontiersman. The two Hodgson boys were in their positions at the far end of the wall. They were armed with .22 rifles which were probably as effective as a couple of feather dusters against the Saf Dar, but it kept them occupied. At the section of wall above the main gates stood the two elder Hodgson brothers, their massive freckled hands clamped around the shotguns.

  Tony stood leaning back against the wall, his face as white as paper, a cigar between his lips.

  "Tony, best not smoke too near those bottles. They're full of gas."

  Tony looked like a man waking from a dream. "Gas?"

  "Gas. ... Petrol." Mark Faust looked at his old friend. "You feeling okay?"

  "I'll be fine." He carefully stubbed out the cigar. "Now, we've got everything." The business-like tone came back into his voice. "Enough shells?"

  "Should be ... There's forty in the box on the table."

  Tony turned to Chris. "You've told everyone to stay in the building until it's over? We don't want people milling about up here; someone'd end up getting hurt."

  Chris nodded. "And I've filled the buckets with water in case anyone manages to set themselves on fire when we start lobbing those things." He indicated another table that carried thirteen bottles, filled with petrol and soap powder; wired to the neck of each bottle was a handkerchief-sized piece of cloth.