Max Gilbert

by Simon Clark

  "I'm expecting the delivery boy any moment." Chris handed her the mug. "You're entitled to one digestive biscuit now. Or you can save up your ration and orgy on three biscuits tonight with a cup of hot chocolate."

  "Oh, I'll have it now. I'm starving."

  At least they could treat the rationing a little more flippantly now. After the success that morning, wiping out six Saf Dar in the space of a few minutes, the outlook looked brighter.

  They joined Tony. The little Londoner sat on one of the cannon that Chris had bought from the Vicar. The Vicar himself walked unsteadily in the direction of the sea-fort building. Pissed again.

  Tony had half finished his coffee and was smoking a cigar in nervous pulls.

  "Went the day well?" Chris grinned. "At this rate we'll have the lot in a day or two."

  "I hope so, Chris. I hope so."

  Ruth told Tony about the state of the food and water. There were adequate supplies for up to four days. Surely long before then the Saf Dar would be wiped from the surface of the earth and life could return to normal. Chris decided that as soon as it was over they would all drive over to Lincoln and feast on Big Macs as a special treat. Also he could call in on the architect and see the man up to get the plans completed. This place had to be transformed into a thriving hotel within ten months. The days were beginning to slip by, bringing that deadline remorselessly closer.

  He looked around the courtyard. Nothing, but nothing, could get in the way of his dream.

  Mark looked over the wall at the two heads protruding from the water. He said to John Hodgson, "I reckon I could wade out that far and blow their heads clean off at point-blank."

  "You'd be a dead fucker if you did. You can see those two sods plain enough; but what about them you can't? There'll be a couple more sat underwater waiting to grab any silly chuff's legs who tried to get across there."

  "I want to get out there. I want this place rid of them."

  "Aye, all in good time. It's when you take risks you start losing people. They'll come back up to them gates. It pulls them like a bitch on heat pulls dogs from miles around. They can't stop themselves. And when they come it'll be like shooting rats in a tub."

  Mark Faust knew the farmer was right.

  But for some reason he couldn't explain, he felt that time was running out.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chris had fallen asleep where he sat on the courtyard floor, his back to the wall. The attack on the Saf Dar that morning had exhausted him. And when he woke he had that drugged feeling as if he and reality were still out of synch.

  Tony stood looking down at him. A pair of binoculars dangled from one hand.

  In a flattened way, Tony said, "Come on."

  Chris pulled himself up, yawning into his hand, and followed Tony up the stone steps to the top of the wall. They were alone.

  Without a lick of emotion, Tony said, "Look."

  Chris looked out over the beach. The tide had retreated.

  Then he saw what Tony had been scrutinising through the binoculars.

  On the causeway, now high and dry, stood a dozen figures.

  They stood in a domino-straight line, stretching back along the causeway, staring impassively at the sea-fort gates.

  Saf Dar.

  He looked at them in silence for a full two minutes before leaning forward, his elbow resting on the wall, his face nestled in the palm of his hand.

  "Jesus. ... We've been wasting our time, haven't we?"

  Tony nodded.

  Chris stared at the figures. Of the twelve, five appeared as before. Naked bodies swollen tight with muscle, veins pushing through the skin; the skin that sunburn-red color.

  The other seven differed.

  Different shades of red mottled their skin, anything from small spots to large patches that covered half their bodies. This coloring possessed a shiny, fresh quality. The way skin looks when you pick off a scab too soon.

  These seven were the seven they had "killed."

  They had come back. And they didn't appear weakened by the furious blasting from shotguns or burning by petrol bombs. In fact, the latest growth of flesh that had infilled their wounds stood proud of the surrounding areas as if the new flesh had been infused with more power than the old.

  And it had taken six hours.

  Now they were back: fresh, strong, murderous.

  "What does not kill me makes me stronger..." murmured Tony. "Want these?" He offered the binoculars.

  Chris shook his head. Whatever strength remained oozed from his body, leaving him empty.

  "We failed, Tony."

  "We did our best. But there's something stronger behind all this. Can you sense it? That power I told you about? It's leaking through into this place now. You can feel it running through the stones. You know, like when you touch a water pipe with water rushing through it. You can feel the vibration."

  "What's it going to take to get rid of those things?"

  "I'll tell you what we have to do. We'll have to drop this civilized pretense. This twentieth-century-man pose. We're going to have to do what our ancestors did."

  "Sacrifice?" Chris shook his head. The man was mad. "Pick someone out? Then what? Knock out their brains? Skin them alive?"

  "Chris, it's not as insane as it sounds. Look at every culture from the time that human beings stopped crapping in their own nests. Independently of each other, cultures have developed their own rites of sacrifice. Remember what I said. It was a trade, a barter. They were saying to their gods we give you food, or-or the life of my child. In return you give me something. A good harvest, success in war."

  Chris shut out the words. He could only stare with hypnotic intensity at the twelve figures strung out like red beads along the causeway. They, in turn, glared with chiselled Easter Island statue faces at the sea-fort gates as if willing them to crumble to dust.

  As he watched, the others joined him and Tony on the wall. They watched the Saf Dar silently. Each of them must have realized that the ones with the sticky red patches were the ones burnt and shot to shreds that morning.

  Then he heard a cry. The kind of cry someone would make if they had walked barefoot on broken glass.

  Mark Faust. He lunged forward to the wall, his eyes bulging as he glared at the figures.

  "No! No! No!" The violence in his voice shocked Chris. "I won't let the bastards beat us! I won't."

  Jerking up the shotgun, he fired two shots as fast as his finger could snatch at the trigger. At this range the shot shredded a few scraps of seaweed on the causeway but not much else. Mark thrust the gun out for Chris to hold, then snatched another gun from John Hodgson to blaze off another two rounds.

  The Saf Dar showed no reaction, even though some of the shot had struck them. From the bare shin of one a trickle of black ran down to pool on the causeway.

  "Bastards ... Bastards. They weren't stupid after all. They knew we could do nothing-not one little thing- to hurt them."

  For one terrifying moment Chris thought that Mark would throw open the gates and run out onto the causeway to attack them with his bare hands. His body shook with rage, his teeth were bared in a snarl, his eyes blazed.

  But the moment passed as quickly as it had come. With a coughing cry he turned his back on them and sat down on the stone walkway, arms clutching his knees to his chest like a baby in its mother's womb.

  Chris looked around at the drawn faces of the villagers as they watched the big man reduced to this.

  Impotent. He had seen the word a million times before. Now he knew what it really meant. It's the feeling that breaks you in two when something is going to happen and you know there's nothing in the world you can do to prevent it. Like a mother watching her baby dying of cancer. You can hold the baby in your arms; you can shout and swear at a heartless bastard of a god who let this happen. But there's nothing you can do to stop that tiny life slipping away through your fingers.

  Watching Mark seemed somehow shameful. He turned back to watch the livi
ng statues who now ruled their lives. And tried not to listen to the sounds that Mark Faust was making.

  Chapter Forty

  Depression.

  Hopelessness.

  The villagers retreated into themselves. Most went back to the gun-deck room to stare into space.

  Chris watched Ruth help David color in a drawing.

  He found it hard to think of anything else but water. What would they do when that ran out? He glanced out through the window at millions of tons of the stuff sliding backwards and forward across the sands.

  He purposefully turned his back on the window.

  Just an hour before there had been a real mood of optimism. The things bled, they seemed to die. But their hopes had all been smashed to buggery. The things were immortal. We can make more petrol bombs, blast them with shotguns, stone them, but they'll keep coming back.

  The one hope now was that someone from the outside would come.

  From OUTSIDE.

  Chris suddenly realized how odd that word sounded. Outside. The rest of the world-with streets, cafes, graffiti, crowded buses, parks; it all seemed so remote now. As if this bit of the world had somehow cracked away from Planet Earth.

  Manshead had now become a borderland lying between the common-or-garden world they all knew and that place Tony had talked about. Where some ... thing that the ancients had worshipped as a god stalked.

  The mental video in his head played footage of a hungry tiger restlessly pacing backward, forward, backward, behind the bars of a cage. The bars were all that separated it from its small territory of the cage and the sunny walkways of the zoo, filled with soft and tasty Homo sapiens. Easy meat. The bars of the cage were growing flimsy now.

  "Dad, when are we going down the cellar?"

  "Not now, David. Some time soon, eh?"

  "Dad ..."

  "Don't worry, kidda. We'll go down and have a good explore when we get the chance."

  "But I've been down there tons of times. I want to show you something. It's dead interesting."

  "You've been down before? When?"

  Ooops! David realized he shouldn't have told him. After all, he wasn't allowed down in the cellar.

  "Just a few times. It's great down there."

  His dad was definitely not smiling. "What's down there, David?"

  "Come on, I'll show you."

  David grabbed him by the hand and pulled him to the door.

  In the corridor they met Tony. His face was red and he was panting.

  "Another one, Chris."

  "What?"

  "Mrs. Christopher. She tried to ..." He noticed David. "She tried to end things." Tony turned and spoke in a low voice that David wasn't supposed to hear-but he did. "In the toilet. Plastic bag over the head, tied a ribbon around her neck to seal it."

  "Suffocated?"

  "Damn well nearly succeeded, too. Ruth found her just in time."

  "Go play, David, there's a good lad. We'll go down later, eh?"

  Then his dad and Tony hurried away.

  Life went on.

  In a slow, half-hearted kind of way.

  That evening the LPG bottle that fueled the caravan's gas cooker ran dry. Tony helped Chris to change it. They manhandled the empty bottle through the doors into the sea-fort building, along the stone-flagged corridor and into one of the store rooms. In here were another five of the blue metal cylinders, all full and each almost the size of Tony Gateman.

  Five full cylinders, thought Chris. A lot of gas. Enough to last well into the summer. If we live that long.

  A lot of gas. He turned an idea over in his mind like an archaeologist examining a new artefact. A lot of gas.

  "You know, Tony, before the fresh water runs out we could rig up something to distil sea water. That way we'd have an unlimited supply. We're already bringing it up by the bucketful on a line when the tide's in."

  "It's an idea." Tony's lack of enthusiasm was hardly subtle. He wasn't interested in turning sea water into drinking water.

  What was wrong with the man? Didn't he want to survive?

  "I'll start looking around for some tubing. See if I can rig something up."

  Tony simply nodded as he helped him hoist one of the full gas cylinders upright. As they got ready to drag the cylinder to the caravan, Tony looked up at Chris and asked, "Did you hear a sound?"

  "A sound? What kind of sound?"

  "It doesn't matter. It's nothing ... Come on."

  In silence they pulled the full cylinder out through the doorway, the metal base making a rasping sound that rumbled down through the corridor, like the respiration of some great animal waking from a deep sleep.

  Mark Faust pulled the blanket over his shoulders. Only half-past seven in the evening, but nonetheless he tried to sleep.

  He lay on his side on the stone floor in the gundeck room, one arm pillowing his head.

  Outside, the mist imperceptibly shifted down from white to gray as, unseen, the sun slipped below the horizon.

  Inside, the Reverend Reed snored thickly in the corner, his face red from the gin. Maybe he had the right idea. Sweet oblivion.

  Mark now appreciated the attraction of killing yourself. Dead, you feel no more pain, or distress or misery.

  The Christopher woman, when they had brought her around after tearing the plastic bag from her head, had given such a groan of disappointment at having life thrust back at her that it made him wonder if they had done the right thing. Maybe they should have just turned away and left her.

  Then again, maybe if he had never left the States everything would have been different. MAYBE. The world was full of maybes. Maybe if Hitler had died in that gas attack in World War I; maybe if Charlie Manson had stopped a Vietcong bullet with his face; maybe if it rained for a year in Ethiopia and turned the deserts green; maybe if he had stayed at home in Boston, USA, he would be sitting in front of the TV now with a beer. A wife cooking him supper. A daughter on a date. A son practising power chords on an electric guitar in the garage with a couple of friends. MAYBE ... Those kind of maybes were as hard as the nails going through Christ's hands and feet into the solid God-given wood.

  He rolled over onto his back, trying to sleep.

  He felt like the condemned criminal, lying caged in his cell, waiting for the last walk down to old Sparky. This was a post mortem existence. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

  When would the end come?

  Problem: remember Wainwright and Fox?

  Death would be no ending, no finality.

  It would be the beginning of something else.

  They would wake up on the beach. With new companions.

  The radio should have been an ear to the outside. News reports, music, weather bulletins, time checks. The sounds of a normal world.

  After five minutes, Ruth switched it off. She had scanned every wavelength from AM to FM. All that came from the speakers was the hiss of static. Which sounded very much like the surf that beat upon the beach.