Blood Royal

by Jonathan Green

  “Could come in handy.”

  The roar of Jack’s jet-pack firing startled Ulysses and, in a cloud of rocket smoke, the vigilante propelled himself onto the top of the wall, thirty feet above them.

  “What are you waiting for?” the vigilante called down to the dandy and his manservant.

  Ulysses eyed the wall, with its ‘Warning – No Entry’ signs and barbed wire clad parapet, wondering how he and Nimrod were going to get to the top, never mind how they were going to fair once they were on the other side.

  “You haven’t seen a ladder lying around here, have you?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  No Man’s World

  IT WAS EERILY quiet on the other side of the wall. There was the distant, yet ever-present, sound of the Overground. And there were the sounds of other Londoners doing their best to go about their business as normal – from the stevedores at the Wapping Docks to the steam-powered hansom cabs ferrying people across the city. But inside the exclusion zone, where the streets looked as though they had been subjected to the most terrible aerial bombardment, it was deathly quiet.

  Cautiously moving their flame-throwers in sweeping arcs, Ulysses and Nimrod set off along the devastation of Cannon Street. As Spring-Heeled Jack led the way, they watched for any indication of movement from either side of the thoroughfare, the golem-droid keeping in step behind.

  In the end there had been no need for Ulysses to find a ladder to scale the west wall; the golem had punched a hole through the reinforced concrete with its pile-driver fists, and they had simply walked through behind it. It had only taken the droid a moment to haul an abandoned goods lorry in front of the hole, effectively sealing it again.

  Ulysses could see the dome of St Paul’s ahead of them. The beautiful architecture of the dome – Sir Christopher Wren’s legacy to London and the English Church – was marred by the presence of the Northern Overground line behind it. A bend in the track skirted right past the cupola and, a little further on, the base of a supporting pillar had been positioned just outside the cathedral churchyard.

  St Paul’s was probably no more than a couple of hundred yards away, but it might as well have been a couple of hundred miles when one took into consideration all the obstacles that would have to be negotiated to reach it. And God alone knew where they were supposed to start looking for the child. She could be anywhere within the vast warren of burnt out streets and partially-demolished buildings.

  Blackened vehicles littered the streets, fallen omnibuses blocking the road as effectively as any government barricade. At more than one point, buildings had collapsed into the street. If they wanted to penetrate the exclusion zone as far as the cathedral, they were either going to have to clamber over these unsteady structures or enter the maze-like warren of side-streets made all the more labyrinthine by the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen this part of the city.

  In the days directly following the Catastrophe, the armed forces had pushed back the seemingly endless tide of bugs swarming out of the St Paul’s area, managing to stop the fires spreading beyond New Bridge Street to the west and Queen Street to the east. Industrial droids had helped to raise the thirty-foot tall barricade from prefabricated slabs of concrete and reinforced steel. Within less than a week, St Paul’s had been cordoned off and any of the ‘changed’ that had slipped through the net had been quickly neutralised.

  People couldn’t bear the thought that the monsters that now plagued St Paul’s after sunset had once been their fellow citizens. No, they might once have been people but they were people no longer. There was no hope for them now. They couldn’t be changed back – or so the government-sponsored scientists claimed – and so it was best for all concerned to grieve, forget and move on. Let the authorities deal with London’s pest infestation.

  However, it soon became clear that the authority’s chosen method of pest control was neither quick nor efficient.

  Interestingly, from a scientific point of view, there were distinctive sub-species among the changed, although the most numerous appeared to be the cockroaches. These had fled into the sewers and abandoned Underground tunnels, feeding on the scraps left behind by the city-dwellers above and only really caused a problem when they burst through into run-down or derelict properties, infesting them as surely as their significantly smaller cousins.

  Then there were the locusts. Six feet in length, these were great winged monsters that bore an uncanny resemblance to the people they had once been. That was apart from their totally alien, mantis-like heads, with their bulbous compound eyes and bone-breaking mandibles.

  Observation stations posted at watch towers around the restricted zone reported that the ’changed’ trapped within the confines of the St Paul’s area had reverted to primitive insect instincts and had established a colony within the shell of the abandoned cathedral.

  The rescue party halted in front of a vast wall of broken stone and twisted steel and regarded the unsafe structure; the golem-droid scanning it with lighthouse sweeps of its baleful eyes.

  “So what now?” Ulysses said.

  “Well, if it was just me, I could hop over this in an instant.” Spring-Heeled Jack said.

  “But it’s not just you, is it?”

  “It would take too long for the golem to clear a safe path through, if time is of the essence.”

  “Which it is.”

  “So, if you’re not prepared to risk climbing over it, then I would suggest we find a way round it.”

  “Then we go round.”

  The three men and the robot turned left into Old Bailey Street and Ulysses was almost surprised to see the recognisable landmark of the ancient and venerable law courts ahead of them. But soon they were following side-streets and alleyways, negotiating the tunnels and rat-runs formed by the devastation.

  They moved from streets open to the sky into the near-dark of the tunnels, from windswept corridors that lay between the towering shells of fire-twisted financial buildings into the damp, dripping depths of cellar underpasses. And they were always on the lookout for signs of life, fingers hooked around the triggers of their flame-throwers, the vigilante with a hand to his pocket mine dispenser, just in case.

  The first of the monstrous insects came scuttling out of a collapsed alleyway. Each was roughly the size of a man, and each was a horrific hybrid of mantis and locust.

  Ulysses gunned the trigger of his Smith and Winchester. A jet of liquid fire roared from the end of the weapon. One of the creatures fell shrieking from its precarious perch on the tunnel wall, landing on its back amidst the black puddles of fetid water, its legs frantically pawing the air.

  A moment later, Nimrod’s flame-thrower sprayed fire into the dark hole and another wall-crawler went tumbling to the ground. It ran past them, giving a high-pitched scream, and disappeared along the alleyway behind them, its chitinous shell aflame and trailing black smoke.

  With a sound like a scream of rage, another locust launched itself at Spring-Heeled Jack, twisting its body in mid-air to meet him face on, mandibles snapping hungrily.

  With a flick of his wrists, the vigilante activated his gauntlet-mounted claw-blades. As the locust made a grab for him, he crossed his arms and slashed the insect across its belly. Severed limbs went flying, trailing the disgusting green ichor that passed for blood among the changed. The creature splashed into a puddle at his feet. As it continued to wriggle helplessly he planted one heavy boot in the middle of its thorax and, with another sweep of his blades, delivered the killing blow.

  Hearing a grinding of robotic servo-motors, Ulysses turned. The two-ton automaton was bearing down on him with clanking piston-strides.

  Ulysses put his finger to the trigger of the flame-thrower, his first thought being that there had been a malfunction and the droid’s former programming was reasserting itself. His second thought was that washing the golem with burning naphtha wasn’t going to do the slightest bit of good, as much of the automaton’s internal mechanisms were protected behind a
shell of heat-resistant ceramic armour.

  Ulysses could do nothing but stare into the malignant gaze of the Limehouse Golem’s headlamp eyes as it reached one massive crushing hand towards him, and then snatched a mutant locust from the wall above him.

  The golem closed its fingers, the insect’s armoured body cracking open like a soft-boiled egg, foul-smelling goo spurting from between the cracks.

  The scrabbling of insect limbs on brick echoed from the tunnels all around them.

  Ulysses, Nimrod and the vigilante shot wary glances all around them; the droid’s body rotating about its waist joint as it scanned the maze of collapsed alleyways, optical sensors scanning for body-heat signatures.

  A horde of pale, chitinous bodies emerged from the gloom.

  “Um, sir,” Nimrod said, raising his flame-thrower. “I think we made them angry.”

  “Like pouring a kettle of boiling water on an ants’ nest,” Ulysses agreed.

  Spring-Heeled Jack said nothing, but instead entered a code on his wrist-mounted control panel. The golem-droid immediately hunkered down, taking on a prize-fighter’s stance, swaying from side to side, its huge steel fists bunched.

  As he scanned the walls of the canyon above them, thick with massing insects, Ulysses’ treacherous thoughts began to wonder if having the golem join the battle would be enough. When he had agreed to this mission he had known that they would meet resistance upon entering the insects’ territory; he just hadn’t expected anything on this scale.

  “Give them hell!” Ulysses bellowed and pulled the trigger of his flame-gun.

  The insects fell in their droves, the liquid fire washing over them in a torrent, but still they came.

  Spring-Heeled Jack hacked and slashed, while the golem-droid tore the warrior insects from the walls and hurled them onto the ground where it crushed them beneath its massive feet, leaving nothing but a mess of slime and broken limbs behind.

  Although they were giving a good account of themselves, Ulysses was not sure how long they could keep it up against such overwhelming odds. The flame-throwers’ fuel was not inexhaustible, and if one of the horrors got close enough to rip open one of their containment suits then they would be exposed to the toxins in the atmosphere.

  As another locust fell before him, its compound eyes sizzling and bursting as they burned, Ulysses became aware of a harsh grating sound, even over the shrieks and screams of the dying insects. He glimpsed movement out of the corner of his fishbowl helmet, and dared to turn his head.

  At his feet a manhole cover had been raised and moved to one side. A grimy face peered up at him from the hole.

  “If you want to live,” said the man, in a rough East End accent, “come with me.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Eighth Plague

  THE MANHOLE LED into the crumbling sewer system that ran under St Paul’s. After a fraught race through the stinking, claustrophobic tunnels, hot on the heels of their raggedy rescuers, they at last made for the surface again.

  Climbing a corroded ladder they entered a subterranean chamber, watched over by what appeared to be beggars wielding rifles. And so it was that, under an armed guard, they at last entered the hallowed halls of the Old Bailey.

  Ulysses, Nimrod and Spring-Heeled Jack stood at the centre of a high-roofed, echoing chamber. They had been forced to leave the golem-droid behind; its massive bulk was too big for the manhole. As he had ducked into the manhole himself, the last sight Ulysses had, as the cast-iron cover was pulled back into place over his head, was of the golem standing braced above him, covered in locusts, tearing the monstrous insects limb from limb.

  Peering through the gloom, Ulysses took in their new surroundings. The three of them were surrounded by a rag-tag band of filthy, scruffily-dressed men and women – a dozen or so, Ulysses guessed, at a rough count. Beyond them the marble tiled floor was covered with make-shift beds.

  Anxious faces watched them with wide-eyed fascination. There were men and women of all ages here, and even a few children.

  Ulysses gasped. He had thought the contamination zones were deserted. But these people appeared to be unchanged. So why hadn’t they tried to leave their hiding place and make it back over the wall?

  But if they had been living here since the Catastrophe, and had remained unchanged, then...

  Cautiously Ulysses undid the seal on his helmet and lifted the glass fishbowl from this head.

  “What are you doing?” Spring-Heeled Jack hissed.

  There was a lingering malignant odour in the air as of unwashed bodies and disease. For a moment, Ulysses considered putting his helmet back on, but then thought better of it.

  Ulysses was relieved, but also surprised, to see that none of these refugees bore any obvious signs of mutation. They must have been among the lucky few to escape the Jupiter Station’s toxic deluge, and the imbibing of that other vital chemical component that had laced Dr Feelgood’s Tonic Stout. Supposedly the creation of an anonymous philanthropist, it had in fact been the product of another of disgraced former Prime Minister Uriah Wormwood’s detestable schemes; engineered to force the globe-spanning empire of Magna Britannia to evolve beyond its Neo-Victorian bounds.

  Although the three of them had been saved by the intervention of a number of those hiding out within the Old Bailey, Ulysses considered, they weren’t safe yet. Too much had happened to these poor wretches in the last few weeks; they had seen too much to place their trust in strangers just yet. The dozen or so men and women now surrounding them were all armed – some with the most bizarre and antique firearms, others with cobbled together crossbows and knives. The dandy adventurer had seen a fair number of unusual weapons during his travels, but none quite like these before.

  The three of them moved together so that they stood back to back, facing their possible saviours, keeping the whole ring of armed men and women in sight.

  As Ulysses scanned the uncertain faces ranged before him, he saw a tall man, dressed in a grubby black cassock, rise from where he had been administering to an anxious-looking mother clutching a baby. The man turned and approached. He was lean, as well as tall, and his gaunt, aging face was framed by lank wisps of shoulder length white-grey hair. At his neck Ulysses saw the white flash of a dog collar and a heavy silver crucifix hung on a leather thong over the stained material of his robe.

  The circle of guardians parted as he approached.

  “And who do we have here? Three more lost sheep to join our growing flock, or more sinners in search of absolution?”

  “‘AND THE LORD said unto Moses, ‘Stretch out thine hand over the land of Egypt for the locusts, that they may come up upon the land of Egypt, and eat every herb of the land, even all that the hail hath left. And Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that night; and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts.’”

  The Preacher’s declamation was met with a chorus of amens and hallelujahs from the faithful, or the Children of the Catastrophe as they chose to call themselves.

  “So let me get this straight. You think that the events of Valentine’s Day are akin to the plagues of Egypt?”

  “And you don’t?” the Preacher railed.

  “Put it in layman’s terms for me,” Ulysses suggested.

  “Pestilence, hail, frogs, darkness,” the Preacher checked the list off on his fingers, “all came in the wake of the launch of the Jupiter Station. A prime example of Man’s hubris; an assault in the face of God. It could only ever go one way.”

  “But I was there.” Hearing Ulysses’ confession gasps went up from the crowd. “The Catastrophe was the work of one man – Uriah Wormwood, erstwhile Prime Minister of this great country of ours. It was not an act of God, or the Devil, for that matter.”

  “Does the Bible not say, ‘The Lord moves in mysterious ways’?” This was met with more amens and exclamations in the name of great Jehovah. “And now we find ourselves beset by locusts
.

  “‘For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt.’”

  “Praise the Lord!” came a euphoric cry.

  “You know what?” Ulysses said, pointing. “A couple of hundred yards that way – if that – is a wall and a way out of this living hell. Why don’t you just leave?”

  “Because the Lord is testing us,” the Preacher said, looking aghast at even the suggestion that they might escape from the purgatory in which they now dwelt. “On the other side of that self-same wall lies a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. Here we are safe from the corruption and temptations of the city. Why would we want to leave?”

  “But what about the children, you have trapped with you here? What about the old, the infirm? If you’re not all sick already, they soon will be. It’s unsanitary.”

  “There’s nothing for us on the other side of the wall. Not for any of us. Our life in this world might be hard, but we shall have our reward in heaven.”

  Some might have had their faith tested by the events of recent times but with the Preacher it was more a case of that which doesn’t kill you only makes you more committed. Ulysses considered that there was no reasoning with a man like that.

  “I tell you now, God is not done with this new Babylon, this London!” the Preacher pronounced, his voice rising to a bellow. “London shall know God’s wrath again. He shall not be content until every sinner has been made to account for his sins! Are you saved, sinner?”

  “You tell me,” Ulysses threw back. “No, hang on, don’t bother. I think I can probably guess what your answer would be.”

  “Then you seek absolution.”