Earthfall

by Mark Walden

  ‘We have to find cover,’ she yelled as they ran headlong down the street.

  ‘Couldn’t we just hide inside one of these buildings?’ he shouted back as the Grendel rounded the corner behind them.

  ‘That thing would tear the place down around us. We have to get to the rendezvous point now!’

  They raced between abandoned vehicles as the Grendel thundered after them, swatting the cars and vans aside as if they were toys. As they reached the end of the side street and ran out on to a wider road, Rachel glanced behind them and without a word dived into Sam and knocked him flying. A split second later a car spun through the air over their heads, before cartwheeling across the road and smashing through a shopfront with an explosive crash. They scrambled to their feet and kept on running as the Grendel emerged from the side street, relentlessly gaining ground on them. Sam fought to ignore the painful spasms in his chest, knowing that if he slowed down the monstrous techno-organic creature would be on him in seconds.

  ‘There!’ Rachel yelled, pointing down the street ahead of them. Sam looked for what she was pointing at and spotted a familiar sign, a red ring with a blue bar across its centre bearing the single word ‘Underground’. At that precise moment he couldn’t think of anywhere else he’d rather be.

  ‘Head for the entrance!’ Rachel yelled as she unslung the assault rifle from her back, turned towards the charging Grendel and opened fire. She fired three short, controlled bursts at the creature’s eyes and it slowed, raising one of its huge metal claws to shield its face, while still advancing. Rachel continued to fire, backing steadily towards the Tube station entrance. The Grendel raised its other arm and, without warning, a black tendril shot from an orifice on the back of the creature’s wrist and speared towards her. The tentacle swatted the rifle from her hands before viciously whipping back into her shoulder, knocking her off her feet and sending her flying. Sam stopped his headlong dash towards the Underground entrance and ran back towards Rachel as, her face contorted in pain, she forced herself up on to her hands and knees. The tentacle whipped back through the air towards her and mercilessly slammed down on her back flattening her to the ground again before snaking round her ankle and starting to reel her in. Rachel clawed at the road surface, trying to find something to grab on to as Sam sprinted towards her.

  ‘Don’t be stupid! Get out of here!’ she screamed at him.

  ‘I told you, I’ve had enough of running,’ Sam hissed through gritted teeth. Rachel gasped in pain as the mechanical tendril tightened its grip on her leg.

  ‘There’s no point in that thing getting both of us,’ she snapped. ‘Just go!’

  Sam ignored her and pulled the pistol from the waistband of his jeans. He took careful aim at the thick, black tentacle and fired. The bullet pierced the glistening segmented skin, sending gouts of thick, dark green ichor splashing across the tarmac. The Grendel gave a deafening enraged roar and yanked its arm back, dragging Rachel to within just a few metres of its feet. The creature took a single step towards Sam and Rachel, towering over them, raising its free arm high above its head, claws extended for a killing blow. Sam closed his eyes.

  There was a whooshing sound from somewhere behind him and then an incredibly loud explosion. Sam felt a wave of intense heat as he was lifted from the ground and sent flying backwards through the air before slamming down hard, flat on his back, all the wind knocked out of him. For a few seconds he lay stunned before slowly opening his eyes. He forced himself to his feet and surveyed the scene before him. The Grendel was trying to get up, hindered by the fact that the mangled, smouldering remains of the arm that had been dragging them in for the kill lay severed and twitching on the ground, several metres away. Thick oily liquid spurted from the jagged remnants of the wounded creature’s shoulder. Rachel was lying face down on the road. She wasn’t moving. Sam staggered over and gently rolled her on to her back. She was bleeding from a cut just below her hairline and as he tried to lift her up her eyes fluttered open, her brow furrowing into a pained frown.

  ‘What happened?’ she groaned.

  ‘I did,’ a voice said from behind Sam. Walking towards them was a tall, muscular boy wearing combat trousers and a white vest. His hair was a mass of dreadlocks, held back from his face by a black headband covered in tiny white peace symbols. He pulled a short tubular object from his backpack and pulled on each end, extending it and locking the two halves in place, before raising it to his shoulder. A similar object lay discarded on the ground a few metres behind him.

  ‘Jay, your timing is, as usual, perfect,’ Rachel said as Sam helped her to her feet.

  The Grendel had finally regained its balance and now took a single faltering step towards the three of them.

  ‘You might want to get behind me,’ the boy called Jay said as he squinted through the sights mounted on the top of the rocket launcher. ‘I’m gonna put this thing down for good.’

  Sam and Rachel moved out of the way as Jay waited two seconds for the gentle bleeping from the launcher to change to a continuous tone, indicating a positive lock on his target. He took a deep breath and pressed the firing button on top of the launcher. The rocket streaked across the thirty-metre gap that separated them from the wounded Grendel and struck the creature squarely in the centre of the chest. The explosion tore it to shreds, smouldering chunks of its armoured, black shell scattering in all directions.

  ‘So much for tall, dark and ugly,’ Jay said, a broad grin spreading across his face as he discarded the spent launcher. ‘Now, I reckon we should get off the street before any of his friends show up, ’cos I’m out of rockets and that little firework display is going to attract every Hunter within ten miles.’

  In the distance they could hear the low throbbing roar of one of the black triangular drop-ships growing louder.

  ‘You’ll get no argument from me,’ Rachel said as she picked her rifle up off the road. ‘Jay, this is Sam, Sam this is Jay. It’s short for Jacob, but I only call him that when he annoys me. Which is surprisingly often.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Sam,’ Jay said with a broad grin, shaking his hand. ‘So you’re the last one of the Doc’s little lost sheep, huh? Been looking forward to meeting you.’

  ‘Is anyone actually planning to tell me just what the hell’s going on at some point?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Stirling will explain everything,’ Rachel said, turning to the nearby entrance to the Underground station. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  The three of them ran towards the stairs leading down into the darkness as one of the giant black triangles soared past overhead, a bright rectangle of white light appearing as a hatch opened in its belly. The last thing Sam saw as he ran down the stairs was dozens of Drones pouring out of the hatch, swooping down towards them.

  ‘Hunters,’ Jay said as he ran down the steps behind Sam. ‘We need to get into the tunnels fast.’

  Behind them they could now hear the buzzing hum of the Drones as they searched for their prey.

  ‘Won’t they just follow us down here?’ Sam asked as they ran through the abandoned station concourse, navigating their way through the darkness using only the meagre light provided by their torches.

  ‘Probably,’ Rachel said as she jumped over a ticket barrier, ‘but this is our territory. They’re not catching us down here.’

  ‘Yeah, man,’ Jay said, ‘we’re like rats. We know all the best hiding places.’

  Sam climbed over the turnstile and followed Rachel down a stationary escalator, heading into the bowels of the abandoned Tube system. The noise of their headlong dash through the station seemed unbelievably loud to Sam and the buzz of the hunting Drones somewhere behind them was getting closer all the time. They kept running until they reached one of the station platforms, which stretched away into the darkness on either side of them.

  ‘This way,’ Rachel said as she jumped down from the platform and on to the track. ‘If we can make it to Sanctuary Twelve, we can hole up and wait for the Hunters to give up the search.
’

  ‘How far is that?’ Sam asked. He was finding it increasingly difficult to catch his breath.

  ‘Half a click,’ Jay said, pointing his torch down at the track. ‘Watch your step – last thing we need now is a broken ankle.’

  ‘That’s half a kilometre,’ Rachel said, rolling her eyes. ‘You’ll have to excuse Jay – little bit too much Call of Duty. Thinks he’s a soldier.’

  ‘We’re all soldiers now, Rach,’ Jay said. ‘You as much as anyone.’

  The three of them hurried down the pitch-black tunnel in single file, Jay in the lead, Sam in the middle and Rachel bringing up the rear. They’d gone a couple of hundred metres when the sound of the Drones behind them changed subtly.

  ‘They’re in the tunnel,’ Rachel said. ‘You see the hatch yet, Jay?’

  ‘No, not yet,’ he replied, a slight note of concern in his voice for the first time.

  ‘It’s got to be close,’ Rachel whispered.

  ‘I know,’ Jay replied, ‘but I’m telling you I can’t see it.’

  Sam heard a gentle click from behind him as Rachel thumbed the safety catch on her rifle to the off position.

  ‘Wait . . . I got it,’ Jay said, hurrying towards a hatch set low in the wall twenty metres ahead of them. Sam heard Rachel’s relieved sigh, and they followed Jay down the tunnel. Rachel pointed her torch at the hatch as Jay turned his off and shoved it into his pocket.

  ‘Give me a hand,’ Jay said, tugging at the hatch’s rusty metal locking handle.

  Sam grabbed on to the bar and pulled hard and, with a mechanical groan of protest, it slowly began to move. A moment later the lock disengaged and the two boys hauled the hatch open with a creak.

  ‘Quick, inside!’ Rachel hissed, glancing over her shoulder. The noise of the Drones was very close now. It sounded like they would be on them in just a matter of seconds. The three of them clambered through the hatch and Rachel closed it behind them, pulling the locking bar back into position before turning off her torch. They crouched in the darkness, hardly daring to breathe as the whine grew steadily louder and louder. For a moment Sam thought that they’d stopped outside the hatch, but then the buzzing sound started to diminish as the Hunters continued further along the tunnel and all three of them let out long relieved sighs.

  ‘Too close,’ Rachel said, turning her torch back on and directing its beam down the corridor that led away from the hatch. ‘OK, we should be able to follow the secondary tunnel network all the way from here to the Sanctuary. Once we’re there we’ll have to wait a while before we head back to Central Command. We can’t take the chance that any Hunters in the tunnels might follow us back there.’

  They continued down the dark, twisting passageways for another twenty minutes. Jay and Rachel appeared to know exactly where they were heading, but Sam was hopelessly disorientated after just a few minutes. He’d thought that the layout of London’s sewers was complicated, but the network of maintenance tunnels that they were now navigating was even more intricate and convoluted. If you got lost down here, he realised, you might just never see daylight again. Eventually, they arrived at a short flight of concrete stairs that led up to a heavy metal door. Rachel released the two bolts holding the door shut and pushed it open. Sam followed her inside and found himself in a room containing a bunk bed and a battered old armchair. On a table nearby was a kerosene lamp, which Rachel quickly lit. Hanging on the wall above it was a detailed map of the tunnel system surrounding them with various locations circled in red pen.

  ‘Cosy,’ Sam said with a wince as he felt the pain in his chest flaring again. ‘Reminds me of home.’

  ‘We’ve got bolt-holes like this set up throughout about a quarter of the tunnel system,’ Rachel said, gesturing at the map on the wall. ‘We’re expanding the network all the time. Idea is that you should always be near somewhere you can safely hide for a while.’

  ‘As long as you don’t mind eating this rubbish,’ Jay said, taking a foil-wrapped package from a locker mounted on the wall and tossing it across the room to Sam.

  ‘What’s this?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Twenty-four-hour, general-purpose operational ration pack,’ Jay said, taking another one from the locker and tearing it open, ‘as once issued to Her Majesty’s armed forces. Looks better than it tastes and it looks terrible.’

  ‘Do you ever stop thinking about food?’ Rachel said with a sigh as she took off her backpack and sat down in the chair.

  ‘Thanks,’ Sam said, putting the ration pack down on the table, ‘but I’m not really hungry at the moment. In fact, to be honest, I’m exhausted. I think I might just . . .’

  Sam gasped, clutching at his chest, and dropped to his knees as his body was engulfed by sudden fresh wave of nerve-searing pain.

  ‘Sam!’ Rachel yelled, leaping to her feet and catching him as he toppled over. She lowered him gently to the floor.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ Jay asked. He came over and knelt down beside them.

  ‘Hunter sting,’ Rachel said, lifting Sam’s T-shirt to show the bandage round his chest. The green tint to the veins leading away from the wound now extended almost to his waist and their colour was significantly darker than it had been earlier.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jay asked, looking confused. ‘When did he get stung?’

  ‘Last night – least that’s what he told me,’ Rachel said. ‘I know, I know,’ she added, seeing the expression on Jay’s face. ‘I have no idea how he’s lasted this long. Listen, I was hoping that we could stay here for an hour or two, but we have to get him to Stirling now. Hunters or no Hunters.’

  ‘Rach, I hear you, but you know as well as I do that even the Doc can’t help you if you get stung. No one can.’

  Sam groaned, his face contorting as a fresh wave of agony swept through his body. Each breath was excruciating. He was vaguely aware of Rachel and Jay’s voices, but they were muffled, sounding like they were coming from somewhere distant. He felt himself slipping away from wherever those voices were coming from as the last of his strength faded and the world turned black.

  4

  Eighteen Months Earlier

  ‘Come on, Sam, time to get up.’ Ellen Riley rolled up the blind in her son’s bedroom, filling the room with sunlight.

  Sam groaned in protest, pulling the duvet over his head.

  ‘It’s Saturday,’ he moaned. ‘Can’t I just stay in bed?’

  ‘You promised me that you’d tidy your room this morning and if you don’t do it now you won’t have time before going to the cinema with Ben. So, it’s your choice – you can stay in bed if you want, but I’m not taking you to his house until you’ve got this room sorted.’

  Sam lay in bed, listening as his mother went back downstairs. He stuck his head out from under the duvet and looked around. Yesterday, it had seemed like a pretty good deal, but now, in the cold light of day, it didn’t feel like quite such a reasonable arrangement. His bedroom looked as if a highly localised but extremely powerful tornado had passed through it. Video games were piled up, discs out of their cases, dirty clothes lay scattered on the floor, a pile of discarded comic books lay next to the bed and countless dirty mugs and glasses covered every flat surface. It was, even by his elevated standards, a spectacular mess.

  ‘This is going to take hours,’ he groaned to himself.

  He climbed out of bed and staggered across the landing to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and stepped inside, the torrent of hot water washing away the last of his morning drowsiness. He ran his fingers through his wet hair and felt the five-centimetre-long scar that ran across the back of his skull. He had no memory of the surgery that the scar was a relic of but he understood its significance. Since he was little he’d suffered from epilepsy and the device that had been implanted in his skull was to control the neural electrical storms which caused it. He’d had no seizures since and, although the procedure had been experimental at the time, it appeared to have been a remarkable success. He had to go for o
ccasional check-ups, but otherwise he barely even knew it was there. His parents had told him about it just over a year ago and explained that he’d been extremely lucky to be one of the first people to receive the implant. Everything had been fine up until recently when he’d started getting really bad headaches that seemed to always start around the same area as his scar. His parents had been very worried and they’d taken him for a scan, but it had turned out that everything was OK. He’d just needed to take some anti-inflammatory pills and the headaches had faded away. He hadn’t had a headache for a couple of weeks now, but that didn’t stop his parents fussing over him.

  Sam threw on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt before heading downstairs to get some breakfast. He passed his older sister coming up the stairs.

  ‘Morning, midget!’ she said with a grin. ‘Are you actually getting slightly shorter every day or is it just me?’

  ‘Very funny, Jess,’ Sam muttered, ‘but still not as funny as you getting dumped by Greg.’

  ‘He didn’t dump me,’ Jess snapped back. ‘It was a mutual decision.’

  ‘That’s not what he’s telling everyone,’ Sam said, grinning to himself.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Sam said over his shoulder as he walked into the kitchen. ‘You might want to check Facebook though.’ His grin widened as he heard his sister running up the stairs to her bedroom and slamming the door behind her, almost certainly heading straight for her laptop.

  ‘Will you please stop teasing your sister?’ Sam’s mother said. ‘She’s really upset about Greg, you know.’

  ‘She started it,’ Sam said. ‘It’s not my fault she can’t take a joke.’

  ‘Just leave her alone,’ his mum replied, frowning.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he said as he took a carton of orange juice out of the fridge. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘In his study. Something came up at work and he’s been on the phone all morning. Don’t disturb him.’