Earthfall

by Mark Walden

  ‘Rach, wait,’ Nat shouted as they sprinted towards the railings that surrounded the once magnificent park. She reached into Rachel’s backpack and pulled out their last brick of plastic explosive. She ran back to the crater and placed the charge on the ground just above the climbing Grendels.

  ‘Nat, you’re a genius,’ Jay said as she ran back to the others.

  Rachel pulled the remote detonator from the pouch on her belt and waited as the first Grendel’s massive claw reached up and over the edge of the crater, before slamming down on the ground and dragging the creature upwards. She hit the trigger just as the Grendel’s head appeared, and the creature vanished with a bang in a cloud of fire and dust. The burning, decapitated body of the Grendel tumbled back down the slope, knocking the other creature to the bottom of the crater.

  ‘Bought us some time,’ Nat said, ‘but not much.’ She pointed upwards and they saw half a dozen drop-ships racing towards them from the Voidborn Mothership. They climbed over the iron railings and on to the pavement. At the far end of the street another Grendel rounded the corner and roared as it caught sight of them.

  ‘Other way I’m guessing,’ Jay said, and they all sprinted in the opposite direction.

  ‘Which route did you take to the surface?’ Sam yelled at Rachel as they ran down the street with the Grendel striding after them, swiping aside the cars that sat in the road ahead of it like toys.

  ‘Same way you did,’ Rachel replied, ‘We . . . erm . . . persuaded Adam to give us the route that he’d given to you guys.’

  ‘Is that the closest entrance to the tunnel network?’ Sam asked, trying hard to remember the map that Jackson had given him to memorise several weeks previously.

  ‘I think so,’ Jay replied as they ran round another corner, heading towards Big Ben, which was now just visible above the rooftops. ‘The only other entrance that’s sure to be open is Westminster Tube, but the entrance under Parliament is nearer and we know it’s not blocked or locked up.’

  ‘Well, we need to get undercover somehow,’ Sam said, glancing over his shoulder at the descending drop-ships. ‘If those things catch us in the open, it’s all over.’ He reckoned that they had a couple of minutes at best.

  They kept running. The Grendel was now only fifty or sixty metres behind them. Sam was very grateful that the roads were filled with abandoned cars in this part of the city because they were the only thing slowing the monstrous beast down. The street they were in at the moment was narrow enough to give them some cover from the drop-ships, but the approach to Parliament was horribly exposed. They had to move faster or they were going to be trapped between the Voidborn aircraft and the Grendel.

  They reached Parliament Square just as the first of the drop-ships roared past, before banking and heading back towards them.

  ‘Scatter!’ Rachel yelled as the drop-ship began its run. They split up, all running in different directions, but still heading for the entrance to the Houses of Parliament.

  The drop-ship opened fire, and massive green energy bolts struck the ground all around them, sending plumes of shattered tarmac and concrete shooting into the air. One blast hit a black cab just a couple of metres from Sam and the concussion from the blast sent him flying. He slammed on to the bonnet of another abandoned car and rolled off the other side, landing on his back on the road. He staggered to his feet, and ran as fast as he could towards the enormous Gothic Victorian building, praying that his three friends had not been caught by any of the blasts.

  He was running in a zigzag pattern, just as he had been trained to do, when he heard another drop-ship screaming down towards them. This time none of the blasts hit quite so close to home, but the destruction they caused was no less devastating. Sam was surrounded by burning vehicles and the black smoke that billowed from their blazing shells stung his eyes and irritated his lungs. He didn’t mind; that very same smoke was probably stopping the Voidborn aircraft from drawing a more accurate bead on him. He was only fifty metres from the concrete barriers that had been put in place around the entrance to Parliament to prevent a terrorist from driving a truck bomb into the building. It suddenly seemed quite quaint to Sam that people had once been scared of other human beings, when the true threat would eventually prove to be something that humanity would be completely defenceless against. Regardless, he was glad that someone had once been so afraid of terrorists because those barriers now served as excellent cover. He vaulted over one of the massive concrete barricades and crouched down behind it as more energy blasts detonated all around the square. Sam lifted his head and peered over the top of the barrier. The smoke was so thick that the drop-ships had to be firing blind. Rachel and Nat were a few metres away; Nat was hobbling along, with her hand pressing down on a bloody wound in her thigh and her other arm round Rachel’s shoulders. Sam jumped back over the barrier and ran towards them, putting his arm round Nat’s waist and helping Rachel support her as they slowly made their way to the arched entrance to the Parliament buildings.

  ‘What happened?’ Sam asked, ducking involuntarily as another Voidborn aircraft screamed low over the square, presumably trying to spot a clear target.

  ‘I took a piece of shrapnel in my leg,’ Nat said, through gritted teeth. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks – I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Did either of you see where Jay went?’ Sam asked, looking back over his shoulder into the smoke-filled square. There was no sign of his friend anywhere.

  ‘No,’ Rachel said. ‘I haven’t seen him since that first drop-ship made its attack run.’

  ‘Will you guys be OK from here?’ Sam asked as they walked beneath the archway and into the entrance area of Parliament.

  ‘Yeah, I can probably get Nat down to the tunnels on my own,’ Rachel said.

  ‘OK, then, I’m going back for Jay,’ Sam said, turning and heading outside.

  ‘Sam,’ Rachel said, and he turned towards her. ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Careful’s my middle name,’ Sam said. ‘Actually it’s not, it’s Patrick, but you get the idea.’

  She and Nat watched him vanish into the smoke.

  The smoke outside was even thicker now, but for whatever reason the drop-ships had stopped firing, although Sam could still hear them flying around overhead. Suddenly, he heard a series of crunching thuds and he realised why the drop-ships had stopped their bombardment. Somewhere out there in the smoke there was at least one Grendel stomping around, presumably hunting for survivors. If Jay was alive, Sam had to find him before it did. He headed back past the concrete barriers and out on to the street. The only illumination was provided by the blazing wreckage that the drop-ships had left in their wake.

  Sam crept along, the incessant low growl of the Grendel still inside his head. He closed his eyes for a second, trying to see if he could get an idea of where the massive creature was. It was no good; just like the sound that he heard from the Hunters, the noise seemed to come from everywhere at once. It varied in volume, but it gave him no sense of what direction the noise was coming from, only if it was moving closer or further away. He kept moving despite the intense heat from the fires around him.

  Without warning the burning car a few metres to his right was suddenly hoisted into the air and hurled to one side, crashing into an abandoned bus and sending showers of flaming debris scattering in all directions. The Grendel roared at Sam and swiped at him with one of its huge claws. Sam dived to one side, feeling the breeze from the creature’s talons as they slashed through the air just above him. He scrambled to his feet and sprinted away from the Grendel, expecting at any moment to be crushed by its talons.

  ‘Look out!’ Jay screamed, hitting Sam hard on the shoulder and sending him flying. A split second later another burning car flew over their heads and smashed into the front of one of the buildings that surrounded the square with an explosive crash.

  ‘Come on,’ Jay yelled, pulling Sam to his feet and pushing his friend back towards the entrance, to Parliament. As Sam ran headlong for the entrance,
he could hear the pounding footsteps of the Grendel chasing after them.

  Suddenly, he felt something wrap around his chest and squeeze, pulling him off his feet and dragging him backwards. Gasping for breath, he looked down at his chest and saw the oily black tentacle that was slowly tightening its grip as the Grendel reeled him in.

  Jay ran towards the Grendel, raising his pistol and taking careful aim. He fired half a dozen rounds straight into the creature’s face and it let out a howl of pain, raising a claw to one of its glowing red eyes where one of the bullets had struck home, half blinding it. The enraged creature took three long strides towards Jay and sent him flying with a backhand swipe of one of its claws.

  Jay slammed into one of the concrete anti-terrorist barriers with a bone-crunching thud. Sam felt the tentacle round his chest release as the Grendel turned its attention to Jay who lay motionless on the ground. As Sam staggered to his feet, the creature raised one massive fist, preparing to crush Jay with a single blow.

  ‘NO!’ Sam screamed at the top of his voice as his skull was filled with a bizarre roaring sound.

  The Grendel froze like a statue, its arm still raised. Sam stood there for a moment, gasping for air before a wave of searing pain hit him right between the eyes. It felt like a thousand needles were being pressed into his skull and he dropped to his knees, with his head in his hands, moaning. It lasted what seemed like an eternity but could only really have been a few seconds. He slowly got back to his feet as the pain subsided and walked towards Jay and the frozen Grendel. He cautiously walked around the Grendel, looking up at the creature, which was still active, its one good eye glowing, but was otherwise frozen in place. He turned his back to the Grendel, half expecting to feel its fist come smashing down on top of him.

  ‘Jay, come on, talk to me,’ Sam said, shaking his friend gently by the shoulder.

  Jay groaned and his eyes fluttered open. ‘I never knew that everything could hurt at once,’ Jay said as he pushed himself up into a sitting position.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ Sam replied as the noise of an approaching drop-ship got louder, ‘before those things start strafing us again. Can you walk?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ Jay said, slowly getting to his feet with Sam’s help. He looked up at the monstrous creature looming above them.‘What happened to that thing?’

  ‘Just malfunctioned, I guess,’ Sam said. He knew that wasn’t true, that it had to be more than a coincidence that he had felt whatever it had been that had gone off inside his head a split second after the Grendel had frozen, but he wanted to talk to Stirling about it before anyone else, even Jay. He didn’t know quite how his friends might react to the news that he seemed to have given the Grendel an order that it had for some reason obeyed.

  ‘OK, that officially makes us the luckiest people on the planet right now,’ Jay said, shaking his head. A moment later a drop-ship made a low pass over the square.

  ‘Come on, time to go,’ Sam said as they both saw the Voidborn aircraft banking back towards them above the Parliament buildings. They sprinted towards the entrance to the House, both feeling the last reserves of energy draining away from their battered bodies. The drop-ship opened fire, but the energy bolts missed their target as Sam and Jay ran for cover, striking the ground a dozen metres behind them. The two boys ran through the archway, taking the marble steps two at a time into the comparative safety of the famous building.

  ‘This way,’ Sam shouted, pointing down the corridor that would take them back to the tunnel network. In the air above the building three more drop-ships banked sharply, the noses of the triangular aircraft turning towards their target. They fired indiscriminately, the massive bolts of green energy hammering into the building and blowing enormous chunks out of its structure. Inside, Sam and Jay struggled to stay on their feet as the whole building shook. Lumps of masonry fell from the ceiling and windows blew inwards in showers of glass shards.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Sam yelled. ‘They’re going to bring this whole place down on top of us.’

  They ran down another dark corridor, the only illumination coming from the flashes of bright green light that accompanied the explosions outside. There was another green flash and the wall a few metres behind them exploded, filling the corridor with rubble.

  ‘There!’ Sam yelled, spotting the door that led to the stairs.

  Outside the barrage continued, and the ancient building finally began to buckle under the assault. A volley of fire from two of the Voidborn aircraft slammed into the clock tower a third of the way up, and masonry that had withstood everything that had been thrown at it before finally gave way. With not a single human witness, the tower that had stood for one hundred and fifty years collapsed, and Big Ben fell, toppling into the very building that it had come to symbolise in a shower of shattered stone.

  Sam and Jay reached the bottom of the stairs, blind in the darkness as they staggered into the tunnels, feeling their way along the walls. Above them there was a terrible groaning sound and then a noise like thunder. The stairwell they had descended a few seconds before vanished in a cloud of dust as it was filled with rubble from the destroyed building.

  ‘Sam, are you OK?’ Jay yelled.

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ Sam shouted back.

  At the far end of the tunnel a pair of torch beams came into view and Rachel and Nat walked towards them, Nat still leaning on Rachel for support due to her injured leg. They found Sam and Jay sitting with their backs against the wall of the rubble-filled tunnel, battered, bloodied and covered in masonry dust. Rachel looked at them both and a crooked smile appeared on her face.

  ‘I thought Careful was your middle name?’

  9

  Sam and Rachel walked along the tunnel behind Jay and Nat. Jay had insisted on helping Nat despite the fact that Rachel had told him that she was more than capable of doing it. Sam had pretended not to notice the look of relief on Rachel’s face when Jay had taken over. Sam turned round and briefly flashed his torch down the tunnel behind them.

  ‘I think you can relax now,’ Rachel said as Sam pointed the torch back ahead of them. ‘I very much doubt that any of the Threat are going to be following us through that stairwell. It sounded like the whole building came down.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right,’ Sam said with a sigh. ‘Still jumpy, though, do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m always a bit twitchy after combat,’ Rachel replied with a nod. ‘It’s quite normal, you know.’

  ‘Do you think Nat’s going to be OK?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I think so. It was a nasty wound, but I put a field dressing on it and that stopped the bleeding. It’s nothing that Stirling won’t be able to fix once we get back.’

  Sam didn’t reply, just nodded and was silent. In the light reflected from the torch, Rachel could see a worried frown on his face.

  ‘Something’s still bothering you, isn’t it?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam replied, his frown deepening. ‘It’s just that all this seems to have left us with far more questions than answers. I mean, you heard what Fletcher said. He obviously knew who Stirling was.’

  ‘Yeah, the Doc’s got a bit of explaining to do when we get back,’ Rachel said with a nod. ‘I just can’t believe that someone would collaborate with the Threat like that.’

  ‘The Voidborn,’ Sam replied, ‘that’s what Fletcher said they were called.’

  ‘Yeah, you said,’ Rachel replied. ‘I still think our name’s more accurate.’

  ‘He said some other things – seemed pretty crazy at the time, but . . .’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, he said that this has all been planned for a long time and that this planet has always belonged to the Voidborn. You don’t think that could be true, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t and frankly I would have thought you’d know better than to let a creep like that get under your skin.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam said, ‘maybe you’re right. But there’s more to
this than we know and Stirling hasn’t told us everything he knows.’

  ‘He’s always been pretty secretive,’ Rachel said. ‘I wouldn’t be that surprised if he does know more than he’s letting on. It doesn’t mean we can’t trust him.’

  ‘I suppose. I never expected there to be humans working with the Voidborn. It’s just freaked me out a bit. I mean, how many people like Fletcher are out there?’

  ‘Let’s hope not too many,’ Rachel said. ‘Try not to worry about it. Just be glad that we all got out of there in one piece.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. It did look a bit hairy for a while.’

  ‘I think that might be understating it just a bit.’

  ‘Maybe a tiny bit,’ Sam said, laughing.

  Just ahead Nat’s torch lit up the heavy steel doors that served as the underground entrance to their bunker. Nat leant against the wall while Jay banged three times on the door with his fist. A moment later the narrow panel set in the door at eye level opened and a pair of eyes appeared.

  ‘Password?’

  ‘Password is “Let us in, Jack, before I break your fingers”, OK?’ Jay replied.

  ‘Well, when you put it like that,’ Jack replied. A moment later they heard the sound of heavy bolts being drawn back and the door swung open.

  ‘Welcome home.’

  Stirling was absorbed in studying a computer-generated simulation of the waveform of the Voidborn control signal when his concentration was broken by a knock on the door of his quarters. With an irritated sigh he walked across the room and opened the door to find Anne standing outside.

  ‘Jay, Rachel, Sam and Nat have just got back,’ Anne said happily. ‘They’re in the Ops Area now. They look like they’ve been to hell and back. Nat’s been wounded in the leg and they sent me to come and get you so that you could have a look at it.’

  ‘OK, just let me save what I’ve been working on and I’ll come straight down,’ Stirling replied. He closed the door and headed back over to his terminal. He was just about to shut it down when an alert window popped up with a pinging sound. The small window read: