The wind was dying. The orb almost finished. Max watched as it continued to shrink. A scream from below made him look over the edge of the tower’s platform. Stacey was on her knees, staring up at him. And as he watched, it was like her features were melting away. Her scream ended prematurely as her mouth sealed up.
Max felt with a terrible resignation, his own features were doing the same. It was getting harder to draw breath through his nostrils. He opened his mouth to take a breath then panicked as his mouth wouldn’t open as far as it used to. He glanced over at Irulal, and saw that even she wasn’t immune to the effects of the orb. Her features were almost completely gone as well.
And then, just as Max resigned himself to passing out, the orb flashed several times rapidly, like a paparazzi firing off photos. There was a second’s sensation of weightlessness, then of falling.
Then Max was somewhere else.
50
Payne stared at the screen, Linwood beside him. She’d given up trying to shut the phone networks down and had come to stand next to Payne.
“I don’t know if the planes are going to get there in time,” she said softly. “And even if they do, who knows what effect that disturbance is going to have on their instruments.”
“It’s not all over yet. Max is still there. Give him a chance.” Payne put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer to him. They stood like that for a little while, Payne enjoying the proximity of another body.
“He’s only one man. What chance does he have against that?”
“I don’t know, but he’s shown himself to be resourceful.” Payne imagined Max on his own against this alien that everyone who’d met was so terrified of, and inwardly agreed with Linwood. What chance does a man have against such forces?
Idly, he pulled his hand back and scratched the back of it. “How will we know if the air strike is successful?”
“I’ve got the computers tracking their progress.” She paused and looked away at another screen on the wall. “They’re ten minutes away.”
The itch irritated Payne again and he dug his nails into the back of his hand in an effort to make it go away. But it wouldn’t, and now that he was paying it attention, it had spread to the back of his neck. He noticed Linwood scratching the back of her neck as well.
“Are you feeling OK?” he asked.
“No,” she replied. “Bit dizzy.” Now, she’d started to scratch her arms as well.
“Me too. Something’s happening to us.” Payne’s head felt woolly, like he’d just woken up with the flu. He felt unsteady on his feet and moved over to the operations table where he placed his hands out on the edge for support. The itching continued across his arms, then along the back of his neck and was inexorably spreading across his body.
Linwood hurried over. It was evident from the expression on her face that she was feeling something similar. “It’s the disturbance. It’s got to be.”
“The blackout in Ainsdale. Could this be similar?”
“I don’t know.”
Linwood hunched over the table pulling up displays. “I don’t know what’s causing it.”
Payne pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the display. A no signal indicator sat in the corner of the display where the signal bars would usually sit. He moved to scratch the back of his hand again but looked at his skin, horrified. Tiny ripples of flesh undulated across the back of his hands. He pushed up his sleeve and saw the same waves of skin pulsing along his arm.
“Oh my god, Linwood. Your face.” He saw the same ripples spreading out across the woman’s face.
“Yours too,” she said with a rising urgency in her tone. She set to work faster, typing instructions into a keyboard in front of her.
“It’s the phone network isn’t it? Irulal’s doing this.” He pulled out a stool and sat opposite Linwood at the table.
“Let me concentrate.”
“You said you couldn’t shut down the networks.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“Then what are—”
“Please, just be quiet,” she snapped. “This is really tricky enough.”
Her hands flew over a virtual keyboard on the desk in front of her, becoming a blur as she entered lines of instructions.
The lights flickered. A shiver traced an icy finger across Payne’s back, and then the itching sensation was gone. Linwood stood up from her work and gazed at him, eyes pouring over his face.
“Has it stopped?” he asked.
“Yes.” She was looking at her own hands, turning them over like she’d never seen them before.
“What did you do?”
“I set up an interference zone around the office. No phone signals can get in.”
“So, it’s still happening to everyone else?”
“I don’t know how far reaching it is.”
“Well, what do your instruments show?”
She answered without looking down at her screen. “All the cell towers within forty miles of Jodrell Bank were sending that signal. I’d need to do a new scan to see if it went any further than that.”
“Do it. We need to let the authorities know. There’ll be injuries. We were lucky at Ainsdale but if we’re talking about major population centres—” he trailed off as Linwood entered some new queries into her system. All those people, and traffic. Thank god it was so late at night but even so, there’d be a massive operation to help those people. And what do they get told? He didn’t think the public would be grateful to be told that the signal was alien in origin.
“Oh.” Linwood sat down.
“What’s the matter? Has it gone beyond forty miles?”
She nodded. “Yes. A little farther.”
“How much? Birmingham?”
“Farther than that.”
“Oh god, London?”
She shook her head. “As far as I can tell, it wasn’t a local disturbance after all. Network towers across Europe were affected.”
Payne stopped asking questions. He didn’t want to know the answers.
51
It was a night that had changed the world. Payne knew this; Linwood knew this. It was a cold hard fact.
But, not everyone had woken up yet. Payne wondered how many of them would go about their business, not realising what had happened until it was pointed out to them by someone else. How many people looked in the mirror before they left the house in the morning? He guessed that those that did check their mirrors would be staying inside.
When the disturbance on top of Jodrell Bank dissipated, Linwood lowered the screen around the operations room and they went outside to see what damage had been done. Payne expected to find unconscious people on the street—knocked out by the signal. Part of him suspected the people he found would be dead; part of him knew the truth. Payne had met the faceless hunters in the police station, hell, he didn’t think he’d be able to close his eyes at night and ever forget them. And this was why he knew that the people outside would be faceless. The rippling effect that had appeared on Linwood’s face demonstrated that the telephone signals were behind the face wiping, and they knew that Irulal was behind it all.
So, it came as a surprise when they didn’t find any faceless people at all. A moment of confusion came to them both as they stood outside the abandoned job centre and saw people with their faces very much in the right place picking themselves up from the floor.
A car fire blazed orange flames into the night from a pile up less than a hundred metres down the road. The non-moving traffic stretched along the road. Payne ran to the burning car, Linwood close behind. The small silver Focus hadn’t stood a chance against the traffic light, its bonnet crumpled around the post.
“There’s someone trapped in there,” he cried, shielding his face with his arm from the beating heat. The woman driver lifted her head from the steering wheel at the sound of his voice, and stared at him through a wall of confusion. When she saw the flames on the bonnet she screamed and lunged for the door handle. But Pay
ne was already there, pulling at the door from the outside. For a terrifying moment, he thought it had jammed, but then he glanced down at the door.
“Unlock your door,” he shouted, pointing at the door lock. She understood and flicked the remote locking button. This time, when Payne tried the door, she practically fell out of the car onto him.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, wary of moving her too quickly but balancing the risk with the rising heat from the burning car.
“I’m OK I think,” she replied, and Payne didn’t wait to be told anymore. Linwood grabbed her around the waist, and together they hurried away from the burning car. Payne chanced a look behind him; the flames had risen higher, there wasn’t much time.
When the car exploded, the blast knocked them all to the tarmac. Heat scorched Payne’s back, but it didn’t last for long. He turned over and saw the danger had passed, the blackened car was no longer a threat.
But how many drivers out there were going to suffer a similar fate?
Linwood reached out and pulled him to his feet, before helping the driver do the same. When she turned back to see her car, her legs buckled and she grabbed tightly to Payne’s arm.
“My god, if you hadn’t been there.”
“Don’t think about it. You’re absolutely fine.”
“I don’t know if I am. What happened? Did you see it? I blacked out—at least, is that what you would call it? I don’t remember.” Her voice wavered and then she started to take in the other cars along the road.
A large 4x4 had driven over the central reservation and had smashed into the billboard on the opposite side. The smell of petrol and burning plastics hung heavy in the night air.
A taxi-cab had crashed into the glass front of the budget hotel across the road from the billboard. Payne could make out dark shapes on the floor in the bar area. Everywhere he turned, new damage and destruction seared onto his memory.
“And this is across Europe.”
“Yes, at least. We won’t know until we can tie up with other sections.”
Oh god, how many have died?
“I want to go home. I want to go and see my family.” She started to walk away from them. Payne didn’t try to stop her. There seemed little point in encouraging her to wait for the emergency services. He guessed that anyone still walking had got away from this lightly.
He watched her as she walked along the road, steading herself a couple of times against the railings, paying scant attention to the stationary cars.
“What do we do now?” he asked Linwood. “We need to help these people.”
Linwood didn’t speak for a moment. She too was watching the driver walk away from them. “What’s she doing?”
Payne saw the woman slow as she approached the budget hotel with the taxi parked in the bar area. She’d seen something. She stopped and turned to face the hotel.
Payne was running towards her even before she started to scream.
By the time he got to her, she was shaking and screaming so loud that he had to shout at her to get her to be quiet.
“What’s the matter?” he screamed at her.
Payne turned to see what she was looking at; her face crisp with fright. People were beginning to move in the bar area, but that wasn’t what was bothering her. She raised an arm and pointed across the room, towards the bar area behind all the broken glass windows. Payne could see himself and the woman in the mirrored back wall of the bar.
“You’re fine. Look, you’re fine.”
Linwood took her other arm. “You’re going to be OK. You’ve had a scare, but you’re not hurt.”
The driver shook her arm free and bustled closer to the front of the hotel, stepping through the broken windows into the bar area. Her fingers danced over her face, poking at her eyes, her nose, her mouth, looking all the time in the mirror.
“Who are you?” she cried into the reflection. “What have you done to me?” She rounded on Payne and Linwood. “What the hell have you done? That’s not me. That’s not my face.”
52
Payne’s stomach hadn’t stopped doing somersaults since they’d left the hysterical driver by the side of the road. She’d been inconsolable and there was nothing that Linwood or Payne could do for her. Linwood claimed not to have the resources to reverse what had happened and Payne had to take her word for it.
Payne found himself checking out his own reflection in the car mirrors and knew that he wasn’t going to be able to stop doing that any time soon. He kept touching his own face, feeling the familiar contours of his cheeks, his developing jowls. He’d wake up in a few hours and laugh at the absurdity of this dream.
Everything they knew was speculation. It wasn’t just the woman they’d pulled from the car wreck; the others in the bar area of the hotel had reacted in the same way when they’d gone in to help them. Eventually, after about an hour of helping people, they came to the conclusion that they were having little impact on these people’s lives and there were more pressing matters for them to deal with.
It had been the phone signal that had done this. Of that, they were pretty confident. What they didn’t understand was why the results had been so different to what they’d seen before. Irulal had used the phone network to wipe people: turn them into her hunters. But there was no reason why people were waking up with the wrong faces.
“Something went wrong,” Linwood said as she avoided another car crash on the motorway, neither one of them wanting to look at the occupants of the cars. “It’s the only explanation that makes sense. She sent the signal, spent god knows how many weeks or months setting up the hardware around the telephone cell towers. And what's she achieved?”
“Carnage. That’s what she wanted.”
“No, it wasn’t. This is all too random for her.”
“How do you know what she wanted? She’s an alien. Why presume that she thinks like us?”
“I spent a lot of time with her once.”
“And what did she tell you? Why was she here?”
“She got left behind.”
“You make it sound like there was more than just her.”
“That’s what she told me.”
“You don’t think there are more of them out there?” he asked insistently.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“How on earth can I be sure about anything?” she snapped. “I didn’t even realise she was still alive until yesterday.”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at the power button.
“Do you think it’s safe to turn on yet?” he asked Linwood.
She kept her eyes focused on the road ahead. “I wouldn’t. The network never got shut down. I’ve no idea what else it’s been set up to do.”
“But your systems showed it was inactive.” Payne felt hopelessly out of his depth again. Linwood had kept busy on the computers after she raised the forcefield but couldn’t do anything to stop the signal that Irulal had been sending. Eventually, her systems told her that the signal had stopped transmitting, but by then, they were beginning to realise it was too late.
The live TV stations went off the air. Linwood didn’t know whether this was as a result of the phone signal or the disturbance at Jodrell Bank. Radio stations were off the air as well.
Perhaps the only blessing was that this had happened so late at night whilst most people were still in their homes. But this hadn’t just happened in Southport, or even the UK; this had happened across Europe.
They hadn’t been able to contact the rest of MI18. Linwood had used the fixed lines from the operations room but no one was answering her calls. Payne had wanted to call Nixon and Sally but he only had their mobile numbers on him and Linwood had advised against using those numbers to contact them.
“We can’t be the only ones unaffected.”
“No. The signal was strongest around the cell towers. Some people will have gotten lucky.”
“Do you think Max is still
alive?” Payne asked the question he knew they’d both been thinking about since they started their journey to Jodrell Bank.
“I hope so.”
Due to the traffic on the road, it took them twice as long to get there as it should have done. There were many accidents on the motorway and Linwood rarely got up to a good speed before having to slow again. At least on the motorways there tended to be space for her to manoeuvre around the traffic; on the smaller roads on the way in to Jodrell Bank, any accident caused more disruption. People were starting to come out of their homes and see what they could find out. But everyone they passed looked distraught and scared. Linwood just drove without speaking.
They stopped in the car park and Linwood switched the engine off. Payne checked his watch. 4:15 am. Still pitch black but he fancied he could sense the dawn on the horizon. Linwood hurried out of the car and ran over to the car Max had driven here in. The ambulance that Irulal must have hijacked was tucked in the far corner of the car park, impossible to hide.
“They both made it then.” Payne said, getting out of the car. He had an MI18 issue weapon in his hand and felt all the safer for holding it.
The sky above the dish looked clear of the disturbance they’d seen in the operations room.
They both started towards the dish. Payne kept tight hold of his weapon. Linwood pulled out a small device from her pocket. It made a series of bleeps as she tapped her fingers over it.
“What’s that do?” Payne asked as they both broke into a jog across the field to the dish.
“It’s linked in with the computers back at the base. I’m checking to make sure that disturbance has well and truly gone.”
“And has it?”
“Yes. There’s nothing there anymore.”
She pocketed the device and they continued the jog through the complex in silence, both looking around them for signs of a disturbance.
The Face Stealer Page 31
