“What’s the purpose?” asked Eastwood.
“Save the planet.” Castle’s matter-of-fact response left no doubt he was genuine.
Vector put an arm around Eastwood’s shoulder and pointed at the amber squares in buildings they passed in the night.
“Check it out, mate. People get up, go to work or school every day, and ‘ave no idea wot’s really going on right under their noses. Talk to anyone and they’ll all say they think there’s summink coming, summink important is on its way. But no one can tell you wot it is. Like they all feel the ripples but can’t see the splash.”
“And that monster is a splash?”
“Yeah, but that nastie was just one in an ocean full. The things that keep the dimensions apart . . .”
“Membranes,” offered Castle.
“Right, the ‘branes wot keep things in their place,” Vector continued, “they’re stretched real thin at the best o’ times. And now, as we get closer . . .” He nodded skyward. “The membranes are startin’ to rip, and things come spilling through.”
“Splash,” concluded Eastwood, understanding.
The Russian took up the refrain again. “I was found in orphanage, like your Frenchie friend up front with Lion. Vector here was, how you say—picking pocket?”
“Yeah, a right little Artful Dodger I was. But wot’s a kid to do on the streets? The point is, the Foundation picked us up, dusted us off, and gave us a nudge in the right direction. Recruited us. Out there the governments, the suits and the soldiers run the normal world as far as anyone knows. Then there’s us, the glue between the cracks. Teams of us all over the world.”
Eastwood’s mind was spinning with new information. Or was it the cold? He was really shivering now. “You c-c-an’t keep this secret. People must see you—see those creatures all the time. Is that why there’s nobody on the streets—they’re all in hi-hiding?” He looked around at the windswept road as they left the bridge behind.
“No mate. It’s London, near midnight on a Tuesday, and the weather is shite,” laughed Vector. “Ain’t nobody in their right mind out in this but us.”
A lone mo-ped zoomed out of a side street and disappeared around another corner toward a ring of red flashing lights that silhouetted the London Eye against the dark.
“Us and that geezer,” the dusky youth corrected. “The thing is, you shouldn’t have been able to see us fighting Mr. Blobby back there. Not while our Longcoats are charged.”
He fingered a metal tab hanging from his right sleeve. “As for the creature, it hadn’t fully phased into our dimension yet. Sniffers like me and Jax spot ‘em using our gear. But you saw it clear as day. Why is that?”
“I don’t know,” Eastwood muttered. “And I saw you all walking on top of the river. That’s not n-normal either.” He shook involuntarily.
Vector lifted his coat flap away from his feet to expose a metal ring mounted around both ankles. “Mercury Boots. Bladeless fans; air goes down, you goes up.”
The buildings were denser now they were across the river, and the immense curved roof of Waterloo Station loomed before them, Big Ben faintly visible to the right.
Tucker eyed Eastwood’s dripping, comical shape up and down.
“S’truth, the little bugger’s frozen through. Let’s get him downstairs.”
INITIATION
BY CROWDING AROUND the newcomer the Longcoats were able to screen his miserable wet form from the few midnight travelers they passed as the group entered the station. Not that it was crowded at this hour as the icy rain was keeping normally curious tourists tucked in their warm hotel rooms or staying for one more round in cosy restaurants.
Even so, the team took no chances. When their distinctive coats were altered, the high collars folded down, and the protective visors retracted, each had a different appearance than his or her companion. How this was accomplished Eastwood could not imagine. Hummer explained that it had something to do with flux prismatics.
“But don’t ask me to do the math, my friend. If you want, you can research it for yourself in our lab.”
Eastwood eyed him quizzically. “You have a lab? A laboratory? For science?”
“O’ course we ‘ave a lab, mate.” Vector tapped him on the shoulder. “And a library. It ain’t like we don’t go to school. Though our lessons are a little—wot’s the word, Castle?”
“Advanced,” replied the gaunt dark-haired youth.
Clustered inside the station they waited while the late night crowd thinned even further. Like any sensible citizens of London who found themselves sharing a train platform with a group of unsupervised leather-clad teens, some in warpaint, these few folk hurried to be on their way.
Once he was certain they were more or less alone, Lion pulled from a pocket of his copious coat a small device that he surreptitiously directed at the nearby security camera. The gadget he was wielding looked like an ordinary cell phone. What it did was temporarily disable the camera feed. If they weren’t asleep, any security personnel on duty would barely have time to notice and report the outage before coverage resumed.
By that time Lion and his Longcoats had disappeared into the tunnel.
Once they had walked far enough to lose the tunnel’s own illumination, lights flared from collars to illuminate their path. Dating back to Victorian times, this portion of the old line featured maintenance conduits and side corridors that sometimes didn’t see a visitor for a year or more. To his surprise Eastwood found that he could follow the intricate twists and turns taken by his new friends with comparative ease. Whoever he was, he plainly possessed an able memory, short-term at least.
They had walked two miles underground from Waterloo to Lambeth when one of the party produced a plastic card and waved it over a brick that was slightly paler in hue that those that surrounded it. Something buzzed softly, there was a click, a door opened, and lights came on beyond.
Preceded by Castle, Eastwood walked through a pale blue beam that beeped once in acknowledgement of his passage. Behind him, Vector leaned over to murmur at Lion.
“Well, at least we know he ain’t no bloody Grem.”
Looking back, the newcomer frowned. “What’s a Grem?”
Vector snorted. “You ‘ang with us long enough and you might find out. If you’re lucky, mate, you won’t. Grems are nasty green little blighters, not much bigger than your foot, which makes it tough for ‘em to move in our world without standing out. So they got their own way of blending in.”
Going deeper into the complex, Eastwood observed the grunge of sooty brick was giving way to scrubbed stone and reflective surfaces. A smell of lemon mixed with plastic was palpable as the tunnel widened ahead.
“So how do they blend in?” he asked in mild curiosity.
“They wear your skin.”
It was the matter-of-fact way Vector said it combined with the image his words generated that stopped Eastwood in his tracks.
Hummer put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and pressed him onwards, explaining: “Sharp teeth with venom. They bite in soft place like stomach, groin or butt, then burrow inside and eat out a hollow place to hide. On ends of fingers and legs they have filaments that wind into nervous system. They don’t keep body alive, but until it stiffens they use it. Like bus.”
They were passing lockers and open storerooms now, walking through a succession of vaulted brick chambers that were easily more than a hundred years old.
Eastwood’s mind was spinning. “So one of these Grems takes over a person?”
“Not exactly,” said Vector, keying buttons on another door. “It takes five of ‘em. A hove. One each for legs and arms, and another to control the head. A hove blends into the body and into each other, becoming a single synaptic entity, perfectly coordinated as they work the body. But as the body breaks down, the speech starts to slur, the movements get jerkier. Only then can you really spot a skinsuit. One thing I’ll say for ‘em, they’re not like other random creatures. Sometimes I swear . . .” He t
railed off.
“Swear what?”
Vector gave Eastwood an uncertain look, as though he wanted to share something not common knowledge. Then as Lion and the others caught up, his eyes shifted, full of cockiness again. “I swear,” he grinned, “that after tonight I will sleep for a week.”
He pulled a latch, and with a squealing hiss the heavy metal door slid sideways into a recess in the stone.
Moving deeper into what he heard them call ‘The Chimney’, a wide-eyed Eastwood was astonished to find himself walking onto a platform made of thick steel mesh that wound in a descending spiral around a central cavity that extended down numerous levels. Branching outwards in half-storey intervals away from the open void were brightly lit hemispherical chambers.
Some appeared to be classrooms full of children interacting with colorful touchscreens, several more rooms were for storage, and as his companions nudged him downwards he saw that a lower level held multiple dormitories of hundreds of bunks.
Lion veered sharply to the right through another tunnel, and suddenly they were in an identical chamber, another in what Eastwood realized was a subterranean honeycomb of significant size.
He spied the gleaming stainless steel and steam of a working kitchen. A nearby dining area was crowded with children and youth of all ages eating and chattering on long low benches and tables. Over the railing on the lowest level, the floor was covered in orange rubber mats across which dozens of teens in tight black apparel sprinted, vaulted, and climbed an assortment of exercise equipment.
“So many of them . . .” he started, incredulous.
A hand came down on his shoulder. Looking around, he saw Castle grinning back at him.
“Welcome to your temporary lodgings, Eastwood.” Glancing upward and pointing a finger back in the direction they had come, he elaborated. “We entered through Waterloo Station. So this is kind of like Waterloo South.” Moving past the visitor the older boy started slipping out of his coat. “There are other Chimneys scattered around the world under the big cities.”
“Why is it called a Chimney?” asked Eastwood, still taking in his surroundings.
“Central core, shaped like a tube,” pointed Vector, “Looks like a bleedin’ chimney dunnit?”
“And,” Castle added, “you’d be surprised how many large abandoned chimneys exist in every city that nobody pays any attention to. They drive past them, play around them every day, and just don’t see them anymore because they’ve been there so long. This one’s even painted bright blue topside, jutting out of a building nobody ever visits, and people just don’t think to ask what it’s for anymore. They’re a perfect hiding place for us in the middle of the action. Where you see a tall empty chimney in the middle of a town, chances are a Longcoat base isn’t far away.”
Past the dormitory, his companions found him an empty cot in a small side room with an iron barred door.
“This’ll be yours, mate,” Vector told him. “One of us will be just outside the door till morning. I suggest you get some sleep. Monarch will want to check you out.” The members of the Longcoat crew gave him one last curious glance as the door creaked shut, then went their separate ways.
Peeling off his soaked outer garments, Eastwood rifled through a selection of neatly folded dry clothes in a basket they left him. He managed to find one set of black coveralls that offered a reasonably good fit.
When he had finished dressing, he lay down on the makeshift bed and ran a hand over his shaven head, thoroughly perplexed and completely exhausted. Sleep crashed upon him in seconds.
THERE IS A BELIEF among the Algonquin Indians of Quebec that whenever you dream, you walk in a world of spirits. As believers that man should find and live by ‘midewiwin’, or the right path, they contend that at all times we are surrounded by many spirits from other realms, and that when we sleep we can dreamwalk amongst them and receive instruction on our true path.
Whether dreaming or awake, the boy now called Eastwood found himself in a field of yellow waist-high flowers that had overgrown a black tarmac road, long since abandoned. No, not a road, but a runway, once busy, now still.
That was the way of it with dreams. Things seen for the first time came with their own explanations. When you saw a thing, you knew the thing. And Eastwood knew this runway as he knew his own hand, which he held against the sky in silhouette, studying the way the light and shadow played off both sides of his palm.
When he looked down again a white jet plane was before him, perched within the golden field with no rearward path to denote it had landed any time in the recent past. It had always been here in this field, belonged here. As did the faint beat of his heart.
Climbing narrow stairs to the open fuselage door, he craned his neck to the white interior, and spying nobody, stepped aboard. Amid seats of rich leather and walls of caramel trim, the foldaway tables were neatly set with linen and flatware, ready for a meal.
As he sat and lifted the cutlery, he gazed dreamily out the window. The black ink of space glided past, white specks of stars in the distance, the massive bulk of Jupiter’s orange bands spanning both horizons below as the jet rotated to dock with a coupling manacle on a craggy moon-base, surrounded by a swab of verdant terraforming moss.
At the jolt of unison, the boy sensed movement in the cabin behind him, the thumpity thump of his heart growing steadily louder.
Sliding from the cushions he walked slowly through the jet, past a jumble of steel boxes incongruously strewn on the otherwise pristine floor, padlocked shut. He wanted to look into these boxes. In this dream state he knew their contents belonged to him.
Yet the most rearward seat beckoned him on, facing the opposite direction so that it obscured his view of the figure therein. He could hear the visitor now, above the booming in his head. A gnawing of bone, the slurping of succulent juices, a snap, snap, snap of serrated scissors.
As he edged closer the boy felt a rising chill, a tightening in his gut.
He sensed danger here.
His instinct was to run, but as he turned for the door an obsidian wall filled the cabin, blocking his retreat.
It crept towards him like a living thing, a black gloss sheet made of geometric triangles and cubes that hungrily absorbed the deck, the seats and the walls of the jet as it lurched steadily onward.
As the living wall advanced, he was obliged to inch closer to the dark stranger in the last seat. Now at an angle where he could see past the curving neck of the chair, a blue-green opalescent arm covered in reptilian scales could be seen stabbing chunks of rotting meat into a fanged snout, nostrils flaring at his approach.
Beside the man-lizard, just out of sight past the heaving saurian chest, a glimpse of a pink leg draped by grey school uniform. A girl’s leg, held intractable by a giant clawed mitt.
For some reason his heart jumped at the sight and he let out a gasp.
The serpentine head twisted in his direction with a wicked leer, shucked bones dropping with a hollow clatter from between the yellowing daggers than lined its mouth. Green eye slits narrowed and shone with unmistakable menace. No, more than menace. This was hatred, directed at him as for an old foe delivered to a final reckoning. Face to face with the monstrous apparition, the boy could only stand and gape.
Where the black wall of angles now pressed urgently into his back, his skin turned into ash. An arm, now a leg vanished as the pounding thumped ever louder, drumming out all else.
The last vision to register as eyes and brain ceased to be was that craggy dragon’s head cocking to one side as it spoke a tone that started low and ended high, carrying with it the intent of both mockery and instruction. Against the din in his head, the word crested like the elongated fizz of surf hitting the shoreline.
“Sly-y-y-z-z-z.”
THE NEXT MORNING after being escorted by Hummer to a row of hot showers in a wide tiled area filled with steam and other young bodies of mixed gender, Eastwood’s companions from the previous evening formed a square around him an
d marched together to a communal dining floor.
There were no set meal times underground: food was available around the clock, just as the Longcoats might be called upon at any time. Dozens of teens, some uniformed, some garbed casually in sweats and hoodies, milled to and fro. It was clear the Longcoat base was a hive of activity, well directed, with more than a tinge of urgency in how the people moved from one activity to the next.
“Hungry much?” Vector asked him as Eastwood absently piled food onto a tray until the resultant mound threatened to topple over. Indeed he was. And tired, despite nearly six hours of rest. Like a poultice sucking out poison, sleep had drawn forth an unending succession of bad dreams, each worse than the last.
While he downed a mass of brown food they called stew with white food they called sandwiches and green slices of what was fruit, several of his companions studied him thoughtfully from another table.
“I don’t like this.” Lion had never been one to hold back his opinions. “He professes to know nothing, but he’s clearly not a normal kid. That sound from his mouth last night . . . it wasn’t of this world.”
Jax turned a thought around in her head. “I don’t like him. The ability he demonstrated clearly doesn’t come from our world. He must have fallen through from one of the others, even if he does know our language. Sleeping on it hasn’t changed my mind about that. He must have been there before we showed up, long enough to lock into our phase.”
Commissioned by the enigmatic Cassandra Foundation, the Longcoats’ primary brief was to put things back where they belonged if they fell out of place. While most of the rank and file of these teens had never talked directly with their benefactors, enough knowledge had been ported onto a shared server to challenge centuries of scientific and religious teachings about the true nature and history of the world.
Echoes of Worlds Past Page 7
