by John McNally
“You think he’s dead?” Finn asked.
She looked at him. Finn tried to stop it all spilling out, but lying there on the path in the darkness he couldn’t help it, after being in the Grip of the Spider Woman, he felt he’d been let in on a secret and now he owed one.
“Kelly… he could have killed the other Scarlatti too, but I messed up and he had to save me instead. I should have just done what he said and now he’s probably dead. But I thought he was going to blow himself up and I couldn’t help it…”
Finn looked back up at the night sky.
Delta didn’t usually get close to people like this. She generally kept them as far away as she could. But he looked so young suddenly. She tried to think what she’d say to Carla.
“You can’t care about Kelly. It’s what they train us for. All that matters is the mission. We are what we do. You don’t want to be like us, Noob. We walk with death. If you lose someone, the training kicks in: you shut down, collect the XP and move on.”
“Collect the XP… Do you treat everything like a game?”
“Only thing I know. Apart from Carla.”
“You play online?”
“Sure.”
“Tag?”
“West Pole, like North Pole or South Pole, y’know,” she said, reaching into her jacket and flicking out a gum, as Finn lifted his head off the path, open-mouthed, to lay eyes on a legend.
“The West Pole? Black Ops number one ranking of all time West Pole? Shot me twenty-two times in one deathmatch West P—”
“Yep,” she said, expecting him to reel off her stats.
But he’d stopped mid-sentence. Because beyond her he could see something else.
“The lights… They’re going out!” he said.
“What?”
They jumped up.
First upstairs and now down the lights in the house were going out in sequence as the last family member tracked back through the building. Soon there would just be a silhouette against the night sky.
“We’ve got to get there and stop them! HALT! HALT!” Delta called.
“The signal flares!” said Finn, and Delta ripped one out of his backpack.
She pulled the ripcord on it and – SWOOOOOSH! – red fire arced up from her hand into the night.
Then she pulled out two hand flares from her own pack – the kind used to guide planes on to aircraft carriers – and waved them madly as if guiding in a hyperactive albatross.
Finn snapped the ammo clip back into the M27 and fired into the air.
DRTTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRT!
“OVER HERE!”
But it was ridiculous, and they knew it – the flares would be barely a glimmer at this range and scale.
The last light went out. The 4 × 4 coughed to life.
In the weird red light of the glow flares they were the picture of despair. Finn was just about to break into a string of his worst playground expletives when…
WHKWHKWHKWHKWHKWHKWHK
…from nowhere, over their heads, they felt a powerful downdraught followed by the flicking, whipping brush of stiffened silk.
“Oh, what now?” Delta snapped, ducking.
But Finn was in awe, looking up at the most brilliant orange and black moth he had ever seen.
“Woah…” said Delta, held by the strangeness of the rapidly beating wings, the moth held in turn by—
“The flares!” said Finn. “Don’t move your hand. It’s caught in the light…”
They held still. The moth continued to hover, a fantastic thing, a horse of a thing.
“It’s a tiger,” said Finn. “A tiger moth.” He looked over to the house. The 4 × 4 was still there. Barely daring to do so, he reached out and grabbed one of the moth’s dangling feet. They were rough, alien almost, covered in brittle hair – but strong.
“What the hell are you doing?” asked Delta.
“Keep the flares right where they are!” Finn insisted.
He reached up and grabbed a second foot, then pulled on both, testing, seeing if the hovering beast would take his weight.
WHKWHKWHKWHKWHKWHKWHK
It did. He hung there easily. He couldn’t believe it. He looked at Delta.
“Come on! Put them both in one hand a sec, then hang off this foot. Do it fast!”
“You’re crazy…”
“They’re going! They’re leaving!”
“I like the way you roll, Noob. You know that?” Delta said, and took her heart in her mouth as she stepped forward to grab hold of a foot herself. The fluttering beast seemed so strong and so strange.
“Now pass me one of those…” urged Finn, excited, feeling the moth reel, confused.
Delta leant towards him and Finn grabbed one of the flares from her. Quickly he held it directly under the creature’s head. The moth moved instinctively towards it. Mesmerised. When Delta held her flare out as well, the moth sped up.
WHKWHKWHKWHKWHKWHKWHK
“It’s working!” said Finn as they picked up speed and the ground began to rush beneath them.
Their arms ached as they dangled, the ride as painful as it was precarious, but by holding the flares to the left or right they could, very roughly, steer the thing.
“Back to the path! Keep on the path!” yelled Delta.
WHKWHKWHKWHKWHKWHKWHK
Suspended in the machine-gun beat, they shot along a few nano-metres off the ground, hours of effort blitzed in a few terrifying moments of flight.
They held their breath and Finn prayed – to Mum and Dad or Richard Dawkins or the Queen or God or David Attenborough – “Please don’t let me let go.”
He was just starting to fear the moth would never slow down (the house was suddenly looming large) when, for a fraction of a fraction of a moment, he glimpsed a face. A terrible, snarling mask, wide red mouth, razor teeth, travelling at incredible speed.
SMACK!
Finn felt himself spin through the air.
TWENTY-SIX
Swarm…
The Beta woke. Stirred. Something was coming. Swarm. It was still just warm enough to flick its wings and take flight…
Kane reached the nest site. The badger had long ceased smouldering, but the smell of charred and burnt flesh hung in the damp air, a foul miasma.
Swarm…
The Beta Scarlatti flew to him. Straight at his face. To touch him. To taste him. To crawl across his warmth and taste the toxic sweet traces around his lips.
Swarm…
Kane opened his mouth and let the Scarlatti dip its tongue into any remaining sweetness in his saliva. It buzzed happily – Wzkxzkxzkxzzxzzzz! – and Kane felt an urge, an instinct to protect. To nurture. To swarm.
He had been sick at first when the injections started.
Spiro had created a zombie bacteriophage from the DNA of the Vespula cruoris strain (source species of the Scarlatti) and repeatedly infected Kane with it until his body no longer resisted. The infection would turn him slowly, cell by cell, into a wasp-human hybrid. It was an impossible cross, and the process could kill him within weeks. But it would also afford him immunity from attack by the Scarlatti, allowing him to release and work with it directly. Much of his cell DNA was already mutating. There was a counter-virus waiting to reverse the process back in the Carpathian Mountains. If he made it.
It mattered not. It was for the Master.
The Scarlatti finished tasting Kane’s saliva and flew back down to tend the swarm.
The badger corpse was nearly obliterated, but five of the corpses around it – three crows, the cat and a fox – were just enough to sustain the dozen or so nymphs that remained. They were fat and healthy, and from the empty carcass of the Alpha and scattered dead nymphs, Kane could see the Beta was feeding them a rich supplement. Indeed, one or two nymphs were beginning to discolour and look more like adults with viable wings.
He flipped open a small cryogenic
container from his pocket, picked up a nymph and placed it carefully inside. He pressed a button to open a small liquid nitrogen vessel and instantly froze it.
He glanced at the electronic eye in the tree and held up the container for the Master to see. Then he pocketed it and headed back through the woods. Towards the village.
The Scarlatti, refreshed by the contact, writhed among the growing nymphs. Renewed. Feeding. Healing. Tending.
Swarm…
* * *
For a brief moment Finn didn’t know who he was or where he was or when…
…all he could see was the frozen momentary image of the face, and from deep in his hindbrain it formed into something that made sense… a building block of sense and civilisation… a Latin classification… Pipistrellus pipistrellus.
He laughed to himself through a mouthful of mud as everything rushed back to mind.
“A bat ate our ride!” He lifted up his head, looking for Delta, and realising he’d dropped face down into the soft mud of a flower bed.
Right by the 4 × 4.
Finn scrambled to his feet. He couldn’t find his gun or his backpack and he couldn’t see Delta, but he knew what he had to do. Standing before him, barely 100 nano-metres away, was a gargantuan child, 100 times his size.
“HEY! HEEEEEYY! DOWN HERE!” He started to wave and holler.
“Get in the back of the car, darling! NOW!” shouted Mummy.
She was one of those perfect mummies you see perched high up in shiny 4 × 4s, only less so right now – panic having aged her ten years in two hours.
“I’m not going without Zizou!” said the little girl.
She had long hair, a rag doll and angry tears stained her cheeks.
Mummy took a deep breath. “But we can’t find Zizou, darling, and we have to go…”
“I’m NOT going without Zizou!” She stamped her foot and stood firm.
“Fine! I’m getting Daddy!” said Mummy, storming back to the car.
Finn saw his chance. “DOWN HERE!” he yelled, leaping about in the dark.
Then, a few nano-metres away, he heard, “YO! OVER HERE!” and saw Delta staggering to her feet, still holding one of the red flares and waving it like mad.
They were within a macro-metre of the child now, and would be easily crushed if she took a step forward. But still they waved and roared.
The little girl thought she noticed something sparkle on the path; thought she could hear something squeaking. She stepped forward.
Yes! It was a sparkle. Or more a glow. A red glow… and two tiny pinpricks of light… She put her head right down.
* * *
Kane entered a housing estate on the edge of the village.
It was already empty, the young families who lived there having evacuated quickly. Further into Willingham he might have to deal with the lingering old and lonely, but here no one heard the smash of glass and splinter of wood as he began to break in and search the houses one by one.
The thermal sight revealed the odd mouse, nothing more. It was worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack – more like a miniaturised needle in a giant’s haystack.
But the Master had ordered it, and the more difficult the task – the more resilience and concentration it demanded – the more Kane and all the Tyros loved it.
* * *
The giant girl bent down, and Finn saw above him a looming, terrified face, with two expanding, pond-like eyes, fighting to comprehend what was in front of her.
“IT’S OK. DON’T BE FRIGHTENED!” said Finn, with an exaggerated smile, trying not to scare her.
“LISTEN UP, LITTLE LADY! DIAL 911!” Delta jumped in. “YOU WILL BE REWARDED WITH ALL THE CANDY YOU CAN EAT!”
Finn literally had to shove Delta aside.
“DON’T BE FRIGHTENED! IT’S ALL GOING TO BE OK… WE’RE YOUR FRIENDS! DON’T GET TOO CLOSE!” he added, getting caught up in the end of her hair.
She reflexively pushed it over her ear as her daddy appeared. “Listen, poppet, do be reasonable,” he began, exhausted and peeved. “We’ll get you a new Zizou – we’ll get two, how about that?”
He positioned himself to scoop her up and sling her over his rugby-playing shoulders. But he didn’t stand a chance. The little girl shot straight past him and dived into her mother’s lap in the front of the car.
“Mummy! Mummy! There are these… people! There are these little people!”
“At last! Sit round properly, dear,” said the mummy. “Duncan! Get in the car!”
And Daddy, feeling quite pleased with himself for somehow finding the magic words, sauntered back to the 4 × 4.
“NO! DUNCAN! NO!! COME BACK!!” Finn ran after the man.
“HEY! DIPSTICK!” shouted Delta, throwing the hand flare at him and extracting her last distress flare.
SLAM went the door of the 4 × 4.
“NOOOO!!” called Finn.
VRRRRRROOM! went the engine as it started to pull down the drive.
Delta pulled the ripcord – SWOOOOOSH! – fire arcing up from her hand and speeding after the receding car.
But even if Daddy did catch a flicker of it in the rear-view mirror, he must have dismissed it as a trick of the light, because he drove straight on.
They watched as the tail lights disappeared.
Then a second later – BLINK – the security light cut out and they were left staring at darkness.
“Way to go, big sister.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
DAY THREE 00:00 (BST). WILLARD’S COPSE, BERKSHIRE
It had started with a speck of light. That was all he saw.
Something glinting through the trees on the surface of the water. He’d ignored it at first, thinking it was just reflected starlight or something, but the further south he travelled, the more insistent it became.
Kelly had spent almost six hours in continuous combat of one kind or another.
First, just after he’d been dropped by the Apache, he was taken by a small pike in the stream (although ‘small’ in this case meant ten times his size – bigger than a great white shark at macro level). It had almost bitten off his leg, but Kelly had managed to sink his knife into its forebrain before it could take a second helping.
Then he’d drifted ashore to escape the rapids and had made his way slowly through the woods, his recovering leg still slowing him down. Robbed of Finn’s specialist knowledge – and on so many occasions he’d willed him to be there – Kelly had reverted to his ‘attack first, ask questions later’ tactic. He had lost the Magnum, so only had his bowie knife for protection, which some time ago he’d lashed to the end of a stick to make a spear.
He’d roughly followed the course of the stream and on the way been attacked by, among other creatures, newts, frogs, a scorpion (or some kind of weird red earwig thing), dragonfly larvae and dive-bombing, kamikaze mosquitoes (may have been gnats).
And then… he’d seen the speck of light.
The nearer he got to the shoreline, the more he became convinced he was dealing with artificial light reflecting off the water, and it soon became clear that it was flashing; some sort of strobe anchored somehow to the opposite bank.
Yes! Stubbs. The Stubbster. The Stubbsulator.
He’d gone back upstream, constructed a raft and set about crossing the rapids (in the middle of an almighty downpour).
Finally, he’d reached the other side. There he’d found the Apache’s landing light blinking on the APU2, together with a short note in Stubbs’s handwriting that said simply – ‘Gone to shed.’
Kelly climbed the bank with some difficulty, saw light coming from under the shed door and burst in to find… an improvised workshop that was something to behold.
Stubbs had laid out the dismembered components of the T700 jet engine he’d removed from the Apache and set up an A-frame lifting rig, ready to hoist the engine into place aboard an old radio-controlled toy jeep that was about five times their size, but what the hell.
Stubbs stood in the midd
le of an explosion of parts and tools, lost in his task. As Kelly approached, he looked up and said, “Ah… You. Good. I needed a volunteer.”
The jet engine had to be adapted to burn macro-fuel and fitted to the basic vehicle; then steering, power and braking systems all had to be addressed. What Stubbs was undertaking was a massive task for any normal engineer, let alone one of his current size… and he loved it. Kelly respected his knowledge and skill, and had to admit he hadn’t seen him so energetic or engaged since their original work on Boldklub. No doubt about it, the little old man was on fire.
And I might soon be too, thought Kelly, because he found himself a few minutes later standing before Stubbs’s new creation – the ‘Adapted Distillation Apparatus’.
It was an old medicine bottle half full of lawnmower fuel, tilted over a crude burner. One pipe fed fuel into the medicine bottle from the lawnmower, while another led to the bottom of a tank of water. The idea was to boil the lawnmower fuel and feed the vapour through the water so that it condensed on the surface. This refined fuel could then be collected and used to power the “T7-S Mark 1” (Stubbs), or the “Toy Jeep” (Kelly).
“What are the odds of this thing going boom?” asked Kelly.
“About fifty-fifty.”
“Great. Why don’t I do your job, and you light this, because you know what, Stubbs? I’ve been putting it on the line rather a lot lately!”
Stubbs looked thoughtful. “Can you ream out turbo-jet feed nipples?” he asked. “Do you have advanced engineering experience? Can you calculate compression-thrust ratios? Remind me – what was it you so briefly studied at university before they chucked you out?”
“History of Art.”
“Huh huh huh.” Stubbs actually laughed, in a wheezy old man way.
“All right, just give me the damn lighter!” barked Kelly.
Stubbs took out the lighter, then turned and walked away. “Wait. I should be a minimum of twenty nano-metres away.”
“What about me?”
“As you’re injured anyway, you are technically ‘mission expendable’,” Stubbs explained.
