by David Moody
‘What is it?’ she asked, frantically looking around but seeing only the road and the tall hedges on either side. Tom stopped, unable to tell from which direction the people were approaching. What he couldn’t hear unnerved him more than what he could. There was still not a single voice of dissent. Not a solitary groan, moan or other voluntary or involuntary noise could be heard over the relentless marching noise.
He took a few more steps forward, and then stopped. He could see the first of them now, coming towards him. They walked in single file in the absolute centre of the road, their formation so perfect that it was only when they followed a slight curve to the left that he saw any of the others behind the man in front. He turned and ran in the other direction, grabbing hold of Clare’s arm and dragging her along with him.
‘Tom,’ she hissed at him. ‘Tell me!’
There was a gap in the hedge to his left; the entrance to a well-trampled public footpath. He pulled Clare down the dark path and off the road. She tried to pull back the other way to see what was happening but he restrained her, covering her mouth with his hand and keeping them both out of sight.
‘This is what I saw in Thatcham,’ he explained, whispering right into her ear, afraid of being overheard. ‘Hundreds of people.’
Clare writhed and bit his hand. ‘Let me go,’ she spat at him. ‘Penny…’
It took all his strength to restrain her. She slipped one arm from her rucksack strap and started to run but he pulled her back again. Still she fought as the thunderous marching noise continued, kicking out and trying to scratch at his face, anything to free herself. In desperation he kicked her legs out from under her, dropped her down and lay on top of her body, his weight too much for her to move.
‘There’s no point,’ he said, still whispering, still terrified. ‘There’s nothing we can do. Even if we find Penny, we won’t be able to help her.’
At the mention of her daughter’s name, Clare struggled again. She tried to knee Tom in the groin but couldn’t get enough leverage. Holding one of her wrists with either hand, he twisted his legs between hers and spread them, then pushed his weight down on her harder than before. She hissed and yelled in his ear, in real pain now, but he ignored her, even when she started spitting and biting again. He focused on the apparently endless queue of people still striding down the middle of the road, perfectly equidistant, unblinking and unseeing. He was hypnotised by their emotionless gaze. Whatever the aliens had done to them had stripped away their individuality and made them all the same. No longer people with personalities, capable of free thought, they were now just vacuous, easily manipulated shells. Soulless and dead.
‘They’re all lost, Clare,’ he said. ‘All gone.’
She finally stopped struggling. Tom lifted his head slightly and saw that she was looking up now. He looked over his shoulder and watched as an alien ship moved overhead. He’d seen one like this before. It had a distinctive engorged head and stunted body. This was the same kind of ship which had hovered over Thatcham when he’d been hiding in the pub, perhaps the exact same one. The ship, he assumed, which controlled the people.
‘Are they looking for us?’ Clare asked, slightly calmer now.
‘They’re not interested in us.’
Moments later – Tom wasn’t sure how long – the end of the column of marching figures finally came into view. Tom watched as the last of them disappeared. The final person was a girl, older than Penny and darker-skinned, still wearing pyjamas. Her hair was tied into a ponytail which bobbed as she marched, its random movements completely at odds with everything else about her. He waited a minute longer, then relaxed his grip on Clare. He got up and brushed himself down, taking care to make sure he was still blocking the way through to the road.
‘Where are they going?’
‘Let’s find out,’ he said, taking her hand and starting to move. He could still hear the regimented footsteps. Rather than risk the road, he instead went further along the footpath they’d stumbled across. It curved left, running almost parallel with the road, then climbed a formidable-looking hill. ‘Up,’ he ordered.
The ground beneath their feet was increasingly steep, the narrow path little more than a greasy furrow. The climb was difficult and slow, both of them having to help each other to keep moving forward, the summit never seeming to get any closer. After several minutes Clare reached the top. She stood upright, hands on her hips, panting hard. Tom pulled her down.
The distinctive alien ship had stopped less than half a mile away, he estimated, and was now hovering over a large, open expanse of grass. Below it he could see the queue of people entering the field through a single gate. It took him a few seconds to realise, but there were far more people in the field than the number he’d seen on the road. He’d estimated that hundreds of people had just marched past them, but there were thousands here. What was this place?
‘Look,’ Clare said, pointing ahead. There were more of them filling adjacent fields. It looked like they were being grown here ready for harvest: some kind of bizarre crop. ‘Penny must be here somewhere. And Siobhan and your brother too. Once that ship’s gone we can go down there.’
‘It controls them, I think,’ Tom said. ‘I saw it earlier.’
Tom sat up and fully unzipped his jacket, struggling with the inclement heat and the effort of the climb. He was transfixed by what he could see happening in the field up ahead now. The people were forming themselves into perfectly straight lines, their keenly paced, rhythmic movements strangely soothing and distracting to watch from this distance. They appeared to instinctively know the limits of their immediate surroundings, no matter how unexpected those surroundings were. The field was odd-shaped, and yet exactly the right number of people peeled off at a time to form each row. He doubted whether they still had any degree of control over themselves. Their movements were being orchestrated from the ship above.
As the field continued to fill, Tom was just about able to make out the faces of some of the people. Even now he caught himself still looking for the familiar, praying he’d catch a glimpse of Siobhan or Rob, wondering if, somehow, he really did have a chance of saving them. Despite their uniform movements and emotionless demeanour, the physical appearance of the people in the field still gave some clue as to who they used to be. Most were fully dressed. A few were naked. None of them reacted to the conditions or to any aspect of their surroundings in the slightest. Neither the wind nor the torrential rain affected them. He counted thirty-seven people in the furthest forward row, and each of those people stood at the front of columns more than fifty deep. He lost count after a while, but he’d already seen enough to know that there were tens of thousands of people out here tonight. Was there anyone else like him and Clare left, or were they the final two?
He was about to say something to Clare when she scrambled to her feet and started to run, catching him off-guard. She sprinted down the other side of the hill towards the fields full of people.
‘Clare!’ he yelled. ‘Clare, don’t…’
He got up and ran and almost immediately lost his footing in the wet grass. He rolled over and over, unable to stop or even to slow his uncontrolled descent until he reached the bottom. He landed in a deep puddle and swallowed a mouthful of filthy water, which he coughed out as he got up, and continued to run.
Clare had kept her balance and was racing towards a gap in the hedge.
Tom looked up and saw that the alien ship hovering over the fields was moving again. The hatch in the bottom of its rounded head began to slide open and the long, stem-like appendage he’d seen earlier was lowered down.
He ran faster, diving forward and managing to catch Clare by the waist, tackling her before she could step back out onto the road. He fell back and dragged her over with him. She pushed him away then scrambled to get up again.
‘Clare, wait! Don’t go out—’
His words were abruptly truncated as the world was filled with unbearably bright, incandescent white light. He was vaguel
y away of Clare staggering for cover as he buried his face in the mud, his eyes burning. He reached out for her but she pulled away when his outstretched fingers made contact with her leg.
Tom sat up, his back to the light, leaning into the hedge. He opened one eye slightly and saw that, bizarrely, the incredible illumination was limited to a specific area behind him, leaving the rest of the world shrouded in darkness. It was filling the field and nowhere else; a perfectly shaped beam.
And then, as quickly as it had appeared, the light was extinguished. Everything was immediately bathed in inky black, this time even deeper and darker than before.
‘You all right?’ Tom asked. His voice sounded weak. Frail, almost. Clare didn’t answer. She picked herself up and continued through the gap out onto the road. He walked after her, no longer able to run, every footstep an effort now.
When they both reached the entrance to the field, they found it completely empty. The ground was littered with clothing, but every other physical trace of every last person had gone. The alien ship was already moving away, casually drifting further down the coast.
‘You bastards,’ Tom mouthed at the disappearing machine, his mouth too dry to properly form the words. ‘You fucking bastards.’
He kicked his way through the rags covering the ground. Clare dropped to her knees and picked up a shoe, no trace of its owner. She stared at it in disbelief, even tipping it upside down and looking inside to see where the person who’d worn it might have gone. Everything was bone dry, covered in dust. The rain began to soak the arid ground again.
‘It’s a cull,’ Tom told her. ‘I didn’t want to say anything, didn’t think there was any point. They don’t need us, Clare, they just want the planet. They’re wiping us out.’
For a while they remained in the field, exhausted and beaten, the enormity of what they’d witnessed almost too much to bear. Thousands of people had been destroyed in seconds. Penny, Rob, Siobhan, James, John and Betty Tipper, everyone else they could think of… all gone.
CHAPTER 43
The driving rain increased in intensity and although unnaturally warm, the swirling wind battered them from every direction. They kept walking, because they didn’t know what else to do. They knew whatever they did was most probably pointless now, but carried on regardless. Better to be on the move when it happens, Tom had long since decided, than to just be sitting there waiting for the apparently inevitable. They were disorientated and lost, but it didn’t matter anymore.
And then, just when he was on the verge of finally giving up, Tom saw something which both confirmed their location and gave him renewed impetus to keep moving. It was the dark, boarded-up shell of The Black Swan, the burnt out restaurant he tried to take Siobhan to early on in their relationship. The memories of that night both filled him with a crushing sadness while also reinvigorating him somewhat. He remembered how much of an idiot he’d felt as he pulled up outside the ruin of a building, and how Siobhan had laughed at him, unable to understand how he’d managed to avoid hearing it on the news all week: a cash-strapped celebrity chef setting light to the restaurant to avoid bankruptcy. He remembered the evening they’d gone on to have together, and how they’d made love for the first time…
The memories of that night made him sob with pain, and yet that pain also made him more determined to keep moving forward. He wasn’t prepared to give up, and getting off the mainland still seemed the only viable option.
‘Down here,’ he said to Clare. They’d reached the top of a muddy, uneven and well-worn footpath which wound down a steep slope towards the beach. He looked back and saw that she hadn’t moved. She remained standing on the road outside the burned-out building. Behind her he thought he could see Thatcham or, at least, the space where it used to be. The village itself – normally an obvious bright cluster of street lamps and houses – had melted into the landscape, wholly unlit. The only lights he could still see came from the myriad alien ships above and Christ, there seemed to be hundreds of them now, cross-hatching the skies at different altitudes and speeds, perfectly coordinated. He looked back along the coast line towards the cliffs from where he’d witnessed the arrival of the first aliens. A ship of a similar shape and size bore down towards the land from which they were now trying to escape. It was so black and so featureless that it seemed to be eating its way through the heavens, blocking out thousands of stars at a time.
Clare still hadn’t moved.
‘You coming?’
Before she could answer, another ship drifted overhead. Its vast belly slid open and a phalanx of seventeen smaller vessels dropped down into the squally skies. Tom crouched down, battered by the sudden warm wind and the change in air pressure, but Clare remained standing, looking directly up at the alien machines as they whipped through the air just metres above her. The physical closeness of the aliens unnerved Tom, but Clare seemed not to care. She’d seen enough. She’d had enough. Tom stood up again and tried to hold her close but the warmth and strength he’d felt in her previously had all but gone. She felt like a shop-window dummy: all life extinguished. But he refused to let go, and gripped her tighter still. Over her shoulder he watched as the aliens continued their work. In the distance, bright blocks of controlled light shone down intermittently, and he knew that each brilliant flash resulted in the eradication of untold numbers of innocent lives. He counted more than ten bursts of light as he scanned the horizon – hundreds of thousands of people reduced to nothing in seconds – and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it.
The longer he looked into the clouds overhead, the more alien activity he saw. The air was teeming with their smaller ships. Some were flying low, ground-hugging reconnaissance flights, others darted from one mother ship to another, the pulses of white from their engines illuminating their routes and drawing bright connective trails in the sky. It was like watching electricity flow around a circuit, like blood being pumped around a body. And it occurred to him that he was watching something new being created. The old being discarded. New life beginning. He thought about the words of the alien he’d killed, how he’d talked about mankind’s plundering of the planet, filling the atmosphere with fumes, cutting down the rain forests, forcing natives out of their homes to build shopping malls and factories. Jall had been right. This wasn’t any different. This wholesale reclamation of the planet was the same thing, but on a massively increased scale.
He dragged Clare down the narrow coastal path, forcing her to move. She was slow to react, almost falling over when her feet didn’t move quickly enough. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t comply either. She was beaten. Empty.
The gradient of the path steepened, their footing becoming more treacherous with each step. The waterlogged, sandy loam made the ground impossible to read, particularly at speed. Tom almost fell, but he didn’t dare stop or slow down, nor would he let go of Clare. He kept his eyes fixed downward, desperately trying to distinguish the zigzag route the path took through the darkness, but just for a moment he allowed himself to glance up. His stomach dropped and his heart leaped. The steep landmass seemed to have momentarily fallen away, and all he could see now was the ocean. It stretched out ahead of him for endless miles, a vast vista untouched. But the illusion was shattered seconds later when another alien ship swept out over the waves.
The slope worsened again, then gradually levelled out, the sandy mud eventually giving way to the shingle of the beach. The noise of their footsteps as they crunched across the bay was reassuringly loud: a pathetic yet satisfying act of defiance. They stopped just short of the wet line where the waves hit the beach and Tom spat and cleared his throat, panting hard. He let go of Clare and stood with his hands on his knees, struggling to breathe. Was it his imagination, or was the temperature rising again? He looked over at Clare through another sudden shower of rain, and thought that he saw a flicker of emotion. She caught his eye.
‘We did it,’ he said. ‘Told you we’d make it.’
She looked around. ‘Now what
?’
Tom shielded his face from the driving rain. He didn’t immediately recognise the cove they’d found, but he knew roughly where they were. There were several of these small bays along this part of the coastline. He was certain he’d seen boats moored around here before now.
‘This way,’ he said, already marching back up the shingle shore. He checked back and when he was sure she was following, led her along the crescent shape of the beach. The land narrowed and he was soon ankle-deep in ice-cold sea water, its icy temperature a stark contrast with the unseasonably warm air. He ignored the discomfort, long past caring. They were both soaked through and exhausted, what difference would anything else make now? He steadied Clare as a wave caught her by surprise, and she almost lost her footing, then dragged her towards a shadowy headland which separated this bay from the next.
‘I’m tired,’ she said, shouting over the wind which had suddenly increased in ferocity. ‘Want to stop now.’
‘Keep going. Not much longer,’ Tom yelled back. He began to climb, wondering if the aliens were somehow controlling the wind to spite them, using its speed to make life even tougher. He forced himself to focus, knowing that was as ridiculous as it sounded. The aliens weren’t going to waste any time or effort on them. They didn’t give a damn about the two of them. Whether they were standing in the middle of Thatcham or on a boat rowing out to sea, it didn’t matter. They were of no consequence.
Tom waited for Clare to catch up then scrambled up the rocks behind her, pushing her forward and keeping her moving. The moss-covered rocks under his boots were slimy and his foot slipped as a large wave hit the headland and broke over him. He fell back, under the surface before he’d realised what was happening. Complete darkness. Muffled silence. An intense cold punch which sucked every last scrap of air from his lungs. He flailed in the water but couldn’t find anything to hold onto until another wave seemed to cradle him and flip him back over onto his front. His feet and hands made contact with the ground and he stood up. Clare was standing right in front of him. He looked up and took her outstretched hand. She pulled him up, the lights from an endless procession of alien ships illuminating the sky behind her.
