by Glenn Cooper
Venables studied the camera feed and looked up in alarm when the image began to rotate wildly. In the distance he and the rest of his squad saw the helicopter rapidly corkscrewing toward the ground until it exploded in a yellow fireball onto the roof deck of the car park.
The Merlin pilot blinked in disbelief.
He was in blackness. The helicopter was gone. His helmet and flight suit was gone. He heard his crewmen screaming and then he heard his own screams as he plummeted three hundred feet to his death.
Five broken bodies lay in an alleyway running behind a row of low cottages in another Leatherhead, this one a small town in the Brittania of Hell.
Prime Minister Lester finished his call with President Jackson and turned up the volume on the TV screen in the backrest of his ministerial Jaguar. A BBC reporter was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange where circuit-breakers had halted trading following historic market crashes in New York and Europe. He turned to his principal private secretary beside him and said, “We’re going to have to issue some kind of statement tonight to calm things down or today’s market plunge is going to look like a picnic.”
“Shall I get the chancellor for you?”
“Not until we know what we’re going to say. We’ll have to go farther than we’ve gone so far today but how far? That’s the question.”
“Up to but not including the word Hell, I should think,” the secretary said.
“I think that’s right.” He turned down the volume of the TV and the sirens of the motorcycle outriders penetrated the padded interior of the car.
The secretary’s phone rang. “Call from Paris. President Rembert.”
“How long till Windsor?” the PM asked his driver.
“Ten minutes, sir.”
“All right, give me the president.”
The prime minister’s personal mobile rang. He looked at the caller ID and answered. After a short conversation he ended the call and said, “We’ve just lost an RAF helicopter over Leatherhead.”
The prime minister was escorted to the Garter Throne Room of Windsor Palace. The queen was seated in one of the padded chairs drawn up to face her ornate red throne chair which sat alone on its elevated, carpeted platform. She was fidgeting with her gloves and said, “Ah, there you are,” when Lester entered.
“Your Majesty, how are you?” the prime minister said, extending his hand.
“I am most distressed by the day’s events, as you can imagine. Also, I felt it was a cowardly thing to flee London for Windsor.”
“Until we have a better handle on the situation, it really is for the best,” Lester said, taking a seat beside her. “Windsor is probably fine for now. If the situation deteriorates I will be recommending you relocate to Balmoral.”
“We’ll cross that bridge later, Peter. For the moment I’m quite focused on the gentleman who will arrive shortly. Are you certain, absolutely certain he is who he claims to be?”
“As fantastic as it is, it seems he is. We have several lines of evidence. The first is a thorough interview conducted by Professor Malcolm Gough of Cambridge, a leading Tudor scholar. He reports that no one other than Henry or a major Henry scholar would know the answers to the questions he posed. Combine that with the testimony of Mr. Camp and Dr. Loughty and we have a powerful circumstantial case. The second is more scientific. Doctors did a DNA swab test this afternoon on the gentleman. Although there are no known living descendants of Henry the Eighth, there is a possible bloodline through Henry’s sister, Margaret Tudor, to several living individuals. The DNA analysis suggests a likelihood of a match.”
“You might test me, as well,” the queen said. “I believe he is my great grand uncle, twelve times removed.”
“We can certainly do that, yes,” the prime minister said.
“Well, I hardly know what to think,” she said. “I’ve had a word with the Archbishop of Canterbury about the spiritual side of all of this. He is rather less incredulous than most about the existence of a domain called Hell, but he is nonetheless flabbergasted.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“Before he arrives, what is the security situation?” the queen asked.
“We’ve sealed off Leatherhead, Sevenoaks, Dartford, and Upminster, as well as two of the sites previously compromised, Iver and South Ockendon. We believe there have been significant casualties, particularly in Leatherhead, but we had not yet authorized police or military entry into the affected zones. However, an RAF Merlin helicopter has just crash-landed in Leatherhead and the MOD is mulling the advisability of deploying a search and rescue operation.”
“Good gracious,” the queen said, sighing heavily. “I understand that Jeremy Slaine’s son is one of the affected boys from that school.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
There was a knock on the heavy doors of the throne room and a royal official announced their guests were on the palace grounds. Just then, a large contingent of crown protection officers filed in and lined the walls.
“Is this necessary?” the queen asked.
“It is a prudent precaution in my estimation,” the prime minister said.
A videographer entered via a side door, splayed his tripod and affixed the camera.
The queen said, “I was advised we would be remiss not to have this event captured for posterity.”
“I agree,” Lester said, “although I am not so sure it will ever be seen by the public.”
“That is a matter for another day,” she said. She rose, took her seat on her monogrammed chair, and donned her white gloves.
Everyone waited expectantly. When the doors opened yet again three men slowly walked inside.
No one paid any attention to Malcolm Gough or John Camp. All eyes were on the equally tall man in the middle.
Henry was dressed in the clothes he had been wearing in Dartford village when John took him hostage. During his spell at the Royal Hospital, his garments had been photographed, inspected, and expertly cleaned by a company in London that specialized in laundering film costumes.
His outfit was one of his hunting ones, not his ornamental finest but still eye-catching. His below-the-knee tunic, worn over a scoop-necked white blouse, was finely brocaded purple and gold. It was parted below the waist revealing a provocatively large yellow codpiece, which caught the queen’s gaze for a second. He had a pair of supple, long riding boots, tight crimson breeches, a loose, fur-trimmed brown mantle that flowed over his tunic, and a flat broad-brimmed hat trimmed with feathers. He had been given a choice of half a dozen colognes and had chosen one he had applied so liberally that his foul aroma was obliterated by a jasmine and rosemary spiciness.
He permitted himself a few glances at the magnificence of the paneled Garter Throne Room, its high, ornate and gilded ceiling, the paintings of the queen and predecessor monarchs from George I onwards, but he deferentially paid most of his attention to the queen.
He seemed to sense just how close to approach before he should stop. John and the professor took a few steps back to allow his precedence.
He doffed his hat and without a bow said, “Your Majesty.”
John noticed that the queen’s gloved hands were trembling on her lap.
She gained her composure and said, “Your Royal Highness, I scarcely know what to say, so I shall simply welcome you back to Windsor Palace.”
“Though it is nightfall, your marvelous illuminations revealed to my person that the palace is much changed from my time,” Henry said. “It is splendid, indeed.”
“Will you sit?” the queen said.
“I will.” He pointed with his hat toward the video camera. “Is this a weapon of some sort?”
John and the professor were sitting beside him. John told him it was a machine to record his words and his image. Henry shrugged indifferently.
The queen said, “I would like to present the prime minister of Great Britain, Peter Lester.”
Lester made a short welcoming speech but Henry only had eyes for the quee
n.
When Lester sat, Henry said, “This fine scholar, Master Gough, has been my tutor for the past hours. He has educated me on the state of her majesty’s government. In truth, I know well of your reign and of many of the monarchs portrayed on your wall. I diligently study the chronicles of new arrivals to my domain and I have done so for some five hundred years.”
“I admit to utter amazement at the existence of your domain, my good King,” the queen said. “It is hard to grasp the theological implications, the scientific implications. And to be able to sit here and converse with one of the greatest personages in British history, well, I am overwhelmed.”
“You can thank this man, John Camp, for my presence,” Henry said, “for it was he who took me prisoner and spirited me to your side. I can thank him too because today, in your royal hospital, I looked from my window and saw something I never thought to see again: the sun.”
The queen looked squarely at John. “I thank you for your service and your bravery,” she said. “More will be made of this at the appropriate time.”
John deeply nodded.
She turned her attention back to Henry and said, “I must admit that I was shocked to learn that upon your death you were remanded to your present realm.”
“Hell,” Henry said. “You may call it what it is. And I can assure you that no one was more surprised than I, for I never once killed or maimed a man by my own hand, and everything I did, I did for the greatness and glory of England.”
“I know you have had a confusing and tiring day,” the queen said, “but I have so many questions I would like to ask you about—yes, I’ll say it—about Hell.”
Henry beamed and relaxed in his chair, casually opening his legs and exposing his codpiece. “Nothing would give me more pleasure,” he said. “I have learned that you are not of my direct bloodline, but you are a queen of England, and I feel a kinship and love which warms my ancient heart and lifts my accursed soul. Ask of me what you wish and I will sing my replies like a happy bird released from its cage and returned to its verdant forest.”
5
Heath was too tired and drunk to carry on. He dropped to his haunches, leaned against a baked goods rack at the Leatherhead Sainsbury’s inside the Swan Shopping Centre, and closed his eyes.
“What’s your problem, then?” his mate Monk asked, ripping open a box of cake. Monk was a brutish thick-limbed man who was missing all but two fingers of his right hand. He used them like a claw to extract a wad of chocolate cake and made sure Heath was awake enough to hear how delicious it was.
“What?” Heath asked, blinking.
“This cake. It’s fucking amazing.”
“My gut’s full up,” Heath said, closing his eyes again.
Heath’s coarse shirt was stained with food and blood, reflecting two of his three main activities of the day—eating and killing. The raping hadn’t soiled his clothes. It had been a long day and a strange day, the strangest he’d had since the one in 1899 when he landed in Hell, a moment after getting coshed in the head in a brawl near Tower Bridge.
Though Heath wasn’t a large man, he was quick, with lightning reflexes and a pitiless lack of remorse, both qualities which gave him an edge in a fight. When he got a man onto the ground, he finished him off with ruthless efficiency. Since his youth he’d been a hair-trigger brawler who’d usually gotten the better of others but his luck ran out that cold, London night. In Hell, he’d been fortunate, and though he was scarred from head to toe and had lost half his teeth in hundreds of skirmishes, no one had done too much damage.
On his arrival it hadn’t taken him long to fall in with a rover gang. Nothing about the conventional, fearful existence of village or town dwellers appealed to him. He was a predator in life and he’d be an uber predator in death. Within a year of roving the dank streets of London he crashed the band’s leader and slit his throat. He’d been a leader ever since, the most feared in London. In recent times he’d taken the strategy of subjugating and absorbing other rover bands in and around the city to create a fighting force able to take on fortified towns and even small garrisons of crown soldiers. An eight to ten-membered band of rovers tearing through a settlement was intimidating. A gang of nearer one hundred was terrifying beyond imagination, a horde of human locusts leaving nothing but husks in its wake.
Heath’s gang had spent the previous night swarming through the village of Leatherhead. They had been sleeping off an orgy of destruction when they suddenly found themselves in the city centre of a very different Leatherhead. Squinting into the glaring sun, they had stumbled around in disbelief as men, women, and children scattered before them.
Heath had no idea what was happening but one of his men, a thug who’d died of a heroin overdose in 1994, instantly recognized the modernity of the place.
“Know where we are, Heath?” he had called out.
“No fucking idea.”
“I swear we’re back on Earth. We’re back among the living.”
“How? Why?” Heath had asked, spinning around to take in the sights and sounds of the twenty-first century.
“No clue, mate, but I see girls. Lots of pretty girls.”
Throughout the day, Heath had struggled to satisfy his personal urges for food and sex and his instincts to keep his men together. This land had, he was told, police and soldiers, but armed men had not materialized. Noisy flying machines were soon soaring overhead and voices from the sky were warning people to stay inside and lock their doors and windows and await further instructions. Later in the day, the voices were telling people to make their way out of the city centre if they could safely do so.
In the early hours the rovers had followed their instincts to butcher and cannibalize the victims they ran down, but as the day wore on, they found an unimaginable bounty of food inside houses and shops.
“No need to cannie,” Heath had said to Monk, ripping through a ham in an old man’s flat. “Tastes better too.”
“I like it here,” Monk had said, stepping over the body of the old man and finding bottles of lager in his fridge. “Fucking amazing, it is.”
By nightfall, Heath had managed to find a good number of his rovers and herd them inside the mall at the Swan Centre. Their reward was discovering the beer, wine, and liquor section in the deserted Sainsbury’s. The old heroin addict had taken it upon himself to teach the ancients how to work a screw-top bottle and how to pop a tab on a can of beer, and before long, the few dozen bloodied and stinking men were well toward drunken incoherence. Heath tried to keep his brain functioning but fatigue and brandy took their toll. He was contemplating the blurred image of Monk’s chocolate-smeared fingers when he was jolted by a mighty thud and the sound of an explosion overhead.
“What the hell was that?” he said, shaking the cobwebs out and pushing himself to his feet.
“Sounds like cannon fire,” Monk said.
“Get some of the lads. Now,” Heath said.
In their passage, the men had lost their favored weapons, long curved rover knives, but most had rearmed themselves in the houses and shops in the town centre. Those who hadn’t were able to find knives in the Indian restaurant inside the mall and the kitchenware department at Sainsbury’s. When a group of the drunken louts assembled one of the men told Heath he’d found a way to the roof and led them up the stairs to the top of the multi-story car park.
The wrecked Merlin helicopter was burning with intensity. The rovers were forced to shield their eyes and keep their distance.
“What is it?” one of them asked Heath.
“I’ve no idea,” he answered before adding, “This is a strange land for which I have little comprehension.”
“It’s called a helicopter,” the addict said. He was almost too drunk to form words. “It’s a buggered, flaming, helicopter.”
“I like it here,” one of the men said, wobbling on boozy legs. “Good drink, beautiful victuals, plenty of molls. Doesn’t bother me that flaming machines are falling from the skies. As long as t
hey don’t land upon me head.”
Heath lost interest in the blazing wreckage and used the vantage point to survey the town below. Encircling the town at key junctions were the flashing red and blue lights of emergency vehicles.
“I don’t know why they haven’t tried to crash us,” Heath told Monk. “No coppers. No soldiers. Doesn’t make sense.”
“They’re probably scared of us,” Monk said.
“Maybe, but in time they’ll come.” He surveyed his gang members and asked, “Who’s the least drunk of you lot?”
Amidst sniggers, no one answered. Heath picked three of the least glazed-over and told them to stay on the roof and let him know if they saw any men advancing. He was going back downstairs to have a kip.
Heath had been asleep in one of the supermarket aisles for less than an hour when one of the rovers on the roof came running for him.
“They’re coming,” the man said.
Heath sat up and massaged his face. “On foot? On horseback?”
“No. Inside machines.”
“Motorcars,” Heath said to his sixteenth-century gang member. “They’re called motorcars. How many?”
“One big ’un what was on the bridge. Heading straight toward us.”
Heath was already on his feet, kicking his men awake. There were about fifty of them. Thirty or so were unaccounted for, off somewhere in the town.
“Come with me,” Heath shouted. “They’re coming to crash us. It’s time to fight.”
As they made their way out to the street Heath drew two of his new butcher knives from the new belt he’d gotten off his first victim. The kid was pale and pimply and was at the wrong place at the wrong time, rounding a corner shortly after the rovers arrived. He’d looked askance at Heath who, lacking a belt buckle, had been dealing with his loose trousers, turning his head this way and that in utter confusion. The kid hadn’t even said anything. It was his look of contempt at Heath’s filth and stench that had prompted Heath to bend over, pick up an ornamental stone from someone’s front garden, and bash the kid’s head in. Before stealing his belt, Heath had stood over him, marveling at this kid’s immobility. He’d kicked him a few times to be sure before coming to the conclusion that unlike victims in Hell who were incapable of dying, this one was dead. It had dawned on him at that moment that the incredible had happened: he was back on Earth.
