by Glenn Cooper
“Just over nine stone,” the professor replied, waiting for his piggyback. “Will you be able to carry me, do you think?”
“Nine stone? I’ve had shits bigger than you.”
The one thing they had neglected to game out was where the civilians would march in the formation so John hastily made the call. He tucked Emily, Trevor, Kyle, and the professor just in front of D Troop for maximal protection.
“Where are you going to be?” Emily asked.
“Right by your side,” he said. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Ben came over and wished them well. “Make sure you return, all right?” he said.
“We’ll try to come back with all our bits,” Trevor said, giving him a hug. “Don’t envy you your job. You’ve got a damn sight more Hellers to deal with this time around. Don’t let them get the upper hand. We’re counting on you.”
“We’ll prevail,” Ben said. “We have no choice.”
As they began marching toward the bridge over the River Mole, Trevor said with a sigh, “Once more into the breach.”
“Ah, you know Shakespeare,” the professor said from high on Moose’s back.
“Do I?” Trevor asked.
“Why yes,” Nightingale said. “Henry the Fifth, Act Three, I believe. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead!’”
Moose cocked his neck and said, “What’s he going on about?”
They marched at double-time until they crossed the bridge when Captain Marsh at the point slowed the formation to a walk. They had come off the bridge too bunched up for his liking and he ordered them to fan out along Bridge Street.
It wasn’t long before they encountered the first bodies. It was late spring. The daytime temperatures were not very warm but the corpses had begun to bloat and discolor. The soldiers glanced at them but they had all seen worse in deployments to the Middle East and Africa.
“Jesus,” Kyle said when they passed the first victims. “Is that from rovers? Were they murdered?”
“Yeah,” John said, “Poor bastards. They didn’t have a chance.”
Nightingale cried out in alarm as the smells from the victims reached his nostrils. Emily trotted ahead a few paces to hold his hand before falling back to John’s side at his insistence.
The Swan Shopping Centre was coming up on their left. The pedestrian way looked desolate. Small drones whirred overhead.
John may not have seen it first but he was among the first to act, grabbing Emily by the forearm and pulling her to his right side.
The attack came from their left with as many as a dozen rovers spilling out of an abandoned restaurant.
“Hostiles left!” John shouted.
Kyle froze but Trevor moved toward the left to further insulate Kyle and Emily from harm.
A D-trooper closest to the restaurant didn’t have time to raise his pistol. Two rovers set upon him and slashed at his throat with kitchen knives. His gun clattered to the paving stones. Other members of D Troop began firing, dropping the attackers. A third rover managed to kick the errant pistol toward the restaurant before he was killed by an expert shot to the head.
One of the rovers in the rear of the pack, a man who had arrived in Hell in the 1980s, picked up the gun and shouted to a member of his gang, “I know how to use a semi-auto pistol, asshole! I’ll kill you bastards!”
He rushed forward, took aim at the highest target, the professor bobbing on Moose’s shoulders, and pulled the biometric trigger. Nothing happened. A second later, the confused rover was dispatched by a hail of bullets.
All but two of the attackers fell to gunfire. The survivors dove back into the restaurant.
Captain Yates fell back from his position at the point of B troop to check on the civilians.
“All right, then?” he shouted to John.
“We’re okay,” John said. “We’ve got one friendly down.”
Captain Greene who was kneeling over the bloody, fallen soldier, called out, “He’s gone!”
“We’ve got to keep moving,” John said.
A nearby soldier said, “We don’t leave our men behind.”
“Drones,” John said. “Your people are watching. They’ll come pick him up.”
A D Troop sergeant yelled, “Eyes right!”
Two men and a woman were running toward them from a block of offices on Elm Street waving white paper.
“Hold your fire!” John shouted. “They’re not Hellers!”
“How do you know?” Yates said.
“They’re showing white signals,” John said.
“And their clothes are modern,” Emily shouted.
“Help us!” one of the men called out. “We’ve been trapped for days!”
“Back across the bridge,” Yates shouted at them. “The army’s that way. It’s safe.”
They didn’t need coaxing. They kept running and didn’t look back.
“This is exciting, isn’t it?” the professor said, leaning sharply over Moose’s ear.
“I’m glad you’re having a good time,” the corporal replied, trying to balance his load.
From ahead they heard Captain Marsh shouting something.
“What’s he saying?” Greene asked. “We’re half deaf without bloody radios.”
“Get used to it,” Trevor said.
They saw Marsh running back toward their position.
Yates called out to Marsh, “What’s the problem?”
The bald captain pulled up in their midst, red in the face.
“Gatti and most of C Troop are gone!” he said. “I saw it with my own eyes. They were moving forward and then they were gone. All that’s left of them are their sidearms on the ground.”
“They hit a node within the hot zone,” Emily said.
“We need to follow their track,” John said. “That’s why we’re here.”
With the captains back in position, orders were given and the column advanced down the promenade.
Ben and Major Parker-Burns were watching the video feed from their position across the river. Neither said a word until every member of the column had vanished.
“May Heaven help them,” the major gulped.
“I don’t know if Heaven will be of any help,” Ben said. “They’re going to have to help themselves.”
Holed up in the restaurant by the promenade the two remaining rovers discussed their hunger. Their gang had finished every scrap of food days earlier.
“It’s time for cannie grub,” one of them said, eyeing the closest rover bodies on the road.
“We’ll wait for dark,” the other said. “Could be more of them soldiers.”
The first one looked out the plate-glass window up into the sky and swore at the hovering drones, lamenting, “Where the blazes did Heath go? The bastard left us to fend for ourselves in this infernal place. If I had me druthers I’d be back in Hell where there an’t no wingless birds flying about and at least we knew how to shift for ourselves.”
12
Heath had not been much interested in Leatherhead. After his murderous attack on the platoon of Marines he led his gang north. London was what he wanted and London was what he got. True to their rover habits he and his fifty-strong group had sheltered during the day and traveled by night. The A24 had not been there in his day but he instinctively followed its course through Epsom and Mitcham and into Wandsworth. On their first night they invaded a large country house where they made fast and bloody work of a family of seven who had not heeded evacuation calls, and were it not for a well-stocked pantry, three generations would have wound up as cannie food. On their second night they took over multiple terraced houses, none large enough to hide them all. On that night human flesh was on the menu. The heroin addict had split from the pack and without him, none of them had a grasp of modernity; Heath, a nineteenth-century man, had been one of the more recent arrivals in Hell. None of them fathomed electronics but they stumbled upon the correct operation of lig
ht switches and faucets and the function of refrigerators.
“What’s this for?” Monk had asked pressing the flush lever of a toilet.
“Could be some sort of a water closet,” Heath had answered.
“What’s that?”
“Never mind. Do your shitting in the garden and stop asking me questions.”
They slept during the day and moved at night and on the third night they stood on the south bank of the Thames at Battersea.
Heath took in the twenty-first-century vista on the opposite bank and breathed in the brackish smells. He declared, “It’s not as I remembered. It was busy in my day but not like this.”
“I can’t make out any of it,” Monk said, scratching at his scraggly beard and puzzling at the lights of a passenger jet streaking through the night sky.
“Time don’t stand still,” Heath said. “Things change. Why in the devil’s name have we been brought back?”
“We’ve been given a second chance at life, that’s what I think,” one of the rovers said.
Recalling the carnage they had wrought since their return Heath said, “I don’t reckon we’ll be Heaven-bound next time ’round.”
“Where are we off to, then?” Monk asked him.
“There.” Heath was pointing across the river toward the heart of the city. “That’s where we’re headed.”
For almost a week, Dirk and Duck hardly left their cottage in Dartford. For the most part, they were fearful that Cromwell would reappear, looking for news on the return of King Henry. Cromwell had left a small party of soldiers behind in case Henry might suddenly reappear. The soldiers hadn’t given the brothers any problem, especially since Dirk let them have every drop of ale he had and promised them first crack at the new barrel he was brewing. But Cromwell was another matter. His dark visage and sharp tongue scared them witless and they wanted to be well hidden if he were to ride into the village. They subsisted on their store of dried meat and consumed the last of their root vegetables. One of their neighbors, an old man who kept a few chickens, came by their back door to see if they had any beer to trade. Dirk was the best brewer about and his beer was as valuable as copper coins.
“Another few days and we’ll be well sorted,” Dirk told him. “I’ve put up two barrels. One for the king’s men, one for me and my brother. How go your birds?”
“Alive and pecking,” the man said.
“None lost to thieving?”
“Not with soldiers about. Keeps the scum away.”
Rovers didn’t come to Dartford often. There were richer pickings elsewhere. The problem was the scavengers, men like their old nemesis, Brandon Woodbourne, not depraved enough to join a rover gang but too uncivilized to live in a village or town.
“Any sign of Woodbourne?” Duck asked, his brow furrowed with worry. Woodbourne had a soft spot for Dirk but not for him, and Duck lived in fear that he’d make good on his perennial threats to crash him for denying him a chicken some time back.
“I didn’t see him but he was spotted nearby yesterday,” the old man said.
“Got any eggs?” Duck asked. “Wouldn’t half like a fry-up.”
“Might have a few stashed aside.”
“Tell you what,” Dirk said. “You advance us four nice eggs and we’ll give you a flagon of ale from our new barrel in straight trade.”
The old man was thinking about the transaction when they heard some shouts from the road. From the front door they saw a bunch of villagers pointing and talking loudly.
“What’s the fuss about?” Dirk shouted.
“The soldiers,” one of the men replied. “I saw them walking up by Alfred’s house and they vanished. They were there and then they weren’t!”
The old man was standing behind the brothers and shouted directly in their ears, “You haven’t been drinking, have you?”
Duck rubbed his right ear. “You’ll make me deaf, old man!”
“How could we be drinking?” the man in the road replied. “We’re all waiting for Dirk to brew a new barrel, same as you.”
Thoughts of eggs vanished as quickly as the soldiers and the brothers shooed the chicken man away.
“I reckon I know what ’appened to the king’s men,” Duck said.
“You think they’re off to where you were?” Dirk asked.
“I do indeed.”
“If that’s the case, then where are the ones who were swapped in trade?” Dirk asked.
“It’s true enough,” Duck said. “Every time some of us got sent there, some of them got sent ’ere. Yet gone they are and no one’s taken their place.”
The brothers spent the rest of the day and well into the evening arguing about what to do. Duck forcefully made his case and Dirk just as forcefully made his.
“We’re half-starving ’ere,” Duck said. “You can’t imagine the glorious victuals they got. I told you ’bout pizza, didn’t I?”
Dirk said he was sick of hearing about these flat pies.
“Yeah, but you won’t be sick of tasting them. And ice cream and cakes and juicy fruits and such. And vids about mermaids and snow dwellers. And …”
“And did you forget that they kept you locked up and sent you back when they was done with you?”
“I didn’t mind being locked up. It were better than the day I roamed free. I’m going to try and cross,” Duck insisted. “My Delia will look after me. And I’ll tell you this, Dirk; I’ll do it whether or not you come with me. But we are brothers and I dearly want you by my side.”
Nightfall came. While Dirk went through the motions of checking on his barrels, Duck paced back and forth inside their small cottage, every so often opening the shutters to peer onto the dark street. Finally, he couldn’t contain himself any longer.
“Brother, I love you more than anything in this dark world of ours but I must go. If you ’ad been there, if you ’ad seen the things I seen, you would be walking beside me.”
With that, Duck wrapped his arms around Dirk, kissed him on the cheek, and was out the door.
He slowly trekked up the road toward Albert’s house. As he approached the point where the soldiers had last been seen he heard the squishy sounds of another pair of feet slogging through the mud behind him.
“Yeah, I’m coming with you,” Dirk said. “You know that they’ll be stealing all my beer when we’re gone, don’t you?”
An overjoyed Duck said, “They’ve got all manner of beer where we’re going. In bottles, in metal tins, any way you please. Come, take my ’and so we won’t be separated on our journey.”
Hand in hand they walked forward.
Suddenly they were standing on the service line of a tennis court. To their right were the low-slung buildings of the MAAC labs illuminated by security lights.
Dirk began to tremble but Duck exuberantly reassured him everything was all right, better than all right. It was perfect. He knew exactly where they were, ever so close to all the marvels he’d been crowing about.
“But we’re in a giant cage,” Dirk cried, reaching out to touch the chain-link fence. “I seen a bear in a cage like this once and it didn’t end pretty for the beast.”
“It’s called a tennis court. It’s a game they play in modern times.”
“In a cage?”
“Come with me. See those buildings yonder? That’s where they keep the fine grub. We’ll knock upon the door and once they see that old Duck is back, they’ll surely let us in. But we must tread carefully in case we run into the king’s men who crossed before us.”
The grounds were dark but the night sky was full of light. Dirk pointed in awe at the crescent moon and the big dipper.
“Look, Duck! The ’eavens. We ’aven’t seen them even one time in ’ell.”
“And wait till the morning!” Duck said. “You’ll see the sunshine too. ’Tis a stirring sight.”
Duck was leading his brother toward the lab when they heard the tennis court gate creaking open.
A hulking figure began running toward them.
Duck froze in terror and in seconds the man was upon them.
Duck was too scared to speak his name but Dirk managed.
“Woodbourne. It’s you.”
“Fancy meeting Duck and Dirk here,” Woodbourne said, wildly looking about.
“Please don’t hurt me,” Duck said, falling to his knees. “Next time I’ll give you all the chickens I got. I swear I will.”
“I can’t believe I’m back again,” Woodbourne said, his black eyes reflecting the moonlight. “Don’t worry, you miserable sod, I’ve got more pressing things to do than crash your miserable arse. Seen any guards about?”
Duck got to his feet but kept his distance. “None. Not the modern kind, not the king’s men neither.”
“King’s men here?”
“A whole platoon crossed earlier, or so we was told,” Dirk said.
“Strange times,” Woodbourne said, “but I’ll be making the best of it. I’ll be off. Don’t say you saw me or next time we cross paths you’ll be headless, the both of you.”
“We won’t say nothing,” Duck said. “Where are you headed?”
Woodbourne didn’t say. He hurtled across the lawn and disappeared into the darkness.
“I thought I was done for,” Duck said. “Nearly peed my trousers. I’m glad he didn’t want to cast in with us. Don’t trust ’im as far as I could toss ’im.”
The door Duck tried to open was the one Delia and his minders had used for his walks on the laboratory grounds. It was locked.
“What now?” Dirk asked.
Duck told him to stay put while he found a rock in the flowerbeds that he threw through the plate glass.
Dirk cackled and wondered out loud what kind of a fool would fashion a door of glass.
Stepping inside Duck called for the two people he knew best, Delia and Barry, one of the security guards. “Delia, it’s Duck back among you. Barry, are you there?”
He led his brother through the empty and dark corridors, illuminated only by yellow security lights and red, glowing exit signs.
“It’s like a castle in ’ere,” Dirk said. “But not the ancient and smelly sort.”
“It’s massive, all right. This way. I’ll show you where they was keeping me.”
