Six put them on and felt the screens extend to her cheeks, immersing her in a brilliant white light. She then shuddered as an electric shock flashed through her temples. Her fingers, toes, even the hairs on her arms were left tingling, and when the light subsided she felt a damp wind caressing her face.
Six looked up to see dark clouds floating above a supermarket, an airship low in the night sky.
What on earth?
The words MONDAY GAMES PRESENTS scrolled along the airship’s cabin, its spotlights searching the ground about her.
People jostled past, some of their faces glaring. Litter and newspaper pages skipped over her feet, one of them catching on a lamppost. The headline of the poster flapped in the wind WANTED: FREEDOM FIGHTER/TERRORIST and below was a picture of herself, complete with bruises, as if she was looking in a mirror.
It’s like a video game, she thought, and I’m the star! But what would Lord Truth want with a video game?
The security beam fell on her and people turned, as if recognising her battered face. Some of them shouted, others ran away from her, clearly alarmed.
Six heard whistles, then sirens. “There she is, get her!” someone yelled, before a car screeched to a halt and a door flew open, the music in her ears reaching a powerful crescendo.
“What are you waiting for, get in!” a voice yelled from inside the vehicle. “And ditch that piece!”
Six looked down to see a pistol shaking in her right hand, her fingers perfectly mimicked in this new digital reality.
And a red word blinked in front of her.
START.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
JACK Bellingham, The Pirate Prince, sat on the rocks of the island’s causeway with his head on his chin. After all the excitement of recent days he was beginning to feel quite lonely. Lonely and frustrated.
He was not used to failing.
“The King,” he shook his head. “Who’d have thought?”
He sipped on tasteless strawberry daiquiri from a cocktail glass with a small umbrella in it. Keen to wave his pirate guise goodbye he had also donned a new outfit of a Hawaiian shirt and board shorts. But neither could lift his mood.
As Jack breathed out his stomach sagged, his neck fattened and his freckles disappeared. He struggled a cough as his nose bloomed and became crooked, rings formed around his eyes and he pulled a pair of spectacles from his top pocket and placed them over his ears.
“So, you’re still here then?” the hummingbird sang as it buzzed past, no longer coloured but like the rest of the Other Worlds drawn in white and black. “Whoever you are.”
“It would certainly seem as such, wouldn’t it?” Jack replied bitterly.
The hummingbird dived between the sprawling waves that splashed at the man’s bare feet, which had grown larger and hairier. “How come you’re not dead then, like your brother?” she enquired.
Jack sighed for a moment before running his hand through his shaggy hair, now black with flecks of white. “It’s a little more complicated than that. Not that I’d expect you to understand.”
The little bird squeaked: “Try me.”
Jack frowned, extra creases marking his angry forehead. “Well, for starters, Klaus Gravenstein was far closer to me than a brother,” he began. “He’d been my host for almost twenty years. You get to know someone awfully well in that time.”
The bird flew in a looping arc over the man’s left shoulder. “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” she chirped.
Jack snorted. “He was a simple soul, stupid really, much like yourself,” he reflected airily, the cocktail swilling in his glass. “But he was loyal.”
The bird bristled as she hovered in front of him, her black eyes sparkling. “Is that right?”
“Yes,” Jack grinned, his body slouching, his own eyes trained on the bird, tracking the angle of her flight. “Unlike some.”
And he pounced, tossing his drink aside. “Got you!”
The hummingbird gasped as she was snatched from the air. “Ack!”
And Jack’s fingers closed in on her. “You betrayed me,” he leered, holding the bird inches from his face as he squeezed, her throat trapped between his forefinger and thumb. “Why?”
“Betray you?” the hummingbird choked, her wings buzzing wildly within his grasp.
“Yes, you joined forces with our little visitor,” Jack scowled, his cheeks flushing black, “you and all your daft little friends. That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“What plan?” the bird squeaked as his fist tightened, clipping her wings, crushing her breast, raising her high above his head.
As if he made to eat her.
“You think this island and the ‘simple souls’ within it are yours to command, spirit? It is not,” the hummingbird struggled desperately.
“No, it’s mine,” a voice said.
And Jack looked up to see a man walking towards him, dressed in a shroud. Walking on water.
Terrified, he scrambled back from the rocks. “What? Who, who’s there?” he screamed.
The figure drew closer, while above him the moon rose in front of the sun, splitting the orb’s rays in a flickering war of shadows - a monochrome battle for supremacy so fierce Jack had to shield his eyes.
He released the bird and hid, the light blinding as the man approached, neither black nor white but grey, the ocean pooling at his feet.
Jack blinked, crawling in the sand, the figure almost upon him. Taller than any normal man, he held out his hands and the hummingbird flew out to greet him. She poked at her plumage, and produced a strand of hair.
Neon’s hair.
Jack stared, dumbstruck, as the man took the gift from her beak just as the sun’s rays burnt through the moon’s with such ferocity they momentarily painted all of the Other Worlds white.
And the man black.
“Hello Jack,” Lord Truth said, his permanent grin slowly becoming visible under his cowl. “How nice to see you again.”
“My, my Lord?”
Jack felt a deep throb in the pit of his stomach, a pulse inside his head. He watched as
Lord Truth twirled the hair between his fingers.
“But...” the spirit started, almost lost for words.
The bird landed in Lord Truth’s outstretched hand. “Our island’s been collecting treasures for me, I see?”
And Jack turned to see parts of the island glowing, as if alternating in and out of time. Places where the children had played: the sandwiches they’d stepped in, the rocks their skin had scraped against, the vines they’d snagged. Each an imprint of a Seeker, a trace of their power, now beating to another’s tune.
The little bird fluttered back into the air, almost level with the veiled man’s unseen eyes, and she screeched, a small vortex spewing from her stomach, twisting and climbing higher and higher until...
POP!
A woman appeared, clothed in white, plump and voluptuous as she fell in behind the man, the pair reaching the water’s edge as the bird, even smaller now, flew on.
Jack’s jaw hung open, his face aghast.
“Why, my spectral friend,” Lord Truth smiled as he pulled away his hood, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
His face was scarred like a patchwork of tattered silk, roughly sewn together; his left eye covered with a patch, his hair jutting out stiffly. “Did you not think our plan had worked?”
And, having reached the rocks, he took a breath, as if he could suck the entire island into his lungs. “No, it was perfect,” he smiled once again. “Almost perfect.”
.............
“His name is Silas Monday, the terrorist believed responsible for the bombings that have shaken the world. The explosives themselves have often taken the form of robot toys, among them, these sophisticated clockwork monkeys used in the atrocities in Hong Kong 15 years ago.”
Tucker stared at the monitors in the broadcast tower. He was playing the videotape he’d found hidden in the watchmaker’s workshop. Oh my cheesy ball
s, she really was right all along, he thought.
“In tonight’s exclusive report we investigate just how these bombs were made, as well as what’s known of the man who made them, for so long a mystery until now...”
Tucker paused the video and sat gazing at the face of the man on the screens. Caught walking towards a CCTV camera he was heavily disguised in white make up, his ginger hair spiralling beneath a top hat.
“What’s that?” Six came shuffling into the control room, her arms loaded with stereo equipment and records. She was smiling for what seemed the first time in ages, Tucker thought. He didn’t want to spoil it.
“Oh nothing,” he said, ejecting the tape and turning, exhausted, in his swivel chair.
Six shrugged and lifted a record player onto the desk where Jon Way had attempted to read her mind. “This is what’s left of your DJ set up after our oh-so-friendly werewolf decided to smash people’s heads through it.”
“Nice,” Tucker stood fiddling with the cross around his neck as he watched records spilling from Six’s arms. “You’ve been to the bar?”
“Yep,” Six blew a strand of red hair out of her eyes as she peered down at the cracked case of the turntable. “Just how do you work this thing?”
“Here,” Tucker opened the lid and began searching through the leads that hung from the back of the deck. “So, did you see Giles?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Six nodded, picking up one of the records from the floor and sliding it out of its sleeve. “He seems okay.”
“You’ve forgiven him then?” Tucker fed the power cord into a crystal adapter, the audio plugs into the suite’s amplifier.
“I don’t know,” Six shrugged, her blue eyes still inspecting the strange disk. “He’s the only family I’ve got, so I guess I have to? And it’s not like he really knew what was going on. According to Sir Justice, at least, he wasn’t a conspirator.”
“No, unlike Eddie,” Tucker returned to his seat and began flicking switches until the hum of the waiting record player filled the room. “I just can’t believe he did that to us, Six. I thought he was my friend, our friend. And yet he and Carol...”
He trailed off mid sentence as Six dropped the needle on the spinning turntable. It landed with a CRACK! before the sounds of a strumming guitar took over and a man’s voice sang as if far away.
“A SMASHED BOTTLE AND A RIOT ALARM, CRASHING BRICKS AND THE SMELL OF PETROL...”
“They tried to kill us, Six,” Tucker said glumly. “The King was even in on it too, not that Sir Justice believes that.”
“I know,” she nodded.
“A CAR ON FIRE AND SHIELDS THAT CLASH, TV CAMERAS AND YOUR MOTHER PLEADING...”
“They murdered Lord Truth. Set us all up. Us and all the other knights.”
Six nodded again and moved around the table towards him.
“THAT’S ALL YOU CAME FOR, THAT’S ALL YOU CAME FOR...” the record sang.
“It’s all so messed up.” Tucker could feel the tears welling within him. Before he knew it they were streaming down his cheeks. He wasn’t sure he’d ever cried in front of a girl before. He was definitely sure he didn’t want to.
“A RUSH OF BLOOD AND A BALLED UP FIST, A LUCKY PUNCH AND A BROKEN WINDOW...”
Tucker looked down at his hands already wet with sobs as his shoulders shook. “I didn’t even like the guy, y’know? I really hated his guts.”
“YOUR MATE LAUGHING WITH THE HOWLING DOGS, LIGHTS BLINKING AS THE NIGHT SKY’S FADING...”
When he looked up at her, standing over him, the water in his eyes made it look like she was sparkling.
And the guitar kept strumming. “THAT’S ALL YOU CAME FOR, THAT’S ALL YOU CAME FOR.”
“C’mon,” Six beckoned to him. “Let’s dance.”
Notes from the Author:
So there you have it, that’s the end of The Last Days.
I hope enjoyed it.
The story will continue in a second novel Play Me... that I’m hoping to finish soon. Obviously, writing a novel takes time, however, and that is where you come in: Basically, the more people talking about The Last Days, the more Likes on our Facebook page, follows on Twitter, quite simply the more people reading it, the closer it gets to a publisher.
And the closer it gets to a publisher, the sooner Play Me... gets completed.
So please, if you liked The Last Days and want to read more, let us (and hopefully someone else) know! Here’s an email address where you can send me your comments, the best of which I’ll post on our website:
[email protected]
And thank you so much for reading it.
More thank yous:
This book would not have been possible without all those people who have supported me, inspired, and helped me write it, not to mention all those I have shamelessly ripped-off! To name but a few they are:
Ben Macleod, who helped dream up the project as a comic book more than 15 years ago; Sarah Evans, who began to draw the comics that followed, as well as the illustrations you can see at the start of this book, and further shaped the ideas and characters within it; Laura Atkins, who wrestled my badly plotted and overly written prose into everything it is today (so basically, it’s all her fault); and my wife Sarah, my parents, family and friends, without who’s patience and faith I’d never have been able to finish it.
Lastly, I thank God, for giving me the words long before I knew He existed.
I’m forever in your debt.
The Last Days Page 31
