by Sam Enthoven
She was standing in the open air, just over the road from the mysterious Egyptian obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle. She was on the north bank of the Thames, just five minutes’ walk from where her father’s titanic battle with Tim had taken place.
Watching the fight unfold on the screens earlier, Anna had imagined the way the ground must have shook as Mallahide and Tim traded blows – but she’d felt nothing. Then she realized: the bunker was buried so far underground that nothing, theoretically at least, could reach it. That was its purpose. No wonder she hadn’t known.
The second thing that surprised Anna was that the door to the British Establishment’s most secret stronghold just stood there in plain sight. It was a plain grey door in a facade of plain brick: on an ordinary day millions of Londoners would have walked past without sparing it a second glance.
But this was not an ordinary day.
Anna stood there looking all around herself for a full minute before she could begin to take it all in. All she could grasp were random details at first.
To her left, the upside-down beached hulk of a pleasure boat loomed upwards, blocking the whole of the road. She saw the broken paving and severed pipes jutting into the air like the exposed bones of ghastly fractures. She looked at the river and the stumps that remained of London’s bridges. She looked at the skyline, or what was left of it – the gap-toothed grin of the row of buildings that faced the water.
Then she looked at the sky itself. She looked up at what her father had become.
A vast disc of darkness hung over London – almost blotting out the sun and casting the entire city into shadow. Six strange raised ridges radiated out from its centre: you could see that the whole thing was revolving, slowly, and in absolute silence. It was about as far from what a living person looked like as you could possibly get.
It – or he, Anna reminded herself with an effort – was her dad.
Anna felt raw fear open a sluice in her insides again. She waited, watching the vast mass overhead, gripped with a vertiginous certainty that at any second it would reach down a delicate grey tendril and boil her away to nothingness where she stood.
The radio at her hip gave out a burst of static, almost making Anna have a heart attack.
‘Miss Mallahide?’ said Wythenshawe’s voice, crass and crackly in the silence. ‘Anna? Do you read me? Over.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna through gritted teeth, with her thumb on the transmit button, just like she’d been shown. The handset she’d been given seemed woefully old-fashioned, but with the cellular network down like most other communications, it was the only way she could keep in touch with people at the bunker. ‘Please don’t shout. I can hear you just fine. Over.’
‘Oh,’ said Wythenshawe. ‘Er, sorry. I just wanted to say, all the closed-circuit TV cameras in the whole city are hardwired to us here at the bunker. Wherever you go, we’ll be watching: if you get into trouble, we’ll know and we’ll do our best to help you. Over.’
‘Great,’ said Anna crisply. ‘If you don’t mind, though, I think I’d rather keep radio contact to a minimum. It’s very quiet out here, and I don’t want to make any more noise than necessary. Over.’
‘What was that, Anna?’ Wythenshawe’s voice crackled back. ‘I didn’t quite catch that. Over.’
‘I said,’ said Anna, ‘I’d rather you didn’t call me too often on this thing. Over.’
‘Sorry, Anna, we can’t quite hear you. Please repeat. Over.’
‘I DON’T WANT TO MAKE ANY NOISE!’ Anna shouted. ‘Don’t call me again,’ she added, turning red. ‘Over.’
‘Oh,’ said Wythenshawe. ‘I see. Sorry. Er . . . be seeing you, then. Over and out.’
The radio fell silent.
Shaking her head to herself, Anna started walking.
It was as if she was in some kind of dream city, not the London that she was used to. The light – obscured as it was by the looming shape overhead – lent everything she saw a muted, grey kind of look. Not a breath of wind stirred the air around her. There were no birds in the air or the trees – not one solitary pigeon. No animals of any kind. And there were no people.
The London streets were empty. The only cars she passed were abandoned, parked, or crushed. There were no sounds apart from those she made herself: her own breathing and the tiny scuffles and crackles of the rubble underfoot as she picked her way along. Anna moved as quickly as she could, keeping to the sides of the pavement to be as out of sight from above as possible. And after twenty minutes, she reached the British Museum.
Its gates were open, which was a bonus. She made her way along the tarmac drive and up the museum’s wide stone steps, wondering how much longer her luck would last.
‘Hello?’ she asked the echoing silence of the lobby. ‘Anyone here?’
No answer.
Anna took another deep breath and – glad to be indoors at least – set off, trying to retrace the steps that Chris had taken on the afternoon of the school visit.
Anna’s footfalls echoed off the surrounding marble walls as she made her way into the Great Court. Of course, she realized, she had no real idea where she was going. She was looking for some clues to what she should do, some way some opposition could be put up against what her dad was doing . . .
Well, she asked herself. What is that about?
Say she did find a way for Chris and Tim to team up and defeat him. Was that really what she wanted? What if it worked? What if they killed him? What then?
All around Anna, treasures from all sorts of times and all sorts of places sat in their glass cases, waiting to teach her amazing things: Anna ignored them. Wrapped in the confusion of her thoughts – dancing lightly but definitely on the edge of just giving up on the whole situation and freaking out completely – Anna was oblivious to everything around her. When an arm snaked out around her throat from behind and another hand pushed one of her arms up her back in an agonizing half nelson, for a moment Anna was so surprised that she didn’t even scream.
‘Who the hell are you?’ said a gruff female voice. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’
‘I—’ Anna gasped. ‘I’m – please . . . do you mind? I’m choking—’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ The arm around her throat released its grip. But the one holding Anna in a half nelson – she couldn’t help noticing – did not.
‘Well?’
‘My name is Anna,’ said Anna. OK, she thought, no point trying to hide it . . . ‘Anna Mallahide.’
‘You’re his daughter,’ said the voice from behind her, ‘aren’t you? They showed your picture on the telly.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna.
‘That must be why you haven’t been taken to bits like the others.’
‘I imagine so,’ said Anna as patiently as she could, ‘yes. Now – could you let go of my arm, please?’
‘Keep your hair on,’ the voice muttered, ‘I’m just doing my job.’
‘Thank you.’ Released, Anna turned.
The lady security guard’s grey flannel uniform looked a size too small for her: its tautness on her stocky frame and the glint of its buttons made it look like a suit of armour. Her henna-red crew-cut was pretty intimidating too, Anna thought, as were her eyes: grey-blue and hard as flint, they focused on Anna in an appraising look, and Anna found that any complaints she was about to make about being manhandled (again) had suddenly died on her lips.
‘So,’ the woman prompted, ‘what can I do for you?’
‘There’s . . . a boy,’ Anna began hopelessly. ‘His name’s Chris. Someone here gave him a bracelet.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘He’s . . . sick,’ said Anna. ‘Unconscious. But dreaming. The doctors can’t figure it out.’
‘No,’ said the woman, to Anna’s surprise. ‘No, I guess they wouldn’t.’ She looked thoughtful.
There was a pause. Anna held her breath.
‘This thing,’ the woman said, pointing upwards – but that was enough for Anna to know exactly wha
t she meant – ‘that’s really your father?’
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘Well, if you don’t mind my asking,’ the woman went on, ‘what concern is the bracelet of yours? Call me suspicious, but I’d’ve thought that you and the Defender would be on opposite sides.’
The woman’s tone was casual, but Anna hadn’t missed the way the set of her feet had shifted and her hands had bunched into fists. Anna’s relief and amazement at having found the person she was looking for suddenly turned to horror. Oh God, she thought. She thinks I’m going to attack her.
‘I thought,’ said Anna, her eyes beginning to fill with tears, ‘that you might have some idea of how we can help him. To be honest, this whole thing with him and the, um . . . dinosaur is – well, it’s a little hard to understand. Do you know what’s going on? Do you know how it works? I mean,’ she added, the words beginning to pour out of her in a rush, ‘I didn’t want the monster to die, but we didn’t know what to do to help it. Chris said something about the life force of the world, we all held hands, and suddenly there was this bright light. My dad kind of fell back, and the dinosaur creature escaped, but then Chris collapsed. I sat with him for a while until I realized that I didn’t know what else to do, so I came out of the bunker. I made my way here through all the empty streets, and I—’
‘Whoa!’said the woman. ‘Whoa, there!’
It was Anna’s turn to fall silent. The tears were dripping down her face now, and she was immensely annoyed at herself for coming to pieces like that.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s been kind of a weird few days.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ said the woman. ‘My name’s Eunice. Eunice Plimpton. You . . . er, want a cup of tea or something?’
‘No,’ said Anna, wiping her nose and straightening herself up. ‘No, I’m afraid I honestly don’t think there’s time. What I really want are answers. Can you help me?’
‘I think so,’ said Ms Plimpton. She sucked her teeth. ‘But you’re going to have to take me to him.’
ACOLYTES
THE UK IS a small country, but it has over two and a half million closed-circuit TV cameras – an estimated ten per cent of all such cameras in the world. Of these two and a half million, by far the biggest proportion are set up and focused on London: they’re used mainly for crime prevention, antiterrorism and enforcing the charge all motorists must pay for entering the city. Many of these cameras can focus in close enough to pick out individual licence plates, even the faces of people driving: sophisticated computer programs can cross-reference these details against databases such as police records, and armed response teams can be dispatched when appropriate within as little as four seconds. The population of Britain is under constant surveillance. These facts are matters of public record. What’s less known is that all the images, from every one of these cameras, are fed into a single room.
The room is in the bunker, deep under Westminster. From there, almost every street in London can be monitored and watched, around the clock if necessary.
Wythenshawe, watching the screens and what they were depicting, sighed.
‘What do we do, sir?’ asked his second in command.
‘Not much we can do,’ said Wythenshawe curtly. ‘It’s too risky to send anyone out to intercept them. All we can do really is watch and wait, and hope against hope that these fools don’t get their wish.’
They had heard the call and had come from all over the country. Most had been forced to abandon their cars or trains at the edge of the city, dodging what limited quarantine arrangements the government had set up and continuing their journey on foot. Most had been walking for a long time – days, in some cases. All were tired and sore and grubby. But as they neared their destination – as they sighted their goal at last and it loomed ever larger in their vision – all of them were also almost delirious with excitement.
There was nothing coordinated or organized about they way they came: they were arriving from all points of the compass. Their numbers weren’t vast, but they were growing all the time as more came out to join them. At that moment, perhaps six or seven thousand people were out on the streets, converging underneath the shadow that lay over London.
Not everyone was cowering in their homes, terrified of what Mallahide could offer them. Some had listened to his message. Some had welcomed it. Some were eager to leave their fleshly bodies behind and become something better. Some wanted the chance to become posthuman.
And they were coming.
Joe Bennett was nineteen years old. A year before, he had started to experience a lot of bad stomach aches: he had gone to his doctor, been referred to a hospital, and now, after a succession of painful and undignified treatments, all of which had failed, he’d been told he had something less than six months to live. Pancreatic cancer: a genetic predisposition. Those were the words that the doctors had used, but they weren’t Joe’s words. To Joe, it was much simpler.
His body was crap. It was as straightforward as that. His body – which had been supposed to last the length of a decent lifetime at least – had instead packed up and failed him. Now, Joe was a person with big plans for his life. He wasn’t prepared just to give those up simply because the useless lump of a body that fate had doled out to him wasn’t up to the job. He wanted more. He wanted something better. And when he’d heard Mallahide’s message, he’d set out from home straight away.
It had been a long journey. His treatments made him constantly tired anyway, but getting all the way to the centre of London on foot had completely exhausted him. He walked the last of the distance to the banks of the Thames almost on pure adrenaline alone. He was one of the first to arrive there, under the giant disc-shaped shadow that continued slowly to revolve over the London skyline. He stood there, breathing hard, clinging to a railing for support.
The crowd was full of people like Joe. Not just people who were sick or in pain – and not just people who saw what Mallahide offered as an easy way out of the problems in their lives, either. There were people there who believed. People who had longed for the day to come when human beings could reach out beyond the limits of their bodies and become something else, something beautiful and eternal.
But Joe was the first one that Mallahide spoke to.
‘Sir!’ said someone in the camera room warningly. ‘I’m reading some kind of increased activity in the swarm.’
‘I know,’ said Wythenshawe grimly – and shrugged. ‘Well . . . here we go again.’
On the north and south banks of the river, the crowd finally stopped. Their numbers carved in two by the swathe of the Thames – the gap between them rendered uncrossable by the shattered remains of the bridges – they faced each other, and waited.
The gigantic shadow reached down a hazy grey finger. A soft wind blew, and out in the centre of the river something a little like a column of ash whirled into being, shivering in the air like a small tornado. Then Professor Mallahide appeared.
He was standing there on the water, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. His rumpled tweed suit was exactly the same. His tie was skewed, and his cheeks were wet. He was crying.
‘H-hello,’ he said with a smile.
The crowd to either side didn’t answer. They just stood there watching, and a pregnant hush settled over the river.
‘You came,’ said Mallahide, looking around. His eye was caught briefly by a homemade banner that someone had brought with them: the banner showed an arrow pointing down at the person holding it with, above, the words GET ME OUT OF HERE in big red letters.
‘You heard me,’ he said almost to himself, as if he could hardly believe it. ‘You understood me, and now you’re here. I . . .’ He paused. ‘I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.’
With shining eyes, he glanced around the crowd again until they locked on something else.
With a shudder of joy in his heart, Joe realized that Mallahide was looking at him. And now he was coming towards him! Ca
sually striding across the surface of the choppy grey water, Mallahide made his way to the north bank of the Thames. The professor floated up over the embankment, alighted on the tarmac, and walked slowly through the crowd towards Joe. The crowd reached out to touch Mallahide’s tweed suit as he passed as if he was some kind of god.
‘You,’ he said, standing in front of Joe and grinning hugely. ‘Hi! What’s your name?’
‘Joe,’ said Joe.
‘And you’ve also come to leave your body behind? You’ve come to join me on humanity’s greatest ever adventure?’
‘Well . . . yeah,’ said Joe.
‘You’re so young,’ said Mallahide, frowning. ‘What made you decide, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘Cancer,’ said Joe. He shrugged. ‘It’s inoperable.’
‘Oh, Joe.’ Mallahide looked sad. ‘My wife, Katherine – I lost her to cancer. As a matter of fact, that’s what set me on this path in the first place. Now that I’ve succeeded, I. . .’ He hesitated. ‘I hope she’d be proud.’
Joe had nothing to say to this, so there was a pause.
‘When you . . . change,’ Joe began, ‘what’s it like? Is it really as good as you say?’
‘Joe,’ said Mallahide, ‘believe me, it’s even better. You know what? Even with everything that’s happened, I wouldn’t go back to the way I was, never in a million years. In fact, Joe’ – he winked – ‘in a million years, you can ask me about it yourself! How about that? Now, are you ready?’
Joe smiled. His heart was pounding. ‘I’ve always been ready,’ he said.
‘Then you’ll be the first,’ said Mallahide, smiling back. ‘You!’ he added, addressing the crowd. ‘All of you! You’re a shining example to the rest of the human race. Where others cower in fear in the face of change, you people reach out and embrace it. You are pioneers,’ he added. ‘You’re an inspiration. And it’s people like you who will help me lead humanity out of the darkness, into the light of the future.’
