by David Nickle
The Australian pulled down a layer of frozen scarves to free his mouth, and shouted, “Headlight off!” He switched his off and crept slowly forward. Neil followed his lead.
They inched slowly up to the crest of the hill. “Do you see it?” Amoco yelled over the engine noise.
“See what?” Neil shouted back. Then they reached the crest, and he knew an answer was unnecessary.
The ruins in the valley below reminded Neil of the charred remains of some mob which had, in its frenzy, attempted to escape by scaling the walls of the valley. The cowering remains of sheds and buildings were jumbled at the bottom of the slope, pointing in towards overlapping tarmac squares with the half-melted remains of bulldozers and cranes centred in them. The fallen masts of the cranes lay like outstretched arms reaching futilely for the flame-blackened walls of a colossal pile of rubble like a monstrous scab fixed in the very heart of the valley.
Under fiercely sharp starlight, the mound looked like some kind of black ziggurat. Its heights were not rounded like a normal rubble heap or hill; rather the whole thing was drawn up and pinched with a twisted, girder-jutting spire lofting arrogantly from the top. Neil had seen the results of explosions, in training films and even out in the field. He knew that, after an explosion, things were scattered around the central point of the blast. The opposite was true here—everything had been sucked in somehow, to the heart of the conflagration. This vast factory had not exploded, it had imploded.
“Eight years ago.” Amoco’s voice broke the silence, making Neil jump. Instantly he began to shiver violently.
“I never believed the stories,” said Amoco. “The lads used to say there was a great building here, with many outbuildings clinging to it like lice. All giving off this awful smoke, dirtying everything for miles. I didn’t believe ’em—who would build up here? But they said there was thousands of tall windows with the glow of furnaces and arc welders behind ’em. You could see long shadows move from window to window. And machines crawling around on the tarmac. But never any people.” He shook his head. “It was all true.”
They continued down, more cautiously. The debris extended for miles. Two squashed cranes formed the twisted parody of a gate, and driving under them, they entered a kind of macabre theme park for industrial accidents. Mangled remains of heavy machines dotted the grey plain, every angle and curve of dark metal draped with sheets of snow and runnels of ice. Each stood in isolate glory, inviting Neil’s courage in climbing or even walking under it. These outskirts soon gave way to buckled tarmac lots, which proved to be too treacherous to cross. Amoco found a winding route around them, and they criss-crossed back and forth, as if negotiating a minefield, edging closer to the huge junk-heap at the centre of it all.
Details began to resolve themselves out of the gloom. The spiralling ruin was adorned with random flagpoles and fluttering banners: jutting pieces of reinforcement bar hung with ragged strips of plastic sheet. Concrete abutments leaning together formed gothic entrances to fathomless darkness, and layer on layer of fallen walls rose heavenward, each with its hanging garden of metal ribbons and lawn of broken glass reflecting the stars.
“The place was huge,” Neil said, half to himself. He was starting to understand what that capering madman in the Santa suit would do with three billion dollars.
“But who destroyed it?” No bomb would leave chaos like this.
Amoco didn’t answer, but instead stopped his skidoo and tuned the engine down to idle. They probably couldn’t have manoeuvred the skidoos much closer anyway, since the landscape now consisted mostly of tilted concrete slabs and fallen walls.
“We walk from here,” Amoco said. Neil was grateful for the exercise. They left the machines purring next to an overturned ore carrier, and trudged up a snowy slope toward the second level of the pyramid. It smelled strongly of petrochemicals here. About twenty feet above the plain, they found a fairly clear area of tumbled flooring that seemed to extend all the way around the mound. Amoco produced a pair of binoculars from inside his coat and began scanning the area.
“No tracks coming in, other than ours. Don’t know about the other side, though,” he said. Neil tilted his head back to stare up at the distant, black smoke-stack jutting from the peak of the rubble. It was visible only as a black absence of stars.
They walked gingerly over creaking rubble and tilting slabs, under a collection of high leaning pillars like the upthrust fingers of a buried giant’s hand. Neil tripped twice over cables buried just under the snow, scraping his hand through the mitt the second time.
He was just pulling the mitt back on with his teeth after examining the wound when Amoco’s arm flailed out across his chest. “Oof!” said Neil. Thinking Amoco must have stumbled, he said, “Watch what you’re—”
“Sshh!” The Australian dropped to his haunches. “Get down!”
Confused, Neil lowered himself, not an easy process in the bulky snow-suit. Amoco pointed over the top of an upturned work bench. “There!”
Where he pointed, Neil could make out several moving lights. They looked like flashlights, three or four of them, working their way along the side of the ruin about a hundred yards ahead.
“Who are they?” whispered Neil.
“Dunno,” said Amoco in a normal tone. “Don’t think they’ve seen us. Let’s get a little closer.”
“You think that’s wise?”
Amoco blinked at him. “You got another suggestion?”
“Go back for the rifles.”
“Hm. Good idea. But a bit paranoid. Let’s take a look first.”
So they went down on their bellies and crawled slowly over the gritty surfaces, slithering nearer the lights. Neil was grateful for his infantry training, though he nearly speared himself on the wires and iron bars sticking out of the snow. By the time they were close enough to get a good look, he had several long rents in his suit, which leaked little puffs of down into the wind.
Together, he and Amoco raised their heads to peer through a broken, tilted window frame. About forty feet away, several figures were digging unenthusiastically at the rubble. Another held a huge flashlight on the scene, illuminating the white snowsuits with heraldic patches the searchers wore. Another similar group was working a hundred yards further on.
One of those digging picked a telephone handset out of the mound, and suddenly Neil’s perspective shifted. The handset was huge in the person’s hands, and if it was normal size, then the searchers were all very small—and also were only fifteen feet away, not forty. He ducked back when he realized this.
“What’re they looking for?” Amoco hissed. Neil craned his neck again to see.
One of the searchers gave a weird, high-pitched cry, and dove into the hole it had been digging. It emerged covered in concrete dust and snow, and holding aloft a small, round object.
“Havenit!” cried the little person. “Oh ocularity! The orb is ours!”
“Gawan,” sneered the one with the flashlight. “Whoo drained yur brains? Tsnae got fur, ye cretinous nose-wipe. Holdenem’s a tennis ball.”
“Satan’s skin-mites, yur right.” The dust-covered fellow pitched the ball off into the ruins. A cry of alarm came up from that direction, then a loud, stuttering roar which Neil recognized as a machine-pistol being fired. Everybody stood up out of their holes to watch.
The one holding the flashlight shouted, “Careful, ye scabrous knot-heads! Ye’ll perforate the treasure.”
The distant, gabbling voices fell silent.
“What are they?” Neil asked.
“The lads told me about blokes like that,” Amoco whispered. “They called them the Ogolulu-nuk. ‘The stealers of bile’.”
“We’d better get back to the skidoos,” said Neil. But just at that moment, he heard a creak from behind them: the sound of a boot stepping on dry, packed snow. Instinctively, he dropped and rolled, finding himself half under a large metal door.
A flashlight snapped on, its circle pinning Amoco in the centre of the broken
window frame. A nervous, phlegmy voice issued from somewhere behind the light. “Who’re you?”
Amoco raised his hands, sighing in annoyance. “I guess you can call me Umberto,” he said.
Fire licked out of the dark. The thunderclap of sound brought Neil to his knees under the metal door. Amoco Jones leaped away from Neil, and tumbled down a slope of debris to a lower level. Neil prepared to jump after him, but the flashlight beam was roving close to his hiding place. He ducked down again. Distractedly, he realized he was crouched on top of a heap of tiny bodies—dolls.
Dolls?
“Split up!” shouted Amoco. “I’ll see you back at the skidoos, mate!” Another gunshot sounded, this time from directly over Neil’s head.
Without thinking, Neil braced his shoulders against the fallen door and stood up. It was a bone-cracking effort, but the big metal leaf levered out of the rubble and toppled in the direction of the flashlight.
He heard a warble of panic, then the submachine gun went off and the door rang like a giant bell. It continued the arc of its fall, thudding down over the light and extinguishing it. The submachine gun sent one more burst wildly into the night, then was silent.
Neil jumped onto the door and crouched down. He could just see a tiny hand projecting out from under it. Lying next to the hand was the submachine gun—and a little ways away, the darkened flashlight. He grabbed both. The gun was unmistakably an Ingram M11 nine-millimetre. These held 30 shots per clip, he knew, and it had used about half that.
He could hear incoherent shouting from behind him. Somebody fired something, a single shot which rang off a nearby concrete pillar. With a deep curse, Neil turned and ran.
More gunfire erupted behind him. The snow to his left jumped up in gouts and he dodged behind a triangular wall of bricks. He reached around the wall and fired off a short burst, then made another break for it.
He’d slowed them down, but they kept firing. Neil ran bent over, hoping to escape around the curve of the rubble pile and then down to the skidoos. Then he’d get out of here, and order an airstrike down on these horrid little midgets.
Lights flickered ahead of him. Neil stopped, panting; the cold air burned his throat and lungs. There must have been a party of midgets farther up the side of the mound. He and Amoco had passed them without knowing, and now they were coming down between him and the skidoos. “Bastards,” he spat, and hunted quickly for some way down from this level. He spotted a collapsed catwalk that might provide some purchase, and crabwalked down to it. It sat on a slope of about sixty degrees, its lower end overhanging the ruined tarmac by about ten feet. If he could get that far…
A bullet clipped the railing of the catwalk not two feet from him. Another shattered an entire line of darkened light bulbs on a wire between him and a tall steel girder. Neil gripped the railings of the tilted catwalk and let himself slide backwards down it. Bullets were zinging back and forth above him; if he was lucky the two groups of midgets would annihilate each other with friendly fire.
His boot caught in something, jarring his ankle. The shock made Neil let go with one mitt, and he pivoted around his trapped foot and other hand, right over the side of the catwalk. A torrent of sparks and metal flinders erupted from the spot he had just vacated and bullets ricocheted out into the night. Hanging on desperately with one hand, his foot twisting itself free as he turned in the air, he brought up the Ingram M11 and fired at the muzzle-flash he’d seen. Then Neil’s hand slipped from the glove he was holding on with, and he fell.
This is it, he thought as darkness enclosed him. He bounced off something hard and rolled to a stop. The Ingram clattered away.
He was alive and uninjured. For a few seconds this was all Neil could think about. But Augustus wouldn’t have been satisfied with that. Get moving, he’d say. They’re right on your tail.
Except that movement might be a bad idea. He couldn’t be sure he wasn’t lying on a beam over some pit, after all. Neil could hear real voices above him. He dug for the flashlight he’d recovered as he listened to them.
“Git, Smamy. Yer the volunteer.”
“Shep said that! Not me.”
“So what? Volunteerin’s the way. Downit, floe-head.”
“Naw!”
“Are ye an elf or are ye a chicken?”
“Buckaw!”
Elf? Neil found the flashlight. He put his hand over the glass and clicked it on. The faint red light showed a kind of tunnel formed out of the walls of crushed boilers and storage tanks. Wax stalactites hung everywhere, and pools of the stuff had hardened into big oval mounds. And below…
He stood on a surface made entirely of children’s toys. Tops, building blocks, string games, etch-a-sketches, all smashed and pulverized by some titanic force. Like he was in some giant toy warehouse that had collapsed.
Toys? A horrible suspicion skittered around the edge of Neil’s consciousness, but he had more important concerns right this second. He had to survive.
There was the Ingram, lying about four feet away. Neil lunged for it, and aimed it out the opening. Then he hesitated. If he fired, they might think twice about coming after him, but they could just stand back and shoot down the hole for a while, and sooner or later a ricochet was bound to get him. The alternative was to see how far this crude tunnel went. He voted with his feet.
The flashlight illuminated a kind of toys’ Hades. The immense weight of the collapsing fortress had come down on some warehouse, and squashed the stacks and shelves of toys down into a compressed sedimentary substance that formed bulging walls to the narrow fissure Neil found himself in. Turning the flashlight to inspect the stuff, he discovered a sort of fossil record of the warehouse’s contents: thin games boards alternated with teddy bears visible only as long flat lines of brown fuzz; cracked marbles like jewels were matted between elongated rubber duck’s heads and the sinuous lines of plastic skipping ropes. Thousands of toy cars and trucks had been reduced to mashed bricks that formed a solid wall for many feet. Later he passed through a region of sagging unidentifiable rubber things; at one point along this stretch, a single Frankenstein mask had been extruded into the tunnel and frozen, distorted and open-mouthed. Neil instinctively avoided touching it, shimmying under instead.
The walls began slowly opening out and the ceiling rose. Soon he could walk upright. The tunnel mounted steadily, its ceiling and floor now formed by heavy iron pipes. His footsteps echoed dully through the long yellow tubes.
The air in here was cold but crisp, and smelled of talcum powder and rubber. At last the flashlight beam encountered complete darkness ahead, signalling the end of the tunnel. Relieved, Neil ran up to it, remembering only at the last second to switch off the flashlight and raise the submachine gun.
He had expected to see stars, and he did—but only a little patch of them, far above. His footsteps echoed back to him hollowly. It was impossible to make out anything else, so he reluctantly switched on the flashlight.
This chamber was so big that the only comparisons he could think of were to a sports stadium or a zeppelin hangar. But it was like neither; though half the place had fallen in on itself, the space was still large and long enough to put a few houses, or even a few apartment blocks in it. The flashlight didn’t light the far walls or the ceiling. He could sense rather than see them.
Neil resisted the childish urge to yell “hello” to test the echo, and swung the flashlight down to his immediate vicinity.
The tunnel from which he had emerged came out of a ponderous wall of rubble that had sliced down over half the chamber. Huge chunks of concrete and iron stanchions a hundred feet long lay tumbled like jacks throughout the remaining space, but it was so vast an area that only a few of the hundreds or thousands of tables on the floor had been destroyed. The tentative beam of his flashlight struck dusty highlights from objects on the nearest table. Neil was too far from either of the remaining supporting walls of the room to see an exit, so he stepped out to cross the broad, debris-scattered floor.
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nbsp; The floor was swathed in deep dust. So were the tables, and the outlines of the objects on them were softened. Nonetheless, it was plain to Neil that each and every table in this room had, at the time of the catastrophe, been heaped with presents.
He wanted to escape, so at first he didn’t pay much heed to the endless panorama of packages. After a few hundred feet though, as his eyes adjusted to the new situation, he began to notice strange details…
Many of the neatly wrapped packages on a table to his right had large pools of something viscous and brown around them, and oily stains corrupted their pink and blue sides. Many of the packages on a table to his left had large, ragged holes ripped out of them, apparently from inside. Other packages on the same table were flattened, bite-marked messes with dark stains on them and little puffs of fur hanging from the raw holes. Farther on was a tabletop on which the packages had swollen up, tearing long rips in their festive wrappings. Some had exploded messily, and the ones that were intact all trembled and rocked silently.
Neil went out of his way to avoid this table, and the one next to it, which glowed a pale blue, but in so doing had to pass by another where at first he thought there were no presents. As he got to it he realized that the tabletop was covered with hundreds of perfectly square or rectangular holes, each with charred edges. He paused, and flicked the light under the table.
There were the presents, sitting in neat rows on the floor.
His flashlight was able to illuminate the far wall now, and he could see what might be a big hangar-style door there, bent but half-open. He made his way toward it.
There was a final detour he had to make, around the end of a long catwalk that had drooled down from the ceiling like so much metal spaghetti. It had flattened at least ten tables in its fall. Neil moved over two aisles and walked slowly past it, casting his light along it with dulled curiosity. Halfway along the fallen length was a broken megaphone, and pinned underneath the walkway at that point was a small, midget—no, elf-sized—skeleton.
