by Al Ewing
Those who saw the invasion vessels as they truly were did not last long. They screamed their own throats raw, rupturing vocal cords and choking on their own blood and vomit long before the first of the devourers stripped their bodies for food and fuel.
As similar floating engines materialised over London, tiny black ovoids, like the eggs of nits or lice, dropped down from the underside of the first invasion craft, impacting in the soil, and quickly doused with the fluids spraying from above - the same fluids that reduced plant and animal life to smoking, toxic husks, black and skeletal remains. The reaction was almost instantaneous - the black shells cracked, split and disgorged writhing white maggots of various sizes, ranging from the size of a thumbnail to the size of a watermelon, that burrowed quickly into the toxic ooze surrounding them. Within a matter of minutes, they would be capable of scuttling vast distances at speed, finding their prey still shaking in terror in nearby streets and houses, burrowing into flesh and bone, working up into the skull. There they would tear into the cerebral cortex, chewing and ripping, nesting in the skull to shelter. For a few hours, the victim would stagger, eyes rolled back into the skull, drooling, moaning, sobbing, occasionally attacking his fellow men as the nesting maggot spurred him on.
For a few short hours, the zombies would rule London.
Finally the maggot would be nourished enough from draining the fluids and meat of the brain and the body would have reached the limit of its development, and the bones of the staggering man would shatter, spraying blood, the skin splitting as the creature inside flexed obscene muscles, a newly-formed black carapace covering it completely as it stepped out of its host and went to continue its terrible mission.
This was the first wave.
Other ships began to materialise over the wide-open spaces of London, disgorging their terraforming ooze and their legions of mind-eating worms, plague-ships carrying the ultimate obscenity in their holds. But already the pattern was changing. The maggots were transmitting back to the main intelligence, the hive-mind of the Insect Nation, as they chewed through the skulls of their victims, pronouncing the matter inside inferior and unserviceable. This species - this 'human race' - was not sufficiently evolved. It was useless as slave labour, for the most part possessing not even rudimentary telekinesis. As a source of nutrition, it was substandard. A War Wyrm, grown to maturity on the brain matter on offer on this world, would be barely thirty feet long and hardly even capable of chewing through steel and concrete.
The Sentinel had been deceived somehow. This species was not yet ready.
The Insect Nation had been called too soon.
There was a great chittering, like a tide of strange otherworldly static, that emanated from the hovering ships, washing over London, crashing against the terrified ears of those who'd watched fathers, sisters, infant children scream and haemorrhage, who'd seen friends and neighbours with great holes torn in chests and faces, eyes rolled back as they tore and smashed blindly at everything around them while maggots writhed in their minds. It was the noise of debate and decision.
Planet Earth was useless.
But it could still serve a function of sorts.
If all animal and human life was erased from the planet - if every vestige of humanity was torn down to leave a thick mulch of protein, a soup for larval forms to grow in - then this spinning ball of mud, filled with its backward, hobbling creatures, might have some use after all. A breeding ground. A place of experiment, to find new and more powerful forms that could live and grow on less.
They were here now, and it would be a shame to waste the journey.
The chittering static ceased, and silence rolled over the doomed city. It was decided. Organic life on this world would be broken apart, slowly and with care, their molecules and atoms split into nutritious mulch. From the burned and tortured cradle that remained, new forms would grow, forms capable of surviving more efficiently in this cramped, enclosed space of four dimensions with its buffeting wind of seconds and moments.
One of the floating motherships broke from the rest, turning slowly through the air and drifting towards Buckingham Palace.
London held its breath.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Survival, Zero
Listen:
The doctor had told Megan Hollister she was too old for children at forty, but she and Neil had made the decision to try anyway. They'd each spent years telling themselves they didn't want a child - didn't want to be tied down, didn't want the financial hardship or just the basic, total, complete responsibility of having a life in their hands - but the truth was that they hadn't wanted a child with the people they'd been with. Within a month of Meg's first meeting with Neil - that ridiculous blind date at that ridiculous jazz-theme restaurant that her sister had set up - she'd found herself brooding. She had looked at babies being brought into the theatre in front of her and thought about how sweet they looked and how nice it was that their parents were exposing them to culture at such a young age, instead of thinking about how horrific it was going to be when the little brat started bawling at the top of its lungs halfway through the second act, obliterating the performance and ruining the whole evening for everybody else. She'd looked around her apartment, already measured up for when Neil moved in - his lease was almost up, and he was making commitment noises - and she found herself looking at the spare bedroom and measuring it for a cot or a playpen.
On their wedding night, they'd finally broached the subject, and he'd been going through exactly the same thing. It was time for children. It was probably too late for children - Dr Mears thought so when she'd broached the subject at a check-up - but they could try, and there was always IVF, or adoption. It was the commitment that was important. Knowing that they both wanted the same thing. That was enough. That had been enough - a month later, she was pregnant, and Dr Mears was fussing around her again, telling her how bloody irresponsible they'd both been and how difficult this was all going to be. Meg had only smiled - she had faith in herself and her child. Faith in the future she was building.
The delivery had gone as painlessly as deliveries do, and little Evan was as perfect a baby as anyone could wish for. She'd cried, seeing Neil holding the little boy, only looking, unable to come out with any of the usual half-sarcastic little jokes and put-downs he used to take the weight out of moments of emotion. This was too big, and he had no words. She'd reached to him, gently brushing her fingers against his arm, and he'd given her a glance and a shy little smile, as though meeting her for the first time. Then he'd gone back to looking at his son's brown eyes. His own eyes. The silence between them was like a warm blanket, and she buried herself in it, feeling complete in a way she hadn't understood people could. She remembered all the times she'd rolled her eyes at baby conversations and smiled. She'd have to watch herself - she still had childless friends.
But she hadn't been able to contain herself, and her childless friends had rolled their eyes and made her blush, and smile, and carry on anyway because it was so good to tell it.
Her wonderful little boy.
Her little Evan.
In the end, they'd left the apartment and found a nice terraced house out in Zone 5, left the centre. She'd even left her job. When you're tired of London, you're tired of life, they said, and they were right. She was tired of that life. This was what she wanted now - a little peace, a little solitude in the days when Neil was out at work and it was just her and the baby. And the nights, with him sleeping by her side and the cot by the bed, the whole family - and that word still had a wonderful resonance in her thoughts and on the tip of her tongue - all together, Mummy and Daddy taking turns to get up and grouch and get the bottle.
It was three in the morning, and the family wasn't together. And Megan couldn't sleep.
Neil was away for the weekend - a business meeting in Tokyo, one he couldn't get out of. His paternity leave had been criminally short and it was long over. His bosses had forgotten what it was like to be a new father, or they just di
dn't care. He moaned to her whenever she let him, but he knew the cold truth, that they couldn't afford for him to switch jobs right now or look for something less intensive. So Neil was gone, and the bed was cold, and Megan couldn't do anything but look forward to when he came back to them both.
She certainly couldn't sleep.
Little Evan was being an angel, sleeping peacefully in his powder-blue cot, and Megan knew she should just drift off and let herself sleep until he woke her, but she couldn't. There had been strange noises in the distance - a scream, like an animal, and then some kind of static noise, like hundreds of crickets. She'd thought about turning on the television to see if anything was happening, but she'd told herself not to be silly. She'd find out what it was in the morning. Probably it was one of those night-noises, those sounds in the early hours that are never explained. A bump in the night.
It was enough to put her on edge.
She decided to fetch herself a glass of warm milk and then go back and watch the baby for a while. Maybe that would help her to relax, seeing that little face that meant the most to her in all the world, sleeping peacefully. She wondered if all mothers felt so strongly about their children - certainly they did, but little Evan wasn't only flesh of her flesh, but a tiny little miracle, eased safely from the impossibility of late conception, grown in perfect health despite Dr Mears' endless worry and fuss, delivered without a scratch, against such terrible odds, odds she hadn't even allowed herself to consider.
He was everything to her.
Megan sighed, and lifted herself off the bed, the nightgown rustling against her thighs as she padded to the kitchen. The light of the fridge illuminated her tired face and the bags under her eyes as she reached for the milk carton.
There was a sound.
Nothing she could quantify. The sound of something breaking, or bursting. A crunching, cracking sound, as though something was being pushed with great force through brick and wood. She turned and listened.
Silence.
Seconds ticked by, the cold of the carton in her hand matching the chill in her spine. Then she put the carton down on the counter, feet padding back towards the bedroom.
She would just check on the baby and then she'd go back and pour her glass and put the carton back into the fridge.
Just a quick check.
Just to be on the safe side.
The door to the bedroom whispered open slowly, and Megan gently padded into the room, trying to pretend that her heart wasn't trying to pound its way out of her chest. She remembered the stories in the newspapers years before - missing babies, missing children. A big blank shape formed in her mind, words she never allowed herself to think, to admit even existed, but only felt the edges of occasionally, in moments of terror: cot death. She looked at the cot, trying to deny the terror that was flooding through her.
Little Evan was there. And he was breathing. The tiny baby chest rose and fell, tiny little movements as the child lay curled up under the blankets, facing away from her.
Megan breathed out a soft sigh of relief. She shuffled over towards the cot, not noticing the hole in the wall of the bedroom, down at skirting board level. Gently, she reached a fingertip down to trail lightly over the soft, smooth head of her wonderful, miracle child.
And then little Evan turned over in his sleep.
He had no face.
The face had been eaten away, chewed through, leaving nothing but a gaping hole tinged with torn, red flesh, and inside that hole there was only pulsing white maggot-flesh, inhabiting the baby's hollowed out corpse, pulsing in and out in a manner that seemed almost like breathing.
Megan stared.
And then she began to scream...
And scream...
And scream...
Listen:
Jimmy Foley was thinking about strike action in the hour before he died. The government were experimenting with extending the hours the tubes ran into the early morning - the Central Line ran until past three a.m. - and that was all fine and dandy, but the bloody bastard idiots seemed to think that late-shift drivers like Jim Foley could just carry on into the watches of the night without any kind of remuneration, not even overtime pay. So Muggins Foley gets stuck in a bloody metal box at three in the morning on a Saturday for no extra money and he has to bloody lump it - not likely, mate. Not bloody likely. See how your bloody three in the morning metal box runs with nobody driving the bastard...
And on and on in that vein. Jim Foley's knuckles were white with anger as he gripped the tube control, turning it away when the train was stopped, turning it back and pushing the lever forward when it was time to send the train west along the line.
They called that a 'dead man's handle'.
Jim Foley was not a young man. He was fifty-seven years old with a sagging paunch and the grey straggly ruins of what had once been a Kevin Keegan perm nestling above his ears. He thought everything since Pink Floyd had been a load of rubbish and had a particular hatred for Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, ever since his son brought a seven-inch single back from the shops that sounded like a robot having it off with a Clanger in the gents toilets on the bloody space shuttle. He'd snapped the bloody thing across his knee and the boy had told him he was a fascist and got a clip round the ear for his trouble. Danny worked in a bloody merchant bank in the city now and Jimmy went round his house every second Sunday for dinner and a lecture on how UKIP were the only way forward for Britain. Jim frankly preferred his son as a member of the red brigade - there'd be less rows about unions for a start - but at least he wasn't listening to Orchestral Bloody Manoeuvres In The Bloody Dark any more, which was a blessing.
Pull the dead man's handle back and twist away - "mind the doors please, please mind the doors" - wait for the signal - turn and push forward and that was Holborn. Nobody got on. Nobody got off. The place was empty as a tomb.
Jim shook his head. They were all using the bloody night buses. He was just wasting his bloody time without even any bloody overtime to show for it. By the look of it there was no point even striking - nobody was using the bloody Tube anyway so they'd all be stuck out in the pissing rain like spare pricks at a bloody wedding...
The train thundered on.
Tottenham Court Road.
Jim shuddered.
This was a hell of a place to be in the small hours. He remembered - was it three years ago? He'd heard about what had happened. They'd called it a terrorist attack.
Some... thing... running amok down the pavement, tearing heads off bodies, turning people into red mist. There were people who said it was a monster, a will-o'-the-wisp that moved too quick to see and unravelled people where they stood. Apparently there were stills of CCTV footage floating around the Internet that showed something covered in hair and a mouth full of teeth ripping passers-by to shreds. But they could do anything with computers these days and Jim knew better than to believe what he saw on the bloody Internet.
But he knew what had happened on the platform that day. Hundreds of people running for their lives, trampling each other, stampeding down the stairs into the station and crushing against the barriers, clambering over the dying to get down to the platform. Dozens - hundreds - panic-stricken, crowding and shoving on the narrow space of the platform...
They counted forty-two people who went over the edge. The lucky ones died instantly, fried like bacon on the third rail. The unlucky ones lived long enough for poor Dave Patton to come down the tunnel and slam into them, smashing them like pumpkins and dragging them under the wheels to slice and maim the corpses. Dave hadn't come back to work. The word on the grapevine was that he was shut up in some bloody home drooling on his straightjacket. Jim supposed the sight of that toddler's arm smashing his front window did that to him, the poor bastard.
Jim must have taken the train through Tottenham Court Road a thousand times since then, but he still felt a split-second of chill as the train pulled in and he saw the plaque on the wall. He'd seen the pictures of the clear up - the men in the
white suits hosing the blood off and picking up the severed bits in bags. It gave him the horrors and then some.
Nobody got on, nobody got off.
The horrors were one thing, but Tottenham Court Road shouldn't be empty, even at three in the morning. There was only one bloke on the platform and he looked like he was pissed as a fart. Jim watched as the little hoodie bastard weaved, staggering along the platform, bumping against one of the Cadbury machines and then lashing out at it with a fist, bashing at it again and again. Bloody disgraceful. Bloody thugs getting pissed and smashing up the bloody platform.
Bloody sickening.
Still, not his problem. The platform attendant would deal with that little thug soon enough. Probably listening to that 'emo' music. A clip round the ear wouldn't do him any harm. He'd had many a clip round the ear from his old dad, and it hadn't done Danny any harm either. Look at him now - pulling in eighty grand a year and all because he took a clip round the ear from his dad. Jim didn't agree with Danny about some of his politics, but he knew that if he'd let them loony liberals have their way, Danny would have grown up a little tearaway like that bloody yob on the platform...
The train moved towards Bond Street.
...trouble with them bloody liberals is they didn't like how things were in the real world. If Jim hadn't been firm with Danny, he'd probably be in prison right now with a bloody glue habit. Jim had taught him to work hard and play hard, and now he was on eighty grand a bloody year. Eighty grand! And he'd come from humble origins like his father, not like half of those posh public-school tossers in the city. Working hard and playing hard, that was the secret. Danny was probably out right now in one of the city bars, having the time of his life. Because he'd earned it. That was what those liberals didn't understand -
