by Al Ewing
"Fix this? Fix this? That's my fucking grandmother!" Magnet hissed. The rage was boiling up inside him again, and this time he didn't bother to bite it back. "I'm going to 'fix this' myself, Morse, right now. Magnet out."
"For God's sake, Magnet—"
The radio clattered to the ground.
On the other end of the line, Morse heard three shots, and then the sound of something sharp cutting meat. A butcher's-shop sound, repeating again and again and again...
And then silence.
Listen:
Jean-Luc Ducard was a man of many pleasures, and he had worked for them all. He had worked for his home in Geneva - a three-storey building with a sumptuous wine cellar, in one of the most expensive and exclusive areas in the city. He had worked for his antique Georgian bookcase filled with expensive first editions that he never read. He had worked for the wine cellar that was so sumptuous, and for the musty, dusty vintages that sat in it, that he never drank although he was told by many that they were extremely rare and extremely fine. He had worked for the expensive dinners he picked at in many fine restaurants. He had worked for his beautiful trophy wife, who he ignored and who he suspected - but did not care enough to verify - was being regularly serviced by his gardener, who maintained the expensive garden that he had worked for but never set foot in.
Monsieur Ducard was a proud man. He was proud of his home, and his wines, and his books, and his garden. He had worked for them all.
He sipped his coffee, studying the first rays of the morning sun, and prepared for his daily exercise regimen. Monsieur Ducard had turned one room of his house into a luxurious gym, filled with the latest and most advanced exercise machines. Each day he would dress himself in a royal blue tracksuit, seat himself on the comfortable cushions of the multigym, and read the paper, promising himself that he would begin his exercise routine before too long. In this way he would pass a quiet half hour before changing for breakfast, and tell himself that he had spent a profitable half-hour turning some of his sagging flab into muscle. In his mind, the sheer fact that he had unearthed himself at such an ungodly hour with the intention of exercising was as valid as the exercise itself.
In the same way, he told himself that his steady accumulation of wealth - through subtle manipulation of stocks, shares and the definitions of what constituted taxable income - was hard, difficult labour similar to toiling in a mine. He felt that the sweat of his brow had earned him his manifold luxuries, despite the fact that he employed several top-level accountants and lawyers to do the actual work of wealth creation while he himself lounged in a tastefully-appointed study, took the occasional call that informed him of how much he had earned that day, and read the morning papers. Occasionally, he left his opulent study to perform some small task, such as ringing for a pot of green tea or writing a cheque for the People's Party, and then paced languidly around his home, admiring his many possessions and occasionally checking for finger-marks or other signs that they had been touched or disturbed. He would occasionally ring for the maid and imperiously tell her to improve her work. He could not abide signs of use on the many objects he owned.
And why not? He had worked for them all.
Had he woken to the sound of the radio on that fateful day, he might have had some glimmer of what was about to happen to him. But each morning he was woken by the sun. The radio - a precision-engineered model with high-powered Bose speakers - was never switched on, lest the parts become worn out through overuse.
Monsieur Ducard finished the cup of coffee and set it down on the edge of the balcony, turning back towards the bedroom in order to change from his robe and pyjamas to the blue tracksuit he exercised in.
The cup rattled.
Monsieur Ducard turned, concerned. The cup was an antique, and very fine china.
The cup continued to rattle, jiggling in the little espresso saucer, and suddenly toppled off the balcony before Monsieur Ducard could catch it.
Monsieur Ducard cried out in horror. It was as though a beloved child had fallen from a high cliff.
The entire balcony began to rattle now, shuddering and clattering under his feet. In fact, the whole house was beginning to shake. Monsieur Ducard turned and raced down the stairs, thinking only of the cup - one of a set that had cost him tens of thousands of francs. Originally used by Il Duce himself! Perhaps it had only fallen into the bushes, in which case it could be sent by courier to a restorer of antiques - he had to make sure. It was vital.
On the walls, the paintings rattled, vases shuddered dangerously on their tables and the chandeliers swung crazily, glass and diamonds tinkling against one another. The whole house trembled like a living thing. Monsieur Ducard looked around in horror, scarcely able to take in what was happening, still driven forward by the ghost of the fallen cup. The tracksuit clung to his grotesque, flabby body as he hurried out of the front door.
The whole street shook, undulating like jelly underneath him, slates crashing around him as they slipped from his perfectly-maintained roof. Under his feet, the pavement was cracking, the surface of the road tearing like paper in the first rays of the dawn. Monsieur Ducard searched desperately. Where was the cup?
There!
It lay on the pavement, miraculously intact. The spirit of Il Duce must have been watching over it. Quickly, as another crack split the concrete inches from the precious porcelain, Monsieur Ducard darted forward, gently plucking the precious cup from danger and nestling it in his meaty hands. Despite the earthquake going on all around him, he breathed a deep sigh of relief. There wasn't a single scratch on it! Thank God, thank God, from whom all blessings flow... his precious cup was whole and safe again.
Smiling, Monsieur Ducard turned to look back at his wonderful house.
Behind it, miles high, there was a wall of blood.
No, not blood - a wall like one facet of a massive ruby, beautifully carved and polished. It was impossible to tell where it ended, or how fast it was moving, but Monsieur Ducard had a brief instant of understanding as the force field expanded through his home, sundering atomic and molecular bonds and reducing all of his precious commodities to a rain of elemental sludge. His eyes widened in horror, and in a last desperate gesture, he held the precious cup out, away from his body and the oncoming wall of ruby light.
Then the ruby wall passed through him as well, and Monsieur Ducard ceased to exist, leaving behind a precise mix of minerals and gases that could never be reassembled into human form.
The cup was the last to go.
Listen.
Listen.
Listen.
You can hear them dying.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Secret Adversary
"Shit."
Morse switched off the radio and put his head in his hands for a moment. Then he stood up and breathed in deep, tasting the air - old and dusty, full of cobwebs. They hadn't been using this room long enough to imprint themselves on it - it was still heavy with the accumulated dirt of years of disuse, a hidden place squirrelled away in the middle of London. The walls were painted grey, the paint cracked and chipped. There was one steel door, camouflaged on the other side, and one window that nobody wanted to look out of. The only other furniture in the room was a table with an old radio set on it, which Morse had been using to contact his opposite numbers in Europe and America, a generator to power the radio, several filing cabinets filled with protocols and procedures, and a safe which contained food rations, fuel for the generator, two automatic pistols and spare ammunition.
The bolt-hole had been set up for if the worst came to the worst - if the world ended, the Tower was compromised and Mister Smith was killed in the line of duty. Three things that couldn't happen, shouldn't happen and nobody wanted to imagine happening. Christ, thought Morse, no wonder they hadn't spent any bloody money on it. Just bought a room in a skyscraper, sealed it off and pretended it didn't exist.
Welcome to bloody Centrepoint. Right in the guts of dead London.
Not as far in
as poor Magnet, though.
"Bloody Christ!" He swore under his breath, and it echoed around the room like a shout.
The silence struck him. The group was waiting expectantly for him to speak, not daring to draw a breath. He'd have to tell them, then.
"Right."
He turned, not looking at any one pair of eyes.
"We've lost Callsign Magnet."
Tom Briscoe spoke first. A heavy-set man of about forty-one, with curly black hair. The day before, he'd been a lawyer working for an independent television company - now his grey suit was covered in dried blood. He wouldn't tell anyone where the blood had come from. He wouldn't take his suit off. He slept in it - his last link to a vanished world that he couldn't be made to believe was gone.
"That... that was Buckingham Palace?" he swallowed. "That surely wasn't..."
Morse forced himself to meet Tom's eyes, looking into the watery grey orbs coldly, clinically. He didn't feel like doing his bastard impression right now, but it was the only thing they'd understand. One crack in the foundation of his authority and everything would tumble down. "That surely was, Mr Briscoe. And I just sent him to his death. Feel free to speak up if you have some sort of problem with that."
Nobody said a word. Behind Tom, Charu Kapur looked at the ground, tracing the dust on the floor with the toe of her trainer, arms wrapped around herself. She hardly ever said anything, and when she did, it was in a whisper. She was barely fifteen and the day before, she'd been the youngest of a family of nine. Now she was an orphan. She'd seen four members of her family die in front of her eyes. Occasionally, she'd take a pink mobile from the pocket of her tracksuit and look at it, hoping for a text or a missed call. But there was never any text, or a missed call. There wasn't even any signal. But she kept looking anyway.
Someone might have left a message. Surely someone might have.
The soft chug of the generator was the only sound in the room.
"That's settled, then. We know where their base is - where they've set up their central intelligence - and thanks to radio contact with America and Europe, God rest them, we know what they're going to do. Any questions?"
Briscoe coughed, clearing his throat. In the corner of the room, Mickey Fallon tutted once, but didn't speak. He was another who didn't speak. He was seventy-one, but still in good shape - a welder, once, now retired and living in York. He'd been visiting his grandchildren when it had happened. He didn't have grandchildren now, and there wasn't any York either. He hadn't spoken since he'd told Morse his name. There was nothing to speak about.
Briscoe coughed again. His hand trembled for a moment, as though he was going to raise it and ask a question to the teacher. Then it fell back to his side.
"Mister Morse... um... you can't seriously expect us to believe all this nonsense..." he looked around him at the others. Great beads of sweat glinted on his brow, and there was something wild and lost in his wet, grey eyes. "Aliens, for goodness sake! It's... it's just silly, now. I'm sure the armed forced are dealing with... with the terrorists..." He swallowed. "Look, I have a meeting tomorrow! Nine o'clock sharp. An important meeting!"
He looked down at the floor, shaking his head. Then he looked back up and repeated it softly, as though dealing with a particularly difficult maître d'.
"Nine o'clock sharp."
He smiled, gently. There were tears in his eyes.
Silence.
Sharon Glasswell began to sob. She had turned nineteen only a week ago. Her Mam had made a cake and made her have two slices 'cause she was eating for two now. She must have conceived the week after the wedding, the doctor said. It was like her whole life had come together at once, everything she'd ever wanted. It was going to be a little girl, they said. Jase wanted to name her Lily after Lily Allen, but Sharon wanted to name her Agnes, for her gran who'd died. Jase had given her a slap and said who's ever called Agnes and they'd had a row, right then and there, in the street outside the McDonald's with all people staring, and then...
And then something had happened in the sky.
And it'd started.
Sharon couldn't seem to stop crying.
Jason Glasswell was twenty. He was six foot with sandy hair shaved to a grade one. He supported Chelsea. He knew what a Chelsea smile was. He'd done it once when he was sixteen, to a fat prick in the pub who told him he didn't have any respect for his elders. Took his eyes out an' all. Teach him for starting. He had a job packing boxes in Hackney but he was thinking of going into the army. He didn't know what was going on or what the fuck had happened but if this fat prick didn't shut up and stop bothering his wife he was going to fucking do him. He fucking would.
Thoughts like these helped Jason Glasswell deal with some of things he'd seen. He could deal with giving some fucking cunt some. He could deal with that. That'd be a pleasure. There were other things he couldn't deal with. So he sat back and thought about putting the blade of a box-cutter through the sides of Tim Briscoe's mouth.
Briscoe muttered softly. "Nine o'clock." It was no more than a whisper. Jason Glasswell grinned at him, one hand gripping his wife's shoulder, the other feeling the comforting shape in his pocket.
Morse looked at them all. Three years of complacency and his emergency strategy had been reduced to grabbing five random strangers off the street and getting them out of harm's way when the trouble hit. He'd sent the signal out immediately, but none of his actual team - his hand-picked, highly trained specialists - had made it to the rendezvous point. Maybe they'd died trying to make it. Maybe they'd just decided to die with their loved ones. They knew what was at stake.
The trouble with the end of the world is that you never know how people are going to take it until it happens.
So now he was stuck babysitting the handful of civilians he'd managed to save, and not a single one of them was worth much in a fight. Too old, too young, too fat - the boy could probably use his fists but not his head. Morse could smell the aggression coming off him like musk. Reminded him of himself as a lad and frankly he wouldn't have trusted his twenty-year-old self to piss in a bucket... and there was more than that. Maybe it was Morse's years - maybe he was just an old man who didn't much like the noise they called music, et cetera, et bloody cetera - but there was something off about the boy. He was a bit too ready to do some damage. He'd kicked up a right fuss when Morse had saved him and the pregnant girl - "don't you fakkin' touch my wife", all that nonsense. If Morse hadn't shown him the gun he might have gone for him. Still, the boy had calmed down since. He'd taken a good look out of the window at what was going on and then he'd shut right up.
Although Morse had a nasty feeling that may have been because the boy enjoyed watching.
Oh well. Too late now.
They were all he had, so he might as well use them. And that started with toughening them up a little bit. Starting with watery old Tom Briscoe, the fat lawyer and current weakest link. Right now, his fear was forming a tough little shell around him, stopping any of the truth getting in. Morse lowered his voice to a menacing growl, speaking deftly and purposefully, and began the process of cracking it.
"Mister Briscoe. Here is what we know for a fact. All of this has been confirmed by people with clearance a lot higher than mine - international agencies who have been waiting for this the same as we have. Now, this is not by any means pretty, and it isn't going to make you feel like giving me a hug and baking me a bloody cake, and to be brutally frank and frankly brutal I couldn't particularly give half a cup of dog piss whether you believe me or not. But I am telling you now that there is an alien intelligence - a semi-octopoid creature ruling an insect civilisation that comes, as best as we can determine, from somewhere outside the boundaries of what we conceive of as time and space - sitting on the throne of Her Majesty and directing a wave of what can only be described as zombies. Zombies, Mister Briscoe. Zombies. With a capital fucking Zed! And I'm sorry to inform you that that is only the larval stage, Mister Briscoe! Those are the fucking kids!"
Briscoe blanched. The man turned literally white. It would be wrong to say that Albert Morse got any kind of real pleasure from it, but he did feel a certain satisfaction in knowing his words were striking home.
The lips moved, and what came out was a squeak, like a little mouse. "It-it's preposterous -"
"Zombies, Mister Briscoe! Zulu! Oscar! Mike! Bravo - fuck it, I'm not spelling it! Dead humans whose cortical centres are being driven by the larvae that are eating them from the inside out! Eventually those larvae hatch into... Christ, I doubt we've seen the half of it. But if you take a look out of that fucking window your eyes are so studiously avoiding, you will see exactly what's going on. In living bloody Technicolor!"
Briscoe swallowed, shaking his head. He didn't look out of the window.
The sun had not yet risen over Tottenham Court Road, and so the light that came into the dark room was firelight. Oxford Street was ablaze. Staggering human corpses tore at each other, at anything that moved, occasionally at things that didn't. All the windows of the stores had been smashed and the street was cracked and filthy with blood and the bodies of those who'd simply keeled over and bled out through their ears. There was a massive hole just underneath Freddie Mercury's plastic statue where something that looked almost like a black worm, with a mouth full of row upon row of razor-teeth, had bored out of the pavement and chewed into the crowd, before slithering down towards Soho, chewing through halted buses and taxis as it went. Occasionally, in the crowd, other things could be glimpsed - black, almost skeletal walkers, covered with a layer of chitin and slashing out with fingertips like knives. The Insect Nation was busily destroying London from within and without.
This is what Jason Glasswell had stared at in awful wonder. Tom Briscoe wouldn't look at it.
"Strangely, I didn't think you would. And believe it or not, it gets better." Morse paused for breath, wishing he had a cigarette. "According to my contacts overseas, they've set up a force field of some kind around London. Big glowing ruby jewel of a thing. Started off nice and snug around Morden or thereabouts, then it expanded. Evidently they're not that bothered about keeping anything they've found here because anything in the path of that field is broken down into elements. A nice, thick, red, bloody mulch. That's Manchester. Birmingham. York. Edinburgh. Aberdeen. Dublin. Calais. Earlier, when I was talking in French to that bloke on the radio, and then he screamed and the line went dead? That was Paris dying."
