by Al Ewing
Why not stop running?
Albert Morse opened his eyes. There was light ahead of him.
Charing Cross was lit up - that strange non-electricity the aliens were sending out through the wires of the grid making the lights spasm and flicker obscenely, like glowing fish flitting in the depths of the sea, the platform seeming to veer hideously in the damp glow, a scene from a fevered child's disease-dream.
Morse no longer knew if he was asleep or awake. He hurled himself up onto the platform, inhaling the reek of crusted blood as his eyes took in more severed skins, more sloughed faces. He felt something brushing his heel and turned to see the slimy brown skin of the Wyrm as it slid past him, the flesh thrashing. It couldn't check its momentum in time to get up onto the platform with him, so it had slid on into the tunnel ahead. For a moment, he scrabbled back, one hand in the rubbery, torn remains of a woman's mouth, eyes wide as organs slid under his feet, watching the surreal sight of the massive Wyrm coming slowly to a halt, pulsing and twitching, an obscene, organic version of a tube train... then he was on his feet, running again. It was going to follow him. It had to.
The lights in the station glowed and pulsed like living things, lighting up a scene from a charnel house. People had come here to hide, to cower, to protect themselves against the hell raging above them. Then the larvae had crept and slid and scuttled down towards them, some as big as hubcaps, chewing their way into the bellies of fat men, some small as a fingernail or maybe even a dust mote, waiting to be inhaled.
He thought of Sharon. She'd never been safe. He understood that now. Nobody had ever been safe.
Morse could see what had happened. Once the first grubs had started shifting and gnawing their way through the crowd, that screaming mass of trapped humanity had trampled itself, first in panic and then in the shambling half-life that the wriggling white monsters created when they began to devour the brains of their hosts. Corpse upon corpse littered the station, piles of them stacked and heaped like cordwood. Some were whole, mercifully killed in the first crush, but most were torn open from the inside like burst balloons. Snapped ribs jutted from shredded meat. The cracked remnants of skulls opened up like flowers towards the sun. And everywhere there was the stink of blood, shit, piss and rot - the stench of death.
And that wasn't the worst thing. The worst thing was that somewhere above him there was an army on the march. An army that had burst from the remains of these men, women and children, an army that had slithered and clattered up from the depths of Charing Cross, an army of a thousand different horrors, tentacles and mandibles waving and clattering. They'd surged up out of the station, black insect legs stepping on the dead they left behind, and stalked towards Buckingham Palace like a pack of terrifying, Cthulhuesque Dick Whittingtons, off to do Christ knows what in the service of their terrible Queen. And they'd left this unholy mess, this mass of suppurating meat that had once been Charing Cross, as evidence. Marking their territory. The Apocalypse woz 'ere.
Morse wanted to vomit. His head was spinning and filled with strange thoughts. Not now, Lord, not now. I can't afford to go mad now.
He picked his way through the heaped corpse flesh, gingerly at first, trying not to breathe, then moving faster as he heard the sound of something shifting behind him. Something wet and fleshy squeezing itself down into the gaps that presented themselves. The terrible conquering Wyrm, coming to kill.
He ran, boots crunching against the remains of skulls and skeletons, vision swimming under the hellish lights. Behind him, the Wyrm snaked and squeezed through the corridors of the station, hunting. Morse sprinted towards the escalator, the metal stairs shuddering upwards, as sickly as the lights, crusted with blood. Bits of people had been ground into the machinery, but it still ran...
It still ran.
Morse put on a burst of speed, praying to a God who wasn't there as he ran past the staircase to the street, the one with the sign telling you not to climb it unless it was absolutely necessary. Long, glistening ropes of intestines wound around the staircase, shimmering in the flickering light. Had some newly-hatched monstrosity trailed them behind it as it slunk towards light and freedom? Had they been placed deliberately? Maybe they functioned as an antenna, absorbing the strange power that was keeping the station working and flickering.
He couldn't hear the Wyrm behind him as he reached the lifts, hammering the button, knowing that he had seconds at most. His lips moved desperately - please God, please God, please God...
But there was no God to hear him.
The doors opened and he burst into the small metal space. If he could get above ground, he could maybe find some higher ground, evade the Wyrm that way. All he had to do was stay alive until the doors closed.
Please God.
Please.
Morse pressed up against the back doors of the elevator, listening to the sound of the Wyrm slithering slowly through the station towards him. Closer and closer...
Then the doors shuddered closed.
Morse breathed out a sigh of relief.
The doors smashed inwards, sparks flying from the metal, reinforced glass shattering as the huge pieces of steel smashed against the wall inches from Morse's soft body. The Wyrm was there, squeezed into the opening - nothing but mouth, a huge open tunnel lined with razor-sharp slivers of bone, coated with glistening slime, alien saliva. Row upon row of sharp teeth stretched back into the depths of the creature's gullet as it pulsed and tensed. It was squeezing itself through the corridors behind, getting enough slack to make a last lunge.
Morse's heart hammered in his chest. His breath whistled, a foreign sound in his throat. He closed his eyes and waited for death.
The lift started into motion.
The beast's head compressed, flattening towards the floor, a terrible keening whine coming from deep within it as the floor of the lift moved up towards the ceiling of the room beyond, crushing the creature. It tried to tug backward, but too late - the razor teeth came together, sinking into the monster's own flesh. The mechanism gave a terrible grinding whine, gears straining - before the face of the Wyrm simply burst, in a gout of black ichor that showered Albert Morse head to toe.
Slowly, the doors behind him glided open.
He blinked, once. He was alive.
He could hide himself. Survive. Better - he could reach Waterloo, arm the bomb. Finish things once and for all.
He could still win this.
If they didn't send anything to stop him.
Slowly, Albert Morse staggered out of the lift, fell to his hands and knees, and vomited.
The Sentinel stood outside the Tower of London. It had not moved since calling the Insect Nation to Earth. Its primary duty had been fulfilled - there was no need of movement now.
It had two duties now. One was to stand in place, defending itself if necessary from any attack. One was to wait for further orders.
It stood.
It waited.
It did both of these things very well indeed.
And eventually, orders came. Orders from the Queen.
There was a potential threat that needed to be dealt with.
The Sentinel turned slowly, on its terrible bone hooves, and began to walk towards Charing Cross.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Little Sister
Her name was Katie, and she was nine years old.
When she was little, she thought monsters didn't exist. She never asked her Mummy and Daddy to check under the bed or in the closet. She never crept into bed with them because she couldn't sleep. When they told her that the monsters would get her if she didn't eat up all her greens, she just laughed. There weren't any such things as monsters. Her parents were just being silly.
Then some bad men had taken her because they wanted her Daddy to give them some money. They'd put her in a crate and joked about shooting her and she had been very, very scared. But they weren't monsters. They were only some very bad men, that was all. She didn't believe in monsters.
Unti
l her Daddy sent the monster to fetch her.
He was a nice monster, and he was very sorry that he'd scared her. He'd explained that he was sorry while he was driving her home, and he was sorry for nearly making her dead as well. But he was a monster, a terrible monster, and she'd understood that it didn't matter how nice he was being just at that moment because he was a monster and monsters ate people. They might go for years and years not eating people, but eventually they would, because that was what monsters did.
Her Daddy and Mummy had paid the monster to get her from the bad men, so she couldn't tell her Mummy and Daddy. And by extension she couldn't tell any adults, because her Mummy and Daddy were adults and if they thought they could trust the monsters then all the other adults would too. So Katie stayed very quiet about what she thought, even about ordinary things, because the monsters might be listening. Even when her Mummy and Daddy sent her to a nice man called an Annielist who seemed very nice and concerned about her and talked in whispers with her Mummy and Daddy using all sorts of big words like post-tror-mat-ick and ort-is-um.
She had to go to a special school where the adults were all very nice and tried to teach her maths and stuff even though she didn't talk about things because the monsters might be listening. There was more than one monster out there, she knew, and when they'd all finished being nice they'd come out and eat everybody up.
Because that was what monsters did.
And when the time came and the monsters ate everybody up, Katie would have to learn to survive on her own.
Albert Morse had his own problems.
The tunnels weren't safe any more, which meant the quickest route was probably over Westminster Bridge. That was about a mile and a half. On a normal day, he wouldn't have thought twice about it.
This wasn't a normal day.
The sky was red. Around him, buildings burned, belching fire. Corpses littered the streets, some burst open, some just dead, killed by the insect-things. The insect-things that might be watching him even now...
Very suddenly, as though a light was turned on in his head, he realised why the Insect Nation were pumping their strange, alien energy into the grid, making the lights glow and the lifts work. It was the cameras. The security cameras on every street corner, in every building. They needed them working. Needed them seeing.
London had the perfect infrastructure in place to spy on people. If you could tap into that, why build your own?
Morse almost smiled, then felt sick again. He kept moving, ducking through the debris, trying to avoid being seen. He would be, though. He couldn't avoid that.
It didn't matter, anyway. All the time he'd been talking to Sharon Glasswell, something alien and terrible had been growing in her belly. Their little spy.
They knew where he was going.
The monsters had come last night.
Katie and her Mummy and Daddy had been on holiday. It hadn't been much of a holiday - Daddy had been drinking again even though Mummy didn't like it. They'd had another discussion - they always called it a discussion, but it sounded like a blazing row to her. When they had their discussions it was usually about Katie, about how she didn't speak now. She couldn't speak, of course - the monsters might be listening - but it still made her feel guilty. Mummy had said she wanted a divorce and Daddy had said that he didn't want anything to do with 'the dummy' anymore. 'The dummy' was Daddy's special name for her when he was drunk. He got drunk a lot.
Katie had been hurt at the time, but she wasn't any more. Her Daddy had probably been under an awful lot of stress. He'd known all about the monsters.
He'd probably known they were coming.
Albert Morse clutched the railing of the Westminster Bridge, knuckles white. The bile rose again in his throat and he felt his knees buckling under him. He shouldn't have looked.
He shouldn't have looked at the Thames.
The water was red - a bloody wash of crimson, unmoving and stagnant as an oxbow lake. Both ends must flow into the sea of mulch left by the ruby force field that glittered overhead, he realised. But it wasn't the stagnant, bloody river that made him sick. It was what floated in it.
Heads, of children and adults. Severed limbs. Scraps of clothing. Occasionally some buoyant personal effect. A handbag. A doll. Even an empty bottle or a can of Special Brew had the power to make his eyes sting with hot, wet tears, marooned as they were in that crimson sea, little reminders of a way of life that was gone forever.
How many people had been in London? How many bodies had ended up in that stagnant water? A small percentage, but still, so many, so many... and every second, more were dying.
How far had the force field spread now, he wondered? America and Russia were probably gone. Even if he stopped things right now, the sea would be most likely uninhabitable by marine life - any stretches of land still with people on them would die soon after that.
There was a real possibility that Albert Morse was the last human being alive. And every friend he'd ever had was dead, and his wife was probably dead, and his dog was dead. Everyone dead, dead, dead... he knew he should be making some snide little comment about it or at least swearing his head off but he just didn't have the energy anymore. Not for any of it.
What was he fighting for, anyway?
What was the point of Albert Morse?
He shook his head and turned his eyes away from the mess below the bridge. He kept an eye on the sky. None of the insect-craft had come overhead yet, but that couldn't last. He had to be out of the open before one did. Or before one of the insect-men appeared at the other end of the bridge, running on skittering chitin feet, racing towards him... or more than one, a horde of them, a crowd, sent by the Palace to tear him to shreds with their sharp claws...
His head was swimming again. Thoughts like that weren't going to get him anywhere.
The facts were simple enough. There were cameras all along the bridge and no way of hiding from them.
They knew where he was.
They knew where he was going.
He had to be ready.
On the other side of the bridge, The Sentinel stood. And waited.
It was good at both of these things.
Katie and her Mummy and Daddy had been on the Eurostar when it had pulled in at Waterloo, late at night. None of them were speaking, and Katie had thought it was because they were angry with each other, or with her. But she knew why, now.
It was because her parents knew that the monsters were listening.
The train had pulled into the station and the doors had opened, and they were halfway through customs when some men with guns had told them that they should remain where they were because there was a sit-you-ay-shun in London. A man with a moustache asked what the sit-you-ay-shun was, even though it was a grown-up word and he should have known it already. The man with the gun wouldn't say. He said everyone should sit tight and eventually they'd be escorted to safety.
Then something like a big white maggot had scurried into the room and jumped into the man's chest.
All of the adults had started screaming and panicking as more of the big maggots had come into the room, but Katie didn't. She'd known this was coming.
The monsters were here.
And they were eating everybody up.
She'd taken off running, ducking and weaving between the panicky adults and the big maggots. The big maggots didn't seem too interested in her - they seemed to want fat people first, or big muscular people like the man with the gun, and there were so many people about that they could get anyone - but she knew she'd have to find somewhere to hide before they started on her.
Her Mummy and Daddy stayed where they were and screamed for her to come back. But the screams stopped pretty quickly.
It was silly. They'd known all about the monsters. Why didn't they come with her?
She never saw them again.
Morse had slowed to a brisk walk by the time he reached the end of the bridge. He knew he should be running - that every second that passed m
eant more people were dying, in their hundreds and thousands - but more and more he didn't see the point.
The world was a ball of mulch. Everyone he'd ever known was dead. He'd failed the whole planet and handed it over to a bunch of insects from somewhere that didn't even have bloody physics.
All he wanted to do was lie down and die, and he didn't particularly see a reason why he shouldn't.
The walk slowed to a slouch, and then he stopped altogether. He should have been heading up the York Road, towards Leake Street, but somehow he couldn't be bothered. He could feel the weight of the gun in his pocket - the one he'd taken from Mickey, the one Mickey didn't have when he needed it.
The bomb was a pipe dream. Taking a suitcase nuke across hostile territory? Even detonating it in the station - what would be the point? They had different physics. It had been obvious in the station and it was more obvious outside. His feet were held by something other than gravity. He felt sick in his head and his belly, and the air was hot and seemingly filled with miniature razors. His heart and throat hadn't felt right since the scene in the lift.
He hefted the gun, feeling its weight. It would be easy enough. Just put the barrel in his mouth... close his eyes...
All the troubles of the human race, over with just one squeeze...
He stopped, breathing in deep, feeling the shifting glass of this new air scarring his lungs.
He lifted the gun to his head.
And then he saw the thing standing in front of him.
The Sentinel noted that the human had one of the weapons they'd tried to use against the Insect Nation. It had the weapon pointed to its own head. The Sentinel relayed the data back to the Queen - the massive organic intelligence running the invasion force, ruling the planet. The Sentinel cocked its head slowly, and waited for the answer to come.
