by Al Ewing
Am I a monster?
Or do I want to be just like you?
I've never seen a suitcase nuke before. I have a sneaking suspicion that this technology didn't exist back in 2007 when all of this started. The mechanism is delicate, but not so delicate that it goes off when jostled or dropped - otherwise how could you carry it about? Most of that resiliency is down to the carrying case - styled to look like a metallic briefcase - that houses the baby nuke itself. It's a titanium alloy, very solid, thick and hard and very heavy. A normal man would have a difficult time carrying this. The hard titanium shell serves three purposes - one, it intensifies the explosion, in the same way that if you put an M-80 in a matchbox, the resulting bang will be even louder for being contained for a split-second. Two, it keeps all the delicate electronics needed to turn a lump of fissionable uranium into a nuclear blast large enough to destroy a good-sized portion of London in full working order.
And three, it makes a handy mace.
I squeeze time all the way down, to a hard frozen instant, and then in the moment it takes them to react, I swing the case around into the head of the nearest soldier, using all the strength this misshapen body has in it.
The black chitin head of the soldier bursts like an egg, releasing streams of white pus and black fluid that splatter over the silver metal and trickle down the armoured carapace of the thing. It starts to judder, legs and arms spasming, hanging in the air like a suit of clothes on a coat hanger. We're moving too fast for gravity now, so it's not going to fall any time soon.
But it's dead.
In the back of my mind, the voice of the Queen goes still. I've been abandoned.
In a way, this is the moment of truth. This is where I find out if they can turn me off like a remote drone, if they can send some signal that will cut my strings and send me tumbling to the ground or just dissolve me into a pile of disconnected cells. If they're going to switch me off like defective electronics, this is when it's going to be.
Nothing happens.
Gepetto, I'm a real boy!
The two remaining soldiers look at me with their blank chitin faces, flexing their sharp claws slowly.
Then one leaps for me.
This combat isn't only on the physical level - we're all playing with time, squeezing it further and further down, squeezing more juice out of it, trying to tilt the playing field in one direction or another. It's four-dimensional fighting. And it's a strain, even for this new body they programmed for me, this Ultimate John Doe.
I don't know if aliens get headaches as such, but I'm starting to get one now.
I bring the briefcase up like a shield and the steel-sharp claws screech against the metal, peeling tiny slivers of titanium off it. I push outward, letting the furious momentum of the creature carry it past me. Maybe it'll hit one of the ticket machines and that black skeleton will shatter into fragments. No time to check - the other solider is already leaping, all four limbs bending to slash at me in four different ways. If he gets to finish this move, then I'm going to be divided into about eight pieces. Maybe I'll survive that - I got away with being dissected - but I'm not anxious to find out.
I snap-kick forward, the hard hoof at the end of the leg driving out with the speed and force of a bullet. A big, fat, bullet. It drives into the soldier's midsection - the thorax - crunching and punching through the carapace and checking the forward momentum. The tips of the claws slice close enough to leave a series of tiny cuts on my soft white maggot-skin, but I don't feel anything.
I'm going to, though.
I shift balance, going for a high kick with my other foot - my other hoof. The hard bone-like matter slams into the blank face sideways. I squeeze time just that little bit further to see the hard hoof crushing and distorting the head, a spider web of cracks appearing in the black chitin, pus spilling in slow motion before the force of the impact cracks the neck and tears the head from the body, sending it tumbling through space, in slow motion to me but so fast and so hard that when it hits the wall all that's going to be left is a stain.
Stitch that!
One more. I know for a fact I didn't kill that soldier who flew past me because I'm not that lucky. I use the momentum of the kick to spin around and look behind me, just in time to see flashing black claws of infinite sharpness moving right for my big eye...
It takes maybe one hundredth of a second. With time locked down this far, this tight, there's no leeway to speed myself up any further. It's all about being faster than it is.
But in Feudal Japan, I learned the arts of the ninja.
And he didn't.
My right hand darts out in a perfect snake strike, the ten long thing fingers folded together so that the sharp scalpel-nails group together into a little forest of knives that drives right into the hard surface of its soldier's black carapace face, cutting through the hard matter, driving in, punching through. The claws that were about to burst my eyeball like a poisoned boil halt in mid swing and start to tremble as I step back, pulling my hand from its head like a sword from a stone.
Game over.
I let go and time folds back around me like the wings of some terrifying flying creature.
The moment passes.
The shallow cuts on my chest begin to ooze black slime. I concentrate and the wounds seal up, all of my cells moving in concert, working together, a we that is me and mine to control for the first time in my long and ugly life.
If I thought about it, I could even reconfigure my body. Look human again. Be John Doe again, that combination of Bowie and Bogart who looked just unordinary enough not to draw the slightest bit of attention. But there's no place in this world for him anymore.
I can feel the bomb in the case ticking down again. In somewhere around twenty-three minutes, it's going to detonate whatever happens. The closer I am to Buckingham Palace when that happens, the better.
But I don't just want to be close to it. I want to be inside it.
I want to look that bloated Queen, that Insect Intelligence, right in its face before I burn it like an ant through a magnifying glass.
Time locks down again, as tight as I can make it, and I run, my hooves thundering, pounding the floor hard enough to crack the worn tiling. I've got a lot of ground to cover.
And the sooner I get there, the sooner I can finish this once and for all.
The run to the bridge is... not what I was expecting. What was I expecting? A slalom, an obstacle course of monsters - a soldier behind every alleyway, every parked car, leaping and slashing, ganging up to tear me into pieces. But there aren't as many as I was expecting - another five or six at the most. One of them's so short and scrawny it counts as half. It occurs to me that it's about as high as a ten-year-old, and I can't deal with that at all, so I bring my case down on its head hard enough to shatter it and leave it behind me.
They're so slow - faster than any other creature on what's left of this planet, but slow all the same. Not nearly as fast as this new, perfect body I'm wearing.
I guess it's logical when you think about it. The Insect Nation created me - and all the other zombies that walked the planet, the cold replica humans - to be both sentinels and weapons of war. We were pure creatures, things folded through space and time from the heart of somewhere else - not the strange hybrid things on the loose in London, grown on substandard human meat and bone. I can outfight the soldiers. Outrun them. Outthink them.
But still, they're not exactly challenging me considering I'm coming to kill them. I reach the end of Westminster Bridge, retracing Morse's faltering steps. I'm wondering about the implications of that. They weren't expecting me to turn on them. They weren't expecting there to be a 'me' ever again - they thought the personality they'd built was just a mask, a cover. And let's not forget that all the other Sentinels - the 'zombies' - were hunted and killed over decades.
If there had been others like me, would we all have become human sooner or later? Could we have driven them away, an army of Sentinels with human minds? What then? Would we
have created our own society on the bones of the human race, or just protected what was left, obsessively guarding the last remnants of the species into old age and death? Maybe that's the optimistic view. Maybe I'd just have been taken down the moment I started thinking for myself, torn apart by a platoon of Sentinels loyal to Her Majesty, the Queen of the Insects - there are traitors in every war.
It doesn't matter. You could play 'what if' forever. What if I'd never come to London? What if Mister Smith had never been born? What if Morse had killed me when he'd had the chance?
The only question that matters is what now.
Two of the massive alien craft float overhead, watching, keeping me in sight. My hooves clatter and crash on the road. I'm expecting a packed wall of soldiers, waiting to tear me apart, black chitinous creatures clambering over one another to get to me.
But there's nothing at all. Just a red sky and an empty bridge.
How many people were in London? How many of them had those monstrosities burst out of them? How many million soldiers would that make? And they were all crowding towards Buckingham Palace, according to what Sharon's eye-baby picked up from Morse. Simple mathematics says that every square inch of this bridge should be crowded with insect bodies, whether they're after me or not. Where did they go?
If I'm tougher and faster than those black walking things, what were they for? The Sentinels were meant to be the soldiers, clearly. So what are the 'soldiers'?
The back of my mind is silent. Her Majesty isn't speaking to me anymore. I don't know what the plan is beyond the orders I was given. Suddenly I'm feeling nervous, keeping a look out for the other shoe. Overhead, the massive, incomprehensible invasion craft of the Insect Nation circle like vultures.
There's no sign of any enemies on Bridge Street, Great George Street, Birdcage Walk... the blurring grey-brown stone of the buildings changes to a line of trees whizzing past me - or what were once trees. Dead husks of blackened wood, unable to survive in this new air, under this ruby cage of sky, withered down to nothing but sticks of rotted timber. I'm glad this body doesn't have a nose - I can taste the rotting stench of the acres of dried, dead, rotting grass through my skin as it is. It's horrible.
But I'm nearly there.
I put on a burst of speed, hooves racing, straining every muscle, every cell of this strange and terrible body they've put me into...
...and then the other shoe drops.
Oh.
Oh my God.
Stretching up above me, where Buckingham Palace stood, is a wall of writhing black chitin, a massive tower of gleaming, glistening insect bodies. This is where the soldiers went. All of them. Because they might have had slashing claws and biting mandibles to work with, but they weren't soldiers.
They were workers.
And it looks like they were the bricks too.
The Insect Nation have built their own palace around the old one. They've built it from the husks of their own shock troops, fused together into one mass of millions, stretching right up to the ruby canopy overhead. You can see pus and black fluids oozing down the side of the structure.
It's the most horrible thing I've ever seen in my life.
The most horrible thing of all is how much it looks like home.
I take a step back, the case of the bomb swinging on its chain as I swing one arm backwards -
- and then it happens. Out of nowhere.
The concrete under my hooves shatters, sending me falling sideways. Instinctively, I grab time, twisting it hard - too late. I'm staring into a cavern of sickly, slimy flesh, a tunnel with rows of razor sharp teeth running all the way down...
Coming up through the concrete at me is one of the Wyrms, the slithering creatures that infested the Tube tunnels. I guess they have a purpose too - ferrying essential minerals to and fro, crunching up corpses and delivering the resultant mash to the Queen to keep it healthy. Something along those lines.
Now it's purpose seems to be to eat me.
Desperately, I break right - and then it veers left and I feel the side of the monster's mouth bumping against my chest, and a terrible tearing sensation in my left arm...
...and then I'm crashing down on the ruined concrete, watching it tunnel away.
It's only when I look at my left arm and see a ragged stump where the elbow used to be that I realise what's happened.
It's got the bomb.
There are a good fifteen to twenty minutes before it blows. That's time enough for the Wyrm to tunnel down below all the concrete and sewers and pipes, further and further down, further and further away from the Palace. Sacrificing itself to carry away the threat.
In about fifteen minutes, we're going to get a hell of an earthquake.
And that's all we're going to get.
And here I am, stood outside the most terrible monstrosity I've ever imagined, this huge black shell of black insect bone that's going to turn the whole world into a soup of lifeless sludge just because it can, because it's good practice... and I've got one good arm and no weapons.
And I don't have the slightest idea what I'm going to do next.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Vengeance is Mine
This is what the end of the world looks like.
Massive spacecraft, from a place without physical laws as we know them, circling in a ruby sky, then folding and crushing through space like paper planes in the hands of a vicious child. Winking out like candles in a church nobody goes to anymore because there is no God.
Why would they stay? There's nothing left for them to do here.
The Insect Nation came here to harvest our world, to gather up a planet full of slaves and foodstuffs. When it turned out that they'd been called too soon, they decided they might as well turn the entire planet into a rich, nutritious ball of mulch. Everyone in London is dead - mostly killed to create the walls of the structure in front of me, a huge spire of living, fused insect tissue, an antenna to broadcast the Insect Way Of Life.
Right now it's broadcasting an ever-expanding disintegrator field that reduces people and buildings and art and culture and life to their component atoms, leaving a roiling, boiling soup where there used to be a world full of human beings.
The only problem the Queen of the Insects has is a malfunctioning Sentinel unit called John Doe. She doesn't seem to be fussing much about it.
I can't get through the wall of black, slimy insect-flesh in front of me. I've been trying - every time I slash at it with the claws on my one good arm, the wounds close over almost before I've made them. Buckingham Palace is sealed forever in a gleaming, glistening cocoon.
It's all over.
I've blown it.
Nothing left to do but stand around and look at the tower, and the ruby sky, and the dozens of corpses. Nothing to do but admire my view of a world that died.
It's funny - I always thought I was dead because I didn't breathe and my heart didn't beat. Because I was a slave to urges I didn't understand. But having a heart that doesn't beat, lungs that don't work - that's not being dead. So long as you're walking around, able to talk to people, do things, affect things... how can that be death?
But this is death. Standing here, with the power to stop time, and run at a hundred miles an hour, and tear through walls with my fingernails... and all of it being useless. I can't do anything about this, just like I can't go back in time and stop it from happening. What's done is done. I can't change anything.
Not being able to change anything in the world.
That's what it is to be dead.
Dead and in Hell.
Nothing I've ever done matters. Everything I ever did, all those hundreds of thousands of years of watching people, living among people, changing things in small ways, all the lives I saved and ended, all of it is meaningless. Everything I've ever been, wiped away in one second, because I opened my big monster mouth and ended the world. And I can't even avenge it properly.
It feels like only a day since I took the call from Sweeney.
I should write that down. A quote from the last human-like being alive.
I look down at my hand, still crusty with Katie's blood. A representative of the countless billions who've left their blood on my hands.
I look at the ragged elbow joint that the Wyrm left when it chewed up my last hope for doing anything other than standing around feeling sorry for myself.
The flesh is twitching on the end of the stump, little tendrils of skin trying to grow a new arm. I watch for a moment, fascinated. I must be doing that myself, on some subconscious level. I suppose if I really thought about it - and if I ate a couple of you-know-whats - I could grow a new arm.
Why not? I'm giving the orders now. I decide what this collection of cells, this we that is me, should be used for. Why not get my arm back?
Why stop there?
If I've learnt one thing - one thing about being human, about fighting back against the alien thing I used to be - it's that I don't have to be normal.
I don't have to be just like you.
All I have to do is what's right.
Suddenly the feeling of lassitude, of despair, is gone. I can hear Billy Ocean in my head - I met Billy in the eighties - and he's playing his last concert ever, here in my head, and it sounds like victory, like hope, all screaming guitars and crowds waving lighters... when the going gets tough...
If this mouth could smile, it would.
I've got things to do. Things to build on this wonderful body, and I'm hungry. And all around me are fallen Londoners, who died without having the insides of their skulls licked clean by invading parasites, Londoners who were lucky enough to be killed by the horde of zombies without becoming one.
I'm salivating. The stump of my elbow is tingling and twitching. And two spots on my side, below my armpits. And two more spots below that.
I'm hungry. I need to build up some extra body mass. And all around me are brains - delicious, juicy, succulent
