by Alex Scarrow
The root system seemed to loosely follow the roads. Perhaps the ground beneath them was somehow easier to burrow through, or perhaps there was another unfathomable factor at work. Roads were generally the straightest and least obstructed routes between population centres, and the roots presumably mirrored that rationale. Or maybe their branching and direction of travel was entirely random, but their presence was far more noticeable beneath the flat, tarred surfaces.
‘Looks like this place is unvisited,’ said Corkie finally.
He picked up his helmet from the dashboard, put it on, then climbed down out of the passenger door of the truck and banged on the side. ‘All right, lads, dismount!’
He signalled at the second truck parked behind with a circular sweep of his hand. Soldiers spilled out of both vehicles, and army boots clumped noisily on to the parking lot. Riot shields were quickly passed down out of the back of both vehicles, and a couple of minutes later twenty men stood ready for instructions, shields in one hand and an assortment of swords, axes and machetes in the other.
Corkie gestured towards the bottling plant’s warehouse. The objective for today’s foray was to obtain a decent stash of sealed, unspoiled water containers. While there was a source of recycled water back at the keep – provided they had continual supply of firewood to boil and purify it – there was inevitable wastage and loss, and Major Everett was keen to ensure they built up a reserve supply of stored water in case of emergencies.
Water. Food. Source of fuel for heat and medication. The key four things needed for survival.
‘Corporal Briggs?’
‘Yes, Sergeant?’
While Everett insisted on referring to these soldiers as his knights – a frivolous habit that Corkie went along with – when out on patrol, it was his rules, his terminology, not Everett’s. He was damned if was going to call them ‘knights’. Damned if he was going to call Briggsy ‘Sir Briggs’. They were his lads. He’d been the one to train them up and, even if none of them had served a single day in Her Majesty’s armed forces, they were corporals and privates and not bloody men-at-arms, praetorians guards or bloody knights or whatever other stupid term Everett might come up with.
‘I want you to take your section and search that office building for anything worth nabbing.’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
Briggs led his men towards the building, one of them carrying a pressurized fire hydrant on his back filled with heavily salted water – much safer than a flamethrower and just as effective at holding back the crawlers.
‘Rest of you lot with me,’ said Corkie. He led the way over to the warehouse and stopped a few metres short of a large sliding delivery door. He looked up at the placard on the side of the tall structure:
SCHLOOP PLUS!
He couldn’t work out whether the pink, bubbly logo meant this had once been an energy drink or an alcopop bottling plant. He hoped it was the first one. They didn’t need alcohol on the castle grounds. Alcohol was a Very. Very. Bad. Idea. Alcohol caused problems.
Once again he scanned the car park for signs of root humps and the cinderblock sides of the warehouse for any sign of those faint branching patterned stains that growth tendrils would have left behind. It appeared that the virus hadn’t discovered this place yet. All the same, he summoned Private Gosling over to stand right beside him and ready the fire extinguisher for use.
‘Anything inside moves, you spray like crazy.’
‘Aye, Corkie.’
Corkie scowled at him.
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘Right then. Ready, lads?’ He reached for the handle of the delivery-bay door and tugged hard on it. The large door rattled noisily aside on runners that screamed pitifully for a squirt of lubricant. Inside it was gloomy but not dark. The roof was punctuated with two rows of scum-fogged skylight windows and they could see what they’d expected to see: plant machinery, storage vats, pallets of wood on which cling-film-wrapped boxed product waited patiently for a truck that was never going to come.
The concrete floor was damp and puddled in places where rain had leaked through the roof. A solitary tree sapling a metre high was growing out of the middle of the floor where the concrete had given way and light from the skylights above had offered a chance of solar nourishment.
Nature’s a canny bastard.
Corkie inhaled deeply, his nostrils whistling in the silence as he did. No yeasty smell. He puffed out his breath and sniffed again just to be sure. That odour, that musty, brewery odour, they’d come to realize, was a fair indicator of where the virus had concentrated its mass into festering pools.
Nothing.
It just smelt of damp and the faintest hint of diesel sludge and grease.
‘Looks all clear, lads. Gosling, Jameson, you two just do a once-around recce inside the warehouse. The rest of you scruffy Herberts, let’s make a start by grabbing these pallets.’
Several pallets were stacked high with plastic bottles of Schloop! – whatever the hell that was – and blanketed in thick swatches of polythene wrapping.
Corkie cut through it with his machete, then organized his men into a human chain, grabbing twelve-packs of the drink and passing them down to be stacked in the back of the trucks.
They’d just cleared the second pallet when Corkie heard Gosling’s voice bouncing off the roof of the warehouse.
‘Sarge! Sarge!’
‘Shit!’ Corkie hissed. His men froze and looked to him for orders. ‘Gosling? What’s up?’ he barked in reply.
‘Sir, over here!’ The voice echoed around the warehouse. It could have come from any direction.
‘Where the hell are you?’
Just then they heard boots pounding the concrete, webbing jangling, and Jameson appeared to their left, emerging from behind a large iron vat.
‘Sir, we’ve found a survivor.’
Corkie nodded at his men to carry on with the task at hand and swiftly followed as Jameson led him down a narrow walkway between rows of cylindrical brewing tanks linked by a mad spaghetti of rusting pipes. He felt as if he were walking through the digestive tract of some large mechanical beast.
‘Just one survivor?’
‘Yeah . . . a young boy. He looks in a pretty bad way, sir.’
Jameson took a left turn between two vats and ducked under the pipes that linked them. ‘Over here.’
Corkie followed. ‘I said recce the perimeter . . . not dive into the middle. How the bloody hell did you find him?’
‘We heard him crying. We just followed the sound.’
They turned another corner and found Gosling kneeling down beside a small child, his knees drawn up protectively, painfully thin arms around them, hugging them, face buried and sobbing.
Corkie hurried over and squatted down beside them. ‘All right, son,’ he said in the softest tone his gravelly voice could muster. ‘It’s all right. Help’s here.’
The boy was barely clothed. Gosling had found an old rag nearby and thrown it over his narrow shoulders. Even so, Corkie could see there was extensive scarring and livid red welts on the pale skin of his tiny frail body.
The first thought that occurred to him was that the boy must have been physically abused. The world might have ended, but there were still bad people out there.
‘We’re going to take you with us, son, OK? Get you cleaned up and fed. We’re going to take care of—’
The boy raised his face from his arms and Corkie could see the right side of his face was terribly scarred, a swirling spiderweb of tight, ridged flesh from his scalp all the way down his cheek to his mouth.
‘Jesus!’
He recoiled, staggering backwards.
‘It’s OK, Sarge. They’re old scars. It’s not infection.’
Corkie steadied himself and leaned forward again, carefully reaching out for the boy’s chin, lifting it and turning the child’s face to get a better look. ‘You’re right.’ He’d seen enough old wound scarring in his time.
He looked up at Gosling a
nd Jameson. ‘Third-degree burns. Bad ones. That’s what the scarring is.’ He gestured at the boy’s short dark hair. In places, where the scarred tissue was, he was bald. That was skin that was never, ever, going to grow hair again.
‘And see? Real hair. He’s real.’ He rested a hand lightly on the boy’s shoulder. ‘You poor, poor little bastard. Let’s get you out of—’
The boy looked up at him and finally opened his mouth. ‘They’re . . . right . . . here,’ he whispered. ‘They’re everywhere.’
It was then that Corkie heard it. All around them, the soft rasp of movement, the gentle clack of hard chitin brushing against rusting ironwork, the creak of machinery under the weight of subtly shifting bodies.
‘Oh shit,’ whispered Corkie.
CHAPTER 19
Corkie reached up slowly and flicked on his helmet torch. The narrow space around them had previously been gloomily illuminated by the filtered shards of light from above, but was now caught in the tight, stark, glare of his beam. Gosling and Jameson did likewise, pulling out torches, snapping them on and beginning to sweep left and right in panicked jerking movements.
‘All right, lads . . . Let’s all stay calm,’ Corkie whispered.
The sound of scraping and movement was increasing, coming from all directions now. Corkie reached out and scooped the small boy up into one arm, dirty rag and all. The child struggled and whimpered in his grasp.
‘Shhhh, be still. There’s a good boy.’
He signalled for Jameson to lead the way out of this constricted cul-de-sac of piping and machinery. The sooner they were in more open space the better.
‘Jesus . . . I can hear them getting closer!’
‘Just get moving, Jameson . . . and keep your bloody voice down.’
Jameson picked up his riot shield and moved cautiously out. Half a dozen metres up the narrow space towards the junction they’d turned into, he ducked under the piping and then squatted down behind the grounded shield, looking left then right into the walkway beyond.
The others joined him there in a huddle, Gosling at the rear. The sound of scraping and skittering was louder still, the echoes blending the noise together into a soft kettle hiss.
In the distance they could hear their colleagues, their voices, the scrape of their boots, the thump, rustle and swish of packages of drink being tossed from one pair of hands to the next, down the human chain. He heard the rumble of the truck’s engine . . . and realized Morris was backing it up to the delivery-bay door to make it easier for the lads to load into it.
Corkie fumbled for the handle of the machete tucked into the belt of his webbing.
‘We should call out to the others!’ whispered Gosling.
Corkie panned his head left to right, his torch beam making patterns of shadows on the cinderblock wall in front of them. The hiss of rustling movement was getting louder. Surely the others were hearing that now? Or was the noise just here, around them?
‘Let’s make a run for it, Sarge,’ said Jameson.
He nodded. The route back to the others was straightforward: turn right and follow the cinderblock wall to the end, turn right again, follow the wall to the end . . . and right again. It would be quicker cutting back through the plant’s guts, the way they’d come. But he really didn’t fancy that.
Something glinted in the beam of his torch. He turned to look at Jameson and saw a glistening trail of milky gunk spattered on his shoulder strap, as if a pigeon had relieved itself. He looked up just in time to see something descending fast.
It zoomed down, landed heavily on Jameson’s head: a bulbous glistening body the size of a basketball. Limbs protruding from it, random in apparent design and purpose, like utensils from a penknife, every one of them sharp and ragged. The limbs flexed, unfolded and closed around his head as he screamed.
Corkie yanked out his machete and swung it, hacking through the thin chitin shell. It splintered and cracked like cooked crab, spattering strings of pearly white gunk through the air.
Over Jameson’s screaming he could hear the man’s skull crackle like a boiled egg being shelled.
‘Spray the bastard!’
Gosling nodded, shunted out of his frozen torpor. He aimed the nozzle of the extinguisher towards Jameson’s flailing body and the grotesque creature encasing his head, and pumped the trigger. Salt water under high pressure spurted out in a hard jet and splashed over both of them. The creature reacted instantly with a squealing hiss, released its vice-like grip on Jameson and drew back.
Beside him, Corkie heard a soft thump and saw that a second creature had landed a metre away. He glanced upwards and saw a glistening rope ascending to the warehouse roof. And there, in the harsh beam of his torch, he could see the entire ceiling alive with the things, like an inverted ant’s nest reacting to the sudden exposure to daylight . . . a squirming carpet of glistening bodies and sharp-edged blades and spines.
He swung his machete down at the second creature, aiming at its unprotected bulbous centre. His blade sliced through without obstruction and the creature flopped lifelessly to the ground, limbs still quivering with unfulfilled purpose.
‘Sarge! We’ve got to GO!’ screamed Gosling.
Corkie looked down at Jameson. He was still alive and gurgling even though there seemed to be nothing left of his face but an excavated cavern of muscle, bone, teeth and tissue.
He’s gone. Poor bastard’s gone. You can’t save him.
‘OK, that way!’ He pointed right with his machete. ‘GO! GO!’
Glistening threads began to descend from the ceiling all around, like spiders summoned by vibrations in their web, and down them came more of the creatures.
‘Don’t look, lad,’ Corkie hissed. The boy buried his face into Corkie’s chest and clung to him tightly as he staggered after Gosling.
He heard a gunshot. A few of his men still carried guns. Force of habit. Shotguns mainly. Good for only one thing really: a guaranteed one-shot kill, but only right up close.
Gosling reached the corner and skidded to a halt in front of him. Corkie thumped into him and saw why he’d stopped. Between the cinderblock wall and the labyrinth of machinery, no more than a metre’s width, the way was filled with the things, glistening abdomens in the process of detaching from the ‘slide ropes’, leaving gluey strings that stretched and finally snapped.
‘Gosling! Don’t just sit there gawping, spray a bloody path through!’
He tried to swap his machete to his other hand. I’m going to need both hands.
Corkie peeled the boy’s arms from around his neck and put him down. ‘I can’t hold you!’ He fumbled once again into the pouches of his webbing and found a flashbang. He pulled it out, uncapped it, pulled the pin and held the release catch. Ready to use.
Gosling was spraying, pumping the lever and jetting salt water in front of them like a fireman. The creatures hissed and recoiled from it, backing away into the relative safety of the labyrinthine innards of pipes, machinery and vats.
‘Behind!’ the boy squealed, and tugged hard on his belt. Corkie turned to see a swarm of the creatures approaching them. In motion, they reminded him of daddy-long-legses; fully extended, he guessed their limbs were nearly two metres long. Fragile-looking but clearly strong enough to heft their unarmoured bodies up to almost head height as they skittered along, top heavy, almost comical.
He tossed his flashbang at the floor between them. It clattered and rolled across the concrete. He didn’t wait for it to go off, just grabbed the boy’s wrist and dragged him after Gosling who’d made his way a dozen metres ahead, spraying and pumping the cylinder’s pressure up frantically.
They were down at the end wall, approaching the second corner of the warehouse when he heard the percussive thump of the flashbang go off behind them.
He caught up with Gosling as he reached the second corner. The man tossed the fire extinguisher down and it clanged noisily, a metallic ring that echoed deafeningly. ‘It’s empty!’
‘We’re ne
arly there.’ Corkie peeked round the corner and saw the light from the wide-open delivery-bay door. The rest of his men were clustered there, circled around the rear of the truck. They’d picked up their riot shields and had formed a semicircular shield wall.
Good boys.
It was a manoeuvre he’d drilled into them day after day, a revival of medieval battlefield tactics for modern soldiers. They were hacking, from behind the safety of the wall, at a dozen or so of the creatures that had dropped down nearby.
‘WE’RE OVER HERE!’ he bellowed. His voice boomed and echoed and he could see some of their heads turning one way then the other. ‘To your right! WE’RE COMING IN FROM YOUR RIGHT!’
Several threads began to unfurl and descend from the roof between them. He looked up and saw the roof of the warehouse was sparsely populated on this side. But it wasn’t going to remain that way for long. Caught in the glare of his beam, he could see the creatures stampeding their way across the ceiling, spindly limbs clasping metal support spars, puncturing holes in the thin corrugated-iron roof to get a better grip . . . moving with frightening agility as if gravity were an irrelevance to them.
Gosling pulled out a thin-bladed katana from his belt, one of a haul they’d lifted from a martial-arts store. ‘We’ve got to go! NOW!’
Corkie nodded. ‘You swing and run, Gosling. Cut us a path!’ He picked the boy up again. No shield for either of them to cower behind. Just twenty or so metres to sprint. He decided he’d move quicker carrying the boy rather than dragging him by the hand.
‘GO. GO. GO!’ He thumped Gosling hard between his shoulders.
They charged forward, weaving around the dangling tendrils that had already unfurled. Corkie glanced up again. More were coming down now, not actually ‘unfurling’ as he’d first assumed. In his mind he saw these tendrils as the kraken’s version of abseiling ropes, just like special-forces troops sliding down ropes from some hovering black hawk, but instead he glimpsed glistening torsos above, ejecting wet strings from their middle, like spiders crapping out webbing, a liquid-like paste that seemed to congeal in the few seconds it took to drool to the ground, making a robust thread strong enough to take their weight.
