The Veil

by Torstein Beck

  It didn’t matter anyway. He couldn’t swim any more. He had to breathe. He had to suck something into his lungs. He opened his mouth and it filled with water. It slammed against the back of his throat and he wretched. His stomach twisted and folded and his lungs convulsed and seized in his chest, squeezing against his ribcage, his diaphragm spasming against them. This was it. This was drowning.

  He accepted it. He wanted it. The pain was too much.

  And then he broke the surface. His entire body inflated with air and it was like being born. His ears stopped ringing and the light returned. He gasped and gasped again, still swimming and fighting, taking water in his mouth with every manic jerk of his limbs.

  He looked around, water lashing his face. He’d drifted no more than twenty meters from the bridge. The river was slow moving. But, it was still deep and wide and cold enough to kill him. He needed to get out, and fast.

  He saw the closest bank and scissored his legs, propelling himself overarm towards it. With a shivering lurch, he reached for a boulder and hugged it for dear life, its slippery, alga covered surface slick under his blue fingers, digging into the cuts on his midriff, pressing the soaked bandages into the raw skin there. His legs drifted behind in the current, his body half submerged as he caught what he could of his breath. His jeans billowed gently under the surface and the first gust of wind chill hit him.

  From the panic, the adrenaline and the exertion, his heart was thundering inside him. He could feel it in his cheeks, his eyes, his tongue. The sound of rushing blood drummed in his skull and forced everything else out. Droplets ran down his forehead, merging with tears. He clung to the boulder, his mind not seeming to function. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t feel. He wasn’t sure whether he was glad, or horrified that he’d once again survived when he shouldn’t have. It seemed to keep happening. He didn’t know why he couldn’t just die.

  An explosion erupted behind him on the bridge and his brain sputtered to life. He remembered what was going on now. How he’d gotten there.

  He was still alive, but for how long he couldn’t say. Unprotected and alone out there in the wilderness — if hypothermia didn’t kill him, there were always the monsters.

  With another full-body shiver, he pulled his legs up and scrambled out of the water, leaving black trails of water on the stone.

  The banks up from the river were steep but they were his only option. It was nearing the middle of the day and the temperature had already levelled off. It wouldn’t get any warmer.

  The stiff wind whisked away the last semblances of body heat and made the decision for him. There was no way he could stay out in the open like this. Another few hours and the temperature would start to plunge. He’d never dry off in the open air and eventually, he’d slip into hypothermia. If he slept, he knew he’d never wake up. He shook the drips from his hands, clenched them to try to get the blood moving, and then wrung out the bottom of his shirt. His socks squelched inside his shoes as he started the ascent. He took a striding bound up the hill and latched onto a tree branch, pulling himself upwards with all the strength he had left.

  It was a slog, made only more difficult by his stiff muscles and heavy clothes. His jointed creaked.

  Great plumes of steam erupted from his nose and mouth with each heave. Branches bent and snapped under his weight as he crawled higher, until eventually, gasping for breath, he crested the bank, black with mud.

  He squinted through the dim woodland neighbouring the road and tried to make out what was happening on the bridge through the unsettling blur that had clouded his vision. He was shivering so violently he couldn’t see straight.

  Things had fallen eerily silent now. The vehicles on his side of the bridge had dispersed and raced off where the highway was wide enough, but the crush of cars on the bridge had formed their own blockade and now lay still. As he approached between the trees, clutching at his aching chest and rubbing his arms, he could make out open doors and unmanned military jeeps.

  He slid down into the drainage ditch in a cascade of stones and leaves and then scrambled up onto the road, pausing and looking around, suddenly feeling very exposed. The silence was absolute. Not even the birds were singing.

  Nothing was moving on the bridge. There were no people running. There were no soldiers screaming. No guns firing. There were no monsters feasting, or skulking, or hunting. There was nothing.

  As he eased closer, the only things moving were the idling engines of the abandoned cars and the smoking remnants of a military jeep halfway down the bridge. The entire cab was exploded and warped from the inside. The door pillars were bent out like the teeth of a venus flytrap. Aaro swallowed but the lump in his throat was too big to move. Someone in that jeep had pulled the pin on a grenade and then either not thrown it or dropped it. Whoever was inside at the time — or whatever was inside — wasn’t inside anymore. They were strewn all across the bridge.

  Aaro shivered again and forced himself forward, measuring his steps and picking his way between the shards of glass littered across the tarmac.

  The closest car was an abandoned hatchback. The engine had stalled but the door’s warning chime was still dinging incessantly. Aaro got closer and stole a glance through the window, expecting the worst, but it was empty. He exhaled in relief and skirted it, jumping into the driver’s seat. He pulled the door closed as quietly as he could and locked it, just to be sure. He didn’t think it would make any difference, but it made him feel a little better.

  He looked around the cabin for anything dry. His hair was still wet and every second or two he had to sniff back his running nose. The car was pretty much cleaned out but across the back seat was an old blanket. He shed his shirt and snatched it up, throwing it around his shoulders. It was musty and dog fur flew around his head as he shouldered it, but it was warm and it was dry.

  He cowered in the seat, doubled over, rubbing his shuddering ribs, willing his diaphragm to cooperate. He tried the ignition but it wouldn’t turn over. It just fired uselessly. He would have done anything for a heater to be blasting. His survival instinct took over as he glanced at the rearview, spying a lot of cars with open doors. His mind was made up and he was already on the road again, squelching his was towards a minivan with the side door open. He climbed in and let himself smile. There under the back seats was a black duffle bag. He hauled it out tore it open, almost breaking down when he saw the pile of men’s clothes inside. He wiped his cheeks and rummaged through them. Jeans, socks, underwear, jumpers, a jacket and even gloves.

  He ransacked the contents until the harsh reality came bounding home once more. Under the opposite seat was a small pink suitcase. A little girl’s, no doubt. He paused and looked at it, only now wondering at the fate of the family that surely ran, or were torn, from this minivan. He hadn’t seen any bodies, but did they eat where they killed, or did they simply drag their prey off to devour them?

  He hadn’t seen any creatures either. If he had, he sure as hell wouldn’t have ran onto the bridge. At that thought he picked his head up and panned around the windows, looking in every direction, the paranoia dumping more adrenaline into his system. He climbed in, pulled the door shut and changed into jeans, a thick knitted sweater and jacket. He towelled his hair off with a spare t-shirt and tossed the remains back into the bag. He wiggled his freshly socked toes and checked for keys in the ignition. There were none. He snatched up his sodden boots, checked again for the keys, knowing they weren’t there, and slid back out onto the bridge.

  Now, a little warmer, and in dry clothes, he realised how biting the wind was. The asphalt was sharp through his socks and his shoes dripped as he carried them along. He could still hear the sound of an idling engine on the breeze, but its whereabouts were a mystery in the throng of cars were piled on the bridge. Aaro came to a blockade in the road and tossed his shoes over the two nose-to-nose cars that formed the barrier. They bounced with a dull thud somewhere on the other side and he turned, sliding sideways over the bonnet of one of
them, swinging his legs over. He dropped on to the roadway and looked around. One of his boots was there but the other must have bounced on impact. He cursed under his breath and knelt, looking for it.

  He needed to find a running car to use the footwell heaters to dry them. Without his boots, he’d be totally stranded. There was no way he could make his way to Oslo shoeless, that was for certain. And he didn’t like his chances of finding a new pair of size tens somewhere in this mess.

  He grumbled and turned around, scanning the dark spaces under the nearby cars. It took a while but eventually, he spotted a lace sticking out from behind the wheel of a nearby sedan. He crawled towards it and slunk lower to the ground, pressing his chest to the floor.

  The asphalt dug into his stomach, pressing on the still fresh wounds as he crawled forward to reach it. The underside of the car was still hot. He could feel it on the back of his neck as he crept under the wheel arch. His fingers stretched out and found the heel. He afforded himself a thin smile and pulled it to his chest.

  He started to turn around, but as he did, his blood ran cold. There was a quiet squeak of springs, a breath as the shocks compressed. The car jostled a little above him, rolling backwards and forwards as something moved around inside. He could feel the weight of it pressing down and then it relieving. Whatever was skulking around moved to the passenger side and paused. He stayed deathly still, lying face down, torso hidden beneath the car, legs and feet exposed behind. Very exposed.

  He closed his eyes and stayed motionless, trying to breathe away the intense feeling of blood in his temples. It was like the blood was flowing up, and refused to come down. He could taste it.

  The car above fell quiet for a moment and Aaro risked an inch. He tried to rationalise it. It could just be another survivor. Someone holed up and hiding in their car. Someone like him. Someone who was terrified and waiting for the horror to subside. For all he knew, they were scared and thinking that a monster was crawling around under their car, and they were just moving around, daring to get a look at its back from the window.

  The notion made his heart slow a little, but it was instantly undone as the chilling scrape of claws on glass filtered down to him.

  There was a low growling hiss and then the delicate creak of a car door being pushed open. Aaro racked his brain, hoping to God he hadn’t done something as stupid as crawl under an open door. No, it was shut. He was sure of it. His throat went dry as the car tilted above him. He had his face pressed to the ground and the dust from the road and the undercarriage stung his eyes. He could feel the wheel arch touching his shoulder as the weight moved right over the top of him.

  He was wrong. Shit. He was wrong. He must not have noticed and the door must have been ajar. He was stupid— cold and not thinking straight, not cautious enough — and now it would cost him his life. There was nowhere to go. The monster would slither from the car right by his feet and it would drag him by the ankles into the open and tear him to shreds.

  He screwed his eyes up and blinked them open and found his vision blurred through tears. In the darkness under the car, he saw Emilie. She smiled at him, lying with her nose to his, her arms folded under her chin. She wrinkled her brow at him and twisted her lip, pained to see him cry.

  ‘Don’t worry, baby,’ she whispered, edging closer. ‘We’ll be together soon. Just let it happen. Come to me. Let’s be together again. Aaro, I miss you. Come to me.’

  Aaro slammed his eyes shut and pressed his face into the ground until it hurt. He sobbed into the dirt as the door groaned open and the car rebounded on the springs, finally free of the weight.

  Whatever was inside wasn’t anymore.

  Aaro sobbed.

  This was it.

  SEVENTEEN

  PLAYING GOD

  2082 AD

  His rise to fame was as steep and meteoric as the launch of the Argus shuttle itself.

  The name had become popular and synonymous with the project in its entirety, so it seemed only natural to name the shuttle that too. It had blasted off from Cape Canaveral almost twelve years ago now, but since then, the Argus, while carrying the specimens, had travelled out to the GSC Space Station — a gigantic structure in orbit around the moon. This station, the GSCSS, or ‘G-Sess’, as everyone took to calling it, was the launch pad and development station for all the major missions in the last thirty years. The first manned mission to Mars. The rovers on Titan. The ‘Eyes’ — gigantic spheres fitted with hundreds of telescopes and cameras jettisoned into space without the need for propulsion, spreading out into the vast emptiness, seeing, and subsequently documenting the universe for us. It was how we spotted Orsus for what it was.

  The Argus had docked with the G-Sess where the engineers had been working on an experimental nuclear fusion propulsion engine. Building it on earth was totally out of the question. It was basically a gigantic bomb, and if it went off before or during the launch, it would have been responsible for more fallout than the Planetary Nuclear War had, in its entirety, more than forty years before. But in space, without the constructs of gravity and the other forces detrimental to on-earth engineering projects, they could dream big, and they did.

  The Saturn V rocket, the one that put man on the moon, had seven million pounds of thrust — and when compared with the measly seventy thousand produced by an engine fitted to the Boeing 747 passenger planes — some the most famous of the fixed-wing aircraft of the early twenty-first century — that might seem like a lot. This new fission engine, however, produced forty-six million. It would accelerate the shuttle to near light speed, completing the journey in just eighteen years. It was a phenomenal feat of engineering. And now, more than a decade after the launch, the shuttle was out of range.

  They knew this would happen. It was simply too far away to contact any more. The ship was programmed for the approach and landing, and the automated systems should do their job from there on out. The shuttle would release the landing pod which would touch down on the surface of Orsus while the rocket orbited. Sensors in the specimens’ rigs would notify the shuttle when they returned and food scent would draw them back into their cryo pods. The automated systems would re-engage, the organic-rovers would be flash-frozen, and the landing pod would return to the shuttle, ready to make the return trip. After approximately twelve years of no contact, the ship would come back in range and begin transmitting the data to Earth again. That was estimated in the year 2093. By that time, Gertlinger would be seventy-four. He hated that prospect.

  He was sixty-two now, and that frightened him enough — he was certainly feeling the wear of the years. Life expectancy was well over a hundred for someone in his financial position. And perhaps even a hundred and twenty was within reach, if he played his cards right. But it was still hit or miss whether he would live to see his creations return to earth. If they returned at all. Nothing was certain.

  So, as he sat, once more in front of a live studio audience, on some mind-numbing chat show only marginally less awful than the last, his mind was in three places, and three times, all at once. He was perched on a leather armchair, facing a young woman, no more than mid-thirties, with dark skin and curly hair. Her name was Eleanor and she was merely a newer version of Tammy. He was there to discuss the next steps of the mission now that the ship was out of transmission range. That was the first time — the now. That’s where his body was.

  The second time that he found himself in was the moment that was displayed on the screen behind him, enlarged for the audience, and the world to see. The launch of the Argus, twelve years ago. They’d already replayed his now world-famous speech — the one given outside the GSC lab in Washington DC and now it was showing the launch from Cape Canaveral. He sat with his head craned and twisted, eyes focused on the screen. This was the second time that he was in at that moment, the time that his eyes saw.

  And the third time, where his mind was, was all the time in between. Watching his speech played back had invoked a little pride, but mostly pain. He remembere
d that day, as he did with most things, quite vividly. After the silence befell the crowd and he finished his speech, Angela had rushed forward and placed her hand on his back. She leaned around him with her PR smile and spoke words of thanks and encouragement into the mic. Gertlinger had been so wired that the only thing he heard was his heart in his ears. Her words had been numb and distant. Applause started slowly in the crowd and then built to a deafening crescendo as she spirited him away from the podium. Now in her embrace, he felt himself settle, and with her arm still around him, she whispered into his ear, almost playfully.

  ‘I think you just put me out of a job,’ she laughed, squeezing him tighter with her arm.

  McPherson gave them a thumbs up as they passed, and then they were off the stage and into the building. She loosened her grip on his waist and he walked under his own steam across the lobby. Their footsteps clinked in unison as they paced the wide marble tiled floor towards the bank of elevators. She pushed the call button and they both stopped. He wanted to ask why she was spiriting him away, and where they were going, but his mouth had gone dry and his ears were still ringing from the speech.

  They both stepped into the elevator in silence and waited patiently for the door to close. When it did, Angela Perrott sighed and unbuttoned her blazer, sucking in a deep lungful of air. He half expected a dressing down for straying off the script, for risking the entire public relations campaign that they were running — but it was just the opposite in fact.