Authors: Guy Adams
Geeta Sahni grips the bench beneath her as the police van takes a speed bump too fast. Everyone sways and collides with one another like the steel balls in a Newton’s Cradle. If the passengers weren’t all so terrified they would be shouting at the driver.
Andrew, with sweaty, nervous palms and a false smile, is sitting to Geeta’s left. ‘I don’t know why we’re doing this,’ he says. ‘This is a job for the SFC.’
‘You think they weren’t already called?’ replies one of the other officers. ‘From what I heard they’re drafting in everybody.’ Geeta recognises him: Leeson, she remembers – they were at training college the same year.
‘The union’s going to have kittens,’ says Andrew, ‘I’m not legally covered to carry this.’ He looks down at the Heckler and Koch G36 assault rifle he has been issued with, staring at it as if it might change into something else, something less terrifying.
‘You must have bagged decent training scores,’ says Geeta, ‘or they wouldn’t have given it to you.’
She has been thinking about this, trying to decide why she has been drafted in, and this is the only reason she can think of. Her performance during weapons training was deemed exemplary, much to her smug satisfaction and the chagrin of her male colleagues.
‘Not bad,’ Andrew admits, ‘but that’s a bit different, isn’t it? I’m shit hot on
Grand Theft Auto
too, but they didn’t ask me to drive.’
There’s a ripple of laughter at this, a brief release of nerves before the van draws to a halt and nobody is in the mood to laugh anymore.
There is the bang of a fist on the side of the van and the rear doors open.
The police officers step out, moving quickly but awkwardly, not sure of what they’re going to see once they’re on the street.
There is already the sound of automatic fire, the dull crack of munitions that is a world away from the rich, Hollywood noise of firefights. Gunshots are loud, flat and pinched – there is nothing romantic about them when they are in the air around you, rather than being piped from a Dolby 7.1 speaker system.
‘Come on! Come on!’ An SCO19 officer is herding them into formation, facing the oncoming crowd of aggressors. Geeta is looking for the enemy, head low, anticipating retaliatory fire. Then she realises the enemy are the civilians marching up the street toward them.
‘They’re not armed, sir,’ she shouts, then notices the bodies of those who came before her: fallen firearms officers being trampled by the advancing crowd, their black body armour glistening wet in the afternoon sun.
‘They don’t need to be,’ the commanding officer replies, ‘now pick your targets and fire. We’ve got to stop them overwhelming us.’
For a moment, Geeta can’t bring herself to pull the trigger. It goes against everything she knows, shooting into an unarmed crowd. Then she begins to recognise the civilians for what they are. They move in a jerky, uncoordinated fashion, their faces are unresponsive as shop window dummies.
Next to her, despite – or perhaps because of – his fear, Andrew is the first to fire and she watches as a couple of rounds hit one of the first of the crowd. The target is a young male, his baseball cap flying off as the bullet hits him in the face. He topples
backwards, thrashing on the floor, but is soon back on his feet and advancing towards them, his face just a red whorl. Geeta thinks of James Hodgkins, of the impossibility of Harry Reid, and she opens fire.
The bullets are having little to no effect, the crowd drawing silently closer despite the hail of copper, zinc, steel and lead that the officers are hurling at them.
‘Hold the line!’ the commanding officer is shouting. ‘Take their legs out from under them!’
The officers try, and many of the crowd do fall, but that doesn’t stop them dragging themselves along the tarmac towards them.
‘Fall back!’
The officers don’t need to be told twice, running up the road to gain vital distance between themselves and an army that simply won’t respond to gunfire in the way they should.
‘What are they?’ Leeson shouts agitatedly. ‘Why don’t they stay down?’
Geeta knows. Even a bus didn’t stop Harry Reid, she remembers, so what chance do
they
have?
It is something the world often talks about – the speed with which normality can vanish. Krishnin’s sleepers by no means attack at once – some have been quicker at digging themselves free than others – but they hit in such numbers, wave after wave of them, that the country goes from business as usual to borderline apocalypse within the space of single day.
Most people are slow to accept the sleepers for what they are. Words like ‘riot’ and ‘acts of terror’ are thrown around with wild
abandon on the rolling news networks, until the footage of these strange, doll-like cadavers simply can’t be denied any longer. The emergency services are tight-lipped, the government maintaining a silence until early in the evening when the nation’s leader appears on every channel trying to reassure a nation already gone past the point of sane return.
Martial Law is declared. The streets fill with gunfire and death.
And, across the oceans, the rest of the world looks on and begins to wonder if the threat may spread to them. And if so, it wonders
what
precisely it should do about that.
My mind was raging. I was beyond logical thought. I was white noise. I was fury. I was The Fear.
‘The countdown,’ said Jamie. ‘We can’t have been here that long.’
‘To hell with the countdown,’ said Krishnin, still lying on the floor. ‘I’m not an idiot. I was ready, so I sent the signal. There was always a chance something could go wrong. Shining might have told someone. He might have known more than he was letting on, even after I had been so …
encouraging
. Who waits for countdowns? It was an automatic system that would have kicked in if something had happened to me … Not that anything can happen to me that hasn’t already. I am dead. Lingering consciousness infesting old meat.’
I heard the words but they didn’t register. Like water hitting a fire, they flared into steam. We had failed.
I
had failed. Again. Over and over again.
‘What are we going to do?’ Jamie asked. I think he was asking me. As if I could possibly know.
And then I did.
‘Why haven’t you just vanished?’ I said to Krishnin.
‘Why should I? I’m enjoying the moment. Besides … what does it matter now? I think I’m better off here than in the real London right now, don’t you think? I don’t know how many hours have passed there – it’s always so difficult to tell. But either my little army is already leaving its mark on your country or they’re clawing their way up through the earth to do so. There’s nothing you’ve got that can stop all of them. Break one apart and another will take its place. Death only comes once. I’m the proof of that.’
‘Yes,’ I said, standing over him. ‘And maybe that’s something you should have thought about. We’re going back there. All three of us.’
‘You’re giving me orders? How British of you. I don’t think I have to do a thing I don’t want to.’
‘I can make you.’
‘Really? How? Are you going to threaten to kill me?’ He laughed at that.
‘No. I’m going to threaten
not
to.’
He stared at me, not understanding. I looked at Jamie and saw the same look of confusion.
‘You said it yourself. You can only die once. Sünner’s drug is a permanent solution. Did you ever think that might be a problem?’
‘The opposite, surely?’
I leaned down, pressed the barrel of the gun next to his left knee and fired. The recoil knocked the gun from my hand but that didn’t matter. I focused, then picked it up again.
Jamie was panicking, hands to his face. Krishnin was staring at me. Those dead eyes of his would probably show fear if they could.
‘The Beretta 92FS,’ I said, ‘a popular military weapon. Nine millimetre cartridge, not much in the way of stopping power, but when you have fifteen in the magazine you can afford to fling them around a little.’
I looked at Krishnin’s knee. While the entry wound was small, the impact had done its work; the knee was shattered. I pushed at his lower leg with my foot. Even with my lack of solidity it pivoted quite freely.
‘I don’t think you’ll be using that leg ever again,’ I said. I aimed the pistol at his hand and fired again, taking out all four fingers and leaving congealed, useless stumps. The gun had jumped free of my grip again; there was no way my aim would be up to much over long distances, not with my inability to hold it firmly. That was fine. I planned on using the gun for surgery not target practice.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Jamie, his voice terrified.
‘I’m proving a point.’ I said, turning back to Krishnin. ‘If I can’t kill you like this – ever – then how do you think existence is going to be after I’ve really gone to town on you? What if I just cut those legs right off? The arms too? Or maybe I just set fire to you and we can all sit around and watch you pop and hiss for a while. You just became the easiest man in the world to torture. Normally, however bad it gets, you know that you’re going to be able to pass out. Or die. But I can make you nothing. A burned stump. A fucking
soup
of a man. Still alive. Still aware. Forever. Or …’
‘Or?’ Krishnin had lost his bravado now. While his doll-like face might not be able to show the emotion inside, I knew I had his attention.
‘Or I can actually end it for you. That’s my offer. That’s the
reward I have at my disposal. I can make you cease to be. Sound attractive?’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Right now you don’t have much to lose do you? Do as I tell you. Do
exactly
as I tell you and I’ll keep my promise. Fuck me around and I’ll just start whittling bits off you.’
‘And what’s to stop me just traveling?’ he asked. ‘I could leave you two here at a moment’s thought.’
‘Yes, you could,’ I agreed, and shot him in the other knee. ‘But you’d have a real job dragging yourself out of the warehouse, the other warehouse, the
real
one, before we came chasing after you. And if you make us do that, the deal’s off. So think about it very carefully.’
‘But he’s already triggered the signal,’ said Jamie. ‘What’s the point? He’s already won!’
‘Then he won’t mind doing as he’s told for a bit will he?’ I said. ‘We’re all going back together.’
I soon had cause to regret having shot the bastard in the legs. Given how difficult it was for Jamie and me to interact with physical objects, it was perhaps foolish to have created a big one that needed dragging around. Yet, as annoying as it was, I couldn’t help relishing my little eruption of violence. I hated that man more than I have ever hated anyone. I enjoyed what I did to him. Sorry. Be disgusted at me if you want. Frankly I don’t care.
We found a sack truck Krishnin had used to transport his equipment – that at least made the work a little easier. We rolled him down the stairs, strapped him on, and between us managed to push him out of the warehouse.
There was still no sign of the creatures that had been loitering
outside when we arrived. Whatever had drawn them off was still doing its job.
‘It feels wrong,’ said Jamie as we wheeled our way back towards the van, ‘just leaving Tim there.’
‘Shining,’ I said, ‘his name was August Shining. And it doesn’t matter now. He’s dead.’
I was just about keeping it together, partly for Jamie’s sake, partly because I was focusing the anger and panic on keeping myself moving. Still, as we made our way along that surreal, twisted version of Shad Thames I felt The Fear bubbling away inside me. It had fed well. My earlier failures, the stains on my personnel file that had seen me relegated to this section in the first place, faded away to nothing. They had dumped me here because they thought I couldn’t do any more harm. I had managed to prove them wrong. The operation was a bust, Shining was dead and Krishnin’s plan had come to pass. I failed to see how I could fuck up any more than I had already.
‘Wait.’ Jamie stopped and the sack truck pulled free of his grip.
I looked ahead. To our right was the large building whose glass front had been stretched sky high, and reflected in it was a sea of movement. The creatures, the Ghost Population, were on the move, just around the corner and coming right for us.
As we watched a figure suddenly appeared, hurtling into the street. This must have been what had attracted them in the first place, this was what they wanted: Tamar.
She saw us and the look of fear on her face intensified. ‘They are behind!’ she shouted, ‘they are …’
They are coming
, I thought. And we didn’t stand a chance of stopping them.
‘If we don’t move,’ said Jamie, ‘they might pass us by. It’s her and Krishnin, they’re real. They’re drawing them. We have to move back. Be still. Hope they don’t notice us.’
And what about Tamar? One more failure? One more victim? One more person I couldn’t help? The thought of that curdled inside me. The Fear, only barely held back through all of this, began to burst out.
I might not have had real lungs there in the Ghost Universe but my breathing became shallow nonetheless. The white noise that beat down on me during an attack hit me like a wave. I saw Tamar mere feet away, not understanding why we simply stood there, the look on her face now a mixture of fear and contempt. She recognised my inaction. She knew I had frozen. Just another witness to the stupid waste of skin and bone that was Toby Greene. I held my insubstantial hands to my face feeling they had
always
been insubstantial. I was the Insubstantial Man. I was the eternal ghost haunting my own stupid life.
Then I thought of Shining, of the unshakable faith he had placed in me. The first person ever to have done so. To have seen something. Some potential. Some
point
. And here I was, with him barely cold, trying to prove him wrong.
I fucking burned.
The air filled with darkness, a wave of shadow that flooded out of me and launched skywards. The dark thing Shining and I had first seen in this plane when we had rescued Jamie. The thing that Jamie hadn’t understood. That lethal presence that had surged towards us. Towards
me
. That wasn’t something that lived here. Here in this plane where thought was everything, where we had fought by strength of will, it was something I brought with me. Now it took flight again. The Fear. Given form.
Shed by the silly bastard that had let it hold onto him for all of his life. Who had let it control him. Damn him. Push him. Kick him. Cheapen him.