There were several men there, small and with jet-black hair tied back in ponytails. There were four or five horses tethered behind one of the wooden huts, along with a couple of small black yaks. The two Spiral agents stayed for a few minutes at this desolate outpost, just long enough to buy several small cups of butter tea, some potatoes, soya beans and wheat, and for Mongrel to use the local toilet at the edge of the village—effectively a wooden hut on beams that stretched out over a small but breezy ravine. It brought a whole new meaning to the term ‘free fall’.
After Mongrel had followed local custom by burning his used toilet paper—much to his wrinkle-nosed disgust but at the urgent insistence of the villagers dressed in their heavy wraps of Yak fur—they listened to one of the men talking in the fast-spoken local dialect. Carter frowned as he tried to grasp at the odd word of intermingled Chinese.
‘Little guy seem excited about something,’ muttered Mongrel.
Carter nodded. ‘I think he’s trying to warn us.’
‘What, about vast damned bloody drop under toilet seat? I swear, Carter, it enough to give man coronary. I not want to die on bog! I want to die in arms of gorgeous plump woman with arse like two badly parked Land Rovers!’
‘Come on, before they try to sell us something else. They seem to have an addiction to dollars.’
They mounted the KTMs and headed out into the freezing wilderness of broken stone. Far off, they could now see the Himalaya range and the distant, mammoth peak of Qomolangma—otherwise known as Everest—and her many sisters. They were only a distant smudge on the horizon but, even so, they filled the two men with a subtle awe at the majesty of the planet on which they lived.
The bikes pounded along the narrow dirt road, picking up speed now that daylight was on their side once more. Mongrel’s recovery from HAS seemed well under way as they dropped from the higher mountain elevations. The road was deserted. Since their purchase of creamy hot butter tea in the run-down village the Spiral agents had seen nobody.
The road wound down into a valley, the floor of which was littered with huge boulders. Man-made caves lined both sides and as the two men approached the valley’s entrance on their bikes, Carter suddenly halted his machine.
Mongrel pulled up close. ‘You got a bad feeling, bruv?’
Carter nodded. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Carter the world spinning like I had twenty pints of Guinness. I not see danger if it bit me on my fat beer belly. Tell me what you sniff.’
‘It’s too convenient, this place. But there’s no other way through.’
‘How far we from Spiral_R?’
‘About forty klicks. We’re definitely close enough to be near the area where Constanza is supposed to operate. You ready to take on an army, Mongrel?’
Mongrel snorted. ‘I couldn’t take on my old grandmother.’
‘So we just walk into what might be a trap?’
‘Have we any other choice, Carter boy?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Let’s see what they got for us. It only way we get to meet Constanza.’
They eased their bikes forward and the towering valley walls closed in. Carter’s eyes twitched from left to right, trying to see into the small dark hand-hewn caves. And he suddenly realised that something smelled bad; it drifted to him on the breeze, a distant lingering stench. The stench of organic atrophy.
‘Into the valley of the shadow of death,’ muttered Mongrel.
‘What?’
‘I just trying to lighten mood. Maybe we could sing songs?’
‘Sing songs? Just keep your fucking machine gun pointing at those caves!’
‘Only trying to help,’ mumbled the big dentally challenged soldier.
The bikes rumbled across the valley floor, weaving to avoid obstacles. Then, up ahead, a small figure—stooped, and clad in furs—emerged from one of the caves.
‘Here we go,’ muttered Mongrel: The man was dark-skinned, small, with black hair and dressed in heavy yak furs. He carried an SLR, the rifle clasped in gnarled hands that had crusted red skin. But it was his face that caused Mongrel to stop his bike, Carter following suit a couple of seconds later. The man’s face looked ... scorched. The skin was blackened in patches, red-raw in others. Strings of flesh fell from his cheeks and flapped against his jawline, revealing the hollow cavities of his mouth within and the yellowed stumps of worn-out teeth.
Mongrel suddenly raised his H&K but Carter lifted his own weapon and knocked Mongrel’s gun aside. Mongrel’s head snapped right, his expression questioning. Carter gave a shake of his head. They waited as the man approached, his SLR pointed unwaveringly at them.
‘He’s on his own!’ hissed Mongrel. ‘Come on, Carter—we take him, no sweat.’
As the last syllables passed from Mongrel’s lips, so they noticed other figures moving within the gloom of the caves—
all
the caves. Figures stooped, and started to stream slowly from dark holes in the rock—men and women, and a few children, all dressed in furs, all with the same scorched skin and spaghetti-flapping holed faces. Their eyes seemed distant, almost vacant, and they carried an assortment of weapons—from ancient British Army rifles to modern German, American and Russian sub-machine guns. Several even carried H&K MP5Ks—the same weapons that Carter and Mongrel held.
‘Not good,’ snapped Mongrel, looking rapidly from left to right at the closing circle of—what? Is this the army of the insane? he wondered, then licked at his lips behind the neoprene mask.
‘Don’t make any sudden movements,’ growled Carter.
‘I not dream of it, Carter, old boy.’ More and more people were emerging from the caves and plodding across the valley floor. With them came a stench of something rotten.
‘How many?’ muttered Mongrel.
‘At least three hundred, so far,’ said Carter, the hairs on his neck prickling. And still they were emerging from the scatter of caves which lined the valley walls.
‘How many bullets we got between us?’
‘Don’t even fucking think it.’
‘We either shoot or run, Carter.’
‘Or wait.’
‘For
what?’
‘There.’ Carter pointed, and from the throng, which had halted about ten feet from the two men on the bikes, came a woman. She was dressed in the same furs as the people with the deformed and scorched faces, but her beautifully haughty face was held high, skin perfect, eyes a deep gold. She had a mane of dark brown hair which flowed down her back, and she was of modest height but wiry and powerful, with generous hips. She carried a Kalashnikov JK50—an old Nex weapon. She moved gracefully from the rear of the gathered mob to the front, and a hushed silence fell over the crowd. A cold wind blew, and Carter pulled down his mask. His eyes met the woman’s and something clicked in his mind. Something strange, yet...
familiar.
His head tilted gently, and she smiled at him then. She lifted her weapon and pointed the muzzle straight at Carter’s forehead. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We come searching for Angel Constanza. We seek her help. Are you Constanza?’ Carter spoke carefully, his gaze locked to her large and beautiful gold eyes. He could see the scorched aliens around him in peripheral vision. They seemed uneasy, restless, toying with their weapons. As if they were ready to—
‘
Murder
,’ whispered Kade.
‘Cheers, mate.’
Constanza nodded, and she licked at her lips. ‘You are not welcome here, Spiral man. You are trespassers in our land. You are defilers of our soil. You tread our holy mountains with your bloodstained feet. You befoul our pure air with your hate-soiled breath. You carry your weapons of assassination in toxic hands, and your eyes reek of death and destruction and decay and despair.’
‘A simple yes or no would have been enough,’ muttered Mongrel.
‘We have not come with death in our minds. We come seeking only knowledge. The world—your world as well as ours—is in terrible danger. We all face extermination—the human race faces
extinction
—and you have knowledge which could aid us, which could save us all.’
‘You speak of the Evolution Class Warhead,’ Constanza said softly, gold eyes sparkling in the bright Tibetan sunlight. ‘You are not the only ones who have been here seeking such knowledge.’
‘So it exists?’ Mongrel blurted out.
Her gaze turned on him, and he felt suddenly chilled to the core of his soul. She carried death within her cold beauty. ‘Yes, the ECW exists. I programmed it. Even now, it awaits only a simple priming sequence.’
‘The others who came?’ said Carter. ‘Did you tell them where to find it? Did you give them ignition codes?’ A sudden dread that the Nex would reach the weapon before him raised his fear to new heights. This was a situation he had not anticipated.
‘I will tell you what I told them,’ said Constanza, as her soldiers came closer and took the H&K sub-machine guns from the two men’s helpless hands. ‘You are the unholy. You have poisoned my soil. You have burdened my brethren with your toxic world. From this place you will be taken to Temple—and your flesh will be stripped from your bones, and cooked, and consumed to achieve an ultimate and perfect purification.’
‘And I thought day could not get any fucking worse,’ snapped Mongrel, scowling like thunder as Carter and him were dragged from their bikes. The stench of scorched, diseased flesh overwhelmed them as clawed red hands scrabbled eagerly, hungrily, binding the Spiral agents with raze-wire.
The army—numbering perhaps a thousand—moved as a single unit, warily, with many scouts moving ahead and several covering their back trail. Carter and Mongrel were forced to walk near the centre of the mass, surrounded by sweating, stinking fur-clad bodies. Often, fingers would come snaking towards the two men, poking and prodding, and it took every ounce of their discipline for them to refrain from slapping the red gnarled hands away.
‘You ever feel like you a chicken on butcher’s block?’
‘Yeah, that or a prime rump steak. Get the
fuck
off!’ Carter smiled icily as he spoke through gritted teeth. His hands, bound in front of him, steadily dripped droplets of blood to the rocky ground they traversed.
‘At least they’re bringing the bikes,’ said Mongrel. ‘Dumb cunts wheeling them over the bumps.’
‘I think this might be a case of chemically-induced genetic regression, as distinct from the fuckers being naturally stupid.’
‘Har har.’
‘Something amuse you?’
‘We talk of them being stupid, but it is
us
for cooking in da pot.’
‘We must have misheard her,’ said Carter uneasily.
‘No, no, mad bitch say we get all cooked and consumed for purification. In Mongrel books, that mean we due for chop, then pot.’
Constanza moved at the head of her hordes of bandits. They made good speed out of the valley and then moved on up, climbing a huge slide of dirt and scattered rocks until they reached a plateau ledge which curved away in a great arc.
‘Up there.’ Mongrel nudged Carter.
Carter glanced up and could see some kind of base high up the wall of a mountain. It was built from dark steel and glass, and glittered in the bright Tibetan sunlight. ‘That’s got to be Spiral_R. No wood in the construction. Far too technical for this part of the world.’
‘That some ascent, laddie.’
‘Yeah, the story of my fucking life.’
They moved across the plateau, the mountain looming closer and closer. Several times Carter tried to attract Constanza’s attention, but she was either ignoring him or was too focused on something beyond his own powers of vision.
Once the plateau reached its highest point the rocky ground started to fall away in a gentle cascade of smooth, polished steps—like a giant’s staircase, with each step five metres across. The men and women of Constanza’s ‘army’ moved forward, leapt down one huge step, then moved on once more, jumping down with their furs flapping. A wind howled from one side of the natural polished formation, blasting up out of the valley and stealing Carter’s breath away. Through his wind-seared tears he caught his first glimpse of the camp at the base of the mountain—at the foot of Spiral_R—looking as if it had been laid out for the purpose of ritual worship.
‘Big camp,’ observed Mongrel.
Carter merely nodded. They moved closer, boots slapping stone, the leap down the big steps made dangerous by their tightly bound hands. With each jump, the wire bit into Carter’s flesh and he cursed the bindings viciously.
‘They got lot of animals,’ observed Mongrel after a few more minutes had passed. ‘Yaks and horses. Look, and some goats. They have own little farm.’
They moved still closer, and both Carter and Mongrel’s blood froze suddenly in their veins. They stared hard at the pole, and the rigid locked body of the man who had been brutally impaled on it. His arms and legs were twisted unnaturally, his face frozen in a rictus scream of death.
The Spiral men turned to look at one another, silently communicating their mutual determination to get the fuck away from this hell-hole as soon as they could.
After this first marker they passed more and more impaled bodies. There were men, women, children—even the occasional Nex, some still wearing their black body-hugging uniforms and soft leather boots. All Nex had had their masks torn free, and the copper eyes were dulled, lifeless.