They were in a pit, low-walled and circled by ramps. Everywhere lay bodies, diseased and naked, thin-limbed and covered with sores weeping pus, riddled with infection and creating a communal stench of slowly rotting, barely living flesh.
In the flash of light, Carter saw hundreds of figures. Some lay prostrate, alone, unmoving; some squirmed together in sliming parodies of disease-sex, fucking in slow, rhythmical movements, sores and parted flesh rubbing together in a total merging of blood and pus and semen and contagion. Some bodies lay in tiny piles, human pyramids of putrefaction sporting twisted limbs and slack jaws and staring eyes and a core of decay, with a grinning round-eyed cannibal sitting atop each pile as if he was king.
And the floor: what had once been an alloy-panelled vehicle bay was now a sea of blood and pus, a scatter of bones and skulls, old weapons blood-congealed to metal, and occasional dismembered limbs. Carter saw that where they thought they had been walking across gravel, they had in fact been traversing a bed of yellowed old knuckle bones.
Both Carter and Mongrel retched as the darkness closed back in. Constanza said, her voice shaking slightly, ‘I think we’d better move. And fast. We’re attracting some unwanted attention.’
Mongrel wiped his vomit-stained mouth on his sleeve. Suddenly he pulled free his ECube. He activated it and a dull blue glow radiated, allowing the group to once more witness the horror of this pit of squirming human decomposition.
‘Like moths to a light bulb,’ warned Carter.
‘I need to see!’ bellowed Mongrel. ‘I sick of standing on popping eyeballs!’
They began to jog, now that they had a light source, albeit a feeble one. Constanza had been right: they were attracting attention. Lots of it.
A grey-haired man with no teeth and a missing nose, naked except for what looked like a green knitted jumper, lurched into their path, a bright light in his grey eyes and his maggot-like penis swaying. They dodged to one side, veering around his shambling efforts at walking. But a hand lashed out, nails blackened with blood, and grabbed at Mongrel who squawked and put a bullet between the old man’s eyes. The disease-riddled corpse collapsed to the ground.
Carter looked back and saw that already a woman had dragged herself to the old man and was eating his face, chewing at his cheeks, tearing at strings of flesh.
‘Sorry,’ muttered Mongrel. ‘Overreaction.’
‘Even napalm wouldn’t be a fucking overreaction here,’ came Carter’s low growl. ‘You did him a favour, mate. You did him a big fucking favour.’
They sped on, and more figures—all around, but more importantly,
up ahead—
had crawled to their sore-speckled feet. The group were suddenly confronted by a huge bloated woman, so large she was unable to stand. She squatted back on her wobbling tree-trunk haunches, and heaved a slithering still-birth into the mire on platters of gore, pushed from bright pink flaps of a warped and distended vagina. They sprinted around this cackling monstrosity, as she took the still-born and began to feed.
‘I think I want to die,’ stuttered Mongrel.
‘Better death than
this.’
Ahead, figures were lumbering to cut them off. Constanza had raised her gun but seemed unable to fire. The suddenly halted, and Mongrel and Carter nearly slammed into her rigid back.
‘What is it?’ barked Carter.
‘I can’t! I can’t shoot them! They are unarmed, polluted. They may be freaks—but they do not know what they are doing! I can’t kill them in cold blood.’
‘They want to fucking eat you!’ screamed Carter, and wrenched the sub-machine gun from her hands. The gun blasted in his steady grip, and he mowed down a line of staggering human-form disease, creating a gap through which they could escape.
Mongrel went first, then Carter. Finally, Constanza followed, tears on her cheeks. The walking corpses milled around in confusion, then fell to eating, with file-sharpened teeth, their fallen comrades.
Mongrel was the first to get his boots on the ramp of the alloy corridor. He stood there, a look of horror on his face, and turned with haunted eyes as Carter and Constanza joined him. ‘I thought I had stomach for anything,’ said the big squaddie. ‘But that...
that!
It make a man want to forget fried breakfasts—oh, for at least a week!’
They moved up the corridor, away from the squirming mass of rotting cannibals, and stopped at the top, breathing slowly, calming their thumping hearts.
‘You nearly got us killed out there,’ said Carter.
Constanza stared up at him. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she said simply.
‘Meaning?’
‘I could not shoot them
because there were faces I recognised.
Some of those people were ex-Spiral! God only knows what happened to them down here, what toxins and poisons have been let loose in this place ...’
‘Makes me happy to breath Tibetan air,’ muttered Mongrel. Then he launched into a quick-fire barrage of stilted Russian, German and tension-relieving gibberish. Carter nodded. He hoisted the sub-machine gun and pocketed his Browning. Then his face set in a hard mask and he glanced back down the corridor. Eyes stared back from the edges of the gloom, watching him carefully. There was intelligence in there. And patience. Carter shivered.
‘God save their souls,’ said Constanza softly.
‘Yeah,’ snapped Carter. ‘Because no other cunt will.’
It took them another hour to reach the bunker where the aircraft were kept. Various code-locked doors had been buckled and bent, and inside several Mantas had been partially dismantled—as if somebody had been trying to escape but couldn’t get the vehicles to work.
Carter’s heart sank as he saw the destroyed fighter planes, and his gaze swept over the devastation of the yellow-lit chamber. He glanced at Constanza, bitter words springing to his lips. But she pointed hurriedly, recognising the beginnings of his fury. ‘Through there! There’s more.’
Carter led the way, through a narrow tunnel and out—
Into fresh air. Carter breathed deeply as daylight flooded his world, and the mountain air filled his lungs with its purity.
‘Where are we?’
‘Halfway up a mountain,’ said Constanza. She smiled then, her face looking suddenly young and pretty. Carter could see the years drop away from her, could see the signs of the stress evaporate. ‘The Nex haven’t spotted it—there’s a GRID curtain. Hides the entrance from prying eyes, but it’s still easily accessible from both directions. We can get out—if you can start the damned aircraft, that is.’
Carter glanced over at the mountain’s internal landing bay. There were thirty Mantas, most of them covered by tarpaulins. Missiles gleamed along their flanks.
‘It feels good to be alive,’ Carter said suddenly.
‘There always somebody worse off than yourself,’ said Mongrel philosophically. He fished out a chocolate bar and began to chew, savouring the view as he contemplated his recent experiences.
‘I am, quite frankly, amazed that you can still eat,’ said Carter.
‘Yeah, but what I could
really
murder is a big pan of B&S!’
‘Beans and sausage? At a time like this? You are fucking insane!’
Mongrel considered this, then tilted his head and gave Carter a stern look. ‘Some of them zombies,’ he said, ‘they were bigger zombies than me. But I thought, I did, I thought: you big zombie, but you out of shape, and I do this as full-time job.’ Mongrel grinned a chocolate-smeared grin and breathed deep of the mountain air. A breeze ruffled his tufted excuse for a haircut. ‘A pus-filled zombie should not destroy a man’s appetite. Or, by
pizda,
I not true solider.’
‘Mongrel, they were
not
zombies,’ said Constanza. ‘They were innocent unfortunates; victims of a toxic war who were left behind.’
‘Once you cross frontier of sanity, you no longer human,’ said Mongrel gently. He placed his big spade hand on Constanza’s shoulder. ‘Those things back there—they not people you once knew. They not men and women of Spiral ... their minds dead. Only their rotting flesh remained—flesh without soul. You understand, little lady?’
‘Yes,’ she sighed, lowering her head.
‘We thought you mad!’ laughed Mongrel. ‘Hanging out with all those cannibal loonies!’
‘Not mad,’ said Constanza, closing her eyes and allowing tears to roll down her cheeks. ‘Just desperate to survive. Sometimes the world makes you hard, yeah? And it changes you, Mongrel. It turns you into something you are really not.’
‘I understand.’
Mongrel hugged her then, and a long look of understanding passed between them. Mongrel’s touch lingered just a little longer than it should have. Their eye contact lasted just a little longer than it should have. And Mongrel’s smile was too warm, too friendly, just too fucking
nice.
Carter groaned, and wandered towards the edge of the mountain. He breathed deeply again, looking out over Tibet. This whole country, he thought, fills me with exhilaration—this whole world is sheer magnificence!
‘Carter?’ Carter managed to find a bedraggled cigarette in his pack. He rummaged for a lighter, cursing the confusion of his packing, and finally resorted to the laser function of his ECube—not something the tiny four-billion-dollar device was designed for but still a welcome addition. He inhaled deeply on the nicotine fix.
‘Yeah, Mongrel?’
‘I think we need move quickly. Those Nex, they surely not far behind.’
‘OK. You two lovebirds happy now?’
‘What?’ Mongrel frowned deeply.
Carter winked, and nudged Mongrel in the ribs. ‘I saw it, you fucking old goat. I saw that give-away pyramid crotch. You’ve got the fucking
hunger
for that chick.’
‘Mongrel not know what crazy Carter talking about,’ said Mongrel, somewhat primly. ‘I just assisting wounded and scared lady, showing her utmost chiv— ... chilav— … honour. You talking crazy talk, Carter, and I think you been breathing too much of those tox fumes down there!’
‘A good attempt.’ Carter grinned, drawing on his cigarette.
‘No! I must protest!’
‘You must protest
?’ cackled Carter. ‘What are you, Victorian fucking Mongrel all of a sudden? Weren’t you in mat movie
Lady Chatterley’s Mongrel
? Or maybe you marred in
The French Lieutenant’s Mongrel
? Or, may one be so bold as to ask, could you possibly be one of the leads from that Dickensian masterpiece
A Tale of Two Mongrels
?’
‘Fuck off.’
Carter grinned. ‘Come on, let’s get the Manta started.’
‘Just fuck off.’
‘Aww, Mongrel, don’t be like that! We’ve been through so much together!’
‘Fuck off.’
Chuckling, smoke pluming behind him, Carter strode to the nearest Manta and hauled the tarpaulin free. There, under a thin layer of grease, sat a brand new jet, squat, powerful, and looking like the serious piece of military hardware that it was.
‘So, then, Constanza, where we going? This exchange deal of ours, it’s going to need navigational coordinates. Or do you intend to point us through the skies with your finger?’
‘No, Carter. I have the coordinates. I have the exact coordinates for the location of the Evolution Class Warhead—all stored up here, in my pretty little head.’
Mongrel moved towards Constanza. ‘You ignore old Carter, he always bastard grump on mission. He always whining and moaning!’ Mongrel gave Carter a shifty sideways smile. ‘It like being on fucking mission with your wife! Har har.’
Really got to you, didn’t I? Carter thought, climbing up the recessed steps and peering into the cockpit. He reached down and turned on the power. Inside, the Manta’s control panel lit up in a display of glittering colours. It gave Carter a warm, glowing feeling inside.
The fighter aircraft seemed to say: Welcome Home.
Carter piloted the Manta low over the smooth blue waters of the Indian Ocean. Sunlight glimmered from the silver crests of small waves and the low-flying Manta left a trail of foam surging in its screaming wake.
After leaving the southern tip of India, Carter, Mongrel and Constanza had a straight flight of just over 8,000 klicks to the coastline of Antarctica. A Manta could be cranked up to just over Mach 2.2 or 2,330 km/h so their journey time was going to be around four hours flat out. And Carter was certainly pushing flat out—time was of the essence, and God only knew to what stage of his plans Durell had progressed by now.
Mongrel and Constanza chatted intermittently as Carter flew. But Carter himself sank into a mental tomb world as he mulled over the recent events which had left him so battered and bruised that every time he moved it was agony. Until the adrenalin arrived; until
Kade
arrived.
For years, Kade had professed to soak up Carter’s pain like a sponge, allowing the Spiral operative to push on regardless when most other men and women were left behind, whimpering in the mud.
Once again, Carter found himself mulling over the very concept of Kade. Kade: his internal demon.
Kade: his dark and violent brother.
What was it that Constanza had said?
‘We have met, Carter. That’s why I know about Kade—that’s why I know about the demon nestling inside your skull.’
And yet Carter was
sure
that he would have remembered the woman; remembered that face, that athletic figure, that smile. Carter was good with faces ... it was names that eluded him. Usually the names of the dead.