‘ . . . department claims up to a million people may already be dead, while many times more are missing.’
The television, he recognised the formal tone of a news anchor. He crept forward nonetheless, ready to spring back the way he’d come if he needed to. Didn’t the vicar say he had a wife? The thought of her shrieking down the corridor ready to claw his eyes out made him feel like bolting. He didn’t think his body could survive another attack, old lady or not. He pushed past his fears, through the door, into a kitchen. The television was in the corner, a man and a woman sitting at the news desk while the storm raged behind them. Cal looked away. He didn’t want to see it. He listened, though, as he rummaged through a cupboard.
‘We’ll bring you more on that in a moment,’ said the man. ‘Meanwhile a statement from Downing Street confirms that the Prime Minister and the Cabinet have been evacuated from the city, amidst criticism that they are not doing enough to help the people of London. With the death toll already in seven figures, and no indication yet that the threat has even been identified, the government faces increasing pressure from the international community to provide safeguards for the population.’
He opened up a second door, seeing nothing but pots and pans. The third contained linen and, right at the back, a green case with a white cross on the front. He unzipped it, pulling out a bottle of aspirin, still listening to what was being said.
‘Our London correspondent Lucy White is still on the scene. Lucy, can you tell us what the word is on the street?’
The woman’s voice was almost blotted out by the grinding noise of the storm, the sound of a million trumpets blaring.
‘As you can see, Hugh, the word here is chaos, and understandably so. I’m standing south of the river, a stone’s throw or so from the London Eye. Just yesterday there were thousands of people here, locals and tourists enjoying the city. Now the streets are jammed with crowds attempting to flee the attack taking place just fifteen miles from here. Over the river there you can probably see army vehicles. They are setting up a quarantine zone on the northern embankment. The bridges have been closed. Nobody is allowed back there, not even the press. Whatever happens next, we’ll have to watch it from here.’
‘Can you describe the attack, Lucy?’
‘Yes, it’s a cloud, almost like a mushroom cloud from an atomic blast. Only . . .’ She gulped for words. ‘It’s moving, like a tornado. It’s huge, estimated at five miles in diameter, and it’s growing. Everything that gets close, and we have reliable information that this includes some Air Force aircraft, is what you might say vacuumed up, buildings and cars and even whole streets.’
Cal popped open the bottle and swallowed an aspirin. After a second, he took one more, using his hands to splash tap water into his mouth and over his face.
‘There have been some reports of a figure inside the cloud,’ the woman continued, and at this Cal turned back to the television. ‘A man. We believe it is some kind of optical illusion, but . . . But we just don’t know.’
On screen, the reporter was pushed out of the way by an angry foreign guy who shouted something at the camera before running off. There were so many people there, hundreds of them in this one shot alone, most fleeing in the same direction. Over her head it might as well have been a winter’s night, the sky as black as pitch. The screen was too small to really make out what hung there, but it swirled and thrashed, a squirming coil of vipers. She was right, it was huge.
‘The Secretary of Defence has announced that he is bringing in a panel of experts to attempt to identify the threat,’ the woman went on. ‘But until that report is made public we have literally nothing to go on.’
A soldier jogged into shot, shoving the woman and gesturing to the camera. She struggled to speak as she was roughhoused off the screen.
‘We’re being told the quarantine line is being moved south. Back to you, Hugh.’
Static, then the studio again. The man shuffled his papers, his mouth open like a goldfish. He coughed and Cal turned away. It was always a bad sign when the newsreaders lost their tongues; that’s how you knew you were really in trouble. Cal rubbed his temples, seeing the phone next to the television, and his thoughts turned back to his mum. She’d be worried sick about him, she would have left countless messages on his phone, but he’d had no signal out in Fursville, and his mobile had been lost somewhere in between the raid at the factory and Schiller’s destruction of Hemmingway. He picked up the cordless handset, paused for a moment, then dialled the house number.
What was he going to say to her? Hey, Mum, sorry not to have been in touch for a while, it’s just that last time we saw each other you tried to beat your way through the car window to kill me, remember? Of course she wouldn’t remember. That’s how it worked, the Fury, that was the cruellest thing about it. They attacked you, they killed you, then they forgot you. It was like you’d never existed.
The phone connected, but it was him that answered. The sound of his own voice made his heart flutter, a depth charge of adrenalin detonating inside his stomach.
‘Hi, this is the Morrisseys, we’re not here right now but leave a message, yeah? Or if it’s me you want, call me on my mobile. See ya.’
He sounded so young, so far away, so not himself, as though there was another version of Cal Morrissey sitting at home, one without an angel in his heart. He heard the beep, realised he was breathing loudly down the phone, shut off the call with his thumb. He didn’t want his mum to think she had a pervy phone stalker, she had enough to worry about. He racked his head, trying to remember her mobile number, typing it in. It started ringing. Please be okay, he thought. And she would be, right? They lived in Oakminster, it was way east of the city, miles away from the storm. Unless she’d gone into London, he wondered. Maybe she was there looking for you.
‘Hello?’
The single, simple word took him utterly by surprise, a crack in the dam. Before he even knew it he was sobbing, the cries flooding up with so much strength that he couldn’t get a word out. He collapsed against the counter, the tears streaming down his face, salty on his tongue, his whole body juddering with the force of it.
‘Callum? Cal, is that you? Jesus, where are you? Are you okay?’
He spluttered out a handful of not-quite-words, taking a deep breath and trying again.
‘I’m okay, Mum,’ he moaned, the sobs ebbing into soft hiccups. He wiped the tears away, his eyes feeling as if they were stuffed with cotton wool, his throat aching. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Oh God,’ he realised she was crying too. ‘I was so worried, Cal, I thought . . . I thought something terrible had happened. Where are you?’
‘I’m safe,’ he said. ‘I’m out of the city. You need to get out too, Mum, something really bad is going on.’
Scuffling, like she was unlocking a door or something. He could hear voices.
‘I’m okay,’ she said, sniffing. There was a steeliness to her voice now. Cal knew it well, once the tears were gone there was always anger. ‘Do you know how worried I’ve been? You just took off with the car. I’m assuming it was you who took the car?’
‘Yeah, sorry, I—’
‘Cal, I’ve had the police out looking for you, the neighbours, nobody could think why you’d up and run away. Was it because of what happened at school, the stampede? Your friends are scared, Cal, and furious too, they think you’ve abandoned them. Poor Georgia is still in the hospital. Why, Cal? You better have a good explanation.’
I’ve got something inside me, a creature that’s waiting to hatch and turn me into a weapon so that we can fight the man in the storm, but it’s so powerful and so alien that people can’t stand to be near it, so they try to kill me. The thought was so ludicrous in his head that he snorted a bitter laugh.
‘This isn’t funny, Cal, your dad is flying back tomorrow, he’s gonna be so angry.’
‘Sorry, I wasn’t laughing. Look, Mum, I can’t tell you everything, not yet. I just wanted you to know that I’m safe, tha
t I’m okay. I’ll come home soon, I promise, there’s just something I’ve got to do first.’
Was that true? Would he ever be able to go home? What happened if they did fight the man in the storm, if they somehow managed to defeat him? Would the angels just go? Or were they there for good?
‘Don’t go home,’ said his mum. ‘I’m not there. I’m at your Auntie Kate’s. Haven’t you seen the news?’
‘Yeah.’ He offered a silent thanks that she was safe, or out of the city at least. Kate lived over in Southend, right by the ocean. If they needed to, they could always get on a boat and head into Europe. ‘Yeah, it’s really bad, Mum.’
‘They’re saying millions are going to die, or are already dead. God, Cal, can you get here? Where are you? I promise I won’t be angry with you if you just drive to Kate’s right now.’
‘I . . . I can’t, Mum, not just yet. But I will, yeah?’ The sobs were pounding at his chest again and he locked them in. ‘Look, I gotta go, but I love you.’
‘Cal, please, just tell me where you are, I’ll come get you.’
‘I love you, Mum.’
It took her a moment to hear him, not his words but the truth inside them, the understanding that it might be the last time they spoke. She began to weep again, and Cal could see her in Kate’s house, sitting on the faux leather couch in her leopard-print coat, her head resting in immaculate red painted nails, surrounded by that fog of hair spray and Chanel No. 5. He saw himself putting an arm around her, squeezing her, the way he did when she and Dad had an argument; giving her a peck on the soft skin of her cheek.
‘I love you, Cal,’ she said, her voice just a whisper. ‘I love you so much. Tell me it’s going to be okay?’
‘It’s going to be okay,’ he said. ‘I promise, it’s going to be okay.’ He felt as if he had a rock in his throat, he almost couldn’t force the air past it. ‘I gotta go, Mum.’
‘Cal, don’t.’
But he did, thumbing off the call, standing there in a pool of sunshine feeling too exhausted even to cry. He let the phone tumble from his fingers and it clattered off the counter on to the stone floor, the battery flap spinning loose.
Tell me it’s going to be okay, he said to the creature inside him, the thing that squatted in his soul, the angel-but-not-angel. I promised her, which means you did too. You can’t break it, you have to make things okay.
There was no answer, just the fluttering beat of his own heart. He turned, wondering if he had the strength to make it out of the kitchen, let alone back to the church. At least the aspirin were doing their thing, numbing the agony. It’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay, maybe if he kept saying it, it would be true. And he’d almost managed to convince himself of this when he heard a change in sound on the television, a chorus of screams carried over the airwaves. He looked back, saw the storm, somehow still vast even on the tiny screen, heard the reporter cry out:
‘It’s true, we’ve just had confirmation, it’s moving.’
The Other: III
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
Graham
Thames House, 11.59 a.m.
‘It’s moving.’
Graham looked up from his screen, blinking the spots of light from his vision. The video footage from the field op in Norfolk had come in a few minutes ago, and he’d already watched it four times. The soldiers had been wearing helmet cams – standard procedure now for any offensive action – but what they had recorded just didn’t make any sense. The kids had come out of the windmill and the boy, the same one as before, had somehow changed. They didn’t have any decent footage, the light that he had been pumping out was simply too bright for the cameras, saturating them, bleeding white. But somewhere in the blur he swore he could make out a creature of flame, with two huge, burning wings.
Then, in an instant, they vanished. Graham had flicked back and forth from one frame to the next, just one-thirtieth of a second between them. In one, four normal kids and the boy in the inferno; in the next an empty circle of fire, like when you took a photograph of a moving sparkler. And after that there was just a hail of ash and burning embers. What he was looking at was unbelievable, utterly impossible. It had to be some kind of camera glitch, only every single piece of footage they had, half a dozen different cams, all showed the same thing.
The worst of it was they’d also lost over thirty men. Graham didn’t have the full report yet, but from what he’d heard in his brief call to General Stevens there weren’t even any bodies, the soldiers had simply been vaporised along with the windmill and a field of beet. There’s just dust, the man had told him. The other soldiers were all being treated for shock. Apparently two had tried to scratch out their own eyes.
‘Graham, did you hear me?’ It was Sam, sitting next to him.
‘Huh? Sorry, what?’
‘It’s moving.’ She jabbed her hand at the screen and he followed the rough arc of her chewed fingernail to see the satellite footage of the city. It showed everything from Watling Park in the north to Fortune Green in the south, and most of that was solid inkblot black. It was like watching a weather forecast and seeing the unmistakable spiral of a hurricane. This, too, had an eye in the centre, a pocket of absolute night that showed up black and blank on visible, infrared, UV and every other lens they had. It was as though beyond that event horizon was nothing, no heat, no matter, no air, just a hole where the world should be. And Sam was right, the storm seemed to be shifting south, engulfing the train lines of West Hampstead. He saw a chunk of something huge lift up into the maelstrom, a warehouse, maybe the Homebase store they had up there. It crumbled as it went, shedding pieces of itself as it vanished into the churning current.
‘We’re—’
And that was as far as Sam got before the entire room lurched. Graham almost screamed, grabbing his chair so hard he thought he’d broken half his fingers. Every single monitor in the room went dark, the lights strobing as the emergency systems fought to gain control. When they booted back on Graham saw that a crack had opened up in the thirty-metre-thick solid concrete ceiling of the bunker. Not good.
‘What the hell was that?’ he asked. There was still a tremor running through the room, making his teeth chatter.
Sam’s monitor flashed back on, the satellite feed still in place. The storm’s movement had increased, sliding south like a patch of oil slowly dripping towards the bottom of the screen. In its wake it left an ocean of pitch, an empty trench where once there had been a city. Graham’s jaw dropped. He could taste the dust of the room on his tongue, in his dry throat. It’s coming this way, it’s heading right for us.
‘There’s nothing left,’ said Sam. ‘Oh God, it’s . . . it’s destroyed everything.’
But destroyed was the wrong word. Destruction left ruin, left rubble, left corpses. This thing left nothing, no bodies, no wrecks, no ash. It devoured it all. Graham knew that if he was standing there, on the lip of that trench, he would see only darkness. The room shook again, the very earth around them seeming to groan in outrage like a helpless beast suffering some dreadful torture.
‘There’s nothing we can do,’ shouted a voice behind them. Graham looked to see Habib, heading for the elevator. He shrugged an apology. ‘You should go too. If you’re still here when it arrives . . .’
He didn’t need to say it. Graham knew that if the beast – the beast, where did that come from? It’s an attack, just an attack – hit Thames House then being underground wouldn’t save them. It would reach down with fingers of storm, pull them up to the gaping hole of its mouth, and everything he had ever been would be eradicated. He turned back to the screen, hearing the soft chime of the elevator door.
‘He’s right, you know,’ he said. ‘You should get out of here.’
‘Yeah, and leave you in charge?’ said Sam. ‘No way. I don’t trust a man to get us out of this.’
She smiled gently, squeezing his shoulder, and he placed his han
d on hers for a moment. If the storm continued south then they’d leave, but there was still time. A muffled explosion rippled through the ceiling above them, more dust raining down, making such a racket that Graham almost didn’t hear the phone on his desk. He picked it up.
‘Yeah, this is Hayling.’
‘Graham, it’s Stevens.’ His years of military service made him sit up straight in his chair when he heard the General’s voice.
‘Sir,’ he said. ‘It’s on the move.’
‘We know,’ said the General. ‘We’re out of options.’
‘Sir?’
‘We launched another air assault fifteen minutes ago, but the bastard swallows everything we throw at it. Whatever is at the heart of this, it’s not letting us close. You any closer to working out what we’re dealing with?’
‘No,’ Graham said. ‘You know what we know. It’s not atomic, it’s not meteorological, it’s not geological, and it’s not biological. But now we know it’s mobile.’
‘If it carries on its current trajectory it will hit the City in half an hour.’ The General’s voice, usually so strong, was like a little boy’s. ‘It’s almost as though . . . as though it knows where it’s going. You make any sense of that?’
It’s going where there are people, Graham thought.
‘No, sir,’ he said.
‘And the other incident, the one by the coast, any more leads?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Graham, I need you to be honest with me.’ Stevens cleared his throat, something bad coming. ‘Do you think your team can identify this threat before it reaches the centre of London?’