The door slid open to reveal the huge, open-plan room. At first he mistook the constant movement for people, but he soon realised it was just the monitors that lined every wall and sat on every desk, displaying images of the city and the storm. He wiped the sweat from his brow, wondering how the hell he was supposed to handle this alone, when a woman stepped into view. She looked up from a sheaf of documents, frowned, then broke into a huge smile.
‘Graham? Jesus, I thought nobody was coming.’
He recognised her as Sam Holloway, one of the MI5 codebreakers. She’d done some work for him over at the CT unit last year.
‘Sam, it’s good to see you,’ he said, walking into the room. ‘Please tell me you’re not here by yourself.’
‘No, Habib Rahman’s over in comms trying to get a feed on what’s happening. That’s it, the rest of them either jumped ship or are over in Downing Street trying to evac the PM and the Cabinet. That’s Priority One.’
Yeah, save the idiots in government, definitely a priority.
‘What’s the current situation?’ he asked, walking to the director’s desk. On the monitor there more of the city was being sucked into the throat of the storm.
‘The Air Force have sent in an attack force, but . . .’
She didn’t need to finish, he’d seen it for himself.
‘Any idea what it is?’
‘No,’ Sam replied. ‘But it’s big. Everything from Edgware in the north down to Fortune Green is gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yeah, gone. It just isn’t there any more.’ There was a tremor in her voice, nothing to do with the roar of the storm. ‘This footage is from a US Black Hawk, positioned five miles from ground zero.’
Five miles, but the picture was sharp enough to make out the vast gulf that had opened up beneath the tornado. It looked bottomless. More than bottomless. Graham got the idea that if you were to step off the edge of it, you would simply cease to exist.
‘Any other eyes on?’ he asked.
Sam nodded, running her hands across the touchscreen monitor until the view changed.
‘From a Sentinel,’ she said.
This shot was higher, making the storm look more like a tornado than ever, a looping coil of shadow that towered over the city, maybe three miles wide now. Even as he watched, Graham saw a chunk of land snap free from the earth, rising slowly, almost gracefully, into the maelstrom where it began to break apart. The entire room shook, dust raining down from the ceiling and several of the computer screens shutting off before rebooting. It was as though he was back in the Gulf, bunkered up inside a cave while enemy RPGs pounded his hideout. That island of land had to have been five hundred metres across. How many people? he asked himself as it crumbled, caught in the howling spiral of the vortex, pulled towards the mouth of the storm. How many more just died?
‘Theories?’ he coughed the word out.
‘None,’ Sam said. ‘No radioactive signature, no indication of a biological threat. But . . .’
He looked at her, at the way the colour drained from her face, and felt a million icy fingers run up his back.
‘But what?’
‘Ground zero,’ she started. ‘The epicentre of the storm. There was something there when all this started.’
‘A bomb?’
‘No, a man. A dead man.’ She chewed her bottom lip, loading another piece of footage on to her monitor. It showed a morgue table, one of the ones upstairs in this very building, he thought. Lying on it was the body of a man, pulled open by a coroner’s tools to reveal the empty box of his torso. And yet even sitting here, watching it on a screen, it was obvious that there was some kind of life there, in the man’s pale, quickening eyes, and in his endless, inward breath. Oh Jesus it’s the same noise, he realised. It’s the same sound as the storm. ‘He came in on Friday, from Scotland Yard.’
‘Why wasn’t I told?’ Graham asked.
‘It was stonewalled, no communication in or out. The plan was to get the . . . get it to Northwood, get it secure, then bring people in. But they never made it. Something happened on the way, we only found out when it became visible.’
Graham wiped his mouth, staring at the screen, at the living corpse that lay there. That was the figure he had seen in the tornado, the shape that hung in the centre of the chaos. The man in the storm, he thought, the words appearing from nowhere. And suddenly the overwhelming unreality of it hit him like a punch to the gut, a high-pitched whine popping in his eardrums. He leant forward, hands on his knees, wondering if he was about to puke, swallowing the acid back down with noisy, gasping gulps.
He straightened, cleared the mess of his throat, spoke in a grating whisper: ‘So what do we know for sure?’
‘That it’s expanding fast,’ said Sam. ‘That’s why this place is deserted. We’re a good ten miles from the centre of the attack –’ It’s not an attack, Graham thought, it’s something more than that, something so much worse – ‘but at the rate that thing is growing we’ll have to be out of here soon. Other than that, we don’t know anything.’
‘We need satellites, Sam,’ he said.
‘I’m attempting to task one now, but the only one close enough is a NSA bird, and the Yanks are being cagey.’
‘Do whatever you have to,’ he said, pushing himself to his feet. ‘Hack it if you can.’ He walked around a bank of screens to see Habib at his desk. He didn’t know him personally, but the guy was pretty famous for writing unbreakable cyphers for the army. ‘Habib, anything from the General?’
‘He’s been alerted to the attack,’ he replied, shrugging. ‘Northwood has been evacuated, but he has given us full use of any tactical units, and is happy to discuss other options.’
Other options? There were no options, not that Graham could see. They didn’t even know what this thing was. Part of him wanted to believe it was a nuke, a big one. Yes, it would be awful. Yes, parts of the city would be destroyed, would be radioactive for decades, and hundreds of thousands would perish. But a nuke was still a nuke, a fission warhead, a neutron striking a concentrated mass of Uranium 235 and starting a chain reaction of energy release. He understood a nuke, it was one of the first things they had taught him. The scenario was right at the top of the nightmare list – what if somebody detonates an atomic weapon in a major British city – and they had procedures to deal with it. Hell, during the Olympics they’d done nothing but prepare for a strike like this. No, he could handle a nuke.
This was different. Because it isn’t science. Whatever that thing is, it doesn’t obey the rules of the universe, it destroys them. And that’s what was truly terrifying, because there were no instruction manuals dealing with this, no computer simulations, no emergency drills. This was unknowable.
He pressed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, wishing he was back in bed, that this really was a nightmare. How many times had he had dreams like this? The Bad Things dreams, nothing more than stress or too much port and cheese before bed. Why couldn’t he wake up?
‘Sir, you need to take a look at this as well.’
He opened his eyes, a solar storm of flashes filling the room. Sam was standing next to her desk, both hands clamped in her short hair. On her screen was a bulletin report from district command. He squinted, reading the message twice and still not quite believing it.
‘Another attack?’ he said. ‘Where exactly?’
‘On the coast,’ said Sam. She sat, typing instructions into the console. The images on screen disappeared to be replaced by a crude photograph. For a moment Graham couldn’t quite make out what he was looking at; a beach, an angry grey sky. There was something wrong with it that he couldn’t put his finger on.
‘What is that?’ he said.
‘It’s a wave.’
He saw it even as she gave her answer. Only it wasn’t a wave. It wasn’t the right shape. This huge mass of water was scrunched into a fist, as if a vast explosion had been set off beneath the ocean. It hung above the horizon, and Graham only rea
lised the sheer scale of the image when he noticed a town there – tower blocks and houses and cars and tiny specs of people dwarfed by the great dappled shadow of the water.
‘Oh my God,’ he said, slumping into his chair. ‘When was this taken?’
‘Half an hour ago,’ Sam said. ‘In Norfolk. Yarmouth.’
‘Half an hour?’ he said. ‘Why are we just finding out?’
‘It got logged by the local law enforcement, but everything’s tied up with that,’ she said, nodding at Graham’s screen where the storm still raged. ‘There’s not enough of us here, I only just picked it up in the hourlies.’
Graham swore, once again feeling the urge to get up and run.
‘The city – or town, really – it got wiped out. There’s nothing left.’
‘What caused it?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes again. Sam shook her head.
‘We don’t know. It’s related to another attack last night, in the same area. An explosion – at least we think it was an explosion – destroyed a town called Hemmingway. Nothing there, nothing worth attacking anyway. But for some reason it was hit.’
‘Meteor strike?’ he said. Wishful thinking.
‘Uh-uh. The radar station up in Holmont recorded no meteor activity. Nothing has come in from the skies.’
Which ruled out missile strikes too. That was one good thing, it meant that someone like Iran or North Korea hadn’t decided to lob a bunch of nukes at them. He took a deep breath, trying to shut out the white noise of fear, trying to arrange his thoughts into neat, logical patterns. One thing at a time, establish a clear chain of events.
‘Is there any footage from the attack last night?’ he asked. Sam fiddled with her touchscreen, loading up a video feed.
‘There’s this,’ she said. ‘Came in just now with the report. From local LE, Norfolk Constab.’
She pressed PLAY and they sat and watched it together. It was a night shot, everything green. A bunch of SWAT officers were jogging over what looked like a sand dune, the sea a huge slab of slate in front of them, the darkest thing on the screen. He could hear barked orders, the harsh, panting breaths of whoever was wearing the helmet cam. They reached the summit of the dune, and began to descend towards . . .
‘Kids?’ he said, seeing the group on the beach. Two girls and two, maybe three, boys, from the look of it, the fear in their expressions obvious even in shades of black and green. ‘What the hell do they want with children?’
There was a scream, the front row of police breaking into a run. They charged at the children, uttering howls of rage. The flesh of his arms rippled into goosebumps as the police charged, trampling over each other, looking more like animals than people.
One of the children yelled something; a name, perhaps. Schiller.
‘Did you catch that?’ he asked. ‘Sounded like—’
The screen flared, the light so bright that Graham had to screw his eyes shut. When he looked again, a moment later, the scene was in chaos. The camera was shaking wildly, everything a blur, but that didn’t stop him seeing one of the cops jerked up into the air like a fish on a hook. The man – or woman, Graham couldn’t be sure – thrashed and shrieked – then popped. Graham could think of no other way to describe it, the body just burst into specs of ash which drifted down through the shimmering green light, looking like fish food dropped in a tank of water. Another of the cops was pulled apart by invisible fingers, then another, all the while the man with the helmet cam sat on the beach shaking his head. He howled again, lumbered to his feet, then turned his head towards the sea.
It was only for an instant – before the picture lurched upwards then fizzed into static – but it looked as if there was something on the beach, something where the kids had been standing, something burning.
‘Go back,’ he barked, hearing the panic in his own voice. ‘Go back and freeze it.’
Sam scanned back through the file, then played it forward, frame by frame, each expression caught with perfect clarity, the eyes of the cops shining madly. Their expressions were like nothing Graham had ever seen, so full of fury that they didn’t look real. The scene lurched up instant by instant, the beach coming into view, then a girl, then a white flare, burning like phosphorous. Sam paused it, and for a while they sat there and stared at the boy in the flames, two huge plumes of fire arcing up from his back, his eyes pockets of absolute brilliance that made Graham’s retinas itch.
‘They set him on fire?’ Sam asked. Graham shook his head, but what else could it be? The kid, he isn’t human, look at him, he’s something else. Sam was edging the footage on, the burning boy visible for only a dozen more frames before the cameraman went airborne and the picture was lost.
‘Get images of that over to the General,’ he said, feeling suddenly cold despite the heat of the room. ‘Tell him to send a squad out to the coast, try to find out what happened. Anything on the satellite?’
‘I can get it,’ Sam said. ‘If you don’t mind breaking the law.’
‘Do it,’ he replied. She brought up a new panel on her monitor and he watched as she hacked the NSA satellite command code. It took all of thirty seconds.
‘It’s already in place,’ she said. ‘They’re watching us.’
Of course they were. The NSA would be monitoring London and the coast to make sure whatever was happening over here wasn’t a threat to them over there. Nice of them to share. Sam loaded an image on to the screen. Fortunately the skies were flawless today – not counting the storm – and the view of the coast was perfect. It had been decimated, nothing but rubble and ruin still glistening in the sun.
‘Can we go back to the time of the attack?’ he asked. Sam shook her head.
‘This is live-ish. Just got to hope we get lucky,’ she said.
He leant forward, studying the images on screen, the quagmire that had once been roads and buildings and people. There was something else there.
‘You make any sense of that?’ he asked, pointing. It looked like an island of land in the sea, and on it a ball of light, almost like a solar flare, too bright for the satellite cam to properly capture. Sam shrugged. ‘Can that be real? Is it a data transfer glitch?’
‘From an NSA bird? No way. It’s real.’
Past the glare Graham could make out five black dots, five people. There was no way of seeing who they were, the shot was too wide, too far away, but he had a hunch that they were the same kids as in the police video. After all, this was only a few miles away.
‘Can we track them if they move?’
‘Yeah, but the moment I do NSA will know we’ve taken control of it. The last thing we want right now is to piss off the Yanks.’
‘Do it,’ he said, jabbing at the screen, at the little dots there. ‘Whatever happens, we need to maintain eyes on.’
Sam sighed, typing in codes until the image on screen shifted. On the other side of the room a phone started to ring. He ignored it; it would be somebody from the States, somebody very, very angry.
‘They’re attempting to regain control,’ said Sam.
‘Fight them for as long as it takes,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the General put together a team. We need to bring them in alive.’
‘Yes sir,’ Sam said. The phone stopped ringing, then began again, sounding somehow even louder and more irate than before. Graham tuned it out, staring at the screen on his desk. It still showed the burning boy, those plumes of flame stretching up from his back. They look like wings, he thought with another sweeping rush of vertigo. It was impossible, and yet the cataclysm that raged not ten miles from where he sat was impossible too. He thought about the shape in the darkness, the man who hung in the storm. Wasn’t there a likeness there, between him and the burning boy? A similarity? There was no way it could be a coincidence. Whatever was happening in London and on the coast was connected.
If they could just find those kids, they’d find answers.
Morning
And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a clou
d: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices.
Book of Revelation 10:1–3
Daisy
East Walsham, 9.27 a.m.
There was so much violence, and she didn’t know how to turn it off.
It played out before her, inside the giant glaciers of her frozen world, each scene more horrific than the last. In one, she saw Cal beneath a car as the fire bit at his legs. She called to him, reached for him, but this place, wherever she was, had turned her into a ghost. It was okay, though, because he made it out, leaving a trail of charred corpses behind him. In another, she watched Schiller lift up the ocean and use it like a sledgehammer, pounding a town into oblivion, all those poor souls washed away. The scene was so insane that she wondered how it could be real, if maybe this was just an illusion in her head. But she could taste the salt water deep in her throat, could hear the awful sound of the sea as it rose up and ate the land. It was real. It was all real.
Schiller was growing more and more powerful, that was obvious, transforming from boy to angel with nothing more than a thought. But it was taking its toll. Daisy could see the fire in his chest, the place where his angel rested, and it was spreading, burning him from the inside out. It reminded her of the video they’d seen at school about cancer, the way it would – what was the word? Meta-something – from organ to organ, using your veins and arteries like motorways to carry its poison around your body. The blue flame inside Schiller’s chest had extended its fingers up into his throat, out towards his shoulders, tickling his ribs. She saw it as if she was looking at an X-ray. What would happen when the fire consumed him?
There was someone else with Rilke and Schiller now, not Marcus or Jade – although she could still see them there, could sense their terror and their awe – but another boy. His name was Howard, she realised, but even as she thought it she heard a voice, faint, as though travelling a long way on a high wind.