Instead of leaping the wall I climbed on to it, then ran along its top in the direction of the church. Even though the building occupied a military site it looked the real deal: stained-glass windows, a cemetery, headstones, the works, all enclosed by a five foot high wall in yellow brick. Glancing back up the hill revealed a mass of Echomen walking along the road in my direction. If this was a pilgrimage to ME they were mistaken. I’d take off, leave the monsters to their fate. Ahead of me a flat-back truck stood in the centre of the road with a gap of around five feet at each side before the black top reached the high wall. I continued running along my side of the wall. My clone shadow followed against the other curtain of brick, flung there by the rising sun. A plan formed in my head as I saw the truck there. If the keys were in the ignition I could simply roar out of here in my own steel chariot. The notion filled me with a surge of exultation. I’d escape this place. Then I’d return with the military to reduce these creatures to piles of bloody flesh. In my imagination I could see flame-throwers at work already. The screams, the burning smells, the dance of death. Laughter gurgled in my throat. The surge of adrenalin the chase had pumped through me had knocked common sense out of kilter. What seemed like a cogent plan: leaping nimbly on to the back of the truck from the wall, then driving away all turned to crud. The leap I accomplished with ease. The landing I did not. I threw my upper body forward too enthusiastically; it left my feet trailing behind in the air. So when I landed on the back of the truck I slammed chest first into the boards from a height of five feet. My head whipped forward to crunch against solid matter. The excruciating pain, coupled with a nauseating sense of slippage inside my skull, suggested that the collision of man and machine had resulted in my brain tipping out through my forehead. I groaned. Wet stuff (brain matter; it had to be cerebral stuff) slid through my fringe into my eyes. Ribs aching like hell, choking back the pain I rolled on to my side. Touching my forehead revealed that I hadn’t spilt my fool brain but my fool blood painted my fingertips red. Damn …
I managed to sit upright on the truck’s boards. There, flowing down the road toward me between the ten-foot high walls, were Echomen. Hundreds of them. All me … I shook my head … no – these are monster clones of me; not really me. They were culled from both sexes and all ages. I saw a withered old man with my face – a grotesquely young face on an old head. He approached the truck with shuffling steps; his trousers sagging from a narrow waist. Too dazed by the fall to do more than hoist myself into a sitting position, all I could do was watch. The river of human beings grew closer – human beings? No, these were like the clone monsters from the school. They’d been ravaged by experiments conducted by their own kind to discover how much punishment they could absorb before they ceased to function. Yet more of their species suffered an assortment of hideous wounds from fighting their human foe.
I saw men and women with arms missing, with gashes in their bellies that had released red fronds of intestine; others were burnt offerings to their god. Mason Konrad eyes peered bleakly from charred faces. Acid burns stripped scalps from heads. Bullet strikes had robbed some of hands, jaws, eyes – they’d die soon, but not soon enough for me. They all moved toward me. A single purpose drove them; their eyes blazed with a kind of hunger that made my blood run cold. As they got nearer – twenty yards, fifteen yards – I shuffled back along the truck’s boards. I saw in my mind’s eye how they would drag me off the vehicle then enter into whatever passed for a sacred – and very physical communion with their creator, their godhead.
In the early morning sun they approached, hauling their torn bodies closer and closer, their eyes shining with such a fervour that they surely couldn’t have felt the hurt from their hundreds of wounds. A boy held his face to his head that had been torn away by shrapnel. The flesh of the face had long since died. A green moss formed on the skin, but still a trace of Mason Konrad remained in its features. While behind the mask of skin the boy’s flayed skull oozed blood that now resembled black treacle.
With an effort I tried to stand but concussion had exploded my sense of balance. After a second attempt to rise I sank back to accept my fate at the hands of the look-alikes.
Ten yards, five yards, four, three, two, one – they’re here. I closed my eyes, breathed as deeply as my sore ribs would allow, then held my breath as I waited for the hands; all those hundreds of hands with Y-shaped scars, marking them out as my spawn; I waited for them to seize me.
And yet I felt nothing. I raised an eyelid. They were flowing by. All looked me in the eye as they passed, all those hundreds of faces, some with the most appalling wounds imaginable, but they kept surging by as I sat on the truck. At last I did climb to my feet. I had to see where they were headed. Soon it became only too apparent. They marched on the church. But why?
Again a wait of a few seconds revealed the reason. Behind the church wall I saw the appearance of heads. Even though it was fifty yards away I recognized Dianna and Ruth. With them were around a dozen soldiers, more survivors from the big house. Just beyond the church I saw burned-out cars, which had been stopped at a barricade of trees that had been felled across the road.
Ah, how clear … how so transparently, awfully clear … Ruth and the other survivors must have fled through here in their cars only to be stopped by felled trees blocking the way. They’d taken refuge in the church. Now the Echomen closed in. Gunshots rang out. The creatures at the front toppled. The old man with the young face clutched his forehead as a rifle slug ripped his skull.
Despite the vicious hail of bullets the humans soon fell back to the church as their magazines ran dry. Still the inexorable tide of transformed men and women flowed by me, engulfing me in a river of ME. When they reached the graveyard they spilled through the gates to turn the cemetery into a sea of living bodies – one that flowed above those bodies buried in graves six feet down beneath the sod. At the church the Echomen piled against the walls. Their bodies formed a growing ramp against the stonework. Within moments the stained-glass windows sagged as unnatural flesh pressed against the panes. Then nothing could stop them. The creatures engulfed the church. Of course there were gunshots. I knew that many must have been killed by Ruth and her comrades in arms. But there were not enough bullets in this entire valley to stop the invasion. Soon the guns were dead.
A voice came from behind me. ‘Mason. Are you all right?’
‘I’ll live. For now,’ I replied, as the copy of me with the pit in his face climbed on to the back of the truck. A fatalism infected me now. Where could I run? What could I do? My survival, or lack of it, depended on the whim of fate now.
A moment later he crouched down to examine the head wound with an expression of genuine concern. ‘We’ll get someone to take care of that for you. That’s a nasty cut.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘But first we have a surprise for you.’
chapter 44
I sat there on the back of the truck, some seven feet above the road, as the Echomen flowed past; nothing less than a river of monsters converging on the church. Their heads were at the height of my waist so I looked down into the faces. Male, female, old, young, injured uninjured – a mixture of racial backgrounds, yet it appeared as if some evil magic had copied my face then pasted it on to a thousand or more strangers. Still dazed from my concussive landing on the truck’s boards, I watched the flood wash by. The guy with the gaping hole in his face that I’d inflicted just days ago at my old school had promised me ‘a surprise’. That should have sounded warning alarms yet all I managed to accomplish at that moment was stare in a dull way at the tightly packed flow of heads.
Crouching, he handed me a handkerchief that was surprisingly clean. ‘Here. Press this to your head; it should stop the bleeding. Although you might need a stitch.’
The pain caused by the misguided leap on to the truck returned with a vengeance. An invisible drummer must have mistaken my skull for a hi-hat the way it throbbed. The off-the-wall thought produced a grunt of laugher in my throat.
My clone tilted his head as he checked my face. ‘Pale, very pale … is your vision blurred, Mason?’
‘You mean, do I see more than one of you?’ I managed a groggy wave of the hand. ‘There are dozens of you. Hundreds … probably thousands …’
‘You know, Mason’ – he pushed his thumb into the corner of his mouth in the familiar way – ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said. That the mechanism that creates duplicates of other men and woman is a kind of time bomb planted in the DNA of our ancestors millions of years ago.’
‘Ah, the engine of our transformation.’ Still holding the handkerchief to my forehead I nodded. Concussion now made me feel as if I’d gulped down half a pint of vodka. ‘Hidden in our DNA it bided its time until we developed intelligence … technologies; it waited until we came close to travelling to other worlds and thereby run the risk of contaminating other civilizations. Scientists say that when two cultures encounter one another the least advanced will suffer.
‘So millions of years ago alien beings sprinkled their secret weapon into the DNA of life-forms on earth. Then, whenever a creature becomes too intelligent, the mechanism activates, and that mechanism has the power to transform people into an exact copy of another.’
I managed the woozy nod again. ‘I thought we just said that.’
‘Sorry, I’m just trying to get it clear in my head, Mason.’
‘Did anyone tell you, you’ve got a rotten head? There’s a hole in your face.’
‘I have noticed it, thank you.’
‘I did that.’
‘I know.’
‘Angry?’
‘No.’
‘Should be.’
‘Mason, you’ve explained the history of how our kind came into being, but I still don’t understand the purpose.’
‘Because once the change takes place all you evil little clones become hostile to genuine human beings. You try to destroy us …’ I groaned. ‘I’m going to lie down now. My head’s really …’ A grunt came from my lips.
‘You’re going to wait for your surprise, aren’t you?’
‘If you insist, my dear twin. Ouch. Must’ve banged my noodle harder than I … uhm …’
‘Stay awake, Mason. Your surprise is coming.’
‘Keep it for Christmas.’ The moment I closed my eyes he shook me awake.
‘We haven’t finished discussing why all these people became a copy of you.’
‘You’re nothing more than a minefield, a spanner in the works. No alien race can risk being damaged or destroyed through contact with another culture. Your purpose is chaos. To mess civilization up so much we’re too busy repairing the damage to even think about allotting resources to building big, sexy spaceships.’
‘I’ve heard you talk about this before. It’s bad manners, I know, but back at the school when you and Madeline were in the cell I eavesdropped. As an explanation of our nature it was distinctly shabby.’
‘Shabby? Ouch. You know, I can’t even say the word without it hurting my head?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘But don’t we have a telepathic link? You should be saying “I feel your pain” and meaning it.’
The man with the hole in his face smiled, pus welled from the crater. By now flies buzzed in, drawn by the odour. ‘Do you feel the wound in my face?’
‘Now you mention it, an itch.’ I grimaced at the ache in my skull. ‘Ah … you said my explanation of your nature is shabby. But then up there on another world cowardly aliens have played a shabby trick on all of us. Maybe it’s the cosmic equivalent of spitting bubblegum on a bus seat to spoil the clothes of whoever sits there later. Some lowdown skunks on Planet X, Mars, or wherever it is, intend to spoil the progress of a life-form that they don’t even know exists. Imagine if the Echo process results in the substitution of world leaders who start wars, or for ordinary men and women to be replaced by copies of themselves who commit terrorist atrocities. If they detonate a bomb in your town every day, how long would it be before you stopped visiting the supermarket there, or going to work? Ancient Rome didn’t collapse solely because of an invasion from outside, it went rotten on the inside … people stopped going to the office … “no more office for me”, they said. “I’m going fishing” …’ My head sagged as pain overwhelmed me. ‘Got any morphine … anything to take the pointy corners off this?’
The thing with the holed face continued with an obsessive fire in his eyes. ‘If this spoiler theory is true then is it such a bad thing? It stops humanity spreading its virus of violence into the universe. So aren’t we doing God’s work? Who wants the human race knocking on their planetary door when we’re addicted to war, terrorism, and suffer such irrational behaviour we have an inability to agree on international boundaries, food standards, religion, or even what constitutes physical beauty. Let’s face it the human race is a problem child. It can’t be let out of the cage we call Earth yet. Agree?’
‘We are quarrelsome to the point of being self-destructive. But it’ll pass. One day nations will live in harmony. So there’s no need for Echomen to wreck society and our capacity to progress. Therefore, we will destroy you monsters.’
‘But what if we aren’t this time bomb that you and Madeline have dreamed up between yourselves?’ His ruined face loomed toward mine. ‘What if we are the next stage in evolution?’
I didn’t answer. My head hurt too much.
‘Hmm?’ Flies swarmed in the wet mess in the side of his face. ‘At this moment, which side is winning? Human beings or us?’
For a moment I didn’t reply, then my head cleared as an idea formed there. ‘When I was in the cell with Madeline someone else arrived. You didn’t put them in there. They just strolled in to visit me. Remember that?’
His eyes hardened.
My turn to smile. ‘Yes, you do remember, don’t you? And I’ve heard that you and your people were none too happy with it. In fact, the stranger who can walk through walls to visit me scared the daylights out of you. Isn’t that correct?’
Instead of answering he stood up abruptly. ‘I promised you a surprise, Mason. Here it is.’
The pain in my head suddenly wasn’t important anymore. What I saw being brought toward me had the effect of a stinging slap in the face. Enough to dispel the vertigo and bring me to my feet in a second.
‘Let them go,’ I said.
‘But this is your surprise.’ The ruined face grinned hard enough to squeeze gobs of yellow from the wound.
The flow of Echomen had reversed itself. They now walked uphill away from the church. Only that flow carried with it Dianna and Ruth. Sooty marks around the women’s noses revealed the intensity of the gun battle. They must have fired hundreds of rounds into the monsters as they crawled through the shattered church windows. Now the Echomen brought their captives to me as a gift.
Ruth blinked in the sunlight. ‘Mason?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I called to her. ‘They’ve decided I’m responsible for their creation. I’ll order them not to harm you.’ I flung the bloody handkerchief to one side that I’d been clamping against my forehead. ‘Listen to me,’ I shouted to the things that I’d unwittingly spawned. ‘These two woman are my friends. You must not hurt them.’
Dianna shrugged herself free of the hands that held her. ‘Mason. They attacked the house last night. There were hundreds of them.’
‘I know. And some of us are safe.’ I couldn’t afford to be any more explicit than that. ‘And don’t worry, it won’t be long before help arrives.’
Meanwhile, the sea of faces gazed up at me – a sea of my faces. That brought the vertigo back. All those Mason Konrads watching me. ‘Don’t lay a finger on these two women,’ I told that sea of staring eyes. ‘I order you not to hurt them.’ Then I turned to the two women who stood on the road just twenty yards from me. ‘Ruth, Dianna, don’t run, don’t make any sudden movements. Just walk to the cab of the truck and get in. I’ll join you in a moment.’
They moved at an easy pace toward
the truck. A germ of an idea formed inside my head. Join them in the truck. Drive out of here to safety.
‘Mason, you don’t understand,’ the man beside me sighed. ‘We offer these two women as a sacrifice.’
He nodded at the crowd. They swamped the two women in a second. And what could I do? Well, I’ll tell you. All that monster-maker, Mason Konrad, could do was stand there and watch as Dianna and Ruth were torn apart by dozens of bare hands. Torn apart? Think of old T-shirts torn apart to polish the car. Newspapers torn apart to light a fire. Lettuce leaves torn apart to feed a pet rabbit.
But a human being torn apart?
The forces necessary are immense. Let me tell you those forces were present that day. Driven by sheer bloodlust my clones ripped the hair from the heads of the two women. They heaved at fingers until sinews gave way. Arms are tougher. A mass of eager hands had to participate to separate a human arm from a shoulder. Ruth and Dianna’s screams were so full of pain that I found myself hating the sun for still daring to illuminate the scene. And all I could do was stand absolutely still, watch, listen, smell, experience their deaths. And deaths that had to be the bloodiest I’ve ever witnessed.
chapter 45
They swarmed up on to the truck. The first carried the heads of my two dead friends, the twenty that followed celebrated with lumps of raw meat. One boy held aloft a fistful of crimson human offal as if it were a floral bouquet.
I thought: They’re smiling. These things really do believe I’m pleased by what they’ve done.
‘You see,’ the man with the crater in his face was satisfied, ‘they’ll die for you … and they’ll kill for you.’
‘You bastards … you filthy, murdering bastards.’ I punched one grinning youth with a handful of bloody hair. He toppled back on to the brutes who crowded in tight around the vehicle. Their heads were just about level with my feet as I stood on the back of the truck. Something that, in my enraged state, was temptation beyond my power to resist. I delivered full-blooded kicks to those faces – my copied face – noses shattered; eyelids ripped open in bursts of blood.