Max Gilbert

  Tears.

  "Don't cry, Mum. I know what to do. To make it all better."

  She shushed him gently. She had not understood.

  But he understood what had to be done. He knew a secret grown-ups didn't.

  "I want to stand up, Mum."

  She let him go.

  The towel slipped onto the sand. He knew what to do. And he had to do it now.

  It was time.

  His dad was not looking his way. He was staring at the red men. David waited until his mum looked the other way.

  Then he ran.

  "Chris!" Ruth's voice pierced his ears. "Get him!"

  Chris looked round.

  David had run down the beach in the direction of the causeway. He ran between two Saf Dar who made no effort to catch him.

  Plenty of time for that. ...

  Plenty of time to play with the little boy in our own special way. ...

  Chris bounded down the beach, the hammer gripped tightly in his hand.

  By the time he reached the causeway, David was a third of the way across.

  "David! Come back... You can't go back there."

  David didn't, or pretended not to, hear him. He ran on; a small blond-haired figure in a red sweatshirt and jeans, bare feet splashing through the surf.

  Chris struggled through the waves. Now they were above knee-deep, making running nearly impossible.

  By some fluke, David must have been running between waves. He ran easily and fast.

  He prayed that a wave would not knock David into the sea. Flanking the causeway were Saf Dar. Waiting.

  He moved as quickly as he could, not knowing what he would do when he caught up with David. The seafort was alight. Maybe not all the gas bottles had exploded. The smoke would be choking. How could they return to the shore?

  If they did, they would only meet the Saf Dar. Time ... life was running out.

  Something twisted around his ankle. He pitched forward, sliding along the cobbles on the palms of his hands and knees. Picking up the hammer, he kicked free the long strand of seaweed that had bound itself around his ankle.

  Then on his knees he suddenly stopped.

  He knew he would chase after David no longer.

  He watched his little boy leave the causeway and run through the open gates of the sea-fort. Smoke rolled through them and up into the flame-colored sky.

  He should save his son. His inner voice begged him to go on, to bring his son out of the burning building.

  But another voice, the voice of the other dancer, said No.

  The voice, clear and overpowering his, rang through his mind: It's time to leave David now.

  As Chris Stainforth knelt there, the water curling around his legs, the final blast came.

  This time the explosion was titanic.

  The sound tore open the sky with a tremendous crack. A fountain of flame shot up from the courtyard, turning the sea the color of liquid gold. He screwed his eyes to slits.

  But he had to keep watching. He knew he had to.

  The top half of the building-the windows, the balcony-split from the rest. In a single piece it rose into the sky, flames spurting from the bottom, cracking like thunder.

  Like some stone rocket it rose higher and higher toward the rose-colored sky.

  Then, with horrible slowness, it tore itself in two. Bleeding fire and smoke, it dropped piece by piece into the sea.

  Chris's eyes opened wide. Fragments of burning wood were raining down from the sky all around him, to fall into the sea with a sharp sizzling sound. A burning tire from the car dropped like a meteor onto the causeway ten feet in front of him and rolled into the sea.

  The sea-fort was a mound of blazing rubble.

  David.

  Chris, the father, had knelt there and let his son run into the building. Now David lay crushed beneath that inferno.

  As if a handful of skin had been torn from his face, he howled.

  His only son.

  An avalanche of memories swept everything from his mind.

  It was more than grief; it knocked the breath from his body.

  David. He remembered how three days after he was born they had brought him home from hospital wrapped in a white shawl. The time he had fallen from his bike and cut his chin. He was three years old; Chris had been nearly mindless with worry. Driving him to hospital, David in Ruth's arms in the back. And two years ago, when David had woken in the middle of the night crying and holding his head, saying it hurt him. Chris had convinced himself it was meningitis.

  When David had first started school a bigger boy began bullying him. How can someone punch a four-yearold child? David, his eyes large, had calmly catalogued how the boy had hurt him: punches, kicks, bending fingers back, jabbing a thumb into his spine. All the times Chris had taken his son to school then walked away. David had watched him with those big frightened eyes, giving him a little wave and a forced smile, knowing that the bully would be waiting for him around the corner.

  God ... You try to protect your children. There are so many cruel things waiting to hurt them: a car traveling too fast; a dormant cancer waking in their bones to kill them by inches; or choking to death on a piece of apple.

  You're afraid some pervert's going to snatch your son or daughter off the pavement. Even from the garden. You see it over and over in your mind. Some faceless man, gripping your child by the hand, pulling them along crying and frightened. Then doing what to them?

  You've read enough newspaper reports to know. The remembered fragments of text, odd sentences, stream up in a poisonous flow through your mind: little girls, little boys, abducted, tortured, killed.

  The little details haunt you. The little girl murdered and left in a deep-freeze. Police find a single tear, frozen to her cheek. Perverts forcing whiskey down the throat of the five-year-old boy. They hold him by the throat too hard. He is asphyxiated. The little boy had only gone to the canal to watch the swans.

  For years and years he had read these reports. He had wished over and over that he could have surprised one of these perverts just as they abducted a child. He would have broken every bastard bone in their body.

  Those thoughts had sifted through his mind for years.

  He had tried as hard as humanly possible to keep David safe from harm.

  He had failed.

  A change took place inside him.

  The icy calm broke. A fury began to run through him, bitter, and burning like fire.

  "Bastards!"

  Chris stood up, the huge hammer gripped in his two hands.

  "Bastards!"

  Those red men had caused this. The Saf Dar. They had destroyed Chris's life. They had taken away his son. They had robbed him of the reason to live.

  Bastards.

  Fucking bastards.

  What have I done to you?

  He walked back toward the beach, fury pumping his legs, forcing him through the surf like a man-of-war.

  The hammer seemed to quiver in his hand.

  The Saf Dar's circle was tightening around the people on the beach.

  Chris didn't give a shit now.

  He wasn't walking away from this one.

  Those bastards killed my son.

  Revenge.

  The word had a beautiful power. Revenge. It resonated inside his skull. REVENGE.

  The monsters would pull him apart like roast chicken, but he wouldn't run away from this. No. This was where he stood and fought.

  Fury thundered through him, bursting inside, lighting UP his arms and legs in a rush of blazing power.

  The first red man turned to face him, glass-splinter eyes gleaming hungrily. The lips parted in a vicious grin. It lifted its gorilla arms, muscles bunching, distorting the skin and veins.

  "Bastard!"

  Fury ripped a scream from his throat; he swung the hammer at the flat red face.

  He had not expected it.

  The impossible happened.

  The massive iron head of the hammer swung down i
nto the face-dead center. And it kept on going, the fury-driven swing sending it down through the spade-like forehead, down between the eyes, splitting open the nose to wreck the jaw, driving out teeth to punch through the skin.

  The red man crashed back onto the sand, flat out, arms and legs outstretched as if he had fallen from a tower block.

  One to Chris's left lurched forward furiously, its arms reaching out, the fingers flexing to snap his neck.

  The anger blazing through Chris powered him into something more than human. Arms straight out, he swung the hammer toward the side of the monster's head.

  The head exploded like a paint-filled balloon; splinters of bone, cancered brain, and a gobful of black shit hung through the gaping hole the hammer had made.

  The thing's knees bent and it folded dead on the sand.

  Shouting, he twisted around to face the next one. He was howling, swearing, the fury blasting through his whole being like a high-pressure hose; its intensity hurt, but there was a sweetness too, a sweet pain like pulling a deeply embedded thorn from your finger.

  "Kill me!" he roared at the red man. "Do it. Do it!"

  He wanted the thing to rip him apart and end his life. He didn't want to live knowing he had failed his son.

  "Come on! What are you waiting for? Kill me!" he bellowed furiously. The fire blazed in him, from his balls to his brain; it torched the core of his being.

  "Kill me! Come on, I want you to kill me!"

  He walked forward, body burning, the hammer above his head.

  Then he saw it.

  The realization stopped him dead.

  He had looked into the monster's face and seen for the first time an expression of the emotion it felt.

  On that great flat face there was ... fear.

  This lump of man-shaped shit was actually frightened of him.

  He moved forward, hammer swinging over his head.

  The creature groaned.

  Fear. He scared that great bulging block of muscle.

  The knowledge uplifted him. He felt strength flowing through him. He felt a new power. His fury met with it; fused with it and-

  The hammer tore off the monster's face.

  Faceless, terrified, it turned and tried to run.

  The next hammer blow snapped its spine. It fell to the sand, face down.

  He didn't stop to finish it off. He walked over it, his feet stamping down, cracking the ribs like wishbones, rupturing its internal organs.

  The remaining Saf Dar were backing away now, looking from one to the other.

  They didn't look so big now. Their arms looked thinner. The look of evil had been replaced by one of fear.

  This shouldn't be happening ... Chris knew what they were thinking. This wasn't what was supposed to happen. These people from the sea-fort were sheep.

  Well, one sheep had turned into their nemesis. The avenging angel.

  He moved among them. He moved fast. The hammer became an extension of his arms; it had no weight, it sliced through the air like a blade, pounding a skull to red mush here, separating an arm from a torso there.

  The Saf Dar howled and ran in terror.

  And he exulted in their destruction.

  For a few days the Saf Dar had soaked up the power from this chunk of coast. That force had animated them, driving them onto fulfil their own warped passions. But now the power was leaving them. No, not quite that. Something was taking away that power-and redirecting it through Chris Stainforth.

  Even as he cracked open another face he saw that they were weakening.

  Their skin was wrinkling, like a tomato left too long on a shelf. Inside they were withering, muscles shrinking. Their skin was turning gray-bloodless. They stumbled across the beach and died as the massive block of iron hammered them to mush.

  Within minutes he faced the last one. It trembled.

  He looked into that gray face. The eyes were sticky white drops, weak, barely focused. The face twisted into an expression of utter, bottomless fear.

  It raised its thin white hands to its face.

  He raised the hammer high, ready to swing it down on top of its hairless gray head.

  But he did not bring the hammer down.

  Welling up from deep inside him was a huge swelling of absolute power; it rocketed up through the core of his body, up through his throat, to his mouth.

  Then he roared out an ear-bruising cry. The sound rolled over the beach and away, to reverberate down and down and down to another sea, which belonged to a different world.

  For ever and ever, world without end.

  Amen.

  Before him, the last Saf Dar crumbled without being touched. Its skin peeled away from its head, exposing shriveled eyes that looked bleakly back at Chris. As if molded from ice-cream, the body melted, dribbling down to form pools of gray on the beach.

  Seconds later it flopped onto the sand with a wet smacking sound.

  As he walked slowly back to Ruth and the villagers, the sea slid in to wipe away the melting remains of the dead men.

  He knew. They would not come back this time.

  The villagers watched him in silence.

  Chris looked down toward the surf. A line of figures- Wainwright, the Fox twins, Hodgson, the drowned boy and the others-was filing into the sea. They walked calmly, like sleepwalkers. Now a greater voice was calling. They obeyed. Their nightmare was over too.

  He dropped the hammer to the sand, put his arm around his wife, and they crossed the causeway together, back to the sea-fort.

  They stood together in what was left of the courtyard, the car a crumpled metal box beneath the masonry. What was left of the caravan blazed.

  Hardly one stone stood above another; there was just a heap of rubble rising from the sea. Here and there, like a scattering of yellow daffodils, small flames flickered through the rubble.

  I killed our son. Chris wanted to say the words, but nothing came.

  He had his arm around Ruth. She said nothing. She seemed somehow inert, as if part of her life had left her.

  A car tire hissed as air escaped from the burning rubber.

  He felt empty now. The huge reservoir of bitterness, frustration, rage had been spent.