Chris gasped when he saw it. Even Wythenshawe let his mouth fall open.
There was almost nothing left. The dome, of course, was gone and the rest of the roof had collapsed: without it St Paul’s looked so different it was almost unrecognizable. The area around the cathedral was littered with chunks of masonry. Two entire sections of the walls were missing, and the remainder were sagging dangerously.
‘Anna!’ Chris yelled as the van pulled up. He’d got the door open, and was on the point of running straight up the steps into the cathedral, before Wythenshawe laid a warning hand on his sleeve.
‘Steady on, old chap,’ he said. ‘Poor old St Paul’s looks a bit shaky. You’d best let me take the lead on this, I think.’
Chris just wrenched his arm away. ‘Anna? Anna!’ he called.
Stepping out from behind one of the pillars of the main entrance, she put her hands on her hips.
‘Chris,’ she said, sounding exasperated, ‘what do you think you’re doing here?’
It wasn’t quite the response Chris had been expecting. He gaped.
‘I . . .’ he said, then tried again. ‘We . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Well, we’re here to . . . rescue you, I guess.’
For a moment, Anna just stared at him.
‘Honestly, Chris,’ she said. ‘You’re sweet in a way, but you can really be incredibly dense sometimes. What about the plan? Why do you think I lured my father here? Why aren’t you back at the bunker with Ms Plimpton, where you belong?’
‘It didn’t work out, Anna,’ Chris told her. ‘We did the hand-holding, the TV, the whole bit. But it just didn’t work. I don’t know, maybe what happened before was . . . a fluke or something. Anyway, I gave up, and here I am. So why don’t you come with us?’
‘Come where, Chris?’ said Anna. She gestured outwards at the shattered landscape around them. ‘Where do you think we’re going to go? Haven’t you been listening to what’s been going on? You were the last hope. If Tim doesn’t defeat my father, it’s the end. The fate of the whole world is resting on how this fight goes, and Tim can’t possibly win without your help!’
‘But it’s not my help, is it?’ said Chris, losing patience at last. ‘I’m not fighting this bloody battle! I’m not doing anything! My job, apparently, is to sit there in my pants in a bath of water on TV while everyone holds hands around me. My job is to look like an idiot! How do you think that makes me feel?’
‘There’s rather more at stake here than your feelings, Chris,’ said Anna through gritted teeth. ‘Wow. I thought you’d changed – you know? I thought there was a bit more to you than this constant obsession of yours with trying to be cool – but I guess I was right that first time. Being cool is really all you’re about, isn’t it, Chris? Every thought in your mind is all, How will it look if I do this? Well, I’ve got news for you.’ She glared at him. ‘I don’t claim to know much about cool, but I do know this: Trying to be . . . isn’t.’
She shook her head.
‘You’re not even shallow, Chris. You’re nothing. And now . . .’ She paused. ‘Now, you’ve killed us all.’
THE CRUNCH
TIM FELT MALLAHIDE’S arms lock around him and begin to tighten. That was when he knew: the final facts of it at last penetrated even his dinosaur brain. One way or the other, this was going to be the end of the fight.
Plumbing the bottomless blue depths of himself, Tim brought out everything he had. A burst of animal rage lit up in him like a bomb behind his eyelids. He locked his own arms behind Mallahide’s back; his hind claws dug into the ground – and he hung there, squeezing with every cell, every particle of his being.
Time seemed to stretch. The arms around Tim’s great sides tightened slowly, inexorably. In response, all the muscles in Tim’s colossal ribs and back began to bulge and ripple as he tensed them, straining against the intolerable inward pressure that – if he once allowed himself to succumb – would crush the life out of his body. At the same time, though the effort make him snort and wheeze through his nostrils, Tim tightened his own arms – harder, harder still, until every muscle, every fibre was quivering.
The two titans stayed like that, locked together, and the world waited, holding its breath.
‘This is Fiona Pilkington of the BBC, bringing you the latest from the battle. As you can see, we’re flying in the BBC helicopter and we’ve got about as close as we dare. Military choppers have stopped bothering to police the area: now the whole world can watch as this astonishing battle enters its last moments . . .’
On-screen, though the footage wobbled and shook, the two monsters sprang into focus.
All over the globe people sat frozen in front of their screens, locked on the events unfolding on the London streets. Since Ms Plimpton had gone off the air, the helicopter coverage had become all there was to see. The emergency broadcast might have ended in farce and confusion, but everyone – everyone – was watching this titanic struggle as, now, it reached its climax.
Mallahide poured on the pressure. He could have changed his shape again: he could have turned himself into anything he liked and escaped Tim’s grip without effort, but instead he concentrated every last bit of himself on his final move against his opponent.
There was something strangely fascinating about how Tim always got up, always came back for more. Tim’s tenacity would be admirable if it wasn’t so stupid: it was a shame, really, that Mallahide wouldn’t get the chance to study this determination and where it came from in more detail. But it was clear to the professor that simple punishment was no longer going to be sufficient. There could be only one outcome now. Tim was going to have to die.
Imperceptibly at first, the sky over London began to darken.
It wasn’t Mallahide’s doing. From across the whole world storm clouds were rolling in to bunch overhead. A strange pressure seemed to be building in the air. Weird little gusts of wind caught up scattered bits of paper and rubbish and whirled them into the sky. Bin lids bowled along crippled streets, hot dust hissed on the breeze, shattered brickwork trembled where it fell, and Chris – suddenly and unaccountably cold – found himself folding his arms and pulling his sleeves tight about him to trap what warmth remained in his body.
‘Something’s happening,’ he said.
‘Oh no . . .’ whispered Anna. ‘I think this is it.’
Mallahide’s arms crushed at Tim’s sides. Tim could feel the great bones of his ribs grinding as the pressure began to take its toll. The pain was intense. Tim’s whole body was a mass of it. So for the last time, knowing what the answer would be, Tim reached inside himself and concentrated. Gathering his slow woolly thoughts as best he could, Tim reached out, crossing the distance to the mental presence he’d felt before – the tiny person that stood between him and the source of his strength.
Chris felt it. He shivered and bit his lip, but his mind remained set: he had tried, he had failed. He wanted to help Tim, a part of him knew what was going to happen, but there was nothing to be done. Inwardly, he turned his back again.
Tim tried to roar, but all that came out was a kind of low whine. He squeezed, just once more, a last-ditch effort.
No answer. It was no good. Exhausted, he gave up.
Instantly the pressure surged inward. Feeling Tim’s defences finally weaken and fail, Mallahide rushed to make safe his triumph. There was a sudden dreadful sound: crack, like a cannon shot. It was heard around the world.
Tim’s eyes rolled up in his head: a fine green drizzle sprayed up his throat and out over his teeth. His great arms released their hold on Mallahide’s armoured black back, and fell to his sides.
Tim went limp.
For a long second, Mallahide just held him like that. Then slowly, knowing the whole world was watching, Mallahide’s arms lifted Tim up into the air. As the swarm bulged and fizzed with effort and concentration, Mallahide hoisted the tonnage of Tim’s slack body overhead in a final gesture of victory.
Then he threw his defeated foe down onto the ground.
WHAM! The shock wave spread outwards, knocking Chris and Anna helplessly to their knees. Another of St Paul’s great walls collapsed. The wind, which had been steadily rising, blew up into a terrible shriek. Then died down.
Chris opened his eyes. Mallahide was coming towards them.
His ranks of bristling legs rippled eagerly. He grew even bigger in Chris’s eyes as he got closer, a heaving black mass of clashing limbs and snipping scissor fingers, a mobile factory of death.
‘Anna!’ Chris yelled weakly.
The look she gave him then made Chris feel like his heart was turning to ashes.
‘It’s me he wants,’ she told him hollowly. ‘You’d better go.’ She turned and stood between him and her father.
‘Wait a second,’ said Chris. ‘This’ – he shook his head – ‘this isn’t right. This can’t be happening! It can’t be!’
That was how he felt. Tim’s defeat, the impending nuclear catastrophe, the hulking nightmare figure of Mallahide coming towards them – it was all like a bad dream. But it was real. Slowly, almost gently, two black trunk-like arms swung down on either side of where Anna was standing. Closer they came, closer still, their edges blurring, becoming translucent. The scissor hands passed straight through her. They caused no wounds. There was no blood. One set of the great blades swept through Anna’s torso, the other through her legs. Then the arms went back to Mallahide’s sides again.
Anna began to take on a grainy, effervescent quality. Chris blinked; his eyes were watering, but it wasn’t that: Anna had frozen in place, like the image on a photograph, and now she too was blurring – her outlines, her skin going translucent for a moment, then bursting apart. For a last long second her afterimage hung in the air . . .
Then Anna was gone. She had joined her father at last.
‘No!’said Chris. ‘No! No! No!’
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Fiona Pilkington from the helicopter overhead while her cameraman’s eye remained glued to his eyepiece, ‘what you’re seeing is coming live from the scene. Mallahide has won, and – in this corner of the world at least – it seems humanity has lost. Is there nothing that can stop the professor and his nanomachines? Is there nothing that can stand between the British Isles and Armageddon?’
At the emergency session of the United Nations, the room had fallen silent. Each representative was equipped with a hotline to their respective military commanders; each had the day’s codes for missile launch memorized and ready to be given. At bunkers and silos all over the globe, nervous but resigned military personnel stood ready to receive them, ready to press the buttons and start the processes that would wipe Great Britain from the face of the Earth. They had made their peace with what they were going to do. They believed they were ready to face the consequences. But as Mallahide’s claws reached down again – for Chris this time – they waited. Poised to unleash Britain’s utter destruction . . . they paused.
Chris didn’t care about that. Chris didn’t care about any of it: Chris was thinking about Anna.
He stood there staring at the spot where she’d been standing.
He thought about the first time he and Anna had spoken, back at the British Museum. He remembered how he’d felt then, and since. Chris had never met anyone like Anna before: someone who could throw herself into things and not care what people thought. She was sharp, she was brave, she was cool – and, until a moment ago, Chris had been hoping one day they might be friends.
Anna had been right, Chris realized. Through most of the events of these extraordinary few days he’d managed to keep his distance and not let himself get fully involved. Now, at last, that changed. He cared about Anna. He cared about what had been done to her.
Chris was angry.
The bracelet grew warm.
‘What’s that I just saw, back from where Mallahide is standing?’ asked Fiona Pilkington. ‘Can it . . . can it be? Is . . . is the tyrannosaur stirring?’
The cameraman blinked. His attention had been caught too. He focused on Tim: there! There it was again! It was true! His tail was twitching!
And now . . .
Chris felt that weird, bulging, swelling sensation, like his brain was growing too big for his skull. It wasn’t just rage, he realized: it was the bracelet. The bracelet was doing something! How?
Suddenly he understood.
Ms Plimpton had got it halfway right. He, Chris, had been picked to represent the human race. But it wasn’t a question of making everyone hold hands. It was him. He’d changed. He’d begun to care about something outside himself.
He, Chris, had joined the world.
Mallahide’s scissor fingers reached down towards him. Chris ignored them. There was an opening sensation at the back of his head. A connection was forming, coming straight up through the soles of his feet – and something . . . something was coming through.
On Chris’s wrist, the bracelet flared. The world brightened around him.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come on: get up. Let’s do it.’
Woozily, wheezing, Tim sat up. Shaking the masonry dust from one of his enormous arms, he wiped the blood from his jaws – and looked around.
Tim was as surprised to be alive as anyone. Stranger still, considering the battering he’d taken, he felt amazing. There was a weird feeling building inside himself, a sudden kind of strength – something (Tim realized) he’d felt before.
Something old and vast seemed to take hold of him and shake him, rushing roaring racing shrieking bursting. Every sinew in Tim’s body seemed to swell with power – and then it relaxed. Joyfully, hardly believing it, Tim opened his mouth . . .
. . . and breathed.
The blast struck Mallahide like a spear of light, punching straight out the front of his chest. He froze, arms spread and pincers outstretched, his half-insect form looking like he’d been pinned that way for some entomologist’s cosmic-scale collection.
They stood there like that. The boy, the bracelet, the breathing giant monster, and their enemy. And then Professor Mallahide began to change.
The edges of the swarm went first. All over the surface of Mallahide’s cockroach-brown armour, tiny spots began to form. Flaws and imperfections swelled into clusters and clumps as – struck by the torrent of light – the nanobots spontaneously began to change their interactions. Drawing on the information they’d stored at their creation, they began the process of reconstruction.
The insects came first, a dispersing hail that pattered on the pavement. Pigeons poured, clattering, from Mallahide’s arms; rats and squirrels ran from his legs in a sudden and seething tide. Now came the people, their faces and bodies forming under the shuddering brown mass, mouths still open in the screams they’d worn when Mallahide had taken them. Released, they floated to earth – shocked, confused, themselves once more. But still Tim continued to exhale.
By now the swarm had shrunk down almost to nothing. Of Mallahide’s hulking armoured torso all that was left was a single human silhouette, stranded in the air. Impaled by light, arms outstretched, the figure dissolved, then vanished.
Tim closed his mouth and the light winked out.
Mallahide was gone.
‘YES!’ roared Ms Plimpton in the bunker, punching the air.
‘Yes, ladies and gentlemen,’ echoed Fiona Pilkington, ‘you saw it here first! With an extraordinary blast of energy from his breath, no less, it seems that Tim has come back from nowhere to defeat the Mallahide swarm when we least expected it. The scene below us is one of utter confusion. We’re not quite sure what’s happened: frankly,’ Ms Pilkington added, ‘until some facts are established, your guess is as good as ours – but it seems that somehow Tim has saved the day!’
‘Stand down! Stand down!’ From the room in the United Nations the order spread to missile silos and nuclear submarines around the world. The day’s secret launch codes remained just that: secret. Fingers retreated gratefully from their red buttons. The world sat back from its screens and breathed a sigh of reli
ef.
Tim and Chris looked at each other.
Tim looked tired: every inch of his tyrannosaur body was banged and bruised and battered. Chris knew how he felt. Chris’s legs were shaky, his vision was full of purple splashes, and he was sure he was going to collapse again any second. But Chris smiled.
In answer, Tim let out a deafening bellow of glee and delight that finally blew out any remaining windows in a twelve-kilometre radius. Tim’s little blue planet was safe for now, and he was happy. Tim turned. Thrashing his great tail, he stomped off back to the Thames and out to sea – there to heal and wait until he was needed once again.
Chris watched him go. There were (he supposed) worse fates in the world than playing sidekick to the Defender of the Earth . . .
Then, with a nervous pang in his heart, he looked down.
The streets, the whole world, seemed suddenly to be teeming with people: picking themselves up, helping the injured, and gamely – but with varying amounts of success – trying to figure out what the hell had just happened to them. They were a London crowd, a West End crowd, a young crowd for the most part: Chris figured they could look after themselves all right. But where was the person he wanted?
Surely the power couldn’t have destroyed her too when it destroyed her father . . . could it? Surely Chris’s change of heart couldn’t have come too late: surely he’d get the chance to make up for what an idiot he’d been! Chris searched the crowd, suddenly frantic.
‘Chris?’ said a voice.
It was her!
Chris grabbed Anna and wrapped his arms around her. Then, of course, he let go and stepped back, blushing again furiously.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘It’s all right, Chris,’ Anna told him quietly. ‘It’s over.’
Chris smiled at her. Anna was human again.
Anna was real . . .