Amidst the falling dust (The Green and Pleasant Land) (4 page)

I assume from their clarity that he has removed his gas mask. He calls out to me every now and then, perhaps trying to elicit a reaction that will not come. He whispers to me of all the things he will do to my body with his blade. He tells me that I can't get out. He tells me that he is coming for me.

If his intention is to frighten me there is no need, I will not get much more scared than this I hope.

“You may as well come out little man”, comes the sibilant hiss.

“Surrender now, quietly to me, down here in the dark, I will make it quick, I promise”.

His accent is untraceable. Just another Englishman who has turned away from the horizon. I wonder a year and a half ago what this man would have been doing. Rotting in a deep, dark hole at her majesties pleasure; or sitting in an office, discussing the news over a mug of tea. Fiona was right, it mattered less and less with each passing day, who we were and where we came from. There were no ashes from which to rise, just more and more fire to fall into.

There are many puddles down here and more than the occasional rat. I tiptoe as quietly as I am able, up and down this way and that. The noise of the fighting has gone now, we won or we are dead, or I am just too far underground. Though my eyes adjust to the gloom somewhat I still find myself bumping into pipes every now and then. I use the wall to navigate through the dark until I get to a point where the wall stops. The air changes and I sense that I am in a very large underground room.

There is a stench down here, not the smell of something rotting, the smell of a thousand things which have rotted away and left only an angry, putrescent vapour to pollute the air, odorous ghosts which clog the senses.

The smell has been getting worse the further I have come. I stand at the edge of the large vault and sniff the foul air, from somewhere close by I hear a movement, a slippery, wet, sound.

A few steps back and I feel a cold metal barrel against my head.

“Hello little man” whispers the voice, he follows up his greeting with a short sharp whack against the back of my head which sends me to the floor.

Suddenly a light shines in my face, I am blinded again. I can hear the sound of a weapon being unsheathed, the blade rubs against a whetstone. “Where have you lot come from then?” asks the Englishman in a conversational tone. I do not answer him. Beyond the shining light my other senses still probe the room. That sound is still there, louder, more pronounced. I look around for the weapon I dropped when he hit me, it has been swallowed by the gloom.

The light moves, it seems to wedge itself in a hole in the wall. My attacker walks forward. I need to stand up, I need to fight, I scream at my limbs to react. They ignore me, they are being governed my a more powerful imperative. A silhouette is framed in the light of the powerful torch. I see a gas mask slung over one shoulder. In both hands he holds knives. “You may not feel like talking now but you will in a minute my friend, of that I can assure you”.

He stops mid stride. He's heard it too. This is not a background noise, it is the sound of something close by, something alive, something large. I can make out some of my attackers features, he is nondescript, plain and mundane looking. He is staring off into the dark behind me.

What was a slopping, slow, wet sound changes. Now there is a noise like a cracking whip and suddenly my assailant collapses beneath his own nemesis. Some fiend labours over him in a crazed attack. The light is not good and nor are my senses, but it looks like a cadaver. An armless, legless cadaver, just a body, just a head, just teeth. How can it be that such a creature moves? It is mounted, mounted on the end of what I could only describe as a giant tentacle.

All down the thick, slimy arm of the beast there are spikes which flex as the cadaver at its end devours the now dead marauder. It seems there is no air to breath, my lungs are struggling, does it see me? This question rotates around my mind at ten thousand revolutions a second. I close my eyes to calm the whir. Slowly I rise to unsteady feet. I start to creep around the edges of the torchlight, to stay outside the dining area.

I am halfway to false freedom when I see the second tentacle arrive, an equally hungry and deformed cadaver sits on its tip, it begins to feed alongside its fellow. From the darkness behind me I hear the sound of much writhing. I turn and squint against the blackness. Something huge sits there, I have seen but one part of this horror.

I start to run again. I am getting good at running. As I pass I snatch the torch from the wall. I press my hands to my ears as the beast lets me know its anger. I am reminded of the undulating 'nooooo' of the cadavers I have heard before, but a thousand times louder and of a depth that could swallow cities whole.

My lungs start working again, my legs pump as they have never done before. I am surprised there is still moisture left to sweat, but its presence is undeniable as it runs into my eyes and soaks my fatigues. Every now and then I turn and flash the light at my pursuer, this is a mistake I cannot help repeat such is my thrilling, morbid fascination. What looks like dozens of cadavers follow me, each and every one of them sits on the end of a tentacle, that leads back into the darkness, back to something else....

Walls give way with a tumbling crash, pipes are snapped apart like matchsticks. The creatures strength is matched only by its desire to feed. Is it chasing me or guiding me? I know not but my ascent back to the world is by some murky fate far quicker than the slow escape down. I come upon a stairwell up which I am instantly racing. My feet pound against the metal, now and then I stumble, my shins accrue more bruises. Looking down I see them rising, thick slimy tentacles fill the stairwell behind me like a flood, at their tip the cadavers scream through sharp and rotting teeth.

The sunlight blinds me as I stumble from the metal cellar like doors and out into the open. I am greeted shortly by gruff shouts and a blow to the head. Recovering eyes take in several sights. The smouldering wreckage of the Chinook with dozens of burned bodies around it. Many men in gas masks standing around the parade ground. Around fifteen of my fellow sailors are knelt upon the ground with their hands on their heads. Most are weeping as a gasmasked villain goes down the line and ends their coil with a single round to the back of the head.

“We have to run” I gasp to the stranger who stands over me, looking down at my wretched form through impassive black lenses. “Your running days are over bitch” he muffles as he lifts his weapon. There is so much to be seen down the barrel of a gun, so much life that can fit into such a small dark space. My would be executioner is almost decapitated by one of the doors through which I excited as it flies from its hinges.

A roaring mass of tentacle cadavers surges from the opening. The rumbling in the ground is a testament to the size and strength of the beast. Indeed even as its long arms unfurl through the opening the ground around the entrance begins to crack and splinter, such are the insufficiencies of its dimensions. Guns roar. The gas masks appear from many directions. The death sentences that were being carried out against my tearful fellows have ceased. Four of them get a reprieve.

The cracks in the ground get bigger. The cadaver tentacles flay this way and that. Men are swiped aside, flung up high over the buildings by the force. Others are pinned to the floor and many mouths descend, rending and tearing. Blood sprays from the tentacles painting the concrete red. But still they flail, still they emerge, not only from the cellar doors but now from the large cracks which appear here and there. Bloodied and mangled cadavers punch through the floor and begin to hunt.

I make it to my comrades and we start to run together. The gasmasks ignore us, they have bigger problems. The whole area feels like it is becoming unstable. As we race towards the edge of the parade ground I see movement between the buildings, in the buildings and curling up around them. Dozens, no hundreds of tentacles are rising up from all directions.

Alleys are blocked, entrances burst open to reveal gaping maws and bloody saliva. I turn and see a similar picture unfolding around the large parade ground. Fifty foot long tentacles fill the air, swooping down every now and then to pick off a marauder. Their numbers are dwindling, the maws descend in packs like rabid dogs, pinning a meal to the ground and tearing it apart within seconds.

From deep in the ground there are rumbles now and then. The creature roars from far below, though unless I am mistaken the noise gets louder each time. It rises. I fear we will soon be part of the feast. I look to my beaten fellows, they are resigned, they have drunk their last cup of melancholy, it fills their veins until the weight drags them to the floor, the world has become a monster and there is no point fighting any more.

Then there meets my ears a familiar sound. The sound of something man made, the sound of something that is engineered, powered by a fuel that human hands prised from the earth. I hear the sound of rotor blades, I look up and see a bird of prey, sleek, metallic and bristling with mass destruction.

The Lynx swoops in. Chainguns trail fire across the parade ground, rockets spray through the air and sever whole tentacles with a mighty boom. In the cockpits he sits, my most hated fellow traveller, battle hardened, battle maddened, battle-god. Lieutenant Emmanuel Tasker. His face is a mask of precision focus. The Lynx glides effortlessly towards us. Several tentacles dart towards it but are driven off by the hail of fire which screams barely inches above our crouched heads.

The chopper lands and we half stumble, half drag each other towards it. Tasker barely looks back to check we are all in before gunning the engine and lifting us into the air with such force that we roll around in the back like downed bowling pins.

I get enough leverage to be able to pull myself up and gaze out of the window. Tasker angles the chopper and its main rotor blade cuts through a mass of tentacles which bar the way. Behind us the few remaining gasmasks have turned their weapon to the sky. They will not escape their fate and their resentment at our flight fills them with a raging despair. Then we are up and away. I look back to Brampton Barracks. The last I see is a huge fissure appearing in the middle of the base, from it something begins to emerge, a gigantic, logic defying mass. I do not see its entirety, we fly too high and too fast, the base and the monster are soon left behind. All I will carry is a hint, a flash of memory of the thing that emerged from the deep.

Tasker, Patricia Jones, Sergeant Trowler, Mark Kirby, Daniel Sutton and me. Patrick Redmayne. This is not like the solemn flights of before. Too much has occurred for us to wade about in it inside of our own heads. We splurge, we weep, we theorise. Each of us checks our version of events against the others, we are checking to make sure we saw the same thing, we are trying to ascertain that we still have our sanity and that what we just witnessed is real.

I tell them about what happened in the basement. About the chase. About Fiona and about what happened to the Puma. I hear a similar tale about the Chinook, shoulder mounted missiles fired from the residential blocks. A perfectly executed ambush. Only expert piloting and advanced countermeasures had allowed the Lynx to evade a similar peril.

Judging by their apparel and weapons the gasmasked marauders had been at the base for some time. We were not the first to have thought about raiding Brampton and we paid for that second place with many lives.

Of the monster we can only theorise. A radiation freak, a result of some warped branch of the deathwalker virus. These were the most sensible options for such a senseless concept. We did not talk of other possibilities, the darker corridors of definition through which such horror might have emerged into the world.

There does not seem to have been any debate about our direction. I ask Tasker who flatly informs me that the mission will continue, we are making for Carlisle. None of us object out loud. About half way there Tasker says that Edenpark will be our final destination. “Why?” asks Patricia fearing some alternative agenda which the lieutenant has conceived. Tasker indicates out of the offside of the chopper, we look out to see fuel pumping steadily from the side of the tank. A stray bullet, a fond farewell from our gasmasked friends. We have been steadily leaking fuel, the only cold comfort is that the man who fired the shot is now probably being digested in the belly of the beast.

We limp into the skies above Carlisle. The engine has been sputtering with increasing frequency, the fuel gage has sunk low enough to no longer be an indication of the fumes left in the tank. My chest tightens as we cross the city. My home. There is so much familiarity, shopping parades, cinemas and traffic lights. We move north, to the other side of town. After a couple of miles of open fields we see our final destination. Edenpark is a grand complex.

The main central building is a large glass pyramid, at each corner there rises up a tower, from the four towers are skybriges which link into the pinnacle of the pyramid. At the apex of the structure is the boardroom from which the Pendragon Systems masters used to stare out over the land. The Pendragon flag still flutters atop the pyramid. A red background with a golden sword held in an armoured hand. Miles of empty car parks surround the structure.

Tasker guides the bird down into an empty space. We sit and listen as the engine winds down. Finally there is silence. Tasker turns to look back at his sorry passengers. “It won't start up again” he says matter of factly.

“There is a helipad atop one of the towers, they may have fuel stored up there” I offer up helpfully.

“Let us hope so” says Tasker. We deploy. Not with the military precision that we did at Kielder Water. Nor with the battle driven haste that we did at Brampton. A weary and depleted group clambers clumsily from the helicopter. Ammunition is lugged, SA-80 assault rifles are dragged along, hand guns are checked and loaded, grenades are fastened to belts.

As we creep across the car park I cannot help but notice the fading light. We reach a service entrance and I bid my fellows stop. “We need to keep moving Redmayne” growls Tasker.