Amidst the falling dust (The Green and Pleasant Land) (8 page)

Breakfast was miserable. We climbed from the illusory protection of the car in order to relieve ourselves. Personally I also spent a considerable amount of time staring off into the trees imagining running through them to safety, then I recalled the anger Tasker had shown during my last sojourn. I imagined his face prowling through the undergrowth behind me, hunting knife in hand.

I got dutifully back into the car and we trundled on. The puddles caused huge splashes as we went. We saw a couple of cadavers by the side of the road, shuffling along, the undead hitchers who would not find a willing ride.

Through Dobbin Wood we went, through the spidery, slick trees. As we neared the end of the lake we came across the idyllic English village of Glenridden, the villages populous had ambled together in the centre of town to great us by the time we got there. This was one of the few occasions that the others were forced to open up with heavy ammunition in order to clear a path.

Barrels poked out of windows and boomed at the cadavers. Grenades made red puffs and loud cracks here and there. I put my hands over my ears to protect them from the roar, the guns were mere inches from my head. I looked out of the window at the lame Ullswater Steamers, they bobbed up and down, bereft of passengers and crew. Destined to rust and break down into the water, one day they would be nothing, it was likely that not even the history of what they were or the pleasure they brought would be remembered.

Eventually the guns went quiet. We rolled with slick, red tyres through the rest of the empty village and carried on down the road. When we got there Ravensburg seemed slightly less idyllic than Glenridden. The water of the Ravenpool was grey and murky. The tiny stone cottages seemed cramped and cold, meagre dwellings which, unlike those of Glenridden, did not give the impression that there was a warm and welcoming fire beyond the door.

Fortunately the village was cadaver free, those dead souls who once dwelt here must have wondered off some time ago, into the wild to savage squirrels and unwary travellers. We pulled to a stop just outside the village. On the other side of the small body of water that was the Ravenpool I could see a cluster of buildings, they looked deserted but I noted with interest the large antenna tower in their midst.

Tasker had his long range radio in hand which was connected to his ear via a headphone. Both he and Captain Skellen had been sketchy about the nature of the radio signal coming from the area. As far as I knew only a handful of people had been allowed to listen to it back on the carrier. Certainly as far as I was aware no one else had heard it since we started the mission which seems like many days ago now.

Always Tasker would listen to it privately. Right now he seemed to be incredibly agitated by what he heard.

“What's wrong Emmanuel?” asked Trowler. After a few moments Tasker shook his head and pulled the earpiece out.

“Nothing, there has been no sign of the signal for several days now” he said banging the radio down on the dash.

“Well what was it when you did hear it?” asked Mark Kirby. At this Tasker adopted a furtive posture.

“Different things, nothing clear and coherent, nothing tangible” he evaded.

“We've come all this way for 'nothing tangible'?” said Daniel Sutton voicing an annoyance I sensed was becoming universal.

“The message is irrelevant, just the fact that someone was here transmitting was the key factor, and it still is,” said Tasker starting up the engine and revving loudly to cut off any more conversation.

We drove slowly up to the cluster of buildings down the lake road. They stretched off into the valley beyond the Ravenpool, this was a much bigger complex than was apparent from the village and the main road.

Ravensburg Secure Hospital was what it read on the signs. It was not an area which any of us were familiar with. We drove around the ring road but the site looked as dead as the village. When we heard about a radio signal I think everyone assumed that perhaps a bastion of the old world was still here. An operational base where there would be people with a plan that we could leech off for some hope. Instead there was just another of the civilised worlds ten million tombs.

We got out and skimmed the perimeter on foot but this yielded nothing. We were just about to return to the car when Sutton spoke up.

“Blood here” he said indicating some bushes just outside the main fence. We walked out to where he stood and sure enough there was an unmistakable sanguine sheen to a number of the leaves on the bush.

“More here” said Patricia a few feet into the undergrowth. The trail of blood went off into the woods near the hospital and the further along it we went the fresher and more plentifully it was daubed on the flora and fauna.

We were a few hundred metres into the trees when I saw him. He was just laying there in a clearing. His chest moved slowly up and down, he wore some sort of white gown that was covered in blood. The others moved in as a circle, their eyes and their guns scanned the undergrowth until they surrounded the wounded man. Trowler reached him first. I saw the sergeant reach tentatively to the persons neck. I walked up behind him and gazed down upon the wound ravaged form.

That he still breathed was a miracle. I could see the shards from where his shoulder bone had once been. The old me would have vomited, but the new me has a harder stomach. Even so it is difficult to look at the injury, the burned, mangled flesh around the shoulder is what has given our friend away, the steady trail of blood it left behind has now become a pool in which he lays, dying slowly in the woods.

Trowlers hand has not moved from the man's neck, which is strange but I think nothing of it. I look at the face, there is a horrific injury to the victims cheek. An aperture through which I see a dark tongue flailing slowly.

It is impossible to place his age, old I would say, but the ageless old, like your favourite filmstar, who reaches a certain peak in years and seems to stay that way for decade after decade.

Thus far his eyes have stayed closed, but as I stand fully over him, as he lay in my shadow they open. With green brilliance they shine on me and it feels like I am falling. They look like eyes which have watched me through time, eyes whose gaze has pierced the veil of the centuries, eyes which have seen things they should not have seen. My legs are unsteady but I do not notice as I fall with a leafy thud into the undergrowth.

I am experiencing a dream that I know I will never remember yet I sense it is vital that I try. I see a world that is illuminated by a green shadow. Vast towers poke out from the clouds and yearn to touch the moon and sky. Circles of gold pulsate around the planet. Ravens whose wings cover cities float majestically in space.

Fields of white ash stretch as far as the eye can see. Pits are filled with bodies. They are so deep that with my hands I could never reach the bottom, I would crush myself in a sea of limbs and torsos long before I got there. Long before I gave up in my search for a non existent radioactive phoenix.

I can see every fruitless ambition that came before, every woe that came after. They follow one another yet are completely unaware of each others existence. They stand on opposite sides of the circle, close enough to touch yet without a chance of meeting except on the pages of a book, except in the minds of those unlucky enough to live through both.

“Redmayne. Redmayne wake up” Patricia's voice pulls me back. I am hauled from the edge of a void. I open my eyes. She looks worried. I am too. But not by her, nor by the vision of an ever expanding doom which was sparked by the eyes of the prone injured man. No, I am worried by the black clad figure who has appeared at the edge of the clearing, I am worried about the hulking giant whose long barrelled silver cannons are pointed straight at us.

“Don't move” spoke a voice that was so deep it sounded like it could have only been generated by a machine. Indeed it seemed to warble with an echoing, metallic flux.

How he managed to get the drop on such a highly trained and vigilant group I do not know. Tasker, Kirby and Sutton are tense but they adhere to the strangers instructions. Trowler still has his hands on the wounded man's neck, he does not respond in any way. Patricia stands very slowly.

“Who are you?” asks Tasker.

“A friend perhaps, an enemy I hope not” says the giant. Perhaps it was the after effect of the dream trance, perhaps it was the fact that I was still sunk down on the muddy forest floor, but my mind reels from the size of this new player in our game. I would have put him at eight feet at least. But he was not just tall, his bulk dwarfed that of any rugby player or sumo wrestler that I'd seen. Judging from his catlike poise and that way in which he held rigid the massive silver guns it was a bulk comprised of muscle and not fat. Not that it was possible to tell given the thick black clothes he wore which were further smothered by an enormous cloak of a similar shade.

“Friends don't tend to point guns at each other” says Tasker, I could see the lieutenant was itching to raise his weapon and squeeze the trigger. But Tasker wasn't an idiot, he hadn't stayed alive this long by being rash. There was something about this newcomer that reeked of death, the capacity for violence oozed from every obsidian pore and the lieutenant knew it.

“These are unusual times, as well you know” replies the stranger cryptically. The chalk white skin of his face gave away nothing of any emotional content, neither did his pure jet back eyes which looked like something from a horror film.

“I'm going to need to take him with me”, speaks the stranger indicating with one of the guns at the injured man on the moss.

“What is he to you?” I find myself asking. The stranger turns his eyes on me. As he assesses me there is a faint hint of surprise in his reply.

“You have the look of a Redmayne” he speaks, I am shocked and can find no words to reply, the stranger continues.

“He is a parasite and a criminal, I will take him to meet his justice”. Tasker glares at me, then the stranger, then his fellows.

“I don't think so” says the lieutenant. Suddenly I notice something. Ever so slightly the black clad figures arms are tensing. They quiver in the air and I can see the fingers holding the triggers of the long barrelled weapons he has trained on us are taut with pressure. If I did not know better I would swear that the stranger is trying with all his considerable strength to pull the triggers, to send us on our merry way to hell, but he can't, some force restricts him.

“Our mercy will be our undoing you know” says the black clad man to no one in particular. As he speaks he lifts the heavy looking cannons and points them into the air, adopting more of a relaxed posture. Almost as soon as this happens one of our group strikes. It's not me, or Tasker, or Dan or Mark or Patricia. No, Sergeant Trowler who has to this point avoided all interaction with the stranger springs up, SA-80 in hand, he is firing as he brings the weapon to bare, the others react a split second later, aim is taken, lead is loaded and flung through the air at hundreds of miles an hour.

I look to the stranger, I expect to see him fly back through the air punctured by half a hundred bullet holes. Few of my expectations are being met these days. He moves, I will not say he moves quickly, I will not say he moves with inhuman speed for even this does not do him justice. He moves so fast that my eyes can barely track his movements. The stranger bends around trees like the wind, they cannot track him with their heavy leaden barrels.

Over fallen logs and through the undergrowth he moves with grace that would fill the eyes of every dead ballet dancer with green envy. It seems like only moments and he is gone. A few wisps of vapour hang in the air from the rapid fire machine guns which have collectively failed to hit their mark as they vandalised the trees and the air.

“What the shitting hell was that?” asked Tasker after a few moments of dumb incomprehension.

“I don't know, but I don't fancy being here when he comes back” says Kirby. Tasker nods.

“Too bloody right, lets move”.

“We have to take him with us” says Trowler quietly.

“No way, bugger him, lets go” says Tasker starting to stride of into the trees.

“We have no choice” says Trowler moving to the body of the blood soaked man.

“I wasn't putting it up for debate” says Tasker intercepting the sergeant. They stand eyeball to eyeball for quite some time. No one else knows what to do. I sense that this confrontation has been building for a while. I am surprised to see Tasker back down.

“Fine, but he's your responsibility” says the lieutenant, storming off into the trees without a word to anyone else. Trowler picks the injured man up into his arms in an almost reverential fashion and follows Tasker. I exchange looks and shrugs with the others and then we fall in line. About ten minutes later we are all stood together on the edge of the woodland. We are all staring in dismay at our carriage and the billowing cloud of smoke which wafts up from it into the sky. The car is a shell, our belongings are less than that.

At that moment a cadaver comes stumbling from the trees behind us, it has seen the smoke and smelt the burning. It has sensed life and has moved to extinguish it. The manner in which Patricia pulls out her hunting knife and rams it through the fiends head is almost casual. Off in the trees we hear more noise, the sound of multiple things stumbling towards the roaring fire.

“Run” says the lieutenant. We obey.

Just when you think things can't get any worse, any more strange and cruel, they inevitably do. The past twenty-four hours have been bizarre and uncomfortable. We avoided the cadavers. Trowler made up a makeshift stretcher, which nice guy Dan Sutton offered to help carry.

The strangers condition did not change, his every breath was a struggle, he would occasionally open his eyes, though after my first encounter I avoided going anywhere near him. The dream which had seemed so real had been reduced by my feeble mortal mind. Now just scraps and shreds remained, torn pieces of metaphysical cloth which I could not weave into anything coherent.