Flower of Scotland (7 page)

The cop gagged and fought hard to keep down the bile as a human foot, still trailing bloody threads behind it, floated across his view.

She was the second victim.

He raised his gun and fired.

The noise echoed loudly in the hallway.

The plasma surged again, enfolding the cop until he fell into it, like a drowning man going down for the last time. The plasma rolled forward forcing its way out onto the sidewalk beyond.

The backup team saw what happened to the cop. They started in with their own weapons.

The air filled with the noise of gunfire.

The plasma surged and took them.

Sirens blared as the squad cars of more backup teams arrived in the street.

The plasma surged and took them too.

The plasma lay along the eastern seaboard covering most of New York and New Jersey.

Flocks of birds cawed and fluttered.

The plasma ate them.

Three passenger jets inward bound from Europe passed overhead at thirty thousand feet.

The plasma threw up tendrils and ate them.

The bomber carrying the nuke came in at over a thousand miles per hour.

The nuke exploded creating a fireball of white heat and radiation at more than a million degrees centigrade.

The plasma ate it, surged, and headed for Canada.

"We only have one option," the President said. `We hit it with every missile NATO and Russia have, and hope for the best. And somebody close that window!"

Outside, the crazed fluting of Rickman’s plasma filled the air.

Over a thousand nuclear weapons were launched in the next fifteen minutes… enough firepower to start, or finish, a global war, enough mega-tonnage to destroy every city on the planet.

The plasma ate them all and surged.

"We only have one option," the head scientist said. `We keep quiet, and hope it passes."

The crazed fluting of Rickman’s plasma filled the air.

The scientists sat in silence, barely breathing.

Their generator kicked in noisily.

The plasma surged.

The noise came again just as Jim Reagan reached the edge of the field - the same high singing as before.

He tried to peer though the growing gloom of dusk, but all he could see was an expanse of whiteness - a completely snow covered landscape.

"Probably a fox" he told himself, but deep down, even though he would never admit it, he knew that no fox was capable of making that noise. Something was trying to get past his mental filters - something from his childhood - but it wasn't getting through. Not yet.

He made a note in his book that the south fence needed repairing again and was just turning back towards the house when someone spoke.

Can you hear them?

He turned, wondering how a person could have got so close without him noticing, but there was no one within sight, and the only tracks in the snow were his own.

Two minutes later he was standing in the hallway of his cottage, his breath coming in hot steaming gasps, his boots shedding compacted snow onto the hardwood floor.

"It was jist a wee bit o' wind" he whispered, and indeed, as if to counterpoint his thought, a gust whistled through the eaves of the cottage. But he knew that it wasn't the same thing. Not by a long way.

He left his notebook and pencil on the telephone stand in the hall and headed for the drinks cabinet. It took two large glasses of whisky for his mind to turn the memory of the voice into something more resembling a breeze, but even then it still nagged, still lodged way down deep in a place he didn't want to remember.

He tried to settle, but the television was broadcasting its usual inanities and the radio reception was so bad that he was forced to switch it off after a while. He sat at the window, watching a storm build up, until it got too dark to see. And even then he sat, watching his reflection for long minutes before drawing the curtains and closing himself in.

Silence settled around him.

Eventually the wind dropped and, apart from his trusty, wheezing, generator there was only the soft patter of snow on the window. Soon he began to hear rhythms in the noise, the weather sending him a coded signal of danger which he was only just unable to decipher.

"Music," he muttered aloud, needing to break the silence. "That's what I need. Something good and loud."

He rummaged around in a box of old tapes discarded by his wife, his ex-wife, when she left. He put on a compilation of pop songs from a happier time and let the mindless mania wash over him.

For nearly half an hour he managed to lose himself in the intricacies of police work in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct while the music washed around him. He had even found himself singing along at one point, but then a drum beat kicked in that he didn't recognise.

Twin guitars started to wail, then the vocal began, a vocal whose first phrase was echoed by another, deeper voice in his left ear.

Can you hear them, singing their songs

If you listen, they'll soon be a throng

He was up and out of the chair before the voice could continue and switched the player off by pulling the plug out at the mains so that the song died on a slow, ever deepening, chord. For long seconds he stood there, the plug in his hand, his heart pounding its own drumbeat in his ears. He half expected to turn and find that he was not alone in the room, but there was only a spilled glass of whisky and a book beside his chair.

"You're getting daft in your auld age." he said, and almost managed a smile as he realised that talking to himself was probably the first sign that he was right.. But when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the mantle he knew that he was only fooling himself.

Haggard eyes stared blankly back from sunken, blackened sockets. And that was when his mental filters dropped.

It was the eyes that did it - the same, dark blue eyes that his father had, the same eyes that had twinkled on a long ago night when stars filled the sky.

Jim had been twelve, and a vessel ready to be filled with wonderment.

"They're oot there," his father said. "Watching us. They come on quiet nichts jist tae see what we're up to. If ye jist haud yer wheest for a bit ye'll hear their wee voices singing ."

They sat there together, father and son, in the quiet dark

"Can ye hear them?" the older man whispered, and Jim tried, he really did, but there was only the wind in the trees.

"Never mind," his dad said. "They'll be back. They always come back."

Jim stood, staring deep into the mirror, hoping to read meaning in the eyes, trying to connect with the boy he had been, but no illumination was forthcoming. Maybe if Isobel had still been around she might have given some insight, but he refused to let his thoughts drift that way - one year wallowing in self pity hadn't brought her back and he was damned if he was going to go on wishing the rest of his life away.

He dragged his tired body off to bed and was asleep almost as soon as his head rested on the pillow.

The reverberations of some unrepeated noise startled him into wakefulness. His room was hazily lit by moonlight and for long minutes he watched the lazy crawl of shadows across the ceiling. Far off in the night a cow lowed, and it was only then that he realised that his generator had stopped, its ever present clunk and hum suddenly silent.

"Bloody thing can wait till the morning" he said, but he knew it would be too late by then. The outside temperature would already be well below freezing, and it would still be dropping. He knew from bitter experience that the house would be one big block of ice before dawn if he didn't get down to the cellar and kick start the machine.

It was only when he got out of bed that he realised just how quiet the night was. He pulled the curtains back and stared out of the window, out across the bare expanse of snow to the forest beyond. The sight that met him almost stopped his heart.

Out there, just at the top of the tree line, a shimmering, dancing rainbow of lights hovered among the trees, illuminating the canopy with a cold steel blue that pulsed and quivered as if alive.

A voice whispered in his left ear

Can you hear them?

And this time he could. At first it was little more than a whisper, but it grew into a chorus of high pitched chanting unlike anything he'd ever encountered. To start with there were no words, just a formless wall of sound, but then patterns began to form and the melody slowed to an air, a lullaby that he almost remembered from childhood.

He stepped back as the lights flashed once, brightly, and, pulling the curtains shut, fought off the urge to get back in to bed and huddle under the covers. His first priority was the generator. Strange lights in the woods would just have to wait - if he didn't get the generator fixed he was going to be a prime candidate for hypothermia.

His fingers were slow to respond to his brain's commands as he fumbled with the buttons of his cardigan and his shoe laces proved impossible to manipulate. Silence had returned by the time he was fully dressed and when he pulled back the curtains all he could see was the dark shadow of the forest and the moonlight on the snow.

"Definitely goin' daft in the heid," he muttered to himself, and put it to the back of his mind. He realised that there was a lot of detail back there now, things that he'd have to confront later, but for now he had to get to the generator.