Kingdom: The Complete Series (41 page)

A man with an unhinged
jaw and fangs has Mark pinned to the ground, gnashing at his throat, his eyes
bulging out of his skull as he holds Mark with inhuman strength.

“
Amateur,”
sneers Mark, and head-butts the beast so hard that he caves its face in. It
goes limp and falls on Mark, and he tosses the body off of himself and gets to
his feet.

Trespasser One closes
the distance with a pale faced woman in a track suit, who opens her mouth and
lets loose a torrent of boiling, frothing water. He brings his hands up to
defend himself, crying out as the water seeps through his armour, scorching his
already-burned skin.

Jamie is suddenly
behind the screaming woman, her banshee-like cry accompanying the torrent of
steam and bubbles. Without saying a word, Jamie links his elbow-joint around
her throat and locks it behind his other arm, squeezing as she thrashes at him.

There's a struggle and
a snap, and she stops moving.

Out of the smoke comes
an arm four times longer than any human arm can be, punching Jamie across the
jaw and sending him to the ground. Like an elastic band it snaps back to its
owner, who emerges from the smoke like a rubber puppet on stilts, his legs
lengthening with a grotesque cracking sound.

He towers above the
squad and reaches down with gangly, greasy arms, a clown-like grin too large
for his elastic face as he wraps his rope-arms around Stacy.

She screams and
struggles, and Donald lays a hand on the man's leg.

The rubber stiffens and
contracts, and the rubber-man falls to the ground, his heart stopped. Donald
falls to his knees with the effort, his armband orange.

More figures emerge out
of the gloom, following them.

“
We
can't keep this up,” shouts the Trespasser, cutting Stacy free of the
rubber-man's arms with his combat knife. He pulls her free and points the squad
to the stairs in the darkness. “Head for the subway.”

Jamie picks up Donald,
linking his arm under his shoulder, and the squad stay close together as they
stumble toward the stairs, towards the shadow in the darkness.

“
Twelve
o'clock,” groans Jamie, peering through the gloom. “High.”

The Trespasser looks up
and sees a pale green man, his hands webbed and his toes long and slimy,
clinging to the side of a burning building. He opens his mouth, showing a
coiled tongue with a sharp spear on the end, ready to strike at the squad.

Trespasser One raises
his pistol, and two shots spray the frog-man's guts against the wall. He drops
with a wet thud, and the squad climb over the rubble and descend into the
Buchanan Street subway, thundering down the stairs.

The darkness is
absolute. As they search through the shadows, only the faint red light of the
Destroyer's haze follows them in.

“
I
don't suppose anybody has the 'see in the dark' power, eh?” asks Mark as he
barges through a ticket-stile, cursing in the darkness.

“
I
have a torch and night vision goggles,” says the Trespasser. “But the bloody
Destroyer went and knocked them all out.”

“
Hold
on,” says Stacy. “I can kind of feel my way about.”

Gary laughs through the
tension. “Well, that's what we're all doing Stace, no offence.”

“
No,
I mean I can feel the mechanisms. Like, we're walking through ticket stiles,
yeah?”

“
Right.”

“
Well
straight ahead is clear, until – I can feel the lights, like little bugs in my
mind.”

“
Can
you turn them on?” asks the Trespasser.

“
No
– I can't do electricity; even if the Destroyer
hadn't
broken
everything. But I can feel the wee switches in them. Everybody hold onto me.”

The squad do so without
saying a thing.

“
Operation
human centipede is a-go,” sighs Gary.

“
Surely
operation conga-line would be better,” whispers Jamie as he holds onto Gary's
shoulders.

“
Can
you guys hear that?” asks Cathy. They listen in as Stacy leads them in silence
through the blindness.

There's the distant
rattling of desperate gunfire. They can hear the roaring of fires, the creak of
collapsing buildings above them. From time to time, the low, red bass note of
the Destroyer's cry reaches their ears, shaking the earth.

There's nothing else.

“
It
sounds like the world's ending,” says Jamie.

Trespasser One turns in
the darkness. “It is.”

“
Maybe,”
says Mark.

“
Stacy,
we close?” asks Gary from the back of the line.

“
Going
down the stairs,” she says. “Watch your step.”

The train tracks have a
strong reek to them, like damp smoke. It is the choking scent of brimstone, the
volcanic stench of sulphur.

“
Smells
like eggs down here,” says Gary.

“
There's
something burning, no doubt,” says the Trespasser. “The surface is getting too
hot.”

“
You're
sure the tracks aren't going to shock us?” asks Cathy.

“
Cath,”
whispers Donald, “all the electricity in the city is off.”

“
Just
in the city, you reckon?”

“
No,”
says the Trespasser. “It must go further. I'd go as far as to say worldwide.”

“
Worldwide
power cut? That's -”

“
It's
a disaster,” says the Trespasser. “But I reckon it's the most accurate guess
owing to one fact: if people elsewhere in the world
could
launch
missiles – they would have.”

“
You
think?”

Their footsteps echo on
the train track as they push deeper into the darkness, with Stacy feeling the
way with her mind, gauging the path by the machinery.

“
To
be honest,” the Trespasser goes on, his voice flat, “current strategic doctrine
is fairly clear about how to treat this situation.”

Jamie gives a bitter
laugh. “Lots of bombs and missiles constitutes a strategy, I take it?”

“
The
city has been evacuated, and the nature of the threat is such that if it is
not
contained now, we lose our chance for good. If the nations of the world were
capable of a nuclear strike, we'd be ash and dust right now. The fact that we
haven't been nuked is, ironically, a bad sign.”

“
Guys,”
says Stacy, stopping the group. They bump into one another like a convoy on
ice. “We're below the St Enoch's centre station. Start feeling for the edge and
climb up.”

“
Can
you feel if there are helicopter's up there?”

“
Not
yet – too far away for me to tell.”

“
Listen,”
says Cathy. They can hear gunfire – assault rifles, human voices, screaming.

“
Hurry,”
says the Trespasser, pushing the squad towards the platform in the darkness.

They emerge into the
hellish bloody light, the sky so red it seems inflamed by some infection.
Whilst they heard screams before, the only sounds now are sporadic gunshots,
followed by a long, sinister silence. The heat hits them hard as they ascend
the broken escalator, breathing in dry, heavy air that burns the insides of their
lungs like the draw of a cigarette.

When they get to the
surface, the Trespasser holds up a hand for them to stop. They stay low,
looking over the towering rooftops to where the red orb of the Destroyer hangs
over Glasgow, climbing higher and higher into the sky. Tongues of fire lash out
from it, scorching deep wounds into the earth, whilst tears of burning flame
weep from its centre and rocket out into the dark recesses of Glasgow to find
new soldiers.

“
We're
not alone,” says the Trespasser, urging the squad to follow him as he leads
them around the subway station.

They look as they run:
humanoid shapes wander the streets like lost children, awakening as the squad
begin to move. Some are twisted out of shape, some are seven feet tall and as
broad as a truck – but they all have those same red eyes that catch the light
like a cat's, and trickles of blood coming from their noses.

“
I
can sense helicopters,” says Stacy. 

They turn the corner
and pass through what remains of a coffee shop. The metal chairs and tables
outside have been blown apart and melted into shapeless husks, the old building
torn apart and marked with bullet holes and claw-marks.

More shadows awaken in
the corners of the square, emerging from the flaming mess that was once a
shopping centre, clambering over rooftops, climbing out of windows and ruined
cars.

“
Just
keep moving,” says the Trespasser, and they all hear the urgency in his voice.

They round the coffee
shop and find what they came for – Cathy stops and retches, her hand on
Donald's shoulder.

Sandbags and barricades
have been erected around the square in a defensive position – an action which
failed, as evidenced by the mixture of dead civilians and soldiers scattered
across the area. The helicopters – two of them, side by side – are empty.
Bodies lay around them, soldiers in body armour, their weapons lying by their
sides, useless.

“
They
didn't stand a chance,” says the Trespasser.

Nobody mentions the
corpse lying in the open, or the five bodies surrounding it. Everybody
recognises Staff Sergeant Ferguson from earlier – nobody needs to say a thing.

The Trespasser pushes
Stacy towards an empty helicopter, a heavy machine gun mounted on its open
door. It's the same type of helicopter they're all used to – dark grey, with a
bulbous body and a long thin tail: the kind of helicopter that the Agency uses
for almost everything. There is no pilot in the cockpit.

“
Get
it started, Stace” he says. “Quick as you can.”

“
Ok,”
she mumbles as she climbs into the cabin, past the brutal-looking mounted
canon. She plants a hand on the machine's body and closes her eyes,
concentrating.

People begin to emerge
from the shadows, into the red light. The air itself, dry and hot, starts to
tremble.

“
Get
ready,” the Trespasser says, checking his ammunition and loading his last
magazine into his pistol. Shrugging, he holsters it and picks up a
squad-support weapon from a fallen soldier: a powerful, heavy machine gun. He
checks the load and racks the slide, scanning his eyes across the scattered people
walking towards them, menace in their eyes.

The squad stay close to
the Trespasser, and he orders them to spread out and put themselves around the
helicopter.

“
Protect
Stacy,” he says. “And be ready to get onboard.”

Donald hears Stacy
groaning with effort, and turns and leaps in beside her. He puts his hand over
hers and tells her to relax, to breathe: her armband remains green, and she
feels his fire spreading up her arm and into her heart, helping her, focusing
her mind.

The gears in the engine
begin to turn with a screeching, grinding sound. Above them, the blades start
to move.

Now the circling
monsters descend upon their prey.

Mark tenses up, locking
eyes with one figure in the crowd that keeps staring at him.

The air flickers as the
red-eyed people start running and jumping towards them.

“
Here
they come,” shouts the Trespasser, and the booming register of his heavy
machine gun cuts through the screeching beasts leaping at them.

Mark watches the
Trespasser put seven rounds into the chest of a charging man, and he tumbles to
the ground.

Something smashes into
Mark from behind, and he rolls and glances around for his attacker; all he
finds is a hunk of metal lying on the ground, the remains of a table.

Something else flies at
him – a chunk of masonry – and catches him in the chest. He is knocked over,
rolling to avoid the metal and stone being thrown at him.

Mark's eyes catch his
attacker – a woman in a business suit, her hair dishevelled and her designer
glasses smashed. She has her eyes closed, and as her hands move so do the
objects. He tenses his legs and leaps at her, knocking her to the ground with a
single punch to the forehead.

Objects clatter around
him, dropped from the air before they could smash into his body. Mark roars and
leaps back into the fray.