The Gates: An Apocalyptic Novel (18 page)

“We’d never make it out,” said Keith. “The demons
would rip us apart before we even reached the road. You’ve seen that one with
the black hair, Rick. He’s just waiting for an opportunity to finish what he
started.”

Rick shuddered at the thought of confronting the
monster again, but he was resolute in his decision. “We go over the back fence
like I said last night. The stepladder.”

“Oh, wonderful, the stepladder. And what makes you
think there aren’t a hundred demons waiting for us around the back?”

“Because I’ve looked, Keith. They’re all outside
the front gate. We can check things out first, of course, but I’m certain we
can sneak away. Torquay is an hour away by car, and it’s safe.”

Steven shook his head. “It’s safe here, Rick. Your
house is huge and protected by the gate. We shouldn’t leave.”

“Don’t you get it?” cried Maddy. “We’ll starve to
death in here. No help is coming, so we have to help ourselves. If we put off now
what we won’t be able to do later, then we’re screwed. We need to leave while
there’s a chance we can.”

“No,” said Keith. “I won’t allow it.”

Rick stood up from his stool and faced his
brother. “You won’t allow it? Who’s asking?”

“I saved your arse last night, Rick. You do as I say.”

“Are you kidding me? I thought you’d actually found
a little humility after being caught fucking your secretary, but you’re the
same old control freak. You’re not the boss of anyone here.”

Keith shoved Rick hard into the kitchen island.
“Watch what you say to me, Rick. I’ve been wiping your arse your entire life,
but I’d just as soon give you a good hiding.”

Rick was in shock. His brother had never struck
him before, not even as a kid. “What the hell is your problem?”

“You’re my problem, Rick. You’re running away and
trying to isolate yourself, just like you always do. I won’t allow you to get
everyone killed. I’ve already lost too much. No one is leaving. It’s a suicide
mission.”

“It’s not your decision,” Maddy muttered.

Keith put his hands up and let some of the
aggression leave his face. “Look, I hear what you’re saying about the food
situation, but we have running water and enough food to get through for a
little while longer. Maybe we should wait a day or two before making any rash decisions.
We’re all in fight or flight mode—and that’s understandable—but it isn’t
conducive to good reasoning. Running for the hills might sound good, but is it
wise? I don’t think so, and I’m not leaving.”

“I’m staying put too,” said Steven.

Diane flipped her hair behind her ears and said, “I’m
not leaving unless everybody else is. We’re fine here, and we have Internet. We
should learn as much as we can before we try to escape.”

Rick and Maddy looked at one another in
desperation. Maddy seemed to have lost her fight and broke eye contact with
him. “I’ll stay one more day,” she muttered, “but after that I’m going home.
You people can stay here if you like, but you’ll regret it, I promise you.”

“I won’t regret it,” said Rick, “because I’m
leaving today.”

“You are not,” said Keith in a voice cold as ice.

Rick huffed. “Keith, take a hike, okay? This is my
house, and I’ll bloody well leave if I like. In fact, you can have the place;
it’s yours. Just stop being a twat.”

Keith went red in the face. “Rick, you’re—”

“What the hell are you people fighting about?”
asked Daniel, wandering into the kitchen. “I could hear you from all the way upstairs.”

“What were you doing upstairs?” asked Rick.

“Sleeping, until you sods woke me up. What’s the
problem here?”

“Rick wants to leave,” said Keith.

Daniel shrugged. “So let him.”

“If he goes outside he’ll die.”

“His place, his rules. If he wants to leave, who can
stop him?”

Keith clenched his fists. “I can. And I will.”

Rick felt his own face growing red now. He
realised, in that moment, that one of the main driving forces of him wanting to
leave was to get away from his brother. What was Keith’s problem? Whether he
was arguing out of genuine concern or just plain stubbornness, it pissed Rick
off royally. He had made up his mind and wasn’t backing down. The more and more
the argument went on, the more claustrophobic he felt, and the more he was
certain he wanted to leave.

“Look, Keith. I can’t stay in here knowing that those
things are right outside the gate. I’d rather take my chances on the road.”

Keith shook his head and was actually trembling.
“Please, Rick. Don’t do something you’ll regret.”

“You’re not the boss of me.” Rick went to push
past his brother, and to his relief, Keith stood aside.

“I understand, Rick.”

Keith grabbed one of the empty beer bottles off
the counter and swung it at Rick’s head. Rick tried to duck, but ended up on
the floor bleeding as Keith stood over him with a look of pity on his face.
“The problem with you, little brother, is that you never help yourself. No
backbone, just like dad always said.”

Before the others in the kitchen had chance to
stop him, Keith lifted his foot and kicked Rick in the face, sending him right
back to sleep.

“There’ll be no one left to
save by the time we get there,” said Tony as he and Aymun led their men across
the desert at a sprint. The gate was less than half a mile away, but they could
all see the civilian militia was taking heavy losses. The clawed creatures
poured out of the gate and cut through men, woman, and children too young to
wield a rifle. Blood stained the ground as if gallons of red paint had been spilled
onto the dirt.

“If we save only one man or woman then we have
done our duty,” said Aymun.

The Syrian and British soldiers were all now armed
with L85s, AK47s, grenades, and a PKM machine gun that Harris, the strongest of
them, lugged over his shoulder. The civilians in front of the gate wielded a
mixture of reclaimed assault rifles and pistols, but they were not trained
proficiently enough to form a firing line. As they missed shots, or were forced
to reload, they were set upon by the demons. In the last five minutes alone,
dozens of them had died.

Aymun and his two men reached firing distance
first, as they were less unencumbered than the British soldiers clad in full
battle armour and carrying the heavier L85s. Aymun dropped to one knee and let
off a barrage from his AK47. He hit several of the creatures, even at two hundred
metres. His men then overtook him and fired from their knees ten metres ahead.
Tony’s men caught up and set themselves down a further ten metres before firing.
Aymun got up and ran past them all and once again took a knee and fired from
the front. They continued this series of firing overlaps until they were only
fifty metres away from the battlefield. The civilians saw their arrival and
cheered, even as they continued to be slaughtered. It was the first time Tony
had ever seen civilians in this region show gratitude to see British soldiers.

The demons outnumbered the militia five to one,
but now their flanks were under attack by Aymun and Tony’s men. Tony unclipped
a grenade from his vest and lobbed it into the air. His men followed suit. Unlike
the ones they had tossed at Aymun’s convoy, these grenades fell perfectly
amongst the enemy and exploded with venom. Mangled demon parts littered the
ground along with great clods of displaced earth. The resulting mess was enough
to ignite hope. Tony saw the confidence creep onto his men’s faces as they
advanced further, unloading round upon round into the enemy.

Demons fell in their dozens.

Now that the enemy were split wide open, the
militia gained a foothold. They formed up in a group behind their battered
vehicles and fired all at once, cutting down another two dozen of their foe in
seconds. The battle was turning.

Tony and his men released another volley of
grenades, opening up more craters in the enemy’s ranks. Any human army would
have turned tail after such sudden and devastating losses, but the clawed
creatures continued their attack, more than willing to die.

Harris set down the PKM on its bipod and opened
her up as soon as it was steady. Its roaring teeth ripped the creatures apart
like razor wire, dissecting limbs, torsos, and heads with the precision of a
surgeon’s buzz saw.

“Send their wee dirty arses to Hell,” Corporal
Rose yelled triumphantly as more demons fell.

But their advantage waned when Harris’s PKM
jammed. The decades-old machine gun had been stashed in a cave for God knew how
long, and they suffered the consequences. The second thing to go wrong was when
one of Aymun’s men threw a soviet F1 grenade at the enemy, but didn’t bother to
cook it first. One of the creatures was proactive enough to scoop it up in its
claw and launch it right back again. It exploded mid-air over the original
thrower, and Aymun’s man hit the ground, clutching his burst eyeballs and
trying to pull out the shrapnel. Aymun had no choice but to leave the man where
he lay.

The creatures were unbroken, and kept on coming,
even as they continued falling to fresh onslaughts of gunfire. Reinforcements
came through the gate every second to join the fray.

Harris hadn’t thought to bring his rifle with him
when he’d picked up the bulky PKM, so he had no way to defend himself when one demon
broke away and headed right for him. It fell upon him like a rabid beast and ripped
shreds out of his stomach with its claws. At first, only clothing and armour split
apart, tatters twirling in the air, but then a spray of blood jetted upwards
and covered the demon’s snarling face. Tony was too far away to help his man,
but Harris wasn’t done for yet. The private reached around to his webbing and slid
his combat knife from its sheath. He rammed it into the demon’s side with such
forced that it sounded like somebody had hit a bass drum. He twisted and turned
the knife until the creature stopped moving and fell to the ground.

Tony finally made it over to Harris and dragged
his injured private back to his feet. It was hard to assess the man’s wound
while hidden beneath several layers of clothing and torn armour, nor was there
time to try, so Tony pulled his Glock 17 pistol from its holster and shoved it
into Harris’s hand. “You should have brought a backup, Private.”

Harris held up his blood soaked knife and gave an
ugly grin. “I did.”

The civilians screamed as the demons made it
through the parked vehicles and attacked the back lines—mostly children and
women. There must have been a hundred dead villagers scattered in the desert
now, and the militia was down to its last remnants.

“The villagers are falling,” shouted Aymun. “We must
go to them.”

Tony nodded and ordered his men to skirt the edges
of battle to where they could form up alongside the militia. They covered each
other in turn as they made an overlap toward their ailing allies.

Tony and Aymun reached the villagers just in time.
There were perhaps twenty of them remaining, but half were out of ammo, and the
other half were wavering. The creatures had pushed them all back to the
rearmost vehicles, which meant that they had nowhere further to retreat. A
small group of children cowered behind them.

“They just keep on feckin’ coming,” Corporal Rose
shouted, aiming his rifle in a dozen different places and taking well-aimed pop
shots. One demon made it through, but he kept his calm and took a leaf from
Private Harris’s book and stabbed it in the face with his knife.

Tony watched the glowing gate and cringed every time
another demon leapt through. It was like they formed out of vapour, coming into
existence one droplet at a time, before dumping down into the desert. Were they
lined up somewhere on the other side, leaping through the gate one after the other,
like lemmings off a cliff?

They would not stop coming.

Tony had an idea. He snatched the last grenade
from his vest and coiled up like a spring as he prepared to throw it. When he finally
let go, he aimed it right at the centre of the gate. It seemed to sail through
the air forever, arcing over the heads of the writhing creatures in slow
motion. Then it disappeared. The only proof the grenade had ever existed was a
brief ripple in the gate’s translucent centres.

The explosion was muted, as though occurring
underwater, but a great torrent of flames burst forth from the gate and
immolated the demons closest to it. The creatures stopped advancing for the
first time, and looked back to see what had happened.

“Attack the gate,” shouted Tony. “Attack the bloody
gate.”

Everyone concentrated their fire on the gate at
once, causing the translucent surface to plop and shimmer as bullets hit it
like the pitter-patter of rain. The men launched the last of their grenades and
cheered each time another muted explosion brought forth another torrent of fire.

But then they were forced to regroup.

While the men attacked the gate, the remaining
demons charged. Aymun’s last remaining man went down as two creatures grabbed
his arms and yanked them off, leaving him to spin around in panic, bleeding
into the air like a sprinkler. Two of Tony’s men got isolated and gutted in quick
succession. A handful of the remaining villagers went down in a haze of blood.

“There’s no more coming through the gate,” shouted
Tony as he peppered the enemy. “Keep fighting, and we can end this.”

The men took heart and kept up the assault, even
though the urge to run was in all of them. There were still several dozen
creatures coming right at them, but as they spread their fire in a wide arc,
they thinned the enemy out.

“We can do this,” Corporal Rose cried out. “Kick
their lily arses.”

The enemy numbers were down to ten, outnumbered
for the first time since the fighting began. Harris came up beside Tony with
his Glock, popping off shots carefully and exploding heads off demonic
shoulders. He emptied his last magazine into a leaping creature and knocked it
right out of the sky like a clay pigeon. Aymun fired from twin AK47s now, like
some kind of action hero, after picking up the weapon of his fallen comrade. The
villagers emptied the last of their ammo and took down another handful of enemies.

Soon there was only one, single remaining demon
left alive. It glared at them, and took a step back.

It was afraid.

Tony reached out and reclaimed his Glock from
Harris. He crossed the battlefield with it until he was face-to-face with the
demon. The oily skinned, coal-eyed abomination snarled at him like a cornered
cat, spitting and hissing. Its breath stunk of rotting meat.

Tony raised the Glock and fired a bullet right
through the bastard’s forehead. For a moment, it remained standing, staring at him
through wide, almost-human eyes, but then it teetered and tipped over
backwards, hitting the ground with a thump.

The men behind Tony were silent, but then, like a
rising tide, their voices rose to a triumphant cry. He turned around to face
them, too beat and too weary to smile. What he could do was raise the Glock
above his head in victory—the weapon that had fired the final bullet. “We did
it,” he croaked. “We sent those fuckers straight back to Hell.”

The men cheered even more, their voices strained
with jubilation. The surviving villagers were crying with a mix of relief and
shock. They had done it—they had fought back their deaths.

But then the cheering stopped.

More creatures poured through the gate.