The Storm (2 page)

‘No, you’re not dead,’ the angel boy said. ‘You’ll be okay. We’ll look after you.’

‘Get him up,’ said the girl. Howie felt hands under him, lifting him, and there was no pain. ‘My name is Rilke. This is Schiller. You’re going away somewhere now, but it won’t be for long. When you wake up again, well . . .’ she smiled, but Howie couldn’t quite work out what was in that smile. ‘You’ll have fire too. Don’t be scared, you’ve been chosen.’

He wasn’t scared, even though his vision was darkening, cotton wool in his ears. It didn’t feel as though he was sinking into a grave this time, it was more like lying in bed and drifting off to sleep, warm and comfy and safe.

The girl called Rilke placed her hand on the angel boy’s cheek, offering him the same smile.

‘You’re getting good at this, little brother,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ he replied.

‘Let’s go,’ she went on. ‘Burn it all, don’t leave anything except sand.’

And that was the last thing Howie heard before sinking into sleep, already dreaming of the fire that would be his when he woke.

The sound of the phone wormed its way into his dream, and for a moment he was floundering in an ocean full of bells. Then he was awake, switching on his lamp and groping in the dark for the mobile beside his bed. He had it halfway to his ear before he noticed it wasn’t making the noise, and that realisation blasted the last few scraps of sleep away.

It was his other phone. The
bad things
phone.

He swore, tumbling out of bed and ignoring the murmured protests from his boyfriend. The ringtone cut through his head, its cry shrill and relentless.
Bad things bad things bad things
his mind sang along as he rummaged through the suit trousers hanging on the wardrobe door. He ripped out the mobile, the vibrations making it feel like a living thing trying to squirm free. He almost dropped it, better to let it go than to find out why it was ringing. Instead he flipped it open and put it to his ear.

‘This is Hayling,’ he said, although the introduction was pointless. The caller knew he was Graham Hayling, chief officer of the army’s counterterrorism division, otherwise he wouldn’t have dialled this number. Because this number was for emergencies – not your average run-of-the-mill serial killer or arson or train crash or bank-robbery emergencies, but code red, critical, end of the world emergencies.
Bad things
.

‘Sir . . .’ the voice belonged to Erika Pierce, his second in command, only it sounded somehow hollow, dead.
Don’t say it,
he prayed.
Please don’t say it
. But she did: ‘Something’s happened.’

‘An attack?’ he asked, using his shoulder to pin the phone to his ear while he scrambled into his trousers. Erika sighed, and he could picture her chewing her bottom lip. In the pause that followed he heard the echo of sirens on the line.

‘I think so,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s . . .’

Bad,
he thought when she didn’t finish. It couldn’t be worse than 7/7 though, could it? That was the last time he’d had to pick up this phone, only that time he’d been in Majorca and they’d flown him home in a VC10. He glanced at the bed, David propped up on one elbow blinking at him.

‘Where?’ he asked Erika.

‘London,’ she replied. ‘Somewhere on the M1. We can’t be sure yet.’

Can’t be sure
meant they couldn’t get near, and that scared Graham so much he slumped on to the edge of the mattress.
Can’t be sure
meant dirty bombs, or worse; it meant contamination.

‘We sent two teams up,’ she went on. ‘Neither came back. There’s something . . .  It’s not right.’

‘I’ll be right there, Erika,’ he said. ‘Don’t be scared.’ And that was just about the stupidest thing he ever could have said to Erika Pierce, who had come top of her academy class at just about everything, who had single-handedly uncovered a plot to smuggle liquid explosives on to a Navy carrier and once punched a suspect so hard that she’d broken his jaw. But the voice on the phone didn’t sound like his partner’s, it sounded like a child’s, lost and frightened.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Don’t. I wasn’t calling you to get you here, I was calling you so you could get away.’

‘What?’ he said. ‘Erika, what are you talking about? Listen, I’m leaving the house now, just hang on.’

‘I won’t be here,’ she said, a ghost’s whisper. ‘I’m sorry, Graham.’

He said her name again before he realised she’d hung up.
What the hell?
He looked at the phone as if somehow it could tell him more, then tucked it into his pocket and tightened his belt.

‘What’s wrong?’ said David, rubbing his eyes.

‘Nothing,’ he lied, pulling yesterday’s shirt over his head and throwing a jacket on top. He didn’t bother searching for socks, just slipped his shoes on, the leather cold and unpleasant against his skin. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I know.’

He took three steps towards the bedroom door when something stopped him, a pressure in his stomach. It felt like a rope, one that had wound itself around his guts and was anchoring them tight.
Fear,
he told himself. And that was true, but this was something else, something more.
I was calling you so you could get away,
Erika had said.
Get away. Get away. Get away
. He turned back to David, wanted nothing more than to take his hand and run, and keep running. Instead he walked out of the bedroom and down the landing to the apartment’s front door.

Outside, dawn had failed. Where sunlight should have been pouring over the lip of the world there was only a muted haze. It hung in the air, rotten, the colour of a dead man’s skin. The sensation in Graham’s gut intensified, his pulse racing, that same nervous chant –
bad things bad things bad things
– battering the inside of his skull like a trapped bird. There were too many people here, he realised. At this hour there should have been a sprinkling of delivery drivers and market sellers and the last dismal dregs of the drunken clubbers. But the street was full, cars gridlocked and honking all the way up to the store on the corner where a white van straddled both lanes, engine smoking. He was amazed the noise hadn’t woken him sooner. A crowd was pushing up the pavement, weaving in between the motionless traffic as people made their way towards Gospel Oak Tube. Everyone was moving east, and when Graham turned his head to see where they were coming from he understood why.

Over the rooftops and the trees of Hampstead Heath, the sky was broken.

Smoke churned upwards, a vortex so thick and so dark it could have been granite. It looked like a tornado, only it must have been two miles wide, maybe more. It rotated slowly, almost gracefully, forming a pool of oil-coloured cloud overhead. Explosions detonated inside the column, but they had no light – whipcracks of black lightning that left traces on Graham’s vision, dark spots when he blinked. Every time they flashed they rent the air apart, revealing what was inside the vortex. Or rather what
wasn’t
inside it.

Nothing,
Graham thought, feeling as though he were teetering on the edge of some vast, awful madness.
There is nothing there
. It wasn’t just empty, it was utterly,
utterly
void. He could make out slivers of sky that weren’t dark and weren’t light – that weren’t anything at all. It looked as if a mirror had been smashed, shards shaken loose to reveal the truth behind.

Another blast of negative light sliced through the vortex, cutting a silhouette into the smoke. Was that a
person
in there? It was too big, surely, too high off the ground. Yet it was there, a figure in the very centre of the maelstrom, a man in the storm. Graham was miles away from it, and yet he felt as though that man was looking right at him with eyes of inverted fire. They burned into him, the darkness seeming to expand in his vision until he was blind.
It doesn’t matter,
he heard himself think.
It’s better that I can’t see, better that I just—

Something thumped into him, sending him stumbling back into the door of his apartment block. The woman muttered an apology, dragging a screaming child down the road after her. Graham caught his breath, shaking some of the darkness out of his eyes. He almost looked up again before stopping, putting a hand up to shield himself from the skies. Whatever it was over there, it was a bad thing, a
really
bad thing. And it was his job to make sure bad things didn’t happen. He turned away, flicked open his phone and hit the first number of his address book. It rang just once before somebody answered, and Graham didn’t give them a chance to speak.

‘Get me General Stevens,’ he said. ‘And tell him we’re under attack.’

Pieces of broken world were still falling when Cal opened his eyes.

They drifted down on to the windscreen of the Freelander, forming a translucent layer that looked like snow but which he knew was actually rock and metal and powdered flesh. He sat up, his back numb from a night in the passenger seat, his feet full of needles. The entire car wore a jacket of dust, all except for the broken driver’s side window. Through it, the land had turned the colour of bone, blanketed in the same fine powder. It was like every single thing on earth had been erased.

Every single thing except us,
he thought.

It had to be morning, though, because parchment-yellow light streamed into the car. And there were birds too, he realised, singing so loud and so hard he wondered if that’s what had woken him. They had short memories, the birds, they had already forgotten what had happened. Not him, though. He had spent the night dreaming of it over and over and over again – the police, the Fury, and Schiller, the boy in the fire.

The angel.

Cal shook his head, easing his aching neck round to see Adam lying across the back seat. The little boy was out cold, shivering in his sleep. It was no wonder. Daisy lay in the Freelander’s boot, smothered in coats and blankets and pretty much everything else they could find, but still ice cold.
Literally
ice cold. The chill coming off her had frosted the inside of the tailgate window, had turned the leather seats into crystal. The poor girl had been shot, had taken a bullet in the shoulder from one of the few policemen who hadn’t gone feral. And now . . .

She was changing, Cal knew. Schiller had gone through the same thing, imprisoned in ice before he was gripped by fire. Daisy was in some kind of cocoon, and when she woke she’d be just like him. Sooner or later they all would.

No,
he told himself.
Not like him, not killers
.

The memories were making him sweat despite the cold. He popped open the door, an avalanche of dust sliding free, filling his eyes and nose and mouth. He clambered out, spitting, ignoring the protests from his cramped back. At least his finger felt better – stiff but not painful. His nose, too. He didn’t think anything was broken.

Winter had risen overnight, the world covered by the same snow-grey sheet. Dark clouds scarred the cold, blue sky – not rainclouds, not storms, just earth and cars and trees and people blown to atoms, lighter than air. Clumps danced their way back to the land only to be kicked up again by the breeze that whispered in off the sea.

‘We need to go.’ The voice didn’t seem to have any place out here, and it made Cal jump. He turned, looking over the Freelander’s bonnet to see Brick standing there. The older boy’s ginger hair was the brightest thing in sight, glinting like copper. A trail of footprints spiralled out around him, curling around the boarded-up toilet block all the way up the dunes. Once upon a time this had been a car park, Cal remembered, the place where he and Daisy had first met Brick. How long ago had that been? Three days? It felt like forever. The entire universe had been turned upside down and shaken like a snow globe.

‘Now,’ Brick said, his tone just as blunt and infuriating as always. ‘Been here too long.’

‘Morning to you too, mate,’ Cal replied, running his fingers down the bonnet and leaving grooves in the dust. Up close he could see the different colours there – brown and silver and red, so much red. Blood, muscle, brain, all reduced to powder by the power that had blazed from Schiller’s new body. It couldn’t have been possible, and yet here it was, all around him, life made dust by the blink of a burning eye.

Only it hadn’t really been Schiller, had it? He was the one who had turned, but it was his sister who had forced him to kill so many.

‘Rilke,’ he spat, remembering some of the last words he’d heard her speak:
But it told you why we are here, didn’t it. To wage war with humanity.
Schiller’s eyes had burned, yes, but the insanity in Rilke’s own gaze had scared Cal far more.

‘What about her?’ asked Brick. ‘Rilke’s long gone, isn’t she?’

Cal nodded. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but she was miles away from Hemmingway. He could almost see her, walking with Schiller and Marcus and Jade, leaving a trail of death in her wake. Or maybe that was just his imagination. He wished Daisy would wake. She’d know for sure which way Rilke had headed. Daisy knew things like that, even when nobody told her. But Daisy was frozen, and when she woke she’d be something else entirely.

‘We need to talk,’ Cal said, scuffing his trainer on the ground. ‘About what happened. We need to think of a plan.’

Brick snorted a humourless laugh, running a hand through his hair and giving himself a pale halo of powder. They hadn’t spoken much at all last night, they’d been too exhausted. They had found the car, climbed inside, and fallen asleep.

‘We don’t need to talk,’ he said. ‘We just need to move. Been here too long, slept right through, though God knows how.’

It
was
weird – they’d slept for almost twelve hours straight. Shock did that to you, though, Cal guessed. Knocked you out so the body could recover.

‘But Rilke, Schiller, they’re killing people,’ Cal said. ‘We need to tell someone at least, the police.’

‘Duh, they killed about a hundred cops last night,’ Brick said. ‘I think the police know. There’s nothing we can do. You saw what he did—’

Brick seemed to choke on the words, and Cal knew what he was seeing: people bundled up by invisible arms, smashed into each other until all that remained was a spinning ball of compressed flesh; a helicopter crumpled, its pilots still inside; an explosion that obliterated everything from horizon to horizon. And Schiller hanging above the ground, lost inside an inferno, commanding it all.

‘How the hell can we stop that?’ Brick asked when he had recovered. ‘I can’t believe Rilke even let us go.’

Because whatever Schiller was, they were too.
You’ll see, Cal,
Rilke had said.
It might take a day, it might take a week, but you’ll see
. And he would. He knew that one day he too would go cold, and then something terrible would break through his soul. He shuddered, realising that Brick was still talking.

‘We show up now, we get in her way, and she’ll just set Schiller on us. One word from her and we’re . . .’ He scooped up a handful of ash from the bonnet of the car, letting it trail from his fingers. Then, disgusted, he rubbed his palm down his filthy jeans, glaring at Cal like everything was his fault. ‘I haven’t got through all this just to get killed by her pet dog. We need to get out of here, and whichever direction she’s gone, we go the other way.’

‘What about Daisy?’ Cal asked. ‘She needs help.’

Brick glanced towards the back of the Freelander.

‘She’s going to be like Schiller, isn’t she?’ he said. Cal didn’t reply. They both knew the answer to that. ‘She’s got one of those
things
inside her.’

‘An angel.’

Brick snorted. ‘That’s what Rilke said they were. But she doesn’t know anything. She’s talking crap.’

But Daisy had said it too, thought Cal, and she had known the truth. She’d known other things too.

‘But what if Daisy was right,’ Cal said. ‘What if there is a reason we’re here – to fight whatever it was she saw.’
The man in the storm,
she had called it.

‘Yeah, Cal, sure. The world is in peril and it’s you, me and a couple of kids destined to save it. I’m tired. I just want all this to be over.’

Cal nodded, looking up at the trees. Most of the needles had been blown off by the explosion and the birds, perched on branches like pinecones, had nowhere to hide. They still sang, though. There was a message in there somewhere, he thought. He leaned against the Freelander, the metal frozen. It was his mum’s car, he’d stolen it when everything had kicked off, to get him out of the city. The last time he’d seen her was in the rear-view mirror as she’d screamed and raged and tried to murder him. She would have killed him if she’d been able to, she would have torn him to pieces and then gone inside and put away her shopping like nothing had happened.
The Fury
.

‘You think everyone still wants to kill us?’ he asked Brick. The bigger boy shrugged.

‘Think people have bigger fish to fry now, with Rilke out there. Maybe they won’t even notice us.’ He paused, spat, almost smiled. ‘Hell, if she has her way maybe there won’t be anyone left
to
notice us.’ It was a smile without humour, though, and when he wiped his face again his tears left streaks in the dirt. Cal turned away, pretending not to notice.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go, just get away from here, from Rilke. We can figure out what to do on the way.’

‘Think the car will still work?’ Brick asked, sniffing.

Cal climbed back in the driver’s seat, fishing the keys from his pocket. The Freelander had taken a proper battering on the way up here from London, but Schiller’s onslaught didn’t seem to have reached it. He flicked the ignition, grinning when the engine spluttered, whined, then finally caught. There was a rustle from the back and he turned to see Adam there, sitting up in his seat and looking around with wide, wet eyes.

‘It’s okay, mate,’ Cal said, leaving the car in neutral so he could take his foot off the clutch and shuffle round. ‘You’re safe. It’s Cal, remember?’

Adam nodded, relaxing a little but still not blinking.

‘You have nightmares?’ The kid nodded again. He hadn’t spoken since he’d turned up at Fursville, and didn’t look like he was about to start any time soon. ‘Me too,’ Cal went on. ‘But they’re just dreams, they can’t hurt us. You’re safe here, with me and Brick. Daisy too, she’s sleeping just over there.’

Adam glanced into the boot, reaching down to touch Daisy’s face. He quickly pulled his hand away, putting his fingers to his lips.

‘She’s okay,’ Cal said. ‘She’s . . . You know the story of Sleeping Beauty, right? That’s what’s happened to Daisy. She’ll wake up soon, I promise you. Will you put your seat belt on for me, Adam?’

He did as he was told, as meekly as a beaten dog. Brick opened the passenger door, angling his lanky body inside and slamming it behind him. It took a couple of attempts to get it shut, and by that time the car was full of dust, countless cremated dead swimming in their ears and mouths and noses. Cal lowered his window, stuck the car in gear and steered it through the car park, leaving a perfect circle of tyre tracks in the ash.

‘You know where we’re going?’ Brick asked.

The car rocked down the potholed path that led through the trees, back to the coast road.

‘Cal?’ Brick said.

‘I know where we’re going,’ he replied as they reached the road, checking that the coast was clear before heading south, away from Fursville. He thought about Daisy in her coffin of ice, and about the creature inside her. The angel. A hospital wouldn’t help her, not the police, not the army either. There was only one place he could think of where they might find answers. He put his foot down, the car accelerating and dragging a flowing cloak behind it. Then he looked at Brick and said:

‘We need to find a church.’