Doomsday Game, page 15
She stepped outside. The ocean, at least, looked much the same as it ever did. And the air tasted fresh and salty on her tongue. The moon occupied the same position in the night sky it had back where she’d come from.
She approached the nearest corner of the building and peered across the compound: in every possible way it appeared to be the same. Despite everything she had seen inside the hangar, some part of her still rebelled against the idea she was not on the alternate that had been her home for some years now.
There was, however, one major and noticeable difference: there were no lights. The compound back home was lit up twenty-four hours a day. The town, far off in the distance, was similarly dark. Of course, it was the middle of the night, but usually there’d be at least one person still burning the midnight oil.
The roiling in her guts told her there was something very, very wrong here.
She jerked her head around at the sound of a pebble skittering down the steep embankment just a few metres from where she stood, the same one she had climbed up after following the shoreline back home. She stepped back as a figure suddenly lunged into view, laboriously climbing up the grassy embankment.
The moonlight revealed something in the shape of a man, but with a head so swollen that the facial features were distorted into a grotesque mask. Once it was on level ground it came straight towards her, its mouth stretched unnaturally wide.
Rozalia reacted instinctively, pivoting on one hip and delivering a round kick to one of the creature’s knees.
It collapsed onto one leg, and she got close enough to slam a fist into its skull—something she immediately regretted. It felt like punching rotten fruit. When the creature forcefully exhaled, the stench was far worse than anything inside the hangar.
It tried to struggle back upright, and she kicked it again, breathing as shallowly as possible to keep from puking. The creature gave up, crawling away from her before again stumbling upright. She saw it take a misstep, tumbling over the edge of the slope and back down to the shore below.
She stared down at the darkened shore, her heart thundering in her chest. What the hell is a bee-brain doing here?
She gazed fixedly at her hand—the one that had come into contact with the bee-brain. She needed to get hold of the antidote in case she was infected already. There was some back home on her own island—
—except it was currently under the control of people who had escaped from this alternate. Even if she headed straight home, there were no guarantees she’d be able to locate supplies of the antidote without risking capture.
Which also meant she had anywhere from twenty-four hours to a week before the virus—assuming she had been infected—became too advanced for the antidote to make any difference. That left her at least a few hours in which to take a look around and find out what had happened here…even if she was already pretty sure just what that was.
She made her way along the side of the hangar towards its front, scanning the surrounding darkness with even greater care. She saw someone had locked the big sliding doors of the hangar with a chain and padlock. Rotting bodies lay here and there across the compound.
She caught movement out of the corner of one eye and turned to see several more bee-brains emerge from the shadows near the fence that ran around the compound. Rozalia then tried to go back the way she’d come only to find yet more had appeared behind her, blocking her retreat.
Her throat became suddenly dry. They must, she thought, have climbed up from the beach. It had been a mistake to assume there was only one of them down there.
Yet more appeared, pushing through a part of the compound fence that looked like it had been trampled flat. She took out the handgun she’d taken from the clinic and aimed at the nearest of the bee-brains.
She pulled the trigger and it jammed.
‘Oh, shit,’ she said, very softly.
She pressed on the magazine to make sure it was home and checked that a round was chambered. It was: she worked the slide and tried to fire again, but it still didn’t work. She found herself wondering just how long it had been sitting, forgotten, in its cabinet.
The bee-brains were much closer now, surrounding her in a loose ring. Rozalia’s breath became ragged, and she gripped the gun like a club. She could try running, but by now there were just too damn many of them…
She heard a sound that was at once both familiar and terrifying: a metallic shnick-shnack that poured ice-water into her veins.
Then came another sound, like a ton of concrete being dropped onto sheets of metal, and the head of the bee-brain nearest to her exploded like an overripe melon. It collapsed soundlessly, and she noticed that it had been wearing the uniform of a transfer stage technician.
A new figure emerged from the shadows, wielding a pump-action shotgun. The figure worked the pump, ejecting the spent shell and firing again, killing another of the bee-brains.
Shnick-shnack. The figure, still shrouded in darkness, worked the pump once more and fired again. Another bee-brain went down. And another. And another.
Rozalia had frozen in a half-crouch, afraid whoever it was might mistake her for another bee-brain in the darkness, but then she realised that a path had been cleared in front of her all the way to the far side of the compound.
The figure ejected a final spent shell and hurried towards her, revealing itself, to her astonishment, to be Selwyn. He carried a heavy rucksack on his back, a pair of binoculars dangling around his neck.
It was immediately evident this Selwyn was quite different from her Selwyn. This one was older-looking, more…weary.
‘This way!’ he shouted, grabbing her by the wrist and dragging her after him.
Given the circumstances, it seemed wise not to resist.
They ran across the compound and past the remaining bee-brains. The older, scragglier Selwyn pulled her inside a storage shed, slamming the door shut and bolting it. The shed was windowless, and when he reached up to turn on an overhead light she was momentarily blinded.
He dropped his rucksack on the floor and cracked the shotgun open, feeding more shells into it. She noticed a pair of heavy bolt-cutters secured to the back of the rucksack with bungee cords. He closed the shotgun and held it with the barrel pointing down at the ground, staring at her in utter disbelief.
‘Now I know I’m losing my mind,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I saw you die.’
Rozalia slid down to the floor with her back against a wall and stared up at him. ‘As you can see,’ she assured him, her voice shaking only slightly, ‘I’m very much alive.’
‘Yes, but I—’ he halted mid-sentence, and looked down at the shotgun still gripped in one hand, as if remembering something.
She wondered if he’d been about to say I killed you myself.
‘Just tell me what happened,’ she said. ‘Assume I don’t know anything.’
His eyes were wide and haunted. ‘You’re not from here.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not. Is it just the island?’
He looked at her with momentary confusion. ‘You mean the bee-brains?’ She nodded. ‘No, my girl, it’s everywhere, I’m sorry to say.’
‘The Authority…?’
‘Gone,’ he said. ‘It started there, then came here with the first wave of refugees.’ He slumped down across from her, his gaze still fixed on her like he couldn’t be sure she was real. ‘If this means I’m mad,’ he muttered, ‘it’s not as awful as I thought it might be.’
‘You’re not mad,’ she assured him. At least now she understood what Greenbrooke had been fleeing. ‘Are we safe in here?’
He shrugged. ‘They’re in no hurry, if that’s what you mean.’ He licked lips that looked cracked and filthy. ‘Where did you—?’
‘Please,’ she said, interrupting him. ‘First just explain to me how it started.’
‘And then you’ll tell me where you came from?’
She nodded.
He settled back and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Casey Vishnevsky is the one responsible. He had some insane vendetta against the Authority, so he set out to destroy them. By the time we realised what he’d done, he’d already fled to some post-apocalyptic alternate. We never found him.’ His eyes grew wide and he dropped his head back down to look at her. ‘Is there a Vishnevsky where you come from?’
‘We killed him,’ Rozalia replied, ‘before he could do the same thing to us.’
‘Ah.’ Not-Selwyn’s brow furrowed in thought. ‘I suppose that’s where our histories forked.’
‘Does the name Greenbrooke mean anything to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, him and a bunch of his cronies just turned up on our alternate looking for a fight and took us by surprise. I came here hoping I could figure out what he wanted.’
‘So that explains it,’ he muttered.
‘Explains what?’
‘The transfer hangar—Greenbrooke and his men were living in there for weeks. I couldn’t get near enough the place to see what they were up to. There were always one or two of them up on the roof of the hangar, and they’d pick off anyone who got too close, human or bee-brain.’
‘There’s no one in there now.’
‘I saw they’d pulled the snipers from the roof,’ he said with some excitement. ‘That was yesterday evening. I’ve been watching them, you see—from what I could hear, they’ve been running both stages day and night for weeks. I figured they were looking for some alternate to escape to, but I never imagined…’ he broke off and shook his head.
‘Selwyn,’ she asked, ‘how many of them are infected?’
‘Some, if not most,’ Selwyn replied. ‘We had serum, but it got used up by the first wave of refugees.’
‘We have serum,’ said Rozalia. ‘Is it possible that’s what they want?’
‘Maybe.’ He shrugged. ‘If it is, it’s too late for them. They’ve been exposed to it for too long.’ He glanced down at his shotgun. ‘I suppose you’ve given me even more reason to finish what I came here to do.’
‘Which is?’
‘Destroy the hangar. Greenbrooke and his men killed a lot of good people when they took over here—people who were also trying to figure a way out of this mess. Now they’ve left the hangar unguarded, I want to make sure they can never use it again.’
Rozalia shifted closer to him. She put her hand over his, where it rested on his knee. ‘Selwyn—what happened to the other Pathfinders?’
He smiled sadly. ‘I’m the last of us, Rosie my girl—in this universe, at any rate.’ His expression turned fierce. ‘Listen to me—when you get back there, you have to kill Greenbrooke and all of his men. You can’t risk the same thing happening there too. They don’t care about anything or anyone that gets in their way.’
She stood. ‘I didn’t know what I’d find when I got here, but I never thought…’
‘I know.’ He stood as well.
She looked at him with grim determination. ‘I need to get back home.’
From outside came a metallic clattering, and the sound of many feet tramping across the ground. Selwyn opened the door a crack and looked outside, then stepped back, nodding at Rozalia to take a look.
She peered outside. A stream of bee-brains were making their way across the compound, moving in the direction of town. Some wore the rags of civilian clothes, while others wore the tattered remains of military uniforms. They were dragging along pieces of junk, bound, no doubt, for some proto-hive they were in the process of building.
‘What was your plan, exactly?’ she asked him, pulling the door shut again.
Selwyn picked up the rucksack and opened it, angling it so she could see inside. ‘There’s enough industrial gelignite in here to put the Pyramids into orbit. That’ll put paid to the transfer stages.’
‘Jesus,’ she muttered. ‘What about you, Selwyn? Where are you going to escape to?’
He closed the rucksack, pulling it back on before favouring her with a tight smile. ‘It’ll be a lot harder to avoid them in the day,’ he said. ‘And dawn isn’t far away. So let’s do this now.’ He nodded at the handgun she had pushed back into her waistband. ‘Why didn’t you use that?’
‘It jammed.’
He pulled another handgun from his belt and handed it to her. ‘A shotgun would be better, but between the two of us, we should be able to clear a path back to the hangar.’ He snatched up a box of shells that had been sitting near the door, shoved them into a pocket of his khaki trousers and reached for the door-handle. ‘Ready?’
Rozalia nodded. He carefully pushed the door open and took another look outside. ‘Even more of the blighters than before,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘But we can’t sit here all night, can we?’
‘No, we can’t.’ Her body thrummed with nervous energy.
‘Then let’s make haste,’ he said, slamming the door wide and stepping into the night.
She followed in his wake, and saw the nearest dozen or so of the creatures lurch towards them. Selwyn fired at one and it collapsed, half of its pulpy head sheared away.
Rozalia did the same. Fortunately, the majority of the bee-brains were locked into their path towards town, and they were soon able to reach the hangar’s locked doors.
‘Take this and reload,’ said Selwyn, handing her the shotgun and the box of shells. ‘This is going to take a minute.’
Rozalia took the shotgun and cracked it open, feeding in more shells, her back to the hangar doors. She cut down four more bee-brains that came staggering towards them, including one that got close enough to almost reach out to her. Next to her, Selwyn swore and muttered as he worked to sever the chain holding the doors shut with the bolt-cutters.
The chain rattled as it fell away and Selwyn slid one of the doors open. ‘Inside!’ he shouted.
Rozalia shot two more, then ran inside the hangar, helping Selwyn slide it shut once more. He slammed the inside bolt and the doors shivered under the pressure of bodies pressing up against it from the outside.
‘That won’t hold them for long,’ said Rozalia, panic edging her voice.
‘It doesn’t need to,’ Selwyn replied. ‘Get the stage powered up.’
She nodded and ran over to the same stage by which she’d arrived, programming it for a return journey.
While she worked, Selwyn tore open his rucksack and pulled out bundles of explosive daisy-chained together with wire. He set a detonator next to the opposite stage and fiddled with it for a moment: Rozalia guessed he was setting a timer. Then he stood up and placed more explosives around the base of the stage she had just programmed.
Rozalia finished programming the stage and quickly ascended its ramp, pale lightning throbbing at the tips of its field-pillars. She heard the sound of splintering wood and saw the hangar doors bow inward.
‘Selwyn!’ she shouted. ‘They’re coming!’
‘I’m nearly done,’ he yelled back, still tinkering with something.
‘I don’t think you need to worry about blowing this place up,’ she said. ‘Those things are going to tear it apart.’
‘Better safe than sorry.’
The light above her head grew stronger. ‘For God’s sake, Selwyn, get up here!’
He laughed softly and made his way over to the controls for her stage. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘What?’ She stared at him in horror. ‘You’d be safe back on my alternate. You’re not making any sense!’
‘I’ll die whether I’m here or there, Roz,’ he said, his voice calm. As he spoke, he shrugged off his heavy jacket and rolled up a sleeve. She saw the black and red buboes marking his skin from the wrist all the way up to the shoulder.
‘You’re infected,’ she said, her voice numb.
‘I’m glad fate allowed me this last chance to talk to you, Rosie. But if you don’t mind, I think it’s best if I stay where I am.’
She tried to find something meaningful she could say, but the words wouldn’t come. ‘I’m sorry,’ was all she could manage.
‘On the contrary,’ he replied, ‘I take great comfort from the knowledge that the multiverse is full to the brim with uncountable Selwyn Rudd’s. Where I fall, long may they continue.’
‘I’ll tell him about you,’ she said as the light grew towards its peak. ‘The Selwyn I know.’
‘Tell him he’s a drunken sot,’ he replied, ‘and that Gwendolyn Bennings of Hatcher and Hatcher Ironmongers, Cardiff, is still the finest sight that ever passed before his eyes.’
The hangar doors burst open, and a great swarm of bee-brains came pouring in. Selwyn turned, shotgun raised to his shoulder, and fired shot after shot into them as they swarmed around him.
The transfer-light washed over Rozalia. She screamed, thinking for a moment she had been caught in the detonation. But when her vision cleared, revealing her own transfer hangar, deserted in the middle of the night, she collapsed onto the stage, gasping and sobbing.
Get moving, she told herself, stumbling upright and making her way back down the ramp and towards the rear exit. She stepped out into moonlight and cautiously made her way along the side of the hangar to its front, déjà vu prickling at her senses. She ducked low when a jeep, carrying several raggedy-men, drove past.
She doubled back and made her way down to the beach. The moon was behind clouds, so she could hardly see a thing. Her imagination conjured a thousand hands grasping for her from out of the darkness.
An idea came to her. Instead of heading south towards town, she turned north, her destination the fishing hut where she had first seen the raggedy-men.
Randall
Alternate Delta Twenty-Five
‘Hey, Danks! I said pass me the damn wrench!’
‘Sorry,’ said Fred Danks, who stood with his back pressed up against the side of the truck. He reached down into the open toolbox beside him, picking out a wrench and passing it to Private Young without once taking his eyes off the huge Chimera prowling across the grass just metres from where he stood. Young, who had made the request, snatched the wrench from Danks before squirming back underneath the EV truck.
