The Beauty of Destruction (55 page)

Britha did not understand what Lug was saying. This was clearly the work of the gods. She had no business being involved. She wanted to scream, bolt, finally break down. Instead she tried to hide the trembling from him as she shook her head.

‘No,’ she finally managed.

‘Then your children and mine have no chance anywhere,’ Lug said.

‘How will my children live if this place falls?’ she demanded. ‘If I am gone?’

‘They can be carried from this place. I will make a sacrifice for them.’

Britha found herself looking at Tangwen, frozen in place.

‘Then send someone else,’ she said desperately. She knew it was cowardice, but now the tears of red metal ran down the side of her face only to be sucked back into her skin. After all of it, the battles, the betrayals, and the sacrifices, suddenly she knew what it had been for. Why she was still fighting after her people had been killed. Two unborn children. Two people she did not know and might never meet. For whatever reason, to her, they were all that mattered.

‘You are a weapon now. One of the Llwglyd Diddymder’s children sewed part of their essence into you. You can become one with the city.’

She had heard the word city before, from Germelqart, but it was unfamiliar. Cities sounded like hateful places.

She shook her head. It made no sense. It was too big. Her head felt as though it was about to split.

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head again. Lug held up a closed fist, and then opened it. The crystalline tendrils reached for her. The other end of them was in unseen space, difficult, painful to look at. She knew that they did not come from here, not from the Otherworld, or her realm. They were parasites from some other place, Cythrawl perhaps, like Bress. They had granted Teardrop his power when she had first met him in her world. They had consumed him.

‘You will do this. We understand you. You want your children to live. This is the only way.’

She did not move away but she tried to keep her mouth shut. Her nostrils flared in panic, her eyes widened, but at last she succumbed to her fear and opened her mouth to scream and the crystal tendrils forced their way into her eyes, up her nose.

‘You are a poison. You must consume the Llwglyd Diddymder from within. You must truly learn to hate.’ Lug’s words were lost among the agony. The crystal tendrils silenced the scream as they surged into her mouth. Then they started to eat.

Tangwen’s eyes rolled up into her skull and she collapsed to the warm copper ground. Britha was convulsing nearby, her eyes turning silver. Teardrop looked down at the Pecht
drui
, pity and guilt warring on his face.

‘Did you know?’ Raven’s Laughter asked, his wife’s voice filled with disgust. The veins on Britha’s head bulged as something pushed its way through her veins, her head already starting to swell.

‘We have to take them both to the Cauldron,’ Teardrop said.

‘Did you know?’ Raven’s Laughter demanded. Teardrop turned to his wife.

‘Do you think I would do this? That I could?’ he shouted.

‘We could defy him,’ Raven’s Laughter said, but Teardrop could tell his wife knew that it was already too late. He crouched down and gathered Britha into his arms, carrying her back towards the chariot. He was disgusted with the gods, his people, and himself. Moments later he heard his Raven’s Laughter pick up Tangwen and follow.

The seas surrounding the continent boiled first, then they turned to steam. Internal pressure, and water rushing in from further afield, sent plumes of water vapour shooting thousands of miles into the sky. Then the land, the entire land burst into flames. Fountains of blackened slag, ash and lava flew into the atmosphere as though from a continent-sized volcano.

Níðhöggr, the behemoth, the living ship, the Nagas’ biomechanical hive god’s serpentine, maw-like prow emerged first through the breach, surrounded by vast jets of molten matter. Other smaller craft, looking like shoals of fish in the fire, shot past the huge ship, spreading out quickly, sporing.

The eggshell had been cracked.

38

Now

Lodup was shaking, though he didn’t feel the cold any more. Germelqart’s severed head, on the end of the pole, was linked to the breathing stone by tendrils of flesh: a hardwired connection. The Mwoakilloan salvage diver had watched the tendrils grow through Germelqart’s head, pushing themselves beneath the skin, cracking through skull. The severed head was still screaming in glossolalia. It was little more than an interface for them. A mutated larynx had grown from the now organic-looking pole that the head was impaled on. It did not look like a human organ. It was clearly designed to accommodate the twisted vocabulary of an alien language. It worried Lodup that he was starting to understand the words.

It had been through the head that they had risked looking for sane minds in Earth’s now insane and extensively redesigned communications network. He wasn’t sure if he had made contact with someone or not. He was sure that he couldn’t take another attempt.

Command and Control stank. Lodup had no idea how long they had been living there for. They had intermittent power, and the lower deck of the habitat had been partially flooded when the structure had shifted. He knew there had been significant changes outside. He had felt them, just like he felt the still-slowly-wakening minds. Something was protecting him. Some vestige of how they had once been before they had made contact with the thing that lived through the tear in the sky, before Germelqart had unwittingly sacrificed the boy to it. Lidakika, the octopus god who in myth had created Lodup’s island home of Mwoakilloa, was the name the protecting entity had taken. Whether it was literal or not he did not know. Lidakika’s protection felt like a thin membrane with the immensity of the sleeping minds pressing against it. The city was a palpable presence, glowing with energy, crawling with life, an unseen surrounding pressure.

They hadn’t gone back into the water since they had seen the congregation of clones around the waking, living city. Since they had seen the black thing from the cold sump, growing like a tree, the thing that they all somehow knew, from ancient racial memory, hated life.

They had mostly been left alone in C&C. Sometimes Siraja, the dragon-faced AI, would appear and watch them through many eyes. Each time, his appearance was more warped than the last. Yaroslav screamed, drooled, and reacted the only way he could remember, with violence, even though the AI was just an image in the cracked smart matter of the wall, and then ricochets would fill C&C for a while. They had seen some of the wedge-headed creatures, reborn out of the city’s stone, but those had left them alone as well. Other times the black-eyed clones, who had once worked on the city, came to stand and watch them from the moon pool, or even out in the corridor. Yaroslav fired on them when they were close enough. They stood there taking round after round until their physiology gave up and they collapsed to the floor.

The worst times were when Sal came on her own to stand in the Moon Pool and look up at C&C’s oval window. Even when he hid from the window she knew he was there.

Yaroslav, the once taciturn Russian security chief, was pushing for a suicide pact. It seemed like he had been talking for days now, mostly in Russian. He was very enthusiastic about it, ranting, waving his gun around. Sometimes he curled up in a corner and rocked back and forwards, switching between nonsense words in English, Russian and German. He seemed to be reliving something from his past. Lodup kept hearing the word Leningrad.

It was Siska, however, who he was most frightened of. She was mostly silent now. She stayed in the darkest corner of C&C, moving little, but when she did she moved sinuously. He had only caught a glimpse of her eyes recently. They were reptilian slits. Her skin was starting to scale, and the few words that she had muttered had put emphasis on the sibilants. She made him feel like prey.

This was survival as a habit. Lodup was half convinced that Yaroslav was right, though the solidly built Russian hadn’t taken his own life yet. The only thing that stopped Lodup putting a gun in his mouth was the knowledge that the modified seedpods were still there. There was a chance they could leave this place. Lidakika had told him this. He was learning to despise hope.

The sky was the colour of a bruise, and a strange storm was coming in from the Pacific. The sea was unnaturally dark. Beth didn’t like having to dip her arms into the water to paddle the surfboard. She had stripped off her jacket and boots and much of her webbing, transferring the pistol holster and the pouches for clips to the belt of her combat trousers. The
OHWS
was loaded with the magazine of nanite-tipped rounds.

She was wondering how much of what was going on she was able to deal with, because it all felt so unreal, like she was in a film. She might understand that the people she had killed were already dead, little more than vessels for alien madness, but they still felt human when flesh impacted on flesh, when warm blood splashed across her face. The sound of shouted warnings and crying was becoming fainter now. She felt weak, emaciated, her body feeding on itself to heal her various wounds. She knew she should have eaten some of the energy bars before she paddled out.

She was coming to the conclusion that the sea calmed her. This wasn’t like Southsea, however. There was the constant feeling of a presence under the water, though she supposed it had been the same in the Solent. Even though she was being glared at by surfers with crude swastikas carved into their flesh, many of them wearing skin masks cut from the faces of their victims, paddling out on the water was still the calmest she had felt since she had arrived in LA.

The surfboard tipped into a shallow trough between waves – it felt like she was sliding downhill – and then she was next to Inflictor Doorstep. He was sitting on his board, bobbing up and down in the swell. He paid her little attention. He looked the same as he had the last time she had seen him up close. Monstrous physiology on the edge of what the human frame could support: tough looking leathery skin, and the inhuman features of a comic book-demon. The only differences were the wetsuit, the dreadlock-like tendrils of flesh hanging off his head, and this time he wasn’t pointing a massive pistol at her. She thought about drawing the
OHWS
to cover him, but he didn’t seem very interested in her, and he was unarmed. He was just looking out to the east. The sun was a red ball just above the horizon, its reflection a path of fire across the surface of the dark water.

‘What are you waiting for?’ It hadn’t been the question she had meant to ask.

‘A break from the tedium, same as ever.’ He still didn’t look at her. ‘It’s the apocalypse, and everyone has been assigned their roles by central casting. It’s like we all still think that we’re living in a reality TV show.’ His chuckle was a dry rasp. ‘The real reason for a surveillance society.’ This was little more than a whisper. ‘Maybe in Norway it’s like Ragnarok, or in Africa … they’re doing … African … things, but here it’s the apocalypse and we all know how to act because we’ve played the games, seen it on TV, watched it at the movies.’

‘You’re bored?’ Beth asked incredulously. Now his monstrous head turned to look at her.

‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘They’ve made madness boring, how the fuck’d they manage that?’

‘You don’t feel special any more?’ Beth asked. Demonic eyes regarded her. She suspected he was trying to work out if he was being mocked or not. He was. Gunshots rang out over the water from the beach, but neither of them turned around.

‘We used to be monsters,’ he said quietly.

You used to be
bullied kids with ridiculous levels of entitlement
, Beth thought. ‘Now you’re just the same as everyone else. Where’s King Jeremy? Where’s the nuke?’

Inflictor turned back to look out to sea. ‘You know they’re burning A-list actors in wicker men up by the Hollywood sign? It’s being done by every waitress, office clerk and bathroom attendant who never got a break. In Beverly Hills the plastic surgeons are operating on people’s larynxes so they can speak the new language. It’s this year’s big thing, like breast enlargements, or the latest smartphone. In the valley, porn stars lived next door to soccer moms. Sometimes they were the same person – or was that just a fantasy? Now the whole valley is one big orgy, one big orgasm, one big organism. This is what we want. A Pavlovian response to pornography: violent, sexual, both. Everyone wants to rape someone, just to prove they can. It’s the dominant social discourse of the twenty-first century. It’s an alien invasion, right? Bullshit. They’ve been here longer than us. They’re that thing, foetus-curled around my brain stem, the old reptilian part. This is all just supply and demand.’

‘How much more of this shit am I going to have to listen to?’ Beth demanded. What was getting to her was that that Inflictor had made himself this way without any alien involvement. ‘Where’s King Jeremy?’

‘Tell du Bois I let Silas go.’

‘He knows,’ Beth told him. Inflictor’s frown lasted for a moment.

‘They’re supposed to have driven us mad? All they’ve done is put everything that was on the inside, and not that well fucking hidden, on the outside. Nothing’s changed. We’re the alien invasion, have been for a while. Maybe since we first felt that satisfying thud running up our arm, the warm salt spray of blood when we took a rock and used it to cave in some Neanderthal’s head.’

‘You’ve given this a lot of thought,’ Beth said.
Pseudo-intellectual, philosophical
bullshit!
‘Do you understand that I don’t care? To me you’re just another sociopathic little shit. Now, what do you want to do? Talk or get shot?’

‘It’s a small price to pay,’ he said. She wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about.

‘This isn’t a confessional,’ she told him. She again considered drawing the
OHWS
but she was beginning to suspect that he was well beyond threatening.

‘No, but it is a church. I understand why you hate me, fear me …’

‘It’s more disgust,’ Beth said, but she foresaw a monologue and made herself comfortable. She was trying to decide how much of it she was going to put up with before shooting him in the head.

‘… but nothing we did matters now. They would have ended up the same way.’

Beth thought back to Elizabeth in the warehouse in Massachusetts. She just about managed not to draw the pistol and kill him then and there.

‘You’ve been superseded?’ Beth said. ‘Poor baby.’
This wanker thinks he’s in some
kind of atrocity competition.

He turned to look at her again. ‘Tiger shark embryos fight in the womb. The winner gets to be born. We’re not going to be the winners.’

‘Do you owe King Jeremy anything?’ Beth asked, her voice brittle.

‘Everything, in some ways, but he’s a motherfucker. He’s at Terminal Island. Look for a submarine. That’s all I know.’

Beth drew the pistol and pointed it at Inflictor’s head. He showed no reaction whatsoever.

‘You know, don’t you?’ she asked. He didn’t answer. ‘Doesn’t matter what you’ve become, what you’ve done, the power you think you have, you’re still the same frightened little boy, aren’t you?’ He said nothing. Beth holstered the pistol. He couldn’t cause any more damage, he was right about that at least. The worst he could do was just join in. She turned the surfboard around and started paddling back towards the shore.

‘Don’t you want to surf?’ he called after her.

They cleared most of the rubbish out of the back of the Cougar and took that. It was less damaged than the
ECV
. They made their way south-east along the Appian Way. Beth’s last glimpse of the ocean was of the surfers rising on a large swell, the water obscuring something dark and huge just underneath the surface.

Things that looked like a cross between tendrils and vines shot from the water, taking root in the ground, climbing up buildings, explosively making trenches in the beach sand. They burst open, the spores just about visible, like a heavy pollen fall in the haze of the morning sunshine and smog. The buildings started to warp and change, splitting open as if to reveal a new world inside, independent life growing from the matter and tearing itself free.

Alexia steered away from the sea front. Du Bois ran his tanto over her skin. The cut didn’t bleed. He cleaned the blade and did the same to himself. Grace was doing likewise. Beth could feel the blood-screens filling the armoured vehicle. The Seeder spores from the sea were like a bad itch. She drew her grandfather’s bayonet and used it to release her own blood-screen to help fight the spores and wished things were different.

They drove towards the smoke and fire still surrounding the ruins of LAX.

They were in a gun shop. She knew where she was geographically, but the place names were pretty meaningless now, just raw information that had only been relevant before the Seeders woke up. The place had been pretty extensively looted, unsurprisingly. Beth was trying to ignore the dead bodies, but one of them had been run through with a hunting rifle. She couldn’t stop smiling at the absurdity of this. She was starting to worry about herself.

‘Fuck!’ Grace screamed and kicked at one of the display cases. She had managed to retrieve the fighting knife she had been holding when she’d hit the bonnet of the
ECV
during the chase. It had got lodged in the grill at the front of the vehicle. She had, however, lost one of her Berettas. ‘It’s like balance, y’know?’ Beth didn’t know. The punk girl continued searching through the detritus. Alexia was by the door, crouched down, leaning against the wall, chain smoking.

‘I don’t think you’re going to find what you’re looking for,’ du Bois said. They hadn’t come here looking for another Beretta; they were pretty sure that most of the guns would have already been stolen. Instead they had come for another scope for the Purdey. At some level it annoyed Beth that she knew the replacement scope for the custom weapon wasn’t as good as the first one, which had been destroyed during the chase. She didn’t want to know this much about guns and military stuff, let alone have to utilise the knowledge. Though she was managing it better than Alexia, it would seem.