“He’s stable, for now,” Davies replied. “But he needs a real doctor looking at his heart—it’s still fluttering like a caged bird.”
“Can he walk out of here if needs be?”
Davies waved his hand in a seesaw motion.
“Fifty-fifty at best, Cap,” he said. “If we do have to walk, he’ll have to take it slow and easy. By rights, he should be in hospital.”
“Aye,” Banks replied, “and by rights, I should be on holiday in Ibiza on a sunbed with a bucketful of cocktails. We’ll just have to make do, like always.”
He turned to Hynd.
“Can you get the stove and stuff squared away, Sarge? I’d like to be ready to move fast if Wiggo and the others somehow come up with a miracle.”
Hynd gave him a salute that was somewhat ruined by the cigarette dangling in his lips. Banks was lighting a smoke of his own when Davies called from a room at the rear.
“You need to see this, Cap,” he said. “I came through looking for somewhere to take a piss… and found this.”
Banks joined the private in a small room that had indeed once been a washroom, containing little more than a cistern and a sink. The cramped floor space was mostly taken up by one of the worms—what was left of it.
It looked to have been dead for as long as the station had been abandoned, a desiccated husk, the bright red of the body dulled to deep crimson like dry rust but with the sheen of dry candle wax. The bulk of it was four feet long and about a foot wide, lying almost in a circle like a discarded tire. Banks didn’t want to touch it. He used the end of his rifle barrel to prod what passed for lips. Waxy pieces of dry tissue fell away exposing twin rows of pencil-thin teeth that seemed to shine white in the gloomy room. The touch of the rifle barrel was enough to disturb whatever delicate balance the thing had lain in—it collapsed in on itself, raising a faint puff of red dust that had both Banks and Davies standing back, not wanting to breathe any of it in.
Once the dust settled, Banks sifted the remains, again using the barrel of his weapon. What was left was a waxy residue that left a smear on the end of the rifle. There appeared to be something more solid in the center of the collapsed mess but when he uncovered it, he wished he hadn’t bothered—it was a skeletal, all too human hand with most but not all the flesh stripped away from the bones.
“Sarge,” he shouted. “Check on Wiggo and the others. These buggering things got in here at one time; there’s no reason why they can’t again.”
It was raining harder now, running in runnels off the roof and starting to puddle even on the rockier ground on which the shack sat. Out of the window to the north, the view was grim, the weather having closed in, reducing visibility to twenty yards.
“I think we might be here for a while, Cap,” Hynd said.
“I hope not,” Banks replied but any hope of Wiggins producing a miracle was dashed minutes later when the three men returned from outside.
“Nowt there but heaps of junk, Cap,” Wiggins said. “The batteries, the ones that are left, are flat as pancakes. Somebody’s already cannibalized a good many of the engine parts and there’s only two good tires among the lot of them.”
“It’s shanks’ pony again then,” Hynd said.
Banks looked again out the remains of the north window and over to where the professor lay snoring softly on the table.
“We’ll give yer man here a rest for a bit and hope this is just a passing shower,” he said with more enthusiasm than he felt. “Sarge, get that stove back out again and get a brew on. Looks like this is home for the duration.”
Banks went to stand by the north-facing window. It only had a third of its glass remaining, a jagged triangle to the right-hand side—the remainder was open to the elements. The wind was coming from that direction, blowing rain in his face, but he hardly felt it. His mind was twenty or more miles north, at a rural airstrip that was their destination and one where they’d be expected at nightfall. It didn’t look like they were going to make it and with their comms out of service, he could only hope that the plane would wait for them.
Otherwise, it’s going to be a bloody long walk home.
Every fiber of his being was telling him to get moving but the professor was still sleeping—soundly by the looks of things—and every bit of rest would stand him in better stead on the long march yet to come.
Besides, Banks had these fucking electric worms to worry about. The view outside was restricted by the weather but he saw enough to know that as the rain got heavier, the blue swathes of dancing static got more intense, with fewer patches of clear ground between them. He wouldn’t be surprised if the whole expanse of sand to their north was filled, just beneath the surface, by a multitude of squirming, roiling worms.
The only plan he had in mind was to walk along the track, either east or west, and hope to find rockier ground heading north at some point. That was trusting to luck and was more Wiggins’ style than his own but he could see no other option. Even that was going to prove to be fraught with danger, for the rocky ground around the shack where they’d taken shelter was now surrounded by puddles.
He thought of the dry, dead thing in the washroom and suddenly knew how it came to be there.
“Wiggo, Davies,” he said, turning, “I want a guard on the front door. Wilko, Sarge, you take this window here.”
“What are we watching for?” Wiggins said, heading for the door carrying a coffee with a smoke hanging from his lower lip.
“Blue and red meanies,” Banks replied. “And if any turn up, don’t wait for an order, just take the fuckers down.”
They didn’t have to wait long for Banks’ hunch to be proved right. Taking advantage of the wet conditions, the first of the long red worms slithered onto the rocky station concourse before the squad had finished their coffee. This one was three feet long, a foot thick, glistening red in the gloom, with blue crackling flashes of electricity running in waves from front to rear. It raised its head, opening the fang-filled mouth as if tasting the air, and started to move towards the doorway.
Wiggins put three shots down its gullet and it exploded into a puddle of pink mush that left not so much as a bone behind, just a tumble of white fangs that looked like white pencils scattered on the wet rock.
“At least they go down easy enough,” Wiggins said.
“Aye, but it looks like there’s a fuckload of them,” Banks said at his back from where he’d come to have a look. He pointed out into the gloom to the south. The desert was alive with squirming worms coiling wetly around each other in a rolling mass surrounded by crackling blue static—a mass that was slowly but surely heading their way.
- 10 -
The noise of Wiggins’ shots had been deafening in the confines of the shack. Donnie saw the soldiers put in earplugs as they unslung their rifles, and he saw from Hynd and Davies’ body language beside the north window that they were expecting trouble.
The gunfire woke the professor. He sat up with a start, his white face appearing ghostly in the dim light.
“What the hell is this now? Can’t a man get a bit of sleep around here?”
Donnie did the first thing that came to mind. He grabbed Gillings and pulled him down under the table. Thankfully, the professor didn’t look to be in the mood to argue. They squeezed together in the cramped space.
“Keep your head down, Prof,” he said. “Looks like there’s going to be a firefight.”
He had enough time to notice that flickering blue light showed at both the open doorway and out the north window, then felt his hair stand on end, smelled ozone on the air.