In the Otherworld they showed their power. They caged her in light and destroyed her with fire. Just before the fire consumed her, she saw the dead. Fachtna was watching her from beyond the circle of stones.
33. Now
Beth sat in the Range Rover at the bottom of Alhambra Road, picking dried blood off herself and looking at the wreckage of South Parade Pier. Knowing what she knew now, it was difficult not to think that this was the apocalypse – but happening here in Portsmouth? A back-alley apocalypse largely unnoticed maybe, seen out of the corner of the eye. The helicopters in the sky, the light and the sirens meant that people knew something was happening, but they talked a little louder, the laughter was more forced and they pretended it wasn’t. Or maybe this wasn’t the apocalypse. Maybe this happened all the time in the secret world Beth seemed to have been inducted into. Perhaps every terrorist atrocity or disaster was actually brought about by this hidden conflict of monsters, strange technology and madmen.
‘There’s a house down there with its windows painted black and it smells bad,’ the chief madman said. Beth looked over at du Bois. He wasn’t looking at her; he was glancing over at the partially destroyed pier. Another piece of collateral damage in this hidden war. She wondered if she was on the right side. She would think about that once she got her sister back.
Beth felt something wet coming out of her ear. She touched it and her fingers came away bloody. Indescribable pain lanced through her head and her vision went red. Beth found herself in the passenger foot-well of the Range Rover, curled up as if trying to hide from the pain. It had lessened, but her head still felt white hot and was throbbing. Du Bois was looking at her with a degree of sympathy, though no surprise.
‘What’s happening?’ she managed before screaming again. There were very few people on the streets. The city had been told that it had been the target of multiple terrorist attacks. Home might not feel safe at the moment but it felt safer than outside. However, Beth’s screams, the badly damaged Range Rover and their ragged and bloodstained clothing were drawing attention. Du Bois watched people get out their phones and press one button three times. That didn’t matter. They were covered on that front. They were supposed to be special forces combating a particularly bloody group of terrorists. The local police were kicking up a storm but were holding off. Du Bois knew that helicopters filled with Special Boat Service commandos were en route to Portsmouth.
‘I dumped a lot of information into your head at once.’
‘All the gun stuff?’ Beth said and then suddenly looked out to the choppy Solent under the bright blue sky.
Why did she do that? he wondered. ‘Small-unit tactics and… yes, all the gun stuff. Normally the information would be assimilated in a much more careful manner, but there wasn’t time. Whatever you have inside you coped admirably but there was always going to be bleeding and pain. I’m sorry.’
‘I almost certainly wouldn’t be alive if you hadn’t.’ Assuming I believe you, Beth thought. ‘I would have been trying to fight those things with a bayonet.’
‘You have a bayonet?’ du Bois asked, a little confused.
‘That’s it? That’s what we’re going on? Blacked-out windows and a bad smell?’ Beth asked, holding her head, the pain having subsided a little.
‘The smell’s really bad. And it seems to have its own naturally occurring blood-screen.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘They have access to technology like… It means it’s the people who took your sister, okay?’ du Bois said, sounding exasperated.
Beth looked up the Alhambra Road. It was a road of white-painted terraced houses which had seen better days, like much of the seafront in Southsea. Most of the houses were four or five storeys high.
‘What’s the plan?’ she asked.
‘I do this, and you sit here and try to cope with the pain.’ Beth stared at him. She didn’t realise her eyes were full of blood. ‘No? That’s what I thought. Has it occurred to you that if the pain distracts you, it could get us both killed? Not to mention, I don’t have anything that could even kill hybrids. The best I can hope for is to debilitate them for a while. When they heal they’ll also be very angry about having just been shot.’
‘Really?’ Beth glanced towards the gun compartment in the back of the Range Rover. ‘With all the guns you’ve got?’
‘It’s not about the guns; it’s about how quickly their internal nanites can knit them back together again. I don’t have anything that can stop that from happening, I’ve used them all, and all the guns have a different purpose,’ he said somewhat defensively.
‘Look, I won’t let you down, but if I have to I’m going in there on my own,’ Beth said. Du Bois sighed. ‘So, what’s the plan?’
‘Well, when I was having a look at the house I just happened to attach some frame charges to the bay window…’
Du Bois backed the Range Rover up the narrow road at speed, clipping more than one car. He then yanked the wheel and reversed the four-by-four up against the wall of the house with the blacked-out windows, not quite braking in time, letting the wall of the house stop the car.
With a thought he sent the command to the radio detonators on the frame charges. The bay windows on the front of the house exploded inwards.
Beth was out of the car running at the front door, the Benelli M4 at the ready. Du Bois was on the bonnet of the Range Rover, the H & K UMP in his hands.
Beth fired lock-breaker rounds into the door’s hinges and then the lock, looking away as she fired so she didn’t get blinded by splinters. Du Bois leaped through the hole where the black-painted panes of glass had been.
Beth checked the hall quickly but saw nothing. She raced up the stairs as she heard du Bois kicking in doors on the ground floor. Quickly she checked the rooms on the first floor. There were signs of lots of people having lived there recently. The place stank like sewage. Discarded food, most of it meat, had been left to rot, but there were no flies.
Du Bois ran by her on the landing as he headed up to check the second floor. Moments later Beth was on the stairs heading to the third as du Bois searched below.
On the third floor Beth kicked in the door to the first room she came to, a back bedroom. The same soiled mattresses, the same rotting food, the same smell of sewage. She tried not to gag as she heard du Bois on the stairs to the fourth and final floor.
Beth came out of the back bedroom and moved to the front, kicking it open. This was not quite as bad, perhaps because the blackout curtains that had covered the windows had fallen down, making it less usable.
If her senses hadn’t been quite as acute as they had become recently, Beth wasn’t sure she would have heard the burst of suppressed sub-machine gun fire from upstairs. She probably would have heard du Bois’s cry of surprise, however, and definitely the sound of glass smashing above her. She saw a shape, much larger than du Bois on his own, plummet past the window. She heard the impact and a scream. Beth rushed to the filthy window and looked out. Du Bois was lying mostly on the roof of the Range Rover. Something not unlike what she had fought in the dog stadium was crouched over him, repeatedly slashing at him with an extended spur of bone.
Beth ran out of the room, leaped over the landing banister and landed on the stairs close to the second-floor landing. She ran down the few remaining steps and charged at the landing window. The black-painted single pane exploded outwards as she hit it. It felt like she had a long time to think about what a stupid move this had been on the twenty-five-foot drop to the ground.