“Porgy!”
THE STRUTTER ROARED into the air, the landing wheels clipping the tree tops as Tulliver continued to climb. A few whipperwills cracked and snapped after it, but he left them behind as the aeroplane banked away.
Tulliver circled round the crater at a couple of hundred feet, out of range of the whipperwills. He could see the tower of the temple and the cobweb shroud of fungus threads draped over it. He pointed down for the Padre to see. It looked like a cobweb-covered bride cake. From the air, the extent of the fungus became clear, draping through the trees. The extent of its growth was far worse than it looked from the ground. He was glad the Fusiliers didn’t know. In his head, he was already calling it the Havisham Effect.
In the distance, beyond the crater, great plumes of telluric energy blasted into the sky. He saw the shiny patches in the air, far off, as distant energies built, but nothing over the crater. He circled over the Strip again.
Every now and again, through thinner canopy, he’d catch flashes down below as the Tommies’ electric lances flared. At least he knew where they were.
Oil spattered from the engine and built up on his goggles. He pulled them off as he scanned the crater jungle for any sign of imminent telluric build up.
As he banked round again, he saw it, out of the corner of his eye: a patch of air that shimmered as though worn through. It was on the Strip’s edge.
ATKINS COULDN’T BRING himself to disassociate the thing before him from his friend. To him, this shambling grotesque was in some way still Porgy, and therein lay the danger.
“Porgy, it’s me, Only,” he shouted though his gas hood.
“Then do him a favour and fire!” yelled Mercy from behind him as the things that had been Porgy and Jenkins lumbered towards them.
The mould-ridden men showed no sign of recognition. Anything that was Porgy was long gone. The advancing carpet of fungal threads forced Atkins and Mercy back.
EVERSON HEARD THE drone of Tulliver’s engine overhead, and could see him circling above through the leaves and waggling his wings. He’d found a telluric build up. If they were to have any chance of defeating these things, of staying alive, they had to follow him.
“That way!” he bellowed though his gas mask. “Atkins, Tonkins, break out, follow Tulliver! We may only have one shot at this.”
Atkins tore his attention away from the shambling things that were once Porgy and Jenkins, and joined Tonkins as they concentrated their electric fire. Blue-white bolts danced and flicked across the white-carpeted ground, vaporising a path through the thick fungal shroud that surrounded them.
Behind them, fruiting bodies began to swell as the Talbot-thing and the others followed, now keeping their distance beyond the range of the electric lances, paralleling their advance as they spread out in a skirmish line behind them. Like beaters, thought Everson bitterly.
“There!” said Pot Shot, pointing in the sky, where Tulliver was circling tightly.
The Tommies forged towards the spot beneath him, and broke out of the trees onto the scrub-covered Strip.
As they set foot on open ground, Everson waved the aeroplane away. Tulliver waggled his wings in acknowledgement and side-slipped out of the turn.
“I guess this is the spot, then,” said Everson.
From the edge of the wood, the Talbot-thing and its ghastly grey section appeared and staggered silently towards them.
Something in the air changed. Even under his mask, Atkins could feel it. At their feet, the thin rocky mantle began to crack, exposing the metal beneath as the telluric charge began to build.
Napoo, trusting to his nature and innate sense of survival, would not stay. He fled to safer ground beyond the Strip.
The grey-faced Fusiliers shambled towards the small group. The creeping wave of mycelia stopped, its advance stunted by the discharge, but the twisted Tommies kept coming. The fungus that animated them was drawing on more and more of their tissue to fuel itself and the bodies shrivelled with every step as it sought to reach fresher hosts.
“Hold your positions,” yelled Everson.
Atkins and his Black Hand Gang shuffled nervously. They’d been here before, repelling German attacks on the trenches; you hold your nerve, try not to funk it. It didn’t get any easier.
Small crackles of energy flickered about their feet.
“Hold it.”
Hepton danced a jig as ribbons of energy snapped and flared around his boots. “Christ, talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire!” he said. “Are you trying to get us killed?”
“No, just you if we’re lucky,” muttered Mercy.
Discharges of blue-white energy rolled across the ground, building in strength.
“It’s coming!” hollered Riley. “Hold steady, son,” he said calmly to a fidgeting Tonkins.
Hepton broke and ran, lugging his tripod, camera and film canisters.
Energy began arcing up from the exposed metal around them, striking out at trees.
“Hold it,” Everson called.
The Talbot-thing stopped and the others lurched to a halt alongside it.
It wasn’t falling for it.
Atkins wasn’t going to let this happen. This had been his idea. These things had to die, if only so the men themselves could rest in peace. He pulled off his gas hood and stepped from the defensive ring.
“Atkins, what do you think you’re doing!” bellowed Everson.
Atkins ignored him and walked towards the grey men.
“Porgy. Porgy, it’s me. Only! You remember me? Porgy!”
The ashen-faced soldier turned its head and stepped towards Atkins, pulling free of the mycelia that wove into the ground around it. The others began doing the same. The fungus, overcome by an imperative for survival, lurched towards him.
As energy began to build beneath his feet, Atkins could feel the thrum of it through his boots. About him, tongues of lightning lashed out at the trees.
The Tommies could hold their position no longer.
“Run!” yelled Everson. They didn’t need telling twice. Atkins took one last look at the fungal effigy of Porgy staggering towards him, its grey skin almost shrivelling against his skull as the fungal canker that possessed it sought to extract every morsel of energy from its decaying host.
A huge bolt of telluric energy roared up from the ground, shattering the thin shell of rock over the metal below. The concussive wave threw Atkins and the others off their feet as a blast of heat washed over them. It threw everything into sharp relief, like all the Very lights in the world going off at once.
Atkins turned his head and squinted through his lashes against the light. He saw the silhouettes of fungal Fusiliers caught in the blast, consumed as the huge white beam jagged up into the atmosphere, like some electric beanstalk. Their faint outlines grew fainter and more indistinct against the increasing brightness until there was nothing left but a painful angry white light, spitting and crackling.
Suddenly that, too, was gone.
Ears ringing with the blast, half-blinded by the brilliance, the Tommies staggered to their feet. They wandered round dazed, waiting for their senses to return.
Where the blast had erupted, there was now an exposed circle of metal, one of those nodes Tulliver had talked about, a planetary junction, an intersection of geometric alignments.
Of the animated corpses, there was no sign. They had gone. Beyond the metal, the fungal carpet lay blackened and charred. It crumbled to dust with a soft satisfying crunch beneath the boot.
For minutes afterwards, the decaying afterimages of the men haunted Atkins, but eventually, they faded, too, as the ghosts of the dead ought to.