Part Four - Robin

In Robin’s boat, there were two sections, one up the front for the living, and the other for those who weren’t. So far, of the quick and the dead, the dead were winning out. She sat wearily in the front of the boat as it meandered around the harbour picking up people. The thing in the water had frozen a little after daybreak, its grey pillars reaching up to the sky, some kind of saggy skin sloughing off it. She could see, if she squinted right, dark shapes moving in the water around it, and she wondered what was to be done about them. There was something so very melancholy about it ... whatever it was had burst into life with passion and vigour, it seemed wrong that it should collapse in on itself with such a mild whimper.

She could remember, back when her life had included things like going into museums, seeing a movie of people in a lifeboat the day after Wahine Day coming into the shore. They had all seemed so very blank. Not real people at all. People in black and white films, or overseas people, or made up people, because that kind of thing didn’t happen to people like her.

The police launch was in Evans Bay, and she and the other quick ones climbed stiffly out of it onto the marina. The man next to her had no clothes on, she hadn’t noticed till now. Maybe he’d been in the bath when It happened. Someone was talking to her. She blinked, and tried to make sense of the words and the pointing hand. The others from her boat were trudging down the coast road to Cobham Park. She was supposed to go with them, or something. Robin turned and looked at the nearer Kilbirnie Park. Ah. It had sprouted with khaki green tents and people wandering around with radios. Somebody was Coping.

Above them, the walking thing was straddling the boundary between earth and sky. There had been a time in the night when it had given a great cry, and the clouds had cleared for just that one moment and she had seen stars, very bright and very cold. There had been a greenish light around the wreckage of the Beehive, and another rising from the round bulk of the CakeTin; they had faded into whiteness and she’d wondered what was going on, and like that, all of a piece, her migraine had evaporated as if it had never been. At some point, the walking thing had climbed the hills, growing up along the slopes of Mt Victoria, a multi-limbed creature straining upwards, drawing the green ribbons from the clouds into its interlaced structure...

A man at a desk quizzed her on her name and birthday and wrote a number on her hand in black vivid marker. He wrote it again on a card that he slung around her neck, and sent her off to another queue. A private, who looked about 14, gave her a sealed ration pack and a bottle of water, which she drank greedily. A middle aged woman in a Salvation Army tabard was the clothes provider – second hand sneakers and a surprisingly spiffy blazer. All of them ticked her card. Robin had one slipper left, a comfortingly blue bunny, now with shabby waterlogged ears. She tucked it carefully into her blazer pocket.

At the medical station, a doctor strapped her ribs and tutted unknowledgeably at the grey patches of rash spreading on her skin, and sent her off to sit next to a chubby girl with bite marks on her arms. Nurses were working their way through the line giving injections – tetanus and hepatitis, they said, just to be sure. Robin wondered idly if they would have been doing rabies, too, if they’d the vaccine for it, but she didn’t think it mattered much. She couldn’t believe that the creatures of yesterday would have anything to do with something as mundane as an earthly virus.

There were people in the queues who were restless, who wanted to find things out, who kept wanting to talk to her about what was going on, most of whom she ignored. The things, they said, had demolished the CBD, but most of the suburbs were alright, especially the ones on the hills away from the water. Except Mt Victoria, they said, looking upward, and Miramar, away out at the entrance to the harbour. Another wave of rumour went around a couple of hours later; buses, they said, buses were coming to take them away on the back roads out to Palmerston North, or closer, perhaps, to Porirua or Paraparaumu or the Hutt Valley. Robin didn’t care much. She should, she supposed, but it was too hard right then to think around the dry air biting her lungs and the short panting gasps of breath that were all her lungs could make. It was cracked ribs, she figured, or at least hoped, but she spent most of her time in the water queue trying to drink away her thirstiness.

It didn’t matter, anyway. Sooner or later she was going to find a phone and call Claire, safe up in Brooklyn, and go back to being a mendicant younger sister. She’d had a few years of trying to be otherwise, but she knew how to be dependant on someone. She’d had the practice.

The buses did come, sometime after dark, sneaking their way in through the city in the chilly dank air. Each driver started calling numbers, and she sat in the waiting line watching children go past when she realised she recognised one. She ducked under the rope, ignoring people who yelled at her, and hobbled over to the bus he was getting on, a little boy clutching a red backpack and rubbing his face a lot. She grabbed his shoulder and turned him to her.

“Robot?”

Part four - Adam

Adam blinked, everything was black and his head hurt. There was dust everywhere and he was finding it hard to breathe. There was something pressing on his chest; that was the problem. The world was dark and dusty and his head hurt and his chest ached. Where was he exactly? He screwed his eyes up and tried to remember.

The last thing he remembered was the dream he’d just been having, which had been about massive fish nestled in eggs. Hundreds of the things, glued together, the eyes inside staring out at him with some sort of hidden knowledge. The eggs were the children of the thing in the ocean, some sort of nameless God. Adam had the horrible feeling that the things in the eggs meant him harm. The huge Godzilla thing had been there too, he was related to the ocean or something. Adam hadn’t felt as scared of him as he did of the eggs.

Before the dream? What had he been doing? There was somewhere he was supposed to be going wasn’t there? Or some place he was trying to get away from? He tried to turn over to relieve the pressure on his chest and some rubble fell near his nose. Rubble was confusing. Where would he ever be with rubble?

Then it came back to him in a flood; the monster, Gretchen over the road who wasn’t Gretchen, the building falling down. He hadn’t been fast enough to get away. Adam wondered how much of the building had fallen on him. The pressure on his chest was from a beam, it was resting on him.

He tested how much space he had. His right arm was pinned, his left folded underneath his body. He tried to extricate it. It was hard, he was stiff and whatever was on his chest wasn’t letting him move that much. After what felt like half an hour his arm was out from under him. It started prickling all over as the blood flowed back into his veins. He flexed the fingers in and out, the pain was intense. He ground his teeth together and kept flexing. He rubbed it with his other hand and that felt a bit better. He felt around in his trouser pockets and pulled out his cellphone. He unlocked it and the light from the little screen illuminated his surroundings.

Trapped under what had formally been a building seemed to be the sum of things.
‘OK. So, how long til the National Guard come for me?’ Adam asked his phone. ‘Oh right, this is New Zealand, we don’t have a National Guard.’ He tried calling 111 on the phone.
‘This number has been overloaded. We are not able to connect your call at the moment. Please hang up and try again in a little while.’
‘Neato,’ Adam said. ‘Well, I guess it’s just you and me now, phone.’ He wondered for a moment if it was a sane response to being trapped under a building to talk to your phone. It probably wasn’t.
‘But,’ Adam pointed out, to his phone, ‘there’s no one else here.’

That was a nasty thought, when the rumbling of collapsing building had started Adam had been surrounded by people. That red headed guy that he had thought was Gretchen, for example. Or Bonny from the office, not to mention all those hundreds of people.

Adam aimed his cellphone light at the walls of his little rubble cave. There was some space around his head, probably about a metre of space. There was a very close wall of broken concrete on his right hand side, which would probably be why he couldn’t move it. Adam sighed, and then coughed because being trapped under a building it turned out, was quite dusty.

‘Well, what do you reckon, phone?’ Adam asked. ‘How should I get this beam off my chest? Because I’m pretty sure that’s the first thing I need to do before I can get out of here.’

The phone did not respond. He tried calling the first number in his phone book. He got a new message, ‘the network is currently overloaded. Please hang up and try again.’

‘Yep, my plan is to move the beam and then I’ll crawl that way,’ he pointed above his head, ‘and from there I think I should be able to dig my way out. Like in that movie about firemen after 9/11.’ The phone looked at him. ‘OK, so I never actually saw that movie, but I saw the trailer. Don’t judge me.’

The phone told him it had been twenty minutes. It felt more like six weeks. He had put his phone down next to his cheek and was using his left hand to take bits of broken concrete from the right hand side and make a pile under the beam. He had been talking on and off to his phone. ‘It’s a good thing,’ he said, for probably the ninth time, unless it was the nineteenth time, ‘that I am not claustrophobic. Because, heh, if I was? Then I would be freaking out right now.’

The pile was getting high enough now to reach the beam. He was really having to work to wedge the pieces under the beam. When he had spent 3 minutes jamming a shard between the beam and the pile he’d made and it slid out of his hand onto the ground he decided it was enough.

Adam took a deep breath in, pushing his chest out as much as he could. Then he exhaled it all out, concentrating on making himself as thin and as flat as he could. Then he braced his feet against whatever it was they were up against and shoved as hard as possible. He moved a couple of inches.

He had a party with the phone for twenty minutes before he was able to work up his strength again. He tried another call and his phone told him again ‘This number has been overloaded. We are not able to connect your call at the moment. Please hang up and try again in a little while.’
‘Damn straight,’ Adam said.

According to his phone, his one and only friend, it took him three hours to extricate himself from his rubble cave. Getting out from under the beam was a lot easier once he got his backpack off. The digging himself out was hard, and his hands were a shaking, bloody mess when he reached daylight, but he did reach daylight and that was the important thing.

Wellington was a wasteland around him. The street he was on was rubble, a cleared swathe of buildings leading from down by the waterfront to up towards the hills. Adam remembered how he had wanted to go to the hills, to get away from the whatever-it-was in the water. There were strange pools of black water on the footpath, and huge craters where the Godzilla monster had passed through.

Adam checked his phone again. It looked less like his friend now, and more like a cellphone. It wasn’t going to solve his problems. It might have helped to get him out of the cave, but it wasn’t going to help him make sense of today.

Adam took a few steps. His whole body was one massive ache. The sun was harsh, but after the events of the night Adam was incredibly happy to see it. The sun made sense. He took another couple of steps, not sure which way to go. He could go back to the waterfront and see what had happened there, or he could head further into town, follow the Godzilla.

Then he heard something, a noise. A tiny kitten mewing for milk. He spun on the spot, trying to find the source of the noise.

‘Hello?’ he called, as loud as he could, ‘hello?’ The thought of something to talk to, even if it was just a kitten, was very appealing. It was coming from a pile of rubble closer to the far side of the road. Adam made his way over gingerly, there were exposed electrical wires lying on the street. ‘Are you there?’
The sound got louder, it was inside the rubble.

Adam slung his pack down and took out a spare tshirt he’d stuffed inside. He tore it up with his teeth and used the strips to bind up his hands. Then he started digging in the rubble again. It was much less scary to do it from the top down.
‘Hey, there, kitten. I’m digging down to you. Just keep making that noise and I’ll find you, OK?’ The more bits of concrete he moved from the pile and put over on the street, the louder the noise was. It stopped sounding like a kitten after a while and sounded more like a person. Adam kept up his babble, telling the nameless voice about his phone and the things he’d seen yesterday.

Finally he pulled an iron strut aside and found a hand, the hand was grey and dusty and Adam grabbed hold of it.

‘It’s OK. I’ve got you know. Stay still and I’ll dig the rest of you out.’

Adam looked around at the street. More of it was rubble piles than anything else. The crowd last night had been huge. He wondered if there was any way he could travel back in time and just deal with the confused callers who didn’t know what an email address was, or how to find the @ symbol on their keyboard.

He pulled the bits of building off the hand with renewed energy, desperate suddenly to talk to another human being. To try and make sense of what had happened and where it had all gone.

‘Because I only saw the start of it, I think,’ Adam said, ‘for the rest I was under cover, asleep like the princess in Sleeping Beauty. I think there’s something really strange going on, I mean, more strange than what I saw. Because the sky looks kind of strange, like it’s been broken. Like, I think if I look at it too long I will see that big rip in it again and then I might go crazy, so I’d really like your take on it.’

Finally he took the last pieces off the person underneath and helped them out from their rubble cave. They were unrecognisable, covered in grey dust. Adam guessed he looked much the same.

‘OK?’ he asked, keeping a hand on the person’s shoulder as they swayed. The person, Adam decided it was a man, since there was a distinct lack of boobs, coughed and nodded.

He straightened up and Adam passed him his bottle of water. He drank a little and then coughed again, rasped out ‘thanks.’
‘Hey, it’s no problem man,’ Adam said, ‘I’m Adam.’
‘Richard,’ the man said, clasping Adam’s bandaged hand with his own.

Adam turned to look at the street again. There were bound to be other survivors under the wreckage of the high rises. It was going to be a long day.

Part Four - Michelle

A relentless drumbeat pounded at Michelle’s ears. Her other senses returned sluggishly, feeling creeping back into her limbs and a groaning certainty of the events of the night crawling into the front of her mind.

The horrors had not been a dream. There was no comforting sense of distance, no relief that at least it was now all over. It had been real and worse still; the nameless horrors were still out there. Even more terrifying was the realisation that maybe there were imminent dangers in here, in the bar with her.

The dripping went on. Drip after pounding drip after drip. Why wouldn’t that terrible sound stop?

Michelle forced her eyes to open, the need to know what was happening overpowering the terror of what she might see. It took a few blinking seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and take in her surroundings.

A small puddle of dark liquid was forming beside her head. Instinctively, she pulled away. The ominous dripping continued, small drops falling every couple of seconds from above. An upturned glass of beer was hanging half over the edge of the pool table above her, the dregs dripping onto the floor next to her where she lay. It was a relief to know it was only beer, although she didn’t know what she’d thought it would be. Blood? Something worse?

She lifted her head off the floor a little to get a better look around. The lights in the bar had gone out when the third tremor had hit them, just before the crushing impact that had demolished the front half of the bar. She shuddered at the memory. The force of the walls caving in had thrown her back. She must have had hit her head when she fell against the pool table at the back of the bar. That would explain how she’d been knocked out, and the pulsating throb at the back of her skull.

It seemed ridiculous now that she had run back here after seeing the monstrous toe smash into the street with such terrifying force. She had grabbed a pool cue as though she had any hope of defending herself against such colossal and incomprehensible terrors. But the instinct to fight for self-preservation, no matter how delusional such desperate hopes were, had saved her life. If she had remained at the front of the bar she would have been killed instantly, crushed under the shattered glass and crumpled supports of the building.

Retreating to the back of the bar meant she was still alive. At least for now.

She looked around. It was dark but it wasn’t complete blackness. She could see the outlines of the ruins of the bar around her; a graveyard of shattered furniture, broken glass and crumpled walls covered in dust. The lifeless torso of a man protruded from underneath a pile of rubble about ten feet in front of her. Even in the shadows she could see his chest had been crushed by the large fluorescent light fitting that had fallen on him, and his dead eyes shone out with a bright emptiness.

She didn’t want to look too closely at the other glimpses she caught of twisted limbs and shadowy shapes in the ruins after that. She needed to look past the decimation of the bar, to see if there was any indication of what was happening out there and what she should do.

There was no shortage of light in the street. A couple of street lights, the ones that hadn’t been crushed, were still standing, trickling out sickly yellow light. The silhouette of the one that had stood directly outside the bar was bent over, the top half hanging limp like a flower whose flimsy stem had been snapped to breaking point.

However, a more potent light source from above seemed to bathe the whole street in a pale, unnatural hue. She moved forward to get a better look at the sky. The front two thirds of the bar was now roofless apart from a few crumbling tiles and beams that clung tenaciously to the broken metal girders jutting precariously downwards.

Michelle stepped carefully out onto the uneven floor of rubble and debris, and looked up into the night.

Nothing stood between her and the infinite sky. The whole skyline was washed with a glow stronger than moonlight, as beautiful as it was menacing. The stars were blotted out by clouds but pulsating green flashes danced behind them, too bright and vivid to be hidden. Even the heaviest clouds were no more than diaphanous veils, floating and swaying to the rhythm of the flashing emerald lights. Michelle stood transfixed in awe and wonder, just like when she’d watched fireworks on Guy Fawkes as a kid. It felt safe there at that moment, gazing up at the sky.

Another dazzling flash filled the sky, overwhelming her eyes. She had to look away for a second as a sharp beam of light stretched down towards the ground in the distance. She felt sad watching it, wished it had been her that the light had reached down to touch.

Her eyes lowered to her shadowy surroundings. She had to get out of there. Maybe if she could make it to the place where the light shone she’d feel safe again. Maybe that light would even reach down for her.

She went back to grab the pool cue and then started to make her way out over the wreckage-covered floor. She stopped though as she approached the booth where the four men who been driven crazy with thirst had been. The booth they’d been at was undamaged even though it was further forward than the pool tables. For some unfathomable reason this one area had been untouched by the devastation. Not so much as a chair leg had been broken.

It hadn’t done them any good though.

The three bodies of the men lay in contorted positions on the floor, a pool of muddy water surrounding them. There was something unnatural about the bodies too. Even in the dim light their skin seemed wrong. It was too loose and stretched. It hung limply over the bones at the wrists and necks, like they were deflated rubber dolls.

They were completely motionless, lying face down in the pool of brown liquid but she couldn’t be certain. Were they really dead?

Michelle drew in a deep breath in the eerie quiet of the ruined bar. She gingerly poked the closest body with the end of the pool cue. It didn’t respond. She slid the cue under the shoulder of the body, its saggy skin dripping liquid as it was shifted. It was surprisingly light, like a husk of a body rather than a corpse and she flipped it over without really meaning to. Squelching folds of loose skin oozed back down towards the floor like molten wax pulling hard against the hollow bones. The head rocked from side to side before settling back to face her, two sunken dark pits where the man’s eyes had been staring in her direction.

His hand, the skin seeping off the fingers and sagging at the wrist, started to twitch.

Michelle screamed and jumped back. She swung around, cue braced and ready to defend herself from someone or something that was about to attack her from behind but there was nothing there. The sound of her cry echoed in the silent void of the bar.

Without caring when she tripped or scraped herself she fled over the detritus and left the bar.

The street seemed dimmer now that she was out in it. Darker clouds had passed overhead and they were dampening down the green light from above. Signs of destruction lay everywhere. Cars, vans, even a city bus had been flattened like squashed aluminium cans, a sea of glass around them twinkling green as the light above pulsed. Buildings for blocks and blocks were demolished, nothing but small mountains of rubble and smashed concrete to show that they ever existed. Shops, street lights, billboards, road signs - all obliterated so that she could see the expanse of the city in ruins stretching out around her.

It used to feel so comforting to walk through town, the tall buildings separating out different streets from each other, each maintaining its own private and distinctive territory. The devastation of the city had ripped it open and it lay in waste; an empty and horrifying wasteland that bore little resemblance to its former self. Occasionally, she spotted lone buildings or structures that had escaped destruction. They seemed all the more piteous for surviving when so much was destroyed around them, like single plastic teeth jutting out on an old broken comb, looking vulnerable and useless, standing in solitary weakness without support around them.

She walked for some time without seeing another soul.

The sense of isolation closed in around her. It was even worse than empty quiet of the bar had been, left alone with the crushed and twisted bodies of all those poor people who had died and those shrivelled, twitching husks. A horrible thought struck her. Perhaps she should have checked for survivors? Somebody might have been alive under all that rubble, lying there injured and breathing, praying for help.

A wave of regret washed over her at the terrible realisation. She could go back of course but even under the sickening weight of guilt she knew she would not. The horrors she had seen there, those husk-like bodies with their sagging skins stretched over them and their dark, eyeless cavities in their heads terrified her more than the barren landscape of the destroyed city.

Nothing could make her go back to the bar.

She kept walking, her footsteps resounding on the cracked concrete. The destruction seemed to ease a bit as she headed towards Lambton Quay. Many of the buildings still lay in waste but more remained intact here than see had previously seen, enough that the long road seemed recognisable to her. She headed along the quay, every unharmed shop giving her hope of finding survivors or some way out of this disaster. Perhaps things were not as doomed as she feared. Perhaps she would still make it through this.

The faint sounds of voices trickled down from the distance. The light seemed brighter, warmer here than it had by the bar. She increased her pace as the road coiled round towards Parliament.

Her footsteps suddenly faltered as it all came into view in one sudden and overpowering flash.

Ahead in the distance, the Beehive stood out like an ominous beacon, a blazing dome of flickering orange. Fire had engulfed the whole building, the flames spewing out from every level and lighting the horizon with a smouldering amber haze.

A mass of people had gathered near the base of the cenotaph nearby, watching the terrifying spectacle. Michelle forced her limbs to move and hurried over to join them. She could hear that there were people at the front shouting orders to the crowd. She pushed forward, eager to be of some help this time, or perhaps just desperate to be included and interact with living people again.

“What can I do?” she yelled over the drone of muttering voices as she pushed past a couple of tall men at the back of the crowd.

One of the men she had jostled turned to face her. She recognised the dark, sunken pits where his eyes had been and the skin starting to droop away from his cheekbones. He opened his mouth to speak and a surge of rust-coloured water gushed from his lips.

Michelle leapt back to dodge the stream of vile-smelling brown liquid but someone behind her grabbed her arm. Without thinking, she spun round and drove the pool cue down with all the force she could muster on her assailant. Stunned, the man staggered back, coughing and spewing brown water as he went.

The mass of people uttered a wordless groan and turned on her. She swung the cue wildly at anyone who approached, fighting with every ounce of determination that she had but it wasn’t enough. Soon the force of numbers overwhelmed her and the mob had her beaten. They clawed at her with bony hands, the skin sagging off their fingers and their dry nails tearing holes in her skin. Helpless and beaten, she was hoisted over their heads, roughly bundled along to the front of the crowd.

Two of the eyeless ones then lowered her to her feet in front of them, their tight grasps fixing her in place.

Michelle saw then what they were really gathered round. They hadn’t been watching the huge, burning structure of the Beehive; they were making a nest.

A mound of bulbous sacks was being piled up in front of the crowd, each blob big enough to house the two or three adult-sized shapes she could see below the surface. Dozens of lumbering figures with skin sagging from their limbs rolled more of the translucent globules up to the growing mound. Each sack attached to the next when they touched, their glutinous membranes gluing together with the ooze that seeped out of them.

The mound of blobs, slick with grease, glistened in the firelight. It seemed to pulsate with the warmth and light. Mindlessly, eyeless ones were dragging bits of burning wreckage down from the Beehive towards the mound; some of them caught fire themselves but didn’t appear to notice. The dark shapes wriggled and pressed themselves against the front of the membranes whenever a fiery offering was brought forward. The whole mound seemed to feed off the flames, burgeoning outwards and throbbing as it consumed energy from the fire.

She looked around, desperate for a means of escape. The mass of writhing shapes in the blobs scared her more than anything else she had seen that night.

A few other people were being held like her at the front of the crowd by the eyeless ones. A man in a business suit struggled helplessly against his captors about ten feet away; a woman wearing headphones stood further past him also held in place, her arms pinned behind her back.

There were others too, ones who hadn’t lost their eyes but were still part of this. They stood free and watched, smiling at the growing mound. A couple of them marched around, shouting orders at the eyeless ones.

A thundering crash resounded through the night and the ground trembled ever so slightly. Michelle looked up and saw that a massive section of the Beehive had caved in, flaming parts of the framework falling with a shuddering impact.

An excited murmur rose up and the crowd, as if commanded by some unheard orders, pressed forward towards the mound. Michelle struggled and fought but she was pushed towards the mass of blobs by the tide of movement from the mob; she was powerless to resist.

Panic coursed through her body; a fear so primal and intense that it seemed it should kill her. Didn’t people say you could die from fright? She hoped it was true, not just a meaningless expression. It seemed a nicer alternative.

But even that one pathetic strand of hope was broken. She was crushed up next to one of the greasy, pulsating blobs. Her face pressed up against its warm membrane. The violent smash of her face against its slick surface hurt more than she’d expected; the sacks were harder than they looked.

The figures inside sprung forward as soon as she touched the blob. One of them was a man; the other a woman. They both looked about the same age as Michelle. They seemed quite human except for the enlarged black pupils that dominated their eyes and leered out with a ravenous greed. She could feel the membrane stretching and thinning underneath her skin. She struggled and thrashed to break free but her arms were held tightly behind her back and her captors kept pushing her up against the blob.

The man and woman were in a frenzy now. They licked the inside of the blob excitedly and even started gnawing at the glutinous sack with their teeth. Michelle knew why they were so getting so impatient to break through.

They were going to eat her.

With a piercing liquid shriek, they started to rip through the membrane; pungent ooze trickled down from the tear and ran down Michelle’s cheek. She kicked and thrashed for one last chance of survival but the eyeless ones’ grip was iron tight.

A blinding flash washed over the sky above. Michelle squinted as long, slithering tendrils of light reached down to the mound, sending it into quivering convulsions.

The hands holding her arms dropped away but it was too late. The man and woman, dripping with blobs of oily jelly, had burst through the translucent sack.

With one fierce, synchronised lunge, they threw her to the ground and sunk their teeth into her scratched and bloodied arms.

Part Four - Seth

Seth’s ears were throbbing. A shop window had exploded beside him, and the shouts of panic and the scream, the echoing unending scream of the mob was driving him out of his senses. At least, it would have done if he hadn’t already been beyond reason. The lights were out and something was moving through the city, tearing buildings down and crushing people and cars in its wake. Seth felt unaccountably drawn to it, whatever it was. When it had overtaken him, stepping over the Circa Theatre building, lurching into Te Papa and crushing half the building as it steadied itself, then wading through the streets of central Wellington, Seth had been intoxicated. It was beautiful, a perfect image of destruction on a scale that was at once incomprehensible and a perfect incarnation oif his childhood love of monster movies.

He was sure he was batshit out of his mind. The drugs had ruined him, or the madness he’d always feared had finally caught up with him. Whatever the case he was out to lunch. No point trying to interpret the world any more, no point trying to sift the real from the imagined. He was along for the ride now.

He hadn’t lost hold of the gun.

He picked his way through the detritus and waste, trying not to look at the corpses littering the street. For all he knew they were rubbish bags awaiting pickup. Hell, for all he knew he was still at home in the bath.

When he reached Te Aro park he paused, climbed up onto one of the intact sculptures and looked around. The panicked crowd from the waterfront had clearly passed this way. The ground was wet, innumerable footprints merging together. The scream was a distant echo now, the mob having moved further inland. There was an upturned shopping trolley and inside it two children, probably not more than seven or eight years old, huddled together. They were shaking, obviously terrified, and Seth looked around desperately for someone to help. Beside the trolley lay the body of a woman in her thirties, a sling over her shoulder, sprawled face down on the slick tiled stairs at the centre of the park. Her right hand lay limp against the side of the trolly, two fingers hooked through the spaces in the steel mesh. There was something under her body, something propping her up slightly on her right side.

Then Seth saw the ooze.

It pulsated rhythmically as it slid towards him, spreading out from the corner of Taranaki street, first flooding the intersection then creeping in waves up the gentle slope of Manners street. The ebb and flow of the ooze was hypnotic, as was its casual ignorance of the laws of physics. It was about a foot deep, clearly highly viscous, yet seemingly able to crawl uphill and maintain a cohesive edge.

It had almost reached the children before Seth decided to act. Shaking his head and tearing his eyes away from the advancing liquid he slid down the side of the sculpture and crossed to the shopping trolley in two quick strides.

“Come with me,” he said, surprised by the human sound of his own voice. Somehow the distant howl and the corpses around him and the roar of car engines and sirens were distant now, were the remnants of a civilization lost to him. He was alone in the heart of a suffering city, but there were children here. Someone had to look out for them.

He reached down and lifted one side of the trolley, the action made more difficult by the handcuffs and the gun in his right hand. He heard one of the children whimper and knew how terrifying he must look, a handcuffed madman waving a gun around. He tried to smile, but knew that this too would be terrifying.

“Get up,” he commanded, abandoning any hope of convincing the children he was friendly. If he could get them moving that would be enough.

The two small forms uncoiled from around each other and a pair of grubby faces, a boy and a girl, looked up at him. The ooze was close now, lapping around the edges of the stairs behind the children. Seth could see dead bodies in the water, lifted gently like broken rag dolls and carried back and forth, swaying in the water’s strange tide, but moving inexorably back toward the sea.

“Move!” he yelled, and he brandished the gun at them. He felt bad threatening kids with a gun, but what else could he do?

They moved slowly, stumbling past him towards Cuba Street. Seth caught sight of a figure in the water, a face bobbing close to the moving edge of the ooze, and he felt the blood drain away from his face as he saw it blink. Beyond it, further back in the foot deep liquid, he saw another body move, curling up into a ball and drifting on the current. Corpses brushed past these living forms unheeded. The ooze was sliding up into Te Aro park, up the stairs, sliding up the edges of the statue where Seth had perched. He took a few halting steps backwards, his vision blurring as tears threatened to well up, then he dragged a hand roughly across his eyes, turned and ran.

“Alex!” the girl ahead of him screamed, reaching out to grab at the little boy’s foot.

They were only ten feet ahead of Seth, only just out of reach. The little boy was rising into the air slowly, gently, his fragile little body bent double at the waist, a tendril of bright, flashing green wrapped around him. A droplet of light fell from the tendril and splashed onto the road, glowing faintly.

The boy did not look scared. He smiled sweetly at the girl as he swung up into the darkness. Seth lunged forward but before he could reach her the little girl was snatched up too, another tendril snaking down out of the clouds above. Looking up Seth saw flashes of light above the clouds, saw hundreds of tendrils reaching down into the city.

Right. Don’t look up.

He rounded the corner into Cuba Street and began to fight his way towards home. There was a mass of people here, a sudden explosion of sound and activity. There were police officers trying to control the crowd, screaming men and women and children, a howling mass of rioters in Manners Mall. People with bags and suitcases and bottled water and knives clutched tightly in hand jostled against each other, fought to get away, wherever that might be.

The bucket fountain loomed out of the darkness, a strangely comforting landmark amid the chaos. What a ridiculous thing it was, colourful and random and oddly delightful. Seth fought his way to the edge of the fountain and paused to rest a moment.

The crash of a collapsing building was enough to make the crowds panic, scurrying like cockroaches when the light is turned on, clambering over each other to find shelter. It was close, right behind Seth. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the huge figure of the rampaging giant slope past. He saw its pale foot come crashing down, saw the people scattered and crushed in its wake. Watching it move by he saw the sores on its skin, the suppurating craters which oozed and gaped. Its body was covered in erupting pustules and as Seth watched one such pustule on its shoulder ruptured, spat forth a huge mass of puss. It tumbled through the air, growing more spherical as it fell, then splashed to a halt in the bucket fountain in front of him.

Seth raised a hand to shield his face, expecting to be showered in goo, but the pustule held together in spite of its fall. It wobbled and settled in the basin of the fountain, a huge greasy globule of jelly. At the heart of the globule he saw two forms, coiled around one another. For a moment he remembered the axolotl eggs he’d watched growing as a child, the hundreds of little clear blobs with dark shapes inside, tiny curled things that twitched and grew slowly, hatched and devoured each other. He leaned closer to the fountain, closer to the bulging bubble of jelly, and peered into its heart.

Mark peered back at him.

His eyes wide and unblinking, the fish woman from the bar clinging to him, Mark stared out at Seth from inside his bubble.

Seth took a deep breath and let it out in a long, ragged sigh. He scratched his eyebrow with the barrel of the gun and chewed his lower lip for a moment. The Mark in the bubble was almost identical to the Mark he knew. He didn’t blink, which was odd, and he was a little smaller, though he was growing imperceptibly in front of Seth. The fish woman singer was much as Seth remembered her, the sallow skin and haunting stare. She lifted her head from Mark’s chest, hair waving gently in the goo, and looked at him.

Seth sighed again.

The giant man staggered and lurched at the edge of Seth’s vision, stumbling into one of the tall buildings up on Willis Street. Seth glanced over at it and saw that it was loping its way up towards the University, its movements slow and uncoordinated like a drunk at the end of the night or a clumsy child. Delicate strands of glowing green drifted around it, lifting tiny shapes up through the clouds to the flashes of light beyond. The enormous figure seemed to be ignoring them, pressing forwards, upwards.

Mark and the singer. Seth turned back and considered them for a moment, the gun heavy in his hands. The air was growing cold despite the mass of panicking people moving around him. He was weary, bone tired, and sick of seeing things. He was sick of fighting to stay on top of the rising tide of despair he felt inside himself, at the very core of his being.

He heard the cracking sound of bone breaking before he registered the pain or had any idea of what was happening. His cheek hit the rough, wet surface of the ground and the wind was knocked out of him and he realized he was lying down, was in pain, was under attack.

His left arm was useless now, a heavy burden of pain that dragged at him, pulled him to the ground, shouted to his brain to curl up and lie still. He fought it, grunting with the effort of rolling over. A baseball bat crashed into the ground where his head had been and was lifted again. Looking up Seth saw a young man, probably not more than twenty years old, a look of wild panic in his eyes. He was standing over Seth with the baseball bat raised, his blue business shirt torn and bloodied and wet.

Lift the dead weight, drag it by the handcuffs, get your hands up enough Seth told himself. Slow and painful as it was difficult Seth raised the gun in his right hand, dragging his shattered left arm up with it. He screamed, the exhaustion and confusion and terror coming out of him in a mindless, terrible howl, and pulled the trigger.

When he opened his eyes the man was gone. The sound of buildings collapsing in the distance and screams and sirens flooded back in. And the ooze was close.

Seth looked around desperately, the ooze closing in on him on all sides, only a few feet away. He could feel the warmth radiating from it, could see the bodies living and dead suspended in it. He pushed himself backwards, his arm screaming at him, and felt the hard edge of the fountain against his shoulders. Glancing over his shoulder he saw Mark and the woman staring serenely at him, their bubble of goo subtly different in colour to the ooze that was even now lapping against Seth’s boot, warming his toes through the leather.

“Fuck,” Seth muttered, hauling himself to his feet. “Fuck.”

He turned as the ooze reached the edge of the fountain, began to flow around it, and dived head first into Mark’s arms.

Part Three - Robin

i am. I think, therefore iamb.

Robin crouched under the shaking kitchen table and tried to remember what you were supposed to do in earthquakes. Her flatmate, Gretchen, skidded across the floor, lost her footing and thudded into the table leg. “What the fuck?” she said, or something like it. Robin shook her head in bewilderment – the TV was babbling random stuff at them, before degenerating into static. It blinked off once, twice, taking the lights away with it.

Robin grabbed Gretchen’s hand and hung on to the table in the dark. Then they were falling, in the dark, in a yawning void of downness.

Then they were still, and alone in the dark. At last, Robin ventured: “I think we should get out of here.” The way to the front door was blocked with a knocked over stove and crumpled kitchen shelving, so they ended up crawling out from under their table to the living room and onto to its little balcony. “What’s water doing on The Terrace?” Robin asked, for it was, lapping up the sloping street like a greedy cat – not, Robin realised, as a welling tide, but viscous fluid creeping up the street. Down the hill she could see people wading knee deep in the water, when by all rights it should have been over their heads.

“That’s seriously creepy,” Gretchen said.

“Yep.”

Night was folding over them softly. For a little while, everything was very still, the flickering street lights reflecting on the water, the shadows of the people wading in it blotting out the hesitant pools of light. Robin pulled her hand away from the balcony rail for a moment. When she placed her hand there again she could feel the vibration more clearly, the subtle repetitive thumping she was more used to feeling when the neighbours downstairs had the bass turned up. She looked back and up at their apartment building; it was twisted up and crumpled in on itself – their fifth floor balcony was overhanging the street only a few metres above the ground.

“I’m not staying here for another earthquake,” she told Gretchen, and began climbing out over the balcony, a comic figure in her pyjamas and fluffy bunny slippers. She was just looking up to see if her flatmate was following her when the building finished its lean into infinity and splashed down in the water.

.

i am.

The water was so very warm. A lavender scented bath, just barely above blood temperature; a baby floating in amniotic fluid; the yolk of a just laid egg... She opened her eyes beneath the salt sea and looked upwards at the shimmering interface between water and air. She thought about mermaids, about drowned girls in the lake, their hair floating outwards in soft tendrils, about being born. She didn’t want to leave the softness for the harsh bite of winter air in tender lungs, the shiver of south-laden wind ... much better to stay down here with the creeping tentacles of the Other. Around her, she could see others like her floating in the salt sea, pulled by the tide upwards into the world, saw them reach the shallows and stagger into a semblance of personhood. She fought against it, turned in the water, curled up into the corner of two fallen buildings until the pull of the tide receded and she could follow it down into the harbour.

The light was dim, but just enough for her to pass the old familiar buildings, the new familiar creatures that shared the warmth with her. Others had fought against the tide as well, and like minnows they dashed around the monuments of drowned Wellington. In the depths of the harbour they found The One, The Source, The Creator and she embraced it singing.

It was a time after that when she had to leave the water. Something sharp and heavy collided into her back and dragged her up screaming into the bitter air. She twisted and clawed at the thing eating into her side and then she was falling again, not to land in sweet water but a thing that was solid and hard and hurtful.

She ... it ... Robin scrambled to get upright on the solid crookedness of concrete. Making her arms and legs move properly seemed the hardest thing in the world and it was a long time before she could unpanic enough to look up. She was somewhere out in the middle of the harbour, on Carter Fountain maybe? and the world seemed to be coming to an end around her.

There was an enormous thing in the water, growing tentacles upward and spreading them over the city. There was a great pulsing sky that was lowering down to the water dropping ribbons of acid green and jerking them upwards with a vicious yank. Robin saw a person hooked by one of the ribbons fly up into the sky and disappear into the aether, and she curled into a ball and hid under the rim of the fountain to hide from the rest of them.

She wondered if the earth and the sky were coming together again, Rangi and Papa clutching for each other’s arms, heedless of whoever was caught in between them. She wondered if the kraken was waking from the deeps; or visitors from the outer darkness had come.

Robin hugged the comforting bulk of manmade concrete and steel. She was so very thirsty.