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.