MM-
Always the same scene, the street, the car yard, the burning museum.
Two figures walked past, one supporting the other. Dragging, even. Perhaps the second one was asleep, or dead.
And the one walking, the one doing all the work, looked up and saw her.
Shouted straight up to her.
Said: “Enjoying yourself? Eh?”
She was trying to understand it. This movie.
“Enjoying yourself up there?”
Always the same image, the waterfront. The wreckage and the water, the strange form there, out in the harbour, a tree that had lost its leaves. And the smell of smoke.
Someone smoking in the cinema.
“Put that out!” she warned. Shining the light around the theatre, but then she was alone of course.
You’re in shock.
But a sensible reaction nonetheless, it was a non-smoking cinema. In fact the whole country was non-smoking now.
Poor dad, him and his rollies.
MMA-
“See what it says here,” he said.
She turned and found him filling a pint glass from a dirty brown bottle. He showed it to her. “Export strength. Means it’s stronger than regular Guinness.”
MA. MAA.
“Seven point five percent.”
And her mother tutting.
“So needless. Doesn’t need to be so violent.”
But of course Mum had no idea. They’d neither of them been to the movies in twenty years, they had no idea of the kind of filthy thing they showed nowadays.
She would have tried to explain it to them, but Margaret couldn’t follow it herself. She couldn’t make the story out at all. It had changed. There were kids, they were driving, and a horrible man with leaking eyes, and the water poured out over everything, dirty water pouring onto the streets, creeping slowly along the tarmac, but then again there were fires and shouts, people running. The people were put into cages. And the man was enormous, tall as a building, once or twice you saw him walking in the distance. And there were lights in the sky, arms coming from the ocean, and –
“Bloody fool,” said her father.
Meaning her of course.
MAAARR.
“Poor dear.” Her mother.
Her mother and father weren’t here, she was alone.
She knew this. She was sitting alone in cinema 7 and she’d gone into shock.
And the man wasn’t walking through the city a hundred metres tall, he was behind her somewhere, out in the hallway. Looking for her.
Going to find her.
GAR.
____ her, kill her.
RET.
There was that voice again – so it was real after all. Drifting into her thoughts, a huge gentle voice from the sky.
MAR-GAR-ET.
Her breath caught in her lungs, she waited and listened.
MARGARET.
A hush.
DON’T BE AFRAID.
Silence hanging in the air of the theatre.
DON’T BE AFRAID.
Out in the hallway, the headphones off. Tuning her senses to her surroundings, as an animal might do.
There. He was there, she could hear him. Back towards the snack counter.
MAR MAR DON’T BE
Limping silently across the carpet, clutching her torch.
Squinting, searching shapes out of the darkness. Only the faintest impressions, dark grey against black – she almost walked into something, a line of poles with a chain running along them.
DON’T BE SCARED.
She wasn’t scared. This was how it happened at the end of these movies, after everyone else was dead there’d be one girl left. They’d chase her and hurt her, pull her hair, make her scream and run. They’d go on an on, chasing her for hours, days, a lifetime. Day after day, chasing her to work, chasing her home again, back and forth.
And then (sometimes) the girl would stop running.
She’d turn around and you could tell from the look in her eyes that she wasn’t
DON’T BE
“I’m not,” she said.
The man was here, at the sound of her voice he groaned, rose to his feet. Seven or eight metres away, the other side of the big round escalator well.
She hefted the torch,
then had a better idea.
She lay the torch down on the carpet, aimed it towards him, and clicked it on. There he was, spotlit in the darkness, a Halloween monster. Except the light was on his legs and body, he was shambling around the curve of the banister but you couldn’t see his face. That wouldn’t matter. She straightened up, she was beside the last of the line of metal poles, which she uncoupled from its chain. It was a metre long, with a round metal base. Heavy, but she could manage it. She hefted it, swung the base up to shoulder height, wielded it like a top-heavy softball bat. Watched as the man stumbled towards her. Licked her lips. Tightened her grip. Watched. She could see it in her mind, a dotted line, the arc that the pole would take as it swung through the air to connect with the side of his head. He needed to come a little closer. Just a few more seconds. Here, now. Grunting with the exertion, it swung and it made the same sound as if she’d thumped it into the floor, a dull carpet thud. He staggered but he was still standing. She took a step back, hefted up the pole, swung again. Swung up this time, brought it down on the top of his head, and this time the flattened base dug in and you could hear something break, like slate cracking. The man said: “Uuuu.” Couldn’t see but it was stuck now, she had to wrench it back and forth to free it from him, and then suddenly streamers of blood were pouring down the front of him. “Uuu-uuu.” She was giggling now. Heft, swing. Thump. Heft… swing… thump. Spots of blood on her hands, on the lens of the torch. Thump. THUMP. A hard, solid blow to his broken skull. He went straight over the banister, tumbled into the well and dropped out of sight.
There was a deep CLUD as he glanced off the escalator, and then a SMACK as he struck the foodcourt tiles.
Her shoulders shook.
MAR-GARR-ET.
The owner of that voice, the Kindness above her, was smiling. Its smile was filling her entire mind – as if her life, her thoughts and memories were a landscape, and that beautiful smile was a golden sun.
It said:
AGAIN.
She was fighting for breath in a frenzy of laughter.
AGAIN.
A strange feeling of elation had come over her. She didn’t feel tired or hungry at all. Perhaps a little thirsty. Calm and excited both at once – and happy. For the first time in years she felt genuinely happy.
She made her way down the steps of Cinema 7, testing the uncertain footing with the smeared base of her pole. The gaping rift – the movie screen – teased her face with bad smells and a cold breeze. She approached it, inspected the terrain beyond, then stepped through.
The back wall of the Courtney Central complex had collapsed to form a snowdrift of cement, girders and reinforcement cables. Margaret picked her way down it like a staircase, it was easy.
She was in the film now. Was she?
She hesitated.
No, she was in shock. Something awful was happening, something too big to name, and she’d killed a –
AGAIN
– that’s right. That’s right. She smiled, content and eager, and picked her way down to the lot below.
Everything was flooded.
Wakefield Street had transformed into a lagoon of thick green sludge – in places it was climbing up the walls. It stank. Margaret gave it a wide berth, making her way along the high ground of the rubble. Many of the nearby buildings had collapsed.
She came down into an alley. It was strewn with corpses. They fascinated her, the way they lay about. Like a pre-school class on their afternoon nap. But if you leaned closer you saw their eyes and mouths were open.
There was a scuffle of movement further along, out towards the street. A young woman teetering on her feet. A ripped blouse, a short skirt… but she saw with relief that the skin hung off her like wet pastry and the eyes had rotted away to pits.
The muscles in Margaret’s arms and shoulders sang as she hoisted and swung, swung, swung the pole.
AGAIN. MORE.
She found more in the street: three of them staggering beneath a tilted traffic light. It looked like too many. Regretfully she walked the other way.
This was Taranaki Street, she realised. Incredible. It had transformed into something else. A waste land. The whole precious, mad, exclusive world, all of the places she didn't belong.
It was funny to think that buildings stood proud, they looked as tall and hard as mountains, but give them a push and they came apart into the cheap materials they were made from. Worthless junk. Concrete, fibreglass, plasterboard. And people were the same. She inspected her pole. Gobbets of red matter and strands of hair clung to the base.
She found another one in an alley (or what remained of one) across the road, it had been injured by falling debris and was trying to stand.
It didn’t tire her, in fact afterwards she was brimming with energy.
Limping faster, almost jogging, with the base of the pole clank-clanking along the asphalt.
HA HA HA. MORE.
The library was still standing. She got one on the street near the library.
In the darkened hull of a fast food restaurant, two.
MORE.
Something strange at the end of Willis Street – she found one, an old man, he was up against a wall, a metre off the ground with his limbs splayed, and he was spreading out like ivy, actually growing into the bricks.
She couldn’t reach any higher than his chest, but she hammered at his ribs until they came apart in a horrible mess.
AGAIN.
Hard to walk here, there was so much fallen glass, tumbled piles of concrete and cement.
There was a group in the little park, she couldn’t tell which type they were. They began calling to her, so she put the headphones on.
And maybe she was tired after all, because a little ways further on she was sick. Her skin felt clammy, it flashed hot and cold.
MARR-GARR-ET.
Yes.
MARGARET NEED MORE.
Yes, she thought, wiping the slime from her lips. Of course, yes. She only needed a minute or two to catch her breath.
LOOK
There was a fire up ahead, a massive fire.
NEED YOU TO –
Okay. Okay.
She limped on.
Shapes ahead, moving, gathering. A big group. Too many. But they were slow – the right kind, mostly, the eyeless kind although there were others too.
YES NEED TO MARGARET AGAIN MORE
Fighting. A man at the edge was swinging his fists. A girl with blood on her face was swinging a long stick. But it was useless, there were too many. Too late for either of them.
NEED
Margaret looked around, wondering where to start.
There was one. Short but very obese, a woman, on the outskirts of the group.
YES
Here was another, a child. But they’d seen her now. She just had time to…
THANK YOU
…before their hands were clutching at her, catching her wrists, pulling her weapon away.
MORE
But no, impossible, there wouldn’t be more. They had her now. They had the man too. They had the girl and they were dragging her to the front, her eyes were round and bulging, she was screaming like a girl in a movie.
MORE
AGAIN MORE
I can’t, she thought.
Too many.
NEED
They carried the girl away. Something was happening at the front.
DON’T BE AFRAID
She wasn’t, she wasn’t. God she didn’t care any more, she felt sick, they were hurting her, pushing deep inside the throng.
NEED
The mass of bodies, staring eyeless eyes, the terrible stink of their flesh but she didn’t care let her die here please she was so tired everything had fallen down you
dead you crazy _____
crazy _____ same as always
was she crazy yes she was crazy leave her alone she knew she was crazy alone useless a murderer so let her die just let her die
MARGARET
but then the voice in her head the sun in her mind flexing like a muscle pouring new light
warmth
energy it poured into her like fire into the heart of her the sadness and sorrow like water and the collision was ANGER like steam so much ANGER blind unreasoning her mouth stretching open
as if it had been building her entire life and it had it had been building and building with every limping step every suspicious stare and whispered criticism why should it be HER to die why HER and not THEM it was THEIR fault it was THEIR FUCKING fault she was this way her life was this way NOT HERS THEIRS keep her at home box her in LAUGH at her friendless a charity case well FUCK THEM fire steam blasting away the weight of the water and inertia was she screaming yes she thought so she seemed to be writhing in their grasp trying to hold her down FUCK YOU like a mad thing sinking her teeth into flesh her thumbs into melted eye sockets elbow back into a jaw fingers thrusting forward the flesh of a throat grasping through skin pulling levering her body turning biting knee flung up into the cushion of a stomach grasping an ear wrenched from a head hair wrenched from a head screaming kicking free of their grasp falling hands closing around a lump of concrete standing swing the rock into a face another face teeth spitting from gums swing the rock into a neck rip the flesh bash it crack it there’s the stick a pool cue jab it into a mouth wrench it sideways the wood splitting the face splitting
YES
THANK YOU MARGARET
MORE
AGAIN
YES
THANK YOU
Showing posts with label Part four. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Part four. Show all posts
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
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?”
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?”
Monday, September 14, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, September 11, 2009
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.
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.
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