Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

“Get in!” he yelled. “Get in the car!”

The drones had cowered back at the gunshot but already they had begun to regroup and were starting to move toward me, their new leader a fat man dressed from head to toe in pinstripe.

For the last time, I reached down and took the old bastard’s hand. “This is my granddad,” I called back. “I can’t leave him.”

The man in the car looked at me as though I was an idiot. “There’s nothing you can do for him now.”

“You don’t understand. He’s… he’s the most important person.”

“Leviathan!” Stomach bulging through striped shirt, fat hanging heavily over belt, the new leader of the drones was clumping purposefully in my direction, the rest of them following cloddishly in his wake.

“For God’s sake! Get in the bloody car!”

I looked at what was coming toward me, squeezed Granddad’s hand and made my decision. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m so sorry,” and I turned on my heel.

I ran over to the car and scrambled inside. My rescuer looked haggard, unshaven and scarily bloodshot — but it was unquestionably him.

“Hello, Henry,” he said, and gave an unnervingly high-pitched laugh.

“You recognize me?”

“You are Henry Lamb, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I mean, yes, Your Highness.”

“I want you to call me Arthur,” the driver said, and pressed his foot down hard, squealing out of the street, bumping over a colony of rubbish bags and only narrowly avoiding knocking down several drones.

When we were clear, I asked again how he knew my name.

“I’ve been dreaming about you. The cat’s told me everything.”

“What cat?”

“Little gray fellow. He told me how to fight the effects of ampersand. He told me how to finish this.”

“Excuse me for saying so,” I said, “and thanks very much by the way for rescuing me, but aren’t you the enemy? Aren’t we supposed to be at war?”

“The war ends tonight,” Arthur Windsor said firmly. “You and I, Henry. We’re going to put a stop to it.”

As we drove from Tooting Bec, we witnessed first-hand the fall of the city. Houses were smoldering, pavements were carpeted in glass, cars had been reduced to blackened clinker and entire streets were streaked with red. I saw a bus stop mangled into scrap and what looked like the contents of a clothes store sprayed across the road, as though a bomb had exploded in a jumble sale. It was almost unendurable to see — London, that remorseless victor, that dead-eyed master of predation, turned victim and prey, defenseless meat for some parasite which, comfortably accommodated in its gut, now chomped its eager way into the world.

There were people abroad, drones streaming in the same direction, rushing forward in makeshift columns, and we had no choice but to drive funereally through their midst, like killjoys at a parade. In their haste to move forward some of the stronger ones were trampling their weaker fellows underfoot. A number of times, I asked the prince to stop so we could at least try to help, but he just snapped something about not having time for sentiment and kept on driving.

“They tried to send me mad, you know,” he said. “Can you believe that?”

I looked at him, with his tangled hair, tufty stubble and bulging eyes, and couldn’t believe that it would ever have taken that much.

“They tried to get me hooked. They showed me ghosts and slivers of the truth. Lord knows why but I think they wanted me to kill my wife.”

We left Tooting behind us and, following the mass of drones, roughly retraced my old route to work — through Clapham, Brixton, Stockwell and Lambeth. The further we went, the more the streets grew clotted with crowds and the harder it became to maneuver through the tide of humanity.

“The cat had a message for you,” said the prince, swerving fast around a double-decker which sprawled across the length of the road like a great red seal bathing in the sun.

“I’m sorry?”

Arthur drummed his fingers excitedly on the steering wheel. “He said you’d need a phrase. For the Process. An incantation to close the trap. He told me you’d know what to do.”

I thought for a moment, then: “I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

Although I feared that the journey would last forever, that we would drive through this shadow realm, I feared still more what was waiting for us at our destination. Then we turned a corner, the exterior of Waterloo station came into view and at last I realized where it was the drones were heading.

The streets were now so choked and thronged that we had no choice but to abandon the car and take our chances amongst the mob. Stepping carefully from the vehicle and trying our best to stop our ears against the cries of the crowd, we moved toward the station. The crowd seemed mostly oblivious to us, too close to the object of their quest to pay us much heed. We had to join the surge, give in, become a part of the torrent and let ourselves be swept into Waterloo.

The place, though packed, seemed eerily neglected. The small shops, fast food outlets and newsagents were entirely untouched, unstaffed but still open for business — burgers cold to the touch, days-old newspapers lying undisturbed, a rack of sandwiches starting to turn green and rancid behind their plastic wrappers. The drones ignored them all, even their needs for food and current affairs now subsumed by the urge to reach their destination. There was death, too — mangled cadavers clogging up the escalators, a solitary ticket inspector trampled underfoot, the flyblown corpses of a guide dog and its master — but Arthur and I walked past it all.

We were pushed through the main part of the station, then moved along with the drones, allowing ourselves to be jostled up an Escher maze of concrete, unable to stop or slow down, trying not to think too hard about those who were thrown to the floor and trampled underfoot. We emerged onto the South Bank, almost exactly opposite the spot where, in a lunch-hour long ago, I’d sat and watched Barbara devour a cheese baguette.

Before us was the river, the great dark width of the Thames, and there at last we saw it — the sea beast, the great serpent, the tyrant of the seven heads.

It must have been a crash landing. The Houses of Parliament looked smashed and half-demolished, Cleopatra’s Needle was snapped in two and the Eye leant askew like something had simply batted it aside. In the distance, the spires of the business district stood darkened and empty. Boats of every kind — sight-seeing vessels, pleasure cruisers, industrial transport ships, floating restaurants and a fleet of police launches — had been hurled against the bank, where they lay shattered like broken toys, reduced to so much driftwood and debris.

The sheer mass of the creature had caused the river to burst its banks. Water overflowed and sluiced across the pavement, making the ground slippery and treacherous.

The entire length of the Thames as far as the eye could see was filled with a vast black shadow, just out of sight. The water around it was bubbling and broiling in distress, shooting out jets of steam and malevolent emissions from the deep. All that was visible of the beast were slender tubes, long thin tentacular things which snaked out of the water and came limply to rest on the pavement like stems of meat or straws of flesh.

Our ampersand had made the people of this city so grateful! They rushed out to meet us, eager to offer their services, aching to become part of something greater and more wonderful than themselves. And, honestly, who amongst us can blame them for that?

To our horror, Arthur and I saw what was happening. All the people who had been hurrying with such desperation through the city now dashed on toward the riverbank, skidding, sliding along the pavement with such insanely enthusiastic speed that I thought they were in danger of toppling into the water. But no, they came to a halt just in time and fell to their knees. Then, humbly, reverentially, each and every one of them picked up a tendril in their hands and, in a moment of unutterable obscenity, took it into their mouths, opening wide, gobbling with infantile glee. The suckled for a moment, their faces suffused with pleasure, before, disgustingly satiated, they collapsed onto their backs and crawled away into the city, chattering to themselves, bleating nonsense words and strings of impossible numbers. One of these unfortunates blundered past me, his eyes hopeless and black, his lips able to move only in the service of Leviathan, like a termite, an insect helplessly in thrall. I tried to stop him but the drone barely seemed to notice and he shouldered his way past, still gibbering his incomprehensible language.