Dave Hutchinson: Sleeps With Angels

I held up my hands. I was wearing manacles. The manacles were connected to a generator behind my chair; if I looked as if I was going to do something outrageous — or if I even sneezed a bit forcefully — the manacles would deliver a shock strong enough to stun me. I knew this because they’d demonstrated the process to me when I came round from the sedative.

“I would love to put myself in your position,” I said. “So long as you could put yourself in mine.”

“It’s only a precaution, Mr Dolan,” said the other middle-aged man. “Until we can be sure you won’t leave us again.”

I looked at the manacles. From a certain point of view, they didn’t go round my wrists at all. I lowered my hands and folded them in my lap. “Professor Delahaye,” I said.

“We don’t know,” said the youngish man. “We don’t dare go into the control room. We sent in bomb disposal robots with remote cameras and there’s… something there, but no bodies, nothing alive.”

“ Something ?” I asked.

He shook his head. “We don’t know. The cameras won’t image it. It’s just a dead point in the middle of the room. Can you remember what happened?”

I was busy attacking Larry Day for having an affair with my wife . “They were doing the last shot of the series,” I said. “Delahaye counted down and then there was…” I looked at them. “Sorry. I won’t image it.”

“Did anything seem out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”

Yes, I’d just found out Larry Day was having an affair with my wife. “No, everything seemed normal. But I’m not a physicist, I’m a journalist.”

“Where do you… go ?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. Nowhere. Anywhere .”

The four men exchanged glances. One of the middle-aged men said, “We think there may be another survivor.”

I leaned forward.

“A day after your first, um, appearance there was an incident in Cairo,” he went on. “Half the city centre was destroyed. There’s no footage of what happened, but some of the survivors say they saw a djinn walking through the city, a human figure that walked through buildings and wrecked them.”

A terrible thought occurred to me. “That might have been me.”

The other middle-aged man shook his head. “We don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“Because it happened again yesterday in Nevada. While you were unconscious here. A small town called Spicerville was totally destroyed. Eight hundred people dead.”

“We’re calling it an explosion in a railcar full of chemicals,” the general said. “The Egyptians say theirs was a meteorite strike. But we think it’s… someone like you.”

“Whatever happened at the SCC, it changed you,” said the younger man with what I thought was admirable understatement. “We think it changed this other person too, whoever they are. But where you seem to have found a way to…cope with your…situation, the other person has not.”

“I haven’t found a way to cope at all,” I told them. I looked at the table between us. It was a rather cheap-looking conference table, the kind of thing the government bought in huge amounts from cut-rate office supply stores. It seemed that I had never looked at things properly before; now I could see how the table was constructed, from the subatomic level upward.

“Obviously this…person is dangerous,” one of the middle-aged men said. “Any help you could give us would be very much appreciated.”

I sighed. I took the table to pieces and put it back together in a shape that I found rather pleasing. Nobody else in the room found it pleasing at all, though, judging by the way they all jumped up and ran screaming for the door. I slipped away from the manacles and went back there .

I went outside and stood in front of the building with my hands in my pockets. About seven hours ago I had been sitting in a briefing room in a White House basement with the President and about a dozen NSA and CIA staffers, watching a video.

The video had been taken by a Predator drone flying over Afghanistan. It was the spear-point of a long-running operation to kill a Taliban warlord codenamed WATERSHED, who had been tracked down to a compound in Helmand. It was the usual combat video, not black and white but that weird mixture of shades of grey. The landscape tipped and dipped as the Predator’s operator, thousands of miles away in the continental United States, steered the drone in on its target. Then a scatter of buildings popped up over a hill and the drone launched its missile, and as it did a human figure came walking around the corner of one of the buildings. The cross-hairs of the drone’s camera danced around the centre of the screen for a few moments, then the building puffed smoke in all directions and disappeared.

And moments later, unaffected, seemingly not even having noticed the explosion, the figure calmly walked out of the smoke and carried on its way.

“Well,” said the President when the video was over, “either the war in Afghanistan just took a very strange turn, or we’re going to need your services, Mr Dolan.”

I looked into the sky. The Moon was low down on the horizon and everything was bathed in a strange directionless silvery light that cast strange shadows from the buildings. There was an electrical expectancy in the air, a smell of ozone and burnt sugar, a breeze that blew from nowhere, and then he was there, standing a few yards from me, looking about him and making strange noises. I sighed.

“Larry,” I called.

Larry looked round, saw me, and said, “Jesus, Alex. What the hell happened?”

Larry didn’t remember The Accident, which was good. And he didn’t remember what came after, which was even better. But he was surprisingly adaptable, and I couldn’t afford to relax, even for a moment.

I walked over and stood looking at him. He looked like part of a comic strip illustration of a man blowing up. Here he was in Frame One, a solid, whole human being. Here he was, at the end of the strip, nothing more than a widely-distributed scattering of bone and meat and other tissue. And here he was, three or four frames in, the explosion just getting going, his body flying apart. And that was Larry, a man impossibly caught in the middle of detonating. His body looked repugnant and absurd all at the same time, an animated human-shaped cloud of meat and blood, about twice normal size.

“There was an accident,” I said. “Something happened during the last shot, we still don’t know exactly what.”

Larry’s voice issued from somewhere other than his exploding larynx. It seemed to be coming from a long distance away, like a radio tuned to a distant galaxy. He said, “What happened to your hair, Alex?”

I ran a hand over my head. “It’s been a while, Larry. I got old.”

“How long?” asked that eerie voice.

“Fifteen years.”

Larry looked around him and made those strange noises again. “Delahaye…”

“All dead,” I said. “Delahaye, Warren, Chen, Bright, Morley. The whole team. You and I are the only survivors.”

Larry looked at his hands; it was impossible to read the expression on what passed for his face, but he made a noise that might, if one were psychotic enough, be mistaken for a laugh. “I don’t seem to have survived very well, Alex.” He looked at me. “ You seem to be doing all right, though.”

I shrugged. “As I said, we still don’t know exactly what happened.”

Larry emitted that awful laugh again. “My god,” he said, “it’s like something from a Marvel comic. You think maybe I’ve become a superhero, Alex?”

“That’s an… unusual way of looking at it,” I allowed warily.