Pat Kelleher - The Alleyman

Either side of the temple door, the tank crew and the Black Hand Gang readied themselves.

“Walk and keep walking.” said Everson. “Stay close, don’t get separated. Hold your fire. Don’t shoot at them, don’t use bombs.”

Mercy stood by the doors with Atkins.

“Check you can turn the crank handle,” said Riley. “Never really tried it in battlefield conditions.”

Mercy glanced around in his hood, and Atkins smirked under his. He could tell Mercy was embarrassed. He gave the handle a tentative crank.

“You’ll have to do it faster than that!” scolded Riley.

There was a peculiar hacking from under Pot Shot’s gas hood. He was laughing. “It’s what your right arm’s for!”

TULLIVER PULLED OPEN the temple doors. The sky outside, just beyond the crater, had worn through and seemed almost black. If he shifted his eyes, its normal colour reasserted itself, as if some after-image danced in the corner of his vision. “Wait!” he called out.

A tremendous flash of light and a deep sonorous boom that he could feel in his bones drowned out any response. It set off a frenzy of whipperwills somewhere overhead as a concussive blast of wind swept over the jungle.

Before them, the advancing carpet quivered and almost seemed to ebb, and the grey mould-ridden cadavers cowered from the harsh flash.

As the skyward bolt dispelled, the fungal carpet was briefly dormant.

“Now!” commanded Everson.

Atkins stepped from the temple and aimed the electric lance at the edge of the fungus now covering the clearing. He squeezed the chatt trigger pads and felt the lance kick and jerk in his hand, as the untamed bolt of lightning bucked and writhed, vaporising a patch of fungus. Fruiting pods had no chance to spore and surrounding mycelia shrivelled. He soon found that by varying the pressure on the trigger pads, he could vary the strength of the electric bolt.

“It’s working!” yelled Mercy into his ear.

The Talbot-thing waved a hand and the clearing began to blossom with more swelling fruit pods.

Atkins fired again, moving forwards to clear a path out towards the surrounding jungle, sweeping the lance from side to side like a Flammenwerfer.

Following them, the rest of the party edged nervously along a narrow causeway of cleared ground through the deadly garden. Bringing up the rear, Gutsy turned the crank handle as Tonkins’ bolts licked away at the ground, repelling the fungus threads trying to close in behind them, lapping at their feet like a rising tide, cutting off their path back to the temple.

“Keep cranking!” yelled Atkins to Mercy over his shoulder.

The grey fungus-possessed corpses kept their distance. The electric lance wasn’t a useful long-range weapon, but it was enough to keep them at bay.

The tight knit group shuffled forward behind Atkins as he cleared a path, edging past the urmen bodies smothered by the thick blanket of mycelia, like the cobweb-cocooned bodies of flies in a spider’s web.

But the time between recharges was getting longer, and the strength of the electric bolts weaker. Gutsy and Mercy were tiring at their crank handles, leaving the Tommies vulnerable. Everson ordered Pot Shot and Gazette to take over the cranking.

With a fresh charge, Atkins’ lance spat another convulsive stream of electricity into the growing fungal mass as the Talbot-thing watched impassively, out of range.

Tulliver stumbled, and several hands caught him up before he fell. “Wait!” he cried.

Another telluric discharge, somewhere within the crater this time, ripped up into the sky with a blinding flash and a concussive wave of thunder that Atkins felt roll through him.

Around them, the fungal mat convulsed and the advancing mycelia shrank back involuntarily.

Atkins pressed home their advantage, white bolts of energy carving a path through to the forest. From there, with Pot Shot behind him cranking the magneto handle, he covered the rest as they made it to the comparative safety of the tree line; the Padre and Napoo helping the semi-conscious Tarak, Alfie hobbling along, aided by Nellie, followed by Jack and the tank crew; Cecil, Norman, Reggie and Wally, leaving Hepton to struggle alone, weighed down by his equipment. Mercy and Gutsy came next with Riley, who kept his eyes nervously on the backpacks. Everson followed them in and Gazette and Tonkins brought up the rear.

Even here, gauzy curtains of fungal threads hung from the trees, but they were thinner, as though the fungus had been conserving its energy for its assault.

“More spore pods,” called Cecil as huge great plum-pudding-sized balls swelled in the fungus-covered undergrowth nearby. Atkins turned and swept a jagging electric bolt across them.

“It’s at times like this I really wish we had the Ivanhoe !” cursed Alfie.

“I agree. But it’s out of fuel and ditched,” said Reggie.

“Fuel?” said Pot Shot. “I saw a stack of fuel drums go over the side of the crater during the Zohtakarrii attack. Rolled right over the edge, they did.”

“Why the bloody hell didn’t you tell us before?” asked Norman, aggrieved.

“I had other things on my bloody mind, all right?”

Atkins squeezed the trigger pads of his lance. The lance tip fizzled. “Pot Shot, stop gossiping and get cranking.”

“You know I’ve already got a wife, don’t you, Only?” he sniped as he set about the magneto handle with a will.

They advanced through the jungle. Shrouds of fungus hung from the boughs above them, where more fruit pods began to balloon.

“Overhead, Atkins,” cautioned Everson.

“I’m on it, sir.” Atkins brought his lance up. Behind him, Pot Shot’s handle turning began to slow and he stopped again, shaking his wrist to try to bring some life back into it.

Jack pushed Cecil forward. “Take over, lad; give the mud-slogger a break.”

Cecil stepped past Pot Shot, who nodded his thanks, and the young gunner whizzed the handle round. Hearing the hum build, Atkins held the lance firmly, squeezed the trigger pad, and played the arc of electric energy across the trees. Super-heated instantly to high temperatures, wood and sap exploded above them like Woolly Bears, even as the gossamer veils and fruit pods were vaporised. The Tommies ducked as hard wood shrapnel exploded around them like Whizz Bangs.

“Jesus! Watch it, Only. It’s not us you’re trying to kill!” yelled Gazette.

“Sorry!”

Atkins looked back and saw that the mycelia had reached the temple; the path by which they had made their escape was lost again under the tide of alien filaments that now covered the entire clearing.

Watching them, the Talbot-thing lifted its feet from the tightly knotted fungus fibres around it and, dragging a train of them behind it, began to lumber after them, the other grey reanimated Fusiliers turning to follow.

“Go on with the others!” Atkins ordered Tonkins, “I’ll follow.”

Atkins waited. Behind him, Cecil kept cranking the handle, building the charge. “Keep going, Cecil. I want to teach this thing a lesson.” The whirring upped its pitch as Cecil redoubled his efforts.

Atkins fired. The lance kicked violently in his hand as a bright bolt of electrical fire snapped out at one of the grey mouldering dead, incinerating the puckered growth on its chest and flinging the creature backwards, where the carpet of corpse-fed filaments cushioned its fall.

The others halted their advance.

From under his hood, Atkins curled his lip with grim satisfaction. “That ought to buy us a minute or two. Come on, Cecil.”

As he turned to leave, Atkins heard a whirring.

“Cecil, it’s all right, you can stop cranking now.”

“But I have,” said the young tanker, standing by his side in his coveralls and gas hood.