Pat Kelleher - The Alleyman

EVERSON HEARD THE drone of Tulliver’s engine overhead, and could see him circling above through the leaves and waggling his wings. He’d found a telluric build up. If they were to have any chance of defeating these things, of staying alive, they had to follow him.

“That way!” he bellowed though his gas mask. “Atkins, Tonkins, break out, follow Tulliver! We may only have one shot at this.”

Atkins tore his attention away from the shambling things that were once Porgy and Jenkins, and joined Tonkins as they concentrated their electric fire. Blue-white bolts danced and flicked across the white-carpeted ground, vaporising a path through the thick fungal shroud that surrounded them.

Behind them, fruiting bodies began to swell as the Talbot-thing and the others followed, now keeping their distance beyond the range of the electric lances, paralleling their advance as they spread out in a skirmish line behind them. Like beaters, thought Everson bitterly.

“There!” said Pot Shot, pointing in the sky, where Tulliver was circling tightly.

The Tommies forged towards the spot beneath him, and broke out of the trees onto the scrub-covered Strip.

As they set foot on open ground, Everson waved the aeroplane away. Tulliver waggled his wings in acknowledgement and side-slipped out of the turn.

“I guess this is the spot, then,” said Everson.

From the edge of the wood, the Talbot-thing and its ghastly grey section appeared and staggered silently towards them.

Something in the air changed. Even under his mask, Atkins could feel it. At their feet, the thin rocky mantle began to crack, exposing the metal beneath as the telluric charge began to build.

Napoo, trusting to his nature and innate sense of survival, would not stay. He fled to safer ground beyond the Strip.

The grey-faced Fusiliers shambled towards the small group. The creeping wave of mycelia stopped, its advance stunted by the discharge, but the twisted Tommies kept coming. The fungus that animated them was drawing on more and more of their tissue to fuel itself and the bodies shrivelled with every step as it sought to reach fresher hosts.

“Hold your positions,” yelled Everson.

Atkins and his Black Hand Gang shuffled nervously. They’d been here before, repelling German attacks on the trenches; you hold your nerve, try not to funk it. It didn’t get any easier.

Small crackles of energy flickered about their feet.

“Hold it.”

Hepton danced a jig as ribbons of energy snapped and flared around his boots. “Christ, talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire!” he said. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

“No, just you if we’re lucky,” muttered Mercy.

Discharges of blue-white energy rolled across the ground, building in strength.

“It’s coming!” hollered Riley. “Hold steady, son,” he said calmly to a fidgeting Tonkins.

Hepton broke and ran, lugging his tripod, camera and film canisters.

Energy began arcing up from the exposed metal around them, striking out at trees.

“Hold it,” Everson called.

The Talbot-thing stopped and the others lurched to a halt alongside it.

It wasn’t falling for it.

Atkins wasn’t going to let this happen. This had been his idea. These things had to die, if only so the men themselves could rest in peace. He pulled off his gas hood and stepped from the defensive ring.

“Atkins, what do you think you’re doing!” bellowed Everson.

Atkins ignored him and walked towards the grey men.

“Porgy. Porgy, it’s me. Only! You remember me? Porgy!”

The ashen-faced soldier turned its head and stepped towards Atkins, pulling free of the mycelia that wove into the ground around it. The others began doing the same. The fungus, overcome by an imperative for survival, lurched towards him.

As energy began to build beneath his feet, Atkins could feel the thrum of it through his boots. About him, tongues of lightning lashed out at the trees.

The Tommies could hold their position no longer.

“Run!” yelled Everson. They didn’t need telling twice. Atkins took one last look at the fungal effigy of Porgy staggering towards him, its grey skin almost shrivelling against his skull as the fungal canker that possessed it sought to extract every morsel of energy from its decaying host.

A huge bolt of telluric energy roared up from the ground, shattering the thin shell of rock over the metal below. The concussive wave threw Atkins and the others off their feet as a blast of heat washed over them. It threw everything into sharp relief, like all the Very lights in the world going off at once.

Atkins turned his head and squinted through his lashes against the light. He saw the silhouettes of fungal Fusiliers caught in the blast, consumed as the huge white beam jagged up into the atmosphere, like some electric beanstalk. Their faint outlines grew fainter and more indistinct against the increasing brightness until there was nothing left but a painful angry white light, spitting and crackling.

Suddenly that, too, was gone.

Ears ringing with the blast, half-blinded by the brilliance, the Tommies staggered to their feet. They wandered round dazed, waiting for their senses to return.

Where the blast had erupted, there was now an exposed circle of metal, one of those nodes Tulliver had talked about, a planetary junction, an intersection of geometric alignments.

Of the animated corpses, there was no sign. They had gone. Beyond the metal, the fungal carpet lay blackened and charred. It crumbled to dust with a soft satisfying crunch beneath the boot.

For minutes afterwards, the decaying afterimages of the men haunted Atkins, but eventually, they faded, too, as the ghosts of the dead ought to.

Atkins blinked away the last of the images and the tears that came with them.

“Goodbye, Porgy.”

AFTER THE TELLURIC blast, it took a while for Atkins’ senses to return. His vision was mottled, and his ears buzzed with phantom swarms. Temporarily deaf and blind, he was not in the best condition to go stumbling round a cruel, capricious jungle. None of them were.

Gutsy, Gazette, Mercy and Pot Shot sat quietly, each lost in his own thoughts, waiting on orders and watching the exposed metal warily, as if no longer trusting the ground they stood on.

At least here, at the seat of the blast, the thunderous flash had panicked the animals into flight. It should be a while before they picked up the courage to return. The Tommies would be safe for the moment.

EVERSON LET EVERYONE take a breather while he took stock and decided on his next course of action. He turned his attention to the book they had taken from the Ruanach temple, as best he could with the fading afterimages obscuring and distorting his vision; the book that had come from Roanoke, all the way from Virginia.

He traced his fingers over the iron sigil of Croatoan on the book’s cover. The crater had been caused by a meteor impact, and he had seen the proof for himself in the broken Heart of Croatoan. It had clearly inspired the myths that had been woven into both chatt and urman mythology. For all the urmen’s belief in Croatoan, the underworld and some Promethean punishment by a dung-beetle god, he couldn’t bring himself to believe it, although some small part of him began to wonder. It was certainly enough to bring Jeffries all this way.

How many other groups of humans had been displaced from Earth? There were stories and legends of mass disappearances throughout history. What if all the urmen were merely descendants of displaced survivors, subsisting like Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of Eden? And if they were, what did that say of the Pennines’ chances? He coughed and dismissed the thought as best he could. There would be plenty of dark, lonely nights in which to dwell on thoughts of that nature.