Pat Kelleher - The Alleyman

“Fire and brimstone?” suggested Gutsy.

Mercy shrugged. “Well, yes, I suppose. A little less woodland dell, more Welcome to Hell , as it were. Although I’m not complaining. To be quite honest, I’m a little glad it ain’t.”

“Evil has a banality all its own,” said Hepton, eyeing the entrance warily. “I wouldn’t let your guard down.” He made the sign of the cross and, a little self-consciously, Tonkins followed suit.

“Well, we’re not getting through that stuff without a little help,” said Gutsy, watching the slow-writhing creepers. He had a hand on Little Bertha, but knew it would be of little use against the mass of choking plant tendrils before them.

A bolt of blue-white energy blasted Pot Shot off his feet.

“Another telluric blast,” yelped Tonkins.

They dived for cover. Atkins grabbed the dazed Pot Shot by his webbing and hauled him behind a buttress root.

“What hit me?” he asked.

“Lightning,” said Atkins, his attention focused on the undergrowth around them. “Lucky for the rest of us you’re the tallest. Makes you a natural lightning rod.”

“Good job I wasn’t wearing me steel helmet then,” he said with a dazed smile.

Another blast followed, but it wasn’t the thunderous concussive heaven-bound telluric bolt, nor was it the half-expected blast of sulphurous hellfire.

“What the hell is it?” asked Everson, his back to a boulder for cover, as he checked the chambers of his Webley.

Mercy peered over the top of a fallen tree, behind which he’d taken cover.

Another bolt of energy arced out from the undergrowth. It was the writhing, spitting Tesla arc of an electric lance. Another licked out across the open space, scorching the undergrowth in which they’d taken cover.

“Chatts!”

“Blood and sand!” cursed Atkins. “How? I thought they were afraid of this place. What the hell are they doing here?”

“One of their balloons must have come down, like us,” said Gutsy.

“Nothing must enter. Nothing must leave,” Gazette quoted, laconically. “They’ve been abandoned. They know they’re not getting out of the crater, so they’ve got nothing to lose. Makes them dangerous.”

Another arc of energy spat across and hit a fallen log, vaporising sap and moisture in an instant and exploding the bole into a thousand fire-hardened shards of wooden shrapnel.

“Christ, you think?” yelped Gutsy, ducking as low as he could.

Gazette settled against a rock, nestled the stock of his Enfield into his shoulder and targeted the shadows in the grove of scab trees to the side of the cavern entrance. He squeezed the trigger.

Another bolt flashed from a different direction.

“How many of them are there?” bawled Pot Shot, pinned down behind a buttress root.

“I can’t tell, they’re leaping around, keeping us pinned down,” replied Gazette.

“Where’s Napoo?” asked Everson.

Atkins looked around. The urman had vanished. Gutsy jerked his head upwards; Napoo was edging round a scab tree, trying to get a better vantage point to spot the chatts.

Hepton flinched as the brief flash of another electric bolt threw his shaded funk hole into sharp relief.

There was a gunshot and a chatt fell from its perch, in a tree overlooking their position. Gazette cycled the Enfield’s bolt and looked for another target.

There was another gunshot. A chatt staggered through the undergrowth towards them, its electric battery backpack spitting and fizzing. It stumbled a few steps before the pack emitted a brief whine and exploded, engulfing it in a ball of white heat that left its carapace charred and smouldering as it collapsed.

“That wasn’t me,” said Gazette.

There was a snap of dry wood underfoot and the shade of a grey ashen-faced man stepped into the dappled shadow of Hell’s dell.

“It’s another fungus-man,” said Hepton, shrinking into the shadows as far as he could.

The figure stepped into the light.

“Fuck me,” said Mercy. “It’s the Alleyman.”

“Werner,” muttered Everson.

The German pilot looked the worse for wear. His smart uniform was scorched and his tunic unbuttoned, his face blacked with oil and soot; oil-filmed goggles sat atop his flying helmet and his smart polished boots were now scuffed and dulled by dust and mud.

“We meet again, gentlemen,” he called out jovially.

“If you think we’re surrendering to you and your chatts, you have another think coming,” called Everson.

“On the contrary,” Werner called back.

Another electric white-blue flash arced towards him out of the undergrowth, interrupting him. He flinched and ducked as it earthed yards away from him, blasting a chunk out of a young Japheth tree. The trunk gave way slowly with a creaking tear. Werner began running towards the Tommies. The tree crashed to the ground and Werner flung himself into the dirt. Using the fallen tree as cover, he scrambled over to them before peering back out at the undergrowth where the rest of the chatts were concealed. When he looked back, it was into the points of several rifles, fixed with bayonets.

Slowly Werner put his pistol down on the ground and raised his hands to shoulder height, not wanting to present more of a target to the remaining chatts.

“Tulliver said you crashed,” said Everson.

“My machine crashed. I survived, which is more than can be said for my uniform,” Werner said, indicating his torn and scorched tunic. “My tailor will be furious.”

“They were firing at you.”

“I knew my alliance with the insekt menschen was at an end when I came down in the crater, that I would be outcast anduntouchableto them,” he said with a shrug. “I no longer have my machine, so I am of no further use to them. They will not let me out of the crater now. They let nothing out unless it is to kill it. They would leave me here to die, and I do not want to die, Lieutenant.”

“None of us do,” said Everson.

“I am alone,” admitted Werner. “You have your battalion. I wish to put aside our enmity. I wish to be… human again.”

They ducked as another flurry of electric bolts crackled through the air. The remaining chatts had moved to cut the Tommies off from the cavern entrance.

Werner snatched up his pistol. Nobody stopped him.

Gazette squeezed off another couple of rounds. Normally, he’d look for a muzzle flash and target that spot, like any good sniper, but here the blue-white brilliance of the electric bolts left irritating afterimages blotting his vision. The chatts fired and moved, springing across large spaces with inhuman speed, never firing from the same place twice.

“You know what?” said Gutsy, shouting over the miniature thunderstorm that raged briefly around them, “I’m beginning to look back on the days when I could kill chatts in the hundreds using just a candle with some nostalgia!”

He pulled a safety pin from a Mills bomb and lobbed it into the writhing tangle of creepers that contorted around the cavern entrance. The explosion ripped and shredded it like barbed wire, throwing chatt limbs up into the air in graceless arcs.

“They will not let us go,” said Werner. “Nor can they leave themselves. They are dead to the colony. All they can do is carry out their overriding chemical decree; nothing must enter, nothing must leave. They will die to fulfil that precept.”

“Well I’m sure we can oblige,” said Everson through clenched teeth.

“Are you really going to trust a Hun, sir?” asked Mercy, eyeing the German with deep suspicion.

“No, Evans,” said Everson firmly. “I’m going to trust a gentleman.”

TULLIVER CIRCLED THE crater, looking for signs of another telluric blast, but it seemed that the land storm was moving away.