Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

With a thought he sent the command to the radio detonators on the frame charges. The bay windows on the front of the house exploded inwards.

Beth was out of the car running at the front door, the Benelli M4 at the ready. Du Bois was on the bonnet of the Range Rover, the H & K UMP in his hands.

Beth fired lock-breaker rounds into the door’s hinges and then the lock, looking away as she fired so she didn’t get blinded by splinters. Du Bois leaped through the hole where the black-painted panes of glass had been.

Beth checked the hall quickly but saw nothing. She raced up the stairs as she heard du Bois kicking in doors on the ground floor. Quickly she checked the rooms on the first floor. There were signs of lots of people having lived there recently. The place stank like sewage. Discarded food, most of it meat, had been left to rot, but there were no flies.

Du Bois ran by her on the landing as he headed up to check the second floor. Moments later Beth was on the stairs heading to the third as du Bois searched below.

On the third floor Beth kicked in the door to the first room she came to, a back bedroom. The same soiled mattresses, the same rotting food, the same smell of sewage. She tried not to gag as she heard du Bois on the stairs to the fourth and final floor.

Beth came out of the back bedroom and moved to the front, kicking it open. This was not quite as bad, perhaps because the blackout curtains that had covered the windows had fallen down, making it less usable.

If her senses hadn’t been quite as acute as they had become recently, Beth wasn’t sure she would have heard the burst of suppressed sub-machine gun fire from upstairs. She probably would have heard du Bois’s cry of surprise, however, and definitely the sound of glass smashing above her. She saw a shape, much larger than du Bois on his own, plummet past the window. She heard the impact and a scream. Beth rushed to the filthy window and looked out. Du Bois was lying mostly on the roof of the Range Rover. Something not unlike what she had fought in the dog stadium was crouched over him, repeatedly slashing at him with an extended spur of bone.

Beth ran out of the room, leaped over the landing banister and landed on the stairs close to the second-floor landing. She ran down the few remaining steps and charged at the landing window. The black-painted single pane exploded outwards as she hit it. It felt like she had a long time to think about what a stupid move this had been on the twenty-five-foot drop to the ground.

Knees bent, Beth landed fine, pleased that the bones in her legs hadn’t exploded. She moved quickly to where the hybrid thing was savaging du Bois’s face. Beth put the shotgun barrel next to the thing’s head and pulled the trigger. Its head disappeared in a spray of blood and bone.

‘Are you okay?’ Beth asked.

‘Of course I’m not fucking okay! I think I’ve broken my spine, and you just about blew my face off!’ Beth glanced down at him and had to admit some of the cuts on his face looked a little like pellet wounds.

‘Sorry?’ she ventured. Du Bois lay there glaring, but at the sky, not at her. ‘Well, get up then,’ Beth finally said.

‘I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that a forty-foot fall onto my back may have caused some damage?’ he asked testily.

‘Oh,’ Beth said. ‘Will it heal?’

‘Given time.’

‘Were there more up there?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘So she’s not in there?’

‘I saw what looked like a basement door. I wanted to clear up first, so if we went in we wouldn’t get any nasty surprises from behind.’ Du Bois screamed as Beth jarred his broken spine taking the UMP from him. She already had his .45 and his spare clips. She relieved him of his ammunition for the UMP as well.

‘You said yourself that we didn’t have much time.’ Beth glanced down the street again. Despite the clear blue sky, the Solent was looking choppier and choppier. Waves were coming over the beach and onto the road. Some of the seawater was even washing up to where they were.

‘I don’t think –’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘– that leaving me here this exposed is a good idea and you will not be fine; you will almost certainly be eaten.’

‘Then see you and thanks.’ She turned, UMP at the ready, and headed back into the house.

Beth had found that whenever things happened quickly she was fine. It was when she had time to think that things became tricky. She stood at the door down to the basement for a long time trying to make herself reach out and touch the handle. She knew there was something on the other side of the door. Felt it.

Beth opened the door, barely realising that she was doing it. She was at the top of a set of concrete steps looking down. The smell was strong but it was the smell of the sea and not altogether unpleasant. It was carried on a warm wind. Beth found that she could see perfectly in the darkness. She moved down the stairs. The fear was gone. It had to be her imagination but she felt as if something was calling her.

It wasn’t a basement. It was a crossroads. Tunnels of fused stone and earth met there. It was a wonder the whole street didn’t collapse , Beth thought. The passage going south was alive. It looked like an empty vein and it was where the warm wind was coming from.

At some level Beth knew this was all wrong, fundamentally so. This was part of something that should not be, that didn’t exist in the world as she understood it. But another part, perhaps the part that had been sprayed with blood by something old and strange, understood. It was that part that was being called to by a huge, alien and sleeping mind.

Pushing the calling aside, Beth brought the suppressed Heckler & Koch up in front of her, the folding stock secure against her shoulder, and moved ahead with the weapon at the ready.

The tunnel took her down. She didn’t have to walk far before she knew she was under the sea. She even felt the tube sway with the water and the sound of pebbles sliding up and down.

Beth knew that she should be freaking out. She was clearly walking through something that was alive in some way. She knew first hand how dangerous the things she was following were, but somehow, instinctively, she knew this was okay. She all but felt welcome.

It was pitch dark but her eyes had no problem seeing ahead of her, though everything looked grey. Then there was a glowing. It looked like the chemical light she had seen some animals make on nature documentaries. The word bioluminescence suddenly popped into her head. She wasn’t sure where it had come from – another part of her ‘gift’ from the mad old woman?

The pain in her head was still there but it was now a dull ache. With rising disquiet she realised that she was being soothed by something. She had a sense of enormous scale, a mind all around her and not like her own but familiar. A mind that slept but was close to waking.

The light was growing brighter. Beth decided to abandon caution. She knew that if she didn’t go straight in then fear would freeze her. Keeping low, moving rapidly, the UMP sweeping left, right, up and down with her movements, she entered a cavern.

The warm wind was stronger here, like moist breath on her skin but still not unpleasant. She was wading through water. No, not water; it felt more viscous. It put Beth in mind of amniotic fluid. It was a massive space, arched with a bone-like material, the flesh walls reminding Beth of the inside of a mouth. Islands of a bone-like material stuck out of the fluid. Beth’s vision magnified, and at the end of the cavern she could make out what looked like massive internal organs pulsing with life.

They were there, of course: the twisted, once-human, mutated hybrid servants. They moved like ambulatory patches of darkness, blocking the glow in places. Edging towards her. There were a lot of them. How big was this fucking diving club anyway? Beth wondered.