Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

He was about to turn and ask his slave, Gnaelus, for his armour to be readied in case the mood to participate in finishing off any squirming survivors took him when he heard, faintly, over the hubbub of the impatient onlookers around the stalls of the amphitheatre, a soft, rhythmic thumping, almost like a distant battle drum.

His lean face knotted with curiosity. ‘Gnaelus, can you hear that?’

The old slave nodded.

‘Now what do you think that is?’

He cocked his head. ‘Sounds like a marching drum, Caesar.’

Some other heads among the roaring crowd began to curiously turn one way then the other at the still faint but steadily increasing volume of that thumping.

The convicts meanwhile were now standing in the middle of the arena, the escort of Praetorian Guards withdrawing to the edges of the pit as a pair of slaves passed out an assortment of weapons to the criminals. Their minds on the prospect of imminent violent death, none of them yet seemed to have registered the growing noise.

Caligula stood up and leaned against the railing of the imperial box. ‘What is that?’ he uttered. ‘It really is getting quite irritating now.’

All of a sudden a flock of starlings fluttered and swooped across the sky above them, quite clearly startled by something. Heads all around the amphitheatre looked up at them, circling once above the arena and then fleeing over the walls and out of sight.

Caligula could hear the roar of impatient excitement for the next round giving way to a chaos of voices filled with curiosity and a growing anxiety at the noise and that sudden peculiar behaviour of the birds.

The thumping sound was now almost on a par with the noise of the crowd, a deep, slow, regular pounding, like a heartbeat. Accompanied by something else now. It sounded like a horn. No. In fact… like nothing he’d ever heard before, a note increasing in pitch, getting higher and higher, more insistent, like a roaring wind whistling with growing intensity.

Up until now he was damned if he was going to display any unease or urgent curiosity like the rabble in the stalls around him. But this cacophony, the thumping so loud his chest was beginning to vibrate, this growing whistling, wailing sound…?

Then shrill screams.

He turned to where they were coming from and saw something loom over the top of the highest row of stalls, something large. The size of those curious, grey, lumbering beasts from Africa, two of them in fact. But it was all angles, corners, plated like armour and the drab colour of a muddy river. It rose over the edge of the stalls and seemed to slide down just feet above the heads of panicking people fleeing their seats. Hovering — the air beneath it shimmering and churning like the air above a campfire.

The thudding was suddenly so much louder, Caligula could hear what sounded like a voice shrieking and wailing like a man tormented by a thousand demons. He dropped to his knees behind the parapet, his eyes bulging with terror.

The giant thing, not alive, not any kind of animal, he sensed that now — some sort of vast flying chariot perhaps? — finally slid over the last stall and down on to the arena floor, whipping up swirling clouds of sand and dust.

A second one of these leviathans appeared over the top wall of the amphitheatre, glided down across the stalls, now empty except for the writhing bodies of the trampled and wounded, finally coming to rest beside the first. Both olive-green leviathans were hovering a man’s height off the ground, churning up storms of grit and sand into the thousands of terrified faces all around.

Finally the roaring wind sound began to drop in pitch and volume and both monsters settled gently on to the ground, the storm cloud of dust and sand settling around them. The deep booming thudding and the horrifying wailing continued, however, drowning out the hoarse screams of panic from all sides of the amphitheatre.

Caligula realized that beneath his imperial robes he had wet himself. Another childhood memory for him today.

Shame.

AD 37, Amphitheatrum Statilii Tauri, Rome

Rashim could hear Stilson’s voice over the comms-channel, guffawing like a frat-boy with a hall-pass. ‘Just look at ’em!’

Dreyfuss was grinning too. Drinking in the spectacle of the arena.

The combat unit leading the platoon, Lieutenant Stern, barked some orders to his men and they dropped down from the hulls of both MCVs on to the hard sand, setting up an ordered circular perimeter, kneeling, weapons raised, around both vehicles with quick, well-practised efficiency.

‘Can we cut this wretched noise now?’ said Rashim. ‘I can’t help but think we’ve made our point!’

Forty feet away, standing on top of the weapons turret of his MCV, he saw Stilson nod slowly. ‘I guess these dumb suckers have heard enough AC/DC. Yeah, OK, you can cut it.’

Rashim ducked down inside and gestured for the unit manning the console to turn the music off. He flipped a switch… and all of a sudden they were engulfed with silence. Complete, hear-a-pin-drop silence.

Stilson’s voice quietly crackled over Rashim’s earpiece. ‘I think we got their attention, eh, Dr Anwar?’

Rashim nodded. Yes, I think you could probably say that.

‘Have we got that recording ready to go?’

Dreyfuss had worked with Stilson last night, taking the vice-president’s scribbled words and translating them into Latin then reading them aloud and recording it. He’d fussed and fretted for endless hours over the various versions of the recording, worrying about the precise pronunciation of the language. ‘No one knows for sure how some of these words were actually spoken!’ had been his repeated complaint. But he’d done it… eventually settling on one particular recording as the best he was ever going to get.

‘It’s good to go,’ said Dreyfuss over the comms-channel.

‘Then let’s play it!’ said Stilson, hopping down from the weapons turret, walking across the sloping hull of his vehicle and standing proudly on the front of it, hands on hips like some Shakespearian actor centre stage.

The complete silence was broken by the booming sound of Dreyfuss’s voice over the two vehicles’ synced PA system.

‘CITIZENS OF ROME! We come in peace!’

Rashim shook his head. Only a pompous idiot like Stilson would start with a line as cheesy as that.

‘We have come down from the heavens to be gods among mortals! We are here to show you new ways, to share our knowledge and our wisdom with you. We are here to educate this dark world, bring peace to every land and… prosperity to you!’

He looked at the crowd. The panicked stampede from the stalls had stopped and all around them, on the four sides of the Statilius Taurus, ten thousand faces stared in silence at Stilson… assuming the voice they could hear was his. The members of Project Exodus, crammed down inside the MCVs, began to emerge warily from a ramp at the rear of each vehicle.

‘We… are all gods in human form. We are all from the heavens, a place that we call… America. And we are here to bring you our way of living. The “American way”!’

2001, Barnes amp; Noble, Union Square, New York

‘This is not the historical reference section, Liam.’

‘What? Uh…’ Liam looked up guiltily from the comicbook in his hands. ‘Oh hi, Bob, I wondered where you got to.’

‘I have been waiting in the historical reference section for twenty-nine minutes.’ Bob looked at the label at the top of the spinning carousel. ‘ Graphic novels? You will not find relevant or useful texts in this section. I have located the computer technology section at the — ’

‘You should have a look at these!’ Liam flicked through several pages. ‘I never really took any notice of the cartoons in the Cork papers. Thought they were for children, or fools who couldn’t read proper.’ He handed the comicbook to Bob. ‘But this…’ he said, grinning, ‘it’s properly amazing, so. Look at them pictures.’