Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

He dropped to the ground and took a closer look at the car he’d climbed. There was a tall sliding door along one side. Padlocks looped through iron latches, but they weren’t locked. The bottom of the door was at head height, but there was a handle. He hauled at it and the door trundled back, running on small wheels in iron grooves. Greased, nice and easy. He opened up a four-foot gap, jumped and pulled himself up over the edge. Crawled on hands and knees in rough dusty straw. Inside was airy dimness and an overpowering smell of tar, disinfectant and straw. Cattle wagons. Empty. Only there were shadowy structures inside that didn’t look like cattle stalls.

As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he stood up and looked around. There were no windows but narrow slatted gaps ran along near the roof, letting in thin strips of dusty light. The whole of the carriage was lined with slatted wooden racks, like bunks but wider, three tiers high, the top tier four feet under the tarred wooden roof. Each tier was packed with a layer of straw. Lidded barrels lined the narrow aisle that ran between them the length of the wagon. Lom opened barrels at random. Most of them held only water, but from every third one came acrid disinfectant fumes. In the far corner he found a couple of mops and shovels and a stack of galvanised buckets.

They were cattle trucks, but for people. As Lom got used to the air inside the wagon, he picked out other smells under the overpowering reek of disinfectant. Urine. Excrement. Sweat. The trains had been used before, and they’d been cleaned up ready to be used again.

Lom dropped to the ground and eased the door closed. All around him the high blank walls of identical railway trucks blocked out the sky, and each one could carry hundreds of people, jammed in side by side in acrid, excremental shadow. He kept on cutting sideways between them, ducking under or climbing across the heavy couplings. After four or five more he chose another ladder and took another look across the roofs.

He was almost at the edge. A couple more lines of wagons, and then a stretch of dead ground, and beyond that, set apart within its own high perimeter fence, was a long military train. He was pretty much level with its two massive locomotives coupled in series, crudely plated with thick blue steel. Behind them was an anti-aircraft gun on a flatbed truck and a couple of slope-sided armoured wagons with firing slits for windows and roof-mounted gun turrets. The muzzles of twin twenty-pounders at rest, tilted skywards. The rest of the train as far as he could see was mostly made up of freight cars interspersed with passenger carriages, incongruously neat and fresh in their purple livery. The only exception was one flat truck about four or five hundred yards from Lom’s position, at the point where the train curved out of sight. It was wider than the rest of the train, and it had been fitted with what looked like wide iron trestles and a high canopy. Soldiers were draping it with grey camouflage netting. Somewhat apart from them, waiting patiently, arms at its side, observing, stood a crudely human-shaped figure. It was broad and squat but taller than the wagons. A mudjhik, formed from a solid block of dull reddish-purple angel flesh.

Lom felt the touch of the mudjhik’s awareness brush lightly across the surface of his mind, pass on for a second and flick sharply back. Its sightless head turned in his direction. The full force of its attention gripped him hard like a fist. He tried to close his mind against it and push it away, but the dazzling floodlight crash of its glare pinned him. He was naked and exposed, alone in a wide empty space, his shadow stretching out behind him, inky black and infinitely long. The mudjhik took a step in his direction, then another, gathering pace, opening its legs wider, relaxing into a steady loping jog.

Lom slid down the ladder, crashing his shin painfully against the train coupling, and turned and ran. The long passage between the trains was a tunnel, a trap. He turned and scrambled between the carriages, crossed the narrow space and scrambled through again, and again, heart pounding, fighting panic, desperate to put as many trains as possible between himself and the approaching mudjhik. Repeatedly he slipped and stumbled, crashed bruisingly into couplings and the iron edges of the freight cars.

The mudjhik knew where he was. Never for a moment did the grip of its awareness shift or falter. Lom felt the hunger of its desire to seize him, to pinch the cage of his ribs between its thumbs and squeeze. Somewhere at the margins of that fierce desire Lom sensed the mudjhik’s handler fighting to keep some measure of control. It was like trying to dig fingers into polished granite.

The mudjhik could not pass between the railway wagons, it was too large, so it crashed through them, one after another, splintering the wooden superstructures and stepping over the iron chassis.

Run. Lom heard the mudjhik’s mind in his. Run, little man, run. I am coming.

The wagons could not stop the mudjhik, but they slowed it. When Lom broke through into open space on the other side, it was still a couple of hundred yards behind him. Ahead of him lay the waste ground he’d crossed before, the wire fence, and then the crowds hustling for places on the passenger trains out of Mirgorod. People there were looking his way. There were shouts and screams. They’d seen the out-of-control mudjhik smashing its way towards them through the cattle wagons. Lom sensed their rising fear. He launched himself towards them in a desperate sprint.

He hit the fence at a run and scrabbled up and over, dropping recklessly on the other side. The crowds were backing away and scattering, terrified. There was a sound like a low despairing collective moan. The mudjhik was through the trains and out in the open ground, but it had slowed. Lom felt its riveted focus on him begin to slip and disintegrate. It was the crowd. The background noise of so many panicking minds confused it. It was sifting through them, trying to find him again. It hooked him and lurched forward but he pushed its gaze aside.

The mass of people was a single collective entity, a herd mind with a simple overwhelming purpose, moving on instinct, getting through from second to second, shoving, shouting, pushing, desperate to escape before the mudjhik crashed into them. Lom charged into the middle of it and joined them. For the first time in his life he surrendered himself up to the tidal mind of a mob, obliterating independent thought and sinking without question below the surface into dark, exhilarating waters. The energy that flowed through him was tremendous. The people around him were shadows, rivals, part of him, indistinguishable. Somewhere at the outer edges of his mind he felt the grazing trail of the mudjhik, superficial and negligible. The mudjhik itself was being pulled into the dark vortex and absorbed. Lom ducked away from it and let himself be carried away.

Lavrentina Chazia sat alone in the projection room in the deserted offices of Project Winter Skies, running the film of the test explosion at Novaya Zima over and over again. The evacuation of Mirgorod was under way. Her instructions were being carried out. Her train was ready: the Pollandore installed, her angel skin crated and stored, the Shaumian girl under lock and key in a barred freight car. There was nothing that required her attention until the train left at noon. She ran the film again. And again. She must have watched it twenty, fifty times. She could close her eyes and watch it all unfolding inside her head: the technicians busying themselves with the final preparations; their stupid, excited grins; the caption, UNCLE VANYA; the wind across silent level tundra, dwarfing the gantry; and then the cataclysm. The blinding gush of absolute, total, irresistible destructive power. As soon as the film had finished she went back to the projector, rewound it and played it again.