Mark Chadbourn - Darkest hour

"They know where we are," Church said. "They're coming up."

Laura shrugged. "So, it's Alamo time. Well, it's not like it's a surprise or anything."

Church looked at that fat, red sun hanging on the horizon. "It's too soon."

Laura followed his gaze, couldn't see anything. "What do you mean?"

"I didn't expect them to make their move till after dark." He gnawed on a knuckle, even more worried than he had been a few moments earlier. "I've got to try to hold them off for a bit."

Laura snorted with mocking laughter. "Throw stones at them! That'll do some good."

He rounded on her bitterly. "I'm sick of your carping. Couldn't you say anything useful, even here at the end?"

"Sorry to be such an irritant, shithead." She looked away so he couldn't see her face.

The black tide was rising quickly. Church was transfixed as it swallowed grass and stone, lapping ever upwards. At that distance Church couldn't make out any shapes within the greater mass, adding to the illusion of an ocean stretching out around the island of the tor; and with the sun so low it was impossible to guess how far it did reach, the night and the Fomorii merged into one. He guessed, from the average size of them, there must have been thousands gathered round the tor, ready to celebrate the rebirth of their own dark god and bear him back to whatever burrow they had made their own. And there he sat with a sword, nearly crippled by his injuries. If the situation wasn't so tragic it would be laughable.

The bitterness had drained out of him by the time he turned back to Laura. "I want you to go back and sit with Ruth," he said tenderly.

"Well, aren't you the big macho bastard. Send the womenfolk back to the homestead while you do men things."

"It's not like that. Ruth deserves to have someone sitting with her, you know-"

"Up to the end?" She seemed to understand this. She stared back at the house impassively, and after a long pause, she said, "You're not expecting me to do it, are you?"

"No. Don't do anything. That's my job."

`But what happens if…" She struggled to find words that wouldn't hurt too much to say them.

"I'll find some way to get back in there to do what needs to be done before it's all over."

She nodded slowly. "This is it then. The fuck-ups fuck up big time." Still nodding, she began to walk back to the house. She hadn't gone far when she turned and came striding back to him. The last rays of the sun highlighted the glimmering wetness in her eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand, then threw her arms round his neck and hugged him tightly. "I'd like to say it was fun, Church-dude. Bits of it even were. But I can say this-I'll never forget it until my dying day." She kissed him passionately on the lips and then she was gone.

Church's thoughts turned to what lay ahead. He desperately tried to think of some delaying strategy to give him the added time he needed, but there were so many, whatever he did, they'd keep going right over the top of him towards the house. The building wasn't even protected enough for him to make any kind of stand. A pass in the mountains, that's where he needed to be, or at a bridge. Instead he was on a flattened ridge on a bleak mountaintop where they could come at him from every direction at once. Clever.

"Shavi. Tom. Ryan," he said out loud. "If you're going to make a move, now's the time to do it." His words were picked up by the evening breeze and flung out over the countryside.

He sat on the boulder, his stomach muscles knotting, his heart beating faster and faster until he thought it would explode with anxiety. They were moving slowly, staying together in one tight corpus. It allowed him time to consider their nature. The times he had seen them en masse they had moved almost like one creature. He remembered the Lake District and how he felt like he was being borne along on a river of darkness. Perhaps that was the way to perceive them, as the embodiment of evil, one mind, one form, which could break itself down into smaller parts when called for. That line of thinking made his head spin. The Fomorii, and the Tuatha De Danann too, were so alien the only yardsticks he could apply to measure them were human ones which made no sense. There was a whole new set of rules and regulations out there which mapped the existence inhabited by those two races.

He wondered, with a note of dark humour, how the scientists were coping right then. Madly trying to apply their laboratory conditions to something which could not be measured or categorised? Going crazy trying to force all those square pegs into the round holes which comprised their intellectual life?

Yet, strangely, there were some parts of the Fomorii that were parallel to human experience, as if people had learned the baser part of their existence from the Night Walkers long ago. Or perhaps, he mused, everyone was cut from the same cloth. That thought was so depressing he wiped it from his mind immediately.

They certainly had a hierarchical structure, tribal in nature, with the different factions constantly rivalling. He guessed only the iron rule of Balor could keep them united, in fear and in the promise of ultimate victory over all existence. But while the Fomorii were like the barbarians in the outer darkness, the Tuatha De Danann reminded him of some emperor's court structure, but one that had passed its peak and was winding down into decadence and decay. How could they be gods when aspects of them were so human?

And so he waited. Halfway up the tor he began to hear those horrible animal cries and grunts that tormented his sleep. Then came the zoo smell, thick and stomach turning. And then, finally, he could see them, no longer as one dark mass, but as swarming black insects, thousands upon thousands of bodies, scrambling upwards, clambering over each other, their shapes flickering in and out of his perception so that sometimes they seemed to have bony shells and wings, other times gleaming black armour, sometimes wielding twisted limbs with scorpion stings and lobster claws, other times brandishing cruelly deformed battle axes and those terrifying swords with the serrated edge along one side. It was too much. He had to withdraw from the edge as he felt the nausea rise to the point where he was almost blacking out.

He retreated until he was a few yards from the house door and then he took his stand again.

Laura watched the impending confrontation from the house with a mounting sense of desolation. All the suffering and heartache had come down to this: more failure. Behind her, Ruth had started to buck and writhe once more. Getting ready to give birth, Laura thought.

She wondered what it would be like to die, almost welcomed it in a way. But in contrast the thought of Church or Ruth passing filled her with an overwhelming sickness; it brought tears to her eyes.

As she blinked them away, she caught sight of a movement close to the house. Her stomach turned. The Fomorii had outflanked Church and were coming. It was an obvious ploy; they wouldn't leave their god in the hands of others for longer than they had to, she thought. She glanced round frantically for some kind of weapon. She'd go down fighting if she had to, protecting Ruth to the last. If only she could have had time to say sorry for all the terrible things she had done; for being so weak and pathetic and twisted when confronted by someone so unselfish.

Before the thought had barely formed, the door burst open and it was in there with her. Terror bloomed in her face and in that instant she knew it was over.

An age seemed to pass while the atmosphere grew charged with the overpowering force of an electrical storm; he tasted burnt metal in his mouth, felt disturbing vibrations run through the ground and into his legs. Although he tried to find that place deep within him where all his aspirations to heroism and bravery lay, when the Fomorii rose into view the cold fear that washed through him almost drove him to his knees.