Tim Lebbon - Contagion

“They’re coming,” Rhali said, and moments later four shapes burst from a side street across the road from the square.

“What the hell are they ?” Sparky said. No one answered. Everyone drew close together and squatted down, sheltering behind a sculpture but knowing that it would not protect them for long.

Jack probed inward and prepared himself, balancing two talents, ready to use either. His heart hammered and he felt sick. Even though these things no longer looked quite like people, the thought of killing them was horrible.

A woman wore flowing clothes, but they did nothing to camouflage her lengthened limbs, or her scaled skin. Her eyes shone with a purple membrane, and her teeth were long and crowded into her mouth. She hissed as she ran by, tongue tasting them on the air. A man followed, bounding on hands and feet. He was naked, body elongated. Long spines protruded from his back, and on either side grew rudimentary wings. Blood dripped down his side, and when he roared it sounded full of pain. He followed the woman, away from them and towards the river. But the other two arrivals slowed as they crossed the square. The two women hooted to each other as they both turned to stare at the huddled group.

“Don’t think much of yours, mate,” Sparky whispered, and Jack almost guffawed with nervous laughter. But he had to be in control. Everyone here was depending on him.

The women’s skin was so pale it was almost translucent, bodies incredibly thin, breasts reduced to nothing. There was something fluid about them, both in the way they moved and how they looked—as if their skins contained molten innards, rather than flesh and blood. They hooted again, and countless tiny tentacles extruded from their forearms and palms, waving as if caught in a breeze.

“Do you think—?” Jenna began, and then both women roared and came at her. Their inhuman voices cried hunger.

Jack stood and pointed at them, keeping his arms and shoulders relaxed, and as he exhaled both women were lifted from the ground. He held them there using the talent he’d first seen in Puppeteer, and he felt the potential thrumming through his arms—he could throw, squeeze, crush them. They thrashed and squirmed, and one grasped hold of the sculpture. Her tentacles flexed and curled around the concrete, pulling hard, but Jack only felt the slightest tension. His power was not muscular.

“What now?” Rhali asked.

“Ice cream van,” Jack said. “Doors.”

Sparky, Jenna and Breezer rushed to the van and tugged open the driver’s door. Jenna winced back at whatever was inside, but Sparky turned and gestured to Jack.

Jack started walking, still pointing, and the two strange women drifted through the air before him.

“Stand back,” he said, and he guided them in through the door.

Breezer slammed it shut.

“Stay in the van,” Guy said, and Jack felt an intimate, sickening sensation inside his head. If I was in the van, I’d stay inside , he thought. He knew at that moment that he could bear that talent as well, given time. Its star was open to him.

But as well as their bodies, these women’s minds were sufficiently altered from human to apparently make them immune to the man’s words. They kicked and banged at the door as Sparky shoved it closed. Thin tentacles squirmed through the lock and around the door’s edge, and Jack had only moments to reach out with his mind and snap the locks closed. He did the same for the other door, and also the wide hatch that led from the cabin back into the ice cream van’s rear area. He didn’t think it would hold the women for long. He caught a brief glimpse of one of their inhuman faces at the window, and he thought perhaps they wanted to feed.

It did not bear thinking about, and they all ran as one from that place of sculptures and danger, sprinting across the wide paved walkway and towards the Thames.

“Which way?” Jenna asked Breezer. He pointed left. There was an iron fence lining the river, but five hundred feet away Jack could see a break in the fence and a walkway leading across to several pontoons. Two of them sat unevenly in the water, the large boat moored to one resting on a slant on the river’s bed. But another pontoon floated upright, and he thought he could see the two boats Breezer had mentioned.

From behind them they heard glass smashing. The trapped things would be out in moments. Jack was not afraid of being caught by them, because he would not let that happen.

He was afraid of killing them.

“Jack!” someone shouted. He looked around, wondering who they’d left behind, but they were all there. As he caught Sparky’s eyes, his friend’s mouth fell open in shock.

“Jack!” the voice called again, and then he recognised it. Lucy-Anne.

She was along the path from them, running and waving frantically. There was someone with her…or was there?

“Lucy-Anne!” he shouted. He forgot the danger they were in, the people he had killed, the weight of danger crushing them from all angles. For that brief instant all was delight, and he wanted to greet his dear friend with a hug. He waved at her to come with them, and heard Jenna’s and Sparky’s delighted laughter.

And then Lucy-Anne shouted again. “ Get down! ”

Between them, several Choppers stood from behind a fallen wall and three heavy benches. Without warning, the shooting began.

Lucy-Anne shouted one more time, and then a Chopper turned and started shooting at her and she fell and rolled, pressing herself flat against a kerb, the gutter barely deep enough to protect her. Bullets impacted the sidewalk about her and plucked at her clothing, her hair, and kissed the back of one leg with icy pain that quickly turned lava-hot. Oh no oh no! she thought, again and again, because she had not dreamed the end of this. Whatever fate had in store for her and her friends today had yet to be played out.

“Andrew!” she yelled, but his wraith was no longer with her. “Jack!” she called instead.

More gunfire, shouting, and behind the impacts she heard running feet. She glanced up and around, terrified that at any moment a bullet would find her head. At least she wouldn’t know. She could not comprehend the instant change from alive to dead an impact on her brain would cause, but right then it did not frighten her. What scared her was not being here anymore to tell her friends about the bomb. They were all she had left, and with every atom of her body she did not want to let them down.

Someone screamed, androgynous in their agony.

“Drop your—” a voice shouted, and gunfire erupted from a different direction. More of them! she thought. She risked a glance above the shallow kerb.

A Chopper was running towards her, barely thirty feet away, rifle held across his chest. As he saw her he paused and shouldered his rifle, and then he was smashed forwards in a haze of blood, pavement beneath him fracturing, a roar accompanying his death. Blood spattered the ground close to Lucy-Anne and she rolled back, stood, not knowing which way to turn.

Beyond the dead Chopper were three others, all of them dead and leaking across the ground. And beyond them, Jack and his friends were dragging a shape across the pavement, huddled low and heading for the cover of a boat ride ticket kiosk. Lucy-Anne couldn’t see who had been hit. She started running.

More gunfire burst from a building to her right, flashing from two second floor windows. The kiosk blurred, and splinters and shards of wood flicked at the air. They wouldn’t last a second behind there. Barely aware of what she was doing—not knowing what she could do—Lucy-Anne changed direction and ran for the building. It was a grand old structure, perhaps an up-market office block, and the storeys were tall. So the two Choppers fell at least fifteen feet when they were thrown from the windows.