Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

The machines did not look made by sorcery. They were entirely silent, looking like rows of gigantic, rusted steel chess pawns twice the height of a man, with no pipes or wires entering or leaving them, apparently sitting here unused for any purpose. Mativi felt an urgent, entirely rational need to be in another line of employment.

“HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT THE MACHINES WERE BUILT FOR?” said Mativi, who had.

The girl nodded. “THE DEMONS ARE IN THE MACHINES,” she said. “THE MACHINES WERE BUILT AS CAGES. THE MILITARY MEN WHO MADE THIS PLACE WARNED ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT MEN IN OUR DISTRICT OF THIS. THEY WARNED MY FATHER. THEY TOLD HIM NEVER TO BREAK ANY OF THE MACHINES OPEN. BUT OVER TIME, THEY LEAK, AND THE DEMONS CAN GET OUT. THE FIRST TWO MACHINES ARE SAFE, FOR NOW. BUT YOU MUST BE CAREFUL, BECAUSE WE THOUGHT THE THIRD ONE WAS SAFE TOO, AND IT TOOK CLAUDE.”

“WHAT DID IT DO TO CLAUDE, WHEN IT TOOK HIM?” said Mativi. He could not see any damage to the walls around the third machine beyond, perhaps, a certain swept-clean quality of the dust on the floor around it.

“IT TOOK HIM,” said the girl. “IT MADE HIM SMALL. IT SUCKED HIM UP.”

“THE MACHINES,” said Mativi in broken Lingala. “THEY ARE COVERED WITH… WITH THINGS.”

The heads of the chess-pawns, under the light of Mativi’s torch, were surrealistically coiffeured with assorted objects — spanners, wire, door furniture, and, worryingly, a single fragmentation grenade. Many, perhaps more than half of the things were ferrous metal. But some looked like aluminium. Some were even bits of wood or plaster.

Not just magnetism, then.

He fished the fake Rolex out of his pocket, waved it in the direction of the machines, and felt a strong tug on it as he held it in his hand. But he also felt a strong tug on the sleeve of his shirt, and on his arm itself.

He realized with growing unease that the wind was not blowing out of the chamber, but into it, pushing him from behind. It also appeared to be blowing in through the skylights in the roof above.

It did not seem to be blowing out anywhere.

The girl gasped. “YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE DONE THAT! NOW YOUR WATCH WILL NOT KEEP GOOD TIME.”

“IS THAT HOW THE MACHINE SUCKED CLAUDE UP?”

“NO. ALL THE MACHINES DRAW THINGS IN, BUT YOU CAN PULL YOURSELF LOOSE FROM MOST OF THEM. BUT THE ONES THE DEMONS LIVE IN WILL SUCK YOU RIGHT INSIDE WHERE THE DEMON LIVES, AND NOT LEAVE A HAIR BEHIND.”

“WHOLE PEOPLE?”

“PEOPLE, METAL, ANYTHING.”

“STONES?” Mativi picked up a fragment of loose plaster from the floor.

“YES. BUT YOU SHOULD NOT THROW THINGS.”

He threw it. The girl winced. He saw the plaster travel halfway across the floor until it passed the second machine. Then it jerked sideways in mid-air, as if attached to invisible strings, puffed into a long cone of powder, and vanished.

The girl was angry. “YOU MUST DO WHAT I SAY! THE MILITARY MEN SAID WE SHOULD NOT THROW THINGS INTO THE BAD MACHINES. THEY SAID IT MADE THE DEMONS STRONGER.”

“YES,” said Mativi. “AND THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. NOT MUCH STRONGER, BUT IF ENOUGH PEOPLE THREW IN ENOUGH UNCHARGED MATERIAL OVER ENOUGH TIME…”

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN BY UNCHARGED MATERIAL.”

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I MEAN BY ‘EVERYONE WOULD DIE’?”

The girl nodded. “WE SHOULD NOT STAY TOO LONG IN HERE. PEOPLE WHO STAY TOO LONG IN HERE GET SICK. THE DEMONS MAKE THEM SICK.”

Mativi nodded. “AND I SUPPOSE THIS SICKNESS TAKES THE FORM OF HAIR LOSS, SHORTNESS OF BREATH, EXTREME PALENESS OF THE SKIN?”

“YES,” said the girl. “THE VICTIMS DISPLAY THE CLASSIC SYMPTOMS OF RADIATION ALOPOECIA AND STEM CELL DEATH.”

Well, III be damned. But after all, she has lived through a nuclear war. She’s been living among radiation victims her entire life. Probably taught herself to read using Red Cross posters.

“WELL, THE SAME DEMONS THAT WERE USED IN THE RADIA-

TION BOMBS ARE IN HERE. SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, BECAUSE THESE ARE A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT WEAPON. BUT THE SAME DEMONS.”

The girl nodded. “BUT THESE ARE NOT RADIATION BOMBS,” she said. “THIS MEANS YOU HAVE TO PAY ME DOUBLE.” She held out her hand.

Mativi nodded. “THIS MEANS I HAVE TO PAY YOU DOUBLE.” He fished in his wallet for a fistful of United Nations scrip.

After all, why shouldn’t I pay you. None of this money is going to be worth anything if these things destroy the world tomorrow.

“I’m telling you, there are at least forty of them. I counted them. Five rows by eight.”

“I didn’t go to the hotel because I didn’t want to call you in the clear. We have to be the only people who know about this.”

“Because if anyone wanders into that site, anyone at all, and does anything they shouldn’t, we will all die. I’m not saying they, I’m saying we, and I’m not saying might die, I’m saying will die.”

“Yes, this is a Heavy Weapons alert.”

“No, I can’t tell you what that means.”

“All I can tell you is that you must comply with the alert to the letter if you’re interested in handing on the planet to your children.”

“Your children will grow out of that, that hating their father thing. All teenagers go through that phase. And credit where credit’s due, you really shouldn’t have slept with their mother’s sister in the first place.”

“No, I do not want ‘an inspection team’. I want troops. Armed troops with a mandate to shoot to kill, not a detachment of graduates in Peace Studies from Liechtenstein in a white APC. And when I put the phone down on you, I want to know that you’re going to be picking up your phone again and dialling the IAEA. I am serious about this, Louis.”

“All right. All right. I’ll see you at the site tomorrow.”

When he laid the handset down, he was trembling. In a day when there were over a hundred permanent websites on the Antarctic ice shelf, it had taken him five hours to find a digital phone line in a city of five million people. Which, to be fair, fifteen years ago, had been a city of ten million people.

Of course, his search for a phone line compatible with his encryption software would probably be for nothing. If there were this few digital lines in the city, there was probably a retro-tech transistor microphone planted somewhere in the booth he was sitting in, feeding data back to a mainframe at police headquarters. But at least that meant the police would be the only ones who knew. If he’d gone through the baroque network of emergency analogue lines, every housewife in the cite would have known by morning.

He got up from the booth, walked to the desk, and paid the geek — the geek with a submachinegun — who was manning it. There was no secret police car waiting outside — the car would have been unmarked but extremely obvious due to the fact that no one but the government could afford to travel around in cars. The Congolese sun came up like a jack-in-a-box and it was a short walk through the zero tolerance district back to his hotel, which had once been a Hilton. He fell into the mattress, which bludgeoned him compliantly unconscious.

When he opened his hotel room door in the morning to go to the one functioning bathroom, a man was standing outside with a gun.

Neither the man nor the gun was particularly impressive — the gun because it appeared to be a pre-War cased ammunition model that hadn’t been cleaned since the Armistice, and the man because his hand was shaking like a masturbator’s just before orgasm, and because Mativi knew him to be a paterfamilias with three kids in kindergarten and a passion for N gauge model railways.