around the Malvern Hills. He’d spent a lot of time here before, good times before the bad with Della and her father, and being here again was unexpectedly painful. His stomach screamed for food again and he caught a bolting horse between his hands, snapping its neck with a flick of the wrist before biting down and taking a chunk out of its muscled body. He hated the destruction he caused with each footstep, but what else could he do? It would only get worse as he continued to grow. The effort of lifting his bulk and keeping moving was increasing, and for a while he stopped and sat on the ground and rested against the side of British Camp, the largest of the hills, relieved that, for a short time at least, he wasn’t the largest thing visible. The size of the hill allowed him to feel temporarily small and insignificant again.
Why had this happened to him?
Much as he’d tried to forget, he still vividly remembered every detail of what had happened. He remembered the accident — the piercing light and those screaming, high-pitched radiation alarm sirens — then the disorientation when he’d first woken up in the clinic. It had been like he’d been trapped in one of those old Quatermass movies his dad used to watch. But in those films the guy being quarantined had always been a hero — an astronaut or genius scientist — not anyone like him. He just cleaned the damn labs, for Christ’s sake. He wasn’t one of the scientists, he just worked for them.
They’d kept him pumped full of drugs for a time, trying to suppress the metamorphosis, studying him from a distance through windows and from behind one-way mirrors, none of them daring to get too close. But there had come a time when the medicines and anesthetics no longer had any effect, and when they finally wore off, the pain had been unbearable. He realized he’d outgrown the hospital bed and had crushed it under his massively increased weight. He was more than twice his normal size already, rapidly filling the room, and he’d become claustrophobic and had panicked. He wanted to ask to see his son, Ash, but his mouth suddenly didn’t work the way it used to and words were hard to form. He tried to get up but there wasn’t enough room to stand, and when he tried to open the window blinds and look out he instead punched his clumsy hand through the glass. The people behind the mirrors started screaming at him to stop and lie still, but that just made him even more afraid. He shoved at an outside wall until it collapsed, then scrambled out through the hole he’d made. He stood there in the early morning light, completely nude, almost four meters tall, and he fell when he first tried to run away on legs of suddenly unequal length. They blocked his way with trucks, and he thought they were going to hurt him. He’d only wanted to move them out of his way, but he’d overreacted and had killed several of the security men, not yet appreciating the incredible strength of his distended frame, popping their skulls like bubble wrap.
He’d taken shelter in a derelict warehouse for a while — the only place he’d found that was large enough to hide inside. He lay on the floor, coiled around the inside of the building, and for a time he sat and listened to a homeless guy who, out of his mind with drink and drugs, had thought Glen was a hallucination. Now Glen leaned back against the hillside, crushing trees like twigs behind him, and remembered their onesided conversation (he’d only been able to listen, not speak). Like the blind man in that old Frankenstein film, the drunk hadn’t judged him or run from him in fear, but by the morning he was dead, crushed by Glen, who’d doubled in size in his sleep. Woken by the sounds of the warehouse being surrounded, he’d destroyed the building trying to escape and had literally stepped over the small military force that had been posted there to flush him out and recapture him. In the confusion of gunfire and brick dust he stumbled away toward the town of Shrewsbury, another place he’d known well, avoiding the roads and following the meandering route of the River Severn across the land.
Christ, he bitterly regretted reaching that beautiful, historic town, and his swollen, racing heart sank when he remembered what had happened there. Still not used to his inordinate rate of growth (would he ever get used to it?) and the constantly changing dimensions of his disfigured body, he’d stumbled about like a drunken giant, every massive footstep causing more and more damage. He’d crashed into ancient buildings, demolishing them as he’d tried to avoid cars and pedestrians, unintentionally obliterating the places he’d known and loved with Della and Ash. He’d killed innocent people, too, as he’d tried to get away from the town to avoid causing more devastation, and their screams of terror and pain had hurt more than anything else. He’d never intended for any of this to happen, but the final straw had been when he’d lifted his foot to step over what remained of a partially demolished row of houses and had seen a child’s pram squashed flat on the pavement where he’d been standing. Had he killed the baby? He hadn’t waited to find out. Instead he loped off as quickly as he was able, his ears ringing with the sounds of mayhem he’d caused.
In the shadows of the hills, Glen lifted his heavy head toward the early evening sky and sobbed, the noise filling the air like thunder.
They’d assumed he might come back to this place eventually, that he’d want Della and the rest of her family to suffer as he had. It was the ideal location from which to launch an attack on the creature — exposed, out in the middle of nowhere, away from centers of population — and a squadron of Hawkins’s men had been deployed to take the monster out. They took up arms as the aberration’s vast, lumbering shape appeared on the darkening horizon, still recognizably that of a man, but only just. Orders were screamed down the chain of command, and a barrage of gunfire was launched as it approached. Bullets and mortars just bounced off its scaly skin, barely having any impact at all. Incensed, the creature destroyed many of its attackers and marched on, leaving the dead and dying scattered across the land.
And then, as the last rays of evening sunlight trickled across the world below him, it found what it had been looking for: Della’s father’s house. The beast strode toward the isolated building, ignoring the last few scurrying, antlike men and women attacking and retreating under its feet. It swung a massive, clumsy hand at the waist-high roof of the house, brushing the slates, joists, and supports away with a casual slap, trying to peer inside through the dust and early evening gloom. And when it saw that the top floor was empty, it simply ripped that away, too, taking the building apart layer by layer, kneeling on the roadside (crushing another eight men) and looking down into the building like a petulant child tearing apart a doll’s house, looking for a precious lost toy.
They weren’t there. The house was empty. Disconsolate, Glen stood up and kicked what was left of the building away, watching the debris scatter for almost a mile.
Way below him, a final few soldiers regrouped and launched another attack. They were the very least of his concerns now; irritating and unfortunate, nothing more. In temper he bent down and swept them away with a single swipe of his arm, then turned and marched onward, immediately regretting their deaths.
This was all Della’s fault. If it hadn’t been for her he’d never have been in this desperate position. Did she even realize that? Did she know she was to blame? Surely she must have had some inkling? If it hadn’t been for them splitting up and her making him sell the house, this would never have happened. If she’d just talked to him sooner, let him know how she was feeling, let him know how unhappy she was … She said he should have guessed, that she’d tried to tell him enough times, but what did she think he was, a bloody psychic?
It was Della’s fault it had all gone wrong, and jumping into bed with her bloody therapist had been the final nail in the coffin — the full-stop at the end of the very last sentence of their relationship — but he accepted it had been his own bloody foolish pride that had subsequently exacerbated the situation. He’d wanted to do everything he possibly could to support his son, but when Cresswell earned more money in a month than he did in a year, he realized he’d made a rod for his own back. His pigheaded solution was to work harder and harder, to the point where money became his focus, not Ash. It wasn’t Glen’s fault he hadn’t been blessed with the brains Anthony Cress-well had, or that he hadn’t been fortunate enough to share the same privileged, silver-spoon upbringing as the man who’d taken his place in Della’s bed. Ash didn’t even like him, he knew that for a fact.
Glen had been desperate to prove his worth and not let his son down, and that was why he’d agreed to take part in the trial (that and an undeniable desire to bulk himself up and become physically more of a man than he ever had been before — he’d certainly achieved that now). It was perfectly safe and legal, they’d told him as he signed the consent forms, a controlled trial of a new muscle-building compound for athletes. All the top performers will be using it this time next year, they’d said: twice the effect, a quarter the cost, absolutely no risk … Maybe they’d been right about that, because he’d been taking it for a while and, other than the weight gain and a little occasional nausea, there hadn’t been any noticeable side effects. It had almost certainly been the radiation from the accident that had caused the change — either that or a combination of the two. But even the accident had been Della’s fault in part. If she hadn’t got the courts involved and been so anal about the times he was supposed to pick Ash up and drop him back, then he wouldn’t have been rushing to get his work finished on time, and he wouldn’t have left the
