“Yeah, sorry about that. A consequence of being dead.”
Tox spluttered. “Say what now?”
Damien cleared his throat. “We can go into that later, but right now there’s work to do. I heard you all talking, and you’re right, there’s not enough of you to take over Portsmouth. Luckily, Diane was busy while you were gone. Turns out, Thomas isn’t as popular as he thinks.”
People emerged from the shadows behind Damien. At first, just a couple, then almost thirty men and women appeared.
“Diane was my friend,” said a woman.
“The fucker killed Tom,” said a man.
“There’s no way that old bastard wasn’t involved in Wickstaff’s death,” said someone else, the anger clear in their voice.
Mass couldn’t help but smile. Alongside the people Mass had brought back to Portsmouth, they now had a respectable force. Thomas had made a mistake trying to take over Portsmouth, assuming it to be a city. But it wasn’t a city, it was a family.
And families stuck together.
11
The flare lit up the sky like a firework. Tony had been propped against a gnarled oak tree with roots the length of a tennis court. He was only half-asleep, which meant he was, at first, only vaguely aware that something was happening. He didn’t truly wake up until the first chatter of gunfire. At that point he bolted upright and grabbed his rifle.
Time’s up.
Tony had sought to eliminate Thomas, but the general had been sleeping in a tent guarded by several men. The time hadn’t been right. Now it might be too late.
The camp erupted, thousands of men and women spreading out around the playing fields and nearby buildings. Many were set up in firing nests on upper floors, or embedded inside vehicles. Those in the parklands formed a wide circle, covering every angle of approach with their rifles. Reserves stood within and without the circle, taking cover behind trees and inside shop doorways. Tony headed to Thomas, whose tent stood directly in the centre of the main playing field. The general had puffy eyes and grey skin, as though woken unceremoniously from a deep slumber.
“They’re here,” said Tony. “I warned you they were coming.”
“Yes, Colonel, you did, and like before we shall deal with them. The men know what they face.”
“No, they don’t!”
Thomas rolled his eyes, making Tony want to punch him. “A giant beast, yes. We are more than capable of dealing with it.” Thomas pointed to the rear of the circle, where a L118 light gun had been parked and unlimbered. The men called the modern-day howitzer ‘Lulu’, and it was a veteran of the conflict in the Middle East. Two more existed in Portsmouth for home defence. “That gun has one job and we need only to ensure it has enough time to do it. We took down several giants in the desert with less.”
“But this one is bigger, and it could be invulnerable, like the others were in the beginning.”
“The gates are all closed, Colonel. That thing will bleed, I promise you. Either way, the fight is upon us, and it’s your duty to make sure that we meet it as true British heroes. This is our moment – the turning point of history. Be a part of it, Tony. Stand with me.”
Tony tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry. He let out a sigh. Arguing was a waste of time and energy that they couldn’t afford. “I’m with you, Thomas, but only because there’s no other choice. After this battle is through, you can have my fucking resignation.”
With a bullet to the head.
Thomas appeared genuinely hurt for a moment, but he soon settled on anger. “Resignation accepted in advance. I suggest you consider your future wisely, Tony, or you might find you don’t have one.”
“If things go badly here, none of us do.”
Before the general could speak again, Tony turned tail and ran. There was no sign of where the threat was coming from, so he picked a section of the circular firing line at random. As it turned out, the threat came from everywhere at once.
Coughing gunfire met demonic screeching. The men had orders to be conservative with their ammo, but it was hard to pick targets in the dark. They had searchlights pointed at the nearby buildings, but shadowy gaps existed in several places and wrecked vehicles obscured many of the sight lines. More than ten thousand men and women were crammed together, standing in each other’s way.
When Tony spotted the first demon, he thought he might have imagined it. The slight flicker of movement, a disturbance in the shadows, quickly grew into an endless flow of monsters. Directly in front of Tony, two dozen at least came clambering from beneath the collapsed awning of a French restaurant.
The battle raged. Tony picked his first shot, taking the head off a primate as two more leapt in behind it. Someone else in the firing line took both monsters out with a long burst of rifle fire.
Amongst the staccato of combat rifles, shotguns roared. Handguns popped. Machine guns rattled, spaced every fifty feet along the circle. Demon blood erupted into the air, coating the masonry of the various buildings and painting them red. Guts and innards slopped on the road. The demons slid and fell in the offal of their own dead. All the while, the firing line continued its assault, bullets hitting flesh a hundred times a second. Tony started to believe they had a chance. The demons kept coming, but they were being massacred. They had to run out of bodies sometime. How many could there be? How many had been hiding during the previous months?
And how many came out of that giant gate?
An almighty crash sounded in the near distance, out of sight but not far away. It sounded like a building
