Then London’s always-precarious network crashed.
It was stupid, but Horatio responded by looking upwards again, as if appealing to ancient gods. Vast lightning webs seethed far overhead, cracking the sky open. He squinted into the frenzied glare. Something was moving at its heart – a dark-grey elongated oval shape that just kept growing. The lightning forks stabbing out of it were permanent now, clawing at the shield and expanding to create a single jagged sheet. It was if daylight had returned; the whole gleamed under the terrible forces emitted by the huge alien ship.
‘Is that . . .?’ Maria gasped.
‘Yeah.’ He’d slowed to take in the shocking manifestation; now he surged forwards again, crossing into Curtis Street. It’s only a few hundred metres. Please!
The light changed abruptly, shading to a disturbingly intense violet. Horatio had hoped he’d never see that light ever again: devil-sky. Huge patches of the shield were fluorescing from whatever beams the ship was firing down. It was much brighter than during Blitz2, and getting brighter.
The shield would never hold against that, he knew.
Jaz was whimpering as she and Niastus stumbled along together, shielding their eyes from the lightstorm above. She was young, only nineteen, Horatio remembered; Blitz2 had ended before she was even born. So she would’ve listened to her parents’ stories with healthy teenage scepticism and boredom. It was tough when we were young, you kids today have it so easy. Now reality was crashing against her senses with a brutality she’d never known.
He veered over towards her. ‘It’s okay. Five minutes and we’ll be out of here. Just hang on, yes?’
She nodded frantically, clutching at Niastus – her only dependable rock in the storm erupting around her.
The devil-sky light vanished. Horatio felt a stab of pure panic, like boiling adrenalin flooding his brain. There was only one reason for that. He almost didn’t dare look upwards yet again, but . . .
The air provided a foretaste of what was about to come. There was still no wind, not even a breeze, but it seemed to squeeze him. Then he saw it, something moving in the sky – a dark column like a twister, but broken into segments. And moving fast, like planes used to, already several kilometres high. He stared in amazement. The apex of it was a crumpled building, bigger than the community exchange behind him, spinning its way upwards, shedding hunks of wall, its panel roof twisting and disintegrating. Below it was a tail of debris: smaller buildings, inverted cascades of earth, even tree trunks. Something had reached down from the sky and pulled them up.
Instinctively he knew what that building had been: shield generator. The Resolution ship had somehow reversed gravity and pulled the city’s only defence out by its roots. He spun around, seeing a couple of similar columns, already peaking, the debris starting to curve groundward.
‘The wind’s going to hit,’ Horatio shouted. ‘Find something to hold on to.’ He looked along the street. There wasn’t much. A few dead trees, some iron bollards at the far end, where the road narrowed to feed into Bacon Grove. ‘Those!’ He sprinted off towards the bollards. Above him the furious barrage of sheet lightning began to calm. With the glare reducing he could see there were two Resolution ships hovering over London. Crap, they’re huge. Clouds began to boil around their edges, slamming down towards the city.
Wind was already blowing fast down Bacon Grove when they reached the bollards. Horatio and Maria clung to each other around one of the posts, while Niastus and Jaz hugged tight, with their baby between them. Horatio braced himself as the noise of the storm’s leading edge impacting the ground struck. It was bone-shaking, riding a pressure wave that was almost strong enough to pull them apart. The heat was something else he hadn’t anticipated, making it hard to inhale.
Windows all along the street shattered, the shards joining the thick airborne streams of roof slates. There was so much debris in the air that even the gigantic lightning halos around the Resolution ships were eclipsed, plunging the street back into a grey twilight. His clothes were flapping against his limbs, as if they were trying pull free of him and take flight.
With Maria’s face centimetres from his own, Horatio could see the frightened grimace sculpted into her features as she dug her fingers into his arms. He knew that she’d be seeing exactly the same expression on his face.
‘What do we do?’ she yelled. It was barely audible above the howling wind.
He winced as a denuded pine tree crashed to the ground fifty metres away and tumbled along until it was pinned against a wall; smaller branches vibrated until they snapped off, to be sucked back up into the churn of rubble above the rooftops. ‘This isn’t going to get any better,’ he bellowed back. ‘We need to try and move.’
Jaz looked at him in pure terror, but Niastus nodded.
‘Everyone hold on to each other,’ Horatio said. ‘We crawl.’ It was the best he could think of – present the smallest slimline profile to the wind. To stand up was to be snatched into the air.
He estimated it wasn’t quite two hundred metres to the front door of his block. After the first few metres pushing hard against the gale, he wasn’t sure if he had the strength to make it. A frightening number of lethal shards were hurtling along Bacon Grove – slates, tree limbs, glass, cans, bags of rubbish splitting open to shed their contents like oversized artillery rounds. He didn’t even know how many times the ground trembled from seismic shock as some nearby building collapsed. Once, a two-seat cabez came rolling towards them like an outsized metallic football, crashing from side to side in sprays of shattered glass
