insects that its outline appeared permanently blurred through movement: bees, flies, wasps, gnats, beetles, roaches, all these and more crawled and wriggled, burrowing or attempting to take flight without ever being able to leave the creature’s gravity.
Hunter stared into its insectile eyes and got the same feeling he had experienced staring through the meat- doorway: an alien intelligence travelling back along his line of vision to examine his own mind forensically.
The insect-thing held out one hand, palm upwards, and a swarm of insects rose off it, sweeping towards Hunter. He closed his eyes, turned his head away, but they enveloped his head, forcing their way into his nostrils and through his clenched lips. The buzzing filled him, followed by the sickening sensation of crawling creatures working their way into his nasal passages.
He fought the urge to choke and vomit, and then suddenly all sensation was lost. His consciousness was circumscribed by the insectile buzzing, inside him, outside, everywhere.
And then he wasn’t there at all.
Insects crawled around the edges of his vision, but he knew that it was not his eyes but his mind that was examining the fractured hallucinatory images he could see. It took a second or two for him to realise that the creature was attempting some form of communication, but it was so inhuman that there was no frame of reference. The images shattered, twisted out of shape, moved from incomprehensible alien forms to pictures he could almost recognise. It felt as if he was tuning across the wavelengths to find a channel he could understand.
The process came to a halt with an image of a wasp as big as a bus nestled in a strange, irregular landscape that appeared to be made out of the same kind of meat as the doorways. It buzzed up and down the scale, insistently, distractedly, but the meaning was lost to him.
Yet some form of comprehension began to grow deep in his subconscious. A power as big as the universe had become aware of humanity. Its nature, if that was the right word, was to oppose life, not only in its form, but also in its essence: what it meant in terms of positivity, advancement, connectivity, hope, goodness — all the things that on his better days Hunter dreamed life really was about.
This power, this Anti-Life, was a gulf of nothingness that went on for ever, yet could be constrained on the head of a pin. Trying to comprehend what it really was made Hunter feel sick. He forced his thoughts to move on, but before he left the subject he realised its motivation: the eradication of everything it was not. The Anti-Life could not rest until humanity was gone or circumscribed. A name came and went, not from the thing itself, but from somewhere without: the Void.
And so it had come to Earth, acting through agents and generals and outriders who prepared the way for its ultimate ascension. Again, Hunter discovered names that existed somewhere, but did not come from the Void itself. The zombie-things that leaked purple mist were called the Lament-Brood.
The five creatures he had come across in the forest were the Void’s generals, leading the charge against humanity. They had no form in and of themselves; they were ideas, nothing more, clothing themselves in the matter of the physical world, negativity given shape and identity. The Lord of Bones, the Lord of Birds, the Lord of Lizards, the Lord of Flesh. And above them all, the force that would see humanity wiped away — the King of Insects.
Hunter was not a religious man, but childhood images of Satan haunted him; here, he felt, was true evil: dispassionate, relentless, capable of causing death on a grand scale, without any meaning at all. A quote came to him from a Sunday School class: Revelation 19:19 — ‘Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army.’
The giant wasp’s message was clear: there was no hope, it really was all over and the world was about to be remade in the image of Anti-Life. Hunter tried to imagine what that would be like, but all he kept coming back to were those self-same childhood lessons, with their talk of hell and burning souls.
The wasp was so huge that it could not take flight and so it pulled itself forward obscenely on its spindly legs, until its head filled Hunter’s vision and he could see himself reflected a thousand times in its multifaceted eyes. The wasp opened its maw wide, trailing strands of sticky acids, and lunged. The stinking, wet dark closed about Hunter hard and he was sucked in and down.
And then he was hovering in the air once more before the King of Insects, wasps and flies crawling all over his skin, across his eyes and lips, skittering legs and wings setting his nerve endings afire as revulsion filled him. It felt as if his time had come and he was pleased at how calm he felt. Those who kill for a living think about death a great deal. He had once seen a man plead, sobbing, offering to give up his girlfriend in his place, even though he knew it would do no good. Hunter had always hoped he would be brave enough to go with dignity.
But instead of delivering the killing blow, the King of Insects twisted its outstretched hand and then snapped it shut. Hunter felt a squirming in his belly, rising up his spine, growing faster until it reached the back of his head, and then he shot out of himself as if strapped to a rocket.
Hovering somehow amongst the tree branches, he looked down to see his body still hanging in the air before the King of Insects. A second later, an irresistible urge drove him up through the trees and into the grey sky. Hunter felt simultaneously detached and queasy, as though he was in a dream on the verge of turning into a nightmare. Far below in the blasted valley, hundreds of scattered enemy corpses formed fractal patterns in the thick snow. Gliding forward over the next ridge, he caught the familiar wisps of purple mist drifting in the wind. It had just started to snow again, adding to the otherworldly ambience.
But when he had a clear view of the white landscape, raw emotions broke through his detachment. It was carnage, worse than any battlefield he had ever seen. The Lament-Brood were a purple-edged wave swamping the feeble ranks of the army. Guns cut them apart, but it took at least fifty rounds, and as quickly as one fell, six others took their place. The enemy were brutally efficient. Rusted swords cleaved heads, hacked off arms, left trails of steaming entrails in the churned, red snow. Spears rammed through flimsy skin and muscle, arrows plunged into eye sockets. The despair the Lament-Brood engendered was a weapon in itself, and many soldiers simply laid down their arms to have their bones snapped and life extinguished by dead but powerful hands.
It was a rout beyond any defeat the army could have envisioned. As fast as men fell, they were brought back to unnatural life to swell the ranks of the enemy, going on to kill their friends and colleagues with vigour. Explosions roared flames and gouts of smoke high into the air as ammunition was detonated and batteries overrun. Fire raged in several of the tanks in the front line. There were no tactics, no weapons that would make any difference. It was only a matter of time.
And just as that thought entered Hunter’s head, choppers carrying the General and other COs rose up behind the lines. A retreat had been ordered, but it was too disorganised to be effective. Men tried to pull back, but the Lament-Brood kept coming, picking them off as they fled.
It’s all over, Hunter thought, dimly grateful for the remaining detachment that still swathed him.
One final shell was loosed into the sky before the enemy swamped the lines. It rushed towards Hunter, passed through him and came down beyond the ridge. When the explosion resonated all around, he suddenly felt as if a rope at his waist had been tied to a speeding car. Yanked backwards, he flew over the valley and down towards the forest, now blazing from the strike which had impacted right at the point where his body had been suspended.
Chapter Seven
‘ Heaven cannot brook two suns, nor Earth two masters.’
There are times when the world feels like an irritating distraction, even when buildings are collapsing, blood is flowing and people are crying about the end of the world. Some things are more important. Hal understood that clearly as he made his way along the corridors of Queen’s College. All he could think about was the kiss Samantha had shared with Hunter, how it had been a whole conversation in a single moment, a complex communion of secret
