The Domino Men

She wrenched open the door and I saw the scene outside, a window onto what the city had become. Chaos, smoke, endless snowfall. Dozens of men and women in the same condition as my mother, loping through the snow, all of them streaming in the same direction.

They no longer seemed like people at all. Drones. That was how I thought of them now. Just drones.

Mum stepped into the street and sniffed the air.

“Don’t go!” I shouted.

But she paid me no attention. Mum gave another cry of fury and triumph, and ran into the street to join the others, into that exodus of the damned.

“Mum!”

She didn’t turn back. I stood on the threshold, wondering what to do, uncertain whether to give chase, knowing that she wouldn’t thank me for it. A few seconds more and she was lost to the snow and my decision had been made for me.

I stepped back inside and snapped shut the door, just as Abbey emerged from the bathroom, clutching a wad of tissue to the side of her face.

“She’s gone,” I said.

At five o’clock that afternoon, the television went black. With the exception of half an hour of the test card on BBC1, there was nothing on any channel except static and interference. Snow outside, snow inside, blackness crept all over London. A few hours later, the lights went out as well and we lost power for good.

Abbey and I went to bed, too scared to sit up in the dark, not brave enough to pay any heed to the strange sounds we heard from outside, the rustlings and stampings, the whinnies of terror, the orgiastic cries.

Much later, as we lay close to one another, we heard the same hissing at the letterbox as the night before, the same whispered invitation. But we held each other tight and stopped our ears against it.

As I’m writing this, I feel a flicker of hope. You know what I’m talking about. You must have noticed it yourself.

The other handwriting, that other story, has gone and there have been no more interpolations, no more intrusions, for days.

Maybe everything’s going to be OK. Maybe there’ll be no need for that journey I thought I had to make, for that appointment of ours in the wilderness. Perhaps at last I’m really free.

As Abbey and I tried to sleep, outside an old man was running. I didn’t know it at the time but he was very near to us, almost in sight of our door.

His flight had not gone unnoticed. He was being tracked, although not with any subtlety or grace as he could hear them blundering behind him, wheezing and squealing in weird pleasure. There was a whole tribe of them, dumb but implacable, tireless, without morality, the new face of mankind.

The old man was growing weary and out of breath, his years of active service in the Directorate long behind him, weakened by his days in a hospital bed and ground down by the spectacle of his darkest fears become reality. No one would have blamed him for giving up. Thousands would have done just that, long ago. In medical terms, he shouldn’t even have been on his feet. But he didn’t give up. He kept going, forcing his ancient body onward through the snow and the dark, pushing himself far beyond endurance just to try to reach me before the end.

He was less than a street away when they found him, the herd driven mad by the snow, inflamed by the ampersand in their systems.

Every breath felt like fire. Each step was an ordeal. He could feel them at his back. Determined not to slow down, at the last instant he tripped, fell forward, grazing old hands, bruising old skin, until at last he righted himself and turned to face the mob, courageous and unflinching.

He would have fought, I know that. He would have fought tooth and nail to the end.

Sentimental nonsense. The old man had his wrinkled cock in his hand when they came for him. They cut him down mid-dribble, his body made unrecognizable, battered by a thousand boot-heels, stamped into the snow by an army of our commuters.

Even this, of course, was very much more than he deserved.

Abby and I woke with the dawn, too distraught and too scared to kid ourselves that we were going to get much sleep.

I managed a wan sort of smile. “Merry Christmas,” I said.

“Merry Christmas, Henry.”

We hugged, and I was clambering out of bed to get us some tea when Abbey reminded me that the power had gone. No tea, then. No heat, either, and the pair of us lost no time in wrapping ourselves in multiple shirts and jumpers, self-insulating in worn vests, old cardigans and favorite sweatshirts.

We had been up for a couple of hours, in which time we’d scraped together a meager breakfast, held one another tightly and swapped tender pledges of devotion, when there came a knock at the door — a sharp, brisk tap, all business.

I ran to open it. “Granddad?”

A stranger stood at the threshold. A man not much older than me, slim, blond and sharp featured, his hair cajoled into slick, brash spikes.

“You must be Henry Lamb,” he said.

“Who are you?” I asked, although I think by then I’d already guessed the answer.

“I’m Joe,” he said, sardonically extending his hand. “Joe Streater.”

You hoped that we had gone?

We were only resting. We were relaxing, taking a little downtime, stepping back to gain a better perspective on all that has been laid before us to date. It is of vital importance (Leviathan has always said so) to maintain an equal balance between leisure and our working lives. But now our lunch hour is over and we have returned to work with a revitalized sense of purpose and a determination to succeed that I think you will find to be steelier and more implacable than ever.

We thought it might be of interest to adumbrate something of what occupied Arthur Windsor whilst the execrable young Henry Lamb was barricaded into his flat in Tooting Bec, crying into his pillow and quivering in the arms of his landlady.

Details follow, and as ever, unflinching accuracy is guaranteed.

As the prince slept upon the floor of his palace, a small, gray cat trod softly through his dreams. He told Arthur the truth about the war, he told him about the innumerable clashes between Dedlock’s men and the House of Windsor — a secret history of the British Isles which had run beneath the surface of public life for more than one hundred and fifty years. He spoke of the Process, of Estella’s sacrifice and of the dark miracle of Tooting Bec. He spoke of the one who had been prepared to take Estella’s place, a boy groomed almost from birth to contain Leviathan and who now needed only to remember a simple formula, an incantation to activate the Process and close the ancient trap. And the small, gray cat spoke, too, of the prince’s part in it all, his responsibility to deliver the boy into the belly of the beast. If the boy is the bullet, said the cat, then you, Your Highness, you are the gun.

When Arthur opened his eyes again, he was at once aware that something had changed, that something had tipped and shifted in the balance of the world which meant that no day would ever seem quite the same ever again. As he rose, awkwardly and painfully, to his feet, something of what had happened came back to him and, with it, certain details of his peculiarly troubling dream. But the prince tried to shake it off, stretching, yawning, attempting to persuade his eyes to focus, forcing himself back into wakefulness.

He looked around for the cat, but if it had ever been there at all, it had long since vanished. Only then did he notice what was happening outside. Snow. Jet-black, ebony snow, hurtling toward the