The Storm Read online

  – something there inside that bag of flesh that had to be obliterated.

  Kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it.

  He fell to his knees, driving his fists into the squirming shape, again and again, tearing at it with his nails, his teeth, with every weapon he had, wanting just to

  Kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it.

  Wanting it to be gone, to be dead, to be dead, feeling as though he wouldn’t be able to breathe again until he had killed it, like he was drowning, his lungs screaming, and the only way he would ever be able to get to the surface again was to

  Kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it.

  He punched and scratched and gouged and choked and fought and dreamed of the breath he could take when it was dead, and raged and raged and raged.

  Kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it kill it.

  Howie couldn’t feel the punches any more. He couldn’t feel anything. It was as if he was sinking into a grave, dark and numb and cool and peaceful. His thoughts were ravaged, torn to shreds, but in those pieces he saw what had happened: the headache he’d had for days now suddenly vanishing, and then they’d turned on him without warning – Lee, Hayley and that idiot Connor – throwing themselves at him outside the hardware shop, howling like animals. He wasn’t even sure how he’d got away the first time, he’d just put his head down and run. He was good at running, he always had been, but Connor had been faster.

  And Roly, his brother. How could he be in on it? Howie felt his head snap to the side and for an instant he was out of his grave, back on the street. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were open, or if he was just imagining it, but he could see Roly now, kneeling next to him, his knuckles red. That’s my blood on his hands, Howie understood. He’s stealing it.

  He tried to call his brother’s name but he was six feet under again, or at least it felt that way, worms as tough as fingers burrowing into his skin. I don’t want to die, Roly, he thought, hoping the words would reach his brother even though they would never find their way out of his mouth. He was only thirteen, he hadn’t even kissed a girl yet, or had a go on Lee’s dad’s quad bike like he’d been promised. It’s not my time yet, just stop, stop!

  At least he was numb down here. It was getting darker, like somebody was throwing spadefuls of soil on to him. The thought was terrifying, and the shock of adrenalin that followed brought him back for an instant, the street once again there in shades of yellow and grey and red. Fists and feet rose and fell like pistons, like he was stuck inside an engine, and somewhere in his shattered mind he fumbled at gears, trying to drive himself away.

  Howie lifted a hand, wondering why his skin sparkled like he was wearing a suit of ice. Roly slapped it aside, preparing for another strike.

  It never came. His brother’s arm disintegrated, becoming a cloud of ash which hung in the air for a moment before spiralling slowly to the street. Roly didn’t even notice, just attacked with the stump of his wrist and his other fist. The fingers of his left hand came apart, leaving trails of red and white in the air like streamers. Then the rest of his body came undone, dissolving like a sculpture of salt thrown into a hurricane.

  Howie couldn’t move his head, but in the corner of his vision he saw Connor melt away into the night. The soft breeze made the boy’s ashes dance in looping circles. Two more soft pops followed and the air was a shimmering haze of dust.

  ‘Is he alive?’ the words seemed to come from a million miles away. Somebody crouched down beside him, a girl, brushing powdered bone from her skirt. She put her hand to his head, leaving it there for a moment. Howie tried to nuzzle against it, but she pulled her fingers away, wrapping them in her other hand.

  ‘He’s freezing,’ she said. ‘He’s one of us.’

  Thank you, Howie wanted to say. The words were forgotten, though, when a boy appeared beside her. Where his eyes should have been there were pockets of fire, blue and gold and fierce. The inferno consumed his whole body, and from his back stretched two huge, perfect wings as pure and as bright as the sun. An angel, Howie thought, and he wondered if he had died.

  Then the boy blinked, and the fires burned out.

  ‘No, you’re not dead,’ the angel boy said. ‘You’ll be okay. We’ll look after you.’

  ‘Get him up,’ said the girl. Howie felt hands under him, lifting him, and there was no pain. ‘My name is Rilke. This is Schiller. You’re going away somewhere now, but it won’t be for long. When you wake up again, well . . .’ she smiled, but Howie couldn’t quite work out what was in that smile. ‘You’ll have fire too. Don’t be scared, you’ve been chosen.’

  He wasn’t scared, even though his vision was darkening, cotton wool in his ears. It didn’t feel as though he was sinking into a grave this time, it was more like lying in bed and drifting off to sleep, warm and comfy and safe.

  The girl called Rilke placed her hand on the angel boy’s cheek, offering him the same smile.

  ‘You’re getting good at this, little brother,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she went on. ‘Burn it all, don’t leave anything except sand.’

  And that was the last thing Howie heard before sinking into sleep, already dreaming of the fire that would be his when he woke.

  The Other: I

  And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.

  Book of Revelation 11:7

  Graham

  Monday, London, 5.45 a.m.

  The sound of the phone wormed its way into his dream, and for a moment he was floundering in an ocean full of bells. Then he was awake, switching on his lamp and groping in the dark for the mobile beside his bed. He had it halfway to his ear before he noticed it wasn’t making the noise, and that realisation blasted the last few scraps of sleep away.

  It was his other phone. The bad things phone.

  He swore, tumbling out of bed and ignoring the murmured protests from his boyfriend. The ringtone cut through his head, its cry shrill and relentless. Bad things bad things bad things his mind sang along as he rummaged through the suit trousers hanging on the wardrobe door. He ripped out the mobile, the vibrations making it feel like a living thing trying to squirm free. He almost dropped it, better to let it go than to find out why it was ringing. Instead he flipped it open and put it to his ear.

  ‘This is Hayling,’ he said, although the introduction was pointless. The caller knew he was Graham Hayling, chief officer of the army’s counterterrorism division, otherwise he wouldn’t have dialled this number. Because this number was for emergencies – not your average run-of-the-mill serial killer or arson or train crash or bank-robbery emergencies, but code red, critical, end of the world emergencies. Bad things.

  ‘Sir . . .’ the voice belonged to Erika Pierce, his second in command, only it sounded somehow hollow, dead. Don’t say it, he prayed. Please don’t say it. But she did: ‘Something’s happened.’

  ‘An attack?’ he asked, using his shoulder to pin the phone to his ear while he scrambled into his trousers. Erika sighed, and he could picture her chewing her bottom lip. In the pause that followed he heard the echo of sirens on the line.

  ‘I think so,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s . . .’

  Bad, he thought when she didn’t finish. It couldn’t be worse than 7/7 though, could it? That was the last time he’d had to pick up this phone, only that time he’d been in Majorca and they’d flown him home in a VC10. He glanced at the bed, David propped up on one elbow blinking at him.

  ‘Where?’ he asked Erika.

  ‘London,’ she replied. ‘Somewhere on the M1. We can’t be sure yet.’

  Can’t be sure meant they couldn’t get near, and that scared Graham so much he slumped on to the edge of the mattress. Can’t be sure mea
nt dirty bombs, or worse; it meant contamination.

  ‘We sent two teams up,’ she went on. ‘Neither came back. There’s something . . . It’s not right.’

  ‘I’ll be right there, Erika,’ he said. ‘Don’t be scared.’ And that was just about the stupidest thing he ever could have said to Erika Pierce, who had come top of her academy class at just about everything, who had single-handedly uncovered a plot to smuggle liquid explosives on to a Navy carrier and once punched a suspect so hard that she’d broken his jaw. But the voice on the phone didn’t sound like his partner’s, it sounded like a child’s, lost and frightened.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Don’t. I wasn’t calling you to get you here, I was calling you so you could get away.’

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Erika, what are you talking about? Listen, I’m leaving the house now, just hang on.’

  ‘I won’t be here,’ she said, a ghost’s whisper. ‘I’m sorry, Graham.’

  He said her name again before he realised she’d hung up. What the hell? He looked at the phone as if somehow it could tell him more, then tucked it into his pocket and tightened his belt.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said David, rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Nothing,’ he lied, pulling yesterday’s shirt over his head and throwing a jacket on top. He didn’t bother searching for socks, just slipped his shoes on, the leather cold and unpleasant against his skin. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I know.’

  He took three steps towards the bedroom door when something stopped him, a pressure in his stomach. It felt like a rope, one that had wound itself around his guts and was anchoring them tight. Fear, he told himself. And that was true, but this was something else, something more. I was calling you so you could get away, Erika had said. Get away. Get away. Get away. He turned back to David, wanted nothing more than to take his hand and run, and keep running. Instead he walked out of the bedroom and down the landing to the apartment’s front door.

  Outside, dawn had failed. Where sunlight should have been pouring over the lip of the world there was only a muted haze. It hung in the air, rotten, the colour of a dead man’s skin. The sensation in Graham’s gut intensified, his pulse racing, that same nervous chant – bad things bad things bad things – battering the inside of his skull like a trapped bird. There were too many people here, he realised. At this hour there should have been a sprinkling of delivery drivers and market sellers and the last dismal dregs of the drunken clubbers. But the street was full, cars gridlocked and honking all the way up to the store on the corner where a white van straddled both lanes, engine smoking. He was amazed the noise hadn’t woken him sooner. A crowd was pushing up the pavement, weaving in between the motionless traffic as people made their way towards Gospel Oak Tube. Everyone was moving east, and when Graham turned his head to see where they were coming from he understood why.

  Over the rooftops and the trees of Hampstead Heath, the sky was broken.

  Smoke churned upwards, a vortex so thick and so dark it could have been granite. It looked like a tornado, only it must have been two miles wide, maybe more. It rotated slowly, almost gracefully, forming a pool of oil-coloured cloud overhead. Explosions detonated inside the column, but they had no light – whipcracks of black lightning that left traces on Graham’s vision, dark spots when he blinked. Every time they flashed they rent the air apart, revealing what was inside the vortex. Or rather what wasn’t inside it.

  Nothing, Graham thought, feeling as though he were teetering on the edge of some vast, awful madness. There is nothing there. It wasn’t just empty, it was utterly, utterly void. He could make out slivers of sky that weren’t dark and weren’t light – that weren’t anything at all. It looked as if a mirror had been smashed, shards shaken loose to reveal the truth behind.

  Another blast of negative light sliced through the vortex, cutting a silhouette into the smoke. Was that a person in there? It was too big, surely, too high off the ground. Yet it was there, a figure in the very centre of the maelstrom, a man in the storm. Graham was miles away from it, and yet he felt as though that man was looking right at him with eyes of inverted fire. They burned into him, the darkness seeming to expand in his vision until he was blind. It doesn’t matter, he heard himself think. It’s better that I can’t see, better that I just—

  Something thumped into him, sending him stumbling back into the door of his apartment block. The woman muttered an apology, dragging a screaming child down the road after her. Graham caught his breath, shaking some of the darkness out of his eyes. He almost looked up again before stopping, putting a hand up to shield himself from the skies. Whatever it was over there, it was a bad thing, a really bad thing. And it was his job to make sure bad things didn’t happen. He turned away, flicked open his phone and hit the first number of his address book. It rang just once before somebody answered, and Graham didn’t give them a chance to speak.

  ‘Get me General Stevens,’ he said. ‘And tell him we’re under attack.’

  Dawn

  And where two raging fires meet together

  They do consume the thing that feeds their fury.

  William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

  Cal

  Hemmingway, 6.01 a.m.

  Pieces of broken world were still falling when Cal opened his eyes.

  They drifted down on to the windscreen of the Freelander, forming a translucent layer that looked like snow but which he knew was actually rock and metal and powdered flesh. He sat up, his back numb from a night in the passenger seat, his feet full of needles. The entire car wore a jacket of dust, all except for the broken driver’s side window. Through it, the land had turned the colour of bone, blanketed in the same fine powder. It was like every single thing on earth had been erased.

  Every single thing except us, he thought.

  It had to be morning, though, because parchment-yellow light streamed into the car. And there were birds too, he realised, singing so loud and so hard he wondered if that’s what had woken him. They had short memories, the birds, they had already forgotten what had happened. Not him, though. He had spent the night dreaming of it over and over and over again – the police, the Fury, and Schiller, the boy in the fire.

  The angel.

  Cal shook his head, easing his aching neck round to see Adam lying across the back seat. The little boy was out cold, shivering in his sleep. It was no wonder. Daisy lay in the Freelander’s boot, smothered in coats and blankets and pretty much everything else they could find, but still ice cold. Literally ice cold. The chill coming off her had frosted the inside of the tailgate window, had turned the leather seats into crystal. The poor girl had been shot, had taken a bullet in the shoulder from one of the few policemen who hadn’t gone feral. And now . . .

  She was changing, Cal knew. Schiller had gone through the same thing, imprisoned in ice before he was gripped by fire. Daisy was in some kind of cocoon, and when she woke she’d be just like him. Sooner or later they all would.

  No, he told himself. Not like him, not killers.

  The memories were making him sweat despite the cold. He popped open the door, an avalanche of dust sliding free, filling his eyes and nose and mouth. He clambered out, spitting, ignoring the protests from his cramped back. At least his finger felt better – stiff but not painful. His nose, too. He didn’t think anything was broken.

  Winter had risen overnight, the world covered by the same snow-grey sheet. Dark clouds scarred the cold, blue sky – not rainclouds, not storms, just earth and cars and trees and people blown to atoms, lighter than air. Clumps danced their way back to the land only to be kicked up again by the breeze that whispered in off the sea.

  ‘We need to go.’ The voice didn’t seem to have any place out here, and it made Cal jump. He turned, looking over the Freelander’s bonnet to see Brick standing there. The older boy’s ginger hair was the brightest thing in sight, glinting like copper. A trail of footprints spiralled out around him, curling around the boarded-up toilet block all the way up
the dunes. Once upon a time this had been a car park, Cal remembered, the place where he and Daisy had first met Brick. How long ago had that been? Three days? It felt like forever. The entire universe had been turned upside down and shaken like a snow globe.

  ‘Now,’ Brick said, his tone just as blunt and infuriating as always. ‘Been here too long.’

  ‘Morning to you too, mate,’ Cal replied, running his fingers down the bonnet and leaving grooves in the dust. Up close he could see the different colours there – brown and silver and red, so much red. Blood, muscle, brain, all reduced to powder by the power that had blazed from Schiller’s new body. It couldn’t have been possible, and yet here it was, all around him, life made dust by the blink of a burning eye.

  Only it hadn’t really been Schiller, had it? He was the one who had turned, but it was his sister who had forced him to kill so many.

  ‘Rilke,’ he spat, remembering some of the last words he’d heard her speak: But it told you why we are here, didn’t it. To wage war with humanity. Schiller’s eyes had burned, yes, but the insanity in Rilke’s own gaze had scared Cal far more.

  ‘What about her?’ asked Brick. ‘Rilke’s long gone, isn’t she?’

  Cal nodded. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but she was miles away from Hemmingway. He could almost see her, walking with Schiller and Marcus and Jade, leaving a trail of death in her wake. Or maybe that was just his imagination. He wished Daisy would wake. She’d know for sure which way Rilke had headed. Daisy knew things like that, even when nobody told her. But Daisy was frozen, and when she woke she’d be something else entirely.

  ‘We need to talk,’ Cal said, scuffing his trainer on the ground. ‘About what happened. We need to think of a plan.’

  Brick snorted a humourless laugh, running a hand through his hair and giving himself a pale halo of powder. They hadn’t spoken much at all last night, they’d been too exhausted. They had found the car, climbed inside, and fallen asleep.