The Storm Read online

  He left his hand there for a moment more, then jabbed the ON button. It was an old set, and it took a few seconds to warm up, the grey mush gradually giving way to a kids’ show. A little penguin with a funny orange beak was scooting around an igloo, honking. That had to be good news, didn’t it?

  He pressed the channel down button, and it was as if the television was a dam that had suddenly broken, a million tonnes of filthy water sluicing from the screen, blasting away the kitchen, the vicarage, the cemetery and everything else, filling up Brick’s nose and mouth and lungs. He saw it there, amidst the darkness, grainy footage of a vast, churning vortex of smoke and debris, suspended above the city, above the skyscrapers; saw the clouds of matter that spiralled it, all being sucked towards the centre of the storm, towards . . .

  There was a man there, only not a man. How could it be? It was too big, its body ballooned to the size of a building, and yet there it was, its mouth the very core of this abomination, the event horizon at the centre of the black hole. Even from this distance, even on the small screen of the television, Brick could feel the force of the thing, the sheer, unrelenting power of it as it dismantled the world piece by piece.

  He dropped to his knees, the bottle slipping from his hand, forgotten. And somehow, impossibly, the man in the storm seemed to see him there, cowering in this kitchen, because its dead eyes rolled in their sockets, filling with something that was not laughter, that was not madness, that was not glee but some combination of them. It looked at Brick and it spoke, a voice that was lost in the thunder of the tornado, drowned out by the roar of its fury; a voice speaking in no language Brick could recognise, no language that had any place here on earth; but a voice he could understand as easily as if it had crawled into his ear and breathed its needled words directly into his brain.

  You are too late.

  The Other: II

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there's some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England.

  Rupert Brook, ‘The Soldier’

  Harry

  London, 9.14 a.m.

  Captain Harry Botham’s stomach flipped the way it always did on take-off, but it had settled by the time he banked the chopper round and pulled it out of Portsmouth Naval Base. The Apache’s monstrous Rolls-Royce engine growled, the whump of the blades settling into him like a heartbeat as the ground shrank and the sky opened up.

  ‘Coordinates locked,’ said Simon Marshall. The gunner was sitting in front and below him, but his voice was fed through Harry’s helmet speakers. ‘North, we should be there in twenty minutes.’

  Harry checked the heads-up display then pushed the throttle, taking the bird up to 1,000 feet and 180 miles per hour. Up here sunlight poured into the cockpit like liquid gold, his visor darkening automatically to cut out the glare. Two blips appeared on his radar, moving fast, and a second later a pair of RAF jets screamed overhead. Their contrails were the only blemish against the blue, an absolutely flawless summer’s day. God knew they didn’t get many like this, not even in the middle of summer, and Harry had been sunning himself outside the barracks when he was called up. As much as he loved being airborne, he could have done with another couple of hours R and R. Especially as nobody had told him why the RAF’s entire fleet was being mobilised.

  ‘It’s the Chinese, I’m telling you,’ said Marshall, reading his mind. ‘They’ve finally decided they want to rule the world.’

  Harry snorted.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he replied, his voice feeding back into his own ears and making him sound not quite real.

  ‘What then?’ he said. ‘An exercise?’

  ‘They told us this wasn’t an exercise,’ Harry replied. His commanding officer had made that very clear, but the man’s hurried briefing hadn’t provided any information other than the fact that something was going down in London. Something big.

  ‘Probably terrorists,’ he replied with a shrug.

  ‘Well wait till they get a load of me,’ Marshall said, patting his control panel. Harry smiled. The Apache was fully loaded – a 30-millimetre chain gun under the fuselage, capable of pumping out 625 rounds per minute, and a sweet mix of Hellfires and Hydras mounted on the hardpoints. Whatever was waiting for them, it was about to get blown to kingdom come.

  So why was there still a tickle of discomfort in his stomach, one that had nothing to do with the motion of the helicopter? He’d flown on two tours in Afghanistan and hadn’t once felt like this, not even when he’d been clipped by a ground-fired RPG out in Helmand and had to crash-land. Back then the adrenalin had stripped every shred of fear from his system, had turned him into a machine. This was different, he felt way too human, way too vulnerable. Maybe it was because he was flying over home ground, the fields and towns of England floating below like debris on a slow, green river. Maybe it was because he was flying into London, the city he’d once lived in. Maybe. He gulped down more air, suddenly uncomfortable in his seat.

  All they had been told for sure was that there had been some kind of attack on the capital. The order to scramble had come from General Stevens himself, which was a good indication how serious it was. That dude didn’t get out of bed for anything less than a world war.

  ‘Identify and intercept the target,’ he’d said over the comm. And that was that, their orders, five words they had to obey even if it meant life and limb.

  ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ he said, the only poem he’d ever committed to memory. They all had, everyone in the unit.

  ‘Ours is but to do and die,’ Marshall finished. ‘Hell yeah!’

  Harry checked the coordinates, nudged the stick a little to bring the bird back on course. They were over Guildford, a minute or two off the M25. The Apache just ate up the miles.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Marshall. ‘What the . . .’

  Harry squinted through the narrow window, past the sweeping colours of his HUD. Something had a hold of the horizon, a fist of black smoke. The chopper rocked in a bout of turbulence and Harry had the sudden idea that the clenched, knuckled hand was shaking the world, trying to rip it free from its mounting. He glanced at their position, still a good twenty miles away from ground zero, surely too far away to get a visual. He felt his guts squirm again, his hand twitching, wanting to bring the bird around one-eighty. He had to force himself to keep moving forward.

  ‘That thing is . . . It must be huge, Harry.’

  ‘Base, we have eyes on,’ he said, knowing that the command centre had an open line into the chopper. ‘Looks like some kind of explosion. How should we proceed?’

  There was a sharp hiss of static, then the XO’s voice fed through.

  ‘As ordered, Captain. Investigate and intercept. Maintain a perimeter, five miles. We don’t know how dangerous this thing is.’

  ‘Roger,’ he said, slowing the Apache down and lifting her to 2,000 feet. Whatever was down there, he wanted to be as high above it as he could get without entering RAF airspace. Nothing would kill him half as fast as a mid-air collision with a jet. ‘Do we go weapons hot?’

  Another pause, then, ‘Yes, weapons hot.’

  Harry felt his skin go cold and prickly. Any hope that this was an exercise had just been obliterated – there was no way in hell that they’d be given weapons hot status above the biggest city in Europe unless this was real.

  The windscreen was gradually filling with smoke, so thick and so dark that it looked like a huge granite mountain sprouting from the city. No, it was more as though somebody had hacked a section out of the sky. Harry’s polarised visor compensated for the dimming light and he found himself craning forward in his seat trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ Marshall said, his voice whispered into Harry’s ear. ‘Oh Jesus, there’s nothing there.’

  Of course there’s something there, Harry thought. There had to be, with all that smoke. Only it wasn’t smoke, he realised as they closed in. It was things. It was
a spiralling cloud of matter – there were buildings in there, crumbling into pieces as they churned upwards. He could make out glinting shapes that might have been cars, and smaller, darker ones – not people, those can’t be people – that twitched and struggled as they rose. The tornado spun relentlessly, maybe five miles across, sucking everything towards . . .

  What was that? There was a shape in the chaos. Everything spiralled around it, like filthy bathwater circling a drain, sparking off fingers of lightning that were dark instead of bright, which left huge black scars against Harry’s retinas. He didn’t blink. He didn’t dare close his eyes for even a second in case this thing, this impossible nightmare, came for him. He just stared at the figure in the centre of the storm – because that’s what it was, a man. Huge, yes, and deformed, as though his body was a balloon pumped up almost beyond recognition, but still unmistakably human. And the worst thing was its mouth, immense and gaping, breathing in everything with an endless howl that could be heard above the chopper’s engines.

  Harry was throwing up before he even knew it, ripping off his mouthpiece just in time, his breakfast hitting the reinforced glass screen that separated him from his gunner. The chopper banked hard, the ground looming up in the right hand window.

  ‘Christ, Harry,’ Marshall yelled, and Harry realised he’d dropped the stick. He grabbed it, levelled out, bringing the Apache to a standstill and wiping his free hand over his mouth. He spat acid, his whole body drenched in sweat and his stomach cramping hard.

  There was a rip of thunder as a jet flew by overhead, the hiss of two sidewinders being launched. The missiles hurtled into the morning night, impacted right in the middle of the storm. An explosion bubbled out of the chaos, the shockwave making the chopper bounce. But the fire didn’t last, sucked into the man’s vast, dark gullet and extinguished. If anything it seemed to make the tornado churn faster, harder, more of the ground peeling away and carried up by the vortex. And the man still hung there, his eyes two pits of boiling pitch, his mouth sucking in everything it could.

  ‘Fire,’ Harry screamed, feeling a creeping tickle of madness in the corner of his mind. He had to destroy this thing – not to save London, but because he understood that if he had to look at it for much longer then his brain was going to short-circuit. ‘Fire goddammit!’

  Marshall didn’t hesitate, unleashing the chain gun. A deafening rattle filled the cabin, streaks of tracer fire cutting a path towards the man in the storm. The barrage tore through some of the spiralling debris before finding its target, but the 30-millimetre rounds disappeared into the carnage. There was a soft hiss, the chopper rocking as four missiles blasted outwards. Harry counted the seconds – one, two, three – before they ignited in a ball of rippling gold. Once again the explosion was swallowed up, pulled into the man’s cavernous mouth along with the constant stream of debris. Marshall tried again, emptying the Apache’s payload and turning the sky to fire.

  ‘It’s not working,’ the gunner said. But Harry wasn’t listening. The smoke was clearing, and more of the world had been erased. It wasn’t just black, the way things disappear in the dark, it was gone. It was utterly empty. Just looking at it made his head hurt, because there was no way he could comprehend what he was seeing. It just didn’t make sense.

  ‘Harry, get us out of here,’ Marshall shouted. He had turned around, his eyes wide and white. ‘Harry!’

  Something popped, like a cannon blast, and the chopper lurched downwards. It took Harry a moment to realise that it was the pressure changing as air was sucked into the storm. They were being pulled towards it, caught in the flow, the chopper’s demented alarm ringing into his headset. Marshall was banging on the window that separated them, but Harry couldn’t pull his gaze from the windscreen. The bird was tilting downwards, giving him a perfect view of the streets below. They were breaking up, dissolving like sand sculptures in the wind. Buildings and cars and people alike burst into powder, sucked up into the tornado.

  ‘Harry, please,’ said Marshall. Harry felt the chopper buck. It turned slowly, the engines whining, but the force that was pulling them was too strong. It was like being in a boat heading for a waterfall. No, it was more like they were in a spaceship being wrenched towards a black hole. There was nothing they could do, he realised. It was over.

  ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ he said. The Apache shook, so violently that his head smacked against the top of the cockpit. Metal groaned, then the rotors ripped free overhead, spinning off into the darkness. Marshall was shrieking, and Harry tore off his helmet, suddenly drowning in the howl of the storm and that same endless inward breath from the hanging man.

  ‘Ours is but to do and die,’ he went on, louder now. ‘Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die,’ again and again, like a chant, like a prayer, as the front of the chopper began to come apart, breaking into pieces like a kit model. Then Marshall, his arms and legs and head coming loose, hanging there against a backdrop of boiling black skies. Harry looked down, realising that he was no longer inside the helicopter. Pieces of it floated beside him, suspended in the turbulence a mile above the vanishing ground. He’d dreamed of this as a child, night after night, of being able to fly. That memory blew out the fear, and even though he could see his own flesh begin to unravel, layers of pink then red then white trailing outwards, he found himself smiling.

  ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ he said through crumbling lips. Then his mind ruptured into white noise and black light, and everything that was Harry Botham was pulled into the abyss.

  Graham

  London, 9.24 a.m.

  The worst thing was the noise. It was deafening, literally – he couldn’t hear the people screaming, couldn’t hear the revving engines or the wailing car alarms or the crash of metal as it folded into metal at the intersections, not even the explosions. There was only the storm, an endless roar that made the streets tremble, as if the city was a living thing quaking in terror. It was so loud that Graham hadn’t seen more than a handful of windows still intact on his way across town, glass ripped from frames by the immense, rolling sonic pulse that pounded the streets. It was doing the same to his skull, as though the sound was a solid, living thing seeking the right frequency to split open the bone and let his brains slop out on to the pavement.

  He pushed past a crowd of tourists fleeing in the opposite direction, then turned on to Millbank. For a second it appeared in the gap between buildings, a vast, churning mass of matter that curled and spiralled around a core of darkness. From here, ten miles away, it looked halfway between the cloud from an atom bomb and a storm, the sky impossibly dark, as though a section of night had fallen loose, dropped on to London. But in the gaps between the debris, between the flotsam and jetsam of his city, he saw something worse than darkness. He saw the places where the world had been rubbed away.

  Something was happening up there, soft explosions detonating in the middle of the storm. There were jets in the sky, choppers too, being pulled into the hole like toys in a stream. Graham wrenched his head forward, focused on where he was going. It had taken him – how long? – nearly four hours to get from his house to Millbank. He’d had to walk. The city was clogged with people trying to escape, nobody going in the same direction. All the main roads were frozen solid by accidents, the trains and the Tube were shut down, which meant everybody was on foot. He felt as if he had battled past each and every one of London’s eight million inhabitants just to get to Thames House. He’d headed over to Whitehall first, to the counterterrorism unit, but Erika Pierce hadn’t been lying, the place had been deserted. MI5 was the next logical destination, but he had the awful feeling that he’d get there to find its rooms empty too.

  They’ve all fled, and you should too, because it will eat you, that storm, it will devour you. And he knew that was the truth, knew that he should turn tail and run. He’d called David three hours ago, told him to go, to head south, get out of the country if he could. With any luck he’d have reached the coast by now, could
head over the Channel into France. Or maybe he went the other way, maybe he got caught up, carried towards the storm. Maybe now he’s circling the pit, or lost inside it. And the thought of him pulled into nothingness, snuffed out like a flame, the very essence of him extinguished, made Graham want to die. He could go, call him on the way, meet him in Calais and just survive. Just go just go just go.

  He pushed the words away, turning the corner to see the river dead ahead. Even that was agitated, vibrations herding the water into white-lipped eddies and whirlpools, spitting dirty fountains and filling the air with the stench of sewage. The noise was louder here, echoing off the buildings back and forth over the embankment. It sounded like a vast turbine sucking every last scrap of air into its engine. And yet it sounded like something else, too. It sounded like trumpets, like a million war horns being blown in the skies above his head.

  It was the sound of London being eaten alive.

  He ran the last hundred yards to Thames House, finding the main doors open and deserted. There was nobody in the lobby, just a snowstorm of papers on the marble floor. At least the lights were on. Luckily the building had its own power source – several, in fact – because from what he could see half of the city was dark.

  He ducked into the first elevator, using his counterterrorism keycard to activate the control panel. If there was anybody left, they’d be in the emergency bunker control centre – standard procedure for an attack. He counted down the seconds as the elevator descended, wondering how powerful the storm had to be for him to feel its voice so deep beneath the ground, in the rocking of the elevator, the vibrating whine of the metal cables.