Kristin Read online

  Kristin was dead.

  He wished he were dead too. Dead and lying deep beneath the cold earth from which she’d arisen, wished the bullets had finished him off. But he thought of his parents, of the gift of life their love had given him, of his inexplicable responsibility to humanity, and he abandoned any notion of leaving this life. She would wait for him, she had promised.

  As he kissed her lacerated, disfigured lips Commander Richard Morton left his hiding place and approached the clearing. Thom looked up at his towering figure and bared his teeth. ‘You said she wouldn’t suffer ... you said it would be quick!’

  ‘I doubt she knew much about it,’ Morton said. ‘The body goes into shock you see, you don’t feel anything after the first couple of cartridges. Look, I’m sorry we had to nip you in the leg. You were the bait, I’m afraid.’

  ‘ ... What are you going to do with her? I want her to receive a proper burial.’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, shaking his head, as another soldier appeared behind him. ‘Sergeant Wilshere, attend to Mr Sharman’s wound will you?’

  The young soldier stooped, lifted him and helped him from the clearing

  Thom looked back just once, and felt her true spirit smile down upon him as it lifted into the dank air above the tree tops. He could no longer feel the presence of evil, it had ceased to exist the moment her heart stopped beating, just as she’d predicted.

  Morton stared at his victim. He’d heard the rumours although he didn’t believe them. But he kicked her blood-soaked legs, poked her in the head with the muzzle of his assault rifle several times until he was satisfied the manoeuvre had been successful. Then the first pangs of remorse struck him like a hard slap around the face. He’d never killed a woman before — an unarmed woman. A woman whom even after having suffered such a death had somehow managed to retain a disturbing measure of beauty.

  Now he wished he’d instructed his men to restrict their aim to her torso, so her face had not been disfigured so badly. But he was a professional, he’d had his orders and had carried them out to the letter: Kill her, and do not leave her recognizable — destroy her icon. But the soldier within Morton had found it impossible to perceive her as a threat to himself, his men, or anybody else and he bowed his head in shame, praying to God for forgiveness. Then his eyes glimpsed a flash of metal inside a weeping hole in her neck. He leaned forwards, breathless. Another sparkle revealed a greater surface area of the cartridge; it must be turning with postmortal, muscular spasm? It was something he’d seen in the field before. But the flattened tip turned towards him, protruded from her mutilated flesh and disgorged itself as if rejected by her lifeless being, rolling onto the wet earth. The skin drew together and healed, leaving little indication of trauma.

  He stepped back and readied his rifle, shaking his head. ‘Impossible,’ he murmured. ‘Downright fucking impossible.’

  The bullet that had blown away most of the left hand side of her face was next to be ejected, followed by more in her chest and stomach. Others exited her arms and legs until hundreds of rounds lay upon the soil. Apart from her shredded clothing it was as if she’d never been shot.

  Morton moved forwards, stood astride her and aimed directly between her rain-lashed eyes. ‘Now, my beauty, I’m afraid I must send you straight to hell ... where you truly belong.’

  He began to pull back on the trigger. But, uncharacter-istically for the ultra-reliable weapon, the mechanism jammed. Her eyelids sprang open, the reborn organs beneath aflame, and they burned through his soul.

  ‘Hell?’

  His men had shot most of her jaw away, and her mouth hadn’t moved: Something had spoken for her.

  ‘Ah, that ultimate destination that mortal man fears more than any other, but to which I am fully accustomed. Thou shalt live in hell now, soldier, and for the remainder of thy days.’

  Morton choked.

  She shifted her bodyweight slowly, agonizingly, and gazed up at him. ‘And now I will make thee hurt … ’

  ‘Be quite, you fucking monster!’

  ‘It will be an empty existence for thee, now thy spousewife is dying. She is being murdered by thy three young offspring.’

  ‘What are you talking about, you piece of shit?’

  ‘They are clubbing her to death. They crept up on her from behind and are taking it in turn, using heavy objects that came into their hands ... ahhh ... she has departed!’

  He reversed the rifle and swung the butt at her head, smashing it back against the granite. But she could feel no more pain. ‘Fucking lying bitch!’

  ‘ … Thou … existeth in a space whose exterior is blue in colour. There is green foliage outside the perimeter, with species of ... willow ... elm and offspring’s playthings crafted from another species I cannot readily identify.’

  Morton searched what was left of her face for any sign of falsehood but could find none and he knew, instinctively, that she’d spoken the truth. He dropped to his knees before her, his tungsten hardness gone.

  ‘Thy progeny will live with madness and guilt all their lives. Thou shalt live with intolerable, infinite loss. This is the price thou shalt pay. And thou shalt never give such orders again.’

  Morton poked out his tongue, bit the organ right through and spat it out, his throttled cries vying with the roar of the teeming rain on the leaves of the trees.

  ‘Neither shalt thou operate such a weapon.’

  The flesh of his hands melted to the bone and ran into the puddles as hers continued to repair.

  Then she turned towards the hedges — an action that elicited screams of agony as Morton’s men perished one after the other.

  Twenty-five

  Prime Minister Andrew Devlin sat at the head of the long, mahogany table in the Cabinet Room of Ten Downing Street. To his immediate right was General Sir Ashley Valentine, head of the British Army, and to his left United Nations President, James Bathurst. Further down the coffin-shaped table Aldous Waldegrave, the Archbishop of Canterbury, faced Cardinal Cezar Valdez.

  Devlin leaned forwards and formed a flexing apex with his fingers. ‘Let me be absolutely sure I understand what you’ve just told me, just in case I ... misheard you. You’re saying that this woman, this girl ... isn’t human?’

  ‘She is a child of God, just like the rest of us,’ Waldegrave replied. ‘But she has no soul. It has been replaced by something quite terrible.’

  ‘Replaced ... by what?’

  ‘By the opposite of all that is good in mankind. By the antichrist.’

  Devlin sat bolt upright.

  ‘Prime Minister,’ Bathurst said. ‘We understand you have video footage of the Special Air Service Manoeuvre? Prime Minister?’

  Devlin tore his eyes away from the portrait of Sir Robert Walpole above the grand fireplace. ‘Yes ... yes, that’s correct.’ The premier pressed a button on a gold panel and a screen unfurled from the ceiling. He looked round the table slowly and then prodded a second button to start the digital projector.

  They watched in horror as the hail of ammunition riddled Kristin’s body, lifting her from the ground. The men of God turned away in disgust. And then the assembled observed her impossible rebirth, her revenge. The recording ended and silence held sway.

  ‘Prime Minister?’ Valentine said, eventually. ‘Sir?’

  Devlin stared at him wide-eyed. He hadn’t seen the footage before and his mind was in turmoil.

  ‘We’ve never known anything like this before, there’s no precedent. It isn’t humanly possible to withstand an attack of this magnitude — even if she’d been wearing a vest. We’re talking about hundreds of rounds, sir.’

  ‘ ... Are you telling me that this person is immortal, General?’

  Valentine could offer no answer.

  ‘Then how can we ever win? If we’re to assume that she is responsible for everything, how on earth do we stop her?’

  ‘Her possessor will not let her perish,’ said Cardinal Valdez. ‘It won’t allow her to be harmed in a
ny way. She’s it’s host, its earthly body, its vehicle for existence, its means to enable it to achieve its purpose.’

  ‘What is its purpose, Cardinal?’

  ‘To overthrow Christianity, to deliver humanity itself to hell, and if we don’t act quickly it will succeed.’

  Bathurst patted his pockets until he found his cigarettes and took one out. ‘Does anybody mind? Prime Minister, gentlemen, I believe there’s little doubt now, however hard it may be to accept, that this girl, this presence in our midst, is the real enemy of humanity. What we’ve witnessed here in this room this morning — countless other incidents connected to her actions — can’t be explained by the use of mind control methods employed by the Islamic terrorists as a form of modern warfare, as we’d first suspected.’ He drew deeply on the cigarette and filled the air with its smoke. ‘I feel that, overall, we were ... in error ... reaching the resolution we did. In actual fact, I believe we’ve made a terrible mistake.’

  ‘Resolution? What resolution was reached?’ Waldegrave asked.

  He smoked the cigarette to the butt and looked pensively around the table before replying. ‘The security council reached a unanimous decision ... in view of the repeated refusal of the administrations of Afghanistan and North Korea to admit United Nations disarmament teams — and in light of our belief that the Islamic group had successfully engineered and unleashed some type of psychological warfare upon the West in preparation for the enforced conversion of Christianity to Islam — the Security Council reached the unanimous decision to launch pre-emptive nuclear strikes on Kabul, the northern region of Afghanistan, Pyongyang, and the missile base in the Kangwon province of North Korea.’

  Waldegrave’s complexion turned powder white.

  ‘Such neurosis,’ Valdez whispered, through trembling lips. ‘Hysteria that has now manifested itself as insanity.’

  ‘You have its exercised its will, played directly into its eager hands,’ Waldegrave added, condemningly. ‘This is what it sought, for man’s loathing of his fellow man to become an irreversible sickness, for it to destroy itself. Now it knows its work is nearly complete.’

  ‘But why now?’ Devlin asked. ‘Why has it chosen now to visit us, Archbishop?’

  ‘Man has become so iniquitous, so warring, his heart filled with such hatred. Your United Nations Council was charged with the safeguard of international society and yet its representatives freely determined to attack human beings with weapons too terrible to contemplate, the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forgotten. The presence sees this as weakness of spirit, an opportunity to gain absolute mastery of the human race.’

  ‘How do we stop it? How do we kill her?’

  ‘To kill this woman would neither be the solution nor morally acceptable. To kill is to break the sixth commandment of God and we will have no part in that. Instead, we must draw out the evil that has invaded her soul and destroy it.’

  ‘But how do we do that?’

  ‘We’ve arranged to fly to Rome this evening,’ Valdez said. ‘There we will meet the remaining leaders of the Christian church in Europe, those who are unscathed. We shall assemble at Saint Peter’s Basilica, in Vatican City, and believe that our combined presence in a place of such religious significance will bring the devil to us. Upon its arrival we shall exorcise the abomination from the soul of this beleaguered woman.’

  Devlin leaned forwards, his chair creaking, and stared at Bathurst. ‘ … How much time, Mr Bathurst?’ he asked, his throat painfully tight.

  The United Nations President stared vacantly into space.

  ‘How much time is left?’

  ‘Mr Bathurst?’ Valentine prompted.

  ‘ ... Twenty-four hours.’

  The clerics hung their heads.

  ‘Go back to New York at once,’ Devlin instructed. ‘Reconvene the Security Council. Use your influence, do whatever you must, but in the name of God get this monstrous decision overturned.’

  ‘But sir, their threat to us will remain,’ Valentine warned, urgently.

  ‘Yes, I know, but I’m going to put my trust in them as human beings. We will not be responsible for starting a holocaust.’

  Twenty-six

  The thirteen men of the church waited, arms linked, in a resolute line beneath the great dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, protecting the beautiful papal altar that glinted warmly in the early morning light under Bernini’s magnificent canopy of gilded bronze. Facing towards the atrium, the Door of Death and the Holy Door beyond, the brevity of their respiration was palpable.

  When the vile enigma entered the basilica, drifting through the dense wall of travertine stone between the two entrances, there were gasps of dismay, hastily uttered prayers, and two of the elders wilted as the Beast’s presence sapped their strength.

  Aldous Waldegrave shuddered with revulsion as she slid down the brilliant marble nave, snorting like a pig, slavering onto the cold stone.

  She reached them and passed along their line, examining each man in turn, inhaling his fear. Then she took three backward steps. ‘A crude ploy,’ the Beast grunted. ‘I might have guessed. The men of God arrayed against me, seeking to wash the girl clean of me. Fools!’

  Cardinal Cezar Valdez stepped forwards. ‘ ... Dear Lord, I beg you to release this woman from the dreadful curse that has befallen her. Please help us this day to remove the rotten manifestation from her ... ’

  ‘Motherfucker! I shall dwell forever within her mortal shell. I shall abide, always, within the hearts of everybody, everywhere.’

  Aldous Waldegrave braced himself, his eyes stinging with sweat. ‘ ... In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy ... ’

  ‘Tell the Son to go fuck himself!’

  ‘ ... and the Holy Ghost, I command that you leave this ... ’

  ‘COMMAND? WANKER! Thou shalt not command me!’

  ‘ ... body, and return to the confines of hell.’

  ‘Dost thou think it makes any difference if thou art one or so many? If thou wert a thousand, a million strong, if every bastard on Earth prayed with thee I would still not be expunged, not whilst such doubt of allegiance prevails within the spirit of man. Many have welcomed my coming and bid me stay. Thy violence, thy greed, feeds my soul and makes me strong.’

  Armando Vasquez, the Bishop of Valencia, crept forwards with trepidation and reached out to lay his hands on her. The Beast acted swiftly, using materialized thought to sever his fingers at the first knuckle, and he fell to the immaculate altar, blood gushing, his screams resounding in the cavernous cathedral.

  ‘So simple,’ it wheezed. ‘So easy for me to stop thee harming her. Now, use those mushy organs of thought thy maker gave thee and join me, heart and soul, or go to meet him.’

  ‘In the name of the Father, the ... ’

  ‘Ah yes, keep trying ... that’s it!’ it rumbled, spitting bile into Valdez’s face, burning his eyes.

  But their prayers began to unsettle it. It felt as if it were caught in a vacuum, as though it were being sucked out of the flesh and bones of the girl, from the existence, the security she provided. The collective was stronger than it had expected.

  ‘PIOUS ARSEFUCKERS!’ it shrieked.

  ‘ ... and the Lord will protect this woman’s ... ’

  ‘Leave her be!’ it begged. ‘Canst thou not feel her pain?’

  ‘ ... soul from the darkness that has forced itself upon her.’

  She clutched her head and squealed, acidic drool splattering onto the brilliant marble. Her shadow of pure evil could sense that it was being drawn out, that it was coming to an end after millennia. It was time to act.

  It allowed its poison to flow freely into their minds and watched as they set upon one another with shocking barbarity. But it spared the one it surmised to be their leader, the one with the purest speech, making him observe the carnage, helpless.

  A young cleric lifted a golden ciboria above his head and brought it crashing down upon Valdez’s head, splitting it open like a melon. Two s
enior members of the church, men who had no reason to hate each other, grappled viscously. They spat, they struck, they kicked, they gouged, and the Beast felt the noose around its neck loosen.

  One by one the men succumbed to the irrepressible rage that burned within their souls, until all but two of them had perished and the altar was awash with their blood.

  Waldegrave stared into Valdez’s scorched eyes as life departed them, and his shoulders started to shake.

  She stood over the defeated, kneeling man. ‘A valiant effort, I suppose,’ the Beast muttered, begrudgingly, masking the unprecedented fear it had experienced moments earlier. ‘But humanity has fallen to me, now its future will be entirely of my making. What wilt thou do, clear-tongue, now that thy co-conspirators lie bloodied, dead?’ It encouraged her to run her fingers through his sodden, white hair. ‘Wouldst thou live in my world? Couldst thou, I wonder? Perhaps, with a little help from me. But no ... thy time has passed.’

  She placed two fingers on his forehead and the Beast passed a charge of electricity through them into his his brain. Waldegrave’s eyes rolled up until they were white. He shook violently and toppled forwards stiffly, smoke blowing from his open mouth, and his tears stopped.

  The Beast elevated her attenuated body in a vertical trajectory and its physical make-up altered, enabling it to amalgamate with the atoms of the brick dome and materialize into the bright morning light on the other side.

  Kristin held on to the masonry of the dome in desperation. A strong gust of wind blew her forwards and she clawed at the lead flashing as the ground so far below spun dizzyingly; she didn’t like being this far from terra firma and she could feel the Beast revelling in her anxiety.