Kristin (16 page)

The threat in her eyes, the
entity’s portals onto earthly life, had been temporarily abrogated by human emotion.

‘A good person whose soul
has been invaded, obliterated by a terrible force she can no longer control.’

‘Yes, I’m nothing more than
the badness now, Thom, it’s consumed me. I’m its tool.
You must end my life
. As soon as I’m
dead, the badness will die, and the world will be free of it. One small sacrifice,
Thom.’

‘But it has no weakness.’

‘I can’t help you, its
achilles heel is the last thing it would ever reveal to me, words it would
never allow me to utter. But I can feel its fear of you, it’s palpable,
absolute. It can’t bear to be anywhere near you, and yet it’s drawn to you like
a moth to a flame. Its abhorrence of you is greater than anyone, anything else
on this Earth. I’ve done my best to shield you from it but I’m so tired. It
means to do you harm, Thom, it wants to kill you.
It must kill you
.’

She flinched as it
continued to preach, indoctrinate and kill. ‘Take it before it takes you.
You’re a good man, Thom, a righteous man, with untold powers. You must find a
way of ...
no
more words
,
bitch
!’
it spat, jerking her head back like a puppet. ‘Don’t worry, Thom, you’ll find a
way.

My life here will end and
one day you’ll join me — tomorrow, the next day, or in many years time,
it doesn’t matter when, you know we’ll be together again, you know we could
never be parted forever.’

Twenty-one

An olive-skinned man stubbed out his
cigarette against a red brick wall and stepped out of the shadows. He glided
silently across the road, entered the building and propped himself against the
bar, ignoring their gaze.

‘
A new whoreson in my presence
,’ the raw
voice scratched, acerbically.

‘Any service in here?’ the
man barked.

Thom nodded at the opened
bottle and the man stood, sidled arrogantly behind the bar, dispensed a long
drink and sat on a bar stool facing them. He was tall. His dark brown hair was
slicked back, his cobalt blue eyes were cold and dead. He tipped his head,
emptied the glass, and smiled insincerely. ‘Quiet in here?’ He took an extra
glass from the shelf and filled all three. ‘Some weird shit goin’ down. Whad’ya
think, huh? Think it’s the end of the world, huh? Think we’re all gonna die?
Shit, I wouldn’t fuckin’ mind man, all my family’s dead or crazy. Think it’s
the apocalypse?’

‘
Believe it
,’ the voice brayed.

Thom downed the alcohol and
stared hard at him, his brow creasing as the latino-american drawl left the
man’s lips.

‘Not drinking, huh?’ the
man asked the chilling, black-eyed woman.

‘Keep thy vile, burning
fluid,’ she hissed.

‘I’m from Detroit. Shit’s
happenin’ there too man ... fathers killing sons ... friends kickin’ each other
to death ... churches burnin’ ... man! Hey, I know you!’

‘
Thou knowest me
? Brash fucker! Not even
my father recognizes me.’

‘Yeah, sure, you’re that
fuckin’ girl, right? On TV? Is it true what they’re sayin’ ‘bout you? Man ...
you’re one
crazy
bitch!’ He reached slowly inside his jacket and laid his hand on something
smooth and cold. His long fingers wrapped around it, grasping it lightly. He
tensed his biceps, feint perspiration forming on his brow.

Her jet eyes lost their
reflectance. Suddenly, they seemed vast, hollow spaces empty of all matter, and
he could feel a presence stripping him bare as it entered his mind, read his
intentions. He shuddered, fear was a new experience for him.

Beneath the jacket he loosened
his hold, involuntarily rotated the smooth grip. The opposite end, the
razor-sharp tip, pierced the sheer fabric of his white, cotton shirt, drawing a
small drop of blood from his abdomen.

‘Bitch!’ he spat.

‘Thou wert slow, far too
slow, and I will do anything to protect her.’

‘You are up against the
best now, motherfucker.’

‘A killer never hesitates …
he kills.’

‘Y’know, you’re right,
and it
’
s kind of a pity
.’
He spun the hunting knife and slashed her throat once ... twice ... then drove
it in and left it there.

The assassin stepped
backwards, and the shower of her blood covered his smiling face, which
transformed into a featureless wall of skin.

Thom caught him with a blow
to the cheek, another to the ear, but the man was bigger, stronger, and he brought
a bottle down upon Thom’s head, pitching him into darkness.

She seized the knife with
both hands and withdrew it, slamming it down on the bar. The echo sounded like
cannon fire. The spray from her neck slowed to a trickle and stopped. ‘Didst
thou believe I would just let thee kill her?’ it gargled defiantly, as the last
drops ran from her lips.

The knife evolved into a
sword. She thrust it through the white material of his shirt into his hard
stomach and sliced upwards to the sternum with enough force to gut a shark,
spilling his internal organs. The partially digested, bloody effluence of his
final meal splattered onto the virgin carpeting. His throttled screams, begging
for a mercifully quick death, fell upon deaf ears as she elevated his dripping,
shelled carcass above her head, watching with relish as he wriggled on the long
blade, his eyes bulging with blood and shock.

When he was still she
tipped the blade. His corpse slipped from it, crumpled to the floor and
vanished. She lifted the sword to her mouth and ran her tongue along its
razor-sharp edge, severing the tip: The taste of the lifeblood still tasted
bitter to her, unpalatable. How could this species exist with such a foul
substance circulating within their bodies? Soon only hatred would pump through
their veins. It would be the only lifeblood they would need.

Twenty-two

‘Prime Minister?’

‘Yes.’

‘Our attempt to terminate
the enigma has failed, or so we must assume.’

‘ ...
What attempt
?’

‘Our man should have contacted
us on a secure line by six this morning. He hasn’t done so and as he’s always
punctual it can only mean one thing, that he’s dead.’

‘I see,’ said the new
Premier, Andrew Devlin. You should have told us your plans. Christ. We’ll send
our best men in.’ He put down the red phone, his hotline to the corridors of
power across the Atlantic, and stared at the black one: Now he would organize
his own solution.

Devlin had been at the
funeral of a close friend in the Solomon Islands when the siren sounded. The
disturbing, disruptive tone had been weak there, as it had in many oceanic
regions, its effect minimal. But he’d watched the television broadcast three
days later expecting his doubts over the girl’s apparently terrible powers to
be substantiated. Instead he’d witnessed the transformation of Greta Johansson
from beautiful young television presenter into bloated old hag — a
grotesque, smoking carcass.

He withdrew a document from
a desk drawer, faxed to Downing Street by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner,
William Spence, and read once more of the grim death of Professor Hassin Baabda
at Scotland Yard. The vastly experienced police psychiatrist had spent less
then thirty minutes alone with Kristin and was subsequently discovered with
half of his skull missing, his brain extirpated. The security camera recording
of the examination had shown Baabda reeling as a series of unseen blows punched
cavernous holes in his head, whilst his subject rocked, crazed, but safely
restrained in a steel chair inside a room she’d somehow sealed against outside
interference. Logic dictated that it was impossible for anybody to commit such
acts. But the world was no longer governed by logic.

Pacing the room, he turned
to the left and saw his reflection in the large, gilt-framed wall mirror. The
insanity had killed his predecessor, the man who’d led his country so ably,
with such distinction, for three years. But he would
not
buckle under the colossal weight
placed so suddenly upon his inexperienced shoulders. He would
not
succumb.
He’d fight the psychosis and demand that the surviving members of his cabinet
do the same. He would not allow the nation to degrade any further. If this was
a battle that could be won then his country would lead the way, he’d make sure
of that. If the assassination of the female anomaly might help the cause, if
only superficially, then so be it. He returned to his desk, picked up the black
phone, and ordered the killing. There would be no mistake this time.

Twenty-three

The monster inside the human being felt her
shiver as she huddled against a wall, defenceless against the relentless
barrage of hailstones that battered her sallow face, making her howl with
discomfort. It was a new type of pain — not as bad as a bullet in the
back, but unpleasant all the same. It imagined the hard, frozen droplets of
water had been sent by its father as further punishment for transgressing his
foremost law once again.

It made her open the coat,
hoping that the repulsive edict burnt into her flesh had vanished, or would
prove to be a mental aberration on her part, but it was still there and unlike
the traumatic gunshot wound, it showed no sign of healing.

It had been close to the
Christ, very close, after it fled Koreans and returned to the streets it knew
so well. But then the female had heard footsteps behind her, moving with
stealth. She’d whirled around to find nobody there. There had been a deafening
sound, a contained explosion, and she’d been blown forwards, landing face down
on the frozen ground. She didn’t know anything was wrong, couldn’t feel any
pain at first. Her back felt wet but she was unaware that half of it was
missing. Then searing, mortal pain had assailed her and she’d screamed out,
rolling one way then the other, unable to breathe, terrified that everything
was about to end.

A tall, olive-skinned man
had stood over her, grinning, and she’d heard another explosion, felt more,
terrible pain between her limbs of mobility as her organs of repro-duction were
blasted away. It was a callous, savage attack, and she made the assassin pay.

There was little left of
him, more bullet hole than flesh after she’d repaired fully, snatched the
powerful weapon from his shaking digits and emptied the remaining chambers into
his head, saving one for
his
organs of reproduction.

The assassin had surely
been dispatched by those in power, in a calculated, but foolish bid to destroy
the body of the female. Exacting immediate revenge for their murderous
inclinations it turned its attention, quite randomly, to the continental island
it recognized as Australia
,
and infected a group of individuals inhabiting a northern
peninsular of the land mass with a mutated strain of the disease, influenza.
The virus was highly contagious and particularly aggressive. It would spread
like the dreaded fires of the
bush
, and kill hundreds of thousands at the very least.

It decided things would be
this way from this moment on. Any attack against its earthly body would be
avenged swiftly, on a scale exceeding the limits of human comprehension. It
would kill them, and make them kill. It would force them to do despicable
things to one another. It would make them suffer until they begged for compassion
it would never show them.

It would make them serve.

Twenty-four

When Thom woke it was morning. His body had
seized. Painfully, he straightened his limbs, back and neck. His phone had
slipped from his pocket during the night and lay on the hard, cold ground, its
screen cracked. There had been hardly any charge left in the cell when he’d
last checked — enough to take one call ... from his mother ... or
Kristin, and he’d turned it off to conserve what little remained.

He picked the phone up and
wiped the grime from the display. There was one message from a withheld number awaiting
him. He opened the SMS, read it and swallowed. Then he dragged himself up,
glanced once more at the message and stumbled across the deserted street.

Three cars were parked on
the other side. Thom chose a battered, blue Range Rover, smashed the driver’s
side glass and got in. He hot-wired the ignition and moved off, erratically,
towards the city. But within minutes he fell asleep and the vehicle caught a
wall with a glancing blow that whipped his head forwards, tearing his slackened
neck muscles and cracking a vertebra.

Steam billowed from beneath
the crumpled bonnet, the wind carrying it onto the windscreen in a mist, but
the engine continued to run. He reversed the car and carried on; the sinister
rumble from the leaden sky would keep him awake thereafter.

Bracing his neck against
the pain he reached forward and switched the radio on. White noise. He tried
again, kept tuning, but the airwaves were dead and the vacant hiss quickly made
him feel isolated. He switched off.

The first of the army units
appeared as he neared the northern end of Vauxhall Bridge Road and by the time
he’d reached Grosvenor Place one such outfit had formed a roadblock.

He brought the car to a
standstill and an austere, red-faced, senior ranking officer strode forward and
lowered his head, his breath steaming the glass. The soldier wagged a finger in
a downward motion and produced a small photograph from his fatigues. He
examined it closely, scrutinizing Thom, his face twitching nervously, eyes
flitting back and forth. Then, without uttering a word, he straightened and
waved him through.

Thom eased down the
accelerator and rolled forwards, checking the rear-view mirror. The officer was
shouting madly at his men. Seconds later he pulled out a pistol, shot four of
them dead, screamed maniacally and fired the next bullet into his mouth. Thom
floored the pedal. There were no more checkpoints, no more soldiers.

The car had picked up a double puncture and
could carry him no further. He pulled over and continued by foot, his neck pulsating
with pain. Sleet began to fall, settling on him, soaking his clothes, reddening
and numbing his hands.

He passed through the Queen
Elizabeth Gate into Hyde Park and turned left into Rotten Row:
The city
’
s finest open
space had been disfigured beyond all recognition
,
  
its ancient trees burned black
,
as they
’
d been in his nightmares.

Alongside the Serpentine
Lake he stopped dead: hundreds of bloated cadavers drifted in the freezing
water amidst mounds of litter. He waded in a few feet and rolled one of them
over. Glazed, lifeless eyes, those of a teenage boy, gazed senselessly at him.
He plunged the youngster’s head below the waterline, again ... and again, until
his crazed expression sank below the loose surface ice, and then hauled himself
out.

Further on, he saw that an
enormous pit had been gouged from the dead grass by some type of colossal
digger, above which a cloud of flies swarmed frenziedly.

He approached the hole and
looked in. It was nearly full, full of death, the sort of death he’d only seen
on newsreels from the end of the Second World War when the allies liberated
Dachau and Belsen. The army must have dug the ditch, filled it with dead from
the park and beyond and not covered it over.

Thom turned away from the
ditch, masking his face. The terrain was familiar, he was nearing the memorial.
Ahead, he noticed a naked figure on the ground and he rushed forward. It was a
man, a dead man, pegged out on the grass. Between his splayed legs a horde of
ravenous maggots feasted upon the bloody stump that had been his genitals. More
ate away at the remains of his eyes, crawled from his nostrils. Thom retched.

Soon, he reached the circle
of commemorative, granite stones, where the covering trees afforded some
shelter from the icy cascade and waited, as he’d been told to.

From some thick bushes to
his right a cold forged, steel shaft slid silently forwards and a single shot
cracked the damp air. The cartridge tore a hole in his thigh and he writhed in
the dirt. Then through the mind-numbing pain he saw the ground beyond the
clearing rupture and she rose up from beneath the sodden earth, worms and roots
entangled in her black hair:
He couldn
’
t
,
he wouldn
’
t
,
let her die this
way. So violently. So coldly
,
when her love for him had drawn her to his side.
He would do what she
’
d asked
,
but not like this. Not here. Not now.

‘IT’S A TRAP, KRISTIN!’ he
cried. ‘GET DOWN, IT’S A TRAP!’ But the warning came too late. The hail of
amm-unition blasted her backwards twelve feet and she thudded bloodily against
the cold granite slabs.

The barrage of bullets
continued unabated. They punctured her arms, exploded into her skull,
decimating her brain. They shattered her ribs, ruptured her heart, tore her
lungs and liver to shreds. It went on, and on, and on. Then the guns fell silent.

He crawled to her side:
There had been a
limit to the degree of punishment her body could withstand. It had been met
,
exceeded.
Her
ordeal on Earth was at an end, but she didn’t seem at peace. He held her
slender wrist. There was no pulse, and already she grew cold, her flesh
greying, her hands frozen in tight claws of defiance and anger. Thom closed the
lids to her midnight eyes, kissed each tenderly and lay his head in the
blood-drenched lap of her broken body.

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.