The Hounds of Avalon (Gollancz S.F.) (18 page)

Hunter looked at his watch again and then signalled to the others. Quickly donning masks attached to portable oxygen canisters, they dropped low. Though they were beyond the estimated blast area, they still had to be cautious.

The shelling stopped. In the disturbing silence that followed, Hunter’s ears still rang, but he removed his plugs to listen for the drone of the approaching jet. It was a Tornado GR4, one of the few they still had left after Newcastle. When it was overhead, Hunter shielded his eyes.

The fuel/air explosive was detonated fifty feet above the valley. Those immediately beneath the blast were vaporised instantly, others nearby seared by the tremendous heat. Hunter and his team were far enough away that the shock wave didn’t burst their eardrums or rupture their lungs. The oxygen was sucked out of the air in the immediate vicinity of the explosion, which would have been devastating for human troops, but Hunter doubted its effectiveness on this enemy. He was proved right when the thermal winds cleared and he looked up. On the periphery of the blast zone, the enemy still stood, waiting, but there was now a massive hole in the heart of the force where flames raged out of control.

Clevis and Ormston high-fived before restraining themselves, but Bradley, Spencer and Coop were already coolly removing the explosives from their knapsacks. Equipped with what were essentially hi-tech catapults for launching the plasma bombs, they moved like ghosts through the trees. One after the other, they emerged to fire and then retreated back into the forest depths before they were seen.

Scores of the enemy fell with each blast. There was none of the panic and chaos that the General had hoped to engender, but at least they were cutting swathes out of the enemy lines.

The team continued with the guerrilla attacks for ten full minutes, but as the blast from one of Clevis’s launches died away, Hunter saw that a change had taken place. The enemy were moving – but not slowly, not like robots coming alive in some fifties science fiction movie. In the blink of an eye, they were suddenly in rapid motion up the other side of the valley, weapons ready, but still eerily silent.

Hunter was convinced that he and his men had not been seen, but some of the enemy had now turned to the trees where they
were hiding. He had the creepy feeling that the enemy didn’t need to see, that they had abilities far beyond anything anyone had imagined.

‘There’s something back here – in the trees.’ Coop’s voice had the first faint tremors of uneasiness.

There was no time to respond: the enemy moved forward too quickly. Hunter faced an attacker resembling some over-muscled barbarian from a Schwarzenegger film, naked to the waist where a blood-stained animal fur hung. He wore a twin-horned Viking helmet on top of a matted mane of red hair and a long fiery beard. Half of his face was exposed skull, and more bone could be seen protruding from his meaty forearms and muscular thighs. Both hands were welded together around an enormous broadsword, bone and flesh merging directly into the metal. Purple mist streamed from his eyes and mouth, as if a fire raged within him.

The closer the barbarian got, the more Hunter felt despair welling up inside him. He realised instinctively that it was another weapon, subtly inflicting psychological damage. And it was effective: he had to fight hard to stop himself giving in to its damp pull.

Hunter switched to his SA80. The bullets cut a swathe across the attacker’s torso, but didn’t slow him for even an instant. The barbarian’s shadow engulfed him, and then the broadsword came crashing down. Hunter had a second to grip the gun with both hands and hold it ahead of him to block the sword. He knew it was futile, but although the gun shattered, it did just enough to deflect the sword from splitting his skull in two.

Instead, the blade ripped flesh as it slid down his arm before slamming against his shoulder blade. Hunter was driven to his knees in pain, but he used it to focus his mind. As the barbarian came at him again, Hunter ripped open his knapsack, pulled out one of his few remaining explosives and hurled it. It was stupid to release it so close to him, but it was a last resort.

The explosive hit the barbarian in the middle of his stomach and he dissolved in a mist of meat and bone. Hunter was thrown backwards ten feet, and when he clawed his way back to vertical his head was ringing. He muttered, ‘Take that, you bastard.’

There was no time to glean even a glimmer of satisfaction. Ranks of purple-misted enemy moved towards the forest, bristling with
weapons and filled with a mute, mechanistic savagery. But as Hunter ran back into the cover of the trees, he saw a sight that hit hard. On the tree line, Bradley stopped firing his SA80 and let the weapon fall slowly to his side. In his face was a dismal acceptance of the worst that life had to offer. Hunter knew he had succumbed to the waves of despair that washed off the enemy. A tremble ran through Bradley; the gun fell from his hand.

Hunter yelled a warning, but Bradley was transfixed by a tall, thin figure, almost majestic with its golden skin and long hair blowing in the breeze. The god languorously raised a hand with an arrow protruding from the wrist bone, and then drove it into Bradley’s throat.

Hunter was horrified to see that Bradley even bared his throat slightly for the killing blow. Blood spouted from the wound and bubbled from Bradley’s mouth as he choked and bucked and went down on his knees. The enemy withdrew the arrow with a ripping sound, then grabbed Bradley’s head and twisted sharply.

Still holding Bradley’s sagging head, his killer leaned forward, mouth wide, and exhaled forcefully. Purple mist rushed out of him and with a life of its own flowed into Bradley, into his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his mouth. Within a second, Bradley began to mutate. Bones shattered and twisted, breaking through his flesh. Though dead, Bradley reached out one twitching hand to grasp his SA80. When his fingers closed around the handle, his skin and bone flowed like oil, merging with the weapon.

Seconds after he had died, Bradley was standing next to the god that had killed him, moving with the same mechanical tread into the forest to search for his former comrades.

Hunter searched through the trees for the others, cursing to himself. How could you hope to defeat a force that could turn even your own fallen to their ends? The more they killed, the stronger they got; they didn’t feel, they didn’t think; their only purpose was to destroy.

Hunter needed to get this information back to the General, but as he sprinted through the trees, Ormston staggered into his path. The transformation that had overcome him was unnerving: his face was drained of all blood, and his constant shivering revealed a man terrified of his own shadow. ‘They’ve got Clevis,’ he said with a voice like a bird in flight.

All Hunter’s training told him he should not be distracted from getting the vital intelligence back to his commanding officer, but he couldn’t get Clevis’s frightened face out of his mind; the boy still had an innocence that Hunter barely remembered, but knew was worth saving.

‘Show me,’ he said.

Ormston looked sickened at the prospect. Instead, he pointed back through the trees and then zigzagged away frantically. Hunter knew Ormston wouldn’t get far in his state of panic.

Behind him, the enemy crashed through the thick vegetation at the forest’s edge. Drawing a knife from his boot, Hunter moved stealthily away from them in the direction Ormston had indicated. He soon spotted movement deep in the shadows amongst the pines. With his breath clouding in the freezing air, he hid behind a tree to steady himself before proceeding on his belly through a thick carpet of fern. Some kind of strange structure stood nearby.

Raising himself up slightly to get a better look, Hunter saw something that looked like a doorway constructed out of meat, yet it seemed to have grown out of the spongy vegetable matter of the forest floor. When he looked through it, he was shocked to see stars gleaming in alien constellations, planets circling seething suns that had never been glimpsed by human eyes.

He recoiled sharply. It felt as though something was looking back at him, peeling his flesh and bone aside to get deep into the core of his mind. The sensation made his skin crawl. Looking around, he saw other similar gates situated randomly at other points in the immediate vicinity.

A cry rang out – he recognised the voice as Clevis’s. Hunter moved as quickly as he could without revealing himself and came upon a scene that was even more shocking than anything he had yet seen.

A thing completely constructed out of bone was clutching Spencer, who flailed wildly. His skeleton was being drawn out of him, easing through skin and muscle as if they had the substance of water. A pile of shapeless black skin lay nearby, which Hunter took to be the remains of Coop, and within a few seconds Spencer’s pink skin landed next to it with a sickening plop.

With a disgusting flourish, the bone-thing absorbed Spencer’s red-stained skeleton into its own mass. When it had finished,
Hunter could see Spencer’s vacant orbits staring hollowly out of the centre of the monster’s chest.

The bone-thing, which was larger and more terrifying than any of the enemy Hunter had witnessed so far, was not alone in the gloom of the forest. Other equally imposing figures stalked around the area in ritualistic patterns, as though they were drawing invisible lines on the ground. Hunter saw something that was alive with forest birds, their flapping, twitching bodies forming a kind of skin. Another figure was made out of snakes, frogs, newts and other lizards and amphibians, green and slick, catching the light as it moved. The third had larger woodland animals wrapped into its frame, rabbits, foxes, mice, squirrels wriggling as if they were trying to break free from an invisible cage. And it was this one that dragged Clevis behind it as though he was a spoiled child refusing to go to school.

Hunter had a split second to weigh the situation. He was smart enough to know that any attempt to save Clevis was hopeless, yet even so he leaped towards the animal-thing with a wish and prayer. His only hope was that the fury of his attack would allow Clevis to break free and that in the confusion they could both escape into the undergrowth. But when he plunged his blade into the depths of the snapping, snarling mass of fur to no effect, he knew the game was up.

The animal-thing turned towards him and stared with eyes made up of the multiple orbs of the creatures it possessed, and then reached mouse-fingers for Hunter’s face.

‘Hunter!’ Clevis cried tearfully. ‘Get me out of here!’

Hunter wrenched his knife free and staggered backwards. A buzzing arose behind him.

The animal-thing saw Hunter’s interest in Clevis and dragged the youth forward. There was no sadistic glee or malice; it acted with the neutrality of someone brushing away a minor distraction, dragging Clevis in tight against its chest where the fox and badger heads snapped and tore at his flesh. Clevis’s cries were muffled by the fur, but Hunter could see his eyes swivel towards him, pleading.

Hunter attempted another attack, but the buzzing was all around him now, and before he could move he felt a seething at his neck that grew tighter and held him fast. He could only watch as Clevis’s
features were torn apart, his lifeless body leaving a red smear as it slid down the animal-thing’s torso to the ground.

Choking, Hunter was lifted effortlessly off the ground and turned around. The source of the buzzing was now apparent. The thing that held him was made of insects, in the same way that the others had used other kinds of natural matter to give them corporeal form. The insect-thing withdrew its grip, but Hunter was still magically suspended in the air.

It stood before him, eight feet tall at least. As it surveyed him, once again there was no recognisable emotion, not even curiosity. Hunter had trouble focusing on the creature, for its body was such a writhing mass of insects that its outline appeared permanently blurred through movement: bees, flies, wasps, gnats, beetles, roaches, all these and more crawled and wriggled, burrowing or attempting to take flight without ever being able to leave the creature’s gravity.

Hunter stared into its insectile eyes and got the same feeling he had experienced staring through the meat-doorway: an alien intelligence travelling back along his line of vision to examine his own mind forensically.

The insect-thing held out one hand, palm upwards, and a swarm of insects rose off it, sweeping towards Hunter. He closed his eyes, turned his head away, but they enveloped his head, forcing their way into his nostrils and through his clenched lips. The buzzing filled him, followed by the sickening sensation of crawling creatures working their way into his nasal passages.

He fought the urge to choke and vomit, and then suddenly all sensation was lost. His consciousness was circumscribed by the insectile buzzing, inside him, outside, everywhere.

And then he wasn’t there at all.

Insects crawled around the edges of his vision, but he knew that it was not his eyes but his mind that was examining the fractured hallucinatory images he could see. It took a second or two for him to realise that the creature was attempting some form of communication, but it was so inhuman that there was no frame of reference. The images shattered, twisted out of shape, moved from incomprehensible alien forms to pictures he could almost recognise. It felt as if he was tuning across the wavelengths to find a channel he could understand.

The process came to a halt with an image of a wasp as big as a bus nestled in a strange, irregular landscape that appeared to be made out of the same kind of meat as the doorways. It buzzed up and down the scale, insistently, distractedly, but the meaning was lost to him.