The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (46 page)

“What’s. Going.
On
,” Cassie hisses angrily, but Alex doesn’t dare break skin contact for long enough to tell her, not while there are more than 60,000 transient parasites passing through his focus, embodied in his mind’s eye as desiccating white crystals. She bucks and heaves under him, pushing his head dangerously close to the line of daylight.
“What did you why hasn’t she killed us wait what’s this why do I feel so
—
”

The eaters take longer to banish than to summon, but the last of them finally flicker out of his perception, buzzing and turgidly replete. Alex closes his eyes and forces himself to pull his tongue away from her throat. He’s weak-kneed with hunger, or desire, or a questionable titer of both. The mindless keening of the V-parasites is deafening and his limbs feel like lead as he pushes himself off her. “Eaters,” he gasps, rolling on his back and trying to sit up: “I had to keep skin contact to protect you.”

What’s left of First Liege lies in the shadows of the back half of the pavilion, black and withered as a slug that has died in a dish of salt: wisps of smoke rise from her curled limbs.

Cassie pushes herself to her feet, looking dazed and very angry. “If you ever do that to me again” – she bends over the body and deftly pulls the mace from a mummified claw – “I will —” She blinks, and bites back indignation. “WhatWhat?”

“I’m hungry.” Alex takes a deep breath. Then another. “I need blood. Also cover. Then we need to run.”

“Run?” In the sudden silence Cassie’s eyes widen. “What did you do?”

“Your father took my phone.” Alex looks her in the eye. She’s lovely:
I could gobble her right up,
part of him thinks. “Do the People have GPS? Or drones?”

“No, but the air defense —” Cassie blinks and finds her feet abruptly fascinating. “Let’s get you fed and clothed.”

“Where is he?” Alex wraps his arms around his stomach, trying not to rock with the force of the hunger pangs.

“He’ll be with the —” She stops and takes aim as two guards clatter around the back of the tent.
“Halt and obey the Heir of the All-Highest,”
she commands, in the same voice of authority that set Alex’s hair on end when her father used it. The guards freeze. “Oh my,” Cassie says in English for his benefit, her face slowly brightening into a luminous smile. “I could get used to this.” She points at the guards.
“Step inside. Do not look at this magus
–
man. Remove your helmet.”
The guards seem hesitant, stumbling as if drunk.
“I order you to disarm and kneel!”

The words batter at Alex’s ears like brass gongs, and he’s not even the subject of their terrible imperative. The soldier Cassie pointed at slumps slightly, knees going out from under him. The other turns as if to run and Cassie begins to raise her mace, but before she points it at him he collapses like a puppet with its strings cut. Blood trickles from his nose and ears, but Alex can tell instantly that it’s no good for him: V-parasites can’t eat the dead.

He watches, woozy with hunger, as she pulls the kneeling soldier’s helmet off and pushes his head down towards the ground sheet in front of his feet. “Eat, dammit,” she snaps. Frustration rises in her voice: “Why are you standing there? What are you waiting for, why won’t you feed?”

Alex watches himself as from a great distance while he shuffles over to the kneeling sacrifice and crouches close to the rushing, frightened pulse —

I can’t do this,
he thinks despairingly. The kneeling man is paralyzed like a mouse beneath a venomous snake. When you’re dying your whole life is supposed to flash before your eyes, but Alex finds that in this situation he stands witness to someone else’s life. Not a good life, perhaps, but not a life nearing its end in a hospice bed, riddled with cancer or dying of dementia: this is a healthy adult in his prime, with many years ahead, who kneels terrified before him with throat bared.
I’m not a murderer
—

“Alex,” Cassie says, close to his ear, “if you won’t do this, we’re both going to die here. I can’t carry you.” There is a tiny quaver in her voice as she adds, “And I’m not leaving without you.”

Shock rushes through him. Then disbelief.
She’s bluffing. Isn’t she?
Then embarrassment.
It’s blackmail!
Then pragmatism:
He’s an enemy soldier and if he wasn’t under her
geas
he’d be trying to kill us both
—

“Just do it. Blame me. We can work it out later, YesYes? But I won’t let you die here —”

Alex blanks. When he opens his eyes again, his mouth is full of warm wet love and he has a painfully sensitive erection: the V-parasites are crooning their satisfaction in his ears.

“Oh God,” he says incoherently, and begins to weep over the body.

“Shut up,” she says through gritted teeth. “Hold your arm out.” She’s sliding something over his right arm – a sleeve. “Left arm now.” It’s a padded leather jacket, tight in the shoulders. It laces together: she begins to tie him into it. “You keep invoking some God but I don’t think he’s listening right now,” she adds in a quiet singsong under her breath.

“But I bit that man’s throat out, like I’m fucking Dracula…”

“Shut up. Stand up. Put this on. That’s right… if you were the kind of man who found it easy to do that kind of thing do you think I’d bother with you?” Her question takes him by surprise, rattling his introspective daze.

“How long has it been since your father left?” he asks as she snaps the breastplate into place around him. (It has cunning quick-release fasteners, more like the clips on a bulletproof jacket than the buckles and straps on the museum pieces in the Armouries.)

“Three… no, four? Minutes. No more.” Alex shuffles uneasily: his trousers feel warm and wet, and when he looks down there’s a dark stain across his legs. Blood or urine, he can’t tell. Cassie hands him a helmet. He pulls it on, feels an unfamiliar tight headband, and adjusts it so that it doesn’t pinch his temples. “Quick!” she urges, then yanks the glass face-plate down, grabs his hand, and tugs him towards the open back of the tent.

“Wait, my eyes —” But then he’s in daylight and his face
isn’t
on fire and he can see clearly through the tinted visor. “What are we doing?”

“Act like you’re a guard and I’ll get us out of here as long as we can avoid my father. Where’s your rescue party?”

“How should I —” Alex looks round. There’s a murmurous rumble and clatter from beyond the tents clustered between the pavilion and the edge of the cove. He can’t see the cause of the racket but from the snorting and snarling it sounds as if a cavalry troop is mounting up on Bengal tigers. He looks up, scanning the edge of the ridge above them, putting the picture together. Malham Tarn has been popular with school trips for decades, so much so that half the population of Yorkshire must have been here at one time or another, which means the walking path must be over there— “Wait, what’s that?”

Something monstrous moves beyond the top of the cliff. Alex sees a neck like a tree trunk and the body of a giant elephant – no, it’s a big-ass dinosaur, a sauropod, like a brontosaurus. He squints. There’s something wrong with its head, an efflorescence of tentacles and iridescence —

He looks away in time. The warded visor saves him, but he’s blinking rapidly and his eyes are stinging furiously as he draws breath to ask Cassie what they should do; which is why he hears, rather than sees, Pinky put his cunning plan into effect.

A droning roar like a storm god unzipping his chain of lightning reverberates from the clifftops.

Pete crouches down in Ilsa’s legwell, his shoulders hunched, as hot brass cartridge cases bounce off the limestone slabs embedded in the reverse slope of the hillside. Strays from the rain of hot brass ping and clatter off his shoulders. He can’t see what’s going on – this is a good thing – and he’s having difficulty even seeing the controls, which is perhaps less of a good thing. So he concentrates on keeping a tight grip on the mummified hand with the burning fingertips, tries
not
to think about where it came from or how its unfortunate owner met his end, or even why the Laundry’s armorer came to have it in the special stores room at the National Firearms Center.
Obviously
the government would have maintained a stockpile of Hands of Glory, the amputated appendages of hanged felons, even though they ended capital punishment in 1965. It’s all he can do to refrain from prayer. God probably doesn’t want to know what he’s doing here this morning, a borderline accomplice to evil in service to a greater cause. If you should find yourself on a slippery slope some questions are best left unasked, lest you find yourself already fallen from grace.

Pinky stands on the bench seat behind Pete, methodically directing a roaring torrent of gunfire over the rise. He beats the ground around the trenches with a heavy steel-jacketed rain, working the minigun by dead reckoning, for he can barely see the ends of the spinning barrels – the Hand of Glory is doing its job, and Ilsa has become a numinous vision of cobwebs on the breeze, functionally invisible. So are the things in the enemy dugouts, of course, and in this battle if you can be seen you will die: but iron and steel have a way of slicing through enchantments, especially when they’re augmented with a banishment circuit embedded in the base of each and every round.

A jaw-rattlingly loud detonation sends an oily fireball rising over the crest of the hill. Pinky releases the firing switch. In the sudden ear-ringing silence, the echoes of the burst bounce back and forth between the hills. A monster bellows a plaintive soloist’s refrain against a chorus of higher-pitched human screams.

Pinky thumps Pete on the shoulder. “Back up ten meters!” he shouts in Pete’s ear.

“What? But that’ll put us on the ridge!”

“Yes! I need to see what’s back there. Let me finish this.”

Pinky slides back down behind the gun.
This is a really bad idea,
Pete tells himself as he twists the throttle grip. Ilsa lurches and begins to slowly reverse up the ever-gentler hillside. Pete orients himself by looking sideways at the steps, guessing how far he’s come, and he’s still crawling backwards when Pinky hits the firing switch again, the rotary gun barrels spin up, and the jackhammer roar resumes bashing on his helmet earpieces.

The world lights up pink as the grass in a circle around Ilsa ignites, smoking and sparking and fizzing. Pete’s skin prickles and he bursts into a cold sweat.
Basilisk!
He’s wearing wrought iron armor and holding a Hand of Glory, but the vegetation around here is quite capable of burning and the secondary radiation is also potentially deadly. If it wasn’t for the machine gun two meters behind his ears he could hear the grass flames hissing. He feels itchy and sick, squinting against the deadly light.
Don’t look round.
He screws his eyes shut. The basilisk is there —

A huge explosion shakes the ground from the vicinity of the enemy and the pink glare vanishes. Pete blinks furiously, trying to clear the green and purple blotches from his vision.
I was looking away with my eyes shut,
he realizes.
How bright was that?
Pinky lets go of the trigger and the echoes subside. “Pinky?” He calls. “Pinky?”

“Dude.” Pinky’s voice is shaky and muffled by the ringing in Pete’s ears. “I got them both.”

“Both what?”

“Fucking big-ass sauropod dinosaurs with compound eyes and tentacles around their mouths. And minders in armor. Shot one, then the other reared up and began flailing around and looked at it and then it like, exploded.” He pauses. “You’ll have to get us out of here.”

“Wait, what do you mean?”

“I mean I can’t see anything. I’m only flash-blind. I hope.” Pinky is matter-of-fact about his sudden loss of sight.

“Hell.” Pete thinks for a moment. “What should I do?”

“We’re still alive so they’re all dead back there. Clearly, or we’d be dead, too, sitting around with our thumbs up our ass like this.” Another pause. “Look for Alex and his chica down below. Pick them up and drive us out of here.”

“Okay.” Pete raises his visor. He feels shivery and his skin is prickling. The hilltop around them is scorched black and gray with ash, smoking and smelling of fireworks and ozone. He looks down at the hard-to-see tents in the floor of the valley. “How long have we got?”

Pinky doesn’t answer immediately, but the silence is filled by the ringing in his ears and a new uncomfortably familiar sound, like a lawnmower buzzing in the distance. “Just move,” says Pinky.

As the torrent of mounted cavalry floods down Vicar Lane, the flicker of hundreds of bodies exploding is joined by a crackling roar that drowns out the faint screams of the survivors.

In the control room inside Quarry House, Brains and Jez Wilson watch horrified for endless seconds as targeting stills flash up on the screens around them. “This is
wrong
!” Brains shouts, appalled. The mounted whirlpools of light seem almost immune to the carnage around them, but there are people on the pavement, people around the bus station, flickering statues that crack open with a violet flash and a sullen red glare as of molten lava. “Why isn’t it locking on properly?”

“I don’t care. Hit the kill switch.” Jez’s eyes are wide. “Shut it the fuck down on my authority,
right now
.”

“But we’ll —” Brains is already typing a series of commands. “Fuck, they’re coming at us —”

There’s a final eye-searing flash outside a nearby hotel and the sequence of camera stills freezes.
“Fuck.”
Brains mouses over one of the images. “There’s a cosplay convention in town? Who ordered
that
?”

“Later.” Jez pushes back her seat and keys her headset. She updates an unseen observer on the situation, biting back her words, then turns to him: “All right, we’re useless down here so it’s all hands on deck upstairs.” There’s an SA80 rifle on her desk. “Do you know how to use one of these?”

Brains slumps, then stands up. “I could pull the trigger. Doubt I’d last long enough to need to know how to reload it.”