Dead Letters Anthology (9 page)

When he looked down from the glass stairwell wall he saw that the stage had been vacated. At its back, the immense high-definition screens were black and dead. The movement of the crowd was increasing as those at the back started to push forward. The security teams were trying to herd them toward the service exits, but instinctively the guests were trying to return to the electronic gates through which they had entered.

He felt the plate glass reverberate from an explosion. Running to the next stairwell window, he followed the direction of everyone’s turning heads. The first of the fountains, a great concentric circuit of pipework set in the baroque concrete turrets of an artificial lake, had blown itself apart under the unregulated pressure. Shards of stone and steel were raining down on those caught at the back of the crowd.

As a second network of jets blew, the screams spread from one quarter to the next, and the great mass of bodies ploughed forward. Another of the main fountain’s spiral water turrets twisted on its base and crumbled, sliding over into the writhing morass of guests like a collapsing cake. The first of the gas pipes, designed to blast spears of flame into the centres of the pulsing fountains, ruptured and caught fire. The elemental displays were arranged around the entire perimeter of the park, and would soon engulf the resort in a ring of flame.

There was nothing anyone could do at ground level now. The guards had left it too late to start taking down the fences. Roy continued grimly up toward the deck, his thighs shaking and burning. When he reached it, he was able to enter through the airlock that sealed the kitchens. He found the open-plan floor deserted. It looked as if they had found the way down through one of the other service airlocks.
Journalists with initiative
, he thought,
that’s a first.

It was only as he made his way back to the stairs that he discovered the woman in the blue gown. It looked as if she was lying on the floor laughing at something. Then he saw that her jaw had been wrenched down until its muscles tore. The thing in her throat had gone, leaving behind a ragged red hole. There was very little blood. Most of it had already oxidised.

It dries out the host
, he thought, intrigued.
So it has to keep moving on.

He had not formulated any further plan beyond coming here. He felt disconnected from everything that was happening below. There was no rational way of accounting for it. Rather, it seemed inconceivable, dream-like, that anything could do this.

He needed to concentrate on solving problems minute by minute instead. Ten flights further up there was a smaller deck, off limits to the press. Here were the unfinished floors without walls. He could check that the rest of the hotel was clear, see the scale of the event from above, then leave when it was quieter.

It took him a while to reach the upper observation platform, sixty-five levels above the unfolding horror. The leeward walls of the deck had yet to be fitted with replacement glass, and wind moaned through the concrete shell, distorting the sound of the fire-truck sirens far below. The entrance to the resort was barricaded by a bottleneck of police vehicles, their red and blue lights strobing the crowd like some kind of militia-inspired discotheque. The town beyond the resort had patches of total darkness where there should have been street lights.

‘Kinda wild, isn’t it?’

Roy turned to find Jim Davenport leaning against the platform balustrade. At his feet was an open laptop with some kind of live streaming application open.

‘It’s better to learn the most sophisticated technology first,’ he explained. He sounded as if he was speaking through a mouthful of food. Whenever his teeth parted, Roy saw the pocked thing sitting in the back of his throat. ‘I never understood that old idea. You know, when a new lifeform reaches us it’ll first be seen by a couple of hillbillies in a pick-up truck. Makes no sense, does it? You start at the top and the rest is easier.’ He bent over, coughed and spat red. ‘It must be strange for you, suddenly realising that it’s coming to an end. You must wonder what it was all for.’

‘Just me?’ Roy took a step forward. ‘If this place goes up, you’re not going to get out of here. What happened, you draw the short straw?’

‘I don’t need to get anywhere, my cycle is different to yours. Anyway, it’s out of my hands. We started here, but soon we’ll be everywhere. Global economic collapse. They’ll all blame each other. The last thing we want is to draw attention to ourselves. We’re doing something that everyone secretly wants to happen.’ He bent down and folded his laptop shut, sliding it into his backpack. ‘I’m done. Want to come and see the end of empire?’

Roy threw himself at Davenport, tearing the backpack from his hands. Spinning, he hurled the laptop bag as far as he could. It flew through one of the unfinished window panels, out into the night.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the engineer, watching the bag fall. ‘I finished my part.’

Roy slammed himself into Davenport’s bony chest. He did not even try to move out of the way, and was knocked from his feet. He landed on his back and slid across the polished marble floor with Roy on top of him. Kicking down, he carried on pushing, the rubber soles of his trainers finding purchase so that he propelled them to the edge of the deck.

Roy struck out at Davenport’s face, but only succeeded in landing a glancing blow. Grabbing the rim of the steel balustrade, Davenport dispassionately kicked at Roy’s back and legs, moving him closer to the edge.

Below, the crowd screamed as the remaining gas jets ruptured and ignited, popping from one nozzle to the next, spraying flames across the gardens.

Roy landed a punch, knocking the breath from his opponent. Davenport was stronger and back on his feet in seconds, stamping him down.

Neither of them would give way. Davenport was blocking Roy’s return to the floor, keeping him at the windy edge of the platform. He dropped his jaw, and Roy saw that the thing inside had come forward, ready to be spat into a new host.

Below, a massive explosion shook through the resort, blowing out most of the lower windows. The tethered raft housing the firework display had ignited, sending a peacock display of sapphire, emerald and ruby comets into the assembly. Gold plumes sprouted from the running figures below, crimson and indigo cartwheels of fire appearing about them, turning them into fabulous beasts. The rainbow of fire spiralled and burrowed its way through the howling crowd.

An updraft caught the building, bringing with it the reek of burning copper, aluminium, sodium chloride, scorched flesh. Another explosion, this time from within the hotel. Glittering shards of glass cascaded from the Atlantica like the contents of an upended jewel box. It was an appropriately tasteless spectacle, the end of the world repainted in Day-Glo colours.

Roy barrelled at Davenport with human hatred in his eyes. The slick marble floor of the platform functioned as an ice rink, and the impact sent them both over the edge.

Davenport climbed up easily. He leaned on his haunches, catching his breath, watching and waiting.

‘Pull me up,’ Roy asked. ‘My arms.’ He was still hanging in the dark windswept space above the screaming mob.

Davenport considered the consequences of doing so and decided against it. He was in no rush. He sat motionless and waited until the man suspended below him could hold on no longer, and was forced to release his grip.

Roy Brook did not fall in silence, and was not heard above the greater cacophony of the crowd.

The thing that had once been Davenport decided to remain on the deck and watch the unfolding disaster for a few more minutes. Then, his lifecycle ending without another host, he simply dropped himself discreetly over the side of the building.

Roy saw the engineer fall. Lying across the raft of scaffolding poles on the floor below the viewing deck, he wondered if it was worse to have survived. The wind shear had punched him back in. He eased himself painfully off the poles and back through the floor’s shattered picture window. There was something badly wrong with his left leg. It shot a lightning bolt of pain when he tried to stand on it.

He sat watching the fire trucks, the ARVs and ambulances eddying around the entrance gates as the police attempted to redirect the public and clear the resort. The surrounding pavements were still filled with orderly panic and chaotic attempts at control. The sealed-off roads had created bottlenecks of stalled vehicles. Something rare and unthinkable happened: authority began to fail as crushed pedestrians pushed down barriers and ignored directions. Fighting broke out, and the crowds began to thin, dispersing into the dark.

Roy found a piece of steel lintel to lean on. He made his way down and out through an alley at the back of the site, the one used as a shortcut by its workers. Resting up in a café lit by hurricane lamps, overlooking the smouldering shoreline, he watched in fascination as the blackened buildings pulsed with muffled explosions and fires. The resort’s greatest flaw had been its paranoid level of security; the management team had refused to allow its staff to make decisions, and had been brought down by the technology in which it had placed its trust. A lesson to be learned there, he thought, although it’s too late for lessons now. He wondered what might have happened if Raj’s letter had got through. It might have changed everything.

As expected, there were no cabs to be found, but he was able to hitch a ride heading away from the resort. His leg was grinding at the joint and bleeding badly. The truck dropped him at the edge of the compound where he lived.

If any neighbours were watching events unfold at the coast, they continued to do so behind drawn curtains. He was halfway down his street when its lamps winked out.

He let himself into his apartment and lay on the bed, bruised and exhausted. When he closed his eyes he saw the rotating red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles. He saw the windows of the Atlantica bulging and shattering. He saw chunks of pediment and pilaster being blown into the night air by the force of water. He saw the thing in Davenport’s bulging throat, using the manager as a puppet. He saw millions of them hard at work, remaking the world for themselves.

We’re not so different
, he thought.
Everybody works, and for what?

He saw himself falling away from the viewing platform, his eyes and mouth wide, his arms as limp as if he was floating in water.

The dream ended and he awoke. He sensed someone at the end of the bed, standing over him. The familiar, comforting figure of his wife.

‘You’re awake,’ she said, her voice thick with emotion. She looked as if she might fall down at any moment.

‘I thought you’d gone,’ he said uselessly.

‘I have to tell you something.’

Roy winced as he pushed himself up on one elbow.

‘The children.’

‘What about them?’

‘They couldn’t sleep with all the noise so I gave them sleeping pills. They ate them all.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘I think they saw the news.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘It’s for you.’

She wasn’t holding the gun correctly, the military service revolver he had brought home after finding it in the resort’s security storeroom. She had probably never held a gun before. Her left hand clasped the barrel to steady it. The trigger was tighter than she had expected it to be. She fired four shots into his body, hitting his stomach, his heart, his throat, his face.

Somebody must have heard the noise, seen the flashes of light in the bedroom. Nobody opened their front door. Nobody called the police.

‘It’s better if you’re dead to start with,’ she said. ‘Now you’ll find there are wonders to come.’

Hunching over him, she pulled down his ruined jaw and spat red.

Christopher Fowler is the author of more than forty novels and short-story collections, including the
Bryant & May
mysteries, which record the adventures of two Golden Age detectives in modern London. He is the recipient of the 2015 CWA Dagger In The Library. His latest books are the thriller
The Sand Men
and
Bryant & May: Strange Tide
. Other works include video games, graphic novels and plays. He writes a weekly column in
The Independent on Sunday
and lives in King’s Cross, London, and Barcelona.

“When I wrote
The Sand Men
, about the owners of a futuristic resort trying to impose order on a chaotic world, I didn’t get to go into wholesale apocalypse mode, so when Conrad’s letter arrived it gave me the world-trashing opportunity I’d been looking for – or rather it nearly didn’t, because I’d forgotten he was sending it and dismissed it as junk mail, which got emptied into a six-foot high waste container that I had to climb inside after realising who the letter was from. So, as in the story, my ordered world also became a place of chaos.”

Weird shit happens to you when your life turns into liminal space.

Actually, I thought it was a perceptual shift. When the oncologist tells you that the uterine cancer they thought was gone has come back and you’re looking at a life-expectancy of maybe two years, the personal paradigm shift is like nothing you’ve ever been through before.

I can’t speak to anyone else’s experience but here’s mine: when you have a baby, you find out what’s important and that, my friend, is the fucking secret of life. I’m sure there are other ways to get clued up about that; this is how I learned it. And I figured that was the Big One; I’d never do anything more profound than become someone’s mother. It never occurred to me that Big Things aren’t only things you do – they also happen to you.

* * *

The Macmillan Cancer Centre in London is a pretty nice place. They’ve made it look like a hotel lounge, or maybe a casual reading space in a library. I’ve been to the Google Office Space or whatever it’s called in east London, where you can go work on your start-up or find somebody else’s, and the Macmillan Centre is nicer than that. It would be a great place to hang out if you wished you didn’t have to go there.