For
maybe five seconds the pounding stopped. The sudden silence became
almost unbearable.
Chris
quickly leaned forward over the wall to look down.
The
thing with the rock still stood on the causeway immediately outside
the twin gates. It had paused. The arm held high, frozen in
mid-hammer, still grasped the white pebble in its massive paw. The
hairless head still faced the gates, its eyes glittering white in the
red face.
Chris
stared down until his eyes watered. There was something different
about the monster, it had-
That's
it!
Running
down from the shoulder, down its red back knotted with veins, was a
thick liquid, the consistency of rich gravy.
Blood.
Heart
beating hard, Chris looked swiftly at Tony to see if he'd grasped the
significance of the liquid hemorrhaging from a jagged break in the
thing's shoulder.
Then
the huge arm came down, cracking the stone against the gate. The
mechanical pounding had begun once more. Bang-one-two-bang-one-two
... A handful of speeding lead shot hadn't stopped it long. But there
on Manshead a small miracle had taken place.
"Christ,
these things actually bleed," whispered Chris.
"Sure
they do," said Mark in a low, controlled voice. "And if
they do ..."
Raising
the shotgun to his shoulder, he aimed, every gram of concentration
squeezed into his eyes as he looked unblinking down the barrel. His
trigger finger tightened.
Again
the explosion from the shotgun punched Chris's eardrum-but he never
took his eyes off the figure pounding the gates.
This
time the shot hit the creature square, knocking it away from the door
with enough force to make you believe it had been dynamited away. The
momentum carried it back five feet across the causeway, its arms
windmilling loosely over its head. Then it fell back into the blanket
of foam.
A
wave rolled around the seafort and the bastard creature was gone.
For
a moment they stared down. Gone. The gun smoked. Gone. Mark's eyes
glistened with tears, whether from the gunsmoke or what Chris didn't
know-but he felt his spirits lifting.
Gone.
All that remained was the big white pebble smeared with that black
gunge that had oozed from the bastard monster's body.
Jesus.
These things bleed. They actually bleed. The words buzzed like
lightning through his head.
Now
the creature lay at the bottom of the sea with a hole in its chest
big enough to plant a tree in.
He
looked out at its brothers. Three were visible on the causeway. They
sat immobile, expressionless. Sunburn-red bodies splashed by waves
from the rising tide. Did they know that one of their kind had just
been blown from the surface of God's earth? Did the moronic fuckers
care?
From
his right came a shrieking sound. It was a Hodgson boy, jumping up
and down as high as his lard-arse would allow. He whooped again, his
freckled face ecstatic. Then he ran to the steps whooping and
shouting: "Dad! Mr Faust killed one of them things. Dad!"
Tony
was grinning and shaking his head as if he'd just seen Father
Christmas plop down his chimney.
Chris
let out a huge breath. He felt as if he'd been holding it for the
last forty-eight hours.
At
last they knew. These things bled. They hurt. And they died.
Within
minutes a dozen or more people crowded onto the walkway to look down
at the bloody pebble on the causeway or to slap Mark Faust on the
back. At that moment the villagers would have given him everything
they owned.
"Looks
like you're a bloody hero," called Tony over the
congratulations.
"Should've
done it sooner," Mark replied with one of his broad grins. "Just
never thought a shooter would do a thing against them."
"Let
the dog see the bloody rabbits, then." Hodgson Senior hoisted
his bulk up against the wall, the shotgun in his well-padded hands.
"Make
way for a little 'un." Tom Hodgson joined his brother, rolling
his shirt-sleeves up his freckled arms. The two of them leaned
forward against the wall, plump elbows resting on the stone, aiming
the shotguns. The Saf Dar sat in a group fifty paces away on the
causeway.
They
fired quickly. The shot at this distance spread enough to hit all
four of the things as well as splashing the water around them.
Each
shot brought a slight flinch from the figures, but they did not relax
their statue-like pose. Nor did they blink their eyes which still
glittered like glass in their faces.
As
the echoes of gunfire crackled away into the distance, the Hodgsons
pulled more shells from their pockets and blasted the creatures
again.
Chris
knew it would be too much to hope for. But he longed for the bastard
creatures to explode into the shit they were and simply be washed
away forever by the tide.
He
glanced back into the courtyard. Ruth stood, her arms around David.
Chris waved to catch their attention.
She
looked up.
He
grinned and gave a thumbs-up sign. She nodded and smiled back,
relieved. They were going to be all right. He was going to call down,
but a deafening battery of crashes came from the Hodgsons' guns as
they pounded the figures on the causeway.
He
turned to see the figures moving back.
It
wasn't exactly a rout. They moved back in an unhurried way like men
casually seeking the shade of a bigger tree. But they were moving.
And in the right direction.
Tony
called out, "All right, lads. Save your ammo. They're out of
range."
The
two farmers stopped firing. "Pity the cunts weren't a bit
nearer. We'd have turned the fuckers into pig-shit."
"No
... We didn't even wing 'em, Tom."
Mark's
voice rumbled, excited. "That doesn't matter. That doesn't
matter a shit. What does matter is that we can hurt them."
Chris
realized, feeling the same flash of excitement, that Mark had got the
scent of his prey. Now the hunter, not the hunted.
Mark
said: "Whatever those bastards are, they are flesh and blood. We
wait till they come back. Then we hit them hard."
"Fill
it right to the top?" asked Ruth, slipping the funnel spout into
the neck of a bottle.
"Half,"
Mark told her. "It'll be easier to handle. Also we still need to
mix in the soap powder."
"Soap
powder? I thought we were going to burn them, not clean them."
"The
soap powder slows down the rate of burn. It also sticks to whatever
it touches. A direct hit and those bastards will burn and burn.
Chris, will you siphon more petrol out of the car? Half a
bucketful'll be fine."
Chris
walked across to the car carrying the zinc bucket together with a
length of plastic tubing. Christ, he thought, I came here to open a
hotel. Here I am getting ready for a bloody war.
Around
the courtyard the villagers were making preparations for the battle
to come.
They
all knew what had happened. They knew that the Saf Dar, although they
weren't mortal, bled and died.
Now
there was a sense of nervous exhilaration running around the
building. They were going to hit back.
Chris
watched his son helping Tony line up empty bottles on a table. He
felt hope flow back into him again. Soon life should return to
normal. (Should he say God willing? Which god willed it anyway? Tony
Gateman's pagan god which even now was getting ready to lean over
this little rock-slab of an island and slurp up his/ her/its fix of
human emotion? Christ, there was plenty of that about.) He allowed
himself a smile.
He
returned to his job, the strong smell of petrol making his eyes
water. He sucked at the pipe, squinting downward to see the clear
liquid slide up the tube.
"How
we going?" asked Tony, squatting down beside him. There was an
unlit cigar in his mouth. "Don't worry, old son. I'm not going
to light it." He took it out of his mouth and looked at it as if
it was a dog turd. "Disgusting things ... Funny, isn't it. How
stress makes us revert to infantile behavior. All the Hodgson boys
want to do is eat. The Reverend Reed sucks away at his gin bottle
like a baby. He must have five bottles in that briefcase of his. This
..." He put the cigar in his mouth. "An infantile craving,
you know. Something to suck. It's just a substitute for my mother's
tit."
"Tony,
if you don't mind me saying so, you're taking a cynical view of what
we're doing."
"Me?
Cynical? Whatever gave you that idea?"
"From
your own lips, Tony. You said you were the world's greatest cynical
bastard." Chris looked hard at Tony. "Do you think we've
got a chance? After all, Mark blew a hole right through one of those
things."
"You've
got every chance, son. I'm not going to pour cold water on all this."
"But?"
"But
... But life's all been turned inside out. What we've got here is
like running a car on a weak mixture of two-stroke ... then suddenly
we slam in some superhigh-octane mixture. We saw what happened to
Wainwright. And you and I saw what he became. Youmentioned the
goldfish. Have you seen it lately? It's changing all right. You can
see hard lumps pressing through from under the skin; I think it's
really--"
"Tony,
I know something weird's happening here. You think this old pagan god
thing's going to put in a personal appearance. But do you think it
will? And if it does, will it have any effect on us?"
"Chris,
you've seen the phenomena. Christ Almighty ... This thing is so
powerful it's made death redundant. You see what it's done? An animal
dies. Out goes the old life force, but this thing rams in some of its
own high-octane life. This kind of life is what nuclear energy is to
a poxy parafin lamp. You saw those things on the beach the other
night, Chris. Once they were ordinary people. Wainwright. Fox. A boy.
Fishermen. Now they are so full of life they are bursting at the
seams."
"Okay,
Tony. I believe you. But look at ordinary, everyday nature. If you
stand back and look at that objectively that's as weird as buggery.
If someone said a lump of rock two hundred thousand miles away had
the power to lift millions of tons of water twenty feet in the air,
you'd think they were crackers. But the moon does it twice a day. We
don't call it magic, we call it tides. Tons of water are dumped by
the sky all over the world. Not a miracle-rain. Invisible forces can
slam a door shut. Not ghosts-wind. A natural force can light up the
sky at night and blast a tree to smithereens. Lightning. Enormously
powerful forces, but they're not supernatural." He took a deep
breath. "Look, Tony. Whatever's happening is extraordinary. But
perhaps we're just encountering some natural phenomenon that nobody's
witnessed before."
"Hey,
man. Are you drilling for that gas or what?" called Mark. "Your
wife and I are making napalm over here."
"Coming."
He climbed to his feet.
Tony
said nothing, but Chris noticed the man's expression. Maybe he needed
to believe in a pagan god that came to look after its flock.
The
Saf Dar would not come.
Had
they learnt their lesson? Chris watched them. They squatted on the
causeway, the sea rolling around their chests, staring
expressionlessly at the seafort.
"Do
you think they'll get close enough?" asked Ruth, putting her
arms around him.
"You
sound like a right little bloodthirsty warrior."
"I
just want to get rid of them, Chris. I'm sick of all these people
here. I'm sick of being a prisoner in this building."
"The
Saf Dar seem short on common sense. They're like hungry dogs around
the back door of a butcher's. They can't keep away. When they do ..."
He shrugged. "We'll get back to normal."
Normal?
He wondered what Ruth would consider normal. He found himself
wondering if she'd want to leave. No. He couldn't believe that. They
loved the place. He glanced back at the seafort, gloomy in the
evening mist. When he looked at the great expanse of building, his
mind ran ahead, planning how the place would look when it was
completed.