Huxley and Rhys fired in unison, the volley raising tall fountains around the inflatable, their guns falling silent at Pynchon’s shout: “Save your ammo! He’s gone!”
“Not a fucking octopus!” Huxley gasped in breathless impotence. He itched to fire again, possessed by a perverse need for revenge. But whatever deeply ingrained training he had received halted his finger on the trigger guard and shifted it to the safety catch.
“Eyes on the water,” Pynchon said, continuing to steer the inflatable through the maze of wreckage. “If there was one there might be more.”
“One what?” Rhys asked, voice shrill with shock.
“Extreme mutation,” Plath said, her voice lacking the panic of Huxley and Rhys. She ignited the gas nozzle of her flame-thrower and settled a steady, searching gaze on the water. “Looked similar to the deformity on that body, don’t you think?”
“That was post-mortem,” Rhys said.
“Then it’s reasonable to assume the disease isn’t a hundred per cent fatal.” Huxley saw Plath’s mouth twitch and knew she was containing a laugh. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
He wanted to tell her to shut up. He wanted to shoot something. He wanted Golding not to be dead and he especially wanted to wipe away the glistening patch of the historian’s blood on the inflatable’s hull. Instead, he pulled the stock of his carbine tighter against his shoulder and kept scanning the water. Discipline. Training. Resistance to trauma. Learned skills coupled with something he suspected was more innate.
They were halfway through the wreckage when the next attack came. As before, there was no warning, a thrashing, multi-limbed thing erupting from the water directly in the inflatable’s path. Pynchon’s reflexes saved them, hand jerking the tiller to a right angle, turning the craft in time to avoid the descending limbs with their wickedly sharp points.
Huxley was unable to discern many details among the dark, swift-moving shape of their assailant. However, he did hear its voice, harsh and grating but also entirely human, born of a mouth somewhere in the deformed mass of its being. “Bitch! Lying fucking bitch!” It lurched after the inflatable as Pynchon steered it into a wide arc, Huxley catching a glimpse of a face in the spiky shadow, a hating, teeth-bared rictus. “Lying whore!” it screamed, water churning as it continued its pursuit. “You took everything from me…”
Huxley aimed for where he thought he had seen the hate-filled face and fired twice. The thing jerked at the impact but kept coming, following the inflatable’s wake with anxiety-inducing swiftness. Huxley and Rhys shifted position and fired again, their pursuer shuddering as the bullets lashed it but showing no signs of slowing.
“Steer left,” Plath told Pynchon, voice flat and curt, her narrowed gaze fixed on the Diseased. “Then kill the engine.”
Pynchon frowned at her but, apparently perceiving her intent, did as she said. Plath rose to one knee as the inflatable slewed and slowed, the Diseased closing the distance in a fury of white water, still screaming its grievance.
“Bitch! Whore! Cunt!”
The whooshing blast of the flame-thrower drowned the words, Huxley shielding his face from the heat but finding the sight of what came next too irresistible to close his eyes. The yellow and orange tongue spewed from Plath’s weapon to engulf the Diseased in an instant blossom of steam and burning matter. Spindly limbs spasmed and clawed, its clear howl of utter anguish audible even above the roar of the fiery torrent consuming it. The thing slipped briefly below the surface in an attempt to extinguish the flames, but, driven by panic or madness, it re-emerged a second later. Plath maintained the blazing stream, tracking the Diseased as it scrambled to a mound of rubble. It screamed in incoherent pain as it latched its spindly limbs onto the piled debris, vainly attempting to crawl away from the inferno. Finally, its screams ended as the fire ate its throat. Huxley found he still couldn’t fully discern the shape of the thing as it slumped into the water, a floating, charred island of ruin. His guts roiled under the weight of a stench that mingled spent fuel with overdone meat.
“Wasn’t very polite, was he?” Plath observed, casting a judgemental glare at the Diseased’s smoking remains. Resuming her seat, she waved a languid hand at Pynchon. “Home, and don’t spare the horses.”
Pynchon opened the throttle to full power as soon as they emerged into the open but Huxley found the inflatable’s lack of speed jarringly aggravating. The journey back to the boat probably required no more than fifteen minutes but felt like hours. As the inflatable ploughed its steady, unimpressive course, all eyes were fixed on the water in expectation of another attack, apart from Plath. She had relaxed into a placid repose, cradling her flame-thrower with almost motherly affection.
Once back aboard the boat, the engines flared to life as soon as they had reattached the inflatable to its tethers. Huxley skidded across the aft deck as the boat swung around in a 180-degree turn, pointing its prow away from the ruined bridge. For the first time the engines roared to full power, twin arcs of water fountained in their wake as they sped downriver. It maintained the same speed until the remains of Westminster Bridge faded into the fog.
“This should do it,” Pynchon said as the engines altered pitch and the boat slewed around once more. Silence settled upon them as they waited, eyes scanning a sky they couldn’t see and ears straining for the sound of approaching aircraft.
“It’s possible we might not even hear them,” Pynchon added. “If it’s a high-altitude drop…”
The groaning whoosh of a jet drowned his words, the sound sweeping from east to west. They saw nothing, not even a shadow in the red mist. Seeing Pynchon clamp both hands to his ears, Huxley did the same just as the bomb hit. To call what came next a boom was pitifully inadequate. It was a sound that was felt rather than heard, so vast as to swamp the senses, Huxley shuddering as what felt like the invisible arm of a vicious ghost swept through him.
The boat shifted as the blast raised up in a sizeable swell, the surrounding fog thinning to reveal more of their surroundings. Huxley’s eyes immediately went to the sky in an instinctive desire to catch a glimpse of blue, but all he saw was a lighter shade of pink before the red haze closed in once again. Removing his hands from his ears, he heard what sounded like rain, another elemental feature that had been absent from their journey. However, multiple splashes drew his gaze to the sight of debris falling into the floodwater.
When the last chunk of rubble splashed into the river a few yards ahead of the prow, the boat’s engines resumed the steady, unimpressive chug that had marked most of the journey. As they closed on the site of the explosion it became apparent that the ruins of Westminster Bridge had formed a partial dam given the strength of the current rushing into the newly created gap. The bomb had torn a 40-foot-wide hole in the barrier, creating a frothing channel through which the boat made jolting but undamaged passage. Once they settled into comparatively calmer waters, Huxley took in the sight of the newly inundated precincts of the Houses of Parliament. On the south bank, half-submerged trees swayed in the fresh torrent.
“Was this our mission, do you think?” Rhys wondered. “Flood the rest of the city?”
“To what purpose?” Plath said. “It’s plainly already dead so why drown it?”
They passed beneath two more bridges over the course of the next half-hour, their middle spans destroyed by what Pynchon judged to be airstrikes. “Looks like they were trying to stop people crossing,” Rhys said. “But in which direction?”
“I doubt it mattered after a while,” Pynchon said. “From what the girl on the laptop said, it looks like they gave up on the city and established a perimeter on the M25. Must’ve been quite an operation. We’d be talking tens of thousands of troops to make it work.”
“What if it didn’t?” Huxley asked. “As far as we know it could have been overrun months ago. What then?”
“Then we’re living in a whole world that’s gone to shit instead of just a city.”
The next bridge was noteworthy for three reasons. The first being that it was fully intact, spared bombing for reasons Huxley doubted he would ever know. The second was its design: it was the first suspension bridge they had seen, three spans and two sets of tall white pillars providing anchors for the steel cables arcing between them, while also serving as the supports for its third notable feature. The bodies hung from the cables at varying heights, fifty or more swaying in the meagre breeze. Tracking his carbine sight over the dangling corpses, Huxley found many lacking obvious signs of infection, others riven by telltale distortions to face and limbs. Some were naked, others fully clothed. Some old, some young, some children. In a few cases, their executioners had felt the need to adorn their victim with signs, the daubed lettering proclaiming one elderly woman a “CLASS TRAITOR” while the child a few yards to her left was dubbed “MIGRANT SCUM”. Death appeared to be the only unifying factor.
“Turned on each other,” Rhys stated, voice thick.
“It’s what people do,” Plath said. “When things get bad and fear is the overriding emotion. They probably started with the Diseased, then anyone they thought might be infected. After that—” she shrugged “—every living soul they could get their hands on. Didn’t realise they were most likely all infected themselves by then. Probably thought they were doing a good thing even as they were stringing up that little girl over there.”
Despite the lightness of her tone, Huxley saw something new in her face: disgust. It was a knowing expression, one he knew to be habitual. For the first time he felt the urge to question his judgement about the true aim of this mission. If this is what she thinks of humanity, why send her to save it?
He began to formulate some carefully worded questions for Plath, probing enquiries aimed at revealing more of her already troubling character. It was a difficult prospect; how to elicit information from someone with a life history amounting to only two days. Assuming she’s as forgetful as she claims. The thought surely came from his cop-brain, the product of professional suspicion moulded into second nature. Of them all, even Pynchon, Plath now appeared the most composed, the most assured of herself. It wasn’t too paranoid to entertain the notion that such surety arose from a depth of self-awareness denied him and the others.
His growing list of questions quickly slipped away when, with a whirr of gears and electronics, the chain gun activated.
“What the fuck!” Rhys reached for her carbine as they all stared at the bulky contraption through the wheelhouse windscreen. It didn’t fire, instead merely tracking its long barrel right, left, then up and down, putting Huxley in mind of a boxer flexing his arms before the bell. They all started again when the screen on the right side of the dashboard came to life. It flickered briefly before settling into a monochrome image of the river ahead, shifting in concert with the movements of the chain gun. Below the screen a panel slid aside to reveal a small joystick and keypad.
“Controls are active.” Pynchon’s voice held a mingling of both relief and anticipation as he settled into the seat in front of the display. His fingers played over the buttons and the joystick before taking a firmer hold. As he worked it, the chain gun altered its angle to match, Huxley finding its movements disconcertingly fluid, lacking the robotic jerkiness he expected.
“Got a full load of ammo too.” Pynchon tapped a numerical readout on the display. “High velocity twenty-five millimetre cannon shells. Won’t just take down an elephant, this’ll make mincemeat of the whole herd.”
“Why activate it now?” Rhys asked.
“Because,” Plath said, a wry smile on her lips, “what’s ahead will be worse than what’s behind.”
The boat began to slow when the next bridge came into view. Like the suspension bridge it was intact, but fortunately free of hanging bodies. Its supports were less encouraging in appearance, featuring another sprawl of wrecked river craft, which raised the prospect of once again having to blast their way through. As they drew closer, Huxley sighed in relief at the sight of a navigable gap in the mess. His lightened spirits soon evaporated when his gaze tracked to the largest and least damaged boat among the jumbled craft.
“Is that…?” Rhys squinted at the wreck through the windscreen.
“A Mark VI Wright Class patrol boat,” Pynchon finished. “Yeah.”
The engines died and it was with a sense of grim inevitability that Huxley reached for the sat-phone when it began to chirp. He placed it on the dashboard and hit the green button, his greeting a terse grunt. “Huxley.”
“Do you have casualties?”
“One. Golding’s dead.”
No pause. “Do any of the others display signs of confused thinking or unwarranted aggression?”
“Oh, get fucked. Golding’s dead! Do you get that? A fucking monster came out of the water and killed him! He’s dead!”
“Acknowledged. Answer my question: do any of the others display signs of confused thinking or unwarranted aggression?”
Huxley rested clenched fists on either side of the phone, bafflement and anger competing to spill more rage-inflected words at this faux-female machine. Pointless. It’s a thing, not a person, designed not to care what you think, or feel. Probably with good reason.
“No,” he said, after a few calming breaths.
“Sensors on your boat have detected a transponder signal. What is the origin?”
Huxley raised his eyes to the windscreen and the tilted, pale-grey craft pushed up against the bridge’s northern stanchion. “There’s another boat just like this one ahead.”
“Describe its condition.”
“Immobile. Seems intact.”
“Signs of life?”
“None.”
A pause, then a faint series of clicks. “Investigate. Gather additional weapons and ordnance. They may be necessary for the next phase of this mission. Destroy the other boat with explosives when the task is complete.”
Huxley surveyed the others, finding doubtful suspicion on the faces of Pynchon and Rhys while Plath appeared only marginally interested. “What if we find survivors?” he enquired.
“Kill them.”
“Whose boat is that?”
“That is not relevant to your mission. Your boat will reactivate when the transponder on the other craft is disabled.”
The signature clicks of its customary sign-off followed, then the sat-phone fell silent.
“My advice,” Plath said. “Prime some C-4, toss it on that thing. When it goes boom we get to move on.”
“They want us to investigate,” Rhys pointed out.
Plath raised her eyebrows, smiling blandly. “And I don’t give a shit.” She turned away, heading for the ladder to the crew cabin. “Go if you want, but don’t ask me to join you. I’ve done my heroics for the day, and you’re welcome by the way. I think I’ll have a nap.”
They decided Pynchon should stay behind, since he was the only one who knew how to operate the chain gun. The north and south banks had been silent when they first halted at the bridge but the more they lingered the greater the number of distressed and delusional shouts came at them from the mist. The fog was so thick they were denied the sight of these vocal Diseased, but the growing number of ripples to either side indicated an increasing throng. Also, Huxley’s eyes scanned the water in constant expectation of another spiny, spear-pointed limb lashing out from the depths.
“Might need some serious firepower before long,” he told Pynchon, inclining his head at the chain gun.
The soldier nodded in reluctant agreement, his focus on the other patrol boat. “It’s not a bad idea, y’know. What she said. Just blowing it up and getting out of here.”
“We need to know,” Rhys said. “Or I do, anyway. Who they were. What they were doing here.”
“How did they get this far is what puzzles me,” Huxley said. “With Westminster Bridge blocking the river, I mean.”
“Bit obvious isn’t it, Mister Policeman?” Pynchon gave him a grin of muted disparagement. “It wasn’t down when they came through. Means they must have been here a while.” His grin faded as another notion dawned. “Or they took the bridge down to stop them turning back.”
He prepped four blocks of C-4, each with its own detonator and timer switch. “One in the engine room,” he instructed, placing the last block in a pack and handing it to Huxley. “One in the prow. One in the crew quarters and the other on the dashboard. If that doesn’t destroy the transponder, wherever it might be, nothing will.”
Huxley took charge of the inflatable’s outboard while Rhys perched on the prow, carbine trained on the other boat. “I know you’re thinking it,” she commented when they had covered half the distance.
“Thinking what?”
“Plath. She’s not who she used to be.”
“That’s probably true of all of us.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” She glanced back at him, face hard with intent. “We should kill her.”
“You suspect she’s infected?”
“Possibly. Or she was always like this and her very particular psychology is reasserting itself. If she scored less than ninety per cent on the psychopath test I’d be very surprised. In short: she’s fucking nuts and a danger to the rest of us.”
“Seems a pretty significant diagnosis to make based on little evidence. She’s not going to win any prizes for charm or likeability, sure. And she’s certainly got a vicious streak. Doesn’t make her a psychopath.”
Another glance, this one more of a glare. “In a survival situation we’re forced to make life or death judgements based on available data, thin though it might be. I told you I intend to survive this. And I told you why.”
Her daughter. The daughter that might just as easily be a son. A child she knew she had brought into the world but couldn’t even remember their name or face. He knew then with complete certainty that Rhys had volunteered for this, driven by a fierce and implacable need to secure that child’s future. It was the same need that fuelled her resolve now, the same need that made her want to kill Plath.
“A psychopath can still be useful,” he pointed out, closing the outboard’s throttle as the inflatable nudged the aft deck of the other patrol boat. “She proved that today.”
“Because she had to. She’s fundamentally incapable of giving a shit about anyone else. If she thinks it necessary to ensure her own survival, she’ll turn on us in an instant.”
“We’re getting short on crew. You may have noticed.” He hefted his carbine, shifting it so the stock rested against his shoulder. Rhys didn’t move, keeping her eyes on his. “If it comes to it,” he said as the moment grew uncomfortably long, “I won’t hesitate. But I’m not ready to do outright murder.”
Rhys’s face bunched in reluctant agreement before she straightened, turning to aim her carbine at the patrol boat’s wheelhouse. The craft lay half concealed in the gloom beneath the bridge’s span, Huxley making out the dull sheen of the displays on its control panel, but no sign of power. Rhys kept her carbine aimed with one hand as she climbed from the inflatable to the aft deck, kneeling then activating her flashlight.
“Knock, knock!” she called out. “It’s Rhys and Huxley from next door. We brought you a cherry pie. Love what you’ve done with the place.”
No answer as Huxley hauled himself to her side. Their twin flashlight beams played over the wheelhouse interior, catching a glint of shattered glass when they touched the windscreens. “Bullet impacts,” Huxley judged.
“Lot of them too.” Rhys rose and moved into the wheelhouse, shifting her LED beam left and right. “All over the place. Looks like they had a full-on firefight in here.”
“Bodies?”
She shook her head, lowering her flashlight to illuminate numerous expended cartridge casings littering an extensive abstract pattern of dark stains decorating the rubberised floor plates. “It’s dried but this was definitely a bleed-out. Somebody died here.”
Huxley went to the dashboard, finding it a stark contrast to their own. The sealed unit that was such a feature of their boat was absent. The board was rich in buttons and control panels, featuring a large joystick and levers on the right that he assumed controlled the boat’s rudder and engines.
“They had full control,” he said. “Can’t see a sat-phone either. No waiting around for the engines to start up for them.”
“Then they knew what they were doing. They knew who they were.”
“Possibly. Either way I’d bet they knew a shitload more than we do.” He nodded towards the ladder. “Crew cabin. I’ll lead.”
“Sexist.” She spoke the word in a tone devoid of objection, standing aside while he swung the carbine to his back and drew his pistol. Unhooking the flashlight from his webbing, he held it in a reverse grip alongside his gun hand. The light revealed more staining to the crew-cabin ladder but the deck below was clear. Huxley crouched low as he descended, pausing with every step, forcing himself not to flick the light around too quickly. The bodies were easy to find, two of them, slumped on either side of the narrow aisle between the bunks.
He paused at the foot of the ladder to scour the cabin with the flashlight, finding blood spatter and a scattering of detritus. Empty ration packs littered the deck along with a number of smartphones. “Clear,” he told Rhys, shifting the light to the bodies. “You’ve got some examining to do.”
Both corpses, a man and a woman, were dressed in the same non-camo fatigues Huxley wore. They were dark with the onset of necrosis, tendrils of corruption creeping through mottled flesh. The man had a dark stain in the centre of his chest and the woman a coin-sized hole in her forehead with a larger one in the rear of her skull, the wall behind dark with exploded matter. A pistol lay in the stiffened, ash dark hand resting in her lap.
“Murder–suicide,” Huxley deduced, drawing a withering look from Rhys. He was grateful she didn’t bother with the ‘no shit, Sherlock’ jibe before carrying out a cursory inspection of the bodies.
“Both in their thirties,” she mused, angling the woman’s head from side to side, Huxley fighting a spasm of revulsion at the creak and grind of dried muscle tissue. “Rigor’s come and gone so they’ve been dead a while,” Rhys went on, casting a critical eye over both corpses. “I’d expect more decomposition, but the disease might slow the process somehow. They were both infected, see?” She traced a finger along the woman’s jawline to point out the deformities. Near the woman’s chin a small spur of bone resembling a miniature rhino horn jutted from the flesh. “He’s got growths at the top of his spine,” she added, nodding to the dead man.
“Their scars are different.” Huxley moved his light closer to the woman’s shaven skull, illuminating the inch-long healed incision above her ear.
“Smaller,” Rhys agreed. “I’d guess a less invasive procedure.” She had to use a knife to cut away the woman’s vest, matted and stuck to the flesh in places. “No scars above the kidneys. Guess they saved that just for us.”
“What about names?”
Rhys moved her flashlight to the woman’s forearm. The tattoo was hard to make out among the discoloured flesh but she deciphered it after some squinting. “Kahlo.” The man’s tattoo was easier to discern, Rhys putting it down to the fact that the blood had congealed in his hands rather than his arms. “Turner.”
“Frida Kahlo and J. M. W. Turner,” Huxley said. “Painters. Looks like this was the artists’ boat. But only two of them?’
“Unlikely.” Rhys jerked her head at the ceiling. “The firefight was inside. My guess is they killed the others when infection took hold. Tipped them over the side when the shooting ended, then…” She gestured to either side. “Decided on this when they realised they weren’t going to make it.”
Huxley turned his attention to the smartphones littering the deck. “Must’ve gathered them from the wrecks downriver.” Picking up the nearest phone, he pushed the power button, finding it dead. He tossed the device aside and tried several more with the same result. “No good. If they learned anything, it died with them.”
“Gotta be something here.” Rhys rose and moved to the storage lockers in the floor. “They don’t seem to have had as much gear as we do, or they used it all up getting this far.” She knelt to rummage in the space while Huxley moved to the engine room. He spent a few minutes in fruitless searching, shining his light on various machinery and finding every dial inert and readout dead. A wordless exclamation from Rhys caused an involuntary jerk of his gun hand, finger twitching, but once again his ingrained training stopped it moving to the trigger.
“What?” he shouted back.
“They left us something.” Her voice held a surprisingly cheery note, like a kid finding a toy in the cereal box.
As he re-entered the crew cabin, Huxley paused when his LED alighted on a mark disfiguring the wall behind Turner’s body. At first it looked like an elongated smear of his blood, dried into dark filth, but as his eye lingered, he saw that it formed a word. Kahlo shot Turner then wrote something in his blood before blowing her brains out. Crouching, he played the flashlight beam over it, mouthing the daubed letters, each one rendered in irregular, barely legible capitals: “A N T I B O D Y”. Another short, meaningless smear he took as some form of punctuation, then a digit followed by another incomplete word: “5 F A I L U”.
Five failures? he wondered. There were five of them, but seven of us set sail on this river. Did they want an improved chance of success or just a bigger sample size?
“Huxley,” Rhys said in irritation. He began to tell her about the gruesome graffiti, then stopped. He didn’t know why, but some instinct told him with unambiguous insistence to say nothing. More cop-brain stuff, he decided, suppressing a pang of guilt. Keep back information that might be useful later.
“What’ve you got?” he asked, moving to her side.
“Something useful for once.” She reached into the locker to grasp the neck of an object about the size of a heavy duty desktop printer, but judging by the difficulty Rhys had in lifting it, considerably heavier. “Oh please,” she grunted. “Don’t help. I’m fine.”
“What is this thing?” He took hold of the object’s broad base and together they managed to heave it onto the deck. Huxley used his light to illuminate a device that seemed to be an elaborate marriage of binoculars and flatbed scanner.
“If I’m not mistaken.” Rhys ran a hand over the thing’s bulky head. “This is a microscope spectrophotometer.” Seeing his blank look, she elaborated. “A microscope and a spectrometer in one unit. Not only will it let you image samples at micro-levels, it’ll also tell you what they’re made of, and—” she flicked a switch on the base, letting out a satisfied laugh when it lit up in green “—it seems to have its own fully functioning power source.”
“You know how to use it?”
“Pretty sure I do.”
“All right.” He glanced over his shoulder at the bodies. The word daubed onto the wall was lost to the shadows. Antibody. “Let’s get it on the inflatable. Then we’ll see if there’s anything else to find…”
The sound that erupted outside was so loud he thought at first another jet had come screaming in on a bombing mission. When it paused for a short interval before blaring into life once more he realised it was no jet. The cacophony brought to mind some kind of heavy-duty drill but much more rapid and accompanied by a high-pitched yowl that told of violently displaced air.
“The chain gun,” he said, getting to his feet. “Time to go.”
Rhys grunted as she attempted to lift the microscope, barely managing to get it clear of the deck. “We can’t leave this.”
Huxley bit down on a profane exclamation, hearing the chain gun pause then scream again, a thud sounding from above as something impacted the roof of the boat. After shrugging off his pack, he extracted one of the C-4 blocks and set the timer for five minutes, thought about it, then reduced it to four.
“This’ll have to do,” he said, returning the block to the pack and hurrying to place it at the hatch to the engine room. He checked the ladder was clear, seeing nothing but taking comfort from the fact that the chain gun had fallen silent. Together, he and Rhys manhandled her prize up the rungs to the wheelhouse, the chain gun letting out another scream when they reached the top. More thuds sounded above their heads, the boat heaving with the impacts. Huxley caught a glimpse of something wet and heavy sliding down the windscreen but didn’t linger for a better look.
They emerged onto the aft deck to be greeted by what at first appeared to be a bolt of horizontal lightning. The screaming report of the chain gun thrummed their ears as they ducked, Huxley looking up to see a near solid line of monstrous fireflies buzzing overhead. Tracer, he realised, tracking the glowing stream to the bridge. At first it seemed to be blossoming into red fireworks as it met a dark, shifting obstacle, tracking back and forth to leave a trail of crimson novas. When one of those fireworks deposited a chunk of smoking, deformed forearm on the deck, he understood the nature of the unfolding danger.
The chain gun fell silent once more and he looked towards the boat, seeing a thin stream of grey vapour rising from its barrel. He thought he saw Pynchon waving urgently behind the wheelhouse glass but couldn’t be sure. From the rear of the boat he heard a steady, repeating crack, catching the muzzle flash of Plath’s carbine as she fired aimed shots at something on the north bank.
A collective growl from above drew his gaze back to the bridge. Its balustrade was streaked with blood and decorated by the partly destroyed corpses of the Diseased. He couldn’t see the source of the growling but assumed it came from those who had survived the chain gun’s attentions and possessed enough residual reason to take shelter. The scale of the noise they produced told of a large number. While he had been able to make some sense of the utterances from the other Diseased they had encountered, this was a truly hellish and incomprehensible babble. Rhythmic yelping overlapped with plaintive wails and infuriated roars to create a chorus he would have described as bestial if he hadn’t been sure no collection of animals would ever produce something so ugly.
One of the disarranged bodies tumbled from the bridge, the boat bobbing as it collided with the wheelhouse roof. More followed, Huxley seeing how they were being pushed over the balustrade directly above the boat, some whole, most not, dismembered limbs and decapitated heads forming part of the growing cascade.
“They’re trying to sink us,” Rhys said.
A rapid series of cracks from Plath’s carbine snapped Huxley’s attention back to the boat. Four minutes, he reminded himself, stooping to heft the microscope contraption and dragging it to the inflatable. Closer to two now.
The inflatable contrived not to sink under the concentrated weight of the microscope, but did bob alarmingly as Rhys cast away the rope and Huxley deposited the device in her arms before reaching for the outboard. Unwilling to risk a wayward shot from Plath’s carbine, he steered to the boat’s port side, the chain gun roaring back to life the instant they cleared the prow. It fired in short bursts now, Huxley looking back to see the pulses of tracer impacting the upper side of the bridge in what he assumed to be an effort to keep the Diseased’s heads down. It didn’t appear to have much effect, the cascade of body parts continuing without pause. The other boat listed at an increasingly acute angle under the additional weight, drifting away from the bridge stanchion, water lapping over its stern.
“New toy?” Plath enquired, sparing them a glance as they tied up the inflatable and heaved the microscope onto the aft deck. She turned and fired without waiting for an answer, Huxley raising himself up to see what she was shooting at. The ripples disturbing the floodwater off the starboard side had intensified considerably and he saw numerous silhouettes in the fog. Like the Diseased on the bridge, this group gave voice to a grotesque song, just as discordant but shot through with a burgeoning note of enraged aggression.
“One or two rush forward now and again,” Plath said. Beyond her a splash appeared in the haze and she fired two quick shots. “See? Seem to be getting bolder by the second. We can’t change the angle of the boat so Pynchon can get them with the chain gun.”
“How long?” Pynchon called from the wheelhouse.
Huxley left Rhys to add her carbine to Plath’s efforts and moved to the front of the wheelhouse, peering through the windscreen at the other boat. The stern was part submerged now as it drifted further towards the centre of the bridge, burdened by ever more grisly projectiles from above.
“I set a four-minute fuse,” he told Pynchon. “Can’t be much longer.”
Pynchon’s face bunched in consternation, hand tensing on the joystick to rake the top of the bridge with another burst of chain gun fire. Huxley focused on the other boat, counting off sixty seconds then letting out a sigh of self-reproach when nothing happened. “Maybe I didn’t set the timer right.”
“Terrific.” Pynchon’s jaw worked in a manner that indicated he was, with difficulty, containing a stream of highly critical and profane invective. “We’ll just have to hope the transponder signal is muffled when it sinks. Water’s a pretty good inhibitor for radio waves. Not sure the river’s deep enough though.”
Huxley watched another fleshy deluge pummel the boat, the Diseased ducking down as Pynchon unleashed another short burst of tracer. “Gonna run out of ammo fast at this rate.”
“Can’t work out why they’re so intent on sinking it,” Huxley said. “I mean, they’re all insane, right? The disease makes them that way. This is collective effort…”
His conjecture ended when the boat disappeared in an instantaneous upsurge of water. The explosion was so close the sound swamped them, spiderweb cracks appearing in the windscreens as Huxley and Pynchon ducked, hands clamped to their ears. The boat swayed and heaved in the wake before righting itself and resuming forward motion. Huxley only realised the engines had reactivated when the ringing in his ears faded.
As the shadow of the bridge swept over them, he made for the aft deck, finding Plath casting a few farewell bullets at the Diseased. The fog closed in before he could make out any details, but he gained an impression of a large mass of deformed bodies crowding the span, their collective, infernal chorus fading into the engines’ roar.
Looking down, he saw Rhys engaged in a close examination of their treasure, hands playing over the various knobs and switches with tentative appreciation. “Shit,” she said, glancing up at him with brows arched. “All that blood and guts and we didn’t think to take any tissue samples.”