Huxley found the air within the structure unpleasantly humid. This, coupled with the weight of his pack, weapon, and the nuclear explosive device he carried, produced constant sweat and mounting fatigue. His discomfort was exacerbated by the stench of mingled corruption, oil and sewage that arose whenever they were forced to wade through a stretch of pooled water. He knew that he trod on not just the remains of those who had died here, but the collected effluent of a dead city. Evidence of its demise was all around. Mangled cars and vans protruded from arcing walls of what Rhys had taken to calling ‘veg-meat’ along with twisted lampposts and traffic signs.
A few hundred paces in, they found a double-decker bus, its passengers providing the seeds for the huge growth sprouting from its roof. Of course, there were bones and bodies too. Curiously, the bones were mostly human but the bodies were not. Dogs, cats and rats snarled in frozen fear or anger from their veg-meat prisons, crushed, mangled and part-rotted, but otherwise unchanged. The bones were a different story. Denuded of flesh in most cases but all showing signs of deformity. One in particular was so grossly altered that Huxley came to an involuntary halt, transfixed by its sheer ugliness.
The cranium had been narrowed and stretched. The eyes, teeth and cheekbones were a distorted convex mask that could only be described as demonic. It lay amid the remains of a car, a small electric hatchback, its structure shredded, presumably by the scythe-like claws this Diseased skeleton bore at the end of its six-feet-long arms. He had a vague sense of what it had looked like when still clad in skin and muscle but no firm mental image, except to say that it would truly have been a living nightmare.
“Hey, phone-voice lady,” he said, continuing to linger in scrutiny of the skeleton. The phone had been guiding their steps, clicking every now and then before uttering an instruction to “bear left in twenty metres” or “keep straight”. Sometimes, the route it dictated turned out to be an impassable wall of growths, confirming its claim that this grotesque cavern system was impenetrable to the varied imaging tech at the disposal of those Huxley had begun to think of as their “Overseers”. Apart from directions, the phone hadn’t consented to offer any more enlightening details on this new environment, something he was no longer willing to tolerate.
“Bear right in fifty metres,” the phone-voice said, updating a prior instruction with typical blandness.
“Forget that for now,” he said. “It occurs to me you haven’t told us where the M-Strain came from. Origin story. Patient zero, all that shit. There must have been one, right?”
He expected another statement regarding the irrelevance of his question. Instead the phone clicked twice before providing a prompt response. “The origin has never been determined. Informed speculation produced conjecture but no testable or substantive theories.”
“But not aliens, right?” Rhys asked. She had come to a halt a few yards on, flame-thrower held at waist height, sparing the phone a sour glance as she turned in a slow circle, scanning for threats.
“No evidence of extraterrestrial origin has ever been found,” it stated.
“There must be something,” Huxley insisted. “It can’t just have sprung out of nowhere.”
“The first identifiable case was a forty-three-year-old male warehouse worker located in the Enfield borough of London. Witnesses reported a rapid transformation into something they insisted looked a great deal like a werewolf. There were several deaths before the subject was subdued. Some have suggested that a box containing spores was delivered to the warehouse at some point. It handled international deliveries so, if the hypothesis is correct, the consignment could have originated anywhere. However, it is likely there were numerous prior cases missed due to the absence of a violent outcome.”
“Werewolf,” Huxley repeated, gaze still captured by the grotesquely deformed face. He discerned something reptilian in it now, the curve of the jaw and the pointed teeth adding to the sense that he was looking at a dinosaur. Something that might scare you as a kid watching Jurassic Park, or an old stop-motion Harryhausen flick.
“Nightmares,” he said, realisation adding a soft gasp to his voice. “That’s what it does. Turns you into your nightmares.”
“The M-Strain Bacillus multiplies at a greatly increased rate in the centres of the brain most connected with memory,” the phone-voice said. “Also emotion. Fear and memory combined could be said to equal a nightmare. Via a mechanism yet to be identified, the M-Strain is capable of forcing rapid mutation of human cells, guiding the process to produce deformities that are sometimes vaguely recognisable as characters from popular culture.”
“A plague of nightmares,” Rhys said. “I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe this thing had a natural origin.”
The laughter started then, a faint but unmistakable echo that seemed to come from multiple directions. Rhys tensed, flame-thrower raised, while Huxley set down the bomb and unslung his carbine. The laughter persisted for some time, clear in its mockery and, once Huxley detected the female tones that inflected it, recognisable in origin.
“Plath,” he said.
“Got here ahead of us.” Rhys’s lips drew back from her teeth as she brandished the flame-thrower, answering the laughter with a loud snarl: “Got something here for ya! Come and get it, bitch!”
The laughter continued with unconcerned hilarity for another minute or two, dwindling into a chuckle then fading away.
“How’d she get in here without blasting a hole like we did?” Huxley asked the phone.
“Unknown.”
“Seems she found our conversation amusing. Why’s that?”
“Also unknown.”
Liar. He sighed and shouldered his carbine, hefting the bomb. “How long until we can set the timer on this thing?”
“Keep following my directions. The location of the Primary Detonation Site will become evident soon.”
“The PDS, huh?” Rhys said, straightening and resuming her slosh through the stinking water. “You folks really love naming things, don’t you?”
Another hour of navigating befouled pools and heaving their burdens over growth mounds brought them to the largest space they had encountered yet. Emerging from a narrow confluence of growth columns, Huxley drew up short as his night-vision goggles were swamped by a blaze of light. Removing them, he found a single street lamp casting a mostly steady glow over a portion of road abutting a park. Roots snaked over tarmac and pavement before enmeshing themselves in the park railings. Beyond this a small patch of green lawn ended abruptly in a wall of dense matter. Opposite the park lay a parade of shops not yet swallowed by the encroaching veg-meat.
They paused to survey it all, Huxley using his carbine sight to peer into every shadowed corner. Since assaulting them with laughter, Plath had remained silent and unseen yet Huxley harboured no doubts she surveilled every step of this journey. Waiting for us to rest, he concluded. Sleep, even. Like we could in here.
“No prizes for guessing what he was afraid of,” Rhys said, using the flame-thrower to gesture at the park railings. Seeing a figure splayed across the wrought-iron barrier, Huxley moved closer. He guessed it was a man from the breadth of the torso but the level of deformity and covering of roots made it hard to tell. The body was pierced by railings through the legs and arms. These were outstretched, the head thrown back, mouth gaping, bone sprouting from the skull in a spiny circle.
Not just a circle, Huxley thought, stepping closer. “A crown,” he muttered aloud, gaze shifting to the hands, where more bone had sprouted to form the semblance of nails hammered into the palms.
“Think this happened more than three days ago?” Rhys quipped with an arched eyebrow.
“Whoever you were,” he said, turning away, “I’m guessing you weren’t Catholic.”
“Au contraire. I can remember the words to the Hail Mary, Our Father, the Act of Contrition and a load of other shit, in English, Spanish and Latin, no less. On the boat I’d recite it to myself, expecting to feel… something. I didn’t. Maybe faith just doesn’t survive surgically induced amnesia.”
Huxley inclined his head at the cruciform corpse. “Looks like it survives the disease.”
“For all the good it did.” The sardonic curve of her lips faded abruptly, gaze narrowing as it scanned the parade of shops. “Upper window. Above the mini-market. See it?”
He saw it: a dim, flickering yellow glow behind besmirched and cracked window glass. “Something on fire?”
Rhys shook her head. “No smoke. I think it’s a candle.” She took a firmer grip on the flame-thrower. “Could be her. Trying to lure us into something.”
“She’d never be that obvious.”
“Check it out or move on?”
“Move on,” the phone-voice said. “This is not the mission.”
“Really?” Rhys leaned closer to Huxley, hissing into the phone’s receiver. “And who says you get a vote? Just for that, I think we will take a look.”
“Rhys,” Huxley said as she turned and strode towards the mini-market. She didn’t turn, kicking in the part-destroyed door and disappearing inside.
“Signs of aggression,” the phone-voice said. “Irrational thinking…”
“Shut the fuck up,” Huxley snapped, taking a firmer grip on the bomb and following Rhys at an awkward trot.
The interior of the mini-market featured bare shelves and a floor strewn with ravaged food packaging. A light bulb flickered in one of the refrigerated cabinets, the smell it exuded indicating it had stopped functioning weeks ago. A desiccated body lay in front of a self-checkout terminal. Unlike all the others encountered since stepping into this place, it showed no signs of deformity.
“Skull bashed in,” Rhys said after a cursory glance at the dried matter leaking from the corpse’s sundered head. “Looter, maybe?”
“Or someone who tried to stop a looter. Must’ve happened pretty early on, just when things started falling apart.”
Rhys shone her flashlight at the rear of the market. “Door back there.”
She shifted the flame-thrower onto her back and switched to her carbine, carefully easing the door open to reveal the stairs beyond. A dim, inconstant glow from above played over the carpeted steps. She started up without hesitation, Huxley briefly debating the wisdom of leaving the bomb behind before dismissing it and following. He dragged his burden up the stairs one handed, his pistol in the other, the hard plastic emitting a soft but audible thump with every step.
“So much for stealth,” Rhys murmured, crouching at the top of the stairs. She tracked her carbine around the landing, finding nothing to shoot at, the weapon halting at the door leading to the room overlooking the street. It was outlined in soft, wavering light, a repeating, dull click sounding within.
“Could just torch the place and move on,” Huxley pointed out, seeing the sweat beading Rhys’s upper lip.
“Curiosity,” she said, forcing a smile and a shrug. “Can’t help it. Some things amnesia doesn’t erase, I guess.”
She straightened to a half-crouch, approaching the door slowly, then darting out a hand to shove it open. She stepped back a little, carbine ready to counter any threat with a burst of fully auto. But, instead of firing, Rhys became very still. Huxley moved forward to peer over her shoulder.
The man sat on a two-seater leather couch flanked by tall stacks of neatly arranged food cans, most of them empty as far as Huxley could tell. He wore a striped shirt and grey slacks, the fabric stiff from lack of washing. His lowered head was mostly bald with tufts of unkempt grey fringing his ears and nape. His scalp shone in the meagre light of a candle stub burning on a small dish on the coffee table before him. The man didn’t look up to regard their intrusion, hands moving over the surface of a large jigsaw puzzle covering most of the table. It was nearly complete, with only a small gap in the centre, rapidly diminishing as the man’s deft hands took pieces from the carefully arranged row alongside the puzzle, slotting them into place with unconscious precision.
“Erm,” Rhys said. “Hello.”
The man didn’t pause in his task, but did consent to raise his head. Huxley tensed in readiness, expecting to find the leering, gnashing maw of some creature plucked from modern media’s ample supply of horrors. But the face he saw was just that of a tired old man. Curiously, he saw no fear in the old man’s eyes. Instead, they creased as he offered a thin, weary smile of welcome.
“Hello to you, young lady,” he said with the precise, slightly lilting inflection of someone who had learned English as a second language. “Please do come in. Your friend too.” His hands didn’t stop as he spoke, each piece clicking into the near-finished image on the table. “I regret I have no refreshment to offer.”
He smiled again and returned his focus to the puzzle. Rhys shot Huxley a wary, baffled glance and stepped into the room. She kept her weapon trained on the old man, maintaining a wide gap as she edged around the table to the right. Huxley went left, sliding his pistol into its holster. Something – cop instinct probably – told him this aged puzzler presented no threat at all.
“May I?” Huxley asked, resting a hand on the armchair positioned next to the couch.
The old man inclined his head, eyes still on his puzzle. “Please do.”
The sheer pleasure of sitting brought a surprised groan from Huxley, one that drew a chuckle from their host. “You have been travelling a while, then?”
“Yes, sir. A long while, at least it feels like it.”
“So you are soldiers from America.”
Huxley looked at Rhys, finding her engaged in a careful inspection of the room, a suspicious scowl on her face.
“It might surprise you to hear that we have no idea what we are,” Huxley told the old man. “I’m probably some kind of detective and my friend is some kind of doctor. But we can’t even tell you our real names.”
“Why is that?”
Seeing absolutely no purpose in a lie, Huxley said, “They took our memories. It was this whole surgery, implant deal. Not sure how it worked, exactly. But it protected us, from the disease, y’know.”
“Ah.” The old man clicked another piece into place. “Very clever.”
Huxley angled his head to gain a better look at the puzzle. Instead of a landscape or classical painting, it was a photograph, a family photograph in fact. Six people, two women, four men, arms about each other’s shoulders, laughing. The man at the centre of the group stood a little stiffer than the others, attempting a more dignified pose that had apparently amused those around him. The picture had been taken at the moment when their contained laughter burst. The stiff man was younger with far fewer lines to his forehead than this old man on his two-seater couch surrounded by a dwindling food supply, but Huxley still recognised him.
“Your family?” Huxley asked.
“Yes indeed. The last time we were all together. My neighbour took this photograph. My wife sent it to a company that makes jigsaw puzzles from any picture. It was my sixty-fifth birthday present.”
He fell silent as the final piece slotted into place. Huxley watched his finger tremble as it tapped the last piece, a tremble that spread to his hand, then his arm until soon his entire body shook.
“Forgive my rudeness,” the old man said as he immediately went about disassembling the puzzle, hands splaying over the finished image, breaking it apart. “But I must do this, you see.”
“Why?” Rhys asked him.
“It holds me. I must do this.”
“Holds you? To what?”
The old man began to separate pieces from larger segments, turning them face down on the table. “To here. To me. To them. That way I continue.”
Huxley looked around the room, struck by the sense of careful organisation gradually gone awry. Ornaments gathered dust on shelves but not as much as they should have. Sparse cobwebs glittered in the candlelight. “You’ve been here from the start,” he said. “Haven’t you?”
The old man bobbed his head, hands still busy on the disassembled puzzle. “After…” He paused, Huxley seeing his throat constrict, a distance showing in his gaze although his hands never stopped moving. “At the start… The first day when it all began to happen. There was a great deal of noise in the street outside, screaming and shouting. They went to look. I was in the storeroom…” He swallowed. “After that, I saw no reason to leave. My wife…” He made a sound that Huxley thought might be an attempt at a rueful laugh, but it instantly transformed into a shrill screech of pain. The sound might have been unbearable if the old man hadn’t contained it, raising a hand to jam the knuckle of his thumb between his teeth. Blood welled and trickled over scabbed and scarred skin. Huxley fought the instinct to reach out to him, feeling more impotent and angry than at any point since waking on the boat.
The old man lowered his hand after a few seconds, showing no concern at the blood he dripped over his puzzle pieces. When he spoke again his voice was as pleasant and even as when he greeted them. “My wife said we should have left when the first soldiers came. One of many times she was right when I was wrong.” This time he succeeded in voicing his laugh.
“The first soldiers?” Huxley leaned forward in the armchair, cop instinct piquing. “Soldiers came here before your… before it started to happen?”
“Oh yes. About a week before, in fact. They did not dress as soldiers and came in vans that had no insignia. But I was a soldier once and I know how they look, uniforms or not. They had armoured vests under their jackets and weapons too. They parked their vans around the warehouses opposite the stadium. Police came too, cordoned off streets, arrested people who started to film with their phones. Of course, they couldn’t stop everyone but my daughter told me nothing appeared on the Twitter or the other places. There was nothing on the news either.”
The phone clicked then but the voice didn’t speak. Huxley unhooked it from his fatigues and stared into the receiver, head filled with the image of the Overseers in their uniforms and white coats all exchanging tense glances.
“Did you ever find out what they were doing?” he asked the old man.
“No, no. They stayed for an hour. My daughter captured video of them taking many boxes and computers out of the building, escorting people into the vans too. She said she saw one man struggling but the soldiers got him out of sight very quickly. When they left the building was shut up, police stationed around it. People didn’t like it, of course. Rumours flew all around. My wife said we should leave, just in case. I said we were a month behind on the business loan…” He paused again, turning over the final piece so that they all lay face down. A brief moment of hesitation, palsy once again causing his arm then his body to tremble before he began turning the pieces over.
“Any idea what was in the warehouses opposite the stadium?” Huxley asked.
“All manner of things, there are several there.” With all the pieces now turned, the old man set about sorting them into piles: edges, corners, the others grouped according to colour. “You have a purpose here, I assume?”
“Yes.” Huxley slapped a hand to the bomb’s case, forcing a jovial note into his voice. “When this thing goes bang it’s all over, so we’re told.”
“Will it kill everything here?”
“That’s the plan. You’ve still got time to try and make it out…”
Another shrill, pained exclamation bubbled from the old man’s lips, though mercifully this time he managed to quell it without biting his hand. “No. There is nowhere to go for me. This is where I belong. This is my reward and my punishment.” He blinked wet eyes and began to slot pieces together, forming a corner with swift dexterity. “At first I could maintain a routine. Eating, cleaning, toilet. I closed my ears to all the terrible things I heard outside and mostly I sat and I completed this puzzle. I maintained the routine for a long time, but not now. Now there is only this.”
He stopped, the tremble returning as he straightened, turning to face Huxley. “When I was a child I would run around my grandmother’s garden in Mumbai, until one day a snake bit me. It hurt a great deal. So much I thought I would die.” His hands moved to the buttons of his shirt, carefully undoing them to reveal the skin beneath. Huxley couldn’t suppress the revolted shudder that ran through him, unable to look away from the sight. Small marks covered the old man’s flesh from chest to belly, and they seemed to ripple. Huxley’s disgusted but fascinated gaze saw that each one was opening and closing, gaping like the mouths of goldfish. No, he corrected himself, seeing the minuscule fangs protruding from each mouth, leaking venom as they gnashed. Snakes.
“They bite less when I do the puzzle,” the old man said, shaking from head to foot now. “I think it slows it, remembering the good things, I mean to say. If you can keep the bad thoughts at bay, you live. But no one can do that for ever.” He blinked, tears trickling down his twitching face. “I request that you kill me before you leave.”
Huxley found he couldn’t meet the old man’s gaze, keeping his eyes on the puzzle pieces as he rasped out a soft response. “I don’t think I can do that, sir.”
“You must.” Desperation trilled in the old man’s voice. “I deserve it. You see, I killed someone. A young man. My customer. He tried to steal from me so I killed him. His name was Frederico. He would come in every few days and buy a six-pack of the cheapest lager in stock and a copy of the Racing Post. He would give me tips, for bets you see. They never won.”
The body downstairs with the smashed skull. One of countless murders in a city claimed by nightmares.
“It changes things, you know.” The old man’s tone softened, hands returning to the puzzle. “Memories. It twists them, makes lies of them. I loved my family more than anything in this world, and they deserved my love. But, whenever I allow myself to pause, I remember things. Things that make my wife into a liar and cheat, my sons into thieves. Things that I know never happened. I think it feeds on ugliness. I think it needs us to hate, that is how it spreads. If you do not kill me, I know I will surrender to that ugliness, and then—” his fingers splayed on the pieces “—they truly will be dead and I will no longer be… me.”
His last word was a barely legible explosion of spit and desperation and he immediately returned to his task. His hands moved so fast they seemed to blur, turning and fitting pieces together with a speed and accuracy far beyond merely human skill.
“Huxley,” Rhys said. He looked up to find her inclining her head at the door, finger moving to the fire selector on her carbine. Huxley shook his head and stood up, releasing his hold on the bomb and drawing his pistol. He expected his arm to shake as he trained the muzzle on the old man’s temple, expected a bout of last-minute cowardice, but it didn’t happen.
“First soldiers.” Huxley held the phone close to his mouth as they exited the mini-market, his words clipped and very precise. “Soldiers who showed up at the warehouses opposite the stadium. Soldiers in plain clothes who arrived weeks before the army. You heard all that, right?”
No clicks or hesitation, but the very promptness of the response made him suspicious. “M-Strain infection is known to produce hallucinations and false memories. The situation described by the Diseased you encountered simply did not occur.”
“Bullshit. You selected me for this because I’m a detective. Years of experience getting to the truth makes me a living lie detector, whether I remember how or not. He wasn’t delusional and he wasn’t lying.” He and Rhys paused beside the overgrown ruin of a police car while he continued to harangue the phone. “Get it straight, whoever the fuck you people are, we are not taking one more step until you tell us exactly what—”
The shot was poorly aimed, missing him by a clear foot to smash through what remained of the shop window behind. His response was instinctive and immediate, crouching behind the remains of the police car, dropping the phone, one hand still clutching the bomb case while he raised the carbine with the other. Rhys had already begun returning fire, two aimed shots fired into the sprawl of growth dominating the park. He couldn’t see what she was shooting at until he caught the answering flare of a muzzle flash, a flickering strobe accompanied by a rhythmic growl that told of automatic fire. He ducked, shredded metal and shattered glass lacerating the street.
“She got herself a gun,” he observed to Rhys.
She crouched behind the police car’s rear wheel hub, shaking her head and shrinking from another burst of fire. “It’s not her.” The firing ceased before Huxley could ask what she meant. “He’s out,” Rhys grunted, bobbing up, carbine at her shoulder, snapping off two more shots. Huxley saw something shift behind the park railings, a grey-green, vaguely human figure staggering as Rhys’s rounds struck home.
Huxley put his eye to his carbine sight, the figure leaping into stark clarity. It was a man, or had been. Growths snaked over his form from ankles to head, obscuring identifying details. However, the bullpup assault rifle he held in his enlarged hands marked him as a soldier. Another salvo from Rhys tore gobbets of veg-meat from the figure’s chest, making him stagger but causing no appreciable delay as he went about reloading his rifle.
“Covering’s too thick,” Huxley said, centring the sight’s reticule on the soldier’s forehead. The shot tore away the growths covering his face, producing a plume of blood. Still he didn’t fall. “Shit.” Huxley aimed for the same spot, firing again. It took three attempts before he succeeded in putting a bullet in the Diseased’s brain. Once again, he failed to fall, reeling about and firing wildly, bullets striking sparks from the railing and tearing holes in exposed tarmac.
Huxley and Rhys crouched low as the bullets zipped around them, cautiously raising their heads when the soldier’s rifle fell silent. “Seriously?” Rhys said. Apparently robbed of the motor skills required to reload his rifle, the Diseased soldier had dropped it. He charged towards them, arms outstretched and a guttural cry of wordless fury emerging from his mouth along with a spray of blood. He continued to rage after colliding with the park railings, casting out a torrent of dark-red fluid, arms flailing through the gaps in the iron barrier.
“Fuck,” Rhys swore in a soft, elongated sigh, Huxley turning to find her staring at something on the pavement. The sat-phone lay shattered in several pieces, plastic and wiring scattered. Stooping to pick it up, Huxley knew pressing the green button to be a pointless act but he did it anyway.
“Now where do we go?” Rhys asked, voice laden with weary despair.
Huxley spared a glance at the mini-market’s upstairs window where the candle still flickered. “The stadium sounds like a good bet.”
“Great. I’ll ask for directions, shall I?” Rhys hefted her flame-thrower and strode towards the still gibbering and flailing Diseased pressing himself into the railings. “Excuse me, sir. Is there a stadium nearby, perchance? No? Oh well, fuck you then.”
The flame-thrower’s roar smothered the soldier’s enraged cries and the short-lived scream of pain that followed. He took an absurdly long time to die, arms waving and hands clawing at Rhys with fingers reduced to blackened stubs. She blasted him twice more, stepping back with a disgusted grimace at the stench as he finally subsided into ashen stillness.
She stared at the smoking mess for a short while then sniffed. “Guess the old man might’ve had a map somewhere. A–Z, maybe.”
“No need.” Huxley pointed over her shoulder at a part-obscured junction twenty yards on. The sign had been twisted and morphed by the growths to resemble an arch, but some words remained legible, the most salient being the four positioned next to an upwards pointing arrow: Twickenham Stadium 1 Mile.