On Deadly Ground by Simon Clark
Tesco mentioning the names of Victoria and Jesus brought the memories thundering back. Oh, Christ. I looked up at Stephen as he turned back towards me after closing the door. I suddenly realized Stephen knew nothing of what had happened earlier. That Victoria, his lover, was dead. Or that Jesus and Dean had planned to kill everyone who stood in the way of them seizing power. I knew I’d have to tell him. Now, before I could go on to explain that the Grey Men were hallucinations generated by the electrical energy in the ground.
‘Get you another beer, kiddo?’
‘Stephen, listen, buddy. I’ve got to tell you…uh…crap…’
‘Hey, hey, take it easy. You were pretty nearly gassed to death out there.’
The room had blurred as I’d suddenly sat up. I shook my head groggily.
‘Take it easy, Rick,’ he said kindly. ‘There’s no rush to tell me anything.’
‘But there is. Kate…and me. We…’ I shook my head again. The dizziness wouldn’t shift. Also my throat still felt as if a fire raged deep in my gullet. ‘We met…Victoria on the way in.’
‘Victoria? She was with Jesus and Dean. Why didn’t she come back with you?’
‘They met us a few hours walk from here. We—’
Bang!
The cabin door exploded open. Tesco stood panting in the doorway. ‘We’ve got trouble, boss! You better come up on deck.’
Stephen stood up. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Greys…and there’s thousands and thousands of the fuckers.’
‘How far away?’
‘Five minutes’ walk.’
‘Shit.’
‘Best hurry up, boss. I think they’re going to attack.’
‘Tesco, get everyone on deck who can fire a gun.’
‘Sure thing, boss.’ Tesco left at a run.
Stephen hurried to the door. He blazed energy and determination.
I pushed myself into a sitting position. ‘Stephen, there’s no…uh, shit, shit…’ I shook my head. My brain just wouldn’t work. That gas had really screwed up my thought processes. ‘Stephen…the Greys…I need to tell you…’
‘It’s OK, Rick. We can handle this. We’ll blow the bastards to shit.’
‘No…no, you’ve got to listen.’ I made it to my feet, rocked forwards.
Stephen grabbed me. He wore this wild, wild grin on his face.
‘Don’t worry, Rick. You’ll get a chance to blast the bastards later. No…no! Rick, lie down, that’s an order.’
‘Stephen, they aren’t—’
Tesco leaned in. ‘Better hurry, boss. They’re closing in.’
‘Stephen…I…’
Stephen pushed me gently back onto the bed. I tried to resist but in that gassed state I felt as weak as a kitten. ‘Stay here,’ he said sympathetically. ‘We’ll talk later. OK, Tesco, it’s showtime.’
The two left the cabin, shutting the door behind them.
‘Stephen…Stephen!’
I pulled myself from the bunk, then staggered to the door, my hands straight out. I made it to the door, twisted the handle. Shit, shit, shit.
‘Stephen! Unlock the door. Stephen, unlock this damned door. You’ve got to listen to me! The Greys aren’t there! They don’t exist!’
I pounded on the door.
Nobody heard.
Nobody came.
Chapter 131
I looked out through the porthole window. Christ, what a terrible sight. I knew right then that this was going to be the worst day of my life. Bad things were going to happen. I mean really bad shit. If I hadn’t been half gassed, if I’d had my wits about me, if I could get through that fucking locked door. If I could tell Stephen all about the Grey Men then maybe I could do something worthwhile. I couldn’t prevent the disaster that was going to happen. No, the wheels of the machine that were going to manufacture a disaster of titanic proportions were already turning. But, as they say in legal cases, maybe I could mitigate the damage. I could save some lives at least.
Picture the scene:
I’m standing there in the warship cabin. I’m sweaty and scared and still dizzy enough to flake out flat on the floor. I’m running my fingers through my hair, which is stiff and coarse from the soot vented through the cracks in the ground. It blackens the palms of my hands.
I’m leaning forward against the porthole, the thick glass cold against my cheek. I’m staring in horror.
Because I’m seeing what is actually moving across the plain towards us.
Close my eyes and I can see it all now. The plain stretches out into the distance. It’s a flat desert of black mud. That mud is cracking open in ten thousand places. Poison gas blasts through the cracks, carrying with it sparks that glow yellow and red against that endless slab of dark, lumbering cloud.
Lightning stabs from the sky. Thunder rumbles on and on and…
The lightning flashes constantly.
Only now I see flickers of electric blue light at ground level. The electricity in the earth is building as the temperature below ground climbs higher and higher and higher, cracking open the dried mud, shooting out sparks.
For all the world, it looks as if those flickers of blue light are dozens of alien creatures. They have tentacles of electricity instead of arms. They wave these madly as they struggle to escape from the ground. The tentacles of what must have been pure electricity writhed in shades of dazzling electric blue, the strands of electricity sharply defined against the black earth. Then a second later they shifted shape, dissolving into pools of flickering blue that looked like puddles of electric rainwater in the dirt.
‘Oh, Christ…’ I froze staring out of the porthole, my face pressed hard to the glass because my legs are too weak to support my own body weight. ‘Oh, Christ. Christ…’
I couldn’t stop repeating His name. Because I’d seen something else; a terrible, awesome sight that was nothing less than Biblical in its enormity.
There, moving like a dirty great tide across the plain, were thousands upon thousands of man-shaped creatures.
‘They’re not Greys, they’re not Greys,’ I murmured to myself. ‘They are hallucinations. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing but mud; nothing but sparks…soot. Black…black.’
I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, trying to pump oxygen into my brain. I had to be able to think clearly. I had to drive out the last of the carbon monoxide that had poisoned my blood.
I looked out. There they were, still. Thousands of Grey Men. But I knew they didn’t exist. They were products of my imagination, triggered by the electrical field generated below ground. I wiped the sweat from my eyes.
Stephen and everyone else on deck would be seeing the same thing, sharing that same hallucination of thousands of Greys moving in towards the ship, like an army marching across a battlefield. Soon the people on deck would begin firing their guns. Of course they’d hit nothing more than hot dirt.
I wiped the sweat from my eyes again, blinked, and repeated to myself, ‘They’re not there, they’re not real. Your name is Rick Kennedy. You are nineteen, no…no, you’re twenty years old. You are the brother of Stephen Kennedy. Your mother’s name was…is Elizabeth.’ I had to pump the thoughts through my head in order to reinforce my self-identification. I had to remind myself who I was, otherwise the hallucinations would swamp me.
Even though I knew the Greys were figments of my imagination—very vivid figments, nonetheless—they still had the power to strike a genuine terror into me.
They were now about five hundred metres from the ship. Again, I was struck by the fact that they looked like an army marching forward to attack its enemy.
‘You’re not real,’ I whispered fiercely. ‘You’re not—damn well—real.’
At that second the hallucination dissolved. I had expected the grey figures simply to evaporate as my mind conquered the delusion.
The figures remained.
Although they were no longer grey. I wiped my eyes, breathed deeply. The figures were black with ash.
Holding on to the walls, I made my way toward the chair. The room spun sickeningly. Every couple of steps I’d have to stop, breathe deeply, shake my head in an attempt to dislodge that queasy dizziness.
As I moved forward again my bare foot crunched into the leg of the chair. The pain spearing up my leg from the toe-cracking blow actually helped clear the muzz from my head.
I reached down, yanked the binoculars from the pocket, then made it back to the porthole in something between a fall and a stagger. I put the binoculars to my eyes and nudged the adjusting wheel to focus.
The blurred image hardened.
‘Shit…’
There, magnified in the lens, were thousands of people. I took a deep breath. For some reason they were converging on the ship. A great tide of humanity, no doubt half choked by the poison gas and stung by the red hot sparks bursting from the ground.
The people looked strangely elongated. I was ready to dismiss that as some residual effect of the hallucinations that had gripped me. Or perhaps even the hot air rising from the ground distorting the image I was seeing.
But then I realized I was seeing thousands of adults carrying children on their shoulders.
‘God, no…’ I breathed. Any second now Stephen would give the order to fire on the people walking towards the ship. Our people on deck would see only Grey monsters, not desperate parents carrying their children above the layer of toxic gas.
I looked again through the binoculars at the pathetic exodus of humankind. Where they’d all come from God only knew. They might have come from that green oasis Kate and I had seen earlier in the day. Perhaps the toxic gas had driven them out and now they were wearily searching for a new home. I saw people carrying all they possessed in the world in supermarket carrier bags. Their racial origins were immaterial. All their faces were blackened by the omnipresent soot. Children sat on the shoulders of both men and women. They hung their heads wearily, their arms loosely dangling forward round the necks of those that carried them. From the hand of one child swung a doll; it slipped from the child’s fingers and was crushed beneath the thousands of feet, exhaustedly slugging across the plain. I looked again at the feet of the refugees. Many were barefoot; the skin on their soles must have been burnt by the hot mud; every step had to be agony; yet still the instinct for survival pushed them on.
‘Stephen!’ I yelled, looking up at the steel ceiling. ‘Stephen! Anyone! Can you hear me? You mustn’t shoot. Do you hear me? Don’t fire! They’re not monsters, they are people!’
I listened for the sound of footsteps outside, then the key being turned in the lock.
Nothing…wait.
I listened hard. There was a noise coming from beyond the door. Unsteadily I walked across to it, then thumped the metal panels.
‘Hallo! Can you hear me? Stephen…hallo!’
I heard the key scratch in the lock as it was turned. I stepped unsteadily back as the door opened.
‘Hey…hey, we can hear you up on deck. What’s with all the noise, kiddo?’
‘Stephen. You’ve got to listen to me. Now…no, don’t say later. Not later.’ My head spun dizzily. ‘Hear me out now, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’
‘It’s got to wait, Rick. Have you seen what’s coming towards us?’
‘I have.’ I looked at him closely. The way the pupils of his eyes had shrunk to tiny black dots told me he was in the grip of the hallucination. He was agitated—another symptom. ‘Believe me,’ I spoke as calmly as I could manage. ‘You haven’t seen what’s out there. What’s really out there.’
‘Everyone can see the Greys. Come on, Rick. The gas still isn’t completely out of your system. You need to sit—’
‘Stephen…look, just relax for a moment, listen to what I have to say.’ But he stood there in the doorway looking agitated and scared, yet somehow energized. ‘Stephen, the Grey Men aren’t really there. There’s an electrical discharge from the ground that’s causing you to hallucinate. If you breathe slowly, relax, they’ll disappear.’
‘I can see them, they’re real.’
‘No, you’re mentally projecting the image of the Grey Men onto ordinary men and women. There’s thousands of refugees out there. Just give me a minute to break you out of this. What do you say?’
He didn’t have a chance to reply. Suddenly he made an ‘Uph!’ sound, then he pitched forward into me as if shoulder-charged from behind. We both fell onto the cabin floor, the weight of Stephen’s body slamming the breath from my body.
I struggled into a half-sitting position.
I looked up. Then stared in disbelief. My skin tingled with shock.
Standing there in the doorway, panting, blackened, horribly scorched, hair burnt from his skull, a great white blister reaching from the edge of his mouth covering half his face and partially closing his left eye, was none other than the man who called himself Jesus.
He stared at me with those blazing, Charles Manson eyes and hissed, ‘You’re a dead man, Kennedy.’ The eyes blazed with a psychotic hatred. ‘You are a fucking dead man.’
Chapter 132
Stephen groaned. ‘Rick, what’s happening? How did he get burned?’
I managed to get to my feet by holding on to the chair and hauling myself up.
Stephen groaned louder. ‘Shit. The bastard stabbed me…he’s gone and stabbed me…uh, what the hell did you do that for?’
The burnt man stood in the doorway holding the knife out at us. It was a flick-knife with a blade no wider than a screwdriver blade. ‘Ask your baby brother.’
I swayed unsteadily. ‘Because Jesus here, or to use his real name, Gary Topp, plans to kill both of us, and anyone else who stands in his way, then take charge. Isn’t that right, Topp?’
‘Call me Jesus,’ hissed the burnt man.
‘Will I fuck,’ I snarled. ‘You’re nothing but a lunatic with delusions of grandeur.’
‘Call me Jesus.’
‘Lick my arse.’
He growled, then swung the knife in front of my face. It missed by a dozen centimetres. I saw he was burned bad. His hands were blistered claws. He’d lost a couple of fingernails as he’d hauled himself out of the fire pit, probably treading on the backs of his buddies as he scrambled out.
The man made that animal hiss again. ‘I’m going to carve my fucking name on your backs.’
‘How?’ I said feeling anger blaze inside of me. ‘You’re a burnt-up piece of shit, Gary Topp. Even with that knife how you going to take on both of us?’
I glanced down at Stephen: he’d managed to pull himself up onto his knees. I grabbed his arm and pulled him up so we stood side by side. We held onto each other. I was still groggy from the gas.
I looked at my brother. With a scared draining sensation I realized Stephen’s knife injury was worse than I first thought. His face had turned grey. He bled sweat. He swallowed repeatedly and I felt his body tremble.
The madman’s scorched lips managed a grin. ‘Oh, brothers in arms, eh? Literally. What a touching scene.’
I snarled. ‘Come one step forward and I’ll break your damned neck.’
Stephen was panting from shock, but he still managed to sound ferocious. ‘You’ve shit your hole. If you believe for one minute that any of my people will take orders from a lunatic like you, you’re sadly mistaken.’
‘When you’re both dead,’ lightly he touched his blistered cheek, ‘who’re they going to believe? That I came in here and found you’d killed each other. Everyone knows about the fight you two had on the island back in London. You know, gentlemen, I think my story’s going to hold up. And you know something else, too? I think your people are going to welcome me with open arms.’
‘And if they don’t?’
&nbs
‘Don’t you know what our people are facing up there?’ Stephen said, swallowing down the agony from the knife wound. ‘You must have seen them. Thousands of Greys. They’re going to attack the ship. Don’t you care what will happen?’
The man shook his burnt head. ‘All in the head, boyo. Isn’t that right, Rick Kennedy?’
‘You know?’
‘Oh, I know. Of course I saw them at first. Like everyone else. Then, one day, I just stopped seeing the Greys—as simple as that—and I realized they were all in here.’ He pointed to the side of his blistered head. ‘All hallucination.’
I said, ‘But it suited your purposes to let your people carry on believing there was an invasion taking place?’
‘Abso-fucking-lutely.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘I take it you won’t go up on deck and stop our people opening fire on all those half-starved refugees?’
‘Not a chance. When you have an enemy it unites your people behind you. They have—’
I took my chance and went for it.
I scooped my jacket from the chair and flung it into his face. He slashed it away with his knife.
But I waded in, swinging a full-blooded punch.
My fist struck him in the side of the face.
That massive blister popped under my knuckles in a spray of fluid.
The man screamed, then hacked at me again with the knife.
This time I caught his wrist and pushed the knife back towards the face with the ruptured blister that gaped redly at me.
Stephen grabbed his other arm. But I could see my brother was in a bad way. He could barely stand, never mind fight.
Gary Topp easily pushed him away.
But Stephen’s attack had at least distracted the man enough to allow me to slam his hand against the steel opening of the doorway. The blisters on the back of his hand erupted in a gush of puss; droplets spattered the door. With a scream he dropped the knife.
I thought he’d turn this into a fist fight but the man simply shoved me backwards. I fell sprawling back over Stephen who lay on the floor.