Quake (2 page)

On his road to freedom.

Water was gushing, roaring all around him. He accelerated, speedometer needle bouncing against the redline, the bike howling as it hit 220 m.p.h. The world flashed around Carter in a series of stuttering, splashing bright images.

‘
Guards
,’ hissed Kade in warning.

Carter palmed the Browning and blew the three guards from their feet before they even lifted their weapons. Two hit the ground, and one fell and toppled down the front of the dam, bouncing and flailing like a tumbling rag doll until he was smashed into a battered purple pulp-drenched carcass in the darkness far below.

Carter dipped the clutch and the KTM’s front wheel kicked into the air again, the rear wheel ploughing through one of the corpses, losing traction for a moment in a supple compress of flesh and kicking the bike violently sideways. Carter felt, for a terrifying moment, his loss of control as the massive drop to the right tore his eyes from their target and fear rammed its fist down his throat. Then the KTM’s front wheel touched down and the bike stabilised. Carter piled on the speed once more.

‘We’ve done it!’
crowed Kade. ‘
We’re there ...
’

Carter frowned. His eyes narrowed and he touched the brake, shaving speed out of instinct more than anything he could actually see or hear, his mouth opened, tongue darting against dry wind-chapped lips, and he realised that—

Hell, he thought.

It’s a fucking
tank.

The war machine squatted at the end of Carter’s personal runway. Even as realisation hit, guards swarmed from behind the tank’s protective armoured flanks and opened up with machine guns. 7.62mm rounds screamed like tiny tortured insects buzzing around Carter’s face as he squeezed the brakes and left metres of tyre smeared against the dull white concrete. He kicked the bike around, wheel-spinning in a cloud of stinking burning rubber, then wheelied back the way he had come, ducking low over the tank as bullets howled past. Several slapped against the bike’s exhaust pipes. It was a miracle no metal raped his flesh.

‘
You’ve got one minute, Carter.’
Kade’s voice was no longer filled with humour, or arrogance, or mockery. There was tension there. An edge of fear that chilled Carter to his very core.

‘I - fucking - know ...’ hissed Carter through gritted teeth.

Up ahead, more guards had gathered.

Suddenly, he grabbed the brakes and twisted the KTM left; it shuddered to a halt, front wheel hanging over the terrible descent. Carter glanced down and Natasha’s words came back to him.

You’ll come back to me, won’t you?

It’s not that dangerous, he had lied.

I don’t want to be left a widow.

But we’re not married! he’d protested.

All right, then ... I don’t want you to leave your new child without a father ...

But we haven’t got a
—

Actually - Natasha’d smiled weakly
-
I’ve got something to tell you ...

Oh.

Their lovemaking had been gentle, teasing and soft - a merging of flesh and sex - and in the warm afterglow, bathed in the iridescent flickering light of the candles, Nats had tickled her tongue down his neck and whispered in his ear, ‘You make sure you come back to me, you reckless fucker ... You make sure you come back to
us…’

Now, Carter gazed at the vertical drop; 7.62mm rounds screamed around him and the world had descended into a blood-red insanity. His lips compressed in a grim line. Kade was screaming at him to turn back and he was counting, internally, the seconds left until the heavy HighJ detonation and subsequent shock waves cracked the dam, allowing the hugely titanic pressure of the reservoir to force its way violently and unstoppably to freedom—

He revved the KTM.

Revved it real hard, popped the clutch and allowed the bike to dip and fall over the edge—

Darkness and the world rushed towards him, gulleys of foaming white smashing to either side in an insanity of bubbling, roaring noise. The bullets were gone, fallen far behind ... the bike was an insane bucking metallic bitch straining and heaving beneath him, trying its utmost to launch him from the saddle—

The tachometer’s needle danced, bouncing against the redline, and Carter’s teeth ground against each other as he grabbed the front brake and left a trail of rubber hissing down the concrete face of the dam ... Then a string of detonations began to go off deep within the bowels of the dam ... Carter felt them smashing through the wheels and suspension of the bike and he focused his eyes on the distant curve at the dam’s base and the dense trees beyond - as the bike’s speed peaked at just over 250 m.p.h.

Kade screamed in Carter’s head, words of anger and words of insanity: pure hot curses of hatred—

—With a terrifying monstrous lurch the concrete dam moved ...

—It heaved—

And, with a violent animal moan, exploded.

The TV sparkled into life with a digital buzz of electro-hum, diamond-sharp images spinning and morphing into the jewelled-liquid logo of Leviathan Fuels.

Do you despair of the filth of low-grade fuel? Do you tear out your hair over the pollution, over the high cost, over the degradation of your children’s futures and the destruction of the whole planet? YOU
can
stop this ... YOU
can
change the world, YOU
can
make a whole big difference ...

Scene pans:
slowly, from belching thundering oil-slick diesel engines and black fumes suffocating the smog-heavy cancer-riddled twisted population of some tar-smeared contemporary dying city ...

Scene morphs:
into a crystalline metropolis, glittering skyscrapers, happy shining faces, definitive cleanliness ... hospitals closed because there is no scum of dust and depravity and need ... gleaming cars purring silently along free-flowing highways ... healthy children of all cultures and religions and ethnic minorities playing together with an inflatable beach ball and laughing as they skip across dazzling white sand and crushed pink seashells ...

Leviathan Fuels proudly present Premium Grade LVA, four hundred miles to the gallon, pollution-free with absolute guarantees. Go on, make the switch, because you know your children deserve a better future ...

SCENE DISSOLVES TO BLACK

i see priests, politicians?

heroes
in black plastic body-bags

under nations’ flags

i see children pleading with outstretched hands

drenched in napalm, this is no Vietnam

i can’t take any more, should we say goodbye?

how can you justify?

Blind Curve (Part v. Threshold)

Fish/Marillion

Durell’s dark clawed hands clasped the small and ornately carved silver box tightly, almost reverently, to his chest: as if he carried the container which bore the ashes of God.

He moved, ghostlike and robed completely in black, down the long, damp stone corridors. He turned at intervals, picking passages through the labyrinth until he came to a small, ice-cold chamber. Despite its simplicity and bareness, there was something special about this place.

Something almost holy.

Durell’s boots crunched on sparkling crystals. His breath plumed from the hidden folds of his hood.

Two men waited patiently. The first was tall and massively thickset^ his hair greying and neatly cropped around a heavy skull. He was hulkingly muscled but his brown-eyed stare was serious and stern, fixed impassively on Durell; and he was as strong as steel.

In contrast, the second man was considerably slimmer, although he was wide across the shoulders in the manner of an athlete; his eyes were blood red and set in a face that carried heavy, vicious-looking scars. The red eyes themselves were criss-crossed with angry, minute marble-veined lesions - a legacy of an old accident involving alkaline chemical agents and a gang of Colombian drug-purifiers. The man’s vision had been saved by the miracle of nascent nanotechnology and the Avelach. His eyes were now fixed in a permanent and terrible expression of pain - and they throbbed with a burning hot-acid intensity in their sockets. He, too, exuded power but in a different, more subtle, even more terrifying way - and both men nodded as Durell entered, the small intricately fashioned silver box clutched within the cage of his fingers.

‘Is it ready?’

The red-eyed man nodded curtly. Durell stepped forward, and there came a glitter of brightness from within the heavy folds of his clothing. He slid past the two men towards a narrow, tiny corridor. Stooping, he moved into its circular confines.

They journeyed along the winding passage. It led down.

And down ...

After many minutes Durell finally stepped out onto a ledge, his breath catching in his throat with a sibilant hiss. It was terribly cold, at least minus fifty degrees centigrade, and he slipped slightly on the slick wide expanse of perfectly smooth rock. In front of his eyes opened a giant chamber, mammoth in its naturally carved proportions. Behind him his keen hearing detected the footfalls of the other two men.

The chamber spread out, dimly lit, the rocky walls frost-spattered and glinting, leading out into witch light and going on seemingly for ever. Within the chamber stood men and women - suited in black and grey, masks covering their faces, gloved hands clasping ice-rimed automatic weapons. They stood immobile, insect-like in their poise, waiting.

Durell exhaled a plume of breath-smoke and smiled.

‘Does it please?’ asked the red-eyed man.

‘Yes, they are perfect.’

‘We have worked hard since you left us,’ said the athletic soldier. His gaze surveyed the masked army and he smiled to himself, the smile playing gently across his iron-hard face. ‘And our forces are still growing at an incredible rate.’

Durell passed the red-eyed man the small silver box. ‘With the new nano-alterations to the Avelach machine, you should continue your work with more speed.’

Durell turned to the large bearded man. ‘And you, my oldest comrade. Are you impressed with the scale of your invention? What it has achieved? What it can
do
?’

‘Our
invention, surely.’

‘Yes,’ purred Durell.
‘Our
discovery. Our invention. From so many years ago, when the world seemed so much more - simple.’ He let the word hang against the ice breeze, and then led the way down to the metal steps that spiralled down to the vast chamber itself. The two men followed, cursing as they left strips of skin against the freezing alloy of the staircase’s guard rail.

Reaching the smooth rock floor, Durell walked among his soldiers, among the Nex, looking up into copper eyes and smiling with a deformed pride from within the hidden folds of the dark robes.

‘Have you heard the news regarding our enemies?’ came the voice of the older, grey-bearded man, his words rich and discordant in this place of cold inactivity.

‘Yes,’ soothed Durell. He gazed into the distance, past hundreds of Nex. ‘Spiral are fools. They think they have us crushed; they destroyed the QIII processor and thought that they had won the war ... when in fact all they did was delay the battle. So naive of them to think that we had only the QIII to rely on - when in reality the processor was just a tiny slice of the cake. Their arrogance is a crime against all humanity.’

‘And Carter? And Jam? And the other DemolSquads?’

Durell sighed. ‘Thorns in my side,’ he whispered. ‘Carter has disappeared, but I have scouts searching for him. Jam has been targeted.’

‘And the other squads? Spiral have been rebuilding their strength hard and fast since our ... assassinations.’

Durell merely chuckled, breath-wraiths emanating eerily from within his dark hood.

‘Do not underestimate Spiral,’ muttered the bearded man in warning.

‘Of course I will not underestimate them. But then, in a beautiful and ironic twist of fate, they have misjudged our strength and our aspirations -
they
are underestimating
us.
They have misread our intentions and they are arrogant enough to think that they have nearly destroyed the Nex with their pathetic search-and-destroy teams. The fools. Just look around you - look at our superiority!’

The two men glanced up, at the fifty thousand Nex who were grouped in battalions within the chamber. Their stares met - for the briefest of instants - and something unsaid passed between them. Hurriedly their gazes returned to the dark husk of Durell.

‘We are stronger than we have ever been. Yes, they destroyed our mobile station and the QIII processor - but the development files still exist. The schematics still exist. It has merely cost us time ... and in that time we have developed another weapon which should level the playing field somewhat.’

‘May I ask you about the ScorpNex?’

‘The ScorpNex,’ said Durell softly, his voice low and menacing, ‘was an accident. We have attempted to replicate the procedures that led to its creation and distortion, but each time the subject dies on the slab. If we could find the correct sequence and inhibitors we could build a superior Nex - but that is a problem for another day. Let me show you what the ScorpNex can achieve ... Kattenheim?’