The Storm (5 page)

He was dead.

Or as good as. There was nowhere to run. Ahead, people were streaming out of a shop like a river in spate, all of them howling. They were coming from behind him, too, the glass door of a bakery smashed into golden shards as seven, ten, fifteen people pushed out on to the street. Cal stumbled away, tripping off the kerb. On the other side of the road two men were staggering out of an estate agent’s, the Fury twisting their features into Halloween masks.

There were too many of them, all running, the first – a kid, maybe eleven or twelve with a broken arm in a cast – just seconds away. Cal staggered. He thumped into a car, one of the ones parked along both sides of the road, and before he even acknowledged what he was doing he had scrambled underneath it.

There was barely enough room for him, the metal ribcage of the car on his back, pinning him against the road.
What the hell were you thinking?

Something thumped against the car, turning day to dusk. Then it was as if the heavens had opened, hail thundering down all around him, plunging him into absolute night. The screams were so loud that he was drowning in them, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t do anything but lie there and listen to that deafening, awful chorus.

People were flooding underneath, a torrent of limbs and teeth. Hands grabbed and pinched at him, trying to pull him out. Bodies wormed in beside him, crowding his coffin. The car rocked from side to side, its suspension groaning. They would roll it, then they would fall on him, and he would be no more.

It wasn’t that thought that terrified him, though. After everything, death seemed almost like an old friend. No mystery, no surprises, just one last breath and then oblivion. What terrified him was the thought of going cold, turning to ice, while something hatched in the frozen cocoon of his body.

Somebody’s hand gouged across his face, nails scratching his eyes. He batted them away. The hand reached for him again, dirty fingers in his mouth, and he bit down hard enough to taste blood. His attacker didn’t even seem to notice, scratching and snatching at him. He tried to roll over but there wasn’t enough room for his shoulders. He was dead.

No, Cal, fight them!

The voice didn’t sound like his, but there was no doubt it was coming from his head. What did it want him to do? There was another car in front of him, he knew that much. There was a line of them running down the side of the street, parked almost nose to tail. Could he reach it?

He started to wriggle forwards. Legs barred the way, forming a fence between his car and the next, but he pushed past them. There wasn’t enough room for them to get a proper hold of him, their punches and kicks deflected by the bumpers, and just seconds later he was underneath the next car.

It didn’t do any good. The crowd followed him, their radar tuned into whatever it was inside him. He couldn’t creep away because they didn’t need their eyes to find him. They surrounded him, blotting out the sun, a hundred fingers working into his flesh.

Burn them
.

That voice again. It wasn’t his, but it was familiar. He tried to tune into it, but whatever it had been, it was now lost in the storm of voices.

‘How?’ he yelled.

Someone was crawling in beside him, a nightmare face with a distended jaw. Cal smashed his elbow into the woman’s nose, knocking her out cold. That was good, because the other ferals couldn’t reach past her. They were still squeezing in from every other angle, though, pinching and biting, all the while that same voice pleaded
burn them burn them burn them.

Fuel. That was it! He was under a car, and somewhere above him was the tube that fed petrol into the engine. He didn’t know much about cars, but you didn’t have to be an engineer to know that if you ripped enough pipes something flammable would eventually start leaking.

He struggled on to his back, reached up, ignoring the pain as something bit his leg. There were dozens of tubes above him, huge pipes and smaller, softer lines. He grabbed one of the latter, pulling hard. It resisted, but he didn’t let up, wrenching at it with everything he had until it tore loose. Fluid dripped from it, but it wasn’t petrol – he knew that from the smell. He scrabbled for another. It was too dark to see anything, and twice he felt a hand clutch at his fingers, only just managing to shake them free.

‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Where are you, you piece of—’

Another pipe, and this time when he tore it from its mount the pungent smell of fuel instantly punched up into his sinuses. He gagged, feeling the steady drip of petrol on to his clothes, forming a pool beneath him. That was a problem, because even if he found a way to spark it up he’d be burned alive in the fireball.

You do have a way,
said the voice. And Cal suddenly saw the restaurant back in Fursville, the candles. He reached into his pocket, feeling the box there. Matches. He pulled them free. Something thumped his arm and they almost spilled, but he clutched the little box tight, sliding it open and taking a match from inside.

That still left the whole
being burned alive
problem.

‘Think!’ he yelled, his voice lost in the howls around him. He needed to move again, get under the next car. He grabbed hold of the underside of the vehicle, using it to pull himself backwards. Once again there were ferals in the way, but the space between the cars was too tight for them to grab hold. He wiggled his way across, the crowd following, burrowing in next to him like maggots into old flesh.

He drew the match across the box, once, twice, three times before it sparked. Careful not to drop it on himself, he flicked the flaming stick back the way he’d come. It bounced off a tyre, looked for a second as though it was going to go out, then landed in the gutter in a puddle of fuel.

Darkness exploded into light, every scrap of metal beneath the car, every distorted face, every bloodied fingernail revealed in impossible detail. The flames spread fast, engulfing the people closest to the car. One of the men who was crawling underneath lost his face to the fire, but even through the inferno, even as his eyes melted, he raged.

Cal’s shoes were on fire and he thrashed his legs to extinguish the flames. There was no air, his lungs full of smoke and smouldering flesh.

An explosion ripped through the car in front as the fuel tank ignited, the shock wave peeling away the crowd. This was his chance, now or never. He rolled to his side, lashing out at the people in his way, gouging at eyes and throats and everything else he could find until the sky opened up.

They were on him before he could stand up, but he threw himself away, heading into the smoke so they wouldn’t be able to see him. He collided with a flaming shape, shoving it as another blast shook the street. He was running now – a lumbering, unsteady shamble, but
man
was it good to be moving. He felt like he’d escaped from his tomb. He put his head down: nothing quite working the way it should but each clumsy step carrying him further from the pack.

Only when he could no longer feel the heat of the fire on his back did he risk turning around. The street was a mess, at least four or five of the closely packed cars now engulfed. The smoke was too thick to really see much else, but Cal could make out a dozen shapes there, bodies dressed head to toe in fire, weaving in and around each other like ballroom dancers. Even now they were coming after him, and he was grateful for the Fury, because they would never know what happened to them, would never know the horror of their own deaths. One burning thing collapsed to its knees, and another, the dance coming to an end. Other shapes were emerging from the billowing black curtain, though, soot-black silhouettes that stumbled towards him.

They couldn’t have him, though. Not now, not ever. Cal turned, began once again to run, while that same quiet voice rose up once again in his skull.

Burn them. Burn them. Burn them all.

‘Burn who, little brother?’

Schiller started as though he’d been woken from a dream. He licked his lips as if to erase all trace of the words, looking at Rilke with big, sad eyes. They were still walking along the coast, south, leaving a vast blanket of dust in their wake. They hadn’t seen more than a handful of people since the last little town, the trailer park. Word must be spreading that something bad was coming.

No, something good,
she thought.
Something wonderful
.

‘I asked you a question, Schiller,’ she said. Her brother had started whispering those words a few minutes ago –
burn them, burn them
– as though reciting a mantra to himself. She assumed he was speaking about the humans – she had come to call them that, knowing she was no longer one of them – that the purpose of their mission was finally getting through to him. Yet there was something in the urgency of his speech, and in the way his eyes had flicked back and forth, seeing a world she could not see, that made her think he was hiding something. ‘Burn who?’

‘Nobody,’ he said. ‘I mean
everybody
. Sorry, I didn’t even know I was saying it.’

She held his gaze until he broke away and peered out across the quiet, slate-coloured water. He was chewing something over, she could tell. She knew her brother better than he knew himself, and there was something inside that little head of his that wanted out.

‘Schill, I won’t ask you again.’

‘I . . .’ he kicked at the wet sand, clumps of it sticking to his shoe. Then he looked up at her. There was no fire in his eyes, but they seemed somehow brighter. ‘It’s nothing, really. I’m just tired.’

She opened her mouth to press him, but decided not to. They were all tired – exhausted, really – Schill, her, and Marcus and Jade, who traipsed behind with the new boy strung up between them. It was a wonder they hadn’t all dropped dead from fatigue.

‘There will be plenty of time to sleep,’ she said. ‘And a whole world to rest our heads on. Imagine it, Schiller, how quiet it will be. How empty.’

He nodded, staring at his feet as he shuffled down the beach. It was infuriating, Rilke thought, that her brother went back to being his usual self. Why couldn’t he be an angel all the time? Why should she have to put up with these bouts of snivelling misery in between his displays of god-like rage? She knew the reason – it was evident in the bald patch above his right ear, and the waxy sheen of his skin. Too much fire would kill him.

‘One more,’ she said, looking up ahead. The wide, sandy beach led towards a town, a big one by the looks of things. A cluster of houses sprang up to their right, and past them was a collection of piers and promenades blighted by towers. ‘This place, can you end it?’

Schiller seemed to shrink at the thought, his back stooped as though all the world rested on it. He looked ready to wither away into dust and sand. It was pathetic. Where was the creature inside him? Where was his angel? She felt a hot stew of anger rise from her gullet, and for a second she saw nothing but white. Schiller must have sensed it – he knew her temper well enough to fear it – because he gave her a sharp, hurried nod.

‘Then end it,’ she said.

Somewhere, far away down the beach, a bright yellow kite nuzzled the sky like a hungry fish. Maybe the word hadn’t spread as far as she thought. Maybe people hadn’t heard about Hemsby, about Caister. Well, they’d know soon enough.

The world erupted into colour as Schiller transformed, tongues of blue and orange fire licking at the beach, freezing the damp sand and spreading a web of silk-like ice all the way to the water’s edge. It was getting easier for him, Rilke realised. He didn’t even flinch as the wings unfurled from his back, sails of pure energy that emitted a ceaseless pulse, one which made her bones hum like a tuning fork that would not quiet. His red-rimmed eyes erupted, the light inside them like molten rock, spitting and spilling down his face.

Schiller began walking – 
floating
– towards the sea, plant-like tendrils of light curling up from the ground as if to touch his feet. The water retreated from him like a wild cat, lurching back in desperate movements, hissing and steaming. His fire was cold, but it was something else he was trying, something new.
What is it like, little brother,
she thought,
to wish the world apart and watch it obey; to peek inside the very centre of things, the spinning orbits that make us all, and to pull them inside out?

Schiller opened his mouth, spoke something wordless and world ending. She didn’t see it, but she heard it – or rather
felt
it, because the sound of his voice was so alien that her ears almost couldn’t register it, like when a church organ plays a subsonic note. But it raged inside her head, inside her stomach, inside every single cell, forcing her to her knees.

The sea rose up, a wall of water as thick as rock, so immense and so sudden that Rilke screamed. Vertigo hit her like a punch to the gut – the sight of the ocean there, upended, the unbearable groan of a billion gallons of water held against its will, just too much. She had to look away, curl into herself, unable to stop the cries that spilled from her lips. The ground was trembling, and she expected it to split open, to disintegrate at Schiller’s touch and plunge them all into darkness.

The wall of water made a noise like a million peals of thunder resounding at once, the sand so agitated that it leapt two foot into the air. Not seeing was worse than seeing, and Rilke peered through half-shut eyes to glimpse Schiller, her burning boy, standing before the wave. It towered above him – fifty metres, a hundred, she couldn’t tell. Probing fingers of sunlight sluiced through it, turning the water a colour she had never before seen in her life, a deep, angry green filled with flecks that could have been fish or boats or rocks or people. It churned and raged and howled with anger at the way he was treating it, but it could not refuse him.

Schiller turned, his mouth still open, still speaking in that voiceless, deafening, unbearable whisper. Then he raised his hands towards the town, and let his new pet off its leash. The water surged past her, around her, over her, a tunnel of noise and movement that seemed as if it would never end.

But it did, the rush and thunder gradually fading, leaving only the ringing in her ears. She looked up to see the ruined beach, stripped of its sand to the bone-white stone beneath, and beyond that a roiling black line as the ocean did its work, a giant eraser scrubbing the horizon clean in frantic, desperate motions, leaving trails of white foam that reached for the sky. There was another sound behind her, the sonic boom of the displaced ocean as it filled the space Schiller had created. It thrashed and spat towards them as if seeking revenge, but crashed to a halt against the invisible bubble of energy that surrounded them.

It felt like a thousand years before the sea grew quiet again, its outrage turning to a stunned, silent disbelief. Rilke tried to get to her feet, the unsettled ground spreading out beneath her, making her lose her footing. Schiller showed no sign of turning back into the boy, hovering before her, those twin portals watching the last of the tidal wave as it soaked back into the earth.

‘Well done, Schiller,’ she said, and before she even knew it was coming a giggle tumbled out of her mouth. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure the others were still there. Marcus and Jade looked back, moon-eyed, and she wondered how much of them remained intact; whether there would be anything left inside their heads for their angels to possess. ‘Are you ready to move?’

Marcus nodded, slowly, as if each movement of his head required every ounce of his intelligence. Jade didn’t reply at all.

‘Let’s get away from here,’ she said, finally managing to stand. ‘Find somewhere to rest. I think you deserve it, Schill.’

He cocked his head, his molten eyes fixed on her. And she wondered just how much control he had. Not over the earth – that much was clear in what had just happened – but over her. She had trained him well over the years, the way you train a dog to know who is in charge. But how many dogs, if they knew they were faster, stronger, deadlier than their masters, would continue to tread by their heels?
Come on,
she thought, willing the message deep inside her, to whatever part of her soul her angel occupied.
You need to hurry up, because we can’t control him forever.
And what would happen then? What would her fate be if Schiller turned against her?

She watched him float away, and once again she wondered who he had been talking to –
burn them
– and, more importantly, who he had been talking about. And in doing so she realised, for the first time in her life, that she was scared of her brother.