The Storm (8 page)

She pressed
PLAY
and they sat and watched it together. It was a night shot, everything green. A bunch of SWAT officers were jogging over what looked like a sand dune, the sea a huge slab of slate in front of them, the darkest thing on the screen. He could hear barked orders, the harsh, panting breaths of whoever was wearing the helmet cam. They reached the summit of the dune, and began to descend towards . . .

‘Kids?’ he said, seeing the group on the beach. Two girls and two, maybe three, boys, from the look of it, the fear in their expressions obvious even in shades of black and green. ‘What the hell do they want with children?’

There was a scream, the front row of police breaking into a run. They charged at the children, uttering howls of rage. The flesh of his arms rippled into goosebumps as the police charged, trampling over each other, looking more like animals than people.

One of the children yelled something; a name, perhaps.
Schiller.

‘Did you catch that?’ he asked. ‘Sounded like—’

The screen flared, the light so bright that Graham had to screw his eyes shut. When he looked again, a moment later, the scene was in chaos. The camera was shaking wildly, everything a blur, but that didn’t stop him seeing one of the cops jerked up into the air like a fish on a hook. The man – or woman, Graham couldn’t be sure – thrashed and shrieked – then
popped
. Graham could think of no other way to describe it, the body just burst into specs of ash which drifted down through the shimmering green light, looking like fish food dropped in a tank of water. Another of the cops was pulled apart by invisible fingers, then another, all the while the man with the helmet cam sat on the beach shaking his head. He howled again, lumbered to his feet, then turned his head towards the sea.

It was only for an instant – before the picture lurched upwards then fizzed into static – but it looked as if there was something on the beach, something where the kids had been standing, something
burning
.

‘Go back,’ he barked, hearing the panic in his own voice. ‘Go back and freeze it.’

Sam scanned back through the file, then played it forward, frame by frame, each expression caught with perfect clarity, the eyes of the cops shining madly. Their expressions were like nothing Graham had ever seen, so full of fury that they didn’t look real. The scene lurched up instant by instant, the beach coming into view, then a girl, then a white flare, burning like phosphorous. Sam paused it, and for a while they sat there and stared at the boy in the flames, two huge plumes of fire arcing up from his back, his eyes pockets of absolute brilliance that made Graham’s retinas itch.

‘They set him on fire?’ Sam asked. Graham shook his head, but what else could it be?
The kid, he isn’t human, look at him, he’s something else.
Sam was edging the footage on, the burning boy visible for only a dozen more frames before the cameraman went airborne and the picture was lost.

‘Get images of that over to the General,’ he said, feeling suddenly cold despite the heat of the room. ‘Tell him to send a squad out to the coast, try to find out what happened. Anything on the satellite?’

‘I can get it,’ Sam said. ‘If you don’t mind breaking the law.’

‘Do it,’ he replied. She brought up a new panel on her monitor and he watched as she hacked the NSA satellite command code. It took all of thirty seconds.

‘It’s already in place,’ she said. ‘They’re watching us.’

Of course they were. The NSA would be monitoring London and the coast to make sure whatever was happening over here wasn’t a threat to them over there.
Nice of them to share.
Sam loaded an image on to the screen. Fortunately the skies were flawless today – not counting the storm – and the view of the coast was perfect. It had been decimated, nothing but rubble and ruin still glistening in the sun.

‘Can we go back to the time of the attack?’ he asked. Sam shook her head.

‘This is live-
ish
. Just got to hope we get lucky,’ she said.

He leant forward, studying the images on screen, the quagmire that had once been roads and buildings and people. There was something else there.

‘You make any sense of that?’ he asked, pointing. It looked like an island of land in the sea, and on it a ball of light, almost like a solar flare, too bright for the satellite cam to properly capture. Sam shrugged. ‘Can that be real? Is it a data transfer glitch?’

‘From an NSA bird? No way. It’s real.’

Past the glare Graham could make out five black dots, five people. There was no way of seeing who they were, the shot was too wide, too far away, but he had a hunch that they were the same kids as in the police video. After all, this was only a few miles away.

‘Can we track them if they move?’

‘Yeah, but the moment I do NSA will know we’ve taken control of it. The last thing we want right now is to piss off the Yanks.’

‘Do it,’ he said, jabbing at the screen, at the little dots there. ‘Whatever happens, we need to maintain eyes on.’

Sam sighed, typing in codes until the image on screen shifted. On the other side of the room a phone started to ring. He ignored it; it would be somebody from the States, somebody very, very angry.

‘They’re attempting to regain control,’ said Sam.

‘Fight them for as long as it takes,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the General put together a team. We need to bring them in alive.’

‘Yes sir,’ Sam said. The phone stopped ringing, then began again, sounding somehow even louder and more irate than before. Graham tuned it out, staring at the screen on his desk. It still showed the burning boy, those plumes of flame stretching up from his back.
They look like wings
, he thought with another sweeping rush of vertigo. It was impossible, and yet the cataclysm that raged not ten miles from where he sat was impossible too. He thought about the shape in the darkness, the man who hung in the storm. Wasn’t there a likeness there, between him and the burning boy? A similarity? There was no way it could be a coincidence. Whatever was happening in London and on the coast was connected.

If they could just find those kids, they’d find answers.

There was so much violence, and she didn’t know how to turn it off.

It played out before her, inside the giant glaciers of her frozen world, each scene more horrific than the last. In one, she saw Cal beneath a car as the fire bit at his legs. She called to him, reached for him, but this place, wherever she was, had turned her into a ghost. It was okay, though, because he made it out, leaving a trail of charred corpses behind him. In another, she watched Schiller lift up the ocean and use it like a sledgehammer, pounding a town into oblivion, all those poor souls washed away. The scene was so insane that she wondered how it could be real, if maybe this was just an illusion in her head. But she could taste the salt water deep in her throat, could hear the awful sound of the sea as it rose up and ate the land. It was real. It was all real.

Schiller was growing more and more powerful, that was obvious, transforming from boy to angel with nothing more than a thought. But it was taking its toll. Daisy could see the fire in his chest, the place where his angel rested, and it was spreading, burning him from the inside out. It reminded her of the video they’d seen at school about cancer, the way it would – what was the word?
Meta-something
– from organ to organ, using your veins and arteries like motorways to carry its poison around your body. The blue flame inside Schiller’s chest had extended its fingers up into his throat, out towards his shoulders, tickling his ribs. She saw it as if she was looking at an X-ray. What would happen when the fire consumed him?

There was someone else with Rilke and Schiller now, not Marcus or Jade – although she could still see them there, could sense their terror and their awe – but another boy. His name was Howard, she realised, but even as she thought it she heard a voice, faint, as though travelling a long way on a high wind.

Howie,
it said.
My name is Howie. Where am I?

It was him, the new boy, speaking to her. Maybe he was here too, somewhere in this palace of ice and dreams.

‘You’re . . .’ she started, wondering how best to explain it. ‘You were injured, I think.’

My brother,
the boy went on, and even in that soft whisper she could hear a heavy weight of sadness.
He killed me. Am I in heaven?

‘He didn’t kill you. He . . . You’re still alive, but you’re changing.’

Into what?

‘An angel,’ she said. ‘But not really an angel. It’s just what we call them. They’re . . . I don’t really know, Howie, but they’re good, they’re here to help us.’

Is that what he is?
He meant Schiller, Daisy understood.
I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to kill people. I don’t want to burn.

‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘It’s not him doing that, it’s
her
.’

Rilke. Poor, sad, angry, crazy Rilke. How could she have got it so wrong?

I just want to go home. Please let me go home.

‘You will, I promise,’ she said, trying to peer past the endless maze of ice cubes, trying to find him. ‘It won’t be long. These things, they don’t want to hurt us. They’re trying to help us. There’s something we have to do.’

The man in the storm raged inside the ice, clearer than ever. He hung above the city, churning everything into nothing. His inkwell mouth was huge, that same awful, endless inward breath sucking up buildings and cars and
people
– thousands and thousands of people. It was horrible. It was like the time at home when they’d found an ants’ nest just outside their back door and her dad had brought out the Hoover and sucked them all up. They had one of those fancy new ones, with the transparent container instead of a bag, and she’d seen them, those ants, hurled around and around with all the dust and filth, hundreds of them caught in the storm until she’d pleaded with her dad to turn it off.

She wondered if Howie could see it too, wherever he was. But the boy seemed to have gone.

Maybe the man in the storm could be reasoned with too. After all, she had managed to get her dad to turn off the Hoover. He just hadn’t realised what he was doing, the harm he was causing. What if this thing was the same? If she could just speak to him, just tell him what he was doing was wrong, then maybe he’d stop.

But how could she do that from in here? She floated through the ice like she was in a hall of mirrors. And all the while her own angel sat in her chest. She knew it was hatching in there, like somebody waking from a deep sleep. The angel had come from a place far away, she knew that much, somewhere even the fastest spaceship couldn’t ever get to. It had been a long journey, and now the angel was waking up, remembering how to use its arms and legs the same way she sometimes needed to when she woke from a deep sleep. And once that happened . . .

You’ll be just like Schiller,
she thought.
You’ll be made of cold fire, and you’ll be able to flick your fingers and pull the world apart.

And that scared her, because she did get angry sometimes. Once, years ago when she was about six or seven, she hadn’t been able to find her mum. It wasn’t even like they were out anywhere, they were all inside the house, but Daisy had called and called and called because she’d painted a picture and she wanted to show it. Her mum hadn’t answered, and the anger in Daisy’s chest had been so sudden, so unexpected, that she had torn the painting clean in two. Of course her mum was in the garden, putting something in the shed, and she’d come back in to find Daisy shivering with rage, the tears streaming down her face. She had taped the picture back together and hung it over the fireplace, and everything had been okay. Daisy had never forgotten that day, though, and the bolt of white-hot fury that had screamed up from her tummy. What if it happened again? What if the angel inside her saw it as a command? It wouldn’t just be a picture of a lopsided lighthouse that was destroyed.

But what if she needed her angel in order to talk to the man in the storm? Right now she was a ghost, she could see everything but touch nothing. And before that she had been a girl; nearly a teenager, yes, but her voice was so quiet, people were always telling her she should speak up, especially her drama teacher, Mrs Jackson. The man would never have heard her. When her angel hatched, though, when it woke up inside her heart, then her voice would be loud, loud enough to hear even over the howling thunder of the storm – as loud as Schiller’s had been back at Fursville. She would tell the man to leave her world alone, to just go away. He would have to hear her, he would have to listen.

‘Howie?’ she called, wondering where the boy had gone. Had Schiller heard him? Or Rilke? Were they keeping him quiet somehow? ‘If you can hear me, don’t listen to Rilke. She’s not a bad person, but she’s got it all wrong. We’re not here to hurt people, I know it. We’re here to help them.’

No answer. Her voice was just too quiet. It wouldn’t be long now, her angel was nearly ready. Then she wouldn’t be a ghost any more, she wouldn’t be a girl either.

She’d be a voice, loud enough to blast away the storm.

Only now, in the quiet stillness of the church, did his body seem to remember what pain was. It started in his feet, pushing up into his abdomen. He could feel his heartbeat like a pulsing heat in his skin. But he was alive. Alive and safe – if anybody had followed him to the church they’d be here by now, howling up and down the aisles.

And he was
warm
. That was the main thing. He wasn’t slipping into a pool of ice like Schiller and Daisy. That was good. It meant that whatever was inside him wasn’t in a hurry to get out. He just wanted to drink something, lock the church door, and sleep for a hundred years.

But what to do about the vicar? The old man sat on the altar, muttering something beneath his breath and occasionally smiling nervously at Cal. He kept taking off his glasses and cleaning them on his jacket, again and again and again. If he wasn’t careful, there would be no glass left in them. He put them on his nose, coughed, then spoke in a soft voice that carried the length of the church.

‘Your friend needs help.
You
need help. Please, we can work through this together. Just tell me what’s going on.’

You don’t want to know,
Cal thought. He flexed his jaw and a spasm shivered through the muscle like pins and needles. When he swallowed, it was as though he had a rolled-up sock lodged in the back of his throat. If he didn’t get a drink soon, he felt like he’d turn into one of the stone statues that gazed benevolently down on him.

‘Look,’ the vicar said, ‘let me free and I’ll tend to your injuries. There’s a first-aid kit in the rectory. I promise I’ll do everything I can.’

‘No,’ Cal croaked. ‘You don’t understand. If you come near me – come near any of us – you’ll try to kill us.’

‘That’s absurd,’ the vicar said. ‘I would never hurt a child, I would never hurt anybody. Please believe me, I’m a man of God.’

‘I don’t think God has anything to do with this,’ Cal said. ‘It’s . . . it’s older than that.’ He had no idea what he was saying. ‘Tell me what you know about angels.’

‘What?’ the vicar asked, cleaning his glasses. ‘Angels? Why?’

‘Just humour me,’ Cal said. ‘Angels.’

The man cleared the phlegm from his throat, a noise that might have been a laugh. Then he must have seen the look on Cal’s face because his brow creased and he glanced at the floor.

‘Angels, well, I don’t know what you want to know. In the Bible, they are spiritual beings, they are the messengers of God – in fact, that’s what the word means, messenger. It’s Greek originally. Um . . .’ He shrugged, the coil of rope rising then slapping on the floor. ‘Is that the sort of thing you want to know?’

Cal had no idea what he wanted to know.

‘No,’ he struggled to think of the right question. ‘Can they possess people? You know, like demons. Can they come to earth?’

How insane did
that
sound? The vicar was shaking his head.

‘Look, son.’

‘Cal,’ said Cal.

‘Cal, look, I’m not sure what it is you want to know. I—’

There was a crunch of gravel from outside, then the squeal of the door. Brick pushed into the church carrying a glass of water in one hand and a loaf of bread in the other. He looked ashen, each freckle picked out like a pen mark against his pale skin, and when he held out the glass his hand was shaking – so much that most of the water had sloshed out over his arm. Cal took a sip that burned down like acid. It was cool in his stomach, though, and he instantly felt better.

‘I thought I told you not to speak,’ Brick said, looking at the vicar.

‘You told me not to try and escape,’ the man replied. Cal took another sip, bigger this time, before adding:

‘It’s okay, Brick, I asked him a question. About angels.’

Brick hissed through his nose, crashing down on the back pew next to Adam. He handed the boy a fistful of bread, and Adam tucked into it like a starved dog.

‘Angels,’ snorted Brick, spitting out crumbs. ‘I’m telling you, that’s bollocks.’

‘Doesn’t hurt to ask, does it?’ Cal said, the anger making everything hurt twice as much. ‘We’re here, we might as bloody well.’ He turned back to the vicar, waiting for the man to continue.

‘If you tell me why you want to know about them, I may be able to give you a better answer.’

‘Because . . .’ Cal started, hesitating, wondering if saying it aloud inside a church might make it real in a way it hadn’t been before. In front of him, Brick tore off another chunk of bread with his teeth, shaking his head. Cal finished. ‘Because I think we’re possessed by them.’

The vicar didn’t reply, just swallowed noisily and started eyeballing the church door. His thoughts may as well have been broadcast over his head:
They’re crazy, they’re on drugs, I just need to loosen the rope and make a run for it, if I can just get to the street . . .

‘Mr . . . I mean, Reverend . . .’ Cal started.

‘Doug,’ said Brick. ‘His name is Doug.’

‘Doug, I know how insane this sounds. If we could prove it to you we would.’ He cocked his head, an idea floundering inside the sea of pain that was his thoughts. ‘Wait, do you have a camcorder?’

It didn’t take long to find it inside the rectory, Brick returning after five minutes with a small Flipcam. He crashed back into the pew, fiddling with the camera, snapping open the viewfinder.

‘Please be careful with that,’ said Doug. ‘It’s Margaret’s. She would be very upset if it was damaged.’

‘It will be fine, we’ll be careful,’ said Cal. ‘I need you to make sure that rope is secure, okay? It needs to be tight. Knot it again, just to be sure.’

The vicar did as he was told, then tugged his arm, twice. It looked safe enough, but right now he was just an old fat guy. In a moment or two, when they crossed the line, he’d be something else, a creature of ancient, instinctive rage.

‘Do it,’ said Cal.

‘You do it,’ Brick replied. ‘No way I’m going over there.’

‘Look,’ said Doug, his voice an octave higher than it had been. ‘Whatever you’re thinking of doing to me, don’t.’

‘Brick, just do it.’

The older boy pulled a face that made Cal want to kill him there and then. He looked as if he was going to try and hand the camcorder to Adam, then pushed himself to his feet and slid out into the aisle. He hovered for a moment, unsure, cast one glowering look back at Cal, then hesitantly made his way towards the altar. There was a soft chime as he started to record.

‘Please, just stop there,’ Doug whined, starting to pick at the knot with his free hand.

‘Leave it,’ Cal said. ‘We’re not going to hurt you, I promise.’

Brick took another short, shuffling step, and another, closing the gap between him and the vicar. How far was it now? Twenty-five metres maybe? Cal couldn’t be sure, but it wouldn’t be—

The vicar uttered a nasal whine, which curled up at the end into a snort. Even from the other end of the church Cal could see the man’s eyes grow dark, his face slack, as though the flesh was slowly sliding off the bone. His whole body lurched, bumping him down on to the next step, his arms gouging at the carpet, at the stone, as though he was having a fit. Brick paused, and Cal could almost see the waves of fear pulsing from him, filling the building with a sour, unpleasant smell.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You’re not close enough.’

Brick muttered something that Cal couldn’t hear, then stepped over the invisible line of the Fury. Doug rocketed to his feet, a brittle scream grating from the black chasm of his mouth. He charged at Brick, making it all of three feet before the rope grew taut, locking him in place. Momentum caused his legs to fly up, his body thudding to the stone. He didn’t care, thrashing, howling.

‘That’s enough, Brick,’ Cal said. Brick staggered back, almost tripping on his own feet. And just like that he was back over the line and the vicar was just a vicar again, a bundle of black cloth in the aisle, panting for breath and spitting blood. It took him several minutes to remember where he was, wheezing his way on to the lowest step of the altar, wiping the sheen of sweat from his bald head. He clutched his wrist, slick with blood, his cloudy eyes searching the church until they landed on Cal.

‘What . . . what did you do to me?’

‘Show him,’ said Cal. Brick flicked the camcorder closed and bowled it down the aisle. The little hunk of plastic skidded over the uneven stone, thudding into the wooden rail that Doug was tied to. He no longer seemed concerned about his camera. He didn’t seem too concerned about anything any more, as though the Fury had picked him up and shaken out anything that ever mattered, leaving him hollow.

‘Watch it,’ said Cal.

Another silent age passed, then Doug reached down and picked up the camcorder. There were more quiet beeps, then Cal heard his own voice –
Go on, you’re not close enough
– followed by the unmistakable soundtrack of the Fury. Even hearing it like this made his skin crawl. The vicar’s eyes were like golf balls, huge and white, as he watched himself on the tiny screen. What was it like, to see yourself like that? To know that, for a short while, you were not you, you were something else, something terrible. The man watched it again, then gently folded the screen into the camera and laid it by his feet.

‘My God,’ he whispered, suddenly a child, as if Cal was the priest. ‘What happened to me?’

‘We did,’ Cal said. ‘Now please, tell us what you know.’