July 23rd, 2002.
The Farm.
Those who were already on the surface were indeed fighting for their lives, standing in the middle of the yard with about a dozen ambulant Things surrounding them, closing in for the kill.
Libra could see Toni Daly fighting off one of the shamblers with a spanner - the last spanner in the garage, by the look of things. With her were Joanna Cagney, Mary Chesters, Michael Pollard and Timothy Davies.
"Offensive capabilities?" Libra asked the team with him. Anna looked at the fighters in the middle, shook her head.
"Defensive, mostly," she said. As she watched, Joanna gestured, and half of the Things flew away from them, propelled by an invisible expanding force. This left the small knot of hunters with an avenue opened towards the farmhouse. Libra saw what they were trying to do, gestured. His team - himself, Anna, Teri, Alex, Karen, Kevin Jones and Wendy Clixby - followed his lead without question, bringing up the rear as he led the charge towards the farmhouse.
Across the yard, a Thing lunged for Joanna Cagney. Libra hollered "Oi!" and its clawlike hand was deflected. Anna and Alex made their gestures, too, and shamblers were bowled over by the fresh assault from the direction they were not expecting. Together, both teams of imbued made it to the relative safety of the farmhouse, where they herded Smudge and Michaels into the back, letting Teri do her thing.
And a strange ritual it was, too: as Libra watched, Teri Butler went from door to door, shutting and locking it, murmuring "none shall pass." She did the same to the windows, checking each one: and for all the Things' efforts outside to batter down the front door, for all their impressive strength, nothing could get through that door.
Libra turned, looked at Smudge and Michaels as they got busy unloading Michaels' bag. "That is an impressive quantity of armaments," he told them.
Smudge looked up, smiled. "There's more in the cupboard round the back," he replied. "In the kitchen."
The kitchen reeked of milk that had been left to go sour for what seemed like months. A pile of the stuff lay curdling on the floor next to the carton, which was covered with dust, half falling apart itself.
Libra saw the walkie talkie which had once belonged to the soldiers stationed here; that Savage chap, and the girl. He picked up the unit.
"Libra to the compound, Libra to the compound. Anyone there?"
Silence for a time.
"Libra to the compound, Libra to the compound. Can anyone hear me?"
"I can hear you," said a voice, calm and cold.
"Bloody Hell," Libra said, with the unit muted. It was Inmate Five. Libra glanced around: everyone had stopped what they were doing to stare in disbelief and horror at the unit in Libra's hand.
"Hello?" Inmate Five continued.
"Five," Libra said, "are you still in the compound?"
"Of course I am," Five replied. "And yes, I am monitoring your situation. You're in the farmhouse right now, aren't you? And there are, as far as I can tell, a dozen walking dead trying to batter down your defences. Your situation looks rather grim, if I do say so."
"For us all," Libra replied. "We need to clear the way so we can get to the trucks and get the hell out of here."
"Oh, I can do that," Five said. "That's easy."
Libra looked at the unit. "You can?"
"Yes, but I will have to command a small force of volunteers. I can't very well kill the creatures on my own."
Libra looked up, saw the hunters staring, watching what Libra was going to do next. He sighed. "Stand by," he said to the unit.
"Of course I will," Five said. "But it isn't me you need to ask to wait, now, is it? You're running out of time up there."
"Bastard sounded happy just now," Smudge said, as Libra looked around at the others.
"Well?" he asked them. "What do you want to do?"
"I can fight," Alex Pritchard said. "I'll volunteer."
"Me too," said Joanna. "As it stands, I haven't seen home for almost a year. Everyone's likely given up on me, moved on. I'm dead to the world. What's there for me to lose now?"
Libra glanced at the others. "Who else wants to volunteer?" he asked. It looked as if they all did. Libra sighed, picked up the unit to his mouth, prepared to call Inmate Five and tell him he had a deal.
The pounding stopped. Silence fell outside, broken only by the howling of the storm. Everyone turned to face the door. It had stopped shaking.
"Five, there's been a change," Libra said. "What can you see on the monitors?"
Silence.
"Oh, bloody hell," Libra said. "They've broken into the compound." He went for the door, unlocked it, opened it without thinking.
The courtyard was empty.
Libra looked around him ducked back inside. "Five?" he called on the unit. "You there?" No response.
He put the unit down, gestured. Anna came forwards.
"Anna," Libra said, "push away anything you see that comes near. Can anybody else do that thing that makes objects burn and do damage?"
Joanna and Toni raised their hands.
"Okay," Libra said, "we're going to go out there, in a circle, and look around for whatever we can find. I'm sure those bastards have found a way down into the compound right now. We've got to get to the lift, so that everyone can get out alive and we can make our way to the trucks. Got it?"
Joanna, Toni and Anna nodded. Libra gestured. The door was flung open. The yard was still empty.
"All right," Libra said, "let's go -"
Smudge was at the door.
"It's not safe outside for you," Libra said, calmly.
"I've got this," Smudge replied, holding up a large - barrelled pistol.
"A flaregun," Libra said.
"More than that," Smudge said. "It's got the latest model starshell round. One of these ought to let us see what's outside the range of the farmhouse spotlights. If there's more of them out there, you might as well see how many you'll have to fight through."
Libra nodded, reluctantly. The team filed through the door, formed a circle around Smudge for his protection. Together, as a unit, they made their way through the empty yard towards the garage where the trucks sat, idle.
"Is this all right?" Smudge asked. "Only the wind's died down a bit, now, and I don't know if it's going to stay that way."
"All right," Libra said. "Let it off."
Smudge pointed the gun straight up, fired off the round with a dull thump. The round rose into the air on a column of smoke, reached its peak, exploded into light and hung in the air, suspended on a small parachute, illuminating everything around.
"Well?" asked Smudge. "Do you see any more of those Things?"
Libra looked around, gathering in what he could see, with his Sight on and augmented by the strong light to pierce the preternatural gloom for the first time. "Oh yeah," he said, the horror strong in his voice.
There was a solid wall of the Things, surrounding the Farm. Staring at them.
Waiting for a signal to come in and kill them all.
At long last, with the protection of the hunters guarding the lifts, the remainder of the inmates reached the surface.
Many of them stood around in wonder; this was their first taste of the outside world for months.
Anastace Deveraux looked around her, taking in the Farm. She approached Libra, took his hands in hers.
"Thank you," she said.
"We're not out of this yet," Libra replied. "We still have those to get through." He gestured. Anastace glanced at the Things waiting expectantly outside the Farm.
"They're waiting for us," she said. "They don't need to come in to get us. They only need for us to try to come out to them."
"I know," Libra replied.
Anna Dawson came up to Libra. "We're almost ready," she said. "The volunteers have agreed to stay, to take on the creatures, attempt to buy time for you to get the trucks away. The one thing left for us to do is to wait for ... him."
"Do you mean me?" said Inmate Five, quietly, nearby.
Anna spun around, gasped. "When did you -"
"- Get up here?" Inmate Five said, calmly. He was sitting on the engine of the defunct third truck. "Oh, only a short while ago," he replied. "Before the rest of you got up here."
Libra looked hard at Inmate Five. Five's hair had once been in a widow's peak, but he'd graded it down to next to nothing on his head. He looked like a thinner version of that Graham Norton on the TV, except that Graham never had the steely look in Five's eyes.
Libra had seen this look before. In leaders on TV and in person. Saddam. Slobodan. In newsreel archive footage of Hitler, and in monochrome pictures of Uncle Joe Stalin. He'd seen it in Bosnia, in a man who took great pride in displaying his red and white checkered standard, proclaiming his pride in being a Croat.
He'd watched as the man had knowingly set up that standard in full view of a bunch of Serbs, as a deliberate racial taunt, to remind them that as a Croat, he'd sold out his kind to the Nazis during the war.
And he'd seen it in the faces of his men, too, on the night they'd ...
Libra looked away from those eyes; but he no longer flinched from them. They were magnetic, sure: but once he knew what was behind them, he no longer feared. He'd found the measure of Inmate Five.
"You can do this," Libra said to Five. It was not a question. Five did not respond; did not need to.
"Okay," Libra said, "your volunteers are out there." He gestured. Five nodded, got up from the truck engine, began to go out the door. At the threshold, he stopped, turned back to face Libra.
"I'm not like the others," he said. "Not the ones you were thinking of. You and I know we're on the same side here. And we both want the same thing."
Libra nodded. "A world free of the Things out there, and those who follow them into Hell."
Five smiled. "Only our methods differ," he said. "We shall see whose methods will be instrumental in making that world come about. Won't we?"
And then he was gone.
Libra stood, listening, as the wind outside began to pick up. Anna stood at his side, looking out at the world through the open garage door.
"What have I done?" Libra asked. "I just let loose a worse monster than those Things out there."
"You needed to," Anna replied. "It's the only way to ensure our survival. Otherwise," she added, "we'd all be dead by now, and the only one guaranteed to come out of this alive would still be him - only he'd be the only survivor. Wouldn't he?"
Libra nodded. "It doesn't mean I have to like it," he said.
Alex Pritchard, Joanna Cagney, Karen Whittaker, Toni Daly and Wendy Clixby fought like demons under Inmate Five's command. But they died anyway. All but Inmate Five.
Fuelled by rage, their sight pumped by his power, they raced towards the lines of the Things, preceded by a hail of projectiles - heavy nuts, bolts, ball bearings, large stones. Things fell down, their bodies pierced by multiple objects, only to get up again.
Joanna's Power flew at them, scattering them from the Farm entrance and clearing the way momentarily. Wendy's face was a scowl; for some reason, none of the Things could come near her to do her harm.
Karen Whittaker belched out a vast field of black smoke which surrounded the hunters and encompassed some of the Things; there was the intermittent chatter of the firearms Smudge had supplied them, muffled by the cloud, and more Things went down, riddled with bullets.
So did Michael Pollard, impaled by one of the Things. An unlucky blow; its arm just happened to be there as Michael ran into it. The arm went through his sternum and out his back in a shower of blood and gore.
Five's retaliation was swift and impersonal, decapitating the Thing with a single stroke of a weapon he'd improvised from lengths of metal and wood.
Karen Whittaker was next, felled by a swipe from a Thing as they finally began to move, brushing past the hunters as if they were nothing to move into the courtyard, towards the trucks.
But the trucks weren't idle any more. They were moving towards the entrance, at speed. Their task accomplished, the imbued at the gate had provided the final distraction, and at long last the evacuation was underway.
Toni Daly sliced at a Thing with a smouldering kitchen knife as it lunged for the lead truck. The Thing howled as its arm fell off its slimy shoulder. It turned, returned the favour.
As the trucks went past, Alex Pritchard spent the last of his energies shoving Things away from the road, clearing as much of a path as he could, while Anna Dawson and Kevin Jones, in the lead and second trucks respectively, used their repelling power to drive Things away from the trucks. Finally, his last energies spent, Alex sank to his knees beside Wendy, who valiantly defended Alex with thrown ball bearings and, at the end, with a length of broken fencing. The Things closed around them when the fence broke in her hands.
Neither of them screamed.
Inmate Five found himself standing in the centre of a diminishing circle of walking dead in the middle of the courtyard. He could see a glimpse of the trucks as they pulled away for freedom. He smiled, as the Things closed in on him.
"I bet you haven't seen someone do this before," he said.
One of the Things reached out to claw at Five's face. It never connected.
The wind started small, circling around Five; but within a few moments, it had built up to a rushing wall of air. At first, the Things remained standing, as pieces of stone, grit and sand were whipped up around them.
But then the wind continued to build up its momentum; and before long, the air was full of walking dead being picked up and flung in all directions.
In the rear of the second truck sat Libra, peering out through the canvas flap at the Farm as they rolled on their way towards freedom. He watched as the last of the people he'd come to call friend, those brave souls he'd condemned to death, fell. That only left Inmate Five behind: and Libra felt a pang of sorrow for him, too, murdering butcher that he was.
The pang only lasted a moment. The sorrow vanished when the column of black wind reached down and scoured the ground at the spot where Five stood.
Libra, Mary and Anastace found themselves looking out of the back of the truck, staring at the storm funnel formed, in defiance of nature, by one man.
Nobody said a word.
As the truck crested the hill, the Farm and the flooded valley fell away from sight. The storm funnel remained over the Farm, though, occasionally picking up bits of black here and there which Libra knew damn well were Things, being picked up bodily by the tornado and dashed against the ground up to half a mile away.
July 24. Abergele railway station, North Wales.
The Daily Post ran a headline about the storms that had battered North Wales the morning of July 23rd. Inside the rag, the Health column lead on an article on depression, and what to do if one suffered from anxiety attacks or had persistent, chronic nightmares.
Someone had spotted a Big Cat prowling near Peterleigh. Damn thing was still there. So was Herald Recruitments, apparently; the advertisement in the Jobs section was as big as ever. A full half page, offering positions in IT coding C# and ASP and seeking Flash MX experts.
Libra put down the newspaper as someone approached him. He looked up, expecting Smudge, perhaps, or Michaels.
"Bloody Hell," he said, with a smile. It was the Welsh guy. The artist.
The living ghost.
The Welshman was wearing a polo neck jumper and brown corduroy trousers, Hush Puppies and white socks. Over his shoulder, he carried a large art case.
"I never thought I'd see you in person again," the man said, approaching Libra cautiously. Libra extended his hand. The man did not accept. Libra dropped his hand, shrugged.
"Are you all right?" Libra asked, taking a step forward. The Welshman shook his head, took a step back.
"I ... have a problem coming too near people," he said. "I'm all right, except when I'm in the company of a lot of ... well, people."
"You seemed all right last year in the pub, and in the hospital," Libra said.
"Ah, but back then I wasn't as strong, and the pain ... the pain wasn't as great." The man put his hand to his temple. "I'd only just had some of my work hung in a local art gallery. Somehow, that always seemed to make the noise go away for a time."
"What pain?" asked Libra. "What noise?"
In reply, the artist unslung the portfolio he'd been carrying over his shoulder, presented it to Libra.
"It's all in here," he said. "Including a rather interesting little dossier on ... er ... cats."
Libra nodded, took out something from a bag he had with him. A CD ROM. He handed it over to the Welshman.
"What's in this?" the Welshman asked.
"Everything Division Six has on us," Libra replied. "All their intelligence reports; the results of tests conducted on our bodies: everything."
"What do you want me to do with this?"
"Get your own back for being an inmate of the Farm," Libra replied. "Get vengeance for all of the imbued who died protecting us, who sacrificed themselves so we could be free again."
"Who should I send it to?" asked the Welshman.
"Well, you have a choice," Libra said. "Sir Marcus Kinnison, head of Department 23 working from Whitehall; or the News of the World."
"Who's Sir Marcus? What's Department 23? And didn't you say Division Six a moment ago?"
"Sir Marcus is a Minister working in Whitehall. He's the chap Department 23 has to answer to for its continued existence. Sir Marcus persuaded the head of the NCIS to spare a few men from its routine police work to set up an agency to do more or less what Division Six are doing in the intel community: investigate the supernatural.
"Sir Marcus and Sir Ian Lennox don't have a lot of love between them. It could be due to some sort of old Cold War enmity or rivalry ... or maybe they once shared the same lover, whoever he was." Libra shrugged.
The Welshman smiled, accepted the disk.
"I've got my own copy," Libra said. "Smudge gave it to me. Told me to look at it. We might have to be ready for possible threats from the Government: those who are aware of the imbued consider them part and parcel of the supernatural population of Great Britain, possibly servitors of existing monsters like ... mosquitoes, if you know what I mean."
The Welshman nodded, grimly.
There was the honk of a train approaching the platform. Libra stood, dropped the newspaper on the bench, extended his hand. This time, the Welshman shook it firmly.
"Emrys," he said to Libra. "Call me Emrys."
"Greg," Libra replied.
Libra boarded the train, did not look back. He was tired. He found his seat, sat down, let the train start up and take him away from North Wales and werewolves and farms with hidden military complexes and dead things and nutters who burned children alive in their cribs.
All he wanted, at that moment, was a long, hot bath in his own home.
Libra swore. He didn't have the house key. Without thinking, he patted the pockets of his jacket, and felt a foreign object in one of them. He took it out, looked at it.
It was a manila envelope, addressed to him. Libra opened the envelope. A piece of paper and a key fell out. He looked at the key, then at the note, which contained an address in Yorkshire, and a locker number.
There was a note underneath this address. It read "My wife and kid. Give them a full quarter of what you find, this time. The rest can go to your cause. Good luck. S."
Libra pocketed the note and the key, sat back and smiled as the train rolled on towards Chester and, eventually, home. "Gladly, my old son," he said to nobody in particular. "Gladly."
By: Fiat Knox
Copyright © Fiat Knox, 2001