The Invasion Page 14

  Nessa is searching among the branches. She is an expert at this, but her damaged left hand can’t cope.

  ‘Oh,’ says Hornblower, ‘let me!’

  Before she can move, he takes her hand and squeezes. The pain! Oh, she had forgotten the pain! Nothing Cassidy did can compare to this! It’s like hammers pounding her bones to powder. Like needles of fire and acid ripping into each individual pore. She screams, all her precious illusion of calm ripped away in an instant. ‘Get away! You’re not to touch me!’

  ‘Oh,’ he mutters, abashed. ‘I forgot. I just wanted to fix your fingers.’

  Nessa totters, barely able to see through eyes full of tears, her breathing hoarse as an old man with TB. Hornblower only touched her for an instant, but she’ll have a whole day of such agony the moment they realize she’s lying about Dagda.

  Quickly she takes control of herself. All he did was heal her, that’s all. And we’ll make him pay for that, Megan whispers. Nessa can only agree. She can’t fathom the strange trust the enemy are putting in her, but she knows she needs to take advantage of it.

  Crutches are the one thing she understands better than anybody. Even in this alien wood where black sap spurts like blood, she quickly fashions a pair perfectly suited to her height and weight.

  ‘Can I try them?’ asks the innocent monster by her side.

  ‘You’re too tall for these. Too heavy. Here. Hold them, while I prepare yours.’

  He’s as eager as a child, standing proud and straight as she sizes him up. He nods wisely when she picks out an appropriate branch for him, and she thinks, By Crom! He’s pretending he understands what I’m doing. No different from a real man.

  She’s especially careful with the way she breaks this new branch off.

  ‘Now,’ Nessa says, ‘I need you to open your mouth.’

  ‘Why?’ he asks, just as she shoves the sharpened stake right down his throat.

  She leaves him there, drowning on his own blood. This is her second killing, counting Conor as the first. She barely remembers that one and still isn’t quite sure how she went ahead with it. Her memories are vague in the extreme.

  But now, as her crutches carry her out of the far side of the wood, faster than most humans can run, her eyes fill with tears and her half-empty stomach threatens to spew what little nourishment remains to her out onto the ground.

  ‘He’s not even human!’ she tells herself. ‘He’s a monster! They’re all monsters! They will torture me for an eternity if I let them!’

  None of that seems to matter. She needs to watch where she’s going, skidding down a pebbly path while spider bushes reach for her crutches. One tumble, one broken bone, and she’s done for. But all she can see is Hornblower’s blood. The surprise on his face.

  ‘I’ll do it again!’ she cries. ‘I’ll do it all again!’

  Exactly! crows Megan’s ghost. We’ll kill the lot of them! We’ll make this place a graveyard of the Sídhe!

  The Promise

  Nessa is fast now, faster than her enemies could ever be, hurtling down the slope towards a vast coastal plain. But she can’t keep this up for long. Already the sweat is blinding her, her breath rasping like sandpaper in air that itches and burns as it goes down.

  Don’t think about it, don’t think, push! Push!

  Giving up is not how survivor Testimonies get written. The way it works, the way it always works, is that you stay alive, for one more minute, or a second even! In that time your pursuers may trip. A smother tree might wrap them in its bark … And maybe, just maybe, you’ll add enough stolen seconds together for the Call to end and send you home.

  But this isn’t a Call, is it? Nessa’s not going home, unless her home is here where even the air hates her.

  She skips through a field of knee-high trees, scattering whole tribes of tiny men. In the distance a larger ‘animal’ roars and a herd of naked human antelope scatters in terror.

  Nessa doesn’t stop to look. Ten minutes, fifteen, maybe even twenty she keeps it up. Longer than ever before! And then, like a horse ridden until its heart has burst, she is simply lying in the freezing muck.

  And what has she achieved? The enemy can’t be more than a few hundred metres behind her and she has left a trail of blood and snot and broken twigs that nobody could ignore.

  And yet the horn never sounds. No cries of delight issue from the top of the hill where she left them. Why are they not coming for her?

  They’re in no rush, Nessa thinks. They said they could feel the promise written by Dagda into her flesh. The one that said only Conor could kill her. They think they can find her anywhere. But they’re wrong about that. Nessa hasn’t forgotten the volcano she saw earlier.

  Hours away, in the direction of her flight, the mountains begin. As she watches, the clouds of ash clear just enough for her to see the violent glow of lava. They won’t be able to touch me there. She’ll rest a few minutes first and then be on her way.

  Nessa wakes with a start. How long …? How? The silver spirals spin as they always have. Her stomach heaves with hunger.

  She has a little cry, although Crom knows she’s not entitled to one. She never pitied the weepers in the dorms at school. Just get on with it! she used to think. What good will it do? The answer then was the same one she has today. None. It’s all just a waste of water. But there’s nowhere she needs to be right now and the tears won’t stop, so she just lies there weeping quietly.

  If Anto were here – she would hate for him to be here! To see her sobbing like a baby! But not even the Grey Land could destroy her happiness then, she thinks. She lets herself sink into the fantasy for a while. The two of them here together. His great strength allied to her will. They would conquer all before them. His smile. The smell of his skin …

  But slowly, slowly, something intrudes.

  Singing.

  She freezes, straining her ears. She doesn’t recognize the music, but it’s the same angelic sound you would get from a children’s choir at Christmas. Sweet high voices, innocent and sacred at once. She scrambles to her feet because beauty almost always signals danger here. Where? Where is it coming from? She looks up, almost falling again in surprise.

  Massive black shadows fill the sky, a dozen maybe, each with a body the size of a car and a wingspan of four metres or more. The song drifts to a close, as one by one the figures peel away from the flock and come screaming out of the sky. They seem to be moving away from Nessa, off towards the mountains, but when they hit the horizon they wheel around, one after another. Tiny, tiny dots, growing fast as they shoot towards her, barely a metre above the surface of the plain.

  And the song begins again, glorious harmony that would once have filled every opera house in the world and thrown Puccini and Bizet into despair. But the creatures themselves are far from beautiful. They are human flesh, of course, stretched over a batwing-shaped frame of bones, their sagging bellies trailing jellyfish fronds along the ground. Only the faces remain human, although they have two of these each, both singing. And on their backs, these eagles or bats or whatever they are, each carries a Sídhe warrior.

  Nessa has spent too long staring. The first is now upon her. She lurches to one side, swings a crutch, only to have it yanked away by the trailing fronds. The force of it spins her around, throws her helplessly into the path of another.

  Instantly, dozens of sticky tentacles, none thicker than a finger, wrap her tight.

  Great wings power them up into the air, leaving Nessa’s stomach behind on the ground.

  The girl has no idea where they plan on taking her, but, by Crom, she knows she won’t be going quietly. The wrapping fronds have pinned her arms together with the one remaining crutch, while the world shoots away a long drop beneath her feet. Even her strength won’t free her here. Nessa is left with only one appalling option.

  She doesn’t hesitate. She bites right through the nearest fleshy ropes until she is gagging on human blood and bits of … ‘Meat,’ she tells herself. ‘It’s just
meat.’ But the monster howls and shudders. It lurches in the sky, and one of the heads cries, ‘Oh, such pain! By the Buddha! The pain!’

  The other voice is just weeping, although now and again it utters words in what might be French. Show no mercy! Megan’s ghost whispers. What choice does Nessa have, unless she wishes to become a monster herself?

  Only two of the strands are gone, out of maybe forty that grip her. The mountains have grown large since she last looked at them, their tips gleaming white except where ash stains them from a great belching mouth of fire near the sea. She bites again. I’m already a monster, she thinks.

  By the time she has freed her right arm, both mouths are screaming in their child-like voices and her own face is a mass of gore.

  And then, with the air flying past her, she hears another voice.

  It is the Sídhe rider, leaning precariously over his mount’s side, his hair gleaming like a ribbon in the wind.

  He nods appreciatively at the wreckage she has made, uncaring that he hangs above the abyss or that the bat-creature’s flying has grown dangerously lopsided due to his weight. Nessa ignores him, for what can he do to hurt her?

  ‘Stop it!’ he shouts above the wind. ‘I am trying to help you.’ He sees her astonishment and nods. ‘You were right to leave the others. The way across the mountains is the quickest route to Dagda, but it is not so easy to cross the heights on foot unless you know the way. So when my squadron learned what you were trying to do, we followed along to get you there on time. We only wish to help.’

  ‘No! It’s my death you want.’

  ‘But your death is promised to another.’

  ‘To Conor, you mean? He’s in the grave himself!’

  ‘Yes.’ The Sídhe smiles. Behind him the mountains grow ever larger, their sides forested with twisted, twisting trees. ‘He is dead. We have already found another king to replace him. And yet, it is Conor who will kill you. But first you have a promise of your own to keep. You must see Dagda.’

  Nessa twirls high above the ground. A promise? She made a promise? And it all becomes clear to her. This is the reason the first group of Sídhe refrained from hurting her. And she laughs. What idiots they are! Just because they are obsessed with keeping promises doesn’t mean she has to be. She could have sworn to do anything, it seems, anything at all, and they’d have bowed and scraped to her for it. She laughs. She can’t help it. Are they really so easy to fool as all that?

  But whatever the reason, Nessa has no interest in rushing towards Dagda just so she can be murdered by some type of zombie Conor.

  She bites and bites again, while the beautiful man urges her to stop ‘for her own good’. It’s all just encouragement for Nessa, until suddenly her host swings down from the flyer’s back and grabs hold of some of the unbroken fronds nearest him.

  ‘This is wonderful!’ he shouts. ‘You fill my heart with joy.’

  Nessa takes this as an invitation to punch him with her now free right fist. All he does is laugh and spit a tooth in her direction. It misses, falling away into the void below. Then he reaches up into the belly of the creature above him, his hand sinking deep into its flesh. If the two voices screamed before when Nessa attacked them, they are now as loud in their agony as air-raid sirens. Nothing is more painful than the moulding touch of the Sídhe! The wings cease to beat entirely. Nessa is spun around and the surface of the Grey Land comes corkscrewing up towards her.

  ‘Steady!’ shouts her enemy. ‘Steady there, my sweet one!’

  Desperate flaps of the wings follow – just in time – for suddenly they are skipping over the canopy of a forest like a stone over a pond, scattering leaves and spreading panic among a tribe of hideous crawling apes.

  Nessa must have been holding her breath. By the time she has released it and looked up again, the Sídhe is holding what looks like a viper in his hand. He has fashioned it from the flesh of his mount and it is still attached to the flyer’s belly. The serpent has a fanged questing mouth and hideous, dribbling nostrils that expand and contract where they sense her presence.

  ‘Only the weakest of poisons,’ the Sídhe assures her. ‘I need you asleep rather than dead.’

  The viper comes at her, the head snapping, the jaws dripping. She fends it off with a handful of fronds and it sinks its teeth into them: once, twice and again a third time.

  ‘You have poisoned my mount,’ says the Sídhe, ‘That was not clever of you.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asks.

  ‘You will regret it, dear one. You will suffer now.’

  The great wingbeats slow. The Sídhe releases the ‘snake’. He shoves both hands deep into the belly above him. Not this time to reshape it, but because they are now spinning out of control and he needs something to hold on to.

  All of a sudden the twin voices stop singing and the fronds holding Nessa in place slacken. The second crutch tumbles down into the trees, and she herself has to grab on for dear life to keep herself from falling after it.

  They hurtle through a pall of smoke and … there! Right beneath her lies a river of lava such as she dreamed she would find. Now, she thinks. Now I’ll let go. But the river is gone again, it’s gone, as their failing mount veers to the right.

  ‘Remember I tried to help you,’ the Sídhe says. ‘You will have to walk to find Dagda.’

  ‘I will kill myself first!’ she snarls.

  He laughs and laughs, but stops as she releases her hold, falling down and away.

  An Army

  The remaining students and instructors of Boyle Survival College huddle in an abandoned house in Longford town, while snow drifts down the fogged-up windows.

  It’s been a week since the invasion of Ireland began. In that time, they have travelled no more than sixty kilometres. They’ve stolen supplies from hastily abandoned defences. They’ve heard reports over a dying radio that Galway is under siege from a thousand different horrors, and every captured village gives the enemy more innocents to turn into monsters.

  Yet all of the reports agree on one thing: the Sídhe themselves, famous for how little they care for their own lives, are rarely seen. They hang back from the fighting. They send their ‘heralds’ ahead to demand surrender, and keep waves of monsters between themselves and the human army.

  But the group wastes little time on this puzzle. They just want to get back to safety.

  As night falls, they block out the windows so they can have a fire. Aoife, it turns out, knows how to cook. ‘Polish stuff, mostly,’ she explains. ‘From Granny. The owners of this place even had spices. Can you believe it?’

  ‘The smell will get us caught,’ Liz Sweeney says. However, Longford town was left completely empty, leaving them their pick of houses to hide in.

  Shadows dance on the walls. Anto’s stomach rumbles. He’s drooling like a cartoon character, and he sits drowsily with the others in the front room, content as a dog before the flames. How can he be enjoying this when Nessa is gone? When she is dead, or much, much worse?

  The students of Boyle have only now reached the front lines, but they’ve had a dozen horrible encounters along the way. One of the Year 3s was Called, returning as a completely exsanguinated corpse. Bronagh Glynn was carried away by something that gibbered and laughed as it ran off on spindly legs, and Liz Sweeney had to take over Bianconi’s pistol after his right hand got too close to a pair of centaurs.

  Aoife emerges at last with Mitch Cohen as her helper.

  ‘Taaft and Nabil are having theirs in the kitchen,’ she says.

  Some of the food she serves in mugs. ‘Tastes amaaaazing!’ Krishnan says, his Adam’s apple bobbing in appreciation. But his look turns to outright jealousy when Aoife comes into the room again bearing two portions far larger than his. ‘Yours has no meat,’ she whispers to Anto. Even with so much death and horror around, she always remembers he needs extra calories and goes to great efforts to look after him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he replies. For some reason he has a lump in his throat.

&
nbsp; But Liz Sweeney’s helping is even larger: a mountain of mashed potatoes, along with winter stores of meat and vegetables from jars.

  The bigger girl shakes her head. ‘Don’t think you can win me over, Aoife.’ For some reason her eyes slide over to Anto when she speaks. ‘I’m not into that. I’m not like that tiny little sneak you used to hang around with.’

  ‘Don’t eat it if you don’t want it,’ Aoife replies, quiet as a mouse. She’s staring at the taller girl, not with hatred, exactly, and certainly not with the lust Liz Sweeney mocks her for.

  ‘Oh, no! It’s mine now and I’ll eat every bit.’ Liz Sweeney digs an enormous nugget of mash out with her spoon. ‘Every. Last. Crumb. I intend to live, even if you don’t.’ She squashes the food into her mouth, chewing, swallowing, while her greedy spoon has already dived in for a refill.

  Then it pauses. Liz Sweeney wheezes like an old smoker. She blinks and her eyes are brimming with tears.

  ‘Every last bit?’ asks Aoife. ‘I don’t think you’re able for it.’

  Liz Sweeney growls and takes the next bite. Sweat beads on her forehead. Her skin has turned red enough to light the whole room. Every few seconds she has to pause to cough, but still, she won’t give up or back down, and the spoon dips again into the bowl. Her hand is trembling now, reluctant to cooperate. With only two spoonfuls remaining, the food tumbles from her grasp and she is bent double, tears streaming from her eyes, gasping, wheezing. Anto and the five other remaining students have all been staring, their own food untouched.

  At last, Aoife kneels down next to Liz Sweeney. ‘You told me I’m a waste of space. You’re right about that. You’re right, and I don’t care if you say it or anything else you want about me. But next time you insult Emma, it’ll be broken glass in your food instead of chilli powder.’

  She retreats to the opposite corner of the room with a small bowl of food of her own.

  Finally they all settle down to sleep.