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It was getting harder to breathe, harder to think. But every time my thoughts began to drift, all I had to do was remember the vision the alien had shown me back at the morgue, and a cold rage would blow the cobwebs from my thoughts and let me think clearly again. I was here to bring the aliens blood and horror, and nothing was going to stop me.
Not even me.
An alien surged forward out of a side tu
“Allow me,” said Walker, his words just a breath in my ear.
He took a firm hold on the handle of his umbrella, pulled and twisted, and drew from its hiding place a long slender steel blade. He strode purposefully forward and cut, hacked, and sliced the alien into a hundred pieces with cold, stern ferocity. The steel blade sliced keenly through the writhing tubes, severing and opening them up almost without resistance. The alien seemed more surprised than anything. It made no attempt to defend itself, just slid slowly backwards down the tu
Walker stopped and lowered his sword. He stood over the last remnants of the alien and looked slowly about him at the scattered pieces. He was breathing harshly, as much from emotion as exertion. He straightened up, flicked a few drops of clear ooze from the tip of his sword, and then slid it neatly back into the spine of his umbrella.
“A sword?” I said finally. “Hidden inside an umbrella?”
“Don’t show your ignorance,” said Walker, his breathing already back to normal. “It’s an old tradition in the British spy game. Mention it to your Armourer; he’ll remember.”
“Why hasn’t the alien’s death set off any alarms?” I said, glaring about me into the painfully sharp light.
“Perhaps they weren’t expecting such a basic response,” said Walker. “There is such a thing as being oversophisticated.”
“And if more aliens do arrive?”
“Let them come,” said Walker. “I feel like killing some more aliens. I want to grind their bodies under my feet and dance in their blood.”
“Good,” I said. “I want that too.”
The centre of operations turned out to be a honeycomb of interlinked tu
I entered into a chamber like all the others and stopped dead in my tracks. Walker stopped beside me and swore softly. We weren’t the only people in the mound. The aliens had abducted men and women and even children from the town of Roswell and done things to them. For knowledge, or curiosity, or as a precursor to the experiment they were pla
Some forty men, women, and children lay scattered across the sticky floor of the great open cavern. More protruded from the walls, half sunk and immersed in the slick wet surfaces. There were no cages, no bars, no force fields. These people had just been . . . worked on, and then dumped here to live or die. Many had died, their broken and distorted bodies unable to accept the terrible things that had been done to them.
Most had not been so lucky. They were still alive, aware, and suffering.
Their bodies had been vivisected: opened up and changed, made use of for surgical experiments. Not the brute mutilations I’d seen on the farmer in the morgue, or even in the future vision the alien had shown me. There was purpose to some of what had been done here, even if its end remained unknown. These people had been opened up, had their organs removed . . . and then put back again in different places, set up to work in different ways. Some organs had been replaced with alien substitutes, pulsing organic machines that wrapped themselves around kidneys and lungs and intestines.
I moved slowly forward into the chamber, like walking in a dream, a nightmare from which I wanted so badly to awaken. A man lay on his back, split open from crotch to throat, the sides pi
The children were the worst. I couldn’t look at the children.
“Dear God,” said Walker. “What . . . What is this, Eddie? Are the aliens . . . playing with them?”
“I think . . . they’re trying to upgrade us,” I said. “According to their lights. Make us . . . better. More like them.”
“Is that what this is all about?” said Walker. “Forcibly . . . improving us?”
“All for our own good,” I said, and I didn’t recognise my own voice. “That’s what the alien said. Remember?”
“What are we going to do?” said Walker. He sounded lost. “What can we do? I mean, we can’t leave them like this . . .”
“No,” I said. “We can’t. That would be . . . inhuman.”
I armoured up and took on my battle form, covered with razor-sharp blades. And then I went among the suffering people and gave them the only comfort I could. I killed them. I killed them all. I raged back and forth across the great chamber, cutting throats, tearing out hearts, stamping on heads; killing men and women and children as swiftly and mercifully as I could. I cut off heads and stabbed alien organs, ru
Some of them still had voices. I think some of them spoke to me, but I’ve never let myself remember what they said.
I went screaming and howling through the chamber, ripping bodies out of the walls and tearing them apart with brute strength, shouting obscenities and prayers, and blood sprayed across my armour and ran away in thick crimson rivulets. I killed them all, every last one, and when it was over, when I had dispensed the only mercy left to me, I armoured down and stood shaking and crying in the middle of the piled-up bodies. Drood field agents are trained to deal with horrors, to survive acts and decisions no one else could, but there are limits. There have to be limits, or we wouldn’t be human anymore.