The officer suddenly shook his head with disgust at himself. ‘I’m sorry, awfully rude … I didn’t manage to get your names?’
‘I’m Liam, Liam O’Connor. And the big fella here is Bob.’
McManus offered Bob his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, Bob and Liam. Now look … we’re going to try and run these genics down before they get to the city’s outskirts. We’ll do what we can to get your friends back … but — I’m not going to tell you a lie — they can be very unpredictable.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Liam.
McManus shook his head. ‘They can be gentle, tender, loving even. Then without any warning at all, without any reason, they can turn on you. Be quite deadly, in fact. There’s no knowing what sets them off.’ He looked at the trickle of drying blood running down from Liam’s temple and gestured at the gigantic vessel looming over them. ‘There’s a regimental surgeon aboard the ship type. I suggest you go aboard and let him have a look at you. And we shall go and — ’
Liam shook his head. ‘No … I need to find her! Please! I have to come along!’
Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. Enough time has already been wasted. We cannot lose them.’
The officer looked at them both, silently.
‘She’s my sister,’ said Liam finally, desperately. He tossed a hooded glance at Bob. ‘Both of our … sister. Isn’t she?’
Bob acknowledged that with an unconvincing nod. ‘Yes. We are … family.’
‘Your sister?’ McManus frowned circumspectly. ‘Hmm … I shouldn’t really do this, allow civilians along.’ He stroked his chin. ‘But … well, yes … missing family, you want to do all that you can to find them, don’t you?’
Liam nodded. ‘We won’t get in your way. We just want to find her! And our friend.’
McManus summoned one of his men. ‘Sergeant Cope? These two civvies shall be joining us. Clear some saddle space for them, will you?’
The sergeant, eyes dark beneath the brim of his helmet, and the rest of his face lost behind a large walrus moustache, nodded briskly. ‘Right you are, sir!’
McManus turned back to Liam and Bob. ‘You’ve ridden a huff?’
‘Huff?’
‘A huffalo?’ He shook his head. ‘Not to worry, you’ll be riding rear-saddle.’ He glanced at Bob. ‘Going to need to pick a jolly big one for you, though.’
At that moment the Indian tracker — White Bear — emerged from the farmhouse and jogged across to Captain McManus.
‘They go north-east.’ He gestured past the building towards the gravel road on which Liam and the others had entered the hamlet earlier that day. ‘Tracks go that way.’
‘How many do you think, White Bear?’
‘Fifty. Maybe more. Many different ones. Some big. Some small.’ He glanced quickly at Liam and Bob then back at his commanding officer. ‘Only one human track. Man, I think.’
Liam looked alarmed and the young officer raised a hand to calm him. ‘That may just mean they’re carrying your sister. To move along faster, you see?’ McManus turned to his men. ‘Platoon! Ready your mounts!’ And then he tugged something down from the side of his helmet, a padded leather pouch that settled over his ear. From that he pulled out a thick telescopic brass arm that curved round his jawline and ended with a brass mouthpiece.
He tapped it once. ‘Captain McManus to duty officer. We have some very reliable tracks down here. We’re going to follow them on foot.’
He nodded to a response coming through his earpiece. ‘Right you are … we’ll call you if we need you.’
He smiled at Liam. ‘Ready?’
‘Yes! We need to go now, before we lose them!’
The officer nodded over towards the two huffs that had had rear saddles cleared of field kit. ‘Of course. Let’s find your friend and that sister of yours.’
CHAPTER 41
2001, somewhere in Virginia
They moved through the darkness silently, across the seemingly endless cornfield. Sal was bouncing uncomfortably over the shoulder of some huge lumbering beast. She might have said ‘man’, but she’d only caught the briefest glimpse of it. It stood on two legs and had two arms, that much she knew, and that was about as much of a comparison as she could make to a human.
The group of them — ‘pack’ seemed like a better word — moved swiftly through the corn stalks, leaves and cobs swiping at her face. She tried to call out to Lincoln, not sure whether he too was somewhere among the pack — behind her, ahead maybe, draped like her over the large meaty shoulder of one of these things. But a hand, the oddest-shaped hand she’d ever seen — two fat fingers as big as aubergines and a thumb like a marrow — clumsily smothered her mouth, mashing her lips painfully against her teeth.
It seemed like almost an hour before the group emerged from the edge of the field and hesitated by the side of a tarmac road, the very same road, she suspected, they’d been driven along by the Chinese man.
It was fully dark now and a gibbous moon had emerged into the sky to bathe the night a quicksilver blue. Upside-down, she could see these creatures more clearly. They were all ‘human-like’ in so far as they stood erect on legs and their arms swung free. But their size and shape varied immensely. She saw that about a dozen of them were as large as the one carrying her. They teetered on small legs, incredibly top-heavy, with a muscle mass that put Bob to shame. They vaguely reminded her of silverback gorillas, except there wasn’t a single hair on them. Bald from head to toe, skin pale, almost translucent in the moonlight.
Their heads didn’t look anything like a gorilla’s head either: loaf-shaped skulls, smaller in fact than a regular adult human’s skull, with tiny, almost delicate, faces. Eyes so small they almost looked like mere pinholes. Beneath those, a gash. No nose, just an open flap of flesh, a hole. And beneath the non-nose, a simple lipless slit for a mouth.
Sal twisted her head and saw others, much smaller, agile-looking. They had slender torsos with a narrow ribcage that reminded her vaguely of a salamander. She noticed their hands were the same kind: two fingers and an opposable thumb. But these were long and thin with bony knuckles and fingernails that were more like claws. Their heads were similar, but the eyes much bigger. She glimpsed all-black eyes, wide and round, that blinked in the moonlight like those of an owl.
She saw one of a third type, the smallest, the size of a child, with a head disproportionately large. It must have been that one which had burst into the kitchen and stolen the shotgun. She wondered where that gun was. Whether this creature had dispensed with it … not knowing what it was or how to make use of it.
Are they that stupid?
She suspected not. They’d cleverly outflanked them in the farmhouse, bottling them up in the hallway. At the very least they seemed to know a house tended to have a back door and a front door.
This smallest creature, the ‘child’, had the same hand configuration, but the two fingers and the thumb on each looked completely human. The hands could easily have been those of some machine-worker who’d lost the little finger and the next one along of both hands in some unfortunate industrial accident. Its face looked odd in the light; she thought she saw some scarring around its lipless mouth.
One other thing she noticed about all these creatures, the last observation she made before the brute carrying her began to lope forward, and her vision blurred as her head bounced and bumped against his muscular chest, was that every one of them was completely naked except for a solitary item of clothing on them. One of the ‘apes’ had a lady’s straw sunhat on its head, the strap tucked under its chin to hold it on. Another had a threadbare winter scarf wrapped round its neck. One of the ‘salamanders’ even had a lady’s polka-dot summer dress on, far too large for its narrow frame.