The Twilight of Briareus

Book 374: Gateway Essentials

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

On the murky outskirts of our solar system, a lonely star has exploded, emitting monstrous doses of radiation . . . The year is 1983. The exploding star Briareus Delta, 132 light years away, provokes only mild interest from planet Earth. Suddenly, appalling tornadoes and storms ravage the cities and countryside, leaving death and desolation in their wake. Then mankind realises another terrifying side-effect - every adult in the world has been rendered infertile. Schoolteacher Calvin Johnson discovers he is one of the select few to have acquired strange psychic powers. Termed 'Zetas', these people experience mental flashes of the future - a future of freezing isolation, snow-swept landscapes and bleak, ice-bound cities. A second ice-age is imminent as man faces the ultimate horror . . . extinction.

Release date: May 20, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 232

Sample

I recognized the place a good twenty minutes before we set eyes on it. The wind dropped soon after we left the abandoned village and, as the snow veils thinned, wisping away to disclose the low hills to the north, I paused. Margaret who was following a pace or two behind me, looked up. ‘What is it, Cal?’

Slowly I shook my head. ‘Maybe …’ I muttered. And at that moment the clouds drew apart and the sun elbowed its way through. At once everything clicked into focus. I knew.

I glanced round at Margaret and caught that tell-tale flicker in her grey eyes which said, far more clearly than any words could have done, ‘Please, God, let him be right.’ I grinned, pulled off my left mitt and felt inside the slit pocket of my anorak for the map. As I bent to examine it a sprinkling of fine snow cascaded from my fur cap and blotted out the grid. It seemed an inauspicious sort of omen. I blew the snow away and laid my finger on the point on the chart which approximated to where we were, moved it across to the pale fawn area which denoted the hills and then began circling slowly westward. Margaret’s fur-capped head bent beside mine and the barrel of the 22 repeater she was carrying nudged my shoulder. My roving finger came to rest on a tiny patch of blue among a group of stylized cartographic trees. Margaret peered down. ‘M-o-y-n-e,’ she spelled out. ‘Does it mean anything to you?’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But there’s nowhere else within range.’ As I spoke the sunlight paled abruptly. A breeze sprang up, the familiar snow clouds thickened and the hills withdrew. I folded the map, thrust it back into my pocket and fumbled my hand into its glove. Easing the straps of my rucksack on my shoulders I looked around. ‘There should be a drive off to the left somewhere,’ I said. ‘Probably beyond those trees.’

‘Cal …?’

‘Um?’

‘What if it’s … if you’re …?’

I helped her over the verbal threshold. ‘If I’m wrong, you mean?’

She nodded.

‘Well, it won’t be the first time, Skeet. If I am we’ll just have to push on further north.’ I patted her arm clumsily with my muffled hand. ‘But I don’t think I am wrong. Not this time. Maybe it’s not Moyne, but it’s round here somewhere. I’ll bet my life on it.’ I grinned at her and she smiled back, a little tremulously, nibbling at the luxury of hope.

I took a firm grip on the five foot blackthorn which I used for plumbing the drifts and, as I did so, an odd thought struck me. ‘I do believe it’s my birthday, Skeet. June the fifth.’

‘Is it?’

‘Well, it’s June all right. They told me that at Peterborough. And that was four days ago. Hey, I must be forty-five! I never thought I’d make it.’

A few flakes of snow shaken from the low apron of cloud drifted past my shoulder.

‘Come on,’ said Margaret. ‘We don’t want to get caught out here in a blizzard.’

As we plodded off up the track beside the tumbledown wall I was assailed by a poignant memory of the last time I had been in this region of England all of fifteen years before. Mad summer 83! I recalled the great blue mounds of slumbering trees; bone-white corn quivering in the liquid heat haze; the scent of crushed wild peppermint flowers along a river bank where Laura and I had stopped to picnic; and it was all as remote and unbelievable as the Arabian Nights. I found my eyes were searching the snow-bandaged twigs of a thorn bush for signs of buds and I actually found some. Perhaps the nightmare would end and the world would come back to its senses again. But even as I toyed with my daydream I knew it for what it was. Whatever the future held for us it was not the past. Too much had altered.

We found the turn-off more or less where I was expecting it. Snow had drifted like a petrified wave against the long white gate so that only the top bar and the curved bracing post were visible. I ploughed my way forward and probed with my stick till I struck a buried chain. Plunging my arm down into the drift I felt the solid weight of a padlock. ‘Over the top, Skeet,’ I said.

She handed me her rifle, clambered on top of the gate and dropped on to the other side. I passed the gun back to her and watched her wade forward through the drift and out on to the track beyond. As she stamped to rid herself of the clinging snow a dog howled in the distance. Hardly had the sound registered on my ears before I caught the purposeful click-click as Margaret worked a shell out of the magazine. Using the bars of the gate as ladder-rungs I heaved myself over and forged along her wake through the drift. I reached her just as another anguished howl rose and fell and rose again to die away at last fitfully in the distance.

Margaret eased off her right mitt and stuffed it into her trousers pocket. ‘Are they after us, do you think?’

‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘More likely to have picked up those pony tracks outside the village. Still, there’s no point in us hanging about longer than we have to.’

‘I thought there weren’t supposed to be any packs this far above the snow-line,’ she said. ‘Do you think they’ve sensed a change in the weather?’

‘Maybe,’ I shrugged. ‘Or maybe they’re homing mutes too.’

I’d meant it as a joke but Margaret didn’t laugh – which wasn’t altogether surprising in the circumstances.

We couldn’t have progressed more than a couple of hundred yards down the drive before we heard the baying again. This time there was no doubt in either of our minds as to what was the probable quarry. Of course we’d both had experience of dogs before but never this far north of London and such stories as we’d heard had seemed to belong to the usual travellers’ Apocrypha. Below the snow-line the packs still tended to keep to a wary distance and to leave men alone. I prayed fervently that the same behavioural pattern applied up here too.

To add to our difficulties it started to snow again – not really heavily, but enough to gather in the horizons of our world to the point where it was difficult to be certain where the tree-line ended and the driveway dipped. I consulted the map again while Margaret screwed up her eyes and peered into the shifting gauze of snowflakes that had been drawn across the track behind us. ‘The drive should drop down on the other side of that hump,’ I said. ‘There’s a stream which feeds the lake coming in from the north west, and there seems to be a bridge marked here. The house is beyond it and round to the right. Can you see anything?’

‘Snow,’ she muttered.

I thrust the map back into my pocket, seized my stick and crunched on through the folded drifts. Twice I stumbled over branches that earlier storms had torn from the wayside trees and then buried from sight. Beyond the crest of the hump where the prevailing wind had scoured the snow from the exposed slope, we found the going was easier. We broke into a lumbering jog-trot which carried us round a slow, right-hand bend through what appeared to be a rhododendron shrubbery and there, just as I had known it would be, was the lake and the bridge and the house.

I stood for a moment peering at it while my panted breath plumed up like smoke. ‘Pilgrim’s rest, Skeet,’ I grunted, and the words were still hovering frozen in the air when a chorus of savage yelping spilled over the ridge-crest at our backs.

‘Run!’ cried Margaret. ‘Get to the bridge! They won’t risk it in the open.’

We plunged off down the slope, our loaded packs thumping into our backs, and gained the bridge just as the gaunt leader of the pack bounded into sight down the drive. Margaret dropped to one knee and fired. The crack of the rifle was flung back sharp and distinct from the blank front of the house. She pumped the magazine and fired again. I saw the leader leap into the air, execute a sort of crazy pirouette on his hind legs, and then vanish into the shrubbery. ‘You got him!’ I exulted.

‘No. Look there!’ Margaret gestured with the rifle barrel and I now saw the dog racing low among the frozen bushes in a wide, looping circle to our left. Margaret fired twice more then stood up and pointed to the house. ‘They’ve guessed where we’re heading,’ she said grimly. ‘Come on, Cal.’

At the instant she spoke I time-tripped – did what in the dear distant days we would have called experiencing ‘déjà vu’. Had the moment not been quite so urgent I might have tried feeling my way along the filament to find where it led, but as it was I had to content myself with the reality within reality of the instant of Margaret’s outflung arm and the whiff of gunsmoke and the aching whiteness of the interminable snows. So that moment joined my previous glimpse of the sun-sculpted hills as just another strand of the elusive web that had drawn us here, and, as I stumbled forwards beside her up to the house, I had the weirdest feeling that I was fugitive in limbo fleeing between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.

Margaret, as usual, sensed what had happened. ‘You got it too?’ I panted.

She nodded. ‘Where does it lead?’

I shook my head and then, suddenly, I was running full tilt into it. ‘Blood on the snow!’ I gasped. ‘Look out, Skeet!’

‘When, Cal? When?’

My boots felt as though they were shod with lead. Ahead of me the frozen eyebrows frowning above the windows seemed to jig up and down over their blank glazing. Ridiculously, hysterically, I heard myself laughing at the enormous effrontery of her question, laughing so much that the tears sluiced across my eyes and the ancient stonework of the façade before me became both real and insubstantial at the same time. I had been running over this snow for a million million years while the molten universe was poured from the crucible of Time. It was all there for my grasping—

‘Look out!’

Dimly I sensed the force driving towards me, hurtling out of a different time, its primitive hunger-energy preceding it like a shock-wave, and I had half turned to meet it, thrusting out my stick to fend it off when, with a roar like a small cannon exploding, the leaping dog arched up into the air and dropped – its spine smashed and its belly blasted to shreds – five paces from where I stood. All the tangled time-strands unravelled themselves again and went their whispering separate ways.

I stared down at the blood and the mess and even noted dully that the dog was in fact a bitch. I raised my eyes and saw a young girl in a tattered sheepskin coat step out from beneath the brick archway at the end of the house. Without saying a word she broke open the huge double-barrelled shotgun she was holding, pulled out the spent cartridge, dropped it in the snow at her feet and then, deliberately, pushed another into the breech, snapped the gun shut and stood staring at us. I spread my hands to show I was unarmed and then pointed to the shattered carcass of the dog. ‘Thank you,’ I said feebly.

Who are you?’

‘I’m Calvin Johnson,’ I replied. ‘She’s Margaret – “Skeet” to her friends.’

‘Margaret what?’

‘Hardy,’ said Margaret. ‘Is it important?’

‘Are you robbers?’

The archaic word seemed singularly appropriate to the setting. I smiled and shook my head. ‘We’ve got our own food. But we’d be grateful for some shelter and a warm at your fire.’

For a moment I thought she was going to refuse but finally she nodded. ‘You’d better gut that and bring it in,’ she said motioning with her chin towards the dead dog. ‘We won’t get rid of the rest of the pack till it’s gone.’

Very conscious of her eyes upon me I looked down at the carcass and wondered where to begin. I dumped my pack in the snow, slipped off my mitts and drew my knife from its sheath. Squatting down I prodded gingerly at the toast-rack of gaunt ribs then, giving a mental shrug, I jabbed the knife point through the pinky-grey skin and sawed my way down the lacerated belly. Coiled entrails and gobbets of saffron-yellow fat spilled through the gash and steamed in the frosty air. Averting my face I plunged my hand into the gruesome cavern, scraped around with the knife and scooped out anything that seemed willing to come. Then, lurching to my feet, I caught hold of the carcass by the hind legs and dragged it across to where the girl was standing. Margaret picked up my pack and my stick and followed me.

The girl led the way through the arch, along a paved pathway treacherous with trodden ice, into a stable courtyard. This she crossed and unbolted one of the doors. ‘Hang it in here,’ she said, thrusting the door open.

I peered in to what had once been a tack room and saw the carcass of a red deer hanging head down from a vicious hook in a wooden beam. ‘Did you shoot that too?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘Tony got it five days ago down in the valley.’

I noticed how the deer had been suspended by its tendons and I had the presence of mind to slit the dog’s hind leg likewise. Then, assisted by Margaret, I succeeded in hanging the carcass. It swung gently back and forth. A single drop of dark blood plopped from its muzzle on to the bricks beneath.

‘All passion spent,’ I muttered.

The girl frowned and gave me a thoughtful sideways glance of her brown eyes. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s a quotation,’ I grinned. ‘From Samson Agonistes. A poem.’

She looked at me again and then at Margaret. ‘Is he yours?’ she asked.

Margaret cocked her head on one side and eyed me ironically. ‘Are you, Cal?’

I glanced down at my right hand and noted with a spasm of disgust that black blood was congealing between my fingers. ‘Is there somewhere I can get cleaned up?’ I asked the girl.

She nodded and led the way back into the courtyard. I scooped up my rucksack and followed her. As she slammed the door hard behind her, walloping the bolts home and thumping them down firmly, she said: ‘If we don’t do that the dogs can drag them open. Listen!’

She held up a finger and we caught the yelping and snarling as the rest of the pack fought over the tripes of their lost leader. I shivered violently. ‘It’ll have taught them a lesson,’ she shrugged. ‘They’ll clean it up so’s you’ll never know it happened. Then, with luck, they’ll keep away for a couple of months.’

‘How did you come to be standing there with your gun?’ I asked.

She tilted her chin at Margaret. ‘I heard her shooting. It’s over two years since we saw anyone we don’t know.’

‘Well, you aren’t exactly what you’d call on the beaten track, are you?’

‘Is there a beaten track any more?’

‘There’s a weather station at Peterborough still operating,’ I said, ‘and another at Cambridge. Otherwise it’s all more or less south of London now. I doubt if you’d find more than a couple of thousand people between here and Manchester.’

She nodded. ‘Two summers ago a helicopter came and landed out in the front. They’d seen Spencer and Tony working in the garden. They told us we should move south – that the government wouldn’t consider themselves responsible for us if we stayed. They were the last strangers I’d seen till you came.’

She led the way up to the back door and kicked her boots against the wall to free them of snow. Margaret and I followed her example. ‘You still haven’t told us your name,’ I said.

‘It’s Elizabeth – Elizabeth Toombes.’ She had her hand on the wrought-iron ring of the latch and, as she said this, she turned and looked at us again. ‘You really aren’t robbers, are you?’

‘Do we look like it?’ smiled Margaret.

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen any.’

‘Well, we’re not,’ I said. ‘But I don’t see how we can prove it.’

‘What are you then?’

She would have to know sooner or later and it was probably better that she should know now. I pulled off my fur cap and slapped it against my knee. Then, making the words sound as casual as I possibly could, I said: ‘She’s a Zeta and I’m – well, I’m a sort of Zeta too.’

Elizabeth’s ‘Oh,’ was so absolutely non-committal that I confess I was taken aback, though in retrospect I find I cannot recall what I was expecting her reaction to be. There was something here which didn’t fit. I wondered how old she was. ‘You’ve met others then?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘Spencer was one.’

‘Was?’

‘He went away last year. He had to. Tony thinks he’s been killed, but I’m sure he’ll come back again one day.’

The heavy door groaned as she pushed it open and led the way into a brick-tiled passage. I clacked the latch down behind me and followed Margaret along the corridor into a long, low, whitewashed room. It was lit by three mullioned windows and warmed by a log fire which flickered in a huge inglenook fireplace. As soon as I set eyes on the place I knew that our journey really was over – ‘port after stormie seas’. We were where we had to be, just as, no doubt, Spencer was where he had to be. But I suspect that only a genuine DD can appreciate that extraordinary sense of ‘completeness’ that invests us when we find our ordained haven. In part it is, no doubt, a relaxation of mental tension – a lifting of the burden – but only in part. There is, above all, an awareness of total satisfaction, almost as though you are a compass needle which no longer needs to seek for the north – point east, west, or south, all are now one.

I hefted my rucksack on to the huge oak table, drew in an enormous breath and smiled at Margaret. ‘We made it, Skeet.’

As she nodded I caught a memory picture from her of us both setting out from Provence twelve long months ago, climbing to the top of the hill behind Fontveille and gazing around us while we waited for something to direct our feet on to the trail which was eventually to lead us here. I saw the glint of tears in her eyes and, at that moment, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least to find some in my own.

Elizabeth broke open her gun, extracted the cartridges and slipped them into the pocket of her coat. Then she replaced the gun in the wooden rack and turned towards me. ‘You wanted to wash?’

‘Please.’

She shrugged off her coat and looped it from a peg beside the gun rack. Underneath she was wearing a faded and patched Fair Isle sweater and corduroy trousers. She was as slim as a boy. It occurred to me then that she must have been one of the very last of the Twilight generation and yet I wasn’t contacting her at all. It just didn’t make sense. ‘Bring the kettle,’ she said and nodded towards the hearth.

I walked across to the fireplace and unhooked the black iron kettle that was hanging from a chain above the logs. Margaret squatted down and held out her hands to the flames. ‘Coming, Skeet?’

Perhaps she didn’t hear me, certainly she made no sign that she had, so I left her there and followed Elizabeth down the passage into a scullery where a pump stood at the end of a stone sink. ‘What luxury,’ I said. ‘Does it work?’

‘Oh, yes. There’s a well right under the house.’ She seized the handle and cranked it rapidly up and down half a dozen times. Water began to trickle then to gush from the lead spout. She stopped pumping and pushed a scarlet plastic basin under the flow.

‘Hey, is that soap?’

She smiled, I think for the first time since we’d met. ‘Are you surprised?’

The truth was that I was and I wasn’t, but since she obviously wished me to be I said: ‘Who wouldn’t be?’

‘We’ve got boxes of it down in the cellars,’ she said. ‘The Captain laid it down right at the beginning.’ Then, perhaps realizing that she was being unwise in confiding so much to a stranger, she said: ‘Pour the kettle in here.’

I tilted the spout obediently and the steam billowed up from the plunging jet and misted the windows above the sink. ‘There’s a towel behind the door,’ she said. ‘Don’t tip the water out when you’ve finished in case she wants to use it.’

I nodded, set the kettle down in the sink beside the basin and unzipped my anorak. As she moved away to the door and was about to go out I called: ‘You were expecting us, weren’t you, Elizabeth?’

She glanced back, regarded me sombrely and said nothing.

‘Well, you must have been expecting someone.’

Not a solitary tremor could I detect.

I tried again. ‘Did Spencer—?’

‘No.’

‘Yet you were,’ I insisted. ‘You had to be. Because of the dog.’

‘The dog?’

‘The pattern was there,’ I said. ‘As strong as death. Skeet and I both got it. Was it really just hearing her shots that brought you out?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘How long had you been waiting there?’

She shrugged, so small a movement that I all but missed it.

‘You were waiting though.’

‘And if I was?’

What was it that was making her so wary? Surely she must know that we couldn’t harm her. Besides, not only was I picking up no trace of fear from her, I was picking up absolutely nothing at all. ‘We’ve been a long time getting here,’ I said.

She was dusked by the shadow of the open door, a slender shadow against the whitewashed wall behind her. ‘What happens will happen,’ she murmured. ‘Your water’s getting cold.’

The shadow was gone. I paused just long enough to be certain she was not there then stripped off my layers of woollen jumper, my shirt and my vest, and began sluicing myself over the ancient sink.

When I had dried myself I dragged my clothes on again and examined my reflection in the mirror which I found tucked in behind the pump. The hairy features regarded me dubiously. I fingered the crowfeet at the corners of my eyes and even had the effrontery to grin at myself. ‘Forty-five,’ I grunted, ‘give or take a week either side. Could be worse, I suppose.’

I tidied myself up as best I could, replaced the towel, and took a final glance round the scullery. It was old-fashioned to a degree but even so the pump was by no means a museum piece – in fact it bore the name of a well-known engineering firm. Similarly the copper looked as though it might have come straight out of a folk museum yet the brickwork and the metal flue were obviously modem. Whoever had installed them had known what he was about: forget the frills and concentrate on the essentials. I found myself becoming more and more intrigued by Moyne.

I returned to the kitchen to find Margaret and Elizabeth sitting side by side on one of the inglenook benches. By the way they both glanced up as I entered I guessed they had been . . .