the aberration

chapter seventeen

Master Beef's hands were shaking again. His whole body was shaking--so much adrenaline, so much fight, with nowhere to go.

He had killed all those people. Did he feel remorse? No. But perhaps that would come later.

Now, he only felt frustration, frustration that the bizarrely dressed soldiers had not been what he wanted them to be. He was no longer able to beat them.

He clenched and unclenched his fists, beat against his visor, pulled at his ears. He fell dramatically to his knees, smeared with soot and drying blood; stayed there, swaying ever so slightly, waiting for the feel of some breeze to reach him through his visor, through his suit. But there was no breeze.

The surroundings were as stubbornly inanimate as ever. He felt absurd, suddenly, and would have done even if he had not been dressed like a mutated rabbit. He looked down at his chest, idly attempted to pick off the grime with his uselessly fuzzy fingers. He wondered if the costume had worked. It was hard to tell.

He pushed himself back up to his feet. The shaking had subsided, but his impatience had not. He still had to find out who had brought him here. He gazed around and tried to orientate himself, mentally rewinding his movements--where he had just come from; the position of the first base (or what was left of it); where he'd tied Sam to a tree; the spider-thing; where he'd woken up.

He swivelled, facing southwest on his own personal compass, where the earth rose steeply but steadily and then fell away again. He began to walk in that direction, deciding that he would do some exploring--and venture out where the marines had not yet been.

Sam felt the building swallow him. He felt nauseous and apprehensive still, and it seemed to him like the last place he wanted to be.

The feeling was compounded by the fact that the soldiers--or the other marines--had followed them in with their guns still pointing. Winnie gave them a look to make known her disapproval, but she decided not to press the issue. Simon, glowering, had reluctantly agreed to hand Fragg's rifle back to them; Winnie had already extracted the pistol from Sam's stunned grip when he had been too surprised to resist; and now she reasoned that if he could get them all to a kettle and a teapot, everything else would sort itself out.

'Which way is it to the kitchen?' she asked them. She stopped and turned. 'You do have a kettle, don't you?'

Marcus' brown eyes peered at her. He lowered his rifle as she stared back, severely. The question had him flummoxed; he settled for shaking his dark head and asking, 'Why would we have a kettle?'

Winnie threw up her arms in despair--Marcus' rifle rose again. 'How can we make tea with no kettle?' she cried.

'Maybe you didn't hear the bit about this not being a hotel,' Koyle muttered.

'Yes, but I thought you had everything here!' said Winnie. 'How can you have so much food and not any of the other necessities?'

'We do actually have teabags,' put in one of the other soldiers. 'I found them the other day. In one of them crates.'

Sam watched the exchange with a kind of dumb detachment. At the moment, everything was too surreal for him to treat like anything other than a dream. Had h been conscious enough to register the expressions on the soldiers' faces, he might have guessed that they were feeling exactly the same.

'Do you have biscuits?' asked Winnie.

'Yeah. Orange juice too, I think.'

'Well, that's something,' the old lady said, turning back around and plodding on. 'Which way from here?'

Master Beef trudged his way across a new valley. It looked very much the same as the last, the only difference being that there were maybe even more deadened trees, thus having an additional obscuring effect through their increased density.

Beef wondered if he should have brought a weapon with him. He could not tell how likely it was that he would come across something else that needed shooting, but he would have felt more purposeful with a gun in his hand. Now it just felt like he was wandering aimlessly--which he was, pretty much, but he did not want to have to acknowledge it.

He paused in a small clearing and looked up at the sky, and his visor became a rectangle of luminous grey-white. He could not even tell the time of day in this place. It was always the same, or it was darker, or it was night-time. It somehow sucked the soul out of everything.

Then he heard rustling. He looked quickly around; could not see anything for all the trees. He moved, stepping lightly, when he heard the rustling again, distant but definite. Again he clenched his fists, his hands making a point of being empty. He felt the anticipation, felt his excitement rising again, as if whatever it was that he was about to see had been waiting for him to come this way.

The rustling got louder.

Beef peered through the trees. He saw movement, kept moving forwards, slowly but surely, and the trees gradually peeled back. Then, some way away, he saw a pair of legs--female, lightly tanned, naked--one up in the air, the other pushing at the ground as the owner of these legs leaned forward, rummaging around inside a large crate.

The figure that emerged from the crate was small, almost elfin, and apparently wearing nothing but a red-and-black silk bathrobe. Beef stood and watched. She gracelessly stuffed what appeared to be an entire packet of biscuits in her mouth, munched and left the crumbs all over her face. She flicked her head back to push her hair out of the way, fine and black and dishevelled, and gathered in a high ponytail that had nearly come apart.

Preoccupied with the gorge of food, her gaze swept the trees with some indifference. When her eyes fell upon Beef, who had failed to do anything but stand there, she froze, poised like a burglar caught in the act, and stared at him with her stuffed cheeks still bulging.

They remained at an introductory stalemate for what felt like a full minute at least. She, now looking exceptionally wary, attempted to swallow the rest of her food inconspicuously, munching slowly.

Beef took one step forward. Then a noise, a sudden glug, made him look sharply to his left. He retracted the step as he saw something else making its way through the trees. Two somethings, in fact--two shiny, bulbous, copper-coloured metal things, hissing steam.

He fell back further, carefully picking a position behind a tree where he could see without being seen. The two bloated, spider-like machines trotted along side-by-side, apparently oblivious to his presence, crossing the distance between himself and the strange girl--the girl who, when Beef glanced in her direction again, had vanished.

If the machines had noticed the crate, they ignored it, seemingly on a very determined path to somewhere else. He scrutinised them from where he crouched, remembering his last encounter with one of the things in that underground passage. He could not guess what they were for, these machines; but he was reminded of what else he had seen in that passage: all those pipes and vats with all that noise, like some kind of subterranean factory. He had assumed that it was something the soldiers had built, and had added it to his mental list of answers to beat out of them, before he'd got carried away killing them all--but here were these machines now, wandering around in the daylight, their shells of that same shimmering, glossy-copper metal that he kept seeing everywhere--and Beef felt, somehow, that the spiders might just be worth following, as long as he kept his distance and did not follow them too hastily down dark, narrow holes.

He moved out, circling around behind them and trailing as they made their sluggish advance.

Simon Hyde sat on the edge of a bed, attempting to fix his shades back on to his face, but winced as they came into cold contact with the raw skin on the bridge of his nose and came away again with his hand. He fingered the wound gently, sighed, and glared at the floor.

'What are you hiding in here for?' came Amelia's voice, as the detective appeared at the doorway. 'You're not still sulking, are you?'

Simon said nothing.

She sat down beside him on the bed. 'Is it because Master Beef pushed you around? Or is it because he broke your shades?'

'I'm just resting, detective,' replied Simon, coldly. 'I am allowed some time to myself.'

'You know, I think you look better without the shades,' persisted Amelia. 'So your eyes are a little squinty, and as a personal preference I prefer green over brown, but yours aren't so bad. And the whole never-seeing-them thing was pretty weird.'

Simon sighed sharply. 'Did you want something?' he said.

The detective clasped her hands and looked down at her feet. 'No, not really,' she said. 'Winnie's got all the marines sat in the mess room, trying to get them to talk. She's like a chat show host or something.' She paused. 'I just wanted to see where you'd got to.'

'Right.'

'They found what's-her-face, by the way. Locked up in our cell. I wondered what you'd done with her.'

'I think I might get some sleep now,' Simon said abruptly. He glared fixedly ahead, turning the shades over in his hands. 'I'll see you...whenever.'

It was the detective's turn to sigh, then. She got up from the bed and left the room, leaving Simon with his glowering thoughts.

The spider-things stopped at a large, copper gate, a thick rectangle of metal, embedded in a concrete wall. It struck Master Beef as somewhat familiar, being as it was in the almost identical metal-and-concrete architectural style of the two fort-like bases he had spent the last couple of days running around.

This one, however, was much vaster, boasting a single curving wall with at least twice the circumference of the forts, tall and thick and offering no indication at all of what lay within.

The rectangular gate suddenly bisected and pulled apart, just enough for the machines to step through in single file. Before Beef could even contemplate following them inside, however, the gap closed again. Beef approached it cautiously, in case it might open similarly for him and alert the spiders, but when he got there it remained solidly shut. He pressed his hands against the metal--it felt cold even through his fuzzy layer--and felt along it for the crack. One hand still on the metal, he began to walk around the wall anticlockwise, his hand leaving the gate and dragging along the roughness of the concrete, all the little threads at his fingertips wearing down just that little bit. About halfway around he found an identical gate, which he assumed was exactly opposite the first, and then he made his way back around to where he had started.

He looked up to the top of the wall. With a running jump, he then attempted to use the concrete's rough texture to scrabble up to the top, but his boots kept slipping. Down on the earth again, Beef looked around impatiently, determined to find a way in.

He eyed the trees, which encroached nearly right up to the wall, and considered using one as a catapult. He was on his way to executing this plan when the gap in the wall appeared again and one of the spider-things tottered out.

It rocked on its legs, apparently looking for something. Beef quickly ducked for cover again, but it saw him anyway and began lolloping hugely in his direction, its piston-legs hissing and the liquid inside it glugging away. Beef had not been as discreet as he had hoped.

He readied himself, squatting like a fighter, one who somehow expected to trap the oncoming tub in a wrestling embrace. But when it reached him, Beef threw out his booted foot and kicked it in the snout area instead. The act sent the thing shuffling a little off its course, but it quickly righted itself and Beef found himself limping to the nearest tree, which he climbed up to get out of the way. The machine butted into theb trunk, shaking dead leaves from the branches.

This was not how Master Beef liked to fight.

The thing snuffled pointlessly at the base of the tree, venting hot steam. The purpose of the thing seemed purely to bludgeon or scorch anything that got too close--to push Beef out of places he was not supposed to be, like a mechanical bouncer.

Beef found this thought encouraging. He repositioned. It was starting to feel like a sauna where he sat. The bouncer moved back and forth as something in its programming had it persist in trying to mow the tree down. Holding on to two of the sturdier branches, Beef leaned forward and waited for it to back up beneath him.

When it did, he dropped from the tree with his feet together, hitting as hard as he could. His boots landed right where it had all its little insect-like eyeholes, and he felt a sharp pain travel up to his knees. He was flung off as the spider bounced from the sheer force of it, and he landed on his stomach, feeling his visor knock against his face. Then he got to his feet, shaking off the daze to find the reeling machine charging at him drunkenly.

Then it stumbled, stopped and collapsed.

Beef waited for it to move again; limped up to it and gave it a shove with his foot when it did not. At the temporary cost of his knees, which still shot with pain, he seemed to have it incapacitated.

He sighed, lowered himself and prised off the spider-thing's lid, which surprisingly did not prove so difficult. Having rolled onto its side, all the fluid inside its bulbous body poured out onto the grass--water, maybe, though it smelt strange.

Beef tilted it more to help it drain, and then peered more closely at its inner workings. He had no idea what he was looking for. It was too dark inside to see much anyway.

He grabbed one of its piston-legs and dragged it across the ground to the gate, throwing the thing before it in a heap. The emptied bouncer was less than half the bouncer it had been. He stood back and looked at it. Then he turned the machine's body so that it was facing the wall as it would if it wanted to enter: and, like magic, the gate opened up a crack--faltering at first, before sticking in place and leaving Beef with a gap wide enough to step through.

Beef stepped through. When he did so, however, he found that he was not able to step very far, left with only a little space in the form of a grassy ledge. Beyond that, rimmed with the ubiquitous shimmering copper and taking up nearly of the space behind the wall, was a massive, circular hole. Beef edged around it and peered down, leaning dangerously forward but still not able to see a thing.

When another spider-thing suddenly heaved itself over the rim right where he was standing, Beef reflexively kicked it off. It detached and disappeared back down--and Beef didn't hear the crash for a full ten seconds.

A giant hole. A very deep, giant hole. That was all he got for his efforts.

Beef's stomach made liquid noises; he was suddenly very hungry. He gazed up at the sky again, still with no idea as to the time. He needed to head back to base--what would have to be base now, however well the soldiers chose to receive him--and he needed to get there before it got dark again, unannounced.

He edged his way back around to the gate, squeezed through the gap, which was twitching again, and decided that he would take the spider-thing back as a kind of peace offering. There was also the chance, he reasoned, that somebody else would know how to dismantle it without destroying it--and not smash it to bits like he had done with the porcelain woman's brain.

He picked up a damaged piston-leg for each hand and, setting himself in the right direction, pulled the thing after him. The gate shut behind him as he left.

Detective Muse sat alone in the mess room, crouched forward over one of the tables. In front of her was her collection of notebooks, which she scribbled on under the flickering, fluorescent light.

Winnie entered the room quietly, a troubled look on her face.

'Hello, detective,' she said.

Amelia started. 'Hey,' she said, rubbing her tired eyes. 'How did the talk go?'

Winnie sighed and at down opposite her, perching on the edge of the chair. 'I did most of the talking,' she said. 'From what I can gather from the young lad, Sam, they were in almost exactly the same situation as the soldiers here. All his friends are dead. It's an appalling mess.'

'So both sides were tricked into killing each other?' asked Amelia, gathering her notebooks and putting them back in her pockets.

'That's about the size of it,' said the old woman. 'And I don't think any of them are willing to accept the truth of it yet.'

'Where are they now?'

'Well, Sam was in bed and staring at the ceiling last time I checked. The others are talking amongst themselves. Which worries me.' Winnie looked thoughtful. Then she yawned and smoothed out the folds of her skirt. 'How are you holding up, dear?'

'I'm OK, I guess,' said the detective. 'Simon isn't speaking to me, though. I think he's mad that I left him behind when we tried to escape. And he feels humiliated over the incident with Beef.'

'He'll come around,' said Winnie. 'I gave him a plaster for his nose.'

The two of them sat in thoughtful silence. Then Winnie got to her feet. 'I think I'll get some sleep now. Come and get me if anything happens.'

The sky was phasing back to darkness when the fort finally came within Beef's sights again.

The bouncer machine had left a sunken impression in the grass behind him. He paused, dropping the thing's legs for a moment to flex his arms and fingers. Then he resumed, heaving the thing into the clearing.

There was movement on the top of the wall, a handful of soldiers pacing back and forth. Some of them appeared to have removed their hats.

Beef kept moving, watching them carefully. Then he met the glare of their torchlight as they became aware of him. He stopped, leaving the broken bouncer in a visible heap, and waited for the glare to subside.

Beef's heart hammered when he heard the clicks of half a dozen safeties being removed. The torchlight shifted, but their rifles were still pointed. For one pounding moment, Beef expected them to shoot. But they did not.

He realised, then, that the rifles were not even pointing at him--but at something else that was trying to creep up behind him. His neck tingled, and he turned slowly to see someone cowering in the soldiers' pool of light: a figure wearing patchwork, threadbare clothes, now genuinely tattered, and stubble that had grown into a full beard.

Phil looked back at him, shielding his eyes with an arm against the glare--shaking, shivering, gaunt as a ghost.

'Heya, Beef,' he said.