The Fall of Deadworld Omnibus Read online

  “I’ll take that asss a yessss,” the witch murmured. She placed her forearms on the lip of the cauldron, unconcerned by the heat from below, and gazed up, studying Cafferly’s face. “You are a tough nut to crack, but make no missstake, we will sssspill your ssssecretsss.”

  “I don’t know why thisss one fassscinatesss you ssso, sssissster,” Phobia said. “It’ssss jussst another dead thing. Feed it to the crowsss.”

  “Oh, Judge Cafferly hasss much to give up. We can learn a great deal from her—not leassst her reaction to the Fluidssss. But even more intriguingly, there isss another. A sssibling, long sssince ssseparated, yet the two are connected.”

  Phobia glanced sharply at her twin, unable to disguise her sudden curiosity. “Oh, really? How do you know thissss?”

  “Cafferly neuro-flipped with her—their mindssss and memoriesss merged. The pssssi-amp mussst’ve initiated it, forged the link that had previousssly been unknown to them.”

  “Ssshe didn’t know of her sssisster?” Phobia asked, motioning towards the head above them, still dumbly grinding its jaw.

  “No, the parentssss had her committed to the Academy while the other wasss sstill in the womb. Her powerssss were impressssive even then. But the sssecond daughter, when ssshe emerged, manifessssted no sssimilar talentsss—or sssso it was thought at the time.”

  “Interesssting…” Phobia rubbed her chin ruminatively. “But there mussst have been ssssome…”

  “…Dormant, yessss, I believe ssso. At the very leassst, ssshe’sss a receiver. Sssshe may even have been remotely influenced by her sssisster during the flipssss.”

  “Huh. Well, that doessss make Cafferly rather more of value than ssssimple compossst.”

  “I thought you’d ssssee it that way, Phobia dear,” Nausea said, smiling.

  “Sssso you presssume to find this sssibling?”

  “I’m sssmoking her out asss we ssspeak,” Nausea remarked, pointing a bony finger at the strands of green steam that played in and around the Psi-Judge’s skin, ears, eyes and mouth. “A living blood-relative could prove vital in developing the Fluidssss.”

  Phobia paused, then asked, “Have you told Mortisss of thisss yet?”

  Nausea shrugged. “No. Let’ssss keep thisss between usss for the time being. No ssssensse ssshowing our hand unnecesssssarily. We may well need an advantage in the dayssss to come.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Brother Mortissss can have what’s left of Judge Cafferly’sss grey matter when I’m finissshed,” Nausea whispered, closing her eyes and leaning forward to breathe in the clouds. “For now, sssshe and her ssisster are mine…”

  FOR THOMAS AND Mary Cafferly, there was only the rule of law. Their home, their family, was governed like the city at large—with absolute iron authority—and woe betide anyone that chose not to accept that. The pair were passionate, party-donating believers in the Justice Department—anything else was chaos; liberal, communist anarchy—and the Judges were their gods, their strictures handed down and abided by without question. They instilled this in their first child Rachel from an early age, sitting her in front of TV footage of their uniformed overlords, and impressing upon her they were the icons to which she should bow. She imprinted upon the badge and the gun almost straight away, and that was around the first time she displayed signs of her soft talents.

  When they discovered the level of power their daughter was capable of, Thomas and Mary were overjoyed. They had offspring that would join the Judges’ fight against the pernicious, criminal society they hated, and to have your child joining the department’s ranks was, in their eyes, like gifting your first-born to God. It was an opportunity they would not pass up. They moulded her abilities before she was five, encouraged her to expand her telepathic, projection and psychokinetic skills, prepared her for the day when they handed her over to the tutors at the Academy with glee etched on their faces. Punishments were severe if she neglected her exercises, the training brutal, but Thomas and Mary reasoned that it would get no easier once she was a cadet. If Rachel was to be an effective instrument for justice, she was to be as finely honed as any weapon, her mind a powerful force; and indeed by the time she did don the uniform, her head had been filled with enough propaganda that she was the model recruit—disciplined, dedicated, utterly committed to the law.

  Mary Cafferly was already pregnant by the time they lost their first child to the Judges, and they fervently hoped the second would follow suit. But the programming wouldn’t take, no matter how harsh the consequences and how extensive the brainwashing; Misha rebelled at every opportunity. She flirted with democracy, and went on anti-Department demos, seeming undeterred by what repercussions would await her at home. She’d be banished to the dark at the top of the stairs for hours on end, and still she persisted. They forcibly tried to enrol her at the Academy, but she didn’t make it past induction. She also showed no signs of the psychic talents that her sister had displayed, proving to be resolutely and disappointingly ordinary in every respect, apart from her refusal to respect authority. She couldn’t have been more different to her sibling, of whom there was no mention within the family, nor were there photos—Rachel had been born again into the Department, her parents believed, and she had no life outside the Judicial ranks, hence she no longer belonged to the Cafferlys. Misha grew up unaware that her sister had ever existed.

  By the time Misha entered college in her mid teens, Thomas and Mary barely acknowledged they had any children at all. The punishments, rather than steeling her like they’d done to Rachel, simply alienated her. They’d failed. And yet, there seemed like moments, sometimes—when she was left on that shadowy landing for refusing to do as she was told, when she took another beating at the hands of her mother and father—that Misha seemed aware of what had come before; there was a resonance, a recognition in her eyes. It gave them some kind of hope.

  There was the seed of Rachel in her younger sister.

  5 May

  THE ONE CONSTANT I always clung to, even as I watched the world circle the drain, was that I knew who I was, that my humanity was without doubt. It gave me assurance for what was worth fighting for, that we were nothing like these creatures that have pledged to wipe us all out—even if they too were once regular people before they drank the zombie juice. Their genocidal schemes are against all that is right and natural. Now, though… I don’t know if I’m the same woman that I was two months ago. My mind hasn’t been my own—it’s been invaded, sluiced with thoughts from a sibling that I never knew existed, a sister that’s allied herself to monsters. I haven’t been myself, and I don’t know if I can ever be myself again.

  I mean, what is true any more? I thought I was a survivor—but I might actually be a killer, sharing a mind with someone who wants to hasten that very extinction. She embedded herself in my brain and sprouted foulness, and made me complicit in her monstrousness. Kez, Katherine and the rest—their fates are unknown, yet more disappearances in a world being butchered by the millions, but I am sure that I was responsible, and my sister Rachel Cafferly drove me to it.

  I can hear the whispers when I close my eyes—the siren songs, the entreaties, the promises. The creatures want to find me, and are casting out their hooks, trying to pull me in. What they want me for I’ve yet to ascertain, but they must be aware of the familial connection, and clearly seek to exploit it. If Rachel’s still there, I don’t know—but I do know for sure that I never want to meet her.

  I should tell Hawkins about all this, that I’m compromised, a danger to her and everyone we meet. But I can’t bring myself to—I don’t know if I’m scared she’ll put a bullet in my head there and then and leave me on the side of the road, or that by vocalising what’s been entirely within my head up to this point, I’ll be making the nightmare real. We’re living through horror on a daily basis, but we’ve never been the ones responsible. Now… now I can’t say that any more.

  No, I’ll keep the secrets locked up inside me and face this alone. In the m
eantime, we’ll keep going and attempt to put distance between us and those that mean us harm, keep moving in the hope of finding a haven, even as I’m aware I’m bringing the darkness with me, like the cigarette-stink of death attaching itself to my clothes.

  And she’ll be with me, of course. Always. Sistersss to the end.

  PART THREE

  GREY FLESH FLIES

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE WORLD WAS incrementally dying; there was no doubt of that now. Bit by bit it was dropping away into darkness, slowly and steadily. There hadn’t been an atomic flash that had exterminated millions in an instant or a seismic shift in the tectonic plates that had cracked continents in half; instead, it was deteriorating in stages, like a once healthy organ being eaten from the inside out. You were aware of it in the sudden sharp scent of corruption brought by the wind, in every fluctuation in the miasmic light, and especially in how the plant-life was responding to its new environment, contorting horribly like it couldn’t understand what was happening to it. It made your heart break to see it, Misha thought; the flora was adapting with no comprehension to what was going on around it, once verdant shoots twisted by a poisoned earth to the point where they, like everything else on the planet, could no longer survive.

  She was standing on a ridge looking down at a copse, and the trees were virtually petrified, noticeable for their sickly calcified brittleness. Considering the season—she was fairly sure they were somewhere in the summer months, but it was increasingly difficult to discern the passing of the days, as a tombstone-grey cloud settled permanently over the sky—the branches should’ve been bursting with leaves, but instead they’d been reduced to skeletonised shadows of their former selves. They hunched together like terminally ill old men, bewildered by the malicious toxicity of their situation, and as they struggled to maintain that pulse of life, the cancerous new eco-system was ensuring their eventual downfall. She imagined it wouldn’t be long before fissures appeared in the bark, the trunks would split asunder, and the trees would collapse as little more than ash. Misha and Hawkins could pass by this way again in a week, and the landscape as it was would simply be a memory. She didn’t want to come back, though; partly because retracing their steps would be one more sign that they had nowhere to go, and partly because she had no desire to witness such grim inevitability. Better to leave it in the rear-view mirror, decaying out of her sight.

  She glanced across at Hawkins, the Judge bringing her toolkit to bear on the Lawrider’s gearbox and grunting in irritation as she wrestled with it. The ability to keep moving was so far a luxury they’d taken for granted, but they might not have transport for much longer if the bike gave up on them. It was showing increasing signs of strain, its suspension shot and the onboard computer displaying worrying eccentricities. Hawkins needed the communications unit fully functioning if she was going to intercept radio traffic to guide them to safety, and she couldn’t afford the A.I. to go on the fritz. (Misha, for her part, was philosophical about the slim possibility of such a sanctuary existing, but kept her opinions to herself, aware of how important it was to the Judge. Let her have something to hold on to, at the very least.) The loss of a ride would be a most troubling development indeed—it didn’t pay to linger in any one place for too long. They’d learnt that to their cost.

  It wasn’t just the threat of discovery by the greys, though that was challenging enough on its own; it was seeing, like this, the devilish details of the land’s destruction. It did things to your head, watching the change being wrought upon the world, the new status quo being foisted upon it. While the global scale of it was at times simply too vast to comprehend—and she had to assume that what was happening here was being repeated in other countries: the climatic shock was too great not to be affecting their overseas neighbours—it was brought home when she gazed down on acres of grassy plains shrivelling away to nothing, or abandoned fields of blighted crops that had degenerated into an ugly hue and now gave off a fetid stench. With, so she’d heard, most germinating insects effectively wiped out, fertilisation was now impossible. Nothing would seed or sprout; there would just be tracts of barren, hostile ground. Having that laid out before you, you couldn’t help but want to weep, the sheer wrongness of it proving difficult to process. There’s something not right about this picture, she wanted to say. This is against the natural order of things.

  But of course, that was exactly what it was: a perversion, a tilting of a fragile balance that served the interests of the new rulers’ anti-life agenda, and there was seemingly nothing that could be done to stop it. If the planet had any kind of consciousness—a Gaia spirit, Misha had once heard it called—it was being viciously choked, and these swathes of crumbling, blackened vegetation were symptoms of its death throes. Small wonder that she didn’t want to hang around for too long: to confront this was to test the limits of your endurance.

  Put it behind you. Put it behind you, however futile that may be. Outrun the world’s unravelling.

  She turned and crossed over to Hawkins, whose brow was furrowing as she twisted something deep in the bike’s chassis with a wrench. “How’s it looking?” Misha asked.

  The Judge shook her head. Her speech was limited by the knotted mess of scar tissue that was the lower half of her face, and she could evidently only open her mouth so far without it causing her significant pain. Her diet subsisted mainly of liquidised rations that she could suck through a straw. Misha had never fully gleaned the whole story of what had happened to her, but then again, she didn’t really need to—they were all walking wounded now, some carrying more obvious injuries than others. If she was still alive, then she’d fought her battles against the common enemy and come out the other side still in one piece, more or less, which was some kind of small victory. But the legacy of those encounters was unmistakably writ large upon her flesh, and they told enough of their own tale that the actual details seemed superfluous.

  Given the weeks Misha had now spent in Hawkins’ company, it meant the pair had developed a rudimentary sign language that the Judge clearly found less exhausting than trying to formulate words. The younger woman was surprised at how adept she quickly became at picking up what Hawkins was communicating simply from raised eyebrows and a few hand gestures. They seemed to understand each other intuitively, often predicting the other’s actions, or knowing what needed to be done without any kind of signal. They had a solid system, and it had stood them in good stead so far—but Misha couldn’t escape the fact that she didn’t know how far the Judge trusted her. Hawkins had encountered the girl when the balance of her mind was disturbed, and effectively saved her from herself. The rest of Misha’s fellow survivors had eerily vanished in uncertain circumstances, their fates unknown, and the teen had been discovered raving, on the verge of losing her sanity entirely. Hawkins had sat with her and brought her down gently.

  Misha—for whom that entire episode remained something of a blank spot in her memory—was still unclear on why the Judge persevered with her, committed herself to pulling the girl back from the brink and bringing her with her. Hawkins could be forgiven for simply looking out for herself as the world crumbled; plenty of others had done just that. Yet here the two of them were—partners, of a kind. It could be that the Judge simply appreciated her company, that ironically her own mental health was in a better state having another human being to interact with, even one as borderline crazy as Misha (potentially; she’d never had another episode since) was. Maybe Hawkins simply saw something of herself in the younger woman that she wanted to protect. The teen was well aware she’d lucked out tagging along with the law officer, as she’d never have made it on her own, and felt beholden to prove herself useful should the prospect of her getting ditched ever finally come up. She went overboard in demonstrating her reliability and capability, hoping that every chore performed without complaint, or extra watch duty taken, reinforced her place in Hawkins’ confidence. It seemed to do the trick, but, nevertheless, paranoid niggles remained that the Jud
ge was just waiting for her to make one wrong move… and Misha had good reason not to fully trust herself.

  Hawkins slung the wrench back in the toolbox and motioned towards the bike with angry resignation. She stood, stretching weary limbs, and looked out across the landscape, markedly avoiding eye contact. She shook her head again, then started to pack the gear into a rear pannier compartment.

  “How long have we got?” Misha asked.

  The Judge shrugged, and held up a finger.

  “A day?”

  She gestured with her hand: .

  “Fuck,” Misha breathed. Hawkins nodded her agreement. “So we need a new set of wheels sharpish.”

  The Judge leaned back against the Lawrider’s handlebars and picked up the comms transmitter, signalling that she was listening to it. “Stay in contact,” she intoned, the words forced out, raw and raspy.

  Hawkins’ obsession with finding other uniforms hadn’t dimmed, despite the radio giving out nothing but static for weeks. “You mean we somehow lay our hands on another Justice Department vehicle?”

  The older woman spread out her gauntleted palms: .

  “Which would mean diverting towards the capital.” They’d deliberately skirted pockets of civilisation as much as possible, which were dense with grey teams, and kept to the country roads. They’d found less trouble that way, but it also meant supplies were sparser. Picking up a car or truck that still had fuel was one thing; stealing a Judge’s bike was a whole other level of complication. But Misha knew that Hawkins wouldn’t be dissuaded on this one—she had to know that the resistance was out there, and that she could rendezvous with it.