Walk the Line

Quatermass 31: Saving Christmas, a Choice and a little pew pew pew

This may be the first newsletter that I get out on time for quite a while.

All praise the true Queen in the North, Ena Sharples, snapped here by John C Madden in 1968.

I just yesterday finished the next section of PANIC, which I think takes me over the halfway mark, and even though the deadlines for this particular book are self-inflicted I still feel a sense of relief slash accomplishment when the writing is off my desk.

I also take a little break before tackling the next thing and that downtime, coupled with the Anthrax album I’m listening to, has spurred me on a little this evening.

Life with Coops has also entered a new chapter as he’s finally allowed on the ground, unrestricted, and everything immediately feels a little easier. Now his training proper can kick in although I think if we’re home invaded by a new generation of the Manson Family I’m confident they’d get a very thorough licking and be mesmerised by a maddeningly-fast wagging tale while I grappled with the flame thrower. You can also now add church bells to the long list of things that he’s scared out of his wits by.

Still, you can’t chose your partner in a good buddy cop movie, that decision is made by your loud exasperated chief, but the bad guys still end up fucked.

Speaking of bad guys, someone asked me about the ‘Glaswegian police letter’ this week and I looked at them without a single clue as to what the hell they were talking about. Turns out around the time I wrote about the letter my grandfather sent to my grandmother during WWII I mentioned in one of my streams a second letter and posted a photo of the letterhead.

I’m always grateful for the occasional nudge and reminder because, honestly, my head is Swiss cheese most of the time. Here’s the letter in full:

I have zero idea what my dad was doing in Glasgow almost exactly 59 years ago today. In fact I had no idea he ever lived in Glasgow or anywhere apart from our tiny in-bred tick of a town for that matter. He, along with anyone I could ask about it, or long gone so can only surmise that he never spoke of what he did and saw there because of the Scotch Mist.

It’s cool that, aged around 20, he helped overcome violent resistance to save charity money nicked by some ne’er-do-well and maybe in some small way saved Christmas that year.

Well done, dad.

I’m now trying to remember the few times that either of us said something nice to the other and honestly it’s difficult. I didn’t have the worst upbringing, far from it in most cases, but there was a definite lack of connection with my family and by the time I was a teenager everyone had given up trying to cross that divide and then one day in 1988 he was just gone. I see aspects of him in myself of course and I’m now older than he ever was which still feels odd, but it’s the missing parts that I have no direct knowledge of that I find mesmerising. Probably because it’s so easy to fill in those gaps myself and reinvent the man.

One of the things that I do I remember about him is how much he absolutely loathed my taste in music. I didn’t have my own music system for a while so we shared his late 60s stack which I knew nothing about, but sounded pretty sweet. I do actually owe a lot of my musical growth to his record collection, but that was assuredly a one-way street. And he fucking hated Iron Maiden.

I mention them because their original singer, Paul DiAnno, died this week and the news left me reflecting on how big a deal those first two Maiden albums were. I still have a couple of his solo project albums on vinyl, but the completist in me drew the line at two because his output in the late 80s was very different from his glory days with Maiden. But he did the vitally important job of bringing a little punk rock into my life a few years before I properly found my footing in the genre. And, as an old friend remarked, an album like Killers was one of the few pieces of music that we as a social group could all get behind no matter which strand of metal we’d eventually embraced.

The best story I have about my dad’s record collection happened long before I owned a record myself. My dad did not enjoy watching me handle his vinyl and especially the disregard I showed for the needle when moving it along trying to find my favourite song on a Glen Campbell compilation.

One day he finally snapped and said, ‘Enough!’

He decided to give me one of his records. One and only one. That way I could do what the hell I wanted to it without ruining his entire collection and maybe along the way would learn to look after it to boot. He lived in hope.

For some reason, I know not what, he decided to give me a choice between two albums. The soundtrack to KID CREOLE (1958) by Elvis Presley and A Johnny Cash Portrait, a compilation album that featured all the songs you’d expect.

Now I didn’t know much when I was around 11 years old, but I did understand instinctively that Elvis was a prick and Johnny Cash was the real fucking deal.

I grabbed Cash and I’ve never looked back.

If I wrap that up there I may still get this thing to you around midnight so without further ado…

Story time.

Tendenko Blue

Part One: Fucko

She climbed out of the subway at the tip of the island helping the older woman who was still bleeding from a nasty gash to her head.

Blue assured her there would be paramedics waiting for them, but that turned out to be a lie. There had been no one on the subway station either, but she figured if this was terrorism then it made sense that there’d been an evacuation.

But the lack of first responders bothered her.

The woman was stumbling now, worse than she had been down in the tunnel, struggling against how her regular journey home had flipped into something else when their train left the tracks. She was enough to keep Blue busy. First she had pulled her from the wreck and then carefully helped her down the track avoiding the live rail even after the lights went out and she was fairly sure it was safe.

No one followed them. There had been eight passengers in their car and she knew that six were dead. One, a hospital orderly, had a broken neck from the impact and the others were crushed when the tunnel collapsed on the front of their carriage.

She’d made eye contact with a young guy of around 19, a student from the book he was carrying, Camus, and the backpack full of notebooks, pens and folders that splayed out when he dropped it during the collision. His lips were moving, but she couldn’t make out what it was he was saying. A prayer perhaps or just the lyrics to the last song he was listening to before the carriage had begun to skid.

She’d found herself reciting an old nursery rhyme when she was under fire back in the day. No idea why. It wasn’t a conscious thing, but it calmed her. Kept her focused. And not the part everyone knew, but one of the later verses that most kids never got to.

Iron bars will bend and break, bend and break, bend and break.

Iron bars will bend and break, My Fair Lady.

Whatever the kid was repeating was lost when the roof of the train collapsed under the sudden shifting full weight of New York, but at least it was quick.

What could cause that? What the fuck was this?

They surfaced into the night only to find, like the deserted station behind them, that it was eerily quiet.

Blue could hear sirens in the distance, but the roads surrounding the subway were as still as the grave. The cars that usually continuously blasted their displeasure at each other were still there, but their ever-angry screaming drivers were not. A lot of vehicle doors were open as if the drivers had been only focussed on getting away from them. There were a few fender-benders here and there. Looking up and down she didn’t see a single flash of red and blue, but saw that a few cars had mounted the sidewalk here and there. No angry storekeepers stood guard over shattered windows. No cops. No paramedics. No news crews. No people period.

“Where is everyone?”

It was a good question. The woman had sat down on the stoop of an empty restaurant holding the bloody rag of a shirt that Blue had given her to her head. She seemed calmer now that the bleeding had finally stopped. She’d pulled out her phone, but, no surprise, it was as dead as Blue’s. She herself had tried to get a signal in the tunnel, but when the lights went out her $1500 phone became a pretty glass brick.

Even if the immediate evacuation had cleared this street there should still be signs of a rescue attempt. They’d just walked out of a major incident in one of the busiest, most media drenched, most populated cities on the planet and… nothing.

Unless whatever had happened to cause their subway car to leave the tracks and the tunnel collapse was big enough that a major incident like this didn’t even register.

She walked over to the nearest empty car, a cab, and leaned in to turn the key left in the ignition. Nothing. She leaned over to turn the radio on and off but it remained as dead as everything else. She looked up at the few plasma screens that normally ran advertising 24/7. They were all silent and black.

EMP? There were no signs of damage anywhere. No smoke rising in between the buildings. No bodies… and then she saw it.

A few cars down there was something lying on the road.

As she walked towards it she picked up a faint smell, ozone carried down with lightning after a storm that lingered in the air… but the ground was bone dry. The road and sidewalk were all littered with detritus left in the wake of the abandoned stores and vehicles. Books, magazines, luggage that she’d dismissed until she got a good look at the pile of something she was now standing over.

She took a fresh look at the street and surely enough in amongst the regular city trash and discarded belongings were a few more little piles just like this one.

Fuck.

She looked down at the mess again, trying to make sense of it. It was mostly black, slightly charred, but she could see a touch of flannel here and a lick of blue fabric there that she guessed was all that was left of a pair of jeans. The whole mess was twisted and folded on top of each other and if she had to guess she’d say it weighed about 170lbs or so.

The clincher was what lay in the very centre of the spiral mass. A wide open human eyeball that she could see was still connected to the thin strand of warped flesh that curled around underneath it and not long ago had been a human face.

She walked calmly back to the woman. The last thing Blue needed was her going hysterical on her before they could…

The problem the injured woman represented disappeared as Blue watched, still fifteen feet or so away from her.

A sudden blue beam of light hit her dead centre in the chest and she just had time to open her mouth in surprise, not pain, before everything about her, the clothes she wore, the phone she held, the bloody shirt and even her clutch purse were almost instantly fused together in a spiral of meat and bone that burned brightly for a second before cooling instantly. Leaving what had once been a human being - “Eleanor,” she had said. “My name is Eleanor,” as they walked through the dark of the subway tunnel together - into yet another pile of spiralled organic matter.

Blue’s training kicked in immediately. She dropped and rolled behind the nearest car, kicking the wing mirror on her way past so it would give her a view of the street in the direction the beam had come from.

With her head pressed against the car she studied the mirror until the attacker stepped into view.

It was white. Bright fucking white. That was the first thing that registered. Armour of some kind? But like nothing like she’d ever seen in the field or on the drawing board and she was pretty up to date on new military specs.

She realised, as she moved herself slowly along the length of the town car providing her cover, that she was relieved to see the figure was at least human-shaped. She’d faced down enemy fire more than once, but this was the first time someone had pulled a fucking Star Trek ray-gun on her and some part of her brain, the part that had kept her alive and mentioned in dispatches for thinking outside the box, had gone to a single word, made almost useless due to ridiculous tv shows and late night movies; alien.

It was the most apt description for what had happened to the woman.

But now Blue saw that the thing moved like a human being and stood around six feet or so. It handled the weapon like a human would and the ray-gun itself conformed to regular rifle system dimensions. Although it was as bone-white as the figure that wielded it.

It had been moving towards her cautiously, but that coupled with her own slow push away from the car to the next piece of cover, a Greyhound half up on the sidewalk, meant she could no longer see it. So as she reached the rear corner of the car she risked a quick look.

Which was what the figure had been waiting for.

The streak of blue light filled her vision as she fell backwards and she thought she heard the slight sizzle of burning hair as the beam missed her by a fraction of an inch and hit the side of the bus behind her.

She twisted back to her feet and scrambled around the Greyhound realising two things at the same time. One, she was fucked. Two, the bus was still here. She hadn’t seen any damage from the beam at all. In fact it seemed to spread itself and dissipate almost immediately as soon as it made contact with the metal.

Interesting.

She filed that away just in case she lived through the next few minutes and refocused on getting the storage compartment under the bus open. It was still filled with luggage that she now quickly pulled out piece by piece assessing the probability that one of them may contain a weapon. For a  moment she considered a pair of fencing foils housed in an expensive looking custom case and then struck gold under the next hold-all.

Lying there was what her dad would have referred to as a lump-hammer.

Short, stocky and heavy. She wasn’t sure if it had fallen from a random bag many trips ago or was something the driver or garage mechanic kept handy when the thing’s engine needed some heavy-handed TLC, but whatever the reason for it being there she said a quick thank you to Thor -  the most appropriate non-existent deity that sprang to mind - and picked it up with a satisfied smile.

Climbing over the small pile of discarded luggage she pulled herself into the compartment, bringing the door down after her just as the white-clad figure stepped around the bus.

Moving slowly and silently it kept the weapon fixed on the doorway as it worked the handle, stepping back into a crouch as the door swung upwards.

The compartment was empty.

The figure could see the remains of the first woman across the street through the, now open, second storage door on the far side of the vehicle.

“Hey, fucko!”

The figure turned its head and weapon automatically in the direction of Blue’s voice.

Blue had swung and released the hammer a fraction of a second before announcing herself to ensure fucko turned to meet the impact with no time to duck, doge or block.

The result was a satisfying crunch as the lump hammer hit it point blank in the face, dropping the figure like a sack of potatoes.

She kicked the weird-ass weapon to one side out of its reach and knelt to see exactly what she was dealing with.

The first thing she clocked was that the helmet had no visor. The bone-white surface over the face looked as solid and impenetrable as the rest of the armour. Although on closer examination she saw that the formally perfect curvature now sported a fresh dent. The helmet had held and there was no sign of a crack in its surface, but the hammer had done its job and left a mark. Satisfying.

The second thing was that there were no visible joints or seams. The arms and legs were obviously given full movement, but right now she couldn’t see how that was possible as the smooth surface of the armoured figure now resembled a marble statue fallen in a sacked museum rather than a piece of active combat equipment.

She reached out to touch the armour and--

POP!

--the whole figure simply blinked out of existence.

She narrowed her eyes at the empty space her attacker had filled just a moment ago, feeling a slight and sudden sense of vertigo.

Impossible.

But she wasn’t concussed and she was pretty sure she hadn’t been exposed to any chemicals or hallucinogens. She looked to her right and the fucking ray-gun was still where she had kicked it to. Pop! The same part of her brain that had whispered alien now realised that the sound she had heard was simply air rushing back to fill the void the vanishing soldier had left behind.

Soldier.

Yes, that was what this thing was. It carried a weapon and moved like a combatant despite its outward appearance. It was trained too, not an amateur. Something had declared war on New York City and while the nature of the enemy was completely alien to her - that word again - she knew instinctively what she had to do next and exactly where she to go.

Blue’s hand paused above the weapon for moment unsure if it too was going to snap out of existence the moment she touched it. Then she thought, fuck it, and picked it up.

It was light, but perfectly balanced. She checked the barrel, from an angle lest the thing discharged suddenly and warped her into a slice of street-pizza, and it seemed completely hollow. That would explain the weight, but the fact spat out a dozen more questions she couldn’t answer.

There was an obvious trigger mechanism and a single circular fixture easily reachable from the handler’s trigger finger. Some kind of dial perhaps, but it and the trigger, like the soldier’s limbs, now seemed solid and immovable.

She nudged the dial which was cold to the touch and it easily moved, offering just enough resistance so that she could feel it click as it fell into each progressive setting. Moving the dial revealed a dim glow in the weapon’s stock; blue, yellow and red then back again as she moved the dial backwards and forwards.

Curious and curiouser, she thought.

Then, making the decision to get going, she let the weapon, the fucking ray-gun, rest in her arms as if it was her old M4A1, picked up the lump, just in case, and crossed the street back to the subway entrance,.

She passed the pile of unrecognisable matter that had been the woman, Eleanor, and nodded an acknowledgment. It wasn’t much of an apology, but it was all she could muster as her mind raced through all the options of what the fuck was actually going on. None of them were good.

Once again her training kicked in and she pushed the shock, horror and pure amazement away to concentrate fully on her new objective. Out here things were fucked. Whatever had happened had happened fast and people were gone and dead, probably both. A lot of people.

She had to get clean across the island without getting gone herself and right now walking through the darkened subway system seemed to be a better bet than getting lucky again in hand-to-hammer combat with whatever-the-fuck these fucks were.

She had to get to Daniel.

If he were still alive. That was all the mattered now.

Daniel was all that mattered.

She pressed on down the steps whispering the old familiar line like a mantra, ‘iron bars will bend and break,’ over and over and over again, back into the darkness beneath the city that now swallowed her completely.

I didn’t have it in me to pick up last week’s story from where I left it and here I am starting something new and leaving you dangling. Sorry. Normal service will be resumed next week and I promise to wrap up all these loose ends soon.

I’ll leave you with this image I found earlier today that only goes to prove the old adage, ‘Even a Dave who is pure in heart / And says his prayers by Night / May become a wolf / When the wolfbane blooms / And the autumn moon is bright.’