Battle of the Hollow Men
Since we had a decent run-up, the first three drones were easily dispatched under the front wheels, and Addie expertly sliced another in half and Wilson two more. They were surprisingly easy to bring down as they were only as strong as their clothes. They remained animated when cut in two but the top half was dangerous only if you were near, and the bottom half not dangerous at all unless they gave you a kick. All this didn’t really register, as my forward view was filled by several more Hollow Men popping into life. I was relieved to find that there didn’t seem to be so many of them and I steered into them, the lifeless husks disappearing under the heavy treads, ploughed into the mud.
‘Anything yet?’ I shouted to Perkins.
‘Not yet,’ he said, concentrating hard, fingers on temples. ‘I think they’ve been spelled in a non-standard reverse weave.’
I turned the wheel and accelerated towards a group of three and they too vanished under the front wheels.
‘They’re getting up again!’ shouted Wilson as he fought off two more drones that had popped back into life as soon as the tracks had passed over them. One even managed to climb aboard, but was soon dispatched by the Princess, who had discovered that if a drone’s right sword arm was sliced through, they had to stop and find the sword with their left before continuing.
Several more popped up and I steered towards them to help Addie slice through two in one go, then positioned the half-track to run over two more. All seemed to be going quite well, until I noticed three of them run towards the half-track and dive under the front wheels, something that suddenly made me wary.
‘This is too easy,’ shouted Addie.
‘I’m not complaining,’ yelled back Wilson, hacking a drone diagonally in half from the shoulder to the waist. I changed gear to speed up and the half-track suddenly lurched aggressively to the left. Addie was caught off balance and fell off the bonnet. I accelerated but this only made the swing to the left worse, and in a few more seconds we had spun around and were pointing not at the forest and safety, but back towards the mountain. I let in the clutch and came to a halt as Addie went on the attack and dispatched another drone that was approaching, one of ten or twelve still out there. They seemed to be walking towards us in a more relaxed manner, something I didn’t like the look of.
‘Damn,’ I said, thumping the wheel, ‘what a time to lose a track. Addie? Damage report!’
Addie ran around to the right of the vehicle while Wilson jumped off the half-track to more easily engage the closest drones. Addie had a look and then yelled:
‘Reverse, but easy does it!’
I clunked the half-track into gear and reversed slowly. The vehicle seemed to move correctly at first but then lurched in the opposite direction, and Addie yelled at me to stop.
‘Three swords jammed in the right-hand track,’ she yelled.
‘Let me see.’
I left the engine running and jumped out to have a look as Wilson and the Princess stood by defensively, ready for the slow-approaching drones. The swords were bent around the drive sprocket, jamming it completely. They weren’t the only things jammed in the tracks – there were several Hollow Men, or at least their clothes. They hadn’t really been fighting at all, just searching for a weakness, and they’d found it. The Achilles heel on a tracked vehicle is the same as its main advantage – the tracks.
I looked around. We had covered barely four hundred yards from our starting point and had not even reached the river. Tactically speaking, it was a good place to disable the half-track, and as I looked back to where we had left the jeep, six more drones popped up from the earth where they had been buried.
‘They’re cutting off the retreat,’ said Wilson.
‘Perkins,’ I shouted, ‘we’re going to need something from you pretty soon.’
‘Working on it,’ he replied.
I grabbed a spare sword from the back of the half-track and faced the drones alongside the others.
‘Hang on,’ said the Princess, ‘they’re stopping.’
She was right. We were surrounded by at least thirty Hollow Men by now and they had halted about twenty yards out and simply stood at readiness, the gap between each drone and its neighbour precisely the same.
‘They’re waiting,’ said Wilson.
‘They’re waiting because they have time in their favour,’ said Addie. ‘Look behind them.’
Behind the row of drones, other Hollow Men were popping into malevolent being all over the scrubby land and were walking towards us. Reinforcements. I looked again at the jammed track, swore to myself and switched off the half-track’s engine.
‘Okay, the half-track is dead. We need a new plan.’
Worryingly, there were no suggestions, and Perkins climbed out to join us.
‘They’re like a conjoined military mind,’ he babbled excitedly. ‘They don’t need a chain of command because each individual is a general and a soldier combined. They will study their enemy, exploit its weakness and neutralise its strengths. The reason they’ve stopped is because they don’t yet know how to neutralise our strength.’
‘We have one?’ asked Addie.
‘It’s me,’ said Perkins. ‘They know I’m reading them. And since they’ve stopped thirty or so feet away, we must assume they do have a weakness that we can exploit. Watch this.’
Perkins took three strides towards the line of drones, and they all withdrew. When he returned to us, they moved back in again.
‘They’re waiting until they have overwhelmingly superior numbers,’ said Addie as more drones arrived behind the ones already present, ‘and waiting is something we can’t do.’
‘They might be made of nothing but drip-dry terylene,’ said Wilson, ‘but if they charge at us, we won’t stand a chance.’
He was right. The drones were now three deep, and more were arriving by the second. Just then, one of the Hollow Men who was wrapped around the track tried to grab me with an empty arm attached to a muddy empty glove. We had needed a break, and it seemed we had just got one.
‘Bingo,’ I said. ‘Perkins?’
Perkins looked at where the drone’s gloved hand was still feeling around, while the rest of it was jammed in the drive sprocket. The other drone costumes wedged in the track, I noted, were devoid of life, and just empty clothes.
‘Ah,’ said Perkins, ‘wounded. Spellcode probably disrupted. Here goes.’
He held the gloved hand of the drone for a moment, then smiled.
‘Now that’s something I can use,’ he said excitedly. ‘Sickeningly simple, when you think of it. They were right to be nervous. Wait a moment.’
And he squatted down to prepare himself as the drones became five deep. There were, I reckoned, about a hundred and fifty of them fewer than ten paces away.
‘Blast,’ said Perkins.
‘What?’
‘I need twenty years of life spirit to make this spell work, and I wouldn’t have made it past sixty-nine, so I’ve not got enough years to trade – I need a dozen more to figure out a countermeasure and to clear the swords out of the half-track.’
‘Take it off me,’ I said, ‘I’ll still be only twenty-six.’
‘No,’ said Wilson, ‘use me. This way I get the Value Added Death I’ve always wanted. Dying, to protect you all. It is poetic. It is heroic. I insist.’
‘I’m only twelve,’ countered Addie, ‘so I’m the most qualified to surrender any years. I’ll be in my early twenties and I feel twice that old already. Perkins, do your thing.’
Addie’s argument seemed the most sound, and already the drones, now six deep and in excess of three hundred, were beginning to tramp the ground in readiness for attack.
‘Okay,’ said Perkins holding out his hand to Addie. ‘It’ll be at the count of three but you have to repeat the count. One.’
‘One.’ She took his hand.
There was no time for any goodbyes or pithy final speeches. I didn’t even have time to think before the
Hollow Men drew their swords in unison – a sound, like the song of the Quarkbeast, that I hope never to hear again.
‘Two,’ said Perkins, eyes tightly closed, concentrating hard.
‘Two,’ said Addie.
The Hollow Men all advanced a pace. There were so many of them I could see nothing but black suits and white shirts in every direction.
‘Three,’ said Perkins.
But Addie didn’t get to say three. Wilson jumped forward with surprising agility, and knocked Addie’s and Perkins’ hands apart – and replaced Addie’s hand with his own.
‘Three,’ said Wilson, and Perkins summoned up every available second of his life and let fly. There was a high-pitched wail, a sudden bright flash and a pulse of blue light that moved rapidly outwards as Perkins and Wilson vaporised, the spell squeezing every last vestige of mortality from their souls. A moment later, Addie and I and the Princess were left standing there quite alone, the Hollow Men every bit as alive as before.
‘This isn’t good,’ I said.
The Hollow Men charged, and the three of us, our tempers up, did the same and met the first wave head-on with an angry clatter of swords. I had expected a swift end but a second later and the first rank of Hollow Men seemed to falter and collapse inwards, quickly followed by the second row and the third. Within a second or two swords were falling to the ground and Hollow Men were collapsing like deflating parachutes, their clothes quite literally falling apart around them.
Perkins did not have the power to defeat drones, but he had the power to turn the complex co-polymer in nylon stitching to its component parts: gaseous nitrogen, carbon dioxide and quite a lot of hydrogen. If I’d had nylon stitching, my clothes would have fallen off too, but I didn’t. I was sensibly dressed in cotton.
Addie and I looked around at the sections of clothing blowing in the wind. They were twitching as the three hundred or so drones attempted to make sense of their fate and develop a countermeasure of their own. But Hollow Men don’t to do magic, they are magic, and short of their acquiring several hundred seamstresses in the next ten minutes, we’d won.
The last stand
Correction: we’d sort of won. Perkins and Wilson were no longer with us. On the ground where they had been standing were merely their dog tags, the change in their pockets and a few zips, gold fillings and Wilson’s gallstones. I also noted the swords stuck in the drive sprocket of the track were now made of ice and were melting. Perkins had excelled himself. We were back in the game.
‘I’m thinking we shouldn’t be hanging about,’ said Addie, pointing to where the Hollow Men in the most distant ranks of the surrounding army were not quite as dismantled as the rest – they were not dangerous, but already we could see more Hollow Men popping into life in the distance and heading our way. I jumped into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine with Addie joining me in the passenger seat. We looked at one another. Someone was missing.
We found her crouched on the ground behind the half-track. She was cradling her arm and looked up at us with an apologetic smile.
‘I took a hit the second before Perkins did his stuff,’ she said, showing us the wound. Her right hand was severed cleanly at the wrist, and bleeding badly. If we didn’t do something pretty soon, we’d lose her to blood loss.
Luckily, Addie had dealt with this sort of thing before on the tourist trail, and pulled a bandage kit from one of her pouches.
‘This will hurt,’ she said.
‘It already hurts,’ said the Princess. ‘Do it.’
Addie bound the stump tightly with several bandages, which seemed to help, although I could see that the Princess was in considerable pain. But there wasn’t time to commiserate. We quite literally threw the Princess into the back of the half-track and I jumped back in the driver’s seat.
‘Hurry,’ said Addie, ‘they’re redeploying.’
And so they were. All the Hollow Men that hadn’t been affected by Perkins’ spell – and those few that had, but were just about functional – were moving to cut off our escape by the river at the only place we could cross. I noted also that even though the swords jammed in the tracks were no longer a problem, the clothes also wedged into the tracks were impeding progress. I was flat out in second, and we were barely making the pace of a jogger. Even if we were to retreat back to the mountain, we’d still be overtaken by the drones, and to be honest, I wasn’t big on retreating, and I didn’t suppose Addie and the Princess were either.
Addie grabbed her sword and returned to her place on the bonnet. The battle was not yet over. The Princess climbed in next to me and stared forlornly at her stump.
‘Laura Scrubb will be pissed as hell when she finds I’ve lost one of her hands.’
‘I’m sure you can make it up to her.’
‘Before I was useless but with a sword,’ added the Princess. ‘Now I’m double-useless without one.’
‘Maybe not,’ I said as I had an idea. I rummaged in my bag and passed her the Helping Hand™. It was a sound idea. A Helping Hand™ was memory preloaded with every dextrous act imaginable, from mending barometers to building box-girder bridges. With a pair of them you could even play Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, which is seriously hard. More relevant to the here and now, a Helping Hand™ can wield a sword as expertly as it can conduct open heart surgery – which are not as remotely related as one would have supposed.
‘There’s some duct tape in the toolbox,’ I said, pointing in the back. ‘Get a couple of lengths and I’ll tape it on.’
She did, and pretty soon the Princess had two hands again, even if her new one was too large, four decades older then her, hairy, and had ‘No more pies’ tattooed on the back. She didn’t waste any time, either. The Helping Hand™ grabbed a sword and she and it joined Addie on the bonnet.
We covered the next four hundred yards in less than a minute, the engine labouring to overcome the drag of the clothes stuck in the tracks. We plunged down the slope into the shallow ravine and forded the river, barely glancing at the decaying bones of the massacred. We made it another hundred yards beyond this, and just as the engine temperature was nudging into the red, the Hollow Men closed ranks and presented an unbroken wall in front of us. There were fewer of them – Perkins had depleted their numbers by at least two-thirds – but even as we watched, more were streaming from Shandar’s Guanolite facility, quite literally dropping their droppings to assist in this, the most important of tasks: protect the secret.
The half-track slowed to a walking pace, then stopped entirely with a clatter as it overheated.
We were less than three hundred yards from the Hollow Men, who were standing about an equal distance between us and safety. As their ranks swelled with their identical compatriots, they began walking slowly towards us, the outer edges of the long line curving around in readiness to attack on all sides.
I grabbed a sword and joined the others on the bonnet for what was now a last-stand defence. The Hollow Men would be upon us in thirty seconds, and unless we could each take down between sixty and seventy drones before succumbing ourselves, the end would not be long in coming.
‘It’s funny what runs though your mind when the end is near,’ said Addie, ‘and all I can think about is how annoyed I am that my sums didn’t add up. With Perkins and Wilson dead we’ve lost five out of eight, and that’s one more than the fifty per cent I’d calculated.’
‘I was thinking of odd stuff too,’ I replied with a half-smile, ‘like who was going to look after the Quarkbeast – Tiger, I guess.’
‘I was thinking about walking one more time in the Palace gardens,’ mused the Princess. ‘The fountains are very cooling in the summer.’
I looked behind us. Cadair Idris was almost three-quarters of a mile away. I could see the jeep, and the rock-hewn stairway. We’d be safe there, but only safe to die of starvation, or be attacked again on the next attempt.
‘We’d never reach it in time,’ said Addie, divining my thoughts, ‘and I don’t run. Not
from anything.’
‘Me neither,’ said the Princess. ‘Fleeing for one’s life is so very … unregal.’
So we stood together on the bonnet of the half-track, swords at the ready, awaiting our fate. I wasn’t thinking only about the Quarkbeast. I was thinking about the Eye of Zoltar, and where it might be. I was thinking that I had failed to find the Eye, and that the Dragons would die. And I was thinking about Perkins.
Then I had no more time to think, for the Hollow Men had charged.
The Princess was the most skilled with her new old hand, with Addie not far behind. They dispatched three each in quick order, keeping the drones from climbing upon the bonnet. We were, quite literally, defending the high ground. For my part, I simply swiped where I could with my sword in both hands. It was desperate but, given the numbers, we were not so much fighting as postponing the inevitable. I sliced through one that had jumped on the bonnet, then ducked to allow Addie to cut down another behind me. The situation was becoming increasingly difficult, and I could feel my muscles begin to tire. When they could no longer swing a sword, it would be over.
And that was when we heard a loud rushing noise. It was like a distant express train, but ahead of the noise was a call, like the sharp bark of a … seal. A sound that was familiar, but given that I was concentrating on the fight, a sound that I could not at first place.
The rushing noise increased to a thunderous roar and a moment later the Hollow Men in front of us scattered like playing cards, disrupted by a foe whose form was wobbly and indistinct. Almost instantly the drones we were battling disengaged to fight the new, larger enemy, and we were once more on our own. I had a cut on my thigh, had lost part of my boot and, I think, my little toe. I could also feel the salty taste of blood in my mouth from a cut lip, but we were still alive.
We heard the whooshing noise again, mixed with a faint ‘Ook, ook!’, and we saw the wobbly outline of the partially invisible Cloud Leviathan as it executed a steep hammerhead turn in the air and then dived down for the second attack, its large mouth open, a pattern of red marks upon its broad jaws where it had withstood the drones’ swords on the first run. As the rushing sound increased again and the Leviathan dived down for the second attack we could see that it was not alone – it was being ridden. But this was not a pirate of some sort, this was Ralph. He was alive, well, and no longer a passenger: he was standing upright upon the Leviathan’s back, riding the creature as a surfer, without fear.