Day 51 - Babel - Chapter 13 (1587 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 13

“You have to do something.”

Victor was watching people walk through the city streets, like zombies heading towards the waterfront. He had seen them since yesterday, once or two at first and he took shots at them, striking the ground at their feet and kicking up the pavement in shards. He was stunned to see not reaction whatsoever and not even a missed step. He took a range of shots all around the feet of the second person and they simply walked through them, the shattered pieces of concrete scratching at the shins of the man walking calmly down Queen Street.

The man walked on with blood dripping slightly behind him, leaving a few spots of a trail and as the first did not break stride.

The voice that was telling him about the aliens, giving him clues as to their intention was very agitated about their arrival and what they were doing.

“This is exactly what I told you would happen. This is it Victor, this is the end. They mean you harm, they mean you all harm.”

He had been hearing the voice for a few days, he had tried asking it questions but it seemed to be exactly what the voice said it was.

“I'm trying to help. You can hear me, I can talk to you and help you.”

Victor had questions of course, but it was no good if he could not be heard. He just listened and used whatever information the voice gave him.

He had imagined at first that it was some kind of secret government agency. Something with technology that could pull this off, but it did not sound professional or military enough, not organised. The voice sounded desperate to be heard, to help and to affect the outcome of the Alien invasion. His second theory was some kind of fifth column, an opposition or resistance within the Alien ranks, which would explain how this telepathic voice could be put directly into his head, but not necessarily be able to hear him back. Obviously the Aliens had limitations, they did not appear to have weapons, not in the conventional sense anyway.

There had been no sign of any Alien beings, which suggested weakness and fear to Victor. The voice backed this idea up with little things he would say about the cautiousness and the deliberate measures they had taken to not fight humanity, head on.

The Babel was a weapon, the voice had told him that it was a genetic softener, something to make resistance and fighting too hard to do. That it had been planned a long time in advance, they had been watching for years. They had brought viruses before, some stronger than others and they were chemically engineered to prey on human weaknesses. The one they had settled on, the Babel though was the Neutron Bomb of viruses, it was devastating but left so much intact, but useless.

“They have plans for you, they have plans for the Babel. They'll take out the ones who are immune, the ones the can't control. The ones that resist, the ones that are too strong.”

This was what he had suspected for some time, something was definitely going on. Stragglers were making it through his barricades, and finding their way in like water pressing at a dam, looking for cracks to seep through. Parnell was barricaded and blocked, the motorway gulleys were as closed off as they could be, and that only really left north, the bridge and the bays.

He toured the southern and eastern entryways to the downtown area and found them sealed, but with the people there walking around the edges, heading to the north and looking for that crack.

He got to the the bridge and there was already quite a few people there, and he could see once he was high enough, that all the way up the shore there was a line of people stretching and thin, but back further, people slowing down and more joining in the crowd. Before long it would be hundreds, and not long after tens of thousands, if there were that many people left in the world.

Victor took guns, explosives and enough gear to seal the bridge with him and snuck through the people now making their way into the lower edges of the Viaduct and finding cracks in his barricades to get into downtown. There was maybe a hundred people there by the time he got back to his building, and that doubled by the time he made it to the bridge.

No one seemed to recognise his existence, he walked amongst the zombies that sightlessly walked past him, and though he kept his gun safety 'off' and in his hand, he felt sure he would not need it.

“You have to stop them. It's for their own good. They want to do … bad things to you. To them. They are not in control like you. They cannot resist, they cannot do it themselves.”

Victor could see that what he was being told was true. He was unsure if he could truly trust the voice in his head, but in this instance they seemed to be on the same page. This was not good and something needed to be done.

“You have to stop them getting in. They want them here, they are bringing them here for a reason. You need to not let them get all these people.”

The bridge was the key. Victor stared at it and then back up at St Mary's Bay. He had blocked College Hill Road effectively, it was the entry point where the bridge joined up with St Mary's that was the biggest gap. He could seal that, he could seal the rest pretty well, he had done already.

Victor had left the bridge open as a potential escape route if he needed it. He had a plan on destroying it behind himself if he had to abandon the city centre, he knew where and how to plant the explosives to bring it down if need be. He did not expect to be on this side of the problem though, he had always thought it would come to fleeing, not to making a fortress of Down town.

There was a lot of people on the bridge though. A lot. Slack eyed and without any will, they may not even be alive anymore, but looking at hundreds of people marching like that it was not an easy call to make to blow the bridge supports from under them.

He picked a person at random and stood in front of him, the person stopped at first, then walked around. He got in the way of the person about twenty feet behind him, this time a woman and she did the same thing, so he moved to be always in her way, eventually placing a hand on the forehead of the woman and pressing hard. There was little resistance and she stopped in her tracks until he moved his hand and then, she kept walking.

“You're wasting time, there are more people on the bridge, you are putting more lives in danger!”

Victor knew the voice was right, again and he took several deep breaths and pulled the trigger on the detonator switch.

There was a compressive thump and he felt the air change as the explosives ignited and blew out the support struts in quick succession.

He watched the buckling, the overwhelmingly loud screech of metal and concrete sliding against each other, protesting the force of the explosions and gravity pushing them in on each other. There had been a few bodies thrown clear by the explosions, and the ones on this side of it, got up and walked on. A few were still walking when the ground fell from under them, Victor lost count of how many exactly went into the water from is handiwork, he stopped counting almost immediately after starting, the knowledge was something he neither needed nor wanted.

The people in the water sank or floated but made no effort to swim to safety. He could see that there was no way to save or assist all of them, so he made the decision to save none of them. It was as he turned his back that he saw that the people lining the hills walking and poking at the barricades for an opening to get in had stopped moving.

He looked back at the bridge and there were a dozen or so people on the very edge, standing there, behind them everyone in the distant 'queue' were also stopped, the Aliens had stopped moving everyone together. Over the other side of the barricaded streets, the ones who had been heading to the waterfront, to the Quays they were also stopped.

“That will slow them down. It will not stop them.”

He knew it was true.

Victor looked across the Gulf at the ship hanging in the sky above the Mountain Island of the Hauraki and wondered what on earth could even dent such a behemoth. He felt like an insect crawling on the arm of a giant. How long before he was slapped into a stain on it's skin?

“Its got to be done.”

Victor did not for the life of him know what “it” was, but for the sake of the people he had just drowned for their own good, “it” needed to be found.