Day 119 - Babel - Chapter 15 (1666 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 15

Victor had not left his building home all day, the streets outside were becoming too full to manage moving about unseen or unnoticed and the sudden influx of people had bought him less than a day of peace before people found their ways into the city again. The bridge was out, but it was not the only way across from the shore by road, the long way round on foot added a day to the journey for the Babel making the pilgrimage to Auckland’s Waterfront, and a few hundred had made it across to St Mary's bay before the Harbour crossing was detonated out from under them. He had seen a few people bedraggled and wet in the City, he had to assume that they were Babel that made it out of the water alive, coming to or being controlled to swim in time, but he was just guessing.

He hurried back to his base and gathered as many things as he could carry back to the building, barricading himself in and setting up his sniper's nest with a clear view of people in Queen Street all the way down to Britomart. He didn't shoot anyone, but he did line a few of them up in his sights and felt an urge to take some out and even the odds in favour of humanity. The voice in his head told him not to bother, not to waste his ammunition on unfeeling and uncompromising zombie Babels. He could take dozens out, and if he laid the explosives out just right he could take sizeable hunks of them in one go, but it would be a drop in the bucket. They felt nothing, no fear and no panic would ensue if one of their heads suddenly exploded from one of his well placed shells, they would amble forwards and onwards. It would just waste bullets.

The next day after a fitful sleep, the voice whispering in his ear about what he needed to do to save the human race and to save the planet, he woke to find thousands more people lining the streets. They were shuffling down to the bottom of town, heading to the waterfront, from the very roof of the building he could see even further, the tens of thousands of people were streaming in like ants, coming from all directions and crowding out the streets and lining up in pairs, shoulder to shoulder each pair a few feet apart from each other, all of them at an equal distance. All day he watched them coming in and at one point his position was surpassed and the people blocked the streets all around him as far as he could see. It had to be hundreds of thousands of people now, it was hard for him to judge exactly.

Victor was getting jumpy, every little noise and disturbance clanged on his nerves like he was in the middle of a war zone yet it was still eerily silent in the city. There were tens to hundreds of thousands of people now, all in the one place yet silent as the grave and motionless once they reached their position in line. Right now he could not go out unless he wanted to clear a path using explosives or bullets. The voice in his head told him that if he cleared a space then another would simply take their place again. He leaned over the edge of the roof and took aim at the pair in the middle of the pavement below the building, dropping a printer from one of the office floors directly down as straight as he could manage it.

The heavy box of metal and plastic fell with no fanfare or drama, but at the height of the roof down it had a long way to fall in relative silence, momentum and air resistance causing a slight whistle as it fell but no other sound until the sickening wet crunch of blood, muscle and bone cushioned the impact between it and the ground. The printer missile took out one of the pair only, the other stayed stock still as the person next to them, if they were still a person that was, concertinaed to the pavement and beginning to stain the ground. The force and velocity of the dropped hardware knocked the woman to the ground and moved her a few feet away, knocking into the next pairing.

What happened next creeped Victor out even more than he had been already and set the voice in his head to swearing profusely in fear and revulsion. As a single unit then crowd in a line behind the now half dead pairing moved forward one person in a single synchronised step. Hundreds of people all disentangled from the pair they were in and all moved in unison forward to the pair in front of them, filling the gap as they did so.

Not one of the hundreds of thousands of people looked at his direction, the direction from which a plunging printer had plummeted towards them, the death from above was duly ignored and then they all moved to close the gap in their ranks. A cold rage swept through Victor and he ran down the stairs, leaping them three or four steps at a time, not breaking his stride and barrelling down through the floors until he was home again. He slung his rifle and grabbed his detonators, ready to blow the entire street to Kingdom Come.

His fingers where white knuckled around the pistol grip detonators and he stood shaking at the shattered window he had been using for his eagles nest with a view of the street. No one was moving and no one was making any noise, and it was time to put an end to this blasphemy of humanity and take them all to hell. He held up his two prime triggers, ones that would daisy chain through the streets and take out maybe a quarter of the people he could see and maybe one twentieth of the ones he could not, but he knew were still there.

He hesitated and looked again at the street, closer than he had been on the roof where people were amorphous blobs that he could barely tell the gender of at that distance, but here a few floors up he could see faces, races and who they were and that touched a spot inside of him that made him baulk even for a few seconds at a deliberate act of mass murder. He was leaning towards not pulling the triggers, maybe even going down and defusing the explosives when he saw the landing craft flying towards the city.

Up in the air moving quietly, at least there was nothing he could hear from his vantage point a few blocks up the road, there was a landing craft or a shuttle craft perhaps. It was an irregular shape and it floated in much the same way as the large ship had when it had arrived preceding it days beforehand. It covered the ground a lot slower, it took maybe half an hour to make it from his first sighting of it in the air between the large ship and the city to the Waterfront itself.

Victor left his building and made his way downtown, weaving through the pairs and avoiding contact with them at all costs but moving through them unmolested and unimpeded. He took his gun, and the explosive trigger devices and made it to Britomart where he could now see that the pairs were all facing the same direction, up towards Queens Wharf, and from the approach vector of

the Alien craft, it was going to land there.

The wharf itself was empty of Babel, they all lined up and faced the land connection to the pier arrangement but did not extend on to the structure at all. It was definitely the focal point of where they were headed. Victor started running down, closing the gap between himself and the landing point as fast as he could. He broke down the doors to a small building on Commerce Street and the Quay and swiftly made his way to the top of it, getting a perfect and unobstructed view down the wharf as the landing shuttle was descending to land in the empty space in front of the Cloud structure near the start of the assembled crowds.

He lined up the sights on his rifle, eyeing the front of the craft as it touched down and he heard the clang of metal on the tarmac surface of the concrete wharf. He could feel himself shaking, and he needed to calm down and slow his heart rate, reduce tension and regain control. He wanted to turn of the communication from whoever it was sending him messages directly to his brain, but he could not silence the voice which was now screaming at him about the danger and to shoot whatever came out of the craft.

The ship sat there unmoved for a moment, which allowed Victor to rebalance his own feelings and bodily control. It calmed him down and he managed to block out the noise of the voice projecting it's own fear and rage into him without any filtering. He was in the zone now and calm, he saw everything through the lined circle with distance ranging etched into his scope.

The a door opened in the ship and a ramp extended and he waited, patiently and calmly as a dozen pairs of human legs appeared and walked into view.

He did not hesitate and he shot the first two people he saw exit the ship, but then he stopped when he saw that the rest of the scattered and he could hear them screaming from where he was.

They were screaming and running in different directions, they were panicking, fleeing and in control.

These were not Babel Zombies.

Victor had killed two fellow humans.