Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [75]
Transparent, delicate wings, each the size and shape of a canoe.
Mrs Winfield was shouting for him to get inside.
A few of the monsters were moving to surround him. He turned but there were dozens of them in every direction. Hundreds now. The air was humming as though it was full of Lancaster bombers. He daren’t look up.
The monster nearest him opened its mouth and rasped a stream of white powder over him. It stung his eyes, made him cough violently. It smelled of fly spray.
His wife was screaming.
∗ ∗ ∗
156
Across Europe, most people were woken by the buzzing above them. It was a little past dawn, but it grew dark again. A strange, restless darkness. But few people really noticed. Many had seen the news about the new moon and assumed this was a storm cloud or weather front associated with it. The sky grew ever more black, the buzz ever more loud.
Across eastern Europe satellite signals had been erratic for a few minutes.
Digital signals were choppy, images pixellated, sounds disjointed. Aircraft started falling from the sky as the cloud pressed down, clogging up jet engines and jamming ailerons. Radar screens became bursts of static – swarms of points of light circling around, descending. Despite this, air-traffic controllers could see that planes were dropping down ahead of the cloud. Some were doing it deliberately. Most had lost all control. Some of the aircraft had started to break up.
Telephones began ringing.
Emergency services and government hotlines were active, although many were affected by the loss of satellite signals. Prime ministers and presidents were woken. Army units were being deployed, emergency plans were being dusted off, key personnel were being located and ferried to secure locations.
None of these preparations made the slightest difference.
When the base of the cloud was around two hundred feet from the ground, it was possible to discern that it was a swarm of insects. It was difficult to judge its scale at first, until the monsters began swooping down wherever crowds were gathering, lifting up men and women and taking them away.
Half an hour later the next wave passed over the crowds, spraying them with white powder, like crop dusters. Those not caught by this watched those who were die quickly and painlessly.
Armed police in Frankfurt were the first to fire on the monsters. It usually took two shots to down one. Hit it and it fell, twitched and died. Easy. But there were far more insects than there were bullets, and they converged on anyone shooting as though they were answering a call to prayer. The surviving police were soon falling back, trying to get other survivors inside buildings.
The streets of Geneva were thick with bodies, slowing down – but not stopping – people trying to escape and the ambulances and police cars that were making for the worst-affected areas. The sky was so black with swarms of the insects that every vehicle had its lights on. This only seemed to attract the monsters, which were strong and used their fore limbs like tin-openers to take the roofs off cars.
Fifteen minutes into the attack on Lyons, and policemen kitted up in riot gear were finding that tear gas had some effect in dispersing the swarms. It was also incapacitating the people they were trying to save. Whatever the insects were spraying could penetrate gas masks. Once again, as everywhere 157
else, the police fell back.
Hospitals braced themselves for a catastrophe, fearing that they were about to be overwhelmed. Health-service managers knew, even if they never admitted it, that one nuclear strike on a city would generate more casualties than any nation’s health service could deal with. But there weren’t that many bodies left behind after the monsters had passed over.
The reports coming in were putting the number of deaths in the tens of thousands in just the first few minutes. There were almost no injuries. Fewer, in fact, than in a typical morning rush-hour. Most were the result of people trying to get away: there were car accidents and casualties caused