Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [114]
Perhaps, I thought, it was time for some more Rapt after all. Or maybe I should keep it as a little treat for when I’d been here for a hundred years.
“Jack,” Ratchet said quietly. “You may want to look out the window.”
Something in the tone of the computer’s voice made me sit up. The light was blue again outside, and now it wasn’t just trees which stood silently all around us.
The children were back.
They had returned, but this time there was no comfort in their presence. Their eyes emanated coldness, anger—though I didn’t feel either was directed at me. They surrounded the gunship in a circle which stretched in all directions, I couldn’t pick out the boy I’d seen first, but perhaps he was somewhere in the crowd. They were all there, gray-faced and staring up at me, their mouths open as if they were screaming.
“Are they Gap children?” Ratchet asked, even more quietly. I don’t suppose that computers get frightened, but even he sounded pretty spooked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s something odd about them. They brought me to this ship. They led me there and left.”
“What are they doing now?”
The children farthest away from the ship began to move, turning so they were facing in the opposite direction. All their mouths shut at once, and then they started walking away. As they got farther from the ship, others came from behind us to join them. They formed into ranks five across, a column which marched between the trees and into the twilight.
“Follow them,” I said.
Ratchet turned the ship and hovered back up to ten feet in the air. The children didn’t seem put out that we were tracking them. Far from it. Some of them started running, slowly at first, and then much faster. They weren’t running from us. They were leading us somewhere.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s pick up some speed.”
Ratchet accelerated slowly, and the children ran faster and faster like a pack of wolves finding their rhythm. Ratchet put his foot on the gas again until we were slipping along at a good forty miles an hour.
We followed the column of the children as they sprinted through the trees; Ratchet working overtime to avoid the trunks while keeping on the children’s track. At one point we rocketed over something that looked like the shadow of a truck, and I wondered if it was the ghost of the one Vinaldi and I had entered The Gap in. This impression was gradually reinforced as we surged farther through the forest, small hints of familiarity pressing themselves upon me through some sense I hadn’t known I possessed.
Then we flew over the village, and I knew for sure that we were going in the right direction. The gray shadows were streaming through the huts and out the other side like a river of smoke crushing all before it. Sometimes they seemed to blend into one being, at others to be a countless multitude; but they kept pounding forward, pulling Ratchet and me in their wake.
“I’m getting some infrared hits in the distance,” Ratchet said eventually, and I knew everything was about to go down.
“Okay,” I said. “Rack’em up.”
“What armament do you have in mind?”
“Everything we’ve got.”
The space between the trees was greater here, five yards apart in places. This freed Ratchet to increase the gunship’s speed still further until everything outside was a blur; but we didn’t overtake the children. However fast we went, they were still in front—until suddenly they weren’t there anymore and the forest all around us was empty.
I shouted at Ratchet to slow down. He did so immediately, our speed dropping so abruptly that I almost ended up molded to the control panel.
“Where’ve they gone? Can you see anything?”
“No. But there’s a small hill ahead. Could be masking them.”
“Go round it as quietly as you can,” I said. I felt sure there were probably some more technical terms I could have used, but I’d been a foot soldier and I didn’t know them. The words “shoot” and “run” had been the limits of my tactical mastery.
The gunship inched onward, and I had a moment