There was the sound of metal slicing metal, and the tip of War"s blade buried itself in the concrete at his feet. Something gave a faint fizzle, and sparks began to flicker along the thin line that now ran the length of Dr Black"s body.
"You can"t stop him, you know," the robot informed them, even as both halves of it began to fall in opposite directions. "The world ends today, and there"s nothing you can do toa""
The halves. .h.i.t the ground. The voice faded and the glow in the android"s eyes grew dark. War yanked his sword free of the tarmac, then poked one half of Dr Black with his toe. "Techno-magic mumbo jumbo," he said.
"What...? But...? How did you know?" Drake asked. "It was him. I was sure it was him!"
"I had my doubts, but I couldn"t say for sure until I"d seen him with my own two eyes. He fought a h.e.l.lhound, then face-planted twenty metres on to concrete without winding up a messy splat. Death Nine"s human now, and no human could do that. Besides, you said yourself, he"d been there for ages," War shrugged. "He couldn"t be Death. Death"s barely been human a few weeks. He would have to be someone new."
An icy needle of shock p.r.i.c.ked at the centre of Drake"s chest. "New?"
"Aye. Stands to reason."
It hit Drake like a sledgehammer. He reached for the fence to support himself, but his hand slipped and he lurched to one side. "Mr Franks," he said in a barely audible whisper.
"Who?"
"Mr Franks. Darren Franks. D.F."
"What you on about?"
"The other teacher. The one in the cupboard. He"s the old Death, and we"ve left him with Mel!"
"h.e.l.loooo!" called a voice from nearby. Famine was slowly approaching on his scooter, waving enthusiastically with one hand, while frantically trying to steer with the other. "Be with you in a minute."
Drake didn"t wait for Famine, and he didn"t wait for the other hors.e.m.e.n. He ran back towards the school gates, his pounding heart making his legs move faster than they had ever moved before, until...
PZZZZKT!.
A shock of pure agony exploded across Drake"s skin and through his skeleton, hurtling him backwards on to the ground. He rolled in pain, his legs refusing to function as he kicked and struggled to stand up.
In the depths of his shock-addled brain, he knew the pain, recognised it as the same sensation he"d experienced when he"d tried to shoulder-barge the Deathblade Guardian. Only worse. Much, much worse.
It took both War and Pestilence to get him to his feet and keep him there. They were still supporting him when Famine dismounted next to them. He gave the scooter a firm pat on the back of the seat, and it trundled over to a patch of gra.s.s on the other side of the road.
Famine looked at the sleeping children and police officers around him, and at the two halves of Dr Black on the pavement at War"s feet. "Missed anything?" he wheezed.
Leaving Pestilence to support Drake, War slowly made his way closer to the school gates. He stopped just in front of them and turned his head slowly left and right.
A pale blue glow hung in the air in front of him. It stretched up, down and side to side. It was barely there, barely anything. If War hadn"t been looking closely, he would never have seen it.
Cautiously, he raised a hand and touched one finger against the glow. A gasp of pain burst through his beard as he drew his arm sharply back. He shook his hand around and clenched it into a fist a few times, never taking his eye off the glow.
"Some kind of magic barrier," he said.
"What, like a force field?" Drake asked. He pulled away from Pest and hobbled over to War. "Can you break through it?"
"I can barely even touch it," the big man replied.
A sudden scream from within the school cut Drake off before he could say anything else. He looked up to the first floor, and caught a brief glimpse of Mel at the window, before a shadow appeared behind her and she was dragged back into the room.
"We have to do something!" Drake yelped. "We have toa""
The Earth trembled beneath his feet. On the other side of the force field, the horses neighed and stamped their hooves against the concrete.
A low rumble shook the ground, making them all stagger away from the glowing blue barrier.
"Can I just make it clear," Famine said, "that that wasn"t me?"
"Earthquake?" Pest asked. "That"s one of the signs! It"s one of the signs of the Apocalypse. Oh, G.o.d, what if we"re wrong? What if this really is the end?"
The ground vibrated again. From inside the barrier there was the sound of falling rubble. Narrow cracks began to split the pavement beneath the hors.e.m.e.n"s feet.
"It"s not an earthquake," War said grimly. He followed the lines of the cracks. They led all the way back to the school.
"Then what is it?" Drake asked. He was still looking up at the window on the first floor, and so he was the first to notice when it started to move. With a crack of snapping concrete, the extension on the front of the school building began to rise slowly up, revealing an enormous chrome construction below.
"What... What is that?" Drake muttered, his eyes following the first storey window as it rose higher and higher into the air, revealing more and more of the metal shape beneath it. "What"s happening?"
War groaned. "Something b.l.o.o.d.y spectacular."
UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, Drake had never seen a real robot before. But it was safe to say that over the past few days, he"d seen more than his share.
But he had a nagging suspicion that the one before him now would be the last one he ever saw.
It rose from the Earth, like a slow-moving rocket with a school balanced on top. Drake didn"t realise what it was at first, not until the arms tore their way free of their concrete surround, and hands the size of Panzer tanks helped lift the rest of the metal body out from within the ground.
With a whinny of panic, War and Pest"s horses bolted. They leaped at the barrier, pa.s.sing through without any problem, just as the first of the giant robot"s feet smashed down on to the ruined tarmac.
Metal groaned as the robot drew itself up to its full, towering height. The dull aluminium cladding of the extension fell away, revealing a head that was the same chrome colour as the rest of the body.
All four hors.e.m.e.n leaned back to look up at the machine. It stood around eighty metres in height, and fifteen or twenty across the shoulders. Decades of dust and soil crumbled away as it held its train-carriage-sized arms out to its sides and stretched its steel tendons.
"There"s something you don"t see every day," Famine said. He took half a sandwich from beneath a roll of flab, sniffed it cautiously, then began to chew. "What"s the plan, then? We running away?"
"No," said Drake firmly. "We"re not running away."
"Thank G.o.d for that, my feet are killing me," Famine said. He finished his sandwich. "So, what do we do?"
"The horses got out," Drake said. "Maybe the barrier"s gone?"
He took a step towards it, only for War to pull him back. "Or, it means things on the inside can get out, but not the other way round." He pointed to a spot just a few centimetres in front of Drake"s face. A faint blue light flickered in the air. "It hasn"t gone anywhere."
"This is it, then," Pestilence whispered. "This is how the world ends."
Famine shoved a handful of popcorn into his mouth. "I"ll be honest, I did not see this one coming."
"One giant robot doesn"t make an Apocalypse," War said. "Let"s just see what happens next."
"No, we have to do something now. Mel"s up there," Drake said. "We have to..."
His voice fell away. He c.o.c.ked his head, listening to something he couldn"t be sure he had actually heard.
"What"s the matter?" asked Pest.
"I thought I... There," Drake said quietly. "Did you hear that?"
"What?" said Famine, chewing thoughtfully. "That buzzing noise?"
"Yeah," said Drake, and at that, the sky went dark.
None of them saw where the billowing ma.s.s of silver bodies came from. It was just seconds between the moment Drake heard them and the moment they blocked out the sun. It took even less time for them to swoop down and begin their attack.
There were thousands of them a" tens of thousands a" each one just eight or nine centimetres long. They came in on metal wings, with pin-like teeth snapping hungrily at everything in their path.
The hors.e.m.e.n were suddenly lost in a cloud of chittering robo-bugs. War swung with his sword. It sparked as a dozen metal bodies ricocheted like bullets off the blade. Drake saw them crash to the ground.
"Gra.s.shoppers?" he said, shouting to make himself heard above the buzzing of mechanical wings. "A swarm of gra.s.shoppers?"
"They"re not gra.s.shoppers, they"re locusts," Pest cried, in a voice bordering on hysteria. He ducked, as his leather hat was lost to the throng of bodies. "And it"s not a swarm. It"s a plague. Don"t you see? It"s another sign!"
"Techno-magic mumbo jumbo," War spat, swinging with his sword again and bringing down a few more bugs. "That"s all. They"re not real signs a" he"s doing them himself. He"s trying toa""
A tightly packed section of the swarm, or plague, or whatever it was, hit War"s chestplate with the force of a cannonball. He stumbled back, struggling for balance, before a second attack took him down.
Drake reached out a hand, but the wings and the teeth and the sleek metal bodies were a hurricane around him, preventing him from moving. He snapped the hood of the robe up over his head and kept low, trying to avoid the locusts, but they were suddenly on his back, their weight forcing him to his knees.
He clawed at the locusts in his hair and saw Famine go down beneath an even bigger pile of winged bodies. War was lying on his back on the ground, punching and kicking, but the things were moving too fast, and there were too many of them, and there was nothing, Drake realised, that they could do.
Through the haze of silver he saw Pest open his mouth, but the horseman"s scream was drowned out by the din around them. Pestilence was still on his feet, but only barely. His legs were a heaving ma.s.s of silver. His leather jacket was intact, but the clothes beneath it were ragged and torn. He staggered, thrashing around, his eyes wide and panicked and darting from bug to bug to bug as they closed in on him.
"Get off!" Pest"s cry was so shrill Drake heard it even above the angry drone of the insects. "Get off, get off, get off !"
Drake saw Pest"s gloves go up in flames. The smell of burning rubber hit the back of his throat, as green gas sprayed out from Pestilence"s fingertips.
Pest stopped screaming. Even the plague seemed to quieten a fraction, as the green fog began to form shapes in the air. They were hazy and indistinct at first, but then the shapes took form. They became tiny numbers, ones and zeroes in the air, circling round and round just beyond Pestilence"s reach.
A locust whipped through the cloud of digits and instantly began to fall. From his knees, Drake followed the bug"s flight until it clattered on the ground. Another crashed down beside it. Then another, and another.
When Drake looked back up, the air was filled with ones and zeroes. They floated through the swarm, slowly at first, but gaining purpose with each bug they hit.
Another sound replaced the droning of wings. It was the sound of hail on a tin roof, a rattling drumbeat as thousands of metal insects left the sky and arrived, quite abruptly, on the ground.
The weight on Drake"s back fell away. He got to his feet just as War jumped up. The final few locusts clattered to Earth, leaving a great big question hanging in the air.
"What the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l did you do?" War asked, as he picked robo-bugs from his beard. "I mean, not that I"m complaining."
Pest stared at his hands. He stared at them as if they were loaded weapons, and he couldn"t quite remember where the safety catch was.
"I have absolutely no idea," he admitted quietly. "It felt like, like a cold or a flu or something."
"It was a virus," Drake said. Realising it even as the words left his lips. "You made a computer virus."
"A computer virus?" Pest raised his eyebrows. "What"s one of them, then?"
But Drake was already looking up at the giant robot, and at the force field that stood between them and it. "I"ll explain later," he said. "We have to get in there and stop that thing."
War sheathed his sword. "Right," he said. "But we can"t get in."
"So, what do we do?" mumbled Famine. He held one of the locusts between finger and thumb, and gave it a cautious sniff.
"There"s got to be some way. We have to find a way in. We have to..."
Drake"s voice fell away. He knew, in that moment, what he had to do. "I"m Death," he said, as if realising it for the first time. "I"m Death."
"We know," Pest said. "You"re preaching to the converted there."
"No, I mean I"m Death." He looked way up at the school building, shimmering faintly through the force field. "And Death can go anywhere."
He took five purposeful paces backwards, like a footballer preparing to take a penalty kick. "Death can go anywhere," he said, more quietly this time, and for his own benefit.
"You sure about this?" War asked him.
A large part of Drake"s brain wasn"t sure about this in the slightest, but a small part of it was more certain than it had ever been in its entire life. If he could keep that small part away from the more sceptical larger part for the next twenty seconds or so, everything would almost certainly be fine.
"I can do this," he said. He focused his attention on the mystical barrier, and repeated the words over and over like a mantra. "Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere."
He kept chanting as he ran those few paces, picking up speed with every step.
"Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere."
The Robe of Sorrows fluttered as he sped towards the force field, still muttering those four words over and over below his breath, faster and faster, like the clattering of a train on the tracks.
"Death can go anywhere Death can go anywhere Death can go anywhere."
He did not close his eyes as the glowing blue wall raced up to meet him. He didn"t so much as flinch, even though he very much wanted to. Flinching, he knew, would mean he thought he was about to hit something, and for his idea to work, he had to keep that thought out of his head.
As he approached the barrier, he didn"t even jump. Jumping would imply an obstacle in his path, and there were no obstacles in his path. At least, that"s what he wanted that little part of his brain to continue believing.
But instinct proved too strong to resist, and Drake raised his arms in front of his face just as he was about to smack into the force-field wall.
Or rather, that"s what he thought was about to happen. In reality, he had run straight through it several paces previously, and was now recoiling in terror from a figment of his own imagination.
"You did it," Pestilence cried. He clapped his gloved hands together, making a muted thuck-thuck-thuck sound. "You got through the barrier."
"What? Did I?" Drake asked. "I mean, yeah. No problem."
"Well done!" Famine said. "I think I"ll have a nice bun to celebrate." He reached under another fat fold and pulled out something that didn"t look very nice. Or, indeed, like a bun.