Apocabigbang: Fic: Postremus Regum Britanniae; Merlin; R; Chapter 1
Prologue
Chapter 1 - The Earth was Ripped Asunder
Merlin wasn’t sure what he thought when it happened, even immediately afterwards he couldn’t remember. He supposed, later, that he must have been scared. Perhaps he prayed or maybe he was just wondering what the hell was going on.
Will was on the phone, apparently rebounded from the gay chat line because he had rung up the next number on one of his little cards, and things seemed to be going more smoothly this time. Will laughed at something the girl said - apparently he had found someone who was more amused than upset by his antics, and then all Merlin felt was the earth shaking.
Living in Britain wasn’t really conducive to taking earthquakes in stride. He remembered the last one he recalled in the country when the news had been filled with people whose garden gnomes had broken. He himself hadn’t even felt it.
This was not like that one. He had seen the pictures on the news of the big ones far away, on the other side of the world, everyone had - roads split apart, whole bridges and buildings collapsing into themselves just because of a geophysical phenomenon. He had never really thought what it must be like to be caught up in one, though.
He worked on one of the higher floors of the office block and the whole room felt like it was made of jelly at first, quivering for a few moments before quivering turned to shuddering, turned to full on rocking and careening from side to side. Computers fell onto the floor, sparks flew. People screamed and it felt as if a giant had lifted the building up and decided to play catch with it.
He remembered everything that happened; he just couldn’t remember what he was thinking.
He remembered, in the middle of it all, one of the windows breaking into shattering pieces that bounced across the floor. He saw another of the employees - hell, he had never even learnt her name, just knew her by her face. She wasn’t even someone who he nodded at in corridors, not even a passing acquaintance - stumble and catch, reaching for some sort of hand grasp.
She did not find it and he watched her fall, from under his desk (and when he had got there, Merlin had no idea). It was not something spectacular, there was nothing dramatic about it. She simply stepped backwards through where there should have been glass and then she had found nothing beneath her feet. There was a moment when he met her eyes and he saw the sheer terror there just before she fell out of sight.
He did not even know her name and he was the only person she shared that last moment with.
When he thought about it afterwards he would shudder at the very idea that he had watched that happen; but right then he didn’t feel pity, fear or even panic. He just watched it happen.
Then, the jerking of the floor turned to shudders, which turned to quivers and shakes until it wasn’t the world that was shaking - it was him.
The first thing he heard was Will’s voice, strangely calm in the midst of his own terror. The first thing he thought was that Will was somehow still steady and that seemed right somehow.
“Are you okay?” Will asked and it took Merlin peering out from under his desk at the horror around them before he realised Will was still on the phone. He was talking to the poor chat line girl at the other end.
Perhaps it was hysteria, but Merlin had to laugh at that; he had to laugh instead of cry because something had happened, he knew that. You didn’t get earthquakes that big in Britain, not for no reason.
“Okay, so, no injuries. That’s good. I don’t have any either... Now, tell me your name.
“I know you’re not supposed to, but I think the world’s falling apart and I swear I am not going to hurt you.” Will sounded more serious than Merlin had ever heard him. “Look. I’m Will, if that helps, William Gordon. That’s my real name. I was born on the fourteenth of September. I like the colour blue and the Die Hard films.
“It’s nice to talk to you Gwen...” Merlin watched as Will gave a sudden grin.
“A cup of tea sounds like a fucking brilliant idea,” Will agreed and when he caught Merlin’s eye neither of them could help their smiles.
That was when the screaming began again, cutting into the almost quiet brutally. One thing led to another and then another, soon the entire office was awash with noise, crying, whimpering, groans of pain.
“He’s dead...” a hollow voice Merlin might have recognised said to his left. “Shit... he’s dead.”
“Where’s that blood coming from?”
“My work... My computer...”
He crawled over to where Will was crouched and answered the unspoken question of his raised eyebrows.
“I’m fine.”
Will’s free hand found his arm and squeezed gently, it gave them both a little reassurance that, despite the shaking and the feeling that nothing was quite real, they were both solid and fine.
“Do you think we should leave the building?” Merlin asked. Will looked around at the chaos and shrugged helplessly.
“Gwen... it’s just a teapot,” Will told the girl. Merlin could hear the laughter from the other end of the line, so incongruous with everything around him. “Well, can you find a mug that isn’t broken? You can make tea in mugs, you know.” Merlin could hear the outrage, even muffled as it was.
“I know it impairs the flavour. Honestly, I don’t think that really matters right now.”
“Can’t let standards slip,” Merlin said, shaking his head. “Where’s your wartime spirit, Will?” His friend chuckled.
“Just a friend of mine - he agrees with you about the tea.” Will looked up and smiled at Merlin.
“She says you’re clearly a highly educated person. You can tell she hasn’t met you.”
The normality of this conversation was, somehow, more hard-hitting than the terror around them.
“Look, Gwen,” Will said, struggling to his feet as Merlin stood up as well. It felt as though he had been on a ship for hours, the way his legs wanted to go in different directions, the way they couldn’t decide which direction was horizontal. “Do you have anyone you need to call?”
“I’m sorry... No, no, I’m fine. The only person I’d call is standing right next to me.” Merlin ignored that comment out of a combination of embarrassment and sorrow. Will’s family was dead, he knew that, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that you talked about. He never knew what to say when Will brought it up and if he said anything it led to awkward conversation.
“Okay, then why don’t you just stay on the line - I’m paying for this call after all,” Will said, and Merlin winced as he thought of the bill. It was sure to be premium. “No, of course I don’t mind. I mean, someone’s got to make sure you don’t start screaming at the tea bags and I need someone to keep me from going completely mad... oh him? He’s never been any good at that before. Don’t see why he would start now.” Merlin was about to glare at him when he caught sight of a foot, sticking out from beside his desk.
He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to know, but he couldn’t stop himself from taking that step forward and looking round the corner.
Five seconds later he threw up.
*
Arthur and Lance were on their way to a meeting at a client’s office, so they were on the streets when everything went to hell.
The first shake was accompanied by every car alarm in the vicinity going off in a chorus of clashing noises. High, trilling rings and on off again blares of noise.
Then there were the screeches of tires, the crash of metal against metal and the screaming.
The pair of them ducked into the entrance of a building, clamped their hands over their ears and crouched together.
If it had been any other situation, it would have been awkward that Arthur’s face was against Lance’s neck and Lance’s arm was over his back, but in that moment it was just good to know that they weren’t alone.
It’s just an earthquake, Arthur told himself, over and over again, like it was nothing to be worried about. But his heart was in his throat and he knew that he would have bruises over his ears where his fingers were clenching into his scalp. Only an earthquake. Except it felt like the earth was exploding around him or tearing itself apart. Lance was muttering swear words over and over again, interspersed with ‘we should do something.’ But there was nothing they could do except stay there, clinging to the ground until the world righted itself - sort of.
Arthur didn’t realise, as he rose on unsteady feet and looked around at car crashes and shell-shocked people, that the world would never right itself completely again.
*
The journey down the stairs to the car park was hesitant. Both Merlin and Will were worried that another earthquake - an aftershock perhaps - would come and they would be clinging to the handrail in a hopeless attempt not to fall and break their necks. They moved slowly, gingerly edging down step after step.
“We could be fired for this, you realise,” Merlin commented part way down, the amusement evident in his tone.
“I doubt anyone will even notice that we’re missing,” Will said. “And if they do, I think this might be one of those days when you don’t get fired for leaving early.”
“Where are we even going to go?” Merlin asked again. The stairway was at least quiet. Because of the lifts people seldom used the staircases in the building and the heavy fire doors on every floor kept the sound out easily.
It also didn’t have any windows, which meant no broken glass and no views of the devastated city.
Of course, it had not completely avoided the effects of the quake. They had managed four flights when they came to a part that had been broken badly by the quake. An entire section of the stairs had broken away, falling down, like Godzilla had taken a bite out of it.
“Why...” Will said, edging his way around the hole, “did... no one put a...railing... on this side?” he asked. Merlin shook his head, waiting until Will was safely on the other side.
The wall was painted breeze blocks and there was little to hold on to, so, as he made his way around the hole, his feet struggled to find purchase on the broken crumbled edge of the concrete that had been the stairs.
For a sickening moment one of his feet dropped lower than he had expected and his heart missed a beat before it connected with something solid again. Once his heart restarted it echoed in his ears, so fast he thought that it might give out then and there. It would be typical really: survive the earthquake and die of a heart attack afterwards.
When he finally got back onto the stairs, helped a little bit by Will on the last few steps, who grabbed him and dragged him away from the hole, he couldn’t resist looking downwards to where the broken stairs had fallen through the flights below them as well, right down to the bottom. The stairs they were on were the worst damaged, but if he had fallen it would have been a long way down.
He had never been one to get vertigo, but standing there looking down the drop that he had almost fallen down, he felt it.
“Let’s go,” Will muttered.
*
“Arthur!” A familiar voice called out and he couldn’t help but look up. “Arthur!” He looked up, his ears still muffled from the sheer contrast between this sudden silence and the cacophony that had just ended.
She was running through the streets, the same woman who had chastised him that morning.
“Arthur!” she called out again. She was looking all around on the ground, into the crashed cars, darting from one place to another, her dark hair in disarray. He had been right: she did not look like she had always done in the mornings. She was younger and her clothes were completely different. She looked like she had been going to a ball or something, a long trailing green dress and jewellery that had that fake look that meant it was definitely real.
Lance turned to him, confused.
“Do you know her?”
“Not... exactly,” Arthur admitted. “She’s this woman who stands outside our offices. Prophesying the end of the world or something.” Lance laughed bitterly.
“Looks like she was right,” he said, gesturing around them. Arthur followed the wave of his hand. Lance was right. This looked like the end of the world. There were cars on fire in the street, broken glass everywhere, people wandering the streets in shock like zombies. He saw some dark liquid spreading across the road. It might have been oil and it might have been blood. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know which.
“ARTHUR!” She was growing frantic, but then she turned and her gaze slid past him for a second before snapping back abruptly.
She was running towards him, her hair and the flimsy material of her dress drifting out behind her. She reminded him of something, a picture he had seen once, or maybe an advert. He couldn’t quite remember what, and when he tried to grasp the idea it slid past him.
She hit him like a cannon ball, her arms wrapping round him and, though he would have never said it, the action actually brought him some comfort at the same time as utterly confusing him.
“I’m fine,” Arthur said, trying to push her away. She went easily, before glaring at him.
“You idiot!” she shouted. “You complete fool. I thought perhaps, this time around, you might actually use that brain you have, but no. All you had to do was speak to Merlin and you could have stopped this here.”
“What are you talking about?” Arthur asked, although he knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer: she was clearly insane, even if she had predicted a natural disaster.
“You don’t think it’s going to stop here, do you?” she asked, looking at him like he was a complete idiot.
“It was an earthquake,” he said dismissively, “nothing more.”
“And since when was Britain on a fault line that had quakes that bad?” she asked. “It wasn’t a normal earthquake, Arthur. Which you would know if you had just spoken to Merlin.” She sighed. “It wasn’t a geographic fault line that moved, it was the boundary between this world and Avalon.”
“Avalon?” Arthur raised his eyebrows. “Look, it’s been a very strange day and a difficult experience. Is there anyone I can call for you?” She shook her head and then she seemed to notice Lance.
“Oh...” she said, and Arthur almost rejoiced at the fact she seemed to have run out of words. “It’s good to see you.”
“Nice to meet you too,” Lance replied, polite as always, Arthur noticed, even with crazy stalker women who accosted his best friend on the street. “I’m Lance.”
“Of course you are,” she said, smiling serenely, like she hadn’t just been proclaiming further doom and disaster. “I’m Morgana.” She shook his hand, smiling as he inclined his head. “It really is good to see you,” she said, almost in wonder before turning back to Arthur. “Look. It won’t matter whether you believe me or not in a minute. It’ll all be a moot point. So just listen.
“You need to get off the street. There are things coming. Things that have just broken through and they haven’t been here for so long that the sheer number of people around is going to be like an all you can eat buffet. Do you understand?”
“No...” Arthur said, “We should try and help those people,” he nodded towards the people wandering the streets and those who were on the ground.
“No. You need to get inside. Those people are already dead, Arthur. I know you want to help, I know you can’t stand back and let people get hurt, but right now you’re unarmed, you have no idea what you’re facing and you don’t have Merlin. So you are going to go somewhere I can keep you safe. That is not on the streets. Understand?”
“I am not going to hide,” Arthur snapped. “Those people need medical attention and the words of a mad woman are not going to stop me.”
“You called me that once before,” Morgana said suddenly, “and at least that time it was true. But I’m not going to let you-”
“You can’t stop me,” he said, striding past her to the street, kneeling by the first person he came to. He rested his fingers against her neck for a second; she was already dead. He went on to the next one.
“He’s right,” Lance said, smiling apologetically at her. “In these situations you have to help.”
She watched their backs for a second before sighing.
“Why do they have to be so bloody noble?”
“This one’s alive!” Arthur called, kneeling next to a teenage girl in the middle of the road, not minding that her blood was soaking into the material of his suit trousers. He tore his scarf off and pushed it into the wound in her side, trying desperately to staunch it.
There was an echoing thwum that made the glass shards on the road dance. Arthur thought, momentarily, that it was another quake and he yelled at Lance to go back under cover and keep Morgana with him. But Morgana was screaming at him, her eyes glued to the end of the street, up... up above the highest point of the buildings. Both she and Lance were running towards him now.
Feeling as though the entire world was in slow motion, Arthur turned to look where Morgana’s eyes were glued.
There was no bird that big, he knew. And the wings… Even from here he could see they were not feathered but webbed.
His hands were still pressed to the girl’s side, but he couldn’t move even if he wanted to for that moment.
Then there was a roar and a whoosh and the silhouetted not-bird let a stream of fire pour from its mouth, incinerating what remained of a bus. When the glow of the flame died down, there was no movement.
Hands grabbed him but he struggled against them.
“We’ve got to get here out of here,” Morgana said, still looking down at the girl in front of him.
“We can’t,” Arthur told her and she turned to Lance instead, looking for help there.
“Arthur... I think...” Lance said, his eyes still stuck on the beast flying towards them as another thwum came, louder now and, watching the creature, Arthur could see that it was the noise of its wing beat.
“We’ve got to go.”
“Where?” Arthur asked. “Where could we possibly go that thatthing- “he was not going to say dragon, never, “-won’t burn us to a crisp.”
He stared at them for a second before Lance took a breath in and said “Underground.” “It can’t fly down there, it won’t be able to see us and we’ll be shielded as well as we can be.”
“What about another quake?” Arthur asked. The thwum of the creature’s wing beats got closer, and Morgana began to drag on Arthur’s arm, pulling him away. He fought her but when Lance joined in, prying him away, Arthur had to stand. “We can’t just…”
“She won’t make it,” Lance said, firmly. Arthur met his eyes before allowing himself one last, sad, look at the girl bleeding at his feet.
“There won’t be another quake,” Morgana said. “They’ve already broken through. How do we get underground from here?”
“The nearest station is on the next street,” Lance said and Morgana looked around at him.
“Station?” she asked, blankly.
“Underground Station? The Tube?” he said. The wing beats were growing louder and closer and each one was followed by a roar of flame. There wasn’t enough time for explanations, so he just ran, calling for her to follow him. Arthur was hot on his heels.
The entrance to the Tube was just round the corner and they ran through the doors of the station and further in. They jumped the barriers, ignoring the people who still surrounded them and the security guard who gave a half hearted yell from where he knelt by an injured woman.
They almost fell down the escalator as they took the steps two or three at a time, down, down, past people who were walking in a daze upwards. They tried to call out warnings, but no one listened. They kept going until they were at the bottom.
“Do you think we’re far enough in?” Lance asked when they finally came to a stop. He turned to Morgana, as though she was the authority on these things.
She probably was, Arthur realised, a thought that made him more disturbed than anything else he had done all day. Even the giant fire-breathing bats - not dragons, not dragons, not dragons - had not worried him as much as the fact that they were living inside a mad woman’s fantasy.
The entire tube station shook with the force of the next wing beat and Arthur reached out to steady himself on the wall, looking over at the busker who sat opposite, staring at Arthur with wide eyes and clutching his guitar as though it was a lifeline.
Then came the now familiar roar and Arthur felt the heat of the fire. He turned towards the entrance and saw flames licking all the way down the stairs and heard the screams as the people who had been there were incinerated. His knees began to buckle and he collapsed to the floor without even noticing. In the background the sounds of screaming dissolved.
Lance was next to him and tears were rolling unashamedly down his cheeks. Morgana, on the other hand, was still standing, her face hardened to the sight of the charred walls and the stench of cooked flesh. Arthur thought she looked as though she had seen something similar before.
The busker across the way looked over there and, in some state of shock - he must have been because that was the only explanation Arthur could think of - he began to play and sing in a shaky voice.
‘And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder: One of the four beasts saying: "Come and see." And I saw. And behold, a white horse.
There's a man goin' 'round takin' names. An' he decides who to free and who to blame...’
*
“Did you see that?” Will asked from Merlin’s right. They were crouched behind a parked car... or an abandoned car, they couldn’t tell anymore.
“Of course I bloody well saw it,” he hissed back, “it flew right past us.”
“It looked like one of those things from Harry fucking Potter,” Will muttered. Merlin nodded.
“Hippogriff,” he said.
“Bless you,” Will said, running on automatic.
“No... They were called hippogriffs.”
“You don’t think...” Will said, shaking his head.
“I don’t think what?” Merlin asked, too impatient to wait for Will to decide that the sentence needed to be finished. They had just barely made it down the still crumbling staircase and outside when they had seen the hippogriff or whatever it was swoop down and pick up a man from right in front of them, its beak tearing into his throat.
It had eaten parts of him and then dropped the remains of his body, with a sickeningly wet thump, onto the ground.
“That stuff from books or films is coming to life...” Will said. He took one look at Merlin’s distinctly unimpressed expression before smiling uncertainly. “I guess not. Shit, did you see that?”
“Yes,” Merlin replied again.
“It just- That guy- It just-”
“I know,” Merlin snapped. He didn’t need to be reminded. He had never seen anyone die in his life before today, and now he was on two people and more dead bodies than he wanted to think about. “I know.”
-
Arthur wasn’t sure how long it took before he felt ready to stand again, struggling to his feet, the smell of burned bodies still flooding his nostrils.
Lance was sitting with his back against the tiles of the wall, his legs draw up to his chest and his head thrown back.
Across the way the busker had finished playing Johnny Cash and was looking over at them, furtively.
“What’s your name?” Arthur asked, more out of instinct than anything else. The likelihood was, as far as he could see, that they were going to die. It would be nice to know who he was going to die with. The man was actually little more than a boy - probably a student, Arthur decided, looking at the dirty but not very old hoodie and jeans. He was growing a scruff of beard, but did not appear able to grow a moustache because his top lip was stubbornly bald.
“I’m Jeff,” he said, laughing a little hysterically. “You?”
“Arthur,” he said, reaching over to offer his hand. The boy took it, shaking like a leaf. How he had managed to play the guitar with nerves like that, Arthur couldn’t tell. “This is Lance and that...” Arthur looked over to where Morgana stood, staring into the dark of the underground tunnel like she could see the light at the end of it. “That’s Morgana, apparently.”
“Right.” Jeff smiled before rubbing his hands self-consciously on his jeans to get rid of the worst of the sweat. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what’s going on?”
“None whatsoever,” Arthur replied. Morgana suddenly turned round, crossing over to them in quick but measured steps.
“The end of the world,” she said firmly. “The end of the human world anyway.”
“This is actually the apocalypse?” Jeff asked, sounding awed. “Horsemen and the whore of Babylon and all?” Morgana’s face creased. “You know, like in the Bible. ‘And I looked, and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him...’? Revelation?”
All three of them looked at him like he was mad and he gave an embarrassed shrug.
“Theology and Literature,” he said by way of explanation. “I study the Bible in both of them. And I always liked Revelation.”
“You,” Arthur said with great feeling, “are possibly the strangest person I have ever met.”
“Death, and Hell followed with him,” Lance echoed from next to him. He was Christian, Arthur knew, though he didn’t practise “That’s a fair description of what’s going on out there,” he said with a sigh.
“Welcome to hell,” Arthur commented.
“Dum Spiro, Spero,” Jeff muttered from over the way, earning him another strange look. “While I breathe I hope. It’s inscribed over the gateway to hell in Dante’s Inferno.”
“How... ironic,” Morgana said, smiling slightly.
“Like the Monty Python boys always say,” Arthur muttered under his breath, “always look on the bright side of death.”
“And no one expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Lance said with a smirk.
“I never should have let you watch Sliding Doors,” Arthur said, though he couldn’t bring himself to put any energy into his words.
“I think that’s the least of your worries,” Lance said.
The four of them looked up towards what had once been the entrance, at the merciless black of the walls and the floor and what had used to be people. Arthur had not known that black could be that dark. It was as though, where the fire had scorched, there was no light at all.
*
“Mum, Mum!” Merlin said down the phone, his voice as low as he could manage, “I’m fine, just stay inside, Mum. I’ll get home when I can... I’m always safe... Yes, Will’s here too. We’ll take care of each o-" Suddenly he heard nothing. He looked down at the screen and saw that his signal was gone entirely. “Shit, of all the bloody times to lose signal,” he said with feeling.
“What?” Will asked, grabbing the phone and pulling his own out of his pocket. “Crap. What are we supposed to do now?”
“To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to work anyway.” Merlin shrugged, as though he wasn’t terrified that his mother would come out looking for him. “You remember what the mobile networks were like after the seventh of July bombings. They’re probably overloaded again.”
“Probably,” Will said, but he looked around, “that wasn’t a signal problem, though.”
“No... Well, there are always dead spots.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never not got signal here before.”
“Maybe a phone mast went down in the quake,” Merlin replied, reasonably.
“Then why did the signal only cut out now... why not immediately after the earthquake?” Will asked. He sounded worried. “And what about the hippogriff thing?”
“What about it? Scientific experiment gone wrong, perhaps. New military program?” Merlin was pulling ideas out of his arse; he knew that, Will knew that. “You know what the government’s like. It was probably some genetically engineered hybrid killing machine prototype.”
“Merlin...” Will said, “I mean this in the nicest way possible, but you sound like a nutter.”
“I know, but that’s all I can come up with. What have you got?”
“Evil super-villain who thought flying monkeys were passé,” Will admitted.
“At least I went with conspiracy theory instead of comic book storyline,” Merlin said, sighing. The conversation felt forced, every joke, every insult came to their minds and their lips, but behind it there was just blind terror. They hadn’t seen a soul for the last three blocks, apart from dead bodies littering the street like crisp packets. It was a ghost town when less than an hour ago there had been people everywhere.
There was a noise behind them, like a cross between a high pitched scream and the deafening screech of a giant’s fingernails on an oversized blackboard.
They turned, as one, to see another of the hippogriffs staring them down. Its beak was open and its beady eyes were fixed upon them.
Merlin felt dizzy. This could not be happening. They were not about to be eaten by rejects from the Harry Potter CGI department.
“Merlin,” Will whispered next to him. A little late to be quiet, Merlin thought uncharitably. “Don’t look now, but I think there’s another one behind us.” Another unearthly screech proved him right. There were others, quieter, that first Merlin thought were echoes of the earlier ones, rebounding off the glass and stone of the buildings around them, but then he looked up.
They lined the tops of buildings like gargoyles. All looking down. An entire pack of hippogriffs... or a herd, whatever you were supposed to call them. Merlin remembered watching Hitchcock’s The Birds and thinking how horrible it would be to be pecked apart by all those beaks.
He looked at the razor sharp beak of the beast in front of him. If Hitchcock had seen this...
“Do you think we could run for it?” he said, already knowing the answer.
“I think we could try,” Will said, “I’m willing to give it a go. I’m not just going to stand here while they disembowel me.”
“Don’t worry,” Merlin said, trying desperately to find an escape route, but none was apparent. The things were everywhere (which explained where everyone had gone. You’d expect them to be a little full by now, but apparently not). “I’m sure they’ll knock you to the floor so that you die lying down. You might even writhe a little bit.”
“Not helpful, Merlin,” Will snapped back.
“Sorry, trying to lighten the mood,” he said. It could really do with some lightening, imminent death wasn’t doing anything to help really.
“Right, well forgive me if the idea of being ripped into shreds by creatures that don’t have the common sense to decide whether they’re birds or mammals is preventing me from laughing out loud at your sharp wit and eloquent banter.”
“Your vocabulary gets a lot broader when you’re terrified,” Merlin commented. He was quite impressed actually. He was having difficulty thinking of anything other than the words ‘help me’ in giant flashing neon letters.
“It’s a coping mechanism,” Will said, still staring at the hippogriff behind them. “If I think about words then I’m not thinking about wetting myself.”
“That might have been too much information,” Merlin said, trying to laugh and only letting out a noise that sounded like a broken radio.
“As though you have complete control of your bladder right now.”
“Of all the bodily fluids I’m most concerned with right now,” Merlin said, trying to focus on the words, like Will said. It did make it easier. If he focussed on the words then he could imagine he was in a film and this was all just made up. “I’m less concerned with urine than with blood.”
“Good point,” Will admitted. “Blood is a little more worrying... especially my own.”
“You’d never get it out of that T-shirt,” Merlin said.
“Which would be terrible. Do you think intestines stain things?”
“Probably.” Merlin paused. “Why aren’t we dead yet?” he asked. “We’ve been standing here talking about them ripping us to pieces and they haven’t even moved.”
“It’s like they’re guarding us,” Will said, turning slowly around so that he could look at every one of the creatures.
“That’s not a particularly comforting thought,” Merlin said, shivering.
“Why not? At least we’re not dead,” Will’s grin was just this side of insane.
“Yes, but if these things are just the advance guards, or the scouts,” Merlin told him, trying not to think about the words coming out of his mouth even as he said them, “then what, or who, are they waiting for?”
Will’s face drained of colour.
“The Kingpin,” he said. “The overlord, the fucking evil genius. We have to get out of here.”
“I’m in total agreement with you on that, if you could just show me where to go?” They looked at each other. “As guards, they’re really quite good.”
“Maybe we could... talk them round to our side,” Will said slowly.
“And how do you suggest we do that?”
Will began to walk towards one of the hippogriffs. When Merlin came to think of it, they didn’t look exactly like hippogriffs, the heads were wrong, and the back halves of them weren’t horses... they looked more like lions. He glanced down at the paws... yes, definitely lions.
Will bowed, shakily.
“What are you doing?”
“It worked in Harry Potter!”
“Harry Potter was a children’s book! And these aren’t hippogriffs.”
“What are they then?” Will asked, seemingly hypnotised by the monster in front of him. “Good, Buckbeak, nice Buckbeak.”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think treating them like a scared dog is really going to help. You can’t just roll a newspaper up and smack them on the nose with it,” Merlin knew he was starting to shout, but the way he saw it, the monsters already knew where they were so the situation couldn’t really get much worse.
“If they were scared dogs,” Will said, slowly creeping backwards, “then all we’d have to worry about is them peeing on the carpet.”
“You’re thinking about urine a lot at the moment, aren’t you?”
“I might need the toilet,” Will admitted. “Sadly the apocalypse doesn’t mean that I cease to function like a human being.”
“What did you say?”
“That I need to pee,” Will replied.
“No, after that, you called this...”
“The apocalypse,” Will said. “The ground shook and tore itself apart and monsters are walking the earth - sounds pretty apocalyptic. Why, what are you calling it?”
“Tuesday,” Merlin replied.
There was a moment of silence before the pair of them couldn’t help but laugh. It was ‘dear God we’re going to die’ laughter and ‘we’re not dead already’ laughter, with a decent side-helping of ‘this is really not the time or the place’ laughter. They laughed until their sides hurt, then, looking up into the amber eyes of the not hippogriffs, they burst into laughter again, until all they could do was wheeze and cry.
“We’re going to die,” Merlin said with utter certainty.
“And we’re not even going to know the name of the thing that killed us,” Will agreed. “That sucks.”
“If it helps at all,” Merlin said with a sigh as the last lingering hiccoughs of laughter left him, “I can’t think of anyone I would rather die with.”
“With every other beat I’ve got left in my heart,” Will said, as solemnly as he could manage, “I’d rather be damned with you.”
“Meatloaf?” Merlin asked, incredulous. “That had better not be the last thing I hear you say.”
“It’s a good song,” Will said, defensively.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I want it to be the last thing I hear on this earth.”
“Then what do you want to hear? I can give you some Queen if you want, or maybe some Robbie Williams. I even know a Take That song, but if we get out of this alive I will deny all knowledge of ever having admitted that.”
“Hell no!” Merlin snapped. “If I had to hear Take That right now, I think I’d kill myself. It would just be adding insult to injury.”
“Black Sabbath?”
“I might be able to live with-”
“Or Metallica,” Will suggested with a smirk, “Some Kind of Monster.” Merlin was about to reply about how choosing songs that matched the situation like that was hardly better than bad puns, but he caught sight of something at the edge of his vision - a flash of pure white.
He turned, trying to move slowly, in case it was another passer-by and he alerted the beasts to their presence.
It wasn’t a person.
The first thing he thought when he caught sight of it was ‘what is a horse doing wandering around London?’ It wasn’t the strangest thing he had seen all day, but it was definitely high up there. It had no saddle on either, he noticed. There were no stables or circuses anywhere nearby, as far as he knew. Perhaps it had been pulling one of those old fashioned carriages that tourists hired when the earthquake hit.
But it did not quite look like any horse he had ever seen before. It was pure white. There was no way even the most dedicated horseman would call it grey, and it almost seemed to glow.
It darted through the abandoned cars and rubble gracefully, leaping over bodies and turning so swiftly that Merlin was reminded of the horses of his imagination he had dreamed about when he was younger. The horses that the great heroes of his favourite novels had ridden on: Glorfindel on Asfaloth, Aragorn and Roheryn. If ever there had been a horse capable of playing Shadowfax, he thought, staring in awe, this was it.
That was when he noticed the horn on its forehead, twisted and beautiful, jutting out like it was completely natural as the forelock of the horse parted around it.
“Is that...?” Will asked, his voice awed.
“Well, we’ve got non-hippogriff hippogriffs,” Merlin said, not tearing his eyes away from it, “I think we’ve got to assume that it is...”
“This day keeps getting weirder,” Will’s voice was hardly louder than a breath of air.
“It’s beautiful,” Merlin said, not bothering to hide his awe.
“Do you think that’s what they’ve been waiting for?” Will asked, suddenly. “I mean, I know unicorns are supposed to be pure and wonderful and everything, but it can’t be a coincidence.”
The unicorn whinnied then, stopping where it was, just outside the circle of the monsters and tossing its head. It looked like a command to come.
“I don’t think it wants us hurt,” Merlin said, not having any idea why he thought that, but knowing that it was true anyway. “I think it wants us to go with it.”
“Do you think it’s trying to save us?”
“I think our chances against one unicorn are better than our chances against an army of whatever these are,” Merlin replied.
“That doesn’t stop the fact that, if that isn’t what these things are waiting for, then we still have to get past them to follow it.”
Merlin looked around. The creatures around them were not moving still, in fact, he couldn’t even see the expansion of their ribcages as they breathed. Before, every now and then, one of them had tossed their head, or ducked it down to look at the pair of them from a new angle, but now they stood completely still, as though frozen.
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.” He edged forwards, toward the closest monster and, tentatively, reached out a hand. “I think-” he patted it on the nose, very, very gently; the creature did not even blink, “they’re frozen.”
“It can do that?”
“It must be able to,” Merlin said with a shrug, pulling back his arm as quickly as he could. The beasts might be frozen now, but there was no telling when they would move again. “We should move quickly.”
“What if we’re going somewhere worse?”
“I think our choice is certain death here, or following the unicorn,” Merlin pointed out. Will didn’t look happy, but nodded and the two of them slipped between the flanks of the creatures, so close they could feel their body heat, until they got to the unicorn. As Merlin reached it, the unicorn bowed down, bending one of its front legs.
“Wow,” Will said.
“Thank you for helping us,” Merlin said, trying to fill in the silence. The unicorn gave no response except for moving so that its mane brushed their hands. “I think it wants us to hold on.”
They tangled their hands in its mane, gingerly, trying not to pull and hoping that this would not turn out to be a trick of any kind. Then, content that they were following it, the unicorn began to trot off.
Merlin could not resist glancing backwards to where they had been standing before, where the creatures still stood frozen, more like gargoyles than ever. He looked at their beaks and their claws and shivered in relief.
Anything had to be better than that.
*
They had found a couple of bottles of cheap white cider, the sort you got from a supermarket in the huge plastic bottles, lying under one of the benches and Arthur, in a strange moment, had proposed a toast to being there at the end of it all.
It was easier, somehow, with the alcohol. Easier to forget that beyond the wall they leant against were the bodies and the ruins of lives that they had never known anything about. Easier to think ‘we might die’ and let it change to ‘we will die’ with the buzz and fuzz of intoxication running through them.
“This stuff is foul,” Morgana commented, her voice still somehow perfectly enunciated and accented even after having swallowed cider from a two litre plastic bottle. Lance made a face as he downed his own swig.
“It really is,” he agreed, “I haven’t drunk this since I was in university, and then I only drank it when I was too drunk to notice the taste.”
“Gets me through revision,” Jeff said with a smirk, grabbing the bottle with both hands as it drifted his way. He gulped the foul liquid down with enthusiasm.
“You revise drunk...”
“Not anymore,” the student replied, smiling.
“No,” Arthur agreed, “I guess not.” As he took the bottle back again, Jeff reached for his guitar once more and began to pluck out notes quite happily.
‘Words are flying out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe. Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind, possessing and caressing me... Jai Guru Deva... Ooooommmmmm,
“Nothing’s gonna change my world,” Lance murmured. “Nothing’s gonna change my world.”
Determinedly not thinking about it, Arthur raised the bottle above his head and swallowed as much of it as he could without choking. He kept his eyes wide open as he looked up into the electric lights, hoping that they would burn away the image of that girl on the street and those people they had passed in the entrance.
“Nothing’s gonna change my world...”
‘Nothing’s gonna change my world.’
*
Chapter 2: Following the Unicorn Takes You to Strange Places
Chapter 1 - The Earth was Ripped Asunder
Merlin wasn’t sure what he thought when it happened, even immediately afterwards he couldn’t remember. He supposed, later, that he must have been scared. Perhaps he prayed or maybe he was just wondering what the hell was going on.
Will was on the phone, apparently rebounded from the gay chat line because he had rung up the next number on one of his little cards, and things seemed to be going more smoothly this time. Will laughed at something the girl said - apparently he had found someone who was more amused than upset by his antics, and then all Merlin felt was the earth shaking.
Living in Britain wasn’t really conducive to taking earthquakes in stride. He remembered the last one he recalled in the country when the news had been filled with people whose garden gnomes had broken. He himself hadn’t even felt it.
This was not like that one. He had seen the pictures on the news of the big ones far away, on the other side of the world, everyone had - roads split apart, whole bridges and buildings collapsing into themselves just because of a geophysical phenomenon. He had never really thought what it must be like to be caught up in one, though.
He worked on one of the higher floors of the office block and the whole room felt like it was made of jelly at first, quivering for a few moments before quivering turned to shuddering, turned to full on rocking and careening from side to side. Computers fell onto the floor, sparks flew. People screamed and it felt as if a giant had lifted the building up and decided to play catch with it.
He remembered everything that happened; he just couldn’t remember what he was thinking.
He remembered, in the middle of it all, one of the windows breaking into shattering pieces that bounced across the floor. He saw another of the employees - hell, he had never even learnt her name, just knew her by her face. She wasn’t even someone who he nodded at in corridors, not even a passing acquaintance - stumble and catch, reaching for some sort of hand grasp.
She did not find it and he watched her fall, from under his desk (and when he had got there, Merlin had no idea). It was not something spectacular, there was nothing dramatic about it. She simply stepped backwards through where there should have been glass and then she had found nothing beneath her feet. There was a moment when he met her eyes and he saw the sheer terror there just before she fell out of sight.
He did not even know her name and he was the only person she shared that last moment with.
When he thought about it afterwards he would shudder at the very idea that he had watched that happen; but right then he didn’t feel pity, fear or even panic. He just watched it happen.
Then, the jerking of the floor turned to shudders, which turned to quivers and shakes until it wasn’t the world that was shaking - it was him.
The first thing he heard was Will’s voice, strangely calm in the midst of his own terror. The first thing he thought was that Will was somehow still steady and that seemed right somehow.
“Are you okay?” Will asked and it took Merlin peering out from under his desk at the horror around them before he realised Will was still on the phone. He was talking to the poor chat line girl at the other end.
Perhaps it was hysteria, but Merlin had to laugh at that; he had to laugh instead of cry because something had happened, he knew that. You didn’t get earthquakes that big in Britain, not for no reason.
“Okay, so, no injuries. That’s good. I don’t have any either... Now, tell me your name.
“I know you’re not supposed to, but I think the world’s falling apart and I swear I am not going to hurt you.” Will sounded more serious than Merlin had ever heard him. “Look. I’m Will, if that helps, William Gordon. That’s my real name. I was born on the fourteenth of September. I like the colour blue and the Die Hard films.
“It’s nice to talk to you Gwen...” Merlin watched as Will gave a sudden grin.
“A cup of tea sounds like a fucking brilliant idea,” Will agreed and when he caught Merlin’s eye neither of them could help their smiles.
That was when the screaming began again, cutting into the almost quiet brutally. One thing led to another and then another, soon the entire office was awash with noise, crying, whimpering, groans of pain.
“He’s dead...” a hollow voice Merlin might have recognised said to his left. “Shit... he’s dead.”
“Where’s that blood coming from?”
“My work... My computer...”
He crawled over to where Will was crouched and answered the unspoken question of his raised eyebrows.
“I’m fine.”
Will’s free hand found his arm and squeezed gently, it gave them both a little reassurance that, despite the shaking and the feeling that nothing was quite real, they were both solid and fine.
“Do you think we should leave the building?” Merlin asked. Will looked around at the chaos and shrugged helplessly.
“Gwen... it’s just a teapot,” Will told the girl. Merlin could hear the laughter from the other end of the line, so incongruous with everything around him. “Well, can you find a mug that isn’t broken? You can make tea in mugs, you know.” Merlin could hear the outrage, even muffled as it was.
“I know it impairs the flavour. Honestly, I don’t think that really matters right now.”
“Can’t let standards slip,” Merlin said, shaking his head. “Where’s your wartime spirit, Will?” His friend chuckled.
“Just a friend of mine - he agrees with you about the tea.” Will looked up and smiled at Merlin.
“She says you’re clearly a highly educated person. You can tell she hasn’t met you.”
The normality of this conversation was, somehow, more hard-hitting than the terror around them.
“Look, Gwen,” Will said, struggling to his feet as Merlin stood up as well. It felt as though he had been on a ship for hours, the way his legs wanted to go in different directions, the way they couldn’t decide which direction was horizontal. “Do you have anyone you need to call?”
“I’m sorry... No, no, I’m fine. The only person I’d call is standing right next to me.” Merlin ignored that comment out of a combination of embarrassment and sorrow. Will’s family was dead, he knew that, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that you talked about. He never knew what to say when Will brought it up and if he said anything it led to awkward conversation.
“Okay, then why don’t you just stay on the line - I’m paying for this call after all,” Will said, and Merlin winced as he thought of the bill. It was sure to be premium. “No, of course I don’t mind. I mean, someone’s got to make sure you don’t start screaming at the tea bags and I need someone to keep me from going completely mad... oh him? He’s never been any good at that before. Don’t see why he would start now.” Merlin was about to glare at him when he caught sight of a foot, sticking out from beside his desk.
He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to know, but he couldn’t stop himself from taking that step forward and looking round the corner.
Five seconds later he threw up.
*
Arthur and Lance were on their way to a meeting at a client’s office, so they were on the streets when everything went to hell.
The first shake was accompanied by every car alarm in the vicinity going off in a chorus of clashing noises. High, trilling rings and on off again blares of noise.
Then there were the screeches of tires, the crash of metal against metal and the screaming.
The pair of them ducked into the entrance of a building, clamped their hands over their ears and crouched together.
If it had been any other situation, it would have been awkward that Arthur’s face was against Lance’s neck and Lance’s arm was over his back, but in that moment it was just good to know that they weren’t alone.
It’s just an earthquake, Arthur told himself, over and over again, like it was nothing to be worried about. But his heart was in his throat and he knew that he would have bruises over his ears where his fingers were clenching into his scalp. Only an earthquake. Except it felt like the earth was exploding around him or tearing itself apart. Lance was muttering swear words over and over again, interspersed with ‘we should do something.’ But there was nothing they could do except stay there, clinging to the ground until the world righted itself - sort of.
Arthur didn’t realise, as he rose on unsteady feet and looked around at car crashes and shell-shocked people, that the world would never right itself completely again.
*
The journey down the stairs to the car park was hesitant. Both Merlin and Will were worried that another earthquake - an aftershock perhaps - would come and they would be clinging to the handrail in a hopeless attempt not to fall and break their necks. They moved slowly, gingerly edging down step after step.
“We could be fired for this, you realise,” Merlin commented part way down, the amusement evident in his tone.
“I doubt anyone will even notice that we’re missing,” Will said. “And if they do, I think this might be one of those days when you don’t get fired for leaving early.”
“Where are we even going to go?” Merlin asked again. The stairway was at least quiet. Because of the lifts people seldom used the staircases in the building and the heavy fire doors on every floor kept the sound out easily.
It also didn’t have any windows, which meant no broken glass and no views of the devastated city.
Of course, it had not completely avoided the effects of the quake. They had managed four flights when they came to a part that had been broken badly by the quake. An entire section of the stairs had broken away, falling down, like Godzilla had taken a bite out of it.
“Why...” Will said, edging his way around the hole, “did... no one put a...railing... on this side?” he asked. Merlin shook his head, waiting until Will was safely on the other side.
The wall was painted breeze blocks and there was little to hold on to, so, as he made his way around the hole, his feet struggled to find purchase on the broken crumbled edge of the concrete that had been the stairs.
For a sickening moment one of his feet dropped lower than he had expected and his heart missed a beat before it connected with something solid again. Once his heart restarted it echoed in his ears, so fast he thought that it might give out then and there. It would be typical really: survive the earthquake and die of a heart attack afterwards.
When he finally got back onto the stairs, helped a little bit by Will on the last few steps, who grabbed him and dragged him away from the hole, he couldn’t resist looking downwards to where the broken stairs had fallen through the flights below them as well, right down to the bottom. The stairs they were on were the worst damaged, but if he had fallen it would have been a long way down.
He had never been one to get vertigo, but standing there looking down the drop that he had almost fallen down, he felt it.
“Let’s go,” Will muttered.
*
“Arthur!” A familiar voice called out and he couldn’t help but look up. “Arthur!” He looked up, his ears still muffled from the sheer contrast between this sudden silence and the cacophony that had just ended.
She was running through the streets, the same woman who had chastised him that morning.
“Arthur!” she called out again. She was looking all around on the ground, into the crashed cars, darting from one place to another, her dark hair in disarray. He had been right: she did not look like she had always done in the mornings. She was younger and her clothes were completely different. She looked like she had been going to a ball or something, a long trailing green dress and jewellery that had that fake look that meant it was definitely real.
Lance turned to him, confused.
“Do you know her?”
“Not... exactly,” Arthur admitted. “She’s this woman who stands outside our offices. Prophesying the end of the world or something.” Lance laughed bitterly.
“Looks like she was right,” he said, gesturing around them. Arthur followed the wave of his hand. Lance was right. This looked like the end of the world. There were cars on fire in the street, broken glass everywhere, people wandering the streets in shock like zombies. He saw some dark liquid spreading across the road. It might have been oil and it might have been blood. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know which.
“ARTHUR!” She was growing frantic, but then she turned and her gaze slid past him for a second before snapping back abruptly.
She was running towards him, her hair and the flimsy material of her dress drifting out behind her. She reminded him of something, a picture he had seen once, or maybe an advert. He couldn’t quite remember what, and when he tried to grasp the idea it slid past him.
She hit him like a cannon ball, her arms wrapping round him and, though he would have never said it, the action actually brought him some comfort at the same time as utterly confusing him.
“I’m fine,” Arthur said, trying to push her away. She went easily, before glaring at him.
“You idiot!” she shouted. “You complete fool. I thought perhaps, this time around, you might actually use that brain you have, but no. All you had to do was speak to Merlin and you could have stopped this here.”
“What are you talking about?” Arthur asked, although he knew he wouldn’t get a straight answer: she was clearly insane, even if she had predicted a natural disaster.
“You don’t think it’s going to stop here, do you?” she asked, looking at him like he was a complete idiot.
“It was an earthquake,” he said dismissively, “nothing more.”
“And since when was Britain on a fault line that had quakes that bad?” she asked. “It wasn’t a normal earthquake, Arthur. Which you would know if you had just spoken to Merlin.” She sighed. “It wasn’t a geographic fault line that moved, it was the boundary between this world and Avalon.”
“Avalon?” Arthur raised his eyebrows. “Look, it’s been a very strange day and a difficult experience. Is there anyone I can call for you?” She shook her head and then she seemed to notice Lance.
“Oh...” she said, and Arthur almost rejoiced at the fact she seemed to have run out of words. “It’s good to see you.”
“Nice to meet you too,” Lance replied, polite as always, Arthur noticed, even with crazy stalker women who accosted his best friend on the street. “I’m Lance.”
“Of course you are,” she said, smiling serenely, like she hadn’t just been proclaiming further doom and disaster. “I’m Morgana.” She shook his hand, smiling as he inclined his head. “It really is good to see you,” she said, almost in wonder before turning back to Arthur. “Look. It won’t matter whether you believe me or not in a minute. It’ll all be a moot point. So just listen.
“You need to get off the street. There are things coming. Things that have just broken through and they haven’t been here for so long that the sheer number of people around is going to be like an all you can eat buffet. Do you understand?”
“No...” Arthur said, “We should try and help those people,” he nodded towards the people wandering the streets and those who were on the ground.
“No. You need to get inside. Those people are already dead, Arthur. I know you want to help, I know you can’t stand back and let people get hurt, but right now you’re unarmed, you have no idea what you’re facing and you don’t have Merlin. So you are going to go somewhere I can keep you safe. That is not on the streets. Understand?”
“I am not going to hide,” Arthur snapped. “Those people need medical attention and the words of a mad woman are not going to stop me.”
“You called me that once before,” Morgana said suddenly, “and at least that time it was true. But I’m not going to let you-”
“You can’t stop me,” he said, striding past her to the street, kneeling by the first person he came to. He rested his fingers against her neck for a second; she was already dead. He went on to the next one.
“He’s right,” Lance said, smiling apologetically at her. “In these situations you have to help.”
She watched their backs for a second before sighing.
“Why do they have to be so bloody noble?”
“This one’s alive!” Arthur called, kneeling next to a teenage girl in the middle of the road, not minding that her blood was soaking into the material of his suit trousers. He tore his scarf off and pushed it into the wound in her side, trying desperately to staunch it.
There was an echoing thwum that made the glass shards on the road dance. Arthur thought, momentarily, that it was another quake and he yelled at Lance to go back under cover and keep Morgana with him. But Morgana was screaming at him, her eyes glued to the end of the street, up... up above the highest point of the buildings. Both she and Lance were running towards him now.
Feeling as though the entire world was in slow motion, Arthur turned to look where Morgana’s eyes were glued.
There was no bird that big, he knew. And the wings… Even from here he could see they were not feathered but webbed.
His hands were still pressed to the girl’s side, but he couldn’t move even if he wanted to for that moment.
Then there was a roar and a whoosh and the silhouetted not-bird let a stream of fire pour from its mouth, incinerating what remained of a bus. When the glow of the flame died down, there was no movement.
Hands grabbed him but he struggled against them.
“We’ve got to get here out of here,” Morgana said, still looking down at the girl in front of him.
“We can’t,” Arthur told her and she turned to Lance instead, looking for help there.
“Arthur... I think...” Lance said, his eyes still stuck on the beast flying towards them as another thwum came, louder now and, watching the creature, Arthur could see that it was the noise of its wing beat.
“We’ve got to go.”
“Where?” Arthur asked. “Where could we possibly go that thatthing- “he was not going to say dragon, never, “-won’t burn us to a crisp.”
He stared at them for a second before Lance took a breath in and said “Underground.” “It can’t fly down there, it won’t be able to see us and we’ll be shielded as well as we can be.”
“What about another quake?” Arthur asked. The thwum of the creature’s wing beats got closer, and Morgana began to drag on Arthur’s arm, pulling him away. He fought her but when Lance joined in, prying him away, Arthur had to stand. “We can’t just…”
“She won’t make it,” Lance said, firmly. Arthur met his eyes before allowing himself one last, sad, look at the girl bleeding at his feet.
“There won’t be another quake,” Morgana said. “They’ve already broken through. How do we get underground from here?”
“The nearest station is on the next street,” Lance said and Morgana looked around at him.
“Station?” she asked, blankly.
“Underground Station? The Tube?” he said. The wing beats were growing louder and closer and each one was followed by a roar of flame. There wasn’t enough time for explanations, so he just ran, calling for her to follow him. Arthur was hot on his heels.
The entrance to the Tube was just round the corner and they ran through the doors of the station and further in. They jumped the barriers, ignoring the people who still surrounded them and the security guard who gave a half hearted yell from where he knelt by an injured woman.
They almost fell down the escalator as they took the steps two or three at a time, down, down, past people who were walking in a daze upwards. They tried to call out warnings, but no one listened. They kept going until they were at the bottom.
“Do you think we’re far enough in?” Lance asked when they finally came to a stop. He turned to Morgana, as though she was the authority on these things.
She probably was, Arthur realised, a thought that made him more disturbed than anything else he had done all day. Even the giant fire-breathing bats - not dragons, not dragons, not dragons - had not worried him as much as the fact that they were living inside a mad woman’s fantasy.
The entire tube station shook with the force of the next wing beat and Arthur reached out to steady himself on the wall, looking over at the busker who sat opposite, staring at Arthur with wide eyes and clutching his guitar as though it was a lifeline.
Then came the now familiar roar and Arthur felt the heat of the fire. He turned towards the entrance and saw flames licking all the way down the stairs and heard the screams as the people who had been there were incinerated. His knees began to buckle and he collapsed to the floor without even noticing. In the background the sounds of screaming dissolved.
Lance was next to him and tears were rolling unashamedly down his cheeks. Morgana, on the other hand, was still standing, her face hardened to the sight of the charred walls and the stench of cooked flesh. Arthur thought she looked as though she had seen something similar before.
The busker across the way looked over there and, in some state of shock - he must have been because that was the only explanation Arthur could think of - he began to play and sing in a shaky voice.
‘And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder: One of the four beasts saying: "Come and see." And I saw. And behold, a white horse.
There's a man goin' 'round takin' names. An' he decides who to free and who to blame...’
*
“Did you see that?” Will asked from Merlin’s right. They were crouched behind a parked car... or an abandoned car, they couldn’t tell anymore.
“Of course I bloody well saw it,” he hissed back, “it flew right past us.”
“It looked like one of those things from Harry fucking Potter,” Will muttered. Merlin nodded.
“Hippogriff,” he said.
“Bless you,” Will said, running on automatic.
“No... They were called hippogriffs.”
“You don’t think...” Will said, shaking his head.
“I don’t think what?” Merlin asked, too impatient to wait for Will to decide that the sentence needed to be finished. They had just barely made it down the still crumbling staircase and outside when they had seen the hippogriff or whatever it was swoop down and pick up a man from right in front of them, its beak tearing into his throat.
It had eaten parts of him and then dropped the remains of his body, with a sickeningly wet thump, onto the ground.
“That stuff from books or films is coming to life...” Will said. He took one look at Merlin’s distinctly unimpressed expression before smiling uncertainly. “I guess not. Shit, did you see that?”
“Yes,” Merlin replied again.
“It just- That guy- It just-”
“I know,” Merlin snapped. He didn’t need to be reminded. He had never seen anyone die in his life before today, and now he was on two people and more dead bodies than he wanted to think about. “I know.”
-
Arthur wasn’t sure how long it took before he felt ready to stand again, struggling to his feet, the smell of burned bodies still flooding his nostrils.
Lance was sitting with his back against the tiles of the wall, his legs draw up to his chest and his head thrown back.
Across the way the busker had finished playing Johnny Cash and was looking over at them, furtively.
“What’s your name?” Arthur asked, more out of instinct than anything else. The likelihood was, as far as he could see, that they were going to die. It would be nice to know who he was going to die with. The man was actually little more than a boy - probably a student, Arthur decided, looking at the dirty but not very old hoodie and jeans. He was growing a scruff of beard, but did not appear able to grow a moustache because his top lip was stubbornly bald.
“I’m Jeff,” he said, laughing a little hysterically. “You?”
“Arthur,” he said, reaching over to offer his hand. The boy took it, shaking like a leaf. How he had managed to play the guitar with nerves like that, Arthur couldn’t tell. “This is Lance and that...” Arthur looked over to where Morgana stood, staring into the dark of the underground tunnel like she could see the light at the end of it. “That’s Morgana, apparently.”
“Right.” Jeff smiled before rubbing his hands self-consciously on his jeans to get rid of the worst of the sweat. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what’s going on?”
“None whatsoever,” Arthur replied. Morgana suddenly turned round, crossing over to them in quick but measured steps.
“The end of the world,” she said firmly. “The end of the human world anyway.”
“This is actually the apocalypse?” Jeff asked, sounding awed. “Horsemen and the whore of Babylon and all?” Morgana’s face creased. “You know, like in the Bible. ‘And I looked, and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him...’? Revelation?”
All three of them looked at him like he was mad and he gave an embarrassed shrug.
“Theology and Literature,” he said by way of explanation. “I study the Bible in both of them. And I always liked Revelation.”
“You,” Arthur said with great feeling, “are possibly the strangest person I have ever met.”
“Death, and Hell followed with him,” Lance echoed from next to him. He was Christian, Arthur knew, though he didn’t practise “That’s a fair description of what’s going on out there,” he said with a sigh.
“Welcome to hell,” Arthur commented.
“Dum Spiro, Spero,” Jeff muttered from over the way, earning him another strange look. “While I breathe I hope. It’s inscribed over the gateway to hell in Dante’s Inferno.”
“How... ironic,” Morgana said, smiling slightly.
“Like the Monty Python boys always say,” Arthur muttered under his breath, “always look on the bright side of death.”
“And no one expects the Spanish Inquisition,” Lance said with a smirk.
“I never should have let you watch Sliding Doors,” Arthur said, though he couldn’t bring himself to put any energy into his words.
“I think that’s the least of your worries,” Lance said.
The four of them looked up towards what had once been the entrance, at the merciless black of the walls and the floor and what had used to be people. Arthur had not known that black could be that dark. It was as though, where the fire had scorched, there was no light at all.
*
“Mum, Mum!” Merlin said down the phone, his voice as low as he could manage, “I’m fine, just stay inside, Mum. I’ll get home when I can... I’m always safe... Yes, Will’s here too. We’ll take care of each o-" Suddenly he heard nothing. He looked down at the screen and saw that his signal was gone entirely. “Shit, of all the bloody times to lose signal,” he said with feeling.
“What?” Will asked, grabbing the phone and pulling his own out of his pocket. “Crap. What are we supposed to do now?”
“To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to work anyway.” Merlin shrugged, as though he wasn’t terrified that his mother would come out looking for him. “You remember what the mobile networks were like after the seventh of July bombings. They’re probably overloaded again.”
“Probably,” Will said, but he looked around, “that wasn’t a signal problem, though.”
“No... Well, there are always dead spots.”
“Yeah, but I’ve never not got signal here before.”
“Maybe a phone mast went down in the quake,” Merlin replied, reasonably.
“Then why did the signal only cut out now... why not immediately after the earthquake?” Will asked. He sounded worried. “And what about the hippogriff thing?”
“What about it? Scientific experiment gone wrong, perhaps. New military program?” Merlin was pulling ideas out of his arse; he knew that, Will knew that. “You know what the government’s like. It was probably some genetically engineered hybrid killing machine prototype.”
“Merlin...” Will said, “I mean this in the nicest way possible, but you sound like a nutter.”
“I know, but that’s all I can come up with. What have you got?”
“Evil super-villain who thought flying monkeys were passé,” Will admitted.
“At least I went with conspiracy theory instead of comic book storyline,” Merlin said, sighing. The conversation felt forced, every joke, every insult came to their minds and their lips, but behind it there was just blind terror. They hadn’t seen a soul for the last three blocks, apart from dead bodies littering the street like crisp packets. It was a ghost town when less than an hour ago there had been people everywhere.
There was a noise behind them, like a cross between a high pitched scream and the deafening screech of a giant’s fingernails on an oversized blackboard.
They turned, as one, to see another of the hippogriffs staring them down. Its beak was open and its beady eyes were fixed upon them.
Merlin felt dizzy. This could not be happening. They were not about to be eaten by rejects from the Harry Potter CGI department.
“Merlin,” Will whispered next to him. A little late to be quiet, Merlin thought uncharitably. “Don’t look now, but I think there’s another one behind us.” Another unearthly screech proved him right. There were others, quieter, that first Merlin thought were echoes of the earlier ones, rebounding off the glass and stone of the buildings around them, but then he looked up.
They lined the tops of buildings like gargoyles. All looking down. An entire pack of hippogriffs... or a herd, whatever you were supposed to call them. Merlin remembered watching Hitchcock’s The Birds and thinking how horrible it would be to be pecked apart by all those beaks.
He looked at the razor sharp beak of the beast in front of him. If Hitchcock had seen this...
“Do you think we could run for it?” he said, already knowing the answer.
“I think we could try,” Will said, “I’m willing to give it a go. I’m not just going to stand here while they disembowel me.”
“Don’t worry,” Merlin said, trying desperately to find an escape route, but none was apparent. The things were everywhere (which explained where everyone had gone. You’d expect them to be a little full by now, but apparently not). “I’m sure they’ll knock you to the floor so that you die lying down. You might even writhe a little bit.”
“Not helpful, Merlin,” Will snapped back.
“Sorry, trying to lighten the mood,” he said. It could really do with some lightening, imminent death wasn’t doing anything to help really.
“Right, well forgive me if the idea of being ripped into shreds by creatures that don’t have the common sense to decide whether they’re birds or mammals is preventing me from laughing out loud at your sharp wit and eloquent banter.”
“Your vocabulary gets a lot broader when you’re terrified,” Merlin commented. He was quite impressed actually. He was having difficulty thinking of anything other than the words ‘help me’ in giant flashing neon letters.
“It’s a coping mechanism,” Will said, still staring at the hippogriff behind them. “If I think about words then I’m not thinking about wetting myself.”
“That might have been too much information,” Merlin said, trying to laugh and only letting out a noise that sounded like a broken radio.
“As though you have complete control of your bladder right now.”
“Of all the bodily fluids I’m most concerned with right now,” Merlin said, trying to focus on the words, like Will said. It did make it easier. If he focussed on the words then he could imagine he was in a film and this was all just made up. “I’m less concerned with urine than with blood.”
“Good point,” Will admitted. “Blood is a little more worrying... especially my own.”
“You’d never get it out of that T-shirt,” Merlin said.
“Which would be terrible. Do you think intestines stain things?”
“Probably.” Merlin paused. “Why aren’t we dead yet?” he asked. “We’ve been standing here talking about them ripping us to pieces and they haven’t even moved.”
“It’s like they’re guarding us,” Will said, turning slowly around so that he could look at every one of the creatures.
“That’s not a particularly comforting thought,” Merlin said, shivering.
“Why not? At least we’re not dead,” Will’s grin was just this side of insane.
“Yes, but if these things are just the advance guards, or the scouts,” Merlin told him, trying not to think about the words coming out of his mouth even as he said them, “then what, or who, are they waiting for?”
Will’s face drained of colour.
“The Kingpin,” he said. “The overlord, the fucking evil genius. We have to get out of here.”
“I’m in total agreement with you on that, if you could just show me where to go?” They looked at each other. “As guards, they’re really quite good.”
“Maybe we could... talk them round to our side,” Will said slowly.
“And how do you suggest we do that?”
Will began to walk towards one of the hippogriffs. When Merlin came to think of it, they didn’t look exactly like hippogriffs, the heads were wrong, and the back halves of them weren’t horses... they looked more like lions. He glanced down at the paws... yes, definitely lions.
Will bowed, shakily.
“What are you doing?”
“It worked in Harry Potter!”
“Harry Potter was a children’s book! And these aren’t hippogriffs.”
“What are they then?” Will asked, seemingly hypnotised by the monster in front of him. “Good, Buckbeak, nice Buckbeak.”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think treating them like a scared dog is really going to help. You can’t just roll a newspaper up and smack them on the nose with it,” Merlin knew he was starting to shout, but the way he saw it, the monsters already knew where they were so the situation couldn’t really get much worse.
“If they were scared dogs,” Will said, slowly creeping backwards, “then all we’d have to worry about is them peeing on the carpet.”
“You’re thinking about urine a lot at the moment, aren’t you?”
“I might need the toilet,” Will admitted. “Sadly the apocalypse doesn’t mean that I cease to function like a human being.”
“What did you say?”
“That I need to pee,” Will replied.
“No, after that, you called this...”
“The apocalypse,” Will said. “The ground shook and tore itself apart and monsters are walking the earth - sounds pretty apocalyptic. Why, what are you calling it?”
“Tuesday,” Merlin replied.
There was a moment of silence before the pair of them couldn’t help but laugh. It was ‘dear God we’re going to die’ laughter and ‘we’re not dead already’ laughter, with a decent side-helping of ‘this is really not the time or the place’ laughter. They laughed until their sides hurt, then, looking up into the amber eyes of the not hippogriffs, they burst into laughter again, until all they could do was wheeze and cry.
“We’re going to die,” Merlin said with utter certainty.
“And we’re not even going to know the name of the thing that killed us,” Will agreed. “That sucks.”
“If it helps at all,” Merlin said with a sigh as the last lingering hiccoughs of laughter left him, “I can’t think of anyone I would rather die with.”
“With every other beat I’ve got left in my heart,” Will said, as solemnly as he could manage, “I’d rather be damned with you.”
“Meatloaf?” Merlin asked, incredulous. “That had better not be the last thing I hear you say.”
“It’s a good song,” Will said, defensively.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I want it to be the last thing I hear on this earth.”
“Then what do you want to hear? I can give you some Queen if you want, or maybe some Robbie Williams. I even know a Take That song, but if we get out of this alive I will deny all knowledge of ever having admitted that.”
“Hell no!” Merlin snapped. “If I had to hear Take That right now, I think I’d kill myself. It would just be adding insult to injury.”
“Black Sabbath?”
“I might be able to live with-”
“Or Metallica,” Will suggested with a smirk, “Some Kind of Monster.” Merlin was about to reply about how choosing songs that matched the situation like that was hardly better than bad puns, but he caught sight of something at the edge of his vision - a flash of pure white.
He turned, trying to move slowly, in case it was another passer-by and he alerted the beasts to their presence.
It wasn’t a person.
The first thing he thought when he caught sight of it was ‘what is a horse doing wandering around London?’ It wasn’t the strangest thing he had seen all day, but it was definitely high up there. It had no saddle on either, he noticed. There were no stables or circuses anywhere nearby, as far as he knew. Perhaps it had been pulling one of those old fashioned carriages that tourists hired when the earthquake hit.
But it did not quite look like any horse he had ever seen before. It was pure white. There was no way even the most dedicated horseman would call it grey, and it almost seemed to glow.
It darted through the abandoned cars and rubble gracefully, leaping over bodies and turning so swiftly that Merlin was reminded of the horses of his imagination he had dreamed about when he was younger. The horses that the great heroes of his favourite novels had ridden on: Glorfindel on Asfaloth, Aragorn and Roheryn. If ever there had been a horse capable of playing Shadowfax, he thought, staring in awe, this was it.
That was when he noticed the horn on its forehead, twisted and beautiful, jutting out like it was completely natural as the forelock of the horse parted around it.
“Is that...?” Will asked, his voice awed.
“Well, we’ve got non-hippogriff hippogriffs,” Merlin said, not tearing his eyes away from it, “I think we’ve got to assume that it is...”
“This day keeps getting weirder,” Will’s voice was hardly louder than a breath of air.
“It’s beautiful,” Merlin said, not bothering to hide his awe.
“Do you think that’s what they’ve been waiting for?” Will asked, suddenly. “I mean, I know unicorns are supposed to be pure and wonderful and everything, but it can’t be a coincidence.”
The unicorn whinnied then, stopping where it was, just outside the circle of the monsters and tossing its head. It looked like a command to come.
“I don’t think it wants us hurt,” Merlin said, not having any idea why he thought that, but knowing that it was true anyway. “I think it wants us to go with it.”
“Do you think it’s trying to save us?”
“I think our chances against one unicorn are better than our chances against an army of whatever these are,” Merlin replied.
“That doesn’t stop the fact that, if that isn’t what these things are waiting for, then we still have to get past them to follow it.”
Merlin looked around. The creatures around them were not moving still, in fact, he couldn’t even see the expansion of their ribcages as they breathed. Before, every now and then, one of them had tossed their head, or ducked it down to look at the pair of them from a new angle, but now they stood completely still, as though frozen.
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.” He edged forwards, toward the closest monster and, tentatively, reached out a hand. “I think-” he patted it on the nose, very, very gently; the creature did not even blink, “they’re frozen.”
“It can do that?”
“It must be able to,” Merlin said with a shrug, pulling back his arm as quickly as he could. The beasts might be frozen now, but there was no telling when they would move again. “We should move quickly.”
“What if we’re going somewhere worse?”
“I think our choice is certain death here, or following the unicorn,” Merlin pointed out. Will didn’t look happy, but nodded and the two of them slipped between the flanks of the creatures, so close they could feel their body heat, until they got to the unicorn. As Merlin reached it, the unicorn bowed down, bending one of its front legs.
“Wow,” Will said.
“Thank you for helping us,” Merlin said, trying to fill in the silence. The unicorn gave no response except for moving so that its mane brushed their hands. “I think it wants us to hold on.”
They tangled their hands in its mane, gingerly, trying not to pull and hoping that this would not turn out to be a trick of any kind. Then, content that they were following it, the unicorn began to trot off.
Merlin could not resist glancing backwards to where they had been standing before, where the creatures still stood frozen, more like gargoyles than ever. He looked at their beaks and their claws and shivered in relief.
Anything had to be better than that.
*
They had found a couple of bottles of cheap white cider, the sort you got from a supermarket in the huge plastic bottles, lying under one of the benches and Arthur, in a strange moment, had proposed a toast to being there at the end of it all.
It was easier, somehow, with the alcohol. Easier to forget that beyond the wall they leant against were the bodies and the ruins of lives that they had never known anything about. Easier to think ‘we might die’ and let it change to ‘we will die’ with the buzz and fuzz of intoxication running through them.
“This stuff is foul,” Morgana commented, her voice still somehow perfectly enunciated and accented even after having swallowed cider from a two litre plastic bottle. Lance made a face as he downed his own swig.
“It really is,” he agreed, “I haven’t drunk this since I was in university, and then I only drank it when I was too drunk to notice the taste.”
“Gets me through revision,” Jeff said with a smirk, grabbing the bottle with both hands as it drifted his way. He gulped the foul liquid down with enthusiasm.
“You revise drunk...”
“Not anymore,” the student replied, smiling.
“No,” Arthur agreed, “I guess not.” As he took the bottle back again, Jeff reached for his guitar once more and began to pluck out notes quite happily.
‘Words are flying out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe. Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind, possessing and caressing me... Jai Guru Deva... Ooooommmmmm,
“Nothing’s gonna change my world,” Lance murmured. “Nothing’s gonna change my world.”
Determinedly not thinking about it, Arthur raised the bottle above his head and swallowed as much of it as he could without choking. He kept his eyes wide open as he looked up into the electric lights, hoping that they would burn away the image of that girl on the street and those people they had passed in the entrance.
“Nothing’s gonna change my world...”
‘Nothing’s gonna change my world.’
*
Chapter 2: Following the Unicorn Takes You to Strange Places