Content Warnings: cosmic horror, mass character death/extinction event, blood/gore, existentialism, mentions of pregnancy, implied post-partum depression, mentioned psychosis, mentioned suicide
I wake to the sound of my phone ringing.
There was a time when I would sleep through anything. Did sleep through anything, as my parents could attest after I slept through my brother attempting to heely down our staircase, breaking his arm and my father’s model of the HMS Abercrombie in the process. And the ensuing, prolonged argument.
After I took my job at the Agency I had this trait trained out of me, much to the ire of Romaine, who works odd hours and feels bad every time she wakes me by so much as opening our front door downstairs. But I’m sure that even if the Agency hadn’t forced me to become a light sleeper, Kiran would have – our beautiful, angelic, loud baby Kiran who mercifully seemed to be sleeping through this night, although if I allowed the phone to ring for long that would quickly become untrue.
So I went to dismiss the call, hoping against hope it was a scam or cold call, only to see Withheld Number and feel exhaustion preemptively set in. I jabbed the answer button.
“Do the words ‘maternity leave’ mean nothing to you?” I hissed through grit teeth, uncomfortably and acutely aware of the soft breathing of Romaine lying asleep beside me.
“Babylon,” says the voice on the other end, and the call cuts.
For a moment – for the last happy moment – I allow myself to believe I had misheard the caller. That it was a wrong number. That it was a sick, cruel prank, or perhaps not even that – an ignorant prank, a teenager who’d chosen a word at random to confuse their victim without knowing what it meant.
But it was not a prank, or a wrong number, and I knew that I had not misheard, and I feel the ice cold dread grasp at my chest even as I propel myself out of bed and pull on the coat I keep draped over the chair at our bedside. I shove my feet into slippers and then I am out the door. If I really need to be dressed, I have clothes in the office – I’m not sure they’ll fit my post-partum body, but then if I’m late, or even if I’m not, there’s a good chance that it won’t matter. There’s a good chance nothing is going to matter.
I drive in silence. I don’t want to listen to music or a podcast, and I’m not brave enough to turn on the radio yet. The streets are normal, riddled with potholes, lit by flickering streetlights, absent of rubble or doomsayers or corpses, and I am not comforted in the slightest.
The office, too, is quiet when I get there, and this transforms the dread from a pit into a chasm which I am teetering on the edge of. There isn’t even a security guard to verify what the machine says after it scans my I.D. card. The few people I see as I make my way to the briefing room are grey-faced and silent, wandering aimlessly as though they have become ghosts already.
I’m not the last to arrive, meaning I have to sit in silence amongst my colleagues, sat on a plastic office chair, chilled inside and out, waiting for I don’t know how long until our Director finally starts the meeting.
“We got the call at 02:21 British Standard Time from our branch in Kuwait,” she begins, and I think idly that my undergraduate roommate took a job there a few months ago. “They were asking for assistance in dealing with a local anomaly. At the time the anomaly seemed contained, so we advised they attempt to resolve the issue themselves. By the time we got similar reports from our branches in Australia, South Africa and Japan, Kuwait had already gone dark.
“The anomaly appears to strike randomly and intermittently in intervals of ten minutes. During those ten minutes, up to 95% people within an approximated twenty-mile radius suffer severe internal haemorrhaging, psychosis, and in most cases, death.
“The anomaly moves a distance of approximately 500,000 miles per instance. It then disappears, before re-emerging in a new territory ten minutes later.
“The anomaly cannot be seen, smelt, or touched. Survivors have described hearing loud caterwauling for the duration of being within effective radius of the anomaly.
“It is now 03:42 British Standard Time. The last confirmed appearance of the anomaly was three minutes ago in Indonesia. We do not know the nature of the anomaly. We do not know where the anomaly originated. We do not know what it wants, if it indeed wants anything.
Your duty as always is not to ascertain the answer to these questions. There is only one question you must concern yourself with, and it is how the anomaly can be stopped. In six minutes the anomaly will strike again. It could be in Antarctica. It could be on top of us. We must assume it will not stop until life on Earth is eliminated. Therefore we must not stop until the anomaly is eliminated. Dismissed.”
We leave the briefing room and get to work.
I’m used to working with precious little evidence, but this is bare bones even for me. We find out early on that there are meteorological discrepancies consistent with the anomaly’s appearance, but all that tells us is that the anomaly is extraterrestrial. What the Director said is all well and good, but how the hell are we meant to stop an invisible, intangible force that could be anywhere at any time, that could kill anything that so much as gets near it?
It’s been twenty minutes. Two more attacks, in Egypt, then Poland. Could be us next. Or anyone else. I think of my parents in Bhopal. Of my brother, spending his gap year travelling Vietnam. Of my wife and child asleep at home in Solihull, or at least I hope they’re still sleeping. Please, god, if we can’t stop this, just let them be sleeping when it comes.
We’re throwing ourselves at a wall. Trying every scan we know, trying them again when they come up clear. I’m reminded of the sleepless nights when I’m on baby duty, rocking Kiran for hours on end, singing the same lullabies until the words are burned into the walls of my mind and wondering how a human can be so beholden to a being that is so small. My line of work concerns anomalous beings that can achieve what many consider impossible – can rend a person across five dimensions, can make a city disappear and reappear three hundred miles south, can erase a concept as integral as breathings from the collective consciousness of those near it – but those nights were the closest I ever felt to madness in my life.
Maybe that’s why I’m relatively unaffected – I’m choking on dread, my head swimming with what-ifs and a kind of existential terror that feels too big to fit in my body – but I’m doing better than the vast majority of my colleagues. Some are still laughing, making sardonic and self-deprecating jokes until the end, but some are near catatonic in their chairs and one I’d never taken to be religious was escorted out ten minutes ago after he started ranting about the rapture. The rest, those who haven’t fallen to catatonia yet can’t find it in themselves to be jesters for the end times, have ended up sort of rallying around me. Somehow I, in my too-big overcoat and my milk and spit up stained pyjama top, have become a calming influence. And even I can’t help when we get the news that people on the South coast have started dying.
We’re desperate. The Director comes in and points at Lainy Forrest, who shot a shambling filth-mound from space last week. She announces her to be head of human-alien relations before shipping her off to Bromsgrove, which the anomaly is predicted to pass through. Lainy asks in a broken voice if she can at least take someone with her. The Director, in a rare show of her humanity, asks Lainy who she wants. Lainy looks at me. I think of my wife, and I think of our little baby girl, and I think that if this fails nothing will matter, and I say that I’ll go.
The drive is silent, mainly because we need to get there as fast as possible and I’m grimly focused on the road so I don’t focus on anything else. Lainy is still in the passenger seat, her eyes blown wide open. The car stinks of salt.
It’s as we leave Birmingham proper that I begin to feel it, a kind of pressure inside my skull, like my brain is being gently massaged by a many-membered hand just learning how to grasp. There’s a subtle ringing in my ears that’s growing as we get closer and closer to the source. Then Lainy gasps, gurgles, and slumps forward, bleeding from her eyes, ears, nose, rectum probably. Her death rattles sound a little like Kiran when she’s about to regurgitate her morning feed.
I keep driving until I reach a point when the dead bodies in the road block my car’s passage, at which point I get up and start wading through flaccid limbs and fresh blood. The ringing grows louder and louder until reaching a fever pitch and I feel my bones begin to shake and I know that something is here, that there is something that needs, needs, needs something that I cannot comprehend. The cry is agony, the cry is confusion, the cry is abject and unrelenting terror of a nature that is like nails dragging down my cheeks and needles in my eyes and pain agony pain where are you where are you and I’m standing in the bathroom with Kiran in my arms and I want to take a shower so so so bad but Kiran is wailing and Romaine is working and my slippers are soaked with blood that’s still warm with ebbing life the cry just gets louder and louder and it won’t stop and I can’t make it stop what do you want what do you want just tell me what you want there’s blood on my lips because Kiran is learning to grab and she grabbed my lip and pulled and why are you hurting me you’re my baby why are you hurting me why can’t you just shut up and I’m tired I’m so tired I want to sleep but all my pyjamas are disgusting and I don’t even care my shirt is stained with milk and spit up and my trouser cuffs are stained with blood and the cry just keeps going and going and going and going and Kiran won’t stop crying so I start singing a lullaby and I don’t stop.
I don’t stop until long after the pressure has released from my brain. Until long after the noise has died down everywhere but within my head. Until I feel the gentle probe of two somethings at the edge of my consciousness, and even in my exhaustion I know better than to consider how big these somethings might be.
The somethings speak to me. Their words taste like the time I came home from a date night to discover Kiran had come down with a cold I’d sworn earlier was colic and had thrown up no less than four times on the hapless teenage babysitter, in tears, convinced her temporary charge was dying. Through grit teeth I offer a reply, my own words tasting metallic and sour.
“It’s ok,” I say. “None of us can be perfect.”
The somethings draw away. Retreating into the atmosphere. All three of them, hand in incomprehensible hand.
The first thing they tell me when they come to pick me up is that Romaine and Kiran are alive. Awake, and Romaine is pissed mostly at the Agency and a little at me, but alive.
My parents, too, are alive. Romaine’s parents, in a retirement home in Cornwall, are not so lucky. No one has gotten in contact with my brother. They say that Vietnam wasn’t so badly affected, but Cambodia and Laos were, and I can’t bring myself to keep my fingers crossed.
The overall death toll will take days to ascertain even for the Agency, but already estimates are in the billions. This number doesn’t include those in full-blown psychosis, those who were not within range of the anomaly but nonetheless suffered psychological damage, those who believed the end of the world was upon them and committed suicide.
I think of this ruined world I am left to raise my daughter in. A world that has lost a quarter, perhaps a third, of its population in one night. A world where humanity will not forget for a long time it’s fragility, will not heal for longer from its wound. And then I think of the child retreating into the stars beyond us.
And I hope to god that, when that child grows up, it will never learn of what it has done to us.
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