The Beauty of Destruction Read Online Free Page A

jeans did not look soaked through. His clothes seemed to have repaired themselves as well. The last time Beth had seen him he’d been lying on the roof of his Range Rover with a broken spine. Despite everything they had been through, even his shoulder length, sandy-blond hair didn’t look all that out of place. He looked undernourished, though. His sharp cheekbones normally made his face look aristocratic; now they made it look angular and gaunt. Beth was up to her waist in water looking out at the choppy Solent. She was standing on the road that ran down the seafront in Southsea. The road had been completely swamped. She could barely make out the top of the remains of South Parade Pier, which du Bois and the strange bag lady – who had put the alien technology into Beth’s body – had destroyed when they had fought. There was no trace of the huge and very alien creature that she knew lived under the water. The one she had been inside. She could make out smoking wreckage in the water to the west of them, a sinking warship.
    Talia! Selfish bitch! But Beth knew her sister was gone. Talia was with the creature, or part of the creature. She wasn’t sure which. Her sister had joined the cult that seemed content to live as some sort of parasite within the alien. She staggered a little, trying to assimilate it all. She had been caught up in events: car chases, gunfights, alien creatures. It was only now that she had a moment to try and think it through. She tried to sit down in the water, borrowed weaponry still hanging off her on slings. Du Bois helped her back up with one arm, the other holding his carbine at port.
    ‘You want to go into shock,’ du Bois said. ‘That’s not unreasonable. The nanites, however, are trying to counteract your body’s biochemistry. You’ll be fine.’
    Nearby a woman’s body floated on top of the water, and as Beth swayed she could see the gunshot wounds that had killed her. She also saw the thing that had tried to grow and pull itself out of her flesh. Beth was vaguely aware of many phones ringing in the distance.
    ‘Did you …?’ Beth managed. Du Bois followed her eyes to the floating body.
    ‘I killed her,’ du Bois told her quietly. ‘I did her a favour.’
    For a moment Beth had a hysterical urge to attack du Bois. Punch him, kick him, claw at him. Just as soon as the feeling of hysteria came, it disappeared in a way that felt unnatural. She didn’t think that was the way that emotions, feelings, were supposed to work. Blue eyes looked down at her, du Bois’s expression grim.
    Beth was suddenly aware of just how itchy her skin was. She scratched at it.
    ‘What is that?’ she asked, the unpleasant sensation distracting her for a moment from everything else that was happening.
    ‘It’s sporing,’ du Bois told her. ‘It’s trying to make new life. The itching is your body’s defences warring with it, protecting you.’
    They heard raised voices, cries of terror and the sound of breaking glass, then an agonised scream followed by more of the same.
    ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Beth demanded. Despite all the strangeness she had seen, she was struggling to understand what was happening. She couldn’t stop anger creeping into her voice.
    ‘I don’t know. All the phones started ringing at once. If I had to guess, it was some sort of attack on the communications infrastructure.’
    ‘Portsmouth’s?’ Beth asked, almost hopefully.
    ‘The world’s,’ du Bois told her. He was no longer holding her up. He was checking all around them, his carbine at the ready.
    ‘I don’t know what that means,’ Beth said in a small voice. Du Bois saw some figures moving on the other side of the now-flooded boating pond. He sighted on them with the carbine and then lowered it. They were too far away to be any real threat. He glanced back to Beth.
    ‘Yes you do. It means that anyone who answered their phone when it rang was subject to the attack. I think they were driven