The 13th Horseman - By Barry Hutchison Page 0,60

to avoid the locusts, but they were suddenly on his back, their weight forcing him to his knees.

He clawed at the locusts in his hair and saw Famine go down beneath an even bigger pile of winged bodies. War was lying on his back on the ground, punching and kicking, but the things were moving too fast, and there were too many of them, and there was nothing, Drake realised, that they could do.

Through the haze of silver he saw Pest open his mouth, but the horseman’s scream was drowned out by the din around them. Pestilence was still on his feet, but only barely. His legs were a heaving mass of silver. His leather jacket was intact, but the clothes beneath it were ragged and torn. He staggered, thrashing around, his eyes wide and panicked and darting from bug to bug to bug as they closed in on him.

“Get off!” Pest’s cry was so shrill Drake heard it even above the angry drone of the insects. “Get off, get off, get off !”

Drake saw Pest’s gloves go up in flames. The smell of burning rubber hit the back of his throat, as green gas sprayed out from Pestilence’s fingertips.

Pest stopped screaming. Even the plague seemed to quieten a fraction, as the green fog began to form shapes in the air. They were hazy and indistinct at first, but then the shapes took form. They became tiny numbers, ones and zeroes in the air, circling round and round just beyond Pestilence’s reach.

A locust whipped through the cloud of digits and instantly began to fall. From his knees, Drake followed the bug’s flight until it clattered on the ground. Another crashed down beside it. Then another, and another.

When Drake looked back up, the air was filled with ones and zeroes. They floated through the swarm, slowly at first, but gaining purpose with each bug they hit.

Another sound replaced the droning of wings. It was the sound of hail on a tin roof, a rattling drumbeat as thousands of metal insects left the sky and arrived, quite abruptly, on the ground.

The weight on Drake’s back fell away. He got to his feet just as War jumped up. The final few locusts clattered to Earth, leaving a great big question hanging in the air.

“What the bloody Hell did you do?” War asked, as he picked robo-bugs from his beard. “I mean, not that I’m complaining.”

Pest stared at his hands. He stared at them as if they were loaded weapons, and he couldn’t quite remember where the safety catch was.

“I have absolutely no idea,” he admitted quietly. “It felt like, like a cold or a flu or something.”

“It was a virus,” Drake said. Realising it even as the words left his lips. “You made a computer virus.”

“A computer virus?” Pest raised his eyebrows. “What’s one of them, then?”

But Drake was already looking up at the giant robot, and at the force field that stood between them and it. “I’ll explain later,” he said. “We have to get in there and stop that thing.”

War sheathed his sword. “Right,” he said. “But we can’t get in.”

“So, what do we do?” mumbled Famine. He held one of the locusts between finger and thumb, and gave it a cautious sniff.

“There’s got to be some way. We have to find a way in. We have to...”

Drake’s voice fell away. He knew, in that moment, what he had to do. “I’m Death,” he said, as if realising it for the first time. “I’m Death.”

“We know,” Pest said. “You’re preaching to the converted there.”

“No, I mean I’m Death.” He looked way up at the school building, shimmering faintly through the force field. “And Death can go anywhere.”

He took five purposeful paces backwards, like a footballer preparing to take a penalty kick. “Death can go anywhere,” he said, more quietly this time, and for his own benefit.

“You sure about this?” War asked him.

A large part of Drake’s brain wasn’t sure about this in the slightest, but a small part of it was more certain than it had ever been in its entire life. If he could keep that small part away from the more sceptical larger part for the next twenty seconds or so, everything would almost certainly be fine.

“I can do this,” he said. He focused his attention on the mystical barrier, and repeated the words over and over like a mantra. “Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere. Death can go anywhere.”

He kept chanting as he ran those few