The Eye of Zoltar

Battle of the Hollow Men

Since we had a decent run-up, the first three drones were easily dispatched under the front wheels, and Addie expertly sliced another in half and Wilson two more. They were surprisingly easy to bring down as they were only as strong as their clothes. They remained animated when cut in two but the top half was dangerous only if you were near, and the bottom half not dangerous at all unless they gave you a kick. All this didn’t really register, as my forward view was filled by several more Hollow Men popping into life. I was relieved to find that there didn’t seem to be so many of them and I steered into them, the lifeless husks disappearing under the heavy treads, ploughed into the mud.

‘Anything yet?’ I shouted to Perkins.

‘Not yet,’ he said, concentrating hard, fingers on temples. ‘I think they’ve been spelled in a non-standard reverse weave.’

I turned the wheel and accelerated towards a group of three and they too vanished under the front wheels.

‘They’re getting up again!’ shouted Wilson as he fought off two more drones that had popped back into life as soon as the tracks had passed over them. One even managed to climb aboard, but was soon dispatched by the Princess, who had discovered that if a drone’s right sword arm was sliced through, they had to stop and find the sword with their left before continuing.

Several more popped up and I steered towards them to help Addie slice through two in one go, then positioned the half-track to run over two more. All seemed to be going quite well, until I noticed three of them run towards the half-track and dive under the front wheels, something that suddenly made me wary.

‘This is too easy,’ shouted Addie.

‘I’m not complaining,’ yelled back Wilson, hacking a drone diagonally in half from the shoulder to the waist. I changed gear to speed up and the half-track suddenly lurched aggressively to the left. Addie was caught off balance and fell off the bonnet. I accelerated but this only made the swing to the left worse, and in a few more seconds we had spun around and were pointing not at the forest and safety, but back towards the mountain. I let in the clutch and came to a halt as Addie went on the attack and dispatched another drone that was approaching, one of ten or twelve still out there. They seemed to be walking towards us in a more relaxed manner, something I didn’t like the look of.

‘Damn,’ I said, thumping the wheel, ‘what a time to lose a track. Addie? Damage report!’

Addie ran around to the right of the vehicle while Wilson jumped off the half-track to more easily engage the closest drones. Addie had a look and then yelled:

‘Reverse, but easy does it!’

I clunked the half-track into gear and reversed slowly. The vehicle seemed to move correctly at first but then lurched in the opposite direction, and Addie yelled at me to stop.

‘Three swords jammed in the right-hand track,’ she yelled.

‘Let me see.’

I left the engine running and jumped out to have a look as Wilson and the Princess stood by defensively, ready for the slow-approaching drones. The swords were bent around the drive sprocket, jamming it completely. They weren’t the only things jammed in the tracks – there were several Hollow Men, or at least their clothes. They hadn’t really been fighting at all, just searching for a weakness, and they’d found it. The Achilles heel on a tracked vehicle is the same as its main advantage – the tracks.

I looked around. We had covered barely four hundred yards from our starting point and had not even reached the river. Tactically speaking, it was a good place to disable the half-track, and as I looked back to where we had left the jeep, six more drones popped up from the earth where they had been buried.

‘They’re cutting off the retreat,’ said Wilson.

‘Perkins,’ I shouted, ‘we’re going to need something from you pretty soon.’

‘Working on it,’ he replied.

I grabbed a spare sword from the back of the half-track and faced the drones alongside the others.

‘Hang on,’ said the Princess, ‘they’re stopping.’

She was right. We were surrounded by at least thirty Hollow Men by now and they had halted about twenty yards out and simply stood at readiness, the gap between each drone and its neighbour precisely the same.

‘They’re waiting,’ said Wilson.

‘They’re waiting because they have time in their favour,’ said Addie. ‘Look behind them.’

Behind the row of drones, other Hollow Men were popping into malevolent being all over the scrubby land and were walking towards us. Reinforcements. I looked again at the jammed track, swore to myself and switched off the half-track’s engine.

‘Okay, the half-track is dead. We need a new plan.’

Worryingly, there were no suggestions, and Perkins climbed out to join us.

‘They’re like a conjoined military mind,’ he babbled excitedly. ‘They don’t need a chain of command because each individual is a general and a soldier combined. They will study their enemy, exploit its weakness and neutralise its strengths. The reason they’ve stopped is because they don’t yet know how to neutralise our strength.’

‘We have one?’ asked Addie.

‘It’s me,’ said Perkins. ‘They know I’m reading them. And since they’ve stopped thirty or so feet away, we must assume they do have a weakness that we can exploit. Watch this.’

Perkins took three strides towards the line of drones, and they all withdrew. When he returned to us, they moved back in again.

‘They’re waiting until they have overwhelmingly superior numbers,’ said Addie as more drones arrived behind the ones already present, ‘and waiting is something we can’t do.’

‘They might be made of nothing but drip-dry terylene,’ said Wilson, ‘but if they charge at us, we won’t stand a chance.’

He was right. The drones were now three deep, and more were arriving by the second. Just then, one of the Hollow Men who was wrapped around the track tried to grab me with an empty arm attached to a muddy empty glove. We had needed a break, and it seemed we had just got one.

‘Bingo,’ I said. ‘Perkins?’

Perkins looked at where the drone’s gloved hand was still feeling around, while the rest of it was jammed in the drive sprocket. The other drone costumes wedged in the track, I noted, were devoid of life, and just empty clothes.

‘Ah,’ said Perkins, ‘wounded. Spellcode probably disrupted. Here goes.’

He held the gloved hand of the drone for a moment, then smiled.

‘Now that’s something I can use,’ he said excitedly. ‘Sickeningly simple, when you think of it. They were right to be nervous. Wait a moment.’

And he squatted down to prepare himself as the drones became five deep. There were, I reckoned, about a hundred and fifty of them fewer than ten paces away.

‘Blast,’ said Perkins.

‘What?’

‘I need twenty years of life spirit to make this spell work, and I wouldn’t have made it past sixty-nine, so I’ve not got enough years to trade – I need a dozen more to figure out a countermeasure and to clear the swords out of the half-track.’

‘Take it off me,’ I said, ‘I’ll still be only twenty-six.’

‘No,’ said Wilson, ‘use me. This way I get the Value Added Death I’ve always wanted. Dying, to protect you all. It is poetic. It is heroic. I insist.’

‘I’m only twelve,’ countered Addie, ‘so I’m the most qualified to surrender any years. I’ll be in my early twenties and I feel twice that old already. Perkins, do your thing.’

Addie’s argument seemed the most sound, and already the drones, now six deep and in excess of three hundred, were beginning to tramp the ground in readiness for attack.

‘Okay,’ said Perkins holding out his hand to Addie. ‘It’ll be at the count of three but you have to repeat the count. One.’

‘One.’ She took his hand.

There was no time for any goodbyes or pithy final speeches. I didn’t even have time to think before the Hollow Men drew their swords in unison – a sound, like the song of the Quarkbeast, that I hope never to hear again.

‘Two,’ said Perkins, eyes tightly closed, concentrating hard.

‘Two,’ said Addie.

The Hollow Men all advanced a pace. There were so many of them I could see nothing but black suits and white shirts in every direction.

‘Three,’ said Perkins.

But Addie didn’t get to say three. Wilson jumped forward with surprising agility, and knocked Addie’s and Perkins’ hands apart – and replaced Addie’s hand with his own.

‘Three,’ said Wilson, and Perkins summoned up every available second of his life and let fly. There was a high-pitched wail, a sudden bright flash and a pulse of blue light that moved rapidly outwards as Perkins and Wilson vaporised, the spell squeezing every last vestige of mortality from their souls. A moment later, Addie and I and the Princess were left standing there quite alone, the Hollow Men every bit as alive as before.

‘This isn’t good,’ I said.

The Hollow Men charged, and the three of us, our tempers up, did the same and met the first wave head-on with an angry clatter of swords. I had expected a swift end but a second later and the first rank of Hollow Men seemed to falter and collapse inwards, quickly followed by the second row and the third. Within a second or two swords were falling to the ground and Hollow Men were collapsing like deflating parachutes, their clothes quite literally falling apart around them.

Perkins did not have the power to defeat drones, but he had the power to turn the complex co-polymer in nylon stitching to its component parts: gaseous nitrogen, carbon dioxide and quite a lot of hydrogen. If I’d had nylon stitching, my clothes would have fallen off too, but I didn’t. I was sensibly dressed in cotton.

Addie and I looked around at the sections of clothing blowing in the wind. They were twitching as the three hundred or so drones attempted to make sense of their fate and develop a countermeasure of their own. But Hollow Men don’t to do magic, they are magic, and short of their acquiring several hundred seamstresses in the next ten minutes, we’d won.