Decay Inevitable (24 page)

When the door opened, and one of the cleaners came in, Will laughed in disbelief. Because it was her. It was
her
. The woman who had chased him and Elisabeth from her house all those days ago in London.

“Cup of tea, mate?” she asked, and in doing so, a slick of drool flooded from her mouth. “Bit parky, isn’t it?” Her top lip fell from her face like a slug from a branch.

She made to rub her hands together but the mime only resulted in her gluing the muscles of the two limbs together. Her flesh stretched and tore as she attempted to separate them, and, her concentration lost, she made herself fully known to him, shedding the hastily donned disguise of whichever hapless cleaner she had devoured outside. Will took two steps towards her and swung the kettle, connecting with her head just above the right eye. There wasn’t any sense of jarring, just a sickening giving way of the meat, as if there was no bone beneath to support it. Perhaps there wasn’t. Boiling water spattered her face, and poached an eye in an instant, turning it opaque. Her shriek, Will guessed, as he dived for the doorway, was not of pain but of frustration. He didn’t hang around to see how that fury would manifest itself.

He clattered through corridors, turning left and right at random, hoping that the sickly-sweet smell of medication, disinfectant, and mental decay would unhinge her and shake her off his tail. He thundered out onto a tarmac drive that led to the carriageway. He was half-way up the gates, trying to cock his leg over the evil spikes without skewering himself, when he heard her behind him, mewling like a lost pup. He watched as she staggered after him, and feared that there would be no respite until she had him dead and ingested.

In the seconds before he managed to disentangle himself and drop to the ground, he found himself marvelling at her mercurial skills, no matter how clumsy they were, because he knew she was better than she had been when he first encountered her and that she would no doubt continue to improve. He backed away from the gate as she shambled towards it, reassembling herself from whichever body patterns she had absorbed and made her feel comfortable. She hit the gate and wrapped herself around its bars, becoming interstitial, forcing the solids through her body with little grimaces of pain. He didn’t hear the sounds of tyres screeching on the road, or the blare of a horn. It was almost, in the moment that the car hit him, that Will had become like her, so that instead of being shunted onto the road the vehicle would simply travel through him, and he would filter the metal and plastic and leather and tissue through his body until it was on the other side of him, and the car could go on its way.

He didn’t see her finish her journey through the bars. He was too busy screaming at the pain that was ricocheting through his body. And dimly, he was aware that the scream was not just for his pain, but an accretion of agonies that had heaped upon him over the last week. Agonies and terrors in equal measure that his body, in extremis, was only now beginning to deal with.

P
ART
T
HREE

U
LTIMA
T
HULE

Death is talking to us. Death wants to tell us a funny secret. We may not like death but death likes us.

– Gustav Hasford,

The Short Timers

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-
E
IGHT:
T
HE
G
UARDIAN

S
EAN’S HEAD RESTED
against the lip of the bath. His arms were bared, as if readying themselves for a needle. Blood in the water webbed the flesh below his elbow where it had been flayed. Deep cuts to his thighs hung in feathered crimson gouts. In his despair, he’d done for his left eye: its gelid cargo formed a clear, stiffening thread of fluid over his cheek. The razor blade was a red tablet sticking up from Sean’s thumb.

Emma studied the scene as a way to concentrate on staying upright and calming her heart. She found herself snagging on minutiae previously overlooked: a spatter of bleach discolouring the shower curtain, a crack in one of the wall tiles.

She sat down on the toilet lid. Eventually, Sean opened his good eye.

“I waited for ages,” she said. “I thought it was happening.”

He wiped the mess from his cheek and fingered the sticky remains of his socket. He said, “This isn’t going to fucking work.”

T
HEY HAD BEEN
staying in the safe house for the best part of four weeks. As she dressed Sean’s wounds while he sat on the edge of the bath trying to fasten the gashes in his thighs with safety pins, Emma thought back to the moment that Pardoe had caught up with them. In the intervening weeks, she had been able to think of little else. The little man in the round spectacles and the brown worsted suit had arrived on Sean’s doorstep a little after three in the morning, when she and Sean were trying to relax Will. It had been a bizarre evening up until that point. After almost running Will over on the dual carriageway back into Warrington, they had bundled him into the back of the car when they saw what was trying to follow him through the gates of the hospital. All Will had done, in his delirium, was mumble what sounded like “casually” over and over. In a way, Emma had been grateful for the incident. It prevented her from concentrating too much on what had happened at 26 Myddleton Lane. It prevented her from suspecting she had finally gone mad.

Once they got Will back to Sean’s bedsit (he had railed violently against being taken to the hospital), they covered him in a blanket and let him sleep. Still he persisted with his strange litany, only now, Emma noticed, as he relaxed, did it sound as though he was repeating names. “Cat”, he would say. And “Eli”.

“Who do you think he’s talking about?” she asked Sean, but Sean wasn’t saying anything. He was sitting in the dark, in an armchair by his window, his fingers steepled together and pressed against his lower lip. She thought, maybe, by the way the low light from his kitchen glistened on his face, that he was crying. She did not go to him, but sought her own retreat, curled in a ball on Sean’s bed, hugging a pillow.

An hour later, Will woke her with his thrashing on the sofa. In sleep he was begging to be killed. She went to him and revived him, helping him to calm down, bringing him tea, stroking his forehead. Sean had not moved.

“What’s to be done?” she asked him.

“Things haven’t even started yet,” Sean said, cryptically. She wanted to ask him what he meant, but he was distracted by the sound of footsteps on the pavement. He put a finger to his lips and glared at her. When the footsteps ceased outside his door, Sean went downstairs. Emma heard him open the door while the visitor was in the middle of knocking.

It had been the strangest day she had ever lived. And now it just got weirder. The oddest thing, Emma thought now, as she carefully dressed Sean and kissed him lightly on the mouth, was that she had taken in everything Pardoe said to her as if he were trying to sell her life insurance. She had been mildly bored by it, yet understood that it was really quite important.

Jeremy Pardoe had been Sean’s guardian, many years before. “The only one left,” he said, almost smugly. “You would have had a guardian yourself, Emma, but no more. Frederique, her name was. Nice woman. Ran an amber shop somewhere out in East Anglia I believe. She died a number of years ago. I’m getting a little too old for running around after Sean now. I never thought I’d have to again of course, but, well, there you go. I’ve got some younger legs outside in the car to do my running for me.”

Pardoe had a sleepy voice that carried something of the Highlands’ softness in it. When she asked him about it, he confirmed that he was from Oban. A maltster by trade, as had been his father and grandfather.

“What brought you south?” she asked him.

Sean had rubbed his forehead, irritably. “Emma, he’s doing the talking. Let him finish, and then we can get on to swapping recipes and putting each other on our Christmas lists, okay?”

“No, Sean,” Pardoe had said. “It’s really all right. It might be best for her to hear this at her own pace. You’ve had a busy day.”

“Where’s
my
guardian?” Will said, groggily.

Pardoe had smiled. “You, sir, never had a guardian. But you’d make a very good guardian for someone else.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Will said, and turned away from their conversation.

“Well,” Pardoe sighed, moving to the window where he teased open the net curtain with his little finger. “I’ve known you, Sean, for a long time. I was detailed to shadow you from your fifteenth birthday, a couple of years after we lost you. You know, when you ran away from home.” He put his hand to his face and rubbed a while. “God,” he whispered. “I thought there’d never be a time when I had to tell you this. I thought the links were down. I thought the territory had been barred.”

Sean heard something squeaking stertorously but couldn’t be bothered to show surprise when he realised it was the sound of his own breathing. Deliberately, he walked to the sideboard and pulled Will’s gun from the drawer. Turning, he pointed it at Pardoe’s head. Pardoe was ice.

Emma said, “Who’s
we
?”

Sean and Pardoe ignored her. Sean said, “You know about my parents?”

A nod.

“You killed them? What? You worked with them?” He was getting jittery. Sean had never trained a gun on anybody before and he did not like it one bit. In the Force, he had done a little target practice, but had never taken it seriously. A rookie, he was a long way off being considered for armed service.

Emma said: “
What
about your parents?”

Now Pardoe held up a hand. “I don’t know about any of that. We didn’t know your father was involved with anyone or had deals with anyone. We were trying to track down people with, ah, a strong constitution.”

“What are you talking about?” Sean asked, his bead on Pardoe already wavering. Although he didn’t understand what the man was saying, he understood him to be innocent. Somehow he was as familiar as the jacket Sean had owned for ten years.

Emma’s first question caught up with him and he echoed it. “Who’s we?”

Pardoe did not answer. Clearly he had rehearsed this moment for some time, and his delivery was as dead and level as his hands were active, moving against each other, lightly greased with his perspiration. “You were the vanguard of a special project funded by a secret... society,” he said. “At the age of thirteen, as you reached puberty, it was decreed that you would be controlled, killed, and sent on your mission. You too, Emma. And a girl called Naomi.”

At this, Will turned his attention back to Pardoe. His face was all:
What have I got myself into now?

Sean dropped the gun to his side. He suddenly looked very weak. “Naomi? Killed? Mission? Jesus, Pardoe I–”

“There was a man. A very important, very dangerous man called de Fleche. He disappeared. To a place he should not have gone to. We had to track him and bring him back, or... things would have become really not very nice. That’s when we started work tracking down suitable Inserts. The first wave we tried either died or were trapped inside. With hindsight, I suppose we put them in too early, before their training was completed, before we really knew what we were dealing with. But
you
... you were the true vanguards. You took to the Negstreams like a babe to the teat.”

“Negstreams? What the fu–”

Pardoe silenced Will with a wave of his hand. “I’ll fill you in on Negstreams some other time. For now, I reckon it’s important you find out who you are. Or rather, that you remember who you are.”

“Who was it tried to kill me? Weird woman she was. Coming apart at the seams like something made out of wax.”

“Ah,” Pardoe said. “I didn’t know about her. That makes things a bit trickier, it has to be said.”

“Who is she?” asked Emma.

“Well, I don’t know specifically, but she sounds like Canaille to me.”

“Can I?” Will said. “Can you what?”

“Canaille,” Pardoe enunciated. He spelled out the word.

“Like that’s supposed to mean anything to me?” Will sat up, his face hard-edged.

“You’ve drawn a blank with us too,” Sean said.

“Our opposing forces have a knack, shall we say. There’s a way of plucking from the ether certain individuals who, crude as they are to begin with, have skills that are above and beyond anything you or I could boast. Give them a little time and they can hone these skills until they are ultra-sharp. We are talking about extremely dangerous killing machines. Sorry to get all horrorshow about it, but there you are.”

“Plucked from the ether?” Emma said the words as if they were the magical combination with which to invoke a spirit.

“After a fashion, yes.” Pardoe rubbed his hands together, clearly delighted with the prospect. “They need a way in, it has to be said. A physical entry. This usually will be an expectant mother. Not that there’s much hope for mum or child once the Canaille individual has borrowed that route into the world.”

“I don’t fucking
believe
this,” Sean said, the words coming hard and nasty, curling his lip.

“Believe it,” Will said, quietly. “I saw it happen. I saw her. I remember her. They called her something.
Cheke
, I think it was.”

“Cheke. Yes, that’s one of the swine. We know about Cheke.”

Emma’s face bore the look of someone who had eaten something sour. “It has a name?”

“Of course.” Pardoe seemed put out. “We’ll have to watch out for her. Do not underestimate her. She might seem a bit ungainly at the moment, but she will grow into her role. She is a supreme talent, make no mistake. She will improve.”

“You sound like you admire her,” Will said, bitterly.

“Oh, I do. I do. She is to the land what the shark is to water. She has few peers. Be alert, my friends. You must be very, very careful. I can’t emphasise that enough. She’ll do for you all if you aren’t.”

Pardoe’s jaw clenched and relaxed as a silence wadded the air between them. Into it, Sean whispered: “Why are you telling us all this?”