Decay Inevitable (48 page)

He returned to the barn and gently lifted Emma in his arms and walked around the building to the front of the house. He placed her in the back of the cab, securing her in the seat with the seatbelts. When he turned to get in the driver’s seat, Will was standing three feet away from him, smelling him on the air like a cat at dinner time. Only it wasn’t Will. It was too crude an approximation. Sean felt a flare of anger when he thought of how easily she hoped to fool him. She noticed the reticence in the way he appraised her. Slowly, Will sank from her true face as it emerged.

“I couldn’t take him in,” she said, almost apologetically, her voice coming as easily as if they had been chatting for an hour. “Vernon. I couldn’t take any part of him in. Too dry. No moisture in him at all. He was like something you’d use to start a fire. He’s still out there in the field. Mummified.”

“That’s time for you,” Sean said, carefully. Her eyes were dark and lovely and too intensely fixed upon his own for his liking. She was deeply, horribly beautiful. He was scared to look away and scared to maintain eye contact.

He said, “Your leg, it got better.”

Her hand brushed against her thigh. “Yes,” she said. “It’s a little difficult for me to concentrate sometimes. There’s so much here to distract me.”

“I know how you feel.”

Cheke moved around the bumper of the cab, six feet away from him now. “I’d like to know how you feel,” she said. “I’ve dreamed about you. I never had dreams before, before I came here.” She frowned. “At least, I don’t think I did. I can’t remember. But I dream now. Vivid dreams of you and me. All the different ways it could be.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes. Do you find me attractive, Sean?”

“It’s hard to find somebody attractive when they’ve been spending such a long time trying to get you killed.”

Amusement played on Cheke’s lips for a second as she tried to gauge whether he was toying with her or not. “We’ve moved on from that,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I know what pain is. I wouldn’t want any of that for you.” She took another step closer. “I don’t have anything left to do and there’s nobody left to do it for.”

“Then you’re free.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be free. Maybe you’re the genie who rubbed my lamp for me. I’m indebted to you.”

Sean’s fingers on the keys twisted clockwise a fraction. “Really, you don’t have to. I did nothing.”

“You were the catalyst.” Her lips were carmine and soft. He could see every wrinkle and flaw in the flesh. It was good that she had flaws, this creature who had seemed so perfect. It was good, promising even, that she allowed them to show. “You were the reason they brought me here.”

“Then you have a job to finish.”

“It’s over,” she said. “Gleave promised me that he would help me change enough to be like him, like you. All of you.”

She was within touching distance, if he wanted it. Sean’s fingers loosened then recircled around the butt of the revolver. He said, “You look fine to me. Keep that look. It suits you.”

Cheke spread her arms and looked down at her body. “You think so? This is me, well, most of it. Plus a few modifications.”

“It looks good on you.”

“It would look good on you too,” she said.

“I’m not your type.”

“What is my type?”

Sean said, casually, “Dead.”

She bowed her lips in mock disappointment. “That can be arranged.”

“You’re kidding, of course.”

Now Cheke smiled and Sean was overwhelmed, shocked by the depth of her mouth, the animal slant to it. Her teeth were packed in rows inside it, like a shark’s. “Of course,” she said.

“Then I can go. You won’t mind if I go.”

“A hug, first, to see you off. It’s only fair.”

Sean went immediately to her and drew her into the circle of his arms. He felt her ripple against him, every sensory pimple and pad snuffling into his secret smells. A slight burning, in his gut.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

He shot her twice through the heart. She buckled under him and staggered back, scooping up the fluid that was lost to the explosions. She was trying to breathe, but her lung had collapsed; Sean could see it, a deflated, frothy balloon of blood. Will’s face returned, a surprised oval that couldn’t quite complete itself: his mouth belonged to someone else, someone of a different caste that Sean didn’t recognise. While she was trying to rein in the loops and lassos that her body had become, Sean bent and picked up her heart, which was slowly, clumsily rolling back to the magnet of her body. He flung it into the fire.

She made an O of her mouth and blew a gust of air from it, as if she had been lightly punched in the stomach. She looked surprised, as if she had never believed that she could be disposed of so simply, so swiftly. She said, “When we are married–” Then she fell back onto the frozen soil and began to drain into it. Bitterly, he went to watch until there was just a dark outline of her shape discernible in the white.

He went back to the cab, tossed the gun onto the dashboard, and started the engine. Then he turned it off, got into the back with Emma, and held her until her solid, cold flesh began to warm and he could almost believe she might turn in his arms and say hello.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-
S
EVEN:
K
ILLENNIUM

Y
EAR
Z
ERO.

The quiet houses were rebelling. People did not want to die in their beds. They came onto the streets with weapons that could do no harm and fought until the breath was squeezed from their bodies. Large men with powerful muscles folded under the thin men. Everybody folded under the thin men. They were irresistible. In seconds, the ranks of the thin men were bolstered by those that had just been dispatched. Enemy to ally in the beat of a heart, or lack of one.

Will moved on the periphery of the crowd, powerless to prevent the slaughter. He could feel de Fleche in him; he presumed they all did, gathering strength and pace. Rediscovering his appetite for a land he had not seen for twenty years. Tired of death’s environs, he wanted to branch out and have some influence over the living as well as the dead. He was ready to return, Will could feel it. And when he did, all would be lost. Architects made designs and he knew that de Fleche had been busy. He caught a glimpse of some of these blueprints when his eye, jaundiced by the street battles and the insensate dropping of bodies, turned away to look at the sky. He caught sight of vast machines of torture to process the living, of awful dark houses where the doors and the windows were ceaselessly motile to prevent any escape while the minions within went about their business of dismemberment and witchcraft. He understood de Fleche’s motives for the grand plan that he wanted to put into place – revenge fed his ambitions – but he did not know who the targets were. Nobody was to be spared in his search, however. It was this indiscrimination that cut Will to the quick.

“Are you hungry? Jesus, I am absolutely
starving
.” The man with the itchy scalp and the fidgeting hands had not left him alone. Will couldn’t see how his hunger had prevailed, not after the terrible feast he had gorged upon. The man sucked juices from his fingers and smacked his lips. “I could eat that again,” he said. “So hungry. My stomach thinks my throat’s cut.”

If de Fleche was still near, Will could not
feel
him. He suspected that he was in the background, assessing his position, biding his time before the balance of power shifted and he could make himself known again.
Revenge
, he had said, Will recalled vaguely. Revenge against whom?

It didn’t matter, for now. What did matter was the hell that was being raised around him, not six feet from where he stood. Blood was being spilled as generously as red wine from a sot’s glass. The thin men were systematically wasting anything that stood in the way of the food they craved. Hunger tickled Will’s belly too, but not to the extent that he was ready to take life for it. Why was that? What was so different about him that brought on this moralistic stance? He thought of the man he had killed at the caravan site. Was that it? That he had broken the neck of some evil swine and had marked his own card by that action? There was no compulsion to add to the body count here because he had been blooded and could take on a supervisory role? The deferential way in which his colleagues treated him seemed to support that suspicion. And as soon as the seed was sown, he backed off, recoiled from it.

“Well then, are
you
hungry?” Fidget boy was pointing at a small girl holding a plastic doll with no head. He reached out, for God knows what purpose, and Will stood in his way, clamping a hand around his arm.

“Leave her alone.”

Fidget regarded him uncomprehendingly. His tongue stuck out from between pock-marked lips and ranged dryly around. “Hungry?” he whispered.

A bell rang, a tiny bell jang-jang-janging. Everyone turned to watch as the sit-up-and-beg bicycle wobbled through the throng. The man on the seat flapped his hands at people to get out of the way. His hair flew out behind him in grey streamers. His tongue lolled and dribbled against his cheek. When people recognised de Fleche, they cringed and sank into the shadows.

“Will, this simply won’t do,” he said. His tone was that of a prissy director at an am-dram rehearsal. He rode the bicycle round and around Will, rubbing his chin, while Fidget asked for a croissant, a pot of Müller Rice, shit mate,
anything
.

De Fleche clenched the brakes and skidded to a halt. He touched the little girl on the forehead with his thumb and she imploded. All that was left of her was a scrap of her skirt and the plastic doll, black, molten, and disfigured.

“Well that was fucking charming,” Will said, and pushed de Fleche off his bike. He was sickened that his ability to be shocked by anything had been closed down, as neatly and as finally as the switch on a life-support machine. A groan rose from the thin men behind him. De Fleche stood up and brushed himself off. He was laughing, but there was something unpleasant about the laugh. An edge.

“I haven’t the time for this, Will. What is it, do you think you’re too precious to be part of this revolution?”

“I don’t want a part of this. I want to be left alone.”

“You signed up.”

“You tricked me. You used Catriona as bait.”

“I did nothing of the sort.” He smiled and clapped Will on the shoulder. Will flinched, thinking of the way the girl had winked out of existence. “Some tatty little book I came across and you went all Bambi-eyed over it. I could have spread you on my toast at that moment. It was all rather sweet.”

Will said again, “You tricked me.”

De Fleche sighed and looked around him. “This is going on all over the shop, you know. Pretty small potatoes for the time being, but there’s some big King Edwards waiting to be pulled out. It’s in these places, Warrington and the like, where the grand changes, the new dawning will come into its own. Not London or Paris or Sydney. Warrington. Landevant. Beecroft. Places I know, but you’d be hard-pushed to find on a map. Out of acorns, and all that flim-flam.”

“Jesus,” Will said, and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes until he saw ideograms of colour dancing there. Not a bad trick, he considered, for a dead man. “Why?” he asked.

“Will, I’m not prepared to build a little campfire and have all you owl-faced cub scouts sit around listening to Uncle Peter telling stories while–”

“You said something about revenge,” Will cut in. “Revenge for what?”

De Fleche nodded, gravely. “Okay,” he said. “All right.” He put a fatherly arm around Will and led him away from the impasse. He said, “Three is the magic number. Three wise men. Three stooges. Three coins in a fountain. Three for the price of two at Boots. The
Godfather
trilogy. And then there’s me, and a man called Leonard Butterby and a man called Thomas Lousher.” He stopped and turned to Will, brought his other arm up to Will’s shoulder, and massaged them both gently. “I’m telling you this because you have promise. Also, because you have nothing else. Eternity without a bag of marbles to play with is like a Widnes prostitute with a corrugated gob. It sucks bad-style.”

“I don’t want anything to do with you, or your sick fantasies.”

“You will, once your dead brain kicks in. Once the maggots down south have reamed out your Willishness. Once you’ve become a puppet for me, like these other gawps.”

Will could hear something else nagging him above de Fleche’s hubristic spiel. Something clunkingly mechanical approaching from the end of the street where de Fleche himself had appeared.

“I worked with those two men for maybe ten years. They were attracted to me for my natural beauty, my collection of Japanese stamps, and, I suppose, my ability to sniff out the odd Negstream. They were impressed that I could track down ways into this place. They paid me to do research into it. We thought we could make a fortune by using the doorways into different levels of consciousness for all kinds of stuff. Sponsors might want to use it to advertise. Imagine. Go to sleep, we switch on, and people all over the world wake up wanting a bag of KP nuts, or a tub of Ben and Jerry’s. It was naughty, but who was going to stop us? Bollocks to the standards agencies. How are they going to find out? How do you control something that you can’t touch? We were going to talk to film and TV bigwigs. Get people to pay us a subscription so that they could have films shown straight into their heads. Or football matches. Or porn. Or 24/7 news.”

It was a black cab, turning into the street. De Fleche was too caught up in his own reverie to notice.

De Fleche said, “Problem was, I couldn’t get in. Because once you get in, you can’t get out the same way. So we were a bit stuck. But those pricks, they were small-time idiots. They picked up some measly five-figure financial package from a company who were interested in backing them as long as they were guaranteed front-end mentions once the system was up and running. What did they do? Filled their nappies that they had so much money for the sweet shop that they pushed me through a Negstream and fucked off with the dosh.”