Lost in a good book (32 page)

“SpecOps-17 work ain’t no bed of roses, Thursday. I’ve had enough, and believe me, having this little nurk coiled up in my head is not as easy as it looks. I should have never let him in in the first place, but what’s done is done. You have to kill me and kill me well.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Undoubtedly. But look around you. You followed me in here. Who’s crazier? The crazy or the crazy who follows him?”

“Listen—” I began. “What’s that?”

There was a thump on the church door.

“Blast!” replied Spike. “The undead. Not necessarily fatal, and severely handicapped by that slow swagger—but they can be troublesome if you get cornered. After you have killed me and captured Chuckles up here, you may have to shoot your way out. Take my keys; these two here are for the inner and outer gates. It’s a bit stiff, and you have to turn it to the left—”

“I get the picture.”

Another thump echoed the first. There was a crash from the vestry, and a shape moved past one of the lower windows.

“They are gathering!” said Spike ominously. “You’d better get a move on.”

“I can’t!”

“You
can,
Thursday. I forgive you. It’s been a good career. Did you know that out of the three hundred and twenty-nine SpecOps-17 operatives who have ever been, only two ever made it to retirement age?”

“Did they tell you that when you joined?”

There was the sound of stone against stone as one of the graves from the floor was pushed aside. The undead who was thumping on the door was joined by another—and then another. Outside we could hear the noises of the
awakening.
Despite the moonlit night, the Evil One was calling to his servants—and they were coming running, or shambling, at the very least.

“Do it!” said Spike in a more urgent manner. “Do it
now
before it’s too late!”

I raised my gun and pointed it at Spike.

“Do it!”

I increased the pressure on the trigger as a shaky form stood up from the open grave behind him. I pointed the gun at the figure instead—the pathetic creature was so far dried out it could barely move—but it sensed our presence and teetered in our direction anyway.

“Don’t shoot it, shoot
me!
” said Spike with some alarm in his voice. “The job in hand, Thursday,
please!
”

I ignored him and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell harmlessly with a dull
thock.

“Eh?” I said, rechambering the next round. Spike was quicker than I and loosed off a shot that disintegrated the head of the abomination, who then collapsed in a heap of dried skin and powdery bone. The sound of scrabbling increased from the door.

“God damn and blast, Next, why couldn’t you do as I told you?!”

“What?”

“I put that dud on the top of your clip, idiot!”

“Why?”

He tapped his head.

“So I could trick Chuckles in here to come out—he’s not going to stay in a host he thinks is about to croak! You pull the trigger, out he comes, dud bullet, Stoker lives, SEB sucked up—QED.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, my temper rising.

“You had to
mean
to kill me! He might be the personification of all that is evil within the heart of man, but he’s no fool.”

“Oops.”

“Oops indeed, knucklehead! Right, we’d better be out of here!”

“Isn’t there a plan C?” I asked as we headed for the door.

“Shit no!” replied Spike as he fumbled with the key. “B is as high as I ever get!”

Another creature was arising from behind some upended tables that once held a harvest festival display; I caught it before it was even upright. I turned back to Spike, who had the key in the lock and was muttering something about how he wished he
was
working at Somme World™.

“Stay away from the door, Spike.”

He recognized the serious tone in my voice. He turned to face the barrel of my automatic.

“Whoa! Careful, Thursday, that’s the end that bites.”

“It ends here and tonight, Spike.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“No joke, Spike. You’re right. I have to kill you. It’s the only way.”

“Er—steady on, Thursday—aren’t you taking this just a
little bit
too seriously?”

“The Supreme Evil Being must be stopped, Spike—you said so yourself!”

“I know I
said
that, but we can come back tomorrow with a plan C instead!”

“There is no plan C, Spike. It ends now. Close your eyes.”

“Wait!”

“Close them!”

He closed his eyes and I pulled the trigger and twitched my hand at the same time; the slug powered its way through three layers of clothing, grazed Spike’s shoulder and buried itself in the wood of the old door. It did the trick; with a short and unearthly wail, a wispy entity like smoke emerged from Spike’s nostrils and coalesced into the ethereal version of an old and long-unwashed dishcloth.

“Good work!” muttered Spike in a very relieved voice as he took a step sideways and started to fumble with the bag that contained the vacuum cleaner. “Don’t let it get near you!”

I drew back as the wraithlike spirit moved in my direction.

“Fooled!” said a low voice. “Fooled by a mere mortal, how utterly,
utterly
depressing!”

The thumping had now increased and was also coming from the vestry door; I could see the hinge pins start to loosen in the powdery mortar.

“Keep him talking!” yelled Spike as he pulled out the vacuum cleaner.

“A
vacuum cleaner!
” sneered the low voice. “Spike, you insult me!”

Spike didn’t answer but instead unwound the hose and switched the battery-powered appliance on.

“A vacuum cleaner won’t hold me!” sneered the voice again. “Do you really believe that I can be trapped in a bag like so much dust?”

Spike turned the vacuum cleaner on and sucked up the small spirit in a trice.

“He didn’t seem that frightened of it,” I murmured as Spike fiddled with the machine’s controls.

“This isn’t
any
vacuum cleaner, Thursday. James over at R&D dreamt it up for me. You see, unlike conventional vacuum cleaners, this one works on a dual cyclone principle that traps dust and evil spirits by powerful centrifugal force. Since there is no bag, there is no loss of suction—you can use a lower-wattage motor. There’s a hose action—and a small brush for stair carpets.”

“You find evil spirits in stair carpets?”

“No, but my stair carpets need cleaning just the same as anyone else’s.”

I looked at the glass container and could see a small vestige of white spinning round very rapidly. Spike deftly placed the lid on the jar and detached it from the machine. He held it up, and there inside was a very angry and now quite dizzy spirit of the Evil One—well and truly trapped.

“As I said,” went on Spike, “it’s not rocket science. You had me scared, though; I thought you really
were
going to kill me!”

“That,” I replied, “was plan D!”

“Spike . . . you . . . you . . . you . . .
bastard!
” said the small voice from inside the jar. “You’ll suffer the worst torments in hell for this!”

“Yeah, yeah,” replied Spike as he placed the jar in the holdall, “you and all the rest.”

He slung the bag round his body, replaced the spent cartridge in his shotgun with another from his pocket and flicked off the safety.

“Come on, those deadbeats are starting to get on my tits. Whoever nails the least is a sissypants.”

We flung open the door to a bunch of very surprised dried corpses, who fell inwards in a large tangled mass of putrefied torsos and sticklike limbs. Spike opened fire first, and after we had dispatched that lot we dashed outside, dodged the slower of the undead and cut down the others as we made our way to the gates.

“The Cindy problem,” I said as the head of a long-dead carcass exploded in response to Spike’s shotgun. “Did you do as I suggested?”

“Sure did,” replied Spike, letting fly at another walking corpse. “Stakes and crucifixes in the garage and all my back issues of
Van Helsing’s Gazette
in the living room.”

“Did she get the message?” I asked, surprising another walking corpse who had been trying to stay out of the action behind a tombstone.

“She didn’t say anything,” he replied, decapitating two dried cadavers, “but the funny thing is, I now find copies of
Sniper
magazine in the toilet—and a copy of
Great Underworld Hitmen
has appeared in the kitchen.”

“Perhaps she’s trying to tell
you
something?”

“Yes,” agreed Spike, “but what?”

I bagged ten undead that night, but Spike only managed eight— so he was the sissypants. We partook of a haddock chowder with freshly baked bread at a roadside eatery and joked about the night’s events while the SEB swore at us from his glass jar. I got my six hundred quid and my landlord didn’t get Pickwick. All in all, it was a good evening well spent.

24.
Performance-Related Pay, Miles Hawke & Norland Park

Performance-Related Pay was the bane of SpecOps as much then as it is now. How can your work be assessed when your job is so extraordinarily varied? I would love to have seen Officer Stoker’s review panel listen to what he got up to. It was no surprise to anyone that they rarely lasted more than twenty seconds, and he was, as always, awarded an A++—“Exceptional service, monthly bonus recommended.”

THURSDAY NEXT
,
A Life in SpecOps

D
OG
-
TIRED
, I slept well that night and had expected to see Landen but dreamt of Humpty Dumpty, which was odd. I went in to work, avoided Cordelia again and then had to take my turn with the employment review board, which was all part of the SpecOps work-related pay scheme. Victor would have given us all A++, but sadly it wasn’t conducted by him—it was chaired by the area commander, Braxton Hicks.

“Ah, Next!” he said jovially as I entered. “Good to see you. Have a seat, won’t you?”

I thanked him and sat down. He looked at my performance file over the past few months and stroked his mustache thoughtfully.

“How’s your golf?”

“I never took it up.”

“Really?” he said with surprise. “You sounded most keen when we first met.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Quite, quite. Well, you’ve been with us three months and on the whole your performance seems to be excellent. That
Jane Eyre
malarkey was a remarkable achievement; it did SpecOps the power of good and showed those bean counters in London that the Swindon office could hold its own.”

“Thank you.”

“No really, I mean it. All this PR work you’ve been doing. The network is very grateful to you, and more than that,
I’m
grateful to you. I could have been on the scrap heap if it wasn’t for you. I’d really like to shake you by the hand and—I don’t do this very often, y’know—put you up for membership of my golf club.
Full
membership, no less—the sort usually reserved for men.”

“That’s more than generous of you,” I said, getting up to leave.

“Sit down, Next—that was just the friendly bit.”

“There’s more?”

“Yes,” he replied, his demeanor changing abruptly. “
Despite
all of that, your conduct over the past two weeks has been less than satisfactory. I’ve had a complaint from Mrs. Hathaway
₃₄
to say that you failed to spot her forged copy of
Cardenio.
”

“I told her it was a forgery in no uncertain terms.”

“That’s
your
story, Next. I haven’t located your report on the matter.”

“I didn’t think it was worth the trouble to write one, sir.”

“We have to keep on top of paperwork, Next. If the new legislation on SpecOps accountability comes into force, we will be under severe scrutiny every time we so much as sneeze, so get used to it. And what’s this about you hitting a neanderthal?”

“A misunderstanding.”

“Hm. Is this also a misunderstanding?”

He laid a police charge sheet on the desk.

“
Permissioning a
horse and carte
car
to be driven by personn of low moral turpithtude.
You lent your car to a lunatic driver, then helped her to escape the law. What on earth did you think you were doing?”

“The greater good, sir.”

“No such thing,” he barked back, handing me a SpecOps claim docket. “Officer Tillen at stores gave me this. It’s your claim for a new Browning automatic.”

I stared dumbly at the docket. My original Browning, the one I had looked after from first issue, had been left in a motorway services somewhere in a patch of bad time.

“I take this very seriously, Next. It says here you ‘lost’ SpecOps property in
unsanctioned
SO-12 work. Flagrant disregard for network property makes me very angry, Next. There is our budget to think of, you know.”

“I thought it would come down to
that,
” I murmured.

“What did you say?”

“I said: ‘I’ll retrieve it eventually, sir.’ ”

“Maybe so. But lost property has to come under the
monthly
current expenditure and not the
yearly
resupply budget. We’ve been a little stretched recently. Your escapade with
Jane Eyre
was successful but not without cost. All things considered, I am sorry but I will have to mark your performance as ‘F—definite room for improvement.’ ”

“An F? Sir, I must protest!”

“Talk’s over, Next. I’m truly sorry. This is quite outside my hands.”

“Is this an SO-1 way of punishing me?” I asked indignantly. “You know I’ve never had anything lower than an A in all my eight years with the service!”

“Raising your voice does you no good at all, young lady,” replied Hicks in an even tone, wagging his finger as a man might do to his spaniel. “This interview is over. I am sorry, believe me.”