The Scioneer (21 page)

Together
Lek and Crystal
ran into
the shadows, into the darkness of the dead end. Lek slammed the
palms of his hands against the brick wall and cursed. Twelve feet
above him, the razor-wire glinted in the moonlight. He scrabbled
desperately at the wall, hoping to find any crack, any foothold,
knowing that there would be none, and that he had no chance of
climbing it. Crystal frantically searched the ground at her feet
for anything that would pass as a weapon. She only found an empty
coke can and tossed it aside.

Roma
Bruce sloped into the courtyard. She picked out the two figures at
the end of the passageway, seeing them as clear as day, and she
laughed cruelly again, knowing that there was no way out for them.
She gave a low growl to announce her presence and felt a shudder of
excitement as she saw their heads snap up in fear. Roma Bruce
wanted to hold that pink hair again, wanted to know how it would
feel against her own skin, wanted to rip it from the scalp of that
smug bitch with her model good looks who had never in her easy life
had to touch an ounce of Bad Moon to get a man’s attention. She
stepped into the alley.

Lek
breathed deeply. He had an idea but didn’t like it. He needed time
to consider the implications. But there is no time, he told
himself, stop thinking like a scientist!

‘This...
girl. She’s going to kill us, right?’ Lek already knew the answer.
‘And there’s no way out of here, is there?’ He put his hand inside
his pocket. If Crystal replied, he didn’t hear her. ‘If we stay,
we’re dead. And if we miss that train, we’re also dead’. He pulled
out a handful of extracts and a hypo. ‘OK then, let’s do this.’ Lek
looked down the alley – fifty yards away, he could see Roma’s
yellow eyes glowing in the dark. He spun around and held the first
vial up to the moonlight. ‘Octopus,’ he cursed, and held up
another, ‘Arctic fox... no,’ and then another ‘Moose.’

‘Lek!
Do
something!’
hissed Crystal.

‘I AM!’ Lek
shouted and held another vial up to the moon, ‘Got it!’

He clipped the
vial into the hypo, took another deep breath and rammed the needle
into his own neck.

‘Lek!
Lek
! What did
you just give yourself?’

Roma took
a few paces forward, sniffing the air. Something wasn’t
right.

Lek was
having trouble
breathing. He leant forward, choking for air and thought he
was about to vomit. His chest was on fire. He swallowed hard and
forced out a single word.

‘Grizzly.
’

Lek only
created the formula for scion
s. He was the scientific mastermind behind the operation.
In his tiny high-rise lab, overlooking the river – the apartment he
would never see again – he made up a tiny amount of the drug from
his vast collection of replica bases, mixed it with appropriate
levels of weak alkaline solution and alcohol to increase its
uptake, and tested it on a mouse. Tigranol, for example, contained
a number of animal extracts, carefully mixed to balance out the
effects of pure tiger DNA. After all, nobody
really
wanted to share their bed with a tiger. But a
tiger with his claws clipped and his fangs filed down, with
extracts of dolphin or spaniel – that was another matter. When he
was sure that it was clinically safe enough for the streets, he
passed his workings on to a group of chemists, none of whom knew
one another, working out of a number of separate company-owned
laboratories throughout the city. Each chemist was given a part of
the formula to make into a functioning element of the final drug.
Vast quantities of these elements were then delivered to the
‘cutter’ – a paranoid schizophrenic named Barry Krantz who sat
happily all day in his flat in Bethnal Green mixing the packets as
they arrived from the four corners of London, with common low-tox,
low-effect agents: extracts of Golden Labrador, Jersey cow, and so
on, as well as baking soda and talcum powder. There was no point in
flooding the market with one-hundred percent pure product when
users were happy to take drugs which were only sixteen percent
shark, or gorilla, or wolf. When this part of the operation was
complete, a sample of the end product was bicycle-couriered back to
Lek for final testing and the circle was complete. As much as he
was a scientist though, Lek also believed himself to be something
of an artist, and he liked nothing better than to sit under the
cherry-trees in Finsbury Park, or the olive groves around Camden
and create another masterpiece, another scion symphony from the
bases he always carried around in his briefcase and test it when he
got home to his lab. So it was that he had been able to administer
a pure shot of sloth extract into the unsuspecting Delić that
afternoon, and how now, in a dead-end alley in the Kidholme
residential estate in Battersea, with his lap-dancer girlfriend by
his side, facing down a young woman who had overdosed on one of his
own creations and in doing so had permanently crossed her own DNA
with that of a wolf, Lek Gorski had imbued himself with the brute
strength, the savage power and the ferocity of an Alaskan grizzly
bear.

‘Lek! LEK!’
screamed Crystal, ‘You’re dying!’

‘N..No’ Lek
stammered.

‘What
then?’

‘Ch…changing.
Grafting.’

‘Ringo
Starr, Lek! She’s coming!’

Roma was
moving stealthily down the passage, smelling the change in her
prey. The female reeked of fear and she could see that the male was
doubled over in agony, but there was something new in
him….

‘Get… behind…
me!’ Lek managed to say, and Crystal heard his voice lower an
octave over the words.

‘How long
will it take to work?’

‘SecONDS!’ bellowed Lek, as Roma lowered her head and
charged at them.

Lek felt
like he had been reborn. Anybody looking at him
, standing there with his beautox parlour
haircut, bloodstained face and XXL sports suit hanging off his lean
frame would have seen a madman, but inside, Lek’s muscles were
charged with electricity and his bones felt like reinforced steel.
Why didn’t you let me out years ago? screamed the Grizzly in his
head and Lek was lost for an answer. He wasn’t big, by any
standard, but even an average man forced to work out in the Dynagym
for an hour every day had fairly decent muscle tone. Lek pulled
himself to his full height, stretched his arms back behind him, and
roared like a beast as Roma launched her attack. In a move which
reminded Crystal of a man crashing a pair of cymbals together, she
saw Lek catch the wolf with both hands in mid air, before throwing
her back against the ground. With a strangled yelp, more from
surprise than pain, Roma scrambled to her feet, gathered herself
and came again, rising up on her hind legs to slash at Lek’s chest
and neck. ‘Get BACK!’ yelled Lek and clouted her in the muzzle with
a stinging blow. Her head cracked off the wall and for an instant,
Lek saw more than confusion in her eyes. Crystal screamed and clung
to his back for safety and without thinking, he twisted in his rage
and knocked her to the floor. Roma seized the opportunity his
momentary distraction had afforded her and darted forward to close
her jaws around his leg. She sunk her teeth down to his shinbone -
Lek roared out in pain and instinctively kicked her away. She hit
the edge of a steel ash-bin and felt a rib break. In an instant,
Lek threw his weight on top of her and the two rolled around in the
alleyway, like animals, each trying to pin the other to the ground.
Roma was fast and vicious, rabbit-kicking him in the stomach and
groin as they grappled, catching him with her claws and ripping his
skin, but the bear felt only bramble-scratches and fought on
furiously. Lek had the weight advantage and shifted his bulk,
rolling her over and headbutting her with all his might. Roma was
stunned and Lek saw his moment, pulling her towards him by the
shoulders and smashing her head down against the cobblestones again
and again. He tried to hold on to his humanity, but the bear in him
would not be restrained and released all of Lek’s anger in a
torrent of violence. Years of pent-up aggression and frustration,
two decades of living in fear of his life, and the last
cherry-on-the-cake day he had spent running from Delić, Vidmar and
Pechev, Pechev, Pechev poured out of Lek Gorski and he cracked
Roma’s head on the ground with such rage, he heard her skull
fracture and she finally gave up the fight and lost consciousness.
Lek leaned back, throwing out his chest in victory and then lowered
his head again to bellow once more in Roma’s grotesque face, blood
and spit running from his bottom lip. He rolled off her then, and
crouching like a man who had been stabbed in the stomach, limped a
few paces down the alley on his wounded leg, before collapsing in a
heap against the wall.

Crystal ran and
threw her arms around him. There was still fire in his eyes, but
Lek was there too and he held his shaking hands in front of his
face and whispered gruffly, ‘What did I do?’

‘You
saved us, Lek. You saved our lives!’

‘My leg!’
he said through gritted teeth, when he saw the crooked rows of
puncture wounds bleeding through the tattered fabric of his trouser
leg. Crystal tore the sleeve off his sports suit and having
absolutely no clue about first aid, fashioned a makeshift
tourniquet around his shin.

‘We’ll
have to get that looked at. And you’ll need a shot,’ she remarked
crisply, trying to sound like a nurse.

‘I c..c..
can’t stop sh…shaking,’ whispered Lek.

‘It’s
shock.’

‘N.. no. It’s
the dr..drugs. Reacting with m..my adrenaline.’

‘Just lie
down for a moment,’ Crystal said.

‘No
time,’ said Lek, and with one hand on Crystal’s shoulder and the
other on the wall, he forced himself into a standing position and
together they hobbled back through the courtyards.

Chapter
30

In the
smoke filled air of Battersea, in the middle of a wild pack-clash,
i
t seemed as though the
smell of Roma Bruce suddenly blossomed in the night air like the
aroma of wild jasmine in Harlesden, and her pack looked at one
another, bewildered by the bizarre phenomenon. Only Dahlia Ortega
understood its true meaning, and she led the pack back around the
Queen’s Circus, dodging the missiles and avoiding the skirmishes,
through the side streets of Battersea without questioning herself.
Their pace slowed and the trail led them to a brick wall outside a
housing estate. One by one, they leapt up and over the razor wire
and dropped gracefully into the alley below.

While the
Twins cowered in the corner of the alley,
unsure of what to say or where to look, Zevon ran
to be at Roma’s side and was the first to touch her. Blood had
pooled behind her head. ‘Don’t speak Roma. We’ll get a doctor.
We’ll get you to a hospital. I don’t know. Just, just stay with
me.’ He had known her demise was inevitable, having already
outlived the average lifespan of a pack leader, and even though he
had begun to resent her control over him, in all aspects of his
life, he was still crushed. Here she was, his childhood friend, the
wolf he had served under for six years – stealing, mugging and even
killing at her command. To see her fallen made him question his own
mortality. He felt like a part of himself was dying with her and
his eyes flooded with tears. He stared down at her battered face
and asked through choking sobs, ‘Who did this to you?’

Before
she could even try to answer, Dahlia told
Zevon to step away.

She knelt
down and turned her cold eyes on Roma. Her voice was like ice.
‘Roma. I cannot challenge you now, but know that your actions
tonight have brought disgrace on the name of the Brixton
Wolves.’

‘How…
dare… you?’ whispered Roma, but all the venom of her voice had
already died, and she sounded beaten.

‘The boy
you killed was an innocent. A no-mark. You broke the agreement of
the
prelim and now
you’ve started a war. It will take a strong leader to right your
wrongs.’

‘Zevon,’
croaked Roma.

‘No, you
have forfeited the right to choose your successor. Besides, I paid
for Zevon’s life in drugs and now I own him. Zevon will not replace
you. I am the leader of the pack. I am Alpha.’

Roma’s
eyes narrowed slightly, and she bared her twisted fangs at her
lieutenant’s insolence, but Dahlia only stood up, rolled the
muscles at the base of her neck and pla
ced her foot on Roma’s windpipe. She took a long
look into the eyes of the three males before pressing down with her
full weight.

‘The Queen is
dead. Long live the Queen.’

***

What had
changed? Everything and nothing. Arid Bomani was still
fifteen
; still the son
of a shipping merchant and a school inspector; still a schoolboy
himself. In the morning, he would be sitting in a classroom. Osaze
would not. Where was his body now? In a hospital? Or a mortuary?
Arid didn’t even know how such arrangements were made. His brain
struggled to cope with the idea of returning to the life he had
known earlier that day, his life before the rumble. And where were
his new friends now? Those who had been so keen to share their
drugs and to laugh and speak of their war, and the new revolution.
Ulan and Fogo? Yakuba? Gone. Back into their holes. In a daze, Arid
placed one foot in front of the other and walked around the Queen’s
Circus, until his emotions got the better of him and he broke down
and cried again for the loss of his friend. Arid Bomani was a good
boy.