The Unblemished (38 page)

He felt his stomach spasm involuntarily; he loosed another great
glut of treacly vomit over the side of the boat. Fish gathered instantly,
jostling for titbits. Was that blood, making it turn that colour? He
gritted his teeth against a sudden throb of neuralgia that skated
around the contours of his face, as if he had been touched by an
electrical charge. Not good. Not good. He saw the sky changing
colour, from a wintry morning blue to pale grey, and wondered if this
was how death began for people. Brain cells popping off like lights on
a satellite image of the world as night's leading edge swept across
it. Everything shutting down, withdrawing, turning in on itself.

But what was helping to kill him was also keeping him awake; the
pain in his leg hammered nails through his groin every time he moved.
He steered the boat west, towards the buildings of the South Bank.
He could see no figures at all now; he felt like the last man alive on
the planet. No other boats moved on the river. He caught a glimpse
of black sweater on the bank and his heart leaped. He powered the
boat over to the silt and ditched it. The boat grounded itself, tipping
over as he made his way on to the deck, propeller roaring, black
exhaust fumes belching into the sky. Bo lowered himself gingerly to
the shale.

'Sarah?'

She was blue in the face, her skin elsewhere leached white like old
bone. Grit and weed were stuck to her lips, her hair. Bo touched
Sarah's neck. He found a pulse, weak, arrhythmic, but a pulse
nonetheless. He felt a bitter pang of guilt about his relief that, of all
of them, it had been Sarah who had survived. He cast around him for
evidence to the contrary, but there were no bodies. He doubted he'd
find them so close by; chances were, they'd be washed up far away, if
at all.

He slid his arms under Sarah's body and tried to lift her. Somehow
he managed. Hobbling badly, he carried her up the stone steps and
over the gate beneath Waterloo Bridge. The National Film Theatre
was a desolate witness, their crumpled bodies reflected in the large,
dark windows. The second-hand book tables riffled in the breeze,
many of them dislodged from their regimented stacking by some
recent flurry of violent activity. At least there were no bodies here. He
needed a break from that. It was so quiet. No jets nosing along the
river's trajectory on course for Heathrow; no skateboards; no chatter
about Chaplin or Tarkovsky or Hitchcock at the tables outside the
NFT café. The thrum of traffic on the bridge above, a constant at any
time he had spent down here in the past, was absent. London seemed
poised. A point had been reached where resolution was the next step.
The city seemed to teeter on invisible brinks. He closed his eyes and
the map showed him the carcasses of offices and blocks of flats. He
saw this unholy breed feeding and warehousing and securing, then
pushing on, pushing out, creating a cordon of horror. At this border,
fierce fighting with a perilously thin line of troops. Infiltrators in
uniform turned their assault carbines on their fellow men. An endless
swarm of attackers scuttled across the urban battle lines, strong now,
focused, suicidal in their intent to keep the nest clear of invaders.
Beyond, the map showed him smoking cities snaking north:
Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Edinburgh,
Glasgow. Sacked, sucked-clean zones of high population, trembling
in a vacuum, waiting for the next stage of their annihilation. Bodies
wadded in bedsit corners, heads locked by a froth of capture adhesive
knitted from flagelliform glands; the victims forced to watch as the
things that would kill them hatched from chrysalids.

Bo came back, gasping, his eyes stinging as he opened them to the
bleached greys of the South Bank.

'I don't know where to go,' Bo whispered to Sarah. 'I don't know
what's next. I need some kind of guide. I always have.' He closed his
eyes again and now the grainy little grid that spilled across his inner
vision was faint, fragmenting. The map was dying. He had done his
job; he was expendable.

He rubbed Sarah's face and hands. He knew he must either get her
indoors or into fresh clothes soon before her body temperature hit a
low that it could not return from. He half-carried, half-dragged her
through the sliding doors of the NFT and laid her on the floor. A
dead man sat on a stool, his upper body propped against a table
furnished with an untouched slice of chocolate cake and a cold latte.
Bo stole his jacket and jeans, grinding his teeth against the man's
stiffness, hating the assault on the corpse's dignity but knowing that
the victim would probably have consented to his extreme actions, had
he been able. That's all right then. That's all right. Okay. All's fair in
love and –

'SARAH!'

She came out of it, a little. Her body flinching from his shriek. He
pulled off her wet clothes and massaged her rigid flesh. He beat and
slapped at her until her skin filled with colour. The regenerating
fingers of his damaged hand weren't yet developed enough for him to
comfortably button and zip her up in her new clothes but at least now
she was dry. He dragged her into the booth where the coffees and
scones were served and switched on one of the toasting grills. He
positioned her beneath it. The heat was glorious; Bo had forgotten
what warmth meant. He began to cry.

'I'm dying,' he said, as he tried to coax the stiffness from her face,
her arms, her legs. 'I'm dying, and for what? What have I done in my
life?'

'Have you loved?' Sarah asked, her eyes closed, her voice so soft
as to make him doubt he heard it. He pressed a finger to her lips and
her eyes flickered open.

'Yes,' he said. 'I've loved.'

'Then you've done something valuable. And anyway –' she rolled
on to her side with arthritic slowness '– you saved my life. That has
to count.'

He fetched her a bottle of water, which she waved away. 'I don't
want any more of that shit. I've probably got a few litres of Thames
inside me. We ought to get vaccinated.'

'We will,' he said. 'But first we have to find the nest.'

'And then what?'

He shrugged. 'Destroy it. Make sure we isolate them. Make sure
the Queen cannot be born.'

'But we lost Claire,' Sarah said. 'She was incubating it.'

'She jumped?'

Sarah shook her head. 'I held her hand. We were about to leap. But
she pulled free. She was waving to them as I stepped off. As if they
were old friends of hers.' She covered her mouth with her hands. She
couldn't stomach her wish that her daughter was dead. Death was the
best way out now. She was actually hoping her daughter would die.
A week earlier she'd have killed herself before thinking that. How did
you get from that to this? How did you lose all hope so quickly? She
thought of them hunched over her, performing some sick birthing
ceremony upon her. 'How do we find this place, this nest, without
her?'

'We'll find it,' he said. 'I found the house of flies. I can find the
nest.'

'The house of flies?'

'Charnel house. Dead zone. Home to all the map-readers, if they
want it. The map was first unfolded there by the man who discovered
them, brought them into the city.'

'We get to the nest and we burn it ... then Claire will be
free?'

'I don't know. I hope so.' He couldn't stomach the lie, but trading
truths was not going to have them back on the road soon. He couldn't
tell her that the Queen was within a human host because it meant
ready food after the hatching. And that, destroyed nest or no, the egg
was going to crack open anyway.

'The others,' Sarah said.

They went outside. Bo hurried to the railing to scan the choppy
river again. They walked a little way west along Queen's Walk,
stopping occasionally for Bo to hoist himself up to look down on to
the banks, but nobody could have survived this long in those
conditions.

'Dead,' Bo said. 'Or if not, then as good as.' His face hardened. His
voice too. 'I wouldn't know where to begin looking for them. It's too
dangerous and we don't have time.'

He led Sarah along the concourse between the Royal Festival Hall
and the Hayward Gallery to Belvedere Road, which runs parallel to
the river, servicing the South Bank. Scaffolding concealed the true
skin of the buildings along here, which were receiving a face-lift.
Cranes and pile-drivers dominated the surrounding airspace, some
bearing Christmas lights and decorations.

'I'd forgotten how close we were to Christmas,' Bo said.

'What day is it?'

'I don't know,' he said, with a little nervous laughter.

Some of the brick netting had come free of the scaffold ties and
was flapping violently in the wind. Bo saw the sole of a boot poking
free of one of the walkways. A construction worker in a yellow
helmet had either committed suicide or been hanged from one of the
scaffold's transoms.

'So much work going on here,' Sarah said, shivering despite the
heavy clothes she was wearing. She had not asked him where they had
come from, but he knew she must have a good idea. She hugged them
to her, looking pathetic and frail within the large-shouldered jacket.
'I'm lost. I don't know where to begin.'

Suddenly, belying her brush with death, and the bruised, pale taint
of her skin, she screamed her daughter's name.

'Hey,' Bo said, grabbing hold of the jacket sleeve and turning her
gently to face him. 'We've come this far. Keep on top of things.'

'You too,' she said, trying to smile but succeeding only in forcing
the tears from her eyes. 'I don't like it here,' she said, turning away
from him. 'This architecture. It's so cold. So angular. They should
leave the scaffolding on. It's doing it some big favours.'

She was moving away towards Concert Hall Approach, and he
watched her go. A rare shaft of sunlight picked out the great curve of
the London Eye; it warmed his face a little. Sarah turned back to look
at him and raised a hand to shield her eyes from the glare. A simple
gesture, a human moment, but it pierced him deeply.

To each its mess.

JH Fabre

'This way,' he said, increasing his pace.

Sarah was finding it difficult to keep up. He was leading her
deeper into a part of London that seemed permanently dark. The
brick guards, bright-orange debris netting and duckboards conspired
to shut out the light; the criss-crossing galvanised steel tubes were
fingers laced across a reticent face. She thought she could hear music
struggling through the complex system of couplers, uprights, ledgers
and braces, or maybe that configuration of steel was creating its own
tune, as the wind fluted across its open ends.

He stopped on occasion, moving his head fractionally, as a mantis
will alter the line of regard it affords potential prey. He would frown,
or swear, press the heels of his hands into his sunken eye sockets as if
digging for inspiration. Then he was off again, skipping through the
metalwork like something born to it, like an ape to the jungle. At the
foot of a polypropylene debris chute, he paused and listened. Then he
opened his eyes and turned to her.

'We're close,' he said.

She no longer knew where they were. They seemed to have been
running for hours. At a guess, they were in the white spaces of the
A-Z, a waterfront wilderness somewhere well east of Docklands, a
forgotten reach of land that was yet to be reclaimed and turned into
millionaires' counting houses, and might never be. It was a desert of
failed factories and machinery frozen by time and bad air. All that she
could see around her was the paraphernalia of abortive repair.
Decaying brickwork had been abandoned before it could be healed,
leaning walls forsaken in the act of being braced and corrected. The
workforce still in evidence were few and dead. One man was hanging
by his foot from the cabin of a crane, some forty metres above the
construction site. Another peeked over the edge of a duckboard, a
frozen javelin of blood hanging from his throat. She never got used to
the shock of so much death around her, but she was unable to shy
away from it. She searched each face hungrily, needing the truth to be
rammed home, needing a constant reminder that this was the end of
things.

She followed Bo through the clutter, stumbling on the half-bricks,
timber and abandoned tools lying on the floor outside the building. It
seemed like a film set, something that looked realistic from a distance
but did not stand up to close scrutiny. She noticed, as they got closer,
that the scaffolding was scorched, the debris netting melted in places.
Some of the bodies here smouldered. Heat ghosted into the air but there
was no obvious source. For the first time, she faltered in her determination
and hung back, even as Bo was moving towards the ladder that
would take him into the scaffold proper, his boots crunching into
plaster dust and pebbles of broken glass. When she glanced over her
shoulder, the landmarks of the capital were nowhere to be seen. They
were in a rotting urban hinterland. An in-between place that was cold
and scarred; a dead zone that would never be improved, no matter how
much money was thrown at it. There were some places that people just
did not want to go to; some places that were barren for ever. Die here
and you would not be discovered for months.

They pushed through rotting wooden fences bound with rusting
wire. A large edifice, shaped vaguely like a church, was sheathed in
buckles and chains and pipes and tarpaulin. Boards covered its
windows. The brickwork seemed swollen, bruised. The steeple was
like a crooked stovepipe hat, latticed with iron supports. Bo's hands
rested against the patterns of the bricks, traced their black pointing.

'You can wait, if you want to,' he said, noticing her unease. 'But I
have to go in.'

'There's no door,' she said, as if that were reason enough for a
retreat.

'I know,' he said. 'But then, this place isn't a building. It's a shell.
It's camouflage.'

'I'm scared,' she said. On another day she might have been pleased
to have her suspicions of this site confirmed, but the knowledge that
they were on the doorstep of hell was threatening to blow all her
circuits at once. 'I'm scared,' she said again, needing to have it aired.
Needing someone else to know.

'I know,' he said gently. 'So am I.'

As he stood on the ladder, looking back at her, she had never seen
anybody look so tired, or old, or frail. He needed her as much as,
perhaps more than, she needed him. How could she let him go on
without her? She went to him and followed him up the ladder to the
top level of scaffolding. The wind was stronger up here; it blew
smartly through the corridors, the concussions of the plastic sheeting
deafening. The brick shell that Bo had referred to felt hot to the touch
whenever she put out a steadying hand as she moved along the
duckboards. All of the windows she had thought she could see from
the ground were false, cleverly painted
trompe l'oeils
to deflect closer
inspection. She was about to ask him how he expected to get inside
when a figure stepped out on to the end of the scaffold. She recognised
him as the strangely dressed character from the hospital. His
mouth was a riot of blood, metal, and infected tissue. She could smell
him from here, a carious mixture of sour rot and rust.

He was trying to speak through that swollen car-crash of a mouth
but all she could make out was a lot of aggressive noise. She saw him
twitch his shoulders and clench his hands as he marched towards Bo,
his physicality in stark contrast to the other man's. His feet were
certain on the planks; it did not seem to concern him that they were
many metres off the ground. From here, at last, she could see the
familiar London architecture, far in the distance, but it offered no
succour.

'Hello,' he managed to enunciate. 'You made it, then. No more
kiss-chase around those shitty streets, hey? My name is Greene, by the
way. Graham Greene.' Greene doffed an imaginary cap and bowed
low. 'Say hello to my companions. Stanley Kubrick and Kurt Cobain.'

She heard the skip of feet up rungs she had just vacated. Two men
with a similar look to Bo's attacker hefted themselves on to the
platforms, sandwiching them. She looked around for a weapon, but
all of the tools that might have passed for one were down on the
ground. The men held claw hammers and cold chisels. One bite from
this Graham Greene would be worse, she felt, than a bludgeoning.

'Your daughter, our host, is with us now. The girl is about to
become the mother. You've done a grand job, but now it's time to
forget her.' Greene turned his attention to Bo. 'And you, sir. You
should have retired days ago. I can help you with that.'

Bo suddenly launched himself at the man. Greene was on his back
foot and his expression, such as could be read in that riot of metal
and pus, was one of surprise. He parried Bo's kicks and punches and
laid him out flat with a head butt to Bo's nose. Sarah heard bone
crunching and Bo's hands became ribboned with blood as he tried to
staunch the flow.

She slammed her heel against one of the couplings that conjoined
the cross sections of scaffolding tube. It sprang clear and dropped to
the planks. She wrestled the tube free and turned to face the pair
inching towards her from behind. Their weapons were raised now,
but they spent more time keeping tabs on what was happening at the
other end of the walkway than in their own task. She was determined
that this lack of respect for her should be their undoing. She waited
until their attention wavered again and attacked. She skipped a
couple of feet forwards, bringing them within sudden range of the
steel tube, which she swung in a low arc from the left, cracking it into
Kurt Cobain's left hand, forcing him to drop the chisel. As Stanley
Kubrick swept around his partner, bringing the hammer down in a
slashing movement across his body, she ducked hard to her right,
scraping her face hard against the hot bricks, and felt skin come
burning off the side of her face. She blinked and spat away the grit,
fighting to close her mind to a sheet of pain as it tried to tuck itself
around her head.

Kubrick was off balance now, the weight of the hammer having
missed its intended strike bringing his arm down to his right-hand
side. He was between Sarah and Cobain, whose left hand was
clamped under his right armpit as he struggled to recover from the
shock of a hand of bones being turned into so much calcium dust.
Sarah kicked out at Kubrick's left knee and, as it folded, tipping him
back towards her, she shifted her grip on the tube to its middle and
swung again, this time in a tighter, swifter arc, punching it up into the
jawbone. Kubrick's head snapped back and he fell, lashing out his
arm to prevent him from toppling over the edge of the scaffolding.

Grunting with the effort of moving so quickly with such an unwieldy
weapon, Sarah thrust it at his head, at a point just behind and below
his left ear. The tube ground into his scalp, removing a great curl of
flesh. Her momentum forced Kubrick's elbow to bend against his will
and he folded over the horizontal brace, tipping, without a sound,
into the void.

She flashed a look back at Bo and saw it was not good; Greene was
kneeling above him, trying to throttle Bo, who was wriggling ineffectively
beneath the bigger man. She turned back to Cobain as he was
trying to shape a grip on the chisel with his other hand. His damaged
fingers were already cartoonishly swollen, filling with blood that
seemed to have come directly from his face. She stepped back,
preparing herself, her breath coming hard and hot through clenched
teeth. She felt alive. She felt more alive than ever before, and she knew
he could see it. He was uncertain about her. His face twitched with
more than just pain.

The fire in her belly. The murder in her eyes. She was ready for
him.

'Come on, you cunt. You fucking freak cunt,' she said.

He moved towards her and his face hardened. His mouth twisted,
showing large, brilliant-white ursine teeth. The slitting of his eyes. He
charged her. She was slow to respond this time, her arm growing tired
of the tube's weight. She managed to parry his first thrust with the
chisel, but it was weak. The tool drew blood to an eight-inch strip of
her forearm. She grunted and stepped back, tried to bring the tube
around in front of her to ward off the chisel a second time, but she
forgot about his other hand, which came up under her guard and
punched her hard in the throat. Her teeth bit her lip and she felt an
instant patina of hot blood spread across her tongue. She spat in his
face and in the instant he blinked it away she brought the end of the
tube down hard on the toes of his left foot. Blood turned the eyelets
of his shoe bronze. His posture changed; she flashed the tube to her
other hand and swept it behind his weight-bearing right leg. She
kicked out at him and, although she didn't connect well, it was
enough to unbalance him. He dropped the chisel and fell. She kicked
at his face repeatedly, gasping as the toe of her shoe sank into the
meat of an eye. He made no sound. She rolled him off the edge of the
duckboards and swiped a hand over her own face, shifting sweaty
blades of hair out of her eyes, smearing what felt like a pint of blood
across her swollen jaw.

She turned and saw Greene looking up at her, his hands around
Bo's neck, his mouth wide open in shock or triumph, she couldn't be
sure. The red security lights gleamed in the cheap jewellery of his
gums. Bo was arching beneath him. Slowly, almost tenderly, Greene
closed his mouth and lowered his forehead until it was resting on that
of his prey. She saw his muscles grow beneath his jacket as he went
for the kill.

She screamed and it was the sound of more than who she was. She
believed, in the seconds before she drove the end of the pole into the
bullseye of Greene's head, that her daughter's voice was somehow
caught up in the cacophony, emboldening her. Greene's head snapped
back and to his right. She saw his left eye turn red, an expression of
astonishment – perhaps at her gall, perhaps at the intensity of the pain
– but no, it was down to a loss of sensation, for he was unable to
move his left leg, his left arm. He slithered off Bo, who rolled away,
coughing and choking, spitting up long strings of bright-red phlegm.
Greene was trying to drag himself upright, his right arm curled
around one of the oblique support spars, but she could tell by his
abject expression that he knew the game was up.

'What are you going to do?' he asked. 'Kill your daughter? Because
that's what it will take. Do you think you can do that?'

His voice was just noise now, a noise that she couldn't stand. It
caught on her teeth, like tin foil. She launched herself at him; he
closed his eyes and tilted his head back. She hit him so hard that he
was dead before he hit the floor, the flesh of his neck filling with
black.

The build-up of unused fuel in her limbs made her begin to shiver.
Death had been moments away; it seemed it had been at her elbow
since the day she gave birth to her daughter. She imagined herself
with some sort of mark of Cain, singled out as a target that Death
was drawing an ever more accurate bead on. There was no euphoria
at having survived the onslaught. There were too many next times to
have to worry about.

She edged towards Bo, needing to know if her guardian, her
saviour, her friend was still alive. Lights were popping off all over the
buildings on the Victoria Embankment and beyond. London's
muscular architecture: Swiss Re, Tower 42, Centre Point, St Paul's,
all of it had been subsumed by the darkness, and didn't she know just
how that felt.

'Bo,' she said. 'Hey, guess what? I do trust you. I really do.'

She levered Greene away and watched him roll silently off the edge
of the planks into the night. Bo looked heart-breakingly small
beneath her, like a young boy who needed his mother. She threw
away the tube and knelt by him. Blood had caked heavily on his face,
spoiling his angular beauty. His nose was horribly broken and she
wondered if its splintering had killed him. But now she saw how she
had underestimated his desperation. Black bubbles skittered across
his mouth.