The Unblemished (42 page)

Bo drifted along streets he barely recognised. He felt as light as a
polythene bag, and sometimes imagined he was moving as swiftly
as one snatched up by the wind. In one hand he carried a five-litre
plastic container sloshing with petrol. Sometimes he thought he could
hear her ghost as she followed him, a heel scuffing against the kerb,
the vicious
swit
of her belt as she tied her mackintosh more tightly
around her.

A long narrow band of pale yellow and green on the horizon marked
the beginning of the new day. By the time he reached the cathedral and
climbed the scaffold, that colour had deepened and pushed a hefty
wedge into the dark. He piled the bodies into the nave and placed
Keiko on top. He poured every drop of petrol on to the cairn of bodies
and stepped back, blinking, the fumes blinding him for a second.

He said to her, 'You sent me those emails.'

'Yes,' she said, and her voice was as he remembered it: clean,
clipped, alluring. 'I was trying to help you. I didn't want to see you
get hurt.'

'You didn't want to see me dead before I'd finished my job, more
like,' he said.

'However you want it, Bo,' she said. 'You were always like this,
chipping away at supportive things I said, suspicious of everything.'

'Well, it stood me in good stead, didn't it?' He pulled a box of
matches from his pocket. Most of them were damp, but he struck
them anyway, enjoying the theatre, enjoying the panic he imagined
would be in her eyes.

'What's the matter?' he asked. 'The gig's finished. All the punters
have jumped in their cars and are on their way home. There's no
point in hanging around. This lot have done all the encores they're
ever likely to do.'

'We will come again,' she said.

'Not if I have anything to do with it,' he said.

'You won't be able to stop yourself,' she said. 'It's in your blood.
It's part of your code. It's who you are.'

Bo stopped striking matches. Outside he could hear the
thrum
of
attack helicopters as they swooped low over the city. Under that was
the sporadic sound of gunfire, precise, military bursts. A voice rasped
like an insect through an amplifier in authoritative tones. He
imagined tanks rolling down The Mall, troops in combat gear,
picking over the remnants of the city.

'There's timing for you,' he said, but his voice had lost any of its
cockiness.

He imagined her smiling at him now, in that way she used when
she wanted to get something from him. He remembered how she used
that smile when she emerged from a steamy bathroom, her robe
barely on, to ask him for a massage.

Of course
, he'd said.
You can brain me with a rake and drown me
in porridge as long as you smile like that while you're doing it.

He looked down at his ruined hand, at the way the fingers were
slowly lengthening through the riot of muscle and ligament that was
trying to make a fist of itself. That was the reminder, if he needed one,
of what he was, who he had become. Surely they could not rally after
this. The Queen was dead. Claire was dead, or as good as. There were
no more hosts. Surely?

'We can be together again,' she said, reaching out a hand.

'I loved you,' he said. 'I wanted to marry you.'

'We can talk about it,' she whispered. 'Come with me.'

The next match he struck flared wildly. 'Praise the Lord and pass
the ammunition,' he said.

He stared at the flame and curled his injured hand around it to
protect it from a sudden breath that rose in the lungs of the foetid
edifice. He sensed the cathedral shifting around him, the faces
loosening, turning his way, moaning in what might have been
approval or objection. He closed his eyes and saw the map. It was
reassembling itself, reformatting itself.
Not on my fucking watch.

He tossed the match on to the pyre and reflexively stepped back as
the petrol ignited and a sheet of flame rose into the heights. She might
have been reaching for him. Her thin, delicate fingers.

'We'll be together,' he said. 'For ever.'

He caught hold of Keiko's hand and allowed her to drag him
screaming into the blaze.

She had been back home for a day. She couldn't understand how
she had got here. She remembered the maelstrom of leathery limbs
and needle teeth, remembered being born from the warmth of her
companions and standing up to find Manser little more than a pink
froth filling his suit.

She saw the bloody, tiny mound of towels on the pool table. She saw
the bucket; the dishcloth had shifted, revealing enough to tell her the
game. Two toes was enough. She didn't need to be drawn a picture.

And then somehow she found herself outside. And then on Edgware
Road where a pretty young woman with dark hair and a woven
shoulder bag gave her a couple of pounds so that she could get the tube
to Euston. And then a man smelling of milk and boot polish she fucked
in a shop doorway for her fare north. And then Preston, freezing around
her in the early morning as if it were formed from winter itself. She had
half expected Andrew to poke his head around the corner of their living
room to say hello, the tea's on, go and sit by the fire and I'll bring some
to you.

But the living room was cold and bare. She found sleep at the time
she needed it most, just as her thoughts were about to coalesce
around the broken image of her baby. She was crying because she
couldn't remember what Claire's face looked like.

When she revived, it was dark again. It was as if daylight had
forsaken her. She heard movement towards the back of the house.
Outside, in the tiny scruffy garden, a cardboard box, no bigger than
the type used to store shoes, made a stark shape amid the surrounding
frost. The creatures were hunched on the back fence, regarding her
with basilisk eyes. They didn't speak. Maybe they couldn't.

One of them leaped down and landed by the box, nudged it
forwards with her hand, as a deer might coax a newborn to its feet.

Sarah felt another burst of unconditional love and security fill the
gap between them. Then they were gone, moving fast; they were more
limber, more muscular than the others she had seen. Sarah took the
box into the living room with her and waited. Hours passed; she felt
herself become more and more peaceful. As dawn began to brush
away the soot from the sky, Sarah leaned over and touched the lid.
She wanted so much to open it and say a few words, but she couldn't
bring herself to do it.

In the end, she didn't need to. Whatever shifted inside the box
managed to do it for her. Here it was, a pathetic comma of skin and
bone, barely formed, barely functional at the point of what ought to
have been its death. Its head was smashed in, its fishbone-thin ribs
threatening a collapse under the speed of its heart, the labour of its
lungs. The tiny belly was translucent; Sarah could see the thousands
of eggs that it would release over its lifetime.

There was so much blood on the thing's mouth that it took Sarah
a long time to realise it was smiling at her. And much longer than that
to find the strength to return that smile, and to reach out her hand.