Decay Inevitable (7 page)

C
HEKE HAD BEEN
left in a stone room with a high window and a solid wooden door. A deep bath made of thick, frosted glass awaited her. The water was cold, but she had begun to understand how to alter herself to accommodate for temperature changes. She moved the blanket slightly and looked down at her body.

Already she was losing her hold on her own identity, such as it could be after such a short time – that which mapped out the set of characteristics was being subtly differed and she could feel invisible fingers plucking at her, though mercifully the change was painless. After a while she’d begun to notice it wasn’t restricted to her interior. Her breasts were swelling, the nipples becoming darker, more pronounced. Her hips were growing rounder, her buttocks firmer. Three moist, puckered punctures buttoned her abdomen. A curious fingernail made the punctures shiver and relax, betraying a moist, pink velvety lining within. The woman who had provided her with her first real sustenance did not have anything remotely resembling this formation on her. Absorbing her, feeling her body pulverise under the juices she ejaculated, Cheke had pored over the woman’s face, her interest quickening when death settled and her features relaxed. The woman had a rind of colour to her eyes; a dip at the apex of her top lip; just one set of canine teeth. Subtle differences, but they were fascinating to Cheke, who was coming to grips with the slow play of limbs still apparently discovering their true shape. Her body seemed to be going through a variety of minute alterations. She had spent an hour transfixed by the undulation of her knuckles, which dissolved and reknitted themselves in a new configuration. She couldn’t understand the motive for this mischief in her flesh, but she welcomed the freshness it inspired; the gradual improvement in her movement and thought.

She bathed, baptising this new body of hers. Faces she didn’t know (but seemed maddeningly familiar) loomed in the patterns of oil in the water, inspiring different levels of emotion. Hatred for this tired, ageing man; grief at the appearance of a woman with cataracts in her eyes; desire for a young man disfigured by scars almost beautiful in their symmetry. She realised with disappointment that these phantoms were somebody else’s memories, faces in the fire, tricking her into thinking they bore significance to her own life. She remained alone.

Her hands made their acquaintance with the fresh geography of skin and muscle, the experience both like self-exploration and the touching of another. Still there existed that vestigial tremor at her core – it transmitted itself no matter where her fingers reached.

“Why me?” she whispered.

A car drew up outside. Even before its doors opened she could hear Gleave barking orders.

She stepped from the bath and wrapped herself in a white towelling robe, the activity in her flesh reaching a new level of intensity. Her mouth filled with drool. A key in the lock. Only when the boy was pushed over the threshold did she realise the nature of its energy.

The boy stared at her. Ice cream was slicked across his jaws. His hair sprang up stubbornly at his crown. The door snicked shut.

The boy said, “Mummy?”

“If it makes you happy,” she whispered.

H
E WOKE, FRUSTRATED,
his heart pounding and his dick hard as a door handle. He had been unable to still Catriona. She had slipped in and out of focus, her words to him garbled, as though coming from a slightly detuned radio. Her smile was genuine enough, her mouth somehow super-real, Technicolor. He had been reaching to kiss her when she sank from view and he was unable to conjure her again.

But this wasn’t the only reason for his revival. The slap of fast-moving footsteps had him blinking and scooting back in his seat as Known and his gang came pounding across the road. Behind them, Cricket cap had got out of the car and was standing uncertainly in the road, alternating his gaze between the heels of the burglars and the flapping entrance door.

“Got enough stuff there?” Will asked, indicating the television and stereo equipment with which Known’s gang were laden.

“Actually, we were thinking of going back for some more. Would you mind?”

“I don’t care,” Will said. “Was... Cat there?”

“No. Should she of been? This some kind of kinky trick to jazz up your sex life, then?”

“Forget it. Did you get my wallet?”

Hot Badge passed over the wallet, at pains to point out that nothing had been taken from it.

“And there was something else?”

Known pursed his lips. “I’m a bit miffed that you think of me as someone who carries small arms around in his pockets, but here... enjoy it.”

Will took the gun. It seemed woefully small. “What ammo does it take?” he asked. “Caps?”

“Funny.” A box of shells was passed over.

“Is it easy to load?” Will twisted and turned the gun in his hand. It gleamed dully, like a snake’s skin, under the courtesy light.

“Shit, mate,” said Known. “Want me to shoot the bastard for you as well?”

“Never mind. I’ll figure it out.”

“Who are them mongs, anyway?” Hot Badge nodded back at Cricket cap, who had been joined by his colleague. They were both looking in the direction of the car.

“Friends of the family,” Will said.

“Well they’s going to go visit some poor bastard called Slowheaf next. Fort you might like to know.”

“Slowheaf?”

“Well, wiv a T-H at the end. Slowheaf.”

“Slowheath. Right.”

“Yeah. What I said. Some hard-sounding bastard came froo on the walkie-talkies while I was fuckin’ the lock. ‘We ’it Slowheaf next,’ he said.”

Will shrugged. The name meant nothing to him.

“Whatever.” Known lost interest with commendable swiftness. “What now?”

Will pulled the hood of his jogging top over his head and eased out of the car. He watched the gang stuffing the fruits of his marriage to Cat into the back.

“Something extremely foolish, probably,” he said.

“Nice doing business,” Known said. Everyone left.

The sky was bruising rapidly. The gun in his waistband felt impossibly huge now. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to use it. He watched the house and waited for change.

A car pulled up a little over an hour later. It was dark by then, and the cold was drawing the colour from his hands. A full moon, and those streetlamps that had not been shattered, turned the grey pavement into a strange, luminous strip of pale orange. Will watched Cricket cap and his female counterpart walk up the street to meet it. Two men got out; they talked for a few moments; Cricket cap and the woman got into their own car. They all left.

Will strode into West End Lane. He bypassed his home, forcing himself not to look, and wondered how such a course of events could have put him in a position where he was dicking around in the cold, his life in shreds, when he should have been helping his wife to relax while counting the fingers and toes of his little boy. The loss of the baby and Cat’s disappearance, maybe even her death, had reduced the meaning of his life here to nothing more substantial than the dust that skirled around West End Lane’s back alleys. He didn’t know what to do. There was no point going back to the flat. They might have booby-trapped the place or one of the men might return while he was in there. Then what now? He felt frustrated and impotent, as in the common dream he sometimes had where he knew he must get to an appointment on time but the moment he went to open the door to leave, he remembered he had forgotten to brush his teeth or pick up his keys or turn off the electric blanket. Without realising, he was stumping up and down the pavement, his hands clenching into fists, repeating the name “Slowheath, Slowheath, Slowheath...”

Who was this Slowheath? How did you begin to find a person you didn’t know anything about? That question, and the sight of a slow-moving police car nosing into the lane from the Finchley Road end, got him moving.

Maybe there was one person he could rely on after all.

S
HE COULD SENSE
them, beyond these walls. Somehow they were watching her.

Her body wanted to change. It fluxed and fluttered beneath a skin that seemed too paltry to contain her. The woman and the boy forced themselves to the surface and she had to work hard to quell them. Only when she could exercise control over herself would it be possible to bring her otherness into play.

She felt their eyes scorching her. They were waiting for her to acquiesce to what was inside her; to be comfortable with who she was. She sensed they were testing her. Well, she thought, pressing her hand against the thick wooden door, the test was over.

The cameras were not, as Cheke had supposed, inside the cell, but poised just outside. A guard with a grenade launcher was positioned in full armour at the mouth of the corridor, ready to abort should she render.

“It’s started,” the guard said.

His earpiece crackled. “Stay with it.”

The paint on the door blistered. The smell of charred wood prefaced the sudden shape of two hands emerging through the door. At the same time, in the small viewing window, a face appeared, rippled to nonsense by the cracks and the natural warp of the wire-enforced glass pattern. The face became the glass, cracks and all, oozing squarely through the frame. Coins of blood fell from its skin and the guard noticed how the glass had somehow fused with the flesh. He was so taken by the beauty of its passage that he sat back against the wall to watch, his lips shock-dry, his need to both laugh and bawl cancelling each other into awed silence.

He could see every nuance of her progress through the door; an intimacy between the living and the inert – if living was what she was. Only when her eyes, freshly blinked free of paint, splinters of wood and glass, met his own did he feel the first stitch of panic.

As she plucked the last shreds of her body from the door, the guard realised she was naked, but it had taken him until now to establish that. Her body was of a rudimentary configuration only; much of it ran in loops and strands. Liquid parts of her dribbled to the floor then swiftly collected and rejoined her mass like quicksilver. They wrapped around gaping, bloodless holes in which hints of muscle and bone could be seen. Her body turned brilliant white in an instant, generating a burst of intense heat that did for the cameras and tanned the guard’s face.

“What is it, Exley?” The fussy voice was full of needles. Exley, the guard, had forgotten all about his grenade launcher.

The flux of her face was at the same time both horrific and bizarrely tranquil; he was put in mind of lava lamps. When his voice came back she’d surged across the few feet between them, flowing over his legs, numbing them with her delicious chill.

“I don’t know what it is,” he whispered, as she covered his mouth with what passed for her own.

Although they were on her within fifteen seconds, dragging her away from Exley, the damage had been done. The soft tissue of his face was a pulped mass. Gleave, in the moment before he shot him through the forehead, couldn’t work out whether what dangled from the centre of his face was a tongue or an eyeball.

“Impressive,” came a gravelly voice at his shoulder. “And I don’t mean your sharp-shooting.”

“She’s the fastest we’ve seen. She’s almost ready. And this is, what... eighteen hours after we put the draw on her?”

“Give or take.”

“So what now?”

“Come and have a drink.”

Gleave followed the older man along a corridor carpeted with deep, wine-dark pile. He had been with the Junction for almost fifteen years now, yet was no closer to knowing Leonard Butterby than he was his partner, Thomas Lousher, or the history that they shared. Rumour was a rogue bull in this place: it could gore you if you messed about with it. The only whispers Gleave allowed himself to believe involved the suggestions of violence that had followed the pair around as they grew up in London during the ’60s and ’70s. Neither Butterby nor Lousher had any previous; at least, there was nothing on record. What the linens had printed on the couple over the last quarter of a century you could find in a few paragraphs devoted to their charity work. They were barbed wire without the barbs; nothing snagged.

“Absolut, isn’t it?”

Gleave nodded.

“Absolute disgrace, more like. Arseman’s drink, if you ask me. Here–”

Gleave took his drink and sat opposite Butterby, who had poured himself a large Scotch. A big desk, empty but for a blotter and a Meisterstück fountain pen, separated them.

“I don’t need to tell you how bollock-shrivellingly important the next few weeks are going to be–”

“No,” said Gleave.

“–but I’m fucking well going to. Fuck up once, just once, mind, and your arse is going to look like a choice cuts diagram on a butcher’s shop wall.”

Gleave swallowed hard, wishing there was some ice in his drink, something to chink against the glass and lend a little relief to this ordeal.

“We had word come in this morning. There’s agitation.”

“Where?”

“You know where. Fifteen years of nice and easy, and now the blood’s up. Check out this convergence. I want them wasted. I don’t want any fuck-ups. Now finish your drink and fuck off.”

Gleave put the glass down, even though he had barely wetted his lips with the contents. He knew Butterby well enough not to piss him off; at least he went through the motions of hospitality. Butterby and Lousher were yesterday’s men; they just didn’t realise it yet. Old, old men. Their power was failing. A tingle in his gut, unlike anything he’d felt in a decade and a half, drove him to pick up his pace on the way back to the ops room. A convergence. He wondered which of the Inserts it might be. Chances were, they’d be able to hit them fast before they became aware of their abilities.

Cheke was mopping up the juices on the carpet. Everyone else was watching her, afraid to say anything. Gleave went to her. “Come with me,” he said. And to one of the suits: “Bring me a file on the lost.” He would have to work through the night to train her on the basics of human interaction. She must learn not to draw attention to herself. She must be a ghost, until circumstances demand she reveal her gifts.