Kraken (49 page)

A space between concrete sweeps of flyovers. Where the world might end was turp-industrial. Scree of rejectamenta. Workshops writing car epitaphs in rust; warehouses staffed in the day by tired teenagers; superstores and self-storage depots of bright colours and cartoon fonts amid bleaching trash. London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. Here was an arena of scrubland, overlooked by suspended roads.

“We have to keep out of sight,” Dane whispered. “Let’s find out what’s going on, check who this is.” Wati muttered to him, coming and going from their pockets.

Seers were on the roofs. Billy saw them, silhouettes sitting with their backs to chimneys. He saw the fuddled air where some made themselves not visible. Dane and Billy clung to service ladders on flyovers’ undersides. They dangled, while cars and lorries illuminated the wasteland. “Be ready,” Dane said, “to get out of here.”

•   •   •

“C
OLLINGSWOOD,
I
MAY NOT FORCE YOU TO ALPHA LIMA FOXTROT,
but if I ask you if you’re receiving me and you are I expect a bloody answer. I can hear you breathing.”

Collingswood made an
on and on
motion to the unhappy young officer in the car next to her. “Alright, Barone.” She said
Bah Roany
. She flicked the earpiece. No lapel radios. She, and the few officers seconded to the FSRC that night, were in mufti. She sat slouched in a beat-up car near the gathering ground. “Yes, coming through, big up to the Metropolitan Massive. Rewind. How’s it your end?”

“We can see some predictable players pitching up,” Baron’s crackling voice said. “Nothing from our lost boys yet. You not heard from Vardy, then?” Collingswood shucked as if his plaintiveness were a mosquito in her ear.

“Nah. Said he had to go see a professor. I told him he was one already, but apparently that wouldn’t do.” She looked around at the fag-end landscape, her head thrumming like a bad receiver, aware with near certainty and very swiftly when the few late-night passersby passed by whether they were innocent or guilty of knowledge about the sort of thing that was going on. Spectators hieing for hides. Twitchers if dooms were birds. Her companion stared as she laughed and nudged him, as if she had spoken that aloud.

“Where is the sod? Bit much given this was his idea,” Baron said into her skull.

She had quite enjoyed organising it. It had mostly been Vardy driving, suggesting what to suggest to whom, when and how, what rumours to seed on what bulletin boards, which implications to leave unsaid. She had been happy to cede that to him. She liked the tinkering, but the strategic overview he was welcome to.

Her own enquiries, in venues less epochally inclined than those where Vardy did his musings, closer to that everyday border between religion and murder, proceeded slowly. It was the gunfarmers she was trying to track down. No matter how bloody monkish they were, ultimately they got paid to kill people, and that meant, in some form or other be they ever so abstracted and magic, receipts. And where there was that sort of trail, there would be chatter, a smidge of which, slow though it still was, was wending into her shell-likes.

Collingswood kept only the most vague tabs on who Vardy was manipulating how: she simply did not care enough. Perhaps a part of her thought that wasn’t sensible, that she’d do well to learn that game, but, she thought, she would always be happy to subcontract to the Machiavellis of this city. What she liked doing was what she was good at. And what clues she
had
sowed about the questionable ends she and Vardy had cooked up were eminently, obviously persuasive. Soon, perhaps, she might do some arresting.

Collingswood said nothing to Baron. She could hear him keeping the connection open as if she would.

M
ARGE FINGERED HER CRUCIFIX AND IGNORED THE HUMMING
tunes from her iPod, like the singing of a young child. Every few minutes people passed her, or she walked a little farther and passed them, talking into their phones and walking quickly, paying no attention to the scrubby afterthought waste where whatever it was was due to happen. Marge was watching the space, she would have said all alone, when a woman emerged from behind a lamppost too narrow to have hidden her.

Hey, the woman’s mouth shaped, but Marge could not hear her. The woman was in late middle age, in a stylish dark coat. Her face was sharp, her long hair styled, and all sorts of oddness about her.
You’re here for this
, she mouthed, and was abruptly much closer than she should have been with so few steps.

Marge turned up her iPod in fear. The tuneless singing enveloped her.
Wait
, the woman said, but the voice in the iPod made its way through “Eye of the Tiger” and it gusted Marge away, a London motion sped up and strange. It was all a bit unclear, but within moments she was in another place and the woman had gone. Marge gawped. She stroked her iPod thank you. She looked around and took up watch again.

•   •   •

W
AS IT STARTLING THAT TWO RELIGIONS SHOULD NOT ONLY SHARE
their last night, but commence the unravelling in the same spot? There had been repeated insistences of where the ends
might
occur, competing declarations, prophecies “examined more closely,” the venues growing closer until they met.

Representatives of many factions were near. Cult collectors took bets on the outcome; the vagrant magicians of London, many with familiars come crawling and defeated back as the strike entered its endgame, were ready to scavenge for shreds of power and energy that would be given off. “Oh no,” said Wati from Billy’s pocket, seeing his shamefaced members. “I have to … I need to make some rounds.”

It was depressing, Wati agust from figure to brickwork figure, whispering, cajoling, begging and blackmailing, pleading with members to stay away. His bodiless self was buffeted on such an excitable night. Gusty aether blew him into the wrong bodies. He circled the arena very fast. From the eyes of a discarded pencil-top robot Wati watched a woman shift with knacked escapology away from a collector. There was an air about her that drew him, and he would have gone closer, or into the figure she wore around her neck, but something started to happen.

“F
UCKSNOT,”
C
OLLINGSWOOD SAID
. S
HE LEANED FORWARD.
A
WOMAN
continued her slow circumnavigation of the space. Collingswood made a little motion as if prying curtains a touch apart. A shaft of the night between them and the approaching woman grew momentarily lighter, a clearer line of sight. Collingswood peered and sighed and released her fingers and the dark came back.

The man beside Collingswood gawked at her. She did not look at him.

“Boss,” she said as if to air. “… Nah, boss, no sign of them, but I’m pretty sure who I
did
just see. Remember Leon’s
lurve
interest? She’s pitched up…. Fuck should I know? … Well it’s her stupid fault, innit?” But as she said that last she was sighing, she was tugging on her plainclothes jacket and opening the door.

She pointed at her temporary partner. “Stay,” she said. “Good dog.” She was gone, turning up her collar, and he could hear her muttering as she approached the nervous-looking woman.

W
ATI WOULD HAVE GONE CLOSER, TOO, BUT FOR THE ARRIVALS
. A
T
last, late, striding across the scrubland, in yellow jumpsuits, carrying equipment, looking side to side with pugnacity, came a group of shaven-headed men.

Chapter Sixty-Two

M
ARGE COULD NOT HEAR WHATEVER IT WAS THE NEW FIGURE
suddenly approaching her said, not through the chatty, chirpy bad singing. She saw a young woman mouthing at her as she came closer with so much authority and swagger that Marge’s heart lurched and she turned up the iPod frantically. Space slipped. It lurched. The little voice in her ears shouted the excited chorus of a Belinda Carlisle track and the bricks around Marge rushed in tidal passing. She kept going, like a raft on white water, even laughing at herself while the motion still continued for so violent a reaction.
How were you going to face whatever
really
bad was coming?
She hadn’t realised how stretched taut and anxious she was about that promised finality.

It was as she was coming to rest, though the phrase felt odd in her head given that she had not moved—only the pavement below the walls beside and the slates above her—that the foot that had started descending in another place was yet to touch the ground, that she recognised the woman she had seen. That rude young constable.

W
HO WAS SHOUTING IN FRUSTRATION AS THE MELTING-BUTTER
residue of Marge’s presence sizzled away from before her. Her noise was interrupted, and she turned to spectate on the spurious event she had helped bring about.

•   •   •

“W
HAT IS THAT
?” B
ILLY SAID
. T
HE NEWCOMERS WORE MILITARY
boots, moved like soldiers. The roads beside the open space were half blocked by hoardings, and motorists who glanced down might take what they saw for council workers on some late-night necessary actions.

“Jesus Buddhists,” Dane said. “Nasty.” Dharmapalite supremacists, worshippers of Christos Siddhartha, amalgamed Jesus and Buddha of very particular shapes into one saviour, accentuating brutal identitarianism, a martial syncrex. Billy could hear a rhythm, a little chant as the figures came.

“What are they saying?” he said.

“Only one and a half,” said Dane.
Only one and a half! Only one and a half!
“It’s how many they’re going to kill. No matter how many they do.”

“What?”

They quoted the Mahavamsa, the reassurance to King Dutthagamani after he slaughtered thousands of non-Buddhists. “Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts.” One and a half was how many the Jesus Buddhists counted in the mass of dead after any of their depredations, according to careful religious accounting.

“Get ready.” Dane held his gun. “We don’t know what’s coming.”

Would the Siddharthans be stood up? Their apocalypse would win by default, but what then? The spectators just out of sight were there to see a godwar. Things too large to be birds, too faunal to be gusting rags of plastic, circled in the wind. End-times always came with harbingers, generated like maggots in dead flesh.

“Oh,” Dane whispered. “Look.”

In the lee of a big windowless wall was a gang of helmeted men. Surrounding another man. Billy was rinsed with adrenalin. The Tattoo. “He’s here like us,” Dane whispered. “To see what this is.”

There was the punk man in his eyeholed leather jacket. Two of the men in crash helmets held him, in an alley overlooking the field of fighting. He stared in the opposite direction from it, at nothing, at dark streets, while the Tattoo spectated.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “Where’s Goss and Subby?”

“If they’re here …” Dane said. The Siddharthists were putting together a rough altar, carrying out secret ceremonies. “Wati?” But Wati was on rounds again. “If whatever this ‘animal church’ is doesn’t pitch up, we’re gone.”

There was a flash behind the night clouds, silent. It etched cloud contours. The air felt pressed down and the cars kept howling. From the altar was an unpleasant shining. “Here it comes,” said Dane.

All the way over them all, the cloud moved fast. It took shape. Church-sized clots of it evanesced, leaving—it was not mistake—a lumpy anthropoid outline in night-matter, a man shape crude as a mandrake root, a great cruciform figure over the city.

Billy stopped breathing. “If this
is
the end,” he said at last, “it’s nothing to do with the burning … What do we do?”

“It’s not our business.” Dane was calm. “There’ll be no shortage of people trying to put that out. If it’s just some piddling apocalypse, we needn’t worry.”

Then the earth in the dead space, the ugly dusty bushes and debris, rose. Men and women stood out of their camouflage and came quickly forward.

“They were there all along,” Dane said. “Well played. So who are they?”

T
HOSE COME FROM THEIR HOLES WERE IN LEATHER, BELTS CROSSED
bandolier over their chests. They surrounded the Jesus Buddhists. The cloud-man loomed.

“S
hit,”
Dane said. He turned to Billy. “Waste of our time,” he said in a flat voice. “That’s the Brood. Nothing to do with a kraken. Different animal.”

“What? Seriously?”

“Nothing to see here.”

“… We knew it was a long shot,” Billy said.

From their power base in Neasden, the SV Brood were devoted to a wargod polecat ferret. Its uncompromising ontology ultimately precluded its iteration as one deva among many in the Hinduism from which it was doggedly self-created, and the Brood had become monotheists of a more reductive sort. The Brood’s inspiration in southern India, their predilection for fighting forms of Kerala, gave the Christos Siddharthans a peg for prejudice: they screamed “Tamils!” as the Brood approached, as if it were a derogatory term. They brought out pistols.

“Bugger this,” whispered Dane. “Ferretists versus racists. This is
not
the end of the world.”

Could you really feel the hand of destiny while pointing a Glock? The Siddharthists would not let chivalry stand in the way of their Buddhist rage. They fired. Broodists fell and the others leapt, unwinding their metallic belts. They were urumis, whip-swords, blades metres long, ribbon-thin and knife-edged, that they lashed in the crooked agile poses of kalaripayat, opening their enemies’ saffron clothes in ragged vents, drawing red lines so fast it took seconds for the victims to scream.

A sinuate mustelid presence coiled and uncoiled out of dust and nothing in the wasteland. “Red thoughts white teeth!” chanted the Brood. “Red thoughts white teeth!” (This long-promised ferret eschatology had been endlessly distant, until the probing and knacked prodding of the FSRC had helped midwife the cult’s little Ragnarok. All to flush out who was where.)