Nylon Angel (28 page)

Yet it came from me. The pressure built steadily until my skin stretched to bursting. Crimson ran before my eyes.

With a crack I exploded.

At least I thought so.

 

Time passed.

I groped around dazed, my hands free from the ropes. Bodies lay strewn around me. Other shapes backing away. Scared. I touched the nearest corpse. Hot flesh. Burnt. Sounds overtook the echoing warcry in my head. Sounds of fighting. Young voices. Young bodies with homemade weapons - finishing the job I had started.

More bodies. Around me like torn scraps.

‘Oya?’

I stared into a child’s face. Filthy, feral and alight with hope.

‘Oya. We fight for you.’

I licked my lips. With immense effort I framed a word. ‘Me?’

More of them came. Clustering around. ‘Oya, we were watching.’

I shook my head in confusion.

Daylight was coming.

They helped me up, two tall, skinny boys under each arm. One blind, the other smiling broadly.

I only looked back once as I limped away.

 

A drink and some crumbling pieces of pro-sub and I felt less surreal. The ferals had taken me into a building; an attic protected with movement sensors like the ones in the attic above my room.

They swung on rafters and perched on beams around me like little primates. Watching and listening. I wondered if Jamon knew about them.

‘Why did you help me?’

‘The Muenos feed us because of you, Oya. The Muenos talk about you. Light candles for you.’

Pas!
He had kept his word.

‘What happened back there? When you found me?’ I asked one of the tall boys. ‘What did you see?’

He looked puzzled. ‘We saw you, Oya. You burnt them because they were going to hurt you. You are fierce.’ Around me they began to clap and cheer.

The boy confirmed my fear. It had come from me. I’d killed twenty or more people with some type of electric charge from my body. Burnt them alive.

Shivers racked me. ‘A-are y-you sure?’

He nodded, his long hair falling across his eyes. ‘One moment they are on top of you. The next . . . Psss!’ He made a noise like food sizzling in a fire.

Nearby, an explosion sent dust spiralling around us. The crossbeams groaned.

The ferals silenced in one accord. The tall boy fixed me with serious, worried eyes.

‘Oya. Can you save us?’

T
oo many people, too much.

But how could I stop now?

For someone trying to climb out from under the pile, I seemed to have gotten responsible for everyone else in it
.

I forced myself to think. ‘Do you know a shaman named Vayu?’

The tall boy pondered. ‘Where from?’

‘Here. Torley’s.’

‘We can find out. The Pets will know.’

He clicked his fingers, a succession of staccato noises, and a small, pale girl with pure white hair crept alongside him.

‘Tina will go.’

Tina smiled nervously as if the act itself might get her killed.

I tried to smile back, but my mouth seemed to be suffering rigor mortis. ‘Thank you. What would you like in payment?’

The tall boy shook his head and pointed high to a rough shelf attached to the roof. Two young girls armed with small, sharp spears guarded either end of it. The shelf bulged with stale bread and dried meats. ‘You’ve paid. Many times over.’

‘Is this what the Muenos gave you?’

‘Yes. But with the fighting there will soon be none for them to give. They help us, but not if their own bellies go hungry.’

‘Then tell Pas you have spoken with me. Tell him no matter what he must give you some food.’

‘But he will not believe me.’

‘Then I will find him.’

‘Thank you, Oya. Thank you,’ he said beaming.

 

I slept for the rest of the day and through the night, dimly aware of bodies pressed closely around me. I woke in the slim light of dawn and discovered a tiny girl no more than three or four, still asleep, clutching my shirt and sucking her finger. As I eased away from her I nearly rolled on another, an emaciated boy who tossed and turned restlessly, unable to find comfort for his bones on the hard surface.

Children lay littered around, moaning as they dreamed; whimpering and calling out in fear. The sound shook me.

Treading the beams carefully in between young bodies, I moved towards the manhole.

Tina sat nearby, gnawing on hard bread and sipping water from a container, waiting for me. Exhaustion and apprehension showed in her white face.

I kneeled next to her. ‘Tina?’

She broke off some bread. ‘I will take you to Vayu now?’

I hesitated, weighing my promise to the ferals against my desire to find someone who could help me with my visions. Yet from the moment I’d woken to find their bodies pressed trustingly alongside me, I had my answer. ‘I need to speak with Pas first.’

She nodded.

We ate together silently. Then left.

 

Timid though she appeared, Tina led me through The Tert with surety. Her innate sense of direction reminded me of Bras.

Outside seemed quieter with daylight dawning, but the remnants of the night’s excesses were evident. Drying bloodstains, ransacked hovels, dismembered Pets.

Tina searched their remains for faces she knew, stopping to sprinkle water on them from a little jar she gripped tightly in her hand.

‘Holy water?’ I asked, curious.

‘No. Acid. So nobody eats their eyes.’

I flinched at her matter-of-fact tone.

‘How did you come to be alone, Tina?’

She stared back at me, cruel shadows under her eyes. ‘How did you?’

We walked south, almost the way I’d come, towards Mueno territory even though I itched to be going east into the heart of Shadoville. We kept on the major walkways. It was dangerous in the open but more dangerous using the cover of back alleys.

‘Have you got a weapon?’ I whispered, fearing for her as the weight of watchful eyes travelled with us. The Remington, rescued by the ferals and back in my hands, didn’t fill me with great confidence.

She nodded, pointing to a tiny pouch around her waist.

‘Rasta virus,’ she whispered back. ‘Killing radius of a hundred metres. The . . . potency weakens after that.’ She seemed disappointed at the thought.

No wonder she moves with confidence, I mused. She was a walking biobomb.

We barely spoke again until midday, when the building facades displayed gaudy threadbare banners, bundles of feathers and roughly made dream catchers. Silent, knifed-up Muenos began to mark our progress - whether as protection for them, or for us, I could only guess.

Without hesitation she took me to a door smeared with dried blood.

‘Pas thinks chicken blood wards off evil spirits,’ said Tina.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think it’s a waste of food.’

Her pragmatism almost made me smile. Almost.

 

We spent a day and a night with Pas. He was less obese than he had been and more confident. An energy of purpose seemed to rage through him as he flicked his long hair about.

‘Topaz strays from our ways,’ he spat. ‘He is like
this
with Mondo from the Stretch.’ He made a rude gesture with his fingers.

‘How does he stray, Pas?’ I asked, curious.

He lowered his voice. ‘I have heard, at night, he takes a woman’s form.’

Shape-changing?
I didn’t know whether to laugh or be troubled by Pas’s words.

‘No matter. Oya is our true leader now.’ He stopped short of prostrating himself before me, but I could sense his impulse to do it.

I thrust the image away before it got me shaking. ‘This fighting must stop, Pas. You must tell the Muenos to resist it. Secure your territory. Mondo wants this fighting to spread something evil. Much blood will mean much evil. More than Oya can stop.’

‘There is nothing Oya cannot stop.’

This whole conversation was ridiculous. I’d come here to convince Pas to keep feeding the ferals and wound up acting as the Muenos’ favourite godhead again.

Next thing there’d be an anointing ritual.

 

An hour later I was perched awkwardly on something that felt and looked like bones, with a swathe of chicken feathers on my head.

I should have split when Pas started filing his men past me for benediction, but I couldn’t bring myself to crush Tina’s wide-eyed belief.

Pas recited the Mueno faiths, including the legend of Oya. I learned that Oya was a powerful female voodoo deity. A witch who invoked great changes. By the look of all the hundreds of Oya dolls cluttering Pas’s living room she also had some bad-hair issues.

Where was the likeness?

Truthfully, the Oya association scared the Jeesus out of me. Not only was I hallucinating Angels, but now half of The Tert reckoned I was a femme voodoo warrior. I’d thought to use it, but it was getting way out of control.

After the litany, the room filled with shaven-haired Mueno women bearing dirty trays of food. Tina ferreted whatever she could carry into her robes.

Confined to my bone throne, the heat of the bodies and the overwhelming smell of blood made me dizzy. The graininess of a vision threatened.

I fought it with every ounce of self-control, and lost . . .

 

 

I came back, draped indecorously across the bone throne with fifty Muenos prone before me. The sight nearly blacked me out again, yet my behaviour seemed to be what they expected.

Tina told me, as we made our way back west at daybreak escorted by a small Mueno guard, that I had
glowed
. She related it matter-of-factly, as if it was something Oya would naturally do.

I tried to hide my shaking hands from her and didn’t ask any more questions.
At least Pas will keep feeding the ferals
, I thought.

I insisted the Muenos leave us on the edge of their territory, feeling relieved when it was just Tina and I again.

The weight of a being a saviour made me totally nauseous.

 

We reached the fringe of Shadoville by late afternoon, dodging skirmishes as we went. Tina led me to an inconspicuous building sandwiched between a semicircle of villa units. It was only two storeys high and about one room wide. I couldn’t remember ever seeing it before.

She pointed to the building: her pale eyes filled her face.

‘Don’t kill any children,’ she said simply, and turned and left me standing.

What had my life become?

I
stepped toward the narrow building in a hurry to get under cover and off the street.

The front door wasn’t barricaded and I moved cautiously amongst the lower rooms observing the sparse furniture and bare kitchen. A noise above drew me to the stairs. The Remington lay loose in my grip, comforting.

I flicked away a crawling sense of foreboding as if it were an insect and squeezed my finger against the trigger.

Upstairs was more typical of a spirit house: symbols painted along the staircase, the scent of incense drifting down. It reminded me of Mei, and I wondered if she was still alive. I hoped for Sto’s sake that she was.

The last door at the top of the stairs was shut. I hesitated, balked by a sense of foreboding.

I had to go on, but what if the shaman, Vayu, couldn’t give me answers?

I was running out of options and into lunacy.

I flashed on the face of the mongrel woman, and the disfiguring, black whorl. What the hell had caused that?

I reached out for the door handle a second before it opened. A slight woman with a weary expression stood there. Her beaded red hair fell almost to the floor.