The Gates: An Apocalyptic Novel (32 page)

I.

The Briefcase

Kindness can be deceptive,
like a steaming mug of coffee on a cold day. You never know how hot it's going
to be until you pick it up.

So, when the man sporting nothing but a pair of
stained pants offered a cigarette to the man in a stinking coat from a charity
bin, the man in the coat was understandably suspicious.

It wouldn't be the first time someone had held out
a kind hand, only to follow it through with a hard boot to the ribs. The man in
the coat was a few teeth shy of a full mouthful. Scarred lips from a punch, a
wheeze from the cold and neglect. He had a heavy limp - three youngsters had
given him such a kicking one night about seven years before that they'd managed
to break his thighbone. Him, an old man. Homeless, shit out of luck, stinking,
yes. But a man, still. Always a man.

The man in the coat was named Ed Bright. He was
the man who would not bend.

Ed sniffed unsuccessfully and wiped his dripping
nose with his right hand. He wore a glove on the left and didn't want to get
snot on it - the glove was nearly new.

'No trick, Boss,' said the man in the underpants.
He still held out the cigarette pack, like he could do it all day. Like it
wasn't snowing up above their little perch in the shelter of the subway.

Ed sniffed again.

Bugger must be freezing
, Ed thought. Shit,
he was wearing a coat and three jumpers (if he remembered rightly) and he was
still cold. Cold like the kind that you couldn't get out in a couple of hours
sitting around a shop's heating vents. The sort of cold that wouldn't go until
the first month of spring, and even then, your bones would remember it.

Bones don't forget the cold so easily when you're
an old man.

He did really want a cigarette. He had a lighter,
too. There was a bit of gas left and the flint was still sound.

'Well...cheers, then.'

Carefully, wary as always of the kind hand, Ed
Bright took the proffered cigarette in his bare hand (snot hardening on his
skin in the cold air already). He didn't look at the brand, because he didn't
care. A cigarette was a cigarette, he figured. It didn't matter to him who made
it.

He fumbled in one of the large pockets of his
stinky coat and brought out the disposable lighter of which he was so proud.
With a nod to the man in underpants, Ed lit his cigarette and took that
grateful first hit all the way down into his tattered lungs. He could feel the
warm smoke, the tar, the nicotine...working their magic straight off. The kind
of magic any junky feels after a fallow spell breaks.

'Been a while,' said Ed Bright, warming to the
stranger sitting with him, weathering the mid-winter cold...in his pants.

Ed meant to ask about that. It just didn't seem
polite, right now, while he was enjoying the man's cigarette.

'Mind if I join you?'

'Nope,' said Ed with a largely toothless smile. Ed
hadn't shaved in a while, and when he smiled the corners of his moustache went
into his mouth.

Shifting around on his perch - a grubby briefcase
that Ed had found and been using as a pillow - Ed watched the man tap out his
own smoke and rolled it expertly across his knuckles before popping it into his
mouth.

The stranger flicked his own lighter at his own
cigarette. Same brand as Ed's. Basically, an identical cigarette. Like might
happen for rich people when their cigarettes came from the same packet. People
with money smoked whole packets. They had a brand, rather than homeless people
who smoked whatever was left on the ground outside shops and pubs, or in the
wall-mounted ashtrays that adorned Britain's walls since the indoor smoking
ban.

Ed didn't notice where the stranger kept his
cigarettes or lighter. He did wonder, for a moment. Not long enough to bother
himself, though. And he was enjoying his smoke. A bit giddy from it, too, like
a virgin smoker, even though he'd managed to scrounge up three butts the day
before.

Hasn't been that long
, he thought. But he
didn't let that strangely powerful hit he was getting from each puff of his
cigarette bother him either. If anything, he felt pretty fucking grateful, all
told.

'Please excuse my lack of attire,' said the
stranger. A well-put together older man. One to whom the years had been a
little kinder, maybe, than they had to Ed Bright, with his sandpaper skin and
sawdust lungs.

Ed shrugged in answer to the stranger's comment.
He might have been curious as to the lack of attire a moment before, but oddly,
he didn't seem to care anymore.

He could do little more than shrug.

And smile. He felt happy. Getting a hell of a buzz
off a mere cigarette.

Ed kind of swayed a little when he took the next
hit. Reminded him of the rare times he'd picked up a roach, thinking it a butt,
and smoked it. Similar hit, this, to those leftover drugs he found on occasion.

Oh,
thought Ed.
Oh. Fuck.

He threw the cigarette down as the first wave of
sickness hit him.

'What...what the fuck?' he managed. His head
wasn't buzzing anymore with a harmless smokers' high, but thumping like a
fucking great big drum.

'Flunitrazepam, my friend,' said the stranger,
merrily smoking his own cigarette without any sign of ill effect. 'Roofies?
Rohypnol? Ringing a bell?'

'You...
cunt
.'

Each word Ed managed was slurred. Confused. The
next time he tried to speak, he couldn't.

'Tip was soaked in it. Warmth of the smoke
released the vapours. Not a big dose, but you're undernourished, freezing,
run-down and worn-the-fuck-out, aren't you, buddy?' The man in the underpants
didn't sound happy, or sad. Just matter of fact.

'Shsl...flu...'

'I'd give up if I were you, Mr. Bright,' said the
strange man with kindness.

Ed didn't register the oddness of this man, this
pusher, knowing his name. He coughed and followed through with a small spurt of
foul vomit on his coat. Then, unceremoniously, slid to one side and cracked his
head against the cold concrete of the subway's floor.

Out, cold. Not dead, though.
No,
thought
the stranger.
Dead wouldn't do at all, would it?

Gently, the man closed Ed's glazed and staring
eyes. The stranger's fingers and hands were soft and clean.

He finished his own cigarette, crouched over Ed
Bright, watching the worn old man dream. He dragged Ed to one side and rested
the man's head on his briefcase-pillow. He wasn't especially gentle, or rough.
It was just a gesture, and like most gestures, probably empty.  Then, flicking
his cigarette butt end over glowing end into the murk, the strange man walked
away from Ed Bright. He left the old man curled against a piss-stained wall
with a children's mural on it.

 Ed Bright lay unconscious, in the darkness of the
subway. It was the middle of the day in the middle of a cold winter in the
middle of a cityscape like so many others.

The stranger walked out of the subway as the first
of the meteors hit.

The prelude to the big one, small fragments,
outriders, striking all across Europe, before the big one and the reign of
fire.

Before the setting skies.

He'd saved the old homeless man's life with a
cigarette and a little liquid loving. The strange man smiled at that thought as
a rock the size of a hatchback car hit the entrance to the subway, sending hot
shards of rock through the air, concrete and meteorite alike.

The stranger didn't flinch, nor did he duck. He
wasn't thinking about the meteors and the destruction raining down from the
sky, but of the old, broken man he left beneath him, safe from the coming
storm.

He hadn't saved him for nothing, though, but Mr.
Bright and the briefcase were more like a deposit in a bank, he figured.

'Work to do yet, Mr. Bright,' he said as rock
after rock tore into the city all around him.
Not like I can do everything
on my own,
thought the man as he lit another cigarette from a smouldering
piece of wreckage he passed. Ed Bright might not be the sharpest tack, but he'd
do just fine.

'Just fine,' he said.

He began to feel the heat already. Snow fell, but flames
were licking at his heels as he walked and he was breaking a sweat. The tarmac
melted from the heat of the fires throughout the city. Ball sweat was dampening
the man's pants. He stopped, shook his head and laughed.

He dropped his pants on the hot ground and they
caught fire in the heat.

He walked on naked while the city burned and the
people screamed. He looked up at the skies with their rain of fire, beyond the
sky to something above, beyond.

'You had your turn, buddy,' he said. Nodded up at
the sky, then walked on with a big grin and not a lick of clothing.

*

Three months
earlier...

Frank Liebowicz weighed in
at 250lb, there or thereabouts. Plenty of it was fat, but not all. He had
muscle, too, and thick hard bones, and a forehead that had broken countless
cheeks, noses, and teeth over the years.

Not strictly an enforcer, Frank wasn't really
anything more than a big strong guy who didn't care what or who he broke. A
grunt, maybe, for whoever needed a little work done. It didn't matter to
Liebowicz what that work was, or who it was for, or if there was blood. He was
a realist. People had blood in them. Sometimes it came out.

He was a simple man at heart, if he seemed
slightly more complex on the surface. He listened to classical music in his
home, read books with long words without the aid of a dictionary. He was
simple, not stupid.

Not stupid enough to miss a trick. Like this
current job of work he had on. It stank. He couldn't quite put his finger on
it, but Johnny Muller had sent him to the docks, so he'd gone and not kicked up
a fuss.

Johnny had never steered Liebowicz wrong.

So far?

He wondered.

Liebowicz remembered why he was out this late at
night; the small annoying man whose tie Frank held in his thick fist. That was
why he was here.

Hard enough to smart, not hard enough to break
anything, Frank pushed the little man against the metal siding. The resulting
noise was loud in the empty market, but it didn't matter, because only the two
of them could hear it.

The little man was wheezing and crying. Liebowicz
thought maybe he'd just broken a rib or two, despite not putting much effort
into the shove.

'Mr. Lowe. Please don't drag this out. For your
sake. I don't care, either way, I get paid. It'll cover the cost of a new suit.
Believe me. But come on...let's stop fucking around. You're wheezing, you're
scared. I'm a big fucking bastard who beats the fuck out of people for a
living. Eh?'

Frank wasn't particularly keen on cursing to make
his point, but sometimes a little rage, a few swear words, could do the trick
before he had to cause any kind of lasting damage and get a new suit mucky.

The little man - Mr. Lowe - wheezed some more. A
trickle of blood came from his ear, probably ruptured when Liebowicz had first
slapped him on the side of the head (getting some of the slimy man's hair
product on his palm).

Maybe Lowe couldn't hear him out of that ear.
Maybe. But no reason to be stubborn. He had two ears, didn't he?

'Going to count to three, Mr. Lowe. Then I'm going
to hurt you. Something you won't shake off.'

Mr. Lowe wheezed some more.

Liebowicz wondered if he could pull off a finger.
Not dislocate, or snap. Actually pull it free.

That'd probably work.

'One. Two...'

He paused slightly longer before getting to three.

Getting soft,
he thought.

'Three,' he said, and pulled.

Turned out he could, after all, pull a finger off.

He held up the finger, skin ragged, pristine
fingernail one end and gristly knuckle at the other, for Mr. Lowe's benefit.

He probably knows without show and tell
,
Liebowicz told himself.

Lowe was pale and he was screaming. It was a
breathless kind of scream, but a good effort, nonetheless.

Liebowicz stuffed the finger down the little man's
throat to keep him quiet, and, well, to drive home the point.

Unfortunately, Frank stuffed Lowe's dying index
finger in a bit too hard, because as Lowe inhaled for a second round of
wailing, the finger went right into the bastard's windpipe. Choking, Lowe began
to turn a funny hue.

'Fuck,' said Liebowicz. You didn't kill people
until you had what you wanted. Fucking schoolboy error.

'Fuck,' he said again, flipping Lowe around so it
looked like he was going to try and take the little man from behind.

'Fuck!'

Frank squeezed hard a couple of times with his
fists bunched up into Lowe's diaphragm. The finger popped out, covered in
spittle.

Liebowicz let Lowe loose to breathe. But the man
wasn't breathing. He was dead, which explained why the daft bastard fell
straight forward, face into concrete, without so much as moving a hand to stop
himself.

'Ah,' said the big man. 'Oops.'

Frank often spoke to himself. His was, largely, a
solitary existence. He didn't even know he did it most of the time.

He didn't often have fully fledged conversations
with himself, though, so when someone else behind him replied, he was back in
the world, ready to roll.

'Oops? Fucking
oops
?' Muller. Muller was
here, behind Liebowicz.

Frank's fists clenched. He'd known something
stank. Fucking known it.

'You stupid fucking ape,' said Muller.

Liebowicz spun, ready to lash out. He didn't
though, because Muller had a revolver. A big fat thing of dull metal, with a
medium-sized barrel.