SOMETIMES, AS MANSER swam in and out of consciousness, he spoke to the dead man by his side but was disappointed to get no reply. He controlled the pain by concentrating on him, asking him what his likes were. Asking him what kind of soap he used, what toothpaste, what brand of toilet tissue. That and the sheer force of his will kept him together.
He was constantly surprised out of his fugues by the simple fact of this man’s death. Manser was lying next to him in a large deserted car park. It was late, but somewhere nearby there was heavy traffic. The dead man’s eyes were large dark shadows. Assessing them, he wondered how he could be dead if they were open so wide. But then another ripple of reality would work through the morphine haze and he saw how he had no eyes at all, just ragged black holes where they had been torn out. The man’s heart was gone, but try as Manser might he couldn’t remember eating it, or taste the richness of the organ on his tongue. He supposed he must have consumed it, but then he couldn’t remember killing him, or how he had come to be here.
Manser drew a hand gingerly to his face and flinched when he felt the crisp, tender mask that it had become. The heat from the fire had caused his eyelids to melt and slide down over his eyes; he turned Jez Knowlden’s body over, catching a carrion whiff from those gouged sockets, so he could reach inside his jacket. Knowlden always carried a pair of nail scissors with him; he wouldn’t need them any more. Manser used them to snip the membranes from his own brow.
All Manser could smell were the carbonised parts of his body.
Gyorsi had left him for dead. His friend, his mentor, had betrayed him and as good as murdered him. His throat felt raw where the heat and smoke had scorched it. He couldn’t hear too well because the shells of his ears had been burned clean away. The forefinger and middle finger of his left hand had fused together and become little more than a black claw of protruding bone and ligament.
He wondered if he would be able to come back from this and be anything like his former self. He doubted it, but here was Knowlden, and he hadn’t killed himself.
In the distance, he thought he could hear sirens. London. So what? But a tremor of adrenaline drew him upright. Something didn’t feel right. He almost laughed at that; a burned man in a car park at the Devil’s hour, spending time with a cold, opened body, and something didn’t feel right. Maybe Knowlden was wearing odd socks. Now he did laugh, a brutal, dry cackle that transformed itself into a painful cough almost immediately.
He shambled away, towards a more complete darkness, away from the hard sodium glare and open spaces of the shopping centre, the Toys R Us, the Holiday Inn’s inviting lights, at the fringes of the car park, the low ceiling of the Brent Cross flyover. His instincts were right. A couple of minutes later, as he moved through shadows that reeked of stale urine, the hot grease of cheap hamburgers and his own foggy, smoggy smell (although he cringed to think that all of those smells might be emanating from his own body), the blue scatter of lights from police cars and a van tossed and turned the night this way and that. A couple of unmarked cars brought up the rear. He squinted through the trees at them and the headache they were inspiring.
They drove right up to the body and immediately half a dozen armed, heavily armoured policemen leaped out of the van and began spreading out. High-powered torches sent the night scurrying back a little more. Over this industry came the distant throb of a helicopter. He knew that he must hide soon, within the next five minutes, if he was to escape the infrared cameras on a police chopper. His body would stand out like a piece of white chocolate on a black carpet.
He hurried along, feeling alternately too hot and too cold, but knowing that if he discarded his coat he would be dead before he realised it, either from the freezing November air or a bullet in the back of the head when his trail was picked up. He heard dogs. What was this? Not some arbitrary location search. They knew what they were going to find. And, he realised with a thud in his heart, they thought they’d find him too.
He found the strength to run, although the movement caused furious reactions in his face, neck, and left arm. At the far end of the parking space – an area he guessed was too remote for shoppers, but a prime location for lovers and junkies – he clambered over a fence on to a litter-choked walkway alongside the thin thread of water that was Dollis Brook. Darkness stretched away into what seemed to be cold miles of empty space. Stars were visible here, just a few hundred feet away from the light pollution, like spilled talc. He moved through the long grass, knowing that he was done for. His pathetic, stumbling figure would be picked up by the thermal imaging cameras within a few minutes, with him barely a hundred metres along the bank. He had hoped for busy streets to lose himself in, places bustling with people. Where was London when you needed it?
He imagined the pilot coming in low, swooping over the crime scene, moving on across the brook, which was, he realised with disgust, the most obvious escape route, its cameras trained on the acres of black, on the look-out for a staggering white ghost. But he had a chance, as long as he could find something cold to hide beneath.
He followed the brook as best he could, trying not to slip in the mud, resisting the temptation to keep feeling that his face was still where it ought to be. At Staples Corner, where the M1 begins its journey out of London, he struggled over another fence, dropping into a slope of gravel and weeds that led down to the railway. He staggered south, following the moonlight as it skated along the parallel lines, until he reached Brent Sidings. The helicopter’s noise had bottomed out now; he could see it suspended in the sky, a white beam poking into the urban landscape, trying to expose him. Without warning, it swooped his way. He reckoned he would have about thirty seconds before the cameras picked him up. He must be the warmest body out on the streets for miles, despite the winter crawling through his veins.
Shapes emerged from the darkness. Rolling stock. He reached the first of them and relished the bite of cold the metal gave his fingers – so cold as to almost cause his skin to fuse to it. He got to his knees and scrabbled his way under the car until his body was between the tracks, his face looking up at an underbelly of black steel that smelled of dead diesel. He heard the helicopter droning, using up its own reserves of fuel. He counted off the minutes of their search. The helicopter’s buzz grew more distant.
Nothing to report. Must have been picked up by a knight in shining armour before we could get to him. I’ll make another pass, but it’s not looking likely. You’d be better off checking the connecting roads and paths in the immediate vicinity. Roger and out.
He thought of the things they had discussed, the two of them, in the restless shadows of the trees. A passing on of knowledge. A secret history. Before this betrayal. This farewell to arms.
How had it started, that final conversation?
– In 1980, Malcolm, my dear chap, I had my pancreas removed, an illegal operation conducted by a freelance surgeon, much like Doctor Losh, the objectionable sawbones in your employ. My pancreas was in perfect working order. As I fully expected it to be.
Why?
– Because I have perfection in me, Malcolm. I was born to it.
No, I mean, why did you have it removed?
– Oh, I see. Well, it meant that I no longer produced insulin. I became a diabetic. My blood would become sweeter.
You did it to make your blood sweeter?
– That’s right, Malcolm. Yes, I wanted to improve my flavour. There is an interesting medical anecdote regarding diabetics. If you walk into a hospital ward and smell pear drops, it usually means, unless someone is actually eating those sweets, that someone is suffering – quite badly, I hasten to add – from diabetes. It’s the ketones that are causing the smell. Basically, you need insulin to transport glucose from the blood to the muscles, where it can be burned as fuel. If you don’t have enough insulin to do this, then the body converts fat into ketones to use as fuel instead. Too many ketones, for a diabetic, can spell danger.
You’re at risk? You don’t take insulin?
– I don’t need it. I told you. I’m different. But you tell me. You smell that fruitiness on my breath? Like pear drops. Like nail varnish. It’s heady. It’s seductive.
Yes. I smell it.
– Well, you’re not the only one.
Why are you telling me this? Why is this important?
– I’m telling you because I like you, Malcolm. You found me. You have sustained me, you’ve kept up certain levels that I’ve had to maintain, or I’d fritter away like froth, like flotsam in the wash of a powerboat. I’m still a player. I still matter. Things are going to happen in London that will turn your piss to ice, boy. I’m telling you. Get out while you can. While you still have the blood beating in your heart. Because believe me, anything alive in the capital when they, when they relearn the art of killing is going to be nothing more to them than a walking, no, a running, no, a sprinting snack.
They?
– I should say, we, really. A little offshoot of mankind, one of its vestigial limbs.
I don’t understand.
– No, Malcolm, I know you don’t. You’re in this for the stumps. You have base desires, yet pedigree know-how. The thing is, your devotion to amputees is attractive to me, to us, for the reason that it signals a need in human beings for the unconventional. We know that when we reintegrate into society, we will be able to progress, to seamlessly knit ourselves into that pattern that so violently rejected us all those years ago.
– I’m putting it formally, I suppose. A different way of explaining our position would be that we intend to declare war on you fucks until there’s nothing left but human chum. Four hundred years ago, we were chased out of this city after being invited, begged to enter it in the first place.
There’s no need to shout at me, Gyorsi, I’m not –
– There’s every need. Talking never achieved anything with your lot. Do you know how many people were killed during the Great Fire of London in 1666?
It wasn’t many. I think it was six. Maybe eight?
– That’s what the history books tell us. But they lie. If you believe it was started in Pudding Lane by a baker called Farriner – Jesus Christ, who made that up? Mr Fiction of Story Street? – then you’ll believe anything. Thousands died, Malcolm. Thousands of us.
And you want revenge?
– We want what’s owed us. A piece of this city. Our own Palestine. And yes, we want you to feel the suffering we’ve known. We’re hungry. We’ve been sucking on fresh air for centuries. We want some meat.
Why now? Why here? Wouldn’t it be better to target a small village first? A sleepy seaside town? London is tough. It knows how to deal with terrorism.
– Not this kind, believe me. And the current crop of citizens … tough? Don’t make me laugh. This city is so ripe you can almost smell it. You know the thing about plague? The weird thing? It comes when the environment is right. You look at the 1300s when agriculture failed and the country was ensnared in the Dark Ages. Poor climate. Famine. A population growing, outstripping the amount of produce that could feed it. War. Misery. When people are psychologically and physically prepared for plague, it comes, Malcolm. And it is coming again. The miasma. The people in this city are slow, fat, weak. They sit at their desks all day developing haemorrhoids and pilonidal sinuses. Fat accretes around their hearts. It creeps along their arteries. Infarctions and cancer hang around the population like hoodlums chewing matchsticks on street corners but they’re being bullied out of things by the machines and the medicine. Age expectancy might be on the rise, but only because of the technology its health service can offer. Your senescence is unnatural, manufactured. We’re here as Mother Nature’s agents, to reimpose the balance.
– The fire was started to get rid of us, Malcolm. We were invited to rid the city of plague, and what thanks did we get? An almighty torch up our arses. How they must have patted themselves on the back when the fire was dead and both their blackbirds killed. Well, just as yersinia pestis lives on in its little hidey-holes around the world, so do we.
What do you want me to do?
– You’ve played your role, Malcolm. And you’ve played it well. You turned in an award-winning performance. It’s time to take a bow and return to the wings. For your own safety, I recommend it.
But I can help you.
– No, you can’t. I’m changing, Malcolm. I’m becoming something that will forget what it means to be human, in the way you know it to be. And when I’ve done so, I may lash out at anything in my way. One of the problems of our breed is a lack of control, or discipline. I’m hoping to rectify that.
But how can you do that? You’re one of them.
– I’m not. Not yet. But I’ve been building to this moment all my life, ever since I realised I had their blood in my veins. My mother was not like your mother, Malcolm. My father was a human being. My mother loved him for a little while. And she was respectful of his remains; he’s buried somewhere near Oxford. His bones have her little teeth marks all over them. She had pretty, childish teeth, my mother.
– These human traits of restraint and discipline, we need them if we are to abide. Once the firestorm of our making has been damped, and the Queen installed, I’ll introduce level-headedness. I’ll introduce the concept of moderation. Savages will not endure. I will make gentlemen of monkeys.
You? A moderate?
– Don’t bait me, Malcolm. I won’t rise to it. I did what I had to do to gain attention. They know who I am. They know of my dedication and my wish to subjugate myself to the new Egg-layer. I will be with my Queen and together we will oversee the coming of a new generation. London will be our spawning ground, and may the shit that survives know what it means to scrabble in the sewers for a living for centuries to come.
The new Queen. Where is she? Who is she?
– Oh, come, come, we both know the girl who is hosting her. I know you’ve taken a shine to her.
You mean it’s growing inside her? Inside Cl–?
– Names mean nothing to me. She is who she is. We are who we are. Names are for dinner parties. She will be with me.
But …
– There are no more lines for you to recite. The final curtain is there for you to take. The audience is on its feet for you.
I don’t want to leave.
– The Thames will run red, Malcolm. The infamy that is English litter will be replaced by scraps of rotting bodies. Skeletons will adorn the high street shops like Christmas decorations. It will be a festival for the carnivores. For our spurned people. We return. We rise again. And this time there will be no inferno, no scourge, to stop us.
They’re like the plague bacillus, Malcolm. And there’s irony for you. Hiding in old, unknowable places. If you disturb it, it will come again. You can’t. You won’t be a part of it.
I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE. I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE. I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE.
From: chewingman@yahoo.co.uk
To: saycheese@mac.com
Sent: Saturday, November 29, 2008 21:01
Subject: a wrnng 2 th wse
1 of us is cmng 4 u. b wtchfl