Approximately half a mile from St Christopher’s Hall, and Gavin McGafferty is about to die.
He doesn’t know it right now; in fact, right now he’s having a hard time thinking of anything through the red haze of contempt clouding his better judgement. He walks, and doesn’t fully grasp where he’s walking, and under his breath he mutters, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking…”
A bus sweeps by. It’s his bus. He was waiting for it at the stop outside the chemist, but when it didn’t come fast enough, he started walking to the next, and now there it is, passing by at that perfect point where he’s too far to run, and he knows, he just knows, that it, like everything else, is out to get him.
“Fuck fuck fuck SHIT…”
It is perhaps unfortunate, in a strictly humanitarian sense, that in less than fifty yards Gavin McGafferty will have his throat torn out with a single swipe of a fist-sized claw, his left ear ripped from the side of his face and his pelvis fractured by the sheer weight of creature bowling him to the ground. Nevertheless, his co-workers, when informed of the unfortunate event some twenty-two hours later, will pause a fraction too long as they consider his departure. There may even be some who, going to the bathroom afterwards to compose their faces in an appropriate mask of grief, find themselves looking in the mirror and breathing out a slow sigh of guilty relief. Gavin McGafferty is not a man who endears himself to the universe, and it is in this vein that he understands that the driver of the 159 bus that overtook him on the corner has waited–absolutely waited–just outside his line of sight for the right moment to screw him, personally, over.
The world has been conspiring against Gavin McGafferty from the start. He knows his co-workers talk about him behind his back; he knows that his work–which is fucking good fucking work, FUCK!–has been made to look shit by the apathy and personal hatred of his peers. He knows that no man can achieve perfection against such a world of inadequacy, but most of all he knows, more than anything else, that he is right and everyone else is wrong, and if he looks shit it’s only because the rest of them are out to get him.
“Fucking stupid fucking arsehole…”
He turns onto St John Street and sees the bus stop. The 159 is pulling away, two kids visible in the back seat, framed by the bus’s internal white lights, laughing, probably at him. There’s no one at the bus stop, no one on the road. They’re all on the bus, or inside the last fucking taxi in EC fucking 1, not that they even need it, lazy pricks, because they’re probably not going far, to a wine bar or something, whereas Gavin is going–Gavin is going to—
A motorbike grumbles into life behind him, distracting him from his train of thought. Its engine rumbles, a low throaty growl, then keeps turning over. He crosses the quiet street. The bike is still revving, but now there is something wrong with the sound: a potency, a thickness, a thing within it that…
“Fucking stupid fuck fuck fuck…”
… that pauses for breath?
He hesitates on the edge of the yellow light that frames the empty bus shelter. Something soft presses on a loose cobble stone, which sings a hollow note as it bumps against its neighbours. Other men might have looked back. Other men might have wondered. Gavin McGafferty knows better than to look. Only an idiot looks.
He steps up to the shelter and looks at the timetable. At this time of night, the 159 runs every twenty to twenty-five minutes, which he knows means at least half an hour. And it’ll be full of weirdo druggies and stupid kids, and he’ll be late, which is fucking fine because they can all fucking wait for him anyway but shit shit shit shit…
A ripple in the sound behind him, and it’s louder, and it’s closer, and that ripple–for that is the word–could almost be defined as the sound a soft leathery lip might make as it rubs its way across protruding fanged teeth, while a deep rumble inside a ribcage pressed within a hundred pounds of taut black flesh might yet prove the source of this persistent grumbling.
Idiots look.
Idiots look.
He’s not an idiot. Jesus, he’s Gavin McGafferty, he’s the shit, he’s the stuff, he’s the guy on the up, and all those fucking idiots around him who talk behind his back and try to bring him down because of their envy, their envy for Christ’s sake, they don’t understand. They’ll never get it, they’re the kind of guys who’d look, they’d look and he wouldn’t he wouldn’t he…
Looks.
The start of the scream doesn’t make it all the way to his voice box before it finds itself some three feet away from the air that should have supplied it. The teeth that remove his left ear dig deep enough to crack the solid sphere of his skull like a pistachio. Arguably, it’s the combined weight of Gavin and his attacker hitting the ground that causes the fractured pelvis. But frankly, given the time the paramedics spend trying to identify the body afterwards, no one really bothers to check.