Christopher Fowler - Personal Demons

Around the next bend, crimson accident flares were spread before a stack of crushed vehicles spread across the road.

'Shit! Hold tight!'

Slamming on the brakes, Brett carommed the car side-on into the flames and veered off at a fast-approaching junction of the freeway. Suddenly there were people lining either side of the connecting road, waving, cheering and making the handsalute of the church. It felt as though Brett and Lisa were making their entry into Rome. In fact, they were about to enter the city of Phoenix.

The car radio had been operating below Brett's hearing threshold for several miles. Now it boomed into fresh life as the announcer spoke of one last hope for peace; a few minutes ago the Chinese had said that if they were provided with a positive, conciliatory gesture from the leader of the US military within the hour, they would halt their planned strike action on the Russian seaboard. So there was a slim chance of salvation!

'Did you hear that? There's still a hope!' He turned to Lisa, and one glance at her unguarded face told him all he needed to know.

No-one could look so disappointed at the news. He had been duped. She had deliberately led him out here. She saw him looking and stared blankly back.

'This is where you need to be in order to fulfil the prophecy,' she said simply.

He looked up at the road ahead, and saw that once again they had entered a deserted stretch of highway. A sign above him read YOU ARE NOW ENTERING PHOENIX CITY LIMITS. Puzzled, he accelerated – and suddenly on the ramp below the car he saw dozens of police motorbikes crossing in formation. A motorcade was passing beneath the empty road. Brett started to brake, trying to make sense of what he saw, but with a feral cry Lisa stamped her shoe over his, forcing his foot down. The Oldsmobile rocketed ahead to vault the off-ramp barrier and smash down on to the central passing limo of the motorcade, flipping both vehicles and turning one into a thundering ball of flame. A roar of triumphant applause grew from the reappearing crowds.

Hurled from the Oldsmobile, Brett spiralled away in a bellowing sea of flame-lit faces.

Slowly, painfully, he returned to consciousness.

He was stripped to the waist, lying on a warm granite slab that formed a dais in the middle of a field near the freeway. He was surrounded by thousands of celebrating people. Fires filled the horizon. He could smell barbecued chicken in the air.

Lisa, Mara and his son checked with each other to see who would go first, then stepped bashfully forward in turn. Davey's arms were unbandaged, and completely unmarked. He gave a Candid Camera kind of smile and shrugged. Brett's work colleagues were there. So were most of his friends and family.

'You did it, Brett!' Mara cried happily. 'You fulfilled your destiny as the Horseman of Death!' There were whoops and hollers. Everyone was joyous. The noise was like a hundred sitcom audiences cheering the entrance of a sexy woman.

'I don't understand,' he croaked weakly.

They tried to explain that he had hit the motorcade bringing the military heads back from Nevada. A simple accident on the road to Phoenix – that was all he had been needed for. They all talked at once, and weren't sure if he could hear them.

Now the only remaining moderate military leader was dead, Lisa explained. No answer could go back to the Chinese. She felt bad about killing Elias, but he'd had a good life. Hadn't it all turned out for the best? She poured him a plastic beaker of Californian champagne, but he knocked it out of her hand.

The apocalypse ran a little late. It was some time after midnight that the sky from the East began to light up with the arcing trails of the arriving missiles. Lisa gripped Brett's arm and told him not to worry.

'Your destiny isn't ours,' she said sadly. 'You and your three partners will live on, through destruction, death and decomposition. You'll see it through – right through – to a time of rebirth and regeneration. Then you'll be released from your earthly duty, to return to dust.'

As the world erupted around him, Brett demanded to know why he was chosen, out of anyone in the world.

Lisa stroked his face gently. 'Don't you know that the greatest harm can only be carried out by the blind?' she whispered, kissing his forehead as the cleansing conflagration filled the sky.

Brett stood naked at the centre of the blinding sun, the brightest light in the universe, his limbs outstretched, the living personification of Leonardo Da Vinci's drawing of Man. Like the phoenix he would die and be reborn in flame.

Around him he could see four galloping stallions of fire, racing like missiles. And through them, the merest glimpse of something else, the world far into the future, a world that was green and clean and pure, ready to begin again.

It cannot think, fanciful to imagine it could, for how would so many millions of lives make themselves heard, distilled into a single voice? But if – just if – there was such a thing as a collective intelligence, what would it be saying now, the voice of London?

During the trial of Captain Clarke at the Old Bailey in 1750, the court became so hot that the windows had to be opened, and the foul germ-laden stench from nearby Newgate Prison that blew in killed everyone sitting on the window-side of the court – all forty-four people.

'How much do they want for the sale?'

'Three hundred and seventy grand. That's what they figure it's worth at today's prices.'

'I'm in this business to make a living, not to be bent over a table and fucked stupid.'

'I'm sorry, that's what their man told me to tell you.'

'Well, you can tell them – ' The door opened behind Marrick and his exhausted secretary stuck her head into the room. Marrick nearly fell off his chair trying to see who it was.

'For fuck's sake, Doris,' he exploded, 'will you stop creeping around like Marley's fucking ghost?'

'I'm sorry, Mr Marrick, I'm about to vanish for the night, and your wife is here.' Doris tossed the information into the room like a lit firecracker and beat a hasty retreat.

Marrick banged his chair upright. 'Harrods must have declined her credit cards again. This is all I fucking need. Excuse me, gentlemen. Jonathan, see if you can talk some fucking sense into the sales agent. Try to make him see that I'm not a completely heartless bastard. You know – lie.' The door slammed and he was gone in a cloud of acrid cigar smoke.

Jonathan Laine didn't much like his boss; the man had no respect for anything or anyone. Adrian Marrick trampled a path through life in a cheap suit, shouting and shoving all the way. The technique worked, up to a point, but Jonathan could not see the company expanding beyond this dingy Holborn office. There were barriers of class in the city, invisible lines that could not be crossed by a marauding loud-mouthed oik from south London.

Jonathan was not complaining; at the age of fifty-seven he was at least still employed and making a subsistence wage. His boss was just past his twenty-fourth birthday, and although it sometimes seemed strange to be working for such a young man, Marrick possessed a cunning far beyond his years. He could even be fun in an appalling way – chainsmoking, swearing, drinking and dealing through the property market, and he was a good teacher so long as you remembered to isolate the immoral and illegal elements of his advice. His observations about his fellow man could be jaw-droppingly crass, and yet there was often a horrible accuracy to them. He was part of a new generation whose tastes were decided by price. 'You owe us, old sport,' he would say in one of his magnanimous after-dinner moods. 'We're burying the past, chucking away the old rules. Giving commerce a chance to breathe.'