Ник Харкуэй - Tigerman

The bike slid and skittered on the loose rubble in the alleys, so he abandoned it. He was close enough to Sandrine’s house to walk, and he would need in any case a better transport if he must abduct her. He could hardly ride with a screaming woman across his handlebars – in his mind’s eye he saw the journey, the slender, fragile legs of his patient-captive thrashing and distracting him, catching on some obstacle at speed and shattering, pulling her from the saddle to a red ruin on the road. He pushed the thought away and walked on, hanging close to the walls as if he was back in contested Baghdad.

In a marketplace he came upon a living fragment of the mob, perhaps two dozen strong. The square was illuminated by the headlights of a quad bike, and the Quad himself stood full height on his saddle and snarled as the mob tormented a small family group cowering by the water pump. In one way that was good: the Quads were dispersed rather than gathered, which meant that there was time to see to the boy’s mother before dealing with the attack on Brighton House. But for these people, it was bad, because the Quad was here and so were they.

In the hard white light the victims looked stark and ill: a woman, a young man, a child. He didn’t know whether the child was male or female, not that it mattered, and he couldn’t imagine what their crime had been. Perhaps they had dared to try to put out a fire, or perhaps they were identifiably from the wrong part of the shanty, or possibly the woman had refused to sleep with someone, or the young man had, or just had the wrong sort of face. Tonight it was all one. Tonight it was a lottery, and they had lost. The first bottles were flying, smashing on the ground in front of them, splinters spattering over their feet and lower legs. The child flinched and howled, the young man lifted it and offered his back as a shield. Good lad.

The Sergeant moved around the shadows of the square until he was directly behind the Quad. He made no particular effort at concealment, and on the fringes of the mob people glimpsed him and turned, so that by the time he had reached his chosen position fully half the mob was looking not at the Quad nor his victims but into the darkness for something they could not see, blinded as they were by the bright light from the bike. The bottles slowed and stopped, and a hush fell over the square.

The Sergeant whispered, ‘Go home.’ And heard the mask turn it into something harsh and cold. ‘Go home,’ he said again, louder, and then he shouted it and heard the echo bounce off the far walls of the square, a noise from a torture room or a surgeon’s cutting station.

Between him and the Quad was an open space like a road, and he stepped into it, his anger mounting until he was running and the Quad was staring open-mouthed, so the Sergeant drove his fist into the offered target and followed the staggering man over the front of the bike and down, landing on him with both knees and hearing a gasp and a crunch of collarbone. He reared up and hit the man three more times, feeling the gloves soak up punishment which would have cracked his knuckles, knowing the Quad’s cheekbones were not so protected. The man slumped, coughing, then gasping as each convulsion shook the broken bones in his face. The Sergeant dragged him towards the family by the pump and left him lying in the broken glass. He looked at the mob.

The square emptied. He turned and found the family had vanished too, into the night.

A few minutes later, when he found Sandrine’s house, it was already burning.

He went in anyway.

The lower floor was filled with smoke, and breathing through the mask was like taking a mouthful of tea straight from the pot. He trusted the filter would protect his lungs, but there was no saliva in his mouth and his throat felt like dry wood. His teeth grew uncomfortably hot to the touch. He was an astronaut on Mars, or Venus, or whichever of them was hot and dark. He saw porcelain ducks on the wall. His parents had had ducks like that. They might even have been from the same factory. For all he knew they were the same ducks, travelled by some weird route across the world to see him die just as they had seen his first days after his mother brought him home from the hospital.

The house was one of the old farm cottages which had been swallowed by Beauville’s expansion and hemmed in by concrete-slab homes, lean-to shacks and the permanent tents of the inner shanty’s markets. The walls and stairs were made of stone. Everything else was dry wood. He judged he had less than two minutes.

On the upper landing there was more smoke but less flame. He slammed open one door, then another, sure he was getting the firefighting all wrong, but sure as well that it didn’t matter because the house was doomed anyway and anyone in it too unless they got out right now.

He found her lying in the middle of the bedroom floor, a roiling cloud stretched above her like a comforter, and thought with relief that she had made a good choice, up to a point. He could have wished that she would just abandon the house through the window onto the adjoining roof – he glanced out, saw that it was the side to which the fire had not spread – but then he would not have found her, would not be able to take her back to her son. The son she didn’t know.

But she ignored him, flat on her tummy and staring down at the wooden boards. They must be painfully hot, and the steam coming up through the cracks must be scorching, but she was resting on some sort of tray or panel. Her expression was intent. What was she doing?

A tendril of flame leaped up a few inches from her face, and she smiled in delight.

He realised she was lying on a full-length mirror on the floor of her burning house, watching the fire. A moment later another jet was erupting between the cracks and then another and he knew the house was giving up, that the time was now. She clapped.

He offered her his hand but she did not acknowledge him, so he scooped her up by the hips and lifted her, his legs and lower back protesting, until she was a wriggling, objecting burden in his arms and he was lunging for the window, feeling the boards sag under him as he went and expecting at any moment to fall into the inferno below, a thing he might just about survive but which would see her roast in his arms in an instant, and that would make an end of Lester Ferris, he was fairly sure, in any form he recognised now.

He lowered his head and hunched as he dived out of the window, felt the catch give way rather than the wood and glass, so no shower of razors, thank God, followed them down onto the next roof. He landed too hard and felt something crack, then realised with relief when no pain followed that it had not been his ankle. He had just enough time to wonder what that meant, and then they crashed through to the ground floor. He picked himself up, ready to fight, but the room was quiet and when he turned on a torch he saw it had until recently been some sort of vegetable stall. A mongrel pup had been sleeping in the corner, and the woman immediately shied a cobble at it, glowering. The mongrel yipped and scuttled out, and she mellowed again immediately, as if that was all it took to restore order to the world.

Sandrine – he had no doubt that it was she, he knew the lines of her face by proxy, and there was a weird disfocus to her expression which spoke of a damaged or remade intelligence – peered at him. Her hand reached out hesitantly to touch the mask, then sank to poke experimentally at the proboscis.

‘I’ve come to take you somewhere,’ he said, then cursed himself as the reassuring words came out metallic and wild.

But she smiled in approval and poked the mask again as if he had done something clever and interesting. She dived forward and began to investigate him, pat him down and follow the contours of his body in frank appraisal. It was not a sexual curiosity, but something else. She had never seen a man in a mask like this. He was a new thing. New things pleased her, so she wanted to know as much as possible about him. When she had roved, rapidly, all over him, and established that he felt essentially the same as other men, she frowned in disappointment and stepped away.