Филип Керр - The Second Angel

Rimmer placed the Pinback in his ear and, unobserved by the black night attendant, selected a piece of Mendelssohn, Elijah, as accompaniment for his imminent act of homicide. Be not afraid, sang the voice. It made a pleasant alternative to the Muzak and the chatter of the attendant leading them along an eleventh-floor corridor to 1105, the chamber of the Clostridium’s longest resident. Part of him wondered why they were still bothering with this little facade. They knew where Dallas was to be found. It was simply a matter of going there and killing him.

‘As a matter of fact, in the morning I was going to have to decompress Ingrams anyway,’ explained the attendant, whose own name, he said, was Taylor. ‘We have to do all the long-term guests once or twice a week, otherwise they get the bends. Y’know? Bubbles in the bloodstream. We’re real careful about that.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Ronica, as Taylor stopped outside the door to a chamber and inserted his electronic key into the security lock. She was still trying to think of some way in which she could put on a show of testing the hapless resident of 1105 for superoxides. Perhaps she would get the guy to lick the screen of the matchbook phone she was carrying: It was a new one, a little different from how they normally looked, and she was banking on Taylor not having seen this kind of phone before. That would have to do.

Now that he had the key in the lock, Taylor was able to open a control panel on the wall beside the door and manually override the pressure settings that had been made on the inside of the chamber. He glanced at his watch and said, ‘This’ll take a few minutes. But you can’t hurry it.’ He laughed grimly. ‘Not unless you want to kill the guy.’

Rimmer’s available ear picked up.

‘As a matter of interest, how high can you set the pressure?’

‘High as you like. Two or three hundred atmospheres. These chambers are built to withstand huge amounts of pressure. Much more than the human body can take, anyway. But we don’t let guests set their own pressures as high as all that. Anything really high has to be done from the outside by an attendant with a key like this one. It stops some of the guests from using the pressures to commit suicide, when they get depressed.’ Taylor shook his head. ‘You should see the mess it used to make.’

‘That is fascinating,’ said Rimmer. ‘You learn something useful every day.’

‘Don’t know about useful,’ murmured Taylor. He glanced up as a red light above the door extinguished. ‘Soon as it turns green we can go in.’

Rimmer looked at Ronica and smiled. ‘I think we’ve seen enough, don’t you?’ Be not afraid, saith God the Lord, be not afraid, thy help is near.

‘What are you talking about?’ Taylor frowned. ‘I thought you wanted to do this test on Ingrams. Superoxide test, or whatever.’

Rimmer had the gun behind his back now, his thumb adjusting the bezel of the noise suppressor to ensure the shot would be a silent one. No point in disturbing the other guests, he thought. Especially if those guests included Dallas on the floor immediately above them. Though thousands languish and fall beside thee, and tens of thousands around thee perish, yet still it shall not come nigh thee. That didn’t include Taylor, obviously. But Rimmer was beginning to feel a bit like some Old Testament prophet of doom. It was a good feeling. He was just waiting on a sign from the Lord now. A green light to go. He hardly cared that some hidden camera might record his image. Not in a place like this. It was only in the Zone that such considerations really mattered. The police from a city sector like this one were never allowed to enter a CBH Zone.

The attendant’s eyes flicked momentarily above the door as the green light came on, and in the same instant, Rimmer placed the thick square muzzle of the gun against the back of Taylor’s head and squeezed the trigger, stepping neatly out of the way of the collapsing body and the great spout of blood that discharged itself in a red arc from the pressurized chamber that was the instantaneously dead man’s skull. Quite unprepared for what had happened, Ronica was not so smart on her elegantly shod feet, and these were quickly drenched in a shower of hot, steaming blood. Horrified at this sudden eruption of potential contamination, for you didn’t work in a hyperbaric hotel unless you too were infected with the virus, Ronica started back on her high heels until she felt the wall on the opposite side of the corridor against her back, whereupon she stared down at her incarnadined shoes.

‘You bloody idiot,’ she screamed.

‘Keep it down, will you? There are people trying to sleep, you know?’

‘Keep it down?’ Ronica gasped with outrage. ‘Keep it down? Rimmer, do you see what you’ve done to my fucking shoes? They’re ruined. They were by Federico Ingannevole. And they cost a bloody fortune. But now. Christ, I look like...’ Ronica shook her braided head.

Rimmer glanced down at her shoes and laughed.

‘His blood be upon us,’ he said. ‘And on our children. And on our shoes. You’re right.’

‘Yeah, well I don’t notice any of it on you,’ she replied bitterly, trying to wipe the worst of it off onto the carpet.

‘You’ve got to move quickly on this job.’ Rimmer kicked the attendant experimentally, drawing forth a sharp exhalation of air from the dead man, enough to make Rimmer step back and contemplate firing another shot. Then, looking up and seeing a green light, he perceived the real source of the noise. It was not Taylor gasping his last, but the door to the hyperbaric chamber, where a near naked man of indeterminate age stood, his whole skeletally thin body covered in the bright red lace that was the maculopapular rash characteristic of final phase P2. The dying man uttered a hoarse, parched cry and staggered forward into the bright light of the corridor, pointing an accusing finger at Rimmer in an almost spectral manner. Now that he was in the light Ronica and Rimmer could clearly see the cheeks of the man’s emaciated face, as red as if he had been slapped hard several times and flecked with tiny pinpricks of oxygen-starved blood.

Snatching the Pinback from his ear — for the sight looked a little too biblical even for him, like Samuel returned from the grave to haunt King Saul — Rimmer recoiled from this walking corpse and the putrid smell that preceded him. And with a shudder of distaste that quickly turned to panic as the figure reached out to touch him, Rimmer shot the man in the leg. This was not for mercy’s sake, so as not to have to shoot him dead, but only to allow Rimmer to step a little farther away from the now supine, groaning wretch — Rimmer had no wish to be spattered with any body fluids from this contaminated creature — before shooting him twice more, in the chest. But in truth, the old man, Ingrams, hardly bled at all. It was as if the blood that had become his every waking preoccupation was simply too exhausted to leave the etiolated cadaver.

Ronica removed the protective hand from her still gaping mouth and let out a gasp of horror.

‘Bloody hell,’ she muttered. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘It sure looks like it,’ Rimmer said coolly.

‘Jesus Christ, Rimmer, what is it with you?’

He shrugged a half-apologetic little smile. ‘I didn’t want him touching me. You can understand that, can’t you?’

‘I guess when you’ve got a gun everyone looks like a target, eh?’

‘Sweetheart?’ he said, collecting the attendant’s electronic pass key, and starting back along the corridor toward the stairs, ‘we’ve hardly started.’

For a moment, Lenina looked at the footprints on the corridor’s beige carpet and thought someone must have stepped in dog shit — until she remembered how a particularly virulent strain of canine parvovirus the previous year had left most of the city’s population of uneaten dogs dead of a combination of enteritis and myocarditis. As a child in California, there had been a dog. While she had lived in the country, anyway. Before the family had moved to Los Angeles, and she had started her life of crime. But these days the only dogs you saw were the Motion Parallax kind. Lenina no longer cared very much about dogs. It had been a police German shepherd that had apprehended her during the commission of the aggravated burglary that got her sent to Artemis Seven, and it had left her with a badly scarred calf that still caused her pain when she stretched the muscle. As it did now, kneeling down to investigate the woman’s footprints — that much was obvious from the shape of the shoe. This was not the kind of shoe that guests in the Clostridium were ever likely to wear, too expensive, designed not for comfort and practicality, but for style, and that meant a woman with credits to her name and good blood in her veins. The kind of woman Lenina would like to have been. It was impossible to tell if the blood on the carpet was good or bad, but blood it was, for the dark brown tracks were sticky and unmistakably salty to taste.