Mark Chadbourn - The Burning Man

Church raced to catch up. The door had closed behind her. His fingers were already on the handle when a shiver of doubt ran through him. Instinctively, he felt something was wrong. Why hadn’t Ruth waited for him, or left the door open?

He removed his fingers from the handle and listened. All was silent on the other side of the door. He shivered. It could have been his imagination, but he had the impression that something was waiting for him, listening for the moment when he would open the door. A chill ran through him.

Telling himself he was foolish, he gripped the handle again and began to turn it, but this time warnings shrieked in his head. He paused again, and in that instant he heard a barely audible sound on the other side, little more than an exhalation, but it filled him with unaccountable dread. As he released the handle and ran, he could feel on his back the weight of that door and whatever lay behind it.

Finally he came to a large echoing space where water dripped from a broken pipe high up in the shadows. As he made his way across it, the smell of fresh blood reached him. In an area illuminated by a shaft of streetlight coming through a dirty window lay Oakes. His stomach had been torn open, the pool of blood around him looking like a sea. Not all of him was there.

The brutality of the scene held Church in its gravity. He wasn’t aware of the approach until the gun was placed at his head.

‘Jesus H. Christ.’ Tombstone couldn’t tear his gaze from Oakes’s body.

Nelson bumped the gun barrel against Church’s temple. ‘You saw who did this?’

‘No,’ Church replied. ‘But you’ve got to get back to the precinct. Someone’s going to try to kill my friends. I heard Oakes order it-’

‘Shut up and lie down on the floor.’

‘Stand up. You’re coming with me.’ The policeman at the door of Shavi’s holding cell was not the guard who had been watching him for the last four hours. This one reminded him of an older Brad Pitt, good-looking in his youth but now starting to turn to fat from too long at a desk.

‘Is this more questioning? I have told you all I can.’

‘Shut up.’

He escorted Shavi past the interview room where he had spent an unpleasant twenty minutes with the detectives earlier that night, but when he bypassed the main detectives’ room and entered a deserted stairwell that took them two storeys below street level, Shavi’s unease grew. At that time of night, they encountered no other people.

‘Where are you taking me?’ Shavi pressed.

His guard didn’t answer. Eventually they came to a small room cluttered with filing cabinets, where Tom was slumped in a chair, dried blood around a bruised cut on his forehead. The policeman locked the door behind them before taking out a gun that was not police issue. He proceeded to fit it with a silencer.

‘If you haven’t guessed by now, he’s one of the spider people,’ Tom said.

Shavi glanced around for a weapon.

‘Don’t bother,’ Tom said, ‘unless you want to give him a lethal paper cut.’ He added ruefully, ‘I never thought you would be the Brother of Dragons to die.’

‘You know we will lose one of our own?’

‘I’ve known for a long time that one of you will go very soon. It was just a flash … more an impression … a blue flame being extinguished.’ He shrugged. ‘No point making a meal of it. It wouldn’t have helped matters to have everyone worrying about their mortality.’

‘It must be difficult for you to continue with that knowledge … with all the other knowledge of future suffering you must have.’

‘It’s not been a holiday in the sun. Not that I’ll have to worry about it any more now.’ Tom appeared almost to be welcoming his impending death.

The policeman levelled his gun at Shavi. ‘On your knees.’

‘I am not afraid to die,’ Shavi said, getting down. ‘I have lived a good life, filled with experience. I have known love and friendship. I have attempted to do something worthwhile with the time I have been granted here.’ He smiled at the guard. ‘And this is not the end.’

Sweat stood out on the policeman’s forehead, but he couldn’t resist the compulsion to tighten his finger on the trigger.

Behind him, a pot plant on a filing cabinet began to waver as if caught in a breeze. The leaves shivered, grew larger and then erupted in an explosion of greenery that lashed around the policeman’s head. His hand jerked as he pulled the trigger and the bullet whipped by a half-inch from Shavi’s head. The leaves continued to sprout rapidly, wrapping around the policeman’s face faster than he could tear them free. They forced their way into his mouth and nose, and he crashed to the floor, unconscious.

Shavi wrenched the door open to reveal Laura, hands on hips. ‘Three cheers for Chlorophyll Kid,’ she said.

Shavi threw his arms around her and lifted her off her feet. ‘I knew you would have a use sooner or later,’ he teased.

‘Takes it out of you, the whole growing plants thing. But I’m getting better at it.’

‘I was sure you were going to be the one to die,’ Tom muttered as he pushed past her.

‘The world needs me as a balance to miserable old bastards like you.’ She prised herself free from Shavi’s hug.

‘How did you find us?’ Shavi asked.

‘I remember crossing over and then …’ Laura struggled to recall. ‘Somebody was there, grinning at me. That’s all that comes back, the grin.’

‘The Puck,’ Tom said. ‘He likes to guide, but not interfere.’

‘So.’ Laura grinned. ‘New York. Hedonism capital of the Western world. Tell me we’ve got time to hit a bar, a club, get off our faces-’

‘Of course,’ Tom replied. ‘Pamper yourself. Meanwhile, Shavi and I will get the sword, rescue Church, find the Key and save the world.’

‘Thank you,’ Nelson said into the radio before turning to Tombstone. ‘That’s a confirmed sighting of our three runaways — in the vicinity of Grand Central Terminal.’

‘This is a fucked-up world,’ Tombstone said as he pulled into traffic. He was still queasy from the shock of seeing the spider Church had pointed out, embedded in Oakes’s body, shortly before it freed itself and attempted to scurry away. Nelson’s shoe had ended its run. ‘The Army of the Ten Billion Spiders? What is that, like the Jesus Army but with extra legs?’

‘All that matters is that they’re mind-control agents,’ Church said.

‘Don’t think for a minute that I believe any of this,’ Nelson said. ‘All I know is that things don’t fit and until they do, I’m keeping you near.’

‘My friends-’

‘Still no sign of them.’

‘And why are you so important, Jude Law? British Secret Service? Or just an asshole with paranoid delusions?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘Course you can’t.’

They drove up Park Avenue to East Forty-Second Street and Vander-bilt Avenue where the imposing Beaux Arts facade of Grand Central Terminal presented itself to them. The first hint of dawn was visible in the sky, but it would be a while before the trains started running.

‘Don’t go for another jog,’ Nelson cautioned as they got out onto the deserted street. ‘This time I will shoot. Only to wound, but it hurts like hell, believe me.’

‘If they’re trying to skip town we’ll need to call for back-up to cover all the gates,’ Tombstone said.

As a newspaper delivery truck passed, its rumble merged with the chilling low, moaning cry, this time clearer: Weeen … deeg … . Another truck cut off its ending.

Some underlying quality of the sound chilled them all. It conjured up images of wintry wastes, and frigid skies, and blood on snow, as though a stream of information was encoded in a precise combination of notes and timbre.