Mike Carey - Thicker Than Water

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

The hallway was completely still. We pulled open the swing doors — with some difficulty because of the broken glass and débris littering the floor — and stepped out into the darkness. Automatically I looked towards the east. The sliver of light I’d seen there before had gone now: the sky was unrelieved black from horizon to zenith. Except that there wasn’t any horizon, to speak of. The nearer towers loomed out of the dark like black cliff faces, pitted with darker holes like caves where the broken windows stared down at us. Beyond that, there was nothing.

Matt was in the lead as we spread out across the walkway. He cleared a space with his foot, knelt and set the cutting kit down between his knees. He looked up into the blind, black sky.

‘Mark,’ he said again. ‘This is Matthew, your –’ he choked on the word but he got it out ‘your father. Please stop this. Please let these people–’

He didn’t even get to finish the sentence. A wind from nowhere ripped the breath from his mouth. It hit us full-on, sending Coldwood and me slip-sliding backwards on the treacherous footing of broken glass and powdered brick. Juliet leaned into it and kept her footing.

A second later, we realised that the dust and débris on the walkway hadn’t stirred. This was a wind that had no quarrel with matter: just with us.

‘Mark–’ Matt yelled, and the darkness swallowed the sound so that, standing a scant few feet away from him, I could barely hear it.

I heard an answering bellow, though, equally muted but many-throated. It came from the windows above, where the pale blobs of faces could now be seen looking down at us.

Okay. That probably wasn’t good. Juliet was staring at Matt. I touched her shoulder and, as she turned towards me, pointed up. She nodded. She was aware of the watchers already: she didn’t need to see them to know they were there.

Matt was still speaking, speaking continuously now, but the words were torn up and scattered by the void-wind so they never reached me. Seeing Juliet walk past Matt to guard the further end of the walkway, I turned with Gary beside me to watch the nearer end.

They came on us from both sides at once, with the terrifying, utterly focused madness of the possessed. There were a couple of dozen of them, and I realised with a shock that I actually knew some of the ones at our end: they were the gang that Bic’s older brother belonged to. They had jagged shards of glass in their hands, and blood coursed down over their wrists unheeded as they ran at us. Gary faced them with his bare fists, but I had my whistle out and I blew the first skirling notes of the wound-demon’s exorcism in their faces like pepper spray. They slowed and faltered, which saved Gary from being julienned in the first couple of seconds. After that, even though they moved like sleepwalkers, he was fighting for his life. The narrowness of the walkway worked in our favour, but there were so many of them: and a single lucky thrust might be all it took. Coldwood ducked and punched, spun and kicked, used every dirty trick they teach in cop school. I dropped the whistle and joined him, humming the exorcism tune between dry lips as I fought.

For a packed and frantic minute I held my own: then an actual knife rather than a glass one, thrown through a gap between the nearest attackers, caught me in the left shoulder, close to the throat. It must have been wickedly sharp: the thick cloth of my paletot would have kept a dull blade from penetrating too deep. Or perhaps the demon’s magic worked like a blessing on knives and caltrops. In any case it went in hilt-deep, and I screamed with the shock and the pain.

I threw another punch, right-handed, but being a southpaw I threw it without any real conviction. The plukey teenager I was facing took it squarely on the chin and then rushed me, his clutching fingers closing around my throat as he raised his jagged-edged shank to plunge it into my face.

Someone hit him from behind, making him sprawl on top of me. I got a handful of his hair, levered his head up away from me and slammed my forehead into the bridge of his nose, giving him something else to think about. He jerked and went limp and I rolled him — with an awkward, one-handed heave — to the side.

I barely glimpsed my rescuer as he jumped right over me and charged on towards Matt. I saw him dive on a guy who’d got past our little Horatio-at-the-bridge last stand and was about to slit Matt’s throat from behind. Further away, Juliet dipped and pirouetted in an elaborate ballet of carnage, inert and damaged bodies flying and falling away from her as her hands and feet wove their skein of graceful violence.

Then I returned my attention to the last few stragglers who were still trying to gut Coldwood. A half-brick to the back of the neck discouraged two of them, even in my weaker hand, and Gary took out the last man with his knee and his elbow.

We stared at each other, panting, taking a full three seconds to register the lull. It wouldn’t last. The demon had hurled the nearest tools it could find at us. It had a thousand more lying ready to hand, and it wouldn’t take more than a moment to hurl them into the breach. It could empty the whole estate on our heads. And then what? Even if we survived, what would we do when the damned thing started to look further afield?

Juliet walked towards us, heedless of the bodies that she stepped on. She was staring at the newcomer, who was facing Matt head-on as Matt came slowly upright. They seemed unable to look away from each other.

I knew this guy too, I realised without surprise. It was the dead man who I’d met here on the first day, and then again on the footbridge at Love Walk. The man who’d talked in a woman’s voice and apologised as he’d tried to throw me off the bridge to my death.

I took a step towards him, and his gaze flicked momentarily to me. He nodded an acknowledgement, but his eyes narrowed as if the sight of me raised unpleasant memories.

‘I hope that makes us even,’ he said.

That voice again: trompe l’oeil for the ear. The wrong sex, the wrong age, the wrong — what? The wrong end of the map, is what. London, instead of Liverpool. Now instead of then. Drowned instead of waving.

‘I wasn’t sure what you were going to do,’ he went on. ‘If you’d tried to do an exorcism — I was going to kill you.’ There was a knife in his hand — a heavy, brutal thing, double-edged, that looked as though you could use it to gut and skin rhinoceroses. He held it up by way of illustration. ‘I would have had to, Fix. I’d already made up my mind. I know what you are. What you can do. You told me all about it a long time ago. But — you didn’t try to hurt him. You talked to him.’

His gaze went to Matt again. Slowly and hesitantly, his hand came out as though to touch Matt’s cheek, but he stopped short and then withdrew it again.

‘It didn’t work,’ Matt said. ‘He won’t answer me. But perhaps if we both try—?’

The pale man drew in a breath. Or at least, his chest worked as though he was trying to draw in a breath. There was no accompanying sound, and for a moment he seemed unable to speak. His fists clenched, and his face twisted into something like a grimace. It took me a while to realise that he was trying to cry, as well as to breathe. Zombies can’t do either.

Finally he nodded. But at the same time he turned to me.

‘Alone,’ he said. ‘The two of us. Fix, you can’t be in on this. You, especially, can’t be in on this.’

I threw up my hands, palms out. ‘I’m good,’ I said, the raggedness of my voice betraying me. I was anything but good. I was exhausted and hurting. Blood from my shoulder had found its way down the inside of my sleeve and was now running the length of my fingers before pattering to the ground in a continuous drip-drip-drip that sounded unnaturally loud in the surrounding stillness. I felt the pressure of the demon’s attention, drawn by the blood. And then I felt its heavy, invisible gaze pass beyond me to the two figures at the centre of the walkway.