Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

I turned around, to find the two men I’d walked past moments before now heading straight towards me. ‘Gate’s locked,’ I said, mildly. I wasn’t looking for trouble, and I didn’t automatically assume that they were: true, they were still heading towards me even though they knew now that there was no through road. But maybe they were hard of hearing: there’s an innocent explanation for most things if you keep an open mind.

‘Good,’ said the guy on the left, speaking from way back in his throat. He drew a knife from his belt in a smooth, practised motion. The one on the right, the bigger of the two, who had eyebrows so thick they looked like bottle brushes, smacked his fist into his palm. Oh well, I only said most things: I guess this was the exception that proved the rule.

They kept on coming. Over their shoulder I could see the street, which was empty in both directions: no help there. I braced myself to give them as much of a fight as I could – but they were both faster and slicker than I expected. They left the path and peeled off to either side of me, so that I couldn’t keep both of them in view at once. I backed away to avoid being sandwiched, but the locked gate was right behind me and two steps was all the backing room I had. I kept darting my stare back to the taller guy whenever he moved, because he looked like the business end of the partnership even though he hadn’t produced a weapon. That was all the opening the other guy needed: he did a standing jump, slamming into me hard and knocking my feet from under me.

I hit the gate with his shoulder still wedged against my chest, and he put all of his weight into it so that the breath hiccupped agonisingly out of my lungs. I slithered down onto the crazy paving in a dead slump, and they were both on me before I could get up. I twisted wildly, in the hope that the knife would get tangled up in the thick fabric of my coat or go in obliquely and miss all the many vital organs that nature sprinkles so liberally through our body cavities – but for some reason the blow didn’t come. I carried on thrashing, and the knife-man almost fell over his colleague as we bucked and writhed together on the cold, wet stones.

The knife-man cursed, and some stuff that must have fallen out of his pockets or maybe out of mine clanged against the fence, then clattered away across the rain-slick stone. I jabbed an elbow into his throat, but without much force – and there was enough muscle there to stop the blow from being anything more than a minor irritant. He punched me in the mouth a couple of times just to get my attention, then once more for the sheer fun of the thing: after which the one with the eyebrows hauled me to my feet, unresisting, his massive fist clamped on my throat. As I came up, though, my hand closed on a stubby metal cylinder that had fallen between my arm and my body. I brought it with me.

The big guy was even bigger than I’d realised. He lifted me clear of the ground, so that my own weight began to choke me even more effectively than his constricting fingers. His heavy-featured face leered into mine. He had a very wide mouth, with too many teeth in it.

‘Knock it off, Po. You’re killing him,’ the knife-man snapped. His voice was so deep and harsh, it sounded like he was spitting up razor blades.

‘I thought that was the idea,’ the big guy rumbled. With my throat clamped shut, I couldn’t inhale: as the tall man’s breath passed over me in a hot, fetid wave, I was able to appreciate the upside of that position.

‘Bring him down here. I’ll tell you when to fucking kill him.’

With a snarl, the taller man dropped his forearm an inch or so, letting my toes touch the ground.

Frowning in concentration, the knife-man judiciously adjusted the height of his colleague’s extended arm – a millimetre this way, a touch that – so that I’d be able to avoid choking myself so long as I didn’t actually try to move. It reminded me of a dentist adjusting his chair: I wished it hadn’t.

I’m not one to judge a book by its cover, but he was an ugly son of a bitch. He didn’t exude the sheer physical menace his heavily-eyebrowed friend did, but there was something wrong with his face; with the proportions of it. The jaw was subtly too long, the eyes set too low. It was like a face that someone had got tired of halfway, screwed up and thrown away. And then this guy had fished it out of the basket and reused it.

‘So now we talk,’ he said at last, his voice the same broken-edged growl.

‘You . . . first . . .’ I mumbled thickly. The bastard had split my lip.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘Me first. My name’s Zucker. My friend here is Po. And I’ve got sad news for you, Castor. My friend is not your friend. My friend wants to bite your throat out.’

‘Sorry . . . to hear it,’ I managed.

‘I’ll bet,’ he hissed, his mouth up close to my ear. His breath had a sour stink to it too. Why couldn’t I be intimidated by people with good personal hygiene?

‘You know why Po wants to hurt you?’ Zucker asked me.

‘No idea . . .’ I wheezed.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You have no idea. Which is why I’m going to tell you. You’ve been hanging around with the wrong people. Whoring yourself out to any fucker that asks. Storing up trouble for yourself.’

Ironically enough, it was around about then that I came to the conclusion that I had a chance. For some reason this fruitcake didn’t want to kill me – or at least, not until after he’d given me a stern lecture and maybe a spanking: if that reluctance made him hesitate at some point when he and his burly friend had the drop on me, then there was an outside chance that I might one day be in a position to look back on this and laugh.

Either way, though, I couldn’t answer the charge in any detail while the hand of the taller man – Po? – was still crimping my windpipe. Zucker seemed to realise this: he tapped imperiously on Po’s wrist, and Po slackened his grip a little.

‘Well,’ I said, swallowing with a wince of discomfort, ‘you tell me who the wrong people are, and maybe I can avoid them in future.’ I slurred the words more than my already-thickening lip required, and I let some bloody drool come out with them: it was probably good if they thought I was more damaged than I was.

‘There’s something in your tone that sounds like sarcasm.’ Zucker brandished the knife in front of my eyes: the edge of the blade had a two-tone sheen to it, suggesting hours of loving work with a strop and a wad of Scotch-Brite. I probably wouldn’t even feel it going in. ‘You can’t imagine how unhealthy sarcasm could be for you right now. You should be thinking in terms of humility, contrition and open cooperation. We’re looking for nothing less.’

I threw up my hands, palms out. ‘I’m just doing a job – like you,’ I said. ‘Okay? No need for heavy threats.’

‘Like me?’ The comparison seemed to sit badly with Zucker. ‘Like me? Say that again, and I’ll cut your tongue out.’ I thought the anger might be a sadist’s window dressing, but the glint in his eyes was real enough: I’d touched a nerve, and he was ready to touch back. Good. That was another point in my favour: if he was angry, he was likely to be stupid and hasty and misread my move when I made it. Unfortunately, he was also likely to make good on his promise and cut my tongue out. I was treading a fine line.

‘Sorry,’ I said, making my voice a servile mumble. ‘Sorry, mate. No offence.’

By now, that additional sensory channel I’ve got which is more like hearing than anything else was jammed with deafening discords. These guys looked human enough, the eyebrows aside, but they were loup-garous : dead human souls that had invaded, possessed and shaped animal bodies to the point where you couldn’t tell any longer what they’d originally been. Not until the dark of the moon, anyway – then all bets were off. When I realised that that was what I was dealing with, I dropped my gaze to the ground: some were-men respond to direct eye contact in the same way male silverback gorillas do. Come to think of it, Po could have been a gorilla at some point in his post-mortem history. Maybe that was a touch exotic for central London, though: the risen dead tend to do their shopping locally.