Mike Carey - Vicious Circle

It occurred to me to wonder what Zucker looked like when he made the change into his animal form. He obviously had a lot more self-control than his partner. I decided that I didn’t want to be around when that self-control snapped.

He hauled me after him into the thunder-grey semi-dark. I presumed that Po was still with us, but I couldn’t see him any more. I couldn’t see anything. It seemed like the whole place was ablaze, although I suddenly realised I hadn’t seen any flames not felt any heat.

Suddenly a face loomed out of the smoke: a security guard, in full uniform, wielding a futile torch that did nothing but reflect off the churning billows. The guard saw us as we saw him, and opened his mouth to yell.

Po leaped more or less directly over my head, landing full on the guy’s chest. He went down hard. Then Zucker was on top of Po, grappling with him. ‘Leave him!’ he snapped. ‘Leave him, brother! Let God find him out! Let God judge!’ There were grunts, and scuffling, and then a full-throated roar from Po.

For a moment I thought I could give them the slip. That would have made life a lot simpler. But stepping sideways in the stinking gloom, with the shrilling of the alarm still jangling my thoughts, I bumped straight into a wall. Then the alarm stopped, abruptly, leaving the appalling vacuum of silence to rush in and claim the space where it had been. After-echoes died away and were swallowed in the deadening fog.

Zucker’s arm clamped down on my shoulder, whatever altercation he’d had with Po presumably settled.

‘It’s this way,’ he said, with an undertone of warning.

We moved forward. There was something cold and granular underfoot: for a moment I wasn’t sure what it was, then I heard the crunch from under Zucker’s boots and realised that I was walking on broken glass. ‘Fuck!’ I protested. Zucker hissed me silent. My voice sounded indecently loud in the sudden hush.

Two eyes opened in the fog ahead of us: gleaming yellow eyes, about seven feet apart. An engine revved. Zucker waved, and the eyes flashed: headlights, on full beam. But we were still inside the building.

More indistinct figures were staggering through the gloom off to our right. Someone shouted, and I saw the flash of another torch beam. Zucker snapped his fingers and, before I even figured out that it was a signal, Po scooped me off my feet. He ran behind Zucker, around to the left, past the lights. The side of a vehicle slid by us, dull white, and two metallic clangs sounded one after the other. Then I was thrown down, not onto the glass-strewn floor of the atrium but into the back of some kind of van. The two loup-garous piled in after me and we backed at reckless speed, Zucker pulling the doors closed with a deafening crash, then swung around with a squeal of tyres.

‘Mach two,’ Zucker bellowed, pounding twice on the roof with the heel of his hand.

And we tore away so fast that I was thrown over onto my face again just as I’d finally managed to get up on my hands and knees. A siren gave a mournful, oddly truncated whoop-whoop-whoop as the driver shoved down hard on the accelerator, making the speed limit a distant memory.

I twisted my head around and took in the gurney with its wheel locks, the medical kit on the wall, the oxygen cylinder strapped down solid in its recess. We were in an ambulance. The sneaky bastards had hijacked an ambulance.

There was a third man lounging in a fold-down seat next to the gurney. He was stocky, with a pugnacious, peeled-red face and the kind of hair that – although long and even luxuriant – starts a good couple of inches below the crown of the head, leaving a shiny circular landing area for mosquitoes. He was wearing a biker’s jacket and a pair of torn jeans that looked as though the rips had all happened by accident rather than being installed at the factory, and he was holding a gun with a silencer so long it suggested desperate over-compensation. It was pointing at my head.

‘I’m Sallis,’ he said, in a voice as raw as his face. ‘I’ll be your stewardess for this evening, and if you so much as fucking move I’ll be putting a really slow .22 hollow-point into your skull. They’ll have to pour what’s left of your brain out through your nose.’

‘What’s the movie?’ I asked him, and he prodded my cheek with the end of the silencer barrel as if to say that he didn’t appreciate my trying to move in on his stand-up act.

‘You just lie there,’ Zucker elaborated, sounding a little more relaxed now that the hard part – for him, anyway – was over. The ambulance was lurching from side to side as we banked and turned in the narrow streets, so the loup-garou had to grip a handrail to keep from being bounced off his feet: it made him seem more human, somehow. ‘You don’t say a word to anyone in here, including me. The next words you speak will be when you’re asked a direct question. Okay? Just nod.’

I shrugged. It felt fairly quaint to be threatened with a gun when Po was squatting beside me like a bag full of muscles with a decorative motif of teeth.

‘That wasn’t a nod,’ said Zucker sternly.

‘You didn’t say Simon says,’ I pointed out.

Sallis kicked me in the ribs, but for all the tough talk they were clearly under orders not to bring me in either dead or too badly creased. I was banking on that – on the fact that Gwillam would want to debrief me before he made any last judgements about my disposal. Otherwise I might have minded my manners a little more, and tried to leave a better impression.

I had plenty of time, as we drove on at breakneck speed through the gathering dark, to figure it out. There’d never been any fire, of course. Just a lot of smoke grenades that the loup-garous had chucked out of the ambulance’s doors as they’d crashed through the large picture windows that fronted the A&E block. The chemical smell was a cocktail of formaldehyde and carbon monoxide – and maybe launch gases too if they’d actually fired the fucking things from a mortar.

It figured, of course. The Anathemata wouldn’t do anything so indiscriminate as to set fire to a hospital – but the judicious application of panic was well within their remit. If anyone actually died in the resulting stampede, I was sure Gwillam would fill in the appropriate form and a Mass would be said. One thing you can’t fault about Catholics is their organisational skills.

But of course these were ex -Catholics: they’d been outlawed as an organisation and excommunicated as individuals. What did that make them? The papacy’s equivalent of the Mission Impossible team, maybe. Fanatics, certainly: so convinced they were fighting the good fight that they’d ignored their own leaders’ orders to stop.

That made what I was doing here more dangerous, and more uncertain. Fanatics are unpredictable, zigging when you think they’re going to zag: they don’t connect to the world at the same angle as the rest of us do, and you have to bear that in mind when you try to reason with them. Better yet, cut your losses and don’t bother to try.

I’d only called Gwillam because I was out of other options, and because I didn’t know Basquiat well enough to trust her yet. Maybe she’d have enough sense to see the truth when it reared up and smacked her in the face, but maybe not. In any case, I wasn’t going to bet my life on it; or Abbie’s soul. Or my own arse, for that matter. A smart cop is still a cop, with all that that implies.

We slowed down, abruptly, then speeded up again. That process was repeated several times over the next few minutes: even with the siren, and the emergency lights presumably flashing to beat the band, we could only push so far against the press of London traffic. At one point, as we were crawling along in some jam we couldn’t shift with our borrowed moral authority, Zucker suddenly tensed and Po emitted a sound that was halfway between a snarled curse and a cat’s yowl. I knew what that meant, and it gave me a rough indicator of how far we’d come. It also left me a little awestruck at how much punishment the two loup-garous were prepared to take in the line of duty. We were crossing the river. They had to be in agony: running water is like an intravenous acid bath to the were-kin, and they took it in their stride.