Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“We know there’s at least one in the city,” he says. “We need you to tell us where it is.”

Dermot pointedly wafts a hand in front of his face. Carnegie glowers and bashes out his half-smoked cigarette.

“What about my fee?” Dermot asks.

“Fee?” Carnegie spits the word out with loathing.

“My reward, then. For doing my bit. For being such a good boy. For saving so many lives.”

Carnegie’s eyes are slits. His hands are clenched, the knuckles white. His mouth looks like a half-healed scar. Then he breathes out and his face goes slack.

“Your reward’s waiting downstairs,” he says. “When you deliver your side of the bargain. You know what we want. Where is it?”

Dermot smiles, nods, licks his lips. It’s the last that Abbie finds the worst. The anticipation in it.

He closes his eyes. Prayers his hands together. Smiles. Parts his lips oh-so-slightly and spit-bubbles go pop-pop-pop.

He opens his eyes and his hands drop. His eyes are bright.

He speaks, rapidly. Abbie’s already scribbling, transcribing it in shorthand. Then he’s done and she’s picking up the phone.

Sirens wail in the night, and three police vans tear up Oldham Road into an area of bleak, functional looking sixties era council housing and old mills and factories either abandoned or converted to new purposes. Most of the district’s one big industrial estate.

At one point along the roadside, a rank of three shops. The buildings are abandoned, boarded up and covered in geological layers of flyposters. The vans screech to a halt outside them. Armed police officers pile out. Some carry shotguns, other submachine guns.

Doors are kicked in and boots thunder up the stairs.

What they’re looking for is on the topmost floor.

All the upstairs rooms of the three shops have been knocked together, creating a huge open space.

Things lie on the floor. Five of them. Still asleep. Waiting to wake up. They are vast. They have long talons. Longer jaws. And worse.

Guns are aimed.

Yellow eyes open. Something wakes, leaps up, howling, screeching, clawed hands aloft.

A dozen guns fire simultaneously. The flat, thundery blasts of shotguns, the staccato splitting cracks of submachine guns. The rearing thing is danced back across the room and collapses to the bare, rotted floorboards, writhing, spurting, and then is still.

Then the guns aim down, at the other things, and they fire again.

They don’t stop until nothing is left alive on the floors or walls of that upstairs room.

The phone rings.

Dermot watches Carnegie pick it up. The big man nods and grunts. DC Stone is watching all of this, her eyes darting back and forth from one of them to the other.

Carnegie replaces the handset.

“They found them. There were five of them. Just like you said. They got them all.” He doesn’t want to say the next bit, but Dermot has his eyebrows raised and is demanding it, tacitly. Just like he always does. And so Carnegie says it. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” says Dermot. “Now—” he strives to keep his voice level; to show excitement would be unseemly “—there’s the small matter of my reward.”

“Yes,” says Carnegie thickly, not looking up at him, looking down at the surface of his desk instead. “Detective Constable Stone?”

“Sir?” says Stone at last.

Carnegie still doesn’t look up from the top of his desk. “Take him down to the cells. It’s cell number thirteen.”

“Ah,” says Dermot. “How apt.”

Carnegie doesn’t look up or reply.

Stone’s face is ashen. She’s even shaking slightly. “If you’ll just come with me,” she says.

All the way downstairs in the lift, Abbie’s thinking this can’t be real, thinking this has to be a dream, thinking please let me wake up before —

But it is, it isn’t, she can’t.

The lift doors open in the basement and she heads out, Dermot following in her wake. He’s trotting after her, she realises with disgust. Trying to hide his excitement and failing. Miserably.

But who’s more disgusting, him or her?

The custody sergeant doesn’t look up from his paper at either of them as they pass. Determinedly. He knew they were coming. And he knew, just as well, that he wasn’t going to, didn’t want to see them.

Abbie leads Dermot down past the row of cells. They’re all empty tonight. That’s been arranged.

There’s a slap of paper, the sound of boots on a tiled floor. She glances round to see the custody sergeant walking out fast. Getting out before the sounds start. Well, there’ll be nothing else in here demanding his attention tonight.

She puts the key in the lock and opens the cell door. Light from the corridor spills into the darkness.

“Mummy?” The voice is tiny, thin and blurred. “Daddy?”

Dermot stands at the threshold, not going in yet.

“Go on then,” she says. He doesn’t move.

“Mummy?”

This time she prods his shoulder. “ Go on .”

Dermot’s head snaps round and for a second Abbie is afraid. But he’s only smiling. Smiling and holding her with his eyes. Till she drops her gaze.

Then he’s moving, tired of the game, and into the cell. Abbie pulls the door shut behind him, but not fast enough to evade a glimpse of the child’s face, bewildered and afraid, or shut out the beginnings of her cry.

Dermot hears Stone’s footsteps recede down the corridor. He puts the briefcase down on the floor and loosens his tie.

The little girl has backed up against the far wall.

Dermot opens the briefcase and takes his tools out one by one. He puts them on the floor beside the case. And then he starts to undress.

In the pub, afterward, Carnegie is on his third double Scotch and Abbie’s forsaken her usual white wine spritzer for a vodka tonic. She’s on her third. There’s been less and less tonic in each one.

“You did good today,” he says. Thick and slurred, but drunkenly sincere.

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

“It’s got to be done,” he says. “They need us. Otherwise…”

She knows. Knows what would happen without Dermot to tell them where the latest batch of creatures are incubating, ready to wake to murderous life. Knows you do your time in Special Projects — a year, two, maybe three — and then the world’s your oyster, a fast track to any job you want, or if you don’t want one anymore, early retirement on a fat pension. There’s a reason for that. A price you pay.

She downs her vodka, digs out her mobile, rings for a cab. She feels bad, a little, about leaving Carnegie to drink alone, but sharing the bar with him just makes her remember what she’s now part of.

“What time do you need me in tomorrow?”

“Don’t bother. Come in in the afternoon.” His watery blue eyes are bloodshot. “You passed the test, Abbie. You’re in. I’ll handle the cleanup.”

Normally, she’d object to being treated like the little woman. But this time around, she doesn’t mind.

She weaves out the door to the waiting cab.

Alone now, Carnegie downs the last of his whisky. Without being asked, the barman brings him another.