Joseph D'Lacey - Meat

‘Juster, sir.’

‘If he’s dead, bury him. No, wait. Juster you say? I’ve always liked the look of that man’s arse. Get Cleaver to cut me some rump steaks. Then you can bury him. And do a proper job this time or I’ll have your bollocks.’

Magnus turned and walked back towards the bedroom. He was weary and the urge to finish with the girls had slipped from him.

‘Sir?’

Magnus stopped.

‘What the hell is it?’

‘What if Juster’s not dead? Should we fetch the doctor?’

He turned back to them.

‘If Juster let Shanti get the better of him, he’s as good as dead. You get Cleaver to fix him for me one way or the other.’

In his room he sat down on the coffer, exhausted. There was no sign of the girls in front of the window. He stood and glanced around the room. Cursing himself for leaving the door open, he flicked up the bedcovers and checked under the bed. Nothing. Likewise in the cupboards. He rang for the maids and heard them sprint up the stairs. His unpredictability and savage moods had worsened, even he was aware of it, and now everyone around him was not merely quick to respond but strained as well. Two maids appeared at the door looking drawn and tense.

‘My baby love-bitches have run off somewhere. They can’t go very far. I want you girls to search the house top to bottom. Get everyone else to check the grounds. But keep all the outer doors locked. At worst, they’ll end up back at home and we’ll round them up there. I don’t think they’ll go far away from mummy and daddy.’

The maids entered the bedroom and proceeded to check under the bed and in the cupboards.

‘Not in here, you stupid pair of twats. I’ve already checked. Now, I’m going to get some sleep and I don’t want to be disturbed until I wake up or Bruno gets back with Collins. Go on, fuck off, the pair of you.’

He collapsed back into the bed and covered himself up. The door clicked shut and he was unconscious.

He’d managed to suppress all emotions of panic on the journey out and then down into the tunnels. Returning was different, assailed by misgivings. Why wasn’t Collins where he was supposed to be? That was what worried him most.

Returning empty-handed to Magnus was the other thing that concerned him. Over the past few weeks – ever since the encounter with Collins and the blackout he’d suffered at the emaciated man’s hand – Magnus’s behaviour had worsened. He’d always been a man that ruled by violence. Everyone knew it and that was how he kept Abyrne in such an efficient stranglehold. But since the incident with Collins, Magnus had turned nasty even by Bruno’s standards. It had become hard to respect him.

It was obvious to everyone that Magnus was sick with the Shakes. Now was the time when a man like Collins really could wrest control from the ailing Meat Baron. If that happened, who knew what the future would hold for Bruno or the town?

Bruno had been Magnus’s personal bodyguard and the leader of his army of guards and enforcers for seven years. Magnus trusted him and he trusted Magnus. He didn’t always like the way his boss treated him, but at the end of each day he knew that he could not have been in a safer position – other than being Meat Baron himself.

Now, all that had changed. Magnus was sick enough and crazy enough to destroy any of his employees including his most trusted. When Bruno returned to the mansion without Collins and a man down for no good reason, Magnus was going to get very upset. For the first time in his career, Bruno was thinking about a change of allegiance. But to whom? The Welfare? He could never live that kind of life. He hated prayers and churches and rituals. He couldn’t see himself abstaining from sex or anything else for the sake of a God he neither understood nor believed in. Who did that leave? The lunatic prophet, John Collins, with his half starved crew of zealots?

There was nowhere else to go – except perhaps the grain bosses. Would they trust him, considering where he’d worked and the things he’d already done to keep power from their hands? He doubted it.

The blizzard of questions and fears assailed him as he led his men back across the Derelict Quarter. By now, most of them had fallen or stumbled badly enough to bruise or cut themselves on the uneven ground. They were tired from the running and let down by the unfulfilled adrenaline rush in the tunnels. If they were attacked now, he wasn’t sure he could even rely on them to hold their ranks.

Before they reached the tower blocks he saw a flash of red. In the next step it was gone behind broken masonry. He crested a small rise and saw it again. Beyond it there was more red. It was the gowns of Parsons he was seeing. At first he thought it was an ambush as all the figures were lying down. Then he noticed the discarded or dropped femur clubs and knew it could not be that. Closing on them cautiously he saw that every cassock was no more than that – just the shell of a Parson. The uniforms had been removed and laid out on the ground. They’d been arranged, and carefully so.

What the hell is this ?

His men saw the uniforms too and tensed.

Then they were among the red gowns of the Welfare, positioned with care and imagination to look as though they’d fallen in battle. Whose trickery was this? The Welfare, pretending to have been attacked by some other force? John Collins leaving a message for him and his men?

For several minutes, Bruno believed it was some kind of a set up. He walked among the gowns and inspected them.

‘What’s going on, sir?’

Bruno held a gown in one hand and a femur club in the other.

‘I don’t know.’

If there’d been a battle, most of the clubs should have had fresh bloodstains on them. There was nothing. Had there even been a battle? Or was it simply that the Parsons had never landed a single blow? Bruno remembered how one starving peck of a man had bested the giant that was his boss and he knew to his core what was going on. This skirmish, if such it could be classed, had taken place long before they’d even stepped into the Derelict Quarter. Collins and his followers had hidden it from them until they were ready to let it be seen. That was why there’d been no one in the tunnels.

They were busy elsewhere.

‘This is nothing more than a message,’ he said. And to himself he added: and a warning . ‘We’ve got to get back to the mansion. Right now.’

He dropped the relics of the skirmish and began to run.

He hoped Collins and his people couldn’t run like Richard Shanti.

The girls lay in total darkness, their small thin bodies pressed tight together. They dared not speak but instead whispered, little more than a silent breath, into each other’s ears from time to time. As terrified as they were of the moment when they were discovered and the light blasted in to reveal them, they felt a sense of security in the cramped darkness.

In the old days there had only ever been one of them enclosed like this and it had always been a competition. Now, they were together, tighter than they’d ever been squeezed and staying brave for longer than ever before. If they wanted to win this game, they’d have to work together.

It was impossible in the darkness to tell how much time had passed. It seemed like hours but they knew it might only have been minutes since the shouting and wrenching of doors and the stomping, running footsteps of people searching for them. That had been the worst time, knowing that they might be exposed at any moment and listening, listening, listening for the faintest sign that their captors might be coming closer rather than getting further away.

And then there’d been a growling sound. At first they thought it was the hairy man coming back to get them but the growling sound went on and on and never moved. They could still hear it now. Someone was in there with them and there was no way they could creep out of their hiding place without being seen or caught. They had to wait. They knew that when they heard the growling noise stop and footsteps walking away; that would be their moment.