Darren Shan: Hell's Horizon

At the end of an uneventful shift I ducked out to grab a pizza. Shared it with a couple of guys in the canteen when I got back. Jerry was among them.

“Frank get onto you about the stairs?” he asked as we ate.

“Yeah.”

Jerry made a face. “I hate the espionage shit. If The Cardinal says leave the stairs alone, we should leave ’em the hell alone. For all we know, he plans on running a team of cannibal ninja bastards up and down them all night long.”

Cannibal ninja bastards. I had to smile. “You could have said no.”

“To Frank?” Jerry snorted. “I also could have said, ‘Here’s my ass — ram a stick of dynamite up there and blow me to fuck.’ It was different with Tasso — he didn’t sulk if you turned him down. But Frank…”

I nodded. Frank did tend to take things personally.

“Wanna go out later?” Jerry asked. “I’m meeting a coupla guys in a club.”

“I’ll pass,” I told him. “It’s been a long day.”

Pizza finished, we took the elevator up, Jerry to the sixteenth, me a couple of stories higher. Offices were few and far between up here. Most petered out at the fourteenth. The Cardinal occupied the fifteenth. Beyond that sprawled the legendary floors of files — room after room packed with newspapers, reports, data sheets, populace surveys, birth and death certificates, volumes of city history, housing plans, income tax returns. The myth ran that The Cardinal had a detailed dossier on every one of the city’s millions. That couldn’t be true, of course, but he probably had something on the majority of them.

I made the rounds of the mainly deserted rooms, breaking off two or three times an hour to meander down the stairs and back up again. I ran into other similarly deployed Troops a couple of times but we never acknowledged one another’s presence.

I was on my way up from the third floor at about half past nine when Frank came storming down, his face a furious twist of lines.

“Jeery!” he snapped. “What are you doing on these stairs? Haven’t you heard they’re off-limits?”

I paused, wondering if he was joking or testing me. “You want me off the stairs?” I asked cautiously.

“Of course I want you off the fucking—,” he started to roar, then caught himself and forced the bleakest of grins. “I know what I said earlier, but those orders are canceled, OK?”

“OK.”

Frank studied my face, daring me to question him. When I didn’t, he relaxed slightly and drew a long, disparaging breath. “Know what the crazy bastard’s done now? Ripped three-quarters of the guard out of the yard. Told me it was an exercise.”

“What do you reckon he’s up to?” I asked.

“Fucked if I know,” Frank replied. “Seems like he’s clearing the way for an invasion. There’s a gap out back that you could drive a fleet of tanks through. But what do I know? I’m just the head of this goddamn army. I’m a nobody.”

He fumed for a few seconds, then grimaced. “Anyway, with this other shit going on, we may as well forget about the stairs. Let the lunatic have his way. Finish your shift, then do whatever the hell you want the rest of the week.”

“Fair enough.”

“And pass on the word, would you?”

“You’re the boss, Frank.”

“Ha!”

I saw the shift out, then took an elevator down to the basement and made for my locker. It had been a long night and I was looking forward to changing clothes and getting home. When I opened the door, something rolled out of the bottom and spun away down the floor. I thought it was a coin and I wasn’t going to bother with it, but then I noticed the dark sheen of the rolling object and hurried after it. I stopped it with my foot, then picked it up and studied it with incredulous suspicion.

It was the small black marble I’d found in the trout’s mouth and then lost. Only now the golden squiggles down its sides no longer reminded me of worms. They’d been broadened and touched up. Now they looked like snakes .

The marble bugged the hell out of me and I slept fitfully. By morning I knew I must have had it on me all along, and was only imagining the change in the squiggles, but part of me wasn’t convinced. I laid it on a wad of cotton wool on the mantelpiece in my living room and kept a close eye on it for the next day or two, but when nothing further happened I forgot about it and concentrated on work.

Wednesday was another busy day. I didn’t get home till two in the morning. Spent the last four hours covering for a sick colleague on the fifteenth floor, one of seven Troops guarding the elevator doors. A further ten soldiers would usually be on each of the three stairway openings, and more patrolling the corridors, but due to The Cardinal’s recent instructions the floor was largely deserted.

It could be difficult staying alert in such conditions. The warm air, the peaceful corridors, the mostly inert elevator, the carpets tickling the soles of my feet. Party Central was layered with thick, expensive carpets from the second floor up. No shoes were allowed. Had to check them in downstairs, even if you were only running a quick errand. Most of the carpets were more comfortable than an average mattress. The temptation to lie down and snooze was overwhelming.

But I was paid to ignore such temptations, so I focused on the doors of the elevator, didn’t let my mind wander, and kept my hand close to the butt of my gun. In the unlikely event that we ever came under attack, I’d be ready.

I meant to call Nic — I still hadn’t spoken with her since I got back — but didn’t get a chance. It was too late when I got home so I simply undressed and crawled into bed, same as the night before.

Thursday, the shit hit the fan.

I’d clocked on an hour before midday and was changing into my uniform in the basement when Vincent Carell stormed in. Vincent was one of Tasso’s men. Thin, face like a ferret, not blessed in the brains department, quick to draw his dick and his gun. I never knew why Tasso placed so much faith in him.

A guy called Richey Harney was by my side, slipping off his boots. “Richey!” Vincent barked. “With me.”

Richey glanced up, pained. “I was on my way home.”

“ Was ,” Vincent snickered.

“But Frank said I could leave early. He—”

“I don’t give a fuck what Frank said!”

“It’s my daughter’s birthday,” Richey moaned. “I missed her First Communion last month. If I miss this, my wife’ll kill me.”

“Do I look like I give a fuck?” Vincent snapped.

Richey lowered his head and muttered something, then started lacing up his boots again. Sap that I was, I took pity on him.

“Could you use me instead? I just arrived — I’m fresher than Richey.”

Vincent rolled his eyes, then nodded. “Sure. One asshole’s the same as another. Meet me out back three minutes from now.”

“Thanks, man,” Richey said softly as Vincent left.

“No problem. You’d do the same for me, right?”

“Sure.” Richey laughed lamely.

Vincent had calmed down by the time I reported for duty. He tapped the dashboard of a glistening ambulance. “I love these,” he said as I got in, then jammed his foot down. The Troops on the gate only just got it open in time. Their curses trailed us out of Party Central.

“Where are we headed?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the blaring sirens Vincent had activated.

“The Fridge,” Vincent replied, taking a corner like a Keystone Kop. He always drove like this when Tasso wasn’t around.

“Dropping someone off?”

“Picking someone up.”

The Fridge was a privately owned morgue, sometimes referred to by brave — but foolish and short-lived — reporters as the Elephant’s Graveyard of the city. It was where The Cardinal’s employees took undesirable corpses, bodies they didn’t want washing up, victims they wished to keep on ice. Sometimes his own men were stuck away there too, if they’d died in suspicious circumstances and required an autopsy. Apparently the best pathologists in the country plied their trade behind the camouflaged walls of the Fridge.