Конрад Уильямс - Decay Inevitable

Will took the gun. It seemed woefully small. “What ammo does it take?” he asked. “Caps?”

“Funny.” A box of shells was passed over.

“Is it easy to load?” Will twisted and turned the gun in his hand. It gleamed dully, like a snake’s skin, under the courtesy light.

“Shit, mate,” said Known. “Want me to shoot the bastard for you as well?”

“Never mind. I’ll figure it out.”

“Who are them mongs, anyway?” Hot Badge nodded back at Cricket cap, who had been joined by his colleague. They were both looking in the direction of the car.

“Friends of the family,” Will said.

“Well they’s going to go visit some poor bastard called Slowheaf next. Fort you might like to know.”

“Slowheaf?”

“Well, wiv a T-H at the end. Slowheaf.”

“Slowheath. Right.”

“Yeah. What I said. Some hard-sounding bastard came froo on the walkie-talkies while I was fuckin’ the lock. ‘We ’it Slowheaf next,’ he said.”

Will shrugged. The name meant nothing to him.

“Whatever.” Known lost interest with commendable swiftness. “What now?”

Will pulled the hood of his jogging top over his head and eased out of the car. He watched the gang stuffing the fruits of his marriage to Cat into the back.

“Something extremely foolish, probably,” he said.

“Nice doing business,” Known said. Everyone left.

The sky was bruising rapidly. The gun in his waistband felt impossibly huge now. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to use it. He watched the house and waited for change.

A car pulled up a little over an hour later. It was dark by then, and the cold was drawing the colour from his hands. A full moon, and those streetlamps that had not been shattered, turned the grey pavement into a strange, luminous strip of pale orange. Will watched Cricket cap and his female counterpart walk up the street to meet it. Two men got out; they talked for a few moments; Cricket cap and the woman got into their own car. They all left.

Will strode into West End Lane. He bypassed his home, forcing himself not to look, and wondered how such a course of events could have put him in a position where he was dicking around in the cold, his life in shreds, when he should have been helping his wife to relax while counting the fingers and toes of his little boy. The loss of the baby and Cat’s disappearance, maybe even her death, had reduced the meaning of his life here to nothing more substantial than the dust that skirled around West End Lane’s back alleys. He didn’t know what to do. There was no point going back to the flat. They might have booby-trapped the place or one of the men might return while he was in there. Then what now? He felt frustrated and impotent, as in the common dream he sometimes had where he knew he must get to an appointment on time but the moment he went to open the door to leave, he remembered he had forgotten to brush his teeth or pick up his keys or turn off the electric blanket. Without realising, he was stumping up and down the pavement, his hands clenching into fists, repeating the name “Slowheath, Slowheath, Slowheath…”

Who was this Slowheath? How did you begin to find a person you didn’t know anything about? That question, and the sight of a slow-moving police car nosing into the lane from the Finchley Road end, got him moving.

Maybe there was one person he could rely on after all.

SHE COULD SENSE them, beyond these walls. Somehow they were watching her.

Her body wanted to change. It fluxed and fluttered beneath a skin that seemed too paltry to contain her. The woman and the boy forced themselves to the surface and she had to work hard to quell them. Only when she could exercise control over herself would it be possible to bring her otherness into play.

She felt their eyes scorching her. They were waiting for her to acquiesce to what was inside her; to be comfortable with who she was. She sensed they were testing her. Well, she thought, pressing her hand against the thick wooden door, the test was over.

The cameras were not, as Cheke had supposed, inside the cell, but poised just outside. A guard with a grenade launcher was positioned in full armour at the mouth of the corridor, ready to abort should she render.

“It’s started,” the guard said.

His earpiece crackled. “Stay with it.”

The paint on the door blistered. The smell of charred wood prefaced the sudden shape of two hands emerging through the door. At the same time, in the small viewing window, a face appeared, rippled to nonsense by the cracks and the natural warp of the wire-enforced glass pattern. The face became the glass, cracks and all, oozing squarely through the frame. Coins of blood fell from its skin and the guard noticed how the glass had somehow fused with the flesh. He was so taken by the beauty of its passage that he sat back against the wall to watch, his lips shock-dry, his need to both laugh and bawl cancelling each other into awed silence.

He could see every nuance of her progress through the door; an intimacy between the living and the inert – if living was what she was. Only when her eyes, freshly blinked free of paint, splinters of wood and glass, met his own did he feel the first stitch of panic.

As she plucked the last shreds of her body from the door, the guard realised she was naked, but it had taken him until now to establish that. Her body was of a rudimentary configuration only; much of it ran in loops and strands. Liquid parts of her dribbled to the floor then swiftly collected and rejoined her mass like quicksilver. They wrapped around gaping, bloodless holes in which hints of muscle and bone could be seen. Her body turned brilliant white in an instant, generating a burst of intense heat that did for the cameras and tanned the guard’s face.

“What is it, Exley?” The fussy voice was full of needles. Exley, the guard, had forgotten all about his grenade launcher.

The flux of her face was at the same time both horrific and bizarrely tranquil; he was put in mind of lava lamps. When his voice came back she’d surged across the few feet between them, flowing over his legs, numbing them with her delicious chill.

“I don’t know what it is,” he whispered, as she covered his mouth with what passed for her own.

Although they were on her within fifteen seconds, dragging her away from Exley, the damage had been done. The soft tissue of his face was a pulped mass. Gleave, in the moment before he shot him through the forehead, couldn’t work out whether what dangled from the centre of his face was a tongue or an eyeball.

“Impressive,” came a gravelly voice at his shoulder. “And I don’t mean your sharp-shooting.”

“She’s the fastest we’ve seen. She’s almost ready. And this is, what… eighteen hours after we put the draw on her?”

“Give or take.”

“So what now?”

“Come and have a drink.”

Gleave followed the older man along a corridor carpeted with deep, wine-dark pile. He had been with the Junction for almost fifteen years now, yet was no closer to knowing Leonard Butterby than he was his partner, Thomas Lousher, or the history that they shared. Rumour was a rogue bull in this place: it could gore you if you messed about with it. The only whispers Gleave allowed himself to believe involved the suggestions of violence that had followed the pair around as they grew up in London during the ’60s and ’70s. Neither Butterby nor Lousher had any previous; at least, there was nothing on record. What the linens had printed on the couple over the last quarter of a century you could find in a few paragraphs devoted to their charity work. They were barbed wire without the barbs; nothing snagged.

“Absolut, isn’t it?”

Gleave nodded.

“Absolute disgrace, more like. Arseman’s drink, if you ask me. Here—”