Louise Welsh - Death is a Welcome Guest

The economy of his movements reminded Magnus of Jeb and he wondered if the altered world would be ruled by men like them, practical men who would not let pain or emotions interfere with getting the job done.

Jeb’s leg was purple with bruises that seemed to deny the separation of blood and skin. It looked swollen and ripe, like a fruit ready to split its casing.

‘Without an X-ray it’s impossible to know if it’s broken,’ the priest said. ‘We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. Can you stand?’

Jeb pushed himself up and tried to put his weight on the injured leg, but his face buckled with pain and he sank into the side of the ditch.

‘Well, that’s that,’ the man said, as if something he had suspected all along had just been confirmed. His eyes met Magnus’s. They were bright Anglo-Saxon blue. ‘Why did that maniac want to kill you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on.’ For the first time the vicar’s voice was more army than Church. ‘I may have lost my immortal soul to save you. I deserve to know why.’

‘It’s like I said.’ Jeb had bitten his lip and spots of blood jewelled his mouth. He licked them away. ‘We slashed his tyres.’

‘He tried to run us off the road a while back.’ Magnus glanced at the gun. The man had holstered it, but he had proved his willingness to shoot to kill. ‘There was no reason for it except boredom or badness. We managed to get away, but we ran across him later by accident when we stopped at a service station. He was somewhere inside, but we recognised the Porsche he was driving. It was parked next to a fleet of around twenty fast cars. We thought he would be less likely to bother us again if we put them out of action.’

‘And so it starts,’ the vicar muttered. ‘So few of us left, but already we’re fighting.’

There had been no need to shoot their attacker in the head; a shot in the leg or foot would have put the driver out of action without killing him. Magnus said nothing and when the vicar hooked an arm beneath Jeb’s left shoulder and nodded for him to take the right, he obeyed without a word.

In the end they pulled him from the ditch backwards, arse on the ground, ruined leg dragging painfully against the earth. Jeb kept up a low and steady stream of invective as they eased him out. It was hard work and all three of them were sweating and powdered with dirt by the time they reached the roadside. Magnus looked to see what kind of vehicle had driven the vicar to their rescue, but there was only the yellow Audi, abandoned diagonally across the road like a prop in a cop show. The priest opened the car’s back door. Jeb lowered himself gently on to the back seat and slid, still swearing, until he was propped against the other door, his injured leg stretched out in front of him, the other in the footwell, bracing his body against a fall.

‘Thanks.’ Magnus unzipped his motorcycle jacket and peeled it off. It was a relief to feel the air on his skin. He realised that he should have thanked the man before and added, ‘You saved our lives.’

The vicar nodded. ‘Were they worth killing for?’

Magnus looked at Jeb and then back at the other man. ‘I hope so.’

‘What are you going to do with them?’

Here it was, Magnus thought, the pitch for God. ‘I don’t know.’ He gave the grin that had never worked on his school teachers, but which he seemed destined to greet authority with. ‘Live them.’

There was another groan from the back of the car and Jeb said, ‘If I don’t fucking die first.’

The cleric in the stranger seemed to recede again and he reverted to army mode.

‘We’ve a place nearby.’ He looked at Magnus. ‘I’ll drive. We can send a truck to collect your bikes later.’

Magnus wondered who the ‘we’ were. He said, ‘I’d rather follow on my bike.’

‘I know these roads. You won’t be able to keep up on that thing.’ The man turned away as if the conversation was over and began unfastening the tow chain from the handlebars of Jeb’s damaged bike.

The shadows thrown by the trees had lengthened. The crash and its aftermath had swallowed time. Late afternoon was edging into early evening and in a few hours the dark would start to drift in. Magnus leaned inside the car. Jeb was hunched on the back seat, clutching his leg.

‘I don’t fancy this.’ Magnus’s voice was a whisper. ‘We could be walking back into prison.’

Jeb looked at his leg. ‘I’m not walking anywhere. I’ve smashed this good.’ His breath juddered and he said, ‘I’ve done my ribs in too. A sudden move and one of them might puncture my lung; then I’d be truly fucked. Sorry, mate.’ It was the first time Jeb had apologised for anything, the first time he had called Magnus ‘mate’. ‘I don’t like it, but I’ve got no choice. I’ve got to go with the Righteous Avenger. You do what you have to do.’

It was in Magnus’s mind to say that he could drive north while Jeb convalesced in the back of the car, but a look at the strained expression on the parchment face told him it would be impossible. He had planned to ditch Jeb, but the prospect of continuing his journey on his own made him uneasy.

The vicar was at the car now, the tow chain still in his hands. ‘Ready to go?’

Magnus straightened up. He pulled his motorcycle jacket on and dragged his bike from the hedge where he had abandoned it. ‘Where are you heading? An army base?’

‘My base is a hundred miles south-west of here.’ The chain clinked as the man dropped it into the boot of the car. ‘It was hit hard, everywhere was hit hard. I’m the only survivor. I came here looking for someone I knew.’

Magnus noted the past tense and did not ask if he had found them.

Jeb mumbled something. The man glanced into the car and said, ‘Your friend’s going into shock. The sooner we get some meds into him the better.’ He glanced at the bike. ‘Don’t worry. I told you, I’ll send someone for it.’

‘I’m used to country roads. I’ll follow you.’

‘Not on that.’ The vicar nodded at the back wheel of the motorbike.

Magnus followed his gaze and saw an evil rip grinning in the bike’s back tyre. ‘Shit.’ He knelt down and touched the torn rubber, though he did not need a closer look to know that the damage was beyond patching. It could have happened when he skidded out of the Audi’s path, but he had heard no explosion, felt no tell-tale loss of control. Jeb groaned in the back of the Audi and Magnus got to his feet.

‘I’ll be heading north tomorrow, in this car if I can’t find a way to fix my bike.’

He set the motorbike at the side of the road and slid into the passenger seat of the Audi, wondering why the vicar was so desperate to ensure he accompanied them.

The yellow Audi ate up the country roads at what felt like racing-track speed. The vicar had been right. It would have been impossible for Magnus to have matched the pace on his motorbike, even if its tyres had been undamaged. Magnus sat silently, trying to hide the urge to press his foot against an imaginary brake pedal. He pulled down the sun visor and glanced at Jeb in the vanity mirror. His eyes were closed, his lips moving silently. Magnus wondered if he was praying.

‘What’s your name?’ the vicar asked.

Magnus snapped the visor back into place.

‘I’m Magnus McFall, he’s Jeb Soames.’

‘Short for Jebediah?’

‘I don’t know, I never asked.’

The vicar ignored the road markings, keeping to the centre of the track as if he were confident of meeting no one coming the other way, though the whole reason for their haste was that the Audi itself had come the other way. The route was as winding as the man had implied. The old Magnus would have relished the challenge of its twists and turns. He had loved the sensation of speed and rushing air, the roadside flashing by, blurring on the edge of his vision.