Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

“You what? It’s not money... Who are you anyway?”

Sean said, “Talk to me. I might be able to help.”

“Seany. Seany-Sean. What have we here then?” Vernon slouched into the unformed room.

Sean straightened.

“Good running, mate.” Vernon swung the bat as though it were a golf club before holding it out and squinting along its length, checking the true. “It’s nice to have a bit of hard around. But not for you though, eh, Billy?”

“Fuck off, you wanker,” Billy said. “What did you do to my old girl?”

“If you mean your mother,” Vernon said, “I told her to put her teeth in if she was going to scream at me like that. Ugly specimen. I can see where you get it from.”

Billy laced his fingers behind his head and crouched low. “Look, just get it over with then, why don’t you? I’ll take my beating and then you can get lost.”

“It’s not quite as easy as that, Billy,” said Vernon. “We are going to do you over, make no mistake–”

Sean loved that we .

“–but where will that leave us? No progress, you see. No improvement in our relationship. The cold, brutal facts are that you owe me and I expect payment.”

Sean said, “I don’t think he’s got any money on him.”

Vernon gave him an indulgent smile. “Sean. Rule A: keep your mouth shut. I talk in these situations. You just stand around looking pretty. Now. It’s cold. I am starving. Let’s get this sorted. Sean. Hurt him. Then you can go. I’ll take things forward from there.”

“You’ve got the bat. You hurt him.”

“Sean...”

Sean pressed his teeth against his tongue. Vernon’s habit of prefacing every sentence with his name was getting up his nose.

“Sean... let’s say that I need you to do this. To prove something to me. It’s a test. Pass it, or fail it. If you fail, you will fail badly. And in more ways than one. So.”

Billy crouched on the ground between them, his face slack with bewilderment, watching them at it.

Is he on to me? Sean thought. And following that: If he is, he won’t be expecting this.

It helped to think of Naomi. It fuelled him. But not so much that he couldn’t rein it in when Billy coughed up a little blood. Vernon was making admiring noises but Sean wasn’t listening. He pushed by Vernon quickly before he became Sean’s target, and strode to the Shogun. He sat in the passenger seat, trying to calm himself, hissing over his raw knuckles. He watched Vernon as he spoke to Billy. It darkened a little, out there, as if a cloud had blocked the sun, but the sky was cloudy anyway.

Getting a headache , Sean thought, and rubbed his temples while punching at the radio buttons for something that might soothe him.

He wanted so much to return and mete out a little to Vernon, just a little, of what Billy had suffered. He wondered if Naomi had been alive when her killer had cut off her lips. Sean rubbed his bruised knuckles and tethered his rage. He thought: not yet... not yet .

He saw Vernon fiddle with his collar and lift something silver to his lips. If it was a whistle, it made no sound that Sean could hear. But when he blinked, there was another man in white standing next to Vernon. He wore a white skull-cap. His eyes were covered with dark glasses, and his mouth and nose were obscured by a green mask. Both men were looking down at the spot where, presumably, Billy lay.

“Christ,” Sean muttered, as Vernon shifted slightly to allow a view of the blood stains that swirled across what must have been a surgeon’s apron. “Christ.”

Nonchalantly, as if he were plucking a pen from his top pocket, the surgeon extracted something slender that glittered.

“ Christ .”

He knelt out of sight. Vernon moved back across Sean’s line of vision and he didn’t see anything else until Vernon was striding back across the ploughed field, sliding a neatly wrapped parcel of white, greaseproof paper into his pocket. Neither the surgeon nor the boy were anywhere to be seen.

Vernon came towards the four-by-four bringing the collars of his coat up around his neck. The wind played with his pony tail. He threw the bat and the briefcase onto the back seat as he settled behind the wheel with a contented sigh.

“Is he all right?” Sean asked.

“Depends what you mean by ‘all right’. Actually, come to think of it, it doesn’t depend on anything. He’s not all right. He’s dead, but he hasn’t quite got the grip of it yet.”

“How do you mean?”

“Look at this place, Sean. Look at the people here. Staggering, blasted shells of people they are. This isn’t living. It’s not life . Is it?”

Yes it is , Sean wanted to say. It might not be what they hoped for, but it’s what they’re dealing with .

Vernon fired the engine. He switched on Radio 3. “I like classical music after a job like this. Calms you down.”

Sean persisted. “What did he give you? What was in that white parcel? Who was that fucking freak you were talking to? Where did he come from?”

Vernon selected first gear and took the Shogun on a slow, bumpy arc away from the field. “Ask me no questions,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper, “I’ll dig you no shallow grave.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN: PIRATES

MORNINGS THEY STRUCK out early, trying to force the cold from their bones. Around midday, they rested for an hour or two, wherever they could find shelter. Come nightfall, exhausted and hungry, they would steal food, smashing the windows of bakers’ shops in villages, and sleep in dilapidated houses, huddled together for warmth.

Though he did not say it, Will was happy for Sadie’s presence. He was grateful for the way she unconsciously geed up both himself and Elisabeth. He was glad too that she acted as a check on his emotions. Had it been just Eli and Will, he might have tried to develop their night-time huddles into something more intimate as the memory of her smell seeped into his. Or he might simply have gone to pieces, happy to rot while his mind tried to cling to the broken images of Catriona.

It had been five days since the bombs went off. They were no nearer finding out who or what had been responsible for the blasts. Will had sent Sadie into a village in the Midlands to see if she could find out some news but she had returned at speed. Someone had tried to follow her, she said. It was best that they took no chances.

“How can it be that Sadie’s drawing this kind of heat?” he asked Elisabeth one night, as Sadie slept.

“She might be imagining it, Will,” Eli suggested. “She was hiding when you found her. She’s probably been frightened by what has happened to me and you. There’s tension in the air. The poor child hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep. She might be imagining it.”

“Possibly,” Will said, unconvinced.

Elisabeth was moving better now. She had taken a battering, but there was no lasting damage. She felt better once they had stolen some fresh clothing from a washing line; the blood on her own shirt had stiffened to a dark red crust. She looked good in the new clothes. Her pallor might almost have been of her own design. Her beauty was fragile, non-committal. Brittle as porcelain.

They were covering around eight to ten miles a day now, Will estimated. They shied away from people, choosing to make their way across country. It was slower, but it meant they were guaranteed passage without scrutiny. The only people they had to dodge were farmers in tractors ploughing their fields or heavy-coated figures taking dogs for a walk.

Good luck paid them a visit when Sadie found a gulley partially shielded by trees. At the bottom ran a disused railway line, great tufts of weed sprouting between the sleepers. It was a joy to walk along the gravel, hidden from view; it created a pocket of silence. It gave them direction and purpose. Occasionally, if they did hear someone approaching, they could clear the track in seconds for the shade of the boughs that dogged the line.