Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

“I know, but still. The din up there was awful.”

The din, when they returned to street level, was still awful, but Sean couldn’t shake the belief that it had been reintroduced as they came back to it. As if it was all for their benefit. Something about these people too, so vital, so vocal, hinted of only recent animation. When he voiced his concerns to Emma, she seemed uninterested. “You might be right,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be sinister. It’s just different.”

They continued down the street, happy for now just to absorb the newness of this experience. It was nice to not have a direction in mind. To not have immediate purpose. “Do you think she can come through too?” Sean asked. He didn’t feel he needed to qualify the “she”.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe if she does, she’s different too.”

Sean fell into step beside Emma. He held her hand and tried to accept the differences around him. He couldn’t accept that there might come a time when they would never seem alien to him. He turned his head, too late, as a door snicked shut. He looked at Emma but she hadn’t seen. Or if she had, she happily accepted that a man could reach into his own chest, pull out his beating heart, put it to his ear and return it, seemingly satisfied, back inside.

THEY CORNERED WILL in a school.

He had been shot in the leg and he could feel blood still seeping out of the wound, even though he had tied his belt around the calf, just above the bullet’s point of entry. How had it come to this? He didn’t understand. It was frightening, really, to consider how far, how rapidly, one could fall from what had been, on the face of it, an unassailable position.

It had all gone wrong so quickly. He had stalked up the high street with his rake, but all his intentions had been spirited away the moment he started trying to choose victims. Should he take the lives of the old or the sick? Might he get the same result if he killed a dog? The beggar sitting outside the bank? Who would miss him?

In the end, his choice was taken from him. He accidentally tripped up a man of about twenty with the handle of the rake that he was dragging along behind him. The man’s mouth was full of the anaemic pie he clutched in one hand. The other was stretched around the shoulders of his girlfriend, an older woman on the heavy side, with features that seemed to be concentrated too much at the centre of a large face. It was as if someone had fed a hook through the back of her head and was trying to pull the face inside. She wore a large, billowing white T-shirt and leggings that emphasised podgy, orange-peel thighs.

“Ot the uckinell jaffink...” the youth began. A blue tattoo teardrop clung to a cheekbone. Across the knuckles of the pie-wielding hand, more blue: LUVV.

“Paste him, Teddy. Go on.” The pinched singularity of the woman’s face made little tremors as she spoke. A rouged pinhole at the centre was plugged with a cigarette that she sucked violently.

The man looked at his girlfriend, looked at his pie, and looked at Will. Then he dropped the pie and extravagantly slapped invisible crumbs from his fingers. Then he swaggered forwards, rotating his shoulders, lifting his arms, and waggling his hands. “Kincomonden! Come on!”

Will raised the rake and slashed it across the youth’s face. He saw the tines bite into the flesh and lift it clear of the boss of his skull before the tissue tore and the rake came free. The youth screamed and dropped to his knees, clasping his face to stop it from dribbling clean off the bone. Blood made red gloves for his hands. The pinched face on the girl relaxed and the cigarette dangled from her mouth, threatening to ignite the fuzz on her chin. She looked suddenly vulnerable, but then she breathed deeply and screamed for the police.

Will hit the youth on the back of the head, but had to stop to be sick when the teeth were hindered on their way out by the grinding of bone that he felt work its way through the handle of the rake. The youth was squealing, his face ashen. His eyes were closed.

Wiping his mouth, Will yanked again on the rake, which came free with a sucking noise. Something was spitting and bubbling out of the back of the youth’s head. He didn’t wait to see what it was, but swung the rake a final time, forcing the tines through the youth’s throat. He might well have been dead before that moment, but now Will was certain of it. He looked wildly around him. The street had filled up quickly, to rubberneck.

“Come on,” Will beseeched the sky. “Come on!” Blood from the rake, held aloft, splashed on his forehead.

The spectators drew back, thinking he was addressing them. A siren came to them through the streets and all heads turned in its direction. Will ran. Where was it ?

In the playground of the school he had grabbed a girl and dragged her into a classroom. He sat on the floor with her while the evacuation went on around him. He heard lots of sirens wailing in the distance and cars pulling up on the road outside the school. There was a helicopter too. Someone said something he couldn’t understand through a loudhailer. He ignored it and soon they stopped trying.

They played Snap. She told him her name was Fiona and described what she had received for Christmas. On the way back from a visit to the toilet, he was shot in the leg by a police marksman. Now Will and the girl were sitting in the corridor, with their backs to the wall, beneath the window through which he had been fired at.

“Does it hurt?” Fiona asked him. Her brown hair was in bunches. On her finger there was a plaster that she was now picking at.

“Only when I go jogging,” he said. She laughed.

He wondered if Catriona might have given birth to a girl. They both had hoped for a daughter. Cat had said it felt like a girl even though it was her first child and she wouldn’t have known if a boy felt any different.

“Do you want to do some colouring in?” he asked her. He was so tired.

She brightened at this idea and nodded her head. She said, “You can help. I’ve got a farmyard to do. Can you colour in the chickens?”

He nodded. “Go on. I’ll catch you up.”

She ran back to the classroom. He heard the static of radios going mad as the snipers reported this. A minute later, he heard a door clicking open and footsteps in the corridor. He didn’t look up.

“I have a gun,” he said. “In my pocket.”

A calm voice, surprisingly young, told him to lie on the floor, face down, with his hands on his head.

“I don’t think so,” Will said. “I don’t think I’ll do that.”

“It would be more helpful to us if you did,” came the voice.

“I’m tired of being helpful. I didn’t kill my wife, you know. Everyone reckons I did. But I didn’t. I didn’t do quite as much as I might have done to help her, but I didn’t kill her.” Now he looked up into the face of a young man, a ridiculously young man, holding a Heckler and Koch submachine gun. Will remembered running around a playground like the one outside when he was little, pretending to be a British soldier, or, if he drew the short straw, a German. Pretending to hold a Tommy gun. Pretending to spray the enemy with bullets while you made that noise with your tongue and your teeth: Ddddrrrrrrrrraaa! Ddddrrrrrrra!

The armed policeman said, “It doesn’t bother me what you did or didn’t do. We can sort all that out later. You need some rest.”

Will nodded. “Lots of it,” he said, and reached into his pocket.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: KATHEUDO

HE OPENED HIS eyes and the sound was all around him. Incessant whispers, nervy bleatings, a cacophony that set his teeth on edge. The tree behind him bore a mass of black parrots chiding him like bitchy next-door neighbours. The stench from the parrots scratched at the back of his throat. White guano streaked the tree and turned its tarry bark into a nonsense emulsion, gleaming as it ran and set in the midnight sunlight. It wasn’t the parrots making the noise. He couldn’t see where the noise was coming from. Or what it meant, for clearly they were words: sibilants and fricatives multiplied by the many voices until form was lost to a hellish, snake-like hissing.