Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

Where she had kissed him felt strange. There was a tingle there, like the phantom sensation on the mouth that heralds a cold sore.

“Don’t touch me any more,” he said. “Please.”

Sadie said, “Can’t make promises like that, Will.”

He raised a finger and probed his lips. They felt mushy and hot. They felt as though there was nothing as firm as teeth behind them. Fluid seeped onto his fingertip; it appeared black in the poor light. He hoped to God it wasn’t.

“I do like a sacrifice,” Sadie said, suddenly excited. “Don’t you? Doesn’t it just fill you with importance? A death, for your sake. This will be for you too. For our new family, for as long as you last.”

She caught hold of the sac by its umbilicus and swung it up so that she was eye to eye with its occupant. “And baba makes three! Yes he does!”

Joanna was stirring on her macabre throne. Sadie gripped Drinkwater’s arm and dragged him towards their prisoner, asking him if he had a knife or a gun or a grenade they could use. Attention diverted from him, Will moved towards the stage. He drew himself up onto it and carefully navigated his way around the weakened boards, the holes, and the splinters to the pike.

He reached out a hand slowly, reluctant to touch the failing flesh of her face but desperate to make one last contact. In the end, it wasn’t so bad, not really. It felt a little like the skin on his grandmother’s face when he had visited her in hospital, towards the end. She had been sleeping; he touched her cheek and it had been cool, dry and soft, slightly powdery. She had woken with a start and he had tried to smile at her tired, bewildered eyes, but it hurt too much to do so. “I love you,” he had told her, around the lump in his throat. The first and the last time. I should think so , she had replied, in a voice full of mock-chastisement.

“I love you,” he said now, through the mess of his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

As gently as he could, he wrenched her head from the spiked end of the weapon, feeling to the core of his bones his revulsion as it came suckingly free.

He turned to Sadie, who was pushing sticks of dynamite into Joanna’s pockets, into her mouth, under her seat. She was laughing with Drinkwater, who handed her the TNT as if it were treats from his pocket.

Will leapt from the stage and launched himself at them. Somebody was screaming, and it was only when he was within slaughtering range of the others that he realised the screams were coming from his own mouth.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: SOFTSUCK

“I DON’T FEEL very well,” Sean said, pausing a moment to lean against the wall. Window-dressers stopped draping winter clothes on startled mannequins to watch. Emma moved to block their view and put a hand to Sean’s brow. Her fingers came away wet with his sweat.

“You were fine a moment ago,” Emma pointed out. “You were going on about ice cream. About how much you’d like to have some.”

“Well I’m not fine now,” he snapped. “Jesus. It feels as though my guts have been filled with hot grease. I think I’m going to vom.”

Sean staggered away from his resting place and dropped to his knees by the roadside. The occupants of the nearest gridlocked cars started honking their horns and yelling at him to puke on somebody else’s doorstep. One woman snatched the curtains together on her passenger-side window. In the next car, a man who was washing dishes in a tub clamped to the door tutted away like a faulty Geiger counter.

Emma gently rubbed his back and mouthed apologies to the bystanders while Sean heaved. Astonishing heat was rising out of him and changing the nature of the air. Jewels of sweat broke out on his nape and stained his blue T-shirt. There was an awful, vertiginous moment for her when she heard the cackle of a child and looked up to see a bird with a pair of fingers between its beak. Then Sean’s back moved in a way it shouldn’t have and she returned her attention to him in time to see her own hand sink into him. She had a brief, shocking sensation of her fingers grazing against the nubs of bone that formed his vertebrae, and then she was pulling away, dizziness clouding her vision. She was not so giddy that she missed the way that Sean’s back arched unnaturally at the apex of every retching fit. He seemed to become spineless, his body twisting so violently during the spasms that it threatened to bend him double. The small of his back where she had touched him developed a serious dip, a pocket that resembled the suck of a plughole as it devoured everything around it. He barked out, his face clenched shut with pain, and then the extremities of his body were drawn into the hungry pit at the base of his spine until, a second later, all that was left was a spinning disc of hot air trembling in the cold sky. By the time that vanished, Emma too was beginning to feel unwell.

“PARDOE. YOU BASTARD. You might have warned us.”

Emma was creased on the floor, her hands splayed out on the carpet of Pardoe’s living room. Her own vomit was drying on her fingers. Her stomach felt as though every muscle in it had been strained, her ribs like they had been swapped for a handful of scorched firewood. Six feet away from her, Sean was lying in a foetal position, shivering by the radiator. Pardoe was sitting in an ostentatious leather chair, regarding his two visitors bemusedly. He had shed the avuncular air he had carried with him on their first meeting. Instead of a slightly worn cardigan, he now wore a suit with creases so sharp they might have sliced flesh. On his desk was a telephone and a bunch of keys, a couple of paper clips, nothing else. He played with a small, matt-grey pen, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger.

“Do you enjoy the big blue yonder? Do you like the Zoo?”

“Is that what you call it?” Emma asked, wiping her mouth.

Pardoe sniffed. “It’s called what you want to call it. It’s home to some, it’s hell to others. To some it’s the Dead Zoo. I’ve heard it called Arcadia, Z, the Place... Tantamount, that was yours, wasn’t it, Emma? Particularly good name, that. We knew it simply as In Country. But I’ve heard it called – and this is a particular favourite of mine – Oh Shitting Nora, Is This It?”

Sean glared at him. “Considering you put us through enough grief to get us in there, you didn’t hang around for long to pull us out, did you?”

“I had news for you. What was I supposed to do?”

“There has got to be an easier way to communicate with us when we’re in,” Emma argued. Her mouth was spiced with her own sickness and her left eye felt dry and scratchy. “There’s got to be something safer than just pulling us out like that.”

“You find it, we’ll use it,” Pardoe said, and then, his temper showing through the usual reserve, he flicked a paper clip at Sean. “Oh get up, you big baby. Christ, anybody would have thought you’d just been born.”

“I can imagine what that must feel like now,” Sean croaked, pulling himself up to a sitting position.

“De Fleche,” Pardoe said, conversationally. “Any word?”

Sean shook his head. “We’re having trouble getting to the hill, where we think he’s based.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“Every time we go in, we find ourselves in a big city. We never get in anywhere else. The hill–”

Pardoe coughed to interrupt. “This hill,” he said, ruminatively, the pen twisting faster in his grip. “What’s that all about? What makes you think there’s a hill, if you haven’t seen it? Surely it would be expedient to search this city. He must be there.”

Now it was Emma’s turn to shake her head. “No. There’s a hill. We both dreamed of it many times when we were children. I think it must have been around the time of our initiation.”