Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

“Then find the fucking hill,” Pardoe said. “We don’t have for ever. I’ve had reports already of leaks in a number of places. The first in this country have occurred. We’re mopping up, but we’re missing quite a few.”

“How long do we have?” Sean asked. “Before it gets serious?”

“Oh, it’s already serious. But we’re holding our own for now. I’d say that in three days’ time, if we haven’t done for de Fleche, then the breakdown will be more pronounced. Think floods instead of leaks. Think of the sky rotting. Think of the ground falling away as you walk. It’ll be grade-one chaos. A free-for-all, with the dead at the head of the queue.”

They took this in, trying to wipe away the effluvia from their clothing.

“And this news,” Emma remembered. “What’s going on? What was so important?”

Pardoe studied a nail and took his tongue on a tour of his teeth. He slid the nail in between his incisors, digging for a speck of food. Emma and Sean waited, used by now to Pardoe’s theatre. “Your friend Will,” he said, finally.

“What about him?” Sean asked.

“He’s had a bit of an accident.”

DRINKWATER WAS QUICKER and more fancy on his feet than his bulk suggested. Will lunged with the pike but he was too slow, and Drinkwater ducked easily out of the way. Overbalanced, Will hit the edge of a chair with his shin and started to topple over. If the chair had survived the fire without damage, it might have floored him, but the arm came free at the moment of impact and Will was able to right himself, turning to defend the attack that Drinkwater had already initiated. A knife flashed in his hand.

Drinkwater was fleet, but he was stupid, relying on brute force and lots of noise for his offensive. Will was intimidated, but not to the point of freezing. He swung the pike around as Drinkwater reached out to slash him and lanced the biceps of the bouncer’s right arm. Having hooked him, Will dragged him around in a wide arc, and then, at speed, jerked back on the weapon and watched Drinkwater disappear over the backs of some of the chairs while about half a pound of his muscle flicked up into the air.

Will turned quickly in time to feel the fist of the second bouncer pile into his jaw. He staggered back, driving the back end of the pike into the shredded, scorched carpet beneath him. It skidded for a short while, and then caught in a series of cracks, inviting Kynaston to impale himself upon it as Will fell hard onto his back. But the bouncer was smart to the trick. He sidestepped the pike and batted it away with his forearm. Will changed his grip, holding the pike horizontally as Kynaston dropped on to him. He managed to lodge the handle under Kynaston’s ribs and tilt backwards, vaulting the bouncer over his head.

He was dimly aware of applause in the background, of Sadie clapping wildly, before Kynaston was back on his feet and rushing him again. Will feinted to go to his right and checked left, unbalancing Kynaston sufficiently to allow Will enough space in which to smack the blunt end of the pike across the bouncer’s jaw. He heard a splitting sound and Kynaston’s parted chin began bleeding profusely. The bouncer was preoccupied with keeping his face together with his hands, and backed off as Will approached.

“Enough,” Sadie called. She was standing over Joanna with a Zippo in her hand, flicking the wheel with her thumb.

The bouncers regrouped, their injuries already on the mend. Fibres of muscle knitted themselves across the gouges in Drinkwater’s arm; Kynaston worked his jaw as the skin zipped itself up over the rent in his chin.

Sadie kept the wheel turning, rasping sparks against the fuel nozzle. When it caught, the flame roared a foot into the air. Then she would extinguish it and begin again. With her other hand, she played with the fuse on the stick of dynamite in Joanna’s mouth. “When I play at mean motherfuckers,” she said, “people stay hurt.”

Will moved towards Sadie, but she drew another flame from the Zippo and kept it burning, wafting the flame towards Joanna’s face, a slow grin blossoming, made grotesque by the tremble of light against her skin.

“Don’t,” Will said. The thought of his being responsible for another woman’s death turned him ice-cold inside. His heart, once so warm, once so full of hope, was now little more than a hard twist in his chest. When it beat, it spelled out the names of Catriona and Elisabeth. They were scar tissue on the tired, cold chambers. He didn’t think there was room enough for one more without it stopping altogether.

“I thought you said you’d never seen her before. She meant nothing to you.”

“She doesn’t,” Will said, but his voice told her otherwise.

“You have to learn,” Sadie said, soothingly. “You have to know that I’m in charge around here.”

Was it the light sucking the colour and the firmness from Joanna’s skin? Her cheeks hollowed out. Her hair lost its shine. She settled more completely on the wasted limbs of the dead man in his chair. She opened her eyes and turned to him, ignoring the indignity of the TNT jammed between her teeth and tucked into her cleavage. She smiled at him around the stick and winked. She nodded. She was gone.

“You missed your chance,” Will said. Did she die, or was she pulled back?

Cheated of her display, Sadie lapsed into a shrieking fit. She swore and stomped and burned the unfeeling flesh of Joanna’s husk. She promised Will a thousand million years of suffering. She screamed at him until his face was pitted with her spittle. But he didn’t hear a single word. He was watching Joanna’s face sag on the bone, failing in seconds. At one point, just before the top half of her body crumbled away from her spine and made a nonsensical dustpile on the floor, he thought he saw a spiral of light lift from the centre of her chest: a fine necklace catching the light as it was removed by a lover’s careful hands.

And then the bouncers moved in at Sadie’s behest to show him how well their injuries had healed.

IN A HOSPITAL room in east London, a woman’s eyes fluttered. Sitting beside her, her husband put down the book he was reading and leaned across the bed. Around them, well-wishing cards crowded the tables and the windowsill. The amount of cards, the various colours of hope, could not shake the husband’s belief that his wife was as good as dead. He had decided, when the week was up, that he would switch her off. She wanted it that way. They both did. The ventilator had been breathing life into her for five days. It could not fix the warp of her spine, the crushed vertebrae, the jigsaw puzzle of her ribs.

Her eyes opened.

The husband ran to find one of the nurses. She told him to relax, then gently pushed past him and closed the door on the bedroom. A short time after, there was activity. A great deal of it.

“Joanna,” he said, his voice staggering over the word, as if he had never said it before. “Joanna.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: THE HILL

THEY MADE LOVE. The Negstream shivered into view. They went in.

It was still daytime. A raw wind funnelled down the street, stripping the soporific warmth of climax from their bones.

Sean said, “Pardoe found three leaks this morning. They had passed through overnight and were walking down a Newcastle street. They killed and ate a dog. They didn’t have much clue as to where they were or what they were doing, thank God, or it might have been a lot nastier. Pardoe said that he spent most of last year tracking down what the police had thought was a serial killer. It was just a very clever leak who developed an appetite for young women. He took seven before Pardoe caught up with him and sent him back home. They found some of the bones in an old skip near the public tip. He had been living there. Or dying there. Whatever.”