Decay Inevitable Read online

  “Meet Kynaston and Drinkwater,” Sadie said. “Evil bastards the both of them.” The two bouncers saluted him.

  Joanna murmured as they brushed past her.

  “Who’s this?” Sadie asked. “Got some competition, have I?”

  Will said, “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

  Sadie smiled. She reached out and flicked the end of his nose. Her fingers smelled of cold, old things. She nodded at one of the bouncers. “She’ll do. Take her.”

  THEY WALKED THROUGH the seething streets, but nobody jostled them. Bodies parted in Sadie’s path as though she and the oncoming throng were repelling magnets. Eventually, the strip clubs and dive bars and street corners haunted by junkies dwindled. The traffic shook off its insanity. Will followed Sadie along a series of ever-narrowing corridors in a mangled spread of housing that seemed to have been jammed together like ill-fitting Sticklebricks in a child’s playpen. Flues and drainpipes, vents and fire escapes clung to the superstructure, little more than add-ons or afterthoughts. Some people were on the fire escapes, drinking tea or watching the stars or fucking. Cardboard boxes, tarps and plastic sheeting had been arranged on some of the landings, makeshift houses for the wretches who couldn’t find themselves a toehold. Will wondered about them, what their lives beyond coma must be like. So-called lives.

  It grew so dark in the rabbit warren that Will had to listen out for the sluicing of the foetus in its membrane. At least, in here, he didn’t have to look at it. Nevertheless, his mind settled upon the developing child, and he imagined it rotating in its vital jelly, watching him as he followed Sadie through passageways so thin he could feel the cement of the walls muscling in against him. He smelled Juicy Fruit on the breath of the bouncers marching behind him, and when he looked back he could just see a reflected gleam off the insectile lenses of their sunglasses. They walked until they came to a set of storm doors set into the floor, at a point where the walls actually converged. All around them, lifting into the night, were sheer edifices of urbanity: greasy windows filled with dirty yellow light, a jungle of satellite dishes and TV aerials, telegraph wires, and cables. Will saw figures using these as a monkey might use a vine in a rainforest. It seemed a safer option than using the streets. As if in confirmation of this, the rooftop horizons were spoiled by the shape of tents and bivouacs.

  Kynaston pushed past Will and grappled with the storm doors. Sadie descended, but paused when half of her body had disappeared to look back at Will.

  “Welcome to my palace,” she said.

  SHE SAID, “I need you.”

  He knew he ought to be impressed by what she said, and at some level he knew he was, but for the time being his eyes were too busy to allow anything else to bother him. They kept returning, despite the opulence of the surroundings, to the head on the stage behind him. One of the eyes was only half-shut, as if trying to trick people into thinking it belonged to a dead person. At any moment, the mouth seemed as if it might open and sing-song: “Fooled you!” The head had begun to shrink, and the skin had tightened into an arid mask, but the hair was still lustrous, the thing that helped Will identify it as belonging to Elisabeth.

  Sadie’s palace had turned out to be an underground theatre that had been gutted by fire. Seated in the auditorium, either slumped with decay into the burned seats or erect with rigor mortis, death grins, and clenched fists, corpses blankly contemplated the stage with its craters and its mountains of ash. Joanna had been draped across the laps of one of these bodies. Her arm was around its shoulders. She twitched in sleep and nuzzled up against its puffball throat. Up in the gods, bodies twirled slackly on ropes, swollen necks bent bonelessly over the slipknots.

  Whatever fire had scoured clean the theatre had done for the curtains too. Immense runners hinted at their extravagance; Will could almost imagine a great weight of maroon velvet and gold brocade sweeping across the stage to consume the players. He could almost hear the clamour of the ovation, the hands blurring as they clapped beneath the smoky floods. The flowers. He could taste, behind the coarse, carbonated bones of the theatre, the electric clash of sweat and nervous excitement. He clung to those ghosts. Knowing they had been real once helped him to cope with the atrocity that had been visited upon Elisabeth and the madness that was devouring Sadie’s mind.

  “We both need you.” She came to him and unbuttoned his shirt, looking up coyly through her fringe as she had when he came to rescue her from the travellers. He saw now how that had been a test. A trap, even. He had unwittingly created a bond in that moment that had doomed him as surely as the fly accepting the courtesy of the spider in his parlour.

  Will looked down as Sadie gently peeled the shirt back from his shoulders. The rot that was displayed made Will gag. The muscle had stripped back almost to the bone, the edges of the wound were furred and discoloured, slowly spreading outwards to the uninfected areas of his body like a recalcitrant flame on damp paper.

  “I’m dying,” Will said simply.

  “Yes,” Sadie confirmed. “You’re being consumed.” Though she said the words gravely, she was racked with giggles. She covered her mouth with her hand and stepped back from him, her eyes becoming wet. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to make fun of the dead. Or rather, the dead to be. But it was a good joke.”

  “I’m cracking a rib here,” Will said, flatly. “What have you done to me?”

  “I’ve touched you deeply,” Sadie said, and she was off again, chuckling into her palms.

  “You’ve poisoned me.”

  “No,” she said, hastily. “I’ve not poisoned you. I’ve taken from you, because my child... our child... needs nourishment from her father. That’s the way it is here. A true two-parent upbringing.”

  Will licked his lips. “That,” he said, pointing at the sac, “is not my child.”

  “In the church,” Sadie said softly. “Do you remember how I fucked you? How my legs spread wide on top of you? How I sucked in every inch of you? Do you remember how hard you came? Do you remember the shadow, the shade? The black shape that moved in the corner of the church? You know what that was. You know full well. You thought you had a headache, you weren’t entirely sure that any of it had happened.” She smiled and leaned over to kiss him. Will recoiled but one of the bouncers stepped up behind him, making a wall with his chest that Will could not knock down. Sadie’s lips were cold against his. Her tongue wormed between them. She tasted of damp woodlands. He closed his eyes when the sac slapped against his thigh and he felt the spindly limbs of what spun inside it grope for his hands.

  “It happened, Will. You poured yourself into me. We made heat. We made a baby. And you have to provide for the child. You have to. You belong to us now.”

  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 fa
ce 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.”

  “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.”