Chapter 24
A stunned silence followed.
Nothing, Dougie decided, could top the absurdity of Nettleby’s words.
A slow handclap began. Clap clap clap clap. Applauding victory; but mocking it too.
‘One Nil, One Nil, One Nil,’ went a chant among the riot cops. It was pretty perfunctory.
The clapping soon died out. The mood became toxic. Adrenalin was turning into bile. These riot cops were some of the toughest men and women in the world; yet they felt like frightened children.
Dougie stripped off his riot gear. He handed in his helmet and Kevlar body armour to the guy in charge of the battle bus. He also surrendered his Heckler and Koch automatic rifle, that he didn’t really know how to fire. But he kept his hand gun. No one even bothered to challenge him on that. Then he walked to the Elephant and Castle Tube station, where he’d parked his Job car in the middle of the vast roundabout at a skew-whiff angle upon the grass.
He got in the car and drove it back on to the road so that it was pointing north. Then took out his phone and called Angela.
‘Angela, love, it’s all over. We’re safe. You’re safe. Our fucking kids are safe. Love you, darling. See you soon,’ he said, into Angela’s voicemail.
The streets he drove through on his way back to the East End were almost deserted, except for occasional convoys of ambulances and fire engines returning to their bases. The curfew was still in force; the Army forces still in position as the ceasefire was brokered. But there were no more white trails across the sky.
But there were no fireworks either; and no trace of celebration. No crowds massed in the street to embrace their victory that day. The news reports that Dougie heard on the car radio were bleakly delivered.
Dougie crossed Tower Bridge and drove through a series of rat runs and shortcuts until he was on familiar territory - Commercial Road - once more. He drove for ten minutes, then turned left, right, second right, until he reached his own street, Balliol Road.
As he drove into the street, he felt a pang of pleasure – the feeling of homecoming he always got when he returned to his own gaff. Mingled with desperate relief that he and Angela and their two beloved children were not, after all, going to die. Dougie’s heart was overflowing. He even felt a sting of tears in his eyes.
But as he parked, Dougie noticed the street was empty of people. As if the humans had all vanished leaving only cars.
He also noticed that some of these cars had been trashed. Their windscreens smashed in; their panels and bonnets dented; their tyres ripped.
He got out of his car and looked more closely. He saw patches of dried blood on the road and pavement but no trace of any bodies. He saw also that some of the houses had wide open front doors. Dougie carried on walking along the street towards his house at the same unvarying pace; but he was at full alert now. He saw that his own front door was open. He walked closer and saw the mortise bolt had been broken and the door panels were dented. It had been kicked in.
He drew his gun, still loaded with silver bullets, and entered.
He searched every downstairs room in textbook style: gun in both hands; wait outside door; turn rapidly with gun pointing at head height; step inside. Repeat. But no one was there.
He went upstairs. He heard a sobbing noise from the children’s bedroom.
Gun held against his chest, he eased the door open. He saw baby Jessica, in her cot. No sign of his toddler son Daniel. He eased the door open a little further.
He saw an impish small demon, grey-scaled and horned, squatting on the floor, blood on its lips. Angela was dead beside it, in a pool of her own blood. Her waxy face looked anguished, frozen in a scream. He guessed she’d died fighting. Daniel was also on the floor, sobbing but not crying, staring with big eyes at the imp, which was sucking its fingers ready to pounce.
Dougie fired. He emptied the magazine; all fifteen bullets. Fifteen silver bullets blessed by a priest. Fifteen direct hits: eight in the beast’s head, seven in the body.
The imp exploded.
Dougie holstered the gun, spitting out grey flesh from the imp’s explosion, and ran forward, grabbed Daniel in one arm, grabbed Jessica in the other arm. He took a final look at Angela and saw there was absolutely no chance she was alive, so he left her.
He hurried out of the bedroom and trod carefully down the stairs, terrified of dropping his baby or his toddler, and stumbled his way outside. The street was still empty. He put Daniel down and murmured some nonsense to him. He took out his mobile phone and with Jessica still on his shoulder, dialled for back up, using his thumb to punch the speed dial. He was confident the imp was dead but didn’t know if there were more nearby.
Half an hour later the backup arrived.
Two hours later the house was thoroughly searched by the Army. The imp’s remains were still there. And Angela was still dead.
Skip forward four days. Thursday the twelfth of June, 2014. The day of Angela’s funeral. A grey rainy day to mark the passing of a life.
Dougie watched as the coffin was levered into the grave and wondered why his wife hadn’t opted for cremation. But, he guessed, Angela was raised a Catholic and she valued the old ways.
Angela’s family were clustered in a tight mob by the graveside. Her mother Maeve was holding Jessica in her arms; her face was a mask of deferred pain. Angela’s dad Thomas stood close to Dougie, presumably trying to lend moral support, though the two men hadn’t spoken all day.
Thomas was the only Englishman in a family full of big hearted bossy Irish women. He had never learned the knack of grieving well.
Dougie wasn’t doing much better.
Almost the whole surviving strength of Whitechapel police station was present, all in full dress uniform. This was a long day for them all; there were sixty-four other Whitechapel funerals scheduled today. And the church, St Alfrege, had been selected because it was a brisk walk away from the crematorium where fifty-two of the services were to be held. Angela was number nineteen on the cemetery list. They were currently running forty minutes late.
When the coffin was laid down in its bed of earth, the forty-six surviving armed response officers based at Peckham and Whitechapel raised their Glocks and a gunpowder salute to Angela’s courage wracked the air.
Angela had been out of the force for several years before she died. But she was still considered by all who’d known her to be a copper, and she was given a true copper’s send off.
‘May her soul and the soul of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace,’ said the Catholic priest, who Dougie knew was a friend of the family. ‘Douglas, would you like to say a few words?’
‘I will do my best, my very best, so help me,’ said Dougie a few moments later, in calm grief-stricken tones, in front of two hundred and more mourners: ‘to kill them, yes, kill all of them, all those fucking scum who broke into our world. I will –’
Hands were grabbing him, and dragging him away and he realised he was weeping and hysterical: ‘Let me go, let me go, you bastards, let me go!’ Dougie ranted, as the hands patted him and tears rolled down his cheeks.
‘We’re with you, Dougie, bide your time,’ a voice muttered in his ear. Dougie recognised it as Phil Matthews.
‘Me and the boys,’ said Phil Matthews. ‘We thought we should have a word with you.’
Two days had elapsed since the funeral of Angela. Dougie was in the canteen, drinking shit tea. The Murder Squad was temporarily suspended, while the fatalities of Occlusion Day and Battle of London Day were identified and tallied.
‘Yeah?’ he said.
‘We’re up to something.’
‘Something?’
‘You know the kind of thing,’ said Phil, knowingly.
‘Not interested,’ Dougie said swiftly.
‘Payback time.’
‘Don’t even –’
‘Dougie listen.’
‘No don’t. Don’t talk to me about crap like that.’
‘Ho
w are the kids?’ Phil asked.
‘The kids are good.’
‘Is Daniel –’
‘He’s with his gran. His mother’s mum. Maeve. Him and Jessica both. I’m –’
‘You doing okay?’
‘No.’
‘It’s not right, what they’re doing,’ Phil said. And Dougie realised that he agreed. It wasn’t fucking right. Not one bit of it was right.
It was being sold as a truce. In fact it was a fucking occupation.
More than three hundred thousand Hell Entities and at least forty thousand Resurrected Humans had burst through the gates of Hell on the seventh and eighth of June 2014, for reasons that no one had yet been able to determine.
Their attempt to conquer the world had been thwarted by a powerful group of magicians – hitherto unknown to the rest of humanity except, perhaps, for a very small community of nutcases – who called themselves ‘warlocks’. And who all – except for their leader and public spokesman James Brannigan – appeared to have long grey beards and faces that could not be remembered.
Brannigan - who was appearing hourly on television to appeal for calm - was a calm and bookish man who had been an academic of some repute. And now - to the astonishment of his former colleagues at the University of York, where he had been a Professor of Mediaeval History – he was considered to be the single most powerful man in the world.
According to the deal negotiated by Brannigan and his Grey-Beard associates, all the hell entities who weren’t slain on those two days of fighting were to be allowed to remain on Earth. A fate which all of them preferred to being expelled back to the bleak, horrendous Hell Dimension from whence they came. And in return, the demons and the damned had jointly agreed to accept a binding spell that prevented them from harming or killing the human inhabitants of London.
‘It’s Berlin, post Cold War,’ Dougie said bitterly.
‘Not really. More Poland, post Hitler,’ Phil said.
Phil was smarter than he let on, Dougie realised.
Furthermore, according to an additional clause in the peace treaty - which Brannigan had explained to the bewildered London populace in a live broadcast that was not made available to the rest of the UK - an amnesty had been declared to aid the cause of ‘intra-dimensional reconciliation’. In a nutshell, this meant that no demon could be prosecuted for the murder of a human being during the time of the Breaches and immediately thereafter. And, by the same token, no human could be prosecuted for the killing of a demon or a Resurrected Human during that same period.
After much tough negotiation, the amnesty had been signed at 5am on Friday the fourteenth of June 2014 and was scheduled to remain in force till midnight that night. All crimes committed by either humans or hell kind after midnight that night - i.e. from the fifteenth of June onwards - would of course be prosecutable in the usual way.
History would record this as a clerical error of appalling proportions. For by this stage in the peace process – ever since 6am on Friday the thirteenth June 2014 - the entire demon and damnèd hosts had been spell-bound and were incapable of killing humans.
Which meant, as Dougie was well aware, that at any time before midnight tonight you could kill as many monsters from the Pit as you wanted with complete impunity. There would be no fighting back, no risk of retaliation, and no chance of being prosecuted.
‘You owe it to Angela,’ argued Phil, who had known her well.
‘Fuck off.’
Phil shrugged. ‘Your call, mate.’
Dougie thought a second longer. ‘When do we go?’
‘Now,’ said Phil.
Within the hour, Whitechapel police station had been virtually abandoned. Only the gaoler, the custody sergeant and two PCs were left. The rest departed in convoys of unmarked cars.
The operation had been organised on Twitter; concerted attacks would take place all over London. In the Hammersmith Whiteleys, in Peter Jones in Sloane Square, in Debenham’s and Selfridge’s and John Lewis in Oxford Street, at Westfields in Shepherd Bush and Stratford, and in dozens of other location - mostly department stores that had been commandeered and turned into internment camps for the demons and damned who had surrendered.
The largest single gathering of demons was South of the River, in the Elephant and Castle shopping centre in Walworth. That’s where Dougie and the boys drove.
They were using stolen cars, and all wore face masks impounded from blaggings. There were George Bush masks, Tony Blair masks, Boris Johnson masks, Donald Trump masks and wigs, old man masks, black man masks, Scream masks, and Batman masks; and many more.
Dougie had an old man mask, and so did Phil Matthews. The other lads in Dougie’s car - Mitch Tucker, Wayne Anderson and Gemma Johnson - wore demonic Halloween masks, in open mockery of the enemy.
Six cars pulled up outside the shopping precinct. The designated drivers stayed behind, and left the engines running.
Dougie, Phil, Wayne, and Gemma approached the entrance, leaving Mitch at the wheel of their car.
The Shopping Centre had once been a lurid pink monstrosity with a giant model of an elephant on its roof. Now it was blue and elephant-less and scheduled for demolition, and was in a state of some disrepair.
They approached from the Newington Causeway side and trotted up the steps to the main entrance. Four armed security guards blocked their way at the glass doors. They weren’t police, they were private contractors.
‘All right lads,’ said Phil in his old man mask.
‘Make it quick.’
The guards stepped aside.
Fifty-four coppers and thirty-two off duty soldiers entered the Elephant and Castle shopping centre that day. They took their instructions from Twitter, and they worked to a strict timetable. Each of them carried a sports bag with an automatic rifle or a shotgun inside.
The barn of a shopping mall was filled on every floor with squatting and roosting and flying creatures: a bedlam of noise and terrible visions.
Dougie had seen news footage of the creatures emerging from the Breaches, and of course he’d seen the imp who killed Angela. But this was his first exposure to the mass presence of creatures from an alien dimension. It was disorientating and frightening in equal measure. Dougie wanted to weep and shit and run, all at the same time. But he stood his ground.
Dougie and Phil and the other Whitechapel lads took the escalator to the first floor. There they found snakelike demons cawing and howling. Beast-like demons were roaring. The humaniform demons saw them and begged for mercy; they knew what was about to happen.
A gang of scaled monsters with horns and tails gathered and charged at them; and were rebuffed by an invisible barrier, as their spell-binding kicked in.
‘Lock and load,’ said Phil, in his George Bush mask.
‘They’re hard to kill,’ Dougie advised.
‘Do your best. Six bullets in each. Anything you can’t kill, hurt. A world of pain. Let ’em know what it’s like.’ The old man spoke with Phil’s voice; but it didn’t sound at all like the Phil Matthews that Dougie had known for so many years.
‘Mister, no,’ said a voice. A boy’s voice.
Dougie turned and saw him. It wasn’t a demon, it was a human boy. Tousle-haired, blond. His face was mucky, his clothes were thick and cumbersome and grey. He had no shoes on his feet. He was fourteen years old at most. A damnèd child. ‘Please, no!’ he begged. Tears poured down his cheeks.
Dougie was stunned.
‘I can’t do this,’ said Phil, lowering his gun.
‘Stand aside,’ Dougie told the boy. But the boy didn’t move.
‘Stand aside!’
But the boy put his body in front of the massed demons who were clustered against walls, or crouched on all fours like beaten dogs, ready for the massacre.
‘We don’t deserve this,’ the boy pleaded. ‘Have pity on me. I’m just a kid. I’m just a fucking kid! Haven’t you got any kids of your own? How would you like it if – if – if –’
‘Fuc
k this,’ said Mitch. He lowered his gun.
‘I can’t, I just can’t,’ said Gemma.
‘Warning shots. That’ll do us eh?’ said DCI Wayne Anderson, from behind his spooky ghost mask.
Dougie took off his old man mask. He was sweating underneath. He stared at the cute little kid. The kid stared back, fearless and proud.
‘I command thee I command thee I command thee,’ Dougie said calmly. ‘Tell me your sin, lad.’
The boy twitched. His voice spoke without his will, in grating tones. ‘My sister. I did her.’
‘Dougie, what are you –’ Gemma said.
‘Shh.’ Phil shushed.
‘You did her?’ Dougie queried. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I did her. We did it together, like.’
The child’s voice had changed subtly. He still had a London accent, but it was broader, thick as tar. Dougie realised this was a boy from an earlier century.
‘You fucked her?’
‘I occupied her, aye, that I did, sir.’
‘What are you playing at, Doug?’ asked Phil. ‘Let’s just go. I don’t care if he shagged his sister, I’m not going to start killing children.’
‘Bear with me. Let’s find out the truth of this,’ said Dougie.
To the child he said: ‘When you fucked your sister, son, was it with her consent? Answer me honestly, child, for so I command thee, I command thee, I command thee.’
The child stared angrily. He knew by now what Dougie was up to but he had no choice about this. ‘Don’t know the fucking word, mister. What’s “consent”?’
‘Did your sister desire you to fuck her? Did she ask you to fuck her? Or, rather, did she scream, with tears in her eyes, “please dear brother, do not fuck me?” ’ Dougie clarified.
The boy blinked. He nodded vigorously to show he got it.
‘She weren’t willing, and that’s a fact. But I took me turn,’ the boy bragged.
Hell on Earth Page 60