Nobody knows how they do this. There are no humans living in the Neighbourhood, absolutely none. I know, I’ve looked. There are just a hell of a lot of cats. Some live there all year round, some just for a few months. They chase things, roll around in the sun, sleep on top of things and underneath things and generally have a fantastic time. And the lights work, and the plumbing works, and the place is immaculately clean.
I walked down the steps from the mono portal and towards the main gate. A huge iron affair, it opens eerily as you approach, and then shuts silently after you. On the other side lies the Path, a wide cobbled street that leads into the heart of the Neighbourhood. The Path has streetlights all along it, old-fashioned lantern types that spread pools of yellow light along the way.
Cat Neighbourhood is a perfectly peaceful place, particularly at night, and I was in no hurry as I walked slowly between the tall old buildings. All around everything was quiet, everything was calm, like a living snapshot from a time long past. For a while the street was deserted, and then in the distance I saw a pale cat walking casually towards me. We drew closer and closer, and when we were a few yards apart the cat sat down, and then rolled over to have his stomach rubbed.
‘Hello, Spangle,’ I said, sitting down to give him a serious tickling. ‘How did you know? How do you guys always know?’
Next morning I was on the mono at 7.00 a.m., hotwired on coffee and feeling tired but alert. I was carrying my gun, a few tricks of the trade and nothing else.
We’d got back to the apartment around midnight, and Spangle had a brilliant time poking around the upturned furniture and bits and pieces while I sorted through my messages. Most were from the contacts I’d phoned that morning, all saying they hadn’t heard anything. There was also a photo of most of someone’s brain, transfaxed by Ji and Snedd, doubtless stoned out of their minds. Then with the aid of a lot of coffee I’d worked through the notes I had on Stable, trying not so much to memorise it as assimilate it, make it a part of me. I got to bed about three o’clock.
I made it to the far side of Red at nine-thirty, and clambered gratefully off the mono. There’d been six fatalities during the Red section of the journey, and the prostitutes had been doing heavy trade in a variety of far from straightforward positions. One of their pimps started to give me a pretty hard time for no very good reason, but I showed him my gun, which has Ji’s mark on it. That did the trick, so much so that he offered me a freebie instead. Which I declined, I’ll have you know.
The far portal in Red is always deserted: the next Neighbourhood is empty, and there’s no reason for anyone to get off there. I ran a quick mental check, making sure there was nothing I’d forgotten, and then climbed over the barricade.
When I poked my head out the other side, I saw that the sun was shining steadily and that the day was going to be rather nice. Not that the Stablents would ever know that, of course: all they’d ever see was the everlasting swirl of fake radioactive dust. I stepped out onto the metal balcony and stared across the Neighbourhood at the wall I was going to have to get past.
The wall round Stable is very, very high. Between it and me was a network of metal walkways and bridges which interconnected clusters of metal buildings. The whole of the bottom of this narrow Neighbourhood is filled with water, and today it was sluggishly stirring in the light breeze. A long time ago Royle Neighbourhood was very popular, a rather bijou town-on-water affair. Unfortunately Red, Stable and Fnaph Neighbourhoods all started pumping their waste into the water via pipes in their Neighbourhood walls, and it wasn’t long before the area was uninhabitable and abandoned. One thing I was going to be very careful to do in the next hour was to not fall in the water.
Like Hu, the abandoned buildings in Royle are empty husks, and I walked carefully to avoid making a clang which would echo round the town. If you step too heavily in Royle it sets off a vibration which travels all the way round the Neighbourhood, getting more and more amplified till by the time it gets back it can plang you forty feet into the air. As I negotiated my way across the rusting walkways, heading for the Main Square, I peered at the white wall in the distance, gearing myself up, trying hard to think like a Stablent.
By the time I reached the Square, which is the biggest open area in the Neighbourhood, I was mentally exhausted and beginning to think I’d find it easier passing myself off as a Fnaphette. They believe that each man has a soul shaped like a frisbee and spend their whole lives trying to throw themselves as high as possible, trying to get to heaven. I stopped for a cigarette.
It must have been quite a feat of engineering for its time, Royle: the Square, which is about a quarter of a mile to a side, is made entirely out of one sheet of steel. I’d been there once before, a few years ago, just to see what it was like. It hadn’t changed much, and was better preserved than the bridges and walkways.
What I like to do in empty Neighbourhoods is half close my eyes and try to imagine what they were like when they were still alive. As I sat I tried to re-enter a time when thousands of people walked across the Square every day, when the wealthy and cultured had flocked to the metal opera house down the other end, when the metal cafés and shops along the sides had thronged with chattering life, when the Neighbourhood had been one taut sculpture of gleaming steel poised above clear water. It must have been pretty flash, I think, and now it was just a rather strange and alien scrapyard teetering above a sewage tank.
As I sat there on the warm metal, two of my senses suddenly sent up messages at once. My hand registered the faintest of vibrations, and my eyes discerned some minute movement down the far end of the Square. I couldn’t make out more than that through the gleam of the sun off steel, but the message was clear: someone else was sightseeing this morning. I stood up and peered that way again, shielding my eyes, but was still unable to see anything. It could just have been some vagrant from Red: Royle is occasionally used as a hide-out by those who’ve run foul of someone like Ji. That was the most probable explanation. There was no reason for me to feel a little odd, as if some nerve had been touched. Probably just a vagrant. Either way it was time to be going.
Within another fifteen minutes I was about two hundred yards away from the massive wall that penned in the half-million inhabitants of Stable, and began to choose my route amongst the interconnecting bridges more carefully, heading towards the area Snedd had told me about eight years ago. After a few moments I spotted the distinctive building he had mentioned and headed for it, taking a few risks on shaky walkways but eventually getting there in one piece.
The building was unmistakable from Snedd’s description. It looked as though a borderline insane architect had bloody-mindedly set out to create the most alarming building of all time out of gleaming metal, and had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Strange little towers and extrusions stuck out of it at disturbing angles, all of them different. Either the architect had lost his protractor before starting the job, or he’d deliberately broken it and stuck it back together wrongly.
Round the other side was a peculiar balcony and, first testing it with my hand, I braced myself carefully and leant over to peer at the base of the wall just above where it went down into the water. Still about fifty yards away, the area was rather confused, covered in many generations of bracing struts and twisted metal, and it took a while before I found what I was looking for.
Then I saw it: a small hole, about three feet above the waterline. Using it as a marker, I left the balcony and headed down the walkways that led in the right direction towards the wall.
One of the reasons that Ji and Snedd make such a terrifying couple is that they are not exactly the same. They’re both primarily extremely dangerous psychopaths, to be sure, but within that there are shades of difference that make them a complementary pair. Ji favours a head-on approach to everything, whereas Snedd will often think a little longer, and sometimes finds a way of slipping round the side. Ji will simply destroy anything that’s in his way, but Snedd might try asking it to move first. Sne
dd also has an ability to Find Things Out which is frankly extremely impressive even to me, and I spend my life doing it. The fact that he was still alive after eight years of one-year countdowns was testament to that: to the best of my knowledge no one else has ever managed to find a way round DNA expiration. Snedd had managed to get into Stable as a result of one of those little pieces of information, and I was relying on it still being true.
What he’d discovered was that, over the years, the level of the water in Royle had dropped. Not by much, it was still hundreds of feet deep, but enough to reveal the earliest external wastepipe Stable had built over two centuries ago. It had been replaced by a whole system of outlets which were below the present water level, but the pipe had never been blocked up. It was used by Stable police to gain access to the outside of the wall for maintenance work, and in the old days to eject intruders once they’d had their biological time-bomb set. The pipe was guarded by a unit of three men armed with machine guns, but to the likes of Snedd that was as good as rolling a red carpet down it and stringing up a neon sign saying ‘Welcome’. He’d crept in the hole that night eight years ago, annihilated the guards and gone running out into the Neighbourhood looking for fun, unfortunately not having found out about the eleven o’clock shutdown.
As I got closer to the wall the pipe entrance began to look bigger, but it was still going to be a bastard to get to. Twenty yards away I stepped to the edge of the walkway, sat on the edge, and then swung myself under it. The outer wall of Stable is unbreachable by anything short of nuclear weapons. It hadn’t used to be, and Snedd had gained most of his information from a survivor of the last time a group had got in through the wall. Now it was impassable, so I didn’t expect Stable police to be wasting their time keeping too strict a watch on the surrounding walkways. But you never know, so I made my way to the end of the walkway by swinging along underneath.
A few yards before it reached the wall the walkway stopped, destroyed a long time ago by Stable authorities. Just visible in the weathered rock ahead of me was the dim outline of where a large portal had once been. It was filled in tightly, and gave me a bit of an eerie feeling, as if I was about to try to break into a huge mausoleum, a tomb which had been bricked up with people still alive inside it.
The next bit, I realised as I swung gently underneath the walkway, was going to be a bit of a challenge. The next bit was going to be pretty damned intrepid. With nothing to push against, I had to generate the forward swing to carry me over almost two yards of water, with enough momentum left to spare to give me time to grab hold of something on the other side. As I tensed and relaxed my muscles, limbering up, I scanned the area below the hole, trying to spot something that looked like a handhold rather than a means of killing myself.
I couldn’t see anything. Underneath the pipe entrance was a largish sheet of rusting metal, the remnants of some ancient brace or strut or other construction-related thing. The sheet had peeled away at the top to become a dangerous-looking lip of jagged metal. If I tried to grab that I would simply lose my fingers before falling the ten feet into the water, from which there was no hope of getting back up again. The pipe itself was only about a yard across. I estimated my chances of swinging myself neatly into it in a crouched position, as the lunatic Snedd had done, at just less than nil.
Bollocks, I thought, my arms beginning to hurt. Bollocks.
I might have hung there all day, or as long as my arms held out, had I not suddenly been given a massive incentive to move. There was a rush of air in front of my stomach, and a fraction of a second later I heard the soft phip of an energy rifle shot. As I looked round wildly, the same thing happened again.
Some bastard was shooting at me.
Intensely concerned at this development, I started to swing back and forwards as hard as I could, simultaneously craning my neck round to see where the shot was coming from. I couldn’t see anything, but a whining ricochet off the top of the walkway thirty seconds later removed the minimal chance that it had been an accident.
Somebody was actually shooting at me. They really were. I couldn’t get over it. Give me a break, I thought. Surely I have enough grief on my plate as it is?
The Stable police must have posted someone to guard the hole from the outside. That’s who I’d seen in the Square. I stopped craning and sheltered my head behind one of my arms, now swinging back and forth at quite some speed. As I swung back another energy bullet slashed though the air where my stomach had been the moment before, and I decided that I had to get the hell out of this position.
Another shot spun behind me as I swung forward, and I realised that I was going to have to go for it soon: the bullets were getting closer and closer. As I swung back I braced my wrists and tensed my arms: when I reached the highest point I was going to I whipped my arms as hard as I could, waited till I was speeding forwards, and let go.
I came closer than I can say to screwing it up. I’d been so intent on flinging myself off as hard as possible that my feet went too far ahead of me, and for a terrible moment it looked as though I was going to end up smacking into the wall back first, smashing my skull in the process. I jacked my legs down and thrust forward with my arms, achieving semi-upright flight just in time to slam painfully into the wall just to the side of the pipe. As I fell I scrabbled out with my hands and the right one caught the lip of the outlet. I whipped the left over to it and for a moment my fingers slipped down the old masonry, but then they held.
A bullet smacked into the rock a foot from my head. Christ on a bike, I thought irritably, why not blindfold me and set my clothes on fire too? Desperately, but carefully so I didn’t slip, I hauled myself up towards the lip of the pipe. My right arm was in far enough to get a minimal grip on a groove in there when another bullet cracked into the wall, this one much closer.
Sod it, I thought, and just heaved. I was up over the lip and into the pipe in one surprisingly fluid movement, in time to see a large chunk of rock disappear out of the wall at the level where my lungs had been seconds before. I scooted up the tunnel a couple of yards, until I was safe, and then sat down heavily, chest heaving. Things, I realised, had gone from crap to really, traumatically crap. There was no further sound of gunfire, but the guard outside would surely be radioing to the ones inside that an intrusion through the pipe was in progress.
I’m pretty tough, actually, by most people’s standards, but I’m not Snedd: if they knew I was coming, then three machine-gun-toting guards were going to be more than I could handle. Unfortunately, there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t go back, because the guard would be standing there, sight steady on the entrance to the pipe. Even if I sped down he’d be able to get me as soon as I hit the water, and I didn’t want to die by being shot full of holes in a lake of turd soup. It struck me as undignified.
There was no point in rushing up the tunnel firing my gun: a blanket fire of energy would cut me in half and quarters and eighths before I got anywhere near them. There was a bend in the pipe about five yards ahead, and that seemed to be my only potential hope. If I waited, and they eventually crept down to do me in, there was a tiny, minimal, infinitesimal chance that I might be able to get one or more of them first. My position would still be absolutely terrible, but I wouldn’t be dead. Soon afterwards, perhaps, but when all you have is a few minutes, each one of them seems fairly precious, each couple of seconds worth having. I crouched down and waited, gun ready.
On impulse I fumbled the portable vidiphone out of my jacket and called my apartment. I told the fridge to make sure that Spangle was fed regularly, and to alert the store if it ran out of cat food. I think it sensed I was in a serious jam, and it dispensed with the usual backchat and wished me luck. There was still no sound from the pipe up ahead, so I quickly called Zenda’s office and got Royn on the screen.
‘Oh hi, Stark. Hey, you’re in a tunnel.’
‘Yeah. Is Zenda available?’
‘Christ, no way, Stark, I’m afraid. She’s in meetings for the next
seventy-two hours solid. Any message?’
I thought for a moment. Nothing came, nothing big enough.
‘Just say I called. No, say this: say I said to remember the waterfall.’
‘Sure thing. Remember the waterfall. You got it.’
“Thanks, Royn.’
I heard a sound up ahead and cut the transmission, hugging the wall as tight as I could. Each shot was going to be critical, and so I braced my arm and held my torso as steady as I could, waiting, I knew, for death.
After everything I’d done, everything I’d seen, the distance I’d travelled, it was going to end in being gunned down in an ancient sewage pipe on an unimportant job. And I found I cared, strangely. A few years ago I wouldn’t have done. Something had been changing in me recently, stirring and flexing beneath the surface. I’d started to feel worse, but to care more. Something was happening, but I didn’t know what. Now it looked like I’d never find out.
Then the sound came again, and my arm wavered slightly. It was very faint, but I thought I recognised the kind of sound it was. I opened my mouth slightly to let the noise get to my eardrums through the eustachian tubes as well as my ears, and strained every nerve to hear. It happened again, and my mouth dropped open wider of its own accord.
It was laughter. The sound was definitely laughter.
I’ve had a lot of experience of macho people. In the last nine years I’ve worked for, with and against a wide spectrum of soldiers, policemen, lunatics, hit men and gang members, and I’ve met a lot of ‘if it moves shoot it, and if it doesn’t shoot it until it does’ kind of guys. When that kind of person is on the hunt, when he’s got a quarry in his sights and he’s moving in to blow it to little bloody pieces, some of them will laugh. A few laugh with nervousness, with a last-minute realisation of the enormity of what they’re about to do. Some will laugh heartily, desperately proud and strong, and some will laugh the thin giggle of the completely and utterly deranged as the twisted devil inside them peeks out to do its work.
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