Border Princes

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Don’t,’ said Jack.

  ‘I really can’t describe it,’ Toshiko repeated.

  ‘I really am gonna be sick,’ said Owen.

  ‘I meant don’t to either of you!’ Jack demanded. He closed his hand around the object. ‘You can’t describe it because it’s got more than four dimensions. You can’t stand looking at it for the same reason.’

  Owen nodded, wagging a finger in agreement, and turned aside to be sick anyway.

  ‘Jack?’ whispered Gwen.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jack, smiling broadly. ‘Oh, I see what they meant about the two blue lights. Moving.’

  His smile melted away. He sat back on the path, cupping the object in both hands. He was staring into the rain-swept distance.

  ‘Moving,’ he said. His voice had dropped to a dull sound they could barely hear. ‘Moving about. Big, blue, flashing lights. Oh.’

  Toshiko reached towards him. ‘Jack? Let it go and let us—’

  Still staring into the distance, Jack pulled away from Toshiko’s touch. ‘It’s my turn,’ he said.

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘Big,’ said Jack Harkness. ‘Big, big,’ he added, stressing the middle ‘big’.

  Then he fell back and went into convulsions.

  ‘Jack!’ Gwen screamed.

  ‘Bugger Jack!’ cried James. Gwen turned. They all turned. They saw what James had noticed.

  Dozens of people were shuffling and twitching down the overgrown bank towards them, coming up smack into the rattling chain link and still trying to plod forwards, dead-eyed and grasping. Others were hobbling along the path from both directions. The patrons of the empty pub, Owen was sure, staff from the late shop, families from the nearby row of houses. It was all far too George A. Romero to be remotely funny.

  ‘Oh bollocks,’ said Owen. The shambling figures were all muttering as they bore down, their voices overlapping in the rain. They were all saying the same thing.

  ‘Big big big. Big big big.’

  Emphasis on every middle ‘big’.

  THREE

  Shiznay rather fancied Mr Dine. He’d been eating in the Mughal Dynasty for sixth months, every Monday and every Thursday, like his life was regimented. Always the same thing: shashlik, followed by a lamb pasanda, then a bowl of chocolate ice cream. He drank one bottle of lager with his meal. He paid with a card, signing Dine.

  He was a lean, straight-backed man, with hard cheekbones and a head of white-blond hair cropped back like flock across his skull. He always wore a suit, sometimes grey, sometimes black and occasionally blue, and a tie with some club insignia repeat-embroidered on the jet-black field. A crisp white shirt. He was always respectful, though never talkative. Shiznay imagined an IT job, a nice car parked in the nearby Pay-and-Display, a regular run to Bristol and Bath and Swansea, whatever was in his area. She wondered who he visited. Big offices in the Bay most likely. New European businesses probably. Yeah.

  Two weeks before, on a Thursday night like this one, although lacking the rain, Mr Dine had come in and sat down at his usual table. When she’d brought him the menu, he’d looked up at her, and smiled, and asked her, if she didn’t mind, what her name was.

  ‘I’ve been coming in here for such a long time, and I don’t know what you’re called,’ he had said.

  ‘Shiznay,’ she replied, blushing.

  ‘Shiznay,’ he repeated, turning the word over and over.

  This Thursday, she produced the bottle of lager he hadn’t asked for yet, and set it down next to the upturned glass.

  Mr Dine smiled. ‘Thank you. You read my mind, Shiznay.’

  ‘My pleasure. Have you decided yet, sir?’

  ‘A moment.’

  Shiznay retreated to the kitchen door and waited. As ever, the restaurant was nothing like busy.

  ‘What are you doing?’ her father asked, bustling out of the kitchen. ‘Are you loitering?’

  ‘I am waiting for Mr Dine, Father,’ Shiznay replied.

  Her father looked out across the empty restaurant and spotted Mr Dine at the distant table.

  ‘You favour him,’ he observed.

  ‘He’s a customer, Father, and a regular. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Not get any ideas,’ her father said.

  Shiznay had plenty of ideas. Mr Dine knew her name. Mr Dine had smiled at her. He had wanted to know what her name was. He liked her.

  She caught sight of herself in the floor-length mirrors beside the restaurant door. Her father insisted they all wore authentic clothing at work – even though neither of her parents had ever been out of South Wales in their lives. Authentic clothing revealed her midriff, and also revealed what the local white boys called a ‘muffin top’. But authentic clothing also accentuated her bosom.

  Shiznay was proud of her bosom, but she was also fairly sure she had a pretty face.

  ‘He’s a breast man,’ her mother had told her.

  ‘Mother, what?’

  ‘That Mr Dine. I’ve seen the way he looks at you. He’s a breast man.’

  ‘What is a “breast man”?’ she had wondered.

  ‘There are four kinds of men... the breast men, the backside men, the leg men, and the others.’

  ‘The others?’

  ‘The ones who’ll go for anything. Mr Dine—’

  ‘Mr Dine is a very nice man, and a regular customer.’

  ‘Mr Dine is a breast man, Shiznay, you mark my words.’

  Shiznay turned way from her reflection and looked across the Mughal Dynasty at Mr Dine. Are you a breast man? she wondered. What exactly does that entail, being a breast man?

  Mr Dine had put his menu down.

  She crossed the floor to him, breathing in to minimise her muffin top and push out her bosom. Maybe, maybe, he’d ask her out on a date. What would that be like? A walk down to the Pay-and-Display, him holding the door of his nice car open so she could get in. A trip to—

  But, no. Revise that fantasy. He’d have eaten, of course, he’d already have eaten. No fancy restaurant on the Bay for the two of them. Unless, of course, he asked her out on an evening that wasn’t a Monday or a Thursday...

  She wondered what French food was like. What Welsh food was like. How would it taste if Mr Dine was sitting opposite her?

  Shiznay didn’t really care if he was a breast man. He was a nice man, and he’d smiled at her, and he knew her name, and—

  ‘Are you ready to order?’ she asked.

  He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Yes, I am, Shiznay. Shaslik, and a—’

  ‘—lamb pasanda?’ she finished.

  He frowned. ‘Am I so predictable?’

  ‘You know what you like.’

  ‘I study the menu,’ he confessed, picking the tri-fold card up again, ‘and I look, but always the same things seem agreeable. Meat, spiced, then meat and carbohydrates. The alcohol is a treat for me.’

  She smiled, not quite knowing what to say. ‘And chocolate ice cream?’

  A broad smile etched itself across his lean face. ‘There’s nothing like it where I come from.’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Well, thank goodness we’ve got some.’

  ‘Would you... can you... sit down?’ he asked, indicating the chair opposite.

  Shiznay sat down. This was it. The moment. Her breathing had become rather rapid, but she didn’t mind. It did splendid things to her bosom.

  ‘Shiznay, I’ve been coming here for a while now. I want to ask...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What is chocolate ice cream?’

  She paused. ‘I... uh... that’s not what I was expecting you to ask. Chocolate ice cream? Well, that’s animal fats and flavouring, pretty much.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. He sighed. ‘No wonder I love it so.’

  ‘Is that... will that be all?’ she asked, rising.

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Shiznay.’

  She got up and hurried back to the kitchen.

  ‘Jack!’ Gwen yelled. ‘Jack! Come on!’

  She and To
shiko were trying to hold Jack’s convulsing body still. The shambling, mumbling figures were closing in all around them.

  ‘What do we do?’ James asked Owen. ‘Start throwing punches?’

  Owen took a shiny, black, custom side-arm from his coat and racked the slide. ‘We do whatever we have to do to get out of here alive,’ he replied.

  ‘You brought a gun?’ James asked.

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘I thought this was the End of the World?’

  ‘Look—’

  ‘Shut it, the pair of you,’ said Gwen. ‘The SUV’s got a weapons locker.’

  ‘Well, that kind of requires us to be where the SUV is,’ James told her, ‘rather than being, you know, up a certain creek without a particular implement.’

  ‘Just get behind me,’ said Owen.

  ‘They’re coming from all sides!’ James objected.

  ‘Just get behind me in spirit,’ said Owen.

  They could all smell the ketosis on the breaths of the advancing figures. A girl of eleven in a Powerpuff Girls nightshirt was in the front rank, a middle-aged man with flecks of potato crisp around his mouth, a woman in a housecoat and fluffy slippers.

  ‘You’re cheerfully going to shoot them?’ James asked.

  ‘Not cheerfully, exactly,’ Owen admitted.

  Jack made a sudden, deep exhalation, as if surfacing from a deep dive. He sat up, panting.

  ‘Not something I’d recommend,’ he said, blinking. He looked up at Gwen and Toshiko, and then back down at the object clenched in his hand.

  ‘Hard to fight it. Really hard. We have to get this contained. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it busy.’

  ‘There’s a containment box,’ Gwen began, ‘but it’s—’

  ‘—in the SUV,’ James and Owen chorused.

  ‘Then let’s move!’ Jack ordered, clambering to his feet with Toshiko’s help.

  They started back along the riverside path in the direction Jack and Owen had come from. Almost at once, they were pushing their way through the muttering files of automaton people. Hands clawed at them, catching at their clothes.

  ‘Just run!’ Jack barked. ‘Push through! Just shove them aside!’

  They fought their way forwards. A couple of the moaning figures went sprawling. Gwen got clear enough to start running. Toshiko followed her.

  There were hands all over Jack, grabbing at him, and dragging him down. Someone had hold of his left leg.

  ‘Dammit!’ he cried out. ‘Gwen! Go long!’

  Still running, Gwen glanced back. Jack freed his right arm and pitched the object like a Rawlings ball.

  ‘Pass it on!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t hold onto it!’

  Running backwards under the object’s arc, Gwen kept her eye on it, and caught it neatly. She started to run towards the embankment steps.

  The mindless crowd forgot about Jack and started to spill after her.

  She could feel the terrible warmth of the object in her hand. She blinked. On the back of her eyelids, two blue lights shone, moving.

  ‘Gwen!’

  Toshiko was near the top of the steps, looking back at her. She held her hands out, begging. ‘Gwen!’

  Gwen blinked again. She didn’t want to let the thing go. It was her turn.

  A young man in a collegiate rugby jersey ran into her from the side, and began to fight her for the thing in her hand.

  ‘Big big big!’ he explained. ‘Tokyo drift. Wood. Trees. Leaves. Nothing behind.’

  ‘Get off!’ Gwen told him.

  He punched her in the ribs. A small, weasel-faced woman joined him, and started to kick and scrabble at Gwen.

  The three of them fell back against a secondary stretch of chain link that had been fixed along the edge of the river wall below the embankment steps. The iron poles juddered as the weight of them hit the mesh.

  ‘Get off me!’ Gwen cried. She got her arm free and hurled the object up towards Toshiko. It was a poor effort. The weasel-faced woman had been hanging on her elbow.

  ‘You throw like a girl!’ Owen declared as he raced past her, heading for the steps.

  The object had sailed through the air and missed Toshiko by about six feet. It bounced into the long grass near the top of the embankment, somewhere to the left of the steps. Uttering a very clipped and precise piece of Anglo-Saxon invective, Toshiko floundered through the long, wet weeds to retrieve it.

  The mindless crowd on the path turned towards the bank, tottering up the steps or scrambling up through the long grass after Toshiko.

  Pressed against the chain link, Gwen tried to push the bodies off her. They’d already lost interest in her, and were trying to extricate themselves, but they’d all lost their balance into the belling net of the fence.

  There was a sharp, metallic ping, then another, and another.

  The section of chain-link fence was pulling away from its end pole under their combined weight. The rusting bolt-pegs sheared with a staccato squeal.

  Gwen felt herself pitching back off the edge of the wall into open space. The invisible river rushed below. The young man in the rugby jersey managed to flail backwards onto the path. The weasel-faced woman was not so well braced. As the fencing tore away, she went off the wall face first, and dropped into the blackness.

  Gwen was holding onto the fence, her fingers and thumbs threaded into the links. She was already too far off her centre of balance to pull back.

  The fencing tore back and unspooled all the way to the second pole, where it held. Gwen yelped as she fell, and ended up hanging over the river wall, feet dangling, clinging to the swaying, straining section of torn-away fence.

  The bolt-pegs on the second pole began to shear.

  Toshiko rummaged in the undergrowth. A man thrashed into her, and she chopped the side of her left hand into his throat to keep him busy.

  There it was. A dull glint in the rain-soaked grass. Toshiko snatched up the Amok, and started to run up the slope and back towards the steps. There were people milling around her. The moment she had it in her hand, they surged after her. Some fell over on the wet undergrowth. A woman squealed in disappointment as she slithered right back down the slope.

  Toshiko kept running. Her throat ached, and she was aware of plenty of bruises elsewhere on her person, but all that seemed to matter any more was the thing in her hand. She could feel it, like a hot coal, through the leather of her stylish gloves.

  Someone grabbed the tails of her long coat, and she kicked them away. Someone else seized her by the arm, and she gave them a blunt elbow smack in the philtrum as a present. She had reached flat ground, a puddled square of broken concrete between the derelict buildings and the late shop. She could see the SUV forty yards away outside the pub, sitting under the streetlights in a haze of rain.

  A wrecking ball swung in and struck her in the small of the back, walloping her off her feet.

  She fell on her front in the puddles. It wasn’t a wrecking ball, she realised. It was the big man in the lumberjack shirt. Twice in one night he’d poleaxed her.

  He was raving, speaking in tongues, his mouth a bloody ruin and his face purple-bruised from Jack’s punches.

  Toshiko rolled away as he clawed at her. Her body hurt. Her mind hurt more. Her hand was hot. It felt as if the leather of her glove was burning away. As she blinked, she saw blue lights. They were moving, moving in ways nothing could be expected to move, not even two blue lights. And they seemed very big. Big big—

  A gun went off.

  It was so loud and so close, and the acoustic echo of the narrow yard so hard, Toshiko jumped out of her skin.

  Owen came running up to her, his smoking weapon raised, shouting her name.

  The big man in the lumberjack shirt turned, unfazed by the sight or sound of a high-calibre handgun, and socked Owen in the face. Owen looked as if he’d run into a clothesline. His legs kept going as his head snapped backwards. He bounced on his back as he hit the ground.

&n
bsp; The big man turned back to regard her, ropes of clotted blood swinging from his nose. She was already up.

  ‘Big big big!’ he explained to her.

  ‘Piss off!’ she explained back.

  As he ploughed on, she kicked him in the balls. He went down, but not before he’d caught her across the side of the head with his fist.

  Two blue lights, moving, this way and that, and then the numbers, scrolling up across the darkness like the end titles of a movie...

  Toshiko opened her eyes. There was rain in her face. She’d blacked out for a moment. The big man had fallen across her legs. He was writhing. The thing in her hand was red hot.

  She tried to pull her legs free. The big man reared up, and grabbed her throat. There was an ugly noise, like canvas tearing and raw liver being hit with a mallet, both at the same time.

  The big man’s face deformed as muscle control became extinct, and any character and expression fled from the sack of meat his mind had occupied. Blood gurgled out of his mouth like an overflowing drain. His head folded over on one side and he pitched forward.

  A blade of clip-frame glass two inches wide was buried in the nape of his neck.

  The tramp stood over her, his hands bleeding. ‘It’s my go!’ he protested. ‘You can’t have it!’

  Toshiko scrambled away, kicking the big man’s body off her legs, crawling furiously. Dawn of the Dead rejects moaned and staggered after her.

  ‘Tosh!’

  She saw James, at the mouth of the yard, nearly in the street.

  Toshiko leapt up, ignoring the tramp’s hands as they closed on her back, and yanked the glove off her left hand. She dropped the Amok into it – thankful at least that the retinal pattern of blue lights went away – and launched the wrapped object down the yard towards James.

  He caught it as neatly as Shane Warne at the gas-holder end. Turning, he ran out into the street towards the SUV. The mob followed him. Some of them kicked or even stood on Toshiko in their urge to pursue him. She curled up in a ball to protect herself.

  The South Wales Police Unit, a flash-marked Vauxhall Vectra, had been responding to a call concerning a disturbance in the West Moors area. It was doing just under thirty miles an hour as it pulled in along the terrace by the pub. It caught James on its front bumper, hoicked him up over the bonnet in a thumping tumble, and bounced him off the windscreen. The windscreen crazed. The police car squealed to a halt. James rolled off the other side of the bonnet and fell on the road.