Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday

by Heide Goody

  “Professor?”

  He turned slowly. Pain etched the tall man’s face, ageing him, maybe making him look a little closer to his true age. “Now, I don’t want you to panic, dear,” he said.

  “What?” said Morag.

  “I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.”

  She felt it like a punch. How could it impact her so much? Daughter or not, she’d only known her a short time, and yet his words took hold of her innards and twisted hard.

  “Prudence!” she yelled.

  03:31am

  Nina and Donk kept up the momentum, dragging the donkey train with them. From the park it was a short walk through terraced streets up to the car park of the train station. The station building had that old Victorian school look. There was a light on inside.

  “Nina,” Pupfish called from the back of the line. “Sure the trains aren’t running, man.”

  Nina ignored him and walked out onto the platform. Her best scenario was that a train was waiting at the platform with the engine running. No such luck, but there were two figures down the end of the platform: an older woman in a wheelchair and another beefy-armed woman in a railway uniform. The beefy woman had armed herself with a gigantic wrench. Nina saw that it glistened stickily under the lights as the woman wielded it as a warning. It had clearly already been in a fight.

  Nina approached with her hands held up, so she did not alarm the woman. Unfortunately, the donkey procession undermined her efforts. The woman looked at Nina, the donkeys, then Pupfish as he entered.

  “Go away!” she shouted. “No trains here!”

  Nina held up her ID, not that the woman could see it. “We need to get a train.”

  “Not another step,” said the beefy woman. “I will fucking brain you, darlin’.”

  Nina tossed her the ID. She had hoped it would fly like a frisbee into the woman’s hand but instead it wobbled and fell like a falling leaf.

  “What’s that?” said the woman.

  “It tells you who I am. I’m Nina Seth.”

  The woman shrugged. “Hello Nina. There are still no trains.”

  “I work for an organisation. We are some of the only people who are briefed on the current situation and equipped to deal with it.”

  “Deal with it?” scoffed the woman.

  There was a growl from the ticket hall. Donkeys bunched together nervously. They weren’t stupid. Pupfish raised his pistol and fired in the direction of the dendooshi. There was a yelp and a long silence.

  “Ooh, that was loud,” said the old woman in the wheelchair. It was said in a mildly amused and jolly tone. Wherever the woman’s brain was it, it wasn’t orbiting Planet Normal.

  “I need your help,” Nina told the railway employee. “I had a police escort when I set out on this job, but he— ” Nina didn’t want to talk about Ricky Lee to this stranger who didn’t care. “I don’t have one anymore. Now I need a train to get this group to central Birmingham. If you can’t make a train happen, then I urge you to put me in touch with someone who can.”

  “Donkeys,” said the woman. Her face crunched with confusion and she opened her mouth to ask a question but abandoned that. “Karl’s looking for a train.”

  “Karl?”

  “He’s a driver. We tried to use the computer to see where the trains are on the network, but the system’s not working. So he went old school.”

  “What does that mean?” Nina asked.

  The woman pointed up the track. “Walking up the track to find a train then bringing it back here. We’re taking his mom into Birmingham with us. We need to get her somewhere safe. There are men with guns…” She pursed her lips. She clearly had her own horror stories.

  “It’s not easy to know what ‘safe’ even means at the moment,” said Nina. “He went that way?”

  The woman nodded.

  Nina jumped down from platform to track. “Pupfish will guard you while I find him.”

  “I’ll unlock the ramp while we’re waiting, shall I?” said the woman.

  “Ramp?”

  “You’ll need the ramp to get the donkeys on.”

  Nina ran down the track and only tripped a few times on the sleepers. She soon caught up with Karl.

  “Woah! Woah!” he shouted in alarm, waving a heavy-duty torch about.

  “It’s okay,” she told him, a little out of breath. “Human. Normal human. Here to help.”

  “No hi-vis? No hard hat? This is a place of work, not the Wild West, mate.” He was apparently more alarmed by her lack of health and safety considerations than the possibility of her being a monstrous thing from beyond.

  “I forgot to bring them,” she said.

  He was younger than Nina had expected. She gave him a deeply abbreviated version of her situation, reassured him that his mom was still fine, and might have entirely neglected to mention the donkeys in her haste to get him up to speed.

  They walked up the side of the track, while shining his powerful torch in front of them, so that any trains would see them coming.

  “Train!” she shouted, pointing to a stationary carriage ahead.

  Karl nodded with satisfaction, as if he’d known that there would be one here. It wasn’t very far away from the station, so maybe it was a train car park, or a train park, or whatever. It had three sections which was quite possibly enough for their donkey crew.

  Karl climbed into the cabin.

  “You can make this work?” Nina said.

  He ignored the question. “We can’t go full speed into the city. We will need to proceed at a speed where we can apply the brakes if we need to. We have no idea what we might find on the line.”

  “Uh-huh. Makes sense.”

  Nina ran back up to the platform (taking Karl’s hard hat and torch because he insisted) to help get the ramp in place and the donkeys loaded.

  “Only two bullets left,” said Pupfish. “The donkeys ain’t happy neither.”

  Karl and his train slowly pulled into the station. The beefy woman pulled the ramp into place and wheeled Karl’s mother on board. Pupfish tried to haul Donk up and onto the train. The donkey wasn’t all that keen on the idea, and strained on his halter, hooves skidding on the platform.

  “Come on Donk!” Nina called. “We need to get you moving.”

  She ran to a platform vending machine and shovelled in some coins. There was the hint of sound and movement from the ticket hall. The dendooshi were wary but hadn’t left.

  “What are you doing, Nina?” called Pupfish.

  “Crisps!” she replied. “What flavour do you reckon?”

  “Did I mention the bullets and the teglau wolf monsters?”

  That wasn’t a helpful response, so she got cheese and onion because she imagined donkeys might like onions. She ran back, opening the bag and then went to Donk, getting the scent of the open bag under his nose. “Come on! We’ll get you some proper donkey food as soon as we can, but I bet you’d like a crisp, wouldn’t you?”

  Donk did seem interested, and he followed Nina up the ramp and onto the train. Nina was well aware they needed to move right down the carriage if they were to accommodate all of the donkeys, so she kept going along the aisle, while Donk squeezed his tubby frame between the seats in pursuit of the snack. She opened the door to First Class and continued into the next carriage.

  “How many are left?” she called to Pupfish.

  “Ten.”

  She shuffled back to the end of First Class and emptied the crisps onto a seat so that Donk had something to keep him absorbed. She squeezed back down the crowded aisle, checking that the donkeys were all installed comfortably. There was a gunshot.

  “One bullet!” yelled Pupfish. “Let’s go.”

  The doors shut. Nina could see three dendooshi devouring the corpse of one of their own in the ticket hall. Another, one of the largest, came prowling onto the platform.

  “Can you look after all of our passengers while I ride up front with Karl?” Nina asked Pupfish.

  “Sure
. Can I get some of your crisps?”

  “I gave them all to the donkey,” she said.

  The train pulled away slowly to the sound of huffs, nickers and whines of nervous donkeys. The dendooshi kept pace with the train to the end of the platform, then stood there and watched them go.

  03:33am

  The unholy colours of Ammi-Usub seemed to be gathering more thickly the further Prudence, Steve and the Mammonites travelled. Prudence wondered if the unknowable colour was following them, or if they were by chance following it. Plant life swayed to its rippling powers. Colour danced around the street lamps. The tops of wooden telegraph poles warped and sprouted new growth, anaemic shoots reaching for the alien light around them.

  A puddle of water that had gathered around a blocked drain was oily. When Prester kicked through it, it oozed and rippled in a way that water shouldn’t. Even the air seemed changed. It would have been easy and simplistic to say the air stank, of fire and fumes and filth, but that would be wrong. Such expressions were only a human approximation of the indescribable change that had come over the atmosphere.

  “Are we in danger?” Prudence had asked. “Is the light changing us too?”

  “It will have me to deal with if it tries,” said Yang.

  “Still think you can fight a colour?” said Steve.

  Shortly afterwards they were attacked by The Things That Used To Be Dogs. Prudence thought they looked cute, with their scruffy fur and floppy eyes and bright glowing eyes. Then they ran at the children and one of the big ones grabbed Elon Mogg-Mammonson by the shin and tried to drag him into the bushes. The Mammonites shot The Things That Used To Be Dogs. Even when several of the dogs had been killed, and it was clear that children were off the menu, they kept coming, until every one of them had been slaughtered.

  “I thought they looked cute,” said Prudence.

  Elon hissed as he inspected his ripped and bloodied trousers.

  “Are you hurt?” said Yang.

  He nodded, his teeth gritted.

  “Can you walk?” she said.

  “I think.”

  Yang Mammon-Mammonson ejected the ammo clip from her rifle, checked it and reinserted it. “You think?”

  Elon looked at the rifle. “Yeah. I can walk. Sure.”

  “Good.”

  They carried on and passed through a housing estate. Mutated creeper plants curled into lettering along the side of boxy housing.

  “Hello,” Prudence read before realising what she’d just done. “I can read!” she said.

  Prester grunted dismissively. “I have a reading age of sixteen.”

  “I heard you cheated on that test,” said Ayesha.

  “Are you accusing me?” he said bluntly. “I am recording this conversation for monitoring purposes.”

  “I am only recounting what I heard,” she replied smoothly.

  “Who from? I could sue them.”

  “They’re dead now,” said Ayesha. “We shot them.”

  “Muda,” said Prester. “Can’t sue the dead.”

  “Cheating – cheating successfully – is an accomplishment in itself,” said Yang.

  Prudence waved at the plant-writing on the house. “Hello, house,” she said.

  “Do not talk to the literate vegetation, gobbet,” said Steve. “Nothing good will come of it.”

  It was not the only plant trying to communicate. Along the road, wildly growing ivy contorted itself into strange ideograms and near-triangles that hurt Prudence’s eyes to look at. In the garden of another house, a bush had produced an array of giant white flowers. The five petals mimicked the outline of human arms, legs and heads. The largest flower was only slightly smaller than Prudence herself. A petal bent towards them as they passed. Through the front window, she could see the interior of the house was filled with dense plant matter. The tip of a shoe poked out of a cluster of leaves, but she could not see if there was a foot within it.

  Yang slowed as they neared a grass covered roundabout. Twenty or so humans were gathered in a circle on the roundabout, hands linked and faces raised to the thing above them.

  “What is that?” asked Prudence.

  “An ulah weyskin?” said Prester.

  “It could be a sholog’ai frei,” said Steve.

  “It looks like a stupid blobby jellyfish,” said Ayesha.

  Whatever it was, Ayesha had perhaps summed it up best. Ten feet above the circle of people – chanting, dancing, worshipping people – a shape had congealed out of the light. It wobbled and distended like an unstable soap bubble. Tracers of light crackled over its surface, ephemeral tentacles questing blindly. Where they touched the human devotees, they burned skin and left black scars. The humans moaned in religious ecstasy.

  “They’ve picked that as their god?” said Yang disdainfully.

  “I guess,” said Prester.

  “With all the gods of beyond coming to earth, they picked that one?”

  “Humans are stupid,” said Steve.

  “That’s why democracy is such a bad idea,” said Ayesha.

  “Look,” said Elon.

  “We are looking,” said Yang.

  “No, look. The Co-op.”

  Prudence followed his pointing finger and saw a shop on the far side of the roundabout.

  “And the phone?” said Prudence.

  “The booth thing on the corner,” he said.

  The group made their way slowly round. Ayesha and Prester kept their assault rifles trained on the blob-worshippers. A woman screamed as the jelly-god burned her face and chest. It was hard to tell if it was a sound of joy or agony.

  “I could take out half of them from here,” said Ayesha.

  “To put them out of their misery?” said Prester suspiciously.

  “Target practice,” she said.

  The shop was open or, at least, the lights inside were on. They crossed the last road and Prudence approached the phone box. It was hardly a box at all, just a battered metal stand with a scratched plastic cover. She looked at the graffiti covered phone unit and the number buttons. “What now?”

  “I’m going in,” said Ayesha and jerked her toward the shop. “Prester, are there sweets in the ‘glorious world to come’?”

  “Our divine mother – San-shu chu’meyah – is hardly concerned with sweets and snacks.”

  “Thought so,” she said. “Gonna go stock up on Haribo.”

  Yang adjusted the shoulder strap of her rifle and didn’t quite point her gun at Prudence.

  “We brought you here. Now you pay us.”

  “Oh.” Prudence had almost forgotten. She took the tin from her pocket. “Here.”

  Yang took it and appraised it from various angles. “Special? Bites people?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Yang struggled with the lid for a second and then prised it off. The angry whelk inside clattered and snapped and grabbed onto Yang’s thumb with its sharp shell. Yang grunted but did not flinch. She watched it as it tried to chew the flesh from her.

  “This is sufficient,” she said, prising the creature off and back into the tin. She stowed it away in her blazer, sucked her thumb and then stepped back to take aim at Prudence. Prester followed her example. A cold feeling passed over Prudence.

  “Safe passage you got,” said Yang. “And now our deal is concluded.”

  “You going to shoot us?” said Prudence.

  “Traitors,” growled Steve, readying his spear.

  “Don’t blame me if you’re poor negotiators,” said Yang.

  “That’s really unfair,” said Prudence.

  “We are nothing but fair and honest.” Yang smiled. The smile contorted her unnatural face. “We pride ourselves on that.”

  “Well, it’s certainly not nice,” said Prudence, who was sure there was a point to be made and that the Mammonites would put their guns away if she could only make that point clearly enough.

  “‘Nice’ is a coward’s word,” said Yang. “Meaningless.”

  “We can take these
weaklings,” Steve said to Prudence.

  “They have guns.”

  “You can dodge bullets, can’t you?”

  Prudence bit her lip. “No. I really don’t think so.”

  The shop’s automatic door slid open and Elon and Ayesha came out. Ayesha’s arms were full of packets of brightly coloured sweets. Elon chewed on a wriggly snake sweet as long as his arm.

  “What’s going on?” he mumbled.

  “Hey, I thought we had a deal,” said Ayesha.

  “What deal?” said Yang.

  “The kaatbari was going to put in a good word for us. With Yo-Morgantus or someone.”

  “No one needs to put in a good word for us,” said Prester. “When our mother rises—”

  “She’ll be bringing a family bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken with her, will she?” said Ayesha.

  Prester turned to her, anger on his fractionally lopsided face. In a single action, Ayesha dropped her stash of sweets, aimed her assault rifle from the hip and fired. Prester stumbled back.

  “You just—” he began to say and she shot him again: a concentrated burst that spattered his chest and knocked him back into the road where he fell down.

  “And gravy,” said Ayesha. “KFC always tastes better with the gravy.”

  There was a long moment of stillness. Ayesha stared at the body. Yang watched Ayesha. Prudence stood, stunned. Even Steve held his position. The only sounds were the blob worshippers on the roundabout and Elon slowly chewing a red jelly snake.

  “He cheated on his reading test,” said Ayesha eventually.

  Yang tilted her head on one side, conceding this.

  “Couldn’t read an adn-bhul situation though,” said Ayesha.

  “Good one,” said Elon.

  Yang’s attention turned back to Prudence. Difficult though it was to judge the expression on her uncanny face, there seemed to be a calmer contemplative air about her.

  “You going to speak to Yo-Morgantus?” she said.

  “Maybe,” said Prudence.

  Yang jerked her head. “I know there’s not going to be any KFC or sweets—”

  “Or phone data,” said Elon.