Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday

by Heide Goody

  “Heavy enough,” said Kathy. A set of wires was taped to Kathy’s arm, and a chunky bracelet of electronics strapped to her wrist.

  “There are no civilians out there,” Malcolm continued. “Anything that moves is a viable target.”

  Another soldier came forward holding strips of black plastic. “Here, ma’am.”

  “Take my hand,” Kathy told Prudence. Prudence did no such thing. Kathy grabbed it. The soldier stepped forward. With quick actions and a zipzip sound, he pulled a plastic loop around Prudence’s wrists and attached it to one around Kathy’s wrist.

  “We’re sticking together, Prudence,” said Kathy and gave a jolly little laugh, as if it was all somehow funny. “You, me and—” She waggled the wrist with the electronics on it.

  “That’s a bomb,” said Prudence, although she already knew the answer.

  Kathy jiggled her shoulders to shift the bulk on her back. “Big enough to kill your dad.”

  “My dad was a man called Drew,” said Prudence. “My mum told me that when I was in her belly.”

  “Is that what she said, eh?”

  “He was a kind man and a funny man. She said that too. What you mean is Yo-Morgantus.”

  “I do,” said Kathy.

  “He will kill you.”

  “And that’s what these are for,” said Kathy, waggling both bomb controls and the straps holding Prudence to her. “I don’t want him to kill me before I get a chance to tell him what we want.” She tried to give Prudence a serious look. “We are the good guys. You do know that?”

  Prudence remembered the soldiers shooting the living fish sculpture and dragging Yang away. She said nothing.

  * * *

  The court of Yo-Morgantus was conveniently thought of as occupying the top two floors of the Cube, but this was incorrect. The court of Yo-Morgantus occupied a space that might look like the upper floors of a modern tower block but which, even upon casual inspection, was obviously nothing of the sort. The hall in which the emissaries, ambassadors, hostages and hangers-on went about their foul daily existence was too tall and too wide to fit into the space it notionally occupied. Like a Mount Olympus for demonic pan-dimensional horrors, the Cube was less a home to the court and more of a gateway. To step into the dark and windowless court room was to put one foot into the reality of the Venislarn.

  Dangling metal orbs and irregular mirrors on the walls reflected and amplified what little light there was. In the gloom, the walls rippled. Was reality here wavering like a sail in the wind, or were they floor length drapes: theatre curtains to conceal the things in the wings? Or were the walls as alive as the crowded floor?

  Presz’lings moved about the floors and wall on their stilt-like legs, treating gravity as an option rather than a law. Draybbea squelched into, merged with, and separated from one another in a continuous flow. Chitinous, winged croyi-takk moved restlessly, like bees in a threatened hive. An inhumanly humanoid Voor-D’yoi Lak prowled through the crowd, its claws flexing, its circular wound mouth salivating.

  Omar stepped forward, his mouth open like a dumb yokel. She couldn’t tell if he was appalled, or as wonderstruck as a child in a sweet shop.

  “This place—” he whispered.

  Morag nodded. “It’s something else. There used to be a big Skrendul thing over there. A stone giant. Never moved. Just waiting for the ending of the world.” She grunted. “Huh! I never thought he’d actually move out.”

  “But this place—”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s like—” Omar rubbed his finger together like he was feeling cloth, searching for something. “Doesn’t the décor remind you of a really, truly tacky night club?”

  “Yes!” said Morag. “Thank you. I’ve always thought that. Yo-Morgantus has very poor taste in interior design. And staff uniforms,” she added, nodding towards the nearest people in the room.

  Yo-Morgantus surrounded himself with human servants. Or rather, while his vast corpulent form dwelt in the ceiling space above – a cancerous fatberg big enough to block the channel tunnel – his retinue of naked redheads moved about the hall. They were his hands, his mouth, and his playthings. They serviced the godlings gathered about. They carried messages, or fought and fucked and danced for the entertainment of their master.

  A stellated gastropod royogthrap rolled over and raised itself above Morag and Omar as though debating which to eat first.

  “Reh solesk-andu’s!” commanded a voice. The royogthrap wheeled away.

  “Here’s the queen bitch,” Morag whispered to Omar. She straightened her aching back to stand tall and proud before Brigit.

  Brigit – Morag didn’t know her surname, or whether Brigit was even her real name – had been the preferred mouthpiece of Yo-Morgantus for almost as long as Morag had been in Birmingham. Morag despised her, spending a number of lonely drunken hours wondering quite why she hated Brigit so much. She had argued it was Morgantus she hated, not Brigit; but she knew that to be a lie. She hated them both.

  She’d wondered if it was because Brigit seemed to enjoy her sordid role. Quietly, and uncomfortably, she’d considered if she hated Brigit because of her naked body, and the way she flaunted it. No, Morag wasn’t simply jealous of Brigit’s youthful and shapely figure, her pale unblemished skin, or how her bloody boobs seemed to defy gravity, (not that Morag wouldn’t have swapped a month of her life to get any of those things). She had eventually admitted to herself (and it had taken a lot of alcohol to achieve this level of honesty) she hated Brigit for being beautiful and knowing it; for having the confidence to live her life as she saw fit, without hesitation or apology; for having no shame, no hang ups and no moments of doubt. Being the servant of a sadistic god-monster was just the frilly trimmings round the edges.

  Brigit held her hand up high, her fingertips entwined with a fleshy streamer that hung from the ceiling – skin to skin contact with Yo-Morgantus.

  “San-shu chuman’n, Yo-Morgantus,” said Omar, bowing his head in reverent greeting.

  Morag looked to the high ceiling. “Greetings, Lord Morgantus.” She looked at Brigit. “Hey, Brigit.”

  Brigit treated them to a cold smile. All Brigit’s smiles were cold. Or maybe Morag just chose to see them that way because she hated the smug cow.

  “Morag. Professor Sheikh Omar. This is a…”

  “Surprise?” suggested Morag.

  “No,” said Brigit. “A bit rude. You weren’t invited. You weren’t summoned.”

  “Lord Morgantus, we have come to negotiate.”

  “The consular mission’s role is completed,” said Brigit. “The ink on the contract is dried. The ship has sailed. Axana-i adek hiif’ude.”

  “We haven’t come on behalf of the consular mission,” said Morag. “Or, if we have, it’s in our new role.”

  “New role, eh?”

  “We’ve come on behalf of the other gods, lord,” said Omar. “Yoth Mammon, Yo Daganau-Pysh, Yo Kaxeos. Others too,” he lied.

  Eyes, blind faces and pseudo-organic sensory appendages turned towards them. At that instant, it occurred to Morag that by coming as representatives of the em-shadt Venislarn in the city, they were usurping the role of some of the creatures in this room.

  “What do they want?”

  “They want assurances about their role in the world to come,” said Omar.

  “And I want to see my daughter,” added Morag.

  Brigit’s expression turned from cold to playful to quizzical to consternation. Morag could read what those turns of expression meant.

  “My daughter is here, isn’t she?”

  Brigit’s slappably beautiful eyes widened. “You lost her?”

  05:47am

  Chad found the taxi driver, Hasnain, to be the most wonderful man to talk to. Sure, Chad had to get the ball rolling and, after reading Hasnain’s name off the licence plaque on the dashboard, felt more than comfortable enough to talk to the man on first name terms. It was true Hasnain said little – in fact had said nothing a
t all to Chad – but there was a look in the driver’s rheumy, tired and fire damaged eyes that spoke to Chad on a deep and personal level.

  Given the situation, Chad had felt compelled to explain what his role was in relation to the critically important public perception of the Venislarn.

  “True, it didn’t happen quite as we expected,” he admitted. “We had a whole slew of marketing and advertising campaigns which we were going to roll out in the weeks and months before the Venislarn revealed themselves. We had a movie – Man of War. It was going to be a lovely touching story. Bromance. Romance. An emotional piece bound to get you right in the feels. I was working up ideas for a manufactured rock band with a Venislarn angle. Tentacular. The idea came from a passing comment by a colleague, but I put a lot of work into it. I practically donated my creative kidney to it.”

  Hasnain’s eyes stayed fixed on the road in front of them, not a flicker of emotion, but Chad could tell he had the man’s sympathies. A puff of brick dust appeared from the building just beyond Chad’s window. A puff of smoke and a sprinkling of dust fell from the wall. Which was odd.

  Chad pressed his face closer to the window and tried to look around but saw no obvious cause. There were a number of distant pops, like firecrackers going off, but nothing of note.

  “Oh, people often think that just because we’re in Birmingham, we’re on the periphery of things,” he continued. “Hey, Chad, if you’re such a big part of these end of the world projects, what are you doing in Birmingham? Why aren’t you in … New York? Washington DC? Beijing? Who ever heard of the end of the world happening here?” He chuckled.

  A tiny figure leapt up from the roadside and onto the bonnet of the car. It was a little cloth thing, a sort of gingerbread man creature executed in threadbare sack cloth for the top half and flowery patterned linen for the lower half. It swung a pencil around in its shapeless fist like it was Moses’s staff. It looked up at a building across the road and shouted something, but its voice was too weak and high-pitched for Chad to hear through the glass. Then it turned, jumped off the bonnet, and ran towards the Cube building.

  Chad watched it go. When it had vanished he tried to remember what he’d been saying.

  “People don’t know – and you probably can’t tell from my accent,” he said to Hasnain, “but I’m actually from round here. That’s right, I know! You know St Chad’s cathedral, the Roman Catholic place? Of course you do. You’re a taxi driver. You’ve got the knowledge. My parents used to go there when I was a child. St Chad and yours truly. A pair of local boys. They’ve got his bones up on the altar there. I tell you, this is where it’s happening. Right here.”

  Hasnain slipped the car into gear and reversed a short distance. A second later, a man in soldier’s uniform fell from the sky and smacked into the road where the taxi had just been.

  “Oh, my good God!” exclaimed Chad. “Someone call an ambulance! I should call a … of course. There are no ambulances.” Without further thought or words, he got out and went to the man. He was quite clearly dead. There was a series of ragged wounds in his chest. Because of the way he’d fallen, his helmet contained little more than a lump of red mush. He wore a little fist and castle insignia on his shoulder marked with the words ‘Forward Company’.

  There were further firecracker pops. Now, out of the car, Chad realised it was gunfire, and it was coming from above. He looked to the building directly above him. Another shot. A head appeared over the rooftop. The figure was slight, the rifle it carried too large in its hands. It looked for all the world like a schoolgirl.

  Chad realised the girl was aiming at him. He felt a choking lump in his throat. She clearly decided he wasn’t worth shooting and vanished again.

  * * *

  Vivian lifted her gaze and saw that Mrs Seth had entered the conference room once again, waddling behind the trolley. In fact it seemed to Vivian the trolley was now an extension of Mrs Seth, much in the same way that she had melded with her writing tools during the largest part of her past existence.

  “Yes?” Vivian asked.

  “You need more tea.” It was a statement.

  Vivian took the cup with raised eyebrows. Mrs Seth had not been briefed in the correct procedure for making Vivian’s tea. It was therefore extremely irritating that she presumed to know how it should be prepared.

  Vivian took a sip, and was forced to concede this was, in fact, excellent tea. “How interesting,” she said.

  “Interesting?”

  “This is a … good cup of tea. You know how to prepare it. A rare skill.”

  Mrs Seth laughed richly. “I think my methods might be a little bit different to yours.”

  “No. I doubt that they differ in any material way.” Vivian had spent a great of time consuming tea. She knew what was required.

  There was another knock at the conference room door. Deputy Council Leader Rahman entered, wheeling a sack truck laden with boxes of catering supplies. Surely he was one of the city’s leaders? Vivian supposed he was grateful to be given a sense of purpose, even if it was to be some sort of errand boy for Mrs Seth.

  “I was able to access the stores cupboard as you requested,” he said to Mrs Seth. “Can you work with this?”

  Mrs Seth peered at the boxes, examining labels and tutting loudly as she went. “You should know I can work with anything. Even these things.”

  Vivian made a show of not raising her gaze from the Bloody Big Book. “I do hope you have better tea than the stuff I can see on that trolley, or we shall all be in trouble,” she said.

  “What do you think you are drinking right now?”

  Vivian looked up sharply. She regarded the cup of perfect tea, then she checked again to confirm that the tea on the trolley was indeed the cheapest of supermarket own-brand tea bags. Little more than floor sweepings. It was impossible for her to be drinking and enjoying tea made from such a low-grade source.

  “Hah!” laughed Mrs Seth. “You’ll be telling me next you don’t approve of evaporated milk in tea.” Mrs Seth had folded her arms across her ample chest. The woman was goading Vivian.

  “I most certainly do not.” Vivian did not want to enter into a debate, but some things could not go unchallenged.

  “Well you’re drinking that now, as well.”

  Vivian paused. Was Mrs Seth seriously saying this cup of tea was made from the worst possible teabags and evaporated milk? Two of the most serious horrors it was possible to inflict upon a cup of tea, yet it tasted wonderful. Vivian had been functionally all-knowing for most of her existence, yet this state of affairs was a staggering surprise.

  “Oh yes, I’ve heard it all before.” Mrs Seth was still going. “Warm the pot! As if we always have a pot! I even heard people who fuss if you make tea in the microwave.”

  Vivian dropped her pen. “What? No, no, you can’t—”

  “The microwave. A perfectly useful thing, and better than nothing at all, wouldn’t you say?”

  The thought was unconscionable to Vivian. Tea? From a microwave?

  Mrs Seth harrumphed. “Are you one of these who insists it’s all an important ‘ritual’?” She mimed the air quotes. Vivian was reminded that this was Nina’s mother, and saw a glimpse of where Nina’s insufferable cheek had come from.

  “Only in the sense that any practical task performed properly can be called a ritual,” said Vivian. “The steps can be practised and learned.”

  “You cannot possibly believe that,” said Mrs Seth scornfully. “It is, without any doubt, an art.”

  “Poppycock,” said Vivian and turned back to her work.

  “You and I both know this to be true,” said Mrs Seth, not budging an inch. “Do you want to know how I am sure?”

  “I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”

  “If the steps can be learned, then my daughter Nina should be capable of making a decent cup of tea by now, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Obviously, a willingness to learn is paramount—”

  “You hav
e never tasted a decent cup of tea from her, have you?”

  “…No.”

  Mrs Seth smiled with quiet triumph then turned around, wheeling her trolley from the room.

  05:52am

  “I was told my daughter would be here,” said Morag.

  Brigit still had a surprised look on her face, either because she was surprised or because it suited Yo-Morgantus’s mood to make her wear that expression. “You lost her?”

  “I was told the August Handmaidens of Prein had her.”

  “They took her from you?”

  The rolling ball of knotted worry and anger in Morag’s belly stopped her from replying with full fury. “No,” she managed. “She … wandered off.”

  “Wandered off…” Brigit turned and walked away. Morag and Omar were expected to follow. Morag wasn’t a big fan of following naked, lily-white arses, but follow they did. As they approached the furthest wall, heating vent covers popped from their housing and a tide of wobbling flesh flowed through. Morag couldn’t help but be reminded of a sausage machine. Pink, grey, veiny blue and fat-marbled white, the body of Yo-Morgantus extruded itself through the building vents and into the hall, accompanied by the warm wet fug of unwashed flesh.

  “My lord,” whispered Omar and muttered a number of Venislarn spells that Morag hoped were meant to offer protection to the pair of them.

  The continuous, unbroken loops of pulsing meat pooled on the floor, building one upon another to form a regular and ridged mound. Brigit stepped onto the first ridge and began to climb the wobbling steps. Only when Brigit sat on the top, and a rigid flap of flesh and skin folded up behind her back, did Morag realise it was a throne; one atop a dais of god-meat. Armrests rose to meet Brigit’s arms. Tensing, questing folds of skin embraced and supported the human.

  “Looking healthy there, lord,” coughed Omar.

  Brigit closed her eyes and breathed deeply, perhaps savouring the moment, perhaps communing with her god. “You gave birth to the kaatbari but five hours ago, ushering in this golden moment and you … you what? You let her wander off? A new-born?”