Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday

by Heide Goody

  She stepped briskly towards the rear exit. She had an appointment by the canal in less than twenty minutes.

  07:24am

  “My butt hurts,” said Nina.

  “You could always get off and walk,” said Pupfish.

  Nina thought about it. “I was only passing comment. I’m fine really.”

  “Dunno if – ggh! – Donk likes it.”

  “It’s a donkey. What’s not to like?”

  Nina had decided to try riding the lead donkey back at Moor Street. Walking donkeys were no faster than walking humans (or samakha), but they were more sure-footed, far less prone to tripping over on the rubble and ruin from the demolished Primark store. Donk led the group steadily through the mess while Nina had stumbled, teetered, and generally threatened to twist an ankle. Of course, Donk didn’t have the additional distraction of looking out for clothing bargains amongst the ruins. Nina didn’t mean to, but there was something about Primark’s cut-price clothing that brought out her needy and greedy side. Even more so when it was free and lying around for anyone to take.

  Nina had climbed on Donk and the beast hadn’t objected. If he was Mr Grey, as she suspected, the old gent probably felt he was being chivalrous by giving her a lift. Donk wasn’t quite so keen to go where directed, so Pupfish, rather than riding on Dink or Duncan, had to walk, leading the way.

  Nina rolled her spent Chupa Chups stick from one side of her mouth to the other as they plodded up the pedestrianised New Street. Initially they had gone down the Moor Street link path, leading round to the Library via New Street Station, but the station building had looked unpleasantly busy. Flying Tud-burzu and vicious little hort’ech swarmed and battled inside. Something huge could be glimpsed moving in the upper levels. They had hurried through a covered shopping arcade onto New Street, and continued from there.

  Nina rode with her wand resting in one hand, across the donkey’s bristly mane, ready to blast anything that got too near. They had not seen another human since the train a couple of hours ago. A deserted city centre was a creepy city centre. It reminded Nina of Saturday or Sunday mornings, walking home from an all-nighter at a club or party, with the streets achingly empty and the buzz of drugs or alcohol still not yet worked out of her system.

  “I could really go for a McDonalds breakfast,” she said, tapping into those Sunday morning comedown cravings. “Sausage and Egg McMuffin. Double Sausage and Egg McMuffin.”

  “Never had a Maccy D,” said Pupfish.

  “When this is over…”

  “I’d settle for a drink. This dust – ggh! – it’s getting in me gills.” His big fish eyes blinked suddenly. He looked back along the line of three donkeys.

  “What?” said Nina, swivelling. “We being followed?”

  “Nah. It occurred to me – ggh! – we should have checked out the donkeys back in the park.”

  “Checked out?”

  “Mr Grey’s a man, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So we should have taken a look.”

  Nina let this sit for a few seconds, Donk rocking beneath her. “Are you looking at donkey dicks?” she asked.

  “Trying to.”

  She thought about this some more. “I mean, it sort of makes sense.”

  “I thought they’d be easy to spot. Hung like a donkey and that.”

  “You saying none of our donkeys have dicks?”

  “I haven’t had a close-up look.”

  “You shouldn’t have to.”

  “Ggh! That’s what I’m saying.”

  Nina did not need this additional worry. They’d gone from twenty-eight donkeys to three and did not want to be bothered by the possibility that all she had left were dickless donkeys.

  “I bet they do that thing where they suck their dicks inside their bodies,” she said.

  “They do what?” laughed Pupfish. It was a strange sound, laughter. Not just because it was samakha laughter. Laughter seemed to have gone from the world, and not just because the people had gone.

  “Suck it into their bodies,” said Nina.

  “You been watching dirty DVDs?”

  “Certainly none of yours. No, it’s a thing. Animals don’t go wandering around with their dicks out.”

  “Dogs do,” he said. “I seen it. Ggh!”

  “Cats!” said Nina. “You never see a cat dick.”

  “Never looked.”

  “Or birds. That pigeon you saw, bet it didn’t have a dangling wang.”

  “Ggh! I don’t think birds have dicks,” said Pupfish.

  “Then how to do they make baby birds, eh?”

  He stroked his scaly chin and coughed a little. “It’s eggs, innit.”

  Nina sighed. “I’m not going to start worrying about donkey dicks. He’s either sucked it up inside him, or maybe he’s even been turned into a girl donkey.”

  “You think the human man has been turned into a girl donkey?”

  “Are you saying you don’t believe in transgender donkeys?”

  He shrugged. “No one’s ever asked me to.”

  Winds howled down the canyon of ruined buildings as they climbed, only easing as the donkeys crested the pedestrianised hill into Victoria Square. They should have been able to see the Town Hall, the council building, and a statue of Queen Victoria standing regally above the Floozie in the Jacuzzi and the sphinx-like statues guarding the steps at the base of the square. The Town Hall and council buildings were gone, mashed together in a single pile by some passing titan. Victoria had been knocked askew and decapitated.

  Halos of racing light circled the heads of the stone sphinx figures, their blank eyes glowed with an unnatural inner light. The statues were carved from stone. They had bald human heads and eagle wings. One had lion’s paws, the other had bent hoofed feet. Nina had seen them many times, had even sat on their plinths when waiting for friends and lovers in the city centre. She had always assumed they were just statues – not some weird Venislarn shit.

  “Er, hi!” she called to them. “I’m Nina.” She slid gracelessly off Donk’s back and spent an undignified few seconds trying to walk and stretch some feeling back into her bum. “San-shu, er, statues. Ech kunir as sho’ vei.”

  “You talking to the stone shaska?” said Pupfish.

  “Shhh. They’re sphinx things and they’ve got glowing eyes. Who knows what they can do? Didn’t you ever watch NeverEnding Story?” She stepped closer. “We just want to come past,” she said, glancing from one statue to the other.

  “We can go round,” said Pupfish. “Don’t have to bother with any of this muda.”

  “But the Library is only—” She waved her hand in the direction of Centenary Square. It was so near. The consular mission, her colleagues, her parents, maybe Mrs Grey and the means to undo this bloody mess.

  The light above the nearest statue wavered and stuttered. Duncan the donkey made a nervous noise and tried to back away.

  “It’s going to speak,” Nina whispered. “Or shoot us with its laser eyes.”

  “I hope it’s the first one, man,” said Pupfish.

  The light scattered as a short figure stepped through onto the top of the statue’s head. One side of its body was black and sooty. The stitching on the top of its head had come loose, looking like the hair of someone who had stuck their fingers in a plug socket. It leaned heavily on a charred pencil.

  “You would not believe the day Steve has had.”

  07:33am

  Mr Seth opened his eyes, but it didn’t help much. Thick grey dust swirled everywhere, like fog he could feel in his mouth, his nose and his eyes. He was standing, which was good. He wasn’t all that sure where he was standing, because the landscape looked very unfamiliar. Like a spoil heap.

  “Sheetal?” he called.

  “I’m right here.” She emerged from behind a statue on the pavement nearby. It had been a representation in gold, or highly polished bronze, of three posh old-timey men looking at a length of carpet. All that remained was the length of ca
rpet, three sets of legs, and a steaming pool of melted metal running down to the gutter.

  Mrs Seth tried to clean herself off, but in the billowing clouds of drifting smoke and dust it was impossible. “This is very unhygienic. I leaned on the cake. I think it’s ruined.”

  “I believe it is all ruined,” said Mr Seth. He looked across to where the Library of Birmingham had stood. There was nothing left but a concave depression in the earth, one that had also taken the REP Theatre and most of the International Convention Centre and Symphony Hall. “They’re all gone. We saw that opera woman at the Symphony Hall.”

  “Katherine Jenkins.”

  “That’s her. All gone.”

  There had been a noise going on for a long time. Or was it actually a noise? When the ground bounced up and down, and everything shook with unimaginable violence, that was more than just noise. He wondered if the earthquake, or whatever it was, had affected other parts of Birmingham. He looked around and across the city.

  He blinked, realising he could see more than usual, even taking into account the nearby buildings which had been pulled down. In the distance, the world seemed to curve and ripple. Strands of landscape swirled up into the sky, like strips of orange peel. Tower blocks and railway lines, factory buildings and housing estates – all stretched upwards and away. He wondered if what he had thought of as the grey pink light of dawn in the sky was actually far-off lands, burned and smouldering, curled up to the height of clouds.

  “I think perhaps we should get away from this place,” he said, first clearing his throat to find his voice.

  It was not clear where they should go. His wife took his hand and they stepped carefully through the dust and rubble, trying to move away from the worst of it.

  “There will be no buses running,” said Mrs Seth with a click of her tongue.

  Mr Seth kept quiet. He knew no response was required, it was simply his wife’s way of working through their situation. Neither of them were fond of change. It had taken her years to switch to a cordless vacuum cleaner, and it was only last month that he’d agreed to go to paperless bank statements. Well, he thought, that was a whole load of heartache and soul-searching for no good reason.

  They trudged between smashed buildings. Some were folded slabs of concrete and others piles of red bricks. Pieces of grimy white marble littered the ground in front of them. Which building was made from marble? Mr Seth was unhappy to realise he had no idea. Would it be the same when he tried to recall the faces of his daughters? He pushed that thought firmly away. The girls would be fine. They had to be.

  Were they moving downhill? It was hard to be sure when the horizon was just a few feet away and half of the country seemed to be up in the air. He looked to the orange sun and tried to orientate himself. He pointed in the opposite direction: at the floating landscape many miles up and above them.

  “I think that might be Wales,” he said.

  “Do you think?” said his beloved.

  A monster flew high overhead. It was roughly cone-shaped, all mouth and teeth at the fat end and trailing tentacles and weird outgrowths at the other.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  She held him close. After a lifetime of being the man of the house, he realised this was one of those moments when she was offering him reassurance.

  “How do we cope with this?” he said.

  “It’s like that hard quiz show on the telly,” she said.

  “The Chase?”

  “No. We both like that one. I mean the really hard one with the four clues. That woman presenter. She likes a drink, you can tell, and she’s married to that posh shouty comedian.”

  “Only Connect?”

  “That’s the one,” said Mrs Seth. “We sit there watching it and neither you or I ever get the answers right. Even when they show the answer, we still don’t understand it. It’s so hard that we don’t even know what the question means.”

  “Sometimes we get it.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “And you feel so pleased with yourself when you do. Well, it’s like that.”

  He nodded as they walked on. “Like that how?”

  “We don’t understand any of this, but we’ll just keep going until we find something we do understand and we’ll have to be happy with that.”

  They continued through the ruins.

  07:49am

  Rod tried to shift his position and immediately regretted it. The upturned litter bin under his feet wobbled, and the noose cut sharply into his neck. He choked, gargled, and forced himself to be calm and still. Panic would lead to a stumble, a drop and slow strangulation.

  The samakha pulled away the legless and lifeless corpse of the last contestant and moved along the line. The next contestant was Malcolm McKenna, the former consular mission guard turned Maccabee. Malcolm had a long cut across his brow and he blinked constantly to keep the blood out of his eye.

  “Right,” said the fat pale samakha, Hragra, wiping the last game off the glass door in the remains of the convention centre. “Who’s up next? Fluke? Chen di.”

  Rod couldn’t be sure how long he had been floating in the canal before the samakha had found him. He had surfaced, groaning, by a towpath populated by silent, shellshocked ducks. Long powerful hands had closed around his arms and hauled him out.

  He’d had no time to offer his thanks before the helping hands had grabbed him, bound him, and dragged him off. His situation, it clearly transpired, had not improved. The King in Crimson followed them silently. Rod couldn’t see the ancient undead thing, but he could sense him. The King’s presence was as solid as a favourite overcoat.

  Rod had tried to pull away from his captors, to look round for Prudence in the water. He ached to spot her, have the samakha pull her out and know she was alive, but he couldn’t see her.

  The samakha were angry. Apparently, they had been betrayed in some way. The half-breeds who had taken him prisoner switched languages with little consideration for someone with no grasp of Venislarn beyond basic swearing and the equivalent of “My name is Rod. Can you tell me the way to the swimming pool?” As best as he could tell, someone had promised them all top quality apartments so they had followed their god Yo Daganau-Pysh here. There had been some sort of fight and Daganau-Pysh was gone, either dead or fighting elsewhere, and the samakha were left, battered and abandoned in this blazing hellscape, without either a god or a home.

  Why this specifically meant the samakha were stringing up captured humans in the shadow of the demolished International Convention Centre and forcing them to play hangman for real was not clear.

  Where a now collapsed footbridge had crossed the canal from Brindley Place to the ICC, there was a wide open space, once populated by a post-modern sculpture, a restaurant and the occasional waterfowl, now filled by a crowd of displaced samakha and their hangers-on. The air was thick with the smell of wet dust and fishy sweat.

  A girder from the ICC, fallen across two towpath walls, formed a crossbeam. With rope and twine, and various boxes and oddments for their victims to stand on, four men were strung up, ready to drop. They were, in turn, a legless corpse, a soldier who had bled out before hanging, Malcolm and Rod.

  Rod scanned the group for familiar faces. Apart from Pupfish’s crew, Rod should have recognised a few of the women who had sold themselves to the fish-people, and therefore would have been registered with the consular mission. He recognised no one. Bitterly, he wondered if somehow this was all a punishment for his inability, even unwillingness, to socially interact with the Venislarn citizens of the city over the years. He could imagine Nina joking and charming her way out of this situation. Vivian would have had them cowering in fear, calling them out one by one, name by name.

  When Fluke pushed himself out of the shadows and crossed to the glass pane they were using as a writing board, Rod called out to him in a half-strangled gurgle. “Fluke! Fluke! It’s me! Rod!”

  “Don’t know you, G-man,” said the youth. There was a dead and miserable
tone in his voice, like he had seen things he shouldn’t. Rod was not the best reader of emotions, and fish emotions were utterly beyond him, but there was something akin to social embarrassment and grief in the samakha’s voice. He dipped a finger in the corpse they were using as a paint pot and put smeared dashes on the glass. He turned to Malcolm. “Right. Five letters. This one is easy.”

  Malcolm, strung beside Rod, just in the edges of his vision, swayed in his noose, boots on tiptoe on a fire-blasted ornamental shrub planter. “Sod off! I’m not playing your sick games.”

  “Five letters,” said Fluke and casually picked a Forward Company rifle off the ground.

  “You can’t do this,” said Malcolm.

  “Ggh! You’ve just got to guess a letter.”

  “I’ve got a son—”

  Fluke took aim.

  “E!” Malcolm spat. “Okay? E!”

  Fluke grunted, put the rifle aside and daubed a sloppy lower case ‘e’ in the fourth space.

  In the crowd, human and samakha eyes swung from the board to the dangling player.

  “Guess a letter,” Fluke said.

  Malcolm stared and blinked and spat blood and snot away from his lips. “D or R,” he muttered. “R!”

  The crowd groaned as Fluke dipped his finger and sketched two ‘r’s in the first and fifth place.

  “Hell, yeah,” Malcolm panted.

  “Keep going,” grunted Rod. “R-blank-blank-E-R.”

  “What the hell d’you care?” Malcolm grunted back.

  “Keep going,” Rod insisted. “Stay alive.”