by Wilson, Mark
“The archer and his little girlfriend...” Bracha flexed his stiff right arm subconsciously at mentioning her. “They’re in my way.”
“So what? Kill them then,” James said without disturbing the passiveness of his expression.
Bracha smiled that cold smile of his. The one that showed off his perfectly straight, very white teeth, one of the few signs of the wealth and privilege he’d been raised in that he still wore.
“I’m not really up for that right now Some help would be appreciated.” He indicated his injured arm.
James shook his head. “No. If you have a problem with those kids, fix it for yourself or just leave them alone.”
Bracha sighed. “They’re at the hospital.”
James’ heart sank. “Then they’ll be dead soon enough.”
“Actually, the entire compound has been shut down, at least at the moment. Has that ever happened before?”
James thought for a moment.
“Maybe, around six years ago. It went dark for twelve hours, nightfall to sunrise, and then back to business as usual. Somna got word of it beforehand and was instructed to discourage anyone who might see the closure as an opportunity to scale the fences.”
“Instructed by whom?” Bracha asked.
James shrugged. “You know who. The Corporation.”
“Somna still receives supplies, medicines and intel from them in return for keeping the hospital’s outer perimeter clean of intruders?”
Another non-committal shrug from James.
“I didn’t see any of your people anywhere in or around the compound. Obviously this close-down wasn’t planned.” Bracha smiled.
He pulled his coat tightly and drew his golf club, twirling it playfully around with his left hand. It was a sign that the conversation was over and he was leaving.
“I’d best get back before my little love-birds wake up. Do I have your word that you won’t inform Somna of my presence? I promise that I’ll be long gone by midday. After I’ve seen to my young city-centre friends.”
“Why don’t you just leave them to it? Wait until you’re healed before you engage them?” James asked.
Bracha’s face darkened. “You know what’s in there, James. I can’t let them find it.”
“The cure?” James asked. “That’s a bloody myth, Bracha. You can’t honestly believe in it.”
Bracha gave no answer. Instead he turned and melted into the dark foliage.
James sat, staring into the dark woods for a few moments. A girl from The Gardens, a boy from The Brotherhood. The words replayed through his head. A fighter. Expert with Sai, an archer.
James was on his feet one minute after Bracha departed, sprinting for Drum Woods and Somna’s bungalow.
Chapter 24
Joey
Eyes glued shut from sleep-snot, Joey reached up with his left hand and rubbed some of the graininess away. The right arm he didn’t budge. Now able to open his eyes, he peeked through the murk looking at Alys sleeping peacefully, her back to him, head resting on his right arm. Despite his arm having gone numb hours before, Joey couldn’t recall ever feeling so comfortable.
Lifting his head a little he noticed that a thin frosted dew covered their clothes, boots and hair. They’d best get on the move… in a moment. As he grinned to himself and settled his head back down, a thunderous rattle echoed through the shed from the locked door.
“Little Pigs, Little Pigs… Let me in.” Bracha’s mocking voice was full of amusement.
Instantly on their feet, they drew their weapons, Alys choosing her two blunt Sai and blinking the blurriness from her eyes. Joey drew his blades too, not that he had any choice. A quiver-full of arrows lay two hundred yards into the woods. They may as well have been on Jupiter.
“You go first, crash the door and step aside. I’ll see if it’s clear to move out,” Joey whispered.
It was a horrible position to be in. If he’d had his bow, getting both of them through the door safely would be a whole lot simpler, but that wasn’t an option.
Alys quietly unlocked the door and shoved it out, rolling her right shoulder along the wall to leave the open doorway clear. Nothing came through so Joey dived outside. Tucking into a roll that brought him up onto his feet in a ready stance a metre away from the shed, he called to Alys.
“Clear.”
Alys shot through the door taking position so that they stood back to back. All of Joey’s senses were on maximum, but it was a shrill state of alertness. He wasn’t at his best in full daylight and found it difficult to blink his eyes into full focus.
“You see him anywhere?” Alys asked.
Before Joey could answer, a fire exit door swung open from a building further down the street on which they stood. Bracha’s red hair came through, followed by the rest of him. He’d clearly expected Joey to be armed with his bow and hadn’t hung around outside the tool shed. They’d caught a lucky break.
Bracha greeted them like old friends.
“Kids! How delightful to see you both.”
He stood grinning manically at them for several long moments, waiting for a reply he wouldn’t get.
Standing in the middle of the road, arms and hands spread to his sides, he began to take a few slow steps towards them.
“Of course, you really shouldn’t be here.” He indicated the hospital compound as he took several more steps. He was assessing them, deciding if he could engage both of them. He thought that he was in control.
“How’s the eye?” Joey called, straining to make out what Bracha currently had sitting in his right eye socket.
A flicker of something dark passed over Bracha’s face for a moment but was quickly replaced by his jovial, kindly uncle expression.
“Oh, I got a nicer one. So kind of you to be concerned for me though, Joseph.”
His smile broadened.
“Did you give the padre a nice sending-off? Some nice words spoken over his grave, maybe a few close friends sharing a pleasant meal and exchanging anecdotes about the old boy?”
“Ignore him,” Alys whispered out the corner of her mouth.
“What’s that, my dear? Oh, how rude of me. I forgot to ask about your dear cousin. Stephanie, wasn’t it? Lovely girl, she’s keeping well, I hope?” Bracha winked at her with his marble-eye. “Perhaps I’ll visit with her? Once we conclude our… meeting. Oh, and once the cure has been disposed of. It’s through here, y’know.” He nodded into the doorway he’d come through. “Found it earlier, but I had a little trouble opening the container.” He smiled his reptilian smile, raising his right arm.
Alys grinned humourlessly, noting the lack of mobility in the limb.
Joey had had enough of his words, and threw him a line Jock had used to antagonise opponents.
“Are you gonna bark all day, or are you gonna bite?”
Bracha gave him a pitying look.
“As you wish, young archer.”
In a flash he disappeared through the open door.
Both Alys and Joey shot after him. Sprinting through the doorway they heard his footsteps echo along the corridor. They skidded to a full halt before entering, but not out of fear or caution since Bracha was well into the building from the sound of things. What alarmed them was how clean the corridor was. How… white.
They’d never been inside a building with artificial light, or one that didn’t have plants or moss creeping along the walls and floors. Their footsteps felt different on the hardness of the tiles. Their voices sounded all wrong, bouncing off the bare walls. It was an alien world to them, this one simple corridor.
Alys turned to him. “It’s so unnatural-looking.”
Joey didn’t know what to say, so gave her hand a squeeze, offering reassurance and gaining the same from touching her.
They stepped further along the corridor, instinctively lightening their footsteps to counteract the noise of their boots on the pristine floor. A few metres along the corridor, they noticed a map of the building.
Inst
ead of wards, it was filled with offices, labs and tech rooms, all labelled neatly on a graphic painted onto the wall. Both of them were unnerved by how impossibly new everything was.
“Do you think this place has been sealed shut since the plague broke?” Joey asked.
Alys shook her head. “Can’t have been, or it’d be full of dampness, bugs, moss and God knows what by now.”
Her eyes widened as the realisation hit.
“People have been here, recently. This place is being used for something by people. People from out there.” She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder at the general direction of the fence-line.
“That can’t be true, Alys. Nobody would come through the outer fences. They don’t want to be infected. Something else must be happening. Maybe it’s something to do with The Exalted? They’re in the area.”
“I don’t know, Joey. Have you ever seen any community live like this, with access to electricity?”
Bracha stepped around a turn at the far end of the corridor. The fake, cheery demeanour was gone. He had a blade in each hand, one of them the stiletto he’d killed Jock and maimed Steph with. The sight of him, and it, made Joey have to work very hard to stay calm.
“I assume that the padre told you about The Exalted, Joseph?”
Joey didn’t reply. He didn’t have to. Bracha had already read something in his body language or facial expression that confirmed for him that this was the case.
Bracha twirled the stiletto blade around in his fingers in the same manner he did with his golf club. He was clearly deciding what to say.
“This place isn’t theirs.” He jerked his head to the right, indicating the building.
Joey and Alys remained still, but ready. Let him talk, they were both thinking.
“She’s right.” He pointed the tip of his stiletto at Alys. “This place is normally shut down, inaccessible. On a normal day, merely approaching the fences will get you executed.” A toothy grin spread across his face. “It is a complete disgrace that I couldn’t access this building before. My grandmother opened it, you know?”
Bracha noticed the puzzled look on both of their faces, quickly replaced by indifference. He waved his hand as though dismissing his own words as unimportant.
“Ancient history.”
Suddenly his face morphed into a perfect mask of hatred.
“I picked a good day to attempt stealthy entry. It seems the place is in close-down, maybe only for a few more hours, maybe minutes.”
Bracha threw a square, white padded pack with a large red cross emblazoned on it towards them.
Joey watched it skitter along the smooth tiles and put a boot on top of it when it came to him.
“I found that at the location I’d been told I’d find the cure. Open it.” Bracha spat the words.
Stealing a quick glance at Alys, he noticed the eagerness in her eyes. Do it, they said. Joey unzipped the bag around its lid.
Empty.
“So there it is: your cure.”
Bracha almost disappeared in a blur of speed as he ran towards them. With the corridor so narrow, they weren’t able to fight as a unit. Rather Alys would engage, perform a few sequences, then allow Joey to move in. They fought like this, alternating attacks, delivering kicks, elbows and punches. Weapon slashes and strikes all thrown at a variety of angles and in a myriad of styles. After two exchanges lasting five seconds, Alys knew that they could beat him, but only because his arm didn’t have a full range of motion and only together.
She stepped up her attack, spreading more blows to his right where he couldn’t defend effectively. He wasn’t tiring but he was getting frustrated at his own ineffectiveness. She didn’t improve his mood when she delivered a vicious backhand strike to his face, breaking his nose with a sickening crunch.
Following the momentum of her swing she spun around, allowing Joey to step through and launch a front kick into his gonads. Bracha went down instantly, projecting a plume of bright green vomit onto the white tiles as he collapsed. Vagus nerve, Joey thought, stepping back whilst Alys hammered her knee into the back of his neck, smashing his face into the tiles and breaking his mandible. She systematically used the heavy-butted handles of her Sai in overhand blows to break one hand, then the other, followed by a series of blows to the back of his ribcage. Joey watched her strikes flash along, breaking five of his ribs.
“Try talking now, you bastard,” she spat at him, rising to her feet.
Joey fished out a handful of plastic cable ties from his pockets and handed a few to Alys.
She looked puzzled. “We should just kill him.”
“I don’t disagree, but I want a look around this place first. See if there’s anything useful, or something that can tell us more about whoever runs this place. According to him.” Joey kicked at the unconscious Bracha.
“We don’t have much time. I want to know more about this compound before we leave and, like it or not, this piece of trash knows more than we do.”
Alys didn’t look happy. Pulling the USB drive Jock had given him from his pocket, he held it in an open palm for her to see.
She nodded her agreement and helped him restrain Bracha’s limp body by wrists and feet and attach him to a large, immovable iron radiator.
“Let’s make it quick,” she said
A door immediately to Bracha’s right had a sign labelling it as Main Feed Router. That sounded like something technical they wouldn’t understand and so they headed the other direction, along the corridor.
They made their way through a series of offices, trying not to waste time staring at the electrical equipment they saw in each space. Neither had any idea what most of it was, but Alys had seen a photo of a laptop in a magazine she’d read as a kid and picked one up for Joey in the third room they visited. It’d been plugged into an electrical socket and had a little green light buzzing on its front face before she’d unplugged it. They hoped that it meant a full charge in its battery, but it was inconsequential until they found someone who could use it. Maybe Bracha.
Almost every room, and corridor, had the same stylised logo on its walls.
UKBC
Neither of them recognised it. The logo was also on mugs of unfinished coffee, stationery and some lab coats. It seemed people had left in a hurry, and recently.
Having searched all of the offices and taken everything they recognised as useful, which was very little, the pair made their way back to the corridor they started from.
Alys handed him the laptop. “Time to get some use out of that monster.”
Joey took the device and made his way along to where Bracha still lay, strapped to the radiator.
Chapter 25
James Kelly
James looked along the group of Exalted, lined along the fence that looped around the Royal Infirmary compound on Little France Crescent. Each of them looked relaxed, but determined. Almost none of the fifty who had assembled here today on Somna’s command had been at the hospital the last time Somna was called upon to defend its fences.
Most had never been near the compound, despite its close proximity to The Exalted’s base at Drum Woods. Somna’s deal with The Corporation didn’t allow for their presence beyond the Dalkeith Road fences, unless ordered so by The Corporation. James had no idea how The Corporation communicated with Somna – he’d never seen any contact take place – but he was fairly certain that none had in the hours since he’d told Somna of Bracha’s presence and the absence of personnel at the hospital. Somna was acting on his own initiative, James was sure of that.
James had torn into Somna’s bungalow within minutes of leaving his meeting with Bracha. Finding his leader praying at the feet of their King, he’d waited patiently for the ritual to end before seeking Somna’s attention. As Somna knelt at the base of his King’s altar, James moved his eyes over the scene in front of him as he decided exactly what he should tell him.
As always, the King was bound to bamboo poles. Snarling at his follower, the King was held in the po
se he’d used as his logo when he’d been a footballer: one arm out in front, the other behind for balance, one leg planted and the other in mid swing. The posture of this footballer taking his famous free kicks, forever preserved in the form of the undead remains of the once famous man. It was a sick parody of the image the footballer had presented before The Fall. Power, money, fame, skill, determination; all represented by the sick pose he was held unnaturally in by the infection in his cells and the ropes on his limbs.
The presence of the King never failed to sicken James. Unlike the rest of The Exalted, James Kelly was not now and had never been a true believer. His loyalty to the tribe was one of necessity rather than devotion.
He didn’t subscribe to the tribe’s beliefs that cleansing the city of all life, as communicated to Somna by this King, was their holy mission. He did know a winning side when he saw one, though, and the pragmatist he’d been since leaving the city-centre so many years before whispered to him that Somna and his followers couldn’t be stopped.
Somna, of course, knew that he didn’t buy into The Exalted’s religion and tolerated James’ lack of belief because of his combat skills and farming knowledge. When Bracha’s unsuccessful coup had been ended and Bracha had escaped punishment by fleeing the tribe, James had taken his best friend’s position as Somna’s right hand. He’d served ten years as Somna’s lieutenant. Ten years.
Shifting his eyes once more, to Somna this time, he reflected on what a truly hideous sight Somna was. Dressed in black, worn biker-leathers he stood at almost six-seven in height. His skin was covered in a network of tattoos, all of which meant something to him or was a trophy, a reminder of each soul he’d saved. His trophies took the form of small ravens. He had hundreds of them etched permanently into his skin as a mark of his dedication to his King and of his success. All of The Exalted did this in celebration of the lives they’d sacrificed to their King.
James had only one raven, etched in flight under his right eye. A permanent tear.