Meat

by Joseph D'lacey

  ‘We’ve missed them,’ he said to the shadowed circle of faces around him. ‘Time to go and look elsewhere.’

  He felt the relief wash through the group. None of them wanted to fight down here, to risk dying in the dark. Like hunched crows, they followed him back to the light.

  They stood in front of him, hesitating, their faces the purest misery.

  His cock jutted, blunt and stupid. A silvery bead appeared at its tip and they took a step back.

  ‘Sweet lolly juice, just for little girls.’

  They were almost his now, at the beginning of a journey in which he’d be their guide and tormentor. They would become his favourite maids, these two. He could already tell he wanted to keep them around for a long time to come. Train them, educate them, twist them to his will.

  Hema reached out her hand and he smiled, his heart missing a single blessed beat.

  Outside there was noise. Footsteps running in the downstairs hall and then thumping on the stairs. He heard the shouts of men and a struggle. Someone fell down the stairs yelling. The yell was cut short. The struggle continued and the voices came nearer. He recognised the voice of one of his men and another voice that should not have been in the house.

  ‘Fuck it all,’ he said, standing up.

  The girls ran back to the window.

  He wrapped his dressing gown around himself as best he could and went to the door. He turned and pointed a fat finger at the girls.

  ‘You two stay where you are or I’ll suck out your eyeballs. Understand?’

  They said nothing. They only stood and trembled. One of them was pissing herself. Whoever made him miss that little treat was going to pay a heavy price. He tore the door open and stepped out into the upstairs hallway.

  ‘What the fuck is going on in this house? I want some fucking peace and –’ He saw who was there. ‘What are you doing back here, you freak?’

  At the top of the stairs, Richard Shanti was struggling with two of Magnus’s men. They couldn’t control him. Instead of fighting them he was dragging them along the upstairs hallway. At the bottom of the stairs a third guard lay silent and unmoving.

  Seeing the trouble his men were having restraining the intruder, Magnus strode along the hall to his study and slipped inside. He returned with something hanging from his right hand and walked towards the affray. Shanti was elbowing, kneeing, jumping and twisting. Despite his diminutive size next to the two guards, he’d broken one of their noses and was almost free. When he saw Magnus so close, a new frenzy of energy took him. He broke the grip of one guard and lunged. Magnus raised his right hand and brought it down once, hard. There was a dull crack and Shanti fell. The Guard let him drop onto his face.

  Magnus stared at his men through bloodshot eyes. The no-brainer hung beside him.

  ‘Why is it,’ he said, ‘that if I want a job done, I end up having to do it myself?’ He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. ‘Lock Shanti up until I’m ready to see him.’ He looked over the banister at the motionless guard. ‘Who’s that down there?’

  ‘Juster, sir.’

  ‘If he’s dead, bury him. No, wait. Juster you say? I’ve always liked the look of that man’s arse. Get Cleaver to cut me some rump steaks. Then you can bury him. And do a proper job this time or I’ll have your bollocks.’

  Magnus turned and walked back towards the bedroom. He was weary and the urge to finish with the girls had slipped from him.

  ‘Sir?’

  Magnus stopped.

  ‘What the hell is it?’

  ‘What if Juster’s not dead? Should we fetch the doctor?’

  He turned back to them.

  ‘If Juster let Shanti get the better of him, he’s as good as dead. You get Cleaver to fix him for me one way or the other.’

  In his room he sat down on the coffer, exhausted. There was no sign of the girls in front of the window. He stood and glanced around the room. Cursing himself for leaving the door open, he flicked up the bedcovers and checked under the bed. Nothing. Likewise in the cupboards. He rang for the maids and heard them sprint up the stairs. His unpredictability and savage moods had worsened, even he was aware of it, and now everyone around him was not merely quick to respond but strained as well. Two maids appeared at the door looking drawn and tense.

  ‘My baby love-bitches have run off somewhere. They can’t go very far. I want you girls to search the house top to bottom. Get everyone else to check the grounds. But keep all the outer doors locked. At worst, they’ll end up back at home and we’ll round them up there. I don’t think they’ll go far away from mummy and daddy.’

  The maids entered the bedroom and proceeded to check under the bed and in the cupboards.

  ‘Not in here, you stupid pair of twats. I’ve already checked. Now, I’m going to get some sleep and I don’t want to be disturbed until I wake up or Bruno gets back with Collins. Go on, fuck off, the pair of you.’

  He collapsed back into the bed and covered himself up. The door clicked shut and he was unconscious.

  Twenty-four

  He’d managed to suppress all emotions of panic on the journey out and then down into the tunnels. Returning was different, assailed by misgivings. Why wasn’t Collins where he was supposed to be? That was what worried him most.

  Returning empty-handed to Magnus was the other thing that concerned him. Over the past few weeks – ever since the encounter with Collins and the blackout he’d suffered at the emaciated man’s hand – Magnus’s behaviour had worsened. He’d always been a man that ruled by violence. Everyone knew it and that was how he kept Abyrne in such an efficient stranglehold. But since the incident with Collins, Magnus had turned nasty even by Bruno’s standards. It had become hard to respect him.

  It was obvious to everyone that Magnus was sick with the Shakes. Now was the time when a man like Collins really could wrest control from the ailing Meat Baron. If that happened, who knew what the future would hold for Bruno or the town?

  Bruno had been Magnus’s personal bodyguard and the leader of his army of guards and enforcers for seven years. Magnus trusted him and he trusted Magnus. He didn’t always like the way his boss treated him, but at the end of each day he knew that he could not have been in a safer position – other than being Meat Baron himself.

  Now, all that had changed. Magnus was sick enough and crazy enough to destroy any of his employees including his most trusted. When Bruno returned to the mansion without Collins and a man down for no good reason, Magnus was going to get very upset. For the first time in his career, Bruno was thinking about a change of allegiance. But to whom? The Welfare? He could never live that kind of life. He hated prayers and churches and rituals. He couldn’t see himself abstaining from sex or anything else for the sake of a God he neither understood nor believed in. Who did that leave? The lunatic prophet, John Collins, with his half starved crew of zealots?

  There was nowhere else to go – except perhaps the grain bosses. Would they trust him, considering where he’d worked and the things he’d already done to keep power from their hands? He doubted it.

  The blizzard of questions and fears assailed him as he led his men back across the Derelict Quarter. By now, most of them had fallen or stumbled badly enough to bruise or cut themselves on the uneven ground. They were tired from the running and let down by the unfulfilled adrenaline rush in the tunnels. If they were attacked now, he wasn’t sure he could even rely on them to hold their ranks.

  Before they reached the tower blocks he saw a flash of red. In the next step it was gone behind broken masonry. He crested a small rise and saw it again. Beyond it there was more red. It was the gowns of Parsons he was seeing. At first he thought it was an ambush as all the figures were lying down. Then he noticed the discarded or dropped femur clubs and knew it could not be that. Closing on them cautiously he saw that every cassock was no more than that – just the shell of a Parson. The uniforms had been removed and laid out on the ground. They’d been arranged, and carefully so.

&
nbsp; What the hell is this?

  His men saw the uniforms too and tensed.

  Then they were among the red gowns of the Welfare, positioned with care and imagination to look as though they’d fallen in battle. Whose trickery was this? The Welfare, pretending to have been attacked by some other force? John Collins leaving a message for him and his men?

  For several minutes, Bruno believed it was some kind of a set up. He walked among the gowns and inspected them.

  ‘What’s going on, sir?’

  Bruno held a gown in one hand and a femur club in the other.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  If there’d been a battle, most of the clubs should have had fresh bloodstains on them. There was nothing. Had there even been a battle? Or was it simply that the Parsons had never landed a single blow? Bruno remembered how one starving peck of a man had bested the giant that was his boss and he knew to his core what was going on. This skirmish, if such it could be classed, had taken place long before they’d even stepped into the Derelict Quarter. Collins and his followers had hidden it from them until they were ready to let it be seen. That was why there’d been no one in the tunnels.

  They were busy elsewhere.

  ‘This is nothing more than a message,’ he said. And to himself he added: and a warning. ‘We’ve got to get back to the mansion. Right now.’

  He dropped the relics of the skirmish and began to run.

  He hoped Collins and his people couldn’t run like Richard Shanti.

  The girls lay in total darkness, their small thin bodies pressed tight together. They dared not speak but instead whispered, little more than a silent breath, into each other’s ears from time to time. As terrified as they were of the moment when they were discovered and the light blasted in to reveal them, they felt a sense of security in the cramped darkness.

  In the old days there had only ever been one of them enclosed like this and it had always been a competition. Now, they were together, tighter than they’d ever been squeezed and staying brave for longer than ever before. If they wanted to win this game, they’d have to work together.

  It was impossible in the darkness to tell how much time had passed. It seemed like hours but they knew it might only have been minutes since the shouting and wrenching of doors and the stomping, running footsteps of people searching for them. That had been the worst time, knowing that they might be exposed at any moment and listening, listening, listening for the faintest sign that their captors might be coming closer rather than getting further away.

  And then there’d been a growling sound. At first they thought it was the hairy man coming back to get them but the growling sound went on and on and never moved. They could still hear it now. Someone was in there with them and there was no way they could creep out of their hiding place without being seen or caught. They had to wait. They knew that when they heard the growling noise stop and footsteps walking away; that would be their moment.

  They had agreed what would happen next. It was very simple. They would run out of the house and into the grounds where the trees and bushes would hide them. And every time they hid and people didn’t find them, they would run to another bush and then another until they reached home. Home would be safe. And mama and papa would come home and love them again.

  In utter blackness, they squeezed each other tight.

  ‘Soon,’ breathed Hema to Harsha.

  ‘Soon,’ replied her sister.

  The cell in the mansion was far worse than the one the Welfare had provided.

  He awoke to pain in many parts of his body and the smell of shit and urine. He tried to sit up and smacked his forehead against hard wood. Stars spread across his darkened vision. His head was exploding. He lay back and felt with his hands. The cell was more like a coffin than a room. It was about two feet deep, seven feet long – so he was able to stretch to his full body length – and about three feet wide. Whatever he did, there would be no way to stand.

  He imagined the pressure sores that would erupt on the bony areas of his body while he waited for Magnus to do him in. Perhaps Magnus was so incensed at all that he’d done that his end – removal from the box, at least – might come swiftly. In the next moment he was ashamed that his first thoughts were of himself and not of Hema and Harsha for whom he knew it was already too late.

  He’d done all he could do for them. Perhaps with more time, with the chance to liaise with others, it might have been different but there was no point hoping to change the past. In the box, little more than an oubliette – and perhaps that was how Magnus had decided to dispose of him – he was alone with his memories and his fears. Desperation grew despite the impossibility of escape. If only he could get out, he might have the opportunity to prevent the damage to his girls from being too scarring. With fewer guards around the house and grounds perhaps he’d have one more opportunity to finish Magnus himself.

  The thoughts would drive him crazy.

  He wasn’t prepared to give in to his mind yet. He was still alive, that meant there was still some kind of chance. At the very least perhaps he might see them again. Have the opportunity to say he loved them, to apologise and say goodbye. Such pitiful aspirations. How the town and everything in it had reduced him. How evil his life had been. No matter how he’d tried to absolve himself, no matter how he’d tried to stay pure, he had committed endless crimes and brought the very worst upon his family.

  Again, he realised, such thoughts were deadly.

  There was one good thing in the town. One good person that had wrought at least a little change – John Collins. Prophet John. The man who had shown him miracles were possible, that there were other ways to live for those compassionate and loving enough to try. It was crazy, what John Collins had been teaching, but Shanti believed it. In fact, belief didn’t fully define it; he knew in his body that it was true and possible. He knew it because he’d begun the same journey himself and it had not killed him. He had not eaten anything but light and air for many days and he was stronger and healthier than he’d ever been. He’d noticed in the mirror that, far from emaciating himself since he had stopped taking vegetables and rice, he had filled out. Not much, but enough to notice. His muscles were larger, his chest more expanded and able to hold more air. John Collins said that one day, when enough wisdom and love had been acquired, even the need to breathe would become a thing of the past. People would understand they were immortal, that they had always possessed the potential without realising it.

  Of course, if Magnus knew that Shanti no longer needed to eat to stay alive, he might keep him in this stinking hole until he drove himself insane.

  No.

  He had to survive and to do that, he had to think right. He had to prepare.

  First he checked out the painful places on his body. His nose was broken – he was fairly sure it shouldn’t be as mobile as it was. A couple of his front teeth were loose. His ribs were sore on both sides and he remembered being kicked a lot when he regained consciousness only to black out again. His legs were fine but his hands and elbows were cut and bleeding where he’d made contact with the teeth of some of Magnus’s men. There was a lump on the back of his head and that, more than any other injury, gave him cause for serious concern. It made his whole head hurt inside and out when he touched it. There was a swelling there and he didn’t know what it was filled with. His fear was that Magnus’s blow had cracked his skull and that his brain was exposed below the skin. If that was the case, he knew he could die at any moment. And if he didn’t, and if he made it out of this box, he might not live beyond standing up.

  Instinct told him that he should try to heal himself. Was it instinct or was it something else? He felt a small pressure in his gut, right in the very centre of himself. He knew what it meant. He would try to be ready.

  Lying on his back in the stinking filth of Magnus’s primitive cell, Shanti drew the light stored in his abdomen and sent it up to his skull. He prayed that it would fuse his broken cranium.

  Bruno
led his unfit brigade of guards up the long driveway praying, yes praying, that they were in time.

  They rounded the final bend in the approach and he saw what he’d hoped not to. Ranged around the mansion in twos and threes were Collins’s raggle-taggle followers. They were dressed in clothes that might have been worn for decades at a stretch. Torn, faded, in some cases patched, in others not. They were no better than vagabonds. Scruffy urchins that had escaped the town’s attention for far too long. He would have laughed at them but for three things.

  He was so winded he couldn’t spare the breath.

  He had seen what they’d done to the Parsons.

  And every man he’d left behind to guard the mansion had fallen.

  As he came around that final curve in the driveway, the followers heard the stomping footsteps of nigh on seventy men in hobnailed boots and turned to face them. No matter what happened now, Bruno and his men were committed. There was no need for a command, every black-coat could see the enemy; a force they outnumbered more than two to one. Bruno let the machete drop into his right hand and raised it in the air.

  With what breath they had left in their lungs, Magnus’s men released their war cry and fell upon the acolytes of the Prophet.

  When the growling stopped, they tensed and dug their fingers into each other’s skin. They bit their lips against the fear. They heard grunts and felt movement. Heavy footsteps dragged past them. The footsteps stopped not very far away. In the background they could hear shouting; a crowd of men swearing and pushing each other. There was a sound like their mother opening a heavy drawer of cutlery in the kitchen and the uproar from far away became much louder.

  Then they heard the voice, the terrifying voice that wheedled and cajoled and commanded. The voice of the man that wanted so much to hurt them. In the darkness, still safe, they didn’t know what to do. Was it time to run? Would he hear or see them?