by J G Alva
Bez looked like a bouncer. He was carrying what Fin thought was an Uzi. He didn’t talk much. Frankly, he scared Fin. Two other men were on their haunches in the passageway that led up to the front of Debenhams. They looked deadly and competent. A row of guns was lined up against the wall: AK47s, Kalashnikovs, long guns whose names Fin did not know, or want to know.
Danny Longhall was there, checking a rifle.
“Why’d you kill Bellafont?” Fin asked.
Danny’s head came up. Alert. Worried.
“What?”
“Did one of your guys shoot Bellafont? He’s dead.”
Danny ran to the entrance to the underpass to look.
“Oh fuck,” he said. He turned to his men. “Get ready. Now.”
◆◆◆
Had Danny shot him? Was that what had happened? Had he gotten carried away? That hadn’t been the plan.
A ripple ran through the crowds at the railings, and someone started shouting. Someone else began crying out, and suddenly they were all chanting, like activists at a protest march…but if they were protesting anything, then it was something evil: the right to hang a black man, the right to kill the Jews – it was that sort of crowd. Some pointed him out, marking him. Others drew their fingers across their throats, explicit in their meaning.
They wanted him dead.
“Coos-jak! Coos-jak! Coos-jak!”
Come on, motherfuckers.
They began climbing over the railings. Like ants.
A projectile shot over Sutton’s head then, from behind, trailing a plume of white smoke.
There was a peaceful moment where it crossed the space over the Bearpit, perhaps twenty feet in the air; halfway across, there was a wobble, as if air currents had disturbed its flight; as it reached the far side of the Bearpit, it began to veer upward.
It cleared the railings and hit one of the buses parked on the roundabout.
The explosion was incredible.
The flash hurt Sutton’s eyes, but the noise…they must have heard it for miles around. He felt it in his chest, like a hand pushing him back. The bus was torn to pieces. Sutton saw a section of it reach a height of thirty feet before plummeting back to earth like a fiery comet. Cult members were tossed around like dolls from the force of it. There were screams. Those behind the railings were thrown violently against them; those halfway over them were tossed off, twisting and spinning in the air, crying out with surprise and fear. Like pieces of confetti. Windows in the surrounding hotels shattered, showering the pavements below with glass.
The ball of fire shrunk, but it continued to burn, thick black smoke belching into the air in a dense column.
Danny had never said anything about a fucking rocket launcher.
And yet…some part of Sutton was savagely proud of the attack.
He had brought this vengeance upon them, after all.
Sutton scurried to Bellafont’s corpse. Those already down from the railings were running toward him, intent, determined. Each of them had a weapon of some description – a knife, a machete, an axe, a club, a bow and arrow, even a sword – and each of them wanted to gut or eviscerate him.
Sutton checked Bellafont’s pulse, found none, and then flipped him on to his back.
This close, it was clear to see the man was not Bellafont. It was a facsimile, nothing more, and only vaguely similar: same height and build. The beard was real but the hair was a wig…and not a particularly good one either. Good enough for their purposes though.
And the eyes…
The eyes of course were brown. Prosaic, ordinary, normal.
Sutton didn’t know if he should be darkly amused or just appalled: they had used his own idea against him.
Someone screamed, dangerously close, and Sutton looked up. A girl in her late twenties was coming for him. She was overweight, and her large stomach swung to and fro in a pendulum motion that was almost hypnotic. Her blonde hair was flying out behind her, like a cape. The bloody severed head of a pig balanced precariously on top of her own, tied to it with a dirty piece of twine. She had a knife in each hand, and still more knives poked out of the belt of her jeans.
She was almost on top of him when a bullet took her high in the chest.
She didn’t stop running so much as her legs gave out beneath her; the nerve connections severed, the brain impulses halted, her limbs tangled like the limbs of a puppet. She fell to the concrete, her momentum carrying her unwillingly to within Sutton’s grasp. The twine snapped, and the pig head came off, rolling and circling like a discarded china bowl, finally coming to rest on its apex. One knife went off to his left, while the other remained clutched in her hand in a death grip.
They were coming.
About twenty of them were still out for his blood, believing he was responsible for killing their beloved leader. And that was the point. Bellafont had sacrificed his double in order to insight his followers; maybe he had even shot the man himself. Now, they all had death and hate on their faces; curiously, it made them all look very similar, as if they were related.
Somebody jumped on to the small stone structure to Sutton’s left. Sutton didn’t recognise him, but he had a rifle, and he was shooting at the Cult. One of Danny’s men.
Above, on the road, Sutton saw the scorched and blackened motorhome pull away, shunting some of the wreckage from the burning bus out of its path, before turning off the roundabout.
Bellafont.
Sutton took the knife from the dead girl’s hand and gave chase.
◆◆◆
“My name? It’s Dorothy Salting.”
“Miss-“
“Mrs.”
Pointe shook his head.
Annoyed, Pat thought, and trying to control it.
“Mrs Salting, I’m looking for a Detective Darren Board. I’m wondering if anybody by that name has visited you here?”
The old woman’s eyes moved suspiciously. What did she know? They could only see a small slice of her face through the gap in the door that the chain would allow.
“What’s the matter?” She responded. “Did you lose him?”
Pat saw Pointe’s polite smile.
“We just need to speak to him. We believe he’s…not well.”
“I haven’t seen him.”
Pointe continued to talk with the old woman, but Pat stepped back, staring up at the house. There was an old sign hanging from the bottom of the balcony: the Lion’s Rest. A bed and breakfast then.
What disturbed Pat was that the picture above the writing on the sign was of an old fashioned maiden cradling a domesticated lion’s head.
Just like that ruddy Tarot card.
It gave him the willies.
It was as he was looking up at the sign that he saw the boy staring down at him from the balcony above.
He was gone in a moment, but Pat recognised him.
Toby Matheson.
“Let us in,” Pat said sternly, talking over them both.
Pointe turned a surprise look on him.
Dorothy Salting said, “you can’t just demand-“
Ignoring her, he said to Pointe, “I just saw the boy upstairs.”
“The boy?”
Pat nodded.
“Toby Matheson,” he confirmed. He turned to the woman. “Let us in. Right now. If you don’t, I’ll break this door down myself.”
◆◆◆
The boy was there, and Pat felt the greatest relief in having found him.
But there was something else in that small bed and breakfast:
Darren.
Trussed to a chair.
Beaten so badly that he was unrecognisable.
Under his breath, Pointe said, “Jesus Christ.”
An attractive blonde woman stood in the doorway to the hall, shielding Toby Matheson with her body.
“What happened here?” Pointe asked her.
“It’s your traitor,” she said. Her voice and manner were arctic.
“Are you sure?” He asked.
&nb
sp; “He had that madman Bellafont’s number on his phone,” she said. “What do you think?”
Pat moved into the kitchen and squatted in front of Darren.
There was a makeshift IV beside the chair, a clear plastic hose coiled around the bag. He really couldn’t understand what was going on here.
Blood dripped from Darren’s chin and nose.
So. The beating was fresh.
He was still breathing.
Pat gently lifted Darren’s head.
The damage to his face was extensive. With so many parts of it swollen and distorted, it was difficult to be sure it was actually him.
Slowly, his one good eye opened.
It focused on Pat.
Darren’s throat worked, and he licked cracked and swollen lips.
“Thirsty,” he croaked.
“He needs a drink of water,” Pat said.
Nobody moved to get it for him.
Pat turned to search their faces and found only disdain looking back at him. Even Pointe wasn’t inclined to help.
So Pat did it himself, finding a glass on the draining board and then filling it from a tap in the sink. He had his misgivings, but the water was a small thing. Whether Darren deserved it was for better men to judge.
He returned, holding the glass to Darren’s lips while he sucked at it with his distorted and swollen mouth.
“Why did you do it, Darren?”
Darren’s head bobbed loosely.
“I…had to,” he whispered, his speech slurred.
“But…why?”
“Thirsty,” Darren said again, so Pat let him drink some more.
As he drank, Pat turned to the blonde and said, “who did this?”
She wasn’t inclined to answer him. The lack of remorse she was displaying was shocking.
“I said, who did this?”
The blonde looked at Dorothy, and then she shrugged.
“He was like that when he got here,” she said, but for the first time he sensed a modicum of unease.
“Was it Sutton Mills?” He asked. “Did he do this?”
They might have been shop mannequins for all that their expressions betrayed.
Darren had finished drinking, so Pat put the glass on the table.
“Pat Pat Pat Pat,” Darren said. “Pat Pat Patty.”
“Darren? Are you alright?”
“I feel…goooooooood.”
Pat lifted Darren’s head and then looked into his one visible eye.
But he needn’t have bothered, because suddenly he could smell the alcohol. It was a very faint smell on his breath, but it was there.
“Is he drunk?” Pat asked, releasing Darren’s head.
No one answered him, so he turned to them.
“Did he come here like this? Drunk?”
“He wouldn’t talk,” Toby said, from behind the woman. “So we rigged up an IV with some alcohol to loosen him up. Worked too.”
Pat thought about that while he listened to Darren mutter incoherently under his breath.
“He had Bellafont’s number on his phone?” He couldn’t quite believe it…but he supposed he had no choice.
“Yes,” the blonde confirmed.
Darren crooned, “sooooooooooo….good.”
“You spoke to Bellafont?”
A moment passed, but when he turned to see what had happened to his response, the blonde’s mouth was resolutely shut.
“Did Sutton Mills speak to him?”
The blonde’s jaw loosened, and her resolution wavered; a confirmation of sorts.
Oh dear.
“Is he going to meet him?”
No answer.
He searched them all, and this time they did react: they each turned away.
“Answer me,” he intoned, but he was more desperate than commanding.
“St James Barton Roundabout,” Darren said softly, dreamily.
Pat once more squatted in front of the battered detective.
“Is that where they’re meeting?”
Darren nodded.
“The computer guy is going to pretend to be the boy,” he said, his head dropping forward as if exhausted.
Pat stood up.
“Get your things,” he said. “You’re all coming with me.”
“We are not,” the blonde said.
She was vibrating with tension.
He strode toward her, and she backed up a step.
“Either you come in with me voluntarily, or I arrest you, and you come in with me in handcuffs. It’s up to you.”
Her eyes cleared a little, and he took that as acquiescence.
He turned to Pointe.
“Call it in,” he said. “Get all available men to the St James Barton Roundabout.”
◆◆◆
Sutton couldn’t believe what was happening.
Even though he had imagined this scenario, some part of him – some sober spectator deep within – looked on in horror at the events unfolding in that pedestrianized arena in the centre of Bristol. He had always suspected that civilization – and by association, civilised behaviour – was only a thin veneer, a gossamer fabric. Here and now, in the St James Barton Roundabout, the proof was clear for all to see: young men and women wearing animal heads and screaming and trying to kill him. The true face of humanity: the tantrum addicted emotionally unstable child within all of us. Every human being was only one or two traumatic events away from wearing an animal head mask; only one or two traumatic events away from the inner animal bubbling to the surface and showing the human organism’s real face: the face of an animal; a grasping mouth with razor sharp teeth; a creature that could only understand the concept eat or be eaten. Human beings were not really that far removed from the animal world. Despite its pretensions to more sophisticated modes of behaviour, it was still only an organism, determined to survive irrespective of any other organism in its world.
Sporadic gunfire echoed against concrete. Somebody was screaming; Sutton could not determine if it was a man or a woman. Some screeching rhetoric was being broadcast without a microphone, a jumble of words with no definition. A man in his twenties with a dog’s decapitated head atop his own tried to spear Sutton with a long sharpened stick. The stick had been burnt at its tip, Sutton noticed, to tempter the wood, harden it. He dodged it, first shifting to his right as the man went for his face, then batting it away when he went for his stomach. Sutton used the spear to pull the man off balance, and then stuck the knife in his armpit. The man screamed, dropped the spear, and fell to the ground.
Sutton was already moving past him.
Danny’s spraying of the area with his arsenal had the unexpected benefit of sharpening the Cult’s focus, or at least distracting it: Sutton was able to make his way across the Bearpit mostly uninterrupted. Sutton saw two teenage girls get hit by gunfire in the shade of a thin tree. Small geysers of dirt erupted to his right, moving in a line toward a man desperately trying to climb another tree. The gunfire eventually found him, pocking his back and prizing him from the tree like a disturbed spider. Sutton looked to his right, and saw a dozen men and women either on the floor, bleeding, or tending to others who were bleeding. They were no match for the guns.
One or two bloody forms were not moving at all.
He had just jumped on to the concrete hexagonal island directly beneath the railings when another explosion rang out. Sutton felt the vibration through his feet, and the trees shook, shedding leaves. The rocket launcher again? He turned to look over his shoulder and saw that, instead, it was the Cult fighting back. Some of Danny’s men were retreating from where they had been stationed at the railings on the other side of the roundabout. As Sutton watched, the Cult member with the homemade bombs – because that’s all it could be – stepped to the railings above and to the right of Sutton and prepared to throw another bomb – two bottles of liquid taped together with black electrician’s tape – toward Danny’s men.
This was a war.
Before the man could release it
however, someone shot him in the chest.
The man flinched, and the bomb went backward.
There was an inestimable moment of silence…and then another explosion rocked the junction. Glass shattered, and a voice rang out, so loud and wretched and in so much pain it made Sutton’s skin crawl…but they must have known what they were getting into. Fuck them. He couldn’t spare any sympathy for them; they didn’t deserve any sympathy.
Sutton climbed the wall, digging his finger into the broken edges of bricks to pull himself up. Once at the railings, he was able to climb over them quickly. Before he had pulled himself over the top another projectile shot over his head. The rocket launcher once more. Quickly, he dropped back down. His head rose above the level of the road just in time to see it hit the back of Bellafont’s retreating motorhome, ripping the metal in a rhapsody of smoke and light. The motorhome, moving at twenty miles an hour, seemed to drop down a couple of feet on to the road…and then what remained of the back end of the vehicle began to turn, irrespective of the front section. There was a terrible screech and yawn of metal, and then the back section tore itself free, turning over a couple of times in the road. The front of the motorhome, relatively unharmed save for the exposed interior, ground to an unceremonious halt amid a flurry of sparks and plumes of smoke.
“Coosjak!” Someone screamed.
Sutton looked up. A teenager with a beard and a crazed look in his eyes was standing over him. He had an axe in his hand. He wasn’t wearing an animal head like the others, but one side of his face was covered in blood from a vicious wound just above his temple.
Sutton shifted his hands, swinging along the railings like an uncoordinated monkey. The axe came down, bouncing off the railings with a sharp clang. There were sparks.
Sutton swung up on to the road.
The motorhome.
Bellafont.
The bearded teenager shifted his hold on the axe, and then swung it at Sutton once more, giving an outrageous bellow at the same time.
Sutton stepped back, dodging it, but almost lost his footing at the same time. There was debris everywhere, from the explosion, scattered bits and pieces that were as undecipherable and mysterious as Egyptian treasures, and it was almost impossible to avoid stepping on something.