‘Ecstatic. So now prove it: cross the city and get home without passing beneath a single lamppost. Tag your Walk; you will be watched, though you won’t see those watching. I’ll come with you, but I can’t help. Make it by midnight, and you will be welcomed as one of the Narrowfolk.’
‘Easy peasy, tits-a-squeezy.’
Dodd rubbed his eyes. ‘Just sit on the roof, Bex, watch the sun set, and take your leave.’
‘Like it says in the song,’ she said, ‘let’s do it.’
So she sat, taking a good look around at the housing estates, the derelict factories and the blind concrete canyons of shopping centres. She felt the echoing weight of a dozen empty floors of burnt-out and pissed-in flats beneath her feet while the map glowed like the tattooed skull of a junkie. She huddled against the drizzle, watching as it faded into a meaningless scribble and the daylight bled from the grey roofs of the estates, and then made her goodbyes.
***
Andy yanked his tie to half-mast as the escalators carried him down from the Pallasades shopping centre to New Street Station. Usually he preferred to take the stairs, since that at least resembled exercise, but tonight it was simply easier to let himself be carried along, conveyer-belt style. Easier to shuffle along tiredly with the shopping-centre herds, through the unmanned ticket barrier (but you always bought one; you never knew), and descend to the platform. More stairs, down into the warm orange-brown smelling fug of diesel fumes and damp humanity.
The platform was crowded with late-night Christmas shoppers, even though it was still only mid-November, so he sat on a footrail, closed his eyes, and filled his lungs with it. The long exhalation felt like dissolving, and was strangely comforting. After the long evening shifts in particular, it was a relief to just let everything go and become another tired corpuscle in the city’s old, slow heart. He barely heard when the tannoy announced his train’s delay.
What he saw, when he opened his eyes again, was a small piece of graffiti on the polished white tiles of the pillar opposite him, framed between a briefcase and a backside the size of a small East European country.
It nagged at him. It reminded him of the graffiti that he had seen on the gate at today’s weird shortcut. Somebody had cleaned it off as best they could, but a faint squiggly pink outline remained, floating just above the glaze of the tile, or perhaps more deeply within it. He supposed he must have seen these things thousands of times before: the tags of street kids on overpasses and the walls of corner shops, but this one almost made sense, as if the swirls and scrawls were coming close to resembling letters spelling out nonsense words he had nevertheless once understood.
Then Buttockistan shifted in front of him, and he decided he was simply zoning out with fatigue.
After a while, passengers began to shuffle and crane their necks like cattle scenting danger. The train screeched and ground its way up to the platform, black fumes roiling into the darkness where the ceiling should have been.
He climbed aboard as late as physically possible, so that when he found himself jammed in with a dozen other passengers in the standing-room-only space by the doors he was at least pressed up to one side rather than surrounded. Leaning his forehead against the curving glass of a door, Andy closed his eyes and waited to be taken home. On the way out of Birmingham city centre, there were five tunnels which he could count with his eyes closed as the train passed through each one and the snarling of the engine altered pitch. Doppleganger effect, or something like that.
Halfway between the fourth and fifth, the train coughed and died, braking to a halt.
Vague exclamations of protest arose from the passengers. The man standing next to him – who was, incredibly, managing to do the Telegraph crossword in this dense crush of bodies – looked up from his paper, sighed, and continued to stare at it. Andy could almost read his thoughts. No point in raising a fuss; it will sort itself out eventually. Just be patient. Andy’s nerves, on the other hand, were twitching with forced immobility and the sensation of his journey having been disturbed in the process of its predictability and order. He got out his phone and began to text Laura that he was going to be late.
The minutes were dragged kicking and screaming – or, more accurately, muttering vaguely about how they were going to have very firm words with Somebody about This Sort of Thing – into another hour.
***
Bex and Dodd fetched up with a crash against a wooden construction-site hoarding, gasping for breath in the shadows and barely able to stand. On the other side, high-arc security lighting blazed a blue-white nimbus into the drizzling air, but here there was nothing except straggling overgrowth and shadows.
‘How can there be… so many… of them…?’ wheezed Dodd, his words disappearing into the night like smoke. He slid painfully down the hoarding until he was sitting in the frosty, rubbish-strewn grass, and he groaned.
All Bex could do was toss the shredded mess of her clawed rucksack to the ground and spit a long gluey string of phlegm. Last time she’d run like this had been in PE class; her lungs were on fire, and her mouth felt like it was coated in rust. Then again, she’d never run like this in school – not from things like that.
‘Dogs…’ she managed. ‘They’ve got fuckin’ dogs, man…’
Dodd shook his head and coughed. Almost puked. ‘Not dogs. You know what they are. Jesus, my back…’
She didn’t know exactly when it was that they’d picked up her trail; how it was that she could have been so careless. She’d reached and tagged the checkpoints at Chinn and Roman stations in good time and had dipped into the Narrows to negotiate the city centre, crossing under Broad Street by a semi-collapsed subway which had been abandoned for years due to some typically messed-up piece of urban planning. She’d thought she’d heard something moving behind them at the time and hurried along, dismissing it as a dog or a junkie, and then they were out, and she’d given it no more thought until she’d passed Gas station and was making good time south along the cut of the main Worcester-Birmingham canal. Then she’d turned back and seen at least half a dozen dark shapes following her along the tow path. Less human than any junkie she’d ever known, and more dangerous than any feral dog.
Never once did it occur to her to take refuge in the open lighted spaces of the city. It was nothing to do with the rules of her Walk, just the simple reason that she had long since ceased to consider such places as safe. Having turned from the streetlights and embraced the city’s dark and hidden heart, she found it impossible to imagine that her pursuers were more at home here than she. Until was too late.
But they weren’t what really scared her, though – this was just nerve-ending stuff, adrenalin rush, fight-or-flight fever. In a weird way she almost liked it. No, what really made her heart stop in her throat was the long, wet smear that Dodd had left on the wood, black in the half-light.
‘No way. That’s bullshit. They never hunt together. Maybe they were, you know, apes or something. Escaped from the zoo.’
‘Course they were, Bex, sure. Giant killer ape-dogs at Dudley Zoo. What were they thinking.’ He hissed in pain again and slid sideways until he was lying on the ground.
‘Come on, then, let’s get you somewhere safer and have a look at you.’ She clambered to her feet and got an arm under his shoulders, trying not to notice how slippery and warm they were, and dragged him several yards further along the hoarding until they found a large wooden gate which gave access to the site. It bore warnings of dire retribution to trespassers upon the property of Jerusalem Construction Services, several large safety notices (Hard-hats Only Beyond This Point!) and an extremely large padlock which looked as if it had been forged by a medieval blacksmith.
Bex propped Dodd up against the chipboard wall, took from inside her jacket the permanent marker and with quick, economical strokes tagged the gate. For a moment her sigil stood proud and clear again
st the raw pine, the perfume of evaporating toluene mixing with her steaming breath. Then the padlock opened with a snap and thudded into the damp earth.
She helped him through and dragged the gate shut, but she couldn’t do anything about locking it again from this side, so she stumble-carried him across the construction site to its far side, where there were at least some concealing shadows.
The site was huge – not wide, but long, a frozen wasteland of concrete pits and steel beams which framed nothing but darkness. She knew that the other side, facing busy Broad Street, was all one brightly lit billboard, an architect’s computer-generated panorama of flawless, gleaming towers inhabited by equally flawless, shining people. A Solution to the Problem of Urban Living in the Twenty-First Century, apparently. Beyond it, Friday evening nightclub crowds jostled and shouted above the thudding of half-a-dozen competing bass beats. Taxis growled, and footsteps click-clacked past on tottering heels barely yards from where Dodd lay, twisting and groaning in a pool of his own blood.
She knelt down beside him as he rolled painfully onto his front. In the patchy oblongs of streetlight, she could see that right between his shoulder blades the battered leather of his biker jacket had been laid open in twin rows of deep parallel slashes, and it was stuck to his flesh with gore from the wound beneath. It looked like he’d been mauled by a tiger. The leather and the cold looked to have staunched the worst of the bleeding, but it was spreading steadily enough for Bex to know that unless they made it to Moon Grove pretty sharpish, Dodd was, medically speaking, fucked.
He seemed to be getting his breath back but was trembling in a way which suggested that shock was getting its teeth more deeply into him than cold, exhaustion, or anything else. She didn’t like it at all.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘It’s just a scratch. You’ll live.’
‘No, man, my jacket. Jesus, get some priorities.’
She grinned. ‘I don’t know. I think its catwalk days are pretty much over.’
‘Shit.’
The main problem was, with all the traffic noise, she couldn’t hear a bloody thing. Coming this close to a major carriageway had been a gamble calculated to throw off pursuit, and for the moment it seemed to have worked. For how long – well, that was another question entirely. She might have been optimistic enough to hope that the chase had given up by now, if only there hadn’t been so many of them.
Skavags.
A normal hunting pack of two or three was easy enough to avoid if you knew what you were doing, but this time there had been just so many. Dozens. It wasn’t natural.
For a second, Bex toyed with the idea of dragging herself and Dodd out from underneath the billboard and trying to attract help, but she knew exactly what would happen: nothing. Nobody would help. No cars would stop, no passers-by would so much as ask them if they were alright, much less offer to help. The most attention they might get would be from the police, who would chalk it up to something gang-related and sling them both into a care home, where you couldn’t even run from the things that wanted to eat you.
On the other side of the hoarding, drunken voices laughed, chip-paper rustled, and a half-eaten kebab landed next to them. No. No fucking way.
She stopped and stared at him. ‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’
He’d struggled up into a sitting position and was taking his jacket off. It came away from his back with a wet peeling sound, and he cried out in pain.
‘Put that back on right now. You’ll catch your death.’
‘Very funny.’ He shook his head and held the jacket out to her. ‘Take it.’
‘Oh please. Spare me the macho bullshit.’ She tried to sound scornful and offhand, but it came out a little too much like a plea. ‘Please, Dodd, no.’ She saw with horror that it was steaming in the night air as his blood froze.
He shook it at her. ‘I’m too slow. We both know it. One of us has got to get back and tell Walter there’s something seriously messed up going on here. Look, this is a good jacket.’
‘Other than the gaping claw holes, naturally.’
He tried to grin, but it just looked more ghastly in the pallor of his face. ‘Don’t let it go to waste.’
Mutely, she took it. It would have shamed him if she hadn’t; the waste of something useful was close to a mortal sin. Nothing which was not already lost. Oh Dodd, no.
At the same time they both heard, off in the darkness of the waste ground behind the construction site, the peculiar mewling cries of the things which hunted them. Too many. Far too many.
When Dodd suggested that they split up, she could have objected, offering hollow reassurances that he wouldn’t slow her down, that they’d somehow manage together, but it too would have been shaming to both of them. If nothing else, the Narrowfolk had their pride. It formed more of a barrier between them and the strutting nightclubbers than any flimsy wooden hoarding, and it withheld from them the easy comfort of the whitest of lies – even at the very end of things. She simply took the jacket and shrugged it on as he ran in a slow, painful crouch into the darkness.
On a whim she called out: ‘Hey Dodd!’
He paused and turned back, nearly invisible. ‘What?’
‘Watch your back, yeah?’
‘Couldn’t resist it, could you?’ The last she ever saw of Dodd was his middle finger disappearing into the night.
She made her own way, and when she heard the sounds of Dodd’s pursuit suddenly escalate into a shrieking frenzy mingled with human screams, she tried not to let her tears blind her so much that she couldn’t see where she was going.
It never occurred to her that the ease with which their hunters had found them had a human agency behind it, nor how neatly she and Dodd had been maneuvered. Which was why, when the ambush came, all she had time to feel was a kind of numb surprise.
3 Intersection
Sudden movement flickered in the corner of Andy’s vision.
From his position, squashed up against the track-side door, he could see the high embankment on the other side, where a ragged human figure appeared as if out of the very ground itself, tumbling and rolling to land in a heap at the bottom.
Seconds later a wild, pale face smeared up at him at knee-height from the darkness on the other side of the glass, and two small fists began to beat desperately on the door. The face – it seemed to be that of a girl – was shouting something. Yelling, begging, to be let in. Glancing over her shoulder with terrified eyes and then turning back to beat with renewed urgency on the thick glass.
Andy reacted the only way he knew how, the way any self-respecting suburban commuter would react given the circumstances: he stood rooted in shock, gaping down at her like a particularly stupid fish, and did nothing. Open the door? He hesitated, glancing around to see if anybody else was going to do something. Nobody seemed to have noticed the girl at all. She was staring up at him with panic and a kind of hopeless, baffled fury; why wasn’t he doing anything?
His shoulder – his whole arm – began to burn with pins and needles. It was like he’d been dropped in (dead) nettles.
Then she reached up with what looked like a large marker pen and scrawled a jagged, looping symbol on the glass. There was a hiss of hydraulics, and the doors popped ajar with a sudden thunk, and a thin stream of chill, diesel-heavy air. Pale fingers curled around each door-panel and tried unsuccessfully to prise them apart. Her mouth appeared in the gap, and one eye, bright blue and pleading.
‘…please help…’ was all he could make out. And to his surprise, he found himself doing just that, ignoring the tinfoil-on-teeth sensations searing down into his fingertips. As he held the doors open so that she could climb inside, he thought he saw something – several somethings, in fact – dart away from the carriage and the sudden light. They moved too fast to be seen clearly, so it must have been his
imagination which made them greyish and lumpen. If they were even there at all.
The homeless girl who hauled herself up and into the train was dressed in an almost archaeological layering of clothes, no single one of them intact, full of holes and so deeply begrimed that it was impossible to tell what colour anything had originally been. Short blonde dreads corkscrewed wildly from her head, and constellations of piercings glittered at lip, nose, and ears. Her smell filled the crowded carriage like a living thing as she climbed up right next to him, heaving for breath and clearly exhausted, so close that they were touching. The back of her torn leather jacket left a wet red smear on the inside of the door as it slowly closed again.
The silence in the carriage became deafening. This was clearly too much for Telegraph Man.
‘I’m sorry!’ he protested, sounding anything but. ‘You can’t just open the doors and climb on like this!’
Bex looked back down through the door windows and then at him. ‘Just did,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Do you even have a ticket?’
She eyed him sidelong, as if considering. ‘Tell you what,’ she suggested. ‘You go and get the guard, or whatever, and he’ll call the transport police, and everybody else can enjoy sitting here for even longer in the cold while I’m being arrested so that you can work that chip off your shoulder. How’s that sound?’
After a moment’s hesitation, he very carefully folded his newspaper away, took out his MP3 player, popped in the earbuds and leaned back with his eyes closed. His fellow passengers were also now doing an impressive job of pretending that she didn’t exist. Andy, on the other hand, was simply agog. She was very short, and very very close.
Bex stared back up at him, her nose barely centimetres away from his chin. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Got a fag?’
‘Uh, hi. No, what? I mean, is that blood? Are you okay?’
The Narrows Page 3