Decay Inevitable

by Conrad Williams

  But he felt somewhere, not too far away, a tiny coal of warmth that pulsed in the cold, perhaps just for him. A speck of relief. The dot of an island in the Pacific.

  Like a hungry dog nosing around for the merest shred of scent that promises dinner, Will made long detours into unlikely streets or cut across unkempt lawns booby-trapped with plastic toys in his search for the warmth. Sometimes – he couldn’t explain how – he knew he was on the wrong track and had to double back and find his original spot, where the feeble pulse of heat had been detected. Then he would be off again, trying to plug into the current and let it pull him in.

  It took an age, and Will realised that in real terms that was exactly what might have happened. But suddenly, the heat was stronger and he gave himself to it, the decisions to turn into this street or hurry across that square coming more fluidly as the pulse quickened. At one point he laughed out loud: this must be what it was like for animals, the scent of blood hot and heady in their nostrils. He understood the thrill of the hunt as he closed in on his catch. He could almost see it, a red ball throbbing in the midst of so much blue-black emptiness. Its promise of succour was great; his veins sang and sweat broke out on his forehead, despite the wind’s cruelty.

  A door. A red door. It might have been a blue or a green door, but it had been overtaken by the red of warmth. What lay behind it understood the secret of need, the science of comfort. He touched the door and suddenly he was inside the house, sitting on the edge of a bed. He was unhappy now because the interior of the house had proved to be chillier than he expected. No warm welcome. No lack of tension to relax the tight band of pain that circled his head. His hands itched. He stared down at them, at the raw welts scoring the pads of flesh on a parallel with his life lines. If he put his hands together, miming an open book, the weals made a V-shape across them. Their pain was fresh and bright. Closer inspection revealed a pattern in the welts, a series of raised obliques, as though a length of hemp had bitten into his flesh.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Will stood up. He didn’t want to look to his side. Someone lay there, unmoving. A body, losing heat. But that couldn’t be right. This was a house of warmth and promise. He went to the window and peeked through the curtains. There were people outside.

  Sally, there’s someone watching us... Would you mind opening the front door, please, sir?

  The voice came to him heavy and full of interference, as though he were a child again, listening to a message from a friend through a Ski yoghurt pot at the end of a piece of string. He went to the door and opened it on a tired policeman in a wet uniform. For a moment he didn’t recognise the man for his scrubbed look and the extra few pounds he was carrying on his jowls and his waistline. But in the moment he recognised him, he recognised too how he had been tricked. Death didn’t work to a timetable. He remembered how de Fleche had put that. Death was sinuous and sly. Death was a Moebius strip, or Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. This was Sean’s beginning, and Will’s true end.

  Sorry to bother you, sir. We’ve had word of a prowler in the area. Have you seen anything? Heard anything?

  De Fleche spoke through him as he was about to give the architect to Sean, making a mockery of any belief Will had that he was in control.

  I was asleep. Your torches woke me up.

  Sean seemed satisfied with that. Will raged against the seal that de Fleche had squeezed between him and the outside. Is there anyone else in the flat that might have heard anything?

  Luce, my girlfriend, she’s asleep too. You’d have had to drive your car through the wall to wake her up.

  And then the policeman was apologising and backing off, hurrying back through the rain with his partner to a car that was warm.

  When they were alone again, de Fleche let the leash out a little and Will struggled against it, battling to be free. The book was just pages and glue but it had more spine than he. It was yesterday’s book. Catriona didn’t exist any more, the book meant nothing.

  “I don’t want to be in your pocket,” he said, sounding like a petulant child at a birthday party who had failed at every game.

  “Too late,” de Fleche said. “You killed her. How does that make you feel? You and women are a potent combination, aren’t you? Lethal. How many’s that now? You should have some stickers done, slap them on the side of your cockpit. Authorised kills. Will, the Red Baron. The Strangler. Sleep-Stealer. Kids’ll have trouble going to bed knowing you’re on the hoof.”

  “You killed her,” Will said.

  “Oh go on, don’t be so modest. You passed my test, squadron leader. Ladykiller. You’re in the army now. Go out there and make mayhem. Make lots of what you are. It’s New Year’s Day for you, for all of us. Year Dot. Year Zero. Let’s have a fresh start.”

  The door opened and he found himself in another street in a part of the world he didn’t know. There were others there like him, thin men with clothes that hung on their bodies in dire need of a wash. They sweated, these men, and he sweated too, despite the cold. One of them came up to him, scratching the back of his head and looking around him maniacally as if they were in the middle of a column of biting gnats. His hair was a greasy cap stuck to his scalp and his chin had not felt a blade for a week or so. He wouldn’t look at Will, and when he parted his lips to talk, a fist-sized glut of flying beetles buzzed out of his mouth. He didn’t notice them. They might as well have been exhaled smoke; he certainly looked nervous enough to need a cigarette.

  “Are you hungry?” the man said. “I’m hungry. Are you hungry? Because, like, I am hungry. Am I hungry? Too right. Too right. How about you? You hungry?”

  The other thin men were looking at him with similarly earnest expressions. There was trouble too, in their eyes, as if they couldn’t quite understand how they had come to be in this position. They looked at Will, the newcomer, as if he had brought some instructions with him.

  Up ahead, behind a blockade of cars, he could see more people, but these were not like him or the other thin men. They were stouter and wore a better cut of clothes. They were nervous. Some of them held guns or knives. Their children stood behind them, guarded by the legs of their elders. Even at this distance, Will could smell their odious flesh and the alcohol reek of their perfumes and soaps. They smelled of fat and dairy products. They smelled of mouthwash and shoe polish. It made Will’s mouth sour to feel such an alien flavour in his throat. The thin men walked slowly towards the blockade, and all they could think about was how they wanted to make those fat people less glossy, less stench-ridden. Thinner.

  GLEAVE WAS DEAD. But it wasn’t his leg injury that had killed him. Appalled, Sean took in the extent of his degeneration. He resembled potatoes that had been left to boil for too long and had collapsed to a watery vichyssoise in the pan. Tufts of hair or nubs of bone emerged – macabre islands – laced with bloody veins, like seams of sauce in raspberry ripple ice cream. His suit had become a poor-quality bag in which to contain him. Sean couldn’t feel satisfied with Gleave’s death. It had not been achieved by his own hand. He felt cheated, ill-organised. Things were passing him by.

  The gun in Sean’s hand drew him on. Without it, he might have stayed with Emma until someone forced him to leave her. The ticks from the cooling engine of the lorry were more spaced out now. Water dribbled from the cracked radiator and a sigh eased from its innards, as if the machine were settling into its death.

  He remembered little of what Pardoe had said of Cheke, but he remembered what he had said about her improvement. She had already been dangerous, and very fast, that day when Marshall had been killed. How long ago was that? A few weeks? Sean found it hard to nail down time now. So much had happened. His life had seen the kind of upheaval that a man of eighty would never witness. Time became unimportant in those shadows. All it did was tease you with how much more shit you might have to put up with.

  The gun felt comfortable in his hand. He edged outside, past the creaking back end of the lorry and the rotting
brick teeth at the smashed entrance. Small fires had combusted here, despite the cold and damp. They burned sootily and pumped oilsmoke across fields that were white with frost. Bare branches made stark exclamation marks on their perimeters. The sky was a beautiful blue, paling as it bent to touch the horizon. There were a few icy scratches up there but no clouds. A bird sang a brief, exhilarating snatch of song from the chimney stack. The taxi was parked to the side of the farmhouse, the door open, the keys still in the fascia.

  He watched Vernon Lord staggering across the field, pursued, if such leisurely advancement could be described so grandly, by Cheke. The crash had realigned her somewhat: she was dragging her leg behind her and the leg, freed from any immediate control, was finding it hard to concentrate on remaining a leg. From here, it looked like a head, with a baseball cap jammed down over the ears.

  There was nothing he could do. He watched until, like a leopard bringing down a deer, Cheke had Vernon underneath her. He screamed, or tried to scream, for as long as it took her to detach his face. Then Vernon withdrew into himself like a surly child. Age piled on to him, denuding his bones, puckering his flesh into a sea of wrinkles and liver spots. Cheke stepped back, aghast. He’d had enough, old Vernon. All the fight was gone from him and time, waiting in the wings, had recognised its cue. It came back to him, with interest, enjoying the feel of meat that it had been cheated of for so long. It wasn’t Cheke that killed Vernon Lord; it was his own greed that did it.

  Two deaths, then, that could have gone one way but found another. And Emma, whose murder ought to have been foreseen. Pardoe, the bastard, should have paid out his story just as all that bad rope had been. They should have been warned. Sean wondered how his own end would come. He was tired of the body count and the unnecessary killing. He wouldn’t mind making a little peace with someone, anyone, for a change.

  He returned to the barn and gently lifted Emma in his arms and walked around the building to the front of the house. He placed her in the back of the cab, securing her in the seat with the seatbelts. When he turned to get in the driver’s seat, Will was standing three feet away from him, smelling him on the air like a cat at dinner time. Only it wasn’t Will. It was too crude an approximation. Sean felt a flare of anger when he thought of how easily she hoped to fool him. She noticed the reticence in the way he appraised her. Slowly, Will sank from her true face as it emerged.

  “I couldn’t take him in,” she said, almost apologetically, her voice coming as easily as if they had been chatting for an hour. “Vernon. I couldn’t take any part of him in. Too dry. No moisture in him at all. He was like something you’d use to start a fire. He’s still out there in the field. Mummified.”

  “That’s time for you,” Sean said, carefully. Her eyes were dark and lovely and too intensely fixed upon his own for his liking. She was deeply, horribly beautiful. He was scared to look away and scared to maintain eye contact.

  He said, “Your leg, it got better.”

  Her hand brushed against her thigh. “Yes,” she said. “It’s a little difficult for me to concentrate sometimes. There’s so much here to distract me.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  Cheke moved around the bumper of the cab, six feet away from him now. “I’d like to know how you feel,” she said. “I’ve dreamed about you. I never had dreams before, before I came here.” She frowned. “At least, I don’t think I did. I can’t remember. But I dream now. Vivid dreams of you and me. All the different ways it could be.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes. Do you find me attractive, Sean?”

  “It’s hard to find somebody attractive when they’ve been spending such a long time trying to get you killed.”

  Amusement played on Cheke’s lips for a second as she tried to gauge whether he was toying with her or not. “We’ve moved on from that,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I know what pain is. I wouldn’t want any of that for you.” She took another step closer. “I don’t have anything left to do and there’s nobody left to do it for.”

  “Then you’re free.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be free. Maybe you’re the genie who rubbed my lamp for me. I’m indebted to you.”

  Sean’s fingers on the keys twisted clockwise a fraction. “Really, you don’t have to. I did nothing.”

  “You were the catalyst.” Her lips were carmine and soft. He could see every wrinkle and flaw in the flesh. It was good that she had flaws, this creature who had seemed so perfect. It was good, promising even, that she allowed them to show. “You were the reason they brought me here.”

  “Then you have a job to finish.”

  “It’s over,” she said. “Gleave promised me that he would help me change enough to be like him, like you. All of you.”

  She was within touching distance, if he wanted it. Sean’s fingers loosened then recircled around the butt of the revolver. He said, “You look fine to me. Keep that look. It suits you.”

  Cheke spread her arms and looked down at her body. “You think so? This is me, well, most of it. Plus a few modifications.”

  “It looks good on you.”

  “It would look good on you too,” she said.

  “I’m not your type.”

  “What is my type?”

  Sean said, casually, “Dead.”

  She bowed her lips in mock disappointment. “That can be arranged.”

  “You’re kidding, of course.”

  Now Cheke smiled and Sean was overwhelmed, shocked by the depth of her mouth, the animal slant to it. Her teeth were packed in rows inside it, like a shark’s. “Of course,” she said.

  “Then I can go. You won’t mind if I go.”

  “A hug, first, to see you off. It’s only fair.”

  Sean went immediately to her and drew her into the circle of his arms. He felt her ripple against him, every sensory pimple and pad snuffling into his secret smells. A slight burning, in his gut.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

  He shot her twice through the heart. She buckled under him and staggered back, scooping up the fluid that was lost to the explosions. She was trying to breathe, but her lung had collapsed; Sean could see it, a deflated, frothy balloon of blood. Will’s face returned, a surprised oval that couldn’t quite complete itself: his mouth belonged to someone else, someone of a different caste that Sean didn’t recognise. While she was trying to rein in the loops and lassos that her body had become, Sean bent and picked up her heart, which was slowly, clumsily rolling back to the magnet of her body. He flung it into the fire.

  She made an O of her mouth and blew a gust of air from it, as if she had been lightly punched in the stomach. She looked surprised, as if she had never believed that she could be disposed of so simply, so swiftly. She said, “When we are married–” Then she fell back onto the frozen soil and began to drain into it. Bitterly, he went to watch until there was just a dark outline of her shape discernible in the white.

  He went back to the cab, tossed the gun onto the dashboard, and started the engine. Then he turned it off, got into the back with Emma, and held her until her solid, cold flesh began to warm and he could almost believe she might turn in his arms and say hello.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: KILLENNIUM

  YEAR ZERO.

  The quiet houses were rebelling. People did not want to die in their beds. They came onto the streets with weapons that could do no harm and fought until the breath was squeezed from their bodies. Large men with powerful muscles folded under the thin men. Everybody folded under the thin men. They were irresistible. In seconds, the ranks of the thin men were bolstered by those that had just been dispatched. Enemy to ally in the beat of a heart, or lack of one.

  Will moved on the periphery of the crowd, powerless to prevent the slaughter. He could feel de Fleche in him; he presumed they all did, gathering strength and pace. Rediscovering his appetite for a land he had not seen for twenty years. Tired of death’s environs, he wanted to branch out and have
some influence over the living as well as the dead. He was ready to return, Will could feel it. And when he did, all would be lost. Architects made designs and he knew that de Fleche had been busy. He caught a glimpse of some of these blueprints when his eye, jaundiced by the street battles and the insensate dropping of bodies, turned away to look at the sky. He caught sight of vast machines of torture to process the living, of awful dark houses where the doors and the windows were ceaselessly motile to prevent any escape while the minions within went about their business of dismemberment and witchcraft. He understood de Fleche’s motives for the grand plan that he wanted to put into place – revenge fed his ambitions – but he did not know who the targets were. Nobody was to be spared in his search, however. It was this indiscrimination that cut Will to the quick.

  “Are you hungry? Jesus, I am absolutely starving.” The man with the itchy scalp and the fidgeting hands had not left him alone. Will couldn’t see how his hunger had prevailed, not after the terrible feast he had gorged upon. The man sucked juices from his fingers and smacked his lips. “I could eat that again,” he said. “So hungry. My stomach thinks my throat’s cut.”

  If de Fleche was still near, Will could not feel him. He suspected that he was in the background, assessing his position, biding his time before the balance of power shifted and he could make himself known again. Revenge, he had said, Will recalled vaguely. Revenge against whom?

  It didn’t matter, for now. What did matter was the hell that was being raised around him, not six feet from where he stood. Blood was being spilled as generously as red wine from a sot’s glass. The thin men were systematically wasting anything that stood in the way of the food they craved. Hunger tickled Will’s belly too, but not to the extent that he was ready to take life for it. Why was that? What was so different about him that brought on this moralistic stance? He thought of the man he had killed at the caravan site. Was that it? That he had broken the neck of some evil swine and had marked his own card by that action? There was no compulsion to add to the body count here because he had been blooded and could take on a supervisory role? The deferential way in which his colleagues treated him seemed to support that suspicion. And as soon as the seed was sown, he backed off, recoiled from it.