Pandaemonium

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Oh.

  This is so very, very different to kissing her cousin’s wet and weedy little next-door neighbour Carl. It isn’t something she merely feels in her lips or even her arms: it’s like some heightened vibration that is tingling her skin, melting her insides, threatening to explode her from within. Caitlin’s always thought Rocks looked intimidating, even harsh, but his lips are surprisingly tender, and though his arms are soft around her, there are places beneath the skin that feel like they won’t give.

  He is warm, delicate, gentle, and just a little too polite. She recalls Carl’s wandering hands, the ongoing struggle to keep his paws from her chest without breaking off and completely ruining the minor excitement of getting a snog. Tonight, she wants Paul to touch her chest, and not through two layers of cotton and Lycra. She’s waited a while, altered her position incrementally to try and bring his hand closer without being too overt, but he’s not taking the hint. So much for subtlety, she thinks, undoing a couple of buttons and leading his hand through the resultant gap.

  He breaks off, looking uncertainly at her as if to say ‘You sure about this?’

  She nods, giggling a little.

  Theresa draws on the joint, the resultant glow from the tip lighting up her face as they stand huddled in the lee of the biggest outbuilding. Looks like a barn or a stable or something. Fuck knows. Closest Beansy ever gets to the countryside is when Celtic are away at Kilmarnock. Might be warmer inside but he’s afraid it’s full of fucking hay or fertiliser or petrol and they’ll end up setting the thing ablaze. He’s still warm from the dancing anyway: they all are. And when they start to get cold, then the lassies might be that bit more amenable towards the idea of a wee cuddle.

  The track is searing now, guitars screaming as ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ reaches another crescendo. Radar’s alone on the stage but he’s got about thirty dance partners, and five hundred more in his head. Everybody’s having it. Adnan and Marianne: get in there, mate. Deborah and Cameron. Deso and Fizzy are dancing together, right next to Carol-Ann, Michelle, Ruth and Roisin, and close by that crowd, even Rosemary and her pals are up.

  Ewan takes a long draw and holds the smoke. Matt is working the controls, going to find Saturn. The music sounds both distant and immediate at the same time: loud enough to move him, far enough so as not to intrude. It’s all just . . . out there. He’ll remember this forever, man.

  Caitlin breaks away from the kiss for a second. Rocks opens his eyes, staring back, checking everything is okay. It is. She just wants to look at him, see all of his face. This time it’s his shirt buttons she undoes before kissing him again. She senses the tautness of muscle beneath his skin, runs her fingers over his nipple and down on to his stomach. She feels very pleasantly, very slightly out of control. It’s like she’s drunk, like she’s high, though she hasn’t touched a drop since a sole glass of champagne at her mum’s fortieth in June.

  Deso and Fizzy are seriously going for it, the girls all around forming a circle or maybe just giving them a wide berth. They’re pouring water over each other, spinning in a binary orbit, then they pull off their shirts and dance on, stripped to the waist. Looking over their heads, Radar can see steam coming off them as they pass in front of the outside door.

  It seems so isolated down here. The music is muffled and consists mostly of bass sounds: throbs and thumps.

  Caitlin’s hand runs along Paul’s abdomen, feels the rigid bumps of his six-pack, then her fingers brush against a different kind of rigid bump altogether. How can it be flesh and yet so rigid? How can the softness of a kiss, the tenderness of caressing, give a willing place to this brutal, unyielding thing? If she could touch it, hold it, it might put her mind at ease. She undoes the button on his waistband. The voice that would normally warn her she’ll regret doing this is barely audible beneath the one telling her she’ll far more regret not doing it when she had the chance.

  Eyes accustomed now. Picking up speed. Got his bearings, a fix on his target. He’s moving through the trees, closing in.

  Liam’s heart is racing as he closes the door. It’s like a shot of adrenalin straight to the heart. In fact, no drug could do this, and you never need to escalate the dose. He twists the key and locks it. By the time he turns around, Rebecca already has her top off and starts kissing him, popping studs as she tugs his shirt.

  ‘Hear that?’ Ewan asks.

  Matt nods, mumbles agreement.

  Ewan nips the joint and slips it back between his fingers, out of sight, so he can show a clean palm. Not throwing it away until he sees who’s coming. If it’s Guthrie, it’s gone. Moving too fast to be Guthrie, though. Moving very fast.

  It’s stripped right down now, down to just the bass drum. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

  Deso and Fizzy, stripped right down.

  Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

  Rocks and Caitlin, stripped right down.

  Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

  Liam, Rebecca, kissing, clasping.

  Caitlin’s hand. Gripping, moving.

  Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

  Light. Heat. Flesh. Faster.

  Sees him now. There’s the bastard.

  Music. Souls. Prey. Closer.

  Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

  Theresa toking. Yvonne giggling.

  Draws the knife. Grasps the hilt.

  Gripping, sliding, faster, harder.

  Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

  Eyes on target. Dead ahead.

  Sounds behind him. What the fuck?

  Something grabs him. Knife goes tumbling.

  Wheels around. Sees his hunter.

  ‘Fuck you doing? Was that a blade? A fucking blade? You want the jail?’

  Matt’s eyes widen. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Dazza raging. Kirk’s mist lifted.

  ‘Make him scared. That’s all I wanted . . .’

  Smashed aside, sent to ground. Something sprays him, wet and warm. Blinds his vision, fills his mouth. Tastes like metal. Feels like oil. Wipes his face, opens eyes.

  Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

  Throat is open. Chest is open. Stomach open. Eyes are open.

  Knife plunging.

  Beat. Beat.

  Blood spurting.

  Beat. Beat.

  Come spurting.

  Beat. Beat.

  Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.

  Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat. Beat.

  Radar fades up ‘Cloudy Room’. Brings it in above the beat.

  There’s no going back from here. There’s no going back from here.

  XIX

  Merrick had never truly understood the word carnage. He thought it was just another term for chaos, one he’d heard used to describe a bad rush-hour, Christmas Eve at the supermarket. Now, though, he fully comprehends its meaning, and in particular why it derives from meat. He has never seen so much rent flesh.

  That it appals the eyes is merely the beginning: its true horror is what it conveys to the mind, to the soul. Billions of years it had taken, since that first twitching flagellum, millions of generations, minutely developing, expanding, adjusting, refining, to bring forth these constructions, the most astonishingly complex machines in the known universe. And in a matter of seconds, they had been reduced to quivering, glistening chunks of lifeless matter.

  He doesn’t know whether it would have made much difference had he been able to sound the alarm. They have torn through the place so quickly, overwhelming anything in their paths. Along each corridor, decoherence rifles sit serenely in their locked cabinets, surveying the scenes of bloody devastation they were intended to prevent. He sees severed arms still gripping pistols, soldiers’ own knives buried to the hilt in what could barely even be described as their corpses.

  With a cacophony of screams cascading pell-mell through the corridors and the slap-slap sound of their inescapably fleet footfalls seemingly all around, he comes very close to taking one of those pistols and just using it on himself. I
t would be quick, would be easy. But just as he bends down to prise it free, Colonel Havelock appears, along with three other soldiers, grabbing hold of his trembling arm and hauling him onwards.

  They make it only a matter of yards before they are attacked, demons bouncing off the walls with deadly agility to blindside soldiers who had seen them coming half a second ago. Havelock gets off a couple of shots from his side arm, but it doesn’t seem to stop any of the creatures. He and Merrick survive, though, because the demons are so intent upon slaughtering the other three men they’ve brought down first.

  Havelock hurls Merrick towards a door off the passageway and urges him just to keep running down the tunnel ahead.

  ‘We’ve got to make for the back door,’ Havelock yells breathlessly at him. ‘The main elevator shafts and all the emergency exits are cut off.’

  ‘Back door?’

  ‘Access walkway, north-west ventilation duct. Maintenance details sometimes use it as a short cut.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To the surface,’ Havelock urges.

  Merrick hasn’t the breath to ask if it’s far, doesn’t want to know the answer anyway, doesn’t want to think about how long these tunnels run, blocks the echoes of voices quoting how many kilometres the accelerator chase extends beneath this mountain. He concentrates expressly on running, breathing, blanking out the fire in his muscles, the pain in his lungs.

  His breath is loud inside his head, amplified, like their footfalls, by the narrowness of the passage. It’s a clattering, irregular tattoo, two non-synchronised gaits, but within it is syncopation enough to detect the interference to it of a new sound, approaching from behind. It echoes from all sides and seems to be coming sometimes from above, sometimes below. Havelock hears it too.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ he hisses. ‘Just keep running.’

  He feels like his chest is going to implode, but somehow he keeps his limbs pumping, the hot air scorching his dry throat, his eyes fixed on Havelock’s back. The colonel is fitter than he is, has to be holding back so as not to abandon him. That may change if he can’t maintain this pace.

  The other sound is getting closer. He daren’t look back. If he looks back, he’s dead, he knows it.

  Havelock knows it’s gaining. He accelerates, starting to put distance between them. Oh no. A voice in Merrick’s head repeats an old punchline, he doesn’t remember the rest: ‘I don’t have to outrun the lion, I just have to outrun you.’

  Then he sees why Havelock has sprinted: there’s a ladder up ahead, leading to a hatch in the ceiling of the tunnel. He’s run on to climb up and get it open.

  Merrick is a few seconds behind as Havelock scales the ladder and gets a hand on the hatch. He twists a spindle to unlock it, then starts banging the metal plate, first with his arm and then, with growing desperation, his shoulder. Finally it bursts open as though spring-loaded, and Havelock hauls himself up out of sight as Merrick reaches the foot of the ladder.

  Havelock re-emerges through the hole immediately, leaning down to offer Merrick an arm. As he stretches his hand up to reach the colonel’s, he feels something slam into his side, trying to haul him away. Merrick grips the rung with all he’s got and thrusts his free arm once more towards Havelock, whose eyes suddenly widen in shock. Merrick feels arms about his legs, pulling him down, as blood suddenly erupts from Havelock’s neck, preceding the emergence of a blade from inside his throat. Merrick’s horrified recoil causes him to lose his grip on the rung, and he is pulled downwards as the blade yanks sharply to the side, semi-decapitating his erstwhile protector.

  Merrick hears screaming as he is dragged along the floor of the tunnel; realises it’s his own only when a hand is clamped over his mouth. Up above, he sees the demon descend the ladder, head first, moving like liquid. Whatever’s got him changes its grip and rolls him into a cavity he hadn’t seen at the foot of the wall.

  He drops, free-falling for what turns out to be about four feet but at the time feels like a thousand, landing with a dull bang on a metallic surface. It’s suspended, though, not solid, so there’s a bit of give, for which he’s all the more grateful when his abductor lands on top of him a second later. The hand returns to his mouth: a human hand. He sees a whirl of black material as the figure kneels up and pulls a metal grate back into place with his free arm before sliding an aluminium panel out of the way, revealing a further drop into one of the maintenance ducts attending the accelerator chase.

  The figure then turns around and reveals himself to be the man Merrick most wants in his corner right now.

  ‘Oh thank God,’ he whispers, and truly means it.

  ‘Indeed,’ replies Tullian archly. ‘No disrespect, Dr Merrick, but if either of us gets out of this place alive, I sincerely doubt we’ll be thanking science.’

  XX

  Gillian endures a moment of panic, fearing Julie is going to let out one of her signature indiscreet guffaws as they hasten along the corridor. Gillian wonders whether it was wise to tell her beforehand rather than wait and just show her. Probably safer this way: better she blurts now than pressed up against the bedroom wall.

  Gillian puts a finger to her lips as they approach their room.

  ‘Total silence,’ she whispers. ‘Tiptoes, don’t bump the furniture, no sound, got it?’

  Julie nods.

  Gillian leads her up to the wall and nudges the mirror aside, revealing the spyhole. Julie leans against the cornflower plaster and closes one eye. She squints, wiggles her head unsatisfactorily.

  ‘Cannae see anything,’ she whispers. ‘Too dark.’

  ‘Let me try.’

  Gillian presses her head to the wall, keeping the mirror levered away with her elbow. The lights have been switched off next door, right enough. She gestures Julie to flip off their own switch. ‘Quietly,’ she mouths.

  She looks again, shapes gradually forming in the dark, black becoming minutely distinct shades of grey. There is something moving, writhing, definitely, but with one eye and limited depth perception, it remains shapeless. They must be under the bedcovers. Just have to be patient, and all will be revealed.

  Julie’s nudging her.

  ‘Let me.’

  ‘Just a sec.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Just a sec.’

  She hears a slapping sound, a guttural breathing, deep and masculine. There are more pronounced stirrings, a peak appearing in the bedclothes, which seem imminently about to fall off and finally reveal what they are covering. Then Julie uses her bulk to shove Gillian out of the way, side-swiping her with her hips. There’s delight, disbelief and mirth in Julie’s eyes.

  Gillian stumbles, off-balance from the way she was leaning. Stupid cow’s probably given the game away doing that. She looks up, sees Julie shove her face against the plaster, mouth open slightly in concentration. Then just behind her, through the darkened window, she thinks she catches a glimpse of movement. How ironic would that be: getting spied upon while spying upon Liam and . . .

  Gillian feels her entire body seized and shaken as though by some invisible giant as the window shatters and something hurtles through it, smashing into Julie with a crunch of bones. They end up on the floor a few feet from where Gillian has collapsed, having lost her footing in fright and slid backwards down the wall. She sees limbs tangling, clothed and bare, two heads, one Julie’s, one bald, a thousand fragments of glass glinting in the moonlight on the floor.

  Julie ends up face-down, the intruder on top, his head bowed so that Gillian cannot see his face. She can see Julie’s, though, suddenly racked with pain and fear as he grips a long, jagged splinter of wood and drives it into her back.

  Julie reaches out a hand to Gillian, but though she’d only have to come forward a foot to reach it, she cannot move, will not draw an inch from where she is pinned against the wall. He tugs and twists at the splinter, Julie screaming, reaching, Gillian paralysed, morbidly entranced.

  Then the intruder lifts his head and looks at her.


  It is as though white light and white noise have filled her head, some kind of information breakdown inside her brain. Though she doesn’t close her eyes, she sees nothing for a few moments, hears nothing. When sound and vision return, it is to show the intruder thrusting its claw inside the wound in Julie’s back, a scaly knee pressed into the base of her spine. Then it lets out a roar that shakes the room as its muscles tighten, commencing a wrenching action that silences Julie’s cries forever.

  The sound of the roar awakens something in Gillian, something so deep and automatic that she feels suddenly possessed, as though it is not her own will or even her own energy that moves her, scrambling backwards on her hands, feet, bottom, out of the room and into the corridor. Her body is no longer her own, but she is condemned to remain inside it, like a helpless passenger. Control of her eyes has been surrendered also. She wants to look away, wants to turn her head, wants to close them, cover them, but she cannot take her gaze from the creature. It climbs slowly to its feet and begins moving forward, rendered a dark silhouette now that she is in the light of the corridor. There is something in its hand, something dripping.

  She has to climb, has to get upright, but it’s almost as though she’s forgotten how: as though whoever has possessed her needs to learn how to walk again. She pushes herself against the wall as the creature fills the door frame. Light hits it.

  Oh Jesus.

  There was no breakdown, no brain malfunction. She imagined nothing in the half-light. It really is a demon. And it’s holding Julie’s spinal cord in its fist, her head still attached, dangling like a mace.

  Something inside reconnects, her own consciousness abruptly thrust back into the driver’s seat in her brain. She’s on her feet. She runs. She makes it to the first corner then slams into Liam, naked but for a towel wrapped around his waist, come to investigate. He reels, grabs her shoulders to steady himself and tries to hang on to her. She struggles to throw off his grip, wants to shout, to scream, to tell him, but her brain reboot hasn’t fully completed. Instead her eyes convey the message. Liam turns to look just as Julie’s head smashes into his face, crushing it like a bowling ball hitting a coconut.