by Luke Walker
“Are you going to help me?” Tom said.
“To do what?”
“Convince Ashleigh she’s wrong about Makepeace.”
I laughed. “You can’t convince Ashleigh of anything once she’s set her mind on a plan.”
“I know, but we have to try. This is dangerous. We’re the only people who know what she thinks. If word gets out, the police will be all over her. She’ll be a sacrifice in minutes.”
I wanted to tell Tom they only took the elderly, the poor, the ill and criminals. They left kids alone. Except she wasn’t a kid. She was an adult with dangerous views. A prime candidate for sacrifice. An organized sacrifice from the authorities. Not like the jokers I’d met earlier.
“I take it you’ve told her she’s in a dodgy area?” I said.
“Yeah. But she won’t listen. Which is why I came looking for you.”
“When did you last speak to her?”
“A few days back. She hasn’t answered any of my calls since.”
I fished my phone out, called her number and her voice mail answered. I hung up. Tom slowed the van; we turned the corner and I slapped a hand on his arm. “Stop.”
Bless the boy, he did so without any argument. We jerked to a stop a short way from my house.
The bedroom light was on. I whispered that to Tom and pointed to the window.
“I think your front door is open, too,” he said.
I peered outside but my eyes weren’t sharp enough to see past the shadows in my little front garden.
“Expecting anyone?” Tom said.
“No.”
“Shit.”
He moved to reverse us; I stilled his hand. We had to see who was in my house. Plus we didn’t need to make any more noise than we already had.
Something moved in my front garden. A figure. A man.
They trotted to a parked car and enough moonlight shone for me to make them out. One of the men from earlier. The Children of Naz Yaah had paid me a visit, it seemed.
Quickly, I told Tom who was outside. He swore again.
“How do they know where you live?” he said.
“They know my name. They saw my ID card.”
“We need to get out of here.”
“No. Wait.”
I was thinking at a much faster speed than I had in years. Like almost everyone else, I lived my life as quietly as I could. Don’t question things. Don’t be noticed. Don’t think. And here I was doing just that.
“We need to deal with them,” I told Tom. “The last thing I want is them coming after me when we get to Ashleigh. And you know what these guys are like. Most of them are idiots, yes, but the rest of them believe. They think they’re doing necessary work so they’ll keep after me for as long as it takes. Now they know where I live, they’ll find Ashleigh. I’m not having that.”
“What’s your plan?” Tom said.
With barely any thought, I told him. He nodded once and that was it. Outside, another man joined the first at the car, both speaking, waving their arms around. It’d been a long time since I’d had that much of an effect on anyone.
“Slowly,” I said.
Tom rested a hand on the ignition. I pulled a firework from the bag and leaned out of the window a few inches. Hot air coated me and it was thick with the promise of more of the usual smog the next day. I stabbed the cigarette lighter in. As it glowed red, I whispered to Tom.
“Ten seconds.”
We counted silently. He turned the key; the engine kicked in and I lit the firework. At once, the fuse was a sparkling light inches from my face. And somewhere beyond that flaming light, I knew the Little Nazs were turning towards me.
“Hey, Little Naz. Fuck you.”
My shout broke the hot air and for a tiny second, I was a freezing ball of ice as if I were lost in another world. I let go of the firework and everything worked perfectly. In its own way.
The firework streaked towards the men outside my house; Tom drove us backwards, tires screaming. As he spun us around to face back up to Segoth Way, the firework hit one of the men in the face.
He dropped, trying to scream through his ruined face, hands beating at his burning skin as the other one tried to help him. I lost sight as the van spun, but their screams were still audible. As was the roar of their car engine.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Tom yelled and I wanted to tell him it’d been an accident. I meant to make the men run, not kill one of them.
We skidded, clipped a car and shot forward. Behind, lights began chasing us.
“We’re in trouble now,” Tom said.
We hit the junction of the two roads, took the left and Tom upped our speed. A burned-out parkland raced by one side. I caught sight of a few car wrecks covering the scorched grass and no signs of life. Behind, the headlights drew rapidly closer.
“You sure this is a good idea?” Tom shouted over the noise of our van and the car.
“No,” I yelled. “But it’s too late now.”
We raced on, never any more than twenty feet ahead of the car. They fired at us a few times; their shots went wild as I’d hoped. Believers they might be, but sober marksmen they were not. Ahead, the road curved a fraction, forcing us to slow. The Little Nazs drew level with us on my side—two in the back and two in front. The one in the passenger seat was screaming at me, his voice lost in the rushing wind. He leaned out, gun aiming at me.
I had no time to shout.
5
For the second time in less than two hours, Tom saved my life.
He hit the brakes. The bullet streaked past the front of the van and all I knew was the shriek of the tires and my own racing heart.
In front, the car stopped in the center of the road. The passenger fired a couple of shots at us and then the car was a racing block of metal coming to us.
“Brace yourself,” Tom said and gunned the engine.
We covered the distance between our vehicle and theirs in seconds. At the last moment, they looked as if they were trying to get out of the way. Too late.
They hit us; we rammed them. The van shook. Tom and I shot forward, held in check by our seat belts. Even so, the impact was enough to jar every bone in my body and force all the air out of me.
The rear of the car had crumpled and I could only hope the two men in the back were dead. The vehicle bounced from us, spun out of control and bashed into a squat wall. We sped past it, me thanking whatever fate had spared us, Tom staring unblinking ahead into the black road.
“We did it,” I said, coughing.
“Not quite.”
Behind, the lights had appeared again. They were still coming for us.
I swore under my breath and pointed to the next right.
“The bridge?” Tom said.
“The bridge.”
He didn’t argue. Instead, he drove even faster, the road vanishing below us. Within seconds, we hit the foot of the bridge over the long-since-abandoned train tracks and Tom slowed when I told him to. He took us to the far right side of the wide road. If anyone else was out on the road, we’d have about five seconds before they crested the rise at the other end of the bridge and came at us.
“Slow down,” I shouted.
He did. The car of the Little Nazs was a roaring bullet speeding to us. There was no time to think of another plan. All we had was that moment.
They raced to our side. I imagined the driver’s hands on the wheel, readying the car to smash into us. I gripped the dashboard and screamed at Tom to do it, do it now.
He did it.
We bashed into the car before they could do the same to us. Again, the jolt shook through me, but I barely felt it. Instead, I watched the car fly over the road towards the other side of the bridge. Towards the side built of high fence, crumbling and old for decades.
They hit it. Wood and glass exploded. Then the car was a flying black shape streaking into more black. Dropping. Dropping.
We hit the other end of the bridge at the same time the car cras
hed into the ground and train tracks.
And how I wish we’d gone back to check on them. I wish that almost more than anything else.
6
Tom took us to what had been his parents’ house—a nice place about fifteen miles away from the city. His mother and father had been dead for six months, both sacrifices due to his mother’s disabilities and his father’s views on the sacrifices. They’d left him the house but he’d stayed at university, only returning for the small funeral.
The roads out of the city were dead and I had to be grateful for that. During traffic jams, muggings were common: people trapped in their vehicles were easy targets for violent men with their bats and knives. As it was, we saw no traffic at all, which was no surprise.
Tom parked on the long drive; we got out and I took a few breaths of the sticky air. The house stood at the end of a short row. Fields rolled away from it on one side and, I assumed, behind. There were no streetlights anywhere near us; clouds had eaten the moon, so we stood in thick blackness.
“Best get inside,” he said and that was fine with me. We’d killed men to get that far; we’d be sacrifices for sure if the police caught us. And if any other Little Nazs found us, they’d tear us apart.
Tom led me to the living room and turned on the television while I tried to relax. The news was the usual. The latest film recommendations, a report on the new albums by a lot of X Factor singers and a brief bit about tomorrow’s air quality (which, thanks to the highest levels of pollution in twenty years, was awful). Then the names of the people “sent” to Segoth and Naz Yaah that day. I turned the sound off after the first few minutes. The newsreader carried on reading out their names, everything in the studio as professional and controlled as always.
Tom returned with two beers, both warm. He sat on a large armchair. We drank.
“I’ll do anything to help Ashleigh, Dave.” He said it out of nowhere. “Even if it means doing what we did on the bridge.”
“I know.”
“Is that okay?”
I shrugged. “What’s it worth now? Even if we weren’t on the run?”
“It’s worth everything,” he said and I forced myself not to laugh at him. The kid was young. The kid was in love with my daughter. Best time to be in love, I imagine.
I eyed him as he drank, already getting a good idea about him. He came from a bit of money; he was young enough to still be hopeful and idealistic. Chances were he hadn’t been exposed to all the shittiness I knew of. There’s a lot to be said for money and youth. Either increased your chances of staying alive these days. Both kept you away from the monsters ruling us.
“Tell me about this Makepeace,” I said.
He leaned forward, skinny arms resting on skinny knees. In the poor light cast by the television, he looked ill as well as young. For the first time, I wondered if he really knew what we’d fallen into.
“He wrote a lot. Short stories mostly. He was never a massive seller, but the people who liked his stuff, they really liked it. You can still get some of his work now.”
“No chance,” I scoffed. Tom had to be joking. Nonfiction books were available to those with the money (or who simply stole them) but nobody had cared about fiction for years.
“It’s true. There’s an industry of books out there, Dave. If you know the right people.”
The thought of hundreds of lost books still available at the risk of turning their owners and readers into social pariahs at best and sacrifices at worst needled at me.
“A black market of books?” I said, trying to go for scornful.
“If you want to call it that.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“The point is Ashleigh’s read everything Makepeace wrote. It’s cost her a lot of money but she doesn’t care about that. She cares that…” He sighed. “That she thinks he was telling the truth about the other worlds.”
“So you said.”
“Don’t you get it?” Tom shouted. I swallowed a lot of my beer, not wanting to get it.
“Other worlds,” Tom said. “Worlds where they don’t exist.”
We were silent for a few minutes. To be honest, a part of me expected the house to explode as one of our gods came for us. Came to devour our souls and cast us deep into the blackness of their bellies. Nothing happened. Even so, my fear remained.
“Where is she now?” I asked when the silence became too much.
“Still at uni. Last I saw her, she was neck deep in her books, researching Makepeace. She was saying she was close to finding out how to get to one of his other worlds. I kept telling her to stop, but she just told me to go. So I left and came for you.”
“So we go to her and she listens to me because I’m her dad? That’s your plan?”
“More or less.” He grimaced.
“Then that’s what we’re doing.”
Outside, the silent night pressed on the windows and while it seemed empty, I knew our terrible gods walked somewhere out there.
7
We set out early the next morning. The sun rose shortly after four, which was a new record for that time of the year. The day, already hot despite the early hour, was no louder or more animated than the night had been. I took a quick look at a few of the nearby houses. All still. I had to be grateful Tom’s parents’ house was in one of the few nice areas. At least we’d been able to sleep without noise of cars racing, of windows being broken, of shouts and all of it with no police to put a stop to it.
We ate, showered; I tried calling Ashleigh again and got nothing.
“It’s about a hundred and sixty miles to Norwich,” Tom said as we got into his van, the morning already baking. “The roads should be clear.”
“First things first. To my job. We need some money.”
He pulled a face, not liking my plan, but aware I was right. We’d need petrol pretty soon not to mention food.
“Where is it?” he said.
“I’ll direct you. Head back to the city.”
He drove. I turned on the radio. We listened to a bit of music before the news.
“You’re listening to Radio Naz and here’s the headlines at five a.m.”
The voice might as well have belonged to a robot.
“A mass shooting in West London claims thirty-two lives and police say each member of the public will be posthumously offered to Gatur the Green; a smog level of high in London; a group of French artists burn themselves to death in the name of Naz Yaah and the PM announces plans to dedicate the twenty-fifth of December to Segoth, calling it a gross oversight this hasn’t happened already.”
“Enough of that shit,” Tom said and lowered the volume.
We drew closer to the middle of the city. The only other traffic was a couple of delivery vans and the usual police cars on the prowl for troublemakers and potential sacrifices. None of the cops gave us a second look.
The parkway brought us to the edge of the city center and the remains of the hospital. Not for the first time, I wondered if anyone had set up home in the building. Probably not. The homeless didn’t like to congregate in large groups. Made it easier for the police to find them if they did.
“Victoria Street,” I said. “It’s off Brennan Road.”
We turned onto the road at around half past five. Tom steered between the abandoned cars and the piles of overflowing rubbish until I told him to stop. We were outside my work. The Arms of Gatur. Formerly known as the Old Victoria, or so I’m told.
“You work in a pub?” Tom asked.
“It pays the bills.”
We left the van; Tom locked it and checked every door. He needn’t have bothered. There was nobody in sight who could drive. Or walk in a straight line for that matter.
I shoved at the side door. Wood scraped and I had to boot the bottom of the door to get through.
“All right. Mind what you’re doing,” someone shouted from the gloom inside.
“It’s me, Derek.”
We entered the narrow side passage,
took a few seconds for our eyes to adjust and I led Tom to the main bar. Derek, my boss, stood at the pumps. There were half a dozen drinkers and the television was tuned to the news, volume low. All usual for that early hour of the morning.
“You’re not on till this afternoon, Dave.”
Derek crossed to us, eyeing Tom with clear interest.
“I need a favor, D,” I said.
“Derek.” My boss extended a hand to Tom, who shook it.
“Tom.”
“Pleasure.” Derek nodded to the taps. “Pint?”
“No, thanks,” I answered. “We’re in a hurry.”
My boss rested his big arms on the bar and smiled. It made his black beard crinkle. “Of course you are, Dave. Who isn’t?”
He gestured to the silent drinkers and laughed.
“I’m serious, D. And I really need a favor.”
Derek had always been one of the nicest guys I knew and he knew when the jokes stopped.
“Best come through,” he said and opened the little door at the end of the bar.
Tom followed me. We headed to a little room off the bar, all sides of it piled with cans of beer and bottles of spirits. Through the wall, the murmur of the news was a steady throb.
“What’s up?” Derek said and smiled at Tom. “He got you into trouble, young man?”
“Not quite.” Tom tried a smile. It made him look like he was about to vomit. Derek’s smile faded.
“Here it is, D. I need three days off and I need an advance on next week’s wages.” I said it as fast as I could.
Derek stared at me and licked his lips. In the little room and given the trapped heat in the pub, we were all sweating.
“I have to ask why,” he said.
“It’s about Ashleigh. She’s—”
“Okay.”
“What?”
He’d held up a hand to stop me as soon as I said my daughter’s name. “I said okay. Three days. Fine. Money. Fine.”
With that, he squeezed past us and returned to the bar. At the till, he yanked the drawer open and pulled notes free.
“Just like that?” I said.
He kept pulling money out. “I’ve got a daughter, too, Dave.”