The Scioneer

by Peter Bouvier

  Roma had completed a full circle of Queen’s Circus roundabout, killing at will and notching up a chilling tally of hyena casualties and fatalities. The exertion was finally beginning to take its toll when she approached the Queenstown Road exit, and she drew breath for a moment in the middle of the battle and focused on the people milling around the edge of the rumble. There, amongst the cowards and the spectators, she noticed somebody: a woman, and the part of Roma Bruce which was still human registered a fleeting memory, a spark of envy for the woman’s beauty.

  ‘I want a trophy,’ she growled.

  ***

  Lek paled at the scene in front of him. What had started as a rumble was now a war, raging like an inferno across a square mile. The dead were strewn everywhere, others sat at the edge of the crowds, grey with shock and nursing horrendous injuries, but still there must have been four hundred youths brawling on the street and on waste-ground in the centre of the roundabout.

  ‘What have we done?’ said Crystal, horrified. We’ve got to go back; get a later train, anything! We can’t go through this. It would be suicide.’

  Lek cursed their luck. He felt his escape slipping away from them, and the very idea of trying to survive for another hour - or maybe more - in this city brought tears to his eyes. He struggled to remain in control, realising he couldn’t let Crystal see him like this. ‘But we can’t. We can’t,’ he said to himself, knowing that they couldn’t stay where they were, couldn’t afford to wait, couldn’t carry on.

  They were weighing up the options when something in Crystal’s peripheral vision caught her attention. Before she had even turned her head, her subconscious screamed at her to move and she grabbed Lek by the wrist and yelled at him to run.

  Twenty yards to the end of the road at full pelt. Hand in hand, Lek and Crystal sprinted into the darkness of the Kidholme Housing Estate, screaming for help: the residents knew better than to open their doors to anybody on the night of a full moon, but they still peered out from behind their curtains at the strange couple fleeing across the courtyards. Crystal let out a cry when she heard the deep howl echoing off the walls around them and she knew they were being hunted.

  ‘Who is it?!’ shouted Lek. ‘What is it?!’

  ‘It’s the psycho who mugged us in the car. It’s the girl!’

  Another howl resounded in the deserted yards.

  ‘That isn’t a girl.’

  He pulled Crystal along a row of squat houses, moving as fast as he could and trying to keep low. They darted across a pampas grass verge and found themselves at the foot of a staircase leading up to the high-rise flats towering above them.

  Roma Bruce was barking somewhere in the network of housing rows and they could hear the sound of her footfalls as she followed their scent and closed the gap.

  ‘The lift!’

  ‘The doors won’t open! Curfew! Keep moving!’

  Crystal began to run up the steps, but Lek dragged her back. ‘No, she’ll trap us! This way!’ and they turned left and ran back in the direction of the main road, hoping to lose her in the crowds there. The estate was like a rabbit warren: a maze of walled gardens, underpasses and stairwells. The pair ran through a covered recyclo-bin shelter and into another courtyard, banging desperately on the doors they passed, in the hope that somebody, anybody, might take pity on them. It was useless.

  Roma Bruce could smell their fear and it drove her wild. She summoned the reserves of her own human DNA. ‘Barbie-doll,’ she sang, ‘Barbie-doll!’ ‘Where are you baby? You never… introduced me to that… fella of yours. I just want to be… friends,’ and she cackled hoarsely and the sound carried though the underpasses and sent a chill down Crystal’s spine.

  ‘There!’ called Lek suddenly. He pointed across the yard, but was already pulling Crystal in his direction. He could see the flames of a burning car on the corner of Nine Elms Lane. When he saw that their path was blocked by a padlocked iron gate, too high to climb, he swore bitterly. In his desperation to be in the open space, drawing out the distance between themselves and the monster, Lek made his mistake. He turned down a blind alley.

  Together Lek and Crystal ran into the shadows, into the darkness of the dead end. Lek slammed the palms of his hands against the brick wall and cursed. Twelve feet above him, the razor-wire glinted in the moonlight. He scrabbled desperately at the wall, hoping to find any crack, any foothold, knowing that there would be none, and that he had no chance of climbing it. Crystal frantically searched the ground at her feet for anything that would pass as a weapon. She only found an empty coke can and tossed it aside.

  Roma Bruce sloped into the courtyard. She picked out the two figures at the end of the passageway, seeing them as clear as day, and she laughed cruelly again, knowing that there was no way out for them. She gave a low growl to announce her presence and felt a shudder of excitement as she saw their heads snap up in fear. Roma Bruce wanted to hold that pink hair again, wanted to know how it would feel against her own skin, wanted to rip it from the scalp of that smug bitch with her model good looks who had never in her easy life had to touch an ounce of Bad Moon to get a man’s attention. She stepped into the alley.

  Lek breathed deeply. He had an idea but didn’t like it. He needed time to consider the implications. But there is no time, he told himself, stop thinking like a scientist!

  ‘This... girl. She’s going to kill us, right?’ Lek already knew the answer. ‘And there’s no way out of here, is there?’ He put his hand inside his pocket. If Crystal replied, he didn’t hear her. ‘If we stay, we’re dead. And if we miss that train, we’re also dead’. He pulled out a handful of extracts and a hypo. ‘OK then, let’s do this.’ Lek looked down the alley – fifty yards away, he could see Roma’s yellow eyes glowing in the dark. He spun around and held the first vial up to the moonlight. ‘Octopus,’ he cursed, and held up another, ‘Arctic fox... no,’ and then another ‘Moose.’

  ‘Lek! Do something!’ hissed Crystal.

  ‘I AM!’ Lek shouted and held another vial up to the moon, ‘Got it!’

  He clipped the vial into the hypo, took another deep breath and rammed the needle into his own neck.

  ‘Lek! Lek! What did you just give yourself?’

  Roma took a few paces forward, sniffing the air. Something wasn’t right.

  Lek was having trouble breathing. He leant forward, choking for air and thought he was about to vomit. His chest was on fire. He swallowed hard and forced out a single word.

  ‘Grizzly.’

  Lek only created the formula for scions. He was the scientific mastermind behind the operation. In his tiny high-rise lab, overlooking the river – the apartment he would never see again – he made up a tiny amount of the drug from his vast collection of replica bases, mixed it with appropriate levels of weak alkaline solution and alcohol to increase its uptake, and tested it on a mouse. Tigranol, for example, contained a number of animal extracts, carefully mixed to balance out the effects of pure tiger DNA. After all, nobody really wanted to share their bed with a tiger. But a tiger with his claws clipped and his fangs filed down, with extracts of dolphin or spaniel – that was another matter. When he was sure that it was clinically safe enough for the streets, he passed his workings on to a group of chemists, none of whom knew one another, working out of a number of separate company-owned laboratories throughout the city. Each chemist was given a part of the formula to make into a functioning element of the final drug. Vast quantities of these elements were then delivered to the ‘cutter’ – a paranoid schizophrenic named Barry Krantz who sat happily all day in his flat in Bethnal Green mixing the packets as they arrived from the four corners of London, with common low-tox, low-effect agents: extracts of Golden Labrador, Jersey cow, and so on, as well as baking soda and talcum powder. There was no point in flooding the market with one-hundred percent pure product when users were happy to take drugs which were only sixteen percent shark, or gorilla, or wolf. When this part of the operation was complete, a sample of the end product
was bicycle-couriered back to Lek for final testing and the circle was complete. As much as he was a scientist though, Lek also believed himself to be something of an artist, and he liked nothing better than to sit under the cherry-trees in Finsbury Park, or the olive groves around Camden and create another masterpiece, another scion symphony from the bases he always carried around in his briefcase and test it when he got home to his lab. So it was that he had been able to administer a pure shot of sloth extract into the unsuspecting Delić that afternoon, and how now, in a dead-end alley in the Kidholme residential estate in Battersea, with his lap-dancer girlfriend by his side, facing down a young woman who had overdosed on one of his own creations and in doing so had permanently crossed her own DNA with that of a wolf, Lek Gorski had imbued himself with the brute strength, the savage power and the ferocity of an Alaskan grizzly bear.

  ‘Lek! LEK!’ screamed Crystal, ‘You’re dying!’

  ‘N..No’ Lek stammered.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Ch…changing. Grafting.’

  ‘Ringo Starr, Lek! She’s coming!’

  Roma was moving stealthily down the passage, smelling the change in her prey. The female reeked of fear and she could see that the male was doubled over in agony, but there was something new in him….

  ‘Get… behind… me!’ Lek managed to say, and Crystal heard his voice lower an octave over the words.

  ‘How long will it take to work?’

  ‘SecONDS!’ bellowed Lek, as Roma lowered her head and charged at them.

  Lek felt like he had been reborn. Anybody looking at him, standing there with his beautox parlour haircut, bloodstained face and XXL sports suit hanging off his lean frame would have seen a madman, but inside, Lek’s muscles were charged with electricity and his bones felt like reinforced steel. Why didn’t you let me out years ago? screamed the Grizzly in his head and Lek was lost for an answer. He wasn’t big, by any standard, but even an average man forced to work out in the Dynagym for an hour every day had fairly decent muscle tone. Lek pulled himself to his full height, stretched his arms back behind him, and roared like a beast as Roma launched her attack. In a move which reminded Crystal of a man crashing a pair of cymbals together, she saw Lek catch the wolf with both hands in mid air, before throwing her back against the ground. With a strangled yelp, more from surprise than pain, Roma scrambled to her feet, gathered herself and came again, rising up on her hind legs to slash at Lek’s chest and neck. ‘Get BACK!’ yelled Lek and clouted her in the muzzle with a stinging blow. Her head cracked off the wall and for an instant, Lek saw more than confusion in her eyes. Crystal screamed and clung to his back for safety and without thinking, he twisted in his rage and knocked her to the floor. Roma seized the opportunity his momentary distraction had afforded her and darted forward to close her jaws around his leg. She sunk her teeth down to his shinbone - Lek roared out in pain and instinctively kicked her away. She hit the edge of a steel ash-bin and felt a rib break. In an instant, Lek threw his weight on top of her and the two rolled around in the alleyway, like animals, each trying to pin the other to the ground. Roma was fast and vicious, rabbit-kicking him in the stomach and groin as they grappled, catching him with her claws and ripping his skin, but the bear felt only bramble-scratches and fought on furiously. Lek had the weight advantage and shifted his bulk, rolling her over and headbutting her with all his might. Roma was stunned and Lek saw his moment, pulling her towards him by the shoulders and smashing her head down against the cobblestones again and again. He tried to hold on to his humanity, but the bear in him would not be restrained and released all of Lek’s anger in a torrent of violence. Years of pent-up aggression and frustration, two decades of living in fear of his life, and the last cherry-on-the-cake day he had spent running from Delić, Vidmar and Pechev, Pechev, Pechev poured out of Lek Gorski and he cracked Roma’s head on the ground with such rage, he heard her skull fracture and she finally gave up the fight and lost consciousness. Lek leaned back, throwing out his chest in victory and then lowered his head again to bellow once more in Roma’s grotesque face, blood and spit running from his bottom lip. He rolled off her then, and crouching like a man who had been stabbed in the stomach, limped a few paces down the alley on his wounded leg, before collapsing in a heap against the wall.

  Crystal ran and threw her arms around him. There was still fire in his eyes, but Lek was there too and he held his shaking hands in front of his face and whispered gruffly, ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You saved us, Lek. You saved our lives!’

  ‘My leg!’ he said through gritted teeth, when he saw the crooked rows of puncture wounds bleeding through the tattered fabric of his trouser leg. Crystal tore the sleeve off his sports suit and having absolutely no clue about first aid, fashioned a makeshift tourniquet around his shin.

  ‘We’ll have to get that looked at. And you’ll need a shot,’ she remarked crisply, trying to sound like a nurse.

  ‘I c..c.. can’t stop sh…shaking,’ whispered Lek.

  ‘It’s shock.’

  ‘N.. no. It’s the dr..drugs. Reacting with m..my adrenaline.’

  ‘Just lie down for a moment,’ Crystal said.

  ‘No time,’ said Lek, and with one hand on Crystal’s shoulder and the other on the wall, he forced himself into a standing position and together they hobbled back through the courtyards.

  Chapter 30

  In the smoke filled air of Battersea, in the middle of a wild pack-clash, it seemed as though the smell of Roma Bruce suddenly blossomed in the night air like the aroma of wild jasmine in Harlesden, and her pack looked at one another, bewildered by the bizarre phenomenon. Only Dahlia Ortega understood its true meaning, and she led the pack back around the Queen’s Circus, dodging the missiles and avoiding the skirmishes, through the side streets of Battersea without questioning herself. Their pace slowed and the trail led them to a brick wall outside a housing estate. One by one, they leapt up and over the razor wire and dropped gracefully into the alley below.

  While the Twins cowered in the corner of the alley, unsure of what to say or where to look, Zevon ran to be at Roma’s side and was the first to touch her. Blood had pooled behind her head. ‘Don’t speak Roma. We’ll get a doctor. We’ll get you to a hospital. I don’t know. Just, just stay with me.’ He had known her demise was inevitable, having already outlived the average lifespan of a pack leader, and even though he had begun to resent her control over him, in all aspects of his life, he was still crushed. Here she was, his childhood friend, the wolf he had served under for six years – stealing, mugging and even killing at her command. To see her fallen made him question his own mortality. He felt like a part of himself was dying with her and his eyes flooded with tears. He stared down at her battered face and asked through choking sobs, ‘Who did this to you?’

  Before she could even try to answer, Dahlia told Zevon to step away.

  She knelt down and turned her cold eyes on Roma. Her voice was like ice. ‘Roma. I cannot challenge you now, but know that your actions tonight have brought disgrace on the name of the Brixton Wolves.’

  ‘How… dare… you?’ whispered Roma, but all the venom of her voice had already died, and she sounded beaten.

  ‘The boy you killed was an innocent. A no-mark. You broke the agreement of the prelim and now you’ve started a war. It will take a strong leader to right your wrongs.’

  ‘Zevon,’ croaked Roma.

  ‘No, you have forfeited the right to choose your successor. Besides, I paid for Zevon’s life in drugs and now I own him. Zevon will not replace you. I am the leader of the pack. I am Alpha.’

  Roma’s eyes narrowed slightly, and she bared her twisted fangs at her lieutenant’s insolence, but Dahlia only stood up, rolled the muscles at the base of her neck and placed her foot on Roma’s windpipe. She took a long look into the eyes of the three males before pressing down with her full weight.

  ‘The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.’

  ***

  What had
changed? Everything and nothing. Arid Bomani was still fifteen; still the son of a shipping merchant and a school inspector; still a schoolboy himself. In the morning, he would be sitting in a classroom. Osaze would not. Where was his body now? In a hospital? Or a mortuary? Arid didn’t even know how such arrangements were made. His brain struggled to cope with the idea of returning to the life he had known earlier that day, his life before the rumble. And where were his new friends now? Those who had been so keen to share their drugs and to laugh and speak of their war, and the new revolution. Ulan and Fogo? Yakuba? Gone. Back into their holes. In a daze, Arid placed one foot in front of the other and walked around the Queen’s Circus, until his emotions got the better of him and he broke down and cried again for the loss of his friend. Arid Bomani was a good boy.

  ***

  Queen’s Circus was deserted. The chilling silence was fractured by the sound of a siren to the east. The only evidence of the all-out war which had been raging not fifteen minutes earlier was the smouldering recyclo-bins, smashed glass and burnt out Credibus shelters. All the bodies had been removed, either carried off by the gangs themselves, or taken away by the authorities who had appeared as if by magic when the violence ended and the cease-fire was called. The only figure still on the scene as Lek and Crystal made their way over the roundabout was a young black kid, sitting on the kerb with his head in his hands.

  ‘We’re not going to make it,’ Crystal said despondently.

  ‘We have to,’ Lek snapped, ‘we’ve come too far to give up now. We’ve got seventeen minutes to make it to Victoria before that Smarte Locker opens.’

  ‘Forget the money Lek. I’m thinking about the train.’

  ‘Forget the money? Are you kidding? That’s our ticket out of here.’

  ‘A hundred grand? How long do you think we can survive on that?’

  ‘It’s enough to keep us under the radar while we make our escape. Besides, Pechev controls all my money. I just used to send him the bills.’