by Mark Speed
“I suggest you –”
“Thank you, Mr Dolt. Operational emergency procedures dictate that I must get on with the task in hand. If the Galactic Council considers that the illegal aliens are still a threat then the emergency status still stands, does it not?”
Dolt made silent movements with his mouth like a goldfish.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Thank you so much for your input.” He shut the door firmly and went back to his desk. He took out his Tsk Army Ultraknife and thought at it for a fraction of a second. He held it against the end of the mandible that was scorched. It took a few seconds longer than he had thought it would, but the Ultraknife cut through it, leaving a fresh edge. He took a few more seconds to cut a sample from that, then put them both in his pocket. He didn’t know exactly where his Spectrel was, but he could still give her samples to analyse.
The mandible itself had arrived carefully packaged by Peterson to prevent it from cutting itself loose. She’d used wedges of polystyrene to hold it in place inside a piece of folded cardboard. He carefully wrapped it again. “One for the trophy cabinet,” he said under his breath, and set off back home.
Kevin had taken a Tube to Stockwell and then a bus up to Tulse Hill. A seat on the upper deck gave him a bird’s eye view of his estate as the bus climbed the hill. It was the first time he’d been back in days. Up until a week ago he’d been the go-to guy if you needed your stolen laptop or computer unlocked. Then it had all gone wrong for his clients. Stolen devices had been traced by the police; key boys in the Tulse Hill Crew had been arrested, and the blame pinned on his ineptitude for not having deleted tracking software. Someone – an out-of-towner it transpired – had taken over his computer and sabotaged his handiwork. They’d used his computer to try to hack into Doctor How’s Spectrel via David Where’s. The Doctor had saved him from a certain beating, and possibly something worse, by using his Tsk Army Ultraknife to addle their brains. In the days immediately afterwards the remaining Crew members had stayed away from him, like dazed and scalded cats – but he wasn’t sure how long the effects would last.
So much water under the bridge. He’d seen things the Crew wouldn’t even believe were possible. Kevin had left the estate a nerd, but felt like he was returning a battle-hardened warrior. He had new clothes, and a deeper feeling of confidence than he’d ever had. Still, as he got off at his regular stop he couldn’t help feeling a little naked and vulnerable without the power-assisted combat suit and the Con-Bat he’d used to help Doctor How and Trinity defeat giant killer beetles the day before.
He looked around the neighbourhood he’d grown up in and saw what a small world it was he’d inhabited. Boys a decade younger than him could be stabbed for crossing the road from one postcode to another, yet they lived in an almost infinitely large universe. Unknown numbers of aliens – out-of-towners – were living amongst them in ordinary dwellings. He looked around again.
When they’d visited the Plenscas he’d thought the Rindan consul and her husband had lived in a nice flat in a good area and had assumed that the whole out-of-town community would live as comfortably. Indeed, he assumed that the Plenscas, being religious and pious, would be living a relatively humble life compared to some of the others. Most of the rest, he’d assumed, would be living in the finest areas of London – Mayfair, Westminster and Kensington. That morning’s visit to the… he struggled to find a name for it… the slime – there was no other word for it, for them, he corrected himself – in Tooting had put paid to that. There was a being which was perfectly happy to live in a dank and dark basement and do nothing but exist in solitude. And the Cleaners had proved that out-of-towners could take on the appearance of anyone.
Then he wondered about all the Eastern Europeans who’d flocked to London – how many of those he took to be Eastern European were not actually from Eastern Europe, but from out of town? How long had they been here? As long as the Doctor? How many of the people in the Establishment weren’t human? Now that he thought about it, he didn’t know whether Doctor How was all he appeared to be either. The two cousins he’d met looked very human, but then the Time Keepers were masters of technology beyond any human’s comprehension. Were the Time Lords hideously ugly creatures underneath a biomask veneer? Tulse Hill had a considerable variety of housing, both social and private, and the proportion of immigrants was very high – how many of the dwellings he’d seen on his short bus journey were occupied by non-humans?
More importantly: what did they want? What brought them to Earth, and to London specifically? It didn’t seem that the Doctor had business elsewhere on the planet.
But here he was, back in the small corner of London he’d grown up in. With his mixed-race heritage and out-of-place blue eyes, he’d always felt alien himself.
He walked into the open space in front of the huddle of low-rise apartment blocks and felt familiar eyes on him. He was pretty sure he’d have been spotted getting on the bus in Brixton. That was the way in this corner of the metropolis. Sure enough, he saw a window swing open on the third floor of one of the buildings. Jabba the Hutt leaned out and took a long look at him. Jabba had got his nickname from the apparent stream of Pizza Hut deliveries to his flat. He’d since changed to Domino’s but the name had stuck. A week ago Kevin wouldn’t have stared back, but now he did. If you have a dog spooked, you let it know you’re still not afraid. His heartbeat quickened with the thrill and fear of defying the thug’s authority.
He smiled and waved, then turned away to put his key fob against the security reader and tapped in the code. The door to the stairwell opened and he trotted up the stairs. He unlocked the front door and went in to the familiar smell of home.
“Kevin?” called his mother from the kitchen.
“Hi Mum,” he said as she stormed into the living room. He braced himself for a barrage for having been out of touch.
“Thanks for the voicemail. That was very considerate of you.”
“Uh?” He was lost – he’d not even texted his mother, let alone left her any voicemails. Then he remembered that the Doctor had said he’d had a bot leave a voicemail for him. “Yeah, no problem.”
“And thanks to you and Doctor How for bringing in those casualties yesterday. They weren’t my patients but I heard only good things through the grapevine about what he achieved.”
“Right.” He decided to test the deeper water. “It wasn’t a problem that we just rocked up with them like that?”
“Not at all. It’s an emergency department, Kevin. For the life of me I have no idea why the police were there either.” Her face took on an uncharacteristically puzzled look.
“Whassup, Mum?”
“Nothing. It’s all a bit confused, to be honest. I just know you did yourself proud, young man. That Doctor How – he’s a good influence on you. Is he feeding you right?”
“Yeah, I’m doing well.”
“Oh!” his mother said. “The time! I’m gonna be late for my shift. My alarm went all funny. If I’d not been on a two-to-ten shift I might not have woken up in time at all. There’s stuff in the fridge for you if you get hungry. Friday night – don’t be doing anything stupid.”
“Sure. See you later.”
She gave him a kiss and locked the door behind her.
Kevin wandered through to the kitchen and looked in the fridge. There was a Tupperware box of something Afro-Caribbean – fish and rice, it looked like. He took it out and plucked a fork from a drawer. He went over to the kitchen window and looked outside. On the windowsill there was a new piece of bric-a-brac: a white plastic flower with a yellow centre. It bobbed up and down on a bulbous blue plastic pot which was about three inches in diameter. It had two green plastic leaves that seemed to act as a counterweight to the stem and the flower. He picked it up and looked at it. On the top of the pot were a couple of small solar cells, of the type he’d seen on pocket calculators at school. His mother was always buying tacky rubbish like this. She would have been taken with the way it responded to the s
un. He shook his head and took the Tupperware bowl out of the kitchen and into his bedroom.
If the estate he’d grown up on now appeared small, his room was miniscule. It was risible for a man of his experience, he thought. But he recognised it as his own time capsule. It was not just a moment frozen in time from his previous life – his pre-Doctor How life – it was a museum exhibit. It was a diorama of the low expectations and limited horizons of his South London upbringing. The teenage posters of singers could go, for a start. He fired up his computer, which was probably the best on the estate, having been cobbled together from the latest cannibalised and stolen parts.
The time on the computer was way out. Faulty motherboard? he wondered. He ran a few checks. There was nothing wrong with any part of the software or hardware that he could detect, so he corrected the clock and began researching the news from the previous twenty-four hours. Apparently there was a rise in absenteeism in London. There was a bit of a scare about a virus affecting the internal clocks on computers across the capital, as well as on mobile phones. However, no virus could be found, and it was intermittent. A software glitch was thought to be the culprit.
The only thing related to his and the Doctor’s exploits that he could find was a story about a small tremor under Essex related to fracking. It was as if the whole series of spectacular events hadn’t happened. He leaned back in his chair and whistled. The world really was as he’d suspected it to be before any of this kicked off. Conspiracies and cover-ups were everywhere. It wasn’t exactly as he’d believed, but even his wildest beliefs hadn’t been too far-reaching.
An evening of nothingness yawned before him. He turned his attention back to his computer, donned his headset and joined a game of Rorrim. He gave a few lame excuses for his absence to the other people in his gaming posse as they prepared for a virtual assault on an alien citadel. As he blasted his way through a doorway and took out a couple of bug-eyed monsters, he wished he could tell them he’d played this game for real.
“Great shot, Kev!” shouted one of his team.
“Yeah, your play’s slick,” said another. “You’ve been away practising man.”
“For real,” said Kevin.
Earl had been working the sewers for nearly three decades. When he made new acquaintances and told them what he did, he would joke that it at least kept him out of the rain. Of course, it didn’t keep him out of the rain at all; if anything other than a light drizzle was forecast they weren’t allowed down to do the job – no matter what the emergency – because of the danger of flash floods.
Methane gas was another hazard, but the detectors were highly effective. As for explosions from the methane, he couldn’t remember a single one in all that time. Even the smell wasn’t quite as bad as people thought. Unless you came across rotting flesh, of course. A larger drowned animal that had been swept in that the rats hadn’t eaten – a cat or a dog maybe. You learnt not to pierce the skin of the carcass, or the putrid liquefied insides would burst out with an evil stench.
No, the biggest danger was slipping. If you slipped, you’d really be in the poo, he would tell the new lads on the job. Being covered in it was one thing, but cutting yourself was quite another. One of his mates had slipped, cut his hand through his glove and not said anything because he’d needed the overtime. They’d rushed him to hospital the next day when he fainted after putting his heavy work-wear on. You could have fried an egg on his forehead, his temperature was that high. It was septicaemia – blood poisoning. Two days later they’d amputated both his arms below the elbow. Two days after that his legs had gone below the knee. Earl didn’t know if he’d want to live after losing that lot. Still, he’d heard through the grapevine that the guy was happy enough. Amazing what people could cope with, he thought.
He gave a couple more jabs with his spade at the solidified mix of yellow-white fat and wet wipes caked on the roof. A particularly large lump of it dropped into the shallow water with a dull splash and he planted his boots on either side of the curved wall as it was carried back towards his mate Derek, who was manning the suction pipe. It stopped moving, so he edged along upstream of it, turned around and hacked at it to break it up. He swept it along with the blade of his spade and nodded over at Derek, seeing the beam of his helmet light dipping as he did so. They tried never to look at each other directly – the beams of their lights were LED these days, and a quick flash was painful on the eyes, and a little blinding. You didn’t want to lose your night vision. Derek acknowledged him with a wave. They’d take a break soon and then swap places to alleviate the monotony and share the hard work. Derek would welcome the chance to get away from the noise of the pump running on the surface.
Earl couldn’t wait to get to the position under the manhole, and to have a tiny patch of sky fifteen feet above him. Something was bothering him today and he couldn’t put his finger on it. He told himself it was the uncanny lack of rats. The myth that you were never more than ten feet from a rat in London was a complete fabrication from the nineteenth century. They weren’t even abundant in the sewers – but they were a constant presence. To have seen none at all this far into a shift was a first for him.
His mind turned over the possibilities. They’d either been poisoned or they’d been killed by a disease. What did he know about rats? Immune to a lot of poisons, and an animal had to be pretty resistant to disease to live in this filth. Rats didn’t get septicaemia when they got cuts, that was for sure.
If the rats had all died, then where were the bodies? He’d seen enough dead rats in his time to know that the carcasses got stuck in eddy currents. They’d crawl onto ledges well above the water when they were sick, and they’d die there. Not one body had he seen today. Why was it bothering him? He’d had nerves on day one of the job, but never since.
He stabbed at the fat with his spade. This was something that had got much worse in the last few years: fat and fancy tissues made of fibre that didn’t break up like toilet paper. Together they were a lethal combination, clogging London’s sewers. The restaurants didn’t care – they just chucked the fat down the drain at the end of every night, and there was nothing to stop them.
It had had one health benefit for himself though: it had made him give up takeaway food. He could see what the doctors were talking about now when they explained that fat clogged up arteries. He might be pushing fifty, but he thought he’d never been fitter, whereas some of his old school friends were diabetic now.
He felt something bang up against the back of his wading boots. The new lad, Arek, was ‘on point’. The use of this military patrol term was their black humour for being the most upstream worker – the one who’d clear enough of a way through for the next man behind if it was really thick.
Arek was a Pole. He was a good worker, and fearless too, but Earl couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to take a job in the London sewers. He could understand the younger ones coming over for jobs where they got to learn the language, like doing office work, or being a barista in a coffee shop. But you never got to say a word when you were down here, and the very nature of the job meant that language was limited. The Inuit might have a hundred words for snow, but there weren’t that many for turds – no matter how much time you spent with them. Once, Earl had tried to make a joke about the fact that you couldn’t polish a turd. When he’d written it out on paper to explain that ‘polish’ and ‘Polish’ had the same spelling but different meanings, Arek hadn’t really got the pun, and Earl had realised that associating the Polish with turds hadn’t been such a great idea in retrospect.
He stepped aside and helped Arek’s lump of fat along with a swish of his spade before turning around again.
Arek was facing upstream, his back to Earl. He saw him hack skilfully at one last big yellow-white mound of fat at shoulder height. It fell in one piece and splashed into the water in front of him. He stepped carefully over it and gave it a shove with the flat of his blade, sending it downstream to Earl, who saw that it was so big it was dammin
g the water behind it. It edged towards him and then stopped, the water and waste flowing over it. There was no sense in shouting over at Arek, who was splashing along the last few yards to an intersection, where the main tunnel split into two gaping black chasms that were tributaries to the section they were cleaning. The one on the right came from Balham and Tooting, and was likely to be the filthier of the two, given the high density of restaurants and takeaways in those locations. It veered off quite sharply compared to the one coming over from Streatham Hill.
Earl saw the beam of his own light wobble and realised he was shaking his head subconsciously. Arek wasn’t just fearless – he was curious with it. No harm in him going off to take a quick look and make a start on the next section. Earl glanced at his watch. Ten minutes until they swapped. He’d tackle Arek’s lump and then finish his own section on the way back downstream. He’d get out in the fresh air for half an hour, have a laugh and a cup of tea with the lads, and then spend the remainder of the shift doing the easy job of manning the suction pipe with a patch of sky over his head. The prospect cheered him no end, and settled his nerves.
He walked carefully up through the sewer to the large chunk of fat and wet wipes. He planted his feet either side of the curved wall and stepped over into the pool of liquid behind it, turned around and hacked it into smaller pieces, swishing them downstream towards Derek. The backed-up pool of sewage rushed past his boots and he felt the little impacts of turds against his heels. He waded back to the end of his section of roof. A few more digs with his spade and he’d be done. Keeping the beam of his light pointing at the roof and away from Derek, he started hacking. Out of one corner of his eye he could see Derek working the remains of Arek’s chunk of fat into the end of the suction pipe. The beam from Arek’s head torch was shining off the walls around him, and getting closer. There was something odd about the angle of the beam – it seemed to be coming from below, rather than head-height. A shadow of his legs was cast upwards. Something bumped into the back of his boots and he looked back over his shoulder.