by S Williams
95
Constantine and his remaining crew stumble up the escalators to the next level. They are half blind and retching, blisters erupting from any exposed skin. It was lucky that they were on the Northern line platform, as it is less deep than the Piccadilly one. By the time they reach the escalators below the ticket concourse the gas has thinned out. It now forms a swirling, viscous pool about their feet. Constantine is the least affected. When the canisters blew, and he saw the gas rolling towards them, he immediately drew his tee shirt up over his mouth and nose, and then he held his breath, and smashed a vending machine and snatched a bottle of water. Taking the cap off, he poured the water over the cloth round his mouth. After that, he grabbed the people with him, and pulled them off the platform and up the escalators. Behind them people stagger out of the tunnel, blind and firing indiscriminately. Constantine is amazed that neither he nor his crew are hit by random bullets as they stagger through the arch into the escalator hall.
They travel up the final set of moving stairs below the ticket concourse. The LED posters on the walls are showing scenes from the station below them. Tuesday must have set up remote cameras and patched them into the station network, thinks Constantine, one part of his brain grudgingly admiring. The screens show people lurching around, screaming, and firing at anything that moves. Down near the tunnels the gas is like a river, with the would-be murderers wading through it, scratching at their eyes, and shooting each other.
‘Well at least the fucking dub music has finished,’ Constantine mutters, pushing his men onto the final escalator. He waits till they’re a third of the way up, gets on, then lies down on the cold, metal steps.
96
All things considered, I think it’s gone rather well. After I’d said bye-bye to the boys on the Piccadilly line, I scoobied up to the ticket concourse and waited for the fun to start. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I get pleasure from the death and destruction of those who want to kill me. Just because they’re murderers, rapists, peddlers of drugs and despair, and all-round soulless deadheads, it doesn’t make it fun. What makes it fun is they’re so fucking shit at it. They think they’re something special, with their guns and power.
Well, look at them. They’re not fucking special; they’re just dying, and dying badly. In fact, if they weren’t dying, they should just blow their brains out in embarrassment, for being made to look like playschool tossers by a girl.
I look at my tablet. I can see from the phone tags on my screen that some of them have made it to the escalator in front of me.
Clap clap.
I pull the 1934 Russian PB 9mm silenced pistol from my thigh holster and point it at the top of the escalator, feeling very Resident Evil. Didn’t find that one did you, Professor?
As the first hoodlum comes in sight, appearing like a toy on a fairground game, I shoot him through the mouth. I don’t want him screaming to his baby-killing cronies. The only noise from the gun is a tiny phutt. As the first one falls to his knees the second one comes into sight. I shoot him in the heart while he’s still rubbing his eyes, trying to get the bromide sting out of them, wondering what the hell is happening. I walk over to the top of the descending escalator and crouch down between the scarred metal sides. The machinery driving the stairs is old and in need of a service. With no other ambient noise going on I can hear the grating and the grinding of it. I crouch there and wait for the third bad boy. There is a whining in my head and the snow storm behind my eyes is at full blow. There is a slight possibility that I may be losing it a bit. As he steps over his dead buddies, gun held out in front of him pointed at where I was, I shoot him in the side of his head.
Bang bang. Everyone’s dead. Boo-hoo. All that’s left is the metal stairs, grinding their way to forever.
I get up and walk back to where my bag is. I sense rather than hear something. Maybe a slight difference in the tone of the escalator as it turns. Maybe a shadow, or a shadow of a shadow. I’m spinning round and pointing the pistol but I’m too late. Of course I am. In my head I’m three years too late, but right now I’m just too late, period. I can see him lying on the metal floor of the escalator, cloth round his mouth and a big, never-wake-up gun extended in front of him. I see him squeeze the trigger and I feel something punch me in the shoulder. I know it’s a bullet but it doesn’t feel like a little slug of metal. It feels like a sledge-hammer. There’s no sound accompanying the shot, but I don’t know if that’s because he has fitted a silencer, or the detonation is so fucking loud I’ve gone deaf. It doesn’t matter. I’m spun round, and then suddenly I’m spun round the other way as a second bullet hits me in the leg. Nice shooting, fuck-face. I fall down and stay down. Not on purpose. I just can’t move. I can feel my heart accelerating, giving my body adrenalin to keep it working. To stop it shutting down and dying. The man points his gun at me a bit longer, to see if I’ve got anything left. His arm is extended past the end of the escalator, and his shoulders are where the flattened steps disappear into the heart of the machine. Then he gets up and walks towards me.
No. No, I haven’t got anything left.
Nothing at all.
97
Constantine steps over the three dead bodies of his gang members and walks towards Tuesday. She is still on the floor, her body looks like a thrown doll. Her legs are splayed out, blood seeping from her left thigh, and her right shoulder is just plain wrong where the bullet has shattered the bone. She is breathing quickly, but with no depth. Constantine keeps the gun pointed at her, but he can tell she’s got nothing left. Nothing left inside her. Now she’s just a little girl, trying to stay alive. Constantine smiles.
‘Hello, Tuesday. We’ve had some fun today, haven’t we?’ He walks over, kicks her gun out of reach, and body-searches her. He is not gentle as he pats her down. He takes her tablet out of the pocket of her pilot trousers. It takes him a little while because there are so many pockets. Amazingly, the tablet is still working. Constantine notes the GPS glympse tags of all the people down in the station, stumbling about in the bromide fog, and the unmoving tags of the gang boys six metres away.
‘Very clever, little girl. You’ve done some truly amazing things over the last few weeks.’ He taps a few keys on the tablet, changing the screen to the control panel. He taps the buttons a few more times and the images that were on the LED posters cease. The station is now still, except for Constantine, who has stood up and is pacing back and forth. After a moment he stops and looks again at the broken girl lying at his feet.
‘You know I’ve been told not to kill you, don’t you, little girl? You know I’ve got to cut your hands off and then take you back to Mr Slater? The money and resources you’ve cost him, I think he might want to make an example of you.’ Constantine is clearly enjoying this. His pulls an elegant silver cigarette case out of his pocket and removes a black-papered Sobranie. He places the gold-tipped cigarette in the corner of his mouth and removes a Zippo from his pocket.
‘You’ll never get me out of here. The police will stop you,’ says Tuesday, panting slightly, spit hanging out of the corner of her mouth.
Constantine laughs, lighting his cigarette with the Zippo, which he fires up by flipping it open and scrimming the cog down his trouser leg. ‘Stupid girl! He owns the police! The amount of drugs and guns he deals in, he couldn’t do it without the cooperation of the police. Everyone knows that! Even the fucking school kids know that, Tuesday.’
‘Yeah, well. I guess he owns you too, blood.’
Constantine smiles, blowing a plume of white smoke towards the girl. ‘Nobody owns me, Tuesday. Or maybe everybody does. I’m just a gun for hire. Tell me, though. I’m interested. What did this man do to you to make all this happen? To fuck you up so royally? Oh, I know your baby died, and she died on a Tuesday. That’s why you took the name, yes? Like a respect thing.’
‘You’ve got no idea.’
‘No, I get it. I really do. Your baby dies, and so by calling yourself Tuesday you keep her alive.’ He taps h
is head gently. ‘In here.’
‘My baby didn’t just die, Mister I’m a gun-for-hire, too-hard-for-cancer.’ Tuesday spits on the floor. Her spit is flecked with red. ‘My baby was stolen, and then broken down.’ Constantine moves his head to one side, waiting. ‘For parts,’ she almost whispers.
For a while there’s no noise in the station. Just the sense of noise; sub noise, coming up from the tunnels below. Tuesday is finding it hard to breathe. There is an ever-growing pool of blood beneath her thigh. After a time, she continues. ‘The Refuge. The whole place was a scam. Not the nurses and shit, but the set-up. They’d take in runaway girls who were pregnant. Half of them were rape pregnancies from the gang-bangers in your mate’s little outfit.’
‘I told you, he’s not my friend.’ Constantine stubs the cigarette out under his suede desert boot.
Tuesday spits more blood onto the tiled floor. ‘Whatever. Anyway it had police protection, all the way up. Nobody found us. Nobody bothered with us. We just waited there and had our babies, thinking the state might actually have a good side.’ Tuesday laughs without humour. ‘What a fucking joke. The whole place was a cutting shop. They’d deliver the babies, then kill the babies, then break them down. Kidneys. Hearts. Everything had a price. They’d harvest the babies, then your boss would sell them on. What do you think of that?’
Constantine contemplates her words for a moment or two, clicking his teeth together repeatedly. The sound makes a sinister echo around the hall.
‘Poor girl. Sad little never-mother. That must have broken your mind, yes? Did you have to watch?’ His eyes are alive with dark merriment.
Tuesday is crying, but she is quite clearly bleeding away too. Constantine sits down cross-legged in front of her, placing the tablet on the concourse floor. Tuesday swallows hard, fixing him with her gaze.
‘But not everyone was in on it. There was this doctor, Suzanne, who sussed it all out. She told me her dad was in the police. The proper police. Not those fuckers in the tunnel. She told me that she was going to go to him, make it all end. But he never showed. They made her end, instead. They made everything stop.’ She pauses, either because she has no breath left since she has two holes in her body through which her life is bleeding out, or because the memories playing on the screen in her head make a horror film. ‘After they’d killed my baby and stolen her body I went blind, just white-ed out. They thought I was nothing, a street girl who was fucked up, but I grabbed a scalpel and followed him out. I was too late to save Suzanne, but I stopped his clock.’
‘Yes. I saw the stills. Really, very nice work.’ Constantine smiles at her, as if he’s watching a clever animal in the circus, and then he stops smiling. ‘I’m going to put you to sleep now, Tuesday, and when you wake up you’ll be in hell, and I’ll have been paid and will be long gone. What do you think of that?’
Tuesday gazes at him, empty. Head empty, heart empty, womb empty.
‘I win, little girl,’ Constantine, grins. ‘You lose.’
Tuesday continues to stare at him a moment longer. Her pupils are pinpricks as the last of her adrenalin flies round her body, trying to keep it functioning.
‘Honeytrap,’ she whispers.
‘What?’
‘Just fucking shoot him, will you?’ Tuesday looks up at the ceiling.
‘What?’ Constantine is confused. ‘What did you say?’
‘You heard what he did? What he does? I’m too tired for fucking about. Just put a bullet in him so we can all go to sleep.’ Tuesday closes her eyes, and Constantine spins around, gun extended as the bullet enters his shoulder.
‘You, my friend, are fucking under arrest,’ says DI Loss, his gun rock-steady in his hand, pointing at Constantine’s heart.
98
Mister Ice-cold-dickhead is so busy rubbing himself up on having shot me that he didn’t see them by the ticket office.
Whoops.
My body feels like it’s crashing every time my heart beats. The pain is so bad I want to shut down and throw up at the same time, but I have to keep the man’s attention on me so that the detectives can get in a position to save my pretty self. I tell him about the Refuge, about how his people, the people he hangs with, would cut up little babies, and sell them off for scrap. It’s absolutely no surprise to me that he is unmoved, but I can see that Loss and Stone are devastated. Of course they are. They’re real people, one of them with a real dead daughter. I’m talking about Suzanne as well, trying to tell him what she meant to me. Trying to convey it to DI Loss, in case Fuck-head here goes all country and decides to shoot me dead anyway.
And all the time I can feel the tide turning. The waves of pain that crash in my body are having less impact. It’s lucky the lights are back on, because my senses are only working part-time.
I’m shutting down now.
Eventually, when I think that Assassin Boy has dug a big enough hole, I tell them to shut him up.
He looks confused. He thinks he’s so clever, bringing down a girl like me. What a shame he’s not.
Win, lose, who cares. I’ll leave it to them.
I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes.
‘For fuck’s sake, just shoot him.’
I barely hear the sound of the gun.
99
DI Loss and DS Stone walk towards Tuesday and Constantine. Loss has his gun straight-armed out in front of him, and Stone is scanning the ticket office for signs of anyone else; anybody who might harm them. As far as she can hear, all the action seems to be coming from down on the platforms, but she’s not taking any chances. Loss continues to point his gun at Constantine, stepping over the bodies at the top of the escalator.
‘Well look who it is, Laurel and Hardy,’ Constantine is speaking through clenched teeth. There is a small wound in his shoulder where DI Loss’s bullet grazed it, but he does not appear to be too badly hurt.
Unlike Tuesday. Even if she isn’t wearing ghost-white make-up, she looks more dead than alive. Her breathing is irregular and her eyes are closed.
‘About bloody time,’ she whispers. Her voice is like a breeze, barely disturbing the silence of the station.
‘Tuesday,’ says Loss, never taking his eyes off Constantine. ‘I’m so sorry about your daughter.’ Constantine just smiles at him, as though he’s waiting for the detective to tell him a joke.
‘Same,’ says Tuesday, a worrying rattle in the back of her throat, eyes closed, her voice barely audible.
‘Well here’s another fine mess you’ve got yourself into, Mr Policeman,’ quips Constantine, scratching the top of his head with his right hand, in an imitation of Stan Laurel. ‘Why don’t you go and get some handcuffs off your friends outside?’ Constantine nods towards the steps leading to the street above them, and then widens his eyes in mock shock, and brings his hand down in front of his mouth. ‘Oh, that’s right; they’re not your friends, are they? They’re my friends. You and your partner are just in a little bit over your heads here. I tell you what. Why don’t you let me take our teeny murder-girl here back to my employer, and I promise not to ruin your lives forever?’ Constantine drops his hand to his side and grins at them.
DS Stone is still looking around. She can hear some noises coming from the levels below her. Maybe nearer than they were a few minutes ago. Maybe a lot nearer.
‘Sir? I think the bad guys are on their way up. Whatever we’re going to do, we’d better do it quickly.’
Loss shifts his attention from Tuesday, with her eyes closed, lines of pain mapping her face, to Constantine with his feral grin. He continues to point the gun at him. ‘I tell you what, Sunshine: my life was ruined forever when your boss decided to kill my daughter. How about I stop your clock and we call it a night?’
Constantine stops grinning and licks his lips.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ croaks the girl on the floor. ‘How about you knock him unconscious so I don’t have to suffer the pain of listening to his brain trying to work, and I’ll tell you the plan?’
‘There’s a plan?’ Stone looks at the girl practically dead in front of her.
Tuesday opens her eyes long enough to return her look. ‘’Course there’s a plan. I’ve spent three years doing this. There’s nothing but a plan.’
‘And this is part of it?’ Loss nods at the small river of blood leaving Tuesday’s body. Tuesday lowers her head slightly. Loss can’t tell if it’s in acknowledgment of what he said, or if she’s about to lose consciousness.
‘All right, Smart-arse. Plans, plural. Not plan A, I admit. More plan X.’
There is a weighty crunch and Constantine slumps prone to the floor. Behind him, Stone, holding a 20 centimetre length of a metal Tannoy microphone, looks extremely pleased with herself.
‘Wanker,’ she says, staring down at Constantine’s unconscious body.
‘There you are with the swearing, again,’ says Loss, kneeling down next to Tuesday and examining her wounds. He does not like what he sees.
‘Right, we’ve got to get you to a hospital. Immediately.’
‘You think?’ says Tuesday, managing to convey sarcasm whilst coughing. Her eyes are still closed. She takes a deep breath and then says: ‘All right, here’s how it is. You’ve got police and thieves coming up from the platforms below, hardwired to shoot anything that moves. You’ve got laughing boy here who, when he wakes up, will slit your throat just to clear his head. You’ve got corrupt coppers at every exit, no doubt with orders to make sure we never make it into custody, and you’ve got a half dead, but very good-looking, hard-as-nails girl who needs urgent medical attention. So how about you sack the double act and get me to hospital.’