Hyenas

by Michael Sellars

  Then, from further off than the last clatter, the hyena said, “Bingo. Tom Sawyer.”

  Jay peered over the counter. On the far side of the shop floor in what, judging by the remnants of undersized tables and chairs, had been the children's section, was a tall man, at least six foot four, thin despite his winter padding, wearing a Peruvian-style bobble hat. He was dropping whatever minimally damaged books he could find into a large backpack. There was no sign of a weapon and none of the military and riot-gear motley of Pepper's militia.

  Jay thought about the Jerusalem, the prospect of taking it out onto the Mersey and then the Irish Sea alone. And once he found a safe place, some little island, then what?

  He stood and then cleared his throat to speak.

  In a single fluid motion, the book hunter drew a small revolver from his pack, spun to face Jay and fired.

  Chapter 12

  The first bullet hit the blistered cash register, sending up a shower of carbon flakes.

  “Jesus!” Before Jay could raise his hands to signal his surrender, the book hunter squeezed the trigger again.

  The second bullet whined past Jay's left ear, hitting the wall behind him with a sound that was equal parts crack and thud. He didn't even realise he'd scrunched his eyes shut, every muscle in his body painfully tense, until the book hunter said, “Christ, I could have shot you, you fucking bell-end!”

  Jay opened his eyes. The book hunter had lowered his weapon, but not completely.

  “I thought you were a fucking zombie,” said the book hunter. “You're lucky I've got the eyesight of a mole with cataracts or you'd have a bullet in you right now. I mean, it's only a .22, so at this distance, it's only slightly more dangerous than a hole punch, but still, you know, it'd fucking hurt, like being stabbed really hard with a blunt pencil. I'm Brian Hughes. Brian. Who the fuck are you? And could you put the knife down, please? It's making me want to shoot at you again.”

  Jay lowered his hands and put the paring knife on the counter in front of him. Carbon flakes were swirling around him, like black snow.

  “I'm Jason Garvey. Jay.”

  “Jay,” said Brian, seeming to weigh the situation on the basis of that one syllable. “What are you doing here, Jay? You're obviously not one of Pepper's.” He lowered the gun a little more.

  “I'm looking for a book.”

  “Well, good luck with that. As you've no doubt noticed, this place has been visited by a little flame-related mishap. And the other Waterstones is overrun with fucking zombies. Anyway, all the best, mate. I'd better be getting back to the others. They start bickering when they run out of reading material. It was my turn to do the honours this time.” He shouldered his backpack but kept the gun in his hand.

  “Others?” said Jay.

  Brian flushed a little, realising he'd said too much.

  “Look,” said Brian, “I know it's not easy on your own, and I'm sorry, I really am, but we're not taking on any new personnel at the moment. Sorry, but you're on your own. You'd do the same if you were me. Maybe you'd be better off with Pepper.”

  “I've already declined his offer,” said Jay.

  “Don't blame you. I mean, don't get me wrong, I like The Beatles; I just don't fancy getting beaten to death by zombies during the Battle of Strawberry Fields, you know?”

  Jay nodded.

  “I'm off, then,” said Brian, shuffling his feet and exuding awkwardness, like a guest trying to leave the world's dullest party without hurting anyone's feelings. He coughed twice, sighed, and then set off toward the escalators. “Don't follow me, Jay. I'll shoot you in the leg if you do. And a blunt pencil wound is still going to be something of an impediment when you're being chased by a pack of those bastard things. Sorry, but life's a bit shit all round at the moment.”

  As Brian started down the escalator, Jay shouted after him, “I was looking for a book about sailing.”

  “Keep looking,” said Brian, the top of his Peruvian bobble hat disappearing from view. “But don't hold your breath.”

  “An instruction manual, sort of thing.”

  The escalator continued to squeak and groan. Then silence.

  Jay waited.

  A gritty shriek and the Peruvian bobble hat rose into view, followed by the rest of Brian.

  “You've got a boat?”

  “I've got a boat.”

  Brian stuffed the gun into his coat pocket.

  “What kind of boat? Where?”

  “A sailing boat,” said Jay, coming out from behind the counter, scooping up the knife. “And I don't think it would be very wise for me to tell you where it's docked, do you?”

  “No, I suppose not. But how do I know you're not lying?”

  Jay shrugged. “You don't.”

  “If you are, Jay, it's blunt pencil time. Seriously.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Brian’s face underwent a series of contortions and he bobbed from foot to foot. Then he said, “Christ, Dave’s going to skin me alive. Come on. Follow me.”

  They left the bitter stink of Waterstones behind, heading down the enclosed boutiqued canyon of Peter’s Lane, then turned left onto School Lane, where the snow quickly reasserted itself, seeming to rise up around their calves. They passed Bluecoat Chambers. A large banner over the wrought iron gates advertised an exhibition by Peter Chang, with oversized images of Chang’s jewellery; they looked like weird bioluminescent marine life or models designed to explain some elusive principal of quantum physics. They passed the Quaker Meeting House on their right, a building as modern as its name implied it couldn’t possibly be. At the Old Post Office pub, with its inexplicable hedgerow, snow-capped now, running between the ground and first floors, they turned left down an alley crowded with dumpsters. One of the dumpsters had tipped over, spilling boxes of paperwork, toner cartridges and two human arms that were so physically different from one another they couldn’t possibly have belonged to the same victim. A fat crow pecked at the limbs, hopping from one to the other, as if it couldn’t decide which tasted better. It held its ground as Jay and Brian passed. The alley turned abruptly right, running parallel with School Lane, heading toward Hanover Street. When Brian stopped at a recessed loading bay with a steel roller shutter, not far from the end of the alley, Jay couldn’t help laughing.

  “What?” said Brian.

  “Nothing. It was just that I was hiding out about a minute from here, in Waterstones. On Bold Street. We were neighbours.”

  “Waterstones? Really?”

  “Yeah. On the top floor. I set up camp in the old staff room.”

  “We nipped in and out of there all the time, nicking books. Well, not ‘nicking’, exactly. I mean, they don’t really belong to anyone anymore, do they? Anyway, we had to give up on the Bold Street branch after the zombies moved in.”

  “Me, too.”

  Brian shrugged off his pack, rummaged about inside it, then produced a pink baby monitor. He gave Jay a sheepish grin and switched it on. It crackled to life, an arc of red LEDs lighting up.

  “Anybody there?”

  A pause, then, a man's voice, “I'll be down in a second.”

  “I've got company. Don't worry. He's cool.”

  “Oh, Christ, Brian, you know the rules on waifs and strays.”

  “It's okay. He's cool.”

  “And did you invite him to tag along on the basis of this 'coolness'? What precisely constitutes cool in Brianland? I mean, what, does he have great hair or something?”

  “He's wearing a hat.”

  “Is it as cool as your hat?”

  “Not really. Sort of plain.”

  “I was taking the piss, Brian.”

  “Yeah, I know. Anyway, let us in, Dave. It's fucking freezing. I'm going to lose a nut if I stay out here much longer.”

  “You’re going to lose both fucking nuts when I get down there, Brian.”

  “He says he's got a boat, Dave. A sailing boat. Pepper must have missed it or something.”

  The sound of
breathing. A sigh so loud it produced a crunch of distortion.

  “Hang on.”

  Brian turned to Jay, putting the baby monitor back in his pack.

  “See? What did I say? When they run out of reading material they get all arsey. Me, too, though, if I'm being honest.”

  Without making eye contact, instead looking up and down the side street, Jay said, “So, what were you like before the... before whatever it was that happened, you know, happened?”

  “We don't talk about that. First rule of Book Club: the past never happened. Better that way. Less painful.”

  “Book Club?”

  Brian grinned. “That's what we call our little group. By the way, I'd put that away if I were you.” He nodded to Jay's hand.

  Jay hadn't realised he was still clutching the paring knife. He put it into his jacket pocket.

  There was a sharp click from the other side of the steel roller, then a rattling of chains. The roller began to rise. When it was halfway up, the voice that had addressed them from the baby monitor said, “Come on, stoop, you bastards.”

  Brian did as instructed. Jay followed.

  Dave — presumably — regarded Jay with undisguised suspicion and naked aggression. He wasn’t much over five and a half feet tall, but he was considerably broader than Jay in the shoulders. Pushing 50, he had the kind of face, lined and ruddy, that Jay couldn’t imagine expressing anything other than distrust and hostility.

  Brian dragged the Peruvian bobble hat from his head, revealing a thick scar running from his crown to just above his left ear. Jay felt certain Brian had been in some kind of accident, a car crash maybe, which had doubtless left him with the inability to read or write or both. That was why he was a survivor and not a hyena.

  Dave caught him looking at Brian’s scar and said, “We don’t talk about the past, so don’t ask. And we aren’t interested in yours, so don’t tell. Are we clear on that?”

  Jay nodded.

  Without another word, Dave headed up a short staircase which opened up onto a small and weirdly angled reception area, as if a corridor had been ineptly reengineered for the purpose. There were a couple of leather armchairs and a small round table covered in magazines about cars, property and computers. About twenty feet to the left, a pair of tall glass doors presented a view of Hanover Street with its snow covered abandoned cars. Between the Hanover Street entrance and the staircase from which they’d just emerged was a lift, the doors open a couple of inches. Dave headed right, down a narrow corridor and through a door marked Stairs to All Floors. Brian and Jay followed. On the fourth floor, they went through a fire door kept ajar by a bucket of sand and emerged into a small waiting room, all dark wood, leather armchairs and prints on the wall by Lucien Freud and George Stubbs. On the far side of the room was an open door, from beyond which Jay could hear men's voices raised in argument.

  As Dave passed through the door, he said, presumably to the room's occupants, “Brian's decided to bring a stray home with him. But don't worry, Brian says he's ‘cool’. So that's alright, then, isn't it?”

  Brian then Jay entered the room to a chorus of groans and a solo, “Oh, for fuck's sake, Brian, lad, what are you doing to us?”

  It was warm in the room, courtesy of two Calor gas heaters back-to-back at the centre of a rough circle composed of seven armchairs. All but three of the seats were occupied, and everybody — except Brian but including Dave — was looking at Jay as if he was the harbinger of a particularly irritating variety of doom. There was an Indian man, early fifties, in a charcoal three-piece suit and a gleaming white turban, chewing on an unlit pipe; a teenage boy, white but with straw-coloured dreadlocks that almost reached his waist; a man almost as tall as Brian but broad, mid-thirties, with short hair and a neatly trimmed beard, both prematurely frosted; and, aside from deep black skin and an exuberant afro, a man who could have been Brian's equally gangly brother. They each had a book, in their hand, on their lap or forming an upside down 'v' on the arm of the chair. Jay could only make out the details of the book in the hand of the room's nearest occupant, the teenage boy — Ask the Parrot by Richard Stark.

  The Indian man was the first to abandon his expression of guarded resentment, taking the smokeless pipe from his mouth, producing a modest smile and saying, “I'm Kavi Singh. And you are?”

  “Jason Garvey,” he said. “Jay.” He was embarrassed to hear a tremor in his voice and realised he felt so intimidated by this room full of relatively ordinary people, that he was nervous to the point of nausea. But, at the same time, he was almost relieved to discover there were other sorts of fear, gentler than the outright panic and ground-in dread he'd been living with for the last five weeks. He couldn't help smiling.

  “What's so funny?” said Dave, as if he suspected he was the object of some private joke.

  “Just nervous,” said Jay.

  “Where'd the blood come from?” said the teenage boy, closing his Richard Stark and pointing at Jay's face.

  It took Jay a couple of seconds to realise he was still speckled with the evidence of his encounter with Hello Kitty.

  “Hyena,” he said.

  “Hyena?” said Brian's almost brother.

  “That's what I call them.”

  “Zombies,” said the teenage boy. “They're zombies.”

  “Christ, Simon,” said Dave, “We've no idea what the fuck they are.”

  “Better than what Phil calls them,” said Simon, pointing at the man with the prematurely white beard. “Fucking ‘Twats’. I mean, you're a twat, Dave, doesn't mean you're going to beat me to death and try to eat my brain.”

  “Yeah? Don't tempt me, Si” said Dave.

  Phil grinned. “Well, they are,” he said. “A bunch of twats. I mean, they can't help it. Feel a bit sorry for them, myself.”

  “But would you let your daughter marry one?” said Brian's almost brother.

  “Now, if I'd said that, Joe,” said Dave, “you'd be calling me a racist.”

  “But you are a fucking racist,” said Joe.

  Dave grinned. “True. But an honest man.”

  “I'll give you that, Dave,” said Joe, shaking his head but grinning a little.

  “Jay's got a boat,” said Brian.

  “Says he's got a boat,” said Dave.

  All eyes were on Jay again.

  “Is this true, Jay?” asked Kavi.

  “Yeah. A sailing boat.”

  “Where?” said Joe.

  “Like he's going to tell us.” A woman's voice, from behind Jay.

  He turned. Standing in the doorway was a woman of about twenty five. Her brown mid-length hair was held up in a bun by two yellow pencils. She was holding an artist's paintbrush in one hand and an empty tea cup in the other. She wore low-slung hipster jeans and a fitted blouse, both black and both splashed with various colours of paint. The last couple of buttons of the blouse were undone to allow for the fact that she was distinctly pregnant.

  Chapter 13

  “Where's the harm in telling us where the boat is?” said Simon. “It's not as if we're going to kill him and take it off him, is it?”

  “Depends how many people it can carry,” said Dave. “Might have to take it off him. Christ, with any luck, we might have to leave you and Brian behind, Simon.”

  “And who's going to sail the thing?” said the woman. “You, Dave? Did you have many nautical themed away days while you were in Walton nick?”

  Dave barked a laugh. “Harsh as ever, Ellen. Anybody know how to sail a boat?” A chorus of negatives. To Jay, “So how many people can this boat of yours handle, then?”

  “All of us, probably,” said Jay but he was almost certain it would struggle to stay afloat with more than five bodies aboard.

  “Anyway,” said Brian, “even he doesn't know how to sail the fucking thing. He was in Waterstones looking for an instruction manual, weren’t you, Jay?”

  Ellen raised an eyebrow at Jay.

  Jay nodded.

  She rolled her eyes
and then smiled.

  “Well, I hereby declare you hopeless enough to join our little club, Jay,” she said. “We deserve each other.”

  There was a half-hearted clatter of applause.

  Dave smiled, shook his head and let out a long, sighing, “Christ.”

  “Fancy a cup of tea, Jay?” said Ellen.

  “I'd love one,” said Jay.

  “Well, put your bag down, take your coat off and I'll show you where the kitchen is. I like mine strong, just a splash of milk and no sugar.”

  “Milky, two sugars,” said Simon.

  “One sugar, a touch of milk,” said Dave.

  “Coffee,” said Phil. “Black.”

  “Tea, milky, no sugar,” said Brian.

  “The same way I like my women,” said Joe. “White and weak.”

  “Now if I'd said that,” said Dave, “you’d say — ”

  “Yeah, but you are,” interrupted Joe.

  “I'll make my own,” said Kavi. “You English don't have a bloody clue how to make a decent cup of tea.”

  “Kitchen's this way,” said Ellen once Jay had dropped his pack and shed his coat.

  Jay followed her back into the waiting area and through a door opposite, into a small kitchen.

  “Kettle's there,” said Ellen, pointing to a camping stove next to a couple of five-litre bottles of water, a few cartons of UHT milk and a box of Yorkshire Tea. “I'll leave you to it.”

  As he watched her walk out of the kitchen and through a door that, before the Jolt, had probably led to someone's office, Jay suddenly realised he'd been hoping that she'd stay. Then Kavi appeared, holding a small wooden box with elephants carved into its surface.