Oddjobs

by Heide Goody

  He let it drop and considered the chains. They were too thick to break. He would need a welding torch to break through them.

  He pressed an ear to the door. There was no noise from within, none that could be heard above the echoing background noise of a busy train station.

  “Plan B.” He jumped down and ran on towards the locomotive cab.

  A station worker in hi-vis orange waved at him up ahead. “Oi! What you doing?”

  “We need to move this train,” said Rod.

  “You can’t be down here!”

  Rod ran past him to the locomotive.

  “We need to find the driver.”

  He grabbed the cab door handle and yanked it open. He looked at the body crumpled up beneath the train controls.

  “Okay. I’ve found the driver.” He turned to the station worker and flashed his ID. “Can you drive a train?”

  “I’m a platform manager.”

  “Then you need to go find your superior. Tell them there is a terrorist device on this train. The Transport Police need to clear the station. Wait,” he said as the man made to run off. “And tell them I’m taking the train out of the station. That way.” He pointed.

  “Can you drive a train?” said the platform manager.

  “I’m a quick learner.” As the man bolted off, Rod pulled out his phone and googled ‘How to drive a train’.

  When Nina felt she had recovered enough to both breathe and move, she attempted to sit up.

  “Easy now,” said Ingrid and pushed her back in her seat.

  Nina gripped the sides of the swivel chair and tried to clear her fuzzy head.

  “Ladies,” said the barman and placed two champagne flutes before them.

  Nina looked around.

  “Wh’re ‘m I?” she said groggily.

  “A wine bar,” said Ingrid with a smile. “Don’t worry,” she said to the barman. “She’s not drunk. She’s just a bit backward.”

  The barman left them and went to clean the taps further along the bar.

  Nina felt her strength coming back to her and reached for the glass of champagne.

  “No stupid moves,” said Ingrid and rolled the stick in her lap between thumb and fingers.

  “Oh please,” said Nina. “You get that from Shit that Villains Say in Bad Films dot com? What’s that thing?” She nodded at the stick.

  “A wand of guirz’ir binding. Fashioned it myself from a piece of the weird tree of Chippenham.”

  Nina drank half the glass in one mouthful. “It’s got one hell of a kick,” she grunted.

  They sat on the upper level of the station, the wine bar overlooking the main concourse. “So, you’re the bad guy,” said Nina.

  Ingrid gave her a pretend look of shock and offence. “Me? God, no. I’m the hero.”

  “Uh-huh. I think I might need that one explained to me.”

  “Is this the bit where I do my evil villain monologue? No, I didn’t keep you alive because I needed the company. I need to know what you know.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Does anyone suspect me?”

  Nina downed the rest of the sparkling wine and waggled her glass at the barman for another. “Suspect you of what? None of this makes sense. You know we’re meant to stop this sort of thing, not make it happen.”

  “I do know that,” said Ingrid with a quiet anger. “We stand at the brink, against a hell of monsters, and we’re meant to stave it off for as long as possible. And with what? A pocketful of spare change and hope?”

  Nina watched the barman pour her refill and gave him a cheeky smile in thanks.

  “So,” she said to Ingrid, “this is a fundraiser.”

  “I prefer to think of it as a wake-up call.”

  Rod remembered a time before the internet. Despite what Nina might believe, it really wasn’t all that long ago. It was a time when an argument over trivial facts could fuel an entire evening’s conversation in the pub, rather than be settled in less than a minute. It was a time when libraries were respected as houses of knowledge and depositories of wisdom. It was a time when any idiot with a computer couldn’t just pour their idiot thoughts into the public arena. It was a time when publishing houses, news agencies and academic institutions were the gatekeepers of truth and respectability and one could actually believe the things one read.

  It was a time when a man couldn’t learn to drive a train in under five minutes.

  Google said he was in the cab of a British Rail class 66 diesel-electric freight locomotive. The wikiHow website gave him an overview of the general principles of driving trains, and he found a handy, labelled diagram of the control desk at railsimulator.com. With his phone propped up in the window, he was now watching and copying a YouTube clip of a driver in Norway at the controls of an identical vehicle. He already had the engines started.

  “Directional lever moved to forward. Train brake lever off. Locomotive brake lever off. Throttle to notch one.” And the train moved.

  The internet was a marvellous thing.

  “You know, it wasn’t my idea,” said Ingrid. “Not in the first place.”

  “Was it the voices in your head?” suggested Nina.

  Ingrid gave her a withering look. “Greg,” she said. “Greg Robinson.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “He did it for all the right reasons. We have people to protect, suffering to ease. Doomsday is coming and we will not go gentle into that good night. But we need the resources. You do know how we get our funding.”

  “The ToHo formula.”

  “Right,” said Ingrid. “Funding is given to regions based on the number and magnitude of incursions. Greg always made sure we had a bigger slice of the pie. You know the Birmingham tornado of 2005?”

  “It was the Winds of Kaxeos,” said Nina.

  “No.”

  “It was a game of Venislarn Scrabble gone wrong.”

  “Now you’re being silly.” Ingrid sipped her wine, barely letting it touch her lips.

  “It was just a tornado, Nina. Just a tornado, but Greg convinced the accountants and auditors that it was an incursion and we got an extra thousand square feet of room for the Vault.”

  “But that’s other consular missions’ money,” said Nina. “You’re not contributing to the global Venislarn effort by pinching funds from Manchester or Leeds or Glasgow.”

  “So,” said Ingrid, “we need to frighten the government into increasing the overall budget.” She took out her phone and thumbed open her messaging app. “There’s a cargo container in a train directly under our feet. There’s another phone in the container and, when I send it this music file, the other phone will play it and the great dread lord Zildrohar-Cqulu will awaken and kill every man, woman and child within a mile radius.”

  “You…” Nina’s lips curled up in disgust. “You’re…”

  “Mad?” said Ingrid. “Hardly.”

  “I was going to say ‘a complete cunt,’” said Nina.

  “Oh, save your abuse for the pillocks in power. Haven’t you ever noticed? The politicians always complain there’s not enough money for health or education or the environment. But there’s always enough for a war.” She tapped her phone; message sent. “Let’s give them a war.”

  Rod saw the night sky above the cutting as the train came above ground, half a mile from New Street station. It took him a second or two to recognise where he was: south of the Cube and the Mailbox, with a canal to the left of the train tracks. That put Five Ways and Birmingham University ahead. Two, maybe three, miles to Longbridge on the edge of the city. Five more and he’d be in the Worcestershire countryside, as far from human habitation as he was likely to get.

  There was no knowing if the hymn of awakening had already been sung or if he had robbed the singers of their opportunity. His only criterion for success was getting the train out of Birmingham before his passenger started kicking up a fuss.

  He pushed the throttle forward to full power.

  Morag’s uCab taxi
stopped on a bridge.

  They were less than a mile from where it had picked her up. Morag looked out at the surrounding area and recognised the purple archway at the end of the bridge.

  “This is Bournville train station,” she said. “I’m going to New Street.”

  The taxi driver said nothing and sat perfectly still.

  “This is my local train station,” she said. “I could have walked here. Take me to New Street.”

  The taxi driver remained rudely oblivious.

  “Yo-Kaxeos, massa-khi nei New Street station shu’phro,” she tried.

  Nothing.

  “Muda ben ai,” she swore and got out. The taxi pulled away immediately.

  Her phone rang. “Hey, Rod. Where are you?”

  “Driving a train,” he said. There was an edge of boyish excitement in his voice, mixed in with the general mood of grim concern.

  “I didn’t know you could drive a train,” she said.

  “The jury’s still out on that one. I’ve got Zildrohar-Coo Ca Choo on board. I can’t get hold of Nina. Where are you?”

  “Stupidly, I’m stuck at Bournville train station.”

  “Two minutes and I will be too.”

  Morag went to the side of the bridge and looked along the tracks towards the city. “A Kaxeos cab brought me here,” she said. “Do you think Kaxeos knows something we don’t?”

  “Bollocks,” said Rod with feeling. “I guess it was too much to expect to be able to get out of the city…”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “Are there people on the platform?” said Rod.

  Morag ran for the stairs, waving her arms and yelling at the trio of figures waiting on the platform below.

  At first, Rod could only imagine Zildrohar-Cqulu waking up and bursting forth from his cargo container womb. The sound of the locomotive engine and of several thousand tonnes of rolling stock rattling along smothered any external noises.

  But soon Rod thought he felt a change in the train. There was a new sluggishness to the acceleration, a grinding sensation along one side. He couldn’t see there was much to be done about it, just press on the throttle and hang on tight.

  And then Rod did really hear it. He heard, above the engine and the train and the tracks, the sound of rending steel and snapping links. And the roar of a titanic beast, its hour come at last, sliding into Bournville to be born.

  The locomotive began to tip to one side and Rod had a few scant seconds in which to curse the manufacturers for not fitting the thing with seatbelts.

  “Because I bloody said so!” Morag yelled at the one man remaining on the platform.

  “I know my rights,” he argued. “It’s a free country. You can’t make me move.”

  “I will in a minute, when I skelp you one.”

  Let’s see that ID again,” said the man. “It’s a fake, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t have time to stand here and…” She trailed off and looked along the track. “Oh, I really don’t,” she said softly.

  She grabbed the man’s sleeve and ran as the freight train, tilted up at a forty-five degree angle and riding on only one rail, came into the station. Wagons tipped, some having already shed their loads. A half dozen carriages back, a shipping container trailed its ruined top like a comb-over caught in a gale. The great shadow clambering out of it threatened to pull the whole train off the tracks.

  The recalcitrant commuter resisted until the locomotive struck the concrete platform edge and, with its nose as the fulcrum, cartwheeled up and over, dragging flatbed cars behind it. The disintegrating train reared up like an industrial tsunami — and suddenly the man was ahead of Morag, dragging her towards an exit.

  Vivian closed the door to 27 Franklin Road behind her.

  “All done, eh?”

  Vivian looked at the young man who had appeared at the gate. Morag’s neighbour, Richard, had a vacant smile and equally vacant gaze.

  “A fear of beards is called pogonophobia,” she said.

  Richard’s hand immediately went to his hairy chin.

  “If the Greeks went to the effort to come up with a name for it, they were probably trying to tell us something.”

  Richard nodded, uncomprehending.

  “Sorted out the old Africa stain, yeah?” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “They can be stubborn things but with a little scrubbing… And a bit of faith, of course.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” said Vivian. “Where is Morag? My niece.”

  “She had to go,” said Richard. “Work called. A taxi picked her up. Just came out of nowhere.”

  “I see.” Vivian stepped into the road to meet the uCab taxi that had just pulled up. “Then I had better see what she is doing.”

  “I’m sure she’s fine,” said Richard as she climbed in.

  Vivian made a disapproving sound.

  “The road to hell is paved with bland platitudes,” she told him and shut the door.

  Ingrid looked at her watch.

  “Problem?” said Nina.

  “No,” said Ingrid defensively.

  “Should something have happened by now?”

  “The timing is immaterial,” said Ingrid. “Wheels are in motion. The deed is done. At any moment, a —”

  She was interrupted by a whooping alarm sound.

  “This is an alarm,” said a rather self-explanatory recorded voice. “Could all customers please make their way to the nearest exit.”

  All around, people stood still and looked about themselves in faint surprise.

  “So, this is how the world ends,” said Nina. “Not with a bang but with —”

  “This is an alarm. Could all customers please make their way to the nearest exit.”

  Down in the concourse below, some people headed off unhurriedly towards the exits, some with overactive imaginations or a keen sense of self-preservation ran for the exits and some, who perhaps didn’t think alarms applied to them or suspected it was all part of a reality TV show, stayed exactly where they were.

  “Our time is up,” said Ingrid and tightened her grip on her wibbly wand.

  “I’m afraid we have to evacuate, ladies,” the barman was already removing his pinny.

  As Ingrid turned her attention to the barman, Nina lunged forward and threw her from her chair. Ingrid rolled, scrabbled for the wand and her phone, and found her feet again in time for Nina to rush her once more. Nina barged her, rugby-style, wrapping her arms around Ingrid’s upper body and pinning her arms in place. Ingrid screamed, kicked and stumbled. Nina slammed her against the handrail that ran along the walkway.

  Ingrid yelled and kneed Nina in the groin. Nina bent in pain, but it was only momentary. Then she came back at her (definitely) former colleague, striking hard, striking upwards, and pitching her up and over the handrail. Ingrid pivoted and would have plunged straight down to the concourse floor but for Nina’s hand gripping her wrist.

  Ingrid swung, wriggling. Nina pulled up hard against the barrier and huffed at the exertion. She tightened her grip on Ingrid’s wrist but her hand wasn’t all that strong and, it turned out, Venislarn geeks were heavier than they looked.

  The shouts and screams, and the sight of a woman being thrown off the upper floor, lent credibility to the station-wide alarm and finally got people running properly for the exits.

  Nina reached down with her other hand. Ingrid, still squirming, looked up with both panic and contempt. “So, you’re the good guy, now?”

  “Me? God, no,” said Nina. “I’m a stone cold bitch.” She wrested Ingrid’s phone from her clenched hand. “And a sex kitten.”

  Nina let go of the wrist. Dr Ingrid Spence dropped and managed a half second of scream before slamming noisily and violently through the plastic and steel roof of a falafel stand.

  “Mostly a sex kitten,” said Nina and massaged her aching shoulder.

  Morag pushed the man ahead of her as they climbed the stairs from the platform to the
road bridge. She turned back to look at the wreckage. Wagons were mashed up against each other in a tangled heap. Red and blue and green cargo containers lay scattered across the area like God’s Legos. There was no sign of life or movement from the locomotive engine.

  Down on the platform a low shape lifted itself up.

  Morag had seen pictures of Zildrohar-Cqulu, but pictures rarely did monsters any justice. They could never convey the movement of muscle, the oily flow of the alien body or the malevolent intent that lay behind its movements, its very being. Zildrohar-Cqulu — as long as a shipping container — moved on four angular legs with joints in all the wrong places, switching between standing upright and squatting on all fours from second to second. His wings, folded along his back, twitched, yearning… His head, vaguely simian in shape, was covered in scales of glistening chitin. Spear-like barbs, longer than a man, jutted forward from his cheeks and chin. The god growled and worked his four-piece jaw.

  Zildrohar-Cqulu stood and put his forelegs-arms on the station building roof. He swung his bristled head towards the road bridge and produced a roar so multi-layered that it could have won an Oscar for best sound design. It was the roar of a blast furnace, of primeval monsters, of an unholy choir, of a petulant toddler. Morag felt it tug at her consciousness and, responding quickly, she dropped to her knees.

  “Yo-Zildrohar, meh skirr’ish. Perisa ghorsri Yo-Zildrohar.”

  The prayer of submission given, Morag felt the god’s presence brush over her mind and move away.

  “Lord! My Lord!” shouted a man on the bridge who then, without hesitation, flung himself over the edge and to his death.

  “Bhul,” whispered Morag and ran to the other two bystanders. She whipped the feet out from under the woman and then slammed the man against a lamppost before he, too, could throw himself off the bridge as a sacrifice to the Venislarn.

  “Stay down,” she hissed.

  Zildrohar-Cqulu clambered over the station building, pulverising tiles under his huge claws and up onto the street that ran alongside the railway. Lights were on in houses nearby and Morag saw more than one door open.