Roofworld

by Christopher Fowler

  —

  Spice’s progress at the top end of the North Seven run was hampered by the fact that one of the steel station staves supporting the run had partially collapsed, dipping the cable in an alarming parabola over the tops of the enormous oak trees guarding the edge of the park. It appeared that the last two stations were indeed attached to the trunks of trees within the park itself, although why such a run had been constructed in the first place was something of a mystery. The history of the Roofworld had remained a verbal one and few written accounts chronicling the exploits of its founders existed for fear of such documents falling into the wrong hands. Zalian knew more than anyone else about his predecessors, mainly because he had tapped the memories of those in the Old Boy Network.

  There seemed no point in travelling to the final station. Here the cable dropped even lower, to vanish into a dark tangle of blackened and bare oak branches, the nearest of which stuck out into the light like a cluster of knife-points. Spice balanced lightly in the fork of the tree and untwisted her line from an overhanging offshoot. She glanced at her watch. It was time to return and stop the others from worrying. They wouldn’t be much good to anyone if she left them to fend for themselves. Just then, the tree limbs above her banged and clattered with the weight of a body suddenly landing amongst them. She threw herself flat against the trunk of the oak and looked up through the branches.

  There above her stood a shavenheaded boy with a spiderweb tattooed across his throat. Within seconds, Spice realized that she was staring into the face of one of Chymes’ chief ministers.

  Reese looked down at the girl. After leaving his leader to enjoy another sacrificial diversion, he and Dag had travelled north to one of the disused park stations where they knew they could fix up and get stoned in peace. Now, with the chemicals coursing through his veins, he was feeling a new hunger.

  The girl’s outfit tipped her off as one of Zalian’s remaining troops. She was attractive in a muscular kind of way, small breasted and strong limbed. And she wasn’t showing any fear of him. That was interesting. He lowered himself down, dropping with a simian swing from branch to branch.

  ‘Hey, pretty lady, didn’t they tell you not to go out on your own at night? How come your big brave leader ain’t looking after ya?’

  Spice smiled up at him, beckoning him nearer.

  ‘I think I know what you want. You wanna see what a real man feels like.’

  He was still a body-length above her when she grabbed his boots and pulled down hard. He tried to kick out at her face, but his grip loosened on the bough overhead and he fell into a nest of branches further down. Struggling for his coin-gun with one hand, he clawed out at Spice with the other, but was not quick enough. She raised the loaded dart-gun and aimed it at the centre of his chest, firing and sending the dart squarely into his sternum, where it quivered and stuck. Reese screamed. The searing tip flared across his chest with fingers of molten fire. He twisted his body in agony and dropped backwards out of the tree to fall nearly thirty feet to the ground.

  ‘That’s what a real woman feels like,’ she said, pocketing the gun. Then she fastened her belt-line and swung off between the trees.

  From his crouching position atop the nearby terrace surrounding the lower end of the park, Dag looked first to the fallen body of his friend, then at the girl moving rapidly away into the brightness of the city streets, her swaying body outlined in the icy atmosphere like a rag doll on a string.

  Leaping up at the line above his shaven head he left the roof at a run, leaping and sweeping over the side of the elegantly facaded building, then down towards the cable junction where he would be able to intercept her. As he dropped, he pulled the coin-gun free of its casing and aimed as carefully as possible at the bouncing figure ahead. Three, four times he fired, but the movement between them forced his shots to fly wide of the mark. His line arced nowhere near as steeply as hers. He needed to move much faster than this if he was to draw alongside. Reaching up with his free hand, he pulled at the line-brake, opening it wide. Slowly his speed increased, but it was still not enough for him to catch up with her. The drugs he had ingested gave him the extra strength it required to rip the line-brake out from its sleeve and toss it into the rushing wind. Instantly his speed doubled and continued to build.

  ‘Watch out, bitch, you’re about to die!’ he screamed at her, overtaking at last, twisting and firing wildly behind him. He did not manage to catch a glimpse of her face, but he hoped she was scared.

  Now he was travelling at three times her speed. He had never moved this fast on a run before. He swung around in time to see Spice’s eyes widen in alarm. She must have realized that he would reach the junction point way in advance of her. The tall, bare limbs of the oak roared towards him at a terrifying pace. With a final burst of speed he shot forward like a bullet from a gun and flew straight into the tree, no longer able to control his flight path. Dag released a shriek of horror as the rapier-like tip of a bough plunged into his stomach, then passed out through the small of his back in a single swift movement.

  Spice, gliding into the station, her feet touching down on the bark of the trunk, looked across at the flailing skinhead skewered onto the branch. ‘Poetry in motion,’ she murmured, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘Still not lovely as a tree.’ She shuddered and pushed on once more, back to the comparative safety of Portland Place.

  —

  Rose contacted the survivors of Damien’s team and wrote down their current position. She then tried to pinpoint Robert’s whereabouts using an ancient hardback A-Z while warily keeping an eye on Zalian, who still sat hunched over the battered notebook. Robert had been right. It was dangerous to trust him. He steadfastly refused to be drawn into an elaboration of his remark about Sarah, promising only that from now on his actions would not endanger the lives of anyone. If, however, he decided to take matters into his own hands, Rose doubted that there would be much she could do to stop him. She resolved to stay as near as possible to the radio transmitter in case any further messages of assistance came through.

  ‘Something’s odd here.’

  Zalian turned around and held up a page filled with scribbled horoscopic symbols. ‘These goat and moon signs…’

  ‘The zodiac stuff. They’re just shorthand symbols.’

  ‘But they’re not. There’s no moon symbol in the zodiac. Nothing that remotely looks like it. And there are others that don’t fit in. Look.’ He pointed to a row of faint impressions stretching across the page. ‘A figure four. The female symbol. A circle with a roof on it. A sickle with a cross on top, what the hell are these?’

  Rose leaned across and took a closer look.

  ‘Wait, I know this,’ she said excitedly. ‘They’re old alchemical signs. I think they still use them for trading metal. Show me…’ She took the book from Zalian’s hands. ‘A four, that’s tin. The female symbol is copper. The moon is silver, that’s female too. I think the other two are lead and zinc, but I don’t know which is which.’ She threw open her hands excitedly. ‘It explains the list, the one headed by Apollo and Diana.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Just as the planets correspond to gods, they also correspond to metals. Quicksilver is Mercury. Copper is Venus, tin is Jupiter, lead Saturn and so on.’ Rose dropped her head into her hands, thinking. ‘The question is, where would one look for these ancient symbols nowadays?’

  ‘I think I know exactly where you’d find them in this city,’ Zalian said. ‘At the London Metal Exchange. We’ve used their hedging facilities in the past, without their knowledge naturally.’

  ‘But why would Chymes hide out there? Wait a minute, can you find out where it’s located?’

  Zalian punched the keyboard in front of him and waited for a moment while an address scrolled up. ‘OK, it’s somewhere in EC3….’ The street name appeared, letter by letter across the screen.

  ‘Oh, no…’ Rose grabbed for the radio mike and switched to Robert’s frequency. ‘Come in, Robert,’ she call
ed. ‘Robert, you have to get out of there fast….’

  ‘Too late.’ The reply was faint and half-swallowed in static. ‘I’m standing here behind about fifty of Chymes’ men. They seem to be meditating, or something. They haven’t seen me yet, which is just as well. The odds are kind of uneven.’

  ‘We’ll get help….’

  ‘Are you kidding? I…’ The line fuzzed and faded into silence.

  ‘Robert!’ Rose shouted. ‘Robert, come in!’ She threw down the microphone. ‘Shit, they’ve got him and it’s all my fault.’

  ‘Why, because you didn’t figure out where he was earlier?’

  ‘He wouldn’t be up here in the first place if it wasn’t for me,’ she said angrily, jumping up from the desk. ‘We’ve got to do something.’

  ‘How can we?’ reasoned Zalian. ‘By the time we get there it’ll be too late.’

  ‘You can stay here if you want to. I’m going after him.’ She pulled back the door and ran out across the roof, scooping up one of the nylon equipment bags as she went.

  ‘You don’t know the way! Believe me, Rose, we can help him better from here!’ Zalian shouted after her, but his words fell short as she reached the low pylon of the cable station and hooked herself up. ‘You can’t go in there by yourself! It’s not a safe run, it’s one of the damaged ones!’

  Zalian arrived at the foot of the station as Rose clipped her belt-line to the main overhead cable. ‘Rose, you don’t stand a chance by yourself! It’s an old, unstable run….’ He tried to grab her legs, but she was too quick for him. Slipping from his grasp, she sailed over his head and away into the windy darkness of the roofscape.

  Chapter 37

  Escaping

  The radio, they had heard the crackle from the damned radio. Robert released the handset, letting it bounce onto the tarmac. For a moment everyone seemed to be as surprised as he was. The sudden bitter breeze now sideswiping the roof caused a ripple of movement.

  Sweat prickled Robert’s face. He looked behind him, at the edge of the guttering, at the street far below, at the line still connected across to the building on the other side of the street. He looked back at Chymes’ men. They seemed to have no idea how he had suddenly appeared in their midst. Further behind them Robert could see a long low construction similar to the temporary headquarters Zalian had erected at the stock exchange. The men, for there were by far more males than females, certainly seemed in poorer shape than the ones in Zalian’s krewe. They had the wasted, dead appearance of habitual drug abusers. Haunted eyes stared out from pale, sweat-slick faces. All seemed to be wearing a new kind of uniform, black with a red slash on the front, some kind of ritual symbol.

  Slowly, the ones at the front of the group began to move forward. Robert stepped back to the edge of the roof and looked behind him once more. His belt-line was disconnected from the main cable across the street, which could only be reached from the rooftop he was earlier standing upon. With a jolt, he realized that the grappling hook was still stuck in the wall with the climber disc-line attached.

  Two of Chymes’ men reached out for him. One grabbed Robert by the wrist, the other clawed at his face. A shout went up, then another. Robert frantically pulled backwards. The jumpsuit was too large for him and his body slipped within it. The man on his left found himself clutching an empty sleeve. He reached out with his other hand, coiled the fingers and punched Robert squarely in the stomach. The force was enough to break him free and drop him to his knees. Half blind with pain, Robert grabbed for the anchored disc-line and rolled back over the edge toward the roof he had climbed from, just as the outstretched hands of his attackers reached down for him.

  He fell fast, the nylon singeing his palms as it slithered through, too quickly for him to be able to break his fall. He hit the angled roof on his back, hard and flat. As he lay there for a few moments, pain billowing in his stomach, he began to slide on the steeply raked tiles. Chymes’ men had run to the edge and were looking down at him, shouting and swearing. Already one of them was halfway down the line and another was coming over the top. Robert tried to turn over and gain a foothold, but the force of his momentum rolled him over once, then again, slamming hard on the tiles until he reached the very edge of the roof in a shower of broken slate. For a second he thought he would keep from overbalancing and threw out his arms, then he was over the guttering and hanging in empty air. Above him, skittering and sliding, came his pursuers, how many he could not tell.

  His fingers were curled around the gutter in an agonizing grip, arms wrenching from their sockets. The line which had brought him here led across the street and was attached to the wall roughly two feet away on his right. Throwing his boots against the brickwork he released his fingers and launched off into space, hands thrown high. He caught the line with his forearms, shouting with pain as it slipped under his elbows, then beneath his armpits. Hunched over it in this fashion he dropped one hand and grappled desperately with his line-belt, to try and hook it up to the main cable.

  Behind him, one of Chymes’ minions, unable to halt his slide on the roof, shot over the edge and fell into the street screaming. Another was hanging on to the gutter, replacing Robert in the position he had just vacated. He was joined by a third, a tall skinhead who tried to rise from the roof, but overbalanced, landing hard with his knees on the guttering. There was a metallic bang and the entire length of gutter and drainpipe broke free of the wall, creaking and groaning as it carried its human cargo down to the pavement.

  Robert had succeeded in hooking himself up and took off along the cable. He was just over halfway across when he looked back to see someone hunched over the line, sawing at it with a small knife. There was no chance of reaching the other side in time. He threw up his hands and grabbed the line overhead. As it broke with a sharp crack he suddenly found himself dropping like a stone, swinging down toward the wall of the building opposite. Releasing his hands and folding his arms across his face, he hit the large sashed window feet first, his body following through to the floor in a fusillade of glass shards.

  Seconds later an alarm bell began to clatter. Robert lifted himself painfully. He was sitting on the floor of a darkened office, its window blown in and scattered across the surrounding executive furniture. A venetian blind had partly broken his landing. He rose stiffly and surveyed the damage to his body. A few small cuts from the broken window, a bad gash on his leg, torn muscles, burned hands. He limped out of the office towards the signposted fire escape at the end of the corridor and when he reached it followed the spiral down to the ground floor.

  He was lucky to be alive. Painfully he shoved against the bar inside the steel door and released himself into an alleyway. Above, the alarm bell rang out into the deserted street, unheeded. Keeping to the edge of the building he limped along in the shadows, aware that the shouting and scuffling above him meant that he was still within firing range. To cross the street towards the main road he would have to pass into the light. There was nothing for it but to run. Breathing deep, he broke free of his cover and sprinted across the pavement towards the glowing red traffic signals. The first missile hit the kerb beside him, ricocheting up and ringing off the stem of a lamp-post. He could feel the blood starting to flow freely from his torn leg as he pumped the muscles in it.

  There was a sudden hail of razor-coins all around, one hitting him on the shoulder with its flat surface, others bouncing onto the roadway. Above stood a dozen shadowy figures with raised guns trained on his retreating back.

  Robert had to look twice at the sight ahead of him. Standing there patiently waiting for the traffic lights to change was a black cab with its yellow ‘For Hire’ light glowing. Finding a free cab at Christmas was a little akin to stumbling across a herd of wildebeest in the underground. He raised his arms and shouted just as another volley rang off the paving stones behind.

  Red changed to amber, then green. The cab started to move off. Robert ran behind, frantically signalling. The driver glanced in the rear-view mirror, sa
w the stumbling figure and slowed. Catching up, Robert pulled open the door and threw himself onto the back seat, panting.

  ‘Where you wanna go, mate?’ The driver turned and looked at him, suddenly unsure that he should have stopped.

  ‘Anywhere you like,’ said Robert, closing his eyes in blessed relief as the cab moved off.

  —

  Rose was managing just fine. She had crossed Moorgate and was heading into the small roads bordered by Threadneedle Street and the London Wall when the mishap occurred. The run she had been travelling on was clearly marked on the map she had dug from her nylon travelbag. It zigzagged from the old Smithfield market to the Bank, then up towards Finsbury Circus, passing virtually overhead the London Metal Exchange. By now, travelling on the run had become almost second nature, simply a matter of hooking on and off whenever she reached a break in the line.

  She was thinking about Zalian as she shoved out over Gresham Street and failed to notice that at this point the gradient of the run was almost non-existent. Consequently, she had reached the exact mid-point of the cable when she came to a halt. Rose raised her hands and tried to slide the metal sleeve along the line, but it would not budge. Perhaps the sudden coldness of the night had contracted the metal sufficiently to seize it. Grunting and slowly twisting in the breeze she gripped the sleeve with one hand, the line with the other and pulled as hard as she could, but failed to move even an inch. Ahead of her, the weatherbeaten cable station creaked ominously with the movement of the wire, light falls of rust pattering from it to the rooftop below.