by Bill Broun
“It’s the Flōt, Cuthbert,” said Dr. Bajwa. “You’ve got hallucinosis, my friend. We can get help—at the hospital. We don’t hear lions speaking with words. We don’t hear otters. We don’t hear little cats. We’re not awaiting anyone. All we hear is a man desperately in need of looking after. A man almost destroyed by Flōt.”
“Flōt.”
“Yes, Flōt. It makes you see things.”
Astrid said, “But, Cuthbert. I know this will sound unbelievable. But I care about you. I don’t even . . . well, I think I may know why.” She smiled, but sourly, shaking her head in tight little wiggles. “Or not. A bit why. Maybe? But you’ve . . . you’ve drawn me here tonight. And I . . . I want to believe you. And I want to help you.”
Cuthbert felt his heart begin to gallop unevenly, and a vise-like pain shot up his chest. He looked up in the sky. There was the comet.
“The co-co-comet,” he said, in a daze. “Thar’s a spaceship in there. Hidden.”
Again, the officer and Dr. Bajwa looked at one another. From above, one of the Red Watch’s frightcopters trained its spot beams on St. Cuthbert and Astrid.
There was a voice from above: You are commanded by the Yeoman of His Majesty the King to remain where you are.
Astrid waved her hand, as if trying to swat midges away from her face.
“Cuthbert,” said Astrid. “Our time’s running out. You know, I came here tonight, and now I’ve lost everything, but I wouldn’t change it. You see, I don’t know who you are, but I knew I had to find you. I look like you. Anyone would see that. And I wonder if I think like you? And feel like you? I’m a Flōt sot, too, and I’m in second withdrawal, and you know there aren’t many of us, and the statistics for me are bleak, but I am here. I think, Mr. Handley, I think you could be my granddaddy. Maybe.”
St. Cuthbert gasped. “Yow? How can that be?” He stood tottering on the edge of the enclosure, knotting his fingers. “It’s impossible. Sullivan? Irish? You’re bold and brave, Inspector. Irish blood and English heart?”
“Oh, far better than that,” she said. “Are you from the Black Country? And your family’s from the Marches?”
St. Cuthbert nodded.
“Did you know a barmaid from Bermondsey? And you spent a night? A long, long time ago?”
The bits about the Marches and the Black Country made sense, but the rest was entirely foreign to St. Cuthbert. He never knew any barmaid from Bermondsey, at least not one he could remember.
“Do you see someone in me?” Drystan asked. “Someone else, too?”
But St. Cuthbert needed no further proof of a connection than to stare into the dark eyes of this woman, at something far deeper than genes. Her questions felt like a sweet vine pulling through him, even if, in his mind if not his heart, it kept hitting snags. She was, surely, looking through the same strong eyes he hadn’t seen since his gran Winefride Handley lived so long ago. And that meant there was another human being in Britain who would, one day, be able to speak animal. She would possess the Wonderments. She was a he was a she. She was Drystan. She was the Christ of Otters. St. Cuddy no longer would have to carry the burden himself. He was beautifully, perfectly, finally sacrificable.
A hot streak of Red Watchmen was now spidering down from their dark, hovering scarlet frightcopter on black nylonite ropes. When they touched down, they gathered themselves for a few moments, folding and unfolding their arms in arthropodal jerks.
Astrid, Baj, and the other officers watched anxiously as the ropes retracted like hissing black asps. The frightcopter remained rigidly in place, about forty feet up, its solar-electric engines thrumming in near-silence. Looking over his shoulder, St. Cuthbert leaned over the edge of the lion enclosure, peering down into the moat.
“Move back from there, Cuthbert,” said the doctor. “Please, Cuddy.”
The Watchmen—there were three of them—extended their extra-long golden neuralpikes. One of them cracked open a black nerve-bar instant prison at their landing site. The other two Watchmen began to stomp toward Astrid and Baj, their pair of pikes jutting ahead of them, the tips charging with red glows. The pair together were a single massive satanic head, swaying forward and back with ox-like unstoppability. They seemed to know exactly what—or who—they wanted—and only Astrid and a GP with lung cancer stood between them and their quarry.
“Cuthbert, run,” said Astrid. “Get out of here.”
“I won’t,” he said, smiling sadly. “I can’t.”
These were no ordinary Watchmen, Astrid fearfully realized. Suicide cultists and street-rousing republicans were generally left to the regular Watch. These Watchmen belonged to a special new unit, the Scots Coldstream Aristocratic Regiment, or SCARE. They were deployed for high-level political or strategic-level hits when Harry9 wanted to make a special, showy example. They wore the red and gold House of Windsor mantles of the regular Watch as well as the glossy scarlet body armor associated with the king’s own Yeoman Protection Command. SCARE’s distinctive, bulbous mantis-eyed helms hid their faces.
“Cuthbert Handley and Astrid Sullivan,” said one of the approaching Watchmen, warning through a fuzzy speaker. “You are both hereby placed under the custody of His Majesty and you—”
“Just croak that cunt,” said the other.
St. Cuthbert swung one of his legs over the relatively low enclosure wall. The moat below, between the wall and the exhibit area, was the chief barrier between visitors and the lions. The saint sat upon the wall like a novice skier, leaning forward a bit for balance, trying to hold the wall between the palms of his hands. He kept glancing between the Watchmen and the lions down in the enclosure.
“Cuthbert! No!” cried Bajwa.
The Met officers and firearms specialists, still in TotalCamou, backed away ominously, a set of receding floating guns, and Astrid knew she was in gravest danger. The other Royal Parks constables, some of whom Astrid knew well—fat Jenkins and young Hopper and the jokester Sergeant Raheem—seemed either confused or paralyzed with fear. They remained rooted along the bushes.
The doctor, instinctively, had dropped to all fours. He was a picture of appalling befuddlement, crawling toward his wayward patient, then stopping, looking back like an impatient pony, and cantering back toward Astrid.
No one, not even registered law enforcement, took stands against the Watch, and its SCARE units possessed an especially fearsome reputation for outrages against civil decency. Their favorite quarry were British republicans and followers of Anonymous UK, and their pop-up prisons ended up securing the bodies of “terrorists” as often as live prisoners. Indeed, anyone they killed was, ipso facto, a terrorist.
“Behind me,” Astrid said to the doctor, struggling to get herself in front of both the doctor and Cuthbert. She plunged her hand into her trouser pocket. She clutched her neuralzinger. Still loaded with nonlethal gangliatoxic rounds, she remembered.
Before Astrid expected, one of the Watchmen hurled himself forward. He stabbed out at her with his pike’s searing red tip, stretching his arm so far he became unbalanced. The pike hit the pavement beside her foot with a chittering zhe-zheeng! A fist-size divot of pavement concrete spurted up. The missile hit one of the sheepish Met officers in the knee, and he fell hard, moaning.
“It begins,” said St. Cuthbert. “It begins.”
Astrid stepped back. She knew now that the Watchmen were trying to kill her—to kill them all, probably. She drew her neuralzinger, gripping it tentatively with just her one hand.
“Please. Move back,” she said to the Watchmen. “Please. Please. Let’s all kotch a bit.”
But then her pistol went off. It kicked back and up, almost flying from her hand. She’d pulled the trigger all right, but it hardly felt willed. The living gangliatoxin’s visible gray net grew as wide as a shark’s mouth before hitting its target. It stuck to the one Watchman’s armor, a dull shroud now silvering with white sparkles. There was a second’s pause, and everyone assembled stood dumbly, petrified; then the victim stag
gered over in mortal agony. He screeched through his helmet’s speaker as his brain opened millions of pain receptors.
“Jesus fuck,” cried Bajwa. “Inspector, you didn’t have to—”
“You fooking bitch!” shouted the other Watchman with a neuralpike. “Now you’re dead, you slag.”
The frightcopter, humming above, descended abruptly. It thudded upon the pavement, its feathery rotor blades folding up and inward. When this happened, the other Watchman with a pike, and the one still fussing with his pop-up prison, retreated a few steps toward the compacted frightcopter, which sat like an enormous black scarab, ticking with heat, its two giant neural cannons slowly gliding toward Astrid. It presented an implacable, story-ending foe, and Astrid knew it.
“Listen! I’m sorry!” she hollered. She crouched down, pulling the doctor to the pavement. “Get down,” she whispered to Bajwa. “Down! Crawl toward the copter!” She did feel sorry; hurting anyone felt repugnant to her, but she also needed to stall them. “I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t . . .”
Astrid motioned to St. Cuthbert and the other constables and Met officers. “Get down!” She glared at the frightcopter with steely anger.
But now the other SCARE pikeman, bolstered by Astrid’s proximity, was barreling heedlessly toward her and the doctor, his weapon’s tip fully charged. This time, a hunkered Astrid held her neuralzinger with both hands, like the trainer she was, and took down the pikeman.
The Met officers, who had switched off their TotalCamou for safety, began scampering toward Astrid and Bajwa, too. The parks constables started to make more tentative, parallel moves on St. Cuthbert.
“She’s bloody off her chump!” one of the Met officers screamed. “I tell you, she’ll kill us all!”
There was a shrill zhinging! sound as the grounded frightcopter fired its neural cannons. First, for a fraction of a second, white tracer laser-lines landed on St. Cuthbert and just above Astrid’s head.
“No!” screamed the doctor.
Then, two darkening fat columns of air, wide as smokestacks, puffed out all along the laser-line guides and turned into the equivalent of million-tubed synaptic extruders. The deadly columns of swirling gray-black plasmas swiped back and forth like windscreen wipers and at once shrank off.
As Astrid had calculated, the shots ranged safely above their heads, but instantly and silently, they had liquefied the brains of all the Met officers and parks constables around the lion enclosure. She and Bajwa watched in horror as the men’s eyes turned into orange sockets even as they timbered to the ground.
The last Watchman scrambled into the eight-by-eight-foot pop-up prison, which he was now treating as a spur-of-the-moment fortress, or at least a kind of safe room.
The winged red doors of the frightcopter flew open.
Astrid felt she had no choice about her next maneuver. She must subdue the frightcopter’s pilot before he killed them all. She sprinted toward it. She ducked under one of the copter’s hot red and gold-crested nacelles. She pushed her back against the main engine cowl, inching toward the door, weapon drawn. As she crouched and rolled into the open, aiming for the pilot, she saw the reason that she and the doctor were still alive: it was empty. The Watchman inside the prison was controlling it remotely.
“You will be hunted down,” the Watchman said to them. He took off his helm, and he clearly considered himself safely ensconced. He was a sallow, weak-chinned, balding man with tiny blue eyes and an incongruously noble roman nose. “But I’m going to kill you first.”
Dr. Bajwa stood up behind Astrid. “Distract him,” he whispered. “I’ve got nothing to lose, have I?”
“What?”
“Distract the idiot in the box.”
So Astrid said to the Watchman, “You can’t, er, see it . . . from your angle, but above you, chap, I see . . . I see the king’s own frightcopter. It’s all pretty-ditty Windsor golds and scarlets, and I don’t think His Majesty’s going to be pleased with your performance. You’ve murdered your colleagues. He’s landing down, my friend.”
“Oh, piss off,” the Watchman said, smiling greasily. “You’re lying. King Harry! And now you better hope your affairs are all in order.” He began tapping the aerosol touchscreen on back of his armored hand, and frowned. “What the bloody hell?”
Dr. Bajwa popped his head out of the frightcopter’s cockpit. “I’ve disabled the remote,” he said. “I’ve got an NSeven solarcopter certification. Almost. It’s ours now.”
“It’s a bloody frightcopter,” the Watchman hissed, his face grown incandescent red. “It ain’t some weekend whirlybird.”
“Well, we’ll see, friend. I’ve been to Philip K’s Solarcopter Flight School. In Kent, mate, in case you’re wondering.” He nodded and grinned. “And if you don’t mind my saying, you look like you’ve gone for a burton, old chapper.”
“You’ll all die,” the Watchman spat back.
“I won’t argue that,” said Bajwa.
Astrid and the doctor looked toward the lions. “Cuthbert!” they shouted, nearly in unison.
They ran over to the enclosure and looked over its edge. There he was—St. Cuthbert, slid halfway down the inside wall, up to his thighs in moat water. He was using his bolt cutters like a climber’s pick, keeping himself above the moat. A full inch of bright emerald algae covered the water, so much it hardly rippled. Only four or so feet deep, it posed little danger to adults, but it was cold, and Cuthbert was old, sick, and he’d had a few knocks. The lions gazed at the spectacle of him with interest, but not any sort of bloodlust.
“Cuddy,” said Bajwa. “We’ll get you out of here. Can you stay there?”
“Oi’m St. Cuthbert, my old friend. Oi’m going nowhere. Yow must—yow must get down to Grosvenor Square—with Drystan. Ar, it’s past time. I shall begin my . . . my last prayers.”
“But we can’t leave you,” said Astrid. “You’ll die.”
“Yes, yes,” said the doctor, nodding.
“Drystan,” said St. Cuthbert. “I will call you ‘Astrid.’ It’s only two letters off ‘Drystan,’ and one of them is ‘I’—and I’m here, ain’t I? Ha-ha. But the animals. If I can hear them, so must you because of who you are. Listen for them. They will not hurt me any more than people have already. Go. Go to Grosvenor—now, please. And then come back.”
“But you won’t be safe,” said Astrid.
“If you don’t go, there’s no future.”
“No.” Astrid turned to Baj. “We can’t do this. We shan’t leave him.”
St. Cuthbert, his words smearing together, said, “Pleaseplease-gonow. Oi’m just a voice in tha wilderness of the streets. Yow’re the glory. So go. Gogaga-gogo. Go.”
Smiling down at his patient, battling back tears, Dr. Bajwa said, “Well, Cuddy, I guess this is, officially, going for a burton.”
“Yes,” said the saint.
It was with heavy steps, and crushed hearts, that Astrid and Dr. Bajwa climbed into the frightcopter.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” said Astrid. “It’s utter madness.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Bajwa, pulling up the hovering touch-controls. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
And they whirred into the busy London night sky.
eight
always england
MASON GAGE WAS A LONG WAY FROM HIS HOME IN Mingo Grove, West Virginia.
The chief security officer at the American Embassy, still a little grumpy at getting awakened at 4:00 A.M., couldn’t believe his eyes. He was standing in what was officially called the Central Confidence Module, or CCM, but most everyone called it the Roost. Apart from the sound of air whooshing through a ventilation register, the dim room was cool and silent, despite the twenty or so people packed in.
He took his spectacles off. He wiped them on a paper serviette he kept folded in his wallet. He could never get the last smears of facial oil off his lenses these days. Something about London. He put his specs back on. In his hands, he clutched three reports about the night, pr
inted on sticky-feeling, dissolving TemPaper, like all classified communiqués of the Company. The latest report read:
NORTHERN EUROPE-WIDE CLASSIFIED UPDATE 20520501.1 UK / CROWN SOURCES CLAIM SEVERAL NON-DOMESTIC RARE LIVE ANIMALS ON STREETS ACROSS CENTRAL LONDON. POSSIBLE LINKS TO ENGLISH TERRORISTS OR US-BASED DEATH CULT ACTIONS OR (EARL OF) WORCESTER INSURGENCY. ADDITIONAL REPORTS: GORILLA NEAR GROSVENOR COMPLEX. ADVANCED ROYAL WATCH ASSETS DEPLOYED. THREAT BLUE. STRICT LEVEL H PROTOCOLS IN RISK ASSESSMENT / CONTAINMENT. REPORT ENDS, 202061-33.
No report could have prepared him for the surrealism of the facts at hand. Animals in London—everywhere. And there was a dang gorilla on the loose!
He didn’t like the tie-in with the nutjob cults. He didn’t like relying on Crown intelligence sources. And he really didn’t like the gorilla.
Mason wasn’t classic Foreign Service, even within the comparably asperous milieu of the diplomatic police. He was a God-fearing, foulmouthed, bona fide Allegheny grit, a coal-dusted rut-buck hunting hillbilly from Pendleton County, West Virginia, who considered anything smaller than a .30-06 Springfield a squirrel gun. He kept a fourteen-point set of whitetail antlers on his dresser beside an old picture of his mama in a pink housedress, standing in a kitchen in slanted sunlight, holding Mason up proudly as a toddler, kissing his black flyaway hair.
Beyond a seated row of Diplomatic Security Service agents, a bank of screens showed various feeds from low-light and deep-infrared videocameras around Grosvenor Square. On several, a Royal Watch frightcopter was hovering erratically above the square’s lime and plane trees.
“That’s cockeyed,” Mason said to himself.
The pilot seemed unable to keep the aircraft evenly pitched. It looked like a big red, black, and gold Easter egg, rocking and tipping and threatening to take a great fall.
“Watch that chopper,” Mason said aloud. “Something’s . . . something’s just off there.”
“Yessir!” said several voices.
“And please, will someone please ‘ring the Circus’* and find out what the fuck is going on?”