The Queen of sinister da-2

by Marc Chadbourn

  'There's a drop-off point round the way,' he said, muffled.

  'Nah, stick 'em back inside,' the warden replied. 'It'll be a warning.'

  The one with the mask dragged the bodies back into the family home, shut the door and then took out two cans of spray paint before proceeding to mark the door with the circle and cross.

  'Shit. There goes another load,' Thackeray whispered to himself. He looked at Caitlin. 'You don't know how much you have to thank me.'

  He pulled her up the steeply climbing alley where another man around Thackeray's age waited anxiously, shifting from foot to foot. He had a thin acne-scarred face and long hair, and wore an old greatcoat and motorcycle boots.

  'You're a stupid fucker, Thackeray,' he hissed. 'If they catch us now because of her-'

  'I couldn't just leave her out there, could I?' Thackeray protested. He turned to Caitlin again. 'This is Harvey. Not a six-foot invisible white rabbit, but just as much fucking use.'

  The bikers reached the end of the alley. A flashlight shone up and Harvey threw himself into a doorway. Thackeray pressed himself against Caitlin and her against the wall. His nose was only a centimetre from hers. He stared deeply into her eyes, which were seemingly untroubled by the threat below. Whatever he saw there brought a smile to his face.

  One bike turned into the alley, paused briefly while the engine gunned, and then began to move slowly up. Thackeray dragged Caitlin into the doorway where Harvey cowered. They exchanged a nervous look and then Thackeray nodded to the door. Harvey wrenched at the handle, but just as it came open the light shifted enough to reveal a white cross on a red circle.

  'Fuck. Charnel house,' Harvey whispered.

  'No choice.' Thackeray propelled him through, then thrust Caitlin in with him and eased the door shut. 'Don't hang around near the door in case he checks inside,' he hissed.

  'I can't see anything!' Harvey whined. 'And shit, it reeks!' He coughed. 'I can't breathe! I'm going to choke to death in here!'

  Thackeray gagged and pulled his scarf tighter. 'She's not moaning so you can't either, you big fucking girl. We haven't got a choice. Get a move on.'

  'Bastard.'

  The sound of Harvey shuffling through the dark filtered back to them, and then Thackeray followed suit, holding Caitlin's hand tightly.

  'Look, I'm going to use my flint,' Harvey said. 'They won't see the light through the door.'

  He struck it three times and then a light flared. The shadows swooped back to reveal a scene so terrible Thackeray and Harvey recoiled, but there was nowhere to avert their eyes. Bodies bearing the unmistakable signs of the plague were stacked against the walls in various stages of decomposition, men, women, young, old. The floor around their boots was puddled with juices.

  But that wasn't the worst thing. Several pairs of eyes followed the light, and then the moans started. Some were barely human, a whine on the edge of death, a hum of madness inflicted by the situation. Others whimpered. And a few called out in frail, pitiful voices: 'Help me. Please help me.'

  'Shit!' Thackeray said in horror. 'The bastards have dumped some in here while they're still conscious.'

  'There's nothing we can do about it.' Harvey tried to sound hard, but he couldn't keep the desperate humanity out of the end of the sentence. 'Bastards,' he said under his breath, keeping his eyes straight ahead.

  'What kind of person are you to do something like that?' Thackeray guided Caitlin ahead of him until they reached an area where there were only corpses.

  'I don't know how many times I've see this, but it still makes me sick.' Harvey picked his way through the cadavers to the back of the room where the flickering light revealed a door. 'I hope you're right and we are immune.'

  'We'd be dead by now if we weren't.' Thackeray glanced back to the area where the barely living still moaned, wondering if there was anything he could do.

  'There must be, what?… thousands gone by now…'

  'Tens of thousands.'

  'Smacker says there's whole areas where they haven't cleared them — Erdington, Bearwood… They're just lying in the streets, what's left of 'em now, in their homes… He said there's like, plagues of rats and clouds of flies as big as your fist, and the stink-'

  'All right, I don't need you to paint me a picture. Let's just get out of here.'

  They made their way through the door and into the back of the building where there were even more bodies. A section had been set aside where corpses could be prepared for disposal, but neither Thackeray nor Harvey paid any attention to it.

  They eventually made their way out through a window on to a flat roof and then a fire escape. The roar of the bikes had now moved down towards Digbeth. They moved through the still city, the smell of corruption never far from their noses. Occasionally they'd glimpse frightened people scavenging amongst the cavernous buildings, masked with scarves or hooded to keep the stink out or in a feeble attempt to stop the spread of infection. A medieval air now lay across a city that had been thriving and modern only months earlier. Thackeray and Harvey had their base in the Mailbox, a once-upmarket shopping mall now reduced by looters to a maze of empty rooms. They lived in the barricaded back offices of a former shoe shop, with dwindling supplies stolen from a supermarket lorry in the early days of the Fall. Their food cache had once been secured in an entire shop — bottled water, trays of cans, sacks of pasta and rice — safe behind a steel security gate that could only be opened by a key Thackeray had taken from a security guard killed in the first rash of riots. Now it filled barely a tenth of that space. They still didn't know what they were going to do when it was all gone.

  Once safe inside they relaxed. They had a couple of armchairs, sleeping bags under rickety tents of designer sheets to make it more homely, the food for the day in one corner, a?1500 Arabian rug on the floor, scatter cushions all around and a poster of FHMs cover girls on the wall.

  'It might look like a seedy smackhead's squat, but we like to call it home,' Thackeray said, sitting Caitlin down on one of the cushions.

  'So what's the deal with the bow and arrows?' Harvey said, nodding towards the weapon that was still strapped across her back.

  'I don't know. Maybe she uses it to hunt animals. Nothing like a bit of roast squirrel.' He went to remove the bow, but Caitlin's hand went up unconsciously to block him. 'OK. She wants to keep it on. Might be uncomfortable sleeping in it, but that's her call.'

  Harvey threw Thackeray a can of sardines and opened one himself, eating with his fingers. Thackeray took out one sardine steak dripping with thick tomato sauce and offered it to Caitlin. She looked straight past it, past him, so he put it to her mouth, rubbing it gently back and forth on her lower lip. Eventually her tongue flicked out to taste it, then she took a bite, and then took the whole piece into her mouth hungrily. 'I don't know where you came from,' Thackeray said softly, 'but you can't have been walking round this city long in this state.' He fed her another piece of sardine. 'And it looks like it's been a while since you ate. So how did you get here? Couldn't have wandered in from the outside. Getting past all the checkpoints… it was bad enough before the plague. Muzzy in the west isn't letting anybody pass through his turf. Siegler in the east has bolted everything down — and those bastards down south, you wouldn't be in this good a condition if you'd passed through there.' A look of distaste crossed his face.

  'You don't really reckon she can hear you?' Harvey peered into Caitlin's blank eyes, then shook his head and returned to his can of sardines.

  'It's trauma — hardly surprising in this place. She's probably locked up deep inside, understanding everything I'm saying. A fugue state…'

  'You've had too much of a bloody education, you have.' Harvey finished his can and tossed it into a shiny dustbin in the corner. 'I have to ask you, mate — isn't it going to hamper us a bit carting a zombie-bird around? We've had enough close calls as it is.'

  'We couldn't just leave her out there, Harvey, for all those other bastards to pick off. How humane would tha
t be?'

  'You just fancy her.'

  Thackeray didn't answer. Thackeray and Harvey cared for Caitlin for the next week. After the first day she was able to feed herself, silently, laboriously, and she was capable of coping with her other bodily functions once they showed her the toilet. When her period started on the third day, Harvey went out and located a large cardboard box of sanitary towels from the storeroom of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

  Thackeray slept on the cushions while Caitlin had his sleeping bag, and during the day they gave her plenty of exercise walking around the roof of the Mailbox. Though she didn't realise it, from that vantage point the true state of the city could be seen.

  Parts of Balsall Heath were burning and a thick cloud of smoke hovered over the area. There were gaps in the urban sprawl in other areas where similar conflagrations had been allowed to run their course. Abandoned cars and buses were everywhere. Some roofs had caved in due to more localised fires or disrepair, and there were few windows that hadn't been smashed. Barricades had been set up in many streets while bonfires blazed all over the place, pockets of hellish reds and oranges in the grim spread of browns and greys. Few people were visible on the roads, but occasionally white faces briefly passed gaping windows.

  Yet there were flocks of birds all over, starlings swooping with evil eye and sharp beak, crows roosting on the rooftops of offices or nesting in the dark, empty interiors of broken-windowed tower blocks. There was greenery in unusual places, self-set elders in guttering, weeds on rooftops, out-of-control ivy swarming over entire terraces. Nature was reclaiming its own.

  'It's a real mess, isn't it?' Thackeray said. He took Caitlin's hand when she ventured too close to the edge. 'I used to love this city. They'd turned it round from that horrible industrial past… lots of culture sprouting all over the place, galleries, clubs, restaurants, places you actually fancied going out to for a drink. I went to university here, decided to make it my home.' He laughed bitterly. 'Good choice.'

  Harvey came up behind them. 'Don't get too close to the edge. We don't want Buckland's goons knowing we're hiding out here.'

  'Ah, yeah, good old Buckland. The King of Central Birmingham,' Thackeray said sarcastically to Caitlin. 'He came up fast after the Fall, some local crook with plenty of thugs on tap to enforce his ways. There was too much chaos to get any opposition going, and once he was established, that was it.'

  'That's not just it,' Harvey interjected. 'It's the thing he picked up at the Fall… the devil…'

  'Superstition,' Thackeray sneered. 'You'd believe any old bollocks, you would. That's the kind of stupid stuff they put out to keep people like you in line.'

  'It's true! Smacker saw it.'

  'He did, did he?'

  'Well, not exactly

  'Buckland's just a hard man who'll go that extra mile to stay in power. And none of us are inhumane enough to match him. So we just hide out, and live a life in the shadows.' His voice was filled with self-loathing, but he turned to Caitlin and forced a smile. 'You know what they say, you're either part of the cure or you're part of the disease. So that's us done for.'

  'I wish we could get out of here,' Harvey said wistfully. 'Maybe go down to Worcester. I had some good times there, in the Lamb and Flag. They're mellow down there.'

  'Forget it. We're never getting out,' Thackeray said. 'Look at it — they've got it bolted down tight with their little principalities and banana republics, living off the leftovers of society and doing over everyone else who comes into view.' He scanned the skyline thoughtfully, then added sourly, 'This city is a metaphor. Everybody has their own Birmingham — it's a state of mind. You never get away from it.'

  'Bloody ex-student,' Harvey muttered. Mary erupted into a twilight sky high over Wilmington, filled with an overwhelming sense of failure, but not really knowing why. Below her, on Windover Hill, the god was slowly closing the door with a fizz of blue fire. Her confusion and dismay were quickly supplanted by a burst of unfocused anxiety. She trusted her instinct in the spirit-form, where every thought and sensation was heightened, and quickly looked around for the source. What she saw made all the ecstasy of her current state quickly drain away. Her body was not where she had left it. It had been dragged twenty feet across Dragon Hill. The culprit stood nearby: the twisted dead man she was sure had died in the fire, looking completely untouched by the conflagration that had engulfed him.

  It was being tormented by the Elysium, but in their spectral state they clearly had no true ability to physically stop him. They swooped and soared around him, their faces transformed by howls of pain. For a moment, Mary was locked in panic. How could she have been so stupid as to leave her body in such an exposed position? She knew the risks: if her body died while she was in spirit-form, she would drift like a ghost before she finally broke up and blew away.

  The Jigsaw Man lashed out at the Elysium, somehow clearly able to see them. Sharish broke off from the battle and rushed up to Mary like a beam of light reflected off glass.

  'You must come quickly,' he said. 'We cannot hold him off much longer.'

  But Mary was already moving before the final word had been uttered. She re-entered her body with force, desperate not to accept the usual period of lazy readjustment, tinged with sadness, her limbs feeling as heavy as lead, her head stuffed with cotton wool. She attempted to get to her feet, but her legs buckled beneath her. It felt as if a rock pressed on her shoulders. The Jigsaw Man noticed her sudden movement and instantly ignored the Elysium. Its gait was as fast as it had been in the abandoned house, slow for a split second, then speeded-up and jerky. Dead hands clasped around Mary's throat before she had barely registered that the Jigsaw Man had moved.

  'You must fight him!' Sharish said. 'We can do nothing.'

  The fingers clamped tighter and tighter. Mary couldn't breathe; the pressure in her head grew intense.

  'Use the Blue Fire!' Sharish pressed. 'Your kind have always been able to manipulate it.'

  As the oxygen disappeared, a strange clarity came over Mary and she knew exactly what Sharish was telling her. She recalled the lines of earth energy rushing from Dragon Hill to the Long Man, and with one grasping hand reached down to the scrubby grass. Her fingers clutched at the air, missed, clutched again, and somehow she was able to extend herself enough to scrape the ground.

  The Jigsaw Man helped by pressing her down towards it, but her life was fading fast under his rigid grip. The back of its head faced her her, but she could just glimpse the eyes, turned away, rolling wildly.

  In her mind, she formed the image, but she had no idea how to activate it. And then Sharish was beside her, whispering a word in her ear that she had never heard before and which made her slightly queasy. Without thinking, she repeated it.

  All she saw was blue, across her field of vision, deep in her head. Sapphire flames ran from her fingertips through her body and into the Jigsaw Man, exploding in a cascade of sparks twenty feet above her head.

  When her vision cleared, her attacker spasmed on the ground several yards away, smoke rising from his joints.

  'You must hurry,' Sharish said. 'The thing will not stay down long.'

  'Goddess, what is it?' Mary gasped, rubbing at her sore throat as she scrambled for her clothes. 'Its power comes from you.' Sharish floated at her side while she bundled up her possessions and hurried down the hillside, Arthur Lee bounding at her heels from wherever he had been hiding. 'Despair. Self-hatred. Failure. It will not stop attempting to destroy you until all those things are gone from within you.'

  'Then it'll never stop,' Mary said bitterly. 'Never.'

  By the time she reached the foot of the hill her head had cleared. The blue fire rushing through her had a strange effect on her system: she felt positive for the first time in years. 'There must be something I can do to put things right,' she said to herself. She turned to Sharish. 'OK, if I failed with the god, then I want to find the Goddess.'

  He shook his head slowly. 'It-'

  'Don't tell me ho
w dangerous it is. Don't tell me how I'm going to fail. Just tell me where I can find her. I've got to do one good deed before I die… before that thing gets me.'

  He stared into her face. 'You are stronger than you think.'

  'Don't give me flannel. I just want to help Caitlin. I've messed up again, as usual, but I can't give up now — she's depending on me.'

  'Then you must be prepared for a long journey,' he said. 'And a terrible trial. You may not survive.' Time passed for Caitlin in a haze of food and rest and as much comfort as could be conjured from the makeshift premises. She was not aware of anything, least of all herself, but a part of her knew that she was cared for, and beneath the dull, flat line of her existence, that felt good. In her head, she still wandered the bleak, frozen plains of the Ice-Field, but it had become more of a Zen meditation than a desperate search for a way out. In time, perhaps she could even accept it. Thackeray never left her alone for fear she might accidentally harm herself. When they crept through the darkened streets in search of premises to ransack, he held her hand, guiding her carefully past dangers, always watching out for her. Occasionally he would take her off with Harvey for what he laughingly called a 'road trip', sitting by the canals throwing stones while Harvey attempted to fish, or breaking into the council chamber to lie on the floor and examine the majestic architecture of the sweeping ceiling.