by Simon Morden
It passed over their heads, a blurred, scouring shadow above which disappeared into the darkness, dragging roof supports down with it. Something heavy shifted in a long, slow slide inside the station concourse which grew in volume, then subsided. A storm-front of dust and grit blew out, smothering them. A final patter of debris, and it was over.
Petrovitch had his face next to hers, in the dirty darkness formed by the angle of their cowering bodies.
“You okay?” He could feel her eyelashes tickle his cheek, her ragged breath against his skin.
“Do you suppose there was anyone on that train?”
He risked raising his head. His glasses were coated with a layer of speckled dust. He took them off and huffed gently on each of the lenses. Even that simple act made him cough hoarsely.
The out-of-focus scene resolved as he put them back on.
“Yobany stos,” he said.
The station behind him had partially collapsed, the bridge in front torn in two, and the two platforms stripped clean and carved with deep grooves. The air was thick with fine powder that the wind tugged at like fog.
The fence they’d crawled under was gone, along with the front wall of the terrace opposite, which was ripped out and thrown down across the road. The rooms inside looked like the insides of dolls houses: a standard lamp flickered as it hung by its flex from a first-story sitting room. Part of the first carriage was embedded in someone’s front room.
“We have to look for survivors,” said Madeleine.
“No. No, we don’t.” Petrovitch gingerly brushed his hair with his fingertips. It was stiff with dust, and there were fragments of glass lodged near the roots. “What possible use could we be?”
“We could help them,” she said, her voice trailing away as she realized the enormity of the disaster.
“We can’t even phone for an ambulance! The network is down, and even if it wasn’t, we don’t have a phone—I saw you look at yours when you took off your robes, then you handed it over anyway. But who would we call? Who would come? The police have vanished. The hospitals will be locked down. The fire service? Where would they start? The whole yebani city is in flames.”
“We’re not just walking away.” She balled her fists with frustration.
“I was thinking of running,” said Petrovitch, and pointed toward the tower blocks of Paradise. “That looks like a good direction.”
“I can save someone!”
He could feel himself losing his temper, a heat that was rising to boiling point inside. “And I can save everyone. If we stay here, all we can do is drag bodies out of the wreckage and watch the wounded die for the lack of anything more complicated than an aspirin. There’s no one else coming. No one. It’s just us. So what do we do? We can waste our time being good and holy and accomplish absolutely nothing. Or we can go and find Sonja Oshicora and take her to the New Machine Jihad, who might be persuaded to stop this bloody slaughter. It’s a long shot, it makes no sense, but you know, it might just work. Your call.”
Madeleine swayed, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “You care, don’t you?”
“Too much. The Metrozone took me in, hid me, gave me a life. I owe it.”
She hawked up some phlegm, and spat on the ground. She smacked her lips like there was a bad taste in her mouth. “I suppose we’ll have to do it your way.”
“This isn’t cowardice, even though I’ve seen enough carnage for one morning. This is the only thing I can think of.” He dug his hands in his pockets to feel the reassuring touch of a gun. “I know this makes you feel like govno: it won’t exactly go down in history as my finest hour, either.”
Madeleine groaned, and chased some loose strands of hair away. With one last look behind her, she set a reluctant foot forward. The other followed more easily. Petrovitch half-jogged, half-walked beside her giantess strides. Their path was blocked by the demolished bridge, and they could do nothing else but start to climb over the unstable rubble.
It shifted and slid. A car roof showed green through the dust and boomed as they stepped on it. As they crested the edge of the crazily tilted box-girder roadway, the back end of a railway carriage came into view. All its glass was gone, and anything loose inside had been propelled to the front.
Madeleine glanced at it briefly, then pointedly turned away and concentrated her gaze on where she was placing her feet.
Petrovitch did more. He waited for her to pull ahead, then picked his way to the first visible window. As he approached, he became more and more relieved: the carriage was empty. It was nothing more than a ghost train. He put his head inside to check. No bodies, no blood. No repeat of the lifts inside the Oshicora Tower.
He caught her up and they walked side by side, past the end of the platform and into the long sloping cut that led into the tunnel’s entrance.
“There was no one there,” he said quietly.
“Thanks.”
“That’s okay.” He listened to the sharp, high chatter of a machine pistol as it echoed off the enclosing buildings. “Of course, I could be lying.”
“I know, but then I’d thank you for lying to me.” She looked down at him and picked a glittering bead of glass from between his collar and his neck. It embedded itself in her finger and drew out a bright drop of blood. She flicked both the glass and blood away, then stiffened. “There’s something else coming.”
Petrovitch cocked his head. The violence of the train wreck had left him with ringing ears, and he couldn’t hear anything.
She grabbed his hand and ran up the tracks. Hidden behind the buildings to their right was an Underground line that briefly appeared from the depths before plunging into the shared tunnel ahead. Before disappearing out of sight, there was a section in the open air where the two systems ran parallel to each other.
Petrovitch felt a drawn-out vibration deep in his bones. He pulled back, but she was irresistible. She wanted to see all the horrors invented for this day. A tube train hurtled into view around the corner of the building, shaking and rolling, sharp flashes of blue light bursting from underneath its wheels. It ran away from them, up the narrow-gauge track, its grafittied livery bright against the drab veil of dust it pushed through.
The rear door of the last carriage was open, forced by those inside, and there was a figure braced in the frame, feet and hands clawing at the sharp metal edges before being propelled out onto the rail bed.
A spin of skirt and a flap of jacket: she landed across the electrified third rail and jerked and bounced. But just because she was dead didn’t stop her moving.
Her place at the door was taken by another as the rear of the tube train rattled away into the tunnel. Its lights faded and sank as the darkness took it.
They walked slowly forward. The woman’s body was starting to smoke, little tendrils of steam that the wind caught and blew ragged.
“You know,” said Petrovitch, “When I find the New Machine Jihad, I’m going to have to think of a way to make them pay for this pizdets.”
The corner of Madeleine’s eye twitched involuntarily. “I thought you said they were in charge.”
“They’re no more in charge of the Metrozone than they are of the weather.” He was level with the contorted body on the tracks, and he resisted the urge to pull it clear. The clothing was on fire, and yet again there was nothing he could do. He hated feeling powerless, especially with the smell of cooking flesh in his nose. “Fucking amateurs.”
The tracks crossed a canal: the surface of the water was black and bubbling, thick like mud, and interrupted by shapes that could have been the rotting corpses of barges. It looked to be the last place to head for, but the only danger was organic decay: no automated systems to go wrong down there.
Madeleine climbed over the bridge parapet and skittered down the rough concrete support until she landed on the rubbish-strewn tow path. She crouched and looked both ways. She beckoned him on.
The footing was uncertain, slippery after the rain, the moss acting both as a spo
nge and a lubricant. He was covered in wet, greasy stains as well as mud and dust by the time he joined her.
“Tell me this is strictly necessary,” he said.
“No one comes down here. Or at least, they never did.”
“I can’t guess why.” It smelled of the deep wood in autumn, of earthy sulphurous decomposition.
“Don’t fall in. You’d be poisoned before you drowned,” she said, and tried to take the land-most side of the path.
It seemed, however, that for the past two decades the canal had been treated as nothing more than a tip for everything from everyday refuse to old furniture and appliances, not to mention the obligatory shopping trolleys. In places, the tow path was buried underneath drifts of filth that jutted out like headlands into the stagnant water.
They had little choice over the route they took, slipping and sliding on the inconstant ground, determined not to use their hands for fear of being cut by something unclean. Instead, they held each other’s hands—one bracing themselves and the other moving, leapfrogging across the ad-hoc tip until they reached a place behind an ancient, rusting industrial building that was all rusting pipes and leaking tanks.
“Climb up here,” said Madeleine, and made a stirrup of her hands.
Petrovitch slapped his hands against the wall he had to get over and tried to scrape off some of the mess that had stuck to the sole of his boot.
“Don’t worry about that,” she said.
“Yeah, well. I’m told it’s the thought that counts.” He put his foot in her hands; he was so light and she so strong that he was hoisted almost level with the top of the wall. He overbalanced, and started to fall.
There was only one way to go: forward, because back toward the canal would have been unthinkable. His hands waved ineffectually at the brickwork, scraping his knuckles raw, and he fell on the other side in a heap of dead and dying weeds.
He wasn’t alone. His glasses had been knocked awry by the impact, and it was as he straightened them that he saw three pairs of feet. On looking up, there were three guns.
One of the men—a skinny white kid much like himself, but with a milky eye—jerked the barrel of his gun up.
Petrovitch made certain they could see his hands, raising them with nothing but grime and blood on his pink palms. Then he shouted in one breath, “Runmaddyrun,” before a metal-filled fist crashed into the side of his head.
26
It wasn’t the first time he’d come round to find himself being dragged through the streets like a piece of meat. All the other times had been in Russia, though, and it took him a few moments to recognize the unwelcome strain on his arms and the scraping of his toes on the tarmac.
He was slung between two people, head down over the road. They had hold of him under his armpits. They seemed to be content to half-carry him, and Petrovitch was content to let them. He was in no shape for a fight, especially since his pockets were considerably lighter than when he’d last checked.
His glasses were missing: that was something that was going to cause him far more problems than the lack of a gun.
He tried to get a sense of where he was, without looking up. The poor condition of the road surface, the echoing, the gloom of an occluded sky: he could only be in Paradise.
They’d been waiting for him, for both him and Madeleine, which was odd considering she’d changed their route on an ad-hoc basis. He was certain he wasn’t carrying a tracker, and no one would have dared get close enough to Madeleine to tag her. Neither had they been followed; she wouldn’t have allowed it.
His attackers pulled him up a ramp and into a building. He could see a bare concrete floor, stained and damp, and could feel a ceiling over him. Natural light seeped in behind, and he was facing a wall.
They dropped him without warning, and his face closed with the floor at alarming speed. He managed to turn his head in time not to break his nose, instead choosing to stun himself into insensibility again.
He lay there, quiet and still, and wondered what they were all waiting for.
He could hear a rhythmic grinding noise that grew louder. It stopped and, after a few moments, there was the unmistakable rattle of lift doors opening.
Two of the men reached down to pick Petrovitch up again, and he decided that he’d be damned if they were going to put him inside that metal cube. If he blinked, he could see the pile of bodies and the wash of blood.
“Stop,” he said, and they were so surprised that he was conscious and talking that they dropped him again. He managed to get his hands under him to partially break his fall.
The lift door started to close again, and one of the men stuck his boot in the way. The motors wheezed pathetically as they strained against the obstruction.
“I don’t want to go in the lift.”
“I don’t see how you’ve got any say in where you go or how you go,” said the man at the lift.
“I can walk,” said Petrovitch.
Someone laughed.
“I don’t think so,” said the man. “You barely look alive.”
Petrovitch looked up. The man’s face was a blur; he could just make out a shaved scalp and a black beard. That, or his head was on upside down. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have hit me so hard.”
“Like it matters.” He relented, and nodded to the men standing behind Petrovitch. “Get him to his feet. Let’s see him stand.”
Petrovitch was hauled upright, then steadied as he wavered. He lacked the visual cues that told him where vertical was. Something else was wrong, too. He put his hand to the side of his head to find his skin wet and sticky.
He stared at his palm, and scratched a pattern in the half-dried blood with his fingers.
The man heaved the lift doors back. “You wouldn’t make it up the first flight of stairs, and we’re going all the way to the top. We don’t get credit for your corpse, either.”
Petrovitch felt a hand at his back push him toward the open doors. He tried to resist, but realized how weak he really was when he found himself going faster and faster toward the rear wall. He slammed into it with a boom, and stayed pinned there by the same hand.
The bearded man released the doors and let them squeak shut. “You see? Much better to cooperate.”
There were only so many more blows to the head Petrovitch could take. He shook himself angrily and turned around, pressing his back against the lift side as it rumbled into life.
“Nervous?” he asked.
Without his glasses, he missed their expressions, but the way they stood betrayed them.
“We haven’t got anything to be nervous about.”
“Yeah. Let me tell you about my morning. Big, modern tower, the latest, smartest everything; polished marble floor, brushed steel and glass. Something called the New Machine Jihad took that building over, trapped most of the people who worked there in lifts not so different to this one, and killed them all. Dropped them from the top floor, crushed them to an unrecognizable mush at the bottom. So much blood in each one that it came out in a wave.” Petrovitch paused. “You have heard about the New Machine Jihad, haven’t you? Everyone’s talking about them.”
“Shut up, you Russian bastard.”
“They’re the ones to beat. Sorry, but no one’s afraid of the Paradise militia anymore—not when the Jihad can reach into the heart of your territory and take out whoever it likes.”
“I said, shut up.” The fuzzy shape the bearded man held up was Petrovitch’s Norinco.
“Must make you cross. Struggle on all these years, carving out your little kingdom, living in little better than a ghetto, then when your moment comes… it gets snatched away from you by a bunch of faceless nerds who just happen to know how the Metrozone really works.”
His own gun was pressed to his already bruised temple. “Five, four.”
Petrovitch squinted past the barrel. “You’re going to lose, and lose hard.”
The lift shuddered to a halt, and the doors slid open. “Three. Two.”
A
familiar voice drawled: “Is that necessary?”
“He’s asking for it.”
“And you got sucked in? Come on out, Petrovitch. We’ve been expecting you.”
Petrovitch could see a bulky figure in a plaid shirt framed in the doorway. He added that and the accent, and worked out it could only be Sorenson.
“Hey, kid. Where are your glasses?”
“You’ll have to ask the peshka. Maybe they’ve been so busy slapping me around and playing with their yielda that they don’t remember.” Petrovitch stumbled out, blinking. The watery light was bright enough to make his eyes smart.
“Come on, boys. Hand ’em over,” said Sorenson. He waited a few moments, and the door started to close again. He stepped forward and held one of his meaty hands up to prevent it moving any further. “Don’t make me come in there.”
The bearded man thought about defiance, and decided against it. He reached into his pocket and threw Petrovitch’s spectacles onto the floor outside the confines of the lift. He followed it with a gobbet of phlegm.
Sorenson was just about satisfied. He let go of the door, and when it had shut, he kicked it for good measure. He scooped up the glasses and pressed them into Petrovitch’s hands.
“You look like crap,” said Sorenson.
“Yeah. So everyone keeps on telling me.” Petrovitch jammed the bent frames onto his face, wincing as the cold metal touched his open wound. “I was wondering where you’d gone to. Then I was told a police station had been destroyed in an explosion, and I thought of you. That’s what you used to do, right? Blow stuff up?”
He blinked and tried to make the lenses more or less cover his eyes. He was in what used to be a community lounge for the residents of the tower block and was now a war room. It was at the very top of the building, with only the roof above, and the long plate-glass windows afforded an uninterrupted panorama of the destruction below. The tower was on the south side of Paradise: he could see Regent’s Park off to his left, and the City straight ahead, partially obscured by the smoke rising from many fires—one of which was St. Joseph’s.