Days

by James Lovegrove

Again he smells burning, but around him he can see nothing black or charred or dead. Everything is green and lush and living. He must have fallen some way from the explosion, carried out from the edge of the hoop by its updraught.

  It is an effort to stand. The ground does not want to let go. It clings to him like a mother to her child, and even when he has discharged himself from its embrace, still lays claim to him with the weight of earth, plant matter and moisture coating his back.

  Frank looks himself over. He has been divided into two halves, one clean, the other filthy. Viewed from the front, he would appear normal; from behind, a muck-encrusted mess. Where he landed there is a body-shaped impression in the ground, lined with flattened plants. Pour in plaster of Paris, let it set, and you would prise out a rough half-statue of a spreadeagled man.

  He checks his limbs. All working, some with more complaint than others. He checks his eyes. Everything is haloed with a pale, peach-skin furriness, but his focus sharpens if he moistens his corneas with a few blinks.

  He glances around. Which way is out?

  If he was on the shop floor proper, he would know without hesitation, but the Menagerie is unknown turf. (Here there be tygers.) This is the one part of the store he hasn’t tramped through thousand upon thousand of times. Every footprint he leaves here will be a first.

  Think.

  There are two gates allowing access into the Menagerie from the Basement, one to the north, the other to the south. All he has to do is head for the perimeter wall, follow it around, and he will reach one or the other eventually. Of course, he could simply stay put until a team of Menagerie staff locate him. He has no doubt that they are coming. Mr Bloom will have alerted them. But with nearly two square kilometres of jungle for them to search, that may take some time. Getting out will be safer if he waits for them, but making for one of the entrances by himself will be quicker.

  Walking, the skill which has been so indispensible to his career, has to be learned all over again. He is hampered by snaking ground vines and ankle-snaring weeds; the slippery underlayer of moss and the unevenness of the ground. Each step has to be planned, carefully considered, before it can be executed.

  The smell of burning grows stronger, and he discerns wisps of smoke trailing through the air towards him. From somewhere ahead comes the crackle of flames. From overhead, the jabber of customers on all six hoops massing their voices in a chorus of opinions and concerns, and a distant wail of fire alarms. What he cannot hear are birdsong and the rustling of hidden creatures. The bomb has shocked all of the Menagerie’s denizens, even the insects, into silence.

  As the smoke thickens, tingeing the air grey, Frank comes across trees that are seared on one side. The ground turns ashy. Flecks of soot swarm around him like gnats. Soon he is walking among charred and tattered foliage which hangs from singed branches like torn black lace, although, higher up, the trees are intact and the canopy is still green and tightly intertwined. Feeble flames lick along ground-shoots, shrub-tendrils and the leaves and petals of orchids, flickering fitfully before petering out – everything here too wet, too full of juices, to burn well. His footsteps crackle as his soles tramp down singed-brittle stems. He accidentally kicks over the furless, flash-fried body of a small mammal. Its blistered flesh gives off a not unappetising aroma of cooked meat.

  The smoke becomes chokingly thick, and he decides to turn back, but not before glimpsing the epicentre of the detonation. The trees there are blasted but still standing. The crevices in their scorched bark glow orange, and their passenger epiphytes have been reduced to shrivelled black lumps. But they are still standing. The Menagerie was big enough to absorb the fury of the explosion, and damp enough to snuff out its fire.

  Frank retreats from the ghostly, fuming ground zero, heading back into the emerald depths of the unharmed jungle.

  Unaware that he has been spotted and is being followed.

  2.54 p.m.

  IT COULD HARDLY be called walking. It is more like a cross between a stagger and a lurch – in terms of effort to result, disproportionately strenuous. But still she drives herself on. One foot drags, one arm dangles uselessly by her side. Her body is partially encased in a carapace of melted clothing, burnt hair clings to her scalp in gobbets like tar, and her skin hangs in crisp strips that loop her limbs and sometimes snag and tear and fall away when she bumps against something. Slivers of steel from the beer keg protrude from her flesh. Bone can be seen where bone should not be visible. One eye – her right eye, the one that was not baked to a cinder in its socket by the blast – shines balefully. She hurts beyond hurting. She should not be alive. But she is.

  And as she shambles after the Security operative who thwarted her plans, Miss Dalloway stoops and, with the blackened claw that is her functioning hand, picks up a rock.

  She knows she is dying. Dashing his brains out will be her final gesture of vengeance and defiance.

  2.55 p.m.

  FRANK LOOSENS HIS tie. Its silk has begun to wrinkle in the humidity. He undoes the top button of his shirt. Then he undoes the next one down. What the hell. Go crazy. There isn’t much point in trying to pass himself off a smart, well-heeled Days customer in the heart of a replica jungle.

  He tries to put out of his mind all thoughts of large, untamed creatures roaming noiselessly among the trees or lurking in the undergrowth, observing him, but with so many shadows around it is hard not to imagine predatory eyes peering out, tracking his movements with calm animal intelligence. There is no way he can blend in here or belong. Even half covered in organic muck, he sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb.

  He wishes he hadn’t lost his gun. Whether or not he would be quick enough with it to kill an attacking animal, simply having it in his hand would make him feel safer.

  Chances are he will make it to one of the gates unscathed. Chances are the animals are more scared of him than he is of them.

  An inhuman screech directly behind him halts him in his tracks.

  2.56 p.m.

  MISS DALLOWAY UNDERSTANDS, at some primal, lightless level far below the surface of conscious thought, that she cannot hope to creep up on her target by stealth. Her only chance is speed and the element of surprise.

  Summoning up every last erg of energy left in her body, she makes her final charge. Sheer stubborn perversity coaxes her dragging leg to function properly and lends her the strength to lift the rock above her head. The very air itself seems to be trying to hold her back, like an invisible hand, but she wills herself on, accelerating from a stumble to a run.

  Even if her eardrums had not been blown by the explosion, she would not recognise the warcry that issues from her throat as a sound created by her own vocal cords.

  2.56 p.m.

  SOME KIND OF ape? A bear on its hind legs?

  That is all Frank can think as the scarecrow-like, tatterdemalion creature comes rushing at him through the trees, howling, its one eye shining with a terrible inner illumination. It does not occur to him that this shaggy, screeching, upright beast could possibly be human.

  The rock in its paw begins its arc of descent. There is no time for defensive or evasive action.

  Then something slams into the ape-bear creature, knocking it sideways, sending the rock flying out of its grasp. Frank has an impression of muscularity, pale fur, vertical black stripes...

  The tigress.

  The ape-bear is pushed to the ground, supine. It flails madly at the tigress as she sets her forepaws on its chest to hold it down. It gropes frantically at her pelt for some kind of purchase as she lowers her head and clamps her jaws around its neck, and it continues to resist even after she has torn out its throat with a single sideways toss of her huge white head. Gargling horribly, the ape-bear fights on like a machine that has been shut down but continues to run on momentum alone, its stuttering, spastic efforts growing feebler as the tigress chews further chunks out of it.

  It is only when the ape-bear ceases struggling that Frank spots, affixed to its chest, a warp
ed, blistered rectangle of plastic still just about recognisable as an ID badge, and realises what (or rather who) the ape-bear is (or rather was).

  That is when he turns away. However, though he can avert his eyes to shut out the sight of the tigress savaging Miss Dalloway, he cannot shut out the sounds of human flesh being consumed. They are sounds that will haunt him for ever.

  They cease, eventually. Sated, the tigress turns away from her eviscerated kill.

  Frank hears the sound of her paws delicately crushing the undergrowth, coming closer, and he holds himself perfectly still, closes his eyes and longs for congruity. If only he knew how to camouflage himself among trees and vines as well as he does among displays and merchandise. If only he could somehow tune himself out of the tigress’s perceptions by immersing himself in the jungle equivalent of the everyman ordinariness which makes shoplifters overlook him so easily. But he cannot. Here, he is the suspicious character, the tigress the Ghost.

  The tigress halts in front of him, and extends her blood-pinkened muzzle forwards to sniff. She runs her nose over his right hand, up his sleeve to the elbow and down again, down one leg of his trousers and up again to his crotch. The air moves in and out of her nostrils with an audible hiss. Her musk is earthy, urinary, potent.

  Frank wants nothing in the world so much as to run, but he orders himself to stay still, not to move.

  The tigress peers up at his face with her azure eyes and makes a noise deep in her throat, like a growl, only softer.

  So faint is this noise that Frank will never be sure if he imagined it or not. However, just as he will always remember the sounds of the tigress eating Miss Dalloway, so he will always remember that low, subtle rumble. And he will always wonder if it really was, as he thinks at the time, a purr.

  Fur brushes briefly, lightly against the fingertips of his right hand – a brittle tickling – and he parts his eyelids a crack, and there the tigress is, loping away from him with her tail slung low, past the mauled corpse of the Head of the Books Department, heading deep into the viridian gloom of the Menagerie, gradually merging her paleness into its darkness, slipping her stripes in among its fretted shadows, becoming a spectral grey tiger-shape, and then becoming a part of the jungle and no shape at all.

  3.12 p.m.

  SOME TIME LATER, Frank finds himself sitting on a rock by a stream in a clearing, very possibly the same clearing in which he caught sight of the tigress this morning. Above the membrane of the net, the tiers of the atrium rise, narrowing, to the dome. Faces fringe the parapets, many of them peering down at him.

  A squad of Menagerie staff are crashing through the jungle towards him. He can hear them shouting to one another. Clad in their chain-mesh suits and armed with their tranquilliser rifles, they will escort him out to safety.

  The stream burbles over its bed of pebbles in a long, shallow, sinuous curve, here and there bubbles beading and breaking spontaneously on its smooth surface. The irrigation pipes hiss a mist that drizzles down onto Frank’s head, plastering his hair into flat, matted rat-tails. Nature has tapped her baton, and the Menagerie’s birds have tentatively begun to sing again; the insects have picked up their instruments once more and are starting to play.

  In his hand he is holding his broken Sphinx, angled towards his face. He is gazing hard into the cracked glass of its screen. Gazing in delight and mild wonderment.

  The Menagerie staff are coming.

  He will be out of here soon.

  42

  Seven-Day Fever: an acute infectious disease caused by a spirochaete transmitted by ticks or lice, and characterised by recurrent attacks separated by periods of remission lasting approximately seven days; also known as relapsing fever.

  4.30 p.m.

  THE PROCESSING ITSELF was not so bad. The dour little Scotsman who officiated was terse but not rude. Unlike many whose jobs bring them into close contact with human failings on a daily basis, he had not entirely lost his respect for his fellow men. He remained essentially civil, and for that Linda was grateful. It was a small shred of comfort; she had not entirely been stripped of her dignity.

  In the cramped booth, with the Trivetts seated opposite him and an accompanying guard to one side of his desk, the processor listened as Linda recounted her version of the incident with the Ghost in Clocks. She put as sympathetic a slant as possible on what she had done, but under questioning could not deny either that she had smuggled the pepper spray onto the premises or that she had assaulted an employee. Not knowing at the time that he was an employee was no excuse. Nor did it help that her offence had been observed and recorded by the Eye. The Eye did not lie. Morrison (for that was the processor’s name) showed Linda the clip of her squirting the Ghost in the face. There it was in smudgy black and white. Incontrovertible.

  Spinning the monitor back round, Morrison then told Linda that, in the light of the evidence against her, he had no alternative but to suspend the Trivetts’ account permanently and banish them from Days for life. Both of them. Linda because of her misdemeanour, and Gordon because he was co-signatory of their account, and so guilty by association.

  Even though she had been expecting this, the words fell on Linda’s ears like a funeral knell. Gordon’s left ear was still ringing so sonorously that he had to ask the processor to repeat himself several times to him until he got the gist. He seemed none too upset.

  Morrison asked Linda to hand over their card, and used it to call up their account details. With a few brief keystrokes he transferred sufficient funds from their joint bank account to pay off the debt they had run up. There would, he said, be an additional sum to be paid once the cost of the damage done in Third World Musical Instruments had been established. Since the total was going to be divided equally among the four hundred or so participants in the shopping maul, the Trivetts’ portion would be well within their financial limitations, although still not inconsiderable.

  The unkindest cut came when Morrison gave Linda back their Silver, along with a pair of blunt-nosed safety scissors.

  “We prefer our customers to perform this task themselves,” he said.

  She almost burst into tears while cutting the card in half. Almost, but not quite.

  After that, there was nothing for her and Gordon to do but go out and sit on one of the benches in the main room and wait to be escorted off the premises, and here they have remained for the past hour. This is the really humiliating part, sitting here among the criminals and the opportunist fools, although of course Linda does not think that she and Gordon belong in either of those categories. Linda would like to believe that she and Gordon belong to a third distinct group, that of hapless unfortunates.

  At last a guard calls their names. He takes them out of Processing and down a narrow corridor, at the end of which lies a short flight of concrete steps. At the top of the steps there is an unprepossessing metal door, secured by a number of locks and bolts. Unlocked, unbolted, the door scrapes inwards to reveal another short flight of steps heading off at right angles.

  “Out you go,” says the guard, holding the door open, and out Linda and Gordon go. The door clangs shut behind them.

  They are outside. The steps lead up to Days Plaza. Wind buffets them as they ascend to street level, in full view of dozens of window-shoppers. Linda braces herself for jeers and catcalls, but the window-shoppers obviously do not consider the sight of exiled customers coming up nervously into the daylight either a particularly novel one or, indeed, more interesting than the events going on inside their favourite window, although one man, noticing them, is prompted to smile and say, “Welcome to the club.”

  Linda’s cheeks flush furiously. She strides off, Gordon in tow.

  Taxis are parked in the turning circle outside the nearest entrance, waiting for the closing-time crowd. Linda approaches the first in line, checking before she climbs in that the driver is not the same one who ferried her and Gordon here. That would be too much. The final straw. An embarrassment too far. Although, thinking about it,
she wouldn’t mind having a few words with that particular taxi driver about the pepper spray he conned her into buying...

  The driver of this taxi reluctantly agrees to accept cash. “Reached your limit, have you?” he says.

  Linda, ignoring the remark completely, gives him their address, then slides the privacy window between the front and rear seats shut.

  “So that’s that then,” says Gordon loudly, as the taxi pulls away from the world’s first and (emphatically, resoundingly, deafeningly not) foremost gigastore.

  “It was fun,” Linda replies, nodding. “For a while.” She longs to take a backward glance but she can’t. She mustn’t.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said, it was... Oh, never mind. How’s your poor ear?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I said –”

  “I heard you that time. I was just joking.”

  She punches gently him in the ribs.

  “So we’ve learned our lesson, have we?” he says, reaching along the back of the seat and tentatively placing a hand on Linda’s shoulder. When she doesn’t shrug it off, as she has been known to in the past, he slowly begins to massage the shoulder, proceeding to the back of her neck. She submits gratefully. “Never again, eh?”

  “Never again,” she says. “Although,” she adds, “there is always the EuroMart.”

  Gordon stops massaging. “Linda...”

  She talks quickly. Best plant the seed as early as possible. “Once we’ve paid off what we owe Days, it won’t take long to build up enough credit again to apply for an account there. Think about it. We could go on day-trips to Brussels. They do discount fares. Package holidays. We could stay in a cheap hotel...”