Shift #2

by Jeff Povey

‘There’s only three of us left. Me, you and Johnson.’

  ‘Don’t forget the Apes.’

  ‘They don’t count. They belong with their own subspecies. I’m scared, all right. Petrified,’ she says

  Billie takes a seat on one of the tables, leaning back, arms crossed as if the debate is over. Even through the reinforced glass in the windows I can hear the Apes thundering down the platform, getting further and further away.

  Billie’s skin has developed a sheen of perspiration that glistens under the carriage lights.

  ‘My head hurts,’ she says.

  ‘I’ll get Johnson. He’s great. He knows medical things.’

  ‘It’s spinning. Can’t focus.’

  ‘Wait there.’

  I make to move away but she grabs my wrist. Her movement is staggeringly quick.

  ‘Did you know we were together?’ she eventually asks.

  ‘You and Johnson?’

  She smiles the smile of someone in love. ‘He’s amazing, Rev.’

  ‘Yeah – uh – about that.’ I can tell Billie is halfway delirious. ‘Tell you what, why don’t we go see him?’

  Billie is lost to her imaginings. ‘We got trapped in a rainstorm.’

  This is getting awkward now. ‘We’ve talked about this, Billie. We dealt with it, remember?’

  ‘I kept getting a drip down the back of my neck.’

  ‘That wasn’t real.’

  Billie’s eyes flick to blue then black again. ‘Of course it’s real.’

  ‘Listen to me.’

  She stops.

  And smiles.

  Not a proper smile of happiness, more one that would accompany scorn. It’s a jeering smile.

  ‘I get it. You think he should be with you.’

  My shoulders tingle.

  ‘Enjoy your little piggyback, did you?’

  Billie climbs to her feet, steps closer. She looks weak and is unsteady on her feet. ‘Johnson and I . . .’ She sways and has to sit back down on the table. ‘That was amazing. What we had, what we still have. It’s perfect, Rev. I can see why you like him so much.’

  She smiles again.

  And something glints in her mouth.

  ‘I totally get it.’ She is panting, and her breathing is laboured and she has to steady herself in case she slides off the table. ‘It’s just a shame I got him first.’

  The overhead lights in the carriage bounce off something metal in her mouth.

  ‘We shouldn’t be here, Billie. You should be rehearsing Hamlet and I should be dyeing my hair a normal colour and thinking about Kyle and what my mum’s going to say when she eventually sees me and asks me where I’ve been. And I’ve seen my dad! I need to tell her that.’

  Billie stiffens. It’s tiny and almost unnoticeable.

  ‘When?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When did you see your dad?’

  I hesitate.

  Her black eyes give little away. But I’m tingling all over now.

  ‘In the supermarket,’ I tell her, backtracking as fast as I can. ‘Where he got burned. You were there.’ Instinct is screaming at me not to tell her about the hospital.

  ‘No. You didn’t mean then.’ Her clammy skin ripples. It’s like a small wave as it runs the entire length of one arm and then back down the other. Non-Lucas’s skin did the same once.

  ‘Yeah . . . I did. When . . . when else would I have meant?’ I stammer. Though to be fair I wouldn’t believe me either. I’m a rotten liar.

  ‘Where did you see him, Rev?’ Her eyes flick from black to blue and back again. ‘Where?’ She says it quietly, intimately, almost a whisper.

  I think quickly. ‘In my dream.’

  Billie is surprised.

  ‘I dreamed I saw him,’ I tell her and because it’s the truth I can talk more convincingly. ‘He was back at the train station and I climbed across the track to see him. But it felt realer than a dream, you know? So I guess it feels bigger than that.’

  In the dream my dad was standing at the train station in our home town. He was wearing a suit and shiny shoes and the dream was so real I truly thought that he’d somehow reached out to me.

  He’d told me to run for my life.

  Billie’s skin ripples again.

  ‘A dream,’ she says, almost to herself. But the way she pounced so quickly onto any thought of my dad is worrying. Something about her attitude makes me think that the last thing she wants is for my dad to help us.

  Where the hell are the Apes?

  ‘But it was just a dream,’ I add. ‘And anyway, maybe it was the other Rev’s dad. Maybe they helped him get better and took him home.’

  ‘They went home? How would you know that?’

  ‘I-I don’t,’ I stammer.

  Billie presses her face closer to mine. She scans every aspect of my face, as if sniffing out my awkward lies.

  ‘It’s just we never saw them, so I presumed,’ I offer.

  ‘They left their Ape though,’ Billie says quietly.

  ‘Who wouldn’t, right?’ I add a smile to this, as if we’re in on a little joke together. ‘Who wouldn’t leave an Ape if you got the chance.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ she says simply. ‘And that other Rev is also you.’ Billie is processing me, evaluating me in ways I really don’t like. ‘You’d make sure we all went back together.’

  ‘Yeah but—’

  ‘And you wouldn’t leave Johnson behind.’ Which is her coup de grâce, her thick iron nail driving deep into the tissue of half-truths I’ve been selling her. ‘Would you?’

  Her eyes switch to the deepest black yet and stay that way. I don’t know if she’s even aware of it happening but she looks like a lion who has cornered a lamb.

  ‘So Rev Two and the others must be still here . . . which means your dad hasn’t gone anywhere.’

  ‘Of course he has.’

  A talon slides from Billie’s index finger. It takes her completely by surprise.

  ‘Billie!?’

  Her mouth drops open. ‘Rev!?’

  ‘It’s all right, Billie. It’s all right.’

  ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’ Billie staggers back, as if she can get away from the talon, but it’s attached to her and she can’t escape it.

  ‘What the hell?’ The shock has sent Billie tumbling back into her human state. She’s now a panicked sixteen-year-old with a talon sticking out of her finger.

  I try to stay calm for her. ‘Billie, take some breaths. Breathe. OK? Breathe . . .’

  Another talon slides out of the tip of her middle finger.

  ‘Rev.’ Her voice is faint now, barely a whisper as her brain fails to make sense of what she is seeing. She backs down the carriage, bumping into a seat and almost falling before steadying herself.

  ‘Breathe, Billie . . .’ I have no idea why I’m saying that. It’s not as if she’s about to give birth. ‘Just keep calm.’

  Billie stops backing away and takes some deep lungfuls of air.

  Where the hell are those stupid button-obsessed Apes?

  Billie raises her hand. She looks at the talons in quiet wonder, as much baffled as bewitched by them.

  Her teeth glint and I can see that they have turned to metal. The thing I feared the most – in fact, the one thing I tried my best to ignore, as if that would make it go away – has happened. When Non-Lucas cut her with his talons his DNA somehow bonded with Billie’s.

  There’s no two ways about this.

  She’s one of them now.

  Billie runs the tip of her other index finger along a talon until it reaches the hideously sharp point.

  ‘Rev?’ she says, her brain still unable to accept what her eyes are telling her. ‘Say something.’ Billie’s internal war between shock and grim fascination has been won by shock.

  ‘It’ll be OK—’

  ‘OK!? You call this okay!?’ Her eyes are as black as coal now, but the panic is still evident. ‘What’s happening to me?’

  ‘You must’ve noticed
.’ Which sounds so, so lame.

  ‘Noticed what?’

  ‘The way you-you’ve changed . . . You’ve been sort of behaving like one of them – on and off – for a while now.’

  Being hit by a nuclear explosion would have less impact on Billie than my words have just had. She opens and closes her mouth and tries to speak but her eyes are filling with tears.

  ‘Billie, you must have felt something inside . . . The anger, the way you’ve been with the Ape, with me . . .’

  Billie starts crying and she is about to clasp her hands over her face when I leap forward and grab her wrists.

  ‘Don’t, you’ll stab yourself!’

  Billie comes eye to eye with the talons in front of her face. She can barely see them through the blur of her tears but it’s enough.

  ‘Rev, kill me.’

  ‘What? No! Don’t say that!’

  ‘Look at me! I’m a monster!’

  ‘Billie, please, you’ve got to take control, all right. You’ve got to try and-and . . .’ What? I think. What, what, what? ‘Billie, try and put those-those things away.’

  Billie stares at the talons and while she does another slides out slowly and sleekly.

  She screams.

  Another talon follows it.

  ‘I can’t stop them!’ She starts to back away again, as if she can outrun them or something. Her brain has overloaded and can’t process anything.

  Billie turns and as she does the tips of one talon rake a plushly upholstered seat. They slice through the material and the stuffing with obscene ease.

  She stumbles and this time the talons slice the head off one of the table lamps.

  I go to her but she can’t connect her brain to the talons and she comes for me, needing me to hug her or hold her, but the talons drive straight towards me as she flings her arms out and I have to duck fast, shielding my face and head with my forearm. I feel the swish of air as the talons miss my skin by millimetres.

  ‘Oh God . . .’ Billie turns away, lurching back down the carriage.

  I go after her. ‘Billie!’

  Billie stops so suddenly I almost crash into the back of her. She doesn’t turn but her chest is heaving as she takes a long moment to try and find a shred of sanity.

  ‘OK . . . OK . . .’ she says over and over.

  I give her all the time in the world.

  ‘OK . . .’

  Seconds become minutes.

  The Apes must be at the far end of the train by now. Why haven’t they come to find me?

  ‘I can’t go home, can I?’ Billie says eventually.

  ‘We’re all going back. I won’t leave you.’

  ‘Not like this.’

  ‘Billie, we’ll deal with it.’

  ‘How?’

  I don’t have an answer, which is an answer in itself.

  ‘You did this to me.’ I’m not sure but I think she is crying again. ‘You and your stupid dad.’

  I stay silent because anything I say will probably only inflame her.

  ‘I hate you right now.’

  Billie finally turns and faces me. Her look cuts right through me. ‘We are not friends.’

  ‘Billie—’

  ‘We are nothing.’

  Billie raises one of her hands and the talons look sharper and deadlier on her than even Evil-GG’s did.

  ‘Billie—’

  ‘You should’ve had a proper dad.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ I cry.

  ‘A proper normal dad wouldn’t have caused any of this. And what do you do when you realise what a mess we’re in? You treat it like it’s one big wild adventure.’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘And at the centre of that adventure, there’s you, being the hero. The big brave girl, leading everyone on. But what really matters, what’s more important than anything, is that you get to moon over two boys. Because you’ve never had that have you? Never really been noticed that much, or wanted, apart from that leprechaun Kyle. So it goes straight to your head and you start dangling the Johnsons on strings, turning them into lovesick puppets waiting for you to make up your mind. And it goes straight to your head and you think you can somehow have both of them.’

  ‘That’s-that’s not true.’

  ‘And when it looks like I’m with Johnson, you can’t wait to destroy that.’

  ‘Billie, that was someone else doing that. They were playing with you, with all of us.’

  ‘You’re the one playing with us, Rev.’

  I try my best to stay calm and hold it together. I have to reach Billie. ‘This isn’t you talking.’

  ‘Ask Lucas, Carrie, GG – the Moth. They’ll tell you the same thing. That this is all on you. But wait, they can’t talk any more, can they?’

  ‘You can fight this,’ I tell her. ‘You can be Billie again. Take control of it.’

  ‘You want to know who the monster really is, Rev? It’s you.’

  Her words cut deeper than any talon as Billie fixes me with the deadest eyes I’ve ever seen. ‘Do not come near me again.’

  It’s a warning.

  A threat.

  Speak to me again and you’re dead.

  Billie sucks in one last breath, then turns, heads for the doors that refuse to open and slices the EXIT button, before driving a talon deep it into its electronics. The doors give a dead man’s sigh and shudder open with an aching whine.

  ‘Don’t get burned out there.’ She mockingly echoes Johnson, her voice dripping with bile and venom.

  She drops from the train and glides away. She moves with a new grace and power and her transformation is complete.

  She is definitely one of them now.

  Johnson still hasn’t returned and Other-Johnson intercepts me as I return shaken and pale from St Pancras with the Apes.

  ‘Stupid trip,’ Non-Ape grumbles.

  ‘No big mice anywhere.’

  Other-Johnson takes my arm and leads me away. He is anxious, which is not the natural state for a Johnson. ‘Well?’

  ‘I, uh . . . I didn’t find her.’

  Other-Johnson doesn’t need to be a mind reader to know that’s a lie.

  ‘Try again,’ he tells me.

  ‘She’s . . .’ I start again. ‘She’s not what she was.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘She’s like one of you now. Talons, metal teeth, black eyes.’

  Other-Johnson sucks breath in through his teeth. ‘That’s different.’

  Which as understatements go is up there with the biggest of them. Having your best friend turn into a murderous alien that hates you is not how most friendships pan out.

  ‘She didn’t come back this way?’

  ‘Didn’t see her. But I’ve been thinking, Rev—’

  ‘Read her mind. Find out where she’s gone,’ I snap.

  ‘All I’m getting is static,’ he says.

  ‘You’re hopeless. We have to find her!’

  ‘Give me time, OK? I’m not what I was either.’ He almost looks wounded.

  ‘I want my dad’s papers,’ I tell him. ‘While I’m doing that, start getting your head fixed. Then when you’ve done that, you can find Billie and the Moth. OK? We don’t have time for you to fail now.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  But I’m not inclined towards humour right now. I know I’m being bitchy, but I can’t help it. In just a few short hours I’ve managed to make everything a thousand times worse. ‘Just get it done.’

  I call to the Ape. ‘Dazza. We need transport.’

  Both Apes look at me, but the Ape knows I’m talking to him because he grins.

  ‘Something big enough for all of us,’ I add.

  The Ape scans the street that runs in front of King’s Cross and then marches towards it, eyes keenly peeled for the perfect vehicle. ‘Easy,’ he purrs.

  ‘What about me?’ Non-Ape asks, already looking lost and exposed without his new best friend by his side.

  ‘Do what you do best. Stay strong, stay tough,’ I
tell him. Which he grins at, pleased.

  I feel like I’ve turned into a sergeant major from the army but I am sick of this world.

  I scan the huge station. Johnson should be back by now. There are newsagents everywhere and it shouldn’t have taken him long to find one, grab a map and get back here.

  I check the time on the arrivals and departures board: he’s been gone over half an hour.

  Non-Ape pulls off the remains of his slashed clothing and is practically naked. He doesn’t seem to care and from what I can tell of most Ape-types they love stripping off and bearing their vast bodies.

  ‘Can’t you find a blanket or something?’ I ask him.

  He proudly slaps his big hairy belly. ‘I don’t do cold.’

  The slap echoes through the ridiculously quiet station.

  I check the time on the giant board again. As if that’s going to get Johnson back sooner.

  Other-Johnson senses my concern. ‘Maybe Billie found him,’ he says.

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘She didn’t come this way so maybe she went looking for him.’

  ‘It wasn’t real – what they had. So why would she?’ My temper is fraying by the second.

  ‘I’m just saying, Rev. Chill.’

  But I can’t ‘chill’. I just can’t do it. With every hour that passes I seem to lose someone else.

  I keep watching the seconds tick by on the giant display. Each silent movement means we have increasingly less time to find the papers and then track the Moth down.

  Where the hell is Johnson?

  Is Other-Johnson right? Has Billie found him and convinced him to run away with her? What if they’ve both changed and right now they’re skipping away, talons entwined.

  ‘I’m thinking it came with us on the train,’ Other-Johnson says quietly. ‘The person from my world. I think they’re here, Rev.’

  ‘Can’t be, we’d have seen it whoever it was.’

  ‘You didn’t see it arrive in the classroom so why would you see it now?’

  It makes sense but it also doesn’t make sense. ‘So where was it on the train? Riding on the roof?’

  Other-Johnson looks reluctant to say. ‘What if it’s invisible?’

  My stomach switches places with my heart, or at least that’s what it feels like.

  ‘I’m not saying it is but . . .’

  ‘Can your kind do that?’

  ‘It’d be a first. But then so would making it snow in summer . . .’