The Vanguard

by SJ Griffin

Chapter Three

  At last I was wearing clothes, instead of one of those hospital gowns with altogether too much ventilation in the rear. Not my own clothes, they were covered in bodily fluids, all my own and almost the full range, and they had been burnt. I was wearing new clothes that Casino had selected from some lost property cupboard, which was somewhat suspicious in that all the clothes still had the credit tags on them.

  ‘And you are feeling perfectly fine,’ a set of scrubs and two pale blue eyes asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When can we go home?’

  ‘Well.’

  That was all he said. Well. He said it in a neutral way that I found disappointing in its lack of affirmation. Roach, Lola and Casino were standing on the other side of the glass that ran along one side of my room from waist height to ceiling. I pulled a face indicating I wasn’t happy with how things were going. They also thought I felt fine, I was our ticket out of there and we were all starting to get tetchy with each other. We didn’t tend to argue that much, just bicker a little, but we were starting to get on each other’s nerves.

  ‘What does “well” mean?’ I tried not to blink as my non-committal friend shone a blinding light into my eye.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he swiped around on his tablet for a bit and then swept out of the room. They never left our notes anywhere we could find them, I had no idea what was wrong with me. I figured I was winning because I ought to be dead, all things considered, but still, it would have been nice to put a name to some of the parts that hurt.

  ‘What did he say?’ Casino stuck his head round the door.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘That’s funny because my doctor told me the same thing,’ Lola followed Roach and Casino into the room. ‘Nothing. Even after I gave him the eyes.’

  The eyes was a technique Lola used to bend a certain type of man to her will. I had no idea how or why it worked because as far I could make out she just looked at them and blinked. It did work though, but only when she did it. Her facial expressions were like a wardrobe, she had a range of looks for every occasion.

  ‘Where’s Minos?’ I said.

  ‘He had an accident,’ Lola said.

  ‘What kind of accident?’

  ‘Can you believe he set his bed on fire?’ Casino said.

  I could and yet I couldn’t. How had he managed that in a hospital? If it was a hospital, it was feeling less and less like a hospital. Where were the other patients? Why couldn’t they tell if I was fine? Why did they wear medical clothes like disguises? How long had we been here?

  ‘Why is that thermometer rolling around like that?’ Casino said. He picked it up. It was one of those ones you stick in your ear. It had been sliding from one side of the bedside table to the other. I had a funny feeling behind my eyes. Like something was wriggling around in there.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ I said. ‘I feel fine.’

  We had dinner in a small room that was empty except for a small table with five chairs around it. There was a security camera in the corner of the room but we’d got used to ignoring that and watching what we talked about. Once every few minutes it would move as though looking for something more interesting to spy on. The room had a window that looked out on a peaceful mountain scene, but it wasn’t real. The screen looped every four minutes so that the lone cow in the alpine landscape was destined to walk from one side of the picture to the other and never back again. It was an endless trail of cow. Our meals were all sealed inside foil pouches as though we were astronauts.

  ‘Maybe we’re in space,’ Lola said.

  ‘We’re not in space,’ Roach said. ‘We are on the ground.’

  ‘How do you know? We could be anywhere,’ Minos said, who much to my huge surprise was not covered in bandages. He just looked a bit greasy. He was also very quiet, but then we were all quite subdued. I figured it was because we were feeling trapped.

  ‘This food is not bad,’ Roach said. ‘Given that it’s probably completely synthetic.’

  ‘I’d kill for one of Greasy Clive’s breakfasts,’ Minos said. ‘I’d kill any of you.’

  ‘If you let me live I’ll shout you a number seven with extra bacon,’ I said.

  ‘Any other offers?’ Minos said.

  But no one was really listening. Casino and Lola were tucking into their dinner, Roach had already finished his and had settled back in his chair with his hands folded over his chest looking peaceful. The only sound was that of our cutlery scraping the plates. I wasn’t hungry but at least eating was something to do. The dizzying combination of acute mystery and intense boredom was making me anxious. Then Roach let out a snore. I looked up and Casino had also nodded off, his head was on the table. Lola’s eyelids were closing like they were too heavy for her to keep open.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I’m very sleepy all of a sudden.’

  Minos looked horrified as she slipped off her chair, by the time she made it to the floor she was asleep.

  ‘It must be the food,’ Minos looked at his empty plate in terror.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Why would they put sedatives in the food? We’ve been no trouble at all.’

  Minos yawned and put his hands over his mouth to stifle it, his eyes were like saucers. Minos had such an expressive face, it was all rubbery. He tried to hold his eyes wide open with his fingers but he too started to fall asleep.

  ‘OK,’ I said to the camera in the corner. ‘I’ll come quietly.’

  I lay on the floor and curled up with my head on the crook of my elbow, it must have taken me all of about three seconds to fall asleep.

  And then I woke up in my own bed.

  I’m sure lots of things happened in between and I’d love to remember them but I slept through them and that’s all I know. I was in a car falling from the Flyover and then I was in a hospital, then my own bed. I could have called that many things but I chose to call it progress.

  I lay in bed for a bit, assessing how I was feeling and how many things hurt. My head hurt but everything else seemed to be back to normal. I spent some time staring at my bike as it hung above my bed. It was a little scratched and worn but it was still silver and beautiful. I thought it looked like it had missed me, maybe. I pulled it from its hooks and I rode it down the hallway to the lift. A ride could fix everything. On the ground floor, the lobby was calm and quiet so I rode in sweeping arcs through the huge rooms looking for company. Only Minos seemed to be up. He was fiddling around with his computers in the restaurant. I could smell burning.

  ‘Morning,’ he said.

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s quarter past ten in the morning on the tenth. We’ve been away for two weeks.’

  ‘Two weeks?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But what’s really going to mess with your mind is that all our sickness notification has been updated. Officially we’ve been in isolation due to a type of simian influenza that is as yet unidentified. I got it from Happy Chicken Valley which has been closed down permanently. I now work at Mr Magico’s House of Meatballs. That sounds awesome.’

  ‘Have I got a better paid job?’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. ‘You are still a pauper. A very fit pauper but a pauper none the less.’

  The money at Packet was terrible, even for a top flight courier such as myself, but it was a Ministry sanctioned job and kept officials off my back while I pursued more lucrative schemes. The job at Packet gave me a citizen card which afforded me access to minimal healthcare, almost drinkable water, a small amount of rationed food and some electricity. It also meant that you weren’t arrested, put on a boat and set adrift in the ocean. Minos wasn’t cut out for the world of legitimate work, it gave him a rash, but needed an official job for his citizen status, his actual job of pirate simply wouldn’t do as far as the Ministry of Work and Labour was concerned. He didn’t go to another job, he just adjusted the shift accounts and
salary spreadsheets by hacking into the Ministry databases. They had a bespoke system built years ago. It cost them a huge amount and didn’t work. It featured such big security holes that each one came with a welcome mat and complimentary pair of slippers. If we were going to be rigid about it I should have been fiddling the system for him. He was hardware and I was software. He built the machines and I told them what to do. But he had a tolerance for databases that I didn’t share. Besides, I had to have a job and he didn’t. It was unfair. Minos may have had a shadowy virtual self who existed only in administrative databases but the others, like me, had the necessary jobs. Roach worked security for a private firm that hired out huge men to stop people taking things that weren’t theirs. He’d managed to get a posting guarding the north dock where Minos and his pirate mates took things that weren’t theirs. He was their man on the inside and got the best of both worlds. Casino worked at Packet with me. Lola didn’t need to work, she had an allowance and was registered as her father’s daughter and therefore exempt from usual Work and Labour laws. She didn’t even need a citizen card. It was how the other half lived. I wasn’t sure what arrangement she had with her family, or what arrangement her family had with the authorities, but it was manners not to ask.

  ‘Well, at least we’re covered. Happy days,’ I said.

  ‘Weird though,’ Minos looked worried.

  ‘Has anyone touched anything here?’ I looked round. Nothing seemed out of place.

  ‘No. Everything was locked up as tight as it would be if we’d done it ourselves,’ he flicked on the EF-47 scanner and the usual Enforce activity fizzed through. ‘Nothing has changed.’

  I left my bike and went out to the kitchen that we used as a kitchen, as opposed to the kitchen we used as a bike workshop or the kitchen we used to hide stolen goods.

  ‘The fridge is how we left it as well,’ Minos said from the restaurant. We had an intercom. ‘Empty.’

  I sighed. The fridge door swung open of its own accord to prove his point.

  ‘I’m going to the shop,’ I said into the intercom. ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘No, thanks. I thought I might have a barbeque later if you’re interested.’

  I slammed the door of the fridge and it hummed at me in protest.

  The street outside was just how we’d left it as well. Littered with everything. Rubbish, people, dirt and jammed cars. It was a grey day and the sky was too close to the ground. A watcher balloon hung overhead, a brown blimp sweeping the area with its nosey cameras. Drones flew over every so often, heading south, low and silent. It was a quiet day with no security alerts so the sky wasn’t as busy as usual. I rode up towards the market hoping to find a shop stocked and open on the way. I didn’t want to see Doodle, but I didn’t want to not see him and only see an empty space where his stall should be. I couldn’t decide which would be worse. In our two week absence a new shop had opened. It was open-fronted, which was a bold move, its wares spilling out into the street. It seemed to sell everything, they even had some vegetables which was pretty unusual given the price of the licence you needed to sell them. Some people bought them from the roofs where the sky people grew their own and then sold what they couldn’t eat. It was a lottery but much cheaper than getting them in a shop, which most people couldn’t afford to do. You could spot those people because they had scurvy and rickets and other old fashioned problems. I locked the bike to a bent railing and activated a security device or two. I wandered up and down the narrow aisles, touching things in wonder. The shop had fruit as well, which was a miracle, the last time I saw an actual banana I was about five. The apples smelt incredible. I filled a basket with greens and reds and yellows. I picked up some water and some rice. There hadn’t been real rice for years.

  ‘Hello!’

  ‘Hello,’ I said, looking around to see who had bellowed.

  ‘Hello,’ said a small round lady. ‘I am Haggia.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said. I don’t usually tell people my name straight off, particularly not this person, who I recognised from the market the day Minos had knocked over Doodle’s stall.

  ‘Welcome to my shop,’ she looked me up and down. I was not looking my smartest in cropped jeans, not very clean, cycling tights and a t-shirt, not very clean either. ‘You live in the hotel round the corner, no?’

  I looked down at her with immense suspicion. She was much, much smaller than me. I am tall so lots of people are short in my opinion, but this woman was so short she was as wide as she was tall. She looked like a jolly bauble. She was swathed in a huge piece of purple material and almost every finger sported a fat, golden ring. She was impossible to place, either in terms geographical or historical. She didn’t seem to have her notepad on her.

  ‘I only ask because I am looking for someone from the hotel. I need to talk to them.’ She took my basket and waddled off to the counter. I followed her at a safe distance.

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’ she said as though she had just remembered something.

  ‘It’s about ten thirty,’ I said, fishing around in my pockets for a card with some credits on it so I could pay the woman and get the hell out of there.

  ‘You are a bit early, my darling,’ Haggia said. ‘You’ll have to wait a minute, he’s always late you see.’

  ‘Who is?’ I asked her back as it disappeared, along with the rest of her, down an aisle.

  ‘Are you feeling better?’ she blundered back with an aubergine. I tried not to stare at it in wonder.

  ‘Better than what?’

  ‘Better than just after the accident I should think,’ Haggia said.

  ‘Accident?’ I said.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I meant the flu. Monkey flu, was it?’

  I frowned at her while I thought of some appropriate remark. She didn’t look like Enforce, or Administration. But how did she know about that accident and the flu and where had she got all this stock from?

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice behind me.

  There was a man in there somewhere, lost in the general air of abstraction that surrounded him. He looked as though a large part of him, the logical sensible part, was somewhere else. The part that was here, the forgetful chaotic part, had dressed him and dragged something through his hair. No part of his suit match any other, his tie was done up in a bow as though it were a shoe lace and his trench coat was inside out. If he’d told me he was some kind of genius I would have believed him.

  ‘I’m Marshall Dailly,’ he said. ‘Hello.’

  The name sounded familiar.

  ‘Am I late, I’m sorry. Or are you early? You’re often early right? Sorcha Blades, yes? I recognised the bike,’ Marshall said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, although in response to which question I didn’t make clear.

  ‘I’m a reporter. I report things on the television,’ he said. ‘I’m not a journalist, don’t worry. I just report what happens. No fancy editorial or working lunches in the Riverside. I live round the corner. I’m one of you.’

  I wasn’t sure why I needed to know all this, but at least I knew where I knew the name from. He was the television equivalent of wallpaper and could be found on the round the clock local news channel.

  ‘How are you? Marshall winked and then did a passable impression of a monkey with a terrible cold.

  ‘Fine,’ I turned to Haggia. ‘Look, I’m kind of busy, can I just pay for these?’

  ‘Pay for them?’ Haggia said. ‘They’re on the house, my dear.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why?’ Haggia said. ‘Because...’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Marshall said. ‘She’s the right one, I checked.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, holding the frayed end of my tether in my figurative hand. ‘What’s going on here?’

  Haggia squeezed herself behind the counter and pressed a large blue button on the wall next to the telecom cards. The shutter in front of the shop began to close. I sighed my most exasperated sigh and sat on a pile of rice sacks that was sit
ting next to a shelf of eggs, it really was a remarkable shop.

  ‘So, darling,’ Haggia leant one of her chins on her pudgy hands. ‘We figured it would all have started by now and we’re here to help. We’re on your side.’

  ‘That’s our sole purpose,’ Marshall said. ‘To help.’

  ‘To help how?’ I said.

  ‘Well, have you noticed anything strange happening?’ Marshall said.

  He came to stand by the counter so they were both peering down at me. I would have stood up but I was too tired all of a sudden.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean no. Like what?’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Well. You tell us, dear,’ Haggia said.

  ‘Yes, otherwise we can’t help,’ Marshall said.

  ‘We are here to help,’ Haggia said.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  The shop was quite dark now that the shutter was closed, having crushed a crate of pak choi and a bucket of flip flops on its way down. I knew there was an exit at the back which would lead out to an alleyway from where I could either climb the wall into the gardens behind or run down the alley and get Emirhan at the kebab shop to let me escape through his kitchen. I could pick the bike up later.

  ‘For example,’ Marshall said. ‘Can you do anything you couldn’t do before the accident?’

  ‘How do you know about the accident?’ I said, leaping to my feet.

  ‘There we are,’ Marshall said. ‘She’s got it.’

  ‘Right. If someone doesn’t tell me what is going on in the next two minutes I’m going to walk out of here and never come back,’ I said. I hadn’t got anything.

  ‘Now don’t get angry,’ Marshall said. ‘We’re on your side.’

  ‘This is going all wrong,’ Haggia raised her hands to the ceiling and made an unknown but intense gesture.

  ‘Leave this to me,’ Marshall said to Haggia. ‘We’re going to have to improvise.’

  He steepled his fingers beneath his nose and exhaled, his eyes turned to the ceiling. I couldn’t help but look up there to see what they were both so interested in. Then he turned to me with an expression so serious that I wanted to giggle despite my intense irritation.

  ‘Have you noticed anything strange since your accident?’ he made rabbits ears around the word accident with two fingers on each hand.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No funny things happening like, I don’t know, like things flying around.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘People disappearing and not being where they should be?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘People knowing secrets they shouldn’t or being able to finish your sentences?’

  ‘No.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Haggia said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing at all?’ Marshall said

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Not even an unexplained fire or two?’ Haggia said. ‘I would have put money on that one.’

  Fire. The smell of burning this morning. Minos set his bed on fire in the hospital.

  ‘Yes?’ Marshall said.

  ‘I knew it,’ Haggia slapped the counter in her excitement.

  ‘There was a fire, it seemed weird,’ I said. ‘But Minos is the clumsiest person on earth so I didn’t really...’

  I trailed off. I didn’t really what? I stood up again. My brain was wriggling behind my eyes. The shutter flew up with such force that it almost embedded itself in the ceiling. The noise from the street seemed too loud after the hushed quiet of the shuttered shop. Marshall and Haggia exchanged a look that suggested an event had just occurred that meant something to them. Nothing meant a single thing to me.

  ‘I have to go,’ I was confused.

  ‘Of course, just let me bag these up for you, like I said no charge,’ Haggia said, gesturing for Marshall to move, shooing him away as though he was an unwanted chicken. ‘Now, you go home and get some rest. You’re a bright one, you are, it’ll all be OK.’

  ‘Right,’ I picked up the bag of vegetables, defeated.

  ‘We’ve made contact now, that’s the main thing,’ Haggia said. ‘We’re here to help you. With anything.’

  I ambled into the street. Stunned.

  ‘With anything,’ Marshall said.

  ‘There is something you can help me with,’ I said as they assembled on the doorstep by the broccoli.

  ‘What?’ Haggia said.

  ‘There’s these two people, I think they might be insane and in need of immediate medical assistance,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose you could get them some help?’

  ‘I should think so,’ Haggia fished her notepad out of a pocket in her voluminous dress. ‘What are their names?’

  ‘Haggia and Marshall Dailly,’ I said. ‘Either they’re mad or they think I am.’

  I left them with that suggestion simmering in their muddled minds and went home. To bed. As recommended by the nut in the new shop. I wondered if some kind of mass psychosis has set in while we’d been away.

  I tossed and turned for a couple of hours without sleeping. I was beset with small disasters. The blinds wouldn’t stay closed, it seemed they preferred dancing up and down instead, the stereo kept coming on, the door kept locking and unlocking itself, opening a little in between as though it was testing something out. It was like being in a horror film. Minos and Casino must have been up to their practical jokes again. Every time I got my jumble of thoughts in a neat and tidy line something would happen and disturb them all. In the end I got up to find someone to distract me from the feeling that my brain was squirming around behind my eyes. Maybe it was trying to escape. I couldn’t blame it.

  I found Minos being furtive in the garden, he was burying something. I watched him from the tradesmen’s entrance until he had finished. He looked up from his mystery and gave me a sheepish grin.

  ‘Find some food?’ he said.

  ‘Found some food, lost my appetite,’ I couldn’t be bothered to ask him about his mysterious burial. ‘Drink?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, clapping his hands together. They were covered in ash, a dark cloud puffed up as his hands met. ‘It’s definitely time for a drink.’

  We wandered through the hotel to the lounge bar, which was the more elegant of our bars since we held an arts festival one weekend that trashed the gallery bar. There was still no sign of the others. I poured Minos a large scotch and fixed myself a mojito. Casino had left his dressing gown, or house coat as we were supposed to call it, on the end of the bar, next to an empty cocktail glass with a forlorn cherry in it. We each sat on a bar stool and for the first time ever I couldn’t work out the best way of saying what I had to say to him. He was the easiest person in the world to talk to, even easier than Roach who wouldn’t judge you even if you begged him to. As I watched Minos in the mirror behind the bar, between the optics, I could have sworn he was having the same problem. It made me feel miserable. He looked pretty down too.

  ‘Listen,’ we said at the same time. ‘This is going to sound ridiculous....sorry....you go....no you.’

  He pointed at me and sipped his drink so I took another deep breath.

  ‘OK. So, I went to the new shop round the corner’

  ‘There’s a new shop?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not the point,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry, go on,’ Minos rubbed the damp ring his glass had left on the bar with his sleeve.

  ‘This woman works there, Haggia, and this other man came in. That news reporter from the community station, Marshall something.’

  ‘Dailly, is it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Haggia and Marshall Dailly. Do you know them? Or does one of the others maybe?’

  ‘I don’t. I only know Dailly from the news, as you say. I’m sure no one else does. Why?’ Minos put his glass down and lifted it up. There was another ring.

  ‘Because they seemed to know all about the accident. And they asked a lot of questions that I di
dn’t like.’

  ‘Like what?’ His chin sounded like sandpaper as he rubbed his stubble.

  ‘Like if anything strange had happened since the accident.’

  ‘Apart from that freaky hospital and getting back here to find everything has been looked after better that it would have been if we were here?’

  ‘They knew about the flu,’ I said. ‘They were on about whether people were disappearing or things flying around or people knowing things they shouldn’t and fires starting.’

  ‘Fires starting?’ Minos almost fell of his stool.

  ‘Yeah.’ I looked at him. I could feel my face had pulled itself into an expression of wide-eyed alarm, it didn’t feel like my face, it never looked like that.

  Minos pulled me closer and then whispered, ‘I need to tell you something.’

  ‘What?’

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. ‘I can set things on fire.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can set things on fire.’

  ‘With matches?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘With what then?’

  ‘Well, sometimes by accident, but sometimes by thinking a thought like I might just set that dressing gown on fire,’ he said.

  Casino’s dressing gown started to smoulder. Lazy smoke rose from it in an elegant spiral. I watched it as it made its way to the smoke sensor on the ceiling.

  Oh dear,’ I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, it was most unlike me.

  ‘My housecoat,’ Casino appeared at the end of the bar.

  He did. He appeared. Out of nowhere.

  And then the smoke set the sprinkler system off. We just stood there for a moment, getting soaked, watching a naked Casino trying to help put out the fire in his dressing gown. House coat. Then we made a dash for the hallway, out of the indoors rain.

  I grabbed Casino by the arm. ‘Where did you come from and why don’t you have any clothes on?’

  ‘I took them off,’ he said. ‘He can set things on fire with his mind.’

  ‘Will no one talk sense?’ I said. ‘Clothes?’

  ‘I don’t need them if no one can see me,’ he said, prising my fingers from his arm. ‘I would have thought that was obvious.’

  All the doors in the broad corridor opened for a moment and then closed themselves. I wondered for a moment why the emergency fire system would do that, but then it was smart enough to know that the fire was only in the lounge bar so maybe it could do that too.

  The fire in the lounge bar. The fire that Minos started, with a thought. The fire that he started with a thought, in Casino’s house coat. The house coat that Casino didn’t need if no one could see him. Because he could make himself appear out of nowhere. The doors opened themselves again. One after the other, like dominoes. Then they slammed in unison.

  ‘Fix that. And stop that sprinkler,’ I said and exercised my right to storm off.