What came out was a long, low groan, punctuated by flat consonants from his deadweight tongue.
“I didn't catch that, dear,” said the woman, squinting hard. Her eyes were a lovely, faded blue, that made parts of Clive happy, and other parts sad.
Then he swung an arm around her neck, pulling her into an embrace. She shrieked, dropping her plastic shopping bag, and Clive saw dozens of tins of cat food roll free. Never mind, she could feed the animal later.
Unless she was like the others.
Of the few Clive had gifted, none possessed the sense they had in life. Clive trusted that he was special, that receiving the gift from an angel had sped the process of accepting his new state. The others would catch up soon. In the meantime, they were happy to spread the gift further, just as he had shown them. Clive knew that from somewhere, Heather was looking down on him, as he finally made her proud.
Clive let himself topple forwards, and the old lady gave a muffled shriek as he landed on top of her. There was real agony in that shrill cry, as brittle bones contended with his leaden weight.
“Hey, get off her!” The shout was deep, male, and only a few feet from him. Others looked up from their reveries, some stepping forward to help her.
They all stopped when Clive forced his hand into her abdomen.
Unable to push through the rib cage, he had earlier learned that entering through softer places could be successful. With so little sensation in his hands, it was a question of force and willpower alone. His fist jerked inside her, forcing through networks of veins and arteries, tearing muscle through brute strength alone. Ramming upwards, he watched the old lady's wide eyes, inches from his own, stare at him in shock as blood vomited from her mouth. Finally, elbow deep in her, his hand seized the warm, fluttering heart, the last gasps of her lungs massaging his forearm.
Clive squeezed down with his fingers, sat up, and yanked her heart out through her guts. Arteries and veins trailed behind it, bound up in a gelatinous mess of muscle and fat, her blood spraying Clive's face.
Turning, he held the heart up to the man behind him, a tall, bald brute who looked like he was familiar with the inside of a gymnasium. The man shook his head, too shocked to move, and Clive grabbed his leg with his free hand, pulling him to the ground and rolling stiffly on top of him.
Behind him, in the light of the falling fire drops, the lady whose heart he cast aside to free his hands for the bald man, sat up. She looked stupidly at the crowd behind her, and staggered to her feet.
Those nearest tried to flee deeper into the park. Those further in, not seeing the danger, blocked them.
Over the next hour, the blue angel's gift spread far.
Malachi stood in the dimly lit foyer of the hotel, and waited. There were shadows everywhere, behind the abandoned reception desk, behind the potted palm trees flanking the elevator doors, in the dark and gloomy bar which heaved with frightened drinkers pretending to revel in these strange days.
Nothing came for them. For five long minutes, he had stood perfectly still, listening to Freddie Mercury declaring from the jukebox that the show would go on, ignoring Melissa's pleas to hurry.
“Please, Malachi. The shadows aren’t coming. Things have moved on. They're going to be unleashed on everybody soon.”
Malachi turned to her, cold speculation in his eyes. This woman had dreamed the future, and in it he was supposed to destroy Pandora and save the world. So be it. As long as the future's needs coincided with his own, then a saviour he would be. Perhaps by playing Heaven's warrior, he could even steam out some of the stains on his soul. Melissa's explanation, and her slumbering demonstration of her gift, at least explained why the shadow creatures had taken an interest in her. If he was doing the work of God, it made sense that the legions of Hell would conspire to stop her giving him information. Now that they had failed, other business drew them, and he and Melissa could move around. “Follow me then,” he said, deciding to trust her instincts.
Striding to the door, he found the street was everything promised by the cacophony he had been listening to for the last few minutes, a heaving river of bruised and battered flesh. Some people were drinking, others fighting, a few praying to various gods to save them, most just caught up in anarchy and chaos. Every dozen yards or so, he saw the bright yellow of police high visibility jackets, as a handful of officers tried to restrain those whose worst instincts had taken over. Stepping out, Melissa staying close to him, he found that the wind was up. The flecks of fire streaking through the air were relatively painless against his flesh, carrying no more damaging a portion of heat than the accompanying snowflakes did cold. The noise - of sirens, people, music, and more - hit him harder than the elements, and he winced whenever it hit a crescendo, noticing Melissa crowding that little bit closer to him. Part of him felt warm, that she trusted him so. A spark of his old humanity, the man who had laughed in pubs and cried at movies, was fanned back to life, and he realised he wanted to protect her.
So be it. She had seen the church in her dream, but not its name, so he needed her with him. Let his heart melt a little, so long as it understood that he would cast her to the wolves for one chance to lay Pandora low. Revenge meant more to him than she.
“That way.” Melissa pointed left, against the direction of the crowd and the wind, and Malachi grunted. That would take them back towards Pandora's flat, and the heart of the West End. Pulling his blackjack from his pocket, he let his coat hang free rather than buttoning it. While the cold made his chest and arms taut with goose pimples, the coat billowed and cracked in the wind, making the most of his imposing build. When he stepped into the street, most people found the sudden sense to go round him. Head up, he started onwards, ignoring the wind, the fire, and the snow.
In the windows of flats along both streets, white faces looked down as the man in black strode through the rushing crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea, a frightened, raven-haired woman following in his wake. Occasionally, somebody would leap out of the crowd at him, teeth bared back in fear and confusion, and he would lash out, a blackjack splitting flesh and cracking bone. The woman would stop in these moments, looking at the fallen as though deciding whether she should help. Inevitably, she would chase after the man in black, too fearful of losing him in the crowd to stop and render aid.
Malachi's mind burned while he pushed on, with questions that the pressure of time had forced him to put aside. Melissa said that Pandora was in a church, but holy ground was anathema to demons, and she should not be able to bear staying there. That aside, if the legions of Hell were massing in some transdimensional nowhere, ready to wage war, then should she not be among their ranks?
A fat man, in summer shorts and nothing else, waddled towards him, fists clenched. Malachi swayed to the left of a clumsy punch, and stamped on the cluster of nerves at the man's knee, dropping him like a screaming stone. The crowd stumbled and tripped over him. The leg was dead, and the man wouldn't be walking anywhere for a while. It wasn't Malachi's problem, though he could feel Melissa pause every time he cleared somebody from their route. So far, he had not been forced to drag her past them. The end of the world was obviously a higher priority than the individual hurts and pains of mankind, at least for the moment.
Abruptly, the crowd was past him. Stopping so suddenly that Melissa walked into his back, he saw why the crowd had been running in the same direction.
A hundred paces further along, stumbling towards them between the pools of light from the streetlamps, abandoned cars, and burning buildings, was a new crowd, at least sixty strong. They had nothing in common but for the bleeding holes in their backs and stomachs, and the madness in their eyes.
Melissa stepped to his side. “What?” Her heathery perfume distracted him for a moment, and he snarled at himself.
“There.” He pointed, and found that he was afraid.
“It's just another...”
“Dead.” Melissa stopped talking, and her mouth fell slowly open. “Every one of them is de
ad.” He looked down at her, and for the first time felt helpless.
“And where we're going is somewhere on the other side of them.”
“Sir,” Summer said, so quietly that Gemmell could barely hear her over the background roar of his berserker city. “I don't believe in zombies.”
Gemmell bit his lip, knowing that he was not going to be able to prevent himself from commenting, but hoping a few deep breaths would minimise the damage. As she eased the car gently into the mob, he saw their slack, dead faces in the headlights, and tried to remember the moment he had accepted that all these people really were dead. He couldn't do it. When they had left the station, unable to take the car past walking speed even with the sirens on for fear of mowing down a reveller or rioter, he had understood without questioning that whatever was happening to the world would all eventually have a rational explanation. At some point, when they had eased along Byres Road and into the growing plague of the dead, he had accepted that the world was far stranger than that. Maybe the change came when he saw the little boy, not five years old, face innocent, struggling to keep up with a crowd of adults as his feet tripped over a dangling loop of his own intestines.
Earlier, he had felt that what he and Summer were doing, tracking down Eidolon and Numen, was important, and related somehow to the rivers of blood, and the fire in the sky, and the panic on the streets. At the time, he would have struggled to explain why he thought that connection existed. The link was irrational, a feeling rather than the offshoot of hard earned evidence. Now, with the whole world defying the laws of logic to which it had once adhered, an irrational connection felt more suited to events than a rational one.
Before the television stations had stopped transmitting an hour or so ago, he had watched images of rioters in China, of tanks on the streets in France, of civil uprising in America. All over the world, fire fell from the sky, and that small prompt had been enough for humanity to rip free from the shackles of law, order, and society. It was as though the planet had been waiting for an excuse.
Now the dead were walking the streets. He breathed deeply, but to no calming effect. Gemmell had never been a screamer, but wondered if now would be the appropriate time to change that. Instead, he spoke. “Excellent, DS Summer. You don't believe in zombies. Well, you know what? Neither do I. I don't believe in zombies, and I don't believe that rivers can spontaneously fill with an unending supply of blood, and I absolutely, positively do not believe that fire can fall from snow clouds.”
Around the car, which had been easing through the thick crowd of walking corpses, heads began to turn their way, as he had known they inevitably would. The undead had grown in number as they got closer to St Cottier’s, the church nearest to Pandora's destroyed flat, which he had decided to try first. Being inside the car would soon be no protection at all.
“However, it's my sad duty to report that the zombies have an absolute, unquestioning belief that we exist.”
As though awaiting his cue, several of the zombies began tentatively thumping their cold flesh against the car. Within seconds, those behind the first few were pushing those in front hard against the vehicle. A naked chest pushed flat against the passenger window, putting Gemmell's face inches away from a raw, suppurating wound that streaked the glass with red. Gemmell raised a hand to the wound, feeling his own skin go white and cold as he touched the glass. “What would you say that is? A shaving cut?”
Summer's eyes were filling with tears and panic. Gemmell couldn't allow that. With his own sanity hanging on by a thread, he knew that if she started to scream or cry, then his own tenuous control would quickly follow. “Don't you bloody well dare, sergeant,” he snapped. “I did not ask for your help finding this pair so that you could sit in the bloody car and bawl.”
She blinked at him, took a breath, and rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. “Yes, sir!”
Thank God, Gemmell thought. “Now, I gave you a direct order. Get us moving, or we are going to die. You don't have to worry about killing anybody, because these people are already dead. Do you understand me?” Summer gave a sharp nod of the head, just as an arm smashed through the back window. “Now, woman! Put your bloody foot down!”
Summer did, and the car lurched forward. Gemmell looked over his shoulder, and saw that the intruding arm was gone, having left small shreds of bloody flesh behind. Jerking in his seat as the car hit body after body, he watched as they crushed the dead back, bouncing whenever they ran over flesh and bone. Summer was driving blind, praying under her breath. Neither of them could see what was past the crowd ahead of them. All they saw was glimpses of faces, and blood, and torn clothing, and exposed organs. For all they knew, they could be heading straight towards another car, or somebody who really was alive.
Gemmell gripped his seat, and thought about putting his seatbelt on. They hit another body, and Gemmell saw the high visibility jacket of a police officer. For a moment he wanted to scream at Summer to stop, to let the man into the comparative safety of the back seat, and then he saw the dead eyes, and the blood splattering the slick, waterproof material.
The dead policeman span onto the bonnet, his head cracking the windscreen, turning it into a white spider web and destroying what remained of their view. That was why Summer didn't realise the crowd had either vanished or parted, and so didn't know to ease off the accelerator. Free of obstacles, the battered vehicle rocketed forwards, and they slammed into something solid.
Thrown towards the dashboard, Gemmell wondered how quickly it would take the dead to get into the car when he was unconscious, and then all the lights went out.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Melissa stumbled back as one of the dead men reached for her. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth as he half lunged and half fell, and she saw that he had bitten through his own tongue. A long moan escaped his lips as his swinging arms failed to embrace her, but he kept coming.
Three feet away, Malachi carved a path through them. Their lack of coordination made it easy to shove them individually aside, though he had discovered very early on that the knife in his hand was little deterrent to them. Dead already, they felt no pain, could not be killed, and could not be intimidated.
And they just kept coming. Melissa had watched, shrieking, from further down the street as one man, drunk and covered in blood, had stumbled out of a flat and into their midst. The dead had turned, achingly heavy on their feet, and surrounded him.
Then one of their number had ripped out his heart.
It had not been a simple thing, the tearing out of the heart. It had been slow, clumsy, painful, and for most of it the man had been alive. Melissa had screamed into the wind, and would probably still be doing so if Malachi had not physically shaken her, rattling her teeth in her head.
“The end of the world,” he had shouted at her. “If we don't get through them, it's the end of the world!” Wide-eyed, she had stared at him, realising what he wanted to do, what she knew they had to do. “Stay close! Do you hear? Stay close, and keep moving!”
That had been what saved them. Individually, the dead were little threat. They were slow, and mad, and in some sort of pain that Melissa couldn't hope to comprehend. The numbers were the problem. If they got trapped among them, with no room to dodge and move, then they were finished.
It didn't help that every time one came close, and she saw the wet hole in its abdomen, she wanted to freeze up. So far, she had stumbled, dodged, and jumped, and they had not taken her.
When she had seen that first man, who died so painfully among the pack of the dead, clamber to his feet as Malachi and she were running towards the group, she had nearly turned and fled. What stopped her was knowing that Malachi might then never discover which church concealed Pandora. The world would end, and it would be her fault.
Despite the snow and the ice-cold wind, Melissa was dripping sweat. Stumbling over a fallen body, skipping on the spot to dodge its flailing hands, she watched Malachi with awe. While she had slept at the hotel,
he had not rested, yet he moved like an athlete freshly woken. Earlier, she had seen his strength and brutality. Now she saw his grace.
Smashing his blackjack against the head of an old, dead woman hard enough to knock her into those behind her and stall their progress, he whirled with the same motion to slice his knife across the eyes of a naked teen boy coming at him from the left, leaving it stumbling blindly into its kin. He ended the motion by ducking low beneath the arms of a third zombie (for that was what they were, whether she liked the word or not) and simultaneously lashing out with one leg to bring a fourth crashing to the ground. A maelstrom of violence, he was aware of everything around him, and everything he did had but one focus – to take them onwards.
But the pack of zombies travelled with them. They weren't going to get through to the other side, because the other side kept moving back.
Malachi fought on anyway, and Melissa stumbled along in the lee of his ferocity, watching as one fallen zombie grabbed his flapping coat, only to hear the crack as his boot shattered its wrist. She hopped over this body too, wondering how long he could blaze so brightly, before they first took him, and then her.
Melissa tripped over the kerb. How they had come so far to the left when they had been in the centre of the road? It could only mean that Malachi was losing control of the forward advance. Staggering, her head back, she saw what was a hundred yards further along the street.
“Malachi,” she screamed. “It's there! The church is there! We're there!” She saw him take a fast glance towards it at the same time as cold, clammy arms wrapped around her neck. They tightened before she could cry out, cutting off her air, and an icy, leaden belly pushed against her back. She was lifted from her feet and swung against the wall, her cheek smashing against the brick. She had no strength to struggle, even when a frigid hand probed the flesh above her pelvis.
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