by Chris Ward
‘It’s okay, Daddy,’ Nozomi said, stroking his arm as tears filled his eyes. ‘It’s okay.’
Jun’s body had been found in the burnt out shell of La Sagrada Familia. Parts of the church had been destroyed by explosives drilled into the walls and it was estimated that it would take ten years or more to repair the damage.
Jun’s body was returned to Japan, where it was cremated and interred into his family tomb in Saitama.
Jennie, Nozomi, and Jorge all attended the ceremony.
Nozomi had survived the fire unscathed, hiding in a back passage as the floor of the nave caught alight. Jorge had been found wandering around outside, unharmed after leaping from the truck, while Jennie’s injuries had healed after minor surgery.
Aside from a couple of obligatory press conferences, Jennie declined all offers from the media. More than three hundred people had died and many others had suffered severe burns, but thousands had been saved, many with just minor injuries. A photograph of a young girl called Elenora Vasquez hugging her parents outside the burning church had swamped the press as a symbol of hope and human survival, but Jennie had wanted to stay out of the spotlight.
With Ken’s approval, Nozomi was made her official ward by the Japanese courts, and after a little more paperwork than she would have liked, she was allowed to officially adopt Jorge.
‘This ends,’ Ken said quietly, reaching out for Nozomi’s hand. ‘This ends now. Whether Crow still lives or not, he’s taken too many people from me. I loved Jun like a brother, but he was blinded by a quest for vengeance that I couldn’t turn him from.’ He sighed. ‘I can only hope he’s found peace now.’
Nozomi squeezed his hand. Ken glanced up at Jennie, who had her arms around Jorge’s shoulder, then quickly looked away, not wanting to see the tears in Jennie eyes.
#
Time would tell if any of them would get over it, Jennie thought, as she walked through the streets near her old home, a pilgrimage that she did often, unable to resist even though she had now moved to a new neighbourhood several stops away on the Yamanote Line. She had a new job in an office, but her own name was still written on the faded sign above the boarded up travel agent that had once been her pride and joy.
She would never forget the day Jun Matsumoto had walked back into her life outside Nakajima Travel Services, and while thoughts of what might have been had left deep incisions on her soul, she hoped that somewhere, somehow, he was at peace.
It might never be over, she knew. Professor Crow’s body had still not been found. For now, though, each evening when she returned home to find Nozomi and Jorge fighting over what to watch on TV, or that they had cooked up some special hybrid of Japanese and Spanish food, she could only smile and remember that she had it better than most, because she had got out alive.
But each day, when she woke up to see the sun shining in through her window, she could still see the kind smile on Jun’s face, and while she knew that life would go on, and that one day she might meet someone new with whom she could fall in love, she hoped that a little bit of that defiant smile would remain in her memory forever.
I miss you, Jun.
END
The Circus of Machinations
The Circus of Machinations
War is coming against an unknown enemy.
For five long years, Professor Kurou has been in hiding, a wraith haunting the streets of the remote Siberian town of Brevik.
Victor Mishin is the small-town inventor who needs his help. An unstoppable, inhuman army is approaching the town, and the townsfolk face total annihilation at the hands of an evil even greater than the one that walks among them.
For at the head of the army is a man who will stop at nothing to see Professor Kurou dead.
Prologue
The Robot and the Inventor
A cold wind was whipping in from the south, bringing with it flurries of hard ice ripped off the top of seasons-long snow drifts standing like dirt-streaked grey sentinels by the side of the road. Victor Mishin stopped one more time to tie up his hood, but the string was frozen stiff. He scowled, cursing under his breath. Dipping his face away from the wind instead, he turned back to make sure the cart was still following.
From both sides of the road, the dead eyes of Brevik’s abandoned houses watched him with their broken door grins. From inside flickered torchlight, accompanied by the faint peal of nervous laughter. Many became temporary crack houses and brothels after dark, living crypts filled with the skeletal remnants of men and women put out of work by the closing mines and factories.
The first rock to clang off the outside of the cart’s casing made Victor jump. The echo of laughter from a shadowy alley that followed made him shiver.
‘We see you, old man.’
It was the voice of a kid, throat dry from too many cigarettes and cheap local homebrew. Brevik started its youngsters early, and only a kid would ever call him old. Victor wasn’t yet thirty.
‘Come on,’ he told the cart. ‘We have to hurry.’
The machine’s head snapped up, a vaguely humanoid oval. Twin lights at the front gave a wild flicker. ‘Rolling, rolling.’
Another stone landed in the snow at Victor’s feet. He grimaced. Even the prepubescent kids were built out of wire passed down through generations of miners with playful fists, and Victor was no fighter.
‘Level up,’ he said to the cart. ‘We have to move. Now.’
‘Roger that, partner.’
The cart, a silver rectangle, rocked back on its caterpillar treads and lurched into an upright position. Smaller central treads unfolded from the ends of its main propulsion system. It was activating its sprint mode, but in the snow and ice its motors would only last a couple of hundred metres. It would have to be enough.
‘Move it,’ Victor said, as another stone clanged off the cart’s casing.
Shadows shifted behind him as he started into a run, morphing into the shapes of four, five, six kids as they bolted from the alleyway. Victor squeezed his eyes shut as the cart’s accelerator runners spun in the snow, then clunked as they caught on something buried under the surface.
He didn’t want to turn around to see his most treasured invention pitch forward onto its robotic face as the group of laughing urchins descended on it, thrown stones rattling off the metal like machine gun fire, but he had no choice. The cart was dear to him; he owed it a single icy tear frozen against his face by the chilling wind.
He glared for one long moment at the feral children as they engulfed the cart in a flurry of thumping hands and kicking feet, then turned and hurried for home, feeling at least some scant relief that its sacrifice had allowed him to get away.
It was not yet four p.m. but full dark had descended upon Brevik like a galloping black horse, bringing with it a cold so dense it was like an iced blanket draped over the streets. The man in the shawl shivered. The cold made his bones ache to the very brink of what he could stand, but that chill gave comfort to the many scars on his savaged body.
Across the street, one of the brothels had fallen near silent, the last sounds the tired grunting of one last couple as they concluded their transaction. The man in the shawl headed out into the street, stepping through footprints left by others where he could, wary that the wind could be fickle and might choose to leave his tracks unburied.
The house’s door hung on one hinge. The man in the shawl pushed inside, pausing a moment to listen to the rutting underway in a room to his left. A ratty carpet hid his footfalls as he peered in through a doorway to see a naked ass rising and falling between two skinny, pockmarked legs in the flickering light of a trashcan fire, accompanied by a series of halfhearted grunts and moans. The man in the shawl moved on, deeper into the house.
In a room near the back he found what he was looking for, an unconscious man plump enough to be new to this game. Two crusty circles of blood lined the man’s nose, and purple bags hung from his eyes as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. His body leaned against the window, and onl
y ragged breathing indicated he still lived.
The man in the shawl reached into his jacket and pulled out a metal bar about two feet long, curved at one end for pulling up floorboards. He pulled back a strip of threadbare carpet and worked up a couple of boards. Then he dragged the man over and laid him on the ground with his forehead pressing against the side of the hole, his neck over it.
With expert precision the man in the shawl pierced the unconscious man’s main carotid artery, then held his head steady while the man bled out onto the freezing gravel two feet below. It took several minutes before the man in the shawl was satisfied that any mess he made would be easy to clean up, then he set about sawing off pieces of the man’s body and dropping them into a sacking bag lined with plastic. It was a crude operation, but the intense cold made it easier. Any blood that was spilt quickly froze into tiny droplets that could be brushed into the under-floor space.
He sometimes wondered why he went to such lengths to cover his tracks. He had observed long enough to know that no one cared about these people. Had there been anyone to miss them, they were long faded away into the smoke of the belching factories, ground down so far by their own misery that the death of a loved one might go so far as to incite jealousy. People in these towns toiled in the snow and ice, and if their factories failed they died if they couldn’t find another before the fingers of temptation took hold. And once they took those first steps along the path to the crack houses in the downtrodden Lenin District, there was no coming back.
With the choice cuts secured in his bag, he pushed the rest of the body into the under-floor space and lowered the floorboards back down, covering them over with the carpet. The next gang of fiends to use this building might notice the creaking of the loose boards, or the way the carpet seemed to slip more on one side than the other, but the man in the shawl felt confident that the underlying dread that shrouded these communities would keep them from letting their inquisitiveness take control. They would turn away from their suspicions and embrace the blind acceptance of their own crumbling paths.
He stood up and hauled the heavy sack up over his shoulder. The house was silent now, the sounds of rutting gone, the light dying down as the cold stepped back in. The man in the shawl shivered, feeling the creep of the chill on his skin, but it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. The cold, tormentor of most, was his greatest comfort.
As he reached the door he heard the sound of breathing, and turned to see the whore still lying there, her legs wide as if waiting for the flickering of the dying trashcan fire to become her next customer. Now that he could see her clearly, the man in the shawl marvelled at how haggard she was, almost skeletal. Had he been desperate there would have been no meat worth taking, and he wondered how it was possible to find pleasure between legs that were little more than skin stretched over bone.
Her eyes studied the shadows where his face was hidden. Unable to resist, he put the bag down by his feet and squatted down.
‘A penny for your thoughts, sweet princess?’ he asked her in a good impersonation of the Russian dialect spoken in these parts.
‘Are you him?’ she asked, and he wondered whether she meant Death, or perhaps someone more welcome. ‘Are you … him?’
The man in the shawl smiled. ‘I’m him and them and everyone,’ he said.
‘Do you want me?’
Again, her meaning was ambiguous. The idea of screwing her was almost as repulsive as she would find his face—were he to reveal it—but perhaps she was searching for a different kind of answer. There was little brightness in her eyes, only a flicker that pulsed in and out of view, a candlelight struggling to stay alive.
He reached out a scarred, bony hand and ran one hooked, claw-like finger up the inside of her thigh from her knee to her pelvis. Her eyes continued to flick across the shadows under his hood, but she made no other reaction.
Even after everything, he couldn’t resist setting in motion a little game. Would it work out for her, or wouldn’t it? She would cast the die. And she would either live, or her candle would be extinguished forever.
‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But I am following at your shoulder. Whenever you look, I will be there. Outrun me if you can.’
‘I’m so tired.’
‘Sleep now, but when you wake you will remember me only as a dream, one to fear, one to speak of to no one.’
He slid a finger into the shadows between her legs, feeling damp warmth. Still she made no reaction.
‘Are you him?’ she said again.
‘I am the worst creature in the world. I am the end of all things.’
With his finger still inside her, she smiled. It was so unexpected that he tensed for a moment, wondering if perhaps he’d been sucked into some kind of trick.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you’re not. I know where he is.’
The man in the shawl pulled back, alarmed. He glanced behind him, but the room was empty, the punter gone. When he looked back at the girl her eyelids had fallen half closed, and she gazed at him with a drugged nonchalance.
Who did she mean by he? The man in the shawl stood up and took a few steps backwards. There had been an intensity to that one word that set his nerves on edge. The days when he could hide out in the open were gone; now he was penniless and alone, cut off from the resources that had so long sustained him. And he was hunted. He knew it as surely as night followed day.
He left the girl alone to her own devices. Either she would stand and leave and live or she would sleep and die, as the trashcan fire burned down and the killer cold returned. The temperature was often minus ten even during daytime, and at night minus twenty or more was not uncommon. It could take the unprepared quicker than a knife to the throat.
Outside, he slung the bag over his shoulder as he moved quickly up the street. It hadn’t snowed in several days but the air was filled with flurries of ice shards ripped off the top of the last drifts.
The building he had chosen to make his lair was a gutted Soviet-era apartment block. While the upper levels were populated with a similar assortment of nobodies and has-beens to those he preyed on, the old basements were his alone. It was easy to keep people away. The scraping of his nails on the metal door frames, a shriek from his fire-damaged throat, the shadow of his ghastly shape on the walls, were more than enough to deter the curious. For the most part he was left in peace.
Something was lying in the road up ahead. Knocked over on to its side, it had the size and shape of a shopping cart. The man in the shawl glanced left and right as he approached it, fearing a trap, but it was late now and only the foolhardy or the desperate were out on the streets.
It was covered with a dusting of the ice-snow. It looked like a motorised transportation cart, but when he leaned down and ran a finger along its metal casing he heard a ticking sound coming from somewhere inside. A spherical object, bent and dented, tried to twist around to face him, but its mounting had been cracked and it could only turn halfway.
‘Ever ready, always ready to help.’
The man in the shawl started. It was some kind of robot. Battered and damaged, left to rot out here in the snow.
An old awakening stirred in him, and a purring sound rose in his chest. It had been so long. Years of stumbling further north where the temperatures were easier on his skin, moving from place to place and living like a beggar in the streets, or a wraith in the bowels of some forgotten building, his old pleasures had become a sideshow rather than the driving force that had once been his obsession.
The thing tried to lift its head again, but the mounting cracked and it bumped against the side of its body.
‘Can you move?’ the man in the shawl asked.
‘Ready and willing to take orders,’ it said, although it didn’t move.
The man in the shawl inspected its outer casing. In one end a handle had been fitted, perhaps for the very event that its propulsion motors might fail. Slinging his bag of human flesh into an empty carry compartment built into the machine’s top, h
e unclipped the handle and began to pull the cart along behind him. He was far stronger than the scrawny body gave away, but every few steps he had to stop to clear away an accumulation of scraped ice from around the machine’s caterpillar treads.
As his building appeared like a grey shadow out of the gloom of the winter night, his excitement grew. His raging hunger was long gone, replaced by an impatient desire to begin tinkering with the machine, to open up its body, to investigate its components.
Sometimes, in his darkest days, he felt like none of his life had ever happened, that he wasn’t an aging monster so disfigured as to be more scar than skin, but that innocent child sitting around on the floor of his mother’s hovel, taking apart junked video players and food processors and pieces of circuit board and fashioning them into something wondrous.
Back when he had just been a boy who made robots.
Part I
The Cold Little Town in the Middle of Siberia
1
The man who consumes other men
He had forgotten many things over the years, but one thing he had always remembered was his name.
It was pronounced ku-row and written in Romanised letters as Kurou. It was the British businessman Rutherford Forbes who had first named him for the bird that his name so resembled, in part for his inability to pronounce an unusual Chinese name and partly for what the boy’s face reminded him of on those few occasions when he had no choice but to look at Kurou eye to eye. The bony outcrop where the nose should have been, the thin, pinched lips reminiscent of a bird’s tongue, the tiny black eyes, and the tufts of calcified hair that looked like the feathers of some starving, emaciated bird. Kurou’s body, too, was misshapen, twisted and scrawny, the wiry strength greater than two bigger men combined no consolation for a need to hide himself from every reflective surface.