Death Got No Mercy

by Al Ewing

  I'd left him in the theatre, and now I want to jump forward in time a little to that big orgy, and what happens after that... yes, with Cassie.

  Right.

  The machine judders back into life and I'm confronted by a loading screen and then the stark whiteness of the blank page. This time it doesn't seem so intimidating. My fingers find the keys.

  'CHAPTER NINETEEN.' I type.

  'Cade opened his eyes, and the sky was a livid red'... no. Bloody red.

  No, not that either.

  'Cade opened his eyes, and the sky was on fire, burning orange with streaks of blood red that ran from horizon to horizon. He could feel Cassie...' No. No. Doesn't work.

  'He could feel someone's fingers brushing through the hair on his chest.'

  Better.

  Fingers tap and words appear. I smile, happy to be back in the zone, back writing. The envelopes and the stamps are sitting forgotten in the bedroom, and I know I won't get around to posting off the contract until tomorrow, maybe not until the day after, but that doesn't matter. It took me a while to get into it today, but I'm in it now.

  I reach out and take another sip of the Red Bull, and then settle down to making Cade's life worse.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Helter Skelter

  Cade opened his eyes, and the sky was on fire, burning orange with streaks of blood red that ran from horizon to horizon. He could feel someone's fingers brushing through the hair on his chest.

  It took him a second or two to realise he was naked.

  The fingers played over the fresh scabs on his chest, the cross that was cut there, then reached down to play slowly over his belly, and then Cassie's face filled his vision and before he knew what was going on, her lips were on his and her tongue was diving and darting against his own.

  Cade figured he should be shocked at that, or at least surprised, but it felt like the most natural damned thing in all the world. He realised his hands were on her bottom, squeezing, fingertips rolling up the small of her back and into her hair, but he couldn't quite remember telling them to do that.

  It didn't much matter, he figured.

  Nothing much mattered.

  In the back of his mind, he was finding it a mite strange, through - Cade wasn't a man to let his guard down lightly and Cassie, though she was sweet and pert and all the rest of it, wasn't Cade's type at all. Cade liked women with a good twenty or thirty years on them, and like as not a few years on him into the bargain. That was how come he got on so well with the Duchess.

  Cade blinked, feeling her young, slim fingers taking a hold of him and half-stroking, half-tugging, in an inexpert sort of a way that was exactly the reason why he usually fooled around with older women. This time he didn't mind - as a matter of fact, it felt pretty damned good. Cade let his head drop onto the grass, and he felt each cool blade brush softly against his fingertips, and the muscles in his face twitched into something that anybody who'd ever known him long wouldn't recognise.

  Cade smiled.

  He was out in the park, then - Golden Gate park - and in the arms of a girl of no more than eighteen, maybe seventeen, which at any other time might raise a moral complication, but not now. Not during the zero hour.

  Cade blinked, wondering where the hell that had come from, and then Cassie's lips were on his again and she was clambering onto him, and then he was in her. All around him, he could hear people together, in twos and sometimes threes and fours, laughing and sighing, tumbling over each other and intertwining like coiling snakes, some quiet as a whisper, some shouting out with every stroke. Cade lay back and let it all wash over him.

  He turned his head to the left, and he saw the woman in the well-fitting jeans from the ball game - only now she was in nothing but an unbuttoned shirt, nuzzling with another girl about the same age and the actor from the TV show, or stage play or whatever the hell it was. The three of them were writhing and rubbing, not doing anything in particular but enjoying the contact of skin on skin. Cade guessed there was an element of polymorphous perversity to it. Then again, the same could be said of him.

  He pulled Cassie close, breathing in the scent of her neck, and gave it some thought. That in itself was a feat for Cade - the thoughts in his head seemed like quicksilver, slippery and impossible to get any kind of a hold of. He'd been drugged, he knew that - or rather, he'd taken the damn drug himself. He'd forgotten why he'd ever been tempted to, although in the back of his mind he could remember meeting a fat, depressed-looking fella... the thought left him as soon as he latched on it, and was gone. They were all under the influence of whatever this was, and it was pretty good at that. Cade hadn't felt quite so free in a while.

  Still, there was something wrong, he knew that.

  Something in the way the shadows were lengthening across the park, spreading out like a black pool of contaminating liquid.

  The sun was going down.

  Cassie leaned in again, breathing him, her giggle filling his ear. He could hear something over that, and the sighs and the laughter.

  He could hear screaming

  It was the kind of screaming animals did, enraged, snarling beasts, and it was coming from the shadows - from those parts of the park where the shadows fell. Cade turned his head, and saw that the shadows were starting to fall over the park. Only natural.

  The sun was going down.

  He blinked, wondering why he didn't care, and then remembered the drugs. He'd taken a white pill and a black pill, and they were working together on him. He had an idea that it was the white pill that was making him so mellow and easily pleased, so ready to let Cassie do what she wanted and to do what he felt in return. He wondered, idly, what it was the black pill did.

  The screaming was louder now.

  And the sun was going down.

  The shadows slowly crept towards him, flowing over the actor and the woman who filled her jeans while she wore them, and the other girl between them, and they changed. It was such a sudden change that Cade almost couldn't see it - it was as though it was just one more kind of lovemaking. But their faces were twisted now, masks of rage and hate and pure menace, the actor flexing his arms and smashing out, backhanding the unknown girl across the face and sending her tumbling, while the woman who'd filled her jeans so well reached out fingernails like long talons for his face, laughing cruelly as they plunged down for his face, raking down the cheeks and drawing blood.

  "Helter skelter!" she screamed, or maybe it was him, it was hard to say. Their mingled voices rose up as she clawed at him, and he struck out wildly at her, the girl out cold beside them with her nose bloody. Naked people clawing at each other and shrieking, maddened: "Helter skelter! Helter skelter! Helter skelter!"

  And the whole park seemed to be shrieking it as the shadows lengthened and caught more people in their grip. Cade felt cold, suddenly, but didn't feel anything else but good, even though that wave of violence was spreading closer to him and Cassie.

  She was in his arms, and her lips were on his neck, and somehow that was all that mattered. His hands slid up her back, taking hold of her shoulders, and he turned his head to kiss her, deep and long.

  And then the shadow hit him.

  At first, it was like nothing had changed, and it took him a second to work out what had. Only the sun had gone, after all.

  Cade was now in a world with no sun.

  It seemed as if there had always been an inferno at the front of his skull, burning and crisping his frontal lobes, sending white-hot needles of pure agony scorching down his spine and back up again, setting his blood alight and pumping it around his body. It seemed like he'd always been angry.

  There'd never been a time he hadn't wanted to kill anything that moved.

  Above him, the girl thing screeched and clawed, raking her nails over his chest, opening up the wounds. The pain hit him, but became lost in the red roaring flames that burnt and scorched his mind. It seemed that that heat - that burning, hateful rage and pain - had always been there and a
lways would be. The girl-thing was screaming at him - "Helter skelter! Helter skelter!", over and over. He realised, without being surprised, that he was bellowing it as well.

  Hell with it. It was how he felt, he might as well say it.

  Helter skelter. Helter skelter.

  Over and over.

  The air was full of screams and snarls as fights and scuffles broke out all around - here and there Cade could see people scratching and clawing at themselves, unable to reach anyone else to hurt but needing to hurt something. Once people were unconscious, they were ignored - Cade realised he had to force himself to see them, as if now that they didn't pose him any threat his brain felt free to just pass over them and move on to something else.

  Cade was rationalising, and he knew it - fighting the drug. That was no damn good. That just made it hurt more. What he needed was to take that hurt out on somebody. The girl-thing brought her fist down at his lip, splitting it, and all his attention was suddenly on her. She'd do as well as anybody.

  His fist snapped up, slamming into her jaw and cracking it, skinning a knuckle in the process. That familiar blast of agony rolled down from his mutilated hand, but it was a weak thing now compared to the fire in his brain and he paid it no heed.

  He couldn't remember her name.

  All he knew was that she was moving around, rolling on the grass, hissing and clutching at her face, and every time she moved it caused another wave of flaming pain in his mind. He needed to do something about that.

  Through the fire and the fog in his mind, it came to him that everyone was lashing out almost randomly - they must be feeling the same pain that he was, the same rage and hate, but they weren't focussing. Cade guessed they'd never learned how to focus past pain, or maybe they just weren't of his mind. Maybe they just didn't feel as strongly about it as he did. They damn sure weren't going to do much in the way of damage in that state, although Cade figured he knew where all those little injuries he'd seen had come from now.

  But Cade could damage them. Cade could damage them a hell of a lot.

  And he would.

  He reached down and grabbed the girl-thing by the throat, closing his screaming hands and twisting. Her spine went with a sickening crack of sound, but he kept squeezing, not realising that his teeth were gritted and his eyes were bulging right along with hers until after she'd gone still. Only then did his fingers relax, and once she'd flopped onto the ground, cold and heavy and without life, he simply forgot she'd ever been there.

  The actor was swinging out wildly, not doing much more than bruising the woman he was fighting. Cade went for him next. He wished he had his knife, or his knuckledusters, or anything at all - maybe he left them in the movie theatre. He'd go there soon and find what he needed, but in the meantime he had work to do. The fire in his head wasn't going away.

  It was all rational for Cade. It was the most natural, rational thing in the world to grab the actor's head in his hands and twist it round with one motion until it sat backwards on the neck, the flesh twisted and the vertebrae snapped apart, the man's bladder and bowels voiding on the grass. Cade kept kicking him as he shuddered and convulsed, the nerve endings sending their last signals to the dying body. Finally he went still, and vanished from Cade's head.

  Cade moved on to the next one.

  And the next.

  And the next.

  It was a long night, and there were a lot of people in that park, maybe fifty in all, maybe more - Cade went through them one by one, breaking necks for the most part, but occasionally getting in something closer to a real fight, trading brutal punches again and again until they crashed to the floor with nothing but a red smear where their face had been - whoever they were.

  The only thing in Cade's head was pain, but he kept moving, cracking spines and snapping necks, choking and killing, while all the folks around him just fell to the dirt and hollered and shrieked, repeating their nonsense phrase over and over. Somehow, he managed to gain a kind of calm from it - a balm in his blazing, burning brain. He was a man reduced to one function, and that function was death,

  And death had no mercy.

  Eventually, there was nobody left to kill, and Cade slowed, and stopped, falling to his knees, a clockwork man with a stopped key. He would have broke his own neck or carved himself open like a turkey on a farm, but somehow he couldn't raise his hands anymore, so there he knelt until the dawn.

  By the time the rays of the sun started to wash over the park, and the blood and the corpses on the ground, the pain in Cade's mind was almost faded anyway. The drug had worn off after a few hours, and the first light of dawn washed it out entirely.

  Cade felt washed out right along with it.

  He lifted his head, and saw someone walking towards him from the gates of the park. A man wearing a good suit, looking at the carnage Cade had caused. He looked horrified, stumbling through the dawn like a man who'd released some terrible virus, some contagion upon the world, without considering what it might do.

  Like a biochemist, maybe.

  Cade nodded. "Doc." His voice sounded ragged in his ears. He cleared his throat and spat the taste from his mouth.

  Doc Clearly looked back at him. His face was white as ash. "...Cade."

  He looked around at the piled corpses. He reached out with the toe of one immaculate shoe and prodded the thing that had once been Cassie, raising a buzzing cloud of flies from her stiffened body. He swallowed hard, shaking his head. Then he looked back at Cade.

  "I think... I think we'd better talk."

  Chapter Twenty

  The Confession

  "It was all about balance, you see. Balance and release."

  Doc Clearly sighed, scratching his head, before leaning down quickly to check the pulse of one of the more recent kills, then standing slowly, sighing and shaking his head. He was dead, of course - a young man in his early twenties. Cade couldn't remember seeing his face, but there was nobody else who could've twisted his head around like that.

  Doc Clearly seemed to read his thoughts. "It's possible not all of these were you. We do have fatalities sometimes. It's... it's the nature of it." He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if warding off a developing headache. "I'm sorry, Cade. I expect you're wanting to know why."

  Cade nodded. "I'd be obliged."

  Clearly sighed. "Why I dose them with it... the compound. Why they keep taking it, night after night, despite... well, despite this." He shook his head. "I should have warned you. I should have given you some kind of indication what to expect, or... well, or told Cassiopeia not to bother bringing you." He looked up, angry. "Damn it, Cade, you told me you didn't have this in you!"

  Cade stared back, not moving. The Doc looked at him for a moment, then the anger dropped out of him and he just looked depressed. "Sorry... Sorry." he sighed, rubbing his brow. "Cassiopeia was someone... well, I liked her a lot." He shook his head, slowly, and turned away from Cade. Cade got the impression Clearly didn't want to look at him. He couldn't blame him for that.

  He could sure as hell blame him for slipping him something that turned him into a killing machine, though. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  Clearly sighed. "You killed the dog because you thought it was a threat. I didn't know how you'd react to hearing about the compound, whether you'd... oh, I don't know. Whether you'd think we were just like what you'd been through up north. I thought it would be safer to just introduce you to it - let you see for yourself. Experience how good it could be." He sighed. "Not one of my better ideas."

  They were at the gate of the park now, and Cade could see a few of the love children staggering through the streets, bruised and sore, covered with bites and scratches, looking for their clothes. They looked tired, but there was something healthy about them all the same, as if the watches of the long night had drained some boil. They were standing straight and proud, despite their nakedness. A couple of them waved to the Doc.

  "The park's off limits for now, everyone. I'll need a work party in an hour or t
wo - about twenty, and they'd best be prepared for some ugly work. Oh, and we'll need someone to take census. Spread it around." The waving people nodded and went back to what they were doing. Satisfied, the Doctor walked on grimly, heading back towards Haight Street and the movie theatre. Cade followed. He was more aware of his own nudity now - the way the other folk didn't seem to give a damn about theirs seemed to have that effect on him. He shook his head, waiting for the Doc to carry on.

  Eventually, he did.

  "Most people just pick up afterwards and carry on, as you saw. Like I said, we have fatalities sometimes, but generally it's just bites, scratches, the occasional black eye... things have calmed down a lot from how they were. Most people... they still hold back, you see. From doing anything permanent. Even in the grip of it, we hold back." He looked at Cade. "I really should have known when you killed the dog, Cade. You don't hold back. Do you?"

  Cade shook his head. He wasn't a man to hold back much when it came to killing, it had to be said. He looked up at the Doc, eyes narrowed. "Got some questions."

  Clearly scratched the back of his head again, his moustache seeming to droop further. "Of course you have. We all have. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we take this terrible substance and put ourselves through a night of hell? What do we gain?" He looked down, at a man lying on the sidewalk, the left side of his face beaten raw, one eyelid puffy and closed. He was smiling serenely, looking up through his good eye at the clouds overhead. "You okay, Ed?"

  Ed grinned, revealing missing teeth. "Just fine, Doc. Just fine."

  They carried on walking in silence for a moment before turning the corner onto Haight Street. They were starting to see some people wearing clothes now - long-sleeved shirts, polo-necks and ponchos were popular, pulled down over the arms to hide the bruises and scratches, shades hiding black eyes. They smiled, and waved, and one girl walked up and threw her arms around the Doc and hugged him, then leant in to kiss Cade's cheek. Then she moved on, leaving her gesture to do the talking.