Border Princes

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Catch her,’ Jack advised.

  Gwen was already doing so. She secured Mrs Peeters’ falling form around the shoulders, dragged her quickly and gently into the hall, and lowered her onto the hall runner. Jack stepped inside behind them, and closed the front door.

  Mrs Peeters was effectively unconscious, but her body bucked and rocked with involuntary coughs and throaty choking noises. An impressively noxious quantity of viscous yellow mucus was flowing from her mouth and nose.

  ‘Recovery position,’ said Jack. ‘Keep her airway clear.’

  ‘Doing it,’ Gwen replied. She had rolled Mrs Peeters onto her side, and reached her fingers into the lady’s spluttering mouth, pulling out globules of mucal matter. Thank God for surgical gloves. And pac-a-macs. The blast pattern of Mrs Peeters’ first sneeze covered the front of Jack’s plastic slicker like glue.

  ‘Give her another go,’ Gwen said.

  Jack bent down and administered the paddle to Mrs Peeters’ head again. As they hatched, the Droon were especially vulnerable to infrasonic bursts.

  Mrs Peeters began to rack and cough more violently. A much more considerable flood of mucus began to pour out of her head, thick and soft like sugar icing.

  ‘Oh, that’s nasty,’ said Gwen, hard at work.

  A voice called out from somewhere. A man’s voice, calling his wife’s name between phlegmy coughs.

  ‘Tosh?’ Jack advised over his headset.

  At the back of the house, in a dew-damp garden of mature apple trees and hydrangeas, Toshiko and James started to move. James had already popped the catch on the French windows.

  The back room was a sitting room, with a handsome baby grand and antimacassars over the chair backs. An aspidistra stood on a jardinière beside a rack of sheet music. A number of school photographs hung on the walls; tiers of uniformed kids staring at the camera in landscape format.

  James and Toshiko went out into the hallway. The voice floated down from upstairs. ‘Viv? Who is it? Who’s that at the door?’

  Back down the hall, by the front door, Jack and Gwen were dealing with Mrs Peeters. The poor woman was emitting wet, splattery sneezes and gurgles.

  Without waiting for further instruction, James and Toshiko went up stairs.

  ‘Whoo! Really spiking now!’ Owen warned over the link.

  ‘Understood,’ replied James. An upper landing, with a blanket box and some framed watercolours and mezzotints of Snowdonia. A rattling, fluid cough coming from a nearby bedroom.

  Mr Peeters had taken to his bed the day before. The room smelled of menthol and cough linctus. There were two boxes of tissues beside the rumpled bed. Mr Peeters had made it to the doorway, unsteady and flushed. He was wearing flannelette pyjamas and a worried expression.

  ‘Who...?’ he began to say.

  ‘Health visitors,’ said Toshiko smoothly. ‘Your wife called us.’

  ‘Just sit back down on the bed, Mr Peeters,’ said James, ‘you ought not to be walking around.’

  Mr Peeters was too poorly to argue. He allowed himself to be manoeuvred back onto the bed. He was still confused, flu-stupid. He sneezed, and snot hung from his left nostril like an icicle.

  Toshiko helped him wipe with a tissue.

  ‘Why are you wearing plastic macs?’ the elderly man asked.

  ‘It’s raining,’ said Toshiko.

  ‘Just going to take your temperature, Mr Peeters,’ said James, producing an audio paddle.

  ‘There we go,’ said Jack. Gwen had already spotted it in the pooling mucus. A wriggling blob, pale blue and sickly, about the size of a cockroach. Jack fished in with the stainless steel tongs, grabbed the blob out of the jellied goo and bagged it.

  ‘Watch closely,’ said Jack, ‘there may be more than one.’

  ‘What’s the maximum you’ve ever seen?’ asked Gwen.

  ‘Six,’ said Jack.

  ‘From one nose?’

  ‘Unlikely as it seems.’

  ‘There’s another!’ Gwen announced, with distaste.

  This blob was more active, its blue casing slightly ruptured to reveal something sharper and blacker inside. It wriggled away across the parquet flooring.

  There was no time for finesse with the tongs. Jack grabbed it with his gloved hands and shook it off his fingers into another baggie. He held the baggie up to the light and shook it, studying the tiny, grotesque thing wiggling inside.

  ‘Just in time,’ Jack said. ‘That one had almost shed.’

  Mrs Peeters had gone into a paroxysm of gagging coughs. The matter flowing out of her mouth and nose was thinner suddenly. Watery snot streaked with blood. The pool on the floor widened.

  ‘Any more?’ Gwen asked.

  Jack scanned the woman. ‘No,’ he said, but he gave Mrs Peeters a third blast with the paddle to make sure. ‘Her body is just voiding now,’ Jack said. ‘Cleaning out the nest. Go put the kettle on.’

  Toshiko extracted the third organism from Mr Peeters’ phlegm-stoppered mouth and cleared his airway. She’d had to take the old man’s false teeth out. The thing clamped in the jaws of her tongs was almost all the way out of its pale blue casing. It had begun to unfold. Black, barbed, needle limbs the length and thickness of pencils quivered as they filled with ichor and began to inflate.

  ‘Yuck,’ she said.

  ‘Kill it,’ said James. ‘It’s too well formed to just bag.’

  With a grimace, Toshiko dropped the emerging thing into a bag, put the bag on the corner of the bedside cabinet and flattened it with a sharp blow from a hardback Wilbur Smith.

  ‘I think he’s clear,’ said Jack. He had Mr Peeters’ limp form rolled forward and well supported, so that the muck drooling out of him could pour onto the bedroom carpet. There was a lot of it, like wallpaper paste stained with brown sauce.

  Toshiko scanned the unfortunate ex-history teacher.

  ‘We’re there. He’s clean.’

  Owen paced on the path beside the garage. Birds twittered obliviously in the wet trees above.

  ‘Come on,’ he called. ‘Are we done yet?’

  ‘Owen?’ Jack replied, after a pause.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Get the carpet cleaner and the scrub-packs from the SUV.’

  ‘How does that end up being my job?’ Owen complained.

  They put the couple to bed, and wiped the place down. Owen grumbled as he went to work with the mop.

  ‘This is disgusting,’ he said.

  ‘You should have been here earlier,’ Gwen said. She’d made the rehydrating drinks as per Jack’s recipe: salts, glucose, antibiotics, warm water, plus a subtle cocktail of drugs that wiped short-term memory. Gwen wasn’t fond of using those.

  ‘You want me to strip out the pattern monitors?’ James asked.

  ‘We’ll come back in a week and do that,’ said Jack. ‘Better keep them under watch for a few days more.’

  They bagged up the soiled macs and gloves and disposable towels in waste sacks, and locked up after them.

  Later, when Mr and Mrs Peeters woke, tucked up in bed, they were both feeling very much better.

  As the team got into the SUV, Gwen’s cellphone rang. She checked the display. RHYS.

  She pressed ‘reject call’.

  EIGHT

  Sometime around four o’clock, after a bout of late rain, Davey Morgan heard voices outside the shed.

  He’d spent the morning on the allotment, then gone in for his lunch. Some vague urge had brought him back out in the mid afternoon, some desire to potter around the shed, sorting through old seed packets and polystyrene bedding trays.

  Davey had chattered away. The thing in the wheelbarrow had hummed once or twice. Davey wondered if the humming was actually his imagination. His hearing was not as good as it had once been.

  He heard the voices well enough. He went outside and pretended to check on the brazier. It was just turning dark, the very edge of dusk. Three or four of the boys, the yobbos, were having a kick-about on a patch of waste ground in the co
rner of the allotment area. They were shouting, and calling each other all colour of filthy words. Davey prodded the brazier, trying to look as if he wasn’t watching.

  The yobbos ignored him, or didn’t see him. There’d be a broken shed window or two, by the morning, in all probability. He worried about the thing in the shed. After a while, he went back into the shed, laid the thing down in the barrow, put a piece of potato sacking over it, and wheeled it out. He locked the shed, and carried on down the path towards the gate with the barrow. Its wheel squeaked annoyingly.

  He heard the dense, pneumatic thunt of a ball being kicked, and flinched slightly as it soared past him and bounced across Mrs Pryce’s plot, snapping fronds of kale, and throwing aslant a nice head of white celery.

  Driven by jeers, one of the yobbos flashed past Davey, laughing, on his way to recover the ball. His trainers did more damage than the ball had managed.

  Davey couldn’t contain himself. ‘Standing on the bloody veg!’ he exclaimed.

  Scooping up the ball, the youth glared at him with a mystified look.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re trampling all over the bloody vegetables!’ Davey cried.

  The youth looked down. He was a thin, whippety man-boy, long of neck and ping-pong balled of Adam’s apple. Eighteen or nineteen years old, stupid two-tone hair, and a narrow, pimpled face. Davey recognised him. He had a feeling his name was Ozzie. This Ozzie, looking down at his muddied feet, grinned, and hoofed another head of celery out of the black soil. Bits of it scattered on the path.

  Davey looked on, expecting verbal abuse. He sometimes doubted they could do anything but swear.

  The youth, Ozzie, stared at Davey and took a step or two forwards. He held the football against his chest, with a hand on either side of it.

  A few feet from Davey, still staring at him, the boy suddenly fired the football at him, two-handed. Davey grunted in surprise, and jerked backwards.

  It had been a feint. The boy hadn’t actually thrown the ball, just pretended to. But it was enough to overbalance Davey. He teetered, and fell sideways into a patch of cow parsley. Going down, he banged his knee on the corner of a galvanised water tank.

  Ozzie howled with laughter, and trotted off with his ball. His mates were laughing too, shouting and whooping.

  They called Davey some choice names. He waited, prone, feeling the throb in his knee, divided by rage and fear. He waited until the voices fell away and his breathing steadied, then slowly heaved himself upright, using the edge of the tank for support. The boys were moving away along the south path, lobbing the ball to each other, their interest in him evaporated. He felt like shaking a fist and yelling, but knew that would only start the cycle again.

  He didn’t want that.

  He waited a while longer, leaning on the butt and lifting his sore leg to rotate the foot gingerly. Bloody bastards. Bloody, bloody bastards.

  The surface of the syrupy green water in the metal tank began to pucker and dimple. The rain picked up again. Davey buttoned up his digging jacket, raised the handles of the barrow, and started on his way again.

  More slowly, this time, limping.

  He unlocked his backdoor, and wheeled the barrow into the kitchen. It left muddy tracks that he’d have to mop over later, but there was only so far he could carry the thing. It was heavy.

  He wondered where he should put it. Where would it be safe? Where would it be comfortable? Upstairs was out of the question, and the under-stair cupboard, where the Hoover and the gas meter lived, seemed inhospitable. He finally decided on the tub in the little downstairs bathroom. He moved the soap dish and an ancient spider plant that he’d somehow kept alive since Glynis’s time, and laid the thing in the worn bath, propping it back against the calcified snouts of the taps. He adjusted it carefully, made sure it was steady.

  Then he took the barrow back outside, set it handles up against the yard wall, and came back in. He put the kettle on.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ he called.

  The cat appeared, and looked at him expectantly.

  Davey took off his digging jacket and hung it on the peg.

  ‘Well, I’m certainly never eating cheese fondue again,’ said James.

  ‘I didn’t know you were fond of fondue,’ said Gwen.

  ‘I wouldn’t say I’m unduly fond of fondue,’ James replied, smiling.

  ‘Give it a rest,’ said Owen. His scowl was particularly pronounced, a weary look, though he half-smiled at the banter.

  ‘Decent enough result, though,’ said Toshiko. ‘Mucus notwithstanding.’ She looked tired too.

  ‘Not exactly how I’d choose to spend a Monday,’ said Gwen, ‘but yeah. Decent enough. Least we didn’t balls it up this time.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Owen. ‘If I had a drink...’ He looked up.

  Half six. The small, cellar bar off the Quay was filling up. A herd of suits from investment firms, insurance brokers and the rest of Cardiff’s big, anonymous plcs were flooding into the watering hole.

  ‘I’ll help Jack with the drinks,’ Gwen said, getting up. James watched her disappear into the crowd.

  He looked back at Toshiko and Owen. They were smiling at him.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’

  ‘Need a hand?’ Gwen called over the chatter.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jack, turning to hand back a couple of drinks from the bar. He waited for the barman to bring him his change.

  ‘More to your liking?’ Gwen asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Today. Performance more to sir’s liking, was it, then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I think we did all right.’

  ‘What, are you writing your own pep talk now?’

  ‘Ha ha,’ she said. ‘Look, there’s something up, isn’t there?’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘There’s something up. More than just this last weekend.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. My “tall, dark and brooding” detector’s been going off more than usual.’

  ‘Your what now?’

  ‘You. You’ve been standing around looking a lot more enigmatic and windswept these last few days. A real look of destiny on your face.’

  ‘What can I say? I’m working on the image. I hope to have the full-on Heathcliff by Christmas.’

  ‘OK,’ she chuckled. They edged their way back to the booth with the drinks. ‘But you’d tell me if there was something, wouldn’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘Do I usually keep you in the loop?’ Jack asked.

  ‘No. Usually, you keep tons of stuff from us.’

  ‘Well, that’s not likely to change then, is it?’ Jack said with a toothpaste-ad grin. ‘Gwen, I know stuff. I know all sorts of stuff. I know stuff none of you need to be bothered with. The moment you do need to be bothered with it, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘Blimey,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did we just have an actual need-to-know conversation?’

  ‘I think we did.’

  ‘Christ, now I feel like a proper secret agent.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find you one.’

  They delivered the drinks. One of the city types had loaded the jukebox with coins, and ‘Who Are You?’ blared across the cellar.

  ‘CSI,’ said Owen. ‘Can I get a transfer to them d’you think?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, you have to be a doctor.’

  James snorted his beer. Toshiko patted Owen a ‘there, there’ on the arm. Gwen’s cell rang. She took it out, and switched it off.

  ‘Shouldn’t you answer that?’ Jack asked.

  ‘No,’ said Gwen, raising her drink. James glanced at her.

  Jack set his half-finished glass of water down on the table. ‘Well, charming though this is, I have to be going.’

  ‘Lightweight,’ said Owen.

  ‘I’ve got a few things to do in the Hub,’ said Jack. ‘Tosh, did you finish those costings?’
>
  ‘Can I give them to you in the morning?’ she asked. ‘I still can’t shake this headache.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll walk you out,’ said Toshiko.

  Left on their own, the other three sat there for a minute or two without speaking. Owen looked at Gwen, then at James, and then back at Gwen.

  He shook his head. ‘I get it. See you tomorrow.’ He got to his feet. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he said.

  ‘That leaves us a lot of scope,’ said Gwen.

  James waited until Owen had vanished into the bustle of suits, and then said, ‘Rhys has been calling you, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s all right though.’

  ‘Are you going to talk to him?’

  ‘At some point.’

  ‘What will you say?’

  She shrugged. ‘That’s why I said “at some point”. I don’t know yet.’

  James nodded. ‘If this is difficult for you—’

  ‘Shush now.’

  Over the din of voices, the jukebox flipped from ‘Who Are You?’ to ‘Coming Up For Air’.

  Gwen smiled. ‘So, what shall we do?’ she asked.

  ‘Goodnight then,’ said Toshiko.

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Jack replied. Toshiko hurried away through the dinner rush on the Quay. There was rain in the air. The illuminated windows and signs of the restaurant-bars formed a loud band of light and colour under the low night sky.

  Jack walked to a quiet part of the rail facing out towards the Barrage. He took the black tile out of his coat pocket and studied it. The display was the same. Ominous. Ticking.

  ‘Need to know,’ Gwen had joked. Jack needed to know, and there was no one to ask.

  Owen walked around the Bay to his apartment, and let himself in, the bag of takeout banging against his raised arm.

  He put his wet coat on the back of a chair, and went into the kitchen to find a plate and a fork, and a beer from the fridge.

  He felt wired and restless. A headache nagged behind his eyes. His bruised mouth was sore. He dished out the food, carried it into the lounge, and set it down on the table, the beer beside it. Then he headed into the bathroom to study his lip in the mirror.

  The girl – Miss Tremendous Rack UK – had left a lipstick by the sink. He picked it up and idly twisted it.