Oddjobs 5: The Long Bad Friday

by Heide Goody

  Several hundred metres down the road, another giant hand – grey, slick and translucent in the light of nearby fires – reached down and plucked the taxi from the road, lifting it away.

  “Oh, fuck,” whispered Ricky.

  “We’re on a sushi conveyor belt,” said Nina.

  “Don’t say ‘sushi’, man,” said Pupfish. “Ggh! That’s one of them trigger words.”

  “This was a bad idea,” said Ricky. “We’ve got to get off this thing.”

  “We need to work out where the ground is first!” Nina pointed out.

  “Water’s that way,” said Pupfish, pointing.

  “No time for your bullshit!”

  “It’s there, dog! Don’t be adn-bhul doubting me!”

  “There is a canal right underneath Spaghetti Junction,” said Ricky.

  Nina revised her opinion of Samakha superpowers immediately. “Okay. You keep pointing at the canal, Pupfish. Then we’ll know when we’re done on this loop.”

  Pupfish kept his arm rigid and tracked the canal. Nina tried to picture what that meant in terms of their trajectory. If the canal was straight ahead, they were completely upside down, surely? She expected Ricky to report they were coasting down the other side, as Pupfish’s finger moved gradually downwards, but the engine noises, and Ricky’s grim expression remained the same.

  Soon enough, Pupfish’s finger pointed right back at the position it had started. Nina had been watching the screaming column above Villa Park, and it confirmed the same story. “We’ve been right round the loop,” she said.

  Ricky shook his head. “And yet, it’s like we’re always climbing. What do we do?”

  “We could – ggh! – jump out of the van when we’re over the canal,” said Pupfish.

  Nina looked at the indistinct smear that Pupfish had identified as the canal. “Does that sound achievable? To anyone?”

  “Also, I feel compelled to point out that gravity is not behaving like it normally does,” said Ricky. “So jumping for it doesn’t necessarily mean you would fall in the right direction.”

  Nina cast around the cab of the van. “What would Rod do? This is one of those times when he would whip out a gadget to test gravity.”

  “Pretty sure anything you have in your pocket will test gravity,” said Ricky, his eyes fixed on the road and signs of hungry hands.

  “Huh,” said Nina. “Oh, right.” She leaned over and felt around in her jacket pocket. She located a coin and held it in her outstretched palm. It was a silver shilling from her travels in the past. It was marked with a shield pattern on one side and an engraving of one of the King Georges on the other. She didn’t know which George it was, but she did recall this coin could pay for a cheap night’s entertainment at the King Street Theatre.

  She turned her palm downwards. The coin stayed in place. She took it between her fingers and let go. It stayed where it was, appearing to hover in mid-air. “Ah.”

  “Maybe that means we can fly?” Pupfish said.

  “This is just a bubble of Venislarn weirdness,” said Nina. “There’s no sense in any of it.” The thought of a bubble gave her another idea. She cracked open the window and held the coin outside. She let go, and it dropped away. “OK. So gravity’s fine outside, apparently.”

  “Great,” said Ricky. “Maybe getting out of the van is a good idea when we’re sure it’s at the bottom.”

  “We gonna do this?” Nina said to Pupfish. He nodded. “Right. We go round again and do a countdown to when we think we’re properly at the bottom – so that gravity is under our feet, yeah?”

  They all nodded. Pupfish traced the canal with his finger again. They joined him in the countdown, voices getting louder as the van approached what they hoped was the bottom.

  “Ready?” said Ricky, unclipping his seatbelt. He dropped the speed.

  Nina flung open the van’s rear doors. Some items of police equipment dropped out, skittering and sliding unnaturally along the road.

  “Three, bhul tamade!” shouted Pupfish. “Two, bhul tamade!” He grabbed the door handle as he yelled, “One, bhul tamade!”

  Nina leapt.

  She hit the ground squarely. She was ready for the momentum to tip her over, but it caught her by surprise, rolling her in a different direction.

  Pupfish shouted in alarm. Nina turned and tried to stand, looking for him.

  Nina felt the plunge of vertigo. Her legs buckled beneath her. Why couldn’t she walk? Even her feet were slipping out from under her. Pupfish seemed to be having similar difficulty. She leaned her upper body towards the concrete balustrade at the side of the road. She saw the van, stalled, starting to slide backwards, drawn by whatever bizarre gravitational pull held it. She pressed herself against the crash barrier to stay out of its way, and as it fell back past her she caught sight of Ricky Lee halfway out of the door, his face rigid with fright. Was this what he had feared when he took his foot off the accelerator? She twisted to watch. He called out, but the words were lost as the van dropped away at an acceleration that seemed impossible. It swerved over to the side and slammed hard against a steel post. Nina couldn’t see whether Ricky had managed to get out of the van, but at that moment she lost her footing and started to slide along the road. Pupfish scrabbled to grab her as she slid past him. His hand hooked under her armpit and they collided hard together against the balustrade.

  Nina had Pupfish’s armpit in her face. She twisted to look back – or was it down?

  The van peeled itself away from the side of the road where it had crashed, careering and bouncing away. As it spun, the crushed remains of Ricky Lee toppled soggily from the driver’s door. There was a faint slapping sound as his too-thin corpse hit the tarmac and slid out of sight.

  Nina couldn’t breathe.

  “I can’t – ggh! – hold you for long!” It was a stupid thing for Pupfish say. What did it matter? Ricky Lee was dead.

  “No,” she told herself. “He’s not dead.”

  “I need to get you to the side, Nina,” Pupfish grunted.

  “He was the sensible one,” she said.

  “Grab that metal post!”

  “He had to go last. He had to make sure we were out.”

  Pupfish grunted and swung her hard against the crash barrier, forcing her to take hold of the vertical struts that were now, in this tilted world, rungs on a ladder. She grabbed the crash barrier with both hands.

  “We need to get off this,” said Pupfish. “Over the side.”

  Nina grasped the low wall of the balustrade with one hand and tried to bend over it. She brought her other hand over, and clung on. Pupfish followed. The two of them peered over the edge.

  “Canal’s right there,” said Pupfish, pointing straight down.

  The road they stood on had some lighting, making it hard to pick out anything in the gloom below. Nina could see something that might have been a fire, or it might equally have been a reflection of fire in the water.

  “Do you think that the gravity gets more … normal if we go over the edge?” Pupfish asked.

  “I don’t know.” What she meant to say was she didn’t care. “We should just do it anyway.”

  Nina wriggled forward until her hips were on top of the balustrade and pivoted for a moment, unsure which way she was going to fall. Pupfish overbalanced before she did, maybe because he had a greater upper body weight, maybe because he was already arcing into a dive. He disappeared into the darkness below.

  Metal and concrete screamed. In the corner of her eye Nina saw something intercept the tumbling van. There was a spit of flame and sparks.

  She pushed herself over the barrier. She thrashed and yelled as she fell. The tumbling empty darkness seemed to last an age and still she didn’t care. She hit the water at an angle and sank fast. The cold ejected the last of the air from her lungs in a sudden blast.

  She was grabbed by the arms and pulled briskly out of the water. Pupfish plonked her on the bank of the canal.

  “You alive?” he said
. “Ggh! I don’t know CPR.”

  Nina laid on her back and looked up at the hideous glare of the crazy looping road.

  “You lost your hat,” added Pupfish.

  She got to her feet, surprised she could even stand. She was dripping wet and even colder now she was out in the air.

  “I didn’t love him,” she said, looking at the death trap highway. “I didn’t love him, but I really liked him.” She glared at Pupfish. “More than I like you,” she added, which was unfair and cruel, but she was too torn up inside to resist.

  Pupfish just nodded.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  02:35am

  Even though the pink light of the Gellik orb had faded, the gasping and screaming from the bundle of human parts on the floor had not. Morag stared, frozen in incomprehension. Limbs were held close, contracted. A face lined with black filth, teeth gritted, eyes wheeling madly. The body, bones jutting, joints twisted, was covered in a collage of rags: flaking, dirty, indeterminate layers, like sections of tree bark, peeled away in places to reveal skins of ages past.

  “Mrs Grey?” said Omar, aghast. It was only at that moment Morag realised this creature – this castaway, this cavewoman, this wild thing – was Vivian Grey. She struggled to accept it, struggled to see how this tensely-bunched and twisted thing was human, but she kickstarted herself into action and dropped to Vivian’s side to help.

  Vivian’s hands – no, her one hand – clawed at her throat as she gasped. She barked a single syllable over and over, although Morag could not make it out.

  Professor Omar had picked up the telephone and was urgently requesting medical assistance in the Vault.

  “It’s okay, Vivian,” said Morag. “Help is coming.”

  Vivian wheezed and shuddered and Morag realised the word Vivian was gasping and shouting was “Chor!” The Venislarn word for air.

  “Can’t you breathe?” said Morag.

  She hoped the woman wasn’t choking. If she tried the Heimlich manoeuvre on this frail creature, she might just snap her in two.

  Vivian nodded distinctly, taking deep, if hurried breaths. Morag could see her making a conscious effort to slow her breathing in order to speak.

  “Mech ar—” deep breath “—dey-ah chor—” deep breath “—Frein paz u-hrei?”

  “What day? Er, Friday,” said Morag.

  Vivian launched herself at Morag and wrapped her in a tight and foetid embrace. “U-hrei! Gre’nh siv u-hrei!”

  “Yes,” said Morag, not sure what to make of all this. “There are days and weeks and hours and minutes. We have time.”

  Vivian pulled away sharply. Tears had washed little tracks of near-cleanliness down her filthy face.

  “Shet,” she said and searched about herself. Under the sprawl of her legs and disintegrating rags, Vivian scrabbled for the thick, church-Bible sized book which had materialised with her.

  The Vault doors opened and two women hurried in: Lois the receptionist and Angie, one of the office nurses. Angie carried a green plastic first aid kit and Morag felt the urge to laugh. What relief from the symptoms of a visit to hell could be found in there? She doubted such things had been covered in any medical training.

  “What’s happened?” said Lois.

  “Jae rhho chor!” Vivian gasped.

  “How does the air hurt?” asked Angie the nurse.

  “Mrs Grey has just returned from a long sojourn in hell,” said Omar, helpfully.

  Angie took this at face value and was already opening the medic kit. Vivian’s eyes widened at the sight of a small hypodermic.

  “It’s just some droperidol,” said Angie. “Just to help calm you.”

  Vivian tried to scoot away, gripping her book tight.

  “Mrs Grey!” said Omar sharply.

  Vivian looked up and collapsed to the floor, instantly unconscious. The professor was already screwing up the piece of paper he had shown Vivian. Angie the nurse paused with the syringe of sedative.

  “She’ll be out long enough for you to fetch a stretcher,” Omar suggested.

  Angie nodded. She raised her eyebrows at Omar, pasty-faced and more than a little slumped in his chair. “Don’t look so chipper yourself, mate.”

  “I think I can soldier through to the bitter end,” he replied.

  Angie headed out and took Lois with her.

  Morag sat on the floor. With the tenderness and aches of childbirth still upon her, she felt no hurry to get back up again. Now that Vivian was still, Morag had time to look at her properly. She asked Omar to pass her the jacket he had tossed over a nearby chair.

  “That’s my second-best corduroy,” he said, reluctantly handing it over. “A little Egyptian tailor. Marvellous man. Probably dead now.”

  Morag bundled it up and placed it under Vivian’s head as a pillow. She straightened Vivian’s head – it felt so light – and tried to disentangle some of the hair stuck to the side of her head. Much of it was matted down with blood. There were wounds on each side of her head, gouges from the crown to just above the ears, pink and barely healed.

  Thoughts of injury drew Morag’s attention down to Vivian’s amputated arm. There was no forearm and no elbow. Her upper arm ended in a mess of knotted flesh, like some badly tied-off sausage.

  “Christ, what happened to her?” Morag whispered.

  “I’d say she looks remarkably well,” said Omar. “All things considered.”

  02:42am

  The tunnel of lightning dumped Prudence and Steve onto a hard floor. Prudence banged her knee and rolled. Steve the Destroyer landed with a soft “Oof!” next to her. The floor was hard and white, like that of the Library Vault, but not cold, and slightly tacky to the touch. That was not the only difference. There was also the screaming.

  A man yelled in horror and fled from them, abandoning his metal trolley of bottled drinks and packet food. As the residual blue lightning sparked off overhead strip lights, Prudence heard other screams. The quality of the echoes told her this was a large space.

  She looked at the long aisle of shelves (stocked with plastic bottles of drinks on one side, glass bottles and metal tins on the other) and shook her head. “Is this whole world nothing but shelves?”

  Steve thumped his stuffing back into shape and picked up his spear pencil. “This is a supermarket, youngling.”

  Prudence looked round. “It’s okay, I s’pose. What’s it for?”

  “It’s a shop, fool.”

  Prudence understood that much. “There’s a lot of drink.”

  “Humans drink spirits to obliterate the terror of their own continued existence.”

  Prudence gave the abandoned trolley an experimental push. It was heavy. “He wanted a lot to drink.”

  “A lot of terrors to obliterate,” said Steve. He jabbed upward at the swinging blue and white sign above the aisle. “The floating placards tell us what wonders can be found in each corridor.”

  Prudence had not really wanted to visit the outside world in order to go shopping, but now that she was here…

  “I like pink wafers,” she said.

  “Then we must find an aisle advertising wafers, pink or otherwise.”

  “This way.”

  A high and distant siren had started up. The screaming still continued, although it seemed to have moved off to a distant corner.

  They entered an aisle containing boxes in various bright colours. There had been an accident: dozens of boxes had been tipped onto the floor and trampled, spreading nuggets of crunchy cereal grains everywhere. Down the far end of the aisle, Prudence saw a window and the night beyond.

  “It is an odd time to be shopping,” she commented.

  Steve grunted. “Humans are like sandajj tree-crawlers. When startled they gather up all their nuts and run for a place to hide.”

  Prudence picked up a box of cereal and inspected the image on the front. “Does the monkey boy make the cereals? Or are the cereals to be fed to the monkey boy?”

  “I do n
ot care about monkey boys,” said Steve.

  “Maybe I’ll like them,” she said and tore open the packet. The little brown grains were hollow, crunchy and sweet.

  There were sudden fresh shouts elsewhere in the supermarket: less panicked, more commanding.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that,” said Prudence.

  “Give me the cube!” commanded Steve. “We need to leave this place.”

  She looked at him. “I don’t have it.”

  “Of course you have it!” he snapped. “You were holding it.”

  Prudence looked at her hands stupidly, as though they might suddenly contain a portal-opening cube instead of a handful of puffed rice grains and a yellow box with a monkey boy on it.

  “I didn’t mean to drop it,” she said.

  “You dropped it! When?”

  “While we were travelling, I think.”

  “In the inter-yadella vortex? Idiot child!”

  “Don’t shout at me!” she snapped, wounded by his words. “I’m not an idiot.”

  Three men came running into the aisle. They had heavy clomping boots, brown-green uniforms, helmets and big guns.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll put them back,” she said, placing the yellow cereal box back on the shelf.

  “Come on outside, lass. Let’s find your parents,” one said, before the soldier next to him shouted “Hostile!” and took aim.

  For a split second Prudence thought he was aiming his weapon at her – which seemed a bit of an over-reaction for cereal theft – then she realised he was looking past her. Steve dived towards a gap in the display of cereals as the soldiers opened fire. Prudence expected the gunfire to be loud but she wasn’t prepared for just how loud it was. Cereal packets burst in tatters of card and showers of cereal.

  Prudence had cowered automatically and now a hand grabbed her under the armpit. “Let’s get you out of here. It’s okay. It’s gone now.”

  She was hauled out of the aisle, lifted past a row of conveyor belts and through the sliding doors. There was further sporadic gunfire elsewhere in the shop.

  “Steve!” yelled Prudence, but there was no reply.