An arm went around her neck, and the catapult was twisted from her hand. She smelled his strong cider-and-shit stink.
“It be the little poacher,” a voice cooed.
It was Stan Budge, Maskell’s gamekeeper.
“Who’m trespassin’ now?” she said, and fixed her teeth into his wrist.
Though she knew this was not a game, she was surprised when Budge punched her in the head, rattling her teeth, blurring her vision. She let him go. And he hit her again. She lost her footing, thumped against tiles and slid towards the gutter, slates loosening under her.
Budge grabbed her hair.
The hard yank on her scalp was hot agony. Budge pulled her away from the edge. She screamed.
“Wouldn’t want nothing to happen to you,” he said. “Not yet.”
~ * ~
Budge forced her to go down the ladder, and a couple of men gripped her. She struggled, trying to kick shins.
Shots came from house and hillside.
“Take her round to the Squire,” Budge ordered.
Allie was glad it was dark. No one could see the shamed tears on her cheeks. She felt so stupid. She had let Susan down. And Lytton.
Budge took off his hood and shook his head.
“No more bleddy fancy dress,” he said.
She had to be dragged to where Maskell sat, smoking a cigar, in a deckchair between the loudspeakers.
“Allison, dear,” he said. “Think, if it weren’t for the Civil War, I’d own you. Then again, at this point in time, I might as well own you.”
He shut off the cassette player.
Terry Gilpin and Barry Erskine—out of uniform, with white lumps of bandage on his head—held her between them. The Squire drew a long thin knife from his boot and let it catch the firelight.
Maskell plugged a karaoke microphone into the speaker.
“Susan,” he said, booming. “You should come out now. We’ve driven off the gyppos. But we have someone you’ll want to see.”
He pointed the microphone at her and Terry wrenched her hair. Despite herself, she screamed.
“It’s dear little Allison.”
There was a muffled oath from inside.
“And your protector, Captain Lytton. He should come out too. Yes, we know a bit about him. Impressive war record, if hardly calculated to make him popular in these parts. Or anywhere.”
Allie had no idea what that meant.
“Throw your gun out, if you would, Captain. We don’t want any more accidents.”
The back door opened, and firelight spilled out. A dark figure stepped onto the verandah.
“The gun, Lytton.”
A gun was tossed down.
Erskine fairly slobbered with excitement. Allie felt him pressing close to her, writhing. Once he let her go, he would kill Lytton, she knew.
Lytton stood beside the door. Another figure joined him, shivering in a white shawl that was a streak in the dark.
“Ah, Susan,” Maskell said, as if she had just arrived at his Christmas Feast. “Delighted you could join us.”
Maskell’s knifepoint played around Allie’s throat, dimpling the skin, pricking tinily.
In a rush, it came to her that this had very little to do with railways and land and money. When it came down to it, the hurt Maskell fancied he was avenging was that he couldn’t have Susan. Or Allie.
Knowing why didn’t make things better.
Hand in hand, Lytton and Susan came across the lawn. Maskell’s men gathered, jeering.
“Are you all right, Allison?” Susan asked.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, dear.”
“I have papers with me,” Maskell said, “if you’d care to sign. The terms are surprisingly generous, considering.”
Lytton and Susan were close enough to see the knife.
“You sheep-shagging bastard,” Susan said.
Lytton’s other gun appeared from under her shawl. She raised her arm and fired. Allie felt wind as the bullet whistled past. Maskell’s jaw came away in a gush of red-black. Susan shot him again, in the eye. He was thumped backwards, knife ripped away from Allie’s throat, and laid on the grass, heels kicking.
“I said I didn’t like guns,” Susan announced. “I never said I couldn’t use one.”
Lytton took hold of Susan’s shoulders and pulled her out of the way of the fusillade unleashed in their direction by Budge and Terry Gilpin.
Allie twisted in Erskine’s grasp and rammed a bony knee between his legs. Erskine yelped, and she clawed his ear-bandages, ripping the wounds open.
The Constable staggered away, and was peppered by his comrades’ fire. He took one in the lungs and knelt over the Squire, coughing up thick pink foam.
In a flash of gunfire, Allie saw Lytton sitting up, shielding Susan with his body, arm outstretched. He had picked up a pistol. The flashes stopped. Budge lay flat dead, and Gilpin gurgled, incapacitated by several wounds. Lytton was shot again too, in the leg.
He had fired his gun dry, and was reloading, taking rounds from his belt.
Car-lights froze the scene. The blood on the grass was deepest black. Faces were white as skulls. Lytton still carefully shoved new bullets into chambers. Susan struggled to sit up.
Reeve Draper got out of the panda car and assessed the situation. He stood over Maskell’s body. The Squire’s face was gone.
“Looks like you’m had a bad gyppo attack,” he said.
Lytton snapped his revolver shut and held it loosely, not aiming. The Reeve turned away from him.
“But it be over now.”
Erskine coughed himself quiet.
Allie wasn’t sorry any of them were dead. If she was crying, it was for her father, for the chickens, for the vegetable garden.
“I assume Goodwife Ames no longer has to worry about her cows being destroyed?” Lytton asked.
The Reeve nodded, tightly.
“I thought so.”
Draper ordered Gary Chilcot to gather the wounded and get them off Gosmore Farm.
“Take the rubbish too,” Susan insisted, meaning the dead.
Chilcot, face painted with purple butterflies, was about to protest but Lytton still had the gun.
“Squire Maskell bain’t givin’ out no more pay packets, Gary,” the Reeve reminded him.
Chilcot thought about it and ordered the able-bodied to clear the farm of corpses.
~ * ~
Allie woke up well after dawn. It was a glorious spring day. The blood on the grass had soaked in and was invisible. But there were windows that needed mending.
She went outside and saw Lytton and Susan by the generator. It was humming into life. Lytton had oil on his hands.
In the daylight, Susan seemed ghost-like.
Allie understood what it must be like. To kill a man. Even a man like Squire Maskell. It was as if Susan had killed a part of herself. Allie would have to be careful with Susan, try to coax her back.
“There,” Lytton said. “Humming nicely.”
“Thank you, Captain,” said Susan.
Lytton’s eyes narrowed minutely. Maskell had called him Captain.
“Thank you, Susan.”
He touched her cheek.
“Thank you for everything.”
Allie ran up and hugged Lytton. He held her too, not ferociously. She broke the embrace. Allie didn’t want him to leave. But he would.
The Norton was propped in the driveway, wheeled out beyond the open gate. He walked stiffly away from them and straddled the motorcycle. His leg wound was just a scratch.
Allie and Susan followed him to the gate. Allie felt Susan’s arm around her shoulders.
Lytton pulled on his gauntlets and curled his fingers around the handlebars. He didn’t wince.
“You’re Captain UI Lytton, aren’t you?” Susan said.
There was a little hurt in his eyes. His frown-lines crinkled.
“You’ve heard of me.”
“Most people have. Mos
t people don’t know how you could do what you did in the War.”
“Sometimes you have a choice. Sometimes you don’t.”
Susan left Allie and slipped around the gate. She kissed Lytton. Not the way Lytton had kissed Janet Speke, like a slap, but slowly, awkwardly.
Allie was half-embarrassed, half-heartbroken.
“Thank you, Captain Lytton,” Susan said. “There will always be a breakfast for you at Gosmore Farm.”
“I never did give you the ten shillings,” he smiled.
Allie was crying again and didn’t know why. Susan let her fingers trail through Lytton’s hair and across his shoulder. She stood back.
He pulled down his goggles, then kicked the Norton into life and drove off.
Allie scrambled through the gate and ran after him. She kept up with him, lungs protesting, until the village oak, then sank, exhausted, by the curb. Lytton turned on his saddle and waved, then was gone from her sight, headed out across the moors. She stayed, curled up under the oak, until she could no longer hear his engine.
<
~ * ~
THE WHITE STUFF
BY PETER F. HAMILTON AND GRAHAM JOYCE
Nigel Finchley first blinked into the gleam on his way into the City, where he high-rolled other people's money on the trading floor. A Nimbus owner himself, he cast an appreciative gaze over the classic Lotus Esprit swishing up beside him at the traffic lights. Its engine purred with deliberate, sexual rhythm as the brunette Trust Fund Babe behind the wheel toed the accelerator in provocation.
But when he tried to eye-photo her silhouette, the glare coming off the Esprit's ice-blue paintwork defeated him. Squinting to filter out the reflected sunlight he realized just how mirror-bright that polish was. The Esprit had a sunbeam corona all of its own, making the rest of the queuing cars dull, mundane. Money, he told himself, money lays that kind of gleam on everything it touches.
The Esprit surged forward in a burst of arrogant power.
Nigel watched it go, thoughts contaminated by low-level resentment. Later he saw the gleam again. A Piccolo this time. Nothing wrong with Piccolos; MG versions were decent sporty runabouts. But they shouldn't gleam, not like that. He watched it pass. The Piccolo went gliding down the street with unnatural elegance.
His curiosity was roused. Almost unconsciously he began searching the traffic for more, and spotted another three examples before he swung down into the company's underground car park. Five extraordinarily gleaming cars out of a near-gridlocked city.
~ * ~
Nigel's regular lunchtime pub was The Swan, perched alongside a canal restored by a government benefit-earn scheme. Smartened up beyond the pocket of its original water-traffic clientele, serving a nouveau cuisine menu, it had achieved a reputation equal to any of the area's contemporary wine bars, sucking in a whole strata of City financiers, the players of digital money. It had a whitewashed facade with a frieze of iron-rimmed cartwheels bolted onto the brick, and hanging baskets adorning the taproom door. The landlord served real ale from wooden kegs, and carrot juice from liquidisers with a sound like a dentist's drill. A large parking lot round the back was bordered by a high redbrick wall. It couldn't be seen from the street.
Nigel coasted the Nimbus into a spare slot, turned off the ignition, and looked up to see her. Maybe sixteen years old with freckles and a riot of vivid copper hair in tiny corkscrew curls. Her adolescent breasts bobbled like half tennis balls under a scoopneck T-shirt; her faded denim microskirt offered him a grand view of her long, suntanned legs. Bright noonday sun made her hair blaze, halo fashion.
~ * ~
She would be one of the kids from the sink estate on the edge of the Capitalcorp's redevelopment incentive zone—a hell-hole of squatters, dealers, pimps, and exo-European illegals—all trying to make the same quid washing windscreens. Nigel felt a hot jab of envy. Though he had everything she didn't have, he envied her youth. He envied her street-sassy. He envied, very badly, the twentysomething black guy lurking possessively a few paces back, and who would undoubtedly be screwing her.
Lovely big emerald eyes glittered at him. "Hi there, captain, wanna have your wheels gleamed?"
"Huh?"
"Gleamed." A blink of flawless white teeth. She proffered a little square of metal. Sunlight skipped across its metallic purple paint, dazzling.
"Let me see that." Taking the metal square from her he tried to stroke its coloured surface, to understand the texture, but his fingers slipped about as if it were coated in warm ice.
"What is that?" he asked.
"Micro-friction layer, captain. We'll wipe your bodywork down, and spray it on." She shook a grey aerosol can in his face; no brand name. "Dirt and water can't get a grip, so your shine's permanent, and rust don't get a look in, see?"
He couldn't take his eyes off her. "How long does it last?"
"Always. It's micro-friction, right? Can't rub it off."
He ran through the dubious logic, his eyes wandering down to her legs again. "How much?"
"Twenty five."
It even seemed reasonable. "Count me in. Cheque or card?"
"Aww, come on!"
"If you want cash I'll have to find a hole in the wall."
"Fine. Have your pint and slot your card. We'll have your wheels sorted for when you get back." She stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled. "Got a live one!"
Her proto-gangsta boyfriend stepped over to the car, attempting a customer-friendly smile. On that face, it was never going to work. His head had been shaved in a chessboard pattern, with each square of hair sprouting a single stubby dreadlock. The clothes were ultra-trendy; heavy biker boots crushed the tarmac.
Uneasy prejudices started cattle-prodding Nigel's defence mechanisms awake. Sure the guy was well-dressed, but the hostility was as blatant as Nigel's own disapproval.
They looked at each other, silently negotiating a demilitarized truce for the duration of the gleaming. The black guy clicked his fingers, and a posse of kids solidified around the Nimbus. Seven of them, ranging from sixteen years down to about ten: black kids with locks, white kids with bent-nail tattoos, Asian kids, all loaded with buckets and sponges and can- do. The young redhead was already sauntering off after her next victim.
Nigel paused on the pub's doorstep, the slow-turning cogs in his brain winching a frown onto his face. It had been a very slick operation, way beyond any usual street-rat earner. He turned to look back. The little shits were gleefully spraying his car white, great sweeps of fuck-the-rich graffiti sizzling eagerly out of the grey cans, an oily foam contaminating the grilles, the hubs, the windscreen. It looked like the Nimbus was getting ready for a shave. He was about to scream at them, but his shout never got past the first syllable. The white foam was gradually turning translucent, smoothing out to form a thin, uniform coat, already delivering the gleam.
The redhead caught his eye, giving him a laughing thumbs up. Feeling hopelessly old and dumb (memory image kicking in: his father holding his first-ever CD up to the light in utter perplexity) he smiled back weakly and retreated into the pub. Pity there had been no brand name on the spray cans; the company who owned that process would be worth a dabble. Interesting.
Rewarded by that not-totally-innocent smile of hers, Nigel had promised the redhead to put the word round the trading floor. In two days all his smart colleagues were driving round in gleaming cars.
The Swan's landlord didn't object. Customers parked their cars and checked in for a drink while the kids sprang to work with sponges and spray cans. They had a regular production line going out back. Only once did the financier in him assert itself. How much should a micro-friction coating actually cost? Were the kids at The Swan pulling a fast one?
Nigel tried to price the coating at his Nimbus dealer's showroom. "What's micro-friction?" was the reply.
~ * ~
There were at least a dozen kids in The Swan's parking lot when he pulled in the following Monday. Five cars had their bonnets up, two kids
to a car, doubled up over the radiator grilles, looking like they were being swallowed whole.
The redhead bounded over. Today she wore hip-hugging navy-blue shorts and a sleeveless white blouse, top four buttons undone. Boyfriend nowhere to be seen.
New Worlds Page 9
