Tigerman

by Nick Harkaway

  He had locked the partition behind him and the closed space felt thick, as if he were going down the aisle of a great cathedral and at the far end his bride or his confession would be waiting for him.

  The metal door resisted. He leaned on it and there was a brief moment of stasis before it swung open. He went inside and opened the burn bag. The mask was just as he had left it, a whisper of silica spray around the cheeks. It looked like a cast-off undergarment from a very particular sort of brothel. The front armour plate was perfect, the back one ruined.

  He discarded the useless plate, selected another from store and slipped it home, then found a combat firefighting suit and put the bottom half on, added the armour and then the long coat over the top. He pulled on the utility belt, stuffing random items into the empty places: flare, truncheon, taser, hand-strobe, smoke canisters and anything else which would fit. On reflection, he reloaded the sharkpunch and tucked it away, then looked in the mirror. Without the mask and with the coat zipped up, he was just a rescue worker, just good old Lester come to help.

  He slipped out of the side door into the garage shack, and saw Kathy Hasp’s motorcycle. On instinct, he walked over to it. The key was in the well under the saddle.

  Two hundred metres beyond Brighton House along the coast road there was a track leading down to the sea. It was overgrown now – the tiny hamlet it had served having faded not in this most recent upheaval but long before, when the chemical men first set foot on the island with promises of wealth and modernity – but the baked earth remained solid underfoot. The Sergeant rolled the bike silently onto the path, and then stood for a moment in the dusk, scenting tomatoes on the wind.

  This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.

  He held the mask in his hands like a communion cup, and ducked his face to meet it. The moist interior surface sealed against his skin. The tomato smell faded, replaced by the antiseptic base note of the mask and a whisper of his own sweat.

  He climbed aboard the motorcycle and started it up, then charged it out onto the road in one convulsive movement, waiting until he was pointed at the town of Beauville before turning on the lights. The nearest refugees flinched away from the sudden clap of sound, then ran from the road. No. Not the Quads. Me. He was seeing one face in ten, a brief impression as his eyes skipped from one to the next, but Jesus, there were a lot of them, on makeshift crutches and leaning on one another, bleeding and beaten and burned.

  He must seem to come from nowhere, the clap of sound and then the light: a ghost rider – or so he hoped – like the ones in the song. He roared past them, down to the town and the flames.

  The endless line of refugees flew by, occasional single faces sticking briefly in his vision, their desperation or fatigue or plain boredom filling his mind for an instant before being swallowed by the sound of the road and the certainty which he felt now.

  This was rash. There was no cloud cover, no concealment. If NatProMan was watching, they would see him, they would be able to trace him back to the house – although the house was full now, he realised, rather than empty, and his address would yield nothing more than confusion. The refugees sheltered him even as he sheltered them.

  He had learned from watching Shola’s body fall: a single man could not adequately defend himself except by attacking. If he had known that Shola’s killers – now ash on the wind, and falling probably on the ship which had ordered both their original mission and their subsequent destruction – if he had known that they were coming, he could have met them, stood them down, or beaten them before their attack could find its place. After they had begun was already too late, the shotgun blast tearing through the foppish silk shirt.

  But tonight, in the same position almost exactly, he did know. There were killers preparing now, and they would come into his house to do murder.

  He would go to Sandrine, and then he would see about the Quads.

  He took the north road towards the shanty and left the refugees behind, the seemingly endless line of them and their need.

  17. Sandrine

  HE PASSED AROUND the edge of the town proper, where the fires were far between. The buildings were more cursory in the first place, tin roofs and breeze-block construction, poverty in the spliced power lines and the drainage ditches which were not quite open sewers. He saw stragglers from the riots, either fleeing or looking for something worth the trouble to destroy, and turned the bike into the cheek-by-jowl warren of the shanty. Immediately he heard shouting, veered towards it knowing it for trouble, for a wrong thing. Beauville, something inside him still insisted, was a good place. It was filled with good people. They were ordinary people, venal people, even stupid people, but they were rarely mean and this was beyond them, should be beyond them, should have stayed in the pit of wretched possibility for the island even in its dying. It had been created out of malice.

  The bike slid and skittered on the loose rubble in the alleys, so he abandoned it. He was close enough to Sandrine’s house to walk, and he would need in any case a better transport if he must abduct her. He could hardly ride with a screaming woman across his handlebars – in his mind’s eye he saw the journey, the slender, fragile legs of his patient-captive thrashing and distracting him, catching on some obstacle at speed and shattering, pulling her from the saddle to a red ruin on the road. He pushed the thought away and walked on, hanging close to the walls as if he was back in contested Baghdad.

  In a marketplace he came upon a living fragment of the mob, perhaps two dozen strong. The square was illuminated by the headlights of a quad bike, and the Quad himself stood full height on his saddle and snarled as the mob tormented a small family group cowering by the water pump. In one way that was good: the Quads were dispersed rather than gathered, which meant that there was time to see to the boy’s mother before dealing with the attack on Brighton House. But for these people, it was bad, because the Quad was here and so were they.

  In the hard white light the victims looked stark and ill: a woman, a young man, a child. He didn’t know whether the child was male or female, not that it mattered, and he couldn’t imagine what their crime had been. Perhaps they had dared to try to put out a fire, or perhaps they were identifiably from the wrong part of the shanty, or possibly the woman had refused to sleep with someone, or the young man had, or just had the wrong sort of face. Tonight it was all one. Tonight it was a lottery, and they had lost. The first bottles were flying, smashing on the ground in front of them, splinters spattering over their feet and lower legs. The child flinched and howled, the young man lifted it and offered his back as a shield. Good lad.

  The Sergeant moved around the shadows of the square until he was directly behind the Quad. He made no particular effort at concealment, and on the fringes of the mob people glimpsed him and turned, so that by the time he had reached his chosen position fully half the mob was looking not at the Quad nor his victims but into the darkness for something they could not see, blinded as they were by the bright light from the bike. The bottles slowed and stopped, and a hush fell over the square.

  The Sergeant whispered, ‘Go home.’ And heard the mask turn it into something harsh and cold. ‘Go home,’ he said again, louder, and then he shouted it and heard the echo bounce off the far walls of the square, a noise from a torture room or a surgeon’s cutting station.

  Between him and the Quad was an open space like a road, and he stepped into it, his anger mounting until he was running and the Quad was staring open-mouthed, so the Sergeant drove his fist into the offered target and followed the staggering man over the front of the bike and down, landing on him with both knees and hearing a gasp and a crunch of collarbone. He reared up and hit the man three more times, feeling the gloves soak up punishment which would have cracked his knuckles, knowing the Quad’s cheekbones were not so protected. The man slumped, coughing, then gasping as each convulsion shook the broken bones in his face. The Sergeant dragged him towards the family by the pump and left him lying in the broken glass. He looked at the m
ob.

  The square emptied. He turned and found the family had vanished too, into the night.

  A few minutes later, when he found Sandrine’s house, it was already burning.

  He went in anyway.

  The lower floor was filled with smoke, and breathing through the mask was like taking a mouthful of tea straight from the pot. He trusted the filter would protect his lungs, but there was no saliva in his mouth and his throat felt like dry wood. His teeth grew uncomfortably hot to the touch. He was an astronaut on Mars, or Venus, or whichever of them was hot and dark. He saw porcelain ducks on the wall. His parents had had ducks like that. They might even have been from the same factory. For all he knew they were the same ducks, travelled by some weird route across the world to see him die just as they had seen his first days after his mother brought him home from the hospital.

  The house was one of the old farm cottages which had been swallowed by Beauville’s expansion and hemmed in by concrete-slab homes, lean-to shacks and the permanent tents of the inner shanty’s markets. The walls and stairs were made of stone. Everything else was dry wood. He judged he had less than two minutes.

  On the upper landing there was more smoke but less flame. He slammed open one door, then another, sure he was getting the firefighting all wrong, but sure as well that it didn’t matter because the house was doomed anyway and anyone in it too unless they got out right now.

  He found her lying in the middle of the bedroom floor, a roiling cloud stretched above her like a comforter, and thought with relief that she had made a good choice, up to a point. He could have wished that she would just abandon the house through the window onto the adjoining roof – he glanced out, saw that it was the side to which the fire had not spread – but then he would not have found her, would not be able to take her back to her son. The son she didn’t know.

  But she ignored him, flat on her tummy and staring down at the wooden boards. They must be painfully hot, and the steam coming up through the cracks must be scorching, but she was resting on some sort of tray or panel. Her expression was intent. What was she doing?

  A tendril of flame leaped up a few inches from her face, and she smiled in delight.

  He realised she was lying on a full-length mirror on the floor of her burning house, watching the fire. A moment later another jet was erupting between the cracks and then another and he knew the house was giving up, that the time was now. She clapped.

  He offered her his hand but she did not acknowledge him, so he scooped her up by the hips and lifted her, his legs and lower back protesting, until she was a wriggling, objecting burden in his arms and he was lunging for the window, feeling the boards sag under him as he went and expecting at any moment to fall into the inferno below, a thing he might just about survive but which would see her roast in his arms in an instant, and that would make an end of Lester Ferris, he was fairly sure, in any form he recognised now.

  He lowered his head and hunched as he dived out of the window, felt the catch give way rather than the wood and glass, so no shower of razors, thank God, followed them down onto the next roof. He landed too hard and felt something crack, then realised with relief when no pain followed that it had not been his ankle. He had just enough time to wonder what that meant, and then they crashed through to the ground floor. He picked himself up, ready to fight, but the room was quiet and when he turned on a torch he saw it had until recently been some sort of vegetable stall. A mongrel pup had been sleeping in the corner, and the woman immediately shied a cobble at it, glowering. The mongrel yipped and scuttled out, and she mellowed again immediately, as if that was all it took to restore order to the world.

  Sandrine – he had no doubt that it was she, he knew the lines of her face by proxy, and there was a weird disfocus to her expression which spoke of a damaged or remade intelligence – peered at him. Her hand reached out hesitantly to touch the mask, then sank to poke experimentally at the proboscis.

  ‘I’ve come to take you somewhere,’ he said, then cursed himself as the reassuring words came out metallic and wild.

  But she smiled in approval and poked the mask again as if he had done something clever and interesting. She dived forward and began to investigate him, pat him down and follow the contours of his body in frank appraisal. It was not a sexual curiosity, but something else. She had never seen a man in a mask like this. He was a new thing. New things pleased her, so she wanted to know as much as possible about him. When she had roved, rapidly, all over him, and established that he felt essentially the same as other men, she frowned in disappointment and stepped away.

  ‘It’s not safe.’ He tried again. ‘You have to come with me.’ He made a beckoning gesture. Did she understand language, even though she could not speak? Did waving your hands count as language? Or was she so completely alien now that it didn’t matter, that anything he might attempt to tell her would just be sound and light? Operationally speaking, he realised, he should probably have asked more questions at the beginning.

  ‘There is a boy.’ He was pantomiming a small, slim person, her son, knowing that she would make nothing of it. ‘Your son, the one you don’t remember. He still loves you and I love him,’ and that was his first time saying that aloud. ‘I came to rescue you. To bring you to him.’ He thought he saw a glimmer of understanding in her face, of happiness or assent, but then she shrugged and wandered away to look at the damage they had done.

  He could not leave her here. She was vulnerable to the burning town and to the mob. She was an infant. He realised, in passing, that he had been wrong about something fundamental: no one looked after the boy. When he went away, it was not to be cared for but to care. His mother was his unwitting ward. All seeming evidence to the contrary was proof rather of his self-sufficiency. The comic books he provided for himself; the laptop, the phone, the food – for both of them, no doubt. He was in many ways already grown, waiting only for his body to catch up with his life.

  The Sergeant felt a twinge of fellow feeling, unexpected. He had up to a point taken care of his father, when Arthur Ferris had withdrawn to his television set and his late-onset diabetes and smoked himself fiercely towards the plot beside his wife. Young Lester had forged school notes and worked odd jobs and thought he was looking out for number one, but somehow he had put food on the table for his dad as well, and seen him through the few remaining years. His sister, too, of course, but she had been older and already on her way. She had never entirely understood how much their father had ground to a halt, because he freshened up for her, at his son’s insistence, and they were complicit, if in no other way, in concealing the decay. But it had been nothing like this, not really. Or, only somewhat.

  His vision flashed white and he was lifted from his feet, a solid impact taking him in the right kidney and hurling him forward. A knife blade, he realised, deflected by the links of chain woven into the vest, the power of it still passed to his body, if spread wide enough to avoid penetration. I’ll piss pink all week, he thought sourly, and rolled as fast as he could to avoid a stamping boot. If I get the chance.

  He kept rolling and surged to his feet, bounced off a wall and swirled the torch around the room. There were two of them, ordinary thugs with ugly expressions. Their attention was on him but their goal was Sandrine. He looked for hunger and rape and, curiously, couldn’t see it. Just intent. The nearer one was flourishing the knife at him, the other had a short billy club. Take the blade, but don’t imagine the billy’s not a problem.

  The Sergeant slowed, feigning disorientation, lashed out wildly when the man feinted, and invited a circular stab low at his left side, blocked it early and clipped the elbow with the torch to bend it, driving the weapon hand up along his enemy’s spine until the shoulder dislocated, then putting his knee upwards through the man’s face. Shadows danced and he kept moving, trusting in motion to keep him safe. The billy man rushed in belatedly – they weren’t used to working as a team, probably wouldn’t do it again – and the Sergeant threw his first targ
et into the line of attack to ward him off. The knife skittered away and its owner collapsed, moaning.

  The other man came on. The Sergeant remembered the taser but had no time to reach it as the man attacked, leading with his weak hand, the billy held in reserve for a quick finish. The Sergeant thrust the torch forward instead, directing the blinding light into the billy man’s face. The man scuttled back and reset his feet.

  Sandrine drove the discarded knife in a straight line from the shoulder, hips twisting, power coming out of the legs and the strength of her entire body. The blade went through the back of the billy man’s skull and continued until the point made a soft sound against his forehead. She continued the spiral to bring the arm back, heel of the hand leading and the blade outward, then dropped the knife. He thought it was completely mysterious to her how she had come to be holding it in the first place. The corpse fell at the same time, like a sack.

  She looked at the Sergeant, then dropped to her knees and drew the tiger from the stele on his chest, perfectly, in blood on the floor. She looked at him again as if to say that finished the matter, and walked out of the door. He was fairly sure she had no understanding of what had passed, that she had killed a man, and a worm of suspicion was gnawing in him that this was because she only barely grasped what it meant that he had ever been alive. The world – the island – was one piece to her. Some of it moved, and some of it did not, and that was all.

  He stared after her, wondering how he would get her back to Brighton House, because force seemed a far less practicable option than it had five minutes before, and by the time he heard the engine outside and launched himself at the door he was too late.

  Sandrine was in the back seat of an open white jeep, and beside her sat a woman the Sergeant did not recognise. The woman was actually singing, high and clear, and Sandrine, with blood still wet on her fingertips, was listening to her in placid fascination.