The Complete Afternet: All 3 Volumes In One Place (The Afternet)

by Peter Empringham

  “Technically, Justin, he was just doing his job. Now keep it quiet, will you? I don’t to attract too much attention to four dead people with bundles of loot.”

  He pushed him onto a chair opposite the figure, and sat down next to him, joined by Geoffrey and Mary. She stared at the pale face, which in turn continued a doleful gaze at his fingers playing with a glass which contained a half-finished Long Slow Screw Against The Wall, two paper umbrellas and a purple twizzly straw. At last, the man looked up from his drink, dark rings under his bloodshot eyes, and regarded them dolefully.

  “I can’t believe,” hissed Justin, “that you killed me, sending me to a place with the worst coffee in any space/time continuum, and you are sitting here sipping cocktails. What are you doing, waiting for someone from Deathdates.Com?”

  The Reaper took a long pull on the gloopy mess in the glass.

  “I know.” He said, “I’m a rubbish Reaper. For years I wanted this. I trained and trained. I watched the best in the business on video, loved it. The calm, the detachment. Find, despatch, onto the next job. Celestial hitmen, no mistakes, no procrastination, no conscience. Look at me! No confidence, no finesse, no prospects. I even killed some bird I wasn’t supposed to.”

  “That was her.” Said Justin, nodding towards Mary.

  “And I’m not a bird.” She said. He looked at her and shook his head.

  “Sorry, what can I say? My father reaped, and his father before him. I’m a disgrace to the family, that’s why I can’t go back.”

  “How are you getting by down here?” Justin looked askance at Mary as she said this, recognising the onset of sympathy for their killer.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Begging, mainly.”

  “Begging?” she looked at the ghastly figure hunched over the brightly coloured drink. “Does that work?”

  He pulled a face. “I think the sickle helps. When I wave it, anyway.”

  “We call that demanding money with menaces.” Said Justin.

  The Reaper shrugged. There was a synthetic jingle from the pub behind them as the fruit machine paid out to some loser.

  “We need to get moving.” Said Marcel. The Reaper looked up at them as though even this confrontation had been a welcome respite from his own bleak thoughts. He drained the glass as they stood. Justin still looked at him with a malevolent glare, but the sheer misery of the figure had disarmed his violent thoughts.

  Marcel leaned down and stared into the white face.

  “You need to get back on the horse, my friend. If you want a future in the reaping business you’ll have to get over the odd mistake. I’ve killed the wrong person sometimes, and I’m not even in the business. Do I look bothered?”

  The Reaper shook his head to signify that Marcel didn’t look bothered in the slightest. Marcel nodded, and shepherded the others out of the pub. The Reaper watched them go, and sat deep in thought. After a few moments he hauled himself to his feet, and edged around the table. Drawing his cloak around him he walked slowly to the bar.

  “Awright Reap? What’s it to be?” asked the barman.

  “Give us a Sex On The Beach, Kev. After this one, I’m off.”

  “Yeah mate, that’s what they all say.”

  The four fought their way into the tube station, Justin and Mary swaying and weaving in the manner all citizens of the capital adopted over the years, giving the body swerve to the bloodsuckers who haunted the entrance with practised ease.

  Free paper advertising tat for sale throughout the city? No comment. Golf Sale (big arrow), Haircut Sir? (nope), these also being avoided by Marcel and Geoffrey, with somewhat less aplomb. Not so Les Lust, who had unwittingly discovered a combination of look and message which the visitors from death found un-ignorable.

  Les, to those in the know, was a fixture at the junction of Edgware and Marylebone Roads, characterised by his shiny bald head and the sandwich board he sported which screamed in massive upper case, ‘LESS LUST’. Smaller copy beneath proffered the opinion that the world was about to reach its demise due to excess fornication, and ended with a further big letter proclamation that ‘The End Is Nigh’. Most people, every day, walked past Les, whose name was Jim, and nodded, or said “very nice”, or “awright, Les?”. Not so the visitors from beyond the grave.

  Marcel just took issue with the concept that a surfeit of sex would lead to the demise of civilisation, and said as much to Les, a basic error. There being nothing more the sandwich board wearer, or indeed any proselytizer desires than a gainsayer, Les was galvanised into proving to the Frenchman that procreation would lead to extinction.

  Geoffrey’s objection was more prosaic, but nevertheless had the potential to fatally delay the mission. He had simply pointed out Les’s opinion that the end was nigh and queried the accuracy of the assertion. For Les, already buoyed up by the opportunity to discuss sex in graphic terms with a clearly dissolute Frenchman, a challenge to his most fundamental belief was almost too good to be true. Geoffrey, to be honest, had only based his argument on the knowledge that the Archangel Gabriel had booked a function room twenty years hence for his 2500th, (Dress To Impress, predictably), but Les saw an opening to launch a diatribe on the sins of mankind, the part played by filthy womanhood, and his view that children were the spawn of Imps from Nuneaton. Or somewhere.

  Justin and Mary had bought the tickets from the surly attendant on the assumption that their friends from the Netherworld were right behind them, and so were a little surprised to turn back to the concourse to see only rushing locals and no sign of Geoffrey or Marcel. Mary, who had of course only recently been in charge when one of them went missing, was now looking at the chance that she had lost them both. She looked at Justin, who clutched the tickets as though they were the tube for his oxygen tank.

  “Is this going to happen a lot?” she asked

  He swivelled around, vainly trying to catch a view of them. “Possibly. It’s a bit busier than their usual environment, isn’t it? We’re going to have to keep a really close eye on them, there are too many distractions. Come on, they’ve got to be outside.”

  He was right. Geoffrey was waving a raw beetroot wildly around as he and Les shared views about the imminence of the end of mankind. Marcel, attention span for the semantic argument long exhausted, was attempting to pull two Finnish teenagers who were in London on an English course. Mary grabbed him and pulled him into the tube station, the Finns protesting more than he. Justin reclaimed Geoffrey, who was the more reluctant, having persuaded Les Lust that it would be appropriate to replace the word ‘nigh’, with ‘likely’, which in the end had Les thrown out of the Society of Slightly Mad People Standing Outside Tube Stations with Sandwich Boards.

  “Sorry.” Said Geoffrey as they descended the endless escalator, much to his fascination. “Sorry. I know we’ve got things to do, it’s just that there are so many things going on here! It’s fantastic! I’ll try not to get distracted.” Towards them, striding purposefully up the stairs heading inexorably down, came a tall young man in a tail coat and top hat, with a black cane. He was singing a Coldplay song at the top of his voice. “Oh my God” said Geoffrey, “look at that.”

  Shrilly sang the ascending peacock, or at least he did until Marcel clotheslined him and he tumbled backwards down the escalator and lay crumpled on the concourse. The other three looked at him, shocked.

  “It was for his own good.” said Marcel. “And more importantly, for ours. We need to get him a blindfold, or this is going to take forever.” He nodded towards the gaping Geoffrey. As they stepped from the escalator, Marcel flipped a coin onto the groaning sack of clothes at its foot. What the bruised exhibitionist would make of being the recipient of a solid gold doubloon remains unrevealed, but it was certainly yellow.

  The Underground journey, entirely unremarkable to Mary and Justin, had Geoffrey throughout hopping from foot to foot with excitement and Marcel pursing his lips and restraining his desire to mete out summary punishment.

  Two students mimed a light
sabre battle with fluorescent tubes, dancing forwards and back down the carriage as they waved their ‘weapons’ and pronounced witticisms such as the ‘the force is strong with you Luke’, and ‘join the Dark Side’. Geoffrey watched wide eyed, Marcel resisted the temptation to show them what the Dark Side really entailed, and the erstwhile inhabitants of modern London swayed with the motion of the carriage and read for the umpteenth time exhortations to join a temp agency or at the very least hang on to their personal belongings.

  An itinerant, for all the world having drenched himself in Eau de Meths, stumbled down the aisle, lurching into seated passengers who simply pushed him away, averting their noses, grumbling requests for change. He stopped in his tracks when he came upon Geoffrey. The vagrant eyed the time traveller with deep suspicion.

  “This is my carriage mate. You can’t beg here.” His breath suggested a lack of variation in diet. Geoffrey looked to Mary and Justin for help, as though he were being confronted with a custom unique to these more modern times. Justin reached out and took the beggar by the arm.

  “Don’t worry mate, he’s not begging. He’s just…” he struggled for the correct phrase.

  “Eccentric.” Said Mary.

  “That’s it!” said Justin, “he’s a bit odd. Here you go.” He pressed a small coin into the vagrant’s filthy hand. The man glanced from him to Geoffrey, still not quite convinced that anyone would look like that and not be trying to elicit sympathy, and then shuffled on through the train.

  “Odd?” Geoffrey looked hurt.

  Justin took in the students, loudly discussing the thrust capacity of the Millennium Falcon, the shambling vagrant, and behind Geoffrey a woman seat dancing to whatever was playing on her MP3.

  “It’s a relative term, Geoff. You have to work hard to spot normality around here. Just hold tight and keep your mouth shut.”

  Geoffrey followed the instruction, no less wide-eyed at the ranter who spewed invective from Kensal Green to Harlesden, the girl in a green mini skirt who juggled mobile phones for a couple of stops, or the huge extended Oriental family who teemed aboard at Wembley Central and proceeded to consume what looked like the set meal for twenty from the Shanghai Temple.

  South Kenton tube station, by contrast, was almost deserted, and as they followed the suddenly purposeful Justin through backstreets to a row of lock-up garages somewhere behind Northwick Park, they were increasingly confronted with nothing but litter. At a pair of peeling brown doors they watched as Justin buzzed and after a brief exchange on an entryphone they walked into Aladdin’s Cave.

  The foursome followed a very large man down aisles formed by metal shelving groaning under the weight of everything from ornamental shrubs in ‘silk’ to beer fridges and betamax video recorders. The aisles opened out at the far end of the building to a grubby floor space with a couple of desks. A big man in an expensive, blisteringly white shirt sat at one of them, talking into a mobile phone. Gold cufflinks shone on his wrists and a shot silk tie in aquamarine hung from his neck. His sartorial taste contrasted sharply with that of the others who milled around the open space, who appeared, despite their uniform bulk, to be on the way to the gym in stretched nylon. Two of the large men took up position on either side of the new arrivals. Marcel and Justin intuitively, and imperceptibly, tightened their grip on their booty.

  The man finished his call, dropped the telephone onto the desk and looked up to the visitors. His face split into a huge grin, revealing beautifully crafted dental work, if not, it had to be said, a convincing impression of real happiness.

  “JM!” he said, rising slowly and walking around the desk, “where you bin? ‘Eard you done a runner.” He embraced a reluctant Marchant. “Woulda bin a bit of a prob with that. Lot the Serb reckons you into him for a few quid. ‘E’d be keen to know you still around.”

  Justin smiled weakly. “Well, Lot, you can tell him I’m still around, can’t you? Next time you have some kind of Eastern European petty criminals seminar or whatever.” A couple of the bulky tracksuits shuffled forward as though to set to rights the implied insult, but Lot waved a hand in the air and then did the insincere grin again.

  “Don’t really bother me one way or the other. But if you want anything today it’s gonna have to be cash, JM, I don’t do a slate.” He paused, looked from Justin to Mary, Geoffrey, and Marcel. The first two smiled back. Marcel, of course, was checking out the potential exits. “So what you want?”

  Justin, who was enjoying slipping back into his entrepreneur persona, allowed Mary to explain, ostensibly on the grounds that he didn’t want to get into the detail, but in fact because he had no idea what they really needed or what it might look like. She gave the Latvian a breakdown of their requirements, after which Justin was no wiser. Lot nodded throughout the listing of requirements and then suggested they go to the Computing Aisle and check out his selection of high quality 100% genuine selection of latest hi-tech equipment. This proved to be past the Alcohol Aisle and the Appalling Light Fitments Department, the latter of which did for Geoffrey, who wandered up and down entranced by the spectacular glittery merchandise stacked high on the metal shelves.

  “There you go.” Lot waved a hand encrusted with gold jewellery as though revealing the contents of the Titanic’s safe, “Best selection this side of the Dell distribution centre.”

  As you would expect, this turned out to be not entirely accurate. She gazed with a rising sense of despair on the piled-up results of office clearances, random opportunist thefts, and end-of-line stock sales. If this was Justin’s idea of ‘contacts in the business’, she had to wonder how on earth anyone thought he knew anything about the IT business. There were towers of old style VDUs, in and out of their boxes, massive desktop processing towers which would barely play a game of Football Manager, telephone systems from the era when people were still impressed by a flashing LED, and an inordinate number of trimfones.

  She looked back to Justin, who was following and looking at the shelves with what he thought might seem a practised eye, and Marcel, who was simply staring at her. She puffed out her cheeks, shook her head, saw the Frenchman cast an un-noticed malevolent glance at Marchant. From the next aisle she could hear Geoffrey bleating with delight at the sight of a disco ball.

  She turned back to the selection of archaic computing with neither hope nor expectation, the piles of ageing plastic rising from floor to ceiling. The gold, if it could be so termed, was at the very end, almost as the fluorescent glare merged to gloom. Two tall system cabinets, racks empty, but cabling intact, and beside them a stack of server processor units, cannibalised without a great deal of care from some failed company’s network, not the bleeding edge of processor technology, but it stood very good comparison to the stuff running the Afternet at the moment. On the floor were two large boxes full of various connectors and curled lengths of bus cable. She turned to one of the giant musclemen, who had been following with a trolley in ever diminishing hope of being of use, and pointed to the kit. He ambled across and lifted them with a minimum of effort.

  Lot was sharing a joke in his native language with a group of his muscle when they arrived back at the desk. He broke off to look at the pile of equipment on the trolley.

  “You’ve got some right tut up there.” Said Mary. “You’ll never get rid of it.”

  “You’d be surprised darlin’.” Said the Latvian, peering into the boxes of paraphernalia. “People in Azerbaijan gaggin’ for some of this stuff.”

  “How much?” said Justin.

  Geoffrey emerged from a row of shelves with a rack of blue lights which had clearly been culled from a police car.

  “Can we have these?”

  “No.” said Marcel. Geoffrey’s lower lip stuck out as he turned to return them to the carefully catalogued stock.

  Justin and Lot were engaged in a major sotto voce discussion, every now and then punctuated by the raised voice of the Latvian reminding Justin that he wanted cash. In the end, Marchant threw two gold cups onto the tabl
e.

  “I’m talking about stuff like this, not some old rubbish.” He said. Lot paused and picked up the cups, and then back to Justin, from whom he had clearly expected some old rubbish.

  “So you want me to be a fence as well?”

  “You are a fence as well.”

  Justin added some 17th century gold coins to the offer, and, reluctantly, a silver salver with a relief of the twelve apostles which would have had them salivating on Antiques Roadshow. Lot was neither an expert nor a mug, and cash was beginning to look less of a mandatory requirement.

  “Have you got any screwdrivers?” Mary’s question pulled Lot with a jolt from the dreamlike stare he had adopted towards the booty on his desk. She repeated it.

  “We’ve got 125-piece tool kits. Fantastic value. Best quality Andorran steel.” He said something in Latvian to one of his men, who wandered off towards one of the aisles.

  “We just need the screwdriver.”

  He shrugged. “124 pieces for free, then, innit?” The big man came back with a plastic encased pack of non-precision tools.

  “And we need a van.” Justin said. Lot gave him a look which was not encouraging.

  “Just for the afternoon. Come on, Lot, we can’t ship this stuff around on the tube.” He began to pick up the shiny things from the desk, but Lot grabbed them back.

  “Tell you what.” Justin took a ring from his pocket. It was a large ruby surrounded by diamonds and Lot stared at it like a hunting magpie. “I’ll leave you this as a deposit. When I bring the van back, I get the ring back.” Marcel, who had thought that Justin was offering this fantastic bauble as payment for the loan of something for the afternoon, heaved a sigh of relief. Of course he didn’t know, as Justin did, that in Latvia possession is eleven tenths of the law, and that he had about as much chance of getting it back as turning out to be the second coming of Christ.

  As the van, laden with the computer equipment, ground slowly through traffic towards Brent Cross, Mary voiced her concern to Justin.