Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2

by Louise Welsh

  The alleyway was dark and lined with bins. It reminded Magnus of the lane behind Johnny Dongo’s hotel, where he had beaten up the rapist MP. He should never have got drunk, should never have been there. ‘Should never have been bloody born,’ he muttered under his breath. He could hear footsteps but was unsure if it was the sound of soldiers following them or merely the echo of his and Jeb’s feet against the cobbles. Jeb’s movements were sluggish and twice he stumbled. Magnus realised that his own progress was slow and weaving and knew that if they had to face the soldiers they would lose. They turned another dark corner and saw a blaze of sunlight. The alley led out into a main street lined with shops.

  ‘Thank fuck,’ Jeb said. ‘Come on.’

  Almost all the shop windows that lined the road had been smashed. New clothes, some still on their hangers, lay scattered in heaps at the edge of the road, piled like storm-blasted seaweed at low tide. Trainers spilled from cardboard boxes inside a ransacked branch of Foot Locker and mobile phones were scattered like hand grenades outside EE Mobile. The bank sandwiched between the two plundered shops stood strangely intact, as if looters had decided they preferred solid merchandise to cash. Magnus picked up a smartphone. The plastic had been warmed by the sun. The phone’s screen was cracked, its virgin battery uncharged. It would be no use for calling home. He dropped it with the rest.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘Not a scooby.’ Jeb’s voice was a whisper although the road, like the others they had driven along, was empty of people.

  A plastic carrier bag, caught by the breeze, wrapped itself around Magnus’s leg. He peeled it free.

  ‘Where is everybody? This is like something out of Dr Who.’

  Somewhere there was burning. The breeze was tainted with the odour of melting plastic and charred wood. The scent caught at the back of Magnus’s throat, nasty and acrylic, but there was an undertaste to it, a charred, summer barbecue smell that reminded him he was hungry. A Tesco Direct stood a few yards down the road. Someone had started to board up its windows, but they had given up halfway through and the plate glass on the exposed side had been replaced by fresh air and jagged shards.

  ‘I need to eat something.’

  ‘We need to get under cover.’

  Jeb grabbed his elbow and kept moving, taking Magnus with him. Magnus shook himself free, but they crossed the road together, walking around cars that had been abandoned with no thought to parking fines or regulations. Magnus peered into a baby-blue Mini standing in the middle of the road, its doors wide open.

  ‘Someone left this car in a hurry,’ Magnus said. ‘The key’s still in the ignition.’

  Jeb snapped, ‘Don’t start it.’

  But Magnus had already leaned inside and turned the key. The engine growled into life. The sound was loud in the silent street and was almost immediately punctuated by the slap of boots pounding against pavement. There was movement in some of the abandoned shops as people who had hidden unmoving in the shadows fled. Jeb was already running for cover. The road was too jammed with cars for there to be any point in trying to drive anywhere and Magnus ran after him, leaving the car engine idling. He heard a crack of gunfire. He had been beater at enough grouse shoots to be sure that whoever was firing was not sending a warning shot over their heads.

  ‘Fucking idiot,’ Jeb panted and Magnus knew that it was not the gunman he was cursing.

  A grille had been pulled half shut across the entrance to a subway station, as if someone had started to lock up and then given up the task as too much trouble. A man in a business suit lay just outside. He was thin and might once have been rich, but death had made these things irrelevant. Jeb leapt over his body and Magnus followed, catching the toe of his trainer against the man’s shoulder and landing flat on the tiled floor of the station. The fall saved him. Bullets rattled into the ticket hall, ricocheting against the walls and shattering the window of the information booth.

  Jeb hurdled the ticket turnstile. Magnus crawled beneath the barrier nearest to him and followed the sound of Jeb’s footsteps along the tiled corridors to the platform below. There were bodies in the hallways, men and women who had lain down and not managed to rouse themselves again, but the soldiers might still be behind him and Magnus did not stop to check if any of the sleepers were alive. He saw the black line edging the walls, and a sign directing him onwards and knew that they were heading towards the Northern line. North, the rhythm of his feet said against the tunnel floor: north, north, north, north, north.

  Fifteen

  There were other people on the platform, but Jeb was the only one standing.

  ‘Can you believe it?’

  Magnus did not need to ask what he was talking about. The reality of the sweats was stronger below ground than it had been in the looted streets. Up above there was still the chance that they had stumbled on the aftermath of one of London’s riots; down here the evidence lay in the bodies slumped where they had fallen, waiting for trains they would never board. They were bodies, Magnus told himself, to be pitied and mourned. The thing to fear was flesh and blood, the soldiers who might yet appear and take him back to prison at gunpoint. But his skin crawled with the certainty that the lady who had pulled the folds of her orange sari over her face before she died was about to draw the gauzy material back, blink her dead eyes and come towards him. Or that the youth, whose yellow headphones were still coiled around his neck, might straighten his spine and get to his feet. Or that any of the people, so clear and sharp-edged, so there, but no longer present, would twitch awake, turn their heads and look at him with the jealousy the dead must surely feel for the living. It felt wicked to want the so recently deceased to remain dead, but they were gone and every horror movie and zombie flick Magnus had ever seen was crowding in on him.

  ‘It’s unbelievable,’ Jeb said again, and Magnus saw that the dead stillness of the Underground was working on him too.

  The electricity had failed and the platform was dimly lit by emergency lights. Along at the far end something moved, indistinct in the shadows. Magnus took a step backward; his foot touched the softness of another body and he almost toppled. He let out a gasp. The thing moved again, swift and undulating, and he realised that it was not one of the bodies restored to half-life, but the largest rat he had seen, sleek and busy, its whiskers twitching. The rat looked at him, and then it perked its nose in another direction, turning its ears, like radar towards some sound only it could hear. It scuttled down on to the tracks and ran into the waiting blackness of the tunnels beyond. A moment later Magnus heard the footsteps that had disturbed it. Jeb heard them too and held a finger to his lips. He nodded towards the tracks, where the rat had made its escape. Magnus shook his head. It was impossible. He had seen the Dongolite’s face as the train consumed him. Prison was preferable to the rush of noise and steel that had sucked the boy under. Jeb shrugged, exaggerating the gesture to make up for not speaking. He jumped down on to the tracks and jogged towards the north tunnel, his feet crunching against the gravel.

  Magnus heard his own breath, loud in his head. The soldiers’ footsteps came closer. The dead woman lay still beneath the folds of her orange sari and the yellow wires of the youth’s headphones remained coiled around his neck. There were rats in the tunnels, rats and inky darkness that might be split without warning by the electric rush of a subway train.

  The footsteps were very close now. The soldiers would be with him soon. Magnus wondered how they could be bothered to chase him in the face of so much death. Why they did not simply dump their uniforms and escape while they were still alive. But perhaps he already knew the answer. The only way to avoid going mad was to go on. Following orders was an enviable profession.

  Magnus ran along the platform to a maintenance ladder and climbed down on to the tracks. The live rail glinted silver and tempting on his right. He marked the distance between it and him and ran northwards. A voice shouted behind him but Magnus ran on, into the dark.

  Sixteen


  Pitch-blackness folded around Magnus. The soldiers were still out there, somewhere in the dim-bright. Something scuttled through the dark and he imagined the same fat rat that he had seen on the Underground platform.

  Between the ages of ten and seventeen Magnus and his cousin Hugh had spent many idle days shooting barn-rats with air rifles, competing for the highest score. Hugh had usually won, but they were well matched and Magnus was generally a close second. Magnus bent over in the dark and tucked the hems of his jeans into his socks, the way his father had instructed him to, to stop the rats from climbing up the inside of his trouser legs. He felt a sudden suspicious fear that they might somehow know how many of them he had murdered and decide to get their revenge.

  Magnus stretched out a hand and walked into the blackness. Every atom of his body resisted, but he pressed on, humming the ghost of a song beneath his breath to give himself courage.

  Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,

  Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

  Welcome tae yer gory bed,

  Or tae victorie.

  Now’s the day and now’s the hour …

  Something touched him and he sank on to his haunches gasping for breath.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ Jeb hissed.

  Magnus would have liked to have punched him, but Jeb was a voice in the darkness and Magnus was finding it hard to breathe. He filled his lungs, trying to calm his hammering heart. ‘You scared the shit out of me.’

  He saw a flash of white in the dark and realised that Jeb was smiling.

  ‘Don’t worry. They won’t come down here.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘No, but I wouldn’t join the fucking army in the first place. They have lights on their gun sights. They’re wearing stab vests and helmets and I’m willing to bet they’ve eaten recently. They can take us no bother, if they want to.’

  ‘They don’t have our motivation,’ Jeb said. He was standing in a hollow in the tunnel wall, Magnus guessed. A recess where track workers had sheltered from passing trains, sucking in their bellies as carriages rushed past. ‘Soldiers are pack animals. These guys looked like ordinary squaddies to me. They won’t go far from the rest of their crew without orders. It makes them nervous.’

  As if on cue, two pinpoints of light appeared in the blackness of the corridor. Jeb pulled Magnus into the recess beside him. It smelled of piss, mortar and loamy earth, a graveyard scent. It was a tight fit and Magnus felt Jeb’s body against his, warm in the dampness. Jeb moved a hand to his pocket. Magnus knew he was taking out his penknife and resisted the urge to grab Jeb’s wrist, for fear of feeling the sharp edge of the blade penetrate his side.

  The lights came closer, no longer pinpoints but two fans of brilliance, illuminating the tunnel and revealing its red-brick walls, the high curve of its roof. The lights revealed rats too, larger than any that had graced his father’s barn. Fat enough to make a good meal for a starving man, Magnus thought, disgusted by the eager way his belly responded to the image. He wondered if the army would feed them or if Jeb was right and they would be summarily executed; worse than dying would be to die hungry.

  The lights were edging nearer and it would not be long before they exposed their hiding place. Magnus shrank against the wall. He felt Jeb’s body tense, muscles bunching, readying for combat. There was a good chance that they would die here, wearing strangers’ clothes and carrying other men’s IDs. Magnus heard the sound of the soldiers’ boots, crunching against the gravel, and felt sad that his mother would never know what had happened to him. He heard something else too, phlegm hacking in one of the soldiers’ throats. Light ricocheted around the walls, bouncing across the roof of the tunnel in crazy circles and Magnus guessed that the soldier had bent over to be sick. He felt Jeb holding his breath, and realised that he was holding his own too.

  ‘Mike, are you okay?’ he heard a voice ask. The answer was low and unintelligible and the same voice said, ‘Do you think you’ve got it?’ The answer must have been a negative because the voice said, ‘I think you’re wrong, Mike. I think you’ve caught it. You’re boiling up, man. You should have told me.’ The voice sounded young and full of more regret than a young voice should be able to hold. It had a Liverpool accent, both soft and harsh, like a war ballad. ‘You should have told me, Mike,’ it repeated. Whatever Mike whispered next made the voice sadder. ‘I’m sorry, Mike,’ it said. ‘Sorry, man.’

  Jeb must have guessed what was going to happen next because a shudder ran through him. There was the sound of a gun being cocked and someone – Mike – shouted something that was all fear and panic, not a word at all, but unmistakable in its plea. There was a crack of gunfire, a flash in the dark, brighter than the lights on the gun sights that had led the men there. The soft Liverpudlian voice said, ‘Sorry, mate.’

  There was a moment of not quite silence, a sound of rustling and Magnus guessed the soldier was stripping his dead companion of useful kit, then the light resumed its stare down the tunnel. It puddled inches from where their feet stood, side by side in the recess.

  They were dead men. Jeb’s penknife was a child’s toy, effective against a half-starved convict, but useless against an armed professional. Magnus wished that he could pray. Now was the time to commend themselves to their maker.

  ‘Don’t worry, lads.’ The voice was stronger, as if the act of killing had fortified it. ‘I’ve had enough. You go your way, and I’ll go mine.’ The soldier paused as if he were waiting for a reply, but speaking would give away their position, and Jeb and Magnus kept their silence. ‘Okay.’ The voice sounded at a loss. ‘I guess there’s nothing much to be said, except that I’ve got a gun for each hand now, so go the other way, if you want to keep on going.’

  There was another pause, and then the footsteps resumed their contact with the gravel, fading into the distance. Magnus and Jeb stayed where they were, upright in the open recess, like mannequins in a display case, rooted to the spot until long after the sound of the soldier’s retreat had vanished.

  Seventeen

  They travelled north through the dark, side by side, in silence. Magnus was glad of Jeb’s presence. It was good to know that there was someone else alive, even if it was a man who knew how to kill quickly and who had been locked up for crimes unknown. Magnus would have liked to talk. Silence allowed too much space for his thoughts, which were all of home: his mother and sister, his cousins, even his brother-in-law. Davie was not a bad guy, just a wee bit too concerned with his own comfort for Magnus’s liking. Rhona ran around after him as if it were the 1950s and Davie a limbless invalid. They might all be dead, a cruel voice whispered in his head, dead and no one there to bury them. He started to sing again, softly under his breath:

  Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,

  Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

  Welcome tae yer gory bed …

  ‘Shut up.’ Jeb sounded weary. ‘We don’t know who’s out here. And you’ve got a crap voice.’

  Magnus had always finished his act with a song, like the old comics on the circuit used to. Stanley Baxter, Frankie Howerd, Morecambe and Wise: those boys had known what they were doing and it was all there for the taking if you watched their acts. Not the jokes themselves, time had moved on and they had dated, but their patter, the way they moved, the way they were with the audience. They had honed their techniques over decades of performing live, before they got their big breaks. He would watch them late at night on YouTube, the screen of his computer glowing in a dimly lit hotel room, a miniature of Famous Grouse in a tooth-mug by the bed. He wondered if it was all gone, hotel rooms, the Internet, YouTube, Famous Grouse …

  I fought at land, I fought at sea,

  At hame I fought my Auntie, O;

  But I met the Devil an’ Dundee,

  On the Braes o’ Killiekrankie, O.

  A hand slammed against his back and Magnus stumbled forward, only just managing to avoid falling flat against the track. ‘What the fuck
?’

  ‘I told you to shut up.’

  Magnus had not realised that he was singing. Jeb’s voice brought him back to himself, back to ratty blackness and hunger.

  ‘Who put you in charge?’

  ‘You did.’

  Magnus tightened his fists, but he was too tired for another fight. ‘Soon as we get out of here we split.’

  ‘Why wait?’

  ‘Because this tunnel only has two directions and I’m not going back, not after walking all this way.’

  ‘Reckon I could make you.’

  Reckon you could, the soft voice in Magnus’s head whispered.

  ‘I won’t sing if it annoys you that much …’ Magnus stopped mid-sentence.

  They had been stumbling like prisoners on an enforced march, along a curve in the tunnel, one or other of them occasionally touching the damp wall for guidance. Now they had reached the turn of the bend. A faint light shone ahead.

  ‘Shit.’ Jeb’s voice was as soft as a bird’s wing flapping into flight.

  Fear cramped in Magnus’s belly. ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘Something.’ The light was too far away for it to illuminate their features, but Magnus could hear the shrug in Jeb’s voice. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that. At least it means you won’t feel a song coming on.’

  Magus ignored the jibe. ‘It could be anything.’

  ‘Light at the end of the tunnel, that’s meant to be a good thing, isn’t it?’

  Jeb’s voice was resolute, but Magnus thought he could hear a shiver of apprehension in it. Magnus said, ‘That soldier’s probably clear by now. There’s nothing to stop us going back.’

  ‘If you don’t mind being a poof.’

  It was strange how the darkness Magnus had feared had become the thing to hold on to, the light something to be afraid of.

  Jeb said, ‘I had a girlfriend that was into hippy shit.’ It was the first time he had mentioned anything about his life before prison and Magnus found himself paying attention. ‘She used to say, put the bad stuff behind you and go forward. She was right about that. Always go forward, never back.’