by Gavin Smith
‘Okay, okay. What do you want to know?’
Breathing hard. Trying not to kill him. Beth closed her eyes. She needed not to see the world in red right now. She willed herself back.
‘You knew my sister, and don’t fucking lie. I know you were her pimp.’
Arbogast started to scream, but her hand was over his mouth, gripping it hard as she dug the blade into the side of his head, pressed down until she felt bone and then dragged it down through the skin, blood spurting out of the wound. Head wounds always bled more. Show them their blood, she remembered Thomas telling her. She held up the bloody knife. Showed it to him. Shaking with anger.
‘I’m not in control of this. You are. How much do you want to get cut? Are you trying to show me your skull?’
‘Please, my face . . .’ He was crying.
Your face, Beth thought angrily, and the clothes, the easy smiles and expensive aftershave, the nice car. All props so he could use people, profit from them. She leaned down close to his ear, intimate.
‘I’m going to cut it off.’ She thought she meant it. More importantly so did he.
‘I remember her. She was a party girl. She wanted to do it all but she didn’t have any money, just her looks. Look, she was cool with it. She did some films. Is that what this was about? Did you see her on the Internet or something? Look, I’m sorry but it’s a free country. She had a choice!’ He was sounding desperate.
‘The hooking?’ she asked. She was surprised to see him turn even paler. Somewhere at the back of her head a sane voice was asking why she was doing this. She wasn’t going to hear anything good, anything that would help, and her sister would still be dead.
‘Look, I know it sounds bad—’
‘Sounds?’ Beth hissed.
‘Look, she wanted the money; I knew the people. She made her own decision. All I did was make sure that she was okay. I looked after her . . .’
‘Like the big brother she never had?’
‘She wasn’t standing on street corners. It was upmarket clients, reasonable. She was treated nice.’
Beth wanted to hurt him. Despite his words he knew that he had played his part in what Talia had become. She also knew that she was lashing out. Talia was capable of making her own choices.
‘She was in demand,’ Arbogast said before realising that this might not be the best thing to say in the circumstances. Beth concentrated all her attention on him again.
‘Why?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘She was really pretty, you know. She had the whole goth thing going . . .’
Beth didn’t doubt that Arbogast was an excellent liar under normal circumstances, but she didn’t think this was his normal power relationship with the opposite sex. He was hiding something.
‘Tell me.’
‘Look, you’ve got to underst—’
She grabbed him painfully by the mouth again. She could hear him trying to beg through her clenched fingers. She put the knife back into the wound she had made and started to twist the blade. She tried not to think whether her great-grandfather would have approved or not.
‘Please,’ he was sobbing. ‘Blood . . .’
‘Like this?’ She showed him the knife again and he shrank away from her.
‘Bloodletting. She and her goth friends were into the vampire thing. They would drink blood from each other. Some of my clients wanted to live that fantasy out . . . some of the specials . . . but . . .’
‘What?’
‘There were stories, rumours about her, that people saw things when they drank her blood.’
Confused at first, then angry again. She hurt him some more.
‘Do I look like I’m fucking around, you cockless little bastard!’
‘No, no, no.’ Begging. ‘Please . . . She came back bad a few times, hurt, you know, they took too much. They wanted her blood, I wouldn’t tell you this . . . I couldn’t make it up.’
She could see he wasn’t lying. Her anger was as much because she couldn’t understand. She had no frame of reference to process this, and people get angry and frightened when they can’t understand things.
‘Did you ever do it?’ Beth demanded. He stared at her terrified through the tears. He nodded. ‘And?’
Running, foot on the balcony, into space, travelling forward but in a backwards somersault. Land on the roof of the next building. Nice and smooth, like in PK Killer. Not just a case of augmented speed, strength, agility, but having neurally rewired yourself to remove the fear and inhibitions.
He threw himself off the roof, grabbing his knees, tumbling sideways. He dropped two storeys and grabbed the balcony rail. He pulled himself up with enough force to leap over the rail and onto the balcony. Upper body strength without tears, he thought smiling. His clan joined him.
‘It was like space, you know, like in a film. It was beautiful. Like heaven. I think I heard God. He was angry.’
Beth stared at him.
‘What the fuck am I doing?’ Beth said out loud. The anger just drained from her. Talia was gone. All she was doing was trying to put balm on that. Cheapening her sister’s death with violence and strangeness. She rubbed her face. Talia was gone. She was starting to feel it. She had often hated her but she was family. She felt tears behind her eyes. She turned away from Arbogast. He couldn’t see that. She left him on the floor in his own blood. She didn’t even bother with a parting threat.
It took a moment for fear and self-pity to be replaced by anger and self-pity. Arbogast managed to get to his feet despite the pain. He had to see what she had done to his face.
The door to the balcony opened. They were twelve storeys up. It didn’t make sense: nobody could have been on the balcony. Dark urban wear, hooded sweatshirts, expensive trainers and monster masks.
The one in the front, flayed skin mask, held a phone in one hand; his other hand was cupped. It looked like it was full of glitter. He held the phone out. Arbogast saw a picture of Talia and dearly wished that he had never even met the fucking emo bitch.
‘Look, I know people, right. She’s fucking dead.’ Every time he spoke it felt like his face would split open; more blood coursed from the wound Beth had made. ‘I think she and her friends were trying to cook meth or something. They blew themselves up.’
Flayed skin stared at him. Then he lifted up his cupped hand and blew glitter all over Arbogast. King Jeremy decided it looked as cool as he’d thought it would. He’d seen it in a comic book.
The sun had gone down some time ago but the night was still warm. He had decided to look over Arbogast’s building, justifying it to himself as lazy reconnaissance. Actually he had just fancied a cup of tea. Du Bois was sitting outside a cafe opposite the luxury flats where Arbogast lived. He was wondering why, in Britain, he could get just about every type of coffee possible, including some he felt were patently ridiculous, but finding a good cup of tea was becoming harder and harder.
Arbogast’s picture was on his phone screen. He could have had it appear in his vision but he was of an age that made him very uncomfortable with that kind of thing. Using the phone to externalise things might have been unnecessary but it helped him feel more human.
He saw the woman leave the building. Leather jacket, combat trousers, boots, all looked well worn. Her long hair was tied back into a ponytail, sides shaved. She had a Celtic knotwork symbol painted on the back of her leather jacket.
She looked out of place. Du Bois decided to take a picture of her. The phone’s intelligent graphics software cleaned up the blurry image and ran it through facial recognition software far in advance of what was available to the public. The search was slowed only by having to use police and government databases.
He found the girl. Du Bois read about her. Her sister. Her conviction. That she had beaten someone to death for what he’d done to her sister.
‘Shit.’ He ran towards the apartment.
Du Bois stood in Arbogast’s open-plan lounge. It was mostly white. The sofa had been white. Bits of it still wer
e. Not the bits where Arbogast was sitting, apparently unable to move, though not restrained, his face cut up. Trying to chew off his own fingers. There was no way the girl had done this, du Bois thought; someone else had been there. Someone had slaved him. Someone with access to S- or L-tech.
‘That would make me the ghost of Christmas future then,’ he said. Arbogast was staring at him, eyes full of pain and desperation, but he couldn’t say much as teeth cracked on bone.
‘You are a drug dealer, Mr Arbogast. Do you have a syringe in the house?’
Arbogast’s eyes went wide but he was desperate enough to try anything. There was pointing and searching. Du Bois found the reasonably well-hidden drug paraphernalia stash. Arbogast was a careful man. The syringe was still in its sealed packet. Du Bois walked out of Arbogast’s sight. He suspected what he was about to do would give Arbogast hygiene and contagion issues. Du Bois concentrated momentarily, programming his blood. He tapped the vein and then slid the needle in, removing a very small amount of blood. It was all he needed.
Arbogast tried to protest around a mouthful of his own fingers but du Bois slid the syringe into his neck and depressed the plunger. Then he sat down opposite Arbogast, his .45 held in one hand, resting on his leg, pointed in Arbogast’s vague direction.
He waited for the nanites in his blood to eat the nanites that had been used to control Arbogast. Someone else was playing. Someone in the know. But who? This wasn’t the City of Brass’s style and they had more to cope with. All over the world the Circle was mobilising to utterly annihilate them. After all, they’d doomed humanity, so why not use your not-inconsiderable resources with a final act of revenge? The Eggshell was little more than a myth, even by the time he had joined the Circle.
Arbogast stopped trying to eat his fingers.
‘I realise you’d probably prefer to die at the moment, but I need you to tell me everything that you told everyone else. Only quicker.’
The stairway was made of glass. It gave him a commanding view of the harbour. He could see the neon-lit Spinnaker Tower, designed to look like a sail. He could see the real sails of historic ships and, as he rounded the corner, the cranes in the naval dockyard.
Du Bois attached the vial containing a sample of Arbogast’s blood to the bottom of the phone. He texted the info sent from the nanites in the vial to the phone, which then sent the info on to Control. Then he hit speed dial to Control. The phone ran a biometric check on his fingertip, and one of the most secure telecommunications links in the world connected him to the soothing female voice.
‘Kids in monster masks – who else is in town?’
Beth felt like shit. They had let her into their place; they didn’t know her but they had shown her kindness. She was repaying them by washing blood off a family heirloom in their bathroom sink. She had to take her madness out of their life.
The bathroom door burst open.
‘What! The! Fuck?’ Uday demanded. Beth had thought she’d locked the door properly. ‘Omigod! Have you actually killed someone?!’ He was still too angry to be frightened of the woman with a bloody knife yet.
‘I’ll go,’ Beth said. ‘Please don’t tell Maude about this.’
She could see Uday lose some of his certainty. The fear start to crawl in.
‘What have you done?’ he asked more quietly.
‘It’s Arbogast’s. I . . . I . . . didn’t kill him.’ You wanted to, she told herself savagely, just to lash out.
Uday nodded. He was still not quite sure what to do. He could see Beth’s face crumpling. The tears came.
‘My sister’s dead,’ Beth managed before the sobs racked her body. She slumped to the bathroom floor. Uday stared at her, not sure what to do. Finally he knelt next to her and hugged her.
Maude appeared in the doorway.
‘What’s all the noise?’ she asked sleepily. ‘Oh . . .’
Uday beckoned her in. Maude knelt down and held Beth as well as she cried. She didn’t even notice Uday hide the knife.
One of the problems with being a petty criminal is that there are always people higher up the ladder. Still, there were always people lower as well, and the beating he had taken at Beth’s hands had not done his self-esteem any good. The likes of Beth were supposed to be prey, not predator. It was thoughts like this that made Jaime think he was quite the street philosopher. However, as the BMW took him closer to Bucklands, self-pity was fighting with fear as the dominant emotion. Nobody in the drugs game wanted to hear the words ‘Mr McGurk wants to see you’ from any of his large and violence-capable business associates. Jaime just hoped he didn’t piss himself on the leather seat. He couldn’t see that going down well.
The underground garage under the long wall-like block of flats smelled of sweat. None of the inhabitants of the flats above had been stupid enough to park a car in the garage for years. The vehicles that weren’t burned-out husks had come for the fight. Their headlights were used to provide illumination. They cast long and violent shadows from the two combatants.
Even relaxed, resplendent in his shell suit and gold, leaning on his cane, McGurk still had an air of barely contained violence. His constantly moving, sparsely-haired jaw and eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep accentuated his cadaverous, weasel-like features. He was watching, bored, as two desperate young men beat the crap out of each other to the cheers of the surrounding crowd. It no longer even interested him, let alone excited him. It was just a taster for the real excitement. He glanced over at the Transit van parked in the corner.
‘Mr McGurk?’ Markus said. McGurk turned around. Markus was a solid, slab-like piece of meat and steroids with a shaved head and rings in either ear. He looked away as McGurk looked him in the eyes. McGurk liked that.
Markus had hold of some scruffy-looking ponytailed specimen who smelled of fear and low-level drug dealing.
‘I know your name,’ McGurk said in his thick Pompey accent, cockney two generations removed. Jaime wasn’t sure what to do except stare and try and control his fear. ‘Imagine how pissed off that makes me?’ McGurk continued. Jaime felt his bowels loosen. ‘I mean, you’re so down far down the food chain, Markus here wouldn’t bother with you, isn’t that right, Markus?’
‘No, Mr McGurk, I wouldn’t,’ Markus rumbled, playing his part in the pantomime. McGurk looked at the young man properly for the first time, taking in his bruised and cut face.
‘Someone give you a bit of a kicking?’ he asked. The kid nodded. ‘With knuckledusters by the look of it.’ The kid nodded again. ‘Who?’
‘I don’t know her.’
‘“Her”? What are you, fucking queer? You got beat up by a girl?’ McGurk laughed. It was the kind of laughter that Markus felt he should join in. Jaime just looked miserable. ‘Son, you don’t ever want to go to prison, let me assure you.’ Jaime just nodded miserably. He was so frightened he wanted to cry, but he was pretty sure that would be unacceptable. ‘So who is this girl with brass knuckles then?’
‘I don’t know her name, sir,’ Jaime started. McGurk turned to fix him with a stare. Jaime shut up, swallowed hard and pissed himself just a little bit.
‘But I know your name, yes? Give me something I can fucking use.’ This was punctuated by the flat hard sound of meat hitting meat.
‘She was looking for her sister. Talia, she was looking for Talia.’
‘What’d you tell her?’
‘That we’d gone out together for a while. That she liked gear. I’d binned her when I found her using H, and she liked to hang around with those emo arseholes who blew themselves up.’
‘That all?’ McGurk demanded. The fight was over. One of the combatants was lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood. The other was standing over him, not looking much better, gasping for breath.
Jaime nodded.
‘I swear, Mr McGurk, I didn’t know you had any interest.’
McGurk stared at him for a while. Jaime tried desperately not to piss himself further.
‘You know how I enforce loy
alty?’ McGurk asked. Jaime swallowed, nodded and a wet stain started appearing on the front of his jeans. McGurk leaned towards him. ‘Imagine how I enforce silence.’ Jaime could smell the eucalyptus on McGurk’s warm breath. Jaime had his eyes closed tight. ‘You say nothing about this, nothing at all. You hear any more, you call Markus and tell him, understand?’ Jaime nodded, tears streaming down his face. ‘Get the fuck out of my sight.’
Jaime fled. McGurk watched him run out of the underground garage.
‘Find out,’ he said to Markus. Markus just nodded. McGurk turned to the winner of the bare-knuckle fight.
‘Brian, mate, you’ve made a bit of a mess here.’ Brian nodded, grinning savagely through the blood and the sweat. McGurk turned to Trevor, Markus’ counterpart muscle, who was standing over by the BMW, and nodded. Trevor leaned into the car, pulled out a briefcase and walked over to McGurk. Trevor opened the briefcase and showed Brian the neat rows of tens and twenties. ‘That’s ten thousand pounds, Brian. Do you want it?’ McGurk nodded to Markus, who started towards the Transit van.
‘Yes, Mr McGurk,’ Brian said, greed lighting up his eyes.
‘But how much do you want it?’
‘A lot, Mr McGurk.’
‘No holds barred with my man in the van, and I think he’s going to try very hard to kill you, yes?’ Brian looked nervous but nodded. ‘You don’t have to win, just fight.’ Brian looked unsure but his eyes kept flicking to the briefcase full of money. Finally Brian nodded. The crowd cheered.
‘Excellent!’ McGurk said, clapping Brian on the back.
‘Markus!’ Markus opened the back of the Transit. The van’s internal light spilled out of the back of the vehicle. Brian watched with mounting unease. Something shuffled into the light. Brian screamed.
13
A Long Time After the Loss
Vic was no stranger to seeing or causing death. When he had been in the Thunder Squads his job had been property damage on a massive scale. One squad was enough to bring entire city sectors to their knees. He had been involved in the destruction of starscrapers, watching the weight of the buildings tear their top floors out of stabilised geosynchronous orbit. Collateral damage to sentient biomass had been inevitable but that had been on conflict resolution worlds. Though he had to admit that some of the CR worlds had been newly designated and the new designation had come as a shock to the civilian populations.
