Ah, shit...
Nothing to be done about it now. Not here, at least. When we went on after, I’d do my best to steer us somewhere we wouldn’t normally have gone; although Laura might have something to say about that. Laura wasn’t local, she wouldn’t understand. She might know intellectually how my family ran the town, but she’d never really met it except the once at Morry’s, when she’d met Aunt Bella in my sister’s web. She’d probably be forgetting that as efficiently as she could manage, shovelling it into some dusty corner of her mind, turning hard away from it every time she felt herself straying back in that direction. Certainly she wouldn’t be connecting it with her new beau, this bright and intriguing young man at her elbow; and far from avoiding her normal friends in her normal world, she’d more likely want to seek them out to show him off a little.
So if we fought, we’d just have to fight. One of us would win, or the other would; there’d be more damage done, or there wouldn’t. Most likely there would, one way or another. Wherever I went now, it seemed as though I brought damage.
o0o
Subsumed with guilt, I couldn’t have concentrated on the menu. Luckily, here I didn’t have to. I could order on auto: gamberoni in their shells and my usual sad pizza, the one that had my friends shaking their heads and muttering anxiously about my digestion and my mental health both, that I could do such a thing to my stomach.
Jamie was doing that now, indeed: staring extravagantly, manipulating his jaw back into position, saying, “Mussels, prawns, squid, tuna, anchovies, garlic and what was that?”
“Chilli,” Laura told him cheerfully, apparently oblivious or immune to the atmosphere that had shaken me and taken me so very far from cheerful. “He always has the same. Seafood nut, Ben is, and he pays extra to have it stacked up high, or he does when someone else is paying; only then he gets them to do it so hot you can’t taste any of it anyway. And he sprinkles parmesan all over, which is blasphemy with seafood. I tried a slice once, but never again. It’s disgusting.”
Actually, it isn’t, though it sounds it. Like so much in my life, this had started as a gesture: looking for a way to eat out that would be a significant change from my diet at home and at the same time put no money of mine into my family’s pocket — or at least as little as possible — I’d remembered that this was a coastal town that no longer had any fishing fleet at all. All the boats’ owners had taken advantage of their inherent mobility, and moved to other ports where no one demanded a cut of their profits for protection. Since when I’d eaten as much fish as I could stomach or afford. Obviously someone had to bring it in, somewhere there was a wholesaler no doubt handing over just a little less than the maximum he could afford to lose — good accountants, my family, with an excellent nose for what the market could bear: no percentage for them in getting too greedy, putting people out of business — but at least I could salve my conscience a little. Fishermen were heroes on this coast, middlemen not.
o0o
So I burned my fingers peeling giant prawns, and drizzled garlic juices on my jeans, and remembered my paper napkin too late for more than an ineffectual dab; and after that came my fierce pizza mounded high, dribbling cheese and tomato and chunks of sea life barely dead; and I ate that with my fingers also, while Jamie watched me with all the fascination of an aristocrat meeting a peasant’s manners for the first time. I ignored him. I’d seen him tear a roast chicken apart with his hands, when he was so stoned he could barely control what his hands were doing; but if he wanted to play the high sophisticate to impress his girl, who was I to tell her it was all fraud? Not mine to interfere, where I held no investment or interest...
But as we ate we talked, and that I couldn’t ignore. That’s what we were here for, after all. Birthday celebrations had slipped a long way down the list of tonight’s priorities; it barely cost me a pang, that I hadn’t remembered to find Jamie a present. Couldn’t have bought him a good one anyway, had no idea what he was into these days — except Laura, of course, he was visibly and very much into her, his sweet Laura and not mine after all and never would be, never could be now — so let it go, better no present than the wrong one.
“Three dead,” Jamie said, breaking a piece of good Italian bread and tearing it to fragments, rolling little balls of it unheeding. That was the refrain, that was where we were coming from and where we came back to time and again: three dead and everyone angry and afraid and no one doing anything because no one knew what to do, where to look for the blame.
“What does Uncle Allan say?”
“Uncle Allan says that if you burn a light in the darkness, you will attract insects; and some of those can sting. By definition, he says.”
“That’s no help.”
“No,” he said, “it isn’t. He also says that it had to happen sometime, it’s not reasonable to suppose we’re the only family with talent; and this is a trial of strength, he says. Winner take all, he says.”
“But we don’t even know who they are...”
“No.”
“Brilliant. So what about Uncle James?”
“Your Uncle James,” his son said neutrally, “is filling the streets with family. Every bloke who’ll listen, he’s sending out on patrol; and you know what Dad’s like. He just keeps yelling, until pretty much everyone listens.”
“Except for you,” Laura put in quietly, stroking his forearm where it lay on the table between them, my hero. Unless she was only doing it for the buzz, my erotic hero; but no, she wasn’t that shallow. Was she?
“Except me. Right. In case you’re interested,” and he turned to me but his hand turned also, went palm-up to capture hers and hold it loose against its lack of struggle, “Dad doesn’t see how I can possibly forget my responsibilities and go out for a birthday binge with cattle and a mental defective, while my family is under attack.”
Oh, I was, I was very interested; but it was Carol beside me who spoke, who worked it out slowly on her fingers and said, “Presumably Ben’s the mental defective, right, and Laura’s the cattle? Given that he didn’t know about me being here?”
“Uh-huh,” from Laura, with a savage grin to salt it. “He’s a right charmer, is Jamie’s dad. You’ll love him.”
“I think I’ll avoid him, thanks.”
Laura’s eyebrows gave a little twitch, you’ll be lucky, aimed neatly between the pair of us, as if she were already leaping to conclusions that I was fairly certain would prove to be hopelessly misplaced; but then, what did I know? I was leaping myself here, in the dark and utterly without looking.
“What’s the point of patrolling, anyway?” I demanded. “If you don’t know what you’re looking for?”
“Exactly,” Laura said, backing up Jamie’s shrug. “‘You men — strip-search that haystack, there’s a needle in it somewhere.’ ‘Please, sir, what’s a needle?’ ‘Damned if I know, but don’t come back without it...’”
She was pretty good at voices, was Laura. Disregard the register, and her twit officer barked just like the Brigadier on reruns of Doctor Who.
Couldn’t make us laugh tonight, though. Just smiles round the table, and the faintest hint of a chuckle squeezed out of Carol. Jamie tightened his lips, tightened his grip on her hand, and took us round the mulberry-bush again.
“They’ve got to be somewhere in town, though. And if they can find us, why can’t we find them?”
“Because you don’t know what to look for, sweetheart,” and this was her top-girl voice, slow and smart and patronising, like the little pats she was giving his hand now. “Everyone knows you lot, can’t miss you with those great ugly hooters in the middle of your faces. Wouldn’t call them noses myself, more like cow-catchers...”
“Cattle-catchers,” he said, twitching his at her; though to be fair his nose didn’t have the prominence of mine, that was traditional among my kin. Right shape, but significantly smaller: closer to young-man normal, really, even down to the kink where Marty had cracked it with a saucepan when they were kids. It was wel
l within normal tolerance, at least. If you had a tolerant girlfriend.
Jamie, you bastard, she should have been mine...
o0o
All the evening was like that, us dropping with a desperate relief into mock-cheery banter, trying hard to play at young people out on the town whenever we allowed ourselves the opportunity, until some one of us would drag the talk heavily back to what mattered.
We were still doing it over late coffee and brandies, the restaurant all but empty around us and Gino laying tables for tomorrow, glancing our way every few seconds: not dropping hints like he might have done yesterday, nor showing any signs of coming over to chat and scrounge a cigarette, as he surely would have done yesterday; only checking, always checking that Jamie was content, he had everything he wanted and his friends likewise, no one was waiting for service.
Then the bell on the door jangled, as someone came in. I glanced round, we all did, glad of a moment’s distraction; and I saw a man who was briefly a stranger, darkly dressed and dimly lit. He stood still, only his head moving as he scanned the room and the people in it, us; and I felt my arms prickle with chill at the threat of him, and was glad of the touch of Carol’s hand suddenly on my leg, although that was only saying, I’m scared too...
Our own fault, partly. We’d been talking about unknown and threatening figures all night, we’d set ourselves up to be spooked by any combination of man and shadow. But it wasn’t all fancy, there truly was something sinister, an air of danger about this man; and I knew it, I saw and understood it as soon as he stepped further into the light and came towards our table.
He was one of us, was what it was. Steven Macallan, blond and burly, another heavyweight cousin, pretty much of a thug: unexpected here and so I hadn’t known him for a moment, had seen him instead as the cattle, as Carol and Laura and Gino and everyone in town must have seen him. Shadowed, dangerous, a constant threat and his close company a terror...
But Jamie raised his hand in greeting and so did I, just to give a message to the others: no panic, look at his nose, he’s got to be on our side with a proboscis like that.
“Steve,” Jamie said, going the second mile here, giving him a name for added reassurance. “You looking for me?”
“No. Just checking.”
“Right.”
Right enough. He’d be one of Uncle James’ patrolmen, the town’s new security force out pacing the streets all night. Looking into doorways, big noses sniffing for trouble. And pray they don’t find it, I thought nervously, distrustful of the presumptions that underlay such patrolling. I don’t want to lose any more cousins...
“Seen anything?” Jamie asked.
“Nah. No one has. We’ve got radios, see,” and he tapped a neat walkie-talkie in a holster on his belt, “we keep in touch, but there’s nothing happening. The whole place is dead as shit.”
No surprise, with three Macallans dead and the rest on the warpath. If I were a normal citizen I’d be battening down my hatches, locking up my children and staying all night indoors and also as much of the day as I possibly could.
“Well, I guess that’s good,” Jamie said. “Be careful, though, Steve. Yeah?”
“Yeah, sure,” Steve said casually, the wave of his hand a dead giveaway, sure guarantee of a young man who was not going to be careful. Who hadn’t learned the lessons of these last days, who still thought himself immortal.
Oh, Christ, I thought. And they’re all going to be like him, all the young men, all my cousins... Too many years of invulnerability, it was an attitude soaked into their bones; and of course they weren’t going to learn from others’ dying. Such men never had. It took their own to do it, too late by definition...
“What about you, then?” Steve asked, still addressing himself only to Jamie. Apparently I counted with the cattle. “You coming to join us, or what?”
“Later. Maybe,” Jamie said, with a glance around the table that settled on Laura and said no, I’m not. “I’ll see.”
Steve grunted, obviously at one with Uncle James in this, that a cousin’s duty as much as a son’s lay in the street tonight, not in bedding a girl who wasn’t even blood. Water off a duck’s back, to Jamie; he didn’t even look up, though I saw him smile and I saw his hand tighten very publicly on Laura’s, all the protection she needed against the weight of Steve’s glare.
After a second or two of difficult silence, Steve’s radio crackled and a voice whispered his name through static. He stepped aside from us to answer it, having obviously labelled us all, even Jamie, equally unworthy to overhear; and then he glowered around at the apprehensive staff like Arnie, I’ll be back, and he stalked out of the restaurant.
Soft breaths of relief, from Gino and Mario and the girls and me; but as the door crashed shut behind him, I said, “Something, something my sister said to me: whoever they are out there, they’re picking off the weakest. People like Steve shouldn’t be going around on their own, making targets of themselves...”
Jamie stared at me. “Steve’s not weak. Nor was Marty,” emphatically.
Not like he thought I meant, no: bruisers, the pair of them. But, “The ones with the crudest talents, then. Steve, he’s got strength, okay; but he’s got no finesse, you wouldn’t back him in a fight with anyone smarter than he is...”
Which in all honesty didn’t narrow the field too far. Jamie saw that, and nodded, and his eyes narrowed; and he pushed back his chair an inch or two, as if he had half a mind to leave right then, to go after Steve, not to let him be alone out there.
But if he had half a mind to do it, he had no more than that, because the other half was still hand-linked to Laura and not wanting to go anywhere; and then a moment later he had no mind at all, we none of us did.
Because a voice yelled, and the big plate window at the front of the restaurant shattered; and we were still sitting frozen, still trapped in the aftershock of that while Mario moaned and hid his face behind his hands and we could all see blood dribbling through his fingers, when the voice outside quit yelling and started to scream.
And that was Steve, just as if I’d made a target of him myself with my concern.
Sixteen: The Electric Haemoglobin Acid Test
It was Carol among us who moved first. That bit older, I guess that bit more used to crisis, she was up on her feet while the rest of us were still stricken. Her moving got us moving, but we could only follow her as she pushed her way between the tables and towards the door. She broke stride briefly when Mario came blundering from behind the bar, still seemingly blinded by blood and his big hands; but Laura said, “I’ll see to him, Carol. I’ve done first aid, at least...”
And first aid won’t do anyone any good out there, the footnote that we all heard, that none of us felt any need to voice.
“Good.” Carol spared a second to grip Mario’s shoulders, to guide him into Laura’s arms. Lucky man. Twice lucky not to have to face, not to be able to see whatever might be outside. I’d seen its like three times now, and already I was shaking. “Call an ambulance too, yeah?”
“Only one?”
Laura glanced through the gaping hole that was the restaurant’s front now, that let Steve’s screaming in so loud; and her glance said, Won’t he need one too?
It was me Carol looked at briefly, and our eyes shared a memory, Hazel far beyond the skills of any paramedic; but she shrugged, said, “Call half a dozen, if you like,” and yanked open the street door with barely a visible hesitation, barely a confession, I don’t want to go out there before she did, with Jamie and me behind her and someone else coming after me.
Looking back, I found Gino at my shoulder.
“Don’t you want to stay with Mario?” I asked. I knew I did; and he surely looked like he wanted to stay with Mario, or preferably behind Mario, somewhere a long way behind. Down in the cellar, maybe, with the door locked and the lights on and all those bottles of courage to help him through till daylight. His eyes were enormous and all the flesh of his face was trembling; but he sh
ook his head hard, almost managed to look insulted.
“Mario’s cousin is the cook, he has nephews here too. They will stay with him. I want to help.”
“Good enough. Come on, then.”
I didn’t see what help he could be; but the same went for me, very much so, and I was going. The other two had gone already, and though Carol was still in front, in truth only Jamie had any hope of helping.
o0o
Il Milano’s wasn’t the only window broken. All the length of the alley glittered with glass, in what light fell from the pizzerias on either side. There was little movement, though, no customers tumbling out to see what was going down; only the odd figure in a doorway standing as still as possible not to be noticed, craning to see from the shadows, squinting towards the sound of screaming.
It was darker than usual out there, darker than it ought to be; only the shattered shopfronts lit the alley. All the streetlamps had had their lights punched out, by the same force that had riven so much plate glass to splinters. The main street at the end was bright still, but of course we had to turn our backs to that; we had to head the other way to where it was darker still, to where a keening song of terror thickened the air and twisted gravity higher, till we could hardly run against it.
We found Steve at the corner, at the furthest distance from the light; and he was a man of supplication when we reached him, down on his knees with his eyes tight shut to be sure not to see, and his hands held out palm-up into the air. His fingers curled around nothing, I thought.
I was wrong. Jamie, cruel Jamie made a globe of nightfire to shine its light around us; and then I saw how Steve’s fingers curled around pain, as if he held a bowl of it cupped in his hands.
His flesh seethed and festered in that cold light; and Christ, no wonder he was wailing.
This wasn’t like Tommy, when blood-leeches had writhed within his flesh. This wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. All Steve’s skin was blistering, and the blisters were starting to burst; and there was an acrid smoke wafting up, and a thin liquor dribbling off.
Dead of Light Page 21
