by Guy Adams
Jamie moved behind the table the radio transmitter was sat on and, with obvious effort, willed himself solid enough to push it up and over, spilling the machine to the floor where it crashed with a pleasingly destructive sound.
Krishnin kicked at Shining’s knee and I heard a cracking sound.
I hurled myself onto the Russian’s back. Wrapping my hands around his neck I pulled with all the strength I could muster, feeling the man’s skull dislodge. There was a popping sound and his neck twisted. Krishnin fell to the ground.
Just smoke? Fuck you.
Shining had staggered backwards, his knee either dislocated or broken. He fell against the far wall, just managing to support himself.
‘That won’t do,’ he informed me, through gritted teeth. ‘He was dead already. It’ll take more than a broken neck to stop him.’
I looked over to where the radio had fallen. Jamie was now kicking at it. A few of his blows did damage, a dial snapping off here, a plastic fascia cracking there. But most just passed through ineffectually. I think Jamie was so panicked that he was losing the focus required to retain any solidity.
On the floor was a semi-automatic pistol, spilled from the table along with the radio.
‘The gun!’ I cried to Jamie. ‘Pick up the gun!’
Krishnin was rising up behind me, his head hanging at a sickening angle on his broken neck.
Jamie reached down for the gun and snatched it up, only for it to fall through his fingers, clattering back to the floor between us. I jumped for it and actually felt Krishnin do the same, the weight of his body passing through me, his heavy hand pushing through mine and grabbing hold of the weapon.
As he turned to face me I fought to rise above him, desperate to find enough strength in my ghost hands to hold him down. We struggled, his head lolling freakishly, hideously.
I could hear Shining behind me, shuffling forward, trying to help.
Krishnin turned the gun on me and fired.
Good luck with that, I thought. There was no way his bullets were going to stop me.
With one last surge, I managed to push down on him, twisting the gun from his hand. I snatched it and focused hard to keep hold of it. It seemed to writhe in my fingers, constantly almost slipping free. I got up and turned the gun on him. Which is when I noticed he wasn’t fighting anymore. He just lay there. Smiling.
‘I can’t imagine what you’ve got to be so happy about,’ I spluttered, for now resisting the urge to empty the rest of the gun’s clip into him.
‘Tim!’
I looked at Jamie, who was staring over my shoulder.
The gunshots. They couldn’t hurt me. I was insubstantial. They just passed right through … right through and into …
I turned to see Shining flat on his back on the floor, two bloody wounds spreading across his shirt.
I couldn’t believe it. After everything we’d done.
I moved to his side, hoping desperately there was something I could do. Was it possible for me to push these ghost hands into him? Try to remove the bullets? It didn’t take long to see that August was beyond such help.
‘Ludwig,’ he said, his face rigid but determined, biting back on the pain. ‘This is so important,’ he said. ‘You did brilliantly. No need to worry. We stopped him. We did the job. Whatever else happens I want you to remember that. The rest doesn’t matter. It wasn’t your fault.’
And then he died.
I looked up at Jamie. He just stood there, staring, not knowing what to do or say.
Krishnin was lying still. Staring up at the patchy roof. That ghastly smirk still on his face. ‘He’s wrong, you know,’ he gloated. ‘All this never mattered. I sent the signal already. Black Earth is underway and there’s nothing any of you can do about it.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: REVIVAL
a) Emergency Call Centre, Metropolitan Police, London
The first call comes in at four minutes past nine on the evening of the 30th. The call is routed through to Nigel Rogers, who has been manning his post at the ECC without break for six hours and wants nothing more than to clock off, go home and sleep. It has been a stressful shift thanks to violence kicking off at a second-division football match and what seems like a whole asylum-full of the usual line-hoggers. His faith in humankind, already worn thin by his few months in the job, has all but vanished entirely by the time the automated system queues up the fateful call.
‘It’s …’ the voice splutters through his earpiece, ‘I think he’s dead. He was in the grave. He dug himself out …’
‘Can you give me your location, please?’ asks Nigel, quite convinced he’s dealing with a joker. ‘Tell me where you are.’
‘He looks like he’s screaming, but there’s no noise … Oh God … I think he’s going to kill me … he’s—’
The phone cuts off. Nigel is already checking the location. You can’t be precise with a mobile, not without spending a lot of time and money, but you can get within spitting distance. He fully intends to report it: these time-wasters need to learn – it isn’t funny, it’s dangerous. They have more than enough on their hands without idiots like this adding to the load.
Within an hour the switchboard will be jammed by similar calls. Eventually the staff will concede they might be real.
b) City of London Cemetery, Manor Park, London
Cemeteries are like cities – they fill up over time. However much you try to expand you are always fighting against one unchanging problem: people keep dying.
The City of London Cemetery and Crematorium is the largest in the country, a plot of land that has grown and grown in the hundred and sixty years since it was established. It holds something in the region of a million bodies. That number is about to drop.
Cathy Gates is a woman who relishes space. She lives with her mother in a house that drips resentment and arguments. ‘I didn’t have a child so that I could end up in a home,’ her mother says. ‘It’s about time you paid me back the loving care I showered on you all those years.’
If pressed to identify the love, Cathy would struggle. Yet she can’t abandon her remaining parent, however much she might wish to when the old woman’s voice becomes raised and the demands increase. And so her life is one of duty and remorse. Sadness over a life lost, sacrificed in the care of an unloving mother.
She stays out when she can. To get some fresh air. Be at peace. She walks. She tends the grave of her father, a man who escaped that oppressive house ten years earlier, struck down by a heart attack in the middle of a work shift at the bakery.
‘I shouldn’t feel jealous,’ Cathy says, looking down at her father’s headstone, ‘but some days I wish my heart was as weak as yours.’
What a terrible thing to say, she thinks, brushing away embarrassed tears and making her way back towards the South Gate. What a horrible, horrible person I am.
The grass is wet with that morning’s rain and Cathy tries to find beauty in her surroundings. Something sweet to lighten the bitterness.
To her left she can see someone kneeling at another grave. They are clearly overcome with emotion, she thinks, to have fallen to their knees. She feels embarrassed to have noticed them but can’t help but watch as the distant silhouette appears to be waving its arms about, as though beating away attackers.
Maybe they’re in pain, she thinks, her mind going back to her father and the mental image she has always had of him, spreadeagled on the flour-dusted floor of the bakery, clutching at the air as his heart pounds and clenches in his chest. I should probably check …
She leaves the path, cutting through the rows of burial plots, her eyes fixed on the figure ahead of her. She doesn’t notice, for the moment, the movement elsewhere. She doesn’t hear the scattering of earth and the shifting of rocks.
‘Head in the clouds,’ her mother often moaned, ‘that’s your problem – always dreaming.’
As Cathy gets nearer she realises this is no mourner. The ground is dug up around the grave, piles of dirt and scattered
clumps of turf. They must be relocating some of the graves, she thinks. She’s heard that the council have to shift bodies now and then, though why anyone would move this one, stuck at the heart of the cemetery, she can’t imagine.
If only she were to look around her she would see that this is happening all over the cemetery – splintered stumps of hands, worn down by their work, reaching for the light. But she doesn’t. Her eyes remain fixed on this one grave.
Cathy steps beneath the shadow of the pine tree and the figure begins to turn towards her. It is not sitting in a neatly-excavated hole; it is writhing in a mess of disturbed earth. She is reminded of an old cowboy picture she watched with her father when she was a child, the hero sinking into a patch of quicksand, his friends trying to feed a rope to him so they can pull him free.
‘Are you all right?’ Cathy asks, the first question that pops into her head.
The figure is now looking at her. Cathy’s second question goes unvoiced. ‘His face, what’s wrong with his face?’. She is too busy screaming.
c) Section 37, Wood Green, London
April Shining is furious enough to kill. Not an unusual state of being for her, however much she might affect an attitude of carelessness, the people around her frequently drive her mad.
‘Douglas,’ she shouts into the mouthpiece of the phone, ‘if you patronise me one more time I will drive that voter-paid-for BMW of yours right into the front of your taxpayer-funded house. I am not in the habit of wasting your time with rubbish. If I tell you that you’re facing an emergency then you most certainly are.’
A monotone dribbles out of the earpiece in response, the sort of aggressively calm speech that fuels all the best arguments in the House of Lords.
‘Oh piss off!’ she shouts and cuts off the call with a thumb stabbed so viciously it nearly forces the rubber button irretrievably into the phone housing.
Her attempts to mobilise a response to the threat of Operation Black Earth have not been successful. She has warned, begged and bribed but nobody wants to know.
‘The thinking on the Harry Reid case,’ one of her contacts at the Met has explained, ‘is that it must be some form of hoax.’
The evidence against such a pointless theory is substantial and convincing, but she has no time to offer it before the call is cut off.
She needs to get off the phone and start bullying people in person. To hell with phones. No one ignores April Shining.
d) Cornwell’s Club, Mayfair, London
‘Sir Robin?’
The jelly-like civil-servant quivers into life from the stupor brought on by his perusal of The Times and looks up at the man addressing him. He is a young man, smartly dressed but in a manner that suggests a nightclub rather than Cornwell’s. The club has thrived for over one hundred years by providing a warm place for gentlemen of secrets to sink into leather armchairs. It is like a well-maintained greenhouse, built for the cultivation of decadent begonias. It has a set of rules so long and complex it is said the main proof of being worthy of club membership is to be capable of understanding them. If Sir Robin had his way, one of those rules would ban the heliotrope tie this man is wearing. A pity he is no longer on the committee.
‘Do I know you?’ he asks.
‘We’ve never met,’ the man replies, taking a seat next to Sir Robin, ‘though I’ve been aware of you for some time, and we have a mutual acquaintance in August Shining.’
The mention of that name is never likely to improve Sir Robin’s mood and it doesn’t do so now. He looks around for his glass of brandy, determined to wash away the foul taste this fellow has just dumped upon his palate. ‘You’re one of his lot are you?’ he asks, abandoning the search for his drink and waving at a waiter for another one.
‘No,’ the young man replies, ‘he is merely an acquaintance. I have had certain dealings with him over the years. Not always favourable dealings – if that helps?’
Naturally it does. If there is one man Sir Robin truly detests, it’s August Shining.
‘Can’t stand the old shit,’ he says. He has managed to secure the attention of a waiter and gleefully orders himself a brandy, deliberately extending no hospitality to his visitor.
‘I had heard as much,’ the young man says, ‘which is why I thought it worth having a quick word. The country is about to experience a potentially catastrophic emergency.’
‘So people tell me every day,’ interrupts Sir Robin. ‘If you expect me to believe your word above the others, you’ll have to provide compelling evidence.’
‘I take it you’ve heard about Harry Reid?’
‘Name means nothing.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you’ve heard about him. Died fifty years ago and yet managed to commit an act of murder yesterday morning.’
‘You sound like that idiot Shining.’
‘Good, you have heard about it, I was sure you must have done.’
Sir Robin is slightly thrown by this.
‘You will receive a phone call in a few minutes,’ the young man continues. ‘It will concern Harry Reid and throw some rather worrying new light on matters.’
‘What sort of light?’
‘He is not an isolated case. You’re about to be inundated by them. The phone call will mention two others, a woman in Fulham and a child in Sussex. I mention this only to lend a little credence to my information. Shining’s sister is trying to convince people that this is all linked to an old case. She is quite right, though nobody is willing to listen to her at the moment.’
‘Not surprised. Mouthy little sow is almost worse than her brother.’
‘Nonetheless, someone should listen to her because the right person, acting now, might just turn the tide on this affair before it gets out of control.’
‘Sounds like a load of old bunkum to me. You sure Shining didn’t put you up to this?’
‘Shining is in no position to do anything at the moment, which is precisely why he has his sister doing all the heavy lifting.’
Sir Robin’s brandy arrives, allowing him the opportunity to think while he takes the glass, sniffs it and pours half of it into his capacious mouth.
‘If this is all on the level, why are you coming to me and not acting on it yourself? For that matter, which department are you with?’
‘I didn’t say and I don’t intend to. Obviously, if I were able to act openly in this I would. Someone’s going to come out of the whole mess smelling of roses. And given half a chance I would rather that was me than you.’
Of course this hooks Sir Robin; the thought of accolades always does it.
‘And should I become involved, what are you suggesting I do?’
‘I would suggest you get an emergency committee together, mobilise armed forces and, above all, prepare a press statement about how the whole affair is well under control. The last thing you need is for the country to be seen as a risk to the rest of the world.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘You are about to become ground zero, Sir Robin. Just think how that might make other countries feel. Indeed, what might they do to ensure the devastation doesn’t spread to them?’
Sir Robin scoffs. ‘Now I know this is a load of old tosh, I think you’re—’
The young man stands up. ‘Very well, I’ll take it to someone else. Just don’t start whining in a few hours time when you’re caught with your trousers around your ankles.’
‘Hey, hey …’ Unsettled by the impressive resoluteness of the man, Sir Robin decides he’s played his hand too aggressively. ‘No need to be like that. I’m not saying I’m not available to help. What is it you want in return? You don’t come to me with something like this unless you’re after a favour.’
The young man smiles. ‘Actually, you’re quite right. I am all about favours. Let’s just say you’ll owe me one.’
With that, he walks out of the club and into Mayfair.
A few yards from the entrance of Cornwell’s, the young man – a broker from Chiswick by the name of Len Hoop
er – looks around, trying to remember quite how he ended up there in the first place.
e) Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, London
The problem, according to Connor, is that Mikey has had more than his fair share of what little remains of the weed. The problem, according to Mikey, is that there’s fuck all to do except smoke, so what does Connor expect?
They’re sheltering in Abney Park because it’s as good a place as any, and when Shell comes Mikey’s hoping he can convince her jeans to come off. He knows it’s never going to happen, but he’s been thinking about it for days and wants to give himself the best odds he can. Having at least a small possibility of privacy might just stand in his favour.
‘She ain’t coming,’ says Connor, which pisses Mikey off for two reasons: firstly because it’s like Connor’s been reading his mind, and secondly because he knows he’s right.
‘Who cares?’ he says, because that’s the only response he can think of on the spur of the moment. ‘If she does she does …’
Connor knows better than to argue about it. He’s pissed off that Mikey’s used up their stash, but he’s not so pissed off he’s going to get in a fight over it.
‘What do you want to do then?’ he asks, because he’s bored out of his skull of sitting staring at trees, and he really hopes one of them can come up with a better way of spending the afternoon.
Mikey certainly can’t. ‘Fuck knows,’ he says and starts throwing gravel at a headstone.
As entertainment this has its limits, but it’s better than picking a fight with Connor. He doesn’t want to share more black eyes or the inevitable weeks of mutual sulking. Friends have always been in short supply for Mikey and he’s not going to push things again.
‘What’s going on over there?’ Connor wonders, staring towards the other end of the cemetery where a group of people seems to be forming.
‘Funeral innit?’ says Mikey, keeping up with his target practice. ‘Happens in cemeteries you know.’
