Till You Drop

by Mat Coward

Till You Drop

  by Mat Coward

  Copyright 2012 Mat Coward

  Cover by Dean Harkness

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  ***

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  About the author

  Other books by Mat Coward

  ***

  Chapter One

  “They’re calling it ‘ropetirement’ on Twitter,” said the sergeant, looking down on the body dangling from the bannisters.

  “Ropetirement? Yeah, not bad. That could catch on.” Detective Inspector Pipe watched as the medic confirmed that the dead man was dead. You’d need a special name for it, Pipe thought, now that they were getting so many of them. This was the fourth he’d been called out to in the last week. Three men in their seventies, and a woman of ninety-two.

  “The Commissioner retired, though, didn’t he?” The uniformed sergeant spoke through a mouthful of crisps. “How come chief constables can retire, if retirement’s been abolished?”

  “Executive stress.” Pipe kept his voice as straight as his face. Politics was none of his business, not when he was on duty. That was a basic rule for him, always had been. Police should be above politics, and that included not making sarky chitchat in the hearing of civilian staff. “The Commissioner retired on doctor's orders. That’s perfectly lawful.”

  Which it was. As part of austerity’s second phase, retirement from work had been made illegal. But the rich, the powerful and the well-connected still seemed to manage a well-earned rest.

  None of Pipe’s business. Not when he was on duty.

  Apparently, the sergeant didn’t share his code. “Oh, yeah, I was forgetting, sir. You see, my brother-in-law’s a bus driver, he’s seventy-one, and he had a total nervous breakdown last year, and evidently the best cure for that sort of thing is the work cure.” He finished his crisps, and crumpled the bag into his trouser pocket. “But of course, it’s been clinically proven, hasn’t it? Executive stress is a different illness, different remedy. Can only be treated with complete rest.”

  DI Pipe took a folding knife from his pocket and held it out, handle first. “You can cut the poor sod down now, Sergeant.”

  ***

  Definite beginnings do not exist; everything is the heir to something else. Turning points, however, are a different matter - often visible, especially in retrospect. And in retrospect, most informed opinion would agree that one of the greatest turning points in the history of the Great Monster Strike occurred on a warm autumn night, on a Saturday, in the West End of London.

  Its central player was a dark-haired man, dressed well but not ostentatiously, a man who carried with him an air of restraint. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties, and had done so for more than a century. His name was Lanto.

  If you know the night, there are many ways of moving through a city. There are short-cuts and long-cuts, and there are places which seem to have been designed for the purpose of being loitered in.

  In one such - a slim, shadowed passage connecting Leicester Square with the Charing Cross Road - Lanto duly loitered. This had proved a good hunting ground in the past, but the qualities which made it so suitable for Lanto's purposes - its seclusion, its darkness, its lack of human traffic - also meant that those who fished here needed patience.

  But then, patience - the ability to absorb boredom and turn it into serenity - was a birthright to Lanto's kind, and so it was with no sense of weariness that, as he finished his third cigarette, he finally heard the uneven trundling sound which told him that his next appointment was ready to see him.

  "Do you have a light, friend?" Lanto's voice was darker than the night, but lighter than his hair.

  "Oh, Jesus!" cried the man; drunk-eyed, unshaven for a week, in his fifties, sitting in a wheelchair that looked as if its previous owner had been run over by a minibus. “You scared the stuff out of me, like that!"

  "So sorry," said Lanto, with a smile which appeared reassuring but wasn't, and wasn't intended to be. He waved an unlit cigarette in the air in front of the man's face, while moving his feet, quickly, easily, so as to stand between the stranger and his freedom. "I was just wondering if you had a light?"

  The stranger was merely drunk, not senseless. He'd seen the business with the feet; fast and smooth it'd been, like Fred Astaire. He could see, even in this vague light, that the man standing before him - a striking, commanding man, calm and confident, who looked taller than he was, and made you somehow, whatever your fears, want to please him - was not the sort who spent Saturday nights in alleyways, asking strangers for lights.

  He could tell, certainly, that this charming man, with his understated, gentlemanly manliness, his smart, timeless clothes, did not mean him well. But what could he do? It is hard to meet charm with aggression; if you find it easy, you're a psychopath.

  "I've got a light, sure," he said, his voice as strong with defiance as it was shaky with despair; he knew what the inevitable looked like, all right, when it sat on his face. "No problem, pal - but shall we take it into the Square where we can see what we're doing?"

  "No," said Lanto. The stranger knew; didn't know what he knew, almost certainly, but he knew that something out of the ordinary was happening, and that it was bad. So: it was time for the stranger to become a victim. "No," said Lanto again, simply but not curtly, and the man sagged in his chair, in relief and resignation.

  Lanto threw his unlit cigarette to one side. "I think here will do fine." His hands moved as elegantly and as speedily as had his feet, and the victim was unconscious within a second or two at the most.

  Only a few seconds more, and Lanto was out of the alley, onto the Charing Cross Road - thinking "A falafel in pitta? With hot chilli sauce? Or straight home?" - when a noise from behind him sent him running back towards the alley, his long black coat flying to keep up.

  "Hey, you! What the hell do you think you're doing - leave that man alone!"

  Three young men and one younger woman (business suits, expensive haircuts, vodka and cologne, camera-phones in hand) looked up at Lanto's yell, and saw him framed in the entrance to the passageway: a shadowman, a darkness visible against the dark.

  Lanto’s erstwhile victim was lying on the ground, foetal, his chair upside down on top of him.

  Two men began to edge towards the nearer, Leicester Square end of the short, brick tunnel. The woman was slower; she struggled to hoist her tights, and to persuade her heels to move in the right direction. The third man, with a glance behind to see how near he was to light and safety, found time for one more boot in the prone body’s gut, and some career advice: “Get a job, you dirty scrounger!”

  Any further words died in his stomach, as Lanto - suddenly, impossibly upon them, and them with just inches to go before they reached their neon sanctuary - ripped his fingers backwards across the faces of the two stragglers. It was done in one motion: swift, smooth, casual. With a single seamless, throwaway movement, he scarred both deeply, and left one of them half-blind for life.

  They tried to scream, but couldn't. It was not until they'd been running for fifteen minutes - flat out, running wherever the streets led, just running - that they were finally free of the feeling that they were drowning in their own breath, and could at last make a noise other than a gurgle.

  "If you've come back for my wallet, matey," said the man on the ground, painfully hauling himself into his chair, "you're too late." He accepted a cigarette from Lanto. "I see your lighter's fixed, then? That's good." He smiled through bleeding lips.

  "Are you hurt?" said Lanto.
"Do you need an ambulance?"

  “I’ll be all right. I’ve had worse.” He brought a handful of jacket up to his nose and sniffed. “Just blood and dirt, I think. You saved me from that fate worse than death, anyway. There again, I’m sure there’s blokes in this town’d pay well to be pissed on by a posh bitch.” As he smoked, he studied Lanto through the smoke, candidly and with a wry expression. No longer afraid: he was no longer this man's victim, at any rate.

  "They took your wallet?" said Lanto.

  "That's right. Though I carry such an item purely for affectation, you understand. Paid my rent this afternoon, had a good drink this evening. There's not enough in that wallet to buy them a cup of tea each and a sticky bun between them, at London prices."

  "Is that why they were beating you? Disappointed with their haul?"

  "On the contrary. Do you have another of those cigarettes? I'm much obliged. No, they seemed more than happy when they checked the wallet. Laughing away, they were. Best yet, one of them said, which wasn't very flattering, as I took it to mean Poorest yet."

  Lanto frowned. "Why should they be pleased to steal a thin wallet?"

  The former victim, the ex-stranger, suddenly seemed to lose the strength which had held him up. He leaned back in his chair, sighed deeply and ran a hand over his face. "Oh, Jesus, I don't know. Just their idea of a joke, I think. One of them told me cripples were a drain on the economy. Actually, benefit-thieving cripples was the exact phrase. Said they were taking their taxes back.” He laughed, and drew on his cigarette. “They obviously don’t read the papers. At least a year now since the government stopped paying benefits. Sure, it's 'discriminatory to treat disabled people as if they are less able to work than the abled,' don't you know?"

  "Hell's bells ... " Lanto murmured, looking not at the man but at the ground, or through it. He shook his head, and gave the stranger a smile. “Is your chair still mobile? Let's get you to a taxi. My treat, friend, and my pleasure. We're not all the same in this city."

  "You're more than kind, pal.” The wheelchair resisted a bit, but its driver’s arms were strong, and after a second’s struggle it began moving towards the lights. "Especially considering ... well, what I mean is this: I know what happened earlier. I know what you are."

  "Indeed?" said Lanto. It was possible, he supposed. Most victims met him only once, and remembered very little about him when they came to. But who knew what unforeseen effect tonight's extra events might have had?

  The man stopped, put a hand on Lanto's arm, and stared firmly, deliberately into his dark eyes. His expression said: I'm a man. I'm entitled to the truth. His voice said: "Fair's fair, we've all a living to make. And God knows I owe you tonight for the rescue, which was most welcome and just in the nick of time if I may say so, and for the taxi, which is a rare bit of luxury that I shall savour. But one thing I have to know."

  "No," said Lanto, lighting two more cigarettes and passing one over.

  "No you won't tell me, or no it won't happen?"

  "No, it won't happen."

  "I won't become like you?"

  "You will not," said Lanto, softly. "I give you my word. You will continue to be what you are now."

  At that, the man seemed ready to resume their search for a cab. He laughed, and looked up again at Lanto. "Well, my friend, I suppose that's comforting news, but I have to say - judging from your fine coat, and your evident ease in the world of taxis and fancy cigarettes, I'd reckon yours is the better occupation!"

  Relief, perhaps, or the roller-coaster events of the night - or just the gorgeous release from immediate responsibility which climbing into a taxi always signifies - made the man feel suddenly drunk again, and he laughed carelessly all the way home.

  Lanto went home by another route, one known only to those who know the night with as much intimacy as a knife knows a wound. This was not a short-cut; he travelled slowly, his thoughts a storm of anger and foreboding.

  And determination: "This can't go on," vowed Lanto the bloodtaker - out loud, though to himself. "Things have gone too far, things are getting out of hand. Someone's got to do something." He paused to look up at the sky; the dark, rich sky. "We've got to do something," he said, to himself and to the night.

  ***

  When they abolished retirement, people must have thought: 'Well, that’s about it, surely, now you work from birth to death, they can’t really improve on that.'

  But then at a meeting in a boardroom somewhere some farsighted person says: “So people who illegally commit suicide don’t have to work any longer? Everybody else does, but the unlawfully dead don’t, because they’ve cheated the system? Like, how’s that even fair? And I’m going: I thought we were all in this together?”

  Which was only a thought, really, only an idea, nothing concrete. It was think-tankery, and it earned plenty of bonus for the consultants that came up with it, but it perhaps wouldn’t have got any further if it hadn’t been for the growing epidemic of ropetirement. All these people, in their seventies and eighties and hundreds, all these lazy old people, desperate to retire, to finish work - to stop, just to stop - and realising that there was one sure way of doing it: you weren’t allowed to stop working until you died, so, logically, when you just couldn’t carry on, when you just had to stop, the thing to do was …

  And that couldn’t be allowed. That was cheating. Which was why all the resources of a technologically brilliant civilization were brought to bear on the problem, until, at a Cabinet meeting that autumn, the Secretary of State for Fairness in Work was able to announce that a trial run of a new scheme, named Restart, was ready to begin. And ropetirement was no longer a way out. Cheats wouldn’t prosper.

  ***

  “You do sound like an old man,” said Orlandus. “Everything was good in the old days, eh? Come on, there's always been thugs and cruelty and psychos and sadists.”

  Orlandus was Lanto's cousin: not merely a Cousin, but actually, in the familial sense, a cousin. He was also a bloodtaker in his first youth - which is to say, his apparent and chronological ages were in unity. Born in the 1980s, he was, in many ways - and in almost all outward ways - a typical young man of his generation.

  Despite this gap of upbringing and experience, he and Lanto were close. Beyond the loyalty of Cousinhood, beyond even the natural affection of kinship - in a world, a life, in which true friendship was made all the more precious by its rarity - Orlandus and Lanto were true friends.

  And sometimes, they drove each other totally bastarding bonkers.

  It was two days after Lanto's encounter with the man in the wheelchair. Two days and two nights which Lanto had spent brooding. He was in no mood now for instant reassurance.

  "This was different," he said. "I'm telling you, things are changing."

  "The Fearful live in fear - that's why we call them the Fearful, right? I'm sorry, Lo, but I really can't see where you think you've made some great new discovery!" Orlandus sighed. “Look, I am listening. It's just that you haven't really told me anything yet." He loped into the kitchenette, came back with a pair of cold beers and a jumbo bag of tomato sauce-flavoured crispy snacks. They were at his flat, a compact, comfortable one-bed-plus-bath near Belsize Park tube station. Street-scented afternoon sunlight drifted through the single, large window.

  "I've told you what happened, and what I felt about it. I don't know what else I can tell you," said Lanto, taking one of the beers and digging an overflowing handful of crisps from the open sack. "Thanks. Mm - these are good."

  "Yeah, not bad are they? They also do them in pickled onion, but those stink a bit." A taste for food was one of the unusual characteristics which bound the two friends. They ate it purely for pleasure, of course; their sustenance they took otherwise. "These two guys," said Orlandus. "The ones who attacked the victim. They were definitely Fearful?"

  "Definitely."

  "Definitely not Cousins?"

  Lanto's face formed a patronising smile. "I think I can be relied upon to tell the Night
hood from the Fearful, Little Orly. I have been at it for a bit longer than you."

  "All right, then," said Orlandus, finishing his beer, and tipping up the bag of crisps to scoff down the last few crumbs. "So I ask again: what's the problem? With your many, long lifetimes of indispensable experience, O Lanto the Ancient and Learned, I'm sure you don't need a stripling like me to tell you that the Fearful behave like beasts, given the slightest chance. Or have you never heard of war, sweatshops, concentration camps ... "

  "No," Lanto interrupted, insistently. "This was different, it really was. And it's not just the other night. There's a different scent abroad these days. In a hundred and eleven years, I've never - "

  "In a hundred and eleven years!" echoed Orlandus, clutching his sides and rolling on the carpet in feigned hilarity. "Harken ye to the words of Lanto, ye Wise Old Vampire!"

  Lanto accepted the well-meant mockery with resignation. He was aware that this conversation was, in one sense, an odd reversal of roles, and that to some degree, Orlandus was playing the part of devil's advocate. It was, after all, the younger cousin who more usually argued from what might be called the modernist position, against Lanto's changeless conservatism.

  Orlandus was the one who lived so easily the twenty-first century life, of internet TV and smartphones; a bloodtaker who, as often as not, lived by day and slept by night; a street musician, who used his busking as a bloodtaking tactic, yes, for luring and engaging victims - but who also played music for the Fearful because he liked to.

  "What else should I do with my time?" he would ask, rhetorically, when Lanto chided him for the hours he spent in practice and performance. "Hang around all day, like some horror-flick needlefeeder? Sleep in a coffin till sundown, with my eyes open and my arms crossed and my dinner jacket freshly pressed? Music's fun, Lo, you should try it. Get yourself a hobby, get yourself a job." This last remark was meant satirically; no bloodtaker ever went short of money.

  To all of which Lanto had replied, knowing as he did so that he sounded pompous and middle-aged, "Firstly, I don't care to hear terms such as needlefeeder and vampire from your lips; and secondly, I should have thought it something close to immoral for one of us to take paid work at a time when so many of the Fearful are without it."