He thought I'd come all this way for him. He thought this thing, between him and me, was personal.
"I didn't." I said in-between chuckles, which grew thicker and damper with each breath, until my eyes fuzzed with water and I could barely see. "You silly old twat. I didn't."
I said:
Listen.
Her name was Jasmine Tomas.
She was… she was more beautiful than a new moon reflecting off a perfectly still sea. She was so beautiful I spouted corny old movie bullshit like that all the time, and I could get away with it and not get even a little bit embarrassed. She had skin and hair the colour of coffee – one with cream, the other without – and curves in all the right places. When she laughed it was too loud and made people look, but they always looked then smiled, because when she laughed it was like… an infection. Like everyone caught it straight away.
We disagreed about almost everything, but we disagreed in a weird way. Like it meant we thought just the same as each other, but would go hammer and tong to disagree over details. Ha. The colour of wrapping paper. New music. Pretentiousness of art. We couldn't start a conversation without arguing. It was great.
We loved each other so much it scared the living fuck out of me.
An aide came shuffling into the room, then, as silent as death. He didn't speak. He wheeled a medical stand before him carrying a small steel machine with a glass front and a system of tubes dangling below it. I ignored him. I carried on talking.
A week before Jasmine Tomas moved into my flat, she told me to get rid of all the photos I'd taken of her. This was six years' worth. She said… she said when we lived together all our photos should be of both of us, or neither of us.
She said that sort of thing a lot.
The thing about Jasmine Tomas was, it would be easy to mistake her for a romantic. It would be easy to be fooled by the things she said, the gestures she made. And then just when you figured you'd got her pegged she'd switch on the footy, or tell a sick joke, or come home from work with stories of scalpels and infections. One time, I cooked Jasmine a stew. I mean, fuck… my job was to go overseas and kill stuff. I don't cook. Still, it turned out okay, you know? Cheese, leeks, you name it.
So I took the lid off the stew when she arrived – wearing the purple-and-blue dress with the earrings I got for her birthday – and oh god I wanted her, and everything was just perfect, and the first thing she said was:
Looks just like the inside of a gangrenous leg.
And then she laughed too loud, like a drain, and I laughed too. I couldn't help it.
The aide took the end of the rubber tube John-Paul had fitted to his arm. He slotted it neatly onto a spigot on the side of the steel machine, and turned towards me. He avoided my gaze.
My arse hurt. I kept talking.
He pulled a needle out of a plastic wrapper, and came forwards.
The first time I met Jasmine Tomas, for the record, she was teaching a group of wankers with too much testosterone about biohazards. All part of the training. She'd been seconded to the MOD from some governmental research-team or other – had more letters after her name than an episode of Sesame Street – and there she was, stuck in front of a room of leering arseholes who spent far longer staring at her tits than at the projector presentations she brought along. So… a few of those same arseholes dared another arsehole to ask her an embarrassing question about the dangers of sexual infection during fieldwork, and she didn't skip a beat. Told him she'd examine his infected areas after the lecture as long as he promised not to leak pus on her, then kept on talking over the top of the laughter.
I was the arsehole. I went and apologised after she'd finished. She took it well.
A week later we got dinner, then coffee, then the best fuck I ever had.
Three years later I was still killing people for 'Her Divine Majesty's Government', only now I was looking forward to the weekend just like every other guy, bored of his job.
Jasmine Tomas was my weekend.
The canula was in my arm, somewhere. Fitted to the tube that was fitted to the machine. I couldn't see behind my back.
My arse continued to hurt.
The aide flicked a switch with a devotional smile towards his master, then stood with his back to me, fussing over the machine.
And the tube – oh fucking hell I understood – the tube that led from me to the machine to John-Paul, it filled with blood like a long thermometer; red mercury bulging upwards.
My arm felt warm and cold at the same time. A prickling sensation. Pins and needles, killing my cells, spreading across me. And oh Jesus fuck shit I got it, I got it you withered old bastard, and I felt sick and weak and faint, but I kept talking because it's all I could do.
I said:
Listen.
I was never really designed, you know, for the romantic thing. Wasn't sure how to do it, I guess. But then nor was she, so we got on fine. Squabbled and sniped and smarmed our way through it all, awkward as you like. Never happy for long, but never sad for long either. Fuck fairytales. Fuck 'perfect'. We loved each other like nobody else, and that's enough.
So she decides to move in. I asked her, she said yes. The thing is, she works all day every day and I'm… out of the country. Business trips. Frequent flyer, blah-blah. So we figure we'll see more of each other if it's all cosy. All domestic. No need to schedule it every time.
Then the disease started. You remember? Right at the very beginning, it was just… some new thing. Nothing to worry about. They sent me to the East, to… Well. It doesn't matter where or why. I got back and Jasmine Tomas was supposed to move in that week, and all I got was a bloody text message telling me we'd have to postpone.
She'd been reassigned. Couldn't say where. Couldn't say why.
So I waited.
And the world died around me.
John-Paul just stared.
With my blood pouring out of me, filling him up like a greedy mosquito, bringing colour and warmth to his shrivelled face, he just stared and listened. He groaned once in a while, like a man in the throes of passion, and it made me feel sick to imagine him balls-deep in someone, grunting like a pig.
I felt sick in a lot of ways.
The world wobbled around me. Nothing was the right shade. Greyness was creeping out of every corner, and stinging the insides of my arms. My eyes rolled. My arse hurt.
I twitched my fingers behind my back, certain now that the aide was too busy watching the machine to turn around. I worked with all the speed and focus I could muster as everything slid away into bloodless limbo.
I kept talking. I kept fucking talking.
It was all I could do to cling-on. To stay awake. To stay alive.
I said:
I did some digging. Pulled some strings at the SIS; found out what she'd been sent to do. Where she'd gone, even.
UN mandate. That's all I got. Reassigned to a secret location as part of an international research team. Supposed to find a cure for the AB-virus.
'Project Pandora,' it was called.
John-Paul looked up.
And moaned, softly.
My fingers moved behind my back.
My arse stopped hurting.
Blood moved on my hands.
I said:
Listen.
Everybody died.
Jasmine Tomas, who I loved in that old movie way… I never heard from her again. Not for five years.
People died and lay on the streets, ambulances rushed back and forth, the world shat out its own guts and sat there like Elvis, poised on a toilet, dying by degrees.
I went back to Vauxhall Cross. I checked her records. Blood-type AB+.
As good as dead.
John Paul wasn't listening any more. Not so you'd know it, anyway.
His eyelids fluttered and his lips twisted in a smile, and I could see the strength filling him up, my own blood giving him life, turning him back into that man in the photo, the man on the TV, the calm and peaceful saint.
He communed with God through the medium of my fucking blood.
Blood-type O, rhesus negative. Safe to transfuse into anyone, more-or-less. Not quite good for him, not quite recommended. Risk of anaphylactic shock if conducted too fast, but still, but still…
My fingers twisted.
My body slumped. My brain started to slip away.
Something clicked quietly behind me.
I said:
For five years, I didn't exist.
I was just… alive.
And then one day the machines in the SIS comms-room chattered to life, and the correct passwords slotted into place, and the power fluttered through the consoles, and in a string of exchanged information a single word rushed-by.
'PANDORA.'
And a voice said:
"Are… Are you there?"
And it's a long shot. And maybe it's coincidence. Maybe it's fluke.
She should be dead. I know that.
But…
But you listen to me, you fucking leech. You listen to me, because you're still alive and you should be dead, and so nothing in the whole world – you hear me? – nothing, no one, no fucking old reptile or his gang of delusional pricks, would stop me from finding out.
So here I am.
And John-Paul Rohare Baptise smiled, like he'd been catching-up on what I was saying, and his eyes weren't sunken any more, and his lips were red, and he said:
"Mm, yes. Yes. Here you are. And… hah… And maybe you aren't the arch-Satan after all. Maybe you didn't come to get me, eh? Maybe I just got in your way? That's it, I think. But it doesn't matter, you see? No. No, it doesn't. Because here you are, and here you die."
And I smiled despite the weakness. Despite the nausea. Despite the rushing in my ears.
"It won't be as perfect," he said to himself, eyes closed, rapturous, "as a child. A child is perfection. The communion is… perfection. Yes. Mm."
His eyes opened.
He looked right at me.
"But you'll do. For today. It's only fitting. After all the trouble you've caused, mister. It's only fitting that you make a donation."
I smiled and I dropped the handcuffs to the floor by my feet, and the sliver of metal that was buried in my arse tinkled from the lock – the lock it had helped me pick – to the floor.
And John-Paul Rohare Baptise was opening his mouth to protest, to shout for help, to cry-out in baby like shock, but it wouldn't do the old fucker any good, because my fist was already in his face and his teeth were already shattered, and I was already moving onwards and head butting the aide and cracking his nose, and he went down quick and quiet, and I was turning back to the groping old bastard with my knuckles bare and bloody, and this time I didn't stop until he was silent on the floor, and lying in his own juice.
Scratch that:
My juice.
And then I pulled out the tubes from my arm, and threw up like a trooper.
CHAPTER TWENTY
When Cy came blundering in fifteen minutes later, things were a little different.
I wasn't naked any more for a start.
"You wanted me, your holin-?" He started.
And stopped.
I tried to imagine how he must have seen things, in that cold moment when we all froze and stared at each other. But I didn't know him, and could only guess what his brain did in moments like this.
Would he have fixated on the blood? There was certainly enough of it about: great thick pools, already congealing, from where Nate's shaking hands had tried to puncture the comatose aide's artery with the crude transfusion tube. Third time lucky, in the end.
Or maybe Cy's eyes, hidden away behind those stupid shades, went straight to his Lord and Master? The great Abbot John-Paul, slumped on the floor with his teeth smashed out, whimpering as consciousness came slinking back.
After I'd cut Nate free, as the old junkie staggered and whinged and gagged, he told me I needed more blood – quickly. I'd wanted it from the Abbot – take back what he'd stolen. It seemed only fair.
But no, no, no. Nate had shook his head, eyes unfocused, shivering in need of a fix, telling me no. The old man had a different blood type.
"'Member… 'member the TeeVee show?" He grumbled. "'Member the clumpin' cells? Clots inside. Wrong type. One way only."
So he'd swapped the tubes and let me leech off the spindly little aide instead. I would've felt bad, if I had the energy. If I gave a flying fuck.
So John-Paul was still lying where I'd left him, moving slowly, scrabbling in the blood. Was that what Cy saw first, when he stepped in?
Or was it me? Maybe that was it. Instant fascination. The English bastard who'd blown-up his airport, who'd wiped-out his unit of grunts, who'd run rings round him in New York, who'd almost executed him following the Tag, who'd led the army that ejected his gang from their base, who'd held his attention as an honest-to-god Red Injun snuck up and stabbed him through the skull, and who'd beaten-up the withered old man he worshipped.
I guess you couldn't blame him for being a tad grumpy.
Was that what he focused on, as he came marching in? Me standing there, looking and feeling like I'd died, wanting nothing more than to curl up and sleep for a year, letting my body adjust.
No.
Fair enough, the freaky shithead pulled a gun on me the second he appeared – quicker than I could see – but his heart wasn't in it. He wasn't going to shoot.
No. What Cy looked at as he stepped inside was this:
Nate's bag.
"Ah," he said. "Hm."
"K-kill… kill them…" The Abbot groaned from the floor, bent double. "Look what… they did…"
"Yes, holiness." Cy said, voice flat, not even looking down. "Get out now, sir. I'll deal with it."
And so the Abbot John-Paul Rohare Baptiste, spiritual head of the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn, turned his back on the arch-Satan and wobbled away on his hands and knees, trailing blood. The door swung closed behind him.
And then it was just me, and Nate, and Cy. And a gun.
And Bella saying:
Not your problem.
"Well, now," said the Cardinal.
Nate was a wreck. Sweat poured off him. The effort of dangling there off the cell bars, then thinking straight long enough to hook me up to the whitewashed aide, must have finished him. He could barely stand, snot and tears and vomit decorating his face. I wondered how long it had been since his last fix. Certainly since before the battle by the bridge. I wondered what sort of weird-arsed home-made shit he'd been chasing anyway.
"Nigger looks like death," said Cy, grinning.
Nate swayed where he stood. "J's… Jus' need my… my…" He blinked, trying to focus. "Medicine."
A lot happened at once.
Nate lurched towards the red pack with his arms outstretched, gurgling from his guts upwards. Cy moved even faster, gun shifting to freeze the man on his spot. He had the sense to stay.
And I took my chance.
Pounced.
Fists raised. No way he could turn back to cover me in t – fuck, he's fast The pistol muzzle sat on my forehead. Cy smiled.
"Now." He said. "Just you back up. Back up there."
I didn't move.
"Limey. Limey, you hear?"
I worked my jaw. "I hear you."
"You back up. Or the nigger gets shot."
"Not me?"
"Hah. Not you. No guns for you. Not 'less you make me."
I didn't move. Didn't care.
Let him go for Nate.
(But-)
No buts.
(But he saved my l-)
No excuses. You know the rules.
Don't you let yourself owe anyone anything.
Don't you fucking give up, soldier!
(Sir, no sir, etc etc.)
Let him do it.
Let him try.
The second the gun moves, he's mine.
Cy said: "Don't say. Didn't warn you."
And then Nate was on the floo
r, and a gunshot hung in the air, and the stink of guns and the shock of movement, and the pistol was back against my forehead – hot, singeing my skin – before I'd even tilted forwards.
Too fast to see.
He, I decided, isn't natural.
Nate screamed. His foot was a wreck. Bones poked at fractured angles from a fragmented red sneaker, fountaining blood and singed fabric.
"Back up." Cy said again, and still the grin. "Back up. Or next. His face."
I backed up. Nate's screams turned to moans, then whimpered away. Cy kept the gun aimed squarely at me, sidestepping around the growing slick on the floor, squatting to his haunches beside the heavy case. The muzzle never wavered. The dagger-pommel poked from his head like a rubber cock, and I bit-down on the cheap joke in my mouth.
"Didn't have time," he said, smiling like a Cheshire cat, "to grab my own. Back at the Secretariat. Shit, Limey… You shoulda seen the stashes. Junk coming in from all over. Collectors collecting. Scavs bartering. Even had us a team of geeks. Geeks making it. New kinds. Mixing it like fuckin' artists."
"Drugs?" I said. The word sounded… naive.
"Best currency." He licked his lips and rummaged in the bag, not even looking. "'Cept for God. Heh. 'Cept for kids."
He withdrew a sealed hypoderm. Bit the rubber flange off the needle and spat it away.
The gun didn't waver.
"Put it to good use. Trickled it out. Some to Klans, some overseas. Let them know who's boss. See? Rewards for good boys. Sweeties for ignorant masses. Heh. Manna from heaven. Always kept the best shit for ourselves."
His stupid syntax was pissing me off. "Until the ignorant masses rose up and kicked your arse, you mean?"
"Uh-uh." He shook his head. "'Til this nigger stole it." He kicked Nate's ruined foot, drawing-up another round of tortured screams.
Then he lifted the hypoderm to his neck, still staring right at me, punched through the skin and squeezed the plunger. His whole body went tense, cords straining.
"What is it?" I said, morbidly fascinated, watching the liquid vanish inside him.
His lips peeled back.
He hissed, like a boiler reaching critical mass.
Then grunted.
Then he yanked out the needle with a girlish giggle and chucked it away, letting it smash on the floor.
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