by Guy Adams
"Yeah."
"Do what you've got to do," said Ashe. "Your choice."
Tom shuffled his feet. Christ he could do with a drink. A drink always did sharpen his ability to make decisions. Or rob him of the need to.
"I just don't want her to die," he said, "she deserves better. But…"
The door to the apartment banged open and a man ran in firing a revolver. A couple of the bullets lodged themselves in the walls of Tom's apartment, a third in his forehead.
Ashe raised his gun and fired without even thinking, shooting the man twice in the chest and sending him crashing against the far wall.
13.
Miles and Carruthers pushed their way past the ever-increasing crowd of cameramen and coiffured anchor-persons, trying to see what was going on beyond the police tape.
"Jesus," said a guy to Carruthers left, "did someone send out invitations?"
"I don't think we have to worry about anyone wondering who we are," Carruthers said to Miles.
The police had erected a stretch of tarpaulin to block the view of their excavation. Nobody needed to see their loved ones pulled out of the dirt on the news. Lieutenant Dutch Wallace was pacing up and down, clearly uncomfortable at working to a crowd. He knew he'd have to speak to them and was pissed off about it. Dutch's indigestion was moving into overdrive. What the hell was going on out here today?
When he heard the sound of car horns and a motor tear past the entrance to the site he actually turned away. No more, he thought, this man is at his limit…
The car wasn't ignored by everyone. Joey Spencer, a cameraman from the Orlando affiliate of CBS, was resting his shoulder and sneaking a joint in the cab of his van when the Oldsmobile sped by. It had been clear to him that shooting footage of twitchy cops and tarpaulin wasn't going to win him any awards and he had been quick to tire of it, whatever that shrewish bitch, Tyler Mercer had to say. Mercer fancied herself a rising star in the world of broadcast news. Joey thought she'd be gone by the fall. She could barely string a sentence together and if tits were all it took then he'd seen – and cupped – better. When he saw the speeding Oldsmobile in his rearview mirror he jumped out of the van and ran to the roadside with his camera. Why he couldn't say. A speeding car was hardly award material either after all. There had just been something in his guts that told him the story had switched sides on them.
He got to the roadside, camera rolling, just in time to catch that tank of a car hit the concrete overpass and explode. The footage was shaky – Joey couldn't help but flinch when the car impacted – but it captured it in some detail. The networks would have no doubt showed it slowed right down – if, that is, they had been able to show it. Their audiences would have cooed at the screen as the front of the car immediately concertinaed on impact. The rear bumper flipped up as if the General Motor company had taken to installing hinges mid-chassis. The car turned from a big, sprawling, beast to a ball of metal and glass. The fuel line ignited, immersing the whole in a surge of flame that lit with the sound of someone being struck in the stomach by a baseball bat. The other cars on the road, already cautious of the speeding lunatic that had been the unfortunate Hughie Bones, were able to avoid further damage. If it had been busier then there would have been a pileup for sure but traffic was light and those cars that had been behind the Olds pulled safely to the side of the road. The passengers climbed out and ogled the scene before them, half in horror, half in delight, after all, it's not every day you get to see something right out of a Hollywood action movie.
Hughie Bones got more attention from his fellow man right then than he had achieved at any other point in his life. Shame he had to die to do it.
Joey Spencer kept his camera trained on the accident for some time. There seemed no rush to check the wreck for survivors, naturally there couldn't be any.
Lieutenant Dutch Wallace would have agreed with the cameraman's assumption but he wore a badge that insisted he get involved nonetheless.
"Jesus wept," he said, "this day is just fucked."
A blackened and weeping body pulled itself out of what was left of the rear passenger window and fell to the asphalt with a wet hiss, just to prove the Lieutenant right.
14.
"You're going to need this."
Mario tried to hide the gun in his jacket but it was too big for any of the pockets. If he tucked it into the waistband of his jeans he thought he'd likely shoot his dick off. Finally, irritated by the sort of impracticalities he had never concerned himself with in his movies, he cradled it inside his coat like something he was trying to protect from the rain. He needn't worry, he supposed, the passengers on the train were no different to the people walking the platforms. They were insubstantial and he was clearly beneath their attention. There was only one person that could probably see him and he was several carriages in front.
Not that he was any more real than the rest, Mario thought, couldn't be… he was probably lying face down in a Turin gutter right now, drink and the ghosts of Sixties' drugs making him dream this madness while he slept.
Fine by him, maybe he could get a new movie out of it, a time travelling assassin, something a bit different from his usual stuff.
The darkness beyond the train windows was replaced by a run-down looking street as the train came crashing to earth. Mario tumbled from his seat, dropping the gun onto the floor. God damn it, he thought, the heroes in his movies never behaved like this. He grabbed the gun and reached for the door.
Just as he was turning the handle he saw the old man pass by. He waited a second, not wanting to bump into him. Peering through the dirty glass of the window, he watched the man for a few seconds then, satisfied he wouldn't be noticed, opened the door and jumped out.
"You can't park that here," said a voice behind him as he stepped down onto the broken road. He turned to see an old black man who appeared to be wearing an entire wardrobe's worth of clothes. A wave of whisky and tobacco hit Mario as the man coughed. "You gots some kind of permit or something?"
Mario smiled and held up his gun. "This is my permit old man," he said in a passable American accent, "want to see it in action?"
The old man backed away in a panic, tripping over his own feet and tumbling into the rubble.
That was better, Mario thought, much more like the movies.
The old man was out of sight now and he had to run to catch up. Just as he cleared the rear of the train he saw him enter a brownstone across the street.
Inside he could hear the man's footsteps going up the stairwell, heard him talking to somebody. He's as mad as me, he thought, chuckling as he jogged up the stairs after him.
The old guy stopped on the fourth floor. Mario peered between the banister railings and watched. There was a pigeon fluttering around the man's head as he opened one of the doors and stepped inside. Which was ridiculous, but no more so than anything else Mario decided, trotting up the last few stairs and moving along the hallway towards the door of 405.
OK, Mario thought, if I'm going to do this I'm going to be Pacino about it. He waited for a few moments, took a deep breath and, in his best Scarface frame of mind, shoved the door to the apartment open and went in shooting.
Every day above ground is a good day, he thought and smiled as he pulled the trigger of the gun over and over. Two shots went wide but the third bagged his target. OK he thought, time to wake up now…
Which is when Ashe shot him.
15.
"What the hell?" asked Lieutenant Dutch Wallace of nobody in particular, before running into the road to assist what he could only assume was the hardiest road crash victim he had ever had the misfortune of encountering. "It's okay buddy," he said before realising that he had no idea what gender this thing even was. It was a mess of charred flesh and jutting bone, and it occurred to Dutch that the kindest thing to do was to shoot the poor bastard, who would want to live like this? Dutch gave a yelp of panic as the thing grabbed his ankle.
"Hey," the creature said, "don't suppose you
'd give a man a hand would you? I could die of boredom trying to crawl over there at this rate."
"It's him," said Carruthers, "the prisoner."
Miles hadn't doubted it. He had recognised the car well enough from the last time they had seen it, pulling out of this very same entrance leaving a trail of choking innocents behind it.
"Yeah," he said, "hard to kill isn't he?"
The crowd of reporters had, despite their natural inclination to flock towards bad news, fallen back. The sight of this thing, smoke rising off it as it continued to crawl towards them, was not something they thought they would be reporting for their newspapers or interviewing for cable broadcast. This was too grotesque even for them. If only it would have the decency to lie down dead – surely it would do so any moment? Surely? – then they would happily point their cameras at it and write elegant and emotional words about the victim's passing. But while it still breathed, lungs inflating and deflating with the noise of a crumpled plastic bag, there was nothing that could bring them closer to it.
When it grabbed Dutch's ankle there had been a ripple of disgust through the crowd that had echoed the policeman's cry. That ripple intensified as the barely-human body began to pull itself up Dutch, hand over crispy hand. It left sticky, yellow handprints in the man's uniform trousers as it reached higher, grabbing at his shirt.
"Jesus," Dutch moaned, reaching out to help and trying not to upchuck over the damn thing, "someone give me a little help here, what you say?"
The reporters said nothing, but Miles pushed his way past them and jogged over towards the policeman. The last thing he wanted was for the creature to be aware of him but he couldn't watch the poor Lieutenant struggle on his own.
"Oh," the creature said, noticing him even as it continued to pull itself up the policeman's body, "if it isn't my favourite dealer in antiques and pithy remarks. How are you enjoying Florida, Miles? Be careful on the roads, the drivers here are nuts." It chuckled and a piece of its cheek fell off and landed on the tarmac with sound of an egg dropping from its carton and exploding on a sideboard. This was more than Dutch could stand and he fought to tear the thing off him, Miles tried to help, screwing up his face as his fingers dug into the black tar of the prisoner's back. Carruthers was at his side, grabbing the thing's hands and trying to tug them off the policeman's clothes.
"Get off me!" the thing roared and both Miles and Carruthers fell back, pushed away mentally rather than physically. Lieutenant Dutch Wallace's eyes rolled up inside his head and he ceased trying to defend himself, allowing the prisoner to pull itself up onto his back. It poked its sticky head over his shoulder, strands of meat pulling between the policeman's cheek and its own as it looked from side to side, surveying the horrified crowd with creamy eyes.
"Right," it said, "best foot forward." No more than a puppet, Dutch began to stride towards the building site.
16.
"Who was he?" said Ashe, stepping over to Mario's body. He looked over his shoulder at the pigeon. "Who was he?"
"Nobody important," the bird replied, "we need to get out of here, one last stop remember?"
Ashe looked down at Mario, the dying Italian grinned. "Every dog has his day."
Ashe looked to Tom. He was splayed across the floor, legs and arms twisted. The only consolation Ashe could think of was that he must have died instantly. As he thought about that for a second he decided that was no fucking consolation at all. All of this made him so sick he could barely think.
"Build not break," the pigeon said, turning its head on its side. A door appeared in the middle of the room, it clicked open and Ashe could smell the ocean on the other side.
"Come on!" the pigeon shouted. "Get both of them dumped before the younger Tom sees them."
Ashe had forgotten all about Tom's younger self, passed out from drink next door. Before he would lift a finger though he wanted the House to understand one thing.
"Everyone's important," he said, "absolutely everybody."
"Whatever," the pigeon replied, "now come on!"
17.
As the prisoner rode Dutch's back into the Home Town construction site, most of the reporters finally gave up on their story.
"Fuck it," said Joey Spencer, summing up the feeling of most of them. He dropped his camera from his shoulder, the tape with the road accident now followed by footage of the dirt at his feet. He got into his truck and noticed his hated anchor, Tyler Mercer running towards him in the rear-view mirror. He briefly considered driving off without her but decided that would only make assholes out of them both and reached over to pop open the passenger door.
"Quickly," he shouted, though if he'd been asked to explain why they needed to get out of there so fast words would have failed him. It was an instinctual thing, something terrible was about to happen, he knew it for a fact, and if this van could get him out of here before it did then he would be a happy man. She climbed in, looked at him, and without saying a word, he gunned the engine and pulled out onto the highway, narrowly missing Miles and Carruthers as he did so.
Miles had got to his feet first and dragged Carruthers out of the way as the van swerved past them. "What's it doing?" he asked. "What the hell's in there that it wants?"
"I've no idea," Carruthers admitted. "But any chance we have of stopping it is slowly slipping away."
"Stopping it?" Miles almost laughed. "It's just lived through a car crash that would have pulverised a rhino, what the hell are we supposed to do to stop it?"
"No idea about that either," Carruthers admitted, "but it's hurt, we can see that, and if it can be hurt it can be killed."
"Really? Not sure I follow the logic of that if I'm honest."
Carruthers shrugged. "Me neither but it makes me feel a bit better so I intend to stick with it."
They walked back towards the building site, the reporters running either side of them, getting into their vans and cars. There was a look on their faces, a vacant switch towards self-preservation. None of them were talking, they just wanted to be far away. Miles didn't blame them, walking towards the site was like pushing against something strong but invisible. His subconscious begging him to pay attention, to do as he was told and run, as fast and as far away as he could manage.
"Can you feel that?" he asked Carruthers. "It's hard to walk. Like my body wants to do anything but this…"
Carruthers nodded, his face twitching and teeth clenched.
Ahead of them, Dutch had stopped moving, the creature on his back reaching towards the sky with one blackened hand. Above their heads the air began to distort, light refracting and space folding as the creature pushed out, forcing its cremated fingers into a gap in reality that only it could see. The sky split, a solid bisection of the world above them, as if a bread knife had been passed through the air and parted it. Beyond was darkness, a void between their reality and whatever other existence the prisoner was aiming for. Then they began to see shapes in that void, nothing they could fix on, just a sense of movement. Something moving just out of the corner of their eyes.
The prisoner seemed delighted to see those moving shapes, to him – it – they were reassuringly familiar.
There was noise, a squealing feedback, a needle forced against its groove. A wet scream of rubber against rubber. That alone was almost more than they could stand, their hands pressed to their ears in a pointless attempt to drown it out.
Things moved around them, nothing they could see. It was like swimming at night and feeling the brush of dark shapes against you.
This is pointless, Miles thought, this is not something we can fight, this is beyond anything we're designed to deal with.
Then there was a flood of light, as dark as egg yolk, pumping up from the prisoner and into the darkness above. This was it, this was going home.
18.
Ashe walked through the rain, firing his gun at the window of the bar and trying not to remember Tom's dead face as he saw the man's younger self scrabble for safety beneath the booth table.
<
br /> He stared at Elise instead, saw her as Tom had. As a beautiful and special woman.
He had barely been able to talk to her at the strip joint where she worked. Just handed her the box and left.
"Nearly there," the pigeon had said as Ashe walked down the street to stand across the way from Terry's bar and wait.
"I never stood a chance at changing all this did I?" Ashe asked.
"No," the pigeon replied, hovering under an awning to keep dry. "There was only ever one way to deal with him, like it or not."
Beyond the cracked glass Tom and Elise vanished and Ashe sagged. Almost done.
He went inside to retrieve the box. When he returned to the sidewalk, Sophie was waiting for him.
