Walking Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  “They saying you got the power, Foxy,” she crooned.

  Foxe shrugged, then decided that that was too indefinite a response.

  “They say wrong, ma’am,” he said.

  “They saying you put your soul through the locks of doors, and you send it round the baddlements, blowing death in the soldiers’ faces.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Don’ you say nonsense at me, Foxy. I got the power. I know all these things. Perhaps you got a little power. But I got a lot. And now I going to have some more, cause of taking your power, Foxy. I put your soul in a little old beer-bottle and keep it on my shelf.”

  She leaned slightly forward as she spoke. Her voice, already deep, had become a guttural croak, and her accent had shifted so far into the Island dialect that Foxe wouldn’t have understood what she was saying if he hadn’t spent the last weeks living with villagers. He stared back at her, shocked by his own dislike. Just as he had loved Lou for her goodness, so he hated Mrs Trotter for her badness—not for what she had done to other people, for what she might do to him, but for what she was. Six months ago he would have asserted his civilised invulnerability with a smile or a show of polite interest. Now he watched her fully seriously, waiting for whatever might happen next.

  They stood like this for at least a minute, face to face and silent. Her lips began to move, muttering breathy invocations; her face changed several times, a series of masks rather than expressions, all unreadable; Foxe faintly sensed a sort of moral energy beaming out of her, aimed at him but making no impact. Suddenly, along with the hatred, an extraordinary freshet of pity seemed to spurt inside him, pity for her, for her power-lust, for her cruelty. His own lips moved involuntarily.

  “All that’s over now,” he said gently.

  At the sound of his voice she stopped muttering and her own face came back to her. Without taking her eyes from his she stepped down to ground-level and he began to move out of her way.

  What happened next seemed at the time to be a single convulsion of activity, but he later discovered it to be two quite separate events. Mrs Trotter took her right hand out of her reticule, swung and punched him just above the hip. At the same time she began to dance.

  The dance lasted for less than half a step. The swing of her arm seemed to start it and the leap of her body to carry it on, and then it was over and she was falling while the stream of bullets battered into her.

  Foxe turned quite slowly to the source of the noise, raising his hands above his head when he saw that the man coming round the corner of the verandah with his gun levelled was Captain Angiah.

  OUT OF THE MAZE

  1

  “Happy to see you, doctor Foxe,” said the Captain with no trace of irony.

  “Why …?” whispered Foxe, lowering his arms.

  The Captain walked past him and stared down at the body.

  “One shot woulda been plenty, I guess,” he said, as if ashamed at the extravagance of a whole magazine. But Foxe remembered the stories of Rasputin’s death—it was only natural to feel that Mrs Trotter might need more than one bullet.

  “Now come this way, please,” said the Captain, like a guide about to conduct his party to the next sight of historical interest. He led Foxe between the huts and down the forest track to where a spick-and-span jeep waited under a timber-tree; he went to its rear, picked up the handset of a transceiver and spoke in a rapid mutter.

  “Baby. Baby. Baby. Do you hear me? Over … Yeh, but the old chicken’s cooked already. Over … Sure it’s too soon, but she was making to kill the little pig. Over … Well, I guess all you can do is hurry along the rest of the dinner. Over … Sure. Over and out.”

  Foxe listened bewildered while the forest flickered and chirrupped round him. Suddenly he was aware of a struggle beginning inside his jacket pocket, as though Quentin, who had either slept or cowered through the whole of these encounters, was now overcome with claustrophobia. When Foxe looked down he saw the faded khaki jerking and twitching, and in the centre of the convulsions a dark spike like a large thorn—it must have been just about where Mrs Trotter had struck him. Alarmed, he eased the thorn free with his right hand and with his left lifted Quentin from the pocket. The moment his fingers touched fur he knew that something was badly wrong. There was a speck of blood on the left shoulder and that paw hung limp, but the other muscles were unnaturally taut, and spasms of contraction rippled along them.

  “Will you get in please?”

  The Captain seemed jittery, and paid no attention to the fact that Foxe was holding a rat in one hand and a dart-like thorn in the other; he made a gesture of impatience with his gun, so Foxe climbed into the passenger seat and was instantly roared back to the centre of the village. The Captain cut the motor and leaped out.

  “You’ll have to help here,” he said, bending down by Mrs Trotter’s shoulders and dragging her towards the back of the jeep. Foxe climbed out, gently settled Quentin and the thorn on the tramped earth and went round.

  “That’s not how,” said the Captain. “Grab her at the knees … Yeh. Up! One, two, three … OK, thanks, doctor.”

  “Something’s wrong with my rat. I wonder …”

  The Captain frowned, but before he could speak the radio gabbled a quacking call-sign. He leaned across the bloody sprawl of the body and snatched the handset.

  “Baby. I hear you. Over.”

  As he listened to the quack his expression cleared to one of strange pleasure. Like the gardener who had killed the snake his excitement broke out into movement. The fingers of his free hand snapped as if in rhythm to the gabble. At last he said “Great, that’s just great. Yeh, sure, I’ll fetch him along.” He put the handset down and turned grinning to Foxe with his hand held out to shake.

  “Congratulations. Doctor. Now we better be getting along to town.”

  “If you say so. But first please come and look at my rat.”

  They moved round the jeep and stood gazing down at the path, where Quentin was crawling round in circles on his three good legs with his back arched high and his fur staring.

  “What’s into him?” asked the Captain. “Something bit him?”

  Foxe bent and picked up the thorn.

  “Mrs Trotter tried to stick this into me,” he said. “The rat was in that pocket and she got him instead.”

  “Jesus! That must be snake-apple!”

  “Uh?”

  “I saw her take a swing at you, but I thought I got her before she touched you. Jesus! If she got it into you!”

  “Yes, she was off balance already. But what about my rat?”

  “Dead. I don’t know about rats, but if a man gets stuck with a snake-apple dart, he goes walking round a bit, grinning and walking, but already he’s dead. Perhaps he knows where he’s going, but he can’t stop grinning long enough to tell anybody. Then he drops dead.”

  “How long?”

  “Ten minutes. Half hour. Varies.”

  “I see … would you be kind enough to shoot my rat?”

  “Sure.”

  Foxe turned and walked towards the hut where he had lived with Quentin and Lou. At his third pace a gun made its single sharp note but he didn’t falter in his stride. By the time he came back with the blue blanket the Captain was sitting in the driver’s seat. Quentin’s body was lying motionless on the path. Its head had disappeared completely. Foxe lifted it by the tail and laid it beside Mrs Trotter, then hung the blanket over the rail of the dance-house and climbed into the jeep. The engine growled. They bucketed away.

  Two people, thought Foxe. A man and a woman got the power. Mrs Trotter, yes. Quentin? He shook his head, deliberately refusing to adopt a logical attitude to the Sunday Dwarf’s prophecy either for or against. It was perfectly possible that Mrs Trotter had arranged for that to happen, intending Lou and Foxe as the victims, and had simply mismanaged things.

 
; “Are you alone?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Just you and Mrs Trotter? Couldn’t you have sent someone? Or brought an escort?”

  “Everybody else is too scared to come, Doctor. There’s been a lot of crappy stories floating round about what you did in the Castle. But Mrs Trotter, she’s not afraid of anybody, and it suits me to bring her up here alone, because my colleagues are scared to begin if she’s going to be in the room. They think perhaps she’ll smell something.”

  The appalling track dipped to a muddy corner, almost a hair-pin. The Captain’s sudden bonhomie closed into an ecstasy of concentration as the jeep lurched and slithered under liana-hung branches, with its wheels spewing earth into the rattling leafage. Foxe waited till a simpler stretch let him relax a little.

  “You brought her up here to kill her?”

  “I guess so. Yeh. I’ve been telling myself a long time one day I’m going to kill her—long before I joined the revolution. But I thought perhaps you’d be easier to handle if she helps me to find you first. The revolution needs you, Doctor.”

  Foxe sat silent, not very interested in any of that. His mind was full of Cactus, and what she would feel about Quentin’s death. He could see a change coming, heralded by a colonnade of glaring gaps between the shadowed trunks. The track headed for the largest arch. It was like coming out of a cave, out of a primal world, out of Nature’s green womb, into the shock of sunlight. By the time Foxe unscrewed his eyes the Captain had his foot well down on the accelerator and the jeep was humming and jolting along a real road, drearily straight and pocked with pot-holes, between a plantation of leprous-looking grapefruit trees and a patchwork of abandoned smallholdings.

  With the shock came a change in Foxe’s own mind. He had been thinking about Cactus and Quentin with a sad but quiet acceptance, and then between one jolt and the next he seemed to move into a harsh-lit stage, a stage on which he must soon act. The pieces of his world exploded and reshaped themselves, much as they had when he had hooked the skin-diver in Fall Bay. Quentin was only one of the thousands of rats which had died under Foxe’s care—and many of those thousands he had killed with his own hands, because he had thought it necessary. He had killed men too, though only one with his own hands, and those deaths now seemed to him as necessary as the deaths of the rats. But there was one death, Ladyblossom, the human Ladyblossom, which had been wholly unnecessary, and now it filled his mind. Facts floated into place and locked there, building an inevitable skeleton. Misty guesses solidified into flesh.

  “Is the Prime Minister dead, then?” he asked.

  “Yeh. And the President. And three of the Trotter Ministers. They’re having a family breakfast, and two of my colleagues dress up like they’re waiters, and they get their guns in on a trolley and shoot the lot of them dead.”

  “I see. I’m glad it wasn’t a bomb. Why does the revolution need me? Are you going to put me on trial?”

  The Captain’s head swung round to stare at Foxe, but before he could speak there was a rush of noise, clatter and boom and yelling. Foxe, who had been sitting half sideways, was hurled against the dash, bruising his arm and ribs. He was convinced they had hit something, but they still seemed to be travelling, travelling with hopeless speed towards a mass that towered above them, full of shouting faces, the back of a lorry crowded with workers, shouting with alarm or laughter. It must have swung out of a sideway in the Captain’s moment of inattention. He was braking, but the jeep was still rushing in under the tailboard … all this in one of those slowed instants, and then the tailboard and the faces seemed to slither away sideways and were gone and the jeep was bouncing over a rough timber bridge into a canefield. The final slither of braking was prolonged by Mrs Trotter’s body trundling forwards and nudging the back of Foxe’s seat.

  Captain Angiah let his breath out but said nothing as he reversed, swung and headed for the bridge; but once there he stopped and sat looking, not at the lorry which was dwindling into dusty distance down the next straight beyond the curve, but at the black and stinking sludge that half-filled the ditch between the road and the canefield. After a while he nodded and reversed the jeep along its tracks until it was again hidden by the tall and whispering canes.

  He cut the engine and turned to Foxe. His nostrils as much as his eyes seemed to weigh Foxe up. When he spoke Foxe had half-expected him to revert to the detached, precise English he had used on Hog’s Cay, had used too to supervise the torture of Cactus. (In a way she had been lucky, Foxe realised—almost anyone else on the Islands would have been more receptive of the notion that she had her odd talent.) But he continued to use his version of the Island dialect, nothing like Ladyblossom’s slurred singsong, but still somehow claiming kinship with her.

  “Yeh, I’ve been in too much of a rush,” he said. “You don’ know what’s been happening, an’ we don’ know what you’re going to say when you get home.”

  “Home?”

  “Sure. Provided you say the right things.”

  “I don’t suppose anybody will ask me.”

  “That jus’ shows you don’ know what’s, been happening. You know the USA got itself a new President this year?”

  “Carter? Yes. Of course.”

  “You know he started in at once showing the world he’s got clean hands, won’ have dealings with governments running oppressive regimes?”

  “Yes, I remember about that. That was all happening just about when I came to Hog’s Cay. It’s not the sort of thing I take much interest in, but wasn’t there something about South American countries breaking off diplomatic relations because he wouldn’t sell them any more arms?”

  “Sure. Some of them played it angry, some of them came into line. Listen, even the Duvaliers up in Haiti, they started letting a few fellows out of prison—that’s what they said. Only guess who’s too dumb to see the point? No, he ain’t ever dumb … but mad. Just mad.”

  “He wanted to make people good,” muttered Foxe.

  “Yeh. That’s bad.”

  “You really think so?”

  The Captain’s impassive mask flickered with surprise at Foxe’s tone. He thought for a couple of seconds, then smiled.

  “I guess so … but it don’t concern us any more … You were asking what has President Carter and all that to do with you, uh? Listen, when you’re running a country like this one, it don’t matter much what you do to your own people—it’s just a few more niggers in prison. But you mess round with foreigners—educated white foreigners—and you get a lot of questions asked. First off, Doctor O says you’re his guest and too busy to talk to people. Then he says you’ve been captured by communist guerrillas and they’re holding you for a hostage …”

  “I see. The revolution happened now because Doctor Trotter was forcing the Americans to cut off aid, and you want me to tell people that he was a madman and ran an unspeakable regime, but that the leaders of the revolution are honest people doing the best they can for their country, and your letting me go proves it. Then with luck the dollars will start to flow again. That right?”

  Captain Angiah looked at him sideways under half-hooded lids. Foxe became aware of how well the ranked canes hid them from the road, and how deep and concealing the mud in the ditch was—no problem hiding a weighted body there. Of course Mrs Trotter’s body would be needed to put on show in Independence Square, to prove that she was irrecoverably dead …

  “What are you going to do about the Khandhars?” he said.

  “What are you going to say about them?” asked Captain Angiah.

  “You want me to say they’re Communists, and you need American weapons to fight them?”

  “That kind of thing.”

  Foxe shook his head, conscious of the Captain watching him.

  “They’re not any kind of Marxist,” he said.

  Some small animal dived with a faint plop into the invisible ditch. The
silence seemed to sharpen his other senses, making the sour-sweet reek of the black mud almost overpoweringly insistent.

  “I’ll do a deal with you,” he said.

  “Not much time.”

  “Yes, but listen—the Khandhars aren’t Marxists, and I’d have thought you’d get just as much mileage out of the Carter administration by saying they were a bunch of religious cranks who’d been persecuted by Doctor Trotter.”

  “Yeh?”

  “I think so. It has the advantage of being true, so you don’t have to keep changing the story. Supposing anyone asks me, I propose to tell the truth, but I’m prepared to negotiate about emphasis. In any case, I’d play my own part right down, all of it. But for instance, I’ll say I was forced to listen to torture tapes, but I won’t say I recognised your voice on any of them. I’ll say I was forced to experiment on the prisoners, but I won’t make anything of you conducting the negotiations. This isn’t just because I’m making a deal, it’s because I know Doctor Trotter’s style. He cornered me into doing these things, and I expect he cornered you too.”

  The Captain grunted uninterpretably.

  “OK, the deal’s about something else. If you lay off the Khandhars—and by the way you also lay off the village where I’ve been staying—I’ll tell you two things which you need to know. One which you need to know personally, and one which might make a bit of difference to the revolution.”

  “You tell me, and then I’ll see about making promises.”

  “Um. I’ll go half way. I’ll tell you what it’s about. Two related things. Who killed Ladyblossom, and how to stop my Company pulling out of the Islands.”

  “Who killed who?”

  “Ladyblossom. The woman who was killed in my lab. The caretaker’s wife at the laboratories. You must remember—you were holding me as a witness.”

  “Yeh? Yeh, I remember—snake-apple. Doesn’t matter now, that, compared with the revolution. File closed.”