by James Fahy
“I’m fine,” I grumbled. “Will you stop fussing me? For the hundredth time, I’m absolutely fine, it’s just a scratch.”
I was not absolutely fine. I couldn’t remember being less absolutely fine. I think I was still in shock.
“Doc, an hour ago, someone tried to kill you with a car bomb,” Griff said, still staring at me with undisguised concern. “You don’t need to be here, you need to be at the bloody hospital getting checked out.”
“Later,” I said. “And Cloves would disagree with you.”
We were both sitting in the back seat of a Cabal Humvee. I flicked my eyes up at the rear view mirror. Our driver, an anonymous Ghost, was wearing standard issue sunglasses and standard issue blank unreadable expression, so I had no idea if he was looking at us, or if he had his eyes on the road.
Griff had a point. Less than an hour ago, I had almost died. My ears were still ringing slightly and I had scraped both my knees, grazed my hand and cut my forehead superficially above my left eyebrow. Importantly though, I hadn’t died, and this was good enough for Cloves.
The explosion had filled the quiet square, shattering windows, and lifting the car itself ten feet in the air, before bringing it crashing back to earth, a raging inferno. It had been chaos. As I’d pulled myself to my feet, covered head to foot in organic produce from the market stall I had thrown myself behind, Cloves had suddenly been at my side, grabbing me by my elbow and dragging me to my feet. She had her phone in her other hand and was barking something into it, like a professional bodyguard. Moments later, the Humvee appeared, and more Cabal Ghosts spilled from it than could possibly have fit inside. I watched in numb shock, still deaf from the explosion. Cloves had been shouting at them to secure the perimeter and other orders I had only ever heard in overblown action movies.
Two of the Ghosts had run over to us, and Cloves had briskly instructed them that she was unhurt and to see to me.
“Car bomb,” she had said. “They put a fucking bomb in our car. In a Cabal car!” She sounded incredulous, and furious.
My eyes had been glued to the tangled, blazing wreckage of the vehicle. I barely noticed the two Ghosts shining pen lights in my eyes, checking me over for injuries.
“They’re dead,” I heard myself say. “The people…the people in the car.”
“There’s no way the driver could have survived.” Cloves nodded to one of the Ghosts. “We need to get her out of here now. I don’t know who this is, Mankind Movement or GO rights, or the fucking Tribals themselves, but when I find out…” She stopped and blinked at me. “You said people?”
“There were people in the back,” I nodded, licking my lips absently. They were very dry. I thought I could taste blood.
Cloves looked confused. “You’re mistaken,” she said. “There was no one commissioned, just you, the driver, no other agents.”
“Two of them,” I insisted. “Sleeping in the back seat.”
Cloves whipped her head around, staring at the wreckage. It was impossible to see. Maybe when the fire was doused, she could verify this – with a spatula.
“She’s fine,” one of the Ghosts checking me over announced matter of factly. “Physically anyway, she was damn lucky she took cover or the heat blast…”
“How did you know?” Cloves cut him off. She was staring at me. “You knew, the bomb? You leapt for cover before it blew. How did you know?”
I didn’t know what to say. I thought I saw a vampire here, he warned me there was a bomb, then disappeared? Even in my state of shock, I knew this wouldn’t go down well. Nobody likes a scientist who has hallucinations. It unnerves people. I couldn’t really have seen Allesandro in the daytime. He hadn’t really been here. Were my dreams bleeding through into reality?
“I just…I smelled petrol,” I said. It wasn’t entirely untrue. Cloves didn’t look convinced for a second.
She took me by the shoulders, forcing me to drag my eyes away from the burning car.
“Harkness, listen to me,” she said firmly. “This is serious. On a scale of extremely serious to apocalypse, this comes in at ‘fuck you, Hiroshima’. I need to deal with this, right now. Someone wanted very much for you not to meet with the Tribals today. I don’t know who yet, but I have to clean this up now. What I need to know is if you can still operate?”
I gaped at her. The numb shock was wearing off, helped along by her appalling lack of empathy, and I was starting to shake a little. But only a little. Sometimes I surprise even myself.
“Operate?” I repeated, confused.
“Can you still make the meeting?” Cloves pressed. “Let me make calls, push this back an hour. This car will take you, but I think the most important thing we can do as an initial reaction is to stick to plan.”
I stared at her. I had just almost died, and she wanted to know if I could still clock in today. Such is the joy of working for Cabal. Despite this, I hated to admit, I knew why she was asking. If someone really didn’t want me to meet with the Tribals this badly, from her point of view, it was more important than ever that I did.
I glanced over at the Humvee. “There’s not a bomb under that one?”
Cloves took that as my answer. She actually clapped me on the shoulder a little. I think for the first time in our association I had scored brownie points with my boss. Turning to the Ghost at my side, she instructed him to take me to Blue Lab. She would deal with this mess. She told me to get cleaned up, and get to the Botanical. “Take one of your team with you,” she said as an afterthought. “I don’t want you in there alone after this, but I’m needed here. Coldwater is probably on her way right now, and I’d damn well better have something to tell her when she gets here. Check in with me as soon as you’re done.”
I was quite literally manhandled away before I could reply. Half carried across the square, then stuffed into the Humvee, which roared off without a backward glance, leaving Cloves to the chaos. Alarms were ringing everywhere, cars, shops, all set off by the blast. Gawkers and onlookers were starting to appear from side streets, clogging up the pavements. Surely any second the police would be here, the fire service, and hot on their heels, the press. Cloves could handle it. She had been ringmaster of New Oxford’s circus for long enough.
I’d had time to wonder, as we drove out of the square, what had happened to the obnoxious reporter in the red parka. This would have been a hell of a scoop for him. But he’d been nowhere to be seen.
Less than an hour later, we were driving to the Tribal grounds. Griff had given me the once over at Blue Lab, including a butterfly stitch on my eyebrow. I had been remarkably lucky, apparently. He’d insisted on accompanying me on my fateful ambassadorial mission. A smothering presence, no doubt.
“It’ll be all over the DataStream by now,” he said, looking out of the window as New Oxford slid by. “A bomb, right outside Cabal HQ. Jesus.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Who the hell would do that? Who would want you dead, Doc?”
I shrugged. I was still holding the manila file in my lap, wondering if I was going to get a chance to read it before we actually arrived. “Apparently, any number of people,” I said. “Could have been some extremist Mankind Movement nut, not wanting us to build a bridge with the GOs. Could have been the Tribals themselves, who knows?”
I had almost added, “it could have been the murderer who’s killing people in Portmeadow,” but then I remembered that Griff knew nothing about those deaths. No one did, except for Cabal and me.
And apparently, the intrepid reporter Mr…what was his name again? Beaverbrook? Faversham? Something like that.
“I can’t believe you are still going ahead with the meeting,” he grumbled again. “You’re in no fit state…”
“Seriously, Griff,” I barked. “I swear, I appreciate that you are in my corner, but if you don’t cut the mother hen crap, I will kick you out of this car.” He did that cute, downtrodden look and I smiled a little despite myself. A year ago, I wouldn’t have expected anyone to be concerned for my welfa
re. It was actually quite a nice feeling. Irritating mostly, but still nice.
“The only way to react effectively to an act of terrorism is not to react to it,” I told him. “Or something like that anyway. I’m sure Cabal could, and will, phrase it better than that. If we let them disrupt the way we work, then the bad guys get what they want. They win.”
He frowned at me. “You’re starting to sound like one of them,” he said, with a curl of a smile on his lips. “Cabal, I mean. I think they’re trying to fully recruit you. Before we know it, you’re going to have a tattoo and full Servant status.”
I snorted down my nose. “Hardly,” I assured him. “All I know is, the safest place to be at the moment is in an armoured Humvee, so I’m good with this. Besides, I didn’t have any other plans for today. I’d cleared my calendar to meet this guy.”
“You think this has anything to do with the faceless body we’re working on?” he asked. He had lowered his voice to a whisper, which was wise. Neither of us had any idea who else other than Cloves and her division knew about that. Had she reported it to Coldwater and the board yet, or was she waiting on results from us?
“I’d put money on it,” I replied, equally mumbly. “I’m not a big believer in coincidences. What’s the update on that?”
“I was going to fill you in when you got back to the lab. You know, after you were done with all this extracurricular goodwill ambassador stuff and could get back to actual science,” he muttered. “But as you ask, we have something of a Typhoid Mary on our hands. Lucy’s still running the tests, but it seems our anomaly is absolutely riddled with some kind of virus.”
My eyes widened. He was only telling me this now? Griff caught my expression and held his hands up defensively. “Don’t panic, it’s not airborne. As far as we can tell, it’s still in an incubating stage. We’ve quarantined the corpse for security anyway. It’s like nothing I’ve seen before. We should know more by tonight.”
I nodded. “The last thing we need is an epidemic,” I whispered. “If this corpse is dirty, we need to know what with, and we need to know right now.”
“Lucy’s on it,” Griff agreed. “Don’t worry, Doc. Once we know what we’re dealing with, the fight is half won.”
Griff was ever the optimist. I decided it could wait. We had around ten minutes before we arrived at the Tribal settlement. I wanted to look over my homework. I opened the manila folder.
There were a few sheets of dense dry script, on that old fashioned printer paper which has punched holes down either side. They were crumpled and very well thumbed. Whoever this guy was I was meeting with, Cabal had taken an interest in him for a while now.
I skim read what Cabal knew about Kane. He was the leader of the Tribals, and had been for more than a decade, not an achievement to be scoffed at in a position where you had to fight tooth and claw to reach the top. Quite literally. The Tribal’s dossier read like a mob guideline. Kane and his insular extended ‘family’ had been linked to every kind of crime you could imagine. Extortion, drugs, prostitution, gambling, arms dealing. There wasn’t much you couldn’t throw at them, but according to the info, nothing seemed to stick. If Kane was a criminal, he kept a meticulous house. The words ‘suspected’ and ‘accused’ and ‘believed’ seemed to come up a lot. Kane was one wary pack alpha, and didn’t get his hands dirty. If this was an organised crime family, it was elaborate and careful, hiding the dirty behind layers and layers of perfectly innocent small businesses and honest fronts.
Kane had spent time in prison in Kiev before the wars. He had been implicated in the murder of three notable local politicians but had eventually been acquitted. There was little more information on the incident. Some details from before the wars had been lost to us altogether. As a society, we were even now still just picking up the pieces.
A lot of people used the end of the world as a chance for a fresh start. To wipe clean whatever record they held, criminal or otherwise, and to become someone entirely new. Alistair Rutheridge, former minister of Cabal had done the same thing. Before the wars he had been part of the scientific team who genetically engineered the Pale, along with my own father. After the wars, he became a founding member of Cabal and did everything he could to hide the truth about those experiments.
Kane, from his sketchy pre-war notes here, had done something similar. There was no mention of any family. He had been linked to Russia, the Ukraine and Poland, but Cabal were not entirely sure where he had come from, or indeed how old he was. Tribals didn’t seem to age as quickly as humans. Kane had rose to pack alpha for the Oxford Tribals very shortly after the Emergence, when all the supernatural Genetic Others came into the light and rescued us from our own mutated children. It was rumoured he had several high level police officers and more than one judge in his pocket.
Great, I was going to meet the Godfather – and my, what big teeth he had.
Three grainy photographs, all black and white, were affixed to the inner cover with an oversized paper clip. I plucked them free and flipped through them. The first, looking as though it had been taken from a distance through a long zoom lens, showed two people, one a hulking bear of a man, face almost entirely in shadow. He was wrapped in a long overcoat and from what I could tell had long hair pulled back into a short ponytail. In the picture, taken at night at some street corner, he was looming over a skinny man, a shifty looking character standing in the mouth of an alleyway. He appeared to have a cigarette clutched in his hand. It looked to me like some drug deal surveillance. I was guessing that Goliath here was Kane, not the other chap. He looked like a junkie. Or an informant maybe, whereas the large man filling the frame seemed more the Russian mafia mob boss type to me.
Back when Russia had a mob that is. Or indeed a population of any kind. Things went nuclear over there in the wars. Nobody’s heard from them since things…settled down, if you can call this settled.
The second photo was much clearer, like an old-fashioned passport photo or a driver’s license. Or perhaps he just didn’t smile for photos. Big jawed, brooding brow and a neck which looked thicker than his head. Kane glowered angrily out of the photograph at me, a slight sneer on his lips.
Great, I thought. I’m meeting someone who looks one knuckle tattoo short of belonging on death row. I move in the nicest circles.
The third photo was the one which really got my attention however. It was a still from a security camera. Looked like some underground parking lot somewhere, strip lighting in the grainy frame bleaching the image.
There was a blur in the shadows, wherever it had been taken. Something moving, an animal caught on a motion sensor camera? It was moving too fast to make out clearly, whatever it was, but it was a lot bigger than a wolf. Think black bear big.
“That’s the guy you’re meeting?”
I hadn’t been aware Griff was peering over my shoulder. I nodded.
“I thought Tribals looked kind of like wolves when they…you know.”
I shrugged. “There’s more than one type of Tribal,” I said. “They’re not really a classified entity, like humans or vampires. More a loose conglomerate of separate beings. The only thing which binds them together is their common ability to shift between forms. Werewolves, wendigo, yeti, doppelganger, every culture has a name for them. They’re not always wolves, though that does appear to be the most common form. There’s at least one panther Tribal in New Oxford, I know that much.”
“That looks like a bear to me,” Griff said. “Doc, are you sure you want to be going into their turf like this? When did any of us actually ever speak with a Tribal before? I hear they’re pretty insular.”
“So are the Romany, so are the Amish,” I said, as lightly as I could manage. “But that doesn’t make them dangerous, just different.”
Griff looked unconvinced, flicking his eyes up at me over the rim of his glasses. “I don’t think the Amish ever mauled anyone,” he said flatly.
“I dunno,” I smirked. “You kick over the wrong butter churn and rui
n a day’s work, who knows what might happen.” I glanced down so Griff couldn’t see the worry in my face. “The Tribals are loose knit, but they hunt in the woods inside our walls. They hardly go around picking people off the streets. Do you think we’d allow them to live in our city with us if they did?” I don’t know which of us I was trying to convince.
“Do you think we have a choice?” he said. “I doubt they’d leave if we just asked them to.”
“And that, my dear boy, in a roundabout way, is why we’re here,” I muttered, hoping I was right. Three people had been torn apart in our streets. I hoped, really hoped it wasn’t a Tribal vendetta. I was glad Griff didn’t know about the killings. He could have been forgiven for not following me into the belly of the beast quite so willingly. Three dead bodies so far told me something was picking people off the streets, unless the culprit was our faceless mystery body cooling in the lab that is.
The car had stopped.
“Doctor Harkness? We’re here,” the driver said, leaning back over his shoulder. “I think your ‘escort’ is already waiting.”
10.
I glanced out of the car window. We were on the High, and had stopped outside the entrance to the Botanical Gardens. A great stone archway, highly ornate, was set back from the road: three tall bays, each crowned with a classical pediment. The stone was weathered with age but beautifully sculpted. The darkness of the gardens lay behind the chain-link fence which these days filled its span. Ivy had grown wild over the gateway, as though nature were trying to reclaim it, to wrap its tendrils around the stonework and pull it slowly back into the darkness beyond. The Tribals had taken this part of our city and made it very much their own. Amongst the dreaming spires of Oxford lurked this impenetrable wildness, a new and savage Eden. And, previously, extremely off limits to our kind.
“Pretty gothic,” Griff offered, looking up at the looming entrance arches.
