by Bark, Jasper
“What happened to Ashkan and the others? Why are we covered in blood?”
“I don’t know.”
Sam rocked back and forth to turn his chair round and get a better look at the lock up. The floor was slick with blood and his feet skidded. It smelled of fear and blood, like an abattoir.
The whole lock up had changed colour. It was now a deep crimson. All the walls and surfaces were covered in blood. It was raining down in fat drops from the ceiling. Much of it had congealed into the thick puddles filled with heaps of pulverised flesh and bone.
What the hell had Ashkan and his men done? Where the hell had they gone? He looked about the room and saw tiny scraps of clothing that he recognised, in amongst the gore. Then it slowly hit Sam. He was looking at them. This was all that remained of his tormentors.
This was humanity broken down into its essential components. This was what lay beneath the skin of everyone. This is what happened when you tore out the insides of a person and ground them into little pieces. Raw, fragile and utterly ruined.
None of his captors’ violence or selfishness justified this. This was something no human being should ever have to suffer. Sam felt his stomach lurch. He bent his head and emptied his guts onto the blood soaked floor.
“You okay?” said Jimmy.
“Yeah,” said Sam. “Must’ve been a bad pint.”
Jimmy laughed at this. A short high pitched giggle that was more hysterical than anything.
“The hell just happened man?”
“I have no idea, had my eyes closed the whole time.”
“Me, too.”
“This is sick man, this is un-fucking-believable. This is worse than anything we saw on that footage. They’ve been butchered, all of them.”
“Is that even them? I mean, shit, that doesn’t look like any human remains I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen enough photos by now, so have you. They look like ground pork, like someone’s put them through a meat grinder.”
“How is that even possible? This sort of damage should take hours. I wasn’t timing it or anything, but I swear we only had our eyes closed for five or six minutes.”
“I dunno, maybe it’s the drugs.”
“You think?”
“Ever been this high on meth or coke before?”
“Shit no. How could I? I hardly do that stuff.”
“Well I do, and this is hardcore. Who knows how much it’s fucking with our brains. We might have been in here for days for all we know.”
“No I don’t think so.” Sam shook his head and sprayed blood on his chinos.
A long, thin strip of human skin peeled off the ceiling above them and landed with wet slap on the floor.
“So who do you think did this?” said Jimmy. “I mean they didn’t do this to each other, that’s insane.”
“I haven’t a clue. It’s beyond me. I can’t imagine what sort of person is capable of this.”
“Why didn’t they kill us? How come we were spared?”
“Maybe they didn’t see us.”
“How could they miss us? We’re right in the middle of the place.”
“We probably don’t matter to whoever did this. Maybe it’s some gangland thing, a reprisal or whatever. They saw us taped up and realised we weren’t a threat. Plus we had our eyes closed so we can’t identify anyone.”
“What if they come back to finish us off? Tie up loose ends and stuff?”
“Haven’t they cleared off before the cops get here?”
“Are the cops coming?”
“They must be.”
“Who’d call them? It’s totally remote here, no-one would have heard a thing.”
“We’re in the middle of a city. Someone must have heard.”
“I’m not sure I want the cops here.”
“Why? They can’t pin any of this on us. We’re the victims here.”
“We’re the only ones left alive, I don’t think they’ll see us as victims. Besides, what if it comes out that we were gonna offload a serious amount of blow? We could do a lot of time for that.”
“We didn’t actually sell any drugs though.”
“No but I told a lot of people we were going to.”
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
“I was trying to build up a client base. It’s called basic marketing.”
Sam sighed as another rush went through him, making his skin tingle. “It doesn’t matter now. We need to get out of here before anyone else comes.”
“Easy for you to say, I’m kinda taped to a chair, remember?”
“Think I can fix that,” said Sam.
The duct tape went around his chest and arms and both his ankles, holding him to the chair. His cardigan was quite baggy and Sam was pretty sure he could get his left arm out. He was taller and skinnier than Jimmy, so he that gave him more room to manoeuvre. Ashkan had only wanted to scare them, so Faisal hadn’t been too worried about Sam and Jimmy escaping when he taped them up.
This said, Sam nearly dislocated his shoulder getting his left arm free. He leaned a bit too far to the right getting it out of the sleeve and his chair toppled over. He expected to get a face full of blood as he cracked his cheek on the floor, but there didn’t seem as much of it as he thought. When the shooting pains in the side of his head had subsided, he saw there was only a thin smear of blood on the ground. He’d thought there was more. Maybe it had soaked into the concrete.
With a little more wriggling Sam got his right arm free and was able to set the chair back up on its legs. Then he went to work on the tape round his ankles.
“You okay?” said Jimmy.
“Got a sore face and shoulder,” said Sam, as he found the corner of the tape and began peeling it of his right ankle. “But I’ll live.” His left ankle was more difficult, he couldn’t get it loose.
“Sam look,” said Jimmy, nodding his head towards a load of crates nearby. In front of them, in a pool of blood on the ground, was a Stanley knife. It must have fallen out of one of the men’s pockets.
With his left leg still stuck to the chair, Sam stood unsteadily up and moved over to the crates, dragging the chair along with him. He picked up the knife and chopped through the tape round his ankle.
“Thanks,” Jimmy said, as Sam sliced the tape holding him to the chair. Jimmy was shorter than Sam by a good two or three inches, but he was broader across the shoulders and had a stockier frame. This made it harder to get him loose. Jimmy’s winced as Sam sliced through the tape and into the back of his jacket, nicking his skin as he went.
“Ow, watch it,” Jimmy cried,
“Sorry, think I ruined your jacket too.”
“Just get me out.”
Sam cut the rest of the tape and Jimmy got to his feet, stretching his arms and shoulders and stamping his feet to get the life back into them. Sam expected him to send up splashes of blood, but it seemed there was less of it on the floor than ever. It had stopped dripping from the ceiling too. Sam looked up and saw only a thin film, where previously it had been soaked.
The piles of diced flesh and bone looked smaller too, as though they’d shrunk inexplicably. Sam shook his head. The drugs had obviously affected him more than he realised. He dropped the knife and headed towards the large metal doors that led out of the lock up.
“Wait,” Jimmy called out after him. Sam turned. Jimmy was pointing at the laptop. “What about this?”
“What about it?”
“We can’t just leave it here.”
“Of course we can.”
“It’s a potential goldmine.”
“A what?”
“A goldmine. Have you ever seen anything sicker than this footage?”
“Err, take a look around you.”
“I mean on film?”
“I couldn’t watch most of it.”
“Exactly, and we shoot this kind of thing for a living.”
“But the stuff we shoot is all make up and effects.”
“And sometimes people can see that. You
’ve read the write ups.”
“So we’re not Tom Savini, so what.”
“We could be, with this. No-one’s seen anything like it. This is more extreme than American Guinea Pig or anything.”
“No,” Sam was incredulous. “No fucking way! Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“No, hear me out. There are a lot of sick fucks out there that would pay through the nose to see this.”
“No-one could sit through the whole footage. We couldn’t take it and neither could Ashkan or his cronies and those guys are killers.”
“So we don’t use the whole footage. We cut it up into little clips, just enough to really freak people out, and we build a whole story around them.”
“I can’t believe you’re suggesting this.”
“Think about it from an economic point of view. After the kit, make up and effects are our biggest expense. We don’t need much kit to shoot a story around this footage and we won’t need any make up or effects. It’ll take our budget down to nothing.”
“Well nothing is all we have at the moment.”
“At least we no longer owe fifty grand to a bloodthirsty loan shark.”
“Well, there is that.”
Sam looked at the flesh heaps, trying to work out which one had been Ashkan. He could have sworn they’d gotten smaller still. His resistance to Jimmy’s idea was also shrinking. In a strange way, Jimmy was making a warped kind of sense.
“Would it work though?” Sam said.
“We could make it work. Please Sam, I need this.”
“You need this?”
“I need something good to come out of this. Shit, look at us, look at this place. It’s covered in blood, we’re covered in blood.” Maybe the blood had congealed, but Sam noticed Jimmy didn’t seem quite so covered anymore. Jimmy continued: “This is worse than getting jacked by that coke dealer. This is worse than anything.” Jimmy’s mouth started to twitch and he let out a sob.
“Keep it together man,” Sam said.
Jimmy picked up the laptop and held it to his chest, like a comfort blanket. “I need to make something positive come out of this. Otherwise what’s the point of living through it?”
“Does there have to be a point?”
“Yes there does.!”
“But we survived, that’s all there is to it, isn’t that enough?”
“We won’t survive though. I won’t survive, not emotionally, not mentally. You know my history man, you know what happened with Jennie. I need something to get me through this.”
Jimmy was starting to get loud and shrill. Sam held his hands up to quiet him. “Okay, okay, take it then.”
Sam glanced round the lock up one last time. His eye fell on a bunch of cardboard boxes piled up against the wall. He went to check them out. The lock up was full of dodgy goods, some of them stolen, some seized in lieu of debt.
He wasn’t sure why he ignored the voice at the back of his mind screaming for him to leave, but he began to rummage in the boxes. He thought about Ashkan and the things he threatened and Sam felt a wave of anger. Fuck that prick, he owed them this.
“What you doing?” said Jimmy joining him.
“Look at this,” Sam pulled a Sony XDCAM from the bottom of the box. The mic cover was missing, but apart from that it was fine.
“PMW-300, professional quality, nice.”
Sam and Jimmy exchanged a look. Geeking out over cameras felt almost normal. Maybe they could salvage something from this after all.
“Come on,” said Sam. “Let’s get out of here.”
As they headed for the exit Sam tried to ignore the fact that half the blood had disappeared from the ceiling and the floors.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was a short walk to Bethnal Green Road but it seemed to take forever to Sam. The sun was really bright and he felt ridiculously exposed. He was dripping with blood and he’d wet himself, how could he not attract attention.
Sam and Jimmy kept to the back streets. The blood dried quickly and seemed almost to evaporate, disappearing as mysteriously as the blood in the lock up. No-one paid them any attention when they hit the main road. Typical Londoners, ignoring everything they didn’t want to see.
Sam tried hailing a couple of black cabs but they weren’t having any of it. Eventually an empty one pulled up at some traffic lights and they tried to jump in.
“Sorry lads,” said the driver, a middle aged guy with thinning hair and brown teeth. “But I can’t have you in the back like that.”
“Please,” said Sam. “We’ve got to get out of here. It’s all dried, we won’t ruin your upholstery.”
“Listen, whatever it is, I’m not interested. I don’t want any trouble.”
“It’s not like you think,” said Jimmy. He pointed to the camera Sam was holding. “We’ve shooting a . . . err, zombie film, that’s all. This is just make up.”
The driver shook his head. “Sorry lads, not gonna happen.” He pulled away as the light turned green.
“You boys need a cab?” said a voice behind them. They turned and saw a Turkish guy standing by a car in a little side street.
“Are you a taxi?” said Jimmy.
“Mini-cab,” the guy said and pointed to an office half way down the side street. The sign outside said: ‘Yilmaz Cars.’ “Just about to knock off for the day. Where you going?”
“Camden,” Jimmy said, and gave him Sam’s address.
“Hop in,” said the guy opening the back door.
Sam climbed into the back seat and let Jimmy ride shotgun. He didn’t feel like talking to the driver. His heart lurched and he started to shiver involuntarily. The drug in his system was wearing off. It was incredibly potent, but obviously didn’t last very long. And the come down was a killer.
“Lived here long?” said the driver as he turned off Old Street onto City Road.
“Not in Camden,” said Jimmy. “That’s where my friend lives. But I’ve lived in various parts of London all my life. How about you?”
“London born and bred, same as yourself. City’s changed a lot since I was a child in the 70s though.”
“I’ll bet it has. It’s changed a lot since I was a kid. Not just the odd building either, whole streets and stuff. You wouldn’t recognise it in some places.”
“Cities are constantly changing,” said the driver, turning to Jimmy. Even from the back seat Sam could see a thoughtful look cross his face. “That’s part of their nature. But it’s also part of their nature to hold their original purpose. They’re a bit like ancient stories. Every generation tells them in a different way, adds new passages, leaves out old ones, but the essential idea remains the same. You might dress it up, so that a contemporary audience finds it more relevant to them, but the core concept is timeless. That’s what gives them power, that’s why people keep telling them.”
“And you think cities are the same?”
“Definitely. We might tear down old streets and throw up new buildings for modern needs, but the reasons people come to the city, and gather in certain locations, never changes.”
“Even when all the old places are gone?”
“The old places are never really gone. They’re still there, right under the surface of the city.”
“You mean underground.”
“No, just hidden, often in plain view. You just need to know where to look for them, what turnings to take. They’re still there, whenever you need to find them. Like really old stories that lie beneath the surface of the new ones. Giving them shape and form, drawing people back to them over the centuries.”
“Wow, you’re quite a philosopher aren’t you?”
The driver smiled and shook his head. “No, I spend a lot of time driving round with just myself for company. Gives you the space to do a lot of thinking, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” said Jimmy.
Sam knew Jimmy was talking to the driver to take his mind off coming down. He was fidgeting and shuddering as the drug wore off. The d
river chose not to see this. He’d probably ferried all kinds of people around in his car. Sam doubted anything would surprise him, not from the way he was talking.
The driver motioned to the back seat with his thumb. “So how about your friend, he from London too?”
“No, he’s from Surrey, what you might call an off-comer, or an adopted son.”
The driver nodded. Sam was mildly irritated by how much personal info Jimmy was giving away. What if the police questioned the driver later about the two blood stained guys he picked up?
Sam stared out of the window as they approached the Angel tube station. Two lanes of the road were cordoned off and several police directed the slow moving traffic into the remaining lane. As they pulled into the far lane, Sam glimpsed a Ford Mazda by the side of the road. It’s windscreen was shattered and its front bonnet crumpled. The numbness Sam felt, about the slaughter he’d just seen, melted at the sight of blood on a lamppost. His mood was plummeting with the comedown and it all became too real for him. His vision blurred as tears filled his eyes.
The driver put his left hand over a tiny ivory statue on top of his dashboard. It was two faced, like the Roman god Janus, but this statue had an old crone on one side and a beautiful maiden on the other. The driver muttered something that might have been a prayer, in a language Sam didn’t recognise. Then he placed two fingers on his forehead, right in the middle of his eyebrows, and touched a small gold pendant hanging from his rearview mirror. It was a mystical symbol, but not one Sam recognised.
Sam hadn’t noticed either the statue or the pendant when they got into the mini-cab. It was as though the driver had conjured them into being as soon as he touched them. Sam shook his head. That sounded crazy. It was the comedown affecting his mind.
The driver shot them a sheepish smile. “Just a prayer,” he said. “For any spirits that might be abroad, newly separated from their bodies.”
“Is that like, a Muslim thing?” said Jimmy gesturing towards the pendant and statue.
The driver’s smile became broader and more knowing. “No, these are artefacts from far older beliefs.”
“Like from Atlantis and shit?”
“Atlantis is a myth, these beliefs are much older than any myth.”
