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 floor, 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.
"The fuck knows?" He said, voice abruptly smooth, body moving with a weird liquidity. He stood up straight and peeled off his glasses, ignoring the tiny dribble of blood hanging on his neck. "Gave up reading labels years back."
His eyes were almost red. So bloodshot that they bulged, capillaries swollen and angry, pupils dilated to swallow dark irises that brooded at the heart of hot, insane scarlet.
It took me a moment or two to find my voice.
"Good to see there were no adverse effects, mate."
He giggled and winked. It looked painful.
"Now then," he said, moving slow. "You recall the Secretariat? You recall before the Injun arrived?"
"What about it?"
He grinned. And then carefully, letting me see what he was doing every step, he tucked the pistol away in a holster inside his robe and cracked his knuckles.
"Let's… pick up. Hm. Pick up where we left off?"
The first lunge was almost too fast to follow. Maybe I was still groggy.
Maybe I was just too slow.
It didn't matter, really. I knew it'd be a feint before he'd even started, and was ready when he blurred left-right-left – confusing and showy – then sent a foot arching down towards my shins.
Looking flash, playing dirty. Trying to break my ankle, the arrogant fuck; that or push me backwards, keep me on the defensive, box-me against a wall.
Best form of defence is -
I stepped forwards, through and under his guard. Took the force out of the kick with a sideways swipe of my right hand and rolled with the weight, down on one knee – letting fists strike uselessly at the air above my head. My left hand snapped palm-open, thrust forwards with a tiny snarl on my lips.
There's no word for what happens when you hit someone as hard as you can in the balls. It's like… it's like somewhere between a crunch and a squelch. It's like hard-and-soft altogether, and you can barely do it without wincing in sympathy.
What I did was: gripped.
Fact: it's possible to kill a man this way.
We must've stood like that for a second or two. That shocked sense of calm after a flurry of blows and kicks too quick to be handled intelligently. You just react. You just let it flow.
I waited for him to crumple.
And waited.
And looked up.
He winked again, then laughed.
And then his fist was slow-mo-ing and my cheek was all white light, and I was on my back, and the world came back bit-by-bit.
He stepped back and shook his arms, like an athlete warming up. Like there wasn't a great bloody stain oozing through his robes around his crotch.
"Round two." He giggled, every muscle shivering. "When you're ready, limey."
Fuck.
I stood up carefully, overplaying the grogginess. Hamming it right up. I swayed on my feet, waving him forwards with the punch-drunk bravado of an amateur. Trying to be clever about this… He was quicker and stronger and meaner, but if he was as dumb as he looked maybe I could Now.
And he was on me again. Expecting it to be easy; an elbow thrown out at my cheek as he spun past, a low leg orbiting at the edge of the curve. I took the elbow in both hands and wrenched, letting his weight overbalance him, chasing him down so the roundhouse arced uselessly. I fucking pummelled him, knuckles mashing on cheeks and lips, knowing it did no good but enjoying it anyway, leaning my arms on his chest as his back hit the ground, forcing the air out of him and feeling his ribs crackle, then planting both fists in his guts.
Hard.
Trying to get the shithead bleeding inside. Emptying him of oxygen. Playing it carefully, thoughtfully. Not a brawl but an amputation, not a fight but a fucking dissection. He coughed blood and tried to lever himself up, sucking back air, and I broke his nose with a smile and kept hitting, sat astride him; pounding away until my fingers felt broken and my arms ached from wrist to shoulder.
Intelligent application of force.
Yes.
Yes, you fuck.
Controlled violence.
Thwap
Thwap
For Rick. For Malice and the others. For Bella, you shit.
Yes.
For Jasmine.
I took him apart, little by little, and no brain-surgeon was ever as precise as me in that glorious flurry of aggre Snuk
My fists stopped moving.
Cy smiled through teeth smeared with bloody spittle, gripping my hands in mid-swing as if he'd caught a pair of tennis balls, then sat up in a single continuous movement and nutted me on the bridge of my nose. Something snapped.
Fact: It's possible to kill people like this too.
I went over backwards. A fist in my eye helped me down. Warmth spattered off my lips and chin.
And I lay there panting as he dragged himself out from beneath me, and stood with no obvious aches or pains, spitting the blood away and clearing each nostril with a viscous rasp of snot and gore. He rolled his head as if he'd fallen asleep in the wrong position; jumped up and down in his spot once or twice, then gave me a great, bright smile.
"Let's go." He said.
Fuck.
It took a long time to pick myself up. Every inch a mountain. Every movement a defeated consolation.
I couldn't win. This… this thing wasn't even human any more. With his veins clogged-up with freaky narcotic shite, nothing would work. Clever fighting. Precision and stealth. Fuck it. Fuck it all.
I've seen guys on PCP. I've seen guys go psycho on Yaba crazy medicine. Twenty bullets, major organs shredded. Doesn't matter. Takes the body longer to realise it's dead than it takes to kill whoever's killing you.
Cy was worse.
Cy soaked it up then smiled sweetly. He didn't rush. Didn't race to squish me before the wounds caught up on him. He just…
Enjoyed it.
So what happened was, my brain went away.
The conditioning shivered somewhere deep, unflexed like a great squid-thing, untangling from the murk. I'd held it down too long. Let it grow in the dark.
It took a hold of me and blurred-away all those insignificances, all those useless extremities of thought and intelligence. Sharpened me as it blunted me down.
The trainers at the SIS would have been proud.
Good little soldier. Good little killer. Good little machine.
The wolf came out from its shadows, and its eyes glowed in the gloom, and I stopped thinking. Let the instincts take over.
Don't you fucking give up, soldier!
Sir, no sir, etc etc.
And this time when he rushed me I was already hitting him, and when he scooped at the air to knock me back I was ducking into his belly with a knee, and when he snarled and spun and kicked-out I let him, and enjoyed the pain in my hips because it meant I was close, and hungry, and I lamped him so hard in the ear that the skin on my fist popped.
Chased him down to the ground.
Snapped his shin with my boot.
Took out his eye with a finger.
Caught a hold of his jaw as it flapped open and yanked down so hard something shattered and tore.
Grabbed a handful of his neck and balled my fist 'til the skin broke and the cords underneath moved in my hand.
Punches raining on my face.
Like I care.
And I locked my fingers round his throat, bloody and slick and crackling down deep, and squeezed.
His eye bulged and bled. He gurgled.
And then the gun was in my face.
The wolf loped away.
Cy's lips twitched into something like a smile.
I sighed. "You said no guns. Not for me."
"N't…nk… n't less… yuh… made me…"
His finger tightened on the trigger.
And from the corner of my eye a black hand reached out from nowhere, gripped the tall cock-like handle poking from Cy's head, and pulled.
It made a noise something like a champagne cork.
He rustled as he died, and a soupy sort of stuff oozed out of his skull, and Nate – shivering on the floor with the knife in his hand, foot still pulsing blood – grinned his pearly grin and said:
"'nother… 'nother one you owe me."
It was strange.
To have come this far for a maybe…
To have fought and killed and cut my way across… shit, across half the fucking world, on the strength of a feeble radio transmission and the half-a-chance idea of someone who should be dead not being dead.
To have shut myself off, to have sliced across any prat who stood in my way, because:
If John-Paul can do it, maybe Jasmine can too…
I'd come a long way. Following the voice in my head every step. Listening to its orders. It told me not to give up, and I didn't. It told me to know everything, and I had. It told me to cover the angles, and I covered them. Though it left me bloody and broken and knackered, I fucking did as I was told.
Right?
My head hurt, and the world spun around me. I giggled.
The voice, the voice. That was it. At the end, when the time came to find some things out, to finish it, the voice told me not to get distracted, to do the job, to stay focused. It told me:
Not your problem.
I wondered if I'd done the right thing, taking the syringe from Nate's bag. It made the world… different.
I giggled again.
I stood outside a room on the fifth sub-level of the South Bass Island UN Bunker complex, and shivered, trying to concentrate. Things were happening, somewhere. People running, voices raised, footsteps clattering and guns being armed. Right now, nobody was paying me much attention, which made a refreshing change. Earlier-on, as I staggered out of the detention room with my eyes watering and my head spinning, a couple of guards had got lucky and noticed the red patches soaking through my stolen robes. I'd lifted them from the Clergy aide on the floor, whose blood was currently filling my veins. It had seemed elegant, somehow. Like… regardless of whether the damp patches came from him or me, it was all the same thing.
Haha.
Should that be funny?
(The two guards who'd spotted the blood hadn't thought so. I tried to explain it as patiently as I could – not even slurring much – but they kept on telling me I was stoned, and asking me who the fuck I was, and poking me with their fingers. It got boring quickly. I like to think I left them alive – just – though to be honest I can't say I was subtle about it.)
The point was, I was free to roam. And right now I stood outside a door, on the deepest level of the complex, and stared in confusion at the sign.
COMMS
This was where it came from. The transmission. The word PANDORA. The voice. This is where she sent it. I could almost taste it. Could almost reach out and pluck her from the air, and remind myself of all the guilty sensations that time had stolen. The smell of her hair. The slant of her nose. The exact shade of her eye.
I could remember them all. Ish. But memories are like regrets, they linger and haunt you, but they evolve with time. They lose their edge. Become idealised.
I wondered, in some quiet giggling abstraction, if I'd even recognise her when I saw her again. Then my brain reminded me she was dead – must be. Had been for five years.
Idiot. It said.
All this way, for nothing.
Without even realising it, I'd placed a hand on the door handle and begun to push. And that, really, was all there was to it. Inside this room I'd find out. Had she been here? Was it really her that sent me the message?
I felt like a pilgrim who never expected to get to his shrine.
I relaxed the pressure on the door and stepped back. The air was full of light. Hallucinations turned my brain upside-down; twisted synaesthetic confusions swapping sounds for tastes, musical tones for physical feelings, emotions for colours.
Scents for light.
In the detention room, the syringe I took from Nate's pack had been marked: SNIFF.
I recalled a time that seemed long ago, and a chase through city streets, and a big man in red injecting another man with… Well. With something that made him a little less than human. That sharpened-up his senses. I recalled being pretty fucking impressed, at the time.
And now here I was. A wolf in the true sense.
And I turned away from the Comms Room with my nose in the air, and followed a pulsing trail of light-stink that moved and shifted like electrified neon, because maybe it wasn't my problem, and maybe it wasn't part of my mission, and maybe no one would care but me – but some things need to be finished, whether it's your job to finish it or not.
Jasmine could wait.
She'd waited five years.
I found John-Paul Rohare Baptiste in a room decked in red and blue velvet, with flags hung-up behind him. The country they signified was dead.
It had been easy, closing-in on him, down bunker tunnels and twisting corridors, with lights shimmering before and behind me, sniffing the air.
He smelt of me.
He was sloshing with me.
He was talking as I stepped quietly inside, through a door marked: STUDIO
"…and… and so I'm putting this message on… onna loop…"
He was swaying unsteadily. Face all busted-up – cleaned of raw blood but clearly bruised – eyes crossed. He was holding himself upright on the barn doors of an old TV camera, staring deep into the lens. The red light was on.
"…we've… had some troubles. You c'n… c'n see from my face, I think. But… h-hallelujah! We have prevailed, my sons and daughters. God's righteousness has… has shone through. We have been sorely tested, and faced down the… the evil of ignorance. We have endured our great Exodus, and in the… in the process have found our 'Promised Land'. My children… we have been found deserving of glory."
There was nobody behind the camera. Nobody behind the glass window in the control-booth set to one side. Not any more. Not since I stopped-off to say hello.
It had been impressively soundproofed. John-Paul hadn't even noticed.
There was nobody listening to him. Nobody except me, and the world.
What was left of it.
"I send out this message to say to you all: do not be alarmed. We have moved, as God's will has dictated. But our mission remains steadfast. We must build a brighter tomorrow. We must open the eyes of the children! Amen. Mm. A-men."
His eyes rolled and closed-up; communing with the divine. His withered face creased in a perfect smile.
"And… and so I say to you all, continue to send me the architects of the future. Continue to bring me your sons and daughters. Bring them to Cleveland, and Toledo, and we will reveal to them the paradise we are building here.
"We will take them and raise them up, and… a-and…ah…"
His voice tailed off. His eyes fluttered open.
I pushed the silver pin a little harder against the frail skin of his neck. He hadn't even heard me approach him. Hadn't been aware I was behind him, looming like some great fucking bat, until the sliver of metal was pricking his throat.
The sliver Rick gave me. Buried in my own flesh.
John-Paul gurgled.
The red light continued to burn.
"Wh… who… who's there?" He said, not daring to move.
"I'm the Holy Ghost." I said. "I move in mysterious ways."
"Y-you! You would… you would commit this sin before the World? Y-you would expose your evil?"
I leaned down until I was close to his ear, senses alive with the drug, tasting his fear. Enjoying it.
"I will if you will." I said.
"Wh… what d… do you m…?"
"The children, Abbot. You were about to tell us about the children. About how you 'raise them up.' That was as far as you got. Why not… tell us about that?"
"B-but… But I…"
"Now, now. The world watches, your Holiness." I pressed harder with the pin. "Let's not scrimp on details."
And so he told them.
He told them how he'd survived. He gibbered and snotted and cried as he went, and he dressed it up in holiness. Didn't matter. Still came across like a desperate man polishing a turd.
It wasn't murder, he said, it was the Touch of God. It wasn't blood, it was divinity itself.
Listen: people might be a little short-sighted when confronted with miracles. And okay, maybe humanity has a hole in its common-sense where the idea of deity sits nice and firm. Maybe there's something to be said for the infuriating fucking gullibility of mankind, but here's the thing:
You can only push it so far.
I think the message got through.
I think what they heard, out there, clustered round TVs for weeks to come, as the message looped and re-looped over and over, was not a divine prophet delivering words of hope and purity…
…I think what they heard was a wretched little freak, explaining with patience and politeness how he'd stolen the blood of a thousand kiddies, how he'd convinced the world of his perfection, how his acolytes had flocked to serve him, just to fend-off the virus that was killing him.
He told them that there were no 'marks.' No angels pouring out their vials onto the earth. Nothing. Just people with a particular type of blood. Whole ethnic groups, with genetic traces that he neither understood nor cared about, but had nothing to do with the wrath of God.
He told them that the virus was just that: a virus. Biological. Predictable. It killed certain people and left great swathes of others alive. The O-negs. The Native Americans. Eastern Asians. Australian Aborigines. He told them he knew this because he'd been with the group who found it all out. They'd seen what the virus killed and what it spared, and they'd failed utterly to find out how to stop it. They'd hidden away down here in the bunker until the virus caught up with them too, and there was a time of madness and… and things he couldn't remember, and then…
Then he was reborn as John-Paul, the Holy.
Stealing blood to stave-off the virus. Whole transfusions of O-neg, to replace the juices the Blight guzzled every day. Injections of plasma from Iroquois captives, to plant whatever genetic armour they possessed deep inside him.
He told them everything. Then his voice went quiet and his face went slack, and he told them that children were better than adults.
Purer, he said.
More perfect. Like drinking the blood of an angel.
More beautiful.
And…
And when they were weak from blood loss, he said, when the Light Of God was in them…
They never said "no" to anything…
He went on and on and on, and when he was done I patted him on the head like he'd done well, pushed the silver needle into his jugular so the blood went out of him like a balloon losing air, and when he was on the ground I stamped on his head with a noise like a cockroach crackling.
And there were choirs of angels singing, and shafts of light, and the warm gaze of divinity to assure me I'd done well. But then again I was hallucinating like a motherfucker, so I ignored the whole stupid show and told myself – one way or another – I'd made the world a slightly better place.
"Architects of tomorrow." John-Paul had said.
Heh.
Sometimes architects have to tear down before they can build-up.