Decay Inevitable

The other thin men were looking at him with similarly earnest expressions. There was trouble too, in their eyes, as if they couldn’t quite understand how they had come to be in this position. They looked at Will, the newcomer, as if he had brought some instructions with him.

Up ahead, behind a blockade of cars, he could see more people, but these were not like him or the other thin men. They were stouter and wore a better cut of clothes. They were nervous. Some of them held guns or knives. Their children stood behind them, guarded by the legs of their elders. Even at this distance, Will could smell their odious flesh and the alcohol reek of their perfumes and soaps. They smelled of fat and dairy products. They smelled of mouthwash and shoe polish. It made Will’s mouth sour to feel such an alien flavour in his throat. The thin men walked slowly towards the blockade, and all they could think about was how they wanted to make those fat people less glossy, less stench-ridden. Thinner.

GLEAVE WAS DEAD. But it wasn’t his leg injury that had killed him. Appalled, Sean took in the extent of his degeneration. He resembled potatoes that had been left to boil for too long and had collapsed to a watery vichyssoise in the pan. Tufts of hair or nubs of bone emerged – macabre islands – laced with bloody veins, like seams of sauce in raspberry ripple ice cream. His suit had become a poor-quality bag in which to contain him. Sean couldn’t feel satisfied with Gleave’s death. It had not been achieved by his own hand. He felt cheated, ill-organised. Things were passing him by.

The gun in Sean’s hand drew him on. Without it, he might have stayed with Emma until someone forced him to leave her. The ticks from the cooling engine of the lorry were more spaced out now. Water dribbled from the cracked radiator and a sigh eased from its innards, as if the machine were settling into its death.

He remembered little of what Pardoe had said of Cheke, but he remembered what he had said about her improvement. She had already been dangerous, and very fast, that day when Marshall had been killed. How long ago was that? A few weeks? Sean found it hard to nail down time now. So much had happened. His life had seen the kind of upheaval that a man of eighty would never witness. Time became unimportant in those shadows. All it did was tease you with how much more shit you might have to put up with.

The gun felt comfortable in his hand. He edged outside, past the creaking back end of the lorry and the rotting brick teeth at the smashed entrance. Small fires had combusted here, despite the cold and damp. They burned sootily and pumped oilsmoke across fields that were white with frost. Bare branches made stark exclamation marks on their perimeters. The sky was a beautiful blue, paling as it bent to touch the horizon. There were a few icy scratches up there but no clouds. A bird sang a brief, exhilarating snatch of song from the chimney stack. The taxi was parked to the side of the farmhouse, the door open, the keys still in the fascia.

He watched Vernon Lord staggering across the field, pursued, if such leisurely advancement could be described so grandly, by Cheke. The crash had realigned her somewhat: she was dragging her leg behind her and the leg, freed from any immediate control, was finding it hard to concentrate on remaining a leg. From here, it looked like a head, with a baseball cap jammed down over the ears.

There was nothing he could do. He watched until, like a leopard bringing down a deer, Cheke had Vernon underneath her. He screamed, or tried to scream, for as long as it took her to detach his face. Then Vernon withdrew into himself like a surly child. Age piled on to him, denuding his bones, puckering his flesh into a sea of wrinkles and liver spots. Cheke stepped back, aghast. He’d had enough, old Vernon. All the fight was gone from him and time, waiting in the wings, had recognised its cue. It came back to him, with interest, enjoying the feel of meat that it had been cheated of for so long. It wasn’t Cheke that killed Vernon Lord; it was his own greed that did it.

Two deaths, then, that could have gone one way but found another. And Emma, whose murder ought to have been foreseen. Pardoe, the bastard, should have paid out his story just as all that bad rope had been. They should have been warned. Sean wondered how his own end would come. He was tired of the body count and the unnecessary killing. He wouldn’t mind making a little peace with someone, anyone, for a change.