Decay Inevitable

He went back to the cab, tossed the gun onto the dashboard, and started the engine. Then he turned it off, got into the back with Emma, and held her until her solid, cold flesh began to warm and he could almost believe she might turn in his arms and say hello.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: KILLENNIUM

YEAR ZERO.

The quiet houses were rebelling. People did not want to die in their beds. They came onto the streets with weapons that could do no harm and fought until the breath was squeezed from their bodies. Large men with powerful muscles folded under the thin men. Everybody folded under the thin men. They were irresistible. In seconds, the ranks of the thin men were bolstered by those that had just been dispatched. Enemy to ally in the beat of a heart, or lack of one.

Will moved on the periphery of the crowd, powerless to prevent the slaughter. He could feel de Fleche in him; he presumed they all did, gathering strength and pace. Rediscovering his appetite for a land he had not seen for twenty years. Tired of death’s environs, he wanted to branch out and have some influence over the living as well as the dead. He was ready to return, Will could feel it. And when he did, all would be lost. Architects made designs and he knew that de Fleche had been busy. He caught a glimpse of some of these blueprints when his eye, jaundiced by the street battles and the insensate dropping of bodies, turned away to look at the sky. He caught sight of vast machines of torture to process the living, of awful dark houses where the doors and the windows were ceaselessly motile to prevent any escape while the minions within went about their business of dismemberment and witchcraft. He understood de Fleche’s motives for the grand plan that he wanted to put into place – revenge fed his ambitions – but he did not know who the targets were. Nobody was to be spared in his search, however. It was this indiscrimination that cut Will to the quick.

“Are you hungry? Jesus, I am absolutely starving.” The man with the itchy scalp and the fidgeting hands had not left him alone. Will couldn’t see how his hunger had prevailed, not after the terrible feast he had gorged upon. The man sucked juices from his fingers and smacked his lips. “I could eat that again,” he said. “So hungry. My stomach thinks my throat’s cut.”

If de Fleche was still near, Will could not feel him. He suspected that he was in the background, assessing his position, biding his time before the balance of power shifted and he could make himself known again. Revenge, he had said, Will recalled vaguely. Revenge against whom?

It didn’t matter, for now. What did matter was the hell that was being raised around him, not six feet from where he stood. Blood was being spilled as generously as red wine from a sot’s glass. The thin men were systematically wasting anything that stood in the way of the food they craved. Hunger tickled Will’s belly too, but not to the extent that he was ready to take life for it. Why was that? What was so different about him that brought on this moralistic stance? He thought of the man he had killed at the caravan site. Was that it? That he had broken the neck of some evil swine and had marked his own card by that action? There was no compulsion to add to the body count here because he had been blooded and could take on a supervisory role? The deferential way in which his colleagues treated him seemed to support that suspicion. And as soon as the seed was sown, he backed off, recoiled from it.

“Well then, are you hungry?” Fidget boy was pointing at a small girl holding a plastic doll with no head. He reached out, for God knows what purpose, and Will stood in his way, clamping a hand around his arm.

“Leave her alone.”

Fidget regarded him uncomprehendingly. His tongue stuck out from between pock-marked lips and ranged dryly around. “Hungry?” he whispered.

A bell rang, a tiny bell jang-jang-janging. Everyone turned to watch as the sit-up-and-beg bicycle wobbled through the throng. The man on the seat flapped his hands at people to get out of the way. His hair flew out behind him in grey streamers. His tongue lolled and dribbled against his cheek. When people recognised de Fleche, they cringed and sank into the shadows.

“Will, this simply won’t do,” he said. His tone was that of a prissy director at an am-dram rehearsal. He rode the bicycle round and around Will, rubbing his chin, while Fidget asked for a croissant, a pot of Müller Rice, shit mate, anything.

De Fleche clenched the brakes and skidded to a halt. He touched the little girl on the forehead with his thumb and she imploded. All that was left of her was a scrap of her skirt and the plastic doll, black, molten, and disfigured.