Decay Inevitable

The floor they walked on was flooded with soft, red carpet; she couldn’t see her bare feet land, it was so deep. She could smell something rich and dense that made her stomach churn with desire. The man’s hand was gentle but steady upon her arm, staying her, and she fought with the desire to sap him. It would appear that any allies would be hard to find. She didn’t want to alienate the first person to help her.

Up ahead, a door gave on to a room awash with blood. Her mouth filled with drool.

“She’s fresh,” said Gleave. “She helped bring you to us.”

Cheke moved away from him. Her eyes much more comfortable in the false night of the room, she was able to see the woman immediately, slumped in her own juices, moaning, flapping a hand.

Cheke didn’t make a sound as she surged over the dying woman, wrapping her up in a seamless embrace. Her eyes flickered spastically in closing, a reflex of pleasure as she felt the flesh beneath her succumb to the grateful opening of her mouths.

WILL RAN.

The fire escape held him well enough, but he wasn’t sure that his sanity would follow suit. He had kicked out at the hand holding the gun when Trantam was rubbernecking the freak that had come tottering out of his bathroom. Catriona was dead or as near as damn it. He knew that, and the knowledge helped him run faster. If he was to go back he would be dead too, and how would that have made Cat feel? He tore along streets that now possessed a comic familiarity. Usually he would pad back along this lane with the Sunday papers, or cut down this alleyway on his way back from O’Henery’s pub, kicking a can against the wall. Now he scarred these roads of his with fear. He’d not be able to retrace his route in the future without a bad taste in his mouth.

He chanced a look over his shoulder as he fled down Finchley Road, but nothing was coming his way. Traffic was a still concertina, cars aiming for the motorway or fruitlessly attempting to nose south towards the auto graveyard that the city centre had become. Cursing the fact that he didn’t have his mobile on him, and the lack of a police presence in an area usually teeming with them, he jogged to a phone box whose guts had been ripped out. His eyes followed the broken obliques of rain on the glass, splintering the coming and going of white and red lights. He wondered if this numbness was a part of shock; he had never in his life suffered a traumatic moment. No broken bones. His grandparents dead long before he was even aware of what death meant. No operations, no burns, no car accidents...

He tried the phone even though he knew it couldn’t work. He was sitting on the floor of the kiosk, snot and tears dribbling into his mouth as quickly as he could lick them away. He raised his face to a boy in a school uniform slowly obscuring the glass space between them with a can of spray paint. The boy was looking down at him and shaking his head.

MOTION. CHEKE FELT it rolling through her, under her. Warmth seeping into her. She sat next to Gleave who looked dead and grey, flickering in and out of the light that pulsed at the windows. She felt the anger drift off him in similar waves. One eye was lost to a slice of shadow; the other stared flatly at the back of Trantam’s head. She had flinched before the stinging rebuke Trantam had received.

Cheke shifted in her seat, moving against Gleave, and was glad for the arm that enfolded her. The smell of his coat was almost animal. It reassured and encouraged her. She watched the houses stream by the window as they rushed to a place that Gleave had called home. She was like the colour that might otherwise play along these streets; she knew how to lose herself at night, become anonymous, although she couldn’t put her finger on where the knowledge came from, being unable to remember anything beyond what had happened in the last few hours. The illogicality of it distressed her only mildly. Her belly full, her head cushioned by the sublime beating of a friendly heart deep beneath this musky coat, she slept, and dreamed of her abilities as they quickened within her by the second; of what she would be capable when she woke. Of whom she would be capable.

CHAPTER SEVEN: KITCHEN SYNC

HE PREPARED A percolator of coffee while she bathed.

“Don’t you want to know my name?”

The flat was warm, if a little shabby, but the way her shoulders relaxed as she went in before him told him that if she had been feeling any anxiety it had dissipated at the sight of his sofa with a blanket thrown across it, or of the lamp on the table spilling warm colour across the wooden floor, the tired rug in front of the fire. How could anybody feel threatened when there was a picture on the wall of a view from Waterloo Bridge? Where was the danger in a flat where a bag of dolly mixtures was sitting on top of the fridge?

“I’ll guess it. Give me five guesses.”