The Walking Dead

Lucky, really, to have seen him in the mirror before he was past the car. A kid had bicycled up the pavement and had had the big bag on his shoulder with the town's News/Gazette logo on it. He'd lowered his window and asked if there was anything local. He'd been given a News/Gazette from the bottom of the bag, two days after publication. He'd given the kid a pound coin for it, when the price on the masthead was thirty-four pence. He'd sent him off happy.

He could have gone up the road to the pub, where live music played. Instead, he turned pages, moved on from crime, found another issue. The News/Gazette was big on race: 'Fresh Race Hate Probe' and 'Police Chief in Race Plea' and 'Town Muslims on the March for Moderation' and 'Live Together or the Radical Groups Win', and he gutted the articles.

* * *

His man had rung the doorbell, given him a last glance and a grin, like the deceit was enjoyed, and a woman — attractive, middle thirties, bobbed brunette hair, strikingly similar in appearance to the Principal's wife — had opened the door. Wright must have given some sort of a curtailed explanation of a car in the street and a man left in it, and she'd gazed from the step at him, shrugged, and the door had closed on them. It was part of his life — a part that had less than seventy-two hours to run — to be left in cars outside doors. So, Luton had a crime problem with a race problem thrown in — so, Luton was pretty damn ordinary. He read about street muggings and the arguments over the appropriate dress for Muslim girls at school, and about a campaign to deface advertising nudity and about drug-addiction clinics that had opened in the town and were swamped. He wondered why the good folk who weren't thieves, activists or addicts bothered to shell out thirty-four pence and face that litany of misery, of hate. He turned the pages in search of something else.

Banks found another 'Overdose Death' and skipped on. Better, so much better, 'Citizenship Classes' were fully subscribed: 'New Citizens Queue Up to Take Oath of Allegiance'. The football team was challenging for promotion, 'The Hatters March On'. Most of what he knew of two dozen towns and a dozen cities had come from sitting in cars reading local newspapers. He'd gone through the misery of the first handful of grim news pages, and it was like the sunlit uplands beckoned him. A 'New Crèche Opens', three bloody cheers. An 'Extra Budget Available for Town Square Clean-up', hip, hip bloody hurray. 'All Welcome at Saturday Town History Walk'—worth throwing a cap into the air. Couldn't abide the small ads — dating agencies, televisions going cheap, rooms to let — and scrambled through them. Last was the two-page spread: 'Bargains, Give-Away Prices, Monster Sale, Come Early, Doors Opening At Nine, Shopping Centre Bonanza'. It did not affect David Banks, but it humoured him as he sat in the car and the dark closed round his windows. He thought, at last, he had found a trifle of cheerfulness, and he pictured crowds gathering on a warm morning, tomorrow, with the forecast optimistic, and a lightening of the dreariness imposed by muggers, zealots and junkies.

The trouble with having the warrant card was that it placed a man outside the loop of normal life, and the Glock, 9mm calibre, in a pancake holster, at his hip was even further outside it. When the letter was in, with the card and the firearms authorization, and most of his possessions from the bedsit were gone to a skip or a charity shop, the rest to his mother's garage, and he was at the airport for the flight to Auckland, Sydney or Toronto, with a rucksack on his back, he would need nothing that a shopping centre, Prices Slashed, could offer him. He seemed to see those valleys and the tumbling streams, the endless expanses of desert, great inland seas, and he chucked the newspaper behind him. There, somewhere, he might find peace.

He reached into his jacket pocket, where it hung loose over the holster. His hand fastened on the notebook.

He lifted it out, felt the worn, roughened leather of its cover in his fingers. Only three pages remained to be read. He turned one.

David Banks, the streetlight spilling inside the car, saw that the writing was looser, a tiny scrawl — as if more laboured — and that the paper was tainted with a dried dark stain.

The newspaper had been an excuse, a diversion, a palliative as temporary as an aspirin. He was drawn to the page, a moth to a damned flame.

He read.