The Walking Dead

He saw Boniface and Clydesdale walk back from the pier, short lengths of the plastic ties in their hands. They would have cut them at the moment they stunned him with a blow, then pitched him over…Could be a week, or two weeks, longer, before the nameless body was found, and he thought of the scientists and engineers — the new soldiers of the front line in the new war — scouring air waves for messages sent by an enemy who was confused and disrupted…and thought also of a boy in a white T-shirt with an angry bloody swan on it.

'You forgot that damned Saudi kid.'

'Didn't forget him, but I prioritized. Please, I'd like to go back and look for my glasses, what's left of them, then I want some coffee. Dickie, you let the kid take his chance and you don't know, and I don't, what might happen. All I'm saying is, the glass is half full — believe in the bright side.'

* * *

Lee Donkin's targets were those who hoarded a bus fare in their purses, didn't have a car available to them and would walk all the way down the main road into the town and would not fritter what money they had collected for the sale in the shopping centre.

The sun was on his pale face.

His hood was up and, drawstring tied, none of his hair and little of his features, vindictive and cold, were visible. His gloves were on, and those of his right hand were in his pocket and on the handle of the short, double-edged knife. Because it was too many days since he had last injected himself, it was difficult for him to walk and more difficult for him to concentrate on a target. Once, he went forward, increased his speed sharply and came near to a woman with a buggy, but she must have heard the hiss of his breath: she turned abruptly and confronted him. She had an umbrella, folded and concertinaed, in her fist as a weapon, and he backed off.

The aches in his chest and stomach were not from hunger or thirst, but from the craving.

He saw another woman, ahead and on the pavement, and again stretched his stride, but he saw a police car crawling in traffic towards him, and the chance was lost.

He looked ahead and behind and could not see a lone prey, without people close. He swore…He reached a favoured place. Had struck there three times in the last two months, and there were boarded-up toilets beside the pavement that were surrounded by an overgrown evergreen hedge, then a school's playing-fields. He leaned against a lamp-post.

Must wait — and desperation swam in him.

* * *

What did he need food for? He did not need food, and she had none to give him.

She had heard his stomach growl as he had prayed.

He had knelt and faced a wall barely visible in the dull, dark room. She did not know what his mind saw but there was content on his face when he had finished. Her own lips moved, spoke the rehearsed speech, but in silence. She weighed it, the decision as to when she would make the speech, and whether it was necessary…There was no need for him to eat, and Faria knew the time had come.

She took the bucket to him, and the damp, sodden T-shirt she had used the night before. She washed him again. In his armpits and round the neck where sweat had gathered in the night and his arms, legs and face. She squirted the scent on him. He looked down at her as she crouched on her haunches in front of him, but she could not read him.

He lifted his feet and allowed her to manoeuvre the pants and trousers over them, and she pushed them up and pulled the zipper high, then buckled his belt. She put on his socks and trainers, tightened the laces and knotted them, and her hands fumbled it. He was impassive; she did not know whether he felt fear, whether the strength she had tried to give sustained him. She stood, then bent to lift the T-shirt from the careful pile she had made. He held out his arms and she threaded it over them. Faria saw the swan, and its open beak, its wide, outstretched wings: did the bird, in its anger, curse her? She gazed into his face, then sucked breath into her lungs.

She took the waistcoat from the plastic sack, felt its weight. She swatted at the flies crawling over the bags of shit tied to it. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. Nothing at home, nursing her sick, demented mother, nothing in keeping house for her father and brothers before they left for the religious schools of Pakistan, nothing at school, where she had passed with distinction all the examinations she had sat, nothing in the room above the house that had become a cultural centre, where she had watched the videos of smiling women making declarations of Faith and then had seen buses, military convoys and street markets erupt in fire, where she had been recruited…nothing in the long months as a sleeper, and the call nothing in the cottage.