Bad Dreams (38 page)

Then Lindy Styles, her Vice-President/Communications, came in, along with Berenice, the secretary.

‘There are campus cops all over the place,’ said Lindy, ‘and real police. Something’s up in Chem.’

‘Oh shit. Any ideas?’

‘No, but it’s heavy. They’ve put up yellow Do Not Cross tapes and are guarding them. Perhaps the demo yesterday put the wind up UCC?’

‘Some fucking hope, Lindy. Bern, could you call the switchboard and see if anyone knows anything? I’ve got a bad feeling.’

The secretary took off her coat and bag, and started pushing buttons on the phone. After a while, she got through to someone, and talked for a few moments. She rung off.

‘Someone’s been hurt… a guard, last night.’

‘What? Badly?’

‘Tisa didn’t know, but it seems so.’

‘Shit shit shit.’

‘The police were here early. There’s been a break-in as well.’

‘Those fucking idiots.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Just idiots in general, Bern. How about some tea? I think it’s going to be a nasty day.’

‘It looks quite nice outside.’

‘I mean inside, Bern.’

‘Oh, right.’

The secretary vanished into her tea-making alcove, and Monica heard the tap going. ‘Lindy,’ she said, ‘I’m going to have to take care of this, I think. If anyone comes over or calls to hassle me, could you put up with it, please?’

‘Sure.’

‘I love you.’

‘I know that. I love you too.’

‘That’s just hunky-dory, then, eh?’

Alone in her own office, Monica dug out her address book. She did not have a number for Cazie Bruckner, and a call to University Records could not get her one either. Because of all that pissing about, she did not even know where the girl lived. She considered calling the hospitals and the police station, but decided to put that off until she had a better idea of what had gone on last night.

After a long pause for thought, she dialled Brian’s number from three-year-old memory.

* * *

Cazie had gone to bed feeling like shit warmed over, and cried herself to sleep. Now, waking up, she felt terrific.

She was instantly alert, not at all bleary. All her aches and pains were gone. Sitting up in bed, she tingled as the sheet fell, the cotton brushing her nipples. She held out her arm, her torn arm, and could only see a fine pink thread where she had been cut. She was better.

And she was hungry.

She got up and slipped her robe on. Her movements felt strange, catlike. She sensed a strength, a suppleness in her limbs, she was unused to. It was as if she had done a year’s worth of aerobics in her sleep.

Last night?

She remembered. She had been overwrought, and had practically fallen apart during the trip home. She had been hurt, although that now seemed like something that had happened to her when she was a very little girl, and so had Clare. Thommy had split with Clare, and taken her to his room in York House. Derm had driven the rest of them back. He would be sleeping on the couch downstairs, now.

Suddenly, she wanted Derm.

They had been lovers for two months, but she had never needed the boy as crucially as she did now. Needed him to pound his big black cock into her slim pink slit.

At the back of her mind, she was shocked. She did not think like that, usually. There was more than just sex with Derm. Despite his muscle-man physique, he could be surprisingly sensitive, and there was a ball of dispossessed social anger inside him that excited her. Sometimes, she had thought it was mainly the need to upset Daddy. He felt threatened by black people, and she knew he could not stand the thought of her with Derm. That had been one of the most attractive things about the boy. But this morning it was just sex.

If only Rote and his soldiers were not in the front room too, laid out like corpses in their combat camouflage sleeping bags. She yawned, feeling the cool air on the back of her throat, and stretched her entire body. Up on her toes. Legs, back and arms taut. Fingers out like claws. She rolled her head, and felt spasms of muscular pleasure in her neck, and all down her spine.

She touched her breast, lightly teasing the nipple with her thumb and forefinger. Uncontrollably, she came. It was like electro-convulsive therapy. She fell into a crouch, amazing tingles coursing through her thighs. It was like some twisted form of sexual epilepsy. She sucked down gulps of air, and clutched at the carpet. Shutting her eyes tight, concentrating on her body, she regained control and was all right in herself again.

Looking at the carpet, she saw the five slashes where her nails had torn.

* * *

He had just finished giving instructions to Abigail, the student he was entrusting Jason to for the day, when the telephone rang.

‘Hello, Brian, it’s…’

‘Monica, good to hear your voice.’

‘Yeah, it’s…’

‘Hold on a minute, would you.’

He turned to Abigail, a fragile girl who looked about fourteen but was reputed to be a potential First, and pointed at his son, who was already scratching at the bandage around his arm. Abigail caught him, and gently pulled his fingers away. He looked to be stronger than her, but she used persuasion. She took Jason into the next room, leaving Brian to his call.

‘Sorry about that. Jase’s got a war wound, and he keeps making it worse.’

‘Oh, I hope it’s not…’

‘…not serious. Don’t worry. Bitten by a rabbit. Not even a hint of rabies around.’

‘Great. I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. Cazie…’

‘Shit. How many dead?’

‘That may not be a joke, Brian. I haven’t got the story straight yet, but a guard was hurt. I don’t know how much anyone else knows, but there are policemen all over the place. What have you got on today?’

‘Nothing. Uh, well, invigilating, but I took Rob Bickford’s place on Tuesday so he could be on the radio. He’ll step in for me. Do you want me to start digging into the case? I was always a big Philip Marlowe reader.’

Monica was quiet at the end of her line.

‘Like I said, Brian, this may not be funny any more.’

‘Sure, sure, sure. I’m not going to be in the combat zone, you know. I’ll just drop by Sparks’s place for a chat. He’ll be going spare anyway if the key stunt backfired. Then I’ll be around the Union Building, say, for lunch. We could make a habit of it.’

‘Jason?’

‘Taken care of. I’m not being shown up by my own son. Not yet, at any rate.’

‘See you later then.’

‘Later.’

Click.

Brian finished his long-neglected cup of coffee. At least, he took two swallows of the cold stuff, gargled and spat it out in the sink. Out of the kitchen window, he could see Abigail and Jason.

The kid would wear her out. He was throwing Frisbee, and Brian only now realized how good Jason had got. A few weekends back, he had had to struggle to catch one in ten throws, now he was not missing at all. And Abigail was having to run as if she were one-on-one with Billie Jean King in her prime. He could not help noticing the girl’s calves as her peasant skirt lifted when she ran. Despite the ankle socks and trainers, she-did not look as young as he had thought.

At least Jason was ignoring his wound now. He seemed to be positively bursting with energy.

* * *

Derm was out of his depth.

As he sat on the bog in Cazie’s place, straining over the daily bowel movement his mother had prescribed as the key to eternal youth and vigour, he wondered how the hell he had become mixed up with midnight raids and brained security guards, not to mention whale-loving terrorists and power-crazed rich kids.

As usual, he supposed, he was just trying to get laid.

He had been into sports at school because it was as good a way as any to get into Marie-Jeanette Traherne’s navy blue knickers. And he was too good to lie low. Unlike most Incredible Hulks, he could run a mile in six minutes without perspiring hard. And he could stand stock still in front of a speeding locomotive. Well, maybe a speeding go-cart. In the States, he would have been a natural for American Football. Here, it was soccer or nothing. Until he had got into rugby.

Not many Brixton black kids make it in rugby. Derm did not know why. It was his game, and he was the best his school could come up with. Now, while he was peripherally studying Human Biology, he was the star of the
real
all-black rugby team, the Bantu Warriors. His ambition was to violate the Gleneagles Agreement by going onto a field with fifteen double-dyed Afrikaaner white racists and putting them all out of the game forever. Sometimes, he dreamed about it. He felt the slams, heard the bones breaking, tasted the blood.

Now, Crazy Cazie had got him into a position where he could, quite conceivably, go to jail. Her thighs were fine wine, but no pussy was worth that much.

White women! Jesus H. Christ! Why couldn’t he do like that song from
West Side Story
, ‘Stick To Your
Own
Kind’?

After all the dramatics last night, he had hoped to get something back for it. Some people are really turned on by breaking the law. He had never really got through to Cazie in bed, and he was proud enough to be bothered by it. Last night should have seen some good loving in her single bed, but she had got herself chewed open by some kind of mutant bunny and he had had to crash out on the sofa. In the same room as Rote’s Death Squad. Shit in a shopfront, what was happening?

He finished his job, and did the paperwork. The ancient plumbing took forever to finish, and sounded like an earthquake when it did.

Cazie was waiting for him outside the loo.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting, Caz. You okay?’

The girl looked at him weirdly, and Derm remembered all his Jamaican Grandmammy’s scare stories about haints and
zombis
and shapeshifters. Cazie had changed somehow.

‘I’m better.’

‘That’s good. Let’s get some fried bread and bacon going.’

‘No, not yet. Come into my room, quickly.’

She darted away, behind her door. She had touched him, trailing her fingertips from his neck downwards, across his chest – he could feel the points through his thick dressing gown – as far as his hip. It was as if an acupuncture needle had hit the spot precisely. He had an instant hard-on that parted his dressing gown.

In her room, she was naked. Not naked as she had been the other times, under the covers, with the lights out. Properly, brazenly naked. Her shoulders were rotating slightly, as if she were dancing to unheard jazz. Her legs were spread, and Derm could see the muscles clenching under the smooth skin of her thighs.

‘Come here.’ It was an order, and yet a desperate plea. She did not need to say it twice.

He tugged at the knot of his dressing gown, and it fell. The cord brushed his jutting penis, and he felt as if he would come immediately, before he had even touched her.

Her hands came for his shoulders, and pulled him down on her. He slid home smoothly as she stifled a scream. Her vulva gulped, and he was swallowed, held fast, almost painfully.

‘Fuck me, nigger. Fuck me now.’

This was not Cazie, the lily-skinned liberal who would rather be boiled in oil than espouse an unfashionable cause, the girl who traded her body for street credibility. This was some other fantastic tart dressed in her silky skin.

But Derm was past caring.

They moved together, astonishingly fast. He was sure she had peaked early, but she was not put off her stroke. He came, and lost his breath and his rhythm, but she kept bucking under him, forcing him to follow her lead. She sucked air beside his ear, then bit him, hard. He might have been bleeding. Her neck arched up, and she fastened a kiss over his mouth before he could protest.

When he finished spurting inside her, the knob of his penis ached. His erection was dwindling. But faster and faster she moved, and more desperately she sucked at his mouth, trying to draw all the air out of him. Her tongue was in his throat like a snake, stifling him.

He broke free, and tried to protest, but she rolled and – with a strength he would never have expected from her – flipped him onto his back. She rode him high, coaxing him hard again with vaginal spasms and rough fingernail traces just above his pubic hair.

He tilted his head back over the edge of the bed and looked at the ceiling. She was howling, in what must be a continuous orgasm. He climaxed again, then lost it. He might as well be dead, but she kept working on him.

She moved back and forth, her knees raked his sides, and her nails began to dig in. There was definitely blood now. Her hands came to his face, the first three fingers of each extended like an inexpert typist’s. She stroked his cheeks with razorblade tenderness.

He could taste the blood, inside his mouth. She had gone deep, perhaps all the way to his teeth. He was too exhausted to yell.

‘Tribal scars, nigger,’ she screeched, ‘tribal scars!’

The pain began, and he knew he had to fight her off or die.

He feebly tried to push her away, but her legs gripped him ferociously. He tried to get a blow to her sternum, but she took his wrist and broke it as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

Sweet Mama of Shit, she was going to kill him good.

His head fell back again, and he saw an upside-down door opening. Rote stood in the hallway. His face looked hard and dead either way up.

‘What are you looking at, nigger?’ Cazie screamed.

Her hands came for his neck. This would be it, he knew. Her Devil’s Mask face came close to his, and she kissed his mouth as she twisted his head.

‘Mama,’ he tried to say.

He felt his vertebrae straining, then snapping like links in a chain, one after the other. The pain was not so bad.

As he slipped into the dark, he was dimly aware that he was coming again.

* * *

Luckily, there was a quadrangle on campus big enough to land a helicopter in. It attracted a crowd, but there were enough police around to cover that.

Lynch wore a plain black jumpsuit, with a flying jacket to conceal his shoulder-holstered Magnum. The shoulders of the jacket were padded asymmetrically to disguise the weapon. He strode through the police cordons, accompanied by the local man, Inspector Woolbridge. They had kept piping him updates through his earplug radio while he was airborne. He had done his best to ignore the details. He knew the basic situation, and he wanted to assess the specifics from the ground up.