Hyenas (18 page)

Before

“They're a sort of artsy-fartsy community theatre
group, going round schools doing plays about 'issues'. You'd hate them.”

Jay's dad smiled, shook his head.

“I'm sure I wouldn't,” he said and gulped a mouthful
of Cain's bitter.

“Anyway, they're big on promoting literacy. So, I come
on and just, you know, 'be myself'. I tell these kids what it's like trying to
get through life without being able to read and write, and how, unlike me,
they've got a choice. And I actually get paid for this. It's all government
funded. We'll be going all over the North West.”

“Sounds really good,” said Jay's dad.

“The money's not much but I can pay you a bit of
housekeeping now.”

“You don't have to do that, son.”

“No, I want to. I want to pay my way. I'm eighteen,
now.”

Jay drained the remainder of his lager.

“Fair enough. But it's up to you. I won't be chasing
you for it.”

“You won't have to. I'll leave it under the phone,
every Friday after I've been paid.”

“If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. So,
when's your first 'gig'?”

“Thursday. Holt Comprehensive, by the Fiveways.”

“Nervous?”

“A bit, yeah. Well, a lot. But I've got to do it and
I've got to get it right because,” there's this girl in the group, Lucy, and
she's gorgeous and she keeps smiling at me for no reason, “I don't think I'm
going to get another chance like this.”

Behind them, over by the bar, a couple of old regulars
shouted abuse at the horses on a wall-mounted television.

“Fucking donkey!” one of them shouted, throwing his
betting slip to the floor.

Jay's dad finished his pint then pointed at the
empties.

“Another round?” he said.

Jay nodded.

“You must be excited,” said Jay's dad as he returned
with the drinks, a fug of cigarette smoke parting as he approached.

“Yeah, but you know me. I can't help thinking
something's going to go horribly wrong. It usually does.”

“Well, it’d be a pretty dull life if nothing ever went
wrong. Great things are done when men and mountains meet. Blake.”

“But all I ever seem to meet is fucking mountains.”

Chapter 23

Jay grabbed his pack and the rifle and fell out of the
car, sprawling in the snow. Back on his feet, he looked around for a fire
escape, an exit. But there was nothing. There were only two other vehicles on
the roof, parked next to each other about twenty feet away, a Transit van and a
Punto, both inflated with snow, neither with an open door. He put his backpack
on and raised the rifle, sighting the nearest hyena. There were at least twenty
on the roof now and still more spilling from the ramp. As his finger tightened
on the trigger, he wondered where the hell Ellen was. Perhaps she was on the
floor he’d bypassed, or maybe she had doubled back somehow, made her way down
to the ground floor and got out. He hoped so and he was glad he'd told her
where the boat was moored. It suddenly mattered to him that she thought well of
him.

He pulled the trigger. The stock punched him in the
shoulder, sending something like an electric shock through his arm and down
into his fingertips. At the same time, the lead hyena dropped to the snow,
blood as dark as oil erupting from the back of its head. The shot echoed across
the city. But so what if it brought more hyenas? He was fucked anyway.

And then Jay's brain finally processed something he'd
seen a couple of seconds ago, something he'd seen but had failed to properly
notice.

There had been footsteps in the snow, leading up to
the driver's door of the Transit, and the snow on the door itself had been
patchy, as if disturbed.

Ellen. She was in the van. He glanced over. There was
no sign of a broken window. Which meant the door had already been open. Which
meant maybe there were keys. He was turning toward the van when he thought, What
if I'm wrong? I'd just be leading the hyenas to Ellen and then we'd both be
fucked.

“Ellen! If the van has keys shout out, because I can
drive. Not very well admittedly, but well enough. If it doesn't, just keep
quiet.”

Nothing.

Jay fired another shot into the pack, not targeting
anything in particular. Two hyenas fell in a tangle. He wasn't sure which one
he'd actually hit. He wondered how many bullets there were in the rifle's
stubby magazine. Twenty? Already too few. They were nearly upon him now, less
than fifteen feet away. He pulled the trigger again, surprised at how calm he
was feeling, how much he was enjoying the cool breeze against his sweat-sodden
forehead.

And then Ellen shouted, “There are keys! Move your
arse!”

He turned to see her leaning from the open driver's
door. Jay could smell the hyenas behind him as he made for the van, could feel
the wall of heat advancing ahead of them. It was as if someone had opened the
door to a sauna, a sauna full of corpses.

As he grabbed the inner door handle and planted one
foot on the bottom of the door frame, he felt a weight on his backpack. He
pivoted round, rifle held at waist level and fired. A hyena with Marty Feldman
eyes dropped to its knees then flopped onto its back, convulsing. Jay reversed
into the van, firing off a shot at a hyena that was naked but for a pair of red
Playboy boxer shorts. He slammed the door shut, then writhed out of his pack
and put it and the rifle on the middle seat.

Strapping herself in, Ellen said, “You can drive?” She
pointed at what was left of the Meriva. “The evidence to support that claim
isn’t exactly compelling.”

“Wasn't my fault,” said Jay. “There was a hyena
squatting on the bonnet.” He grinned. “I'll try to look after this one.”

Hyenas began hammering against the side of the van.
Filthy palms and faces pressed up against his window then, a moment later,
Ellen's window.

The key, complete with Homer Simpson key-ring, was
already in the ignition. Jay gave it a turn. There was a gritty scraping sound,
gradually becoming more aggressive, but the engine refused to come to life.

“Fuck,” said Ellen. “I definitely should have kept my
mouth shut.”

“Thanks. Nice to know my life means so much to you.”

“Sorry, but if it's a choice between you and Lilly...”

“Lilly?”

“Just came to me.”

Jay turned the key again and this time the gritty
scrape expanded into an industrious chugging.

“What if it's a boy?”

“It's a girl. It's a Lilly. She’s a Lilly.”

“Lilly it is, then,” said Jay and put the Transit into
reverse. Despite the fact that hyenas were now trying to clamber up onto the
van's stubby bonnet, Jay eased the accelerator down. The last thing he needed
was for the wheels to start spinning in the snow. “It's a good name.”

The Transit trundled back in a broad arc. Once it was
parallel with its starting point and facing the ramp, Jay put it into first. He
stepped on the accelerator with a little more force than before. The two hyenas
that had managed to hold on to the front of the van lost their grip and slid
down and out of view, as if they'd been sucked under the wheels. The van hardly
registered their presence.

The top of the ramp was packed tight with hyenas, a
wall of filth and wild-eyed, grinning faces.

Jay pushed the accelerator down hard.

“Hold onto your seat, Ellen,” he said.

“Christ.”

A moment before they hit the pack, Jay was almost
certain that the wall of hyenas was so dense he wouldn't be able to penetrate
it and the Transit would just bounce off. But then most of the hyenas
disappeared beneath the wheels or spun off to the left and right, slamming into
the walls and each other. One was lifted up into the air and hit the windscreen
head first, leaving a bloodied frosted patch about the size of a dinner plate
dead centre, before sliding off the bonnet and under the wheels.

Jay had to brake hard as he entered the bend. There
was a screech of rubber and a juddering crunch as the wing scraped the wall,
crumbling concrete and throwing up sparks.

“Fuck. Where did you learn to drive?”

“I didn't. Not properly.”

“Great.”

As they emerged onto the third floor, Jay locked the
wheel, u-turned the van and with a minimum of damage to the paintwork took it
down the next ramp. More hyenas crowded their path. Jay drove through them.
Another hyena head-butted the windscreen and a second bloody cataract appeared.
The next ramp was free of hyenas and Jay noticed the long bloodstains and
scraps of hair and clothing decorating the concrete walls. Without thinking, he
put his foot down a little harder. The van picked up speed and Jay could feel
control of the vehicle slipping away from him as he entered the final ramp and
the Transit bounced from left wall to right, the acoustics of the van's
interior creating a series of deafening crashes.

There was a rush of cold air from behind him. Jay
glanced over his shoulder and saw that the back doors were flapping open and
closed. He caught a brief glimpse of five or six hyenas in frantic pursuit, the
frontrunner bounding on all fours. Jay knew he couldn't afford to take his foot
from the accelerator. If even one of the hyenas got inside the van...

They came off the ramp to the ground floor so fast,
the van dipped forward, dragging its nose across the tarmac for a couple of
seconds, before lurching up again. At the same time, Jay had to swerve hard
right to avoid a concrete pillar. The Transit lost traction for a moment,
gliding left, almost colliding with a parked Golf, then Jay regained control
and sped toward the entrance, which was now filled with hyenas.

“Once we're outside, we won't be able to get far, with
the snow and abandoned cars,” he said. “As soon as we stop, we'll have to get
out and run.”

“Running's fine,” said Ellen. “Compared to this,
running is great.”

A few feet before the exit, Jay hit the brakes. He
knew he had to slow down before the tarmac was replaced by snow. They were
still doing close to twenty when they hit the hyenas, crushing and scattering
them. The impact shaved a few miles per hour off but they were still going too
fast as they left the car park. Jay pumped the brakes and yanked the wheel
left, but it was no good. He felt the tyres lose their grip. The Transit slid
across the snow, spinning one hundred and eighty degrees counter clockwise as
it did so. The tyre walls struck the opposite curb and the passenger-side
wheels left the ground for a second before dropping back down again, almost
throwing Jay and Ellen from their seats. Jay's foot jerked from the accelerator
but he kept the clutch down and the engine didn't cut out.

The back doors were wide open now, filling the
interior with the sound of hyenas. Jay shifted into first gear then, as soon as
the van started to move forward, quickly took it through second and up to
third. The engine laboured a little but there were no wheel-spins and he didn't
get stuck in the snow. As the hyena clamour increased, the urge to drive faster
was almost overwhelming but he held back. As he turned left into the narrow
side street, drifting a few feet but not enough to take out the front window of
the Premier Inn, hyenas began drumming against the side of the van.

Once he was on the straight, he put his foot down.
Seconds later, a string of abandoned black cabs forced him to drive on the
pavement.

Jay didn't even know the hyena had got in until he
heard Ellen say “Fuck!” unfasten her seat belt and grab the rifle. Inside the
Transit, the shot was so loud Jay felt needles of pain so deep in his ears he
felt like he'd swallowed broken glass.

He slowed the van down as he reached the junction with
Tithebarn Street then turned left in a sweeping arc much broader than he'd
intended. Ellen, still facing into the rear of the van looped one arm through
the rifle's strap and grabbed the back of the seat with both hands.

“Warn me next time, Lewis fucking Hamilton!”

The back end of the van whipped left and right but Jay
managed to point it down Tithebarn Street toward Chapel Street, toward the
Mersey. There were cars strewn across the wide road between the twin high
arches of the Exchange Station Building and the top of Moorfields. Too many
cars. He brought the van to a fishtailing stop a few feet before a too-narrow
gap between abandoned cars made identical by the thick snow.

“Thank fuck for that,” said Ellen, keeping the rifle
as she jumped out of the van. Jay grabbed his pack, hitching it back onto his
shoulders before joining Ellen.

He looked back the way they had come. Slalom tracks in
the snow led back to Vernon Street sixty feet away. Already, pursuing hyenas
were beginning to appear. Jay turned to see Ellen already crossing Moorfields,
passing the Lion then the Railway pubs. He sprinted to catch up.

He was only a few feet behind her, crossing Exchange
Street East which ran back down to Dale Street, the Exchange Building looming
ten storeys above them, when he saw a hyena emerge from Old Hall Street off to
their right. And then he remembered, too late of course, that there were two
entry points to Moorfields Station, one at the bottom of Moorfields itself, the
other on Old Hall Street.

He opened his mouth to warn Ellen but she was already
turning down Exchange Street East, the rifle slipping down her arm on its strap
and into her waiting hands. The sheer soldierliness of Ellen's performance
reawakened in Jay his feelings of woeful inadequacy in the face of the
challenges of life in the post-Jolt world. Despite these feelings, he found
himself grinning and, for a moment, didn't know why. Then he realised it was
because he knew that Ellen, this stroppy, pregnant woman, was going to survive.
Whatever happened next, she was going to live and, inexplicably, he felt a
certain amount of personal pride in that.

His grin faltered then vanished as the hyena, now at
the head of a ten-strong pack, spotted them. It showed them a mouthful of
oversized yellow teeth then pulled away from the dark, corrugated sandstone of
Tithebarn House and cut across Tithebarn Street toward them. As Jay followed
Ellen, he looked back over his shoulder. The car-park hyenas were gaining, only
fifty feet or so behind them now.

“We need to go to ground, Ellen.”

“No chance,” she shouted back at him. “Last time we
went to ground we ended up in that fucking van.” About a third of the way down
Exchange Street East, Ellen broke right, taking them into Exchange Flags, the
plaza between the back of the Exchange Building and the back of the Town Hall.
The Exchange Building seemed intent upon engulfing them, looming above them and
wrapping itself about them. Jay would have been intimidated if it wasn’t for
the fact that the building, in all its Georgian-style excess, resembled a vast,
grey wedding cake. At the centre of the plaza, the Nelson Monument was a
confusion of flags, cannons and skeletons; around its base, shackled French
prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars wept into their hands. Above the prisoners’
heads, the words: ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN TO DO HIS DUTY. Jay had always
wondered what it had said. With Ellen leading the way by a couple of feet, they
crossed the plaza, keeping low, using the monument for cover, and sprinted
around the back of the Martin's Bank Building.

Jay looked over his shoulder. The hyenas were closing
the gap. There was no way he and Ellen were going to be able to outrun them —
no way — and it was very possible they had left it too late to find a bolthole.
He wanted to call out to Ellen, apprise her of the situation, but what was the
point? What would that achieve? And anyway, the hyenas would reach him first.
He’d keep them busy long enough for Ellen to get away. Maybe it was exhaustion
making a fool of him, but he found he quite liked the idea.