Pelquin's Comet (10 page)

S
IX

La Gossa, Babylon’s principal city. Morning had already arrived, settled in, and made itself at home by the time Leesa crawled out from under her bedding and stumbled across to the vast ribbed door. She grasped the metal with both hands and pulled. It was a swine to budge initially, but once she got things moving the laws of momentum came to her aid and the great sheet of metal rolled out of the way in its own sweet time, settling with a clanging thud. Leesa squinted out at the day. The sky was low and dominated by heavy clouds, but then the sky was a tease. It wouldn’t rain today; the air didn’t taste of rain.

The back of her right hand felt raw and tender at the knuckles, as if she’d scraped it along a wall or something, though goodness only knew when. As yet, the events of the previous evening were pretty much a mystery; one more blank space in her mind to sit among the many.

She leant forward and spat the stale taste of sleep from her mouth, then eased herself down from the old carriage and started to shuffle leaden-footed across the deserted goods yard. The part of her that never slept started to fill in the gaps, feeding memories of her exploits the night before to the conscious areas of her mind. It did so by drip-feed, thank God, or she might have been tempted to retreat back to the carriage and bury herself beneath the voluminous sleeping blanket, putting off having to face the day for at least another couple of hours.

She saw herself dancing at one of her usual haunts, the Green Gecko – a cavernous dark and grungy space throbbing with sound and heaving with cavorting forms. She recognised some of the faces associated with the gyrating bodies around her but by no means all of them. There’d been one guy in particular: cute face and a fit body, well worth setting her sights on; but, to her considerable disappointment, he’d faded away pretty early on. The world had subsequently narrowed to a point where there was just one lithe form monopolising her attention: a stunningly beautiful black girl of indeterminate age, her hair teased into a flame-dyed crest which ran like a mane front-to-back along her otherwise shaven scalp. The jewelled nose stud that caught and glittered in the lights looked expensive but was probably fake.

Leesa had noticed this girl once or twice before, but only ever across the room – they’d never entered each other’s orbits. Until now. And God, did she know how to move. Leesa wasn’t into other women as a rule but life was there to be experienced, and this slinky temptress was pretty hard to ignore.

Their dancing swiftly developed into a grinding, sweaty clinch. She remembered being surprised by the other woman’s strength as she found herself pressed back against a wall, with the other woman’s mouth and hands seemingly everywhere. There was nothing cute or dainty about their kisses; they were urgent, hungry assaults, carried out as lights and music pulsed and fellow club-goers drifted around them. She’d scored something off Jamiel – couldn’t recall what, she hadn’t been able to analyse it; something synthetic certainly, though it had an ur-root base. Something new. Something which she and the ebony-skinned demoness had inhaled greedily from fractured capsules once they were alone in the other woman’s apartment. Something which made flesh sing in soaring harmonics at the gentlest of caresses and amplified the body’s response to more intimate intrusions a hundred-fold. Leesa had never felt so open to stimulus. Their love making had been wild, piquant, unfettered, and totally exhausting. Even now, memory of it sent a tingle of pleasure coursing down her spine, the merest echo of last night’s rapture.

There had been a bedside table, draped in a grubby linen cloth and supporting a framed picture of the woman with a fresh-faced man – brother, lover, son; who knew? She was smiling, the sense of happiness and contentment it engendered jarringly at odds with the woman Leesa had just coupled with so aggressively.

Quite why Leesa remembered that detail and little else about the room she couldn’t say, except that it made the demoness more human, somehow.

Despite the instant buzz, the lovemaking left her feeling empty in its aftermath, as did the drugs, as did everything. In those rare moments when she took the trouble to analyse her life, she saw herself as a hollow shell with nothing but need at its core.

She recalled returning to the club, sans demoness, scoring something else from Jamiel, who’d insisted on a good grope as down payment.

She was unsure what had happened after that, but whatever he’d given her hadn’t been worth putting out for. It hadn’t worked.

Some people took drugs to forget. Leesa took them to remember, and the dreams hadn’t come that night.

She crossed the abandoned freight yard, picking her way over rusted rails and sleepers turned brittle as balsa wood by age and exposure to the elements. She felt as broken and discarded as her surroundings. A few other shambling figures were to be seen, testament that she wasn’t the only unfortunate to claim this forgotten corner of the city as home. This was just temporary, though; she wasn’t staying. This wasn’t the dead-end of her life, merely a pause.

Traffic noise rumbled in from a distance, otherwise the whole world might have been this wasteland.

A small shack stood at the far edge of the yard, its door propped open. A plank had been nailed in place above the door, bearing the hand-scrawled legend ‘CAFE’ in bold red letters. Leesa had once overheard the owner, Sal, say, “Screw originality. I want a sign that’s gonna tell folk what we do here. Reckon this does the job.”

The logic was hard to fault.

Sal stood behind the counter, larger than life, his stained red and white candy-stripe apron looking to be no more than one deep breath away from bursting, as it struggled to encompass his corpulent girth. Sal greeted Leesa’s arrival with his customary snaggle-toothed grin, thumping a mug of coffee down on the counter and saying, as he said every morning, “Mornin’, hun’; black an’ strong, just how you like it!”

Just how I like my women too, apparently
, which wasn’t what she thought every morning.

Somehow, Sal always managed to serve drinks piping hot, which was what Leesa most appreciated about his coffee. Otherwise, the brew was a little bitter for her taste and only moderately strong, despite Sal’s proud boast.

She took a seat at an unoccupied table and sipped the drink immediately, savouring the sensation as liquid scalded the back of her throat to leave it raw and tingling.

The shack was a little more than half full. Leesa glanced discreetly at those around her, not wanting to make eye contact, not wanting to be snared into a conversation. Derelicts, one and all. People who had given up on society, on themselves.

I’m not like them
, she told herself, while fearing all the while that she was. Leesa had a plan, though. She was going to get out. Soon. La Gossa was a trap. A sweet and seductive one baited with drugs and clubs and music and sex on tap, but it was a trap all the same. She’d given in to temptation and dallied here longer than intended. The more she stuck around the harder it was going to be to move on. Leaving required effort, and she’d been following the path of least resistance for far too long.

Molly shuffled in through the door. Her rounded shoulders always seemed even more rounded in the mornings, her steady gait all the more stiff and laboured. Leesa averted her eyes, not wanting the older woman to come across and join her, not today. Molly had been the first person to accept Leesa when she’d arrived here, making sure she found a place to sleep and teaching her how things worked in the yard. Even then Leesa had sensed that Molly wasn’t quite right and soon made every effort to distance herself from the other woman.

She owed Molly, no question; but she’d repaid the debt by degree in a dozen little ways: ensuring that Molly didn’t go hungry, making certain she had enough warm clothing when it turned cold. Little things, but they all added up.

Leesa needn’t have worried; Molly didn’t even seem to register her presence. Instead she took a seat at the far side of the café. As she sat down, her body undulated in an inhuman fashion. A small whiskered snout protruded from beneath her grubby sweater, and Molly was soon cooing at the rodent and feeding it cake crumbs.

This wasn’t the same rat Molly had kept when Leesa first arrived. She knew that for a fact. She’d witnessed the old woman kill that particular rat and eat it raw.

Leesa looked away, disgusted with herself rather than Molly, ashamed that she had lingered here for so long. Babylon didn’t hold any answers, only distractions. It was high time she resumed her quest to piece the fragments of her life back together.

Once the coffee mug had been drained, Leesa felt more alive and ready to wrestle with the world. She had resolved to move forward with her life; and this time she meant it.

Standing up, she waved a vague farewell in Sal’s direction and left the shack, heading behind it to squeeze through the hole in the wire fence, ready to trot along the short alley that formed the yard’s umbilical to the city proper.

Head bowed, hands stuck deep in pockets and her thoughts still firmly focused on the excesses of the night before, she stepped into the alley, just as another memory from the previous evening dripped into her consciousness. Leesa stopped dead in her tracks, horrified. It seemed she
hadn’t
accepted Jamiel’s groping as passively as usual, or at least she hadn’t for long. Already high from the previous score and the fast-fading buzz of some glorious sex, her inhibitions must have been low enough to let her loathing come to the surface. She’d lost control, suffering his pawing for a while but then pulling away.

She recalled saying, “That’s enough!” The words came to her now as if she’d heard them spoken by someone else, but it was her voice saying them all right.

Being Jamiel, the cocky little dealer hadn’t taken her seriously, reaching out to slip his hand back inside her top, saying, “Hey, baby,
I’m
the one who decides when it’s enough, not you.” The smile never left his face.

Until she slapped his hand away and hit him.
Really
hit him. A straight jab to the jaw. No wonder the back of her hand had felt sore this morning. Jamiel had gone down without even crying out.
Shit!
She hadn’t killed him, had she? No, even stoned she wouldn’t be stupid enough to hit him that hard. Unconscious, that was all. Mind you, that was enough.

Gabon, the great bull of a minder who was never far from Jamiel’s side, had lunged at her, trying to wrap his tree-trunk arms around her torso. A kick to the knee, punch to the stomach and chop to the back of his solid neck had sent the big man collapsing beside his boss.

And then she’d just gone on with her life as if nothing had happened!

Dear God. Why had memory waited until now to reveal this little gem? If she didn’t set about some world-class grovelling immediately her life here was over whether she wanted it to be or not. It might not be much of a life but it was all she currently had.

Only then did Leesa sense the two figures emerging from the shadows.

One on either side, approaching together, faces artificially darkened to a near-grey hue by manipulation of the skin’s melanin. Leesa wasn’t impressed: she’d seen better skin scrubs on podium dancers at the Green Gecko – more imaginative ones, at any rate. A quick chemical wash and the melanin ‘fix’ would break down, the induced colour fading away to normality. She knew the significance of those grey faces, though, and of the stylised downward-pointing dagger currently emblazoned in gold on each of the pair’s foreheads, the tip of the blade just bisecting the eyebrows. It marked them as Cellothan, a theoretically banned warrior-elite sect specialising in the sadistic; the source of many an urban legend and reputedly the nastiest bastards on the whole of Babylon.

Jamiel had turned to
them
? Damn! He wasn’t messing around.

Leesa had one thing going for her. They were bound to underestimate her. Men always did. No matter if Jamiel
had
told them how she’d handled herself the previous evening. They would still see before them a scrawny no-hope girl and dismiss Jamiel’s claims as either exaggeration or a reflection of his own ineptitude rather than of her skills. Or so she hoped. Right now the two were busy behaving like the professionals they were. As Leesa stepped carefully backward, one of the grey-faced men angled his approach to move behind her, the other circling so that he was in front, the pair always keeping her between them while edging ever closer.

What was their intent, murder or just a serious beating? No weapons in sight, so presumably the latter, which gave her a little more manoeuvring room.

When Leesa acted it was quick and decisive. She feinted to go forward and to her left – one step and a convincing shift of body weight, the merest suggestion of a sway which the two Cellothans instantly responded to. Her actual movement was in the opposite direction. She sprang backwards so that both of the bastards were in front of her. She didn’t hesitate, didn’t give them a chance to revise their perception of her and respond. A sweep of her hand as her foot landed and she grasped the concealed knife, drawing the weapon from its boot sheath and flinging it in one smooth motion. She aimed for the body; the head presented too uncertain a target for such an improvised throw. The whole move was concealed within the flail of limbs and jerk of body caused by her backward hop. The Cellothan she was aiming for couldn’t have seen it coming, couldn’t have anticipated the attack. Yet, impossibly, he somehow managed to react, twisting and turning out of the way in the split second the knife was in the air, so that the blade tore into his upper arm rather than his torso.

Leesa didn’t pause to watch but was already taking the fight to the other man, swivelling to kick him hard in the solar plexus. The Cellothan wasn’t wearing body armour. She’d heard they never did; too much
machismo
, presumably, too tough for such wimpish self-concern. Her kick found its mark, partially paralysing the man’s diaphragm to leave him struggling for breath. She had no idea how she knew to do these things when so much else eluded her – evidently her body remembered how to fight even if her consciousness didn’t, as if violence had seeped indelibly into the cells and synapses that formed her to become an integral part of her being. She didn’t have to think about what she was doing, she simply
did
.