Terminal World (8 page)

‘Not your problem,’ Meroka said. ‘Trust me on this.’

‘Let me past.’ The man grabbed Meroka’s shoulder and made to shove her against the corridor’s outside wall. Meroka didn’t give him a chance. She pulled the machine-pistol out and rammed it under the man’s chin.

‘I did tell you it wasn’t your problem, didn’t I?’

The big man made a choking sound.

‘It would probably be a good idea to get back in your compartment,’ Quillon said, wondering if Meroka had enough tranquilliser to knock out everyone on the train. The big man, for all that he might have been spoiling for a confrontation, evidently knew better than to argue with the gun pressed under his jaw. He started shuffling backwards, his eyes straining to look down as Meroka forced his head up at an unnatural angle.

That was when a figure appeared around the corner at the end of the corridor. Quillon, looking past both Meroka and the man she was holding at gunpoint, had only an instant to recognise the newcomer as the same man they had seen on the platform. In the half-light of the platform he had passed for normal. Here in the brightness of the railway carriage there was nothing about the hatted man that could ever be right. Quillon didn’t even have the sense that he was looking at another angel. The figure was a grey-skinned ghoul, a corpse going through the parodic motions of life.

Meroka acted swiftly. She jerked back the machine-pistol and used her right boot to kick the big man off kilter, sending him careering back into the newcomer. The newcomer looked stick-thin even in his coat, but he had unexpected resources of strength and balance. In what seemed like slow motion, the ghoul began to draw the glinting weapon they had seen him carrying on the platform. With the same slowness Meroka lowered the barrel of the machine-pistol, aiming it squarely at the ghoul. Most of him was still hidden behind the big man, who - Quillon realised - the ghoul was supporting with his free hand, improvising a shield. Quillon began to bring the angel gun up.

The ghoul was the first to fire. He shot through the big man, punching a red-rimmed hole from his back to his chest, neat and central through the sternum. Quillon flinched away, gore spattering the left side of his face like a drizzle of warm rain, bone and blood, muscle and lung tissue erupting from the wound in a widening fan. The ghoul had missed Quillon, but only by a tiny margin. An eyeblink later, Meroka returned fire, releasing a deafening burst of bullets from the machine-pistol, the barrel spitting blue flame, shell casings ratcheting from the side, the torso of the big man - he had died instantly the moment the ghoul fired - turning into a pulverised red chaos. Meroka kept on firing until she had exhausted the magazine. The ghoul staggered back, his coat plastered with blood and tissue, at last relinquishing the human shield. He came to rest with his spine against the rear wall and produced a hideously exaggerated smile, as if invisible hooks were pulling up the extremities of his mouth.

Behind the blue-grey lips was a compacted horror of black teeth and tongue, as if there was too much squeezed into too little space.

‘I am but one of many,’ the ghoul said, his voice like wind through trees, dry and spectral. ‘You are but one, Quillon.’

The ghoul let go of his weapon.

‘Did you come alone?’ Meroka asked, dropping the magazine and reaching into her coat for a spare.

‘Of course I didn’t.’

‘Where are the others?’

‘All around you. There’s no point in running.’ The ghoul coughed black treacle out of his mouth. ‘There are too many of us, and now we know exactly where you are and exactly where you think you are going.’

‘But you probably don’t know about this,’ Quillon said, aiming the angel gun. He waited an instant for the ghoul’s eyes to alight on it, another instant for a flicker of recognition to show in his face.

‘That won’t work down—’

Quillon fired. The gun twitched in his hand - it wasn’t so much recoil as a kind of quickening, the weapon stirring from sleep. Crimson light, bright enough to etch an after-image in his vision, lanced from the barrel. The beam boiled into the ghoul and turned half of him to black char in no more than a second. The smell hit Quillon an instant later.

Along with the realisation that he had just killed for the third time.

The angel left a slick of black blood as they dragged it to the nearest outer door. Bits of it kept flaking off like charred newspaper. If there was anything useful on the corpse, some weapon or gadget that might help them, it was going to have to remain undiscovered.

Meroka pulled open the window, then reached down to the door handle. She had to push it open against the force of the wind. The train was passing over a latticework bridge, spanning one of the points where some impossibly ancient cataclysm had chipped a crevasse in the black fabric of Spearpoint, ripping a tapering cleft all the way down to the next ledge. She shoved the dead ghoul and the body tumbled to the tracks, the train’s forward motion snatching it away. Quillon only just had time to see the angel slip through a gap in the rails and plummet into the dark void under the bridge. There would be precious little to recognise after it had hit the ground again, leagues below. He imagined the corpse providing some puzzle for a counterpart to himself, a striving young pathologist in Horsetown’s equivalent of the Third District Morgue.

They were struggling with the other body when a partition door slid open further down the carriage and two of the rowdy businessmen peered cautiously out. So did the mother who had been sitting in the next compartment along. None of them said anything. They merely looked at Meroka and Quillon, at the remaining body and the tableau of carnage surrounding them.

‘As you were,’ Meroka said.

All three moved quietly back into their compartments.

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t throw him overboard after all,’ Quillon said.

‘What do you care?’

‘He was an innocent man. If he falls all the way down to the next ledge, no one will ever know what happened to him. At least if we leave him on the train he’ll be found by someone.’

‘With your fingerprints all over him.’

‘The least of my worries, Meroka.’ There was no need to add that his fingerprints were purposefully nonspecific, making a unique match very hard to prove.

They moved the dead man into the empty compartment and slid the door closed on him. Propped up in the seat, a hole blown through his chest, there was no way he could be mistaken for anything other than a corpse. But at least he wasn’t lying in the corridor any more.

‘Still another ten minutes from the stop,’ Meroka said, checking her watches. ‘Better find us an empty compartment somewhere else.’

‘Do you think there’s another angel on the train?’

‘If that thing was an angel, it wasn’t like any I’ve ever seen. Fucker didn’t even have wings. You sure you know who’s really after you?’

As they walked towards the rear of the train, Quillon said, ‘It was an angel, just not like the ones we see flying overhead. The angels have been trying to find a way to survive beyond the Celestial Levels for years. That thing - the ghoul - was one of their deep-penetration agents, surgically and genetically adapted to function down here.’

‘Looked half-past dead to me.’

‘He was dying from the moment he crossed into our zone. But just being able to operate down here at all is a significant step forwards for them.’

‘You know a lot about angels.’

‘When they’re trying to kill you, you make a point of studying your enemy.’ He paused as they passed a washroom. ‘I need to get this mess off my face, Meroka. Do you mind?’

‘Don’t take all week.’

He went inside and locked the door. The light came on automatically, bathing everything in a liverish yellow. He took off his hat and glasses and looked at himself in the mirror, trying to match his face against the ghoul’s, trying to convince himself that there was a world of difference. He’d been able to pass as human in daylight, when he had first come to Neon Heights. But forced into exile, cut off from home, he was reverting to type. He had shaved his head when the hair started falling out. He had taken to wearing spectacles when the blue tint of his eyes began to deepen unnaturally. As he dabbed away at the spatter and gore with soap, water and a handful of scratchy paper towels, his skin seemed little more than a translucent membrane stretched perilously tight over alien bone-structure. He had been amongst humans long enough to know how weird he was starting to look.

Half-past dead.

He reached behind his back and felt through the fabric of his coat and clothes for what should have been the hard ridge of his shoulder blade. It wasn’t there. Instead he felt a soft, cancerous bud. There was one on the other side as well, precisely symmetrical.

For years he had practised a kind of chemotherapy on himself, dosing himself with a cocktail of drugs, holding the process of reversion at bay. When that began to fail, he had gone back to Fray. Black-market surgery, performed in a squalid annexe of the Pink Peacock, kept the wing-buds from growing back. Every twelve months, the buds had been meticulously cut away, the wounds stitched and bandaged. Then every six, as the growth rate began to accelerate. Then every three.

And now he was overdue.

 

By the time Meroka and Quillon had disembarked, a snorting black dragon of a steam engine was already being backed into place where the internal-combustion locomotive had been, ready to take the train on the next leg of its journey. Everything happened with stopwatch precision, fixed to a routine that hadn’t changed in centuries.

‘Maybe we should have stayed on it,’ he said, as they followed the handful of other disembarking passengers away from the platform to the station hall.

‘Either way it’s a risk,’ Meroka said. ‘Least now we aren’t stuck on that thing with nowhere else to go.’

From somewhere behind them came a scream, followed by shouting and a growing commotion.

‘Sounds as if they just found the body,’ Quillon said, making a conscious effort not to alter his stride.

‘You can look back,’ Meroka said in a low voice. ‘Everyone else is.’ He risked a wary glance over his shoulder. Passengers and station staff were gathering around the coach where the confrontation had taken place, including some of the rowdy businessmen. There was a great deal of enthusiastic shouting and finger-pointing. A white-whiskered man in a railway uniform began blowing a code on his whistle, the whistle-blasts echoing off the station’s high metal roof. Two men emerged from the end of the coach, supporting the barely conscious form of the guard.

‘That’s them!’ called one of the businessmen, singling out Meroka and Quillon. ‘They were there! I saw them! They killed that man!’

Quillon turned around slowly, trying to look agreeably perplexed, as if he had no possible idea what he was being accused of. ‘Is something the matter ...’ he started to say, not even sounding convincing to himself.

‘Stop there,’ another man called, a black-bearded, uniformed figure who might have been a senior guard, stationmaster or perhaps an agent of the railway police. He began to unbuckle something from his belt, advancing steadily on Meroka and Quillon. The item turned out to be a long-nosed service revolver, which the man gripped two-handed and began to level at his targets. ‘Stop,’ he declaimed, his voice booming out in actorly fashion. ‘Stop or I will shoot!’

‘This isn’t going to end well,’ Meroka said. She began to reach into her coat again.

‘No more deaths,’ Quillon said. ‘Please.’

The bearded man fired a warning shot, ringing high into the vaulted roof - disturbing the night’s audience of roosting bats and birds, a vast eruption of sooty wings. ‘This is your last warning!’ he called again. ‘Stop now!’

Meroka flung something at the man. For an instant Quillon had the absurd impression that she had thrown him a candy or a glass marble. It landed near his feet and exploded, a bright concussive flash louder even than the discharge of his revolver. The grenade threw up a screen of choking blue-white smoke. Meroka tossed another into the melee for good luck, then spun around and started running. Quillon followed her, his medical bag swinging ridiculously from his left hand, drawing his right hand and the angel gun from his pocket so that he could run more freely. They exited the platform area and passed through a wide doorway into the black-and-white-tiled booking hall and waiting room, where late-night travellers were only now beginning to register the commotion outside. A station official, more alert than most, was just putting down the handset of a wall-mounted telephone. He spotted the two fugitives and dashed across to the outer door, bravely set on blocking their escape. Meroka pulled out the machine-pistol and fired off a burst from the fresh magazine she had loaded on the train, aiming not at the station official but at the tilework mosaic above the open door. Shards and chips exploded away, the official shielding his eyes as the pieces rained down on him. Quillon risked another glance over his shoulder. The bearded man with the service revolver wasn’t far behind them, stumbling slightly as if he was still dealing with the effects of the smoke grenade. He stopped for a moment, leaning over with one hand on his knee, the other still holding the gun, and then resumed his pursuit. Other officials - not to mention several passers-by - were hard on his heels.

Just then Quillon registered one of the passengers in the waiting room. With elegant, unhurried calm, the man began folding his newspaper. He placed it down on the vacant chair next to him - no one else was sitting anywhere near him - and rose slowly to his feet. He wore a long grey coat, cinched at the waist, a low-brimmed hat and patent leather shoes. The ghoul reached a black-gloved hand into his coat pocket, as if he was searching for a cigarette lighter.

Quillon was holding the angel gun, but he didn’t dare risk a shot now. As sparsely occupied as the waiting room was, there were still people between him and the ghoul, who was now walking slowly out of the seating area, the black slash of his mouth beginning to curve up at the ends.