The Age of Scorpio (79 page)

On the third floor Beth kicked in the door to the first room she came to, a back bedroom. The same soiled mattresses, the same rotting food, the same smell of sewage. She tried not to gag as she heard du Bois on the stairs to the fourth and final floor.

Beth came out of the back bedroom and moved to the front, kicking it open. This was not quite as bad, perhaps because the blackout curtains that had covered the windows had fallen down, making it less usable.

If her senses hadn’t been quite as acute as they had become recently, Beth wasn’t sure she would have heard the burst of suppressed sub-machine gun fire from upstairs. She probably would have heard du Bois’s cry of surprise, however, and definitely the sound of glass smashing above her. She saw a shape, much larger than du Bois on his own, plummet past the window. She heard the impact and a scream. Beth rushed to the filthy window and looked out. Du Bois was lying mostly on the roof of the Range Rover. Something not unlike what she had fought in the dog stadium was crouched over him, repeatedly slashing at him with an extended spur of bone.

Beth ran out of the room, leaped over the landing banister and landed on the stairs close to the second-floor landing. She ran down the few remaining steps and charged at the landing window. The black-painted single pane exploded outwards as she hit it. It felt like she had a long time to think about what a stupid move this had been on the twenty-five-foot drop to the ground.

Knees bent, Beth landed fine, pleased that the bones in her legs hadn’t exploded. She moved quickly to where the hybrid thing was savaging du Bois’s face. Beth put the shotgun barrel next to the thing’s head and pulled the trigger. Its head disappeared in a spray of blood and bone.

‘Are you okay?’ Beth asked.

‘Of course I’m not fucking okay! I think I’ve broken my spine, and you just about blew my face off!’ Beth glanced down at him and had to admit some of the cuts on his face looked a little like pellet wounds.

‘Sorry?’ she ventured. Du Bois lay there glaring, but at the sky, not at her. ‘Well, get up then,’ Beth finally said.

‘I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that a forty-foot fall onto my back may have caused some damage?’ he asked testily.

‘Oh,’ Beth said. ‘Will it heal?’

‘Given time.’

‘Were there more up there?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘So she’s not in there?’

‘I saw what looked like a basement door. I wanted to clear up first, so if we went in we wouldn’t get any nasty surprises from behind.’ Du Bois screamed as Beth jarred his broken spine taking the UMP from him. She already had his .45 and his spare clips. She relieved him of his ammunition for the UMP as well.

‘You said yourself that we didn’t have much time.’ Beth glanced down the street again. Despite the clear blue sky, the Solent was looking choppier and choppier. Waves were coming over the beach and onto the road. Some of the seawater was even washing up to where they were.

‘I don’t think –’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘– that leaving me here this exposed is a good idea and you will not be fine; you will almost certainly be eaten.’

‘Then see you and thanks.’ She turned, UMP at the ready, and headed back into the house.

Beth had found that whenever things happened quickly she was fine. It was when she had time to think that things became tricky. She stood at the door down to the basement for a long time trying to make herself reach out and touch the handle. She knew there was something on the other side of the door. Felt it.

Beth opened the door, barely realising that she was doing it. She was at the top of a set of concrete steps looking down. The smell was strong but it was the smell of the sea and not altogether unpleasant. It was carried on a warm wind. Beth found that she could see perfectly in the darkness. She moved down the stairs. The fear was gone. It had to be her imagination but she felt as if something was calling her.

It wasn’t a basement. It was a crossroads. Tunnels of fused stone and earth met there.
It was a wonder the whole street didn’t collapse
, Beth thought. The passage going south was alive. It looked like an empty vein and it was where the warm wind was coming from.

At some level Beth knew this was all wrong, fundamentally so. This was part of something that should not be, that didn’t exist in the world as she understood it. But another part, perhaps the part that had been sprayed with blood by something old and strange, understood. It was that part that was being called to by a huge, alien and sleeping mind.

Pushing the calling aside, Beth brought the suppressed Heckler & Koch up in front of her, the folding stock secure against her shoulder, and moved ahead with the weapon at the ready.

The tunnel took her down. She didn’t have to walk far before she knew she was under the sea. She even felt the tube sway with the water and the sound of pebbles sliding up and down.

Beth knew that she should be freaking out. She was clearly walking through something that was alive in some way. She knew first hand how dangerous the things she was following were, but somehow, instinctively, she knew this was okay. She all but felt welcome.

It was pitch dark but her eyes had no problem seeing ahead of her, though everything looked grey. Then there was a glowing. It looked like the chemical light she had seen some animals make on nature documentaries. The word bioluminescence suddenly popped into her head. She wasn’t sure where it had come from – another part of her ‘gift’ from the mad old woman?

The pain in her head was still there but it was now a dull ache. With rising disquiet she realised that she was being soothed by something. She had a sense of enormous scale, a mind all around her and not like her own but familiar. A mind that slept but was close to waking.

The light was growing brighter. Beth decided to abandon caution. She knew that if she didn’t go straight in then fear would freeze her. Keeping low, moving rapidly, the UMP sweeping left, right, up and down with her movements, she entered a cavern.

The warm wind was stronger here, like moist breath on her skin but still not unpleasant. She was wading through water. No, not water; it felt more viscous. It put Beth in mind of amniotic fluid. It was a massive space, arched with a bone-like material, the flesh walls reminding Beth of the inside of a mouth. Islands of a bone-like material stuck out of the fluid. Beth’s vision magnified, and at the end of the cavern she could make out what looked like massive internal organs pulsing with life.

They were there, of course: the twisted, once-human, mutated hybrid servants. They moved like ambulatory patches of darkness, blocking the glow in places. Edging towards her. There were a lot of them.
How big was this fucking diving club anyway?
Beth wondered.

‘May as well get this over and done with,’ Beth muttered. She advanced, firing a three-round burst. A head shot, a hybrid went down. Shift the weapon, her instinct – or some ancient technology if du Bois was to be believed – telling her where to put the shots each time. The sub-machine gun’s kick against her shoulder felt comfortable. The muzzle flashes lit up the cave, making the dark shapes of the hybrids look as if they were moving under a strobe light.

They dived into the fluid with barely a splash. Beth had a moment to think about how graceful they looked as the dark shapes darted towards her through the water. She lowered the weapon to fire into the fluid. It cost her a moment before she ‘remembered’ how useless bullets were underwater. She had to get out of the liquid.

Running slowly through the water, churning it up, still firing short controlled bursts as she moved. Black sprays of backlit blood flew from every target she aimed at. So many of the shadows in the dimly lit cavern seemed to be moving. In shades of grey she saw them charging, swimming towards her. She didn’t think of them as people; they were . . . The word antibodies was supplied to her.

Boots touched dry bone as she raced up an outcrop. One of the hybrids exploded out of the water nearby. He fell back into the water with three rounds, fired from the UMP, in his skull. More of them were leaping onto the outcrop as Beth ran up it, firing. The way they came out of the water and landed made her think absurdly of penguins.

The clip ran out in the UMP.

‘You all right there, mate?’ a voice with the warped cockney accent of Portsmouth asked. Du Bois had a moment to reflect on how having your spine broken encouraged people to ask stupid questions.

‘Oh yes, I’m perfectly fucking fine,’ du Bois snapped from his position atop the Range Rover.

‘Really? You look a little fucked up.’

‘You have peerless observation skills.’

‘What? Oh what, are you being a smart cunt?’

‘Actually I’m just trying to find the requisite level of stupidity so we can converse in a meaningful manner.’

‘Posh cunt.’

‘Indeed.’

Spinal injuries were complicated and challenged the healing abilities of his nanites. They had to pull a lot of matter from other places in the body and adjust it at a molecular level. They took longer to heal, but despite the discomfort, du Bois could feel his spine knitting together again.

A sallow pockmarked face with bloodshot eyes, greasy hair and rotting teeth appeared in his line of vision. Du Bois was aware rather than felt the man searching inside the remains of his jacket.

‘Nice phone, mate. That’s mine now. Ooo, some money. What’s this then? You’ve got more than one warrant card here, mate.’

‘Really? You haven’t noticed the body of the sea creature lying next to the Range Rover?’ He heard splashing. It seemed like the water had risen higher while he’d been lying there.

‘Yeah, he’s all kinds of messed up.’

‘And that’s English, is it?’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Did you shoot him?’

‘No. The person who did is a very angry lady from Bradford with an exceptionally large gun. Why don’t you put my wallet and phone back and run away, and she probably won’t kill you.’

‘Why don’t I take them and run away?’ he asked. Du Bois had to admit that he had a point. Some other operatives had powerful electrical charges in their phones and other items which could be set off by transmitting a command from their internal nano-systems. Du Bois had always eschewed that upgrade, assuming he’d never get into a situation like this.

‘The harder you make it for us to recover those items, the more you’ll suffer,’ du Bois assured the man.

‘You’re pretty scary for a paraplegic,’ the thief told him.

‘Now you get a vocabulary?’

The case!
du Bois suddenly thought.
Did the man have the case?
He tried to make contact with the smart systems on the vials inside the cases containing the blood and genetic samples from Talia. They were out of range.

‘Shit!’ du Bois shouted.

‘You all right, mate?’ The thief’s apparent concern wrong-footed du Bois for a moment.

‘Brilliant! Not only is my spine no longer broken, but thankfully I’m no longer being robbed.’

‘No, you are, really.’

‘Sarcasm not your thing then?’

‘Oh, I get it. Good one. You won’t mind if I look in the car then?’

‘No. Go ahead. Take your time.’

‘That’s all fucked up as well, by the way.’

‘Oh is it? Well thank you for letting me know, and please do keep me up to date.’

The Range Rover shifted underneath him as the thief climbed in, sending pain shooting through du Bois’s spine. He was trying to remember the last time he’d truly been aware of the case while entertaining complex revenge fantasies involving the man in his Range Rover.

‘Fuck me! Is this a shooter?’ Du Bois thought that the world must hold constant surprises for this individual, every moment a new experience.

‘If by that you mean is it a gun, then no, it’s a teapot.’

‘Sarcastic cunt.’

‘Well quite. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you not to say and do things worthy of sarcasm?’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

‘So what are you, a copper or something?’

‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m trying to concentrate here. If you absolutely must rob me then could we have a little more robbery and a little less chat?’

‘You’re the boss.’

The gunfight in Old Portsmouth was the last time he knew for sure that he had had the case. It was the only time he’d lost consciousness. He didn’t think that he’d just lost it, which meant that the DAYP must have it. He closed his eyes. This was unimaginably bad, particularly if, as du Bois imagined, Beth was about to get herself killed and not retrieve Talia.

When du Bois opened his eyes he saw that the thief was holding his FAL carbine.

‘All right if I take this, yeah?’

‘Oh please do. After all, I understand there’s a world shortage of sub-literate morons with automatic weapons.’

‘You know, you’re really not very nice.’ The thief actually sounded hurt.

‘Having my back broken and being robbed has brought out the worst in me. I’m normally a sweetheart.’

‘You don’t have to be so nasty about it,’ the thief said, and then pointed du Bois’s own carbine at him. Du Bois had a moment to ponder how he’d basically talked the man into shooting him with his own gun. Perhaps he should be nicer to people, he reflected. He heard the man start to squeeze the trigger.

Beth let the UMP drop on its sling. She swung the shotgun round, bringing it to bear. The muzzle flash was that much brighter as a nearby face disintegrated. The loud report of the weapon compared to the suppressed whispers of the H & K seemed like a violation of the place.

They were so close that Beth barely needed to aim now. Just shift the shotgun slightly and fire, and another one flew off the outcrop and into the now bloody fluid. Beth knew that she had not killed them, though several were floating face down in the liquid.

In the periphery of her vision she saw two of the six-limbed, bone-crested creatures that du Bois had killed on the motorway climb up onto nearby outcrops. She knew she had nothing that could even harm them.

The shotgun was empty. She drew the accurised .45 smoothly from the holster at her hip, pulling the hammer back on an already chambered round as she did so.