The Mandel Files (56 page)

“Clothes off,” Greg said, then flinched as the electromagnetic rifle poured another fusillade of bullets into the gable end.

“Do what?” Gabriel asked. She was cradling her left hand again. Her face was haggard, totally lethargic.

“We’ve got a lot of swimming to do. Clothes are going to drag us under.”

“Swim where?”

“Clear of the tower, remember? Kilometre at least. How long have we got?”

Gabriel closed her eyes. “About twenty minutes, maybe less.”

“Do we survive?”

“Some of us do, some of us don’t.” She sounded completely disinterested.

Greg ducked his head round the side of the bricks, bringing it back fast. “Bugger!”

“Now what?”

“They’ve put the fire out. I was hoping it would be a beacon to the ships on the Nene. Somebody might report it.”

That brought a half-hysterical giggle from Gabriel, ending in a gurgling cough. “Don’t you worry, Greg. Lots of people are going to see your tower before tonight’s out. You betcha.”

“Oh, yeah.” He felt stupid. “Let’s go.” He started shrugging out of the dinner jacket, clenching his teeth as his left hand dragged through the arm, it’d swollen badly, skin stretched taut, pulling open the grazes. Trousers followed, and the discovery that buckles are tricky one-handed.

More shouting had broken out from the tower. Lots of conflicting orders interwound with Kendric’s repeated urgings and Armstrong’s controlled barks.

Gabriel gave him a remorseful stare before starting half-heartedly on the buttons of her blouse. Greg peeled his trousers off and helped her pull her blouse gingerly over her inflated left hand.

“Put your shoes back on,” he said.

A third burst of rifle fire lashed the bricks.

They bent double, keeping the bulk of the small pyramid between themselves and the tower as they crept down to the grey slime. The stuff was semiliquid, a thick gelatine that squelched and undulated alarmingly as Greg immersed himself. It closed around him, finding its way into every orifice. But he didn’t sink. In fact the worst of it was on the surface. A sixty-centimetre stratum of water had been sandwiched between the spongy mud and lathery algae.

Gabriel groaned as she lowered herself behind him and the cold mire enveloped her.

Greg began to move, a tortuously slow sidestroke, kicking hard with his feet. Big faecal gobs of the pulpy algae clotted his right arm, splattering over his face. He had to stop every four or five strokes and wipe it off. His eyes were stung raw. Gabriel had it easier. He was pathbreaking for her, clearing a ragged channel.

When they reached the second island, Greg began to worry about what kind of chase was being organized back at the tower. He looked over his shoulder and saw that someone had opened the tower’s top-floor window, they were raking the torch beam over the first island and the surrounding water. The light wasn’t powerful enough to reach him, but he made Gabriel keep below the wavering tops of the thin reeds as the pair of them crossed over to the island’s opposite side.

Away to the right, Greg could see the bloated humps of decomposing tree trunks protruding from the algae like surfaced whales. The number, about thirty, implied some sort of park, which ruled out that direction. They needed to move fast now. Build distance before the tower blew. The park would be genuine swamp, impossible to traverse.

A hundred and fifty metres ahead were the first ranks of buildings recognizable as such; detached houses, their walls partially collapsed and roofs concave, but remaining upright. Bridging the gap was a pockmarked landscape of ash-green atolls separated by hoary stretches of slough.

“Any preference direction-wise?” Greg asked.

Gabriel shook her head. “No. But you were right about getting clear. That explosion is a brute. I hope I can make it.”

She was a state. Loose folds of flab were caked in thick sable mud, her hair was a tangle of ossifying dreadlocks. Every breath was asthmatic, a battle against coagulating catarrh. She twitched like a palsy victim.

“No problem,” he said, wishing to God he meant it.

They waded into the first slough channel.

The fifth island they came to was much larger than the previous four. Iron girders were sticking out among the sedges. There was more grass than reeds on the crest. Soil had begun to accumulate in the crevices between the fragments of stone and cement. Greg cut his calf on something jagged. Cursed.

The island’s far shore brought them to within thirty metres of the houses. One more immersion and back on to solid ground. This time it was a long straight ridge parallel to the row of houses. It was cluttered with twisted, drooping chimney stacks, and buckled rafter apexes gnarled with scabby lichens; slate tiles formed a loose flaky shingle beneath their feet, making the going hard.

Just as he reached the summit, Greg heard the sound. A low-volume hum in the background. But rising in pitch and intensity, in menace. A note he was irksomely familiar with.

“Move out, doubletime,” he said. “The bastards have inflated the hovercraft.”

“No more,” Gabriel said wretchedly.

“One last time. That’s all. Then it’ll all be over.”

“Yes. Yes, you’re right. Only a few minutes left. It’s clearing, Greg. So much clearer now.”

Realization struck. He could sense her mind. A pale disconsolate mist of disjointed thoughts, fluttering aimlessly, corrupted with coarse threads of harrowing pain. Gabriel was animated by adrenalin alone, and her endocrine glands were virtually exhausted.

They’d escaped the twins’ nullifying effect. Greg let his gland run riot, charging his cerebellum to overload, and screw the risk. Synapses vibrated shrilly under the stress, delusional ripping sounds filtered into his ears, coming from inside his skull, neurone membranes splitting open. His espersense swept out. It was a heady boost. Whole once more.

Two hovercraft were curving away from the tower, each containing three minds, radiant hard-wound balls of mercurial malevolence. Greg recognized Toby riding in one of them, along with a couple of crewmen he couldn’t place. Mark and Kendric were paired in the second, along with its pilot. There was no sign of the other minds Greg knew to be out there—Armstrong and Turner, not even Hermione. The tower was an empty shell to his espersense, which meant at least one twin had remained behind. The big question was whether the third hovercraft had been inflated.

A faint haze of small minds glowed around the wavering perimeter of his espersense, occasional twinkles within. Animals of some sort, clinging to a dour existence amid the ruins. Abandoned pets reverted to their true feral nature, rodents scrabbling to stay above the mud, an invasion of reptiles.

He pulled Gabriel roughly down the slope and into the bog which covered the street, ignoring her weepy cries of protest. They didn’t have to swim, The syrupy mud drowning the tarmac was only a few centimetres deep, lapping over his feet like slushed snow. It was possible to wade. The raft of algae came up to mid-thigh.

Greg was nearly tempted to hide in one of the houses. None of them had doors or windows left. Pick one at random and cower down. Unless the hovercraft boasted some pretty sophisticated sensors, Kendric and Toby would never find him in time, But the dangerously dilapidated condition of the walls stopped him. If the tower went up with anything like the violence Gabriel claimed the friable houses would collapse on top of them.

They reached a mouldering dune which had once been a leylandii hedge, and squelched over it. Greg saw two white aureoles sliding fluidly across the horizon behind them, winding down through the slough channels. The drone of the hover-craft propellers drifted in and out of audibility. Kendric and Toby were fanning out, their search pattern carrying them further apart. At least it was only two.

He steered Gabriel down the narrow dank gully between two houses. There were animals on the other side of the walls, more than he’d originally thought, scurrying around frantically. The garden at the rear of the house backed on to another garden. Head-high panel fencing marked out the boundary, putrefying laths drooping under their own weight. In one corner was a greenhouse whose panes were pasted with hand-sized valentine leaves. Some abandoned horticultural treasure had thrived in the heat and abundant nutrient-soaked mud, making it look as though the aluminium-framed structure was about to burst apart at the seams.

Caustic fingers of silver-white light probed through a gap between a couple of houses a hundred metres away. The propeller noise was loud, fluctuating in strident piccolo whistles. Greg sensed Toby’s churlish mind; the man was spite-laden, yearning to be the one who found the quarry. Instinct chafed at him. He knew Greg was near by. A nature-ordained hunter.

The bulk of the houses blocked off the light as the hovercraft glided down the street. Then the questing fingers reappeared, closer this time, three houses away.

Greg urged Gabriel behind the greenhouse, and waited until the searchlight fluoresced the verdant avocado-green leaves.

The green corona died as the hovercraft moved on, but Greg knew that knot of determination in Toby’s mind. He’d order the pilot to take the hovercraft down the gardens once he reached the end of the street.

His espersense tracked Kendric, who was still patrolling the slough channels. They couldn’t go back, and the blast would turn the confined gardens into a death-trap of flying masonry.

“Through there.” Greg pointed ahead. The row of houses in front of them were virtually identical to the ones behind, only in slightly better condition. Gabriel moved like an automaton.

Greg kicked at the panel fence, tearing through it like tissue paper. There was a fruit cage on the other side, a box made from galvanized steel poles wrapped in a tattered cobweb of black nylon netting. The sight of it sparked an idea.

He reached up to one of the crossbeams with his right hand and began to tug. The pole was held in place between the uprights by two moulded plastic sockets at each end, both of them fractured and bleached by the decade-long torrent of UV-infested sunlight. One of the sockets crackled at the pressure he applied, then snapped abruptly. Greg yanked the other end of the pole out of its socket with a burst of ebullient strength, tearing the netting as it came free. The pole was three metres long, in good condition; the zinc coating had whitened down the years, but it’d protected the steel from rust.

“What’s happening?” Gabriel asked.

“I’m improvising a little present for Toby.” There was no longer any vindictiveness at the prospect, nor even malice.

This was an intrinsic fight for survival now, nothing more. His mind had relegated Toby to an obstacle which had to be tackled. Hatred was all the other man’s problem.

Greg clamped the pole between his knees and tied on a strip of the ripped nylon mesh. It was a laborious job, he had to use his teeth to grip the end of the strip while his fingers formed the knot. Spears didn’t come any more primitive, but the rudimentary tail ought to keep its trajectory stable for a few metres.

They slogged towards a narrow alleyway between the two houses ahead, the disturbingly concave walls had so many bricks missing they looked like two vertical checkerboards. There was an unstable aggregation of brick chunks and sandy earth in the gap, rising half a metre above the algae. Greg had lost his shoes somewhere in the slough channels; his feet were unrecognizable, lumps of gummy tar which ached abominably.

If he stood on anything sharp they’d go completely numb as the pain breached the cortical node’s threshold. When they reached the small front garden they were knee-deep in the greasy mire again.

The street they found themselves in was virtually intact. Greg could almost believe he’d walked out into a pre-dawn autumn morning of fifteen years ago. Rusted, windowless hulks of petrol-driven cars were parked along the road. Barren trees stood tall, low brick walls were topped by fanciful wrought-iron railings, the lampposts were still vertical. It was a well-ordered slice of middle-class suburbia. Only the algae-matted water shattered the illusion of normality.

A curtain of light streaked out at the far end of the houses a hundred and fifty metres away. Toby’s hovercraft had turned down into the gardens. Greg sensed the excitement rising in the man’s mind. Toby’s native instinct was telling him his prey was near by.

Greg found it uncanny to observe, almost as though his own ability was being turned against him. He and Toby must share the same mental genotype.

“I want you to walk down to the other end of the street,” he told Gabriel.

She didn’t reply, standing with shoulders drooping, arms dangling at her side. Her left hand looked appalling, tumescent and inflamed. Mud had dried and cracked on it, as though she was shedding a hardened outer skin, allowing new, blue-tender flesh to break through. He refused the impulse to check his own.

“Listen, Gabriel. You must walk down the street. And when the hovercraft comes, you fall down. OK? “That’s all. Can you manage that for me?”

A confused frown puckered her forehead. “Walk?”

“Yes.” Greg pressed his hand on her back, starting her off. “And when the light shines, you go for cover.”

Gabriel’s feet had found a shuffling rhythm. “Fall down?”

“That’s right.”

“Orders,” she mumbled vaguely. “I won’t let you down, Greg. I won’t.”

Greg left her doing her apathetic sleep walk, feeling a prize turd for using her as bait; and headed back up the street towards the wide beam of light which kept shooting out, documenting the hovercraft’s progress. Algae foamed around his knees. Slithery mud tried to pull his feet from under him. Sometimes he thought he could feel the hardness of the tarmac.

The light shone out of the gap in front of him. Greg stood still, listening to the drone of the propeller growing louder, echoing back and forth across the street. The light was extinguished. A faint trace of it rippled along the roof of the house.

Toby’s hovercraft drew level with him. Light slammed out of the gap, transfixing him like a rabbit in a headlamp.

A scream of ecstatic triumph burst from Toby’s mind. Greg’s vision was wiped out in a sparkling pink mist as his retinas were overwhelmed by a targeting laser. He lurched forwards. The warbling of electromagnetic rifle fire punctured the night. Bullets stitched a line of small craters in the algae behind him. The propeller drone rose to a crescendo as the pilot fought to turn the hovercraft.