The Scioneer (18 page)

He took a moment to knock the white king over
with the black bishop before turning off the lights.

Chapter
26

‘V
idmar dead.
Body in Proto boot, Long Rd Cnr of Clap Comm. Go well bro.
Ces.’

Domino
Tyrell was staring at his textabeep and trying to work out the
significance of the message on the display, when Roma Bruce and her
gang of thugs appeared out of nowhere.

‘Domino!
We’ve got unfinished business, you and me,’ growled
Roma.

‘Is that
so?’ he asked, with new-found confidence. ‘Well listen wolf, I
don’t want no trouble, so here,’ and grabbing the evening’s takings
from the bag, he handed the rest over to her. ‘There’s enough Bad
Moon in there to kill you and your crew. Go howl at the moon, you
pack of freaks.’

Domino
made to walk off, but Zevon placed a heavy hand against his
chest.

‘What the
fuck is this all about, blud?’

‘I’m
out.’ Domino smiled, pushing away Zevon’s hand, ‘I’m so
out.’

***

Crystal
frantically waved the tiny bottle under Lek’s nose, and
slapped him again, trying not to open the deep cut on the bridge of
his nose. ‘Lek! Lek! Wake up Lek! We’ve got to move! They’re
coming!’

Lek’s new blue
eyes snapped open and he sat up as though nothing had happened.
‘Who’s coming?’

‘The gangs, for
Lennon’s sake! We’re stuck in the middle of gangland and it’s a
full moon.’

‘It’s the full
moon rumble!’ cried Lek, ‘How could we have been so stupid?’

They
scrambled from the wrecked Proto and ran for cover behind a set of
bottle banks. Lek crouched down and drew a deep breath. His eyes
were already bruised and his nose was swollen and black. He tried
to wipe the blood from his face, but it had pooled in his white
goatee and in the lines around his mouth and chin. He looked like a
madman. His head throbbed, and he took a moment to search through
his pockets for anything that might pass as a pain-killer. ‘Scion
vials and gel-caps. Bases and extracts. Enough drugs to turn a
grown man into a menagerie, but not a single aspirin. Typical.
How’s your head?’

Crystal’s
left eye was virtually swollen shut. ‘Better than yours, I reckon,
but still painful. Never mind now. What’s the plan?’

‘Well, we
can’t just sit it out. We’ve missed the last overground, and I
don’t think we’ll make the metro either. So it looks as if we’re
walking. We’ve got a little over an hour and a half to make it to
Victoria, the money, and the train… and we’re what? Only three
miles away. Easy.’

‘Any
other night, I’d agree with you,’ said Crystal as she peered around
the side of the bottle bank at the gangs of wolfish youths who were
striding over the Common, some on all fours, some carrying
nunchakus and kendo staffs, some with metal chains wrapped around
their wrists, holding back fierce German Shepherds. But the
majority were bare-chested and empty handed, content to rely on the
skills and strength that the Lupinex had given them.

Lek
stared at
them and the reality of the situation hit him like a fresh punch in
the face. Just then, the sound of sirens filled the air and for a
beautiful moment, Crystal thought the police in this part of town
still cared about the citizens and had come to break up the
madness.

‘It’s
curfew
,’ whispered Lek,
and all the streetlamps went out.

***

Roma
led the
pack down an alley around the corner. Domino had been true to his
word – the bag was stuffed with gel-caps: mainly Lupinex, but there
was also plenty of ‘Laughing Bag’ for the jackals, ‘Empire State’
and ‘Matador’ for the gym junkies, plus a few odds and ends of
Snake-blood and Tiburon.

‘First
that score on the Common and now this! Doesn’t Roma always get the
goods for you?’ she said, waving the bag above her head. ‘Still,
this is all I want.’ She pulled out the stash of ‘Bad Moon’ and
ditched the rest on the cobble stones. While the others marvelled
at their good luck, Dahlia reached out and stuffed the bag inside
her vest, certain it would be worth something at some fork in the
road.

‘What was
with Domino?’ asked
Zevon as he counted out his share of the loot.

‘Who
gives a fuck?’ Roma replied. ‘Our soldiers are waiting for us,
lieutenant. Shoot me up, big boy,’ and she handed her second in
command eight gel-caps of scion.

‘All of this?’
Are you sure Roma?’

‘Do it.’

‘That’s a lot
of shit in one hit…’

‘You
wouldn’t be challenging me, would you? I said ‘do it’. Now do
it.’

She lay
down in the filth of the alley, among the dog-shit and broken glass
of old hypos and empty vials, and her pack filled their chambers
and pumped the drugs into her veins. Roma Bruce’s howls split the
night.

***

Lek
Gorski
tried to clear
his aching head, but teeming thoughts of the nightmarish
possibilities of his next ninety minutes on the planet were
clouding his judgement. His mind kept coming back to the
opportunities he had wasted throughout the day, chances he had
missed to make it out of the capital in one piece.

He
thought about Cesar –
Lek had never intended to involve him so deeply in his
escape plan and when Crystal explained what he had done, how he
disappeared into the night having saved them both from Vidmar, Lek
could barely speak for the lump in his throat. He promised himself
that if he did make it out alive, he would find some way of
repaying the debt: perhaps dedicating his work at the Rubicon
Institute to finding a cure for the monster Cesar had
become.

And
Crystal. He had never meant to put her in harm’s way, but
then again, he knew he could
not have left her behind, knowing that Calabas would eventually
have worn her spirit down, until there was nothing left but an
empty shell of a woman, just another has-been lap-dancer sitting at
the bar in The Shangri-La hoping for pity-tips and drinks to dull
the pain of loss. He wished she was safe in her bed, but felt
blessed to have her by his side.

As for
himself, he could not have imagined a more bizarre day.
Being a scientist had its share
of surprises, if one considered explosions in test tubes and the
unexpected properties of unstable compounds surprising, but the
last twelve hours of Lek’s life were something else, terrifying
mostly, but strangely exhilarating at the same time. Never before
had he stared down the barrel of a gun, conned a hitman, defied a
drug-lord, bought a woman’s safety, or sat under the heat lamps in
a beautox parlour. If fate let him live through the night, the
scientist in him would enjoy turning over the events, revisiting
those missed opportunities to escape and calculating the
probabilities of his survival. It was sickening to think that he
had managed, with a little help, to outsmart them all – Delić,
Vidmar, Calabas, even Pechev - only to find himself now hiding in
the shadows, surrounded by savages, on the wrong side of the
Thames. The night before he had looked down at that river and, if
only for a moment, considered jumping in. Now, his immediate goal
was to get across it, with Crystal.

***

Delić
cocked an
ear as the tannoy in the IKEA Victoria International Station
announced the first call for all passengers departing on the 21:05
Europatrans train to Paris, Gard du Nord. Across the concourse, one
of the tramps had somehow managed to catch a pigeon, luring it
closer with cake-crumbs, before tossing an old coat over it. Delić
watched in disgust as he bit into it. Focus, he told himself and
turned his attention back to the lockers. He looked about – the
pre-curfew crowd had dispersed, safe and sound on their trains to
the home counties, but people had begun to congregate in the
shelter of the station, one of the few buildings which had been
spared the ignominy of lights-out across the Capital. Delić decided
to take a chance, and pulled the severed thumb out of his pocket
and stepped over to the lockers. It felt good to stretch his aching
legs, if nothing else. He pressed the thumb against a few readers
in a row, leaving bloody smears here and there, but he soon grew
tired of working systematically and began to press them at random.
It was a waste of time, even Delić could see that, after he had
walked the length of the wall of lockers, and he turned around to
find his prime location seat had been taken by the pigeon-eater.
Never mind, keep your eyes wide open now, he told himself, the door
to one of these lockers has to burst open in just over sixty
minutes and your future is inside it, written in a recipe
book.

***

‘It
breaks down like this
,’
Yakuba was explaining to Arid and Osaze, who hung on his every word
as though he were imparting great philosophical wisdom. ‘The hyenas
and dingoes run the south west of the city, from Wandsworth down to
Tooting, and our brothers in arms - the jackals - cover Dulwich.
That’s all ours. You feel me? The wolves run the east: Brixton,
through Camberwell, Peckham and out to Deptford. Clapham and
Battersea are no man’s land. That’s where we clash. True. North of
the river’s got its own rules.’

Yakuba
was a
mass of nervous energy, high on life and the thrill of ensuing
violence, snapping his fingers and nodding to music playing only in
his mind. The boys struggled to keep pace with him as he nimbly
skipped over a wall and dropped down onto the train tracks. There
were small groups of thick-necked youths everywhere, telling jokes
and anecdotes, laughing wildly, and dealing in the recesses of the
railway tunnels. A couple were having rough sex against the wall.
The groups consisted mostly of older teenage boys, but there were
some girls too, a few of whom caught Arid’s eye, and for the first
time that evening he began to feel that same sense of solidarity
which had first drawn him into his addiction. Yakuba must have
sensed this change in him and without breaking step, fished two
wraps of Joker from the knee pocket of his combats and handed them
to the boys. ‘It’s OK brothers, have some of mine.’ They were small
wads of Hyenarc wrapped tightly inside unused lotto slips. Osaze
beamed as though he had been handed a roll of hundred cred notes
and split his open to share with the equally elated Arid. They
stopped momentarily to tap out the yellow powder and snort it off
the backs of their hands and Arid immediately felt at one with his
hyena brothers and sisters. His inhibitions were stripped away
instantaneously; he felt ultra-confident and ready for the fight.
Osaze was nodding at his side: it seemed he too had discovered the
meaning of life. They marched onwards down the tracks like they
were heading to a carnival, until they reached the cutting on
Plough Road and climbed up to street level. ‘We’ll have a little
prelim bust-up in Falcon Park. Just a chance for us to test the
waters, feel how the night is going to go. Then we head into
Battersea for the real deal.’

Chapter
27

‘The way I see
it,’ said Crystal, ‘we’ve got two options. Either we front it out
and pretend like we don’t give a toss what’s going on around us, or
we run.’

‘We could
always pretend that we’re just
drunk, or lost?’ suggested Lek.

‘No. No way.
These kids are looking for easy meat, and if they think they can
get anything out of us, then we’re dead. Pure and simple. We were
lucky to get away with it last time.’

‘OK fine. Then
I say we front it out. We look pretty demented anyway.’

It was
true, Lek and Crystal looked like an advert for domestic abuse, her
with her black eye swollen shut, and him with his broken nose and
blood-stained goatee.

‘Alright then,
are we ready?’

‘Let’s go.’

They
stepped out from behind the bottle bank as though they had been
sharing a moment in the shadows. Lek puffed out his chest and tried
to seem manly. Crystal caught the eye of a girl probably half her
age, and though her stomach flipped at the sight of the uneven
canines protruding from her mouth, Crystal’s face didn’t show the
slightest emotion.

‘Which way are
we going?’ she asked Lek, and he heard the tremble in her
voice.

‘The same
way as everybody else by the looks of things. Which is both good
and bad. We’re headed straight up North Street till we hit
Queenstown Road, then up past the edge of the park and over the
bridge, but Lennon only knows what’s waiting for us. Hold my
hand.’

Together
they moved through the throng of kids, keeping their distance where
possible, and always staying on the edge of the crowd: should
things turn ugly, they wouldn’t find themselves in the centre of
the pack. Lek noticed a man in biker chapajeros and a string vest
checking out his own outfit – he was still wearing the oversized
sports suit, but he had rolled up his sleeves and tucked his
trouser legs into his boks to stop them dragging on the ground. At
best, Lek knew he looked like an outsider trying to fit in. He
winked at the biker, who returned the gesture. So far, so good:
everything was going to plan.

***

Even
Ronnie
and Reggie looked
worried. Dahlia had walked to the end of the alley on the pretext
that she was keeping watch for police and stray jackals. Zevon
couldn’t meet Roma’s eye.

‘Look at
me!’ she ba
rked, her
voice was thick and gruff, no longer her own.