Xenoform (20 page)

Roberts pointed to a corner ahead of them where another generic, squarish building sat, immense and colourless, spotted with sickly lights as if habitation was a disease it had caught from its neighbours. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Twenty-seven, yeah?’

‘Yeah, okay.’

‘Do you think there’s another way in besides the front door?’

Sofi peered out and said, ‘Yeah, it looks like there’s a path round to the back – let’s try that. Might just lead to gardens or yards, but maybe we can climb up.’

‘
Climb
?’ asked Roberts. ‘No.’

‘
Well let’s have a look, anyway,’ said Whistler. ‘Try not to look too shifty. If we get seen, I’d prefer that we don’t
look
as if we’re trying not to.’

‘Okay,’ agreed Roberts. ‘So – everybody sneak out of the bush without looking suspicious. Sofi, maybe you’d better stay here.’

‘Yeah?’ she retorted without pause, ‘and maybe you’d better prepare to be severely beaten about your already misshapen head, you prick!’

‘You two, just come on!’ ordered Whistler.

They filed out into the street. A huge man with a surgically-widened chest and the proportions of a gorilla was coming down the pavement towards them. His face was broad and ugly in an honest kind of way. His massive forearms sprouted hairily from the sleeves of his overstretched t-shirt. As he passed them he grunted ‘Orlright darlin’,’ to Whistler. She managed not to shoot him, even though she knew the smartgun wanted to. Sofi turned to follow him but Whistler ushered her away down the street towards Wrexham Place.

They cut across the narrow strip of scraggy grass in front of the block and headed down the side of the building in silent single file, walking confidently but not too quickly. Somebody on a balcony above them ducked back inside and slammed the door behind them. A dog was barking with brain-numbing regularity, high and hoarse and pathetic from behind a rickety fence. It didn’t cease as they moved away. A spyfly skittered past, doing one unsteady circle around them. Roberts swatted absently at it, missing.

The narrow pathway encompassed a series of wooden gates that presumably led into the yards of those properties lucky enough to have them. At the far end of the path, on the corner of the building itself, was a door of mesh-reinforced glass in a metal frame. Sofi tried the handle and it turned smoothly with the ease of any well-used machine. Quietly, the three stepped inside into a corridor lit only by the moonlight filtering creamily through the grimy windows. The walls and ceiling were of stained concrete prefab pieces and the floor was covered in cracked and peeling linoleum.

Whistler found a small plastic plaque bearing the flat numbers and their relative floors. ‘Twenty-seven...’ she read aloud. ‘Floor four. Let’s go.’

They climbed the stairs and exited the stairwell onto a bare landing. Twenty-seven was directly before them. They stood and looked at it, quiet with foreboding. No light filtered underneath the door. Roberts pressed his ear to the cheap laminate and listened intently for a moment. Then he stepped back and stared at it. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Well,’ said Whistler. ‘Let’s knock, shall we?’

Roberts made a non-committal face and hammered on the door with the heel of his hand. The sound boomed and echoed around the gaping corridor, rolling away into the bowels of the building and back again in decreasing waves. They waited.

‘Maybe he isn’t in,’ suggested Sofi, almost hopefully.

‘Ee focken’ is,’ said a small, high-pitched voice behind them.

Whistler whirled around and the gun was in her hand. It’s barrel keenly homed in on the source of the voice. A small, desperately thin young boy of perhaps six years stood behind them holding a filthy blanket whose end trailed on the dusty floor and had clearly gathered up quantities of dirt with some sort of capillary action. His hair was the no-colour of the malnourished and his face was smeared with what looked like coal-dust. Whistler lowered the weapon, its suspensor field actually resisting for a split-second.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Oi sed ee focken’ is in – oi sin ’im go in dere. ’Im looked focken’ well ruff un’ all.’

‘What – like sick?’

‘Focken’ well sick, yeh.’ The boy agitated the blanket slightly, making its trailing end pick up several dust-bunnies. ‘Ee ent gone out nowhere, neiver. Ee’s still in dere. Got any dollar?’

‘Sure,’ said Roberts and crossed the filthy, extended palm with a couple of coins.

‘Let’s kick it in,’ said Sofi, standing back and readying herself to do just that.

‘Try once more, first,’ said Whistler.

Sofi huffed but knocked again. They waited to see what effect, if any, this would have. Whistler looked around and was satisfied to see that the little boy had departed. ‘Boot it,’ she said.

Sofi push-kicked the flimsy door and it virtually disintegrated into splinters of aged, brittle plywood. The harvesters surged into the flat, armed and wired. There was a corridor from which doors led off to left and right. There was a faint noise coming from somewhere in the flat – a wet slobbering, thick and glutinous like bubbling mud. Whistler flattened herself against the door-frame, her gun held at the ready and her spine convulsing with shivers. She couldn’t hold the weapon steady and it had to dampen the shaking of her hand. There was something very wrong here and looking at the faces of her companions she knew they felt it too. There was a stench of convalescence and excrement in the turgid air, but there was something else as well. It was like the stink of rotting cabbage, but with hints of some chemical contaminant wrapped around it.

There came a pitiful mewling from the far end of the corridor. The harvesters froze in place, nobody breathing. One tatter of splintered wood still hung from a door-hinge – it softly swung to with a quiet squeak. Whistler felt a pressure building in her head, as if her brain was swelling in her skull. The tension was palpable. Roberts laid a hand on her forearm, making her jump. ‘Cat,’ he said in a stage whisper.

A tortoiseshell cat slunk cautiously around the corner at the far end of the corridor, rubbing its head against the wall. Again it called out sadly and came towards them. It was very thin and its fur was matted and dirty. A thin crusting of dried blood encircled the base of one ear like a bizarre piece of feline jewellery. Its dull orange eyes bored into Whistler’s own. It was hungry. It came closer, slipping through the gloom with slow and deliberate grace, its body weaving, fish-like. The humans watched it approach. The smell was starting to make Whistler gag. She fought against nausea. Fear and welling sadness were at war within her.

Sofi crouched and reached out for the cat and suddenly it bolted with a flick of its tail. It disappeared around the corner and Sofi made to follow it.
Careful
, said Whistler and she realised that she had only thought it. Already Sofi was moving down the corridor. Roberts and Whistler looked to each other and then followed her into the stinking darkness. The gun was a tense little animal in her hand, trembling with anticipation.

They rounded the end of the passage as quietly as they could. Roberts jumped when an old board creaked beneath his foot. He paused for a split-second and Whistler heard his sharp intake of breath. They stepped into the small kitchen and saw Sofi standing in shock, her gun lowered, looking around herself. ‘The
smell
,’ she said, her face contorted in disgust. ‘Oh
man
, what
is
that?’

‘
Ohhhhh
...’ Roberts groaned, repulsed.

Whistler fought her rising gorge and failed. She put her hands on her knees and was noisily sick onto the floor. The bright splatter was not actually the most unappealing thing down there. Rotting food was smeared everywhere, mixed with general dirt and dust into a gooey paste of earthy colours. Staring down into this mess didn’t help her either. Roberts looked around fearfully. The noise had been very loud in the little room.

‘Ladylike,’ commented Sofi, but quietly.

Whistler was unable to answer. She stood doubled over with her lower lip dripping bile. After a long while she said, simply, ‘
Shit
...’

‘There’s something not right here,’ said Roberts unnecessarily. His eyes were like those of a hunted animal, wide and mobile.

Whistler straightened delicately and combed the smartgun through her hair, trying to pull herself together. The thick taste of the vile air was still in her throat and she didn’t think any amount of vomiting would get it out. The cat was pacing a small circle in front of a cupboard, presumably the one-time source of its food. The cupboard was bare now, its door hanging by one hinge. Bright scraps of cardboard were scattered in front of it and Whistler realised that they were the remnants of a cat-food box that had been torn open and scoured clean.

The trio wandered round the kitchen cataloguing the signs of neglect. The cat mewled more insistently, ignored. Sofi poked a plate of putrefying matter with the muzzle of her gun. A plastic carton of synthetic milk lay on its side as if it had just given up and lain down to die amidst all the decay. Its contents were a yellow stain across the worktop, jellified around mouldy hunks of bread and cereal. The kitchen blinds were drawn, but it looked as if it had been done with some force, for several of the slats had been torn clean away. The window faced the bare wall of a neighbouring block. Its bricks looked solid and normal but the grubby pane was like a force-field between two opposing worlds. There was a circular table in the middle of the floor and one of its chairs had been pushed away violently enough to gouge tracks in the carpet of dirt and lay upside-down with its legs in the air like a dead deer.

‘What happened here?’ breathed Sofi.

‘And where is he?’ added Roberts in a voice full of grim significance.

‘I wish that fucking cat would shut up,’ said Whistler.

‘Feed it,’ suggested Roberts.

‘Shoot it,’ suggested Sofi.

The smell was coming in waves now, almost too much to bear. Sofi was determinedly attempting to open the window when there was an ear-splitting roar, thick with mucous and agony, utterly bestial. Everyone froze and a collective shudder went through them. Their eyes all rolled towards the kitchen wall. On the other side of it was one of the rooms they had passed on their way into the kitchen. The sound had assuredly issued from there.

Something smashed deafeningly against the interior wall. The round plastic clock that hung there fell off to crack open on the floor below, sowing the bed of food waste with little cogs and wheels. The cat skittered away into a corner, hissing like a pressure cooker. Whistler, wasting no time at all, shouldered back into the corridor. Roberts, his face craggy in the gloom, was at her elbow and Sofi was a honed presence on her mental radar, hot on her heels.

Something was going berserk in the room next to the kitchen. A large animal could be heard bounding about in there, smashing or spilling furniture like a living tornado. The roaring was rising to a crescendo, sustained and ululating, as Whistler crashed into the door, meaning to burst into the room. Sofi was calling out to Vivao by name, shouting reassuring words in a voice unreassuringly close to panic. The door didn’t budge a millimetre. Roberts lent his weight to the effort as inside the room glass tinkled. The roaring suddenly became a whimpering, incredibly high and mindless. Sofi brushed the others away and shot out the hinges of the door, stretching tall to point her gun downwards towards the floor. The weapon barked and the door shifted but did not fall in. Silence now from within the room. Roberts barrelled into the door again and this time it leaned in at the top and came to rest on some object inside the room, making a ramp. Whistler’s team climbed over it as rapidly as they could.

Inside there was a scene of utter domestic devastation. Tables and chairs lay shattered and almost homogenised into a heap of debris. Jags of broken china and glass littered the floor like glittering sawdust. Clothing, burnt, torn and soiled was strewn over the wreckage. Water was flowing across the floor from the stump of a pipe that had once fed a radiator. The smell was beyond belief. There was a faint greenish tinge to the light within the room – it buzzed at the edges of visibility, issuing from no discernible source. Vivao was nowhere in sight.

The harvesters fanned out into the devastated space, their guns stabbing left and right as they endeavoured to cover all angles simultaneously. Silence fell, but for the rapid breathing of the three interlopers. Whistler trod softly in a circle around the perimeter of the room. Broken chunks of furniture brushed against her shins and a protruding staple cut her shallowly on one leg, unnoticed.

‘Where is he? Where is he?’ Sofi was repeating frantically, struggling to breathe in the stinking atmosphere, head whipping left and right, her mohawks lurid fans of colour – and then Whistler saw him.

Vivao’s body lay crumpled beneath a curtain that had separated the main living room from a small alcove, theatrically sprawled with arms and legs tangled bonelessly. The curtain still hung from its rail at one end. ‘Here,’ said Whistler, but the others were already beside her, their weapons lowering slowly.

Vivao’s fingers were thick claws, tapered and monstrous and one hand dripped with dark fluid. One of his feet twitched and then was still. His hair was long and scraggly and his face incredibly thin and harrowed, bumpy and blotched as if some fungus had grown in his skin. A sick green pallor was on his features like a halloween mask. His eyes had rolled all the way up into his skull. He was dressed in the clinging tatters of what had once been a t-shirt and combats. Whistler was somehow quite sure that the hue of his skin was not due to any deliberate bodymod. It looked too
unhealthy
, somehow, and the effect was too convincing to be intentional. She leaned in closer, aware that she was mechanically saying his name, and a despicable squeamishness, totally unlike her, came over her. She saw that he had torn his own throat out. Then she was choking on the smell, reeling away, her head spinning dizzyingly, unable to focus.