Chapter Forty-Seven

You bring back their plastic.

Stranded atop the marching pillars of the Gullet, listening to his own pulse and the echo of his screams, Chris heard Hewitt’s words with hallucinatory clarity. It was as if the woman was standing next to him in the wind.

You go in and you finish the job. If you can, you bring back their plastic.

He peered down on the zone sprawl below. As far as he could tell, the BMW seemed to have fallen through the roof of a decaying commercial unit. He scanned the surroundings in both directions and spotted his access point. Fifty metres further along the Gullet, a caged staircase wound down around one of the concrete support pillars and came out at the end of a shabby residential street. It looked as if there might be a foot passage through from the street to the commercial units. With luck he could be in and out in ten minutes.

He jogged slowly along the road to the top of the staircase. There was an ancient padlock on the rusting iron cagework. He levelled the shotgun, remembered the jagged vehicle-shredder load and thought better of it. He reached for the Nemex and found an empty holster.

Fuck.

He remembered the way the gun had refused to clip in while he talked to Vasvik. Remembered tumbling out of the Saab with the shotgun. He looked back along the road to where the car was slewed. No sign of anything on the asphalt, but it could have skittered away under the belly of the vehicle. Or fallen while he was still inside.

Well, that’s it. You can’t get down. Have to leave it for the clean-up squad. Not like they’ll take long to get here.

The relief gusted through him. Duel etiquette forbade outside approach for a regulation fifteen minutes, except in medical emergencies. But they’d reel the situation in on satellite blow-up, see the way it had played out and be here pretty soon. All he had to do was sit at the edge of the road and wait.

But he knew what Hewitt would say. Knew how the whisper would run among the junior analysts on the floor below. Yeah, sure, Faulkner’s some natty driver. But the way I heard it, no stones when it comes to the consequences. Too soft to pick a corpse’s pocket.

Fuck it.

He locked on the Remington’s safety, reversed the weapon and pounded at the rusted lock until it gave. Dull clank of metal on metal. Orange flakes of rust scattered around his feet. The lock snapped and hung, severed. He levered the cage door open and picked his way down the steps.

At the bottom, it was the same story. Another grilled iron door, another rusted lock, this time on the inside, as if a retreating army had fought a rearguard action out of the zones and up onto the highway. Weeds had grown up to shoulder height on the other side of the grille, effectively hiding the bottom of the staircase from outside view. From the inside, you could barely see the twinned row of black brick-terraced housing beyond. Chris craned his neck and stared through the nodding heads of the weeds, listening, trying to get some sense of whether there was anybody nearby.

Nothing stirred.

He started hammering at the lock. Slipped a couple of times, scraped his hand on the rusting iron. It was hard to manoeuvre the shotgun in the confines of the cage, hard to get a working angle. When he finally stepped out through the weeds, he was sweating and sticky inside his suit.

The street beyond was empty.

He scanned the frontages - the only motion was the flap of plastic sheeting over a broken upper window. A wrecked and rusted Landrover, one of the late models modified to burn alcohol, was beached on its axles about twenty metres down the street. It was skeletal, stripped of everything that would come off, the frame scorched molotov-cocktail black where rust had not yet crept in. He spotted the passageway a couple of houses beyond on the left and moved cautiously out into the street. Unrepaired potholes gaped in the cracked asphalt, some of them wide enough to take the whole front end of the Saab.

He moved a couple of steps at a time, painfully aware of the windows looking down on either side, pausing to listen every two metres. Belatedly, he remembered the Remington’s safety and thumbed it off. Pumped out the last spent shell. The harsh metal noise it made shattered the quiet.

Suit and shotgun, he reasoned nervously. It ought to keep the flies off long enough.

He swung wide around the burnt-out Landrover, feeling slightly ridiculous as he covered the angles. He cleared the corner of the passageway. Moved down past high brick walls topped with broken glass. Detritus crunched under his feet. The passage came to an end amidst shallow mounds of weed-grown rubble and a clutch of leaf-canopied trees. He climbed the first mound with difficulty, burying his Argentine leather shoes to the ankle in little avalanches of sliding soil. From the top he saw the corrugated metal side of the commercial unit and a loading bay door, rusted open on empty square metreage beyond. In the gloom he could make out half of the BMW lying on its back. A qualified relief at his own navigational skills seeped—

Motion.

He whipped around, finger tightening on the Remington’s trigger.

And snatched it away again, as if the metal was hot. On the down slope of the next mound, two children around four or five years old were playing a game with the slaughtered limbs and torsos of plastic dolls. They froze when they saw him, then scrambled to their feet and started shouting.

‘Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-shit! Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-shit!’

He shook his head, lowered the shotgun and wiped a hand across his mouth. This close, the vehicle-shredder load would have—

‘Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-SHIT!’ Elfin faces distorted with the force of the chant.

A woman’s voice came from one of the houses, raised and harsh with anxiety. The children vectored in on it, looked at each other for a moment that was almost comical, and then darted away like spooked animals. They scrambled across the mounds of rubble and through a hole in a wall he hadn’t seen. He was left looking at the plastic carnage of dismembered dolls.

Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck Louise Hewitt and her fucking plastic.

But he went on, over the rubble mounds, up to the loading bay door and through.

Inside, it was cold. Water dripped ceaselessly from the girder-laced roof and puddled along the lines of unevenly-laid concrete flooring. The BMW lay under the hole it had made, nose to the floor with the weight of engine and armour, back end in the air. There was a faint hissing from the front, and steam curled out through a gap where the hood had crushed out of true. Otherwise, it looked remarkably undamaged. The armouring had stood up.

Chris moved crab-wise to the driver-side door, hesitated a moment and then hooked it open. Bryant tumbled out like a bundle of unwashed clothes. Suit bloodied, eyes closed and mouth open. One arm trailed across the floor at an impossible angle to the rest of the body.

Nausea. The rising tide of delayed reaction from the duel. Chris pressed his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth and knelt beside the body. He stowed the shotgun under his arm and flapped back one side of Bryant’s jacket. The wallet gleamed gold-cornered from the inside pocket. He took it between thumb and forefinger and tugged it free. Flipped it open. The photo of Suki and Ariana smiled up at him opposite Mike’s racked plastic.

A hand closed around his leg.

Chris almost vomited with the shock. The shotgun clattered across the floor. He stumbled away from the car, broke the grip and saw. Bryant was still alive, eyes wide and staring up out of his inverted face. His good arm made feeble motions. His mouth opened and closed silently, like a landed fish. It was impossible to tell if he recognised Chris or not.