WATI WOULD HAVE GONE CLOSER, TOO, BUT FOR THE ARRIVALS. AT last, late, striding across the scrubland, in yellow jumpsuits, carrying equipment, looking side to side with pugnacity, came a group of shaven-headed men.
Chapter Sixty-Two
MARGE COULD NOT HEAR WHATEVER IT WAS THE NEW FIGURE suddenly approaching her said, not through the chatty, chirpy bad singing. She saw a young woman mouthing at her as she came closer with so much authority and swagger that Marge’s heart lurched and she turned up the iPod frantically. Space slipped. It lurched. The little voice in her ears shouted the excited chorus of a Belinda Carlisle track and the bricks around Marge rushed in tidal passing. She kept going, like a raft on white water, even laughing at herself while the motion still continued for so violent a reaction. How were you going to face whatever really bad was coming? She hadn’t realised how stretched taut and anxious she was about that promised finality.
It was as she was coming to rest, though the phrase felt odd in her head given that she had not moved-only the pavement below the walls beside and the slates above her-that the foot that had started descending in another place was yet to touch the ground, that she recognised the woman she had seen. That rude young constable.
WHO WAS SHOUTING IN FRUSTRATION AS THE MELTING-BUTTER residue of Marge’s presence sizzled away from before her. Her noise was interrupted, and she turned to spectate on the spurious event she had helped bring about.
“WHAT IS THAT?” BILLY SAID. THE NEWCOMERS WORE MILITARY boots, moved like soldiers. The roads beside the open space were half blocked by hoardings, and motorists who glanced down might take what they saw for council workers on some late-night necessary actions.
“Jesus Buddhists,” Dane said. “Nasty.” Dharmapalite supremacists, worshippers of Christos Siddhartha, amalgamed Jesus and Buddha of very particular shapes into one saviour, accentuating brutal identitarianism, a martial syncrex. Billy could hear a rhythm, a little chant as the figures came.
“What are they saying?” he said.
“Only one and a half,” said Dane. Only one and a half! Only one and a half! “It’s how many they’re going to kill. No matter how many they do.”
“What?”
They quoted the Mahavamsa, the reassurance to King Dutthagamani after he slaughtered thousands of non-Buddhists. “Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts.” One and a half was how many the Jesus Buddhists counted in the mass of dead after any of their depredations, according to careful religious accounting.
“Get ready.” Dane held his gun. “We don’t know what’s coming.”
Would the Siddharthans be stood up? Their apocalypse would win by default, but what then? The spectators just out of sight were there to see a godwar. Things too large to be birds, too faunal to be gusting rags of plastic, circled in the wind. End-times always came with harbingers, generated like maggots in dead flesh.
“Oh,” Dane whispered. “Look.”
In the lee of a big windowless wall was a gang of helmeted men. Surrounding another man. Billy was rinsed with adrenalin. The Tattoo. “He’s here like us,” Dane whispered. “To see what this is.”
There was the punk man in his eyeholed leather jacket. Two of the men in crash helmets held him, in an alley overlooking the field of fighting. He stared in the opposite direction from it, at nothing, at dark streets, while the Tattoo spectated.
“Jesus,” Billy said. “Where’s Goss and Subby?”
“If they’re here…” Dane said. The Siddharthists were putting together a rough altar, carrying out secret ceremonies. “Wati?” But Wati was on rounds again. “If whatever this ‘animal church’ is doesn’t pitch up, we’re gone.”
There was a flash behind the night clouds, silent. It etched cloud contours. The air felt pressed down and the cars kept howling. From the altar was an unpleasant shining. “Here it comes,” said Dane.
All the way over them all, the cloud moved fast. It took shape. Church-sized clots of it evanesced, leaving-it was not mistake-a lumpy anthropoid outline in night-matter, a man shape crude as a mandrake root, a great cruciform figure over the city.
Billy stopped breathing. “If this is the end,” he said at last, “it’s nothing to do with the burning… What do we do?”
“It’s not our business.” Dane was calm. “There’ll be no shortage of people trying to put that out. If it’s just some piddling apocalypse, we needn’t worry.”
Then the earth in the dead space, the ugly dusty bushes and debris, rose. Men and women stood out of their camouflage and came quickly forward.
“They were there all along,” Dane said. “Well played. So who are they?”
THOSE COME FROM THEIR HOLES WERE IN LEATHER, BELTS CROSSED bandolier over their chests. They surrounded the Jesus Buddhists. The cloud-man loomed.
“Shit,” Dane said. He turned to Billy. “Waste of our time,” he said in a flat voice. “That’s the Brood. Nothing to do with a kraken. Different animal.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Nothing to see here.”
“… We knew it was a long shot,” Billy said.
From their power base in Neasden, the SV Brood were devoted to a wargod polecat ferret. Its uncompromising ontology ultimately precluded its iteration as one deva among many in the Hinduism from which it was doggedly self-created, and the Brood had become monotheists of a more reductive sort. The Brood’s inspiration in southern India, their predilection for fighting forms of Kerala, gave the Christos Siddharthans a peg for prejudice: they screamed “Tamils!” as the Brood approached, as if it were a derogatory term. They brought out pistols.
“Bugger this,” whispered Dane. “Ferretists versus racists. This is not the end of the world.”
Could you really feel the hand of destiny while pointing a Glock? The Siddharthists would not let chivalry stand in the way of their Buddhist rage. They fired. Broodists fell and the others leapt, unwinding their metallic belts. They were urumis, whip-swords, blades metres long, ribbon-thin and knife-edged, that they lashed in the crooked agile poses of kalaripayat, opening their enemies’ saffron clothes in ragged vents, drawing red lines so fast it took seconds for the victims to scream.
A sinuate mustelid presence coiled and uncoiled out of dust and nothing in the wasteland. “Red thoughts white teeth!” chanted the Brood. “Red thoughts white teeth!” (This long-promised ferret eschatology had been endlessly distant, until the probing and knacked prodding of the FSRC had helped midwife the cult’s little Ragnarok. All to flush out who was where.)
“Jesus,” Billy said. Cars passed. What did they see? A gang fight? Teenagers? Nothing? The police were surely on their way.
“Let’s split,” said Dane.
Two apocalypse figures clashed over the waste while their followers squabbled murderously. The god-functions struggled, an unusual storm.
“They’re late,” said Dane, retracing his way along the underside of a bridge.
“Who?”
“Whoever’s going to stop this.” Dane tutted.
“Wait,” grumbled Billy. “I want to see the apocalypses fighting.” But Dane snapped at him to come, so Billy sulkily turned his back on the celestial battle and continued through the crawl space. At the edges of the clearing, other figures had appeared. “Who are they?” he said.
“Some chosen one’s party,” Dane said without looking. “’Bout bloody time.”
Somewhere nearby, Billy supposed, Baron, Collingswood and his to-have-been colleagues were carting the wounded and dead to secret hospitals. Whoever saved the city would extinguish these little Götterdämerungen.
“Did you hear something?” Billy said.