The Hipster Who Leapt Through Time (The Hipster Trilogy Book 2) (10 page)

The crowd erupted again with cheers and Moomamu noticed another human next to the prince. A bald one with big eyes. The whites so large Moomamu could see them from all the way down on the Scrapping Grounds. He was a servant of some kind, holding a tray for the prince. But he was dressed well. Robed. Silver ringlets around his wrists. Shoes. For a second Moomamu thought the servant was looking at him, but he couldn’t be sure.

“Okay,” the bellower roared. “It is begun.”

With those words, the slaves took their fighting stances and began to circle each other. Apart from Moomamu and his opponent — the ginger mountain. He grinned at Moomamu and brandished his yellow-white claws. Moomamu looked down at his clenched fists and wondered if he’d doomed himself. What damage could his fists do to a cat that looked like it could eat rock?

From behind Moomamu there was a scream followed by a bell and then cheering. Moomamu caught sight of the cat who’d pissed himself. He’d taken a sword to the stomach and had fallen into his own puddle. The first kill.

Moomamu backed himself up. A step at a time. His opponent matched him step for step, still grinning. He had no weapons, but his claws were out, almost as big as his yellowing teeth — sharper than the parasite who’d once tried to eat him.
 

“I don’t want to kill you,” Moomamu said to the cat, but he ignored him. He lowered his head, placed his front paws on the floor and slowly crept towards him, readying to pounce. “Please,” Moomamu said. “I’m a Thinker, not a fighter.”

The crowd erupted again as the bell rang a second time. Another had fallen. In his peripheral vision, he saw a head rolling across the floor leaving a mist of red in its wake. Moomamu had almost figured out where the head had come from when his opponent leapt forward, teeth out, claws reaching to his face. He screamed the word “No” and fell onto his side and the ginger mountain flew over him, catching Moomamu’s shoulder with his claws as he went. The mountain flew too far, though. He fell into different battle altogether and found a wayward blade dash him in the throat.

The crowd cheered as the mountain tumbled, clutching his wound. The opportunistic pair who’d been fighting each other repeatedly stabbed the mountain as he fell. Over and over, before unsticking their weapons and starting back on one another.

Moomamu clutched his gushing shoulder as he ran towards the giant double doors at the edge of the grounds. The crowd hissed at his cowardice but he didn’t care. He was a survivor, not a warrior.
 

More bells rang. More slaves fell.

As he reached the doors he saw the chain for what it was: a monstrous lock that would take several cats or men to move it, never mind untangle it.
 

He fell to the floor, his back against the wooden doors, hot from the sun. Rivulets of blood fell through his fingers and ran down his side into the sand where they dried into little dirty red balls.
 

“What the …?” he began as he looked back out into the grounds. The bronze human, in the distance, was a blur of metal and sun. There were five cats left and the human. The cats started on the human together. The first one leapt towards him but within a second the human dropped to the floor and ran the curved blade down the cat’s stomach, releasing its innards to meet the floor. Even from this far away Moomamu could smell what was in that cat’s stomach. The human fought like a champion. Another of the cats slashed at him with a blade and another started behind him with the axe, but in a daze of twisting and slashing he took the head off one and the arm off another before sticking it in the neck, leaving great arcs of blood in the sky.
 

The remaining two were on either side of him, a couple of smaller ones. Moomamu could hardly see what happened as the human kicked one in the face, then threw his curved blade at the other where it found its home in the cat’s forehead. He then grabbed the first one, who was covering his nose in pain, and twisted his neck, giving it a 360-degree view of the whole audience before dropping it to the sand.

Moomamu felt a sense of hope. The humans were winning. He might survive after all. The din coming from the crowd was one of confusion. Some were cheering at the bloodshed and others were outraged by the human’s adept fighting skills. How could he beat a group of cats? He didn’t even have claws!

The human kicked up a wooden stick, one with a blade fixed to its end. He caught it and waved it in the air. Perhaps to celebrate the human victory. But then, like magic, the human wasn’t holding it anymore. The stick had vanished.
 

It took Moomamu a second or two to catch a glimpse of it in the air. Small at first, as it reached upwards, but then it grew larger on its way down. He could hardly see through the sunlight as the thing slammed into the wood by his head, splintering it. Moomamu shrieked before realising it hadn’t actually hit him.
 

The humans hadn’t won. There could be only one survivor in this fight. It was all against all. But Moomamu had no reason to be angry at this human. It wasn’t like the broken human who’d killed Marta. This was simply a human fighting for survival. He saw the bronze human plant his foot on the cat’s head and pull his curved blade out. He wiped the blood off against its fur and started towards him. He knew he was going to have to do something soon because this human was walking towards Moomamu with the intent to kill — to survive.

Nisha Bhatia

“Oi!” the runner said as Nisha pushed past him.
 

He bent down to pick up his plastic coffee cup which had spilt onto his canvas trainers. Nisha didn’t stop to say sorry. She didn’t stop to say goodbye to Tom or the rest of the crew. Her nose was still bleeding and she needed to get out. It was the one thing that was clear to her. Get. The. Fuck. Out.
 

She ran down the busy corridor, full of crews from different productions, all chatting about nonsense. She avoided eye contact as she made her way to the lift.
 

“Going down,” said the automated elevator voice as it opened and she stepped inside.

As the metal box worked its way towards the ground floor she did her best to calm her breathing, but it seemed like her world was collapsing around her. The elevator was getting smaller with each breath. The ceiling coming down. Metal scratching against metal. Screaming as it crushed itself into a small cube of wreckage. She cried “No” as the thing swallowed her up.

“Ground floor,” said the elevator voice. Nisha blinked and the lift was back to its normal size. The ceiling was back to its normal height. A chime rang and the doors slid open.
 

“Hiya,” a blonde in makeup with teeth bigger and whiter than hers appeared. She was a news reporter or maybe a weather reporter. Nisha couldn’t spare the energy to remember. She barged past her and walked on towards the giant glass doors leading to the city.
 

“Bye Neesh,” Jean, the receptionist, said as she walked past. “Wait, Mrs Bhatia are you okay?”
 

“I’m fine!” she shouted as the door opened and she made her way outside.
 

The cold air hit her skin and she instantly felt better. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but her white cuff was spoiled with the red and was turning a dull brown. She gasped like she’d emerged from a pool of water. Like she’d never breathed before.
 

Ahead of her were more people. Some tourists taking photos of the building. Various TV crews. A few guys in suits, one with glasses and a beard. Another man with a blond moustache in black clothing. A homeless man with a cardboard sign that read something about being thrown away by society. She saw a bottle of whisky by his side and thought that he was the smartest guy on the planet. She touched her jacket pocket and felt the shape of the vodka bottle in her pocket. Was this the emergency? The reason to break it open?

Ahead, around the corner, not too far from where she stood, was The Old Rope Inn. The pub where the TV people met on Fridays. Nisha checked the time on her phone: 11.34am. It would be opening soon.

She dropped her hand from the bottle and started walking.

London was back to its usual grey. Clouds that were trying to rain but never did.
 

She passed some other buildings. Some modern. Some a century old. All of them full of people. Until she reached The Old Rope Inn. A Victorian sore thumb of black and white amongst the modern buildings surrounding it, towering over it. It looked like this could’ve been where London began, and the rest of the city was built around it. The single birth point where the founders sat at old bow-legged wooden tables and drank ale from wooden beakers.

Once inside, Nisha was reminded that if that were the case, things had certainly changed. The insides were brightly lit and decorated in white and gold. The menu served fine gourmet pub lunch food that came on tiny plates and cost as much as a small country’s GDP. And the ales of old were gone, the barrels shipped out and destroyed to make room for bottles upon bottles of wines from Europe and California.
 

Nisha was right. It
had
just opened. Still mostly empty. There was only a single bartender hiding behind the bar polishing glasses. She gave Nisha the familiar smile. A young girl, fresh in a black pencil skirt and the promise of youth all around her.
 

“Good afternoon,” the girl said. Technically it was still morning. “What can I get for you?”
 

“What do you have?”

An exhaustive list of wines later and Nisha cut in and asked for a large glass of the cheapest red and a glass of water to go with it.
 

“Ice?”

“For the wine?” Nisha was disgusted.

“For the water, miss.”

“Oh yes, sorry. Yes please,” Nisha nodded before retreating to a corner seat. It was an odd little niche where the building jutted outwards. Whatever function the recess had before had long been lost. A relic of some mad architect. It gave Nisha a corner to hide in. From there you couldn’t see the bartender, and the bartender couldn’t see you.
 

No shame for Nisha. No shame at all. No shame at all. She repeated the phrase in her mind as she rubbed her stomach.

She drank some of the water first. The ice stung her teeth. She tongued the water around the inside of her mouth to cleanse the palate. She lifted the wine and looked through it. In the dark red she could see her own reflection. And behind her were the faces of the children. She sniffed the wine and her eyes watered. The caustic bouquet burned her nostrils.
 

“Lovely, fruit, berries, summer … drunk.”

She gulped the first mouthful and ran it around her tongue. The taste was bittersweet. It ran down the back of her throat like a thick syrup and down into her insides. The warmth of it spread through her and she relaxed into the chair. Her shoulders dropped. Her head rested backwards in the cushion behind her. She felt comfortable. Cosy, even. She was on a beach of blood-orange sand and her troubles were being washed away in waves of red.

Sleep quickly found her and bathed her in bubbles of nothing. She enjoyed, for the moment, not existing.
 

And when it was time for her to return she forced her eyes open, but the lids were still heavy. The bar around her was spinning. She made out the faces though. The bar was now packed with people, gulping wine and talking about work. The lights around her were yellow and the world outside was night-time in the window. She was still hidden away in the niche. The wine on the table in front of her had gone.

Just as she was piecing together her identity and her whereabouts, she felt a figure to her right, next to her in the cutaway corner. The figure had blond hair, a moustache, and a black uniform. A badge on his chest. Three letters. She tried to look at him. His eyes were dual moons to her. Looming overhead. He was holding her arm. He was pressing his finger into her skin. He pinched her. It made her sleepier.
 

The figure to her right. She recognised him. Some long-ago dream. Maybe.

She forced her head downwards and saw the slim metal finger pull away from her vein. A dot of blood appeared like magic where the needle had been.
 

“Sleep, Miss Bhatia,” said the male voice. “Sleep now. Everything will be all right.”

She fell back into darkness, back to not existing.

Moomamu The Thinker

Moomamu forced himself to his feet. The metal point of the stick was lodged in the door behind him, and the human was coming for him. Slowly. Surely. The human was confident in his imminent victory. The sunlight gleamed against his curved blade.
 

Moomamu thought about crying and pleading for mercy, but he wasn’t so sure it would work. He grabbed a hold of the stick and pulled, but it didn’t move. He yanked as hard as he could and squealed when he got a splinter stuck in his palm.

“Oh God, that hurts,” he said as he looked at the tiny wooden dagger lodged in his skin.
 

He turned to the see the human who was now picking up the pace. The crowd around were cheering. They could smell the coming kill and they were thirsty for it. They’d drunk all this death so far and it only made them thirstier.

Moomamu planted his foot against the giant door and pulled the stick again. He could hear the footsteps behind him getting closer. The bare feet hitting the sand and dirt. Moomamu tightened his grip on the stick. The splinter in his palm was joined by another in his other hand. He yelped again but continued. He heard the metal in the wood cracking and popping. He screamed and pulled. His muscles ached. He had no energy for such strenuous exercise.
 

Tread. Tread. The man was now running. Not too far behind. Tread. Within slicing distance for sure. Tread. Tread. Tread, and then a leap. The human was in the air. Blade lifted upwards, ready to slash downwards.

The stick loosened and Moomamu fell backwards and the human leapt right over Moomamu and rolled as he hit the floor. Moomamu backed up, kicking the sand. He picked up the stick and pointed it at the human. Sharp-point forward. It made sense.