The Unblemished (29 page)

He wondered where the family that once lived here had escaped to,
if they had escaped at all. The thought of them still in the house
somewhere, in the cellar perhaps, or wadded in the musty corners of
the garden shed, bound and gagged, home to thousands of hungry
white worms, was too much to deal with; he could not bring himself
to confirm it, despite the angelic countenance of the children in the
framed photographs on the mantelpiece, the apparent love that
streamed between the parents.

He had been the catalyst for all of this. He had incited this citywide
riot. Eight hundred square miles, maybe more beyond the city's
confines, had turned into a morass of missing people and ravaged
bodies. If he hadn't been so stupid, so desperate to inject a little
excitement into his life, this would not have happened. There was no
fast track to success, only to misery. Or maybe all of this would have
happened anyway, just starting with some other poor bastard
accepting the map. Bo's feeble attempts to hunt Vero down now
seemed to be even more pointless. Even if he found him and forced
him to take back what he had been so quick, so grateful to offload,
he didn't see any quick fix to the ruins that faced him when he looked
at what his life had become. He had turned his back on Keiko, no
matter how altruistic he believed that act to be, his job was gone, his
health was fucked. He had nothing but a bike and a head full of
horror.

He had killers on his trail.

He returned to the kitchen and sat down on the stool. The radio
spat at him softly. He snapped it off and Laurier's rasping breath
filled the space. Saving the Detective Inspector was a pointless
exercise, a token reaction to the badness piling in on Bo's life, yet he
could not have left him there, despite all the other innocent bodies
chosen as live incubators. He should have torched the building; death
must have been a better option than what they awaited.

His hand twitched and burned. The blood had dried and run
across the skin so often that it looked like something from the props
department of a horror film. The skin was stained mahogany. It
jumped and crawled with black code. It seemed to be more than what
he was. He had visions of it growing, feeding off the rest of his body
until he was a withered attachment being dragged around. He stared
into the complex weave of welts and scratches, as if some route might
make itself clear, but all he could see was damage. Blood traced the
delicate diamonds of his epidermis. It dimpled every follicle and pore.
Veins pulsed wetly, as if psyching themselves for a push into the open.
Blood was all his hand had become. It was senseless. Separate. It was
so alien to the shape and manner of his right hand that it might have
been grafted on to him, taken from something better left unseen.

Laurier's breathing grew irregular. Bo did not move to be by his
side. Laurier was beyond comfort. Bo watched the other man digging
at the bandages around his jaw; they loosened. Laurier's eyes grew
fixed and his mouth gaped. Bo saluted him. 'Help, police,' he said.

Bo smiled into the burnished steel again. The mangled reflection
suggested that a grimace was all he could muster, that humour was
now eradicated from his life.
You should have stayed alive for this,
he
thought, and brought the cleaver up and down on to his left wrist in
one swift, fluid motion.

Someone once said that all behaviourism in nature could be referred to
hunger. This saying has been repeated thousands of times yet it is false.
Hunger itself is pain – the most severe pain in its later stages that the
body knows except thirst, which is even worse. Love may be regarded as
a hunger, but it is not pain.

Eugène Marais,
The Soul of the White Ant

Sarah stood by the window to see if the moon was visible tonight.

The moon had been a comfort to her as a child. Her own mother
used to tell her that the face she could see up there was the face of her
father, who had died when she was very young.

'He had been staring up at the moon, when his illness became too
much for him,' her mother had told her. 'And when he died, the
moon stayed in his eyes, you know, as though his eyes were a camera
that had taken a picture. Trapped it for ever. Your father's face was
captured by the moon at the very same moment.'

'They swapped faces,' Sarah had said, decisively, she remembered,
as if she would believe it even if her mother had said otherwise.

'That face in the moon, that's your dad, keeping an eye on you.

Keeping you safe.'

She often looked out for the moon now when she felt lost or alone
or afraid. It was nonsense, of course, but because her mother had said
it, and it had helped her, it wasn't really nonsense at all. It was as true
as God or Santa Claus or insane men screaming towards her from
dark corners of the world to try to destroy her. It was true if she
wanted it to be.

There was too much cloud cover to see the moon now, but it was
up there, a milky heart in the grey. Even that diffuse light was of some
comfort.

'It's time to go.'

Nick leaped as if stuck with a needle. 'Now? Can't we wait till
daylight, for Christ's sake?'

'You know me well enough to realise that isn't going to happen. I
need to find a doctor. I need to get help.'

'But you were out there earlier. You saw what happened. You saw
what's going on out there.'

'Yes I did, but I can see what's going on in here too.' She looked
at Claire under a blanket, saw her quaking, saw the sweat on her face,
the dark rings around her eyes. The blanket was up to her throat. By
morning she might need to move it six inches north.

Nick put his hands to his face. 'I can't do this. I can't go outside
again.'

'I'm not asking you to,' Sarah said, soothingly. But she felt her
confidence leak quickly out of her. She was aware that she shouldn't
rely on a man she barely knew to put himself in situations he didn't
deserve to be in, but she had blithely assumed he would back her up,
especially after what had happened on the beach back in Southwold.
Here was a man who had seen too much already. It was unfair to
expect him to prolong his exposure to risk; it had gone beyond trying
to impress her to get inside her knickers. Deaths were occurring. He
didn't want to join the statistics. There was nothing left on his meter.
He was spent. Fair enough.

She turned to Tina. 'I'll knock on the door when I get back. One-two.
One-two. Okay? So you know it's me. Let me in quickly, won't
you?' Tina nodded, and handed her a knife. She was moving her
mouth as if trying to say something, but Sarah didn't want to hear
platitudes or rousing speeches of derring-do, especially from a
woman who couldn't back them up with actions of her own. She took
the knife that Tina proffered and left abruptly. No good-byes. No
last-minute efforts to muster support. She forced her legs to take her
down the stairs and into the street before she could persuade herself
that this was suicide, that her bravery was an illusion brought on by
too little food and not enough sleep and that she should get under
that blanket with her daughter upstairs, where it was safe.

Things outside had changed. She had never been in a city where
the light was as subdued as this. Some spots of light remained, but too
many huge pools of blackness stretched out between them. Nothing
moved in those oases, but it wasn't them she was worried about. The
darkness seemed congealed, filled up. It settled against her skin like
soot.
Keep moving
, she thought.
Shift yourself.

It was quiet now, but she didn't feel that was of particular significance
because she couldn't remember if it had been quiet earlier too,
when they had set out to confirm Tina's concerns about her city. It
was a city's size crowbarred into a town or a village's sensibilities. It
was unnerving. Places such as London were rendered pathetic by such
anomalies. It had always been a big come-on of a city, used to
thundering thoroughfares and clogged pavements. Seeing it weakened
like this made her vulnerability more acute. If London couldn't roll
with the punches, how could she be expected to?

She spotted movement on the corner of Charlotte Street and sank
back into the deep shadow of awnings near Tina's entry door,
fighting the urge to call out, to confirm to herself that these were
normal people in a normal place living normal lives.

She was grateful for her instincts.
Keep following those
, she told
herself.
Say how you feel and act on it. No questions. No arguments.

Twenty feet away, two men in charcoal suits drifted along Percy
Street like sharks cruising the shallows. One of them was wearing the
skin of a woman's upper torso like a stole. Her boned head hung down
over his shoulder, flapping with each step, measuring out the distance
they were travelling with her empty black eye sockets. He twisted and
twiddled one of her nipples distractedly as he chatted to the other man
who toyed with a rosary of teeth and chewed on something too large
for his mouth, now and then spitting dark juice into the gutter.

Sarah checked her breathing and moved off once the two men had
crossed the road in the direction of Bedford Square. She moved north,
quickly, flitting between the pools of shade and never lingering too long,
never positioning herself with acres of black space at her shoulder. She
couldn't believe she had given up Southwold for this. Not for the first
time, she mulled over the possibility that madness was eating away her
brain. These things weren't real. They couldn't be real. Which meant
that she was deranged. Fine. Everyone was mental these days.

She wedged herself in a doorway to view the road ahead and then
made a spiderish dash to the next little sanctuary a few metres further
along. In this way she covered the distance between Percy Street and
University College Hospital in half an hour. It was frustrating to be
able to see her goal throughout the journey, but she knew that to
break her cover and run was to invite failure. There was too much
riding on this. If she died, Claire was finished. That was all she had
to know; then it was easy.

No figures moved that she could see in the windows of the
National Health Service building. She edged along Grafton Way,
keen on scouting the area around the hospital first before she
attempted to enter it. There was no point in being cautious up to a
point and then abandoning that for a gung-ho approach once her
destination was reached.

There was a makeshift car park on the south side of the street; an
excavated pit that sank below the level of the road, guarded by a
booth and a barrier. Several cars were positioned around the uneven
ground. Shadows shifted within them. Other figures loitered by the
old UCH building. Badness radiated from all corners.

There was the muffled sound of a heavy iron gate and the jolt and
shudder of a mechanism. More metallic squeals and thuds. A yellow
skip was wheeled into the street from a side door. Almost instantly, a
crowd gathered around the large bin, jostling for position. A whispered
roar. She could practically feel the heat of their need. Sarah saw it as a
good diversion and was readying herself for a sprint past them so that
she could approach the hospital from the junction of Gordon Street and
Euston Road, when she heard footsteps, lots of them, in the direction
she had arrived from. Her distraction was such that she almost lost
balance and fell from the kerb into the road. She recovered and stood
trembling by the wall, her hands flat against it, growing colder against
the cement while she waited for something to develop.

A hundred or so figures turned into the road and she saw she
would have to approach the crowd at the skip or risk walking against
this gang as they marched towards her. She began to inch her way
towards the skip, wondering if she could pass herself off as one of
them. She pulled the knife from her pocket. The handle felt alien to
her grip, suddenly too slippery. She felt her mouth become stripped
of fluid, her tongue turning within it like a loose pebble in the drum
of a washing machine. As she gained ground on the rabble, she saw
that the skip bore red letters that she couldn't quite read. She saw an
S and an A. She saw the word CAUTION. She saw the interlinked circles
of a biohazard sign. A woman broke clear of the pack and staggered
to one side, her hands wet, holding her face. Holding something
to
her face. Eating.

The gang behind her were almost upon her. Sarah knew she stuck
out, was too timid, too undecided. She'd be unmasked within
seconds. She launched herself away from the wall and ran towards
the skip. She began yelling, as the others were, and jutted out her
hands, being careful to conceal the knife in her palm. The jag of
adrenaline helped her overcome the stifling fear of attack; being able
to scream when the last half hour had been a suffocatingly quiet
odyssey was relief of a kind too. She rammed herself into the thick of
it, finding liberation in being able to muscle up against the monsters
instead of shying away from them. Her confidence escalated, despite
the squirm of their bodies against hers. A man appeared over the lip
of the skip and handed out fistfuls of sealed yellow bags and small
yellow buckets. These were received joyously, and cracked and torn
open with the zeal of children being handed a tub of sweets. One of
them was slapped into Sarah's hand with enough force to make her
cry out. She dropped it when she saw what the rest of the words on
the side of the skip said:
MEDICAL SHARPS – DISPOSE OF PROPERLY
.

People around her were ramming spent syringes into their mouths
and sucking whatever juices they could from them. Others gnawed
dried blood from broken glass vials and test tubes. Sarah backed
away, checking her hand to see that the skin had not suffered a
needle-stick injury.

Then she heard someone say: 'She's not with us.'

Sarah abruptly turned and walked away, knowing that she had been
discovered. She felt her skin tighten under the heat of dozens of eyes.
Quiet descended. She knew she was being assessed. She knew that to
look back at them was to give herself away. They weren't sure about
her. They were waiting for her to run, or throw a nervous glance. She
forced herself to walk steadily. A man hurried out from behind a plastic
curtain in the delivery bay at the back of the hospital. He had his lips
clamped to a slashed blood bag and was trying to guzzle the contents
before whoever was behind him caught up. More bags were clutched in
his other hand; they shook and sloshed like strange octopoid creatures.
Cries rang out from around the skip. Here was a feast. The scraps were
discarded; leather hit tarmac at pace.

Sarah put her head down and ran as three men crashed out from
the delivery bay in pursuit of the bloodsucker. She risked assessing the
scene behind her as she reached the corner of the street; she had been
forgotten in favour of the dense red booty now being wrestled from
its owner, who was sitting on the floor, his eyes wide and glazed, like
a sated drunk.

No more distractions, she thought. No more ifs and maybes. Be
certain. Focus. Stay alive.

She stole along Euston Road like something borne on the breeze.

She could hear terrible sounds – snapping, splintering, liquid half-cries
– coming up from the underpass but made no detour to explore
further. The great road was dead in either direction, off towards the
Westway or back towards King's Cross. Snatches of wild sound
volleyed into the desertion. She heard mad laughter and screams in
the direction of Hampstead Road.

There were no security guards on the doors, no nurses or porters
or patients hurrying or strolling around the substantial entrance hall.
Windows were cracked and smashed. A computer terminal was so
much plastic rain across the floor. A wheelchair lay buckled on its
side, one wheel turning slowly. A piece of gauze with a cloudy red
centre hung from a piece of timber that had smashed through a wall.
On the reception desk a partially eaten boy had been discarded; even
the tongue lolling from his mouth had a chunk bitten out of it.

Okay
, Sarah thought. You became inured to it after a while. After
a while it was just a part of the scenery. You took it in, you processed
it, you moved on.

She walked corridors that didn't seem to have an end, past doors
bearing signs she didn't understand. The high, clinical reek of
hospitals bleached her nostrils. Every turn she made was another into
the unknown; she did not know what she was going to come up
against. She poked her head into a staff room with a nurse sitting
primly on a sofa with a pen and a book of wordsearch puzzles. The
mug next to her still had steam curling off it. The nurse was in some
kind of catatonic state, her face grey, fixed upon the puzzle grids as if
she were determined not to allow what she was witnessing around her
spoil her tea break. Sarah could not rouse her. She was stone.

She found toilets that she could not fully open the doors to. She
pushed a piece of broken mirror in through the narrow gap she had
managed to create and saw a mountain of bodies piled up just behind
it. None were moving. She had to swallow hard against a deranged
conviction that Claire was at the bottom of that heap, even though she
knew her daughter was snoozing fitfully on the sofa back at Tina's
flat. It was the curse of being a parent: visions of hell, even while your
children were sitting happily nearby. You trim a hedge with shears and
imagine a playful hand slip between the blades at the moment they
hack shut; you reverse the car out of the drive and feel the sludge of a
tiny body trapped beneath the wheels. All of it fantasy, all of it fuelled
by worry. She supposed it was a good thing, this panic button always
being on. It meant you were always on the look-out for potential
hazards, but it made for an exhausting life. Those bodies had horrified
her, but there was no choice but to go on. She had to do something.