1. Thursday.

I know something is wrong. I don’t need to be fully awake to know it, the feeling is right there in my guts. And so is the feeling of nausea that has slowly crept up as I slept my uneasy sleep in a bed that shifted and creaked under my weight with every little movement of the room around us.

Everything here is unfamiliar. The ceiling is too near my head, the walls are too short a span away from my shoulders, and on the whole the room feels like a floating coffin. The stale air matches the scenery with its suffocating wrap. I throw away the sheets to discover that I was sleeping with my clothes on, and I don’t need the light turned on to remember there are blood stains all over each and every item of my garments.

‘Plock?’ says Pickwick from under the bed, and I reach out to pet her tenderly. Don’t know who finds more consolation in this familiar gesture: her, in discovering her mistress still obviously sane enough to grant her the usual daily dose of affection, or me, in knowing that at least one piece of my old world is still intact.

‘You OK?’

‘Plock!’ she replies with conviction, and I wisely decide to believe her.

I try to sit up on the bed, only to discover that my mobility is badly hindered by a nasty feeling of shakiness in the limbs. All my muscles scream with exhaustion as if I had run miles and miles non-stop. In the slumber- and fatigue-fuelled daze it takes me a while to realize that was exactly the case.

***

The day started with a call from Spike who, having been put through by the hectic receptionist, invited me to enjoy a fine morning by shouting violently on the other end of the line. It took me several invaluable moments to understand what he was apparently dying to convey. It also took me a lot more of similarly costly moments to realize that ‘dying’ in his case wasn’t a metaphor.

“Thurs, where the hell are you?”

“Well, first of all, hello Spike, and secondly, I’m in my hotel room, as you probably have noticed. You just dialed its number.”

“Why aren’t you *here* still?”

“’Here’ meaning the SpecOps headquarters? I plan to be there at the usual time unless something urgent has turned up.”

I heard Spike take a huge gulp of air.

“Urgent? You mean you haven’t watched the news yet?”

“No. In fact I was still asleep when you called.” I didn’t dwell on the quality of the sleep: today was to be the day of the big drop that involved Bowden and me, dubiously backed up by the Goliath squad, delivering the fake ransom to fulfill Hades’ bidding. “Should I have?”

“Ah, scratch the TV! Look out of your window if you want a brief and comprehensive update. But stay clear out of view so that THEY don’t see you….”

I didn’t hear his last words as I walked to the window, so his advice was lost on me. I drew the curtains open as I’d have done on any other normal day, and it all stared me right in the face.

In all its bloody, screaming, frenzied, hysterical glory of Swindon gone mad.

“I… What’s going on, Spike?” I mumbled into the receiver as I crawled back to the phone, half expecting to find Spike gone under, too, in the tide of mass psychosis.

“You’d better hurry, Thurs. Seriously, you’d better hurry. We need you here. We need every officer we have, and then some.” There was an ominous pause, and I could hear him shout disjoint orders in the direction of everyone and nobody in particular. I feared he’d never speak up again, and that I’d be left with a blank silence to ask questions to which there’d be no answers.

Not that Spike had any sensible answers, to begin with.

“We don’t know how long we’ll hold this place. And Thursday? Take all the guns you have.”

***

I did as I was told and felt slightly more secure when the two holsters were nested neatly on my both sides under the jacket. Now and then a particularly shrill scream from the outside reached through the closed windows, and Pickwick plocked nervously from behind the bathroom door. I considered my options momentarily and concluded my speculations by opening the door and grabbing him in my arms.

With an armful of dodo and my pockets full of spare ammunition, I peeked into the corridor. The lodgers of my floor shuffled by like some lost souls, exchanging meaningless comments and equally meaningless suggestions. Either they were being reasonable enough, or just plain scared, but at least they were staying inside, which definitely boosted their chances of survival. A foolhardy few headed to the stairs with their luggage in hand, and I only hoped they had cars to drive – calling a taxi would have been unrealistic.

“Miss? You’re in the SpecOps, you are, Miss?”

The old lady that was tugging at my sleeve wasn’t from the Milton Convention, and should have felt lost even before the hell in the streets broke loose.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know yet, but you’d better stay put. You’re safe here. Just don’t go outside.”

I couldn’t believe my own words even if my voice managed to sound confident; well, that was the last time it did for a long while to come.

The parking lot was the busiest place in the hotel, save the bar. My spirits sank when one brief glance prompted me the ones staying in their rooms were a negligible minority: most of the Finis’ guests were leaving, or rather, trying to leave. I froze in my tracks when a car sped up to race outside, flashed through the driveway and came to a screeching halt as another car bumped into it right at the exit. A queue immediately formed behind the crashed vehicles, and it was an extremely angry queue. The drivers got out of their cars to solve the problem the way drivers do – by shouting and waving fists and getting everyone nowhere.

“They’re coming!”

The fuss at the exit became frenzied but just as useless. The driver of one of the smashed cars found nothing wiser to do than flee; I couldn’t see how far he managed to go but he didn’t get to the place he planned, that was clear from the sounds. The screams were loud and short, and then there was silence.

That was the scariest of all. They moved silently, without shouting, or yelling, or voicing their emotions in any other way. They didn’t even growl like other hungry animals would. All we could hear in the parking was the monotonous thunder of hundreds of feet running in unison of a big crowd.

I found my Speedster, rather unceremoniously threw Pickwick inside, and locked the door.

“Hey, you! Yes, I’m talking to you. Get in your car and back off!”

The man gave me a blank stare. Not to waste time trying to awaken his reason, I jumped into the other car. The keys were still in the ignition; I started the engine, all the while forbidding myself any glance at the street around me. There was enough of frightened blankness already.

I was wrong. They did scream, but the incoherent shrieks their disfigured mouths produced came only before they started to attack, which meant too late to run. The other driver ducked for cover in his vehicle and, luckily for me, desperately tugged at the transmission, without a clear purpose but vigorously enough to disengage the clutch. As the result his car started to roll back, and that was my chance to dive back into the relative safety of the parking area.

I tried to steer the other vehicles into a semblance of order. I tried, I swear.

I also tried not to run over anyone who happened to be on my path, but that humane intention was short-lived. The first body dropped across the hood of my Speedster the moment I emerged on the street. The object that hurled itself vigorously against the windshield resembled a man only vaguely: the face, distorted in a mask of mindless anger, bloodied lips drawn into a wide half-grin, half-snarl, and rows of teeth, red-stained and too numerous for a human, couldn’t belong to any Homo sapiens. The sapiens part had clearly departed from the poor wreck, and so it did from many and many others.

I slowed down before turning into the main road, and another used the moment to bang on the rear window. It was one of the Miltons; I remembered his face from a chance meeting in the hotel’s lobby. Pickwick messed about frantically shedding feathers all over the back seat, and I revved the engine up so that we almost jumped out into the highway, all driving directions forgotten.

***

The memories keep coming, fresh and vivid, and I quietly search for the switch to turn the lights on without upsetting Pickwick more. As if the lamps would make the images go away; and besides, there’s enough light as it, with a reddish glow coming from the window – no, they call these portholes – as more fires burn seemingly everywhere on the ground below.

***

The Speedster acquired a lot of new bumps and scratches by the time I reached the SpecOps headquarters. ‘Reached’ was a wrong word: I could only drive as close as to sight the building and a police squad planting barbed wire hedgehogs in front of it to ensure exclusion and control. I waved my badge at them, and two of them moved one entangling monster to give me way. As I drove closer, something squelched under the wheels, and I saw that while the front line of the squad was busy mounting the defence, the second line stood guard with their guns recoiling now and then as they took down a new target.

Spike tumbled down the porch stairs, looking even more dishevelled than ever.

“Thank Goodness, Thursday, you’ve made it here. We’ve lost five guys from SpecOps 9 an hour ago. From the 9th, can you imagine? That’s Antiterrorism, if they don’t know how to handle this, who does then?”

If he was expecting *me* to give him answers, he was in for a big disappointment.

“Where’s Bowden?”

“Somewhere…round here.”

I could see what he meant by being so intriguingly vague. The large entrance hall was a crowded place even on a quiet day; now it was a boiling cauldron. The metal detectors that used to stand like stern sentry at the doors were overthrown; the buzz of voices drowned in an incessant chorus of phones ringing. The front desk, usually occupied by one really angelic officer whose saintly attitude clearly indicated the person on duty was trying to imagine himself elsewhere, was now besieged by at least a dozen of people shouting into the phones and at each other.

“They’re getting more reports from the mall and the banks. Where the cameras still hold, that is.”

“Any help from the hospital? There are casualties.” A damned lot of, that was for certain.

“Hospital?” Spike laughed in a way I didn’t like. “Paramedics are running out there with the crowds. They were the first to go.”

I stood still in the midst of the whirling throng, ignoring the jostles and irritated swearing. Before, pauses like that used to help when matters acquired a particularly brutal turn, and a view from a distance usually restored the perspective. This time, its only use was an intake of extra breath; well, it was small help, but later I learnt it counted dearest.

“We started to receive first calls around midnight,” Spike recalled dreamily, “and they dispatched me to see what was up. Assumed it was a local zombie occurrence with more panic than any real threat. A one-man division, who am I, a magician? I could only run away.”

“What’s Hicks’ opinion about it all?”

“He thinks it’s an outbreak of fever or something similar accompanied by delirium. Well, at least he got the symptoms right.”

“The fever ones?” I looked at him in disbelief. I was no medical specialist but what I saw was nothing like fever, or influenza, or any other known malaise.

“The highly contagious ones. It spreads exponentially.”

Commander Braxton Hicks, the man in charge of the Swindon SpecOps, was in his room, shouting, like anyone else on that morning, into the receiver.

“No, I repeat, I will not militarise Swindon until I get a confirmation from Salisbury. They should know what’s going on, and they will tell us what to do, and we’ll listen.”

“Fine,” said the familiar voice coldly, and I spotted Jack Schitt standing by the window. He was studying his immaculately polished nails.

“Fine! Police will investigate each and every case, and gradually we will restore order. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll try to reach the Salisbury division again…”

“There’s no Salisbury,” Schitt informed him matter-of-factly.

Hicks produced something like a strangled cough, then placed a reluctant hand on the telephone set.

“Then I’ll try reaching London. There must be someone able to account for all this mess.”

“There’s no London,” Schitt notified him in much the same manner. “Forget it, Commander. Right now we have more urgent matters at hand. I see that Operative Next is already here; quite timely. We only need Operative Cable to join us, and we’re ready to go.”

For a moment I felt my throat attempt to produce a spasm similar to what had just escaped Hicks’ windpipe.

“We’re not going anywhere. It is our direct duty to stay and…”

“And?” Schitt prompted heartily. “I pale to think what two SO-27 officers, whose only exercise is to get up from their desks and fetch books, would do on the streets full of deranged maniacs for no apparent reason obsessed with murder. You’d be of much help, officers, undoubtedly.”

“You know what’s going on,” I said, and it wasn’t a question.

Schitt looked at his shoes, checked his tie, and then met my stare firmly.

“No, and I don’t want to, right now. Bad’s the best. With all this panic and mass disturbance outside, we have the perfect moment to carry on with our plans. No mass media to pester us with inquiries, no public concern for such trivialities as fine literature. It couldn’t be better.”

He made a lazy circle of close observation around me.

“Besides, if – and I say IF – this epidemic of whatever origin isn’t contained within a reasonable period of time, our retrieval of the Prose Portal will be vital. Just think! In times of crisis when endless demands need equally endless supplies and the whole country might just crumble, we’d deliver a source of easy and infinite production of – whatever you need! If you want to help your town, the only way you can do it effectively is do as we planned.”

Mycroft, I thought. Mycroft might want to use his invention for public benefit at a time exactly like this. After all, Hicks still had his police, and most of the SpecOps force to handle the problem. Two people more, two people less – it wouldn’t really matter.

***

2. Victor.

It was, whichever way to look at it, a Goliath operation. My two officers were to serve as a believable decoration, and I was, however painful it is to admit, ballast. Hades didn’t know me and thus couldn’t have any expectations about my humble person; Next and Cable didn’t need my assistance as the last time I held a gun was a decade ago if I remember correctly. My sole purpose of waiting with the company by the abandoned bridge was to remind my officers that getting the Chuzzlewit manuscript back t used to be a LiteraTec investigation once.

I could almost sympathise with Hicks, who stayed behind with his hands full of a whole town quickly submerging into the dark waters of unexplainable violence and anxiety. When we left he was still trying to establish the connection with London. Poor naïve man.

The Goliath refused to spare him any part of their forces to help our people on the streets. That cold raise arguments, but I could see Schitt’s point: his men were equipped to do one kind of business while the development in Swindon seemed more and more to require intervention of the military, and a quarantine was very likely to follow.

I leaned back on the car seat and rubbed my forehead with a somewhat shaky hand. The quarantine idea seemed shocking but in more ways than just the immediate one understandable to me as a citizen of Swindon. Schitt must have secured himself a way to get his men and the expected detainee to the Goliath headquarters, quarantine or no quarantine. The question was, how?

Officer Next walked to the bridge, where a wireless appeared to be stashed. I watched the operation commence when Hades contacted her to confirm the deal, but honestly, my mind was paying only half of the attention such an occasion might have commanded.

Schitt seemed too unperturbed by the happenings in Swindon. None of it seemed a problem for him. Was he sure it was only a local disorder, or was he sure it wouldn’t hinder him in the slightest?

I told Thursday to wait as the criminal had instructed her, and let myself indulge in abstract speculation again. If I were a man like Schitt, fully endowed with all the Goliath power, what means of retreat would I choose? Railroad? I looked at the disused railway line near us. Swindon had its own secret lines, true, but the Swindoners had always been curious people. If police hadn’t by now established order in the town, chances were high the railway station was already swarmed by fleeing families, and rest assured they wouldn’t be content with ‘no tickets left’ signs. They’d be searching for alternative ways, so trains, as well as automobiles, were out of question.

“They’ve got a plane!” shouted Thursday over the walkie-talkie, and I almost jumped in my seat. Then the firing began, and I instinctively ducked out of sight and covered my ears while my mind offered the only possible solution to my problem.

A plane would be too small to carry the whole Goliath squad. No, they must have prepared something different, something bigger and easier to dock: an airship.

Thursday and Bowden rushed off the spot in pursuit of the small aircraft. I could only watch them disappear over the bridge, past the two shattered cars of Schitt’s men. I couldn’t be of any help here; but I still could take some surprise measures, especially while the Goliath people were thus immobilised., and especially when in this impromptu chase I placed my bets on my officers without slightest doubts.

***

I was never a coward. The fact that by pure chance my car had stopped a way off the bridge saved it from any substantial damage; I could still drive it, even if the engine hinted it would rather die than keep going in the very near future.

“Come on, girl, you can do it,” I whispered, not sure who I was addressing my plea to – the car or Thursday in her chase.

The car lasted a few more miles and then stopped with a pained spasm and a whiff of black smoke coming from under the bonnet. So, that was it. I was proving as helpful in this operation as I had expected.

For the sake of my conscience I performed all rites known to the drivers in such circumstances: opened the bonnet, touched the pipes inside, tilted my ear to the dead engine for any sign of revival, all without a shade of success. The road was empty in both directions, and the fields around bore no trace of human presence. It was a fine quiet day, particularly pleasant in the countryside, and I hated it wholeheartedly.

But there was still the wireless. The good old police car still had its wireless working, and I switched it to the headquarters channel. To my surprise, Hicks answered the call.

“Analogy? Tell Schitt to send his men here, now!”

“I’m afraid they’re unreachable at the moment. Things didn’t go quite precisely as he’d planned, and he’ll have trouble getting his people to the town…”

“Trouble?!” Hicks’ voice was intermittent and distant. “It’s us who’s got trouble. We can’t…”

There was more static noise, interrupted only by inarticulate shouts and gunfire.

“Commander, I can’t hear you, please repeat.”

I talked to the microphone for a couple of minutes without getting anything coherent in reply, and then the channel went completely dead. A bird chirped happily somewhere high in the cloudless sky. I tried channel after channel, calling out to anyone who could still hear me, not in the hope to summon help but trying at least to warn the officers that there was something bad going on in the headquarters. Perhaps they already knew.

“Yes? Who’s that?”

I jumped up at the sudden reaction of the wireless. The voice was strangely familiar.

“Spike? This is Analogy from SO-27.”

“Glad to hear you, sir. How are you faring?”

“Stalled. Spike, where are you?”

“Err…” He paused, and I feared this time the connection would be lost again. “Hard to say. Somewhere downtown. It’s a bit messy here at the moment.”

The microphone reported a nasty sharp noise as if glass had just shattered; judging from the power of the sound, it must have been right over Spike’s head. Then there were shuffles, and a sound of a strong, juicy punch.

“Bastard…sorry, sir, that’s not to you. Seems I’m on my own again, and if I don’t take measures they’ll just corner me in this hole…”

“Spike, listen.” I leaned back on the seat trying to calm down and express my idea as clearly as was possible in the present situation. “You need to get out of there.”

“That I’d do gladly.”

“Go to the airfield…”

“No, sir, I don’t think it’ll work. I’ve been down to the railway station and it’s a real Babel. You wouldn’t push through the crowds, and it’s not only the people leaving but people arriving, also.”

I blinked, confused. I had expected people to pull anchor and try to leave the place, particularly when the news earlier today did nothing to appease the community, but I didn’t expect *incoming* refugees turning up in Swindon.

“They must be from Cricklade or Highworth?”

“No, sir, I think they’re from London.”

So soon. I put down the microphone and looked out. The yellow of the sun and the blue of the sky, it always was the most beautiful of all colour harmonies.

“Go to the airfield, Spike. Never mind the passengers; go to the sheds, the rear ones. There may be guards, but I don’t think they’ll be a problem if the bustle in the airfield lounge continues. If things progress the way they’ve been developing, some clever guys might discover there is transport to appropriate; the guards will be busy handling them.”

“What’s in the shed?”

“What?” I was distracted imagining the scenario I had just described; I didn’t like it one bit.

“Sir, what should I find in that guarded shed?”

“The Goliath airship, of course. You’ll have to commandeer it.”

Spike made an unidentifiable sound that could mean anything.

“I’ll try to reach officers Next and Cable, but you’d better try to contact them yourself when you’re ready. There must be radio equipment in there. And Spike?” A sudden thought emerged to interrupt my otherwise seemingly smooth plan.

“Sir?”

“Do you still have a car?”

“Not anymore.” My heart sank, but then he added in his usual cheerful manner: “But I have a motorbike. I just, er, commandeered it.”

***

At least an hour had passed; I didn’t need a watch to see it as the sun had clearly declined on its daily path. After the talk with Spike the wireless breathed its last in a cluster of static. There might be all kinds of reasons for that: either there was no one to answer anymore, or the military had finally arrived and were now jamming all the transmitters that weren’t theirs to stop the uncontrolled exchange of information over the airwaves. Honestly, I couldn’t tell which variant felt worse.

Every now and then I got out of the car, walked a short distance along the asphalt line, looked either way, listened for any strange sound and, finding nothing of interest, walked back to my place. I even considered attempting to walk back to Swindon, but only briefly. There isn’t much you can do with a body a good deal beyond its seventieth birthday, and I had no illusions about my abilities. There was nothing left to do but sit and wait to be picked up by somebody – anybody.

It’d have been hot on this open plate of concrete if not for the wind coming from the west. As far as I could notice, the west, or rather, south-west was the direction my officers disappeared in their pursuit of the plane. If the course of the chase stayed the same, it meant Hades had to fight a rather strong headwind, and that could give Next and Cable good chances to overtake the plane. I stood at the roadside looking westwards but of course could see nothing.

There was, however, something moving down the road. Eyesight isn’t among the things that improve with age, and I peered so hard that my eyes hurt but still couldn’t make out what it was. It looked like a black line drawn across the road, and it was approaching fast.

If I had any luck left, it could be some transport. Perhaps they could tug me back to the town, or at least give a lift. Or perhaps not, if they were refugees leaving Swindon; they’d hardly want to head back to the disaster they were fleeing. I sadly began to calculate my chances of getting back home quick from whatever neighbouring town they could agree to take me to.

The line was approaching, but not as fast as it should had it been indeed motor vehicles. Not to waste time, I decided to go towards them.

It was no cars. The line was made of people, many people running along the road in such a tight pack that they seemed to form one moving body. The front of the crowd was comprised of a group that looked over their shoulders now and then but the next rows, as far as I could see, looked straight ahead and were steadfast.

“You!”

The shout from one of the front runners took me by surprise.

“You! Run!”

I stopped, and he yelled again, this time curses. What did he expect of a man of my age, to turn and join them in their marathon? I couldn’t run even the distance that was now between me and the car.

The warning shout and curses cost the runner dearly. He lost his breath, tripped, and while he struggled to regain balance, the crowd caught up with him. The mass of people surrounded him like water, and in a moment all I could see of him was his ashen-pale face with the mouth open in screaming. The first rows of the horde slowed down around him, there was something of a ripple going through the throng, and then I saw the man’s body hit the ground.

“You fool, they’ll tear you apart!” cried a woman from the thinning line of the front runners as they rushed past me.

What could I do? Even if I made it back to the car, they’d still break their way in.

I stood still.

They moved fast, very fast, and the unnatural jerks in their limbs didn’t hinder them. As they approached, I could see the details of their faces, mindless with rage and covered in vomit and blood. They greeted me with a chorus of incoherent screams, and then the running horde hit me with full impact.

I was never a coward but I think I closed my eyes then. It was purely instinctive; it felt as if I was being overrun by a truck. This was how a rock must feel when the tide falls on it full force.

But the tide retreated. Standing still with my eyes closed, I listened to the unison of footsteps grow distant as they ran on. Incredible as it seemed, I was alive. Bruised, aching, but alive and apparently intact, save for my arm that hurt cruelly.

It was a bite. Only one bite. I couldn’t believe I had come out of the ordeal that easily.

My disbelief lasted about twenty seconds. After that I collapsed on the ground in a fit of spasms I couldn’t control, and my body was no longer mine.

***

3. 1. Thursday.

“Which way?” Bowden yelled after we flashed over the bridge, across the span of the straight road ahead of us, and arrived at a gated entry to a field.

All options considered, I’d have preferred to stop right there and then. The Goliath wouldn’t find a better moment to take the operation back in their hands, and this time I wouldn’t mind. Unfortunately for us, Schitt and his company were stuck in their shattered cars and had to be seething with jealousy for us stealing their fun and glory. To ensure that they didn’t feel lost, Bowden updated them about our progress over the wireless.

Hades’ airplane droned on but not as drastically faster than us as I had feared. If the wind didn’t shift any time soon, the plane’d have to continue labouring against it, and we’d stand a good chance of overhauling it.

“Do you hear that?” said Bowden in a shaky voice as he jumped up and down in his seat when the car skipped and skimmed over bumps on the field.

“Hear what?” I couldn’t take my eyes off the car’s route and could only glance at the surroundings out of the corner of my eye. We had just passed a farm, and there were cows and heifers all over the field to be collided with if I wasn’t attentive.

“I think it’s another plane. It’s behind us.”

I looked into the rear window with one eye. There was no need to take the risk: the sound of the other aircraft grew deafeningly loud as it overtook us in less than a minute, roared past, and soared higher to rise above Hades’ plane.

“What the…”

Physics tells us that sound travels slower than bullets. I saw rows and rows of neat little holes appear all over our car before the sound of shots hit us like a downpour of iron rain.

“They’re shooting at us?” asked Bowden incredulously, addressing his question to me, the quickly disappearing plane, and the bullets that littered the salon.

I hit the brakes, heard the engine cough out its last, and watched how the criminals’ small airplane started to come down in billows of black smoke. It struggled to stay in the air for another hundred yards or so, then its nose pointed downwards with the same inevitability the compass points to the North, and finally the plane crash-landed, ploughing a deep trench in the field as it skidded to a stop.

“Well, apparently, not only at us. If that makes you feel better.”

“It doesn’t.”

I looked at Bowden, who was pressing his palm over a fresh wound on his shoulder.

“A stray bullet. I’m all right. I think…I am.”

We both fell silent and stared at the crashed airplane in front of us. Of the angry anonymous hawk that did all the damage there was no trace.

“We should go check, shouldn’t we?” said Bowden but without much enthusiasm.

“Try the wireless first. Perhaps we can get reinforcement.”

We both knew that was improbable. Even if Schitt could find something still capable of moving, it’d take him time to get here. On the other hand, Hades and his accomplice might have died in the crash, but that was just as improbable, and frankly, definitely not the development I’d have preferred as it’d have left us in the total dark regarding my uncle.

“It’s dead,” Bowden’s words echoed my thoughts.

“What?”

“The wireless. It’s gone dead.”

“Then we have no choice.”

Both with our guns in hands, we started to approach the plane.

“There’s a farm nearby,” I whispered to Bowden when we stopped midway, much like children afraid to take the final look round a corner behind which monsters were hiding. “We could take the farmer’s car.”

Bowden nodded and gestured for me to take the look inside the plane.

There was a lot of smoke but no fire yet. The pilot was slouched lifelessly in his seat, but the passenger showed signs of life. It’d take something bigger than a simple plane crash to kill a fiend like Hades.

“Thursday, what a surprise. I expected ambulance.”

“Don’t move,” Bowden and I said in unison.

Hades disregarded the command, wiped a hand over his face and looked at the blood with curiosity.

“I say. Since when good British farmers started to shoot down planes? That’s not fair.”

Despite the thin voice of alarm that demanded I keep pointing my gun at him a part of my mind went back to the sudden attack of the mysterious aircraft. There was something familiar in its appearance, the manner it flew, the sound it made.

“It was a military plane,” I said at last. “They’ve decided to bring the army into action.”

Bowden glanced at me in apprehension.

“They are shooting at anything that moves. They will let no one get out of the area.”

“Did I miss something?” Hades intervened, looking from one of us to the other.

“Quarantine,” Bowden stated the obvious, and I nodded. The part of my mind that had just made the conclusion about the aircraft’s nature continued the reasoning. What next, a blitz saturation bombardment? Not unlikely if the situation in Swindon hadn’t improved.

Still preoccupied with this nasty possibility, I checked the pulse on the pilot’s neck.

“Dead.”

“Poor Delamere,” said Hades sadly. “He was never too good at driving anything more complicated than a scooter.”

Bowden rummaged in his pockets and produced a pair of handcuffs.

“This way, mister.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, really?” I turned away from the dead pilot to face Hades again. Often had I dreamed about our next meeting but even in the worst of nightmares it didn’t develop along such lines. “All right. All right, let’s see how far you can go with a squadron of heavies patrolling the area and God knows how many military blockades on every road and lane. That is, if those demented sickos don’t get you first. Now, how far is that going to be? Bets, anyone?”

I knew I was beginning to sound pathetic, and what was even more embarrassing, Hades didn’t listen to me in the slightest. He was staring at something behind my back.

“Next, you’d better turn around.”

“Ha! The trick’s too cheap for you, Acheron.”

“No, I mean it. Turn around, there’s something interesting. I think this farmer wants to tell you something, and it isn’t good.”

Bowden and me turned 180 degrees in perfect synchronization and were just in time to re-aim our guns when the running man was already mere feet from the plane. His face looked an exact mirror of the ones I saw this morning, and he showed no intention to stop. We both fired our guns without hesitation.

There was a long moment of silence.

“You just killed a civilian, Next,” Hades observed coldly. “Didn’t you give a sort of Hippocratic Oath when you entered the SpecOps, you know, the stuff about not to harm and keep from injustice?”

“Shut up,” I replied, having run out of eloquence and patience. I could foresee that I’d have to repeat this phrase many times in the future.

Instead, he got out of the plane, pushed his way past us, and squatted by the prostrate farmer.

“He looks wrong.”

“Oh yeah. He’s sort of dead.” My mind, having decided to try its abilities at multi-tasking, shoved one more problem into my view: with Bowden wounded and bleeding and me equipped with only the regular gun, what was our likelihood of detaining Hades if he didn’t want to be detained?

“No, it’s not only about that. He looks…ill?”

“Haven’t you been listening to the news?”

“Allow me to point out one peculiar detail to you, officer Next: for a man from the ‘Wanted’ list who spends most of his days in a hide-out, it can be sometimes difficult to keep up with the news. Sometimes the freshest news simply isn’t available.”

“It’s infection.” Bowden spoke up, somewhat dreamily, and I turned to see him leaning against the plane’s peppered side. His face was unhealthily pale, and the sleeve of his jacket was getting drenched in blood. “It’s not conclusive if it’s airborne or passed through physical contact only; I think it’s the latter, or else we’d all have been infected by now as it takes the symptoms only seconds to develop. The virus doesn’t kill you but robs you of your personality so that the only thought that remains in your mind is brute force and killing everyone who’s not like you. You don’t care about yourself, the people you know, about food or rest. You don’t care if you’re being shot at, stabbed with knives, or run over by cars. There’s no immunity, and there’s no cure.”

“We need to have your wound taken care of,” I whispered leaning closer to him, but Bowden seemed to stare past me into nightmarish landscapes of his own.

“There might be more of them,” he said at last, “on the farm. More of the infected. That man had turned mad violent not without a cause.”

I observed the farm but there seemed nothing suspicious.

“We can handle this. We’ll go there, stem your bleeding, find a car and drive back to Swindon. It’s going to be all right, I promise.”

“Don’t give promises it’s not in your power to keep, Thursday.” Bowden nodded towards Hades, who was now studying the cow-filled fields and the apparently quiet countryside. “What about him?”

I wished I could offer my partner a definite answer but one thing I knew for certain: the thought about somebody immune to most weapons getting infected by this disease made me shudder to the very marrow. Not to mention Mycroft and the problem of his location – I had doubts the Goliath would have been willing to consider his safe release as top priority under the given circumstances.

Hades seemed to feel our stares.

“What exactly did you say about quarantine?”

“Lots of soldiers. Military blockades everywhere. Gatling guns, artillery pieces, fire and, eventually, bombs if the attempts to contain the infection fail. They will stop at nothing.”

“And you imply that you, as always, are resourceful enough to know a way out?”

“I positively intend to get my friends out of this,” I stated with determination that I hoped would keep Bowden going.

Hades looked at the sky where, miles off but still in negligible distance for a military aircraft, patrolling airships were already hovering.

“Well, in that case, how much do you charge for a passenger ticket?”

I suppressed an unbecoming sigh of relief and waved at him with the handcuffs.

“Proper dress code is my first requirement.”

***
The cows were mooing at us when we trotted by much in the same manner they must have mooed pack in the Arcadian times. One of my arms was full of Bowden leaning against my shoulder heavily as he struggled not to fall behind, the other still pointed the gun at Hades, who looked not a bit less dangerous with his hands fettered behind his back. The way from the plane to the farm seemed an eternity long.

When we finally reached the farm’s fence I was out of breath and beginning to think that my promise of improvised evacuation wasn’t such a believable hypothesis after all.

“There are indeed more,” noted Bowden when he glanced at the farm yard through the planks.

There were a dozen of the infected maundering about the yard closer to the house; but what was more important, there was a Land Rover parked at the gate. The gate, following the natural course of fickle fortune, was too near the house and too near to the pack of bloodthirsty hunters.

“They don’t seem to mind us,” I suggested as I watched the infected wander about aimlessly.

“We could take them out if you unchain me and give me your partner’s gun.”

“In your dreams, bastard.” I wished I had more solid ground to base my refusal on than just Hades’ normal reputation, but his proposal did seem to make painful sense: Bowden didn’t look like he was going to be of much help.

There was nothing left to do but wait. I leaned against the fence and breathed in the smells the wind carried – the smells of dry grass, earth, and the quite specific aroma of cow manure that was wafting from the fields.

“They’re moving towards us,” said Bowden, and my moment of peace was gone.

“What did you do?” I shoved the barrel of my gun into Hades’ side.

“Nothing! I didn’t signal to them, if you’re suspecting that.”

The infected were picking up speed as some yet unknown sense prompted them our exact position.

“They can smell us. They can smell the blood,” Bowden whispered in disbelief. “We’re now on the leeward side, and the wind carries the smell towards them.”

I cursed under my breath and prepared to take aim but my hand wavered when the faces of the infected became clearly visible.

“Damn!”

One of them was Victor Analogy, my boss in Swindon LiteraTec division.

***

3.2. Thursday.

I chose to interpret the fact that the farmer happened to own a Land Rover as the first in a streak of lucky occurrences ahead of us. My old Speedster would have been ruined if it had traveled the roundabout paths we took to Swindon, more often over cross-country than along highways and roads.

“You shouldn’t be blaming yourself,” Bowden repeated softly. “They’re deaf to reason. They’re as good as dead.”

I stared straight ahead at the patch of ground the Rover’s headlights were illuminating in the descending twilight.

“It was Victor. Our Victor.”

“You liberated him from this plague.”

“You realize that’s a thin excuse, don’t you?”

“It’s so easy to talk like this when it wasn’t you who pulled the trigger,” Hades added to the general well-being from the Rover’s back seat. “Thursday, dear girl, I offered you to give me a gun. I’d have spared you the remorse.”

“Shut up,” I parried him off in the same uninspired manner I had been doing in all the time we had been on the road home. He took the unobtrusive hint and decided to sulk in silence for a while.

It was a race against time. When we were leaving the farm I saw a convoy of reinforced army vehicles moving along a highway. They had a long distance to go yet and they didn’t seem to be in much hurry, but it was easy to calculate that their secure, measured movement would bring them to Swindon soon enough. I pressed the Rover’s accelerator all the way into the floor and pretended to ignore all obstacles.

“Well, we’ve managed to get in,” Bowden commented when we entered the town. “Now the question is how do we get out?”

“I have some ideas.”

“For example?”

I had two variants. One involved changing into a police car, one of which, I was sure, was still to be found nearby the SpecOps headquarters, and then mingling with the ones still on duty in hope the army would have enough of respect for the local champions of law. If that didn’t work out there was still the possibility of being anonymously filtered into one of refugee camps that were sure to pop up all around the area like mushrooms and then seek our way out. While the former option was bad the latter was even worse.

In the nearing night the streets of Swindon seemed deserted. I slowed down to maneuver the car around many obstacles emerging across the road: broken cars, abandoned belongings, and bodies. Bodies everywhere. The streetlights were out, and most of the houses were dark with only an occasional lit window staring out into the blankness of the night like a cyclopean eye. Sometimes I thought I could see the curtains move and a gun traced our car’s path until we drove out of sight.

“The place’s changed since I last was there,” Hades murmured from the back, and for once I could not but agree.

“All right: first we check the headquarters, take whatever there’s to take. Then I…” I cast a glance at Cable from askance. “The families. Is there anyone you’d like to pick up on our way, Bowden?”

He shrugged and winced at the pain in his poorly bandaged shoulder. “Nobody comes to mind besides the one already in this car.”

In that case, he was the lucky one. My list was just long enough to keep my mind preoccupied with wild guesses all the way. Mother; Joffy. Landen. I shook my head trying to get rid of all kinds of bad images.

The area around the headquarters building could be part of the scenery in a horror movie. Cones of flood-lights brought forth spots of still life where barbed wire mixed with abandoned vehicles, shattered glass sparkled, and scraps of paper littered the pavement, the warnings and instructions written on them no longer readable. Whatever blockades the officers had managed to build since I was here in the morning had been overrun; but the concrete structure of the headquarters seemed quiet.

“You two stay in the car and keep the windows closed. The smell of your blood will have them swooping down on us like starved piranhas.”

I opened the door, got out and surveyed the area again. Seeing that all seemed quiet, I ran inside keeping my gun ready in front of me and trying not to look at the bodies rotting on the ground.

There were many inside, both of the SpecOps and police and of the infected. Corpses, whole and ripped to parts, were jumbled into an indiscriminate layer of flesh that covered the floor wherever my eye could see. Some of them were the people I knew; most were unfamiliar. They looked like toys broken in anger by a frustrated child.

I struggled through the debris to the stairs and climbed to the floor where SO-27’s room was. It was the same thing everywhere; I decided not to go into Commander Hicks’ office.

Suddenly there was a noise. I turned to the open door to the LiteraTec division and peered into dim interior. The room was dark save for one lamp that had been kicked to the floor but was still shedding its soft orange light. There seemed to be no one about.

“Hello?”

Something stirred under one of the tables and made a noise that could be no human utterance. A feather drifted through the air slowly and rested on the open volume of “Much Ado about Nothing” still lying on Victor’s desk.

“Pickwick?”

I forgot. I totally forgot about him after I had carried him into our office in the morning, assuming he wouldn’t appreciate the thrills of the operation ahead. Now my dodo scrambled out of his shelter in a panicked hurry and ran to me, probably fearing I’d leave him behind again.

I took him in my arms and hugged him for a moment of warmth, running my hand over his tousled feathers while he made little happy noises of greeting. While this reunion was joyful, there was little else to discover on this floor, and I went down into the entrance hall.

The radio on the front desk came to life with a thunderous click that made me take a giant leap across the hall in search of cover. In my hurry to secure a good shooting position I stumbled upon a severed head, tripped, and lost my balance. Pickwick, whose nervous system had already undergone tremendous trauma, prepared to faint.

“Thursday? This is Stoker. If you are reading me, please reply.”

The radio repeated the same message and continued to throw up static noise when the caller switched over to another channel. I rushed to the desk and fumbled with the settings, desperate to bring the voice of the familiar ghost back.

“Spike?”

His signal was coming loud and clear, contrary to the irregular transmission we had in my Speedster before it died completely; he had to be using very powerful equipment to achieve this transparency.

“At last!” In the dead silence of the hall his sigh of relief sounded like a small squall. “I’ve been rattling through all channels in the hope to catch you; where have you been?”

“Long story, Spike.”

“Never mind. Now listen: you need to pick up something from your hotel room, understand? Your *hotel* room.”

“I don’t think so. Actually, there isn’t much space to stuff my belongings into, even if I wanted something. We’ve got…”

“Thursday, *listen*,” Spike’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Your hotel. Just go there, will you? And keep your eyes open once you reach the place. There might be something interesting nearby.”

I stared at Pickwick in complete puzzlement but he was just as clueless regarding Spike’s sudden speaking in charades. I could hear him mutter something clearly unflattering about my mental abilities on the other end of the line.

“All right. Let’s try it another way: you’ll get some fresh air there, Thursday. There’s wonderful *air* around the Finis Hotel.”

I blinked, and then it dawned on me. I had no idea how Spike had managed to reach the airfield and what he had found there but it had to be something practical and important enough for him to abuse the wireless for hours non-stop until he got his cryptic message through to me.

“I got it, Stoker. We’ll be coming as soon as we can.”

“Good, but you’d better hurry: I don’t have an eternity to wait.”

I grabbed Pickwick and rushed outside, stopping at the porch to estimate time. Contrary to the Rover, the heavy reinforced convoys wouldn’t be able to take cross-country shortcuts; neither would they ram their way through the traffic jams that were sure to have formed around Swindon’s neighbour towns. With proper planning and caution I knew that I’d manage a short detour.

“No way I’m taking a ride with your chicken sitting on me!” Hades tried to protest when I shoved my disoriented dodo on the back seat next to him. Having had his share of abandonment, my pet immediately climbed into his lap in search of human contact. “That’s outrageous. What if it gets sick?”

“Talk to him. He likes good conversation.”

***

My mother’s semi-detached house was just another black silhouette in the line of similarly lifeless lodgings. I left the car keys to Bowden and pushed open the front gate that put up the same resistance I had to fight on my first visit. Mycroft’s device was still connected to it, performing its cunning job even when the inventor himself was gone. The thought made me feel despondent, and seeing my old home perhaps for the last time in a long while – if not ever – didn’t help.

The usual flock of dodos that used to infest the garden and assault every newcomer was absent. The front door was locked, and there was not a glimmer of light behind the curtains. I knocked, trying not to make it too loud, and then rummaged in my pockets for the key.

She might have left the town with the neighbours. She might have joined any group of people heading to the hospital, or a police station, or to any other possible refugee center that must have been set up in the town’s numerous public buildings. She could be anywhere but she definitely wasn’t at home.

“Mum?”

The dodos were there. Scattered about the house, they nested in the dark corners and refused to come out when I called to them, ruffling their feathers and looking at me with accusation. I had no time to negotiate with them, and there was nothing consolatory I could tell them: they had to stay.

I stood in the doorstep of the lounge, discerning the familiar disposition of the furniture and breathing the smell of home that was now empty. That was it. As a child I had seen enough of trash zombie movies to know how they all ended. The characters run, and run some more, and finally they’re about to hop into a car, or a helicopter, or – if luck would still be on our side – an airship, and… Credits. Some energetic music, the usual tag about how none of the animals were harmed during the shooting, and then the lights are on, the popcorn’s eaten, and you never know what happens afterwards. You never find out if they made it, where they’re living now, or whether the end of the world had come to its natural conclusion.

I wasn’t ready for our case to enter the final pre-credits stage yet.

“Doofus?” said a quiet voice from behind the sofa.

“Joffy!” I dashed across the room, collided with the coffee-table, broke some cups on the way, trod over the shards and finally hugged my brother.

“I thought you were in Wanborough?”

It was hard to see his face in the dusk but his expression wasn’t a positive one.

“I went here when the military had begun arranging evacuation. I’d have come earlier but people had assumed the church’d shelter them. They kept on streaming in until I thought the doors wouldn’t close. As if that’d be any protection.” He seemed to shake his head bitterly but I wasn’t sure I saw his gesture correctly. “Anyway. Most of them must now be safe among blankets, aspirin and hot tea somewhere miles away from here.” He paused. “Have you found mum?”

“No; I thought she’d be home on a day like this.”

“She wasn’t when I came. Must’ve gone shopping, or to her Women Federation meeting, or anywhere. I tried looking for her but…”

His voice trailed off. I knew what he wanted to say but couldn’t bring himself to; I had seen enough already, and Joffy didn’t even have a gun.

We stood still for several moments, and I used the time to struggle with a big and very awkward lump that seemed to be blocking my throat.

“All right, let’s go. Bowden’s waiting in the car outside. We have a plan how to get out of here.”

“I won’t go.” My brother’s tone was resolute.

“Joffy!”

“I’ll stay and wait here. Things will get sorted out eventually, and mum may still turn up safe and sound. I won’t go.”

I let out a long sigh.

“No, she won’t. Either she’s been taken to a refugee camp together with others or… There’s no ‘or’,” I concluded firmly and grabbed him by the shoulder. “I’m not leaving you here.”

Outside, Bowden smiled at Joffy and frowned at me, pointing at his wrist-watch. I had definitely taken my time saying goodbye to our home.

“Bowden, Irrev. Joffy,” I made brief introductions while conscience and fear gnawed at my insides.

“Who’s that?” Joffy nodded towards Hades apathetically, who was sitting very still so as not to disturb Pickwick.

“A tourist.”

“So, Thursday, are we done already collecting the core stock for the Next Ark?” Acheron put in, wary of the dodo’s long beak, and Bowden and me produced our guns to point in his direction with already too well-practiced ease. Joffy looked at each of us in turn.

“You’ve got a funny way of treating tourists. No wonder Swindon’s becoming unpopular. Whatever. Move over, mister.” Much to my relief, he opened the back door and took his place inside the car like a good boy.

Bowden relaxed only when we drove off at full speed. I watched him from askance estimating if he’d manage driving single-handedly; I doubted Joffy would handle the hurdle-race across the littered streets, even if part of his wry humour seemed to be returning. But it was to be either this way or the other because I had to stop at the next crossroad and depart from the company.

I signaled for Bowden to get outside and handed him the keys. His look was full of disapproval, doubt and regret.

“Give me half an hour.”

“You won’t manage.”

“I will. It’s not a long way to Landen’s house from here, and I’d be safer moving on foot through the back yards than racing along the streets. I can be very secretive when I need to, Bowden, and I can be very fast. I can do it.”

He shook his head in the negative and prepared to go on with his argumentation. I took his healthy hand and squeezed it gently.

“Half an hour. Once I get Landen, we’ll find another car and drive to the airfield. If we’re not back on time, you know what to do.”

***

Running along a street on a night like that felt cold, lonely, and very much exposed. I shunned open spaces, tried to keep a wall nearby to back against in case of emergency, and felt pretty much paranoid in general. The sprint to Landen’s place, however, turned out to be uneventful save for the natural exhaustion that was starting to overwhelm me. I should have been doing more exercise.

The windows of Landen’s house glowed warm yellow in the darkness. With any other residence I’d have assumed the inhabitants were trying to keep the light in; from what I remembered of Landen’s habit, he always liked this kind of dimmed illumination that made the light seem to emanate right from the floor like some kind of luminescent mist. It used to help him concentrate and be creative; or so he claimed.

I stopped a few yards away from the house, oblivious of the ticking seconds. The relationship between Landen and me had long gone out of the pink, and I had done nothing to remedy that during my current stay in Swindon. He had attempted some tentative maneuvers when we first met here after a long time of separate peace, but I seemed to greet him with the same fortified denial I had been maintaining since the return from the Crimea. It wasn’t his fault that he was made to return to the life he had built for himself in my absence.

Standing there in the deep shade between the buildings, I realised with all the painful power of actuality that he wouldn’t go with me. He, too, had his principles; that’s why I loved him.

The golden glow of the windows darkened momentarily as a silhouette moved behind it; then, another one followed, occluding the light completely. The two shadows became entangled in one irregular blot of black, and its contours shifted as the bodies comprising it moved. I felt stupid assuming Landen would be alone, and stupider still believing his fiancée would be elsewhere. That Daisy Mutlar girl had an inborn gut instinct for good men, and she had followed her nose to her pot of gold.

The curtains rumpled and folded as one of the bodies pressed against them, and I flinched. Was there a point for me to stay there, watching what could easily be the happy couple’s therapy against the dire situation? I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes trying not to imagine how Landen looked with his clothes off.

When I finally dared to look at the world again, the curtains were torn off and the window glared at me as it framed a scene not quite like what I had anticipated. The silhouettes had distanced from one another, and now one was sinking lower as it hunkered down while the other was suddenly straight and taut like a drawn bowstring, then its arms rose high up and cut through the air in a powerful blow. I drew out my automatic and rushed to the door.

It wasn’t locked. Inside, in the hall, highlighted by the same cozy yellow glow, was Landen with a golf club in his hand. Sprawled on the floor at his feet was Daisy, pretty, once well-dressed, a bit overweight and quite dead as of now. My dashed gait slowed down to a snail’s.

“Her father. He said I should take up golf.” Landen looked at me and then at the golf club, still clutched in his hand. “Never liked the game.”

Coming back to the zombie movie comparison, if I were to write the script I’d have pictured the following scene with me holding Landen in my arms, or both of us on the floor sitting in that weary, ‘I don’t care if hell breaks loose now’ position the directors love to put their actors into when they need to show the characters have nowhere to run. I’d be cuddling him, and his head would be in my lap. There’d finally be no running, and no fear, and we’d just sit through the end of the world together.

But it wasn’t destined to be so.

It was destined that Landen knelt by his fiancée and was tracing the line of her cheek with his fingers while I pranced at the door, wary of the time running short.

“Leave? Where to, Thursday?”

I should have been glad I had practiced my arguments with Joffy; I should also have known none of that would work on Landen.

“She came running home, and I opened the door for her, and she was already… I saw her in the street near the house when one of them bit her. Then, when she *changed*, I locked her in the bedroom and kept talking to her, trying to bring her mind back to me…she quieted down some time in the evening, and I decided to let her out… to see if she was with me again…” He looked up at me from his kneeling pose. “What is it, Thurs, is it some kind of a curse put on me so that it never works out with none of my women?”

“I don’t know.” Perhaps we all had been cursed for the wrongs we had done. I, for one, could admit Hades wasn’t the only one with blood on his hands in our survivor group.

“Thank you for your kind offer, but I don’t think I can accept it.”

“All right.” I tried to fight back the burden of deadly fatigue that was weighing down on me all of a sudden. “Then I have to run. I’d have stayed if it wasn’t for my uncle. You remember Mycroft, don’t you?”

Landen’s stare focussed on me.

“You mean you’ll be running through the town?”

“Apparently. The others are waiting for me on the airfield.”

“Alone?”

“I hope so. I wouldn’t like to have the company this town now has to offer.”

He studied with stern resolve the club that still lay by his side.

“Don’t hit me where it hurts. Do you hear me? After this one last time – never.”

It was later, when we found a car that seemed to have retained most of its vital parts to be fit for driving; later, when I grasped at the wheel and refused to look anywhere but at the road ahead; and later still, when Landen gently took the gun out of my hand and started to take down a stray pack of the infected one after one – it was much later when I finally realized my eyesight wasn’t as clear as before. I blinked, and blinked, but the veil of moisture refused to go away, and I could feel the same moisture on my cheeks.

“You’ve had enough of this,” replied Landen flatly when I asked for my automatic. “Just drive us out of here. You’ve always been good at rescue raids, haven’t you?”

***

My memory decided to keep it brief after that: a chain reaction of flashes, in one of which there was Spike, dreadlocks flying around him and all his jewellery rattling as he flounced about the shed, frazzled by his long waiting. Another showed him and Joffy tying the airship’s mooring lines to the car to tug the gasbag outside. And yet another flash, the clearest of all, depicted a sinister line of army zeppelins securing the Swindon area into a circle of patrolling surveillance.

“How do we bypass that?” As far as I remembered it was Joffy who dared ask the awkward question, to which Bowden answered that even the army wouldn’t stop a Goliath airship.

It turned out that he was right. It also turned out that if you were on a Goliath airship you didn’t need to answer inquiries or notify anyone about your course and intentions; you just went where you pleased, and nobody opened fire. I thought about Victor and his advice, without which we’d probably never have made it that far, and my heart felt frozen to the core.

But after that my mind went vacant. I crawled into the nearest shelter with a horizontal surface, stretched on it, and told myself that with four men on board whom I could trust, I could allow myself a jiffy of sleep.

The last thought I remembered passing through my numb mind was the image of Jack Schitt running around a field and waving his fist at the sky, across which his former ship glided. There were also images of flesh rotting and bovine maniacs prowling, but I forbade myself to think about that.

***

4. Bowden.

“Does this thing come with a manual?” Spike poked at some of the most prominent knobs on the control panel.

“Please don’t do that, Stoker.”

“Ah, come on! How else are we going to figure out what does what?”

“Not *this* way. What if we crash down?”

“What if we don’t?”

Spike Stoker was getting tiresome when consumed in large quantities. I adjusted the bandage on my shoulder that kept sliding down, and for the hundredth time in the last hour only thought about waking Thursday up.

“We’re two seasoned men from the SpecOps, we certainly can handle this. All that it requires is a bit of close study and careful experimentation.”

“Really? I’m from the Suckers and Biters and you’re from LiteraTec, now how much do we know about airships? No coherent reply, eh?” Spike gave me a head-to-toe triumphant look over. “Don’t stop me from being random then.”

He pushed his dark glasses to his forehead and stooped over the airship’s controls to resume his clever gazing and poking. I let him; there was no use to pretend I understood more in the mechanics of this craft.

“How you guys been faring?” asked Thursday walking into the navigation room. She still had those uncomely bluish bags under her eyes, and her features seemed painfully attenuated; she could obviously use a full night’s sleep instead of a short doze in an uncomfortable bunk.

“Well, we’ve got this ship to rise; surely we can keep it going, can’t we, Bowden?” Spike winked at me in an unnaturally cheerful manner. “The question is, where to, captain?”

“That is indeed the question.” Thursday sighed, disheartened. “Bowden? I think it’s time we talk to the bastard.”

I had feared this moment; had pictured it last night during the rare times when I could allow my mind to wander off to subjects lying beyond the mere need to survive; and when I did, I feared myself for what I could do. Crometty’s death still lay heavily on my memory, and while working with agent Next as my new partner had been most rewarding, I still couldn’t forgive myself for not being there with Jim when he tried to stop Hades’ gang alone. Would I need to be infected by a virus to cross the thin line that separates an officer and a human from a violent beast bent on revenge?

“You do the talking,” I said and immediately sensed how strained my suggestion sounded. Thursday eyed me in estimation.

“I feel the same urge.” She placed her hand over my shoulder in the way that always made me fidget, contrary to the reassuring impulse she meant this gesture to convey. “But we need him alive if we want to find out the location of the Prose Portal.”

“Of course,” I replied stiffly. That was what kept us different from the infected: not being single-minded. I only hoped I’d feel more control over myself when I had my automatic pointed at the brute again.

We had locked Hades in the special room Schitt had prepared for this remarkable occasion. It was actually the first time I thanked the Goliath: their foresight had spared us a lot of trouble. Just looking at this plain cube of bullet-proof steel walls filled my heart with bloodthirsty joy; so did seeing the monster chained thoroughly. With his hands and feet shackled, the fetters securely anchored to the floor, and with my gun aimed at him, that’s how I’d love Acheron Hades to spend the rest of his life.

“Good morning, Acheron.” I admired officer Next for this unfaltering self-possession she seemed to maintain no matter what circumstances. Despite all the stress her voice sounded as if she was engaging in social talk and not interrogating the third Most Wanted of the world.

“Is it morning already?” Hades looked up at her nonchalantly. Half of his face was still covered in blood that had by now congealed into a rusty mask. To extenuate our seemingly cruel handling of prisoners, I could say that none of us cared about hygiene at that moment either. “Missed the beauty of the sunrise, didn’t I?”

“I’ll keep it simple and straight to the point: where are you keeping my uncle?”

I had suspected it wouldn’t work out; and so it did not. The bastard only sneered at us.

“I’m not saying anything while I’m locked in this store-room. Is it how you treat your passengers, Thursday?”

“You haven’t even begun to pay your fare yet. Do you realize that we can drop you anywhere amidst the epidemic without any means to protect yourself?”

“Considering my options I’d rather take the chance, but something tells me you will do nothing of the kind, which is rather a pity. I bet you’d all cheer watching me run from the sick beasts. Just think what great fun we’d all have.”

“Can I shoot him, please?” I intervened to diversify the verbal exchange.

“Of course you can, agent Cable,” Thursday mirrored my wicked smile. “But all in due time. First we’ll try to remain civil. Where’s my uncle, Hades?”

“In the safest of all places,” the pest winked at her flirtatiously, and I had difficulty restraining myself from pulling the trigger. “Well, not quite the safest, I must correct myself: his wife – Polly, right? – is in the most secure of all shelters trapped inside one of the Romanticism masterpieces. That Wordsworth man is a deadly bore but not as deadly as the psychos outside. I’m almost sure she can survive the daffodils. As to her genius husband – well, all I can say is that you should wish to be as well-guarded as he is now. I’d even venture to say that if there are borders to stand between the healthy and the sick today, he’s definitely behind one.” He turned to look at me, and I had to force myself not to cower under the stare of his piercing blue eyes. “Now, angry man, am I not a good boy?”

Thursday and I exchanged frustrated glances. We’d be getting nowhere this way, and letting the airship drift without a set course wasn’t only wasting precious time – it was waiting for the danger of the Goliath and the army to come down on us out of the blue.

“Hades, I’ll repeat my question for the last time: where’s Mycroft?”

“Who’s Mycroft?”

That was the end of it. The monster knew we had nothing to corner him with; we couldn’t coerce him into answering our questions with too much force that could harm his mental abilities. It was a stalemate.

Having locked the cell, Thursday leaned against the wall and went silent for several long moments.

“Let’s just forget about him for the time being, will we?”

“I wish this time could be a long one. We could try starving him to near-death but that’d be too slow. No water-no sleep-round the clock interrogation could prove more effective.”

She looked at me with surprise as if she had just encountered a stranger.

“You can be ruthless, Bowden.”

“I can, indeed.”

“We’ll keep that in mind as an emergency variant. Oh my,” she muttered and tensed, striving to pull herself together. “I need to see Landen.”

“Of course.”

Most of my recent replies had been rather stiff. Love is like oxygen, Victor Analogy once told me; officer Next desperately needed to breathe some, and I had no right to block her air.

***

“Ask me. I’m an expert in those things, you know.”

“No, I will not, exactly because I can foresee what you’ll suggest. And besides, you left your iron stakes and mallets behind.”

“Well, I still have some trinkets in my backpack. Or we could ask our chaplain to perform exorcism – for an unprepared novice it looks not unlike torture, and both stem down to the Inquisition…”

“Spike!”

“You’re going to have problems, Bowden. How are you going to feed him, for example? Unless you’ve been considering starvation as a method of influence,” here I preferred to look anywhere but at Stoker, “you’ll have to develop a technique. I recommend pole feeding – I’ve tried that with some of my werepups, and you know they can be nasty. If you’re not careful they’ll just nip off your hand, snicker-snack, and bingo – you’re an amputee!”

“Spike!!”

Stoker took his legs off the control panel, sat up in the chair and adjusted his dark glasses for more comfort of his nose.

“Iron poles, colleague Cable. That’s the safest answer.”

“Why don’t you try it yourself then?”

“Why don’t we try to simply release him?”

We both turned to find Thursday leaning against the frame of the navigation room’s door. She looked at us with innocent curiosity and faked surprise.

“Yes, that simple. We’re all in the same boat after all.”

“Right. Then we just wait till he takes control over the ship. Who’ll be marking the time?” On any other day I’d have made sure my communication with my partner and friend was free of snide undertones but that day wasn’t any other day.

“He won’t be able to do that. How many people does it take to man this ship? Add at least two extra to operate the guns on either side if the ship is attacked. I vote we take the risk.”

“It’s all right, Bowden.” Spike’s bright countenance didn’t dim even for a second. “Just hide your fear well. Werewolves and other beasts of blight can smell your fear; it agitates them.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about in this case,” I shook my head. I still didn’t like the idea in the slightest.

“Sure I do! I’ve been around supreme powers of darkness more than I’ve been with my neighbours. They’re all the same on the inside: more dark than supreme.” Spike shrugged the matter off as routine, placed his huge hand on the ship’s steering wheel and pretended to know which way to turn it. “What about the course, Captain? Or any means to find out where we are now, for starters?”

“I’m working on that,” Thursday’s brow furrowed. “Landen will come down to have a look at the bearings – he used to be a lieutenant in the Crimea, they have studied reconnaissance,” she added as if we needed proof of his merits.

“And a guiding star to steer her by!” Spike tugged at the wheel too fiercely, and we all felt dizzy when the ship began an obedient put pointless evolution. “What a wonderful creature, I bet it can perform Riverdance on clouds.”

I looked back at Thursday and took a reluctant step forward.

“All right, give me the keys.”

“Are you sure that…”

“Absolutely. I promise to be no more cruel than your typical Parkhurst Dispersals warden.” What I was indeed sure that at the given moment I’d rather prefer Hades’ loathsome company to Landen’s.

***

Hades watched me with peaceful interest as I struggled with the fetters. The Goliath engineers had definitely outdone themselves in the ship’s design, all its details included.

“I should have asked if you have double-checked your decision but that wouldn’t be to my benefit.” Once free, he stretched with feline pleasure and looked at me expectantly. “So? Are you a good cop or a bad cop now?”

I pursed my lips, determined to stay silent despite all provocations. I knew of his uncanny abilities to control the ones weak-willed. Well, if the fiend was going to delve in my subconsciousness, he wouldn’t find too wide a variety of concerns, and the challenge was exactly the thing I needed for distraction.

“That’s strange,” Hades continued to muse aloud, not in the least perturbed by my lack of response. “The last time you came here you made no attempt to conceal your dissatisfaction with being in such a company. What’s changed, agent Cable?”

“Do you want anything?” I decided to keep it businesslike. “Living essentials? Nature calls?”

“Well, to begin with, I missed my lunch. But you’re right about nature calls; prioritising’s the key.”

I walked him to the living quarters and the facilities, and discovered with a sort of dour contentment that the place was a long way off the cockpit, thus rendering all chances of undesired meetings improbable.

“You’re not following me inside? No? You sure?”

“Just do your business already.” I checked my gun, surveyed the restroom to eliminate surprises, and started to pace along the corridor.

It was strange to be in a quiet place after a day of splatter fest of violence. Naturally, the quietness wasn’t complete: there was the low hum of the engines, and the various noises the ship’s metal constructions made, but on the whole the ship’s interior had an atmosphere of calm, hushed seclusion that resembled a dead whale’s bowels. It was very unusual and somewhat difficult to find my station in this masterpiece of technical genius without feeling trapped and claustrophobic. It was like being put in a coffin; I wondered how drastically life can reverse things: the all but dead were roaming the open outside while the living had to confine themselves into a floating casket in order to survive.

“Scrap the lunch,” Hades announced reappearing in the corridor. I was glad to see that he had got rid of the bloody marks on his face so that nothing should remind of yesterday’s weirdness. “Agent Cable, can you say, with all honesty and frankness, that your refined intellect, in trying to find a remedy for the trauma we all have experienced, hasn’t considered the simplest way into the bliss of oblivion practiced by mankind since the dawn of its creation?”

“That being?” I blinked, having lost track of his tirade midway.

“Why, getting a drink, of course.”

I weighed the proposal carefully and found nothing inherently harmful. In fact, it oddly appealed to the awkward and hard to explain tumult that had been ruffling my inner peace lately.

“Besides you, there’s only one detail I don’t like in this plan: make it plural.”

***

It appeared Jack Schitt wasn’t only morally despicable but also blatantly unpatriotic: instead of good old whiskey he seemed to favour tequila. He had a stash of the stuff in his compartment, which also showed drastic difference from the otherwise Spartan decorations of the ship. I found the cheap luxury of the room repulsive and suggested the now empty mess area instead.

Having found two glasses, I poured the first round, watched Hades throw it back in one go, and followed his example.

“Repeat?”

“Positive.”

I knew it would seem a bad idea once the booze had caught up with me, but we went through two more repeats in less than five minutes. It was only after the third glass that Hades shifted his attention from the bottle to me.

“So, what’s your story, Bowden? I assumed it’s in the nature of special agents to travel in pairs. Why are you suddenly being solitary when there’s a zombie threat outside?”

“Why don’t you tell us where you’re hiding Mycroft Next?” I parried off with a vengeance. “And they aren’t zombies, technically speaking.”

“Who cares? Nah, you shouldn’t ask me tricky questions when I’m entering a state of altered consciousness. It’s illegal, and besides, I asked first.”

I frowned and focussed on a scratch on the plastic tabletop, determined not to start gossiping. To mask my embarrassment I found nothing better than to look at the bottom of my glass, which quickly became empty again.

“It’s Landen,” I said at last with an effort as my tongue decided it could slur the consonants. “Landen Parke-Laine. He’s a veteran of the Crimean war, a promising novelist, and Miss Next’s long-term romantic interest. He has a leg missing.”

“Dang,” said Hades, and I couldn’t agree more. “I knew there’s sex involved.”

“There isn’t.”

“But you wish there was?”

“If you’re done drinking, can I have this bottle to myself?”

It was fortunate that Jack Schitt had been provident enough to have a back-up for everything on this ship, tequila included. I put the second bottle so that there was perfect symmetry with the glasses.

“I might regret that as you’d probably kill me the moment I say it, but Miss Next and me were almost lovers when she was my student back in ’69,” Hades confessed suddenly.

“Almost?” I shook my head. “You stood no chance. She dumps anyone who isn’t *him*.”

“What a cruel woman,” he remarked, and I noticed with satisfaction that we were now concurring in slurred consonants.

“How dare you speak like that about officer Next!” I considered emphasizing my indignation with a physical gesture and realized I couldn’t lift my arm. “I shouldn’t be talking to you anyway, you abominable fiend. After what you did to Jim…You remember Crometty?”

“Not intimately,” Hades made an honest effort to concentrate. “Should I?”

“Of course you should. You killed him.”

“No, I didn’t. Or I’d have remembered. Perhaps it was Felix number…” he struggled for precision and failed. “I forget. It had to be one of my Felixes anyway. Shall we come back to the Thursday subject?”

“We shall not.”

“Your prospects are bleak, Bowden. Nothing beats apocalyptic romance. Funny how it turns out you have nobody better for company but me. Or me – you. On the other hand, there have been many funny things about this world in the last twenty four hours.”

“You are a repugnant man, Hades,” I stated, articulating the diagnosis carefully.

And after that it all was just one big blur.

***

5. Thursday.

Landen walked around the navigation room slowly, now and then touching the brass frames of the installations. I tried to make my gaze on him feel not too obvious.

“I never thought I’d need those skills again.” He turned back to me, and there was a vague smile on his lips. “There’s no place for gunfire and killing in literature, and when its fictional counterpart does happen, it’s only with my permission and within my control.”

“That’s so convenient,” I murmured, but he didn’t seem to mind my comment.

“I believed I had moved as far away from the war as I could, but first you leave me no choice but to see you safely to your meeting point, and then this.” He stopped in front of me and finally met my stare. “How does it feel, Thurs? How does it feel when you have a second go at the same situation, and it doesn’t quite work out again?”

“What do you mean?” I really didn’t need to ask as I sensed his implication immediately.

“No matter how dashing brave your rescue missions are, there’s always somebody left behind.”

“My mother is still down there.”

“So is mine.”

I wanted to touch him but instead peered at the windshield and the endless sky beyond. He had a few patches of gray in his hair that weren’t there when we last met in the normal life; nothing big to strike the eye but I noticed.

“It’ll end eventually,” I said at last, more to myself than as an invitation for further dialogue. “Considering how single-minded the infected are, they’ll die of starvation sooner or later. It’s not going to turn into a sprawling epic of madness.”

“That’s good to hear,” Landen exhibited that tiny ghost of a smile again and limped away from me to the steering wheel. “And where will we be at that time?”

I still didn’t have the answer to that question. There was something dangling at the back of my mind, a hit and miss assortment of clues, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to match them together. I had hoped that talking to Landen again would help; so far it proved to work to the contrary.

“Bowden and I conducted an interrogation of our prisoner a while ago; I just need to sort it all out.”

“Lucky you,” this time Landen’s smile was sincere – and kind. “I wish I could be just as immersed in my work.”

“You’re sure to be when you’ve got Spike as a helmsman. Do we at least know where we are drifting now?”

“Oh, yes.” He seemed relieved to return to neutral matters of the business at hand, and so was I. “We’re still heading mostly west. I’m almost confident the huge bonfire we flew over a while ago was Bristol. Keeping the same speed and direction, we’ll be leaving England soon. Do you think the situation in Wales is just as extreme? Thursday?”

I gave a start when he reached out to delicately tap me on the shoulder.

“I’m all right. What did you say?”

“I said that in Wales…”

That was it. I knew I could grab the fleeting guess by its tail once I managed to train my thought at the right evidence, of which there were only two scraps, and not very distinct ones at that. Still, I felt that I was as close to learning Mycroft’s location as I could ever hope to get.

In all the teasing charades Hades had furnished us in reply to the questioning, he had been careless enough to let his tongue slip twice. First, when he complained after the plane crash that he couldn’t get the latest news, which was sheer nonsense since on that day every channel in England, be it television or radio, was broadcasting nothing but breaking news reports, right from the streets. The Socialist Republic of Wales, on the other hand, was known to often squeeze their neighbour’s news into a digest that was shown at far less frequent intervals. You could easily miss that if you had an extortion planned early in the morning. And second, when he mentioned borders that were supposed to be keeping my uncle better protected than any SpecOps should aspire to – if there were still such borders anywhere, they had to be around Wales.

“Perhaps we should just go there and have a look?”

Landen narrowed his eyes, puzzled.

“You seem smug.”

“I am smug. That is, I should start to be when I’ve verified my theory.” What I did feel at the moment was my fatigue receding quickly as the future finally began to acquire definition.

Landen distanced from me again, and immediately the air around me seemed to become colder.

“That’s what I’ve always liked about you, Thurs – you never agree to let go. Even when you know, at the very deep of your heart, that there might be no use to keep pretending there’s a point to it.”

“Mycroft isn’t dead!”

“None of them down there are, well, at least not physically, but you must admit it’s not the same to being alive.”

“And what do you propose – just to forget it all? Stay stuck between heaven and earth for eternity?”

“Might be not such a bad plan after all, once you’ve brought your mind to accept the possibility we might be the only survivors in this country.”

I threw my arms in the air. That was how it always went between Landen and me since the Crimea: first we seemed to understand one another perfectly, and the next moment we were colliding and crushing, and drifting apart again, bruised thoroughly. Ten years and the end of the world didn’t change that in the least.

“The destination’s Wales. If the validity of the purpose bothers you, consider yourself on a sightseeing tour for new book ideas so that you can create another cozy fictional reality for you to dwell in.”

“I call it ‘fiction’, and you prefer to call it ‘truth’, and both illusions are made up to suit our liking and give us an emotional boost – where’s the difference between us, Thursday?”

The only way to stop this conversation, before we moved onto a yet more emotional and dangerously personal level, was to leave, and that I did. Subjecting myself to a dose of Hades would be a good antidote to Landen’s self-analysis; besides, I needed to keep up at least a semblance of professional routine – if I had stopped doing that, if I let the spring in me wind down, I feared I’d just crumble.

***

The pieces that used to comprise a more or less healthy and functioning world were now at violent odds with each other. I knew that the moment I sensed the smell of spilt liquor that permeated the mess and lent it a definitive Mexican spirit of debauchery. There were shards of broken glass on the floor, and one of the empty bottles was rolling between the tables rattling in tune to the categorical steerage of the ship. Neither Bowden nor Hades seemed to mind that as they slouched against a table opposite one another and slept the sleep of the innocent.

“Agent Cable!” I made sure my roar resembled the trumpets of Jericho and went right into Bowden’s ear.

He jumped up with his eyes still closed, and flailed his arm about searching for the source of the offending noise.

“What is the meaning of this?”

“Miss Next?”

“No, a pink talking Stella Seacow.” I shouldn’t have said that because he cowered, expecting danger. Perhaps I just made him recall one of his recent nightmares. “End of siesta, Bowden. What do you think you’re doing, going for a binge drink with our detainee?”

“It wasn’t a binge.” Bowden finally pried his eyes open, and his face immediately expressed deep regret that he did. “It was supposed to be…to be…oblique interrogation. Are we passing through a storm?”

“No, that’s probably Spike at the wheel. And how much oblique did you get to end up sleeping together?”

Bowden looked disoriented, miserable, and very much hung-over.

“I don’t know,” he admitted simply. “That is, I do know…if I remember correctly…but if I try to re… reconstruct the chain of events it’ll sound more like my obituary than an explanation.”

“Good that you realize that.” I wasn’t going to spare him even despite the pleading look of his swollen eyes. My mind refused to believe it: Bowden Cable, of all people!

“I… I think at one point we played a game. He was the barman, and I was the customer. You can tell all kinds of things to a barman, right? That’s one of the basic laws of the universe.”

“Certainly. You can. I just hope that was the only game you played. Why didn’t you find my brother if you wanted to be confessional? He’s a clergyman, it’s his job to listen to mumblings about dirty secrets.”

“Precisely because he is your brother,” Bowden answered enigmatically and buried his haggard face in his hands.

It was no use to dig for the occult meaning of this puzzle at that point, and I let him doze off again. It took me this big a shock to realize how much I missed the old agent Cable, ever slightly nervous, awkward, uptight, grand and scrupulously reliable.

I remembered why I came looking for them in the first place, sighed, and turned to Hades, who hadn’t stirred throughout our fruitful conversation.

“Hello? Acheron? Rise and shine, we’re going to Wales.”

The only reaction I received was a weak waving of a hand that immediately went down to rest on the table and continue serving his owner as a pillow. If I wanted a clear sign to confirm my theory about Mycroft’s position, I was in for a long and polysemous interpretation.

I considered pouring a jug of cold water on either of them – or both if I took the trouble of fetching cold water twice – but decided not to waste time and effort, and went out of the mess area wondering what I had done to deserve having so many difficult men in such a tiny crew.

***

I should have foreseen that wasn’t the end to surprise discoveries. Joffy, who had secluded himself from the company shortly after we took off, revealed his presence only after I had searched almost all of the ship and only then thought about the observation station.

He was there, on the glass-domed platform, and he was praying.

Which, by itself, wouldn’t have been unusual at all if only Joffy was a usual priest. From what I knew of my brother, he was the kind of a priest that would smack you for your sins, pick up a gun to defend his parish in danger or, when no gun was available, would stand on the porch of the temple unprotected guiding his congregation inside so that hordes of creepy cannibal shamblers wouldn’t get them.

A priest like Irrev. Joffy would have considered bending his knee in prayer as asking God to work overtime.

“You’re praying?”

“Does it look like that?” Joffy refused to turn to me and continued to face the cloudy void behind the shielding glass.

“Well, judging by your characteristic pose, I’d say yes.”

“You have poor imagination, sis. Maybe I’m on my way to standing up after searching for a stray cuff-link.”

“Are you?”

“No.” He did stand up, adding a philosophical sigh to accompany the action. “But I wasn’t praying either – I was asking questions.”

I raised a brow to express curiosity. He nodded his gratitude for my attention.

“I’ve been thinking, you know.”

“About mother?”

“Her, too, but not only. I started with struggling to figure out what kind of ghouls were those who attacked us, but then I realized I’d be getting no answers because I ask the wrong question.” He paced around the circular platform: two steps across it, three steps the radius. “The question’s not about them – it’s about us. It won’t really help us to know why those infected people – if they’re indeed infected – try to kill us; it’s just facts. They are what they are now. The question is, what are *we*?”

I felt confused. He seemed confused and dizzy as well when he looked into the overcast sky at his feet, but he shrugged the giddiness off with one decisive motion.

“We are defined by what surrounds us. By others. I don’t mean that we have to pay attention to others’ opinion or consider their interests – those are mere requirements of comfortable social coexistence, and they are followed without really affecting what we are inside. But how can we gauge ourselves when there’s no external scale for us? What will become of us once we’re the only measure of things?”

“Well,” I returned his shrugging gesture. “Landen believes we may be the sole survivors in the whole country. For the record: I’m of a different opinion. Unless it’s proven otherwise, at least.”

“Shunning the responsibility it would imply, sister?”

“I prefer to take responsibility in manageable quantities. I know what I have to do in the immediate future, and I intend to do that, one step at a time.”

“Then you’re defined by your job? Lucky you.” I squirmed when his words echoed Landen’s.

“And has your GSD made you any more unambiguous? As general and standardized, and perhaps a bit divine, too?”

“Don’t blaspheme, Doofus. You never know when a deity’s benevolence can come in handy, even if you walk softly and carry a big gun.”

“Bowden’s drunk,” I informed him, part as a means to avoid awkward subjects, partly because I wanted that burden off my shoulders. “Bowden, my SO-27 partner. I don’t remember seeing him drink anything stronger than tonic water.”

“See? That’s what I’m driving at. Without being scaled against others we have limitless freedom. So tempting – at last to become who you never dared to become. Makes you light-headed when you take the first gulp of this intoxicating drink, and then you either become stronger or are totally unmade.”

“Anyway. I hoped you could talk to him. He’s just conversed with the demon; it’ll keep him balanced if he now talks to the saint.”

“I’m not a saint.”

“It was a metaphor,” I assured him before he felt insulted but he seemed too absorbed in his inner calculations to notice my clumsy trundling over spiritual matters.

“I’m not a saint,” he repeated. “I’m sick, we all are. Those down on the ground are the healthy ones. We’re the exception, and they are the rule.”

***

Having made the full circle I returned to the navigation room and offered Spike to change him at the steering wheel. There had certainly been enough of ruined conversations for me, and I rather looked forward to finishing the day in solitude.

Regardless of his attitude, Landen had done his reckoning and presented the results in the clearest of forms by pasting a paper arrow over the compass with the tip dubbed ‘to Wales’. If that was ship navigation in a nutshell, I had no idea why people spent years studying the trade in college.

As we glided over the land, I noticed less and less of fires on the ground; the airship blockades that were to be seen around the bigger towns had also become a rare sight. A few passed miles away from us earlier that day as they headed north – it could only mean they had no business in this region any more.

I looked at the radio in doubt. We hadn’t turned it on after we passed through the military perimeter around Swindon, concluding that staying invisible and not giving overt signals was a sane thing to do; other airships, while they still were nearby, only focussed their floodlights on the Goliath logo to let us progress on our way in silence.

I fumbled with the switches, not sure what I expected to hear. Most of the channels were drowning in noise, others didn’t have even interferences. I hopped from one frequency to another and listened to the signal fade to nil.

“Goliath airship TC-4, can you read me?”

I rebounded from the radio as if it had dealt me a tough blow. The voice was loud and clear, and it belonged to Jack Schitt.

“Officer Next? I suppose it’s you, and you can hear me all right. Please don’t switch off.”

I was going to do just that but stopped midway. It couldn’t hurt to see what news he had.

“I’ll go straight to the point: I’m entitled to make you an offer.” He paused inviting me to reply, which I didn’t. “We’d like to propose you a deal; if you allow me, I’ll explain the simple conditions – the Goliath guarantees you and your friends shelter and protection if you return the Prose Portal to the Corporation.”

I hesitated, fingering the switch in indecision. Schitt started an exasperated sigh but checked himself.

“We still have transport available, and we can guarantee you safe passage to a remote place that is completely isolated from the present biohazard. Food and medical care will be provided. You will have all the conveniences of the civilized world.”

“And whom are you going to rob in order to grant me that?”

Schitt’s relief was tangible even when reduced to airwaves. He must have been desperately trying to contact us since he discovered his ship was hijacked.

“I’m so glad to hear you, Miss Next!” There I said a few rather rude words under my nose. “I’m also glad it was indeed you who have taken our airship – at one point we were beginning to think it might be a stray group of civilians.”

“And what’s wrong with a stray group of civilians fleeing to safety on your airship? The Goliath saves lives, everyone is thankful, and rejoicing is everywhere. Triumph of the selflessness.”

“You don’t fully understand the consequences, Miss Next,” Schitt was patient and very sweet. “In the present situation, when all vital industries are extinct, the Prose Portal is our only means to ensure that there are still meals served, roads passable, medical aid dispatched to those in need, and the nation is properly defended. As fate would have it, you’re our only lead to its location. No doubt you’re conscientious enough to realize that corporate management is the only option for this device to function to the public benefit.”

I bit my lip and caressed the radio’s disabling switch again.

“What did you say I’m getting in return?”

“The Goliath has prepared several islands. They are sizeable, they are clean, and they are fully equipped to live in comfort. Most of them are allotted to the Corporation’s employees, but there’s one… it’s a delicious place, Miss Next.” Despite his honest attempt Schitt would have made a very poor salesman. “You only need to let us know where you’re heading to, and we’ll send our transport to pick you up there.”

“What about Hades? I’m sure you intend to dispense justice, it’s just that more urgent matters make you forget.”

“Priorities, Miss Next,” Schitt answered firmly. “For all I care you can throw him overboard if that makes you feel better. Just don’t do that before you know where the Portal is. Now what do you say to our proposal?”

He could honestly mean all of that. I could believe that there was indeed an island, with good climate and infrastructure, somewhere a way off the British shores to provide isolation in all aspects, mostly regarding my possible desire to turn up one day at the Corporation’s doorstep and ask to what ends Mycroft’s invention had been employed. Barring the one-way ticket implication, it was a tempting offer, and I knew that Landen would look good in a Hawaiian shirt under the palm-trees. So would I. The dwindling numbers of survivors queuing up for the Goliath’s dole, giving up their last and killing each other to advance in the corporate pecking order, would not.

“If you could convince me that the supplies will be distributed fairly and that everyone who survives will get what they need, my answer would be a yes. But you can’t. Go through a better behavioral training, Jack, before you’re appointed to conduct negotiations.”

I finally pressed the ‘off’ button, and the radio went silent, shutting off Schitt and his beguiling talk. Instead of relief I felt the cockpit fill with luckless doom.

“That must have been hard,” Hades said from behind my back, and I ordered my despondently stooping shoulders to straighten. “I can’t believe you’ve successfully beaten the temptation.”

“Well, pinch yourself,” I grumbled and pretended to study the compass. The part of Schitt’s suggestion about overboard throwing suddenly seemed to have its appeal.

“What did he promise, a shelter?” Hades ignored the lack of hospitality in my voice and strolled into the navigation room. “Seems logical. And where’s the promised place behind the clouds – France, the States? Or something as elegant and posh as a private island?”

I stubbornly refused to reveal my inner thoughts by any outward sign, but my efforts didn’t fool him.

“An island, but of course! A temporary heaven for two and hell for all the others. Brings to mind a few notable examples from world literature, doesn’t it. You did wise when you declined.”

“I can’t decide who’s worse: the Goliath or you?”

“Oh, Thursday, spare me the moralizing, please,” he made a pained face. “Thanks to agent Cable I now have a splitting headache, and admonitions don’t agree with it. Coming back to the stirring conversation I partly overheard, what would you actually like to do with your uncle’s wondrous gadget?”

I frowned; that was one of the weak points in my otherwise clear plan.

“Hand it over to the government.”

“What government?” Hades asked with genuine interest.

I decided to stay vague.

“At least that’s a better plan than to utilize it for the demolition of the country’s literary heritage.”

“Touché. I admit that holding book characters for ransom when people seem to have stopped reading books doesn’t look that brilliant any more. Considering that the economy has gone through a 100% inflation in the last 24 hours and slipped back into medieval barter, I think the only use I still have for that Martin Chuzzlewit manuscript is to tear it to shreds to fight depression. Or we can read it as a bedtime story, that is, if you have nothing more exciting to do in bed.”

“I have. I have cracked your conundrum in my spare time. Mycroft’s in Wales, isn’t he?”

“He is.” Acheron stood opposite me on the other side of the wheel and folded his arms across his chest. “But Wales is big. Shall we search each and every town?”

“I’ll do that, I swear…”

“Of course you will, the determined girl that you are. But while you’re using your sleeping hours for reflection, why don’t you think about the Portal as a two-way street?” He leaned towards me across the wheel. “Islands are boring, Thursday, but fiction isn’t. I’ll give you the exact location of the Portal if you promise you’ll let me go through it, and you can join me if you wish. Think about it, will you?”

I closed my eyes momentarily. A perfect shelter within a book, in the surrounding of a universe of its own, complete with effervescent life, interaction, people… totally believable and yet artificial to the core. Don’t we all sometimes wish we could escape into a dream?

“You have my word.”

“Merthyr,” he replied at once. “And let the Neanderthal inherit this pitiful Earth.”

***

6. Landen.

Despite what I told Thursday there was something good and reassuring in the smooth wood of the steering wheel in my hands. I felt keen pleasure when the airship turned in accord to the slightest move of my arms, and I knew where this feeling came from: the control over imagination is nothing when compared to the control of reality.

“We must be nearing the Welsh border,” I notified the crew, and they were immediately glued to the windows to see that with their own eyes.

“It doesn’t look quite the same as what I remember of the Welsh border when I served there,” Spike remarked, somewhat disturbed.

“There are troops,” said Joffy as the wired defences of the Republic became more and more distinct. “And fire.”

“They aren’t troops,” Spike objected, and we all knew what it meant. They might have been once, when they were directed to the border to reinforce it against a flooding inflow of refugees from England, but they were no more.

“You said that Mycroft would be safe in Wales,” Thursday hissed in Hades’ direction, who shrugged in genuine disappointment.

“How could I have known? Pretty lousy development, isn’t it.”

I turned the engines to full throttle, and the airship sped up to its maximum struggling against a strong cross-wind. If Mycroft was indeed in Merthyr he’d better stay where he was because with the distance still to go, I suspected we wouldn’t be able to try any other destination without refuelling.

We glided over the borderline into the Welsh lands, and the infected swarming the area pricked up their ears at the sound of the ship’s propellers, watching us go by with hundreds of blood-stained faces raised skywards. It was an all-out war that was spreading like wildfire, and I doubted there was still a place where the humanity had made a successful stand.

***

At first glance Merthyr didn’t look that much changed. The capital of the Republic was still mostly an industrial center, and the smell of ironworks was a distinctive attribute. There were old hillocks of refuse from old coal mines at the city’s outskirts; some of them were smoldering where the populace had tried to use the remaining coal to block out the infected with a fiery wall.

If one didn’t look close it might seem their plan had worked. There were people in the streets in numbers big enough to suggest a festival of general proportions, and they walked about freely, expecting no danger. It might seem suspicious that they were roaming the streets randomly without any purpose for their walk, but Bowden still relied on the spyglass to be sure.

“No,” he said at last. “I don’t think we can be friends with the people of Merthyr in their present disposition.”

“Well,” Thursday took out her automatic and checked the ammo. “Then we do it the hard way.”

The Penderyn Hotel emerged into view as a large cube of carved stone towering over the neighbouring smaller and far more modest slate-roofed houses. I stopped the engines, and once their drone died off there was the sound of thousands of mouths yelling in unified chorus as hordes of the infected spotted the alien object. The best part of the city center’s dwellers had gathered to greet out arrival.

“We have a problem,” noted Bowden as he gazed down. “They’re on the roof, too.”

The hotel’s flat roof was a perfect place to house a large gathering; I saw Thursday’s face fall as the true meaning of this circumstance sank in. If Mycroft was indeed inside, there was hardly any chance he was still alive.

The infected, scattered across the roof, began to pack into tighter groups, drawn by the tempting sight of the airship hovering only a few yards above them. Some of them clawed at the air, and some of them jumped in vain attempts to reach the prey, and all of them howled in desperation.

“You think dinner’s served?” Thursday shouted to the mindless crowd below, and for a moment her grin became as bloodthirsty. “Bowden? Ever dreamed about operating a really big Gatling machine?”

There were two Gatling-style cannons on either side of the ship right behind the navigation room. From what I remembered of modern weaponry, they were 20 mm six-barreled M61 Vulcans, hydraulically driven, air-cooled, possessing an extremely high rate of fire and quite monstrous on the whole; if there was a gun to take down hundreds of targets at a time, that was it.

I knew that when I’d look back at the scene later – that was, if there was to be any ‘later’ for us, – it’d be with disgust and dread; but right then and there all that I felt was exhilaration and malicious glee. I manipulated the engines so that the ship stayed exactly over the roof while Bowden and Thursday began the slaughter. They soon established a kill zone, mowing down the infected in long bursts, and the huge bullets snapped spines, severed limbs and tore the wretched forms in two with a metallic scream as the barrel clusters of the guns revolved violently. When either of them was out of the ammo, Spike would dive into the magazine compartment and return swaying under the weight of a new ammunition belt draped over his shoulders. While they reloaded, secondary groups of the infected, with glazed eyes and mouths gawking, emerged from the stair to the roof, drawn by the uproar and moving in fast to take the place of their fallen mates. Hades shouted a warning, and I maneuvered the airship for better aim as he directed the resumed fire. Joffy, whose beliefs were lenient to single combat, if inevitable, but conflicted with mass massacre, provided general encouragement.

Overall, it was the moment of greatest fun in our whole adventure. But of course it, too, had its end.

“We’re out of fuel,” I announced when there was another pause in the gunfire. The arrow on the fuel indicator flickered at the zero mark and then dropped hopelessly beyond it.

Thursday surveyed the battlefield as berserker rage gradually sipped out of her. The demolition was of mass proportions as both shooters had successfully touched not only the roof but the square around the hotel, too; there was not a stir of movement below, at least presently.

“I think we’d better be ready to mop up, just to be sure. Landen?” She turned to me, and for a moment I felt I was looking at a stranger; perhaps she felt the same looking at me. “Can we disembark here?”

We moored the ship to the prominent parts of the roof, securing the lines despite the premonition it would not fly again. The gondola hovered mere inches from a thick carpet of minced flesh and empty cartridges that covered the whole space of the roof; as I jumped out of the hatchway my boots sank into the squishy pulp.

“Can you hold him for me?” Thursday handed me her bag with a fidgeting dodo inside before she climbed outside. I grabbed the bag, and Pickwick plocked his acknowledgement of my help.

“I’m sorry, Thurs.”

“Don’t be. I won’t give up until I see his body with my own eyes.” She took the bag back from me and splattered to the staircase, taking out writhing forms that still happened to be in her path through what remained of the previously clamouring horde.

From the tactical side, it was good that we hadn’t concealed our arrival: the noise was the bait to the hundreds still inside the hotel, and they had been lured out to the roof leaving the corridors empty. We descended peacefully all the way to the great dilapidated lounge, once stylish and luxurious and now all but ripped to pieces. The windows were smashed, and the door looked like it had caved in under the pressure from the outside, but there were no bodies on the floor.

“Well-guarded, right?” Thursday remarked in an icy tone aiming the bitterly mocking comment at Hades, who studied bullet holes in the walls and furniture. The fight that had preceded the current deadly calm of the lounge must have been ferocious. The only thing that had survived the ordeal intact was the rumoured Prose Portal Thursday told me about shortly before we arrived at Merthyr.

“You can taunt me if you like, Next,” Hades didn’t even bother to turn in her direction, “but before I left, I ordered Mycroft to be locked in one of the rooms on the upper floor. The door was reinforced so that he wouldn’t apply any of his cunning scientific tricks to get out; chances are nobody had managed to get in, either.”

Without wasting time Thursday rushed back upstairs, accompanied by Spike. Seconds later the whole building resounded with gunshots as they attempted to shoot off the lock and break in. While they produced carefully measured amounts of inevitable noise my gaze drifted to the Prose Portal.

Strange enough, it resembled a book. If not for an array of contraptions on the front cover, it was nothing more than a large volume, but the one that contained all volumes ever written. While the world outside was crumbling to ruin by the minute, it still enclosed a microcosm of its own, equipped with everything the human mind had ever thought about, be it only a prophetic vision or a practical theory. Even if the humanity didn’t live to see another day and ended right there and then, the books it could link to would still be there, outliving their creators and being the autonomous extensions of their past grandeur.

Mycroft appeared in the lounge, moving along with the help of his rescuers, and I had to snap out of my daydreams.

He looked tattered. Over seventy years old and almost completely worn out by what he had to go through even before the outbreak of the epidemic, he struggled to keep abreast with his niece as renewed hope urged him onward. I went to meet them at the stairs, and Mycroft shook my hand with feverish elation.

“Those screams,” he mumbled, and the words were in odd contrast to the vague smile on his dry lips. “And I had been cursing those stooges for locking me in that cell! At first I thought it was a police squad breaking in through the resistance, but it couldn’t be that. They screamed, oh how they screamed…” He stopped in mid-sentence and looked around the room searchingly. “Where’s Polly? Did you get her out?”

“Not yet,” Thursday placed a reassuring hand on her uncle’s shoulder. “I’ll see to it immediately. Hades, where’s the Wordsworth poem?”

“I don’t have it.”

“What?!”

If not for Mycroft leaning on her heavily, Thursday would have reached for her gun, as it had become a habit with her lately; as it were, she only gazed at Hades with hatred and fear while he stood calmly by the hotel’s once huge but now shattered entrance doors, looking at the square and the streets behind it.

“Assuming that ransom drops seldom go as planned, I didn’t want to subject the lady to unnecessary risks by carrying the print of the poem into potential danger. I left it with Felix8.” He looked at us with a smile that seemed sad but, I suspected, not because of Polly’s fate. “It must still be on him while he’s out there,” and he nodded towards the streets that were flooded with the golden light of a setting sun.

Mycroft’s knees wobbled and he sank to the floor despite the double support. Spike settled him down by a wall, and he leaned against it lifelessly, while Thursday stood still, staring at her hands as if something that had just been there suddenly disappeared. I limped towards them, cursing my clumsy artificial leg.

“We can still reach her,” she muttered at last as she knelt by her uncle’s side. “We intend to go through the Portal and wait till things calm down a bit, surely you could find a way to cross over from the Chuzzlewit story into “I wandered lonely…”

Mycroft looked up at her; his face was wet with tears, and he made no attempt to conceal it.

“Thursday, dear girl,” he said softly. “I burnt the manuscript.”

She sat down beside him, looked at me in the way that meant more than all words, and rested her head on Mycroft’s shoulder.

There was a long silence. Finally, Bowden coughed gently behind my back, drawing our attention to the reality.

“So, this is the end?”

“We haven’t killed them all,” Spike said, inspecting our weapons. “There are more out there, and they’ll eventually find their way to this place. Shall we try to barricade the room? It could prolong our survival time.”

I pulled myself together, even if it required the last of my strength.

“No, that won’t do. We’ll run out of ammo soon; if we don’t have any other book to hide in, it’s wiser to return to the ship.” I often thought about the possibility, despite Thursday’s confidence in her uncle’s device and how we might even adjust it to grant safe passage to more survivors, should we find them by some miraculous luck. “Even without fuel, drifting with the wind is better than sitting trapped here.”

I could picture a future of being airborn helplessly, at the mercy of weather and wind; after a while, time and the elements would take their toll, and even if we scavenged the abandoned towns for water, food and, possibly, refuel, the supplies would still not be endless. The ship would deteriorate as storms would lash against it, cold currents and high altitudes would erode its delicate machinery, and if something broke down there’d be no spare parts to fix it. Chances were high there were other smart guys who had taken possession of more ships, and they’d be roaming the skies, too – the buccaneers of the ether who’d stop at nothing to prey on fellow survivors. Not to mention diseases that always follow in the wake of poor food and harsh weather conditions… And yet all of that seemed safer by degrees than staying on the ground.

“In my bag,” Thursday spoke up suddenly, so quietly I had to lean closer to hear her words. “I have a copy of ‘Jane Eyre’ in my bag. Been carrying it around as a lucky charm – it saved my life once. It has a bullet dent in it though – does it make the book unusable?”

“Not really. No.” Mycroft stirred despite his will as his grief-induced apathy receded. “English literature, and approximately of the same period…it might work. I’d be making no guarantees if you carried, say, ‘Mahabharata’.”

I reached out my hand for him, and he laboured to his feet, still feeble but determined not to waver.

***

It’s funny how the mind occupies itself with most trivial or bizarre thoughts exactly when the moment calls for full attention and sobriety. While Mycroft was connecting the plugs and feeds to the Portal, setting its controls and urging the bookworms to work more diligently, I kept wondering why on earth he had named his device a Prose Portal and then got his wife lost in a poem. The world had long stopped to match itself, in little details and as a whole.

The air was heavy with high voltage, and the Portal hummed as it tuned itself to the narrative of ‘Jane Eyre’.

“Too much noise,” muttered Bowden, who had been standing a polite distance away from me. “They’ll be storming down on us any minute.”

But before another pack of the infected nosed their way to the hotel, the Portal emitted one last wave of sound, and suddenly there was a thin vertical line of bright light that expanded slowly until it formed what could count as a door. Mycroft stepped back, observed his creation perform one more wonder, and then looked at his shaking hands.

That was it. The most secure of all gates that would never be broken by brute force or fickle elements, the borderline beyond which no chance trespasser could go. Its complexity guarded it against fortuitous accidents; its other than real state granted there’s be no trace of the storms of our world disturbing its peace.

Still, nobody moved.

“Well, I guess that’s what they call a leap of faith,” said Joffy at last. He had stayed in the background before, watching the blood stains on the lounge’s interior with an expression I, being not that much spiritual, couldn’t decipher. Now he stepped out of the shade, and before any of us could stop him, crossed the thin line between the dark lounge and the light on the other side of the Portal.

“Sorry, Thursday, I can’t wait,” said Mycroft apologetically and followed suit.

“They’ll just scatter across whatever is behind this…this…” Bowden frowned, searching for a good term to describe what he just saw. “We must have a plan for what we do on the other side. We must maintain our group.”

“Of course,” Spike agreed cheerfully, gave him a powerful push on the back and stepped through the door the moment Bowden, confused and indignant at such familiarity, disappeared in the light.

I went up to Thursday, who showed no intention to move and had her firm and unforgiving gaze fixed on Hades. He left his observation point by the entrance and approached us slowly.

“You promised, remember? Are you still a person of her word?”

“Yes, I am.” I always hated when Thursday’s voice became like this, cold, distant, and barring all compromise. She often spoke to me in that voice right after the Crimea; I was glad this time I wasn’t the target. “But ‘Jane Eyre’ is smaller than our world. If you come anywhere near us, I also promise that I’ll kill you.”

“Oh, I don’t intend to be stranded in that obsolete story!” Hades laughed with almost the same arrogance he used to display back on the airship. “I’ll let your uncle blaze the trail and then move on to other, more interesting places. I think the climate of, say, the ‘Vanity Fair’ would suit my current mood better than a tale about a troubled but blissful love.”

And finally, there were only two of us in the ruined lounge. The machine hummed, drawing large quantities of power from the city’s electric network, and the portal door flickered in invitation.

“Shall we?” I offered Thursday my hand, trying to be gallant.

But she shook her head.

“I can’t do it, Landen.” Her face was both puzzled and aggravated as she peered into herself and clearly didn’t like what she discovered there. “I’ve thought about it before, long before this riot with the virus began. How would it feel to enter your favourite story one day? I think I did once, when I was a child, but later assumed it was only a hallucination. It felt wonderful. But Landen!” She squeezed my proffered hand nervously. “What if we can’t go back? What if the power is off by the time we decide to return, or the bookworms die, or the Portal itself is destroyed? I’d take the chances and go to the ends of the earth, to the very fringes of the globe; but this place inside, it doesn’t have fringes. What if we have to stay there for ever – in that fabulation of life?”

I nodded. It was one of the things I hated as a writer – that every book had a beginning and an end, and although there were other books, myriads of them, they still existed only over a preset span of narrative life with minimal variability. I had read ‘Jane Eyre’, I knew what was to happen on page 40, and how the conflict would be resolved on page one hundred-something. This was how a god must have felt living through a human life, had he decided to descend into the world.

It was almost night outside. The darkness was quiet, but I had no trouble imagining how the virus spread even now, making its army grow and prowl across new areas until there would be nothing left to devour. Time would pass, the fires would die, and the screams, of both the infected and their victims, would fade.

“If you get bored, I’ll write more books for you. Beautiful stories that have no end, and with unexpected twists at every turn of the plot. You know I can be unpredictable?”

She took my hand in indecision, almost shyly.

“Only if those are good surprises, agreed?”

I held onto her hand for all it was worth, and we took the one last step into the Portal…

***

Epilogue.
Thursday.

…and passed to the other side. Of course I didn’t manage to do it gracefully, tripped on nothing, staggered on, and emerged in the flooding white light, blinking and disoriented. When the passage is done, I take a moment to stand still and find my bearings, wondering all the while why my hand that only a wink ago was clasping Landen’s, is now empty.

“Congratulations! A most topping performance, Miss Next, but by Jove, didn’t you make the memsahib and me jitter!”

I close my eyes hoping when I open them again my vision will have cleared and I’ll recognize the sturdy looking man that is shaking my hand with enthusiasm. But before I can collect my thoughts there is a thunderous drum roll, and an official-sounding voice, amplified by the loudspeakers to a status of divine decree, shatters whatever conclusions I have made.

“Ladies, gentlemen and other things, the committee is happy to announce that the test reading of the multi-platform, cross-genre, interactive version of “The Eyre Affair 28 days later” v.1.01.var:pulp has been completed successfully!”

I realize that there is an audience present, and not a small one at that, only after the Starlight Room drowns in a storm of applause. The triumphant spotlights are mercifully dimmed down a few candelas, and I finally can see that I’m standing on the stage, elevated to glory above the full house of spectators, one hand clasped in Commander Bradshaw’s strong palm and the other holding a bunch of flowers Mrs. Bradshaw has just bestowed on me.

“What the?…Bradshaw?”

“Drags you into itself, this new narrative machine, doesn’t it?” He courteously helps me down to the floor. “I couldn’t believe it when you agreed to take part in the experiment – after all, you’re a bit conservative regarding radically innovative fictional devices, aren’t you, Miss Next? Or should it be Mrs. Parke-Laine already?”

I begin to stagger again.

“Landen?”

“It was so touching to see how you met anew, my dear,” Mrs. Bradshaw puts in, deeply moved.

“But that wasn’t how…” I force myself to make a deliberate pause and think. “Wait a minute. That’s not *how* Landen and me got together after ten years.”

“Of course it isn’t. That’s interactivity!”

I frown and take a deep breath, determined not to be fooled. Whatever device the engineers of the Bookworld have crafted this time, I couldn’t have fallen for the emulation completely…

“That’s it! There were many little details wrong. Narrative tenses switched randomly at the very beginning, Pickwick’s gender was alternating, and the ending – what crappy ending is that? What happened afterwards? Did we – they – live happily ever after? Did they ambush one another in the bushes, or burn Thornfield down, or have an all-out orgy to celebrate the lucky day?”

“Sorry, that’s interactivity again. The voting will decide.”

“It was a joke about orgy, you know.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Bradshaw seems very serious nonetheless. “You never know what those reader opinion polls will come up with. Well, I suppose there had to be a bump or two in the narrative, but if you felt something more severe you really should report your experience to Mr. Bunuel,” The Commander looks at me with concern and then nods towards the table of the committee, before which crowds of newsmakers, colleagues, and simply fans have already formed a tight circle, each trying to reach out and congratulate the famous engineering genius of the Bookworld with yet another accomplishment.

“Isambard?” I drawl out angrily. “Bunuel? Bastard!”

“Oh, Thursday!” Melanie Bradshaw’s strong gorilla arm embraces my shoulders. “You shouldn’t be saying that! After all, you volunteered to participate…”

“And without you it wouldn’t have been such a success.” Bradshaw concludes, shaking my hand one more time. “Of course, the fact that they employed A-1 Generics to act as your companions in misfortune is also important, but they wouldn’t have got those A-1s if you hadn’t subscribed to the project in the first place.”

I look back at the stage for the first time since our arrival – sorry, since the reading’s successful test – and blink again.

“They felt so genuine,” I mumble as the members of my former company wave to me cheerfully. I find nothing more polite to do than to wave back.

“But of course they did! They all are getting their own books now, well, maybe except the B-1s that played Mycroft and Victor Analogy – but I’m sure they will move to the narratives of their own, too, once they’ve gone through a few more interactive readings.”

“What about the Infected?”

“Oh,” here Commander Bradshaw’s face expresses something close to embarrassment. “It was supposed to be a technical secret. A hundred of D class was the biggest the project could allow. We tried to intervene and raise the funding, but you know how it happens… Bunuel just recycled them.”

“You mean that all the time we were chased by the same hundred of stock stunt generics cloned to infinity?”

“Copied, Thursday. With slight variations added here and there. All they had to do was look scary enough.”

“And they did,” I admit, still feeling somewhat duped.

“A publicity photo for the project’s promo kit, agent Next?” One of the reporters tugs at my sleeve with polite persistence. “Please?”

Before I can say anything the Joffy and Spike Generics pull me back on stage. I walk on, wearing a dutiful smile, as media professionals mess about the stage directing the project stars to stand in appropriate order. I end up being squeezed between Hades and Bowden since the plan is to group us in the order the characters were saved from the virus hazard; Landen is standing on Bowden’s other side, and they both look remarkably stiff and wary of each other. I stare out at the flashing cameras and think what we do know about Generics after all. The Bowden one still has that hurt look of the one largely misunderstood in his eyes, and I still haven’t asked him why my brother wasn’t good enough for him to confide in…

It’s only when the photographers are done with their work that I dare a direct glance at Landen and discover that he is gone.

“Thursday, dear,” Melanie Bradshaw studies my face with worry when I’m back on the floor again. “Is everything all right?”

“I need to go home.”

And that I do, picking my way through the excited crowd and disregarding friendly pats on my shoulders, congratulatory exclamations and interview requests. I’m done with being a celebrity; I need to go home.

***

I emerge out of the Bookworld into my office in the ‘Acme Carpets’ and have to double-check where I am. Normally, crossing the border between the fictional and the real makes itself thoroughly felt on me; but today my brain has decided to ignore any change as it struggles to maintain a continuum of coherent perception despite volatile surroundings. I shouldn’t risk driving before it has sorted out where we are now, and so I call a taxi.

The ride home is fast and uneventful, and I get to see barely enough of quiet Swindon streets to convince myself the town hasn’t changed since I left it in the morning. Seeing a few more people walking by would help, but what should I expect so late in the evening when everybody sane is sitting in their dining-room with their family?

Our house is still in its usual place, as it should be, and yet before the taxi pulls to a stop at the door I go through a short but nasty premonition. Bunuel has devised a monster of a machine; if video games make one feel anything close to the sensations I’m having now, they should be banned by the public health service. I shuffle to the door, prepare to knock and remember that for the last couple of decades I’ve had my own key to this house.

“Hello?”

Landen is in the sitting-room, surrounded by drafts of his new novel and with a book in his hand.

“You’re late,” he says, not making it an accusation but just stating the obvious.

“I know. Sorry. Some overtime job turned up unexpectedly. How are the kids?”

“Asleep, I hope.” He puts the book down and watches me closely. “How was your day? You look as if you had it a bit rough.”

I wave the issue aside as insignificant, all the while trying to make sure he doesn’t notice that I’m studying him suspiciously from askance. Are there ways to verify if the Landen I see now is the real one without appearing too obscene?

“Landen?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“If I were a fictional character, what book would you write for me?”

He stands up and walks towards me in that all too familiar limping gait.

“A sonnet,” he replies without hesitation. “But just one would be too tight for you, so I’d write several. Many strange things would happen to you, and you’d shed an occasional tear but would never give up and continue kicking the bad until it disappears behind the horizon.”

“Sounds good,” I say putting my arms around him, feeling his breath on my cheek, the warm fabric of his shirt, his familiar body underneath it. “I think I love you.”

“I know,” he whispers softly. “That’s why I’d make the story so beautiful we both could be happy living in it.”

Paul was working in the library. The library was situated near the Berlin Wall. He fetched books, used the long step-ladder to get to the upper shelves, earned about 10 bucks a month and had first-hand access to the second-hand propaganda materials as a special fringe benefit. Of the 10 earned bucks he sent 8 to his Belarus relatives. The remaining two he proudly contributed to his and Flake’s household.

Flake, a.k.a. Ch. Lorenz, a.k.a. Doktor, wasn’t employed. He was giving music lessons in his and Paul’s one-room apartment. Most of all Flake enjoyed tutoring young pioneers. They sang Pioneermarsch every morning, right at the time when Paul usually came back from his graveyard shifts in the library, where he had bribed the janitor into sharing his duties. As the result Paul was now earning 13 bucks and had to come home at 7 a.m., and the janitor felt totally corrupted because he had taken a bribe in the hideous form of two packs of Marlboro and three vodkas, while he didn’t smoke and had ulcer.

Paul was very angry at Flake, because when he was trying to sleep, a choir of pioneers was singing “Seid bereit, ihr Pioniere! La?t die jungen Herzen gluhn! Seid bereit, ihr Pioniere, wie Ernst Thalmann, treu und kuhn!”, and Paul’s mum had developed in her good son a habit for a bit different kind of lullabies.

Flake usually answered that is was none of Paul’s business, and although they were friends and all, and really used to play in the same sandbox a while ago, it didn’t now mean a thing, and the only important thing was that Paul was earning 10 bucks, and Flake was earning something like ten times more, and Paul, being his best friend, should still remember who’s buying his bread…

At this point Paul usually remembered the painful occasion back in the mentioned sandbox, when Flake vilely stole Paul’s favourite toy while he wasn’t looking and never gave it back, and that sole occasion should have made Paul know better about trusting the man who used to call himself his ‘best friend’ and who with years had got mean enough to hurl reproaches at his life-long buddy.

But at any other time of the day they got along nicely. Flake was a wise young man, and knew what could upset his friend.

Paul hated his night shifts because he was afraid of the dark.

To get his pal into a better mood, after the lessons Flake went downstairs from their loft to meet their neighbour named Richard, who was working in a supermarket and thus was always well-stocked with edible supplies. Since Richard was a good and sociable fellow, to whom the word ‘greed’ was unknown, he didn’t mind sharing. Besides, he felt in sympathy with his two neighbours, who tried hard to nestle their one short, one long, but both slender bodies under the roof in one-roomed apartment.

Contrary to them, Richard was big. Really big. And he could fight. Paul learnt this favorable feature one night, when he was going home, and a bunch of teenagers tried to mug him in the gateway.

Since that day Paul felt twice obliged to Richard. Not only was the man feeding them, he was also defending their honour.

With every new day Paul hoped to find an opportunity to return the favour.

But he doubted Richard really needed it. In fact, he wasn’t even sure Richard remembered about it. As had been already said, Richard was big, sold food, wrestled, and had a lot of friends.

His friends were in a gang. They called themselves the Schwerin Posse. After the teenagers attacked Paul in the yard, the Schwerin Posse went to their school and said that this boy was under their protection.

Since then Paul could cross the yard safely at any time of day or night, because nobody wanted to deal with the Schwerin Posse.

The Posse’s leader was a guy named Christoph Schneider. He was tall, beautiful, and clever. His last two qualities didn’t contradict. That is why he was the Posse’s leader.

He had a good friend named Till. Till was a good swimmer. The Posse often dreamt about going to the seaside and terrorizing the girls in bikinis. But since there was no sea near Schwerin, and no decent DDR girl would dare to wear bikini, they had to content with terrorizing the ladies in the swimming pools.

Christoph’s mum never suspected what dreams lived in her son’s head. She had a big family, and had no time to think about such trifles with a bunch of kids on her hands, each of whom had to be born, fed, washed regularly, and taught not to speak bad language.

Christoph’s mum liked Till. He had won her affection by presenting her with two wicker boxes for her knitting. Till had made the boxes himself. Besides being a good swimmer, he was also a good basket weaver.

Christoph’s mum liked Richard too. She thought he was a handsome boy. Everybody thought Richard was a handsome boy. The only thing that marred his image in her eyes was the unexplainable disappearance of some of her make-up items every time he was in her house.

Christoph’s mum also liked the fourth member of the Posse, Oliver, who was tall, thin, and silent. She especially loved this last quality, because, having a big family on her hands, she had come to appreciate the rare moments of silence.

Richard, being a good and sociable fellow, introduced his two neighbours to the Posse. Flake was accepted, and Paul was not, because one of the few Posse’s strict rules was that its members be not shorter than 6 ft.

Paul was angry and offended, but tried not to show it. He expected Flake to pledge allegiance to him and to refuse to be a member of the gang that had rejected his best friend.

But Flake didn’t.

For a moment it seemed to Paul the fourth member of the Posse, the silent Oliver, sympathized with him. But Oliver never said a thing, and besides he was just a kid, and nobody would listen to him anyway.

Before that Paul was going to tell Flake he was afraid to work alone in the empty library at night, especially if the library was situated only a short distance from the Berlin Wall, but now he felt his friend was no longer worthy to confide in.

As a result a sad and lonely Paul was heading to the library at 10 p.m., his soul burning with grief at the broken faith in his friend and room-mate, when somebody called him. He turned and saw Christoph.

The reason Christoph had decided to run after Paul was not that he was sorry for hurting the little man. He had just remembered his mum had learnt from Richard that his new friend worked in the library, and asked her son to ask him to find for her the German illustrated edition of “Kama Sutra”.

Frau Schneider was an educated woman. She often dreamt about sitting with this volume by the fireplace, Till’s boxes in her lap. The combination of these two objects produced really interesting associations in her mind. But of course she didn’t say anything about that to her innocent son.

Paul was happy Christoph had caught up with him, no matter what his real reasons were, because when you have to work a night shift in the empty library near the Berlin Wall, it’s good to have somebody nicknamed ‘Doom’ near you.

Christoph asked about the book, but the cunning Paul didn’t immediately lead him to the shelf where it was standing, although he knew the place perfectly well, since only yesterday he was reading the text himself.

Instead, they went to the basement, where, as Paul knew, the corrupted janitor had been hoarding his treasures. Being pretty sure that if the ulcered janitor had indeed drunk that vodka, he wouldn’t be coming to work any more, Paul hoped he could make Christoph change his mind about the Posse’s rules with the only effective method he knew.

Paul hated himself for having to pave his way into society by such disgraceful means as bribes, and he hated Christoph for forcing him to resort to such methods. But his anger subsided together with the level of the transparent liquid in the bottle.

In the middle of the second bottle Christoph began to seriously consider pros and cons of changing the Posse’s height standards from 6 to 5’7 ft.

He was about to say that to Paul, anticipating a happy look of gratitude on his face, which, after serious consideration, seemed nicer with every minute, when their tete-a-tete was suddenly interrupted by a weird noise.

Christoph, being the head of the mighty Posse that had its own wrestler and swimmer, hated to be interrupted when he was about to make a closer acquaintance with an interesting person. He took his hand away from Paul’s knee and went to investigate.

Paul didn’t follow. He wisely believed that if your nickname is ‘Doom’, it’s your duty to investigate.

Christoph disappeared. Paul waited. Christoph wasn’t coming back. Paul looked around the dark basement and rubbed the thigh where Christoph’s hand had been only moments ago. He felt abandoned again. He was afraid of the dark, and he was afraid he was getting infatuated with the Schwerin Posse’s leader.

He was trying to decide if that was good or bad, when Christoph called out to him. His voice was coming from somewhere below, and Paul remembered about the boiler room. In any other case Paul wouldn’t come near it even in broad daylight.

But now he felt obliged to comply, because he had made a bet with himself that if he could overcome his fears, his ‘thing’ for Christoph would have to be real love, and if he couldn’t…well, then not.

He stood up, closed his eyes, and followed the voice.

It seemed easy.

Paul blushed in the darkness. Now he knew what it felt like to be in love.

Christoph called again, this time adding some words that clearly expressed his urgent desire to see Paul by his side.

Paul descended the stairs and beheld a picture of his amour standing face to face with several dirty men with spades and miner’s picks and a wide gap of a tunnel, lovingly hand-made in the general direction of the Berlin Wall.

Paul looked at Christoph. Christoph looked back at Paul. They both knew that the Schwerin Posse, however mighty it could be, was no match to several dirty spade-wielding men with a hand-made tunnel behind their backs, especially if that tunnel was leading in the general direction of the Berlin Wall.

The spade-wielding men said that if the intruders made a single sound, they’d be spaded to death on the spot. Paul tried to hide behind Christoph’s back. Christoph said that if Paul ever wanted to prove himself worthy, the moment was now, and if he invented a way to cover up their new friends, he would be an honoured member of the gang, and moreover, the leader’s personal favourite.

Paul blushed, straightened all his laconic feet of height, stepped out from behind Christoph’s back, and proposed a plan. Christoph gasped, looking at him in awe and not believing how he could ever have any doubts about 5’7 ft always being his favourite height.

In the morning they went to the chief librarian and described their plan. The plan, having been elaborated during the night of vivid discussion and creative browsing through “Kama Sutra”, was approved by the chief librarian whole-heartedly.

The Schwerin Posse had undergone an emergency transformation into a rock band, which was easy, since every its member was very talented and besides many other things could play this or that musical instrument. They were granted to have the library’s basement as their rehearsal premises on one condition: the newly-formed band would take part in a contest of amateur performers alongside with two groups of folk dancers, a Pioneer choir (the one tutored by Flake, but they didn’t know yet their friend was training their rivals), and a septet of bagpipe players.

The chief librarian believed that having its own rock band would increase the library’s appeal and bring back the love for reading into the masses. He also lovingly took care of the band’s repertoire. Leaning back in his chair, he cherished the sweet sounds of his favourite song being played down in the basement.

His favourite song was called “Das Lied der Unruhende Jugend.” It reminded him of his youth.

The band didn’t mind the choice, since the words “our restless hearts call us to new horizons” perfectly matched the secret activity under the Wall.

But after playing the song non-stop for five days, the need for new material became obvious. The talented Schwerin natives decided to generate a creative impulse. It came in the disguise of Till the swimmer and basket weaver. He was the only one who could scribble some rhymed lines in the atmosphere of digging, shoving, and general paranoia. Till was a real poet.

He was also the band’s vocalist. First Christoph wanted to be the singer. After all, he was the Posse’s leader, so the duty was naturally his. But a simple comparison showed the lack of voice is a relative quality, and the Posse, being familiar with democracy, voted for the lesser evil.

The band’s unique music style developed under emergency conditions. It’s main aim was to provide music that would a) be louder than the sounds of digging and shoving, and b) help the workers maintain the rhythm of the mentioned activities.

In the ancient world of slave labour it was called to “row the stroke”.

The undermining work progressed nicely. Besides the spades and miner’s picks, battering rams were also used. To coordinate their movement, each time the ram hit the Wall, Till shouted “Rammstein”, which, as linguists say, is the German name of the tool. Besides being a good swimmer, basket weaver, and a real poet, Till was also a witty person.

This is why when the day of the music contest came and the band was asked to enter their name, they didn’t hesitate about their choice.

Naturally, they won the contest. It was hardly surprising after several months of daily rehearsals. The next day they received a postcard with warm congratulations from their sapper friends, who were now making their new home in West Berlin.

Several days later Rammstein claimed their prize and made their first recording in the official studio. The tape was then smuggled across the Wall through the tunnel. The band, being unselfish as they were, believed they could at least once take advantage of the construction they had helped to make.

END.

p. s. The second prize in the contest went to the septet of bagpipe players. They were scheduled for a recording in the same studio the next day after Rammstein. In the studio they found some drum samples left behind by the winners. But what came out of it is a quite different story…

…Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea
A. C. Swinburne, “The Garden of Proserpine”

…Naked I stand before Thee, Ocean. My clothes are shed into the foam and stolen away by the waves. Their riot has washed the last of my footprints on the sand. They grate their roar onto the rocks and moon-blanched cliffs, leap up in their cadence, begin and cease their climb, incessant and failing day and night. The cliffs will not succumb; the ebb of wasted anger turns towards the ships. Withdrawn but not defeated, the waves sink their claws of froth into the timber, and tear it apart.

How they torture her, the one which was my ship. Like a dead whale’s carcass, she lies thrown out onto a bank, stripped of all her glory. I am a Jonah vomited onto dry land, and I regret the death of my Leviathan.

***

“Sir? Wake up, sir.”

A respectful tug at his sleeve woke him up. Brown’s face was a mixture of concern and panic at such a breach of subordination, but Hornblower felt relieved. The impiety was timely; he had just had that dream again.

Its stubborn recurrence left him clueless. The “Sutherland” wasn’t the best of the ships he had sailed, and it wasn’t his favourite one. The sentence of a disappointing fate seemed to be written on her prow the moment he saw her first. The efforts he had invested into the ship appeared, in the end, to be wasted. Maybe, his dreaming about her was so uneasy because his conscience rebuked him for not having invested still more.

The deafening quiet of the Loire countryside in winter was around him. The snow-bound silence poured into the room as if the windows were not shielded with glass; the dwellers of the house seemed dormant, out of time in their hibernation. He was cut off from the life together with them, suspended between past and future in this glass-house of patient slumbers.

It was a winter of wet winds, but if there were waves still anywhere in this world, he didn’t know. The water near the house was imprisoned under ice; he couldn’t believe it was the same river that had fiercely rushed them downstream, intent on destroying anything that dared float on its surface.

He looked at the white sheets of the bed under him, then at the whitened lawn he could glimpse out of his window. The soft pallor reached across the garden and diffused into the coldness with no boundary definition. Daylight was diffused, too, opaque like fog and able to damp all sounds.

Did shipwrecks dream as well, and if they did, what were their dreams?

“Mr. Bush sends you his greetings, sir, and hopes you’ve had good rest.”

William. His isolation would not be complete while the man was with him. After all, a ship survives as long as its crew lives. The life of the “Sutherland” had been split into dozens of tinier lives, each saved only by her sacrifice. Thus her wreck had a meaning, and only thus his surrender of her had purpose.

“Tell him I’ll come to visit him as soon as I’m dressed.”

They still stubbornly adhered to the naval rules in regulating their relationships. It was a part of elaborate pretence, a thin veil of denial of what had happened.

“The Count has proposed a game of whist for the evening. Now, I dare say, Mr. Bush looks dismal.”

Hornblower grinned in sudden merriment. Any other pastime rang hollow in the quiet house, and in the end all talks abated and the hosts and their strange visitors sat still around the table, peering into the cards as if those were means to reenact the sleeping life outside. Battles were plotted and carried out between warring parties, the gaming table their battlefield and Bush’s eternal frustration.

***

“Did you sleep well, sir?” asked Bush with the shrewdness of an old spouse the moment Hornblower’s lean figure appeared in the doorframe of his room.

“And you?”

He watched the face of his officer become drawn into an obstinate mien of comfort. He had long ago learnt that Bush was a far better actor than himself: his face, now aristocratically pale from the prolonged seclusion from the sun, was able to feign expressions impenetrable in their outward content or, at least, indifference.

“We’re playing with the Count tonight.”

“Oh no, please, not me, sir.”

“Vous ne pouvez pas refuser,” parried Hornblower. He fished out a deck of cards from his pocket. Bush might have become perfect in simulating content, but his captain’s arsenal, handicapped as it was, still carried weapons effective enough to penetrate the barrier.

“Commenзons.”

“Is it necessary, sir?…”

“Absolutely. I don’t want our host to find that the only amusement in the evening will be taunting a British officer for his lack of skills.”

“Yes, sir, but is it necessary to exercise in French?”

In his cruelty he had brought his officer as near to open whining as any enemy ever dared hope to. It was a petty feat, and a dishonest one, and yet he felt appallingly smug.

The morning was only nominal in its scarce daylight; soon they had candles brought in, and Hornblower, long-sighted after years of peering into the ocean’s vast scope, found it difficult to discern the suit of the cards in the mixed illumination. He assumed Bush might be having the same trouble, which, added atop of his usual perplexity over the game’s tactics, left him devoid of any gambling vigour. With his knee propped up in a somewhat childish fear lest the opponent should cheat by peeking into his cards, he was an effigy of sacrifice, bearing his captain’s whim with patient fatality.

“I’ve been wondering, sir,” Bush proclaimed when Hornblower least expected it believing his partner to be too engrossed in contemplation of his next move, “wondering if one can grow tired with rest. Would it not be like this in Heaven – rest, and sleep, and then rest again, without a respite?”

“We should thank this place for being that way.”

“Yes, but aren’t you weary with doing nothing, sir?”

“I’m not doing nothing,” Hornblower retorted and then confessed on the spur of the moment. “Every night, I dream. Of the “Sutherland”.”

***

That evening, Comte de Gracay proposed a toast.

“To our guests – who, having been proclaimed dead, will one day raise in a resurrection that will be triumphant.”

Hornblower studied the sweet sherry in his glass. The sparkle of gold at the bottom reminded him of Spain’s vineyards which he had raided under the Mediterranean sun that seemed to be forever frozen in a shadowless noon. He didn’t want to drink – the sweetness tasted like oblivion. They were now deceased officially: indeed, for dead men – deadly wine.

A single glass brought pink to Bush’s cheeks and a desire for heedless chatter to his speech. Having quickened his bored senses, the rush of wine was stopped only by the linguistic barrier that didn’t allow Bush to express his exaltation to the fullest.

“I’m afraid I will be perfectly sleepless tonight,” he admitted to Hornblower as the evening drew to an end. Brown had excused himself into polite absence early enough, in his disciplined tactfulness shunning the intimacy the noble hosts had wished to share with their higher-ranked guests. Hornblower decided to see to how the servants would relocate his disabled officer to his bedchamber, not so much out of duty but mostly because he felt wakeful himself.

After the servants had left it took Bush a while to realise that the wine had taken the better of him in a most treacherous way.

“Would you please wake up Brown, sir?”

“Absolutely not. Let me help you.”

The drinks hadn’t brought him inebriety but created a kind of melancholic distance. He observed Bush’s embarrassment with vague, cold-blooded amusement.

“Not for the world, sir. This is…inappropriate.”

“Come on, I’m not your captain any more. Had I been titled with a lordship, maybe then it’d be inappropriate, but now we are equal.”

“We are not,” replied Bush with firm conviction, which Hornblower ignored.

He chose, however, to grant his – former, he reminded himself – officer some privacy and stayed on the doorstep to the bedroom, leaving the door open in case of emergency. The world, chased away by the sherry, seemed diminished, as if seen through the wrong end of the eyeglass; he could glimpse the white spot of Bush’s shirt in the dusk but it seemed far out of reach, its bearer but a silhouette.

“William, you look like a heron in the reeds,” Hornblower remarked in a sudden fit of poetry and bit his tongue at the potential offence of his metaphor; the silhouette wavered but managed to keep its balance.

“I’m doing my best, sir. You will soon see that I’m also able to do without help in undressing.”

The drink was putting incorrect implications in his mind, Hornblower concluded as he helped Bush hop along towards the bed. He forgot to turn away and watched, not even realising the focus of his gaze, how Bush tried to remove his clothes, vainly pulling at the wrong laces and missing the buttons.

“You’re a man full of self-conceit, William,” he diagnosed and, dropping to his knees, pushed Bush’s hands out of the way to the buckle of his trousers.

“You shouldn’t be doing that, sir…”

“If you want me to stop, say it in French,” Hornblower demanded suddenly feeling brutal, and was satisfied to see that the attempt to formulate his protest in the alien language distracted Bush from the fight with his captain’s hands.

“Tou ne devrais pas fare…”

“Faire, not fare. Shut up, William, you speak awful French.”

***

The world closed in around him abruptly and down to the very minute detail, and he fought with momentary dizziness at the shock. No longer a darkling plain of half-dream half-wakefulness, the room advanced onto him, gentle candle glow highlighting every object. The dark gap of the window and the starless night outside. The warm mahogany of the furniture, and the white sheets of the bed. Himself, straddling Bush’s hips. And Bush, unable to say a word and staring at him, mesmerized, like a mouse at the cobra.

He rolled off with the agility his body hadn’t experienced in ages. He wasn’t sure in his sorrow or regret, the same as he hadn’t been sure in his joy only the moment ago when he was still feeling the other’s body between his thighs.

He stood up, considering an apology. Under the thin sheet the contour of Bush’s body was discernable, unfamiliar in its dissymmetry. The thought of apology faded in Hornblower’s mind.

“Let me see it.”

Bush shook his head in denial and pulled the sheet closer to his chest, like a virgin holding the hem of her skirt in a sincere and futile hope it’d stop the violator.

“Let me.”

He insisted stubbornly. He put his hand on the sheet and tugged it downwards, his grip creasing the fabric. He could feel the warm relief of the body under it. Then, he could see it whole, unconcealed, mutilated, exposed to forever reproach him.

“I’m sorry.” He slid the hand away to bury his face in his palms. Dead men never rise, and shipwrecks never set sail again.

***

…Why are you haunting me? What is the meaning of your overturned keel? Why are you lying here on the sand, your desecrated ribs a ghostless waste? Has the sea itself denied you final rest and expelled you from its depths?

Winds and waves have gnawed off the flesh and colour from your beams. What is the lesson that I must learn from their bleak, bone-like whiteness? Your single surviving mast points horizontally, to a shore invisible and away from the guiding constellations. Is it to show me that I had been blind in my reckoning of your fate?

The sky over the Loire in winter is always overcast and bleak. I long to see the stars again.

***

Hornblower woke up from the painful stiffness in his back. He didn’t remember closing his eyes to sleep; he didn’t remember finding repose on the floor. Perhaps the Count’s sherry proved too strong for his weary nerves, after all. Now he was sitting with his back leaning against the bed and his cheek nested in Bush’s open palm. Except for the cheek, which had been rather comfortable throughout the night, his body ached like a dozen blasted hells.

“Bon matin,” he whispered, and Bush groaned in reply.

“Please, sir, not again! I admit my head isn’t at its brightest today – I’m afraid it was very unwise for me to risk drinking that much.”

Hornblower snickered and regretted the action at once. Every single muscle seemed to be crying in protest; he must be too old for such follies as spending his nights anywhere but in his own bed.

“Well, it’s always time good enough to learn a new phrase. You never know what, and when, will come in practical.”

“Hmm,” in a sudden insight, Hornblower had just pronounced the word that had a magical appeal to his sensible officer. “In this case I will try to do my best. What was the particular expression you had in mind, sir?”

“Je t’aime.”

“And what does it mean?”

” ‘I love you’. Perhaps the most useful phrase to know in France. And anywhere in the world, for that matter,” Hornblower added philosophically and wondered at the many things that could have been less bitter in his life if he had indeed made better and oftener use of that phrase.

“Je t’aime, sir.”

“Excellent, Mr. Bush.”

***

He listened to the thumps from the room next to his, muffled by the thick walls but still audible to his concerned ear. For the last few days Bush had been practicing the dreary and tricky task of walking on the legs one of which was artificial. Hornblower couldn’t bring himself to be present during every hour of that training. He chided himself for such weakness, and yet was unable to overcome his reluctance.

He often closed his eyes; sometimes he even pressed his palms over his ears, even if briefly, because the next moment he was already cursing himself with the same fervour Bush was cursing his awkwardness behind the wall. It was only the first time on foot that Bush was surprised at the difficulties he now faced; soon enough astonishment gave way to irritation, and then to misery.

“I will learn, sir,” he would promise Hornblower repeatedly, as if his captain was going to censure him.

I will learn, Hornblower would promise himself in silent echo and then think of the “Sutherland”. Stubbornly, much like Bush was mustering courage to conquer his maiming, he tried to puzzle out the meaning of his persistent dream.

The first ship he surrendered. He had always been wary a ship would sink when under his command. The “Sutherland” didn’t sink: it was pulled out onto a bank near Rosas and then looted of all her surviving belongings. It was a mockery of a ship’s fate – to end its life in the hands of land-treading hyenas. She should have gone down, into the swallowing sea and the tranquillity underneath its surface, forever unreachable to both friends and foes. The ship in his dreams did not resent her captain’s betrayal; she mourned her shallow grave of sand, over which the waves would never sing their eternal note of sadness.

And, instead of regret for his lost chances, instead of the dark premonition about his life and career, he found in himself only sympathy. Not only Bush had been crippled; his own legs were cut together with the masts of his ship. He wasn’t made for walking on dry land. He had forgotten how solid it could be when one fell down.

And the sky that domed over it was solid as well, as if a cup full of snow had been put over the world, and he felt blind inside.

***

After Hornblower had cracked the conundrum of the dream, his sleep became barren. It was as if he was falling into a dark pit in the evening, only to wake up a few hours later feeling more tired than before going to bed.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes in the inevitability to live through another of the many days that were so perfectly alike. Soon there was a knock on the door, but he didn’t allow himself to believe there might be anything out of the usual behind it.

“Can I come in, sir?”

Slowly, far from as steadily as he would like himself to be but yet helped by nobody, Bush stumbled into the room, a proud smile on his face and all rules of discipline forgotten. If Hornblower had been lethargic before, in a blink he was fully awake.

“William!” He searched for words that could sound an appropriate congratulation, remembered that it was his commands the consequences of which Bush had to fight, and then lost track of his thought completely. Not that Bush seemed to be expecting any voiced praise from his captain, quite satisfied simply to see the joy on his face.

“I have also learned a few new words. J’ai une envie folle de copuler avec toi, sir.”

“Goodness! Whoever has taught you that?”

“Brown, sir. He says it’s very a vernacular compliment. He assured me everybody he says it to usually glows with happiness.”

Feeling his lips stretch into a grin despite his will, Hornblower had to admit that Brown couldn’t be more right.

***

That night he climbed to the upper floor of the house, as close to the sky as he could get. The cold breeze that was quickly seeping into the room through the open window carried neither the roar nor the scent of the sea. But it carried soft murmurs of the sleeping forest below, and the smell of wet earth, and a promise of an early spring.

He had hoped the strong breeze would drive away the clouds and give him a view of the swarm of stars. The sky was still overcast. He waited, regardless of the late time and stubborn beyond reason. Billowing clouds were rushing above him like waves, and again he thought that everything was turned upside down on dry land.

A narrow gap formed briefly in the west. He looked at it with hope, knowing that somewhere out in the ocean a navigator on a ship had to be looking up just as he did, this sudden clearance his chance to find his bearings.

Instead of the swarm he saw only a single star. A lonely wolf’s star far away over the invisible ocean.

And he knew it wasn’t about death.

*End*

***
footnote about the French phrases [in order of appearance]
1. Vous ne pouvez pas refuser – You can’t refuse.
2. Commenзons – let us begin.
3. Tou ne devrais pas fare [cela] – You shouldn’t be doing that.
4. Je t’aime – I love you.
5. J’ai une envie folle de copuler avec toi – I have a mad desire to fuck you.

For those more French-inclined, there’s a nuance embedded in the [inter]play b/w ‘tu’ – informal ‘you’ and ‘vous’ – formal ‘you’.

As the long night comes we shall all fall down.

…among ashes from the stars that burn out.
…carried by solar winds that ruffle comets’ tails.
…into a hall of mirrors to reflect our debasement.

Most of all he hates mirrors.

Everywhere, siding the walls, clinging to the high ceiling, lodged onto one another in a strange sort of embryo nesting so that a tunnel of ever diminishing reflections is created, leading nowhere. Window into a window, turning on itself, and even the floor is tiled with perfectly smooth glassy surfaces.

It leaves him no room. It gives him no release. Whichever way he turns, he stares at himself, or a being that looks strikingly like him, the same features, the same paleness, the same perfection of image. These mirrors never break.

Fulgrim, they say, look at yourself. Do you like what you see?

One of these smooth rectangles has to be a door. His mind, forever caught in a feverish tumult, refuses to accept the notion of a completely isolated, static space. If he got inside, he surely can find a way out. Somehow. Some time.

That is, if time still exists here. He isn’t sure it does because before that cell, his dreams used to be timeless.

There are, however, two aspects in the room he can seek shelter in. One is the ceiling, which is mercifully high, and in the darkness that moves in thick clouds under its vaulted beams the reflection of his shape becomes tiny and unreal. Sometimes he lies on his back and stares at the reduced likeness of him above, and wonders what this toy of a man is staring at. It certainly can’t be him, not this writhing, crippled creature with pools of deep black for eyes. Sometimes he shouts at the distant figure, and then it disappears in fright behind another cloud.

Or there are still the places on the floor where his blood has spilt to. These spots, covered in disfigured clogs of faded red, reflect nothing but unfortunately, they don’t last. Soon, too soon the blood is imbibed by the floor, drawn in through the invisible pores, and here comes the shiny smoothness again.

Don’t look, he commands himself, and of course, each time curiosity takes the better of him.

He likes to watch, in fact. Seeing himself from any possible angle at any moment enhances his senses beyond imagination, and the cold thrill of mixed emotions makes him shiver disgracefully.

The daemon has kept its promise and acted up to every single word of it. Indeed, his imagination has long been humbled into total perplexity of submission and awe at the untiring ingenuity of the daemon’s devices. Knowledge, experience and expertise in every possible vile and violence has become his, first hand. He knows everything about the human body and its limits, and then some. He could fill a book with ideas as to how to test it; in fact, he already does.

One of the many walls of the room refuses to absorb moisture and is still covered with his writings. He crawls across the floor, dips his finger into an open vein on his arm and straightens to add another line.

Sometimes it is a full sentence, and sometimes just one word. Now and then he reads aloud what he has written and chides himself for his poor style.

Ferrus. Ferrus. Ferrus.

Too many repetitions.

***

To keep his senses awake, the long needles that have been driven along his nerves stir and shift at random intervals. He vaguely remembers something of this kind was employed by the Adeptus Mechanicus to link a titan and its moderators together. Thin threads of steel, wormlike, underlie his skin in a net-like skeleton. The places where the needles went in are continuously inflamed and swollen, and when the infectious burn becomes too hot he scratches at the sores until his broken nails catch a loose end of the wire, and his whole body convulses in shattering pain. Now he knows better than to try and pull at the ends in a vain attempt to draw them out.

The uses of this inner wiring are multiple. At the beginning, when he was determined to conquer the daemon, the impulses sent through the threads rendered him immobile, and his own body turned traitor on him, leaving him with no option but to shout curses and obscenities at his own reflections. Being helpless was new, and somewhere on the deepest level he enjoyed it.

He keeps on betraying himself in every new torture the daemon devises.

The electrifying sting never grows old. His modified physique is still human, and the daemon makes sure he never finds the redemption in turning numb to the anguish. But still, he discovers a way to cheat by shifting the angle just by a split of an attitude, and so torment becomes expiation, pain – a means of cleansing.

Of course, the creature from the Sea of Souls that has taken possession of his body and locked him in this cell sees the trick and does its best to counteract before the prisoner convinces himself he has moved from hell to purgatory. He is frozen with horror at first when he beholds his new tormentor, his nightmare returning to haunt him in his wakefulness.

Many a time he has dreamt of seeing his brother again, but not now, not here. Not this way.

Ferrus Manus pays no heed to his protests, like none of the ghosts that have visited him before did.

“Brother,” he says, as if it were one of their normal conversations, “what have you done to yourself?”

He can’t answer. For the life of him, he can’t answer and only stares at the poorly healed scar running across his brother primarch’s throat. The ugly wound still bleeds, and the gap opens with each word Ferrus pronounces in a twisted imitation of speech. When Manus falls silent, expecting a reply, the wound freezes open, like a wide toothless grin.

“Don’t you like it?” asks the ghoul and points to his cut throat, where the blood is fresh, and red, and bubbling, saturated with the air he has drawn in to speak. “Come on, brother, take responsibility for your actions and admire what you have done.”

The daemon lied. He was promised oblivion, but he received none. He is sprawled on the floor in a helpless, defenseless heap of naked flesh, and can only watch, unable even to direct his gaze elsewhere but on the ghost. Ferrus observes his frail state and smiles sadly, drawing his finger across the slit on his throat absent-mindedly.

“What a wreck you are, Fulgrim,” he says in kind reprove and brings the reddened finger to his lips to lick the blood off the chrome-coloured skin. “Come. Come, and taste your victory.”

He can’t resist the command. He rises from the floor, feeling a wave after wave of neural stimulations wash over him with each step, agonizingly sharp as ever. His brother watches his limp progress with unhappy amusement.

“Have you forgotten what I taste like?”

He hasn’t. He has forgotten nothing, and he could rebuild the image of his brother from his memories of smell, touch and taste as easily as he used to do when their missions in the Great Crusade drove them galaxies apart. Perhaps this is what his mind is doing right now, for this apparition can’t be real, shouldn’t be real.

The wound looks very valid, though. Mesmerized, he reaches up and presses his lips against its sore edges. Manus gives out a short, surprised gasp and presses his brother’s head closer to prolong the kiss.

“It stops to hurt when you’re doing it.”

It might have been only a whisper but it still makes the bleeding wound open up even more, and drops of blood fill Fulgrim’s mouth, making him back off. Each drop is like molten lead, and he staggers as they burn their way towards his stomach, force him to double up and shiver in excruciating convulsions when his body tries to vomit the alien substance.

“Purge,” says Manus coldly, cruelly.

That he would very much like to, but he can’t. Every muscle of his body strains, but the spasms bring nothing out, the droplets of blood forever swallowed and digested by his being just like the killing of his own brother has become part of his history. He looks up at Manus and tries to say that it is beyond his abilities, but his sore throat refuses to produce a sound.

“Let me help you,” the black giant concedes.

The words are what he has been waiting for, what he has been dreaming of, doing his best to keep those visions secret from the daemon. His brother is towering over him, and he watches the silver hand reach for his face without even a thought of resistance. The feel of this metallic skin always astonished him, and once again he finds that where there should have been the coldness of iron there’s actual warmth and softness of flesh. He bathes in the feeling and the memories it brings as the ghost presses his fingers against his lips, traces the outline of his mouth and then pushes forward, demanding entry.

Deeper, deeper. He’d have urged Manus to go on, if only he could speak. As it is, he can’t even take a breath, he chokes on the largeness of the intruder in his throat, and it takes all of his willpower to command his body into cooperation. When the hand finally withdraws, he is again spread impotent on the floor, all the bile the daemon’s devices had pumped into him leaving in a seemingly endless rush of fluids. When it does stop, he looks up and manages a tiny shade of a smile.

“You are truly inside me now.”

Ferrus Manus tilts his head slightly in a manner devastatingly reminiscent of the times they still discussed the plans how to better promote their father’s directives into reality, and his more sophisticated brother would often surprise him with a cunning stratagem.

“If you say so, Fulgrim. I don’t know where I am now.”

This is the moment to be made into a turning point. Whether it is his mind showing things or the daemon’s manipulations, he intends to make the most of it to his benefit. He struggles to stand up and clings to his brother for support, noting all the while how his pale flesh merges with the black contours of the ghost’s shape. He continues his climb upwards like vine embracing a rock, and Ferrus raises an arm in protest as the weakness of his victim turns into compelling seduction.

If the daemon had intended this apparition to drive his prisoner into a state of cowering fear, he is grossly mistaken.

“Can you forgive me, brother?”

“I’d have died a thousand deaths if only it could save me from having to say ‘no’ to you, ever.”

Ferrus’s eyes gleam with the same shade of warm silver as in the times long past, when their love was still unblemished. With his arms entwined around the ghost’s neck and his legs forcefully locked around its waist, Fulgrim revels in how correct and intact he has preserved his memories. It feels right down to the tiniest of details, and he chuckles contentedly at discovering once again that not only Ferrus’s hands are made in the likeness of mercury. It makes him feel engulfed in fire, but who else than he, nicknamed in honour of a fabulous bird from ancient myths, is better suited to accept it?

It has always been like this, every time pleasure mixing with pain, and he wonders if he has his brother to blame for getting him addicted to this strange mixture of sensations. After all, a primarch’s body wasn’t designed for anything but waging war, and when they first tried to tame their nature into something entirely different, it had to be the initial step to damnation. He doesn’t care; never did, and isn’t going to start now. He welcomes the pain and the fire, and triumphs when he feels the thin nerve wires under his skin melt and burn to ash in the heat.

“Enough,” says Manus eventually and pushes him away, gently but with iron resolution.

No. No. He is laid down like an old burden, its bearer determined to turn away and leave it behind. All dignity forgotten, he crawls across the floor on all fours, begging, pleading, promising things he wouldn’t have been able to give even in the best of his days, ready to do anything to stop his brother from dissolving in the mirrors.

“Don’t leave me. Please. Don’t.”

He has failed to even make his brother take one final look back.

***

But his brother is still with him, even if locked within the mirrors. After that one visitation, he is forever accompanied by the vision of the two of them, and it’s always the same scene, the one that ended in the death of Ferrus Manus and his own imprisonment in this cell of true illusions.

“It wasn’t me,” he repeats time after time as the mirrors replay the same sequence over and over again. But even if he’s telling the truth, it doesn’t seem to help. It’s always him delivering the final blow, it’s the same image of perfection he has always strived to achieve, and he recognizes himself in the confident, powerful creature that has defeated his brother.

He has to create a difference. There must be a way to differentiate between himself and the daemon-possessed warrior in the mirrors. If only he had any of his apothecaries’ tools, or at least the chisels he used to employ for sculpting… but he has nothing of the kind. He feels around the floor in fruitless search, but the only thing he finds is his own waste that the glassy pores have refused to consume.

He laughs, his eyes never leaving his double in the reflection, as he applies a handful after a handful of foul-smelling substance to his face, his white hair, and eventually his whole body. Right. Just so. Until the mirror itself is so appalled that it refuses to reproduce him.

There is a moment of victory when the images of a glorious warrior in purple and gold standing over a kneeling figure in black start to fade. He stands before the perfectly blank mirror, triumphant exhilaration thrilling him to ecstasy, until a new shadow is born inside the glass. He takes a step back, reluctant to recognize what he sees, and yet the memory comes as readily as before.

What he sees in the mirror now is the perfect likeness of the portrait Serena d’Angelus once painted of him after the victory on Laeran and which he had always been jealous of for the unnatural vividness and intensity of colour.

“Full circle,” proclaims the daemon, this time using his lips to articulate the words.

***

He refuses to admit defeat. It doesn’t matter if all the prophecies have come true. It doesn’t matter if the daemon has robbed him of all choices.

The many reflections mimic his snarl, but he refuses to notice the similarity of his grimace to the one he had often seen on the portrait. If the route to escape is blocked in one direction, he will try the other one.

If he can’t get outside, he can always go in deeper.

This time he doesn’t care for the absence of suitable tools. His own fingers will do; his broken nails are sharp enough to break the skin around his eyes, and he will find enough strength to drive them as deep into his eye-sockets as needed.

If he can’t stop the mirrors from showing him unwanted things, he still can stop himself from seeing what he doesn’t wish to see.

***

He is floating, swimming weightless in a sea of blood, tears and his own waste dispersed in that amorphous translucent matter that fills the spaces of the Immaterium. Perhaps it is the amniotic fluid of the universe; perhaps he should stop struggling to stay afloat and drown in its warm, welcoming embrace.

Have no fear, for I have come to take you home, his father once said when they first met on a distant planet.

Now he is ready to go.

There are so many things in the Emperor’s Children primarch that Ferrus Manus should find annoying. Measuring the length of Fulgrim’s stateroom with wide, agitated strides, he listens to his own footsteps thunder on the fine marble and unwittingly curbs his temper to move with more grace and less noise, only to chuckle a moment later at the futility of the effort. None of Fulgrim’s whimsy sophistication will ever cling to him, and he should indeed feel natural being annoyed with everything around him.
Take, for instance, the furniture with its overall outline distinctly tipped horizontal and seductively inviting to recline and relax – and waste precious time in revelry, no doubt. He knows the danger; he has come to taste the power of this temptation at its fullest. He steers clear of one particularly appealing soft chair and almost runs into a table of finely wrought iron carrying an array of crystal goblets that chime at him accusingly. Navigating this room is no easier than picking your way through a cluster of stars, and he thinks he can feel the fire.
…Or the debris of half-shaped stone in the corner, which his brother refers to as ‘art’ and which leaves Ferrus perpetually nonplussed as to what, how and when it should come to signify. As far as he has been able to see, none of the statues is ever completed. At times the unfinished state of the marble cries out to the artisan in him, and his silver hands burn with the urge to pick up Fulgrim’s tools and finish what his brother has begun. Work thus suspended makes him unbalanced, and Fulgrim has many a time laughed at him saying that he understands nothing in the nature of artistic quest. Damn well he doesn’t, but he’d do without the omnipresent marble powder and splinters of stone turning up at most unexpected places like the bed or the inside of his boots.
…And he shouldn’t have thought about the bed, either. A silk bed, at that. Unfathomable. The populace probably thinks that primarchs never sleep, least enjoy loitering between those meshes of crimson when duty calls for war and cruelty. He stops by the bedside and runs his palm over the glossy fibre; it warms to the touch instantly, and its vibrant colour looks regal against the mercury of his hand.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, brother.”
Fulgrim reappears in the room, his majestic armour replaced by a robe of simple beige. With none of the usual trinkets to adorn his elevated status he looks all but naked, and in a flash of embarrassing insight Ferrus realizes it’s almost so. The soft folds of the robe touch smooth, naked skin, a pretence of cover that would have made anyone else look vulnerable, but Ferrus thinks that it is he who is vanquished.
“That’s been a long while,” he grumbles in another vain attempt to conceal his discomfort.
“Well then, will you let me find a way to make it up for my fault?”
Every time Ferrus Manus enters his brother primarch’s room he tells himself to feel annoyed; and yet, when he leaves, much later, joy and ache mixing in one as he knows there might be ages before they meet again, he feels that he just can’t be.

*A phone rings; shuffle through the dark room; rattle; curses*

“Hallo? Felix?”
“Arghm…yes?”
“It’s me.”
“…”
“Are you asleep?”
“I was. What’s up, partner?”
“Felix, I’m bored.”

*Some more aggressive noises made in the dark while the receiver is covered with a palm.*

“Jeez, Hades, it’s three in the morning, and you’re calling only to inform me that you’re bored?”
“Yes, very much so. It’s so gruelling.”
“You have my heartfelt sympathies. Why don’t you find a business to amuse you?”
“Can’t. The pubs are closed, cinemas are closed, everything is closed, even the libraries.”
“Then go roam the area, I don’t know, find a hooker or something?”
“On a bank holiday? Is your cerebral matter still in slumber, partner? The nationwide twenty four recreational hours have stopped the world rotation, and I’m sitting here all alone facing the vacuum of solitude. Stop sighing so miserably, Felix, I’m so bored I’m on the verge of wanting to stick sharp pointy things in people, and since there are no other people around, I may be the first victim.”
“Great idea, if you ask me.”
“You’re so awfully kind but I was hoping you’d have other suggestions.”
“Like what? What on earth we can do over the phone?”
“Talk, obviously.”

*bed creaking as the weight is reposed back on it, to the accompaniment of an audible intake of breath full of hopeless resignation*

“All right. About what?”
“How’s the weather?”

*more curses*

“Nightly. There’s a crescent of the moon in the sky, if you want to know the details.”
“Right, I can see it too. A waning one. The forecast for the morning promises a day of fine, clear weather without precipitation and with only occasional clouds. Couldn’t be nicer.”
“True. It couldn’t. Actually, I wouldn’t mind some precipitation.”
“Unless you forget your umbrella. By the by, what are you wearing?”
“Ha…grhm. The usual stuff. I mean, the things people put on when they intend to sleep. I mean, what kind of a question is that?”
“A trivial one. Do you want to know what I’m wearing?”
“Not really. Should I?”
“If such details are important to you.”
“I don’t care about the details! Who’s talking about details?”
“You. You said a crescent moon was important. I wonder what it was that you implied.”
“Nothing. I implied nothing. I only said the moon is out there.”
“Don’t you find that a little bit romantic?”
“…”
“What did you say?”
“I said, maybe. A little bit. If one is in the right mood.”
“I find that a sheen of moonlight makes one prone to sentiment, doesn’t it? This silver veneer brings forth the things you didn’t see in the day.”
“If you say so.”
“What are you doing right now?”
“Besides wasting the time I might have spent sleeping peacefully? I’m lying in my bed, and if the next thing you ask of me besides this ridiculous conversation is to get out of it and go somewhere…”
“Oh, no, I will do nothing that cruel. How’s your bed, by the way?”
“Comfortable.”
“They have such atrocious beds in hotels, partner, so big and impersonal as if a whole generation have slept their lives in them, which is probably the truth. I detest hotels. Company and sleep always elude me in places like this.”
“Too bad. Try jerking off if you can’t fall asleep otherwise.”
“How?”
“What do you mean, how? You don’t know how to jerk off?”
“No. I mean, how do you want me to do that?”
“Why the fuck should I know? Try to think of some tasty scenario.”
“Felix, you probably misunderstood me. The fact that I’m calling you at the wee hours in the morning, even knowing that you’re as good at keeping social conversation as a dead rabbit, shows that I’ve run out of other scenarios.”
“Well. Well. You won’t just hang up and leave me alone, will you?”
“Nope.”
“And what if I hang up first?”
“Then the next time we meet I’ll kill you, slow and painful.”
“I knew you’d say that…”
“Hallo? Are you still there, partner?”
“Yes. *mumbled swear-words* As if I can go anywhere. I’m no good with graphical descriptions. I need an object at hand to demonstrate what I say with.”
“Well, have you got your…err, object ready?”
“Yes…yes. And you?”
“Several minutes ago. When you first mentioned the moon, actually. Now give me some hard-core dirt, please.”
“All right, let me think… You see her in a bar, she’s young, blonde, and has curves in all the right places. You treat her to a few drinks, and when she’s stoned you pick her up and drag to your car, where you rope her tight. She moans as she sees what’s coming her way, and you beat her a coupla times, just to show that you’re serious about it…”
“Is this your interpretation of courting women?”
“Shut up, you little cocksucker! You’re such a great lay, I just want to fuck you till you can’t walk anymore. I’ll cum all over you, but before that I want to put my dick all the way down your throat so that you can’t babble anymore, and you’ll suck, you’ll lick and suck me off till you choke with my come, and you’ll swallow every drop of it and thank me afterwards. Then I’ll bend you over and bang you long and hard, I will slide inside you all the way till not an inch more fits in, and you’ll forget the days when you were still tight. I’ll pound you, first slowly, leisurely because we have all the time in the world, and you’ll open up and spread before me, and then I’ll fuck you harder and harder, in and out of your pretty tight arse so that you beg for mercy, and then I’ll fill you with my cum until it flows out and leave you lying there so dirty and used like you should be, bitch…”
“…”
“…”
“That was pretty much cliché, partner, but apart from that, not bad. Not bad at all.”
“Thank you. My pleasure.”
“Heh, I bet. One more question before I try to sleep again, which will probably be successful this time… Who did you fantasise about?”
“Lola Vavoom.”
“Bastard!”
“I love you too, partner.”

I emerged into the fading daylight from the halls of the Dashwood estate with a long sigh of relief. The surrounding landscape was as perfect as it had always been since penned by Austen. The breeze was light and calming, woodpigeons chirped the same old melody of idleness, and the haze was as soft as it must have been in the original England hovering on the brink of the Napoleonic wars. I was never certain where this particular kind of haze came from, but whether it was the effect of temporal distance between my ‘now’ and that of Norland, or it was the wear imposed on the book by countless re-readings, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Austen could make the most of rural settings; well, to give them credit, Jurisfiction could, too.

I went down the porch and considered the inappropriateness of taking off my shoes in favour of a barefoot walk across the lawn. Decorum against fatigue was always a battle with predictable outcome: I shed my footwear and stood still for a moment letting my toes pretend to be roots growing into the finely groomed grass. Critics might claim that ‘Sense and Sensibility’ had many fortes, but if asked right then what Austen’s best piece of the narrative was, I’d say, the gardener’s skills.

Enjoying the feel of the silky, weed- and wither-free grass under my feet, I strolled across the lawn towards a cluster of ancient oak trees. Their trunks were wide enough to hide behind, and that I did as I settled down on the ground still warm after a sunny day. Saying thankyou to the pigeons that were described only as chirping and not performing anything else from their physiological functions, I closed my eyes and prepared to drift away.

I could fill a list with the reasons for feeling tired. Kids, family, a writer for a husband, which was delicate issue even at the best of times, and writer’s block never makes times better. Delicate issues were wherever I pointed my finger at, starting with my home and ending with my job, or rather, jobs – in a very complicated plural. The business was underfed both on its official carpet-selling side and on the more tender underbelly of covert SpecOps duties; while I was quite used to being on fixed rations in the SpecOps, the downturn in our carpet industry was particularly invidious. One would think that food, carpets, and coffins would always be in demand; why then we were doing so poorly?

Another thing that bothered me was, to put it concisely, that there was too much…me. I led a double life in reality as I hid from Landen the truth about my twofold activity in ‘Acme Carpets’, and so had to be always careful about not mixing the version he knew about with the version he didn’t. Having been duplicated in fiction, too, wasn’t making my life any easier.

“Here you are, ma’am,” chimed a gentle but enthusiastic voice from behind a tree, and Thursday5 emerged from the shade. “I was wondering where you disappeared. Are you all right?”

I looked into her concerned face and promised myself never to wear any such facial expression. It seemed alien on me.

“I’m fine.”

“I’m sure that moment of dizziness you had…”

“I’m fine,” I repeated emphatically, and my cadet sat down beside me with a sad sigh.

“With all respect,” she began as she straightened the nature-friendly fabric of her pink skirt, “you don’t look like you are. That’s hardly surprising with the lifestyle you’ve been following.”

“I thought we’ve discussed that already. Vegetarianism, yoga, and healthy calories, I told you that’s not my thing.”

“And neither is bookjumping.”

I turned to look at her closely, and the dizziness returned with a vengeance the moment I moved my head. My luck was that there was solid oak to lean my back against.

“I saw it, ma’am,” Thursday5 confessed in an embarrassed tone. “There was one time I was afraid you’d faint.”

She was right. The sensations I had when crossing the border between the real and the written, and even within different domains of the written, were like a kaleidoscope of images, all twisted into a mad swirl of colours, textures, and sounds. I didn’t navigate that borderline space well, but I had innocently assumed my predicament was an inner one. Well, apparently it was not.

“If you’d only consider that, ma’am,” the 5th continued tentatively, “there are ways to facilitate the process.”

I was about to cut her short suspecting that she’d again lapse into a sermon about holistic fitness, but then thought better of it. I wasn’t a natural bookjumper, and every little tip I could learn counted.

“Go on.”

“Oh!” She sat up eagerly, all keen again. “Did you know that a very important factor in how easily you move through fiction is the degree of your inner tension?”

I couldn’t hide a grimace of pain. There she was at it again; no matter how she tried, she wasn’t going to get me into meditation, or opening up to the divine guidance, or whatever she’d been practicing.

“But it is! The more tense you are, the harder you cling to the stressful settings, and the harder it is to let go!” She beamed at me triumphantly as if she’d just proven a difficult theorem. “Thus the key to easy and comfortable bookjumping is first and foremost the reduction of your stress. And I dare say,” here she leaned closer to me with a conspiratorial air, “you *are* stressed.”

That would be useless to deny. I shifted so that my back was more conveniently pressed against the oak and felt all the years of my rather eventful life weigh down on the tired spine.

“What do you propose then? Connecting with my inner essence? Tranquil music? A contact with a powerful healing life force?”

“All of those would be good recipes,” she nodded with a smile that I’d call cunning, “but in fact I meant…Tantric yoga.”

She looked at me, obviously waiting for reaction.

“I said, no yoga.”

“Tantric yoga. That’s not the kind you see on TV in programmes for housewives.”

“Sorry, but I fail to notice the difference.”

Thursday5 smiled again with that annoying air of someone much better informed and proud of it.

“Oh, let me explain. Tantra is about realising the truth of your body and thus realising the truth of the universe. This is done through special rituals that activate the energy centres of your body called chakras…”

“Hey, hey, wait! I have no time for such pointless theorising, and frankly, my mind is full already…”

“Tell me, ma’am, do you feel discomfort at the base of your spine?”

“Uhm…yes,” I admitted reluctantly.

“And in your chest, and near the heart, and in your throat, and forehead?”

I nodded since all of that was true, especially the bit about the forehead and the wrinkles that burrowed across it from contemplating my problems too much.

“Then it means all of your gateways to higher energy are hopelessly clogged!” she exclaimed victoriously.

“Well, and yours…aren’t?” I asked with caution wondering how it could be when we looked virtually the same, wrinkles and other age marks included.

“I take care of them regularly. Look, it’s really not difficult at all once you learn to do it properly. Let me show you?”

She moved to kneel in front of me and assumed a businesslike attitude of a skilled nurse. I considered the offer, concluded that it’d hardly make me feel worse, checked again that we couldn’t be seen from the house, and gave in.

“Good! Then may I ask you to change places with me?”

“What?”

“We’d both be more comfortable if you’re seated in front of me. That’d give me easier access.”

With a desperate sigh I crawled away from the tree. She wriggled into my old place, straightened her skirt again diligently, and patted her lap.

“Now, take off your jacket and lean back on me.”

I gave her a suspicious look over my shoulder.

“Is it some kind of massage?”

“Yes, in a way.”

All I knew was that I didn’t like her smile at that moment, and yet I did as instructed and tried not to think how ridiculous we must have looked from aside. She immediately placed her hands on my shoulder in what, I had to admit, was a light and gentle touch.

“Mind you, my husband gives better back rubs,” I grumbled as her fingers began to squeeze and press.

“Sure he does,” Thursday5 murmured dangerously close to my ear. “But the difference is, his is quite another body.”

I lost track of her actions as I tried to figure out the innuendo of her remark, and came back to full awareness only when her palms were suddenly over my breasts.

“What are you doing?” It was hard to picture a fifty-two years old lady jumping up from the ground but I came damn close to doing exactly that.

“This is for your heart chakra,” my cadet informed me in perfectly cold blood while I experienced a violent rush of crimson to my cheeks.

“Stop that immediately!”

“..and that chakra in your case is best activated by…”she carried on as if I hadn’t said a word and then did something as horrendous as rubbing my nipple in a very funny fashion. “By this.”

I was going to grab her hands and reinstate my authority by pushing them away from me with all firmness when something strange and long forgotten rippled through my body. I frowned trying to remember, and the images that came to my mind made me flush even more. I never liked to remember myself as a sixteen year old, and what I did back then in the safe darkness of my room was the stuff my happily married memory should have stayed quiet about.

Anyway, her hands were quicker than my thoughts, and when I had finally located the first funny sensation her digits were already massaging my thighs and that something that was between them and where only Landen’s fingers had wandered with any kind of legitimacy.

“This is…” I gasped, and she readily interrupted.

“Familiar?”

That was the question best left unanswered if I were to maintain any kind of authority over my surprisingly skilled cadet.

“The matter is,” the 5th explained matter-of-factly, “that I know your body as well as you do, which is due to the fact that it is, to put it simply, exactly like my body. It *is* my body, if we dismiss all the pesky details, and that gives us a unique advantage your husband can never have.”

“Is this how you clean your energy centres?” I asked, somewhat meekly. “Regularly?”

Before I could phrase that difficult question her fingers had already unzipped my jeans and dived underneath…much farther underneath.

“Yes, exactly. I choose to stick to the old ways, and that helps my body remember how it felt when it was young.”

What I felt right then and there was my tongue being dissociated with my mind and unable to protest, while the mind curiously made bets where Thursday5’s finger would move next, and won each time.

“Your problem is that you’re not in touch with your sensitive aspect,” she told me, and her digit tickled a place inside me where it was warm and wet. “And now I’m going to reconnect you to your body.”

And that she did. Three times in a row. I felt a tinge of regret as I admitted Landen never could beat that record.

Woodpigeons still sang their song when her hand and my, eh, chakra again assumed their separate existence. I gazed languidly at the evening sky and wondered with a distant sort of amusement that the sky was perhaps the only truly unchangeable thing in both reality and fable.

“You will not tell anyone about that, cadet?” It was too late to fake a commanding voice, but my honour would be shattered if I didn’t attempt it.

“It’s nobody’s business what I do with myself,” Thursday5 assured me with a wink. “I only hope you won’t choose to stay deaf to the reconnection of our selves. After all, like cures like.”

The down there is made of cold, silence, and calm. In the depths of green and black, silky seaweeds idly caress the bare whiteness of bones. The chasers and the chased are equal in their nakedness, and the current alone, disinterested in the nuances of human fights, touches the underside of a Muslim corsair’s rib only to glide lazily a second (a day, an age) later into the vacant skull of a Spanish Jesuit.
Down there is no place for the living. The living are supposed to slither over the surface like water striders whose thin legs never pierce the subtle film of the water. The dead observe them with amusement from the depth, trying to decipher the meaning of the shadows that, waveringly, streak the ocean’s sand bed even on the sunniest of days.
Coy, with the numbness of a condemned, pictures clearly in his mind how inexplicably, out of nowhere, a movement is born in the silt and sand, and empty skulls stare at him with emeralds for their eyes.
LCS: the Law of Confirmed Superstition.

2. Off Watch
Fandom: Ahab’s Wife, S.J. Naslund.
hints at femslash

“He is no more. Never would I have said that, had I only been able to sustain my belief in the opposite any longer.”
Mary’s eyes were clear like a frosty winter morning.
“Una, let them rest there, in the deep. Let Ahab find the serenity he never had in his life. Let yourself live in peace.”
She leant forth to place a cold, chaste kiss on my cheek. From now on, everything would be different. No more nights spent under the high canopy of star-dotted sky, when my eyes wontedly and hopelessly searched the indistinct foaming line that demarcated the graded dunes of ‘Sconset and the sea. No more of the bitter draught from the door which I had grown used to keep unlocked. And when another ship would anchor in the harbour, there would be one waiting woman less on the pier.
I could still feel the dry, bleak despair of Mary Starbuck’s kiss on my cheek. And I knew that if, on a cold, drizzly night, I heard uneven, thundering thuds of steps outside and a knock on the door, I would feel no joy but fear.

3. Charming Morpheus
Fandom: Hornblower, C.S. Forester

When the waves are splashing against the ship’s bow and the wind sings in the tightly drawn rigging, Captain Hornblower’s nights are filled with good dreams. He succumbs to slumbers after a day of routine concerns, safe in the knowledge that the set course is right and relieved to feel his seasickness surrender to fatigue. In the silence between the bells, he drowns in utmost calm, and his soul is set adrift on a smooth ocean of dreams.
But occasional storms send a ripple over that ephemeral ocean, too. With undefined anxiety the captain feels his dream is being intruded by something that isn’t supposed to be there. Maria, with a hearty flush on her plump cheeks framed in the best of her holiday bonnets, effectively navigates the deck making a beeline to the captain’s cabin. Her shrewd eyes take note of every detail: the mess of a uniform on her husband’s shoulders, his unkempt, haggard face. He doesn’t spare himself, he’s too upstanding about his duties, he’s indulging too much in the conversation with his First Lieutenant and pays no attention to his spouse…
“Mr. Bush, you take no care of Horry. Surely, he misses his meals and forgets to put on warm underwear. He needs a female hand – the hand of his wife.”
“Maria,” Hornblower interrupts sternly before his officer finds words to rejoin. “In a certain sense, Mr. Bush is better than a wife.”

The ship’s bow continues to break the waves, and the tall masts are clad with sails that are full of wind. Only at the open sea Hornblower sees truly good dreams.

When they gave her a feminine name, they bestowed her with all the grace of the thousands of women, the refinement of the thousands of years that had passed since Croesus ruled his Lydia into prosperity and wealth. The land had been replaced with water, and now the ‘Lydia’ was afloat on the other side of the world, as far from her home as the winds and waves would carry her.

Her elegance belied her agile strength. When the ocean murmured sleepily at night, her tall masts punctured the stars. Her sleek keel would stand no loitering, and when the seamstresses of the British wharfs laboured on the white canvas of her sails, they dreamed those would wed the breeze. In the dark, gloomy bowels of the workshops, they dreamed of the great banks of golden sand and the blue enamel of the sky above, the things they would never see. And every stitch they made, the thread seasoned with their laughter and the salt of their tears even before the sails tasted sea air, was a promise of the fulfillment of their dreams. The ship, clad in this whiteness, was their messenger.

Then, she was anchored in the harbour, the sails neatly furled and the lines of her masts dark against the grey sky. Most of all she looked like an old spinster, dry and sapped and not hoping any more, as if resigned to be moored there for all eternity. Upon his approach she rocked slightly in shy anticipation, the wooden board scraping against the pier. At once she was a cat chafing against a newcomer’s leg asking for a kindly pat.

She was certain she would entice him, enmesh him in the web of her shrouds. She would hold him secure, as tenderly as only a mother would do. She readily opened the depth of her hull to him, and engulfed him in her warm, slender confinement where he would feel contained. Through the creaking of her timbers she spoke to him and told him how she wanted to be under way, how she longed to be steered. Like all good women of old, she wanted to be subdued by a good man who deserved her.

And she knew that he did. When she wanted, she could speak in a million of sounds, and every plank, every rope of her rigging had a voice. He listened to them all, eagerly and attentively. He was a good captain. He was a good husband.

But she felt that inside he was empty. With him in his cabin – a tiny cell of her ample wooden body and yet the most important one – she felt completed, and yet she knew that he wasn’t. She was not enough for him; and then her shrouds would sing a sad song, and her deck heaved as if on a black tidal wave. It pained her to see that of all cases, this was the only one when he turned a deaf ear to all her signs and refused all her comforts. He was a good captain, but at times he was blind.

He tried hard, so hard, to pretend that all was well. He was a Tantalus, condemned by gods to thirst forever, but unlike the hero of the myth, he had the one able to quench his thirst within easy reach. At night, with truly female curiosity and with no scruples of propriety, the ‘Lydia’ listened to the soft whispers of her crew in their dreamings, and she knew them all.

She longed to be able to share what she had spied on in all her well-intended omniscience. In the dead of the night, rocking on the rippled waters, she longed for her own dreams to be so powerful as to override the captain’s troubled thrashing. In her dream, he would see himself inside her like a child in the womb, enveloped in tender and demure darkness that would tell nobody that he was no longer alone. She pictured him embraced and loved, and cherished, and endeared, bathing with no restraints in the human warmth. Her timber would warm to the soft, sweet touch of caress, dry wood coming alive with the flow of feeling as two bodies held each other, limbs entwining. She would see no crime in it, and she would never give him away.

But in the morning her reverie ended, and she felt the captain’s feet pace her quarterdeck sullenly, the First Lieutenant standing so close and yet as if a world away, his eyes still hazy with unrequited dreams. Like a true woman, she noticed the discomfort in the captain’s commands, and trembled undecidedly on her course, echoing his anxious hesitation. But like all women, she was endowed with endless patience and knowledge that men, despite all their bravado, are essentially weak. She would prompt, and she would guide him as he guided her, and in the end all would be well.

Hostage

An event postponed isn’t an event cancelled. Shifting it farther future-wards on the timeline doesn’t mean abolishing the imminence of the thing to come, and The Antichrist is easily made into An Antichrist with as much as a twitch of the diabolical genitalia.

Those were the lines Crowley’s thoughts ran along, minus high-flown abstractness and plus some personal obscenities thrown in for good measure. Obscenities, in a way, sweetened the pill; not in too long a way, though.

He was sitting in his London flat with the firm intention to sit through the Apocalypse. Apocalypses, he mused, were becoming a regular occasion in his routine. As with rain, snow and other natural annoyances, the wisest thing was to sit [sleep, pace across the room] it out. He was lucky to be left out in all the evil infant fun, which was good, and dismally anticipated to be yet called on stage before the final curtain fell, which was bad. Together, both facts worked as a sort of counterbalance.

He was perched on the axis of this treacherous equilibrium when the TV screen came alive. It had been blank ever since the broadcast network went down, and now the screen was of that special colour that you get tuning to a dead channel. Like all the times this definition was used before, this didn’t bode well.

CROWLEY, began the voice of the dead channel with the same originality it had exhibited throughout the millennia. I HAVE A MESSAGE FOR YOU. ARE YOU THERE?

“Yes, Master,” he said, since it was pointless to deny the obvious. The eye had always been upon him, and now it was ready to blink.

WE’VE BEEN ADVANCING, CROWLEY.

“Good for us,” he muttered, although not too loud.

IT IS TIME TO RIGHT YOUR WRONGS. WE GIVE YOU A SECOND CHANCE. ARE YOU GLAD?

“Overjoyed, my lord,” Crowley murmured, and the screen showed him its satisfaction with a particularly chaotic ripple of gray noise. “Any more odd babies to replace?”

NOT THIS TIME. IT HAS BEGUN. THUS WE PROCLAIM YOU A BLOODHOUND OF OUR LEGIONS. AND HELL FOLLOWED WITH HIM, AS THEY SAY. DO YOU FEEL HONOURED?

“Yes, lord,” said Crowley as it was the only answer expected from him.

THEN GO AND PLACE OUR MARK ONTO THEM. HARVEST WELL, CROWLEY, AND THE NUMBER YOU REAP WILL BE YOUR CHANCE OF REDEMPTION.

The channel switched off abruptly, in style with the usual no-nonsense, straight-in-your-face messaging of the Powers That Be, which had had enough of exegesis and would leave no unnecessary wordy material for expositors to chew on.

Crowley never liked it, even when appreciating the laconic inevitability of the phrasing at certain times. Each of such transmissions usually yanked him out of control over things and, which was more important, over himself, reminding once again that he was nothing but branded property destined to obey, a tool, and extension of a body that was greater than him on quite a disparate scale. The illusion of free will was particularly bitter to part with.

He knew the prophecies of course, and had no doubts in labelling the time he was stuck in. The End of Everything was to be preceded by a reign of misrule and falsification triumphantly led by the Antichrist. While the Scriptures called it ‘a little season’ it was never made clear how little it would be in fact translated into human measure; it could be years, centuries, or millennia, and it meant a hell of a lot of work to do. Literally.

“Hallo, serpent,” said another, this time perfectly materialized voice that was coming from Hastur’s lips. He was tall, and he was good at lurking as ever, and he presented himself out of the shadows in a dark corner with too much ease to leave the flat’s owner unperturbed. “Got the news from Abaddon?”

“The latest.” Crowley gave him a side-long glance. “Whatever fashion are you wearing?”

Hastur, Him Who Is Not To Be Named, The King in Yellow, or simply Kaiwan [1] among friends, seemed to have gone a long way not only from his origin as shepherds’ companion but also from his latest position of a Duke of Hell. Contrary to his usual antiquated attire that hadn’t been renewed since the time he got pinned down to his last button in medieval grimoires, this time he was clad in something that, while similarly antique, had a grand air of battles fought and won. His apparel looked like armour, felt like armour, and smelt, much to Crowley’s dismay, like armour – just fresh out of a skirmish.

“We’ve been given a license to kill, serpent.”

“So I’ve heard,” agreed Crowley tentatively, watching the tall figure of the Duke approach. The stench of blood grew stronger with each of his steps.

“Shielding yourself off, aren’t you?” Hastur gestured towards the windows, which had been shaded ever since it had begun to rain, which Crowley hated, and rain in liquids so meteorologically incorrect that Crowley was driven beyond hate. “You’ve been wasting your time. It’s fun out there – there are souls to take, and take we shall, as long as we’re allowed to. Which isn’t eternity, Crowley. Don yourself.”

“Into what?”

“Have you forgotten?”

In a blink Hastur was by his side, huge, menacing and competent in things it’d be unsafe to know. His eyes glowed malignantly just inches from Crowley’s face.

“You’ve grown soft,” he drawled contemptuously. “I can’t believe you’ve really been appointed to direct us. Now…”

He plunged his fingers into Crowley’s hair pulling him up, then eyed him from head to toe, taking in every detail of his battered appearance before giving his verdict.

“Leather can stay. Change the rest, unless you want me to remind you…”

Crowley didn’t want anything of the kind. And he remembered, although painfully, how it all fitted together once, the pieces of armour fiery red, hyacinth blue, and sulfur yellow [2], the metal etched with signs uncanny and made dim with rusty blood and acid brimstone – the vestiges of evil glory. It enveloped him easily, as if he had never really stripped out of it.

“Now, that’s much better. You finally look like one of us,” approved Hastur, who never understood Crowley’s penchant to be en vogue. “I’ll be around, just in case. As an advisor.”

“You mean, a supervisor?” ventured Crowley, aware of Hastur’s grip on his scalp.

“As your advisor,” murmured Hastur emphatically. “You’re our pointer, and my gang will go the rest.”

***

And so they were back in the street, under the never-ceasing rain of blood and fire. The lower demons, the rank and file of Hell, were wielding weapons the obsolete looks of which didn’t belie their lethal strength. Their whips could crush stone, their swords could cut iron like butter; the halberd that was poised in Hastur’s grip, ready to swing a fatal blow, could smash bone and steel alike. They were hungry, and they were ready to begin their hunt.

“You can sense them, can’t you?” Hastur chanted, intimately close to Crowley’s ear. “You’re almost native here; you should smell them, the yet unmarked souls. Lead us, snake-hound.”

Crowley looked around, outside of his apartment for the first time in months. He hadn’t been out ever since it started and only listened to the deafening sounds of houses crumbling and people shrieking, but never dared a glance out of his window. Now the air was pungent and rich, smarting the senses he had forgotten he had. Hastur was right: he could smell it, the fear of the forsaken ones, those who had dawdled for too long, who had lingered in their indecision, and now their fear and loneliness sang to him. They were potential recruits of Hell, and he was the head of the press-gang.

“Lead us, snake.”

***

He kept telling himself those souls belonged to people he didn’t know and there was nothing personal in it. He couldn’t be held responsible for every weak being that didn’t have the resolve to take sides while there was still a chance. He hadn’t been keeping track of omens already manifested but was sure that those who were to be saved would be saved in the end, no matter what.

His breastplate had become smeared with gore, clots stuck into the wriggly etching that embodied his ancient name. His hands would have been bloodied too, if not for the leather gloves he wore. Hastur had been laughing at him ever since they set out, even more so when he refused the proffered reaper weapons. His forte had always been incitement and propagation, not the crude violence of Hastur’s kind.

He stopped at a crossroads and looked from side to side, senses alarmed. There were two calls, one coming from a church, the other from an orphanage. The orphanage was closer but the church emitted a much more urgent smell of desperation that was coming from more mature and valuable souls. Around him the lesser devils, tanned almost black by the hellish fires, lashed their whips in impatience.

“Which way, serpent?” Hastur spat out the words together with a knuckle he had been gnawing ever since they finished a ‘revision’ of a hospital.

Crowley frowned. His primordial nature, which had been driving him through the city, now felt confused by more recent memories. After one particular occasion he had developed abhorrence of infants, babies, and children, not matter how tasty their souls might be. The orphanage, despite its accessibility, didn’t appeal to him personally, while the church, on the opposite, brought forth the painful memories of all the Christmases he had spent alone.

“The church,” he directed, and the imps rushed forth with a yell of mad glee.

***

They had raided several churches before, but this one was different. There was a particular air around it, and it reminded him of a certain presence that he had somehow come to value and even cherish. It linked in his mind with an image of someone he had been trying to ban from his memories since the beginning of the End – the time he expected that presence to appear like it had done before on a similar occasion. But this time it did not, and he felt abandoned and refused to go out partly for this very reason. During this Apocalypse, Aziraphale chose to mind his own business; all the better for him.

Crowley rushed up the stairs to the temple before Hastur could spur him on with his usual sarcastic remark and gave the door an angry push.

Inside it was cool and dim, as befitted a good church. Incense-laden air tasted too sweet, the candles were too upright, and the place on the whole had too much reverence to do anything good to his insulted nerves. He paused in the main aisle, while Hastur stomped in, careful to navigate a safe way around the basin with the holy water.

“Where are they?” he asked in a subdued whisper: the church had been functioning for too long to lose its spirit even with Apocalypse in full swing. He looked up at the lanky figure of his scout with a kind of uncertainty that he hated to feel.

Crowley didn’t answer. The nave in front of him was dark, and the shape of the rod suspended far above was hardly discernable. Across the transept and beyond the altar shadows hid the details. He took off his sunglasses [another source of Hastur’s endless amusement] and peered into the dusk. Behind him the gang of devils whimpered anxiously.

“The undercroft,” he replied finally to Hastur’s question, and the imps rushed forth, flooding the pews and lashing their whips at anything that happened to be in their way. The Duke slapped him on the back by means of approval and took a firmer grip on his halberd.

The devil soldiers didn’t bother looking for doors or stairs and simply ploughed up the stone floor with quick whip blows. Crowley cringed at the violent sound of thrashing and clouds of dust it was raising. It was probably because of dust that he didn’t notice the movement behind the altar at first.

“Looks like we have a guardian in this place,” Hastur slurred lazily. “Ten times more points for netting a guardian angel. You need bonus score, snake.”

Crowley wasn’t paying attention to the Duke’s wit as he started to walk towards the chancel. The light coming through the stained glass windows cast a reddish hue everywhere but did little to hide the wide span of wings that were pristinely white. The feathers rustled softly as the angel moved, and that it was an angel there was now no doubt. An angry, ass-kicking vengeance-monger of desperate protectiveness, and any such creature coming a demon’s way was no good news for a demon.

“You have your flaming sword back,” stated Crowley matter-of-factly. “Did you retrieve it from the human progeny, or did they restock you after all?”

He shielded his eyes against the flame, missing his sunglasses. Behind him Hastur yelped in sudden excitement.

“Oh my, a reunion? Here,” he grabbed the shoulder of the nearest imp, yanked a scimitar out of his hand and tossed the curved, dark blade to Crowley. “Have fun, serpent.”

The angel’s wings rustled again as Aziraphale sighed sadly.

“Is it absolutely necessary, Crowley? You could just walk out…”

“And find another church? The one that isn’t favoured by your attention?” Crowley stared at the blade in his hand in mesmerized wonder. The abovementioned flaming sword sat in the angel’s grip with far more ease and quite a sudden expertise. “So that’s where you’ve been. I was wondering wherever you went; lost track of you somewhat, you know. This is where.”

“You shall not pass.”

“Was even worried, a bit though, but still. Thought you might have gotten yourself into something foolish. ‘M right about that, it seems. Foolish enough.”

“You shall not pass, Nahash [3].”

Crowley finally looked up at the angel, who seemed stern and detached and nothing similar to the Aziraphale he knew.

“Wrong movie,” he hissed, and then charged.

Aziraphale parried the blow, and then another one, and then thrust his own sword into a well-calculated, almost canonical attack. The demon dodged it, and the blade missed his head by a mere inch, making his hair raise. This was serious after all.

“What about the Arrangement then?” Crowley ventured between deflecting a blow and delivering his own lunge, frantically trying to revive whatever his memory still held about ‘Capo Ferro’ [4], which wasn’t much. “What about laissez-faire and all that – it doesn’t hold any more?”

“Nothing personal,” panted Aziraphale, who was running out of breath trying to outmaneuver his more agile opponent. “It’s about those people down there, not about you and me.”

“Oh, as if those could be just *any* people? Don’t bullshit me telling that you care about everyone in equal measure. You’re being territorial, Aziraphale.” He crossed the distance between him and the angel, as if striving for a narrow measure, but instead of lunging with his blade uppercut the opponent with his free arm. “This IS personal.”

Aziraphale fell backwards on the altar, sending the chalices, candles and assorted communion equipment flying all over the floor. A flap of wings softened his fall, and soon he was on his feet again.

“Why couldn’t you just wait till our time is done?” Crowley grabbed the nearest surviving pew for support and drew in a huge gulp of air trying to steady himself. “It’s not for that long. You should have only waited.”

Beyond them, Hastur’s subordinates were swarming the place, driving the people who had taken shelter in the church’s basement out into the nave and hoarding them into one shrieking, panicked crowd. The Duke looked smug beyond decency.

“Need help?” he offered good-naturedly.

“He’s mine,” Crowley snapped back, watching Aziraphale suddenly soar above only to zoom down in on him in a moment. Hastur made a mock salute with his halberd and left exactly at the moment Crowley remembered he had wings too.

They hovered in the narrow vaulted space just under the ceiling, each waiting for the other to make the first move. Aziraphale looked unusually deadly.

“So, you mean it? To kill me?” asked Crowley softly, balancing the scimitar in his hand.

“You’d kill me now, wouldn’t you, if I gave you a chance?”

Crowley didn’t bother to reply. A sort of a vague plan was forming in his mind. Aziraphale, despite his fighting vigour, obviously was out of shape. He couldn’t be well-trained, he was overweight, less supple, and stuck in an older body. It might work.

Crowley let his scimitar drop to the ground, beat his wings to gain momentum and then hurled himself against the angel. The impact carried them both down on a diagonal across the transept and farther off, into the sacristy, and then onwards, until they both hit the rear wall. The crash left them lost in a cloud of splinters that used to be the sacristy door, and fragments of shattered stone.

Aziraphale came down in a heap of torn feathers and battered tweed while Crowley struggled to stand up, his human body nearly asphyxiated with the effort. The angel’s head tilted towards his shoulder lifelessly, leaving a trace of blood on the wall. He was unconscious, but it wouldn’t be for long.

“No, I wouldn’t”, said Crowley as a belated answer to the angel’s question, then stooped, estimated the situation and punched Aziraphale in the face.

After that he looked around, scanning the room until he spotted somebody’s cloak, dark and inconspicuous enough. He wrapped the angel into it, cursed at the sight, bent down to haul the limp body over his shoulder, cursed again and felt a sharp pang of self-pity. Aziraphale was definitely overweight.

He staggered along the aisle, more grim and sour with each step, and it was yet a long way home. Then he remembered he’d have to find a means to get them both up the stairs, and cursed some more.

One problem at a time; that seemed the safest pace for now.

Solitary confinement

Aziraphale came round to the accompaniment of a throbbing headache that made his head feel like a bell that had tolled for too long. The pain, and a particularly blurred vision, indicated some large traumatic event had occurred.

He wished himself rid of the headache, for starters, and found that he couldn’t do that.

He was lying on a bed in a room lit with nothing but a dim, reddish glow that was, weirdly enough, coming from the walls. He strived to bring the details into focus and was finally able to discern the glow-emitting shapes. Those were of various geometrical designs with pentagrams dominating, all filled with letters and symbols, the fateful meaning of which was to render every angel gentle, peaceable, and obeying. The symbols were drawn in red marker.

“Bastard,” muttered Aziraphale and didn’t even scold himself for saying a bad word.

Stripped of his divine powers, he had to get up still suffering from migraine and wobble precariously across the room. On the other side of the door two voices droned in a conversation; one voice was definitely Crowley’s, the other remained unidentifiable. The low unfamiliar growl must have said something funny because Crowley laughed. The angel squatted by the door and pressed his ear to it for better audibility. Perhaps it wasn’t a joke after all: as far as he knew Crowley’s laughter, which was an infrequent phenomenon, this time it had nothing even vaguely resembling merriment. More like sarcasm, and derision, and somewhere deep, underneath it all, carefully concealed fear.

The growl continued in the same manner, not in the least baffled and with assertiveness bordering on impudence, until the voices drifted off, and there was a sound of a door being closed in the distance, and then, the bedroom door was opened with a tricky quickness.

Aziraphale tumbled forth into the world and would have hit his nose against Crowley’s knees but managed to put out a supportive hand that prevented the nosedive. Close up, he could see that the leather that hugged tight the demon’s legs was no longer black but of a sickly rusty colour, with dry blood soaked into every pore so that the material was beyond redemption.

“Hi, Aziraphale,” said Crowley as if they had just met to have dinner together. “I’ve run into a pack of journalists on my way here, can you imagine? Some underground station or other, they usually call it resistance. Wanted to know how we’re doing. Well, if they think this Apocalypse can be televised, they’ll have to hire their cast elsewhere.”

Aziraphale, frozen doggy-style by perplexity and a sudden twinge of pain in his backbone, inhaled deeply, which he immediately regretted.

“You stink,” he observed, not sure if he meant it literally, figuratively, or both.

“Undeniably so.” Crowley bent down and looked the angel in the face assessing the damage. “Can’t say that you look well, my dear.”

“And who’s to blame for that, eh?”

“Oh, come on.” He offered the angel a hand to help him stand up. “I saved your life. You might at least say thank you.”

“I will, if you let me go where I should be. What’s all this…” Aziraphale bit his tongue before it produced any other bad word, “ this…décor about?”

“It’s your protection. Took me a while to remember how to draw them.”

“If you expect me to appreciate your artistic skill, you’re wasting your – and my – time. You have no right to keep me here, neither from the moral viewpoint nor from the viewpoint of our…” Aziraphale stammered over a word again, “friendship.”

Crowley turned away, a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Won’t”, he snapped, and then added bitterly, despite himself: “Can’t.”

***

Aziraphale then slammed the bedroom door shut right before his captor, and it promptly escaped his notice that while he was confined to that room by potent seals on the walls, the said captor could still come and go as he pleased, so shutting doors in his face or acting out any other household drama had very little real point. He spent the next hour anticipating Crowley to storm [march, sneak, filter] in any moment, but the demon had retreated into some dark recess of a place elsewhere in the flat and showed no intention of violating the bedroom.

He emerged, by Aziraphale’s estimation, a day later, introducing himself with a polite knock.

“I told them I discorporated you,” he said calmly, as if there had been no outbursts and they were just picking up the conversation where they left it last time. “You know, Hastur was getting curious about how it all turned out between us.”

“Hastur?” wondered Aziraphale, giving the demon a supercilious look from his regally reclined position on the bed. “The growling person that makes bad jokes?”

“Bad jokes, yes,” Crowley thought about it for a moment. “You still want to leave?”

“Yes,” admitted Aziraphale curtly.

“Look, angel,” Crowley finally stepped inside the bedroom and tuned his voice to express the best kind of patience and conviction. “You don’t have to be out there. It’s all rather pointless, you know…”

“The defeat of the legions of Hell was written down in the holy Scriptures, yes.”

“Exactly. You just wait until the day I don’t come back, and that’ll be a sign it’s time to you to reappear on the stage.”

“You know what, Crowley, it’s revenge, right?” he asseverated, heedless of the argument offered to him. “Because I didn’t warn you beforehand, because I wasn’t around when it all began, or something of that kind. Whatever it is, it’s awfully childish and dangerous of you to do.”

Crowley pondered the accusation in silence, then turned on his heels and walked out. The angel half expected him to slam the door in yesterday’s manner, but his prisoner apparently had too much self-control – or too little strength left after one of his iniquitous raids – to waste his time on such trifles.

***

It was day, or the closest it could come to daytime in the present state of mangled weather and natural monstrosities. Besides, the glass in the bedroom window had been shaded, and that made the light outside even more ambiguous.

Aziraphale was making his now habitual morning exercise of pacing the perimeter of the room, partly to keep himself from stagnation, partly in the hope to transmute his anger and frustration into something constructive.

He might have paced more expansively if he wished, since Crowley had removed the seals on the bedroom door after their last talk. The exit, however, was still barred, and the windows were of no use as far as escape was concerned. Aziraphale had investigated it earlier and found the same anti-angel signs, although drawn much more knowledgeably, on the outer side of the building’s walls as well. If anyone not of the diabolical tribe attempted to take flight from an open window, it’d mean nothing but a quick and hopeless plummeting downwards.

Plummeting aside, Aziraphale, though he wouldn’t admit it even under torture, wasn’t entirely honest when he claimed he wanted to be outside. He didn’t. When he wondered why he had ventured to go out in the first place when bad signs started to show, he found himself in agreement with most of the points Crowley made. He had no need to go out and pretend saving anyone, since it had been written before who was to be saved, and in what numbers, and trying to alter the written word, and the hallowed word at that, was close enough to being sacrilegious.

It was even closer to having a personal opinion; and where there was personal opinion, there was a germ of free will and disobedience, and that was definitely unbefitting an angel. It was a dilemma.

As the quiet in his new forcible shelter began to exert a somewhat calming influence on him, his thoughts returned to this issue again and again. Crowley was out most of the time, somewhere down there amidst smoke, soot and debris, but since he belonged to the currently ruling party, Aziraphale figured he had to be relatively safe. His being out didn’t mean, however, that the demon wasn’t trying to enforce the power of the seals by appealing to Aziraphale’s reason. Or indignation. Or sense of humour, after all, as Aziraphale had to admit when he reread the note Crowley had left on the bedroom door.

“Angel asylum guide-book and regulations”, it began and went very much in the same manner, which Aziraphale found mocking and disrespectful at first thought and cruelly reasonable at second.

“A special secret institution to serve as ethereal beings sanctuary. Open all the year round, 24/7 in apocalyptical seasons. Location: a very decent place if you look around. Always has vacant rooms, at least one; boarding provided on request/invitation. Rent: free of charge upon identification.
Facilities: a personal agent to keep in touch with the outside world; additional services of the agent available on request.
Walks: forbidden until weather changes.
Leisure activities, hard drinks and such: check availability with your agent. Will be eagerly provided if the agent isn’t engaged elsewhere.
Ethereal beings’ duty to the host: don’t do anything stupid.”

Aziraphale humphed at the note, reached out to grab and crumple the insulting paper in his fist, then changed his mind and let it be.

***

While nobody was looking it was safe to be frank with himself. That led him to acknowledge that he had been meddling in the apocalyptic things before his turn, not out of the wish to help and save but because staying out of it sounded too sensible. He had gone against his own rationale and began to interfere where he could, protecting a scared bunch here and there and knowing all the time that it was useless and they were doomed anyway.

He had done it because he was told not to. Now, that was something the demon would have sneered at, had he only been present.

Trying to stay logical even if it hurt, Aziraphale elaborated on the sudden idea. Looking at things from this angle, it appeared that Crowley, too, was trying to mimic independence of the Plan, at least in such lesser details as occasionally saving an angel or two. The discovery that their motivation had been essentially the same made Aziraphale feel a bit better as it mended the breach he suspected to have formed in their relationship. Besides that, it mended very little.

Free will had always been a dangerous toy, even in small things. It usually meant that in order for one to have it, somebody else had to renounce it. And despite his angelic nature, Aziraphale didn’t feel like being that other one. After all, the Agreement he and Crowley had enjoyed for so long was based on the rule of strictest parity.

Which would mean, if he dared bring his chain of arguments to a logical end, that he would have to do something stupid despite the warning, namely, to try to run away.

***

Crowley had entered, or rather crept in, so quietly that the angel was caught by surprise when he found the flat’s owner seated on the couch. This piece of furniture used to be white, but after Crowley, and, most likely, Hastur too, had sat on it in their working garments there was little left of its original clean colour.

Aziraphale edged his way into the room with precaution that wasn’t really necessary. Crowley’s mind seemed to be occupied only with a cheap-looking bottle from which he was taking large gulps without even bothering to upgrade the stuff to something respectable.

“How’s life?” started Aziraphale, despising himself for such a trite way to open a conversation.

“Uh?’

“Outside.”

“Nasty.” Crowley drank some more. “It’s been raining. And hailing. And casting of untimely figs.”

Aziraphale walked up to the window and peeled off a side of the shade to look out through the crack.

“Don’t do that,” Crowley warned him without turning. “They might notice you and would want to improve their hunting score.” He contemplated the bottle and then added, as an afterthought: “Angels are precious, you know.”

Aziraphale let the alarming ambiguity of the remark stay uncommented. He left the window though, and moved to stand behind the couch. From this vantage point, Crowley’s shoulders looked particularly sagging. He thought about the possible reason for that, assumed that he’d be better off not knowing, and concluded that action might be, for once, more appropriate than speculation.

Crowley muttered something unintelligible, closed his eyes and leaned back into his touch as the angel’s hands continued to rub the tired muscles of his shoulders.

“It’s not at all easy swaggering around with a sword. How did you manage to do that, back in Eden?”

“Takes a bit of practice,” intimated Aziraphale sagaciously.

“Ah!” He took his time melting under the angel’s touch until a sudden revelation made him sit up with a start. “So, you HAVE been practicing? Yes, yes, you must have been, because you were damn good in that church, you were damn super…”

“Mind your language, dear.” Aziraphale couldn’t help but chuckle. “I thought it wouldn’t hurt to be ready… just in case.”

“Unthinkable,” Crowley murmured sinking back in the couch. “And I always wondered what exactly you do in that backroom in your shop. Now I know.”

He fell silent, seemingly drifting off into warmth and relaxation, making Aziraphale almost hate himself for hypocrisy. Still, he had to go on if he wanted to see his plan fulfilled.

“I’ve been thinking,” Crowley spoke up again suddenly, “that you’d never make a fine saint, Aziraphale.”

“Why so?”

“You wouldn’t be renowned for your patience. It doesn’t look so, but you lack restraint. Always rushing head first into things. But you’re always around…well, most of the time.”

“Seems like we’re both sinners, doesn’t it?”

Crowley opened his eyes again, looking up at the angel’s face hovering over his upside down. “No. No. You can’t have sinned. I wouldn’t let you.”

“Now that’s highly assertive, my friend.”

Outside, a bolt of thunder rumbled, and the skies burst in a blaze.

“It’s the sixth bowl already?” said Aziraphale, already knowing the answer.

“You’ve been counting, right? Impatient, I tell you. You probably always look at the end of each new book first instead of reading from page one onwards, like good readers should. That won’t do. There should always be a surprise…a surprise ending…”

Aziraphale listened to the demon’s sleepy ramble, all the while trying to make head or tail of his own emotional clash. Besides moral issues, there was still a very materialistic question of passing the barrier of pentagrams on the way out of the apartment. He wasn’t certain he’d found a good solution.

Not that he had too many ideas, to start with. Actually, the one possibility occurred to him merely moments ago, and he had been staring at Crowley’s hands in fascination ever since. Now, with the demon asleep, he ventured to go round the couch, knelt in front of it and very gently, with his breath caught in an awkward lump in his throat, pulled at one of the gloves.

It took him several painful minutes, but finally the diabolical glove was his, and Crowley’s naked hand fell back languidly on his knee. Aziraphale stared at the leather item of clothing in deep, and quite justified, doubt: there was no way the glove would fit his plumper palm enough to protect it fully.

He squeezed his fingers inside, and pulled as much of leather cover as he could over the back of his hand, and then could only hope that it would do when he would be rubbing off the marker signs from the door.

***

By the time he was done the skin on his hand was itching and burning, the hellish fashion abusive and acid to his angelic essence. He peeled the glove off once he was across the threshold, and threw the eroded leather away. He avoided looking at his hand but knew nonetheless that the skin was red and blistered. The pain was strong enough to make him gasp for air.

And there was still the stairs; long, endless flights of stairs that led down into the dark below and the ash-strewn street outside. Nursing his injured hand, Aziraphale began his descent.
Two storeys lower he was perfectly breathless, humiliatingly close to whining aloud at the searing pain in his hand, and with his heartbeat pulsing so thunderously in his temples that he would be unable to hear the trumpet call of his brothers-in-arms, to say nothing of quick, soft steps coming in from behind. He didn’t even notice when a heavy book was raised above his head, only to crash with a considerable but carefully measured force on his unaware nape.

Crowley sat down on the step near the angel’s once again limp body.

“You should have taken both gloves.” He looked at Aziraphale’s face, pale and so calm in his forced sleep, and brushed away a stray lock of blond hair. “How were you going to open the door to the street, stupid?”

The way up, much like the way down moments ago for the angel, looked dark and endless. Crowley sighed and cringed at the prospect of the troubled climb. It looked like hauling Aziraphale’s lifeless body was becoming his routine exercise.

***

Aziraphale came round to the accompaniment of a throbbing headache, like he did last time, and a stunning realisation that he was wearing handcuffs, which made this time different. He didn’t remember much of what had happened; he had to be planning an escape, that was sure enough because that’s what he would be doing now if his head didn’t hurt so. He could even remember that he carried out his plan, or at least tried to, until he was swallowed by darkness somewhere on the stairs that led down into an abyss.

He wouldn’t have a second chance; that much was also certain. He closed his eyes hoping it would make the headache go away, and attempted to sum up whatever meager means of attaining freedom he might still have. He could think of none, except, perhaps, an emergency discorporation, which he could induce, given that he had enough of persistence, by starving himself to death, for example…

He opened his eyes with a start. The abyss that was at the end of the stairs he had almost descended gaped at him and revealed its full meaning. If he had ever been close to putting his foot on the road that would end in the Fall, it was now.

Suddenly he was thankful there were handcuffs on his wrists.

***

Crowley was looking askance at him, obviously fidgeting about how to start the conversation. He had tried looking calm, and looking infuriated, and looking sorry, and ended up expressing a curious mixture of all those emotions.

“If you think I’m happy that my words about you lacking restraint have proven true, I must tell you that I’m not. Not happy, not in the least.” He paused, waiting for Aziraphale to become indignant and start to demand immediate freedom, but nothing of the kind followed. “You don’t want me to take them off?”

“No.”

Crowley coughed, which was a rather poor attempt to hide his interest.

“May I ask why?”

“I thought you know that already.” Aziraphale, just like the demon, was avoiding any direct looking in the eye of confessional honesty until it was absolutely inevitable.

“Well, I don’t. Funny, eh? Enlighten me?”

Aziraphale sighed.

“I’ve been a complete duffer. I was too preoccupied with proving myself able to do something, not being a coward, so much that I forgot myself. Forgot my nature. It would have been awfully awkward if the Armageddon began and I was deemed ineligible of my rightful rank because of having been overenthusiastic ahead of time. It was you who didn’t let me Fall. Thank you, Crowley. Now I understand why you did that foul trick in the church.”

“No, I simply didn’t want you killed by Hastur, that’s all.” Crowley laughed, not at all believing that he’d fool anybody with his pretence of nonchalance. “But I like your version too.”

Aziraphale listened to his heartbeat resound in his head, which, surprisingly, didn’t emphasise the headache like it did only moments ago. In fact, the headache was gone.

“Care to release me now? Those handcuffs are somewhat uncomfortable.”

With a pensive look on his face Crowley pressed his hand to the lock, and the manacles clicked open.

“They looked good on you, to be frank.”

“Ah, no, not ever again,” Aziraphale laughed quietly, rubbing his bruised wrists.

“We could switch places if you wish.”

Crowley’s lips were hot and dry as parchment, and he still smelled of pungent smoke and gore. Not that Aziraphale paid much attention to it, or minded it at all.

***

He stood behind the door, careful not to lean on it like the last time. Falling into the room where an unwelcome and troublesome guest was temporarily lodged would do little good to him and his host. Aziraphale promptly remembered how the host laughed to Hastur’s jokes and wondered, for the briefest of moments, if the guest was welcome after all. No, it couldn’t be; he might have had doubts before, but not now. Crowley had to be very displeased with this sudden appearance.

The increasing volume of growls and sneers on the other side of the door indicated as much. Aziraphale felt a momentary pang of guilt at trying to eavesdrop, but it was short-lived. He had a right to feel involved since the violent Duke of Hell was as much of danger to him as he was to Crowley, and so it was a question of mere survival. Or maybe, not only that.

“You owe me.” Hastur was beyond polite conversation, and his voice was quickly escalating to a roar. “You did away with Ligur and nearly had me trapped, I think you owe me an apology.”

“Will ‘I’m sorry’ do?” Crowley, on the contrary, was still trying to sound light-hearted. “Not that I really am, but we could pretend…”

“I’ll have none of your lies, snake. You’ve built your career on lies.”

“Wait, there wasn’t a single untruth in what I said back in Eden…”

“Stop chattering. Now it’s a rather pleasant disposition,” Hastur’s voice changed from roaring into a lustful growl, “to have you under my command. I find it very promising.”

“Of what?” Crowley asked, and Aziraphale wished that he didn’t.

“Oh snake, I think you’ll be good and let me choose.”

This time Aziraphale did tumble forth again, but not unintentionally. As his feet carried him into the room his mind was urgently searching for a clever way to continue his surprise attack so that the Duke remained off guard for enough time for Crowley to do something, because his, Aziraphale’s, tactical resources were depleted.

It appeared he needn’t have puzzled so much over what to do next. Hastur was indeed surprised. Hastur gaped. Hastur was astonished beyond coherence for as much as several moments.

Then he turned to Crowley.

“I should have known it! You’ll be at the top of the blackest of all Black Lists again, snake, I’ll see to…”

And then the ceiling collapsed and buried them under broken bricks, smoldering ash and fire-hot rocks as the seventh bowl of wrath was poured, for the harvest of the earth was reaped and it was time to say “It is done.” [5]

Ransom

And so it came to be as it had been written. Fallen was the great city that stood on many hidden waters [6]. It was split in three, and it was thrown down, and all its lost rivers were revealed in fire after it had become a habitation of demons. The judgement was strong, and in an hour it was made desolate.

But it must be said again that there is no equality between divine and human measures of time, so terming it ‘an hour’ was highly subjective.

He was standing with his face turned to the wall of a cathedral. He wasn’t sure which of the surviving ones it was, but he had caught a glimpse of the domes and knew it had to be some major place. It would be only logical, since the spectacle to come needed grandeur and a big audience.

To eliminate all emergencies, they decided to stick to the old scenario. There was an angel coming down out of heaven, and he had a key of the abyss and a big chain. The chain was now securely fixed to keep his hands behind. He listened to the sentence being read, and the crowd cheering to the judgement being given to him, the offender. He wondered with detached interest if they would yet invent some ingenious detail to brisk up the show.

They did.

They pulled at his wings to make them spread out into full span, and then nailed them to the cathedral’s wall with two swords. Not flaming ones, thankfully.

With that they were done with improvisation and went back to following the verdict. While the last of it was being read, he looked on either side, careful to turn slowly as every little movement only made his wings more taut and straining against the pinning swords.

Aziraphale was nowhere to be seen in the crowd. That was good. He pressed his cheek to the crude stone of the wall, felt its cold rough touch, and smiled.

He promised himself not to cry out once they began, but then concluded it would be pointless bravado. Besides, he doubted he’d muster enough willpower to keep silent. Hastur couldn’t, and he used to be a Duke of Hell. And yet he had howled, and cursed, and begged for them to stop.

Well, he would do without begging, at least; that much he could manage.

The verdict was read, and then there was silence, which lasted not half an hour but merely a moment; and then a heavenly blade came down like a mighty thunder and cut off one of his wings.

He screamed, and found it good that he hadn’t foolishly tried to stop himself from doing so. After all, it was his only way to go through the pain.

The thunder blade cut through the air again and severed his other wing. He was still yelling and couldn’t know if the crowd went up in cheers or was silent.

With nothing to support him pinned to the wall anymore, he fell to his knees, weakly struggling for balance, and felt how the very essence of him was pouring out from the wounds on his back onto the stones that used to be fiery but now were ash.

Ineffability

It was a bright and shiny day on the earth that was as good as new; or it could be brand new, because there was no way of telling [all scars dissolved in a week’s time; smooth results guaranteed by ‘I make all things new’™].

Aziraphale looked up at the clear sky, and then down, at the waters of a river clear as crystal. He walked freely in the light through the glorious Paradise that shone and frolicked and sang in the many voices of named and not yet named living things. The air itself was clear and tingling with sounds of joy.

“Pssss, watch your step.”

Aziraphale froze in his stride and peered down into the verdant grass.

“Who are you? Why are you here?”

He immediately saw the redundancy of his first question as the voice that spoke to him clearly belonged to a snake. It was a large specimen with scales forming a fancy pattern in various shades of gold. It crawled carefully out of Aziraphale’s way and coiled comfortably on a rock made warm in the sun.

“We’ll have time yet to make proper introductions. As to the ‘why’, I suppose it’s all part of the big Plan.” The snake watched the angel with acute curiosity in its golden unblinking eye. “Let’s just wait and see; it might turn into something interesting, eh?”

FIN

_____
[1] See A. Bierce and The Encyclopedia Cthulhiana.
[2] Revelation 9:16
[3] The Hebrew name of the Serpent of Eden.
[4] Capo Ferro – the old treatise on the art of fencing.
[5] Rev 16:17
[6] See, or rather, listen to Coil, Lost Rivers of London

A/N 1. It’s imaginable that Hastur could be the Second Beast from Rev. 13:11, London could equal Babylon [sorry, Londoners], and Aziraphale might be the Third Angel from Rev 14:9 gone astray. But in fact they are not because John’s Book doesn’t say so, and you can take artistic license only this far.

A/N 2: the whole plot idea was shamelessly borrowed from Anne Frank’s Diary. If you think you know what angst is, go and read that book; you’ll see that you were wrong.