Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 20

's.h.i.t,' Carl muttered, suddenly remembering about the safety catch and fumbling it into the off position.

Burkitt winced.

'Listen Carl, you need to think very carefully indeed about what you're going to do next. I don't know who put you up to this but you are very easily led. Ask yourself if it's really in your interests to shoot me? Because once you've done it you won't be able to...'

'Don't come no nearer, all right? Don't come no nearer! I'm not p.i.s.sing about!'

'I won't come nearer. Don't worry. I've no intention of coming nearer. But will you think about my question?'

Carl gave a groan.

'f.u.c.k off!' he yelled. 'Just f.u.c.k off all right? I don't want none of your f.u.c.king deskie s.h.i.t! Just leave me alone all right? Why can't you people never leave me alone?'

'Carl, I don't want to upset you in any way but can I just...?'

Carl pulled the trigger.

He wasn't prepared for the recoil. He wasn't prepared for the way that Burkitt hurtled back against the worktop behind him and then slumped to the floor with his limbs sticking out at random angles like a doll that's been thrown across a room. He wasn't prepared for the blood that, in one single instant, had splattered the ceiling, the worktop and two side walls. He wasn't prepared for the way that a person could be alive and talking to you one minute and the next not even have a head, only a kind of obscene cup, like the empty sh.e.l.l of a boiled egg, from which blood kept spurting for several seconds in thick rhythmic gouts.

Carl tried to persuade himself that this wasn't real, that it was happening in another world, that he would soon return to his own. He tried to persuade himself that he did in fact inhabit one of the other worlds that he had glimpsed in those last moments before he fired: the world where he threw away the gun, the world where Cyril persuaded him to put it down...

But it was no good. This had happened, this had happened here, and the existence of other timelines made no difference at all to that simple fact. Here Cyril had no head. Here Cyril's brains were splattered over the wall. Here one of Cyril's eyes was dangling obscenely from a thread. Carl vomited profusely but he couldn't vomit out the past. He couldn't vomit his own soul free from the body that had pointed the gun and pulled the trigger.

And, what was more, the only people he could turn to now were the ones who'd put him up to this in the first place. The only place where he could hope to hide from the consequences of this killing was a place where he'd have to kill again.

Chapter 14.

At five thirty in the afternoon on the day after Cyril Burkitt died, Charles went down to the Gloucester Road to pick up some groceries. The sky was already dark and it was raining. It had been raining heavily all day. Water filled the gutters and gurgled down into the drains and the underground rivers. Water glittered in the electric lights. Water streamed down the windscreens of cars and was flung aside by their wipers in great cold dollops, while drivers in office suits inside stared out dumbly as if there were no other option but this twice daily crawl, encased in tons of metal, listening to the chit-chat of the radio.

'Shifters... time cheats... crackdown...' were words they were hearing over and over again in those metal boxes of theirs, as the news bulletins rolled round and round. A day after Cyril Burkitt's murder, another DSI officer had been shot in an Inclusion Zone outside Bath. Everyone agreed it was shifters behind these crimes, and everyone agreed that this was a new phase, for up to now it had just been dreggies getting killed but now it was deskies as well. For these office workers crawling home along the Gloucester Road, the threat was creeping slowly closer. Something was going to have to be done.

There was a shop on Gloucester Road which sold nothing but mirrors and lights. Its front was narrow and unimpressive, but it went back a long way and the mirrors themselves enhanced and multiplied the sense of great s.p.a.ces unfolding inside a small container, just as the mirrors did in Charles' flat, but on a much more impressive scale. Charles had bought several of his mirrors in that shop, but he often went into it just for the spectacle and, for some reason, he felt like doing that right now. He spent ten minutes or so wandering through the corridors of mirrors and glittery lights, admiring the many different shapes and frames, with the endlessly recursive copies of himself stretching away on each side all the while, disappearing down other corridors that were beyond his reach. The proprietor let him be. Knowing from past experience not to ask Charles what he wanted or to try and sell him things, he sat reading the local paper in a musty little alcove, like a spider in the centre of a web, smelling of cigarette smoke and cider.

Charles hadn't bought a mirror for some time, and he decided to treat himself to a small one that took his fancy. It was perfectly round and very slightly convex, with a delicate, art nouveau-type frame.

'Forty pounds, sir. Thank you. Still raining out there by the look of it.'

As Charles headed for the door, another man came in. He was lightly built and scholarly-looking and he wore a tousled brown suit and half-moon gla.s.ses. As soon as he saw this man, Charles had a sensation of falling, a really acute sensation, powerful enough to make him grab involuntarily at the air. Within a second he had wrestled himself back under control again but the man had certainly noticed his reaction, and seemed neither surprised nor bewildered. He looked directly into Charles' eyes with a tiny smile. And then he sniffed. Just slightly, just perceptibly he dilated his nostrils to sample the air.

This man is a shifter, Charles realised at once, and he returned the man's gaze, looking defiantly back at him until they'd pa.s.sed one another. He sensed an immense intelligence there and an enormous reservoir of bitterness and rage. This was a shifter all right, and a very powerful one. But what could Charles do? He couldn't very well arrest a total stranger just because he gave him a strange feeling in a mirror shop.

And then, as often happened with Charles, he had sudden shift of mood.

What does it matter anyway? he asked himself as he stepped out into the darkness and the rain. Who cares? If the world burned it burned. If it bled it bled. The world would arise again fresh and clean from the bones and the ashes. It would be good to strip away the comfortable padding of civilisation and allow life to break out again in the raw, it would be good if the underground rivers flooded and the waters emerged once more under the sky, and that was exactly what the warriors of Wod and Dunner would bring about. They'd replace dreary rationalism and the last priggish remnants of Christianity with a pantheon of brawling, boozing, fornicating G.o.ds. They'd fight the world until it either submitted to them, or fought back against them with such ferocity that it became exactly like them anyway. Wod couldn't lose!

Exhilarated by these strange and unfamiliar thoughts, Charles turned the mirror this way and that in his hands. New perspectives appeared: new roads striking off at different angles, new sky under the ground, new ground above the sky. Even his own face, in shadow and surrounded by bright electric signs, seemed remote and mysterious. And when he finally lowered the mirror, he saw that someone had sprayed new graffiti on the arch of the railway bridge above him in day-glo pink.

ENDLESS WORLDS!.

Icy shivers of delight ran up Charles' spine and a cold splinter seemed to shift inside his heart and move still deeper in. He felt himself released! He felt that he didn't need to care about anything or anyone any more. He could play in his hall of mirrors for ever now, he could play with his machines, he could play with the blue light, he could give himself over completely to the beautiful blue light as it came streaming up into s.p.a.ce and time from the depths of Mimir's Well...

'BRISTOL SOCIAL WORKER SHOT!'

It was a headline in front of the newsagent's shop across the road that brought him back. These had not been his own thoughts! He had been taken over. The man in the shop had somehow entered his mind, or bent it towards his, or connected with some hidden part. Charles had been looking out at the world through the man's eyes and not his own.

He turned and rushed back into the shop with such haste that the mirror slipped from his hands and smashed into narrow blade-like shards on the shining paving slabs. He ran back and forth through the corridors of the shop, the tunnels of mirrors, but the stranger had gone. He met nothing but his own reflection, and reflections of his own reflection, and reflections of reflections of reflections...

'Hey, steady!' called out the proprietor from his little alcove. 'What do you think you're playing at? You'll b.l.o.o.d.y break something.'

Charles rushed outside. There were cars pa.s.sing. There were people walking by with umbrellas and raincoats. He couldn't see the shifter anywhere.

He ran back into the shop.

'That man who came in just now, has he gone?'

'Yeah he went, mate. What's your problem anyway? You were going to smash something the way you were going!'

'Do you know him? Do you know who he is?'

'No. No, mate. I never saw him before in my life. Why? What's he...'

Charles went back outside. He didn't know what to do. He thought of choosing a direction at random and running, in the hope of catching the man up. But there were so many possible directions to choose between.

He found himself stooping down to pick up the shards of gla.s.s.

Cyril Burkitt's funeral had been arranged by his daughter at a parish church near his home in Westbury. It was one of those Victorian suburban churches built in gothic style to conjure up for its bourgeois parishioners the cosmic order of a mythical Middle Ages, and there were over a hundred people there. At the front were two or three pews of Burkitt's relatives, headed by his daughter Sophie, elegant, brittle and gimlet-sharp in a smart new black dress and a hat with a black gauze veil. With her was her husband wearing rimless gla.s.ses and the distracted look of someone who really does not have the time. Between them were their two boys in their little suits and ties. The older boy, Adam, read a short poem in a clear, confident, private-school voice. Ben, the little one, cried. Sophie spoke a few rather ambivalent words about her dreamy dad.

Then there were the deskies: policemen, administrators, social workers, from Thurston Meadows but also from Knowle South, New Hartcliffe and all the Bristol Zones where Cyril's duties had taken him. With Jazamine and Charles among them, there were about thirty or forty altogether, deskies and their husbands and wives, come not only to mourn Cyril Burkitt but to express solidarity with one another in a time of danger. Janet Richards, Burkitt's and Jazamine's former boss, was also there. She had lost weight and her style of dress had moved several notches along the dimension that stretches from 'business leader' to 'bohemian outsider'. Being sacked had changed her from the mouthpiece of the system to its victim she was in the process of suing the DSI for wrongful dismissal and her loyalties and priorities had quickly changed, as people's do.

'Cyril was one of the last of the old school,' she said in a short tribute. 'He represented an idea of social work and of public service going back to the days when it was not considered absurd to believe in a universal welfare state that was free at the point of delivery to anyone who needed it. He was a custodian of values which, in this brave new world, we are in danger of losing altogether. We must never stop fighting for the things he stood for.'

She was not the only one there to describe the old welfare man as if he had been some kind of beacon, the unheeded prophet of a more just and human way.

The third big group in attendance were the people who didn't work in the Zones but actually lived there: the dreggies. Quite a number had made their way across the Line to Westbury and several of them stood up and paid their own tribute to the dead Senior Registration Manager.

'There's deskies and deskies,' said Wolfgang Amadeus Tonsil, to whom Cyril had awarded a medal at his retirement party. 'Lots of them, with all due respect to present company, are a total waste of s.p.a.ce. But Mr Burkitt was a true gentleman.'

Another speaker was an extremely fat woman named Tracey Parkin, who had been one of Burkitt's 'cases' when he started out as a social worker and she was a child in care. She told the congregation that she was speaking on behalf of both her mother and herself because her mother had been so distressed about Mr Burkitt's death that she had tried to poison herself with toilet bleach and was now in hospital receiving treatment.

'He was a good man,' said Tracey Parkin. 'It didn't matter who you were, you weren't never just a dreggie to him. To Cyril Burkitt everyone was just a human being.'

'This will sound awful,' Charles said to Jazamine as they drove away afterwards in her car, 'but did he really deserve all that acclaim?'

It was dark now and snow was falling. Glittering flakes were pouring from the sky into the halos of the street-lights and the ground was already white.

Jaz shrugged.

'He was a kind man and that's always appreciated.'

'But was he really a custodian of the old values?'

'Well, he certainly wasn't comfortable with the present system, as he made quite clear at his retirement do.'

'No. But he administered it anyway. He wasn't any different from the rest of them in that respect, was he?'

'Yes, but he let it be known that he didn't like it. I suppose that was a sort of rebellion.'

'I suppose so. I can see he felt like a kind of threat to Janet Richards when she was the ruler of Thurston Meadows. And now she's been cast aside, I can see that she might find herself reinterpreting her feelings about him as a sort of respect. But he was just an eccentric really, wasn't he? He didn't have any alternative to offer?'

'Not that he told anyone.'

'And was it better in the old days?'

'I'm not sure it was. I've sometimes had to look things up in old files from the days when Cyril started out and I think it was really much the same then as it is now. The boundary between "them" and "us" was less explicit in some ways. There was no actual SI citizenship category. But you should see the way they used to talk about people.'

She looked at Charles.

'But how can you of all people hold it against Cyril that he administered the system? I thought that was your big thing: being part of the system and not letting others do the dirty work on your behalf? It was pretty much the first thing you told me about yourself! At least Cyril chose a career as a social worker when he started out, which at least sounded like it might involve helping people. You became an immigration officer!'

'Yes but...'

Charles broke off. They had just pa.s.sed a pair of weeping women, and it struck him that this was the second such group they'd pa.s.sed.

'Something's happened,' he said. 'Something bad. I thought that first lot were people from the funeral, but that was over a mile back.'

Jaz turned on the radio.

'Emerging news... Carnage... Guns... Rape... Clifton... Fire... Pillage...'

As the two of them tried to grasp what exactly the terrible event had been, the same words kept recurring. There had been a ma.s.sacre in Clifton. It was thought that it had been carried out by shifters. No one yet knew how many had been killed.

Charles switched on his phone and found a text message telling him to come into his office straight away.

Chapter 15.

It had been late in the evening, two days previously, when Gunnar had called. Carl was lying on his bed in the dark, fully dressed. He hadn't slept or been outside since he killed Burkitt. He'd barely eaten.

'We've rented a flat just off Clifton High Street, where we've got everything stashed. Meet us there, all right Carl? I'll tell you the rest then. It's all a bit last minute for you, I'm afraid, mate. Most of the rest of us have been planning this for months. But we'll fill you in, Carl my old mate, and I know you'll do fine.'

'Um. I don't know if I'm like ready for this, Gunnar mate,' Carl muttered. 'You know, so soon after...'

'I understand, Carl. I understand. It's all a bit too much too fast eh? I know. And I'm ever so sorry about that. But I'm afraid you need to do it anyway, my old son, because we didn't really cover our tracks on that Burkitt job. We were working on the basis that we'd all soon be out of here, you see, so if you don't come with us, the police will be onto you pretty soon. See what I mean, mate? I mean I don't want to put you under pressure or nothing. But to be honest, you haven't got much choice.'

Carl had met the others in the tiny Clifton flat next morning. Apart from Laf and Gunnar and Jod and Micky, there were four young men there he'd never met before: Dave, Rick, Paddy and Wayne and a hard-looking young woman with a private-school accent who was introduced to him as Tess.

'So we do the slip now, okay,' said Laf, 'then we go outside and spread out. When me and Gunnar give the sign, Jod, Micky, Dave and Tess will seal off the first street while the rest of us get to work on it, all right? Jod and Micky at one end, Dave and Tess at the other. And when we're done we'll move on to the other streets and carry on in the same way until the whispering starts. Soon as that happens, we need to link up together, okay, form a circle and wait for the slip to take us over the edge. And then we'll be gone. Gone from this s.h.i.thole for good.'

There was a thin, nervous cheer. Laf handed out seeds and they swallowed them, then Gunnar distributed machine pistols which had been wrapped up and stuffed into shopping bags.

'There you are, my old mate,' he said to Carl. 'You'll be right as rain. Don't forget to take off the safety catch.'

'Okay,' Laf said, 'Jod and Micky, off you go. Turn left outside the door, and go up to the end of the street. Look in some shop windows or something, but keep watching out for me so you don't miss it when I give the sign.'

He sent out Dave and Tess next, then Rick and Paddy and Wayne. Finally it was Carl's turn to emerge. A light snow was falling and the street was full of people shopping for Christmas. A mother walked past him with three little fair-haired boys in matching hats and coats, then two teenaged girls came in the other direction talking excitedly about someone called Justin, followed by an elderly man with a red scarf and a hat that was too big for him. Everyone seemed to Carl to be quite ordinary and human. They were posher than him, better educated, better off, but he couldn't find anything about any of them that could make him hate them.

He turned from the street and looked into the window of the nearest shop. It sold art supplies, and coloured Christmas lights were twinkling over a display of paints, canva.s.ses and modelling clay. Beyond, in the warm glow of the shop itself, the owner was stocking a shelf with pencils from a cardboard box. She was a very tall woman in her late forties with long red hair and she was strikingly beautiful in a strong, statuesque, almost regal way. Yet at the same time there was something rather child-like about her, for she wore colourful clothes in primary colours and little childlike rainbow-coloured lace-up boots as if she had never quite managed to embrace adulthood. When she'd unpacked all the pencils, she looked round and saw Carl's stricken face staring in at her. Her own face too became troubled for a moment a little bit afraid, perhaps, but also troubled on his behalf - and then she gave Carl a small, cautious smile. She might be posh, Carl could see, she might be nave, but she was also vulnerable and kind.

Horrified, Carl turned back to the street. Laf was on the kerb on the far side of the road, craning up and down the street to check he had everyone's attention. Gunnar was two shops down from Carl, cradling a lumpy little carrier bag against his large soft belly. Rick and Paddy were across the road near Laf with their backs to a display of woollen jumpers.

'I know just what I'm going to get for Auntie Susan, Mum,' said a little girl of five in a fluffy white coat, as she walked by hand in hand with her mother.

Blood seemed to ooze from the buildings. Voices seemed to gibber and wail in the yellow sky. How could these people be so oblivious to the horror that was about to descend upon them?

'Now!' yelled Laf.

He had taken his machine gun from its wrapper and was thrusting it into the air above his head.

'Now!' cried Gunnar in his little high voice.

Laf fired a burst of shots at a pa.s.sing taxi. At the top of the street, Jod and Micky joined in, followed immediately by Dave and Tess at the other end. One on each side of the taxi (the driver was slumped over his wheel), skull-faced Laf and fat Gunnar stood with their guns ready, watching the slaughter unfurl. Even now, Gunnar's face showed no rage, no malice, only a kind of neutral concentration, but there was sweat pouring down his cheeks as he reached through the smashed window of the taxi, poured in petrol from a can, and set it alight.

The others did as they pleased. Wayne fired a long raking shot across the shop fronts, watching as one window after another burst into icy shards. Rick fired at upper windows, picking people off as they ran to see what was happening. Paddy, with a strange fixed smile, set his gun for single shots, and chose his targets slowly and deliberately, one by one, from among those cowering in the street, and those trying to make a run for it.