Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 21

But Carl stood motionless in front of the art shop with his gun still in its wrapper.

'Hey look at her in there, trying to hide out the back,' Paddy yelled. 'Let's go in and get her.'

He was pointing at the art shop. Carl didn't move, but Rick and Wayne halted their firing and followed Paddy inside with big grins on their faces. They pulled the red-haired woman out from behind the counter and then, barking and whooping, they dragged her out into the street, that beautiful, statuesque, yet somehow childlike woman, a head taller than all of them, and pushed her to the ground, yelping and slavering like a pack of hyenas with a gazelle.

Flame spewed upwards into the yellow snow. Carl sank to the ground and covered his face with his hands. The art shop woman let out hollow rhythmic cries.

'Look at Carl,' someone sneered. 'The big baby bottled out.'

He thought he'd be killed for his cowardice but the bullets never came. And after a while he heard the carnival of destruction moving away from him. There was no one here left to kill and the others were heading off to find new targets. Carl opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the corpse of the art shop owner, naked except for her rainbow-coloured boots, lying in a pool of blood. He threw up everything in his stomach.

After some time he took a peek up the street, at the strewn bodies, the burning cars, the broken gla.s.s. He was looking for a little white fluffy coat and at the same time he was trying not to see it.

Then he realised that he must have vomited out the seed of slip. He was scrabbling around in his own sick when three armed police officers found him.

'Are you all right?' one of them called out to him, taking him for a survivor in shock.

The sky was dark now. Buildings and cars were burning and glittering snow was pouring into the flamelight over a street full of corpses. Apart from the police, Carl was the only living person there.

'Are you hurt in any way?' the police asked him.

They were in shock too. In a neighbouring street they'd surrounded the perpetrators of the ma.s.sacre and forced them to lay down their guns, only to watch as the killers linked hands and vanished to a place where they could never again be reached.

'I didn't shoot n.o.body, all right?' Carl whimpered. 'Here's my gun look. It hasn't even been fired. I was with them but I didn't f.u.c.king shoot.'

Chapter 16.

The police had cameras fitted to their guns, and the footage was released to the media so that everyone in the country could see the killers laughing and jeering in those last seconds before they disappeared.

'Lovely to meet you all, boys, but we really must dash!'

'What a shame you're not allowed to shoot an unarmed person, eh?'

'Wish we could...'

There was a sudden silence. Just for a moment, as the falling snow was sucked into the s.p.a.ce where they'd been, the killers seemed to linger on in ghostly form as swirling crystals of ice.

Face recognition software showed that, with the exception of Tess, who was from Clifton itself, every one of the perpetrators came from one or other of the Bristol Zones. (It was only some time later that it was discovered that the faces of the two ring leaders had been inserted into the DSI database by a highly skilled hacker.) And so, bowing to public pressure, the Social Inclusion Secretary invoked the emergency powers bestowed on him by Section 62 of the 1999 Act, and decreed that all registered citizens in the City and County of Bristol were to be restricted to their Zones of residence until further notice, 'in the interests' as the Act put it at subsection 62(7) 'of maintaining neighbourly relationships with the wider community'.

The army was sent in to help enforce this, but the government also created what was in effect a whole new branch of the armed forces, specifically to deal with shifters. It was to be known as Special Internal Security - or SIS and it would bring together shifter specialists, like Charles, who'd hitherto been part of the immigration service, with military personnel, secret service people, police officers and others, under the leadership of an admiral called Sir John Rolly, who'd previously been head of Naval Intelligence. In mid-January, members of the still only half-formed Western Command of the SIS a.s.sembled in a hotel in the centre to Bristol to hear Sir John spell out the new agenda.

'Point one,' said Admiral Rolly, 'From now on there will be absolutely zero tolerance of any manifestation of shifter activity.'

He was a tall, broad-shouldered, vigorous man with close-cropped sandy hair, fierce grey eyes and glowing red skin made leathery by the rigours of an outdoor life.

'New legislation,' he barked out, 'will ban cult words such as "Dunner", "Igga" and so forth and make their use in graffiti etcetera a criminal offence. In any Zone where cult graffiti is widespread, pressure will be brought to bear on the whole community in the form of an even tighter regulation of movement within the Zones anything up to and including a 24 hour curfew - and a complete closing down of electronic access to the outside world. We must get the message across to these Social Inclusion people that the party is over. It's pay-up time for the years of government handouts they've received. Any graffiti, any intelligence about unreported shifter activity and we crack down on the community where it occurs until such time as that community hands over, so to speak, the vipers in its midst.'

Charles was at the back of the room with his colleagues: Rees, Fran, Mike, James, Rami, Judy, Ted, and Roger. All of them had been complaining for years that they needed more resources, more powers, more recognition of the magnitude of the problem they were dealing with, but now that all of these things were actually being delivered they felt marginalised and under-appreciated, and that the Admiral was barging into territory that didn't belong to him and that he didn't understand.

'Point two,' barked Admiral Rolly, and it was as if he'd been waiting in the wings for the world to come to its senses, throw aside its sissy scruples and let him take charge. 'We ourselves will, from this day forward, maintain strict self-discipline in respect of loose and misleading language that glamorises the shifter phenomenon. We will not speak of "seeds" or "slip". This appallingly dangerous substance will be referred to by its correct name, as Temporal Transfer Catalyst, or TTC.'

The admiral glared across at the huddle of immigration officers at the back, as if they had been the ones minimising the significance of shifters all this while.

'Point three. Substantial rewards will be paid to anyone who provides information leading us to shifters. And there will be a reward of a thousand pounds for every single bona fide TTC capsule that's handed over.

'Point four. Bringing shifters to book. We now have the power and it is also a duty since you will be required to exercise it every time you encounter an individual who you have reason to believe may have swallowed TTC to administer an immediate stomach pump without consent. Rules on firearm use by the security services are also being revised to allow a presumption in favour of shoot-to-kill in shifter cases and the government is bringing in legislation that will allow summary capital punishment to be administered in situations where a stomach pump may be too late and we are in danger of losing a shifter we believe to be guilty of murder or a crime of similar gravity. These are draconian measures, I know, but if people act in ways that make the normal processes of justice impossible then we are ent.i.tled to modify those processes accordingly. The British public must never again be confronted with the spectacle of police officers standing by while ma.s.s murderers taunt them with their own impotence.'

When he'd finished, someone asked him if he worried that cracking down on the Social Inclusion Zones would prove counterproductive. Wouldn't it alienate their inhabitants and drive them even further into the arms of the shifters?

'Not at all,' snapped the admiral. 'Your average, law-abiding Registered Citizen will understand the reasons for these measures as well as anyone else, and will be more than ready to make the sacrifices required. I refuse to patronise these people with pity. Next question.'

Fran asked if similar draconian measures were to be applied to private boarding schools, which in her experience were also particularly vulnerable to the allure of slip. She said that she herself had dealt with no less than eight disappearances from such schools in the past three months, including one from the Admiral's own alma mater down in Devon.

Reddening slightly Sir John curtly informed her that private boarding schools were an entirely different case and that the correct approach there was to support their senior staff in recognising and dealing, firmly but discreetly, with cult activities as and when they arose, rather than seeking to expose them to embarra.s.sing and destructive public scrutiny.

'I would have thought it was obvious,' the admiral told her, 'that we must make it easier for them to come forward, not more difficult.'

Rees pointed out that not all shifters were killers. Most were not even adherents of the Dunner cult, but were social misfits of one kind or another. Quite a few were refugees, fleeing from persecution in their own timelines.

'We have an emergency on our hands,' the admiral told him shortly. 'We are at war. And when you're at war you don't have time to consider in detail the personal background of your enemy, or your enemy's hard luck stories. The enemy is the enemy.'

'But there isn't really a single "enemy",' Rees objected, 'that was my point.'

Ignoring him, Admiral Rolly looked round the room, hoping for questions or comments from someone other than the little group of old hands from the Immigration Service, who were being so negative and resistant to charge. But Charles stood up before anyone else.

'Deterrence can't work in this context,' he told the admiral, 'because shifters don't have any way of choosing what world they end up in, or knowing in advance what a world will be like. If we're really going to do something about this problem, we need to start operating at the same level the shifters operate, not at the level of individual timelines but at the level of the Tree.'

'And, um, how do you propose that we should do this?'

'By using impounded slip to send some of our own officers to other timelines, taking with them all the information we've gathered over the years. And by encouraging officers in other worlds to do the same thing.'

'I'm sorry,' the admiral said, with a mocking pretence of humility, 'I've probably misunderstood you, but are you suggesting that we ourselves should become shifters?'

The room broke out in incredulous laughter and even the Admiral allowed himself a smile. It was one thing to accept, as the government finally had done, that shifters really did come from other timelines, but it was quite another thing to treat those other worlds as if they were as real as this one.

'In a way, yes. Those of us who are willing.'

The admiral raised one eyebrow and thanked Charles in mock serious tones: 'It's certainly an original idea!' (More laughter). 'Can I take it that you will be volunteering yourself?'

He glanced round at one of his staff officers and signalled that he was finished with Bristol and ready to go. A helicopter was waiting on the roof with its rotor already spinning to whisk him off to his next appointment in Cardiff.

Charles didn't touch the sandwiches afterwards and barely managed to be civil to the various new colleagues a former detective, an army officer, a Royal Marine who came up and attempted to introduce themselves.

'Calm down, dear,' soothed Fran. 'The admiral's no different from all the other bosses we've had. Remember what Roger was like when he first came to us? Remember how annoying he was until the penny began to drop. They don't understand, Charles, that's all. They don't even understand that they don't understand.'

'At least Roger didn't deliberately try to humiliate us.'

'This wasn't the moment to suggest such a new idea, Charles. And it was quite a wacky idea as well, you must admit. Who in their right mind is going to volunteer for a job that involves leaving this world for ever and jumping into the unknown? You could easily end up being strung up from a lamp post in some of those worlds, if the stories we hear are true: strung up from a lamp post or worse. The Admiral thinks he's being tough, but he's not half as tough as they are in some of those places.'

'Well quite,' said Roger cheerfully, joining them with his plate piled high. 'And apart from anything else, how's the pension scheme going to work?'

After the break, there was a presentation about the regional structure of the SIS, with organisational charts in attractive colours. Then there were team-building exercises with a trainer who treated them like children, and after that talk from a theoretical physicist, who was hugely enthusiastic about the need for a whole new way of looking at the relationship between s.p.a.ce, time, and subjectivity in order to understand the shifter phenomenon.

'Subjectivity isn't just in our heads, that's what we've got to understand,' she exclaimed excitedly, jabbing her finger at a diagram on the screen which no one present could understand. 'It's part of the fabric of everything.'

Finally there was a briefing by a police officer, accompanied by video clips, about the interrogation of the only member of the Clifton Ma.s.sacre gang who'd been captured.

Carl Bone looked tiny in the middle of that white-tiled room, all on his own, with the cold fury of the entire state bearing down on him.

'I didn't do nothing,' he said. 'You know that, don't you? Okay, I was with the gang, but I didn't shoot no one. Ask the blokes who found me. I didn't even take my gun out of its bag.'

'What about Burkitt?' demanded one of the five officers who were questioning him.

'I don't know nothing about that, mate.'

'We don't believe you, Carl.'

Carl looked up at his tormentors, his face exhausted.

'I swear on my mother's life I didn't do nothing. Why would I want to kill him, anyway? I liked the geezer. He wasn't a bad bloke at all.'

'Well, if you're going to be stubborn about it, we'll set it on one side and come back to it when forensics have finished their work. What we do know is that Burkitt had been attacked before by members of your gang, and was very lucky not to have been killed on that earlier occasion. We a.s.sume there was a decision to finish the job.'

'There might have been, mate, there might very well have been, but it's Erik you want to talk to about that. He's behind all of it. Like I told you, it was him that did for that Slug.'

'You did tell us. You told us you witnessed the killing yourself and did nothing about it. Which of course makes you an accessory to murder.'

'Please, mate, you've got to understand! I was scared I'd be next if I...'

'How about giving us something useful for a change, Carl, instead of this whinnying? Where will we find Erik?'

'I'm not being funny or nothing mate, but I really don't know. Laf made me cover up my eyes. It was like... cold... cold and damp, like a car park or something, know what I mean?... Or like one of those war things what do they call them? like one of those underground war things.'

'A bunker?'

'That's right, mate, you've got it. Like a bunker. And there was this blue thing in a room there. This gla.s.s thing with this weird blue light inside it.'

Carl Bone looked up hopefully.

'Does that help?' he asked.

'Not much, Carl, not very much at all, but we'll soldier on. Let's see if we can make progress on what he looks like.'

As Charles unlocked the door of his flat a couple of hours later, a vivid fragment of memory came into his mind. He was stepping out of a train onto the platform of a provincial station. It was a frosty, misty day. His stomach was knotted with nervous excitement and his heart was pounding.

He was still standing there in the tiny hallway of his flat, trying to remember when this might have been, or what it was that he could have been looking forward to with such intensity, when Jazamine called out to him from the living room. He'd quite forgotten that she'd be there.

'Charles, you look absolutely knackered!'

She'd been watching TV, but she flipped it off, stood up and held out her arms to welcome him. He laid down his briefcase and stiffly submitted to her embrace.

'Bad meeting?' she asked. 'It certainly went a lot longer than you thought it would.'

'Really bad. This navy guy's a complete idiot.'

'That's a shame.'

'And you should have heard the way he talks about the Zone people, Jaz. He's going to crack down on them so hard.'

'Even harder? There are already soldiers everywhere.'

Charles sat beside her on the sofa, and Jaz began to rub his back.

'I could have stopped the ma.s.sacre,' he said at length. 'Then none of this other stuff would have been necessary.'

'What? You on your own? I don't think so!'

'Remember that guy I saw before Christmas outside that mirror shop? Remember I told you about it? I've never felt such powerful fizz. And I sensed this huge huge intelligence, and at the same time this kind of... coldness, this bottomless bitterness against the world and all its shallowness and hypocrisy. I knew at the time he wasn't just an ordinary shifter, didn't I? I even told you I thought it was the ringleader, Erik. Well, guess what! Tonight they showed us this reconstruction of what Erik looks like from the interrogation of Carl Bone, and it fitted perfectly. It looked just like the man I saw.'

He looked round at her.

'And there were other things too. There were other things that Carl described which I saw in my head when I was near that man. You had a switch once yourself, didn't you? You know how it is. I didn't just vaguely imagine it, I really did see it, this strange hourgla.s.s thing called Mimir's Well that gave out this blue blue light. Remember I told you? And here was Carl in his interrogation, describing the very same thing.'

Jazamine studied his face silently for a while.

'Well let's a.s.sume you're right,' she said. 'Let's a.s.sume it really was Erik you saw down there. What exactly were you supposed to do about it? As you said at the time, you can't arrest a person in this country just for giving you the creeps! '

She gave a little harsh laugh.

'And thank G.o.d for that, actually!' she said. 'Thank G.o.d that, even now, you still have to have some evidence before you can finger someone for a crime.'