Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Part 4

'And do you want to know what turns me on about you?' she interrupted after a while, bringing his attention back to the matter in hand. 'I like men who don't give a s.h.i.t about no one.'

'I don't give a s.h.i.t about no one,' said Slug. 'I've killed three men ye know. Three men with my ain hands. I'm a warrior I am. I'm a warrior of Dunner.'

'I love that, and I love the fact that you're a shifter and you've been to other worlds,' said Tammy, though inwardly she laughed coldly at the idea of little Slug being a warrior of anything.

'Loads ay other worlds,' said Slug, 'and I'll go tae loads more tae. Nae b.u.g.g.e.r's going to stop me.'

'I'm scared you'll go without me.'

'No way, Tammy,' said Slug. 'Ye're coming with me. Ye're coming with me no matter what. No way am I giving ye up.'

He was kneeling right in front of her now, and beginning to run his hands up under her clothes again. Tammy had to think quickly, make sure she played her cards in the right order.

'I need a drink,' she said. 'You got some beer or something?'

He went and fetched a six pack of Special Brew and for a while Tammy kept opening cans and pretending to drink, while making sure he had almost all of it.

'I want to do it with you,' she said after a bit. 'I want to do it with a real warrior. But I want to see those seeds first. It might sound weird to you but the thought of them really turns me on.'

Well anything that would turn her on was all right with Slug by now, so he went into another room and rummaged around in some secret place for a while before coming back with a big bag of seeds. It was like a bag of dying stars.

'Let me hold them,' said Tammy.

After a moment's hesitation he handed them to her.

'What's it like,' she asked him. 'Tell me again. What's it like when you do a shift?'

Slug laughed.

'I cannae describe it really. It's like the world sort ay dances round ye. And then ye get into the Tree and ye see all kinds ay weird things. Sometimes ye see, like, your ain life, but different. Like other lives ye might have had. Know what I mean?'

He put his hand under her skirt. 'But are we not getting off the subject here, sweetheart?'

She saw him looking anxiously at his bag of seeds and decided the moment had come. Inwardly she steeled herself.

'Do it to me now Slug,' she said. 'I don't want to wait no more.'

It took about twenty seconds. When he'd done he began to cry, cuddling up to Tammy as if he was the child and she the grown-up. She stroked his head and called him baby, baby, my baby, and pretty soon, what with the Special Brew in his belly and the release of tension and the baby-mummy dream that Tammy was acting out for him, he was off to sleep, just exactly as she'd planned.

'Just got to go and have a p.i.s.s,' murmured Tammy after a few minutes, the bag of seeds still clutched tightly in her hand.

She lifted him off her, pulled on her clothes and slipped out into the back garden. It was completely overgrown. Brambles climbed over the rusty skeleton of a burnt-out car. Stinging nettles came poking through the springs of a rotted mattress.

She put the seeds in her pocket, picked her way across the undergrowth and pulled herself up onto the wooden fence. For a moment she sat astride it, savouring her triumph. On one side were the overgrown gardens of abandoned Beveridge Street, on the other an alleyway that ran behind the backyards of the still-inhabited maisonettes of Joseph Row. But it wasn't just some old Zone alleyway any more, it was her highway to freedom, her highway to other worlds.

'Tammy? What ye doing?'

Slug had his baseball cap in his hand, but what with the beer and the sleep and the s.e.x he still hadn't fully grasped what was happening. Tammy held up his bag of seeds and stuck out her tongue. His fanged mouth gaped. The hurt in his eyes, the disappointment, the sheer weariness, were bottomless. Just for a short while there, absurdly, against all the weight of previous experience, he had persuaded himself that she actually wanted him.

'Ye... ye little lying wh.o.r.e!' he hissed.

Tammy laughed.

'You're nothing without your slip, mate, are you?' she taunted him. 'You're f.u.c.king nothing. Just a pervy little Scotchman who no one's ever given a f.u.c.k about and no one ever will! Not in a million f.u.c.king years!'

She dropped down the far side of the fence and was off down the little back alley and into the streets that she knew so well, laughing out loud as she ran.

She hid in a patch of shrubs on the edge of a playground. Children had made a network of tunnels and caves through it and she crawled into a hollowed out s.p.a.ce in the middle before pulling out the bag of slip and swallowing one of the seeds: it tasted electric on her tongue. Then, shaken by the enormity of the step she'd just taken, she opened her phone and called her mate Jolene back in the Unit.

'I'm doing a shift, Jolene. I've done a seed. I won't f.u.c.king see you no more. I love you babe. Goodbye. Have a good life for me!'

'Oh my G.o.d, Tammy!' screeched Jolene. 'Oh my G.o.d! Where the f.u.c.k are you? How could you do this to me you b.i.t.c.h? Oh my G.o.d I f.u.c.king love you, Tammy'

Then Mr Johnson, the Unit manager, spoke in the background.

'Who are you talking to Jolene? Is that Tammy?'

Tammy hung up, turned off her phone and waited. After a while she took out the bag of slip and played with the strange glowing things for a bit. Then she grew tired of that and put them away again. She yawned and looked around, but there was nothing to see: only an old cigarette packet, a scrunched up page from a knicker catalogue, a used rubber hanging from a thorn, with its little yellow cargo bulging at its tip.

She took a make-up case out of her pocket to check her face, but, when she saw herself looking back out at her from the little mirror, she snapped it hastily shut again.

She lit another cigarette.

Three hours later nothing had happened and Tammy was thinking about taking another seed just to make sure, when she heard someone outside.

'She's in here, Slug. Kev saw her go in from his window.'

Then she heard Slug himself.

'You in there Tammy, you b.i.t.c.h? Ye're dead meat, you hear me? Ye're going to f.u.c.king die.'

'I'll go in round here, mate, and see if I can smoke her out,' said another man.

Slug had been busy on his phone, it seemed, calling up the desperate men he called his mates, promising them a treat. She was in real danger.

She tried to call the Unit but the phone there was engaged. She tried Jaz.

'You have reached the offices of the Child Welfare Section. Thank you for calling. What you have to say is important to us. If you are calling about a child in danger please press 1 now. If you are calling to...'

Tammy hung up. She started to call 9...

'There she is Slug, I can f.u.c.king see her!' someone yelled.

A big male figure was squeezing through the tunnels in the thorn bushes. Tammy headed as fast as she could in the other direction, doubled up, with thorns catching her arms and face. But then there he was right in front of her: Slug himself and his metal baseball bat, his eyes shining with triumph.

'Well, well, well...' he leered, 'this is a surprise.'

'Oh s.h.i.t, Slug,' she pleaded, 'don't be like that. I was only p.i.s.sing about, mate. Here's your seeds. I'll... Oh f.u.c.king h.e.l.l. Jesus Christ!'

Suddenly the entire world had become as thin and insubstantial as the skin of a soap bubble, quivering and about to burst. And voices were whispering all around her, voices that sounded like hers, repeating words like her own.

'Here's your seeds. Take your seeds. Have your seeds...'

Slug recognised the signs before she did.

'The thieving b.i.t.c.h!' he wailed, lifting his bat. 'She's going to ...'

She had to push, Tammy suddenly realised as she threw up her hands to shield herself from the blow. The seeds took you to the edge but you had to push if you wanted to break through. She didn't know how she knew this, but now she was here it just seemed obvious. It was as if she had been here before, or had always been here without realising it.

The baseball bat was already descending when she finally broke through and felt herself falling. She screamed and clutched out at the air. Slug had vanished, the ground seemed to have disappeared from beneath her feet, and...

But no, it was still there. The thorn bushes were still there. Even Slug and his friends were back again, just for a moment, though the daylight had suddenly become much brighter and they were all standing further away and in different positions, as if two different takes from a movie had been crudely spliced together without the slightest regard for continuity.

But she had no time to take this in. The men disappeared again and there was a brick wall in front of her, and then a lorry in a downpour, throwing up a big sheet of dirty water as it swerved and blasted its horn. And then she was in a dingy front room with drawn curtains. There was a smell of urine and cigarette smoke and clothes worn continuously for days on end, and an ugly, fat, malignant woman was screaming at a little child: 'Get your a.r.s.e over her you little...'

But Tammy was in another world again before the sentence was complete. And then another and then another. Trees and buildings skipped and danced around her. She was falling, she was falling, she was falling through the worlds.

Chapter 4.

Up in Janet Richards' office the miniature government of the Thurston Meadows Zone had a.s.sembled and was waiting impatiently for Charles' news.

'Mr Bowen! Thanks so much for coming straight up!' Mrs Richards cried when he finally arrived from the police cells.

Her eyes were shining with hope as she introduced him eagerly to d.i.c.k Thomas, 'my police chief', Dave Rickets, 'my deputy', Val Hollowby, 'my Social Care Purchaser', Trudy Spice, 'my director of housing', Ginny Frimp, 'my health care co-ordinator' and Ron Julip, 'my director of logistics'. The seven of them had spent most of the morning in anxious conference, Dave Rickets at the computer downloading all the government circulars on shifters that he could find, the others round the pale pine table poring through the print-outs. Who had the circulars been copied to? When were they sent out? Which one of their little group was most at risk of being accused of failing to act?

But, to answer that last crucial question, they really needed to know more about what had actually happened. And here was the expert who would tell them everything.

'So, how did you get on?'

They plied Charles with coffee and sandwiches. They offered him biscuits and gla.s.ses of water. There was a fug of fear in the room, a desperate hunger for shreds of rea.s.surance.

'Have they been here long? Do you think they're alone?'

Mrs Richard's managers were seated round the table, of course, but in Charles' imagination they were pushing and shoving each other to be the one to grasp hold of him, the one to crane into his face.

'Furnish and Ha.s.san have only been here couple of days,' he said. 'I haven't got a great deal more out of them, other than some bits and pieces for our shifter database. Like many shifters Furnish claims to be a Warrior of Dunner. Ha.s.san doesn't go in for that Dunner stuff and he thinks Furnish is a fool, though the two of them arrived here together. I believe they arrived in Lockleaze, not here in Thurston Meadows, so you'll need to think about how they managed to cross the Line into the Thurston Zone without anyone detecting them. Anyway, I gathered...'

'Hang on,' interrupted Police Chief Thomas, the one who'd be held responsible for any failure of Line security, 'how do we know they arrived in Lockleaze and then crossed the Line? How can we be sure that they didn't appear in the Zone itself?'

'We don't know. It's a guess,' Charles told him. 'Anyway, as I was saying, I gathered from both of them that there are a number of other shifters here in Thurston Meadows. Ha.s.san is too sharp to be tricked into giving much away, but Furnish is easily flattered and ended up telling me quite a bit. It seems he's heard that there are at least three or four different groups of shifters in the Zone. And of course that's only what he's managed to pick up in the couple of days since he arrived in this timeline. '

'Three or four groups!' cried Janet Richards in horror.

They had been stewing here all morning, rationalising, minimising, trying to persuade themselves that there wasn't a reason to panic. And now this!

'There's one thing I've never understood about this business,' said her deputy, Dave Rickets, finally abandoning the computer screen, 'If this is really a drug which has the effect of dumping you somewhere else more or less at random, how can a group of people take it and all end up in the same place? Isn't it all a bit far-fetched?'

'I agree,' said Janet Richards. 'I can't help thinking there must be a more prosaic explanation for all of this.'

What exactly was worrying them, Charles asked himself. Was it that the universe itself had sprung a leak in their backyard? Was it that this whole world this entire s.p.a.ce of earth and sky and stars had been revealed to be one of countless possible worlds, each one equally real, or equally unreal, and each one constantly dividing and dividing in every minuscule fraction of a second into more and yet more worlds? No. What they were worried about above all was that they were going to be criticised for not following procedures. That, it seemed, was as far as their imaginations stretched. And, though he remained professional and polite, he found himself despising them.

'How do they cross over together?' he said to Mr Rickets. 'You're certainly not the first to ask that. The other question people often ask is how can a drug bring over the clothes they wear and the things they have in their pockets?'

'Well yes quite!' exclaimed Ginny Frimp. 'I was just wondering about that very thing. It does seem very farfetched, Mr Bowen. I mean I know there's a mystery about how these people get here, given that they clearly aren't foreign but they don't have any ident.i.ty that's recognised by our systems, but we don't really know if all this shifter stuff is true yet, do we? I think Janet's right about there being a simpler explanation than parallel timelines and multiple universes.'

'As far as I'm aware no one has any idea how they cross over together, or how they bring things with them,' Charles said. 'But, as someone once put it to me, trying to understand slip in terms of existing scientific knowledge is a bit like trying to understand a jet plane by examining its paint. There is some aspect of nature involved which is fundamentally different from the ones we feel we understand.'

'Or so people claim,' muttered Trudy Spice, large, grim and very reluctant to embrace anything which fell outside of the world she thought she knew.

'They could have made it all up couldn't they?' suggested Ron Julip, the director of logistics.

'So what about this Dunner business, then?' asked the police chief impatiently. 'This Dunner religion. Should that interest us in any way?'

Charles smiled and slowly repeated a rhyme that Furnish had recited for him: 'Woddy wiv 'is one eye, Dunner wiv 'is c.o.c.k Frija wiv 'er big t.i.ts And two-faced Lok.'

'That's a religion?' asked Trudy Spice.

'It sounds more like the sort of thing you see on a toilet wall,' muttered Ron Julip.

The a.s.sembled managers all laughed heartily. Charles shrugged.

'It isn't like our idea of a religion, I agree. The G.o.d Dunner is a brawling thug. His father Wod is a champion boozer and a serial adulterer. But I suppose a religion like that appeals to the kind of people who are also attracted to the idea of being shifters. My guess is that somewhere out there is a world where either the old Germanic religion has managed to survive into modern times, or it has been revived in some way, and that shifters have encountered it there. Or possibly some of them come from there in the first place. It's not the only cult that shifters follow, and of course many of them don't follow a cult at all, but it's certainly very popular with the particular type of shifter that gravitates towards the Zones.'

He finished his sandwiches and pushed away his plate.

'As I said, there are several groups of them here in Thurston Meadows. Furnish let slip that one group and this one is a group of Dunner cultists is headed by a man named Erik who he says is supposed to be very very clever and a "real psycho". I don't think Furnish himself has met the man but he's apparently a pretty big wheel in the shifter network round here. I couldn't get much out of Ha.s.san. He was holding out for having his slip back in exchange for more information his slip and Furnish's in fact but we obviously can't do that. What is worrying is that Ha.s.san didn't contradict Furnish's suggestion that one of the shifter groups is planning some kind of violent mischief. In fact he quite explicitly confirmed this, and said that he had more information which he would only give in exchange for the seeds.'

'Mischief?' they all cried together. 'What do you mean by that?'

'I don't know.'

'You couldn't get anything else at all out of them?'

'Ha.s.san claimed he could give details if we gave him all the slip. I think they probably both swallowed seeds when they were arrested, so as to get away from here, but of course they still want seeds to take with them in case they don't like the place they end up in.'