Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text (26 page)

‘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, canvasses 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 naïve, 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 passing 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.

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 glass. 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 massacre 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 nobody, all right?’ Carl whimpered. ‘Here’s my gun look. It hasn’t even been fired. I was with them but I didn’t fucking shoot.’

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 space 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 assembled 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 entitled to modify those processes accordingly. The British public must never again be confronted with the spectacle of police officers standing by while mass 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 embarrassing 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?’