Plague Bomb (8 page)

SIX
The tree had brought down telephone lines, and the thick tangle of wires combined with the jutting splintered timber to form a barrier the Range Rover could not bulldoze its way through.

‘That’s it, give it a good swing.’ Having deliberately given the woman the axe, Gross watched her heavy breasts jiggling against each other as they threatened to pop from the restraints of her brassiere.

‘Stuff it, you pervert, that’s the only tool you’ll ever be any good with.’ Trying with a lop-sided drooling grin to conceal his annoyance, Gross set to work with the wire cutters, but he felt the colour rising to his cheeks all the same. He’d get his own back for that, he’d find a way. Maybe he’d catch her bending, and shove his cock up her big bum, just to hear her beg him to stop, or at least use Vaseline. Or perhaps he’d thrust it into her mouth, in and out, in and out, and have her milk him till she choked on the squirting product of his massive orgasm. Oh he knew he could do lots with her that way, gallons and gallons...

Father Venables hovered about the front of the Rover, at times looking as if he might take up a spare implement and assist, but then his fluttering hand movements would cease and he’d clasp them behind his back and once more content himself with just making noises of encouragement, and occasional half gestures of applause for their efforts as gradually the obstruction was chopped out and pushed aside.

Only Professor Edwards remained in the vehicle. From a green plastic Harrods carrier bag he took a flask and carefully poured a cup of beef soup. A crinkled parcel of aluminium foil he unwrapped to remove a buttered water biscuit, carefully rewrapping and stowing the remaining four back in the bag.

‘How nice, oh how very nice.’ Gross stuck his head in through the rear window and his sweat dripped onto the seat. ‘Am I invited, or is this a private picnic?’ ‘This is just to keep my strength up. Of course I would help you all if I could, but I have this condition ...’
‘Such a pity.’
‘I do not feel you are offering genuine sympathy, but if I should have misinterpreted your tone, then thank you. It is nothing too serious you understand, but my specialist has told me I must take care, not indulge in undue exertion. And so you see, much as I would love to assist…’

‘You always shop there?’ With a moss-stained, stub-nailed finger Gross prodded the gold print on the carrier.
‘Do I…? Oh, I see. Well, yes, actually, I do pop in on occasion, when I’m in town, and of course I have a hamper at Christmas, just for a treat.’

‘Went there once myself. Took my kids to show them where the nobs did their shopping. We had afternoon tea there, only one of my girls dropped her yoghurt under the table, and went looking for it. Sort of upset some of the old ladies making their monthly pilgrimage.’

‘So I can imagine.’ Pretending total absorption with his scanty meal, Edwards kept his head down until the fat man lost interest in watching him alternately nibble and sip. He watched the retreating union leader’s back. Their mission had forced strange and distasteful company on him. Not one of them would have come within a thousand years of receiving an invitation to his college’s high table, and he could not see a place for them in the new order of things, when socialist revolution swept Britain, as surely it must one day soon. There could be no seat for them among the vanguard of the proletariat who would herald and guide in the start of the new age. Sipping the hot peppery soup he bathed in the visions that had sustained his spirit and nourished his intellect since his first days at university, since he’d become a member of the apostles ...

Fuck. Sherry Kane glanced about to see that no one was looking, then wrenched at her right breast. One of the damned wires was shifting again, threatening to come jutting out through the thin material of her sweatshirt like a god-damned radio antenna. First chance she got she’d take it off. She’d just have to take care with camera angles when they reached the end of their journey, make sure none of those hick Russian photographers made her look like they sagged to her waist.

As she wielded the axe she could feel blisters raising on her palms, at the base of each finger. It was strange though, despite the obnoxious attentions of Gross, despite the unexpected exertion and the dishevelment it brought, she was kind of enjoying herself.

Just why was hard to figure. She just felt sort of, well elated, real happy. Maybe it was because at last she was going to grab all the headlines, maybe because using the axe it reminded her of when she was a kid, when her only worry was being left alone with Uncle Harry, when he used to pull up her nightdress and rub against her, but that apart all had been well with her world.

All was going to be well with her world again. When they reached the Russian lines the gamble she had taken, the risks of short term unpopularity with the audience and the studios back home, all that would be wiped away. Within a week she’d be bigger than Fonda, bigger than anybody. Swinging the work brightened blade high she brought it down hard and severed the branch she’d been working on.

In the unaccustomed physical exertion Sir Julian Webb found an outlet for his irritation at the delay, and also a release for some of the pent-up anger with life in general that seethed inside him. It was that incident the day before he’d left from Heathrow, when he’d returned to his rooms in Chelsea a little earlier than usual, and found Raymond with that pimply paper-boy.

Never a voyeur, only ever a participant of the homosexual act, he’d been struck by the vulgar ugliness of it all, on finding Raymond standing with a jar of Vaseline in one hand, and his stub of an; erection in the other, trying to fit the lubricated organ into the youth’s tightly rounded pink backside.

The scene stuck in his mind; the youth’s soiled pants tangled among the patched jeans around his ankles, the resigned look of boredom on his acne etched features, the crumpled five pound note clenched hard in his fist: and Raymond, his plump face red with excitement and anticipation, mouthing crude obscenities to encourage the boy and prepare himself.

It was not Raymond’s betrayal of their thirty year relationship that had hurt; it had not been active, had hardly been affectionate for a long time. No, it was. whom he chose to do it with. Had he known about him and the youth? Webb could hardly believe it, Raymond had been away the week he had ... when the youth had come in for a drink of tea. The flushed thrill of that first accidental brushed contact was with him still. Every action of the youth’s had been so obvious, so blatant a come- on ... It had been the youth’s greed for money that had frightened him into ending the tawdry affair before Raymond’s return, and in all truth he’d not been sorry. After that first time he’d not really enjoyed it. Perhaps he was getting old, perhaps he was just old fashioned, but the act had been so casual, so bereft of any ... romance ... that the mechanics of intimacy had not been sufficient alone to make him want to continue the relationship.

Any last lingering doubts he’d had as to whether or not to make this trip had been cast aside at that moment when he’d walked in and caught them ...

‘I’m absolutely fucking knackered.’ Gross straightened and put a hand to his aching back. ‘That bloody bus must have the guts to shove aside what’s left. For Christ’s sake give it another go.’

‘Wait, wait. Before we go on ...’ Father Venables experienced an all too familiar sensation, and trying hard not to look as if he was clutching himself, shuffled off the road and a little way into the straggling undergrowth that bordered it. ‘Ah ...’ That was good. He had adjusted his clothing only just in time. Really, this condition was too unfortunate, too embarrassing. Possibly it would help if he reduced his fluid intake.

He coughed at the slight irritation caused by dust-like wisps that rose from a fungi covered rotting log his dark coloured urine hosed across. Fastening the last of his buttons before starting back, as he pushed through the pliant branches he felt a curious tingling sensation throughout his body, but particularly so about his lips and ear lobes and fingertips.

‘Would you be so kind as to assist me.’ Curious, he had to ask Professor Edwards for help to climb back into the Range Rover. How strange, really he felt very weak ... no, not weak, it was rather a numbness that rapidly emerged into a will sapping, strength draining fatigue. Most peculiar, he couldn’t imagine what was wrong with him, he hadn’t had a cold in years, yet this was like the fast onset of the symptoms of virulent influenza. Ridiculous though, it couldn’t manifest itself so quickly, not from ordinary causes ... ordinary causes ... this was no ordinary place, this was no ordinary virus, perhaps it was no virus at all.

Now there was a, not a tightness, more a definite slackness in his chest. As the Rover robustly bulldozed the near branchless trunk of the tree aside, and they got Under way once more, he realized that breathing was becoming increasingly difficult.

‘Oh dear me no, oh now now, oh please not now, I have so much still to do.’

‘What’s the pee stained old fool on about?’ Crowding in, Gross didn’t bother to look at his elderly companions on the rear seat, but when Venables spoke he became aware of the priest’s blanched face and shallow rasping breaths. ‘You caught yourself in your trouser zip?’

Struggling, and exerting himself to do so, Father Venables managed to slur five more words, ‘Dear God, I forgive them,’ then locked his grip on his rosary as paralysis raced through his body to rob him of the ability to say or do more. He could no longer move, not even to cross himself.

‘Is he having a stroke?’ Sherry Kane turned to look into the back and couldn’t believe it when she saw the other two not helping, but actually trying to distance themselves from the old priest. ‘Say what kind of creeps are you, at least loosen his collar, he ain’t hardly breathing.’ She reached out to do it herself, but Gross lunged to grab her wrists before she could.

‘Don’t touch him. That isn’t the battery in his pacemaker going on the blink, he must have picked up something when he went off on his own.’

‘What can we do?’ The handkerchief Edwards wadded over his mouth as he squeezed himself into an extreme corner not caring that his actions clearly indicated to all that his concern was more with avoiding whatever might be affecting Venables, than helping to apply some remedy. ‘Can he pass it to us?’

‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not going to give him the fucking chance. Stop the car.’ Even before the Rover came to a halt Gross had the door open and was jumping out. From the side of the road he picked up a moss covered bough and using it as a giant prod, began to push the dying man from the vehicle.

Giving a frightened yelp as he realized that Venables was being shoved toward him, Edwards made a hasty exit from the far door and got clear just in time as the priest toppled out onto the road.

Unable to resist, Venables had to suffer the pain of the rough wood rammed fiercely into his side and could do nothing to prevent arrest or soften his fall when the seat was no longer beneath him. Without being able to even put out a hand, he struck the road face first, hard, doing a flopping half roll before coming to rest against the shallow grass bank at the roadside. His glasses had broken and blood poured from cuts about his eyes and from his burst nose.

But pain, even that of the shard that had pierced his right eyeball, was fast becoming a distant thing. What vision he had left was dimming, and his thoughts were blurred, running together and losing their meaning like the images and colours of a painting dissolving in the rain. The last sight he had before it went altogether was of Professor Edwards splashing large quantities of disinfectant over the seat before jumping aboard the already moving vehicle.

The feeble beating of his heart and the sound of shallow breaths whistling past the broken dentures lodged in his throat were the only sensations he was aware of, and his oxygen starved brain never registered the instant when they ceased.

Only Webb did not join in the exchange of accusation, excuse and argument. His only feeling over the event was contempt for them all. It was a mark of how little regard any of them had for each other that the discussion centred not on the fact that a dying man had been jettisoned to a suffering lonely death, but around the moral issues involved.

He listened as the passion and anger flowed back and forth. Gross and the woman made the most noise, but the union-leader’s prime concern was justifying his actions, while Kane’s contribution, though equally loud, was an intellectually lightweight mishmash of half remembered and less understood quotes from schoolroom Marxist pamphlets.

When Gross made an occasional interjection it was usually drowned by the shouting, or interrupted repeatedly, and then he would scowl and his wrinkled face would gain another set of creases and his sharp eyes would narrow and project his hatred and frustration.

A point was reached where it appeared likely that blows would soon be struck. Kane’s voice was so shrill she seemed at times to go off the audible scale and Gross was purple, with his every word accompanied by a shower of spittle. Of the trio the professor alone seemed to have retained a degree of self control, but he sat with tight lipped bridled silence that had all the menace of a volcano on the verge of violent eruption.

Reluctantly Webb framed a comment to take the heat from the situation, but he never needed to utter it. Circumstances intervened.

On the road ahead was a small crowd of a dozen or so civilians. When they saw the Range Rover coming they made no move to step aside, instead they fanned out across both lanes and linked arms to form a human barrier.

Absorbed in the violent discussion, Sherry didn’t see the group until she turned back to the front to discover why they were slowing. They looked strange, she blinked and looked again, still she couldn’t make sense of what she saw, it was like she was seeing images in a grotesquely distorting mirror.

The people rushed forward to crowd about the vehicle, and it was as they tried to reach in through the open window, as they came so close that Sherry could feel their breath on her cheek, that her brain could no longer block the truth of what she could see.