Walking Dead (17 page)

“No, this side,” said the voice.

Foxe turned, still gulping at saliva that wasn't there. The taste of his own vomit stayed sharp in his mouth. He picked his way between sprawled limbs and slithery pools of blood to where two of the Khandhars had drawn back from a body and were gazing at it in the attitude of kneeling angels on a Victorian tomb. The dead man was the last in the line, or rather the first, and that meant it was Louis; his face still wore the look of numbness which Foxe had breathed on to it, and his body seemed unmarked. One of the kneeling men pointed at the cave between arm and torso. For a moment Foxe could see nothing, then two pale flecks gleamed. Foxe slid his hand into the cranny and felt Quentin trying to cringe still further away, but making no attempt to bite or struggle as Foxe took him gently by the scruff and hauled him out. The whole of one flank was scarlet, and his coat was all on end with fright, but he seemed unhurt. The blood must have come from Louis.

Without a word the men bent back to stripping Louis, and as they turned him over Foxe saw that all the left side of his shirt was soaked with blood, with three round holes, neat as a dice-mark, pocked across the scarlet. He shook his head and swung away, still cradling Quentin in his hands, fondling the staring fur, using the familiar touch to soften his own shock as well as the rat's.

Down below, in the arena, Mr Trotter was now sitting on one of the chairs by the table hunched and gazing down at the space between his own feet, quite motionless. Foxe stared at him, thinking not of the deluded assistant in the experiment but of the drunk young man in the hotel. He felt a pang not exactly of guilt or responsibility, but of sympathy for someone else—a fellow scientist—unwillingly caught up in the bloody mechanisms of tyranny and revolt. Time to spare. Time better filled than left blank to the scrawls of horror at what had happened and fright at what would happen next. He walked along the gallery and down the gangway. Mr Trotter didn't look up.

“You coming with us?” said Foxe.

The dark head shook from side to side.

“Sure?” asked Foxe. “It'll be hairy either way, but if they find you alone here … We could tie you up, I suppose. But once the gates are shut I don't know how you open them if there's nobody on the inside to press the switches.”

“My Mamma coulda got me outa here, couple of weeks. Now you done this.”

“Listen,” said Foxe. “The best I can think of is to get them to take you with us, as a hostage. Then if we get out you can escape. It's quite plausible. You are a Trotter, after all.”

“I just got to come along,” said Mr Trotter despairingly.

“That hostage stuff, that no good. No good staying here, either. When they find me they torture me, just making sure I never knew what you was doing.”

“OK, I'm sorry about this, you know. I had to do it.”

“I guess so.”

“Come up now and wait with the others, so you aren't left behind when they go.”

As Mr Trotter groaned, Plantain's voice called from above.

“You better get dressed now, Doc.”

“Coming.”

While Foxe was climbing the gangway a series of dull thuds broke the stillness as one by one the bodies of the dead guards were tipped naked to the sand below. The Khandhars had Louis' uniform hung out for him along the railing, as if to dry. There was no escape from wearing it because Louis' large figure was a necessary part of the guard detail, and none of the Khandhars was nearly big enough to play the part. Foxe found the process of dressing difficult and repugnant in itself, and not simply because it committed him to the next stage of the escape. The clothes smelt of Louis, oily and animal, and even where they were free from blood were greasy to the touch.

When he was dressed he joined the group, also armed and uniformed, who were already waiting by the mouth of the tunnel.

“That's fine,” said Plantain. “OK, we ten go out, because that's the number would be coming out after the cockfighting. Maize, you come and do Louis's voice, and watch how the switches work so you can open the gates again when we've done finish the soldiers in the castle. And listen, brothers. Remember you the guards now. You been in here watching the cockfighting, an' some of you won an' some of you lost, but you all been having a good shout and a happy time. How long now, Doc?”

Foxe looked at his watch. Time was moving with weird slowness.

“Ten minutes at least,” he said.

“OK. Sit down and rest, everybody. How Cocoa getting along?”

“Still the same,” said a voice.

“Bad thing about Sonny,” said someone else.

“Was he one of us?” asked Foxe.

“Yeh. He tell us things. Tell us about you, and the fellow who making the life pill, and the other fellow keeping all the secrets. He say he want to join with us, but we don't know if he be a spy, perhaps.”

“He knew a lot about the labs,” said Foxe. “That's odd … oh no it isn't—he must have been Ladyblossom's son who went to join the army. Do you know if …”

“Rest now, brothers,” said Plantain's velvet voice. “Put your minds to the Secret Ones. Put your hearts to the Secret Ones. Put your souls to the Secret Ones. Peace.”

As he walked beside Plantain along the tunnel the drying blood on Foxe's left boot sucked at the bare rock floor.

“You walking all wrong, Doc,” said Plantain. “You walking like you got no arse. Wave your bum around. Yeh, that better. And feel like you putting your boot down on somebody's fingers. That's a good feeling, uh? Make the feller squeal, right?”

Conscientiously Foxe brandished his hams and slapped his blood-squelching boots down. The tunnel seemed impossibly shorter than it had been when he'd first followed Captain Angiah down it, but there was an echo of that time in the way Plantain walked, with something of the Captain's loose-jointed swagger. He at least looked entirely at home in his disguise, but the rest of them were less convincing. Though they moved with the right half-disciplined slouch, they looked flimsy, lacking the bulk of professional thugs; their uniforms were loose on the starved bodies and their hands on their rifle-straps were skeletal, almost transparent. Still, they held themselves with total confidence, as though fulfilling some God-ordained purpose; only Foxe seemed to be conscious of their feebleness and fewness, as he marched in his Louis-smelling clothes with Louis's blood drying stickily against his ribs; his mind's eye saw the stony mass of the castle, and the warren of guard-rooms and cells, and the machine-gun nests on the battlements. For a few uncanny paces Foxe became two consciousnesses, one still inside his body and one marching in an invisible body a few inches to his left, so that its immaterial limbs actually overlapped with his limbs of flesh. The double being filled him with a new terror. I'm going mad, he thought. But now, here, refocusing the soul-squint, were the steel doors closing the tunnel. A white light blinked above them.

“Look big, brothers,” whispered Plantain. “Feel big and happy.”

His strange eyes stared at them, as if hypnotising them into greater bulk, until the winking light steadied and at the same moment the doors whined into movement. The light through the crack was violet-blue, streaked as it widened with strips of impenetrable shadow where the arc-lamps failed to reach. Now, surely, would come the ambush.

“Walk from your arse, Doc,” muttered Plantain and ambled through the gap.

The lights glared down from above, casting night-black shadows under the peaks of their caps, hiding all their faces. Swinging his rump like a Scot in a kilt Foxe walked the few paces to the guard-shed, pushed at its door and went straight through. The familiar buzzer was sounding. The small room reeked of sweet tobacco, whose streaky haze dimmed the already feeble light. A stronger lamp made a white cone onto an open book on the table, and almost invisible beyond that a man was standing by a control panel on the wall.

“OK?” he said, pressing the switches down. The buzzer stopped.

“Robbie, look at me,” croaked Foxe.

The man turned slowly, as though he foreknew the horror. Foxe had Quentin raised on his palm and waiting, pointing like a weapon. The man stared, silent, numb Foxe blew, gently, almost unwillingly. The blood-clotted fur on Quentin's flank refused to ruffle, but the man froze just as the others had done.

“Don't move,” whispered Foxe. His eyes were locked to Robbie's, but in his peripheral vision he saw Plantain coming past him and the blur of his striking arm. The rustle and thud of it too seemed faint, dimmer than the movement of his own blood. The life died from behind Robbie's staring eyes like a picture fading on a TV screen. Plantain caught him and lowered him against the wall, pulling a knife from his side as the other filed into the room.

“OK,” he said. “Guard off duty goes to get a meal—six of us—Doc, me, Ginger, Date-palm, Coffee, Mace. I guess it be over at the tower by the gate. Clean up there, then go up the tower to the battlement, clean up the machine-gun men. Rest of you stay in here, but soon as you hear any shooting, you pull down those switches—show him the ones, Doc—let the others all out of the tunnel. You hearing me in there, Maize?”

“Sure,” said the voice from the microphone.

“OK. Let's go. I guess you better march us across the courtyard, Doc. Remember to walk like you be stamping on kids' fingers.”

As Foxe reached the door he heard, far off, the crackle and snap of distant explosions. He hesitated.

“Fireworks up at Carnival,” whispered Plantain.

“C'mon.”

They lined up, Foxe muttered an order, and they swung out across the shelterless and violently lit courtyard. Plantain led the file. Beneath his left armpit Foxe could see a patch of wrong-shaped shadow which was really the smear of blood round a bullet-hole. It seemed to emphasise the sheer implausibility of all their disguise. He cringed inside his skin, telling himself that the perspective from the battlements would make heights and shadows unreadable, but always expecting the shout of query, and then the hose-flow of bullets. The crepe soles of their boots whimpered stickily on the cobbles; otherwise the castle was silent as a ruin. He forgot to give the order to halt and dismiss, but Plantain filled the gap with military murmurs, and then once more Foxe found himself leading the way through a narrow door into a new unknown.

Three worn steps led up to a stone landing and another door; the close air smelt of spice and grease; a mug rapped on wood; men's voices rumbled.

“About five, I guess,” whispered Plantain. “OK, Doc?”

He swung the door open.

It was a large room, running away from the base of the tower and filling the width between the inner and outer wall of the castle. There were tables for about sixty men, but now only a small group hunched over a card-game near the kitchen hatchway; their weapons hung from pegs on the far wall. The men didn't look up as Foxe came in, but a cook slouching against the far side of the serving-counter glanced across the room, then away, then back, staring now, at the newcomers. Foxe showed him Quentin and puffed a breath at him, not even bothering to raise his palm. The man stayed still.

The sense of his own power appalled Foxe. It isn't me, he thought. It isn't me. There seemed to be some other being crouched inside him, seeing through his eyes, moving his limbs, exercising these explosive bouts of will that could lock men helpless while they waited for their deaths, like animals in an abattoir. This creature walked his legs to the table where the men sat.

“Look at me,” it croaked.

They looked. It blew across Quentin's ruffling fur. This time the spell didn't work completely. A soldier sitting close to the end of the table stared for a moment like the others, but his mind remained free. His chair scraped, and now he was jumping to his feet and twisting away towards the dangling guns. He hadn't reached full acceleration before Plantain met him and hit him behind the neck with his knife. Blood gushed, the man staggered, but even while he was collapsing his legs continued to run, stumbling him on till Plantain hit him again. This time he fell and lay still in a yard-wide pool of his own blood.

“Disbeliever,” said Plantain.

“Do we have to kill them all?” whispered Foxe.

“I guess so.”

“No.”

“You been listening to those tapes. These were the fellows did the work.”

“No.”

“That mark on your rat—know who it means?”

“Yes,” whispered Foxe.

The creature with the power spoke.

“It is not their time to die,” it said in a voice that wasn't Foxe's at all.

“OK,” said Plantain immediately. “Date-palm, Coffee, strap these fellows up, good and tight. Gags. Mace, you be covering them, case they come round. Doc, will you wake up this cook-boy?”

Foxe slipped Quentin back in his pocket and crossed to the counter. The cook's head had nodded forward since Foxe had blown at him, making it seem as though he'd dropped off to sleep in a standing position, but when Foxe put his hand under the man's chin and tilted it up he found that the eyes were still open, unblinking, glazed as if with drink.

“Wake up now,” whispered Foxe.

The eyelids stirred. The eyes crossed for a moment in an awful squint, then looked weepingly at Foxe. The man began to shiver all over, so that a pile of plates on the counter rattled gently.

“How much men in the castle now?” said Plantain.

“Sergeant upstairs—got a woman to-night,” muttered the cook. “Fellows in the Pit, gone to see the cockfighting—round about twelve of them. Four fellows with the guns on the wall. Sentry outside the gate.”

“The men up top, an' the sentry—when they be relieve?”

“Five minute? Ten minute? Soon as these fellows finish the game.”

“OK?” Now, brother, hear this word. You know who been in here?”

The man's face went grey. He nodded feebly.