The Age of Scorpio

21. Now

They had been driving for a while but Beth was sure that she was still on the island. For one thing she couldn’t see them trying to smuggle her out past the roadblocks. They were clearly on a very rough road as she was getting kicked around in the boot of the car. She had struggled with the cuffs but they were solidly built and had been put on tightly. She still had her Balisong knife and her knuckledusters in her jacket – they hadn’t searched her before they dumped her into the boot.

The car came to a halt. She heard a gate creak open, and the car moved over what felt like soft ground. The car stopped again.

The bright light after the darkness of the boot made her squint. Markus was just a large backlit shadow reaching for her and dragging her out. Suppress the anger, she told herself. Wait for the right moment.

Her eyes adjusted to the light. Markus was pulling her towards an old greyhound racing stadium. Dilapidated and gutted, the stands surrounding the sandy track looked like they were falling apart though there were people gathering in the stands closest to her. There was a throbbing bass noise that she recognised as a generator. She presumed it was providing the power for the lights aimed at a corner of the track.

Beyond the stadium Beth could make out the lights of the police roadblock on the M275 motorway bridge that led out of the city. She had seen this area on the way into Portsmouth. Just past the stadium was the scrapyard with the rusting hulks of amphibious vehicles, submarines, tanks and the like. She was pretty sure the area was called Tipner.

Anger warred with fear as she saw McGurk in front of her. The light was behind him so she had to squint. She might have done it this time, she thought, pushed too hard. It doesn’t matter how much you can look after yourself, you’re fucked when they’ve got guns and more muscle than you. Still, it seemed a little public for an execution, what with all the people watching.

‘What do you know about my sister, you bastard?’ she demanded.

‘That she was a dirty little whore,’ McGurk said, to the sound of a few sycophantic chuckles.

‘Fuck you!’ The struggling was as instinctive as it was pointless. Markus had too tight a grip on her. She spat at McGurk but had no idea if it hit him.

‘I’m a fair man—’

‘You’re an arsehole wannabe who’s watched too many gangster movies!’ Beth interrupted. She was willing herself to be quiet but it just wasn’t happening.

Movement from the other end of the track caught her attention. Next to a brown multi-storey building, the glass in all its windows long since gone, was another gate. She guessed the scrapyard was on the other side of it. Five people were coming through the gate. Four of them were clearly guards, escorting the fifth figure that was in the middle of them all. Their size said muscle. Their body language said that they were nervous of the person they were escorting. The figure in the middle was hunched over and covered in a blanket. Something about this made her even more wary.

She looked back to McGurk. His smile was predatory and more than a little bit smug. She moved towards him but the gun came up.

‘Pussy,’ she said, trying to look him straight in the eyes despite the light.

‘Think you’re hard, do you? Even on your best day, love…’ He shook his head.

‘That what you need the stick for?’

‘What, this?’ he held it up, examining it. ‘You know what this is? It’s a bull cock.’

‘I can imagine you’d want a replacement.’

Even in the light she could see him frown. The four muscle and the strange covered figure were getting closer. Beth was downwind and could smell something like low tide.

‘It’s just an external manifestation, like. A reminder. So people remember who’s got the biggest swinging cock, so everything just jogs along fine. So we don’t have to make too many examples like this.’

‘Put the gun away and let’s find out.’

‘You’re fucking entertainment. Get used to it.’

McGurk looked to Markus, the gun still levelled at Beth. Markus unlocked the cuffs and started to back away as Beth put her hand into the pocket of her jacket as she grabbed his collar. Markus tried to turn but Beth’s hand came out wearing brass knuckles. She punched him in quick succession on the side of his head, all the while moving back, dragging him by his collar, keeping him off balance. By the second punch the tips of the knuckles were red, by the fourth or fifth so was the side of Markus’ head. The sound of metal hitting bone and flesh resonated around the stadium.

‘Hey!’ McGurk shouted, brandishing his pistol. Beth let Markus fall to the sand. She rubbed her nose, smearing blood on her face as she turned to stare at McGurk.

‘You’re about to do something bad to me. I won’t come after you because you’re a pussy who hides behind a gun.’ She saw McGurk’s mouth tighten in anger. ‘So either shoot me or get on with it.’

McGurk laughed. He looked down at Markus’ unconscious body, blood reddening the sand around his head.

‘Fuck him. Stupid cunt should’ve searched you.’

‘Yeah, he might have found this.’ Beth produced the Balisong knife from her other pocket and flipped it open. McGurk looked at the tempered blade as it caught the light and then back at Beth.

‘I like you. For some northern sub-literate you’ve got a pair, but that won’t help.’

‘Fuck you,’ Beth said mildly and then turned to look at the people milling in the stands. Some looked wealthy; others didn’t. Some had hunger for whatever entertainment this was written all over their faces. Others seemed nervous. ‘And fuck your parasite friends.’ Then she turned away from him to watch the group heading towards her. She didn’t realise it, but simply ignoring McGurk had been the biggest insult she’d paid him. She didn’t even register McGurk striding towards one of the stands.

The four guards were each holding the end of a chain that led under the blanket. They got about fifteen feet away from Beth and stopped. The smell was unbearable. She saw they all wore surgical masks. She wished she had one.

They clicked some release on their ends of the chains and heard what she guessed were manacles springing open under the blanket. The escorts dragged the manacle-ended chains towards themselves and ran. Now Beth was really worried. She wondered if McGurk was crazy enough to make her fight a gorilla or a small bear.

She had expected some kind of growl. What she got was a low, wet, bubbly, rasping rattle.

The hands that grabbed the edge of the foul-looking blanket weren’t right. The skin was pale, wet and large amounts of it were peeling. There were webs of skin between the fingers, and what little she could see of the forearms also suggested more flaps of skin. It was the fingers that unnerved her the most. Each of them ended in long black hooked nails.

The blanket was torn off. Beth found herself retreating. She was reasonably sure it had once been human. She was surer that human flesh shouldn’t look like that.

Its flesh was pale to the point of being a faint blue colour, like a corpse left in water. It was hunched over as if the ragged long coat that it was wearing covered a multitude of twisted deformities. Its hair was a stringy dark mess, much of it missing, and its eyes were milky white with no irises or pupils to speak of. There were slits at its neck. The slits seemed to be moving. Beth couldn’t shake the feeling that they were gills and suddenly she didn’t like living so close to the sea.

She felt herself back into something. She had back-pedalled all the way to the stands. Someone shoved her forward. She turned to grab them, shove them between her and whatever the thing was, but she saw McGurk pointing the gun at her. She looked around for ways out, but McGurk had known what he was doing. There were people on each gate, and if she made it to a wall without being shot they’d catch her before she could climb over. Her only way out was through whatever this thing was.

She moved forward cautiously, showed it the blade.

‘We don’t have to do this, but if you come close I will fucking cut you, okay?’ Beth found herself reminded of conversations she’d had in prison.

It didn’t seem to be paying any attention to her. Its head was cocked to one side as if listening to something. The odd thing was, you took away the skin problems and deformities, she reckoned the thing would look like a very normal guy. It was difficult to gauge its age, but perhaps forties or fifties.

It didn’t move like a middle-aged man, however. Suddenly it darted forward, clawing at her. Beth felt a tug as she danced out of its way, the hook-like nails tearing through her leather, ripping it as she pulled away. It had moved so fast.

‘My jacket!’

Retaliation was more instinct than anything else. The knife was mostly for show, to frighten. She had killed someone once and was in no hurry to repeat that. However, the ferocity of its attack took her by surprise and before she knew it she was hammering the blade up into the side of its head. She stabbed three times in quick succession, felt the impacts down her arms, heard the sound of bone breaking under the blade, felt something wet on her hand as she struggled to hold on to it. She pulled the Balisong out and swung with the knuckles, catching it in the jaw with enough force to send it to its knees. Beth stepped back and kicked it hard in the chest, knocking it over.

‘Fucker!’ she screamed, fear and anger mixing.

It rolled back to its feet and flung itself at her, hooked claws outstretched. Beth tried to dodge the lunge but screamed as hooks pierced flesh and dragged her to the ground. She tried to roll it over but was desperate to hold on to the knife.

It was strong. It was on the top. She felt her skin tear, on her chest, her face, her head, as it clawed at her. At some subconscious level her brain acknowledged the sound of cheering and shouting. She stopped trying to push it off. Fingers still wearing knuckles grabbed its head. Her arm was clawed open. A mouth full of jagged, wicked-looking teeth opened and drooled on her before trying to bite her fingers.

The knife flashed out into its chest over and over again, viscous warm blood spraying her. Then she was stabbing its throat to the sound of booing. Then she was stabbing under its chin and into its mouth as it howled. Blood made the metal of the knife slippery and she lost her grip on it. The creature flinched away from the blade, not realising it was stuck in its flesh. Beth screamed and put all her force into punching it in the face. She felt bone crack under the blow from the knuckleduster. The thing’s head snapped around and it spat blood into the night air. Beth bucked her hips, grabbed its hair and dragged its head down towards the sand, rolling at the same time. The creature made strange keening sounds and rolled off her.

Beth was lying on the bloody sand next to the stinking thing. The moment’s respite let her body tell her just how much pain she was in. She had to suppress it. She swung her leg over herself, using the momentum to roll onto the creature, which was wriggling around on the sand in obvious agony. She straddled it and grabbed its slick head. Its blood looked thicker than she thought was normal and black, even in the light. She barely registered the ringing of a mobile phone as she powered her brass-knuckled fist repeatedly into its face, smashing and then powdering bone as she made the face look like something other than a face. It stopped moving. She didn’t stop hitting it. She didn’t notice McGurk leaving.

Eventually she stopped and looked up to see the crowd, silent, just staring at her. She got to her feet and staggered towards them. Some of them stepped back.

Beth heard the creature get up behind her. She swallowed hard and closed her eyes. She clenched her fist around the brass knuckles. She had no fight left in her but that didn’t mean she was going to stop fighting. She heard a ripping sound as vicious spurs of bone shot through its coat from its elbows. Beth started to turn.

Then there was light everywhere, wind and noise, shouted voices telling her that they had guns and that she needed to get on the ground. Gunfire. It didn’t sound like it did on the telly. Shot after shot. Beth sank to her knees and then toppled forward onto the sand. The creature fell close enough for her to see its dead eyes.

A shadow blocked out some of the light. There was more shouting. Have to shout to be heard over the wind and the noise from the light in the sky, she thought. There was a pretty man – sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, well dressed in dark clothes – way out of her league. And he had a gun. A man with a gun was telling her to let go of the brass knuckles. Beth was worried that if she started laughing she wouldn’t stop. She was dead. She was sure of that. What danger is a dead woman with brass knuckles against shouting men with guns? she wondered.

She wasn’t dead. The paramedics had done a good job. The painkillers had done a better one. She was still a mess but she could walk and most of her limbs still worked. They had wanted to take her to hospital. Apparently she needed to be there. The blond man who seemed to be in charge had said no. There had been an argument, which he’d won. She was in an interview room in the big police station on Kingston Crescent. They had outdone themselves in making the room look institutional.

She hurt, but anger was carrying her through. It had to because what she knew about the world, particularly a previously unquestioned faith in – no, knowledge of – the non-existence of monsters, had been challenged. She had anger to deal with this. The alternative was a shaking crying mess.

The door opened. He was attractive, Beth thought as the blond man she had seen at the stadium entered. He had a folder under one arm and was carrying two cups of tea. There was something military in his bearing, but an officer not a squaddie. She’d known enough squaddies to recognise them.

He put one of the mugs down in front of her.

‘I made it myself,’ he said. ‘And put lots of sugar in it.’

It smelled good to Beth. It smelled familiar.

He opened the folder. The only thing in it was a black and white photograph of her sister. Beth looked at him and then the picture. It was a good picture. She’d been caught in an unguarded moment. The smile on her face was genuine. Beth had seen too few of those in her life, but you could truly see how beautiful Talia had been. She hadn’t needed the make-up and the attitude.

‘Where is she?’ the man asked.

‘Dead, died in a terrorist attack. You may have heard about it.’

The man watched her for a while. His face was the perfect example of an adult disappointed by a wayward young person. He had children or a younger sibling, Beth decided. She broke the gaze and took a sip of the tea. It was good.

‘Then why are you looking for her?’

‘What was that?’ Beth asked, meaning the creature she had fought. The man looked at her again, seemingly coming to a decision.

‘A very strong and dangerous man with a series of unfortunate genetic deformities and deep-seated psychological problems. He was probably high on PCP.’

Beth considered this, nodding as he was speaking.

‘Bullshit.’ More silence.

‘Okay. What do you think it was?’

‘I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure you do.’

‘We saw the lights from the bridge. We investigated.’

‘Did I kill it?’

‘No, I did.’

Beth nodded again. ‘Good. I think you did it a favour.’

‘Look, Elizabeth—’

‘Beth. Who are you?’

‘My name is Malcolm du Bois. I’m working with Special Branch. Would you like to see some ID?’ Beth just shrugged. ‘You’re in more than a little bit of trouble. Particularly with your previous—’

‘What is the sentence for gladiatorial fighting these days?’

Du Bois looked at her and smiled. ‘Fine. I need some information. If I don’t get it, I’ll lock you up. This is an anti-terrorist investigation. I can make you disappear for a long time and then make sure that you get sentenced to the full extent of the law. If I do get the information I want then I’ll let you go.’ He tapped Talia’s photo.

‘You think my sister’s alive?’

Du Bois leaned back in his chair. He was getting tired of being asked questions. He pulled his cigarette case out of the pocket of his tailored leather coat.

‘Cigarette?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I’ve been told they’re bad for you.’

Du Bois lit one of the cigarettes and then took a mouthful of tea.

‘Don’t mind if I do?’

Beth shrugged. ‘I’ll overlook the abuse of my civil rights this time.’

‘She’s not your sister.’

Whatever Beth had thought he was going to say next, that hadn’t been it. It took a moment to penetrate.

‘I grew up with her,’ she told him. ‘This is a weird approach if you want something from me.’

‘She looks nothing like you or any member of your family. Your mother was unable to have children due to complications during your birth. I can provide you with medical records if that’s what you want. There’s no birth certificate in her name: in fact, according to the government there’s very little proof of Natalie Luckwicke’s existence at all. I imagine the only reason she slipped through the cracks for so long is because she grew up in Bradford. However, she is of an age and looks like the parents of a baby girl who went missing from Helmsley in North Yorkshire a little over twenty years ago.’

Beth stared at him. She didn’t want to believe him, but too much of what he said fitted. Too much of it made sense. If nothing else, it pointed to the reason why Talia was the focus of so much unspoken resentment for her.

‘Why?’ she asked, uncertainty in her voice.

Du Bois didn’t answer.

Maybe this is good, Beth thought. If it’s true then it doesn’t matter so much that Talia hated her. She could give up this stupid search for her. Make it not her problem.

‘Bullshit,’ she said without much feeling.

‘I can prove it if you want, or the next time you see your father just ask him. Now, if you tell me what I want to know, we won’t press charges, and remember you are now an accessory after the fact. We just want to find her. It’s not your problem any more, and by the looks of it you won’t live too much longer if you keep looking. I’ll give you some money and you can be back on your way home.’

It sounded so attractive. Let it go. Maybe not the part about going home, but she had to look in her father’s eyes. She wanted the truth, deserved the truth, and then she wanted to know why they loved a child they had stolen better than their own. Fuck them, fuck them all. She didn’t owe any of them anything.

‘Is she alive?’ du Bois asked.

‘As far as I know, no.’ He started to say something. ‘Listen. I came here looking for her. Then I discovered she was in the house that got blown up. I was going to leave it at that, but then I decided to find out what happened to her, how she ended up like that. The more I looked into it, the more it looked like people didn’t want me to know stuff. It felt like a…’

‘Conspiracy?’

She nodded. ‘But I don’t think it was. I think she was involved in some really dodgy stuff, and when she died the people she was involved with just wanted to make sure nobody found out about their part in it. Just arseholes covering their tracks is all.’

‘Like who?’

‘Somebody called William Arbogast.’

‘The man you tortured?’

It took someone coming out and saying it. She had no illusions about what she had done but somehow du Bois driving it home like that made it worse. His blue eyes seemed relentless. She looked away but nodded.

‘Anyone else?’ he asked.

‘That was as far as I got. The rest are below him on the ladder and…’

‘You’re not a grass,’ du Bois finished with a sigh.

‘No more than I have been.’

‘So who picked you up?’

‘I don’t know.’ Du Bois opened his mouth to protest. ‘Now wait. I don’t know if it’s to do with Talia or me rattling the wrong cage, but I got a sheet chucked over my head in the middle of the road, a bit of a kicking and chucked in the boot of a car.’

He dragged deep on his cigarette and then stubbed it out.

‘Younger sisters are a pain in the arse, aren’t they?’ he said.

She looked away from him again and nodded. Then cursed herself as the tears came and the shaking started. Du Bois just watched her. He was impressed that she hadn’t gone into shock. He let her get it out of her system.

Finally she looked up at him.

‘What happened to her? Terrorists? A meth lab? The same people as hit the nightclub?’ Beth remembered seeing him there now.

‘The truth is, I honestly don’t know.’

She looked miserable as she took a sip of the lukewarm sweet tea.

‘I’m going to see about getting you released, okay?’

Beth nodded numbly.

Du Bois walked out of the interview room. She was lying. She knew who had taken her to Tipner. Following orders, he should have made her talk. He was more than capable and had done it in the past, but she didn’t deserve it. She wasn’t part of his world. She’d had a glimpse, and he was still wondering what the S-tech-augmented hybrid had been doing in a greyhound stadium in Tipner, but she wasn’t playing in the same leagues. She was just doing the best she could for her father. She hadn’t done anything wrong as far as he could see. He could respect that. She got to walk. He would get what he wanted another way.

DC Mossa had told him that Arbogast moved in circles that had little to do with traditional criminals so he had got away with pretty much operating on his own. Somewhere, however, there was a connection between Arbogast and S-tech but du Bois just couldn’t see it at the moment.

Beth had been lucky. If he hadn’t been parked at the pointless roadblock on the bridge. If he hadn’t seen the lights at the greyhound stadium and checked on his phone and discovered it was supposed to have been deserted. If he hadn’t had the authority to task the armed police on the roadblock to follow him and to task helicopter support, then Beth would have been dead. The girl was tough, du Bois had to give her that. She had held her own longer than most. But he had put two nano-bullets in the chest of the hybrid and another two in its head to make sure it was dead.

As Beth sat there sipping another tea, wiping away tears and snot with the arm of her shredded jumper, her feeling of unease grew. She looked around the room for some explanation but found nothing. The longer she sat there the more frightened she became, and the sense that she was not alone grew stronger.

She stood up. She was the sort of person who, when she heard a noise in a house that she couldn’t explain, went looking for its cause. She moved as fast as she could, limping around the room.

The corner. The shadows in one of the corners of the room. They were just the result of the dim light in the interview room, she told herself. Nothing unusual there. But now the shadows in the corner seemed much darker than they had any right to be. Beth told herself that it was just her tired, pained and drugged mind playing tricks on her. That it was the result of the stress and the shock of the horrors that she had seen and experienced tonight. But the mounting certainty that there was someone there just wouldn’t go away.

She forced herself to take a step towards the corner. The shadows seemed to coalesce, solidify, move of their own accord in the way that shadows just don’t. Another step. She could see the dark shape of a figure now. She looked around for a weapon, her brain desperately trying to understand what was going on. Adrenaline flowed. Fight won over flight in the locked room. But the chair was bolted to the floor.

The figure lunged out of the darkness. The bag lady. Except she was something ancient, primal, ferocious. She smelled of the earth. Sharp teeth, too many sharp teeth, ragged nails outstretched. The hag-like creature bit her own tongue and spat the blood all over Beth’s face.

Beth could feel the blood move. Push itself into her face, through her skin. She opened her mouth to scream and hit the floor. She thought she heard someone whisper, ‘It’ll be okay.’