Terminal World Read online

  He wanted to talk to them. He had the tools in his bag to perform basic tests of neurological function. Even if he couldn’t do anything for the girl, he could at least settle the mother’s doubts, reassure her that she had done all that she could.

  He must have hesitated. The girl turned to look at him through the partition glass. The mother met his gaze, eyes dark and unreadable behind her veil, but there was inexpressible sadness and resignation in the lines around her mouth. The tendons stood out on the backs of her hands, clutching the envelope with its fearful cargo of medical truth.

  Then Meroka was looking back at him, urging him to follow.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Quillon mouthed, as if that made a difference.

  Then a man came around the bend of the corridor, beyond Meroka. He saw her twitch, ready to bring out the pistol. The man wore the cap and waistcoated uniform of a railway worker. He was shorter and bulkier than the figure they had seen on the platform, his frame filling the width of the corridor. In his hand was a ticket clipper; in the other a pocket timetable.

  ‘Be with you in a minute,’ the man called, before sliding open the first compartment door and vanishing inside.

  Meroka kept moving. There was only one person in the fourth compartment, deeply asleep, and no one in the fifth. The guard spoke to whoever was in the sixth compartment; there was the sound of his ticket punch, and then he emerged back into the corridor, to be met by Meroka, standing there with one hand still tucked into her coat and Quillon behind her, the angel gun held out of view.

  ‘If I could just see your tickets,’ the guard said, ‘then you can get right on back to your compartment.’

  Meroka reached into her coat with the other hand and produced the tickets. The guard took them from her and squinted down the length of his nose, eyes narrowing behind glasses. ‘I think you need to turn around,’ he said, not unhelpfully. ‘Looks like you overshot your compartment back in the third coach. Guess you were coming back from the dining car?’

  ‘Guess so,’ Meroka said.

  The guard jabbed a finger over his shoulder. ‘It’s all first class behind me, right to the end of the train.’ He held his clipper up to the tickets and punched them together, then handed them back to Meroka, beaming with the satisfaction of a job well done.

  ‘We need to get past you,’ she said.

  The pleasant demeanour began to crack. ‘Maybe you didn’t quite understand me, miss. These tickets of yours are second class only. You really don’t have any business going into the first-class section.’

  ‘How would you know about our business?’ Meroka asked.

  ‘Let’s not make more of this than we need to. You miscounted the number of coaches, that’s all. Easy mistake, anyone could do it. You just need to turn around and—’

  It was all too quick for Quillon. One instant the guard was looking down at Meroka, the next she had the machine-pistol pushed right up into his face, the barrel digging into the fleshy mound of his cheek. The guard dropped the ticket punch and timetable, falling back against the partition between the corridor and the compartments.

  ‘You could have made this so much easier,’ Meroka said. She spun him around, then nodded at Quillon to open the sliding door into the empty compartment next to the one the guard had just been checking. She propelled the guard through, then gave him a hard kick in the testicles, sending him sprawling onto one of the cigarette-stained couches.

  ‘Don’t shoot me,’ the guard said, recovering his glasses just as they slipped from his nose.

  ‘You think I can trust you to sit here and be awfully nice about not stopping this train as soon as we’re out of your sight?’

  ‘Of... of course.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Still holding the machine-pistol in her left hand, Meroka dug back into her coat and produced a small silver-plated device resembling a cross between a tiny pistol and a needle-less hypodermic. She tossed it over to the stunned guard. ‘Pick it up,’ she said, as the device tumbled down between his buckled legs. There was, Quillon noticed, a growing dark spot on his groin.

  ‘What do you want—’

  ‘Got two choices here, fat man. Either you press that against your neck and squeeze, or I have to shoot you. What’s it going to be?’

  ‘What’s in it?’ the man asked, picking up the device with nervous, fumbling fingers. ‘How do I know it isn’t going to kill me?’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I’d do it if I were you,’ Quillon said, hoping and praying that the device was loaded with some kind of tranquilliser.

  ‘Trigger finger’s getting itchy here,’ Meroka said.

  The guard must have realised that he had very little option, for he pressed the tip of the device against the skin of his neck, just above the starched collar of his uniform, jammed his eyes shut and pulled the spring-loaded trigger. The device clicked and hissed, firing its chemical payload through his skin. The effect was rapid. The guard’s fingers loosened, the anaesthetic device dropping to the floor. His eyes opened, rolled senselessly, and then the guard slumped against the back of the seat, only his uniform distinguishing him from another drunk commuter dozing off the booze.

  ‘Please tell me I was right to convince him to use it,’ Quillon said.

  Meroka ducked in and retrieved the device, slipping it back into her coat. ‘He’s tranked. It’ll wear off in half an hour or so.’

  ‘So now we just ... leave him? Shouldn’t we remove his uniform or something, make him look less like a guard?’

  ‘Yeah. You do that, while I go on and kill the man who’s on his way down the train to kill you.’ Meroka came back out of the compartment and slid the partition door closed.

  As she spoke the adjoining door slid open. A man poked his head out of the gap, appraising Meroka and Quillon. ‘Something the matter here?’ he asked, in a low, threatening rasp of a voice. He had the thickset face of a born troublemaker, the beady, questioning eyes of someone who wouldn’t consider the evening complete if he didn’t get into at least one good brawl.

  ‘No, we’re fine,’ Meroka said, the machine-pistol once more secreted within her coat.

  ‘Where’s the guard? He was here a moment ago.’

  ‘We didn’t see any guard,’ Quillon said. ‘He must have turned back and gone the other way.’

  ‘How’d you know which way he was going if you didn’t see him?’ The man emerged into the corridor, suspicion deepening in his face. He tried to see past Meroka, through the compartment door she had just slid shut. ‘Who’s in there? No one inside just now.’

  ‘Not your problem,’ Meroka said. ‘Trust me on this.’

  ‘Let me past.’ The man grabbed Meroka’s shoulder and made to shove her against the corridor’s outside wall. Meroka didn’t give him a chance. She pulled the machine-pistol out and rammed it under the man’s chin.

  ‘I did tell you it wasn’t your problem, didn’t I?’

  The big man made a choking sound.

  ‘It would probably be a good idea to get back in your compartment,’ Quillon said, wondering if Meroka had enough tranquilliser to knock out everyone on the train. The big man, for all that he might have been spoiling for a confrontation, evidently knew better than to argue with the gun pressed under his jaw. He started shuffling backwards, his eyes straining to look down as Meroka forced his head up at an unnatural angle.

  That was when a figure appeared around the corner at the end of the corridor. Quillon, looking past both Meroka and the man she was holding at gunpoint, had only an instant to recognise the newcomer as the same man they had seen on the platform. In the half-light of the platform he had passed for normal. Here in the brightness of the railway carriage there was nothing about the hatted man that could ever be right. Quillon didn’t even have the sense that he was looking at another angel. The figure was a grey-skinned ghoul, a corpse going through the parodic motions of life.

  Meroka acted swiftly. She jerked back the machine-pistol and used her right boot to kick the big
man off kilter, sending him careering back into the newcomer. The newcomer looked stick-thin even in his coat, but he had unexpected resources of strength and balance. In what seemed like slow motion, the ghoul began to draw the glinting weapon they had seen him carrying on the platform. With the same slowness Meroka lowered the barrel of the machine-pistol, aiming it squarely at the ghoul. Most of him was still hidden behind the big man, who - Quillon realised - the ghoul was supporting with his free hand, improvising a shield. Quillon began to bring the angel gun up.

  The ghoul was the first to fire. He shot through the big man, punching a red-rimmed hole from his back to his chest, neat and central through the sternum. Quillon flinched away, gore spattering the left side of his face like a drizzle of warm rain, bone and blood, muscle and lung tissue erupting from the wound in a widening fan. The ghoul had missed Quillon, but only by a tiny margin. An eyeblink later, Meroka returned fire, releasing a deafening burst of bullets from the machine-pistol, the barrel spitting blue flame, shell casings ratcheting from the side, the torso of the big man - he had died instantly the moment the ghoul fired - turning into a pulverised red chaos. Meroka kept on firing until she had exhausted the magazine. The ghoul staggered back, his coat plastered with blood and tissue, at last relinquishing the human shield. He came to rest with his spine against the rear wall and produced a hideously exaggerated smile, as if invisible hooks were pulling up the extremities of his mouth.

  Behind the blue-grey lips was a compacted horror of black teeth and tongue, as if there was too much squeezed into too little space.

  ‘I am but one of many,’ the ghoul said, his voice like wind through trees, dry and spectral. ‘You are but one, Quillon.’

  The ghoul let go of his weapon.

  ‘Did you come alone?’ Meroka asked, dropping the magazine and reaching into her coat for a spare.

  ‘Of course I didn’t.’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘All around you. There’s no point in running.’ The ghoul coughed black treacle out of his mouth. ‘There are too many of us, and now we know exactly where you are and exactly where you think you are going.’

  ‘But you probably don’t know about this,’ Quillon said, aiming the angel gun. He waited an instant for the ghoul’s eyes to alight on it, another instant for a flicker of recognition to show in his face.

  ‘That won’t work down—’

  Quillon fired. The gun twitched in his hand - it wasn’t so much recoil as a kind of quickening, the weapon stirring from sleep. Crimson light, bright enough to etch an after-image in his vision, lanced from the barrel. The beam boiled into the ghoul and turned half of him to black char in no more than a second. The smell hit Quillon an instant later.

  Along with the realisation that he had just killed for the third time.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The angel left a slick of black blood as they dragged it to the nearest outer door. Bits of it kept flaking off like charred newspaper. If there was anything useful on the corpse, some weapon or gadget that might help them, it was going to have to remain undiscovered.

  Meroka pulled open the window, then reached down to the door handle. She had to push it open against the force of the wind. The train was passing over a latticework bridge, spanning one of the points where some impossibly ancient cataclysm had chipped a crevasse in the black fabric of Spearpoint, ripping a tapering cleft all the way down to the next ledge. She shoved the dead ghoul and the body tumbled to the tracks, the train’s forward motion snatching it away. Quillon only just had time to see the angel slip through a gap in the rails and plummet into the dark void under the bridge. There would be precious little to recognise after it had hit the ground again, leagues below. He imagined the corpse providing some puzzle for a counterpart to himself, a striving young pathologist in Horsetown’s equivalent of the Third District Morgue.

  They were struggling with the other body when a partition door slid open further down the carriage and two of the rowdy businessmen peered cautiously out. So did the mother who had been sitting in the next compartment along. None of them said anything. They merely looked at Meroka and Quillon, at the remaining body and the tableau of carnage surrounding them.

  ‘As you were,’ Meroka said.

  All three moved quietly back into their compartments.

  ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t throw him overboard after all,’ Quillon said.

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘He was an innocent man. If he falls all the way down to the next ledge, no one will ever know what happened to him. At least if we leave him on the train he’ll be found by someone.’

  ‘With your fingerprints all over him.’

  ‘The least of my worries, Meroka.’ There was no need to add that his fingerprints were purposefully nonspecific, making a unique match very hard to prove.

  They moved the dead man into the empty compartment and slid the door closed on him. Propped up in the seat, a hole blown through his chest, there was no way he could be mistaken for anything other than a corpse. But at least he wasn’t lying in the corridor any more.

  ‘Still another ten minutes from the stop,’ Meroka said, checking her watches. ‘Better find us an empty compartment somewhere else.’

  ‘Do you think there’s another angel on the train?’

  ‘If that thing was an angel, it wasn’t like any I’ve ever seen. Fucker didn’t even have wings. You sure you know who’s really after you?’

  As they walked towards the rear of the train, Quillon said, ‘It was an angel, just not like the ones we see flying overhead. The angels have been trying to find a way to survive beyond the Celestial Levels for years. That thing - the ghoul - was one of their deep-penetration agents, surgically and genetically adapted to function down here.’

  ‘Looked half-past dead to me.’

  ‘He was dying from the moment he crossed into our zone. But just being able to operate down here at all is a significant step forwards for them.’

  ‘You know a lot about angels.’

  ‘When they’re trying to kill you, you make a point of studying your enemy.’ He paused as they passed a washroom. ‘I need to get this mess off my face, Meroka. Do you mind?’

  ‘Don’t take all week.’

  He went inside and locked the door. The light came on automatically, bathing everything in a liverish yellow. He took off his hat and glasses and looked at himself in the mirror, trying to match his face against the ghoul’s, trying to convince himself that there was a world of difference. He’d been able to pass as human in daylight, when he had first come to Neon Heights. But forced into exile, cut off from home, he was reverting to type. He had shaved his head when the hair started falling out. He had taken to wearing spectacles when the blue tint of his eyes began to deepen unnaturally. As he dabbed away at the spatter and gore with soap, water and a handful of scratchy paper towels, his skin seemed little more than a translucent membrane stretched perilously tight over alien bone-structure. He had been amongst humans long enough to know how weird he was starting to look.

  Half-past dead.

  He reached behind his back and felt through the fabric of his coat and clothes for what should have been the hard ridge of his shoulder blade. It wasn’t there. Instead he felt a soft, cancerous bud. There was one on the other side as well, precisely symmetrical.

  For years he had practised a kind of chemotherapy on himself, dosing himself with a cocktail of drugs, holding the process of reversion at bay. When that began to fail, he had gone back to Fray. Black-market surgery, performed in a squalid annexe of the Pink Peacock, kept the wing-buds from growing back. Every twelve months, the buds had been meticulously cut away, the wounds stitched and bandaged. Then every six, as the growth rate began to accelerate. Then every three.

  And now he was overdue.

  By the time Meroka and Quillon had disembarked, a snorting black dragon of a steam engine was already being backed into place where the internal-combustion locomotive had been, ready to take the tr
ain on the next leg of its journey. Everything happened with stopwatch precision, fixed to a routine that hadn’t changed in centuries.

  ‘Maybe we should have stayed on it,’ he said, as they followed the handful of other disembarking passengers away from the platform to the station hall.

  ‘Either way it’s a risk,’ Meroka said. ‘Least now we aren’t stuck on that thing with nowhere else to go.’

  From somewhere behind them came a scream, followed by shouting and a growing commotion.

  ‘Sounds as if they just found the body,’ Quillon said, making a conscious effort not to alter his stride.

  ‘You can look back,’ Meroka said in a low voice. ‘Everyone else is.’ He risked a wary glance over his shoulder. Passengers and station staff were gathering around the coach where the confrontation had taken place, including some of the rowdy businessmen. There was a great deal of enthusiastic shouting and finger-pointing. A white-whiskered man in a railway uniform began blowing a code on his whistle, the whistle-blasts echoing off the station’s high metal roof. Two men emerged from the end of the coach, supporting the barely conscious form of the guard.

  ‘That’s them!’ called one of the businessmen, singling out Meroka and Quillon. ‘They were there! I saw them! They killed that man!’

  Quillon turned around slowly, trying to look agreeably perplexed, as if he had no possible idea what he was being accused of. ‘Is something the matter ...’ he started to say, not even sounding convincing to himself.