He lay still for a while. Thin strands of thought unreeled in his head—foamy blue grips on my bolt cutters . . . this foamy stuff, something new, isn’t it? was one bit; my trazzies are too tight was another. He tried to sort one thread from another, but they diminished in thickness the further he pursued them until they became a fine mist of confusion.
He sat up and frantically dug out an old, enormous two-liter orb of Dark Plume–label Flōt in the dirt of his grotto. He’d kept it hidden beneath the back of a round-collared shirt he had found in someone’s rubbish and ripped into useful pieces. One of the hardest things he had ever done in his life was to leave this bottle here not completely unemptied. He popped off the cap. For all his efforts to stop drinking Flōt, when presented with an orb, Cuthbert displayed no resistance whatsoever. He lifted the huge bottle high and took a few long, tense swigs. He repeated the procedure again. He lifted the orb again, and he drank again.
“Thank bloody Jesus,” he croaked. It hurt to swallow. It felt as though something were growing in his throat, but whenever he looked in a mirror, he saw nothing but his tongue, as well as his slightly sunken right cheek, from an old street injury. (Up until just a few years ago, women would still compliment him on his high cheekbones, a feature that distinguished both him and his lost brother Drystan.)
The old man started to feel a bit calmer, physically, and his heart slowed down. It never took much these days, such was the weakness of his heart and liver.
Apart from the animals, there was plenty else to drink about, as far as he was concerned, wasn’t there? It had been a strange week, even by Cuthbert’s forbearing standards. (Much of his news came by word of mouth or the lurid reports glimpsed on fast-food packaging, and the raucous public video screens around Camden Town. He only had access to WikiNous’s free, advert-saturated basic Opticall service, which allowed for reception but very limited transmission of messages.)
In Los Angeles, principally, nearly sixty thousand members of one of the most infamous and oldest cults—Heaven’s Gate—had poisoned themselves along with nearly a million animals in what was being called the largest mass suicide and act of animal cruelty in history. Enormous outbreaks of self-murder and animal sacrifices among the same cult members had also occurred in Britain, Germany, and Japan. With souls “released” from what they called their “vehicles,” the cultists intended to travel astrally into outer space and meet a god they believed resided on the comet everyone was talking about. The animals, according to the cult’s beliefs, were being helpfully “voided,” as they put it, as means of travel for souls, too. It was all over the public screens. Harry9 had long ago recriminalized “self-murder” as a psychological tactic against the cults, and the Red Watch had recently begun another of its roundups of suspected cultist cells, and they weren’t too particular about whom they jabbed with the neuralwave pikes.
News of the suicide cults always deeply disturbed and absorbed Cuthbert. For complicated reasons, his own views fell much in line with Harry9’s virulently anticultist propaganda. He despised everything about the cults. They apparently liked to watch the antiquated 1990s program Star Trek: The Next Generation, a fact that ruined the show for him. They always claimed they were “transiting” between the “lower” Animal Kingdom and what they termed “the Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human.” An enormous secret machine, built decades ago in London on two great sites, would come to life one day, and the machine, “The Gate,” would begin to suck in and dissolve all the souls of animals on earth, except for those humans who suicided themselves. It terrified Cuthbert.
Behind much of his odium was a fear that he, too, could on any day be contaminated, as millions of others on earth had, with an urge to exterminate himself and to “void” as many “lower” animals as he could poison. He could not allow this. He already owed the animals his heart. And what would become of the Wonderments if he were dead? What would become of Drystan? What would become of England?
He patted his hands around in the debris. When he felt what he was looking for, he lifted up a sleeve of the ripped-up shirt and found his pair of heavy-duty, twenty-two-inch bolt cutters. He had first spotted them—they were cut-price returns—in a B&Q DIY store while ducking out of the rain, and blagged the money the same day. He poked his little finger between the hardened blades, which were concealed in a blunt plastic green housing that looked, in profile, like reptilian jaws.