“Cassie, will you be noticed if you disappear for a few minutes?”
“Maybe, but I can tell them I had a stomach bug and had to rush to the little room. Ms. McGuigan will sack me, but who cares? The minibus won’t be back for at least two hours!”
Mo speaks aloud: “I am moving my lips for the benefit of the cameras, ignore me, rhubarb rhubarb bet you wish you’d hired a lip-reader … okay, back to business. Cassie, I need another hour here to trawl the party. Also, I bet Schiller’s people will all turn out when the main guests show up. So once the PM goes in, that’s when we’ll make our move. Do you copy?”
“YesYes! How do you want to do it?”
“I’ll call you five minutes ahead of time. If you’re with people, run your stomach bug excuse. Go into the bathroom under the stairs and await my call. I’ll go in, look around, and if all’s well I’ll come out and give you the all clear. If I call you or if I’m out of contact for more than ten minutes, come in and extract me. Is that clear?”
“Clear as moonlight!”
“MADCAP, relay to ZERO. CANDID out. Thanks, dear, you’re a star, now go and fix yourself some rhubarb rhubarb. Bye.” Mo returns the phone to her clutch, then straightens her back, permits herself a momentary wince as she shifts weight onto her back foot, and heads towards the staircase. The night is young, the Prime Minister hasn’t arrived yet, and who knows? There might still be useful intel to extract from the guests before it’s time to start looking behind locked doors.
*
I can’t stand fucking zombie movies.
Well okay, I’ll make an honorable exception for Shaun of the Dead. But the point stands: zombie flicks strike too close to home—and too far as well. Ever since I did my own star turn in Brookwood Cemetery (and don’t get me started on my perfidious ex-boss, Iris Carpenter, and her happy clappy friends-and-family Black Pharaoh cult), I’ve had an uncomfortably close relationship with the reanimated. We don’t say undead because there’s no such thing. Zombies are just corpses that have been activated by an Eater that wants to go walkabout and chow down on other folks’ souls. Our Residual Human Resources would do just that if they weren’t locked down tight by Facilities’ geas. PHANGs are living people who have been infected by a terrible commensal symbiote or parasitoid. K syndrome victims are living people who are dying of an extradimensional parasite infection. The Eater of Souls is sui generis but I can confirm its host has a heartbeat and still enjoys a plate of spaghetti bolognese, and so on. The thing is, I can deal with them all, kinda-sorta. (Zombies are easy, PHANGs really don’t get on well with UV laser pointers, and K syndrome isn’t a threat, except to my emotional stability.)
But Schiller’s mooks, the ones with giant isopods in place of their tongues who dream of drowning in their god’s mind, give me the willies. And right now they’re trying to give me lead poisoning, too.
While Captain Partridge, Johnny McTavish, and I were working this scene like it was a corporate storage unit and office inside the Heathrow fence, and while Chris Womack was serving an Anton Piller order on the janitor, a silent, many-legged alarm began sounding in the depths of the warehouse. There is a brood-mother here, and while Schiller’s been taking care of business at Nether Stowe House (and presumably at his apartment near Jamaica Wharf) the brood-mother has been busy happily infecting the airport staff and Schiller’s regular employees. It’s after six o’clock on a Saturday night and most normal people would have somewhere better to be than hanging out at Heathrow, but no: the Middle Temple of the Golden Promise Ministries is holding a revival meeting, and the theme of the event seems to be that when you’re speaking in tongues you can never have too many guns.
As I open up my mind’s eye the world fades and I find myself standing in a grayscale maze on an infinite plane, the walls of which are chest-high charnel racks of human bones. An invertebrate the size of a grizzly bear rears up above the piled femurs and skulls on dozens of tiny legs and clatters its chitinous mouth-parts at me. The silvery slug-trails of hundreds of half-eaten souls trail away from it in all directions, too numerous to count, like strings of drool. It’s tugging on them—I register this just as a real-world someone brusquely grabs me by the scruff of my neck and yanks me down onto the floor, hard, just before the airspace previously occupied by my skull is shattered by the percussive banging of gunfire. We are indoors, so it’s deafeningly loud, at least until Johnny lines up his AA-12 and starts laying down an artillery barrage, at which point it feels like I’m being punched in the eardrums by an angry woodpecker.
I sprawl backwards and try not to scream. I can feel the hosts around us, some upstairs and some in the basement, and a bunch more out front. The basement, I think, confused—something about the basement, like a flash of déjà vu to the second Alien movie—oh, right. I crunch down hard, and find myself sucking up the debris of what’s left of Ollie Jackson, 27, single male, born again into the mind of the Sleeper by way of its loyal many-legged servant. Ollie was downstairs with an MP5 pointed at the ceiling, just like those guys in Grozny during the Russian invasion of Chechnya, getting ready to shoot upwards through the floor we’re lying on. Well, not anymore. His mind is a bitter and watery-thin gruel, much of his individuality already digested by the Sleeper before I ended him. I cast the net wider, feel two more above us and off to one side, and another raising his gun on the emergency stairs from the basement—
Nope, can’t be having any of that.
“Can you do something about these guys?” Someone is shouting in my ear. It comes through as a thin, high-pitched buzzing.
“Working on it,” I manage, but it feels as if I’m drowning in secondhand death; the thing is, I can kill at a distance just by willing it so, but I also get to live through my victims’ experience of dying, and—“I’m not a fucking machine gun. Got one below, three upstairs. ’Nother below—”
There’s another burst of gunfire from a soldier’s G36, then shrieking that doesn’t stop but fades into gasping for seconds at a time before it comes right back at full gutshot volume. No more shooting, though. Someone is giving orders, boots are pounding past me. I struggle to sit up, but I still can’t see anything except the host-mother’s bone maze nest. “Host-mother!” I call. “Get the host-mother!”
“Bob? How many fingers?” It’s Johnny. He sounds calm enough.
“Can’t see. Inner eye.”
“Oh bollocks.” Someone grabs my right arm so hard that I gasp, then they’re lifting and after a moment I flex my leg muscles. It’s at this point that I realize there’s a sharp pain in the middle of my sternum, as if I’ve been punched. “Eh, looks like your vest caught it.”
“What. Have I been…”