The airship started the slow descent into Swindon.
“How have you been, Next?” he asked, our past association dictating the way in which we spoke to one another.
“I’ve been well, sir. Yourself?”
“Can’t complain.” He laughed. “Well, I could, but it wouldn’t do any good. The damn fools made me a colonel, dontcha know it.”
“Congratulations,” I said, slightly uneasily.
The steward asked us to fasten our seat belts and Phelps sat down next to me and snapped on the buckle. He carried on talking in a slightly lower voice.
“I’m a bit concerned about the Crimea.”
“Who isn’t?” I countered, wondering if Phelps had changed his politics since the last time we had met.
“Quite. It’s these UN johnnies poking their noses where they’re not welcome. Makes all those lives seem wasted if we give it back now.”
I sighed. His politics hadn’t changed and I didn’t want an argument. I had wanted the war finished almost as soon as I got out there. It didn’t fit into my idea of what a just war should be. Pushing Nazis out of Europe had been just. The fight over the Crimean Peninsula was nothing but xenophobic pride and misguided patriotism.
“How’s the hand?” I asked.
Phelps showed me a lifelike left hand. He rotated the wrist and then wiggled the fingers. I was impressed.
“Remarkable, isn’t it?” he said. “They take the impulses from a sensor thingummy strapped to the muscles in the upper arm. If I’d lost the blasted thing above the elbow I’d have looked a proper Charlie.”
He paused for a moment and returned to his first subject.
“I’m a bit concerned that public pressure might have the government pulling the plug before the offensive.”
“Offensive?”
Colonel Phelps smiled.
“Of course. I have friends higher up who tell me it’s only a matter of days before the first shipment of the new plasma rifles arrives. Do you think the Russians will be able to defend themselves against Stonk?”
“Frankly, no; that is unless they have their own version.”
“Not a chance. Goliath is the most advanced weapons company in the world. Believe me, I’m hoping as much as the next man that we never have to use it, but Stonk is the high ground this conflict has been waiting for.”
He rummaged in his briefcase and pulled out a leaflet.
“I’m touring England giving pro-Crimea talks. I’d like you to come along.”
“I don’t really think—” I began, taking the leaflet anyway.
“Nonsense!” replied Colonel Phelps. “As a healthy and successful veteran of the campaign it is your duty to give voice to those that made the ultimate sacrifice. If we give the peninsula back, every single one of those lives will have been lost in vain.”
“I think, sir, that those lives have already been lost and no decision we can make in any direction can change that.”
He pretended not to hear and I lapsed into silence. Colonel Phelps’s rabid support of the conflict had been his way of dealing with the disaster. The order was given to charge against what we were told would be a “token resistance” but turned out to be massed Russian field artillery. Phelps had ridden the APC on the outside until the Russians opened up with everything they had; a shell-burst had taken his lower arm off and peppered his back with shrapnel. We had loaded him up with as many other soldiers as we could, driving back to the English lines with the carrier a mound of groaning humanity. I had gone back into the carnage against orders, driving among the shattered armor looking for survivors. Of the seventy-six APCs and light tanks that advanced into the Russian guns, only two vehicles returned. Out of the 534 soldiers involved, 51 survived, only 8 of them completely uninjured. One of the dead had been Anton Next, my brother. Disaster doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Fortunately for me the airship docked soon after and I was able to avoid Colonel Phelps in the airfield lounge. I picked up my case from baggage retrieval and stayed locked in the ladies’ until I thought he had gone. I tore his leaflet into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. The airfield lounge was empty when I came out. It was bigger than was required for the amount of traffic that came to town; an off-white elephant that reflected the dashed hopes of Swindon’s town planners. The concourse outside was similarly deserted except for two students holding an anti-Crimea war banner. They had heard of Phelps’s arrival and hoped that they could turn him from his prowar campaigning. They had two chances: fat and slim.
They looked at me and I turned quickly away. If they knew who Phelps was, they might quite conceivably know who I was as well. I looked around the empty pickup point. I had spoken on the phone to Victor Analogy—the head of the Swindon LiteraTecs—and he had offered to send a car to pick me up. It hadn’t arrived. It was hot, so I removed my jacket. A looped recording came over the Tannoy exhorting nonexistent drivers not to park in the deserted white zone, and a bored-looking worker came by and returned a few trolleys. I sat down next to a Will-Speak machine at the far end of the concourse. The last time I was in Swindon the airship park had been simply a grass field with a rusty mast. I guessed that much else had changed too.
I waited five minutes, then stood and paced impatiently up and down. The Will-Speak machine—officially known as a Shakespeare Soliloquy Vending Automaton—was of Richard III. It was a simple box, with the top half glazed and inside a realistic mannequin visible from the waist up in suitable attire. The machine would dispense a short snippet of Shakespeare for ten pence. They hadn’t been manufactured since the thirties and were now something of a rarity; Baconic vandalism and a lack of trained maintenance were together hastening their demise.
I dug out a ten-pence piece and inserted it. There was a gentle whirring and clicking from within as the machine wound itself up to speed. There had been a Hamlet version on the corner of Commercial Road when I was small. My brother and I had pestered our mother for loose change and listened to the mannequin refer to things we couldn’t really understand. It told us of “the undiscovered country.” My brother, in his childish naé¯veté, had said he wanted to visit such a place, and he did, seventeen years later, in a mad dash sixteen hundred miles from home, the only sound the roar of engines and the crump-crump-crump of the Russian guns.
Was ever woman in this humor wooed? asked the mannequin, rolling its eyes crazily as it stuck one finger in the air and lurched from side to side.
Was ever woman in this humor won?
It paused for effect.
I’ll have her, but I’ll not keep her long . . .
“Excuse me?—”
I looked up. One of the students had walked up and touched me on the arm. He wore a peace button in his lapel and had a pair of pince-nez glasses perched precariously on his large nose.
“You’re Next, aren’t you?”
“Next for what?”
“Corporal Next, Light Armored Brigade.”
I rubbed my brow.
“I’m not here with the colonel. It was a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Neither do I. That’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”
The student looked at me oddly as his girlfriend joined him. He told her who I was.
“You were the one who went back,” she marveled, as though I were a rare stuffed parakeet. “It was against a direct order. They were going to court-martial you.”
“Well, they didn’t, did they?”
“Not when The Owl on Sunday got wind of your story. I’ve read your testimony at the inquiry. You’re antiwar.”
The two students looked at one another as if they couldn’t believe their good fortune.
“We need someone to talk at Colonel Phelps’s rally,” said the young man with the big nose. “Someone from the other side. Someone who has been there. Someone with clout. Would you do that for us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I looked around t
o see if, by a miracle, my lift had arrived. It hadn’t.
. . . Whom I, continued the mannequin, some three months hence, stabbed in my angry mood at Tewkesbury?
“Listen, guys, I’d love to help you, but I can’t. I’ve spent twelve years trying to forget. Speak to some other vet. There are thousands of us.”
“Not like you, Miss Next. You survived the charge. You went back to get your fallen comrades out. One of the fifty-one. It’s your duty to speak on behalf of those that didn’t make it.”
“Bullshit. My duty is to myself. I survived the charge and have lived with it every single day since. Every night I ask myself: Why me? Why did I live and the others, my brother even, die? There is no answer to that question and that’s only just where the pain starts. I can’t help you.”
“You don’t have to speak,” said the girl persistently, “but better for one old wound to open than a thousand new ones, eh?”
“Don’t teach me morality, you little shit,” I said, my voice rising.
It had the desired effect. She handed me a leaflet, took her boyfriend by the arm, and departed.
I closed my eyes. My heart was beating like the crump-crump-crump of the Russian field artillery. I didn’t hear the squad car pull up beside me.
“Officer Next?—” asked a cheery voice.
I turned and nodded gratefully, picked up my case and walked over. The officer in the car smiled at me. He had long dreadlocked hair and a pair of overly large dark glasses. His uniform was open at the collar in an uncharacteristically casual way for a SpecOps officer, and he wore a goodly amount of jewelry, also strictly against SpecOps guidelines.
“Welcome to Swindon, Officer! The town where anything can happen and probably will!”
He smiled broadly and jerked a thumb toward the rear of the car.
“Trunk’s open.”
The boot contained a lot of iron stakes, several mallets, a large crucifix and a pick and shovel. There was also a musty smell, the smell of mold and the long dead—I hurriedly threw in my bag and slammed the boot lid down. I walked around to the passenger door and got in.
“Shit!—” I cried out, suddenly noticing that in the back, pacing the rear seats behind a strong mesh screen, was a large Siberian wolf. The officer laughed loudly.
“Take no notice of the pup, ma’am! Officer Next, I’d like you to meet Mr. Meakle. Mr. Meakle, this is Officer Next.”
He was talking about the wolf. I stared at the wolf, which stared back at me with an intensity that I found disconcerting. The officer laughed like a drain and pulled away with a lurch and a squeal of tires. I had forgotten just how weird Swindon could be.
As we drove off, the Will-Speak machine came to an end, reciting the last part of its soliloquy to itself:
. . . Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, that I might see my shadow, as I pass.
There was a clicking and whirring and then the mannequin stopped abruptly, lifeless again until the next coin.
“Beautiful day,” I commented once we were under way.
“Every day is a beautiful day, Miss Next. The name’s Stoker—”
He pulled out onto the Stratton bypass.
“—SpecOps-17: Vampire and Werewolf Disposal Operations. Suckers and biters, they call us. My friends call me Spike. You,” he added with a broad grin, “can call me Spike.”
By way of explanation he tapped a mallet and stake that were clipped to the mesh partition.
“What do they call you, Miss Next?”
“Thursday.”
“Pleased to meet you, Thursday.”
He proffered a huge hand that I shook gratefully. I liked him immediately. He leaned against the door pillar to get the best out of the cooling breeze and tapped a beat out on the steering wheel. A recent scratch on his neck oozed a small amount of blood.
“You’re bleeding,” I observed.
Spike wiped it away with his hand.
“It’s nothing. He gave me a bit of a struggle!—”
I looked in the back seat again. The wolf was sitting down, scratching its ear with a hind leg.
“—but I’m immunized against lycanthropy. Mr. Meakle just won’t take his medication. Will you, Mr. Meakle?”
The wolf pricked up its ears as the last vestige of the human within him remembered his name. He started to pant in the heat. Spike went on:
“His neighbors called. All the cats in the neighborhood had gone missing; I found him rummaging in the bins behind SmileyBurger. He’ll be in for treatment, morph back and be on the streets again by Friday. He has rights, they tell me. What’s your posting?”
“I’m . . . ah . . . joining SpecOps-27.”
Spike laughed loudly again.
“A LiteraTec!? Always nice to meet someone as underfunded as I am. Some good faces in that office. Your chief is Victor Analogy. Don’t be fooled by the gray hairs—he’s as sharp as a knife. The others are all A-one Ops. A bit shiny-arsed and a mite too smart for me, but there you go. Where am I taking you?”
“The Finis Hotel.”
“First time in Swindon?”
“Sadly, no,” I replied. “It’s my hometown. I was in the regular force here until ’75. You?”
“Welsh Border guard for ten years. I got into some darkness at Oswestry in ’79 and discovered I had a talent for this kind of shit. I trannied here from Oxford when the two depots merged. You’re looking at the only Staker south of Leeds. I run my own office but it’s mighty lonesome. If you know anyone handy with a mallet?—”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” I replied, wondering why anyone would consciously wish to fight the supreme powers of darkness for a basic SpecOps salary, “but if I come across anyone, I’ll let you know. What happened to Chesney? He ran the department when I was here last.”
A cloud crossed Spike’s usually bright features and he sighed deeply.
“He was a good friend but he fell into shadows. Became a servant of the dark one. I had to hunt him down myself. The spike ’n’ decap was the easy part. The tricky bit was having to tell his wife—she wasn’t exactly overjoyed.”
“I guess I’d be a bit pissed off too.”
“Anyway,” continued Spike, cheering up almost immediately, “you don’t have to tell me shit, but what is a good-looking SpecOps doing joining the Swindon Litera Tecs?”
“I had a spot of bother in London.”
“Ah,” replied Spike knowingly.
“I’m also looking for someone.”
“Who?”
I looked over at him and made an instant judgment call. If I could trust anyone, I could trust Spike.
“Hades.”
“Acheron? Flatline, sister. The man’s toast. Crashed and burned at J-twelve on the four.”
“So we’re led to believe. If you hear anything?—”
“No problem, Thursday.”
“And we can keep this between ourselves?”
He smiled.
“After staking, secrets is what I do best.”
“Hang on—”
I had caught sight of a brightly colored sports car in a second-hand car lot on the other side of the road. Spike slowed down.
“What’s up?”
“I . . . er . . . need a car. Can you drop me over there?”
Spike executed an illegal U-turn, causing the following car to brake violently and slew across the road. The driver started to hurl abuse until he saw that it was a SpecOps black and white, then wisely kept quiet and drove on. I retrieved my bag.
“Thanks for the lift. I’ll see you about.”
“Not if I see you first!” said Spike. “I’ll see what I can dig up on your missing friend.”
“I’d appreciate it. Thanks.”
“Good-bye.”
“So long.”
“Cheerio,” said a timid-sounding voice from the back. We both turned and looked into the rear of the car. Mr. Meakle had changed back. A thin, rather pathetic-looking man was sitting in the back seat, completely naked and very
muddy. His hands were clasped modestly over his genitals.
“Mr. Meakle! Welcome back!” said Spike, grinning broadly as he added in a scolding tone: “You didn’t take your tablets, did you?”
Mr. Meakle shook his head miserably.
I thanked Spike again. As he drove off I could see Mr. Meakle waving to me a bit stupidly through the rear window. Spike did another U-turn, causing a second car to brake hard, and was gone.
I stared at the sports car on the front row of the lot under a banner marked BARGAIN. There could be no mistake. The car was definitely the one that had appeared before me in my hospital room. And I had been driving it. It was me who had told me to come to Swindon. It was me who had told me that Acheron wasn’t dead. If I hadn’t come to Swindon then I wouldn’t have seen the car and wouldn’t have been able to buy it. It didn’t make a great deal of sense, but what little I did know was that I had to have it.
“Can I help you, madam?” asked an oily salesman who had appeared almost from nowhere, rubbing his hands nervously and sweating profusely in the heat.
“This car. How long have you had it?”
“The 356 Speedster? About six months.”
“Has it ever been up to London in that time?”
“London?” repeated the salesman, slightly puzzled. “Not at all. Why?”
“No reason. I’ll take it.”
The salesman looked slightly shocked.
“Are you sure? Wouldn’t you like something a little more practical? I have a good selection of Buicks which have just come in. Ex-Goliath but with low mileage, you know—”
“This one,” I said firmly.
The salesman smiled uneasily. The car was obviously at a giveaway price and they didn’t stand to make a bean on it. He muttered something feeble and hurried off to get the keys.
I sat inside. The interior was spartan in the extreme. I had never thought myself very interested in cars, but this one was different. It was outrageously conspicuous with curious paintwork in red, blue and green, but I liked it immediately. The salesman returned with the keys and it started on the second turn. He did the necessary paperwork and half an hour later I drove out of the lot into the road. The car accelerated rapidly with a rasping note from the tailpipe. Within a couple of hundred yards the two of us were inseparable.