The Return of the Arinn Read online

  ‘So, there’s some new plan?’

  ‘Dunno! You think they’ve confided in me?’

  ‘C’mon, Sharkey,’ Mark had said, as he’d helped him into the shirt. ‘We need to get you out of here.’

  They’d come across the bespectacled Jo Derby sitting on the floor of the corridor outside the chamber accompanied by a nervous looking Gully. She hauled herself to her feet on recognising them.

  ‘Oh, Mark – Sharkey! Thank goodness!’

  ‘We need the medics. Any idea where they’ve gone?’ Mark had said.

  ‘I doubt there are many left.’

  ‘What’s happening to the farm?’

  ‘The military are moving out. Their presence is likely to attract attack now that Seebox is getting organised. There are hundreds of civilians, mostly families, who would be put at risk.’

  ‘I’ve got to find a medic, Jo. We have a seriously injured VIP.’

  ‘Who? One of the crew?’

  ‘Padraig.’

  ‘Oh, my goodness! I think there might be at least one doctor left. Come on – I’ll help you to find him.’

  Jo was proven right. There was just one medic left in the building: an anaesthetist named Hall. Mark had found himself half running beside Hall as he’d headed out to recover the gear he had already stowed in the back of a Landrover in preparation for leaving. Their conversation had been hurried; Mark helping him carry the stuff back in while explaining Padraig’s situation. Meanwhile, Bull had hauled the emaciated body of Padraig out of the Pig and onto the camp bed evacuated by Sharkey in the infirmary. Dr Hall had taken a brief look at Padraig and had said something about ketotic breathing.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mark had asked.

  ‘It’s the kind of breathing you’d expect in someone who has been subjected to long term starvation.’ He’d put a nasogastric tube down one of Padraig’s nostrils and put his fingers into Padraig’s gaping mouth, ferreting about at the back of his throat to guide the tube down into Padraig’s stomach. ‘This’ll help get some fluid, calories and essential vitamins into him.’

  ‘Is there anything more you can do?’

  ‘You want me to try setting up a central line?’

  ‘Anything that might help.’

  Mark had watched in tense silence as Dr Hall made an incision above Padraig’s left collarbone, and inserted a much finer tube into a vein.

  ‘There you go – one subclavian line.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You understand what it does?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It goes down into the right atrium of his heart.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  ‘Gets even more fluids and calories into the circulation. But more importantly, this line won’t clot so easily as a peripheral. It’s the best way to deliver antibiotics. But he needs a lot more than I can do for him – he needs intensive therapy by trained staff in a proper ITU. He won’t get that here.’

  ‘We’re heading for somewhere he might get it.’

  ‘If you make it, that is.’

  ‘Yeah. If we make it.’

  ‘Well, good luck!’

  ‘Thanks, Doc.’

  While Nan had assisted Doctor Hall in cleaning up Padraig – redressing him in a hospital gown and then finding several thick blankets and two old hot water bottles to keep him warm – Mark had spent a few minutes talking to Jo.

  ‘Take care of Gully for me, will you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t, Mark. I’ll be leaving with the last of the military.’

  ‘Aw, please, Mark, don’t leave me ’ere!’ Gully begged.

  ‘I don’t want to leave you, Gully. But you’ll be safer here with the other civilians.’

  Gully had attempted to break away from Jo’s restraining arm, his tear-filled eyes looking into Mark’s.

  ‘Jo, you sure you can’t take him?’

  She’d grimaced, seeing the pleading look in Mark’s face. ‘Where we’re headed, it wouldn’t be safe for a child.’ She’d put her arm around Gully’s shoulders. ‘Lady Breakespeare will look after you.’

  Gully wailed: ‘Old Pinky Ponky don’t know how to look after herself!’

  *

  Now, facing the barricaded town, Cal’s urgent mutter broke through Mark’s memories of Gully. ‘We need a clear plan before we go in.’ Mark, Cal and Nan had joined the others in the overcrowded belly of the Pig. Patting Tajh’s back, who had been nursing Padraig, Mark inched his way forward to join Cal in watching over Cogwheel’s shoulder as he drove. They descended a small hill on the approach to the flaming barrier.

  ‘Way I see it,’ Cal murmured thoughtfully, ‘the fifteen tons behind the guillotine blade should be enough to get us through the barrier, but we don’t know what’s waiting for us on the town side of it.’

  Bull snorted from behind them: ‘They’ll hail every sort of crap on us from every angle, that’s what.’

  ‘I know you think we need to use the Minimis, but we’re going to expose ourselves to Molotovs if we open the ports.’

  ‘No way we’ll get through without the guns,’ Bull replied.

  ‘Even with the two guns, we can’t man front and rear as well as the sides.’

  Mark spoke: ‘Maybe Nan and I can help?’

  ‘What do you suggest? You going to magic us through?’

  ‘Something like that, yeah.’

  Cogwheel nodded. ‘We can’t go in without covering the windscreen.’

  ‘You saying we go in blind?’ Bull replied.

  ‘The flaps are slitted. We’ll see enough to get through the barrier.’

  Mark said: ‘Let Nan join Cogwheel in the cab.’

  ‘What good will that do?’

  ‘She can probe the field ahead even through the steel flaps, maybe stop us careening into something ugly – like a dug-out pit.’

  Nan added: ‘And I can fight.’

  ‘Makes sense to me,’ Tajh spoke.

  ‘Okay,’ Cal nodded to Nan. ‘We can’t avoid being exposed on every front. So we rake ’em with the Minimis on either side – that’s Bull and me. You get the heavy one, Bull.’

  Bull’s sweating face broke out into a grin under the interior light. ‘Roger, that!’

  Cal nodded. ‘Okay! So we’ll batten down the sides going through the barrier. Soon as we’re through we chink the side flaps open just enough to fit the barrels. And that’s where you come in, magic boy. You cover the rear.’

  Mark snorted, but he began to inch his way to the back again, nodding to Tajh who was adjusting the drip rate on the central venous line to Padraig’s heart.

  ‘Okay – everybody ready?’

  There was a chorus of grunts. Then a single voice of dissent from Sharkey: ‘Hey, fellas, what about me?’

  ‘You can’t handle a Minimi with that shoulder.’

  Bull’s voice cut in: ‘Damned hippie can help me nurse the belt. Belts don’t last long at 800 RPM.’

  ‘Yee-hah!’ Sharkey dragged two heavy belts along the metal floor to sit beside Bull’s allocated porthole.

  ‘Step on it, Cogwheel.’

  ‘I have no foot to put down, boss!’

  ‘Take off, then!’

  Sharkey started humming the Marley song Exodus as Cogwheel revved the engine to screaming pitch, moving through the gears. Bull and Cal took up their positions with machine guns at the ready as the Pig rocked and rolled towards the blazing barrier. The collision, when it came, threw everybody forwards, provoking a chorus of curses. The barricade was bigger, and heavier, than they had anticipated, made up of half a dozen burned out cars and trucks. As the Pig’s guillotine blades tore into it, big chunks of blazing scrap slammed into the armoured windscreen, scraped across the bonnet and ricocheted off both sides. Had the flaps been open they would have been ripped off.

>   ‘Here come the Molotovs!’

  Within moments the Pig was a mass of flames as the petrol-filled bottles fell upon them from front, sides and rear – the noise was deafening. In the windows of the three-storey buildings to either side of the main road they could make out the spectral outlines of figures – maniacal Razzers – dancing and chanting as they ignored their own safety to hurl bottle after bottle into the conflagration. Flames came in through the slitted portholes to either side, forcing Cal and Bull to keep them closed for the moment. Through his oraculum Mark caught the same picture Nan did: the Mamma Pig had become a blazing inferno.

  ‘Go for it, Bull!’ Cal roared from the left side port, which was now opened up a slit, just wide enough to take the barrel of the smaller Minimi. ‘And watch our back, Magic Man. Let them have it!’

  Through the inched open side portals the Minimis poured deadly hails of lead, belt following belt, filling the cabin with the toxic smoke of cordite, and amid this frenzy, the Mamma Pig guided solely by Nan’s oraculum, crashed and sliced its way through every obstacle, screaming in topmost revs. Mark poured a fury of black lightning behind the vehicle, adding a new horror to the lurching, grinding progress of the Pig.

  It wasn’t until they’d cleared the town that the noise abated. A mile further on Cogwheel jerked the Pig to a halt, threw back the windscreen flaps and shouted at them to open every port.

  The burning town lit up the horizon behind them. Cal, Bull and Mark got busy with the fire extinguishers, spraying the tyres and undercarriage, then anywhere that looked like it needed it. Tajh waited for the hissing of the cooling metal to lessen so she could hear herself speak. Then she turned to Mark and spoke to him in a husky whisper:

  ‘Was that us back there – screaming?’

  Mark met her eyes, shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Dear god!’

  ‘We made it. That’s all that matters.’

  Tajh shivered. Her face was ashen, her pupils dilated. Maybe, like him, she could still feel the heat of the flames and hear the screaming in her mind.

  Mark put his arm around Tajh’s shoulders.

  Tajh took a juddering breath. ‘I can’t believe we got through. Was it something to do with you and Nan – your presence?’

  ‘I think we fluked it between us.’

  Cal came back from the rear and suggested they give the Pig a good look over, to make sure they had caught every last spark.

  Tajh’s eyes hadn’t left Mark’s. ‘I heard you say something back there. You said you detected some presence?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Something scary.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘But you don’t know what?’

  Mark shook his head. He stared up into that same night sky and felt the same skittering fall of snowflakes as he had before going through the barrier.

  He thought back to the extraordinary events at the gladiatorial arena in London: Gully had run forward to cry out to Penny, who was on the rostrum next to Grimstone. But there had been a third presence: a small innocuous-looking man. He had radiated power. Only the Tyrant could be that powerful. Yet, he’d held back from destroying them when Mark’s battleaxe had been pulverised with ease by Grimstone wielding the Sword of Feimhin. The Tyrant’s reticence had had something to do with Gully, and presumably, also Penny. Mark had no idea why this should matter to such a dangerous and powerful figure.

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered, ‘I think I might have made a mistake leaving Gully back there.’

  Fate

  Penny was gazing into a reflection of her own face while standing erect within the landscape of a dream. She didn’t know how she could gaze into her own reflection without a mirror, or water, or any medium that would make it possible.

  Am I changing?

  She sensed that she was, but she wasn’t sure. For some time she had not been sure about anything. She didn’t know if she was dreaming or not, or where she was, or what it meant to be here, looking at the changing features of her own reflection – or if there was an even wilder, more extraordinary, alternative.

  She studied the mask of her own face.

  Her skin looked smoother than normal, almost ethereally so, and her eyes looked more shiny, more silvery. Her hair was ivory-blonde, bunched up to make a springy coconut peak within a filigree helmet of cross-hatched beaded strands; jet alternating with pearl and diamonds. She had no memory of making up her own hair, any more than she could recall donning the jewelled helmet, which covered her entire head and face. Around her throat, and one with the helmet, was a corolla of virginal white florets; an exquisitely delicate version of an Elizabethan ruff. The ruff itself was also a part of the dress, which fell to her ankles and was the same virginal white.

  That extraordinary image, purportedly the reflection of her own face, caused Penny to stare at it in astonishment.

  In the reflection, she saw unbearable sadness in her eyes: the acquiescence to her fate, whatever that fate might truly prove to be.

  She spoke: ‘I am within the Black Rose.’

  She heard Jeremiah’s voice as it sounded mind-to-mind.

  Nothing of this seemed real to Penny. It was as if her being had become detached from her will. Somehow she had been transported into a magical world. But it wasn’t how she might have imagined a world of fairytales, with elfin princes and princesses, goblins and witches. The landscape, the three-dimensional ambience, looked and felt solid enough, but she was sure that it wasn’t real. The strangeness of it both intrigued and terrified her.

  Without speaking it aloud, being careful to keep her fears from showing, Penny plucked the thought from her mind: am I a prisoner here? The idea frightened her. It felt as if she had just woken from a strange and disturbing nightmare only to find that the nightmare had not gone away.

  She called out: ‘Jeremiah?’

 

  ‘But you are merely in my mind. I can’t see you. I can’t hear your voice in my ears.’

 

  ‘I feel so isolated. I’m a prisoner here – wherever here is. I want to explore this place – your city, or whatever it really is.’

 

  His words, their strange implications, reverberated in her mind: You will fail me!

  Her surroundings changed. She found herself enclosed within organic shapes, sweeping abstracts composed of curves and arabesques, as if she were within the labyrinth of a gigantic spider – one that wove a wonderland of multi-hued crystalline webs. When she took a dozen strides, swivelled and spun, changing the direction of her movement, the weave changed too, metamorphosed in a fluid, curiously plastic, way. But it continued to envelop her.

  Jeremiah’s laughter echoed within her skull.

  ‘But where do I paint them? There are no flat walls, not even ceilings. And even if there were, I have no brushes, or crayons or pencils.’

 

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  In moments Penny was surrounded by the wheeling images of what looked like spectres. There was a feeling that these insubstantial beings resented her presence.

  ‘What are these wraiths?’

 

  ‘What purpose do they serve?’

 

  ‘I still don’t understand.’

 

  He plucked a thought – her image of him surrounded by his nimbus of wraiths – out of her mind and he twiddled his fingers and it became a s
culpture in crystal.

  ‘How did you do that?’

 

  ‘But I . . . I couldn’t possibly—’

 

  ‘How?’

 

  ‘I cannot.’

 

  Penny had no option but to try. She hesitated, gazing at an empty space in the corner between two out-curving walls. She imagined a waterfall amid rocks as white and smooth as marble.

  The waterfall became substance.

  Penny gasped, her hand reaching out to feel the blue falling water, gazing with delight at the tiny rainbow evinced by the play of light through the gossamer-fine mist.

  ‘It’s . . . perfect.’

 

  But her art was not the only thing that had undergone a profound metamorphosis. Penny’s sense of the passage of time had changed. It was as if she were passing in and out of a never-ending hallucination. Gradually, she became aware of the fact that she was not alone. There were more obviously female figures, as insubstantial as ghosts, who clustered about her. She cared – she cared because she wanted to care – but there were many, all so grey and ghostly, that she feared caring for them all would consume her, and drag her down into a despair that would accomplish nothing.

  ‘Who are they? Why do they look so sad?’

 

  His question caused her to hesitate. She whispered, ‘Yes.’

 

  She could not answer. She didn’t know why she, in this strange, beautiful dream, should care about what appeared to be spectres.

 

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. Perhaps.’

 

  She didn’t know why she should remember or even care about these grey shades who flickered in and out of existence. Why was he testing her so?