city of anarchy
chapter eleven
The sky was tinged with the pink glow of dawn as Holly, Angus and Eugene left the black marble and glass of police headquarters. The streets were still very quiet this early in the morning, and the three of them were nearly the only ones in sight on the empty pavement. They shivered in a breeze that whipped aimlessly around their weary bodies--though Eugene did not seem so affected.
He inhaled, puffed up his chest and sighed with satisfaction, surveying his employees emotionally. 'On behalf of Impassionate Deliveries,' he said, spreading his arms wide, 'I would like to give you another hug.'
Angus and Holly gave a sigh of a different kind.
'We're glad to have you back too, Eugene,' Angus assured him. 'But let's not get carried away with the hugging. I'm sure there's a law against it anyway, hugging your employer. It's not right.'
Eugene's arms clamped themselves around him and he buried his curly head in the taller boy's chest. He resurfaced tearfully. 'There is no such divide in Impassionate Deliveries,' he declared. 'You must consider yourself an essential, integral part!'
Angus was sagging with exhaustion. He yawned, still in Eugene's embrace. 'So, what, on behalf of Impassionate Deliveries,' he said, 'Impassionate Deliveries is now hugging itself?'
The curly-haired man swung happily back on his heels, releasing the boy from his grip. He jabbed a defiant finger to the sky and declared, 'In times of darkness, Angus, hugging yourself is often the best thing you can do!'
Angus looked at him as he paused, awkwardly.
'Wait,' he said. 'That didn't come out right. I meant...I meant hugging as in--I meant that...hugging yourself should be interpreted as a metaphor for...well, self-assurance. Yes. Yes! Confidence. Faith in oneself, and, above all, a positive outlook! Yes, that's it.'
Angus yawned again. 'Listen, Eugene, I really need to sleep. And as much as I've loved every minute of getting the crap beaten out of me for Impassionate Deliveries, I think I'll need at least the next week off to...you know, recuperate.'
Eugene laughed ecstatically, drunk on pride and joy. Once again he wrapped his arms around the boy. 'Two days!' he exclaimed, merrily. 'Then we can get back to business and put this whole, ugly ordeal far behind us! Right, Holly?'
Holly had been lost in thought. She looked very pale in the weak light of morning. 'Yeah,' she said, vaguely. 'Eugene, I need to show you something. On your computer.'
The other two presented blank looks.
'You're insane,' Angus said eventually, stifling yet another yawn. 'It's over, Holly. Let it go. Enjoy all the benefits of sleep in a real bed, like I'm going to right now. See you later, guys.'
'Bye, Angus!' Eugene called after him, waving. He turned back to Holly, his face falling. 'Holly! What's wrong? Aren't you happy that everything's turned out OK?'
Holly glanced back into the police building. Dorz and Russ had disappeared into a back room; they were probably upside down in ropes by now. 'What Dorz said,' she muttered, half to herself. 'I've been thinking about it, Eugene.' She stared at him earnestly. 'And something's not right about it. About this whole thing.'
He placed a hand on her shoulder, in an act that would have been fatherly had he not been so short. 'He was just trying to scare you, you know,' he told her. 'Don't you pay any attention to him. They were bad men who blew up a building and nearly besmirched our good name while they were at it! Can you believe that? They were, of course, bound to fail--'
'That's just it, though,' Holly insisted, ignoring Eugene's recourse to his favourite subject. 'He showed me a video--they didn't do it.'
Eugene looked at her uncomprehendingly.
'The entry for the paperclips,' Holly continued, 'on your computer. It had been deleted. Dorz and Russ only kidnapped us because they found us snooping for evidence that might incriminate them, because they were at the Facility that night, but they had a camcorder and filmed everything and the video shows that it wasn't them who did it--' She gasped having spoken faster with every word. 'And I just got them arrested because I didn't want anything to do with it--didn't want us to have anything to do with it--but Dorz said we couldn't trust the police and he couldn't have deleted the paperclips because he didn't even know about Impassionate Deliveries!' She grabbed the startled man by the shoulders. 'Eugene, I think somebody in the police tried to frame us!'
Eugene, whose jaw had been slack, closed his mouth. Then he tried, 'But couldn't it just have been an error? I mean--'
'No!' cried Holly, jolting him into wide-eyed silence again. Holly caught herself mid-exclamation, remembering with a choking start whose building they were still just outside and spinning her stunned employer around ninety degrees as if this might deflect attention.
'Why is it you and Angus both insist on trying to find other explanations for this?' she hissed. 'They tried to besmirch you, Eugene! The police!'
Eugene stared at her. Then his eyes slid fearfully to the black figures moving about behind the police building's glass façade. 'But...' he said. 'But what can we do?'
Agent Avgi stood over the Electric Man's mottled corpse. He had died with a strange grin on his face--perhaps a pained grimace, though to Avgi it looked disturbingly triumphant.
The pistols still gripped loosely in both hands, she felt her shoulders slump; felt the weight of damning responsibility he had passed on as his parting gift, one last dirty trick, with implications that might outweigh everything that had gone on before. Standing there, she felt a swell of desperate irritation.
Some of the other Agents had approached to get a better look in, examining in astonishment both sides of the torn wallpaper and crumbling plaster of the wall through which Avgi's bullets had made their furious passage.
Agent Yvonne stepped through, stared down at the body in its pool of blood and the trident that lay by it, then up at Avgi, who had been stood still long enough to allow the plaster dust to settle on her clothes, hair and skin.
'What now?' Yvonne asked, quietly.
Avgi did not take her eyes off the corpse. 'You heard what he said?'
Yvonne nodded. 'Most if it,' she said. 'I called an ambulance.'
Avgi looked up sharply.
'We have no choice,' said Yvonne. 'There were some quite severe injuries that we are no longer in a position to deal with. Avgi,' she said, in an even lower voice, 'Sofia is in critical condition.'
Avgi clenched her jaw and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she was looking down at the floor. The dark pool of blood had spread and started to congeal by her foot.
'Find Turnfly, make sure she goes with them. It won't be long before those police thugs get here.' She edged past Yvonne into the next room with about half of the remaining Agents, the rest spilling out into the corridor. 'We need to clear up and move out. And remember,' she piped up to the room in general, 'we don't tell them anything. This is Agency business.'
'Avgi,' Yvonne said again, and Avgi turned. Yvonne remained in the broken doorway, looking concerned. Dark lines had begun to set in below her eyes; she looked pale, tired, almost ill--no doubt due in part to the overbearing smell of the scorched Agents being carried from the room.
'What are we going to do about--about what he said?' Yvonne asked.
Avgi paused. Three days ago, Turnfly had appeared from nowhere, a blatant impossibility to anyone with a sane mind. She had been a hoax, Avgi had then very swiftly decided, and, irritated by Sofia's inexplicable fascination with the girl given the far more important fact that a government building had blown up, she had decided, without the time or patience to look into the girl's story, to deal with it by letting the trouble maker know in no uncertain terms that the Agents were not to be messed with (also, it had to be admitted, working in a little stress relief).
But even when Turnfly had escaped and she had seen it for herself, she had pursued other matters--some way of grounding herself in reality, filing the incident away for later examination even as Sofia reported that the girl had been stolen away by people in masks. Any Agent valuing her own mind would surely have done the same. But the matter then escalated of its own accord, giving them a maniac who could hurl lightning bolts with an ornamental pitchfork; happening as if to slap her in the face for ever thinking sanity should have anything to do with it.
And now this. She hardly knew what to think.
She sighed. It had, at least, helped to streamline her priorities. Her pursuit of Mawgly was now more important than ever. Her thoughts turned to the Mayor and her conversation, as earlier reported by Agent Yvonne, with the mysterious governor.
She would not let her mind go blank.
'There are people involved who are hiding in the shadows,' she said eventually, handing her emptied guns to the closest Agent. 'We are going to drag them out by their entrails.'
'And what about the boy?' Yvonne asked.
Avgi paused again. She had forgotten about the boy.
She took a pistol back from the stunned Agent, empty though it was, and rushed out into the corridor. Hermes was still there, standing around, staring at the Agents carrying blackened bodies past him.
When Avgi pushed him against the wall and levelled the gun at him, he blinked in surprise like she had awoken him from a trance.
'I've been pointing this thing at you more than I should like, Hermes,' Avgi said. 'But I seek clarification. You say you were an intern at the Facility; you had been working there less than a day after being recruited through an interview process. During your brief employment, you encountered only one other individual, saw pretty much nothing, and did not even get that individual's name. Am I correct so far?'
Hermes nodded, staring at her. 'Yeah,' he said.
'And it just so happened,' continued the Agent, 'that when the Sir Tenebrous Tower got attacked earlier, you were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to strangle one of the intruders, put on his clothes and drive off with the rest of them before the rest of us even knew what had hit us.'
'Yeah--well, I was a few floors above--the nurse had let me go and the lift wasn't working so I took the stairs and then there were these noises--gunshots, and--' His blue eyes were wide. He started to tremble noticeably. 'I saw a dead Agent; I didn't know what to do, but then--I don't know why I did it, but--everything was happening so fast and I felt this rush, Agent Avgi, like an adrenaline rush or something, with everything happening so fast and after I'd been stuck in that room since-- wow, that guy almost shot me.' The trembling had stopped, and Hermes resumed his blank stare as if he had fallen into a daydream--like he was reliving it all, suddenly, from a strangely detached perspective. 'Then you blew his face off. His name was Dan. Didn't like him much.'
Avgi watched him carefully. 'And what do you know about the late Electric Man?' she prompted, bringing him back to the present.
'He was in that box thing they took out of the Facility. Like I told you before. I only saw, like, two seconds of him, but there was something about him...something not right in the head, I mean. And they all talked about him like some holy man, or like a god, even. They practically worshipped him. So he's dead, then?' he added, after Avgi had remained thoughtfully silent.
She ignored the question and looked hard at him. 'The thing us, Hermes,' she said, 'we now have a problem. I've learned not to trust in coincidences, and the truth of your innocence happens to rely on a fairly big one. You see, after I had replaced several of his vital organs with a good deal of metal, the Electric Man was kind enough to impart some information regarding exactly why he had felt it necessary to storm the Tower and kill my Agents. We are, apparently, an obstacle to his goal of saving the world from the chaos that is now being inflicted upon this city because--and here's the important bit, Hermes--because of the Conceptual Realisation Facility.'
She paused to gauge his expression, his incessant stare, for some flicker of acknowledgement. He gazed back more blankly than ever. Either he was very good at pretending, or--or, well, his story was true and he really was as crazy as he seemed.
'The fact that you worked at the Facility at all,' she pushed, 'is suspicious in itself. How exactly do you intend to explain the rest?'
The staring continued. 'None of this is real,' he whispered, sliding down the wall and transferring his gaze to the floor.
Avgi took a step back and followed his movement with the gun, cautiously--an empty gun, but a weapon nonetheless if she needed it to be. She didn't know what this was supposed to be on his part: a desperate evasive manoeuvre, perhaps. But somehow, she sensed the desperation was of a different kind, and that any evasive action had been because the boy was genuinely losing his mind. Even if he was somehow more involved than he was letting on, even if he was some kind of spy--killing one of those men and getting in a van with the rest had been incredibly reckless and stupid.
And yet--and yet it had worked. He claimed he hadn't known what he was doing, yet he had displayed some astonishingly quick thinking--acting in a way that had ultimately aided the Agency. Perhaps inadvertently, but still: for a shady Facility employee, he'd brought a lot of unnecessary attention on himself. After all, Avgi had already let him go.
And he couldn't be any older than eighteen.
She knelt down by him.
'It was amazing, Agent Avgi,' he whispered, shivering. He looked up at her. 'I flew! I flew and I want to fly again!'
Avgi looked into that faraway stare. He was definitely crazy. Maybe he had hit his head from that fall.
She sighed, stood up again and surveyed her Agents. One was sat with a bag of ice to her head; another was being covered by a sheet.
'You want to do that sort of stuff, Hermes,' she said, 'stay at home and do drugs. That's my professional opinion.'
'Agent Avgi,' called one of the other Agents, poking his head in from the stairwell. 'The ambulances are here.'
Avgi sighed. 'Good,' she said, but without much conviction. She had so far been avoiding seeing Sofia, and the state her second-in-command was in.
Agent Yvonne appeared behind her.
'Bring the intern,' Avgi said to her. 'We aren't done with him yet.'
Eugene rolled back in his swivel chair, his hands still attached to the desk. 'I see,' he said.
Holly stood behind him with folded arms. The two of them were in his cluttered little office in the small Impassionate Deliveries warehouse. Files and folders still covered the floor from when Holly had pushed Angus into the shelf and broken it.
'Well,' said Eugene, carefully. 'It isn't exactly unknown for the police to do this kind of thing, I guess. But this--' He gestured to the screen. '--doesn't really prove anything.'
'But there's the video recording too,' insisted Holly. 'I told Angus to make copies. If Dorz was telling the truth about that, then he must have had a good reason for what he was saying about the police!'
Eugene spun glumly around in his chair to face her. She had, he felt, quite taken the wind out of his sails. 'He probably didn't want to get arrested, Holly. I don't get why you want to defend him so bad. Though I did once read about this kind of syndrome where hostages fall in love with their captors. Like, a weird psychological thing, so maybe--'
Holly's response to this was a glare so fierce and so haggard that Eugene quickly fell silent and had to sever eye contact to protect himself.
'You said yourself the police aren't exactly unknown for this kind of thing,' she said.
'But Holly...I hate to say it, but it's not our problem! Even if this Dorz person was telling the truth, we oughtn't to have got dragged into this in the first place, and Commander Brutt's people really aren't people you want to get involved with. I don't know if they tried to frame us, or whatever this deleted entry is supposed to mean, but...' He rose from his seat and spread his hands almost apologetically. 'But let's just be grateful that we were lucky enough to get out of it when we did, eh? And let's not go looking for any more trouble!'
Holly exhaled in annoyance and strode to the opposite end of the office--a feat she managed in about three steps. 'I thought you said it was optimism and confidence that got us through,' she said.
Eugene sighed. He followed her and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder: his favourite mode of expression. His bright, brown eyes looked at her sympathetically, but with a definite tiredness. 'Go home, Holly,' he said. 'Get some rest. If you still want to talk about it tomorrow, I'll be here.'
Holly nodded reluctantly. 'Alright,' she answered, and made her way to the door. 'Glad you're back, Eugene,' she said, on her way out.
Eugene slumped back into his chair and watched her leave through the grubby glass partition. He heard her unchain the motor scooter, left outside for the past two days, then start it up and drive away.
The procession of ambulances shot through the city, this time uninterrupted.
Agent Avgi sat beside Sofia in the ambulance, her expression fixed with a frown. She moved back to let the paramedics attend to her, exchanging a solemn look with Yvonne, who sat opposite.
After watching for a minute, Avgi pulled her gaze away from their working hands, leaned back and closed her eyes.
Angus rolled over, and his eyes opened. The noise, whatever it was, had been loud enough to wake him up from a deep sleep. He was still in his jeans and green shirt, having collapsed straight onto the bed.
He ran a hand through his blond hair and swung his legs over the side, grinding his eyes with the heels of his palms to clear away the fog. He got to his feet and stepped bare-footed towards the door, pushing it gently open.
Two men, clad in black and hidden in balaclavas, were disassembling his computer. Another was rooting through his things, searching along his shelves and cupboards.
'What--' said Angus, still half asleep.
The third man turned, a gun with a silencer on the end aimed right at Angus' head. The shot squeaked; it went through his left eye and punctured the back of his skull, splattering shocked blood on the wall behind.
Angus, like a doll dispossessed, wavered but a moment and dropped silently to the floor.