city of anarchy

chapter eighteen

Holly and Eugene watched the burning rubble rain down on the road behind them--looked up to see the corner of a building caught in flames.

France was shrieking with glee as he pulled himself back through the window. The car hastened on, Vann grinning darkly at the wheel.

Holly looked at them in horrified wonder. Once France had lapsed into happy silence, everything seemed to go very quiet. There were no police in sight, no Agents--and the helicopter was certainly not following them anymore.

'Paperclips,' Eugene mumbled. 'They were just paperclips...'

'Where are we going?' Holly asked, doing her best, for reasons she did not understand, to sound nonchalant.

'We are going, Holly Hazzler,' said Vann, 'to a designated hideout, to await further instruction. I'm afraid the excitement has passed, for now.'

France patted his submachine gun fondly and wedged it back under his seat. Holly stared at the blur of the road as it rolled towards them, feeling edgy still, though tiredness was creeping in very definitely. She leaned back in her seat, her eyes pinned open trance-like.

* * *

'Get up,' said Hermes.

'I'm not going anywhere with you!'

Hermes grabbed fistfuls of Boris' black shirt and tried dragging him to his feet.

'Gerroff me!' Boris swiped angrily. 'I told you, my legs won't work!' He managed a moment on his feet before he keeled over backwards in demonstration. His eyes had lost focus, like he was drunk.

Hermes sighed once again and looked at the illuminated skyline. He considered abandoning the man and going the way that Avgi had gone. Leastways, he thought, glancing at the half shop, half crater ruin they had just left behind, he needed to get away from here before more police arrived.

He wiped a sticky brow with his sleeve--sweat, dirt, blood that speckled his formerly white shirt. A few people were maintaining their curiosity of the commotion from a safe distance, pointing him out, commenting to each other. Hermes still gripped the gun in an idle hand.

'I just killed two people, you know,' he said.

'No, you killed one person,' Boris mumbled indistinctly, now face down on the road. 'The other one will just never walk again.' He rolled himself over again and viewed Hermes with all the scrutiny that could be mustered from his perspective. His brow furrowed around his strange, circular tattoo. 'Why d'you do that, anyway? Shoot the officers?'

Hermes shrugged, stuffing the gun in the lining of his trousers. 'They just seemed to ask for it,' he said.

'No, I mean why, if you're--you are Agency, aren't you?'

Hermes looked up and down the street again, still waiting for the police to show themselves. The crowd of spectators was thickening, and, he thought, drawing ever so slightly closer.

'I don't know,' he replied, finally. 'We need to go. Are you sure you can't walk?'

Hermes got no reply. When he looked down again, Boris had passed out.

* * *

Electa Grieve shoved the door open with such excitement that it nearly shoved her back, until one of the officers standing there held it open for her. She stood for a moment, seeming to absorb the details of Mawgly's office through the rogue strands of her increasingly unkempt hair as they hovered in the light.

Commander Brutt was sat in Mawgly's leather swivel chair with his legs upon the desk, looking all clad in black inescapably like he had impetuously broken in. He leisurely dropped his legs and got to his feet.

'Tell me what happened,' Grieve ordered.

Brutt stroked the roughness of his chin as he began the update. 'The officers at the scene, just about conscious enough to witness the events, report that Agent Avgi's helicopter crashed at Burn Street. Shot down by one of the pursued.'

Grieve sharply took in breath, her fingers twitching in some strange display of savouring the moment. 'And the Agency?' she asked.

'Defunct. Pretty much. Other reports indicate that similar engagements across the city yielded high Agency casualties.'

The Governor nodded rapidly and scuttled around to assume the desk. 'The end of a nuisance,' she said. 'Where is Mawgly?'

'Receiving medical attention.'

'Bring her to me.'

The officer by the door disappeared and returned a moment later with the Mayor. Mawgly was holding a bag of ice to her head and looked at Grieve resentfully. She was wincing, either at the pain in her throbbing forehead or at the reprehension she was waiting to receive.

The Governor placed her hands on the desk before her where they continued to twitch. Mawgly watched them: the old creep's irregular internal beat, suffering her leaps of excitement, was manifested in those hands, while her crazy blank stare remained fixed and unblinking.

'Agent Avgi is dead,' she said eventually, and her fingers trilled a higher note. She giggled, then, the most unpleasant thing Mawgly had ever experienced--giggled as the Mayor looked back at her in plain astonishment.

Mawgly looked at Brutt, but he remained darkly impassive, his arms folded over his broad chest. If he shared the Governor's excitement, it was contained.

Grieve tightened her intensely lined lips and gripped the edge of the desk as if to stop herself from unravelling in giddiness. Then she shot to her feet and went over to the drawn curtains, which she parted just enough to slip through and survey the lit cityscape from the window. 'So pretty,' she said, her wrinkled, veiny fingers stroking the curtain absent-mindedly.

Mawgly wondered if Grieve was seeing the city at all. She pressed the ice harder against her head and reached out for the wall, feeling suddenly nauseous.

* * *

Hermes progressed slowly, hunched over with Boris on his back. Fortunately Boris was short, so Hermes could pull at his arms and the feet at the end of his mangled legs did not drag too much. There was a lot of compressed weight in the squat figure, however, and Hermes struggled to bear it as he made his way down the quiet streets.

He was almost too tired to bother about feeling conspicuous, even though the streets, quiet as they were, were never empty and the police were always everywhere. They were a constant, vague threat that he could not quite set his mind upon.

Twice he set Boris down and tried to slap him awake again. The Dark Circler remained completely out of it. Hermes kept going, grudgingly, until he reached a point where he started to recognise his surroundings and could, from there, figure out which direction Beans lived in.

He arrived at Beans' place exhausted and dumped Boris unceremoniously against the door by way of knocking. The door swung ajar--Hermes only then noticed the big chunk taken out of it where someone had evidently smashed it open despite the lock.

Hermes stepped over Boris as the unconscious body slid to the floor. He walked cautiously through the tiny hallway, stopping himself from calling out Beans' name and remembering his gun. He entered the room on the left, switching on the light.

The place was as messy as it had been before, but there were no Agents. The computer hard drive had been taken and the flatscreen monitor stood alone on the desk. Hermes tramped around a little, searching the other rooms, searching under the piles of stuff for nothing in particular. There was no Beans.

He stepped dumbly back into the hallway and looked unenthusiastically at Boris' prone bulk. There was probably no point in leaving him here, though the idea was tempting.

Flexing and yawning first, Hermes prepared to carry him on. He lifted the heap and tottered uncertainly away, muttering swearwords under his breath, leaving the door open behind him.

A phone, buried under the shifted junk, clicked.

'Beans...Beans, are you there? It's Yvonne. Beans? Please...answer...'

Silence, strained. Then the phone clicked dead.

* * *

They drove into a grungy industrial complex, all corrugated iron and brick half-buildings, no one else in sight. They stopped outside some kind of warehouse; France sprang out, hopped up to the big painted door and rapped his knuckles against it.

'Police!' he squawked, thrown into giggles by his own hilarity. The door opened a crack and yellow light spilled out.

A shaven-headed man looked back at him, as did the smiley face on his white, torn-at-the-sleeves shirt. He had a perfectly circular black eye on his left side, from which the bright blue of his irises looked even brighter.

'Close it behind you,' he said, walking back to the three large mounds of cardboard and foam packaging that inexplicably occupied the warehouse's interior, where a handful of other Dark Circlers were already congregated like colourful pigeons.

'You shoulda checked that they weren't right behind me,' France shouted after him, still referring to the police. 'I could have led them here to save my own backside. I might not have been so good at taking down pesky helicopters, eh?' He spun around to meet Van's spread hand with his own.

'Who are the kids?' asked a girl, nestled with her knees together at the highest point of the mounds, blond hair streaked with green and tied into two exploded bunches. She had a plaster on her head.

Holly and Eugene walked in gazing up at the metal rafters.

'Pretty sure they're both older than you, Aura,' the black-eyed man muttered half-attentively, settling himself back into a crumpled, body-squashed cardboard box wedged amongst the other junk.

Holly met the girl's gaze and looked smug and slightly fierce. Eugene stared at the women in his benumbed, oblivious sort of way.

Aura frowned and looked away. 'Whatever,' she said.

'Make yourselves at home,' Vann told them. 'We'll probably be here for a while 'til we hear from the Hood.'

Holly looked at him tiredly. 'The Hood?'

'Well, it's Mr Hood to you.'

'Oh, you mean the guy who hides in the dark and won't show his face,' Holly replied caustically, nudging a polystyrene block with her foot. 'Right.'

The remark earned her a collective glare from the Dark Circlers, with the exception of France, who asked, 'Have we got any food?'

'No,' Aura said, picking a scrap of packaging out of her hair. 'And I'm starving.'

Vann sniffed and experimentally rubbed his nose with a finger. 'We'll get something in a bit,' he said.

Holly turned around to see Eugene lowering himself to the floor at the edge of the nearest pile, where he sat with his legs crossed, hugging his knees. She took a box, punched it into shape and sat down beside him.

Eugene watched Vann go over to the black-eyed man to speak privately, then turned his head briefly in Aura's direction. She broke her own gaze and went back to flicking bits idly.

'We could try to escape again,' Eugene whispered to Holly.

Holly stared at the floor between her knees. 'We could,' she said. Then she stretched out her legs, reclined onto the semi-soft, sloping bed and closed her eyes.

* * *

Early day tinged the edge of the sky pale orange. Hermes gazed up at it, letting the slightly icy breeze cool his face, then tested his injured leg, pushing down on it and squeezing just above the knee. It was giving him almost ceaseless pain.

He rotated and lifted Boris by the armpits. He had given up carrying the unconscious weight along the first road from Beans' apartment and now simply dragged him and let the ground wear away at the heels of his shoes.

The next few streets were lined with terraced rows of flat-roofed tenement buildings, alternating flaky off-whites, greys, browns and yellows, though all muted a similar grey in the limited light. The fluorescent white light of the streetlamps, such as it was, revealed the buildings as old and modest, four storeys encased within black-painted ladders and railings.

The sounds of the inner city could still be heard quite clearly in the distance; the streets here all sloped towards it and the tightly-packed buildings looked like they might at any moment slide to the centre, the fierce urban gravity well, from which it seemed impossible to escape.

Such were Hermes' vague thoughts, at least, dragging Boris up the hill.

Just a little further up, he stopped outside a brown tenement, let go of Boris and knocked on the green door several times, just below a tarnished gold number 674. Then he paused, leaning against it to take the pressure off his leg, which nearly sent him toppling when the door finally opened.

It opened very abruptly, the red-haired woman in a nightgown who answered having peered through the peephole and seen who he was. She was aging, the curly red faded and lightening to a dun grey in streaks at the temples. She had lines around her eyes, which stared at him, still looking spooked for having been awakened by loud noises.

'Hermes!' she cried at length, one hand still on the door. 'Where the hell have you been?'

'Mrs Brue,' he said, as her eyes fell down his bloody, blemished shirt to the crumpled body at his feet. Then they rose again, full of speechless, compounded inquisition.

Boris groaned and rolled over.

'I lost my key,' Hermes said, looking slightly peevishly at Boris for his somewhat overdue reanimation. 'Sorry if woke you up. Can I come in?'

Mrs Brue did not move. 'What happened to you?' she insisted. 'You said you were off to your job at that place...that place that blew up! Bloody hell, Hermes, I thought you were dead!'

Hermes shrugged dumbly. Boris groaned again, reaching out with his hands and searching for his feet.

'What's wrong with his legs?' Mrs Brue gaped.

'There was...a series of accidents,' Hermes said.

After looking up and down at them both a few more times, Mrs Brue shuffled back, muttering her astonishment. Hermes half-picked up Boris and heaved him into the narrow hallway.

'I hope you're not going to tell me that you blew that place up to get out of a job,' Mrs Brue said. 'I wouldn't be surprised. Don't think you're getting out of paying the rent either, for your absence.' She paused, one hand on her hip, and shook her head. 'Typical, isn't it? Only you'd make such a pig's ear of your first day at work.'

Hermes propped Boris up against the wall.

'Whose is the blood? His? Yours? What have you gone and got yourself into, Hermes? Are you going to explain anything, or just bring strange friends into my building without an excuse?'

'Not sure if I can really explain this one,' Hermes said, rising and rubbing the back of his neck.

'I'll bet,' Mrs Brue retorted, folding her arms. She waited, then sighed, her arms falling to her sides. 'I'll go and get your spare key,' she said, 'so he can bleed all over your room. You never could just get along with the world, could you, Hermes?'

Hermes watched her walk off into another room, shaking her head once again. He then looked down at his feet and redundantly tried with his shoe to rub out some of the dirt he had trodden into her carpet. It was an act made in the absence of guilt, which he felt vaguely that he ought to be feeling, but he was tired and his body and mind were switching off. He felt disconnected.

Mrs Brue came back with a plastic basin of water and a towel over her arm, and the key balanced on top. 'Do you want a drink?' she asked, as he took them from her. 'Tea? Whiskey? I need a whiskey.'

At the back of the hallway was a small, narrow flight of wooden stairs that descended into the basement: Hermes' residence. He carried the basin and set it down by the door. Then he unlocked the door, slid the basin across the floor with his foot to wedge it open, and went to fetch the Dark Circler.

Hermes' living space was fairly big, though low-ceilinged, with undecorated breezeblock walls and bare, unvarnished floorboards, illuminated by a single bulb. On one side, something that was either a very low couch or a long, large beanbag sat against the wall with a very old television on a block of wood opposite and a mottled brown rug in between. Next to that was an easel with a canvas on it, an unfinished pencil sketch of some vague figure reaching up to the sky.

Hermes nearly knocked it over as he dragged Boris past and dumped him on the small bed, shoved right against the wall.

Boris looked around blearily. 'What are you doing?' he said. 'I need to...I need to get back to the others!'

'The other Dark Circlers?' asked Hermes. 'Where are they?'

'You can't stop us,' Boris rambled, his eyes fixed on the ceiling in an out-of-focus sort of way. For an alarming moment, the circular tattoo on his forehead seemed like a mystical third eye, until he wrinkled his brow. 'Why would you want to stop us? We're going to change everything.'

'How do you do it?'

Boris turned his head to look at Hermes. His eyes still seemed strangely blank.

'Tell me how you do it,' Hermes repeated.

Boris laughed--guffawed--and looked at the ceiling again. 'You want in, eh? Yeah, you gotta want in. Or you gotta want out, if you know what I mean.'

Hermes stared at him. Then he nodded slowly.

'You showed some style against those idiot police,' Boris said, turning over. 'Maybe I'll put in a good word for you.' Then, apparently, he fell asleep again.

Hermes walked over to the couch and sat down heavily. He slid back and lay there, staring at the ceiling.

* * *

Jella Turnfly jolted upright. She gasped, her inhalation catching her vocal chords in an extended, traumatised note, the jagged edge of her huge bush of hair faintly silhouetted against the weak light of bedside machinery. She reached wildly forward for support she did not need, seeing a train rapidly retreating, and cried out when she found her legs in entirely the wrong place.

In her flailing panic, she managed to upheave the tight bedding, lost balance and fell sideways out of the bed. Jella scrambled in the darkness, slapping at the floor.

'Oh my fucking hell oh my--'

She removed the tubes and bedsheets from her person and climbed to her feet using the support of the metal bedframe. She felt weak and disoriented.

'Where the fuck am I oh my fucking hell...'

Her patient's robes fluttering behind her, she tottered toward the rectangular light, which she could just about bring herself together to perceive as her exit. In the white corridors beyond, a few people gave her looks in wonder. She hurried past them, not noticing, talking hysterically to herself and not slowing down.

She pushed through the glass doors, exited the hospital, and ran screaming out into the morning.

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