Bad Dreams (37 page)

‘Shit!’

Rote had Thommy’s torch now. Clare was rolling on the floor. He directed the beam at the thing she was holding up. It
was
a rabbit, but not like any rabbit she had ever seen before.

Its teeth shone red, and then it twisted in her grasp and kicked free.

‘Don’t move,’ Rote said. ‘Something is loose.’

Cazie helped her up, and put her arms around her. They were both crying out loud now.

‘Shut up!’ It was the other woman, Rote’s soldier. She had Clare’s torch.

Rote threw light into the Animal Room. There was a row of exploded cages. Straw was on the floor, and things were moving incredibly fast under the light. They came out of the room and spread out into the lab, hiding under tables, benches, sinks. They were furred, but fast as mercury on an incline.

‘The animals are out. That’s what we wanted. Let’s move! We go now!’

‘Rote,’ shouted Cazie, forgetting all need for quiet, ‘we’ve got to collect them. They’ll just be recaptured. We’ve fixed up homes…’

Rote shone his torch full at Clare, dazzling her. She knew how she must look.

‘Take a gander at that, Bruckner! If you want to pet something with a disposition towards that kind of rough stuff, it’s up to you. The rest of us are pulling out!’

‘He’s right,’ said Thommy. ‘Move it.’

Rote led them as if it were a retreat. Clare could not move, but when the torches were out of the lab she could hear the things moving around her. Something ran over her feet. She ran through the sealing doors and caught up with the torchlight. They followed her.

‘Help,’ she whispered.

Only Cazie turned. A furball collided with a wall, bounced, and ran up the girl’s leg. Clare could not do anything. Cazie grunted sharply as teeth rent through her sweater. A tear opened white down her arm, and then a line of blood appeared. She slammed her arm, and the thing on it, against the wall. The rabbit screeched and burst.

There was a mess, and Cazie was spattered from head to foot. The girl could not stop screaming. Red and purple lumps dripped from her face and chest, and she frantically wiped at herself, trying to get the blobby filth off her.

It took Thommy and one of the soldiers to get Cazie moving again. They left the exploded animal on the wall, and went towards the main door.

There was someone between them and the outside. Derm? No, someone in a peaked cap. Someone with a uniform.

Rote reached out his hand behind like a surgeon requesting an instrument, and one of the soldiers gave him a jemmy.

‘Stop,’ said the shadow. ‘Security.’

Rote swung the jemmy like a baseball bat, and connected with the figure’s head. The cap went flying, and the man was down. Rote paused to deliver two more professional blows. The guard did not make a sound after the first
oof.
Clare knew something must have broken inside him. She thought she had heard a punching crack that might have been his skull fracturing.

‘Leave him for the rabbits,’ said Rote, holding the door open.

Derm was outside. He did not ask any questions, just got the van started. In the back, in the darkness, Clare started to feel her own hurts. Waves of pain shot through her body. Cazie was having unattended hysterics, babbling incoherently, and lashing out in the darkness at anyone who came near.

Orange light passed through the van at intervals as Derm drove under the streetlamps. In these flashes, Clare saw Rote’s scary, feral grin. Then she curled up, and blacked out.

* * *

It was six-thirty in the morning, and Brian was naked in his bed – thankfully alone – when Jason came into his room as if it were Christmas morning, and jumped up and down on him.

‘Uhhh, Jase, what is it?’

‘Daddy, Daddy…’

He looked at his bedside digital clock and did not believe it. Without his contacts in, the world looked fuzzy and unfinished.

He repressed the urge to become the father of an abused child, and smiled sweetly at his son.

‘Couldn’t it wait, Jase?’

‘Daddy, Daddy…’

It was light out, a grey light that could just be working up to the first sunny day of summer. But right now, it was cold enough to goose-pimple him all over under his thin duvet.

Brian sat up, feeling an ache in the pit of his stomach where Jason had landed too hard on him. He got hold of his son and stopped him moving. Even if he was unable to calm the kid down, he should be able to prevent him doing injury to himself and others.

‘I’ve found a rabbit, Daddy,’ said Jason, eyes alight. ‘Can we keep it?’

* * *

As usual, Frank Lynch had slept for barely two hours. He was generally getting restless. It had been too long.

He had read until five o’clock, about Napoleon in Egypt, ignoring the woman in bed next to him. Theresa never noticed when he was not sleeping. It was not one of their sex nights. Finally, he had to join her for his few hours – dreamless, almost catatonic. When he woke up, she was gone.

He could not remember her speaking to him during the last few days. That had to be an illusion. They were just in one of their routine ruts. It sometimes happened, between assignments.

He was washed, shaved, showered and finished before Darren and Tracy were up. In any case, the children – well, junior adults – would not have interrupted his routine. He had had his own bathroom put in, adjoining the mini-gymnasium he had designed and built himself.

Looking after his body was important, a part of his job, and he should not have to share his space with anyone else while he was about it. He had caught Darren using his shower once, and given him a demonstration of his need for privacy. He was skilled enough not to leave a mark on his son, but the boy would remember the pain long after he had forgotten his excuse.

Lynch did not think of himself as a brutal man; but he knew the value of direct action. Darren would never again set foot in his father’s space. A lesson had been driven in.

For an hour, Lynch did push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups. Then he punched and kicked the bag. He was as fast as ever, but still worried about his heart rate. He could control his breathing, knew how much to drink to stop himself over-heating, and could work out any aches in his limbs, but there was no way he could do anything to slow down wear and tear on that big muscle nestled in the cage behind his slablike pectorals.

Theresa had his table ready when he was finished. Milk, orange juice, high-fibre cereal, and a well-done steak with green salad. No sweets, no sugar, no coffee. She had even laid out the
Telegraph
for him. Darren and Tracy were spooning down dollops of wheaty pulp and yoghurt, without much enthusiasm.

Occasionally, Lynch reflected with satisfaction that he would probably outlive his children.

There was no talking at the table. It was a week-day; Tracy was going to school, Darren to college. Neither had been out last night. He had not checked to see if they had done their homework, but he felt confident that they had. The first time he had caught Tracy skipping homework, he had snapped twenty-five of her records, one after another. It was not supposed to be easy to break vinyl.

He was set up for a day much like yesterday and tomorrow. Exercise, diet, reading, thinking. He had been on this course too long, resting, waiting. He had to be ready at the slightest warning, but knew you could over-train, stretch your nerves too far, and fall apart through
lack
of stress.

After the children were gone, he completed the
Telegraph
crossword in seven minutes fifteen seconds – two minutes and thirty-eight seconds over his record – and read the front page. Strikes, elections, terrorism, lawsuits, and the Royal Family. Josh Unwin, described as a ‘Chemical Baron’, was meeting the Prime Minister to give economic advice, following his suggestion that the country would be a better place if it were run like his corporation. A missing pro-Paisley councillor in Northern Ireland had turned up in a roadside ditch with a bit from a Black and Decker drill embedded in his brain.

Then he got dressed, in slimline body armour and regulation jumpsuit, and went into the cellar room to look after his guns. The room was double-locked, and banned to everyone else, although he had to let Theresa in twice a week to vacuum. Dust and dirt were the first enemies of any good soldier.

His pictures were on display in the workroom. There were not many of them – obviously, his efficiency in the business would be compromised if he had to stop and pose for snapshots every few minutes – but he was pleased with the few he did have, as much for the way you had to look twice to see him in them as for the record of his achievements. There he was at Goose Green, blending in with the paras, and there in Ulster, outside the ruin that had once been an IRA bomb factory. They were from the time before he joined the UCC CSD.

Then there were the other pictures, grainy and clipped from front pages or photocopied from files. They showed just faces, mainly, some posed and grinning, some mashed and broken. Palestinians, Iranians, Iraqis, Argies, Micks, nationless vermin, slit-eyed fanatics, a few simple security risks, inconvenient bystanders. All his.

He took an Uzi out of the rack, and began to strip it down. Just as he was reaching for the baby oil, he heard his telephone klaxon sound.

He was on call. The waiting was finished. All over the city, beepers would be sounding, and his men would be scrambling.

He picked up the receiver. He did not have to say anything. The familiar, but nameless, voice gave him the facts like a newsreader delivering a prepared statement.

He felt alive again.

* * *

Jason was crying. His rabbit had died before Brian could even get up and take a look at it.

There was something funny about this dead thing. It was unmistakably a rabbit. It had probably been run over by a car. It certainly had been squashed in some way, and Brian thought he felt broken bones inside the corpse. But there was something more wrong about it than the mere fact of its deadness. It was as if it had died angry, with its claws out.

‘Where did you get him, Jase?’ he asked, trying to reach through his son’s grief, hoping to distract him with the mystery.

‘Came… through… window.’

‘Oh yes. Show me.’

Jason took his father’s hand, and led him into the spare room where he was sleeping – the room that had been his when he and his mother shared the house on campus with Brian. His bed was a mess, and the window was open. There were reddish-brown smears on the windowpane and the sill. Brian saw three hard, black pellets on top of the dressing table, and more blood where Jason said he had found the rabbit.

‘It was alive.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘It’s not a very pretty rabbit, Daddy.’

‘No.’ It certainly was not. Especially not now, and probably not when it had been bouncing around.

‘It doesn’t have white gloves like Bugs Bunny.’

‘Not many rabbits do.’

The front of Jason’s pyjama jacket was a bloody ruin. It was a good thing his mother was on an island thousands of miles away.

‘It wasn’t a very happy rabbit, Jason. I think it’s probably better off dead.’

‘And in Heaven?’

‘If you like.’

Heaven? Where did he get that? From school, probably. Jean was as agnostic as he was. Or had been. Who knows? People change.

‘Only…’

‘Yes.’

‘Only… at the end… when it was dying… it was bad… mightn’t God notice?’

‘It doesn’t count. You aren’t yourself when you’re dying.’

He looked out of the window. The sun had come up. It would be a nice day. Should he try to get in touch with Monica? There might still be something there.

If there was not, there was always Debbie. The trouble there was that having Debbie over meant going through her last essay, a generous D+, before anything else.

The playback in his head stuck on something Jason had just said: ‘it was bad…’ What did that mean?

‘Jason, how was the rabbit bad?’

‘Oh, it doesn’t hurt any more.’

‘What?’

‘The bite. See.’

His son rolled up a sleeve to reveal a white, plump little arm. Jason had not bled much, but the tooth-shaped cuts were still visible.

PART TWO

THE FREAK-OUTS

S
ecurity was out in force. Monica had to drive through two checkpoints.to get on campus. The place was getting like South America. None of the polite uniforms could or would tell her what was up, but she had this horrible feeling…

She parked in her usual space by the Union Building, and went up the backstairs to her suite of offices off Mandela Hall. No one else was in yet. The front desk should at least be manned… oops, personned. A pile of mail had been dumped in the old milk crate by her door, mostly tubed magazines.

She sat at her desk, and leaned back in her swivel chair. Her back was starting to ache already. She ought to change her mattress, she knew. She was still worked up from yesterday – from Cazie, from Brian, and from the disastrous UGM.

She knew that she had come close to being the Richard M. Nixon of student politics yesterday. If the Broad Left Alliance and the Left Caucus had been able to agree on a wording for the motion, the student body would have impeached her. It was not her fault, it was not anyone’s fault, but she was a Libertarian Socialist and they were out of favour in the Movement at the moment, for flirting with notions of a free market economy. It was just a bloody label.

There was too much to worry about – Union Societies haggling for a slice of the funding, the University Authorities trying to get their programme of spending cuts implemented, the threat of decreased quotas for overseas students, everyone from the miners to the Sandinistas begging for the students to be in solidarity with them and shell out for the privilege. Plus the eternal niggling doubt that this had nothing at all to do with the day-to-day life of her average student constituent. At the last election, the Apathy Society candidates had polled surprisingly well.

She had heard too many times that she had been elected because of her nice smile, blue eyes and red hair. Sometimes she was attracted by the prospect of resigning and getting back to her post-graduate research. There was even a real world out there somewhere beyond the three small hills that bounded the campus community, bunching it up close to the main road. She had spent her whole life being educated; it was time she did something else.