Bad Dreams (45 page)

‘Jason, no. We don’t talk to people like that.’

The boy head-butted her in the stomach, winding her. Christ, he was turning into a little monster!

‘Jason, no. That’s too rough.’

He let her go, and glared up at her. Abigail remembered how powerless she had always felt in the presence of adults. In Jason’s eyes, she could see dull resentment, but also something else… An animal cunning she had never come across in a kid before. She did not like it.

‘Let’s make you some tea, shall we? There’s cake and biscuits.’

Jason threw back his head and howled like a wolf, ‘Hun-
greee
!’

There was something wrong with his teeth, something wrong with his mouth. It should not be able to open that wide. He would do himself an injury.

Abigail held his chin, and closed his mouth.

‘If you go around like that, Jason, a bird will come and nest in it.’

She turned her back on him and went into the kitchen. That was her mistake.

He must have sprung like a coyote. She felt the impact on her upper back, forcing her forward. His hands were in her hair, pulling.

‘Ow, Jason. Cut it out. Come on.’

She wriggled, trying to dislodge him, but he was holding fast. His knees gripped her sides, and one arm was around her neck. She could not talk. Her hair was in her mouth.

She did not want to hurt him, but she might have to.

His hand passed in front of her face, and she felt an icy touch near her ear. Something wet.

He had cut her.

She tottered into the living room, and hurled him free. He shot into the sofa, and bounced up and down laughing.

She put her hand to her temple. It came away bloody.

‘Jason, your nails are too long.’

Suddenly, he was still, tense as an armed mantrap. And as dangerous. Abigail started thinking seriously about protecting herself. His eyes looked yellowish now, with tiny pupils. He looked hungry.

There were knives in the kitchen.

She could not believe she had thought about that. This was an eight-year-old boy, not Jack the Ripper.

Just now, there was something very adult, unhealthily adult, about the way Jason was looking at her.

‘Abi… hun
-greeeeee
!’

He licked his lips. No tongue could be that long. He shrugged, and ripped his shirt. He pulled at his collar. Buttons popped, and cloth tore.

Abigail could not take her eyes off him.

Just inside the kitchen, on a side-table, there was a half-full bottle of Perrier water. She thought she could pick it up and use it faster than he could strike, but she was not sure.

She did not want to bet her life on it.

She put out a hand behind her, and found the doorjamb, held it.

Jason just looked.

He was squirming now, with barely repressed energy. He was a growing boy. She could
see
him growing.

‘Jason,’ she whispered, pleading, ‘Jason, don’t…’

Then he came at her.

* * *

Pete had been shot in the side, but did not notice much. When he was away from the Infirmary, he hiked up his bloody pyjama jacket and saw the hole. It was puckered up, but healing over nicely.

By the campus clock, it was four-fifteen. He still had a quarter of an hour. Realistically, he knew he could not get his essay typed up and ready in time. But he could show up in person and plead his case.

He thought he could convince the dean.

There were people running all around, and firing off guns. But he ignored them.

The steps to the School of English and American Studies were up ahead. His bare feet were frozen by the concrete slabs, but he hopped up them and pushed through the main doors under the Humanities H structure, getting good rubber under his soles.

Inside, things were much quieter. There was a Godard film showing in A2, and a steady dribble of students were walking out on it, yawning and complaining.

He was having to get used to his strength. Opening the door to the stairwell, he wrenched it off its hinges and had, embarrassedly, to lean it up against a wall, hoping no one would notice. His muscles were expanded inside his striped pyjamas, straining the seams.

Up on the Eng/Am floor, outside the dean’s office, there was a minimal queue of his coursemates, waiting to hand over their take-away papers. Bloody Basil, pouting smugly, was glancing over his catamites’ papers, making jokes and dishing out complacent reassurances. His own essays were in an imitation leather folder, done up with a bow of red ribbon. Bloody Basil had a word processor with a presentation-standard printer, and all his essays looked like published articles.

‘Petah, my dear colleague,’ Basil said, seeing him for the first time, ‘how perfectly shocking you look. If there is any weather about, you certainly seem to have stumbled under it.’

One of Basil’s gunsels giggled, handing over his own essay to the dean’s secretary.

Pete loped up to Basil, feeling the strength in his insteps and thighs as he walked.

‘Care to take a glance?’ Basil said, offering his essay for inspection. ‘A modest effort, but one hopes it will suffice.’

Pete took the essay, and opened the folder. Basil had chosen to answer the Porson question. ‘“When Dido found Aeneas would not come,”’ he read, ‘“she mourned in silence and was Di-dodum,” Richard Porson, Epigram on Latin Gerunds.’

Only Basil would even have attempted the fucking Porson question!

He looked at Basil’s foot-wide smile.

‘Porson, eh?’

Basil nodded, barely able to contain his glee within his checked trousers.

‘1759-1808?’

Basil swelled with undisguised pride.

‘“I went to Frankfort, and got drunk,

“With that most learn’d professor, Brunck,”’ Pete quoted.

‘Ah-hah,’ Basil countered, ‘“I went to Wortz, and got more drunken, “With that more learn’d professor, Ruhnken.”’

The catamites all but clapped their leader’s erudition.

Some time after Porson’s death, his executors had been sorting through the books and papers in his library and kept coming across green hairy things stuck between pages. The scholar and wit had been in the habit of using unwanted sandwiches as bookmarks.

Pete rolled up Basil’s essay like a scroll, enjoying the sparks of dismay in his eyes. He put his forefinger and thumb into the lizard’s mouth, keeping it open like a letterbox, and posted the essay into his oesophagus. With the heel of his hand, he rammed the folder in past Basil’s tonsils, scraping chunks out of his throat.

The catamites were aghast, and the secretary fainted. Basil was on the floor now, foaming and choking around his learned critique of the childish humour of the author of
Facetiae Cantabrigienses.
Yellow and white foam came out of Basil’s mouth, soaking around the essay and dribbling down onto the pleated collar of his affected smoking jacket. The scholar twitched and spasmed on the carpet, squawking in a most un-Johnsonian display of undignified pain.

Pete needed a piss, and Basil’s face was there handy as a target. He took his dick out of his pyjamas, aimed it, and let go.

* * *

Abigail woke up, and could not believe what Jason was doing to her.

His face was above hers, and she felt his tongue on her eyelids, lips, cheeks, nose. He was panting hard, and strings of spittle fell from his mouth. Cords in his neck were working ferociously. Behind his little boy face, was a calculated adult cruelty, a wish for power over others, a need for brutal dominance.

He was still child-sized, and his body did not match hers. Small as she was, he was smaller. If his face was pressed to her neck, his knees were at her hips, his feet trailing between her thighs.

Her clothes were mostly tom away, and his hands were on her. Her flat breasts hurt where his fingers had clawed. He had chewed her neck, but not broken the skin. Blue bruises circled her throat like a necklace. She thought he might have stove in a couple of her ribs.

She could not feel anything below the waist, which was probably just as well. She thought he had not been able to get into her, and was thrusting his hips against her soft stomach.

He obviously wanted to rape her, but did not quite know how.

Surprisingly, she could dissociate herself from this. It was as if she were a ghost standing in the doorway, looking down on the child-thing and her former body. There must be streaks of red on her white skin. Her hair was a tangle over her face. She felt a broken tooth in her mouth, and one of her eyes was swelling shut.

When Jason was finished, if he
could
, finish, he would kill her. But she really did not have a lot to say about that any more.

The numbness was creeping up.

* * *

Monica was resisting him, but he pulled her by the hand.

Most people were dashing about at random. But Brian knew where he was going.

‘The Admin Building. We’ve got to see Jackson.’

Lynch could not be allowed to deal with this on his own. His idea of therapy was a bullet in the brain. They needed paramedics, not mercenaries.

Brian thought he was the only one thinking clearly on campus.

‘Useless… useless…’

She stopped fighting him, and let herself be led. That was one worry less, he thought.

The gunfire was constant now, from all over the campus. By the canteen, they saw a crowd of things – infectees? – corner a Zombie and take him apart. He emptied his gun into them, but they did not take any notice until it was all over. Then they died, mostly.

Some of them he still recognized.

On a grassy slope, one of the cleaners was battering a professor of anthropology with a broom. Brian could not tell which was the sick one.

The Admin Building forecourt was deserted. There were not even any bodies.

Should they get in one of the cars and high-tail it the hell out of there? No, there was Jason. Anyway, he did not know how to hotwire a car. He half-thought that was just one of those things you only saw in films and television shows.

The uniformed porter was still on duty in the reception area. He waved to Brian and Monica as they passed. Probably, fifty per cent of the people on campus still did not think there was anything wrong.

How could they ignore all this fucking bang-bang?

They went up the stairs. The place was just as it always was. Posters advertising plays and concerts were neatly pinned to the walls. The large windows let in late afternoon sunlight. It was warm and airy.

Upstairs, someone was typing.

There had not been a P.A. announcement for a while. Jackson was letting things lie.

‘Monica, this way.’

He hoped she was not going catatonic on him.

The V-C’s suite was still open.

Inside, there was a mess.

Jackson sat on the imitation leather settee in his reception room, long, dark, stains on his suit, his face white as wax. In his lap, he had Gabrielle’s head. He was stroking her hair, crooning something to himself.

The rest of Gabrielle was still at her desk.

‘Hello, Brian. It’s been a bad day for us all, hasn’t it?’

Jackson lurched forwards, as if about to be sick, and coughed up a long, ragged snake. It dangled from his mouth like a particularly vile old school tie.

The Vice-Chancellor’s head hung uselessly, but the snake – new organ, whatever? – darted about, alert. There was an eye where its head should have been, blinking sideways.

Things began to push at Jackson’s suit from the inside. Damp patches appeared.

Gabrielle’s head fell from his lap and rolled across the floor.

What had been Jackson stood up. His old flesh hung like a tramp’s suit on the living skeleton of new growth. Feeble hands were pushing his clothes apart. The cobra-necked eye looked at Brian, then at Monica.

He could not read any expression in the thing.

Brian picked up a tubular steel hatstand and held it like a lance. The Jackson-Thing staggered forward. One foot came off, and it steadied itself with a three-fingered hand that squeezed out of the raw ankle.

Brian realized that Monica had been screaming since they had come into the room.

Conquering his disgust, he rammed Jackson with the hatstand. The circular base sunk slightly into his chest, and flesh lapped around it. The thing was forced back against a bookcase, trapped. The snake growth stretched towards him.

He pushed hard on the hatstand, mashing the thing. There was blood, and a thick, yellow liquid that fell in splashes on the carpet.

He pulled the stand back, letting Jackson fall, then started using it as a long bludgeon, pounding again and again into the unrecognizable mass of swelling, bleeding, contracting, formless flesh.

After a long time, it stopped being anything except a stain.

With a roar, Brian threw the ruined hatstand through the picture window. It hung in the air for a moment in a cloud of glass shards that caught and reflected the sunlight, and then fell out of sight.

Cool air rushed in. And the sound of gunfire.

Monica had stopped screaming. Brian was drained, had nothing left to feel. He turned to her, and she threw herself into his arms. He hugged her tight, needing her as much as she needed him.

Over her shoulder, he saw Gabrielle stand up, purple feelers extended from her neck like a ruff.

* * *

If anything had happened, it was over. Jason had left her alone.

She could feel herself again. There was a stickiness on her stomach, but not between her legs. However he had changed, he still could not manage that much.

Abigail thought she would die a virgin.

She tried to get up, but nothing seemed to work. There was pain behind her eyes, and under her scalp.

Jason was still in the house, still dangerous. She should make an effort. He was only eight; he had proved that he could not rape her, and she was damned if he was going to kill her.

She was unsteady on her legs, and felt silly in her scraps of clothing. There was nothing in the room for her to wear.

Looking down at her too-thin, too-young body, she saw the cuts. She had not bled much at all, as if the marks were just red biro lines on her skin. But she tingled all over.