Barking (51 page)

Oh well, he thought.

Security stumped round the lobby a couple of times, checked that the door wasn't damaged, opened a walk-in cupboard to make sure he wasn't in there hiding. They didn't bother looking behind the desk because who in his right mind would choose to rely on such pathetically inadequate cover? One of them shut the alarm up. They stopped, looked at each other and got back in the lift. Going up, two, three, four, fifty-seven, seventy, seventy-three . . .

Just for the hell of it, Duncan tried the door again. This time he took the longest run-up he could fit into the lobby. When the moment came to jump, he hurled himself into the air like a leaping salmon. He bounced back so hard that he ricocheted off a wall before hitting the floor. The stupid alarm went off again, of course.
Ting
, said the lift, smugly. Going down.

He picked up the desk and hurled it at the door. Fortunately, he had the good sense to duck a split second later.

He sighed, and picked up the file. Mental note: when they'd finished beating him up, he needed to ask them for another pencil. That'd be a good joke.

He wandered over to the door for one last look before the lift came back down again. He could see George's silver Volvo, glowing orange in the lamplight as though it had been heated in a furnace. Between it and him was a barrier he couldn't even see, but strong enough to make all the difference. A bit like life, really.

Well, he wouldn't be needing the car after all, so there was no point holding on to the keys. It'd just make trouble for someone. He picked up the desk and stood it back upright again, then laid the keys on it where they'd be able to find them.

Keys. Plural.
How had George got into the building?

The big one with the black plastic on it: that was the ignition and door key. A small, flat one: that'd be the petrol cap. The third one - long, silvery, not a car key at all. Surely not.

Oh for crying out loud, Duncan said to himself, and unlocked the glass door.

Ting
went the lift behind him as he wrenched the door open. Not that it mattered. With the keys in his right hand and the file in his left, he hopped through, out of the building, into the street.

And promptly dropped both the keys and the file. He hadn't meant to. It just sort of happened automatically. That's the thing about prehensile fingers and opposable thumbs. You only really miss them when you haven't got them any more.

Instead, he had paws. Four of them.

For a tiny part of a second, he balanced on just two paws. It's a trick that most dogs can do, standing on their hind legs, but only the specially trained ones can keep it up for very long. Of course, Duncan reflected as his forepaws hit the pavement, the window in my office, it's been shuttered for the last couple of cycles. He looked up and saw the full moon, and howled.

Security was right behind him, and dead people aren't afraid of werewolves. Well, the car keys weren't going to be much use now. Duncan grabbed the file in his teeth and broke into a run.

I
n Year Ten, the maths teacher had been Mrs Hicks. The letters in front of her name implied that somewhere, at some stage, there had been a Mr Hicks, though nothing was known about him; nevertheless, he'd lodged in Duncan's mind as a paradigm of reckless courage. There must have been a moment (candlelit restaurant, lazy summer afternoon beside the river, bright frosty morning in the park) when he'd turned to her, probably but not necessarily got down on one knee, and asked her to be his wife.

There had been many afternoons (Wednesdays -
double
maths), when the yelp of Mrs Hicks's voice had lost the atom-splitting feather of its edge and the distant whirr of maths going way over Duncan's head had lulled him into a dreamy, meditative stupor, when he'd tried to reconstruct the scene. He had no idea what the real Mr Hicks looked like, of course, because nobody had ever seen him - Luke's hypothesis, that she'd killed and eaten him the day after they got back from their honeymoon, was generally accepted throughout the school, so that no further speculation was necessary - but in his mind's eye he had a clear picture of a small, thin weedy man (because that's the type that huge women so frequently team up with), sometimes with a thin straggly ginger beard and glasses, sometimes bald, with little bleary eyes like a mole, clearing his throat nervously, presumably putting up his hand and waiting to be allowed to speak:
Excuse me, miss, but
. . . Then there'd be a short bit of mumbling, because Duncan really couldn't imagine what form of words could've been used on that occasion. Then pan to Mrs Hicks; she scowls as she considers the request, and the little scrawny man waits for the answer, a single drop of sweat trickling its crooked, leisurely way down the full length of his nose. Then
Yes, I suppose so
or
Well, all right, then
, followed immediately by some grim imperative:
But you've got to promise you'll stop keeping terrapins and for pity's sake shave off that ridiculous beard
; and that'd be it. Subject closed, judges' decision is final, no further communication will be entered into. Fast forward to a church (one side practically deserted, the other stuffed to bursting with her loud, enormous, ferocious relatives) and a great white shape barrelling up the aisle like the
Bismarck
bearing down on an unescorted convoy, her train frothing behind her like the incoming tide on a shallow beach.

Well, it had passed the time until the bell went, and a little pity and terror's good for the soul. And besides, Duncan had told himself, it doesn't matter if I don't pay attention in class. It's not as though I'll ever need to know any of this stuff later on, in the real world.

Indeed. Maths? Complete waste of time. Pythagoras. Quadratic equations. Pointless, meaningless garbage. I mean, when the hell are you ever going to need to calculate the volume of a cone, or use logarithms? Or transfer a bunch of numbers from Base Ten to Base Something Else . . .

If only, Duncan thought as he trotted down a subway, it could've been something else, a different subject. Geography: he'd always been keen as mustard in geography. To this day he still knew all sorts of cool stuff about cumulo-nimbus and magma layers and ox-bow lakes and subsistence agriculture in Bhutan. Or chemistry: he'd learned loads of chemistry (mostly things you added to other things to make them blow up, but never mind). Or drama, even. He'd learned how to play poker, blackjack and pinochle in drama, and still got an A-star in his GCSE. But not maths. His worst subject. Now, of course, he knew why, but that didn't make it any better. The fact remained that if only he'd paid attention the day they'd done Bases, he'd be laughing. A quiet room somewhere with no windows, a calculator and a pencil, and that'd be the end of Bowden Allshapes. A few calculations, some straightforward addition, the two bottom lines would balance and that'd be it. Accountancy as a lethal weapon; death by double entry. And then he'd be free.

Duncan stopped in a doorway. Moonlight blanched the walls on either side of him to a pale dead grey. He sniffed. People about, but not many and not close. No trace that he could register of wolves, vampires, unicorns or formaldehyde. He had no idea what time it was.

His first thought, of course, had been to leg it round to Crosswoods and bark and scratch at the door till they let him in. It hadn't taken him long to see the folly in that. She'd have her people (if you could call them that) out in force, guarding every street corner for a square mile, waiting for him to trot tail-waggingly into the trap. The same went for Ferris and Loop. As for going home: highly unlikely that he still had one, after the unquantifiable but substantial amount of time he'd spent on the seventy-third floor. He relaxed his aching jaw muscles and let the file flop out of his mouth onto the pavement.

Base Ten Point One, for crying out loud.

And then there was the matter of the total lack of rescue attempts. He'd tried not dwelling on it, to the point where his mental rubber had worn a big rescue-attempt-sized hole in the page of his consciousness, but the moment he lowered his guard it came roaring back. They'd
left
him there, the
bastards
. Fine, so the vampires didn't owe him anything (apart from the one whose life he'd saved; what's-her-name, begins with a V), but what about Luke bloody Ferris and his other so-called friends? Even if decades-old loyalty and the brotherhood of the pack didn't count for anything, that bastard Ferris had got him into this mess by poisoning Ver - thingummy, the girl whose name he couldn't call to mind. If he had the faintest shred of decency he should be tearing himself apart with guilt, desperate for a chance to atone, even if it cost him his life. Instead, nothing. Not a bark, not a whimper. Times like these, you find out who your true friends are.

A cloud drifted quickly over the moon and Duncan felt his shape relax its grip for a moment. It felt like that point in a dream where you know you're about to wake up, and that the dream isn't real. But he hadn't woken up, and it was still bloody real, thank you very much. Inside him, the horrible reality growled, and he felt a strong urge to find something to chase and, if at all possible, kill - or at least bite. Times like these, you find out who your true friends are; namely, nobody at all. Being a wolf was, all things considered, a bad thing. Being a lone wolf was no fun at all. But, he considered as he lifted his head and sniffed, we aren't put on this earth just to have fun. Mostly we're here to make things as nasty as possible for those around us.

He listened for the nearest main thoroughfare and followed the sound. No pedestrians: it was just an anonymous urban dual carriageway, amber-lit and concrete-bleak. He tucked himself into a shadow and waited for a little while, until a white Transit van appeared in the distance, coming towards him. He let his tongue loll, his best shot at a grin.

To make it a little bit more interesting, he made himself wait until the van had passed him and gone on a good hundred yards or so. Then he let his mind relax and his legs take over. The rhythm of the run came back to him like a favourite tune. When he was close enough, he could see the vague shape of the driver's head, reflected in his side-view mirror. He accelerated.

There was always a moment when the drivers noticed you; at which point, the key thing was to close in. At first they think
Oh look, a dog
. Then it's
That's a big dog
, then
That's a very big dog
, and then
That very big dog's following me
. And then an instinct as old as the species kicks in and overrides centuries of safe, civilised complacency - the pedal hits the metal and the chase is on. At first, the driver only speeds up a bit because, after all, it's just a dog and what can it do to you when you're safe inside your sealed steel box? Just enough speed to shake the stupid thing off, therefore, except that the stupid thing turns out to be much faster and much more tenacious than any dog has a right to be. So the right foot goes down a little further, the frown in the mirror crinkles round the edges with the beginnings of actual fear, and the huge running dog with the big red eyes is still hardly more than cruising . . .

The trick, Luke always said, was to know where the speed cameras were. On urban freeways heavily infested with the things, you could shred some poor bugger's licence in ten minutes flat and he wouldn't even realise it until days later, when the summons hit his doormat.

Tonight, however, it wasn't going to be just about driving licences. There were other games you could play, or so the lads had said; not the sort of activity the Ferris Gang went in for, because - well, they
were
werewolves but deliberately hurting people wasn't really their style. There were other packs, though - the Esher Boys, or the Wealdstone Crew - and you heard things. Discussing them with your pack-mates you might pretend that you approved, at least of the ingenuity and the panache, but deep down where it mattered you knew that we don't do that sort of thing, because fundamentally, staring red eyes, slavering jaws and inch-long fangs aside, we're basically nice.

But there were those other games; and although nobody had shown Duncan how to play them, he reckoned he'd heard enough about them to figure out the basic rules. There was the one where, instead of maintaining that precise, psychologically perfect distance behind the van, you zoomed up flat out, overtook and hurled yourself at the driver's side door, snapping at the handle with your teeth. The scoring system the Esher pack used, rumour had it, was five points for a swerve into the crash barrier, ten points for sideswiping another car, five bonus points for every vehicle that joined the pile-up, double bonus for each one that flipped over. Subtler, according to received opinion, was the Greenford serial kamikaze dive: when you overtook, instead of attacking you shot out in front of the target to give yourself a lead of, say, ten yards, and then stopped dead. The mess your granite-hard invulnerable body made of the van's front end was just the preliminary selection of poppadums and dips. The fun started when the driver got out and tottered back to inspect your flattened corpse, whereupon you got slowly to your feet, hackles up, and did the extra-special growl. Where the fun ended depended on how fit the driver was, and whether he had a latent predisposition to coronary disease. You actually lost points if you had to bite him to finish him off - hence, presumably, the reputation for subtlety.

The van driver had seen him. Duncan speeded up to cover the slight acceleration. Because he knew the driver would be looking at him, he lifted his head and let his tongue loll stylishly. His nose caught a faint tint of human sweat in the slipstream, heralding the start of the
That's a very big dog
phase. He speeded up just a little bit more. Keeping station is one thing, but gaining on them accelerated the lurch into irrationality. There was another game the bad boys played that all depended on getting mental control of the quarry, so that he started paying too much attention to his mirror and not enough to the road ahead. It was a delicate variant, all to do with nuances of pace, instinct and body language, and you got a triple bonus score if they crossed the central reservation and hit something coming the other way.