Forever After (a dark and funny fantasy novel) (5 page)

             
He left one last look of diastase with the stranger before turning around and heading into the increasingly bright lights of the street ahead. The sound of sirens was now extinct but the lights of distant police cars, still parked outside the bar, lit up the sky a few streets ahead.

             
Further down the alleyway, next to a pair of dumpsters, a collection of broken cardboard boxes and a clutter of empty beer cans, two men were waiting for Michael. At the sight of him they popped their sluggish selves from the wall and slowly advanced towards him.

             
He saw their silhouettes before their faces, as their bulky frames staggered forward. He prepared to fight or flee, depending on the severity of their intentions, but he relaxed somewhat when their faces were close enough to make out.

             
They were bikers from the bar. He had left one of them bent-double and beaten, no doubt he had dragged his crippled body away from the scene before the police had arrived. The youngster who had swung for him with the pool cue before fleeing the scene when the violence erupted, was with him.

             
“Hello boys, ready for round two?” Michael said cockily.

             
“Nice moves back there kid,” the older one commented. “But you pissed of the wrong people.”

             
He lunged forward unexpectedly, catching Michael by surprise. He wrapped his body around him, snaking his arms around his chest and using the clasp to pin Michaels’ arms uselessly by his side.

             
Michael was still smiling. He opened his mouth to offer a mocking retort when the youngest one sucker-punched him in the stomach.

             
He felt the air rush out of his lungs, felt his body jerk in opposition. He bent over from the impact, dipping at the waist.  His captor forced him upright, held him tighter.

             
The younger biker, his face a picture of concentration, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, lowered his head and delivered punch after successive punch to Michel’s midsection.

             
Michael coughed something out in mocking reply, but was surprised to feel his words strangled into silence before they escaped his throat. He felt something cold and wet soaking his top and his pants, running through the material and dripping down his legs.              

             
The youngster stopped punching him. His tongue returned to his mouth, his body straightened, his determined gaze lifted to meet the perplexity on Michael’s face. Only then did Michael see that he was holding a knife. The sickening sight of the blade, covered in blood, was an extra thrust through his heart.

             
His captor let him go and he immediately fell to his knees, suddenly overcome with panic and pain as a dizzying madness crept into his mind.

             
The older attacker planted a boot into his spine, stabbing his steel-pointed toecaps in between his shoulder blades. He laughed and spat a glob of saliva onto the back of Michael’s head.

             
He said something, but Michael didn’t hear it. His world was spinning, his ears imploding, his body drifting. He felt himself being pushed to the floor, but barely felt the abrasive concrete as his face was forced against it, or the crushing weight of the man behind him as he walked heavily over his back and away from the scene.

             
He managed to turn himself, taking the pressure away from the wounds in his stomach and exposing them to the air and the fresh drizzling rain which began to pierce the night sky.

             
Through hazy, fastly fading eyes, he saw the stranger approach. He watched as his smiling, greyed expression beamed down at him.

             
“You ready to talk now?”

Part Two

1

              Inside a decrepit diner, at the corner of a street deep in recession country, where the surrounding shops are bordered up boxes of their former selves and the pedestrians ambling by do so with a melancholic swagger, Martin Atkinson sat alone.

             
His fingers tapped dull melodies on the chipped, glossed surface of the centre booth. The heel of his right foot bounced up and down repetitively as his calf muscles worked out their angst.

             
Martin was anxious, ill at ease and very agitated, but most of all, he was hungry.             

             
In his grubby fingers, black with dried dirt and yellowed from the tips of a thousand cigarettes, Martin twirled a sachet of tomato sauce. He checked his watch. He licked his lips. He eyed the counter, the window, the floor. He checked his watch again.

             
A waitress appeared behind him, her hollowed steps introducing her approach. Martin relaxed slightly, his sensitive nostrils pulling in the aromas from the food she carried.

             
She placed a mountain of food in front of Martins’ twitching features and noted his delighted expression as his eyes pored over the cuisine.

             
“Full English,” she said as he watched the food, making sure it didn’t get up and leave before he had a chance to tuck in. “Extra bacon. Extra sausage. Extra black pudding. No beans. No tomato.” She paused, he was drooling; she was intrigued, and a little bit disgusted. “That okay love?”

             
“Perfect,” he said with a liquid swirl to his words as his salivating mouth chewed them up before offering them. “Thanks.”

             
She gave him a practised smile, ignored his strange behaviour and returned to her station behind the counter.

             
When Martin sensed that the waitress was no longer paying any attention to him he dove into the plate of food like a child jumping into a ball-pen. He relished the texture and the sound of tearing meat as his teeth ripped strands of rear bacon and charred sausage to shreds. The food barely stayed in his mouth long enough for him to relish any taste.

             
Occasionally he lifted his head to check behind the counter and out of the window. He was weary of being watched, of being judged; as far as he knew no one was paying any attention to him. He didn’t see the car parked opposite the street, didn’t see the darkened figures behind darkened glass as they surveyed his animalistic behaviour.

             
His stomach growled and groaned with contentment when he left the diner. He felt at ease now that his hunger has been fulfilled. He took a deep breath of fresh air, lit a cigarette, and set off down the street at a leisurely pace.

             
With a light breeze at his back and the scent of sunshine on the horizon he decided to take a shortcut through the park. He relaxed even more under the tuneful whistling of flocks of birds and the distant barking of unseen dogs.             

             
An exaggerated cough from behind disrupted his peace; stopped him dead in his tracks. He turned around with a smile still beaming on his pudgy face.

             
Two men were staring back at him, both of them wearing three-piece suits despite a growing afternoon heat. They didn’t look friendly; they didn’t look aggressive. Their faces were blank, devoid of emotion, not even the slightest hint of a smile on the corners of their mouths. Their eyes and the emotions beyond were shaded with pitch-black sunglasses.

             
“Can I help you?” Martin asked, feeling his smile slowly slip from his face.

             
“Martin Atkinson?” one of the identical men quizzed.

             
“Who wants to know?” Martin quizzed.

             
In a voice very similar to the first man, the second man replied: “We do.”

             
“That’s why we asked,” One clarified.

             
Martin felt ill at ease. He felt like he was seeing and hearing double, and he was sure that neither of them had good intentions.

             
“What do you want?” he asked, hearing the trepidation in his own voice.

             
The suited men looked at each other, their faces in perfect sync as they turned to exchange a glance and then turned back to a bemused Martin.

             
“We’ve come to help you,” Two said.

             
Martin took a few steps backwards and glanced around. There was no one around.

             
“I don’t need your help,” he told them.

             
Over his shoulder he could see an approaching thicket; he could see the welcoming claws of darkness inside the dense accumulation of trees and foliage. He backed up towards it, noticing that the two men were following his every step.

             
“I suggest you leave me alone,” Martin warned. He could feel the cooling shadow of the trees on his back, “For your own safety.”

             
The two men followed him regardless.

             
“We can’t do that,” One said.

             
He was amongst the trees now. He kept going, happy to see the two men duck into the darkness with him.

             
He stopped and turned to face the other way, his back to them. “How do you plan on helping me?” he wanted to know, feeling confident and safe inside the shaded darkness.

             
The two men looked at each other. They fired a synchronised look over their shoulders. They returned their eyes to Martin, watching as the leafy trees painted shadows on his broad back.

             
“We want to rid you of your curse,” One said.

             
“We’re going to kill you,” Two added.

             
Martin snapped his head back towards them, exposing a set of sharp teeth and a jaw that stripped back to his ears. He lifted his hands, preparing to attack. His fingers had been replaced with elongated pincers, tipped with razor sharp claws. He waited for the terror to explode in the eyes of his attackers, waited to revel in their fear before ripping them to shreds.

             
Their faces were still emotionless. They didn’t react, at least not how Martin expected they would.

             
Simultaneously, from underneath immaculately pressed jackets, they exposed sleek black handguns, fitted with slender silver suppressors. Martin sensed the danger and threw himself towards them, but it was already too late.

             
There was a short staccato blast; a light show in the darkness.

             
Martin, the agitated, anxious man with a belly full of meat and a mind full of shame, was reduced to an angry, agonised wreck on the dusty, dirty ground, before being executed; put down, like the wounded animal he was.

2

              “I have an appointment for twelve with Dr Khan.”

             
“Please take a seat.”

             
Michael was the only one in the waiting room. It was a fairly small room. Opposite the reception desk, to the right of the only window, four chairs were lined up against the wall. The doorway leading to the Doctors office was on Michael’s right as he took his seat.

             
There were a few magazines on a small coffee table shoved between his chair and the next. He glanced over and read a few of the titles with little interest. There were magazines on gardening and interior decorating, magazines whose entire customer base seemed to be dental and doctors surgeries. There were also the obligatory pamphlets on health and a picture book to keep the children entertained. Michael frowned them away and sat upright, his attention on the receptionist whose attention was on a stack of papers in her hands.

             
She was pretty, which was a rarity in this part of town. She also had a job, another rarity, and a sign that she probably didn’t live around here. Years ago Michael would have been all over her, but this was the eighth time he had sat opposite her and he had barely said more than a few words to her, none of which had referenced anything other than his appointment or her job.

             
He watched her blue eyes pore over a file, watched her thin lips unconsciously mouth the words she read, watched a smile tweak a fine wrinkle at the corner of her mouth when she read something she found amusing. She picked up the stack of papers and bounced them on her desk to align them. She yelped in discomfort as one of the papers slid against the nib of her forefinger, opening up a wound that dripped a drop of crimson onto the desk.