Hyenas (13 page)

“Weird,” said Robert. “Usually, they lose interest and
fuck off. Maybe they want to borrow a book, too.”

More connections formed in Jay’s mind. He found
himself recalling that as they’d left Saint John’s Garden, emerging onto
William Brown Street, there had been hyenas at the top of the road near the
Wellington monument and at the bottom of the road, spewing from the Queensway
Tunnel. He’d noticed it at the time, of course, but he’d been all fear then.
Now, he was calm enough to reflect upon what it meant. And then all the other
little inklings, suspicions and what-the-fucks that had been rattling around
Jay’s mind since he’d witnessed the Byron-eating incident from beneath a table
in Waterstones abruptly adhered to Robert’s outlandish theory.

“They weren’t following us,” he said.

“What?” said Robert.

“The hyenas. Mouth-breathers. They were coming here,
to the library. They want the books.”

Robert offered Jay a patronising smile.

“I really don’t think so, Jay,” he said. “Books?
Really? What are they going to do with them, exactly?”

“Eat them,” said Jay. “I was holed up in Waterstones.
A hyena got in. It started eating the pages from a book. Poetry. Byron. I saw
more, later, eating books, magazines, a fucking dictionary. I think, they...
Christ, what’s the word? Crave. That’s it. I think they crave language. They
can sense it. You must have seen the way they follow your words when you speak,
like they can see them coming out of your mouth. It’s like they’re mesmerised.
Like in your paintings, Ellen.” Like Hello Kitty, he thought. “It didn’t happen
right away. It took a few weeks for them to become... attuned? They weren’t
following us at all. They were coming here. All of them. They can sense the
books, the words, the language. Christ, we’re in the middle of a fucking
beacon
.
The biggest language beacon in the North West.”

Robert’s patronising smile held but he looked pale,
sick, and his voice wavered. “I’m hardly in a position to dispute your theory
on the basis that it sounds insane, given my own little treatise. But if they
want books, they can have them. Let’s get out of here and leave them to it.
They can choke on the fucking things.”

Another window shattered but it was impossible to tell
where, the sound echoing off the ornate wooden panelling that had doubtless,
pre-Jolt, created an air of cosy, Victorian studiousness.

“Fuck! Let’s get moving,” said Robert. “Sport
section’s this way.” He started toward a staircase that zigzagged back on
itself, beyond which ranks of bookcases faded into the gloom. “No offence, but
I imagine neither of you are that well-acquainted with the Dewey-Decimal
System. Did I mention that I’m coming with you on this boat of yours?”

There was a prolonged crash from some indefinable
point in the library, the kind of sound a toppling bookcase might make.

“Oh, Jesus, I think they're in,” said Robert. He
headed up the stairs. “Come on.”

Ellen took a deep breath and rose slowly.

“You going to be okay?” said Jay.

“I have to be, don't I? Unless you fancy giving me a
piggyback.”

“You must be bloody joking,” said Jay, forcing a
smile. “My spine would snap like a fucking Twiglet.”

“Cheeky little bastard. I'm not that heavy. Anyway,
I'm all baby.”

“If you say so.”

Ellen flicked him the 'v' and set off after Robert.

From somewhere within the library, possibly from the
same location as the crashing bookcase, there was the shrill, cracked laughter
of hyenas. Jay hurried after Ellen.

Chapter 18

Robert, Ellen then Jay emerged onto a mezzanine with
windows overlooking Saint John's Garden. On a counter running beneath the
window, there was a scattering of books, papers, empty Evian bottles and crisp
packets. It looked like the aftermath of an all-night study session. Jay was
pretty sure the library had to have been shut on the Sunday of the Jolt, so he
surmised that the materials were Robert's.

There was no time to ask. Robert was already making
his way up to the first floor. From down below there were more crashes and a
sudden surge of grunts and shrieks.

“They're in,” said Robert. “They’re definitely fucking
in. Jesus.”

When he reached the first floor, Jay hoped Robert knew
his way round the library. There were at least forty wide bookcases running in
parallel ranks down the length of a space that was far too big to be called a
room. The walls were lined with books too, from floor to ceiling, and about
eight feet up a sort of balcony, accessible by four small spiral staircases,
skirted the entire perimeter, containing more bookcases with just enough room
between them for two people to stand back to back and scan the spines.

“Over here,” said Robert, moving off to their right
and stopping at one of the wall shelves about half way along. A rectangular red
plaque above the top shelf said Sport. The plaque was duplicated above the next
five shelves.

Jay didn't even want to think about how many books
they had to search through.

“You start at this end,” Robert said to Jay and moved
down to the fifth shelf. “And I'll start at this one.”

Jay went to the first shelf, tipped his head and began
inspecting the titles.

Robert leaned his sword up against the sixth shelf
then began sweeping armfuls of books onto the floor.

“If you see a boat, shout out,” he said to Ellen.

Jay immediately adopted Robert's irreverent but
undeniably expedient technique. The floor was soon awash with footballers,
tennis players, snooker champions and formula one racing drivers. The next
cascade produced a couple of books with images of rock climbers on their covers
and Jay knew he was in the right vicinity. He began dragging out books in
smaller numbers now, threes and fours. More rock climbers. A scuba diver. Then,
a boat. Not a yacht; a speed boat. He stopped dragging the books out now, instead
flipping the books down into the space left by his earlier excavations and
glancing at the cover of the next book revealed.

And suddenly, there it was, on the back cover of the
seventh or eighth book Jay slapped down onto its face, the
Jerusalem
or a sailing boat very much like it. He lifted it out with both hands, turned
it over and started flipping through the pages. It was the same book that had
followed Dempsey down to the bottom of the Mersey. A different edition, older,
but the same book.

When Robert stopped littering the floor with books,
Jay assumed he'd noticed Jay holding
the
book. But then he saw Robert reach for the sword.
Then Ellen pointed her empty revolver somewhere past Jay and began pulling the
trigger, her face rigid with panic.

Jay turned. They'd made so much noise knocking the
books onto the floor, had been so focussed on the task in hand, they hadn't
heard the hyenas approaching. Five of them. Four were at the top of the stairs
about twenty feet away, one was advancing quickly, less than ten feet away, and
one was reaching toward Jay, close enough that when Jay gasped he inhaled a
lungful of its rancid stink.

As Jay staggered back, the hyena, tall and skinny,
filth and ruined clothing almost obscuring the fact that it had once been a
woman, snatched the book from his hand.

In the time it took the hyena to take the book, the
second hyena had closed the gap and Robert lunged at it, sword arcing out ahead
of him. The blade tore across the hyena's chest and blood leapt from the wound
in fat droplets that rained down on the cream-coloured tiles of the library
floor with a wet slapping sound. The hyena's mask of mindless savagery was
replaced in an instant by one of almost innocent stupidity and it crumpled as
if suddenly boneless.

Something about that look of dumb acceptance, the ease
with which the blood had been released, the sound it had made when it had hit
the floor, like sweaty applause, threw a switch somewhere deep in Jay's
exhausted, desperate and terror-riddled brain. As he launched himself at the
book-stealing hyena, a detached, clinical aspect of his consciousness supposed
there was a psychological term for what was happening to him.

He planted both hands on the hyena’s shoulders and
slammed it to the ground. Its head cracked against the floor with a sound that
could have been tile, skull or both breaking. Then he began punching its face
over and over. He heard its nose break, felt its lips tear against its teeth
and its teeth give way beneath the weight of his fist. He punched until his
knuckles, wrists and shoulders ached, until the hyena's face was slick with
blood and didn't look much like a face at all anymore. Even then he carried on
punching until he was grabbed by the hood of his coat — the way the hyena had
grabbed him by the hood in Waterstones — and was dragged to his feet.

“It's dead,” said Robert from behind him. “And we will
be too unless we get out of here right fucking now.”

Jay couldn't take his eyes from the mess on the floor
at his feet. His breath tore in and out of his lungs, his heart felt as if it
was trying to hammer its way through his sternum and his mind was wrapped in a
hot fog of rage. He couldn't think. There were no words. There was just the
pain in his hands and arms and a fury that felt like it was in his blood,
was
his
blood, propelled through his body by bomb-blast heartbeats.

“No words,” he heard himself say. Then, his first
thought in what felt like an age: Is this what it's like to be one of them, to
be a hyena?

“And when I say right fucking now, I mean right
fucking
now
, Jay,” said Robert.

Jay dragged his eyes from the dead hyena, catalogued
briefly the five other corpses strewn about the floor and turned to see
Robert's irritated face and, beyond that, Ellen's, staring at him with
something between horror and if not quite admiration a kind of grudging
approval. He shook his head, to dislodge the thought and bent down to pick up
the book. The plastic protective cover was slippery with blood.

“Which way?” said Ellen. “They're everywhere.”

And Jay noticed for the first time that the library
had been comprehensively breached. The sound of hyenas and crashing bookcases
came from every direction.

“Up,” said Robert.

“Up?” said Jay, the word emerging as a coarse whisper.

“Yeah, up. The roof. We can cut across to the museum.
There's a broken skylight, drops you on the top floor. Where do you think I got
this samurai stuff? Debenhams?”

Jay nodded, shook his head, nodded again. He had no
idea what Robert was talking about. He could hear the words, he understood them
individually, but they seemed to have been thrown together with little
consideration given to coherence.

“What?” he managed.

“Jay,” said Ellen, placing a hand on his elbow.
“You're going to have to pull yourself together, okay?”

“Okay. What? Oh, pull myself together, yeah.” But it
didn't mean anything to Jay. It was just a congealing of words.

Robert rolled his eyes. “From Conan the Barbarian to
Father Dougal in under a minute. How the fuck did that happen?”

“Lucozade,” Jay found himself saying. He had no idea
why.

“What?” said Ellen.

“Lucozade,” Jay said again and he felt his heart rate
drop. His breathing slowed.

“Lucozade?” said Ellen.

“Dempsey,” said Jay. He could see Dempsey in his
mind's eye, handing him the Lucozade and then he could feel himself coming back
to himself, reeled in like a kite.

“Dempsey gave me Lucozade. Made me feel better. Calm.”

“We don't have any Lucozade, Jay,” said Ellen. “Who's
Dempsey?”

“My dad. Not my dad. Some old guy. Not my dad. Sorry,
we don't talk about the past. It's better that way.”

“We can talk about the past if you like, Jay. Just not
now. We have to get going. Maybe we can find you some Lucozade.”

“It's okay,” said Jay. “I'm okay. I’m okay now.” He
shrugged off his pack, shoved the book inside, then shouldered it once more.
“I’m fine. Let’s go.”

Robert, who had been watching the exchange with a
mixture of alarm and puzzlement, looked from Ellen to Jay and back again.

“We good to go?” he asked.

Ellen nodded.

“Good to go,” said Jay.

Robert clapped his hands together like a teacher
signalling a change of topic and headed back toward the stairs that lead down
to the mezzanine but, before he reached them, swerved left through an open
doorway.

Ellen, then Jay, followed. Robert had led them onto a
landing with a green marble floor. To their left, windows provided a view of
bookcases and desks. Ahead, closed doors, staff only. To their right, a
zigzagging stairway, from the bottom of which rose a dischorus of shrieks,
grunts and giggles.

That sound finished the job that thoughts of Dempsey
and Lucozade had started and Jay experienced a kind of drawing together of all
the pieces of his mind that had broken off and drifted away. He sprinted after
Ellen and Robert as they all but threw themselves up the stairs. Jay wasn't
sure if he could only imagine the collective heat of the hyenas below. He could
certainly smell them; the air was oily with their stink.

Something about the high magnolia walls, the dimness
and the way their slapping footfalls echoed sharply took Jay back to school for
a few seconds and he couldn't help smiling as he thought, I never imagined I'd
ever find myself wishing I was back in that sadistic little shitehole. Time
heals all wounds. Time and Armageddon.

Jay wasn't sure how many flights they had covered when
they arrived on the top floor. It was even more school-like up here. There was
even something that looked very much like a classroom ahead of them, off the
narrow corridor which formed a t-junction with the top of the staircase.

“This way,” said Robert, breaking left. The corridor
ended in shadow less than ten feet later and Robert went through a door on the
far left near the corridor's end.

Before following Robert and Ellen through the door,
Jay glanced back.

The first few hyenas were at the top of the stairs
already, fighting with each other to get at their prey.

Robert dragged Jay the remaining few inches over the
threshold and slammed the door shut. Ellen had a chair ready and passed it to
Robert who wedged it under the brass door knob.

Jay looked around. They were in a small room,
containing only the chair, a scratched and battered desk and a metal filing
cabinet from which the beige paint was peeling. There was a large sash window
opposite the door. The pane was wire-glass, murky daylight straining through.

Robert put his sword aside and gripped the bottom of
the sash.

“I thought they wanted the books,” he said. “Why the
fuck are they chasing us?”

“I don’t know,” said Jay. But he thought maybe he
did
know
and in his mind’s eye he saw a hyena sinking its fingers into a shattered
skull, rummaging about in search of...
something
.

There was a thud from behind them as the first of the
hyenas slammed into the door. The chair shifted half an inch, its feet screeching
briefly against the tiled floor.

Robert grunted and the sash juddered upward in a
shower of paint flakes.

“You first,” Robert said to Ellen.

Another screech from the chair and the door was open
wide enough for filthy fingers to worm into view.

Jay watched as Ellen clambered out into a high-walled
well which sprouted various pipes and ducts. There was a cast iron ladder, rust
blistered, attached to the far wall.

Another screech. Hands grasped and clawed at nothing
and the small room was assaulted by the sound and stink of the pack. From
somewhere beyond the hyenas, somewhere deep down in the library, Jay thought he
heard a gunshot, then another.

Robert followed Ellen, who was already halfway up the
ladder.

Another screech. The chair moved a couple of inches
this time then dropped to the floor. The door flew open. Three hyenas were
wedged in the frame, grinding against one another to be the first to claim a
victim.

Jay plunged head first out onto the roof.

As he got to his feet and looked up, he saw Ellen
looking down from the top of the well and Robert completing the last few rungs
before scrabbling from view.