The Clown Service (29 page)

I let it go.

The Fear flooded down the street before us. Tamar fell to the ground as it rushed over her head and moved on, ice cold and endless, colliding with the creatures that had been chasing her. They winked out, one by one, swallowed by The Fear as it swallows everything. As it had once threatened to swallow me.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Jamie asked, his voice terrified and yet in awe.

‘An old friend,’ I said, ‘and our best chance of getting out of here.’ I looked to Tamar. ‘No questions. No time.’ I pointed at Krishnin on the sack truck. ‘Push him as fast as you can and follow us.’

There was no sign of the Ghost Population as we rounded the corner and found ourselves face to face with the mirror-image of Derek’s van. It seemed that The Fear was as crippling to them as it had been to me. I wondered if either Krishnin or Jamie understood what had happened. After all, this plane was one they both knew only too well. A place where the currency of the mind was easily spent. If they did, I was long past caring. They could think whatever they liked of me.

I had handed the gun to Tamar. Tucked in the waistband of her jeans it was more secure than gripped in my unreliable hands. ‘Don’t be afraid to use it,’ I told her, ‘if he gives you even the slightest trouble.’

‘You will take her back with you,’ I said to Krishnin. ‘Or you become my hobby for the next few months, understood?’

He offered no reply but I decided I had him for now. He wanted to know what I could offer. No doubt he believed he could slip away again easily enough if it wasn’t to his liking.

I opened the van doors, startled to see another version of Jamie lying in the back.

‘That’s just the holding pattern,’ he said. ‘My bookmark, if you like.’

‘Give me a hand with this,’ I said as the three of us lifted Krishnin and the sack truck inside the van. I wanted us all as close together as possible.

The rest of us climbed in, Tamar and I stepping awkwardly around Jamie’s inert twin.

‘You are very strange people, I think,’ said Tamar. ‘You throw up darkness, keep dead talking Russians as pets and leave copies of yourselves in the back of vans. I do not know what my August sees in you. Where is my August?’

‘When we’re back,’ I said, looking at Krishnin. ‘Go. Now.’

His rigid mouth almost had an impression of a smile and he reached out to take hold of Tamar’s arm.

‘Ready?’ I said to Jamie. ‘I want us to arrive at the same time if possible.’

He nodded and lay back into the replica of himself, the two merging. I lay down next to him and took his hand.

‘I’ll tell you where Shining is, my dear,’ said Krishnin, just as I felt this world begin to fade. ‘I shot him.’

The world jumped and I heard Tamar cry out.

We reappeared to the sound of screaming and the squeal of tyres.

‘Christ!’ came the northern tones of Derek Lime as he fought to keep his van on the road even as it suddenly filled with four struggling people, one of them clearly hell-bent on killing another.

There was a sudden deafening roar as Tamar shot Krishnin.
Guns should not be fired in the back of transit vans; they are far too loud.

I just about heard the sound of Derek swear once more, a distant grunt lying beneath the agonising whine in my ears, then the van screeched to a halt and we all ended up in a pile behind the seats of the driver’s cab.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Derek shouted, trying to shift his weight so he could look over his shoulder.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘We’re fine.’

Whether true or not, someone had to try to stop the madness before it got completely out of control. My mouth was painfully dry, my throat sore, every movement was a fight against pins and needles.

‘Tamar?’ I asked.

She was still raging against Krishnin, kicking at the broken body, his head now little more than splinters and bloody mush.

‘Tamar!’ I shouted, reaching out to her, vaguely aware that I had managed to sprain something in my wrist in the crash. ‘Enough! Not now. We need to focus.’

‘Focus?’ she sneered. ‘What do you care? You did not know him. Not like I did.’

‘I can bring him back,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’m trying to do. Bring him back. But I need you to calm down.
Now
.’

I was shouting. A mixture of anger, panic and the fact that my ears were still ringing.

‘I think she’s deafened me,’ said Jamie. ‘Oh Christ, I didn’t want any of this …’

‘Will someone tell me what’s going on?’ asked Derek.

Part of me wanted to tell the lot of them to shut up, to stop
asking questions I didn’t have the time to answer. But I swallowed it. Tried to remain calm.

I looked at Derek and the view through the windscreen. ‘Where are we?’ I asked.

‘Trying our best to get the hell out of London,’ he said. ‘Where the hell were you all this time? You’ve been gone for over a day. You have no idea the shit we’ve all sunk into.’

That long? If the radio signal had been binding the two realities together, breaking it had severed the link; no wonder my body ached. ‘I have some idea, actually,’ I replied. ‘The man Tamar just shot is the one responsible for it.’

I looked over to where Krishnin was still writhing, despite the demolition of most of his head.

‘He’s like them!’ said Derek. ‘They’re everywhere. We’ve got to keep moving, the city’s full of them.’

‘I need your equipment,’ I said firmly. ‘It’s the only way we can dig ourselves out of this.’

‘What are you talking about man? There’s no going back now. These things are all over the country, there’s talk of airstrikes.’

‘Airstrikes?’ echoed Jamie.

‘Not ours,’ said Derek. He sighed, trying to marshal his thoughts.

‘Look. The place is overrun with these things. Dead people, only they’re not, they’re mad, running through the streets, smashing the hell out of anyone and everything. The rest of the world is panicking too. They think it’s viral. They think the only way to be sure it doesn’t spread is by making sure the outbreak is limited to the UK.’

‘And so they’re going to try to sterilise the source, regardless of how many people are still here? That’s horrendous.’

‘And it’s happening soon. London is by far the worst affected, so that’s the first target. The UK government has agreed to sanction a nuclear strike on the city in the hope that they can mop up the remaining stuff elsewhere. It’s all panic and politics. Not that it matters – there’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘There is,’ I said, ‘but you’re not going to like it.’

‘What part of “insanely dangerous” did you not understand?’ Derek was shouting. ‘This is not something you can screw around with – the consequences are potentially catastrophic.’

‘Look around you,’ I said. ‘We’re overrun with the living dead and they’re planning on dropping nukes on London. What makes you think this isn’t already a catastrophe?’

‘Listen. You don’t get the scale of this. You start interfering with causality and all of this is nothing. This is a pinprick. A mosquito bite.’

‘But the change is minimal,’ I insisted. ‘Think about it, Krishnin shouldn’t even exist in the first place.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with causality. The universe doesn’t care what abominations we build, it’s not the moral arbiter of reality. It just is. He exists and so he’s part of the fabric of our timeline.’

‘Barely. He has spent most of it in another plane entirely. The impact he’s had is
this
… the last couple of days. This one operation. If we remove him now, before things develop even further, the change is minimal.’

Derek thought about this. I could see that he wanted to. I could see that he was considering it.

‘We will save thousands of lives,’ I said, ‘including Shining’s.’

‘Who?’

‘Leslie.’

‘Right. “Leslie”.’ Derek rubbed at his face, trying to come to a decision. I wondered if I could operate the equipment without him. I would certainly try. If he said no, then I would do whatever it took and to hell with anyone who was in the way. I’m sure he must have realised that.

‘It only works on things that are not alive,’ he said finally.

‘I don’t think that’s going to be a problem, do you?’

‘You say that, but he’s obviously alive in some way – they all are. We’re saying they’re dead because they’ve died once already, but how you do you really define life? Moving around is usually a fair indicator …’

‘Whatever consciousness he had, I think Tamar’s spread it over the inside of your van.’ I said. ‘But … whatever. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work – and nothing will happen.’

‘We’ll get blown up.’ Derek gestured towards the back of the van. ‘The controlling mechanism is back there, but I had to leave most of the kit back at the warehouse. When I heard what they were planning I didn’t want to waste time packing, I just grabbed the potentially dangerous bit and ran. They could drop the bomb at any minute.’

‘All the more reason to hurry then,’ I said. ‘Please. We have to try this. I think it’s the only option left open to us. We go back there, we turn your machine on what’s left of Krishnin and we cut him out of recent history.’

‘Oh God!’

I turned to look at Jamie. He was looking at his mobile.

‘So many texts from Alasdair. The silly sod came looking for me. Then got himself cornered by those …’

He began to cry, dropping the mobile to the floor of the van where I could see a single pair of goodbye ‘X’s on the screen.

‘This cannot be allowed to stand,’ I said to Derek. ‘We have one chance to make it all stop. Yes there are risks. There always are.’

‘These are pretty big bloody risks,’ he said, but I could tell from the tone of his voice that I had won him over. ‘Oh sod it,’ he continued. ‘If I had a chance to save the world and I didn’t take it …’ He started the van again and drove on to the next exit. ‘Of course,’ he said to himself, ‘my chance to save the world
could
be stopping you doing something as stupid as this …’

Getting back into London was easy enough; the choking traffic moving in the other direction proved testament to Derek’s description of panic as car after car fought to escape the capital.

‘The emergency services just can’t cope,’ he said. ‘Spread too thin from the start. Estimates vary, but we’re potentially dealing with an attacking army of half a million, countrywide. It’s worse in the built-up areas, of course; some rural communities have barely felt the pinch. It’s all down to odds. A large percentage of bodies buried in the latter part of 1962 and the whole of 1963 have become active. Some are a greater threat than others. The decomposition may be negligible, but cadavers that were damaged can’t regrow missing parts, obviously. On the way out, I saw little more than a torso, dragging itself along the middle of the road.

‘But it’s not just the numbers, it’s the fact that they’re hard to
put down. You have to completely incapacitate them. I saw an armed response team overrun by a massive crowd of the things. They say it’s best to aim for the legs. At least that stops them running after you.’

I called April. She managed to sound utterly nonplussed at the fact that I was back in action. I got the impression that her hands had been pretty full trying to provoke some form of action from the government. Now that was all redundant. No need to convince anyone of imminent trouble when it’s running down every street.

I told her what had happened to her brother, quickly followed by what I hoped to do about it.

‘I dare say you know what you’re doing,’ she said, ‘or not. I was never sure
he
did half the time. You made a good pair, that’s for sure.’

‘And still will, if I’ve got anything to do about it.’

‘Bless you.’ I could tell she was unconvinced. I couldn’t blame her.

‘You know the clock’s ticking, don’t you?’ April reminded.

‘Derek said there was a threat of a nuclear strike.’

‘I couldn’t possibly comment on an open line. Still, what are those silly old buggers going to do about any indiscretions? Yes. It’s been agreed. We have a couple of hours at most. Ridiculous. Makes me sick the way the stupid shits behave.’

‘You tell them.’

‘Oh I have, darling, I have.’ She paused. ‘You shouldn’t have come back, you know. There really isn’t time.’

‘Time is movable,’ I replied. ‘Or at least it better had be.’

‘You’re a good boy. Tell you what, I’ll meet you there, if only to give you a lingering kiss before we’re burned to shadows.’

‘Right.’ I didn’t quite know how to respond to that.

‘You could at least try to flirt with an old lady given we’ll only have a few hours of existence left.’

‘Sorry. Erm … that will be lovely, you … sexy thing …’

‘Oh shut up. It’s awful – you’re making me feel sick.’ She hung up.

‘I am sorry,’ said Tamar as we cut into the city. ‘I should not have acted in the way I did.’

‘No worries,’ I assured her. ‘To be honest I had planned on doing something similar myself. I don’t know how Krishnin managed to jump between the planes but I’m willing to bet he needed to think hard in order to do it. That’s not something he’s going to be doing again.’

‘Do you really think we can bring August back?’

‘If this works. If Krishnin had actually died back in 1963, then none of this would have happened. Derek is panicking because it’s dangerous to interfere with history, but Krishnin was barely part of this world over the last fifty years, so – bar the last forty-eight hours – the change shouldn’t be too significant.’

‘And you’re going to go back and kill him?’

‘Not exactly. The machine needs a specific focus. Usually an area of space, but in this case we’re going to use Krishnin himself. We’ll see moments from his life, significant events. I’ll be waiting for one in particular – the time he should have died – when I intend to give history a helping hand.’

‘I think you are all very mad. But I hope it works.’

Her and me both.

I asked Derek to pull over so that I could get out and join him at the front; I was sick of rolling backwards and forwards
in the rear and not being able to see where we were going. Besides, if things got difficult he might be in need of a supportive co-driver.