got an answer.
Alun came to the door in just his underpants.
‘Don’t tell me – you’re complaining about the noise,’ he said.
‘Didn’t you hear the alarm?’ Owen asked.
‘Alarm? What alarm? You’re joking, right?’
His pupils were dilated like black holes. Alun was high. It didn’t take much force to get past him, and Owen pushed his way into the flat.
Wendy followed. ‘We’re looking for Alison. You haven’t seen her, have you?’
The apartment was lit by so many candles it made Owen think of a church. Or a black mass. Amy Lee was pouring out of a battery-powered boombox, singing about her Immortal. Julie with the Melons was lying semi-naked on the couch with a tourniquet around her arm and the hypodermic she had just injected still clutched in her hand.
‘Oh, hi,’ she said, trying to find the right muscles to make a smile with. ‘Are we going to party?’
Owen turned off the music and looked at Wendy. ‘You’d better hope Alison isn’t here.’
Wendy looked horrified. Alun and Julie couldn’t find any expressions at all.
‘Stay there,’ he said to her and tore the used hypodermic from Julie’s hand. He wasn’t sure if she even noticed.
‘What are you doing?’ Wendy shouted after him as Owen headed for the bathroom.
‘I told you, stay there!’
Owen slammed the door shut after him.
Wendy felt scared and unsure. What was he doing in there? Why had he taken the hypodermic? Oh, God, she had put her daughter’s safety in the hands of a junkie like Julie and Alun!
She hammered on the bathroom door for him to come out – she wanted to know what he was doing!
But Owen never got to tell her, because that was when the apartment door flew open and the knuckle- draggers finally showed up.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Fifteen centimetres, Jack had always insisted, was not nearly enough, not even when it had been six inches. He had, however, found on numerous occasions that you could work with what you were given.
Right now, it was all that was keeping him from falling over sixty metres to what, for him, would still be a pretty messy and uncomfortable resurrection. For Gwen, who moved slowly alongside him on the slender concrete ledge that skirted the circumference of SkyPoint, it would be certain death.
They had come maybe six metres, and it had taken them the best part of fifteen minutes. At this rate, they were going to reach Lucca in time to catch him eating breakfast on the terrace.
The night wind tore at his hair as he stood with his back to the SkyPoint wall, his arms spread, hands plastered against the concrete, feeling for the slightest grip. He could sense the toes of his boots sticking over the edge of the ledge and, immortal or not, it wasn’t a comfortable place to be. He turned his head towards Gwen. She was half a metre away from him, stuck to the wall as he was by sheer will and the sweat of her palms.
‘You doing OK?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yeah. Brilliant. You can see my house from here.’
Jack smiled, and moved his left foot a little further along the ledge, edging his shoulder along as he did so, then gently brought his right foot after him, keeping his centre of gravity as close to the wall behind him as possible. Then he watched as Gwen repeated the same action.
He tried to bring to mind the schematics of the building, tried to remember just how far they had said it was from the SkyPark window to the lightning conductor.
Twenty-four metres?
They weren’t even halfway yet, and moving so slowly had never seemed so exhausting.
Distantly, he heard the sounds of cars in the city below. Night owls heading home, and shift workers making for the plant. He had travelled to a lot of worlds in his time, but that one seemed stranger than most, and so much more than just sixty metres away. A world of mortgage repayments, office jobs, pension plans and family. Not his world, and never would be.
He moved along the ledge a little more.
At least the air was good up here. It was coming straight in off the Bristol Channel and, beyond that, the Atlantic. There was no air on any planet quite as good as the air that came in off the Atlantic.
‘You keeping up?’ he called to Gwen.
He saw her nod. But she didn’t look at him now, she was keeping her eyes dead ahead. Concentrating. Feeling her way along the side of the building. Shifting sideways, moving one foot slowly along after the other.
Jack worried about her, but there was nothing he could do now. She had been determined to join him, and arguing with her would just have used up more time. Besides, she was right, six shells wasn’t a lot to take out a man like Lucca and however many heavies he might have shoring up his fortress defences. In his experience, guns were like heads, two were always better than one. Unless they were pointing your way, of course.
He continued to move along the ledge and found he was getting into a rhythm now; everything starting to fit into a pattern, his movement and his breathing – even the gusts of Atlantic air were coming at the right time. He felt that he was moving faster.
Then he saw the gulls.
There were six of them – big, grey-backed herring gulls-roosting on the ledge. As Jack inched ever closer, the first bird turned and looked at him, then looked away as if it thought it was seeing things, or maybe that the humans would fall off before they got much closer. Either way, the bird didn’t move.
‘Looks like we got company up here,’ Jack said to Gwen.
‘What?’ she demanded, as in,
‘You don’t have any mackerel or anything on you, do you?’
‘Jack, what is going on?’
From her position, she couldn’t see the gulls. Jack decided it wouldn’t be a problem, the birds would move. After all, people were bigger than birds, right?
But as Jack drew closer, the birds didn’t move. The closest one looked over at him again and stretched, beat its wings, and cried out into the night. That set off its companions, who took up the chorus. But they didn’t take off, as he’d expected.
‘Come on, guys, move along,’ Jack said, as he got within half a metre of the gulls.
Instead, the first gull edged towards him and stabbed at his boot with its beak.
‘Hey! You little freak!’
Jack kicked out at the bird and it hopped back in retreat, but as Jack took his next step the bird darted forward again and attacked his boot.
Jack lashed out with his foot. ‘Get out of it!’
And this time, the bird leaped into the night, and took its friends with it. Suddenly the air around Jack and Gwen was filled with the thunder of beating wings and crying gulls.
‘Oh my God, Jack!’
Jack reached out and grabbed Gwen’s hand.
‘Just stay calm,’ he said.
Right now the birds were just showboating, making a lot of noise, warning off the invaders to their territory, maybe still a little intimidated by their size. But these weren’t sparrows, and if they decided to swing in for an attack they were in trouble. Gulls had big, sharp beaks, and they were also the only ones up here that could fly.
It didn’t take much working out.
‘Hey, you lot, shut up!’
The voice came from above them. It was a thin voice, like it had come out of some sort of woodwind instrument played badly.
