‘Noisy buggers, piss off!’
This second voice was deeper, more brass section.
Two men right above them in Besnik Lucca’s garden had been attracted by the commotion of the gulls. Jack and Gwen stopped breathing.
‘Here, now get off!’
It was Brass again, and as he spoke Jack saw a chunk of what looked like burger roll fly over the side of the building. As one, the gulls dived after it into the night below.
Jack felt himself take another breath.
Above him Woodwind was telling Brass how he hated those bloody things; one had swept down on him in Tenby when he was a kid and stolen his ice cream right out of his hand.
Maybe that was where his life had all gone wrong, thought Jack. An incident like that was going to screw a kid up – ice cream robbery: it was the kind of thing that would make a sociopath out of anybody.
He heard the voices of Lucca’s two men move away, and glanced back at Gwen. She looked exhausted, but he knew she was tough. She would make it.
Fifteen minutes later, Jack found the lightning conductor.
Turning around to climb up the conductor was always going to be tricky, and he had been rehearsing the move in his head as he edged towards it. With his back to the wall, he wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the rod and used them to brace himself as he reached over his shoulder with his other hand. With a little quick footwork he found himself facing the right way round and hauled himself nimbly up the wall, knowing that Gwen would work out the move for herself and follow him up.
After the age it had taken them to edge around the outside of SkyPoint, Jack found himself rolling over the balcony wall into Lucca’s verdant roof garden only ten seconds later. He dropped to the floor in a crouch and Gwen was beside him a moment later.
Jack drew the Webley from its holster.
TWENTY-NINE
The goons that had burst into the photographer’s flat – the men that Jack would soon after think of as Woodwind and Brass – had left Alun and Julie behind. The young couple were stoned out of their heads and probably wouldn’t remember the visit if they survived the night. The only people that the thugs were interested in were Wendy and Owen, and Owen didn’t put up a fight.
When he heard them crash through the apartment door, he had finished what he had gone to do in the bathroom, and stepped out.
His only words were to Wendy: ‘Just do as they say.’
There was no real option for them. The men weren’t waving guns around, but they didn’t need to. Even a living, breathing Owen whose bones would fix wouldn’t have been much of a match for Lucca’s slabs of muscle.
Woodwind and Brass shoved Owen and Wendy out of the flat, and ushered them towards the steps. Before they reached them, Owen heard Evanescence pouring out of the flat once again.
Owen and Wendy were taken up to the twenty-first floor and led along the corridor to what looked like a broom cupboard. It proved to be a secret lift hidden behind a panel. Thirty seconds later, he and Wendy were led into Lucca’s apartment. Woodwind and Brass left them there.
Owen saw Toshiko, still secured to the chair, and went to her, filled with a mix of relief and rage.
‘Tosh, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, Owen. I’m sorry, I messed up, didn’t I?’
‘No, course you didn’t,’ he said. Lucca stood watching, amused.
‘You two make such a beautiful couple,’ he said. ‘You should really get together.’
‘Screw you, Lucca,’ Owen snarled. ‘What do you want?’ Lucca spread his arms, took in the apartment. ‘Look about you, Owen. I am a successful man.’
Owen took in the money that hung on the walls at a glance. ‘You’re a bloody crook.’
Neither Lucca’s smile nor his pride faltered. ‘I have many interests. I am a man of culture. Success brings with it the opportunity to better oneself, to learn. To study.’
‘What are you, an advert for the Open University?’
Lucca was patient. ‘When this mysterious thing started to take people here at SkyPoint the average man’s reaction would have been fear, would have been to run. But I am very far from average.’
‘Yeah, well you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ Owen taunted.
‘My reaction, Owen, was to study, and learn.’
Lucca had taken the TV remote in his other hand, and he aimed it at the big set. On screen, Owen saw Gwen and Rhys being led into the show apartment by a man he guessed to be Brian Shaw. The camera cut to a new location – a bathroom: as Brian Shaw walked in and was consumed by the amorphous thing that came out of the wall. He felt Wendy stiffen next to him as she watched. The scene switched to another room and someone that Owen didn’t recognise being swallowed by the thing. In another room, another victim…
‘You recorded all of this?’ Owen gasped.
‘I have cameras everywhere. I see everything.’
‘And exactly what have you learned?’ asked Toshiko.
‘How sick you are?’ suggested Owen.
Sticks and stones didn’t even leave a mark on Besnik Lucca. He played something else on the television. It was the Lloyds’ apartment an hour ago. Owen covering Wendy with his body, saving her from the mass of rippling, glowing matter that enveloped them.
‘The man who sees everything, knows everything,’ said Lucca, and he took a couple of steps towards Owen. ‘Now I want to know about you.’
Owen felt Lucca’s eyes boring into him. ‘Yeah, well I like to preserve an air of mystery. Makes me more attractive to women.’
Lucca put the gun against Owen’s temple. ‘How about if I put a hole in your head. How attractive do you think that will make you?’
‘Leave him alone!’
Lucca swung around as Toshiko cried out. He slipped behind the steel chair and pressed the gun against her neck. Owen saw her eyes swell with fear.
‘Get away from her,’ Owen said.
‘Then tell me what you are,’ Lucca said. ‘Why did it refuse you? Twice?’
Owen looked from him to Toshiko and shrugged.
‘Because I’m dead.’
‘Don’t you play with me!’
Owen could see his finger tightening on the trigger.
‘It’s true!’ And Owen ripped apart his shirt, revealing the bullet hole. ‘I got shot through the heart. But I’m still alive. That’s why the thing – whatever it is – won’t take me, it needs living cellular matter to survive. And I’m not alive.’
He glanced towards Wendy. She looked like she was going to be sick.
Lucca stared at Owen. ‘You’re undead.’
‘I don’t sleep in a coffin or anything. In fact, I don’t sleep.’
Lucca was closing on him again, walking around him.
‘Fascinating. Fascinating. The living dead. Tell me, do you feel pain?’
‘Not pain, as such.’
Lucca kicked him in the shin.
‘All the same, I’d rather you didn’t do that.’
Lucca laughed, a great booming laugh. Like he’d heard the funniest joke in the world. Like he was mad.
Suddenly he pushed the gun up under Owen’s head. ‘If I blow your head off, will you run around like
