augmentations: fantasies that imposed themselves on the real world. How much longer did he have left, then, before he could no longer distinguish the imagined from the real? Was this what it was like for other Labrats when they got close to the end, when their augs consumed first their nervous systems and then their bodies, from the inside out? Did they imagine their pasts literally coming back to haunt them?
If that was the case, then perhaps he would be better off dead.
'I'm here to tell you something. I need to go soon, so are you listening to me?'
Kendrick stared down at the door handle. Sanity lay on the other side of it. 'All right, I'm listening.'
'Don't trust Hardenbrooke. He's a dangerous bastard. Do you hear me? He's dangerous.'
Kendrick pulled the door open. Before he could step through, he sensed the ghost of Peter McCowan coming up close behind him. He saw its shadow darken the inside panel of the door, and felt as if his blood was about to freeze over.
'One last thing before you go.' Kendrick could even feel the ghost's warm, beery breath on the back of his neck. 'So that you know I'm here to help you. The leather suitcase sitting near the front of the bar – look inside it.'
'I don't understand.'
'Near the entrance.'
The shadow shifted, and Kendrick imagined a pallid hand reaching out to pull him back. He stepped through quickly and slammed the door shut behind him, loud enough to attract one or two stares from some of the Saint's other clientele. He ignored them, turning back to the door he had just stepped through. He reached out and gently pushed it open again.
Nobody was there.
But there never had been, had there? He was sure of that.
The Armoured Saint pub was long and narrow, with wide windows facing out onto the street at one end and a bar extending from near the entrance all the way to the dark alcoves in the rear. Kendrick now turned left, towards the front section.
Between the bar itself and the tall windows looking out over the street, Kendrick could see a raised area of floor with a few tables and chairs on it. Business was quiet this early in the evening so it was currently deserted. A leather suitcase rested on the floor by a table next to the windows. A half-finished drink stood on the table as if someone had left in enough of a hurry to forget about their luggage.
This is crazy. Suffering an unpleasant delusion was bad enough, but paying this much attention to it was a step beyond. Kendrick turned away from both the table and the suitcase and found his way back to Malky, who was at the very rear of the bar. The air there was hot and thick with the stench of smoke and booze, in pleasant contrast to the bitter cold outside.
He found Malky staring vaguely into space, his arms folded over his stomach so that his checked shirt was rucked up over his pale rotund belly, exposing the elaborate design on his cowboy belt buckle. This buckle was something that Malky treasured and one of the bioware dealer's favourite stories revolved around his first and last visit to Los Angeles, only days before that city abruptly ceased to exist. Small and round, with his thinning blond hair brushed into an untidy side-parting, Malky was hardly the image of a frontiersman.
He raised his eyebrows as Kendrick sat down beside him. Malky smiled. 'Well, I was beginning to think you'd gone home.'
'Please, Malky, I feel bad. Really bad.' He'd surely only imagined that his heart had stopped beating. A ridiculous notion: if it had, he'd be dead. He subconsciously reached up again and touched fingers delicately to his chest. Malky again raised his eyebrows questioningly, and Kendrick shook his head.
'Don't ask.' He ducked his head a little, resting his elbows on the table top, briefly massaging his temples with his fingertips. He glanced back up at Malky and managed a faint grin. 'I think I'm starting to hallucinate.'
Malky sat up a little straighter, and Kendrick was pleased to see a look of genuine concern sweep over the little man's face. 'What happened? Have you had another seizure?'
'Yeah – now I'm seeing ghosts.' Kendrick leaned his head back against the nicotine-stained wallpaper and shrugged amiably, as if to say that it really wasn't any big deal.
Malky looked even more alarmed. 'You need to see Hardenbrooke now. This is serious.'
'It's not like I'm in the final stages or anything,' he replied. 'Look.' Kendrick pulled down the collar of his T-shirt and leaned closer, eyeing the people around them. But nobody was looking.
The lines and ridges marking the flesh over his ribcage were visible, but only barely. There was no sign of the overwhelming striation that indicated a Labrat in the final, terminal stages of rogue augmentation growth. 'Okay? So take it easy.'
Malky glared at him, while Kendrick let his own gaze pass over the bar's other inhabitants. Most of the accents around them were, unsurprisingly, American. When he'd first come here to Scotland it had been easier to keep track of faces, but in recent years that had become impossible, as even more refugees escaped from the US and its civil war.
'What do you mean, 'seeing ghosts'?'
'Just what I said.' Kendrick remembered his malt whisky and picked it up. He fingered the thimble-sized glass, wishing he could find a more satisfactory way to numb the memories that the ghost – no, he reminded himself, the hallucination – had dredged up.
Malky shook his head. 'I'm telling you, we shouldn't just be sitting around talking like this. You need medical treatment.' He reached out and touched Kendrick's hand as he lifted the whisky to his mouth. 'And no more of that stuff might not be a bad idea while we're at it.'
'I still need those papers,' muttered Kendrick. 'That's why I'm here.'
The 'papers' in question would give him the identity of a lawyer who had died in the LA firestorm and so was therefore not in a position to complain about this misappropriation of his life.
'Don't worry, that's all sorted out.'
'Thanks.'
'My pleasure, really.' Malky shot him a pitying look.
Kendrick drained the last of his whisky, a comfortable heat settling in the pit of his stomach. 'Look, I'm seeing Hardenbrooke tomorrow anyway, so it's not going to make any difference if I see him now or then.'
'Fine, I admit defeat. So… whose ghost did you see?'
Kendrick made an exasperated noise. 'Malky, I didn't see anything. I imagined I saw something.' He could feel the alcohol softening the edge of his thoughts. Nonetheless, he realized that he was on the verge of a serious panic attack. Perhaps talking about his recent experience would objectify it, help put it outside himself.
'I imagined I was talking to someone who died back in the Maze. When I turned around, there he was, like I'm speaking to you now.' Kendrick winced. 'Trouble is, it felt real enough.'
Malky put a hand to his mouth as if appropriately appalled. 'Fuck, I'm sorry. That can't have been easy.'
'It was a long time ago,' replied Kendrick, echoing the ghost's own words.
Delusions, seizures… what else could they be but the precursor to a long-drawn-out death for him?
As he closed his eyes, the hubbub of the bar became abruptly muted, distant. In this artificial hush he searched for the sound of his own heartbeat.
He could hear nothing.
Yet, on opening his eyes again, here he was, still breathing, thinking, patently alive. Another hallucination, then; imagining that he was dead, hollow, silent on the inside.
Barely a moment had passed, and the world flooded back in on him. Delusion or not, Malky was right: he should go and see Hardenbrooke immediately.
So why didn't he? Why would he trust the word of a dead man, a phantom?
He suddenly remembered the suitcase sitting unattended at the far end of the bar.
'… Won't say anything more about it, then,' Malky was saying as Kendrick stood up. Malky looked up at him with a perplexed expression. 'Where are you off to now?'
'I'll just be a second.' This is stupid, thought Kendrick. Even so, he hurried to the far end of the bar, making a casual study of the people around him. Faces he'd seen a hundred times before but had never spoken to.
