again.”
The line went dead. The only sound in the apartment was the damp rustle of the vines as they sucked Fury dry.
Johnson went to the bedroom to retrieve his tube of Sooth from under the mattress. In it he found two Saturns left. He had no recollection of using the others; maybe Beckeridge was right. He took one Saturn, pushed the pill out and placed the disc into his viewer. It took him a long time to come up with a good thought before he placed the pill on his tongue. There was no whisky left so he let it dissolve and swallowed its bitterness as the mesh of plant life grew stronger all around him.
“Play.”
Chapter 22
With Fury and Elina digested by the weed, Johnson knew it wouldn’t be long before someone came looking for them. All his Sooth was gone. He wanted more, even though he couldn’t account for most of the Saturns. There was no Mist left in the apartment either; not even a Beat cap. It meant he would have to hit the streets again.
In the bathroom, he checked his appearance in the mirror. When he didn’t recognise his own face, a tear slipped from the outer corner of his right eye. It travelled from his skin onto the flattened meadow of black hair that was his beard. There it glistened before sinking and disappearing. The beard was full and he could not remember the last shave he’d had. It looked to Johnson as though he had never shaved.
His hair, too, once cut to a regulation centimetre was now a twisted unwashed mass. He saw the dirt ingrained around the skin of his forehead and baring his teeth found them stained yellow. The clothes he wore were the same subculture leathers he’d first worn on his arrival from JHD. He realised with a wave of self-disgust that he smelled bad. Not only of dirt and body odour but also of urine and faeces.
He peeled the clothes from himself as if they were a skin. It hurt to remove them –much of his body hair was torn away as they came free. He walked from the bathroom back to the living space to feed his clothes to the weed. Near the front door where Fury’s body had been there was now a thick clump of creeper that retained the vague outline of a human.
He threw his soiled garb towards an unnourished looking knot of tendrils in the corner beside the viewer. They coiled hungrily over the clothes until they were lost to sight. He noticed as he walked back into the bathroom that none of the creepers attempted to reach for him any more, despite the entire apartment being lined with vegetation; all the angles smoothed by organic growth. It had become a living cave of deep green.
The bathroom remained relatively free of weed and so he set about removing all the traces of dereliction that his body had manifested. Taking the crusted bandage from his shoulder he found no trace of a scar from Fury’s razor strip. He tossed the bandage through to the bedroom. A swaying vine caught it in mid air and drew it back to the proximity of the wall where it was shredded by hungry shoots.
He cut his beard and hair with scissors first and finished the job with his depilator. He had to tear it from its shrink wrapper, realising he hadn’t used it once since moving in. As he removed all traces of hair from his face and head he noticed something unusual about his tattoo. A flickering. He froze and looked down to his chest.
Nothing.
Looking back into the mirror he continued to shave and it was when he turned his face that he noticed the movement. The spider moved when he moved. As he faced the mirror its head pointed to the left side of his chest but when he turned his head the spider shifted its legs, swinging itself to point in a new direction. Johnson placed his hand onto his chest, over the body of the spider, and turned around. Below his fingers he could see the spider shimmering its legs as it turned with him. And yet he felt nothing beneath his palm even though the movement was obvious.
He cut his finger and toe nails, eventually casting all his cut hair and clippings to the weed in his bedroom. He then showered as hard as he could, scrubbing the crusted filth from his behind and the backs of his legs, scouring the stench from his armpits. The smell became worse for a while as the hot water rehydrated the mess before washing it all away. He abraded his hands and feet with a stiff brush, determined to rid himself of every trace of grime and followed the shower with a bath in the hottest water he could stand, adding soothing aromatic oils. When he was satisfied, Johnson withdrew the plug and was cheered to see the water draining away, just as clear as when he’d immersed himself.
Finally, he scraped his tongue clean, flossed and brushed his teeth and cleaned the insides of his ears. In the bedroom, he struggled with the weed to open his wardrobe. From it he took another set of skintight leather clothes, this time all in black. He left his waistcoat unbuttoned so that he could see which way the spider pointed. Pushing his feet into a clean pair of boots, he added a bodkin to each of them.
He slipped his handgun, still unused, under the waistband at the back of his trousers, put his two remaining clips in the back pockets of his striders and walked towards the door. He tested the spider by turning around in front of the door. When its head pointed upwards he was facing the door. That, then, was the way to go.
His pale skin looking vulnerable under the black leather, his head shining, the scalp grey and hairless, Johnson walked through the tangle of weed in the security chamber and out into the city of Tier Two.
Chapter 23
The weed had wrought many changes.
The rampways and thoroughfares were now green corridors, rounded into tunnels by the choking tendrils. Johnson’s apartment had only been an example of minor growth, he now realised as he trod the springy floors waiting for a snakelike loop of vine to snare him. The plant, whether it was one or several he couldn’t tell, had smothered everything. Some of the buildings were totally bound in green, some of the tendrils as thick as tree trunks. He knew if anything as large as that got a hold of him he’d be crushed in a second.
And yet the weed was eerily quiescent. Slight flutters occurred at the tips of the smaller vines as he passed but nothing else seemed to threaten him. It was as if the entire plant was sleeping.
If that was true then it had put the city to sleep too. There was no noise at all. The billboards that had once blocked the view from his window every few minutes were lying tilted or broken on the rampways or smashed beyond recognition at the street level. Through the occasional break in the canopies below he could look over the edge and down into the streets. Looking up, he saw cracks in the weed’s thick cover and shafts of sunlight bursting through. There was no traffic, no construction, no whine of hyper jets. When the gentlest breeze did occasionally blow, all he could hear was the sighing of leaves.
The silence wasn’t merely due to the impossibility of movement for machines. Johnson supposed that he might well be the only person still alive in the city. Everywhere he looked, the outlines of human forms were sculpted in green along the tubular corridors. Some of them were lying down as if sleeping; others were contorted, the vine capturing their last movements in living sculpture. The entire city was now populated by silent emerald statues and the weed that had mimicked them at the moment of death.
The walk to street level was a long one. Under other circumstances Johnson would have taken an elevator or even a taxi but now walking was the only way to anywhere. The spider made the journey even longer by turning at unexpected moments to indicate a different route to the one he would have chosen.
He eventually came out at street level and was able then to see a little more light coming down from very far above. The tendrils of weed had not blocked out the spaces between the buildings the way it had covered the rampways; the unimpeded daylight was a welcome sight. Following the spider, he walked away from his part of town along the centre of a street that would usually have been clogged with traffic. He took care not to trip on the thicker vines, ever wary of ‘waking’ the slumbering carnivorous garden that overlaid the city.
The smell of fresh cuttings and the sap of trimmed garden plants mingled with the unmistakable stench of rotting meat. The streets were clogged with the partially digested victims of the weed, every one of them mummified by tangles of creeper.
