The Hunter spoke into a headset: “Okay, we’re good here. Come ahead.” An armoured van crept from a concealed gap in the trees and pulled up behind the people-carrier. While the medics were closing the ambulance doors and setting the bike upright, Poulsom and I were escorted to the van’s rear, where the motorcyclist opened the doors. The vehicle’s interior was occupied by a steel cage, snugly fitted and bolted down. No sign of lock or key, only a mystifying plate of what looked like dark glass in a metal housing where the lock should be.
Not mystifying for long. The Hunter pressed his palm flat against it. With a string of blips and a gasp of what sounded like hydraulics the cage door popped open.
“Inside,” the Hunter said. Poulsom clambered in, gracelessly, and in a moment had been seated on the floor and secured, cuffs to bars. The motorcyclist helped me in, fastened my wrists to the cage, then released and removed the ankle cuffs altogether. “Better for you like this,” he said. “Save you getting tossed around like a lettuce.”
The Hunter leaped up into the van and stood over Poulsom. Shouldered the automatic and pulled out a pistol from a side holster. Pointed it at Poulsom’s head. “Phone,” he said.
“What?”
“Call in. You’ve drawn heat. You’re going round about. They wait for your update but Ellis is green for go. That’s all.”
“They’ll know—”
“They won’t know shit without any of the alert words, all of which you know I know. Are we clear?”
Pause.
“I’m not going to ask twice.”
Poulsom opened the phone.
“I dial,” the Hunter said.
Poulsom’s performance was surprisingly convincing, considering he had a gun at his head, a blend of tension, weariness and irritation; he was the horrifically overworked dictator who had to suffer shit luck and universal incompetence.
“Good,” the Hunter said, pocketing the phone. He gave the motorcyclist a nod, not looking at me. Palpable contempt came off him. Not for me personally but for all women. I had an image of him choking a young girl while sodomising her, his face testifying that it wasn’t enough, nothing was enough. My nose has sharpened for these things. He knew I knew, which made a disgusting claustrophobic intimacy. It was then I began worrying again about getting raped. Rape was his default. To him the only obstacles were practical. But fear was a practical obstacle. He knew what I was. This, I had to hope, would keep him off. Another surge of the Hunger went through my thighbones. My face was hot. He turned and jumped down from the van.
The motorcyclist produced a small capped syringe from his pocket. “Bobo time, doc,” he said. Poulsom’s face quivered—fear and a look of sensuous revulsion—as the motorcyclist approached him. “Relax. It’s a sedative, that’s all. Hold still.”
“Whatever you’re doing,” Poulsom began—but the motorcyclist belted him, hard, a backhander; my armpits went suddenly hot—across the face.
“Hush. And relax. There we go.”
“Where are you taking us?” I said.
“Can’t tell you, miss. Sorry. Not far, though. Don’t worry.” He saw me eyeing the syringe. “You’re not having any of this.” He winked, then went to join the others. Poulsom’s eyes had closed.
“Let’s move ourselves, gentlemen,” the Hunter said. I heard the people-carrier doors slam and the ambulance start up. The whole ambush had taken no more than two or three minutes.
A slight weight shift said our driver had left the armoured van, and a moment later a man in his early forties wearing Securicor overalls appeared alongside the Hunter. “Thought you should know, sir,” he said. “Looked like a tail a couple of miles back. Can’t be certain. Probably paranoia.”
“Vehicle?”
“Land Rover, white, Alfa Lima two five five Juliet Papa Romeo. Single male driver. Nothing, really, one mile too many, maybe.”
“It’s because it was white,” the motorcyclist said. “You notice white more. It’s the Moby Dick effect. What sort of moron tails someone in a white car?”
“The world’s full of them,” the Hunter said. “I’ll let the boss know anyway. Let’s go.”
57
WE DROVE FOR what felt like fifteen or twenty minutes. There was only a small opaque glass window in the back door, and the Hunger soon had motion sickness to keep it company. I was close to throwing up (or dry heaving, since I’d eaten nothing for a week) by the time we stopped. The van’s rear door opened and the Hunter palmed the cage’s lock. The Securicor guy climbed in to unfasten me and put the leg cuffs back on. Over his shoulder I could see the motorcyclist dismounting. Poulsom, still out cold, was left shackled where he was.
Hard to make out detail in the dark. We were outside a small stone farmhouse with no lights showing. The land around felt empty. I had a sense of deserted fields, remnants of dry stone walls. No cattle, no sheep, nothing.
“Get her inside,” the Hunter said, not looking at me.
The farmhouse was L-shaped, low-ceilinged, damp, furnished with junk-shop crap from what looked like the 1930s. A dark wood bookcase with no books. A green couch you didn’t want to sit on. An armchair with stuffing coming out like ectoplasm. A faded floral carpet. All the curtains were closed. They lit a log fire in the stone hearth. My shins ached. Wolf in my finger- and toenails like the dull biting shock you get from an electric cattle fence.
“I suppose it’s pointless me asking what’s happening?” I said to the motorcyclist, when the Hunter was out of earshot.
“ ’Fraid so, miss,” he said, with the diamond smile and alert friendly green eyes. His curly hair was surfer two-tone, blond and brown.
“Or how long I’m going to be held here?”
“I wish I could tell you, I really do. Try not to worry about it.” He was tearing the cellophane off a pack of Marlboro. Poulsom had forbidden me cigarettes and booze, but since his reign was over …
“Any chance of bumming one of those?”
We lit up. “Thanks,” I said. “Now all I need is a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Maybe you could have a quick rootle arou—”
“Carter,” the Hunter said. The motorcyclist turned. “Outside. Check Poulsom in an hour. If he’s not quiet when he wakes up, give him another shot.”
When the motorcyclist—Carter, evidently—had gone, the Hunter approached me on the couch. I thought, excruciatingly, of myself jerking off in my cell. In the dark, yes, but there must have been infrared. A terrible feeling of disgust came over me. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a roll of duct tape. “You can agree to keep quiet—silent in fact—or I can stick this over your mouth. It’s up to you. You won’t be given the choice again.” The space between us held information. He was up against a higher authority. He was restricted. Whatever he was capable of, he wasn’t capable of it yet. And there was, no mistake—the curryish stink of it came off him—fear. It was causing him trouble, that he could be afraid of a woman. It didn’t compute. He had to keep reminding himself this wasn’t a woman, this was a monster.
“I’ll be quiet,” I said, looking straight at the fire.
It was a bad night. They rotated the watches, two men outside, one in. Obviously I couldn’t sleep, with the pre-Curse fevers and the Hunger like talons trying out their grip on different bits of my insides. In the white jail Poulsom had “allowed” me muscle relaxants, which I’d taken with deep resentment. I would’ve taken a handful with gratitude now. I lay curled up under a blanket on the couch, shivering in spite of the log fire. And if not the shivers the sweats. Jake says shoulders and wrists feel it first but for me it’s the line from the back of my skull to the end of my spine. In the deliriums (deliria? deliriæ? Jake would know) the yellow-toothed wolf from the Little Red Riding Hood book I had when I was a child comes to me—purple jacket and all—shimmering out of the wall or the fire or the carpet or just thin air, comes to me and wraps his bigger weightless body around mine and tries to get in.
The motorcyclist made cups of instant black coffee which
I drank because it was better than nothing. My clothes hurt my skin. There was a pendulum wall clock in the kitchen that went toonk … toonk … toonk and the soft sound was almost unbearable. Jake came in and out of the fever. Sometimes he was the Red Riding Hood wolf, or the wolf spoke with his voice. You’ll be seeing me very soon. I could feel you close all day. Me too. Sometimes he was just himself, invisibly next to me on the couch, the source—as in heat source or light source—of unloneliness. The way sometimes he’d put his hand in the small of my back. It was as if my consciousness was there, in my sacrum, not in my head. Or at least the bit of my consciousness that was terrified of having to go back to being alone.
Sometime in the small hours Poulsom was brought indoors so he could go to the bathroom. He was given water, then taken back to the van. He must have been freezing in there.
At dawn the Hunter and the Securicor guy came in looking raw. The motorcyclist cheerily fixed breakfast from what was in the fridge, eggs, bacon, bread, cheese, tinned fish. The smell of the fried food was nauseating. I sat in the bathroom with the extractor fan going, wafting an open bottle of bleach under my nose. There was no window to even think of climbing out of, and in any case they’d left the Guantánamo restraints on.
My escort was visibly relieved to have got through the night without incident. The Hunter opened the curtains in the lounge. A morning of low cloud and weak light. Last night’s impression of the landscape had been accurate: It was empty, crossed here and there by low pale stone walls. East, the fields undulated very slightly into a distant stack of hills. West, maybe three hundred yards away, they were bordered by a forest.
I’d assumed daybreak would bring some development, but apart from the men’s air of having survived the worst of an ordeal, nothing changed. I saw the Hunter standing fifty yards off talking into a cell phone. The Securicor guy took the cold breakfast leftovers to Poulsom in the van.
At four in the afternoon the motorcyclist and I smoked the last two of his Marlboros. I began to wonder whether the impossible was true, and they didn’t, in fact, know that in a little over two hours I was going to turn into a monster. In which case all I had to do was request a bathroom visit as close to transformation as possible, Change—and kill them. I wondered if I was up to that. The Hunter, surely, would be armed with silver.
Wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t they all be?
“Okay,” the Hunter said, having wrapped up another fifty-yards-away cell phone call. “It’s time. Get her hooked up in the van. No, wait …”
He walked over to me and pulled the duct tape out a second time.
58
THEY MUST HAVE given Poulsom another shot because he was unconscious when I resumed my place with him in the cage. I had to work hard not to let the tape over my mouth drive me crazy. Incredible the difference it made, being denied speech. In combination with the restraints (this time both hand- and foot-cuffs were attached to the cage) it felt like being buried alive.
The journey wasn’t long but it wasn’t easy. Standing was the best position, but with the short length of cable from my ankles to my wrists I could only hold on to the bars at navel height. Jolts and sudden turns flung and yanked me. Poulsom, tossed around, as the motorcyclist would have said, like a lettuce, would be covered in bruises when he woke up. If he woke up.
Five minutes before we stopped, the terrain got rougher. What had already felt like a primitive road turned into what can only have been a dirt track, full of ruts and potholes. Keeping my balance was impossible. Poulsom was the better off, loose-bodied, out of it.
We stopped. Executed a cramped three-point turn. Stopped again. The rear doors opened. The Hunter stood with his hands on his hips, looking at me. Through the bars I saw we were on a dirt road barely bigger than a bridleway that threaded between thinning trees before curving to the right about twenty feet away to run parallel with the bank of what I could hear and smell was a stream. On the opposite bank a narrow strip of grass, a few lilac bushes, then trees again. There was no sign of the motorcyclist or the Securicor guy.
“Getting hungry?” the Hunter said.
I looked past him. Concentrated on breathing through my nose. The air was loamy and damp. The cloud cover had broken and the evening star was out. My nostrils were hot and tender. Moonrise was less than two hours away. The first inkling of animal clarity was already there, a kind of vicious joy in the power that would come up through the soles of my feet into my ankles, shins, hips, elbows, shoulders. If I lived that long.
“Come on,” the Hunter said. “You’ve got meals-on-wheels in there. Couldn’t be handier.”
Poulsom, he meant, obviously. Poulsom says they’ve got it covered, I’d told Jake when we’d discussed full moon, the Change, the need to feed, whatever that means. Whatever it had meant to Poulsom, it hadn’t meant this. It cost me a lot to hold on, teeth jammed together, the tape on my mouth still imprinted with the heat and weight of the Hunter’s hand.
I looked directly at him. Very slowly gave him the finger. He laughed, quietly. Then slammed the van door shut.
59
POULSOM WOKE UP, shivering, in a sweat. As far as I could tell in the little light that made it through the frosted glass his night and day in the van hadn’t agreed with him. He murmured behind his strip of tape, pointlessly. Then looked at his watch.
I didn’t need his reaction to what he saw to tell me how close transformation was. The last hour had taken me into the penultimate phase, the wolf looking out through human eyes with quiet blazing animal alertness. My wrists and ankles were bloody from where Hunger spasms had cut me against the cuffs, but my limbs had calmed in spite of the pain.
Had calmed. The penultimate phase was passing. Any moment the final phase—cramps, sickness, hot and cold, half an infinite minute of casually ripped-up muscles and rearranged joints—would begin. The cuffs would either burst or slice clean through me. I had an image of myself Changed but with four bleeding stumps. I knew just the sound the stumps would make, knocking against the floor and walls of the van.
I looked at Poulsom. He was shaking his head, no, no, no. Very soon, when things began visibly happening to me, he’d start thrashing and screaming into his gag and all his life would rush to the surface of his flesh and be there sweetly for the taking. It was a relief, the Hunger, its refusal to negotiate, something solid to hold on to in the uncertainty.
Suddenly I caught Jake’s scent. My legs nearly buckled. I twisted myself as close to the rear door as I could get. Overrode the impulse to make as much noise as possible. It’s me! I’m in here! Jake!
Wait. Be smart. Listen. There were voices.
“I thought you said we’d be alone,” Ellis said.
“I know,” a second voice said. “But something occurred to me after we last spoke.”
Poulsom, presumably at the recognition of Ellis’s voice, began kicking about.
“Who’ve you got in there?” Jake said. “What the fuck is this?”
The van’s rear door opened. Standing twenty feet away were Jake, Ellis and a third man in Hunt fatigues. Mid-forties. Dark hair flecked with grey. Broad cheekbones. He looks like a Native American, I remembered Jake telling me—and realised I was face-to-face with Grainer.
The other Hunter, to whom Grainer, it dawned on me, was “the boss,” stood close to the cage with the automatic pointed directly at me.
“Nothing silly, Jake,” Grainer said—then something extraordinary happened.
Grainer took a pace backwards and another half pace to his left. He did it as if woodenly executing a formal dance step. For a second everything froze. Jake’s mouth was slightly open. The shirt buttons were still wrongly done-up. Ellis seemed to very slowly reach around for the rifle that hung slightly behind him on its shoulder strap. Grainer’s right hand went up and behind his head. There was a soft rasp and a flash of bright metal. Everyone observing jumped, as if we’d all been given a small electric shock at exactly the same moment: the moment the blade, a brilliant broadsword, swu
ng—with a sound like a wet branch snapping—through Ellis’s neck.
The head toppled a fraction before the legs went. The long blond hair snagged on the rifle. The corpse’s collapse was curiously neat. It dropped to its knees, hesitated, then fell forward as if in a gesture of complete worship. The head, still attached by its hair to the gun, lay facedown just next to the hip, as if it didn’t want to see anything anymore.
“Lu?” Jake said. “You all right?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“How did you know?” Jake asked Grainer.
“How do we ever know? We got a good gal on the inside. I’ve always said women make the best agents. Deceit comes naturally to them. It’s hardly surprising: If you were born with a little hole half the population could stick its dick into whenever it felt like it you’d learn deceit too. Biology is destiny. You can’t blame the women.”
Grainer transferred the sword to his left hand and with his right took a pistol from his side holster and pointed it at Jake. I dropped to my knees and retched up bile. It was coming.
“Keep her covered, Morgan,” Grainer said. The Hunter by the cage retrained his gun on me. It had drifted a little during the beheading.
“I’m sorry, angel,” Jake said to me. “I was stupid.”
I couldn’t speak. We got a good gal on the inside. It didn’t have to be Hardass. There were other women at the white jail. But the ugliness of this moment spread backwards. I know you’re seeing your guy tonight. And me like an idiot weeping on my bunk. It didn’t have to be her. But there was the cynic’s version of Ockham’s razor: All things being equal the shittiest explanation’s the best.