Age of Legends Read online

  She told the other Ajia just to close her eyes and go to sleep. Then it would all be over.

  The other Ajia listened and complied. Sleep brought peace. There was nothing any more, no knowledge, no sensation. Just pure, sweet oblivion.

  CONSTABLE YATES LOOKED at Constable Yelland. Something was wrong. They both sensed it. The girl had gone limp, but there was limp and there was limp. The body of an unconscious person was floppy but still had muscular tension, a kind of cohesion. The level of floppiness shown by Ajia Snell, the absolute absence of rigidity, meant something else.

  “You don’t think…?” Constable Yates began.

  Constable Yelland squatted beside Ajia. He tapped her cheek a few times, put his ear to her mouth, then felt her wrist.

  He fixed his accomplice with a solemn gaze. “Bugger,” he said.

  “She’s…?”

  Constable Yelland nodded.

  “Shitting hell,” said Constable Yates. “It was an accident, right? I mean, we didn’t mean to. How were we supposed to know?”

  “Don’t panic.” Yelland was the senior of the pair. He’d been on the force six years longer. This wasn’t his first death in custody. He knew the drill. “It’s going to be fine. You lose one every so often. It happens. The suspect isn’t strong enough. Maybe there’s some underlying medical condition we weren’t informed about. Not our fault. No one’s going to have our head for this. There are protocols. We just have to get rid of the body.”

  “We can do that?”

  “We’re the London Metropolitan Police,” said Yelland, straightening up. “We have the special powers vested in us by the Extraordinary Regulations Act. We can do as we bloody well please.”

  Chapter 3

  THE TENDRIL COULD not be seen. It could not be heard. It could not be touched, tasted or smelled.

  The tendril could still be sensed, but only subconsciously, instinctively, and only by some, not all.

  As it snaked across the night-time rooftops of London, the tendril’s proximity caused a sleeper in a house below to stir uneasily, plagued by dreams of a missed doctor’s appointment which would have dire health ramifications. In a back garden a prowling cat raised its head and hissed, hackles rising. Dogs barked at the intangible, pseudopod-like presence passing sinuously overhead, without knowing quite why they were so agitated by it. A baby awoke in her crib, wailing for no good reason.

  The tendril was seeking a suitable home, but with no more sentience than a column of ants marching out from the nest, seeking food. It quested this way and that, attuned to certain emanations, currents it alone could detect. It was designed to register the complex ebb and flow of life and death in this city of millions. Invariably it was drawn to sickbeds, hospital wards, care homes, hospices, anywhere where mortality loomed large. Drunk drivers and would-be suicides were attractive to it. And if it detected someone carrying a grudge and a lethal weapon––a loaded gun, say, or a knife, or a bottle of acid––the tendril hovered over that person speculatively, gauging the likelihood of them acting on their murderous impulse and, more importantly, the fittingness of the victim.

  For there were criteria the tendril had to follow, conditions it had to meet, in order to be successful. It could not recruit simply anyone. Everything had to be just right, otherwise the tendril’s purpose was forfeit and within a few hours it would shrivel and dissipate like fruit withering on the vine, its potential squandered.

  A sudden flurry below, a particular disturbance which caught the tendril’s attention. A recent death. It snagged the tendril like a spike catching a breeze-blown ribbon.

  The tendril circled. In as much as it could feel anything, it felt excitement. As though running through a mental checklist, it noted the name of the deceased, the youthfulness, characteristics such as impudence and a love of speed…

  Perfect.

  Oh yes, this one was absolutely perfect.

  Downward the tendril spiralled towards its target, its mission at an end. Within moments it was sinking into cool flesh, immersing itself, suffusing, merging, like liquid into liquid. What the tendril had been, and what it had entered, became one.

  There was darkness.

  Then, amid the darkness, a spark.

  CONSTABLES YELLAND AND Yates were careful. They informed just one other person about the death of Ajia Snell, and that person was Sergeant Hayley Egan, who’d had responsibility for processing the girl’s arrest. Egan gave them a five-minute bollocking, which both men took with good grace, then told them to dispose of the body where it wouldn’t be found.

  “I don’t want to know where,” she said, “I don’t want to know how, I just want it done. Meanwhile I’ll clean up the cell and fix the paperwork, and if anyone asks, which they won’t, we say we interrogated Ms Snell and released her under caution. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Have you two geniuses got that?”

  Zipping the corpse into a bodybag, Yelland and Yates carried it to the boot of an unmarked patrol car and drove to a patch of industrial wasteland. Yelland knew of a drain cover there which led to the sewers. Drop the corpse in and it would be swept away by the torrent of sewage. By the time it saw the light of day again, if it ever did, it would be so waterlogged and rat-gnawed that an identity would be hard to establish and the cause of death harder still. He had used the method before, so far without repercussions.

  Yelland unzipped the bodybag while Yates kept lookout. The area was deserted, but Yates couldn’t escape the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. A breeze tickled the hairs on the nape of his neck, yet the weeds which sprouted here and there in the cracks between the concrete paving slabs were absolutely motionless. In addition, he could almost have sworn someone was watching, even though there was nobody in sight. It was fucking creepy.

  “Give us a hand here.”

  Yates helped Yelland slide the girl out of the bodybag. She was clammy to the touch. One of her eyes was swollen shut. The other stared blankly, reflecting the tawny light of the overcast sky, itself a reflection of London’s ambient illumination.

  Yelland got to work with a crowbar, prying open the iron drain cover. Yates stuck his hands in his pockets and studiously avoided the girl’s one-eyed stare. His gaze kept being drawn back to it, however, and her half-pulped face. She looked defiant, even in death. He almost felt bad for working her over so hard. She’d been good-looking, in an elfin, tomboyish way. If circumstances had been different, he’d have quite fancied her.

  She blinked.

  Yates almost screamed.

  “What the actual––?” exclaimed Yelland. “Gav, why’d you jump like that? You startled the life out of me.”

  “She… She moved. Her eye. She blinked it. Or winked it. Whichever.”

  “She did not.”

  “Swear to God, Dave, she did. I saw her.”

  “No, you didn’t. Even if you did, it was probably one of them involuntary thingies. Like, a spasm. A death twitch. Last little bit of electricity in the nerve endings.” Yelland bent back to the task of dislodging the drain cover.

  Disconcerted, Yates brushed a hand back and forth over his close-cropped head of hair. The sooner they got the body down into the sewers and out of sight, the better. The whole situation was starting to freak him out. He wondered if he was developing a guilty conscience. The great bonus about being a cop was you could get away with pretty much anything. Your warrant card was a licence to indulge your every whim. That suited Yates, who’d always resented how, back in school, his life had been one long round of detentions and suspensions. He’d thought of it as high spirits; the teachers had called it “repeated and sustained bullying”. As a policeman, he wasn’t answerable to the wimps and the finger-waggers any more––especially nowadays, in the Drake era. These were strong times for strong people.

  Ajia Snell sat bolt upright.

  Yates pissed himself.

  Even as his bladder let go in sheer fright, he backpedalled away from the corpse, a weird, mewling noise coming f
rom the back of his throat. He lost his footing and fell to the ground, and still he kept putting distance between himself and the dead-but-somehow-now-alive girl, crabbing backwards on all fours while she, for her part, peered around her as though in a daze.

  Gavin Yates was a big fan of zombie movies, the gorier the better, and all he could think was that Ajia Snell must have joined the walking dead. It was the only possible explanation. She had been infected by a zombie virus and any second now she would stagger to her feet and start munching on him or Yelland, whoever was closest. Yates didn’t much care which of them got eaten, as long as it wasn’t himself.

  Dave Yelland, it must be said, was no less alarmed than his colleague by the girl’s sudden return to the ranks of the living. The difference between them was that Yelland’s thoughts did not immediately stray to zombies. His assumption was that he had misidentified Ajia Snell as deceased. She must have been breathing so shallowly, he’d been unable to detect it. Same for her pulse––too feeble to register. It seemed he had made a serious, but perhaps forgivable, blunder.

  The only solution he could see was to finish what he and Yates had started. Yelland firmed his grip on the crowbar. Two or three purposeful blows to the skull, and the girl would be as defunct as she was supposed to be. Then the crowbar would join her down in the sewers, taking with it any DNA evidence that might be clinging to it.

  Yelland took a step forward and swung, but Ajia wasn’t there. The crowbar whisked through empty air. He’d missed. How the hell could he have missed?

  “Gav? Have you seen her? Where the fuck has she gone?”

  Yates was a gibbering wreck, mumbling something about “the undead”, no help whatsoever. Yelland pivoted on his heel, looking for the girl.

  There she was, a dozen paces away, bent double, hands on knees, swaying somewhat. How she had got so swiftly from right in front of him to that spot over there, Yelland had no idea. Maybe he’d hesitated before trying to hit her, closed his eyes for a second, and she had scurried off. He didn’t think this was the case, but it was possible.

  She wasn’t going to get away from him again, though. She seemed disorientated and dizzy. Yelland strode towards her with the crowbar raised, determined to make the best of the opportunity.

  The girl glanced round, saw him, and was off, running so fast she reached the edge of the wasteland––at least fifty yards away––in just a couple of heartbeats. Next thing Yelland knew, she was climbing the chainlink perimeter fence, still extraordinarily fast, like a spider scuttling up a wall.

  Yelland lumbered after her, but by the time he had covered half the distance between them, Ajia Snell was over the fence and dashing down the road on the other side. He’d never seen anything like it. She was inhumanly quick, like an Olympic sprinter on crack. Within seconds she was lost from view.

  “You saw that, Gav, right?” Yelland said, halting in his tracks and scowling. “Wasn’t just me. You saw how she moved?”

  Gavin Yates nodded blearily. He was now less certain that Ajia Snell had been brought back as a zombie. Even the zombies that didn’t shamble with arthritic slowness, the ones in movies where the story said they could run, couldn’t run the way she had run. He hadn’t known a human being was capable of running that fast.

  “Should we go after her?” he said. “In the car?”

  The unmarked patrol car sat nearby, but Yelland thought that by the time they got in, started the engine and pulled off, there would be little hope of finding the girl. The streets around the wasteland were a warren of side roads, back alleys and underpasses, and if she kept up the pace she’d set off at, she could already be half a mile away by now or more, and getting further with every passing second. Yelland had no idea how long she could run at such a speed without exhausting herself, but then it was pointless speculating, since no one could run at such a speed. Maybe she could sprint like that indefinitely.

  Dave Yelland came to a decision. “This never happened,” he said. “She didn’t wake up. She didn’t give us the slip.”

  “If Egan asks…”

  “If Egan asks, we dumped the body down the drain, just like we said we would. End of.”

  “We can track her, can’t we? The girl? Using CCTV footage and what-have-you. We can hunt her down wherever she goes.”

  “What would be the use?”

  “So we can finish this,” said Yates. “What if she wants payback? If we don’t do something about her, she could, I don’t know, file a formal complaint, get a lawyer onto us, something like that.”

  “You think she’s going to?” Yelland scoffed. “Me, I think she’s going to hole up somewhere nice and dark and far away from here, and never come out again. She will if she’s got any sense. And even if she did try legal action of some sort, how far do you think she’d get?”

  “What about the papers?”

  “Journalists? Pah! No, Gav, there’s no way this is going to come back and bite us on the arse. You can count on it. Now, why are your boots wet? And by the looks of it your trousers too?” Yelland’s nose wrinkled. “Fuck’s sake, mate! You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t. Oh Gav!”

  Chapter 4

  LONDON WAS MOVING in slow motion. Vehicles traipsed along the neon-glossed streets as though the national speed limit had been set at “dawdle”. The few small-hours pedestrians Ajia passed trudged like sleepwalkers. As she ran, she was conscious of everything around her drifting, idling. Sometimes she felt like this when she was on her bike. She knew the secret of speed and no one else did. A hare in a world of tortoises.

  But this wasn’t the same. This was different.

  For instance, she noticed that lights in shop windows were flickering oddly, as though emitting a visual version of Morse code. A startled pigeon, awake and scavenging during the perpetual twilight of the nocturnal city, rose into the air not with panic but with leisurely nonchalance, almost as if floating upward. The traffic signal at a junction ahead took an age to change from amber to green. And sounds had taken on a strange, echoey quality. Car engines droned like the bass pipes of a church organ. Voices were unintelligible.

  There seemed to be a thickness in the air, an unseen resistance which only Ajia was unaffected by. London lay at the bottom of the ocean, where the pressures were enormous, and she alone, shark-sleek, had evolved to cope.

  On she ran. She wondered if she might be dreaming––hallucinating, even––but she knew deep down she wasn’t. The solidity of the ground beneath her feet, for one thing. The feel of the breath filtering in and out of her mouth, for another. Her hair flapping against her neck in time to the alternating piston action of her legs. These were real sensations. Tangible.

  As for a destination, she didn’t have one. There was her bedsit, but she didn’t think it was safe. The police must know where she lived, and it would be the first place they looked for her. Aside from that, nothing came to mind. Ajia did not have close friends. Nor did she have any immediate family in the country, apart from a couple of cousins she had met perhaps three times. And even if there had been someone she thought might give her shelter at their home, she couldn’t go there. She couldn’t bring the trouble she was in to someone else’s door.

  All she could think of to do was keep running. The two cops would surely be chasing her. She was surprised they weren’t right behind her in that car of theirs. At the very least they’d have called in reinforcements, wouldn’t they? They weren’t just going to let her slip through their fingers.

  Eventually there came a point when she had to rest. She’d been running flat-out for ten minutes, she estimated. Which meant she had put a couple of miles between her and the place the policemen had taken her, that abandoned industrial zone or whatever it was. She needed a breather, time to gather her thoughts and regroup.

  She decelerated, on the alert for any sign of law enforcement––a siren, a flashing blue light, a drone. She didn’t recognise where she was. It was the suburbs, that much she could tell. A leafy street of large, detached houses
. The air quiet, with the constant background rumble you got in central London reduced to just a whisper. The loudest sound she could hear was her own panting.

  Once she had got her breath back and her tired legs had stopped trembling, Ajia tried to get her bearings. She found a street sign. The name of the road was unfamiliar––not that she’d expected she would know it––but the sign carried a district code, NW10, and the name of the borough, Brent. Okay, so she was in… Willesden? Harlesden? Somewhere like that. She had done courier runs up this way a few times.

  Odd, though, because she could have sworn that she had been running through Hackney and Dalston earlier. She had recognised a couple of landmarks, including the Empire theatre and the Museum of Childhood. She must have been mistaken. She couldn’t have run from the East End all the way to Brent—nine miles, more or less—in such a short span of time.

  It was then that Ajia realised she was very hungry. She couldn’t remember when she had last eaten. Nor did she know how long she had been held in the police station cell, but it must have been several hours. Everything that had happened since the two cops started beating her up had become fragmentary in her memory, a broken jigsaw of images. Even the events leading up to her incarceration were blurred. Vaguely she recalled being caught stencilling on a wall, getting on her bike, pedalling off… Shot. Hadn’t she been shot?

  With a start, Ajia looked down at her belly. How could you forget being shot?

  There were still holes in her cycling top, front and back. The garment was encrusted with dried blood. She rolled it up and examined the bandaging beneath, which was blood-sodden. Gingerly she peeled away the dressing over her stomach. The bullet wound…

  Was not there. She couldn’t even see any scarring.

  She checked her back with her fingers, looking for the exit wound. That, too, was absent, gone without a trace.