Against Gravity (2 page)

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.

The unfinished drink was still sitting on the table. The suitcase still sat next to it on the floor. It couldn’t have been there for long before he located it, or Lucia or one of the other
bar staff would have noticed it by now.

Kendrick sat down on a seat nearby and glanced around him. What if the owner of the suitcase came back and found him poking through its contents?

The suitcase looked expensive, its leather soft and creamy, the silver clasp glowing brightly under the overhead lights. Feeling like a thief, he leaned down and opened it.

Kendrick found himself gazing down into a jumble of wires and electronic paraphernalia, all bunched around several lumps of putty-like explosive. That this might itself be part of some extended
hallucinatory episode crossed his mind.

The best thing to do was to see what someone else thought they saw. He stood up and stepped over to the bar.

“Lucia.”

She glanced over at Kendrick from behind the bar with a nodded greeting. Then she frowned, as if noticing something in his expression. She finished serving her customer, then stepped out from
behind the bar. Lucia was tall, imposing; in a previous life she’d been a military engineer, adrift in Cuba with the UN peacekeeper forces there while the unrest back in the US spiralled into
civil war. After that some chain of circumstance had brought her here, to the Armoured Saint. Apart from her work as the bar manager she helped Todd take care of any security requirements on behalf
of the Saint’s owner – who, it so happened, was Malky.

She looked down at Kendrick. “What’s up?” she asked, in a voice deep enough to be baritone.

“I need you to tell me if I’m imagining things.” He gestured at the open suitcase.

Lucia stepped over and glanced inside. Her eyes grew large, almost saucer-like, and her dark Hispanic skin visibly paled. She headed back behind the bar and flipped a switch to shut down the
sound system. Customers stopped in mid-conversation as the lights came up.

“Bar’s closed,” she yelled. “Everybody out – now!”

Some regulars merely grinned at her, as if some great jest was being played. Other customers just looked confused. Kendrick glanced down the entire length of the Saint and saw Malky jerk
upright, confusion and anger chasing each other across his features.

“Out. Now. Everybody,” she bellowed again, clapping her hands thunderously above her head. Kendrick eyed the open case nervously. He could hear Malky yelling something similar, a
look of panic on his face as he slammed open the fire doors at the rear.

Malky hurried over to join Kendrick while Lucia chased the rest of the bar staff outside, along with their customers. Grumbling and questioning, they went wandering out into the icy night.

“In the bag.” Kendrick pointed.

Malky stepped up to the table and sat down heavily on a stool. Leaning forward, he looked as if he was about to push his head right inside the case. His angry frown turned to a gasp of
horror.

“Oh shit,” he whispered, “we’re going to have to call the cops.” He looked back up at Lucia, who rejoined them. After her efforts the Saint was silent and
empty.

“Come on,” said Malky, leading Kendrick away by the arm. “If I’m calling the cops, you sure as hell can’t afford to stick around.”

“But my ID—”

“—Will be safe against most police checks. But there’s no reason to tempt fate, is there?” said Malky. “Once we’re out of here I’m phoning the cops so
somebody can come round and defuse that thing before it blows my livelihood to bits.”

“If I’m even so much as questioned—”

“I just said, I know. We’ll go out the back way. Lucia, get upstairs and check if anyone’s there. Get them out into the street if they are.”

Kendrick still had his Euro Citizenship card, of course, but that had been illegally altered to disguise his Labrat past. Otherwise his movements would become severely restricted. Carrying this
card wasn’t even mandatory; in fact, citizens of the European Legislate were not obliged to carry them at all. But in the right circumstances – like a bomb scare – background
checks might go a lot deeper than normal. Even if he’d possessed the LA ID that Malky had been promising him, there were no guarantees that it would survive the full scrutiny of some
Legislate investigative committee determined to root out terrorist activity.

As they reached the empty rear of the bar, Malky leaned over the counter-top and grabbed a long broomstick from its mounting on the wall. A hook was attached to one end of the implement. Next he
pushed a table and a couple of chairs to one side, till Kendrick could see that there was a trapdoor set in the floor. Malky spun the pole around to insert the hook neatly into an iron ring fitted
to one edge of the trapdoor, then, with a clatter, pulled it up and to one side.

“What about cameras?” persisted Kendrick. “Is there anything the police might be able to use against me?”

“There are, and there is. But as soon as you’re out of here I’m going to have Todd alter the security system’s memory pronto. Believe it or not, he works fast when he
needs to.” The open trapdoor revealed a ladder leading down into darkness.

Malky climbed down rapidly, Kendrick following without hesitation.

They stepped off onto a cellar floor several feet below. Although it was dark here, Kendrick’s surroundings instantly became clearer to him as his Labrat-augmented senses
compensated. He saw roughly plastered walls, bare floorboards underfoot, and large metal casks piled up against the walls. The smell of stale hops assaulted his senses as Malky unlocked a door at
the far end of the cellar.

“Through here.” The pub’s owner stepped through, into darkness. Kendrick followed him, traversing a floor that was sticky with rivulets of beer. He passed through the door to
find himself in an unkempt garden backing onto a narrow alleyway glistening with frost.

A chill wind sliced at Kendrick’s face. Since the Gulf Stream had been cut off a few decades ago the summer in Scotland barely lasted six weeks; global warming had altered the flow of air
currents over the tropics so that they no longer carried equatorial warmth towards Northern Europe. Temperatures in the higher northern latitudes had plummeted, and there were people muttering
about whether or not they were sliding into a new Ice Age.

Malky stood waiting for him. “Tell me what just happened there,” he asked, his expression agitated.

“There was a bomb in the bar.”

“How did you know? You didn’t put it there yourself, did you?”

“Oh, come on, I . . .” But what could he possibly tell him? Certainly not the truth. Malky would assume it was a lie, and Kendrick would be the last to blame him.

“I knew the same way any Labrat would,” Kendrick improvised. It was, after all, an entirely valid explanation.

Malky gaped at him with an incredulous expression. “You’re telling me you sensed it – right from the other end of the bar? C’mon, Kendrick, not even a Labrat could do
that. Someone must have warned you, yeah?”

“Look, I don’t have the time for this. I’m going to get myself out of here before anyone arrives. Okay? Let me know what happens.” Kendrick raised a hand in farewell and
hurried away, Malky’s suspicious gaze burning between his shoulder blades.

Kendrick didn’t see a figure peel away from the shadows near the parked cars, but he knew immediately that he was being followed. He turned a corner at the end of the
block and waited there till, a second later, his pursuer appeared. Kendrick grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.

“Easy!” said the other man, his accent making it clear that he was an American. “Easy, I just want to talk to you.”

“What about? Did you leave that bomb in the bar?”

The stranger stared at him, bug-eyed. “Is
that
what it was? Christ, I wondered what was going on.”

“You were in there too?”

“Yes, trying to find you. Then everyone got thrown out.” He smiled. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“No, I don’t.” Which was a lie. There was something familiar about the man’s face. But it wasn’t like seeing the ghost back in the bar – this time there was
no nausea, no sense of impending dread; none of the symptoms that usually preceded a seizure. Whoever he was, he was no apparition.

“The Maze, y’know? Though it’s been a long time.”

“I’m afraid I don’t recall.”

The other man laughed. “Well, we never actually spoke before. My name’s Erik Whitsett.”

“But you were—”

“In a coma, yes. Well, I recovered about a year after they brought me out of the Maze. When you didn’t appear outside in the street, I figured you must have headed out the back
somewhere, so here I am.”

Kendrick shook his head. “Mr Whitsett, I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. It’s just that—”

“It’s been such a long time. Yeah, I know. Look, I haven’t been spying on you or anything. It’s just that I really need to talk to you.”

The sound of sirens drifted through the night air, a few streets distant and coming closer.

“I think we should take a walk first, Erik.”

They crossed the street and kept moving, Kendrick leading the way, Erik hurrying beside him. Kendrick cut diagonally across Parliament Square and stopped Whitsett with a palm
against his chest once they were on the other side.