Shift (17 page)

Walking arm in arm with Aubrey was kind of awkward and I had to change my pace to match her small strides. But it also felt really good. Did this mean that she liked me? I mean, I knew she liked me, but did she like me like me? I was so busy thinking about keeping my bicep flexed under her curled hand that I didn’t see the puddle. My trainer was soaked as I pulled it out. Aubrey laughed, slid her arm away and ran off through the rain.

I looked down at my feet and thought about Shifting. I had considered wearing my boots this morning.

“What are you waiting for?” Aubrey shouted. “We’re here.” I squelched over and joined her in front of number 47. “OK, here’s how we’re going to play it. I ask all the questions and you keep your mouth shut.”

“Fine by me,” I said. “I have no idea what to say to a nutter.”

Aubrey reached up and banged the knocker. The door swung back on its own. We looked at each other.

“Mr Heritage?” Aubrey called as she pushed the door open and stepped in. No reply.

We walked down the hallway, past neat little picture frames holding photos of stern-looking men and women. I wondered if they were relatives of his.

“Mr Heritage?” Aubrey tried again. Still nothing.

We peered into the living room on the left. It was empty apart from a small sofa, draped with a crocheted head cover, a small TV set and a nest of coffee tables. I heard a mewing from the other end of the house. Aubrey and I pushed on further, peering into the rooms as we passed. I was starting to get a horrible feeling about this.

I tripped on a rucked rug and banged into a bookshelf in the seemingly never-ending hall. Aubrey threw me a look of annoyance.

A white cat came hurtling out of nowhere and launched itself at Aubrey’s head. It tangled its claws in her blonde mop and tried to scratch at her face. I was too shocked to do anything, and just stood there, my mouth wide open. Aubrey managed to pull the hissing beast off her head and threw it away. It span in mid-air and landed on its feet, hissed once more and padded off.

“What the…” I said, my heart thudding.

Aubrey leant against the wall opposite me, taking deep breaths. Then her face contorted in disgust. “Can you smell that?” she said.

I sniffed at the air and the stench hit me. It smelt like sewage and rotting food. We looked at each other, pretty certain we knew what we were going to find in the kitchen.

Henry Heritage’s body was lying splayed across the white tiles of his kitchen floor. His legs and arms were stretched out at weird unnatural angles. Pots and pans lay beside him, as if he’d put up a fight and pulled his kitchen down on top of him. But it hadn’t done him any good. He was dead. The fact that he was missing the top of his head was a pretty clear sign of that. There were small tufts of red hair left either side of his ears and then nothing but a bloody mess.

Judging by the smell and the ragged bite marks all over his body, it looked like he’d been dead for a few days. He had an expression of abject terror frozen on his pale face. Whoever said that death was peaceful had never seen a body like this one.

A tabby cat appeared from under the counter and delicately walked across Heritage’s chest, causing a hiss of air to escape his decaying lungs. The cat jumped off the body and proceeded to nibble at its owner’s brain. Aubrey grabbed a nearby mug and threw it at the cat. It missed and shattered next to the corpse. The cat looked up, completely unfazed, licked its lips and sauntered away.

Which was when I threw up.

ARES’ forensic specialist arrived about twenty minutes later. He was a short man, with small, round glasses and a long nose. Aubrey and I were sitting on the doorstep, huddled against each other, as he stepped out of his small van.

“Dr Kepple,” he announced flashing a badge at us. “Apologies for the late arrival. There were road works. Where is the deceased?”

“In the kitchen.” Aubrey gestured down the hall with a jerk of her thumb.

Kepple stepped over us and strode down the hallway. I twisted around to watch him as he disappeared into the kitchen.

Aubrey was holding a cigarette up in front of her face. She rolled it around in her fingers, as if she was considering it. I’d seen her do it before.

“Why do you do that?” I asked.

She slipped the cigarette between her lips. “Do what?”

“Look at it, as if it’s the last smoke you’ll ever have?”

“Because that way, when I want to give up smoking, I can not only give up, but make all these tiny Shifts and not have smoked any. Neat huh?”

“Why don’t you just Shift and not have bothered with the very first one? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

“Well, some I might keep. Like the one I shared with Adam Jackson, for instance.”

“Well, I don’t think you should be smoking here. It’s disrespectful,” I snapped, feeling more jealous than angry.

“I think Heritage is beyond caring.” She pulled the cigarette out of her mouth and put it back in the packet anyway.

I chewed my lip, feeling helpless and angry at the same time. In the space of a week I’d seen two dead bodies. More than that, I’d see the brains of two dead bodies. The image of the guy on the Tube kept haunting me. I was having dreams each night about him reaching out to me. But I couldn’t help because when I looked down at my hands, they had become hooves and I had become a sheep. Warner would then laugh so hard that his head would explode, over and over. After seeing Heritage’s mangled body, I wasn’t looking forward to going to sleep tonight.

Besides the horror of it all, something else kept nagging at me. “Do you think the SLF did this?” I said.

“I don’t know. After that bomb, I wouldn’t put anything past them.”

“I’m starting to think that Warner, the guy on the Tube, wasn’t the bomber at all. I think they killed him too.”

“You said he was in his thirties?”

“Forty maybe?”

“Doesn’t sound like he was with the SLF to me.”

I heard the sound of clanking from the kitchen. “Do you think there’s anything we should do to help?”

“We’ll only get in his way,” Aubrey said, hugging her knees.

“We should probably check though.”

Aubrey shrugged and gave me her hand to pull her to her feet.

In the kitchen, Heritage had been stripped of his shirt and shoes and there were dark purple blotches all over his chest. Kepple was bent over the body, prodding the open skull with a wooden stick. The brains were making slurping noises. In his other hand the doctor held a small recording device and was speaking into it.

“The victim has had the cranium removed. However, judging by limited blood loss to the area, this does not appear to be the cause of death. In fact, I believe the procedure was carried out post-mortem. Going by the distinctive purple bruising to the victim’s chest, I would conclude that the actual cause of death was crush injuries.” He leaned in closer to the gaping skull and lifted a flap of skin away. “There are teeth marks around the brain and part of his brain seems to be missing. I will have to get a cast of the marks, but there appears to be two sets of teeth marks present. One are clearly feline, but… the other may be human in origin.”

Human? I thought. Someone has been munching on his brain?

“Have you seen anything like this before?” Aubrey asked.

Kepple looked up and blinked, as if only registering our presence for the first time. “Bluecoats, hmm? I hope you haven’t contaminated the crime scene.”

“We didn’t eat his brain, if that’s what you mean,” Aubrey snapped, while I looked embarrassed and hoped he wouldn’t notice where I’d thrown up.

The man harrumphed and went back to his examination. I stepped forward, trying to get a better look at the body. The initial shock had worn off and now it was like staring at a mannequin. Even the brains looked fake. Kepple was stroking Heritage’s face with a cotton bud swab and I noticed a soft shimmer on the dead man’s cheeks coming from what looked like a thin layer of dried slime.

“Is that from the cats?” I asked. Kepple grunted and carried on. “I guess not then.” I looked at Heritage’s hands and they had the same, soft sheen. As if they’d been coated in something gluey. Like saliva.

I shuddered and Aubrey looked up at me, her expression one of concern. I jerked my head to the side and raised my eyebrows. She got the hint and we both backed out of the kitchen silently, not wanting to disturb Kepple. Not that we should have worried. He was clearly a man who loved his work.

“What is it?” Aubrey asked when we were in the safety of the living room, only the cats to overhear us.

“I don’t know. Just a thought. Did you see the slime on his face?” Aubrey nodded. “Well, I bumped into this guy outside your flat, the day after we met. This fat, and I mean fat, guy.” I stretched my hands out as far as I could to indicate just how fat I meant.

“What about him?”

“He licked me. Licked my hand. And said something about wanting to eat me up. He also almost crushed me to death. If I hadn’t thrown up on him, I don’t think I would have escaped.”

“What is it with you and throwing up?”

“Hey, I’ve a delicate stomach. And you’d have been sick too if you’d smelt his stinking breath. It smelt like… well, it smelt like that guy in there. Like rotting flesh.”

“You think your fat man did this?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. It’s the stuff with the eating of the brain. And the licking.” I shuddered again.

“You should tell him.”

“Tell whom what?” Kepple appeared in the doorway behind us, and we both jumped.

“Er, it’s just that I was, threatened I suppose, well, he didn’t actually threaten me verbally, but I felt threatened–”

“What Scott is trying to say is that he thinks he may have encountered Mr Heritage’s killer.”

Kepple’s eyebrow raised a fraction. “Can you describe him?”

“He was pretty unforgettable.”

“Then you should give your report to the Regulators when they arrive. I am done here. An ambulance will be arriving shortly to bring the body to the morgue. Good day.” Without as much as a backward glance he left.

“Do you think he’s going to do anything about the fat man?”

“Well, it’s not really his job to go chasing after killers,” Aubrey said.

I wandered back into the kitchen. Kepple had placed a white sheet over the body giving the man some kind of dignity. The cats were perched on the surfaces, looking annoyed at us for taking their snack away. I felt Aubrey lean her head against my back.

“Can they, you know, stop this? Can someone Shift so he doesn’t have to die?”

“I don’t know. They’ll look at all the evidence. But we can’t turn back time. We can only undo our own decisions. If someone was thinking of visiting Mr Heritage a few days ago, but changed their mind, then maybe. But it’s not like you can go back with a warning or anything. As soon as you go back, the memory starts to fade.”

“Not always though,” I said, uncertain. I’d been worrying about why I was able to remember my old realities, when no one else seemed to be able to. “Sometimes it’s like when you wake up from a dream and you can just hold on to it, right?” I really hoped that I wasn’t alone in this.

Aubrey shrugged and shook her head. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t dream.”

I heard the whoop whoop of a siren and a black, unmarked car pulled up outside. We wandered out to meet it.

The guys from the Regulators were efficient enough as they took our statements. They even weren’t too condescending when I told them about my experience with the fat man.

“We’ll look into it,” they said. Before flipping closed their notepads. I assumed they’d do all that DNA stuff and track him down. That’s if it was his saliva, and not just cat spittle that was stuck to Heritage’s face. The ambulance Kepple had promised arrived shortly after and the body was carried away. Soon we were the only ones left in the house. Us and the cats.

“Who’s going to look after the moggies?” I asked.

“Who cares? Evil things.”

“Not the biggest cat fan then?” I’d always been rather fond of cats. I had one as a kid called Mr Tuffy that ran away. And I still checked every black cat I saw, just to see if it had a white spot on its nose, like mine had.

“They totally creep me out. It’s as if they know,” Aubrey said.

“Know what?” I asked.

“About the Shifts. It’s as if they can see all the realities at once. And they’re judging you for making the wrong choice. That, and they’re so bloody smug.”

She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. “Come on. I’ll have to write this all up. What did I tell you?”

“Fieldwork blows?”

“Sure does.”

Watching Aubrey type was an exercise in patience. Her two index fingers hovered above the keyboard, making small circling motions, as she tried to hunt out the next letter. She pounded each key as if worried it would run away.

I sighed as she struggled to find the n.

“What?” she said, looking up from her notes.

“I can’t believe you can’t type.”

Aubrey fixed me with one of her finest stares. Then started typing without taking her eyes off me. Words appeared on the screen without hesitation: “Scott Tyler is a moron.”

“You can type!” I said.

“Shudup,‘“Aubrey hushed, and hit the backspace deleting her typing.

“But why pretend?” I asked, keeping my voice low.

“Because if they know I can type forty words a minute I’ll end up with some ballache desk job after entropy. If they think I’m a complete luddite then I might be able to join the Regulators. So…” She pounded the n. I moaned again.

“You do it then.” She pushed away from her desk and waved me into place. With two hefts of my chair I positioned myself in front of the screen. Aubrey had started typing up her report on Heritage’s death. All she’d managed so far was to write his name, date of birth, date of death and one line.

In the course of my duty, along with First Class Shifter, Scott Tyler, I found Henry Heritage’s body in…

I looked down at her scribbled notes and flexed my hands over the keyboard.

“Is that an r?” I asked

She leant over to look. “It’s a k.”

“Your handwriting is terrible.”