Shift (20 page)

“Are you going to lie there all day?” Aubrey asked, stepping over me.

I pulled myself to my feet, dusted myself off and followed her down the narrow walkway. It opened out to a large area.

“So zis is where ze creature sleeps,” I said, in my best Van Helsing impression.

Benjo had taken over this level and certainly made it his own. A large, sagging sofa bed sat in the middle of the floor. Next to it was a small fridge and in front, resting up against the guard rail, was an old-fashioned TV. It was markedly cleaner up here. I imagined Benjo sat on the sofa, stuffing his face, and hurtling the empty packaging onto the floor below.

Aubrey opened the small fridge and instantly closed it, wincing and covering her nose.

“What’s in there?” I asked, covering my mouth in sympathetic horror.

“Moulding jars of mayo,” she said, stepping away.

Behind the sofa, pressed up against the whitewashed walls, were a row of wooden cabinets. Aubrey opened the first one and gasped.

“More mayo?” I asked, joining her.

She shook her head.

Inside the cabinet was a row of surgical tools, which glistened in the dim light. Scalpels, steel clamps, a small circular saw and something that looked like a mini-crowbar were all lined up neatly. Some of the tools looked as if they were covered in dried blood.

“I think we should call the Regulators,” I said, a cold panic creeping up the back of my spine. “We’re in way over our heads.”

“Speak for yourself,” Aubrey said.

“Bull,” I said, pointing at the blades. “This is some seriously messed-up stuff. And I don’t care how brave and smart you want to play it, Aubrey, but I’m cacking myself here and I want to get out.” I didn’t care that I looked like a total coward. I was frightened. More frightened than I had ever been in my life. It was one thing to find a dead body, or have a guy explode in front of you. But to see the instruments used to actually kill someone, that was a whole world of nightmares right there.

Aubrey looked at me and her face softened. “OK. Five more minutes and then we call in the Regulators. I just want to make sure we’ve got everything we need before they start stomping around.” She started tugging at the door to the next cabinet. I decided that the quicker she found what she was looking for, the quicker we could leave, so I tried to tug at it too. But it still wouldn’t open.

I didn’t hear him come up the stairs. Impressive considering how huge he was. I knew I was in serious trouble when I smelt a stink of rotting flesh. Before I had a chance to turn around I felt a damp cloth over my face, and then everything went black.

When I started to wake up, my first thought was that it must have been a bad dream. I was still at home, waiting for my alarm to go off. I wondered, vaguely, if Mum would make me French toast for breakfast if I asked nicely. A pain in my wrists and shoulders started to penetrate the dream.

“Leave me alone, Katie,” I mumbled, thinking my sister was giving me one of her famous ‘Tyler burns’.

I opened my eyes and, instead of seeing my annoying sister, I saw, swinging twenty feet beneath me, a floor littered with rubbish. I snapped my head back up. I was hanging by my wrists from fraying ropes, dangling from beams in the factory roof. Aubrey was hanging next to me. She was awake already and thrashing about, trying to swing herself to the safety of the mezzanine level in front of us.

“Don’t try and struggle, my sweetness. There is no escape.” Benjo appeared behind the guard rail and stood level with us. Aubrey kicked out her legs, aiming for Benjo’s head. But she was nowhere close.

He turned his head to me. “My fresh Shifter. So kind of you to find your way to me. The last time we met, you had to run off so quickly.” He giggled, and then covered his red mouth with his chubby hand. He had the faintest hint of an accent, something harsh in the way he pronounced the letter w.

“What do you want with us?” I said, not really wanting to know the answer.

“I want to play.” He grinned, showing his rotting, black teeth.

“Let me out of here and I’ll kill you,” Aubrey spat.

He giggled again. “I’m afraid that I have the upper hand here, my little Bluecoat.”

That gave me an idea. “ARES know we’re here,” I said. “They’ll be along any second now, and it’s not going to look good for you if they find us like this.”

“Don’t be a big silly. ARES don’t know anything about you being here. You’re all alone and you’re all mine.” He grinned.

I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to focus on Shifting. I thought back to the alleyway and tried to decide not to follow Aubrey. Or when we were in the club and Rosalie had handed us the address, I could have just walked away. I had never wanted to come here. So I just had to find that point to tip reality in the opposite direction.

Nothing happened.

I opened my eyes and looked at Aubrey. “I can’t Shift either,” she said.

“Of course you can’t,” Benjo laughed. “That’s because I don’t want you to. And I’m the more powerful Shifter here.”

“You’re a Shifter? But you’re… old.”

Benjo posed, his fist disappearing inside the wads of flesh on his hip. “Actually, you’ll find I have the body of a man in his prime.”

“Locked up in your cupboard?” I muttered.

I looked at him. He was ageless in that way fat people often are. He could be thirty, forty maybe. But way too old to be a Shifter.

Benjo giggled, his eyes glinting crazily, and then stopped himself. “I will be thirty-two this November.” He giggled again and waved his arm as if fending off a compliment. “I know, I know, I don’t look a day over twenty. But it’s true, I am the world’s oldest natural-born Shifter. Although when I say natural-born, I am telling an incywincy lie. I was cooked up in a petri dish by my father.”

Benjo shuffled away and returned with a photo frame. He showed it to us. The photo was of a thin, sharp-faced man, with a tiny moustache and cold, evil eyes. Benjo hugged the frame to his massive man-boobs. “My father was a genius geneticist. He had been a Shifter himself, but after entropy set in, he dedicated his life to finding ways to preserve our power.” He gazed at the picture again and then placed it back on the table next to the sofa. “His primary investigation was into senescence – the deterioration that results in death. I can tell, my little ones, that you think death is natural, inevitable even.” He tugged at the end of the rope holding me and sent it swinging. “Not surprising given your… current circumstances. But it’s not. Did you know that some turtles and amphibians don’t age? No one really understands it. They are trying. Hundreds of scientists are beavering away trying to unlock the secrets of life and death. My father made huge advances by studying the genetic makeup of the blowhead whale. They live to be over two hundred years old, you know. Well, my father took the genes from the blowhead and–’

“You’re part-whale?” I said, just about managing to keep up with his chatter. “Well that explains everything.”

“I am special!” he roared, stamping his foot. Dust shook from beneath the platform. He stroked at the greasy strands of hair that coated his scalp and calmed himself. “Thanks to my father’s brilliance, I don’t age at the same rate as you pathetic people. And if you don’t age…”

“You don’t go through entropy,” Aubrey said, pausing in her wriggling to stare at Benjo.

The fat man clapped his hands together. “Exactly.”

“But if they could do that, we’d know,” said Aubrey. “ARES would know about it.”

“Would they? And even if they did know, would they really tell you?” He smiled, showing his tiny, pointed teeth, and for a moment he looked almost sane. Then the mad gleam was back in his black eyes.

“My father said I was one of the most powerful Shifters he’d seen. And that was before I found ways to become even stronger. Even more–”

My arms were burning. It felt as if they were being torn out of their sockets. “Argh! Are you going to talk us to death?” I shouted, pain overcoming fear.

“Do not be so impatient,” he said, looking at me with his dark, empty eyes. “You’ll get your turn.”

I jerked in my ropes, trying again to loosen the grip. Even if I released my hands, it would mean falling to the floor below. But anything would be better than hanging here like Benjo’s puppet.

“As for your friend…” Benjo waddled over to stand in front of Aubrey and started pulling on a rope, winching her, inch by torturous inch, towards him. He reached out a podgy hand and stroked her forehead. Aubrey kicked and writhed, trying to shake him off. When that didn’t work, she resorted to spitting in his face. Benjo smiled and wiped the spittle off his cheek, then licked it off the palm of his hand.

“Get off her!” I shouted, suddenly taking him very seriously.

“As for your friend,” he said again, taking a lock of Aubrey’s hair and twirling it between his fingers. “I’ll add her to my collection.”

He let go of her hair and turned towards the cabinet we’d been trying to open when we’d been caught. With his little finger, he tugged on a chain around his neck and from somewhere under his stained T-shirt a small key emerged. He inserted it into the lock, giggled at us over his shoulder, then threw the doors open and stepped back proudly. I paused in my thrashing for a moment to see what was in the cupboard. I wish I hadn’t.

Inside was a row of large, upside-down test tubes. Perched on top of each tube was what looked like a wig. But as I looked closer I saw dried crusts of blood. They weren’t wigs; they were scalps. Five tubes and five scalps. The two on the right looked tiny, like they’d been taken from children. The one on the end looked the freshest and had tufts of red hair. Heritage. Benjo ran his hand over each scalp, lovingly.

“You sick freak!” Aubrey shouted. “You sick, twisted, fat freak!”

He stopped smiling when she called him fat. “It is so difficult when people fail to understand the brilliance of what I am doing here.” He sighed and plonked himself on the sofa, as if all this talk of killing people was exhausting him.

“Cutting off people’s heads! How is that brilliant?” I said.

The grin appeared again on his purple lips. “Well, let me tell you. You probably don’t know that the power of a Shifter resides in a small area in his frontal lobe.”

“Of course we know that, you slobbering excuse for a human.” Aubrey was trying to make him angry – perhaps hoping to goad him into killing us quickly.

Benjo ignored her. “I came upon it as an accident really. After my father died, I was given a job. Carrying out lobotomies on Shifters who didn’t… play by the rules. And I loved my job.” He smiled, as if remembering fond times. “One day, I was examining the brain of an especially powerful Shifter, a child of only thirteen, and I thought, ‘What if?’ There had always been tales of tribes possessing some of the strength of their enemies by consuming their bodies. So what if I could possess the power of a Shifter?”

“You ate their brain?” I said, not really knowing why I was so shocked.

“Fried it up with some sliced onion,” he said, plumping up one of the cushions next to him. “A bit chewy, if I’m honest. But I’ve perfected my technique now. Just a quick flash fry, not more than a minute, and it is quite delicious. Especially with mayo. But I find eating it hot and raw the most… satisfying.” He licked his lips. “As soon as that first morsel had entered my stomach I felt the energy flood into me. That was just the beginning. Now I am more powerful than even my beloved father could have imagined.”

“So you’re going to eat our brains and take our power? Well, I really don’t have enough power to bother with.” I sounded like Billy Goat Gruff, trying to bargain my way out of being eaten by the troll. But I didn’t have a big brother coming over the bridge. Aubrey and I were alone.

“Enough talk!” Benjo snapped. “Time to die.”

It would have been more commanding if it hadn’t taken him three tries to get out of the sofa. When he was finally upright, he pulled out a small circular saw from the cabinet of tools. With the press of a button, it started whirring. He brought it towards Aubrey’s head, so close it made her hair blow back. She stopped trying to struggle and hung there, as if she’d accepted her fate. She didn’t even close her eyes. Just stared straight at that blur of metal coming closer and closer to her face.

“No! No!” I screamed, tears flowing down my face. “Do me first. Not her. Please!”

“Don’t worry,” he shouted above the screeching of the saw. “Your time will come.”

With the saw in one hand he brushed Aubrey’s fringe back with the other. Then he pressed the blade against her forehead. She screamed as blood splattered over the blade.

I was begging now, pleading for her life. I didn’t even know what I was saying, anything that came into my brain that might make this nightmare stop.

The blade stopped spinning. Benjo looked at it confused. Then he started jerking, as if electricity was racing through his body. His eyes went dull and he dropped the blade. He fell to his knees and, like the air coming out of a hot air balloon, toppled over the guard rail and down to the level below. He landed with a crash.

Only then did I see who was standing behind him. A small kid with sandy-coloured hair, big brown eyes and what looked like a taser in his hand.

“Jake,” I said, stunned. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m back-up.”

Jake released the ropes and slowly winched us back down to the ground floor. Once there was enough slack, I twisted my wrists out of the straps holding them. My arms screamed as I dropped them to my sides and I shook them, trying to get some life back into the muscles. Aubrey hit the ground next to me and her knees buckled under her. I ran over and tried to hold her up. Blood trickled down her forehead but the cut wasn’t too deep. Jake had arrived just in time.

I removed her hands from the straps and picked her up. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she lay in my arms like a rag doll. I pulled my sleeve down over my hand and wiped away the blood.

“Aubrey?” I said gently. Her eyes snapped into focus and locked on mine. For a moment she looked lost, as if I’d woken her from a deep sleep, and then she was back.