The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (12 page)

Salvo’s is brightly lit, brash, and a fine example of what happens when a family of Italian restauranteurs in Yorkshire cross breed a mid-fifties American diner with a Neapolitan pizzeria. While they’re waiting for the food, Pete (who has been wearing a positively constipated expression ever since leaving the office) has another go at getting things off his chest.

“Mind control is…” He stumbles to a stop and glares at Alex.

Alex takes a deep breath. “I’m a very bad boy, yes. It’s unethical, naughty, and as my mentor you’re supposed to shout at me, agreed. But the flip side of the coin is that he was wasting our time, we’ve got important stuff we should be doing instead, and hey, pizza. Where
exactly
is the harm in what I did back there?”

“Saying it’s unethical is beside the point.” Pete picks up his fork and bumps it on the table, using it for percussive punctuation. “You don’t need a lecture on ethics. You’re not
really
a bad boy, otherwise the organization wouldn’t be going to considerable lengths to keep you alive.” He stares moodily at the wallpaper behind Alex’s head. “What worries me is that it’s a contravention of HR regulations.”

Pete taps the table again. “I know why you did it, and I sympathize, up to a point. We’ve both got better things to be doing – you should be studying, I should be monitoring nominally Nicene Creed–compliant doomsday cults – it’s a make-work job and a distraction. Also, you were telling him the truth – all you did was nudge him to agree you weren’t lying to him. And I think you got away with it, too, unless we’re under active investigation by the Auditors. But if we are, well, from their perspective you broke a really serious regulation for an entirely trivial reason.” Alex blinks: that possibility hadn’t occurred to him. “If they catch you messing with employees’ heads, even if it’s for
good
reasons, they’ll throw the book at you. Their thinking is, maybe this time he did it to cut short a pointless training course that had already overrun its time slot, but what if next time he does it because he’s bored and wants to cut short an important mission briefing, and people get k—get into trouble as a result? What if he does it for
bad
reasons, to cover up some impropriety?”

Alex looks into Pete’s eyes and sees something new there: Pete is scared. And not scared
of
him: he’s scared
for
him.

“Shit, man, I wouldn’t do —”

“I know that! But the organization doesn’t.” Pete’s voice is pitched low and urgent. “These are desperate times. There have been issues with internal penetration by opposition factions – not just you-know-who.” Alex shudders again. His experience with you-know-who put him in a locked hospital room for a week,
and
he got off lightly. It could have been ever so much worse. “
They
have to go by capabilities, not avowed intentions. If you ever,
ever
mess with the insides of an employee’s head again, you had better have evidence and witnesses to prove that they were a clear and present danger, or it’ll be the Black Assizes for you.”

He stops lecturing abruptly. Alex’s shirt is cold and clings clammily to the small of his back. Oblivious to their conversation, a pretty, dark-haired waitress approaches the table and places two pizzas before them, asking, with a smile, if they need any pepper or condiments. Her accent is Polish. Alex stares at her fixedly for a moment, before he realizes that she asked him a question and is expecting a reply. He shrugs. “Sorry,” he says, embarrassingly unsure what’s expected of him.

“That will be all, thanks.” Pete gives her a sunny smile. As she walks away, hips swaying, he murmurs, “You don’t need to stare.”

“What? Sorry!” Alex twitches violently. “I was away with the fairies. Thinking about what you said,” he explains defensively.

Pete picks up his knife and begins to saw at the thin crust of his del’ padrone. “You’re doing a decent job most of the time,” he says quietly. “But you’ve got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service. Organizations are not human beings and they don’t obey the same priorities. They’re hives. Like the bank you worked for, I suppose, but you were too specialized, working at too low a level to see the politics going on around you. Hives run on emergent consensus and policy. And there are still people in the Laundry who think that leaving any PHANGs alive – much less hiring them – was a really bad idea. You need to make sure you don’t give them any excuses to challenge the consensus.”

Alex picks at his quattro formaggi despondently as Pete disassembles his own pizza. He’s still hungry, but he’s lost his appetite for food. Across the room he notices the pretty Polish waitress flirting with the maître d’ behind the front desk. He looks down at his plate, focussing on the tines of his fork. They stand out in steely relief against the blurred background of his pizza.
I need to eat,
he thinks dismally, feeling ashamed of himself. After a minute, he forces his hands to move.
I’m not a bad boy,
he tells himself, unsure whether it’s a statement of fact or an instruction. But if it’s true, why does he feel this way?

After pizza, Alex takes Pete over to visit Pinky and Brains’s house. Pete is duly appreciative of the benefits of a nearly unfurnished top-floor bedroom, a lathe in the lounge, and a half-tracked motorcycle in the garage. Pinky and Brains are duly appreciative of the benefits of a second roommate with the right security clearance. A lease is signed, and Alex and Pete hand over deposit and rent cheques. Brains proposes that they celebrate by opening a bottle of his home-brewed tea-wine; Pete leads Alex in gracefully declining (by reason of the need to be sober for the ride home to the hotel), and the evening comes to an end.

The following evening, after dark, Pinky meets Alex with the van and they make the entirely predictable and deterministic trip south to the big IKEA warehouse store just off the M62, where Alex spends the thick end of another five hundred pounds – it feels like a lot more money than it did during his banking days – on a desk, an office chair, a futon, bedding, and some blackout curtains. He’s up most of the night hammering, screwing, and swearing as he tries to interpret furniture plans drawn by M. C. Escher. To his astonishment his new housemates sleep through the racket and do not rise to remonstrate angrily with him. Finally, by about four in the morning he has the beginnings of a vampire lair in place. He might have to sleep in a Lycksele instead of a coffin, and sitting on a Torbjörn in front of a Micke desk and a cheap Dell is a step down from the gothic throne flanked by pulchritudinous undead brides that he feels he truly deserves, but at least he can call it home. And maybe in time it’ll come to
feel
like home? Who knows: stranger things have already happened in his short adult life.

Alex crawls into bed and lies there with the lights out, staring at the ceiling. The blackout curtains are drawn but the LED on his phone charger floods the room with a ghostly green radiance that, to his PHANG-sharp eyes, is almost bright enough to read by. It’s cold – the central heating timer is off until shortly before dawn – and he doesn’t want to reach an arm out from under the covers and throw a discarded sock across the charger. But it comes to him that he’s neither tired nor contented. So in the end he sits up, shivering, grabs a tee-shirt, checks the time – 4:33 a.m. – and phones the only person he can think of who might relate to his predicament.

“Yo, Alex?” John answers on the second ring. Like Alex, he’s one of the survivors of the small band of PHANGs who have ended up in the Laundry, dragged along in Mhari’s undertow.

“Yo. Can you talk?”

“Oh, sure. I was just finishing some paperwork, thinking about fixing myself some lunch, then hitting the gym as soon as it opens: I can be home before sunrise. What’s up?”

Alex can’t honestly call John a friend, but they share a certain number of unique life experiences. Heavy math background, worked for the bank, contracted PHANG syndrome together, survived the massacre at the New Annex. Now they’re both scurrying around auditing courses on advanced computational thaumokinesis between seemingly purposeless training assignments. When they’re in the same city they sometimes go to the pub together after work because bitching about the job is always easier in the presence of someone else who’s been there and done that. They’re foxhole buddies rather than real friends, but that’s okay because it’s exactly what Alex needs right now.

“I was just wondering: Have you guys been tapped for rotation through Leeds yet? I’m trying to get a handle on what’s actually going on. There are rumors about it being a permanent relocation target for the entire organization.”

“Really? You’d do better to ask Janice. If it’s that big, the sysadmins will be up to their ears in plans for the server migration” – unlike a commercial operation, or even a regular civil service department, the Laundry cannot outsource its IT infrastructure to third parties – “won’t they?”

“Janice.” Alex doesn’t need to sigh.

“Okay, so you’re afraid of her. Who else – Dick?”

“I wouldn’t cross the road to piss on Dick if he was on fire. Anyway, he’s about as reliable as the
Daily Mail
. On a good day.”

John chuckles humorlessly. “Hey, I heard a rumor about Dick. Think you can keep it to yourself?”

“Dick’s an animal! When we were exploring the envelope —”

“Dick is in trouble with HR.”

“What?”

John pauses. “Listen. About our condition – what do you know about it and sex?”

“Know about —” Alex’s train of thought falls apart messily. What Alex knows about sex is entirely theoretical, to such a degree that he gets panicky when another man asks him about it – the long-ingrained fear of being found out by the high school gossip ring still haunts him. Alex doesn’t so much wonder about sex as have a fully developed five-year post-doc research program in mind, assuming he ever finds a willing collaborator. “What about it? Apart from how it got Evan into a shitpile of trouble…” Evan was one of the PHANGs who didn’t make it. (A self-identified pickup artist, he thought developing vampire mind-control skills was the best thing ever to happen to him, right up until the night he picked up a vampire hunter by mistake. It had been a closed-coffin funeral.) The penny finally drops: “Wait, is this about Dick and the night club —”

“HR sent a memo, did you get it?”

“A memo? I get a lot of memos from HR. Mostly about the correct use of stepladders and how to fill in time sheets correctly. Which memo?”

“So you didn’t read the memo about sexual contact being a contagion vector for V syndrome?”

“About
what
?”

“Oh geez. You mean you didn’t – well.” John pauses. “Let me give you the TL;DR version. Your blood meal: you get it in a nice sample tube once a week, like methadone, and you don’t really have to think about where it comes from or what happens to the, the donor, right? But when you drink the blood, what happens is that your V-parasites use it to establish a link to the brain at the other end, and they start eating holes in it. Well, the word from HR is that you don’t need to
drink
the blood. You just have to mix enough of it with your own circulation for the V-parasites to go to work. Blood-to-blood contact is enough, no drinking necessary. Just like —”

Alex is neither stupid nor slow. “You’re saying it’s
actually
like HIV.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re saying that PHANG syndrome is
sexually transmitted
?”

“
No.
I’m saying that
V syndrome
, the degenerative side effect we inflict on our hosts, what our victims
die
of, is contagious via blood-to-blood contact with a PHANG. So if you have sex, the only way to avoid killing your partner is to use condoms religiously. Or to choose someone who’s already infested with something that stops the V-parasites moving in. K syndrome–induced dementia, for example: they’re already loaded with extradimensional parasites. Or maybe another PHANG: it looks like we’re immune to each other. Probably.”

“Oh God, Janice will fucking
love
that. I can hear Dick’s new chat-up line already.” Janice is a PHANG: she’s also a no-nonsense lesbian. “She’d punch his nuts through the wall.”

“Well, she might if Dick dared to say anything. But he’s in real trouble this time. They caught him shagging a zombie on the night shift.”

“Gross! Where? I mean, wait, what happened?”

The Laundry can find a use for anyone and anybody – often literally: death doesn’t always result in release from service. The dead bodies on the night shift have mostly been soul-killed by exposure to summoned nightmares. Physically intact, they are set in motion by captive Eaters and bound to obedience. In organization parlance these are Residual Human Resources: the grim joke is that HR likes them because they don’t take vacations or ask for pay rises.

“I’m not sure of the exact details,” John continues, “but apparently they caught him down in the archive tunnels under Dansey House one night with a female former employee. I mean, a former female employee. Um, whatever.
In flagrante.
He went down there and used his warrant card to order the zombie to follow him into a storeroom and, well.”

Alex shuffles uncomfortably. “Right. Forget I asked. But. Um. What happened?”

“Suspension on pay pending an enquiry. The Auditors are looking into it.”

“Oh dear God.”

“They’re talking about bringing him up before the Black Assizes, if they can work out what charges apply. Awkward.”

“Jesus. Fucking a zombie. I feel sick.”

That’s not all Alex feels: despair at the unfairness of the blow that has just been dealt to his hope of ever having a normal sex life is also a factor, not to mention a mortifying, burning curiosity that he dares not admit. But he’s not about to expose his emotional underpants to John, not over the phone and without prior consumption of enough beer to render all statements plausibly deniable.
Quick, change the subject.
“Um. Moving swiftly on. The
real
reason I called – the Leeds thing.”