Good Omens (34 page)

He went through the roadblock at sixty. That was the easy bit.

Cases of spontaneous human combustion are on record all over the world. One minute someone's quite happily chugging along with their life; the next there's a sad photograph of a pile of ashes and a lonely and mysteriously uncharred foot or hand. Cases of spontaneous vehicular combustion are less well documented.

Whatever the statistics were, they had just gone up by one.

The leather seatcovers began to smoke. Staring ahead of him, Crowley fumbled left-handedly on the passenger seat for Agnes Nutter's
Nice and Accurate Prophecies
, moved it to the safety of his lap. He wished she'd prophecied
this
.
⁴⁹

Then the flames engulfed the car.

He had to keep driving.

On the other side of the flyover was a further police roadblock, to prevent the passage of cars trying to come into London. They were laughing about a story that had just come over the radio, that a motorbike cop on the M6 had flagged down a stolen police car, only to discover the driver to be a large octopus.

Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain.

It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met.

It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and the wind at eighty miles per hour.

That would do it every time.

THE QUARRY WAS THE CALM center of a stormy world.

Thunder didn't just rumble overhead, it tore the air in half.

“I've got some more friends coming,” Adam repeated. “They'll be here soon, and then we can really get started.”

Dog started to howl. It was no longer the siren howl of a lone wolf, but the weird oscillations of a small dog in deep trouble.

Pepper had been sitting staring at her knees.

There seemed to be something on her mind.

Finally she looked up and stared Adam in the blank gray eyes.

“What bit 're you going to have, Adam?” she said.

The storm was replaced by a sudden, ringing silence.

“What?” said Adam.

“Well, you divided up the world, right, and we've all of us got to have a bit—what bit're you going to have?”

The silence sang like a harp, high and thin.

“Yeah,” said Brian. “You never told us what bit
you're
having.”

“Pepper's right,” said Wensleydale. “Don't seem to
me
there's much left, if we've got to have all these countries.”

Adam's mouth opened and shut.

“What?” he said.

“What bit's yours, Adam?” said Pepper.

Adam stared at her. Dog had stopped howling and had fixed his master with an intent, thoughtful mongrel stare.

“M-me?” he said.

The silence went on and on, one note that could drown out the noises of the world.

“But I'll have Tadfield,” said Adam.

They stared at him.

“An', an' Lower Tadfield, and Norton, and Norton Woods—”

They still stared.

Adam's gaze dragged itself across their faces.

“They're all I've ever wanted,” he said.

They shook their heads.

“I can have 'em if I want,” said Adam, his voice tinged with sullen defiance and his defiance edged with sudden doubt. “I can make them better, too. Better trees to climb, better ponds, better … ”

His voice trailed off.

“You can't,” said Wensleydale flatly. “They're not like America and those places. They're really
real
. Anyway, they belong to all of us. They're ours.”

“And you couldn't make 'em better,” said Brian.

“Anyway, even if you did we'd all know,” said Pepper.

“Oh, if
that
's all that's worryin' you, don't you worry,” said Adam airily, “ 'cos I could make you all just do whatever I wanted—”

He stopped, his ears listening in horror to the words his mouth was speaking. The Them were backing away.

Dog put his paws over his head.

Adam's face looked like an impersonation of the collapse of empire.

“No,” he said hoarsely. “No. Come back!
I command you!
”

They froze in mid-dash.

Adam stared.

“No, I dint mean it—” he began. “You're my friends—”

His body jerked. His head was thrown back. He raised his arms and pounded the sky with his fists.

His face twisted. The chalk floor cracked under his sneakers.

Adam opened his mouth and screamed. It was a sound that a merely mortal throat should not have been able to utter; it wound out of the quarry, mingled with the storm, caused the clouds to curdle into new and unpleasant shapes.

It went on and on.

It resounded around the universe, which is a good deal smaller than physicists would believe. It rattled the celestial spheres.

It spoke of loss, and it did not stop for a very long time.

And then it did.

Something drained away.

Adam's head tilted down again. His eyes opened.

Whatever had been standing in the old quarry before, Adam Young was standing there now. A more knowledgeable Adam Young, but Adam Young nevertheless. Possibly more of Adam Young than there had ever been before.

The ghastly silence in the quarry was replaced by a more familiar, comfortable silence, the mere and simple absence of noise.

The freed Them cowered against the chalk cliff, their eyes fixed on him.

“It's all right,” said Adam quietly. “Pepper? Wensley? Brian? Come back here. It's all right. It's all right. I know everything now. And you've got to help me. Otherwise it's all goin' to happen. It's really all goin' to happen. It's all goin' to happen, if we don't do somethin'.”

THE PLUMBING IN Jasmine Cottage heaved and rattled and showered Newt with water that was slightly khaki in color. But it was cold. It was probably the coldest cold shower Newt had ever had in his life.

It didn't do any good.

“There's a red sky,” he said, when he came back. He was feeling slightly manic. “At half past four in the afternoon. In
August
. What does that mean? In terms of delighted nautical operatives, would you say? I mean, if it takes a red sky at night to delight a sailor, what does it take to amuse the man who operates the computers on a supertanker? Or is it shepherds who are delighted at night? I can never remember.”

Anathema eyed the plaster in his hair. The shower hadn't got rid of it; it had merely dampened it down and spread it out, so that Newt looked as though he was wearing a white hat with hair in it.

“You must have got quite a bump,” she said.

“No, that was when I hit my head on the wall. You know, when you—”

“Yes.” Anathema looked quizzically out of the broken window. “Would you say it's blood-colored?” she said. “It's very important.”

“I wouldn't say that,” said Newt, his train of thought temporarily derailed. “Not actual blood. More pinkish. Probably the storm put a lot of dust in the air.”

Anathema was rummaging through
The Nice and Accurate Prophecies
.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Trying to cross-reference. I still can't be—”

“I don't think you need to bother,” said Newt. “I know what the rest of 3477 means. It came to me when I—”

“What do you mean, you know what it means?”

“I saw it on my way down here. And don't snap like that. My head aches. I mean I saw it. They've got it written down outside that air base of yours. It's got nothing to do with peas. It's ‘Peace Is Our Profession.' It's the kind of thing they put up on boards outside air bases. You know: SAC 8657745th Wing, The Screaming Blue Demons, Peace Is Our Profession. That sort of thing.” Newt clutched his head. The euphoria was definitely fading. “If Agnes is right, then there's probably some madman in there right now winding up all the missiles and cranking open the launch windows. Or whatever they are.”

“No, there isn't,” said Anathema firmly.

“Oh, yes? I've seen films! Name me one good reason why you can be so sure.”

“There aren't any bombs there. Or missiles. Everyone round here knows that.”

“But it's an air base! It's got runways!”

“That's just for transport planes and things. All they've got up there is communications gear. Radios and stuff. Nothing explosive at all.”

Newt stared at her.

LOOK AT CROWLEY, doing 110 mph on the M40 heading toward Oxfordshire. Even the most resolutely casual observer would notice a number of strange things about him. The clenched teeth, for example, or the dull red glow coming from behind his sunglasses. And the car. The car was a definite hint.

Crowley had started the journey in his Bentley, and he was damned if he wasn't going to finish it in the Bentley as well. Not that even the kind of car buff who owns his own pair of motoring goggles would have been able to tell it was a vintage Bentley. Not any more. They wouldn't have been able to tell that it was a Bentley. They would only offer fifty-fifty that it had ever even been a car.

There was no paint left on it, for a start. It might still have been black, where it wasn't a rusty, smudged reddish-brown, but this was a dull charcoal black. It traveled in its own ball of flame, like a space capsule making a particularly difficult re-entry.

There was a thin skin of crusted, melted rubber left around the metal wheel rims, but seeing that the wheel rims were still somehow riding an inch above the road surface this didn't seem to make an awful lot of difference to the suspension.

It should have fallen apart miles back.

It was the effort of holding it together that was causing Crowley to grit his teeth, and the biospatial feedback that was causing the bright red eyes. That and the effort of having to remember not to start breathing.

He hadn't felt like this since the fourteenth century.

THE ATMOSPHERE in the quarry was friendlier now, but still intense.

“You've got to help me sort it out,” said Adam. “People've been tryin' to sort it out for thousands of years, but we've got to sort it out now.”

They nodded helpfully.

“You see, the thing is,” said Adam, “this thing is, it's like—well, you know Greasy Johnson.”

The Them nodded. They all knew Greasy Johnson and the members of the other gang in Lower Tadfield. They were older and not very pleasant. Hardly a week went by without a skirmish.

“Well
,” said Adam, “we always win, right?”

“Nearly always,” said Wensleydale.

“Nearly always,” said Adam, “an'—”

“More than half, anyway,” said Pepper. “'Cos, you remember, when there was all that fuss over the ole folks' party in the village hall when we—”

“That doesn't count,” said Adam. “They got told off just as much as us. Anyway, old folks are s'pposed to
like
listenin' to the sound of children playin', I read that somewhere, I don't see why we should get told off 'cos we've got the wrong kind of old folks—” He paused. “Anyway … we're better'n them.”

“Oh, we're better'n them,” said Pepper. “You're right about that. We're
better'n
them all right. We jus' don't always win.”

“Just suppose,” said Adam, slowly, “that we could beat 'em properly. Get—get them sent away or somethin'. Jus' make sure there's no more ole gangs in Lower Tadfield apart from us. What do you think about that?”

“What, you mean he'd be … dead?” said Brian.

“No. Jus'—jus' gone away.”

The Them thought about this. Greasy Johnson had been a fact of life ever since they'd been old enough to hit one another with a toy railway engine. They tried to get their minds around the concept of a world with a Johnson-shaped hole in it.

Brian scratched his nose. “I reckon it'd be brilliant without Greasy Johnson,” he said. “Remember what he did at my birthday party?
And
I got into trouble about it.”

“I dunno,” said Pepper. “I mean, it wouldn't be so interesting without ole Greasy Johnson and his gang. When you think about it. We've had a lot of fun with ole Greasy Johnson and the Johnsonites. We'd probably have to find some other gang or something.”

“Seems to
me,”
said Wensleydale, “that if you asked people in Lower Tadfield, they'd say they'd be better off without the Johnsonites
or
the Them.”

Even Adam looked shocked at this. Wensleydale went on stoically: “The old folks' club would. An' Picky. An'—”

“But we're the good ones … ” Brian began. He hesitated. “Well, all right,” he said, “but I bet they'd think it'd be a jolly sight less interestin' if we all weren't here.”

“Yes,” said Wensleydale. “That's what I mean.

“People round here don't want us
or
the Johnsonites,” he went on morosely, “the way they're always goin' on about us just riding our bikes or skateboarding on their pavements and making too much noise and stuff. It's like the man said in the history books. A plaque on both your houses.”

This met with silence.

“One of those blue ones,” said Brian, eventually, “saying ‘Adam Young Lived Here,' or somethin'?”

Normally an opening like this could lead to five minutes' rambling discussion when the Them were in the mood, but Adam felt that this was not the time.

“What you're all sayin',” he summed up, in his best chairman tones, “is that it wouldn't be any good at all if the Greasy Johnsonites beat the Them or the other way round?”