the grey dome of his head. Alive. Still alive, bleeding, wheezing, freezing, shivering, dying, pick one, they were all leading in the same direction, racing each other for the prize.
“Is that . . .” whispered Oda.
“What do you think?”
I dragged him up by an arm and he came, a puppet without the stuffing. Oda took the other arm, slung it across her shoulder and between the two of us, we pulled him free. A rusty screwdriver was embedded in his back, just offset from his spine, sticking out like some obscene fashion accessory. Oda pulled it free with a thick pop of dead muscle, and black ink began to flow from the hole down to the seat of his fouled pants. He stank of urine and shit, dragged uneven and lumpy in our arms as we pulled him along. His legs didn’t move, his head didn’t rise; there was nothing in him to suggest life except the slow beating of black blood in his veins. I turned my head, looking for the way out, trying to judge by the distant rattle of trains the way to the exit. Picked a direction; staggered, walked, ran, dragged, tripped, stumbled, all at once, towards the way out.
“Ambulance?” whispered Oda.
“Can’t save him now.”
“The . . . hospital place?”
“Maybe. They have means at Elizabeth Anderson . . . can you reach the phone in my bag?”
My satchel was swinging uncomfortably from my shoulder; to grab it was to drop the ink-stained boy. As Oda snatched for it, I glanced at his face and saw, through the black stain under his skin, that his cheeks were still slightly puffed with puppy-dog youth; just a kid, and he was going to die. Oda grabbed my satchel, reached inside, pulled out the mobile phone.
“Black Cab,” I said. “He’s the only one who can get us there in time.” She thumbed it on. Continents drifted in the time it took the phone to power up. “Sorcerer . . .” Fear, unashamed, numb-the-senses fear. “. . . there’s no signal.”
We never call bad things “coincidence”.
“Help me,” I grunted, and she took more of the kid’s weight again. “We need to run.”
We ran, tripping and staggering through the thick rain, the sky a sullen gloom overhead making no concession to the time of day, determined to keep things uniform and dead. My hand burnt, my head burnt, my eyes burnt inside their sockets, I could feel them aching and stinging.
“He’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here,” we whimpered.
“Shut up!”
“He’s here.”
“Shut up!”
I remembered the mad eyes of the dragon. Too big, too . . . too much of anything, too too, an endless fall into a thing too big for the mind to grasp.
So we ran, dragging the kid who I guess once upon a time had answered to the name of Mo, son of Loren; blood turned to ink, eyes turned black, dribbling black ink tears down his stained face, draining black blood from a screwdriver hole in his back, from wire tears in his neck, clothes the colour of rust, trousers the smell of shit, shoes the brown stain of rot and decay. We rounded a corner and pulled immediately back, pressing ourself into the pyramid of fallen debris.
“He’s here,” we breathed.
Oda peered past us, towards the exit from the junkyard, and immediately drew back, shoulders heaving with the effort of breath. She had seen what I had seen. Just a guy in a suit, standing in the exit. I wondered if Earle’s back-up had seen him too, and if they had lived long enough to see anything more.
“What do we do?” she hissed.
I glanced forward again, and there he was: pinstripe suit, one hand buried casually in his trouser pocket, the other holding a huge blue umbrella over his head, the water tumbling down from the edges. Smiling - just smiling. Mr Pinner, patient as the dustbin man, just smiling in the way out.
Mo, as if sensing the terror that we could see, groaned.
I turned, twisting my head towards the junk above us. “Get him to the station,” I said. “Buy him a ticket. We can hide behind the barriers.”
“What are you going to do?”
We reached up and brushed the tip of an old, cracked fishing rod, sticking out from the black stinking piles of junk. “Litterbug,” we whispered, closing our fingers round the stubbly end of the rod and snapping it like a dry summer twig, “we’re going to have a conversation.”