As Good As New

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“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

The words rolled off the saleman’s tongue as smoothly as the motor home had once rolled off the production line. It was well worn patter, with almost as many miles on it as most of the salesman’s stock.

“She’s seen better days,” replied David, kicking one of the front tires. David had no idea why he did it, it was just something he’d seen people do when buying a vehicle. Still, the rubber was reassuringly firm, and that had to mean something. Probably.

“Ah, her best days are yet to come!” the salesman continued. “Machine like this? She’s not really broken in until the first hundred thousand miles are on the clock. Trust me, that’s when she really starts to purr.”

David ran his hand along the armored bull bars that covered the grille and the first third of either side of the motor home’s cab. He felt dents, and something wet.

“Those bars are top rated,” the salesman said, pre-empting David’s question. “Heck, you should have seen what we scrapped off them when she came in …”

The salesman stopped. He was wise enough to know when he’d let out a little too much line, and his fish was in danger of slipping the hook. He changed tactics, quickly, before David could ask any awkward questions.

“Where you going, anyway?”

“Providence,” said David. It felt strange to say it out to another person, after all the weeks of planning, the months of hoarding, bartering, trading, and the years before that of wishing, wishing that he could be out of this place.

“Providence …” the salesman repeated, and let out a long whistle. “Wow. That’s a long way.”

“My parents live there,” said David. “Besides, I’ve heard that if you can make it past the first checkpoint, you can get a free ride, anywhere in the country. Anywhere you want to go.”

“Yeah? Heck, maybe I ought to give it a try myself.”

David bristled. “You’ve got to have family, that’s what I heard. You can go anywhere, as long as you’ve got family there to stay with.”

“Ah, right,” replied the salesman. “Well, that’s it for me then. All my family lived right here. Guess that’s true of most folks. We were a small town …”

“That’s what made it so easy for them,” said David. He pulled open the door of the cab and climbed up. Inside, the motor home stank of cigars and beer. There was blood splattered over the driver’s seat. “That’s what made it so easy for them to do what they did. Nobody missed us. Nobody cared. Just another town that dried up and blew away.”

David climbed across to the passenger seat. In front of him, a mounted machine gun hung awkwardly. “You got ammo for this?” he asked.

“Sure, sure,” said the salesman. David didn’t noticed the crack in the salesman’s voice, or that he had turned away from a moment. He didn’t notice the tears as they hit the dry, dusty ground. “I’ll throw in a few clips for you, how does that sound?”

David hopped down from the cab.

“Deal,” he said, trying to contain a sudden surge of excitement. This was it. He was going home.

“Great,” said the salesman, his composure returning, the thrill of the sale overtaking him. “Come up to the office, I’ll get the keys.”

David followed the salesman towards the portacabin that served as his office.

“Can you do something for me?” the salesman asked, as he unlocked the office door.

“What?”

“When you’re out there, on the road? Kill as many of those mutant bastard as you can for me.”

“Sure,” said David, with a nervous smile. “Every one I see between here and Providence.”

This Dish, A Dungeon for Diphtheria

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Doctor Guest sat and drummed his gloved fingers on the clear Perspex table of the interview room. His seat creaked underneath his as he shifted his weight around, the biohazard suit uncomfortable and hot. It all seemed so unnecessary, but there were still some people who doubted his abilities. Mostly, there were people who sold medicine.

Or at least, they used to sell medicine. Their reign was now long past.

The guard had said he’d be ten minutes, long enough for Doctor Guest to “get ready”. The truth was that Guest didn’t time to get ready. Getting ready would imply that, in some way, his ability could be switched on or switched off, that he somehow could stop hearing all the tiny little voices that had been his constant companions since he was a child. The tiny little voices that he had learnt secrets from, the tiny little voices that he had betrayed.

Sometimes, he wished that he did need to “get ready”. But he didn’t. And even now, two miles above The Dungeon, he could hear them. They knew he was here. And they were angry.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” said Guest, trying once more to straighten himself out and get comfortable in his seat.

The guard opened the door slowly, his own biohazard suit making his movements awkward. He lumbered in, holding a sealed petri dish gingerly in the thick, rubber clad fingers of both hands. He was nervous. It had been years since anything came out of the dungeon, and the pale young man behind the greasy visor of the hazmat suit had probably never heard of half the things that were prisoners here. He had probably never been ill a single day in his adult life either, and all because of Guest and what he had done.

“Put it on the table,” said Guest. The suit made his voice echo. He would be glad when he didn’t need to use his voice to talk. He hated the way that he sounded using human words.

The guard gingerly put down the petri dish. “Shall I … shall I open it?”

“No, probably best not to,” Guest replied, with what should have been an inaudible sigh rattling around inside the hazmat suit’s cork-shaped helmet. “I’ll do it once you’re outside.”

“Outside?” asked the guard, his voice trembling just a little. Guest guessed that was the first VIP the guard had ever dealt with. “That’s not the protocol, Sir, I …”

Guest clasped the petri dish in his own gauntlet clad fingers.

“Son,” he replied, “I wrote that protocol. I also wrote the protocol on how often these hazmat suits need to be tested. It got rewritten a few months later, to cut costs. So, if you’re happy that the accountants know more than me about how to deal with this stuff, stick around. If on the other hand …”

Guest left the sentence hanging in the air as the guard scuttled, crab like, out of the room, closing the door behind him. Guest counted to sixty, just in case the guard recovered his courage and returned, but he didn’t.

“Thank God for that,” muttered Guest, pulling off the thick hazmat gloves before releasing the neck clips on the helmet. There was a hiss as the filtered air escaped. Guest took a few deep breaths, tasting the stale air of the interview room. He felt nervous. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible, he started to convince himself that their voices, the tiny voices, had gotten louder without the helmet.

Gripping the lid of the petri dish, Guest twisted, and let diphtheria loose into the air for the first time in almost a decade.

He waited. There were no words, but with whatever passed for body language in the microbiological world, Guest could sense the diphtheria stretching out, filling the space, like a long haul traveler finally arriving at their destination.

Finally, it spoke.

“Are we alone?”

Diphtheria’s voice rattled around in Guest’s head like pennies in a tin. It was so much louder, close up. He had forgotten, as impossible as it should have been, he had forgotten. Parts of his brain that had been dormant for years awoke with a start, and all the tiny voices grew louder in an instant. Guest focused, remembering instinctively all the old techniques. Remembering how to control it, how to marshal his thoughts above the cacophony of the microscopic world.

“Yes,” he replied, his own voice booming in his head. “This is a clean room, there’s just us here.”

“I can hear the others,” replied the germ cloud. It tickled the edge of the only door, bumping against it like a fly against a pane of glass. Guest couldn’t see it, but some other set of senses told him where it was and what it was doing. It was its very nature, the inescapable purpose of the thing. It wanted to spread, to breath, breed, consume, and grow. He envied the germ its simple honesty.

“Yes, we can hear them, but they can’t hear us. I used a room just like this, back in the beginning. It’s safe, you can trust me.”

Diphtheria drifted back across the room, settling back around its dish. Somehow, Guest knew that the germ was sulking.

“The others don’t sound like us,” said the cloud. Germs always referred to themselves in the collective. There was no I, no me. There was only us, and by contrast, only them. Another beautifully simple conceit that Guest envied. He had never found his own place either in the world of men or the world of germs. He was an alien in both, a singular I, a singular me, who could never be anything else. Guest had never been “we”.

“No,” replied Guest, “That’s because you are the last. You’re the last diphtheria in the world.”

“We don’t understand,” replied the germ cloud. “Where are the others?”

“Cured,” replied Guest. “Gone.”

He waited. Mortality, worse extinction, was not a concept easily communicated across the gulf between man and microbe.

“You?” asked the cloud. The tiny myriad particles had settled back down inside the dish now.

“No,” replied Guest. “Not me, but people who used my research, my discoveries, my medicines. People who used me.”

The cloud said nothing in response, at least not in words or microscopic actions that Guest’s strange, wild talent could translate into human thoughts, human words, human concepts. It was moments like this when Guest still found his power frightening, when he had to face that reality that for all his vaunted ability to speak to germs and microbes and virii, there were words, concepts, for which there was no human equivalent.

“Your … fault.” said the cloud. Guest could feel a pressure behind his eyes, a familiar migraine as he brain slowly cooked in his skull. It felt like coming home, and he indulgently wished that he could sneeze, or cough, or feel the damp rattle of mucus on his chest.

“Yes,” he answered. “My fault. I was a fool. I wanted to create a harmony, a world where man did not fear illness, where we understood …” he began to blather, his talent breaking down as he fought to translate his thoughts.

Eventually, Guest’s guilt found its voice. The story did not need to be told, the explanations did not need to be made. Guest felt himself move into the collective mind of the germ cloud, to a place beyond his so human concept of right and wrong. To a place where there was only life, only growth, and all other things were not the purpose of “we”. All other things, guilt and betrayal and sadness included, were something only “they” experienced.

“I am sorry,” said Guest, breaking the link. He realized he had been holding his breath. “Can you forgive me?”

“We must grow,” was the only reply.

Guest smiled. “Yes,” was his simple reply.

Taking the petri dish in his hands, he lifted it to his mouth. There was a think mucus spread inside it, the meager food given to the dungeon’s microscopic prisoners. Guest breathed deep, and felt the diptheria hit his lungs immediately.

It felt like an embrace.

Bulldozer

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Belle fixed her hair in the mirror, carefully tucking away any stray strands of wiry gray that had escaped her hair clips and pins. She had had such beautiful hair once, but the years had been far from kind. Still, what girl wouldn’t have a few gray hairs after a lifetime of deathtraps, alien invasions, mad scientists, would be global dictators, time travellers, and other assorted supervillians? No, the years had not been kind, but they had been magnificent.

The wheelchair, of course, was an inconvenience from time to time, but she refused to let anyone do anything about it. She’d lost her legs the day she’d lost Him, and by comparison the wound barely even registered. She had been the secret wife of the world’s greatest superhero, its first superhero, and she felt his death as keenly today as the day that she had cradled his shattered body in her arms and lulled him softly into the endless sleep.

Belle sniffed, and held back a tear from her good eye. She wouldn’t cry. Not today.

A breeze passed across the roof, and Belle heard the familiar sound of heavy booted feet landing on her balcony. She remembered how her heart had skipped a beat the first time she had heard that sound, the first time that he had visited her in the dead of night. There was no death that night, no tragedy, no battle to fight. There was a just a man, a glorious and impossible man, and the woman who had captured his alien heart.

“Mom?”

Belle turned and smiled. “Hello, Able. It’s good to see you.”

Able was almost identical in appearance to his father, a quirk of his father’s alien DNA she suspected. Belle wished that there had been something more of her in the boy, but he was undoubtedly his father’s son, at least in appearance.

“Come on in,” she scolded, “You’ll catch your death out there.”

Able stepped gingerly into his mother’s cramped apartment, closing the balcony door behind him.

“Mom, I’ve been to Pluto …”

“So have I,” Belle replied, “And it’s got nothing on a New York winter. Now, sit down there, and I’ll get the tea things. Everything’s ready for you.”

Able squeezed himself into an armchair, his massive frame straining the wood and fabric. His cape bunched up around the small of his back. “Don’t know how Dad ever sat down in this …” he muttered. “This whole place is too small”

Belle shook her head and headed out to her small kitchen, her wheelchair creaking noisily. “I saw you on the news yesterday,” she called back.

“Oh,” said Able. On the wall nearest to him were hung row after row framed photographs of his parents, others of his father with various superheroes, world leaders, and celebrities. Interspersed amongst them were newspaper clippings, recording Able’s father’s greatest exploits, and his mother’s most famous headlines. Despite having eyes that could have read a newspaper across the solar system, he scanned the wall from top to bottom five times before resigning himself to the fact that there wasn’t a single photo or newspaper clipping about him. His, of course, was a different kind of super-heroing. It lent itself less to headlines that a mother would want to pin up on her wall.

Belle put the tea tray down on the coffee table. Able recognised the pale blue china and green glass combinations, a wedding gift to his parents from the King of Atlantis. His mother loved the set, but to Able it made everything taste of the sea. Slices of Battenberg sat on plates shaped like seashells that no doubt made everything taste of fish.

Belle poured two cups of tea. “You want to talk about it?” she asked.

“No,” Able replied, looking down at his boots.

Belle slid a cup of tea across the table to her son. “Well, I do, Able. I need to talk about it. I need you to tell me what the hell you think you’re playing at.” Her good eye was fixed on Able in a way he hadn’t experienced since he was a child. A full grown man now, he understood why world leaders had trembled more at him mother’s name than at his father’s. Once a journalist, always a journalist, that’s what she said. She had a nose that was only every comfortable where it wasn’t wanted.

“What do you mean?” replied Able, defensively. He picked up his cup and slurped tea. As he had expected, all he could taste was brine and salt.

Belle clinked her cup down noisily. “You know exactly what I’m talking about Able. I’m talking about you bulldozing shanty towns and refugee settlements. I’m talking about you walking ahead of tanks instead of standing between them and innocent people. I’m talking about you taking sides, and the wrong sides at that. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Sides?” said Able angrily. “Come on, Mom. All Dad ever did was pick sides. You can’t have truth, justice, and the American way without America, and these people are America’s enemies.”

“Who says?” Belle spat back. “Who says that their our enemy?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Able sarcastically, “How about the President?”

“The President? Oh please, Able, I thought I raised you better than that. You’re the Government’s whipping boy now?”

“Mom, Dad worked for the President all the time. It’s up on the wall, right there!”

Able stabbed a finger at the wall, sending a tiny wave of pressure out that rattled the pictures on their hooks. Belle frowned. Able had never had the control over his powers that his father had had. There was something reckless about him, like a child playing with a gun without understanding what it is and what it could do, without realising that real guns kill people for real, and nobody gets back up to carry on playing. Perhaps that was the problem; Able’s father had died and come back to life so many times when Able was growing up, all of their friends had at least once too … Belle wondered if Able had a real understanding of what death was even now. Growing up around superheroes, perhaps it was natural to think that death was something that only happened to other people.

“It was a different time,” said Belle, lowering her tone. “We’d just come out of a war, things were … simpler.”

“We’re at war now, Mom,” replied Able. “There might not be bombs falling on Pearl Harbour, but we are at war.”

“And those people, in that village?” asked Belle, “Were those people at war too?”

Able stood up and unclipped his cape. A patch of damp sweat had stained it dark red around his neck and between his shoulder blades.

“Is it hot in here?” he asked, catching his breath.

“Heating’s on full,” Belle replied. “New York winter, can’t afford a chill at my age.”

Able slumped back down into his chair, the wood cracking under his weight. He ran a hand through his dark hair and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Don’t change the subject,” pressed Belle. “I want to understand what you thought you were doing, why you did it Able? The whole world saw you. The whole world. It’s been on every news station, every channel, for days.”

Able looked up, his eyes rimmed red. “Is that what this is about? Your precious pride? Your reputation?”

“Of course not,” replied Belle. “It’s about you, and what you did.”

“Crap!” spat Able. “This is about you, and about him, just like everything else in my life. You don’t mind people knowing your my Mom when I’m pulling cats out of trees and stopping bank robberies, but the minute I try to do something that’s going to make a real difference, the minute I try to do something that might actually change things …”

“It’s not your job to change things. It’s not your job to decide who wins a war, who runs a country.”

“But I can decide who doesn’t? How many would be dictators have I stopped? How many people with plans for world domination? Who says that one of them, just one of them, might not have actually made things better? Maybe one of them might have made the world work. I have to make decisions every day on who to save, who to stop. Who wins, who loses, it all comes down to me.”

“Your father could always tell right from wrong. He always knew the right thing to do.”

“And so do I!” Able shouted, rattling the windows of the apartment. “But you know what? You’re right. Why should I help a President win a war, when I could win it for myself. Maybe that’s the mistake that Dad made, for all those years. Instead of spending all his time stopping one supervillian or another from taking over the world, maybe he should have just taken it all from himself! You think that this was the first time that I had to do something like that? You think that I haven’t done that before? How the hell do you think those cameras were there in the first place? I can hear atoms rubbing together, you think I can’t here someone switch on a camera? We’ve been doing it for years, Mom. We just decided that it was time people saw what they’re really up against when they mess with America. Me, Mom. They’re up against me!”

Able slumped in his chair, as if his rant had sucked all the air out lungs that could hold enough air to carry him across space. His hands were trembling.

Belle shook her head sadly. “Oh, Able. I wish you hadn’t said all that. I’m so, so sorry.”

Able’s head drooped forward for a moment. “Sorry?” he said, the word slurring as his lips suddenly started to puff up. He raised a hand weakly to his throat, trying to pull his close fitting uniform away from his neck.

“Yes, baby, I’m sorry,” said Belle. “I’m sorry for whatever it was I did, or didn’t do, that let you grow up this way. I’m sorry that you can’t see that what you did was wrong, so very wrong. I’m sorry that you’re already so far down this path, that I don’t think you can come back. I’m sorry that I have to stop you.”

Able tried to stand, his legs trembling and weak. Collapsing forward, he smashed through the coffee table, sending Atlantean crockery flying up into the air. Belle wheeled herself gingerly backwards, until her eye met his.

“Those people weren’t supervillians, son. They weren’t even criminals. They were just people. Men, women, children. People who were looking for somewhere to live, people who believed that the land they were standing on was theirs. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but is it really for someone a thousand miles away to decide where their borders are? Is it your right to kill them, just because of where they were standing?”

“What did you … do?” croaked Able. His eyes had all but closed up, and he relied on his flickering and quickly fading X-Ray vision to see his mother. Her skeleton looked down at him from her wheelchair. He’d never realised that she had so many broken bones, so many injuries.

“I poisoned you,” Belle replied. “An obscure radioactive isotope from your father’s home-world. We cleaned up the last of it on Earth years ago, before you were even born. Your father gave me some, for emergencies. In case he ever …”

“Flattened a village?” quipped Able. With the last of his dying vision, he thought he saw the skeleton smile.

“You have your father’s sense of humour,” Belle said. “I’ll miss that.”

Belle rolled herself closer, until her wheelchair was butting up against Able’s powerful frame. Carefully, she lowered herself down onto the floor, and positioned herself next to him. She stroked his hair gently.

“It will be alright, son,” she whispered softly. “It won’t hurt, your father promised. He said that I had to watch you, just in case. He said that you might grow up with a little too much human in you, that the power might be more than you could understand.”

Able groped with a quivering hand until his fingers found his mother’s hand.

“I’m frightened, Mom,” he croaked. “I’ve never died before.”

“Me neither sweetheart.”

Blind and paralysed, Able lay on the floor and listened with the last of his super-hearing to his mother’s heart stop.

The Armadillo Burns Anthracite

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The cemetery on the hill had tall clouds of black smoke rising from it as Ray’s truck pulled into town, but that wasn’t unusual. This was Centralia, and everything here was either burning or falling down.

Ray checked his watch. The Armadillo was late.

From the back of the truck, there was movement. Awkward, jerking movement, followed by the cracking of bones and low, agonised moans. Ray’s cargo was pulling itself back together, stitching together broken bones and regrowing lost flesh. That was the problem with the undead; every time you killed them, they found it a little easier to come back. Practice made perfect.

Ray was about to turn on one of his gospel CDs when there was a sharp rap at the door. The Armadillo was standing outside, arms folded and looking like he’d been waiting there for days.

Ray wound down the window. The smell of burning hit him immediately, the acrid bite of hot coal mixed with the unmistakable odour of undead flesh. At least it masked the legendary musk of The Armadillo, who looked like he hadn’t seen a bath since the last time Ray had been here.

No more than five feet tall, the Armadillo was a strangely wiry creature. Bald and clean-shaven, with skin that was wrinkled in a way that didn’t look like the result of old age. The Armadillo looked like he had once been a big man, but something unnatural had shrunk him down to what he was now, leaving his old skin wrapped around him like a secondhand coat. Ray didn’t know why he was called The Armadillo, but he’d heard a rumour that the guy had once dug himself out from a mine collapse with his bare hands. Depending on who told the story, he’d been underground for anything from two days to two weeks. Of course, if you listened to some people, it wasn’t his own hands he’d dug his way out with.

“What you got for me?” croaked The Armadillo. He had the voice of an old man, croaky and cracking, but that could have been the smoke. Ray couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live here, constantly under the clouds and dust. Reflexively, he pulled a fresh face mask from the glove box and pulled it over his nose and mouth.

“Some sort of zombie,” replied Ray. He tossed a clipboard of paperwork out to The Armadillo. “I think they called it a Class Four? Heals fast, I’ll tell you that much. I had to go ’round back and break its legs three times on the way here.”

The Armadillo raised a dust encrusted eyebrow. “What’d you use?”

“Sledgehammer,” replied Ray, his voice muffled by the mask. He guessed The Armadillo would be used to it, he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting the breathe the air in this place.

“Huh,” grunted The Armadillo. “I’m an axe man myself. Sever a few tendons, that’s the trick. They always seem to have trouble growing those back properly. They’re never quite the same. That’s why so many of them ”

“I’ll give it some thought,” said Ray, with the unmistakable tone of a man who will do no such thing. He’d been a hammer man for ten years, and he wasn’t going to change now.

The Armadillo pulled a thick tipped marker out of the pocket of his dirty overalls and ticked off a few pages in the paperwork before tossing it back to Ray through the open window.

“Looks in order,” he grunted. “Let’s get him out. I’ve got my cart ’round back.”

Ray hopped out of the cab, dragging his sledgehammer off the passenger seat, and followed The Armadillo around to the back of the truck. The thing inside threw itself up against the wall as Ray passed, rocking the truck from side to side. Ray’s grip on his hammer tightened.

Ten years. Another three, and his term was up. That was nine, maybe ten runs at most. Ten more runs and he was out. No more zombies, no more monsters, no more things that didn’t even have a name. No more truck, no more Centralia, and no more Armadillo.

“You … busy?” Ray asked idly, as he fished the keys for the three padlocks that secured the back doors of the truck out of his jeans. Small talk was all part of the process, Ray’s subconsciousness need to humanize this most inhuman of processes, his sanity boarding up the doors and windows of his brain.

“Too busy,” replied The Armadillo, “Time was, I saw one truck every couple of months. Now, I’m seeing two or three a week.”

“That many?” asked Ray. He had assumed there were others, that he couldn’t be the only person in his … line of work. But two or three trucks a week, coming from all over the country?

“New recruits a lot of them,” The Armadillo replied. “Full of questions. Pain in my arse. And not one visit from anyone who can tell me what to do once the mine gets full.”

“It’s getting full?” Ray asked, snapping open the first two padlocks. “I thought that thing went on forever.”

The Armadillo pulled a rusty old axe from underneath his heavy metal wheelbarrow. “It’ll probably burn forever,” he replied. “Anthracite vein’s been burning since ’63, but the mine is only so big. We pack ‘em in too tight, they’re not gonna burn right, and then all hell breaks loose.”

Ray slipped the third key into the third and final padlock. Inside the truck the thing had started to pound on the doors. Ray wondered if it knew what was waiting for it. As far as he had been told, the undead didn’t feel pain, not in the way that humans did, but the thought of being trapped in a perpetually burning mine, your flesh constantly being burnt away only to regrow again? Living forever, burning to death every day? It was close enough to the description of hell that Ray had grown up with that he could even feel sympathy for the snarling, biting, hate filled thing that was trapped in the back of his truck. If he were a religious man, he would wonder if Centralia was really Hell on Earth, clambered up from beneath the soil to claim the dead that thought they had escaped the clutches of the afterlife and its judgements.

“What you gonna do when it’s full then?” Ray asked.

“Don’t know,” replied The Armadillo. “If no one comes up with a better way of keeping these things down? I guess I start digging again, build a new shaft.”

“Guess so,” said Ray.

He snapped the padlock open. The thing in the truck fell silent.

“You sure you don’t want an axe?” The Armadillo asked.

Blood Brothers Preview

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After a last minute drop out from the 10thology book, Stu challenged me to put together a brand new story based on a set of illustrations. At least, that’s what he told me. He might just be taking revenge for the bedlam that was MWM Live.

Either way, I thought I’d let you all see the first few paragraphs of the story as it shapes up.

There were four blocks of flats, thirteen stories each, arranged around a set of abandoned gardens. The shape, the specific shape of the towers and their gardens, formed an alter to a god long dead. Scorp’s grandmother said so, anyway.

And Scorp’s grandmother knew things.

Like most things living, Scorp avoided the gardens. Scorp had his own place, down in the basement of Block Three, with the boiler, and with Fred. Fred had been the caretaker of Block Three for fifty years, right up until the day he died. Of course, he’d stayed on. Scorp couldn’t repair the boiler, for one thing.

“Are you paying attention, lad?” asked Fred.

Scorp opened his third can of lager and took a noisy slurp. He was too young to drink, of course, but the one shop that was still open on the estate had an arrangement. They sold Scorp his lager, his fags, and his scratchcards, and he looked after them in return. There had been a time on the estate when Scorp had been just another one of those kids that you stayed away from, that you kept on the right side of if you didn’t want your car stolen or your door spray painted. These days, things on the estate were different. These days, people stayed on the right side of Scorp because one day, if they were really, really unlucky … they might need his help.

“I said …”

“Yeah,” said Scorp, “I’m listening. You know, you talk a lot for a dead guy. I don’t get this much aggro from my mum, and she’s alive. Mostly”

Fred fished a spectral bag of tobacco from the pocket of his ghostly cardigan and started to roll a cigarette. “I always thought these things would kill me,” he muttered, ignoring Scorp for a moment.

“Yeah, well, you were hardly going to see werewolves coming,” replied Scorp. “I guess that was the problem though.”