Table of Contents
For Amsler. Thanks for the milk.
DURWARD STREET, EAST LONDON AUGUST 31 4:17 A.M.
THE EYES OF LONDON WERE WATCHING CLAIRE JENKINS.
She didnt notice them, of course. No one paid attention to the cameras. It was an accepted fact that London has one of the most extensive CCTV systems in the world. The conservative estimate was that there were a million cameras around the city, but the actual number was probably much higher and growing all the time. The feed went to the police, security firms, MI5, and thousands of private individualsforming a loose and all-encompassing net. It was impossible to do anything in London without the CCTV catching you at some point.
The cameras silently recorded Claires progress and tracked her as she turned onto Durward Street. It was four seventeen A.M., and she was supposed to have been at work at four. She had forgotten to set her alarm, and now she was running, trying to get to the Royal London Hospital. Her shift usually got the fallout from last nights drinkingthe alcohol poisonings, the falls, the punch-ups, the car accidents, the occasional knife fight. All the nights mistakes came to the early-shift nurse.
It had been pouring, clearly. There were puddles all over the place. The one mercy of this doomed morning was that there was only the slightest drizzle now. At least she didnt have to run through the rain. She got out her phone to send a message to let them know she was close. The phone emitted a tiny halo that encircled her hand, giving it a saintly glow. It was hard to text and walk at the same time, not if she didnt want to fall off the pavement or walk into a post. Am running lake...
Claire had tried to type the word late three times, but it kept coming up as lake. She wasnt running lake, she was running late. She refused to stop walking and fix it. There was no time to waste. The message would stand.
... Be there in 5...
And then she tripped. The cell phone took flight, a little glowing ball of light, free at last before it clattered to the sidewalk and went out.
Bugger! she said. No, no, no... dont be broken...
In her concern over the fate of her phone, Claire first didnt take notice of the thing she had tripped over, aside from faintly registering that it was somewhat large and weighty and it gave a little when her foot struck it. In the dark, it appeared to be a strangely shaped mound of garbage. Something else put in her way this morning to impede her progress.
She knelt down and felt along the ground for the phone, sinking her knee directly into a puddle.
Wonderful, she said to herself as she scrabbled around. The phone was quickly recovered. It appeared to be dark and lifeless. She tried the power button, not expecting any result. To her delight, the phone blinked on, casting its little light around her hand once again.
This was when she first noticed that there was something sticky on her hand. The consistency was extremely familiar, as was the faint metallic smell.
Blood. Her hand was covered in blood. A lot of blood, with a faintly jelly-like consistency that suggested congealing. Congealing blood meant blood that had been here for several minutes, so it couldnt be her own. Claire shifted around, holding up her phone for light. She could see now that she had tripped over a person. She crawled closer and felt a hand, a hand that was cool, but not cold.
Hello? she said. Can you hear me? Can you speak?
She got up alongside the figure, a smallish person dressed entirely in motorcycle leathers, wearing a helmet. She reached up to the neck to feel for a pulse.
Where the neck was supposed to be, there was a space.
It took her a moment to process what she was feeling, and in desperation she kept reaching around the edge of the helmet to get to the neck, trying to get a sense of the size of this wound. It went on and on, until Claire realized that the head was barely attached at all, and that the puddle she was kneeling in was almost certainly not rainwater.
The eyes saw it all.
THE RETURN
Then shall the slayer return, and come unto his own city, and unto his own house, unto the city whence he fled.
Joshua 20:6
IF YOU LIVE AROUND NEW ORLEANS AND THEY THINK a hurricane might be coming, all hell breaks loose. Not among the residents, really, but on the news. The news wants us to worry desperately about hurricanes. In my town, Bnouville, Louisiana (pronounced locally as Ben-ah-VEEL; population 1,700), hurricane preparations generally include buying more beer, and ice to keep that beer cold when the power goes out. We do have a neighbor with a two-man rowboat lashed on top of the porch roof, all ready to go if the water risesbut thats Billy Mack, and he started his own religion in the garage, so hes got a lot more going on than just an extreme concern for personal safety.
Anyway, Bnouville is an unstable place, built on a swamp. Everyone who lives there accepts that it was a terrible place to build a town, but since its there, we just go on living in it. Every fifty years or so, everything but the old hotel gets wrecked by a flood or a hurricaneand the same bunch of lunatics comes back and builds new stuff. Many generations of the Deveaux family have lived in beautiful downtown Bnouville, largely because there is no other part to live in. I love where Im from, dont get me wrong, but its the kind of town that makes you a little crazy if you never leave, even for a little while.
My parents were the only ones in the family to leave to go to college and then law school. They became law professors at Tulane, in New Orleans. They had long since decided that it would be good for all three of us to spend a little time living outside of Louisiana. Four years ago, right before I started high school, they applied to do a years sabbatical teaching American law at the University of Bristol in England. We made an agreement that I could take part in the decision about where I would spend that sabbatical yearit would be my senior year. I said I wanted to go to school in London.
Bristol and London are really far apart, by English standards. Bristol is in the middle of the country and far to the west, and London is way down south. But really far apart in England is only a few hours on the train. And London is London. So I had decided on a school called Wexford, located in the East End of London. The three of us were all going to fly over together and spend a few days in London, then I would go to school and my parents would go to Bristol, and I would travel back and forth every few weeks.
But then there was a hurricane warning, and everyone freaked out, and the airlines wiped the schedule. The hurricane teased everyone and rolled around the Gulf before turning into a rainstorm, but by that point our flight had been canceled and everything was a mess for a few days. Eventually, the airline managed to find one empty seat on a flight to New York, and another empty seat on a flight to London from there. Since I was scheduled to be at Wexford before my parents needed to be in Bristol, I got the seat and went by myself.
