Ozzie landed on the pavement, his powerful thigh muscles flexing to their max to absorb the impact of his not-inconsiderable mass, assisted by the impact of his rough palms on the tarmac. He adjusted his mask, grabbed the bag and looked left and right up the empty road before walking swiftly back the way he had come. He couldn’t resist licking the blood off his fingers as he walked, and the rush of endorphins that followed was almost good enough to take the edge off his need. A different time and he might have chosen to feed there and then and fuck the consequences, but now things were different. Sandra needed to feed. And so did the little ‘un. They’d be dead made up with the night’s proceeds. They could all have a little fresh and the rest he could smoke into jerky. It wasn’t as good, but it kept the cravings at bay and stayed good for ages.
As he turned the corner, though, he froze for a moment. There was a guy walking down the pavement towards him. He was weaving a bit like he was pissed or something. And Ozzie wondered how made up Sandra would be if he came home with two.
But no. The guy was in a suit. Suits were trouble. In fact, come to think of it, the guy who’d chased him earlier in the day had been in a suit like that one. And what was that over his head-?
Shit!
*
Butcher knew he’d been made just as the target was within a few feet of him, and he saw the hooded head come up, the yellow eyes above the mask reflecting back the glow of the streetlights as he saw slitted pupils contract and the target lunged.
Butcher wasn’t sure where the knife came from, but it snagged his coat as he dodged and spun. His elbow whipped around, striking the target in the back of his head and Butcher recoiled from the surprising pain of the impact. But away to his right he heard the sound of metal on pavement and knew that his spin had yanked the knife out of the target’s hand. As he finished his turn, he drove his left hand as hard as he could around the target’s heavy backpack and into his lower ribs.
It should have been a breaker. There should have been snapped ribs and pain and an opponent on the floor, gasping for breath but, although the target grunted from the impact, he bounced away and started running as if he’d no more than jostled Butcher in a crowd. Butcher stooped to grab the dropped knife and then took off after the target.
*
Ozzie didn’t know if he’d stumbled onto someone else’s hunt or they’d stumbled into his. He thought he’d got the local territory well marked out. He’d flexed his dominance enough at the Undercroft to be sure - or he thought he had. Maybe this guy was new. Maybe...
The worst case scenario dawned on him as he ran.
He had heard talk about the Hunters, but he never believed them. The Tribe was too strong, too dangerous. They stayed out of sight because they wouldn’t survive if the humans turned against them as a group. And the humans would turn against them. There was little doubt about that. But there had always been whispers that there were others - some said humans, some said other things - that picked out lone tribe members and disappeared them. Some stories said the Hunters picked the best of them for some great cause or mission. Some stories said the Tribe was fooling itself: that the only reason the Hunters came was to thin the herd, to control their numbers - to stop them from rising up and taking their rightful place…
One way or another, though, Ozzie didn’t want to find out. Sandra needed him. The littl’un needed him. He had to survive.
Weighed down with the night’s hunting, though, he was slower.
*
Butcher chased him as far as the Insignia then, when his target turned down the end of Love Lane instead of ducking through the metal railings again, he jumped behind the steering wheel. There was no way he was letting the target get away again.
*
Ozzie glanced back for a moment to see no one following him. Perhaps he had already out-run the Hunter. Then there was the roar of an engine and the bright gleam of headlights, and Ozzie knew he wasn’t going to get away.
*
Butcher took him in the upper thigh with the bumper. The target was running fast enough, even with the weight of his bergen, that it wasn’t even that hard an impact. He was only doing about thirty-five by the time he hit him. But it was enough to send the target sprawling, face-planting hard on the tarmac, his mask ripping away as Butcher screeched to a halt and launched himself from behind the wheel, pistol in hand.
Without pausing, he ran at the target, who was just pushing himself up off the floor, and kicked him hard in the ribs, flipping him over - the target’s bergen, crushed up over his shoulders, stopping him from rolling all the way onto his back - and brandished the pistol in the guy’s… face.
‘What the fuck are you?’ he asked, the question escaping his brain involuntarily through his mouth.
The target, chest heaving with exertion and adrenaline, look up at him. His skin was an unhealthy pallor, closer to grey than anything Butcher had seen on a human before, and his nose was a receded lump above a pair of gaping, triangular nostrils. But most horrible was his mouth, as he snarled up at Butcher through sharp fangs. His upper and lower canines were unnaturally extended out and over his lips making it impossible for the target to close his mouth and leaving his lips dry and cracked. He had a raw, red graze up his right cheek and across his forehead from where he had impacted the pavement from his fall.
*
Ozzie could see the guy’s mark, now, better than he could see the looming face. The mark was distorted and glitchy, like he was trying to see it on a badly-tuned telly. But there was nothing in it to resemble any of the clan marks he had seen at the Undercroft or elsewhere. And even without a clear look at his face, it was obvious that the guy was definitely human.
‘If yu’re ganna shoot me,’ he growled up at him in a strange distortion of a Scouse accent, ‘shoot me and feck off. Otherwise, I’m out of ‘ere.’
Not a Tribe member. And, if he was that disturbed by Ozzie’s appearance, not a Hunter either. Ozzie would figure him for a bizzie, but not with the gat. But maybe he knew what Ozzie had just done. If he looked in the backpack, he would certainly know what he’d just done.
So there was a good chance, here, that he’d get shot and Sandra wouldn’t get her fix and nor would the littl’un. He was tough as feck, but could he walk away from a shot to the head? He didn’t think so.
‘Right, fuck it,’ said the guy, taking a step back but not lowering the pistol. ‘I know what you did. I know what’s in the bag. But I can’t make him any less dead and I have no fucking idea what’s going on here, so I’m going to stick to my current priority!’
He pulled a phone from his pocket, thumbed it on and showed the screen to Ozzie.
‘Do you know this girl?’
It was probably three years since Ozzie had looked at a human. I mean, he’d seen humans every day, but he didn’t really look at them. They all looked pretty much the same, since the Change. They all looked like food. But he peers at the glowing screen and something familiar does ring with him. He goes to sit up, but the guy gestures with the pistol.
‘You stay right the fuck there, son, whatever you are,’ said the man. ‘I don’t know if this would kill you but it would certainly hurt like fuck and I shouldn’t think the police are going to be that fussed about investigating reports of a gunshot around here even if someone did know what they heard. So I reckon I’d have time to put two or three into you before we’re done. One in each of your knees, perhaps? Then one into the stomach? Bad way to die, I’m told.’
‘Oi, oi,’ complained Ozzie, raising a hand. ‘You win, pal, OK? But I think I’ve seen her before somewhere. Can I just get me ‘ead the right way round?’
The man put the phone away and pulled a photo from an inside pocket which he crushed and threw at Ozzie instead. Then both hands were on the pistol, its barrel trained square on Ozzie’s centre of mass.
Ozzie picked up the paper and unscrewed it, turning it so he could see the picture in the light. He’s not seen the human girl, but something about her… It clicks.
‘This is the elf,’ he said, tossing it back.
‘What?’
‘It’s the elf. I’ve only ever seen one of ‘em. I reckon this is ‘er before she changed.’
‘Changed?’
‘What? You think I was fucking born like this?’ he asked, pushing himself up despite the pistol. He shrugged off the rucksack and sat on it, hands raised. ‘But - heh - yeah, you can probably find ‘er at the Undercroft.’
That would be funny. Sending the guy to the Undercroft. And he wasn’t lying, either.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
‘Not far from ‘ere,’ he said. ‘Down to the docks, up Regent Road, round the back of the Applewood. Doors open at midnight. Shut at dawn.’
‘What is it?’
‘Go and find out,’ said Ozzie, grinning with all of his teeth. ‘Now shoot me or feck off.’
The man seemed to be considering it, but then he backed away, the pistol still covering Ozzie, until he reached the door of the car. He climbed in and drove away, and Ozzie breathed a sigh of relief. He wondered about telling the Undercroft that the human was coming, but decided against it. Pig-fuckers all deserved whatever they got.
But as he climbed to his feet and retrieved his broken mask, he touched the bleeding scrape down his face.
‘If I see you again, ‘uman,’ he promised the man’s disappearing tail-lights, ‘I’ll kill you.’
*
Butcher drove back into town, still trying to process what he’d seen as he stared out into the Liverpool night. He parked up and wandered towards the town centre. It was too long since he’d had a decent meal and, the first OK-looking sit-down restaurant that wasn’t a takeaway or a kebab shop, he went in and asked for a table for one.
As he sat waiting for his menu, an untouched pint of lager in front of him, he looked down at shaking hands.
He had seen a man get murdered.
A homeless man with an alcohol or drugs problem, admittedly. A man who would probably have been dead anyway in a couple of years, for sure. But a living, human being with hopes and dreams and potential, however rotted and wasted, had been snuffed out without reason or warning or a chance to fight back. And it was starting to drag up memories of dead men and women that Butcher had been carefully putting to one side for a long time.
But every time he thought he was going to slip down into a pit of existential despair, the target’s face came back to him. Foul and grey and ugly and twisted and Changed. There had been something viscerally horrifying about how the man… the thing had looked. And it wasn’t just how it appeared. Butcher was an educated child of the Twenty-First Century. Racism was the excuse of the idiot. But the target hadn’t just looked horrifying. He - it? - has been strong and fast and vicious and merciless and fearless. And he used to be human.
He used to be human, but he - it? - wasn’t any more.
He was Changed. And he was marked.
Butcher really, really needed to talk to Cuttler, right now. But he had left Emmy’s phone in his hotel room. And there was only one other person who might have answers for him. He took a deep breath, pulled out his BRS phone and called Miss Cook.
‘I need more information about what the nanoids can do,’ he told her once she answered the phone.
‘I thought you were looking for Cally Cuttler in Liverpool?’
‘I am, but things…’ he paused and reached for the pint, but saw his hands were still shaking, so he put his hand back in his lap. ‘Things are… weird, here. I’ve got solid leads. There are… people who’ve seen her in the last year and I’m going to follow things up with them tonight. But… Look, Cook, can the nanoids change how a person looks?’
‘How they look?’ she asked, confused. ‘Well, um… Why do you ask?’
‘Just answer the question, for now,’ he pressed her.
‘I’m not on the science side of things,’ she admitted. ‘My background is more people and project management. But I can find out from the Dragon team what the capabilities are to change appearances. Do you mean, like aesthetically? Changing eye colour or skin colour?’
‘That sort of thing,’ agreed Butcher. ‘But more so. Could they change the whole physiognomy of a human being? Give them, say… fangs or claws?’
‘Fangs and claws, Butcher?’ she laughed. ‘Are you high?’
‘Just find out and let me know,’ he snapped back at her, angry at the swirling emotions of fear and doubt the encounter with the target had provoked. ‘Before midnight. It’s important.’
‘Well, OK,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll do what I can. But I’d like a detailed explanation when I’ve found out for you, OK? I need to know what’s going on.’
‘Fine,’ Butcher agreed.
He put the phone away in his pocket just as the waiter brought him dinner: a rare filet steak with boiled potatoes and steamed vegetables, and the sight and smell of good food was like a balm on Butcher’s troubled soul. He forced his hand to pick up the cold pint glass, reveling in the condensation on his fingers, took a deep swig and focused himself back on the mission.
*
‘Theoretically, they tell me,’ said Cook, later. It was past eleven o’clock and Butcher had moved to the saloon bar and to soda water, doom-scrolling his way down the international news while he’d waited for Cook to call back. ‘Once sufficiently integrated, the nanoids could re-structure bone, muscle and other tissues and even change melanin levels in skin and eyes. Increasing bone and muscle density are fairly standard features you should already have noticed.’
‘Once or twice,’ agreed Butcher.
‘But they say that full body modification shouldn’t happen for three reasons.
‘First, no one can have been integrated for long enough. Cuttler might have backdoors to change that, but definitely not you. It would require a deep, long-term integration for that kind of transformation to take place.
‘Second, the transformation would have been unbelievably painful.’
‘I’ve tried painful,’ agreed Butcher, scribbling as he listened.
‘Ah, yes,’ replied Cook. ‘I spoke to our senior man in Project Dragon and he talked about that. He said to tell you “not just next level, but two levels after that”. He said to imagine being doused in petrol, set on fire and left to endure it for hours with no respite. Even with pain relief, it would be enough to break even then toughest.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Yes, I suppose he might have had an inkling of what it would be like,’ she threw back at him. ‘So now I need to know why you’re asking.’
Butcher rubbed his cheeks with his free hand and wondered how much he could tell Cook without sounding insane.
‘OK,’ he stalled her, ‘so when you have the procedure, one of the first things that happens is you get this thing over your head.’
‘The procedural status marker,’ she acknowledged. ‘Yes.’
‘You can see your own and, as I found out when I met Cuttler, if you’ve had the procedure you can see other people’s,’ he told her. ‘Which, incidentally, is another fucking thing you lot could’ve bloody mentioned. It makes it sodding hard to bluff my way through a conversation when I’ve got evidence of your involvement flashing over my bloody head.’
‘Old news, Butcher, move on.’
‘Fine,’ he grumbled. ‘Well, I’ve seen someone here in Liverpool with the mark. Or something like it.’
‘Impossible,’ insisted Cook.
‘Maybe, but it was different to the one I’ve got and which Cuttler has,’ he went on, wetting dry lips with his drink. ‘It was green and… glitchy. Like the nanoids couldn’t make out what it was supposed to be. And the guy I saw… Well, he was grey.’
That was probably safe, he thought. The yellow eyes, fangs, superpowers and casual murder would make them thing he’d gone off the deep end.
‘Grey?’
‘Yeah,’ he confirmed, ‘and I don’t mean like he’d had a bad korma. I mean like he was wearing grey body paint, except he wasn’t.’
Was he? Butcher had never thought to check. With the fangs and the yellow eyes, quite apart from the rest of it, he had been ready to just accept that the guy had been grey. But, the glitching marker aside, was it possible he had been fooled by theatre-level aesthetic make-up?
Well, he could always walk it back if he had to, later. There was no disguising the mark, though.
‘That… is certainly strange,’ Cook agreed. There was something in her tone that Butcher spotted immediately. It was the tone of someone who knew or suspected something but wasn’t about to admit it to the present audience.
‘Right,’ said Butcher, downing the last of his soda water and clocking the time. ‘Well, I’ve got somewhere to be. Let me know what you find out.’
She agreed that she would and they each hung up.
*
The Appletree was a proper docker’s pub, or it had been, once upon a time. When these docks had heaved with heavy industry and shipping, the Appletree had been heaving with dockers, flush from a day’s pay, cash in hand, and ready for a thirsty pint or two or three before heading home to deal with the family. These days it seemed to survive off Everton fans, judging from the posters, flags and scarves hanging in the windows. A squat, two storey building with none of the rustic charm foreigners associated with a British pub and all the menace of an imminent glass to the face if you wandered in in a red shirt. So it stood to reason that the heavily-gated side return, with its metal bars and barbed wire, was access to the pub’s cellars, where they kept boring things like ale kegs and soft drink concentrate. Which made it strange that now, at coming up on half past midnight, there was a steady stream of bulky-looking men in dark clothes slipping through the gate and disappearing into the gloom beyond. It wasn’t like there was a queue or the sort of stream that would attract the attention of the Old Bill. But every few minutes there’d be another one or two of them, sidling along the road. Not rushing. Not dawdling. Not giving any impression of aggro. Just quietly making their way to where they belong, then slipping through the gate.
Butcher stepped out of the car, parked completely illegally over the pavement on the opposite side of the road, and quietly shut the door before tossing the night vision goggles into the boot. Then he made his way down the road, away from the gate, until he clocked another pair of dark, hooded figures walking in the opposite direction. As he drew level with them, he clocked the glitchy marks over their heads, doubled back and followed them at a distance. He was wearing his suit and coat, still, but he’d switched his rather suffering leather shoes for his softer trainers. All the better for running the fuck away if that should be necessary. At a kink in the wall along the road, he stopped and pressed himself against the bricks, concealed in shadow, and pulled out his phone, zooming the camera tight in on the pair.
The guys ahead of him reached the gate and one pushed it open - no sign of a key or code being required - while the other looked up and down the street. Butcher darkened the phone screen and pressed himself even harder against the wall. He heard the gate ahead of him squeak open and, a moment later, he eased himself forwards to observe the gate again.
The pair had gone.
Checking up and down the road, no one else seemed to be approaching the gate, so he stepped out and marched quickly towards it.
Don’t wait, he ordered himself. Don’t hesitate. Don’t hold back. There’s a missing girl somewhere in Liverpool and she’s waiting for you to find her. Don’t think about it. Just -
He pushed at the unresisting gate, stepped through into the space beyond and found himself in a side return, sparsely graveled and unlit by any security lights. Immediately in front of him was a steeply descending staircase up against the wall of the pub. But the stone of the steps was dry and undisturbed. It didn’t look like anyone had gone down there in the last few hours, let alone seconds. So he ignored it and explored deeper into the darkness, wishing he’d brought the NVGs. But his eyes adapted quickly - possibly a side effect of the nanoids? - and he could see another flight at the far end of the passage. This one was rougher and newer than the one at the gate, crudely bracketed with poorly-fitted breeze blocks that oozed dried cement and, as he approached, which he could see were daubed with intense and incomprehensible graffiti. It had a visceral and angry look to it, quite different to the massive artistic murals he had seen around the city, and even to the casual scrawlings of the taggers.
There was a door at the bottom and a thin glow of light could be seen emerging from the bottom of it.
He had found the Undercroft.