Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [75]
And that’s when it happens.
That’s when the Bad Thing happens.
But it must be just part of Vincent’s fever dream, because when he wakes up he is back in his bed, the fever still heavy over him like a damp sour blanket. There are voices now, but they are low and quiet. He walks down the long wooden hall to the bathroom where the voices are coming from.
He sees water.
Water dripping from a sponge.
His mother is using the sponge to clean the deep cut in his father’s head.
Now Vincent is standing in the doorway of the bathroom and his father is looking up at him. Water, mixed with blood, dripping from his father’s chin.
His father looking up at him with fear.
Water dripping.
Water flowing.
Vincent’s memories are flowing like the water. Water running into Mrs Kielowski’s swimming pool as he finishes cleaning it. Vincent is fourteen years old now. Sometimes he remembers the fever time and what he did to his father. The impossible thing. Sometimes he even gets the fever feeling. But he represses it, buries it deep. Tries to forget about it. Rain is beginning to fall again, here in Mrs Kielowski’s backyard. Drops of it spread ripples in the smooth surface of the swimming pool.
The tyres on Vincent’s bicycle had sliced through rain puddles on the way home. His new bicycle, the red ten‐speed. Its tyres hissed on the wet road surface.
The shopping mall was on Windacott Avenue, just across from the ruins of the old municipal library. Vincent always stopped there on his way home from school. It was a small development, just the Seven Eleven, a hairdresser’s and eight or nine other stores.
But one of those stores was Smartt Software and another was a drugstore with a large magazine and paperback section.
Vincent got his allowance every week on Friday morning. His mom gave him cash from her wallet before she went to work. ‘Make it last, okay?’ she’d say. Then she’d always smile and he’d always smile back. They both knew the twenty dollars was unlikely to survive that first trip home from school, via Wendacott Avenue. His mother had given up asking Vincent to promise he wouldn’t come home that way. It wasn’t the money she was worried about, it was the other things. But Vincent was big enough to look after himself now and his mom was just being panicky. She just got spooked whenever she parked in that mall and looked across at the gutted hulk of the old municipal library, so close. Vincent had promised her that he’d never go in there, although even the library wasn’t that bad these days. It hadn’t been really bad since the riots two decades ago, unless you were stupid enough to go in there at night and try sleeping inside or something. They said that Bobby Prescott still went in there sometimes. At night.
Smartt Software was in a row of stores on the outside edge of the mall, opposite Seven Eleven. Vincent chained his bike up outside and automatically looked at the police posters stuck on the inside of the windows of McCray’s drugstore, including the latest Bobby Prescott fax. No matter how boring the police department tried to make the Prescott faxes, they were lucky if one stayed up for more than a day before a high‐school kid swiped it to put up in his bedroom. Vincent even knew Game‐boys who had posters of Prescott up above their consoles. Somewhere in their minds they must know that if Prescott ever found them in an arcade or on a public access terminal, or just walking home wearing a Sega backpack, he’d go after them. But they still got a kick out of having his face up on their wall, looking down on them as they played their computer games, staring out of an official police Wanted fax.
Inside Smartt Software it was air‐conditioned and smelled of plastic. Some special kind of plastic they used for shrink‐wrapping the games. For Vincent, the excitement always began with that smell. It was Friday and school was over for the weekend. It was June and all the teachers were winding down. No homework. In a couple of weeks there would be two whole months of summer vacation. And now he stood in Smartt Software, listening to