Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [34]
Creed always wondered if it was some kind of signal the guy gave off, a subliminal display of weakness. But if you took that long walk across the dance floor and they didn’t like you, they would be utterly ruthless. You’d find yourself standing beside a table full of girls who wouldn’t even acknowledge your existence.
And when that happened you could see it clear across the club. The guy’s conversation would falter and his smile would fail and his shoulders would slump. It was like watching the life go out of him. The girls could be completely pitiless, punishing him for not measuring up. It was as if the guy had ceased to exist in their scornful eyes.
And now it was as though the whole room was doing exactly that to Russell.
It was sickeningly easy to go along with it, to ignore him. You felt ashamed of the guy anyway, disgusted by his weakness. It was the ruthless pack instinct of the playground, cutting out the snivelling weakling, condemning him to his own definition of himself.
But warlock magnified it a thousand times and made it lethal. Russell felt it gathering in the room and he whimpered.
After the first hour the hooker and Miss Winterhill locked themselves in the bathroom. Creed didn’t blame them. The Mayans shrugged and sat, holding their guns, watching Russell. They came from the poorest area of rural Mexico and it was a world where death was commonplace. Moving up through the free trade zone as kids they had eventually carved out a lucrative lifestyle in the US. But their careers as drug dealers were no less ruthless than the lives they’d left behind. They never had the chance to soften and they felt not even the slightest sympathy. To them, the manner of Russell’s death was just a novelty.
They watched what happened to him and discussed the fact that the girls’ absence from the living room didn’t seem to weaken the process at all. It had probably gone too far by that time anyway. The Mayans were fascinated by it all.
Creed and Larner did their best to ignore what was happening. They sat playing cards, slapping them down on the glass block of the coffee table. They drank and smoked and hardly exchanged a word, trying to lose themselves in the game, trying to forget the thing in the corner.
Creed knew that the end was near when he realized he’d forgotten the name. The name of the guy sitting in the corner. Creed knew the guy was still in the same room, only a metre or two away. He knew that if he turned his head he’d see the guy.
But it was a purely abstract, intellectual sort of knowledge. Creed knew it, but he didn’t feel it. Deep in his heart, he didn’t believe it.
At some primal level he denied the kid’s existence. He had let the kid’s very name go. What had it been? Curtis? Lewis? Rusty? Sutton? Something like that.
But the name eluded him.
Finally the Mayan brothers had gone over and crouched beside the thing in the corner. One of them had lifted its wrist and checked for a pulse. Then he had got up, gone to the bathroom and knocked on the door.
‘You can come out now. What’s‐his‐name is dead.’
* * *
Chapter 7
Apple orchards and fields of hops flashed by in the Kentish night. The headlights of the VW carved a tunnel out of the shadows as it sped along the dark, winding roads, dense green trees closing in an arch overhead then opening again as the hills descended to fields and the ancient woods relinquished the road.
Ace gripped the steering wheel of the Mazda, dabbing the accelerator with her toe, breathing curses. She was sweating with frustration at not being able to take the lead and roar off down the open road.
But she didn’t know where they were going, so she had to swallow her impatience and hold a steady distance behind Shell and Jack. She pulled over whenever they did, easing into a passing space to let approaching cars roar by on the narrow road, all engine noise and glaring headlights in the country