Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [88]
“What the hell’s he holding?” Vinaldi whispered. “And is this going to work, if we’re watching?”
“I don’t know and I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s a cat,” Vinaldi said. “There’s a cat on the end of that rope.”
The cat was small and thin, and in the dim lights radiating from Ghuaji’s car it looked ill and underfed. This wasn’t some pet which had been drafted in for the day. This was an animal which had been brought here some weeks ago, for a particular purpose. The fact it was still here proved that whatever experiment it had been a part of had succeeded. The further fact that it didn’t look as if it had been fed in the meantime, but simply left in the old Farm building until it was needed again, proved simply that Maxen and his accomplices needed nothing quite as much as they needed a good solid kick to the head.
So Maxen actually had found a way back in. Probably, whatever it might be, it couldn’t have worked unless Yhandim and the others had been trying to come the other way too, but worked it obviously had. Perhaps sometimes the two sides had to touch each other. I don’t know. Chance, fate, or darker forces at work, it didn’t really matter. There was no more room for pretending. Twenty years were going to be stripped away today.
We were teenagers, you know. Eighteen, nineteen. That’s how old most of us were when they sent us into something we didn’t understand. They left us there until they realized we weren’t going to win, and then they pulled us out and threw us away—except that when they brought our bodies out they didn’t check hard enough to see if they’d brought out our souls, too.
Ghuaji leaned inside the car and turned the engine off—luckily Vinaldi was ahead of me and killed ours simultaneously. The mountain and the sky were very quiet, the only sound that of Ghuaji’s feet crunching through the snow, and of our own hearts beating. Warmth and cold, getting closer to each other all the time.
“He’s going to see us,” Vinaldi whispered.
“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied. “I don’t think he’s going to be seeing anything very much at the moment.”
“He got here, didn’t he?”
“He did, but he’s also had a bullet through his head. Maybe it wasn’t him who was directing. Maybe he got pulled this way.”
“Don’t start with that shit again,” Vinaldi said. I shushed him as Ghuaji passed over the road thirty yards ahead of us. There was next to no light, and he was looking the other way, but it was still bizarre that he hadn’t caught a glimpse of moonlight glinting off the angles of our truck. That same light caught the side of his head for a moment and I saw blood there, and a darkness on his shirt. He was close to the end—if he didn’t find the way in quickly he was going to die, and our hopes along with him. Suej and Nearly had already been gone for twelve hours. I didn’t want to think about what might already have happened to them, or to the other spares.
The cat on the end of the rope was padding through the snow after Ghuaji, each foot pulled high against the cold. She saw us, certainly—for a moment her head turned and stared at the truck as if concerned that it was in imminent danger of exploding. But then she lost interest and moved forward again, peering around at the world.
When he was about five yards the other side of the road Ghuaji stopped walking, and stood still, head down. The cat padded past him and into the trees at the edge of the compound, trailing the rope behind her.
“What the fuck is going on?” Vinaldi demanded, panicky.
“You must have heard the story,” I said. “How The Gap was found?” Now that it was all going down I felt strangely serene, the way you feel in the seconds after you’ve had a bad car accident. It’s almost as if you know, all your life, that something bad