Colony Read online

  Just as this thought flits through Gordon's mind, a savage blow to his kidneys drops him heavily to the ground. He looks up to see his assailant: it's the old taximan hurtling along at an unlikely pace, with a fat business-suited man on his back. It could have been an accident that the passenger's briefcase poleaxed Gordon, but he doubts it. As a curse forms on his lips there is a dull explosion overhead.

  Gordon looks up. A large sheet of blue smoked glass is tumbling from the top floor of the Hotel Felicity. The crowd below it does its best to scatter, but the bodies are packed pretty tightly on Easy Street tonight, and a few are too close to the impact as the window shatters on the pavement, sending dozens of large, potentially lethal projectiles towards the terrified stragglers.

  If the taximan hadn't knocked him down, Gordon would have been among them.

  Lucky man.

  He picks himself up and looks around. There are ten, maybe a dozen injured. Some quite seriously. The town's one hospital is a small, flimsy affair: no traffic, no violent crime, why would any other provision be necessary? A small emergency room, a burns unit and a cardiac ward, that's all. Anything more chronic would have to be shipped out.

  Gordon dusts himself down and steps over a screaming woman. The screeching is annoying him. He wants to get away from it.

  He sees the sign for the Felicity Casino, and decides he might as well spend his money in there.

  He kicks away the injured hand that's clawing at him and skips down the steps.

  3

  Eddie is looking out of the wall-to-ceiling void that used to be his window. He's staring down at the street he almost became a part of. Another man might be thinking what a lucky escape he's just had. Another man might take a glorious lungful of sweetly processed air and bless the entire concept of existence, might take a moment to wonder at the bizarrely sturdy fragility of life.

  Not Eddie.

  Eddie's frozen in the glaring truck headlights of fear. Eddie's thinking he's just had a little taster of his immediate future. An amuse-gueule to whet his appetite for the bone-grinding bloody terror of the slasher movie fate inexorably awaiting him. In his right hand, he's turning the sweaty betting chip over and over.

  This is wrong.

  Eddie has to do something. He has to try something, or the awful terrors of his imaginings will most certainly come to pass. But this is precisely Eddie's problem. Eddie's a do-nothing guy. He unconsciously subscribes to the theory that the best way to tackle a terrible twist of events is the old, dismal, double-pronged non-attack: first and foremost, do nothing, absolutely nothing at all, because doing something, anything, might very well make the terrible thing worse, and second, the even more pathetic strategy: hope against all the laws of logic and reason that the terrible thing will go away and never happen. It doesn't matter to Eddie that this approach almost never works. It doesn't matter to him that this lifelong passion for uneventfulness has left him with a dry, unenviable past; a life not worth remembering even in the drastically truncated flashback form supposedly induced by a lethal plunge from a high building.

  The most peculiar aspect of this non-living approach to life is that Eddie thinks himself 'sensible'. And if you could poll any of Eddie's acquaintances, they would concur that Eddie is indeed a sensible guy. Sensible is the word that comes to mind.

  So here's old Eddie, sensibly waiting to have the life smashed out of him, when there's another muffled explosion and another shattering of glass, and he sees another window lazily tumbling down the side of the Hotel Felicity's hasty facade. For a terrible moment Eddie's terror finds a new, higher gear. He thinks it's the ... men, coming back for him. Then he realizes he has no more window left to shatter. The... fellows are paying a visit next door.

  Eddie listens with a peculiarly interested detachment. It's as if the scene that had just been rehearsed in his life is now being replayed in room 886, only properly, for real. Eddie was just a stand-in. Now his part is being played by the real star, the real Harrison Dopple, and Eddie's curious to hear how he might have performed his role better.

  There are angry shouts, Dopple's voice, presumably, and loud, dangerous threats, again Dopple's. There are crude expletives and loud violent curses, counterpointed by quiet, dangerous mumbles. There is smashing furniture and scuffling -- major scuffling -- and the strangely flat, unmovielike sound of fists impacting on flesh and bone. There is, in short, a big kerfuffle.

  Eddie shakes his head. He wishes he could have done that. He wishes he could have kerfuffled more. Or a little, at least. That's what a real man does. Eddie didn't kerfuffle at all, not a bit of it. He minded his manners. Harrison's not minding his manners. He's not trying to ingratiate himself with a couple of cold-blooded murdering bastards intent on his demise. He's fighting for his life. Eddie imagines, rather romantically, that the unseen Mr Dopple must live one heck of a life, to make it worth all the kerfuffling. A thrilling life, full of promise, excitement and gusto. A big, exhilarating roller coaster of a life. A life to kerfuffle for.

  Eddie is actually beginning to feel envious of the man who is being murdered next door.

  And worse, much worse than that, Eddie will very soon come to wish he really had been Harrison Dopple. He'll come to consider being splattered all over the pavement as preferable to his own fate.

  There is a dreadful silence next door, now.

  It's broken by the start of a count.

  'One...'

  Suddenly, Dopple's voice changes tenor and volume, and now he's speaking very fast, very low. Pleas, not threats.

  But the grim count continues.

  'Two...'

  And all the while, Dopple is gibbering his soft entreaties.

  And from the cadence of the count, Eddie realizes that it's never going to reach four. But they're just threatening Harrison, surely. Surely Eddie can't be about to see a human being murdered before his eyes. Surely they're not going to count out...

  'Three.'

  The entreaties stop, and there's a double grunt. Eddie correctly estimates it to be precisely the double grunt generated by the effort it takes two men to launch a third man to his death out of a top-floor hotel window void.

  Eddie looks away, but too late. Too late to avoid registering the look on Harrison Dopple's suddenly silent face as gravity grabs him at the top of his upward arc, and he starts his inexorably fatal acceleration downwards. That look will be burned into Eddie's brain for ever. What's more, Eddie is brutally aware that his mind will file it, as it always files his most horrific recollections, in exactly the same image library it stores all his erotic memories, so it can crop up randomly as he approaches the peak of his solo passion and deflate him instantly, and without hope of resuscitation.

  And it's the understated bathos of Harrison's expression that Eddie finds so peculiarly ghastly.

  The soon-to-be-late Mr Dopple doesn't look afraid. He doesn't look angry. He's not flapping his arms and legs wildly, as Eddie probably would, in a risibly desperate last-minute half attempt to acquire, somehow, the gift of flight.

  No. None of that.

  The soon-to-be-late Mr Dopple is smiling.

  It will take Eddie a while to interpret that smile correctly. In fact, Harrison Dopple is smiling in disbelief. His primary reaction in the face of inevitable death isn't fear, or even anger: it's surprise.

  He can't believe that death is a thing which is actually, definitely, going to happen to him. To him.

  Incredibly, he's danced his last dance (badly and drunkenly, a long time ago), eaten his last meal (mercifully, a deliriously unhealthy and highly anti-social microwaved burrito), enjoyed his last orgasm (thankfully, only minutes ago, courtesy of the round-the-clock hotel porn channel). And now he is actually smiling his very last smile. And even though he's known, all his life, that all human beings always die, he's managed to nurture and protect the nonsensical, irrational conviction that, somehow, the death thing would never happen to Harrison Dopple.

  In the meantime, some good, at le
ast, has come of Harrison's shocking demise: Eddie is no longer wallowing in self-pity. He is wallowing in pity for Harrison Dopple. He turns and moves away from the window. He doesn't want to hear the impact, much less see it. The momentum carries him towards the flattened door of his suite.

  He pauses briefly in the doorframe. He'd rather not bump into redhead and baldy as they leave the apartment next door. But they'll be checking their grisly roster, fairly soon. They'll be crossing off Harrison Dopple, room 886, Hotel Felicity, and looking for the next appointment in their busy, busy schedule.

  And that next appointment could conceivably be Eddie O'Hare, room 888, Hotel Felicity.

  Eddie would rather not risk that possibility.

  He carries on down the corridor, turning his face away from the flattened door of 886 as he passes. Pointlessly, as it turns out. A full-length mirror spans the corridor opposite the suites, and Eddie unwittingly makes nerve-grinding eye contact with the killers' reflections. Inexplicably, the one who used to have red hair is now bald, and the formerly bald one is sporting a convincing blond mane.

  Eddie tries to smile in a way that demonstrates he still feels a kind of recent-acquaintance-type affinity with them, without actually appearing either to condone or condemn their... career decision.

  It's not much of a smile. More of a tortured grimace, really. Still, the newly bald ex-redhead acknowledges it with a brief distracted nod, before returning his attention to his grim list, with the formerly bald blond.

  Lips still locked in the lacklustre leer, Eddie manages, rather neatly, to accelerate down the corridor without actually appearing to go any faster.

  4

  Eddie reaches the lifts, and even though the casino's in the basement, and he's nine storeys above it, and time is in desperately, desperately short supply, he elects to take the stairs. Not as a means of escape: if Eddie's next on the list, using the stairs won't foil any pursuit. No. It's this: Eddie doesn't think he can maintain his wretched limp and fake smile for the duration of the lift journey, should the... should the... men elect to join him, and he doesn't want to try.

  There is no relief in the stairwell from the invariable perfect temperature, which Eddie is beginning to find a kind of torture, but there is a strange smell, which triggers off some sensory memory in Eddie's brain.

  It's a wet, somehow metallic smell. So intently is Eddie trying to place it, the sound of the stairwell door opening a couple of flights above him registers only peripherally, and the urgent clacking of hurried footsteps is almost on him before he realizes the hitmen are following him down the stairs.

  What to do, Eddie? The killers still might not be after you. And if you run, you'll certainly look suspicious. They'll certainly scrutinize their list of business appointments most thoroughly if they catch you fleeing, and there's a good chance you'll be on it.

  On the other hand, if they are after you, an accelerated downwards trajectory just might get you into the casino with a sufficient lead to hide among the milling crowd. This is an important decision, Eddie, and, without wishing to rush you, it's a decision you have to make in less than a second.

  Less than astonishingly, Eddie opts to do nothing. He opts to keep a clear head, a steady, unhurried pace and brazen it out. What cool, he congratulates himself. What elan. What poise. Unfortunately, Eddie's legs immediately chicken out of the cool, elan, poise option and start leaping down the stairs five at a time.

  As he stumbles blindly down, his hand reaching out for the rail and occasionally grabbing it, but more frequently stubbing his fingernails painfully against the wall, Eddie tries to assess how far his possible pursuers are above him.

  Did they hear him take off? Did they accelerate after him? Are the terrible trademark pink socks closer or further away?

  And as Eddie's attention is above and behind him, he fails to notice the fire exit door he's heading towards lurch open.

  He fails to notice it so completely, it crunches into his lunging face and thumps him backwards, so his coccyx cracks into the rim of a concrete step, exploding Eddie's reality into a white-hot eruption of electrified suffering.

  This, Eddie is dismally aware, is not one of those run of the mill collision injuries that will eventually disappear and leave no legacy. This one will result in an intermittently crippling shooting pain that will periodically plague him for the rest of his natural life.

  And arguably, to those who embrace certain religious beliefs, well beyond.

  The one good thing about the pain: it makes Eddie forget, at least for a tiny while, all of his other considerable problems. As the agony haze subsides, and Eddie's able to focus out of it and take in his surroundings, he sees a strange face peeking round the fire exit door.

  'You OK, pilgrim?' The man has druggy wild eyes with pinprick pupils that dart around randomly in a crystalline-induced sham panic. He is wearing what looks like a filthy green bandanna around his head, and a similarly green, similarly filthy smock, with curiously shiny brown stains all over it. He is the source of the smell Eddie couldn't place.

  Eddie recognizes the smell, now, and consequently the stains.

  Blood.

  'You in need, pilgrim? Can I offer you some enhancements?'

  Eddie shakes his head. 'No.' And, because he's Eddie, he adds: 'No, thank you. I'm fine.'

  The man is a backstreet grafter. He is offering surgical augmentation. It's illegal, of course, but very popular. Very fashionable. He wipes a rubber glove over his forehead, leaving a cloyed bloody smear across his eyebrow line. 'You certain, pilgrim? You couldn't think of a use for another penis? Your life wouldn't be dramatically improved by some eyes in the back of your head?'

  The grafter widened his eyes with such pathetic hopefulness, that a big piece of Eddie wanted to accommodate him. Here we are. Eddie, with the last few grains of sand tumbling through the hourglass of his life, with a contract out on him and a couple of hitmen on their way downstairs in his direction, is willing to consider a lengthy pause in his schedule to undergo unnecessary, dangerous and undesirable surgery, from a patently incompetent sleep-deprived speed junky, just because he doesn't want to see this stranger disappointed. Is Eddie a nice guy, or is Eddie an idiot?

  He drags himself painfully to as erect a stance as he can manage. He shakes his head again and tries to smile. 'Thanks, but this is really not a good time.'

  'I've got a whole lot of end-of-line stock' The grafter smiles and slowly yawns open the fire exit door to reveal, crowded on the metal spiral stairs, a terrible tableau that will lodge in Eddie's permanent memory, nestling, as usual, in the worst possible location, among his top-of-the-line masturbatory fantasy images: a miserable group of wretches who are waiting to sell their body parts. Eddie looks away, but not quickly enough. He can't avoid seeing the sodden bandages on recently truncated limbs, the bloody off-white eye patches, the stomachs criss-crossed over major internal organs with hasty, inept stitching, the makeshift wheelchairs and carts, the jerry-built crutches, the pinned-back sleeves and knotted spare trouser legs, and, worst of all, the eager glints in the eyes of those who still have eyes.

  The grafter licks his amphetamine-dry lips ineffectively. 'Last chance, pilgrim. Closing down tonight.' His leer widens unpleasantly. 'Everything must goooo.' And just as Eddie thinks his sense of revulsion has peaked, there is a sudden rustling at the grafter's crotch, and the hand of a grafted third arm bursts through the flies and beckons him towards the door.

  Eddie steps back involuntarily, just as two sets of footsteps hit the top of the stairs behind him.

  With a painful wrench of his head, Eddie spots them. The pair of them now sport that kind of Superman black hair that's almost hair. Eddie marvels at not only the quality, but the astonishing variety of their hairpieces. The hitmen look angry. Eddie instantly regrets having run off the way he did. This is not a pair of gentlemen he would wish to aggravate needlessly.

  On both their faces, simultaneously, the angry look is wiped away by a sinister spreading s
mile.

  They unharness their guns and head down the stairs in their matter-of-fact, businesslike, resolute way. No rush, but no hanging about, either.

  Professional.

  As they reach him, Eddie tries not to cower, but fails. They carry on past him. They fling open the fire escape door, Mr Red/Bald/ Black calls out: 'Jimmy Duffle?' and they plunge into the human butcher's yard inside. Eddie should go now, but he doesn't. He listens.

  Sure enough, there is a kerfuffle. Eddie wonders if he's the only appointment who never kerfuffled. Scuffing on steel steps. A lot of yelling. The almost clinical, flat, slapping sounds of fists striking face, then the door bursts open again, and the hitmen emerge carrying their battered appointment, in his stained white smock all ready for surgery, between them.

  The bruised man is yelling. 'Please, I'll get the money. I'm selling it. Look: it's worth a fortune, I swear. Just let me show...' He struggles a hand loose and frees his penis from the slit in his smock. It is an undeniably impressive beast, if blatantly riddled with unpleasant disease. 'Check that baby out. It'll make a mint. Trust me. Hey!' He sees Eddie. 'Hey, pilgrim: you could use a monster pecker, could you not?' He whips his member around like a rubber hose in a Chilean interrogation room. 'Look at it! It's a beauty. Work it up to performance level, you could go punting with it! Come on! You'll never get a better bargain.'

  The killers stand their appointment at the top of the stairs. Bald/ Blond/Black puts his gun to the man's temple. The other one -- Eddie, believe it or not, has come to think of him as the 'nice' hitman -- raises his eyebrows in Eddie's direction, and, over the doomed man's gibbering pleading, offers the advice: 'I were you, Eddie, I'd take the elevator.'