Decay Inevitable by Conrad Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

injuries.
    But they wouldn’t give her the chance. Again the needle sought her armpit, again the injection flooded her with bitter blue panic, the electric juice they’d pumped her with flirting with heart and brain as though it might violently dissolve them like sodium in water.
    She flailed backwards, tipping up over an obstacle, landing heavily on her backside.
    “What do you want?” she asked, but it came out all wrong, her lips failing to coalesce around the words as she uttered them. Another glut of sputum loosed itself from her lungs. She did not feel good. Someone must have understood her question however, for:
    “We need you to find someone. We need you to end someone’s life for us. It’s a job beyond me or my men.”
    The light bleeding into her eyes was less painful now, allowing her to make out a tall figure in a black coat, the lapels of which were raised high to his cheekbones. His eyes were hard and grey but surrounded with creases and crinkles that softened him, gave him an avuncular air. “My name is Gleave, by the way. Daniel Gleave. I was sent by friends to collect you.”
    Cheke spat again and shivered. She was covered in thin, greyish slime. It was matted in her hair and she could feel it leaking from between her legs. Her brain had no concept of what had gone before a few minutes ago; her earliest memory, it seemed, was of the trauma-thrill of bright light scouring her head and the subsequent creep of form as she perceived figures through foggy, untrained eyes. The fugue that prevented her from dipping beneath the barrier to her memory was not so solid that it had severed her links with any of her abilities. She was, after all, recalling the benefits of torpor. She felt the instinct of attack swooning through her.
    The man, Gleave, approached her, and curled a blanket around her shoulders. “I’m sorry for the haste,” he said, in a voice bound up with smells she could not place but which were of comfort to her. “It must have been a shock to the system, to say the least. But we are in great danger and we need your help. There have been unforeseen developments in spheres we thought were long extinct.”
    Another voice, clipped, withering, in the background: “Unforeseen by some of us, Gleave. Not all.”
    Gleave held the blanket tightly around her and ignored the interruption. She was able to focus on his nails as his fingers made shallow dents in the fabric. Neatly cut nails, with a milky white cuticle, a dull sheen. She felt his fingers warming her skin, little pads of energy. Her pores opened and gulped his proximity, starved for the nourishment that she required to function.
    “I need to feed,” she managed, and the man nodded.
    “I know.”
    He led her through a door into a corridor flanked with plants bearing heavy, waxy leaves. A man’s voice said: “Who the fuck is she?”
    “Where is this?” she asked, her voice growing stronger all the time. Her eyes were pulling in shapes much faster now, although their edges bled colour into the air, making everything seem dreamlike and unreal.
    “You don’t need to know that just yet,” he soothed. “We’ll get you somewhere safe and then you can rest. You’ve made quite a journey. We don’t want you spoilt in any way.”
    The floor they walked on was flooded with soft, red carpet; she couldn’t see her bare feet land, it was so deep. She could smell something rich and dense that made her stomach churn with desire. The man’s hand was gentle but steady upon her arm, staying her, and she fought with the desire to sap him. It would appear that any allies would be hard to find. She didn’t want to alienate the first person to help her.
    Up ahead, a door gave on to a room awash with blood. Her mouth filled with drool.
    “She’s fresh,” said Gleave. “She helped bring you to us.”
    Cheke moved away from him. Her eyes much more comfortable in the false night of the room, she was able to see the woman immediately, slumped in her