I crossed the street, and made my way in.
Cut to-
The second scene came in two parts, but you couldn’t really see the join: the camera didn’t move – it was just that things in the frame jerked into existence. Same scene, different times. In total, it lasted maybe two minutes.
Amy and Kareem walking towards the camera.
They start from quite some distance away. You can see them turn a corner, far up at the top of the picture, and then they come strolling down into view.
Like a gentleman, he’s on the outside. I guess he’s ready to draw his sword and protect her from attackers on horseback. They stop at a building two up from the end of the street and he finds keys in his pocket. Extracts them. Unlocks the door and holds it open for her. They go inside.
Cut to the second half of the scene.
A van flicks into view outside the building. White with blackened windows. I can’t read the number plate, although the vehicle looks to be in reasonable condition and I figure it’s fairly new. There’s no sign as to how or when it got there, or how much videotape is missing in the interim. You have time to notice it appear, and then-
Bang.
There’s no sound on this part of the video, but you feel the noise just from seeing it: the door on Kareem’s building kicked open from the inside, and out comes one of the biggest men I’ve ever seen, carrying Amy, with three men following them out. The big man’s got her around the waist from behind, and she’s fighting, doubling up and lashing out. It was Amy who kicked the door open. One of the other remaining men gets in the back as well; another closes the door and gets into the driver’s seat.
The third man lights a cigarette, shakes out the match and throws it on the pavement.
The camera zooms in on him.
This close, he has a face made out of smeared blocks of colour. You blur your eyes and you get a better impression of him: young – mid thirties; slightly receding hair; narrowish face. Beyond that the details are invisible beneath smudges of colour. The image is badly distorted, both by the man moving his head and by the smoke drifting up from the bright, flaming orange star of the cigarette’s tip, which blurs out a good quarter of the screen.
He looks like an impressionist painting, on fire in one corner.
The man moves out of the frame.
The camera immediately zooms out to catch him climbing into the passenger side of the van. After a second the vehicle pulls away up the street. There are perhaps two seconds of emptiness.
Cut to-
Downtown.
When I was younger – thirteen or fourteen – I’d often go out walking in the middle of the night. My parents never liked it: they thought it was dangerous, but actually they couldn’t have been more wrong. There was never anybody around, dangerous or otherwise, and that was why I enjoyed it so much: if I’d wanted people and bustle, I’d have gone walking during the day, in the fucking sunshine. Instead, I’d walk down the middle of busy main roads, across teeming fields, scrape my shoes over the tarmac of jam-packed playgrounds, and there wouldn’t be anybody else around to spoil it all. The houses all seemed dead. The sky was black: full of blinking stars and wisps of cloud. No cars. Stray animals crossing the roads without noticing you; cats heading quickly from one meeting to the next. It was this whole other world: devastatingly quiet and endlessly different. If you’ve never walked around the streets in the middle of the night, then I don’t think you really know your home town at all.
Purely aesthetically, that’s what Downtown was like. It was shabby, but you were still walking down streets that were recognisable as streets. A lot of the buildings were boarded up, but the signs were still there, and more than one even seemed tenanted. The proper buildings – the ones still being used from top down – looked like enormous concrete pillars: cemented up to protect the white collar workers inside from what was down here, like supporting struts running down to an ocean bed of sharks.
Every little sound produced an echo. There were people dotted here and there, making no effort to hide from or approach any others. Some were shambling in the distance; others were talking quietly in abandoned offices, their voices drifting down like a quiet, mumbling word in your ear. You could hear the rush of a breeze, like a distant stream, but you couldn’t feel it, and the air was almost oppressively hot. You’d be able to sleep in a shirt and wake up happy, assuming you woke up at all.
Twenty or so storeys above street-level was Downtown’s sky: a black patchwork of star-less machinery. Most of the girders and pipes looked rusty and fractured – a support structure in need of some support – and all of it looked dark and shadowy. Water was dripping down everywhere. It was always night down here, and it was always raining: like some kind of quiet, noir Hell. There were occasional lights, but they didn’t seem to work too well, and so even the brightest bits of Downtown were bathed in a kind of dark, steely blue.
I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going, but like all good cities there were signposts to point the way. Most of them were artificial – just daubs on the walls or chalk marks on the streets: more like jottings for residents than a guide for outsiders. My plan was equally vague. I was going to wander around until I recognised a notice for something I’d seen in the video footage – Combo’s Deli or Fairway Street – or until somebody shot me. The odds were probably about even on each.
I’d reached a vague kind of crossroads when I first heard it. I’d actually stopped, because I was faced with three possible directions. But the two to left and right were named randomly, while the road straight ahead was called Fairway Avenue, so that seemed to be the way to go. If I was in the Fairways, chances are that I was in the right area and I’d find the Street eventually. I started to head off, and was halfway over the crossing when I heard it.
A tapping noise, far away to the right.
I turned to look; the sound immediately stopped. But I could see where it had been coming from: there were two figures standing side by side in the centre of the street, about two hundred metres away from where I’d stopped. Blue silhouettes, identities hidden by the pale, sickly backdrop of a streetlight behind them. They weren’t moving, but the left of the two was leaning on a cane.
Walter Hughes, I thought.
The figure on the right was standing straight, with what looked like an overcoat pulled tightly around him. Broad shoulders. Hands clasped in front.
But if Kareem was impossible, then this was impossible a hundred times over. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of physics and biology that I hadn’t quite killed Kareem, and that he’d staggered away from the scene after I’d gone. But Hughes was dead. His bodyguard was dead. If they weren’t dead, they would have got up, but the truth was that you just didn’t get up after what had happened to them. After what I’d done to them.
Although I couldn’t make out their faces, the two figures were very clearly watching me.
I watched them right back.
And after a few seconds, they turned and walked into a nearby doorway and were gone. Just like Kareem. The chit of their feet, and the tap of the cane echoed down the empty blue street, and then faded away to nothing.
It felt like my heart was singing in my chest.
In the distance, far over on the other side of Downtown, somebody laughed. It was an insane sound: high and long, dying away into a sad moan. There was a moment of silence, and then more voices came, like dogs answering the call. Jeers and laughs and giggles. Somebody barked -whoo whoo whoo – and the sounds seemed to fill the air, circling around me. I knew it was only the sound of people, but it made my hair stand on end.