The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

She isn’t going to think about the other part. That will come later. She has to get through this one stage at a time, step by step. If she thought about the other part she’d never be able to get this done. And she has to.

The lift chimes, and she’d never have believed that simple sound could fill her with such relief.

“We’re here,” she says, and steps out of the lift.

Dermot follows her down the same plain, dusty corridor he’s come down how many dozens, how many hundreds, of times before? He doesn’t know how many. Even he’s lost count. Neither she — the pretty little Detective Constable Stone — nor whichever senior officer awaits him in the room — will know.

Will it be Ryan, or McDonald? No — Carnegie, he thinks. It will be Carnegie’s turn now. Carnegie won’t know how many times Dermot’s come down this corridor and into this room. To perform his thankless task. To receive his grudging reward. But he could find out if he wanted. It will be in a file somewhere. In this country, everything has to go on file.

DC Stone opens the door that Dermot knows so well, the one with the frosted glass pane reinforced with its wire mesh. Odd. There’s a smear of blood on it, slowly drying.

Inside, at the desk, is Carnegie.

I was right, thinks Dermot. I always am.

Carnegie smokes.

He doesn’t offer one to Dermot. Or to Abbie, for that matter. Not that she cares. She has her own packet of Silk Cut. Carnegie favours Sovereign, a much stronger brand. High tar. There’s an ashtray on the tabletop. Fuck the smoking ban.

“We know there’s at least one in the city,” he says. “We need you to tell us where it is.”

Dermot pointedly wafts a hand in front of his face. Carnegie glowers and bashes out his half-smoked cigarette.

“What about my fee?” Dermot asks.

“Fee?” Carnegie spits the word out with loathing.

“My reward, then. For doing my bit. For being such a good boy. For saving so many lives.”

Carnegie’s eyes are slits. His hands are clenched, the knuckles white. His mouth looks like a half-healed scar. Then he breathes out and his face goes slack.

“Your reward’s waiting downstairs,” he says. “When you deliver your side of the bargain. You know what we want. Where is it?”

Dermot smiles, nods, licks his lips. It’s the last that Abbie finds the worst. The anticipation in it.

He closes his eyes. Prayers his hands together. Smiles. Parts his lips oh-so-slightly and spit-bubbles go pop-pop-pop.

He opens his eyes and his hands drop. His eyes are bright.

He speaks, rapidly. Abbie’s already scribbling, transcribing it in shorthand. Then he’s done and she’s picking up the phone.

Sirens wail in the night, and three police vans tear up Oldham Road into an area of bleak, functional looking sixties era council housing and old mills and factories either abandoned or converted to new purposes. Most of the district’s one big industrial estate.

At one point along the roadside, a rank of three shops. The buildings are abandoned, boarded up and covered in geological layers of flyposters. The vans screech to a halt outside them. Armed police officers pile out. Some carry shotguns, other submachine guns.

Doors are kicked in and boots thunder up the stairs.

What they’re looking for is on the topmost floor.

All the upstairs rooms of the three shops have been knocked together, creating a huge open space.

Things lie on the floor. Five of them. Still asleep. Waiting to wake up. They are vast. They have long talons. Longer jaws. And worse.

Guns are aimed.

Yellow eyes open. Something wakes, leaps up, howling, screeching, clawed hands aloft.

A dozen guns fire simultaneously. The flat, thundery blasts of shotguns, the staccato splitting cracks of submachine guns. The rearing thing is danced back across the room and collapses to the bare, rotted floorboards, writhing, spurting, and then is still.

Then the guns aim down, at the other things, and they fire again.

They don’t stop until nothing is left alive on the floors or walls of that upstairs room.

The phone rings.

Dermot watches Carnegie pick it up. The big man nods and grunts. DC Stone is watching all of this, her eyes darting back and forth from one of them to the other.

Carnegie replaces the handset.

“They found them. There were five of them. Just like you said. They got them all.” He doesn’t want to say the next bit, but Dermot has his eyebrows raised and is demanding it, tacitly. Just like he always does. And so Carnegie says it. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” says Dermot. “Now—” he strives to keep his voice level; to show excitement would be unseemly “—there’s the small matter of my reward.”

“Yes,” says Carnegie thickly, not looking up at him, looking down at the surface of his desk instead. “Detective Constable Stone?”

“Sir?” says Stone at last.

Carnegie still doesn’t look up from the top of his desk. “Take him down to the cells. It’s cell number thirteen.”

“Ah,” says Dermot. “How apt.”

Carnegie doesn’t look up or reply.

Stone’s face is ashen. She’s even shaking slightly. “If you’ll just come with me,” she says.