Falling Apart by Jane Lovering Page A

that moment because nothing will ever happen again that matters.
    â€˜I’ll think about it.’ I took a deep breath. ‘But leaving Liam in charge of the office wouldn’t be a great move. He might get ideas above his station, and Liam’s proper station in life is a bare platform with one train a week. In Wales. In the rain.’
    Dad smiled at me. It was a complicated smile in which bravery in the face of pain was tinged with sympathy and something like fear. ‘You go and do what you have to, love,’ he said quietly. ‘Just remember what I said.’
    I hugged them both and left the hospital, not liking to ask for clarification on exactly which things I was supposed to remember. Probably not anything grammatical, I thought, wiping my hand over my eyes so that I could meet the outside world looking my usual self. Or about not staying out after midnight – that was years ago. My brain skittered around the things he’d said recently, about being careful and things not always being as they appeared, but those thoughts all came layered under the plastic sheeting of Sil, and what he’d done. They needed careful unpacking, consideration. Coffee would help, I thought, and turned to walk to the office.
    As I passed under the ancient curved archway leading to High Petergate, I noticed a zombie walking ahead of me. Well, I say walking, it was more of a kind of localised shuffle: it looked as though he’d got his legs on backwards – not altogether unlikely given zombie tendencies to sew or stick on anything that had fallen off with more haste than mindfulness of biological design. I didn’t pay him much attention; zombies usually worked the night shift, needing no sleep and not much in the way of wages, so finding one heading through the streets at this time in the evening was normal enough, and, since I hadn’t had a call-out, he was unlikely to be out of area. However,
something
, call it the second-nature of someone who’d spent the last few years sharing an office with Liam and a series of unreliable electrical devices, made me look up. Jerked me out of my dark thoughts and worry and made me pay attention. When I did, I saw the man following him.
    Not just following. Not innocently walking behind, looking for an opportunity to overtake, but actual
following
. I started to watch, one hand cautiously resting on the butt of the tranq gun – okay, shooting humans wasn’t actually
allowed
, but it wasn’t totally forbidden either since no-one had ever thought it would come up, and Liaison worked both ways.
    The man … the
human
man was vaguely familiar, in the way that sends up a mental flag saying ‘not pleasant’, and I ran through my brain’s album of troublemakers. He was average height and stocky, with square shoulders and wide hips giving him the look of a walking shoe box.
    My brain was suddenly flooded with memories.
A crowd, celebrating
 …
fists raised in triumph
. Just like the gang of other like-minded souls preparing to harass Ryan, the zombie who’d been filling his veins with glue-mix. Those Britain for Humans nutjobs who really believed that Otherworlders should be despatched without mercy, ‘Sent to the hell they came from,’ as they put it in their sound-bite-friendly way. They thought that the vamps, zombies, weres and all the other species that had come through when the planet had suffered a brief magnetic flux, were a constant threat and should be annihilated, not tolerated or accommodated. This brought them into conflict with me on quite a regular basis – they probably had me on the ‘to be dealt with as collateral damage’ list, always supposing they could spell ‘collateral’ and, indeed, knew what it meant.
    It was good to give my brain pure action to focus on. Watching these two, thinking about work, pushed the sick dread down from behind my eyes and I took my first deep breath