these insects, buzzing crazy over the smell of dead flesh. Fat creatures, hundreds of them. We had to let off a sonic bomb before we could get our hands on the burial mound.
Some dogtramp had found it, snuffling for food through patches of mist, running scared from what he had stumbled across.
Midnight. Call the cops. Call up Sibyl Jones.
I was still awake when the call came through, charged up by what I had learned from listening to Gumbo YaYa’s station, and from what I had read in Coyote’s diary. Outpourings of love towards Boda in every line of the last few pages, and a scrap of paper lodged there: a love poem to the taxi-dog signed in Boda’s firm hand. Will he push me again up the shaky path, this is how it started. Will he push me again up the shaky path I crave, and pull me down in the waving grass to drown. The writing was familiar. Also, a ticket for next Thursday’s Vurtball game at Manchester City, slipped between pages. According to the diary, Coyote had invited her to the match. Something in the diary’s tale of love got to me; a sense of being desired.
I was naked from the waist up after reading it, kneeling over the cot in Belinda’s old bedroom. My stomach was lodged against the cot’s rim, so that my breasts were lowered toward the baby. My left nipple was being sucked at. There was no milk, of course, I was long past that juiciness. Still, my Jewel, my secret son, was feeding on something. He had started to sneeze rather badly during the night. I applied a wet flannel to his eyes and his nose. He gargled some words at me. I could only trust they were words of love, because there was no translation available. My Jewel had a dead tongue. Over the Shadow I found some scraps of love. I comforted Jewel for a while, resting his mis-shapen head in my arms, and then letting him suck once more. The telephone called me from this motherly job. Which made what we found in the park even harder to take.
The ride to Alexandra was a ride through a spring garden; tiny shoots were breaking through the tarmac of the roads, and the passing shops and houses were soft-edged with greenery. News was coming from the experts that we were heading for the worst hayfever of all time, even worse than during Fecundity 10. In the park, we found a bulbous sculpture of soil, twisted flowers rising from the earth, a fetid stench. Zombie found and accounted for. That creature had hiked his last car home; a final drop-off in unsanctified ground. A resting place in the petals. His body formed out of dirt, totally transformed.
Zero was waiting for me there. “Know what, Smokey? It saddens me to find the perp like this. Because I had one great urge to put this Zombie down. That would really make Kracker smile. And when the master smiles, I smile. But now the bastard Zombie has gotten himself killed, and I’m left with nothing.”
“You want to put Zombies down? We used to do that to dogs.”
“Save the weeping, Smokey. Zombies aren’t human.”
“They’re partly human.” I knelt down beside the body.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“My job.”
“We don’t need a fucking Shadow-search, Jones.”
“I’ll decide that.”
“Christ, if you stepped on a cockroach, you’d Shadow-search that, wouldn’t you? The case is closed. Get out of there.”
“Too late, dogcop.”
I was already dropping down into dead thoughts, with fingers of smoke drifting through to the mind of a Zombie corpse…
Blackness… no flickerings… no signs of life… half-life… any kind of last life… fruitless… my shadows drifting through the layers of darkness… deeper yet… the darkness growing… so cold… layers of death unfolding… and then enfolding me… the need to pull free… back to life… and then… a sparkle of light in the hidden depths… bursting… the world… bursting the world with greenness… too much colour to be taking… large sucking flowers at my shadow throat… fronds of love… flowers on fire…
Some dogtramp had found it, snuffling for food through patches of mist, running scared from what he had stumbled across.
Midnight. Call the cops. Call up Sibyl Jones.
I was still awake when the call came through, charged up by what I had learned from listening to Gumbo YaYa’s station, and from what I had read in Coyote’s diary. Outpourings of love towards Boda in every line of the last few pages, and a scrap of paper lodged there: a love poem to the taxi-dog signed in Boda’s firm hand. Will he push me again up the shaky path, this is how it started. Will he push me again up the shaky path I crave, and pull me down in the waving grass to drown. The writing was familiar. Also, a ticket for next Thursday’s Vurtball game at Manchester City, slipped between pages. According to the diary, Coyote had invited her to the match. Something in the diary’s tale of love got to me; a sense of being desired.
I was naked from the waist up after reading it, kneeling over the cot in Belinda’s old bedroom. My stomach was lodged against the cot’s rim, so that my breasts were lowered toward the baby. My left nipple was being sucked at. There was no milk, of course, I was long past that juiciness. Still, my Jewel, my secret son, was feeding on something. He had started to sneeze rather badly during the night. I applied a wet flannel to his eyes and his nose. He gargled some words at me. I could only trust they were words of love, because there was no translation available. My Jewel had a dead tongue. Over the Shadow I found some scraps of love. I comforted Jewel for a while, resting his mis-shapen head in my arms, and then letting him suck once more. The telephone called me from this motherly job. Which made what we found in the park even harder to take.
The ride to Alexandra was a ride through a spring garden; tiny shoots were breaking through the tarmac of the roads, and the passing shops and houses were soft-edged with greenery. News was coming from the experts that we were heading for the worst hayfever of all time, even worse than during Fecundity 10. In the park, we found a bulbous sculpture of soil, twisted flowers rising from the earth, a fetid stench. Zombie found and accounted for. That creature had hiked his last car home; a final drop-off in unsanctified ground. A resting place in the petals. His body formed out of dirt, totally transformed.
Zero was waiting for me there. “Know what, Smokey? It saddens me to find the perp like this. Because I had one great urge to put this Zombie down. That would really make Kracker smile. And when the master smiles, I smile. But now the bastard Zombie has gotten himself killed, and I’m left with nothing.”
“You want to put Zombies down? We used to do that to dogs.”
“Save the weeping, Smokey. Zombies aren’t human.”
“They’re partly human.” I knelt down beside the body.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“My job.”
“We don’t need a fucking Shadow-search, Jones.”
“I’ll decide that.”
“Christ, if you stepped on a cockroach, you’d Shadow-search that, wouldn’t you? The case is closed. Get out of there.”
“Too late, dogcop.”
I was already dropping down into dead thoughts, with fingers of smoke drifting through to the mind of a Zombie corpse…
Blackness… no flickerings… no signs of life… half-life… any kind of last life… fruitless… my shadows drifting through the layers of darkness… deeper yet… the darkness growing… so cold… layers of death unfolding… and then enfolding me… the need to pull free… back to life… and then… a sparkle of light in the hidden depths… bursting… the world… bursting the world with greenness… too much colour to be taking… large sucking flowers at my shadow throat… fronds of love… flowers on fire…
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