The Forever Man (W.A.R.P. 3)

‘And remember that music you liked? The swing jazz stuff. Mulatu Astatke. That guy was cool, Rosa. We danced at the office party, remember? I stood on your toes.’

The squid huffed and a ripple ran along its tentacles. It might have been a laugh.

‘We’re on the job, Fuentes,’ said Pointer. ‘We took an oath, remember? We got a motto. Fidelity, bravery and …’

‘Integrity,’ said the squid. Well, it didn’t say the word exactly, just snapped its beak four times. Once for each syllable. But there was definitely intelligence there.

Pointer kicked his paws in the air and pressed ahead. ‘Our principal is in danger, Special Agent. We have a hostile in the vicinity.’

The squid rose a full thirty feet higher, tentacles shivering with rage.

‘Oooooh?’ it said, spraying Pointer full in the snout. ‘Ooooh?’

Pointer stuck his nose earthward in Garrick’s direction. ‘You see that pasty-looking streak of misery who thinks he’s some kind of tough-guy pirate?’

The squid swivelled its eyes till they fixed on Albert Garrick.

‘Sssssss,’ it said, nodding repeatedly. ‘Sssssss.’

‘That’s our guy,’ said Pointer. ‘You got the green light, Fuentes. Take him out. Extreme prejudice.’

The squid spared one tentacle to tumble Pointer into a bed of moss and lichen while the rest of it descended on Garrick like a mottled megaton bomb.

Pointer thought he must be stunned or mistaken, because it seemed from his vantage point that, just before impact, Garrick threw back his head and laughed.

The squid came down on Garrick and drove him into the soft earth, throwing up a great shower of mud and sod that engulfed the hunting party, and it seemed clear that even the Witchfinder, who had battled witchcraft in all its sly and obvious forms, could not emerge unscathed from this tussle. Backwards along the border of the lake they drove, the squid’s great legs powering them onward with an undulating corkscrew motion. It was a fierce struggle that saw the battling pair plough through soft ground and sharp shale.

Garrick’s skull cracked more than once as the squid forced him down on to blunt rocks and even dashed his brains against a tree trunk, but, although the Witchfinder’s frankly ghoulish laughter had trailed off, still his face held a rictus and his hands strove for the squid’s cauldron head. Inch by inch he hauled himself closer, repeating over and over in his loud voice, ‘I smell magic. I smell magic.’ Words that boomed like cannon-shot across the fens in spite of the chaos.

Garrick was pinioned inside a whirlwind of destruction, but no sooner was he wounded than the quantum particles in his very marrow clamoured to heal him. With the activation of the healing foam, he felt the colour return to his cheeks.

Oh, happy day, he thought. A ghoul no more.

But later for vanity, Alby, Garrick scolded himself. Now for action. The audience has a certain expectation of their Master Witchfinder.

For any other human this would surely have been a fatal entanglement. Most humans would simply have died of fright at the sight of the giant squid, a monster from their nightmares come to thrashing, sinewy life. But Albert Garrick was not most humans. In fact, he was not mostly human. He was a mutation and, unlike the mutation he was fighting, Garrick had been augmented. He was better, in ways he was discovering as he went.

I sees different, he thought, thinking in Cockney. I sees magic.

The monster with which he grappled had an aura about it. Nah. Not ‘it’. Her.

Rosa Fuentes. The information was coming through her fingertips.

More FBI. Will they never learn?

Apparently they would not, so now Garrick applied himself to his task with glee and fervour, hauling himself along the squid’s grapplers, ignoring its hissings and thumpings as best he could. Time after time he was knocked back or ploughed under, but, strong as the creature was, Albert Garrick was tireless and steely.

The world seemed a maelstrom around him, yet somehow here in the belly of the struggle it felt strangely calm. Garrick sank his fingers into the very matter of which the squid was composed and saw that the quantum foam was his to control; he took it into himself and felt stronger with every gulp of matter that he stole from the squid. So, as his strength grew, the squid lost its power.

I am growing the hair of Samson, thought Garrick. This matter is mine to control.

The squid sensed the loss of its mightiness and tried to discard Garrick, but it was futile. He was now like a tick in her flesh. What had once been Rosa Fuentes panicked and increased her thrashing, a keening squeal erupting from her beak, and still Garrick dragged himself forward, ignoring the piercing sound and batterings.

Round and round they went, inscribing great circles in the soft ground, throwing up great wings of atomized lake water. And somehow Garrick was in the ascendant, beating down the giant squid until their revolutions slowed and they slid to a blubbery halt against a slab of moss-covered rock.

‘I wants it,’ he hissed at her, forgetting his toff’s theatre voice, all barrow boy now. ‘I wants it, d’you hear me, creature?’

He crawled along the squid’s shrinking form, reeling her in like a fisherman’s rope until he was at last at the bulbous head. The eyes darted this way and that but could not escape Garrick. He sank his fingers into the dissolving flesh of the creature’s head and took the quantum foam from it, absorbing it into himself, his chest heaving from the effort, feeling sparks of information and energy rattle through his veins.

Knowledge is power. Energy is understanding.

Garrick felt the particles speak to him, and understood now the wormhole in its entirety and knew suddenly what his destiny was.

Of course, he thought. Of course.

He continued to siphon foam from the creature. The squid shuddered and shrank, becoming amorphous and vague, its limbs flopping ineffectively and its giant head deflating – yet still Garrick bore down, greedy for every drop. A shroud of mist collected around them and glowed orange, strange shadows flickered alarmingly, and the hunting party shrank back from the otherworldly show.

Inside the cocoon, the giant squid disappeared, reduced to a two-dimensional representation on the back of a young Latin lady, lying in the mud on the brink of death and wearing the neoprene jumpsuit of the WARP unit.

Garrick’s hand clasped her skull as though he might crush it, as indeed he intended to do, but not before delivering a gloating message.

‘My thanks to you, Rosa Fuentes,’ he said, all showman once more. ‘You have given me the key to this worl

d. And I shall use it to destroy everything you love.’

Rosa Fuentes blinked, then coughed, and the blood that ran from between her teeth was tinged with orange sparks. ‘Hostile,’ she said. ‘Hostile.’

Garrick chuckled. ‘Oh, I see. Yes, I am a hostile. I could be fairly called that.’

‘Hostile,’ said Rosa again, and from her side she pulled a large handgun that seemed like a cannon in her small fist and Garrick was so surprised that he could do no more than make a small ‘O’ shape with his mouth before Rosa raised the gun and pointed the barrel at his face.

‘Green light,’ said Fuentes, then shot Garrick between the eyes, sending him flying through the air and into the slimy depths of the still-churning lake, where he floated rapidly towards the middle like a punt poled from the bank. As the lake calmed, it was a strangely peaceful scene, with the sun finally poking through and the chirp of birdsong and the plume of smoke drifting from the hole in Garrick’s head.

‘Hostile down,’ said Rosa, and her arm flopped into the mud and the remaining seconds of life in her began to tick down.

Pointer was the first to move, possibly because of his training; he disentangled himself from the greenery where he had been deposited and ran straight to Rosa Fuentes, frantically nudging her.

‘Come on, Rosa,’ he said, though he was so upset that his voice had more dog in it than man. ‘Come on, Special Agent.’

Rosa dropped the gun in the mud. ‘Hey, hey, Pointer. Is that really you, compadre?’

Pointer licked her face; he couldn’t help himself. ‘Yeah, Rosa. Yeah, it’s me.’

Rosa smiled and her eyes flickered. She was barely there any more. ‘I was a squid for so long. It was torture.’

Pointer was miserable, his big doggy eyes matching how he felt. ‘I’m sorry, Rosa. I didn’t know. I would never have sent you in.’

Fuentes coughed again, then she was peaceful and opened her eyes. ‘No. No, thank you, Donnie. I’m free now. Free. And we got him, didn’t we?’

Pointer cast a quick glance over his haunch at the lake, where the men of Mandrake were wading towards Garrick. He noticed that the Witchfinder’s arms were already thrashing in the water.