Quantum of nightmares, p.27
Quantum of Nightmares, page 27
Mary watched, appalled. On the screens she was wearing her nanny weeds, the same twinset and sensible shoes she now wore, the same cute little cap and the blue wool coat with the big buttons. They even had her bag in focus. A coughing fit racked her, and by the time she could focus again the news had moved on. She glanced around, half expecting to see a tide of bounty hunters converging on her like shopping mall zombies, but nobody was watching. The other family groups in the food court were either queuing or inhaling their chicken and chips or pizza slices or whatever. There’s still time, Mary realized, trembling with tension. She’d have to ditch the nanny uniform and run, but—
“Nan?” Emily was staring up at her, with an expression of such baffled bewilderment that Mary’s treacherous heart tried to melt.
“What is it, dear?”
“Are we in trouble, Nan? Was it the trees?”
“No dear.” Not yet. Mary smiled.
“What’s happening?” Robert demanded.
“Nothing to worry about, eat your chips,” Mary said automatically as she unbuttoned her coat. She opened her bag and shoved the hat inside, shimmied her coat off and out from under the messenger’s strap and squeezed it after the hat, then rummaged around inside until she felt something. She pulled out a blonde wig. She held it under the tabletop, glanced around furtively, then ducked and yanked it over her scalp. Another swift look showed that nobody was watching—then she turned back to the table and found she had an underage audience. Emily stared at her accusingly; Lyssa was completely agog.
“Nan, you didn’t say you could do wigs!” Lyssa glowed with anticipation. “Can I have a wig, pretty please?”
Crap. “What kind of wig would you like, dear?”
“I want to be Marceline the Vampire Queen, only teenage—no, wait, I want … pigtails? Only rainbow pigtails like the one Harl—Harley?—wears in Big Trouble in Little Gotham. And a giant hammer!”
“You can have a hammer or you can have a wig,” Mary said sternly, “not both. And only one wig. Harley Quinn or Marceline?”
“Harley,” Lyssa pronounced thoughtfully, “I can get a big hammer later. I will paint it in rainbows and call it Skullcrusher and—”
Mary handed her a theatrical wig (still sealed in a cellophane bag), then showed her how to put it on and tuck her own hair under it (resulting in a somewhat lopsided Junior Harley cosplay, because Lyssa had too much hair of her own).
“I wanna wig, too,” declared Emily.
“Let me”—Mary reached into her bag—“see?” She looked at the plastic bag she’d just pulled out. “You can be a Terrortot! Look, you’re Laserwasp! You’re bright yellow and have a bouncy death ray on your head!” She thrust the package at Lyssa: “Be a dear and help your little sister get changed?” She checked her bag again. “Ethan can be Devilbaby”—a Crimson Television Krampus—“and that makes Robert Twinkster!” The purple Terrortot, with a pintle-mounted minigun atop his skull. “Lyssa, if you get bored with Harley I’ve got a Flytrap costume for you—”
“Don’t wanna,” said Lyssa, but she took it anyway.
Robert and Ethan looked doubtful. “It’ll be fun!” Mary said brightly: “Let’s all go to the bathroom and put on our costumes, then we’ll be on our way!”
The Terrortots were this month’s viral YouTube hit: a sardonic spoof of the ’90s hit babytainment TV show Teletubbies, featuring four brightly colored cyborg/alien apocalypse toddlers who sought to conquer the world before teatime, armed with built-in death rays and cuteness.
She sent Robert into the gents’ with a stern injunction to mind Ethan, then stood guard while Lyssa led Emily into the ladies’. Seeing nobody approaching up the corridor, she nipped into the disabled loo and grabbed a quick-change outfit from her bag. By the time the four alien cyborgs emerged (the boys’ hands were suspiciously dry, but Mary had no fucks left to give), she was in jeans, a biker jacket, a glossy black bob, and sunglasses. “Come along, boys and girls,” she told her wards, “we have miles to go—”
That’s when she saw the approaching mall cop.
He was middle-aged and portly, clearly not in great physical shape, and this being a British mall rather than an American one, he was unarmed except for a walkie-talkie and an officious attitude the size of an aircraft carrier. “Hey, you!” he said, pointing at Mary and blocking the corridor—“Izzat you what was on the telly? You’d better come with me! Or else—”
Mary smiled brightly: “Ethan? Emily?”
“Dakka-dakka-dakka-ZOOM!” shouted Devilbaby, leaping up and down and unleashing a cloud of buzzing robot murder hornets on the security guard. “Death to humans! Eat death, human scum! Watch me destroy all humans!” Laserwasp stood silently beside her brother, thumb in the general vicinity of her mouth, as green vinelike tendrils sprouted from the bottom of her costume and slithered towards their convulsing victim.
“We’re leaving now,” Mary announced, turning and marching smartly towards the emergency fire exit. She pushed the crash bar. “Come along, boys and girls!” The fire alarm drowned out the guard’s screams of terror. She paused for a quick head count. Robert was lingering on the threshold, looking back wistfully. “Smartly, Twinkster!” she snapped.
“That’s not my—” The freshly minted Terrortot saw her expression and clammed up.
Mary relented. “You can take down the next one,” she told him. “And you, Lyssa, wouldn’t you enjoy that, too?” A green velour Flytrap bounced up and down in delight. “Now fetch your brother and sister and let’s hop to it, we have to acquire another”—she glanced up and down the bare-walled concrete passage leading to the car park—“van?”
They emerged in a commercial parking annex at the back of the mall. It was neither the main public car park nor the loading bays for full-sized trucks, but a smaller area for local delivery vehicles. Mary was confronted with a cornucopia of white Ford Transits: box vans, regular vans, long wheelbase models, one with windows and seating for passengers—bingo.
She darted towards it, lifting the flap of her bag and reaching into the side pocket where the keys lurked. She fumbled around. The pocket had gone, but something cold and metallic, clawlike, grabbed her wrist—
“Really, Dad?” Her voice cracked: “Did you have to do this right now?”
An ominous electric buzz vibrated up her arm and she tugged experimentally. Whatever-it-was was trying to suck her arm in—no, it was climbing her arm, enveloping her in chilly pinching caterpillar tracks and G-clamps and who-knew-what mechanisms.
“Nan?” Twinkster was staring at her, head tilted to one side.
The mechanical snake-leech-thing continued to climb her radius and ulna: it had reached her elbow. Shreds of leather and fabric from her jacket and shirt spewed out of the bag. They smelled burnt. She suppressed the urge to scream in frustration and instead gave the Banks children a brittle smile: “This is all perfectly normal!” she trilled at them, momentarily forgetting that she’d ditched her nanny disguise and was free to be herself again. “It happens every so often!” The bag was one of her brilliant but crackbrained father’s creations, and like everything else he made, every so often it malfunctioned. Most of the time it coughed up wardrobe props it manufactured or stored in some kind of pocket dimension, but there seemed to be an Igor in there as well—one of Dad’s mad science robot assistants—and sometimes it got bored and made shit up. It was supposed to give her whatever tool circumstances demanded, but right now it seemed to think she needed a power-assisted exoskeleton instead of a set of keys.
“Swiving clunge-munching”—she gave up the effort not to swear in front of the kids and gave the bag-strap a good firm yank—“fuck.” The bag dropped to the ground. Her arm from the shoulder down was sheathed in gleaming steel, wrapped in a nest of pneumatic hoses and articulated joints. She flexed her shiny fingers, staring at them in disbelief. When she touched fingertips to thumb she felt skin, but to a first approximation her arm had turned full cyborg. “Fuck,” she repeated faintly, then re-slung the bag over her opposite shoulder. It felt oddly light in her machine-arm’s grip, although it hung heavy on her flesh-and-blood collarbone. I hope I’ve still got flesh left under all this, she thought uneasily, then put her game face back in place for the children: “Right-o!”
She marched up to the Sunshine Holidays minibus as if nothing had happened, grabbed the driver’s door handle, and watched it snap off in her fingers. “Shit.”
“That’s a bad word! You swore!” accused the red Terrortot. Mary ignored him, taking deep breaths as she tried not to panic.
If her bag was malfunctioning, was Dad’s condition worsening? Everybody knew that if you overused superpowers the Metahuman Associated Dementia was more likely to get you. Mary had a phobia of MAD. As a mad scientist’s beautiful daughter, she was already at risk of inheriting the condition. In a matter of months, it had turned her father from a kindly but absentminded man who wanted to solve world hunger into a very unstable genius with a tendency to cackle maniacally and play with giant robots. Mary shivered. Maybe she relied too heavily on the magic bag. It was far less violent than her own talent, which drew entirely the wrong kind of attention when she used it. But if Dad was declining again, not only would he need more specialized—expensive—care, the tool Mary relied on to fund the care in question might be on the edge of crapping out.
“Shit.” Mary flexed her bionic hand. The sensation of steel tendons slithering across ratcheted knuckles and cunningly flexible plates was indescribable but disturbing. But what if … She stared at the keyhole in the van’s door, then extended her index finger to its full length. It kept growing, then the tip opened like a flower and sprouted a torsion bar, a pick, and an oddly esoteric rake. She touched the lock and felt the pins engage with the top joint of her index finger, which smoothly rotated of its own accord until the lock clicked. “All aboard, girls and boys!” she called as she opened the sliding door to the passenger area behind her.
“Nan’s a Terminator!” Twinkster told his siblings. “Wicked!” Mary opened her bag and pulled out Twinkster’s Maimstation Portable, then a baby triffid for Laserwasp, and a My Little Unicorn playset for Devilbaby to animate for Flytrap. Then she stuck the top joint of her thumb in the ignition and fired up the van.
She had three hundred and twenty kilometers to drive, four rambunctious Terrortots to wrangle, and her face was all over the TV news. Pulling on a pair of dark glasses seemed mandatory. She didn’t dare check the fuel gauge: it felt like the job was jinxed. But as long as the bag worked some of the time she wasn’t entirely on her uppers. The time to start to really worry would come if Dad’s creation flaked out and she needed something more substantial than a smile and the whiplash voice of authority to keep the kids in line. Say, if the police caught up with them. Never mind Mr. and Mrs. Banks.
If that happened, she’d have to use her own powers.
Which could get very bloody, very fast.
* * *
On Monday morning, Wendy rose early, put on her gray work suit, dropped by the office to update her time sheet, then caught the tube to the supermarket to continue her investigation.
Her first stop was HR, to visit Jennifer and confirm whether she was indeed the officiating priestess from the church. But Jennifer wasn’t in; instead she found Amy, hunched over her desk and scribbling rapidly in a notebook. Wendy paused in the doorway. Amy’s face was set in a mask of concentration. She chewed absentmindedly on a stray lock of green hair, oblivious to the outside world as she extended an intricate inkscape across a page of cartridge paper. Her position was suggestive, and when Wendy glanced at the ceiling, sure enough, Amy was out of view of both of the camera domes covering the desks.
Wendy smoothed her expression into one of disinterest. Then she knocked on the door frame and entered.
Amy jerked upright and flailed for a moment as she flipped her sketchbook facedown, an expression of horror flashing across her face. “I can, uh, I can explain—”
“It’s all right,” Wendy reassured her. She pulled the door shut. Sketching on company time was obviously a sacking offense, going by Amy’s reaction. Or maybe Amy was simply afraid of authority, like so many of the instinctively law-abiding. Wendy indicated the cameras: “Are there microphones in here as well, or can we talk?”
“There would be microphones, if Jennifer hadn’t set the Facilities budget for her office to zero two years ago,” Amy said nervously. Her gaze flickered to the closed door, as if she feared a red-robed Jennifer might pounce at any moment, shrieking, Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
“I was hoping to speak to her. Is she out for the morning?”
“Morning and lunchtime, maybe until midafternoon. It’s another of her off-site meetings.” Amy sat up and stretched, with an audible clicking of tortured joints. “What can I do for you?”
Wendy wasn’t going to let her off that easily. “What’s your project?” she asked.
“Noth—” Amy grabbed for the sketchbook, but Wendy was faster. As she flipped the book open, she was merciful: a twitch of her imagination summoned a floor-standing conference display banner between the camera and the naked page. But whatever Wendy had expected to find—I HATE BIG BROTHER, perhaps—wasn’t there. Instead, a beautifully detailed dragon uncurled from the page and glared up at her, channeling Jennifer’s malicious stare with eyebrow-arched precision. Twin puffs of smoke curled from its nostrils as it spread membranous bat-wings that spanned the desktop. It hissed peevishly, a rainbow of colors racing across its diffraction-grating scales: then it inhaled and sneezed.
“Hey!” Wendy leapt backwards, only just avoiding the puff of flame. The dragon crouched on its haunches then sprang into flight, barely avoiding her hair as it flapped towards the door. Clearly peeved to find its path blocked, the miniature firedrake did a midair backflip and folded its wings, sneezed again, then plummeted, sneezing repeatedly, until it snapped its wings out and flitted under the desk. “Shit!”
“Office dragons always get hay fever,” Amy apologized—she did a lot of apologizing—then pulled her knees up defensively. “You mustn’t let them get too close to your nylons,” she warned.
“You don’t say.” Slightly shaken, Wendy leaned against the door, mentally giving thanks for her wool trouser suit and steel toe–capped DMs.
“He’ll grumble for a bit, then go to sleep under the desk—it’s like a cave, you see. Dragons are to caves as cats are to boxes. He’ll fade away after an hour or two.” Amy sounded wistful. “My sketches have no staying power.”
An hour or two? Wendy blinked in astonishment. If she didn’t maintain physical contact with her summoned manifestations they vanished in seconds. And living ones … “That’s pretty special,” she said grudgingly.
“Are you going to tell Jennifer?”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” A thought struck her: “Does Jennifer have any special powers? I mean, like … that?”
“I don’t think—” Amy’s brow furrowed. She paused. “You’re taking this awfully well.” Behind her, Wendy’s floor-standing banner evaporated. “Why?”
Wendy pulled out the other office chair and sat down. The grumbling from the legwell grew louder, but subsided when she pulled her feet out of the way. “I’m an investigator. We get to see lots of weird things these days. What you do on your coffee break is none of my business.” Although, a sneaky voice prompted her, it could be your next recruitment bonus. Especially if Amy found herself in need of a new job because Wendy—No, don’t go there. Dark side bad! “Do you know where Jennifer’s gone?”
“She’s giving her big presentation this morning to the Executive Committee at Head Office—on the pilot project she’s running at this branch.”
“Really?” Visions of CEOs strapped into face masks danced in Wendy’s mind.
“The, the system she’s come up with? We’ve only got preliminary financials so far so she’ll mainly be talking about the compliance wearables—that’s the equipment for keeping the bolshies in line—along with the control software, and our initial cost projections. But she’s pitching for a wider rollout at the logistics hubs.” Amy managed the difficult feat of simultaneously looking enthusiastic and mildly disgusted, as if she couldn’t quite understand why she was supporting Jennifer. “She should be back this afternoon.”
Amy’s face reminded Wendy of something she’d seen before, and after a few seconds the penny dropped: it was exactly how the cash room staff at Hamleys had looked, or the Pennine Bank clerks, as they came out from under Imp’s influence. “Huh. Well, that’s interesting. I’m going to need to access the store CCTV records this afternoon—I want to have another go at tracking down Mr. Hewitt—but this chat never happened, okay?” She pushed back her chair. “Can you page me when Jennifer gets back? I’d like a word with her.”
Down on the shop floor everything looked normal, or at least as normal as it ever looked to Wendy: just like any other supermarket, only with fewer regular humans and more muppets hauling produce and stocking shelves. There were, in fact, two masked muppets for every fleshface, to a first approximation. Wendy shivered. Hadn’t it been closer to a fifty-fifty split last week? I ought to keep count, she thought as she made a quick pass through the stockroom and glanced through the window into the manufacturing room. Faceless figures were lifting finished pieces of produce out of the maw of an open 3D printer and placing them on the conveyor belt to the vacuum sealing and labelling machines. Behind them another belt moved, carrying thin-sliced ham and pork chops.
