Free Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed by Tim Lebbon Page B

had killed her. Growths on her chest and stomach. Bad blood. Life.
    I tried to open the can, but my fingers were too cold to slip under the ring-pull. I became frustrated, then angry, and eventually in my temper I threw the can to the floor. It struck the flagstones and one edge split, sending a fine yellowish spray of beer across the old kitchen cupboards. I cried out at the waste. It was a feeling I was becoming more than used to.
    “Hey,” Ellie said. She put one hand on my shoulder and removed it before I could shrug her away. “They’re saying we should tell someone.”
    “Who?” I turned to look at her, unashamed of my tears. Ellie was a hard bitch. Maybe they made me more of a person than she.
    She raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips. “Brand thinks the army. Rosalie thinks the Fairy Underground.”
    I scoffed. “Fairy-fucking-Underground. Stupid cow.”
    “She can’t help being like that. You ask me, it makes her more suited to how it’s all turning out.”
    “And how’s that, exactly?” I hated Ellie sometimes, all her stronger-than-thou talk and steely eyes. But she was also the person I respected the most in our pathetic little group. Now that Boris had gone.
    “Well,” she said, “for a start, take a look at how we’re all reacting to this. Shocked, maybe. Horrified. But it’s almost like it was expected.”
    “It’s all been going to shit…“I said, but I did not need to continue. We had all known that we were not immune to the rot settling across society, nature, the world. Eventually it would find us. We just had not known when.
    “There is the question of who did it,” she said quietly.
    “Or what.”
    She nodded. “Or what.”
    For now, we left it at that.
    “How’s Charley?”
    “I was just going to see,” Ellie said. “Coming?”
    I nodded and followed her from the room. The beer had stopped spraying and now fizzled into sticky rivulets where the flags joined. I was still thirsty.

    Charley looked bad. She was drunk, that was obvious, and she had been sick down herself, and she had wet herself. Hayden was in the process of trying to mop up the mess when we knocked and entered.
    “How is she?” Ellie asked pointlessly.
    “How do you think?” He did not even glance at us as he tried to hold on to the babbling, crying, laughing and puking Charley.
    “Maybe you shouldn’t have given her so much to drink,” Ellie said. Hayden sent her daggers but did not reply.
    Charley struggled suddenly in his arms, ranting and shouting at the shaded candles in the corners of the room.
    “What’s that?” I said. “What’s she saying?” For some reason it sounded important, like a solution to a problem encoded by grief.
    “She’s been saying some stuff,” Hayden said loudly, so we could hear above Charley’s slurred cries. “Stuff about Boris. Seeing angels in the snow. She says his angels came to get him.”
    “Some angels,” Ellie muttered.
    “You go down,” Hayden said. “I’ll stay here with her.” He wanted us gone, that much was obvious, so we did not disappoint him.
    Downstairs, Brand and Rosalie were hanging around the mobile phone. It had sat on the mantelpiece for the last three weeks like a gun without bullets, ugly and useless. Every now and then someone would try it, receiving only a crackling nothing in response. Random numbers, recalled numbers, numbers held in the phone’s memory, all came to naught. Gradually it was tried less—every unsuccessful attempt had been more depressing.
    “What?” I said.
    “Trying to call someone,” Brand said. “Police. Someone.”
    “So they can come to take fingerprints?” Ellie flopped into one of the old armchairs and began picking at its upholstery, widening a hole she’d been plucking at for days. “Any replies?”
    Brand shook his head.
    “We’ve got to do something,” Rosalie said. “We can’t just sit here while Boris is lying dead out there.”
    Ellie said nothing. The telephone hissed its