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  Nina muttered something quickly into the phone and then fell to her knees to begin a prayer of supplication, their one hope of returning Kevin to its dormant state.

  “Uriye Inai’e. Uriye Inai’khi rhul’eh. Qa-qa urh lhau-ee,” she intoned solemnly.

  The Kevin/runner mash-up began to make a noise. It sounded like someone blowing through a blade of grass. It sounded like a human voice that had been worked on for a long drug-fuelled weekend by a sound engineer. It sounded like the noise bagpipes would make if bagpipes could scream.

  “It does not sound happy,” said Morag, stepped briefly forward, and sprayed the creature before retreating again.

  Kevin tightened its leathery grip on its victim, like a window cleaner’s chamois wringing itself out.

  “Uriye Inai’e. Zhay te ayvh-ee shau.”

  The bagpipe shrill rose in pitch and volume. Kevin squeezed tighter, tighter, and then…

  Morag’s Uncle Ramsay had been a deep sea welder in his day and had spent his career at the bottom of the North Sea or any other sea where pipes needed laying or repairing for the oil industry. His tales of life spent living in pressurised chambers on the seabed seemed to fall into two main categories: Dutchmen’s fondness for fellatio and what happened when pressurisation chambers went wrong.

  The human body, when all is said and done, is a solid skeletal frame clothed in squishy fibres, jellies and liquid – all held in place by the tensile strength of skin. The human body is a water-filled balloon, and when it is put under sufficient pressure with only a small opening to escape through, only one thing will happen.

  It was pretty much as Uncle Ramsay had described. The runner’s lower legs came apart in a red mess as several gallons of blood, organs and crushed bones exploded onto the path. Then the gore-covered starfish unfurled into the mire and goo.

  “Not a virgin,” said Morag hoarsely.

  Kevin pinwheeled on tentacle tips and dropped into the canal. It disappeared with a fat ‘ploosh,’ leaving behind only ripples and a rapidly dispersing cloud of blood.

  “This is not good,” said Nina.

  “I know,” said Morag. “I saw it.”

  “I meant that Kevin is clearly getting desperate in his hunger.” She looked at the runner’s shoes poking out of the human soup. A spaghetti loop of headphone wire was draped over them and a tinny dance beat could just about be heard. “Either that or he’s a complete dick.”

  “My guess? Both,” said Morag. “It’ll just keep picking at the human buffet until it finds something it likes.”

  Nina gazed in the continuing direction of the canal.

  “The Gun Quarter and then Aston. It’s going to be a long time before it finds a virg–” Nina stopped, mouth open.

  “Thought of something?” said Morag.

  “Before all that,” she said, “this canal passes right by Birmingham Children’s Hospital.”

  She pressed her phone to her ear again.

  “Rod. I’ve just had a really horrible thought.”

  “Does it even matter then?” said Douglas. “Don’t get me wrong. You get used to futility in this place. I heard a woman complaining to the nurses that the jelly’s bad for her husband’s diabetes. If his heart lasts another day it’ll be a miracle, but she’s worried about his healthy eating.”

  “What do you mean, futility?” said Vivian.

  “You need a heart to feed to this creature. Kevin.”

  “That’s not its real name, you understand.”

  “And, eventually, it will find someone. Someone dies. And then, in the end, everyone dies. What’s the point? You’re not actually saving anyone.”

  “Oh, I think you know the answer to that already, Mr Hamilton.”

  Douglas coughed and gasped at the pain. Vivian held the plastic pot of orange jelly for him and supported his hand as he fed himself a teaspoonful.

  “I am not enamoured by metaphors or analogies,” said Vivian. “I find they tend to be used by those incapable of explaining themselves plainly. But given your situation, it seems apt that you should regard me – us – as being in the business of end-of-life care. Humanity is our patient. It is riddled with a necrotic infection, or cancers if you prefer. The patient will die. While some comfort the patient, help it come to terms with its own mortality, the surgeon works on the patient. A gangrenous finger is cut off to save the hand. An enflamed appendix or diabetic foot is removed to relieve pain. The foot is dead. The appendix or finger does not live on and still the patient will die. But it is a better death.”

  “A better death…” said Douglas emptily. “Am I just an infected finger you’re going to cut off and feed to the monsters?”

  “Yes,” said Vivian. “And we will do it humanely and painlessly.”

  “But I’ll still be dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, why the fuck would I let you do that?” Douglas gestured faintly with the spoon.

  “You’d be saving the life and sparing the torment of another human being.”

  “Yeah…” Douglas pulled a face and shook his head a fraction. “Not my… my bag, really.”

  “And I can pay you a considerable sum of money,” said Vivian.

  Douglas opened his mouth to point out the ludicrous flaw in that offer but was overtaken by another thought.

  “How much?”

  “A hundred thousand?” she suggested.

  “And I’d have – what?” He looked at the clock. Nearly five in the evening. “A couple of hours in which to spend it?”

  “You have family you care about. Loved ones. People you care about.”

  Douglas thought it over, relishing every second.

  “No. No. And no. I’d go so far as to say, I’d rather spend a hundred thousand on making various people’s lives utterly miserable.”

  Vivian took a pen and a notepad from her handbag. “You have some specific people in mind?”

  Rod hissed as he overshot the turning.

  He''d circled through the maze of one-way roads and sliproads around the Children’s Hospital for five minutes or more without actually getting there. Up ahead, the road rejoined the dual-carriageway flyover and, if he continued, he would be sucked into the city’s tunnel system again.

  “Bollocks to it!” Rod grunted, pulling on the handbrake, and swung the car through a No Entry sign. He pressed the accelerator and sped the wrong way down a one-way street.

  He clipped the wing mirror off a beeping Mercedes, startled (nearly terminally) a radiology technician on a zebra crossing and swung once more the wrong way onto Steelhouse Lane. Twenty seconds later, he braked hard whilst turning right and skidded to a stop in an ambulance bay. He stuffed a ‘Police Emergency’ note in the window, got out and headed towards the main entrance. Nina and a red-headed woman were coming from the other direction.

  Nina gave him a lazy wave of greeting.

  “Satellite picked up the tracer signal in this general area,” he said. “That was good work with the spray, by the way. Morag, isn’t it?”

  “Hi,” said Morag.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, you look cream crackered. Has Nina made you run all the way here?”

  “I’m fine,” said Morag unconvincingly. “It’s been a long, long day. So, do we know where Kevin is now?”

  Rod shook his head. “If it’s here, the tracer signal is being swamped by the radiology equipment and such. We’re going to have to sweep the place ourselves.”

  “And listen for screams.”

  “Are we getting police support?” said Nina.

  “No,” said Rod.

  “What? They cordon off and evacuate the bloody Sea Life Centre but not the Children’s Hospital. I mean, I like penguins but I wouldn’t have said they’re more important than kids… Well, I would, but that’s a personal thing.”

  “Evacuating the hospital would, and I’m quoting Vaughn here, ‘be lengthy, expensive, endanger lives and draw too much media attention’. Calling on the police… It’s a give and ta
ke thing. And he’s not going to call in that favour again until we have a confirmed sighting.”

  “Tit,” said Nina.

  “No, he’s right,” said Morag. “We can do this.”

  “And we’ve not heard from Vivian yet,” said Rod.

  “So, we’re probably going to have to step back and watch Kevin kill a kid anyway.” Rod clearly let something show on his face.

  “What?” said Nina.

  “He’ll eat them, aye,” he said. “Wrap them up like a mummy. But, I spoke to Ingrid. She’s been doing some more research.”

  “Shit,” said Morag.

  “You don’t know what I’m going to say yet.”

  “Um, let’s see. You will find a new definition of pain and suffering as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.”

  Rod’s mouth dropped open.

  “Unlucky guess,” said Morag.

  Vivian ran through the extensive list on her notepad. “So, we’re arranging for pigeons to… defecate on your neighbour’s car every week. That’s doable. And a screaming baby to move into your flat when you’ve gone. Not by itself of course. What else? Chocolate covered Brussels sprouts for trick-or-treaters to be distributed on your behalf at Halloween, and a horse racing event to be publicly sponsored in the name of your anti-gambling local councillor. That’s all clear. So, who is this Fox Studios person?”

  “She cancelled Firefly.”

  “That is a television series, correct?”

  Douglas Hamilton gave her a sharp glare. “Best bloody TV series that never was.”

  “We will have to see what we can do there. Now, you said you would like to arrange something for your niece.”

  “A clown on her birthday, every birthday.”

  “Does she like clowns?”

  “No.”

  “No, of course not. Anything else?”

  “More jelly.”

  “That is not a problem.”

  “And give me time to think of some more things.”

  Vivian flipped over to the next page of her notepad and pressed the nurse call button.

  Exhaustion piled down on Morag once more.

  Last night’s alcohol had finished having fun with her body and left behind an empty shell of a woman. Morag’s hangover wasn’t a stomach-churner or migraine assault. It was the sapping of all nutrients and energy and willpower from her body. She felt dead on the inside.

  She thought she had powered through it and was now out the other side, but all it had taken was her new colleague, the man-mountain that was Rod Campbell, to point out how tired she looked and the walls of self-delusion had come tumbling down.

  Right now, she would have sold a kidney for a strong Americano or a Kit Kat. Or a soft bed and a lump hammer to knock her out. She would have gladly offered both kidneys in exchange for all four.

  Ahead of her, Rod and Nina’s conversation skated across her consciousness, words from a near dream.

  “I hate hospitals,” said Nina, staring up at the ‘Use Hand Sanitiser’ signs near the entrance. “They’re just fucking mazes and smell of old people.”

  “This is a children’s hospital,” said Rod.

  “Still smells of old people.”

  “I love hospitals.”

  “Sicko.”

  “You want to know why I love hospitals?” said Rod.

  “Little hospital shop!” said Morag suddenly as she recognised what was directly in front of her.

  “Not exactly,” said Rod.

  “No. I’ll be just a minute,” said Morag and dashed inside.

  Lucozade, Red Bull, Monster, Coke. Such beautiful capsules of caffeine and sugar.

  “Morag?” called Nina.

  “One minute!”

  There was a distant scream.

  “Let’s go!” said Rod.

  Morag hurried to the counter with three random cans and tried to find her purse.

  There was a not-so-distant alarm.

  “Shit.” She flung a random note at the shopkeeper.

  “Keep the change.”

  It was only when they had reached the end of a corridor, climbed two flights of stairs, run through a surprisingly located rooftop garden café and found a further corridor that Nina realised that the alarm had stopped and that Morag was no longer with them.

  “We’ve lost her,” she said. Rod skidded to a halt. “I think she’s still back at the shop,” Nina said, but Rod was not paying any attention.

  He was studying an electrical panel by the stairwell. It displayed a multilevel plan of the hospital dotted with LED lights.

  “You know why I like hospitals?” he said conversationally as he studied the plan. “It’s like toilet paper. You don’t realise how much you love them until you need them and they’re not there.”

  “Is this one of them soldier things?”

  He tapped the panel with his forefinger. “What do you mean ‘soldier thing’?”

  “Like ‘aye up lass, I ‘ad to crawl through t’Gobi Desert with only one leg and used a venomous cobra as t’tourniquet.’”

  He gave her his best wounded look. “I don’t know what that accent was supposed to be. It was like Last of the Summer Wine with added hiccups. And, for the record, it was the Syrian Desert and it was a fascinating story in which human ingenuity triumphed, lives were saved and a working saline drip was fashioned from jeep brake lines, Mountain Dew and Dioralyte.”

  “Tell it if you want to,” said Nina.

  “The moment has passed, thank you. The alarm was floor four. Hepatology. Let’s go.”

  Once she accepted that she had lost her new colleagues, Morag stopped trying to chase them, opened a can of Boost and chugged it down.

  “Tangy.” She wiped the dribbles from her chin. Outside, an air ambulance purred past and overhead.

  Morag didn’t have the energy to traipse through the hospital willy-nilly in search of the Venislarn. She marshalled what wits she still possessed and thought on the matter. Kevin might just take victims at random until it chanced upon a virgin’s heart. Or, if it had any discerning senses, would it head towards the greatest concentration of victims, the largest wards? Or would it seek out the fattest and juiciest hearts?

  There was a teenage cancer ward listed on an information board.

  “Fat and juicy teenagers?” she said and then had to give an apologetic look to an elderly woman who happened to be passing.

  The teenage cancer ward was on the third floor. Morag threw the empty can on the floor, popped open the next and made for the nearest stairs. As she reached the first floor, something in her peripheral vision dragged her attention down the corridor.

  It was just a door, a door swinging shut. She paused, trying to fathom why it had drawn her eye. She had just seen a door close and glimpsed someone passing through… the top edge of the door.

  “Ah.”

  She ran to the door and stepped from the clinical cleanliness of a modern hospital into the wooden panelling and stained glass of a nineteenth century chapel. A dozen pews lined the room before an altar and the pipes of a church organ. A lone figure in a blue dressing gown sat in the front rows; there was no sign of Kevin.

  “Hi,” said Morag. The boy looked round. He had a nasal feeding tube taped to his cheek.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “You didn’t just see anyone else come in here, did you?” asked Morag.

  “No. My mum’s just gone to get my inhaler.”

  “Uh-huh.” Morag scanned the ceiling and then crouched to search the gaps between the pews.

  “What are you doing?” said the boy.

  “Looking for monsters.”

  “Monsters?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “In church?”

  Morag got down on hands and knees and looked across the whole floor. “I usually look under beds, obviously, but thought I’d shake things up today.”

  “There aren’t any monsters under my bed.”

  Morag knelt up and looked at him. The boy’s
expression was very serious. “Course not. That’s because we do our job properly. What’s your name?”

  “Biljit.”

  Morag stood and dusted her knees down. “How old are you?”

  “Seven.”

  “Well, Biljit-who-is-seven, I think I can say this place is clear of monsters.” She turned to go. “Except…”

  She gazed about the room once more. “Except,” she looked heavenwards, “I know you bastards. You’d love to do it here. Piss all over the church’s carpet.”

  A shadow unfolded itself from the arch above a stained glass window.

  “Biljit,” Morag whispered.

  “Is that a monster?” he said.

  “Nah. Just an octopus that escaped from the Sea Life Centre. Biljit, I’d like you to cover your eyes now. I’m going to use a powerful light to, er, stun him.”

  “Why?”

  “Cover your eyes, Biljit,” she said firmly.

  The boy raised his hands over his eyes peek-a-boo style.

  Kevin opened up, tentacles unfolding like daisy petals. Albeit a carnivorous, blood-stained daisy.

  “What kind of octopus is it anyway?” said Biljit.

  “A God-damned ugly one.”

  Kevin rolled arm over arm until it was positioned over the room’s one door and regarded them with its many eyes.

  “I don’t think I like octopuses,” said Biljit.

  “You have impeccable taste.”

  Kevin, limbs splayed, quivered. It was sniffing, savouring the smell of its meal.

  “Bhul that, Kevin,” said Morag. “You’re not having him. Fa’slorvha pessh khol-kharid!”

  Its weight shifting like dripping slime, Kevin descended onto the tops of the pews and rolled towards the two humans. Its gnarly and scabrous hide creaked as it folded over each chapel seat. Morag, quite awake now (probably more because of her imminent demise rather than the advertised effects of a popular brand energy drink) positioned herself between Kevin and Biljit. Kevin latched two legs onto the frontmost pew and raised itself up like a boneless chimpanzee. Its eye cluster was close enough to touch. Brown eyes, grey eyes, blue, green, each supported on a narrow extrusion of raw and bloody fibres. Human eyes.

  Fuck that, thought Morag.

  She held out her hands, defenceless.