Thicker Than Water

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"So I went back outside and ascended into the sky on Shanks’s pony.

The first walkway was three floors up. It was wider than it looked from the ground - almost as wide as a street. And like a street it had its own lighting: octagonal grey lamp-posts supported art-deco globes that didn’t sort well with anything else I could see. There was a chest-high stone parapet on either side of the walkway to stop people tumbling down onto the pavement below, and a trellised arch at the end furthest from me that looked as though it had been put there for the benefit of climbing plants.

But nothing decorated the walkway except for some broken glass tastefully strewn around and a few overfilled black plastic bin bags spilling out their freight of tea leaves and tin cans into my path. The parapet was cracked at a couple of points, as though the walkway had suffered a little from subsidence and never been repaired.

This seemed to be where the older kids hung out - school apparently not being an option that anyone around here took very seriously.

A group of them were sitting on the parapet, smoking. One of them looked at me with unfriendly interest as I hove into view, then looked away and spat casually over the edge of the walkway.

I slogged on up the stairs. A lean guy in his thirties, with slicked black hair, a piercing above his right eye and an acrid stench of body odour fighting an olfactory ground war with some cheap cologne, jostled my shoulder as he passed me going down. Then suddenly he stopped, giving me a harder look.

He was as pale as the kid, Bic: in fact, his pallor had gone beyond whiteness into the yellow sallows of nearly exposed bone, so he wasn’t equipped to blanch. But his expression was one of stunned surprise, and my death-sense prickled as he stared at me. Not what he seemed, then: a zombie, most likely, but with enough animation in his face and movements to be of fairly recent vintage.

He’d been handsome once: big-eyed, long-haired, slender in face and build. In a zombie it was pathetic and obscurely indecent.

You wanted to look away. Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you, and used to have to beat the girls off with a shitty stick.

I waited for a moment, because he seemed to be about to speak. When he didn’t, I decided to break the ice myself.

‘Anything I can do for you?’ I asked.

The guy grimaced and shook his head. ‘You look li an ‘You lke someone I used to know,’ he said, his voice a bone-dry murmur.