Cowboys and Dinosaurs - Chapter 15

15. Black-On-White Violence

Lucian and Noel were still waiting in front of the building when he got home. The entire left side of Noel's face was heavily bandaged. Evidently the wound had become infected. Their patience was indomitable. They would get their man.

He wondered if they had realized their mistake, and would recognize him wearing Gonoroid's clothing. He decided he had no desire to find out.

He was forced to scale the drainpipe round the side of the building, then pop open the window in the upstairs hall and squirm in, nearly disembowelling himself on the window catch. Once in, it was a minute's work to let himself in to his flat, to find himself staring down a thicket of assegais, each arm with a heavily muscled, mean-eyed, inauthentically-dressed Zulu warrior woman behind it.

"Er", he said.

***

"We have a big day on Saturday. We thought we would remind you."

One of the vutwamini, wearing a flannelette tracksuit and baseball cap, was leafing through his personal porn stash, including the copy of Fat and Fifty he'd bought because Gonoroid had dared him to. Another, clad in a tartan miniskirt and high heels, reading through his bookshelf.

"You have a lot of Devasekhara", she said curiously.

"They were there when I moved in", said Steve. "The porn too", he attempted.

"This one has your name in", said the porn-browser. "This porn belongs to Steve Simpson of 32, Copenhagen Way, Wood Green." There was giggling.

"A curse upon well-meaning stationery stickers", said Steve. "It was useful at school, believe me. Those little bastards had no concept of private property."

"You've missed two training sessions", said the isangoma, who was wearing a very businesslike pinstriped suit and skirt. "We were concerned you might not turn up on the day."

"Just you try and stop me", said Steve. He could still see Lucian and Noel out of the window. He crossed the room to the built-in wardrobe, flung it open and proudly indicated the blood red infantry uniform within.

"Oh, my", said the isangoma. "You've done us proud. I'm going to enjoy poking holes in that."

Steve winced inwardly. The deposit for the uniform would have paid off a 1990's mortgage.

"Do you have many other, uh, British volunteers?"

The isangoma pulled out a Blackberry and activated it. "A good few. We still have a lot to get around before the end of the evening, so if you'll excuse us..."

A wail of shocked anguish interrupted her. Steve turned to see a multiple-coated, stripy-scarfed figure standing in the doorway, its mouth gaping open like a basking crocodile.

"Uh - this is my, uh, neighbour - these are my friends -"

An inhuman moan escaped her; she turned and fled the room.

Steve followed her, unthinking. She ran out of the front door. He was in the street after her before he realized. Lucian and Noel saw him, began scrambling out of their seatbelts.

Ah. So they've realized their mistake now.

"Stop!"

She turned. Crocodile tears were streaming down her face.

"I saw you", she said. "I saw you with those, those mammals. The size of their mammary appendages! How could you?"

"We were discussing a replay of the Battle of Isandhlwana!" he yelled.

"Darling", she said in quiet concern, "you're not making sense."

He turned to see Noel and Lucian advancing on him with faces of pure murder.

"Can I help you, gentlemen?" he tried. However, they looked set to roll over him with as much pause for conversation as a Tiger tank.

Hang on a -

The very first fist knocked him back several yards onto the tarmac. He heard a bestial, utterly inhuman falsetto snarl, and then a human voice protesting:

"- Luce - Luce - help, mate, she's biting me fackin face off -"

There was another sound like a cricket bat hitting a bag of wet sand, and through a half-closed eye, he saw a doubled-up, snake-slim shape slumped on the roadway with Lucian standing over it.

"Touch her again", he said, "and I swear you'll regret it."

Lucian turned with a contemptuous expression and spat on his fist in preparation for using it.

"Be reasonable", he said. "I've already put you on the floor once, you know I can do it again."

"It won't be me that does it", said Steve. "It'll be them."

He nodded over Lucian's shoulder and Lucian turned -

"USUTHU!"

- just in time to see a forest of zulu spears fly over the road at him, only marginally more slowly than they would have travelled if thrown. To begin with, he hunched up to avoid a beating, possibly not noticing the spearheads and imagining he was being assaulted with broom handles. Within seconds, however, he yelped in pain and leapt away over the pavement, realizing he was not being lightly spanked but actually attacked with intent to drive the safety-first ball bearings on the spear points clean through his internal organs and out the other side. Meanwhile, another sub-unit of vutwamini were harpooning Noel as he lay on the pavement. The isangoma was helping the Lizard Lady to her feet.

"You okay?" said the isangoma.

"Adequate", said the Lizard Lady, and pointed to the isangoma's spear. "Do you mind if I borrow that?"

The isangoma shrugged. "Be my guest."

The Lizard Lady's fingers coiled round the shaft of her spear, and her lips curled back from her teeth. She hissed like a quenched iron, raised the spear above her head, and ran onto Noel as he hunched foetally on the tarmac. Steve turned his eyes away. The majority of the vutwamini, meanwhile, meanwhile, were advancing down the street on the retreating Lucian, spread out into a horns-of-the-buffalo formation, still dressed in mini-skirts, tracksuits and high heels, spears held slanting downwards to chest height.

"YOU'RE GONNA BLOODY REGRET THIS!" wailed Lucian. "IMPORTING BLACK MUSCLE! THEY'LL TURN ON YOU, YOU KNOW THEY WILL! WHAT'S BETWEEN WHITES SHOULD STAY BETWEEN WHITES!"

"ARE ALBANIANS WHITE, THEN?" yelled Steve gleefully.

One of the vutwamini looked back at Steve.

"Albanians?" She turned to look back at Lucian. "You bloody moslem bastard."

"My rabbi was killed at the World Trade Center", said another vutwamini. Steve suspected this might not be true.

Lucian's expression broke into panic, raising his hands to calm the waters. "NO! No, ladies, you've got the wrong end of the spiky stick! Technically, yes, it is true, Albania is a moslem nation. However -" At this point he gave up, stopped backing away, and scurried into an unathletic run, puffing like a beaten carpet towards his Mercedes.

The vutwamini did not follow.

On the road behind them, Noel was still lying clutching his middle. Steve hoped he was only bruised but, having witnessed the advanced culinary preparation that had been performed on Gonoroid, would have had little sympathy had Noel been holding in handfuls of his own intestines.

"Who was he?" said the isangoma, gesturing at Noel as if he no longer existed, disbanding her impi with a wave. They broke formation and began gleefully high-fiving each other.

"An Albanian gangster", said Steve. "From Crouch End", he added. On the road, Noel was dragging himself away on a snail-trail of his own blood. Nobody made a move to stop him. Watching Lucian, a man with two closed eyes and an inability to sit up straight attempting to manoeuvre a Mercedes out of an enclosed space was far too entertaining. After several wings and fenders on adjoining cars had been violently reversed and stalled into, however, the comic effect began to wear off. Eventually, they closed in again, hammering on the car's roof and windows with the butts of their spears, until Lucian eventually hammered himself a clean escape route between the lines of parked cars and swerved dangerously away flanked by showers of sparks. He managed two hundred metres of further forward progress before colliding with a bus at a junction. The vutwamini stowed their spears as unobtrusively as was possible with a two-metre-long assegai, and moved guiltily in the direction of their own vehicle. Luckily for Lucian, it had not been one of the ones that had been damaged.

"We'll see you at the replay tomorrow", said the isangoma.

"I'm sorry I doubted you", said the Lizard Lady.

Steve wiped blood out of the corner of his mouth. "Do you have a name?" he said. "I can't keep calling you You."

"I have a mammal slave name, which I can't use for obvious reasons. It's Ursula, which means Little Bear, which in turn implies warm blood and the suckling of young."

Steve sat down on a wall. "I will call you Liz", he announced.

"Thank you. Although technically, it's also inaccurate, as ichthyosaurs -"

"Are not strictly lizards, yes, I was expecting that. Uh, that blood you're wiping out of your mouth isn't your own, is it."

"No. It belonged to the fat mammal. I had to bite through a good deal of flesh before I hit bone."

Steve giggled uncontrollably.

"We have taught them a lesson", said Liz.

"We may indeed have done", said Steve. "We may have taught them that when they come back, they need to bring guns. These are not nice people, Liz."

Liz pondered this. "Then we should leave."

"We can't. Unless I leave my job, that is. And I'm getting on well in my job. I am good at selling slot machines to the unwary. And you, too, are good at your job, I assume, if you discount the occasional mass murder -"

"Killing mammals at random is evolutionary self defence", objected Liz. "Not murder."

"Have you worked in aviation long?"

"No. I used to work for Microsoft. I wrote numerous bugs into Windows XP that cause it to malfunction if operated by mammals."

Steve nodded. "That explains a great deal. The search engine in particular."

The world suddenly filled with a cacophanous roaring, as if invisible diesel locomotives were speeding past Steve's nose. Glass was vibrating in windows up and down the street; flecks of paint were peeling from frames. Passer-by fell into two distinct groups - those unfamiliar with the district, who looked up in sheer terrors and turned round in the street trying frantically to locate the noise, and locals who simply carried on walking grumpily, heads down. Ve do not talk about ze Castle on ze Hill.

The noise eventually died. By the time it had died, Steve's mood had brightened. He patted Liz on the knee.

"Excuse me. I have to see a man about a Tiger."

Liz followed him across the street to the front door of DANDAIR, and waited patiently with him until slippered feet began shuffling down the hallway behind the door, accompanied by the rattle of keys.

***

DANDAIR's living room was full of battlefield.

Bookshelves, gun cases, antiques, mitrailleuses and suits of armour had been moved aside to make room for a classroom's worth of cheap steel tables, placed edge to edge and overlaid with sheets of green baize, scale model railway buildings, and blue frosted perspex for ponds and streams. The battleground looked waterlogged and gently undulating, stretching for a scaled-down kilometre or so in both directions.

"Busy, I see", said Steve.

"We are recreating a modest part of the Battle of Stalingrad", said Alasdair. "The Russians advance here from the East, the Germans here, from the West. This represents Day Five of the battle in the southern sector along the Tsaritsa."

"Wow", said Steve. "I've not seen many wargames boards this big."

"Game? This is no game, boy. This is merely a schematic. We are actually going to do this, in seven days' time. Everything must be planned meticulously. Luckily, the terrain of this part of the Front is accurately mirrored by the course of the River Lea through Hackney Marsh near Stratford. Daniel's Tiger here -" he crossed the room to obtain a pointing stick, which was apparently needed to point at the single easily visible tank on the German side of the map - "will spearhead a strike through to the strategic bridging point here. Unexpectedly, this will be countered by the Russians, who have a heavy tank of their own."

"Tanks", said Steve, "were what I wanted to talk about. Did the Russians ever have a tank called the Man of Steel?"

Alasdair shook his head. "Not at all. The Russian equivalents of the Tiger were the Klim Voroshilov, the Joseph Stalin, and to a certain extent the big gun variant of the T34." He pointed at the Russian side of the map. "That's a Joseph Stalin. Formerly owned by Sir Robert Maxwell, who was given it as a gift by the Czech government. He used to ride up and down his enormous garden in it wearing a colonel's outfit once worn by Yuri Gagarin. But all this only came out after his death." He looked back at Steve. "Man of Steel, eh? Why did you ask that?"

"No reason", said Steve. "Are you doing all this to commemorate some sort of anniversary? Will the TV or newspapers be there?"

"Goodness gracious no. We're going to do it because we enjoy dressing up in Russian uniform and driving around in tanks."

"I see."

"It will be a great day. The day Mother Russia turns the tide against the Nazi arachnids and crushes them beneath the tracks of Soviet labour."

"Nonsense", came a voice from the door into the garden. "It is the day the spectre of Communism will be exorcised from Europe forever, driven back beyond the Urals to expire in Asia."

These sentiments would have seemed odd coming from an ordinary Englishman, but sounded still odder from a man wearing a yarmulke and holding a copy of the Talmud.

"You're still wearing your Knight's Cross", warned Alasdair. "And you shouldn't drive the Tiger around on the Sabbath. You always forget to take your uniform off afterwards. Rabbi Cohen has already threatened to exclude you after you turned up at Passover."

"Pah! He'll never do it. He knows it was an honest mistake."

"I'd really like to think so, but the frequency with which you do it leads me to suspect otherwise. We'll wake up one morning with our house ringed with sanctified string, and then you'll be sorry."

The tank commander grinned and removed the medal.

"You've got engine oil on your tallit. Here, let me get it off." Fussily, Alasdair pulled a handkerchief from his hat, spat into it, and went to work on the prayer shawl his partner was wearing.

Liz watched the process attentively. "Aren't you worried", she said, "that you are betraying your racial identity by wearing Nazi uniform?"

Daniel shrugged. "It's only make believe. People pretend to be vampires at Hallowe'en. Does that mean they suck people's blood? Today's Nazis don't wear uniforms. They dress up as respectable politicians."

"There." Alasdair straightened Daniel's yarmulke as a final touch. "Now you look like a good Jewish boy, against all evidence. Run along and play with your invisible omnipotent friends."

Daniel looked back at Alasdair. "I just wish they'd let me bring you, is all."

"I know. But do you know, I think I'm happier without the sticky love of Jehovah inside me."

Alasdair kissed Daniel chastely on the cheek, and Daniel ran along.