Year Zero (2000), page 10
The big black car that looked like a hearse must have hit the wall at ninety miles an hour. It wouldn't have mattered a damn whether Dean was wearing a seat-belt or not, although he probably wasn't because it wouldn't have been macho.
The fact that the Devil was riding with him undoubtedly made a difference, though, because the petrol tank went off like a bomb, and Molly knew that that never really happened, in spite of what the movies liked to imply.
Molly was knocked flat on her back by the blast, and she stayed there for some considerable time while the crowd gathered around her. The night air didn't taste clean, but it tasted a lot cleaner than the Devil's tongue. Nobody offered to help her up, but that was because niceness was an unaffordable commodity on estates like this one, on every floor of every dark and dour block.
By the time Molly had pulled herself to her feet the crowd was melting away again in response to the arrival of the uniforms. Molly couldn't be bothered to make herself scarce. She just stood there, fondling her bruises, until a WPC said: "I don't suppose you have any idea who was driving?"
"Dean and the Devil," Molly replied, unable to suppress the temptation to tell the whole truth.
"Dean who?" the WPC asked, wearily.
"Don't know," Molly admitted. "You might try 349 Arcadia House, seeing as it's an emergency."
"Are you all right?" the WPC asked. "The car didn't clip you as it went past, did it?" She sounded like someone who didn't want to be put to the bother of calling an ambulance.
"I'm fine," said Molly, surprised to find that even though she'd finally managed to start sobbing and in spite of all she'd been though, she really was all right. "It takes more than an indecent assault by Absolute Evil to rattle me."
"Better get off home, then," the WPC said. "Nothing to see here."
"Yes," Molly agreed. "Best get back to the thirteenth floor."
She realised, as she stumbled away into the shadows, that she had been getting a bit above herself lately. Perhaps she had needed reminding that even if you could make judo moves on Death, and shatter him into tiny little pieces, and steal his dressing-gown, and make friends with the entire hierarchy of Hell, you couldn't actually put a stop to cold and decay and torment and temptation. That much of what the Devil had said was true—but as for the rest of it ... well, he seemed to know about her little excursion to Altair, but he hadn't said a word about the impending uplift of humankind by the greys' psychotropic viruses. She had to keep it in mind that the Devil was a very old-fashioned sort, whose imaginative horizons weren't as broad as her own. She knew that she needed to keep that in mind no matter how bad things became before the greys could trigger the uplift.
Death will always get up again, Molly thought. No matter what moves you make, he'll always be back. But the only thing you can do in answer to that is to keep on getting up again yourself, and keep on coming back. Next time, it really will be Chris, no matter what the Father of Lies says. I'll find her, one way or another. I'll settle up with her, whatever it takes. I'm her mother, after all. Whatever trouble she's got herself into, I can get her out —and if I can't, I can see her through it.
When Molly got back up to the thirteenth floor, Lilith and Mephistopheles were waiting for her in the corridor. All nine of the security gates stood open behind them, and at least half the doors were already standing ajar.
Nobody called out, but the other demons began to emerge, one by one. It wasn't just the crippled Asmodeus who had trouble making progress, but these were individuals who knew how to cope with frailty. They weren't pretty, and they weren't nice, but they had learned to get by with torment and temptation. If there was any way to come to terms with being older than anyone dared to imagine, the demons had mastered it.
"It was him, wasn't it?" Lilith said.
"Yes," Molly admitted.
"What did he want?" Mephistopheles demanded.
"He wanted a little chat with me," Molly said, trying her damnedest to sound casual. "He thinks I've been getting above myself, lending a helping hand to recently-fallen angels and recruiting little grey men to uplift the human race to a new level of rationality, visionary power and hedonic potential. Oh—and he also asked me to give you all a message."
"What did he say?" Mephistopheles said. Molly could hear the fear in his voice. The others shuffled a few paces closer.
"He said that you don't have to worry about the ugly rumours," Molly said, with utter conviction. "He said that you've all done your bit, and that he's very grateful. He said that you've all earned a little peace and quiet, and that the bottom has dropped right out of the tempting and tormenting game anyway. He said that he wishes you all well, and he hopes that everything works out for you."
"Did he?" said Mephistopheles, wonderingly. "Did he really?"
"Word for word," Molly assured him.
Molly had the impression that Lilith wasn't quite so easily fooled, but the old lady wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. When Lilith smiled, and turned to show her smile to the others, they all smiled with her. They were old and decrepit and they were living in the Waste-Disposal Unit with all the other neighbours from Hell, but they still had hope. For them, as for her, this was year zero—a time of new beginnings brimming with potential.
Molly might have smiled with them, if it hadn't been for Dean and Christine, but at least she wasn't crying any more.
"He said that he can work in mysterious ways too," Molly told the renegade demons. And why not? she added, purely on her own behalf. When all's said and done, why the hell shouldn't he—and why on earth shouldn't we?
23
As soon as she was properly settled into her new home, Molly called the Jarvises and arranged to visit Angie. Molly didn't know why Angie hadn't done a bunk too, although Christine probably hadn't given her the choice. What fifteen-year-old in her right mind would want to go on the run with a twelve-year-old?
Overshadowed as it was by Christine's seemingly-total disappearance, the visit was even more difficult than previous ones. The Jarvises broke all their previous world records in the delicate sport of being scrupulously polite and superficially pleasant while still contriving to imply that Molly was a worthless piece of human scum who would do everybody a favour by falling dead into the Thames and not being washed up this side of Sheerness.
Mrs. Jarvis had obligingly laid out all of Angie's school exercise-books, and pointed out time and time again what beautiful handwriting Angie had. The Jarvises had, of course, seen plenty of Molly's handwriting on those envelopes whose addresses the post office managed to decipher, and Molly did not doubt that the couple always carried out a careful quasiforensic analysis of their contents. The Jarvises were, however, also capable of devastating understatement, and Mrs. Jarvis modestly failed to call particular attention to the fact that Angie now addressed her as "Mummy" while neglecting to hang any label at all on Molly.
"You will tell us, won't you, if Christine gets in touch with you?" Mr. Jarvis said, knowing full well that the Social Services would repair any omission on Molly's part as soon as they got wind of it. "She might, you know, even though she'll have to go to some trouble to find out where to look for you. She's such a resourceful girl, when she puts her mind to it. We'll let you know, of course, if we hear anything—that's probably more likely, given that she knows that we're always here for her."
Molly decided, right there and then, that she had to get a place of her own, of the kind that might be deemed suitable for bringing up children. That meant she had to get hold of some real money, and not by the usual means. She knew, in any case, that if she didn't find something constructive to occupy her time the Devil would find work for her idle bodyparts to do. Having recently met the Devil, she figured that any distractions he threw her way were likely to fuck her up completely, and she couldn't afford that if she hoped to be any use when Christine finally did get in touch.
Given that her qualifications were far outnumbered by her disqualifications, Molly wasn't surprised when the Job Centre couldn't suggest anything better than shelf-stacking or office cleaning. She wouldn't have minded either, because she'd never had a problem with unsocial hours, but when she'd been through six unsuccessful interviews she realised that her current address was a worse handicap than the gaping holes in her CV. It wasn't so much that her immediate neighbours were renegade arch-demons—the DSS weren't officially aware of that—but that the twelve floors below her were packed with enterprising teenage burglars who were always looking for back ways into shops and storerooms, and who couldn't even look at a PC without wanting to strip the chips out of it.
The old Molly would probably have given up after half a dozen knockbacks, but even the Devil had given her credit for trying to save the human race from the slough of mediocrity, and she figured that she owed herself no less. She wondered whether it might be easier to get agency work, but the first ones she tried seemed even more paranoid about her record —especially the criminal part of it—than the employers she'd approached directly. It wasn't until she reached the last one on her list that a glimmer of light appeared at the end of the tunnel.
"Actually, Peaslee Pharmaceuticals is looking for single females in your age-bracket," the agency's employment consultant told her, making no secret of her amazement. The woman was really a mere desk clerk; she couldn't have been any more than twenty-five but she was already making conscientious attempts to look younger, which was presumably why she couldn't figure out why anyone in the world could possibly be interested in women over thirty.
"What for?" Molly asked.
"The card doesn't say, but the pay rate's well above minimum, so it must be some kind of testing. It says that they need people in good health, so it's not medical—but it's not badly paid, considering."
Molly didn't have to ask what needed to be considered. The possibility of being poisoned or disfigured was presumably what lifted the pay to a level slightly better than derisory. Molly guessed that the Peaslee boffins were probably testing cosmetics. Human vanity being what it was, there was far more money to be made out of anti-wrinkle creams than cancer cures.
"I'll take it," Molly said.
The employment consultant rang Human Resources at Peaslee and fixed up an appointment for that afternoon. "They'll reimburse your bus fare," the girl told her, disdainfully. Molly couldn't work out whether the disdain was for people who travelled by bus or people who were so desperate to be needed that they were prepared to moonlight as laboratory rats.
Peaslee Pharmaceuticals was way out of town. The company occupied four buildings tucked discreetly away in a corner of a new industrial estate on one of the feeder roads to the M25. Three of the four were huge windowless blocks but the guard at the barrier directed Molly to the fourth, which was an ordinary office-complex. The security was very tight even there, involving sliding steel doors and shifty-eyed security-men, but her chit from the agency eventually won her admission to its cool and sterile corridors.
The woman who met Molly was another artificially-young item who might have been cloned from the same original as the agency consultant. She scanned Molly's Oxfam-bought ensemble with conscientious fashion-blindness, then switched into hawk-mode in order to scrutinise her face. For one horrible moment Molly thought that the greys might have fixed her up so well that her skin was too perfect for testing cosmetics, but the woman's practised smile was not unwelcoming.
"Have you done this kind of work before?" she asked.
"Not personally," Molly admitted, "but I used to be involved with a man who was involved with something similar."
The woman didn't ask for details, which was perhaps as well, given that Elvis's immortality treatment had gone so badly awry. "In that case," the fresh-faced woman said, "you're probably familiar with the procedure. You have to sign forms giving us permission to administer the injections and to monitor the effects. I have to warn you that you'll be waiving your right to take any legal action against us in respect of any consequence of the trial, but we do provide insurance cover against death or disability. If we need to keep you here for observation you have to comply, although the particular programme we're recruiting for shouldn't require that. You will, however, have to undertake to be here on time for every series of tests. If you refuse any procedure, or if you're late for an appointment, the results become tainted and you'll be deemed to have forfeited all outstanding fees. In order to protect the double blind, you're not permitted to know what the injection is, or what effects we think it might have. If you're unhappy with any of that, there's no point in proceeding."
Molly was unhappy with all of it, especially the bit about the injection, but she wasn't about to back out. The job might turn out to be slightly more hazardous than office cleaning, but at least it promised to be more interesting. She signed all the forms—of which there were a lot—and was promptly whisked away to another room for her preliminary medical and "induction procedure." Nobody said that she'd be bounced if they found any illegal substances in her blood or urine but it didn't matter anyway. Since the greys had cleaned her out she hadn't touched anything more exotic than lager, even though Lilith and Belial had offered to let her partake of one or two of the fiendish concoctions they used to while away their own heavy time.
24
The most grueling parts of the induction procedure were the IQ test and the personality profile, not because they were unduly challenging—Molly didn't worry overmuch about trying to get the multiple-choice questions right, or even trying to make the fill-in answers legible—but because they were so tediously long-winded. Molly did wonder whether the results of the physical exam would be affected by the DNA that the greys had pumped into her by means of the virus vectors that she'd then started spreading through the population, but it didn't seem to be worth worrying about. By now, half the degenerates in the capital could be carriers, and that was a lot of people. She had every confidence that any stray biochip the aliens might have left lying around her person would pass undetected.
Once Molly had finished the preliminaries she was handed a cheque for the first installment of her fee. It wasn't as much as she could have earned over a similar period at King's Cross, even after she'd paid the pitch rent, but it was more than she'd have got if she'd spent the time stocking supermarket shelves. Then she was taken to meet the doctor in charge of the test run, who introduced himself as Nathanael Wingate. He looked exactly like a mad scientist out of an old black-and-white movie, right down to the Einsteinian tufts of wispy white hair on either side of his head and the wrongly-fastened buttons on his fawn cardigan.
"You mustn't worry, my dear," he said to her, in what might have been a Canadian or New England accent. "The last thing we want to do is to cause you any distress. We want all our products to do nothing but good. If all is well with the test results, we'll administer the first injection tomorrow afternoon. I can't tell you what it is, but I can say that the effects ought to be slight and subtle—they certainly shouldn't interfere with your everyday routines, although I'll have to ask you not to drink alcohol or take any other drugs, medicinal or recreational. The testing isn't supposed to make you ill, and if it seems to be doing that you should let us know immediately. I'll give you an emergency number to call. If everything goes well, you must return for a check-up and a new shot every third day, no matter what day it happens to be. There are no Sabbaths in science. Are you okay with all that?"
"Sure," Molly said, bravely. She knew that she wasn't supposed to know what was happening in case her expectations polluted the experiment, but she couldn't help wondering. It seemed to her that the "slight and subtle" effects Wingate's employers would be most likely to be interested in were metabolic, but if it was a weight-loss treatment she must be part of the control group—she'd never been fat.
When Molly got back to Arcadia House she immediately set about composing a letter to Christine, just in case her wayward daughter turned up while she was busy being poked and prodded at Peaslee.
It wasn't an easy letter to write, and Mrs. Jarvis's pointed remarks about Angie's beautiful handwriting made Molly even more paranoid than usual about her unruly script. By the time she was done darkness had fallen, although the combination of pollutant haze and reflected street-lighting tinted the darkness red and turned the cratered face of the full moon a curious cooked salmon colour, like a pockmarked Dequadin lozenge. The letter read:
Dear Christine,
I'm very sorry that I couldn't be here. Please wait until I come back. Then we can talk things over and figure out what to do. I'm your mother and I love you very much.
Love,
Mum
When Molly had put the letter in an envelope she took it to Lilith's, and asked her to look after it. She also asked Lilith to make sure that all the other demons knew about its existence, so that they'd know where to send Christine if she turned up. Mephistopheles and Belial were in Lilith's flat at the time, and Belial promised to put the word around. Molly explained to them what she was doing, and why. She expected them to be very pleased, because they still wanted to move another of their company into Molly's flat, but Mephistopheles and Lilith seemed mildly alarmed by Molly's willingness to be injected with unknown substances.
"There are things man was not meant to know," Mephistopheles said, dourly.
"Not any more there aren't," said Lilith, who was one of the few arch-demons to have adapted her outlook to the twentieth century. "I, for one, wouldn't be ungrateful for a reliable wrinkle treatment—ersatz glamour is so much less demanding than the real thing—but I'm not sure I'd want to try out the ones that turned out to have nasty side-effects." All the demons were past masters in the art of illusion, but now that they had retired from active service they found the magical arts very tiring and Lilith was usually content to appear as she was: very old and more-than-slightly wretched.
