Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Spring had seemed to forget about itself. Either that, or it had been fed up enough to tuck itself away again. Tim was hit by the cold wind as he exited the train station at Westminster. As usual, nobody bothered him. He didn’t have a recognizeable enough face to make a difference, even with how outspoken he’d been about these damn laws. It hadn’t mattered in the end. They had passed them through anyway. The thoughts hung like a weight around his neck as he eased through the London commuters. His mouth still had that strange feeling, the unpleasant taste of mouthwash the dentist used. It was the only reason he didn’t have a morning coffee in his hand to drop when he saw the sight of it.
“Oh my god,” someone had cried, in a voice that shrank with disbelief as the fear grew. Tim’s eyes widened as the explosion of brick and rubble threw up a crowd of dust as the building shrank, imploding on itself as the earth shook and groaned. Parliament was collapsing. He’d thought the words just says ago, but they had been a figure of speech then. Now, it was real.
“Come on, get back,” he called, demanding as much authority over the situation as he could. Half the onlookers were more worried about taking videos on their camera-phones than getting out of dodge. “Oi,” he shouted at a nearby pimple-faced teen, waving his iphone around as though he were filming his cat with a bad case of the sneezes. “Get on that phone and ring the bloody emergency services, would you?” It wasn’t a question. It was an order. The adolescent’s face blanched and with hands shaking, he began to phone, but it might have been too late. If they were lucky, perhaps they’d rescue some of his co-workers but Tim had seen enough disasters on the news to know that nobody would come out of that building the same, even if they did come out alive. The streets were still shaking, people were screaming, running, panicking, and Tim couldn’t blame them. He very well might have been one of them.
The shaking of the ground was so intense that when the rubble began to move, Tim might very well have been imagining it. Nothing was stable. Not the economy, not politics, and certainly not the pile of crumbled brick that had been a London landmark - and had held several hundred lives. His heart froze in his chest when he saw it. “Move!” he cried again, his voice authoritive and pleading at the same time. It was grey-white, wide-browed and long-fanged. It had claws that protuded from long, thin fingers, pulling the mounds of earth aside as it climbed out. Demon. Vampire. Monster. The supernatural world had seen politicians do enough damage, and it was fighting back. A dozen clawed hands joined the fray, brothers and sisters of ill-intent and animalistic desire pushing through the collapsed building and into the grey afternoon.
He needed to find Buffy Summers. Now.
You’re way too kind, anon. Thank you.
The midday sun beamed in through the windows. It was heating up, almost as though spring was on the way. The Prime Minister grumbled, shielding his aging eyes and reaching out to fumble for the cord that would close the blinds. Spring indeed, he thought, though it was a shame most of London wouldn’t get to see it. The thought would have caused a guilty twinge in his stomach once upon a time, but as he stroked his jowels with internal thoughtfulness, the Prime Minister knew he had worked well past that, now. There was no room for morality any more. The world was broken. This /dimension/ was broken. The only thing left was to leave it to the dogs - or, better yet, the hell hounds.
His mobile phone came alive with a small buzz and he adjusted his glasses over the bridge of his nose to read it. Bianca Timberlake. She had that silly girl looking at floral patterns for dresses for a new spring catalogue. A Slayer and Style, she called it. Bloody preposterous, of course, but while the girl’s eyes were on her wardrobe, they were not on him. While everyone’s eyes were on her and the other slayers, they weren’t on him either. It all worked out perfectly well. He replied with a simple ‘well done’ before letting the screen go dark. He had better things to attend to today than Bianca Timberlake.
“Are you quite certain about this, sir?” his aide asked. “The public aren’t going to be pleased when they find out we pushed MIRA through on the quiet.”
He barely even heard the words. He stood, adjusting his midnight blue tie in the mirror, shirt collar fastened tightly against his expanding neckline. “It will hardly matter, Quentin,” he said in answer. “Sometimes, protecting the world means making the unpopular choice.” But that wasn’t the reason at all. The Prime Minister had stopped caring about re-election. He would likely be dead before the year was out. The public could do nothing to him that his body already was not, and in searching outside the realm of modern medicine for a cure, he had found something even greater; the promise of immortality.
“Very well, sir.” His aide brushed off his shoulders with deft hands in spite of the fact the Prime Minister’s suit jacket was already spotless. “Then I believe MIRA will have passed within the day.”
That was what he was hoping for.
Distraction wasn’t enough. Opening the Hellmouth wasn’t enough. It was all a matter of timing and precision and each step had been slowly calculated. Luther and Fellows had been his scape goats, warring with words, battling between them with their extreme points of view. People would blame Luther when MIRA passed, because the Prime Minister had put the words in his mouth. It had served two purposes. The first was a distraction, for the world to have already brought itself half to its knees before he brought them the rest of the way. The second, was the final step in his ritual.
Blood of the slayer, willingly given.
“Do be sure our staff are ready to receive blood, hair and saliva samples from the first to come forward, won’t you? I shall meet you in the hall.”
“Of course, sir,” came the reply, and off his aide scuttled.
By the end of the day, they would be one step closer. Many would die, but he would live. And people claimed politics to be a selfish sport.
We don’t know the exact closing date because it depends on plot advancements, but we’ll be aiming to wrap things up around that time.