I’m drowning like a sorrow. The water rushes in, rising, filling the engine room up to my shoulders. I try to think, my conk awash with thick smoke and the choking taste of ocean. Damaged power cables crackle and dance above, soon they’ll touch the water then that’s it for me. The big sleep in the big drink. No escape, no plan, no hope. There’s a naval hatch above me, I can’t get it open. It’s locked from the other side with no soul left on board to save mine. I’ve led a blue life, now it’s flashing before my blue eyes. This is the story of how I went to look for Abigail Plum, how Ginger Mitchell died, how I learned the true history of the human race, its true future and how I came to be as trapped as a rat in this rapidly flooding room.
This is how the world ended.
Who would have thought it would all come down to fat broads?
SOME TIME EARLIER…
Ginger entered my office as easy as walking through a door. I’d hired him to do everything I couldn't be bothered with, admin, taxes, cleaning out the fridge. He was a smart kid but really dropped the ball by dying at the end. Shame, I’d got used to having the young fella around and not having to do my own hoovering.
“Alex, the 3 o’clock is here” he announced.
I sipped my giggle juice. “So, this city has spat out two more poor saps who need our help like a cure for a hole in the head.”
“Yeah… okay… have you been reading those noir comics again? Maybe cut the lingo? You’re English, it sounds wrong.”
He called in the clients. People laughed when I said I was quitting teaching to start gum-shoeing. They told me, “Being a Private Eye isn’t for you! I mean, sure, quit teaching because that’s not for you either but go on benefits or something.” I started a few months ago and now after solving the case of finding an office (abandoned polytechnic above a fish-pie shop) we had our first clients, a husband and wife couple. Mr and Mrs. Plum entered. I stood to greet the hunk’a beef and his side dish. He was dressed to the nines, her to the tens. Their faces looked like the bad side of a slap and I knew there wasn’t much happiness left in their lives. We sat. "Mr and Mrs. Plum, how may we help you?" Mr. Plum took his dame's hand and a deep breath. "Well, it's our daughter." "Whatever she’s up to I guarantee we’ll stop her. You want her beat up? We can do that too." "No, she's gone missing." This was police business, no place for a peeper as far as I could see, especially not one who’d got his PI license online. "They won’t do owt! She's been gone almost a month and they've still not done a bloody thing. They haven't even been 'round to look for evidence or ask questions. Just a journalist and he weren't any help." I told them I couldn't involve myself. I’d dance with palookas and crooks all night long but only dupes stepped on a flatfoot’s toes. "We can pay you" was their desperate reply.
“Well yeah that’s usually how these transactions work.”
“No, I mean we can pay as much as you want. Just find our Abigail, please, we just want to know she's ok." Ginger handed me Mr. Plum’s business card. Without even seeing it I knew Mr. Plum was rich, I felt the Mohawk superfine paper stock, the embossed texture, the holographic insignia. I read it.
PF Network, Inc.
Roger Plum
Chairman CEO
Turned out they could pay us a lot. He and his wife were CEO and CFO of Plum Foods and all their associated companies, they had more dough than a bakery explosion. They made all those processed foods, sweets and juices. These two were so in the chips they could buy a new daughter if they wanted.
"Tell me everything about little Allison's disappearance." "Abigail!" "Shit-- yeah. Sorry. Abigail. Tell me everything." We listened like tape recorders, also we recorded it, as Mr and Mrs. Plum sang. They’d awoken one morning to find Abigail unfound! She was missing from her bed. There were no signs of a break in or a struggle and they guaranteed us Abigail absolutely would not have left of her own accord. Apparently the little doll was severely disabled. "I need to know as much as possible about Abigail, what she looks like, where she hangs out, who her friends are." The parents shared a secret look. "Well... " Mrs. Plum started "we can show you what she looks like..." From her handbag the dame produced a leather bound photo album and slid it towards me. "As for where she hung out, and her friends, she didn't really care much about any of that..." I flipped open the album to somewhere in its middle. What I found inside got me twisted. She was a blob! A big pink wobbling hill of a girl. Like my eyes acclimatizing to a sudden flash of light I slowly came to understand this giant flesh circus tent was in fact Abigail Plum. "She's just turned 16 and she weighed 286 stone. She never went out, all she enjoyed doing was eating and sleeping." I know, I know. A 16-year-old girl who weighs 286 stone (4,011lbs for our Yank friends) seems impossible but, trust me, we’re only getting started. I took a moment to compose myself. The Plums weren't onions, they knew how I might react. I wasn’t stupid either, I knew to be gracious.
“HOLY FUCK SHE’S FAT!!”
Even though I knew to be gracious I accidentally said this out loud. The photo album presented pictures of a nearly 3 stone (40lb!!) newborn Abigail. Her father was struggling to cradle her next to an exhausted looking Mrs. Plum. The next photo was a 2-year-old Abigail with long flametop locks at the dinner table tearing apart a ballerina birthday cake, her stomach apron hanging past her knees. Next she was 4-years-old, no less than 21 stone (300lbs) sat in front of a television as her father spoon fed her huge ice cream scoops of peanut butter and Nutella. Her gut slumped on the ground, stretching out her far-too-small Tinkerbell shirt. Her tight pink strawberry shorts stained in shit barely covered her tookus. Climbing up the years I noticed how in every snap Abigail was either eating or sleeping, she was never playing or making friends. There were several shots of her on Christmas day, the only evidence of the season being Abigail's more festive feeding flotsam. The greasy stripped skeletons of huge turkeys scattered about the floor of her room, gravy and stuffing decorated her naked flubbery frame. Hundreds of empty advent calendars in the background stacked high like walls while the bed was littered with the decimated crumb rubble of gingerbread villages. On feeding tables beside her bed sat waiting hams, Christmas puddings, fruit cakes, bowls of custard, Yule logs, roast potatoes, innumerable tins of chocolates and gallon after gallon of eggnog. There was no chance of mince pies and milk ever being left out for Father Christmas in that household. In later photos there was a very definite change in her size when she hit puberty. At 12 she was a mere 140 stone (1960lbs) but by the time she reached 16 in the last photos she'd clearly DOUBLED her weight. Ginger asked to hold onto the album for the case, though I was certain we’d recognize her. I doubted there were many janes as big as Abigail (that's called foreshadowing, you and I both know there are lots of women bigger than Abigail but at the time I didn't know that so shut up!) Ginger gave them the gate, promising we’d afford all our resources (Google) to finding their brat. I sat, dogs on the desk, pondering as Ginger returned. "So, boss, what are you thinking?" "I'm not sure yet, it seems a pretty tight case." "Well, I did have a couple of thoughts..." "What's that, Ginger?" "A lot of this just doesn't add up. The village of Weepington has a population of 700 at most, so why was the unaccountable disappearance of a 16-year-old billionaire heiress not in EVERY paper? This is the kind of tragedy that has the whole country on edge, locking up their doors and whispering about their neighbours, so why did no one bat an eyelid?" "Excellent work, Ginger, clearly my teachings have been invaluable to you! Anything else?" "Well, Abigail Plum was 2 tonnes, so imagine the effort and planning it would take to move her even to a different room. Yet these kidnappers managed to take her without alerting the parents or any of the servants and left no visible evidence of their presence behind, all in the space of a night,." "Brilliant." I replied. I scanned another series of pictures they’d brought us, photos of her room. It was like a shrine, untouched, Abigail’s trampoline sized bed covered in more stains than my character. It was a real clean sneak but it told me more than they had realized. "We should go talk to that newshound the Plums mentioned. Maybe he sniffed out something we can use.”
“This is an exciting case sir! The impossible vanishing of a billionaire daughter into thin air and a deadly conspiracy. This is going to make our name.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Ginger” I stood, pulling on my coat and trilby, “I don’t know where Abigail Plum vanished but it definitely wasn’t THIN air.” ~~~
We drove out to the countryside to a speakeasy called The King's Crown where we'd arranged to meet the journo. He was the only patron. I had Ginger buy the man (and me) a drink and sat down.
"So, you wrote the story on Abigail Plum?" "That's right, but my editor canned it. Said she wanted to focus on something less macabre. This is the story we ran instead." From his briefcase the journo handed us a recent edition of the Weepington Echo. Its front cover read--
COUNCIL ANNOUNCES PAVEMENT RENOVATIONS
"My editor said this would be a better story. She said the disappearance of a young girl is too depressing. Plus, everyone's talking about that rich socialite girl, Nicole Hampton, who went missing a couple weeks ago so another disappearance would feel like a repeat, and people hate repeats." "Then, why were you sent to ask questions at all?" Ginger asked. "Don't interrupt, Ginger!" I snapped, before turning to the journo, "Yes, why were you sent to write the story if you weren’t allowed to publish it?" “Not half an hour after arriving at the Plum estate my editor called and urgently summoned me back. She said we weren't going to bother with the story and to not mention it again. She seemed really shook up. I found this on my editor's desk." He handed me a piece of paper, a legal notice. "That's a super-injunction. They're issued by courts to prevent news outlets from reporting certain details on possible stories. That forbids us from publishing any details or reference to the Abigail Plum case. There’s almost no presence to this story, it’s been scrubbed from the social media." I sighed, wrapping my noodle around this development. Here we were, a couple of canaries and someone out there was desperate to stop us singing. "Sir" Ginger interjected "such a ban would have to be requested by the parents, they never mentioned applying for an injunction. Even then it would take longer than a day to get it through..."
“Ginger, please, I’m trying to think.”
I turned back to the newshound. "So, as I was saying, we have an mysterious injunction mysteriously issued to prevent anyone talking about a mysterious disappearance. Yes, I'm starting to see something mysterious here." "We've only ever had one ban like this one, preventing us from reporting another disappearance, seemingly for no reason." "And who was that?" "A Professor Fry, lecturer of Quantum computation and theoretical physics at the Cambridge institution. A quadriplegic, confined to a wheelchair and breathing apparatus since birth, disappeared seven months ago from his private hospital ward." ~~~
We left the pub 2 hours later with more questions and fewer answers. We spent the drive back pondering connections between the Professor and Abigail. The egghead and the redhead. What kinda hood would want the disappearance of an obese teenager and a 70-year-old Professor kept secret from the public? For the next 2 days we worked like dogs, following leads, seeing what we could dig up. Ultimately we were chasing our tails. We researched Professor Fry but found no connection. I insisted on going to check out Abigail’s bedroom in person but it was made difficult by the Plums’ busy schedules. It was all we could do to hop on the horn and ask the johns what they knew but no soap. We were down in the mouth. On the third day something queer transpired. Ginger returned the photo album to my desk. He’d been locked away in his office like he was in the clink, studying the album for leads. I flipped through idly, hoping lightning might strike. One photo showed Abigail at 11 one summer, sat in her garden in a kid's inflatable paddling pool in a blue bikini, her waist stretching out and overlapping the entire rim of the pool. Her bubs of fat trailed down the side of her immense frame and rested heavily on the grass as servants fed her condiment drenched hot dogs while she simultaneously shoveled ice cream from a 5ltr tub into her fat frog face. Ice cream vans parked across the acres of her garden like a parade, bringing their cargo to this titanic tween as other children looked on deprived of ice cream. Another photo showed her at 6, in a wheelchair to support her phenomenal weight, eating at Burger King. She was naked, covered in ketchup and mustard and burger grease and surrounded by empty wrappers. It was just as I was flicking through when I received an email from an unknown sender.
You're taking too long.
I went bug eyed.
If you want the girl, go to Industrial Link, Number 75 Cornell Way, Bethnal Green. I'll meet you there.
"Ginger. come quick!" I hollered, "I think I've found Abigail!" Ginger rushed in from the can. "You've found her, sir? How so?" "I used a clue from this mysterious correspondence, and extrapolated the answer from there." He turned the screen to face him and read the message, he searched the address as ideas exploded in his mind. "Industrial Link, that's not far, the kidnappers could easily have transported Abigail from Weepington to there. It's old factories and warehouses, it would be the perfect place to conceal a kidnapping victim of that size." "As I was about to say, Ginger! We'll check out the building and then find our way inside." "That might be difficult, sir" Ginger said with a worried intonation. "Looks like 75 Cornell Road doesn't exist." He turned the monitor to me, it showed Google Earth, set for Industrial Link, London. To my astonishment the whole street had been blanked out. Just scrambled pixels, like someone had wiped the information. "First the injunctions and now this? That can't be a coincidence, someone is going to great lengths to hide their whereabouts!" ~~~
There was nothing extraordinary about the warehouse. From the outside number 75 looked like any dilapidated buildings. But, as Ginger pointed out, there were fresh tire marks leading up to it. Under cover of darkness we made our way inside, keeping low and moving fast. "Look, Ginger, guards!" Indeed, within the warehouse walls we spied the restless silhouettes of goons patrolling the grounds. "So many tiny little signs, all pointing towards Abigail Plum being trapped inside! Whoever took her must have far more sinister plans than we'd first conceived, to spin such a convoluted web as this." We crept through the shadows like cats, the corridors echoing treacherously. Eventually, distant voices drew us towards our mark.
“...a terrible shame for you, but with your machine we're just about ready to move on with the Great Sanction." In the center of a large loading bay stood 4 ugly brunos carrying shooters and a tall, silver haired man looking real sharp. They converged in a circle around an old codger in a wheelchair. "You can't... leave me... here... it's inhuman..." the old timer wheezed through some breathing mask. The silver-top simply shook his head. "Now, professor, after all you've seen do you really think we're interested in humanity? Our sights are set on something MUCH bigger." The silver man turned away, his goons following. They passed us as we hid and as soon as they’d scrammed we stepped out to help the prisoner. He was ancient and decrepit, strapped into his chair and all number of medical devices. A respirator covered his face. He sighed heavily, watching us with slow and droopy eyes.
"Have you... come to kill me... ?" "No!" I replied "We're here to free you, I’m Alex and this is my sidekick, Ginger!" "Sir" Ginger interjected "this is Abeforth Fry, the professor who went missing seven months ago." As I unstrapped one of the Professor's feelers I realized he was trying to tell us something. His peepers darted back and forth between me and the hallway we had come down, at the other end of which was a large wooden door. "The... the... in there..." “What? What’s in there?” "The girl... the girl!" At last, we’d found Abigail Plum! We’d solved our first real case, I could now put “100% success rate” on our business cards without getting sued. Ginger freed Professor Fry's other wrist. "It's.... too late..." he wheezed "they have the... Vers...chrän... kung... it's too... late" "What's that?" Ginger inquired. "My... machine... to... communicate... what they'll do with it... unspeakable..." "It's ok, Prof, save your energy. We'll get you out." He gave one last wheeze like a hope deflating. His eyes rolled upwards towards the back of his head and his mug fell forwards and his heart never beat again. He’d bit it. There was no time to mourn. We left the poor bastard in the same chair he'd lived and died in, hoping peace would find his soul and friends would find his body. ~~~ The door was large and wooden, recently installed and out of place in such an industrial setting. Ginger peeked through the tiniest slither of a gap in the door's construction. "I can see something, sir, big and pink. But no guards. There's definitely only one person in there." "Then let's end this night before it ends us." I counted to three and then we brayed the door in, it flew away and inside we saw the missing girl. There she was. Nicole Hampton. The missing socialite broad from the newspapers. Her room was fitted in luxury contrast to the rest of the joint. The walls were hung with silk drapes. Fine oak tables surrounded the edges of the room, across each table were platters and platters of the finest nosh, quail and pheasant and wedding cakes amongst greasy brown bags of fast food. Bimbo blonde Nicole Hampton was tied to the bed, her limbs stretched towards each corner. She was naked except an adult diaper, her large PlayBoy breasts exposed. Her face was covered in sloppily splattered food. From the look of her I'd say she must weigh 14stone (200lbs) a considerable gain compared to the world famous size zero Nicole Hampton. Through tears she spied me and Ginger and lunged as if to break free. "HELP ME! FUCKING HELP ME!!" We pulled at the ropes. She screamed obscenities and cried desperately about how much she just wanted to go home and be famous again.
Finally Ginger got the ropes free. I finished on my phone.
“Dammit! No reward, still, we can probably get something out of her family.” But Ginger was more occupied with our surroundings. "Sir. I think they know we're here." Stood in formation around us was a special-ops group. They wore black combat armor and heavy militaristic boots. Each of them pointed an assault weapon at us. We grabbed the air. One took a walkie-talkie from his belt and started squawking. "Sir, there are people here, they're attempting to free the Potential. They don't look like pros or anything." The same voice we’d heard before, the silver man, responded from the black box. "She's failed. She's of no use to us, execute her and the intruders." It cut out and the guns all cocked with a chorus of heavy clicks. The next thing I knew there was a deafening hubbub, gunshots, my eyes screwed up tight and I curled up. There was screaming. I thought of a woman I had known once long ago. Each bellowing crash was like a fire work in my head. A moment later all went quiet. Tentatively, in case doing so would expose me more somehow, I opened my eyes. Nicole was still on the bed, curled up. Ginger's head appeared over the other side of the duvet, startled but very much alive. Around us strew the lifeless bodies of our would be executioners. Stood in the doorway, holding two guns, was the most gorgeous broad I'd ever seen. A real darb. Her body was smoking like her guns and she had curves that threw me. "Alex. Ginger. The four of us are getting out of here, this instant. More will be coming." She turned to leave. Ginger hauled Nicole Hampton to her feet and helped steady her against her newfound, unfamiliar weight. I addressed the jane who had saved us. "Okay, lady, what's going on?" She turned, pressing her hardware firmly to my chest as warning. "You're done for. Both of you. They already know who you are and if you go home they'll be waiting for you, and this time they'll finish you off. They'll do anything it takes to stop us returning Nicole Hampton to her parents. Come with me and we might stop all of this. Come with me and I can help you find Abigail Plum." "So these people did take Abigail! Is that what they are? Professional kidnappers?" She laughed, she had a gallows humor. "It's bigger than that, they want a lot more than just a couple of ransoms. The professor is dead and they have his research, combined with their own they'll theoretically be able to contact the other worlds. And then we're all in trouble. We have to stop them." "Other worlds? What?? Stop who??!?" I was frustrated. She stopped, again, and turned to me. "Nitidus.”