Excerpt from ‘Head of the Beast’ Chapter One

The hand.  Examine it balled into a fist.  What is it?   A threat gesture.  A crude attempt to intimidate.  Do what I want or you will feel pain.  Obey me and you will not suffer damage.  Sure, something that will hurt if the knuckles make contact with your body's tenderer parts at speed.  Otherwise merely a waving echo of frustration and pointless anger.
Yet what an elegant entity is the fist.  A miracle of evolution, biology, chemistry, electricity, and quantum interconnectivity.  A point source in space time.  Let us dissect it.
First we see the skin, wrinkling and stretching as the fingers bunch, pocked with pores and fine hair.  Marked in places with the ridged whiteness of scar tissue.  Each one a timeline, a string of events.  Joints lined with the stretch marks of movement, pulled taut and smooth over bone and sinew as fingertips pull in towards the palm, and the flouro-glo painted thumbnail tucks under.  
The skin, a complexity of epidermis and sub dermal layers.  Punctuated by follicles and tiny sweat glands.  A self healing biological machine in its own right sheathing muscle, cartilege and bone.  An amazingly complex covering for a blunt instrument.  Yet this is only the beginning of our journey.  Down through the dermal layers, riddled with tiny capillaries to the sinew and muscles beneath in a slipping dance of constant motion, strung with nerves constantly firing, twitching, contracting, always living, never still.  Blood vessels bringing glucose, nutrients and oxygen to fuel and heat this restless entity, and bone; crystalline calcium lined and glued with differing types of sinew and cartilage.  Beautifully sculpted miniature versions of the bodies larger bones which are hollow and filled with stringy blood cell replenishing marrow. 
The elegance of slick ended articulation that is a joint, swivelling and rotating as desired.  Pulled and pushed by collections of sinews.  Like the control surfaces of modern aircraft run by cunning software; constantly correcting, seeking stability.  The sinews tugged by muscle contractions, overlying fibres contracting to pull here, then there to make movement happen. Adductor’s and synergists pulling here and there to stabilise the structure.  Now the whole, the distal phalanges, metacarpals  bound by sinew and cartilage into an intricate, twenty seven boned, four fingered mobile structure with opposable thumb sat atop two smooth cartilage bone ends of the Ulna and Radius.  Capable of elegant dexterity, sensitivity and incredible delicacy.  Here as its most brutal iteration.
Chemicals control nerve firings, a drop of acetylcholine here, too little, too much lets the electricity of life fire a nerve, twitches a muscle, tightens a finger.  Never still, restlessly alive, always seeking perfection. 
Down through chemistry to the electricity, the lightening net that drives the body, bouncing electrons from atomic orbits into other atoms.  Like solar systems gleefully swapping planets, causing current to flow down electrochemical paths.    Flowing down a river of acetycholine, amino acids, peptides and monamines. Flickering like an internal aurora of charge and discharge down special branching cell structures.
From the electrical down to the atomic, and thence to Quantum, the great river of everything, all is connected.  We are here, but here is also there, and there, and there.  Particles react, all is interconnection.  At the Quantum level all is position, vector and speed.  Matter is energy, energy matters.  Without energy there is no matter, so nothing will matter, we must move or die.  Stillness holds its own motion, rolling with a planet, ingesting, excreting, buzzing in place, a vibration in space time that is a human fist.
The eye sees the fist, the ears hear the anger, but all is position, inertia, energy.  Poised for a sub second in an infinity of possibilities.
"E's fackin harrassin me!  Wacher gonna do abaht it copper!"  The owner of the fist, a badly tattooed woman wearing far too little tight clothing on a body long abused by many better days and nights screams in his face, her ePhone aggressively waved far too close for him to focus.  The stink of a recently smoked joint clinging like gel to tacky bright coloured clothing. It was pointless to try and read the offending obscene phone message.  He was just a convenient authority figure to scream her rag bag of frustrations at. 
Constable Paul Gregory Calvin knew all about Sandy and her ex.  Flung together on a stoned out night of primitive passion in their early teens, Sandy and her ex boyfriend were a long standing, even longer lying on her back, widespread stiletto shod feet in the air, joke in the local nick.  It was welfare day.  Ex had got his money, gone out and got maudlin plastered on cheap bootleg booze and now desperately, obsessively thought he could slide back between her frenetic, cellulite cratered thighs by sending crude messages of smack headed lust.  Today, Sandy obviously needed a few more tokes to calm her down.  All he had to do was wait.  The conclusion was inevitable.
"Fackin useless fackin coppers!"  Sandy railed.  Paul focussed on the twin rumpled furrows between her eyebrows, idly thinking that if she'd taken care of herself instead of shooting up every stimulant known to chemistry, she'd still be a halfway attractive woman.  Now barely thirty, too much eye shadow and cheap runny mascara making her look like a human Panda impersonator she was a raddled ruin.  Dry, alcohol and drug wrinkled skin marring once pleasing features.  An over tight ponytail of dry, dark brown lustreless hair, excess flesh bulging out at hips and breast line, well, you'd have to be half cut to even look at her.  Which is where we came in, thought Paul.  Any second now. 
With a frustrated incoherent bellow, the fist drops and she turns away to stomp off along the worn concrete path, bisecting a patch of brown lifeless mud, too well trafficked by many feet to remain turf.  Flabby arse wobbling half comically in poorly chosen light grey spandex leggings.  "Sandy?"  A sardonic female voice speaks in his ear.  His immediate boss, the more experienced Cassie Tzerzinski watches from the patrol car.  Always double crewed in this neck of the woods.  
No one went single crewed into the Sink, a low income housing association owned estate of welfare cases and quiet desperation.  Today was easy, only Sandy was out of her noisome pit at present.  There were others, too many of them, and Paul always did the quantum Zen thing.  Letting their hopeless anger wash over him.  Not accepting their pointless judgementalism.  Water off a ducks back.  
He'd no doubt have Sandy fawning all over him when kicking out time came at the local smokey-drinky in the early hours.  Fucked out of her head on poorly distilled booze and whatever drugs she could pick up cheap or for a blow job from one of the local gang bangers.  Of course as Police Officers they were supposed to close the highly illegal private smoke, drink and drug parties down, but two coppers against half a dozen psycho head cases off their faces on Meth and worse?  That was a joke, right? 
Paul had a modest ambition; to be alive and fit enough to collect his service pension.  Such as it was.  You didn't get there by kicking over wasps nests.  If it all got heavy and they had to go tactical, riot guns, the works, the real bad boys would be over the back fence, or through the gaps between attics like startled spiders.  Of course they'd turn up eventually.  Caught because they got stupid trying not to pay off a debt to the wrong guy.  Straying onto anothers 'turf' or breaking the self imposed code of Omerta that underpinned gang culture.  Face down on a piece of garbage strewn wasteland with half their face missing, burns all over, bollocks in their mouth, and a hole in their head you could drive a squad car through, or one of the other gruesome means of disposal favoured by any particular gang.  What went around, came around.  You got cynical fast in this game, or you got out fast.
"NFA."  No further action.  He'd gone out and answered the call handlers alert.  He'd seen the complainant and it was time to go and make some other citizens day full of unexpected drama.  Just for the opportunity to scream abuse at the uniform.  Whoop-fucking-ee.  The Chief Inspector would read the stats, pass them on to his political masters, and they'd all smile at another 'crime' off the books.  Kudos to Constable Calvin, and another notch on the old résumé.  Yeah, baby.  
Paul saw Sandy make her usual obscene gesture before her poky little ground floor maisonette door petulantly rattle slammed shut, leaving him standing alone on the walkway of the neo brutalist architecture apartment block.  No wonder people living here went off the rails.  
That's all he was, a generator of frigging numbers.  A machine for ticking other people's boxes.  Law enforcement?  Whose laws?  There were so many now even the lawyers couldn't keep track.  No wonder the courts kept on throwing the bad guys back out on the streets.  No one could tell right from wrong any more.  Hey, never mind, a little Zen and quantum thinking would make it all right.  It was all cosmic circles that came right in the end.  
"Calvin.  We just got an all units call.  T1."  Cassie called out, wondering why the hell her new baby wasn't heads up and on the bounce like all the other newbies.
"T1?"  He echoed, a sudden lead ball in his stab proof vest protected gut.  A terrorist incident.  All units, no excuses, no priorities.  Break off what you're doing and go where you're told - now.  Unfolding his arms, Paul returned to the squad car at the jog.  Something smashed on the path behind him, and a jeering voice screamed from the middle distance.  "Go on copper!  Run away you cowardly fuck!"  He ignored the shouted jibe and swung into the passenger seat via the door Cassie had opened for him.  Inwardly he was relieved to get away from the Sink, just for twenty minutes, even on a T1 shout. 
"It's a bomb, a big one.  Town centre."  Cassie rattled off her customary bare bones briefing as she expertly swung their balloon tyred all terrain patrol vehicle across the potholed roadway.  "Bomb squad on scene, we're to help with evacuation."  She put her foot down and flipped on the 'blues and two's, a small savage smile on her face, eyes rapt on the road and the sardine packed traffic ahead. 
"Okay."  As the sirens furious sound began to clear a path he downloaded the T1 call details onto his ePhone from their cars internal computer.  No claim of responsibility yet, but who ever did?  In this world where anything online could be accurately tracked within a millimetre in nanoseconds, only the vain or recklessly stupid drew attention to themselves like that.
Now here was Paul Gregory Calvin, Police Constable, eleven months out of training college and almost through his first year of probation.  Originally he'd gone through University and earned a reasonable second class Physics degree, but even before graduation found there were no real jobs for Physics graduates and made a decision.  Based on long ago conversations with his father, a Uniform Police Inspector killed in the line of duty when Paul was in his last year of high school, he'd gone against his Mothers express wishes and joined the Police Service.  From there he'd studied criminology, and psychology, sociology, social meta dynamics, advanced aggression handling, interpersonal psycho dynamics, conflict management and any number of academic courses.  Now here he was, two years on, taking the on-street course in advanced cynicism, becoming an archetypal 'uniformed thug' and 'enemy of the people'.  Whoever the 'people' were.  Probably the self same people who wanted him to pander to their every childish demand.  He's being horrible to me, stop him.  She's not talking to me, and you got to sort it out, right?  No doubt the very same 'people' who wanted him to conveniently ignore all the theft, violence, fraud, and other anti-social pursuits they loved to get up to.  
Now there was a big bomb in the centre of town.  An explosive device designed to destroy and disrupt the lives of 'the people'.  Bringing a little creative mayhem to the world.  According to news over the secure net no one had made any claims.  No vainglorious claims of credibility.  Just a thousand kilos of home made explosive without a reason.  Perhaps a settling of scores?  An act of validation against an uncaring world?  Tripping off on telling everyone how powerless they were?  Maybe some clever psycho who simply wanted to watch everything burn?  To cauterise the evils within a sick corpus populace?  Maybe Ms / Mr clever bomb making psycho had a point.  
Streets wheeled past rapidly as Cassie swerved and bounced their siren squalling squad car around less agile bus drivers, hissing frustration through her teeth as they apparently ignored the strident sonne et lumiere of a patrol car in a hurry.  Hyperactive eyes scanning for possible hazards, dodging the dumb fucks who thought riding a bicycle made them some sort of invulnerable eco-saint.  Pedestrians blinded and deafened to the world around them by whatever brand new techno toy they were playing with.  
Whitened knuckles grasping the inner door handle, Paul held on, enjoying the adrenalin rush for what it was.  He could feel Cassies growing excitement, the teeth gritted intensity building into a desire for action that would send the butterflies in his stomach scattering on a sudden gust of released energy.  His cure for them lay in the chase, pursuit, the addictive exhilaration of taking a perp down, the physical impact and whoosh of breath, snapping on the Wristraints or K-Straps.  The satisfaction of a task fulfilled.  Predator and prey, life and death,  connecting to his atavistic hunter gatherer self, but still being a socially aware, sophisticated and useful mid 21st century male.  Right. 
Now he could see the flickerings of other flashing red and blue lights bouncing off other buildings, then as they swung around the roundabout a smattering, no, a sea of pyrotechnically lit response vehicles lined the dual carriageway as Cassie swung them into a spot he hadn't even noticed at the end of Bristol's Quay street.  He flipped on his headset again, taking care to select the right sector channel as a flood of messages poured in; some appropriate, some not.  Using his ePhone, he filtered out the Fire and Ambulance service channels.  Now the information flow became more manageable.  Cassie was already swinging out of the drivers seat.  "Move, Calvin."  She shouted over the fairground roar of generators, pumps and engines as the Emergency services set up their individual functions.  He danced back as another Squad Car swerved past them, seeing the unmistakeable tall dark skinned wiriness of Inspector Ben Wallace swing out before the vehicle had come to a complete halt.  Their uniform boss was already snarling instructions into their earpieces.
"Command says there's a kids day care centre in the next building.  Tzerzinski, Calvin.  Check and escort the people clear."  Ben Wallace's voice shouted in their ears.  Paul half heard Cassie say; "On it boss."  Before beckoning to her junior partner and breaking into a jog.  Heart pumping, wired on fight or flight, Constable Paul Calvin followed down her past the circus lit, concrete lined street towards the Blueberry Chill Daycare centre, deep inside the possible blast radius.
A group of women and children were already being ushered out towards the Police lines when one of them, a pony tailed girl in her mid twenties, stopped and began to struggle with the accompanying patrolman, trying to force her way back into the danger area.  From the top of the street, Sergeant Singh gestured at Paul and Cassie to go see what all the fuss was about.
“Randy is still in there!  Little Randolph Kovic!  We can’t leave him there!” Ms Ponytail was shouting hysterically, literally punching Officer 'Lofty' Long, a tall, gaunt, almost cadaverous looking man with a long broken nose and slightly Hispanic complexion.  He winced, more in annoyance than discomfort as her frantic slaps, kicks and punches rained in at him.  Cassie approached and roughly grabbed the panicking woman by a desperate arm.  “Who is missing?”  Her voice carried a sharp feminine slap on each syllable.  “Where is he Mizz?”  The woman swung her tearful face towards Cassies sharply arched eyebrows and stopped trying to punch.  “He was here a minute ago.”  The young woman seemed to calm down a little.  “He was holding hands with Petallia.  They always stay together.” 
“Where’s Petallia?”  Cassie said sharply and let go of the woman’s arm.  She didn’t want to waste time with long winded discussions.  “Will she tell me?”
“Petallia doesn’t talk to strangers.”  Ms Ponytail responded sulkily.  
Cassie looked round at Paul and gave a heavy sigh.  “Come on.  Let’s go get the kid.”
“Where?”
“Where else?  Down in the frigging day care centre.  Come on.”  She led the way down the street.  On the way her comms pinged.  “Where are you going Officer Tzerzhinski?  We’re evacuating.”  Came Sergeant Singh’s acerbic voice over their headsets.
“Lost child, Sarge.  He’s probably still in the day care centre.”
“Be quick.”  Sergeant Singh signed off.  Cassie and Paul jog trotted down the street and arrived outside the Day care centre.
“You take the top floor, I’ll take the ground.”  She said, shouldering open the half glazed door, internally smothered with little multicoloured hand prints.  The cheap front door bouncing and rattling as it hit the wall.  
Inside, what passed for a front office was a plain box of a room decorated floor to ceiling with children’s untutored artwork.  Crude fingerpainting and badly taken pictures of someone’s little darling having their face painted dotted the untidy wall.  A desk with a still running Softscreen lying on the top was vacant.  There was a still open plain white door behind it.  The door still moving.  "This way."  Cassie swung through the door, Paul hot on her heavy booted heels.
Cassie led the way into the main stairwell, gesturing at Paul to take a look upstairs.  She took the stairs down to a toy cluttered playroom in the basement.  “Randy?”  She called.  “Hey!  Randy!  We gotta go.”  Finding nothing she barged into the pink detergent smelling wash room checking out every stall in every lavatory and under every table, calling all the time.
“Hi little guy.”  Paul found Randy Kovic, a sandy curled imp in bright purple cotton shorts and sticky stained green Tee shirt, staring vacuously open mouthed in front of some colourful children’s show playing on the massive two metre high wall covering screen.  “Come on kid.  We got to go see your mom.”  He grabbed Randy’s arm.  Instead of meekly coming with the big friendly grown up, Randy wailed and screamed as Paul tried to lead him out of the room, slapping and kicking at his restraining hand, digging in his feet, squalling and shouting.  “I got him.”  Paul reported over the officer-to-officer channel.
“Cool.  Let’s get out of here.”  Cassie’s voice could be heard, both over the comms and distantly in the stairwell as she climbed the stairs to join him.
In that singular moment of distraction, Randy Kovic stopped hitting the uniformed leg and launched himself at Paul’s hand, biting down as hard as three year old jaws could.  “Jeebus!”  Paul let go, startled more than hurt.  “The little fucker bit me!”  He exclaimed, staring at the neat bloody semicircle of tooth marks.  Free once more, Randy squealed with a childs mocking laughter and ran behind a large couch opposite the wall screen.
Cassie entered the room, face like thunder.  “He bit me.”  Paul complained petulantly and sucked at blood oozing out of fresh bitemarks.  "What if the little fuckers a carrier of Hep C or something?"
“Oh for crying out loud Calvin.”  Snapped Cassie.  “Can’t you do anything right?”  Her head swung like a gun turret, locking on to the sound of Randy's excited breathing.  This was all a game to him, and far more fun than the brightly coloured moving shapes and floaty rhythms of the big wallscreen.
In the building next door but one, the Bomb Disposal Officer was sweating in his heavy body armour, staring in frustration at the timer module.  Three minutes and counting, and he still hadn’t cracked the hardened resin casing around the bomb’s wiring harness.  Let alone made any progress getting past the booby traps on the devices protective cage.  He came to a decision.  “Evacuating.  Get everyone clear, this baby is going to blow.”  He said, rapidly turning around, and for a man laden with twenty seven kilo’s of padding and armour, moved remarkably quickly.  He’d simply been called in too late to do any useful work.  Time to leave.  He hit the stairs in a bumbling, scrambling run.
Soft plastic boots ‘pocking’ rapidly on bare, resin coated concrete floors, he burst out of the front door and ran down towards the waiting cordon, desperately waving everyone back.  A thousand kilos of home made binary explosive was going to go up, and with that stuff you could never be sure of the blast radius.  He got to the first patrol car.  “Everyone down!”  He ripped off his helmet and shouted, pushing his way past several officers to where Ben Wallace stood.  “It’s big!”  The officer panted.  “It’s a binary device.  Well made.  I Couldn’t.  Even. Touch it.”
“How long?”  Snapped Ben Wallace.  
“About half a minute to go.”  The Bomb squad man wiped his dripping brow and shucked off his suits outer padding.
“Anyone unaccounted for?”
“Just Tzerzhinski and Calvin.”  Reported Sergeant Singh.  “They’re in the day care centre, chasing after some wayward three year old.”
“Tell them to take cover in the basement.”  Said Wallace.  “Now!  Fraggit!”  He snarled when Sergeant Singh appeared to hesitate.
Singh keyed his comms.  “Tzerzhinski, Calvin.  Get down to the basement and take cover!”
“We would, but this damn kid wants to watch TV.”  Came Cassie's exasperated response over the police comm unit.
“Switch it off and get down to the basement.  You’ve got less than thirty seconds.”  Singh said sharply.  “The bomb is in final detonation sequence.”
In the Day care centre, Cassie and Paul grabbed at the shrieking three year old, who protested and struggled all the more when Cassie cut power to the screen, leaving it a bland pearlescent white.
As the timer hit twenty seconds, there was a whining noise from the bombs detonation mechanism.  Red oily fluid poured into the big semi transparent yellow container inside the booby trapped mesh cage surrounding the device.  It swirled into the yellow liquid, swirling and mixing rapidly with the primary.  Then the container darkened abruptly from the inside, condensation steaming off the casing.  As Paul and Cassie struggled with the life they were trying to save, the detonator ticked down to five.  Bubbles began to rise through the volatile fluids.  Four, the internal mass began to bubble making the translucent plastic reservoir vibrate.  Three, the boiling grew in intensity.
In the day care centre, Paul finally managed to get hold of Randy and picked him off the floor, hugging him tightly to chunky black body armour.
Two seconds.  The boiling fluid grew frantic, making the container vibrate.
“Take cover!”  At the perimeter, Singh was literally screaming into his comms.
“Get under the couch!”  Cassie yelled, tripping Paul so he fell to the floor, and in one smooth motion flipped the couch over on top of him and the still screaming and struggling Randy.
One second.  The container was shaking like a major earthquake.  Cassie swung her head desperately left and right looking for cover.  Seeing none, she began to dive for the floor.
Zero.  A small electric charge zipped into the boiling fluid.

Whiteout.