‘Who was he?’ Brick said. ‘Christ, he must have been carrying a bomb or something.’
‘I picked him up,’ the overweight boy was saying. ‘The same way as the others, only he had the gun and he . . .’
‘It’s okay,’ said Cal. ‘Right, Brick? It’s okay. We can trust them. Everyone just calm down.’
Brick snapped his hands up in an angry shrug. More blood dripped over his fingers, pattering on the ground.
‘It’s just the three of you?’ he asked. ‘Nobody else?’
The boy and the girl looked at each other, but it was the little kid by her side, Adam, who gave it away. Daisy saw a silver car inside his ice cube, a big one, and something thumping and shrieking in the boot, something with blood on its breath.
‘There’s one more,’ said the girl, looking up the path that led out of the park. The plump boy finished for her.
‘But it isn’t one of us.’
Brick
Fursville, 12.09 p.m.
The redhead’s name was Jade. The fat kid was Chris. They told Brick this as they walked back down the side of the Boo Boo Station and out through the gap in the laurel hedge. Daisy had taken the little boy inside and Cal had gone to check on Rilke. Brick kind of wished he had their job and they had his, but he didn’t trust them to be able to deal with the situation.
He certainly didn’t trust the boy and the girl beside him. Whatever they said, they’d brought the gunman here, they’d led him to the park. He looked at his arm, an ugly gash across his bicep. At least the blood had slowed to a trickle, he wasn’t going to bleed out. He’d been lucky. They all had. Who the hell carried a bomb on them?
And yet there was something at the back of his head that told him it wasn’t a bomb, a memory scratching against his skull. He’d been looking right at the man when he’d exploded; hadn’t there been something there, something crawling out of him with a body of fire?
Don’t be an idiot, Brick. It’s the adrenalin talking.
‘It’s just there,’ said Chris. He nodded towards a silver car parked at an angle on the kerb. It was a snob’s car, a Jag or something, huge. There were bloodstains on the bonnet. Brick could already hear thumps from the boot, and a weak, groaning cry.
‘We didn’t have a choice,’ said Jade. She had an accent that Brick couldn’t quite place. Something northern. ‘That guy, the one with the gun, he knocked him out and stuck him in the boot. Woke up, I don’t know, half an hour before we got here and he’s been trying to beat his way out ever since.’
‘Weird thing is, when we’re not anywhere near him he acts normal,’ said Chris. ‘Like now, shout something to him and he’ll probably shout back.’
They both looked at Brick expectantly. He nodded his head.
‘I know. They’re all doing that.’ He sighed, swearing under his breath. They couldn’t leave the car out here, the first person who saw it would call the police. They couldn’t bring it into Fursville either, there was nowhere big enough to get it through the fence. They could take it to the car park where he’d met Cal and Daisy last night, but he didn’t fancy a ten-minute drive with a feral in the boot. Fursville had a car park of its own. It was locked up but they could probably find a way in.
Whoever was inside must have heard them, because the voice got louder, still muffled but now audible.
‘Please, let me out, I promise I won’t tell.’
And suddenly it was Lisa inside that car, clawing for oxygen in the heat, scraping at the lock with her nails. Brick clamped his eyes shut until the image disappeared.
‘You got the keys?’ he asked.
‘They’re in the ignition,’ Chris said.
‘We can park it in there,’ he said, pointing at the Fursville lot. ‘You’ll have to ram the fence. We’ll hide the car, work out what to do with him later.’
Chris nodded. He wobbled over to it, taking a deep breath before sliding into the driver’s seat. Jade stayed by Brick’s side.
‘Ain’t getting back in there,’ she said when he looked at her. She didn’t offer an explanation, just folded her hands over her chest as if she were cold.
Brick walked down the pavement, the boot-man’s voice now a series of howling barks. The thumps got louder, the metal boot lid shaking as he pounded it from inside. Fifty metres down was the entrance to the Fursville car park, the main gates bolted shut. The fence here wasn’t so big, though.
Chris swung the car out then lurched back onto the kerb, ploughing into the fence with a sound like fingernails running down a blackboard. The engine growled but he didn’t let up, revving hard until the wire snapped and the car jolted through.
‘Over there,’ Brick shouted, pointing towards the huge hedge which separated the car park from Fursville. There was a small wooden office – a garden shed, really – where you’d once had to pay a quid. ‘Drive in as far as you can, the other side of that building.’
Chris obeyed, steering the car over the rough dirt until the bonnet disappeared into the hedge. It penetrated as far as the middle of the roof before hitting something and crunching to a halt. There was a cacophony of rustling snaps and grunts before Chris appeared, batting branches away from his face. He stepped gingerly away, looking forlornly at the battered Jag.
‘Dude, my dad’s gonna murder me when he sees his car,’ he said, blanching when he realised what he’d said. He bared his teeth in a bitter, humourless smile. ‘Again.’
The voice from the boot was even louder now, the snarls of a caged animal. But the car was pretty well hidden, Brick thought, the small office concealing it from the road. He’d grab some boards from the park and cover it up properly once they’d decided what to do about the man inside.
‘Come on,’ he said, turning and heading towards the ruined fence. ‘Let’s get back. Something tells me we need to talk.’
Cal
Fursville, 12.33 p.m.
Cal laced up his spare trainers, grateful that he’d thought to pack some before leaving the house. He removed his smoke-blackened T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms and pulled on clean ones before joining the others.
They all sat in the restaurant, huddled around a table on the far side of the room to where Schiller still lay like an ice sculpture on the sofa. Outside it was thirty degrees and golden; inside, behind the boarded-over windows, it was half that even with the dozen candles that sputtered and spat. But it felt safe here. It felt quiet. It felt hidden.
Cal cast another look at Rilke. He’d checked her pulse and her breathing outside the pavilion, where she’d been lying, then he’d carried her here. She was curled up on the floor in the corner, covered with a tablecloth, her head resting on a bundle of clothes which he’d taken from his duffel bag. She’d had a pretty bad thump to the head, the lump there like someone had sewn an egg beneath her skin. He didn’t think it was too serious, though. He’d got lumps like that before playing footy and they went away after a day or two.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Jade said, nodding at Schiller. ‘Why is he so cold?’
‘Tell us about you first,’ Brick said. ‘I want to—’
‘Do you want some crisps?’ Daisy interrupted, earning a glare from Brick. ‘Or some chocolate, or a drink?’
‘We haven’t got much,’ Brick said. ‘We should be conserving it.’
Daisy looked at the table, obviously contemplating something. Then she scraped back her chair and pulled two packets of crisps from the carrier bag behind her. She walked to the new kids and handed them over, flicking a defiant look at Brick that clearly said, Too bad, you big meanie. Cal smiled, everybody waiting for Daisy to pour some Fanta into a couple of glasses they’d found in the kitchen. The big bottle was too heavy for her and quite a bit of it fizzed out onto the tablecloth, hissing like acid.
‘Thank you,’ said Jade, downing the drink in one, then burping into her hand. ‘God that’s good. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since yesterday.’
‘So what happened, then?’ Brick snapped. ‘Why are yo
u here?’
‘You told us to come here, didn’t you?’ Chris answered, speaking through a mouthful of crisps. ‘Who was it that left the message online?’
Brick pulled a face, shrugging. He glanced at Cal as if it were his fault.
‘I saw it,’ Chris went on. ‘Look, this is what happened. I was at home, playing Fallout, was about nine maybe, half nine. Next thing I know my mum has snapped, she’s coming at me with a knife.’ He paused, frowning, like he’d only just realised what had happened. He sat back in his chair, pulling on his shirt so it wasn’t moulded to the rings of fat around his belly. ‘And she trips, right, she’s so . . . I don’t know, so savage, so mad, that she doesn’t look where she’s going.’ He stopped again, holding up his hands, his eyes a million miles away. The only sound in the room was the splutter of the candles and the chattering of Daisy’s teeth. ‘So I called an ambulance, right? But before they arrive someone comes into the house, some guy I’ve never seen before, and he starts punching me, strangling me. Only he trips over my mum, smashing his head on the table. I swear, it was like something from a Monty Python sketch.’
‘Then what?’ asked Brick when the boy didn’t continue.
‘To be honest, I don’t properly remember,’ Chris said. ‘I left the house, got in the car. My dad’s car. He came after me in the garage, but he’s like on crutches because of a toe operation, and he falls. So the ambulance people arrive and even before they get up the road I know what they’re going to do. They start tearing at the car along with my dad. They looked like animals. I just drove, somewhere quiet, used my phone to check the internet, which is where I found your message.’
‘You still got your phone?’ Brick asked. Chris fished it from his pocket.
‘No signal,’ he said, putting it back.
‘What about the others?’ Brick said. ‘What about that man?’
‘Well, that’s the strange thing,’ said Chris. He grunted out a laugh. ‘Well, one of them. I . . .’ He looked at Jade, and for some reason his cheeks flushed. ‘I . . . we . . . just knew where they were.’
‘I’m from Whitehaven,’ said Jade, filling the pause before it got awkward. ‘But I was staying with my friend Heather who’s moved down to Grantham, yeah? Anyway, we were in the taxi on the way to a gig in town, and I didn’t even want to go ’cos of my head, it was really bad.’ She felt her temples, as if trying to find the pain that had been there. We had that too, thought Cal, sharing a look with Brick, the headache, it’s part of this. ‘And the night’s just getting worse and worse because Heather isn’t even talking to me and I don’t know why and then the taxi driver crashes the bloody thing into a tree. Like, a proper crash and everything and we rolled over onto the side in this ditch.’ She wrapped her arms around herself again, pulling her legs up onto the chair for a moment before lowering them again. ‘And Heather is kicking me and scratching, but I just think she’s trying to get out because she’s underneath me, yeah? So I pull myself out the window then lean back in but she takes a bite out of me. I mean really.’ She held out her hand, a purple half-moon on her wrist. ‘And the next thing I know the taxi driver is going at me, even though . . .’
She stopped, looking like she was going to barf.
‘His arm,’ she said, her eyes filling. She put her hand to her mouth. ‘His wrist was broken, his hand almost coming off, but he was still . . .’
She looked at Chris. He lifted an arm as if to comfort her then chickened out, resting it back on his knee.
‘I got there a while later,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even know where I was going, I just had to go that way. And I see the taxi on its side and an ambulance and a police car, and I know she’s not there, but she’s somewhere close, so I park further up and go into the woods and she’s just sitting by a tree. And it’s like we’ve known each other forever, you know?’
Cal did know. He was feeling it now, as if he’d grown up with these guys, spent every waking hour of his life with them.
‘So we get into the car and drive a bit further until I’m just too tired to go any more, and we sleep in the car in this clearing. Then the next morning we both start feeling this thing in our heads, like . . . Like I can’t even explain it.’
‘Like a silence,’ said Cal. ‘But a silence you can hear.’
‘Yeah, that’s just like it. So we both had that silence and we know we only have to drive and we’ll get to where we need to be.’
‘Him,’ said Jade, nodding at Adam. The boy wasn’t listening. He was chewing crisps but the slow, mechanical movements of his jaw were the only sign he was alive. ‘Man, we almost died. He was at the dentist’s, yeah? In this house on this normal kind of street. Where was it? Peterborough?’
‘Ely,’ said Chris. ‘Well, near there, anyway.’
‘He’d managed to hide in the attic, God knows how long he’d been there. This dentist, he went for us, but . . .’
She looked at Chris again and in that look Cal saw what they’d done. What they’d had to do.
‘He doesn’t talk,’ she went on. ‘We got his name from the label in his shirt. Poor little chicken.’
‘And the guy with the gun,’ said Brick. ‘What about him?’
‘He was the last,’ said Chris. ‘We were on the way here, following your message to come to the sea. Not that we’d have needed it, I mean something was pulling us out this way anyway, that same . . . thing that led me to Jade, then to Adam, then to that guy.’
‘Never told us his name,’ said Jade. ‘We show up at this farm, it’s not even that far from here, an hour maybe. And I knew it was a bad idea, ’cos there was blood everywhere, like loads of it.’ She shuddered. ‘So this guy comes up to the car and he’s just insane. Not like the others, not like the feral people. He was with it, just crazy with it, you know?’
‘He dumps an unconscious man in the boot, gets in and says he’ll shoot us unless we do what he says,’ said Chris. ‘So we drive up here, all of us, and we didn’t even need the satnav. We just knew you were in the park.’
There was silence when he finished. Cal took a sip of his own Fanta, ignoring the dirt on the glass. It felt good, crackling on his tongue.
‘I’m glad you killed him,’ spat Jade.
‘You see any explosives?’ Brick asked. Both Chris and Jade shrugged. ‘He had to have been wired with something, an explosion like that. Sounds like he was crazy, so he had to have wired himself, yeah?’
‘I guess so,’ said Chris, although he didn’t look sure.
It had to have been that, didn’t it? Whatever had happened had knocked Cal off his feet and into a dark dream that he didn’t think he’d ever wake up from. He’d come round eventually feeling like he’d been run over. Maybe the guy had had a grenade or something, one left over from the war that his grandad had brought home.
Or maybe it wasn’t that. He thought back to the exploding car on the dual carriageway, the shape that had risen from it on wings of fire, screaming.
‘We’ll never know now, I guess,’ Chris went on. ‘Guy’s splattered all over the place.’
‘You said your head hurt,’ said Cal. ‘Right before everything happened.’
Chris and Jade nodded.
‘And mine,’ said Daisy. ‘It was really sore for days. And I could hear it too, like a pulse.’
‘Thump-thump, thump-thump,’ said Brick. Daisy nodded, her eyes widening.
‘That’s it,’ she said, sitting up straight in her chair. ‘It was just like that, just like that!’
Cal’s skin tightened into knots of goosebumps, his scalp tickling like someone was breathing on it.
‘Things went bad right after my headache stopped,’ said Chris. ‘Like, right afterwards, within seconds.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ said Jade. ‘I even remember thinking Maybe this night isn’t gonna be so bad because my headache had gone, and then three seconds later or whatever we were in the ditch.’
It had been exactly like that, hadn’t it? Cal thought back, remembering the
football pitch, the sunlight. The pounding ache between his temples had gone, like it had just been switched off. Then the whole world had come after him.
‘My headache was definitely gone when the ambulance man came,’ said Daisy.
More silence. They all looked at each other, and in their eyes they saw themselves, they saw their own confusion and fear.
‘What does it mean?’ asked Jade.
‘It was like something banging on my skull,’ said Brick. ‘Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.’
The sound seemed to shake Adam from his trance. The kid looked up at Brick, his jaw frozen mid-chew. He looked frightened.
‘Thump-thump, thump-thump,’ Brick was slapping himself on the head now. ‘It’s like something was trying to get in there, trying to break down the door. Thump-thump.’
‘Brick, that’s enough,’ said Cal. ‘You’re scaring him.’
Brick wasn’t listening, still rapping on his skull and uttering that one word like a madman. Adam was fully awake now, his eyes like saucers.
‘Thump-thump,’ Brick went on. ‘Thump-thump, just like that. Thump-thump, thump-thump.’
‘Brick,’ said Cal. ‘Just—’
And that’s when Adam opened his mouth, uttering a cry so shrill and so loud that Cal had to slap his hands to his ears, a cry that caused his glass to shatter into shrapnel, which swept across the room and extinguished every single one of the candles, plunging them into night.
Brick
Fursville, 1.04 p.m.
Brick fumbled for the matches, sparking one up and thinking, That scream can’t have come out of that little boy. It had been deafening, it had shattered glass.
‘Give him some air,’ said Daisy, who had her arm round Adam’s shoulder. ‘He’s scared.’
‘We’re all scared,’ said Jade. ‘What the hell was that?’