The Darkness and Dogs

by Lanchbery, T. S.

  Ten minutes later, Lowell begins to relax somewhat as he reasons he has now put a decent distance between himself and the pack, and so he slows his pace somewhat to conserve his energy. By his calculation he should now be approaching the far end of Main Street, and he takes another quick break to allow himself a drop of water and then carries on. A little way further, Lowell comes to the back of another shop. The windows on his side are missing, having expanded and popped outwards under the heat of the fire that has gutted the interior of the building. Peering inside, Lowell recognizes the shell as the remains of the destroyed pet store he had noticed on his way into town. Up close, he can see how ferociously the fire must have raged within; the entirety of the stock and fittings are gone, and halfway in the celling and roof above have given way and crashed down onto the shop floor. From where he stands, it doesn’t appear that the fire has spread into the adjoining building to the right; the wall closest to his position having been burnt clean away to reveal a firebreak that the owners would have been incredibly thankful for, were they still around to appreciate it. With nothing of value likely to be left in the store, Lowell continues on his way. The next building in line is shuttered up tightly; the rear door made of the same impenetrable thick steel as all the rest and locked up tight. As he makes to move on, Lowell spots a sign bolted to the wall next to the door, the wording obscured by filth and dust. He runs his hand over the sign to reveal the text below: Please ring bell for deliveries to H. Warren’s. Lowell knows the name. It takes him a moment to place before a mental image of the independent pharmacy on Main Street pops in to his head and gives him pause. It seems likely that anything in the shop of value will have been looted long ago, but he reasons that with the fire raging next door there is at least a chance that the initial wave of looters will have given the place a wide berth.

  Moving back to the pet store, he stares in thoughtfully. Despite the distance he has put between himself and the dogs, he still doesn’t dare head to the front of the pharmacy to attempt entry that way, and so he instead places his hands gingerly on the empty and scorched frame, carefully avoiding the few fragments of glass that remain, and lifts himself up and into the pet shop interior. Inside, he moves quickly, not wanting to hang around in such an unstable building, and heads straight over to the exposed section of wall. Gripping hold of a of soot-covered iron bar that extends out of the rubble, he eases his weight forward, gives the wall a tentative tap with his right foot, and then grins as a small section instantly gives way and falls to the floor. Leaning forward again, he draws back his foot and repeats the action, but with a harder kick, this time the majority of the exposed wall holds for a second, and then crumbles to dust to create a decent sized hole. Lowell lets go of the pole and steps forward. Dropping down onto his hands and knees, he crawls up to the hole, taps away the last few remaining pieces of plaster that are in his way, and eases through into the pharmacy. Feeling smugly satisfied, he stands up, dusts himself down, and then lets out a strangled yelp as he looks up straight into the barrel of the gun pointed directly at his face.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “For some time after the incident with the Dalmatian, I had a hard time of it at school. Before that, I had never been either picked-on or particularly popular. I was just a normal kid. Maybe if it had been a Rottweiler I could have got away with it, but when a boy gets chased and attacked by a Dalmatian, and then lavishly wets himself, its hard for kids to let that one lie. At first I tried to just laugh it off, but despite that I found that pretty soon I couldn’t walk down a corridor between lessons without some joker lunging at me as I passed and barking in my face. If I winced even slightly someone else would chip in with “he’s going to piss his pants!” Hilarious.

  After that it escalated quickly. I was okay when I was with my friends, but there was always a part of my walk home after school when I’d be alone, and then I was in trouble. It was usually in a lane near my house where they’d get me, this group of older kids who’d hang out there most days to smoke and mess about. When I could, I’d wait until an adult was walking through and then cling to their heels until I got past, hurrying home as soon as I was in the clear. That tactic worked fine, but looking back I think it just showed I was scared, and put a target on my head. Pretty soon it escalated from verbal abuse to physical. Nothing serious, just pushing me around, kicking my heels to make me fall over, putting me in a headlock, throwing me head first down the dirt bank. After a few weeks of that I was at breaking point though, and that was when that little shit Chris Fenton made an appearance. He didn’t even do much, just caught me at the wrong time, at the end of a bad day, and thought he could get a few cheap laughs at my expense, like everyone else. He was much smaller than me, and two years younger, and I guess that put me off my guard. As he and his mates walked down the hallway towards me I was lost in my own world, and so when he suddenly veered off and shouted “woof!” as loudly as he could, I jumped out of my skin and let out a startled squeak. And then I just lost it. As soon as I heard his mates starting to laugh I grabbed him by the throat and shook him like a rag doll and then, before I could stop myself, had spun him around and slammed him against the wall, throwing the back of his head backwards to strike against it with a sickening crack. I knew straight away that I was fucked. He didn’t even have to say anything, I knew who his brother was; once upon a time Luke Fenton had even been a sort-of friend of mine, we would muck around together in drama class, but not lately. Either way I didn’t hang around, I just bolted away from them down the corridor as Chris’s sobbing threats cascaded after me.”

  I took the next three days off school “sick”, hoping that somehow it would just blow over, that they would just forget about it. On the Monday after, I kept my head down, expecting at every moment out of class that I would turn round to see Luke looming up behind me, but nothing happened. I didn’t hear a single word about it. By the end of the day I felt great, I was even beginning to think that maybe all I had needed to do all along was get physical with someone and it would have all been fine. And, who knows, maybe if that someone had been someone else it would have been. As I walked home I felt on top of the world. I had stood up to a bully (albeit a very small, weak bully) and won, I had overcome the abuse, and had finally put an end to the days of me taking shit about the Dalmatian. I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I didn’t even notice when I reached the lane, and when I eventually looked up and saw the massive group of kids blocking my way I instinctively stepped to one side to walk round them. It was only as several of them moved across to block my path that I finally grasped what was going on, and then looked across to see Luke and Chris Fenton standing out in front of the rest. Instantly my knees buckled, I wanted to turn and run by my feet refused to move. Immediately Luke began to walk towards me, Chris following close on his heels. I did the only thing I could do; I dropped to the floor and begged Luke’s forgiveness, telling him over and over that I didn’t want to fight him. He just looked at me with disdain, leant close to me and almost whispered, “I’m not going to fight you, piss-pants, you’re going to fight my brother”, and then stepped to one side. Before I knew what was what, the rest of the kids had gathered round, enclosing Chris and me in a tight, baying circle.

  For a long time nothing happened, Chris just stood there in front of me uncertainly, until finally he turned to his brother and said in a small voice, “I can’t punch him Luke, he’ll just hit me back”. Luke snorted derisively “if he touches you, I’ll deck him”, and immediately several of his mates chipped in to say they would follow his lead. Chris looked unconvinced, but after a bit more encouragement he finally found the courage, stepped close to me, reached up and thumped me in the face; an inexperienced blow that was more of a sideswipe than a punch but stung my check nonetheless. I just stood there, powerless to stop him, and so he carried on, emboldened by my passivity. The blows didn’t hurt, really, but the sheer helplessness did. My cheeks gradually reddened, partly from the impacts but mostly from a fam
iliar feeling rising from my gut. I struggled for as long as I could to keep my face neutral and just put up with the beating, but eventually I had had enough. First a single frustrated tear ran down my face, and then another, and I let out a small choked whimper, the shame of crying just increasing my feelings of misery and completing a vicious cycle. As soon as the other boys noticed my tears it was all over, I could no longer repel the tide of pathetic choked sobs that wracked my body. My wretched display signaled the end of the fight, as Chris was born away as the hero who had reduced a boy two years older than him to tears, and I was left crouched crying and alone in the dirt, condemned to spend the rest of my time at school as an outcast and a joke.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Now, so many years later, Lowell feels the same, bitter feelings of hot, frustrated helplessness that he had felt at the hands of the Fenton brothers all of those years before, and recognizes the same curious expression in front of him; the same combination of pity, hatred, and disgust on the face of his captors that Luke had given him as he had left Lowell sitting on the ground in tears that day. The one compensation for Lowell, is that he is at least sure that, however powerless he feels, he isn’t going to cry this time. He knows that he might still be as much of a coward as ever, but the difference now is that these days that is by choice; he has seen and experienced far too much to be reduced to tears just because he has been tied to a chair and gagged by a couple of thugs. His immediate concern after he had emerged from the pet store and into the pharmacy, apart of course from the gun pointed straight at his head, was that the man and woman in front of him had been hunting him down, intent on exacting some revenge for the food he had taken from them at the house. Soon though, he realized that although he knew who they were, Heather and Bill had no idea who he was, and that despite how it felt to him their tying him up was in fact nothing personal. Indeed, as they discuss what to do with their prisoner now, they seem to be mostly concerned by the mistaken belief that they might have inadvertently stumbled on to the territory of some other gang.

  “Well why don’t we just leave him here then?” That is Bill’s suggestion.

  Heather looks at him incredulously. “Oh, and let his pals find him here so he can tell them all about us?”

  Bill’s brow furrows. “How do we know he’s even with anyone else?”

  Heather sighs in response. As usual, her patience with Bill is teetering on the edge, and as she replies she does so slowly and deliberately, in a voice better suited to explaining something very simple to a child.

  “Well, for one thing, he’s alive, Bill.” She says, “You can’t survive in this world on your own Bill. There’ll be others beside him, and close by too.”

  Bill nods.

  “Alright, so we let him go then”. He says.

  In response, Heather taps her head theatrically.

  “Just think would you, Bill? That’s gonna get us the same response, only quicker”.

  Bill considers this at length, pursing his lips together and whistling his breath in thoughtfully.

  “Well if we aint leaving him, and we aint lettin’ him go either, then I guess that don’t leave us too many options”.

  Heather looks over at Lowell and shakes her head sadly.

  “No, I guess not”.

  Taking a step closer she motioned to where Lowell is sitting.

  “Well why don’t you ge....”.

  Breaking off mid sentence, she looks at Lowell for a long moment and then paces over to the corner of the shop furthest from where Lowell sits and gestures for Bill to follow. Once Bill has joined her, the pair continued their conversation, their voices now dropped to a whisper, so that Lowell is unable to catch a word. At length, he sees Bill reluctantly nod his head before turning away and heading over to the door where he stands staring out. Heather remains in position for a moment, cracking her knuckles and then straightens up to look at Lowell, only catching his eye for a split second before hurriedly looking away again.

  As Lowell watches Heather walking slowly over towards him, a small part of him screams inwardly, telling him to make some effort to talk to Heather, to get her to remove the gag so he can explain that he is not part of some larger group, and is not a threat. The larger part of him, though, knows that this is pointless. Even if he were given the chance to explain himself, the chances of his managing to convince them that he has survived alone for so long will be laughably slim. On top of this realization, the truth is that Lowell is tired. He is tired of a life that involves nothing but a constant scrabble for safety, food and water. He is tired of the constant loneliness. Above all, he is tired of being hunted. And so, he makes no complaint, and merely sits still and quietly watches as Heather approaches.

  As soon as Heather reaches her captive's position, she slips her gun from its holster, and cocks it; but even as Lowell hears the sound of the agent of his impending death sliding into place in the chamber, he still feels no great sadness that it has come to this. If anything, the sense of calm acceptance comes even greater upon him, and he lifts his head up high to indicate to Heather that she should not delay the inevitable any longer. For Heather though, the act she is preparing for is not so easy. She has killed men before, but only ever in defense of her loved ones, and then only from afar. Even though she is sure that she has to follow through with it now, the disquiet she feels at the barbaric act of killing an unarmed hostage gives her pause, and it is that pause that gives Lowell a reprieve, for it is at that moment that Bill turns and frantically signals at Heather, and then a second later a tall woman – Susan, he seems to remember, the very same woman that Lowell had witnessed grieving in his hallway a few days earlier – walks through the door.

  As soon as the woman enters, a subtle change comes over the occupants of the room, and it is immediately evident that she is in charge. Bill and Heather stiffen to attention at once, and then have the sense to hang their heads somewhat as a look of displeasure spread over their leader’s face. In a few seconds, Susan has scanned the room and worked out exactly what is going on, and in that short time her gaze has taken in every person, resting only briefly on Lowell before looking away again. But in that instant, Lowell knows his fate has been sealed. As he had looked into the woman’s eyes, he had seen no anger, no hatred, but merely a cool calculation, a basic assessment of how far things had already progressed and the few options available to her, followed by a fleeting look of sympathy that Lowell recognized as a downturned thumb from Caesar. Before the others can notice this look though Susan has rearranged her face into an emotionless mask, and now she raises one eyebrow questioningly as she turns to face Heather, and then in a low, monotone voice asks,

  “What the fuck’s going on here?”

  Heather’s face flushes a bright red, and Lowell thinks he detects a slight nervous stutter as Heather replies.

  “Bill “n” me found this one snooping in the back, thought we could ask him a few questions, aint that right Bill.”

  Away in the corner, Bill stays quiet, and just glances up briefly before dropping his eyes back to the ground.

  Susan takes a step towards Heather, casually places one hand on the holster set on the side of her belt and taps the leather thoughtfully, all the while continuing to fix her with a penetrating stare.

  “So perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me exactly how you were planning on questioning this guy while he had a gag on?”

  Heather laughs nervously.

  “Yeah, we were just getting to take it off him now, y’know?”

  Susan continues to stare at Heather for a moment, and then turns to look at Bill instead, fixing him with the same piercing glare and then addressing Heather out of the corner of her mouth while watching carefully for Bill’s reaction.

  “Funny. It looked to me that you were getting to execute him gangland style.”

  Bill’s eyes dart up and around nervously, as he and Heather share a despairing look, and then, head bowed, he clears his throat and finally plucks up the
courage to speak.

  ”Sorry Sue, we should have fetched you when we found him, but we didn’t know where you’d got to, and we thought you was in a hurry to get off, we can take the gag off now though if you wanna question him?”

  Susan pauses, she takes a long look at Lowell and then waves a dismissive hand in the air.

  “Nah, look at him, he’s all skin and bones, this guy isn’t going to tell us much. Tell you what, I’ll finish him off myself while you two go and finish off loading the van.”

  Heather looks up at Susan, relief etched across her face.

  “No, don’t worry Sue, I can do –“

  “I said. That I will do it”.

  She barks. Neither Bill nor Heather misinterprets the dismissal concealed within Susan’s last, tense words. Heather instantly steps to the door, holding it open for Bill who nods at Sue and quickly paces towards the door after him.