The Truth App

by Jack Heath

  Jarli had put in the first two zeroes when movement caught his eye on the TV screen. He looked up from the phone. He couldn’t help it. It was just a reflex.

  The TV screen was showing the reception area again. Jarli could see himself, part of the counter, and the rows of empty chairs behind him.

  But there was something else on the screen. A man, standing behind Jarli.

  The picture was blurry, but Jarli recognised him. It was the old man with the black glasses.

  AS FAST AS YOU CAN

  Maybe Jarli should have pretended he hadn’t seen the man. He could have let the guy think he was sneaking up on him, and then whirled around and stunned the man with a Judo chop.

  But Jarli wasn’t a trained super-spy. He was just a kid who liked making apps.

  So as soon as he saw the man on the TV, he turned around. The element of surprise was now gone.

  The old man carried a bottle of bleach in one hand and a cloth in the other. He looked like a cleaner, except that his gloves were leather rather than latex and Jarli could see the collar of a business shirt peeking out from under his overalls. Outside of the ute, the man was tall with a slight stoop that might have come from a lifetime of ducking under things. A squint shrunk his eyes to the size of sultanas.

  He looked Jarli up and down, then nodded slightly.

  ‘Jarli Durras?’ he said.

  Jarli had never been less pleased to have his name pronounced right. ‘No, sorry,’ he said, trying not to look terrified. ‘I’m . . . Henry.’

  It was just the first name which popped into his head. His phone beeped in his pocket. Lie

  ‘Oh, OK,’ the man said, not believing him. Maybe he had heard the beep and knew what it meant. ‘Come with me, Henry.’

  ‘I’m waiting for someone,’ Jarli said.

  ‘It’ll only take a minute.’ The old man’s voice was rough and gurgly, like his lungs were full of water.

  ‘OK,’ Jarli said shakily. ‘Sure.’

  Then he ran the other way, towards the front door.

  The man might have been old, but his reflexes were quick. Jarli heard him give chase a split-second later, his rubber-soled boots slapping the linoleum. Jarli was a strong runner—it was the only sport he was good at, since it didn’t involve throwing or catching a ball—but the automatic door was closed, trapping him in the reception area. He had to wait for the door to slide open while the old man’s long legs brought him closer and closer.

  As soon as the gap was wide enough, Jarli slipped through and sprinted out towards the car park. ‘Help!’ he yelled. ‘Somebody help me!’

  He looked around, desperate. No-one was there. He couldn’t run back down the driveway—the old man could drive after him and run him over, and Dad was still inside—vulnerable. Instead Jarli turned left and sprinted up a grassy slope alongside the outer wall of the hospital.

  He had hoped the old man would find it hard to run uphill, but it was tough for Jarli, too. His heartbeat was deafening in his ears. It felt like someone was winching chains around his chest, tighter and tighter.

  ‘I’m not going to hurt you!’ the man yelled.

  Jarli’s phone beeped in his pocket. Lie He had never been so scared.

  He reached the corner of the building and turned left again, out of sight. A cluster of trees stood forty or fifty metres away. They looked dense enough to hide in. But what if the old man heard him? What if he had a torch? Jarli was wearing pale grey jeans and an orange shirt—he would stand out, even in the darkness. And if he tried to take the shirt off, the movement would make his presence obvious.

  There was a back door to the hospital up ahead, but it might be locked. If it was, he wouldn’t have time to run to the trees. The old man would see him.

  Jarli had to choose. Trees or door?

  Door. He pumped his legs as fast as he could. He could feel the old man getting closer. If Jarli could get back into the building before the bad guy rounded the corner, he might think Jarli had gone into the trees instead.

  There was a sign above the door. From this angle, Jarli couldn’t read it. Hopefully it said, This door is kept unlocked but can be locked from the inside if a psychopath is chasing you.

  Heart pounding, lungs wheezing, Jarli finally reached the door. There was a pane of glass at face-height, but the lights inside were dead. He couldn’t see what lay beyond.

  ‘Please, please, please,’ Jarli whispered. He twisted the handle and pushed.

  The door wouldn’t open.

  ‘No!’ Jarli cried. He pulled instead.

  The door clicked and swung back, hinges squeaking.

  Blam! Jarli screamed as the window of the open door shattered next to his head. Shards of glass flew in all directions. A sliver barely missed his eye, leaving a long scratch on his brow. The bang echoed across the grassy plain, and it took Jarli a second to realise the old man was shooting at him.

  Jarli darted through the doorway. He pulled the door closed behind him, but there didn’t seem to be a lock. He looked around for something to throw in front of the door and jam it closed. There was a filing cabinet, a fridge and a desk—but then Jarli remembered that the door opened outwards. None of those would help.

  Jarli kept running. Motion-activated lights flickered into life around him. He was in some kind of locker room with square, stainless steel doors lining the walls. Maybe the hospital staff kept their clothes here. The air was freezing and smelled of chlorine, like a swimming pool. The tiles were slick and shiny underfoot.

  Jarli turned a corner, desperate to get out of sight. He ran through a short corridor into another room—

  And then he realised where he was.

  In the centre of the room was a steel slab, lit by a blinding spotlight. Scales hung from the ceiling. Knives and saws hung from hooks on the walls, alongside more steel doors.

  Jarli was in the hospital morgue, where they put people after they’d died. Those knives were for cutting up dead bodies. Horrified, Jarli backed away from them. He yelped as he bumped into something—a hanging tray for weighing organs. It swung from side to side, chains rattling.

  There was a lift on the far side of the room. Jarli didn’t see any other way out of there. He ran over and pushed the button. Somewhere above, he heard a clank and a hum as the lift came to life.

  It sounded slow. Would it arrive before the old man did?

  The hinges of the outer door squeaked. More broken glass tinkled to the floor. The old man was coming.

  Jarli pushed the button rapidly. Clackclackclack. But the lift didn’t come any faster. If he didn’t find somewhere to hide now, the old man would get him before you could say Gee, a morgue would be an ironic place to die. He looked around and saw . . .

  One of the square steel doors was slightly ajar.

  Jarli hesitated. A morgue drawer seemed like a good hiding place. It would take the old man a long time to search all of them, and he might even assume that Jarli had escaped in the lift.

  But what if the drawer was . . . occupied?

  There was no time to come up with another plan. Jarli ran over and wrenched the door the rest of the way open. The steel was so cold that his sweaty fingers left imprints on the handle.

  There was no white sheet covering a mysterious shape. No cold, grey foot with a tag around the toe. The morgue drawer was empty.

  He exhaled in momentary relief and climbed in, feet first. The space was horribly cramped and dark. Ignoring the tight feeling in his chest, he pulled the door shut, sealing himself into the blackness.

  An automatic lock clicked. HE WAS TRAPPED!

  It took all his willpower not to start pounding on the inside of the door. He hadn’t known it would lock. There wasn’t much air in here. It was designed for people who didn’t need to breathe. The ceiling was so close to his face that it felt like being buried alive. Maybe facing the old man was better than suffocating in this gloomy prison.

  Jarli held his breath. He tried to listen for the old man, but it was ha
rd to hear anything over his own panicked heartbeat. Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump.

  Ding! The lift arrived. Jarli heard the groaning and shuddering as the doors opened.

  Footsteps echoed through the morgue. They got closer and closer to where Jarli hid, and then stopped.

  Jarli lay perfectly still. The lift hadn’t left, so the man wouldn’t think he had taken it. But would he work out where Jarli had actually gone?

  Jarli remembered the handprint he’d left on the icy handle of the door to the drawer. Hopefully it had faded by now. Otherwise it would be obvious where he was hiding.

  There was a long, scary silence.

  Jarli started to wonder if the old man had left. That would be good—except that Jarli was still locked in the morgue drawer.

  He could always call for help, right? Very slowly, Jarli pulled out his phone. The glow of the screen reflected off the steel walls around him. No reception.

  He locked the phone again, and it made a cheerful click. Jarli’s heart leapt into his mouth.

  Footsteps approached. The old man had heard the sound.

  Jarli squeezed his eyes shut, as though that would make him invisible. It was like being a rabbit, hiding in a burrow while a fox sniffed around nearby. He felt like he was going to have a heart attack.

  There was another lengthy silence.

  Then a handle clanked. A nearby drawer slid open, wheels scraping on runners. After a moment, Jarli heard it roll back into place.

  Another clank, another scrape. Another drawer had opened, closer this time. The old man was checking the drawers, one by one.

  Jarli whimpered. He couldn’t help it.

  Clank. Scrape.

  Jarli got out his phone again. If he called the police right now, the call wouldn’t go through. But the phone would keep trying until the reception came back. Maybe the old man wouldn’t kill him right away. Maybe the police could trace the location of the phone. As an app developer, Jarli knew that they could use his phone’s GPS, wi-fi and signal towers to pinpoint his location within three metres.

  Jarli hit the emergency call button just as the door opened next to his head, flooding the drawer with light.

  UNDER SUSPICION

  Jarli screamed.

  So did the old man—because it wasn’t the old man. It was a doctor, his grey eyes wide with shock. He hadn’t expected to find a live person in one of his morgue drawers.

  ‘Hey!’ he yelled, recovering. ‘What are you doing in there? Get out, this instant!’

  Jarli popped his head out of the drawer and looked around. The old man was gone. Maybe he had left in the lift. Or perhaps the doctor had arrived in the lift, forcing the old man to flee.

  ‘Out!’ the doctor snapped. ‘Right now!’

  He was a balding man with an earring, a cotton mask and a white smock. His nametag said LADD.

  Jarli scrambled out of the morgue drawer. He was so relieved he could hardly stand up. ‘Someone tried to kill me,’ he said. ‘He’s still in the hospital. You have to call the police!’

  ‘The police are already here,’ Dr Ladd said angrily. ‘Probably looking for you. This way. Now.’

  He glared at Jarli and pointed at the lift with a latex-gloved finger. He seemed unnecessarily angry, given that Jarli hadn’t done anything wrong. Maybe his unpleasant manner was why the hospital made him deal with dead patients rather than live ones.

  Ladd herded Jarli into the lift, stepped in after him and pushed a button. The doors slid closed and the lift hummed upwards.

  ‘Did you see the old man?’ Jarli asked. ‘With the glasses and the overalls?’

  ‘I saw you hiding in my autopsy room,’ Ladd said. ‘Since you’re not dead, you’re in big trouble.’

  ‘Was there a cleaner?’ Jarli pressed. ‘When you got out of the lift?’

  Ladd snorted. ‘Blame the cleaner, eh? That’s original.’

  The lift stopped, and the doors opened. Ladd prodded Jarli out, pushing harder than necessary, and marched him up the corridor.

  Jarli looked around. No sign of the old man. The hospital was as quiet as a tomb. Most of the lights were turned down so that patients could sleep. It was now late at night—or maybe Jarli was just exhausted.

  Ladd pulled Jarli around a corner into a ward and pulled back a curtain, revealing a hospital bed under a dark window. Two police officers sat in plastic chairs, both fiddling with their phones.

  ‘Officers,’ Ladd announced. ‘I found this boy hiding in my morgue. One of the windows was broken. I trust charges will be pressed.’

  The two cops glanced at Jarli. But Jarli ignored them. He was looking at the hospital bed. A heart monitor was attached to the patient’s finger, beeping quietly. The man’s eyes were closed, and there was a narrow tube leading from a drip to the crook of his elbow. A breathing tube had been attached to the transparent mask on his face.

  ‘Dad,’ Jarli whispered.

  ‘He’s in an induced coma,’ said a voice from behind Jarli.

  He turned around and saw a beak-nosed man wearing navy hospital scrubs. His name badge read, NURSE: AMON.

  ‘You’re Glen’s son?’ Amon said.

  Jarli nodded. ‘Jarli.’

  ‘Hi Charlie,’ Amon said, mishearing him. ‘The doctors were worried that your dad might be bleeding inside his skull, so they put him in a deep sleep to reduce the pressure. He’s just had a scan which showed no bleeding. So now we’re bringing him out of the coma, but we have to do it slowly. You understand?’

  Jarli nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

  Ladd was tapping his foot, still waiting for the police to arrest Jarli. ‘Well?’ he said finally.

  ‘We’ll take it from here,’ one of the cops said drily.

  Ladd nodded, straightened his lab coat, and swept out.

  Nurse Amon squeezed his shoulder. ‘I’ll be close by, OK, Charlie?’ he said.

  ‘OK.’

  Amon went away and Jarli turned back to Dad. He kept his eyes on Dad’s chest, which was rising and falling gently under the thin hospital gown. Jarli didn’t want to look away in case the movement stopped.

  He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d last said to his father. It was something about Mr Kendrick’s emails. Jarli had been angry, and he’d said something sarcastic. What if he never got a chance to say sorry?

  After a minute, one of the officers cleared her throat.

  ‘Mr Durras,’ she said to Jarli. ‘I’m Constable Blanco, this is Constable Frink. We have some questions for you.’

  It took Jarli fifteen minutes to explain everything that had happened. The two police officers didn’t interrupt him. They just sat and watched, as still and emotionless as the statues in Mum’s garden.

  Their stares made Jarli feel guilty, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. A couple of times his phone beeped in his pocket. He was telling the truth, but the app could sense how nervous he was, and it assumed he was lying.

  Jarli took the phone out of his pocket and put it on the table where the front-facing camera could see him. The app was more accurate when the phone could see the face of the person talking.

  ‘Turn that off, please,’ Constable Frink said. He was a bulky, blond-haired man with a scar on the back of one hand and a faded rose tattoo inside his wrist. He was scratching his chin as though wondering how long it had been since he shaved.

  Jarli hesitated. ‘It has my lie-detector app on it. It proves I’m telling the truth.’

  Frink didn’t look surprised. ‘It’s your own app, on your own device. It proves nothing. Put it away, please.’

  Jarli turned the sound off and slid the phone back into his pocket.

  ‘So,’ Constable Blanco said. As she opened her mouth, Jarli could see that she had a chipped front tooth. She was sitting perfectly upright in her chair, like a straight-A student. Her eyes were dark and watchful.

  ‘You think this man drove into your car deliberately?’ she said.

  Jarli’s jaw fell open. Had sh
e not been listening?

  ‘He crashed into us twice,’ Jarli said. ‘He would have done it three times if Anya hadn’t showed up. You have to search the hospital for him!’

  ‘The building is surrounded. If he’s still here, he’s not going anywhere.’

  Jarli didn’t think there were enough cops in Kelton to surround the whole hospital. She must mean that the front and back doors were guarded. But what if the old man rappelled down the side of the building or something?

  ‘So the man works here?’ Frink asked. ‘As a cleaner?’

  ‘He was disguised as a cleaner,’ Jarli said. ‘He was wearing normal clothes under his overalls. I said that already.’

  ‘How could you tell?’

  ‘His collar was poking out. Can’t you watch the video? From the security cameras?’

  ‘The camera in reception shows you running away,’ Frink said, ‘and a man following you out. But it’s a low-resolution camera. He could be anybody.’

  ‘What about in the morgue?’

  ‘No cameras there.’

  ‘How did you know it was the same man who drove the car?’ Blanco adjusted her police cap, which was so clean that it looked brand new.

  ‘I saw the car in the car park,’ Jarli said.

  ‘The ute with the bull bar, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘There are a lot of utes in Kelton. And plenty of people in the hospital. Even if it was the same car from the accident—’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘It could have belonged to anyone. How did you know it was this guy in particular?’

  ‘I recognised his glasses. Then he chased me.’

  ‘Uh-huh. So you went around the back, broke in through a window—’

  ‘No, I opened the door,’ Jarli said. ‘He broke the window. He was shooting at me.’

  ‘What kind of gun did he have?’

  ‘I didn’t see.’

  Blanco glanced at her partner again. ‘No-one else has reported hearing a gunshot.’

  ‘Have you asked around?’

  ‘Everyone’s asleep.’