The David Raker Collection

by Tim Weaver

  ‘The Red Room?’

  ‘Where they keep all the memories.’ He turned to me. ‘That’s where all your stuff is: your gun, your wallet, the bullet, the photos of your wife. Your wedding ring. I broke the locks on it before I came down here for you. That was the diversion.’

  ‘And this alarm?’

  ‘This is the compound alarm. It goes off if the door to Calvary is left open for more than five minutes.’

  ‘What’s Calvary?’

  ‘Calvary was where Jesus was crucified,’ he said. ‘But in this place, it’s the crucifixion room.’

  The Calvary Project. What they’d called the dummy corporation that all their money was fed through. Now it made sense.

  He looked at the diggers, a few of them glancing towards us. An army of faces in their late teens and early twenties.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  We angled left, out of the darkness and into the light. It was freezing cold, snow still on the ground. It must have been late afternoon – in the distance, the sun was starting to drop in the sky, melting away behind patches of thick white cloud.

  The mouth of the compound was built into the extension on the side of Lazarus. We moved past a blacked-out window. Then a second. Finally we reached a red door at the back of the house. Next to it was a small car port. It curved around to the side of the farmhouse and joined up with the main track back up towards Bethany. Parked underneath were a Shogun and a Ford Ranger.

  Alex had split the lock to the Red Room with a chisel. It was hanging out of the side of the door, and the door was ajar, moving slightly in the breeze. Inside was a small storage room, probably ten foot square, with floor-to-ceiling shelving on three sides and dull red walls. On the shelves were long rows of shoeboxes, stacked one after the other, covering almost all the space. Countless surnames were scribbled on their fronts. Some I recognized – Myzwik, O’Connell, Towne – but most I didn’t. I took Alex’s down and looked inside.

  ‘There’s nothing in there,’ he said.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I had nothing when I came back.’

  ‘Came back? Came back from where?’

  He glanced out through a small gap in the door, and back at me. ‘I’ll tell you, but not now. We haven’t got time. Get your things.’

  I looked for my belongings. Further along the middle shelf I saw a box with ‘Mitchell’ on it. I leaned in a little closer. Underneath the surname was a Christian name: Simon. Simon Mitchell. Alex’s friend. The one Cary said had also disappeared, never to be seen again.

  ‘Is that your friend Simon?’

  He nodded.

  ‘He came here too?’

  A noise outside. Someone at the Shogun.

  I pushed the door closed, leaving only a sliver of a gap. Through it, I could see Myzwik reaching on to the back seat of the car for something. He pulled out a jacket and pushed the door closed. When he turned around, his eyes passed the door.

  And zeroed in on us.

  He’d seen movement inside, through the gap.

  His eyes narrowed. He took a couple of steps forward. I looked around the storage room for something to arm myself with, and saw Alex doing the same. But there was nothing except shoeboxes.

  Then I remembered my gun.

  I searched for my box, glancing back over my shoulder to see Myzwik about six feet from the door. He was unarmed, but his hands were balled into fists at his side. I scanned the rows of boxes, one after another, trying to spot my name among them all.

  Quicker.

  He was five feet away now; I could hear snow crunch under his feet.

  Quicker.

  Alex glanced at me – the first glint of fear in his eyes – and back out at Myzwik.

  Quicker. Quicker.

  Then I saw it, off to my left, high up on one of the top shelves. I went to reach up, and my whole back felt like it was tearing open. I sucked air in through my teeth, wanting to cry out in agony. Instead, I brought the box down and flipped the lid. Inside was my life. The car keys. My wallet. My photos of Derryn. The wedding ring I thought I’d lost for ever when I’d watched it roll away, across the floor of the fridge. Next to that was the bullet.

  And next to that was the gun.

  I grabbed the Beretta, placed the box on the floor, and stepped back behind the door next to Alex. It opened fractionally by itself. Between the door and the frame, I could see Myzwik reaching out for the handle. I flipped the safety on the gun – and it made the tiniest of clicks.

  Enough to stop him dead.

  He was on the other side of the door now, only a strip of his back visible through the gap in the frame. I couldn’t see the rest of him. What he was doing. Where he was looking.

  We stayed like that for a long time. And then he started opening the door again, inch by inch, more daylight leaking in, covering the shelves, the shoeboxes, the floor. I looked down. The sun was behind him, low in the sky, and his shadow was long across the floor of the storage room. It got smaller as he stepped further in.

  Then he was inside.

  Immediately he saw me, spinning round to face us. I levelled the gun at his head. He started and stepped back, hitting one of the shelves. A shoebox tumbled over his shoulder and scattered across the floor. Photographs. A necklace. A letter. Someone’s forgotten life spilling across the room.

  Myzwik looked at me. At the gun.

  At Alex.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come back.’

  We were two feet apart. I jabbed the barrel of the gun forward, smashing Myzwik square in the nose. Blood burst out, down over his lips and chin. As he bent forward, clutching at his face, I turned the gun around and swung it into the side of his face. He fell backwards to the floor with a thump.

  The pain numbed me for a moment. When I finally shook it off, I looked up. Alex’s eyes were lingering on Myzwik – uncertain, as if a flood of memories were passing through him. And then he turned and peered through the door, up the rutted track, towards where the group were digging. A couple of them were still looking in our direction, trying to see what was going on.

  He opened his mouth to speak to me when the alarm stopped.

  As silence descended across the farm, it became eerily quiet. Only the sound of shovels against the ground could be heard; the ching of metal meeting earth.

  Alex knelt down and started going through Myzwik’s pockets.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Trying to find a key,’ he said.

  ‘Key?’

  He didn’t reply, just kept searching. Eventually, though, he stood and looked at me – his face etched with unease – and then up to the group again.

  ‘We have to join them,’ Alex said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no instructor up there with them.’

  ‘So what? I’m fifteen years older than anyone else up there. They’re going to know I’m not part of the programme. What’s to stop one of them finding someone in charge and raising the alarm?’

  ‘They won’t,’ he replied, his eyes still fixed on the group. ‘They’re too deep into the programme to remember if we’re part of the farm or not. They won’t care about the age thing either.’ Finally, he looked at me. ‘When you’ve got no memory, you can’t be sure about anything.’

  ‘How much time have we got?’

  ‘Andrew will be securing the compound, room by room, making sure everything’s as it should be. He’ll get to Calvary last, which means we’ve got –’ he looked at his watch ‘– about a minute before he and his attack dog discover you’re not nailed to that cross any more. Which gives us about two minutes before they get to the surface again.’

  ‘I cut a hole in the fence – we can go back out that way.’

  ‘The electricity’s on.’

  ‘Electricity?’

  ‘In the fencing.’

  I looked at the fencing that ran in a gentle curve from the top entrance, all the way down the hill, dissecting a field of heather before hitting
the beach. When the wind dropped away, and the sea quietened, I could hear the gentle buzz of a current.

  ‘When the alarm goes off, the electricity comes on, and stays on for thirty minutes,’ Alex said. ‘You can only switch it off from inside the compound, but we’re not going back in there. So the little hole you crawled through to get in here? That’s no longer an option. The only other way to get out is to find one of the master keys and use it to unlock the main gate. That isn’t electrified. But I haven’t got one of those. Only the instructors have them. So, we join the group and wait for one of the instructors to come back. Once they do, we spring him and take the key.’ He glanced at his watch again. ‘Are you following me?’

  I nodded. My body ached so badly I wasn’t sure which part hurt the most.

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  I pocketed everything from the box, slid the gun in at the front of my trousers and then followed him out. But after only a short distance, I started to fall behind. Alex jammed a fist around my arm, yanking me forward. Something twinged in my chest, forcing me to suck in air. I felt pain snake around to my side, where Legion had sliced it open.

  ‘This could take a while,’ I said.

  ‘We need to be quick,’ he replied, glancing back at the mouth of the compound. He was staring at something. I looked back and could see the CCTV camera attached to the roof of Lazarus panning in our direction.

  The ground beneath our feet was uneven. Snow and stones everywhere. I could feel every bump and piece of gravel through the soles of the slippers, the pain rippling across my skin. Alex tried to quicken the pace by dragging me up the hill. Every time I looked up and expected to see the group getting closer, it was like they were being pushed further away.

  ‘Is this all they do all day?’

  ‘No. Some work locally too.’

  ‘The locals are in on this?’

  ‘No. Only the ones that used to work here. When someone like you breaches security, or gets too close, Andrew swaps everyone around. There’ll be new people working out of Angel’s now, and someone else managing the flat. The people down in London will be in Bristol; the people in Bristol will be up here – on the farm or in the villages somewhere. The project owns a couple of shops along the coast. Every time you open up a hole, they will close it.’

  I looked up towards the group digging in front of us.

  ‘What do they do in the villages?’

  ‘The same as they do here. Digging, planting, fetching, carrying, maybe standing behind a counter and serving. Menial tasks. Nothing tasks. Andrew argues it’s a purer, untarnished existence. But the truth is, by the time they’ve finished with you here, you’re not good for much else.’

  A few of the faces were visible beneath the hoods, staring down the hill towards us. They looked normal, even healthy, until you watched their eyes, darting between us, desperately trying to fit memories together like broken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  We finally reached them and a couple more looked up: a teenaged girl, a man in his mid-twenties, a girl of about the same age. In front of them, cracks and fissures in the frozen earth were gradually opening up. Their hands, wrapped around the shovels, were red with cold.

  There were four shovels propped against the wall behind the group. Alex and I both grabbed one and pretended to dig, using our hoods to disguise our faces, but with a clear sight of the compound. A couple of the group still watched us, especially Alex, but then, as we started to dig, they gradually turned their attention back to their work.

  ‘I’m not going to be able to fight them for much longer,’ I said. My body was on fire: every muscle, every bone. ‘I will slow you up.’

  ‘We both leave.’

  I looked at him. ‘You make a break for it.’

  ‘And go where?’

  ‘Run.’

  ‘There’s nowhere for me to go, David.’

  Then, from the mouth of the compound, they came.

  42

  There were two of them. One I recognized immediately as Andrew; the other was smaller, maybe female, and had the hood up on her top. As soon as they emerged from the darkness of the compound, they were looking right to left, their eyes adjusting to the dusk. They knew we were on the farm somewhere – it was just a question of where.

  They both looked up towards us and studied the group. The slow, rhythmic digging; the sound of the shovels; the wind blowing in from the mountains and the sea. What if they did a head count before we joined the group? I looked at Alex briefly. He shot a glance back, as if he knew what I was thinking.

  Andrew headed towards the front of Lazarus. The woman turned and started making her way towards us. Alex and I turned away slightly, and started digging properly.

  It took her about sixty seconds to get from the mouth of the compound. She was wearing heavy-duty boots, the steel toecaps scuffing against the gravel and the snow on the ground. Apart from Andrew, the instructors dressed like the people they were supposed to be saving – hooded tops, tracksuit trousers – only in blue instead of green. With my back half-turned I couldn’t make out her face clearly, and as she got closer to the group I turned away from her a little more so she was side-on to me.

  I dug the shovel into the earth, and flicked another look at her as she moved level with the group. She was looking off somewhere else. When I jammed the shovel down again, into the ground, I felt the wounds throb in my chest, and my back, and my hand. I stopped momentarily, breathed in, then continued digging.

  A minute passed.

  When I glanced again at her, she’d moved around, closer to Bethany. She was bent over, watching one of the women brushing away some of the earth at her feet. Then the instructor moved again, finally disappearing from my line of sight.

  I flicked a glance at Alex.

  He was at the opposite angle to me, almost facing the other way. I could see his eyes following the woman as she moved behind me.

  We continued digging.

  Thirty seconds later I saw Alex glance up at the woman again, then sideways at me.

  A brief nod.

  It was time.

  I gripped the handle of the shovel, my knuckles whitening, and waited for a second nod from Alex. We hadn’t agreed anything, hadn’t made any sort of plan. But I knew the first nod was the primer, the indication that I needed to get ready.

  The second would be the trigger.

  From my left, the woman reappeared, her eyes fixed on a girl digging next to me. She stopped about six feet from me. A sudden gust of wind swept up the hill, lifting the hood from her face. Then it fell away.

  Evelyn.

  Through the corner of her eye she must have seen me staring at her. She turned and faced me, her eyes narrowing. Then she realized who it was beneath the hood. For a second she must have thought she could reason with me. Play on our history, on the fact we’d once got on; laughed together; even been drawn to each other in some way. But then she remembered how she’d held a gun to my head and let them take me out to the woods to be buried.

  ‘I’m sorry, Evelyn,’ I said.

  She started to call out for help.

  I swung the shovel at her, dirt spitting off as it arced, and caught her in the side of the head. The impact reverberated along the handle, into my hands. She stumbled sideways. Fell to her knees, and then her stomach, one side of her face puncturing the earth as she hit the ground.

  And then she was quiet.

  The rest of the group looked up.

  Alex glanced between me and the others, and back down towards the farm. No sign of anybody else. He dropped his shovel to the floor and moved across to Evelyn, who was drifting in and out of consciousness. He went through her pockets. Eventually he found a keyring in her trousers and removed it. On the ring were two keys: a brass Yale key, and a silver one with a blue head. Alex selected the blue one and held it up to me.

  Then his eyes fixed on something behind me.

  His whole face collapsed, the colour draining out of it. Suddenly, he looked te
rrified.

  I turned and followed his gaze.

  In the middle of the group, surrounded by men and women, Legion stood staring at us. He was wearing the same clothes as we were, his hood up, the mask still on. In his hand was a submachine gun. It looked like a Heckler & Koch MP7. Black and compact. Short barrel. I glanced at the gun, and back up at him. His eyes were fixed on Alex now. He had been among us the whole time.

  He flipped back his hood.

  ‘Alex,’ he said, almost a whisper.

  Despite the wind, the sea, the sounds drifting through the late afternoon light, it was difficult to hear anything but his voice. Sharp, almost scratchy, like a needle cutting across an old record.

  Alex held up both his hands.

  ‘We have something to finish, David,’ Legion said, not looking at me – just staring along the ridge of the gun he was now pointing at Alex.

  ‘No,’ I said, anger in my voice. I reached into my trousers and brought out the Beretta. A twinge in my chest and back. ‘We’re finished.’

  This time he looked at me. Body perfectly still. Head swivelling. Eyes dark and focused. For a second, it was like looking at a ventriloquist’s dummy – as if his head shared none of the muscle, bone and sinew of the rest of him.

  Legion glanced at my gun.

  ‘We will finish what we started, cockroach,’ he said, every word, every syllable, cutting across the ground between us. ‘Put the gun down or I slice Alex in two.’

  ‘Don’t put the gun down, David,’ Alex said.

  I glanced at Alex, then back at Legion. He was still looking at me, standing completely still, even as a gust of wind blew across the group.

  ‘Put the gun down,’ he said again.

  ‘They can’t kill me, David.’

  I glanced at Alex.

  ‘Put the gun down,’ Legion said for a third time.

  ‘Don’t, David – they can’t kill m–’

  In a flash of movement, Legion jabbed the barrel of the gun forward, right into the centre of Alex’s forehead. Alex’s head lurched backwards. He was instantly unconscious, even as he stood. He toppled over and hit the ground like a sack of cement. No grace, no arms out, no reactions at all.