“Anger is a trap, what does that mean Daddy? I heard Mummy saying that to you. What does it mean?”
“It means there is no way out of anger.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Me neither.”
She could see it in my eyes. My wife that is, yes, she knew. She knew in that moment when I pulled the trigger that I had enjoyed it. It was so cheap. But so costly. It was horrible but felt so good. It was an affair. A capitulation to the base level. Always crying out to us, always wanting us to give in.
It felt right despite being wrong.
Yes. It was a trap.
The bat in his hand felt puny and pathetic, like it was wilting. They had trapped each other and there was nowhere else to run to. Watching Maddox just beyond the door he quickly had the notion that they could charge him, swing left or right in the corridor and then escape, outrun him, but the idea was fleeting and half-hearted. She was pushing herself into him and the weight was unbearable, but then suddenly she was moving past him and nudging him to one side.
‘You have a gun?’ she whispered.
‘No. No, I don’t…’ Because I have morals. I’m the better man.
You’re a dead man, daddy.
Sullivan felt his blood chill. ‘I’m sorry, I’m…’
Maddox started wiping down the knife. He was resting on his haunches and gazing back into the doorway, assessing them.
‘I want the girl, killer. What do you say? You don’t try and stand in my way and I promise I will drop you quick.’ Maddox swung the knife through the air in one clean arc.
Mia was now in front of Sullivan, her hand reaching for the bat.
‘What are you doing?’ Sullivan whispered into the back of her head, his hand tightening around the handle, fighting her grip. ‘He’s going to kill you!’
‘He’s going to kill us both but I’m damned if I’m dying on my knees.’
She had caught Sullivan off guard. She fumbled the bat from him and moved it out in front of her.
In the doorway Maddox was standing, a smile creasing his lips that managed to be both patronising and proud. ‘That’s my girl.’
‘Mia, please…I came…’ Sullivan lost the words before they could form. In his frantic mind he pieced them together and heard how stupid they sounded: “I came here to save you!” That was what he had meant to say, and what a damn fucked up attempt at that he had made. She seemed to hear him, her eyes finding his own just for a second as she edged around the room.
‘No you didn’t,’ she said, and turned back to the doorway and to Maddox who was now in the room, blocking their only exit and waiting patiently for Mia to come to him, the knife solid in one meat slab of a hand, the blue blooming again in his eyes.
2
The door to the communications room stood hanging from the frame in two large, jagged pieces. Beneath it, Davenport lay in his bloody puddle. Beyond it there was nothing, a sheer, deep, consuming nothing. Kendrick sat staring at the empty space and couldn’t stop laughing. He held his arms across his stomach as the merriment started to cause him mini convulsions. His eyes watered, his nose ran. It was the funniest thing he had ever seen. He was looking at nothing, and nothing seemed to be hilarious.
He could hear his own laughter from beneath a thick surface. He looked around into the gloom and tried to see himself, but instead he saw nothing. That wonderful nothing. His body felt as if it were imbued with air so light and gentle that he wondered what kept him anchored to the ground. Something did. A heavy weight from somewhere there in the darkness, an unyielding pressure on his head, something kept him out of sight and out of his own body, something impossible. In that moment he felt himself stand up and smooth down his clothes, yet it wasn’t him, it couldn’t be him. He turned to the control panel and listened intently to the voices coming back at him.
‘Second team en-route. ETA…’
He wasn’t listening. Something was, but it wasn’t him.
‘Hold position. Await second team’s arrival.’
He started playing with buttons and switches and suddenly the control panel was alive with light and action. He tried to look out, to feel beyond the sensation of what surrounded him. He told himself he were in a dream and was merely sleepwalking. He had done that a few times as a child. That made sense to him and that was good enough. It added credibility to his wilful deception.
‘Come in. Report status. Kendrick? You there?’
He heard himself responding to the voice through the microphone, yet he knew he hadn’t spoken the words himself.
It wasn’t a dream. It was manipulation.
His body turned from the control panel and looked to the door, staring out through someone else’s eyes to the emptiness beyond. He was a balloon being bent, and squeezed and forced into impossible shapes. Now he was walking off, climbing over the body of Eddie Davenport and moving into the corridor outside. He had no choice other than to let his body walk and try and stay with it, to try and see through the dark and to try and not float away. His screams were like rolling thunder across a faraway horizon and at each came a voice in his ear; deep, inhuman, impossible, and spiked with venom.
Nothing.
He heard himself laughing again.
3
Sullivan could feel his blood within him like it was a growing skin. His damaged ear prickled and itched. His eyes watered. He shivered but it felt good. He was back home, one final time, floating through the scene. Breathing in the old feeling. It came back to him so easily. It wanted to be found.
“Why do they kill the rats, Daddy?”
“They think they are doing it for good reasons.”
“How can there be good reasons?”
“There can’t. There are just bad people.”
The scene slowed in front of him, just for a moment. Mia and Maddox were moving in a Hollywood slow motion, their actions somehow matching the mushy, slurred sounds that were feeding into his deafened ear. She was charging him and he was letting her. For the sweetest, most blessed of seconds Sullivan was a mere spectator watching it all play out from behind a screen. An audience of one for a show he hadn’t paid to see. The deception was brief and all the more crushing for it.
The bat sheared in two across Maddox’s chest and then Mia was knocked over on to her front by one large backhanded slap. Maddox was then bearing down on Sullivan and the knife was slashing through the air. Sullivan ducked the first swipe but the second caught him across the thigh. Maddox was on him, over him, swallowing him up. Sullivan took a hand to the clenched fist holding the knife but instantly his arm buckled back against the force and he was toppled over on to the bed as the knife was shoved crudely into his left arm. Sullivan jerked his head forward and brought his forehead across Maddox’s nose. Maddox mimicked the move and Sullivan felt the bone in his nose shatter. A giant hand now covered him, eating up his face, the palm pushing down on to broken bone, manipulating it one way and then the other. The other hand sought out the knife and pushed it down deeper, moving the blade from side to side, opening up the wound.
Mia regained her feet and jumped on to Maddox’s back, her teeth biting down into his neck, ripping and tearing at the flesh as her hands wrapped around his throat. He found her hair and pulled hard and fast, yanking her off him and then swinging her around so she faced him on the ground. She spat back what she had bitten off and then brought her hands to his throat again and then his neck, her fingers searching out the wound and pushing in. Maddox roared at the pain, the sheer affront of her actions and rolled his giant bulk on top of her, his hands grasping her at the elbows, pushing at the bone and the joint until she had no choice but to release and succumb to his strength. She screamed and she shouted, but it was defiance and not submission; as he pushed his groin against her, rubbing and grinding and growing, and as the piercing blue deepened, she still had the fight and she let him know it.
The pain from Sullivan’s flattened nose was a sharp icicle through his head, his left arm an infern
al, raging fire, yet still he pushed through. His right hand was gripping the handle of the knife, ready to pull it free. He tried to look at it but as he did he saw nothing but a blur. “Pull it quick, that’s the way,” Wiggs told him from somewhere. “Yeah, I know. I’m not stupid,” he responded. “Sure you are, Sullivan. You’re in jail.” Sullivan gripped, then tugged and prised it free, waving it around above him like a trophy, a message to the voices in his head. He could feel an ugly belch of blood gush down his left arm and imagined how it might look and then saw the big mouth of the hole in his mind. It would be grinning, he decided. He turned to the bodies before him, the blurred mound, defined only by the giant, rock of Maddox’s head, and then lurched from cotton ball knees, the knife up in the air, held tight by his trembling hands. The blade connected before he did. He felt it sink in, could feel something give to its demand, and then he was on Maddox’s back in a clumsy half-hug as blood seemed to explode in his face.
It was easy. It was too easy.
“Why is anger so easy if we know it’s a trap?” Wiggs was asking, and for the first time the old sage sounded genuinely perplexed.
“Shut the fuck up, Wiggs.”
Maddox suddenly reared up on to his knees, taking Sullivan with him, his big, beefy hands flapping at Sullivan’s own, now gripped around the handle of the knife buried in the back of his neck. Mia seized her chance and shuffled out from under him, kicking out one foot into his gut as a parting gift. Sullivan pushed the knife further, pulled down on it, then pushed again, forcing it up. Maddox made a sound, a gurgle, and then he tried to speak but his words were swimming in blood and what came instead was no more than a choked warble. His hands started loosening their hold, dropping from the handle to Sullivan’s wrists before slipping silently off and flopping down at his side with two hearty slaps. He seemed to be breaking down in stages; his body jittered and jerked and then started bending forward as if he were bowing to Mia. As the gurgling stopped his breath eased out like the air from a punctured tyre. Finally he tilted forward and thudded to the floor, face first, and remained still. Sullivan gave himself a moment of contemplation and then joined Maddox on the ground.
‘Get up! Get up damn it!’
He could hear how frightened she sounded, how her words were trying hard to spike with authority and command and how instead they just sounded hopeless. She was tugging at his right arm, pulling him a few feet and then bending down and shouting into the bloody pulp of his face before trying again. He fought her, yanking his arm free of her hold and waving her on with a gentle brush of the hand. She wasn’t having it.
‘Get up, Sullivan! Please. Get up! Come on!’
And go where? He heard his mind saying as he fought her off for the third time. Besides, I came here to save you dear, I’ve done my bit. Now let me die. Let me be alone to find them. That’s all…
‘Get up! Don’t leave me alone. Don’t leave me here. I need you. I need you to get up…please…’
She started pulling him by the hair; hard and purposeful tugs, yanking him from Maddox along a wide blood smear on the ground, like a grotesque slug trail. She moved him to the doorway before he found the energy to fight back.
‘Leave me! Get off me!’
‘You saved me, now I’m saving you. Get up!’
‘I don’t want to be saved,’ he said it without consideration; it just tumbled from him in a short, snappy, bark. ‘Please, just…just leave me girl. Will you just leave me?’ He could taste the dull metal blood flavour in his mouth, and swallowed hard, coming empty on what felt like a rock in his throat. He pulled away from her and slumped against the doorway. ‘Enough,’ he moaned, hoping it would be.
It wasn’t.
Mia was tearing at one arm of her fatigues, pulling the material down, and ripping it at the shoulder. She dug her fingers into the tear and prised it open, yanking the material off in one clean swoosh of the arm. She bent down to him and wrapped it delicately around the bloody grin on his arm.
‘This is going to hurt,’ she said apologetically and he laughed. She finished wrapping the tourniquet and made a loose knot with both ends, slowly pulling it tight across his arm. The flame of pain licked up high and bright down his left hand side and he screamed and started batting her away from him. ‘Let’s go,’ she said and began tugging at his shirt.
‘You stubborn girl, you stupid, stubborn girl!’
He pulled away from her again, but this time she moved under him, her head pushing up under his shoulder as she clumsily moved him to his feet and turned him out into the corridor. He could feel the last vestiges of what he held fall down into his boots as he swayed against her. The pain was all, the cuts and bruises, the gashes and breaks, all at once connecting up like a game of join the dots as each and every one ignited within him, pulling him towards submission. She got him no more than a few feet before he collapsed against her, slipped down on to buckling knees and fell amongst the bodies on the floor.
‘No, no you don’t do this to me! Please!’
Tears broke her words. He felt another piece of love shatter in his chest and closed his eyes to her face. There was nothing to be gained from any more guilt, he told himself, no further to fall. He held a hand up and tried to find her face. She came to him and rested a burning hot cheek against his palm, her hands cradling his wrist. He heard a whispered plea, and he shook his head to it and then squeezed her cheek letting the index finger push up and wipe at the salty sting that came.
‘Let me die,’ Sullivan said and then gently repeated the words in case she thought it was a question.
‘No…’
‘Yes, Mia.’
‘I need you.’
‘No. I needed you.’
‘Your family? Please, Sullivan, don’t give up on your family.’
‘They’re dead. I killed them. Both of them.’
‘What? You’re not making sense.’
‘I’m a murderer. Can’t you see it? I fell over the line and there’s no getting back. You don’t cross back, Mia. It’s just a question of how long you have before it finds you. Time, Mia. Time.’
‘You didn’t kill your family. You don’t know what you’re saying.’
‘She came to them because of me. She offered herself up and they took her. I can feel her. I can feel her here. It’s okay, Mia. It’s all okay. My wife is here and it’s all okay.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t need to. You just need to live.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘You do what you have to do.’
‘What does that mean?’ Her hands were on him, pulling the sides of his jacket together as if she were about to shake him. ‘What do I do? Please tell me what I do!’ She pulled him up and leant him against the wall just beneath the hatch, her hands went to his face and turned it to her. Still he wouldn’t open his eyes. ‘What do I do?’
A small line of blood dribbled from one corner of his mouth as he spoke and when the single, solitary word came it was so quiet, so detached, that it seemed to come from a different world. ‘Time.’
‘Tick-tock, tick-tock.’ It was another voice, someone else speaking from a far away place. The voice was low, and broken, mocking yet inviting and as it came again, the words seemed to ooze over her, making her quiver against goose bump skin. The voice was coming from over her shoulder.
Sullivan pulled his eyes open and rolled his head against the wall, looking past Mia and down the corridor. He squinted and then blinked and then his eyes dropped to the floor, moved through the blood and bodies, and came to rest on the pistol just beyond him.
‘Face me, child,’ the voice demanded in a distorted growl. ‘Face me!’
Mia turned slowly, craning around on the spot. Kendrick was standing in the middle of the corridor about twenty feet away. His eyes were rolled back in their sockets, the whites shining out like two opals, suspended in the hugging gloom.
4
The thing that stood before her made no move as Mia
got to her feet, merely smiled expectantly. Her body was alive, jarred open by a fear that seemed to want to eat her; the goose bumps felt as big as pebbles, the piercing cold wave that had started at the tip of her skull was crashing down, rooting her to where she stood. Kendrick’s face blurred and shifted like a reflection in rippling water, slowly washing away and then swimming back as it spoke again. Each word that came to her was a pulse, a gnawing rhythm that started at her heart before travelling to her mind.
‘Mia. Child. The girl that came back.’
The voice wasn’t Kendrick’s. It was her father’s, but only fleetingly, just enough to get further inside her and hold her rapt.
‘Who are you?’
‘Who do you want me to be?’
‘You’re not my father.’
‘Daddy dear. Dear Daddy. Daddy loves Mia.’
‘You’re not Mr Kendrick, either.’
‘I never claimed to be. Though he is here. In the mix. In the pot. In the stew. No one would choose this hollow carcass. This useless vessel. You should hear how he screams. You should taste his fear.’
Something clicked in Mia’s throat and she held a hand up as if she was going to choke herself. ‘Please don’t.’
‘Don’t what, child?’
‘Don’t hurt us.’
‘Us?’
It turned its empty gaze on to Sullivan and broadened its smile to a ridiculous width. At Mia’s feet, Sullivan was hunched over, reaching for the pistol, coughing back blood at each failed attempt. ‘I see only you, Mia. Sullivan is already dead. He is beyond hurt now. Look how he tries to get that weapon. The weapon that killed him. Curious how he finds solace in something so pointless, isn’t it? Such a desperate and meaningless act. Such a weapon changed the course of his fortunes, and yet still he flails around for it, hoping to find answers. Death is all around him. He reeks of it. He is soaked in it. Yet still he comes. His judgement was made a long time ago and yet he doesn’t seem to realise it. Judgements were set on all of you. All but you, Mia.’
Bleeker Hill Page 24