by James Smythe
‘What happened?’ Henderson shouts through the wood. He is somewhere near them, right up next to the house. It’s as if his voice is in there with them. Laurence doesn’t say anything. He looks at Robards, pulling himself to the shore and the water, the trail of thick red that follows him. Like a slug, Deanna thinks. ‘You shout out now who pulled that trigger, or we are coming in.’
‘It was me,’ Laurence screams. ‘You sent him in here and he was going to put us all in danger. He was a threat.’ The shouts sound as if they are coming from a voice that Deanna has never heard, a man that she has never known.
There’s another shot, but this time from outside. Deanna screams and ducks down, curls herself into a ball. There is a hole in the wall the size of a billiard ball, light coming through it, and Laurence is gasping, clutching at his left shoulder. Blood runs over his fingers. He falls to one knee. ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Oh fuck.’ He tries to stand, but even that seems to hurt him, everything pulling against his arm. Deanna watches as the light at the hole is extinguished. Someone – multiple someones – is looking through at them.
‘He’s still alive,’ Henderson shouts, and then there’s another shot, another bullet, another hole. Deanna doesn’t see them coming. A plate shatters in the kitchen. Laurence gasps, but he isn’t shot again. He stands up.
‘Go to the girls,’ he says. Deanna stands up and runs upstairs, finds them both standing at the top. Lane watches her, but Alyx is facing away, her face pressed against Lane’s chest.
‘It’s okay,’ Deanna says.
‘It’s not,’ Lane tells her. Alyx pulls away and hugs her mother. ‘Why won’t he let us go?’ Lane shouts. She storms downstairs towards him, and he holds out his arms for her, as if this is going to make it all better.
‘I can’t, Laney,’ he says.
‘You’re fucking crazy,’ she tells him. Her voice is low and measured; even as she says this, she sounds calm and controlled. He stumbles towards her and she lashes out. Somehow he catches her top in his hands and pulls it away from her neck, and her tattoo is exposed. The four of them, their names, freshly inked; only his, at the bottom, the strongest, the support, is scratched and tarred. Lane has taken a knife to it and it’s barely recognizable as Laurence’s name. ‘Why won’t you let us go?’ Lane screams, and she snaps his hand away from her and runs back upstairs to her mother. He stands at the foot fo the stairs, stock-still and static, and then shakes his head, almost, to rid himself of the thought. It’s as if it never happened. There’s another gunshot, and Deanna sees, through the window, the mob move towards them.
They are coming.
17
Amit’s plane lands, and he holds his cellphone in his hand the entire time he walks through the airport. The New York airports cell-blank everything now and so he has no signal until he’s past the final security checks and out into the main part of the terminal. He calls Jessie as he runs to the rental car place, to get something – anything – that can take him to the Walkers.
‘What’s changed?’ he asks.
‘We’ve just heard from the teams on the ground, at the Walker house. They say there are lights in the distance – and gunshots.’
‘Gunshots? Coming from where?’
‘Down by the lake.’
It hits Amit, then. He was there, but only once. The second day they owned it; delivering a contract for Laurence to sign. He had almost forgotten that they owned it. But the algorithm wouldn’t have. It would have known. ‘The holiday house.’
‘I’m driving there,’ Jessie says. ‘I’m on call still, and I’m taking the story.’
‘Can you do that?’
‘I don’t give a damn if I can’t. It’s done now.’
‘Where are you?’
‘An hour out, maybe, but the crews from the house will be there soon.’
Amit clicks his fingers at the guy behind the desk, who is watching the TV that hangs on the wall, and he looks.
‘Can you turn it over?’ Amit half whispers, and the guy hands him the remote. Amit flicks to Jessie’s channel, and there is it: the pale wood, framed by the lake. Any other time, this would be beautiful: lit by flame torches, the light dancing. This is nature at its finest. But there is a crowd, and the camera stays back. A reporter whispers something that Amit cannot hear. ‘They’re there already,’ he says to Jessie. ‘I’m looking at it right now.’
‘What does it look like?’ she asks.
‘It’s a mob,’ he says. There’s another crack, and another gunshot. The cameraman ducks. ‘Just get there,’ he says. She hangs up; he calls her back.
‘Yes?’ she asks.
‘Be careful,’ he tells her.
He orders a car. They try to find him one that he likes, to match his previous choices, but he shouts, asks for whatever they have that’s closest to the terminal and they hand him the keys and he runs to find it. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets to Staunton. He thinks that he can talk to Laurence, maybe. Tell him what happened; how the video came to show what it did. Explain that it’s not as bad as it seems; that Laurence isn’t the man that the world thinks he is. Except, Amit knows, he could be. This isn’t all ClearVista’s fault. This was always, to some extent, inevitable.
He notices a message on his phone and he plays it as he steps into the car and starts the engine. It’s Lane, telling him where they are. Explaining what’s happened. They’re trapped, and Laurence won’t let them leave, and they are scared. He saves the message, the first time he hasn’t deleted something from his server in what feels like years, and he drives.
‘You let them out, Laurence,’ Henderson says. He is against the door, speaking through the cracked glass window that’s set halfway up. Laurence sits on the bottom stair, out of Henderson’s view. It’s still dark enough outside that they can’t see in through their holes, but it won’t be that way for long. ‘You let them out, and we deal with you on our own.’ The pretense of arresting him is gone, Deanna can hear, the idea that maybe this will be fine in the end. It was promises of arrest and therapy, and now it’s something else entirely.
Deanna holds the girls, the three of them sitting at the top of the staircase. She can see her husband’s head; the sharp jut of his spine from his neck down and the lines on the back of his skull. His hair, which is thinned more than it’s ever been. Or, maybe, she thinks, it’s just seeing him from here, from this angle. The girls are quiet, because she has begged them to be.
‘We’re a family,’ Laurence says, ‘and I cannot trust you. Look at what you did.’ He glances back to where he shot Robards. He has the gun in his hand, and he keeps clicking the hammer, then letting it breathe, setting it back to neutral. ‘Trent, how long have you known me? How long have you known us?’ He doesn’t look up, and he keeps his voice quiet. He doesn’t want them to be able to pinpoint him from the outside. Deanna can tell: he doesn’t want them to be able to do what they will. His shoulder bleeds, still, but he has stopped paying attention to it. The jacket is torn and split on the front and back both, the bullet having passed through. There are spatters of blood on the tie.
‘I have known you long enough,’ Henderson says. ‘Long enough to know what family means to you.’
‘Then you’ll understand.’
‘If you don’t let them go, I most certainly will not.’ He sounds disappointed, Deanna thinks. Laurence turns to look at his shattered family, sitting above him. He smiles a strained smile.
‘Let us go,’ she asks him. He shakes his head, and he looks at her sadly. As if there is something that she simply doesn’t understand. She stands up and looks outside. There are more people now. In the crowd she sees bulky equipment, the glint of reflective lenses. Camera crews.
She knows this will all be over soon.
Jessie parks behind the vans which are blocking the small track like a barricade and she runs down the hill towards the group of people. The sun is coming up over the hills, across the lake, and she doesn’t stop until she reaches the repor
ters. She knows some of them and finds her team easily.
‘I’ve been told to run this,’ she says.
‘Nothing to run,’ they tell her. ‘There’s a standstill. The man at the door, a Trent Henderson, he’s trying to talk Walker into letting his family go.’
‘Let them go?’
‘This is a hostage situation.’
‘Where are the police?’ Jessie looks for them, but there are no uniforms, no badges. ‘Aren’t they controlling it?’
‘They’re here. One of them is dead. Walker shot him.’
‘What?’
‘Back of the house. The others are here, somewhere.’
‘You haven’t got any statements?’
‘Nobody to get statements from. Look at this.’ Jessie does. It’s terrifying, she thinks; a group of people who would usually never look as if they would hurt anybody, threaten anything. And here they are, guns at the ready, in the name of protection. There’s something archaic about it, Jessie thinks; something that feels wrong, desperate and reactionary.
‘We have to stop this,’ she says, but her crew ignores her and keeps filming the action below. She sees it on the screen at the back of the camera; the picture is zoomed in on Trent Henderson’s face, his teeth gritted, his eyes sad; and then there’s a pan down to his hand, and the gilt trim of his pistol’s handle.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Laurence says.
He stands next to the door, and he holds the gun at the level of the window. It’s as if he could just point it and pull the trigger and take out Trent Henderson where he stands. At the back of the house, the glass is catching the start of the sun’s rays and the blood that Robards left on the decking shines like oil. His body, alive or dead, is nowhere to be seen. Deanna wonders if it is on the beach; or if he tried to swim, and found out what happens when you try that. She stands at the bottom of the stairs now, her back to the girls. This way she can see what’s coming.
‘You could let us leave,’ she says to him.
He is broken, she knows. He cannot be fixed, she doesn’t think. Maybe there’s something just gone wrong now; or maybe it went wrong as soon as Sean died, when they lost that part between them. She went to group therapy, where grieving families sat in a circle and spoke about the loss of a child. They were all further along the path than Deanna and Laurence were, and they all said that one of two things happened: either it brought you together, united in your grief, or it did the opposite. It ruined you.
‘You coming out, Walker?’ Trent Henderson shouts. ‘You come out, or we drive you out. That’s how this goes now.’
‘I don’t think we can leave,’ Laurence says. He stands up and walks to the back of the house, taking his eyes off his family.
Deanna moves. She runs back up the stairs, into each room, and looks out of the windows. The girls ask what she’s doing.
‘Nothing,’ she says.
Out of the bathroom, the window looks onto a smaller roof down below, a porch at the side of the house. It would be a drop, and the roof is sloped – no guarantees how that would end – but a broken ankle, she thinks, is better than the alternative. Nothing can happen from that fall that can’t heal. And even if it doesn’t, maybe that’s still better. She flicks the catches and tries to force the window up but it’s stuck, the wood refusing to move against itself. Swollen, most likely; the moisture from the lake getting inside everything, all the wood susceptible to rotting. Or maybe it’s splintered inside there. Either way, it’s not moving. She doesn’t pause or flinch, hurling her elbow at the glass. She’s never broken a pane before and doesn’t know how this will work. It shatters into thick slabs of glass that fall around her. There’s no large crash, no sound effect. She picks at the few shards that hang there in the dry fixative, putting them down carefully on the nightstand, and then the frame is clear.
‘Come on,’ she says to the girls. ‘We’re going out this way.’ She looks down. The drop isn’t that bad. If she could, she would signal to the crowd and try to get them to help, but they’re not looking this way. They’re slightly out of sight.
She picks up Alyx and nods at Lane. ‘You go first,’ she says. ‘You get down there and catch your sister, okay?’ Lane goes to the frame.
‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Mom, I can’t.
‘You can,’ Deanna says. She can taste the air outside. It’s so close.
‘Come back inside,’ Laurence says from behind her. ‘Don’t do that.’
Deanna turns, and he has the gun pointed at them. No, Deanna thinks; it’s pointed squarely at her.
Jessie calls Amit. ‘Where are you?’ she asks.
‘Middle of fucking nowhere,’ he says. ‘What’s happening?’
‘They’re talking about how to drive Walker out.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Nobody knows.’ She looks out over the people. ‘It’s like Waco or something.’
‘It’s not,’ Amit says. ‘Laurence isn’t insane. You try talking to him.’
‘He won’t listen to me.’
‘How long have I got?’
‘Not long,’ Jessie says. ‘I don’t think there’s long at all.’
‘If I’m not stopped by the cops for speeding the shit out of these roads, I’ll see you soon,’ he says.
Laurence brings his family downstairs, away from the windows. He takes them to the kitchen, which has the most protection: cupboards and appliances, and the stairwell to the cellar. Alyx won’t look at him, and Lane has her eyes down, a sad look on her face. Deanna keeps eye contact.
‘You would break us up?’ he asks. He whispers it, because he doesn’t want Henderson to hear. He knows that he’s not at the door any more, because they’re huddled in a crowd, talking something over. But still, better safe than sorry, he reasons.
‘No,’ Deanna says. ‘I would get the fuck away from you. You’re scaring us, Laurence. Look at the girls.’
‘Don’t you fucking understand? I am not who they say I am.’
‘Then who are you? Who are you? They say you would kill. They say you would threaten your family. Who are you, Laurence?’
‘I am protecting you!’ he roars. It’s incredible, guttural and vulgar. He waves the gun around. ‘They want to kill me. Do you even get that? They want to drag me out of this house and tie me up and fucking murder me.’ He paces the kitchen, circling his family. ‘They have said this all along. They have said who I am. They have made me, Deanna!’
‘You made yourself,’ she says.
She sees him flinch, raise his hand. He’s never hit her before, not even once; but now she sees him contemplate it. There’s nothing in his eyes.
‘Walker,’ Trent Henderson shouts through the door. ‘You have one minute to send that family of yours out.’
‘No,’ Laurence says. He leans against the kitchen worktop, pushing at the soft wood with the barrel of the gun.
‘Then you let us talk to them. You send them out here and we can see that they’re all right.’
‘You think that I’m stupid?’
‘No, Laurence, I do not think that.’
‘Deanna, tell him that you’re fine.’ He looks at her.
‘No,’ she says.
‘Don’t push me,’ he says. ‘Tell him that you’re all fine.’
‘No.’
‘Then go out there. Show him.’ He pauses. ‘You could tell them to leave us alone. Say that we’re happy here.’
‘Laurence, your time is running out,’ Henderson says.
‘Go and fucking talk to him!’ Laurence shouts at Deanna’s face.
‘I am not leaving my daughters,’ she says. She stands in front of them and she faces up to him. She won’t move. Laurence raises and points the gun at her. So much power in such a small thing … ‘No,’ she says again. He clicks the hammer. ‘Who are you?’ she asks.
‘Laurence?’ Henderson shouts. ‘This is your last chance. You let them talk or we force you out of there.’
‘Please,’ Laurence
says. The hand holding the gun goes slightly limp; the barrel pointing slightly more towards the floor, looser in his hand. ‘Please, Deanna.’
‘You let us go and I’ll tell them that we were perfectly safe the entire time.’ She steps towards him, closer to the gun. ‘Maybe they’ll let you off easier if I do.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘You know that I can’t. You know that I can’t do that.’
‘Time’s up,’ Henderson says. They hear his footsteps on the porch decking as he walks away.
‘What are they going to do?’ Lane asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Laurence says. He softens. He starts to cry. ‘I don’t know what they’re going to try to do to us.’
‘Can we go?’ Alyx asks. She cries as well, and the words come out huffed and inhaled.
‘No, Pumpkin,’ Laurence says. ‘We’re going to stay together.’ His hand stiffens; the gun raises itself again.
Jessie sees one of the men rush off, running back through the woods. She thinks that he is like a wolf; he throws himself into the trees, staying off the path. He’s run this route before, must know these woods like the back of his hand. The camera traces him for a second but then it’s back to the house, a standoff where nothing seems to be happening but the tension is building. As the sun comes up, as this all becomes illuminated, that’s more and more apparent. Everything is golden; this will be done before the sun is fully in the sky, Jessie knows.
There’s a noise from the crowd, a scream and a shout. They’ve seen something, at the side of the house. It’s Robards, crawled around to the dock. He was trying to escape but couldn’t and he’s there now, lying in the nascent morning rays. Maybe this is the first time that the reality of this has hit them. People will die. It happened on their watch, on their mission. The cameras all zoom in to pick up the body. It’s a close-up, grotesque and marked in red. The group of leaders – Trent Henderson and the others from the town all stand and talk, trying to work out how to do this best. They need a plan.