by Ian Williams
“Do you think they’ve known all along that we were on to them?”
“I don’t know, Conrad. This killer-cult thing has been a pain from the get go. We should have dealt with them weeks ago.”
“Sir, with all due respect, if you hadn’t blocked my investigation I would have.”
“So this is my fault?”
Of course it’s all your fucking fault! Conrad stopped short of saying. “Here, take this,” he said instead, removing a handkerchief from his pocket and offering it over.
Mayor Crawley took it and made it a shade of pink seconds later. “Thanks,” he said with a sudden wince from touching a tender bruise by his lip. “You obviously don’t understand politics, Conrad. If you did then you’d appreciate why I wanted it dealt with quietly. I’ve been in this job for less than ten months, I can’t be seen to fail.”
“You don’t understand my work either, but you still interfered. These people are dangerous and we let them run around freely to kill and mutilate. I should have blown it wide open the moment I took it on.”
“If you had, I would have ended your career. I will not be brought down by the likes of you, or these bastards.”
Conrad leaned back on his haunches and studied the Mayor’s demeanour. He could hardly believe the lack of compassion. Mayor Crawley appeared not at all concerned about the poor individuals killed by the group that now held them. Were they all just an inconvenience to him?
“Any idea how many of them might be out there?” Conrad asked, trying to move past the disagreement before he turned on the Mayor himself.
“I counted at least a couple. Why, what are you planning?”
“Well, all we have as a possible weapon is the damn chair. That would deal with one of them. Problem is, the rest of them would follow soon afterwards and neither of us could deal with that.” Conrad thought to himself for a short while before continuing. “We could do the opposite and try keeping them out. I might be able to jam the door.” He stepped over to the chair and bashed it hard against the ground to test its sturdiness. He was not particularly happy to find it stronger than he wanted. “But that would only hold them back for a little while anyway.”
“That all sounds pretty hopeless, Conrad.”
He agreed. Moving on to the door, he kicked it gently to rattle the lock. There was no chance of breaking it, he knew. All of the cells in his own station had been built to withstand any attempts. It seemed ironic to him to be locked up in one of the forces own stations. Regardless of the state of abandonment most of the smaller ones had been left in, they still worked just as well. Unfortunately not for their own purposes any longer, but that of a crazed group of serial killers.
“Wait,” Mayor Crawley said, sliding away from the locked door. “Someone’s coming.”
“Aren’t they’re early this time?”
“I haven’t been counting, for Christ’s sake, Conrad. Look, I can’t take anymore. You’ve got to stall them or something.”
Considering the chair again, Conrad stood, took a hold of it and pictured swinging it into the face of whoever entered. Reducing the kidnappers’ numbers by one would be a start. It was time to show they were not going to give in so easily.
“Just stay back,” he said. “They’re going to kick off pretty quickly after this.”
The Mayor backed away further, but made no attempt to talk Conrad out of it. He appeared quite happy to let the fight happen without his involvement – not that Conrad was at all surprised.
“Step away from the door,” a voice said from the other side.
Here we go, Conrad thought, lifting the chair an inch or two from the floor. As the lock clanked open and the door slid in, he swung it as hard as he could. It broke the very second it landed against the side of the masked intruder. Only a handful of wooden pieces remained in Conrad’s grips, still more than enough to cause some serious damage.
“Get him!” Mayor Crawley shouted from the corner of the room.
Conrad lunged at the floored man, hitting him repeatedly with the thick lumps of wood in his hand. He continued for as long as possible before another two of the guards barrelled into the room and pulled him away. They held him in place, with an arm halfway around his neck to subdue him.
“That was stupid, real stupid,” one of the guards snarled at him.
A sharp pain in the ribs brought Conrad under control soon after. In the struggle he managed to pull a muscle or two. It did not help that both of his opponents were bending him awkwardly back either.
“What do you want with us?” Conrad had difficulty speaking with the pressure on his throat.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” the guard still on the ground said. He rubbed his side and readjusted his mask before standing. “There’s something else we’d like to ask the Mayor first. You’ll have your turn next. Take him.”
Another masked man entered the room and took hold of the Mayor. “Come on,” he said, as he dragged his prisoner away.
“No, you can’t, please, Conrad, do something,” Mayor Crawley pleaded.
There was nothing more Conrad could do, he was no match for the enemy. All that remained of his fight had been quashed in the choke-hold he had been put in. After being let go, he then turned to catching his breath again. He felt far too old to be involved in such an unfair fight. Despite losing, he had learnt something new about his kidnappers though. They had been trained to defend themselves.
Once Mayor Crawley had disappeared down the hall, the door was again forced shut behind. Conrad found himself alone for the fourth time in a couple of hours. He was less sure he would see the Mayor again this time – at least not without a few more holes in his head anyway.
Soon they would be back for him. Until then he had plenty of quiet to try and figure things out for himself. Escaping now appeared a total dead-end. He was theirs to do what they wanted with. Understanding his enemy, before they did to him what they had done to at least twenty others, was the best he could hope for. Dying for an unknown reason was not something he liked the idea of.
* * *
A chill in the air had Phoenix rubbing her bare arms as she silently slipped out of her parents’ house. She wore mostly what she had slept in, which flapped about in the breeze. In her rush to get outside she had grabbed her coat and now tried her best to slip it on as she moved, ducking so not to draw attention.
Her desire to leave the house was not due to a teenage engagement with a young crush – as she had done once before, to her parents’ disapproval – but through fear. A fear that her life was about to change forever, and not for the better.
“Dillon, Sean, hurry up. And stay quiet,” she said as they snuck out in the middle of a cold winter’s night. She took them out through the kitchen to stay out of sight.
In the front yard the shouting had continued as her father tried to calm things down. He was doing his best to negotiate with people who did most of their talking while armed to the teeth. All they had on the farm were two rather antiquated shotguns used ordinarily for killing vermin or hunting rabbits. They were no match for the gang that had decided to arrive unannounced.
“I’m scared, Phoenix,” Sean said, shivering on the spot. He had not had the time to grab his own coat during their panic to get out. To help him stay warm, she huddled him beneath her own and wrapped her arms tightly around his small figure. Moving was difficult, but still, it was better than letting the poor sod catch his death out there.
“I know, I am too. But we need to stay outside for a little while,” she replied, not knowing exactly when they would be able to return.
The three of them had been awoken suddenly by the excessive volume of the arguing outside. Sensing things were about to get out of hand, their mother had dragged them out of bed and told them to leave the house as quietly as they could manage. At fourteen, Phoenix was the oldest and in charge, while Dillon, eleven, and Sean, ten, were to do exactly as told.
They stopped by the corner of the house and peered
across the courtyard to where a group of six men stood, weapons raised, and facing their parents, both of which had a shotgun in hand and were trying to hold their ground as a torrent of abuse floated through the air. The men looked angry. For some reason they had taken a liking to her family’s little farm and were claiming it as their own. Understandably, her parents were not about to agree.
“What’s going on?” Dillon asked.
“They want us to leave,” she replied.
“We should go help.”
“No, Mum told us to hide. She said to go into the field out back and wait by the well. If they don’t meet us there in an hour, we’re supposed to go to the police in the city.”
“I don’t want to leave,” Sean said with a whimper and a chatter from his teeth. “What if they try and hurt Mum and Dad?”
“I won’t let that happen.” Dillon went to step out from cover, before Phoenix put an arm out to hold him back. “I’m not hiding, I want to help.”
“With what, Rhys? Just wait. They might decide to leave instead,” she said. Rhys? That’s not right.
They turned back to watching the conversation between their parents and the armed men. Something had been said that did not appear to go down too well with the gang members, who all began to call out obscenities. Their once peaceful little home was now awash with bad language and lurid calls. Negotiations were breaking down.
When one raised his gun and took aim, the rest followed suit.
“Don’t you dare! If any of you bastards fire, I’ll take your boss’ fucking head off,” their father shouted, his gun raised and directed right where he wanted it. She had never heard him speak with such rage.
“You’ve had your chance, prick, now get out of here,” the ringleader said through the gaps in his teeth. What remained were yellow and heavily tainted. Weirdly, he held a drill in his right hand too. “This is your last warning. What about you, Missy, you staying as well?”
Their mother stared back and did not say a word. She was going nowhere while her husband held his ground. The two of them were outnumbered and outgunned, yet they showed no sign of wavering. They meant to protect their home and family with little more than a handful of shotgun shells.
“I think we should head into the field,” Phoenix said, thinking of her mother’s last words to her, to ‘get out and not look back’. This one sentence had been enough to age her by ten years at least. She was suddenly looking at the world through bitter and understanding eyes. The world was harsh. It was more dangerous than she thought too. The lessons in survival she had from her parents now seemed lacking. They obviously tried not to scare her too much at the time.
Wait a minute, where’s Rhys gone? She felt strangely confused by his absence.
“I want to stay until they’ve gone,” Sean said, looking up at her from the protective cover of her coat.
She wanted to tell him the truth, that it was not guaranteed to go that way, but she could not. The truth was too difficult to say out loud. The same had probably happened to her parents when they once tried to prepare her for the world. They always stopped short of saying the absolute and devastating truth themselves.
“Noooo,” their mother shouted as the first shot was fired.
Phoenix snapped her head back to face the noise and saw her father crumble. His legs had become red and distorted in shape as he spread out on the ground. The injury was terrible, but there was worse to come.
“Dad!” Dillon shouted at the top of his voice.
Their mother looked up from where she held their father in her arms and was heartbroken to see them still there. Her face spelled out her own prediction of how the situation was to end. There was nothing she could do, they were beaten. Rather than turn and fire back, she stayed in place and closed her eyes, while the gang continued to yell at them for being there.
“No, Mum, Dad. We have to help them,” Dillon ordered of their tiny group. Sean on the other hand had already lost it and was wailing out loud like an injured animal.
There was only one thing Phoenix could do; they had to run. The urge to stay and fight was there, but so too were a group of highly violent men. They would make light work of the three of them if they stayed. She wished she had taken her brothers into the field the moment their mother had told her to. There was nothing they could do. Realising that the end was just around the corner for their parents, it had quickly become only about their own survival.
“What do we do? Phoenix, what do we do?” Dillon said, shaking her arm.
She looked to their parents one last time and was shocked to see their mother staring straight at them. From behind her, one of the armed men approached with his pistol swinging back and forth in one hand and the drill still in the other. He loaded, then began to take aim at the couple. A cruel smirk spread across his face that deformed a large hole in his head.
Why were things happening differently? The driller man, Rhys, neither of them were here.
With a stream of tears racing down her face, Phoenix looked at her mother one last time for guidance. She knew what was expected of her. She still needed to be told it.
“Run… run… ruuuuun!” their mother screamed as the gang took aim.
The second shot did not come alone. It was joined by the others all opening fire like bullets rained free from the sky. The sound ricocheted off of every surface, snapping again and again as the echoes crashed into one another. Phoenix watched the barrage tearing through both of her parents, their bodies shaking as they landed flat upon the dirt.
It was all over in seconds. Much quicker than she knew how to cope with. Shock kept her feet locked in place while her focus slipped. Her entire world had come to an end. Their home had been claimed, their parents too, and they were to run. Never seeing their home again was a frightening reality she struggled to deal with.
“Phoenix, we have to get out of here,” Dillon said. He grabbed her arm and began to pull.
She had no reply, her mind felt numb.
“Dammit, Phoenix, wake up!”
“What?” she said, surprised by Dillon’s odd request.
“You need to wake up before they get back.”
It was not Dillon talking anymore. It was Rhys, even though she could see her brother right in front of her, standing beside her bed. She was lying down all of a sudden too. It was a dream, and the most vivid one she had had in years.
“That’s it, open your eyes. The sedative is wearing off. Shake it off, Phoenix.”
The farm had vanished, her two brothers as well. As she slowly returned to the real world, she was met with an intense and instant feeling of regret. At first for her inability to help her parents on the night of their death, then for realising that Dillon was also still dead. The drugs coursing through her veins had to have played a mean trick on her.
Again she awoke to the blinding light of a low hanging, round light. Except this time something was different. The side of her head felt sore and a little numb, a good portion of her face on that side too.
“Phoenix, over here, hey,” Rhys called to her from the bed to her right.
She let her head fall to one side to face him. The same leather cuffs were attached to his arms and legs, but his head could move freely. He had it raised as he called over to her.
“Oh, thank God, you’re OK.”
“What… what happened?” she asked.
“Don’t worry about that right now. We need to get out of here. I have a knife in my pocket, I just can’t reach it. Can you move?”
Thankfully the sedative had worn off enough to allow her to raise her arms and legs to check the feeling in them. The straps were a little loose this time; someone had started to undo them, but not finished.
“I can move a bit. What did they do to me, Rhys?”
“I’ll tell you when we get out of here. That guy with the drill was about to let you out. If I give you my knife, you stab him when he does.”
Why was he avoiding her question?
“Rhys
?” she said, her expression no longer giving him any doubt about her immediate need to know. To lower her eyebrows any further would have required extra muscles in her face that she just did not possess.
He looked at her – straight into her eyes – while he deliberated.
“What is it?” she asked, more forcefully this time.
“Fine. Don’t freak out though, OK? Oh, Christ, how do I say it?”
“Just spit it out.”
Rhys dropped his head to the bed and stared up at the ceiling. As he spoke he closed his eyes. “They’ve put one of those black boxes on your head.”
Chapter 19
We came for answers
“What? No, oh fuck. What are they doing now? Oh shit, they’re gonna put one of those things in my head. Motherfuckers!” Phoenix said, before letting out a short yelp. She caught it just in time, breaking the sound off a moment later. She could not afford to let despair get the better of her. Turning it to anger, on the other hand, was a more useful option.
“Hey, hey, calm down. I told you not to freak out,” Rhys said, followed by a shushing sound. After no-one came to check on the noise, he continued. “Look, it hasn’t worked for some reason. When they put it on you nothing happened. I think something’s wrong with it. There isn’t a Sentient inside. You’re not one of them, but they don’t know why.”
She did not know how to process this. Was relief the correct feeling? It was certainly a part of what she was experiencing. The end had not come after all. Instead she had been given another chance, and it was one she was more than willing to take.
“I can’t believe this is happening.” She arched her head back and allowed a line of tears to trickle down her cheeks.
“I know. I thought I’d never see the real you ever again. Just thinking about that makes me scared shitless!” Rhys took a moment to move past the thought. When he then continued, it was with more urgency than before. “We really have to get out of here, Phoenix. Can you get those restraints off?”