by Lauren Algeo
‘Do you think he gives jobs to children?’ she asked in disbelief.
‘Maybe. I guess it depends if he trusts them to get it done.’
Georgie’s half-drunk tea had gone cold so she put it on the floor under her chair. The waiting room was even busier than it had been when they’d arrived. Almost every seat was occupied now and the noise level had risen. Hushed voices and moans of pain mixed in with the squeaking of shoes on the floor and the shrill ringing of the phone. They could stay there unchallenged for a while longer.
Georgie winced slightly as she settled back in the chair. Her stomach still ached and it felt like the back of her throat was scratched. There was a distinct, metallic taste every time she swallowed.
Death at the command of the boy would have been a lot more painful than being instantly killed by a tube train, she mused darkly.
After everything she’d been through in her life already, she hadn’t expected to ever feel as terrified as she did today. There was something even more disturbing about the child hikers. She’d seen enough horror films to know that the biggest scares came from creepy, ghost children.
She turned to Brewer suddenly. ‘You said when I’d encountered more of them you wanted to hear my opinions?’ she reminded him. ‘Well I had one hell of an encounter today! I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks though. You’re always trying to fit them into some other mould. All those books we’ve read, trying to find links to something we can put a name to: vampires, demons, witches, it’s all bollocks. What it they don’t fit any type of other creature because they aren’t like anything else? What if they are just hikers: a breed of people who have the power of mind control and an amazing ability to heal themselves. That’s it. The Grand was the first of his kind, some sort of genetic mutation or whatever, and he spawned the whole race. What if the reason we’re not finding anything to kill them with is because we’re using stuff that is supposed to work on other beings? We need to think of hikers as their own, standalone, unique breed. We have to try everything. What if something small could kill them? You’ve seen War of the Worlds right? A bloody cold brought down those fuckers! Whose to say that it wouldn’t work with a hiker? Sod burning them and stabbing them anymore, we’ve got to think outside the box and get creative!’
She finished her rousing speech with a spluttering cough from her dry throat.
Brewer pondered what she had said. He had always tried methods he thought would work on a normal person, or that he’d read about working on some supernatural monster. Maybe they should try coming up with some random new ways. What if there was something hikers were allergic to? It would all be trial and error. The mammoth task was daunting but they could work out a plan of action.
‘Ok,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll try it for a while. We can come up with a list of things that might be effective and work through them.’
Georgie looked pleased with herself. After the boy, she was eager to extract some revenge on hikers.
There was a sudden commotion at the hospital entrance. A woman rushed through the double doors, closely followed by a panic stricken man holding a little girl in his arms.
‘Help!’ she screamed, running straight to a passing nurse. ‘It’s my daughter! I think she has meningitis!’
The staff sprang in to action. The nurse immediately began to examine the girl and a receptionist came around the desk to try and calm the mother down. They were gone from the waiting room in a matter of minutes, no doubt for the girl to be checked over thoroughly. There was no grumbling from the people who had been waiting for hours.
Something sparked in Brewer’s head that he couldn’t quite put his finger on; some seed of an idea that was just out of reach. It was too noisy in the hospital. He needed to go somewhere quiet so he could try and pick up the train of thought again.
The youngest receptionist had glanced at them a couple of times. She’d been on duty for the whole afternoon and didn’t remember them coming to the desk. Brewer could see her sizing them up and trying to work out whether they had come up while she was preoccupied, or if they were just taking shelter there. Neither of them was visibly injured. He looked pretty scruffy in his battered coat, jeans and boots, however Georgie was wearing one of her new winter outfits and looked quite smart. She had on her thick, black coat, blue skinny jeans and flat, black walking boots. They could easily pass as relatives waiting for someone but he couldn’t be bothered with the hassle. It was time for them to get going.
Their original mission – finding out if the two men hit by the snowplough had been victims of a hiker – was long forgotten. The ordeal today had killed their curiosity over that one. Brewer thought if the child hiker was there though, he was probably just playing with people and getting them to kill and injure at his will. There would be a sharp rise in fatalities while he was around. He wanted to get the hell out of there before he and Georgie were added to the list of the dead. If the child came across them again, he would make them pay for evading him.
They left the hospital and walked straight into a blizzard. The snow was really coming down again and visibility was nearly zero.
‘How long did the forecast say this was supposed to last?’ Georgie asked.
She had a firm grip on the sleeve of Brewer’s coat. Being out in the open again was making her nervous, and it didn’t help that they could barely see ahead. She shivered in spite of her warm layers. If that child hiker found them again, her defences would crumble in an instant. She still couldn’t get over how easy it would have been for that boy to kill her.
‘A few hours,’ Brewer replied over his shoulder.
It would take them the rest of the afternoon to get back to the station in these conditions. They chose to stick to the main roads this time, and not go near the housing estate they had cut through on the way to the hospital.
The walking went on forever. They trudged silently through the blanket of snow. Every now and then they would have to veer off course to go around a particularly steep drift or an abandoned car. Other than that, there was only white.
Eventually they made it back to the station. They stood in the warm concourse and tried to get some feeling back in their numb bodies. The station was busy but there were no trains. Every departure board warned of the adverse weather conditions, and every announcement was an apology for a severe delay or cancellation.
‘It doesn’t look good for us getting back to London tonight,’ Brewer sighed.
Georgie stared bleakly up at the flashing boards. She didn’t want to spend the night in this town with that thing out there.
‘Maybe when the snow storm stops they’ll get some trains going again,’ she said hopefully.
Brewer gave her a doubtful look. ‘I think we should find somewhere to stay for the night.’
Georgie shook her head vigorously. Something about being surrounded by people in the station made her feel safer. If they holed up in some quiet hotel she would be on edge for the whole night.
‘I’d rather wait here, then we can monitor the trains and try to get on one of the first ones out of here.’
Brewer nodded in agreement. He could read between the lines when it came to Georgie now. She wouldn’t admit that she was terrified to stay there for the night but he could see it in her face. They’d be safer with more people around anyway. If the child came, he would be easily distracted with all of these agitated minds.
‘The station will most likely stay open all night,’ he said. ‘There’ll be plenty of people who can’t get where they’re going and have no option but to sleep here. We’ll blend right in.’
They found an emptier spot near the side of the station and sat in some vacant chairs. It would do for the night. The station grew quieter into the evening and there was an announcement that there would be no services until the morning. Brewer and Georgie got some dinner from McDonalds and looked through the local papers to pass the time. At around 11pm they stretched out on some seats for a nap.
Georgie didn’t s
leep at all. Every time Brewer opened his eyes she was staring around the station, keeping watch for anything out of the ordinary. She walked several laps around the outside edge while he dozed. There were some people trying to sleep and a couple of others wandering about aimlessly.
At 2am, Georgie thought she heard the child. She was sitting in a chair next to Brewer, gazing vacantly at the blank departure boards, when she faintly heard a light whisper. She bolted upright, instantly alert. Was he here?
She listened intently but couldn’t hear anything else. There was only Brewer’s slow breathing and the shuffling footsteps of a man walking across the concourse to the toilets.
Georgie bit her lip and debated whether to wake him up. Had she really heard a whisper or had her tired mind been playing tricks on her? He wouldn’t be impressed if she woke him up for a phantom noise.
Ten minutes later she heard it again. Just a faint sigh in the back of her head but it was enough. She shook Brewer awake roughly. He blinked a few times and tried to clear his muddled head.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, taking in her petrified face.
‘I can hear him,’ she replied. Her voice barely a whisper in case the boy heard her.
Brewer frowned – he couldn’t hear anything.
‘He definitely out there, I heard him twice,’ she said pointedly.
‘Your range is further than mine remember,’ Brewer said, shifting in the seat until he was sitting up straight. ‘At least that means if you can hear him and I can’t, then he’s not that close.’
That didn’t reassure Georgie at all. The boy was still close enough. He was probably prowling the deserted streets, looking for a new victim to torture.
‘Can you make out any words?’ he asked.
‘No. Just the whispering sound.’ She was glad she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Neither of them slept for the rest of the night. Georgie couldn’t stop imagining the boy walking through the station entrance. When the sky began to lighten, Brewer checked outside. It hadn’t snowed since last night, although the ground was still covered in a white blanket. Some more people began to turn up at the station. It was a Wednesday morning and commuters were seeing if they could get into work.
Brewer and Georgie were on the first train to make it to London. They were silent for most of the journey. Georgie’s face was ashen, making the dark circles under her eyes more prominent. Brewer wanted a hot shower and a decent cup of coffee.
It was lunchtime when they eventually walked through the front door of the flat. Georgie shuffled like a zombie to the bedroom and immediately crawled under the covers, fully clothed, to get some sleep. The whole traumatic trip had left her numb.
Brewer had his shower and coffee then settled on the sofa to get some decent rest. His tired mind wandered as he drifted off. He recalled the noise of the hospital waiting room, telling the story of the little girl, then what Georgie had said – something about a cold? An idea sparked in his brain.
His eyes flew open and he struggled to sit up. The idea of a cold bringing them down had set off a chain of thoughts. He remembered now.
He went and got his rucksack from the dining table and sat down on top of the duvet on the sofa. Sleep was forgotten about.
He dug out a pad and pen and began making notes. Hikers could heal themselves from physical injuries but could they cure diseases? What if there was a way to bring them down from the inside? He tried to think over all he knew about them. He doubted their immune systems would be as advanced as normal people. They would never have had any jabs or inoculations, and probably never been exposed to any serious illnesses – they didn’t spend enough time around people to catch anything. Only how could they give a hiker an illness? And what exactly could they give them?
Still, it was an idea: killing a hiker from the inside. Brewer felt a bubble of excitement in the pit of his stomach.
He turned on the laptop to do some research. Typing ‘How to give someone a cold’ into Google didn’t provide many useful answers. They couldn’t exactly walk up to a hiker and press a snotty tissue over its face. Brewer laughed out loud at the absurd mental image. Getting a hiker to spend time next to an ill person was out too. As far as he knew, they didn’t really feel the cold – judging by them not often wearing coats in the winter – so one of them getting sick by itself wasn’t very likely.
Brewer went to the bookshelf and pulled out some anatomy and science books, and spread them on the sofa around him. He got stuck into his research enthusiastically.
Chapter 27
Three hours later, he heard Georgie leave the bedroom and pad along to the bathroom. She opened the living room door a few minutes later and peeked around it. She was bleary eyed and her hair was sticking up in random clumps. She had changed out of her clothes and was wearing thick, blue pyjamas and fluffy socks.
‘I thought I heard you tapping away,’ she frowned. ‘Have you even been to sleep?’
Brewer waggled his half-empty mug towards her; he was on his third cup of coffee. ‘I’m running on caffeine.’
Georgie collapsed into his armchair and yawned loudly. ‘I’m still freezing,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever feel my toes again!’
‘Mmm,’ Brewer replied distractedly. He was skimming over a web page about contagious diseases.
‘I couldn’t sleep any more. I had a nightmare about that…’ Georgie paused when she realised Brewer wasn’t listening to her.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.
‘Research.’
Georgie rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, I can see that. What research? You can’t be thinking of going on another trip already?’
‘I had an idea,’ came the half-hearted explanation.
‘Scott!’ she cried, exasperated. ‘Take your eyes off the screen! What the fuck are you up to?’
Brewer laughed and tore himself away from the laptop. She’d sounded like his mother telling him off when he was young – apart from the ‘fuck’ part.
‘All right,’ he said, sitting back and putting the laptop next to him on the sofa.
He explained his idea of trying to give a hiker some sort of illness to see if it had any effect.
‘Like I said about War of the Worlds!’ She looked a lot more awake now. ‘What have you found out?’
‘Nothing for a concrete plan yet,’ Brewer admitted. ‘There are plenty of contagious illnesses we could try, the problem is infecting a hiker with them.’
‘I’ll help.’ Georgie went to the bookshelf and scanned over the spines. ‘We should make a list of other things to try too,’ she suggested, pulling out some books at random.
They immersed themselves in books and websites for inspiration. Georgie borrowed Brewer’s notepad and ripped out a couple of sheets of paper then pinned them to the wall next to the maps. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that since they’d been back Brewer had added a second green pin to the map. It was stuck over Bath, nestled between blue and red pins. She looked away quickly, before the memories came flooding back.
‘We can cross things off the list when we try them,’ she said, tapping the pen against the two sheets of paper.
At the top of the first page she wrote ‘ILLNESS’ in block letters, then underneath she wrote ‘cold or flu’ smaller.
‘What other illnesses?’ she asked.
Brewer looked at some notes he’d made from the internet. ‘Swine flu, MRSA, SARS,’ he read. ‘There are things like septicaemia, rabies, and polio that could cause some damage. I’m still looking though so we’ll come back to that.’
Georgie wrote rapidly.
‘Ok.’ She turned back to face him. ‘What other stuff haven’t you tried that could affect them inside?’
Brewer tried to think; he’d experimented with a lot of stuff.
‘Poison?’ he suggested. ‘I dismissed it before but something like anti-freeze or rat poison might work, or acid.’
Georgie added them to the list.
&nb
sp; ‘God knows how we’re going to give any of these things to one,’ she muttered.
‘There’ll be a way, we just need to find it.’
Georgie pressed the pen against her lip thoughtfully. ‘There was something I read… it’s a bit stupid but hey, I just wrote rabies on the list! What about salt?’
‘Salt?’
Brewer had read that in plenty of books too. Salt was supposed to protect against witches, demons, ghosts; pretty much everything.
‘You want to try throwing salt at a hiker?’
‘No. More like standing in a salt circle and seeing if a hiker could still get inside your mind.’
‘Hmm, that’s a bit farfetched, and dangerous. You’d have to try and coax a hiker into your mind to see if it worked.’
Georgie wrote it down anyway.
‘I’m wondering if there’s a way of infecting a hiker’s blood too,’ Brewer said. ‘What if there was a way to stop them regenerating it?’
‘That’s getting too medical,’ she scowled.
‘Ok. I wouldn’t have the first clue how to go about finding that out anyway. Even if we could get a sample of a hiker’s blood, I don’t know how we’d get it tested.’
He thought briefly of Marcus, who would have contacts for that, then dismissed the idea. He’d said he wouldn’t ask for any favours for a while.
‘On that note,’ Georgie said. ‘What if we could stop one from feeding, so it would starve or dehydrate?’
Brewer shook his head. ‘I doubt we’d manage that. We’d have to trap it somewhere for days, and it could easily reach out to a mind to persuade someone to come and set it free.’
‘Well, we’ve got enough to get started with.’ She looked at the list. ‘Let’s carry on researching and see if we’ve got any sort of plan by tonight.’
Brewer was eager to keep digging into contagious diseases.
Georgie made some sandwiches and brought a bottle of coke over to the table. She held a tuna sandwich in one hand and a book in the other, alternatively taking a bite and turning a page.