by Adam Blake
When Ben Rush thought about farmyards – which admittedly wasn’t all that much – he tended to think in terms of a big house with a whole lot of barns and stables all around it, chickens scratching at the dirt and a horse looking over a hedge.
Dovecote Farm was basically just a ruin. There must have been an actual farmhouse once, but it looked like it had burned down, leaving only a massive patch of scorched earth where nothing grew. The barns and stables were still standing, but there were holes in the walls where planks had been taken out or kicked in, and the spavined, sagging roofs seemed close to final surrender. Insects buzzed and chirped in the weeds and bullrushes between the outbuildings, but nothing was moving that was big enough for Rush to see.
From his vantage point on the upper level of one of the barns, with the hayloft doors thrown open in front of him, he could look out across the ruined ground towards the road – and be seen from it in his turn, which was probably the point. He was sitting in a wheelback chair, his ankles tied to the front legs and his arms handcuffed together around the back. The chair was rickety, so every time he shifted his weight it lurched either forward and to the left or back and to the right. He was afraid that if he tipped forward too suddenly, he’d fall right out of the hayloft and break his neck. Or maybe he wouldn’t break his neck, but the explosives or whatever it was in the package that the girl had strapped to his chest would detonate and blow him apart.
The girl was sitting a few feet away, behind him, with her back against one of the beams. She had her arms folded in her lap and she was looking out at the road. Whatever thoughts were going through her mind, they left no footprints: the girl’s face was completely inexpressive.
They’d been like this for a while now, and clearly the girl could keep the silence up for however long it took. So if anyone was going to speak, it was going to have to be him.
He screwed up his courage and went for it.
‘You like Courage, the Cowardly Dog?’ he asked her.
The girl didn’t move, but her gaze flicked round and her eyes focused on him. ‘No,’ was all she said. She said it with a warning emphasis, as though that was fighting talk where she came from.
‘You were watching it.’
No answer.
‘I prefer the golden oldies,’ Rush said. ‘The Flintstones. The Jetsons. Yogi Bear.’ Since the girl didn’t react, he went on listing old cartoon shows as a mental exercise. At least it passed the time. ‘Huckleberry Hound. Hector Heathcote. Funky Phantom. The Hair Bear Bunch. Josie and the Pussycats. Deputy Dawg. Top Cat. Foghorn Leghorn. Tom and Jerry.’
Still no reaction from the girl. Well, maybe a flicker of interest on Tom and Jerry, but nothing you could take to the bank.
‘You want to play a game?’ he asked her.
‘No.’
‘Come on. I bet I can read your mind.’
She stared at him for a long time. Eventually, she said, ‘Be quiet.’
‘You don’t think I can read your mind?’ Rush persisted.
This time she didn’t bother to speak.
‘Think of a number from one to ten,’ Rush said. ‘Then take away five.’
The girl’s forehead creased in a frown. ‘A pink elephant from Denmark. It’s old and it’s stupid. Now be quiet. Or do you want me to cut you?’
And suddenly she had a knife in her hand. It was a weird, asymmetrical thing, with a flat extension like a hook or a bracket to one side of the blade. Rush stared at it, and then at the girl’s face. After a moment, she slipped the knife back inside her shirt. There must be a sheath there, strapped to her shoulder: the strap would go down between her breasts, and the knife would sit underneath. And now he was looking at her breasts – and she was looking at him looking at her breasts, which maybe wasn’t such a great idea.
‘If you cut me, you don’t have a hostage any more,’ he said. He was just about able to keep the tremor out of his voice.
‘No, boy,’ the girl said patiently. ‘If I kill you, I don’t have a hostage. I can still cut you.’
That shut him up for a good ten minutes. But he’d read a thriller once where the detective said that psychopaths found it easier to kill you if they didn’t have to see you as a human being. So he gave it one more try.
‘My name’s Ben,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’
Instead of answering, the girl rummaged in the kit-bag she carried, brought out a narrow strip of straw-coloured cloth and started to twist it into a braid. She looked at Rush expectantly.
He weighed up the pros and cons. It was a good sign, really, that she’d decided to gag him instead of taking the knife to him.
But he really didn’t want to be gagged.
But maybe if she got in close enough to put the gag over his mouth, he could do something. Shift his weight at a crucial moment, maybe, and push her out of the hayloft.
He knew that wasn’t going to happen. Even if he had both hands free, the girl could fold him into an origami sculpture.
But what the hell was he, anyway? She’d called him boy, and he had to be at least a full year older than her, and probably more like two. And he hadn’t done one damn thing, so far, besides get smacked around and tied up and questioned and intimidated by her.
‘Those are really, really small tits,’ he said, after a long and pregnant silence. ‘But they look great on you. If you’ve ever considered plastic surgery, I’d say don’t go for it.’
The gag was uncomfortable, and it bit slightly into the corner of his mouth, but Rush was very slightly cheered by the fact that the girl had been blushing when she tightened the knot.
Now I’m human, he thought. And what’s more, so are you.
43
On the A3100, just south of Shalford, there was a sign by the side of the road that read DEAD PEOPLES THINGS FOR SALE. It stood in front of a windowless wooden shed, whose peeling white paint gave it a leprous look. The first time Kennedy had been driven along this road, as a girl of twelve, she’d mainly noticed the missing apostrophe, and in a priggish way disapproved of the sign. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder who the dead people were, and how their things made their way out here to the arse end of Surrey.
Three years ago, riding as now in the cab of a fourteen-wheeler with Tillman beside her, driving, she’d only been amazed that the sign was still there.
Today, with the sun hiding its face from moment to moment behind sudden, scudding banks of cloud, the unwelcome reminder of death struck her as a bad omen.
When Tillman pulled the truck off the road and onto what was left of the drive of Dovecote Farm, it was death that was chiefly on her mind – her own as much as anybody else’s. On that previous visit, three years before, she and Tillman had been trapped on the roof of the farmhouse as it burned, with a trio of Elohim on the ground taking free potshots at them every time they stuck their heads up above the guttering. Kennedy had been close to jumping off the roof-ridge, with a vague hope of staying intact enough when she landed to make a run for it, but really, she was just choosing a broken neck over being burned alive.
But Tillman had turned the tables on their attackers, who thought themselves invincible in the dark. Firing from the roof, he’d blown up the gas tank of the truck they’d arrived in with a home-made incendiary round. One of the Messengers had died in that explosion, and Tillman had shot the other when he came running – much too late – to help his friend.
Except it wasn’t his friend. It was his brother. They were Tillman’s own sons, Ezei and Cephas, who he’d known as Jude and Seth. And because he hadn’t seen them since they were four and five years old, and because in any case he’d never been close enough to see either of their faces clearly, Tillman never had the slightest idea what it was he’d done – how his quest of twelve years had finally brought him back to his family just so he could gun them down.
But Kennedy was pretty sure that Diema-who-used-to-be-Tabe-who-used-to-be-Grace knew it very well. That she’d chosen this place where her brothers fought and died b
ecause in some way it fitted her agenda for today. And now, as Tillman rolled to a halt on that same sad piece of scorched earth, Kennedy found herself genuinely afraid of what that agenda might be.
Tillman looked a question at her: ready? She gave him a curt nod, turned the handle of the door and climbed down out of the cab, holding the print-out of Toller’s book under one arm. The blackened substrate under her feet – even after three years, probably as much charcoal as dirt – crunched as she put her weight on it. She looked around, and as Tillman rounded the cab, she pointed wordlessly.
Rush was in plain sight. When the farmhouse was still standing, the barn that Diema had chosen would have been hidden from sight behind it: now it faced them across thirty metres of nothing very much. The hayloft doors were wide open, or more likely just gone, and Rush was sitting in what looked like an ordinary kitchen chair, close to the edge, looking down at them. His hands were behind his back, presumably tied or cuffed.
Kennedy wondered for a moment why he hadn’t called out to them. Then she saw the gag in his mouth.
The girl wasn’t visible at first, but then she stepped forward from deeper inside the hayloft and stood beside Rush, her hand resting on the back of the chair. Her expression was calm and cold. They took a step towards her, but she tilted her head in a warning motion and they stopped.
‘Something you should hear before you go any further,’ she called down to them. She raised her hand. Something small and white was resting on her palm. She pressed it with her thumb and the digitised chimes of Big Ben wafted down to them. As far as Kennedy could tell, they were coming from Rush.
‘This is just the ringer from a wireless doorbell,’ Diema told them. ‘But I want you to take a good look at your friend.’ Kennedy did. Rush was wearing something bulky over his shirt – a sleeveless garment like a life jacket. It was shiny black, and whatever was inside or under it showed in rectangular bunchings on its surface. A suicide vest. And the ringer from a doorbell would make a perfectly good detonator at this range. Diema had just armed the explosives. If she pressed the ringer again, they’d detonate.
‘Now we understand each other,’ the girl said, lowering her hand to her side again. ‘Come on up. I won’t ask you to drop any weapons you might be carrying. Just know that any misbehaviour on your part will lead to a more even distribution of this boy across the landscape.’
‘Then maybe we should talk down here,’ Tillman said bluntly.
Diema stared down at him – and there was something of mockery in her face, or maybe contempt. ‘Are you afraid of dying, Tillman?’ she asked him.
‘I’m averse to it wherever it can be avoided,’ he said.
And you want her on ground she hasn’t already prepped, Kennedy thought. But the stakes are too high here, Leo – for you as well as for Ben Rush.
‘We’ll come up,’ she said aloud. And in a quieter voice, to Tillman, ‘Don’t push her too hard. When we find out what she wants, then we decide which way to jump.’
‘When we’re cosying up to forty or so pounds of high-explosive?’ he murmured back.
‘Move the truck away from the road first,’ Diema told them. ‘Out behind the barn. Tillman, you do that. Kennedy, come up here. Now.’
They did as they were told. Tillman got back into the truck and the ignition rumbled into life. It rolled on past Kennedy as she walked towards the barn. Then she stepped across the threshold, into sudden shadow.
The loft ladder was off to her right. There was nothing else in the ruined barn, no hay-bales, no rusting farm equipment, no stalls or mangers. If this was an ambush, the ambushers were up in the loft with Diema and Rush. But then, if this was an ambush, the girl was working too hard. She could have left both Kennedy and Tillman to die individually and severally before now, and instead she’d exerted herself to keep them alive.
If the agenda had changed, they’d find out soon enough. But there wasn’t anything Kennedy could do about it besides play along; not unless she was prepared to stand by and watch Ben Rush’s insides become his outsides.
She climbed up the ladder.
The loft was much better furnished than the floor of the barn. As well as the chair in which Rush was sitting, there were two more chairs set at a fold-up table. A pitcher of water stood on the table, next to a stack of plastic cups. All the comforts of home.
Diema had moved away from Rush and was standing with her back to the wall of the loft, directly facing Kennedy. The detonator was ready in her hand, her thumb poised over it. Kennedy hauled herself up through the trapdoor in the floor, moving very slowly.
‘I want to be sure Ben is okay,’ she told the girl. ‘Can I take that gag off him?’
‘You can sit,’ the girl said, ‘at the table, and wait quietly until I tell you what else to do. Is that the book?’
Kennedy showed her the typescript, which was still unbound and only held together with a thick elastic band. She set it – still slowly, still carefully – down on the table.
‘Good,’ Diema said. ‘Now sit.’
Kennedy sat.
She heard Tillman below, starting to climb.
‘If you press that button now,’ Kennedy said to the girl, ‘you’re going to kill yourself as well as us.’
‘I’m a soldier,’ Diema told her. ‘Death in the field is what soldiers expect.’
‘In my experience,’ Tillman said, his head and shoulders rising through the trapdoor as he spoke, ‘soldiers expect that for everybody else, not for themselves.’ He kept his empty hands constantly in full view as he climbed up into the loft. Nonetheless, the girl gave him a stare that was full of mistrust.
‘Sit down,’ she told him.
He sat, but he pulled the chair a little away from the table and angled it towards the girl. He wanted to be free to move if the need arose, Kennedy guessed.
If Diema saw what he was doing, she gave no sign of being troubled by it. ‘Is everything you took from the warehouse still in the truck?’ she asked him.
Tillman nodded. ‘All the incriminating evidence,’ he said, ‘assembled in one place. Is that what this is about? Are you the cleanup crew?’
Diema gave the question serious consideration. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose I am. But you have no idea what it is I’m cleaning up, so you don’t know what it is you’re saying. That’s why you’re here, really. To be instructed.’ She paused for a moment, as though expecting a question. When neither Kennedy nor Tillman spoke, she said, ‘If I meant you harm – if I meant you harm now, today – I’d have come at you in a different way. You realise that, don’t you?’
Kennedy looked from Diema to Ben Rush, sitting with his back to them, then back to Diema. She raised her eyebrows. Exhibit A.
Diema met her gaze, unblinking. ‘I was doing my best to help you,’ she said. ‘That’s what I was ordered to do. That’s why I’m here. But then I spoke to the boy, and now I think I may need to reinterpret my orders.’
She continued to stare at Kennedy with quiet, fierce intensity. ‘Some time ago,’ she said, ‘a secret came into your keeping. A very great secret. When I spoke to the boy …’ her gaze flicked momentarily across to Rush ‘… I learned that you’d passed that secret on to him. Before we say anything on any other subject, I have to know why. I was assuming you have some sense of honour, some idea of what honour means.’
All of this was addressed directly to Kennedy, seeming purposefully to exclude Tillman, and it was said so solemnly that Kennedy boggled slightly. If this girl had seen twenty, it was a recent memory.
‘You tied Ben to a chair with a suicide belt strapped to his chest so you could see if we’re honourable?’ she said, trying to keep her tone neutral. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No.’ The girl made an impatient gesture – her mouth folding into a grimace before straightening again to the deadpan that seemed to be her default expression. ‘That’s what you’re saying. Let’s go through this again.’
She pressed down on the ringer and the ch
imes of Big Ben sounded again. Kennedy gasped aloud and Rush convulsed, but it was only with an access of panic. No explosion came.
In the loud silence, Diema threw the ringer onto the table.
‘There’s no suicide belt,’ she said. ‘No explosives. And I gagged him because he was talking about my breasts. I didn’t like it.’
Kennedy rose to her feet. Her first thought after screw me sideways! was for Rush. She wanted to get him untied and away from that bloody drop. Tillman’s initial reaction was different. His right hand swept across his left and suddenly he had a gun in it, centred on the girl’s upper body. It wasn’t the big and heavy Mateba Unica he usually carried, it was a discreet little Saturday night special, and it looked absurdly tiny in his big hand.
‘I’m sorry to do this,’ he said to the girl brusquely, ‘because I know you saved my life the other night, but there’s too much blood under the bridge already for me to trust you. Please move over to the wall. Keep your hands where I can see them, and move like you’re walking underwater.’
‘Leo—’ Kennedy blurted, her heart in her mouth.
‘She’s Elohim,’ he said, across her. ‘No surprises, Heather. Not beyond the ones we’ve already had.’ And to the girl, ‘Please. I said against the wall, and I don’t want any argument. Do it.’
Just one damn thing after another, Kennedy thought bitterly. And she knew Tillman was right, on one level. But the level on which he was wrong concerned her more, and she found herself stepping in between the two of them, letting the barrel of Tillman’s gun bump against her breastbone, come to rest up against her throat.
‘Enough, Leo,’ she said. ‘Put the gun away. She’s done enough to prove her point.’
Tillman tried to step around Kennedy but she gripped his wrist in both of her hands and it was clear that the only way he was going to get it free would be by force.
‘What point,’ he asked, ‘has she proved, exactly?’
‘That she’s not interested in killing us,’ Kennedy said, between clenched teeth. ‘So put the gun away, and we’ll talk it out. For now, this is neutral ground we’re standing on.’ She looked over her shoulder at the girl. ‘Right?’