Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  ‘Bravo zero acknowledged,’ Ryland replied, clipped and professional. ‘On way, five minutes.’ There was a brief pause and then: ‘Hang in there, Prav, we’re coming.’

  When she turned back to the door, whatever it was that had been trying to get through was gone, but she could still hear sounds of things being thrown around, doors crashing open, and furniture being upended from elsewhere in the station. She sidled up to the gap and peered through. There was a man and a woman in the corridor. At least, the man was definitely a man. The woman was… different. They were having a conversation, and then he turned around and Prav saw that he had Everett Clifton’s black sickle-knife stuck in his belt and that hideous bone horn thing in his hands, and he was grinning like it was Christmas morning. She recognised him from the information supplied by David Pimblett; it was Matthew Hewitson.

  And he saw her peering out.

  Prav gasped and ducked back into the room, but it was too late. Hewitson came to the door. He looked down and around at the barricade and gave the door an experimental push, and when it didn’t move he shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he told her. ‘We’ve got what we need. It would have been fun watching you wriggle, but hey.’

  ‘There’s a patrol car on the way,’ she said. ‘They’re going to be here in minutes.’

  ‘So that’s a whole…’ He performed an elaborate pantomime of counting on his fingers. ‘Two more cops? That’s almost worth sticking around for. But sorry, no. Places to do, things to be, you know how it is.’ He disappeared, but then came back for a moment. ‘There is one thing you can do, though,’ he said. ‘You can tell the rest of the herd that our lord will take what is owed to him.’

  He went away again, and didn’t come back. The noises of destruction faded too, to be replaced soon afterwards by the welcome music of police sirens.

  4

  VISITING HOURS

  ‘HELLO, STRANGER.’

  David looked up from his phone as Dennie approached his bed. It was the start of visiting hours on the ortho ward, but he wasn’t expecting anyone; Becky had rushed straight up from her parents’ when she’d heard about the attack three days ago, but had gone back yesterday after collecting more of her things from the house. As far as she knew he’d tried to stop an abduction-murder, which was more than enough to be going on with.

  Dennie came around to his good side and gave him a lopsided hug. She moved slowly, and he saw how gingerly she took each step, as if afraid of what the floor might do underfoot. ‘How are you getting on?’ she asked.

  ‘I feel like I’ve been chewed up and spat out,’ he said.

  ‘Funny, that.’

  ‘You?’

  She so-so’d and perched on the edge. ‘Lizzie’s been looking after me. I’ve been sleeping a lot. Other than that, mostly raging migraines and nosebleeds.’

  He winced. ‘Because of…?’

  ‘I think so. As far as I can work out, whatever it is in my brain that makes me see Sabrina – the bit that is Sabrina, if that makes sense – wakes up when it needs to, but when I try to wake it up deliberately, well, pop.’ She mimed a little explosion underneath her nose.

  ‘Cripes, that’s not good, is it?’

  ‘No, indeed.’

  Footsteps approached, and they turned to see Sergeant Kaur appear on the ward, headed for them.

  ‘Huh,’ David grunted as she arrived. ‘Come to give me another bollocking, have you, Sarge?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I’ve come to ask for your help.’ She nodded at Dennie. ‘Both of you, actually.’

  She wasn’t in uniform, he noted, and she looked tired. Now that he looked at her properly, she looked absolutely wrung out. He sat up straighter in his bed, wincing at the twinge in his shoulder. First flesh or not, he was still in a bad way. ‘What’s happened?’

  She pulled up a chair and slumped into it. ‘Last night,’ she replied, ‘or should I say more accurately, early this morning, I had a surprise visit from a Mr Matthew Hewitson.’

  ‘Shit.’

  She snapped her fingers. ‘Yes. That. He broke into the police station in Burton-on-Trent and stole two objects from the evidence room. One was a certain curved knife, and the other was an ugly horn thing made of bones.’

  ‘Did he hurt you?’ Dennie asked.

  She produced a tired smile. ‘No, he didn’t. I managed to find somewhere to hide. Which was just as well because he had brought lots of friends with him.’

  ‘What do you mean, friends?’

  David listened as she tried to describe the creatures that had raided the station, but when she asked if either of them knew anything about them he had to confess his ignorance. ‘They sound a bit like they’re related to Gar, but I never saw anything other than him. Jesus, there’s more of the bloody things?’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious to me that this whole business is a long way from being over. The problem for me is that I can’t tell anybody on the force about what I really saw because if I do they’ll send for the men in white coats.’

  ‘Maybe you should trust them a bit more, because that always works,’ he said. It was a low blow, he knew, but she deserved it.

  ‘Self-righteousness doesn’t suit you,’ she said. ‘Hewitson also said, if I’ve got this right, the rest of the herd should know that their lord would come to take what was owed to him. Do you have any idea what that means?’

  ‘David and I worked out that the Farrow were conducting their sacrifices at each new waxing crescent moon,’ Dennie said. ‘They’d already done three. Lauren was the fourth, but we must have interrupted the process before it could be finished because what came out of the ground was… was…’ She stopped, frowning.

  David and Prav waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She just sat there looking puzzled, her lips moving slightly as if trying to form words that wouldn’t come. Her fingers were making little snapping motions that were becoming increasingly irritated, and with horror David saw a small bead of saliva forming on her bottom lip, getting ready to fall. He couldn’t let that happen – couldn’t let her actually start drooling on herself – so he reached out and laid a hand gently on hers. ‘Dennie, are you—’

  ‘I’m fine!’ she snapped. ‘I don’t need you mollycoddling me, Brian Keeling! I was going to say that I think what came out of the ground was not what they were expecting.’ She looked from one of them to the other. ‘What are you two staring at?’

  He almost said You just called me Brian, but couldn’t bring himself to do so. It would have humiliated her.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘So, look, we’ve got no way of knowing how many more sacrifices there should have been to do the job properly. At least one, by the sounds of things. They’re going to try to finish it somehow.’

  ‘So, what’s this herd that he mentioned?’ Prav asked.

  ‘Everybody who ate the meat that Ardwyn and Everett provided at that hog roast they hosted back in March,’ he said. ‘Except they called it the first flesh—’

  ‘Hughes used that phrase in her interview.’

  ‘I know. I saw the video.’

  Prav grimaced. ‘Everybody saw the video. There’s a data officer somewhere answering some very awkward questions, I hope.’

  ‘Well, it’s the flesh of their god.’

  ‘What do you mean their god? You can’t eat a god’s flesh. A god isn’t a physical thing that you can cut up.’

  ‘Yes, and human-boar hybrids don’t attack police stations in the middle of the night to steal sacrificial knives.’ Before she could protest he went on. ‘Prav, this stuff is real. The first flesh is real. I know, because my daughter ate it and it cured her leukaemia. I ate it, and I should have lost my arm but it’s already getting better.’ He waggled his fingers at her from inside their cast. ‘I mean, I saw a man’s bloody eye grow back.’

  ‘Everybody who ate the first flesh is marked,’ said Dennie. ‘If Ardwyn decided that they could be useful, they were recruited into the Farrow. If not, they were the herd, an
d their blood could go back to the god. Whether you believe any of this or not, Matt Hewitson absolutely does, and someone who was at that hog roast is going to be murdered at the next crescent moon.’

  ‘Like either of you, or David’s daughter.’

  ‘And thank you so much for saying that out loud,’ David muttered.

  ‘Not me,’ said Dennie. ‘Veggie. Sorry.’

  ‘So, was it a big do, this hog roast? Or a small, intimate gathering of easily locatable friends and neighbours?’

  David grimaced. ‘It was pretty large. The allotment tenants mostly, but also some of the locals from the neighbouring houses, plus friends, relatives.’

  ‘Great. So that means it could be any one of literally dozens of people.’ Prav rubbed her face with her hands and yawned, but paused and her mouth snapped shut. ‘Hang on, though,’ she said. ‘How did Hughes decide who to approach and who to sacrifice? If she was new to the area she wouldn’t have known everyone by name.’

  David cast his mind back to the events of that Sunday afternoon, as best he could. ‘She did do an awful lot of chatting and mingling,’ he said. ‘Everett was the one who took care of the food and drink. Which makes sense, if she was sizing up potential victims right then and there.’

  ‘Let’s hope she made a list.’

  He snorted. ‘What kind of idiot would write down a list of all the people they intend to kill?’

  ‘Oh, only loads of mass killers. They write long manifestos and keep diaries of grievances against everybody they think has done them wrong – school bullies, government officials, pop stars, girls who won’t shag them, and yes, it’s always men. Hughes strikes me as a very methodical but also very arrogant person; frankly it would surprise me if she didn’t have it all written down somewhere. If she did, and it was at her farm, it’ll be in evidence. Uniform have been searching the place for the past couple of days, and everything’s coming to Burton while they sort through it. I’ll have a look when I get back. Trust me, it’ll be there.’

  ‘Great then, job done,’ said David.

  Prav squinted at him. ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

  ‘No. I’m serious. If there is a nice convenient list of potential victims then we don’t have to do a thing about it except pass it on to your lot and let them do their job. We can’t protect them any better than the police can, surely.’

  ‘David,’ said Prav, ‘let me tell you how police protection works in the real world. Technically, you are an informant of an organised crime group. No, don’t laugh, that’s the closest equivalent to your situation: you were drawn into a group with threats of violence and you’ve worked to undermine them and now the lives of you and your family are at risk from reprisals. Your case, if you’re lucky, is dealt with by the UK Protected Persons Service. They give you and Becky and Alice fake identities, relocate you away from anybody who knows you – friends, relatives, Alice’s grandparents. And you all have to live with the psychological stress of knowing that the group could find you at any moment.

  ‘The PPS might only look after the person being directly threatened, though, so let’s say it was just you who ate this first flesh and not your family. That would be you being separated from your wife and daughter, potentially for the rest of your lives.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Dennie. ‘They wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Of course, they do that! What’s cheaper for the government: a flat for one snitch or a semi-detached house for his family? Now, scale that up to however many people we’re thinking of here – thirty or so? How many of them are voluntarily going to leave their loved ones? Of the ones that do, where do they go? The PPS is geared to handle individuals, not groups; they’re not going to put everyone in one nice, easily defendable building, they’re going to split them up all over the country. And none of them is going to have armed cops outside their door twenty-four-seven. It’s the anonymity that’s supposed to be the security. And that’s to protect them just from ordinary, run-of-the-mill crims.

  ‘What I saw come out of that shed, and then what attacked the station – that was not normal. I’m not qualified to say what I think it was, but you tell me that it was a half-resurrected god? I say okay, why not, it’s as good an explanation as any. You say that a psychic hallucination of your dead neighbour led you to the cult’s farm? Again, okay. So, here’s the problem with normal police protection: if this Moccus person is what you say he is, who’s to say that he can’t do that too? Maybe he can, I don’t know, sniff out their souls or something.’

  ‘She has a point,’ said Dennie.

  Prav went on: ‘We can’t assume that the police are any more qualified to deal with this than you, and to be honest I’m not happy putting my colleagues in the way of something that they’re not equipped to handle. They might even make things worse by separating Moccus’ potential victims and making them easier to pick off.’

  ‘So, we can’t protect them,’ said David bitterly. The beast’s flesh was in his loved ones, and it was his fault.

  ‘In a nutshell, no.’

  ‘Well then, we better hope that the police find Hewitson pretty bloody quickly.’

  ‘Oh, they will. It’s just a matter of time.’

  ‘Time that we don’t have,’ Dennie objected. ‘If I was him I wouldn’t be sitting on my hands for three weeks waiting for the next tusk moon before I nabbed a sacrifice. I’d take as many as I needed as soon as possible and then keep moving them about until it was time to use them. He knows he’s being hunted. He’s going to act fast, if he hasn’t done so already.’

  ‘If someone else had been abducted we’d have heard about it by now,’ said David.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Prav replied. ‘I bet quite a few of them will have seen that video and got out of town already. Communication between different county forces can be dodgy at best, and if there is another misper report they won’t necessarily connect it with—’

  David felt a sudden terror hollow him out, and he grabbed for his phone, moaning a string of denials.

  ‘David?’ asked Dennie. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Becky,’ he muttered, past a lump of panic that was growing in his throat. He stabbed the contact icon for her. Her smiling face expanded to fill his screen, a shot taken at the beach in the south of France on their honeymoon, above another icon that said Calling…

  ‘David,’ said Prav, ‘there’s no way that he could know—’

  ‘Shut up! Who’s to say what he can’t do? Your words!’

  Calling…

  ‘Oh Jesus, honey pick up the phone, please pick up, please…’

  Calling…

  Dennie tried laying her hand on his but he shook it off.

  Call ended. His phone hung itself up. She hadn’t answered.

  With trembling fingers he found the number for her parents and called that. It was answered in a few rings by Naomi, his mother-in-law. ‘Hello, David,’ she said brightly. ‘How are you doing? Rebecca told us all about—’

  ‘Is she there?’ he cut across her. ‘I need to speak with her if she’s there. Please. It’s important.’

  ‘Of course, I’ll just go and get her,’ she said, with that cool politeness that told him she objected to his tone. As if he gave a toss. If Becky was there he’d apologise with flowers and grovelling.

  A few moments later, Naomi came back. ‘I’m terribly sorry, David, but she’s not here. I think she must have popped out to the shops with Alice. Shall I get her to give you a ring when she gets back?’

  His throat was so tight he could barely speak. ‘Yes please, that’d be great.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s absolutely fine,’ Dennie said, but he could tell that even she didn’t believe it.

  They sat in silence, lost in their thoughts while the business of the hospital bustled around them. When David’s phone rang again, it made them all jump. He snatched it up; Becky’s picture was back and Incoming Call flashed at him.

  ‘Oh, thank God!’ he said into it. ‘Honey, are y
ou—’

  ‘Hello, David,’ said Matthew Hewitson. ‘How’s the family?’

  If his earlier panic had felt like being hollowed out before, this felt like the entire room had been evacuated like a bell jar, every particle of air sucked out to be replaced be a vacuum that roared in his ears. If he hadn’t already been sitting in bed he’d have fallen to the ground. He heard himself whispering, ‘What have you done with them?’

  ‘Now come on, be fair, you were warned.’ Hewitson’s voice was cheerfully smug. ‘You were given something miraculous and you threw it back in our faces, so it’s only fair that you should make up for it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Fine, so let it be me, then. You don’t have to hurt them.’ Somewhere in the background he could hear Becky and Alice, their muffled voices crying out against whatever was gagging them.

  ‘You’re right, I don’t. But you killed my friend.’ The false cheeriness was gone now. ‘You and that old bitch and her fucking dog. You fucked up the only good thing that ever happened to me. So no, I don’t have to hurt them, but I’m going to have fun imagining your face when I do.’

  He cut the call.

  The dead phone fell from David’s hands, and he turned to Dennie and Prav. ‘How do we find him? I don’t mean the police. I mean, right fucking now. How?’

  Dennie uttered a huge sigh that seemed to come up from the soles of her feet. ‘Sabrina,’ she said.

  Prav looked at her in alarm. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Didn’t that nearly make you pop a blood vessel in your brain last time?’ She turned to David. ‘You can’t ask her to do that.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to,’ Dennie replied.

  5

  GUNS AND DOGS

  IT WAS FOUR IN THE MORNING, AND DENNIE WAS running away from home.

  She knew every creaking stair and grumbling floorboard, and Lizzie was flat out, bless her, exhausted by the last few days dealing with the police and doctors. Dennie, on the other hand, had never felt better, which was ironic given what the doctors had actually said.