Mitts listened closely. It wasn’t croaking.
Finally his mind wrapped around the sound.
An engine.
That was what it was.
He peered long and hard into the mist, trying to make it out.
But he couldn’t see a thing.
At first he mistook it for moonlight.
Then he realised what it was.
A spotlight.
Yellow, and bright, and sweeping through the mist.
Mitts rose up.
He trudged down the soggy earth. To the shore.
He shouldered his rifle—for which he would’ve scolded a younger member of the Patrol.
He could make out its shape now.
A boat.
At first it looked enormous. Too large to even contemplate.
But then it became smaller.
The mist swirled away from the craft.
The spotlight beamed across the shore.
Mitts shielded his eyes with his hand.
He could hear voices from the boat.
Shouting.
His men closed around him.
All of them staring at the sight.
At the boat.
The boat came to rest. Its engine clicked off. It moored a little way off shore.
Some of his men waded out into the waist-high water.
Their rifles forgotten.
Mitts held back.
He wanted the high ground.
Where he could see everything.
Where he had a complete view of the situation.
He knew nothing about these people.
They could be aggressive. They could be a threat . . .
They could be—
She clambered over the side of the ship.
Into a dinghy.
He saw her just as clearly as he had seen her the night of the Mid-Summer Blowout.
A ghost.
Samantha’s ghost.
A light blinks on.
Darkness recedes.
Shadows scurry for the corners.
Dozens of glass capsules. Lined up in a row.
Their metal fixings glare in the light.
The scientist treads over to one of the glass capsules.
She reaches out.
Presses a button.
A hiss of escaping air.
The capsule’s glass steams up.
It renders the contents of the capsule impossible to see.
The scientist works quickly, with precision.
She busies herself with the contents of the capsule, her hands tending to the body within as if it were as tender and delicate as a human baby.
As the steam clears, the contents of the capsule is revealed.
Grey-purple skin.
The texture of whale blubber.
Gleaning dully in the light.
The jaws.
The fangs.
All trace of life gone from the black, black eyes.
RESURRECTION
At breakfast the next day, Mitts stared long and hard into his cup of black coffee.
He had just polished off his second cup and he could already feel the unpleasant sensation of caffeine overdose rippling through his bloodstream.
He stared at the browned dregs at the bottom of his cup.
He swilled them about, like tea leaves.
He tried to see something in them.
Wasn’t that the point of being psychic?
Of having visions?
Weren’t they supposed to . . . tell him something?
In an unthinking act of frustration, he gripped hold of his mug and hurled it hard against the kitchen wall.
The mug broke apart with a high-pitched tinkle of breaking porcelain.
Feeling his heart beating hard against his ribs, and the pull of his strained breathing, he stared at the broken pieces lying on the floor.
The brown splodge on the wall where the cup had made contact.
As he sat at the kitchen table, he heard Luca’s footfall on the staircase.
He didn’t turn his head when he sensed her standing in the doorway.
“I don’t want you in my house.”
Although her words were so clear, so gently delivered, they felt like knives rammed in beneath his shoulder blades.
The caffeine rattled through his body.
It caused him to shake.
He was afraid.
Never before had he shown any hint of aggression.
Not even while fighting the creatures.
And certainly not inside the Village . . . much less within Luca’s cottage.
He glanced to Luca now.
Standing in the doorway.
Her eyes were set on him. Her lips pursed.
She turned her back to him, heading up the staircase.
Her words floated to him over her shoulder.
“You have till nightfall,” she said.
For a long few moments, Mitts stared hard at the broken pieces of his coffee mug.
Then he shifted himself up from his seat.
Left the cottage behind for good.
* * *
The Village was alive with activity.
Today, everyone had forgotten their duties.
Nobody tended to the farmyard animals.
There was no one manning rations storage.
Not even a soul—apparently—staffing the Station.
And it was all because Samantha walked among them again.
A pair of men dressed in uniforms escorted her.
They wore uniforms from before.
Their uniforms were navy blue. Each had a silver tag pinned to the breast pocket.
A tag which Mitts couldn’t read.
Their trousers, also navy blue, had been neatly pressed.
Just like everyone else, Mitts found himself staring at them.
He was unable to believe these people were real.
They were fantasy creatures.
He examined their well-muscled arms. The semi-automatic rifles they carried.
Mitts took in the array of reactions from the inhabitants of the Village.
Some scowled. Others looked worried.
Others still smiled and laughed.
Shouldn’t they all have been smiling and laughing?
For what reason would Samantha have returned to them other than to bring them to safety?
To bring them some better life?
Mitts went about his duties. He, at least, was determined not to be distracted.
When he was quite certain nobody else was watching, he slipped out of the Village.
On his way out, he spotted Dag up on the rampart.
The two of them exchanged a salute.
He was pleased to see that at least one member of the Village hadn’t lost all sense of routine.
Mitts headed down to the water’s edge.
As he stood on the shore, he observed a pair of uniformed men standing on the boat.
They chatted casually to one another.
Mitts waved to them.
They waved back.
Mitts estimated the boat was just large enough for Samantha and the four men he’d so far counted. Anybody else and it would’ve been a real squeeze.
He trod along the water’s edge.
He stared across the surface of the lake.
He tried to make out something on the other side.
But there was nothing to make out.
After a while, finished with his sleuthing, Mitts just stood and stared across the water.
He allowed himself to think.
A thousand random thoughts and feelings washed over him.
But he found himself caught on a single track:
She’s back.
She’s really back.
* * *
Mitts must’ve been standing at the water’s edge for about half an hour before he heard the familiar voice behind him.
“At ease soldier.”
He turned to look.
; Samantha.
It was so strange.
She looked like she hadn’t aged a day.
It was as if that fateful night had never happened.
She looked past Mitts. Out over the water. “Trying to work out where we came from?”
“Yeah,” Mitts replied.
She extended a long, slender finger.
Pointed.
“You see that hillside, the one which dips down into a sort of V-shape?”
Mitts looked to where she pointed.
He had to admit that his vision wasn’t the best.
Five years of night-time patrols hadn’t helped.
“Well,” Samantha continued, “if you follow the form of it downwards, about halfway to the water, you’ll see.”
Mitts squinted harder still.
He looked to where Samantha pointed.
The hillside.
The V-shape.
. . . And then he caught sight of it.
A dark object.
It might’ve been blue, or purple, or even green.
From here it was impossible to tell.
“What is it?” he said, turning back to her, breathing in a clean scent of lemon.
Wherever she’d come from there was, apparently, no end of scented soaps.
Samantha smiled. “You’ll have to wait and see. If you come along, that is.”
“ ‘Come along’?”
“You were on my shortlist, actually.”
Mitts felt his heart give a gentle beat.
The blood rose all the way to the tips of his ears.
He stared back out over the water, as if it might prevent Samantha from seeing his reaction. “What about Luca?”
“Sure,” Samantha replied. “She can come too—everybody’s welcome.”
Despite ‘everybody being welcome’, he noted the lack of enthusiasm in Samantha’s tone when he mentioned Luca.
“What about Dag?”
“Dag . . . Dag,” Samantha said, as if she was scouring her memory—as if she had forgotten who he was. “Well, if he really wants to, I don’t see why not.”
Several beats of silence followed.
Mitts felt himself itching from the inside.
There was still the unanswered mystery.
The one which nobody had thought prudent to ask after so far.
Mitts asked after it now.
Samantha remained quiet for a long few moments.
She stared into the distance.
Over the water. To the other side.
Maybe she was staring at the vehicle waiting there.
Waiting to take them away.
Finally, she explained. “It was just a . . . I don’t know . . .” She averted his gaze, looked beyond him, back to the Village. “A silly plan, not even that, really. I saw an opportunity—an opportunity to finish with Dag. And, well, I . . . I decided to take it.”
“Then it’s true. You did shoot Dag?”
Samantha nodded.
She met his eye briefly then looked away.
“I thought it’d be the perfect cover,” she said. “The mist was rolling in. The sound of gunfire all around.” She shrugged. “Mistakes happen under those circumstances. Friendly fire.”
“But he caught you,” Mitts replied. “He saw what you were up to.”
Samantha turned her hand over.
Gazed at her fingernails.
“I think I hit him in the leg. The ricochet caught his eye, too, I guess. And still he managed to grab my gun. To wrestle it off me.” She smirked. “He’s one wily customer, that Dag.”
She looked back directly into Mitts’s eyes.
The smirk disappeared.
Mitts felt a swirling sensation in his stomach.
It was one thing for her to be looking at him with those crystalline, blue eyes of hers.
Quite another for him to have imagined her dead.
. . . And yet, here she was, re-animated.
Standing before him.
“I told him to do it,” she continued. “I told him to shoot me while he still could. With my own gun. But even though he had the opportunity, he didn’t do it. He just shook his head. Told me to go.” She jabbed her tongue hard into the side of her cheek. “I just did what he said.” She pointed out into the water. “He told you I swam, didn’t he? That I escaped by swimming?”
“Yes,” Mitts replied, “we went out there, looking . . . but we couldn’t find you. We only found your boots.”
A long silence hung over the pair of them.
Mitts felt his chest tighten.
And then Samantha said, “Wanna know a secret—a tip that’ll serve you well?”
“All right.”
“Don’t trudge about these hills in only your socks.”
Mitts let out a laugh.
It sounded so unreal—so alien.
He almost choked on it.
* * *
On the way back through the Village gates, Mitts gazed upward.
To the rampart.
He caught sight of Dag again.
But this time Dag didn’t acknowledge Mitts.
He appeared to be fixated on something in his hands. Perhaps one of the torches they used out on the Patrol. Although Dag no longer went out on Patrol, he remained a vital component; maintaining their gear, fixing things that, inevitably, got broken.
Mitts scolded himself for what he had thought following Samantha’s disappearance.
How he had fooled himself that there was more to the story.
That Dag had been the one to take the opportunity to kill her.
As Mitts walked with Samantha through the Village, she asked about his life. About how things had been going. Mitts found it odd to reflect on how little had changed.
Nothing visible, in any case.
Nothing Samantha might’ve noticed.
He wasn’t going to go into details of the fight he’d had with Luca that morning.
How she had finally turned him out onto the street.
Mitts asked after Samantha.
He wanted to know how she’d got involved with the armed men who’d shown up with her.
How they’d arrived by boat.
She told him about how she’d walked for days.
Trudging along the water’s edge.
She had wanted to get the Village out of sight.
She explained how she had felt stifled. How she had felt that she could no longer live in the same place as Dag. That it would tear her apart if things went on the same way.
She needed to be in charge.
She went on to tell him that she had come across a dirt track.
She had followed it.
Wanting to see where it headed.
She told him how the hard, unruly ground had bruised her socked feet.
After a few hours, she had tossed her socks away. They’d become soaked in blood and sweat.
Walking barefoot, she told him, was easier than walking in socks.
Sometime later, she had heard an engine. Out in the darkness.
She had hidden from the sound.
Thrown herself into a ditch at the side of the track.
She had held herself still.
Sinking into the mud.
It was only when she heard car doors slamming directly above that she realised she had sunk into the mud up to her chest. And that she couldn’t pull herself out.
She had no choice but to call out for help.
She went on to explain, in excruciating detail, how a pair of spotlights had blinked on.
How they had shone so brightly.
A pair of guards had helped her out of the ditch.
They had helped her into their truck.
Taken her away with them.
As they walked through the Village, many people came up to Samantha.
Some were happy, smiling at her.
Others clapped her on the shoulder. Glad to have her back.
More still clung to the edges of the street, not so much as wish
ing to cross paths with her.
Whether it was reverence, or fear, Mitts wasn’t certain.
Perhaps a mixture of both.
Mitts pressed Samantha for further details on where she was living now.
But she remained coy.
All she would say was that he would ‘see for himself’ if he came with her.
Mitts noted—only too presciently—her tone of voice.
There was a subtle implication which suggested that—if Mitts did agree to come—the responsibility for the decision would be his and his alone.
Mitts didn’t know how to feel about that.
So he made no response.
He refused to commit.
They approached the Station.
Samantha’s escorts awaited her, chatting among themselves.
Their semi-automatics looked just as frightening simply hanging about their necks.
Both turned to Samantha, gave her a nod.
A slight smile.
As they trudged into the Station, Samantha soon found herself surrounded by her former companions, and she promised Mitts that they would speak later.
At that precise moment, the bomb went off.
The scientist brushes her red hair out of her lab coat collar.
She reaches across the glass capsule where—prostrate—-the creature lies.
Lifeless.
A chunk of matter.
Nothing more.
From a nearby shelf, she produces a clear vial, filled with a light-green liquid. She reaches past the vial to a disposable syringe. She shunts the syringe through the vial’s seal.
She sucks the plunger upward, drawing out the light-green liquid.
That done, the measurement made, she replaces the vial on the shelf where it once was.
Then she turns her attention downward.
Onto the specimen.
She breathes in deeply. Her shoulders arch back.
The pulse in her throat beats hard.
She leans over the creature, then sinks the syringe into its body.
The light-green liquid disappears within its dark-purple veins.
Strangers in the Night Page 18