by Mike Essex
I thought about the purple hooded man and contemplated telling The Deck about it, except what I really said was. “We’re still searching,” I wasn’t ready to tell them anything yet. If it turned out Will was the purple hooded man I didn’t know how The Deck would react. I needed to find him first before anyone else got hurt.
I knew there was something else I should tell them. That I needed to talk to March about the changes that were happening within me but I knew he’d only want me to leave London and get back to the base. I wasn’t ready to do that. As long as Will was in this city I had to keep looking.
“Ok, well let us know if you find anything,” said March. “Good luck and stay safe. Jill is going to get you out of there.”
Talking to March was helping me to calm down and I started to feel the coldness leave my body. In the vacuum that he and Jill had created I could feel the cooling air circle around us, keeping us safe.
“Are you ready to go?” I asked Grace.
“Almost,” she wiped the sweat away from her brow and grabbed a couple of grenades from the soldiers’ supplies. “Ok, now I’m ready.”
In amongst the pink light we watched as the four roads that forked from our location started to clear, the rays of the regeneration machine fading. Four freshly laid roads spread out from the fork in the road teasing us to pick a route and find Will.
“Pick a path,” said Jill, over the comms unit.
The bridge behind us was still broken and the road to our left would take us back the way we came. “Which way is the Strand?” I asked.
“In front of you” she replied.
“Then we’ll head to the right.”
We hopped over the sandbags and ran down Victoria road.
With the pink light behind us we passed into an old area of the city filled with stone buildings and ornate fittings. As we passed a large temple we heard cries of agony nearby.
THIRTY SEVEN
We looked at each other and knew this was one of those moments where we should have kept ourselves hidden, except the cries of pain sounded so desperate and distorted that we had to help. Whoever was making the sound was clearly in trouble.
We ducked down a side-street and could hear the scream start to die down, replaced by the heavy panting sound of someone who was physically exhausted. We found the body collapsed on the floor around the next corner, gasping for air with his face turned away from us.
“It’s ok, we can help,” I said.
He curled his arms and legs into a ball and sobbed. I walked around him and saw the tears rolling down his face, except these were not tears of water but were a trickle of blood that flowed from near his eye.
“Oh my God,” was all I could say as I saw the empty socket where his right eye had been, now nothing more than a gaping red void, a weeping wound that oozed blood and other fluid. I turned away in shock and tried not to be sick, vomit rising from my stomach up to my mouth, trying to force its way out.
I swallowed and turned back to the man. Morbid curiosity forced me to look again to see if what my brain had processed had been real and it was no less shocking the second time. Around the gap where his eye had been, red and purple bruises had started to form and I could see the cuts were from where a knife had penetrated the skin and chiselled out his eye. This had not been a delicate operation.
It got worse. The man’s nose had been smashed to a pulp, the bones ruptured back on themselves, his nose now almost flat to his face. From where the nostrils had been a black fluid stained his face, running down over his lips.
“Emmie, look,” said Grace and she held up the man’s hand. The ends of his fingers were raw, his fingertips removed, presenting the deep red flesh that emerged from underneath. I grabbed at his hand in disbelief and examined the broken skin. More knife marks. The puzzle pieces were starting to form in my mind but I didn’t want to believe what they were telling me.
“This can’t be right…” I backed away from him and this time couldn’t fight back the gagging. I threw up in the corner of the street, my mind trying to purge my body of everything bad. Except it couldn’t remove the niggling in my mind, nor the truth that drew across me.
I wiped the sick away from my mouth and tossed the earpiece away from me. Grace did the same. I didn’t want The Deck to hear what I was about to say. “I know who did this.”
“Who?”
“Will.”
“That’s impossible,” replied Grace and I didn’t want to believe it either but it had to be true. In my Tether event with Will I’d seen him with Vlad, an expert with knives. They had been working together, planning something and it felt like the pieces of that plan were now being laid out in front of me.
“The cuts on the body. They’re too perfect. This had to have been Vlad and my brother.”
“How do you know Vlad didn’t do this on his own?”
“Look at the injuries. Hands, nose, eyes. They’re all attacks on the senses; touch, sight, smell. That’s the area Will specialised in at TethTech. Like his work on the capstone he was obsessed with how Tethers were sustained through the senses. He’s still experimenting now.”
The words left my mouth but it felt like I was talking about another person; a madman like Tobias, not a good man like my brother, and I had to wonder if something had changed in him at TethTech. If perhaps the brother I knew had been lost to me years ago, wrapped up in research of Tethers just like Tobias.
The soldier opened his mouth and started to mumble words. “It’s ok, you can talk,” I said.
His mouth moved slightly but the words were not fully realised. As we stared at his mouth hoping for the words to emerge he turned his head and spat on the floor. A small pool of blood formed where his spit hit the ground and we realised that another sense had been attacked. “Stick out your tongue,” I demanded.
He closed his mouth and shook his head.
“Do it!” I shouted, my frustration at my brother verbalised now. “If you don’t then we will leave you here.”
He reluctantly opened his mouth and stuck out what little remained of his tongue. It had been carved in two in a horizontal slice, the tip removed entirely. Another cut started from the new tip down towards his throat but stopped before it had cut off any more of his tongue.
“Taste gone,” said Grace, “that makes four senses.”
“Hearing,” I said and turned his head to check his ears for signs of an attack. Unlike his other senses his ears appeared fine. The flesh hadn’t been cut and there was no black fluid seeping from inside. The only notable thing was that his earpiece had been removed so he had no way of keeping in touch with other soldiers.
“Can you hear us?” I asked.
He nodded.
Another realisation hit me. “They didn’t finish. There’s still a sense left. For whatever reason they didn’t complete whatever they were planning.”
“Maybe he got away?”
“Either way they could be coming back at any time. We have to get out of here.”
Grace stood up and grabbed her gun. “Great, let’s go.”
“No, we have to take him with us,” I pointed to the solider. “If my brother did this then I have to help him. I can’t let this be what our family is remembered for,” I left out the fact that I felt guilty for killing the blue eyed soldier and that this would offer me a small piece of redemption for my own crimes.
“Can you walk?” asked Grace. The soldier nodded and we helped him to his feet. We searched him for any weapons and discarded what we could find. Grace removed her belt and tied it around the soldier’s wrists until it cut into him. It wasn’t much but it gave us a small feeling of safety.
I put my earpiece back in and Grace did the same. I hoped that The Deck hadn’t heard anything we’d said. “Jill?” I asked.
“Hello,” came the quick and chirpy reply, “everything ok?”
“Do you still have a map of the tunnels we were exploring before you lost signal with us?”
“Yep.”
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“Can you create a route from where we are now that will get us back there?”
“Oh yeah, that’s easy. Give me a minute.”
“Great, oh and it can’t have any ladders. Thanks.”
She planned us a route that took us to the water’s edge and through an alcove into the tunnels beneath the city. The soldier walked with us step by step and we each held one of his arms so we’d know if he tried anything. I kept my other hand pressed against my gun just in case.
We didn’t encounter any soldiers on our way back to Q-Whitehall; a sign that we were either very lucky or that they’d moved on to other concerns. I had to wonder if they were looking for the soldier we had with us or if he’d already been written off as a casualty of war; another acceptable loss.
It made me glad Tom and Chris were not with us. Their devil may care attitude would have made it a lot harder to convince them of the benefits of taking back someone so we could help them. Although I had to admit I had no idea how we’d convince Jacobi to let him in, not with all of his trust issues. Remembering what he had done to the last earpieces, we both pocketed our newly acquired ones.
When we reached the metal gated doors Jacobi greeted us over the intercom. “I see you have a prisoner of war,” he opened the doors and we walked back into the base. Within seconds Jacobi’s colleagues had grabbed the man, forced him into handcuffs and dragged him off into the distance.
“Excellent work,” said Jacobi, the samurai sword gleaming in his hands.
THIRTY EIGHT
“What are you going to do to him?” I asked.
“We’ll patch him up first,” said Jacobi “Fix his injuries, put him in a fancy room and slowly work him over to our side. If he talks then he can stay. If he refuses then we’ll take all those things away and start again.”
He didn’t elaborate on that any further but I could only imagine the horror of having your eye replaced and then removed over and over. “That’s horrible.”
“That’s necessary.”
I wondered what hell I’d subjected the soldier to. Maybe he’d have been better off dying on the street or at the hands of my brother. “He wants to help. He didn’t fight us on the way here.”
“Well let’s hope you’re right because anything he does is on you.”
“What?”
“You vouched for this man, you bought him here. If he won’t cooperate or he causes any trouble it will be your fault.”
“I was just trying to …”
“Help? I know. But every time you help someone you put your own life at risk. Just remember that. Consider it a life lesson. Which reminds me, your little friend wants to speak to you. She said she’d only see you.”
“Olive?”
“That’s the one. Another person you helped. Let’s see when she chooses to betray you…” he left the words hanging in the air and walked away from us, swishing the sword around as he walked.
“Could he mean that she talked?” I whispered to Grace.
“I don’t think so. Wouldn’t alarm bells be ringing and a firing squad be gunning us down?”
Unnerved I went to see Olive. Grace agreed to go check on R&R and make sure they were safe from Jacobi’s ‘mission’. I wasn’t ready to face Rex yet any way.
“One problem at a time,” I told myself.
One of Jacobi’s colleagues walked me to Olive’s medical room. She’d been taken from the operations room into a rest area which contained an extravagant four poster bed, giant TV and bookcase filled with literary classics. It seemed the royals had wanted to heal in style as well.
I pushed the door closed behind me so we would have some privacy and walked over to the bed only to find it empty. “Olive?” I asked, but there was no reply. I moved the bed sheets to one side but couldn’t find her.
“It’s Emmie. Where are you?” I asked and there was still nothing.
Assuming that I’d been led to the wrong room I turned around and reached for the door. A coughing sound emerged from the corner of the room and I walked towards it.
“OIive?” I found her by the side of the bookcase, sat on the floor, her knees pulled up in a defensive position and her hands pulling them tightly to her chest. Her head was resting on her knees and she turned it slightly towards me.
“Don’t hurt me,” the words came out weakly. “I won’t tell, I promise.”
“Hurt you? I would never hurt you, you know that.”
“But Jacobi’s friends … you killed them.”
Instinctively I raised a hand towards Olive’s mouth that I planned to place lightly in front of her lips in an effort to silence her. Those words could not be spoken down here if we were to survive. I immediately regretted raising my hand as she ducked her head downwards in fear.
“I didn’t… I …” I couldn’t find the words to justify what I had done. “It was an accident. I wasn’t in control of myself.”
She tilted her head towards me. “I see them every night. Their eyes burning in their sockets, their minds behind destroyed. I can’t forget it.”
“You know that wasn’t me. I wouldn’t hurt anyone I swear.”
A flashback of the blue eyed soldier’s broken skull, shattered by the bullet from my gun, ran through my mind. I tried to ignore it.
She held her hands up in front of her face defensively. “It’s ok. I won’t talk. You don’t have to worry about me. You can trust me.”
I had wanted Olive’s trust, it was true, but that wasn’t enough. I needed her to know that I didn’t do it on purpose. That I wasn’t the maniac she now viewed me as.
“You can trust me too Olive, I…”
“Just promise you won’t hurt me,” she interrupted. “If I promise not to tell Jacobi then you won’t hurt me right?”
“I wouldn’t hurt you anyway. I’m not a killer.”
She shook her head back and forth in disbelief at my words.
In desperation I reached out to take her hand but she moved away, quickly rising to her feet and moving to the other corner of the room, propping her back against the wall. She started to panic and blurted out. “I said you can trust me. Oh God. Please don’t hurt me,” the sound of her voice started to grow louder until she was repeating the same phrase over and over. “Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me…”
I raised a finger to my lips in the hope that she’d quickly get the message. The last thing I needed was for her panic to draw attention from Jacobi’s colleagues.
She continued to repeat the words in a rhythmic chant. They seemed to be the only thing keeping her sanity in place. I held out my hands to either side and raised my palms towards her.
Ok, I promise,” I stated. She continued to chant so I repeated the words hoping to get through to her. “I promise.”
On the third try my words finally reached her and she stopped speaking completely. She remained standing and crossed her arms across her front, her hands gripping tightly to her arms.
I saw the silence as an opportunity to justify my actions. Olive may have promised to keep quiet but it didn’t feel like I could trust her in her current state. What I really needed was to be forgiven. She was the only one who could make me feel better about that day, the only other person I could really talk to about it.
“Something took me over that day Olive. I can’t explain it but what you saw was not me. I got mad that they wouldn’t treat you and then I lost control,” I couldn’t find a way to phrase it that didn’t make it seem like anything other than my fault. Every way I tried to explain it just made me sound like I wasn’t accepting the truth.
“Look you’ll just have to believe me,” maybe it was my frustration at Olive’s silence or my annoyance in not fighting harder that day but my voice had a harsher tone that I had intended. “I’m not a monster.”
Saying it out loud made me wonder if that was exactly what I had become; killing the soldier on the surface in cold blood, destroying Jacobi’s colleagues and ripping Tobias from his body. There was no denying that I
had changed; that some evil now lurked within me that I was only just discovering.
Yet that same evil force, the one that was driven by intense heat and calmed by icy cold had also saved Grace’s life and stopped Tobias from killing billions. Maybe I had become a monster but at the same time the power that lurked within me also had the potential to save people. If only I could control it.
I let silence linger in the room, giving Olive ample opportunity to talk and explain her side of things. After what felt like ten minutes of nothingness she dropped her hands to her sides. “Finally,” I thought to myself.
I waited for her to speak but she merely walked towards the bed, lifted up the blanket and jumped under the covers. After she had moved her head around on the pillow to get comfortable she muttered the words. “The Deck always said you were special.”
“They what?”
She removed her dog tag from around her neck and tossed it on to the floor, the four of clubs symbol etched in the centre of it. “Do you know what the clubs represent?”
I shook my head.
“It was our job to protect you at any cost, even if it meant our death. Those of us who were assigned ‘clubs’ by The Deck, were nothing more than human shields for you. How messed up is that?”
“You’re wrong,” I replied, thinking about who else I had known with that suite to their name; Chris and Tom being the only two who came to mind. Neither of whom I had seen for days. Some job they were doing of protecting me.
“You are the mission Emmie, you always have been,” she turned her head away from me.
I lightly said the words “I will protect you, I promise,” hoping I could remove whatever delusions she had of my importance.
I waited in her room for another hour hoping she would speak to me but not pushing her for an answer. Eventually she went to sleep clutching the quilt between her legs and in her fists pulling it towards her face.
As she slept she thrashed violently, the memories of what I had done preying on her mind. I hoped that she would fight off the nightmares. I hoped that we both would.