by Eric Brown
He withdrew from the window, more shocked by the sight of her staring eyes than by the fact of her bed-ridden condition.
Shapes passed before the window, and when Halliday next looked he saw Charles pushing Anastasia Dah from the room.
There was little he could do now without knowing exactly what was going on here. He decided to follow Charles and attempt to learn just who he was. He’d return to the road and wait until Charles made his move and left the house.
He hurried along the back of the house, ensured the way across the lawn to the mesh fence was clear, and set off at a jog. He had almost reached the fence when he heard voices behind him. He turned, his heart hammering.
The front door of the house was open, and Charles was pushing Anastasia Dah across the drive towards the white van. Halliday ducked into the cover of an ailing bush and peered out.
Charles was accompanied by two men, a dark-haired man in his thirties wearing a smart blue suit, and a younger black man in casual slacks and a leather jacket.
Charles and the black guy lifted Dah into the back of the van, her unsupported head lolling horribly. Charles climbed in after her. The other two men climbed into the front of the van and slammed the doors. A second later the engine started and the van crunched slowly down the gravel drive.
Halliday pushed through the mesh fence and entered the devastated forest, following the track he had scuffed through the loam. He slowed down as his lungs began to protest. There was no need to hurry, after all; he could allow the van to get well ahead of him and follow Dah with the tracking program.
He moved through the forest, listening to the engine of the van as it drove on a parallel course. He caught glimpses of the vehicle through the trees. As he approached the road, he crouched behind the cover of scant undergrowth and watched as the van turned and headed north.
He emerged from the trees and hurried up the road to the filling station where he’d left the Ford. He opened the case on the passenger seat, accessed the tracking program and watched the red star as it made its way up the coast road.
He drove slowly in pursuit, keeping a kilometre between himself and the van. As he drove, he reached out and opened the nano-med program. Dah’s life-signals were still perilously low.
He switched back to the tracking program.
He recalled Charles’ behaviour in the room. He had kissed the woman’s hand, showed every sign of genuine affection towards Anastasia Dah. Where the hell was he taking her now?
He drove for a further kilometre, glancing at the screen from time to time. Five minutes later the red star slowed in its movement north and veered from the road.
He slowed, allowing the van to move further away. It was passing down another rough track in the denuded forest, heading towards the river.
Two minutes later Halliday drew to a halt at the turning. As he watched the screen, the red star stopped. He judged that the van had come to a halt about half a kilometre from the road. He watched the star for a further three minutes, detecting no movement. Evidently they had reached their destination.
He looked along the length of the road, then drove north a hundred metres and concealed the car behind a stand of dying bougainvillea.
He switched off the computer and sat staring through the insect-encrusted windscreen for a minute. He touched his pistol in its body-holster, then left the car and walked along the road. He came to the gap where the track turned into the forest.
Using the scant cover of the dead trees, he walked into the forest on a course parallel with the track.
The trees were densely packed here. As a result there was more cover, but less light; a pallid twilight hung between the dead and stunted tree trunks.
He kept the track in sight, looking for the distinctive white bodywork of the vehicle as he hurried through the half-light, pausing to listen from time to time. The absolute silence would work both for and against him: it would be to his advantage in that he would be able to hear any noise made by Charles and the others; but by the same token they would be able to detect his approach. As he ran over the carpet of rotted leaves, he realised with surprise that he had drawn his automatic.
Something caught his eye up ahead. He slowed and stopped. Before him, miraculously, was a wild rose bush. A single red flower shone with an almost preternatural lustre. He looked about him and smiled. Once he’d seen the first rose, he saw all the others, a pointillism of blooms like a hundred beads of blood in the twilight.
He hurried on, eyes on the track three metres to his right. He slowed when he judged that he must have covered half a kilometre. If his calculations were correct, he was not that far from the western bank of the river. He paced through the forest, automatic ready, scanning ahead for the slightest sign of movement.
He caught sight of the van, apparent as splinters of white between the trees. He stopped, concealed himself behind a trunk and gathered his breath. He listened, heard nothing in the silence but the sound of his own laboured breathing. He looked around the tree, then moved from the cover it afforded and crept cautiously forward.
The van was parked on a bluff above the river. There was no sign of Charles or the others.
He passed the van, keeping in the cover of the trees. He was at the very margin of the forest; here the trees petered out as the land descended towards the river. He looked down, over the gently shelving river bank, and saw Charles and the other two men.
They were standing in a slight dip or dell, surrounded by dead and dying sycamore trees. Anastasia Dah sat slumped in the wheelchair, and Charles knelt beside her, his hand in hers. He appeared to be speaking to her.
Halliday crouched, moved forward, and concealed himself behind the lightning-shattered bole of a pine, perhaps twenty yards from the van.
As he watched, his pulse loud in his ears, Charles stood and nodded to the black guy and the man in the blue suit.
Between them they lifted Dah from the wheelchair, and only then did Halliday see the shallow trench excavated in the leaf mould.
He wanted to stand up and shout something, somehow prevent what he knew was about to happen, but he could only watch as the black guy and the man in the blue suit carefully, almost reverently, laid Anastasia Dah in the shallow grave.
Charles moved forward and knelt beside the prostrate woman. He took something from the pocket of his jacket, pointed it at the woman’s forehead, and fired. Dah spasmed, once, and a bloom of blood appeared on her brow, as bright red as the roses in the forest. Then Charles knelt, reached out and touched the dead woman’s cheek.
The black man took a spade and quickly covered the body with soil and leaf mould, and in seconds the woman was lost to sight. He scattered dead leaves over the discoloured soil, as if in a bid to conceal his handiwork. Then the trio made their way back to the van, passing within five metres of where Halliday crouched. He found himself unable to move, and prayed for the sound of the van’s engine.
It seemed an age before the van started and backed up the track. The sound died slowly, leaving silence in its wake.
Halliday was aware that he was shaking. He fought to control his breathing. He had the gun gripped tight before him - he could have easily shot the three men before Dah herself died. What had stopped him firing? Self-preservation? Incredulity that what he was watching was actually taking place? He could have acted, but the fact was that he had been frozen to the spot with abject fear. He wondered what the old Hal Halliday might have done in the same situation. Surely he would have acted immediately, attacked and disarmed the men before Charles had murdered Dah. He felt a sudden and sickening spasm of self-disgust.
Later he wondered how long it was, as he stared down into the dell where the killing had occurred, before he saw the second grave, and then the third - leaf-covered mounds side by side.
Minutes, perhaps ... and then perhaps another minute, or maybe even longer, while he stared and tried not to think about what the three graves might denote.
Slowly he stood and emerged from
the trees. He walked down the banking, catching his feet in the undergrowth and stumbling more than once. He was aware of walking into the dell, but at a remove from reality, as if he were manoeuvring his body by remote control from a great distance. He felt cold, despite the heat of the day, and his heart thundered deafeningly in his ears.
There were, unmistakably, three graves ranged side by side in the loam of the forest floor. There was Anastasia Dah’s freshly covered grave, and beside it another, much shorter disturbed patch of earth. Next to this was a third grave, and Halliday dropped to his knees beside it.
Then he began digging where he judged the head might be. He was aware of his tears, misting his vision, the painful tightness in his throat as he fought back his sobs. It came to him that to admit defeat now, and cry, would be to capitulate before he knew for certain, before his fears were confirmed. To cry now, he thought irrationally, might bring about the terrible actuality that he so feared.
His fingers came up against something, something at once harder than the soil through which he’d dug, but soft.
He cried aloud.
He brushed away the soil with the care and attention of an archaeologist excavating a precious treasure. Slowly, little by little, the outline of an oval face appeared in the earth. He wept and continued working at the soil with frantic, manic care; it seemed to him that he might in some way be able to communicate his love and grief with gestures as careful and delicate as those he had made when making love to her what seemed like such a long time ago.
He freed her face from the soil, and then her shoulders, and then reached beneath her and lifted her body into his arms.
A bullet hole marked the exact centre of her forehead.
As he held Kim’s body to him, he looked up, perhaps subliminally aware of the noise, and saw the tall figure of the silver-haired Charles, staring down at him. In his right hand he held a single red rose.
Seconds later the casually dressed black guy and the blue-suited man appeared beside Charles, and looked down at Halliday with expressions of mixed distaste and disbelief.
Then the guy in the blue suit pulled an automatic from inside his jacket and fired at Halliday.
Three shots thumped into Kim’s back, impelling her with a sick, ersatz life and saving Halliday from certain death. He cried and rolled away at speed, drawing his automatic and returning fire. He was up and running before he knew whether he had scored a hit. He dived from the dell, rolling down the bank of the river, then gained his feet and sprinted. He headed north, then turned and scrambled up the bank, making for the sparse cover of the forest. He heard cries behind him, and then shots, and ahead saw chunks of soil erupt from the ground. He made the trees and turned, knelt and aimed. When he fired he did so with rage and intent, and the shot connected. The black guy twisted and fell to the ground as if caught by an uppercut, crying out as he did so. Charles knelt and grasped the guy’s shoulders, but the blue-suited man ran on.
Crouching, Halliday fired again, missing his target and hitting an intervening tree. The shot had the effect of sending his pursuer diving for cover.
He took the opportunity and ran, dodging through the closely packed trees on a zigzag course, his body protesting at the strain imposed, his lungs burning as if swamped with acid. He heard a flurry of gunshots, heard the thwack of bullets strike the trees around him. He turned and fired again and again, more in a bid to slow his pursuer than with any real hope of shooting him dead.
He came to the road and crossed it at a sprint. He dived through the trees on the other side, turning and heading in the approximate direction of where he’d left the car.
There were no further sounds of pursuit. He slowed, hardly daring to hope that he’d outpaced the gunman. He fell into a crouch behind the bole of a tree, taking in great lungfuls of air, and readied his automatic in a trembling hand.
He listened. The silence surprised him, more startling than gunfire. He imagined the man, lying low out there, awaiting Halliday’s next, fatal move.
Ahead, he could see the Ford through the trees. He chanced a glance in the direction he had come. There was no sign of his pursuer, and he allowed himself the insanely optimistic thought that perhaps he’d managed to escape.
He waited for what seemed like an age, probably no more than five minutes. He knew that sooner or later he must make his move, and in that split second he would know whether he was still being stalked, or not.
Crouching, he moved from the protective custody of the tree, and then ran doubled-up towards his car. He expected to hear the whine of a bullet, feel it smack into his body with deadly force.
He reached the Ford, hardly daring to believe his luck. He hauled open the door and dived inside, gunned the engine and accelerated at speed from the forest. He hit the road and spun the wheel, careering in a sprawling turn and sashaying across both lanes.
Ahead, he saw movement to his left. The blue-suited guy emerged from the trees and stepped into the road, levelling his automatic in outstretched hands. Halliday ducked and accelerated, heading directly for the bastard. He heard bullets impact the coachwork, saw a flash of colour as the gunman dived to avoid being hit. Then the car trundled into the ditch and Halliday fought for control as the vehicle veered towards the trees. He hauled the wheel clockwise and the car obeyed, fishtailing crazily onto the road again.
He turned in the seat. The guy was picking himself up, already a hundred metres away, a tiny figure diminishing rapidly in the distance.
He accelerated, leaving blue-suit in his wake. He headed south towards Nyack, hunched over the wheel like a madman as he stared through his tears at the blurred road ahead.
None of it made any sense. He could not banish from his mind the image of Charles with the rose in his hand, nor the obvious affection he had shown earlier towards Anastasia Dah. And then he had simply shot her through the head.
What had happened to Dah, before her death, that might account for her comatose state? And Kim? Had Charles shown the same warped affection towards Kim before shooting her, too?
Into his head came a thousand memories of their time together. He was inundated with images of Kim, her face exhibiting a dozen emotions. He recalled the occasion they had entered VR for the very first time. Kim had taken him to a deserted beach where they had made love in the shallows of a perfect lagoon, and then lain in each other’s arms on the golden sand.
He felt a cold emptiness in his chest, as if his heart and lungs had been excavated. Alternating with grief was the rage of revenge: he wished now that he had stayed and fought, had killed the man in the blue suit, and then the black guy - if he was not dead already - and then, last of all, the silver-haired Charles.
What eventually persuaded him that he had done the right thing in running was not so much the knowledge that he might later regret the killings, but that he had been in no condition to stay and fight. By fleeing, he had saved himself to fight another day.
Manhattan Island appeared in the summer smog before him, a compact wedge of grey high-rises and skyscrapers. He had never before thought that the sight of the ugly metropolitan build-up could be so welcoming.
He found himself driving along East 116th Street, coming to the turning to his own street and continuing east. He turned right and pulled into the kerb before a dilapidated brownstone.
Why had he come here? He had intended, on getting away from Nyack, to go straight to the NYPD headquarters on 42nd Street. But that could wait. How could he bring himself to dispassionately report the murder of someone he had loved to some bored, desk-bound sergeant he hardly knew?
He climbed from the car, then braced himself against the open door as a wave of nausea threatened to engulf him. He took a deep breath, his head clearing, and looked across the sidewalk to the steps leading up to the entrance of the brownstone. The physical act of making the short walk seemed beyond him. He felt sick, and it seemed that every muscle in his body was protesting at the mere fact of standing, never mind having to exert himself to
climb the steps.
He pushed himself from the car and moved to the tenement. He took the steps one at a time, pausing halfway up. He must have presented a strange sight to the kids playing basketball in the street, as he stood trembling before the door, summoning the strength to turn the handle.
He opened the door and stepped inside, and faced the long climb to the first floor. He made himself do it, lifting one foot after the other until he reached the top. He stood before the steel-plated door, trying to rehearse the words he needed to convey what he had experienced.
He rang the bell, and again.
A voice issued from a speaker beside the door. ‘Who is it?’
‘Halliday,’ he said.
The door clicked open automatically. He pushed it open all the way and stood on the threshold, unable now the time had come to summon a single word.
Casey sat on a chair in the corner, staring at a computer screen, her legs wrapped around the legs of the chair. She was wearing, he noticed inconsequentially, blue jeans and a white T-shirt.