Hideout

by Jack Heath

  ‘You made it look like a suicide,’ I say. ‘But you could tell I didn’t believe it. You thought maybe I was the CIA contact. So you took me aside and asked me to investigate the murder. You tried to make me suspicious of everyone except you. Fed me some bullshit about seeing Samson on the cameras that morning—’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ Fred interrupts. Veins stand out in his forehead and neck. His jaw works back and forth. He’s losing it. ‘I was with you when Samson was shot.’

  He must think I haven’t figured that part out yet. He doesn’t know about my backyard autopsy. The bullet I couldn’t find—the bullet that had never existed.

  ‘He wasn’t shot.’ I raise my voice, making sure Donnie and Cedric hear this part. The two men who both loved Samson. ‘You stabbed him in the head with a screwdriver.’

  ‘You son of a bitch!’ Donnie snarls.

  Zara whips out her gun and points it at Fred. ‘Pull over.’ But Donnie is already in motion. It’s like sharing the van with a charging rhino. He barges me aside on his way to the driver’s seat. Fred lets go of the wheel, flapping both arms, trying to protect his head as Donnie reaches him. He only partly succeeds. Donnie’s meaty fist glances off the top of Fred’s skull. The van starts to veer sideways.

  I don’t even brace myself. I’ve done my job. I told the truth. We’re all going to die, but Fred’s going first.

  Zara is out of her seat. She tries to grab the wheel. But Cedric tries to attack Fred at the same moment, and he accidentally backhands Zara. She grunts and stumbles backwards, tripping over my legs and landing on Kyle’s corpse.

  By accident or design, Fred’s foot is still on the gas. The van zooms faster and faster through the streets of Houston. Streetlights strobe the interior. The wheels on the passenger side bump up onto the kerb. I can hear screaming from outside.

  ‘You fuck! You sick fuck!’ Donnie bellows, still trying to hit Fred.

  Zara is on her feet again. She fires a deafening shot into the roof, trying to get everyone to freeze and shut up. It has the opposite effect. Cedric lunges for the gun, but Fred spins the wheel at the same time, trying to get Donnie away from him. Everyone hits the wall except Fred, who’s still strapped in. The van drifts, tyres screaming, before it hits a bump in the road and rolls over—

  The world spins, and for a split-second there’s no gravity, all of us hanging in the air—

  Then the side of the van hits the ground, and we come crashing down. As the metal grinds along the blacktop, I bounce off the roof, my arm covering my head, and then hit the floor—formerly a wall. Kyle thuds next to me, and Cedric lands next to him. A bone snaps. Not mine.

  The van collides with something else and stops suddenly. I can’t stand up. Can’t even tell which way up is. It’s like being inside a shipwreck, on the ocean floor.

  Something gets jammed into the flesh under my jaw. A gun barrel. No—two fingers. Zara is checking my pulse.

  I try to turn my head and look at the others, but she grabs my skull and twists it back to face her. ‘Hold still.’ My vision stabilises enough to see that her hair is all over the place and that blood has trickled into one of her eyes. It blooms pink around the retina—she’s wearing a contact lens.

  Finally she lets me go and I can look at the rest of the van. Donnie is retching on the floor, clutching his junk, his face pale and sweaty. Cedric isn’t moving. His face seems to be on the wrong side of his head. Kyle is nearby, still dead, yet somehow looking healthier than all of us.

  ‘This is Cassandra,’ Zara is saying from somewhere nearby. ‘I’m going to need extraction.’

  Donnie mumbles something incoherent.

  ‘No,’ Zara says. ‘He got away.’

  I wipe my eyes on my bare forearm and look at the driver’s seat.

  Fred is gone.

  CHAPTER 41

  The roof of this war machine goes great with your jeans. What am I?

  I wrench the hammer off the wall and use my teeth to wrap the duct tape around my fist, holding it in place, just like the trick Fred showed me with the glove. I kick the rear doors open. The van is still on its side, so the top door flops right back down, almost hitting me in the face. But the bottom door crashes onto the blacktop and stays. I duck under the top door and stumble out onto the road.

  Fred has to die. That’s the only way this ends. I should have put this hammer through his head the moment I met him.

  My crunching footsteps echo around the empty street. The van has crashed into a steel gate which blocks off a trash-filled alley between two apartment buildings. I try to work out if Fred could have climbed that gate and decide that he couldn’t. There are spikes at the top and it’s impossibly tall—or maybe it just seems that way because I’m concussed.

  I can hear the riot we passed earlier, but I can’t see it. Fred will head that way, hoping to blend in before Donnie recovers and comes after him, or Zara.

  Where is Zara? I look back. No sign of her near the van. It doesn’t matter. I shake my head like a dog, trying to get rid of the ringing in my ears and recover my sense of direction.

  No need. The crowd comes to me. The first few runners emerge from a side street, drawn by the sound of the crash. All three wear dark clothes, baseball caps and sunglasses, and their mouths are covered by bandanas. I have no clue which angry mob they represent. The ones who think Goldstein was a racist cop? The ones who think he was a child molester?

  They slow down as they approach the crashed van and see me, one-armed, shirtless and limping.

  ‘Hey, man, you need help?’ one of them asks. Then she sees the hammer and backs off.

  I ignore her and stumble past them towards the street they came from. If that’s where the rest of the crowd is, it’s where Fred will be headed. Somewhere he can blend in, and hide from Donnie.

  More people are jogging up the alley towards me. Some are wearing polo shirts, no logos but still with the feel of a uniform. Others are carrying assault rifles. A teenage girl with a cross around her neck is carrying a sign that says EVERY LIFE COUNTS. A young man with curly hair is wearing a sweater that says, THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. A woman with a headscarf has a sheet of cardboard with BEHEAD THOSE WHO INSULT THE PROPHET in magic marker. These people aren’t fighting each other, just running. Maybe they’ve realised Goldstein doesn’t exist. Maybe the riot got too much for them and they’re heading away from the action. Or maybe they’re looking for more.

  The crowd gets thicker. I walk against the flow. It’s easy. People shrink back when they see me. With my swollen face, bleeding arm-stump and red-rimmed eyes, I probably look like a leper.

  I can hear sirens now, whistles, screams, bottles exploding against riot shields, nightsticks cracking on skulls. Shouted slogans, all smearing over the top of one another. No gunfire yet, but it won’t take long. One shot is all it will take to turn this into a bloodbath. Bullets beget bullets. I remember my dream: lying in the gutter as a river of blood flows past.

  The side street opens out onto the chaos of a main road. Smashed windows. Burning trash cans. Stranded cars with slashed tyres. Thousands of people clumped together in their various factions, screaming abuse, tearing at each other’s clothes. Throwing rocks and bottles and punches. Brandishing weapons. In the absence of Emmanuel Goldstein, it looks like the protesters have turned on one another. A smoke bomb sails overhead, spilling toxic fog. This is what hell will look like, when I get there.

  The crowd is like a living thing, and the deep bass roar of angry voices uncoils something in my chest. A feeling both genetic and ancient. The sense that Godzilla is coming, or that the ship I’m on just hit an iceberg.

  The cops fight to keep everyone separate. Both the FBI and the local police department are here in huge numbers—I don’t know how they mobilised so quickly, or why they’re here rather than at the courthouse where Goldstein was supposedly being released, or why the FBI showed up at all for what should be a local case. But it doesn’t look like they’re calming anybody
down.

  And some of them don’t want to. A white cop with a can of pepper spray is advancing on a masked Black anarchist, apparently unarmed and looking the other way. Seeing this, a woman with a pro-choice banner hurls a water bottle at the cop. It misses him and instead hits a guy wearing goggles and army surplus gear. He draws a handgun and turns, trying to work out where the bottle came from. The cop spots him, and sprays him instead. He screams and drops the gun.

  I spin around and around in the throng, scanning hundreds of faces, searching for Fred. The smoke and blood and anger blurs everything. Everyone looks the same.

  In the end, I only spot Fred because he spots me. Even in a crowd of thousands, I somehow sense that I’m being watched. Among the jigsaw puzzle of screaming faces, about fifty feet away, there’s a piece of stillness—a slice of Fred, his eyes widening and mouth falling open as he recognises me. Then he turns and disappears into the chaos.

  I doubt he’s scared of me. He probably thinks Donnie is nearby. I grip the hammer a little tighter with my duct-taped hand and give chase.

  The going is tougher now. The crowd thicker, shoving me to and fro. Tear gas stings my throat. The road is slippery with booze, gasoline and blood. If I lose my footing, I’ll be trampled to death.

  A portly white man swings a star picket at a Latino guy in a cowboy hat, breaking half his teeth. The cowboy stumbles into me, moaning. I stay upright by grabbing the shoulder of a woman in an actual cape. She whirls around and tries to bring a sign down on my head, but her rage turns to disgust when she gets a better look at me, and that slows her swing down just enough for me to dodge the blow.

  I get another glimpse of Fred. He’s heading for an alley, but he’s trapped between some cops with riot shields and a bunch of masked protesters throwing rocks. He’s forced to backtrack.

  ‘Fred!’ The shout comes out wet, like I’m gargling blood.

  He’s close enough to hear, but he doesn’t turn around. He sidesteps, trying to get out of the path of the riot police and circle around behind them.

  ‘Grab him!’ I shout to the police. ‘Grab that guy!’

  They have no reason to listen to me. I’m just one more screaming, bloodied lunatic in a sea of them. But the closest riot cop turns her head, her eyes lasering in on mine through the visor of her helmet.

  ‘That guy!’ I point the hammer at Fred like I’m trying to cast a spell on him. ‘Get him!’

  The cop looks, but it’s clear she can’t tell who I mean. Fred is weaving away through the crowd. I try to fight my way towards him, but a man with huge shoulders, a mullet and a blue tank top is unintentionally blocking my path.

  ‘Stop him!’ I roar, still gesturing wildly towards Fred. ‘He’s getting away!’

  The cop seems to have lost interest, but the big guy in front of me can tell who I mean. He clasps my shoulder with a strong hand. ‘Him right there?’ he asks eagerly. ‘White shirt, brown hair?’

  ‘Yes! He’s getting away!’ I’m desperate for this man’s help, although I have no idea why he would grant it.

  He nods grimly and starts pushing through the crowd towards Fred. ‘That’s him!’ he shouts.

  Several other bulky men, all in blue tank tops, emerge from the crowd to accompany the big guy. He’s here with a faction, although I have no clue which one.

  ‘That’s him!’ Someone from a different group has picked up the chant—a white woman with a bandana and a leather jacket. She points at Fred. ‘He’s right there!’ Several other people in bandanas follow her gaze.

  With my head still spinning from the van crash, I can hardly keep up with what’s happening. The big guy and his crew seem to think Fred is Goldstein. Meanwhile, the bandana group have overheard the shouts, and now they believe it, too. Fred is quickly becoming public enemy number one in the crowd, even though no one except me knows who he really is.

  Fred, oblivious, has made it around the cops, but now the alley he’s headed for is blocked by a group in grubby white robes, waving signs and chanting: ‘God hates fags!’ He turns to retreat, eyes widening as he sees the crowd bearing down on him, bloated by the righteous anger he impregnated them with. He backs away towards a shuttered grocery store, but the growing crowd fills the space before he can get to it. He spins around, confused and afraid, as people form concentric circles of hate around him.

  ‘Fascist!’ a woman screams at him.

  ‘Commie scum!’ someone else bellows.

  ‘Jew!’

  The outermost circle wobbles with confusion. They’ve noticed that Fred is being targeted by everyone. Therefore, he’s the enemy of no one. That circle breaks up as the people in it forget about Fred and start hitting each other.

  But the inner circles are too far gone. They’re moving in on Fred, clutching bottles and rocks and planks. Fred makes eye contact with me for a split second, desperation all over his face, before he takes a baseball bat to the throat and goes down. I lose sight of him, but I hear him hit the ground, gagging. A white supremacist and a guy in a hoodie both start stomping on him, side by side. As I push through the crowd towards Fred, a biker barges past and ducks down, a switchblade gleaming in his hand. Fred makes a choked squeal, and the guy comes back up, the blade now red. Someone in a Klan robe holds up a bottle of lighter fluid and starts pouring about where Fred’s face must be. After a second of spluttering, he goes silent.

  I break through into the centre of the mob and raise the hammer, just as someone strikes a match.

  CHAPTER 42

  I visit every day, unseen by most. I am beautiful, but if you touched me, you would die. What am I?

  I’m back at the van. I don’t remember walking here. It’s like waking up from a dream, and not knowing what’s real for a while. The street is deserted. There’s a faint glow from the horizon. I don’t know where the rest of the night went. There’s a cookout smell in my nostrils and my hand is scalded, like I was still trying to get to Fred even through the flames. The hammer is gone. For the first time since Monday, I’m not hungry.

  Cedric’s dead body is sprawled half on top of Kyle’s. With the last of my strength I drag him off and collapse next to them both. No sign of Zara or Donnie. I take Kyle’s hat off his head and crush it in my hand. He looks younger without it. His hair is a bit curly, like mine. I wonder why he always hid it.

  I black out again, and then wake up with someone else’s hands searching my pockets. As soon as I move, the person shouts: ‘Argh! What the fuck?’

  I try to sit up, but I’m still too weak.

  ‘Sorry, man. Thought you were dead,’ the voice says. ‘My bad.’

  By the time I’ve turned my head to look at him, the looter is already hurrying away.

  The next time I wake, it’s because of flashing lights. An ambulance is parked next to the crashed van. Two paramedics climb out, their faces drawn. It’s been a long night.

  My throat is too dry to call out. It doesn’t matter. They come straight over to me. Maybe the looter called them, told them I was alive. A good Samaritan thief. Stranger things have happened.

  One of the paramedics shines a light in my eyes. ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I croak.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  I give the question some thought. I’m aware it’s Timothy Blake, but right now I don’t remember who is allowed to know that. It feels like I’ve been Lux for a long time.

  She’s already given up on a response and is talking to her partner. ‘Concussion, and signs of infection just here.’ She touches my stump.

  ‘I don’t think a nurse dressed that wound,’ the other paramedic says.

  ‘No. I’m also seeing first-degree burns on his hand and around his mouth.’

  The second paramedic shakes his head at my stupidity. ‘Tried to eat something that was on fire, did you?’ he asks me.

  ‘Fred,’ I say.

  ‘Okay. Let’s get you out of here, Fred.’

  They roll me onto a gurney and then raise it up. I feel so
rry for them. The rest of us hit each other, shoot each other, blow each other up, feed one another into meat grinders. Then we expect paramedics and nurses and doctors to repair us so we can do it all again.

  As they slide me into the ambulance like it’s a pizza oven, I raise my head for a last look at Kyle. I’ll never find him again. I don’t even know his last name. But the female paramedic pushes my forehead back down and says, ‘Easy there.’ Her hand is cool. She snaps a plastic mask down over my face. Oxygen flows into my mouth, around a foreign object. Something hard. A little piece of bone, but not a tooth. I swallow it.

  The hospital is overflowing. It’s all the same people from the riot, but they’re not fighting anymore. Maybe they’re too tired and sore. Maybe they’ve had their fill of violence. Or maybe, in their identical hospital gowns and bandages, they can’t tell who they hate.

  There’s no point lying anymore, but with so many patients, the doctor doesn’t have much time to quiz me. Who am I? Timothy Blake. What happened? Car crash. And your arm? Went into a meat grinder. What about the burns? I don’t remember. She doesn’t look surprised by any of this and asks no follow-up questions.

  She unwinds the bandages and examines my stump while a nurse smears some antiseptic on my burns. A bag of someone else’s blood arrives. It enters my body, this time through a vein rather than my mouth. The nurse gives me a juice box and some tepid pumpkin soup.

  I watch TV. There’s footage of the riot. Protestors screaming, punching, getting kicked. Apparently two hundred people were wounded and six are dead. I guess those six include Fred, Cedric and Kyle. It could have been a whole lot worse.

  A commentator is badmouthing the protesters, calling them animals, saying the National Guard should have been summoned to control them. She says witnesses have described one protestor eating a corpse. The other talking heads look sceptical.

  The director of the Houston FBI field office gives a press conference. She explains the riot was triggered by a torrent of fake news, distributed by terrorists. She says her cyber unit got on to it early thanks to intelligence sent by an undercover FBI agent within the terrorist cell. It takes me a while to realise who she means. I guess my package made it to Dr Norman after all, less than thirty-six hours after I mailed it. I’ll never badmouth the USPS again.