Kill All Kill All

by Craig McNish

  “Robert Cutter, a debtor? Well, how the mighty have fallen! This is a surprise, and a sight to brighten my day a little! Maybe we will get to share a cell! Ha!”

  “They don't lock debtors up with killers, you fool! All of this is nothing more than a terrible misunderstanding – I don't expect to be here more than much past midday. My dearest friend is burying his children this morning who were slain by the man stood alongside me, and I should be there with him. Instead I find myself stuck in this godforsaken place when I have never been in one bit of trouble in my whole life. I shall be having strong words with your Commanding Officer when I leave here, Lieutenant.”

  “Every man and woman who comes through that door tells me they never did any wrong” said Laxe, not caring much for who Robert Cutter was (or thought that he was). “And truth be told, I have no interest in what you do anyway. I keep people locked away 'til the law-makers decide what to do with them and that's it. So don't bother yourself trying to convince me that you did not do what you find yourself here for. So, a murderer and a man with no money, eh? Well I have news for you, poor man – the prison for debtors is full to the brim. No room, not even for one more.”

  “So I am to be released, then?”

  “What? No! Oh, no, you don't get off that easy! You just have to go in with the crooks and the killers is all.” Cutter's eyes bulged wide open so much they looked like they might pop out of his head.

  “But I am no common criminal! You cannot do this to me!”

  “This is my gaol and I will do what I like” said Laxe. “So unless you have the money to pay off your debt in full, plus the ten shillings for your release, then you go where I put you until you do.”

  “I do not have the money.”

  “Then we should go and say hello to your new friends” Laxe told Cutter in good humour. “If you can bring them both this way, Lieutenant...”

  It took but a quarter of an hour for Cutter to be stripped of many of his belongings by marauding prisoners. There was ten of them in total with he and Mills, and his expensive clothing immediately made him a target. Mills was quick to mention that he had killed not three children, but six men over a period of two months; his lies were convincing enough for the other prisoners to leave him be. Cutter was quickly of the realisation he would need to concoct his own stories to avoid more persecution. Not that he had anything left to give, but that meant he had only one thing remaining that could be taken. Robert Cutter had no wish to die in prison, and so the urge to shed tears was suppressed as he decided the best course of action would be to breed his hatred for this place instead.

  *

  TEN

  North Yorkshire Moors, 2016

  There was still so much in this strange new world that Andrew Mills didn't know about. While not truly terrified, he did find it an unsettling place to be in. What angered him most was that he had been brought back here without choice; with no say in the matter and then to be left on his own, running from everyone and everything, was no way for a man to be treated. He thought of Jane, and it was her that kept him moving forward for if he had nothing else to work towards he might well have given up a long time ago.

  Still navigating only by heading in a general northerly direction, Mills had been pleased to see one or two landmarks that let him know he was going in the right direction, had not gone off course. There had been a road sign indicating the town of Thirsk to be just a few miles away; he remembered that name from the unsuccessful journey for London with Jane. And what a journey it had been! Carriages without horses? They had moved at speeds of – what did Jane say – seventy miles in an hour? Seventy! He'd been amazed by the number of lamps being used to light the streets; when seen in the distance they had made the sky look to be ablaze, and yet they gave off no heat. Remarkable! And the one thing that had really surprised him was that Jane herself had been in control of the carriage. A woman carriage driver, for goodness sake! If he'd had a chance to tell his father such stories, he would never have been believed for a second.

  But what had delighted Mills most was the evidence that he was closing in on Durham; only another forty-eight miles, according to another sign he had seen before retreating further away from the roadway and onto the western edge of the moorland. The noise of the carriages still intrigued him, while the various animal calls that could be heard were something of a comfort. It was good to know that some things had not changed. And then there was something else; a noise Mills had yet to hear so couldn't identify its source. He looked around but there was little to be seen in the darkness apart from silhouettes and shadows. The sky was clear and laden with stars and a full moon. Still, though, the noise persisted, and while it had been quiet it was slowly getting louder.

  “What in the world is making that racket?” he asked himself, angry and frustrated but also a little apprehensive. After all, it was possible that the unknown might be able to hurt him in this time more than he would think. Another survey was made of the landscape but in vain, and then Mills raised his eyes to the sky in the south. He watched in silence as 'something' – he couldn't even begin to guess as to what it might be – floated through the night sky, seemingly in his direction. It was nothing much more than a speck at the moment, but it did seem to be getting bigger, and quickly. Mills ascertained it was this unknown object that was making the noise, for it didn't seem possible it could be anything else. So if he could hear it this loud when it was still some way distant, surely it must make a thunderous racket when it is close by, he reasoned.

  And then, something else. The brightest light he had ever seen shot downwards from the object, illuminating the ground below in a brilliant circle of light. But the light didn't stay in one place, or not for more than a fraction of a second. As bright as the sun, this beam of light would move left and right over a wide area as the object continued to advance. He might not have known what it was, but Mills quickly guessed that it was looking for something. And then the thought occurred that something could very likely be him. Now, for the first time in as long as he could recall, Andrew Mills felt scared.

  'Thee would stand here and allow yourself to be captured by that thing?' said a voice inside Mills' head. 'Make good your escape before it arrives! Go – now!' And Mills took off on his horse, coaxing it to run ever faster as the object with the light continued to fly in his direction. But no matter how quick he rode, it still wasn't possible to escape. It would find him, and soon.

  'Find cover! Hide! Hide away until it has gone!' Mills listened to the instruction the voice had given and looked for somewhere he might he able to conceal himself. There was no great amount of trees nearby that contained foliage; surely these would be seen straight through by such a powerful lamp, Mills reckoned. But he did see some thick bushes and made for those, dismounting nearby and throwing himself into the cover they afforded. Now all he could do was wait and hope.

  “Finding somebody out here during the day is bad enough, but in the middle of the night? Close to bloody impossible” the operator of the helicopter's search light moaned into his headset. The pilot nodded in agreement. “Not picking up anything on infra-red, either.” Then the pilot indicated to his colleague to move the light towards a gathering of dark shadows on the ground, either trees or bushes. The first man simply shrugged and complied. The beam swept over a wide radius just south of Mills' concealed position; it would surely be right upon him in less than a minute.

  “Got something on the FLIR – maybe we'll strike lucky...” The beam was directed to where a heat source had been picked up, and Mills saw his horse suddenly lit up in the brilliant circle of light. It stayed on the animal for a few seconds before sweeping over the very bush under which he was hiding and a few more close by before returning to his horse.

  “Just a horse; no rider, and nobody hiding in any of the nearby bushes. What do you want to do?”

  “Fly over the area a couple of times, maybe a five mile radius. Anything more and we're wasting our time. I'll call it in.” The
helicopter was also flying at a lower altitude now, and Mills found himself being proved right about the noise. He'd never heard anything like it before. He stayed crouched in his hiding place, not daring to move for fear of being spotted; this thing that was pursuing him might be capable of anything if it could attack from the air. And then Mills got lucky; the noise from the low-flying helicopter spooked the horse, which took off to the east. Immediately, Mills noted that as soon as the horse had bolted, the light was trained upon it. He therefore felt it reasonable to assume this 'thing' was drawn only to large, moving objects. Maybe he would be too small to be seen. A few more minutes, and the flying object overhead apparently had given up its search; it was now turned off to the east, shining its light intermittently, before going back in the direction it had come. Mills crawled out from under the bush, breathing heavily not from exhaustion, but from fear. And while he was now free – at least for the present moment – his horse had now disappeared into the night. If this flying object had not been able to find him from the air with such a powerful lamp, Mills knew he had no chance of locating his horse from ground level in the black night. Now he would have to walk.

  *

  Detective Steve Hawkins sat at his desk and pushed his hands through his hair. A glance at the clock on the wall told him it was almost one in the morning. The last day of January, he mused silently. This somewhat unbelievable case that had fallen into his lap not even a week ago was driving him crazy. It was keeping him away from his home as he became more and more obsessed with Andrew Mills, and the idea of catching a three hundred year-old murderer who had picked up where he left off with great aplomb. And to all intents and purposes, the guy wasn't even alive! At least not in the medical sense of the word anyway. So what the hell were they meant to do with this Mills character when he was finally caught? And Hawkins was adamant that he would catch the murdering bastard who was ruining his life. He didn't know how yet, but he would do it.

  Another look through the notes he'd collated thus far yielded nothing new. He didn't expect that they would. A call from someone in the North Yorkshire Police Department let him know the helicopter had been out scouting for Mills but was unsuccessful in finding anything apart from a lone horse. Whoever was making the call must have anticipated everything Hawkins was going to ask next because they were able to answer his questions without even thinking. The detective should have known that they would be checking for heat sources emitting from potential hiding places and considering the fact Mills had deliberately left his horse behind as a decoy to throw them off track, but he had to ask. And it was only then that another thought occurred to him.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, causing a couple of PCs sat nearby writing up reports to glance up from their work momentarily. “If he's dead then he won't have any body heat! They'd never find him using the FLIR! Shit! And the bastard can move so quick he could easy dodge the spotlight. What a fucking mess this bloody case is...”

  “You okay there, Stevie Boy?” asked one of the constables, bemused by the mutterings of his colleague. “You know what they say about people who talk to themselves, right?”

  “Don't worry, mate – I'm already mad...”

  “The Mills case? You making any headway?” Hawkins put his feet up on his desk, shook his head slowly.

  “Bugger's driving me mental” the detective admitted quite freely. “Just seems to blend into the shadows, out of sight of everybody. Half the police in the north-east of England are looking for this guy and nothing. Not one bloody sighting. Nobody's seen anything of him since his little performance outside York Minster. You'd think somebody would have seen something.”

  “Maybe he can make himself invisible” PC Graham Thomas suggested. Hawkins regarded Thomas for a second before deciding the man was serious.

  “Sod off, Tommo! Are you for real?”

  “Didn't you say he had legs like a horse? And that his eyes glowed red when he got pissed off?” Hawkins suddenly felt embarrassed as he recalled the details from the video Harper had shown him. Was he going crazy?

  “Well, er, at least I think that's what I saw.”

  “So if he can do weird shit like that, is it really a massive jump to think he could make himself invisible somehow?”

  “Maybe not, but even still...”

  “Let's look at the facts” said Thomas, now taking far more interest in Hawkins' work than his own. “This guy, as far as we know, is absolutely unique. Nobody like him has ever existed before, right? So we have to stop thinking twenty-first century and start thinking outside the box.”

  “Okay, agreed. So what are you thinking?” Thomas hadn't been expecting the question quite so quickly and found himself forced to improvise.

  “We're treating him like a criminal of today, expecting to find him using tried and tested police methods like the chopper and its heat-seeking camera, or even just a taser to put the guy out of commission for a few minutes. Neither have worked, so that makes you think he's kind of immune to our technology. This could be real back to basics stuff.”

  “As in?”

  “Well how did they catch criminals when Mills was around the first time? Unless the guy is floating then he must be leaving a trail as he goes, right? So we try some good old-fashioned tracking; look for footprints, that kind of thing.” Hawkins puffed out his cheeks and exhaled heavily.

  “That could take days – weeks, even...”

  “So what do we do – wait for him to kill somebody else?”

  “Do you have any idea of the size of the search area we're looking at? A sizeable chunk of the north-east of England isn't something you can cover with a few dozen coppers and a hundred volunteers, and considering Joe Public isn't aware of just what is on the loose we're not likely to get much help from that quarter.”

  “Has nobody sent a team of dogs out to try and pick up his trail? We know roughly the route he was taking and it seems pretty obvious he's heading back here to Ferryhill so surely we can extrapolate the most likely route he would take and narrow things down considerably? It's a pretty safe bet to say he'll be keeping to the back roads and avoiding people and busy places so even though we're looking rural that still rules out a hell of a lot of ground.”

  “Would a three centuries old dead serial killer have any kind of scent for the dogs to pick up on?” Hawkins said tongue in cheek. “My thinking is that maybe we should just wait until he turns up on our doorstep. I'm not sure the bloke is a danger to the public; he only killed Hodgson and knocked out the other guy out because he felt threatened by them. I don't think he'd be likely to attack somebody at random.

  “I've been giving myself a bit of a history lesson, reading up on the stuff Mills did back in sixteen eighty-three. We think of murders just as a part of everyday life now; not to the stage where we constantly live in fear of being offed by a madman, but we hear someone has been murdered and accept it far more readily than we should. The Brass Farm murders were such big news that word got down to London sharpish, and those were the days when you had to stick some guy on a horse with a note on a scrap of paper to pass on to somebody, or it went by word of mouth. Child killers are the scum of the earth but can you imagine how such a crime would have been regarded back then? Jesus, people must have been fucking terrified! There was no police force, no kind of home security the likes of what we have now; these folks basically just had to hope it never happened to them.”

  “But what they did have was their own brand of justice” said Thomas. “Vigilantes and stuff, right? An eye for an eye – that's how they used to work. So the rapists and murderers must still have had someone or something to be afraid of. They had prisons, didn't they? Bet they weren't a patch on what our cons get today. Get chucked in one of those places back then and you'd get forgotten about.”

  “They knew how to pack them in” Hawkins went on. “Big cells; ten, fifteen or even twenty men in each one. They were locked in there together almost twenty-four seven with bugger all to do. Did you know they had to pay for
all their grub? They even had to pay to get released! Can you imagine the cons now if we did that? Bastards are up in arms if they can't get Sky Sports on for the match...”

  “So we have to confront Mills with the stuff that he knows to draw him out” said Thomas. “There's got to be something he's shit scared of, but you have to take the guy on with the things that he knows rather than what he doesn't. We already know he can laugh off a taser, so say you point a gun in his face; he hasn't got a clue what damage it can cause, so what reason has he got to be scared? Maybe he already thinks he's impervious to any weapons we have. So we confront him with weapons of the day, whatever they might have been.”

  “You're saying our best shot at catching the guy is by going seventeenth-century on him?”

  “Well nothing else seems to be working, and now he's a cop killer as well...”

  “And what are we meant to do when we catch him?”

  “Serve up some seventeenth-century justice – chuck the bastard in a big room with stone walls a foot thick then stick his head in a noose, break his neck and shove him in a cage so the crows can eat him. And if that doesn't work, dig a bloody big hole to throw him in and pour a couple of tons of concrete over the top.”

  “Woah, steady on there Tommo! It's not like we can just go round burying people alive!”