by Jack Heath
09:10At last! The brakes screamed and Kelli-Anne was thrown forwards out of her seat. She crashed into the control panel, hitting a whole bunch of switches. The alarms turned off and all the doors behind her opened with a hiss. She ignored all that and kept pulling hard on the brake.
08:30The train was slowing down but not enough. If that car didn’t get out of the way, it was going to get hit. Not only would that kill the driver, but Kelli-Anne would be in serious danger. There were no seatbelts anywhere. If the train derailed or tipped over, she could be pulverised against the walls.
The brakes kept shrieking. Kelli-Anne tugged at the horn again.
HOOOONK! HOOOOOONNK!
08:00The car didn’t move. And now she was so close that she could see there was no-one in the driver’s seat. A boy, no older than her, was standing a few metres away from it.
‘What are you doing, you moron?’ she howled, knowing the boy couldn’t hear her.
The car wasn’t going to move, and she couldn’t stop the train in time. She was going to have to escape.
She pulled the elastic out of her hair and used the band to hold the brake in place. Then she ran out of the driver’s compartment.
07:30The side door was open, but it was facing a wall. If she jumped out that way, she would bounce back and be crushed under the wheels. Instead, she ripped the fire blanket off the wall, snatched up the extinguisher and ran into the next carriage.
06:55The packaged blanket was almost as heavy as the extinguisher. As she sprinted from one carriage to the next, and the next, and the next, she kept bumping into seats. The canister clanged each time it hit a stability pole.
By the time she reached the back of the train, she had no idea how much time she had left. How close was the car? Was it even still there?
06:30She smashed through the back door with one adrenaline-fuelled strike of the extinguisher, reached through the hole and yanked the door open. The sudden noise was deafening. The wind ripped at her hair. She had slowed the train down as much as possible, but the tracks below still seemed to be sweeping away dangerously fast.
There was no time to hesitate. She held the fire blanket in front of her with both hands—
05:45And jumped.
She was in mid-air when she heard the smash of the train crashing into the car. Despite the fact that she was several carriages away, the sound was like a deafening thunderclap. She rode the shockwave outwards, clinging to the fire blanket as the railbed rushed up to meet her.
CRASH!
Even through the folded blanket the impact stung her knees and hands. The force shot upward into her torso, bending ribs and bouncing organs around. The leftover momentum threw her off the blanket and she tumbled backward onto the rocks and concrete sleepers of the railbed.
05:00She lay still. The warm numbness all over her body told her that nasty bruises were forming. In a minute she would be in agony.
But she was alive.
She turned her aching head, wincing as the muscles in her neck stretched. The train had stopped a long, long way away. It must have ploughed through the car like it was nothing.
But the angle was wrong. Kelli-Anne tilted her head some more. The train had come off the rails and was leaning against the wall of the narrow channel. If she had been on board—
‘Hey, are you OK?’
She turned back to see a man approaching. He was a blur, but he was wearing blue. Like a police officer.
‘Who are you?’ she groaned.
03:50He knelt beside her. ‘I was, uh, driving the train.’
‘No you weren’t. I was driving the train.’ Then her eyes focused and she realised how much trouble she was in.
The man wasn’t a cop. He was the conductor.
The one who had deliberately abandoned the train.
The one who had engineered the crash, and had presumably come here to pretend he was on board when it happened.
03:20The one who now knew she was the only witness to his crime.
They stared at each either in frozen silence for a moment. The conductor looked as scared as she felt.
Then he snatched up a sharp rock from the railbed and held it high, ready to smash her skull.
02:40As he brought it down, Kelli-Anne grabbed the fire blanket and pulled it over her like a shield. The rock thumped against it but didn’t come through. Heart pounding, Kelli-Anne pushed the conductor off her and scrambled to her feet.
They circled one another for a moment, him holding the rock like a dagger, her clutching the blanket like a shield.
She had tried to ride the train without paying and had found herself hiding from transport police and smashing through doors with a fire extinguisher. The conductor had agreed to crash his train and had wound up threatening a teenage girl with a rock.
01:55In that moment, Kelli-Anne understood him completely.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ she said.
He lunged at her.
01:45She blocked the strike with the blanket but dropped it as she stumbled back. Her foot clunked against something and she fell over backwards. The conductor ran at her, madness in his eyes, brandishing his rock like a Neanderthal.
Then Kelli-Anne realised what she had tripped over.
The fire extinguisher.
She grabbed it, ripped the pin out and squeezed the handle. The conductor vanished in a freezing grey cloud of carbon dioxide. He screamed as Kelli-Anne scrambled backward out of the swirling mist. Then she stood up and fled towards the toppled train.
00:55Sirens were wailing in the air. She looked up at the darkening sky, visible between the two walls of the channel. She could hear voices.
‘Hey!’ she screamed. ‘I’m down here! Hurry.’
She shot a look back as the cloud of extinguisher fumes dissipated further down the channel.
When they cleared, the conductor had gone. It was as if he’d never been there.
00:20A head appeared from atop the channel. A face. A woman in a police hat and sunglasses.
‘How did you get down there?’ she demanded.
‘I didn’t have my rail pass,’ Kelli-Anne said, as though that explained everything. And then she fell to her knees and cried.
00:00
POISON
30:00 ‘You’ve been poisoned,’ the tall man said.
Nassim was pretty sure he’d misheard that. He smiled politely. ‘Pardon me?’
The man didn’t return the smile. The warmth had vanished from his luminous blue eyes. His lips pulled back to reveal a chipped tooth. He peeled off his latex gloves, revealing soft, pink hands with neatly clipped fingernails.
29:40‘You have thirty minutes to live,’ he said. ‘I’m a man of my word.’
Fear flickered in Nassim’s heart. ‘Aren’t you here to fix the TV?’
‘You’re wasting time. Soon the nerve agent that you just drank will block the signals from your brain to your organs.’
The bottle of ginger beer was cold in Nassim’s hand. Suddenly he could see something through the tinted glass—a pill about the size of a maggot floating on the surface, fizzing.
He dropped the bottle. It hit the edge of the table and smashed, sending sharp fragments skittering across the floorboards. The fluid spattered the wood and bubbled like acid.
29:10‘Soon you won’t be able to walk,’ the poisoner continued. ‘After that you’ll lose the ability to speak, and then to breathe. Unless I administer the antitoxin.’
He put his briefcase on the table between them but didn’t open it.
‘Is this some kind of joke?’ Nassim demanded.
‘You’re wasting time, Kim.’ The poisoner glanced at his plastic stopwatch. ‘In twenty-eight minutes and seven seconds—’
‘My name isn’t Kim.’
28:00‘You will suffocate—unless I give you the antitoxin.’
He moved the briefcase so it was just out of Nassim’s reach. It was made of dark grey plastic and looked airtight, as though the contents were fragile or had to be kept c
ool.
‘Where is the bloodstone, Kim?’
27:40‘You’ve mixed me up with someone else,’ Nassim insisted. ‘I’m not Kim.’
‘Twenty seven minutes, thirty-one seconds.’
There was no point screaming for help. Nassim’s parents wouldn’t be home for hours. His brother was away on band camp. The floor-to-ceiling windows were double-glazed and the brick walls were well-insulated. The neighbour’s two-storey townhouse was just on the other side of the hedge, but there was no way they would hear him.
26:35Nassim felt like he was falling down a well. How had this happened?
A few minutes ago he was perfectly safe. He had just sunk into the leather couch with a ginger beer and a comic book—why do homework or wash his clothes when his parents weren’t there to see it?—when the doorbell rang. He walked into the foyer to find this man on the doorstep, a clipboard in his hand and a cable company logo on the lanyard around his neck. He introduced himself as Daniel Leigh from CouchPotato and said he had come to repair the tuner so the missing channels reappeared on the TV.
26:00Nassim wasn’t aware of anything wrong with the television, but the man seemed very sure he had the right address. He said Nassim’s mother had already paid for the service. Nassim might have called his mother to check this, but even when she remembered to take her phone with her—which was rare—she often left it switched off. So he shrugged and let the man in.
25:40He should have asked more questions. He shouldn’t have turned his back to pour the man a glass of water while he fiddled behind the television. He shouldn’t have taken his eyes off his drink.
‘Tell me where the bloodstone is, Kim,’ the poisoner said.
25:00‘I don’t know who Kim is, I don’t know who you are and I don’t know anything about any redstone!’ Nassim’s voice got higher and higher.
‘Bloodstone. Do not test my resolve. After you saw my men come out of the bank, I ordered them to leave you on the train tracks. I ordered the train conductor to ram the car. I don’t know how you survived, but you won’t be so lucky twice.’
It sounded like this ‘Kim’ was having a very bad day. The poisoner would only be convinced he had the wrong person when Nassim died in front of him. But Nassim wasn’t willing to wait that long. He wasn’t going to die just because some jerk couldn’t tell one kid from another.
He tried to grab the briefcase.
24:00The poisoner slapped his hand out of the air. He did it so fast that his arms were back by his sides by the time Nassim felt the pain. It hurt so much he wondered if the bones in his hand were broken.
‘That’s not how this works,’ the poisoner told him. ‘You tell me where the bloodstone is, and then you get the antitoxin.’
Nassim nursed his aching hand. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘Don’t lie to me. I have sources in the police department. I know they never found the bloodstone after the train crash. You’re the only one who could have taken it. I saw you leave the police station and followed you here. There was no time to hide it anywhere else.’
‘I walked past the police station,’ Nassim insisted. ‘I was on my way home from school.’
The poisoner grabbed him by the throat.
Nassim had no time to defend himself. A hand crushed his windpipe like a styrofoam cup while another blocked his flailing strikes. He felt his face go purple as the poisoner lifted him out of the chair. The world started to go dark at the edges.
22:45‘This is what it will feel like,’ the poisoner hissed. ‘You’ll be desperate for air but none will come. Your heart will keep beating for a while but the blood it pumps will slowly turn to acid. You’ll be unable to scream or move, like a fly cocooned in a spider’s web. They will find your body with an expression of utter terror on your face. It will give them nightmares for decades to come.’
22:20He let go. Nassim collapsed into the chair, hacking and wheezing. The poisoner waited, his hands neatly folded, until Nassim had recovered enough to speak.
The poisoner was willing to watch him die. Nassim could tell. He wouldn’t even feel bad about it. Those were the eyes of a psychopath, someone who saw other people not even as animals but as furniture. Objects designed to serve his needs and his alone.
21:50Convincing him that he wasn’t Kim didn’t seem like a good plan anymore. If Nassim succeeded, the poisoner might not even give him the antidote. He would probably just leave, taking the precious briefcase with him.
But what else could Nassim do?
‘OK,’ he gasped.
‘OK,’ the poisoner repeated.
‘I’ll take you to the bloodstone. It’s upstairs.’
The poisoner didn’t look relieved. He didn’t look anything. He had a face like a painting of an ancient Roman general—immobile, fearless, merciless.
‘Lead the way,’ he said. ‘And tread carefully.’
Somehow Nassim didn’t think the poisoner was warning him about the stairs.
21:00He rose to his feet and walked towards the spiral staircase. Glancing back, he saw that the poisoner had left the briefcase on the table. If Nassim could somehow incapacitate him upstairs, he could run back down and grab the antidote.
But he wasn’t sure how to do that. There was nothing in the house he could use as a weapon. Perhaps he could push the poisoner down the stairs?
As a child, Nassim had tripped his brother when they were playing in the park. It was supposed to be funny but his brother had cried and cried, leaving Nassim so twisted with guilt he felt like he might throw up. Since then he understood what people meant when they said someone didn’t have ‘the stomach’ for violence. Nassim didn’t think his stomach would let him hurt a human being, even one as frightening as this man with the cold eyes and the fast hands.
He ascended the steps slowly, the banister smooth under his fingers. He had read somewhere that a spiral staircase was the only place in which it was polite to overtake on the inside, because the climb was steeper than at the outer edge.
19:10The poisoner must have heard that theory too. He caught and overtook Nassim on the inside, probably not letting him get to the top first in case a weapon was up there. I wish, Nassim thought.
18:50But nor did the poisoner get so far ahead that Nassim had the chance to run back down the stairs and grab the briefcase. Even if he was fast enough, how quickly could he take the antitoxin? Was it just a pill like the nerve agent? Or was it a syringe, or eye drops—something too complicated to use quickly?
Nassim had never been good with needles. But he’d use one in a heartbeat if it would save his life.
18:30 ‘Hurry up,’ the poisoner said. ‘You don’t have all day.’
Nassim tromped up the stairs, terror curdling in his guts. He had only the vaguest wisp of a plan. He figured there were about eight ways it could go. In seven of them he would die.
‘Which way?’ the poisoner asked when Nassim reached the top.
Nassim pointed to his parents’ bedroom.
The poisoner opened the door, glanced around and beckoned. Nassim followed him in.
His parents’ bedroom seemed bigger than it was. The full-length mirrors opposite the windows gave the illusion of a wide, airy space. An abstract painting hung behind the ornately-carved four-poster bed.
If the poisoner was impressed or surprised by the luxury, he didn’t show it. ‘Where?’
17:40‘Under the bed,’ Nassim said, without moving.
Just as he’d hoped, the poisoner didn’t move either. ‘Go get it.’
With fake reluctance Nassim dropped to his belly and wriggled under the bed.
There it was. His mother’s phone, connected to the wall socket by a charging cable. He unlocked it, flicked it to silent, dialled emergency services and hit the call button.
‘What’s taking so long?’ the poisoner demanded.
17:00‘Just give me a minute.’
With a whoosh that ruffled Nassim’s hair, the mattress disappeared. He looked up
to see the poisoner standing on the slats of the bed frame, glaring down at him. He managed to push the phone out of sight beneath a discarded pillowcase.
‘Well? Where is it?’
Nassim could faintly hear a woman’s voice on the phone: ‘Fire, ambulance or police?’
He spoke loudly to cover the sound. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It was right here.’
16:30The poisoner grabbed the ceramic reading lamp on the bedside table and flung it. The lamp smashed through the window, sending a star-scape of glittering shards out into the daylight.
Nassim barely had time to wonder what he was doing before the poisoner grabbed him by the ankle and dragged him out from under the bed.
‘Hey, wait, don’t!’ he cried.
16:10The poisoner hauled him over to the window and pushed him out.
Nassim screamed as his legs dangled over the sickening drop. The poisoner was holding him by the collar of his shirt. If he let go, the paving stones below would break Nassim’s legs, maybe even his spine. The broken glass and shards of the lamp could cut the arteries in his thighs and leave him bleeding to death.
‘Perhaps I haven’t been clear,’ the poisoner said.
Nassim tried to grab the window frame behind him, but he was being held too far out. Somewhere beneath the haze of fear it occurred to him that he should stop struggling, or else he might slip out of the poisoner’s grip.
A stitch popped in his shirt. Then another.
‘So let me make this very, very simple for you,’ the poisoner continued. ‘Give me the bloodstone, or you will die.’
15:20‘If you let me fall, you’ll never find it,’ Nassim panted.
‘Wrong. You may have only fifteen minutes to live, but I have plenty of time. If I choose, I could spend the next three days tearing this house apart. Anyone else who arrives could be easily disposed of. The only reason you’re still alive is that searching other people’s homes is dull.’
15:05Nassim hoped the police were hearing all this. Another stitch burst in his collar. Soon he would fall.
‘But it’s not in the house!’ he cried.
The poisoner hauled him back into the bedroom. The spikes of glass still attached to the window frame sliced Nassim’s trousers to ribbons.