Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  The guard was thrown like a teddy in a tantrum from his rear-facing fold-down seat, flailing along the front panel and meeting the outside wall mercifully below the glass.

  The Wee Shite, with both cuffed hands gripping the rail and his right foot wedged hard against the base of the seat in front, was the only person sitting on the left not to leave his position.

  The driver’s consciousness returned from a terrified moment’s suspended animation, and he turned the wheel furiously against the swerve. This had the inevitable effect of throwing everyone in the bus back towards the left, although with less force and, vitally, less suddenness.

  Feeling the gut-shifting lurch as his innards suffered whiplash, Tam clenched his fingers tighter around the rail and jammed his left leg into the aisle, keeping himself in position and forming a barrier to prevent Paul being thrown past him. In fact, all of them managed to get a grip on something as the bus swung back against its previous momentum. Unfortunately these measures weren’t quite so effective when it tipped over on to its side.

  There was a scream like a thousand steel-gauntletted fingers down an old blackboard in an echo chamber, the soul-piercing shriek of a hyena with its balls cut off – in fact possibly at that very moment of deep personal and physical loss – as the bus skidded grindingly along the tarmac.

  When it came to a halt, there was a fleeting moment of intense silence, just long enough for Tam to appreciate the pitch and volume of the ringing in his ears, a moment of stillness and paranoid anticipation, as if they each suspected a further unseen onslaught.

  Then came the sighs and exhalations of the relieved, and the strained moans of the injured.

  They had all finished up corralled on the side of the bus, partitioned off from one another by the rows of seats, squatting or crumpled amidst the fragments of black glass. Facial cuts seemed to have come as standard. Paul was nursing his upper arm, which was bloody and raw-looking through a rip in the sweatshirt the cops had given him. With the window shattered, his shoulder had been scraping along the hard road surface for a few seconds before he could drag himself clear of the gap.

  Tam had rattled both thighs off something metal, probably a seatback, when the tipping motion sent them all into the air. The dull ache was like having the whole weight of the bus rested on his legs, but he knew he’d be all right to walk – albeit painfully – after a few moments. He had taken whacks to the same place in his footballing days from centre-halves carrying more bulk than the bus. He just wished someone had a magic sponge.

  Spammy was the first to stand. He shook his shaggy black locks and a small shower of glass fragments precipitated from them, like fairy dust, giving him an even more ethereal appearance. Apart from the basic minimum of a small cut on his right cheek, he seemed completely unharmed. He didn’t even look any more dazed than usual as he opened his eyes wide and took in his upturned surroundings.

  Tam remembered a theory that a man would sustain fewer injuries from a crash or a fall if he was asleep at the time, as his relaxed state would make him more supple. Spammy’s general unscathedness seemed to bear this out rather convincingly.

  The Wee Shite was clutching at one knee with his cuffed hands, swearing and muttering, but apparently out of annoyance more than distress. It was as if he was furious that you couldn’t get through a high-speed crash these days without hurting yourself.

  “Aw, fuck’s sake,” mumbled Spammy ominously, stepping over to squat beside Bob, who was grimacing and spluttering, his hands tentatively feeling their way down his leg. His foot was trapped amidst a tangle of bent metal, a long splinter of wood from the wrecked seatback jutting into his calf, from where blood was steadily trickling.

  “Want to give us a hand here?” Spammy said, not taking his eyes off Bob’s foot, but waving a hand above his head in case anyone was in doubt as to who was talking.

  Tam and Paul trod delicately across the hazardous surface, watching where they placed each step amongst the newly formed stalagmites of glass and twisted metal.

  “Aw Jesus,” Paul said, but he wasn’t looking at Bob.

  Beyond the last double seat, the guard lay slumped, contorted and broken. His blank eyes stared forward above a smashed and gushing nose, his head twisted at an impossible angle to his shoulders, his neck snapped like an expired cheque card by the strap of his gun, which had snagged on a loose bolt as the bus tipped on to its side.

  Paul crouched before him, automatically feeling at the polisman’s wrist for a pulse despite not really knowing how to find one. He released his grip on the limp arm and let his head fall into his hands, taking deep breaths and swallowing hard.

  From behind there was a throaty rumble of effort and an angered scream.

  The rumble was from Tam as he pulled at the crushed metal frame gripping Bob’s foot, the scream from Bob as the splinter was wrenched from his leg. Spammy held Bob from behind, his hands under one shoulder, and gently helped him pull himself a yard back, his feet clearing the mangled seat.

  The old man looked down reluctantly, gritting his teeth, levering himself up gently on one elbow, and a guttural growl built up slowly from his diaphragm.

  “Awwwwrrrrrrrrrr PISH!” he lamented, staring accusingly at the end of his leg. The wound from the splinter was more messy than painful or serious, but below it his ankle had been violently twisted when the weight of his body strained against his trapped foot. In about ten minutes it would probably be the size of a melon.

  Tam rapped on the tinted panel at the front, remembering the two souls in the driver’s cab.

  “Yous all right through there?” he shouted.

  There was no reply.

  He hammered on it harder.

  “Are yous all right through there?”

  He heard a noise from above, and looked up to see a figure staring down at him from one of the smashed windows on what was now, technically, the ceiling.

  “You’ll need to get us oot o’ here,” he yelled. “There’ a man deid and another in bad shape.”

  “The polisman’s away with the keys,” shouted the driver. “You’ll need to hang on.”

  “Well where the fuck’s he away to wi’ the keys?” Tam spluttered in incredulous exasperation.

  “He cannae reach the lock with the bus on its side. He’s lookin’ for somethin’ to stand on.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tam spat, shaking his head. “So what in the name of God happened?”

  “We hit a motor. Came oot o’ nowhere. No lights or nothin’. Just appeared, headin’ straight for us, then bang. Christ, it looks in some state.”

  The driver’s face was suddenly bathed in bright light from outside and he shielded his eyes, looking away from the bus towards the source.

  “Aw, thank fuck,” he said, then looked back into the wreckage below. “Another motor. And here’s Alec back as well. We’ll no be a minute.” Tam saw the driver clamber out of sight and heard some thumps as he made his way down off the hulk and on to the road.

  More silent, unknowing time passed; could have been two minutes, could have been twenty seconds. Tam heard muffled words from outside but the content could not be deciphered, only a final “NOW” as one voice got louder and more heated towards the end of a sentence. Then they could hear activity at the front of the bus, a metallic clinking and scraping, before further footsteps alongside the crippled shell as it lay across the roadway like an upturned beetle.

  Only the Wee Shite seemed to remain unperturbed, and indeed was sniggering to himself as they looked frantically about themselves in nervous confusion.

  “The hell’s goin’ on?” Paul asked no-one in particular as the door stayed frustratingly closed and the anticipated contact from outside remained suspended.

  They heard a laugh and turned to see the Wee Shite at the back, leaning against what had been the floor with an exaggerated nonchalance.

  “Wee surprise boys,” he said nasally.

  With a rusty creak and a slam the lock was released then the door swun
g open and down, like the gangplank on a ferry. PC Clipboard’s colourless young face appeared in the gap, looking quickly at the scene of devastation within, before focusing more intently on the Wee Shite.

  “C’mon well,” the prisoner demanded, and astonishingly, the polisman threw his ring of keys to him, whereupon he proceeded to unlock and remove his handcuffs.

  The Wee Shite made his way down to the front of the bus, and now that he wasn’t obscuring the doorway, Tam could see the tall figure at PC Clipboard’s side, pointing a pistol at his head. The policeman’s semi-automatic was slung around the man’s neck, his side-arm tucked into the front of his belt.

  This was no accident. This was an ambush.

  The Wee Shite extricated the heavy weapon from around the dead man’s head and pulled it over his own, then knelt down and searched the body, producing a pistol from an under-arm holster. He got up and clambered back to the door, moving obliviously between the other four frozen, gaping prisoners like they were part of the inert wreckage. The young officer then offered a shaking hand as the Wee Shite climbed on to the makeshift gangplank.

  Before jumping down, he turned to face his erstwhile travelling companions.

  “Don’t say I’m no good to you,” he said, tossing the keys to Paul, whose handcuffed swipe in the half-light failed to catch them. They clattered across the floor and out of sight.

  It took a couple of frantic minutes to find them again, nestled amidst a shadowy sprouting of twisted metal and broken glass; and still more time to find the right key for each set of cuffs.

  Tam climbed on to the gangplank first, noting with confusion that there was no-one outside. No matter, he thought. One thing at a time. He crouched on one knee and took hold of Bob as he was passed up by Paul and Spammy below, hauling him through the gap amidst loud cries of strain and pain. Then he descended to the road and waited for Paul to climb past Bob and hop down beside him. Spammy remained on the gangplank and took Bob by the underarms, passing him down now to the pair on the ground.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” Bob asked breathlessly as he stood on the tarmac on one leg, an arm around Paul’s good shoulder.

  Another sudden, shuddering BANG shattered the air, shaking all of them into momentary panicked thoughts of whether the bus had been hit again as it lay wounded and helpless. Such thoughts were dispersed by a further BANG, less than a second later, its reverberation diminishing into the skies and hills.

  There was a sound of footsteps from behind, and Tam looked past the exposed underside of the bus to see the Wee Shite and the tall figure jog briskly towards a car sitting across the road, its headlights trained on the wreck.

  “I’ll treat it as gratitude if yous keep your fuckin’ mouths shut,” the Wee Shite shouted to them, hauling off his prison overalls.

  The tall figure opened the boot of the car and they each threw in their semi-automatics, then he produced some clothes and handed them to his companion. He quickly slipped the trousers on and climbed into the passenger seat, pulling a top over his head as the car moved off, swinging around at 180 degrees and passing the stunned gathering. The four of them watched in glazed incomprehension as the Wee Shite’s hand waved – royalty-style – from out of the rolled-down window and the vehicle accelerated into the deepening twilight, unimpeded, unpursued.

  “So where’s the polisman?” Paul asked, the first to find a voice.

  Tam caught Bob’s worried eyes, then Paul’s, then closed his own.

  “Aw Jesus,” he heard himself saying, walking at an increasing pace around the wreck “Aw Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

  Tam made it to where the driver’s cab edged a surface of grass and gravel by the side of the hard tarmac, and saw what he saw. He turned to stop Paul, who had been following him, but was too late.

  Paul halted and recoiled like he had run into a glass wall. He shook his head minutely, like a slow tremble, then closed his eyes, clenched his fists and breathed out heavily, twice, before being convulsed by body-shaking sobs.

  Tam wanted to hold him, to lead him away, but he felt too dazed, exhausted and disgusted. He leaned back against the bus and looked to the darkening heavens, then turned away from the corpses handcuffed to the radiator grill, and vomited.

  FIVE

  Nicole splashed water on her face, the bracing cold an attempt to prime her wits after the soothing warmth of the stuff she had used to wash the flecks from around her mouth and off her hands. She had thought she was beginning to reconstitute herself, recover some semblance of composure, even if it was just a front. But then he had shown her the device, and the fear, upset, tension and confusion had finally served their eviction order on her lunch.

  That was when it had moved from the realms of the theoretical to the physically tangible with a sickening jolt. The best evidence does that.

  It looked like a metal tile, or a transportation bracket for a cooker or washing machine. Then he turned it over to reveal the parallel steel strips that had fitted into a slot cut into the chassis of her car.

  He pointed to a black box between the strips at one end, with a small, red, transparent plastic bubble on top, about half a centime-tre in diameter, inside which a tiny light was blinking at half-second intervals.

  “This is a radio-controlled switch,” he explained. “But most of this wee box is just housing a battery, which is what these two wires are coming from.”

  The wires led along the inside edge of one strip, to a complex but nasty-looking arrangement at the other end, reminiscent of a mantrap.

  “Is . . . is it a bomb?” she asked, eyes bulging at the stuff of Joel Silver movies suddenly appearing in this most tawdry and mundane of living rooms.

  “No,” he said with a dry laugh. “Almost shat myself for a second when I was unscrewing the thing and I saw the wires, but no, it’s not. Watch.”

  He placed a pencil between the strips and slid it along to the end, between the two jagged steel jaws of the “mantrap”, which were each connected to three tiny pistons. With a small screwdriver he flipped off the top of the black box to reveal a tiny circuit board resting on top of the flat, rectangular battery. Then he pressed upon an indentation near the radio pick-up and the six pistons gave out a minute hydraulic hiss as the jaws slammed together with a dull, tooth-grinding clash and the two halves of the bisected pencil leapt into the air and tumbled to the carpet.

  “There were two of these wee gizmos under your car; I’m not sure whether one was a back-up or if your car has a parallel system. But the pencil is your brake cables.”

  That was when she ran to the bathroom.

  She returned to find him sitting on the brown armchair, opposite the TV. Now able to focus properly, if not actually relax, she had a closer look at him. He was a lot smaller than she had initially thought when he was towering before her, and in her slightly less hysterical frame of mind she realised he appeared almost as worried as she did. He looked mid-to-late thirties, although there was a bright youthfulness about him that seemed to contradict his dark dress and solemn demeanour.

  She held a towel in one hand and a glass of water in the other, and took a seat on the matching sofa, whose curled ends meant its shape complemented its colour.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not really used to this. I’m trying very hard to make some sense of it, but you’ll need to bear with me. I’ve a thousand questions. But what I don’t understand first is, why go to all this trouble? Why not just cut my brake cables down in the car park?”

  “Because you’d notice your brakes were gone right away and you wouldn’t drive anywhere. This way, they wait until you’re heading for a red light, or bombing along the M8, then blow your fluid lines and . . .” He waved with his right hand, a blank expression upon a face that didn’t want her to think he was closely contemplating what would have happened next.

  “Jesus Christ,” she mouthed. “So why didn’t you warn me? Why didn’t you just give me a phone call or come into the office? And why did you have to bre
ak into my flat and scare the living daylights out of me?”

  “Because, Nicole, they’re out there. They’re watching. There’ll be a guy in a car somewhere on this street right now, wondering why his wee radio transmitter didn’t work when he pushed the magic button, and deciding what to do about it. He would have been watching you all afternoon, ever since his pal finished work on your chassis, waiting to drive off behind you after work so that he could pick the right time to zap your brakes. Ironically, with the devices removed, you were safe as long as he thought he could kill you. This might be a nightmare to you, but the nightmare scenario for these guys is you finding out they’re trying to murder you – they simply cannot afford for that to happen. If they suspected you had been warned, or that you were on to them in any way, then I’m sure there would have been a contingency that you definitely don’t want to speculate about.

  “If I had called you up – gambling on the million-to-one possibility that your office phone’s not tapped – or I had come into the office and shown you what I have here, you’d still have had to get into your car and drive home. Any deviation would tip them off. And you’d have been doing it scared shitless, so how could you stop yourself looking pale and nervous? How could you stop yourself stealing a look over your shoulder? Or maybe taking a different route home, maybe avoiding the motorway or fast dual carriageways, doing a steady thirty in case I hadn’t found all the surprises?

  “These guys were going to blow your brakes so that your death wasn’t suspicious, so that it didn’t attract much attention. ‘Young lawyer dies in M-way smash. What a tragedy. She lost control of her car at 70mph. Colleagues said she had been working very hard and had been under a lot of pressure recently.’ Does that sound plausible enough to you? The cops wouldn’t even bother to examine the wreckage, what was left of it. But that was just their ideal score. If they couldn’t get you like that, they’ll have instructions to get you some other way. And if they think you’ve rumbled them, they’ll have instructions to take you out ASAP, any way, any how.”