The Runner

by P. R. Black

  Freya did.

  She ran around to the front, and tugged on the driver’s side door of the van.

  Locked.

  He laughed. ‘Nice one! This is going to be interesting. Good try. No luck, though.’

  ‘Get moving!’ Levison said. ‘Head for the dips – there’s more of a path there. Straight up the middle is too steep!’ Then she tore off, long legs slashing her white skirt.

  Freya took a breath, taking in the view before her. The site the Woodcutter had taken them to was a bowl in the earth, made of what seemed to be crumbling earth and shingle. Concentric curves wound their way through the hillside towards a central point, where there was a suggestion of the crane he had mentioned.

  Freya ran, taking the right-hand path, rather than plunging down into the centre of the quarry. Stones dislodged under her feet, and she stumbled, alarmingly, crying out.

  Levison was already out of sight.

  How long had passed? Ten seconds? Fifteen?

  She continued skirting the edge of the quarry. The lip of the quarry wound round soon enough; she could make out the detail of the gigantic industrial lifting machine, the logo and livery that remained on the side, the patches of rust on the plating. Easy, she thought. Too easy.

  Almost as soon as the thought had cleared her mind, she saw the defile in the ground that had been entirely hidden by the waves of loose stone – more of a fissure, a collapsed part of the ground, cracked a long way to the right, tumbling down towards the slick black water at the bottom of the quarry. The gap was tantalising, but there was no way she could jump it; the sides were steep, and filled with loose stones, some of them broad and shiny as a new shovel.

  ‘Bastard,’ Freya hissed, and turned, and started down the side of the quarry. That was his intention, surely; to force her to take the longer, more treacherous route, down the hill.

  Was Levison lying? To make sure I was behind her?

  Freya used the betrayal, biting down hard, loose stones and scree rustled under her feet, and she slithered down it twice, skinning the palm of her hand, before regaining her footing. She glanced over her shoulder; the van was stark white against the dark, rocky hill, but there was no sign of the masked man.

  Freya kept going until she reached the point where she could safely leap over the other side of the defile and reach the top. It had been a trick of perspective, a con of the light in a place of overlapping darkness, which had hidden the defile at first. Then another thought struck her: I’m going exactly where he wants me to go. I have to change that.

  She kept going towards the bottom. Water splashed up, covering her feet and soaking the bottom of her trousers. Still no sign of him.

  ‘This is it!’ a voice hissed, shockingly close. ‘This is what we wanted!’

  He was right there.

  He’d come down the other side of the pit. A snail-like silvery trail marked a steep, but defined path. No defile there. A flash of metal, constrained movement released, then the whistling metallic arc in the air.

  He was aiming for her head, and close enough to reach her.

  She ran into the space where the blow was about to fall, not away, ducking low; the axe blade whirled over her head.

  Freya followed through, and butted him somewhere in the midriff. He crashed to the ground. She looked for the axe; not fast enough; flare of silver as he snatched up again, scrambling to his feet, then he swung it again, aiming for her ankle. He just missed.

  She ran on impulse, straight up the hill, where the head of the pit elevator bent towards her. Benevolent. A plant-eating dinosaur. She scrambled up the stones – no two ways about it, Levison had surely made the checkpoint. It was just her and him, and she had a chance, unless he had one more problem in store for her, one more shock…

  Freya reached the top of the hill, the backs of her thighs aching, but all her training was paying off. She was not aware of fatigue, just a heightened state of awareness born of adrenaline. She did not even look back as she sprinted towards the lip of the quarry, with the gleaming promise of the pit lift up ahead. All she had to do was reach it – or so he said.

  Freya had maybe forty yards to cover. She couldn’t hear any footsteps behind her.

  That’s when her leading foot landed on nothing; she was falling into space, momentum carrying her through another gap in the earth. Her hands clasped on nothing; the gap was a good ten feet, utterly invisible until she was right on it.

  Freya curled into a ball; she rebounded off the cleft in the quarry, stones and earth streaming off her shoulder and trickling against her face. She collided with loose stones, taking most of the impact on her wrists and shin. No way to tell up or down, left or right, and she fell for a time before the natural slope of the cut in the quarry arrested her fall.

  Freya stopped rolling at the bottom of the slope, cut, winded, shocked. The throbbing at her fingertips and at her knuckles and elbows foretold incredible pain to come, but she wasn’t bleeding too badly and she could still move.

  She did; she clawed her way back up a near-vertical slope. When a flickering light appeared just above her, she screamed.

  This was it. He had somehow outflanked her, even as she fell down this fresh pit. Of course he had. He’d wanted her to come this way. Freya had followed his design perfectly. He had studied his killing ground well. There was no choice. There had been no option for lateral thinking, no dodge, no emergency exit.

  The light she glimpsed was surely from a candle, burning in a box cut into the earth. It looked like a bunker of some kind, with a rectangular window denuded of glass. It resembled nothing less than an old coach or train carriage, set into the earth – some kind of canteen or clubhouse or even office. It looked like it had moved, or been partly buried, thanks to subsidence.

  Rocks crumbled somewhere above. She perceived movement without actually seeing it, in the extreme left of her visual field.

  If he knew about this pit, and he surely did, he would have outflanked her on the left-hand side, and was probably waiting for her at the top.

  The flickering yellow light in the bunker surely meant death for Freya, but her choices were limited. She climbed towards it.

  The bunker hung over a fresh dip, somewhat precariously balanced. As she got closer, she saw that it was corrugated, like a shipping container, and badly rusted. She tensed, gripped the edges of the empty window frame. There was no glass remaining to slice her fingertips. Freya took the strain on her shoulders, her feet perched on the edge of the defile, and pulled herself inside.

  She landed inside the bunker – not as quietly as she would have liked. The floor was covered in earth. That aside, the candle burned on a wooden table, beside a set of wooden packing crates and, bizarrely, a brass bedstead covered with a filthy mattress. Whatever once covered the walls had long been reclaimed by earth and mould.

  Freya pulled out the wooden crates, but there was something inside them and she struggled to move them, her lower back aching. She gave up, and turned to the bed.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she hissed, and dropped and rolled underneath it.

  She heard stones crumble outside, and for a moment she entertained a horrible notion that the entire structure was going to tip out into the quarry, dislodged by Freya’s movement inside.

  Freya gripped ancient metal spokes underneath the bed frame, and pulled herself off the ground. Turning her head, she had a full view of the empty window.

  A lithe figure raised itself over the lip of the portal, and grunted as it raised itself inside. It dropped onto its haunches with barely any sign of discomfort, got to its feet, and walked into the light.

  Cheryl Levison.

  55

  Levison’s dress was in shreds, and Freya noticed that her feet were bare, smeared with soot, grime and blood. Levison’s eyes showed no surprise. She crossed over to the flickering candle, and immediately snuffed it out. Only a cool moonlight remained, casting a thin, shiny blade across the floor.

  Then she limped over to the bed
. Freya shrunk back, still trying to process what she was seeing from the bottom. It seemed impossible that Levison hadn’t seen her hiding under there.

  Freya let her back touch the floor again.

  Levison gripped the bed. Freya did not know whether to speak, or to cover her mouth and nose to muffle her heavy breathing.

  The bed shifted. Then, barely audible: ‘Freya, if you’re there…’

  ‘Cheryl,’ Freya croaked.

  Levison still leapt in fright. ‘Thank God. I thought you were in here. Listen – we’ve got every chance if we pair up. We can both take him down, and finish it tonight. I’ll see if one of these boxes…’

  Freya edged out from underneath the bed on her elbows. Levison had moved towards the packing crates, attempting to move them aside. ‘These are heavy,’ she grunted. ‘There might be something we can use for a weapon.’

  ‘The top one’s empty,’ Freya said. ‘We can break it up, use the wood as a club.’

  ‘That’s as good an idea as any,’ Levison said. She blew a stray lock of hair away from her forehead, and smiled. Freya felt a burst of confidence. He couldn’t tackle two of them.

  They both heard it clearly. The sound of a lock turning. A door grated open behind the packing crates.

  ‘Boo!’ said a familiar voice.

  Freya shrank back under the bed.

  There was the sound of a dull, heavy connection. Levison sprawled back on the floor. Blood gushed from a wound on her chest, dark and glistening in the thin light. Levison was turned to face Freya, mouth open.

  Then two gloved hands gripped her by the lapels. Levison was hurled on top of the bed with tremendous force. The bedstead crashed back against the wall, the springs bounded off Freya’s face, and she compressed herself back against the wall, as far as she could. All she could see were Cheryl Levison’s bare feet dangling off the end of the bed, and two booted feet stomping towards her.

  She quite clearly saw the axe head, held low, stained along the edge where it had crashed into Levison’s chest.

  ‘Ah I’m glad it was you, first. So glad. Been a long time coming.’

  Levison gurgled, rather than screamed.

  The blade disappeared. Freya saw his stance shift, his feet braced. Freya covered her mouth with her hands. Then the bed, and the wall behind it, quivered as the blade struck home.

  ‘There! There we are!’ The voice distorter had shifted to a near diabolical pitch, the sound of saw blades clashing, or an unbearable level of electronic interference.

  One of Levison’s feet flailed on the edge of the bed. Then he surged forward again, and the same foot was on the floor, along with half of her shin.

  Freya saw the dainty ankle, the manicured toes, the red lipstick, and the floor behind spattered with blood.

  ‘Bitch, the state of you, sneering at the world, sneering at me,’ the Woodcutter raved.

  Levison gurgled again, the bed thrashing, as the blade swung down again.

  ‘Gonna own you!’

  Then her screaming abruptly stopped.

  ‘That’s right. That’s right. That’s the end of it, the end,’ he shrieked. The blade crashed down again, again, and again. Blood dripped through the blankets and the slats above; it pattered onto Freya’s forehead, dribbling into her eyes. She shrank back further. But there was nowhere else to go.

  Above, he bellowed like an animal, crashing down the axe again, and again. One brass slat split in two, its jagged edge dangling just above Freya’s face. Freya saw the axe blade crash through another slat right above her head, almost passing completely through. The edge wiggled, as if in excitement or merriment, as he tugged the blade out.

  Even more enraged, he chopped, chopped, and chopped. Blood pooled on the floor. She heard its insistent dripping. Then he rested the blade on the floor. It was stained right up to the top of the handle in gore.

  ‘Now,’ he wheezed. ‘Now. That’s that. That’s one bitch down. First of a double bill. And now, folks. The main event. What you’ve been waiting for.’

  He got to his knees. The masked face was utterly unreadable, but there was still a note of glee in his voice.

  ‘Surprise!’

  Cheryl Levison’s face appeared beside his. Her blonde hair had come free during the attack, and covered most of her face, glued to the ultra-white skin by her blood. Her head had also come free during the attack, blood still oozing from the terrible wound. Only one eye showed through the strands of hair, wide open in shock and horror.

  Then the head rolled across the floor as he cast it aside. And reached for Freya.

  56

  Freya jabbed the jagged brass slat right into his face.

  She had no idea if she’d hit him in the eye, as she’d hoped, but the effect was perfect. He cried out, clutching his face, getting up to his knees. He turned to her and reached out again, but by that point she had hurtled out from beneath the bed and sprinted towards the open window space. There was a scratch at her leg from his gloves; her feet slithered in a blood smear, and she almost overbalanced. But she reached the window and clambered out.

  As she edged through the narrow space, she saw him get to his feet, and snatch up the axe from the blood-slicked human disaster zone on what remained of the bed. He actually snarled as he ran forward, with the blade poised high above his head.

  The blade cracked through the plaster on the sill, less than two inches from the edge of Freya’s nose, biting deep into the masonry beneath.

  Then she was free, tumbling onto the slope beneath.

  Freya waited, her ear cocked towards the window.

  She heard the sound of the packing crates shifting across the floor, then the hidden door grating open.

  Freya climbed back onto the sill of the window, her toes right on the very edge, then gripped the roof of the structure. She pulled herself on top, shoulder muscles stretched taut, and then she waited again. She heard footsteps; the structure must be connected to others inside the earth. Perhaps it was part of an old control tower, still to be demolished; a common room, or similar, facing out into the upper world. It had the look of a temporary structure, a forerunner of the kind of cabins you saw on building sites. Perhaps it had been temporarily buried when the site was decommissioned.

  The surface of the bunker creaked, and gave slightly under her feet. She peered down for a second, and pushed down, cautiously. The roof was firmer, now.

  Freya gazed up towards the head of the lift apparatus. It seemed to nod at her in the moonlight. That was the target; though she had no doubt that there was a surprise in store for her if she got there. She had crossed beyond the point of fear and was working on sheer adrenaline, lightning-quick connections, every nerve on edge.

  She waited, to see where he would emerge. She stepped forward, heading to the far side of the roof. At one point, it creaked beneath her feet. She ground her teeth and waited, staring at what she was stepping on.

  Silence followed. Then a breath of wind circulated the loose stones of the pit. It cooled the sweat on Freya’s brow. She looked around for a weapon, anything to use; her hands delved into the loose stones nearby.

  Then a dark shape leapt down from the angled folds in the ground above. He was at the other side of the bunker, the part that was sunk into the earth. There was the length of the roof between him and Freya. The hidden door must have opened out on the other side of the hill.

  The surface of the quarry edged down sharply at the edge of the structure Freya was on, far too steep to run down. She should have stayed at the other side, and taken a circular route around the depression.

  While he gibbered, Freya weighed up the stones. None of them were big enough to do much damage. She saw herself casting them at him, and having them merely bounce off.

  He took a step closer. ‘You have options. You can jump down that gap. You might not turn your ankle. Then again, you might. If you do, all you can do is wait until I reach you. Or you could fight. It’s up to you. You have a chance.’

  Frey
a let the stones fall to the ground. ‘Bastard,’ was all she could say, more of a sob than an imprecation. ‘You bastard. Leave me alone.’

  ‘Excellent! Fight it is, then!’ He darted forward onto the roof of the bunker. ‘Just what I always wanted!’

  Then the bunker creaked. The roof gave way. And he fell.

  He let the axe go on reflex, and it disappeared. Somehow, he held on, clinging to the edges of the hole that had opened up with his fingertips. But he was losing his fight with gravity. The dark, masked face bobbed into view, right at her feet. She heard him grunt with the effort of it.

  Freya gawped. Just for a second.

  The part of the bunker she’d stepped across… it was rusted right through. He’d gone right through the roof.

  The face quivered, the gasps perhaps even more pathetic through the voice changer, as he lost his battle to hold on.

  ‘Fight, was it?’ Freya said, thickly. ‘A fight, you said? Don’t you move. Stay right there…’

  She aimed a kick at his face; before it could connect, he let go, and dropped into space. She heard him cry out as he hit the floor below, the room they had just left.

  Freya sagged to her knees for a second, relief, horror and exhaustion hitting her simultaneously.

  She gazed at the yawning hole he’d fallen through, the rusted edging where the panel had simply dropped away.

  ‘Hope you haven’t turned your ankle down there,’ she said. Then she turned towards the slope above.

  Above the bunker, Freya had a near-vertical part to climb, maybe four or five feet high. There were plenty of footholds in solid rock, and she clambered over it. Then the slope eased off into loose stones. It was treacherous; she was soon at the top, on flat ground. Ahead was the lift apparatus, its steel cords still reaching into the earth. The ground was overgrown, full of weeds and bushes; she ignored these as they whipped and tore at her skin. Soon she reached a covered ladder. With a dreadful jolt that drew a cry from her throat, she saw that it was covered with a hatch, with a padlock hanging from it.