Into the Fire

by Peter Liney

  I don’t know, maybe I overdid it, I was a bit rusty, after all. It seemed about right at the time, but somewhere amongst what I said he must’ve panicked, ’cuz he climbed out the window and tried to crawl along to the next apartment. Trouble was, he slipped and fell eleven floors to his death, screaming all the way down, trying to get all his life out before he hit the ground. I broke down the door, looked out and saw him lying there and legged it out of that building as fast as I could.

  I mean—shit, I hadn’t wanted that, not for one moment. Anyone who’d taken Ray’s woman couldn’t be all bad. It also presented me with a real dilemma: did I do the job right or not? For sure, the guy wasn’t gonna be making whoopee with Ray’s ex anymore. On the other hand—and ironically, ’cuz I didn’t want to anyway—I was told “no killing.”

  I guess the point was, I didn’t kill him. It was an accident. So maybe Ray would regard it as the best of both worlds.

  In the end, I decided to just go back to the First Original and say the job was done, that Ray’s “friend” wouldn’t be bothered by the guy again and leave it at that. They didn’t need to know the details, just that it was taken care of.

  Yoshi was astonished when I walked back in—I’d only left a couple of hours before, after all. The good thing was that my reputation obviously still lingered, ’cuz when I told him the job was done, he was more than happy to take my word for it.

  “No problems?”

  “Nope.”

  He disappeared out back, and returned a few minutes later with a takeaway carton. “Something for you,” he said, with a big smile.

  I squashed the carton into my backpack, accepted a complimentary glass of sake and sipped it as he wiped tables. I actually wanted to get going but felt that would be rude. Outside, the smoke continued to ghost past and as I watched, a couple ran by on the other side of the street, disappearing into the darkness. Seconds later a gang appeared, apparently chasing after them.

  “What the hell happened to this place, Yoshi?” I asked.

  He stopped what he was doing and turned to me. “You were better off on the Island.”

  It was weird; that was the very last sentiment I’d expected to hear from anyone once I got back; now I was hearing it all the time.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “The world coming to an end maybe.”

  I waited for him to say more, to explain, but he didn’t. “Are you serious?”

  “Everything is burning, everyone is sick, the crazy people have taken over. What else can it be?”

  “What crazy people?”

  He grunted, like I had a lot to learn. “You’ll find out,” he said. “One night when they come for you.”

  No matter how pleased I was about what I had tucked away in my backpack, how eager to give Lena the news, I still gotta bit of a shock when I finally struggled across the fallen tree and made it back into the churchyard. It was late and I thought the others might’ve been starting to worry, but as it turned out, they’d had distractions of their own.

  I don’t know whether she’d been trying to prove a point or what, but Lena had gone out with the kids—not so far, just across the road and down a couple of side streets, but they’d brought back a few odd bits and pieces: chewy bars, soda, sticky tape for some reason—I don’t know, I guess they just grabbed what they could. The other thing they’d brought back, which, it turned out, had been the reason for their trip, was scissors and a razor.

  The kids were all sitting around up-top, enjoying the last of what had apparently been quite a show. Somehow Delilah had managed to convince Jimmy that a ponytail on a man with barely ten percent of his head covered in hair was distinctly “uncool,” that a shaven head would suit him better.

  “Whoa! Who’s this young whippersnapper?” I joked.

  “Everyone needs a change of image now and then, Big Guy,” he told me proudly. “You should try it.”

  “Yeah. I’ll give it some thought,” I said dryly. “Where’s Lena?”

  Delilah gestured to the crypt. After exchanging private little smirks with the kids I made my way down and found her sorting through our food, trying to work out how much longer it would last.

  “I was beginning to wonder where you were,” she said.

  I never said a word, just walked up and put the takeaway carton in her hands. She frowned and fumbled with it for a moment, finally getting it open.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “What does it feel like?”

  She put her hand in and knew immediately what it was. “Clancy! Where’d you get it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She paused, as if not sure what to say. “Yes . . .”

  “From a guy I used to know,” I told her, knowing that if she thought her operation had been bought at the cost of me committing a crime or putting myself in danger, she wouldn’t be happy.

  “What for?” she demanded.

  In the end I told her the whole story, even about Ray being my half-brother, and the unfortunate accident.

  “What’s he gonna say?” she asked.

  “Don’t matter. I got the dough.”

  “He might come after you.”

  “Yeah—amongst all this madness, a sick old man who can’t walk is gonna find us down here,” I joked. “I did his job.”

  She was plainly concerned, but I suspected it was more than that: that fear of the operation and what it might mean was already starting to set in.

  “In the morning we’ll go and see Dr. Simon,” I told her.

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “We go on as we are now.”

  “You won’t be disappointed?”

  I put my arms around her and gave her a hug. “Only for you,” I told her.

  I don’t know what time I woke up; we’d gone to bed early, but I couldn’t have been asleep that long. There was this noise some way off, over in the direction of the center: a kind of rhythmic rumbling echoing into the night, like the clatter of machinery, and yet it covered such a wide area, as if a major part of the City was vibrating. It went through my head that it was an earthquake, but then I heard something else even more disconcerting: this massed chorus of shouting. How far away it was, I don’t know, but I didn’t get the impression that whoever was making it was being pursued—more like they were doing the pursuing.

  “What is it?” Lena asked. The insistent pounding rhythm and the deep, ground-shaking pulsation plainly unnerving her even more than me.

  “I dunno.”

  We both lay there, silent and still, holding our breath, unable to make any sense of what we were hearing and all the more disturbed ’cuz of it.

  Eventually I couldn’t take it any longer, I got up and stumbled over to the steps, Lena not far behind me.

  Arturo’s sleepy voice came to us from out of the darkness. “What is it?” he mumbled.

  “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep,” Lena whispered.

  Once outside, I realized that whatever it was wasn’t as far away as I first thought. It’s hard to tell in the City, especially with the persistent blanket of smoke deadening everything down, but I guessed not much more than half a mile.

  Still it continued at the same pitch, this insistent rhythm: thump-thump-thump! thump-thump-thump! The mass yelling now interspersed with the occasional scream. And just for a moment I got the impression that it was moving, spreading through the City like an army on the march.

  I turned to Lena. The soft smoky glow of the continuing fire across the street just enough for me to see how worried she looked.

  “I never heard anything like that before,” she said. “What the hell is it?”

  As if in answer, there was the sudden sound of gunfire—a couple of single shots, and then, as if whoever else was involved had been waiting for that signal, a huge, seemingly never-ending volley, dozens of weapons being repeatedly fired.

  Jimmy came hurrying up the steps, followed by Gordie and Hanna. “What’s going on?” he cried, as
if he thought it might have something to do with him, that Infinity were closing in.

  “Beats me,” I said. “But I don’t like the sound of it.”

  There was another massive discharge of weapons, a sporadic spluttering of loud shots crackling across the night, and Jimmy looked even more frightened.

  “Sounds like a war,” Gordie said.

  “You need two sides for a war,” Hanna commented, and then, as if she couldn’t bear it a moment longer, that it only confirmed what she’d said, that this place was worse than the Island, she turned and went back down to the crypt.

  Course, she was right: it ain’t a war if no one’s firing back, and by the sound of it, this was another massacre: Infinity shooting looters again. And yet, I had this nagging feeling there was more to it than that, and that difference was really unsettling me.

  It went on for quite a while; the repeated beating and baying like some battle tactic designed to put the fear of God into the enemy, followed by the occasional crackle of gunfire; ’til, when it finally started to die down, Lena decided she’d also had enough and went back to bed. Jimmy gave a sigh of relief that it wasn’t coming our way, muttered something about Lile probably having seized the chance to get Arturo into their sleeping bag and followed on behind, leaving me alone with Gordie.

  For a while he just sat there, idly gazing at the fire across the street. “When can we leave?” he asked.

  I turned and looked at him, only then realizing it wasn’t an issue anymore: that even if the fires did die down, I still couldn’t go.

  “I gotta stay, Gordie—I gotta see if I can help Lena get her sight restored,” I told him. “You can go—if you can get through. All of you can.”

  “Nah,” he said. “We’ll wait.” And as if that put a seal on it, that it was all decided, he also turned and made his way back down the steps.

  I smiled to myself as I watched him go. He might be just a kid, but sometimes his simple approach to everything was really reassuring.

  I waited another ten minutes or so, just to see if the noise would start up again. When it didn’t, I too returned to my sleeping bag: slipping in beside Lena, doing up the zip every last quarter of an inch and putting my arms around her.

  I don’t know what the hell happened out there, but it’d heightened this feeling that the threat to us was growing by the day. For some reason it reminded me of what Yoshi said earlier, about the crazy people coming for us—and that maybe it wouldn’t be much longer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The following morning, almost at first light, I was up and out. Lena and me were heading up to see Dr. Simon later, hopefully for the operation, but first I wanted to know what had gone on the previous night.

  If you turned left at the entrance to the churchyard and headed up the hill, you eventually got to Victory Square and all the many streets that led off from there. If you turned right, it was a bit more leafy, more residential, though not the nicest part of town. All the commotion the previous night had been somewhere up near the Square—and even if it hadn’t been, it was a pretty good place to pick up a rumor or two.

  In fact, I didn’t need to ask anyone anything. One of the streets leading off the Square was cordoned off by Specials and I promptly took the next street over and followed it down. Block after block, every time I tried to turn, finding it was still closed off, which was kind of frustrating. I was about to give up and head back to Lena when I saw this empty office building and figured that if I broke in on this side, I should be able to make my way through to the other and maybe get a look at what had gone on.

  There was a sturdy chain and padlock clamping the door handles together, but the hinges are generally the weak point and after a few minutes of searching I found a scaffolding pole I used to lever the doors apart.

  I went up a couple of flights of stairs and made my way down a long corridor that plainly hadn’t been used or cleaned in quite a while. Eventually I found myself in an office on the far side of the building.

  I looked out on this sort of pedestrian precinct, with a few potted trees and a lot of benches dotted about. It looked like the sort of place you might eat your packed lunch—but not that day. It was thick with Infinity Specials all busily clearing up, taking stuff away, hosing things down. You didn’t have to be a genius to work out why, not with those dark stains everywhere. On the far side there was a line of slightly sinister-looking white trucks: like field ambulances, windowless apart from heavily tinted slatted screens, and as I looked, a body-bag was disappearing into the back of one of them.

  So that was it; Infinity had been wielding its iron fist again. And yet, still something didn’t feel quite right. This was where the shooting had happened for sure—the buildings were pitted and scarred, windows had been shot out, fires were still burning—but the variety of the damage set me wondering. Normally, if there’s a force involved—army, Specials, whatever—you’ll see damage caused by two or three types of weapons at the most. But all kinds had been used: I could see the scoring of lasers, the dotted lines of automatic weapons, even the precision of high-powered hunting rifles. What the hell had happened? It looked like some kind of wild come-one, come-all bloodfest.

  As I watched I realized there were far too many Specials around for my liking, and who knew what kind of surveillance they’d set up? They could’ve been scanning the building for life forms at that very moment. The last thing I needed on the day I was taking Lena to the doctor was to get picked up. And taking one last glance out, I quickly hurried away.

  A little later, with noticeably few words being exchanged between us, Lena and me were once again making our way through the smoke to the hills, arriving at the security gates and asking them to inform Dr. Simon, being made to wear pressure bracelets again, the same disapproving driver coming down to collect us. This time, I gotta say, the doc didn’t keep us waiting—in fact his attitude was altogether more friendly, more positive: maybe ’cuz we had the money, ’cuz he realized we were serious about this.

  The first thing I did was to insist on paying him, handing over the entire ten grand—well, less a few hundred I kept back for emergencies—even though he told me it wasn’t necessary, that he didn’t even know what the final cost was going to be. But I just wanted it out of the way, for his staff to know that, no matter how we looked, we paid our bills.

  All the tests were really encouraging. He’d matched up a program to her profile and told us he was convinced he could give Lena back partial sight at the least—and that was something he’d never mentioned before. The only disappointing news was that he wanted to keep her in overnight.

  “It’s a fairly standard operation but the computer needs to monitor her for at least twelve hours, run its checklist,” he told us. “It’s also critical her eyes aren’t allowed to dry out. The last thing she needs is to go out in that smoke.”

  “Can I stay with her?” I asked.

  For a moment he just stared at me, tugging his shirt cuffs out from beneath his jacket sleeves, as if subconsciously wanting everyone to see his gold cufflinks. “No, Clancy, I’m sorry. She’ll need to get all the rest she can.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Lena said, taking my hand.

  “Stay for the operation,” Dr. Simon suggested, “just to put your mind at ease. After that, you’ll both need a good night’s sleep.”

  It took a little bit of rescheduling, but in the end—as good as his word—he booked her in for the final operating slot of the day.

  I stayed with her as long as I could, even though as the day wore on neither of us knew what to say. I had no idea what this really meant to her—how could I? I’d never been blind; I didn’t know what it was to be in endless darkness, missing all the colors of the rainbow, the sun setting over the sea, the expressions on a child’s face. Nor could I begin to imagine the torture of trying to find your way around somewhere utterly unfamiliar, having no idea if you were about to collide with something or what repercussions there might be. And maybe that was the
reason why I was even more nervous than she was. For sure, I wasn’t helping matters, so when they finally came to tell me to leave, I think both of us were that bit relieved.

  I waited out in the corridor, leafing through magazines I didn’t have the concentration for, making the situation worse by going to the restroom and catching sight of myself in the mirror.

  The next time I saw Lena there was every chance this was what she’d be looking at: a sad-faced, dull-eyed, greying old bag of bones. I took a deep breath, determined to ignore it; this wasn’t about me, it was about her.

  It was surprisingly quick. Dr. Simon came out less than three-quarters of an hour later, smiling as he approached, which I hoped was a good sign.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Couldn’t have gone better. Now we just have to wait.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “Clancy, no,” he told me, as if we’d been over this before. “More than anything, she needs to rest.”

  “Just a look—I won’t even let her know I’m there.”

  He shook his head, and I guess he thought I was being a bit of a pain in the ass, which was probably true.

  “Go home. Come back tomorrow. With any luck she’ll be able to go home with you.”

  In all my life I don’t think I’ve ever felt as alone as I did when I finally forced myself to walk away from that clinic. I kept glancing back, hoping she’d appear at a window somewhere, but of course I was being foolish. From what the doc said, she was probably fast asleep.

  Oh God, keep her safe, will ya. Let me come back tomorrow and find everything the way she’d want it to be; just for this one night, forget everyone else on this planet and devote all your time to her.