The Distance: A Thriller

by Helen Giltrow

  There’s a dull light in the room. The only window has a piece of blanket nailed across the frame to block out the day, but strands of light creep around the edges. Bits of scavenged furniture are pushed against three of the walls: a chair, a rickety picnic table with a plastic bowl on it, a chest of drawers in cheap fake-pine laminate. On the fourth wall someone’s been keeping count: there are marks on the plaster, vertical lines in clusters of five, dozens of them. Some are neat, some crude and wonky. Some look like they’ve been gouged into the wall with a blunt nail. Clothes and junk and bedding are scattered across the floor.

  The window is two meters away.

  He pulls the cannula out of the vein on the back of his hand and rises slowly, testing the pain at each stage. Another sharp jab when he breathes in too deeply. Could be a cracked rib. His chest, arms, thighs are bruised—marks from fists and boots—and one knuckle has been grated into a mess of dirty shredded skin and raw flesh. As he crosses the room, everything hurts.

  At the window he peels back the edge of the blanket.

  Daylight outside. A drop to the ground, two stories. An expanse of tarmac marked with the scuffed white outlines of parking spaces. Ahead and to his right, an L-shaped block of low-rise housing in red-black brick. To his left, on the far side of the car park, an eight-foot wire fence, a cluster of people loitering around a gate. Beyond the fence there’s a road, and then the three-story council blocks begin.

  He is inside a compound. Quillan’s compound. Already, automatically, he’s measuring the angles between the buildings, looking for the blind spots, the dead ground, but it’s a prison within a prison. He won’t be leaving yet.

  He finds a stained bucket in a corner and pisses into it, then he lies down again.

  After a while a different man—balding, with weak harmless features—brings him a bowl of food and a spoon. He says his name is Vinnie. “I’m leaving soon,” he adds confidingly.

  “That right?”

  The man nods, pleased with himself, and goes out.

  Swallowing still hurts, but he keeps the food down. He crawls back under the bedding and sleeps again.

  Later—it must be early afternoon now, from the light—the sharp-featured man brings him clothes but no boots. “Here,” he says, “get dressed.” He gives Johanssen a slow look, then he adds, “Name’s Riley.”

  “Jackson.”

  “I know.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Jimmy,” Johanssen says suddenly, “Brice broke his arm.”

  “I know what Brice did.”

  “Why Jimmy?”

  “Nicked stuff,” Riley says. “Photos.” He goes again.

  Johanssen dresses slowly, pushing the pain away. The clothes fit him, but they have someone else’s smell.

  On the far side of the tarmac yard, the compound gate rattles. Running footsteps approach—four men? No, three—carrying something. There’s shouting. He hobbles to the window, but they’re inside already: downstairs a door bangs. More shouting, several voices this time. Instructions? He limps to the door of the room, opens it. Outside, a narrow staircase goes down to a landing.

  Are they coming for him? How much does he have left? Where are his limits now?

  But the noise has formed a knot somewhere below. After a moment he begins to make his way down, wincing at each step. The shouting intensifies.

  He pauses on the first-floor landing. Below him, at the foot of the stairs, a door’s open a crack, and the shouting comes from beyond it. He waits. No one comes through the door.

  He goes to the foot of the stairs and peers through the crack.

  On a treatment bed a man’s body is leaking blood. Hands reach across it, cutting clothing away, exposing wounds, applying pressure. Out of sight Riley says, “What the fuck’s he doing here? Gates are open, aren’t they?” No one answers him.

  “They should have taken him out,” Riley says a moment later, but more quietly, as if the argument’s dying within him.

  He’s not the one in charge here.

  Johanssen shifts his position, and she comes into view: the gaunt woman with the blade. She’s working on the body, fast, efficient. Someone asks her a question, and she raps out a reply without looking up. He doesn’t take in what she says.

  Once she was polished, controlled, aloof. The photo Fielding gave him proves it. Without it you’d never guess.

  Before three weeks are out, she will be dead.

  He drags himself back up the stairs to the muffled room. Her room. Her clothes, her junk, her nest of bedding by the door. Her mirror screwed to the wall above the washing-up bowl—in it his face is bruised and swollen and split, one eye still half closed. And the marks on the wall, they’re hers, too.

  He crouches, ignoring the pain, and goes through her possessions. In a corner under a dirty jacket he finds a handmade wooden box with the name CATE carved carefully into the lid.

  Cate. Her name is Cate.

  Quillan is the authority here. Quillan runs the Program. And Brice works for him, Brice punches with Quillan’s weight behind him. But this woman Cate has another sort of power.

  In the yard—yesterday, was it yesterday?—Brice or any one of his crew could have forced her down, stamped on her hand, used the knife on her. But she held a blade against Brice’s throat and said, Do not fucking make me, and no one touched her. She said Quillan’s name like a threat, and Quillan backed her against his own man.

  Downstairs the noise has faded. They’ve evacuated the man, or he’s dead. Johanssen’s staring at the marks on the wall, the little clusters of five, when Riley walks back in carrying his boots. “Put them on,” he says.

  Johanssen does. Riley watches as he rises to his feet—Johanssen tries to keep a lid on the twitching pain, tries not to let the hesitation show—then looks him up and down. “Tough bastard, aren’t you? Smart money said you were a stretcher case.”

  He leads Johanssen down both flights of stairs and through the door at the bottom. Just inside it there’s a slick patch that smells of bleach. The room beyond is an improvised clinic. Chairs, a couple of trolleys, a curtained recess, a sink, cupboards, a cluster of drip stands. Shelves stacked with medical supplies, cartons of gloves and dressings, odd-sized plastic bottles. A newish defibrillator in a rack on the wall.

  Riley sees Johanssen looking. He says, “How do you like our overnight treatment facility?” His voice sketches bitter quotation marks around the words. “Oh, during the day you’re fine, walk-in clinics, armored ambulances, the lot. But at night? Six o’clock they close the gates, no one in or out—except for emergencies, only you can be lying in the street under their noses with your guts hanging out, they don’t give a stuff. Too risky, isn’t it? Could be a setup, could be an ambush. Safer to just look the other way, safer for them anyway. So”—he surveys the room, the tatty furniture, the improvised kit—“it’s this or a body bag. And it ticks a box in the rehabilitation brief, doesn’t it? Shows we’re learning social responsibility.” His glance switches to Johanssen again. “Happy memories, eh?” he says. Maybe he sees uncertainty in Johanssen’s face. “No?”

  Johanssen shakes his head.

  “You fought,” Riley says, half resentment, half admiration. “You fought all the fucking way.”

  On a work surface a small sterilization unit hums and winks to itself. A flip-top bin has SURGICAL WASTE scrawled on the lid in uneven black marker. A smaller one is labeled SHARPS.

  “And this place is Quillan’s?”

  “Yeah, he’s big on altruism, didn’t you notice? Or maybe it’s because then he gets to say who comes in here, and if it’s four in the morning and you’re bleeding out and he won’t let you in, you’re dead meat. It’s hearts and minds, isn’t it? Hearts and minds.”

  “You work here?”

  “Like a fucking slave. We’re a man down.” Riley pulls a face. “Natural wastage.”

  “Jimmy got medevaced,” Johanssen says.

  “You’
re quick, aren’t you.”

  “But not me.”

  Riley shows his teeth. “Oh no, my friend, not you. Brice thinks he’s earned his fun with you.”

  “But Cate won’t let him.”

  When he uses her name, Riley’s eyes go still, but all he says is “So who’s going to win, eh?” He jerks his head toward a door. “Out.”

  The next room is full of mismatched chairs, with a muddy vinyl floor and a pay phone on the wall. Through another door, and they’re outside. It’s late afternoon fading into winter dusk: the buildings around them are in shadow, but the sky’s a bright remote blue. A group’s still huddled by the gate in the wire-mesh fence, their cigarette smoke rising through the cold air. One of them, a woman, laughs, and the sound rings out clear across the tarmac.

  Riley leads him across the yard. Johanssen walks like an old man. He won’t be able to run.

  He glances back once, to the building they’ve just left. It must have been built as a row of shops. The big plate-glass windows are blanked out with cardboard.

  There’s a guard at the main door to the housing block. He steps aside, and in they go, up the flight of stairs and along a corridor to a door where another man waits, a big man with the damaged face of a boxer. He opens the door as they reach it. Riley stops. “In.”

  Through a tiny hallway and into the same room. The teenage saint and the Madonna on the wall, china gleaming quietly in the cabinet, the kitchen mugs on their wooden tree through the arch. Quillan’s in the same chair as before, but he’s alone, his TV switched off. This time Johanssen has earned his complete attention.

  He nods briefly toward a chair. His bloodshot gaze doesn’t leave Johanssen’s face. Johanssen sits. The door closes.

  For a moment they stay like that, both of them waiting. A clock ticks sedately among the tureens. Outside, in the yard, someone shouts. Neither of them reacts.

  Then Quillan says, “So, Mr. Jackson, what are we going to do with you?”

  Johanssen says, “I don’t want trouble—”

  “Bit late for that, though, isn’t it? You humiliated Brice, publicly. Good move?”

  “Brice told me to impress you.”

  Quillan sits back in his chair. “Brice isn’t happy about what you did to him.” He pauses, as if he’s expecting a reply. Johanssen says nothing.

  “Now, giving you back to him would cheer him up. A little present, a toy for him to play with. You’ve seen what he can do … And that’s just the start. Brice doesn’t kill, you know—doesn’t get the same entertainment value from a corpse. But he’ll make you wish he did. So where do we go from here? Back to the little room downstairs? Brice’s gang with their boots and their buckets?” He narrows his eyes. “Look at you now, Mr. Jackson. Look at you. Barely walking. You’re good with the pain, aren’t you? But this time he won’t be starting from scratch. You’re primed. Every bruise, every cut … he’ll have you begging in seconds. But he won’t stop this time, not after the first finger, or the second. Thorough, is our Mr. Brice. Very thorough.”

  Quillan looks at him for a long moment, speculatively: that scenario’s playing out in his head.

  Suddenly he asks, “Where’d you learn to fight? America?”

  “Here and there.”

  “You’ve been trained.”

  “Picked it up as I went along.”

  Then Quillan asks, “So what is it you want? Don’t tell me. You want Mr. Brice to conveniently forget what you did to him. You want a nice quiet life—”

  “I want to work for you.”

  “Oh yes?” He snorts, softly, to himself. “And what could you do for me? Use your fists? There’s not what you’d call a shortage of violent men here.”

  “Clinic’s a man down.”

  “Is that my problem?”

  “Clinic’s part of your plan for this place.”

  “So now you know all about my plan, do you?”

  “Clinic helps keep you in charge here. Hearts and minds.”

  “And you can help with that? What, you’re a doctor now?”

  “No. But I can pack a wound. I can splint a break. I can put a line in. I can use a defibrillator, I can do CPR. I can recognize a bleed on the brain. I can drain a lung. I don’t need much sleep, and I don’t want anything in return.”

  “Except Brice off your back.”

  “Yes. Except that.”

  Quillan leans back in his chair, still staring at Johanssen. “First-aid skills also something you just picked up as you went along?” Then he turns to the man waiting by the door. “Get her in here.”

  She walks in fifteen minutes later. She glances at Johanssen once, a flat look that slides off him, then she turns to stare at Quillan.

  Quillan raises his hands. “What can I say. He came back.”

  She’s lost all trace of the gloss she had in the photograph. Her skin’s grayish, and she has that look of war-zone exhaustion he’s seen before in cities under bombardment, sleep deprived and strung out on adrenaline. Her clothes are too big for her, and her hair’s raggedly cut as if she did it herself, in a hurry and in poor light. She looks like she’s already heard the question and the answer is no.

  Quillan says mildly, “Mr. Jackson wants to work at the clinic. He says he can help.” Quillan turns to Johanssen. “Tell her.”

  He begins again. “I can put a line in, I can splint a break, I can do CPR, I can use a defibrillator—”

  She snorts. “And Brice?” she says to Quillan.

  “I’ll put in a word.” Quillan smiles reassuringly, then spikes the smile: “Provided he passes the entrance exam.” He turns to Johanssen. “All this talk, but talk’s the easy part, isn’t it? You can’t make these claims about your abilities and expect us to take them on trust.” His gaze snaps back to the woman. “The next one bleeding out is his. No interventions.”

  They lock him in a room with a wired-glass panel on the door. There’s a chair, and sometimes he sits, and sometimes he gets up and stretches in an effort to stop his injuries from stiffening, stop the bruises from clogging his movements. His throat’s dry and sore, but they haven’t given him water. From time to time people peer in at him through the glass, but no one enters.

  Outside the daylight shrinks and fades. Four o’clock, five. Somewhere close by, the woman who calls herself Cate is arguing with Quillan, but it’s an argument she loses: the look on her face tells him that as soon as she opens the door.

  “You coming?” But she’s gone before he can reply.

  He limps behind her, back across the compound to the row of boarded-up shops. It’s dark now, the sky black hazed yellow by streetlights, the floodlights white at the compound gate; strips of light show at the tops of the blanked-out shopwindows, where the sheets of cardboard don’t quite reach. She walks through the central door, into the room full of chairs. There’s a man by the pay phone, about to push a prepaid card into the slot, but one look at Cate and he puts the phone down and goes.

  She swings around to face him. “Is this a joke?” she demands. “Is it?”

  He pulls himself upright, and all his injuries sing out.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” she says, “you can hardly walk. So what’s the plan, huh? There is a plan, isn’t there?”

  “I meant what I said. I can do all those things.”

  “Oh, I hope so,” she says, “because if you’re lying and you fuck up, Brice can have you.”

  “I won’t fuck up—” he says, but she’s already turned on her heel and is heading for the door into the clinic.

  “Wait,” he says. “How often do you get people bleeding out?”

  Her hand’s on the door. She turns, and there’s that flat look again, the mouth a compressed line, the eyes cold. She says, “Tonight I’d put money on it.”

  Three people are in the clinic: Riley, the middle-aged man Vinnie, and a boy who can’t be more than seventeen. The boy turns his head first: he has the dark, depthless gaze of the psychologically damaged. Vinnie’s mopping the fl
oor. Riley’s over by the counter, laying out instruments on a blue paper sheet. He glances up; his eyes meet Cate’s.

  “We got us a new recruit,” she says.

  Riley looks at Johanssen and then back at Cate. “He should be on a fucking trolley, not—”

  “Make sure he can cope with a bleeder.”

  Riley gapes at her. Then he says, “How soon?”

  “How should I know,” she says.

  Just then the door bangs open behind her, and one of Brice’s lot, the one with bad skin and yellow teeth—the one with the funnel and the tube—saunters in smoking a cigarette. He grins and nods at Cate—her stare jabs back at him—then he turns lazily to Johanssen. “Don’t mind me,” he says. He takes up a position against a wall. He looks pleased with himself.

  Soon, Johanssen thinks, and the tension in his chest rises a notch.

  “I’m fine,” Johanssen says, to anyone who’ll listen. Yellow Teeth sniggers.

  Riley says, “You done this before?”

  “Yes.” Part of his Spec Ops training. And once in the field, for real.

  “They live?” Riley reads his expression. “Christ. All right. You know what you need?”

  He’s still grabbing dressings and kit from the shelves when Brice walks in.

  Johanssen’s got his back to the door, but on Cate’s indrawn breath he turns.

  She must have snatched up a syringe—the needle wavers in the air—but Brice doesn’t even glance at her. His gaze finds Johanssen. He smiles.

  He says, “Mr. Jackson … I hear we’re getting another demonstration of your skills.”

  Riley looks like he’s just put down whatever he was holding in case he has to step in, throw his weight around. Vinnie has backed up against the wall, his knuckles whitening around the mop handle—he doesn’t like confrontation, wants it all to go away. The blank-eyed boy simply stands there, neutral, unfathomable, his head tilted to one side: things just got interesting. Over by the door, two new arrivals—Quillan’s?—shift on the balls of their feet. Yellow Teeth pries himself away from the wall, grinning.