‘Get in here,’ the gunman shouted. There was more rustling, then a girl appeared, her hair almost as red as the rings around her eyes. She stepped out and another boy squeezed through the fence. He looked the same age as Cal, tall but slightly overweight. They both wore the same expression: Help us.
‘You better tell me what I’m doing here,’ the man said, jabbing the gun like it was a spear. ‘Why everybody in the goddamned world is trying to kill me. Why you’re inside my head screwing with my thoughts.’
Cal held up his hands and took a step back, slipping on the rubble-strewn ground.
‘I said, DON’T MOVE!’ the man barked. His finger was on the trigger, and it was tense. Even from here Cal could see where the joint had blanched. If the guy so much as sneezed then their brains would be splattered all over the Boo Boo Station.
‘There’s no need for that, mate,’ said Cal, more tremor than voice. ‘We’re not going to do anything.’
‘Got that right,’ said the man, still walking towards them. The barrel of the shotgun was like two dark, unblinking eyes. ‘How many of you are here?’
Brick and Cal glanced at each other.
‘How many?’ the man demanded.
‘Five,’ blurted Cal. ‘One of us is injured.’
‘Where?’
‘Back there,’ said Cal, tilting his head over his shoulder. ‘In the pavilion. We’re just kids.’
‘Fatty, go check they’re not armed.’ The big kid didn’t budge. ‘Do it!’ the man yelled, making the boy jump so hard his flesh wobbled beneath his shirt. He trotted over, apologising beneath his breath as he patted down Cal then Brick. His eyes didn’t rise above their kneecaps. He scampered out of the way as soon as he’d finished.
‘Nothing,’ he whispered.
‘Right, turn and start walking,’ said the gunman. ‘Take me to where the others are, hands on your heads.’
‘What do you want?’ asked Cal, obeying. He didn’t really want his back to the guy but he didn’t see how he had a choice.
‘I want answers,’ said the man. ‘Shift, or I swear you’ll be dead before you hit the floor.’
Cal started back the way they’d come, his hands clamped in his hair. Brick walked by his side, his face pale and downturned.
This is going to get nasty. The thought hit Cal hard. It wasn’t just a fear, it was a premonition. Someone is going to get hurt.
And those words were still ringing in his mind when he stepped out of the shadows and the gun went off.
Rilke
Fursville, 11.22 a.m.
‘Something’s wrong.’
Rilke looked up from her brother when Daisy spoke. The younger girl was sitting on a chair beside the sofa, huddled into herself and shivering. They’d been here for hours now, throwing more blankets on cold, unresponsive Schiller and sorting out the food into piles. Daisy had tried to start a few conversations but Rilke had been too tired to throw back more than a couple of words. This time, though, there was an urgency in her voice.
‘What?’ Rilke asked. There were plenty of things wrong, Schiller for one, his skin like marble, radiating cold. And the world. Right now the whole world was wrong.
‘It’s Cal,’ said Daisy, getting to her feet and standing there trembling. In the flickering candlelight there was something not quite real about her, something fairy-like in her saucer-shaped eyes and her ghosted skin. ‘He’s going to die.’
‘What?’ Rilke said again, frowning. ‘Cal? Why?’
‘I don’t know why. I . . . I just know.’
Rilke used the sofa to pull herself up off her knees, brushing the dust from her skirt. Her pulse was fast, and in its rhythm she understood that Daisy wasn’t being hysterical, she wasn’t making it up. Cal was in danger.
‘Is it Brick?’ she asked. There was something about the tall boy Rilke didn’t trust, something in his face, and in the way he’d avoided answering her when she’d asked about his girlfriend. He’d looked guilty. Daisy shook her head, her eyes on the floor and yet also somewhere else, somewhere far away.
‘It’s not Brick, he’s in danger too. We all are.’
‘Come on,’ said Rilke, holding out her hand. Daisy took it, her skin fever-hot compared to Schiller’s. They began to walk towards the door but Daisy stopped, shaking herself free and running to the far side of the restaurant. She slid a carrier bag out from beneath a table, rummaging inside it and pulling out something big. She ran back across the room and held it out to Rilke.
It was a gun.
‘Where did you get this?’ Rilke asked as she took the weapon. It was heavier than it looked. She’d used guns before, shotguns mainly. Schiller loved to shoot the pigeons and the rats for target practice and she’d often gone out with him, mainly because there wasn’t much else to do.
‘It’s Cal’s,’ Daisy said, her tone more urgent now. She kept glancing at the door. ‘Brick hid it, but I found it when we were going through the bags. Come on, please.’
They linked hands again, Daisy practically dragging her out of the restaurant, down the stairs and out through the chained-up fire exit.
‘Wait,’ said Rilke. ‘Daisy, hang on.’
Daisy’s only response was to increase her speed, racing past the pavilion’s main doors towards the front of the park. Rilke trotted to keep up, and she was about to call out again when she saw them at the other end of the overgrown path.
Cal and Brick emerged first, their hands on their heads like prisoners of war. Then came the long, steel barrel of a shotgun, followed by a man, a teenager maybe, in a green jacket.
‘Do it,’ Daisy said, skidding to a halt. Do what? Rilke thought, shoot him? And, incredibly, Daisy screamed: ‘Yes! Shoot him now!’
There was no time to question it. Rilke lifted the pistol, using both thumbs to pull back the stubborn hammer. She aimed past the notch on the barrel until she found the man’s face. He had a dark beard, his eyes squinting against the morning sun. She pressed both her forefingers against the trigger, a storm of thoughts all shrieking at once inside her head – You can’t do this, you can’t shoot a man! Then, as if they had been vacuumed up, they vanished, leaving only one, leaving only Daisy:
Do it.
She squeezed. The gun resisted, then the trigger clicked. The shot was deafening, almost jolting the pistol out of her hands. She managed to cling on to it, peering through the smoke to see that Brick and Cal were on the ground.
Oh God, I hit one of them, she thought. Then she saw them both squirming in the dirt, trying to crawl away. The guy with the shotgun was still standing, but there was a crimson tear down the left side of his face, stretching from his cheek to his ear. She’d grazed him. His expression of shock was so extreme it was almost comical. It seemed to take him an age to see Rilke, and as he started to swing his shotgun round she took a step forward, aiming her weapon at his head.
‘The next one won’t miss,’ she said, staring him dead on. ‘I swear to God.’
The shotgun stayed down, pointed at Cal’s back. Both boys looked up at her, their faces distorted by fear. The gunman’s shock was fast becoming anger; even from where she was standing Rilke could feel it burning off him. But there was something else, too, the same weird, clanging silence she’d felt just before meeting Daisy and the others. This guy was one of them.
He is, but he’s a bad man. Please Rilke, do it, I don’t want Cal to die.
Had Daisy said that or was it just in her head? Either way the little girl’s voice blasted everything else away.
‘Drop it,’ she shouted, her finger tensing. Was she supposed to cock the gun again? ‘Do it right now. Right now.’
Blood was trickling from the man’s wound, but he still wasn’t letting go of his weapon. She thumbed back the hammer, the click barely audible over the feedback-like whine in her ears.
Please Rilke, Daisy’s voice again, right in the flesh of her brain. I know you don’t believe me but—
‘He’s going to kill him,’ Daisy said out loud,
the switch making Rilke reel. The little girl was sobbing now, her words fractured. ‘He’s going to die.’
The gunman tensed, his face screwed into a wicked grimace. He raised the gun slightly, so that the barrel was pointing right at Cal’s head. Cal was on his back now, his arms up in front of him, frozen like one of the sculptures in the White Witch’s palace. The bearded guy never took his eyes from Rilke.
‘Yeah?’ he sneered. ‘What if I—’
Rilke pulled the trigger, bracing herself this time. The gun barked but she let her arms absorb the recoil, watching as the man staggered back, a perfectly round hole punched into his forehead. Even though he was dead – he had to be dead – he still stared at her, something keeping his body rigid, upright, something stopping him from crashing to the—
White heat, burning bright as phosphorous.
The man exploded, like a nuclear bomb detonating in the middle of the park. A shock wave tore outwards, crumpling the food booths on either side of the path. Rilke didn’t even have time to scream as she saw it hurricane towards her, ripping her from the ground and sending her spinning backwards into the wall of the pavilion.
It could have been a fraction of a second or a million years later that she remembered how to open her eyes. Debris still flew from the impact of the shock, moving in slow motion as if time had been knocked off its axis. Metal poles were falling ridiculously slowly from the big wheel, thudding into the ground like giant javelins. Brick and Cal were in mid-air, rolling like rag dolls as they were hurled away from the source of the detonation.
The man, the gunman, was suspended over the path, his arms out to his sides like he was being crucified. His whole body shimmered, red hot. Suddenly his head snapped back, his spine arching, and his body seemed to split, like two ropes on either side had just been pulled taut. Inside him was an inferno, almost too bright to look at, but Rilke didn’t turn away, she didn’t blink. She couldn’t.
Because something was coming out of the man. It could have been another man except this one was too big, and this one was made of fire – ferocious blue-white flames. Its distended jaw hung open in a silent scream, and the fire stretched outwards from its back, unfurling like twin sails. Its eyes blazed, and in those broken seconds the thing looked at Rilke, burning right into the fabric of her soul. Then another shock wave ripped outwards, atomising the man’s body and the thing which clawed its way out of it, blowing the hotdog stand to ash before slamming into her.
She dropped into darkness.
Daisy
Fursville, 11.48 a.m.
Daisy was burning.
She sat up, noticing that her skirt was smouldering gently, slapping at it until the dull embers died out. Smoke hung in the air all around her, a silvery gauze that looked more like morning mist. It smelled bad, like when her mum sometimes pulled hair from the brush and threw it on the fire. She was lying in the middle of the weed-littered path that led past the pavilion up to the sea. What was she doing here? She clambered to her feet, staring through the smoke to see that one of the food places, the one with the big soft drink on the roof, was on fire.
The whole place was a mess. The little shack on the other side of the path, the one with the hot dog, was totally gone. Further down was a huge crater in the concrete, so charred that it looked like a vast hole in the ground. The kind a giant spider might suddenly crawl out of.
There was a man standing there, a man with a gun. And with that thought the memories returned, fighting each other to be first in line. She’d seen something in her head, like a badly filmed home movie of Cal being shot. It had been horrible. She’d told Rilke, and they’d come out here with the gun.
Rilke. Daisy couldn’t sense her, the way she’d been sensing people recently, those little ice cubes in her mind. She couldn’t see Cal or Brick up there in her head either. There was an ice cube, though, one with a room that looked like a dentist’s place, with the big chair. She could see a poster with a kitten on the ceiling, but there were no people in the ice cube.
What had happened? Rilke had shot the man, hadn’t she? And it was okay, because he had been a nasty man, a really nasty man. He was the one who had been going to kill Cal. It hadn’t been very nice, watching the man die, even though he’d deserved it. But then what? Daisy had seen something inside the man, a fire that howled, that tried to pull itself loose. She must have passed out and seen those things in a dream.
So why the smoke? And where was everybody? She started down the path, feeling woozy. Great big metal needles stuck out of the ground, like hedgehog bristles. Daisy looked up, wondering if they’d fallen from the big wheel. It was lucky nobody had been spiked. There was a pile of rags up against the pavilion doors, and she almost dismissed it until she realised who it was.
‘Rilke!’ Daisy yelled, stumbling over the cracked ground. The girl’s face was covered with soot, and there was no sign of life. ‘Help!’ Daisy yelled. ‘Somebody please help!’
What were you supposed to do if someone wasn’t alive? Breathe into their mouth or something. They’d done it at school with a plastic dummy, the ABC rule. ‘A’ was for . . . A heartbeat? It didn’t sound right, but Daisy pressed her fingers against Rilke’s neck, praying to feel something there. Pulse-pulse-pulse-pulse, rapid, like a rabbit’s. Daisy almost cried with relief, stroking Rilke’s long, dark hair away from her face.
‘Is anyone here?’ she called out again. Then, more softly, ‘I’ll be right back, Rilke, I’m going to find help. It’s going to be okay.’
She set off again, heading for the front of the park, towards that gaping crater. Please don’t let anything come out of it.
‘Hello? Cal? I need you!’
‘Daisy?’ It wasn’t so much a shout as a groan, uttered from somewhere to her right. She walked towards the splintered remains of the hot-dog stand, treading carefully over the rubble. There were a few crates beyond, and half a breeze-block wall that was covered in scribbled writing. Past it she could see a pair of feet, one in a trainer and the other in just a sock. They were moving.
‘Cal?’ She ran round the wall to see Cal sitting on the path. He was a mess too, and some of his hair was missing, giving him a funny bald patch just above his right ear. He saw her coming and tried to get up, collapsing onto his bum. Daisy crouched down beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder. There was a big rip across the front of his T-shirt. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I think so,’ he said, patting his hands over his body. ‘Seem to be all there, anyway.’ He smiled, but it obviously caused him quite a bit of pain. ‘Help me up, yeah?’
Daisy grabbed his arm and he used it to pull himself to his feet. He stood for a moment, his hands on his knees, his eyes scrunched shut.
‘What the hell happened?’ he asked. ‘I feel like I was hit by a lorry.’
‘Guys?’ Daisy turned to see Brick limping towards them down the same path. He had coal-dark rings around his eyes, like a raccoon, and there was blood dripping from his left arm. Daisy was glad to see him, especially when he gave her a weak smile. ‘You alright?’
‘I’m okay, but Rilke is hurt. She’s not waking up. She needs help.’
‘She breathing?’ Brick asked. Daisy nodded. If she had a heartbeat then she had to be breathing, didn’t she? Brick coughed, hacking up a rust-coloured gob of spit. ‘Got to get the fire out first. If people see it they’ll call the fire brigade or send for the police.’
‘Got any water?’ Cal said. Brick shook his head, jogging towards the burning stall. Cal ran after him, hobbling in his one shoe.
Daisy followed, still not wanting to get too close to the crater. By the time she had skirted around the edge Brick and Cal were pulling the front wall of the drinks stand free, releasing a fresh plume of smoke. The fire flared up as it gorged on the fresh supply of air but Brick didn’t hesitate, stamping and kicking on the flames until the plume of smoke began to wither and die. He stumbled away, coughing so much that Daisy didn’t know how he could manage a breath.
�
��Where are the rest of them?’ he said when he had finished, clutching his wounded arm. Tears painted black stripes down his face. ‘You see them?’
The rest of who? she thought as Brick and Cal set off again. She ran after them as they wove through the spikes in the ground, trying to keep up, not wanting to be left on her own.
‘There,’ she heard Brick yell. He turned the corner by the carousel, vanishing behind more debris by the side of the path. Daisy heard a voice, a panicked shout, and suddenly there were more ice cubes sliding around in her brain. Even before she turned the corner she knew she was going to see three people there, two boys and a girl.
‘We weren’t with him!’ the girl was shouting, holding her hands up in surrender as Brick stormed towards her. Her hair was red, almost the same colour as his, and her face was streaked with dirt and smoke. ‘We didn’t know him!’
‘Brick, hold up,’ said Cal. ‘I think they’re telling the truth.’
Brick stopped, taking a deep, rattling breath. The little boy in the Batman T-shirt edged cautiously around him, sidestepping towards Cal and casting quick glances at Daisy. The dentist ice cube was his, she realised, and she could see more now – a man in a white suit screaming through a face mask and reaching for him over the chair.
‘Adam,’ she said, seeing his name in the ice. He turned at the sound of it, his bloodstained brow creasing. She held out her hand. ‘Come on, it’s okay, you’re safe here now.’
He walked to her straight away, not looking back, and she took his hand.
‘Do you want to come inside? We’ve got some food and some fizzy drinks.’
He didn’t smile, but he didn’t let go either. Daisy looked back at Brick, who was pacing from one side of the path to the other like a caged tiger. Cal was just behind him. The girl and the other boy were terrified. Daisy could feel their fear inside her, like the ice cubes were melting, bleeding their emotions into hers. She didn’t like it.
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