The Dead Boy

by Saunders, Craig

  'She took a kid.'

  How the fuck did I forget something like that? Why in the name of fuck would I let them go?

  She took one of the dead boys...but she hadn't been like the kids. The woman had been nothing special. But the kid.

  'A fucking kid did this? Got in my head?'

  Suddenly, other memories surfaced...memories that the sneaky fucker had taken from him.

  His watch trembled against his wrist again. The shrill reminder brought O'Dell back from the brink of rage. He breathed deeply.

  He was dangerously angry...the kind of angry he got when people died. But there was hardly anyone around to kill, was there?

  He could shoot himself in the head. But he'd tried that, once, long ago, hadn't he?

  While he couldn't kill anyone with his hands...he could with another's. He looked at his watch again, and calmed himself until he was cold and his sweat cooled and his breathing steady, solid.

  All fine and good, he told himself. Back in the game. For some reason he couldn't imagine, he saw the game he played.

  It was solitaire.

  Annoyed, again, O'Dell shrugged off the image. He checked his watch a final time and stared at the phone until it rang, that tight-jawed grin hardwired into his brain by a bullet and his immense rage.

  *

  The phone shuddered on the counter beside the kettle. O'Dell picked his coffee mug up, empty, and hurled it at the wall. Shards still moved as he straightened his shirt and jacket, then answered, calm, courteous, to the man who was about to die.

  'Sir,' said O'Dell.

  I should be happy. But I'm not.

  Any minute now...now...come on...now...

  'O'Dell. Excellent work. I understand there is a slight discrepancy, however, in the number of remaining test subjects...the telepaths? Missing one, are you not, Mr. O'Dell?'

  How? He'd only just worked it out. How the fuck did he know?

  Come on...come on, Redman. Now!

  'Sir. Soon sorted. I'm not concerned.'

  'I am concerned, though, O'Dell. I am. And if I'm concerned, so are you.'

  'Of course, Sir. Of course...'

  Wayland, you cunt.

  O'Dell's voice remained smooth, but beneath his jacket his fist twisted around the handle of his automatic.

  'Perhaps the time has come to take a greater hand in affairs.'

  'That won't be necessary. I have it in hand. I assure you...I...'

  'Are you interrupting, Mr. O'Dell? Fucking with my flow?'

  'I wouldn't dream to...Sir.'

  'Remember who you are. You are who you are because of us.'

  O'Dell kept his mind still and calm. Yet, inside, in the deeper parts of his mind, Wayland Redman's face leered. Wayland...

  US. That word grated on his nerves, but he couldn't grasp the reason. All he could think and feel was rage, at Wayland Redman.

  Wayland. I promised you an eternity of pain if you fucked me.

  He'd deliver. Sure he would.

  'Sir,' he said on automatic to something he hadn't heard.

  Then...silence. The line was quiet.

  US.

  A second of silence on both ends, as O'Dell listened for breathing, or Wayland's tortured breathing...but...nothing.

  O'Dell kept the phone against his ear. Redman had to speak first. There could be no mistakes.

  'O'Dell?' Wayland's voice. O'Dell was, for an instant, happier than he thought he could ever be because of a lunatic like Wayland Redman. But only for an instant. That discrepancy finally sank through to him. US. The boss said, 'US'.

  But he hadn't...had he?

  Was he mistaken?

  'Wayland. Good man. I was beginning to think...'

  'Beginning to think, were you? First time, is it?'

  'What? Redman...you know what I can...'

  'Yes, yes. I know all right. But you won't. You're done, you fucking nutjob,' Wayland's laugh drove spikes into O'Dell's brain. 'You double-crossed yourself, you crazy bastard.'

  Wayland's words drifted away. A flash of memory, and with it O'Dell's usual, crushing, anger. He was, for a second or two, back there...then. He remembered the look of the hole that ran down to the bullet that meant salvation. He remembered the steel against his forehead, his finger, trembling on the trigger.

  I wanted it.

  His face had been wet before he pulled the trigger. Wet before the blood came...before memory died.

  Why now? Why now?

  I should be here, in the present. Find Wayland. Cage him, make him immortal, cut the limbs from him and pull his fucking eyes fucking...

  'Wayland...nowhere is far enough. I'm going to hurt you so badly your mind will fucking break. I will...'

  Spittle flew from O'Dell's mouth. He ranted and raved and roared, his eyes red and his voice breaking, sore in his chest and throat from the effort and his rage. His heart pounded, hard and heavy, sweat ran down his scarred forehead and into his eyes and still he swore hatred into the phone.

  Wayland said nothing until O'Dell slowed for a beat.

  'You done, cuntface?'

  'Cunt...face?' O'Dell's mouth dropped.

  He couldn't have. Redman? Calling me...?

  'Yeah. You, O'Dell. You know I'm looking at you right now? And you know what? Your face. Looks just like a cunt. You know that?'

  O'Dell felt stupid, slow. Confused. He was the one who ran the show.

  'No longer,' said the Boss. 'We run this show. US.'

  But those words were beneath Wayland's horrible, cheerful insult...they both arrived at once, overlapping, impossible.

  One voice through the telephone.

  One in his head.

  'No, dickhead. You think I'm there, watching you on a monitor, a camera, something? No. I'm looking at your jabbering face. I'm looking at you on a screen, sure. A bank of monitors, O'Dell, with your ugly-cunt-mug plastered across all of them and thousands of those dead kids you had me take...and people before me, too, eh? How long? What is this? Like some kind of computer? The kids like a hard drive, or a CPU...you know what? I don't fucking care because it's the funniest thing I've ever seen and a good joke's worth dying for. Best. Joke. Ever. I don't need a gun to kill your boss, O'Dell. I just need to switch them off.'

  'What the fuck are you...what...?'

  'Your boss is you, O'Dell. You made it. The tower, the kids? They all serve you. Do they tell you want you want to hear, O'Dell? Oh, daddy, you're so fucking smart. Oh, daddy, we want to be just like you. Cut out our brains, just like yours. That scar's so cool.'

  'Wayland...'

  O'Dell staggered against the counter, put his palm down to steady himself. A shard of the broken mug sliced his hand, but he didn't feel it.

  'You always were a crazy bastard...this is...fuck, man...you're such a lunatic. You killed the world on your own. You told yourself what to do, didn't you? Built this computer out of those weird kids to help you out and believed in your own madness...I'm nuts, O'Dell. I don't think there's even a word for what you are. You're the man who killed the world. Who would have believed it?'

  'You're lying. You're lying.'

  'Really? Then fuck you about that, too. Well done, O'Dell. Give yourself a hand. Don't believe me? Here. Ask yourself.'

  There was the voice again. Tinny, like it was coming through a phone...but...

  'O'Dell...we've been talking and you haven't been listening, have you?'

  'Sir...Sir...are you...?'

  'Spit it out, man. I never took you for an idiot. Something to say, say it.'

  'Sir...' O'Dell's head reeled. He didn't want to talk anymore. He wanted to lay down, somewhere quiet, somewhere dark. Let the flashing lights in his head become still again. The fire he saw all the time, the flare of gun powder, the great fires that burned in the cities of the world, the flames flicking high from the forest...

  'Sir, are you me?' This last, he whispered. Hating himself, his weakness, his trembling legs.

  'O'Dell, are you losing the plot? Of course we
're you. We created each other. Don't you remember?'

  'Wayland!' he shouted, his voice quavering, sudden panic. 'Wayland.'

  'What?' said the man, a smile in his bastard voice.

  'Shut it down. Shut it down...kill it...pull the switch...please...'

  'Fuck you, O'Dell. Fuck your computer, fuck your kids and your great big mad brain. And you know what? Find me, bring me back, torture me. Because I'd like that. An eternity spent laughing in your face sounds just fine to me.'

  'Wayland!'

  But no matter how long O'Dell shouted into the phone, Wayland would still be gone. O'Dell shouted until his voice ceased to work. Then he remembered what he did to the man named Fenchurch. And he remembered how he built the most powerful computer in history over the course of more than fifty years across three tower blocks made from children with powers just like his.

  *

  XVIII.

  Various Means of Escape

  Once, Eleanor Farnham was a dead woman in a tomb, waiting to rot. A cadaver that moved, but really, it was little more than electricity and idiot impulse. Now she was alive, she had become a woman buried in error, clawing at the lid of her coffin. She survived on nothing but water. The hole in her skull, the flesh they sliced from her for their microscopes and laboratories began to mend, and as she healed some semblance of intellect returned. Her coordination, perhaps, taking longer, but still far faster than a child might become accustomed to the use of its body. She wasn't learning but remembering.

  A flash of somewhere sparsely lit, the place where she slept when she had been young with a small light and paper she held and read late (Hardy...Boys? 'Small' and 'Light' comparisons, images, feelings, rather than words). A sense of herself, who she was and who she became stemmed from this. The concept of her, as a person, as an entity.

  She scraped the metal implant from her skull on the window all the time these things drifted into her thoughts, and while they floated away.

  Brief images of people. Parents. More dimly there were grandparents, teachers, friends, bullies, the lollipop lady who helped children cross the school when she'd been shorter. Herself, smiling.

  She recalled herself from the past, from the bottom up, childhood and on.

  A gouge grew in the window. Shallow, yes, but a mark.

  Perhaps days later, perhaps just hours, the mark became deeper still. A valley, the edges etched and dirty, like a rough cut diamond.

  Later, she recalled a time surrounded by yellow metals, white metals. Stones that glinted like glass. Her, smiling, a man beside her. A ring on her hand.

  Her hands were bare and dirty. There was nothing upon her finger but blood and dirt. Her long nails, grimy and dull, that had snapped and torn over and over again. She dredged back that memory of her hands as they'd been in the past. It was a nice memory (warm, comfort, fullness...). The metals and stones gleamed, so had her nails. Her hands had been clean.

  Eleanor stopped scratching at the window and dropped the implant to the floor. She walked on steady legs that at last felt they belonged to her to the tap she only drank from.

  For the first time since rising from her thin grave in a lost and forgotten field while metal still smouldered in (rain...water like this but from up high...) she no longer remembered, Eleanor understood something like pleasure. The feel of that crisp, cold, filtered water over her sore hands. Dirt, sweat, blood, all of it washed away from her hands. She rubbed at one hand with the other, and saw that this sped the feeling. She was aware of the coolness against her skin and the relief from the aches in her flesh. Even the cuts she hadn't realised were sore felt...

  Better.

  Getting well.

  I am...healing.

  She cupped her hands. Then, not knowing why, she filled her hands and splashed the water against her face, on her hair, and she gasped at the cold. Soon after, she stood naked and dripping, most of the soil washed from her body. Some clung, couldn't be reached or loosened with cool water alone. But...

  'Nice.'

  She jumped at the sound of her voice, silent since those early days when she had tried to please the people who cut her...tried to make them happy so that they would stop.

  But they hadn't.

  Her stomach growled at her, and she knew it was hunger. While she healed well, she was weaker. Her efforts on the window were becoming less effective, each scratch hurting the glass less.

  Healing took fuel. Food was fuel. Water was life but food made her move. And soon, she wouldn't move. She would die like before. But not come back, because no one would bring her food. There was no one.

  She remembered O'Dell, but did not know where the other people went - the ones who were sorry and carried knives and secateurs (clippers...calipers...scissors?). She hadn't seen them leave, and she could hear nothing outside her home unless the bad people let her.

  But after no sound from outside for so long, when a sudden and awful, unbelievably loud noise broke through to her home, she threw herself to the floor and covered her ears. It wailed, and over it there was a voice so huge she could not help but feel small. The voice thundered through Eleanor's head and tears sprung from her eyes. Her hands did nothing to shut it out. Her eyes flicked, her movements fast and sharp. Something changed. The wailing voice and the piercing noise grew louder.

  She didn't hear the click of the door as it unlocked, but she'd been in the same room for more than two months. She knew it better than she knew herself and she felt the change in the air. The noise was louder, now.

  Eleanor turned around and around, until she saw it - that tiny slice in her home that hadn't been there before. A split between her world and the worlds where people were sorry.

  A doorway to someplace else.

  Her curiosity proved more powerful than fear. Scuttling across the floor, flinching at each gargantuan and misunderstood word, she reached the door and pulled rather than pushed. Some innate understanding of the mechanics of small things, or just luck - but perhaps, sometimes, powerful forces push luck where it needs to go.

  The door came toward her.

  She frowned, tried to think.

  A word danced before her, an elusive memory.

  Free?

  On her hands and knees and slowly, slowly, Eleanor looked out into a new world, one clean and white and full of sound.

  Bright. Huge. New.

  Wonderful.

  Perhaps wonderful meant the same as free. She crawled carefully over some of the Sorry People to find out. They looked like her, now. Smelled worse, though, and they weren't getting up, and she wasn't sorry about that.

  *

  The human body is remarkable. Sometimes it heals. Sometimes it cannot, but still strives for life, long after it should be dead.

  After the tower block, after O'Dell, Wayland should have been dead. But he made the stairs, then, the car. He drove without a thought to where he was heading. South, he thought. He drove through the destruction and the endless, freezing rain, or sludge, and sometimes snow. England no longer made sense to him. He knew England well. He'd travelled long before O'Dell and his jobs. Many years after, too.

  But he could have been anywhere at all. For a short while, he kept the phone beside him in the hope that O'Dell would call him. He wanted to laugh again. It felt good. But O'Dell didn't call, and the further he drove, the less brave Wayland became.

  The pain was a constant thing, now, a throbbing that settled into his hips and spine, the kind of pain so overwhelming it swallowed thought, wave after wave. The further he drove, the less he remembered. He hadn't pissed in two days. He didn't want to. Such a thing, he thought, might kill him, though he was wrong.

  The fact that he hadn't, and wouldn't piss - that was killing him. Infection was already rife, and he was warm. His insides were failing, and delirium rode a nightmare steed somewhere below the horizon.

  His bladder leaked, but between his wound and his cancer, he thought it was just blood. Either way, the little that seeped did nothing to empty hi
m.

  The petrol gauge dipped but he saw a break in the landscape ahead and took the first road he could find toward that nothingness. It looked like a good place to die.

  He ended up at the northern banks of the Thames River. He didn't know it was a river. It might have been the sea. Visibility was down to maybe a hundred yards, and the first real snowstorm since the end was settling in. Snow that blinds and steals away the land, leaving behind only white and cold.

  He nearly drove into the water before he found a small jetty that stood behind a wooden house. Probably someone's summer house, or maybe it was a boathouse. The boat at the end of the jetty wouldn't need a house. A small boat, an outboard motor. Looked like there might be a cabin, beneath the deck. Somewhere to lay his head and wait to die.

  He stumbled from the car and found the snow he pushed against soothed his fever. He boarded the boat and when he did, he pulled the lanyard to the motor. He did so with no real goal in mind. The thing started. He jumped, startled, swayed and fell against the side of the boat. That pain was fresh and sent him down into insensibility, but just for a short time.

  Woozy, but within the relief of what was now delirium, Wayland Redman loosed the ropes that held the boat against the jetty and headed off, out into the water. Maybe he'd hit France, maybe just drift and starve. Either way, he'd die. But not by O'Dell's hand.

  The only thing Wayland was sure of right then was that when he died, he wouldn't be coming back.

  His eyes couldn't focus, but he found the phone in his coat pocket. He took it out and threw it into the poisoned water, then turned the little boat out to sea. The sea and Wayland both were mad and ragged, but Wayland's madness was good humoured. He howled out his laughter as the heavy snow and the spume plastered and froze his lank hair to his head.

  *

  Klaxons, the woman's droning and repetitive voice - both were heavy enough in the tight corridors and hallways of the underground shelter to make O'Dell's ears pound, close to rupturing. He paid the discomfort no attention as he headed for the exit. He dropped the fob to the command console on the floor.