That was why, when the car alarm finally shut down with a final dramatic peep and the men waited outside the garage door patiently, expecting it to open and a car to roar through it at any moment, Ed was still inside, holding his breath on the cold concrete floor directly under the now-silent Aston Martin.
Come on, he thought, just check the back.
He almost jumped clear through the engine when he heard a voice at the smashed window, so loud and clear it sounded like the speaker was standing right next to him.
“Shit…guys. I think he’s gone.”
Ed heard footsteps making their way from the front of the garage to the back. A moment later he heard a grunt and then a beam of light lanced through the broken window, playing over the garage interior.
Ed knew he was taking a risk: if the men outside stopped to think for a moment they would surely realise the window was too narrow for anyone to climb through. He prayed they would see the glass outside and jump to conclusions.
Ed held his breath; only released it when the light withdrew and he heard the voice he recognised as being the one he had heard earlier in the kitchen. The voice sounded weary, and irritated. No, furious. Dangerous.
“Spread out. Fucking find him or she’ll kill us all.”
Exhale.
Ed waited until he heard the footsteps recede into silence before shuffling out from under the car. He rolled clear of the vehicle before standing, fearful that even the slightest touch would unleash the alarm again and render the ruse meaningless. Careful to remain quiet, he climbed back onto the washing machine and peeked through the smashed window. He saw their flashlights immediately: four splashes of light in the darkness. It looked like they were a few hundred yards away already, searching the road and the gardens. If they were planning to be as thorough as he feared, they might start entering the houses when they couldn’t find him. The man he had left under a blanket in the cupboard would be in danger, then.
And what am I going to do about it? I’m no hero.
When Ed was certain all of the men were far enough away, he eased the poker that had barred the door to one side, and stepped once more into the dark kitchen, almost tripping over the bag of food he had dropped on the floor, and congratulating himself on his clever little plan.
He stepped over the bag and into the glass-fronted living room.
And knew immediately that he wasn’t as smart as he had believed, and that four flashlights did not necessarily mean four people.
He hadn’t been able to see the dark figure waiting for him in the living room. He saw the fist that arced through the gloom, though; saw it at the last second, when it was mere inches from his face, and then everything was darkness.
24
Michael told Linda everything. Once the words began to fall from his mouth, it seemed they gained a momentum of their own and he was powerless to stop them. He told her about the first morning, about Carl and his stale doughnuts and his terrifying transformation into an eyeless killer. Told her about Victor and the bunker, about his frantic flight to Aberystwyth to find his daughter. Told her about John and Project Wildfire.
He told her about the corridor of blood and bone and about killing Gwyneth; about the beginning and what he had thought was the end when he had finally secured the castle and locked the virus outside.
As he spoke, his voice cracked and lowered, and by the time he was done, tears flowed freely from his eyes, and he was surprised to find that Linda was weeping too.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Michael said in a choked voice. “She was infected. It was the only way to keep everyone safe.”
Linda stared at him for a moment and said nothing.
“You have to tell everyone else,” Michael said. “I understand. I'm a killer. And if everyone wants me to leave I will. I won’t cause trouble.”
Linda’s eyes shimmered, and she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Michael, hugging him tightly.
Michael blinked in surprise, and returned the hug awkwardly.
“You’ve done terrible things,” Linda breathed in his ear, and pulled away from him, staring into his eyes. “I can’t imagine there’s anyone left who hasn’t. Maybe you could have chosen another way. Maybe I could. Maybe Darren could. Or John. Whoever. It doesn’t matter, Michael. You’re here. You’re still alive. Your daughter is alive. Right now she needs you, and for better or worse everybody here needs you to pull yourself together.”
Michael stared at her in faint astonishment. He had expected revulsion and fury. Her unexpected response very nearly made him break down completely.
Linda smiled.
“Now, I didn’t ask to hear your whole life story, Officer Evans. I asked where John had gone, and where the hell my candles have disappeared to.”
Michael snorted a laugh.
“I’m afraid that isn’t exactly good news either,” he said.
“Why am I not surprised?”
Michael nodded grimly.
“There was a boat. Came close and then disappeared. John thinks it was a scouting mission, and I guess he would know.”
“Scouting for who?”
Michael shrugged.
“No idea. But it looks like there are other people close by, and they know we are in here.”
“So why wouldn’t they come to the castle?”
Michael looked at her wryly.
“Oh,” Linda said, and sighed. “I guess it would be too much to ask that people stopped fighting each other at a time like this.”
“I don’t think it’s in our nature,” Michael said glumly.
“So what about the candles?”
“John thinks they’ll be coming back. Maybe in force. The only thing I can think to do is make it look like there are a lot of people in the castle, Get a light in every window, get bodies up on the battlements. Maybe if we don’t look weak they’ll think twice about trying to get in here.”
Linda frowned.
“Maybe,” she said, but her tone said she didn’t quite believe it.
That makes two of us, Michael thought.
“You can’t keep this stuff from everybody, Michael. We have to tell them what’s coming. They have a right to know, and the uncertainty is just making everything worse. Who knows, maybe what we all need right now is something to focus our minds. You must have known you’d have to tell them eventually, unless you were just hoping everyone would feel like a stroll on the battlements and wouldn’t notice a boat heading for us. I know you guys think a lot of us here in the castle are damaged and useless-”
Michael raised his hands to protest, but Linda waved his objection away.
“And you might be right,” she continued. “But everyone has the right to fight for themselves if it comes to it. We might just surprise you.”
Michael nodded slowly.
Before he could respond, the door opened, and Claire and Pete appeared, each carrying an armful of candles and oil lamps. Claire beamed proudly at Michael, and his face split in a smile.
“Then let’s do it,” he said.
*
Ed awoke on a hard, ridged mattress that felt more like the back of a flat-bed truck than a bed. He was freezing, and it almost felt like the wind had relentlessly whipped him as he slept. He frowned a little as he lurched toward consciousness.
Once or twice, in an effort to get her lazy son out of bed, Ed's mother had deliberately opened all the windows in his bedroom, allowing the coastal wind to freeze him until he woke up. Clearly, she was up to her old tricks again.
"Mum," he slurred disapprovingly.
That explains the cold. Why is your bed so hard?
Ed's eyes flared open, and he found himself staring up at sky that flitted on the fading edge of full darkness, and the memories flooded back to him.
Mum's dead. Everybody's dead.
Why am I not dead?
Ed sat upright, or at least tried to. He was able to arch his back a few degrees before he met resistance. He twisted his neck as far to t
he side as he could, and his eyes widened in fear.
The reason his bed had felt like the back of a truck is because that's exactly what it was. And he was tied to it. He saw a large building looming above him to his right. It was hard to tell, but Ed thought it looked a little like the hotel that served the golf course a couple of miles south of Orchard Grove.
Which means I’m tied up in the car park.
Ed’s mind refused to process the notion.
"Uh...hello?" He said, and berated himself for how pathetic he sounded. Nobody, he thought, had ever woken up kidnapped and tied up, and responded so feebly.
"Kid's awake," a voice said. Ed recognised it as the voice of the man that had knocked him unconscious in Mrs Atkinson's kitchen.
"It's about time. Go get her."
“What should I say?”
“I don’t fucking know. Just get her out here.”
“Should I say we didn’t find him?”
“Not if you want to keep your nuts attached. Let her find out herself. She’ll take it out on somebody. Let that somebody be this guy, if you know what I mean.”
Ed heard a grunt of acknowledgement, and then footsteps receded away from him. He had listened to the entire conversation in a state of increasing panic and confusion. He had no idea who the men were, nor who the woman they were talking about was, but it was obvious to him that both his captors were terrified of her. If they were terrified…
The old saying about shit rolling downhill popped into Ed’s thoughts abruptly, like a rotten smell.
I’m the bottom of the hill…
He spent a few moments testing out his bonds, but they all seemed secure. His brow beaded with sweat that froze on the cold breeze, and he implored his foggy brain to come up with something - anything - resembling a plan to save himself from the strange group of people. His subconscious offered up numerous options that might have served Steven Seagal or Jackie Chan very well indeed, but it came up disappointingly short of ideas that might be of benefit to a slightly overweight Welsh pothead.
“Uh…are you still there?” Ed asked feebly.
He heard a grunt of acknowledgment.
“If you guys are after money, uh, I don’t have any, but my mother-”
Ed couldn’t see the man from his position, but the caustic laugh that interrupted him made his muscles tense up. He wanted more than anything to put on a brave front. It was somewhat dismaying to realise that he was already on the verge of sobbing.
“Who the fuck is that? Where’s Voorhees?”
An old woman’s voice, dry and rasping. The harsh tone of her words slipped under Ed's skin like a splinter. This, presumably, was the her that the two men had seemed so afraid of.
“Ask this guy. He saw him. Claims he doesn’t know anything about it.”
Ed felt outrage building inside him. He didn’t remember having claimed anything of the sort. Bad enough that these bastards had kidnapped him, but now they were going to lie about him to make things even worse?
“I don’t know anyone called Voorhees,” he wailed. “Are you people fucking crazy? Is the whole world fucking insane? Untie me!”
He roared the last couple of words, and was mildly impressed at how determined he sounded.
“Hush, child. I’ll get to you in a minute.”
The woman’s words were kind, but her tone sounded like the approach of something bad.
Ed swallowed, and did as he was told.
“Where did you find this one?”
“Orchard Grove, Ma. Pretty sure that’s where Voorhees went. When we arrived we found this guy there looting. He knows something, but he won’t talk.”
“I don’t know anything,” Ed snapped. “I told you I don’t know anyone called Voorhees. What kind of a stupid name is that any-”
Ed fell silent as the face of the old woman appeared above him. She stared down at him with a smile that made her manic eyes seem all the more unsettling.
“I believe you,” she said softly.
Ed let out a huge breath that felt like it had been held in until it began to rot.
“After all, no reason why he would have told you his name. Not even his fake name. So forget we’re looking for a man called Voorhees. How about a guy who stands about six foot six, and looks like someone has recently tried to put him through a blender? Yes? No?”
Ed tried to keep his face expressionless.
Failed.
The old woman’s smile widened.
“There, now. I think we’re both on the same page. Now you have a choice to make. Are you going to tell me where that man is? Or am I going to have to cut it out of you?”
25
Ed couldn’t remember a time when he had ever been brave. It wasn’t that he was a coward, not exactly. It was more the case that his life never really reached any points at which bravery or cowardice were even options. To him bravery was taking on a far more skilled player in a one-on-one on Call of Duty. Cowardice was backing out and shutting down the xbox when it was clear he was going to lose. In either case, the worst possible outcome would be a flood of insults from faceless names on the internet. Nothing that required any loss of sleep.
The fact that he was determined not to give up the man who saved his life surprised him a little. It was, he would have to admit, out of character. But then again, when had his character ever been tested before? Life had been pretty easy up until a couple of weeks earlier. It wasn’t his fault he had faced little in the way of adversity.
Maybe I’m a brave type of guy after all.
When the old woman had quizzed him about the man currently laying unconscious in his mother’s storage closet, Ed had let his surprise and fear give the game away. But he would be damned if he was going to give the big man’s location to this weird family. After all, what were these people going to do? Torture him? This wasn’t the movies. People didn’t just torture other people. Not in Wales.
Ed changed his mind about that when the blade entered his flesh for the first time. The man who had knocked him out - whose name Ed had subsequently learned was Rhys - had spent several minutes waving the straight razor in front of Ed’s face and repeating the same question over and over: where is Voorhees?
The questioning and gesticulating continued for long enough that Ed began to think that the man didn’t want to cut Ed any more than he wanted to be cut. In fact, the man’s face looked a little green around the edges at even being forced to contemplate it. Ed felt his resolve stiffen, and he began to believe that maybe he would be okay after all.
Until the old woman appeared and asked her son what progress he had made in a tone that dripped venom.
The cutting began almost immediately.
Ed screamed in horror when the man dragged the cold blade across his gut - my stomach! - and when Rhys Holloway withdrew the blade and held it up in front of Ed’s face, he screamed even louder at the sight of the dark blood dripping from it. He wanted so much to be brave, and to repay the debt he owed to the man that had saved his life. He even thought maybe he could handle the pain; certainly when the knife ate into his flesh the first time it didn’t hurt in the way Ed had expected it would. But when the blade was pulled away, the pain rushed in like the tide, and Ed knew that noble intentions were worth nothing if they meant his flesh was to be split apart.
By the time Holloway made a second cut, Ed gave Voorhees up like a bad habit. He told them he had placed the man in a cupboard in his mother’s house; he hoped and prayed that would be the end of it, but he knew as soon as he saw the old woman’s face that it wasn’t over.
“Take us there,” she said.
*
Ed walked in front, and had his hands tied behind him. The man who had cut him with the blade played several feet of rope out behind Ed, like a leash. In a strange way Ed was glad he was tied up. It at least gave him an immediate problem to focus on.
He focused on that problem like he’d never focused on anything before in his entire life, because Ed felt the dire tru
th of his situation crawling around the edge of his thoughts constantly. The crazy bastards he was leading to Orchard Grove were going to kill him. Nothing had ever seemed as certain. He had no idea how to escape them, but the bonds that tied his wrists together made the first step obvious, and he did the only thing he could think to do: he fell.
Repeatedly. And loudly.
By the fifth time Ed stumbled to the ground, his knees were battered and bloody, but more importantly Annie Holloway was pissed off, and heading inexorably toward fire-spitting all-out fury.
“Cut the damn ropes off him,” she hissed as Ed struggled to get unsteadily to his feet following his latest manufactured tumble. “What do you think he’s going to do? Run away? For God’s sake.”
Running away was Ed’s plan in its entirety, but as Rhys cut his hands free and pushed him forward, Ed reined in his desire to simply sprint away in panic.
Do it at the right time, he thought. It’s your only chance. Calm…
With every few steps, Ed expected to see Infected charging at him; almost wished it would happen so that he could slip away in the ensuing chaos, but the fields they crossed remained dark and empty.
It took about twenty minutes to reach Orchard Grove, and the sight of Ed’s home, familiar and alien at the same time, made his heart feel heavy.
Maybe he woke up. Maybe he’s already gone.
The thought simultaneously gave Ed hope and chilled him. If the big man had awoken and wandered away, Ed thought he would feel strangely triumphant, but he didn’t imagine he’d get to enjoy the tiny victory for long. The old woman’s anger would most likely be fucking biblical and there was only one person she would direct it towards.
“It’s that one,” Ed said, pointing to his mother’s house.
“I told you we should have searched these houses,” a voice behind Ed whispered, and he couldn’t help but smile.
Another voice hushed the first quickly.
Don’t want mummy to hear that, do you?
Trauma (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 5) Page 15