The Unjudged_The battle for Cromer

by Phil Hurst

  Paige had a moment of clarity. She finally understood why her childhood pets had all chose to die alone. There was something embarrassing about dying in front of other people. She had a feeling of utter helplessness and despair. She didn’t want someone else witnessing that moment. She wanted to be alone as she transitioned.

  The crushing sensation on her neck spread to her chest and her head. Even though her eyes were closed, a deeper darkness consumed her. As she struggled for breath, gasping for air became the only noise she could hear. A tingling sensation began in her toes and spread up to her knees. If he kept his knee on her throat, the tingling would work its way up to her chest and kill her. She’d be off into the cosmos above. All the books told her to be excited for that moment.

  So why was she terrified?

  Then the weight was lifted.

  Her senses came back one after the other. She saw that a bright white light had appeared from somewhere. It shone over the top of her car and lit up the teenager’s face. He stood with his arms outstretched. He dropped the knife, and she watched as it fell to the ground in slow motion, clattering on the concrete. She could see the boy had started to sweat.

  Voices.

  There were voices.

  “Walk towards us slowly.” She recognised the voice. “Oliver. Move forward.”

  How did the voice know his name?

  “Kneel.”

  Oliver obeyed.

  She rolled onto her stomach. From the road she’d come down she could see the movement of feet in front of car lights. The gentle thud of boots reached her, and a hand moved down to her shoulder. She smelled garlic. It was the reckoner from earlier. She could barely see, but her brain was sharp. They must have looked up her passport.

  “Looks like you got away with it,” he said. “A stitch or two and you’ll be right as rain.”

  “Please don’t,” she pleaded.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Tag me.”

  “Don’t be silly. You do know who you’ve helped the URC catch?”

  “I hit him with the car. I was going too fast. I should be…”

  The reckoner stood her up and led her away from her car towards the source of the bright light a little further down the road. She walked in a daze, not really understanding what was going on. The reckoner’s car, like most reckoner vehicles, had been converted from an old police car but had seen little in the way of refurbishment. It chugged as it idled, a sure sign it still had a petrol engine.

  The reckoner ran his hand across the bonnet as he walked around it and into shadow, “They don’t make them like this anymore.”

  Paige looked back and saw two more reckoners move towards Oliver. One pinned him to the floor with a soul staff while the other used alternating fists to punch the young man repeatedly. When they paused to swap positions Oliver rolled onto his stomach and tried to crawl away. They watched him with bemusement. Then the one with the staff gave the weapon to his partner and put all his weight behind a huge kick into Oliver’s midriff.

  He screamed in pain and began to cough.

  “Remember I said about the Unjudged?” The reckoner said. “They love that kid.”

  The reckoner reached into the car and retrieved a vape. He switched it on, and his face was lit up by a small green light. He leaned back and exhaled, pushing a vapour laced with garlic into the cold night air. He offered it to Paige, who declined.

  “It’s an acquired taste,” he acknowledged. “But my personal trainer reckons it’ll add years to my life.”

  He tilted his head back further, took another drag from the vape and pushed the consequent plume directly up towards the viaduct. Paige watched the steam disperse and vanish as it moved higher and higher.

  She said, “You were following me.”

  “See, out here, there’s no one to stop us doing this,” he said, nodding towards Oliver, who was now coughing up blood with almost every kick. “If we catch them by the border, we tag them. Then they usually run away, and we have to shoot them. They die, and we scoop them up with the staffs and take them back to The Store. But who knows what it’s like in there? It might be a fucking party for all that we know.

  “But out here, we can teach them a lesson. Like my dad used to before all this started.” He pointed at the two reckoners still beating Oliver. “Like Craig’s dad used to, like Tobias’ used to before they took away our power and gave us a staff and told us we were fucking protectors and everyone was our fucking flock.”

  It seemed like a well-rehearsed rant. He reached into the car again.

  “Do you want a bottle of water?”

  Paige said no.

  “There isn’t one in the glovebox. I’ll have to get it from the boot. Thirsty work, a hunt like this.”

  Paige wondered what he was really doing. The man didn’t take his eyes off her as he walked around to the rear of the car. Then, with a big grin, he pulled a soul staff from the boot and pointed it at her. He rolled the vape around in his mouth.

  “Please,” said Paige. “Don’t.”

  The reckoner kept the staff pointed at her. But then Paige heard a noise that sounded like an onion being chopped. The green glow from the vape fell from the reckoner’s mouth. It hit the floor, and the glass section shattered.

  Paige coughed in surprise. Sprouting from the middle of the man’s face was a glinting silver blade. From the top of his head was a neat black line down the middle of his forehead. Blood began to run from it along the creases of the man’s face, dripping off his chin. The reckoner crossed his eyes to look at the blade. Then his eyes closed and his shoulders sagged as it finally seemed to occur to his divided brain that he was dead.

  Sam

  T he man in the petrol-blue suit leaned back and scratched his stomach through the gaps between his shirt buttons. As the man took his hand away, Sam saw a small ball of fluff stuck to the man’s finger. As he picked up the menu, it transferred to its leather back. Sam stood with stoic professionalism, holding a notepad in one hand at chest height while reaching into his rear jeans pocket with his other for a pencil.

  The man in the petrol-blue suit tapped the menu and asked, “What’s the Cromer crab sandwich like?”

  “Nice.” Sam said.

  “That’s it?”

  “Do you like crab?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s local crab. Cromer crab. If you like crab, it’s really nice.”

  The man returned his attention to the menu, apparently put off the crab by the lack of enthusiasm in Sam’s voice. Sam hoped he’d picked up the passive-aggressive warning tone in his voice. The crab was indeed from Cromer, but it was supplied to the hotel in a four-gallon tub that made a sickening sloshing noise when moved. Sam had read the ingredients and confirmed to himself that it contained more preservatives than actual meat.

  The man threw the menu down onto the table. “Fuck it. Get me the crab baguette. And a pint.”

  Sam waited for clarification. He didn’t say anything, just raised an eyebrow.

  “Of beer.”

  Sam waited.

  “Carlsberg.”

  On his way to the kitchen, Sam stuck the alcohol order to the peg on the top of the bar. He also grabbed the ice cream scoop from the glass washer so Chef Nartez could get a decent portion of crab for his last customer of the day.

  Sam had been working in the Hotel de Paris in Cromer for about 12 years. The building, erected 200 years ago, had seen better days, but its location—overlooking the pier and beaches of the small seaside town—meant it had a steady customer base. It also attracted reckoned people from the rest of the country who wanted a glimpse of how the world worked without Tumi implants.

  Sam could have saved them the trip with a phone call. Cromer wasn’t the wild west; it wasn’t an untamed jungle. It was a small, boring town that had a high unemployment rate and a financial dependency on a tourist industry that hadn’t existed for 150 years. Most of the guests went home disappointed.

  Perhaps spurred
on by a sense of tradition, businesses kept coming to Cromer. He had made sure he showed enough competence in waiting, cleaning and customer service to ensure he didn’t get fired when the new owners came in. He chose to hide his talents in cooking, people management and organisational improvement to ensure he didn’t get promoted. Every two or three years, the hotel would be taken over by another hotel chain eager to acquire such an iconic building, and the new manager would try to persuade Sam that he had the potential to go far in the business.

  The latest such episode happened only 10 days ago, when new manager Olga had opened the door to the honeymoon suite while he was cleaning it and asked for a private word. The honeymoon suite was a large room at the top of the hotel that stretched across the entire building. From the window in one room Sam could see the town below him, and from the bedroom balcony he could see the pier at the bottom of the cliffs. Sam enjoyed being in the room but despised cleaning it.

  Olga asked him what his career plans were. She pointed out that Sam had done extremely well over the first few months that her company, Dreamlovers Hotels, had owned the hotel. She wanted him to tell her where he saw his life going.

  Sam had stood up and walked to the patio doors to the balcony. He picked up the scrunched-up newspaper he was using it to get a clear finish on the glass doors and said he wanted to work in a hotel and spend his evenings and weekends with his family.

  “But you could be my assistant manager if you applied,” countered Olga in her perfect but accented English.

  “Then what?”

  “Then you work for a while and become manager if I moved on.”

  “Then what?”

  “Regional manager? Look after a collection of hotels.”

  “Then what?”

  “You could move to London and work in Head Office.”

  “Why?”

  “Money.”

  “I don’t know what I’d use it for.”

  “Your retirement.”

  “But what would I do in my retirement?”

  Olga was lost for words.

  Sam helped her. “I could always spend my evenings and weekends with my family I suppose.”

  He started scrubbing at a stain he was all too used to seeing on the glass. When he next looked at the door, Olga had vanished. The conversation had been a near-perfect copy of the conversation he had with Wayne, the previous manager. It was a speech he had performed for anyone who challenged him to improve himself over the past 12 years. He originally found it in some crap self-help book about valuing the little things in life.

  Sam caught his reflection in the door as he pushed it open. He wasn’t an imposing man, standing just over 5’10”. He had dark hair that he always kept short and cropped at the sides. He thought his nose too big for his face. If that were a family curse, his bright green eyes were a blessing. He had a small scar cross the bridge of nose from when his older sister, Paige, had pushed him onto a nail when he was younger.

  Sam handed the scoop to Chef Nartez and sat down on a small stool that was supposed to be for trainees watching the chefs at work. He grabbed hold of the counter so he could tilt himself back on one of the stool legs. There never were any trainee chefs in the Hotel de Paris, so Sam had commandeered the stool for his exclusive use. He let the stool fall flat on the floor and allowed his head to fall forward onto the cool tiled wall. He heard a grunt and in response held up one finger.

  “One crab sandwich, Chef.”

  Chef Nartez nodded and opened the walk-in fridge. Sam closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see the empty cavern that the fridge had become since the latest owners took over. During the hotel’s prime (although no one was ever able to explain to Sam when that was) the fridge was installed as a wonder of technology that would allow the hotel to prepare exotic meals from all over the world to salivating customers.

  Now it contained three four-gallon tubs of crab mix and various microwave meals. They were from expensive suppliers that promised meals that tasted like “fresh-cooked” fish and chips, carbonara and mushroom risotto. However, every now and again, there’d be a horse-meat scandal somewhere in Eastern Europe or North Africa, and some of the recipes would suddenly become unavailable.

  “Nearly home time, Chef,” Sam said.

  Chef Nartez exited the fridge and put a supermarket-bought half-cooked baguette into the oven. He reached into some bowls above his head and grabbed a handful of lettuce.

  “I think I’m going to make myself some sausages and chips and chill out in front of a film.”

  A knife was drawn from the block and used to quarter a tomato.

  “I never know what to watch, though. That’s the problem with too much choice, isn’t it?”

  A cucumber the size of a glasses case met the same fate as the tomato.

  “I might always watch the latest trial.”

  With the salad stacked onto the plate, there was nothing for Chef Nartez to do until the baguette warmed. Yet still, his resolution to not talk to Sam remained.

  “Did you watch the trial last night?” Sam asked him.

  Nartez turned and checked the timer on the oven.

  “I’ll go pour the pint.”

  Back in the bar area, Sam poured the pint and looked out of the bar windows towards Cromer Pier. The sun was going down to the left of the wooden structure, and it seemed so peaceful in the twilight. It was about the length of two football fields and notable for a large theatre and bar perched at the end, dangling over the shallows of the North Sea. The pier and its theatre had seen success for over 100 years, amusing locals and tourists with old-fashioned and borderline-racist shows based around British pride and the seaside.

  He released the tap and took the pint over to the suited man, who was also studying the pier. As Sam placed it on the table, the man leaned back and raised an eyebrow at Sam.

  “Nice view,” the man said, nodding toward the pier.

  “It is.”

  “Things like that, you know, they don’t change when a town is reckoned.”

  “I’m not worried,” Sam replied. A total lie. He knew his mother was planning something, although the specifics escaped him. Her status as a minor celebrity in the unreckoned world had led to some peculiar visitors to the house in the past few weeks. He had avoided most of them by spending his time with Fiona, but since she returned from Helsinki a week earlier, his mother had remodelled the house and invited some strange people to stay with them. He felt a deep sense of foreboding about what his mother was planning.

  “It’s a shame, sometimes. You see the soul of a town vanish along with the souls of the people.” Sam heard the angry ding of a bell echo from the kitchen as Nartez announced the completion of the crab baguette. “But the people who get tagged—it’s always the people who deserve it.”

  Sam shrugged. “I’m not worried about being tagged. When Cromer is reckoned, there’ll be more tourists. More tourists mean more work.”

  “Some towns lose their character, though. They become…bland.”

  “You sound like an Unjudged.”

  “Oh God! No. I’m not anything like those nutters.” Another ding. “Is that my food?”

  Something about the man made Sam uneasy. He scurried into the kitchen and grabbed the plate. Nartez hoisted himself up onto the kitchen top. He searched around in his chef whites and pulled out a display. An episode of Eastenders projected into the space between cooking surfaces. The sounds of Cockneys shouting at each other followed Sam as he pushed through the swinging door.

  When Sam placed the baguette down, the man just flicked it slightly with his forefinger. “Impressive cuisine,” he said, not making any attempt to hide the sarcasm in his voice.

  “Would you like any sauces?” Sam asked.

  “You got any family, son?”

  “We have ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, BBQ…”

  “No one who ran to London when it was reckoned?”

  “I’ll get you a selection.”

  Sam went to the bar an
d pulled a small porcelain container filled with sauce sachets. As he did, he saw the man take out his display and type a quick text message. By the time Sam had returned, the display had vanished and the man was leaning forward as he started on his baguette, crumbs falling from his mouth and landing in the folds of his shirt.

  It was nearly the end of his shift. Sam looked at ornate grandfather clock in the corner and wished it still worked.

  Paige

  P aige couldn’t move her feet. She screamed at herself to run, but the message wasn’t reaching the rest of her body. The blade moved back and forth as it tried to free itself from where it was embedded in the man’s neck. As the blade twisted, half of the reckoner’s head fell to the floor and landed flat against the grass, as if the man had been half-buried horizontally in the road.

  A grubby hand caught the shoulder of the reckoner to allow his murderer to pull the blade free from what was left of his head. It twisted as it vanished, flicking more blood across Paige’s face. The blade came free and the body fell to the side. The man’s killer moved from the shadows.

  Her short, elven-cut blonde hair was matted with blood and stuck to her forehead. Her small eyes appeared black in the half-light, an effect exaggerated by the black eyeliner she wore. She had a fresh-looking scar running from below her left eye down to her chin. She offered Paige a blood-covered hand to shake.

  She spoke in a calm, reassuring tone at odds with the brutal murder she had just committed.

  “Hello,” she said. “My name is Lana. I’m here to help.”

  There was a metallic taste in Paige’s mouth. She used the back of her hand to wipe the blood away but couldn’t find the words to introduce herself.

  “You need to stand perfectly still,” Lana said as she stepped over the reckoner’s body and moved closer to Paige. “Just for a moment.”

  Lana wore a battered pant suit with a plain white T-shirt underneath. She looked like a sales rep who’d fallen in a ditch. Not like a killer who could cleave a man’s head in two. Paige recognised the other woman’s weapon from watching history documentaries, a military pike about one-and-a-half times the size of her that dripped blood from its sharp point.