Hell Is Empty

by Conrad Williams

  ‘Ian, they’re coming.’

  I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him upright. Beams of light – I counted four before we shifted our arses – were sweeping across the grass, coming in our direction. Maybe half a mile off. I heard the bark of a dog. Christ.

  We moved Creamer into the cover of the trees but it was pointless. The bubbles exploding from what was left of his face were death rattles. He was beyond help. I frisked him and took his Glock 17. He also had a Taser on him. I pocketed that too. On his leg he wore a sheathed knife, very much not standard police issue – a deep-bellied, drop point hunting blade with an ugly little gut hook. I heard my body singing its usual requiem at the sight of it, and was of a mind to leave it where it was, but they seemed to be carrying lots of interesting equipment so I reasoned that we needed to be as tooled up as possible. Finally I dragged his jacket off him and, much to Mawker’s voluble disgust, mopped up a goodly amount of Creamer’s blood with it.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I told Mawker, and trailing the jacket behind us, we vanished into the trees.

  22

  Now I knew what it must have felt like for those prisoners on Red Row in the hours immediately after the prison fell. Fugitive life. Torchlight criss-crossed like duelling blades, bringing the limbs of the trees into eerie, dancing detail. It was too much for the wildlife. Owls and bats turned the night to ribbons. God knows what shuffled in the bracken. The dog – I thought, I hoped it was one dog – was barking as if at an audition for a reality show called Shouty Animals. It didn’t seem any closer than before, but it didn’t matter. It was an obstacle we would have to negotiate at some point; it wasn’t just going to give up, or suddenly start behaving like something else, like a squirrel or a goldfish. I just wanted to put it off the scent for a while, to grant us some space in which to do what we had to do.

  Mawker wasn’t saying anything. I think he might have been in shock over the jacket versus face moment, which I’d executed with all the reverence with which a parent flannels a shitty toddler arse. More likely his silence was due to him being knackered. Ian Mawker is one of those coppers trapped in the 1970s. A career copper. In early, home late, if at all. If he’d married, he’d have been divorced by now, perhaps multiple times. A full English every morning and when dinner swung around it would invariably consist of something with chips. Bottle of whisky in the desk drawer. Give him his due, he didn’t smoke, but he ate Rennies as if they were Jelly Tots and his temper oscillated somewhere between ‘fucking furious’ and ‘bring me someone’s head’. The only exercise I saw him partake of, other than lifting pints, was climbing in or out of the car or tonguing his superiors’ perineums.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he managed to gasp.

  ‘Away,’ I said.

  ‘I love… how you get… so chatty… under duress.’

  ‘Do you need a piss?’

  ‘What?’

  I slowed to a jog. ‘I said, do you need a piss?’

  ‘What makes you think I haven’t already? And shat myself. Fucking snipers. Fucking running around in the dark like kids at fucking Halloween.’

  ‘Just go over there, will you? I’ll go this way. Have a slash – jet it all over the place – and get back here, quick as.’

  I didn’t hang around to draw him a diagram or put up with any of his inevitable pulling rank shit, but moved off our trajectory and, dropping Creamer’s jacket, unleashed the Kraken and urinated lustily. I hadn’t been for a while and I hadn’t imbibed my statutory eight glasses of water so what came out of me steamed like stewed leather. You could probably have picked it up and skipped with it.

  Mawker was waiting for me, jogging on the spot. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. No matter how indignant he became, or how many serious matters he invoked – Creamer’s violent death chief among them – it only served to crease me up even more. Only the sound of the dog (much closer now, I suspected it had been let off its leash) got me moving, but I still couldn’t stop corpsing.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Everything.’

  ‘Creamer’s not laughing.’

  ‘No, but he’s not listening to any more of your shit either. Swings and roundabouts, isn’t it?’ I stared at the trees. Boughs creaking. Branches tapping against each other. Leaf mould squelching underfoot.

  ‘You hear anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing relevant,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the story about those guards?’ I asked. ‘When do security guards carry sniper rifles?’

  ‘When they’re not security guards.’

  ‘You had a say in who took over here, right? After the investigation?’

  ‘What investigation? We were here for six hours and then we got the call from above to piss off at speed. Money being wasted fannying around with magneta flake and squirrel brushes and photographs of broken windows. How not important. Why not important. Get out in the fields and find the fuckers. So you do. And you assume the site has been secured. It’s what happens.’

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘Well, maybe it was. And then maybe Tann’s men moved in and overpowered them. We’ll find the bona fides tied up in the back of a Transit van when all the shit’s been sieved out of this situation.’

  ‘Tann’s men.’

  ‘I don’t know for sure, but it looks that way.’

  We moved. By my estimate we were roughly parallel with the northernmost end of the prison grounds. If we dumped Creamer’s jacket nearby we’d hopefully, in addition to the diversionary piss, have gained a little bit of time in which to remain maul-free and clean up this whole mess.

  It didn’t work out like that. Not quite. We were nearing the edge of the trees, cautious, watching out for that lethal red beam, when there was a horrible chopping sound and Mawker started screaming to wake the dead.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ I hissed, over and over, not realising that he couldn’t hear me because he was in the depths of a pain so bad it made my bruised rib look like a luxury.

  His ankle was a mess of red. I thought I could see bone when I shone a light into it, but I wasn’t sure, and anyway, I killed the light to stop me from seeing too closely. He’d stepped in a fucking trap. A bear trap, a fox trap… whatever it was. It was designed to kill small things or incapacitate big things.

  ‘What is it?’ he yelped, his voice all strangled. I hunted around for a fallen branch, mainly to try to prise the jaws of the thing open, but more likely to beat him senseless if he didn’t stop caterwauling.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Ian,’ I said. ‘’Tis but a flesh wound.’

  He screamed at me and I had to cover his mouth with my hand. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay. Breathe. Think of your happy place.’

  I started trying to jam sticks into the jaws of the mechanism, but it quickly became clear that I needed something a bit more robust than the odd twig. And clearly Mawker didn’t have a happy place, because he wouldn’t stop mewling.

  I could hear the thump of paws coming closer. The attempts to put the dog off the scent had failed miserably. Which was okay, I reckoned, as long as the handlers were still some distance behind.

  I managed to wrench the jaws of the trap open sufficiently for Mawker to swing his foot free. He clenched it with his hands, which served only to increase his pain as far as I could see.

  I checked the wound again. It was ugly and deep, but no major blood vessels had been damaged. The worst that might happen was infection if we didn’t get it cleaned soon.

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘You can’t leave me here.’

  ‘You’ve got a gun, Ian,’ I said. ‘Point it at bad things.’

  ‘Joel, please.’

  ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘You know I’ve got to go. You’ll be okay. It might be fractured but you’re not going to bleed out. And backup will be here s—’

  ‘There’s no backup.’

  I could hear voices behind us,
but they were far off and they seemed to be moving away. They’d followed the piss, it seemed. We had some time. Maybe enough for me to throttle this granite prick of a human being.

  ‘We were going to do this without help?’ I said.

  His words were tight and shallow between teeth that kept gritting together. ‘It’s not going so well for me,’ he said. ‘At work… I’ve been overlooked on a couple of promotions. Brass have had me on the carpet over my conduct. Tardiness. And my drinking—’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. We were sweating like pigs in the middle of the killing fields, one dead body already and a broken leg. Dogs and fuckers hot on our heels. And he was doing a career evaluation.

  ‘You wanted to Rambo it and take all the glory,’ I said. ‘That’s what it boils down to.’

  ‘Come on, Sorrell,’ he said. ‘We can do this. Look at what we’ve achieved so far. What has he got left? A couple of lifers sitting in their own shit?’

  I stared at him. The man was mad. ‘We don’t know how many people are involved,’ I said. ‘He could have hostages—’

  ‘No missing person reported. All prison guards accounted for. No demands made.’

  ‘Yet,’ I said. ‘What about the kosher security? Sarah? He could have Sarah in chains.’

  ‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous,’ he said. His face contorted; he wrapped his hand around his shattered ankle. I felt like treading on it. ‘She visited him of her own volition.’

  ‘It might look like that,’ I said. ‘But that manipulative cunt could have been employing any number of dirty tricks to get her here. He could have drugged her. Hypnotised her.’

  ‘Listen to yourself,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Blackmail then. Bribery. Maybe he was teasing her with her mother’s last words. Whatever it was. It must have been something. Why else would she visit her mother’s killer?’

  ‘Just give me your arm,’ he said. ‘Get me out of these fucking woods at least.’

  ‘And into the sniper’s sights? I’m sorely tempted,’ I said.

  ‘Leave me here and I’ll die,’ he said. ‘It’s cold. I’m wearing two layers. Both of them of shit quality. I’m in shock. You do the math.’

  ‘Maths,’ I said. ‘It’s maths. And the only maths I’ve got is you plus me equals eternities of fucking woe.’

  I shrugged myself out of my jacket and hurled it at him. ‘Get blood on that and I’ll hold the fucking dog while it chews you a swathe of new arseholes,’ I said. ‘And if there isn’t backup here ASAP there’ll be arseholes upon arseholes. Do it, Ian. Do it fucking now.’ Then I left, ignoring his pleas and threats.

  I moved towards the wash of light rising from the sodium lamps that were arranged around the Portakabin. I could hear the rhythmic grunting of the generators again now. When the dog leapt for me I was slightly off balance, negotiating mud and a bank of earth and loose stones. I went down and the dog, perhaps unprepared for that, went scrabbling over the top of me. I felt a claw punch me in the jaw as it tried to gain purchase. I put out my hands to thrust it away and I hit a flank of solid muscle. Short hair. Heavier than a suitcase filled with bricks. This was no standard security animal – no German shepherd. This was a pit bull, nearly eighty pounds, a bullet of muscle and teeth. I’d given Mawker my leather jacket so now I no longer had anything I could use as an effective barrier between its teeth and my flesh.

  It came for me, eyes rolled back in its head so I could see only white. Its massive jaws gaped open, revealing a calcium arsenal that could quite easily rip my face from my skull. I kicked out at it, but that only served to temporarily divert it: this beast was not going to give up. I was fucked unless I did something quick, incisive and permanently lethal.

  It found its feet and set itself way quicker than I did. It came again. I slapped and kicked at its slavering chops, but one kick failed to meet its target and it sank its teeth into the meat of my calf. I was lucky. I’d understood that pit bulls lock their jaws when they’ve got hold of something savoury. Nothing will get it to let go, short of death and a pair of pliers. It seemed that this dog wasn’t happy unless its teeth were in the optimum position, so it let go for a second. When it lurched to bite again, I rammed a branch between us. The dog growled; I guessed it wouldn’t be up for a game of fetch.

  I didn’t know how to play this out. I’d heard other stories about dogs. That if you could get them into a certain position and pull their forelegs apart, you could basically tear their hearts in two. I wasn’t sure how likely this was. I didn’t want to use the gun because it would serve only to attract the attention of people who were drifting away from the chase. And then I remembered Creamer’s knife.

  Please don’t let me have stowed it in the pocket of my leather jacket… no, here it was, in its sheath, tucked into a back pocket of my jeans. The dog was at arm’s length; I’d been able to lodge a spur of the branch into the leather collar around its neck. It wasn’t coming any closer unless I dropped it, or its strength proved to be, as I suspected it might, supercanine.

  I fiddled with the sheath, trying to get it away from the blade with my teeth without losing my grip on the branch or slicing my lips off. I managed it, finally, and I shut the dog up quick. I wiped the knife on my jeans and hung the dog from its collar on a tree so my pursuers could see the results of my ire and be sorely afraid.

  No guards down in the grounds now; I suspected they were all in the woods, looking for us. I know what I’d do as soon as I saw Creamer’s body, maybe checked the credentials in his wallet: I’d have been out of there like a shot, no matter what Tann was holding over my head.

  But hang on. In the tower to the south-east, the only remaining structure from the riot fire. I saw a gleam of light off glass. A shadow shift position slightly. I wished for binoculars but I was sure they would only confirm what I suspected. The sniper. The lights would pick me out as soon as I broke from the cover of the trees. I’d be Joel mince within seconds, even if I zigzagged and used as much shelter as possible between me and him – the Portakabin, the car, the broken walls – I still had to expose myself in order to find Tann’s retreat. I couldn’t hide and seek at the same time.

  Which meant I had to go around. The trees kept on north for another couple of hundred yards or so, and then suddenly stopped. Beyond that was exposed farmland and a stream. A copse coming back on the other side: shorn of many of its trees, but with enough limbs to keep me concealed until I got to the base of the tower. Then it would be all about how quiet I was.

  I set off, keeping close to the edge of the woods without allowing myself to step where the fingers of light were able to reach. I couldn’t hear any evidence of pursuit. I hoped they’d given up the chase as a bad idea and scarpered for a life of grime on the Costa del Kent.

  At the top edge of the woods I waited, in case there were more sentries posted near the water. It was darker here, the light from the dip in the land where the prison was based failing to penetrate this far so I couldn’t rely on what I could see. The stream cut through the land from east to west. It was narrow – I was pretty sure I could hop across it if needs be – but it was fast and the sound of the water deafened me to any movement through the grass, or the pebbled banks.

  I shivered. The temperature was dropping fast. I watched a satellite fall smoothly across oblivion. That was me, I thought. Untethered, speeding, going round in fucking circles.

  I nipped out from the trees, tensed against a cry or a barrage of gunfire, but none came. I hunkered down, jogging along the edge of the stream. I could smell the water, fresh and clean, but driven over the top of it from the fields was something thick and musky, maybe the natal den of a red fox.

  I kept the diffuse halo of light to my right and angled towards the copse, keeping low, unsure as to when the tip of the tower would pop into view. And there it was, shockingly close now; I was convinced the sniper must have heard my footfalls in the grass. But he remained stationary, glassing the area to the south of th
e prison grounds, certain that our advance would be from that direction. Maybe he wasn’t bothered by the thought of hordes of police arriving. This could be his Alamo, his Rorke’s Drift. He’d take a few of the bastards with him. Well, not today, bucko.

  I moved silently through the trees, alternating between keeping an eye on him and watching the ground for any sudden visitors. I took a few deep breaths and stepped out. I had about twenty feet to cover in which I was utterly susceptible. If he turned around, I was a goner.

  And something came clattering out of the canopy – an owl or a crow, something big and spooked – and he did turn around, but his eye was drawn to the treetops. Once he realised it was only a bird, he’d relax, drop his gaze and there I’d be, right in his sights. Maybe I should wave. Start doing the Sand Dance, something to put him off guard for a second.

  But I didn’t need it because a gunshot went off in the woods opposite. Fuck, I thought, as the sniper swung around to peer into the trees to the east. Mawker. He’d been spotted. Either that or he’d had enough and topped himself. Worry about that later. I zipped across the remaining ten feet of no man’s land and hugged the concrete base of the tower. I could hear the sniper’s feet shuffle on the dusty floorboards high above. Part of the wall here was collapsed and I found an easy route into the tower without having to put myself in a dangerous position again. Metal steps ascended: a spiral staircase. The smell of cold carbon, cheated fire.

  I took my boots off and left them at the foot of the stairs. Just my luck he’d be at the end of his shift and he’d meet me coming down. Or a chum would have taken pity on him and bring him up a cup of tea, sandwiching me. You have to risk it, though. Otherwise you’d still be sitting, shitting it in the dark with Mawker, jumping at shadows. Wondering how to proceed.

  I padded up the steps and once I was level with his feet, swept my arm around them so he fell backwards. He hit his head on the metal skirting around the staircase access and tumbled arse over tit to the bottom. I followed him down and he was grey-faced, out cold. He was breathing shallowly and there was blood seeping from a huge knot on the back of his head.