by Riley Flynn
When. Not if.
Exiting the rear of the house was easy. Alex paused a moment, checking the motorbikes. They were as good as new. A bit dirty, perhaps, but all the better for it. Full of fuel, ready to roll out when needed.
One day, Alex promised himself, I’m going to get myself one of these, and maybe even pay for it.
Leaving through the back gate was more difficult. With the high wall hiding everything, the world beyond the gate was unknown. There might be anything on the other side. Maybe a person. Alex gripped a deadbolt with careful fingers and began to slide it open. The old metal scraped and groaned. Rust was pouring off. It must have been the loudest sound in the world.
But it opened.
The alley was abandoned. If the men were sleeping in the street, they had not just discovered the intricate network of alleyways and paths which stitched themselves in and around the buildings of the town. As well as the walled yard of the hideaway home, Alex could duck and weave between the walls and fences which lined other people’s property. Even in such an empty town, people were adamant about what exactly belonged to them.
It was a quiet morning. Sneaking through the space behind the houses, Alex could hear sounds. Occasional bird song, a dog barking in a distant building. Perhaps someone had left their pet behind as they fled the town. Died, more likely, Alex admitted to himself. Scratching sounds. Footsteps. He wondered whether they were really there, whether they had always been there, or whether his ears were manufacturing noises to satisfy a paranoid mind.
The drug store was only three buildings away, just over fifty feet. Alex ran quick and low through the empty spaces between the houses. As he arrived at his destination, he found the low window into the basement, just as Joan had said. It was between two dried-out rosemary bushes, about twenty inches high and made of thin frosted glass. Just about big enough to squeeze through.
Nearby, Alex found half a brick. Raising his hand to smash the glass, he stopped. Too loud. Instead, he removed his jacket, wrapped the brick inside so that the sharpest corner was coddled in the wax coat. Next, he lay the brick beside the window, looked up and down the alley, and kicked the parceled weapon. The glass cracked. Two more firm kicks and it shattered.
Using the coat, Alex wiped away all the fragments from inside the frame. Each one tinkled and chimed as it hit the concrete floor below, the melody of notes betraying his position. Unwrapping the brick, he placed the jacket back around his shoulders. Over the gun. As quickly as he could, Alex slid in through the empty frame, feet first.
His sneakers hit the floor with a clap. Fumbling in the Barbour pocket, Alex found his flashlight. It clicked as the beam of light stirred and began cutting swathes through the basement gloom. There was a slow drip, drip, drip from an unseen source. Everything down here was moist, from the flat packed cardboard boxes to the bicycle leaning against the far wall without any wheels.
The way out was up the concrete steps. At the top, a flimsy door, the paint peeling off the inside. Opening gently, pulling it shut after him, Alex found himself in the familiar corridors of the drug store. The stifling smell had not improved. Only worsened.
Everything was stored in the morgue. Each step in that direction was a worry. The air thickened. The rotting flesh in the bags on the floor of the blacked-out medical center demanded the attention of every brain cell. It smelled like so much death roasted over an iron forge. Industrialized putridity.
Alex felt his fingers rub the paper in his pocket. The list Joan had written. The medical supplies to ease Timmy back into the world. This and that, just names on a list, random collections of letters that he knew nothing about.
As the door opened, the air rushed out. Escaping, dragging with it the decomposing stench of diseased meat. Every taste cell on the tongue began to rust, to wither, all at once. So overwhelming it rode over every sense. Deafening. Blinding. Alex fought against his every instinct, driving his gagging stomach down and holding it in place.
Move fast, he thought. Alex emptied one box, throwing its contents on the floor. Paper towels, it seemed. He went to the racks, the shelves stocked with medicine. Working through the list, he found everything. Grabbing as much as possible, he laid it all in the box. All except one item. An unpronounceable name with an annotation.
“In the front of store,” Alex read to himself.
A relief. A chance to get out of the morgue. Double checking everything in the box, terrified of having to ever come back, he packed up the loot and left. The click of the door closing behind was a reassurance. A relief.
Leaving the stolen medicine next to the top of the basement stairs, Alex proceeded down the corridor and into the main public space. It was as small as he remembered it. But before, he knew, the door had been working. Now, it hung from its hinges. Someone had been inside.
Stomach still turning over and over, knotting itself into all sorts of Gordian shapes, Alex scanned the shelves for the last item on the list. It was buried in a corner, behind the counter, in the last place anyone would look. Annoying, he thought, but not an unsurmountable hurdle. All that remained now was getting back to the house in one piece and the mission would be a success.
Walking back to the top of the basement stairs, there was a spring in Alex’s step. He clicked his heels against the tiles, pleased that he’d managed to prevail so quickly. Even the stench of all those bodies hadn’t slowed him down, he’d be able to tell Joan, already conjuring up the lurid, wretched ways in which he’d describe the smell.
“Hey,” a voice called from behind. “Who’re you?”
Alex was halfway between the store front and the basement steps. But the voice was coming from over his shoulder, almost. It was deep, rough around the edges. The sound of a person spitting came next.
“Well?”
Turning around, the oversized coat hiding his hands, Alex tried to hold up the boxes of medicine. Adrenaline surged inside him, making his fingers tremble. He tried to hide his nerves.
“Hi. I’m Alex. I’m just here for my pills. Just passing by. Don’t mind me. Who are you?”
The man was indistinguishable from those Alex had seen the night before. Then, they’d been wandering around a fire, drinking and shouting and shooting their guns. The tattoos were the same, except for an intricately designed cross perched between the eyes. The man’s T-shirt clung to a muscled frame. A hand dipped into a pocket and arrived back with a flick of the wrist. A knife. The man walked forward.
“I’m Saul. Me and my friends, we own this town now. Everything in it. Hand that back over.”
“It’s just blood thinners,” Alex told him, stepping backwards. “Just a hereditary condition.”
“Sick people is sick people. You want to see how sick we are? Give it up.”
That was the end of the conversation. The man lunged forward, the knife leading. Alex twisted, just enough. The knife ran through the hanging body of the wax jacket. It was sharp.
Reach for the gun, Alex thought. Get it now.
But the man was in too close, throwing punches and feints. It was all Alex could do to dodge. One hit to the arm, one to the ribs. They hurt. The man just seemed to laugh, not offering an opportunity to switch the hand up and behind the back, where the pistol was hidden.
Trapped in the corridor, the fight was hindered. No space to run for Alex, for room to really build up steam for his attacker. When the man pulled back his arm or slashed with the knife, Alex drove forwards, toward him. Grappling, grabbing, trying to hug him close.
The knife flashed again, arcing past Alex’s face. It cut down hard into the wax coat, catching as Alex turned. Twisting, the coat took the knife out of the man’s hands and it clattered along the corridor tiles.
Again, Alex tried for the gun, using one hand to cover his face while the over dived into the flaps of the coat. He could feel the tape, feel the barrel. The handle was almost in reach. The man landed a hard punch right in Alex’s gut. The wind knocked out of him, the grip on the pistol abandoned,
he tumbled back hard into the wall beside the basement door.
Now, the man beamed. A black space instead of a front tooth, Alex noticed. It didn’t matter now.
“Oh, Roque’s gonna be real pleased with you.”
From two feet away, the man balanced on the balls of his feet. About to pounce. Rising, Alex could barely breathe. Sucking air, staring at the tooth, he saw the sinews in the man’s muscles tense.
The man jumped, flinging himself through the small space. Alex ducked, crouching down. As the milliseconds crawled by, he could feel the weight of the man passing over him. Unbalanced, the attacker tripped, stumbled, and reached out to support himself.
He found only the basement door, still ajar, and vanished into the shadows below. Alex heard the bones snap, the blood spill as he hit every step on the way down. And then silence. On the corridor floor, desperate for breath, Alex listened. All he could hear was the blood hissing through the veins in his ear, hurtling back to his thundering heart.
Alex was alive, just.
31
There was no time to breathe.
The man at the bottom of the concrete stairs had not stirred. Gathering together all of the medicine, Alex collected his box of supplies and stood at the top of the steps. Reaching underneath the coat, he removed the pistol from its hiding place and placed it on top of the IV bags and pills. More use there.
Step by step, he descended. Without a free hand to carry a flashlight, he had to continue in the dark. The light from the broken window and the open door was enough to spot the man, lying prone in a pool of blood. Unerringly still.
Staring at the body, Alex felt a way down the steps with his feet. It took a long time. Once at the bottom, he walked around the body and the expanding lake of blood. Saul, that’s what he’d called himself. And then something about Roque. Unfamiliar names.
As Alex took a wide berth, the crack along the side of the man’s skull glared upwards at the world. Fractured, dark. The bald head did nothing to hide the bone.
Just beneath the broken window, the fresh air seeped inside. The taste almost tickled the tongue, like an ice cube applied to an open wound. Numbing with its crispness. One item at a time, Alex lifted the drugs, the IV bags, and the pill boxes out into the alley. The gun he saved until last. Even the coat went ahead of it and the box was folded down to fit through the frame.
Clambering out into the daylight, Alex heard sounds from the street. The gang members were stirring. The same shouts, muted with their morning hangover, had begun to pick up. From here, words were decipherable. Bellows about drink, food, and half-joking threats echoed from the other side of the drug store, down the main street by the bar.
In time, they would discover that one of their number was missing. Whether they’d check down in the basement of a drug store, Alex didn’t know. If they discovered the body, they might even think that he died from an accidental fall down a dark set of stairs. Which was true, in a way, Alex reassured himself.
Packing everything back into the box, volume was important. The sounds of people moving were audible now. On the street, men kicking stones as they went. Heavy boots on asphalt. Hand slapping, laughter. Alex worried as the clatter of the pills in their packets echoed through the alley.
With the box, the walk back to the hideout was short. But with people all around, Alex was worried. Rather than walking in a straight line, he crossed the alley and waited. The drug store was one of a row of houses which ran parallel to the main street.
From the rear, the yards and the buildings mixed together, the alley built up on either side with walls, hedges, and trees. It functioned like a tunnel, a secret street running analogous to the main road in the town.
Carefully, Alex moved from shadow to shadow. From behind a tree trunk to a darkened doorway. Every time he heard a noise, he found a new hiding place, moving a few steps each time. As the sound of footsteps grew louder, he shrank farther and farther away from the alley, pushing himself and his box into a shadowy porch with a waist-high wall.
It belonged to a house behind the drug store, which backed onto the same space. The footsteps were near. Alex bent down low, hiding from sight. The steps continued through the alley and then stopped.
“Where the hell are you? Saul?” an unseen man shouted.
Leaning against the porch, Alex noticed the door to the home was open. In the alley, the shouting man was scratching around, searching up and down. If he came up to the rear of this house, approached the wall, he would hear the sound of hidden breathing.
“Hey, man, your brother’s looking for you. Boy, is he pissed.”
Alex began to crawl toward the door, leaving the box filled with medical supplies behind. Moving along on his belly, his bare chest scratching on the floor, he reached the doorway.
It was light and airy in the home. But Alex did not have time to stop and admire the décor. There was another sound now. A scratching. A whining. He’d heard it from the street before entering the drug store. Not loud enough to worry about, but loud enough to pique the curiosity.
If the man heard the same, he’d investigate. The scratches seemed to be coming from behind a closed door, down the end of the hallway. The sounds shifted, the man moving up and down the alley. Searching for Saul. Still, there was that same scratching sound.
Alex seized the moment. As quietly as he could, he ran to the end of the corridor and laid a hand on the door. It was closed. It seemed stuck, even as he turned the handle. Locked. Fiddling, finding a small dial to turn, his fingers worked fast. Finally, it sprang open and he ran inside.
Something hit him hard in the stomach, knocking Alex backwards. He rolled to his left, his attacker rolling with him. Coming to a stop, Alex prepared to lift himself up. Ready to fight, again. A tongue licked his face. A long, excited lick which came again and again, accompanied by a whine. Two paws resting on his chest. Alex looked up.
It was a dog. One of those police dogs. But younger. Not quite a puppy. He pushed it to the side, clambering to his feet, worried about the sound. The dog continued to lick his hands. Alex shut the door. Then he noticed. It smelled awful in here.
Not like the morgue. It wasn’t the smell of death. It was much more… natural. Alex looked around the room; the dog must have been in here for days, if not more. A former family room, with a couch and a TV, it had been abandoned to the dog.
A huge sack of dog food had been split open along the seam and laid at one end of the room, next to an open half barrel of water. There were scratches cut deep into the floorboards and the door. The smell, Alex realized now, was exactly what he’d expect from a dog spending a week inside a single room without an opportunity to go outside. The evidence was littered all in one corner.
Still, the creature wasn’t quiet. The dog was licking any part of Alex he could find, whining with delight at the man who’d arrived to free him from his boring cage. But it needed to keep it down. There were people outside, probably searching. Finger to his lips, Alex shushed the dog.
It sat. Right away, without hesitation, the dog fell instantly silent. Stunned by this adherence to authority, Alex patted the animal on the head. The tail wagged. But quietly. After so long with Timmy and Joan, he thought, it was nice to be listened to without any disagreements.
Now, he could see the dog properly. It was about three feet long, nose to tail tip. A foot and a half high. Two ears pricked up constantly searched for any sound, moving independently of one another. It was the paws which betrayed the dog’s age. Long and growing, still outsized and wrapped in puppy fat.
Growing up on the farm, there had always been dogs. Even before he thought about it, Alex knew that he wouldn’t be able to leave this animal behind. It wasn’t even a discussion. As long as the dog was quiet, they could get back to the house and–once they were there–Joan could tell him how terrible an idea it was.
But, for now, the dog was coming. There was no question.
The room had a window which looked out through the porch an
d onto the alley. Positioning himself to the side, Alex tried to spot the man who had been searching for his friend. The dog followed, sitting again beside the window, watching through the glass.
“I guess you must have seen people coming and going,” Alex said under his breath. “Spotted me a few times, did you?”
The tongue left a long, wet lick on Alex’s hand. There was the gang member. The man had similar tattoos to his dead friend, numerals and black ink scattered up and down his arms. This man had hair and was wearing heavier clothes. Still shouting and searching, he was now passing the drug store, walking away down the street.
Waiting for long minutes, Alex watched him go. After the man was out of sight and there were no other sounds, he crept back out to the porch and collected the box with the medical supplies. The dog followed, bending its head down below its haunches.
It was a quick walk back to the hideout. Alex didn’t stop once on the way to the gate, didn’t duck into any shadows. The dog was tight on his heels, sniffing at everything they passed. Once they were behind the walls, the deadbolt back in place, Alex dropped to his knees. The dog licked his face. A sudden burst of delirious laughter punctured the silence and then stopped. This soundless world was never peaceful.
32
The dog ran up the stairs and Alex followed. It needed a name. Heaving the box of medicine to the second floor, he knocked three times and waited. Movement on the other side. The shifting metal inside the locks. The door swung open and Joan stood there, staring.
“What on earth is that?” she said, pointing at the dog.
“I’ve got everything. I think. Can you check it?”
Placing the box on the kitchen table, Alex began to search through the various bags and boxes from Castle Ratz. Finally, he found it. One of the ready meals. This was a big test. Unwrapping the food, removing the packaging, he placed it in a pile on the floor. The dog sniffed it out in a second, trotted over, and almost inhaled it all at once.