The Truants

by Lee Markham

  And so, over the years, the tide had turned, and we’d been forced to look, and forced to care. Or pretend to care. Our suffering obliged to compete on the global stage. And we hadn’t liked what we’d seen. And we couldn’t accept that it was how we’d always been, and so we’d made quite the song and dance about what it was that we’d become, and were continuing to become.

  But that narrative didn’t float for Tom. Nature was indeed red in tooth and claw, and, given the sheer volume of nature on the loose in the city, it always astounded him that the place wasn’t up to its neck in red. Almost made him proud.

  Almost.

  And, damn it, he didn’t see our innate natures becoming more red, he just saw more of us. It looked redder simply because there were so many of us. But, looked at individually, we were less red than our fathers, and our grandfathers. He didn’t fear global warfare like his grandparents had experienced. He was aware of horrors, god yes, and they touched and haunted him every time, and he saw collective atrocities occur, of course, but the general flow of the tide? It was away from the worldwide industrialised slaughter of the last century, and all the conquest-driven genocides of the centuries beforehand, and towards something that might one day approximate peace. Tolerance, at least.

  We were becoming better people. But we still had a way to go.

  But this was not something he tended to share – certainly not with Anna, who’d ended up here, working with him in the city, and who had awakened to the full brutal and bloody impetus of our species far too late to accept that it wasn’t something that we were evolving towards, but something we were at last starting to evolve beyond.

  His wife knew it was how he thought. And it was why she loved him, mostly. That, and he could be pretty funny from time to time. Irreverent. And because he adored her too. Not in a big showy way, but in a still, soft, voice of calm way. His love for her was emblematic of his ultimate faith in humanity. His perspective. That it was what we were truly capable of. And that in itself demonstrated that we were still moving in a forward motion away from the swamp, and the trees. And to her that made it, and him, and the world, and life itself, solid.

  Days like today could rattle him, though. Scenes such as the one he and Anna had attended in the park. Another body burnt on a bench. Tended to knock the wind out of his sails. He was a hopeful man, his hope constructed on the foundation of how far we’d come. But every now and then something would remind him of how far we yet had to go. He’d see and hear plenty, day to day, that would sadden him, anger him, compel him to stand up, step in: violence, robbery, addiction, all of that, but most of it he could find a way to understand. Most of it was fuelled by a desperation of some kind that wasn’t entirely the fault of the people he was tasked with finding and bringing to book. It was, this desperation, nearly always handed down, generation to generation, and symptomatic of a lack of imagination, or resolution, to find a better way up and out of the slime. So, so many of those down there did better than to turn on their neighbours in the grip of this desperation, and while he never excused the little viciousnesses and harms they inflicted on each other, or themselves, he did understand. Most of the time. It was hardly ever forgivable, but it was pretty much always understandable, if one sought to understand.

  But what they’d found on the bench: that was one of the other kind. The rare kind. A throwback. A hateful reminder of that germ of destruction in our nature that had probably got us up and moving from primordia in the first place, that had propelled us through the dog-eat-dog phase of our ascent, but which was now as much use to us as our coccyx was for keeping our balance in the trees. It was the lesser part of us, that part that was, that had to be, on the losers’ page of history, but which every now and then would present itself as a little whisper, an insinuated temptation to give up and to return to the wilderness. It was the animus of the beasts we once were taking dominion over the spirit of the people we had become. And that was an abomination in his eyes. If there was such a thing as evil – and Tom didn’t really believe there was, not in any scriptured sense that might abdicate our own responsibility for it – then this was it: the ghost of the animals we once were, haunting us all, and possessing a very few.

  He closed his eyes and his daughter squirmed on his lap, sucking on her dummy. She was watching the TV sleepily, just up from her afternoon nap. He hadn’t slept since he’d come in that morning. Hadn’t been able to. He’d dozed fitfully, here on the recliner, in front of the TV. He’d loaded the dishwasher and made himself coffee. He’d flicked lazily through the Saturday newspaper but had avoided the news. He’d been quiet today. He’d kept himself to himself. His girls had hugged him – his wife knew that he was in that place he went to from time to time, and she didn’t ask. She didn’t want to know. She knew what he did, and she knew him, and she knew that if he was quiet, and in that place, then she really didn’t want to know. She loved him, and she knew it was her job to remain here, in the light, a beacon for him to find his way home by. It wasn’t for her to head into the darkness. His daughter didn’t know anything, but she went easy on him. Clinged a little. Turned up the cute.

  And they’d bring him back.

  His wife popped her head round the door. ‘Baby, do you want another coffee?’

  His phone vibrated on the mantelpiece. They both looked at it coldly. The child didn’t.

  Tom sighed, and nodded. Then he heaved himself upright, pulled his daughter close to him and held her as he stood. He turned and deposited her gently back into the seat.

  ‘Going Daddy?’

  ‘Just got to check my phone, baby.’

  He picked it up and opened the message. Read it. Put the phone back on the mantelpiece and padded out into the kitchen. The kettle was rattling its intent. He went to his wife and held her. She held him back. They said nothing. He buried his face in the nape of her neck and let her hold him up.

  ‘I love you baby,’ he whispered.

  ‘Love you too.’

  The kettle clicked. The embrace was broken. Tom walked across the room to the landline. He picked up the handset and dialled a number from memory. He smiled wearily at his wife as she handed him his coffee. She ran her hand across his tummy as she left the room and went through to their daughter. He took a sip and hissed: hot.

  At the other end of the line someone answered.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Camera guys have got something.’

  He leant back against the wall and looked at the ceiling.

  ‘No, I haven’t looked at it yet. Computer’s in the car. Just got the text.’

  A pause then as Anna powered up her tablet at the other end of the line and checked the image the CCTV team had sent through.

  ‘OK. I’ll be over in as long as it takes to get there. Keep an eye out for me.’

  He put the phone back in its cradle, went to the sink, poured some coffee down the drain and then topped it up with cold water. Drank it down in two gulps. He grabbed his coat from the bench in the hall where he’d thrown it, pulled it on, bent down and tugged his shoes on. Checked his pockets for his phone. Grabbed his keys. Poked his head round the living room door.

  ‘I gotta go to work. Dunno when I’ll be back.’

  ‘Come with you Daddy? Pleeeeease?’

  ‘No baby, not this time. Daddy’s not going to the office.’

  He tried to smile. Almost succeeded.

  He exchanged a look with his wife.

  She knew. He knew.

  It was love.

  There was hope.

  It would be OK. In the end.

  Then he went back to work.

  4

  They were the first on the scene of the next burning. This one wasn’t like the others though. This fire was normal, and an aside to the main event. And there was nothing normal about that. Nothing.

  They’d been trolling the estate showing people printouts of the Hooded Claw (as the camera guys laughingly referred to him, due to the arm that subsequent images clearly showed
was nursing a bad break – they thought they were very funny, the camera guys. Anna thought they were idiots. Tom thought they spent too much time looking at everything through the mediating retina of a TV screen. They’d become detached. Alright for some). And everyone who examined the printout would look up from it and fix them square in the eye, smile and say something like, ‘You serious?’

  Half of the people they spoke to actually looked like the person in the pictures themselves.

  Average height. Average build. Hooded top. Trainers.

  It didn’t take long before their line of questioning started to lead with, ‘We’re looking for someone who might have recently injured their arm.’ The pictures were on the wall of every hospital in a ten-mile radius, but nothing had come back yet. They’d bring the pictures out if someone offered an ‘I dunno, maybe… you got a picture?’

  A lot of the people they were speaking to had nothing better to do.

  It was shortly after 9 p.m. It was dark, but the estate was very much awake. Those who had jobs to go to, most of them worked shifts. It meant that enough of them had late starts the next day and the place kept going well into the night. It might have felt Continental, except for the bitter cold and the harsh undertow of deprivation that seemed to coat the whole area.

  Anna had been uncomfortable about coming to the estate this late, on their own, and identifying themselves as police. Tom had told her it would be fine. Some of his best mates from the football club he’d played at in his teens had come from this estate, or ones pretty much identical elsewhere in the city. Good kiddies. Most of them. A couple of shits, to be sure, but no greater a proportion than came from the ‘better’ areas. They might have been meaner, but they lacked the obscene sense of entitled superiority that the arseholes with money seemed to think was their birthright. So, swings and roundabouts.

  And he’d been right, by and large. People had laughed at them when they’d shown them the printout because it was so generic. But when they told them what they thought the Claw had done, they’d stop laughing. And they’d have another look. And they’d concentrate. Call their friends over and get them to have a look too. They cared. Of course they did.

  Who wouldn’t?

  Which of course didn’t change their circumstances, or the likelihood that most of them would spend the rest of their lives right here in the shadows of the towers, fighting with each other for the scant scraps the city had to offer them.

  A few of them asked about a little boy who had been stabbed not so far from here earlier that afternoon. The one who had died. Some of them had been angry: ‘What are you gonna do about it? You lot just don’t give a fuck about us.’ That kind of thing. It was understandable. The story was still in its infancy and was mostly word-of-mouth at this stage. Concrete whispers. It had missed the free evening papers. But there were a few vague, ‘unconfirmed’ mentions online. Tom and Anna trotted out the ‘We’re doing everything we can…’ line, neither of them mentioning that the stabbed kid’s body had since somehow gone AWOL.

  Unbelievable.

  From the hospital too.

  That wasn’t public knowledge yet.

  Thank Christ.

  But that wasn’t why they were here. Someone else’s problem.

  They were here for the two burnt people on the bench. They were looking for a broken-armed hoodie that the city CCTV had caught heading into the bowels of this estate. Tom wondered how long it would be before the cameras would actually watch everyone right into their front doors – or even beyond – instead of just safely back into their neighbourhoods. How comforting. But these people wouldn’t stand for it. They might be at the bottom of the pile, but there was only so much they’d stand for. Orwell could rest in peace. Big Brother didn’t stand a chance. Even on TV its days were numbered. Only so much people could stomach. Tom smiled a little at the facile absurdity of the places to which his mind sometimes transported him to.

  Which was when they heard the commotion. Five or six floors up.

  People shouting, calling for help. Fire.

  They didn’t even pause to exchange glances. They made straight for the stairwell and raced up towards the source of the alarm. They barged past an old dear lugging her shopping up the stairs. Almost ran into a young black child in his school uniform heading down the stairs holding the hand of a fair-skinned youngster in a suit. An odd couple that neither Tom nor Anna fully took in and wouldn’t recall until later. Too late.

  When they reached the door to the flat in question there were people standing outside their own front doors on the gantry that looked down over the concrete square between the buildings. Smoke was billowing out round the edges of the door. Tom didn’t hesitate – he threw himself against it, once, twice, three times, and in. He’d arrived after the event at two burnings already in the last week – he wasn’t going to let that happen again. One of the neighbours followed Tom and Anna in.

  The flat stank. Even over the stench of smoke and burning man-made fibres. It stank of piss and shit and addiction. The smell of bad people. He ran down the hall towards the source of the fire, a child’s room, but one that had clearly suffered from surely criminal neglect. The mattress on the floor was stained and threadbare. The boards of the floor uncovered and rough. There was dog crap here and there. And in the middle of the room a small bonfire belched out dark, acrid smoke. An old cardboard box wilting in the yellow and blue flames that devoured it and the melting plastic toys it was clearly failing to contain. It wasn’t a big fire. But it was dirty. And it wasn’t a person. It wasn’t another one of those fires. Thank god.

  Tom paused in the doorway to the room with the neighbour, while Anna went further into the flat. The neighbour went back out onto the gantry and Tom could hear him barking instructions to one of the rubberneckers outside: ‘Nothing serious… but we need a couple of wet blankets… soak them, yeah… and a couple of buckets of water. Quick as you can.’

  ‘Tom.’ Anna’s voice. Weak. Distressed.

  ‘Hang on.’ Something was off about this. It was too… tidy.

  ‘No Tom. You need to see this.’

  He frowned impatiently and went back into the flat. He expected to find her in the child’s room, but she wasn’t there. He moved deeper into the flat, into the sitting room, and saw what she’d seen and he froze.

  She was pale and shaken. Leaning against the wall. Her arms crossed, hands pushed tight into her armpits. Rigid with tension.

  ‘Fuck…’ he wheezed, leaning back against the door.

  Anna pushed past him and left the flat as the first of the neighbours came in with the kit for extinguishing the fire. Tom looked at the neighbour and pointed needlessly at the door to the kid’s room. ‘In there. Don’t come in here. Don’t let anyone come in here.’

  The neighbour looked at him momentarily, quizzically, then took his word for it and got on with putting out the fire. Tom could see Anna framed by the doorway at the front of the flat, talking into her mobile. She looked back in at Tom and nodded: she was calling it in. She still had her free hand tucked under her other arm.

  Tom then reluctantly turned back to the tableau that greeted him. On the coffee table, which was adrift in a scree of strewn drugs paraphernalia, was a dog, dead, bite marks all over his body. Little bite marks. A child’s bite marks.

  In one armchair, bound, sat a stocky blond male, mid-twenties. There were track marks on his arms. His throat was torn out. Not much by way of blood spilt.

  On the sofa, looking as if she’d been laid out, but also bound, was a female, late teens, perhaps early twenties. And once again, throat gone. Her eyes were open and she stared unseeingly up at the smoke-stained ceiling. On her cheek was a little crimson flower. A kiss. A child’s kiss.

  Lipstick.

  Blood.

  Tom had attended murder scenes before, but never a slaughter. He knew colleagues who had, and the one common element they all reported was just how much blood there is. Lots and lots of blood. Not so here.

&n
bsp; At least, not everywhere: because in the other armchair, here was our guy from the CCTV. Same hoodie. Same broken arm. But for this one, it wasn’t his throat that was gone: it was his hands that had been sawn off – roughly, not cleanly. As if it had taken a while to get through the gristle and connecting tissues of his wrists. And his mouth had been smashed too and hung ajar. Tom guessed that his jaw had been dislocated. His blood was all over the place. He could see where it had poured from the stumps where his hands should have been.

  Receding now into cold police procedural mode, Tom leant in closer to inspect the damage to the man’s face. He could see into his mouth. And what he saw chilled him.

  The man’s teeth had all been removed. Smashed from his skull. Not a single one left. Tom stood upright and backed up to the wall. His brain did some quick calculations and nothing added up. The fire was hopeless if the firebug had intended it to destroy the scene of the crime. The murders were savage. Two of them bloodless.

  But the scene hadn’t been abandoned.

  It had been mounted.

  It was as if the scene were only pretending to be hiding evidence, with the fire, and the missing hands and teeth. It was as if the scene had something to say.

  But if it did, then he didn’t want to know what it was.

  It mocked him.

  It was the abyss and, as he looked into it, he could feel its dead-eyed glare staring right back at him. Smiling.

  He could see its teeth.

  And it scared him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  INFECTION AND AWAKENINGS