A Time to Die

by Tom Wood

  He took it.

  SEVENTY

  The ceiling was a chessboard of polystyrene tiles. They had been there for thirty years and looked their age. Once white and clean, they now had the appearance of a desert landscape, cracked and yellow. He had mistaken them as such, as he drifted in and out of consciousness during that first night when his heart stuttered and stumbled to keep going. But it had. A touch-and-go night had become a weekend of uncertainty that had become a morning of hope followed by an afternoon of relief. He had made it.

  He had survived.

  A miracle, he heard a doctor say when he was still only semi-conscious. He hadn’t understood the precariousness of his situation at first. He hadn’t even known what he was doing here. Memories had first come back in patches hazes, unformed and nonsensical. As his blood pressure had continued to rise to a normal range and his brain was supplied with a steady flow of oxygen, the jigsaw of sounds and sights had reconstructed and reformed and reordered.

  And when he understood, when he knew, the pain came, and soon after the sedation because his screams and moans were frightening other patients and the wild movements were threatening to burst open his many stitches. More drugs had followed. Sweet, sweet sedation.

  Now, he was awake and alert for the first time.

  Life was cracked and yellowed because he could see nothing but the ceiling tiles because he couldn’t move his head. It was in a brace, fixing his gaze forward, limiting his range of vision. He was too weak to sit up in bed so the ceiling tiles were all he had to look upon.

  There had been no visitors yet because today was the first day he was fully awake and no longer under heavy sedation for his own safety. He had used the last couple of hours to think. He had to work out a story to explain why he had ended up in hospital. The thought of police officers, honest and true, interrogating him at his bedside made him feel faint. Bravery was not his forte.

  Until then he had the sound of the TV for company. All day long it played dubbed US sitcoms – the same ones that had been playing since the Americans bombed Serbia.

  He had the best care, at least. The nurses and doctors knew he was a man of no small importance. They knew he was an influential man – a connected man – who had to be well looked after. Maybe he wouldn’t have made it through that first terrible night and the days that followed without that extra attention paid to him. It was a scary thought. Life, he thought, was but a flower: beautiful and delicate.

  Dilas swallowed and his heart monitor showed a sudden spike in pulse and blood pressure. It was hard not to be terrified of the fallout, of having to explain himself; to justify his association with Rados and the man’s criminal network. Why exactly were you at the house of a wanted man? But that was only his first reaction, because he remembered that night at the mansion clearly – the girls, the Hungarian killer, the gunshots, the moment of agony followed by nothing.

  Rados was dead, Dilas had overheard. The organisation had been ruined by the Hungarian. It would be scattered. It would be fragmented.

  Dilas had lived through it all. He was excited.

  He heard his door open and in his blurry peripheral vision he glimpsed the shape of a nurse enter the room and hurry to the heart monitor. An alarm had been initiated because of his spiking pulse and blood pressure.

  ‘Are you feeling okay?’ he asked Dilas.

  Dilas felt the nurse looking even if he couldn’t see him in return, so he nodded in answer and breathed and his heart rate began to settle.

  The nurse made adjustments to the monitor and said, ‘Try and keep calm.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll try.’

  He shifted on the bed and grimaced.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ the nurse asked.

  Of course he was. Dilas nodded. ‘A bit.’

  ‘I’ll give you something for that, if you like.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The nurse detached the cannula in Dilas’ arm from the saline drip. ‘No sharp needle scratch this way. You’ve had your fill of pain, I’m sure.’

  Dilas nodded along because he couldn’t be bothered with idle chit-chat. He only wanted some more drugs and some time to plot.

  ‘What happened to me?’ he asked. ‘I can’t remember anything.’

  He was an exceptional liar, he knew. He tried to twist his head to look at the nurse, but the neck brace kept his vision on those annoying ceiling tiles.

  ‘You were shot,’ the nurse explained. ‘You have five gunshot wounds to your chest. You are exceptionally fortunate to be alive.’

  ‘I don’t feel lucky at the moment. But how am I alive? Is it really a miracle?’

  The nurse’s tone was placatory. Dilas couldn’t see his face, but he pictured a look of condescension. ‘Not exactly. You have a very rare condition called dextrocardia. Simply put: your heart is on the right side of your chest instead of the left. Had your heart been in the conventional location you would have been killed instantly.’ The nurse removed the needle. ‘All done.’

  ‘I see,’ Dilas said, trying and failing to look down at his bandaged chest. ‘The bullets have been taken out? They’re not still inside me, are they? I’m going to be okay, aren’t I?’

  When the drip was reinserted into the cannula the nurse said, ‘They were removed straight away. Aside from tissue damage and some blood loss, you are in remarkable condition. Dextrocardia is something you are born with, and, looking at your notes, you are quite healthy otherwise. Aside from the recent bullet wounds, I mean.’

  You didn’t fight in the war, did you? Rados had taunted because it was true, and spoke of deeper truth: Dilas was weak and he was a coward. He was quick of thought and tongue, but he had no macho credentials to draw support within certain demographics. Until now.

  He had been shot, but he had survived. A miracle.

  Vote for Dilas. Vote for invincibility.

  Dilas made sure not to smile too much and asked, ‘What about my head? Why am I in this thing?’

  ‘You landed hard on paving stones when you fell and cracked two vertebrae. There’s no damage to your spinal cord, so don’t worry. The brace is merely to let the bones heal without further damage. You’re going to be fine, physically, but this is a lot to process. Try to get some sleep. You’ll wake up feeling a lot better.’

  ‘Right. Could you shut off the TV, please?’ Dilas asked.

  ‘Sure,’ the nurse said, and a moment later the TV fell blissfully silent. He placed the remote control next to Dilas’ hand on the bed. ‘In case you want it back on. Simply raise it in the air and thumb the top right button.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Dilas said, touched by the simple act of compassion.

  The nurse then said, ‘I’ll check on you later,’ and left the room.

  Dilas lay in silence for a moment, feeling tired but also not wanting to sleep after all – he was too alert – so he did as the nurse had instructed and raised the remote and found the top right button with his thumb and switched the TV back on.

  Dilas was happy.

  Even shot, even bedridden, even pained, he could still play the angles. It was something Rados had been incapable of, and it had cost him. He’d made the mistake of trusting that Hungarian, whoever he was. Dilas had never trusted the outsider, and he planned to find out the man’s true identity. He had politicians who owed him and cops he had paid off and many other useful people Rados had intimidated on his behalf. Would the latter still help him now Rados was gone? Of course not, but then they would suffer because all those leaderless barbarians needed a new purpose, a new emperor to protect – an emperor proven to be even tougher than them; even tougher than Rados himself.

  Everything Dilas wanted would now come to fruition. He wanted power, he wanted respect, he wanted to induce fear.

  He also wanted vengeance. He wanted the Hungarian dead. He would do everything in his soon-to-be-considerable power to make sure of it. Vengeance would be his.

  Dilas was smiling at a sitcom one-liner when the door eased open.

&
nbsp; A shape appeared in the corner of his peripheral vision. A man. Not the nurse. Someone else.

  Careful footsteps approached his bed.

  The shape stopped before it came into Dilas’ view and a man asked, ‘How are you feeling?’

  The voice was quiet. The accent hard to pinpoint.

  Annoyed by another intrusion, Dilas replied with a curt, ‘I’m fine.’

  The man – a doctor by the glimpse Dilas had of his white coat – passed the bed and approached the heart monitor.

  With his back to Dilas, the doctor said, ‘You’re a very lucky man.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dilas said, feeling smug. ‘I guess I’m blessed.’

  ‘Yes,’ the man echoed. ‘Blessed.’

  The white coat drifted by Dilas and the man stood at the head of the bed, where Dilas couldn’t see him. He heard the rustle of paper as his notes were checked.

  The doctor said, ‘I’m going to give you something for your pain.’

  ‘I’ve had an injection.’

  The junior doctor remained silent.

  Dilas heard his notes being set back in the slot at the end of the bed and felt the doctor standing there – a blurred hint of white at the very edge of his vision. It made Dilas uneasy. He had a sudden horrible thought that quickened his heart with terror, but he dismissed it as an attack of cowardice when the doctor left the room.

  He would ask for police protection, he decided. Best not take risks when that asshole was still out there. At least until he was in command of Rados’ brutes, and after: the whole country. He smiled, thinking of a glorious future.

  Vote for Dilas. Vote for invincibility.

  The junior doctor was new and unsure of himself, but he understood protocol and left the room to check who had administered the patient’s pain relief without updating the notes. None of the nurses had, it appeared, and he believed them because they were as honest as they were hard working. The patient probably dreamt the whole incident. It was not unexpected. Heavy sedation could blur the distinction between imagination and reality. The junior doctor often experimented with the many mind-altering chemicals easily ‘lost’ from the hospital pharmacy.

  By the time the doctor returned to administer some real pain relief, Dilas was dead from massive cardiac arrest. He had put up a brave fight, people would later say, but it was not surprising that he had succumbed to his injuries, grievous as they were.

  He might have been saved had his heart monitor not failed to initiate an alarm when he flat-lined. An internal investigation concluded that the machine had developed a technical fault. Unexpected and unexplained, but these things happened from time to time.

  No one was to blame.

  Table of Contents

  By Tom Wood

  COPYRIGHT

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-one

  Sixty-two

  Sixty-three

  Sixty-four

  Sixty-five

  Sixty-six

  Sixty-seven

  Sixty-eight

  Sixty-nine

  Seventy