by G. Brailey
“Well come on, Veronica, let’s get going,” said Bill, ignoring him.
“Bill, I said stop it, please, this is difficult enough.”
“I don’t want to go to the hotel.”
“Well you can’t stay here with that lunatic on the loose.”
“I want to go home, Miriam can take me.”
“Miriam is going nowhere, she’s drunk.”
“We’ll take you,” said Sam, “Clarissa’s driving.”
CHAPTER 30
It was half past seven as the Mercedes streaked along the A40 towards town, setting off every speed camera it passed, but Zack didn’t know what time it was, or what day, or what month, nor did he care. Everyone had urged caution, but he was sick of listening to other people, they weren’t at the butt end of all this. He had done with the guilt, now he was free to deal with this stupidity once and for all.
It was only when Zack reached Stoke Newington did he realise that his mad dash had been completely unnecessary. Susan was probably still negotiating B roads on the pretty route back to town, or maybe linking up with her one friend Hannah for an excited de-briefing over a cheap bottle of wine. Zack had no real plan or scheme, nor did he know what he would say to Susan when he saw her, he just had to do something to get her to drop this ridiculous vendetta. He left the Mercedes a couple of blocks away and running back, dived into the kebab shop paying for a coffee he had no intention of drinking and perching at the window seat which gave him a good view of Susan’s front door.
Twenty minutes later there was still no sign, but there was someone else he recognized… Jacob, every one of his pockets bulging with scrunched up plastic carrier bags as he trudged home from one of his seek and find missions. Zack sprinted from the kebab shop, zigzagging through traffic, causing cars to swerve and hooters to sound, he was over the street in a few paces and intercepting him on the step.
“All right, mate? I’m Zack, Susan’s friend…”
Avoiding eye contact, Jacob opened up and Zack followed him inside. Jacob waited for Zack to walk past him and start up the stairs before unlocking his door, but even up on Susan’s landing, Zack could hear him burrowing his way through the plastic avalanche that met him in his hallway before locking up by shooting dead bolts in place. Zack ran up another few stairs and sat down. The timer switch clicked off leaving him in darkness. He leant his head against the banisters and closed his eyes.
Two hours later he heard the front door open and close and this time Zack recognized her footfall straight away, clicking across the ceramic tiles, then cushioned by the threadbare runner on the stairs. As soon as Susan stepped into her flat, he jumped the six steps to her landing and pushed his way in behind her, slamming the door, as Susan shot forward with a little scream, putting as much distance between them as she could. She climbed up onto the bed and sat cross legged as usual, making herself very small.
“Okay, Susan,” said Zack, eventually, “you’ve had your mad half hour, now stop this before it gets serious, before someone dies. You could have killed someone today, like you could have killed Veronica or complete strangers in Bellini’s.”
“Veronica fell, I had nothing to do with that.”
“So what were you doing there?”
“I was warning her about you of course.”
“Okay, now listen to this… if you come anywhere near me or Veronica again…”
“I won’t stop, whatever you do, you’re wasting your time with all this.”
“Move on for Christ sake, Susan, get a life!”
“You are my life…” she said, romantically.
“No I am not,” he said, right up against the bed now and leaning over her, “and you know why I am not your life? Because you’re a destructive, manipulative loser… so barren and so bankrupt that you find pleasure only in other people’s distress. You’re a witch, and I want nothing more to do with you.”
There were five seconds of stalemate, then, like a cat, Susan sprang up, scratching his face, pulling his hair, biting his ear. The attack was so sudden, and so instantly ferocious, Susan had done a fair bit of damage before Zack made any attempt to defend himself. She grabbed an old chair, cracking it against his body, his head. Zack managed to wrench the chair from her and with his other hand grabbed her by the scalp struggling to keep her at arm’s length, but she was still shrieking and kicking, and swiping and punching and spitting.
Zack threw Susan back onto the bed, but when she grabbed a bread knife from under her pillow and came at him with it, he shot out of the room, frightened by the anger that consumed him, frightened he might lose control, then racing downstairs he was out of the house and turning off towards the main road when he lost pace, like his battery was about to cut out, his lungs on standby, as two cars rammed into each other, doors ripped off in the collision, and started to spin.
A young woman fired out of one of the cars like a fleshy comet, landing at Zack’s feet with a crunching thud. He watched her sprawl to stillness, every one of her movements slightly out of alignment with the one a split second before. Her head lolled from the end of a broken neck and blood sprayed out over her chin. She held out rigid arms towards him. “Take me, Zachariah, guide me through,” she said. Then her mouth stretched into a monkey grin and her flesh waxed and shone as death dropped like the final curtain - eternity waiting in the wings.
A passing ambulance stopped, its back doors flung open, uniformed medics spilling from inside examining the corpse for signs of life, but their sagging gestures suggested it was futile because life had already checked out.
This time Zack’s release was swift. He was breathing again and movement swept up from his feet unlocking ankles, knees, hips. He turned back, raced the two blocks to his car and jumped in, throwing the wheel he skidded out onto the road and there was the ambulance off in the distance its blue light flashing. Zack sped along behind it through roads lined with streaks and blobs of light, neon colours, but misshapen, stretched and elongated, throbbing with energy from secret underground wires and cables that ran in mystifying tangles beneath weary feet, bursting out above open ground triumphantly, like vivid flowers, proudly competitive and wanting only to be the best.
The ambulance made no sound, its engine was silent, and although its wheels were displacing recent puddles of rain, cocooned inside his car, to Zack, the ambulance and the world itself for that matter, was mute.
Right outside the hospital, Zack watched the ambulance pull up and the doors swing open. Strangers climbed out surrounding a small boy sitting strapped onto a stretcher, carried like a little king on his throne, the centre piece in a procession. Zack leapt from the car and flew after them asking where the woman had gone, insisting they tell him where she was. A woman was put into the ambulance, not a child, and Zack needed to find her. She was dead he knew that but where was she? No one could help, and no one was interested in helping either so Zack burst through swing doors, flew down flights of stairs and raced along echoing halls as wide as airport runways, completely devoid of life.
He had followed an ambulance but not the ambulance, so where was the other one? And which hospital was this? Had he been here before? Should he know this place? A sign pointed to ‘Morgue’ and he was almost there when he saw her.
The young nurse crossed a desolate waiting area and turned off out of sight. No needle in her arm this time, no gurgle in her throat, no dying pallor in her cheeks, just sparkling eyes and glowing skin. Zack opened his mouth to shout but no sound came out. He ran to catch her up, her quick, easy, seductive movements at odds with the labouring sloth he remembered in her last moments of life. She pushed through heavy service doors and as he dashed outside to follow her an intense light struck him, blinding him momentarily.
When focus returned he scanned the empty parking bay, the bank of tall out buildings that loomed up in every direction dwarfing him. There was a flutter of movement off in the distance as the girl ran up steps to the road. Zack raced to the steps and took them two at a time a
nd there she was already way off down the hill. He tried to increase his pace when he saw her stop, turn off along a small path, and then she was gone.
Zack shot forwards to reach the path and flew down it, but in his frantic determination to find her, turning one way and another he plunged down a steep bank, scrappy bushes breaking his fall. He was beside a rail track now and sound was back with a vengeance, he covered his ears with his arms, desperate to repel its invasion as the roar of two trains, gaily abandoned, hurtled towards each other on the same track.
The two trains crashed head on, their carriages flipping up behind like Mexican waves, tipping off their rails and then falling onto their sides like crippled dinosaurs, slowly slewing to ungainly, smoking calm.
Next came the shrieks as body parts arced towards him, like grotesque, giant hailstones, fingers, hands and arms adorned with rings and chains, (simple testimony to the worthlessness of wealth), single torn off legs with their hopeful shoes laced up neatly, heads, like blood spattered globes, their eyes still open absorbing the shock of being severed, their once beating hearts made redundant now, freed from servitude, halted by their blood’s desertion, flying and trickling off excitedly in liberation. Then came the choir… the sound of the trains colliding was nothing to this, a cacophony of voices all screaming his name.
“Zachariah… help me… here I am, help me through. Catch me Zachariah, take me, here, here, Zachariah, Zachariah, please, here I am!”
Crawling towards him came a baby, her pink romper suit torn at the knees, in one hand a rattle.
“Help me, Zachariah,” the baby seemed to say as she climbed up onto his shoe. A pudgy torso thwacked into him, its fall displacing the baby, tipping her onto her back like an upturned turtle, then the thump of a booted foot in his face, the continued cries, his name flying around like dead leaves in a storm.
All round him, littering the tracks, bodies and amputated body parts lay like landed fleshy fish, twitching, fighting the advent of death. Some had stopped twitching, some like the lazy movements of landlocked seals, their heads turning, struggling to get a better perspective of their predicament, mourning the loss of their limbs, casting around to see where they had got to and terrified, that like Humpty Dumpty they would never be put back together again.
Zack’s breathing had long since deserted him, and this time it felt like his feet had grown roots, spreading deep beneath the ground in a sprawling network, holding him fast, foiling escape. Hamstrung, all he could do was pray for this horror to end, or for his life to end, whichever came sooner.
A tranquillity settled, punctuated from a distance by a little moan or a yelp, or the continued sobbing of heartbreak, but eventually these too died away. Then, as an afterthought, the whistling of a slice of liver, it slapped against his face, sliding off his chin it dropped onto the baby’s cheek, leaving a smear of blood across it. Finally, slithering off the baby’s face too, and breading itself with dust from the ground until it was still.
Quietness then, followed by distant sirens as word spread, as far off able bodied people responded to the calls of the almost dead. The acrid smell of burning flesh wafted past and settled up his nose making him splutter, as though his airways had just been cleared. He was breathing again, and the roots under his feet relaxed their grip, allowing him to tilt forward. Free of restraint at last, Zack scrambled into the bushes and pulled himself up onto the path as policemen ran past. But Zack streaked off the other way, fear driving him. He knew he lived somewhere but he couldn’t remember where or how to get there. His name was Zack Fortune, he knew that, and he was alive, he knew that too, but he could recall nothing else. Shock had done for him.
Zack raced through unfamiliar streets in despair. Snippets of information broke through the fog, and he latched onto each one, hopeful they might connect with something, something of use. A girl called Clarissa was waiting for him in a church. A small Jewish man had fallen down flights of stairs and was about to die. A black security guard was barring his way into a tall building as a fat women laughed at him from behind a desk. A cell door was shutting, and a policeman looked in at him through a peephole and smiled.
He couldn’t remember walking to the rail track but neither could he remember arriving there by car, or by train. The sirens had stopped, and glancing at placid people walking by, they seemed to suggest no knowledge of the recent disaster.
“There’s been an accident, did you hear?” he called to a couple coming the other way.
“Oh yeah?” said the man, “where exactly?”
“At the station, two trains collided head on.”
“Which station?”
“I’m not sure, but near here, somewhere near here.”
They didn’t believe him, he knew that. They thought he was mad, and someone else had thought he was mad too, someone called Sam. Maybe he was mad, that would explain it. He yelped with fear as he felt something brush against his leg… the baby… it had to be the baby! But it wasn’t the baby, it was a plastic carrier bag that had wrapped itself round his ankle in a sudden breeze. He knew a man once who collected carrier bags, thousands of them, now what was his name?
Then from nowhere a landslide of memory came back with such force his legs buckled and he fell headlong into the gutter, catching his chin on the curb. He scrambled to his feet again and checked his pockets. He would buy something to calm himself down. He would drink alcohol and calm himself down. He raced into a shop and pointed at a bottle on the top shelf. The Sikh shopkeeper looked unsure, but gave him the bottle bewildered at the clutch of notes that Zack threw over the counter in payment.
Zack left the shop, gulping down whisky that burnt the back of his throat and made off towards a main road. Taxis stopped sometimes, he knew that. If you waved at them sometimes they stopped. Zack also knew he had to get home, he needed to hide. He could remember everything now and although it was a relief in one way, in another it was anything but because the impetus was gathering pace. There had been cease fires, there had even been periods of calm but he couldn’t ignore this cancer now as it ransacked his life, devouring everything good and leaving behind rank defecation. The only way he could think of stopping its progress was to get into bed, pull the covers over his head and remain behind locked doors. No one could be trusted, no one.
Jason was just about to head off home. He’d been on patrol outside Claremont most of the day. Two people had asked him why he was there and he had told them various lies. One man said he would call the police if he didn’t stop standing outside his flat all day, casing the joint. Jason didn’t know what he meant and told him so, but the man just laughed at that, asking Jason if he thought he was born yesterday. The Asian family in Londis didn’t seem to like him hanging around either. They said they would call the police too. Jason told them that it was a free country and he could hang around wherever he liked.
When he saw Zack, he knew something was seriously wrong. He had a bottle of whisky in his hand and he was drinking from it. That wasn’t like Zack at all. About fifty yards away from Jason, Zack stopped, and glared at him. He looked frightened.
“Keep away from me,” he said, “what have I said about you being here.”
Jason said: “I’ll help you… whatever it is… I’ll help you.”
“I don’t need your help for the last time,” said Zack, rummaging in his pocket for his keys. “Keep away from me… just keep away from me or I’ll kill you.”
“What did you say?”
“I said if you don’t keep away from me I’ll kill you, and I mean it.”
With Zack’s words came an eerie calm that seemed to sweep right through Jason. “You’d kill your only son, is that it?”
For a split second… for a divine second, Zack thought he might have misheard, but he knew he hadn’t.
“You’re mad, you’re completely insane. I don’t have a son.”
“I’m Angie’s boy, you’re my Dad.”
Zack snatched a desperate breath as he felt his heart
down tools. It was as though it was struggling to assess this new piece of information and while it did so, all plans of keeping him alive were on hold. Zack put out a hand to steady himself as his knees gave, convinced he was about to faint.
“We’ll be a family now and have fun,” said Jason.
Zack backed off terrified at the idea, terrified at just about everything now.
“I’ll stay here and stand guard like I always do!” said Jason, shouting after him, “I’ll stand guard, don’t worry, I won’t let anyone in!”
Although a taxi stopped for Zack, the cabbie seemed to regret his decision almost straight away. He glanced back at him a few times, giving him the once over, but although his fare seemed to be on the verge of freaking out big time, at Kings Cross the cabbie was surprised to be the grateful recipient of a bunch of notes as Zack dived from his cab and dashed off.
This time Zack knew he would find her as he charged up and down outside the station, then on the concourse, then in side streets and now in a back alley. And here she was… staggering towards him as her trick slid off, whatever urge that had driven him here apparently satisfied by his three minutes of sexual contact in a stinking doorway.
“Angie!” he said, “it’s me, Zack.”
Angie gawped, her mind struggling into recall, laboriously slow now, dulled by twenty years of Class A drugs.
“Zack?” she said, straightening her vomit stained top, and patting her matted hair in place - the heartbreaking remnants of a pride which hadn’t quite left her. Her eyes were glazed and her speech was slurred, clumps of hair had fallen out and all her top teeth were missing.
“I’m sorry, Angie,” he said, biting back tears, “I’m so sorry.”
Angie was confused by the apology, she had never expected much from life so had never felt particularly deprived.
“Did you have our baby? Did you have my child?”
It seemed to take her a moment to remember and at first she didn’t seem sure. “I think so, yes, but I don’t know where he is. They took him away.”