by TJ Park
“Can’t I go to the dunny when I want?”
Janet moved in a wide circle to retrieve her daughter from the fold-out cot closest to the couch. At her mother’s touch, Lauren was able to move, rising jerkily to join the others as they backed away from it. Scott finally caught on to the fact that someone else had taken his spot, someone new.
“Who’s that?”
The form under the blanket stirred and turned over. He was the same size as Scott, now laying on his back, only his crown poking out from the blanket, like a dead body recently covered up.
On closer look, the hair was not the same. Similar, but not exact. Curlier.
Not one of them could guess who it was – except for Doug.
“Ah, no,” he whispered.
The blanket slid away from the face. It was only a boy, one not much younger than Scott. A handsome boy with a bloody nose.
To some, he was not a stranger.
He sat up, the blanket slithering to the floor. To Doug, Mick and Warlock he may as well have revealed fangs. As one, they pulled back. To the Clarksons, he was simply a frightened child who was hurt and needed help. But he did not look nearly as frightened as the three hard men gawping at him.
“Where did you come from, son?” Rob asked gently. He stepped forward. Doug blocked his way with a shoulder.
“Dad?” the boy asked.
He was not referring to Rob. His haunted eyes searched for another. He said it again, quickly becoming distressed. “Dad!”
Rob went to push past Doug, but his shoulder was unyielding.
“What is this?” Rob shouted at Doug.
“He’s only a child!” Janet cried scornfully, but there was a thin edge of fear mixed in, the question of how this boy could possibly be here.
The boy focused on Doug, perhaps because he was closest. Doug sincerely hoped he was not singling him out.
“Do you know where my dad is?”
Doug swallowed, unable to speak. Of course, the boy wasn’t privy to everything that had happened on the airfield. He had been shut away through most of it. Doug found it impossible to answer the question. Nor could he bring himself to tell the Clarksons who the boy was.
Rob asked again. “What’s going on here?”
Warlock discovered he was braver when safely tucked away behind Mick.
“Tell him where his father is.”
Mick spun on him. His shock made him savage. “Shut it!”
The boy, whose name no-one would acknowledge, took a trembling step forward. “Where’s my dad?”
Warlock quailed, but stuck his chin out for a last go.
“Tell him, Doug.”
The boy took another tentative step.
Sick with shame, Doug could not help himself. He raised the rifle and pointed it at the boy. “Stay right there!”
“Leave him alone!” Lauren shouted.
Rob might have thought to tackle him, but Doug stepped aside to show he was ready for any such move. But he wasn’t prepared for the mad hope that overtook him.
The boy’s upper lip was bloody, but the rest of him was unscathed. His eyes were wet with fear of what might happen, not sorrow at what already had. His face only seemed bleached of colour because of the rusty splash beneath his nose. There was no sign of the gunshot that would kill him. It hadn’t happened yet.
Perhaps Doug could stop it from happening. He would save the boy, and wipe out all the terrible events that followed from it. He began moving toward Matthew Torlach, prepared to save him. He would wrap himself around the child so the bullet would strike him instead, if that was what it took. He’d do it without a second thought.
Except, as he moved toward the boy, his own gun went off first.
***
Answering screams, both male and female.
The shot from Doug’s rifle struck the boy. In response, Rob turned his rifle on Doug. The only thing that stopped him firing was what Doug did next. Letting go of the stock and trigger, holding it by the barrel and offering to Rob, he shouted: “It didn’t fire! It’s cold! It’s cold!”
Baffled by Doug’s actions, Rob didn’t shoot him, and the moment was over before either Mick or Warlock could react.
“The rifle didn’t go off! It was made to look that way!” Doug persisted.
There was nothing to do except watch the boy die, though not everyone thought it hopeless. Janet tried to go to him before Rob reached out to restrain her.
“For God’s sake, Rob, we have to help him!”
“He’s already dead,” Doug admitted.
“How can you be so heartless –”
“It’s the boy from the airfield, Jan,” Rob said, having figured it out. “The one from the news.”
Janet, still struggling to wrestle free from her husband, went still. After that, she could only watch like the rest of them. The past was put in place, the evil done to the boy followed through to completion. Now Doug could see what he’d only imagined before, the boy dying terrified and alone in the dark.
The boy’s eyes became sightless, not latching onto anyone in the room. His audience flinched when the unseeing gaze swept over them, but Doug knew its meaning. The boy had not gone blind in his last moments. He had died in the dark, unable to see inside the drink machine with the door shut.
His death throes were somehow more pitiful for his lack of movement. Only the boy’s head could shift, doing it with a terrible loose jogging up and down. The rest of him was too tightly constrained by invisible binds to budge. He would almost be at attention if not for the buckled knees hanging him in place like a marionette.
Of course, Doug knew how it would end. He had opened the compartment door and seen. There would be no decency in repose. The child would be unable to lie down and die. He would remain suspended that way, head hanging at an angle that would choke him if he was still breathing, staring down mindlessly at his own trussed feet. All Doug could do was grit his teeth and wait for the phantom to depart. But what if the boy did not go away? What if he just stayed, illuminating Doug’s guilt?
Before he could dwell any more, a man in a Del Rossi security uniform burst from the hallway and into the living room. Rob fired his rifle and caught the man squarely in the back. Twice. Without reloading.
“God almighty!” Rob yelled, nearly flinging his weapon down.
Doug knew he hadn’t pulled the trigger either.
The felled security guard wouldn’t stop screeching as he bucked and flopped over the floor. The dangling boy above him moaned and gargled.
And then a silver-haired man in a pilot’s uniform ran through the room from a new direction, an impossible one, for there was no access that way. Doug flinched in memory a moment before the pilot’s chest caved in and he was hurled backward in a blast of thunder.
It was Scott’s rifle that fired this time. His mum had made him forego the shotgun Doug gave him earlier. The smaller, less lethal rifle was a compromise. Eyes rolling wildly, Scott nearly collapsed from the terrible thing he’d done. He was not to know his small calibre weapon could not have unfastened the man so thoroughly.
The room became even more crowded. Another security guard was on the floor. His scalp bristling with tacky blood, he was struggling under some great unseen weight.
It was Mick’s turn to fire. Though he had caught onto the trick, pointing his gun at the ceiling as it went off, the new security guard still jolted. He gurgled “Gaah” as blood frothed from his opened throat.
Here was every highlight missed in the heat of the battle on a faraway airfield, replayed for their benefit. But it was not only the events they would witness.
Mick alone saw the window behind Warlock fill up with eddies of smoke. For a second he was fearful the house had been set on fire while they were distracted, but then he saw the smoke for what it really was – another madness about to break over them. He moved away from it, neglecting to warn Warlock.
The dead and dying were not immaterial phantoms. They marked the room. They shoved
furniture across the floor in their death throes. Their unwilling audience shrank back at the solid contact of an outflung arm or foot.
Leaping to avoid a rolling body, Warlock twisted round to face one of the few intact windows remaining in the house, the same one he’d idly traced with a finger. At first, he also thought it was thick fast-moving smoke pressing against the glass, then he realised the only thing roiling behind it was dirty brown water. It filled the window all the way to the top and beyond.
Small round white things swam out of the murk and touched the glass. Warlock only guessed what they were because of their position to each other. Fingertips. Then they grew into longer blobs, elongated into the backs of fingers, and then the knuckles of fish-pale hands bobbed against the glass. They slid apart to admit a mashed, segmented face.
Warlock screamed. The segments pulsed against the glass. A quarter of a forehead; a bent, squashed nose; a flattened, puffing cheek. An open ring of mouth. The open eyes veiled behind squared-off films of dirty brown water. Below the face, a glimpse of white shirt, a body drifting unseen in the murk. Caught up in some unseen ebb and flow, the face pulsed in and out like someone breathing. One side of the face was pressed forward by a forceful swell, mashed against the window with the chin raised, the cheek as fat as a thick bar of soap, and the corner of the unblinking eye above it flattened against the glass, bulging like a squeezed grape, about to burst. Belonging to a dead man, the eye wasn’t looking anywhere in particular, but still it found its way to Warlock.
Warlock stood on the spot and screamed and screamed.
He should’ve considered himself lucky. Unlike the rest he was only seeing death, not dying. But that was what made it worse. It was what he’d been trying to avoid when he shot the co-pilot though the seat. To see.
Doug caught a look at Warlock’s nightmare exhibit, but he had his own cross to bear. The boy finished up as he feared, motionless and lifeless, suspended there for all to see, like one of Rob’s trophies. Indecent. He looked like he was hanging by the neck.
The security guard, who Doug had once dubbed Red, was lying nearby. The last of his blood spilled from his throat, his back hitched up against open space where, by rights, there should’ve been a wall, the wall of a plane’s cabin.
Doug had a ghastly premonition. “Oh hell, no.”
And Fatboy came down as if summoned, swept down in a flat spin on a tremendous gust, behaving as if there was no roof in his way to impede him.
He smashed to pieces on landing.
For a few moments, the cries of the living overwhelmed those of the dying. The ceiling dripped with blood and the floor was a wading pool. Spots and stipples and long swooping spatters were everywhere. Every visible surface dotted with the pox. Lauren frantically wiped at the blood on her arms and it spread like lotion.
Then the one intact window of the living room collapsed inward and the co-pilot’s body was ladled into the room on an invisible torrent.
Standing closest, the unseen wave knocked Warlock over. He could feel the freezing water bite into his skin even as his clothes stayed dry. He spluttered its searing cold from his mouth and nose, moving too slowly to stop the co-pilot from collecting up against him in a tangle of floating arms and legs.
Shrieking, he shoved the body away, but the non-existent tide fetched it up against him a second time. Finally Warlock thought to bob down and the co-pilot spun over and passed him by. In a way more horrible than the other explicit sights, the drowned man drifted languidly, almost gracefully, through the room. Doug and the others danced out of his way as the ghostly current caught him up in the furniture and slid him along it. Eventually, he was captured in an invisible eddy in a corner of the room, and there he stayed, face-down, bobbing gently.
Finally, the boy’s father made his appearance.
Shot in several places, he dropped to his knees. When he fell down flat, his head was promptly opened up by another burst of gunfire.
No more, please god, no more.
But their crowded arena, a slaughterhouse, suddenly had a bed in it. The bed was rocking violently, slamming loudly and repeatedly against an unseen wall.
Doug choked out: “Don’t look at it!”
But the Clarkson family saw. They saw everything. They saw the woman struggling on the bed, the ring of ragged shirt collar around her neck all that remained of her clothes. Her assailant could not be seen, only the deep, bruising imprints of his body on top of hers. Impressions of his hands, sometimes elbows, knees and feet, his groin. The woman’s pelvis was exposed and flattened; the skin drawn back and folded like it was experiencing the full blast of a wind tunnel. Her upper body convulsed several times as if from electric shocks. It took a moment to understand she was being struck repeatedly in the chest and head.
Rob went to his son and turned him away, shielding him from this horror. He averted his own eyes. Though she could not look away, Janet clamped a hand over her daughter’s face. Lauren clasped her hands to her ears. Even with sight and sound shut away, she could still tell what was being done to the woman.
The display was a special horror for Doug and his friends, having missed the actual event. The woman was finally driven back into the bed, her chest gaping. Someone’s gun went off when it happened. It didn’t matter whose.
Then Cutter was there, standing in front of the bed.
He faced them all, his overalls half-on, his copious tattoos smudged by his plentiful sweat, body hair glistening like steel wool. The side of his neck was opened up like a spout. He smiled at them with blood-rimmed teeth while his life’s blood gushed from his neck. But, unlike the other players on the stage, he did not fight for life, nor did he act out his death. He just stood there looking at them so long and so knowingly that Doug was able to see something new about him. He had a bloody hole where his crotch should be.
Cutter turned his attention solely on Doug. He winked.
And with that wink, it all disappeared.
The spilled blood. The mutilated bodies. All gone. Furniture shoved aside was returned to place. The window restored. Scott’s blanket, tracked along the floor and soaking, was back in a clean, loose pile on the couch.
There was nothing decisive about the return of reality. The gore just went before they were ready to see it depart – the exit so jarring some of them nearly fell over from the sudden imbalance of a swiftly emptied room.
Nothing remained to remind them it had happened.
Staggering about, Warlock broke the silence first.
“What the fuck was all that about?”
Doug reached for the back of a chair to keep him steady.
“Maybe … maybe it was trying to chase us out of the house.”
Warlock began squeezing the water that wasn’t there from his dry but freezing clothes. “It nearly did!” he cried.
“I think I know what that thing outside is … or what it was,” said Mick quietly.
Doug’s thoughts had been long confirmed.
Mick looked haggard. His eyes burned into Doug’s. “Did you see Cutter at the end? Did you see the tattoos on him? Didn’t they look familiar?”
Don’t use that fucking word, Mick. It was one thing to conceive of the familiar’s origin. It was another to say it out loud.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “Yeah, I recognised the tats.”
Mick nodded dully. “Same ones, aren’t they?”
“What are you saying?” Warlock asked. The circles under his eyes were pallid half-moons. Stray tufts of hair stood out from the sides of his head.
“When did you see them, Mick?” Doug remembered the old man had been mostly out of it during the confrontation on the front lawn.
“In the shed. I got a real close look at them after Rob left me for dead, though I didn’t know what I was seeing at the time.”
“I thought you said this was all bullshit.”
Mick peered at him gruffly. “I still think so. That’s the way I prefer it.”
“What are you saying?�
�� Warlock asked, dismayed. “He’s dead, Doug. You said it yourself.”
“Ah, shut the fuck up, Wally,” Mick said.
“You’re saying that thing is Cutter? No!” Warlock refused to condone the idea, despite leading them down such a preposterous path to begin with. “No, no, no, no. It’s not him. It can’t be him.”
“You.”
The voice was querulous, appalled … it was Rob’s. He stared at Doug, Mick and Warlock with equal loathing. “You three. You did all this?”
“Not all of it!” Warlock insisted, gesturing to the place that once held the memory of Cutter. His denial was as ludicrous as it appeared.
Janet outdid her husband in her look of revulsion. That was when Doug understood who the display was intended for. A news report was one thing; quite another to be put in the thick of it. These horrors were the exploits of animals. Worse than animals. And the Clarksons now knew they were shut in with them.
Neither had Doug’s crew gone unscathed. Their nerves had been shredded. Events from the heat of the moment had been thrust in their faces in full.
And the killing wasn’t over yet. This could be just the intermission.
Everyone in the room was armed. Doug knew someone could begin shooting at any moment. He made his move first. “I know what it’s doing. It’s trying to catch us off-guard.” He looked around jaggedly, putting on a scared turn. He didn’t have to try hard. He spun round to a window. “There it is!” He fired his rifle.
He only meant to let off one or two shots, but Doug became swept up. He didn’t look to see if anyone else was joining in. The others saw no target. But Doug kept firing until his gun ran out of ammo, until the threat and adrenaline of the moment was spent.
“It’s gone,” Doug said.
He was filled with uncertainty. Maybe he had not averted a near-calamity. Maybe he’d only increased the Clarksons’ distrust. Perhaps he’d helped them decide which was the bigger threat.
“We need to keep our heads,” he said a little too loudly. “Otherwise that thing wins without even trying.”
Doug didn’t like how Mick’s eyes became hooded. The old man had caught onto the reasoning behind Doug’s actions and was now as speculative as the Clarksons on whether to nip another potential shoot-out in the bud. But then the old man appeared to let go of the thought, falling back into his seat. Perhaps seeing the killings en masse had gotten to him, and he wasn’t prepared to add to the tally … at least, not yet.