Visibility-wise, we couldn’t have timed our arrival better, stealing through the forest shadow without the use of torches, approaching the ‘carpark’ in the last of the light.
At which point all my nebulous dreads sprang to hellish life.
Side by side on the ground, the dying light in which we’ve lain paralysed for minutes fades at last to near zero, protecting our eyes at least from the chariot Satan chose to ride to this particular workshop.
The Fiendish Beast has tracked us … and this time I’m guessing it has more in mind than urination.
No movement or noise from the Commodore, or anywhere beyond, has me in the grip of an indecision so complete I might be quadriplegic.
Instinct is loud. It hollers: RUN! Run till exhaustion drops you, then get up and run some more! Get the fuck out of here, while you still can! Deal with the ramifications later! Much later!
And, oh God, how I want nothing more than to listen. To ignore it is to cling to an electric fence. At a stroke the realities of our venture have been laid hideously bare, and the terror I’m feeling seems rooted in my very genes; lies on my back like a chunk of tundra. In my life I’ve cracked under fear microbes the size of this.
I offer a silent prayer for something to happen. Anything to limit the endless array of possibilities and actions lying before us, crevasse-like. Something to provide a hint of focus.
But the carpark just waits, patient as an insect in ambush.
Almost as crippling are my feelings of sheer foolishness. Because but for one rational decision of a hundred, we simply wouldn’t be here. My biggest ‘problems’ in life would remain budgeting my dole money to smoke weed every day and leave enough over for a night out here and there, lamenting a world that sought to kill me spiritually, over decades. Instead I’ve walked into this! Walked into it willingly; eyes wide open.
What the hell were we thinking?
I feel like a hedgehog who convinced itself the country lane in front of it actually wasn’t the Southern Motorway.
Barry, whispering: ‘What are we gonna do?’ For once he sounds worried, but ‘worry’ is a state I would currently host as bliss.
On my other hand, I can feel horror rolling from Mick in waves. He’s swapped his glasses over again, and I wish he hadn’t — his eyes are flakes of pure dread. Even whispering, Mick’s words sound strangled from him. ‘What can we fucking do?’
Barry: ‘We’ve gotta do something. Soon we won’t be able to move in here without torches … and then we’re in a lot more shit.’
Mick, pleading: ‘They could be anywhere, though. They could be watching us from the rear window of the Commodore.’
Me: ‘What do you suggest then?’
I find myself hoping he says it. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I believe there’s strength to be drawn from the revelation that someone in this world is currently more terrified than I am. Perhaps I just want to hear it vocalised, thrown on the table for regard. Maybe I’m hoping if Mick says it first, my shame will be able to hide behind his for long enough.
But he doesn’t say it. He says nothing, and, listening to the frantic wheels in his head, I soon realise he’s not going to.
Perversely, his silence steels me some. The wonders of peer dynamics. He ain’t gonna say it, which means I can’t say it, which means Barry most surely ain’t gonna say it.
Which means we’re staying.
Barry, flat: ‘We can’t abandon him.’
The bottom line.
Me, shuddering on the words: ‘How do we do it?’
Barry: ‘You’re the ideas man. How would a SWAT team do it?’
Mick: ‘A SWAT team’d have a fuck of a lot more muscle. We’ve got a knife and club each, and a mutilated rifle inaccurate over more than a few feet … Do ya reckon they’ll be tooled?’
Barry, harsh: ‘If you still need to mull on something that’s been at the fore of our fucking minds long enough to sprout moss, then you just lie here and deliberate.’
Me, still mired, trying to envision myself rising, moving: ‘They’ll be tooled, all right. And they’ll be along the riverbank waiting to spring us, just like we agreed on the way here. They must’ve arrived too late, opted not to come after us in darkness. We can’t second-guess that now; it’d be fear talking.’
Mick: ‘Given our lack of firepower, how is this “knowledge” gonna help us?’
Me: ‘Fuck knows … but it’ll have to do.’
Mick, waspish: ‘And what if it doesn’t “do”?’
Me, vehement: ‘Will you shut the fuck up? Your overlooking of logic helped bring us to this, and now you won’t go in without a plan proofread by Mossad? At least we’ve got surprise on our side. Let’s go and help a mate.’
Mick, barely audible: ‘He’s far more your mate than ours.’
He’s dead right, and with what’s at stake I shouldn’t hold this against him. I choose to anyway. ‘And he wouldn’t fucking be in this mess if you hadn’t let green eyes override your much-vaunted reason. And worse: you then wimped out of fessing up. If I’d known you’d actually beaten Lefty off the team, I might’ve done things differently.’
I feel something on my hand, realise it’s Barry’s own hand, give him mine. He squeezes until it hurts. Relents. Squeezes again, as if pumping me with the fire I need; the fire he has to spare.
I can feel it wanting to work.
Mick, choked: ‘What if we all die for nothing? What if Steve’s already dead? And what if he told them about the second route before they were done with him? What if this “element of surprise” of yours is a crock of shit?’
Barry, grim: ‘Steve wouldn’t’ve told the cunts a fucking thing.’
Click.
The angle I needed.
Because I know in my heart that, even under torture, Steve would have found a way to lie — or die — without betraying us.
Without betraying me.
And were it my fate in question, Steve would’ve come for me as soon as he saw the car, if only for revenge.
Yet chance chose to reverse the roles … and I’ve lain here for five whole minutes.
Barry, in my ear, crushing my hand: ‘No choice, bro.’
None whatsoever.
No parachutist in history struggled more to leave the plane than I do to simply stand up. But once there, I’m free to move again.
Just.
To Barry, who snaps to his feet as if he wants to, pistol held low, cocked: ‘Let’s just get to the car and take a look from there.’
There’s enough light to creep from tree to tree, the club in my hand heavy as a rattle. Each step feels like my last. As the black car looms into view, I make the final few metres on my belly, convinced my hammering heart will any second denounce me.
Barry joins me at the tow-bar … and together we notice the dark mass between the car’s axles.
Panicked, I roll away, inserting a wheel into its line of fire. Barry, though, holds his ground some seconds, reacting at last to the shape’s utter stillness by reaching out. I see him tugging on something without success. Watch him lay down his pistol and tug with both hands. In the gloom I can’t see what Barry’s dragging until it’s directly beside me.
Until it’s far too late.
Steve’s recognisable only by his hair, though chunks of it are missing, patches of scalp gleaming like phosphorescence. He’s been hit in the face so many times he scarcely has one any more. But for an eye glaring with hideous fixation, rusted blood masks him flawlessly. Half his right ear is bitten clean through. Finger marks mar the blood at his throat. His ripped T-shirt clings around only one shoulder, his torso so uniformly bruised it could almost pass for Negroid.
But my only reaction is disbelief. That such a fate could befall Steve, the most vital human force my life has ever known, is as believable as hearing my mother pokes herself to snuff films.
This lifeless slab of meat is not Steve. Not my Steve!
Croaking: ‘No way. No way in the fucking world.’ I roll
him over …
… and the yin-yang tattoo on his shoulder cackles at me.
But I still don’t accept it. As well a rat accepts pi radius squared.
It hits me a second later.
My best and strongest friend is dead. Murdered. Punched and kicked and bitten and choked and butted and kneed and elbowed and Christ knows what else, until he stopped moving.
It hits me as if delivered anally, by firehose, iced filth filling me to bursting in a heartbeat.
I flee it, moaning thickly, my heels and fingers scuffling the forest floor, pushing me from this lump of cold tissue, this collection of inanimate cells, this thing that a few hours earlier was a walking, dreaming, hair-mussing miracle.
I barely notice Barry scramble around behind me, stopping my retreat, clamping one arm across my mouth, holding me tight with the other.
Adrift in purgatory. Drowning on frozen scum.
The intensity of Barry’s whisper finally wins notice.
‘His hands, man! Look at his fucking hands! He never gave up! Not once! Don’t you pussy out on him now!’
Steve’s knuckles are bloodied and skinned, and I know instinctively that he fought until they had no choice but to kill him, then and there.
In time the sewage clogging my organs eases so that I can breathe again. It floats to the surface in an endoskeleton, freezing over completely.
Raw grief spurts into the vacuum.
I crawl back to my friend, lie with my cheek on his chest, feeling the flood but an inch away, a sob that’s going to bend me double …
Rage arrives first, scaring all else clear.
Crowds my head with snarling; scorches my veins like battery acid; directs me like a puppet.
Relieved of pain and duty, surrendering to it utterly, imprisoned in a crazed dislocation. Rise, claim the pistol from Barry. Walk. Toward the river. No hurry, sisters and brothers. Bless me, father, for I love sin.
Check that the bolt on the pistol is closed, safety off. Hoist it once for balance; let it dangle from one hand.
Demonically calm.
I cross the space from which I’d earlier cowered as though it’s my own living room. Stopping at the line of undergrowth, but not through fear, or even caution. Only efficiency. And in my state, that Barry and Mick are standing to my right, clubs at the ready, is something I accept blankly. Mick points: once, twice, three times.
I show him a palm — any more? — but he can only shrug, shying from something in my eye.
I shrug myself, mentally; rush through the brush without a care, tense only in the hand that holds the pistol before me.
Reclining on the grass near my feet, Hemi moves in slow motion, rolling to his back, hand scrabbling for the shotgun by his side, and, deliberately, I’m able to insert the barrel of the pistol into his mouth with what seems like seconds to spare.
I’ve time enough to examine the emotions chasing across his face: shock, purpose, alarm. And then ire, the habitual arrogance of the sovereign above challenge, his hand even moving an inch toward swatting the barrel clear.
And then I watch him absorb the realisation that a friend of someone he just murdered is one reflex from unleashing the physics of gunnery inside his mouth.
A dead stranger deep in my breast: ‘Any of you cunts shift a finger and I use this prick’s skull to water the grass.’ I know there’s two more of them, lying to Hemi’s left. I know also that they’ve weapons; my periphery noted it earlier. It notes now Barry standing above them, Mick arriving belatedly, cudgels at the high point.
Then, for an instant, like a glimpse of Steve’s ghost, his mark on the faces of his killers — cut lips, bruised eyes — stops the breath in my throat.
Barry, a record on slow speed: ‘Dusty! Mate! Fancy bumping into you out here! Un-fucking-real! Did ya catch up with Steve? You remember him from Vegas, eh?’
The homie panics, scrambles for his gun, raises it an inch …
Barry clubs his shoulder with a gleeful grunt.
Crrrunch.
A prolonged scream splits the twilight, sets birds to the wing, but my red trance dials it down with ease.
The giant in the centre seems barely put out by events, lying on his stomach, chin rested on a fist, shotgun untouched beside him, presumably awaiting orders. The Rat on his back snarls a grin and a dare at me.
I watch as Hemi adjusts to his plight, crushed to see him recover from fear so quickly. Or perhaps he’s just learned to hide it well. He moves to ease back from the barrel, raised hands and face stating I’ve no choice but to grant the concession. I do, transferring the barrel to the gap in his collarbone, needing to hear him speak.
Hemi, imperious: ‘Let’s work sumthing out ’ere. I’m willin’ t’ cut yu kids sum slack, even though yu got fuck all t’ bargain wif.’
Mick: ‘What do ya call that shooter set to drill you a new windpipe?’
Hemi, sneering lightly: ‘Yu’s noe what ’appens if that goes orf. Y’all get t’ spend the next thirdy years of yaw lives gettin’ bashed up, slashed up and bum-fucked by cunts like us. In the Joint dudes like yu’s’ve only got one name: bitch.’ He shakes his head, grins a cocky dismissal of me. ‘As much as yu wan’u, yu ain’t gonna pull that trigga …’ cause you doan wanna choke on cum an’ wear lipstick faw the rest of yaw life.’
I need to contradict him. To spite him. To refute this archbully from whose sovereignty the world has for years cowered, who ekes his fortune among us through terror and extortion, whose very word is a law of sorts, who knows this full well, gloats on it, thrives on it, feeds on it. I’m taken by the pure and spontaneous urge to prove him wrong, to be the first in years to deny his authority.
For this reason — and at that instant, for only this reason — I step back from Hemi, train the pistol to the back of his fat friend … and squeeze the trigger.
The thud is atrociously intimate: a clap of thunder in my skull. The weapon leaps in my hand, bucking my arm like the world’s finest orgasm.
The gangster bounces, as if the ground beneath him’s become a trampoline. Blood, black in the gloom, sprays from under him, spattering Hemi and Dusty, flecking our boots and legs.
He begins to spasm, jerking and twitching like an eighties breakdancer.
In half a second I’ve ejected the spent cartridge, chambered a freshie from the six shot magazine, fixed the barrel again on Hemi.
Barry bends to the dying killer for a closer inspection, unconsciously dabbing blood from the neat entry wound, tasting it. Watching the lagging fit with rapt intensity. Giggles breathlessly: ‘How fucking wild is this, lads? Fuuuuck meeee!’ He looks from my face, to Mick’s, to Dusty’s. ‘Did you guys know they flopped like that?’
The actuality of the deed — my reaction to it — is held at bay by both the trance and my need to scrutinise Hemi. Twisted at the trunk, the Rabble boss glares at his dead pal — the Ghost of Christmas Future — his eyes wider than any I’ve ever seen, whites huge in the gloom. Hissing: ‘Holy fuckin’ shit!’ He shifts his glare to me and I watch it fade a degree, dulled by denial, then wonder … and then respect.
Fear comes last. The curdling awareness that his life is to end falls across Hemi’s face like a membrane, festering at the eyes.
I stare back at him blankly, knowing I’m the first white person to intimidate him in god knows how many years — perhaps the first person to terrify him ever.
The knowledge fills me with sick pride.
Me, crooning: ‘Your own fucking cousin, Hemi. Your own flesh and blood. You punched him till he stopped moving.’
But even in extremity, Hemi’s nature rescues him from weakness — to my huge disappointment — banishing the terror as if it hadn’t been there, leaving only hostility and bitter acceptance. Blurting: ‘Yeah, Steve was my cuzin, but so what? ’E plotted t’ rip — me — orf! ’E plotted t’ do sumfin’ t’ me, unprovoked, that ’e knew’d result in ’is death if I found out! ’E knew the price, an’ ’e tried t’ shit on me anyway! By acting
’ow Steve did, what I did t’ im became my right! More, it became a fuckin’ necessity!’
I find myself giving this thought … and accepting the logic.
Hemi reacted to Steve’s action in the exact manner we knew he would. In a sense, Hemi’s behaviour was as fathomable, and justified, as a lion swatting vultures at a kill-site. This whole situation is our fault.
Hemi didn’t murder Steve.
I did.
What in god’s name were we thinking?
The murderous tide ebbs away, leaving only a shell.
A husk named Gator. A kid with lead chunks in his heart. A kid deep in the brown stuff. A kid in need of months to weigh things in and around him.
A kid with only seconds.
I drop Hemi’s glare at last, nodding, grimacing. ‘You’re right. By that logic, you’re no more guilty than a knee tapped in the jerk-spot.’
His sigh is stentorian. He scrubs a hand across his face, bearing stealing back into him.
Me, in time: ‘You remember what Steve did for me outside your pad the other night, though?’
Hemi, wary: ‘Yeah?’
‘Then, by your logic, you’ll understand why I still have to kill you.’
Steeled only by an image of Steve at his feet, drenched in gore, striking feebly at nothing …
Panicking, Hemi shapes to move … but his sand ran out minutes ago.
Sucked into the time within time, I’m braced for the kick … but not for the passion: I’m all alone now … and white-hot rapture rips me to ribbons, lifting me high, hurls me down the face of a breaker in a black sea …
… a ride of such insanity, thrill and horror are soul-mates …
… glory and ruin divided by inches.
The bridge of Hemi’s nose sprouts a third eye and he’s thrown to his back as if kicked by a stallion, inertia snapping him around in a neat backward roll. He comes to rest face first, twitching limbs splayed diabolically …
… the back of his head a dark cavity.
Blinking, I wipe at an eye, my finger coming away wet with blood and something …
… then, gently, I’m wafted back to the banks of the Takahera River …
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