GodBomb!

by Kit Power

  “I think someone’s coming!”

  Alex smiles inside and tries to formulate a smart ass response, pulling the words together.

  She is still thinking about the sentence when she dies.

  Andrew looks over at John, hand resting on the open door of their car.

  “Are you coming?”

  John blinks slowly, turning his head like a lizard too long in the sun. Four in the afternoon and the fat fuck is still sweating out last night's cider, what a fucking disgrace, thinks Andrew. Shithead’s probably over the limit right now, driving the fucking car. Fucking embarrassment to the uniform.

  “What do you need me for?” Whiney. Petulant. That weird nasal quality, like his nose is permanently blocked, along with a gross phlegmy rattle.

  Lazy fucking shit.

  Andrew runs through the conversation in his head – unknown situation, possible missing persons, last known location, SOP, and tires himself out just thinking about it.

  “You know what? I don’t. You just sit tight, okay? Back in a minute.”

  John smiles, a tight piggy expression of satisfaction on his face, and Andrew feels a wave of loathing.

  “Okay.”

  Andrew shuts the car door just a little harder than might be strictly necessary, and pulls his hat on. It’s been sat on the dashboard most of the day, the black felt soaking up the summer heat like a sponge, and he feels beads of sweat pop on his forehead. He walks towards the community hall, squeezing between parked cars at the pavement, noting the distance of the building from the surrounding houses – fucking lot of cars on the street, could do with some residents' parking or something, ridiculous – and reaches the heavy wooden door.

  He thinks about calling his location into Control, but John’s laziness is still grating on him, like a painful rash.

  Fuck it. Let that fat fuck call it in. It’s his fucking job, let him do it for a change.

  The doors are big, solid wood, no window. The service or whatever should have finished by twelve, and Katie Jennings' parents decided that three hours was too late. So here Andrew is, chasing down a sixteen year old that’s probably just on the piss down the mound with her mates or snogging some spotty tosspot on a bench somewhere, and sure, same old same old, but fucking hell, what a way to spend Sunday afternoon. Andrew takes a second to think about what he’d rather be doing - more precisely, who he’d rather be doing, and the room he’d rather be doing it in - but it’s an unprofitable line of thought, and the trousers he’s wearing would make a hard-on uncomfortable, so he shuts it down and gives the door a cursory shake, already sure that it’s locked.

  It’s open.

  Andrew takes a step back, momentarily spooked by the way the door just swings open, and his hand pulls it shut again before he can see in.

  Shit.

  He looks back to the car, intending to make eye contact with John. Hoping John wasn’t looking, didn’t see him jump, but of course John is ‘resting his eyes’, looking for all the world like a slightly tanned Jabba the fucking Hutt sleeping off another slave dancing party. Andrew feels another surge of rage.

  Lazy cunt.

  Fuck him.

  Andrew turns back to the door, pushes it open and steps in, mouth moving into place to form the word ‘Hello’.

  The windows in the room are high but large, which means that although he’s stepping out of direct sunlight, the room is well lit, so it’s not really that his eyes are having trouble adjusting to the gloom. It’s more that his brain is having trouble adjusting to the signal received from his eyes, his ears, his nose.

  The room is full. People sit in pews, huddled. Praying? Andrew is not a bad copper, and he has a pretty sensitive antenna for both bullshit and danger. But too much is wrong here, all at once, and the room of silent people feels like a wall of noise - a screaming warning so jagged that it locks him in place. The door swings shut behind him as he takes in the bodies in the aisle, the blood on the floor. Eyes moving up, too slowly, to the girl near the foot of the stage, head lowered over another body. He doesn’t even hear the door come to rest behind him as he takes in the blood-soaked figure on the stage that looks like something out of one of those shitty martial arts movies his dad was obsessed with when he was little, and his peripheral vision is pretty sharp but his reactions are dull, rusted by too many soft beats and known drunks and easy pickings and petty vandalism, so even as his eyes widen with shock as he takes in the carnage on the stage, he notices movement to his extreme left, almost senses it, but his eyes and head have barely begun to turn when he hears a sound that roots him to the spot.

  Snick.

  “Don’t.”

  One word, but the adrenaline is pumping now, now it’s too fucking late and he’s caught like a rabbit in a snare. His brain is all about the information now, giving him ‘shaky voiced perp, terrified, young, male, been crying or yelling’, giving him ‘that’s gunpowder you can smell over the piss you can also now smell’, giving him ‘that window at the back above the blood-soaked stage is broken, that body in the aisle looks shot’.

  So it’s not exactly a surprise to him that the barrel that’s pressed into the cheek below his left eye is still transmitting a low heat, not dissimilar to the uncomfortable warmth of his hat. All in all, it’s not exactly welcome information either, because a)it’s about three seconds too late to be any practical use, and there’s very little worse than working out how and why something has gone spectacularly bad after it’s too fucking late to do anything about it, and b) one thing that is worse is having a scared teenager who has already shot at least one person in the last couple of hours literally pushing a gun into your face.

  Andrew runs hot and cold. He feels faint and sick, and his muscles lock up as everything goes as still as it possibly can. Andrew feels a dreadful pulling in. For a few moments his vision itself becomes tunnelled, acid bubbling up from his gut towards his throat, but he could no more vomit right now than he could burst into song. His gullet is in lockdown. Sweat coats his entire body surface, like a second skin, slick against his clothes. He feels it soaking in, his underwear adhering to him.

  He draws in breath slow and shallow through his nose, because even though his mouth is still open, still frozen in the act of forming that moronic greeting beloved of sheep before the slaughter everywhere, his tongue appears to have swollen to the size of a tennis ball and is about as dry. It sits in his mouth, blocking the airway, as useless as the rest of him.

  Andrew stands, breathes. His life does not flash before his eyes. Time does not seem to slow, exactly, though he feels aware of each inhale and exhale on a level he would not before this moment have even suspected could be possible. What does occupy his mental processing, blotting out all other thought like a total eclipse, is the simple concept of pounds per square inch, and how many more of them stand between him and oblivion.

  The finger that will make that determination is trembling. Andrew knows this because he can feel the tremble transmitted through the warm metal pressed into his face, jittering against his cheek, almost painful because his facial muscles are as taut as the rest. It seems to Andrew like that tremble is going right into his brain, shaking, rattling, and how many pounds per square inch? How big of a twitch will it take? How big a clench of that trigger finger?

  Will he even hear the bang?

  Time does not seem to slow, but Andrew feels like he’s getting older a lot quicker, all of a sudden. Like something vital is leaving him with every out breath.

  His whole mind, all of his attention is tuned to that transmitted tremble, so it takes his brain a couple of seconds to realise what his staring, unblinking eyes are seeing.

  Which is movement.

  The figure on the stage - who was kneeling, Andrew realises, mind replaying what he’s been looking at while his attention has been absent in the land of the twitching gun hand where Every Tremble Feels Like The End - climbs to his feet. It takes him a moment, and at first Andrew thinks the man must be old, or at leas
t middle aged. Then he sees, no, it’s just a kid, a very pale, extremely crazy looking kid, who has a sword in one hand and something else in the other and a chest covered in crazy wiring that Andrew would dearly like to imagine is some kind of dumb prop or extreme fashion statement. But there’s a warm gun pushing into his face and blood everywhere (including all over this pale fucker and the fucking sword he’s got in his fist) and yup, that’s another body on the stage, fucking butchered, looks like, so we’re in a cosy quadruple murder with at least two suspects, seventy odd hostages, and we’re hoping that the one with the sword just has on a pretend bomb vest?

  Andrew does not think he’s having that kind of luck today. Maybe not ever again.

  The kid is looking at him, and his face looks drawn, and really fucking pale, though Andrew supposes that the blood spatters on his face might be exacerbating the effect. His eyes look sunken and red, but Andrew thinks what he’s seeing is concern. Maybe even compassion. It’s a pretty unlikely expression, given the overall picture, and something about it makes Andrew feel... not fear, but something deeper, more elemental. Like the deep moorings of his mind are being put under strain, just by proximity to the madness of another. Andrew sees a killer staring at him with all the appearance of sympathy, and feels a light-headed dread flood into his mind, like white smoke from green wood.

  “Chris.”

  The voice is a little rough sounding but plenty loud enough – it carries across the room with ease. Andrew feels the gun barrel push into his cheek harder, suddenly. He also feels his own awful impulse to pull away squeezed out by an even stronger desire to stand fucking still, and the conflict feels physical to him, even though he does not so much as flinch. The pressure stiffens, then goes back to shaking, maybe a little worse than before, and for the first time in his life, Andrew understands the mechanism whereby someone might just wet themselves with fear. He’s been in the car for two hours, and he’s got a pretty good bladder capacity, but it’s a hot day and now there’s this pressure, and this horrible desire to loosen and just let. It. Go.

  Please don’t kill me. Please calm down and please don’t kill me.

  “Chris.”

  Less of a reaction this time. The trembles subsiding a little. Andrew catches up to the fact that the killer on the stage is looking past him, not at him. That the care on his face is meant for his accomplice - the submissive one, thinks Andrew, using a gun instead of a blade, scared. He feels his mind settle back into place, and for the first time since he heard the sound of metal sliding into place by his left ear, Andrew feels a small space open in his mind for thought. It’s like the realisation about the killer has reminded him how to think, like his brain had slipped into neutral, and he’s just gotten the bite back.

  “Be calm, Chris. Be calm.” Listen to the nice man, Chris. For fuck's sake, please...

  Andrew hears a sob. Feels it, as it rolls up the arm of the shooter and through the barrel into his face. It is a desperate and terrible sound, and Andrew blinks hard, involuntarily, and is kind of amazed when his eyes open and the world is still there.

  “Chris...”

  “Stop it! Just stop!”

  The guy on the stage makes an odd gesture, moving his arms up and down slowly in a way that might look more calming if the hands doing it did not contain a bloodstained blade and a lump of plastic with wire coming out. Similar problem with the bloody pale face and the wrinkled forehead of concern, the slowly shaking head.

  “It’s okay, Chris. It’s okay.”

  “What the FUCK are you talking about?”

  On the word fuck, the barrel of the gun is driven into Andrew’s face hard enough to prang his cheekbone. He feels a little burst of pain, and has to clench hard to keep his bladder from emptying.

  “What the FUCK is okay?”

  This time the barrel moves back before coming forward, and Andrew’s head rocks a little. It’s like being punched. He feels water squirt into his eye. The pain overrides the fear though, with its immediacy, so he doesn’t feel like pissing again. He does start breathing a little heavier though, aware of this but unable to control it. He’s sweating so hard now it fucking hurts. His heart doesn’t feel like it’s beating faster, but it does feel like it’s beating pretty fucking heavy. Andrew thinks in a desperately distracted way that this cannot possibly be good for him.

  “It’s the plan, Chris. Remember?”

  This time the gun arm freezes completely, the barrel less than a centimetre from Andrew’s cheek. He’s still staring straight ahead, at the bladed killer with the smooth line in patter, but there’s a huge grey lump in his peripheral vision with a dark pit in the centre that seems to Andrew to be roughly the size of the Blackwall tunnel.

  “It has to be the plan. Okay? This whole thing. Him too.”

  The blade points at Andrew here, marking him out, but the gaze of the kid doesn’t shift for a second. He’s clearly holding his focus where it needs to be, like a fucking snake hypnotising its master. Andrew knows he’s got the power relationship right, but can also see that the situation is what we like to call fluid, and there’s panic up front as well as behind, for all the calming voice and soothing gestures and let's-be-reasonable words, and Andrew feels something very dark and unpleasant begin to bloom in his heavily beating chest.

  “Come on, Chris. You know it.”

  “I don’t, I fucking...”

  That big black hole is floating about now, and it’s like a fly that’s buzzing around your face too close to properly focus on, only knowing the fucking thing could end you in less than a second, and Andrew’s still not feeling afraid, exactly, but that dark feeling is growing.

  “Yes.” There’s a smile here, which in Andrew's humble opinion is spectacularly ill-judged, because the face on the stage is not well suited to smiling at the best of times, and these are kind of the opposite of the best of times.

  But it must be working, because Chris stops talking. Which Andrew approves of, because the tremble in the arm was in the voice too, which indicates a level of pressure and a lack of control that are spectacularly ill-suited to the error-free operation of a firearm.

  “You do know, Chris. You’ve always known. The way I haven’t. The way I need to. You know.”

  His voice lowers in pitch as he delivers the last word, and he takes a step forward, reaching the edge of the stage.

  Andrew hears Chris draw breath, as if to speak. Hold it, exhale. Once. Twice. The kid on the stage nods his head, slowly.

  “That’s why this is going to work, right?”

  There’s another hitch of breath, and to Andrew it sounds damp, like a sob, but that dark feeling is not moving and Andrew is convinced on a molecular level that any movement would be a supremely bad idea, so he does not check, does not even move his eyes in that direction.

  The silence drags, spins out, ragged breaths, the boy on stage nodding, then there’s a shuffling noise from behind him and the gun recedes in his peripheral vision, becoming gun sized rather than planet sized. It should be a relief, but Andrew actually feels a very edgy jag, because it’s not far enough back to make any difference. The angle is still wrong for him to try and chance a poor reaction time and the fucking thing is still there and still cocked.

  The kid on the stage holds the silence for a few moments longer, then his eyes shift slightly, and now Andrew knows he’s being appraised for the first time. Andrew stares back, careful to keep his face neutral, but also determined to hold his gaze. Andrew feels the eyes of everyone in the room on him for the first time, and the unwelcome responsibilities of the uniform flood back into him. He can feel just as scared as he likes, but he’d better not show it, because these people are looking to him. This is the job.

  So he can’t stop the bead of sweat that he can feel rolling from the hollow of his left temple down the side of his face, but he can damn well keep his eyes front and centre. There’s a relief to this too, this assumption of a role - one he knows well, has played with reasonable success for year
s. He remembers training, being told most of the time; the uniform is worth an army by itself, and hasn’t he seen it, time after time? Yup, affirmative.

  So he’s being sized up. The kid on the stage imagines himself tough, but it’s clear to Andrew that he’s pushed himself way past any place of comfort. That maybe the barbecue doesn’t taste quite as good as he’d thought it would. Is, in point of fact, making him ill. The kid is so fucking pale, drawn. There are shadows under his eyes, and even across the length of the hall, Andrew can see they are bloodshot. Still, the kid is alert, and...

  “Officer?”

  “Yes.” Andrew is pleased with how calm his voice sounds. His heart still feels like it’s beating too hard, but the dark feeling has... not receded, exactly, but been balanced out by the counterweight of what Andrew thinks of, without irony or self-consciousness, as his duty.

  “What happens now?”

  The question feels like it should throw Andrew, but somehow it doesn’t.

  “Well, Control knows my last known location is here,” Unless my lazy sack of shit partner is still dozing in the car, “so they’ll be expecting to hear from me in the next five minutes max. To confirm the location is empty.”

  “I see.” The kid nods, and Andrew thinks the gears are still spinning, but he couldn’t swear to it.

  “I take if they don’t hear from you, they’ll send more?”

  “That’s right, yes. A lot more, probably.” Is that laying it on too thick? Maybe, but only a little. They should send all units within ten minutes of an officer not responding, even in this chicken-shit outfit, if John has called it in, if John doesn’t get curious and just tries to come on up here himself, if...

  “That would be inconvenient, Officer.” There’s an edge inside that voice that Andrew dislikes intensely, and dislikes all the more for the ragged quality of it. It’s the voice of someone who knows they are out past some fundamental point of no return, but still feels willing to keep on pushing. Come what may.

  “May I ask why you are here in the first place?”