by Seth Patrick
One of the fluorescent tubes kept flickering, but really it just added to the atmosphere. He readied himself to hoist up to the higher of the two bunks that were bolted to one wall.
Then he slipped on something wet and fell over. The floor, naturally enough, was hard. He followed the water back to its source, and saw that it was a mundane slow drip from the air filtration system. He hand-tightened a nut and the drip stopped. Just before he stood, he noticed something under the lower bunk, so he reached under and pulled out what was there.
Notebooks.
He sat on the bunk and – with a single guilty glance to the window in the entryway – opened the top book.
The first thing he saw was a sketch of a landscape, tall buildings in the distance. Overlooking it was a dark shape, drawn in thick chaotic pencil strokes. It resembled a winged demon, he reckoned, but there was very little detail to it.
He sighed. Jonah had described this stuff to him before – the things that haunted his dreams. And while he’d spoken very little about it since Winnerden Flats, it wasn’t like Never had expected it to just stop.
Seeing it like this still made his heart sink, though.
He flicked through the pages. More cityscapes, more creatures.
Then there was one that chilled him: the face of Michael Andreas, the man who’d been the creature’s vessel. The sketch looked like him, too, and Never hadn’t known that Jonah possessed such a level of artistic talent. The myriad little mouths that covered the skin of the face were well-observed and gave him a shiver of recognition, remembering how Andreas had seemed to be struggling to maintain his human shape. He shivered, remembering when that leering face had come so close to his own, as the creature cut out his rib . . .
He groaned, nausea sweeping over him for an instant. He turned the page.
Next was a series of sketches, focusing on people’s shoulders. Their faces weren’t drawn, the key part of the image being the shadows they bore, those parasitic parts of the creature that latched on to human hosts. Again, Jonah had told him repeatedly about the nature of the things, but this was the first time Never had seen what Jonah had seen.
In his sketches, Jonah had captured a distinctly repellent quality. A sheen, a glistening, covering the bulbous and sickening mass. Long dark tendrils, like ancient fingers, stretched down and vanished into the flesh of the host. He realized that the sketches were a series showing the same creature over time, pulsating horribly.
On the next page was another portrait, but the feeling Never got from this one wasn’t horror. It was sorrow.
The portrait was of Tess Neil. Jonah had known her when he was in his teens. She was older than him, and he’d developed a punishing crush on her – something which, Never suspected, he’d not got over.
Tess had died in Winnerden Flats. Jonah had carried her body out, and had insisted she had a proper burial, something Kendrick had arranged.
Her face had been drawn with a delicacy that showed how much he’d cared for her.
Underneath the portrait were the words: The Beast is coming. Be ready.
He flicked through more pages, then opened up another of the notebooks.
There was more of the same, and on one page Jonah had written ‘be ready?’ again and again, in increasingly desperate scrawls.
He was startled by a knocking sound, and looked up.
Jonah’s face was at the window in the door.
‘Having fun there?’ said Jonah, his voice muffled but still audible. Jonah opened the door and came in, his expression grim; Never wondered just how long he’d been watching.
‘Shit,’ said Never. ‘I’d rather you’d caught me with porn.’
This, at least, drew a reluctant smile. ‘Speak for yourself.’
‘I’m sorry, mate,’ said Never. He closed the notebooks. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
Jonah sat next to him. ‘The pizzas won’t be long,’ he said. He had a slightly pained look to him.
‘I lost track of time.’
‘Don’t mention any of this to Annabel, OK?’ said Jonah. He put his hand on the pages of the top notebook. ‘I’ve kept these here because Annabel doesn’t come into the shelter. It creeps her out.’
‘You’re tormenting yourself,’ said Never. ‘Maybe Kendrick can get hold of someone who can help. It’s post-traumatic stress. You need to talk it through, with a professional. Even when something’s over, you need help to process everything that—’
Jonah shook his head. ‘It’s not over.’
‘Right,’ said Never. ‘I know, there are still people out there who want to kick it all off again, but—’
‘No,’ said Jonah, firmly. ‘It’s not over. There’s something I didn’t tell you.’ He pointed at the words on the open page: The Beast is coming. Be ready. ‘This wasn’t me. This was Tess. Her last words. She knew, Never. She knew more than anyone that it would return. She knew it would be down to me to stop it.’
Never could feel something inside him dissolving, a nugget of hope he’d been holding onto for a very long time. He’d be lying if he said it was a shock, though – sometimes you can know a hope is naive, and still get comfort from it. ‘You should have told us,’ he said. ‘This isn’t something you can deal with alone.’
‘Maybe not,’ said Jonah. ‘But I wanted to give you both a chance – a chance to really think it was finished.’
‘Did you tell Kendrick and Sly?’
‘I told Kendrick. Whether he told Sly, I don’t know.’
‘Does he believe Tess was right?’
Jonah shrugged. ‘He has to assume she was, and so do I.’ He took a long breath and let it out slowly. ‘Don’t tell Annabel,’ he said again. ‘Not yet. Not until I get some kind of handle on it.’
‘If you say so. But you should think about telling her sooner rather than later. It’s eating away at you. Even I can tell, and I have the empathetic capacity of a melon.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Jonah. ‘Tell me something, though. After Winnerden, did you believe it was over, deep down? And don’t just tell me what you think I need to hear. Tell me the truth.’
‘Ah,’ said Never. ‘The truth . . .’ He gave himself a few seconds of thinking time, but it looked like honesty was going to have to suffice. ‘Of course I didn’t believe it was over,’ he said. ‘I just hoped it had been kicked so far into the long grass that it’d be decades before anything happened. Or better yet, centuries. I mean, whoever it was that imprisoned that thing the first time, that’s all they were doing. A temporary respite. A very long temporary respite, admittedly.’ He shook his head, thinking about something that had crossed his mind many times. ‘How did they know what to do? I wonder about that. Did they work it out, or did they get help?’
‘It wiped out their world,’ said Jonah. ‘If they got help, they got it too late.’
‘Well,’ said Never, standing up. ‘This relaxing fun-spree isn’t going to plan, is it?’
Jonah put his notebooks back under the bunk. He sighed. ‘I feel like I’m just killing time until it all kicks off again, and then it’ll be my fault when everything turns to shit.’
‘Fuck that,’ said Never. ‘Let’s eat pizza and drink wine. Because right now, we’re in that respite part, and there’s no point wasting it.’
4
The hangover was mighty.
Maybe the boil had been lanced, but whatever the reason, after their brief chat in the shelter Jonah seemed to relax. Pizzas were eaten, wine was drunk, and then a mammoth session of pool ensued.
Annabel beat them both, naturally. When she finally shepherded Jonah off to bed, Never stayed up for a while longer, finally crashing on one of the couches. He didn’t wake until early afternoon, but he made some breakfast. Annabel and Jonah emerged, but Never was the only one who could stomach eating.
When he left, Jonah gave him a big hug. It was good to see Jonah still with a smile on his lips. Annabel gave Never a ride home.
‘Any plans for the rest of the
day?’ she asked.
‘Sleep,’ said Never, and that pretty much covered him.
*
When Never rolled into work on Monday morning, he was feeling buoyant. He’d spent Sunday gaming, and the stress that had been building in the run-up to the visit to Jonah’s grave had gone. Seeing Sam always brought out a strong feeling of guilt. When Kendrick had arranged Jonah’s ‘death’, he’d made clear how important it was not to reveal the truth to those they were trying to protect, however strong the temptation. The whole purpose of the lie would be compromised. Indeed, Kendrick had tried to convince Jonah that even Annabel and Never should be left ignorant of the truth; Jonah had considered that one step too far.
But knowing that it made them all safer – Sam included – didn’t mean much when Never could see the pain in the man’s eyes, as he stood by the grave.
The discovery of Jonah’s notebooks hadn’t hit Never as hard as he might have expected, though. When Jonah was ‘killed off ’, the immediate dangers had subsided. The normality that came with it was such a relief that, on the whole, he’d been able to push out the fears. Nightmares of Michael Andreas aside, he’d made a huge effort to convince himself that whatever might happen in the future, his own involvement with that whole subject was over.
His effort had paid off, and he put that success down to his grandmother – his dad’s mum. She’d lived in her native Aberdeen, and the family had visited her every year. She’d hated sea travel and didn’t trust aircraft, so it was the only time they got to see her. She’d been on her own, his grandad having died before Never was born, but she was a fiercely intelligent woman who always spoke to Never like he was an adult.
He’d loved his grandmother. She spoiled him, for a start. Whenever they were out shopping, anything that caught his eye tended to find its way into her shopping trolley, and that was certainly welcome for a ten-year-old. But the reason for his devotion was much deeper, and it hadn’t been until after her death that he’d really understood the root of it.
‘You were two peas in a pod,’ his dad said to him once, a few years after she’d gone, and that hit the nail on the head. When it came down to it, he wasn’t all that like his mum or dad – his dad had no trace of a Scottish burr, for one thing, while Never still hadn’t lost his Belfast accent. His gran understood him better than anyone because their personalities were so similar. She would come out with things that were as hilarious as they were inappropriate, leaving him in fits of laughter while his parents looked on in vague horror. Sometimes he would be the one to say it, and get a severe glance from his mum.
During one visit, Never had fallen ill with a chesty cough, and his parents had left him with his gran while they went out for the day. He had decided to ask her about something his dad had said. Her house was on Church Road, but his father sometimes called it something else: the Dead Road.
When she came up to the bedroom to see if he was hungry, he asked her why his father called it that.
‘Did you ask your dad?’ she said, sitting on the side of the bed.
‘I did. He said people called it that because everyone who lives here is so old.’
She grinned and burst into laughter. Never frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
‘It doesn’t make sense! Dad grew up here, so when he was young you weren’t old.’
‘That’s true,’ she said. ‘But your dad was right. Half right, anyway. When your dad was a child, the road was full of craggy old dodderers like I am now. There was a handful of young families, but mostly it was wrinkles and white hair.’
‘What do you mean he was half right?’
‘What’s at the top of the hill, Rob?’ She always called him Rob, the same as his friends did, even though his parents insisted on calling him Robert.
‘A church.’
‘You know the funny gateway to the church? It’s a lych gate. Do you know what that is?’
He shook his head.
‘It’s a side entrance to the church grounds, where bodies are brought for funerals. Every funeral used to bring the body up along this road, and carry it in through that gate. Somebody gave the road a nickname, because sooner or later everybody comes up this way. Everybody dies, and wherever a funeral procession started, it’d get here in the end. Eventually, we all travel along the Dead Road.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘OK.’ He started to cough. She handed him a tissue.
‘I suppose old people living here is funny in a way,’ she said. ‘Less distance to travel!’ She gave him a big grin, but the talk of death hadn’t exactly left him feeling cheery.
She reached out and tenderly pushed his hair from his forehead. ‘You know, when your grandfather died, I was determined not to go the way so many of my friends have gone – once one went, the other was close behind. They gave up and were just waiting. Mind you, they’re not the worst. I’ve known people all my life who just had no hope within them, none at all. They were already walking along the Dead Road, because nothing seemed to matter.’ She shook her head. ‘We all die, Rob. But for some people that’s all they see ahead of them.’
‘At school they said the sun would die, too. In, well, billions of years.’
She smiled. ‘And does that worry you?’
He smiled back and shook his head. ‘Don’t be daft.’ He started to cough again, and this time he hawked up some thick green sputum. He spat it into his tissue and grinned.
She took the tissue with a grimace. ‘Nice. If you are going to die today, at least wait until your parents get back or you’ll get me into trouble.’
‘I’ll try,’ he said, still grinning.
‘Good. I’ll go and get some soup.’ She stood, and at the side of his bed she paused. ‘A life lived without hope . . .’ she said, wistful. ‘Some people start travelling on the Dead Road a long time before they’re in a coffin, Rob. Don’t you ever do that.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Promise me.’
He’d made her that promise, and he’d always tried to stick to it. Even now.
*
The office was quiet that morning, although one of the comms links to an offsite storage location had gone down. The video and audio evidence collected at revivals was backed up to other FRS offices, as well as to three sites the FBI still shared with them. With just one down it was hardly a crisis, but it was a good policy to get these things back up and running as soon as possible. They’d had occasional problems with the comms hardware at their end, and it was easy to check and straightforward to fix, so Never got stuck in.
By noon he’d resolved the issue, but the day was about to get much busier.
At 12.23, Hugo Adler got the call. He came to Never first. ‘Something’s come in from Durham, North Carolina,’ he said. ‘Probably a murder-suicide, could be something more.’
While a suicide was only revived if the lottery came up, murder-suicide was a different matter entirely. ‘More?’
‘They want to rule out foul play by a third party,’ said Hugo. ‘I’d like you to be on site.’
Durham was a two-hour drive away. Two there, two back. At least three hours at the site. It’d be a long day. ‘Really?’
‘Better to have a senior staff member on it,’ said Hugo. ‘Who’s our highest rated available reviver?’
‘I’ll take a look.’ He checked. ‘Lex. Have you estimated?’
Hugo nodded. ‘Husband and wife, no kids. Wife was shot in the head, single bullet. Small calibre. She’s our subject. Estimate came out at fifty per cent for a J5 rating. Lex is what, a K4?’
‘Yep. Should be eighty per cent or better for her. Well worth the trip. How come the husband’s not the subject?’
‘I’ve put the pictures from the site on the system,’ said Hugo, and Never brought them up.
‘Ouch,’ he said. The first images were inside a garage, which had been all but destroyed by fire. In the middle of the floor was a shape that Never immediately knew was the husband, pretty much incinerated.
‘Not even the best of the best
would have a chance with that,’ said Hugo. ‘If it’s suicide, the guy obviously didn’t want to be questioned.’
‘No shit,’ said Never. Hugo had paused for a fraction of a second before he’d said ‘the best of the best’, and Never wondered if he’d been about to say ‘Jonah’. There was no question of attempting to revive the man, certainly.
It had always fascinated Never how suicide rates had measurably reduced in countries that performed revivals of suicides. The rates hadn’t plummeted to zero, by any means, but just the idea that your actions would be questioned even if you died seemed to put some people off. The fact that it weighed on the minds of those considering suicide was borne out by the figures. Large-calibre ammunition and fragmenting bullets were one of the options people took to make sure they couldn’t be revived, but so was fire. Some did both, but the key thing was that the extra steps needed – and the extra thought that had to be put into it – was an effective deterrent. Most suicides were spur-of-the-moment acts of desperation, and it had long been known that any kind of additional barrier made it less likely for a person to go ahead with it – keeping a gun unloaded with the ammunition kept separately slashed the risk of suicide.
Having to buy ammunition specifically for the job, or having to set a fire too, had an even greater effect.
He saw Lex enter the office, carrying a coffee. She was smiling, but she wouldn’t be for much longer. He looked at Hugo. ‘Do you want to tell her, or shall I?’
*
The house in Durham was single-storey, in the suburbs of West Hills. When they got there, it had been taped off, a dozen neighbours hanging around with their arms folded, watching with concern.
The air was full of the stench of gasoline, burnt plastic and broiling meat.