Chasing the Dead dr-1

by Tim Weaver

  I swung the stick into Michael’s knees, and he collapsed on all fours. As his fingers grabbed hold of a piece of wood nearby, I thumped the fat end of the stick into the base of his spine. He howled in pain, and went down on his stomach, flat to the floor, his hand clutching the area I’d hit. His eyelids fluttered and both of his legs twitched.

  He was quiet.

  I peered around the box, back to where Malcolm had been. He was gone. Only darkness now. If he was gone, he was coming back towards the middle of the room.

  Back behind me.

  As I turned he was on to me. A huge hand clamped on to my face, trying to cover my mouth, trying to force me away from him so he could get a clear shot. I could see the gun, could see him trying to jab it towards me, but I managed to knock him off balance, punching the stick into his gut. He stumbled, landing against one of the boxes, the cardboard pillar toppling to the floor.

  I shoulder-charged him, lifting him off his feet, and pushed him down to the ground. The gun spun off, out of his grasp, turning circles across the floor.

  But then my body locked.

  Suddenly, the pain in my back erupted. Something ruptured in the cuts, and I could feel flesh tear and blood run, my vision blurring as if a nailbomb had gone off in my head. I stumbled sideways, reaching out for whatever was nearest.

  It was Malcolm.

  He was in front of me now, on his feet, pushing boxes aside so I couldn’t get at them for support. I stumbled further towards him, and he threw a punch that hit me square in the face. I went down hard, on to my hip, and cried out as the impact sent a tremor through my back.

  He came at me a second time, turning me over. This time, something — maybe adrenalin, or instinct — helped me block his punch with an arm. I jabbed my right hand into his throat. He wheezed, a sound like air leaving a valve, and stumbled back towards what little light there was, coming from upstairs.

  I looked around me. The gun was within reach. Four or five feet.

  But then he came at me again, kicking me in the side of the head. I wheeled around, cracking my cheek on something hard. The walking stick fell out of my grasp. Then he hit me again. Hard. Right in the ear. A ringing sound passed through my skull. The room span for a moment, coming back into focus in time to see him land a third punch. He’d tried to get me in the throat, the same place I’d got him, but instead hit my collarbone.

  But the blow to the head had paralysed me.

  My body was broken. Everything they’d done to me had finally caught up. They’d shut me down. Relentlessly burnt away my strength until all that was left were ashes.

  Malcolm stood unsteadily and looked down at me.

  ‘I was prepared to give you a second chance, David,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Do you remember that? We told you not to get involved.’

  He wiped some blood away from his nose.

  ‘But I can’t help you a third time.’

  He stepped over me and went for the gun. I tried to get up, but I didn’t have the strength. Every wound that had been carved into my body over the last few days started to come back to life, snapping away at me, scratching at me, swallowing whatever fight I had left.

  I coughed, blood spilling out over my lips, and opened my hands and lay there. Waiting to be shot. Waiting for the darkness to take me down like it had taken Legion. The water of my existence covering me until everything went quiet.

  Then, in my hand, I felt something.

  I turned my head and, to my side, about four feet away, I saw Mary. She was huddled in the corner, partially lit by the light from upstairs. She’d crept down into the basement. Tears were running down her face, her eyes following Malcolm. She was down behind one of the boxes to the left of where he’d been.

  She glanced at Malcolm again, back at me, then away.

  I heard Malcolm pick up the gun.

  When I looked again, back to Mary, I could see what she’d put in my hand. The walking stick. Somewhere in her eyes I could see a small spark of hope. As if, whatever came next, had to be better than this.

  Slowly, painfully, I forced myself up.

  Malcolm was looking down at the gun, checking it was primed.

  I caught him across the back of the head with the stick. The impact sounded soft and hollow. He went down as if every muscle in his body had immediately stopped working. I hit him again when he crashed to the floor, the ball of hard wood at the end of the stick slapping in against his stomach. The third time no sound came from him.

  Mary continued crying from the same position.

  Distantly I could hear sirens.

  I collapsed to the floor and looked at Mary. My head crashed. My body was powering down. I was on the verge of blacking out.

  ‘Are you okay, David?’ she said, wiping tears from her face.

  Slowly, I reached into my pocket and removed my phone.

  ‘I need you…’ I coughed, could taste blood in my mouth. ‘I need you to call someone. Her name is Liz.’ I coughed a second time. ‘Tell her I’m in trouble.’

  And then I finally drifted away.

  51

  The most difficult thing was getting back. When the police turned up at the farm, the kids were taken into a temporary shelter where the authorities probably thought their suffering would end. A group of stolen lives they’d brought back into the cold light of day.

  But Malcolm and Michael knew differently.

  The majority of the kids had come to rely so heavily on what the farm brought to them, they were no longer prepared for the outside world; a world that had damaged them irreparably the first time round. The Calvary Project had ensured the people they were supposed to be redeeming would never be fully prepared for the return. They had been robbed of their identities. They had been robbed of their memories. They were taken back to their families, but to families who thought they were dead. On both sides it was like starting again; like having a stranger inside your home.

  Alex was different because Alex remembered most of his past. He just wanted to keep it buried. There was an irony to that — after all, keeping secrets buried was what life on the farm was about. He could have lived out the rest of his days there and never heard Al’s name mentioned again. But Alex could see the sacrifice he’d have to make — relinquishing control to a group who had forgotten the reason they existed in the first place — and he wasn’t prepared to turn into the person they wanted him to become. Once he broke away he took with him the one memory he would have given his life to remove. And he knew the moment he came up above the surface, Al would be back. But despite that, despite everything, it was worth it.

  I spoke to Mary about two weeks after the police led us away from the house. By the time she called, I was a fortnight into recovery. They’d cut a hole in the cling film, and given me an injection in my back so I wouldn’t feel them cut away the rest. By the time they were finished, I had sixty-two stitches in my back, three in my foot, and a doctor telling me I might never recover all the feeling in my two injured fingers.

  Mary cried the entire time we were on the phone. She’d lost her son, and now she had lost her husband as well — the man she’d spent years caring for. Every day she’d been by his side because every day she feared it might be his last. I didn’t tell her I knew how it felt. Derryn would always be a part of me, her face so clear in the darkness, her voice so clear in my head. For Mary, Malcolm would only be a reflection obscured by ripples. A convicted drug dealer and kidnapper, eventually charged with manslaughter, who she knew nothing about.

  I looked at Malcolm as the police led him out, and, in his eyes, saw the trade. I wouldn’t mention the girl who’d had his child, Simon and all the others who had died under his watch, and neither he nor Michael would mention my part in the deaths of Jason, Zack, Andrew, Myzwik or Legion. It was a better trade for them. Malcolm had so much blood on his hands, it would never wash out. And while I remained silent, his son remained hidden, and that also worked in his favour — even if his son was lost to him for ever.r />
  Liz sat with me during the interviews, mostly in silence, as it became obvious early on that the police weren’t going to charge me with anything. They could see my injuries. They could see what sort of people they were dealing with. More difficult, though, than lying to the detectives, was lying to her. I think, deep down, she knew I wasn’t being honest with her, but she never said anything. A part of me liked her even more for that.

  The farm and Angel’s stayed Malcolm’s. The deeds were in his name. No one could touch them. The last time Mary ever visited him in prison, he told her he’d use the money to start again on his own when he got out. She never went to see him after that.

  Michael wasn’t so lucky. He only got two years after striking a deal with the police, but he had no money to come back to and no reason to come out. He was the man people had trusted. The man they confided in. Now he was nothing to anyone, just a topic of discussion on Sunday mornings. Malcolm had gone down, and taken Michael with him, and while Michael would be getting out of prison first, he’d return to nothing. No job. No house. No life.

  * * *

  About two months later, something good happened. As the first spring sunlight broke through the trees, Mary got a phone call at the hospital. She was on the ward at the time. The caller was told he could phone back or he could wait. He decided to wait. When Mary finished her rounds, she took the call. It was Alex. He wanted her to come and meet him in France.

  Sometimes the good things were worth fighting for.

  * * *

  I drove back to Carcondrock about a month after Malcolm and Michael had tried to kill me. I buried the box full of photographs, because it seemed like the right thing to do. I called Kathy to tell her Alex was alive, and then Cary, but couldn’t tell either of them more than that, for all the reasons I couldn’t tell Mary. Every day, Alex nudged a little closer to the light, carrying the weight of what his father had done, and what he himself had done to Al. When he got there, he could tell all his friends himself — and he could finally explain to Kathy face to face why he left, and why she was never a mistake.

  When I filled in the hole, after burying the box, there wasn’t enough sand. The top of the hole sank in, making it look disturbed. I didn’t want to leave it like that, but there was a kind of resonance to it. Because each of those memories — every photograph in that box — had been disturbed a little as well.

  Finally, on my way home, I stopped at the cemetery.

  But this time there were no birds in the trees. No birds flying to freedom. I like to think it was because they had already flown. Everything in that cemetery, all the sorrow it contained, had escaped to the skies.

  And Derryn had gone with it.

  * * *

  When I got home that night, the house felt different. I couldn’t explain it, wasn’t even sure I was meant to. But it felt more welcoming, as if something had changed. I didn’t put the TV on, like I always did when I got home. I forgot about it. And by the time I became conscious of the fact that I hadn’t, I was in the shower in the bathroom wiping soap from my eyes. Afterwards, I felt a strange compulsion to be close to Derryn’s things, and sat on the edge of the bed, running my fingers down the spines of her books.

  The next time I really became lucid, clear about what I was doing, it was three o’clock in the morning, and I was staring up at the ceiling. For the first time in a long time, I’d gone back to the bedroom and fallen asleep in our bed. And the sound I was hearing, on the boundaries of sleep, wasn’t the sound of the television as it always was.

  It was the sound of something else.

  My thoughts were of Derryn, looking across at me from her rocking chair the first time I ever considered helping someone. Everything about her was so clear to me. I had a feeling wash over me, the feeling that this was the end of one stage of my life and the beginning of another. And then I heard that same sound again.

  I don’t know how much time went by, but what started out as an abstract noise quickly consumed me, then pulled me away with it. And as I fell away into the darkness of sleep, the darkness I wasn’t scared of, the darkness that took me down below the surface, all I could hear was the sea.

  Acknowledgements

  There are a great many people who have helped with the writing of this book.

  My agent Camilla Bolton has been a constant source of guidance and encouragement, and is always armed to the teeth with incredible ideas and suggestions. Plus, she pretends to laugh at my jokes, and never fails to answer an email (even the really boring ones, of which there are many). Maddie Buston and everyone else at Darley Anderson also deserve a special mention for all their hard work and support, and for getting behind me from day one.

  A big thank you to my editor Stefanie Bierwerth, who took a chance on a book by a first-time author and whose eye for a story helped to massively improve the novel when it arrived on her desk. She was also kind enough to give me a say in other areas of publication when she really didn’t have to. I also want to say a huge thanks to the fantastic team at Penguin, who have worked so tirelessly on my behalf.

  The ‘Just Switch It On And Let Him Talk’ award goes to Bruce Bennett, whose fascinating tales of police life provided more hours of Dictaphone tape than I could ever hope to use (or want to transcribe). Any errors are entirely of my own making.

  For their faith, support and prayers: my mum and dad, whose belief never wavered and who I have so much to thank for; my little sis Lucy; and my extended family, both in the UK and in South Africa. And lastly, the two girls in my life: Erin, who I love more than anything in the world — even football. And my partner-in-crime, Sharlé, who had to put her evenings and weekends on hold for two years, but who has been there since before the book was even an idea, and who is, quite simply, the best.

  About the Author

  Tim Weaver was born in 1977. He left school at eighteen and started working in magazine journalism, and has since gone on to develop a successful career writing about films, TV, sport, games and technology. He is married with a young daughter, and lives near Bath. Chasing the Dead is his first novel.

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