Rubbernecker

by Bauer, Belinda

  He should have run while he could.

  ‘Patrick? It’s not what you think.’ Spicer didn’t shout; he didn’t have to – the half-empty car park was like an echo chamber.

  What did he think? Patrick wasn’t even sure, so how could Spicer know it wasn’t what he thought?

  Spicer’s feet stopped at the first car at the other end of the short row, and his legs folded as he crouched to look underneath it.

  ‘Patrick?’

  Spicer’s head appeared and turned his way, and Patrick’s breath froze in his lungs.

  Then Spicer straightened up and crept a few cars closer.

  He hadn’t seen him! Patrick felt a huge wave of relief. The shadows had saved him – and the cover of tyres on the ten or so cars between them. But those things wouldn’t save him for long.

  Patrick shuffled backwards on his elbows and knees, scraping his back on the chassis and number plate, until he emerged between the headlights of the Land Rover, tight up against yet another slab of dark-grey concrete. He straightened up slowly. Keeping the wheels between himself and Spicer so that the man wouldn’t see his feet, he waited until he saw the top of Spicer’s head bob into view, then quickly lowered himself back down, while Spicer took a few steps to his left. Patrick shuffled carefully to his left, between the cars and the wall, then stood up once more as Spicer knelt again.

  Spicer rose and moved, Patrick crouched and moved the other way in perfect counterbalance. They pivoted silently past each other. The next time he stood up, Patrick spotted a pedestrian exit. A yellow door with a big 2 on it at the far side of the level, a good hundred yards away across the concrete.

  Did he dare make a run for it? The thought of committing to it was terrifying, but if he stayed, Spicer would find him eventually. And what would he do then? Patrick tested his knee and grimaced; it would have to do. He edged between two cars, watching Spicer’s head disappear one last time. He was at the Land Rover; the end of the line.

  It had to be now.

  Patrick lurched from between the cars and ran towards escape.

  The noise of his feet was like uneven gunfire.

  ‘Shit!’ Spicer shouted. Patrick didn’t look back. Behind him a door slammed, an engine roared, tyres squealed. He threw a desperate look over his shoulder. The car was coming at him fast. The yellow door was miles away.

  I’m not going to make it. The thought was dull and dreadful. He had made a terrible miscalculation. His legs worked, his arms pumped, his breath burned, and he dawdled before the speeding car.

  The headlights threw his long shape on to the low grey wall alongside him. Beyond that – through the uppermost branches of a tree – he could see the station, illuminated, and with people standing on platforms. A woman with a pink suitcase; two girls hugging their knees on a bench.

  Unaware.

  Patrick turned and ran towards them anyway, as if for help. The car was almost on him. Spicer wasn’t going to stop – he was going to spread him like jam along the wall. All his arms and his legs would be in the wrong places and his eyes would look nowhere.

  And he would have all the answers.

  Patrick jumped.

  Over the wall and into the black night beyond.

  46

  THE CAR HIT the wall with a sound like a bomb.

  Even as he hung for an infinite beat in the frigid air, Patrick saw the woman with the pink suitcase and the two girls turn their faces towards the explosion, while shards of concrete spat against his back and legs like shrapnel.

  He didn’t want the answers!

  Too late.

  He dropped into the branches of the tree. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to cover his head, and a million firecrackers went off as twigs snapped and popped in his ears. His unprotected arms were pierced and scraped; a branch smashed into his back and he thought of a hammer and chisel and a breakable spine. He hit another and bounced off in a different direction. The next branch he hit, he snapped his arm around. The rough bark slid down his bare skin and tore at his fingers, and he couldn’t hold his weight there for more than a moment, but when he next fell, he only dropped a short distance to the ground and landed almost on his feet.

  He rolled, then stood and looked up.

  Spicer looked down at him. They said nothing.

  Patrick jogged lopsidedly across the road and to the phone boxes at the back of the station.

  He dialled feverishly, not caring even to cover his bloodied fingers. The phone rang and rang and rang and then went to voicemail, so he hung up and dialled again, jabbing the numbers without hesitation.

  07734113117. It was a simple and beautiful number, filled with a lyrical rhythm of sums and products and patterns. He had often thought of it since the day he’d first heard it and wished that it were his.

  ‘Hello?’ Meg answered with the sound of Spicer’s flat behind her. Music and laughter. For a moment Patrick was struck dumb by the sheer strangeness of having been there so recently, when now he was here – light years away. For him the party had ceased to exist so completely that he was stunned that, for others, it could still be going on.

  ‘What’s your code?’ he said.

  ‘What code? Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Patrick. I need your DR code.’

  ‘Patrick? Why?’

  ‘I have to get in.’

  There was a long silence. Something tickled the side of Patrick’s face and the back of his hand came back bloody.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At the station,’ he said. ‘And my money’s running out.’ It was true – the digital readout on the phone was counting down his last sixty seconds. He fumbled in his pocket and came up empty.

  ‘When did you go? What’s happened?’ said Meg.

  ‘Dr Spicer tried to kill me.’

  ‘What! What are you talking about? He’s here.’

  ‘No, he wrecked my bike and crashed his car. I have to—’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Meg.

  ‘No!’ said Patrick, but she wasn’t listening to him. She was talking to someone else nearby. Where’s Dr Spicer? And the muffled response. Patrick looked back towards the car park and felt like smashing the phone and the box. But he needed the code. He gritted his teeth and held on as the numbers fell in front of him.

  20 … 19 … 18 … 17 …

  ‘Patrick? Angie says he’s not here.’

  ‘I know he’s not there! He’s here.’

  More muffled noises.

  ‘She says he popped out for beer.’

  Another lie. There was lots of beer in the icy barrel.

  12 … 11 … 10 … 9 …

  Patrick dug for more coins. There was nothing there.

  A car emerged under the fluorescent exit of the car park. A silver Citroën with a nose crumpled like a bad boxer’s. It swung into the road and turned his way.

  ‘Meg!’ he cried desperately, ‘Give me the code!’

  4 … 3 … 2 …

  ‘Five-five-fou—’ she said, and the line went dead.

  Patrick dropped the receiver and ran away from the lights of the station and under the railway bridge, where his footsteps rang like bells and pigeons cocked their beady eyes from the steel girders. He ran past the pubs and clubs of St Mary Street, where youths clustered to shout and fight, and girls warmed by drink defied the cold in skimpy tops and sparkly shoes. He ran up Queen Street, with its bright windows wrapped around the homeless in the dark doorways, and then over the road, across the grass, past the circle of standing stones and into Park Place.

  The door of the Biosciences building was locked.

  Of course it was.

  Patrick banged it once with the side of his fist, then leaned his hot face against it to recover his breath. His knee shouted for attention. He ignored it. He had to get in. Maybe there was a back door with glass he could break. He slipped quickly around the side of the building, through a narrow passage between this building and the next, and slithered down a steep muddy slope.
/>   There he skidded to a stop.

  Light spilled from a broad doorway at the back of the block. An ambulance was parked outside.

  Patrick sneaked closer, hugging the dark wall.

  He heard voices coming from inside. One of them was Mick’s.

  It was the entrance to the embalming room. This was where the bodies were delivered and where Mick prepared them for the students. From here he could get to the dissection room! Must be able to! But he had to be fast. He guessed Spicer had the keys to the front door.

  Without thinking about it, he stepped through the entrance and into a long, dark corridor. The only light overflowed from the windows in the double doors immediately to his right. Through them he could see Mick and two people he assumed were ambulance drivers. They were lifting a white body bag from a steel table on to a light gurney.

  They weren’t delivering; they were picking up.

  Panic gripped Patrick.

  Had Number 19 already gone? Was he even now six feet under, or fallen in fine ashes over the roofs and gardens of Thornhill, where the crematorium lay?

  He turned from the windows and hurried to the end of the corridor, where a flight of stairs led him up to a fire door. When he opened it, he wasn’t sure which way to go, so chose left and chose well – after two more doors he recognized the dissection room, even though it was from a new direction. And from this end of the corridor – where no students were supposed to be – no entry code was needed.

  Patrick switched on the dissection room lights with a sense of déjà vu. Except this time he already guessed he would not be alone for long.

  The room looked desolate without its corpses. He saw the white bags lined up along the far wall, where Meg had said they would be, and did a quick count. There were twenty-one left. Twenty-one out of thirty. The odds were still in his favour.

  The gurneys holding the cadavers stretched nearly the length of the back wall. He hurried straight to the last one on the right, closest to the refrigerators, without even picking out a pair of gloves. The tab of each black zip was located halfway down the side of its white bag. The first Patrick opened exposed Dolly’s eternal nail polish, and the next revealed a woman too. The third was Rufus – the curled red hair down his freckled forearm giving him away even before Patrick registered the ‘4’ stamped on the dutiful tag on his wrist.

  Patrick unzipped a gash of less than six inches in the fourth bag, and recognized Number 19’s hip as if it were his own. The faint tan-line under the orange hue of embalming, the dark hair that stopped at the top of the thigh in a remarkably straight line. Here was the jagged edge that Scott had made; here was the mark on the ball joint where Dilip had dug too deep. The dull metal tag was redundant. Patrick unzipped the entire side of the body bag and threw it off the cadaver. Mick had packed Number 19 away in roughly the right shape: the legs at the bottom, the head at the top, the torso and arms in between. The organs and skin and fat were in neat bags where Number 19’s stomach used to be, and his spine was draped across his chest like an ambassadorial sash.

  Patrick pulled the mouth open and peered inside, surprised by how much sharper the teeth felt without the protection of latex gloves—

  The realization hit him as hard as the car had, and he almost shouted with the thrill of discovery.

  The scars on Spicer’s finger were bite marks!

  Patrick stared down at the teeth, instinctively knowing it made sense, but trying to understand why.

  Had Number 19 bitten Spicer? If the fading marks on Spicer’s fingertip matched these teeth in this head, then it meant Spicer had interacted with the living, breathing Samuel Galen.

  And not in a good way.

  The teeth would be proof. And all Patrick knew for sure was that he needed to keep that proof from Spicer at all costs.

  Patrick seized the gurney at one end as if to push it from the room. Then he stopped. Even if he made it out of the building without running into Mick at one exit or Spicer at the other, how far was he going to get pushing a corpse through the city on a trolley?

  There was only one solution.

  Patrick skidded over to the white trays full of the odd assortment of tools and cutlery, and picked out what he needed.

  Then he started to saw off Samuel Galen’s head.

  47

  IT WAS REPULSIVE. There was none of the clinical finesse Patrick had come to expect. Instead, the head lolled from side to side with every stroke, as if begging him not to continue the outrage; frayed flesh spattered from the metal teeth and settled on the waxy cloth of the body bag; the thick neck muscles and the gristle of the larynx made him sick with the brutality of it all.

  And all the time, the single remaining eye looked nowhere, and Patrick did not look at it.

  Patrick wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried not to think about anything but the job he needed to do.

  Not Samuel Galen smiling in the winter sunshine; not Lexi.

  Definitely not his father.

  He kept close to the shoulders, to preserve as much of the throat as possible. Luckily the spine was gone, and within five minutes the head was held on by no more than a few minor strands at the back of the neck.

  Four small, familiar beeps made Patrick spin to look at the dissection-room door.

  Someone was entering the code that would allow them on to the anatomy wing.

  Spicer.

  His time was up.

  Patrick dropped the saw, seized the head and pulled. The gurney slid towards him and he put a foot on it and pulled again, as hard as he could – his fingernails digging into the raw flesh under the stripped chin. He tugged and yanked. Then he staggered a little as the frayed tendons snapped with a twang.

  And the head was his.

  Footsteps approached down the echoing corridor. Patrick tugged the body bag back over what was left of the cadaver. No time to zip it up. No time to run. The lights were on and he was exposed, his only way out blocked.

  He pulled open the white sliding door of the nearest refrigerator – the one filled with large yellow plastic receptacles that Scott called the ‘skin bins’.

  Patrick slid the refrigerator door almost closed behind him, clambered awkwardly into the nearest bin and let the lid drop over his head.

  The stench was unbelievable – even for someone who had spent almost six months in the close company of death. The bins had been emptied of the bulk of their contents, but had not yet been washed out, and the sides were slick and gobby with fatty deposits, while the bottom held a half-inch of stinking bodily juices that seeped through Patrick’s trainers and thick socks, and rose coldly between his toes. He retched and then swallowed the vomit, desperate not to add to the contents of the bin.

  He lifted the lid a little so he could breathe. The head in his lap squinted upwards, its mouth open as if even it were trying to suck cleaner air into its absent lungs.

  Patrick could hear Spicer moving about, going down the line of bodies, he presumed.

  He heard the moment when Spicer found the headless corpse of Number 19. It was marked by a word he’d never heard before, but which he assumed was an expletive just by the venom with which it was said.

  The narrow strip of light that marked the edge of the fridge door darkened suddenly, and Patrick let the lid settle quietly again.

  The heavy door slid open.

  ‘Patrick?’

  The light went on, making the yellow plastic seem a poor defence. Patrick felt like an embryo in a jar.

  He held his breath and looked fearfully up at the lid. He waited for Spicer to lift it, and thought of how he would find both of them – him and Number 19 – staring back at him, mouths agape.

  But Spicer didn’t lift the lid. He didn’t lift any lids.

  The light went out and the door closed, and Patrick heard the door of the second fridge open instead.

  ‘Patrick?’

  ‘Sssh,’ Patrick whispered at the head. Or himself. One of them, anyway.

  The head was q
uiet and Patrick was grateful, and felt an unexpected surge of protectiveness. The head was his responsibility now. No longer attached to its body, or cocooned in its waxy white bag, Number 19 was relying on him.

  RELYING on me.

  Relying ON me.

  Relying on ME.

  Instead of feeling that pressure, Patrick felt proud and fierce, and curled his arms more tightly around the head.

  The sound of the second fridge door closing.

  The sound of brisk footsteps receding across the lino.

  The sound of the dissecting-room doors swinging together with a creak and a bump.

  Patrick strained to hear the beeps of the keypad, but couldn’t. Instead he waited until he realized he’d just woken up, freezing cold, still jammed tightly into the fetid yellow bin.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go,’ and he struggled out of the bin and made his quiet way to the anatomy-wing door, where Meg’s code turned out to be 5544. Typically balanced and memorable.

  The outer door was also an emergency exit, which he opened easily from inside by pushing a metal bar. An unexpected break.

  Patrick tucked the head under his arm and walked home as fast as his knee would allow. All the way there his chest fizzed with adrenaline.

  The dead can’t speak to us, Professor Madoc had said.

  But that was a lie.

  Samuel Galen was dead – but he was still telling Patrick all the truth he needed to know.

  48

  PATRICK HEARD THE scream of a rabbit being taken in the night. Without truly waking, he listened for another but nothing came, and so he drifted back into sleep.

  ‘Wake up,’ said his father. It was dawn and they were going to go hiking on the Beacons. Maybe up Penyfan if it wasn’t too busy. At the weekends it was one long string of over-equipped hikers, but midweek it was almost deserted – especially if the weather was lousy. Patrick hoped it was hot and too busy because, for some reason, every part of him ached.

  ‘Wake up.’

  ‘My head hurts, Daddy.’

  ‘I said wake up!’

  Patrick opened his eyes slowly and looked into the hole in the middle of a gun. Not the middle; the end of a gun. Where the bullets come from. The deep black holey thing. The—