The Dead Yard

by Adrian McKinty

  Someone’s screaming.

  It’s me, the weak noise bounding back at me from the log wall. Screaming. Gasping at the air to breathe it in. I bite my tongue to stop it. I take a breath.

  We face each other.

  In the lines of dark with nothing between us.

  Nothing.

  It’s not loss or rage or resentment or revenge. Nothing.

  Only the muddy light and an odd calm. One breath upon another.

  Touched tosses away the patch of skin, irritated. He can read a situation like a master and he sees that he still has not yet mentally beaten me. He picks up the old wooden chair and smacks it into my legs, breaking it into pieces. I buck from the pain and fight another blackout.

  “We have to go now, but we’ll be back,” he says.

  He throws the remains of the chair onto the floor.

  It clinks into the Coke bottle, knocking it against my foot.

  “We’ll be back and we’ll bring Sonia and Kit, too, and we’ll all take our turns on you, and you’ll talk. You’ll tell me everything. It won’t be like that bitch, your boss, in Newburyport. Won’t be in a rush. I can take it nice and fucking slow with you, pal. Jack, Gerry, let’s go.”

  He spits at me, misses, turns, exits, and slams the smokehouse door behind him.

  He will be back. I shiver uncontrollably, horribly scared, for a minute or two. And then I breathe and count to ten, twenty, a hundred.

  And remember that this is the night and I should not be afraid because fear is the enemy.

  Pain is the friend.

  Fear is the enemy.

  And down there on the floor is the Coke bottle that no one notices.

  12: THE DEAD YARD

  They return my armor from the sea. They improvise a weapon. They give it to me. Go and pay them back in kind, they say. The water burns, the air curdles, Kit comes to me in the moonlit hut.

  Geologists say that Ireland was once joined to the coast of North America.

  “Is that so, Kit?”

  Greenland was tucked into Labrador, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland were squished together, and Ireland was soldered in there too. Galway hinged to the coast of Maine. There are rock formations that begin in the west of Ireland and end three thousand miles away in Maine and Massachusetts. So really I’m dying in a part of my homeland, separated by plate tectonics and several million years.

  Is that comforting?

  Is it fuck.

  Kit. I smell sweet pea and look.

  But she’s not there.

  She’s not coming.

  Shit.

  I could never really have been asleep. More a hallucination. A waking dream.

  And the dreams are done.

  It’s business now.

  Self-rescue, as the instructors used to say in the army survival course.

  Imagine, if you can, the situation.

  An epic journey of about one yard.

  First step.

  You’re holding the neck of a Coke bottle between your big toe and your next toe on your right foot. Your arms are spread-eagled, tied to crossbeams. The bottle has a ragged neck and if you can get it to your hands, you’ll be able to use the broken glass to saw through the rope. But how do you get it from foot to hand?

  You’re going to have to swing your right leg up to shoulder height, hook it on top of your left arm, and then grab the bottle with your left hand. You’re probably going to get only one shot at this. Because the bottle could slip or fall out of your grip with the violent motion you’ll have to use to swing it. If it falls and rolls away, you’ll never get it back or another chance at this, and basically you’re done for.

  Kit’s not coming.

  But Touched is.

  This is not the time for mister fuckup.

  You rehearse it in your mind a couple of times.

  It’s going to be tough.

  And remember, also, they’ve taken away the prosthesis on your left foot, so for that second or two that your right leg is hooked over your left arm—if you can get it up there in the first place—you’ll be dangling off the floor, the ropes digging into you, pulling apart your wrists and popping your shoulder blades.

  It’s going to take some time to saw through the ropes and they’re probably going to kill you first thing in the morning. You can’t be sure about the time right now but it’s certainly after midnight.

  At the most you’ve got about five hours.

  One shot to get the bottle up to your left hand and then about five hours to cut the ropes.

  And, to state the bloody obvious, the scales aren’t even.

  On the minus side, there’s your ricochet wounds, you’ve a one-inch square carved out of your chest, you’ve a couple of broken ribs, you’ve had the shit kicked out of you, and you haven’t had any fluids or food in twenty-four hours.

  On the plus side, if you don’t do it, you’re going to die.

  Simple as that.

  You’ll die and you’ll rob the Fates.

  Oh yes, Michael. If you die now you’ll never see what Bridget Callaghan’s got in store for you—what she’s been hiding away all these years.

  Other things.

  You’ll never see the consequences of asking for that pardon from the Mexican government.

  You’ll never go to Los Angeles or Peru and you won’t go back to Belfast on a wet June day seven years from now.

  You won’t do any of that fun stuff, Michael, if you can’t get the bottle up there.

  One chance.

  You’ll need to be a goddamn gymnast. One of those guys with the giant arms and the talc on their hands and their coach praying in Romanian as they swing their legs up above that bloody horse.

  One chance.

  Give you a minute to compose yourself.

  Cut to the establishing shot. Midnight in the primeval forest. In Maine. A sepia film in a remote country of the dead. The uneasiness is everywhere. You can feel it. The hunters, the hunted.

  But if you can get that bottle up there.

  Well, I wouldn’t like to be in that big cabin when I get free.

  A deep meditation.

  A silent countdown.

  Here goes.

  A final look out the tiny window to check for a light on at the cabin. I listen for anyone coming down the path. Nah. Just me and the woods and the boy, and the snow falling, steaming in the log fire. It’s after midnight and they’re done for the night. Those brave inheritors of Cuchulainn. With their tattoos of a maniacal fighting man tied to a stone. You should be concerned about another man, tied to the beams of a smokehouse wall.

  Enough procrastination.

  Slowly and deliberately, I jam the broken bottle into my big toe to give me a better grip. I hold it as tight as I can.

  The night holds its breath.

  If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.

  Ten, nine, eight.

  “Here goes.”

  I swing my leg up, feel the bottle slip, but grasp it tight as a motherfucking vise, jamming the glass deeper into my skin.

  I arch my side and my broken ribs, and in some kind of miracle hook my right leg over my left arm.

  With the fingers of my left hand I take the bottle from between the toes.

  I make sure I’ve got it.

  Have I got it?

  A desperate tenth of a second.

  This is my poleaxe, my claymore, my fucking deliverer.

  Have I got it?

  Aye.

  I hold it tight in my palm and fingers, I unhook my leg, drop it back to the ground, take a huge gasp of air, spit, and begin rubbing the ragged bottle neck over the ropes.

  * * *

  The morning—dour and constant in a speckled half-light. A snowy mist and an eerie quiet, as if the plague had come or we were waiting for old eponymous in the moorland of the Baskervilles.

  The boy raised his head as the door opened.

  A key jangled in her hand.

  She was holding a tray with a plate of toast
and a cup of coffee. I could smell the melting butter and the stench of Sanka.

  She looked at me.

  “You’re free,” she said, surprised.

  I know.

  “How? When?”

  Only just now.

  Her mouth opened.

  This was the moment.

  Slow-down time.

  I swung the Coke bottle and smashed it against the side of Sonia’s face. It caught her on the cheek and made a clubbing noise on contact with the heavy bones in her skull. I’d swung powerfully from the shoulder, and the crushing force of the blow hammered through the bronze dust of hair on her jaw and twisted her jawbone with a dry snap that shoved it almost forty-five degrees from the horizontal.

  Before she could react, I hit her again from the other side. This second blow an uppercut. It knocked out teeth and splintered pieces of bone and cartilage through the roof of her mouth. Fragments slicing through the front of her gums and spurting thick blood down onto her chin. She swayed and staggered to the side. The tray dropped in a clatter on the floor.

  “Ssssss,” she groaned.

  The two hits were enough to send her into a mild standing concussion, but I needed her to stay down. I held on tight to the wall and kicked her in the stomach with the heel of my right foot. I knocked the wind out of her and she fell backwards, bumping her head into the edge of a pine log and slumping to the floor.

  For a second I thought she was unconscious and I hunted for a gag but then she began struggling up on one arm. Conscious, but still too stunned to react. She put her hand to her mouth and looked at the red blood on her fingertips.

  Kneeling there before her executioner like Mary Queen of fucking Scots.

  Our eyes met.

  I lifted the bottle above my head.

  She breathed in air to scream.

  I knew I had to kill her in the next second.

  I jumped up and, in midair, two-handed, thumped her hard on the top of her skull—so hard that the violence of the contact shook her brain and the impact pressure wave retarded back, surfing off the blow itself, and crashed into the bonded silicon of the bottle, shattering it into a hundred micro pieces, like a goddamn fragmentation grenade going off. Fucking Christ. Glass everywhere. Tiny razors cast into life in the dead black air, spraying in all directions. Some caught me and even Peter at the far side of the hut. Like darts into a clayboard. Sonia’s scalp a minefield of little particles of glass. Glass in her lips and eyes and bottle fragments stuck in her forehead.

  “Huuuhhhh,” she said and clattered to the smokehouse floor. The holes immediately giving way to the steady progression of blood, oozing inevitably out from the myriad of wounds. In a second, Sonia’s head looked as if it had been dipped in red paint.

  I listened to the outside.

  Nothing.

  I turned her over.

  It looked bad, but I knew it was still all superficial, not life threatening, not immediately, anyway. She began shaking, flitting in and out of awareness, as if she was having an epileptic seizure. Most of the glass still embedded in her face, some falling out. She hadn’t yelled, but that wouldn’t last forever.

  I was unsure of what to do. Tie her up? Gag her somehow? Maybe use the rope they’d tied me with. A piece of glass could cut off a long strip; I could bind her arms behind her back and— I’d hesitated too long.

  She partially regained consciousness, began whimpering loudly, and with trembling hands tried to pick the bottle fragments out of her face.

  This was a goddamn nightmare and I had to finish it. I grabbed the sheared-off bottle neck and slammed it across the line of least resistance in her throat, nodding grimly as it ripped through the epidermis and into the carotid artery. But it just wasn’t sharp enough. I pushed and pulled and the blood vessel remained intact.

  “Jesus.”

  I tossed the bottle neck and quickly found another frag- ment that looked sharper. I grabbed her hair, held her, and slashed the edge across her throat, lightning fast, before she seized that final chance to cry out. This time I cut the artery and the blood poured out in a long oxygenated red spout. I stood back, away from the curve and flow.

  I looked outside the hut, checked on her, and in thirty seconds she was dead.

  Thank God.

  Ok. I had to move fast now if we were going to live.

  I stepped over Sonia, limped to the other side of the smokehouse, and took the blindfold from Peter’s eyes.

  “Who, what?” he said.

  I rummaged among the set of keys Sonia had brought, found one that looked like a padlock key, lifted the chain that tied him to the wall, put the key in the lock. It turned. I unlocked him.

  No hugs, or thanks, or elation, because he was staring at the offal that had once been Sonia’s neck and now resembled the stringy remains from an abattoir. A carpet of blood around her, seeping into all the corners of the smokehouse and out the door.

  “You did that? What did you do? What did you? Oh my God, you—” he began to say, his voice rising with shock and a screechy panic.

  I cut him off, putting my finger on his lips and forcing his mouth closed.

  “You better chill the fuck out, sonny boy. If it looks like you’re going to get us both killed, I’ll top you before you do.

  So keep your voice down. Get me?” I said severely.

  He nodded.

  “Good.”

  He didn’t seem capable of helping, so I took the padlock and chain and unwrapped it from the wooden support beam and released him. He rubbed his wrists, groaned, looked at me and again at Sonia.

  “Did you have to kill her?” he asked.

  “I had to stop her giving the alarm, it was the only way,” I told him.

  “Could we have tied her up or—”

  “Enough,” I said and gave him a shut-the-fuck-up stare.

  I scanned the hut and spotted my boxer shorts and trousers, which had been thrown in a corner. I grabbed them, pulled them on, and searched for my artificial foot, but it wasn’t there. In a burst of petty malice they’d probably tossed it or burned it on the log fire.

  I thought for a sec. It was going to complicate things. The best I could manage was either an undignified hop or a shambling limp.

  Test both ways of locomotion. I limped from one side of the smokehouse to the other. Hopped back. I moved slightly faster with the limp.

  “What do we do—” Peter began, but I stopped. Someone outside.

  “Sonia, did you drop something?” a voice yelled from the house. Jackie. I ran to the door, opened it a crack. He was standing at the cabin in pajama bottoms, slippers, and a leather jacket. He was holding a gun.

  I looked at Peter.

  “When it goes down, it’s going to go down fast. You wait here and keep a lookout; when you think you have a chance, run for the woods. Don’t come back. Just keep going. We’re about ten miles from a town called Belfast. It’s on the coast, so I think it’s east of here. Do you know where east is?”

  “Where the sun comes up.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Keep going and call the police. You remember my name?”

  “Michael Forsythe.”

  “Right, get them to call the FBI and tell them to get here as fast as fucking possible. This is Gerry McCaghan’s cabin.Say that back.”

  “Gerry McCaghan. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to have to stay here and fight them off. They’ve taken my prosthetic foot, so I’m not running anywhere. I’ve got to keep them at bay somehow,” I said.

  “I’ll help you, I’ll stay here and help you, two of us against the rest of them is going to be better odds. I was in the army cadets. I’m not completely usele—”

  I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m from the fucking midnight school and I’ll do better if I don’t have to worry about you. And I need you to get the peelers out here to save my bloody skin. Literally,” I said, looking at the hole Touched had gouge
d last night.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You’re going to have to take off. Fast. If they kill me, remember they’ll be like mad dogs to track you down.”

  “Maybe we could talk to them, maybe we—”

  I stood firmly on one foot to get balanced and then slapped his face.

  “Listen to me, Gandhi, we’re going to kill them or they’re going to kill us. That’s the way it’s going to be. Your job is to live. To get out of here and live. Ok?”

  He nodded.

  I walked to the door crack.

  Jackie had started coming down the path, muttering to himself, trying to keep the wet snow off his slippers. Not as cautious as he should be. Not by a long way.

  “Ok, Jackie’s coming. Don’t say or do anything.”

  I found my shredded T-shirt, pulled it on, grabbed a piece of toast from the floor, wiped the blood off it, ate it, and sipped what was left of the coffee in the spilled cup.

  “Sonia, are you ok?” Jackie asked when he was a few feet from the smokehouse. When there was no answer he hesitated, lifted up his gun.

  “Sonia?”

  Come on, Jackie, come on in.

  He looked back at the house and at his gun to make sure it was loaded.

  “Sonia, are you ok?” he asked.

  Come on, Jack.

  “Sonia?” he asked for a final time, his face nervous, his eyebrows scrunched up.

  When again there was no reply, he stopped and backed away. I knew he wasn’t going to enter now. He was going to go and get Touched. He was suspicious, afraid. Maybe the famous Michael Forsythe had pulled something. Maybe Sonia had had a heart attack. Maybe the police had shown up. Whatever it was, it was out of his league and was a job for Touched.

  He turned his back and began walking to the cabin.