Adrenaline

by Robert Young

  It seemed to me that they had offered a dreadful proposition; in order to save myself I would need to destroy all that I was.

  That was no choice at all. I could not see how I could possibly bring myself to kill innocent people. Even the guilty had some right to life did they not? Certainly I had never been a believer in capital punishment - I felt that the issue was simple; killing was wrong. If someone was a killer, to kill them in return surely compounded the wrong.

  In any event, I could not countenance the idea of inflicting death upon another human being. That was part of the programming wasn't it? Simple self-preservation as a species built-in a natural and deep-seated reluctance to kill. It wasn't the sort of thing that came easily, no matter what the circumstances.

  I remembered reading about the results of a study where it had been discovered that even trained soldiers, under heavy fire in World War II had found it hard to kill. Only something like 15% had actually fired their weapons.

  That was when their lives were in critical danger, though I supposed that mine would be too, based on what Frost and Stanford had explained, but even so.

  Facing a hostile enemy, fighting for a sound principle, trained for the job; not one of those factors applied to me.

  Frost and Stanford wanted a monster. Another monster, like themselves. So I tried to give them one.

  When I launched myself at Frost, it was not because I felt that he would be softer or easier to fight, but rather that I had the sense that Stanford might be more likely to stand back and watch for a spell.

  He seemed intrigued by this whole thing, entertained by the theatre as though he wanted to see how that which they had started would end. So did I.

  Frost had been off-guard and off-balance and I had just fed. The fresh adrenaline flamed in my veins and I took him down easily, moving fast and with purpose. His arms were pinned under my knees within moments of hitting the ground and my blows rained on his face drawing blood, or something like it. Dark and viscous it burst from his nose. He bucked and roared in shock and anger but was in no position to resist. He went still after a few more crashing blows.

  Stanford stepped in then, later than I thought he would. He also provided a sterner test.

  Hauling me up from my position straddling Frost's chest, he stood me up and then open-handed me across the face sending me sprawling.

  Two steps behind me was a fence. Rising, I grabbed a six foot length of the wood and wrenched it easily from the two fence posts that it had been nailed to and turned quickly back to face Stanford. He was coming at me fast but I was swinging the long thick plank and it shattered across his ribs and flattened him.

  The remaining three foot club in my hand was jagged and splintered at the end where it had snapped and I rushed forward to where he lay and swiped at his face, gouging it hard across his cheek and eyes.

  Stanford made a grab at the wood and caught it. He pulled it from me like an adult taking a child's toy. Back upright so fast I could barely register it, he gripped me by the throat and the waistband of my jeans and with a hissed 'Poor choice,' he threw me.

  The horse box was perhaps twenty yards away but I hit the side of it before the ground. The pain on impact was excruciating but so was it brief. The adrenaline still coursed through every blood vessel. Filled and flared each muscle.

  Seeing Stanford rush across the space toward me, vaulting Frost's prone form, I rolled beneath the trailer.

  The tyres were flat, wheels rusted and the axle buckled low and at the other end was a sagging metal stand that had long since failed in its purpose of propping the structure up level.

  The space was tight but I squeezed through and on the other side, springing up, I caught a glance of Stanford crouched and reaching for me, his gashed face contorted with rage and something else. Hunger?

  Looking about me there was nothing to arm myself with. The grass was long and damp, the nettles tall, but I was too far from any fence or tree to make a break for.

  So I bent my knees, gripped the base of the horse box and hauled up with each sinew, tendon and fibre in me. The adrenaline raged and burnt and my joints and muscles stretched and strained to bursting. For long moments nothing. But the trailer moved an inch, shifted another and then suddenly, the stand gave and the whole thing shuddered forward and down.

  I heard Stanford shout my name in an exclamation of inextinguishable fury and knew that from this point he would either die now or visit upon me every possible horror and torment that he was capable of. This was a declaration of war.

  At the other end of the trailer the axle gave out with a shearing snap and the whole weight came down on its side.

  Wedging my shoulder in beneath the edge I gave a final push and I felt it pivot over until finally it rolled down onto its side, crashing down flat onto the ground, onto Stanford, pinned and crushed beneath. The sound was thunderous and I heard the dull thud and rattle of the body inside the horse box as it was tossed about.

  That brought me back to my senses as the frenzy abated. As I slumped exhausted to the ground and caught my breath, it was not the anguished fury of Stanford that echoed in my head, it was that loose and ragged sound of the tramp’s limp corpse, tossed and slamming against the inside of the cold metal trailer.

  Stanford and Frost were dealt with now but that man inside, no matter how washed-out and down on his luck, had died at my hand. He had died because of what I could not contain and because I had not been able to contend with what they had put there.

  Chapter 31

  Roth has decided to push himself. He has come to equate the changes that have come over him with the acts he commits but in questioning that connection, must now test it.

  This experiment, this waiting and abstaining is unsatisfying and not just because he is bored by it but because he finds it hard to recognise the effects. It is all so unfamiliar that it is difficult to measure.

  He recognises that he feels duller, blunted somehow and slower. But Roth also realises - fears - that this may all be in his head. Perhaps he has not been any stronger or faster, no more swift and invisible and all-seeing than normal, but just imagines that he is, and in the rush and the thrill of what he has done has seduced himself into thinking that he is somehow transformed.

  Or perhaps that is not it at all. Perhaps, Roth wonders, he simply wants to test all the boundaries of this new self, to understand the limits that now exist, replacing the old ones.

  It has been nearly a week since his last and that he remembers was a sad, sordid affair. Half-hearted and born of curiosity Roth had discovered a man unconscious. The reek of alcohol was striking, even from a distance, and the man was so intoxicated he had barely even reacted. Roth had wondered whether he could get himself drunk this way. It hadn't worked.

  Not that he had faced any problems there. In the lives he had taken Roth had known none of the nausea and torment that Laing had contended with and would have been surprised to learn of it. For him, that had lasted so briefly that it had scarcely registered. After the elderly neighbour had yielded to him so feebly, but with such briefly flaring horror, all such problems had evaporated for Roth.

  He had eaten when the mood took him, drunk beer and whisky in pubs or at home - preferring the latter since doing so in pubs not only reminded him of what he might rather be drinking, but resulted either in an escalating sense of isolation and resentment as every other man in the room regarded him with both revulsion and fear, or fast emptying bars.

  He didn't much care for the effect he had on other people like this, the way they looked at him; fearful and aggressive with no sense why. But it might start to get him noticed if it happened too often so he began to avoid drawing attention to himself in public places like that.

  So he had withdrawn a little more into the shadows that the city provided him. He ventured a little further afield from his neighbourhood; rode buses, tubes, walked a lot. In all this he felt that he was honing new skills but the isolation weighed on Ro
th a little more with each day until the doubt began leaking in and he started thinking about the things he had done and why.

  The decision to test things had been easy, not least because it gave him something to focus on. But he was an impatient man.

  Just as in those early weeks he had wanted to discover as much as he could, satisfy every appetite, now he wanted his answers to come. Near on a week and he perceived new differences and developments but they weren't measurable. These changes Roth could not quantify.

  For all the exploration and experience Roth simply lacked knowledge and the ignorance fed his frustration. He was caged by the uncertainty, prowling in the darkness. Blind and angry.

  Becoming invisible Roth had learned through stealth and instinct, finding always shadow and gloom to cloak himself, keeping his eyes down, his face blank.

  In London's loaded streets Roth knew that most people simply sought escape from each other, even if only for minutes at a time. No eye contact, headphones on, tunnelling their way through the crowds until they got through to the other side; friends, family, colleagues. It was easy enough to be another face in the crowd, wilfully expressionless and unengaging, eyes down or staring into the middle distance.

  But disappearing was quite something else.

  Roth felt restless and confined and this feeling of listlessness and decline may be no more than his imagination. It might all be imagination. Might be some twisted psychological episode, some after-effect of whatever trauma had so afflicted him as to evade recall.

  He would set himself a new challenge and see if this were all in his mind. If he failed; so be it. At least he would know. At least then he could begin to understand that perhaps his mind was broken. Deal with it.

  But if not, then Roth might grasp a truth about himself. Claim an answer that had so far eluded him.

  He could lurk in darkness, hide from all the people trying so hard not to see him, and he could do so for ever. But it told him nothing. Roth must set a test that cannot be ignored.

  Chapter 32

  Stanford said that I would have weeks. It would become apparent that the fight had taken something out of me and that the tanks were running a little shorter than that, the fuel burnt lower.

  I covered ground at pace, keen to put distance between me and three bodies and as the darkness began to gather I slowed down. I stuck to my previous tactic of changing course when I neared any sort of settlement and stick as far as I could to fields and hedgerows, woods where I saw them.

  I was surprised by the ease with which I managed to do this. I'd always thought that the countryside of South East England would afford little in the way of genuine open space but I suppose it’s easy to feel that everywhere is linked up and built over when you only ever move around by road or rail.

  Instead I was finding that I could avoid people with moderate ease so long as I applied myself to it. Had been able to since stepping off the train. It was an alien sensation for someone so anchored to London as I had become. London with its endless concrete, brick and steel, London with its mass of humanity, its soaring and burrowing constructions, its parks and green spaces appearing like accidents. Clean spots in the dirt.

  There was quiet here, silence and stars and a chance to think.

  Unleashing such ferocity upon Frost and Stanford had been easy enough, if hardly a calculated move. The impulse at striking back at them as my anger exploded seemed to make more immediate sense than my attempts at denial had done.

  These men, these things, were beneath contempt. There were smiles and faces painted over the shells of evil and corruption. They had dressed their depravity in the plain garb of normality. But they were irredeemably foul. Desolate.

  And I was to become like them? I was made now what had made me: sadistic, soulless, murderous. Amoral and dispassionate.

  Frost and Stanford must have done terrible things and would continue to do so if not for my intervention. In attempting to make me like them, they had callously condemned so many more to the same horrific fate they had meted out to countless others.

  I could not be a part of this, could not bring myself to carry on their squalid, despicable work. My capacity for violence had revealed itself to be greater than I had known, but that had felt like self-defence, or at least like vengeance. Not coldblooded. Not calculated and planned.

  Still, I knew what the extent of the terrible urging hunger felt like. How irresistible and furious and how rabid. The dead vagrant was testament to that. It had felt to me, as his scent filled my senses, that his fear had me in an unbreakable grip and robbed me of reason and control. I felt captive to it, to that rampant, ravening storm. I felt helplessly unrestrained. Impotent and unstoppable all at once.

  Could that be mastered? Could the genie ever be bottled? I would know sooner or later and I would need to be ready.

  Chapter 33

  When he returned to the flat, he had not been home in three days. He had avoided feeding, extending his little experiment through willpower. Though he could not know it, in reality Roth had made enough kills at his rampant peak to last him for several weeks.

  It would be the boredom that broke his spirit, not the fasting.

  The flat next door was sealed up, boards over the windows. The authorities had eventually been alerted and the body of the woman removed. Roth would pass days with a nagging worry that they might be back to ask him questions, but he was careful in setting it up the way he had that no doubts had been raised. Just another lonely old lady, found weeks after her death at home with nobody. She would not be unusual to be found under these kinds of circumstances.

  The lack of any concerned relatives or grieving children, had meant that it was a simple case to close, and the police had precious few of those.

  Roth was in the clear on this one and he knew that this was the only one likely to be of any risk. The others had been so random, so spread out, that he was confident of eluding detection.

  But he did not know that then and he passed a restless day, fleeting nightmares punctuating what little sleep he managed. By the time the evening drew in Roth had resolved to move on from this place and soon.

  He has a good idea where to head first and figures on moving around, not stopping too long in any one place. The creeping sense that Roth has of being pursued is under his skin and he feels vulnerable and exposed in this place where he can be traced and found.

  He has perfected skills he must now employ. He has been a ghost in the darkness, a fleeting shadow in the night and has stalked and hunted these past weeks with increasing effectiveness.

  Roth wants to know what has become of him, what he has become. He wants to be found and knows that there is someone out there to find him, to tell him what he needs to know.

  As the weeks have passed, snatches of memory have floated into view and out again, of the night that it happened. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes merely drifting blurs in the mist, half-formed and ephemeral. But he has a burgeoning sense that someone knows what happened to him and is happening. He recalls enough and can feel the rest. There are answers somewhere and Roth is done with merely stumbling through this darkness.

  The man he encountered in the street, who he followed to the woman, is familiar though a stranger and Roth remembers the confrontation in the dark of her bedroom where he had seemed to Roth as lost and confused as he was.

  But he knows that there is more to this. When he found himself back in the driveway where it happened, startled by the cat in the tree, there was more than just a sense that this is where it had begun. When he'd heard sounds in the branches above him he had expected something else entirely, something he had experienced before, something altogether more formidable than the cat that he had found there.

  Roth has been in thrall to this so far, bound by unspoken instructions and to instincts that are new and irresistible. He has surrendered to it without questioning so far. So far.

  He hoists a holdall onto his back, loaded with
everything that he figures he may need. He lingers for a while on the threshold racking his brain for anything he might have missed. He thinks of and dismisses anything food-related. He has keys and wallet, he has a three quarter full bottle of whisky.

  Roth has spent many years in this flat. He came here at 15 with his Mum. Father long gone and not a word since a cold night three weeks out from Christmas and Roth not yet out of primary school. When his Mum passed on, Roth was halfway through his twenties and was allowed to stay on by the council. Now though he walks away from almost two decades of memories with scarcely a pause to reflect.

  What, after all, does he wish to remember?

  For now he wants some distance from his old home and he wants to be moving. He is hood-up and head-down tonight as he walks. The hour is late, so late that it is early and he encounters few souls.

  The soaring brick arches beneath the railway viaduct vary in use and usefulness. They run from this grubby corner of South East London all the way to the centre, all the way into London Bridge. Some house thriving businesses, some less than thriving. Some are nondescript and simple, unadapted, nothing beneath them but weeds and puddles. They will not do.

  Roth finds a few that look promising. Each end of the arch covered up with some temporary wall; rusting iron sheeting or plywood panels nailed in place.

  He picks one when it feels right. His nose tells him that this one has lain undisturbed for a long time. Inside there is evidence of someone having slept rough but the solid layers of chipboard and the sturdy padlock have kept people out for a while now and though it seems to be unused for anything else, the owner seems not to want any people in here.

  Roth is not people.

  Inside there is furniture. Warped and dirty from the years here in damp darkness but the old leather armchair seems solidly built, the kind of thing about which people say; “they don't build them like this anymore”.