Adrenaline

by Robert Young

  Roth is not calm. In part it is because of the adrenaline he has tapped from the preacher's torn artery, but also because this is more than he hoped for.

  He notes as he lets the corpse slump down over the now-silent speaker that there are men pushing their way toward him through the mass. Some still point camera phones at him, but others have a determined set of the jaw and fixed gaze that tells Roth that the few brave folk are emerging from the panic.

  A few alpha males from the pack, come to restore order.

  Taking them down will, Roth supposes as he turns to them, achieve the opposite.

  There are five of them, another three or four emerging behind from the scattering crowd, and the tallest, broadest of all of them assumes the lead. He is front and centre and bears down on Roth with his chest up, shoulders back, chin raised. He is sneering angrily, but Roth can see that he is steeling himself for this confrontation, building up to it.

  As the five close in, one stumbles forward over a dropped bag and in a flash he is in range. Roth smashes the man's cheek with a clubbing fist on the way down, cracking his head hard into the concrete. He is out cold before his body crumples to the floor.

  The four men pause a moment, their initiative and momentum snatched from them by Roth.

  They stand no chance with his speed and agility. Roth knows that he would have the beating of them all under any circumstances. But fresh from a feed, the odds aren't even worth calculating.

  From his crouched position over the first man to fall Roth pivots up and crashes an uppercut into the big man's jaw that lifts him off his feet and lashes his head back like a whip. Whilst still in the air, Roth thunks a solid cross into the man's chest and sends him backward into the next two men behind him and the three roll sprawling into the road.

  The fifth man is alone, the other figures that had been about to reinforce this group of impromptu vigilantes have melted into the crowd with a speed that almost rivalled Roth's own. He backs away from Roth slowly, eyes frightened, shoulders dropping.

  'Fuck you man. Fuck you!' he shouts at Roth and the defiance that drove him here through the crowd still lingers, even if the courage has faded. Roth can see that adrenaline is all this man has now and Roth tingles for another taste.

  This is not however what he came to do, not what he wanted. But the panic is still crackling through the dissipating crowd like static and though he can hear the blare of horns as the traffic snarls up and is swamped by scattering, terrified pedestrians, the one sound he is listening for does not come. The sounds of sirens in the distance may have saved this man had they come, but they don't.

  Change of plan.

  As the fifth man steps back and steps back again, Roth watches him and is silent. He breathes deeply, slowly. He watches as the man's eyelids drop and he springs at him, fast and stooped, and is on him within the fullness of the blink.

  Chapter 36

  In the hotel room I pull the heavy floral drapes and kill the bathroom lights.

  The box on the bed is untouched and looks pristine and peaceful. It seems a shame to break the seal and proves something of a test to negotiate the elaborate series of tabs and flaps but then it is open and I slide out the brand new laptop from the packaging and place it onto the desk.

  I fish the power cable and adaptor from the box and connect the sleek, slim machine to the mains.

  This is top of the line. It cost me four figures and I was the salesman's dream. In the shop looking eager, I even had my wallet in my hand. That'll get you served fast. I added a few extras asked a few questions and then pressed a few numbers into the chip and pin machine.

  It's an indulgence I suppose, but I've no access to a computer, save the awful looking machines that you can rent from the hotel and there's no telling the sluggishness and security of those things.

  I need to work uninterrupted and after all, what do I need the money for now?

  The computer does what it promises, starting almost instantly and working so fast that I wonder how on earth other computers ever get anything done. It is set up and ready to go, settings configured and preferences updated, email accounts and Paypal details all input and in place.

  I do not know exactly what I am searching for but I have the will and motivation and now I have the means.

  I surf and search and trawl for days on end and slowly but surely I begin to find clues here and there, fingerprints of Frost and Stanford scattered through space and time.

  They are like the tiny faces in a vast, chaotic crowd - enhanced and enlarged and picked out with a careful eye and a looking glass on a grainy photograph.

  Not a photograph. A jigsaw. Hundreds of pieces, thousands and none with edges cut to fit but irregular, some overlapping each other, gaps elsewhere.

  But they are out there in the world, or were.

  They are lurking in the acres of missing persons reports, so many that never even make the local news, let alone the national. They hide there in the details of the murder victims with throats cut and time and again the phrase, ’a shocking loss of blood’. Or bite marks on the flesh that seem never to match police records.

  They smirk back at me through the protestations of innocence that one man makes, for murders that entail slashed throats and victims bled almost dry. He blames sinister others, men of the night that he insists were responsible but who have since vanished having framed him for their awful crimes.

  They are there, smiling in the background of a photograph taken in a bar of a girl and her friends on a night out, the girl not seen nor heard of since and for a fleeting moment a goosepimpling sense of déjà vu settles on me and the feeling that I have seen her somewhere

  Maybe I read this piece or earlier, or saw a different picture of her, a different report of her disappearance. The police are renewing their appeal for witnesses, their leads cold, though not so cold as the culprits who remain at large.

  I read my fill of news reports from every conceivable news outlet, a mass of detail, a tangle of speculation and misinformation. I happen across a wealth of photographic evidence, the horrifying detail of which is staggering and I am shocked that this can exist within the public domain and not sealed up in police files. Nevertheless, it feels like I am taking steps closer to them, even if I am wading neck-deep through a swamp to get there.

  There are hours upon hours of minute long video clips from news channels, from chat sites and forums and all manner of places where the ghoulish and the paranoid congregate, hunched over their keyboards, poring over photos and footage of the most macabre and mawkish kind.

  Much of what I see is useless to me but it leaves its mark nonetheless and there are facts and descriptions and images that will live with me all too long.

  Nothing is conclusive, as I knew it would not be. Some of what I recognise to be their work may be nothing of the sort, and there will be plenty more that I have overlooked or failed to even find.

  But there is just too much here to be coincidence and though perhaps I am seeing it because I want to be right, and feel that I did the right thing - a sort of ’confirmation bias’ - I am confident that though the evidence may be somewhat circumstantial, evidence is what it is.

  Then it all begins to happen at once and what emerges from the mist reminds me that I am not alone.

  There, all over every major news site, over social media and chat sites and everywhere I go, is the big breaking news story of the moment. A man in London's busy Oxford Circus, a little after two in the afternoon, attacked several men, killing two.

  Several eye-witness reports appear to confirm that in at least one of those two cases, the man was seen to bite his victim.

  That man, picked out from the mobile phone footage shot from a dozen different angles, is my man. My fellow convert and the killer of Issy.

  As I flit between sites, fast and silent as the brand new laptop can take me, I find that there are several videos shot of the man doing precisely what they said he had and du
mping the lifeless corpse of some poor preacher over the small speaker he had been preaching through.

  I can find only fleeting shaky images of him attacking the group of men that approach after the preacher is slain, and then nothing at all conclusive of the second killing.

  I follow a few lurid, prurient looking links promising exclusive shots of this event but they are red herrings and lead nowhere so I circle back around to the main news sites.

  Which is where I find Frost and Stanford. A photograph of the two appears above a link that takes me to the story. The headline reads 'Charity workers missing' and as I read the story below their picture I find that I am even more deeply appalled by the nature or their most recent cover than even their litany of crimes.

  There exist no depths to which they will not stoop. These men have been working their way through London's night time streets, playing the role of charity workers among the huge homeless population of the capital, posing as helpers to the weakest and most vulnerable of souls.

  'They were so dedicated,' reads one quote in the text. 'They were always out on the streets instead of working in the shelters. They’d be out there in the cold and dark trying to help all the time. They were always so upset when they lost one. But there were so many, you know. You just can't save them all.'

  The lid of the laptop moves silently on its perfectly engineered hinge and the click of the latch is barely audible.

  I move to the bed and I close my eyes, fold my forearm across my face like a barrier, permitting nothing else to pass through for now. I want to sleep for a long time.

  Chapter 37

  The panic seems to evaporate into the air when the sun parts the clouds and Roth is nowhere to be seen. His absence seems to take with it the palpable feeling of fear that infected so many and a returning calm fills the vacuum.

  The emergency services arrive almost the moment that Roth blends himself into the mass of people and he moves through side streets and back alleys and loses himself quickly, cutting left and right at different corners, doubling back on his route so that should they try to piece together his movements via collected CCTV they will find an impossible and confusing jumble of images.

  Paramedics attend the injured as the cluster of bodies in the tube stairwells is untangled and for a couple of hours the station is closed, trains passing through to the next stop to disgorge their tutting carriage-load of passengers oblivious to the carnage they have been spared.

  One elderly man passes away, the panic and the crush proving too much for his frail heart. Several are taken to hospital for further treatment of their injuries; broken bones, sprains, cuts and scrapes, shock.

  The media descend in force and start pointing cameras and microphones in every face. There are very few remaining that saw what happened. If they did not escape the area when the chaos erupted, they have since beaten a hasty retreat, not keen to linger in the place where it happened.

  Those more ghoulish or excitable souls who were there are happy to talk of the drama they were a part of, and discuss the possibility of selling the phone-footage they shot but competition is high and renders such negotiations short. Few on either side pause to consider the implications of putting a price on a video of a man being killed but rather reflect that in such a large crowd there will be much of it, and some indeed has already been uploaded to the internet for free.

  Roth finds it easy to move fast amongst the crowds of shocked shoppers as they flee the scene and as the numbers thin on quieter streets he slows his pace and remains calm.

  He palms a baseball cap from a stand outside a souvenir shop and ducks into a public toilet where he hands his dark coat to a vagrant and pulls the cap down low over his face before he exits again through a window in the rear of the block.

  Inside five minutes, any kind of trail there may have been is cold and Roth begins to consider his whereabouts and get his bearings in order to make the trip back home, or at least the place he calls home now.

  The closed up railway arch is filthy and remote. As remote as anywhere can be in a city of eight million people. But in a place with such frequent dereliction it is easy enough to find places where people do not go, just as it is to walk into the X-crossing of Oxford Circus and know that you will find an audience.

  Nearer home he stops at an off licence and takes a bottle of vodka from the shelf and for a moment considers walking straight back out again. The man behind the counter is transfixed by his small television with the live news feed and the looping footage of Roth's daylight attack and seems not to have even noticed the man in the grey sweatshirt and baseball cap has entered his shop.

  He drops a twenty on the counter inside the shopkeeper's peripheral vision, who slowly registers the presence of a customer and absently keys the till and rummages for change.

  'You seen this?' the shopkeeper says without making eye contact, attention back on the screen.

  Roth grunts in affirmation. 'Incredible,' he says.

  Chapter 38

  When I wake nearly two days have passed. I have slept a lot but it has not been restful and I am bound and twisted in the sheets. It takes me almost a minute to untangle my left leg from the coiled bedding, some of which resembles prison escape-rope from a jailbreak movie.

  I am bruised psychologically, pricked and sore from the dreams which leave their splinters in my memory.

  There was a long drawn out exchange with my mother who moved between pleading to angry and back again several times. She is at once begging me not to turn and walk away from her and furiously disappointed in what I have become, what I have always failed to be, always fallen short. I know what she means, though she doesn't say it. She means that I have failed to live up to my father.

  When I try to walk away from her she follows after me, seeming to always close the gap though never quite catching up.

  I see Issy again but like before we don't speak. I am unable to articulate any of the thousand things I want to and all the while she regards me silently and with a look of reproach.

  The dreams shift and morph into each other, overlapping and interrupting. Voices spring from the wrong mouths and Frost talks to me with the familiar voices of old friends, seeking to coax and reassure.

  I am in that field again with Frost and Stanford. They fight harder and longer than before, they are irresistibly powerful and when I smash my fists down again and again into Frost's head and face he just laughs the harder, spits blood aside and laughs again. Then Stanford tosses aside the dislodged horse box as though it were balsa wood, paper even.

  They talk at me again, tell me about myself, tell me all the things that I do not want to hear. Frost has that same encouraging tone about him, like a patient parent talking to an errant child, seeking to convince him that he need only have application and focus to unlock his potential.

  But all the words he says are undermined by the smirking Stanford who mocks the very notion that I could be worthy of them and their kind.

  I see them differently through this new prism. I see that Stanford was simpler and more honest. Frost was more dangerous because he was the more devious and manipulative. He would seek to seduce the better side of my character in order to destroy it.

  All the while I am stalked in my dreams by a figure in the shadows. He has followed me from Issy's room that night, the thick set of his shoulders and the close cropped hair. I know who he is but he remains a mystery, always just out of my reach, out of my sight. He lingers in shadows, squat and poised, always on the brink of attack.

  He will always be there lurking after someone, and I may be the only someone who can do anything about that.

  Chapter 39

  He loses himself in the oblivion that the vodka brings and sits alone with the alcohol and his thoughts until one runs empty and the other begins to overwhelm.

  He lets days roll past as he tries by turns to process all this new information, and to ignore it. He knows more now than he did before, knows more o
f what he is capable of and better understands where his limits lie. The alcohol smashes up against the buzz of adrenaline of the two men he killed and eventually wins out as the other subsides. He recalls his escape from the scene and the fact he managed it with cunning rather than simply harnessing the raw power and pace that he might have. He had certainly not dawdled, but nonetheless it was more about blending in and slipping away than outright flight.

  But the more that he thought on it, on what a success it had been and what it told him; that he was not imagining this, that his mind was not broken or bound by the yoke of some awful murderous delusion. These things were real that Roth could do, this power, these abilities and the more clear and convincing that truth became, served only to reveal another.

  Roth did not know why. Something profound had happened to him, something utterly transformative and he knew, as he always had, that that night, that man, that tree marked the beginning of the change. He had stumbled home and cocooned himself inside afterward and emerged reborn.

  He thought over and again of what had happened, tried to organise the jumble of confusion and blurred images, the sensations of terror and confusion. Isolated and cut off from any distractions, he ran it through and ran it through, replayed and relived it and slowly his mind began to unshuffle the pack.

  He slowed it down and reordered it, laid everything out carefully and eventually he began to see it, began to see them.

  *

  Moving on somewhere else gives a sense that he has some control. Roth expects that he is being hunted now by the authorities and to linger too long in one place will work against him. It is harder to hit a moving target, he reasons.

  So the small number of belongings are placed back in the bag and he sets out again, replacing the ragged chipboard and the rusted corrugated iron sheets that concealed the entrance to his hiding place.