by G X Todd
‘Yeah,’ he mumbled again. ‘Yeah—’ he stumbled away from them, heading for the shutter door. He didn’t look back as he bent and shuffled underneath it, and they watched until his feet disappeared. They listened to his footfalls recede until they disappeared, too.
Lacey whispered, ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.’
‘Jack’ll get his ass burned on a candlestick,’ Pilgrim finished.
‘Hey’ – Lacey frowned at him – ‘don’t be a dick.’
Pilgrim took the rebuke and walked over to the storage dumpster Jack had tumbled out of. Using the barrels of the shotgun, he poked around in the bits of clothing and crap in there, but there was nothing of any use.
‘Do you know where they kept her?’ he asked Lacey.
She shook her head. She wouldn’t look at him but swivelled this way and that as she scanned the loading area.
‘What about the room where you first saw Dumont?’
‘Maybe,’ she murmured.
He peered closer at her and realised she was very close to crying.
He frowned. ‘What’s wrong?’
Her lips trembled, but she didn’t answer him.
‘Look, I’m sorry for saying Jack would get his ass burned.’
‘It’s not that.’ It took two more attempts before she could get the words out, and when she did, they came out sounding hopeless and lost. ‘I don’t know how we’re going to find her. There’s nothing here.’ She clamped her bottom lip between her teeth, her mouth turning traitor on her again, softening as tears welled.
She glanced away from him, an almost-guilty shifting of her eyes, as if his witnessing her tears were a shameful thing.
He continued to frown at her, puzzled. He didn’t like seeing her upset, but he wasn’t sure what he should say. There was a high possibility they wouldn’t find Alex. With no clues other than a direction in which she was likely to be headed, Pilgrim didn’t know how they would go about finding one solitary woman. And even if they did find the group responsible for taking her, there was no guarantee she would still be alive.
‘We’ll find these people,’ he heard himself say, not sure where the words were coming from. ‘We won’t give up. We’ll look until there’s nowhere else we can look.’
‘What will they do if they find out she doesn’t hear anything? They’re looking for people with voices, right? That’s what you said. What if they slit her throat like they did Jack’s friend?’
He had said that, and now he wished he hadn’t. In all honestly, he didn’t know what these people wanted. He’d merely been speaking out loud. ‘It’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘She’s attractive.’ He winced when he said that, but there was no hiding from the truth. ‘They’ll keep her around, at least for a while.’
The girl nodded, her head down, and then she did a peculiar thing. She stepped forward and put her arms around him. He had to move the shotgun quickly out of the way or else she’d have hugged that, too.
Pilgrim stood still, his side complaining at her hold. He was aware of his heart beating and wondered if it sounded loud to her with her ear rested over it. Her tears, warm and wet, soaked through his shirt. He could feel the hard length of the rifle she held pressed along his back and hoped she had taken her finger off its trigger; otherwise, he might end up with a second gunshot wound to his head.
He patted her on the back. He hoped it made her feel better.
Eventually, she eased away from him. He didn’t know how long she had hugged him for but wished he’d counted so that he’d have a number.
‘Done?’ he asked.
She wiped her nose on her sleeve and shook her head at him, a slight eye-roll accompanying it. ‘Yes, I’m done. We can go now.’
‘Good.’ He turned away from her and headed for the swinging service doors.
CHAPTER 5
As she followed behind him, Lacey made sure to keep her rifle’s barrels pointed away from the Boy Scout and down at the ground; she was jittery and didn’t want to shoot him in the leg accidentally.
She directed him on which way to go, taking her cues from Voice’s guidance, because she’d forgotten most of it. As they took a left and a right, and then another right, Voice lectured her on the importance of being observant and vigilant at all times, but she pretended not to hear him, mainly because she thought he was being unfair. She’d had a lot on her mind at the time.
They climbed up the four flights of stairs before reaching a fire door she recognised, wedged open by a small block of wood. She pointed the Boy Scout through it and they walked along the silent corridor, their footsteps echoing.
He limped slightly, and she hung back to examine him while he walked, worried that his injuries were worse than either of them wanted to admit. When she’d hugged him, she’d been alarmed by how much heat his body gave off. It was like hugging a furnace. But his heart had beat steadily and solidly in her ear. And she trusted his heart.
The door to the room where she’d first met Dumont stood open. Inside, the city lay before them in a panoramic view of collapsing ruin. This time it held no beauty, there was no buttery sun to soften its rough, crumbling edges, no warm, orange brushstrokes to paint it in a kinder light – now all she saw was a dying, leprous civilisation far past any possibility of rescue. A new addition had been spray-painted on to the middle pane of the floor-to-ceiling windows, a large black outline of a man’s head in profile. In its centre was a spiral, like that of a snail shell, winding round itself. It gave Lacey double vision the more she tried to follow the spiralling coil.
‘I’ve seen something like that before . . .’ she said.
The Boy Scout was silent as he stared up at the messy design. Thin dribbles of paint had slid down the length of the glass. He reached out and ran a finger across the spray-painted face, clearing a line through the place where its mouth should be.
‘On a billboard, not long after leaving my house,’ she continued. ‘A painted spiral. You probably don’t remember.’
He shook his head and turned away from the window. He went about scouring the rest of the room, but there was nothing else to find. Lacey tore her eyes from the black-headed outline and its vortexing mind and sat down in the leather armchair, the seat creaking under her weight. She slowly leaned back, laying the rifle over her thighs. She reached under her collar and rubbed the St Christopher between finger and thumb. It was warm from her skin and the more she rubbed it, the hotter it became.
What’s going on, Red? she thought. What the hell would you do if you were here?
Run in the opposite direction, Voice replied.
Lacey closed her eyes. Other than his reappearance to direct her through the corridors, Voice had been suspiciously quiet ever since the Boy Scout had found her. She had tried questioning him, but Voice simply reminded her not to use the name Pilgrim, that the name would only cause trouble, and that some things weren’t for her to know yet. The ‘yet’ made her hopeful. Maybe Voice would stop being secretive soon and just tell her.
She rubbed the medallion. A soothing, rhythmic smoothing of her thumb.
– But what would she do if she couldn’t run in the opposite direction?
Then I imagine she would stand still until a better solution presented itself.
‘You’re no help at all,’ she breathed, eyes still closed.
There’s nothing wrong with standing still. Movement is overrated.
– We can’t just sit here and do nothing! Alex needs us.
Au contraire, mon cœur, if you sit still, maybe you’ll be able to hear the way forward.
– Hear the way forward? What the hell are you talking about?
Shhhh.
She hated being shushed. Hated it. She scowled and swore, a string of curse words that would have resulted in Grammy getting out the bar of soap and scrubbing her tongue with it until she gagged, even though her grams hadn’t been averse to cussing herself at times.
‘Shhhh,’ the Boy Scout said.
Her eyes flashed open. �
�Seriously? You’re shushing me now, too?’
He cast her a brief, enquiring glance, but then he went back to listening, his head dipped slightly towards the open door. He appeared so attentive that Lacey found herself holding her breath and listening hard, as well.
Then she heard it. It was very faint, but she definitely heard it.
‘A dog,’ she whispered.
The Boy Scout walked out into the corridor and stopped to listen again.
It could have almost been mistaken for the wind, the howling high-pitched and faint, rising and falling in waves. They followed the noise and as they got closer, and the howls became louder, the sound gained nuances of pain and misery. It got to the point where Lacey wanted to cover her ears to block it out.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t be trying to find it,’ she said.
But the Boy Scout didn’t answer. He paused on the landing of a concrete stairwell, the howling swirling around them, directionless and haunting.
Lacey shivered.
A ghost dog.
The Boy Scout headed downwards, trotting down the steps so she had to hurry to catch up. Two flights and he stopped, crossed the landing and swung the door inward. The howling notched up a few decibels.
Lacey nearly jumped out of her skin when a loud, piercing whistle sounded right in front of her.
‘Jesus!’ she gasped. ‘What’re you doing?’
The Boy Scout lowered his fingers from his mouth and the whistling stopped.
The dog’s baying had stopped, too. Then a harsh, grating bark took its place, a barrage of echoing retorts that went on and on and on, one after another.
‘I recognise that bark,’ she said reluctantly.
From the stairwell’s landing, they walked the length of the main corridor and turned into a hallway that branched off it. Three quarters of the way down that corridor, they found Princess shut up in a room. Lacey stayed back as the Boy Scout went to look through the narrow glass panel in the door. Spotting him, the dog threw itself at the door, the whole panel shaking in its frame as the barks ratcheted up in volume. Over and over, the dog crashed into the door, desperate to break out, its claws scrabbling at the floor at the door’s base, trying to dig a way out to them.
Not only did Lacey recognise the dog’s bark, she also recognised the corridor. Another reason she had backed up against the nearest wall, unwilling to step any closer.
Princess didn’t get turned into a burger, after all, Voice said.
The Boy Scout appeared oblivious to the thuds and bangs of the dog throwing itself at the barrier between them; he continued to stare through the glass panel at the room beyond. Lacey could imagine what he was staring at, but she didn’t expect what he said next.
‘There’s something written on the wall in there.’ His head turned, his eyes coming to rest on her face.
‘What?’ she said, not sure she had heard him correctly.
‘Words. Written on the wall. Above the bed.’
The way he was looking at her and the way he said ‘bed’, his tone flat, inflection non-existent, brought all manner of emotions tumbling through her. Guilt, fear, horror, anger. She didn’t want to look inside that room. The brassy taste of panic coated the back of her tongue.
‘What’s it say?’ she whispered.
The Boy Scout shook his head and stepped back from the door, the dog rebounding off the other side, the sound of their voices sending it wild so they had to speak louder to be heard over the barking.
‘Come read it,’ he said.
‘Is he in there?’
It was so hard to read him; his eyes were entirely unfathomable as he gazed back at her. ‘The man I stabbed? Yes. I think it’s him.’
‘I don’t want to see him.’ She realised she was holding the rifle so tight her forearms ached. She made herself loosen her grip.
Easy now, Voice murmured.
‘You don’t need to look at him,’ the Boy Scout said. ‘Look above him, at the wall.’
She didn’t move forward. She could feel her heart pounding at the base of her throat, her pulse thudding through her temples. ‘Why can’t you just tell me what it says?’
‘Because I can’t.’
Her panic exploded. ‘But why! I don’t want to look at him! I had to watch him die and I don’t want to see him!’
‘I can’t read,’ he said.
‘Yes you can!’
He looked unhappy. ‘Not any more. Letters won’t stay still. They wriggle around like worms. The head wound must have caused it.’
Her chest heaved from her outburst. She stood there, her back jammed up against the wall, and stared at him. The Boy Scout looked back at her calmly.
‘You can’t read at all?’ she asked.
‘Believe me, I wouldn’t make you look in there if I didn’t have to.’
Panic, although quashed for the moment, stirred in her chest again, tightening through her lungs and making it hard to breathe. ‘What do you mean? What’s in there?’ She was scared of the answer.
‘The dog’s been in there a while. It must’ve got hungry.’
Lacey squeezed her eyes shut, turning away from him and the room to press her brow against the cool wall. But closing her eyes only made it worse, because Jeb was waiting for her in the dark: his staring eyes, his sunken cheeks, the spittle in his beard, the clawed hands that had spastically drawn up to his chest. Except now there were ragged chunks ripped out of him, raw gaping wounds, and body parts chewed off, his entrails hanging down the side of the bed like a rope of sausages.
She moaned and opened her eyes. Stared hard at the blurry no-space somewhere behind the wall in front of her face.
She felt the Boy Scout hovering near her shoulder, although she hadn’t heard him approach. She rolled her eyes to the right, looking at him without turning her head.
He said, ‘Keep your eyes on the wall. Don’t look down from it.’
‘Yeah, right,’ she muttered. ‘Easy for you to say.’
He gently took hold of her elbow, and she let him steer her away from the wall and lead her the few steps down the hall. Those few steps weren’t enough – she would have gladly walked the circumference of the planet first.
Princess had stopped barking. Now she snuffled at the bottom of the door, as if she could smell fresh meat, and whined and gruffed and snarled. She started frantically clawing at the gap again.
She wants dessert.
Lacey made an angry noise, one she hoped the Boy Scout would interpret as a way of attempting to bolster her courage, and which Voice would translate as a wordless version of ‘shut up’. Neither of them responded, so she figured it had hit both its marks.
‘Use your hand. Hold it so you can’t see. Like this.’ The Boy Scout laid the flat of his palm over the bottom half of the glass, effectively shielding her from any view below it.
‘Keep your hand there,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t move it.’ She gripped his wrist, just in case he decided to ignore her wishes and lift it away. His skin was as warm as the rest of his body – too warm – but it was good to hold on to him. Just while she did this.
She leaned forward, bringing her face closer to the glass. The door shook when Princess crashed into it, and Lacey flinched, gasping, her heart pinballing in her chest.
‘It’s OK,’ the Boy Scout said. ‘It can’t get out.’
‘Princess,’ she told him shakily.
‘What?’
‘The dog. Her name is Princess.’
‘OK. Princess, then.’
‘It’s a girl dog.’
‘I figured. You’re stalling.’
‘I know, I know . . .’ Taking a deep, steadying breath, Lacey leaned in the final few inches, looked over his blocking hand and peered hesitantly into the room. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered.
‘What do you see?’
‘My name. Someone’s written my name on the wall.’
‘Is that all?’
‘No . . . it says, “Hello Lacey. RIP Alexandra. Resting p
lace here,” and then there’s an arrow pointing downwards.’ She moved her head back and looked up at the Boy Scout. ‘But it’s pointing down under your hand, to the bed, and I can’t look.’
The Boy Scout told her to step back. When she had moved, he stepped into her place and looked inside. ‘It’s pointing to a folded piece of paper in his hand,’ he said.
‘No . . . no way. We’re not going in there.’ She shook her head, even though he wasn’t looking at her.
‘We don’t have much choice.’
‘Are you shitting me? There’s a rabid dog in there. Whatever sick little note he’s left for us, it’s not worth getting our asses chewed off for.’
‘It could help us find Alex.’
She stared at him and for the briefest, blackest moment she disliked him intensely for pointing that out. Pointing it out and making her realise that they would have to go into that room despite everything screaming at her not to. She immediately felt a crushing guilt, and she dropped her gaze from him and stared at his dusty boots.
‘You don’t have to go in,’ he told her, and that just made her feel worse.
‘No,’ she said, and hoped he couldn’t hear the trembling in her voice. ‘Tell me what you need me to do.’
CHAPTER 6
Pilgrim knew he would have to be fast.
He had given his shotgun to the girl: it was better for close range and would cause far more damage than the rifle. It wasn’t the dog’s fault they needed access to the room, and he didn’t want the girl using the shotgun unless it was necessary, but if she had to, she couldn’t hesitate. He explained what else he wanted from her, and she nodded, a jerky up–down motion of her head. She held the gun in a firm grip. He knew she was scared, but she wouldn’t run. Pilgrim couldn’t help but respect her for that.
He gripped the door handle. The dog hadn’t stopped barking or growling or whining since they had entered these corridors, but now it went quiet. Disconcertingly so. When Pilgrim leaned in closer to the glass panel, he found the dog staring up at him with its black, shiny eyes, its muzzle wrinkled back to silently reveal its sharp, bloodstained canines.
‘Ready?’ he asked the girl.