Boy 23

by Jim Carrington

  I grab his arm to stop him.

  ‘We don’t know what happened in there. It’d be suicide to go back right now. Wait here. If no one’s come out in a minute’s time, we’ll go back in and get him.’

  Jesper shakes my hand away from his arm. He stares at me angrily. He has The Voice’s dried blood on his neck. I try to hold his stare. I reach my hand out and put it on his bare shoulder, trying to reassure him. Eventually he looks away from me and crouches back down, watching the building, still angry and twitchy.

  For ages nothing happens except some crows return to the trees, wings beating, cawing loudly. I start thinking perhaps Jesper’s right: Blake has shot them all. Four shots, four men. Bang, bang, bang, bang.

  Then something moves and at first I can’t tell what. We both crane our necks to see. Markus emerges from the building. Behind him are the two men from Huber and Frei, all holding their guns out in front of them, searching for us. The only one who doesn’t come out is Blake.

  I sense Jesper getting more and more tense and angry. And I think of the weapon in my pocket.

  I position myself so I can’t be seen and I keep watching as they skirt round the other buildings, guns raised, ready to shoot. All the time I think about Blake. It’s obvious what’s happened to him. And I wonder what Jesper’s thinking right now.

  As the four of them disappear into another of the houses in search of us, I’m thinking about what we should do and there’s only one sensible solution. ‘We should leave now, while they’re searching,’ I say. ‘We can get away. We can get to the border and find the Spirit of Resistance.’

  But as I’m talking, Jesper’s already on his feet. He looks at me, shaking his head. Without a word, he takes his knife out and walks back towards the buildings.

  ‘That’s my dad in there,’ he says.

  Jesper

  ‘Jesper,’ I hear her saying from behind me. ‘What are you doing? You can’t . . .’

  But even though I hear her, I’m not listening. I’m yomping back through bushes and trees towards the buildings, keeping low and prying on the house they just entered. I’m not leaving him there to die alone. We should have taken him with us. We let him down. I left The Voice to die. He brought me into the world. He spent his life helping me. He saved me and I let them kill him.

  I hear footsteps behind me, trampling the leaves and the twigs and I know Carina’s following. I turn round and give her a look, tell her she should stay where she is.

  And then I’m yomping through the undergrowth again, gathering speed, feeling the anger build inside me.

  I spot them coming back out of the building, guns still pointing, squizzing around for us. I drop to the floor and hear Carina do the same behind me. The men haven’t seen us though. I pry on them as they move towards another house and go inside it. I turn and see Carina’s squizzing at me.

  ‘Stay there,’ I hiss. ‘I’ll be back.’

  And in a second I’m on my feet again and I’m moving through the bush, back towards the house, getting closer and closer. And before the men have come out of the other house, I reach the building where we left The Voice. It’s silent. I rush in through the space where the front door’s meant to be, straight to the front room, where I find him.

  His eyes are closed. There are two bullet holes in his head and two in his chest to go with the one in his leg. He lies in a pool of his own blood that’s getting bigger each passing second. He isn’t healing. He’s dead. And all I can do is stand there and gawp like some kind of fool, useless and helpless and not believing what’s in front of me and not knowing what to do about it either. And feeling guilty, like this is my fault, even though I didn’t pull the trigger.

  His right hand still holds his gun. And for a moment I gawp at it and I think. Cos I can’t make this right again, not now; I can’t bring him back to life.

  But I can do something for him. And for me. I can make sure we get away, that we take the information to the Spirit of Resistance.

  I prise the gun from his cold hand and leave the building.

  Outside I crouch low, creep along by the walls, using them to cover me, prying on the building I saw the men go into last. My insides feel strange – stomach tying itself in knots, heart thudding. And as for my brain, it’s racing with information, with thoughts, imagining what’s gonna happen, raking back through what’s already happened and what it means and who I am.

  I say a silent prayer to God, asking Him to guide me to do the right thing, to protect me.

  And then I see them. The two men from the Huber Corporation and Father Frei. I freeze where I am as they come back outside. They squizz around, guns held in front of them, but they don’t see me and move off towards the next building.

  I stand where I am, cos all of a sudden I’ve lost the ability to do anything – think, move, make decisions. I look down at my right hand, at The Voice’s gun. And all of a sudden I’m aware of how heavy it is, how unnatural it feels in my hand, how I’ve never even held one in my life before, let alone used one. And I start to ask myself the same question over and over again: What are you doing, Jesper?

  Except my brain comes up with an answer, doesn’t it? Cos a picture of The Voice lying slumped in the other building pops into my head and won’t go away. They killed The Voice. My dad.

  And I’m gonna kill them.

  And that’s when Markus comes out of the building in front of me. He comes out with his gun held in front of him, squizzing this way and that, just like the others. He doesn’t see me though, does he? And this time my brain fights against my body, makes sure I’m not frozen to the spot. And as Markus moves towards the next building, I follow at a distance, gun pointed at him. Just before he’s about to go into the building and my chance disappears, I open my mouth and I call: ‘Markus!’

  He turns in my direction.

  He sees the gun, but it’s too late for him to do anything about it, cos I force myself to squeeze the trigger.

  BANG.

  Immediately he collapses to the floor, screaming out in pain. I can see from here – ten metres away – that I haven’t killed him. The bullet hit his arm and he dropped his own gun and fell to the floor and now he’s writhing around in the dirt. At first I think it’s just the pain making him writhe around, but then I realise he’s trying to get to his gun. I’ve got to do something before he picks it up and kills me. He won’t think twice, will he? So I raise my gun again and I squeeze the trigger. Only this time it kind of clicks and there’s no bang and no bullet. So I squeeze again and still nothing happens except a click. And again and again.

  Cos I’ve run out of bullets, haven’t I?

  So I drop the gun and run towards him, just as his fingers are edging towards his gun. I stand on his hand to stop him and he yells in pain again.

  ‘Scheiße!’

  I bend down and pick up his gun.

  My mind races with thoughts of what I should do now, but a noise interrupts them, makes me look towards the door of the building in front of me.

  The men from the Huber Corporation are staring at me, guns pointed at my head. With them is Father Frei, his gun held down by his side.

  And all I do is stand there, useless. Cos if I lift my hands to point Markus’s gun at them, they’ll shoot me before I’m even done, won’t they?

  It’s useless. There’s nothing I can do. I’m going to die.

  Except then I think of something. I point the gun at Markus’s head. ‘Put your guns down or I kill him,’ I say.

  But instead of putting their guns down and looking scared, they laugh. The taller of the two men aims his gun at Markus and he pulls the trigger. There’s a CRACK that splits the air, makes Markus’s body jump and then slump to the ground. And as I gawp at him, I watch the life go from his eyes.

  ‘Drop your gun, Jesper,’ the taller man says, ‘before you get hurt as well.’

  So I do what he says. The gun thuds to the ground.

  ‘Nobody else needs to get hurt, as long as you do
as I say.’

  But I know that’s a lie. They’ll kill me whatever I do.

  And the way I see it, I have three options.

  One, stay here and do as they say and they kill me anyway.

  Two, run away as fast as I can and they shoot at me and I die.

  Three, I shoot them, except by the time I’ve aimed at them, they’ll have shot me.

  There’s no option that keeps me alive, is there?

  And so I stay where I am while they point their guns at me and step slowly towards me.

  ‘I don’t want to harm you, Jesper,’ the taller one goes on. ‘I want to take you back to your home. My Place. Will you cooperate?’

  I stand where I am. I know he’s lying. He takes another step towards me.

  Only then there’s a noise that no one’s expecting. It comes from somewhere in the forest.

  CRACK.

  The bullet hits Father Frei in the shoulder and he falls to the ground, dropping his gun.

  Before I have time to think about what just happened, there’s another CRACK and the taller Huber man falls. Dead before he hits the ground. Eyes glazed.

  And for a split second the man from Huber who has a scar that runs down his face just gawps, frozen to the spot.

  I take my chance, pick up Markus’s gun and I point it at the man with the scar. And as soon as he realises there’s more than one gun pointed at him, he puts his hands up, starts backing slowly away. And then he makes a run for it, into the woods.

  I stand frozen to the spot, gawping at the dead bodies and the injured Father Frei, wondering who shot them. Cos it wasn’t me and it wasn’t The Voice.

  Carina

  The short man runs off, and though I point my gun in his direction, I know there are no more bullets left in the chamber and so he escapes.

  I walk out of the undergrowth towards Jesper, who’s open-mouthed, not comprehending what’s just happened. He stares at Father Frei and then at the man from Huber, frozen in his thoughts.

  ‘You shot them,’ he says.

  I nod. ‘I had to. They were going to kill you.’

  And from the ground I hear Father Frei: ‘Help me. Jesper, Carina. Please.’

  He’s bleeding. He needs my attention. I don’t tend to his wounds though. I hold my gun and I stare at him. A memory fills my mind: Father Frei, back when he was Officer Frei of New Dawn, when he watched as Commander Brune used Greta and then put a bullet in her head. All the anger I’ve held inside for ten years surfaces. How is it right that he gets to still be alive when Greta’s dead? How can he even think to ask for my help?

  My index finger closes around the trigger of the handgun. I raise it and aim at Father Frei’s head.

  ‘Please, Carina, have mercy. I haven’t done you any harm.’ He makes the sign of the cross.

  But he’s lying. ‘You let Commander Brune rape my sister. You watched. You stood there as they put a bullet in her head.’

  The look upon his face changes instantly – realisation replacing pain. He opens his mouth but no words come out.

  My finger squeezes the trigger.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Jesper says. ‘We need to go.’

  ‘Help me,’ Father Frei says.

  But all I see is Greta’s face, her tears. All I hear is her screams for them to stop. Their gunshot. And silence.

  And the anger inside me bubbles over. I pull the trigger.

  Father Frei’s eyes bulge as he panics.

  But the gun just clicks.

  The chamber’s empty.

  Jesper grabs my arm and starts pulling me along, away from the buildings, back into the woods.

  We run back through the forest. We hear no gunshots, and I assume that means we’re not being followed, but that doesn’t stop us from running on and on and on.

  It’s only when the two vehicles come into view – The Voice’s van and the black car – that we slow. The engine of Blake’s van is still running where he left it, but it’s filled with bullet holes and the tyres have been shot out.

  ‘We’ll have to take their car,’ Jesper says. ‘It’ll be faster than the van anyway.’

  We grab everything from the van – including the portable freezer from the back – and stuff it into the black car and Jesper offers to drive. The car starts with a quiet but powerful roar. Jesper looks at the buttons and dials, figuring out how to make it work. He pushes a switch and the lights at the front of the car come on, lighting up the darkening forest.

  ‘You were going to kill Father Frei,’ he says.

  I shake my head. ‘I knew there were no bullets left.’

  ‘So why pretend?’

  I say nothing. The mental image of Greta and Father Frei returns. And I begin to wish I’d had another bullet. Maybe shooting him dead – doing something for Greta – would have finally got rid of the memories. ‘I wanted to watch him suffer,’ I say.

  Jesper’s quiet for a while, staring out through the windscreen, thinking. ‘They killed The Voice,’ he says eventually. ‘They shot him in the head twice. I saw him lying there.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘It was my fault. I shouldn’t have left him.’

  Suddenly, as though he’s just thought of it, he puts his hand in his pocket and brings out his machine. The scroll. He switches it on. He stares at it, the glow of the screen reflecting on his face.

  ‘He sent me a message,’ he says. ‘He must have done it just before they found him.’

  He holds the machine out so I can see the message.

  These are the files. Take them to the Spirit of Resistance. Good luck.

  ‘That’s what we do now,’ I say, pulling the leaflet from my pocket.

  He takes the leaflet from me and looks at it. It’s in German though, so after turning it over in his hands he passes it back. ‘We have to do this. For him.’

  I nod. ‘We need to stop somewhere first though. We should change our appearances, like he said.’

  Jesper puts the car in gear, presses the pedal and the car lurches jerkily forward.

  By the time we reach the border, we’ve abandoned the car and it’s late at night, nearly morning. Jesper and I look completely different. His hair is cropped short all over and dyed blond rather than his usual brown. Contact lenses have turned his brown eyes blue. He wears round glasses too. My long hair is gone and it looks almost boyish now. My green eyes are now also blue. I’m unrecognisable from the picture in the newspapers. And as we step towards the two armed officers guarding the border, bags on our backs, we hold our new papers.

  Maria Schultenberg and her brother Magnus.

  An officer points his gun at us as we near him. ‘Halt,’ he shouts. ‘Hand over your papers.’

  We hold them out and the other officer grabs them. He takes a torch from his belt and aims it at the papers, examines them, looking us up and down, while the other one points his gun at us.

  ‘What’s your business in the Low Countries?’ he asks Jesper.

  Jesper stares blankly at him, not understanding.

  ‘He’s deaf,’ I say. ‘We’re going to stay with our uncle. In Aachen.’

  ‘How long for?’ the officer says, this time talking just to me.

  ‘For good.’

  ‘What’s in the boy’s hands?’ he asks, pointing at the freezer with the vaccine inside it.

  I shrug. ‘It has his medication in it,’ I say. ‘He’s diabetic.’

  The officer grabs the handheld freezer from Jesper and looks inside.

  My heart stops beating. I watch his face as he examines the test tube. But then he shrugs, puts the vaccine back and hands the freezer back.

  He hands us our papers and the other officer lowers his gun. Then with a nod of his head he lets us across the border.

  We walk on for a while, until the border is well out of sight. And then we find a place by the side of the road to sit and rest.

  Right away Jesper takes the scroll from his pocket and wakes the screen up. He looks at the map first of all, and
then starts searching through the messages, looking at the last messages he received from The Voice.

  I take the files from The Voice’s case and flick through them. Because what he said was a lot to take in, and some of it was difficult to believe. I want to check the details in the file. Some of what he said – the star voyager and Marsh Flu, and how New Dawn spread the virus before they released the vaccine – is stuff that I’ve heard before. None of it’s new. But I’ve never believed it. It always seemed like conspiracy theories to me.

  But as I flick through the sheaf of documents, it becomes clear to me that The Voice was telling the truth.

  It’s all here – pictures and data and reports. There’s no doubting it. I skim through until I come to the files about Jesper’s family. I look at the picture of his mother, Hanne, see how her face looks a lot like Jesper’s. Her cheekbones are high and pronounced, just like his. Her eyes are deep, deep brown like his. There’s no doubting the similarities.

  ‘Can I have another look at that?’ Jesper asks, putting his scroll back in his pocket.

  I hand the picture to him and look at the next page – a sheet with all his details on it: name, birthdate, birthplace, mother, siblings. And in the box marked ‘Donor’ is The Voice’s real name – Mr Mark Blake. He was telling the truth.

  ‘Jesper, you should look at this.’

  He glances over, puts down the picture. ‘What?’

  I pass the sheet of paper to him. ‘Look at what it says . . .’ And I point at the box marked ‘Donor’.

  He stares at it for a while and then he lets the paper drop to the ground, covers his face with his hands.

  Jesper

  After a while, I feel a hand on my shoulder. I flinch. But it’s only Carina, isn’t it? She smiles at me. ‘Are you OK?’ she asks.

  I nod, even though it’s a lie.

  ‘We should get going,’ she says.

  Carina’s right. I can’t sit here forever.

  Carina takes a piece of paper from her pocket and holds it for me to see. ‘We have to find these people: the Spirit of Resistance. We take them the files The Voice sent you. What’s on your device could stop another pandemic,’ she says. ‘This is important. That information could save millions of lives.’