The End of the Line

by The End of the Line (retail) (epub)

  A trail of vomit was drying down his chest and across his crotch. Amanda could see where it had pooled on the sofa between his legs.

  There was a drinks cabinet in the corner of the room, doors hanging open, the shelves empty. A dozen bottles of spirits littered the coffee table, empty but for dribbles and dregs. A couple had toppled, contents soaked into the carpet, adding to the toxicity of the room.

  ‘He there?’ Caleb called.

  Amanda couldn’t answer, couldn’t take the breath, the grief like a hot rock in her chest.

  There was blood smeared across the back wall. Davis hadn’t bled. Which meant that somewhere else in the house…

  Caleb got the headline from Amanda’s expression, when she stepped back into the hall. He squeezed past to have a look for himself.

  A wave of nausea and fatigue swept Amanda and she shut her eyes a moment, leaning against the wall. Could be the body, the smell, the pills, the fact she hadn’t slept in days.

  She got a start when she opened her eyes to find Bridget in the doorway.

  Anger swelled at the woman seeing her vulnerable but she didn’t have the strength to do or even say anything about it.

  It must have shown on her face because Bridget didn’t say a word. She kept her eyes on the ground as she slipped around her to take a look for herself.

  Caleb was staring at Davis’ body from the doorway, arms crossed over his barrel chest, fingers sunk into his pits like he couldn’t feel the stifling, sick heat of the room. ‘He was wearing that last time I saw him.’

  A cold certainty gripped Amanda around the back of her neck. ‘When?’

  ‘’bout two days ago. Saw him at the club.’

  ‘Reeves must have been here waiting for him.’

  Bridget was crouched at the front door, checking and re-checking the runes, muttering beneath her breath. She touched one and tested the residue on her fingertips.

  Amanda resisted the urge to kick her.

  ‘Where’d the blood come from?’ asked Caleb.

  Amanda rubbed at her lips. She’d been avoiding the stairs up to the first floor. Not even looking at it. But some things you had to see through to the end.

  ‘I’ll do it.’ Caleb stopped Amanda as she made toward them. ‘You got family. I don’t.’ He took the stairs, lumbering up two steps at a time.

  Amanda felt a wave of relief, the usual shot of guilt. Her mind kept going back to the homework on the kitchen table, of the similar books that had been on her table years gone past.

  ‘They were fine,’ said Bridget, her knees cracking as she straightened from examining the runes. ‘They were perfect.’

  ‘They just don’t fucking work.’

  ‘He’s getting stronger. Hopefully that will make him easier to find. If I set up in here—’

  ‘We don’t have time. Soon as Caleb’s back down you’re leaving.’

  ‘I’m not planning on taking long.’ Crouching down near the corpse, she opened her bag and began to root inside.

  ‘No, you’re leaving. Me and Caleb need to work.’ Amanda strode over, to pull her up off the floor, to kick the bag across the room – she didn’t know what. She only knew that to see magic performed in front of her was something that couldn’t happen. Adrenalin was making her sweat, the fearful little girl inside her stoking her anger.

  Bridget was on her feet before Amanda reached her, grim determination etched on her features. ‘I’ll scream. I will bring the police here in an instant and you can explain to your boss why you’re in a jail cell rather than out there looking for the thing after your family.’

  She would do it as well. Amanda could see it in her eyes. ‘We don’t need you.’

  ‘Your ignorance astounds me. Don’t you see I’m trying to help? I thought you were supposed to be the woman who thought of everything. Put aside your prejudice for one bloody moment.’

  ‘If you knew what my—’

  ‘Oh don’t give me that.’ Bridget turned away and knelt back down. Donning a surgical mask, she began to lay out a plastic roll across the carpet. Her whole body was shaking. She was trying to pretend she wasn’t. ‘If you’re going to kill me I suggest you do it. But I will not say I haven’t done my duty.’

  She rolled back her sleeve.

  Amanda backed away, arms folded tight over her chest. She forced herself to watch, desperate to show Bridget and herself that she wasn’t afraid.

  On the mat before her, Bridget set an abacus. It was worn, the wood dark and the paint on the coloured beads was faded. With her thumb pressing gently into her summoning tattoo she began to work it with her free hand, her fingers nimbly moving the beads this way and that with a click like children’s teeth.

  There was the heavy tread of Caleb coming back down the stairs. He had a pink towel clamped under his nose, his ears coloured to match.

  Amanda hadn’t thought her spirits could sink lower but they proved to still have a drop left in them when she saw her friend’s expression.

  ‘Them too?’

  ‘Got a problem,’ Caleb replied, removing the towel from his face. ‘Family are there. Worse than down here.’ He nodded to Bridget, intent on her work between Davis’ knees. ‘But they been dead longer than two days.’

  Bridget got to her feet.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Amanda didn’t know why she asked. Caleb knew his bodies.

  ‘With him the whole evening. Didn’t suspect a thing.’

  ‘You drank with him and didn’t know he was under Reeves’ influence?’ asked Bridget.

  Amanda hoped that wasn’t a gleam of fascination in her eyes.

  ‘He was laughing, joking, worrying like the rest of us,’ said Caleb.

  ‘He was spying,’ said Amanda. ‘Reeves was fucking checking us out. And we’ve got no way of knowing.’

  ‘Why he’s a step ahead of us.’

  ‘I will look into it,’ said Bridget. She pulled a notebook from her bag and begin scribbling. ‘In theory there should be a way to find out who he’s controlling and—’

  ‘And how do we know he’s not controlling you?’ Amanda demanded. ‘Giving us the run around?’

  Bridget frowned. ‘You don’t,’ she answered.

  Amanda stormed back to the kitchen. She needed some air. That poor little girl. She knew what it was to have control taken from you like that, to have a loved one turn on you. She’d never wished it on a single other human being.

  God, she needed a cigarette.

  ‘You OK?’ Caleb asked coming after her.

  ‘We have to stop him. We turn this place upside down. We find something. I don’t want to look at everyone I pass on the street wondering if he’s… I’ve been through that. Being controlled. I will not be put through that again. My kids…’

  ‘We’ll get him,’ said Caleb.

  The clacking of beads in the other room stopped.

  ‘He’s too powerful,’ Bridget announced. ‘I can’t get a trace on him. The theory is correct but—’

  ‘Then make a better theory,’ Amanda snapped before turning to Caleb, fire in her eyes and belly. ‘Upside down.’

  ‘We’ll get him,’ said Bridget. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I think,’ said Amanda, ‘you’d be a lot less certain if it was someone you loved about to get hurt in all this.’

  Chapter 18

  Amanda

  The present – forty-eight hours to destination

  The crack of Steph’s head against the wall resonated around the room. She fell, boneless, to the floor, her face white with the pain.

  Skeebs staggered backwards, the textbook he’d ripped from her grasp hitting him in the face. His eyes lit up as he realised he’d won, heedless of the girl at his feet.

  It was a short-lived victory. Caleb’s big hands folded into the back of the boy’s jacket. The book dropped. Skeebs’ toes kicked at the floor as Caleb brought the boy crashing face first into the wall opposite. Skeebs squawked as Caleb pressed the iron bar of his forearm across the back of the bo
y’s neck.

  Amanda’s belt was half out of its loops when she tripped over Steph, the girl diving under her feet for the fallen textbook. Steph managed to grab the cover between the barest tips of her fingers and pulled it towards her, clutching it to her chest as she recoiled from the struggle.

  ‘No! No!’ Skeebs squirmed, hiding his hands between his body and the wall, Caleb scrabbling to twist his arm behind his back.

  Skeebs hissed and spat against the wall, flecks dripping down the metal by his mouth, eyes rolling as he tried to see.

  Belt trailing from one hand, Amanda wormed her other hand between the wall and Skeebs’ body. Skeebs pressed down, protecting his free wrist. It was slick with sweat as Amanda’s fingers wrapped around it, dragging it inch by inch into the open air.

  ‘No!’ Skeebs growled, half in pain, half in fear as Caleb slowly wrenched his arm up behind his back. ‘Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.’

  Amanda was winning her struggle too – Skeebs’ poor diet working against him, the muscles in his arm too stringy to fight against Amanda’s leverage.

  Skeebs continued to plead as Caleb took the belt from Amanda. There was ink on his left hand, smeared between his second and third finger. Caleb said nothing as he began looping the belt around Skeebs’ wrists the moment they touched, leaning into the boy to keep him in place.

  ‘What did he want you to do?’ Amanda demanded. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Nothing. I wasn’t listening to him. That was all of you. I didn’t do the ink, he made me. He controlled me and let me go.’

  ‘Are we going to keep him tied up the rest of the way?’ Steph asked.

  Amanda grimaced, intent on holding Skeebs square while Caleb worked, the belt’s loops getting shorter and shorter, the leather edges cutting into the flesh of Skeebs’ hands.

  ‘Make things easier,’ said Caleb.

  ‘If you want, I could—’

  ‘No magic,’ Amanda snapped. ‘You even think about it, we’ll tie you up next. You want to help, read your books.’

  She could hear Steph scrambling behind her. There was the flutter of pages and rattle of the bag as she shoved everything inside, the girl retreating back into her shell.

  Skeebs jerked, surprising the pair of them enough that they staggered backwards, giving Skeebs room enough to lift a leg and press his knee to the wall. Another push and he switched his knee with his foot.

  Amanda felt Caleb’s muscles compress under his coat, the big man bracing himself a moment before Skeebs pushed off the wall. The boy might as well have pushed against a truck. Amanda bashed her cheek against Skeebs’ head as the boy was sent crashing back against the wall, knocking the wind out of him.

  The bathroom curtain closed, Steph hiding herself from the fight.

  ‘Stay out here,’ Amanda called. ‘Where we can see you.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Skeebs gasped. ‘Don’t tell my brother. Please don’t tell my brother.’

  The belt was secure now, the prong through the hole, Skeebs flexing his fingers to keep the circulation going.

  Leather cracked against leather as Caleb slotted the belt through its loops. The sound seemed to tug the strength from Skeebs. He leaned against the wall, his whole body shaking as he sobbed. ‘He made me, I swear.’

  Caleb’s face was stone. ‘Sit him down. We’re doing his ankles.’

  ‘Just let me go,’ Skeebs managed, addressing Reeves as they urged him to sit. ‘I’m worth nothing to you. No message this time. No message.’

  ‘What did he want?’ Amanda demanded.

  Skeebs curled, his head almost touching his knees, crying hard. His lips were peeled back from his teeth, fat drops falling from the end of his nose.

  ‘Fuck sake, Skeebs,’ Caleb growled, reaching for the boy’s belt to bind his ankles.

  Skeebs snorted. It could almost have been a laugh. The shaking stopped, the boy’s grief cut off like he’d flicked a switch.

  ‘Sit up. Amanda prodded Skeebs in the shoulder. ‘Sit up.’

  The boy laughed – the snort becoming a chortle, building to a full bellied laugh. He howled with laughter, mouth gaping, eyes unseeing, longer and louder until his lungs strained with the effort.

  It sent chills down Amanda’s spine, forced her to retreat. Even Caleb had a momentary flicker.

  Amanda’s ears caught the smallest noise. Some small release of pressure from the back of the carriage. Behind the curtain.

  ‘Steph?’

  ‘Just a minute.’

  There was something in the way she said it.

  Skeebs laughed all the harder, looking Amanda straight in the eye, grinning wide enough to show his back teeth. Amanda was beginning to get an instinct for that look. It wasn’t Skeebs staring back out at her from those eyes.

  ‘Steph get out here right now.’

  ‘Almost done.’

  Caleb nodded, keeping Skeebs pinned with a big, flat palm.

  ‘No. Now.’ Amanda was already striding over. She caught the harsh scent of chemicals.

  Steph swept the curtain aside with a wide smile, arms open like a magician revealing her latest trick. In her hand, Amanda’s lighter glinted in the lamplight.

  She dropped it by the quad bike, into Bridget’s bag crammed with her notebooks. The flames leapt with a ‘wumph’ of ignition.

  Amanda threw her hands up to protect her face from the fireball’s hot breath, colours dancing across her vision. Flames licked at the walls, the quadbike ablaze. The girl too, fire quickly eating its way up the back of her jacket.

  Reeves’ laugh jumped from Skeebs’ throat to Steph’s with such smoothness that it made the hairs on Amanda neck stand. She could see the man looking out from behind the girl’s eyes. The petrol that ran down her chin where she’d silently, unrelentingly chewed her way through the quad’s fuel line ignited, the laugh jack-knifing into a scream of pain and terror.

  No time to think, Amanda yanked the possessed girl aside sending her tumbling into the boxes and set the table tipping onto its side.

  Already the heat was unbearable. She recoiled, the fire like sunburn across her face, singeing her hair.

  The petrol was burning across the surface of Bridget’s bag, the zip teeth splaying, expanding with the heat. Reeves had doused the inside with petrol too, the contents a bright inferno.

  ‘Fuck. You got to let me go!’ yelled Skeebs, Caleb snapping the buckle’s prong from its hole.

  Amanda grabbed the bag. Trying not to choke on the black smoke, the smells of burnt hair and burning leather, she wrenched it from the flames.

  Caleb had turned his attention to Steph, beating at the girl’s burning tights and jacket, flames leaking out from around his gloved fingers.

  The belt falling from around Skeebs’ wrists, the boy dove across the floor, coming back up with a two-litre bottle of water.

  Seeing him from the corner of his eye, Caleb batted it from his hand. It skidded away, rolling towards the prisoner. ‘No water! Make things worse!’

  The young girl put out, Caleb turned to help Amanda.

  Amanda managed three or four steps away from the quad before the bag split at the seams, the burning contents spilling at her feet. Caleb leapt back, pulling Steph to her feet with one, meaty hand. He kicked away the sleeping bags as the flames began to lick at the nearest tumbled plastic box.

  Skeebs was already stamping at the nearest textbook. Caleb kicked the knife away, the handle smoking, blistered but the blade shining and glinting in the light as it spun into the wall, lost in the material of Caleb’s sleeping bag.

  Amanda dropped the bag with the rest of it as Caleb began working his coat off.

  The room was already filled with foul, black smoke. The icy air was boiling. As they moved, the four of them bounced off one another, against the walls, a confusion of cross-purposes.

  Eyes streaming, Amanda looked at the quad bike, wondered if she should take her coat off to smother the flames there. But the flames were already licking under the w
heel arches, thick, tarry smoke pouring from the tyres.

  Only one way this was going to go.

  She turned her back on the blaze.

  The room was in uproar, the smoke choking the room, everyone in everyone else’s way.

  Steph was staring, horrified, at the disaster, her eyes small and bare without her glasses. She must have lost them in the fall.

  Pushing past the others, Amanda grabbed the girl by her jacket, shouting in her face.

  ‘Where is it?’ Amanda already had her hands in the girl’s pockets, then down her sides, feeling at her hips. ‘Emily, where’s your key? We need to open the door.’

  The girl blinked, comprehension taking its time. ‘It’s…’ the way she twisted her body Amanda knew what she meant. She was already reaching around her, slipping hands into the girl’s back pockets and finding the hard sliver of metal.

  Caleb was on his hands and knees, smothering and patting at the flames of the text books with his coat, fast and methodical, throwing each item aside once it was out and moving to the next.

  Ash drifted around him like snowflakes. The air was full of them, dancing in the heat currents.

  Skeebs was at the big man’s side, slapping at things with his bare hands.

  ‘We need to get the door open!’ That’s what Amanda intended to say but instead she drew in a thick lungful of chemical smoke that grated her lungs and made her cough. The heat was growing, the flames rising, the air tinted a noxious brown.

  She had two keys in her hand now. She worked her way around Caleb, using the man’s back to steady herself. Her aching head was swimming.

  The padlocks rattled with the movement of the train. She didn’t know which key fitted which lock, forcing her to try each in turn. The third came away first. Then the fourth. She threw them aside.

  ‘Come on.’ Her voice was a croak. She coughed again. Skeebs came forward brandishing his key. Amanda took it. The top padlock came away.

  Coughing non-stop now, eyes burning, Amanda turned her attention again to the back of the carriage.

  The whole quad was up now, flames boiling in the under carriage, the chassis and walls clanging as they expanded with the heat. It was fountaining off the ceiling now, smoke rolling and thickening in every direction.