Without a word, Kurt hopped out of the Rover and walked to the passenger side of the car. James was busy looking the other way, and Linda was still snoring on the roof, skin turning a gentle pink. As Kurt approached he was dimly aware of a few more officers walking his way, but he paid them no attention. He pulled open the car door where a man in his fifties was sat. He had a dark crop of hair flecked with silver streaks and deep worry grooves on his forehead. The man turned to see who had opened his door. His mouth fell open and his lips peeled into a wide smile.
“Kurt?”
Kurt’s face turned red in an instant. He felt a kaleidoscope of emotions. Confused. Angry. Upset. Ecstatic. He wanted to hug him, but at the same time, all he could picture was Steve’s face as he plunged a knife into Linda. Into the woman he promised to love and cherish and look after for the rest of her life. Kurt began punching. Lashing out fists at his adopted father’s body. The blows were wild, but there was little damage. Kurt hadn’t realised how weak he’d become. Steve Johnstone shielded his face but allowed the boy his outrage. Surely it was better to let him vent than to restrain a child in front of the cops?
Eventually, Kurt’s puff faded. He felt himself go light for a moment. On the other side of the car, the officers were dragging Steve’s driver. His head hung low so they could no longer see his face, but his defeat was written all across his body. Steven went to step out of the car when two officers appeared behind Kurt. “I’d stay put if I were you.”
“At least leave the keys!” Steve protested, but they were already too far away to pay attention.
Steve fell back into his chair. He looked weary, and the bags under his eyes looked almost bruised. Kurt’s chest rose and fell heavily as he glared at Steve.
“He was my ride,” Steve said to Kurt. “Good guy, was Tim. One in a million. Salt of the earth.”
“You left me”.
Steven shuffled in his seat. “C’mon, Kurt. You know that’s not what it’s like. I—”
“Why?” Fighting back tears, now. Steve looked at Kurt with genuine empathy in his eyes.
“It’s a long story—”
Steve was cut off when James and Karen appeared behind Kurt. “Kurt, we thought we’d lost you. Don’t run off like that. Who’re you talking to?” A flicker of something strange crossed James’ face, before he added, “Steve! Look, Linda. It’s Steve.”
“Hey, Steve!”
“Good to see you’re okay,” James said leaning across to shake his hand.
“Yeah, hi guys. You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had,” Steven smiled, rolling his eyes comically.
“How about we save this reunion for later, eh guys?” an officer called across. “In case you haven’t noticed we’ve got a backup of cars, and you’re blocking their passage.”
They came to an agreement that Steve would travel with them. Although this didn’t please Kurt on the outside, there was a small part of him that felt thankful to have found him. At least a part of his world had survived somehow. Even if he found himself withdrawing as far away from him in the backseat as possible. Those awful images of bloodshed in his head every time he looked at Steve’s worn face. The police reluctantly agreed to move Tim’s Ford to clear the way for cars behind, which unfortunately meant that Kurt, Linda, Steven, and James moved back a few places in line, as cars came to fill the missing spot.
Another ferry came and went.
“Can’t believe that Tim caught it,” Steven mumbled into his hand a while later. “I had my suspicions of course but never believed that it’d be true. He almost had me with ‘varicose veins’, but who wears a sweater in this heat?”
James looked up at his rearview. “I guess we’ve all got to be wary at the moment. No one really knows what’s going on. You can’t trust anyone.”
Another uncomfortable silence.
“How come you’re here?” Linda said, turning to the back seats. Kurt pretended not to be interested and stared out the window at a white Chevrolet. The windows were wound, but Kurt could just make out the two women arguing inside. A baby cried from the backseat of the car.
“I was at work when the news came,” Steven said. “We had an alert come over the tannoy about an explosion at the reenactment field, and my first thought was of Kurt. Of being terrified that you were there.” He looked hopefully over at Kurt but got no response. “I wanted to run then and there from work to go and find out if you were okay. I even started running in the opposite direction when I left my building to go get my car.
“But Tim pulled me back and dragged me away. We saw the chemical, the cloud – whatever it was – as a large wall and I knew then that it was a ‘run now and explain later’ situation, and then Tim hit the pedal to the metal and we fled.”
The words seemed to fall off Kurt like water off porcelain. Since he had known Steve he had never had him down as a coward, as someone that would just run. Much less a liar. When they had first arrived at Steve and Linda’s, Kurt actually thought that he was the epitome of a modern man. The fridge was always stocked with beers, at the end of a hard day of work he’d arrive home in his pristine suit, kick off his shoes and Linda would make him comfortable, and he was often found on weekends screaming at the TV when the NHL season was on. He seemed to enjoy Kurt accompanying him in that last one…
But was that all just a mask? The tired man sat next to him now bore no resemblance to that. His shirt was dark with stains, his eyes seemed to droop. Could he be telling the truth? Kurt supposed anything was possible now. But what if it was all just a cover up, a clever alibi that helped Steve get away with the fact he’d had to murder his wife in self-defence?
Kurt glared out the window, letting his anger stew.
A woman stepped out of the Chevrolet next to them, and slammed the door shut, waving her hand animatedly. In the fraction of time before the door closed, the baby’s cries from the back seat were overwhelming.
“You should know that I didn’t want to leave. You should know that I’d never leave you if I had a choice,” Steve tried to plea.
Kurt wasn’t listening. He was watching the woman skirt the car to her friend’s window. Dark trails of eye makeup lined her wet cheeks.
“Me and Linda fought hard to get you, Kurt. We wanted you, that’s all there is to it. We’re family now, and the minute this is all over, the three of us can…” Steve continued, oblivious to the action outside. As he recalled the name of his wife his memory seemed to jog, as if only just realising what he had said. “Wait… where is Linda? Is she with you? Is she okay?”
Karen and James exchanged looks that spoke more than needed to be said.
“Oh God…” Steven wept.
The woman slapped the glass windows. On her shoulder blade was an aborigine-style tattoo of a swan that stuck its neck out from under the strap of a black tank top. Her shapely legs threaded through denim shorts and her wrist was adorned with a dozen silver bangles that jingled as she slapped the glass again.
“What the hell?” Karen mumbled.
“Get out. Come on, Lisa. Get the fuck out the car!” The tank top lady tried the handle, but Lisa had locked it from inside. A rush of panic flew across tank top lady’s face as she realised that her baby was locked in there too. She looked around frantically, found a rock, and whacked it against the glass where a tiny web of cracks appeared. Lisa sat in her chair, shoulders slumped, head down as her friend threw the rock against the window again. “Lisa, please!”
A few police peeled off from the barrier and began to walk over to them, one hand on their sidearm. All eyes turned to the raucous and a strange quiet passed. The woman in the tank top reached a state of hysteria, tears streaking down her face as panic gripped her. Up ahead Kurt saw a couple of officers patching their radios.
By the time tank top lady had smashed the rock for the fifth time, the window looked like a desert floor in a drought. Lisa was all but gone from view. Then, with a final scream, she punched a fist through, blood scratching lines down her arm, and the glass fell lik
e rain. Tank top lady hitched up the lock, not minding that her fist had made contact with Lisa’s face, and she ran to her baby’s door where she began unbuckling him furiously, struggling as her nerves shook her and the blood slickened her grip, red seeping onto the whites of the infant’s clothes.
“What’s the ruckus ma’am?” It was the voice of the woman cop that Kurt had heard not long after they first arrived. “Is your friend okay?”
Tank top lady didn’t hear him, though. She was preoccupied with her baby. As she threw buckles and blankets to reach the screaming tot, she glanced at the slumped woman in front.
“Ma’am?” the officer said, approaching the front of the car.
Lisa looked up in the direction of the voice, eyes almost red, teeth bared, foam gathered in the corners of her smiling lips.
The cop withdrew. “We’ve got a live one!” she shouted back at her crew. She pulled her gun from her hip and trained its sight on Lisa who had begun straining in her seat. Her belt locked in position and she screeched, tendons pushing out of her neck where the dark veins were now devilishly apparent.
Tank top lady finally laughed with triumph as she extracted the baby from the seat, then, when she saw the cop with the gun aimed at her friend, took a deep breath in and began running towards her. “Nooooo!”
But it was too late. Tank top lady spooked the cop, causing an involuntary spasm to squeeze her finger tight on the trigger. Kurt watched almost as in slow motion as the cop’s face changed from anger to surprise. The bullet was a blur as it bored its way into Lisa’s skull, causing her head to explode like an avocado in a microwave. Sprays of tissue, bone, and blood decorated the interior of the car, some splashing onto the cop’s uniform as her eyes widened. Tank top lady stumbled with her own momentum and crashed into the side of Kurt’s car with a thud, clutching the baby tight to her chest. The baby’s screams stopped momentarily and Kurt wondered if it was okay.
Those gathered around the jetty were silent. All eyes on the cop. Even the few officers that had peeled off to provide assistance had stopped in their tracks when the shot fired, sounding like a thunderclap that bounced and rolled off the rising hill. The ferry that was coasting its way silently to the dock seemed forgotten in that moment.
The cop looked around at the hundreds of eyes on her. She opened her mouth as if to speak when suddenly she saw those standing outside their cars clap their hands to their ears. The sound reached the cop a second after, then Kurt, safe inside his car, also heard it. The screeching of a hundred dying animals in a cacophonous rage.
One head turned and pointed to the hill behind them. Then another, until the woman cop, tank top lady, Lisa, and the baby were no longer a thought.
Kurt heard a voice call from a car nearby. “Run!”
All eyes turned to the hilltop. Silhouetted against the golden watercolours of the sun, a line of ferals ran towards the amassed cars.
The cop looked at her gun, then to the dark mass of ferals, speeding towards the crowd.
17
“Maurice Parker? Can’t say he rings any bells.” Maddie held the card to the light, angling the glare away from the worn photo on the ID. “Rather dashing in his own way.”
“Should’ve seen him the way I did. No way you’d be saying that now,” Lucas said, nudging towards the off-ramp with some speed.
“Who is he?”
“An Aegis bod. Used to be some kind of janitor. I remember seeing his face a couple times at the end of the day once we’d finished in the labs.”
“Wouldn’t that have been a bit late at night for a janitor? I don’t remember ever leaving before 2am.”
Lucas remembered it well. The late nights with the Reviver’s at the Aegis Science and Advancement Facility. Those had been some of the happiest days of his life. The days he had found the family that he had never really found in his own. Lucas, Maddie, Fred, Ani, Lou, and Ira. Reviver’s for life; revive us to life. Breaking down the barriers of modern thinking, one filthy molecule at a time.
That had been years ago. When Lucas had no greys and he actually gave a damn about his appearance. When Maddie and Fred were in their honeymoon phase. Ira had been all smiles and promise. The Spice Girls were killing it on the radio, and the internet had made life spin at the speed of light. In its way, life had been simpler then. Just six friends working together after hours to create the unthinkable. Working at the Aegis facility by day, moonlighting as scientific revolutionaries, outside all boundaries of the little ‘A’ and its electrons.
Who would’ve thought that their discovery would be the very thing that broke them all apart?
Lucas sped through red lights, aware that there was no one else on the road around to tell him otherwise.
“So what’s an Aegis janitor doing blowing up an historic field with a modded form of RevitaGo?”
“I’m not exactly sure. How many people have you told about the formula since we all went our own ways?”
Maddie looked offended. “Erm… none. How the hell do you explain that kind of thing to a person? ‘So, what do you do for a living, Miss Mullins?’, ‘Oh, I work in cellular biology and develop life-enhancing formulas for a multi-national organisation’, ‘Hey, that sounds cool, made anything fun?’, ‘Why sure, we’ve discovered another layer of reality that you can only access once your heart has clinically stopped.”
She rolled her eyes and looked out the window.
“What about Fred?”
“Fred? No. He wouldn’t tell a soul, I’m sure of it. Count him out.”
“Maddie…”
“Count. Him. Out.”
Lucas let it go – for now. The road grew trickier. He weaved around cars that had veered into poles and traffic signs, each one with a door wide open, or some windows smashed. Now and then there were bodies nearby, left to lie on the floor in a pool of their own blood. Some sported the telltale veins. Whereas with others it was hard to tell. Once or twice Maddie pointed out a car that was still rocking on its axis from a feral that had found themselves locked inside and was thrashing around looking for any sign of escape. Its screech could still be heard as they roared past.
“Gosh, it’s awful,” she said, placing a hand over her mouth.
They arrived at a small cul-de-sac some time later. Lucas parked up and led Maddie towards a small, terraced house that looked so run down that it was hard to believe anyone could be living in it. The front lawn was waist high, weeds had cracked the slabs that led to the front door, and the windows were so grimy that you could only see vague shapes of the contents inside.
“’Scuse the mess. It’s been a while since I’ve been home.”
The inside of the house was tidy at least, if not a little dusty. Lucas walked to the end of the hallway to where there was a door under the stairs. He thumbed a code on a silver panel, opened the door, flicked a light switch and indicated for Maddie to go first.
“M’lady.”
“Oh, I see. No drink, no necking, just get in the house and lock me up in the basement?” she grinned, ducking her head and following a flight of stairs beneath the house.
Maddie hadn’t been to Lucas’ house before, and so she wasn’t really sure what to expect. When she reached the bottom of the stone stairs she looked around what looked to be a dentists’ room. The walls were a sterile white. There was a comfy looking chair that reclined, next to a tray of instruments neatly arranged in rows. Along two of the walls were large cupboards with large labels. There was even a fish tank on one worktop, thick with green slime.
“And they say you should never take your work home,” Maddie mumbled.
If Lucas heard, he made no sign. He sidled past Maddie, opened a cupboard on the far side of the room and pulled out a leather pouch. Embossed on the front was the Aegis ‘A’.
“Is that what I think it is?” Maddie said, taking a seat in the chair and spinning to face Lucas.
He lay the pouch on top of the tray of instruments, and unfolded it to reveal two syringes held by a thi
ck band of elasticated material. Inside one was a bright blue liquid. The other was a golden yellow.
“Yep. RevitaGo, as we dreamed it. Figured it would at least be handy to have the original formula on hand if we’re going to figure this shit out.” He drew the yellow needle from the case and studied it in the light.
“What do you think they did to it, Luke?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the stuff that came from Williamsburg… it was clearly tampered with. No Reviver ever turned feral and forgot who they were. The only thing that’s even vaguely similar is… well… the marks.”
Maddie pulled down the neck of her top to reveal her sternum, revealing the same pinprick of black and the network of black veins as Lucas. Only, where Lucas’ spread a few inches from the centre, Maddie’s were no more than a couple centimetres.
“I think that’s what we’re going to have to find out,” Lucas said, flicking the needle and watching a drop slide from its tip.
Maddie watched with curiosity. “Luke?”
“Yeah?”
“We promised.”
“Promised?”
“Yeah. Promised we’d never go back there. To the Deadspace. You haven’t, have you?”
He lowered the needle and met Maddie’s eyes, seeing genuine concern. “Oh, no,” he placed the needle back in the pouch, pocketed it. “No, no. I guess I just wanted to keep a little something of our time together.”
“An exact copy of our lab?”
“We all have our burdens.”
Truth was Lucas had wanted to do more. To continue working on the RevitaGo formula. He remembered buying the house for its basement space. The realtor trying to sell him on the size of the bedrooms and the neighbourhood. Not realising that the secret to the sale lay in the door under the stairs. A week after Lucas had moved in, the rest of the house was still bare (minus the mattress on the bedroom floor), but the lab was good to go. Lucas wiled away hours beneath the house, studying the formula in the pouch, lying in the chair, the needle only inches away from his sternum. Gritting his teeth. Contemplating going back there to find him. Flashes of Ira’s cold, pale face on a gurney before Sammi covered him with a sheet. The tears. The arguments. The divide. Lucas’ hand shaking from the cocktail of emotions fighting inside him.
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