by Vince Vogel
“It’s chained,” one of the boys announced as they checked the sliding door they’d been driven in through.
“He went ’round the corner,” Tyler said.
He carried his friend around said corner and his heart fluttered when he spotted the sunshine shining in through a door at the very end of the building. He could see grass and a tree out there and they represented salvation. Some of the other boys began running as fast as they could for it. Tyler watched them with a smiling face as they passed him.
But the smile dropped instantly.
A shadow blocked out the sunshine of the door and made the boys at the front skid to a stop. Brian Parkes stood wearing a rubber gas mask. A shoot of thick white shot from something in his hand and consumed them in a cloud, so that Tyler couldn’t see anything of his friends except for the white fog.
“No.” He panicked as the shadow emerged from the cloud and dropped Danny. He was no longer the hero. Tyler ran with the other remaining boys back towards the chained door. It was all they could think of, and when they hit the door and grasped at the thick chain, the boys were blindly panicking and screaming. A loud angry hiss and the gas was covering them. Tyler choked until he could no longer feel the chain in his hands.
109
They entered a thick wall of rain the second they’d escaped the thick wall of media hounds. Above, they were covered by two helicopters that looped over the buildings while they sped through the city in a huge convoy. The rain pelted them like drumming fingers and thunder tore through the atmosphere, waking the world up as the weather attempted to wash the smear of the city away.
At Ponders End, Kline sent them on to Buckhurst Hill, the residential streets giving way to countryside, the place looking like a blur of watercolor underneath the deluge, the vans splashing through the drenched lanes. From there, it was Stapleford Tawney, a nowhere village off of Epping. Then it was a zigzag across to Theydon Bois; more nowhere villages surrounded by drenched woodland and puddle-filled roads, thatched-roof pubs living like fleas on the outer fur of the big city. Then it was across to Toots Hill and David Burke began to feel something familiar in their destination, moving forward into the front so he could spy out of the windscreen and recognizing their surroundings.
“He’s taking us to Cracknel Farm,” he said.
Kline turned to him with a knowing look.
“You spoiled the surprise.”
“He’s taking us to the tree,” David went on, ignoring the bitter face of the old man, the prosthetic eye facing him and glinting dully in the light. “The one I told you about. Mum must have told Brian about it.”
Alice nodded. She lifted the radio to her lips and said, “Take us to Cracknel Farm. Over.”
110
At the top of a tall vale, overlooking segregated squares of hilly farmland that resembled the yellow, green and brown squares of a patchwork quilt, stood the gray remains of an oak tree which had been struck by lightning long ago and was now no more than a scraggly, hollowed out stump. A thin crack of gray road cut through the land, bordered by tall verges of grass. As they drove up to it, the clouds appeared to part around them and they were drenched in sunlight, the wet road sparkling like the back of a snake.
The convoy parked, armed response the first to get out, liaising on their radios with the helicopter team while they took positions. The tree stump stood a short way from the road along a path that split two fields of plowed land. In the air, a helicopter hovered over them, a police sniper on board, keeping an eye on the area. Other helicopters moved about the air, checking the place with infrared, several lines of nearby bushes and trees looking like perfect hiding places. But the rain made the ground wet and cold, so the infrared had little to pick up. Essentially, the whole sector was cut off and cordoned by police, a giant net surrounding them. If Parkes was here, they were confident they’d catch him.
“What now?” Alice asked Kline as they sat in the back of the van.
“We get out. I’m to stand with Jack and David halfway between the road and the tree. He said we must be together. Especially Jack.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Jack muttered. “Are we still playing this game?”
He’d turned his frowning face on Alice.
“Yes,” she said bluntly. Then, turning back to Kline, she asked, “Then what?”
“There’s something buried at the base of the tree. A box. You’ve got to find it. Then you’ll see.”
“We didn’t bring shovels,” Alice pointed out.
“It ain’t deep. He said you can reach it with your hands. He’s marked the bark where it is.”
Alice shook her head and frowned at the old man, his good eye looking as dead as the other.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll have them check it first.”
She spoke into the radio to the dog unit. They then waited in the van while they checked the site.
“Found a symbol etched into the bark,” came over the radio.
“What does it look like?”
“Something like a target.”
“A diamond with a cross?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s him.”
They waited a while and it soon came back that the dog smelled nothing suspect under the soil, essentially no explosive material. They then got word that tactical had finished their sweep of the area and it was deemed relatively safe to leave the van.
Jack roughly grabbed ahold of Kline’s scruff, almost choking him when he lifted the old man.
“Please, Jack,” Alice said to him, taking hold of his arm.
He turned to her, still wearing the hateful expression he’d reserved for the prisoner.
Alice and David left the van first. Then Jack got out, holding Kline. The latter took some time getting his old legs down the back steps and Jack hurried him so roughly that he almost fell. When he steadied himself, his feet touching free earth for the first time in twenty-eight years, the old man snuffed in the air through wide nostrils. Because of the earlier rain, the dirt smelled fresh and Kline closed his eyes and gave a joyous smile. A smile which piqued Jack all the more.
“Man, freedom smells good,” the old man said blissfully.
“Don’t get used to it,” Jack snapped back.
Kline opened his eyes and turned to Alice.
“You dig it up,” he said.
“Why her?” Jack wanted to know.
“Because I’m to stand with you and David. Just the three of us.”
“No. I’ll dig for the box.”
“That ain’t the way he wants it.”
Jack gritted his teeth and gazed around himself. They were surrounded on all sides by plowed fields; nothing but mud, the odd tree and grass verges for as far as the eye could see. The tree stump looked like a haggard, old ghost standing watch at the top of the hill, wide horizontal branches jutting out of its sides and giving it the impression that it had been crucified.
“He’s here somewhere,” Jack said to no one in particular.
“Infrared haven’t picked anything up,” Alice said.
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Let’s just do as he says and get this over.”
“Don’t let your boy down,” Kline put forward.
Jack turned viciously on him, grabbed the old man by the throat and pressed him up against the back door of the van.
“I promise you, I’ll kill you myself,” Jack sneered into the old man’s indifferent face.
Alice and David grabbed ahold of him, dragging him off.
“Just shut up,” Alice almost spat at Kline. “I don’t want to hear another word from you.”
They moved from the van. There was twenty meters between the road and the tree. They stepped through a well trodden gap in the grass verge and then clambered across the muddy field. Armed police, speaking constantly into their radios, walked on either side of them, forming a guard around the two detectives, Robert Kline and David Burke. In the air, the helicopter remained hovering over
them, the sniper on board at full alert, the other helicopters circling the edges of the fields.
Alice marched across the mud to the tree.
“We’re to stop here,” Kline said when they were halfway across. The three men stopped and Kline turned to Alice and told her to continue to the tree. “Should only be about a foot down.”
While Jack, Kline and David stood in the center of the field, Alice went on to the tree. She quickly spotted the symbol, the dog team having marked it more clearly, and got down on her hands and knees, removing the sodden earth in clumps.
“What’s down there?” Jack asked Kline, his eyes peeled on Alice as she dug with her hands.
“Nothin’ dangerous,” the prisoner answered. “Just the truth, he said. But that’s not all. He wants me to tell you a story, Jack.”
Turning to face Kline with a frown, Jack said, “What?”
“Not exactly a story,” the old man went on. “More a confession. He never told me why, but he was adamant you should hear it from me.”
“What story?”
“The first time I ever raped someone.”
Jack’s frown grew in intensity and the anger which had hold of him jangled his bones and made every cell judder.
“I was seventeen,” the old man began saying, and though Jack hated his voice and felt like using his fist to stop it, an inner curiosity made him instead stand and listen.
The pictures in the basement, the detective couldn’t help thinking.
“I’d been booted outta my place,” the old man was saying, his spiteful voice mesmerizing Jack, “’cos I’d hit my old man over him trying to throttle me one night when he came back drunk and found me in bed with his wife, my own mother. So I was livin’ in some shitty little fleapit attic.” Jack’s whole body froze. The anger evaporated and was replaced with a cold fear that unsettled his very soul. “I was relyin’ on charity to eat.”
“What is this?” David Burke asked.
“I’m supposed to tell him the whole story, son,” Kline said, turning to David. “That’s what your brother told me. Said I was to tell Jack Sheridan about my first ever rape.”
Jack was gazing beyond Kline at Alice. His face had the look of an orphaned child who expects his mother to come but knows she won’t.
“What you got?” he called to his colleague.
“Mud,” she shouted back.
“I used to go to this soup kitchen at a church,” Kline was saying in the background. “There was a nun what worked there. She was the kindest woman I ever met.”
Jack turned sharply back to Kline, a look of abject horror on his face. A part of him wanted to throttle the old man and stomp him into the mud. But the child in Jack could do nothing. He was completely at the will of the old man’s words. For he knew the tale so well.
“Then I got sick in the head. I woke up one mornin’ an’ couldn’t get outta bed. I was deeply miserable and made a pact with myself not to leave that bed until they carried my corpse from it.”
“It would have done so many people a favor,” David Burke remarked with seething vitriol.
“Then you wouldn’t’ve been here,” Kline retorted. “Anyway, gettin’ back to things. I were set on dyin’ when there was knock on the door. There she was. The little nun. She brought me food an’ over the days, she’d visit me. Feed me. Talk to me. Pray for me. Until one day, the Devil got me and I wanted more from her. So I took ahold o’ her an’ she pulled back. ‘I’m married to Christ,’ she says.”
“Please, stop,” Jack murmured pitifully, his face creasing into despair.
Kline’s face had softened in the minute he’d spoken his tale, giving off the impression that he was a different man. One who regretted this act he was describing. Even his eyes had become buried under thick tears.
“You know,” he went on in a trembling voice, “she closed her eyes and prayed the whole time it happened. I could hear her whisperin’ away. But she wasn’t prayin’ for herself. No; she was prayin’ for me.” He gazed at Jack with a sad face and the latter stood frozen. “Afterwards, I climbed in bed and couldn’t even turn over to face her. As she left the room, she said she forgave me. That I was a sinner that needed help. That I should seek God and trust in him to guide me. Then she left the room. Hell! she never even went to no one about it.”
“Why?” Jack sobbed.
“What does it mean?” Kline asked. “Why did he want you to know that?”
At the tree stump, Alice’s hands finally hit something metallic. She pulled the earth from it and found a metal money box. It was unlocked so she easily opened it. Inside was an envelope wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag. It had Jack written on it.
She pulled it out and opened it. There was a lock of black hair and a lock of gray alongside a letter. It was from some American genetics company. Alice was confused. She read the note and the confusion grew inside of her, her face twisting with bewilderment as she read on.
Dear sir,
We are writing to inform you that our tests have discovered that yes, the two samples are of a closely related pair, possibly father and son.
It went on to confirm that the owner of sample A and sample B were related closely and gave an outlay of the complete results and genetic breakdown of both samples.
She didn’t get it. Who did the samples belong to? David Burke and Robert Kline?
Alice took the box and began walking back to them. But as she did, the air burst and there was a flash of bright light and the sky was filled with raining dirt. She was on the ground, face down with her chest pressing the box into the mud. More explosions, sharp light and the air filled with dirt. Her ears rang with a high pitch siren and she glanced about, watching men dive for cover as the field burst around them.
Jack was on the deck with Kline and David.
“What was her name?” Jack hissed at Kline as they lay flat.
Kline gazed at him. He looked scared.
“Sister Rosy,” he said. “I never knew her surname.”
Jack closed his eyes and cried out in such a way that it sounded like a dying wolf howling into the last of the light. He pressed his face to the mud and clenched his fists into it as the world went mad around him.
“She was your ma, weren’t she?” Kline inquired.
David Burke, from where he lay, widened his eyes.
“Shut up,” Jack mumbled. “Please, just shut up.”
“That makes you my boy.”
Jack’s eyelids burst open. The look of rabid anger was doing battle with the supreme sadness that also rocked the detective’s body.
“Please, Robert,” he said in an exhausted voice. “Don’t say anything else.”
The explosions ended. They had been relatively harmless, amateur devices set up in a circle around them to cause maximum disorientation. Once they died down, armed response stood up and began scanning the area through the sights on their rifles. It was as they did that the first zip was heard. It caught an armed officer in the neck and he keeled over onto his back, a terrible hissing, gurgling sound emanating from him before his body went limp.
Some of the men sent out lines of bullets into the barren fields.
“Hold your fire,” the sergeant in charge cried out. “Only when we have eyes.”
“We’ve got nothing up here,” the helicopter crew said over their earpieces. “Not on the infrared. Not on sight.”
“Fan out,” the sergeant called.
They began spreading out in a circle, unsure where the shot came from. Zip! Another officer was hit in the chest.
“Man down,” they cried.
“It’s out there,” someone screamed, pointing into the vacant mud of a field.
From the floor, Alice watched the field with eagle eyes. He had to be somewhere. Zip! The dirt in front of her exploded and she felt the heat of the bullet as it burrowed itself into the dirt inches away from her nose.
“Alice!” Jack cried out, getting up from the ground.
“Don’t be stupid,
” Kline cried out after him.
Jack ran to Alice and threw himself over her as another bullet hit the ground by her right leg, grazing her thigh like a kiss of fire. Jack didn’t see the source of the bullet, but he saw which direction it had come from. When he landed his whole body on top of her, he signaled to the armed men, pointing off into the field further down the hill.
“What are you doing?” Alice complained when he was over her.
“He won’t shoot me,” Jack said to her. “He wants to destroy me and for that, he’ll leave me alive.”
“Destroy you how?”
“What was in the box?”
“The results of a DNA test.”
“It was me and Kline,” he said before rolling off, lifting her and positioning himself so that she was protected from the side of the hill the bullets were flying from. He marched her to the tree stump and left her there. “Stay here,” he said.
“No, Jack!” she cried as he ran off.
An armed policeman was hit in the cheek as Jack came to him. He was dead before he hit the dirt. Jack crossed himself and then took the man’s assault rifle from his grasp.
“Get up!” he snapped at Kline, grabbing hold of the man by the scruff of the neck.
Kline lifted himself up willingly.
“What’s happening?” David Burke asked from the ground.
“Just stay there,” Jack said. “I’m gonna end this.”
They were sure where the fire was coming from now. About three hundred meters across the vale was a plowed field. The shots were emerging from the dirt; Brian Parkes had buried himself. The helicopter had attempted to get closer, but a shot came out and sparked off the side of the craft, forcing it to bank away and find a position further on.
Jack began marching towards the position with Kline, firing into the dirt across the way. Nevertheless, the assault rifle didn’t have the range. The bullets never made it there in a straight line, dipping by the time they were close, so that Jack had to adjust the aim accordingly. The mud around the hidden shooter burst apart, but no shot made it close enough and only Jack was able to advance as the others had had to take cover behind anything they could.
