by Vince Vogel
“So this was all for me,” Jack grunted as they marched across the mud, bullets skimming the air close by.
“I think it was for all of us,” Robert Kline replied, stumbling along the mud, his cuffed hands out front.
“You raped my mum.”
Jack was shaking his head, trying to wake up. Someone was calling his name from behind and he guessed it was Alice. The explosions had ceased altogether now. Men lay around, dead or dying. Others crouched behind vehicles, David Burke face down in the dirt, Alice behind the stump. Jack’s tearstained eyes concentrated on the patch of mud the shots came from. One headed close by. Kline’s arm was ripped out of Jack’s grip. He turned to see the old man kneeling over in the mud. Another shot zipped out and struck the old man at the base of the back.
“Ugh!” he groaned and Jack found himself down on the ground, cradling him. He’d first been shot in the shoulder, the wound open to the bone. Jack’s head was filled with a burst dam rush of confusing, contradictory thoughts and feelings, one of those being a bleak sadness that this old man would die before he had a chance to ask him more questions.
Jack stood up and aimed the rifle on the spot, holding it tight to his shoulder and repeating his army training as though it were yesterday and not thirty-five years ago. He unleashed a volley of fire into the mud, charging at Parkes with gritted teeth until he realized the gun was only clicking in his arms. He threw it onto the ground and continued to run, now only twenty meters away from Brian Parkes. A square of mud lifted up into the sun—a hatch—dirt running down it. Jack heard the wasplike roar of a motocross bike and the next thing, it was leaping out with Brian Parkes on its back.
The bike twisted along the mud and flew off into the distance. Jack was standing over a trench. A four-by-four meter hole carved out of the ground and patched with bracing at the edges. It had been covered in enough mud to evade the infrared. He watched the sky as the helicopter hovered over the bike in the distance.
He went back to Kline.
The old man was almost dead when Jack reached him. An armed response officer came running over with a medical bag, but it looked hopeless. The second bullet had hit vital organs and Kline’s fingers were cold when Jack took his hand as the officer checked the wound, shaking his head at Jack.
“He never meant to let me live, did he?” the old man asked as Jack gazed down with a mixture of horror and sadness on his face.
“No. I think he intended to kill you and leave me and David with what was left.”
“He’s like that because of me.”
“In some ways, yes. But not in the way you think.”
Kline shook with a sudden pain and his fingers squeezed Jack’s.
“I’m sorry,” he said, a look of terror taking over his countenance now that he was on the cusp of the end. “Tell David that, too. I’ve lived a wasted life and been nothin’ but a bastard. I don’t feel stuff, see. Not inside like normal people. I just never felt nothin’…” He was crying and babbling, Jack watching the last of the color leave his face. “I felt sorry ’bout your mum. Honest. It was one of the only times I felt somethin’. That an’ when the boy spoke to me on the phone an’ said I was his dad. I felt some joy in me, then. Gave me reason to live. ’Part from that, I never… I never felt nothin… not in…”
His good eye went as blank as the other and he stopped moving, the hand gradually releasing Jack’s.
The detective looked up at the sky and said aloud, “Forgive him, Lord. For he is a sinner.”
The air moved rapidly around them, almost blowing Jack sideways off his knees. He turned sharply to see a helicopter landing behind with Alice hanging out.
“Come on,” she cried out. “We know where he’s heading.”
Jack got up from the dirt, having closed the dead man’s eyes, and ran to the chopper. As he settled himself into his seat, the craft lifted from the ground and he gazed down at the diminishing body of Robert Kline. When it was no longer in sight, he looked out at the racing fields that stretched out beneath them.
A hand touched his own and Jack turned.
“I’m so sorry, Jack,” Alice said to him. “I don’t understand how it could have happened.”
“My mother was raped,” he told her blankly, she being only the fifth person he’d ever told. “That’s how I was conceived. Robert Kline, as it turns out, was her rapist.”
“Oh, Jack.”
“Please, Alice, can we just get to my grandson?”
“Sure.”
A new fear contracted inside Jack when he saw smoke rising into the sky from a tree line up ahead.
“I’m sure he’s okay,” Alice said, but Jack didn’t hear her over the chopper.
The smoke was rising out of a circle of oak trees, and as they got closer, Jack saw the orange flames roaring in the center. A compound made of breeze blocks with a corrugated iron roof was trapped inside a fireball.
“Please, God,” Jack whispered in despair.
The other chopper, which was following Parkes, was hovering a little further ahead. They couldn’t get too close to the rising flames, so the chopper began descending about fifty feet away from the fire at the edge of the trees.
While Jack gazed at the flames in horror, Alice was busy on the radio. She was crying into it and then holding it to her ear to hear the reply, the sounds of the choppers and the fire filling the air.
“Repeat,” she shouted. “Are you sure, George?”
Jack was oblivious, leaning against the door of the chopper, his eyes on the building. He was watching the figure of Parkes as he dumped the bike and walked towards the flames.
When the chopper was a meter from the ground, Jack leapt out and began running towards Brian Parkes. Alice spotted it too late and sprung across the chopper trying to grab him.
“Jack, don’t,” she cried after him, “he’s…”
But he didn’t hear the rest. He was running at Parkes, who walked casually towards the flames, the heat becoming more and more intense until the air was thick and burned his skin.
“Brian!” he shouted.
The other man stopped, turned over his shoulder and gave Jack a blank look, before turning back around and continuing on. Jack threw himself forward and rugby tackled Parkes onto the ground, the other man giving in and letting himself be pinned.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said in a hollow voice, “death or imprisonment. I would have preferred to have joined your grandson in death, but I suppose I can wait. There’ll be ample opportunity for it.”
“Whe… wha… where is he?”
“In there. They all are. David’s family and your grandson and his friends.”
“No no no no NO!” Jack cried out, glancing up at the flames with a terribly broken face, the raging fire reflecting in his tear-filled eyes. “Why?”
“Because I’m like our father: I don’t feel anything. Didn’t you read my letters? I wanted you to. I’ve watched you for so long, Jack. Watched you try to be a good man and end up being a bad one. Flawed to the end. It’s like you’ve been asleep. Asleep to yourself. Well, you’re awake now.”
“I could have helped you,” Jack cried down at him. “You could have come to me.”
“What makes you think I ever wanted help?”
Jack was caught in utter desolation. Glancing between Parkes and the flames. He could hear Alice and the others running up behind. She’d been calling his name for some time, but it was an echo from another world. He spotted the glint of the magnum poking out of Parkes’ jacket. He snatched it out.
“That’s right,” Parkes said.
Jack emptied the chambers, placed two bullets back in, snapped it shut and gave the barrel a spin.
“No, Jack!” Alice screamed, coming to a halt behind them with three armed police on either side. Jack turned frantic eyes on her before turning back to Parkes, placing the gun to his own head and grinning down at the other man.
“No!” Alice screamed as the barrel turned and the hammer fell.
>
Jack opened his eyes.
“Drop the weapon!” the armed men cried out.
“He’s still there,” Jack said like a smiling madman, his mind broken. “Still watching over me.”
Jack shoved the gun between Parkes’ teeth, chipping the edge of one as he rammed it into the man’s throat, eyes bulging up at him.
“Tyler’s alive!” a voice screamed at him from somewhere else. “He's alive!” The voice had been saying it for some time, but he’d ignored it, trapped in the red mist. The barrel clicked, Parkes shaking now, the body trembling between Jack’s thighs.
“You feel something now, don’t you?” Jack hissed at him.
“Please, Jack,” Alice cried out. “He’s alive. Tyler’s alive. George Lange got to them minutes ago. Got them out of the fire.”
But Jack was deaf. Senseless now. Stuck in the maddest of moments. He raised the gun to his temple and grinned at the world.
BANG!
111
Tyler watched an ambulance rush past with its sirens blaring and its motor roaring. He sat up on a stretcher, gazing out the back doors of another ambulance, an oxygen mask over his face and a blanket over his shoulders. It was parked down a country lane a mile from the fire. In the background, smoke billowed out from the tops of trees, the air filled with the sounds of sirens.
Tyler and the others had only just woken up, having been unconscious when they were pulled out of the burning building by George Lange. He and two other detectives had arrived not long after Brian Parkes had left. This was what DI Newman had sent Lange and the others out on: looking for the boys around Cracknel Farm, for Alice had a hunch that this was where Kline would take them, and therefore the area Parkes would be keeping his hostages. Lange and the others had already checked four other possible buildings in the area when they came across the smoking farm shed.
George Lange came to a stop at the back of the ambulance and Tyler watched him as he spoke on a radio.
“Uh huh,” Lange said, his face going grave and turning Tyler’s stomach to ice.
The nine-year-old sensed something bad had happened by the look on Lange’s face. Earlier, when he’d asked about his granddad, Lange had promised him that Jack would be there shortly. But somewhere inside, Tyler had felt less sure that he would see his grandfather so soon.
Lange got off the radio and came into the ambulance with an ominous expression.
“Where is he?” Tyler asked, his voice muffled by the mask.
Lange crouched beside him with a solemn face.
“He’s been hurt,” he said softly.
“No,” the boy cried, his eyes filling with tears.
“He’s on his way to hospital.”
“What happened to him?”
“All I know is he was hurt, but he’s still alive.”
“Granddad,” Tyler wept as he removed the mask from his face and attempted to get down from the bed he sat in, his limbs heavy from the sedative that he’d inhaled earlier.
Lange placed a gentle hand on his chest and the boy stopped, turning his terrified face on the detective constable.
“You need to stay here,” Lange told him. “Your granddad’s already on his way to hospital.”
“Is he gonna die?”
“No.” Though the detective wasn’t sure. Alice had said he’d been shot in the head. That was all. Sounded pretty bad, but all Lange could offer the boy was hope. “He’s only hurt. You’ll get to see him soon enough.”
Lange’s radio crackled and he left the ambulance, telling a paramedic to keep an eye on the boy. Further along the line of ambulances, David Burke sat with Catherine and Micky, the three of them holding onto each other.
“I’m so sorry,” David was saying, an arm around each of his family.
“You could have never known,” Catherine sobbed through her oxygen mask.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No. Only threatened to.”
David turned to Micky for assurance that they hadn’t been hurt and the teen shook his head.
“I’ll never let you go again,” David Burke said as he huddled them into him.
112
He stood in the doorway of their old flat, the one he’d grown up in. His mother sat in a frayed armchair by the window, watching the birds outside. Something made her turn to him and smile.
“Come in, boy,” she said in her Irish accent, the soft voice filling him with light.
Jack walked into the room and took a seat on the arm of her chair. She laid a soft hand on his leg and smiled up to him.
“I met him,” Jack told her.
Her smile bent—summer’s end—and she looked away, catching a tear with her fingers as it slid down her cheek.
“How is he?”
“He never got better.”
“Another for the Devil, then. We’re losing so many souls these days.”
“We always have.”
They drifted into silence. Jack followed his mother’s gaze out the window. He expected to see the birds in the tree, but there was nothing out there. Only a thick fog that clung to the window pane. Nevertheless, his mother’s eyes appeared to penetrate through it, see something within that was deeply important to her. She used to watch the birds, delight in their play. A smile appeared at the edge of her lips and Jack got the impression that she saw something out there that gave her the same sense of life that the birds had.
“Did he say if he was guilty for what he did?” she asked.
“For you, yes. But he showed very little guilt for any of the others. You shouldn’t have let him off.”
“I was a thirty-three-year-old nun who’d just been made love to for the first time.”
“That wasn’t love, Mum.”
“What came out of it was: you. You were love, so in that respect, we made it.”
She turned from the fog, wearing a smile filled with hope.
“Go back to your boy and your woman, Jack,” she said gently. “They love you so much and need you. Go back to them.”
Jack glanced away from her swollen eyes and panicked when he realized that the fog had snuck into the room, surrounding them so that he could no longer see the walls of the lounge they sat in.
“Go back to them, Jack,” she repeated.
Her hand came away from his knee and he felt gravity disappear as he floated up through the ceiling and up through the fog. A great circle of light shone through the pitch white, calling to him. It was where he was heading; towards the soothing light that spoke to him in a gentle voice that he felt rather than heard. It spoke a language that wasn’t English, but which he could easily understand. He looked down and saw his mother gazing up.
“Don’t go up there,” she cried to him.
He began to panic, grasping at the air, realizing what the light was. Tyler, he said in his head. Carrie… Jean… What would become of them if he wasn’t around?
He fought with all his strength, like a drowning man trying to reach the sunlight at the surface. Only he was trying to escape it, trying to anchor himself, pull himself down. He managed to grasp onto the fog, holding on for dear life while his legs climbed above him. He pulled himself down through it and began to hear sounds below: voices, beeps, machines. Someone was asking for things: clamps, scalpels, medical equipment. Another voice was updating on things such as heart rate. Jack felt a great pressure in his head.
“He’s coming back to us,” someone called out. “Heart rate is leveling. I think he’s safe.”
“Okay, we’re stable,” another voice said. “That was mighty close.”
Jack felt himself drifting off after that. Not up, but sideways. That was life, he guessed. A sideways line threading between two parallel points. Good and evil always pulling at the thread like two opposing magnets, bending it one way and then the next, a never-ending battle for equilibrium.
EPILOGUE
113
It was two days before Jack opened his eyes. They’d removed a section of his skull where the b
ullet had grazed it, and it was still open when he awoke, at the top of the crown and covered with transparent dressing. This was to give the brain room to swell, the impact having hurt it, but not permanently.
The first thing he saw in his blurred vision was the face of Alice Newman. She sat beside the bed, reading a book. She didn’t notice him wake until he touched her hand, the act of reaching out to her feeling like the raising of a shipwreck instead of an arm.
She widened her eyes in surprise and leaped from the chair, calling out of the room for a doctor. Soon he was having a pencil torch shone in his eyes and being asked to squeeze the doctor’s fingers and wiggle his toes.
“You’re extremely lucky,” the woman said as she came away from him.
Behind her, Alice stood gazing at him with a gentle smile on her face. It wasn’t very often that you saw one there and Jack felt privileged.
“Tyler?” Jack croaked through his oxygen mask.
Alice stepped in front of the doctor.
“It’s okay, Jack,” she said. “Your grandson is alive. I tried to tell you before, but you didn’t listen.”
He already knew it. It was somewhere buried in his memory of what happened with Parkes. He cringed when he thought of placing the cold gun to his head. It had fired. He wasn’t blessed. God had deserted him to teach a lesson.
“What happened?” he asked.
Alice asked the doctor to leave them and then slid the chair so she was able to face him.
“You tried to shoot yourself,” she said gently.
“But why am I still here?”
“I kicked the gun as you pulled the trigger. The bullet grazed your skull, fractured it. They say you’ll need a metal plate.”
“What about Parkes?”
“He’s inside a prison psych ward. Hasn’t spoken a word since they put him there.”
“What about… the rest?”
