Bleeker Hill

by Russell Mardell

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nah, better not say, thing is it didn’t work. So they tried something else, then something else again. They stopped coming in the night then, they would just roll up, throw a bag over some poor bastard’s head and drag them out of there. Never saw them again. Still, who knows, who cares? When we are done it will all be history anyway.’ Finn slung his machine gun up over his shoulder and strode out past the side of the house, Connor tottering along in his wake. ‘Schaeffer is a wacko, always was and will be. The man at the top may change, their legacy of carnage never does.’

  ‘Don’t want to let the Party hear you saying that. Party would kill a man for less than that.’

  ‘Fuck the Party.’

  ‘Didn’t Kendrick say that Schaeffer reckoned he was close?’

  ‘Not close enough to stop me shooting his winkie into the new world.’

  ‘But what if he could actually do it? Think about it. We could get a grip on what’s happening. We could start to rebuild the country.’

  ‘Do you really want to live in a neutered world, kid? It is leaders want that Connor, not lackeys. What are you to the Party? What are any of us to them, for that matter? Expendable assets. Why’d you think they hire in cons?’

  ‘Party have been good to me. Party like me.’

  ‘They will be smiling like a freshly blown gigolo as they pull the knife out your back, Connor. Now shut your trap. Let’s go.’

  Ahead of them the grounds rolled into the distance under sheets of brilliant white snow, glistening optimistically under a sun looking for a way through. It seemed to go on for miles; the forest running around the perimeter of the estate looked a long way off, like it were a trick of the eye. In the middle of the grounds was what appeared, from the distance of the house, to be a long concrete hut; a low building, like a bomb shelter, with a wide metal door eating up one side. Adjacent to the building was a large pen, fenced in by long wooden barriers, and topped off with barbed wire. Figures were wandering in aimless circles within the pen – they counted at least ten – turning their shambling gaits into one another before shuffling away again, all the time their eyes to the sky, and to the balloons belching up above them from an unseen point behind the concrete building. One of the figures tried to grab for a balloon in a clumsy, slightly hysterical wave of the arms, like a child desperate to be fed. Another figure tried to jump up but fell instead; a third figure tripped over the prostrate body and joined it on the ground.

  ‘Balloons? What’s with the balloons?’ Connor asked, his machine gun pointing up to the sky as if Finn needed it explaining.

  ‘Distraction.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Keeps them occupied. Keeps them distracted. It means Schaeffer’s come out his little hidey-hole.’ Finn brought his machine gun down from his shoulder and into a rock-steady hold. ‘Look at the stupid bastards. Just look at them. Kids. They’re just like dumb kids.’

  ‘Don’t say that. Don’t call them that.’ Connor let his machine gun drop to his side, his eyes back on the pen. ‘We got no business being here for people like that.’

  ‘When you’ve seen what people like that can do to people like you, you start to lose any sympathy, kid. You know what it’s said he used before balloons to keep them occupied?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘People like you kid, people like you.’ Finn gave a short, brittle, cackle at the look of fear on Connor’s face and then returned his gaze to the pen.

  ‘Where are Hennessey and Wallace?’ Connor muttered into the air, dropping to his knees and then to his front, pushing his gun to one side and scrabbling into his jacket for his binoculars. ‘What do we do? We wait, right?’

  Finn remained still, looking as likely to drop to his knees as do a jig. His face was fixed in a wiry, satisfied smile. He took one step forward and then stopped, his head tilted to one side, nodding up and down slowly as if he were counting the figures in the pen again. To Connor, he looked like a diner at the lobster tank, scrutinising the options and working out which he wanted to devour. Connor grabbed the binoculars from his jacket and pressed them to his eyes, though no sooner had he pulled them into focus and settled on the building ahead, than Finn had walked across his sightline, blocking his view, as he crunched through the snow towards the pen.

  ‘Finn! What are you doing? Get back here! We’re supposed to wait, aren’t we supposed to wait?’ Connor pulled himself up to his knees and fumbled across the snow to his gun. As he clasped the strap and started to drag it to him, a foot came down hard across his hand as a figure approached from behind. Connor spun his head around and a pistol struck him across the face, then, with a graceless thud, he was back down in the snow, a cold pressure growing against the back of his neck as pistol barrel met skin.

  *

  Hennessey saw Schaeffer slip out of a downstairs window as he turned around the north side of the house. He called to Connor and Finn, screamed at the top of his lungs, but could not be heard over the howling wind. He recognised Schaeffer straight away; a thin tree of a creature carrying a wild bush of white hair, which had now grown down his face. Schaeffer was a man not easily forgotten. Hennessey had been the one to study him, it was his job to lead these men here and his to understand, and eventually eliminate, the target. He knew all there was to know about Schaeffer and his wealth of information had done nothing to make him question the necessity of the job.

  As the pistol cracked across Connor’s face, Hennessey began to run, shotgun up before him, his machine gun clunking against his back. He could hear the three men’s exchanges in small, stuttering gobbles of words, punching out through the persistent, whining wind, whistling into his ears. Schaeffer was calling after Finn, stretching up, yanking Connor with him by the hair, the pistol now against the side of Connor’s head, and he was hollering, pleading, threatening, unaware with each word that he was appealing to quite the wrong sort of man. Finn hadn’t even broken stride.

  ‘You people must leave here…you go now, you turn away and leave!’ There was fear in Schaeffer’s voice, a genuine tremble. Finn wandered on, a raised hand over one shoulder, waving to Schaeffer. Then Schaeffer began to scream, a crazy, howling, barrage of words: ‘Please, please…go…It will see…mustn’t be here…kill…evil…here…evil.’

  Hennessey was about twenty yards away when Schaeffer saw him. Both men fired together, Hennessey’s shot veering wildly off course as he stumbled forward. Schaeffer shot twice and Hennessey let himself fall into the snow. The first shot missed, but not by much, and as Hennessey struggled up, readying himself to fire again, he saw Connor slump sideways into a red splatter of snow. Hennessey screamed nonsense into the air and staggered forward again. Schaeffer was moving across towards the pen now, his pistol in front of him, firing blindly towards Finn. Hennessey began to run, his feet planting deep, turning and pushing him over. He fell next to the prone body of Connor and fired off two quick blasts of his shotgun over Schaeffer’s head.

  Finn was now no more than a few yards from the pen. The figures were turning to him, one at a time, with wide-eyed curiosity; corrupted faces, growing blue from the cold, entranced by the stranger. Numbed hands reached out to him, gnarled fingers curled in the air before his face as they sought him out. Finn stopped and raised his machine gun. He glanced back once over his shoulder and saw Schaeffer charging towards him in a stupid, slapstick stumble, his gun waving around in his grip like a baton. He could see Hennessey in the distance trying to stand, and then, as if what he saw was a mere sideshow, Finn turned back to the pen, stepped forward and fired the machine gun magazine empty, reloaded and then turned to Schaeffer who was now bearing down on him, lunging forward, craziness in his face and fury in his screams.

  As Schaeffer and Finn came together and their respective weapons cracked their shots into the air, Hennessey seemed to freeze on the spot. He saw them but they looked a hundred miles away, and he seemed to be watching from behind a dull screen. He stood wearily, turned uncomfortably and slumped do
wn hard on to the snow, his fear and his fury ebbing out of him in one long breath as he gazed back at the magnificent and imposing features of the old house. He could feel a sticky smear of Connor’s blood on his cheek and on his lips and he let his tongue out to taste it.

  All around him the wind seemed to be pressing in, and it felt like the pressure of human force, it felt strong and firm and alive. It seemed to go up his nose and look into his brain, to seep in through his eyes and his mouth and his ears, almost through his very skin. Then it was a pressure at his legs and ankles and it was tightening around his feet and dragging him forward towards the house and he had no choice but to let it. He could hear laughing from somewhere, deep booming laughter, and then music; he could swear he heard music deep in his soul.

  The building loomed over him, the gentle wave of balloons high above, gliding over the grandiose splendour. It was mocking him somehow, he was sure of it. But he had no fight to challenge the taunt. He had fallen into himself, sunk down deep to a place where the edges were blurred. The force that seemed to cover him had moved into him, stolen him, and then pushed him further back. The shotgun was in his hands yet he couldn’t feel it, nor could he find the certainty it always gave him. Even as the barrel pushed down against his chest, right above his heart, it didn’t feel real. He wanted to speak, he wanted to get up and run, but he was lost and had nothing left to give. Nothing but one word – one single, solitary name – an utterance whose importance would mean nothing to anyone, except himself.

  “Mia…” he said softly in his mind, in perfect symmetry with the explosion that blasted out from the shotgun.

  *

  Mia remained asleep across the front seats of the cab, her light breathing breaking intermittently as the rug was slowly pulled off her. A pain in her right wrist had been growing, throbbing, for a few minutes and yet she didn’t wake. As the right sleeve of her coat was unceremoniously yanked upward and the ghostly pale skin on her arm exposed, she merely rolled her head back and batted absently at her arm with her left hand like she were swatting a fly.

  A pressure grew at her arm, a gentle hold breaking into a firm, unflinching grip; it was stirring her from her sleep, shaking her back to reality, demanding her attention, and as the first scratch slashed into her skin she flew out of her fevered dreams as if breaking through the surface of the deepest ocean. Blood was squirting into the air above her and splattering the roof of the cab and the snow-caked windscreen. She tried to pull her arm from whatever held it, but the pressure and the hold were too strong. Yanking herself crudely to a seated position, she screamed as more blood began lightly peppering her face and her left arm gave wild sweeps of the empty cab, hysterically trying to fight back against that which she couldn’t see and couldn’t possibly be. But at every swipe and each hopeless attack, the hold on her arm grew stronger and more persistent.

  It was only when she finally looked down to her right arm that the pressure stopped and released its hold on her. It had been demanding to be acknowledged. To be seen.

  Mia tentatively raised her right arm to her face, and through the diluted light of another weak morning she slowly connected the bloody scrawl that was there, carved in her skin. The word LEAVE was now written down her arm.

  Apart

  1

  The rat was next to his ear before he even realised it was back in the cell. Two long weeks of visits by this friendly rodent and it was now feeling comfortable enough in their burgeoning relationship to venture up to his pillow and whisper sweet nothings. The rat’s fur was crusty and sticking up on its end in places, its tail stained black at the tip and its little paws devoid of their once baby pink colouring. It was another victim of the surroundings, Sullivan reasoned. He decided that if even those in this decaying country who were free to come and go were coloured by the putrid fear in the air, then there was actually little difference between jail and freedom after all.

  Sullivan was too tired to pick the rat up or usher it away so just turned on his side and looked at it for a while. He always liked the way rats rubbed at their ears with their tiny little paws when they were cleaning themselves; a little twitch of the whiskers for good measure and the tiniest of winks from those beady little eyes. It was possible to befriend a rat, of that he was sure, he’d been closer to much worse back in the old country. Rats were intelligent, he had read that somewhere, maybe in one of those huge old books in the prison library that had pictures of creatures and arrows and footnotes and easy to understand chunks of information. Or maybe he had just imagined that any rat could care. He didn’t. Why should this little fellow?

  The rat seemed fixated by Sullivan’s sad face, its whiskers quivering as its pinhead wine-gum nose sought out the human’s odour and its paws shuffled forward across the bed covers. It was almost at Sullivan’s chin when the footsteps began thudding on the metal staircase outside the cell door and then the rat was rearing up on its back paws, its neck craning up and its nose sniffing at the air, checking out what was headed their way, deciding whether it were friend or foe.

  Sullivan recognised the footsteps approaching the solitary block as well as he recognised most sounds in the prison. People were becoming less and less human, far less a physical embodiment and more and more just a series of sounds and smells. Faces didn’t matter any more. He heard the wheezing and small stuttering coughs that were Hudson’s calling card getting closer, rattling through the hollow shell of the prison, then he heard the jangling keys bouncing up and down and then the chain dragging across the landing floor. It was all so very predictable. But there was something else behind these familiar sounds, something alien and troubling to Sullivan, and as the cell door screeched open the realisation of what it was hit him like a metal fist in the softness of the cheek. It was the sound of pure silence, a backing track to death.

  Hudson was at the cell door, the strap and chain in one hand and more keys than necessary in the other. He tried to smile through his browned lips but coughed instead, spitting out blackened phlegm.

  ‘The Party loves you.’

  ‘The Party loves you too, Mr Hudson.’

  Sullivan tilted his head upwards as much as he could manage and saw Hudson was nodding towards the rat.

  ‘Rats.’ Hudson said through the half of mouth free from chewing tobacco.

  ‘Rat. Just the one. I’d never be that lucky.’

  ‘Let’s go, Sullivan. Walkies.’

  Sullivan’s daily walk amounted to endless circles of the small courtyard at the rear of the prison, under the south watchtower. When there had been someone to cook the prisoner’s food, Hudson would walk Sullivan back through the kitchens and let him have a quick bite or two, but now, more often than not, he was kept alive on scraps past their prime and a small mug of water shoved through his cell door at odd intervals throughout the day. He had learned to conserve whatever food he was given and to not get angry if nothing came at all on some days. It was his own fault, Hudson was very quick to point out, and he should be grateful that anyone cared enough nowadays to feed him at all. Sullivan didn’t argue. There was really no point. Even though he was in solitary confinement, and even though Hudson had never told him what he had done to warrant that punishment, at least Hudson spoke to him, looked after him, and gave the pretence of concern. That in itself reminded Sullivan that he was still a human after all, albeit one of no great importance.

  Sullivan knew from his wife’s letters that things had gone funny back in the real world, he could even remember it crumbling and breaking before he got sent down – the riots, the looting, the anarchy – and, he supposed the very little Hudson did for him, at the very least, set him above the average. Sure, Hudson had once enjoyed his job, he had got nourished on the cruelty and the power, “the little man with a lot of keys complex,” Wiggs had called it before Hudson had beaten him to death, but really, these days Hudson was just little. He wasn’t immune to what was happening beyond the prison walls either; the fire wasn’t there any more and he was working fr
om routine. Sullivan knew that Hudson was probably grateful to be at work and to have a purpose, no matter how unimportant it and he had become. It was frightening to question what a man like Hudson would do without a purpose. He would almost certainly have to create his own, and that was a dangerous prospect as far as Sullivan could see.

  Old man Mandrake was already in the courtyard as Sullivan was led out. Mandrake was turning his shambling circles; his eyes to the floor and his gnarled feet falling out of badly taped leather work boots. There was no guard standing over him so Sullivan guessed Hudson was probably pulling everyone else’s shifts again. Nowadays it seemed it was only ever Hudson that walked him, fed him, and locked him in again. It was always Hudson’s footsteps he could hear on the landings and the staircases, always Hudson’s voice echoing around the ever-emptying space of the prison. Wiggs always used to say that when the Wash is all out of prisoners that they were going to come for the screws next. Sullivan decided they probably had.

  He gazed around the wide courtyard, left and right and back again, but saw no other prisoners. He knew numbers were dwindling – even in solitary, word got around – add in those taken by the Wash, those who had escaped or naturally expired, and more recently the ones taken to diving off the top floor balcony, and there could be little more than a handful left, but somehow that early morning emptiness suggested otherwise.