Bleeker Hill

by Russell Mardell

  Kendrick said nothing and settled down against the cab, gave the cut one last caress and then closed his eyes. Silence fell between them again like a default setting and beyond Kleinman’s moaning and the persistent trill of the wind, there was nothing else on offer until, half an hour later, the truck rumbled with an ugly gurgle and began to swerve and skittle across the road, pinging off rocks, slipping on ice and then finally front ending the rock wall and stopping completely, and then the rear of the truck came alive again in a series of sighs, and grunts, and questioning looks.

  ‘Fuel,’ was all Bergan said, over the side of the cab, was all he really needed to say, and then they were stepping out of the truck, through the doors, over the tailgate, and gathering together in one tight huddle.

  ‘Well, isn’t this just fine and dandy?’ Davenport snapped, pulling his coat collars tight over his face, muffling the rest of his words, but not the venom they carried.

  Bergan shoved Davenport to one side and leant across the open tailgate, looking in at Kleinman. ‘He said anything?’ He asked everyone, and no one.

  ‘Moans and groans, he’s in and out of it,’ Sullivan said joining Bergan at the tailgate. ‘How far we got left?’

  ‘Far enough.’

  ‘Kid make it that far?’ Turtle asked, drawing up to them both, staring in at Kleinman and then looking away.

  Bergan seemed stuck on a thought, staring in at the prone body of Kleinman, his mind working over the situation. A hand went to his neck and brushed the stubble. He could feel the tightening in his throat, the pulsing echoes of a constant dream. ‘Find us a path out of the valley, Turtle. A track, a rockfall, anything.’

  ‘On it.’ Turtle turned away, slipping and sliding as he went.

  Bergan reached up a hand and hoisted himself into the back of the truck, moved across to Kleinman and then crouched down beside him, lifting one shovel hand under his head and resting it against his lap. Kleinman slowly opened delirious eyes to him and coughed a small splat of blood on to Bergan’s sleeve.

  ‘Hey, Frank…think I messed up…we kill ‘em Frank?’

  ‘Sure did. Every last one.’

  Kleinman tried to smile but it seemed to bring a pain. He scrunched up his eyes instead, summoning up the last drop of a waning, puny strength to fight it away, and then rolled his head to the side, almost as if he couldn’t bear to watch his own miserable defeat. Bergan reached over and brought his young charge’s head back into his lap, his free hand gently cupping Kleinman’s right cheek. His skin was almost completely smooth still; Kleinman the only one of the group not sporting facial hair, the only one still groping at his youth with hands strong enough. The smooth skin made Bergan smile but there was an unbearable sadness behind it, Bergan could feel it knocking at him, but he knew the kid couldn’t see it, and then as he slowly moved his hand across Kleinman’s mouth, he made sure the smile was broad, and bright and believable.

  ‘It’s okay, Kleinman. It’s all okay.’ Bergan took thumb and index finger to Kleinman’s nose and then clamped them over his nostrils, pressing his palm down hard over his mouth as he did; his weight brought forward, strength pushed down. He looked away, staring through a rip in the canvas, focusing on the rock wall visible through it, and the steady snowfall that came down and freckled and ate it up. He could feel Kleinman struggling briefly, his head trying to rock back and forth in the grip of his hand, his legs kicking out, and then Kleinman went soft and limp and he tumbled out of Bergan’s hold as soon as he opened his giant hands.

  Bergan could sense everyone’s eyes on him, he knew, even without looking, that the others were all still gathered at the tailgate, he could feel them and he wanted to scream at them. He wanted the sadness and the fury that had just come into him to blast out and he wanted one of them to feel it, to know what it would do, but he held it together, he suppressed it, he screwed the top back on and fell back into his role. The ease at which he could was the most worrying thing to him, and the greatest sign, if ever he still needed one, that he was too far gone now to be the man he was again. Once more something seemed to tighten around his throat. He was going to dream again when finally he slept, he knew it, felt it.

  ‘Maddox?’ Bergan turned slowly to the others, and there they were, like he had pictured them, grouped together at the open tailgate, his merry band of worthless rabble. ‘Gather up the coats, and anything else we might need and can carry. Then get the canvas off the roof. When you’re done, you put the truck over the edge. Sullivan? Get up here and get Kleinman out. Then find a spot and bury him.’

  Bergan stood and jumped down from the truck. Maddox stepped forward and joined Sullivan at the tailgate. Maddox had said very little since planting the punch on Sullivan, but as they stood there, hands on the truck, ready to hoist themselves up, Maddox turned slightly and breathed quiet words laced with menace: ‘I’m gonna break you, killer,’ and then he climbed up into the truck and said no more, gathering up their belongings and bundling them out over the tailgate like they were rubbish.

  Davenport and Kendrick retreated to a long, flat rock and slumped down, Davenport rubbing his hands together against the cold, and Kendrick dabbing lightly at the cut on his face. As Bergan approached, Kendrick stood quickly, too quickly; his posh shoes slipped on the ice, and then he tumbled back to the rock, wincing as his backside connected firmly and precisely.

  ‘And?’ Kendrick said in a loud, pompous bleat that was trying to paper over his little slip.

  ‘And what?’ Bergan said into the air, moving away from Kendrick and rounding the truck.

  ‘And now what, Mr Bergan? Now what?’

  Bergan looked down the valley path and saw Turtle at the mouth of what seemed to be a cave, waving his arms over his head and beckoning them to him. High above, drifting lonely in the wind, a single red balloon floated over them and then fell out of sight behind the valley wall.

  ‘We move on, Mr Kendrick. We move on.’

  Blood

  1

  To Sullivan’s mind, the cave entrance looked like a rotten corpse mouth. It fed through the limestone rock face, opening out further along its throat to two different paths and a multitude of stalactites and stalagmites hanging down or jutting up like giant, perversely vicious teeth. The widest path led them further up into the valley wall and through a fragile patch of flowstone towards an even floor about twenty feet across that sat directly underneath a ragged hole on the other side of the valley wall. It was a hole that would, Bergan assured them, open out in the opposite wall directly above the forest around Bleeker Hill. It would shave off hours of travelling and, after assessing that everyone would fit through the second hole, they settled on the stroke of fortune, didn’t dare question it, and decided to bed in for the night.

  The canvas roof from the truck was strung up across the mouth of the cave yet with the rips and tears and numerous bullet holes it offered scant respite from the howling, snow-flecked wind. Davenport and Kendrick sat together, huddled close just beyond the opening, with Maddox on sentry next to them, sitting on a rock with his legs pulled up to his chest, rubbing the back of his neck absently. No one had asked him to take that position, but no one had wanted to tell him otherwise either. Bergan had said he would take over the watch after three hours and Maddox had just shrugged. As it was Bergan slept through until dawn and Maddox didn’t even move.

  Sullivan and Turtle were charged with guarding the second hole, though, as Turtle was quick to mention “guarding” was a slightly wishful term without any weaponry. Bergan had just stared at him as he said it and Turtle had said no more about it, merely fastened his coat as tight as he could and followed Sullivan on his hands and knees across the flowstone to the even ground before the final angled feed up to the hole.

  ‘We could do with some rope, that’s got to be about twenty feet to the hole,’ Sullivan said, assessing their exit.

  ‘PM’s going to have a problem with that. Kendrick too,’ Turtle offered, shivering into his coat and burying his mou
th into the collar. ‘No place for sensible suits and expensive shoes. You okay, Sullivan?’

  ‘Define okay, Turtle.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I hear ‘ya. But, shit, don’t bother yourself with it. You get used to it.’

  ‘Killing people, you mean?’

  ‘They’re not people, not in the real sense of the word.’

  ‘What is the real sense of being a person?’

  ‘You seen what they do. Baxter? Kleinman? They’re dead, man, they’re not coming back.’

  ‘I’ve also seen what Maddox does, where’s the line and what side am I supposed to be on?’

  Turtle laughed into his coat and nodded slowly. ‘I hear you, man, I do, but we are where we are and we survive how we survive. You know the way the country is now.’

  ‘Do I? I’m not sure I know much of anything any more.’

  ‘You gotta have heard things at Thinwater?’

  ‘Not really…my wife…’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Sullivan instinctively pulled a hand up to his coat and rested it against the pocket that held his wife’s letters. He slowly shook his head to Turtle, brushing the sentence away. ‘It doesn’t matter. I do remember things about the old country, when it broke. Some things. But it feels skewed, does that make sense?’

  ‘What about your family?’

  ‘Somehow when I got sent down…those walls…I dunno…’

  ‘Go on…’

  ‘It seemed to suck everything out of me. That place. Maybe I just accepted that I would never get out of there and wilfully shed things. Maybe I knew it would be easier just to let them have me. Who knows? I’ve stopped questioning it. Fact is everything has changed, nothing makes any sense any more.’

  ‘Only thing that does make sense any more is that nothing makes sense. You think I get this? None of us do. You just play the cards you got stacked in front of you.’

  ‘So, now we’re Party men?’

  ‘We’re nothing, Sullivan. Don’t think that’s ever changed. But if the Party hadn’t turfed me out of my sentence I would probably have been screwed by the Wash or I would still be there now, rotting slowly away. Party saved me, saved you too. I’m no fanatic man, believe me, but I owe them. What’s it to me what they ask me to do?’

  ‘Who the hell were we fighting, Turtle?’

  ‘Shit, you have been out of the loop haven’t you?’

  Sullivan shrugged and shuffled back against the rock wall, trying to get comfy on the cold floor. ‘I can remember what it was like before I got sent down. It was a mess. People were fighting in the streets, rioting, and there were fires everywhere. Yeah, I remember that. I remember the fires. Every night there seemed to be a new building ablaze somewhere in the city. I think back to that place now and everything I see, every memory I can find, all of it is etched in orange or amber. I still dream about that now. Fire. It always seems to be there in my dreams. Those that I can remember and I seem to be remembering a lot more of them just recently. It’s weird. What do you think that means?’

  ‘Don’t mean anything, man.’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’

  ‘I’ve been dreaming a lot. Been dreaming of falling. Nose diving down from a great height.’ Turtle shrugged as his right hand made a swan-diving gesture to reiterate the point. ‘Been dreaming of it daily. Well, nightly…you know. But so what? You’re born with a fear of that, right? So, just means I haven’t grown up yet. I choose to see that as a good thing, way things are now. Dreams don’t mean much. Just means you gotta learn to switch your subconscious off. Don’t let the fears in. Got enough of them in the waking world, right?’

  ‘You always remember your dreams?’

  ‘Yeah, pretty much. You tend to when you live in a nightmare, I guess.’

  ‘These people that attacked the studios today…back before I got sentenced the anger felt different, at the start it was more chaotic…directionless, don’t you think? But this today was…well…’

  ‘Organised? Yeah. They are always evolving. It’s always changing. Individuals became groups, groups became gang’s…communities, I guess. It became territorial. They’re animals Sullivan, feral animals. We’d get word from time to time on our travels that some group had invaded another’s turf, that some tin-pot leader’s been deposed…disposed…but after a while you realise it doesn’t matter any more. You let people off the lead, like we did when we elected that lunatic government that started all this, and sooner or later everyone’s going to want to be a king. Course they are. Everyone’s going to want their own turn on the throne. No rules, any more? No responsibilities for your actions? Fuck, lets make our own rules! Let’s fulfil all our own warped desires. You lose track of who is running the show in each territory, their leaders come and go. It seems like every day they’re having themselves a little revolution. It’s the main thing in our favour. It’s their own thirst for status, for meaning, that stops them growing any further. In time, if we could afford to wait for it, they will probably all kill themselves off fighting power trips out between themselves. Everyone wants to be the king. Nowadays anyone can be.’

  ‘Like Davenport?’

  ‘He’s nothing. A mouthpiece. A man of the law with a nice haircut. You must have seen the posters when he took charge? It was image in the old country, it’s image in the new. That’s never gonna change. Did we learn nothing? Did the leaders not get the message? Plug into the shallow end and all your dreams can come true. The Party changes their figureheads more times than I care to remember. They aren’t that much better than the raggedy-end bastards on the streets in that respect.’ Turtle quickly lowered his voice and looked back down through the cave, sure that they were being listened to. The others below them hadn’t even moved; Bergan was asleep against a large rock, his huge hands closed together over his chest, Davenport and Kendrick were still huddled up together under their coats and Maddox remained on sentry, staring at the tatty canvas door, his right hand still rubbing slowly at the back of his neck. Turtle turned back to Sullivan, his voice staying just above a whisper. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Davenport’s okay for a lawyer, he really is. I mean, in some respects he’s the real deal. He’s got the good intentions. He was the one who wanted to end the Wash after all. He’s a decent man and he’s got the heart, but…’

  ‘The Party has got his balls?’

  ‘Yeah. Poetic my man, and on the money.’

  ‘What about Kendrick?’

  ‘He’s the Party through and through.’ Turtle’s voice dropped even lower and Sullivan had to lean forward to hear him. ‘I’ve heard things about Kendrick, his name has travelled. Not sure I care for the man.’

  ‘Not sure I do either, Turtle.’

  ‘They sure got a hard on where you’re concerned. Your wife, right?’

  ‘She worked for them. They say she was trying to get me released.’

  ‘Damn, she sure must have made a good cup of tea.’ Turtle laughed, then stopped abruptly, aware from Sullivan’s accusing look that the question of his wife’s involvement with Davenport was still sitting uncomfortably in his mind. On the surface the answer was obvious; for a man like Davenport to care so much for someone of no great importance to himself or to the Party, it could only mean one thing. Sullivan dearly hoped there was more to the gesture than showed itself, because if there wasn’t then only the obvious would remain, and that was guilt.

  Sullivan coughed and scrunched up his shoulders to the cold, trying to work the thought out of him. ‘So where are we going?’ he asked Turtle, blatantly trying to change the subject.

  ‘We’re going to the hill, man, finally, been on this journey more months than I care to remember.’ Turtle’s voice had returned to its usual chatty rattle.

  ‘The hill?’

  ‘Bleeker Hill.’

  Sullivan fell silent, contemplating a thought that wished to be heard.

  ‘Yeah, you’ve heard of it, right?’

  ‘Yes. Why? Why do I know that name?’

  ‘It’s got
a history. Long time back though. Don’t mean anything. Every place has got a story to tell.’

  ‘Shit.’ The thought in Sullivan’s mind was heard and a chill ran through him from heart to head.

  ‘Yeah. I see you know your history.’

  ‘I’ve read the books. I went to school.’

  ‘Fuck it. There’s death everywhere nowadays. No place has got the monopoly on that any more.’

  Sullivan leaned back against the cave wall, a hundred old stories flashing through his mind. He shivered again and tightened his coat. ‘The Hanging House,’ Sullivan mumbled to himself in a distracted whisper.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s what we used to call it. At school.’

  Turtle laughed into the collar of his coat and nodded knowingly.

  ‘What is it now?’ Sullivan was leaning forward again, shuffling his backside along the cold rock. ‘What happened to it after…’

  ‘After we reached enlightened times and stopped executing all the bad people?’ Turtle laughed at his own question and the irony wasn’t lost on Sullivan who greeted it with his own, half-hearted smile. ‘I don’t know. Fell to ruin I guess. State sold the land off somewhere down the line and someone made a killing. If you forgive the pun. I don’t know how many owners it went through first, but it ended up in the Culp family, one of the Party elders, and he offered it up as soon as things started breaking. Well, you know, I say he offered it up, but its not like he had much choice. Party seized everyone’s assets off the bat. What’s yours is theirs and all that. They didn’t really give him any choice. Be grateful you haven’t a pot to piss in. Amazing how the other half live…lived…isn’t it? Nothing handed down in my family except a distinct lack of height. Then there’s this minted, wrinkly sack able to offer up this massive white elephant for the Party zoo. Party needed somewhere to start again. Somewhere in the arse end of nowhere. Somewhere safe.’

  ‘Define me a safe house nowadays?’

  Turtle laughed again. ‘Yep, I hear you. It’s a warped joke, right? Particularly this place and especially after what happened with the workers, but what do I care? Give me a roof over my head and a kitchen to cook in and I’m a happy man, don’t bother me what went on there.’