by John Macken
‘Oh fuck,’ Reuben whispered. ‘Fuck.’
As he gazed into the back of Joshua’s head, he saw Lucy’s face. Going over to her house, breaking the news to her. Mouthing the words.
Our child is dead.
He leaned forward to lift his son out of the cot, to pick him up, to hold him one final time. He knew this was now a crime scene, but that didn’t matter any more. Human dignity was suddenly a fuck of a lot more important than preserving the evidence. Reuben hooked a hand under Joshua’s cold face, and one under his legs. Again, Lucy tracked him down. The appalling and horrific descriptions he would have to give her. The ugly house in a row of terraces, the gutted rooms, the cold, the stench of shit, the sight that had greeted him. There was no way on earth that Veno was going to break this to his ex-wife. Worse even than looking into Lucy’s eyes and confirming what she suspected already was the thought of an insensitive bastard like Veno knocking on her door, barging into her hallway, feeding off her reaction as he told her that Joshua was dead.
Reuben cradled his dead son in his hands, still hunched over the cot, the angle uncomfortable. His mouth suddenly bent itself into an unfamiliar shape, a tight aching in his jaw, a wetness in his eyes. Angry, desperate tears dropped on to Joshua’s body. He screwed his eyes up, blinked a couple of times, and more drops tumbled down his cheeks. His breathing fragmented, just like Lucy’s had been doing all along. Reuben fought it. Not here, he told himself. Not in this pit of a room.
And then he was smashed forward, his face slamming into the bars on the far side of the cot. He let go of his son, tried to regain his balance. But he was being jerked backwards, falling away, hitting the wooden floor hard. The wind was knocked out of him. Something flashed through his line of sight. Something hard and heavy crashing into his shoulder. He wiped his eyes, trying to focus. Another blow in the side. Reuben’s brain fought to keep up. Three or four more seconds of rapid jolts. Pain arrived late, in his face, his shoulder, his ribs. He had been pushed forward, pulled back, kicked on the floor. A boot stamping into his sternum. Reuben flailed his arms and legs, kicking and punching, hitting out, parrying blows. Another stamp, another kick.
He looked up, the tears drying as quick as they had come, his vision clearing. A man standing over him, lashing out, doing his best to annihilate him. This is the killer, a voice inside him screamed. Absolutely and utterly. This is the psychopath who has killed five men in the last two weeks. Held them down and hacked off their fingertips. This is the psychopath who abducted my two-year-old son and left him to die.
Reuben flipped over, jumped quickly to his feet. More brutal punches. An instant volley of attacks cutting through thoughts of Joshua. Reuben shook his head, dodged a punch, finally coming round. Dion Morgan, six two, a former rugby player, doing everything he could to overpower him. No longer a benign-looking medic. Now a beast. A livid, enraged, sadistic sociopath. A ferocious and brutal animal.
Reuben swung two punches in quick succession, the second catching Morgan hard on the jaw. He buckled for a second, took a step back. Reuben glanced round for a weapon. There was nothing. He caught sight of his son again, the air seeming to squeeze out of him. Morgan must have been upstairs, he realized. Heard the commotion and came down, catching Reuben by surprise.
Reuben forced his eyes away from Joshua. A virtually empty room. A small table cluttered with various paraphernalia. A briefcase on the floor. A portable TV on a stand in the corner. Then he turned back to face Morgan. He was breathing deep, his cheeks flushed, his teeth bared. Blood seeped out of the cut on his jaw, where Reuben had caught him. In Reuben’s speeding brain all this had taken several minutes. In reality, he appreciated, it was a small number of seconds. He squeezed his fists tight, ready. And then Morgan launched himself forward.
Morgan’s momentum slammed Reuben off balance. He reeled backwards, to one side of the cot. Morgan was on top of him, pushing him down. Reuben couldn’t free himself. Morgan was strong, unexpectedly strong. Sixteen stones of hot-blooded psychopath. Panting hard, his body seeming to swell, pounding Reuben with punch after punch. His eyes on fire, his pupils huge, sucking it all in. Not stopping, just attacking and attacking. Reuben covered his face. A ferocious blow to the sternum. Reuben fought for air, gasping.
Then the pressure eased for a fraction. Reuben stared up. A boot, the heel slamming into his solar plexus. A huge crushing explosion in his chest. Reuben’s ribcage feeling squashed. His lungs empty and useless. Gasping for breath, gulping and choking. A strangled noise in his throat. Morgan opening his briefcase, pulling things out all over the floor. Reuben seeing the other deaths, the drawn-out sadistic ends of five men. Morgan striding quickly back to him. Reuben squinting. A slim hypodermic. A green cap protecting the fine needle. Morgan ripping it off with his teeth. Reuben understood. This was how it worked. A relaxant, a sedative, something to subdue, something GeneCrime had yet to formally identify. Something to allow him to remove all ten fingertips while the victim watched, unable to struggle but feeling every tooth of the hacksaw.
Morgan plunged the hypodermic towards Reuben’s shoulder. Reuben punched at it, glancing Morgan’s arm. Some of the fluid squirted out, some stabbed home, a prick just above the armpit, a cold spike. What the fuck is it? Reuben thought. What’s in the syringe? Morgan ground his shoe into Reuben’s neck, cutting off the air. Reuben grabbed his leg, trying to tear it off, trying to ease the pressure. He was choking, retching, still desperate for air.
As he fought, he felt himself slowly weakening. Not tiring or losing the will to struggle. Just losing his grip, his strength ebbing, his power waning. His left arm was fine. But in his right, the one that Morgan had injected, muscles were fading, sinews loosening. He concentrated with all his might, forced his fingers to grip, his arm to pull and wrench. But it was no good.
Morgan stooped down, the same crazed look in his eye. For the first time, he spoke. Reuben recognized the voice.
‘That’s one of them,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s try the other.’
And with that he stabbed the hypodermic into the top of Reuben’s left arm, and emptied what remained of the fluid. Reuben knew that Morgan had injected most of it into him. Not all, but probably enough. Reuben let go of Morgan’s foot. It was pointless holding on. Morgan eased the pressure and Reuben’s breathing opened up again. He was panting hard, turning on his side, his left arm starting to feel limp and useless as well. Morgan walked off, out of the room.
Reuben shuffled across the floor using his feet, scraping closer to the cot, staring up. Maybe this was dignity. Dying next to the body of your only son. He realized then that no one knew where he was. No one knew about the house, otherwise CID would have checked it out. The property in the name of Amanda Skeen, the female on the trial who had committed suicide three years later. Judith’s text: control engaged. amanda skeen. Morgan the placebo control, engaged to Amanda Skeen. And Lucy, Sarah, Mina, Moray, the people he counted on, all of them unaware of the link, and oblivious to the address.
He tried to reach for his mobile, but it was no use. His arms had stopped cooperating. He could feel the rough wood of the floor against his knuckles, but could barely lift them. He stared around the room, desperate and afraid. He had taken on other psychopaths and won. Had faced down men who had raped and killed. And while he had been injured, shot at, stabbed, he had given as good as he had got. Reuben was not used to being overpowered, and was not used to feeling scared. He could see now that Morgan was a different breed. One of those rare people who defy normal human strength. The ones whose muscles feel like metal, whose fists feel like rocks. Powerful, frenzied, enraged. A sheer force coming at you that you couldn’t defy.
His eyes flicked to the walls. At first he assumed they were just badly painted. Streaks of paint, patchy areas, an uneven flakiness. But then it hit him, and his fear stepped up a gear. Each of the four walls was covered with raw plaster. A pinky orange colour, drying out, maybe two or three weeks old. And over most of the surfaces was a layer th
at varied from crimson to cherry to burgundy. Daubs of red, clotted, congealed, dripping, splattered. Pushed into the corners, thin, peeling regions, darker, wetter areas. Reuben glanced up. The ceiling was the same. Five men all dead, having bled to death through amputated fingers. Men who had been involved in a clinical trial that went badly wrong. Morgan bringing a trophy home. Blood to decorate the house with. A room like a shrine. Wall to wall in the victims’ blood.
The rear door swung open. Morgan was standing in the opening. In one hand he had a nail gun and two plastic bag ties. In the other, a hacksaw. Reuben’s arms hung weakly by his side. He lifted them up and tried to grab the side of the cot, but they quickly fell down again. They had become fleshy appendages with no muscles or bones. No grip, no strength, no use any more.
‘Oh dear,’ Morgan sneered. ‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s coming to rescue you. I guess you followed me from work, barged in all on your lonesome, couldn’t help yourself. You’ve gone and made yourself very vulnerable, surrendered control completely.’ He lifted the hacksaw, ran his eyes quickly across it. ‘Right, let’s get this thing finished.’
15
Reuben focused on the plastic bag ties and the nail gun. He was still fighting for air. Flattened lungs, a crushed ribcage. Coughing up blood, watching it dribble out of his mouth and on to the floor. The amphetamine in his system was doing nothing but heightening his terror. And any strength it might have given him was made irrelevant by the local effects of the muscle relaxant.
Reuben understood instantly what the nail gun was for. Morgan walked swiftly towards him. He stepped on the back of Reuben’s left wrist, placed the tough plastic tie across it. Then he positioned the nail gun. With every fibre in his body Reuben tried to raise his arm and punch Morgan anywhere he could. But he couldn’t. There was a little movement, but no strength. Morgan fired the gun twice in quick succession. The tie held firm. Reuben’s arm was strapped tight to the floor.
Morgan reached on to the table and slid something off it. The hacksaw. He stooped down and showed it to Reuben. The tiny razor teeth, a small row of brutal blades that would tear through almost anything. He could see now that it was a medical implement. Not the sort of tool that you kept at home, but something with cleaner lines, clinical grade steel, easy to sterilize. From the flecks of red in the crevices of each metal tooth, he suspected it still had minute fragments from previous victims on it.
‘You’ve got to be careful with the drug,’ Morgan said. ‘If I inject too much, it has an anaesthetic effect. Too little and you can curl your fingers and make it difficult.’ He dropped the saw on to Reuben’s knuckles, bounced it up and down. Morgan stared hard into Reuben’s face, watching. ‘I think that’s just about right though, don’t you? Full sensitivity?’
Reuben grunted. He was fucked, and he knew it. Standing face to face with a psychopath was dangerous enough. But having one incapacitate you, alone, where no one could hear your life drain away, that was suicidal. The existence of his son had been everything. And that was over now too. Reuben knew that after the tips of his fingers had been removed, he would bleed slowly to death. He wondered whether there would be rats, whether his blood would make it on to one of the walls.
Although he knew there was no possibility of escape, he had to hear the truth, had to hear Morgan tell him what he already suspected.
‘I know about the drink driving,’ Reuben grunted. ‘That’s behind this, isn’t it?’
Morgan didn’t answer.
‘A routine DNA swab taken at the scene and the game is up. Clean record, no matching DNA, but then from out of nowhere you’re no longer anonymous. There’s going to be a match. What you’ve started, killing Carl Everitt and Ian Gillick, two of the three men you want, is now traceable. Any profile found at the scene suddenly comes back to you, where before you had no motive, no association. It’s all over. So you take my son, who was treated at your hospital unit. Set Riefield up, who you still know from the trial, leave his cigarette butts at the scene. Isolate yourself again.’
Morgan stared down at him. He looked bemused. ‘What, you think this matters any more? You think anything matters any more? Your last few minutes on this stinking planet and you want to get your facts straight?’
‘You took my son from me. I think I deserve an explanation.’
‘They took my fiancée from me. You think I got an explanation?’
‘You lived here together?’
‘We tried.’
‘And then what?’
‘Her family stumped up the deposit, I finished my studies, got a job. She rotted and festered. Started decorating this place, never finished it.’
‘Looks like you’re doing a good job yourself.’
‘It’s finished. Or it would have been.’
‘Every one of those souls who received the Vasoprellin lost the tips of their fingers. Micro-circulatory problems. Other affected areas as well, but that was what hurt the most. That’s why you’ve been doing this. Externalizing your hurt, inflicting what Amanda went through on the people who caused it.’
Morgan didn’t say anything. He just kept staring down at Reuben, listening but not wanting to listen.
‘I’ve been putting it all together.’ Reuben flicked through everything he knew, all the evidence he had read, what Judith had said in her text. ‘You must have got engaged as students. You’re older. You do the trial. I bet it’s your idea. You’re a placebo, she gets the treatment. She doesn’t die, but she has physical and mental problems. You try and make it work. You feel guilty. She’s still crying in her sleep about it years later. Then she kills herself. But that’s a while ago. What set you off, Dion? What put you into action?’
‘Fuck you.’ Morgan knelt down on the floor, one hand on the back of Reuben’s hand, the other gripping the saw. He lined the blade up across Reuben’s middle three fingers, just below their nails. ‘You think you have insight into human pain, Maitland? Well, I’m going to give you a fucking insight.’
Morgan moved the saw across, judging the line. Reuben felt the air from the blade on his finger, hairs being sliced away. Morgan met Reuben’s eye. Anticipation, excitement, intent. A lust for pain staring back. Reuben was suddenly acutely scared.
‘My son,’ he said. ‘You killed my son.’
Morgan stopped. The enormity of the words seemed to shake him.
‘You fuck!’ Reuben spat. It had been bottled up for days with nowhere to go. ‘You fucking coward! You sad fucking bastard! You ended the life of a little boy for all this?’
Morgan smiled down at him, his face distorted into a snarl, his knee in Reuben’s sternum. ‘In a way that you will never understand, I suppose I did,’ he said.
And then he forced the saw into Reuben’s middle fingers. Pulled it back, waited a couple of seconds, ground it forward. Shredding skin, chewing flesh, snagging bone. The blade vibrated as it fought its way in, bouncing off the bone. A cold, sharp ache instantly gave way to the white light of unadulterated pain. Reuben screamed. Morgan pushed down to make a deeper cut. He was in no hurry. He gauged the next movement of the blade, lined it up, made sure he was cutting straight across all three digits. Then he yanked it back. Sharp stabs of paralysis coursed through Reuben’s hand. He was shaking and sweating. His legs shook uncontrollably. He stared down. The blade was red. Morgan pushed harder still. Skin, bone, flesh, tendons and veins were all being attacked by the jagged metal teeth. There was burning in all three fingers, like Reuben was holding them in a lighter flame. Middle, index and ring fingers, just below the nail. All of them shrieking in pain. Morgan pushed the saw through, paused again, pulled it back. Slow, careful cuts. The saw was eating into the bone, gaining purchase, burying in. Reuben ground his teeth, focused on the ceiling. Another forward stroke. Reuben stared into the source of the agony. The blade covered in more red. Thick droplets of blood coating its surface. Finer sprays shooting out above and below. A back stroke that made him scream again. Nerves screeching and yelling. Pain receptors mainlin
ing straight to his brain. Feeling sick. Choking it down, trying not to vomit. Realizing he was heading into shock. His brain wanting to shut down, isolate itself from the horror. But the speed keeping it wired, keeping the power on. Another violent and cold spark of pain. Morgan forcing the saw back. A long stroke. Each one of the army of teeth snatching more flesh, snagging at the skin. Reuben saw tiny chips of bone torn out and scattered through the surrounding flesh. He grunted, clamped his teeth even harder, tried not to cry out.
Morgan locked eyes. Reuben knew this was just the start. This would take hours. The thumb. The little finger. The same for his other hand. Bleeding slowly to death. His essence leaking and spraying from ten holes, five on either side of him.
‘How’s that?’ Morgan asked. ‘Starting to understand human pain?’
Reuben didn’t respond. His gut was cramping, his stomach squeezing like it wanted to let loose.
‘Daniel already understood. He lost his fingertips a long time ago. No need to show him. But just like you, Dr Maitland, he outlived the help he could give me.’
Morgan drew the saw back. Quick and hard. The movement travelled right through Reuben, through his legs, his groin, his stomach, his chest, his head. Every piece of him felt it. Raw and acute, intense, burning, crippling pain. He wondered how long he could hold on.
‘You see, when you come across the same people who fucked your future over, who destroyed the one person in the world that you loved and who loved you, find they’re still in the medical community, still running trials, still selling new untested drugs, just in different hospitals, what are you going to do?’
