David Raker 01 - Chasing the Dead

by Tim Weaver

  ‘What you did was wrong.’

  ‘You’re turning your back on me.’

  ‘What do you expect?’

  ‘What do I expect? I expect your protection.’

  ‘You killed someone.’

  He still has the car keys in his hands. He feels for them, runs a finger along the ignition key, feels the grooves against his skin. Now he only has the car.

  ‘I won’t come back.’

  ‘Let it blow over.’

  ‘No, Dad. If I go, I don’t come back.’

  His dad looks at him.

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘What do you expect me to say, son?’

  He turns and heads for the front door. Then he remembers something. He looks back over his shoulder at his dad, standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

  ‘You need to go.’

  ‘Were you ever going to tell me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Were you ever going to tell me?’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘About the brother I never knew I had.’

  They stay like that for a while: Malcolm staring into space, his eyes glistening in the light from the kitchen; and Alex opposite him, a tear rolling down his face.

  Then, finally, Alex turns and leaves.

  When I came round, Legion was to my right. He was standing on top of the ladder, holding the bigger nail level with my right hand.

  And there was a noise.

  He was staring off, behind me, to another set of doors. I heard them open inwards, and the noise became louder.

  It was an alarm.

  ‘What’s that?’ Legion said.

  ‘The Red Room alarm,’ a voice replied.

  It was Andrew.

  ‘Why’s it going off?’

  Silence. No reply.

  Legion didn’t move. He was still poised, the nail pressing against my palm, the hammer in his other hand, ready to strike.

  ‘Why?’ he said again.

  ‘We must have a break-in.’

  Legion glanced at me, then back at Andrew. Anger flared in his eyes.

  ‘I’m finishing this.’

  ‘Later,’ Andrew replied.

  ‘No. We don’t let him go again.’

  ‘Later,’ Andrew said again. ‘Someone’s set the alarm then you finish.’

  ‘Who would break into the Red Room?’

  Legion stared at Andrew and then – briefly – flicked a look at me. They think I’m working with someone. They think, whoever it is has set off the alarm.

  ‘Let’s go.’ Andrew again.

  Legion moved the nail away from my hand and leaned into me again, the mask brushing against my cheek.

  ‘This just makes it worse for you,’ he whispered.

  He climbed down the ladder, dropped the nail and hammer on to the trolley and disappeared from sight. The doors slammed shut. The alarm was muffled now. Outside I heard voices – arguing – and after that there was nothing.

  Just the alarm.

  I moved my right hand. The handcuffs were locked tightly around my wrist. I could feel the metal binds and imagined they’d rubbed a couple of layers of skin away. I tried to concentrate on that, tried to imagine how the skin might look – speckled red, like a graze, maybe some purple bruising – because the pain in my back, in the fingers on my left hand, in my neck, in the top of my legs, was immense. It raged, like thunderous, violent tidal waves.

  I closed my eyes again.

  Blackness and silence. Then it felt like I was turning around and suddenly, in front of me, was a door.

  There was light on the other side. It was startlingly bright: burning through the keyhole, the cracks in the feel my hands on it. Could feel I was turning the handle.

  Then I stopped.

  In the space behind me, I felt someone move in close. A presence. And with it came a distant sound. A sound I recognized. I let go of the door handle and realized the sound was waves turning over, crashing on the shore.

  The sound I heard the first night I ever met Derryn.

  I felt the presence nod at me. Telling me I was right.

  Is Derryn waiting for me beyond the door?

  No reply.

  I want to see my wife.

  I felt the presence drift away.

  Please, let me see my wi–

  ‘David?’

  I opened my eyes. Below me a man was looking up: scruffy, his skin smeared with filth. He looked homeless: stained, mismatched clothes; the hood up on his jacket; an unkempt beard that consumed his face. I wasn’t sure whether he was real or not. I was drifting in and out of consciousness so fast and so often, I was finding it hard to tell the two apart.

  He took a step closer.

  Something flickered in me, the smallest fire of recognition. Then it was gone again. But as he took another step closer to the ladder, I clawed at the memory and it

  ‘Alex…’

  He looked past me to the doors, and then climbed up the steps to my right hand. Glancing at me, he unzipped his coat and took out some bolt cutters. He opened them up, placed them on the chain between the handcuffs, and cut through.

  Snap.

  Alex caught my arm as it dropped, but the movement still unbalanced me. I wobbled on the footrest, the cross vibrating as I leaned forward, but he pressed a hand flat to my stomach and steadied me. Slowly, he guided my arm down to my side.

  He moved down the stepladder, picked it up and placed it under the left arm of the sleeper. He came back up the steps.

  ‘I’m going to take the nails out,’ he said. His voice was soft, almost soothing. A complete contrast to the way he looked. ‘It’s going to hurt. But I need you to keep quiet. If you scream, if you make a noise, they will hear – even above the alarm.’

  He perched the bolt cutters on top of the sleeper, and slowly wrapped a hand around the end of the nail in my index finger. He glanced at me once.

  Then he yanked it out.

  The pain was colossal – like having my whole arm pulled from its socket. Every inch of the nail, every groove, every fleck of rust, bit, tore and ripped at my

  I looked at him, my vision blurring.

  And then I blacked out again.

  David.

  David.

  I came round to find him looking at me, both nails in the palm of his hand. He swapped to the bolt cutters, and placed a hand around my lower arm. He snapped through the handcuffs, his hand still pinning my arm to the cross. He placed a second hand under my wrist and slowly guided it back to my side. I wobbled a second time, the strength fading from my legs, and this time he let me fall forward, on to his shoulder.

  At the bottom of the steps, Alex laid me on my stomach and started picking at the locks on the handcuffs. Inside a minute he was done. ‘John Cary taught me how to do that,’ he said quietly, unfastening them. Then, through the corner of my eye, I could see his attention switching to my back, his fingers tracing the scourge marks.

  ‘I need you to sit up.’

  I shook my head. I’m not getting up.

  ‘I need you to sit up, David. If you don’t want to die here tonight, I need you to sit up so I can cover these marks.’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, forcefully, and rolled me over on to my back.

  He pulled me up, so I was in a seated position, and took off his coat. He laid it on the floor next to him, and started to pull out something from the inside pocket. Long. Clear. I dropped my head forward and closed my eyes. Where’s the door? I searched for it, but couldn’t see it. Couldn’t feel anyone behind me any more. Couldn’t feel anything but pain.

  ‘Right,’ Alex said.

  He was on his haunches in front of me, a long stretch of cling film doubled up in his hands. He started wrapping it around my body, so tight it felt like he was crushing my chest cavity. He circled me, securing the cling film in place under my arms, all the way down to my beltline. After circling me a fourth time, he stopped.

  ‘This’ll hur
t when you take it off again,’ he said, ‘but the cling film will kill some of the pain for now.’

  He gently took my hand in his, looked at the wounds, then started wrapping cling film around both of the fingers individually. Round and round, until everything was covered from the tips down to the top of the palm.

  I looked at him. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why come here?’

  He hauled me to my feet.

  ‘Because someone has to pay.’

  And then the alarm stopped.

  Immediately outside the crucifixion room was a long, thin, partially lit corridor. It looked like a military compound or a bomb shelter. There were no windows, just an arrow on the wall pointing to the left, underneath the words SURFACE. We were underground.

  Alex carried me along, my arm slumped around his shoulder, my feet barely working. He’d been right: the pain in my back had been contained by the cling film, at least above the surface of the skin. Beneath, it felt like razor blades were running through my veins.

  Naked lightbulbs dangled on cords above us, and every so often we passed other doors. Most were closed, but a couple were open. I glanced in at one of the rooms. It was small, empty apart from a pair of bunk beds facing one another.

  The corridor got darker the further along we went. It was damp, with a musty, enclosed smell to it. Rust ran in strips next to the joins in the walls. Alex stopped about halfway down and listened. Above us there were voices – muffled, echoing slightly. It was hard to make out words, hard even to tell whether the voices were male or female. I started to drift away again as we stopped moving, set loose in the darkness. Then Alex pulled me back by forcing me to move forward.

  MEDICAL. Inside I could make out whitewashed walls, a dentist’s chair, a panel of switches and plugs above the headboard of a bed, an oxygen tank, and a trolley like the one Legion had used, this one full of scalpels, chisels, scissors and clamps. The adjacent door, on the right, wasn’t marked, but also had a glass window – it was mostly dark, except for one strip light, dull and creamy in the blackness beyond.

  Alex pushed through the right-hand door. On the other side there was very little lighting – only the strip light I’d glimpsed, and two identical ones further down, spaced about ten metres apart. They gently buzzed above us as we walked. The corridor was shorter, with two doors on either side, and a further one, standing open, at the end. Steps led up from the open door, a block of light at the top.

  Suddenly, silhouettes started forming in the light.

  Alex yanked me forward and through the first door on the right. Inside, it was similar to the room I’d seen before: two sets of bunk beds and a table. He closed the door and switched on the light. On the back of the door hung two green training tops with hoods, and two pairs of green tracksuit trousers. On the floor were two pairs of slippers.

  ‘Put these on,’ he said quietly, and pressed a finger to his lips as the voices passed the door. He glanced at

  I looked at him. He was incredibly focused, decisive, so different from the person I had imagined. Perhaps being on the run for so long changed you like that.

  He looked at my left hand.

  ‘Do you want me to put it on for you?’

  I shook my head and took the top. When I raised my arms, the scourge marks burnt, as if alcohol had been poured into the wounds. I fed my arms through the sleeves and pulled it down over my body. Above the line of the cling film, where some of the cuts were still open – deep, dark tears of flesh – I could feel the training top stick.

  He put on the second one and grabbed both pairs of trousers off the hook. I looked down at my boxer shorts. At my legs. The scourge mark on my thigh was starting to bruise.

  ‘These are standard issue,’ he said, then quietened again as more voices passed the door. When they were gone he turned back to me. He looked at his watch. ‘The alarm will go off again in sixty seconds. Once it does, we make a break for it. Understood?’

  I nodded.

  He pulled on the pair of tracksuit trousers and watched as I did the same – slow, tentative movements, like an old man. When I was done, he pushed the slippers across the floor. The lining was soft, like

  He opened the door a fraction and looked through. Opened it a little further and flicked a look both ways. He glanced once more at his watch.

  ‘Five seconds,’ he said.

  Then the alarm burst into life. This time it sounded different: a long drawn-out wail rather than the short, staccato beeps of the first one.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, grabbing my wrist. ‘Let’s go.’

  We moved out into the corridor and towards the stairs. As we did, he flipped the hood of the training top up over my head, and pulled up his own too. At the bottom of the first step, I looked up. In the block of light, shapes began to form: others, dressed like us, coming down towards us. Three of them. They all glanced at us as we passed, their eyes firing as they tried to recall who we were and what part of the farm they might have seen us in before. I looked back over my shoulder and saw one of them, a girl, stop on the steps. She was following Alex as we headed up.

  ‘Alex–’

  ‘Just keep moving.’

  ‘She knows you.’

  ‘She recognizes me.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s two different things. She recognizes me, but she doesn’t know me any more.’

  At the top of the stairs, in hazy grey light, I could see

  ‘Are we in Lazarus?’ I asked.

  Alex was behind me, further back in the shadows.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Part of it, anyway. The house is new. This underground part isn’t. This used to be a training facility for the army in the fifties. They built the farmhouse on top.’

  I glanced at the people digging.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Turning over the soil.’

  ‘Why aren’t they following the others down here?’

  ‘I don’t know. But we haven’t got time to find out.’ He stood next to me and glanced at his watch. ‘Okay. The first alarm was because someone broke the locks on the Red Room.’

  ‘The Red Room?’

  ‘Where they keep all the memories.’ He turned to me. ‘That’s where all your stuff is: your gun, your wallet, the bullet, the photos of your wife. Your wedding ring. I broke the locks on it before I came down here for you. That was the diversion.’

  ‘And this alarm?’

  ‘This is the compound alarm. It goes off if the door to Calvary is left open for more than five minutes.’

  ‘What’s Calvary?’

  The Calvary Project. What they’d called the dummy corporation that all their money was fed through. Now it made sense.

  He looked at the diggers, a few of them glancing towards us. An army of faces in their late teens and early twenties.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  We angled left, out of the darkness and into the light. It was freezing cold, snow still on the ground. It must have been late afternoon – in the distance, the sun was starting to drop in the sky, melting away behind patches of thick white cloud.

  The mouth of the compound was built into the extension on the side of Lazarus. We moved past a blacked-out window. Then a second. Finally we reached a red door at the back of the house. Next to it was a small car port. It curved around to the side of the farmhouse and joined up with the main track back up towards Bethany. Parked underneath were a Shogun and a Ford Ranger.

  Alex had split the lock to the Red Room with a chisel. It was hanging out of the side of the door, and the door was ajar, moving slightly in the breeze. Inside was a small storage room, probably ten foot square, with floor-to-ceiling shelving on three sides and dull red walls. On the shelves were long rows of shoeboxes, stacked one after the other, covering almost all the space. Countless surnames were scribbled on their fronts. Some I

  ‘There’s nothing in there,’ he said.

  ‘H
ow come?’

  ‘I had nothing when I came back.’

  ‘Came back? Came back from where?’

  He glanced out through a small gap in the door, and back at me. ‘I’ll tell you, but not now. We haven’t got time. Get your things.’

  I looked for my belongings. Further along the middle shelf I saw a box with ‘Mitchell’ on it. I leaned in a little closer. Underneath the surname was a Christian name: Simon. Simon Mitchell. Alex’s friend. The one Cary said had also disappeared, never to be seen again.

  ‘Is that your friend Simon?’

  He nodded.

  ‘He came here too?’

  A noise outside. Someone at the Shogun.

  I pushed the door closed, leaving only a sliver of a gap. Through it, I could see Myzwik reaching on to the back seat of the car for something. He pulled out a jacket and pushed the door closed. When he turned around, his eyes passed the door.

  And zeroed in on us.

  He’d seen movement inside, through the gap.

  His eyes narrowed. He took a couple of steps forward. I looked around the storage room for something to arm myself with, and saw Alex doing the same. But there was nothing except shoeboxes.

  Then I remembered my gun.

  Quicker.

  He was five feet away now; I could hear snow crunch under his feet.

  Quicker.

  Alex glanced at me – the first glint of fear in his eyes – and back out at Myzwik.

  Quicker. Quicker.

  Then I saw it, off to my left, high up on one of the top shelves. I went to reach up, and my whole back felt like it was tearing open. I sucked air in through my teeth, wanting to cry out in agony. Instead, I brought the box down and flipped the lid. Inside was my life. The car keys. My wallet. My photos of Derryn. The wedding ring I thought I’d lost for ever when I’d watched it roll away, across the floor of the fridge. Next to that was the bullet.

  And next to that was the gun.

  I grabbed the Beretta, placed the box on the floor, and stepped back behind the door next to Alex. It opened fractionally by itself. Between the door and the frame, I could see Myzwik reaching out for the handle. I flipped the safety on the gun – and it made the tiniest of clicks.