Morgan glanced at his shirt. He didn’t realise there was blood on the collar. At the same time he covered the prison logo with his hand. Stupid – he should have done that earlier.
Ellie was about to say something. Then her eyes lit up. She was looking at something over Morgan’s shoulder.
Morgan heard footsteps.
“Can we help you?”
Morgan spun around at the sound of the man’s voice. He reached for the Glock tucked into his waist, but when he saw that it wasn’t the police he jerked his hand away.
“Hi,” he said.
A bespectacled man with short, neatly combed brown hair was standing fifteen feet back on the driveway. There was an attractive blonde woman at his side who looked a lot like an older Ellie. Morgan caught the man staring at the same Northern Prison logo he’d been hiding moments earlier – a serpent-like intertwining of the letters ‘N’ and ‘P’, red on a black background.
“Can we help you?” the man repeated.
“I hope so,” Morgan said.
The front door of the house opened. Looking over his shoulder, Morgan saw another teenage girl standing at the doorway beside Ellie. She was a little taller than Ellie and her blonde hair was streaked pink and purple.
Morgan looked back and forth at the four different faces staring back at him. Was this everyone?
The older girl frowned.
“What’s going on?” she asked no one in particular.
Morgan’s eyes clamped onto the jackpot. A set of small in-ear headphones hanging around the girl’s neck. The threadlike wire attached to the buds ran down to a silver smartphone, the tip of which was poking out of the girl’s hoodie pocket.
He was grinning now.
“This man says he’s lost,” Ellie said, pointing a finger at Morgan. “He’s a noise junkie and he says he wants to borrow a…”
“Phone,” Morgan said, cutting in. “Thanks I’ll take it from here Ellie.”
He turned back to the parents. They both looked horrified to see him standing in their garden.
“Good morning folks,” he said. “I’m very sorry to bother you all like this, I really am. But here’s the thing. I was in a car crash today and pretty much everything I need to get home is broken. Like I said to Ellie, I underestimated the potency of this place. Pretty stupid on my part I admit. They don’t call it the quiet lands for nothing, right? If possible I’d like to borrow a phone and a set of cans, I mean headphones, just so I can get safely out of the quiet lands. And I do mean borrow. Anything I take I’ll get back to you.”
“I’m sorry to hear about the crash,” the man said. “Was anyone badly hurt?”
“Just me,” Morgan said. He couldn’t stand here talking like this, not for much longer. He felt like he was going to puke. His legs were jelly, his mind trapped on a neverending merry-go-round.
“Now if you could just help me out,” Morgan said, “I’d be very grateful.”
The man nodded. “I understand,” he said. “But I’m sure you understand too that we can’t just give you…”
“Fuck it.”
Morgan pulled the gun out of his jeans. He pointed it at the two adults whose hands shot up in the air.
“Sorry folks but this is taking too long,” he said. “I know you saw my shirt mister didn’t you? You know what I am right? Well take it from me, I’m a lot worse. Now let me assure you good people first of all that I don’t want to hurt anyone. I have no intention of hurting anyone. I want to keep this nice and pleasant. You help me and there’ll be no trouble. Now is everyone here? There’s no one else in the Ward family?”
The woman shook her head.
“Okay good,” Morgan said. “Now I want the girl’s phone. And I want the cans too.”
Morgan beckoned the older girl towards him. “Come over here darling. I won’t hurt you.”
The girl stayed put at the door next to Ellie. She stared at Morgan like he was a rabid dog.
“You deaf girl?” Morgan asked. “Nice and slow. C’mon, I’ll be on my way and you guys can go back to doing whatever it is you do all the way up here.”
The older girl still didn’t move.
Morgan sighed. He walked towards the door, peering over his shoulder and keeping an eye on the parents.
“That’s a nice phone you’re hiding there,” he said, pointing the Glock at the girl’s pocket. “What are you listening to kid?”
“I’m not a kid,” the girl said.
“Okay,” Morgan said. “You won’t mind then if I don’t treat you like one.”
He raised his voice.
“Give me the fucking phone and cans sister or I’m going to start shooting people. Starting with your mum and dad over there.”
“Get the hell away from her.”
Morgan ignored the man’s weasel voice in the background. As far as he was concerned, Daddy silence hugger was a pencil neck, and of no immediate concern. Certainly he wasn’t as dangerous as the sickness swelling up inside Morgan.
“What’s your name?” he asked the girl.
She hesitated. “Fern.”
“Fern,” he said, “Okay. Here’s what I want you to do Fern. I want you to take
your phone out of your pocket and hand it over to me. It’s really a simple request. Nice and slow, got that? Leave the headphones attached.”
Fern gave Morgan a strange, intense look.
“You’re not sick,” she said. “You know that don’t you? Silence sickness is all in the mind, there’s nothing physically wrong with you.”
Morgan coughed out a laugh.
“Do what I say Fern,” he said. “And I say don’t preach. Now c’mon, the phone. This can be as easy or as hard as you folks want it to be. But this will be the last time I ask nicely.”
“Leave my daughter alone.”
Morgan heard footsteps approaching over the dirt track.
He turned around and the pencil neck was standing in front of him. His narrow eyes, shielded behind a pair of thick glasses, were oddly vacant. Cold.
“Reggie,” the woman called out. “Don’t. Just let him take what he wants and he’ll go.”
The man ignored his wife.
“Leave my daughter alone,” Reggie said. “And leave my family alone. We won’t be bullied or pushed around by noise junkies, not out here and not even if they’re pointing a gun in our faces. This is our place. It’s all we’ve got left. Your kind has taken the rest of the world so go back and get it. Rob the people there all you want but leave us alone.”
Morgan had to admire the guy’s guts. Either it was guts or insanity. This man, Reggie Ward, was a flimsy looking specimen with neat, cardboard hair, the sort of hair that never moved, even in a hurricane. Thick, horn-rimmed glasses sat on the bridge of his nose. He was the sort of guy who was supposed to be afraid of his own shadow, let alone a big, powerful man like Carter Morgan who also just happened to have a gun.
“I’m trying to get back to the rest of the world Reggie,” Morgan said. “I thought I’d made that much clear. Just need a little help getting there.”
He raised the Glock, aiming it at Reggie’s skull.
The woman came forward, palms facing outwards in the universal gesture of peace. “Reggie,” she said. “For God’s sake. Give him the damn phone and headphones. Who cares?”
“I care,” Reggie said. “And so should you.”
“Reggie,” Morgan growled in a low voice. “Listen to your woman.”
Reggie showed no sign of backing down. He might as well have been looking through Morgan and the Glock.
“We won’t be terrorised. We didn’t travel all this way to put up with the same bullshit that we put up with in the city day after day. Leave us alone.”
Morgan shook his head. He pointed a finger at Fern. “Give me the phone and the cans,” he said.
He turned back to Reggie.
“And while she’s doing that Reggie boy, you can go grab the keys to that beautiful big SUV parked over there. Because tha
t’s my ride.”
Reggie’s jaw dropped.
“The car? You can’t be serious.”
“As a heart attack.”
“Never,” Reggie said, his voice still calm despite the shocked look on his face. “Never in a million years. Do you have any idea how hard we’ve worked over the years to…”
“Enough!”
Morgan shoved Reggie, tipping the man off balance. Reggie toppled backwards onto the dirt track, dust clouds flaring up beside him.
There was a startled look on his face. A chorus of muted gasps from the female onlookers.
“You can’t do this,” Reggie said.
Morgan grabbed Fern by the arm.
“I asked you folks nicely,” he said. “So you can’t say I didn’t try. Give me that fucking phone Fern. Give me the cans and somebody else get me the fucking car keys. NOW!”
Fern shrieked as Morgan tightened his grip on her forearm. He reached for the phone in her pocket, not waiting for Fern to hand it over. To Morgan’s surprise however, Fern resisted and managed to wriggle free of his grip. She quickly backed off towards the house. Ellie was by her side.
Both girls looked at Morgan like he was a werewolf who’d trapped them in a dark alley.
All Morgan could see was the phone.
There was a noise at his back. Someone bolted past him. It was Reggie – he was back on his feet and before Morgan knew it, he’d grabbed the phone out of Fern’s pocket, the headphones trailing after him like a thin, mangled tail.
Reggie’s eyes taunted Morgan.
“You want this?” he said. He held the phone aloft, his long stringy arms like two tentacles on either side of his body.
“You want this?”
“Reggie!” Terri cried out. “He’s got a gun for God’s sake. Just give him the phone and I’ll get the car keys.”
Reggie continued to back off with the phone in hand. Morgan, blinded by a fog of rage, lashed out. He charged over and clubbed Reggie on the head with the butt of the pistol. His strength wasn’t much but it was enough. Reggie went down like a stack of bricks, landing on the concrete path and taking the phone with him.
There was a crack.
Morgan watched in sluggish horror as Reggie jumped back onto his knees. He wriggled over the path like a lizard fleeing a pack of hungry snakes. Then he scooped up the phone and with comical exaggeration, smashed it off the path over and over again. He kept going until there was nothing left but dozens of shiny fragments on the concrete.
Morgan could only look on, his mouth hanging open.
“Reggie!” the woman screamed. “Stop it.”
“Are you insane?” Morgan said. He dropped to his knees, stabbing the Glock hard into the dirt track. “You just killed me Reggie. You just fucking killed me man!”
Morgan leapt back to his feet. He turned the gun on Ellie and Fern.
“Give me one good reason not to splatter their pretty little brains out all over the garden Reggie boy,” he said. “You killed me so why don’t I kill you back? I’m giving you five seconds to answer. Five, four…”
Reggie sat on the path, straightening his glasses.
“Three…”
“If you were going to kill us,” Reggie said, “you’d have done it already. You’d have done it and taken what you wanted.”
Morgan swung his pistol arm to the left, aiming the weapon at Reggie’s head now.
“You think you’re smarter than me?” he asked.
“We won’t be intimidated,” Reggie said.
“Is that right?”
Morgan stared hopelessly at the phone fragments scattered like jewels around the garden path.
“Alright. Who else has got a phone?”
The woman replied. “No one,” she said. “We can’t help you. Now please go, get out of here before it’s too late.”
“There’s a landline inside the house,” Fern said.
Morgan stared in both horror and confusion at the older girl.
“A what?”
“There’s a landline. It’s been there for decades.”
“Does a landline play music?” Morgan asked. “Does a landline have the Schedule app? What the hell good is a decades-old landline when all a guy wants to do is juice up for Christ’s sake? Don’t you people understand what’s happening to me here? I need juice…”
Fern pointed at the house. “I’m just saying you could make a phone call if you needed to. Maybe someone could pick you up somewhere.”
“Who the hell am I going to phone?” Morgan asked. “Do you know who I am? Why I’m here? I just escaped from an overturned prison van in the middle of nowhere. Who do you want me to call? The police? They’ll sure as hell come and pick me up.”
Morgan felt cold sweat running down his back. Oh Jesus, it was happening. He was moving onto the next level. His trigger finger shook and without making it too obvious, he readjusted, fastening his hand around the grip.
He needed juice.
“Alright,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Seems to me like we need to conjure ourselves up a Plan B and we need to do it quick. Because without juice, you’re stuck with me. Without juice, I’m going nowhere.”
Chapter 5
Morgan quickly ushered the Wards back into the farmhouse. He closed the door behind him and slid the bolt over, but not before taking a final look around the garden to see if anyone else was out there.
It was empty, at least for now.
“Sit down,” Morgan said, steering the family into the living room. “All of you on that couch. C’mon now, hurry up.”
He stood in the centre of the room, watching everything unfold through a sweaty, whacked out haze. Warm air circulated around the house, rising up from the vents on the floor.
The living room was huge. Inside there was a light blue cotton couch and two matching armchairs, raggedy pieces of furniture that encircled an oak coffee table. There was an ugly crystal ornament sitting on the coffee table.
There were several landscape paintings on the walls – dour images dominated by rivers and fields and hills. The paintings were hideous, a perfect snapshot of the desolate, godforsaken quiet lands.
The musty scent of old paperbacks drifted off the bookshelves.
There was no TV. No reassuring hum in the background, no speakers and no rock and roll. This farmhouse, Morgan’s oasis, was a lunatic asylum and now here he was at the end of his rope, begging the lunatics for help.
“Why’d you break the phone Reggie?” Morgan asked. “You realise if you hadn’t done that I’d be out of your life right now?”
Reggie’s left hand pushed down on his temple, applying pressure to the spot where Morgan had struck him with the gun barrel. A light trail of blood spilled out of his nose.
“I did what I had to do,” he said.
“Good for you,” Morgan said.
He pointed the gun down the line of Wards, moving slowly from right to left.
“Reggie. Fern. Ellie,” Morgan said. The Glock froze on the lady of the house. “And what’s your name again sweetheart?”
The woman hesitated.
“Terri.”
Morgan nodded. “Terri,” he said. “Great. So you guys are the Wards right? Well listen up Wards because we’ve got a big fucking problem, pardon my French. All this country silence? It’s driving me crazy but you can probably tell that just by looking at me. Right? You know you guys call us noise junkies and right about now, I can see why it might seem appropriate to use the ‘j’ word.”
“We’ve got visitors coming,” Terri said. Her tone was devoid of sympathy for Morgan’s plight, much to his disgust. “They’ll be here soon.”
Morgan aimed a crooked smile at the woman.
“Visitors? Oh really?”
“Really.”
“Whatever you say Terri Ward,” Morgan said, laughing through the fog. “So let me get this straight. You guys came all the way out here to the green desert for silence but at the same time you invited a bunch of people o
ver? Hang on now. Something doesn’t quite feel right about that. All that talking, God knows how many pairs of feet trampling over the wooden floor, cars coming in and out of the driveway and all that noise pollution. Visitors? Out here? That makes no sense Terri.”
“It’s true,” Reggie said. “She’s telling the truth. We do have visitors coming over.”
Morgan dried his face on his shirtsleeve. “Horseshit.”
Listen to me,” Reggie said. “We don’t care who you are, what you’ve done or where you’re going. If you leave now we won’t make any calls to the authorities – that’s a promise.”
“Leave?” Morgan said. “Have you got amnesia or something Reggie? I was about to leave before you smashed your daughter’s phone into a thousand pieces. I can’t get my head around that man. The only reason I can think of for you doing that is that you really want me to stay. What for? Too many women in the family, is that it Reggie?”
Terri sat forward.
“We’re not lying,” she said. “About the visitors. And we’re not lying when we say that if you go now, we won’t call the police.”
“That’s very considerate of you Terri,” Morgan said.
His eyes lingered on the woman’s body. She wasn’t statuesque or a skeleton like the dolly supermodel pictures that plastered every con’s wall inside. She was perfectly formed with an enticing hourglass figure and even under that loose fleece top she had on, Morgan could see that all the curves were in the right places.
“So what do you do for a living?” Morgan asked her.
He cringed at the shitty, unimaginative question. Morgan had so little experience of the opposite sex however, that his brain automatically drew upon the standard bullshit small talk he’d seen in movies.
“What?” Terri groaned. “What the hell has that got to do with anything?”
Morgan pointed the gun at her.
“Answer the question Terri,” he said.
Terri groaned. “I’m an actress.”
The Dystopiaville Omnibus: A Dystopian Sci-Fi Horror Collection Page 5
