by K. C. Finn
“Do you have something for the bleeding?” She asks.
Cae looks down at the red patch growing on the white fabric over his heart. He points to the bottom drawer of his desk, looking at the lacerations and tide marks on his mangled left hand. He tucks it away to his side, pointing again with the surgically improved right hand.
“Bottom drawer,” he splutters.
He takes the cream from Kendra and attends to the bleeding patches, shifting uncomfortably under her watchful eye.
“Do you even remember how you got here?” She asks, putting his black polo neck onto his lap.
Cae shakes his head. He can feel her putting his socks on and he wants desperately to protest, to tell her he can do it himself, but it takes all the strength he has just to tend to his damaged skin. When he shifts he knows that his back is bleeding too, but the detective quickly clambers into his jumper to stop Kendra from noticing. Cae takes in a very deep breath, setting the tube of treatment cream down next to the office phone.
“The phone,” he whispers.
“What about it?” Kendra urges.
Something stirs in his mind. “I got a call,” he starts as the vague memory comes back, “Someone asked me to meet them here. And then…I don’t know about after that.”
“Someone?” Kendra repeats. “Do you know who?” Cae shakes his head again. “Male or female?”
“Couldn’t tell,” the detective answers, his vision feeling cloudy again. He wants to ask Kendra all sorts of things to check he hasn’t gone mad. The time, the date, who the mayor is. But he can’t find breath for the words. Cae just has to watch as Kendra leaves his side. Her keen eyes have focused on something behind him.
And suddenly she looks enraged.
“What’s this?” She demands, slipping away for a moment, lunging at something he can’t see.
She comes back into his vision with a furious look, thrusting a little plastic bottle into his face. It bears no label, but as she tips it up the last dregs of some white powder come tumbling out onto the knees of his trousers.
“I told you,” Cae says weakly, “I don’t remember.”
“Did you take this?” She accuses, “Did you make yourself like this?” The forces of anger and disappointment vie for control of her expression.
“I wouldn’t have,” Cae says, sucking in his breath to build his strength up, “I was just getting over that stuff. I wouldn’t have.”
He fixes a set of serious blue eyes on her, and her expression moves fully back to upset, her rage abating.
“Then maybe somebody forced it on you,” she says, observing the bottle sadly, “That would explain the memory loss.”
Even as the chemicals race through his cloudy brain, somewhere in his mind the young detective reminds himself that he is Caecilius Rex. He is renowned for his thoughts, even in the toughest situations. With a flash he suddenly starts struggling out of his chair. Kendra helps him to his feet with a look of surprise until he can stand on his own. Weak and unsteady, he begins to walk.
“Where on earth are you going?” Kendra questions, following him as he stumbles to the door of the office, yanking it open with a limp arm.
“To fight fire with fire,” he answers in a slur.
“Oh yeah,” she comments, “You look real fit for fighting right now.”
Cae would ordinarily be mortified to think of his colleagues watching him, dishevelled and unbalanced, struggling down the corridor in his socks, but right now such self-conscious concerns couldn’t be further from his mind. He marches on in a zigzag down the halls, finding that the determined motion helps him feel less hazy. He can feel Kendra hovering at his elbow, perhaps ready to catch him should he collapse.
“What I mean,” he clarifies with heavy breaths, “Is I know how to make myself remember.”
The House Always Wins
30.
Cae makes it all the way to the door of the contraband storeroom before his legs give out under him. Kendra helps him into the little room and sits him down on some boxes in the corner, throwing her hands to her hips to observe him. She curls her lip up on one side, and there’s a deflated look in her eyes.
“Well? What are we doing here?”
Cae struggles for breath, pointing to the big red tub he can spy on the shelves opposite him. Kendra follows his gaze.
“Pass me a bottle of REMEMBER.”
Kendra doesn’t move.
“Drugs on top of more drugs - that’s your solution?” She presses. “Don’t you think you’re weak enough right now without subjecting yourself to lord knows what else?”
“Pass me the bottle,” Cae says again. His determined blue eyes have sunk deep into his face with the exhaustion of the walk. He swallows a bitter taste on his tongue, rubbing his sore hands together. He looks down at them to the smooth skin of his right hand, someone else’s skin, but just as pale as his own, then the crimson, gnarled mess of the left appendage. Kendra is still ranting, but her voice is white noise to the growing fury in the detective’s head.
“If you think I’m gonna let you damage yourself more, then-‘
“Give me the damn bottle! That’s an order solider!”
He can feel the heat of the water welling up along his eyelids as the shouted orders come out. Cae’s hoarse voice breaks in the command, but the words have been enough for Kendra to act.
“I don’t agree with this,” she states again, but this time she is handing him the bottle all the same.
Cae uses his more human looking thumb to snap the cap, finding it strange to handle the familiar shape of the powder bottle without the thick layer of his gloves in the way. He looks into the container, finding half a jar’s worth, maybe 50 grams. More than enough to pull back one night’s exploits, he hopes.
Without warning Cae swallows the whole mass, choking and spluttering over the dryness of it as it cakes his throat. He coughs, wracking his chest and spine and suddenly tumbling off the boxes. He can feel Kendra’s hands on him even before he hits the floor, trying to straighten him up as he continues to choke.
“You’re a freaking idiot,” she insists, shoving him onto his back on the floor. She speaks again, but her words are distant, white noise again.
The powder in Cae’s throat has dissolved, clearing the airway, and though he knows his eyes are open, he can see nothing but blackness for several moments. Blind and petrified, the young detective waits as Kendra’s voice echoes from further and further away.
He is running, running for the rusted metal vat, his trainers scrabbling against the grey slate underfoot, kicking up great piles of dust into the toxic fog around him. The teenager clutches at his mask, taking deep breaths as he scurries on towards the clearing in the quarry. That vat. It shouldn’t be there. What the hell is going on?
In the storeroom Cae lets out a cry that he can hardly hear. Kendra puts a hand to his brow. She speaks but he receives no sound. He can feel himself shaking. This is the wrong memory. He wonders if he can shift the pattern of his thoughts, try to think of last night and of the mysterious phone call, but the pictures of the quarry in the morning light keep flashing into his head.
When he reaches the side of the vat Cae grabs it for dear life, heaving and panting with his head hung down. It is then he feels the glow from inside it. He can see it even inside his eyelids, that impossibly bright green light. He can feel the heat; hear the hissing of the substance as it burns. His heart quickens, his breathing almost stops entirely. With the greatest fear he has ever known, the young man lifts his head up, opening his eyes.
Cae is contorting on the floor of the storeroom so violently that all manner of objects come flying down onto him and Kendra. He can feel the dull thud of something hitting his legs as he shivers and shakes. He can’t bear it, the sight of his mother’s dead face being eaten away by the tidal shifts of that horrific green liquid. The image is burned into his head as her face, her once beautiful, youthful face, is torn away.
Staggering back from the vat
, the young Cae rips off his mask and vomits uncontrollably onto the floor. He clutches his chest, heaving for breath as he tries to push the breathing apparatus back on. The fumes of the smog and the smell of his stomach acid knock him into dizziness, but through it all he can still smell that burning, hear that hissing. The sound of his mother being taken from this life, the sound of her remains slowly ebbing into nothingness.
With a great heave Cae throws over the vat, the acid and what’s left of his mother’s body rolling out into the stone and dirt before him. The acid does not sink into the ground like it should; rather it rolls like lava out into a great green spiderweb before him. The half-body is some way off now, face down in the grey stone dust. Sobbing and sickly, the teenager takes a step towards recovering her.
But a hand on his shoulder stops him dead.
Amidst the pain and the horror, the convulsing detective on the floor becomes suddenly still. These are the lost moments from his life, those stolen from his mind by the sight of his mother’s body. That hand on his shoulder. There was someone else at the scene, someone he didn’t remember. Until now.
“Don’t turn around boy,” says a rough, masculine voice, “Your mother made the mistake of seeing my face. You don’t want to end up like her now, do you?”
The grip on his shoulder tightens; he can suddenly feel the tall, broad figure of the man standing right behind him. The fear and shock in his body sends him into a paralysing rage. He is shaking, furious, but he cannot move.
“You killed her,” he spits with fury.
“She poked her nose in where it didn’t belong,” the man explains in a guiltless tone, “You’d do well not to follow in those footsteps, my lad.”
And now Cae can remember it, remember the words brimming on the tip of his tongue, remember how he clenched his fists ready to strike. Ready to avenge his mother, ready to give everything he had to destroy the man who destroyed her.
“I’m not your lad,” he bites, turning sharply to attack.
The other man is older and stronger, and before Cae can even turn he pushes him down hard into the ground, into the waves of acid now pooling beneath his chest. The toxic green liquid burns through his shirt instantly, and he screams out in agony as the man holds him down in the pool with his heavy foot. The acid laps away at his fragile skin, his arms, his hands, spreading down in its destructive path to hit his legs with a fresh dose of torture.
“I applaud your bravery boy,” the man says coolly, “I really do.”
And Cae hears it then, the applause cutting through the hiss of the burns. Three claps. Just three. Echoing out into the smog and the stone.
The foot pressing Cae down into the acid releases and he scrambles over weakly, screaming as his palms push into the liquid. He can do no more than collapse onto his back, where a new pool seeps into his skin. Another scream, another hiss as the layers of his young skin peel away.
On the floor of the contraband storeroom, Cae feels himself lying in that same sprawled, helpless position, the memory of the agony returning to him in full force. This is how it felt for his mother. This is how she felt before she died.
Police sirens call in the distance as Cae’s teenage eyes fade in and out from the smoggy morning sky above him. Now that the nerve endings have burned away, the acid soaks in like a hot bath, ripping away his consciousness as he sinks slowly into nothingness.
A shadow in the sky above makes him open his eyes. He looks into a face covered over with a full head gas mask, but through the perspex sockets a pair of eyes watch him with glee. Two huge, green eyes, glowing as brightly as the substance now leading him gently towards his grave. The eyes blink, and everything fades away.
Cae sits up in the storeroom suddenly, his weak frame heaving, tears streaming like white water from his eyes. He looks around, panicked, taking in his surroundings once more. He is twenty five years old. He is at the station. No matter how real it felt, it wasn’t. No matter how real it felt, that moment has long since passed. Kendra kneels over him, cupping his face with both her hands. He takes comfort in the seriousness of her round, hazel eyes.
“What happened?” It is a soft demand. “Cae, did you remember?”
31.
It is even harder to recount the memory than it was to live it, and Kendra doesn’t force the full story out of Cae until she has got him home to rest. She is most interested in the three claps, now inclined to agree that the shadowy figure at that quarry could indeed have been The Face, returning to gloat at how easily he can make Cae suffer once more. The detective notes throughout their conversation that Kendra quite often looks sad, but she never once cries, even when Cae breaks down totally himself on more than one occasion. He wonders, somewhere in the back of his tired mind, if the ability to cry could have been removed by those godforsaken scientists that got their hands on her.
Would she want the ability back, if she knew? Or would she be happier with it gone?
Thinking about Kendra seems to be the easiest way to stop thinking about himself. All other avenues of thought keep leading him back to what he has just witnessed, back to the painful recesses of his own head. Even when Kendra mentions that she is going to call Lady Locke and cancel his shift, the thought that Calista and her brother were involved with that same, haunting figure in his head sends him reeling. He can’t stand it. He either has to push it aside, or he will have to act.
“I want to see Flash Morgan,” he utters suddenly, waking from a turbulent sleep some hours later.
Kendra is dozing in a chair beside his bed, and she abruptly shakes herself awake, processing his words.
“You’re in no fit state,” she begins.
“I’ll rest,” he promises, “I’ll sleep; I’ll do whatever you want today to get better. But make an appointment for tomorrow. I can’t lie here unless I know we’re going to do something about The Face.”
“Okay.”
When Kendra takes his left hand in hers, Cae is shocked to find he is once again without his gloves. He’d felt sure Kendra would have covered him up, but her tough, calloused hand is sitting on top of the raw pink skin over his knuckles. And she doesn’t seem to notice, let alone care.
It is late in the afternoon the next day when Cae ambles slowly onto the Dartley Prison boat at the jetty. Nobody on staff dares mention the state of him, particularly with the stern look that Kendra is giving them, and she guides him to a bench in the boat’s window where he can rest on the short trip over the water. He is much stronger than the day before but his motions are erratic and unsteady, his eyes roaming in and out of clear focus.
“There was something else in that bottle,” he insists for the umpteenth time, “It wasn’t just FORGET. Something else is in my system.”
“It’ll fade,” Kendra promises again, “Just try to stay focused.”
Despite her good advice the journey to Flash’s solitary confinement cell passes in a whitewashed blur. Cae has a hard enough time separating how he feels now from the pain of the memory hanging over him still, but he uses every ounce of mental strength he has to heave all thoughts of feelings out of his head. Flash Morgan has details of his mother’s death that he shouldn’t know. He has killed the only three men in the prison who Cae could have hoped to get a lead from to find The Face. None of this is coincidence.
With a deep breath and a hand on his heart, Cae enters the room.
The deadly profiteer is bound to a chair with steel restraints. Three bands hold his sizeable torso, two on each bicep, two on each forearm, there is even one across his dark brown forehead, wearing a dent into his pock-marked skin. And yet Flash breaks into that psychotic grin the moment he sees the young detective staggering into the room. The criminal’s gold teeth glint in the fluorescent light of the solitary cell.
“I was wondering when I’d be seeing you, Rex,” Flash croons.
Two nervous looking guards stand either side of him. Kendra steps into the path of one of them and takes his gun right out of his hip holster. The o
lder man begins to protest, but Kendra fixes him with a serious look.
“This is confidential business,” she states plainly, “you two get out until I shout you back in.”
The guards obviously don’t know what to do; there is no protocol for the chief of police just wandering in, taking your gun and telling you to get lost. So the two men do the only thing they can do. They walk slowly from the room, perhaps selfishly glad of the respite from guarding their vicious ward, and settle themselves outside the door of the cell to await further instruction.
“Ooh, what you gonna do to me kids?” Flash asks.
Kendra spits at him, the mogul’s features change at once into an animalistic snarl. Cae smiles at her proudly, then sits himself down opposite where Flash is all banded up. He heaves out a tired breath, gathering his thoughts.
“I don’t have time for your nonsense anymore, Mr. Morgan,” Cae begins in a low, deliberate tone, “So if you don’t comply with me today, Kendra here is going to shoot you.”
Flash scoffs out a laugh, until he hears Kendra’s borrowed gun coming off the safety. He can turn his head just barely in his metal restraints to see her stern expression.
“You may well laugh,” Kendra speaks through gritted teeth, “But I was born to the warzone, buddy, and I’m willing to bet I’ve ended plenty more lives than you have.”
Something terribly uncomfortable sits in Cae’s stomach when she says it so casually, but right now he needs the truth of what she is on his side. Perhaps there is something in her system that stops her feeling remorse for these things. Whatever it is, he could use a helping himself at this moment. Killer or not, Cae will still feel the guilt if Flash Morgan dies by his word.
“You know what I want to know Flash,” Cae begins again.
Something flickers in the murderer’s beady black eyes. He sets his mouth in a grimace.
“I can’t give you his name,” Flash says, “I’d suffer a lot more killed by him than killed by you.”
