by Jack Lewis
It was Eric’s cough that made her pause for a second outside Kim’s door. It was shut, so she couldn’t see them, though she could hear them murmuring through the wood. Eric coughed again and it sounded like his lungs were squeezing up his throat. Since his soaking in Cresstone he’d been snivelling and sneezing all over the place.
“What’s it like to breathe outside?” said Kim.
“Nothing special.”
“Come on. You’re lying to me.”
Another sneeze. “It’s like being free,” he said. “It feels natural, like that’s how it’s meant to be.”
“What’s your favourite smell?”
Eric was silent for a few seconds, and then said “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I know you miss your mum,” said Kim.
Eric didn’t respond to this, but Heather knew that silences didn’t deter her daughter. Sure enough, it was Kim who broke it.
“You’re my brother now,” she said.
Heather put her hand to her face. She liked to see the pair of them getting on, but at the same time she felt like she should lock Eric in a room of his own. It wouldn’t do Kim any good to grow to like him, because there was no way that the boy could stay. Imagine what would happen if Charles found out? The pleasure he’d take in having them arrested and sent to the dungeons. She had to get the boy to the Resistance. Maybe they could meet up with him at some point, after they left the Capita lands.
“How did you find out you were immune?” said Kim.
“There’s only one way you can find out.”
“You took your mask off?”
Eric’s voice dropped in volume until he was nearly whispering. Heather had to press her ear against the door.
“Dad did it when he was drunk.”
“So how do people normally find out?”
“I guess if your mum or dad is immune there’s a good chance you are, probably. But I don’t think anyone finds out on purpose. No one wants to get infected.”
Eric went into a coughing fit, and there was a slapping sound as Kim hit his back to help clear the phlegm.
“I never knew my dad,” said Kim. “Maybe he was immune.”
This was a stab in the chest for Heather. She didn’t want her daughter wondering if her father was immune. Where possible she tried to avoid ever talking about him to Kim, and she’d become skilful in dancing around her daughter’s questions. Deep down she knew it was wrong not to tell her, but it was for her own good. Sometimes you had to do bad things if the end result was good.
She opened the door and stepped into the room. The children’s heads turned and Kim’s cheeks went red as if Heather had caught them doing something they shouldn’t.
“Your dad wasn’t immune,” said Heather. “So get that out of your head.”
Kim looked away, and Heather could tell she was gritting her teeth.
“You never talk about him,” she said.
“I won’t have this conversation now, Kim. Go outside for a minute.”
“Are you kidding? I’m – “
“Now, Kim.”
Her daughter stood up and threw her hands in front of her in annoyance. Huffing like a train letting off steam, she stomped her way out of the bedroom. Once the door shut Heather looked at the boy on the floor. He wore a mask, though it was positioned badly over his face and she could tell he’d been removing it to cough and sneeze. Still, at least he was wearing it.
She decided that she was going to have to get him to the Resistance sooner rather than later. Every second he spent in her home increased the chance of him being caught in a Capita raid. She didn’t want to abandon him but she couldn’t put Kim in danger, and she’d already done enough. Nobody else would have gone back to Cresstone to help him.
She’d pay Wes’s price. If he wanted half her food, then so be it. If that was the cost of getting the boy out of the Capita while keeping her daughter safe, then it was worth it. It would set their plan back, but at least she’d feel like she’d done something for once. Not as much as she could, maybe, but something.
“Listen, Eric,” she said.
She crouched down next to him on the floor. How was she going to word this? She didn’t want to upset him.
Eric lifted his mask and sneezed. Heather picked a scrap of old newspaper, tore a strip off and handed it to him. The boy wiped his red nose. There were dozens of strips of paper around him, printed relics of news that was years old and covered in Eric’s snot.
“You know you weren’t going to stay here forever, right? And that it’s not safe for you in the Capita?”
The boy looked up at her, eyes alarmed.
“I’ve decided,” Heather carried on. “That I’m going to –“
She heard something pounding on her front door. From the way the wood rumbled and the letterbox hatch clanged, she knew who made the knocks. From the chill that ran through her and the sudden urge to run, she knew who waited on her doorstep.
She was going to tell Eric to hide when she heard the front door open. She walked to the top of the stairs and watched as Charles Bull’s shadow filled her hallway.
“Miss Castle,” his voice sang. “I have a present for you.”
She walk down a step and waited. Thinking quickly, she grabbed a towel that hung on her bannister and wrapped around her head. Charles’s bulk soon filled the hallway. He smiled when he saw Heather at the top of the stairs.
“Pardon the intrusion. But I brought you these.”
He waved a clear plastic bag in the air. Little seeds danced as he shook it. He flicked his hand back and threw the seeds up the stairs like a master giving his dog a treat, and they landed a couple of steps away from Heather.
“Charles,” she said, with a lump growing so large in her throat that it was hard to talk. “What are you doing here?”
She looked to her right, where she could see into Kim’s bedroom. Eric stood up off the floor. His face had drained, and Heather thought that she might have to rush into the room and stop him fainting.
“I was wondering if I could take a look around?” said Charles, and began to walk up the stairs.
Eric’s teeth chattered as though there was a ghost behind him with its hands on his shoulders. Heather stared at him and made her eyes large. There wasn’t much she could convey in the expression, but she hoped that Eric took it for what it meant. Hide.
Heather stood on the stairs as Charles approached and blocked his way.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
Charles stopped midway up the staircase. His pickaxe hung on his back and looked so heavy that it would have tipped most men over. She glanced into Kim’s room and saw that Eric had propped a chair up against the wardrobe. There was a panel at the top of it, ten feet up, which was just big enough for him to hide in. Heather just had to keep Charles away long enough to give him time to reach it.
Charles’s eyebrows gave him the look of an angry owl.
“I’m not sure when the Capita started having to explain its intentions?”
Heather folded her arms. She tried to relax, but her skin felt like it was tightening over her.
“I’d just like to know what you want from me.”
“It’s not you, Heather. It’s the house and what’s in it.”
In the hallway below two Capita soldiers came into view. One of them, Max Armstrong, looked at Heather and the bounty hunter as they stood on a staircase and raised an eyebrow. The other gave a glance and then walked through into the living room. She didn’t like the idea of him being alone with Kim.
“Kim?” Heather shouted down. “Come here, honey.”
“There’s a mouth-breather boy on the loose, Heather,” said Charles. He took a step forward, and the wood groaned under his boots. “And your questions make me suspicious.”
“I don’t like people poking around my house”
“All the same, I will look.”
He took another step forward. There was six feet separating them now,
and he was only two steps away from being able to see into Kim’s room. If he saw Eric, she knew that everything was lost. She and Kim would be arrested and taken to the Capita, where they’d never feel the light of the sun on their faces again. Two steps were all that separated her from such a fate.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why do you want the boy?” she said.
Hurry up and hide, she thought.
“It’s not for you to know why.”
Charles took another step.
“It is, if the Capita expects me to teach their children,” said Heather. “What good is a teacher who doesn’t know the truth?”
“We don’t want you to teach the children the truth. Just tell them what we want them to believe.”
As Charles raised his leg to take another step, Heather stared to her right. She felt her blood complete a grand prix around her veins. As the bounty hunter put his foot on the last step, Heather saw that the room was empty.
She let out a long breath, one that she hadn’t realised that she’d held in until she felt the relief of releasing it. The chair that Eric had climbed on was propped against the wardrobe, but otherwise the room looked normal.
She backed up the final step and walked along the hall and into Kim’s room. As Charles’s heavy boots followed, she reached the chair and moved it just far enough away from the wardrobe to swerve suspicion. She turned and saw that Charles filled the doorframe. He walked over the doorway and in two paces he was in front of her.
Up close, she could smell him. The factory aroma of aging leather. The smell of the sweat that had collected under his arms and on his forehead. His breath, sour with a hint of tobacco. He reminded her of a friend of Kim’s father. One who, a few years before Kim was born, had lost himself to a gambling addiction. Once he had been a moderately successful salesman with a wife and four kids, and a year later he saw his children every other weekend and had taken a second job to pay his debts.
Charles put his hand on Heather’s shoulder and squeezed. She felt her muscles squirm but fought hard to retain control.
“You’re tense,” he said, and pinched her shoulder muscles between his thumb and index finger.
She lost the control that she’d so careful kept and jerked her shoulder. Charles drew his hand away.
“You’re making this difficult on yourself, Heather.”
The veins on his temple seemed ready to pop through his skin, and despite the casual tone of his voice, his cheeks looked red with heat. It was usually the way someone looked before they got angry, and Heather knew because her mum used to have the same tell-tale tick.
Charles grabbed her arm and squeezed her bicep. She threw him off, this time not caring to disguise her disgust. She hoped he felt unwelcome in her home. She hoped it was a cold place for him.
“You’re not looking around my house,” she said.
“I go where I please when it’s the Capita’s business.”
A voice drifted from the bottom of the stairs.
“Mum? What’s going on?”
Charles shouted in the direction of the stairs.
“It’s okay, darling. Your mother is just disobeying the Capita and might have to go to prison. You can look after yourself, can’t you? You can defend yourself when the infected come for you?”
He turned back to Heather and she could see from the size of his eyes beneath his mask that he was smiling. Moments like this made him feel alive, she realised. He was a vulture who fed on misery and fear.
Something began to bubble in her. The idea of him threatening her daughter made her breath catch in her throat. It made her wish she had a gun. God knew she could get one from Wes if she wanted. She’d take it out and point it at his stupid leather face. Her skin felt hot and itchy. She thought about Kim downstairs with the soldiers, trying her best not to show her fear. The room seemed smaller. It felt like a cage had been thrown down upon her, and that she might never escape the Capita now. All because of him, this pathetic man.
Her hand rose in the air as if guided there by a puppeteer. She brought her hand back and then sent it toward Charles face. It met his face with a slapping sound that had finality about it. As she drew it back she was stunned and wondered what she had done, as though a possessing entity had controlled her, doomed her, and then left her.
Charles put his hand to his face. He stared at Heather and shook his head. She thought about apologising to him, but somehow she knew that the words would fall from the air as soon as she spoke them. There was a wall around Charles’s mind now, and anything Heather had to say would not get through it.
Charles left the room and stood at the top of the stairs.
“Max,” he shouted.
Heather heard two sets of boots move downstairs. Had both the soldiers responded to the name, she thought? Were both of them called Max? Were all the Capita’s soldiers called Max? Did a Capita production line churn out soldier clones, all of them given the same name by an official with no imagination? She smiled to herself with the kind of amusement only a resident of death row could enjoy.
Charles gave a long sigh. He leaned against the bannister.
“Go outside into the garden,” he told the soldiers. “Pull out all the food and collect it in a bag or something. It belongs to the Capita now. Take them back to the stores, and don’t bother waiting for me. I’ll finish up here.”
“But sir,” said one of the soldiers.
“Just go.”
He turned to face Heather. The look in his eyes made her feel like a wounded animal caught by a hyena. It was amazing the mix of emotions Charles could convey with just his eyes. It was as though the mask didn’t hamper him. It was a part of him.
“Kim?” he called over his shoulder. “Come upstairs. Your mother wants you.”
Heather felt a shiver sliver up her spine and spread its chill across her. With every inch it covered she felt her body lock down. First her legs, freezing her in place, then her arms, which wouldn’t leave her sides. As the man in the plague doctor mask approached her, she wanted to shut her eyes but at the same time didn’t dare.
Kim bounded up the steps and into the room. Charles spoke, but his eyes didn’t leave Heather’s for an instant.
“Stand next to your mother, Kim.”
Heather was dimly aware of Kim’s arms wrapping around her, but her senses were numb.
“I’m scared, mum.”
Heather strained to move her arm. She broke through the fog of fear just enough to hug her daughter close to her.
From downstairs she heard the sounds of boots walking across the hallway. They were leaving with all of her food, and there was nothing she could do about it. A person could plan and dream as much as they wanted, but there was always someone with a dark mind and strength of authority who could take it all away. As the front door slammed and silence settled over the house, she realised their escape would not happen.
Charles stood still. He said nothing, just stared at them through the eyeholes cut into his mask. He moved his head a fraction of a centimetre as his gaze went from mother to daughter. Every time his eyes moved toward her, Heather felt the touch of snow on her skin. Time suddenly became endless, and Heather wondered if the last seconds of your life were the longest of all.
“Have you got a cold, little girl?”
Heather felt Kim’s chin hit her waist as the girl shook her head.
Charles looked down. “Then why is there shredded newspaper all over the floor?”
Heather fought an urge to glance up at the wardrobe panel where she knew Eric watched through the slats in the door.
“She did have one,” said Heather. “But she’s better now.”
The bounty hunter bent down, picked up a scrap of paper and brought it to his face. He rubbed it in his fingers and let it fall back to the floor.
“Then you don’t keep a tidy house, and someone’s not wearing their mask.”
Heather fought to keep her voice firm.
“She’s
not exactly going to sneeze into her mask, is she?”
“Do you know how people act when they’re hiding something?” said Charles. “There’s a few ways. The short of it is that your body can betray you. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? You’re trying to betray someone else, but your body is doing the same to you. You’ll tell me that you haven’t seen the boy, but your head will nod ‘yes’. You’ll try to deceive me, but you’ll get out of breath.”
