by Tom Pollock
“No sign, Seamus,” he says when he returns exactly six minutes later. (I know it exactly because counting is all that’s keeping my head from exploding without the intervention of Mr. Ballistic Travel Agent behind me.)
“Shit,” Seamus says, and sighs. “All right, secure the Rabbit. We’ll have to take Henry’s temperature on what to do with him when we get back.”
My arms are wrenched back behind me and with a hiss-zip, plastic bites into my already raw wrists. I roll my eyes right and see Ingrid on her knees in the leaf mould too.
I look at the apple. I look at her. My own words snake treacherously back into my thoughts:
“Option two: tell them the truth. You had a wobble, but now you’re back on the right side.”
Her lips are trembling, like there’s a current running through her, but her eyes are blank. She knows what I know and I am sickeningly aware of how tempting it must be right now for her to tell them, to win back the favour of her family.
Her lips stay shut.
The pressure on my skull eases. I hear leaves crunching behind me, Seamus backing off one, two, three steps. The click of a phone unlocking. The other three agents stand in a loose huddle near Ingrid. One of them tucks his gun inside his jacket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. Weapon gone, he is at once utterly forgettable. I doubt I’d recognise his bland white face and brown hair on the street if I saw him again. That anonymity is probably what he gets paid for. He strikes a match and lights the smoke.
Come on, I think desperately, because even half buried in muddy leaf mould, that apple is still staring right at me. Get on with it, get us out of here, you can collect your lung cancer vouchers on the way back.
He drops the match and I watch it fall next to his feet. Dropping a still-smouldering match onto dry leaves. Jesus. Okay, whatever this guy gets paid for it’s not his smarts.
I stare at the match where it falls. It doesn’t start a forest fire, mercifully, but I keep staring anyway.
I keep staring because right there, where the match fell, right in front of the agent’s scuffed black boots, the static of the red leaves suddenly gives way to the signal of curly red hair.
“Rita, this is Seamus,” Seamus mutters into his phone behind me. “It’s a bust. No sign of Red Wolf.”
Wolf.
There is a tornado of leaves.
It happens so fast I forget to breathe. She surges up from the ground, breaching the leaf litter like a dolphin out of water, corkscrewing as she rises. Pixie-Cut Woman’s the first to react, but she seems to forget about her gun halfway through raising it, clutching her hand instead to the bright red liquid suddenly spraying from her throat. Something gleams in her fist, something that glides smoothly through the same perfect Archimedes spiral to slash through the neck of the bald man, who’s desperately trying to find an angle that won’t shoot his dying comrade.
The smoker, who I guess won’t die from cancer after all, doesn’t even get his hand back inside his jacket. His body falls beside the others. Three dead in under two seconds. Three dead with geometric precision.
Three dead, I think, shock and acid fear in my throat, but there are four.
And I’m twisting, struggling halfway to my feet, my bound hands unbalancing me, and Seamus’s phone is only just hitting the ground. He’s levelling his gun at Bel, not looking at me, the skin of his face stretched taut with shock and incoherent rage. I shove myself across the empty ground towards him; now he’s four paces away, three . . .
I launch myself at him. In the split second before the air blurs, I see how thickset he is, how strong. I feel a trap door open in my gut. I only weigh fifty-seven kilos. The back of my brain does mass-velocity calculations, and even as he rushes up at me, I know it’s not enough. He’ll shoot me, then shoot my sister. The face of our soon-to-be-killer fills my vision.
I collide with his gun arm. It barely moves. A crooked elbow drives the wind from me and I flop down into the leaves. He looks down at me in surprise,
And his face . . .
“. . . If you even think about turning to face me, I will blow your head clean off your shoulders . . .”
His eyes meet mine, and he hesitates. His expression alters, bloody rage ebbing to white, abject terror; and it’s like looking in a mirror, like looking at my own face, the face of a man who knows he’s going to die.
Why didn’t you want to look me in the face, Seamus? I guess now I’ll never know.
I stare at the dark eye of his gun. I wait for the bang, the blow, the bullet. I wait for the pain and the sudden stop. I wait and I wait and I wait.
BANG.
I’m deafened, air screaming into my ears at unbearable velocity. The face before me jerks backwards, red erupting behind it.
BANG.
A second explosion, from behind the right temple. Leaden, I turn slowly, my eyes tracking the invisible path of those bullets to their source.
Her hair’s bunched up behind her head, her arms locked as they hold the gun. Then she’s sprinting towards me.
“Bel—” I begin, but she runs past me. She levels the gun at the human mess in the leaves and fires twice more into his chest. I watch dumbly as she crouches beside Seamus, lays down her gun, and takes his instead. With a click, she slides the black clip from the handle. Nine bulletheads glint there. She slams it back in. Her movements are smooth, direct, efficient.
She stands, and for a moment she is just Bel, my sister who I haven’t seen for five hours and a lifetime, who I thought I’d never see again. I throw myself forwards and press myself against her. Cold metal slides against my wrist and my hands spring free. I cling to her, barely conscious of how my arms shake. Bel pulls me in tight. She whispers in my ear, her tone soothing, but her words not.
“Petey, Petey, there’s no time . . .”
It’s only then that I feel the nightmarish slickness of her clothes, her skin. I step back. She’s painted in blood.
Red Wolf.
“Come on!”
She tries to pull me away, but I drag myself free of her. Ingrid’s staggering towards us, her hands still zip-tied behind her back.
I go to help her and Bel doesn’t argue. I grab Ingrid’s arm and we sprint towards the woods. The second we make the trees, Bel stops us. She holds my gaze. The horrified numbness ebbs a little; as always I can’t help but feel calmer when I look at her.
“You’re okay,” she tells me.
My jaw finally loosens. I look behind us. The agents still lie there, obstinately real, obstinately dead.
“H-h-how . . . W-w-where . . .” I manage finally. “How did you learn to do that?”
“Same way you learned differential calculus,” she said. “Same way anyone learns anything. I studied and then, when I had the theory down, I practised.” A tiny shrug. “It’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.”
She raises a silver-handled knife and tosses it to me. I begin sawing at Ingrid’s cuffs. It’s only when the plastic frays and springs apart that I take a good look at what I’m holding. It’s not a combat knife or a kitchen knife. It’s a table knife, an expensive one with wicked sharp little serrations. The black design stamped on its blade is bloody but clearly visible: nhm.
The Natural History Museum.
“Bel.”
The way I say it makes her look up at me. Brown eyes, a red-rimmed, eye-shaped wound my desperate hands couldn’t staunch. The knife feels so ordinary in my hot little hand.
“It was you? You stabbed Mum?”
She nods, her face puzzled. “Of course it was,” she says. “Who else did you think it was?”
“They . . .” I blink stupidly at Ingrid, fighting to think. “They told me it was Dad.”
“Dad? What has Dad got to do with all this?”
Nothing. I realise, and suddenly, it’s obvious. He was never here. He’s the monster under t
he bed, the nightmare our mother always threatened us with. And 57 knew that. Of course they did. They used it to try to scare me into giving you up.
I think back to the museum, to all the pointed references to “him” they must have meant me to overhear, then the way Rita had gently herded me at Mum’s bedside:
“A vicious bastard . . . egomaniacal . . . petty. It fits our profile.”
Yeah, mine too, and they knew that. They were working me from the beginning.
Dad’s never been anywhere near this. It was you, Bel. You are what they’re afraid of. You’re the wolf.
I drop back a step, as though I’ll see her better: my axiom. I thought I knew her; I built all my understanding on her, and now I can feel it all falling down.
Like Gödel, and look what happened to him.
“Petey.” She reaches for me. I jerk back from her hand and I can see in her face how much that hurts. She looks confused, betrayed, and even now in the midst of everything I can’t bear to be the cause of that pain.
“But you know me,” she pleads. “You’ve always known me. You were there at the beginning.”
She doesn’t say it. She doesn’t have to.
You’ve always known I was a killer.
I feel like I’m choking on a sharp rock.
“But . . . Mum? B-but why?”
Her expression turns flat.
“She made me mad.”
Beyond the wood, engines growl.
“Shit,” she mutters. “I didn’t think they’d be on us that fast.”
She grabs my wrist and plunges us into the cover of a tangled coppice. Ingrid stumbles groggily after us.
Bel presses a finger to her lips. We crouch in the musty, wooded dark, listening past our own too-loud breath. The engines grow louder and then stop. Doors slam, barked orders in the distance.
Bel flicks the safety off her gun, seems to consider giving it to me, then thank Gauss, thinks better of it. Instead she swings it almost idly past me and—oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit—aims it at Ingrid’s forehead.
She knows, I realise then. Somehow, she knows about Ingrid.
“Bel”—I just about strangle my voice to a whisper—“yes, she was one of them, but she got me out. She saw the apple. She could have given you away and she didn’t. She’s with us now.”
Bel barely seems to hear me. Her eyes are locked on Ingrid with the same dreadful concentration as when she killed Seamus. The tendons in her arm are as taut as cello strings; a single twitch in one of them could signal the curl of her trigger finger.
Ingrid darts a beseeching look at me, and then speaks.
“He’s telling the truth. I can help. I want to help. I can tell you how they’ll come for you.”
The gun doesn’t move, but neither does the trigger finger. The rustle and crack of advancing boots draw nearer.
“Two teams on the road by the front of the school,” Ingrid continues, her whisper tight but controlled. “But only one team—four agents—coming in through the woods.”
“Four people?” I say. Bel looks at me sharply. “Four people isn’t nearly enough to cover the whole of the woods. They’ll leave a gap. Is that why they’re making so much noise? So we run the other way?”
Ingrid nods, very carefully.
“But why leave a gap at all? Why not just send another team?”
“They did,” Bel says drily, and jerks her chin back towards the four corpses glistening bloodily in the clearing.
The shouts are so close now I can place them. They’re coming from directly behind Ingrid’s head. There’s a snap off to the right, and I don’t know if it’s a twig breaking or a pistol cocking. Bel jerks her gun towards the sound, snorts, and finally lowers the damn thing. A breath I didn’t even know I was holding rushes out of me.
“You get my message, Pete?”
Her tone is so casual. She tried to kill our mother, but she looks and sounds exactly the same as she always did.
“The Caesar shift in the camera clock? Our birthday as the key? Yeah, but barely; it was pretty obscure.”
“It was the best I could do. By the time I realised the place was crawling with their people, the cameras were the only thing I could still access. Still, it was good advice, little bro, and it’s time to follow it. Don’t argue.” She cuts me off as I open my mouth. “I’m your big sister. I know best.”
“God, Bel, you’re only eight minutes older.” My response is automatic. I’m too punch-drunk for anything else.
“It was a race for the exit, and I won.” Her eyes track the motion of something behind the trees. “Don’t let that happen this time.”
“Bel—”
But then she’s off like a hare, plunging out of cover. Through the mesh of branches, I see her racing between the trees, careless of the noise as she crashes through the foliage.
“What the hell is she doing?” Ingrid demands. “Why’s she heading for the school? The gap in the cordon is the other way!”
Fear for my sister tightens around my heart.
“She’s leaving a trail, leading them away from us,” I say. Seventeen seconds later, I hear boot steps, and through the leaves I spy black-clad figures sprint headlong past our little hiding place, guns ready, breaths heaving. Red Wolf, I think, and I hold that last image of her in my mind: that blood-streaked incarnation. They may be hunting her, but there’s nothing about her that is prey.
“Come on,” I whisper to Ingrid, and slip out of the back of the coppice. “Before they have time to cover back.”
“Where are we going?” she asks.
I barely hear her. Bel, you’re my sister, I love you and I know you and you tried to kill our mother; something had to have driven you to that. I have to retrace your steps, go where you went; see what you saw. I have to know why.
“We’re going to find answers,” I tell Ingrid.
Three dead in a heartbeat. A perfect Archimedes spiral.
I studied . . . I practised.
I pull Ingrid, unprotesting, behind me. Bel and I used to play hide-and-seek in these woods and I know all the secret places. It’s almost dark. Soon we will be invisible.
You got my message, Pete. It was good advice. Time to follow it.
In my mind’s eye, I see the static flaring out of the dusk, like a semaphore spelling that message out.
Run.
Run, Rabbit.
Run.
2:
invert
Recursion: 2 Years,
6 months Ago
The fire raged, white and spectral against the night.
Even on the crest of the hill opposite, we felt the heat on our faces. We gawked and jostled amongst a crowd from the nearby village. A woman in a lavender dressing gown and wellies was jiggling a baby on her hip, but its crying only emphasised how silent everyone else was.
Firefighters scurried below, their shadows stretched and distorted like vast stick insects on the grass, but there was nothing they could do. Because this fire was fuelled by propane; the flames had caught at a mere 400 degrees but now they were up to speed and burning at a metal-chewing 1,800. The Kent Fire and Rescue Service would have needed a Sahara Desert’s worth of dry powder to extinguish them and they didn’t have it. There was no strategy but to let the relay station burn.
The next day, when the whole steel-and-concrete complex was blackened slag, churned up by spring rain, an investigation would begin. The report would conclude that while the damage made it hard to be certain, the evidence was consistent with a leak in the station’s main condensate pump; the same as had caused the fire at the terminal in Augsberg, Pennsylvania, a year previously, and at Berry Hill, Australia, two years before that. All three facilities were owned and maintained by the same contractor and no one would be particularly surprised.
At least this time, unlike Berry Hil
l—I’d seen the pictures of the aftermath of that disaster, and those faces would erupt, peeled and screaming, into my dreams for weeks afterward—no one was hurt. The fire caught at one in the morning, the station’s mechanism was fully automated, and a frantic search for the two security guards on duty had turned them up at a pub lock-in down the road in Durmsley, where they’d been drinking off the worst of the shakes at almost being caught in the explosion.
This time, they’d got lucky.
Bel turned to me, flames reflected in the tears in her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Pete,” she said.
“It’s okay, Bel,” I told her. I hugged myself despite the heat coming off the fire, and wished there was a way to get the smell of gasoline out of my clothes. I put my hand to my forehead. My fingers came away red, blood from where I’d scratched my scab off earlier that night. I fretted about leaving DNA, but that’s what the fire was for, and anyway, it was too late now.
“It’ll always be okay.”
NOW
“And in the shock to end all shocks, I find myself . . . in a cupboard.”
“What?” Ingrid whispers.
“Nothing,” I whisper back. The whispering is partly because of the need for secrecy, but mostly because of the cramped space. The proximity of our mouths to each other’s ears means anything above a whisper would likely split our eardrums open.
It’s not just our faces that are close together. All manner of Ingrid’s bits are pressed against all manner of my bits in a way that is making me extremely conscious of the evolutionary biological purpose of said bits, which I guess would be exciting if we were stuck in this boiler closet for recreational reasons (my fourth cupboard in the last thirty-six hours, by the way, because you know how I like to keep count). Except these aren’t recreational reasons; they’re hiding-for-our-fucking-lives reasons, and I’m concerned that the blood flow to my . . . particular bits won’t recognise the difference, especially since it’s been exactly nineteen hours and forty-three minutes since we were struggling out of our ripped, bloody clothes, and Ingrid looked at me and smiled and . . .
