Country of the Blind

by Brookmyre, Christopher

  Standing on the planet. Lonely on the planet.

  The feeling that it was too late. That they hadn’t made it.

  Their progress had to be slow, cautious, observant, quiet. After seeing the view from the outcrop they knew they had to continue along the mountain, hoping the next valley wasn’t too many miles on, and that more than about three people bloody lived there. He sensed the lengthening of the shadows and the frustrated disappointment that they hadn’t reached another valley, never mind sight of a village. But worse, he sensed a drawing to a close. A dying.

  This was a day that had to last, had to keep going. Why was it abandoning them? Why couldn’t it have still been summer?

  They weren’t going to reach safety, they weren’t even going to reach sight of it. Night was going to fall. And this was a night he couldn’t face, a night that it seemed no morning could follow. The prospect of his own fear chilled him, the inescapable ordeal of either progressing, hunted, in the darkness, a million imagined weapons ranged against him unseen; or of crouching, still, hiding, the hours, the minutes, the seconds an eternal, silent scream of insane suspense as he waited, helpless, to see whether the dawn would outrun the gunmen.

  “I think if we take it as read that there’s gaunny be a double-cross at some stage, we can put oor minds towards anticipatin’ it,” Tam had said.

  No-one was comfortable with the way terms were being dictated by the MM in his voice-disguised phone calls to Tam, which Spammy was taping with another answering machine that looked like it had been salvaged from a domestic gas explosion.

  Specific date, because that’s when the unnamed rich guest would be staying there. Specific time – very specific – of 7:20 p.m. because that’s when the rich guest would be out and when the MM’s man on the inside could temporarily shut off the electric fence, security video cameras, laser trips, alarm system and so on.

  Tam came up with the idea of depositing the envelope with the lawyer as a kind of insurance policy, or more a damage limitation exercise. They put in photocopies of all their “evidence”: the faked burglary pies, the diagrams and plans Tam had been sent, and a letter explaining as much as they could. They held on to the tapes, Spammy stashing them – with the original shots and diagrams – under a floorboard in the flat, on the grounds that they didn’t want to put all their eggs in one basket in case the lawyer screwed them or anything happened to the envelope. Paul had to point out to Spammy that – even though under the loose board in the airing cupboard was a good hiding place – he might want to remove his hash from it after depositing the tapes, because if it came to that, it might be the polis who were under instruction to retrieve them.

  On the Friday before the job, Paul had come back to the flat to find Spammy watching a small cardboard box move erratically around the kitchen floor on its own, giggling to himself. This was it, Paul decided: Spammy’s chronic drug-taking had altered his mind so much that he could now project his trips into someone else’s consciousness. But weirder still, Spammy had to be tripping without gear, as he was off all but late-night whisky since becoming involved in the robbery plans.

  Paul looked again, after briefly closing his eyes, wondering if maybe the pressure was getting to him. But the blue box was indeed moving, in short, speedy bursts, frequently changing direction as it glided back and forth across the grotty lino. Spammy was leaning back against the sink, wide-eyed, big dopey grin on his face visible between straggly strands of over-hanging hair. He wasn’t holding any strings or anything, and no radio-control device either.

  Paul knew he would regret it, but was nonetheless helpless to resist asking what in the name of arse was going on, when the blue object did a ninety-degree turn and caught a table-leg a glancing blow. The box turned over on to one side and a wee white mouse scampered away from it, through Paul’s legs and out the kitchen door.

  “Aw fuck, get it!” Spammy said with a laugh, and took off down the hall after the thing.

  They cornered the mouse in the living room, cowering beside the small safe Spammy had mysteriously acquired, and coaxed it into an old budgie cage that had been gathering dust in a cupboard since Paul moved in. The safe was in that familiar state of midsurgery, the cover having been wedged off the plastic keypad and the LED read-out. Wires led to a complicated junction arrangement, and thence to laptop that Paul suspected neither Arlene’s employers nor Arlene knew had been borrowed from Pixagraph Limited. The MM had told Tam he would only give them the master over-ride code for the electronic safe on the Sunday, as it was changed regularly, so Spammy decided to have a crack at developing his own over-ride facility. “The less we’re reliant on the MM, the less chances he’s got to double-cross us.”

  The mouse, Spammy explained, was the fifth member of the team, and his name was Sparky. “Sparky will warn us of danger,” he said, crumbling – of course – cheese through the bars of the budgie cage. “Sparky’s got EFP.”

  “Extra-sensory perception?” Paul asked, thinking he had misheard.

  “Somethin’ like that, aye.”

  They were walking faster, and the pace was accelerating still. An urgency hauling against the restraint of caution.

  Paul could feel it, they all must feel it. The strain of the tension, of quieting their fears and not screaming because it would give them away, of steadying frayed nerves to retain their discipline, while all the time they wanted to run. They wanted to run for the end, sprint for the finish line, throw it all into one last life-or-death effort, make or break, do or die. But there was no end, no finish line. Just the forest and the mountain, going on and on as the sun paled and slid and the light grew more selective in its castings.

  No looks, no gestures. Just the strides, longer, quicker. And quicker.

  Paul wondered how little it would take – what sound or half-glimpsed sight – to cause the snap and set them running blindly forward towards God knew what, driven mad by the unknowing.

  The other reason for the buzz, the excitement, of course, was that he didn’t really believe it was going to happen. A secure, anchoring thought. They weren’t actually going to have to go through with it. It wouldn’t get that far. Something would intervene. Someone would stop it.

  They hadn’t told his mum. Talked about it, plenty, but never told her. If they got away with it, if they came through it, then she never had to know anything. And if they didn’t, well, it wasn’t going to help her or them if she was worried sick before her worst fears were realised.

  Tam wrote her a letter; so did Paul. Put it in the Craigurquhart envelope as they set off on the Sunday. Told her as much as they could, plus instructions.

  Jesus, Sunday. That was when it became real, that was when the feeling of freedom from choice and responsibility turned into something else entirely, something poisonous within that no amount of gut-mangled puking could purge. Paul hadn’t expected to sleep on Saturday night, but the sanctuary of unconsciousness had quickly tempted him in and traitorously brought the morning to him all the sooner.

  He didn’t think he could go through with it, sitting disconsolate and ill on the bathroom floor, spew trickling down the outside of the bowl, failing in his attempts not to cry. Terrified.

  Why him?

  But it was why Dad, too, and why Spammy, and why Bob. Threats, photographs, phone calls. He had no choice, and he owed it to the others to dry his eyes, blow his nose, and don the mask of the Brave Face Club.

  He sat in the back seat of Bob’s car beside Spammy, a tense silence between the four of them, the sounds of the engine and the tyres against the road emphasising the quiet. He hated Bob for driving them there, for not turning the car 180 degrees and heading back to Paisley, or all the way south and through the fucking Channel tunnel.

  Tam turned his head round at one point, attracted by Spammy’s back-seat fidgetings as he popped some morsel of food into the household-size matchbox he had put Sparky in.

  “Christ, he never brought the fuckin’ moose?” he asked Paul, having learnt not to as
k questions of Spammy himself.

  *

  And then there were three, again, Paul thought, just him, his dad and Spammy. Moving swiftly and quietly through the undergrowth, keeping their heads down, chests thumping, wishing they could block out the fear, but knowing they had to listen to it for what it might tell them. Same as before. Even the same clothes, apart from the sweatshirt that policewoman had given him after they took his own bloodstained one away as evidence. It was what, Wednesday? He had been in the same underpants since Sunday, a thought that might have amused or horrified him in some other world where it mattered.

  Just the three of them.

  Bob had been the driver. He dropped them at the side of the road and they took off into the trees as he pulled away, before any traffic happened along. Speed wasn’t the getaway vehicle’s strong suit, but it did have the advantage of supporting an insanity plea in the event that they got caught. Nobody in their right mind would drive to or from a robbery in a 1978 Hillman Hunter.

  Potential double-cross number one: security cameras still on and recording. They had looked at it logically. The MM did want them to get in – there was no point in going to all this bother only for them to get caught scurrying through the grounds because some security guard had clocked them on a monitor. However, the MM could potentially fix it so that no-one saw the monitors – allowing them to get inside and do the job – but that the action was still recorded, so they got the blame and he pocketed the loot. Who knew. It paid to be paranoid. They pulled on their ski-masks.

  Masks help. No-one can recognise you, most importantly yourself.

  “Ayah, this is jaggy,” Spammy said, reminding them all for a nostalgic moment of the concept of humour.

  Potential double-cross number two: electrified fence still operational. Again, defeated the purpose from the MM’s point of view. But no-one particularly wanted to find out that despite having genuine intentions, the MM had somehow failed to hit the switch. Tam pulled the long-handled wirecutters from a black polythene bin bag, eyeing the fence apprehensively. Spammy put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Hang on, Mr McInnes,” he said.

  Tam rolled his eyes as Spammy produced his matchbox and upturned it. He cradled the mouse delicately in his hand, before suddenly tossing it against the fence. It bounced off the mesh, fell to the floor in a ball, stayed still for an unsure second, then scuttled away out of sight.

  “Sparky says it’s safe,” Spammy declared triumphantly. “EFP.”

  “EFP?” asked Paul.

  “Aye. Electric-Fence-ory Perception.”

  Tam cut quickly through the wires, pulling open a flap for them to crawl through. They were in the compound, on the west side near the back of the house.

  While out at the front, unseen, unheard, the limo was still waiting, engine idling, watches being glanced at again.

  Paul was the agile one. He was supposed to climb up to the window on the first floor, by scaling a drainpipe a few yards along to a ledge that ran above it. From there he was to edge back and dreep down. But there was no need. Maybe the MM, maybe just luck. There was a paint-spattered wooden ladder lying sideways against the wall of the stables, just across the gravel and loose-chip behind the house. He gripped it to pick it up, pulling his hand sharply back as a splinter pierced his index finger, which served to remind him he hadn’t put on his gloves.

  He’d have to move the thing first, though. No point in wearing them if the skelfs cut them to shreds. Paul took more careful hold of the ladder this time and lifted it across the gravel, manoeuvring it to rest its top against the ledge ofthe Master Bedroom’s window. Then he climbed up the rungs and pulled on his latex-smelling surgical gloves, peering into the darkness beyond the glass.

  He took Bob’s home-made gizmo from his back pocket, a pair of compasses with a rubber sucker at the end of one leg and a stiff, sharp blade at the end of the other. Of course, it had to be bloody double-glazed. He was reminded of the end of his short career as a DG sales rep, when he had explained to some biddy in Renfrew about the vacuum between the panes. She asked him what happened if one pane broke. “Well it’s like on an aeroplane,” he told her. “You and your family get sucked out the living room . . .”

  He stuck the sucker to the glass and cut a saucer-sized hole just below the top of the lower pane of the window, then pulled the gizmo back, removing a disc of glass. He squeezed the sucker to make it give up its grip, placing the disc carefully on the ledge by his feet. Then he repeated the operation on the inner pane, before reaching in delicately and disengaging the window-lock.

  He held his breath. Potential double-cross number three: burglar alarm systems still on. Ach, fuck it. Sentence for getting caught breaking in must be less than for getting caught making off with the big bag marked “SWAG”. He slid the window up smoothly and quietly, and was greeted by a welcoming absence of flashing lights and electric bells. He signalled to the others to follow.

  The silence was desolate. Callous. The world turning its back, looking away. Abandonment. No birds, no creatures, no animals, no people, no witnesses. Just them and . . . whoever. Not the hunted and the hunters, more the condemned and the executioners.

  The tread of their feet, the rubbing of their clothes against their skin, it all got louder and louder. Their breathing was becoming the crashing of waves, the roar of a crowd. The forest had ceased to absorb their sounds, the channels between the trees seeming to open up and carry the noises to alert, predatory ears.

  Shadows lengthening still.

  Light, time, something, running out.

  Paul stood at the back (or was it the front?) of the room, furthest spot from the windows anyway, before the double doors, watching Spammy in the half-light crouching on the other side of the four-poster. The safe was built into the hardwood base that ran from below the mattress to the floor, the hinged panel that hid it disguised as a drawer like the big one next to it. Spammy had thrown the valance back over the bedclothes and was working concentratedly and quickly. Paul should have had a camera.

  Urgent looks had been exchanged when the MM’s over-ride code drew a blank. The denial, the thumb-sucking thought that the whole job was never going to happen, had been replaced by the unfounded faith that Everything Was Going To Be All Right. They had anticipated being double-crossed, expected to be deceived, but clearly, inside, they all still wanted to believe that they wouldn’t be. And so far it had been smooth. But when the code didn’t deliver, another hope died. A little bit more of their fear became a reality they were having to deal with.

  The MM was fucking them over.

  Because they were never supposed to open the safe. Because the MM wasn’t interested in the safe. Because the safe was only there, was only mentioned, to make them believe in it all, to make them believe in the job. Because the safe was the double-cross.

  Spammy’s fingers worked the laptop frantically. He held two of them up and crossed them, then hit the return key with his other hand. No-one breathed. It had worked on the wee safe in the flat, a simple programme that convinced the electronic lock that four-digit codes were being keyed into it. All of them. From 0000 to 9999, one after another, more than a thousand per second. The tricky part was getting the safe to understand the laptop. The worrying part was that it might have a security contingent that set a time-lock after a limited number of wrong attempts. Spammy hadn’t been able to come up with anything that could circumvent that; if he had, he explained, no cashcard in the world would be secure.

  There was a sudden, high-pitched whine and a metallic whirr from the safe, before its steel door was swung open by its own weight. Paul was about to step forward, to come around the bed and see finally what this was all about. Then he heard the noise, and discovered exactly what it was all about.

  A scraping at the door behind him, fingernails, then the thump of knuckles. A gasp, a choked, gurgling splutter. Paul turned around, twisted one of the handles on the double doors, pulling it open, the moonlight through the big open windo
w spilling into the ante-room, with its chairs, its coat-rack, and its secret.

  Its punchline, to the sickest joke in the world.

  Snap.

  Without, within.

  Maybe they all thought it was a gunshot. Maybe they were running before they looked, before they saw. The order the information arrived in was lost in their heads.

  Off to the right, up the slope, they saw him. The figure, in camouflage gear, holding up two halves of the stick he had just broken, waving at them and staring.

  Desperate, careering panic, all thoughts jettisoned but the need to run. Paul saw the man begin to run too, and lost his own footing beneath him as his body’s momentum pulled him further around the next tree than his feet were ready for. He rattled his knees off the exposed roots, scrambling on all fours for a few yards until he could right himself again, his dad and Spammy charging blindly ahead of him.

  No more caution, no more thought, no more options. Just flight. Each footfall the last before the bullet. Just running. No target, no destination, no finish line, no sanctuary. Just . . .

  Running running running running running run . . .

  The woman’s face was turned away. The man reached out to Paul, dying, the act of rapping the door having almost finished him. Paul held him in his arms, kneeling on the floor with the man’s torso in his lap. The man gasped, unable to speak, a look of incomprehension, such lost incomprehension in his eyes, so full of tears. He reached out a hand towards Paul’s head, pulling at the material of the ski-mask. He wanted to see a face, a last human face.

  Paul pulled the mask off and let the man look into the mirror-image of bewildered fear, pain, horror and sorrow.