But there was a telephone. A pay phone at the end of the street. Better to go there than stay in the house because the man he’d just hit wouldn’t stay unconscious forever. Better not to be around when he woke up. Kevin stepped over the body and went out.
And stopped.
A second man was walking toward him, and what was odd, what made it all so nightmarish, was that this man was identical to the first. Not just similar—exactly the same. They could have been two dummies out of the same store window. Kevin almost giggled at the thought—but it was true. The same dark suit. The same plastic, empty face. The same measured pace. And now the man was reaching into his jacket for . . .
. . . the same heavy, silver-plated gun.
“Go away!” Kevin screamed. He lurched backward into the house just as the man fired off a shot, the bullet drilling through the stained-glass window in the front door and smashing a picture that hung in the hall.
This time Kevin was defenseless. He had already used the telephone table, and apart from his mother ’s umbrella, there was nothing else in sight. He had to get away. That was the only thing to do. He was unarmed. Defenseless. He had just been attacked by a lunatic and now it seemed that the lunatic had a twin brother.
Whimpering to himself, Kevin crossed the hall and ran up the stairs, stumbling as he tried to keep his eyes on the front door. He was aware of a sudden shadow and then the man were there, stepping into the opening and firing at the same time. The bullet shot over Kevin’s shoulder. Kevin screamed and jumped out of the window.
He hadn’t opened it first. Glass and wood exploded all around him, almost blinding him as he fell through the air and landed on all fours on the roof below. There was a lean-to next to the kitchen at the top of the garden and that was where he was now. His wrist was hurting and he saw that he had cut himself. Bright red blood slid over the gap between his thumb and index finger. Grimacing, he pulled a piece of glass out of the side of his arm. He was just glad he hadn’t broken an arm or a leg.
Because he was going to need them.
From where Kevin was standing—or crouching, rather—he had a view of all the back gardens, not just of the houses in Cranwell Grove but those of Addison Road, which ran parallel to it. Here everything was green, precise rectangles of lawn separated by crumbling walls and fences and punctuated with greenhouses, sheds, garden furniture, and barbecues. He had no time to enjoy the view. Even as he straightened up he saw them: half a dozen more men with guns, all of them identical to the two he had already encountered. They were making their way through the gardens, hoisting themselves over the fences, marching across the lawns.
“Oh, no . . .” he began.
Behind him, the man who had broken through his front door appeared at the shattered window and took aim. Kevin somersaulted forward and landed on his own back lawn, a fall that knocked his breath away and left him dizzy and confused. The man at the window fired. The bullet whacked into a sunflower, chopping it in half. Kevin got to his feet and ran to the far end of the garden, hurled himself over the fence, and tumbled, with a furious yell, into his neighbor ’s goldfish pond.
He was soaking wet. His shoulder was bruised, his wrist stung from the broken glass, and he was feeling sick and disoriented, but sheer terror drove him on. It suddenly occurred to him that from the moment the nightmare had begun, nobody had said a word. There were at least eight men in suits pursuing him, but none of them had spoken. And despite the sounds of gunfire on a quiet summer afternoon, none of the residents of Cranwell Grove had come to see what was happening. He had never felt more utterly alone.
Dripping water, Kevin crossed his neighbor’s garden and then vaulted over the wall into the next garden along. This one had a gate and he pushed through it, emerging into a narrow alleyway that led back to the road. Limping now—he must have twisted his ankle in the fall from the window—he ran to the end, just in time to hop onto a bus that was pulling out of a stop. Gratefully, he sank into his seat. As the bus picked up speed he looked back out of the window. Four of the men in suits—or maybe it was four new ones—had appeared in Cranwell Grove and stood in a crowd in the middle of the road. Four shop dummies from The Gap, Kevin thought. Despite everything, he felt a surge of pleasure. Whoever they were, he had beaten them. He had left them behind.
And that was when he heard the motorcycles.
They roared out of nowhere, overtaking the four men in suits and pounding up the road toward the bus. There were about nine of them; huge machines, all glinting metalwork and fat, black tires. The nine riders were dressed in uniform mauve leather, covering them from head to toe. Their heads were covered by silver helmets with black glass completely hiding their faces.
“Oh, God . . .” Kevin whispered.
Nobody on the bus seemed to have noticed him. Despite the fact that he was dirty, his clothes soaked, his hair in disarray, and his face covered in sweat, the other passengers were completely ignoring him. Even the bus conductor walked straight past him with a vacant smile.
What was happening to him?
What was going on?
The first of the motorbikes drew level with the bus. The rider reached behind him and pulled a weapon out of a huge holster slung across his shoulders. Kevin gazed through the window, his mouth dropping. The rider had produced some sort of bazooka, a weapon at least ten feet long and as thick as a tree trunk. Kevin whimpered. He reached up to pull the stop cord. The motorcyclist fired.
There was an explosion so loud that several windows shattered. An elderly woman with a newspaper was propelled out of her seat. Kevin saw her hurtle through the air from the very front of the bus to the back, where she landed and cheerfully went on reading. The bus careered to the left, mounted the sidewalk, and crashed into the window of a supermarket. Kevin covered his eyes and screamed. He felt the world spinning around him as the wheels of the bus screeched and slid across the supermarket floor. Something soft hit him on the shoulder and he opened one eye to glimpse an avalanche of toilet paper cascading down on him through the hole that the biker had blasted in the bus. The bus was still moving, drilling through the interior of the supermarket. It smashed through breakfast cereals, dairy products, and baked goods, skidded into soft drinks and frozen vegetables, and finally came to a halt in dog food.
Kevin opened his other eye, grateful that it was still there. He was covered in broken glass, fallen plaster, dust, and toilet paper. The other passengers were still sitting in their seats, gazing out of the windows and looking only mildly surprised that the driver had decided to take a shortcut through a supermarket.
“What’s the matter with you?” Kevin screamed. “Can’t you see what’s going on?”
Nobody said anything. But the old lady who had been rocketed out of her seat turned a page and smiled at him vaguely.
Outside the supermarket, the motorcycles waited, parked in a perfect semicircle. The drivers dismounted and began to walk toward what was left of the window. Kevin let out a sob and got shakily to his feet. He just had time to throw himself out of the wreckage of the bus before the whole vehicle disappeared in a barrage of explosions, the bazookas ripping it apart as if it were nothing more than a large red paper box.
How he got out of the supermarket he would never know. In all the dust and the confusion, he could barely see and the noise of the bazookas had utterly deafened him. All he knew was that somehow he had to survive. He leaped over the cheese counter—but not quite far enough. One foot plopped down in a loose Camembert and he was nearly thrown flat on his back. There was a door on the other side and he reeled through it, dragging a foot that not only hurt but that now smelled of ripe French cheese. There was a storeroom on the other side and a loading bay beyond that. Two men in white coats were unloading a delivery of fresh meat. They ignored him.
Fresh meat. Suddenly Kevin knew how it felt.
Somehow he made it to Camden High Street, dodging up alleyways and crouching behind parked cars, desperately looking out for men in black suits an
d men on motorbikes. Three yellow helicopters were buzzing overhead now and somehow, just looking at them, he knew they were part of it, too. Perhaps it was intuition. Or perhaps it was the fact that they had KILL KEVIN GRAHAM written in red letters on their sides. But he knew they were the enemy. They were looking for him.
He had two more narrow escapes.
One of the bikers spotted him outside Waterstones and fired off a rocket that just missed him, completely destroying the bookshop and littering the High Street with a blizzard of burning pages. He was almost killed a few seconds later by one of the helicopters firing an air-to-ground heat-seeking missile. It should have locked onto Kevin’s body heat and disintegrated him in a single, vast explosion, but he was lucky. He had been standing next to an electronics store and the missile was confused at the last moment by the electric fires on display. It snaked over his shoulder and into the shop, utterly destroying it and three other buildings in the same arcade, and although Kevin was blown several yards away by the force of the blast, he wasn’t seriously hurt.
By the time the clock struck nine, there was nothing left on the High Street that you could actually call high. Most of the shops had been reduced to piles of rubble. The bus stops and streetlamps had been snapped in half, mailboxes uprooted, and prefabricated offices de fabricated and demolished. And when the clock did strike nine, it was itself struck by a thermonuclear warhead, fired by one of the helicopters, and blown to smithereens. At least the mauve-suited bikers were nowhere to be seen. It would have been impossible to drive up Camden High Street in anything but a tractor. There wasn’t much street left—just a series of huge holes. On the other hand, their place had now been taken by a swarm of green-and-silver flying dragons with scorpion tails, razor-sharp claws, and searchlight eyes. The dragons were incinerating anything that moved. But nothing was moving. Night had fallen and Camden Town with it.
Kevin Graham was squatting in one of the bomb craters. His clothes were rags—his jeans missing one entire leg—and his body was streaked with blood, fresh and dry. There was a cut over his eye and a bald patch at the back of his head where a large part of his hair had been burned off. His eyes were red. He had been crying. His tears left dirty tracks down his cheeks. He was lying underneath a mattress that had been blown out of a furniture store. He was grateful for it. It hid him from the helicopters and from the dragons. It was the only soft thing left in his world.
He must have fallen asleep because the next thing he knew, it was light. The morning sun had risen and everything around him was silent. With a shiver, he heaved the mattress off him and stood up. He listened for a moment, then climbed out of the crater.
It was true. The nightmare was over. The armies that had spent the whole day trying to kill him had disappeared. He stretched his legs, feeling the warm sun on his back, and gazed around him at the smoldering mess that had once been a prosperous North London suburb. Well, that didn’t matter. To hell with Camden Town. He was alive!
And he had finally worked out what he had to do.
He had to make his way back into town and find the offices of Galactic Games. He had to tell Mr. Go that it had all been a mistake, that he didn’t want a career in computer games, that he wasn’t interested in Smash Crash Slash 500, even if it was the most popular game in the universe. And he believed that now. He just wondered from which part of the universe Mr. Go had come.
That was what he would do. Mr. Go would understand. He’d tear up the contract and it would all be over.
Kevin took a step forward and stopped.
Overhead, he heard a sound like thunder. For a moment it filled the air—a strange rolling, booming, followed by a pause and then a metallic crash.
A summer storm?
At the far end of the battlefield, a man in a black suit appeared and began to walk toward him.
Kevin felt his legs turn to jelly. His eyes watered and a sob cracked in his throat. He knew that sound all right. He knew it all too well.
The sound of an arcade.
And someone, somewhere, had just put in another coin.
The Man with the Yellow Face
I want to tell you how it happened. But it’s not easy. It’s all a long time ago now, and even though I think about it often, there are still things I don’t understand. Maybe I never did.
Why did I even go into the machine? What I’m talking about is one of those instant photograph booths. It was on Platform One at York station—four shots for $2.50. It’s probably still there now if you want to go and look at it. I’ve never been back, so I can’t be sure. Anyway, there I was with my uncle and aunt, waiting for the train to London, and we were twenty minutes early and I had about three dollars on me, which was all that was left of my pocket money. I could have gone back to the kiosk and bought a comic, another bar of chocolate, a puzzle book. I could have gone into the café and bought Cokes all around. I could have just hung on to it. But maybe you know the feeling when you’ve been on vacation and your mom has given you a certain amount to spend. You’ve just got to spend it. It’s almost a challenge. It doesn’t matter what you spend it on. You’ve just got to be sure it’s all gone by the time you get home.
Why the photographs? I was thirteen years old then and I suppose I was what you’d call good-looking. Girls said so, anyway. Fair hair, blue eyes, not fat, not thin. It was important to me how I looked—the right jeans, the right sneakers, that sort of thing. But it wasn’t crucial to me. What I’m trying to say is, I didn’t take the photographs to pin on the wall or to prove to anyone what a movie star I was.
I just took them.
I don’t know why.
It was the end of a long weekend in York. I was with my uncle and aunt because, back in London, my mom and dad were quietly and efficiently arranging their divorce. It was something that had been coming for a long time and I wasn’t bothered by it anymore, but even so, they’d figured it would upset me to see the moving men come in. My father was moving out of the house and into an apartment, and although my mother was keeping most of the furniture, there was still his piano, his books and pictures, his computer, and the old wardrobe that he had inherited from his mother. Suddenly everything was his or hers. Before it had simply been ours.
Uncle Peter and Aunt Anne had been drafted in to keep me diverted while it all happened and they’d chosen York, I suppose, because it was far away and I’d never been there before. But if it was a diversion, it didn’t really work. Because while I was in York Minster or walking around the walls or being trundled through the darkness in the Viking Museum, all I could think about was my father and how different everything would be without him, without the smell of his cigarettes and the sound of the out-of-tune piano echoing up the stairs.
I was spoiled that weekend. Of course, that’s something parents do. The guiltier they feel, the more they’ll spend, and a divorce, the complete upheaval of my life and theirs, was worth plenty. I had twenty dollars to spend. We stayed in a hotel, not a bed-and-breakfast. Whatever I wanted, I got.
Even four useless photographs of myself from the photo booth on Platform One.
Was there something strange about that photo booth? It’s easy enough to think that now, but maybe even then I was a little . . . scared. If you’ve been to York you’ll know that it’s got a proper, old station with a soaring roof, steel girders, and solid red brickwork. The platforms are long and curve around, following the rails. When you stand there you almost imagine that a steam train will pull in. A ghost train, perhaps. York is both a medieval and a Victorian city; enough ghosts for everyone.
But the photo booth was modern. It was an ugly metal box with its bright light glowing behind the plastic facings. It looked out of place on the platform—almost as if it had landed there from outer space. It was in a strange position, too, quite a long way from the entrance and the benches where my uncle and aunt were sitting. You wouldn’t have thought that many people would have come to this part of the platform. As I approached it I was suddenly alone. And
maybe I imagined it, but it seemed that a sudden wind had sprung up, as if blown my way by an approaching train. I felt the wind, cold against my face. But there was no train.
For a moment I stood outside the photo booth, wondering what I was going to do. One shot for the front of my school notebook. A shot for my father—he’d be seeing more of it now than he would of me. A silly, cross-eyed shot for the fridge . . . Somewhere behind me, the PA system sprang to life.
“The train now approaching Platform Two is the ten forty-five to Glasgow, stopping at Darlington, Durham, Newcastle . . .”
The voice sounded far away. Not even in the station. It was like a rumble coming out of the sky.
I pulled back the curtain and went into the photo booth.
There was a circular stool that you could adjust for height and a choice of backgrounds—a white curtain, a black curtain, or a blue wall. The people who designed these things were certainly imaginative. I sat down and looked at myself in the square of black glass in front of me. This was where the camera was, but looking in the glass, I could only vaguely see my face. I could make out an outline; my hair falling down over one eye, my shoulders, the open neck of my shirt. But my reflection was shadowy and, like the voice on the PA, distant. It didn’t look like me.
It looked more like my ghost.
Did I hesitate then, before I put the money in? I think I did. I didn’t want these photographs. I was wasting my money. But at the same time I was here now and I might as well do it. I felt hemmed in, inside the photo booth, even though there was only one flimsy curtain separating me from the platform. Also, I was nervous that I was going to miss the train even though there were still fifteen minutes until it arrived. Suddenly I wanted to get it over with.
Horowitz Horror Page 11
