The Dead Boy

by Saunders, Craig

It was difficult to think through the noise around them. Fire, sirens, and helicopters high and unseen somewhere nearby. Sometimes a scream would reach her, shocking each time. People; dying and terrified and in pain.

  I wish they'd fucking shut up, though, she thought. I can't get my head straight.

  The thought came from someplace low and cold.

  Nice, Francis.

  But she really did wish they'd shut up.

  'I'm not sure back that way is the best...'

  'Shh,' he said.

  'What? Don't tell me...'

  'Wait.'

  Interrupted a second time, she was ready to lash out, policeman or not. His hand dug into her arm hard, then. It hurt enough to stall her - a second later she forgot to be offended entirely. Gunfire. Harsh, understated, barking, and close.

  It couldn't be, though. Why would anyone be firing a gun?

  Not just one gun, but lots of guns. Like machine guns, unmistakable despite that she'd only heard those in action movies and the films about war that her husband sometimes watched.

  Of course it's not gunfire. Doesn't make sense. But what does?

  She crouched lower. Just an instinctive response. The policeman felt it, too. The air, suddenly full of menace.

  'Don't go up.'

  The fear in his face hit her hard. He was supposed to be the one dealing with this. If he was frightened...

  'Is that gunfire? Like real guns?'

  'I think so,' said the policeman. He paused. 'Yes. It is.' Certainty enough in his voice for Francis to believe that all of this wasn't some crazy hallucination, or a madness inside her. It was real.

  The shots were no longer sporadic, shy sounds, but sustained - powerful, filling the night - a wall of noise louder than the fire and the screams both.

  'What the fuck is going on?'

  'Don't know. Army? A terror attack. Not an accident?'

  The intensity lessened. Back to sporadic bursts, then all the way down to single shots. Finishing up, she thought. They'd killed everyone there was to kill and were moving closer. Making sure.

  'What should we do?'

  The policeman was silent for a moment.

  'They're not here to help,' he said.

  'I get that. But what should we do?'

  'Stay right here?'

  A few more shots rang out, then, nothing.

  'You're asking me?'

  'Shit,' he said. 'I don't know any better than you. What about the supermarket?'

  Francis shook her head.

  'I tried to tell you - everyone's mental back there. That's where I came from.'

  'Mental?'

  She nodded. 'Hurting themselves and each other. Maybe it is some kind of terrorist thing. A virus. Something like that?'

  'But is it better than guns?'

  She wasn't sure, but she didn't say it. The policeman was unsure enough for the both of them.

  'Hold on,' she said.

  'I'm not going anywhere,' he replied, but to her back, because she was already heading through the copse of trees to take a look at the supermarket.

  *

  Francis crouched in the cover of the darkness between the saplings and low branches. Ahead, the supermarket was engulfed by fire.

  Clean up on aisle five, she thought. Then wondered if maybe she was going crazy after all. In the car park, men who moved like soldiers raised their weapons. Small bursts of fire spat here and there, and whatever they hit fell down.

  Not whatever.

  Whoever.

  Bullets hit the crazies, the crazies lay still.

  Maybe they were thinking the same as her, just doing their cleaning with bullets instead of a mop and bucket.

  This isn't just serious, she thought. I'm going to die, and if I don't die from whatever it is making people nuts, those bastards are going to kill me.

  If it came to it, she'd look out for herself first, everybody else second, but she wasn't going to run and leave the policeman.

  Where the hell could she run to?

  The soldiers wore protective gear, like body armour, but their clothing was entirely black. They wore masks.

  What kind of soldiers wore masks?

  Ones exposed to chemicals and poisons. Like me.

  Whatever was in the air, or the smoke, or wherever - she and the policeman had breathed it in, too.

  She crawled away from the slaughter with bile burning the back of her throat. But if she puked, they might hear. If they heard...

  Sick rose, but she swallowed in down. That burned, too.

  All the way back she hunched low, expecting a bullet but finding only the shadows and the damp ground beneath. A little rain, but not enough to for the fire...nothing would be enough. These were fires that would burn in a deluge, in a monsoon. The stench in the air couldn't be washed away. She imagined, even there in the cool grass with the red and blue lighting the sky above, that she could smell gunsmoke. But how could she smell anything but the heavy reek of burning bodies and fuel and rubber from above?

  The policeman lay where she'd left him.

  'Can't go that way. Soldiers shooting anything that moves.' She wondered if she was going to cry.

  Nope. I'm not.

  Shock covered any sorrow, fear overrode any compassion. Revulsion, though - that still roiled, somewhere low down that took her breath and stole her energy.

  The policeman said nothing. Francis knelt down and felt his pulse, suddenly sure that he was dead. But he wasn't dead. Just passed out.

  'Shit,' she said. She sat next to him, not worrying about dirt on her expensive trousers, or the cold.

  What to do?

  She didn't know. Any action might be wrong. But she was tired, and that didn't require any kind of mistakes.

  Lay down, she thought. It sounded, to her, like the most sage idea she'd ever had.

  For a few minutes, maybe ten, she lay in the dark listening to the man's breathing, the fire and the sirens, a distant fire alarm, random gunshots. Eventually, all the sound went away. Francis shut down. Her adrenaline fled. She fell asleep in the dirt.

  When she woke her clothes were damp with rain and the night, and it was light. She curled up, like a baby might, facing the policeman. He looked at her as she opened her eyes. Slightly cute, she thought, before remembering why she was nestled with a stranger among these trees, in this dirt that stank of ash and burned rubber.

  A slight turn of her head was all it took to completely ruin this new day. A soldier in black clothing and black mask and a serious black gun.

  He flicked his head. Up.

  Maybe he couldn't talk with the mask on. The message was clear enough.

  'Fuck,' she said.

  No way the policeman could stand. She was sure the soldier would shoot them before he helped. She dragged him up. He cried out. In the new daylight, his misshapen leg became obvious.

  Broken leg? Maybe he's tougher than he looks, she thought.

  The soldier wasn't moved by the policeman's pain. He said nothing but spoke with the barrel of his rifle - they had no choice but to go where it pointed.

  *

  George Farnham woke on his second day of captivity someplace unfamiliar. Barren walls of crumbling plaster. Concrete floors caked with excrement, maybe blood. A rusted metal cot bed with a stained mattress on which he had slept.

  A bare single bulb flickered like it was on its way out.

  The man with fire in his eyes stepped forward, so that as George looked up from the bed the light was directly behind the man's head. It might have looked like a halo on someone else. Instead, it threw his grinning face into shadow. George thought maybe that grin was always there.

  'Hi there, George! My name is Kurt William O'Dell,' he said, with a false and frightening voice that didn't sound happy at all. 'All my buddies call me Mr. O'Dell, though. Have a question for me, George? Mate? Buddy? Got a question?'

  George wanted to go to the toilet. This wasn't the friendly joking thing that his Dad sometimes did. This was the mean
kind of joking.

  'Go ahead, young man. You may speak.'

  O'Dell sat beside George and tried to pat the boy's knee. George scooted back up the filthy bed to get away.

  The man didn't bother to move at all. Where was he going to go?

  'Where am I?' said George.

  'You like it? Welcome to your new home. Nice, isn't it?'

  No, thought George. It's evil.

  'Yes. An evil place, George. It is mine, though, so please be mindful of that. And of course I know what you're thinking...just like you can pick up some of what I'm thinking too, can't you?'

  George's face gave him away.

  'Tell you what, George,' said the man. 'Let's play a little game, shall we?'

  George didn't want to play any game with the man, but he didn't get a choice. Immediately, the name of the place came into his head. Normally, it was like hearing tiny voices, but the man was shouting in his head and his mind-voice was powerful and strong.

  George thought about maybe trying to get the name wrong. Maybe the man would let him go if they didn't think he was special...

  Who are you kidding?

  Himself, he knew. He couldn't kid this man. Couldn't fool him, couldn't outwit him. Couldn't win. Besides, he was an adult and George was just a child.

  'Where's my mum?' he said, instead of saying the words that the man shouted inside his head.

  'Dead, George. I'm so sorry,' said the man with the wide grin.

  George knew the man told the truth.

  Dad...and mum...

  He thought he'd burst into tears, but he held them in. He wouldn't cry.

  But something else whispered to George...

  The man with fire in his eyes thought he told the truth. He believed it...but that truth he plucked from O'Dell flickered. And that was the strangest thing, a thing he'd never experienced with this gift before; uncertainty.

  'Now, I've been a good sport. How about you tell me the name that's in my head? No more fucking about.'

  The swear came with venom. Like a slap, and then, on its heels, the man thought the name of the place again with such force that a small trickle of blood ran from George's nose and he cried out in agony. A stabbing, deep pain, that hurt from the base of his skull right into the back of his eyes.

  'The Mill! It's the Mill...please...'

  'Please what?'

  'Please don't shout.'

  The man - O'Dell - nodded. 'Very well, George. Very well. Rest up. Big op tomorrow, eh?'

  George didn't register what the man had said until the door was closing, and then, an image from the man's mind that still lingered.

  George knew what the 'big op' meant. He knew what was going to happen, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Yet, George frowned in concentration. Tears would come later. But that something else he felt, or simply was given to understand, niggled at him. Like trying to remember how to reset the chain on his bike, or pluck a difficult spelling from the air.

  Uncertainty, yes. But while he'd been in the man's mind, a mind that seethed like snakes might, sliding over each other, George thought he'd taken something away with him. That perhaps Mr. Kurt William O'Dell might well hold all the cards, but George was sure the man with that nasty grin had no idea he was simply playing solitaire.

  *

  Mr. O'Dell scratched at the back of neck while he spoke on the phone. When he spoke or smiled his teeth were on show, just like the small scar on his forehead. It was part of who he was, a facet of the landscape of his face, like a ruby birthmark or a pair of glasses might be on another man.

  Sometimes, he forgot things - random things, unimportant things - but never the big picture. The grin came with the puckered scar on his forehead and the nerve and brain damage from having a bullet lodged in his brain. A two-for-one deal.

  Sometimes his hands shook. The pain in his head was constant. But since the bullet seemed to have triggered the remarkable awakening of his particular talents, he bore it stoically.

  Just like he bore the idiot on the other end of the phone.

  'The boy is officially an orphan,' said the man on the phone. 'I saw her myself, Sir. No doubt.'

  Mr. O'Dell was happy with that, because he'd felt what George felt - uncertainty - and he hadn't liked it at all.

  Happy at the outcome, for sure, though not so much with the man on the phone.

  'You did kill her?'

  'No. Jess pulled the trigger. Shot her in the head,' said the man, speaking of Eleanor Farnham, of course.

  Mr. O'Dell worked at something stuck in his teeth, and scratched the back of his neck again. Damn, he had the fidgets.

  He stilled himself. It took a colossal amount of willpower to work against his own body. His hands, his feet, his neck and head...all of him wanted to jitter and jive. But he gritted his teeth, silent on the phone for a moment, and then he was back in the game.

  'So...we have complete containment?' he said, finally.

  'Yup,' said the man.

  O'Dell grinned some more. 'Good.'

  A clean sweep. The supermarket, the motorway, the buses...everything exactly as it should be. Exactly as he'd hoped, he'd planned, and known.

  'Go and do something useful, then,' he said, and put down the phone.

  Everything, absolutely everything, he had achieved came thanks to that single bullet in his brain and the power it gave him - the power to read minds, manipulate, to foretell the future.

  For a second, O'Dell's head swirled at the thought of what that one small calibre bullet had granted him.

  He was about to remake the whole fucking world.

  He didn't realise it, but as he dreamed the future in his head, his feet tapped crazily under his desk and his right eye drifted as he seized. Petite Mal - yet another gift from that bullet.

  He was entirely unaware of the episode, but as he often did, O'Dell came around swiftly. The seizure passing, nothing but a tired residue to mark it. O'Dell still grinned, and his teeth ached, but then didn't they always?

  He nodded to himself and decided on a new course of action. The future might be what he made it, but he felt more than happy to tinker along the way. He dialled an internal number and drummed his fingers, though he waited a few seconds for the man on the other end to answer.

  'Doc? We're moving it forward. The boy's powerful, and I don't trust him. We're doing it tonight. And the specimens from the field trial? Incinerate them. We don't need them.'

  He put the phone down again. Grinned and scratched and felt, somewhere deep down, that perhaps, just perhaps, he was missing something.

  'Nope,' he said to himself in his grim office in the basement of the Mill. 'All present and accounted for.'

  *

  The place called The Mill was full of so many souls, so many minds; the battered and abused, the crippled and the blind. Then, too, the dark memories of the men and women who worked there. George found it difficult to draw his thoughts back into himself, travelling as it was through the miasma and tumble of fancies and sorrow inside The Mill.

  When George opened his eyes again, his emotions reeled from his trip into O'Dell's remarkable mind. His young bright blue eyes - bloodshot now, from the effort - regained focus slowly.

  The operation to come was huge in George's mind. Like a mountain that blocked out even the sun. But he strove, hard as he could, to pull all the things he learned from the minds around him, into some kind of shape he could understand.

  One thing he knew for certain - there was no chance an eight year old boy could escape The Mill alone. He was small, and weak, and slow. He was tired and frightened, surrounded by soldiers with long guns and short guns and no conscience at all. He knew these things because he had seen inside their minds.

  They would shoot him dead and worry more about the loss of a bullet.

  What he couldn't know for certain was if he could get someone else to help him...maybe even reach out and make someone save him.

  It was something he'd never
tried, nor had he ever thought to try. Why would he? It was a bad thing to do.

  But now?

  He thought his dad and mum, in heaven or wherever thoughts went, would understand that he was left no choice at all. If he didn't try, he was dead.

  Did he have enough strength left to do it, even if he could?

  'Won't know just by wondering, will you?'

  His teacher's voice, he remembered. Asking a question during computer time, his teachers extraordinarily thin finger tapping a logo on the screen. The logo said 'Google'.

  I'll Google it, thought George.

  His body fell still and his eyes flickered and rolled back and the locked door and the rank cell didn't matter any longer.

  He wandered The Mill once more, sifting through the broken and tortured minds within its awful walls for a mind that might, perhaps, be willing to listen.

  *

  Francis held Ben's hand as they sat on their cot in a rotten cell. His face was white with pain and she was powerless to help him.

  No help would come. They had disappeared. The world would never find them. She understood this perfectly well. Whatever was in store for them, there wasn't any doubt that it didn't have a happy ending. Soldiers don't snatch people at gunpoint, then confine them in a horrific cell, broken bones ignored, only to let them go later with a handshake.

  This wasn't the kind of thing you saw on the news. This was the kind of thing that news reporters never heard about...if they ever did, Francis was in no doubt that the reporters, too, would be in there right along with her and Ben.

  She figured Ben - they'd finally exchanged names, the last time he'd been conscious - would be pretty much useless for what she needed to do. He was banged up pretty badly. Broken ribs, leg, probably with a concussion, and that at the very least.

  Unconscious now for hours, she wondered if he might even die.

  Whatever she was going to do, she would have to do alone. 'Whatever' summed it up neatly. She was in such deep shit. This was the part where the heroine died. She wasn't immune to bullets. The door wasn't going to spring open to reveal some swarthy adventurer. There were no windows, no secret passages, no loose bricks. On the way to the cell, everyone they'd passed had been armed with at least a pistol, if not a rifle, too. Dark eyes, the lot of them. Like they'd killed before and were entirely comfortable with it. These were not ordinary soldiers. This was not an army installation. This was not a game.