The Dead Boy

by Saunders, Craig

  He could not break free. Could not, he realised, hear anymore. His grip seemed ineffectual, pointless, despite the fight within him he'd found. Like they merely held hands rather than what they were really doing, which was fighting over Edgar, the survivor of their marriage.

  This isn't an embrace. She's killing me.

  As the bright colours left and his sight began to darken once again, something flashed beside him. Whatever it was seared his face and a terrible pain blasted his left ear. Blood, cold rather than hot, washed over the sheets and the rose pattern and spotted his face and hands.

  The blood cooled the burn. A relief.

  He would remember that thought later and feel sick.

  For now, he was free. He rolled to one side, his weakened hands fluttering at his face and saw a woman stood over the bed. She held a gun, and the gun smoked.

  Edgar waited for her to shoot him, not caring about her reasons at all.

  *

  He expected to see the dark barrel of the gun turn on him, but she moved the gun aside, though her eyes stayed on him.

  'Come on. Move.'

  Edgar neither rose, nor moved. He lay on the carpet in the bedroom he'd shared with his wife for over a decade. The carpet had burned his elbows almost as badly as the powder burn down the side of his face.

  His ears rang, but he heard the woman's voice just fine. Somewhere down deep, either actual hearing, or piecing her words together from her manner; a little movement of her lips, or her head. But her meaning didn't quite register. His wife's handprints were still warm and harsh on his neck. His throat burned, and blood choked the back of his throat.

  'Get up!'

  Still, Edgar could not move.

  'Fuck this,' said the woman. Blonde, long hair. Attractive, but not to Edgar. He was a one woman man, and this woman looked around twenty years younger, and she'd just shot his wife in the face.

  She held the gun beside her leg as she strode toward him. Edgar didn't back away. He craned his head toward her. He wanted her to shoot him, too. But she didn't - with a surprisingly powerful left hand she dragged him to his feet, like he weighed no more than a bag of potatoes, rather than his thirteen stones. Her right hand remained tight on her gun.

  'Fucking hell...do you want to die?'

  That seemed like a strange question. But he knew the answer to that one, even though the words swam through his confusion and fluid ran down his neck from a ruptured eardrum.

  'Yes.'

  She shook her head. 'For Christ's sake. Brilliant.'

  Edgar heard tyres outside, screeching, then the squeal of metal on metal. Other sounds, distant, like you might get two or three times a day in a small town, of sirens and shouting. Then...a gunshot.

  He frowned.

  'You might want to die. I shot your dead wife...get over it. I don't want to die, and I'm not going to.'

  She pulled him and he could either follow or fall down. He followed, thick-headed, and on wooden legs. Like a marionette, and she held the strings.

  But it isn't me that's the puppet, he thought. She is.

  Through her hand, like a jolt of lightning, he saw the puppet master. A man with a straight, hard face, with fire reflected across the surface of his eyes, as though his eyes were mirrors and he stared straight into a burning world.

  The man who sees fire?

  Something like that. It was all he could pick up from the woman.

  'What?' she said.

  He shook his head. He didn't want to say anything. She was his saviour, but she was nothing more than a tool, a hand being told what to do, a gun pointed at whatever and whoever the -

  Puppet...man with fire...

  He turned himself away from the thought with effort. Whoever that man was, he was dangerous.

  So what if he is? Why do I care?

  She dragged him through his open front door.

  Outside, the world had turned to hell.

  She strode toward a black scratched and dented Mercedes. He watched the set of her shoulders, her long legs, the work boots she wore. She yanked the passenger door open and flicked her head.

  The gun was still in her hand.

  Edgar got in. She slammed the door behind him. Another gunshot, somewhere closer.

  The woman slid into the driver's seat and jammed the gun down into the side pocket of the door. She turned the key she'd left in the ignition, reversed and hit someone that bounced back into the road.

  Edgar turned to look, afraid she'd kill him too.

  Why do I care? he thought again. It was a refrain he already disliked.

  The man she'd hit lay across the verge. She'd knocked him from the pavement to the brown grass. The man was naked.

  'You killed him...'

  Why do I care? I want to die...

  'I bloody well hope so,' she said. 'Time's short, Edgar, so I'm not going to fuck around with you. The town, around ten miles out, too...it's quarantined. There's an experiment going on. They put something in the water. It's making everyone crazy, and I don't think it's turning out like they hoped.'

  'They? What? Like...Sarah?'

  The woman shook her head. She didn't look at Edgar but at the road, the houses, then, the buildings around them as they drove through town. She drove fast, almost recklessly, but she was confident enough.

  Looking for someone else to run down, or shoot. Maybe both.

  'Not like your wife. Your wife...' The woman sighed and swerved round corners like she didn't expect to meet a car coming the other way.

  'The way I understand it, it's like a temporary, very rare side effect. It's not permanent. The dead aren't coming back to life, Edgar. That's not what's happening. People are killing each other. That's the problem.'

  'A side effect...' said Edgar. 'Of...?'

  'You think I'm a nut? That's fine. You go on believing your wife just wanted a cuddle and it's normal for a town like this to be empty. Edgar, wake up.'

  Edgar fell silent for a moment. She was right. She drove like a maniac, unmindful of the chance of other traffic but not because she was reckless - because there were no other cars. None at all.

  He noted small things on the street. Bins, overflowing and forgotten. A postman's trolley with three beer cans on top, like the postman left it out all night and youngsters from the off-license had used it for a table.

  Something wet dripped from the bottom of the trolley.

  As they neared town, he remembered walking, head down, past the market. But now, through the market square empty of people, he realised he wasn't even sure what day it was. He wasn't thinking straight. He was...confused. It couldn't have been market day when he walked back. There weren't any people. That didn't make sense at all.

  That's right. No sense at all...because I'm confused. Stress...my wife...

  But the burn on his face was real. The ringing, whistling sound in his ear on that side. The dimming of sounds all around him. Did he imagine the whole thing...if he did, who the hell hallucinates pain, too?

  And who is this woman? Why me?

  'Who are you?' Another thought hit him. 'How do you know who I am? What are you? Some kind of Special Forces, soldier-type?'

  'No,' she said, then laughed. The sound seemed to surprise her, even from her mouth as it was. 'My name's Francis. I'm not a soldier. I used to listen to Luther Vandross in my bedroom,' she said, and laughed again. Her laugh sounded to Edgar much like the feelings that ran in him.

  She's afraid, too.

  She glanced at him, but remained sure on the road. 'I'm not special.'

  'Why did you come for me? Where did you get a gun? I don't understand.'

  She didn't answer that, but waved her hand at the town as they sped through the high street. 'Look around, Edgar. Tell me what you see?'

  He did, again, waking and seeing, cataloguing.

  Bright sunshine. Fruit and crates and baskets and punnets and wooden pallets, tumbled to the ground. A fishmonger's van, crawling with black flies...and over everything, even in
the car was the stench he'd barely registered, head down, walking through town on the way to his wife.

  No people at all. But now his eyes were truly open, he understood that wasn't true.

  There was someone. A man leaned against a shop window and there was a long, dark smear behind him.

  'Is that...blood?'

  'Yep. Blood. It's like that for ten miles in any direction. And how I know who you are? A boy told me your name. He sent me to get you.'

  'Me?'

  'Yeah. Don't know why, but the kid thinks you can help us stop the man who did this because you're special, too, aren't you, Edgar?'

  The man who saw a burning world, he thought. No...

  'The man with fire in his eyes,' he said, and knew that this time he was right.

  'Yes,' she said. 'His name is O'Dell.'

  *

  Something struck the windscreen at the outskirts of town. The screen shattered. Francis swerved. Edgar saw everything slow, though in reality everything happened fast.

  Blood on her. She didn't cry out. The thing, grey and heavy, tore into Edgar's arm and he felt nothing. It was rough, and hard. My arm's broken, he thought, pain on the heels of thought. Not a rock...a piece of concrete. Two feet long, maybe one foot around. Iron or steel inside the concrete. It flew through the space between the front seats to the back, where it speared the material and smashed against the metal inside the boot. His shoulder burned and he understood that the blood on Francis' face and shirt was all his. She bounced the car against something. She spoke but he didn't hear her words. The car hit the kerb and the gun in the side pocket jumped, jounced about, hit her head then landed in the foot well beneath the brake pedal. She didn't touch the brake but stamped on the accelerator instead.

  Stop, he tried to say, but he was weak. He put his left hand over his right shoulder. Blood poured around his fingers. Might as well have been trying to stop a river with a stick. The car sped. Around forty...he checked her dashboard and saw she was up to fifty miles per hour. The lights at a junction ahead were red.

  Her face was grim. Red lights didn't matter. There was no one around to hit. Everyone was dead, or insane...or...

  I've been drinking the water, too, and if what she says is true...

  Thoughts popped into Edgar's head, passed through, left nothing behind. Like the people he said 'hi' to on his walks into town to buy groceries, or Sarah a birthday present. The blood through his fingers and along his arm was a torrent. He felt dizzy, sick.

  At fifty miles an hour Francis leaned the car into a tight bend that led not south, to the bypass, but north and out into the country.

  No one around. All fine. Everything's fine.

  Edgar's left side was soaked. His eyes drifted and his vision wavered but he still saw the white van coming at them.

  A delivery driver who missed the memo, he mused.

  Then he saw the driver's face. A mask of blood.

  At the last moment before the impact Edgar though the driver had no lips - just long teeth, red with blood and froth and spit.

  At fifty, on a tight bend, Francis had no chance. The guy wasn't trying to avoid them, either - he was trying to kill them.

  The Mercedes front end was crushed, the car turning the wrong way up so Francis was above Edgar, before they rolled. Edgar's head hit the window as the car hit the ground.

  Finally, the car skewed and slid on the roof. Distantly, Edgar heard the roar of the engine, or the wheels - something still turning. Francis' head rested on his shoulder. Shattered glass covered them both. The smell of hot rubber, along with petrol, exhaust dirt, a tang like the gun smoke he'd smelled earlier from split airbags. Hot tarmac by his burned cheek.

  There should be a window there.

  The thought was muzzy. Everything was fading away. His hearing took longer to go. He heard footsteps, the woman's breath, the slow tumble of sharp things falling through the wreckage of the car, and a voice.

  'Kshh. Kssahh.'

  The words made no sense, but as Edgar wondered at the meaning, he slipped all the way into unconsciousness, along with Francis beside him.

  *

  VII.

  U+03BF

  Darren Sewell Jones clicked his ballpoint pen repetitively - nib in, nib out - while he stared at the computer monitor in front of him, hardly seeing the website he'd been designing.

  The computer was a high-end Mac. A crisp screen, great graphics. The colours were vibrant and everything seemed to shine like crystal. All around his desk, post-it notes were stuck down with benign messages upon them. Some bore smiley faces above the 'i', some little winking faces, like people thought in emoticons instead of English now. He hated it. The walls to his cubicle were some kind of fuzzy felt thing. He could have stuck a picture of a farm on it, or Mr. Men, or Sesame Street characters. As long as they were made of felt, too, because nothing else would stick there. The wood of his desk was laminated, or covered in some kind of lacquer. He didn't know shit about wood, except this 'wood' got slick with sweat from his wrist as it rubbed on his desk just beneath his mouse mat.

  The post-it messages, bland and cancerous at the same time, peeked back at him every time he looked at them. There was one in particular that troubled him. He hid this beneath his ergonomic keyboard, which he lifted on occasion to remind himself exactly what was written there, like he did now.

  Mick Ranse is trying to fuck your daughter in the ring. Dirty fucker is a snatch rapist. Watch him.

  The note was signed, simply, 'A FRIEND'.

  Jones' daughter was five.

  Jones looked up over the parapet of his cubicle and saw Ranse emerge from the door that led to the small kitchen and the toilets.

  It was the smile the man wore that sealed the deal.

  Snatch rapist.

  Jones had a picture of his daughter and his wife on his desk.

  'Ranse,' he called.

  Ranse didn't look like Jones imagined a paedophile should. The man looked like a tired drunk. His tie wasn't straight after the toilet. Everyone knew Ranse put a shot in his coffee after lunch. Maybe he'd been sick, puking in the toilet and writing it off to a weak constitution. He was an alcoholic and people pitied him.

  They didn't know what Jones' knew, though, thanks to his friend.

  'What's up, brother?'

  Ranse, talking to Jones like they were friends or something. They weren't.

  'Here. Got Daze a new shirt. What do you think?'

  Daze, his pet name for Daisy. His daughter. Five years old.

  'Damn,' said Ranse. 'You're going to have your hands full. Great shirt.'

  Fucker's getting off on the picture.

  Jones almost checked Ranse's trousers for a shift. But he didn't.

  'Here,' he said, standing and freeing his chair so that Ranse could sit. 'Anyway, wanted you to look at this. New design I've been working on. I could do with an opinion. Can't see the wood for the trees, been at it so long, you know?'

  'Sure, bud,' said Ranse. Jones stood, Ranse sat. Jones took the phone from the cradle. Everything was wireless these days. The computers, the printers. Everything except the phones. It had a curly wire which Jones put round Ranse's throat.

  Jones pulled it tight as his strength would allow. Ranse gurgled, but the cable shifted and he almost got loose.

  Jones' used his body to ram Ranse into the desk, thumping his face hard enough into the keyboard to crack the black plastic. The monitor wobbled on its stand, but didn't fall. Ranse fought, but didn't say anything because he couldn't. Jones panted from the effort of strangling the nonce bastard.

  Ranse's feet kicked out beneath the cubicle. There was a smell of piss, not just Ranse's, but Jones, too. He felt the warmth on his leg. He felt sordid, embarrassed about that - an adult, pissing himself at work - but he was just fine with killing.

  Finally, Ranse stilled.

  No one watched. There wasn't anyone else in the office.

  Good, thought Jones. That's good. Because I just killed a man.


  Everyone's going to know I did it, but it's fine because the man was trying to fuck my five year old daughter. Public service. Protecting my family.

  It's fine.

  'It's fine,' he said, and smoothed his jacket as he walked to the office door. It would lead to fresh air, a shingle-covered car park, his Audi. Home, a family that he'd just looked after like a man should.

  Jones opened the door and stepped into a dark room instead of a car park.

  'What the...'

  He didn't finish his sentence.

  A bullet entered the right side of his head, exited through the left, tearing and fragmenting and ruining anything that might have remained of Mr. Jones' awful insanity. He fell onto a plastic sheet. A man in a hazardous materials suit stepped up and folded the sheet over Jones' body, there in the dark, and dragged him away. That man was followed by another with a full body suit and respirator, who switched off the cameras which covered the work simulation and then set to cleansing the room, but only after he'd tidied away the other body.

  *

  Kurt William O'Dell had no memory, but he didn't live for the past. He was all about the future - the one he could see, and the one he was making. He wasn't a chemist, though, or a scientist, or a soldier. That was why he made sure owned the men and women who were, and the ones he owned were very, very good at what they did.

  He watched the video from the simulation until Jones exited the room. The footage showed different angles, each angle displayed on a bank of screens. When the show was finally over, O'Dell looked over the readouts from various sensors on a smaller monitor beneath the screens.

  'What am I looking at?' he asked.

  'The test you just viewed was the last test phase of the second iteration of the compound. Sir, we are officially ready to rock and roll.'

  'But not, Mr. Boyle, the only reason I am here?

  'No, Sir,' replied Boyle, shifting from foot to foot like a restless child. Already, the motion grated on O'Dell's nerves. If Boyle wasn't so brilliant, he would have happily put a bullet in the man's spine, if only to make him still.