The Dead Boy

by Saunders, Craig

  He checked his nose again.

  GET THE FUCK OUT, he thought, hard.

  'Here...a stopwatch, too. Oh, I thought of everything.'

  O'Dell pushed a stopwatch, a cheap black plastic thing, into Wayland's bound right hand. Wayland stared at O'Dell. O'Dell chose to ignore the look.

  'Careful with that, eh? It's running. You have...' O'Dell checked his own watch. 'Precisely five hours thirty-two minutes to kill my boss...no...thirty-one minutes...time flies, doesn't it?'

  'I can't drive. I can't fucking walk.'

  'Oh, don't harp on. Anyway, of course you can't walk. You're sitting down.'

  'You shot my cock off, my hand...you...'

  'Don't be a baby about it,' said O'Dell. He tore Wayland's straps away and dumped him out of the wheelchair. Wayland screamed and rolled, then struggled onto his knees.

  'There you go,' said O'Dell, throwing his hands into the air. 'It's a miracle!'

  O'Dell put the muzzle of his gun in Wayland's ear. 'Or, I just kill you now, bring you back, and we'll call it quits?'

  'Fuck off.'

  'Thought so.' O'Dell fired into the large window. The report was tremendous, huge, in the tight room. The bullet ricocheted from the thick glass and hit a bank of speakers before it tore through and into the plaster wall behind.

  'Starter's orders, Wayland.'

  Wayland began to shuffle toward the elevator, O'Dell watching him all the way.

  *

  Eleanor didn't know that the man who left had stolen her son. If she'd known, still she would only have been able to stand before the wide window as he walked away.

  The man in the suit stared into her cell. She thought of him as the Man, but today he seemed different. Something red and furious in his eyes, and his hair, messed. He left her alone and she knew he would not be back.

  Eleanor seemed intent on standing still forever, merely to stare at the spot where The Man had been. An observer might have been convinced she still saw him, or some kind of afterglow, as though she waited for the memory of the Man to depart.

  But she wasn't staring after him, nor fascinated by his shape, style, even that peculiar aura of power that filled any space he entered.

  She stared at the mark he left behind.

  Now and then, she would cock her head, as though in thought. When she did, the shift in pressure around the bare section of her skull sent her into a long, painful fit of screaming. When the pain passed, she returned and stared with a slow, patient kind of thought, like a child might stare at a puzzle and wonder which colour went where, or which shape. She did the same thing for perhaps twenty hours.

  Stare, cock her head, scream. Then repeat her actions over again.

  Eleanor no longer slept. She felt only the barest sense of fatigue.

  Finally, her mouth dry, her bowels and bladder complaining, she ate the last of her food - just dust from the discarded packs of dried out nutrients. She drank, leaning to do so while she emptied herself into the toilet bowl. She didn't know, yet, to flush, and though she remembered toilet paper, she had none.

  Her gaze returned the spot where O'Dell had stood.

  She walked forward and laid her hand against the window. Her eyes closed for a moment. She knew what she had to do.

  Eleanor dug inside her head and began to pull, one hand each side of the rent they had cut into her. Long, filthy nails scraped at the exposed part of her brain and one leg became numb, but jittered with spasms. Her other leg and the window held her up. She carried on yanking until she tore the metal clasp in her head free. Blood, bone, some brain matter, hair, skin, all torn.

  When it was done she sagged, then slid out on the floor in a wretched heap.

  Later, when she rose, Eleanor remembered why she hurt herself. To heal, but not only that. The metal was a tool.

  The only hope the Man had ever allowed her was right there - the long, shallow rut in the glass that his bullet left behind.

  And if a bullet could mark the glass, then the steel from her head could, too. If the steel could scratch, it could carve.

  Eleanor began to scrape at the glass slowly and carefully, and with the patience of the dead.

  *

  XV.

  A Short Walk, for Some

  In some dystopia, the rig might have been violent, horrifying - certainly for a lone woman. And yet it felt safe. Something in the atmosphere, perhaps. She could feel violence, now, as a vibration on the air. For months, she'd been surrounded by danger, suffused in it. Now, she could often sense it before it came. Violence was sudden, yes, but like a squall or summer lightning storm, there was a smell on the air that almost always preceded it.

  Still, Francis knew such things could catch you out, even when you imagined you were safe. So she shared a room with Edgar and George, not because she needed the comfort, but as an added layer of security. She wasn't some super soldier, trained in martial arts. She could no more defend herself with a knife than some clever, improvised weapon. She could pull a trigger. But so could anyone.

  There were no guns on the rig. Probably a wise and sensible choice, too. Men, plenty of them, confined for long stretches of time. There was alcohol, but that had long gone. Men had died, through accident and idiocy and pure bad luck. There were thirteen people on the rig. John Wake, the three of them, and nine men who'd survived this long. But they wouldn't last forever.

  They had to get off.

  If they didn't, they were dead, and maybe a hundred or five hundred years in some unimaginable future, a new people would find them frozen against the steel. More likely, perhaps, that the rig would just give in and slip beneath the rough seas without anyone to notice at all.

  She lay in the dark, worrying, listening to the night sounds. The blast of the wind, so constant that it became white noise. The sea's efforts to swallow them continued. Sleet hit the metal sides of their quarters slantways, a hollow drone that reminded her of distant holidays in caravan parks. Rain would thunder against the tin roof, keeping her awake. As a child she'd hated it, hated the hard sound, the viciousness of storms. As a teen, she'd grown to love that sound, and sought it out. When she'd bought her first car she often sat with the engine off, somewhere away from traffic, and waited for a dark cloud to bring the rain. Then, she would sit still, her hands in her lap or tight on the wheel. She'd close her eyes, and just listen to that wonderful sound. Drumming on tin, right above her head.

  So thinking, she lulled herself to sleep.

  A hand on her leg brought her sharply to wake. She kicked out, instinctively, and the hand was snatched away.

  The instant before natural reaction freed her, though, George's words reached her mind.

  Francis, he said.

  'Shit, George? Are you alright? Did I hurt you?' she spoke aloud, forgetting to speak mind-to-mind.

  He didn't reply, because if they weren't touching he couldn't speak.

  Edgar, on the top bunk opposite her, stirred at the sound of her voice. She quieted, trying not to wake him. If George had wanted Edgar, Edgar would be awake, too.

  She could see nothing, so reached out a tentative hand, and George's hand found hers at the same time. This time, expecting his touch, she did not flinch, but let herself listen to his strange, silent voice.

  Francis. Will you walk with me?

  'Walk?' she whispered. 'Can you?'

  If you can manage, I can manage. We'll help each other.

  With his voice, in her mind, Francis sensed and felt as much, if not more, than his simple words conveyed.

  'Are we leaving, George? We are, aren't we?'

  I'm not sure, he told her, but the way he said it sounded like at least half a lie. Yet. But we need to learn to walk. Let's teach each other.

  She pushed herself from the bunk, his hand in hers.

  'Sure?' she asked one final time.

  Sure, he said.

  She pulled him up. He staggered, his legs too weak to hold him, but she was there. Her arm under his, around his tiny chest. Th
e pain in her feet was constant, and standing without her crutches sent needles of pain stabbing, it seemed, as high as her hips. But she gritted her teeth, because he needed her.

  I need him, too, she thought. But she tried to keep this to herself.

  *

  Wayland Redman's agony was of a different kind. His felt personal, like hatred, or some kind of betrayal. Worse, too, because no one had ever hurt him like this. He'd killed kids, women, a few men. He'd poured pain onto people like boiling water into his morning coffee - no big deal. Just something to wake him up.

  He was a sick man. The kind who'd get hard, or laugh, at another's pain. Sometimes, too, it affected him. He could find a person in death touching. Once or twice he'd cried, and plenty of times he'd said sorry, over and over, while he made people bleed and scream, but it wasn't a thing he'd been able to stop. He was an alcoholic. Murder was his tipple of choice. He might feel ashamed, dirty, sometimes, but he always came back to it. On the wagon, for years at a time, then it would lure him again. A glass like ruby port, though, rather that something amber, tinkling and full of ice.

  But no one had ever hurt him before.

  Sheer agony coursed through him each time he shifted gear in the borrowed car. His left foot would push down the clutch, or his right, the accelerator. When he moved his legs, bolts of horrible energy coursed through his balls, his spine, into his groin and guts. So many times his sight dimmed and his hearing switched from the roar of the wet road to that peculiar underwater echo that people get when their consciousness wavers and they feel that slip from the edge of waking to the long abyss of sleep.

  To sleep would be to die.

  He remembered the woman in the cell.

  O'Dell was a liar, yes, but when it came to pain and retribution, the man's promises were solid as steel. Wayland did not believe for a minute that the woman's condition was a lie. She was not some simple test experiment, a torture victim or dumb captive. O'Dell said she came back from the dead, then she had indeed come back. He brought her back.

  He'd do it him, too. Wayland had seen into the woman's eyes. He knew she wasn't some idiot husk. She knew what had been done to her. A corpse, raised, only to learn humanity again and fall to dust after years, perhaps even to find the insanity of the grave once again, all the while watching it creep over her.

  Wayland could not bear that. Better a clean end...or...

  He imagined finishing this job, and then hunting O'Dell. The pain, the chance, would be worth it.

  'But I'd never win.'

  He spoke to himself in the sturdy car, his words deadened, and it was true, of course. O'Dell would always win, because O'Dell saw the future, didn't he?

  The wastelands Wayland drove through were testament to that. Burned factories, flattened supermarkets. The remnant of petrol stations and service stations along the road he drove, perhaps burned for fun or simple by accident. Fireballs from gas lines obliterated whole rows of houses. Brickwork remained in random spots along the road like shattered teeth after some brawl. Bodies, just grey lumps under a coating of sleet and ice. Cars, bigger bumps on the landscape and the road ahead, or pile-ups, lorries torched and gutted, craters from small military engagements near the end. Some of the larger cities would be nothing but dips on the landscape, their girth now only broken by skeletal towers where people once took elevators to their jobs in the sky.

  O'Dell's doing, all of it. A man who'd burned the world. A man Wayland could not fight.

  Would not.

  When he weighed his fear of O'Dell against the insult of his missing parts, O'Dell proved heavier.

  So he bit down on the pain with each gear shift, or when he was forced to brake or speed up. Every time he had to use his right hand, so much of it just nubs of bone, he thought of O'Dell, and the horrible fire that burned in his insane eyes, and he took the pain.

  Four hours he drove, sometimes crying out, sometimes simply crying.

  Pure torture until the satellite navigation system in the car told him to take his final turn. A synthesised voice, granting a short reprieve. He expected a giant steel and concrete maw that opened to a secure underground bunker, but it was a simple row of tower blocks. Old things, with a web of walkways connecting three buildings. As little as seven or eight weeks ago, men and women had probably barely survived in places such as this. Old, poor people would die in the cold of winter. Young men with short, dangerous dogs would have prowled those high walkways. Men who wore coats all year long probably sold vials or packages of the kind of medicines that let people live in such places without going mad from despair and throwing themselves thirty floors to a grateful death.

  He counted the windows, from the first floor to the last.

  It wasn't thirty floors, but twenty-three.

  The ruined parts of him throbbed at the thought of it. Then, he balanced that against O'Dell's face, leering at him endless through a thick plate of glass.

  'Cunt,' he said. He took out the gun O'Dell allowed him.

  Phone in one pocket, a stop watch on his wrist, and the gun in his left hand.

  Tears ran down his face as he walked through the grey deluge that splattered against his downturned face.

  'Fuck you, O'Dell,' he said when he was inside the tower block, looking at the first of hundreds of concrete steps. 'Fuck you.'

  *

  George's brow was damp with sweat and his breath laboured when he and Francis reached the end of the short, dimly lit hall. He leaned heavily on Francis' arm. Both legs shook, his left more than the right. His grip on her weakened, too, until she was all but carrying him.

  'Hey, this is supposed to be exercise for both of us. You're like a sack of potatoes.'

  He smiled wearily. But he happy. That much was obvious.

  'You should be happy,' she told him. 'A week ago you could barely stand. You're getting stronger. That's you, George. Not some virus or magic potion or whatever they gave you. You. Understand? It's okay to feel a little pride, sometimes.'

  Thank you. He didn't speak in her mind this time, but mouthed the words, simple enough for Francis to understand.

  'You done for the night? I don't know about you but I could sleep.' She could, too. Her feet pained her, her back sore from lugging George down the hall. Bed seemed like a good place to be right now.

  George, however, shook his head. This time, when he touched her hand, she knew he had something to say that couldn't be read on his lips.

  It's late, Francis...but we have something to do. Somewhere quiet. Away from Edgar.

  'You're sly, George, you know that?'

  Like a fox. He grinned. But this is dangerous, Francis.

  'It's him, isn't it?' she asked.

  George nodded. He's...occupied. Don't ask how I know. I just do. If his mind's on other things, we might be able to...

  'Sneak in?'

  George nodded again. Are you up for a bit of spying?

  'Always,' she said. 'Come on. It should be quiet in the common room.'

  Sometimes, if a man couldn't sleep, he might be in the common room. But the remaining men agreed to ration food and drinks and cigarettes before Francis and her friends even thought about trying to hop the channel and failing. No television or radio. Plenty of old, well-thumbed magazines, and very few books. The end of the world, it seemed, was a shitty place for insomniacs.

  By the time they sat opposite each other on plastic chairs, a table between them, both George and Francis shook from the strain. George on atrophied legs, Francis on healing bones. George, short of breath and pale, held his hand out for Francis to take.

  'Take a minute, George,' she told him. 'Let's catch our breath, at least.'

  But the boy shook his head, his ragged hair flicking away from his eyes.

  He grabbed her, his expression serious.

  We haven't got time. We might not get another chance, Francis.

  She sighed, but relaxed and held him back, palm to palm, as though they were going to shake on it. She knew the deal they we
re shaking on, too. She was the highway. George one end, O'Dell the other. Like she'd been laid by...

  Francis!

  She stopped that train of though. He's nine, she reminded herself. It was easy to forget the kid's age, and even easier to forget how deftly he could pick what he chose from her thoughts.

  'Do it.'

  She felt him squeeze her hand tighter...and then she was gone.

  *

  George didn't understand his talent at all. It was autonomic, like a person's beating heart, like digestion.

  He was aware of Francis' hand in his. Her smooth, warm skin. Aware, too, of his heart beat - just a steady, slow thud somewhere deep inside.

  Follow her heart...follow the highway.

  He concentrated that part of him that usually ticked alone. Sometimes, before this - before the man with fire in his eyes, he had known things he never wanted to. Even as young as four or five. Perhaps younger, too, but too young then think it in anyway remarkable.

  He feared he would see things inside the man's mind that no one should see - boy or adult.

  Francis, he thought. Think of her heart...the beat.

  The beat inside Francis was calm. He let her heartbeat inside that wonderful place in his head, where all the highways he'd ever known remained. Most of those highways led to death; his father, his mother, teachers, childhood friends, his grandmother. Those roads were crumbled and disused and forgotten. But other highways he'd once touched remained, though distant and unreachable. The twins on his street, Jamie and Anna. Anna still lived. He didn't take her highway, because tonight wasn't about friends. Maybe she'd be thinking about cartoons. Teen Titans, The Simpsons. She'd loved cartoons.

  Darker highways were there, still. The awful man whose mind felt and tasted like foil from a chocolate bar, something bitter and unexpected between your teeth. Wayland Redman.

  And the worst of all: The one he must travel.

  George turned his mind from the hundred dead roads in his head, from those few still brightly lit, and sank deeper into Francis' unconscious mind. The road he needed was the strongest he'd ever seen, and it ran from Francis' mind into the distance. This one had cats' eyes along the edges and between the lanes. One lane out, one lane in. George might have even been able to add street lights, had he wanted, but he could have found his way along a dark country road now. His power grew as he healed. Something about this new world - the distractions and bright lights of life were winking out, and so the darkness was becoming easier to see by.