He wouldn't be coming back here. Why would he? Everyone was dead.
They're all dead, he thought. Or, at least, someone thought for him. Forces that made luck, maybe, or pulled when others pushed.
'All personnel are to evacuate immediately. Leave personal belongings behind. Proceed to the nearest elevator. '
'Facility shut down in five minutes.'
'All personnel...'
The noise meant nothing to O'Dell. The voice in his mind drowned out the announcement.
It's all falling apart. All falling down.
On automatic, O'Dell opened the elevator doors and stepped inside. He chose the button for the car park two floors below ground, but several floors above his head.
You think you let the boy go? You think you found the boy? It wasn't you who found him. It was US. You know this is true. You know...
The voice in his head spoke and O'Dell didn't want to listen. It was not his friend. He hated it, even though they'd only just met. He had no choice but to listen, though, because it was in his head and US were louder than any alarm.
You don't even remember US, do you? You're insane. You don't remember yourself.
'Fuck off,' O'Dell thought, though he didn't realise he spoke out loud.
The elevator's motors hummed along the cables that pulled it up toward the surface. His knees buckled as another flashback hit, more powerful that those that came before.
'Fenchurch. Give me your gun.'
Fenchurch, blank, passing a gun from a briefcase to O'Dell. O'Dell pulling the trigger. Fenchurch falling.
He came back to himself, rocking and using the wall of the elevator to keep himself from falling.
When you die, we'll be there. We'll watch you...like watched us.
'Fuck you!' he shouted. 'Fuck you! I don't know you.'
We are not you. We are US.
You tried to put yourself aside. You never could. We are not you. You are not US.
WE ARE US.
The voice towered, immense, deafening. His head pounded and his nose bled. Then, mercifully it, them, US, stepped back.
The door to the elevator opened, and O'Dell walked on loose, numb legs, to one of the many cars. He clicked a key card from his pocket and a 4X4's indicators flashed once. He opened the door, pulled himself inside. He tried to start the ignition, but when he did, his shaking hands betrayed him and flipped the key into the foot well.
'Calm down. Calm. The. Fuck. Down.'
He forced himself to sit still, eyes closed, until his pounding heart slowed, until his hands settled. Only then did he reached down, find the key, and start the engine.
For the first time in over half a century, O'Dell did not know what the future held. Everything behind him was black, everything ahead dark, too. But the past was becoming brighter, and that, more than any other horror imaginable, terrified the Kurt O'Dell. He saw no fire. He'd seen the future, and the fire had always been the last of it. What came after was a mystery like everyone else faced each day they woke.
*
Memory crippled O'Dell, but it bolstered Eleanor. The past spurred her on.
That voice pounded down on her, trying to break her, but her legs moved faster now and she enjoyed the feeling. It felt as though they were doing precisely what they were made for. As was she. Some new remembrance would flood her, some new delight in her mind at each step she took, and soon even the roar of klaxons and the ever-present words the woman (shouted?) didn't touch Eleanor, despite the volume.
She came to a steel door. It was sliced cleanly down the middle. She could go no further. The words changed, the siren-sound, too.
'One minute. Final warning. Exits will close in fifty-five seconds. Final warning. Exits will close in fifty-seconds. Final warning...'
The words meant little, but something about the sound, the change, the way it repeated and then changed, repeated then changed again. Some urgency in the tone and the voice both.
The woman with the huge voice was trying to tell her something. She should understand. Frustrated with herself, Eleanor scratched at her face hard enough to draw blood.
No. No.
Whether she told herself no, or the voice, she wasn't sure.
There was nowhere to go...and then, there was.
See red on the wall instead, Mother. Red on the wall.
She had seen red on walls, all the way. Red in strange arcs, rainbows made only of red, and red that seemed darker and larger, hard pools on the floor.
She didn't want to see that red.
Brighter than blood.
A round, red spot was there. She slapped at it and those steel doors split, and there was a room behind them. She stepped inside. Buttons, unlit, in a line that went up to down, down to up. Green, though, not red like outside. She didn't need to know what to do. The doors closed, automatic. She panicked, thumping the hard, cold metal, but nothing gave and then she/US thought: Top. The one at the top. Top, like your head. Up.
She pressed the uppermost button and screamed when the room moved.
There was nothing to hold, no escape. Her palms splayed against the metal and her back pressed against the steel. Her skin puckered from the cold.
The large voice was quieter inside the elevator. The words remained a mystery, but the numbers...
Cleansing in nine...eight...seven...
The sensation of movement ceased and Eleanor leapt out as the doors opened.
...two...
The elevator door slid closed behind her. She didn't hear the final word, but she knew what it was, and that she was the same, too.
'One,' she said.
*
XIX.
The Memory of Warmth
Above, cold was all there was. Eleanor was at first fascinated by it and relished the feel of her skin tightening and grinned at her breath puffing out like smoke into the air.
Soon after, the cold ceased to be intriguing. It began to hurt. First, at her fingers and toes and nose, then, as she started to shiver, it hurt her nipples, her lips, the place where she...
Fucked.
The word sprang to mind, and like other words she grasped, she knew it had more than one use.
'I am fucked,' she tried to say out loud, but her teeth chattered and her jaw would not work, frozen or freezing like the rest of her.
Warmth. I need to be warm...warmer...
The elevator had opened out into this room, and she knew it would not take her back to the warmth. Even if it would, she would not go. She wanted, needed, to move on. To learn more. But the cold slowed her. Her limbs jittered and thoughts danced away.
Move. Move. Move.
She walked again, her nostrils and lungs hurting from the cold air, far colder than her body. It stung, and she let it. That pain, perhaps, would keep her moving.
A door at the far end of the large room stood half-open, so she followed her instinct; to get away, to be free. The walls of the room were very far away. After her cell, the warehouse that hid O'Dell's bunker seemed a world itself.
In room beyond - an office, once - she found a man. His blood, old, had frozen into crystals. His clothing and his skin seemed to have hardened in the cold. Ice, or frost, whitened the dead man's hair. The cuts which had killed him didn't seem awful, but more like lines on a sheet of paper, like she remembered drawing, long ago. A child, with a red felt tipped pen, drawing in a colouring book.
She stepped over him as her legs began to seize up. She stopped, turned, and looked at the body again.
With hands that were claws, she tore at the hard, frozen clothing on the man. Buttons on his shirt and jacket were impossible, so she yanked them loose. As she moved, her body warmed a little and that lent her the strength to break the clothes free of the floor below the dead man. Some of the material tore free, blood crusted harder than concrete. One of his arms snapped, some place inside, and made stripping him easier. She pulled his clothes on, the ice in the clothing colder than the air against her skin. She managed to free his sh
oes, his trousers, his belt. She pulled the trousers high as she could, just below her wasted breasts, over the top of her jacket and shirt. The belt defeated her. Taking it off had seemed simple. Using it again, impossible. The man's shoes were huge on her feet, but better than the feel of ice on her toes. She didn't even consider the laces, but found, by chance, two giant pockets in the side of the trousers.
'Pockets,' she said, her teeth still chattering. The material moved again, not so hard, but feeling cold and damp. She put her hands in the trouser pockets and used them to hold her new clothes on her thin body. Then she followed the corridor to find more bodies...more things.
A row of coats on hooks over on a far wall were better. She put those on instead of the man's clothes. They helped, later, as her hands, feet, lips and nose turned blue. She pulled the coats free (cold, but not damp), one by one, and pulled them over her shoulders, thrust her arms inside and wore as many as she could. They were warmer, not frozen or frosted hard. These had pockets, too. In the third coat she pulled on, she found cigarettes and a lighter. She looked at each in turn, and even tried to eat a cigarette, which she spat out immediately. Then she turned the lighter in her hands, round and round, fascinated. She ran her thumb along the wheel and it ground against the flint beneath. A tiny spark flew and she laughed, delighted. She did it again and a flame flickered weakly. She stared and held her finger over it, unfeeling as her fingers were nearly frostbitten.
Three or four seconds later she yelped and snatched her finger free of the lighter, but the flame heated the metal against her other thumb, too. She dropped the lighter.
Then, realising what she held, Eleanor picked it up again.
*
Outside, wet snow stung her face until she found her hood and pulled it over her head, then hunched and strode into the growing storm. This snow was new to her, but new to England, too. Cold that froze roads and halted traffic she remembered, but not this - the kind of storm that killed people from frostbite, from hypothermia.
But there were no people.
Eleanor didn't think such things strange. She'd been alone a long time.
Moving was enough for her, and moving kept her from dying right there. She might heal fast, but nothing could heal if it was frozen in the ground. Movement meant living.
She seemed to be in an area with nothing but tall metal buildings, or squat ones, but nothing that reminded her of warmth or home or comfort.
Fighting to keep moving, weak from starvation and the air itself which chilled her chest from within, she headed from building to building. In one, she found a frozen sandwich. Food. It was hard and she could not eat it, but later, perhaps, she might.
Warmth, she thought. Warmth was all that mattered. She found a small bottle of liquid that was the colour of piss, but she was thirsty, and it was one of the few things she found that wasn't frozen. She tipped a little into her mouth and felt it burn her tongue and then, as a little slipped into her throat, a burning warmth that sank all the way to her insides.
At first she gasped, then smiled, and drank a little more.
'Warmth,' she said.
In the same place, she found some huge coveralls and a pair of heavy black boots that were better than the shoes she wore. In the next building, she killed a man.
*
As she would for the next five weeks, or thereabouts, Eleanor worked her way through the industrial estate in roughly a straight line, for no other reason than to get somewhere.
The first time she killed a man, it proved to be quick and painless. For her.
Violence after that became more sporadic, and she got better at avoiding it, whenever she could, because she soon learned how fragile people were...herself included.
She turned to leave that next building, nothing found but a row of tools, more boots that were no improvement over what she wore, no clothes better than the ones on her back that were finally starting to warm her. There, in the darker shadows thrown by the dim daylight, was a shape. She shouted, startled. Somewhere deep inside she recognised it as human. It shifted, and she was afraid because it had been so long.
'Hello?' she said, finally finding the right, lost word.
The shape, large and bulky because of the clothes it wore, stepped forward and she saw that it was a man. He was disfigured, some kind grey, thick growth on the right side of his face, his eye on that side useless and lost inside the mass. His teeth, she saw, were darker than they should be, crusted with whatever the man ate.
Instinctively, some animal part of her cautious, she stepped back. He came forward, and she held her hands up, but he began to run. She understood nothing of the situation, but her core...her core tensed. When he pushed her roughly to the ground, she held him back with all her strength, but her strength wasn't enough. He proved stronger. She understood his intent as the stinking man breathed heavily in her face, his rancid breath and spittle on her face. His hands, gloves, tore at her clothes, pulled at her over-large trousers. She kicked and flailed, but each time his strength and weight pushed her down.
For mere moments, she fell still.
She remembered pain. She remembered being a captive, and men coming to her. She remembered offering them fuck if they would just not cut her, just not hurt her. No more.
She remembered those early words she uttered, hopeful, each time they came to her with knives and drugs to make her sleep and give in.
Wanna fuck.
'Wanna fuck?' she said. The man paused, grinned and nodded.
In that pause, she brought her hands up and thrust her ragged thumbnails into his eyes. Both eyes at once, as deep as she could, until his reflexes pulled him clear of her rage. She wasted no time. She was weak, but he was blind. She pulled the first thing she could find into her grip. It was almost too heavy for her to lift, but her anger and fear helped. The weight of the sledgehammer did the rest as it fell.
She did not feel bad, because she didn't know how to. All she knew what that she wanted to live, and that she would not be hurt again.
Afterward, she was more careful, and before she left the building, she took the man's gloves and a smaller hammer with some kind of claw at the end along with her as she walked, in as straight a line as she could manage - going somewhere.
*
Wayland Redman drifted in his small boat, mostly covered and sheltered from endless snow by a tarpaulin he found on the first day of his jaunt across the sea, to freedom, to France. He smelled something wrong, something repulsive, as his boat bobbed hard in the rough estuary that should lead out to the impossibly wild North Sea, the channel between this island and the great expanse of Europe. The smell brought back memories of fish stalls on London markets in the summer. A hint of food poisoning, sometime later in the day, from crabmeat more green than white, or prawns rancid, somewhere inside.
The smell was him, and he was well over into delirium even by the end of his first day on the boat. Night fell, his flesh burned with fever, but he didn't know. He drifted like the boat, in and out of consciousness. Once, bleary eyed, he imagined he saw a port, perhaps Calais, and whooped at the sight of France. But it was merely the docklands around Tilbury, and further up river than he had started. His boat roamed on the high, heavy water, going nowhere.
The temperature was a long way below freezing, colder during the night. He woke in the morning, burning despite his blackened, frozen fingers. He grinned and snapped one off, threw it into the water to tempt the crabs.
Crabbing off the pier. Nothing finer.
Something heavy bunted up against Wayland's boat, and the noise and sudden leap against the thick water brought Wayland to life, for a moment.
Caught a big one! Granddad, look!
Boots thudded against the wooden hull, though, and even in delirium, crabs aren't supposed to wear boots. The footfalls stopped, close to his head. He looked up, saw a man shape, his head haloed by grey skies.
'I think I need help,' said Wayland, his voice no more than a croak, nearly lost in the h
owl of the rain and the screaming wind that frozen his face. Wayland's cheeks, too, had turned black now.
'Don't worry, buddy,' said the man. 'We'll help you. Take it easy.'
'Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.'
He felt strong hands beneath his armpits, pulling him up.
'Throw him back, man. He's fucking rotten. Look at him. He's full of poison.'
'Fuck you. I'm starving. Got to be something worth eating on him.'
'You're on your own, Matt. On your fucking own. I'll starve.'
'Then fucking starve. I'm eating.'
The words made no sense, and Wayland's eyelids were heavy.
'Thank you,' he said. He smiled, and saw a woman's face. Roo the Kangaroo, he thought. Brought me porridge. I liked her.
*
Later, in the kitchen below decks on a fishing trawler that had found nothing worth leaving the sea when it came home, a man named Matt laid a knife against Wayland's flank and started to slice off thin steaks, which he threw, green-faced, into a hot skillet.
'Tickles,' said Wayland.
'Jesus fucking Christ, man. That reeks. Fuck...don't eat that. You'll die like him. Look at him.'
The man's friend, named Don Wood, gagged at the smell of Wayland's rotten flesh, the smell of the pus that soaked his trouser.
Matt nodded. The stench was sickening.
'Fuck it. You're right. I'd rather die hungry.'
'Better, Matt. Got to be better than...' the man Don, who'd once had a wife and two children and a vicious little terrier waiting for him after each trip, waved his hand at Wayland's ruined body. 'Die right, Matt. Don't die some kind of cunt.'
Matt's head dropped. 'I'm just so fucking hungry,' he said.
'Me, too,' said Wayland.
Matt laid the knife against Wayland's throat, and the old man grunted as Matt cried and slipped the knife through his throat. Then, he gurgled, still clinging to life. Wayland's blood stank of rot, just like the rest of him.
The Dead Boy Page 20
