by Paul A. Rice
George then said, ‘All of this...all of it, the whole lot, everything!’ He waved his arms around his head.
Ken guessed the phrase ‘All of this’ was meant to encompass a little bit more than just the fancy room he was currently sitting in while having his brain fried.
With his blue eyes flaming, George said, ‘This, all of this dimension, the parallel in which you are currently sitting...it will all be gone in the blink of an eye, unless, well – unless the three of us damned well get this right!’
The three of them sat and looked at each other, the gravity of the last echoing words pressing down on them like an unseen weight. Three pairs of eyes looked into each other, two with a shared horror shining in their blue and green depths, whilst the one older pair shone with a barely visible glint of desperation in their faded, blue irises. Ken had not seen that in George before and it made him feel even more uneasy.
As if to change the subject, he casually asked: ‘What do you mean? It looks to me as though you’ve already made us extinct!’ The old man said nothing. Ken shrugged in frustration and decided to ask another question instead. ‘Who else has survived, George, where are they?’ He wanted to know about Jane, had she made it and if so, where was she?
George blinked as if he had just seen his train – the reality train – rolling out of a dirty siding marked with a large sign telling passengers they were leaving a one-horse-town called Madsville. Ken watched as he saw George mentally leap on board, the strange light in the old man’s eyes dimmed as he answered Ken in a low voice.
‘There are approximately two hundred people remaining, there may be a few others, of course, but at the moment we are not showing any confirmation of that.’
Without giving them any chance to think about his last remark, he changed direction, saying: ‘But, there are several men in the region where you last were, a handful or two of highly dangerous individuals with a leader, a very dangerous man, one who knows about this situation. One who knows a lot more than you currently do, and unfortunately for us he has used this knowledge to manipulate certain circumstances.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘However, Kenneth, it seems to us that you have already taken it upon yourself to deplete their numbers somewhat – yes! That was quite an excellent piece of work by the way, quite excellent!’
Ken, having no idea what to say about the dead who lay back in the Funny House, and with only one other thought knocking loudly on the fracturing eggshell of his sanity, blurted out his reply – a burning question, the only one he truly cared about. Taking a deep breath, he said, ‘Do you know who the others are, were they chosen or did they just get lucky? And…’ George blinked at him, eyelids flashing up and down like butterfly wings. ‘…and is one of them my wife?’ Ken finished with: ‘Listen, I don’t want to be a whining bastard when I’m being told that billions of people have been wiped out, but I wouldn’t mind knowing if she’s made it or not, you know?’
The answer was a simple one.
‘I am afraid to tell you that I do not know,’ the old man replied. ‘The names and functions of those who have been spared are dealt with by their allocated Guides. As such the information is restricted solely to those individuals and to Mission Control. No-one else can access the information regarding other Guides’ tasks or personnel, I am so sorry…’ George looked apologetically at Ken.
Mike interrupted. ‘Don’t worry, Ken,’ he said. ‘There’s not a lot we can do right now anyway, you know how much I think of Jane, but if she’s gone, well...then she’s gone.’ He sighed. ‘If not, then there’s nothing we can do about it, not a damned thing!’ Mike looked quite horrified at the sound of his own, terrible words.
Ken realised the awful truth behind his friend’s gentle logic. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ he said. The unknown whereabouts of his wife still bothered him immensely, but, as Mike had pointed out, what else could they do?
George stood up and paced around the room a couple of times, never going far away from his watching pupils. Instead the old man simply ambled about for a while as though listening for something, occasionally rubbing those bony hands over his nose and closing his eyes momentarily, as if in deep contemplation.
Finally, he circled back around and then resumed his previous sitting position across from his audience. He sat upright with his hands on his thin knees, and looked tensely at the men.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Where were we?’ After pausing for a moment, he nodded, saying: ‘Ah yes, the problem, our little problem, yes – I remember now…’
Those blue eyes stared at Ken.
‘I wish he’d give that staring malarkey a miss,’ Ken thought.
Then, George spoke and his words were very persuasive, very demanding.
The sound of his voice was almost hypnotising.
Ken froze.
George said, ‘Kenneth, you have led a very interesting life, a life filled with adventure and...well, let us just say that it has been filled with all sorts of interesting things, has it not? You, as a person, Mr Robinson, are very interesting indeed, in fact, we find you to be quite extraordinary!’
Ken looked at him and then did some blinking of his own. Seeing no answer in George’s eyes, he turned and glanced at Mike. Just for once his best friend was of no use, either. Watching Mike, calmly sitting there and smiling softly, was of no help whatsoever to Ken.
Ken shook his head. ‘I...well, I don’t know what you mean, I…’ he said, stuttering. He stopped as George raised his right hand and pointed the index finger towards him. It was a direct point, somewhat menacing. The gesture filled Ken with a strange feeling of sleepiness, of knowledge, and of freedom. He heard George talking, but couldn’t quite seem to focus on his face.
George was blurring, his voice metallic.
‘Let us examine some of the things that you have done during the course of your life thus far,’ he said. ‘I must say, the way in which you, against all the odds, have merely gone about your business without letting the Darkness take your soul is what interests us the most.’
‘I…’
‘Be quiet now, Kenneth Robinson,’ George said. ‘Be still and let your mind tell us of the tale.’
Ken felt himself slumping, mentally. ‘What tale?’ he murmured.
‘Which moment was the worst for you?’ George asked. ‘Find your darkest hour and tell us.’
‘The worst, what do you mean? Why should I, why do you…’
George spoke, voice coming to Ken from a long way away – from down a tunnel. ‘Are you remorseful?’ the old man whispered.
The sliding started again, sliding and spinning.
Light and blackness, fears and regrets filled Ken’s mind.
‘No, I’m not remorseful, and regrets are for losers,’ he said, denying his own emotions. ‘Take what life has lobbed in your direction – take the bad and the good and deal with them. Then stand upright and stare the world in the eye!’
Even though he’d just denied it, the sorrow still surfaced. Anger and sorrow filled Ken as he turned inwards. Turned inwards and looked at his life, unsure if it was his own voice he heard, or George’s.
The voice said, ‘What has been the worst moment of your life?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Do you have regrets about your father?’
‘No, he’s gone.’
‘What about the marketplace, the woman, perhaps?’
‘No, she’s still there, but…’
‘The mountain, where your friends died, was that a bad moment?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you miss them?’
‘Of course I miss them!’
‘Show us.’
‘Show you what?’
‘Show us your life.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you must, you need to if we are to...to progress.’
Silence, thick and oppressive, prevailed. There was a sense of...of nothingness. Empty spaces sat in silence, waiting to be filled. Ken felt the memo
ries surfacing, like a long-lost sunken galleon. He sensed himself, felt his own mind, his own life, everything lay before him. He saw it all.
All he needed to do was open the box.
He spoke. ‘All of it, you want me to show you all of it?’
‘Yes...you should do that.’
Ken sighed, a deep and mournful sound.
‘Why?’ he asked, voice a whisper.
‘Because you must if you are to know yourself.’
‘I do know myself!’
‘Show us, go back and show us…’ It wasn’t a request.
The blackness swirled and Ken went sliding into that parallel where once he had lived. As he did so, all of his past sins came back to pay him their most unwelcome of visits.
14
The Ghosts of Yesterday
A brown Vauxhall pulled over to the right side of the road, stopping with its driver’s door directly in front of Ken, parking literally six feet away from the end of his muzzle. The two men in the front of the car were totally unaware of his presence, casually lighting cigarettes and sharing a joke as they sparked up. The man in the back, the blond one, passed two weapons into the front and then reached for his own rifle. Together, the three made their M16s ready – the soft clacking noise of working parts, sliding bullets into the chamber of the assault rifles, reached Ken’s straining ears. The man nearest to his hidden position wound his window down.
Ken heard those fateful words once more, words from his past.
‘Right, he’ll be here in about three minutes.’ A soft laugh filtered through the open window. ‘Every day the same routine, every day the same time and the same place, they never learn do they, the stupid fockers – well, he won’t be coming back tomorrow, will he, right, boys?’
The others agreed with the sentiments of the driver.
‘Aye, fockin’ right he won’t!’ Their voices oozed towards Ken.
He and his team had waited in ambush for two days before the men had finally arrived. Months of surveillance and intelligence gathering had finally produced the goods. The trio, who were now sitting barely more than an arm’s length away, had come to kill a part-time policeman as he arrived for his daily work at the local sawmill. The man would pull an eight hour shift before going home for his tea and then doing another six hours manning his local Police station. He’d worked hard all of his life and was less than two years from taking an early retirement. He was a decent, hard-working, family man whose only sin was to have become a little careless. It was a crime for which the penalty would be death, erased without a thought by the men in the brown car.
However, once Ken’s bosses had discovered the plan they had inserted his killing team and put one of their own men in the saddle of the target’s motorcycle. To anyone watching, the helmeted figure would just be seen as the old man going about his daily business, and there were plenty of people watching.
At the same time as the faint sound of a motorcycle engine echoed across the fields, the noise of a squawking voice jerked the occupants of the car into sudden action. Raising a short-wave radio to his ear, the driver waited until the person on the other end had finished talking, and then replied, saying: ‘Roger...understood. We’re in position – get the other car ready!’ He turned to his passengers, grinning as he said, ‘Right, we’re on, he’s coming round the corner down by Joey’s position. Let’s do it, aye, lads!’ They nodded, flicked their cigarette stubs out of the windows and started to pull on their balaclavas.
Geordie Mac’s voice slid into Ken’s head, the metallic words in the earpiece bringing him the only orders he needed to hear.
‘Echo Two-Zero: This is X-Ray Nine-Nine...’
Ken clicked twice on the transmit button, no chance of him talking, the targets were very nearly within touching distance.
Geordie received the hiss of radio waves.
‘Roger that – stand-by, stand-by…’ he replied.
Two seconds, a lifetime.
Then, Geordie’s voice unleashed the violence.
‘Green light...Echo Two-Zero, you have a green light!’
Ken sent two clicks in acknowledgement.
Taking a deep breath, he rose to his feet, bushes rustling. The emergence from his perfectly-camouflaged ambush position caught the men in the car completely by surprise.
It was the man in the driver’s seat who saw him first. With his hands still unrolling the woollen mask, eyes staring straight at Ken, he tried to warn the others, his voice stuttering in disbelief.
‘Oh no – Christ, oh, sweet Jesus…’
Ken smiled at him. ‘Morning fellas, it’s a fine day for it…’ he growled.
In frozen disarray, the three men tried to jerk themselves into action; the rear passenger was having the most success and had managed to raise his weapon into a half-decent firing position. It was only because he was being so successful that Ken shot him first. This time the stuttering came from the end of his silenced assault rifle. In as many seconds, he fired six rounds into the men, two high velocity bullets to the head of each. Blood and gore filled the interior of the Vauxhall. The last thing George’s idea of a trip down memory lane showed Ken was a large piece of the driver’s skull sliding down the inside of a shattered, crimson windscreen. The scene darkened for a second, and with relief he thought it was over. However, before Ken was able to make an escape, his old life was returned to him, and returned with a vengeance.
In an instant, he was taken to the pub car park, the very same one where he had spent hours of his life in watching and waiting. They were all there: the red panel van, the players, the watchers, and the guns – all there, present and correct, all happily involved in their deadly game of subversion and subterfuge, of lies, murder and money. It had been a good game whilst it lasted, but now it was time to cut to the chase.
After a burst of radio transmission in his earpiece, Ken stepped out from his hiding place in the back of the old transit van. In a few seconds, he and his team had changed this particular game completely, no more messing about playing sneaky-beaky, no more of that. Now it was time for some big boys’ rules. A blast of gunfire rippled across the car park, one wave of hot lead later and the game was finished, but only temporarily. In the meantime there were the stiffening corpses of four men and one woman to be dealt with. It had been a shame because she’d been quite a looker, when she’d had a face.
The memory of those days filled him not with sorrow or remorse, but with anger. He had never been happy or sad about such things, they were just the way it was, it was his job and if people played with fire then they may find themselves being burned. Ken had seen many people burned along the way, including his closest friends. But the Dark Lord of Ken’s past showed no remorse, and the show rolled on relentlessly.
From the dirtiest jungles of Africa to the dustiest deserts of Asia, from concrete city tower blocks to frozen South Atlantic wastelands, Ken had been to them all. The old man’s ‘home-truth-cinema’ showed him all of the terrible things he’d committed upon those distant lands, never once did it let him off the hook or excuse him, not once. Ken had brought death to all of those places, he had given a ticket for the final ride to so many people in so many different places that it was almost impossible to keep up.
Without relent, the blackness let him relive them all.
His had been an almost natural talent. Without even trying, Ken just seemed to end up in a place where the shooting always seemed to have started a long time before the thinking ever did, it was just the way it was for him, and he’d paid scant regard to the circumstance at the time.
The final re-enactment took him back to the mountains, back to the horrific fire-fight, the battle where everyone had ended up getting whacked – including him. From its conception that particular mission had been a total disaster; Ken and his guys should have cancelled it as soon as things started going wrong, sometimes it’s best not to keep swimming upstream, sometimes it’s just better to go with the flow and let fate take its course.
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br /> But they didn’t go with the flow, they kept fighting to make things work, and in typical fashion they had pushed on against all of the odds. In the end, as soon as they had been told that the choppers were cancelled, his patrol had inserted into enemy-held territory by another means. Hours and hours spent bouncing along mountain ridges and snow-covered valleys, only moving at night, their silenced quad-bikes puttering away in the thin air of high altitude.
Finally, when the terrain had become too difficult, they had been forced to dump the bikes and continue on foot. That’s when Danny had fallen and broken his back. Ken had made him comfortable, fired up Danny’s rescue beacon and then, with no other choices left to make, told Richie to stay with the casualty whilst he and the remaining four men had carried on with the mission – after all, that’s what they were there for.
A day later, and after one of the worst infiltration marches in his life, Ken and the others had reached their destination, quietly heading into the mountain village as per the plan. All they had to do was kick down the door, grab the bad guy and haul his arse back down the mountain to where the ISAF troops would be waiting for them. They had been assured there would be air cover – Ken knew from then on that the job should be easy. Two miles of running downhill with a captured terrorist in tow, how hard would it be?
Ken leapt into his memories of that night.
Mr Tiny wailed in despair: ‘No, not this, not again!’
Ken dived right in there, was pushed…
It had gone to pot right from the off. For a start, there hadn’t just been the one bad guy, hiding alone with his family as they’d been told the case would be. No, he’d definitely not been alone. The sudden appearance of about two-dozen of the man’s heavily-armed cohorts, quickly put paid to what little respect Ken had left for those wankers back in the intelligence cell. The enemy had burst from cover as soon as he’d sent their Afghan guide into the outskirts of the village.
