by Peter Ackers
"…LOTS OF DEAD ANIMALS…"
We worked like good little workers. I got the van in place and Coyote opened the gate so we could begin loading. He started with the people who fell through the gate once it was opened, but soon after that, when a space had been cleared wide enough to allow Coyote to pass through the gate and into the back of the truck, he pushed and pulled at arms and legs so he could find all the bigger males These, he'd said, would be harder to move if left till the end because we'd be drained of strength. Thus we'd leave the kids and smaller women till last. But it was hard going all the while because some of the bodies were showing the initial signs of rigor mortis, with a neck here or arm there frozen in an awkward position. Soon they would all be as immobile and hard as plastic toys.
I used to collect low denomination coins as a kid. My dad would permit me to raid his pockets – he would toss his trousers on the bedroom floor without emptying the pockets - when he returned from work, or the pub, or the shops, so long as I touched no notes and nothing bigger than a ten pence piece. When my piggy bank was full, I'd upend it and scatter all the money and begin stacking and counting it. This was a slow process at first because I'd hunt for all the tens, then all the twos. This was where the process speeded up, as the amount of coins dwindled and it became easier to see the pennies and the fives because they contrasted.
At first the going was slow here, too. I leaned against the tailgate, waiting for Coyote to haul out the dead men. It was very dark in the truck and I could see only moving shadows, hear the occasional grunt as he tugged and yanked and, sometimes, kicked and punched and swore, as he searched the piles of flesh for male bodies. There was a battery-operated light in the trailer (I could see the battery housing and the switch on the inside of the trailer wall), but he didn't want to expose what we were doing by turning it on.
After about thirty minutes, I closed the van doors, having to push hard against the weight of a guy's legs. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Coyote was looking at me funny. I raised my hands in a gesture of surprise.
"Don't concern yourself with who dies when and why and where, Avenger. That'll just give you a headache. Don't wonder what some of these people did to deserve to die, because maybe it was nothing. There was a philosopher who lived some years back, and he came up with a theory that covers it all. It explains why people who live good lives die early of cancer or whatever, why people who mind their own business get shot in the face or run over by drunk drivers. And that theory is simple and short. Shit happens. Memorise it, repeat it."
I just stared at him.
"So the next time you want to pray to your God, don't bother. Take the time to practice some punches or a speedy escape over a fence - something that will help you in life. Because it don't matter how many kids you help across the road or how much you donate to Oxfam. If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might get a blade in the guts for nought more than trying to mind your own business. Okay? Now, you drive, I'll direct."
"Where are we going?" I knew he planned to dump the bodies. I just didn't like the fact that he wanted me to drive - that would keep my hands tied up and his free, and it made me wonder why he would want it this way. I hoped it wasn't so his hands could wield something else, and that mine wouldn't be there to shield my guts when I was minding my own business…
He didn't answer, just nodded for me to get in the van. I did. I sat there and lurched with it as Coyote dragged his great bulk into the other side and settled in the passenger seat. He didn't seem to have much room to start swinging fists, if that was his plan. I relaxed a little.
"Head on across this field. There should be a track that leads past a farmhouse and a waterfall. Go."
I followed his finger through the dark, away from the rave and from the path that led out onto the nearest road. The land sloped uphill, but the van made the journey smoothly, easily, making me think it had been modified for off-road driving. Even the heavy load we carried didn't seem to affect us. When we came to a perimeter hedge that was in need of trimming, Coyote pointed again and I slipped the van through a gateway that had no gate. There was a bump, as if we'd dropped off a kerb, and suddenly we were on another track. It was made of flat, hard-packed earth, smooth as tarmac. It ran off into the dark left and right.
"Go right," Coyote said. "You'll see the house. Go left."
The van was sideways on the road, which made manoeuvring it a bit tricky, but soon we were on our way, making good speed along the track some fifteen metres behind the spot where the dipped headlights lay on the ground. The track was littered with dead animals, maybe from the passage of other vehicles whose drivers hadn't dipped their headlights, or hadn't thought twenty-seven miles per hour was hair-raising enough through dark twists.
"Lot of dead animals," I said to break the silence.
"Minding their own business. Slow reactions. Too busy eating, I bet."
Coyote didn't have the kind of belly that permitted a man to complain about another's eating habits, but I didn't say this.
A few minutes later the track forked. To the left, the track headed away through a sudden explosion of trees, while the path that continued straight ahead seemed to point right at a two-storey whitewashed wood house that contradicted itself by appearing to be flimsy as paper, like flat-packed home that came in a box with assembly instruction, but at the same time old and timeless, as if it had been standing here for a hundred years. It was the sort of place kids would dare each other to walk past at night (not that kids came this far out of town alone).
"Left," Coyote grunted - I reckoned he felt the van slowing as I lifted my foot from the accelerator, because he wasn't watching the way ahead.
Some way down this left fork, which wasn't so smooth and flat any more, the trees smothered us and what moonlight there had been was no more. Now just the headlights lit our way, but it almost felt as if we were boring through the earth, the headlights two rays of extreme heat that blasted a passage ahead of us. This lasted only half a minute, though, about long enough for me to start to wonder if we were about to lose ourselves in a giant forest. Then the trees ended, the milky light from the moon was back, and the track showed its end.
It terminated at a gate set between two roughly-hewn spherical boulders each about the size of a medium-scale snowman without the head or the stick arms. We had found ourselves at the end of the land, with only this small gate as a barrier - no fence connected to it. Ten feet beyond the front of the van, the ground crumbled away and fell to a river that was wild but too small to be that dangerous. It frothed moonlight-white in places, but I didn't doubt that a good swimmer could pull himself free before he got carried too far away.
Almost directly below us, running right to left, was the waterfall Coyote had mentioned. It was steep but not sheer: the water tumbled down, it did not cascade. Rocks jutted out, which cut the water into frothy forks that instantly reassembled before being sliced open again. A strong man could climb his way up that waterfall on his hands and knees. A lithe man could maybe dance his way up using the dry tips of rocks that poked up. Only dead men were going into this water, though.
"Turn the van round. Make it easier to get them out."
My God, he was being serious. He was planning to roll fifty dead bodies down the sharp bank and into the surging river. (Strangely, the river didn't make much noise, as if Mother Nature had decided that it was a waste of resources to create sounds this far from civilisation. I bet if a tree had fallen, it would have done so in silence, in accordance with the old saying.)
The van was turned. We were at the back doors and I was ready to open them. Coyote put a hand over the hand of mine that grasped the door handle.
"Say the word, and I'll kill that friend of yours for you. With pleasure. I'm always on the move. No one would suspect or ever find me. Say the word."
I didn't know what to say. I would have enjoyed life for a few minutes had I heard that the forker was dead, but only a few. After that, I recko
n I might have been overcome with guilt, maybe even sorrow. I had come to understand that the forker was no longer my friend, but I could not blame him for the damage to my heart. It was my girl I was in love with, and it was she who had cheated on me. The forker had been the instrument, that was all. No bullet had ever been given a life sentence.
"I don't think I want him dead," I said, and I guess something in my tone or my eyes made it final. Or maybe Coyote sensed the raw, buzzing power in me. Whatever it was, he didn't press the question.
We got to work.
"…IT'S JUST AN OLD COIN…"
Back at the Rave site, I parked the van in preparation for round two.
There were three guys left, then we started on the women. Coyote was quicker with these, and even had time to fluff up their sweat- and shit-coated hair and give his opinion on whether he would fuck them or not - a game I refused to join. The immigrants were a mixture of mostly Mongoloid and Caucasoid, with a few negroids. It was the black women that Coyote fancied the most, and these he seemed to take the most care with. The Chinese ones got the roughest treatment, not that they felt any of it.
So fast was he working with the women, they started to pile up on the tailgate because I couldn't drag them off fast enough. Each time I grabbed a pair of hands or a foot or a head or a fistful of sweat/piss-sodden clothing, another dead body would land on top of the one I grasped and I would have to reach for that one instead. Soon the pile was too high and I shouted for him to stop.
"You work like a girl," Coyote told me as he came to help. "Stand aside."
"Why?" I wondered what he planned.
The thunderous boom of heavy boots, further weighed down by living meat and gravy, plodding fast across the steel floor of a truck. He rammed the pile of bodies - about eight of them on a shelf of metal five feet by ten - like a rugby player tackling an opponent. The bodies shifted and slid and those on top tumbled off the pile to thud into the ground where I'd been standing two seconds before - I had to jump aside when I saw what was happening. Coyote pushed and kicked and tugged and soon all the bodies were knotted on the ground like wires left in a drawer, or some Hellish game of Twister.
"Great!" I moaned. Until then I had been sliding the bodies off the tailgate and into the van, using gravity and a swinging motion, but "Now I have to lift them."
"Pussy. Bring another van over, park it beside that one."
Mere minutes later, two black Transits were parked side-by-side with their asses facing the back of the truck. I was lifting and shoving dead women into one, while Coyote was literally throwing kids from the tailgate right into the back of the other van. His aim was good, but sometimes a tumbling body caught the doorframe with its arms or legs and dropped to the ground. Once he even misjudged his aim vertically and the body of a ten year-old white boy with old bruises on his neck and needle holes in his forearms went skidding across the roof of the van, down over the windscreen, where his grimy jumper caught on a wiper blade. He lay there, face pressed against the glass, no breath to mist it. There was a soft clatter of metal on metal. Coyote perked up like a cat that hears a dog bark.
He leaped out of the truck, pulling something from his jeans' pocket. It was a bunch of keys including penlight, which he flicked on. Intrigued (I was the nosiest sod in the world - another side effect of Surfer-dude's drug. But wait! Side effect? If everything I had been feeling tonight was a side effect, then what exactly was the strange drug supposed to do? What might it be doing to my internal systems right now?), I followed him around to the front of the van, where the kid lay on the windscreen, petite nose bent against a windscreen wiper. Coyote sliced the penlight's beam through the grass around the front of the van, finally bending and picking something up. He lay it in his palm under the light like a celebrity on a stage.
It was an old coin with a hole in the middle through which fibre had been fed. A necklace, probably of sentimental value. The immigrants had carried no belongings except perhaps what they could hold in their pockets or wear around their necks.
Coyote's eyes blazed. "It's just an old coin," I said. "Worth nothing. You'll get the best value from it in a condom machine."
Coyote put the coin around his neck. He put the light in my eyes. "I was told they don't carry anything. But some must have hidden little things, little keepsakes. Something that must be worth money, or why bring it?"
I followed him back to the place where van and truck bared their asses at each other across a four-feet gap. "You mean like a lock of mother's hair? Grandfather's false teeth?" He shone the light into the back of the van, and for a horrifying moment I thought he was going to want to start hauling the bodies out so we could search them. The smell of shit and death was overwhelming even out here, and I wasn't about to go trawling through it so this big truck driver could find himself a few foreign pence and some useless trinkets.
But then he turned the beam to the truck. It didn't illuminate much inside the black cavern of the interior. Just five or six shapes that constituted the last of the once-living cargo.
"We have no time for this," I said, but Coyote ignored me and clambered up into the back of the truck. I moved closer. He flicked on the interior light and in the moment before I scrunched my eyes shut, as he had done before flicking the switch, I saw five children laying dead. I had found myself staring right into the withdrawn countenance of the child closest to where I stood - a girl of about six who lay dead on her side, with long hair that had been tied in a bun before the journey but which now had come partly unravelled and lay thick with sweat against her neck and shoulder. She wore rags, which heightened my sense of shame and horror.
I kept my eyes shut, but I could still see that little girl's glowing face, just as you can see the afterburn of an image of a lightbulb on the insides of your eyelids. I turned my head as if I was not seeing an image but the real thing through my eyelids, but the face was there whichever way I turned. I could hear Coyote's boots clang across the trailer floor, then shuffling sounds as he moved bodies, rifled clothing. He cursed. I heard a heavier thump and hoped that it hadn't been the noise of a heavy boot hitting flesh, but I knew it was. I figured he hadn't found anything and was annoyed at that.
I opened my eyes and found myself facing away from the truck, staring out at the Rave tent, where the party continued unabated. When I closed them again, I saw the girl's face once more. Afterburn.
"I bet we could find someone to buy some of these bodies," Coyote said, hopping down from the trailer. "Come on, let's get this finished."
Minutes later we were back on the road, taking the left fork, coming upon the dead end and the waterfall. Coyote had been twiddling a rabbit's foot in his fingers the entire journey. Another trinket snatched from a lifeless owner – so not a lucky rabbit's foot, then, at least not for its first two owners. As we exited the van, he dropped the rabbit's foot and kicked it away with his own foot before it landed. It pissed me off that he had taken something he hadn't really wanted.
"Turn the van," he told me. Just like last time, I did as I was told.
Sixteen people we took from the van. The girl was there, of course, but when we got down to the children, I pushed her away and reached for another.
Coyote was grinning at me. "Got a hard spot for her, eh? Go on, do it. I'll wait. Hell, I'll hold her for you so she doesn't lie like a sack of potatoes like all your other girlfriends."
I took a young boy's legs, ready for Coyote to take the arms so we could swing him and use his momentum to toss him into the river. Down below, the bank was littered with the bodies of the heavier dead, those we didn't have the power to throw all the way to the water. Some of the smaller women we had managed to throw as far as the waterfall, but these had stuck there amongst the rocks. Slowly they were being dislodged by the rushing water. But if they didn't all come free by the time we were done here, one of us was going to have to climb down there with a stick or something and pry them loose so the current could take them and spread every
one out a bit. We didn't want a whole heap of them tangled in the same place, because that would make them easier to spot. They'd look like some freaky water feature, with water pouring into mouths and out of noses and eyes, and hands flapping in their air.
"I'm going to jail forever," I told myself. I must have paused in my movements, because Coyote yanked the kid from my grip, lifted him high overhead and threw him down and out. The body crashed into the water with a crunch as of bone breaking. The sound that followed was Coyote's machine-gun laughter, and that sound was worse.
And so I could push her aside no more. The little girl was the last one to go. Coyote yanked her out, held her as a ventriloquist might hold his dummy, her limp legs bent across his raised thigh, and faked a little girl's voice.
"Sure you don't wanna fuck me before I take a bath, big boy?" He used his free hand to try to move her head. He rolled his eyes at my face of disgust, turned away, and lifted her high, ready to throw.
At last it was over, done and dusted. After this last body, we would go our separate ways. I would be glad to see the back of Coyote Whateverhisrealnamewas. I closed my eyes, waiting.
I didn't feel the horror or shame or shock anymore; instead I felt a strange sense of surety, kind of like the feeling you get when you are lost but sense the correct way ahead. You don't fully know what lies down that road, you just know it would be wrong to go the other way.
"Wait," I said. I let the afterburn image of the girl's face linger on my eyelids for a moment long, then opened them, banishing her into the cellar of my mind until next she chose to rise.
Coyote turned. He was still holding the semi-limp girl over his head. He grinned. "Wanna shag her after all, eh?"
Her dead but open eyes stared at me much as they had from inside the truck, under the bright light from the truck's trailer. Her face was pale, very pale, but into that paleness there crept darkness, dots and patches of it, and suddenly her face was not flesh, not even dead flesh, but paper, dots on paper, a matrix of black and white dots blown-up to enormous size. And now it wasn't much different from the face of Arich, the boy in the photo that Tattoo-guy owned. And she wasn't much different from Arich in another way: young, persecuted, seeking refuge but finding only death. Because of Tattoo-guy, I had come to know that Arich had existed on this planet. I suddenly wondered how many might come to know of the little nameless girl because of me. I had a real urge to learn her name, but Coyote didn't seem to care about such things.
A breeze blew; it seemed to stir whatever was buzzing inside me, so that it coursed through my veins briefly, making me shiver slightly, as you might shiver if a cold breeze washes over your sweaty torso. I thought of video game superheroes all charged up and shivering with power.
"Put her down," I said.
He just looked at me, puzzled. But then he didn't look puzzled any more, he looked sure, just as I had looked sure a moment earlier. That, I knew, was the look of a man having a sudden realisation, maybe a glimpse of his Fate. I knew that I wasn't a bad man and that like most I liked to help people where I could. To not like to do that was to not be human, I believed. Those who looked out for just themselves were missing something integral; they hadn't bridged that evolutionary hurdle that gave a person a sense of bonding and purpose and a need to progress at the side of his fellow man. People who hadn't jumped that hurdle didn't click with other people, and consequently they ended up alone, adrift in a world they didn't fully understand or really even like. People like that preyed on others. People like that had problems making relationships with others.
I had been tricked/coerced/beguiled/hypnotised. And drugged. But I knew now I was not meant to be here. None of this was helping my cause. I wanted away.
Now I understood that look in Coyote's eye; I knew his own realisation. He had become aware of the fragile bond between us, kept afloat only by my own lack of understanding as to what the hell was going on in my head this strange night. And now that he knew of the weakness of the bond, he saw that it could never be strengthened. In time, it would shatter.
He dropped the girl to the ground. He looked at me with complete understanding. He spoke with an intelligence that surprised me.
"I can't let you go, you know that. What you know about me and my activities, that has to die here. I suppose it was my own fault for picking you up when I thought the cops might catch you near me and get me, too. I guess I should have known at the time that when I put you in my van, I was sealing your fate." He looked almost sorry. He took the coin from around his neck, swung it by the twine. "I'll give you a head start. Run. He launched the coin and twine ten feet into the air, straight up. His eyes followed it -
"When I catch this, I'm coming for you. "
- but mine didn't. As he stared up, I threw both hands at his chest, hard. He staggered back with a grunt that carried all his breath out of his body. He tripped, fell, tumbled, rolled, bounced, splashed. Five seconds after I had decided to push him into the river, that river had carried him away into the darkness. After all our adventures together, he was gone just like that.
Oh, and I caught the coin as it fell.
"…HAVE FUN WITH THE REST OF YOUR LIFE…"
I drove the van back to the area where Coyote's truck and the other vans were parked. I had returned for one thing, one thing that would help me come to terms with my situation way out here: Coyote's phone. I surveyed the area with an eye to cleaning it up, getting rid of all the vehicles, but decided against it. I had been here too long already and the sight and smell of the place was killing me. The throb of music from the rave didn't help, either.
I went to the cab of Coyote's truck for the phone and was glad to see that it was new and had the apparatus I wanted. I also noted that the screen showed a message informing me I had missed two calls. I didn't recognise the number, but the 077 prefix meant it was another mobile. I wasn't going to risk returning the call.
I also found a £20 note neatly folded to the size of a postage stamp and blue-tacked to the back of the driver's sun visor. I took it, put it in my shoe, and returned to the van.
A few minutes later I was back at the waterfall. I left the van about fifty metres away, shrouded in darkness, in case someone had happened upon this place since I left. No one had. I approached the little girl's body slowly, feeling nervous. I knew it was because I liked this girl, and the dead bodies of those we like are hardest to look at. Nevertheless, I turned her face to mine and lifted the camera. I took a photo of her using the flash and didn't care who might see it.
When I tried to save the picture, the phone asked me to name it. I thought for a whole minute, despite being where I was with bodies all around, before coming up with: Little Nameless Girl. It made her sound about as sorry and pathetic as possible, thus highlighting my desire to find out who she was and maybe even find her guardians, if any. I had her picture, but just to be thorough I took her hand and pressed her finger onto the interior screen of the phone. The print was clear.
The phone suddenly beeped again. The same number, but this time not a missed call: this time a message. I pressed READ.
"Hey, sexy. Cleopatra here. Have fun with the rest of your life. Don't do anything I would do, ha ha. Oh, and don't be hard on your girl. We're pains at times, but we make up for it with cuteness and love. Forgive her. Bye. X."
Coyote hadn't given me his vote, not officially, but it didn't matter because the sub-vote had suddenly moved to 2-1 in favour of forgiveness over punishment. That put the overall score at 2-1 the same way.
I felt a slight sense of gladness. I didn't know why, but I didn't plan on spending any more brainpower on this subject, just in case I started getting unsure again and decided to do a whole new vote. No, no, no. The votes were in, the decision was made.
I wanted to get to her, get this problem of ours sorted. I didn't want to think about our next step until after we had discussed things deeply. All I wanted to do now was get home. Home, home, home.
I noticed that the sky was a
little lighter. The time on my new phone said 04:21. Soon dawn would break. I knew things were going to feel and become a whole lot different with the light of day. I also knew I didn't want to be here when that happened.
I got back in the van. Coyote wouldn't mind if I borrowed it. I didn't care either way. I -
The phone rang. The screen didn't display a number, only the message: NUMBER WITHHELD. I pressed the answer button and held the phone to my ear, but I didn't speak. This was Coyote's phone and I didn't know who or how many people had the number.
"I'm going to kill you," the voice croaked. A wave of fear washed through me, then was gone. I felt that familiar buzzing again, especially in the arm that held this little device that was giving me bad news. I knew I could crush both it and the voice out of existence.
"Who are you?" I said, and I was angry, and no longer scared.
"Bollocks," the voice said, and that was when I started laughing. The kid, the bloody kid on the CB. He must have jotted down the phone number as I read it out for Cleo.
"Go to bloody sleep, kid, or I'll come down your chimney like Santa, and I won't be bringing you any presents."
"Wank," the kid said, and hung up. I started laughing again.
