by Phil Hurst
Kris passed him and walked over to Steve the MC. Every night after he got changed, he would speak to the MC, discussing how the show went and areas they could improve. Fiona has told Sam that Steve never acknowledged Kris’ lack of clothing and that Kris never offered to explain it. The pair of them created a strange sight that might have had instant meme status on social media. Back when he was doing his photography course at college, Sam would have loved the strange mix of the empty theatre, the half-naked man and the attentive pensioner behind the piano.
Sam knocked once on Fiona’s dressing room door.
“Sam?” she shouted from inside.
“Yep.” He knocked again.
The door swung open. Fiona stood in front of him, and Sam felt the grin on his face widen. Her white hair was pulled back into a bun and her body was covered by a négligée. She left her arm on the door to block his entrance to the room. Her large brown eyes shone at him as she tilted her hips to the right. Her round face was starting to lose some of its definition as her 40 years in show business caught up with her, but Sam couldn’t help but be drawn to her every night he could get away from work.
“Kiss,” she ordered.
Glad to obey, Sam leaned in and pecked her on the cheek. Her arm dropped from the door and wrapped around his shoulders. She giggled in a girlish way as she pulled him towards her and threw him down onto the sofa in the corner of the room.
She looked along the corridor outside the dressing room to see whether any straggling performers had seen her snaring the young man. She hung a “do not disturb” sign on the door handle and slammed it shut. Sam took his trousers off, far too distracted to realise that his display was vibrating.
Lana
O liver was not in a great state. After the display of bravado in front of the reckoners, he had immediately collapsed. He had ignored the damage from the car accident and the beating for a while (how Lana wished she could do that), but even Oliver wasn’t invincible. Dr Bhaskhar had taken one look at him and called for blood packs to be shipped from Sheringham Hall. After dispatching a runner, she had tried to make Oliver as comfortable as possible, but he was breathing with some difficultly.
Lana was happy with the loot from the attack. Two more cars would be useful in the assault of Cromer, especially the reckoner vehicle, once the pulsar wore off and they got it going. Some of the clothing remained intact, and the rest could be repurposed to create shelters as needed. Although the soul staffs were no use to them, each of the reckoners had been carrying pepper spray, and one of them had been touting an illegal gun, no doubt thieved from someone trying to cross the border.
Now stripped, the dead reckoners were prepared for the funeral pyre. Two of the Unjudged were practicing removing Tumi implants from the men who still had intact necks, holding their noses to stop themselves from gagging at the smell of burned flesh. The other reckoner was unsuitable for the practice. Each had his name and identity recorded for the wall of martyrs, and messages of condolences had been sent to next of kin.
Lana had always wondered how the family members felt when they received the messages. That was, assuming that the government didn’t intercept them.
She closed her eyes and muttered a quick prayer for the souls she had just dispatched from Earth. She asked them for forgiveness and wished them luck on their journey. She wondered whether she could have killed with such ease before Tumi had made his discovery. Somehow, knowing death isn’t the end, that the souls of those she had killed were released into the cosmos, made the act seem less impactful.
The soul staffs were already burning. Only one of them contained a tag, but that had been cause for celebration. They had been able to reverse the process and free the soul. One more victim of the reckoning was free and could find his or her own place in the cosmos instead of the probable hell that was The Store.
Lana helped Bhaskhar load Oliver into one of the vans and used the dew on the grass to wipe the blood off her hand. She directed one of the others to stay with Bhaskhar in the van with Oliver. She didn’t trust Bhaskhar, although she couldn’t put her finger on why.
One of the archers from the bridge, a beautiful young woman called Marie, motioned her over. “Thanks for cleaning up,” she said, with the seriousness of her tone failing to disguise her happiness at her group’s first combat operation. “We should have been better through.”
“It was a difficult shot,” Lana said. “From that distance, if they split up, it was always going to be difficult to get them both.”
“We need more archers,” Marie said, looking up at the bridge as if she were trying to trace the path of every arrow her team had fired.
“We’ll get more soldiers when we take Cromer,” Lana assured her.
“I hope so.”
“There are 7,000 souls there.”
“And how many of them will join us?” Marie asked. “And how many of them will be any good with a bow?”
Lana watched with amusement as Marie rested on her bow. Her pride and joy, she had led a patrol into reckoned Suffolk to retrieve it and found an abandoned sporting goods shop. Any scavenging trip that didn’t end with capture and the tagging of everyone in the group was considered a success. But the day Marie came back with useable equipment, the council decided to promote her to any position she wanted. She’d chosen head archer. There were still some grumbles from the older members of the Unjudged, who wondered whether such a young woman should be given so much power within their army, but neither Lana nor Marie cared.
Lana said: “We’ll have enough.”
“To hold the town?”
“To have a bloody good go.”
There was a shout from one of the houses.
“What was that?” Marie picked up her bow and reached behind her for an arrow.
Lana barely reacted. A lack of patience had been their only enemy in finding Paige. Lana dug her pike into the ground and walked towards the house. More shouts were coming from inside. A blood-curdling howl echoed up to the front door as she reached it. “Come on,” she said to Marie. “You can watch my back.”
“Have they killed her?” Marie asked.
Lana spoke to Ben, a gangly Unjudged barely out of his teens who was guarding the front door with a cricket bat and a worried look. As the two women approached, he stared at the ground, occasionally glancing up to steal a glance at Lana. “Who went in?”
“Dave, Derek and Bob,” he said, shuffling his feet.
Marie sighed: “Who put the fucking Minions together again?”
Lana pushed the front door open. Moans floated up the stairs, and she said: “Marie, no need for the arrows. Watch the back door. Ben, stay where you are.”
Marie relaxed the bowstring and replaced the arrow in her quiver. She jogged around the side of the house. Ben looked like a ton of bricks had been lifted from his shoulders.
“They told me to wait up here,” he said. “But I can come in to help.” He straightened his back and tapped his bat against the wall. His enthusiasm was somehow unnerving. “I could watch your back. You know…in case.”
“You’re OK here,” Lana said. “You’re doing a good job.”
Ben stood tall. He swung the cricket bat a few times and turned to watch the door as she entered. Lana was surprised by the offer from young Ben. Last time she had spoken to anyone about him, they had described him as cowardly. She didn’t know what he had been before the reckoning, but she made a note to check his declaration of sin. With Ben, Lana found it impossible to believe that someone that sweet could have any bad habits.
The house was cavernous inside. It would have cost a pretty penny before the village was abandoned. Lana knew that the basements to houses like this were like caves, with numerous rooms and walls. A perfect place for an ambush and difficult to find someone hiding in them.
The stairs to the basement were solid stone and slippery. Lana reached out for support and found the banister was missing. At the bottom, three torches had fallen across the floor, lighti
ng the stone with bright white Vs. She could see Dave huddled in the foetal position, both hands holding his crotch. He was muttering and cursing under his breath but didn’t appear able to move.
“Paige,” Lana shouted. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
Dave looked up, tears streaming down his cheeks. Lana held a finger to her lips.
“Is that Lana?” Bob’s voice. “Lana! She’s a maniac.”
“Bob, shut up.” Lana said.
Derek crawled towards the bottom of the stairs, dry heaving. He looked up at Lana like a child who had just lost a favourite toy. “Lana…” he said, reaching towards her.
Lana shouted. “Paige, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You killed those men,” Paige’s voice bounced off the walls. It made finding her location nearly impossible. “That kid tried to cut my neck open.”
“He wanted you to be free.”
“He’s a fucking nutcase.”
Lana reached the bottom of the stairs and Dave sat up, now clutching his stomach. Lana was impressed. Although the three men were not her best fighters (Dave was rarely sober long enough for training), Paige definitely took after her mother when it came to hand-to-hand combat.
Lana tilted her head to better understand where she was: “I can explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain. He’s a nutcase, and you lot are all insane.”
Lana stepped forward into a separate room. It had wine bottles scattered all over it. Suddenly, Dave’s insistence to search the house made sense. From the number of empties on the floor, he had probably been visiting the place for weeks. Bob was face down, crying into the floor by an old cupboard. “We are the only thing stopping tyranny from taking over the world.”
“Prove it. Let me go.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’m going home,” The voice came from behind Lana. Lana left the wine cellar. “I won’t say anything about what happened.”
“Are you planning on seeing your mother?”
Silence.
“Paige? Are you meeting Jennifer?”
Still nothing.
“Paige?”
Paige stepped out in front of Lana. Covered in the reckoner’s blood, she looked like she had just risen from the dead. Yet her face was etched with a defiant, challenging look. Lana liked her even more. “How do you know my mother?” Paige poked Lana in the chest. They were an arm’s length apart.
“She is one of us.”
Paige shook her head. “My mother?”
“She is the reason we are here,” Lana said. Paige stepped forward. She was studying Lana, testing her. Lana held eye contact.
“She sent you to kill those men?”
“She sent us to make sure you got into Cromer safely.”
Paige suppressed a laugh. “I’ve never had a welcoming committee before.”
“We are the Unjudged.”
“Well you look like a welcoming committee.”
“You should come with us,” Lana indicated up the stairs. One of the men in the room groaned gently.
“And if I don’t?”
“Cromer will not be a safe place for very long.”
“I believe, that is called a self-fulfilling prophesy,” Paige declared, kicking at Bob’s axe.
“We are not the enemy.”
Paige just sighed. Lana waited, unsure of how to negotiate with her mentor’s daughter. Paige was everything Jennifer had said she would be but was also nervous, edgy. It was as if she had drunk a dozen cups of coffee.
“What if I want to go?” She asked.
There it was, Lana realised: the test. If her answer was in any way negative, Paige would assume the worst.
“I want you to join us,” Lana said.
“But if I say no? If I drive into town. You won’t stop me.”
“We have your car.”
“I’ll expect a cheque in the mail,” Paige said.
“It’s safer to stay with us.”
She kicked out at Bob. He tried to dodge her leg but was unable to, and he took force of the impact to the shoulder. He yelped.
“You’re not so scary when you’re not shooting from a bridge,” Paige sneered.
“This is not an army,” Lana said. “We just want to do what’s best for the people of Cromer.”
Paige shook her head and walked past Lana, calling her bluff. Lana was never going to stop her. “Whatever this is, whatever you’re doing, leave my family out of it.”
Lana watched her climb the stairs.
She really was her mother’s daughter.
Marcus
I t had been difficult for Marcus to keep track of time. At first he had tried to count the days, but he lost count at about seven. He took a guess that he had been floating around for about 10 or 12 days now. The fish had not left him alone throughout that time and had stripped most of the flesh from his face. His hair had proved to be expert at catching seaweed, which meant it was difficult for him to see the difference between hair and plant.
He had used his time in the water to analyse his father’s methods and reasons. Earlier that year, he was fitted with a new implant that appeared to have been designed to ensure a tortured afterlife. His father had stopped him from joining those with clean implants who floated away into space when they died. He had stopped him from becoming part of The Store, where the tagged souls were kept on Earth. Maximus had punished Marcus for his misdeeds by giving him certainty in death – an eternity trapped in a purgatory in his own mind.
Floating in the sea, Marcus realised he was looking down on his head. He could look around but didn’t have any physical form he could manipulate. Although he had not been a particularly attentive student, Marcus had learned enough from his father to understand that although his soul was still tied to the implant, he was not trapped within it.
He began to formulate a plan. He would get ashore somehow and find an anti-Tumi news station. There were still a few of them left. After selling his story to the highest bidder, he would pay someone to create him a robotic body. Not human size. Double. He’d appear on a talk show with his father, debating the ethics of the Tumi implant and bring the audience to the verge of tears with his story. He could see the title, across the bottom of the screen: “My father left me to float at sea for all eternity!”
It would be a classic! An instant YouTube hit! Millions in revenue—especially the part when he stood up and seized his father in his massive claw-like hands and squeezed and squeezed until the maniac was nothing but pulp. He would not stop until he could feel the liquidized bones of his father slide between his fingers! What a victory that would be!
It was only now he considered the possibility that his predicament was driving him mad. He searched for a word to describe his feelings but found nothing.
He watched as his head continued to bob on the surface. Part of him wanted to sink so that he could explore the sea from a new perspective. But he also knew that if that happened, he would be trapped forever. At least on the surface there was a chance he might get picked up by a boat or wash up on a beach.
He looked around. There was no light apart from a small array of dots on the horizon. It was an overcast evening, and the moon wasn’t available to show Marcus what the thing in the distance was. He felt like his soul was absorbing the darkness.
He didn’t have a form; there was nothing he could see. It was as if he were in a computer game, looking through the eyes of a character while someone else was looking after the controls. And the darkness was everywhere. He couldn’t look away or blink. He didn’t sleep or feel tired. He had to live every moment of his quasi-existence. He wondered how long it would take him to lose awareness of his situation and become a babbling wreck.
The only constant was the darkness. Even when the sun was up, he could feel it, holding on to him somehow. His sanity seemed to be leaching out of him. He tried to scream, but the darkness remained. He tried to cry, but the darkness remained. He was close to the edge, but the da
rkness hid it. He needed to know what was going to happen, but there was only darkness. Only the darkness knew what was going to happen. Why should the darkness be all-consuming?
It wasn’t. There was something else. Flashes of a robot. Flashes of blood running down the walls and an audience screaming. Blood. Murder. His father. The most famous man on the planet. From the darkness came something else. Revenge. He just wanted to get revenge. He needed to get revenge. Why wouldn’t anyone grant him what he needed? Marcus had never felt so powerless in his life.
He looked up at the sky, imagining all of the other souls laughing at him as they floated away towards whatever waited for the deserving dead. He saw them with lights, smiling and waving at the head floating in the water. But there was only darkness. He tried to scream. He tried to will the souls towards him, to trap them in his hell.
Then Kamar.
Ed
O nce the trains stopped running at eight in the evening (assuming they were all on time), there wasn’t much for him to do. The small, quiet station emptied quickly. The rest of the staff always went home soon after the last train had left for depot. They threw Ed the keys and told him to enjoy himself. That they would see him in 11 hours.
Ed would then walk around the old Cromer railway station and check all the doors to the offices were locked. He’d give the ticket office a quick mop and dust the corners in the waiting rooms.
His display was linked to the security system. This was useful, as he could be anywhere in the complex and still be keeping an eye on the perimeter. Not that anyone tried to break in. For the “last lawless town in East Anglia,” as the papers kept describing it, there was little in the way of crime.
There was also a lack of people eager to break into a steam railway station. Ed almost wished someone would. It would help with the visitor numbers. The so-called last lawless town in East Anglia might have been law-abiding, but it didn’t have much of an interest in steam trains.
