The Truants

by Lee Markham

  The man turned and started to walk back across the grass, back into the darkness.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You lied.’

  ‘We all lie.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘You don’t even know what love is.’

  Anna watched him fade away into the darkness. A jogger rounded the corner on the path below the bench. She could hear the beat pumping from his headphones, even from this distance.

  The man’s voice called out from the darkness, making her jump. ‘Don’t bother sending them after me. You’re not as fast as you used to be. Keep the mother indoors and look after her. We’ll be in touch.’

  And with that he was gone.

  The jogger thumped past the bench and spared her the briefest sideways glance.

  Anna wiped a sleeve across her cheek, stood and followed in the runner’s wake.

  She didn’t have the knife.

  She didn’t have the boy.

  But she knew that the old thing that was haunting her, as it receded back into the cloud that now demanded so much of his attention, was weaker than she’d previously thought.

  And she wavered.

  She wavered.

  CHAPTER NINE

  CALCULATIONS AND CHAOS

  1

  They’d been watching him for forty-eight hours now, and there were still gaps in the story. They couldn’t link him to every murder scene they’d encountered, but they could tie him to some of them. And the pins in the map in the investigation room were thickest around Ricky’s address, and seemed to orbit out from there. That the flurry of violence was gang-related was beyond anyone’s doubt. But how some of the victims had got themselves caught up in it was beyond most of their ken. A few of the victims fitted the profiling spectrum, but most of them just seemed innocent bystanders. After years of this kind of violence being primarily drug-related – with perpetrators and victims by and large falling somewhere within the description of ‘buyer’ or ‘seller’, and by extension fairly generic, not to mention depressing, race and age parameters – this was different.

  But at first no one could agree on what that difference meant, and that had cost them time, and it had probably cost lives. The sheer level of the violence, the literal blood-letting glee, not to mention the bizarre absence of blood that the scenes presented indicated a mind gone terribly wrong. But as the days progressed and the crimes multiplied, it became clear that more than one person was involved. That it was some kind of collective mania. And that had more in common with a nascent protection racket, in that the primary connective tissue seemed to be geographical proximity to a specific location. But, as a vocal minority mumbled quite audibly, protection usually did involve some degree of actual, y’know, protection. This didn’t.

  At first they wondered how the missing kids might be caught up in this. The initial fear of course was that they’d been killed. But CCTV footage unearthed a couple of them, out, late into the night. And then the patterns started to coalesce, but to nothing more than a blurred insinuation that the children might perhaps somehow have a more hands-on involvement. No one wanted to believe that the children were actually doing it themselves. But nobody was naïve enough these days to believe that kids weren’t capable of terrible things. That kids weren’t in fact monsters anyway, given half the chance. But again, too many loose ends. They couldn’t figure out where the kids were. They’d pop up on camera, individually, occasionally, indicating that they weren’t dead or locked up, and then they’d lose them again.

  And so initially, in that first week, it had exploded and accelerated, like an outbreak of chickenpox. It was everywhere all at once on the estate. In the second week it started to plateau. No more disappearances. And the murders seemed to alter slightly. They started to appear more considered. Less driven by some kind of animal madness. More traditionally human. But no less sloppy. These weren’t professional murders. Clues were found. Bits and pieces. Geographical indicators pointed inwards, and enough circumstantial evidence found at the scenes soon gave them a clear enough idea that, by week three, and following a timely tip-off, they were closing in on Ricky.

  They were all too aware that if he committed some other atrocity while on their watch there would be hell to pay. A cautious few opposed storming his flat and hauling him in. Too risky – there was still too much they didn’t know and they figured that they should follow his movements, find out what the hell was going on. But that was argued against because his name had popped up too many times now and he couldn’t be left on the loose. They would storm into the flat, bring him in and get answers from him. What could possibly go wrong? But they would never get answers from him.

  Of course they only knew as much as they did because I told them.

  Because I tipped them off.

  And it was all engineered anyway. Creating a radicalised cell, with its own rabid prophet. A fattened lamb. It is all part of the plan.

  So the time had come, and I gave Ricky to them.

  It is amazing how effective the anonymous tip-off can be. A number-withheld call to the right person can work like a spark onto warm, dry sawdust and whoosh. Away we go.

  In the bedlam within the investigation, Anna’s absence has been very low-priority. I’ve no doubt that Tom probably shared his clear concerns that she’d crumbled and sloped off. The messages on her phone, the disquiet in his voice suggest something greater than worry, whispering his belief that she’d lost it. No one else came searching. They are too busy looking elsewhere. Even Tom seems to have got caught up in it himself because the voicemails have petered out. But they haven’t blocked her remote access. Why would they? And so I have observed their movements, their blundering circling in on something of which they have no understanding. Their chasing of their tails. I have watched and I have waited until their blurred triangulations gave me a minefield into which I could deposit Ricky.

  Three weeks, thereabouts. Three weeks.

  Rats: they have no idea how to hunt. It’s embarrassing.

  And so now they are watching him, with their fingers on their triggers.

  Everything is set.

  I wake him up at sundown. It’s as much as I can do. Split as I am across so many now, my influence is debilitatingly weakened.

  I have been lucky with Anna – she has been sympathetic. Enough. She shares my disgust. Enough. She has worked with me. But Ricky barely even registers my existence. I am the whining of an absent parent to him. And only when the charging clatter of his own directionless hatred and rage isn’t drowning me out. I can place the occasional thought in his mind, and that is about it. And that is how it is with most of them. These rats, more animal even than the dog had been. More feral. If I am to shepherd them all to her – now him, with the scarred face – I need them united. As one. They need bringing together.

  And so I whisper to him, ‘They’re here. They’re coming for you.’

  He sits bolt upright, eyes wide. He stands and goes across to the plywood drawers that are built into the alcove in the corner of the room. He pulls open the top drawer and takes out a sock that has something heavy inside it. He turns his head to the door and listens. He thinks he can sense them. Of course he can sense them. He can sense them through me. I am his sixth sense. But he thinks it is he that senses them. He thinks he is magnificent. He thinks he is invincible. And that is fine. That is perfect in fact.

  ‘Ricky…?’

  Her. The skinny rat-girl from next door. His pet now. She stirs and asks him what’s up. Her I can’t reach, reception too weak. Because I am in her through him. The family bond weakening with each generation. I can feel her as dull sound through a stretch of murky water. She knows nothing of me. She is herself, with my hunger. But essentially she is just herself. Gifted. Perhaps now with a dash of him, Ricky. Disgusting.

  He shushes her with two words: ‘They’re here.’

  ‘Who?’

  He looks at her and smiles. I suggest to him that now it is time for him to rise. To
rise to glory. To reveal himself to them, the new and mighty him. To let them know him, know what he has become. Yes. Let them know what it is they face.

  He nods and heads to the door.

  He pulls it quietly open.

  The outer hallway is quiet and dark. He can smell the decay behind the door opposite, where he and the girl had first broken bread together and feasted on those old fatling rats. He smiles at the memory. The police don’t have a pin in their board for them. He doesn’t know how he knows this, how he even knows that they have a board, or how he can picture it in his mind. In here. He can’t see it, not as he can see some things, but he can imagine it. He can smell them continuing to rot in there, that particular pin still in the tray. As are so many more. He is privy to knowledge now. Or so he thinks.

  Herding rats is like that. They are so quick to believe they are more gifted than they are. It is easy enough for me to pass their secrets across the horde and to allow them to form their own ideas, make their own decisions based on knowledge I choose to share with them. And to then gently steer them to where they need steering. Anna’s not seen the board this time round, but she has seen it before. She knows how it works. And now, so does he.

  I’ve done it before. Rounded up a rabble. Long ago now.

  She – not Anna, she – helped me on that occasion too.

  Damn her. If she hadn’t left me…

  Ricky frowns. A bubble of sadness. He shakes his head and creeps out, across the darkened space, pulls open the fire door, dances through and scuttles up the stairs and out towards the front of the building. The images running through his verminous mind paint a tapestry of insurrectionist grandeur: he will explode out into the world and take down those who might think they have the power to bring him low. To send him back to his sewer. The fire in his mind is largely his own, I simply fan it, and the smoke and the heat obliterate any caution that the fear and oppression of poverty and worthlessness might up until now have quelled. He is primed, the pin pulled.

  He peers out through the graph-paper glass of the front door and sees the darkness. No one milling about. It’s been quieter out of late. He pulls the door open and steps out, brazenly, the sock in his hand doing nothing to conceal the gun contained within. It’ll mask his fingerprints. But that will be moot.

  He hears them. He smells them. He almost feels he can see them.

  Someone shouts, ‘Drop the weapon! Down on the floor!’

  He smiles up at them and shows them his teeth.

  ‘Drop it now!’

  Red dots appear on his chest. They flicker across his eyes.

  He looks down at his chest, then back up. He looks up into the sky, and breathes deeply through his nose. He prepares himself now to stand tall as their bullets bounce off him as he shoots back at them and, one by one, goes from throat to throat devouring them. He closes his eyes and savours the moment. The calm before the storm.

  Then he lowers his face, starts to raise his gun.

  The police don’t hesitate. A short, sharp tattoo of gunfire, and Ricky’s head and chest explode in unison.

  He falls to the ground.

  One down.

  2

  They settled like crows in the playground and murmured their outrage. Their pale eyes and scrawny, track-suited frames hunched, hands stuffed in pockets. They assembled. And this night brought not just the gifted together, but the ungifted too – the infected and the uninfected, united in their hatred for them. The pigs. The filth. And all that they represented. Their casual authority to swoop in and destroy, as they had destroyed Ricky, out there, right in plain view of everyone. So that they’d all know just who was in charge. What else could such an action be, other than a provocation?

  But what to do?

  They milled and fomented and kicked at the woodchip that was left on the bed of torn and exposed canvas that clothed the foundation of the tired playground equipment. Some of them smoked and drank. But many of them didn’t. Many of them didn’t do that any more. They were different now. They were of a kind. And this was new to them. It made them feel powerful. Empowered. Like they could do something about things.

  But what? What to do?

  Having lived entire lives in mute ignorance of the existential penury in which they were imprisoned, and in which they were destined to live out their days, battery-farmed, hen-pecked and regarded as the putrid Petri dish from which all social disease and disorder would germinate – something had now awoken in them. There was now something in them that was disgusted by them. And it came from out there, not here. Out there – where the police came and did something if you got robbed. Out there – where they went to school and got jobs and had aspirations that were attainable. Out there – where they hated our words and our music and everything about us.

  Out there where people didn’t get shot on their doorsteps.

  Out there where they thought of them as rats.

  But the rats could smell the poison now. Their little noses twitching. Their eyes glinting. Their bellies growling. They formed their petty playground parliament and they muttered and discussed and tasted disgust. They spat and made schemes fuelled by seditious mistrust. And there was a voice whispering in their ears. Needling them. Fuelling their conviction of the new dawning truth – of where they fitted into the scheme. What life had mapped out for them. How much they were worth.

  Nothing.

  They were worth as much as Ricky. Blown apart like a dangerous dog.

  They were going to be destroyed for being what they were. That was how this script was being written. By the pigs. By the government. By their parents. By the old fucks who ran the world and hated them. By everyone who wasn’t them and didn’t understand what it was like never to have lived a single day that mattered. That hadn’t been sullied by some casual meanness, cruelty or simple disregard or neglect. They had lived their whole lives and taken it – the hate, the neglect, the blame – and they’d never bitten back.

  Why?

  Because they were cowardly rats. And that’s what rats did: steal from each other and scuttle around in the shadows scrabbling over scraps and dodging the poisons and traps and hurled objects that were unleashed to crush or kill them. Isn’t it? Aren’t they? Well?

  They chorused their vehement opposition to the notion. And cawed their dissonant dissent. They hopped to their feet and started to flap their little wings. Then, as one, they took flight and swooped into the city. And there were enough of them that none stood in their way, and as they flocked through the streets, heading towards the police station where they knew Ricky’s girl was now caged, their numbers grew. Others joined them. Others who had nothing, and wanted to show that they had nothing.

  When they arrived at the police station a crowd had already formed, loudly but peacefully remonstrating with a senior police officer who had ventured out to speak to them on the steps. He obfuscated and avoided giving answers and wouldn’t explain what evidence they had that might justify the shooting. There was a mother in the crowd, and she was wailing. There were uncles and cousins and neighbours and the like and they wanted to know why, after weeks living in terror of whatever had been stalking their estate, ripping out throats, they now had police in the shadows shooting at them too. The policeman was disinclined to make the connection for them – that Ricky was what had been terrorising them – it wasn’t that clear-cut yet. But the crowd heard the insinuation nonetheless. They were disinclined to believe it, but not necessarily because it was beyond belief. He’d been no angel after all.

  The new arrivals on the scene heard the insinuation too, and the gifted few among them knew it to have merit. But they also heard a veiled threat in his words: we’ve killed Ricky. We’ve caged his partner. We’re coming for the rest of you next and we will destroy you just like we destroyed him.

  It was all they needed.

  A small group of them broke away from the main crowd. They tore from the ground a short metal post that bore a small parking restrictions notice and stove
it through the window of a nearby police car. Some of the younger members of the crowd cheered at that and migrated across to this more proactive assembly. A teenage boy who was sipping from a half-litre bottle of vodka that was being passed around poured what was left through the hole in the windscreen and theatrically flicked a cluster of burning matches in after it. It went up with a whoomp.

  The suited senior officer who had been on the steps quickly retreated back into the building. A number of the crowd who’d been demanding answers from him berated these scene-stealers who were smashing the police car, but quickly backed down when they saw the cold sparkle in the eyes lurking beneath the hoods. These ones had crossed a line. These weren’t their children any more. They were something else. Their smiles were altogether too toothsome. Their intent less clear. More dangerous.

  And whoomp, the next car went up. The less sober, ungifted kids then danced round the flaming vehicles, whooping and hollering and waving their hands in the air. A stream of riot police filed out of the station and assembled on the steps. They formed a line. The lippy kids cheered and started to throw bottles and cans and anything else that came to hand.

  The gifted ones didn’t. They swooped forward as one at the police line. The crowd of peaceful complainants had dissipated and things were about to get ugly.

  The police crouched slightly and leant forward to meet the surging flock. They raised their shields and started to move down the steps towards them. Their attackers accelerated and smashed into them. What happened then made little sense to most of those who witnessed it. It was so fast, and so blurred, but the police were quickly dismantled and left broken and strewn across the street.

  The crows looked down on their scattered foes and then started up the steps.

  There was a moment of hushed awe from the kids at the burning cars, followed by a sudden swell of triumphant cheering. The traditional narrative – handed down from generation to generation for such a long stretch of history that it was now almost ingrained in their DNA – that they would be crushed by the powers that be was being rewritten before their very eyes. The noise and the spectacle and wildfire whispers of the changing of the guard, of victory and liberation, pulsed outward across the instant-message grapevine.