Dead Watch: a fast-paced thriller you don't want to miss

by Steve Liszka

  It was almost three years since he had become a firefighter. After they had finished their studies, Dylan and Felicity, who’d got together when they were freshers at Brighton Uni, decided they would make the place their home. First, they needed to get the travel bug out of their system. They had spent eighteen months travelling the world before eventually coming back and settling down in the city where they’d met. Felicity quickly found a job with a reputable accountancy firm as Dylan struggled to find a career of his own.

  Their parents had given them some money to help settle them in, but it certainly wasn’t an unlimited supply of wealth, so if they wanted to keep to paying the rent, he needed some work, fast. When he could find nothing else, Dylan returned to his boyhood dream of being a firefighter. Along with hundreds of others, he patiently queued up at the first recruitment day, waiting to see if he was up to it.

  It was a strange experience, especially as it was based in the sports centre of his old university, but he made it through the basic Maths and English exams without trying too hard, and although not a fitness freak by any means, he cruised through the initial physical tests.

  To his surprise, Dylan also got through round two of the selection process; the practical stage, and he breezed the interview a few weeks later. For every vacancy that was available, up to thirty people applied. It amazed him that, given those odds, and as a man who had never achieved anything in his life, he had managed to bag himself a job.

  Training school for him wasn’t the massive success it was for Jo. He was competent enough when it came to both the theoretical and practical lessons, but it was the regimented nature of the whole affair that really got to Dylan. This chilled-out, easy-going young man was completely unprepared for the disciplined nature of training school. He was meant to be joining the fire service, not the goddamned army.

  The recruits, as they were known, were expected to be immaculately turned when they were not wearing their fire-kit on the drill ground. This meant highly polished shoes, uniforms with creases so sharp, you could cut yourself and perhaps, worst for him, they were expected to be clean shaven at all times. This didn’t seem to bother the girls on the course, but it drove Dylan crazy. He was used to walking around with a scruffy bum-fluff beard, and the shaving instantly set off a rash he couldn’t get rid of for the entire sixteen-week duration.

  Despite his initial concerns, he somehow made it through training school in one piece. It was a relief when he finally got sent out to his station and saw that life on the job was very different to the one that had been portrayed to him at the training centre. On his first day, as instructed by his course leaders, he arrived at the rear gates of the station in what is known as “full undress uniform.” This involved him wearing his blazer with shiny buttons, a long sleeve white shirt, his clip-on tie, buffed up shoes and not forgetting, his brand new, just out the packet, peaked cap.

  Ironically, considering the merciless piss-taking he would suffer from the man over the next few years, it was Lenny who saved him from complete humiliation that morning.

  Just as Dylan was about to ring the bell to be let into the yard, Lenny pulled up on his motorbike and cast his eye down the length of the skinny lad in front of him. He lifted his visor and shouted through the gap. ‘You must be the new boy!’

  Dylan nodded.

  ‘If I were you, I’d take that gear off before you get inside. You look a proper cunt.’

  Even though the lack of discipline on station was a pleasant surprise to him, Dylan struggled through the first couple of months. This was when he discovered that training school was only the start of his education as a firefighter. For the next few years, he would be a probationer, and in that time, he had much to learn. Within weeks, he was questioning if he had made the right decision in joining the service. The practical jokes and piss-taking he didn’t mind at all, the big problem for him was he didn’t feel he was up to the job. It quickly became apparent his colleagues were incredibly practical and able people who could turn their hands to pretty much anything. He, on the other hand, did not possess a practical bone in his body. He was the typical cliché of the student with plenty of brains but little common sense. When they were at incidents, he always felt out of his depth, and he had a strong feeling the rest of the crew felt the same way about him to. What worried him most was, when it really mattered, he would let down his colleagues.

  And then, it happened. After weeks of waiting, at half past two in the morning, he finally got his first real call. A carload of female students was heading back to the university campus after a night out in the town when the driver had lost control of the car and smashed into a wall. The three girls in the back and the two in front all suffered injuries to some degree. The driver, whose side of the vehicle had taken the full force of the impact, had smashed her hip up pretty badly, and the girl sitting behind her had likely cracked a few ribs. The front passenger was suffering from whiplash, and the other two girls in the back had smashed their heads together and were plastered in blood and snot. When the appliance turned up, they were greeted by a wall of screams coming at them.

  The best way of describing a working RTC is organised chaos. There was nearly always a lot of noise, not just from the casualties but also the roar of the hydraulic pack that powered the tools. The fire crews had to shout to each other to be heard, and often they were working simultaneously with paramedics to achieve the goal of safely extracting the casualties. In an RTC, there were always lots of people doing lots of things at the same time, and often the scene became extremely crowded. So much so, that if they didn’t have a specific task to do, often the most helpful thing a firefighter could do was to take a step back to ease congestion.

  It was while all this action was going on that Dylan discovered something important about himself. In high pressure, stressful situations, he worked incredibly well. As the incident became louder and more developed, his calm and focus grew. It was as if the opposite of what was going on around him was taking place internally. After using the hydraulic gear to make the final cut of the A-post that would allow the roof of the vehicle to be removed, he lifted his visor and wiped the sweat from his eyes. Bodhi, who had been keeping an eye on him throughout, patted him on the back before taking the tool out of his hand.

  ‘Well done, bud,’ he said with a wink. ‘You’ll do just fine.’

  And he did. From that day on, Dylan realised, when it mattered, he was more than up to the tasks that would confront him in his day-to-day life as a firefighter. In all the things he had ever done, he had never been so proud as when he got back on the fire engine that morning. The rest of the crew wouldn’t forget what had happened, either. Dylan’s first big incident meant only one thing: cakes, and he was buying.

  The one thing that never left him was the fear that one day he’d let the rest of the crew down at a job. He confided in Jimmy about it once who told him the feeling would never leave him, he still had it himself every time they attended an incident. It was the biggest thing that bonded firefighters; making sure everyone went home in one piece at the end of a shift.

  As he reminisced about his time in the job, Dylan slowly became aware of Felicity’s behind pushing into his groin, and it didn’t take long before is groin responded accordingly.

  ‘I thought you told me to keep my bits to myself?’ he said.

  Felicity continued to grind into him. ‘And I thought you would have put up more of a fight. Don’t you want me anymore?’

  Dylan rolled her onto her back and, in one swift move, ended up on top of her with a smile plastered all over his face. ‘You better believe I do,’ he said. ‘Now, brace yourself. What I lack in girth and size, I make up for with an incredibly fast ass.’

  Harrison

  Harrison opened the oven and quickly pulled out the baking tray. He closed the door in the same movement, making sure none of its heat was lost. After placing the tray on the worktop, he smiled as he witnessed its contents. The pork was cooking beautifully. He ha
d set it on a higher temperature for the first half an hour to allow the fat to crackle, and it had done so perfectly. The oil in the pan was spitting like crazy, and so, before it started to cool, he placed each individual potato around the meat, doing his best to not get burnt as the oil reacted to the moisture on their surface.

  Different people had different opinions about the best way to make the perfect roast potato, but in Harrison’s mind, by far, the best way was to par boil them to the point that you actually thought you’d ruined them. To get them to the stage that when you shook them up in the colander, the outside of the potato would fall away in a mush. It meant that you lost some of the mass of the thing, but if you wanted good roasties with a fluffy centre and crispy edges, that was the price you had to pay. It made him content to know that in forty-five minutes, both the meat and tatties would be spot on. He only hoped by then Janet would have surfaced. He didn’t like the idea of getting her out of bed.

  Despite his protestations at work when he was stuck in the canteen while the others were taking it easy, Harrison loved cooking. Unlike on most Watches where people took it in turns, when Harrison was working, he was always the mess man. Being part of the canteen wasn’t mandatory, in fact, on many Watches, it had pretty much fallen by the wayside with people bringing their own food in rather than doing the whole communal thing.

  That was unless you were on Red Watch, in which case, you didn’t get the choice. It didn’t matter if you were a vegetarian or didn’t like the meal that was being cooked, Harrison was more than happy to make an alternative dish for the fussy ones, but on no condition could you exempt yourself from it. He was a big believer that the Watch sitting down and sharing a meal together was one of the most important things to improve the harmony on station. A Watch that ate together, he would say, is a Watch that stays together.

  Not that anyone in their right mind would want to turn down the offer Harrison was bestowing on them. The meals he made for the Watch were fantastic and far too grand for the heathens that ate them. He could make just about anything – Italian, Thai, Moroccan, Indian curries that he prepared at home and would leave simmering overnight for maximum flavour – none of it was too much for him. His butternut squash and chorizo stew was so good, the Watch got a bit tearful when he said he was making it for them.

  With the food cooking away nicely, he retired to the living room. He had ten minutes to sit down before he needed to go back in and start sautéing the red cabbage. Luckily, he’d remembered to go to the shop on the way home and get some balsamic vinegar that would give it the sweet little kick it needed.

  When he collapsed on the sofa, Harrison let out a prolonged sigh. It was something he had been doing for years and was unaware of. It was kind of a signal of disbelief, usually combined with not a small amount of anger, and aimed either at the arseholes in government or the arseholes that ran the fire service, or the arsehole firefighter that had done something idiotic that he was going to have to defend in some way. But this time, the action was being directed towards his own Watch.

  In his twenty-nine years as a firefighter, he thought he’d seen pretty much everything there was to see, but no. Somehow, his own Watch and managed to surpass all his expectations of firefighter stupidity. He wasn’t a violent man by any means, but when they told him what they had done, he’d wanted to grab the lot of them and bang their bloody heads together. What with all the shit he was already dealing with due to the station closure, it was the last thing he needed.

  Other than his anger, there was another feeling growing inside Harrison that he had become increasingly aware of lately. Although he had been trying to ignore it, it was something that wouldn’t go away. After twenty years of being the Fire Brigades Union rep at the station and doing his best to fight the good fight and not give in to intimidation, bullying, or Catch-22 style bureaucracy, Harrison was tired. He hadn’t had the courage to say it out loud to any of his friends and colleagues yet, but he’d had a gut full of it all.

  He’d had a gut full of the government continually attacking not only his profession, but the rest of the public services too. It wasn’t about money, and he would never let anyone tell him any different. What was happening was an idealistic attack on the public sector, the welfare state and anything else noble in this country that his grandfather had fought to protect. As far as Harrison could remember, they weren’t the people who had caused the gigantic financial fuck up that the country had found itself in. His father, a career firefighter and union rep, had warned him that everything went in circles, and he was right. When he first joined the service, he’d had to fight off Thatcher and her cronies as they tried to destroy his profession, and now, at the twilight of his career, he was in a similar scrap with the pretenders to her throne. In the last few years, as the cuts had taken hold, engines had been taken off the run, jobs had been lost and stations closed. If they continued acting the way they were and continually slashing the budget, the only people who would claim they could run a fire service successfully were the private vultures who were already circling the wounded beast. The thought of working for such a venture made him feel physically sick.

  Harrison was also sick of the chief of the brigade itself and the management set-up. None of them had stood up to the government against the cuts. They had kept quiet and said they could deal with the far smaller budgets they had been dealt, and public safety wouldn’t suffer as a result. It was a lie, and Harrison hated them for it. If the chief had just said they were trying to make the best of a bad situation, he could have lived with it. But when he was being told the cuts were actually good for the people of Sussex and would make the service even safer, it made him want to go to HQ and call them all the liars he thought they were.

  He’d even had a gut full of the selfishness of some of the firefighters themselves and their attitudes towards their profession. Throughout the strike action and the campaign to fight the closure of their fire station that followed, it was the same old faces Harrison would see again and again when they were out leafleting the public or collecting signatures for their petitions. Many of them were older guys like him who were protected from the cuts and had no need to be there. It pained him to say it, but some of his colleagues just weren’t interested. Many of these were the same people who were only interested in the union when they needed representing in an investigation when they had fucked up in one way or another.

  And now, there were the events of the previous night to deal with. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t grasp the levels of stupidity they had displayed. The blame, in Harrison’s mind, rested solely at the feet of Wesley. He was the officer-in-charge; it was his job to keep the troops in line and stop them doing anything so incredibly stupid. The man was weak. Harrison could just imagine Lenny hassling him to take the money, and he’d lacked the backbone to stand up to him. If Jimmy had been in charge, he wouldn’t have let it happen, Harrison was certain of that. Perhaps it might have been easier to swallow if they hadn’t told him about the drugs. If there was one thing Harrison hated, it was goddamn drugs.

  Matthew had always been such a lovely little boy, and the two of them had a fantastic relationship. They were more than just father and son, Harrison was also the boy’s best friend and had been the coach of his football team from the time he and his mates were eight, right up until their late teens.

  That was when the troubles started. Matthew started hanging around with a group of lads Harrison didn’t know, and before long, he was more interested in being with them than going to football training. It didn’t bother him at first. Some of the other boys in the team had developed attitude and stopped coming training unless he press-ganged them into it; Harrison put it down to them being teenagers. But Matthew seemed to take things further than the rest of them. After a couple more months, he stopped playing football altogether. Harrison kept coaching the other lads as he’d grown to love and care for them and wanted the team to win the league, but for the first time in nearly ten years, he
was doing it without his boy being there.

  Things only got worse from there on. Matthew stopped talking to him and his mum altogether, spending nights away from home and only coming back for the shower he desperately needed as he stunk of booze and God knows what else. Harrison would like to say he had done everything in his power to steer the boy from the path he was on, but the fact was, he was so busy with work and union activities, not to mention coaching the boys to league success, he didn’t do nearly enough to protect his son.

  Matthew disappeared a year later, and it was only through some of the boys on the football team that Harrison found out he was living in a squat in Manchester. How they found out, he had no idea. He should have gone up there and dragged him home kicking and screaming, if necessary, anything to prevent what was inevitably going to happen, but he didn’t. Despite Janet’s pleas, he didn’t get involved. Matthew was a grown man now, Harrison would tell her, it was up to him to realise his mistakes and rectify them. But that was the problem with drugs, as Harrison soon found out. They didn’t allow you to take a step back from the mess of a situation you were in and decide the best remedy. They dragged you in and ate you up until there was nothing left of you.

  The police had found Matthew’s body in another squat nearly a year after he’d left home. They said he had probably been there for at least a fortnight before anyone discovered him. Neither Harrison nor Janet could bring themselves to identify his body; his poor aunty Bev was given that task. Losing a child was the worst thing that could happen to any parent, and even though a part of Harrison died along with his son, he knew he had to keep going for the sake of his wife. He also threw himself into his union work with more vigour than ever. His guilt wouldn’t allow him to stop fighting.

  Janet hadn’t managed to move on quite so well. She was devastated by what had happened and had never got over it. The depression that took over the once happy-go-lucky woman was paralysing. Some days, she could still resemble her old self, but more often than not, it was an achievement just to drag herself out of bed. She was lucky if she made it out of the house once a week. Harrison blamed himself for everything that had happened, and Janet had made it clear she blamed him too. If he were a real man, she had told him many times, he would have done everything in his power to stop his boy from dying. There was nothing he could say to that; he agreed with every word she said.