Reckoning Point

by J. M. Hewitt

  I looked at them now, in a row, nestled together. I didn’t see the bags over their heads, I didn’t see the blood stains or the missing arms. I saw my friends, how they were, always laughing, now, at peace.

  “All set, boy?” asked the Colonel, and then before I could reply, he put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. “I’m very proud of you, Roland. You have done an incredible job of helping me clean up this mess.”

  I smiled at him, open and pure.

  Perhaps, maybe once this was all over with, perhaps the Colonel could be my new friend.

  “So, good job, son,” said the Colonel, and with a final glance at the almost comatose Mark and a final flick of his coat, he clamped his hat on his head and left the apartment.

  In the garage I aimed the little torch the Colonel had given me at the board which held all the gas metres. He had been down here with me yesterday, showed me how to turn the taps, ‘just like a kitchen or bathroom sink tap’ he’d said. He had even got me to twist one to make sure I could turn it with ease.

  And I could. And this too, had pleased the Colonel.

  I turned the taps, eight of them in all, the ones that the Colonel had pointed out to me. I heard the gas hissing out of the little splits that I’d made with my own penknife. I nodded, checked my watch, and made my way back up to the top floor.

  Mark hadn’t moved from his chair. He was staring at the television which wasn’t even switched on.

  “Mark,” I said as I opened the cupboard underneath the kitchen sink. “Mark, I’m going to turn the gas tap on now and light the fuse.”

  He didn’t reply. I turned on the tap, heard the familiar noise as the gas leaked out through the tear in the pipe. With that done, I walked over to Mark and crouched down next to him.

  “Mark, are you nearly ready to leave?”

  He turned his face towards me, slowly, as though it pained him to move. I felt almost sorry for him, he was in a bad way. I think he felt very bad for what he had done to the Irish brothers when he’d lost his temper. He said something, but all that came out was a hiss of air. It sounded like the gas taps, and as he breathed out I smelt something terrible.

  I pulled back a little. Rocked on my heels.

  What if Mark didn’t leave the apartment? What if he refused to get up out of his chair?

  And a terrible, wicked thought popped into my head; would that be such a bad thing?

  I gasped out loud, but Mark didn’t seem to notice, so I allowed the thought to form fully.

  If Mark stayed here when the apartment blew up, then he would turn to dust just like my friends. And I really could go home to mother. I wouldn’t have to be scared of him anymore if he didn’t exist.

  Wicked.

  I was wicked.

  But I had to light the fuse, the time was ticking, a fact that my watch confirmed for me. I stood up, walked over to the wire that the Colonel had strung up.

  “I’m lighting it now, Mark,” I called, and immediately felt better, because I’d given him a warning.

  I flicked open the lid of the lighter, held it up to the fuse, put my thumb on the wheel that would ignite the flame.

  I took a deep breath, and then–

  “Leak! Gas leak!” I could hear footsteps pounding along the walkway outside the door, fists thumping at doors and windows.

  I rested my thumb, waited.

  Sure enough, the knocking came at the window of the apartment I stood in, a fleeting shadow, and then whoever was out there tried the door handle.

  I hadn’t locked the door.

  It opened.

  A man I recognised as one of the brother’s neighbours looked in. Luuk, his name was. He was young, he liked the brother’s, indeed he had been at many of their parties. In a way he reminded me of Smith, he was tall, muscled, blonde. Nice to look at, and he’d always treated me kindly, just like the brothers.

  Luuk came into the room, and then staggered backwards as though he had been hit. I wondered why, then remembered the smell. I must have got used to it myself.

  Luuk bought his arm up and covered his nose. He looked at Mark, still in his chair, and then at me.

  “Roland, what the fuck?” Luuk waved his free arm. “Never mind, there’s a gas leak, we need to clear the apart–”

  He stopped talking abruptly, looked at Mark, looked at Miles, David and Vinnie. Looked at the bags that were covering their heads and crudely tied around their necks. I saw what he was seeing, the stumps where Vinnie’s arms should be (where were his arms now? I wondered), and Luuk fell back against the wall.

  Finally he looked at me, and the lighter I held, and the clay and the wires and the gas and he had it all figured out.

  The lighter shook in my hand.

  “Roland,” he said, mournfully, and it was like he was disappointed in me, even though I’d done nothing except what I was told. “Oh, Roland.”

  And his tone started me off, and I began to cry.

  He was beside me now, his arms around me, treating me kindly like he always did. And he took the lighter from me and put it in his pocket as he led me towards the door, and I tried to protest because that lighter had belonged to Miles, and it was all I had left of my friend, and I really, really wanted to keep it. But Luuk was big and strong, and he walked me outside where the air was fresh and crisp and cold and clean, and as I walked out of the apartment I put my arms around Luuk and laid my head on his chest, and I cried like my heart was breaking.

  64

  ELIAN, ALEX, LEV, THE DOCTOR and ERIK

  UNDERGROUND

  14.7.15 Night time

  There is no light in the tunnels, but Elian finds she can stretch out both arms and touch the sides of the walls. If she stands on her toes she can feel the roof grazing the top of her head, and just these points of contact help her as she runs along. At some points the ceiling slopes alarmingly, and she has to bend her knees, lean forward, and run with her face looking at the floor. It feels like her progress is stupidly slow, and she tries to think how far away the pier is.

  As the crow flies it is a walk-able distance, a pleasant walk on land, but these tunnels seem to bend, and though it might eventually come out near the pier, they could be twisting and turning underground, adding miles onto her journey.

  And the doctor could be gaining ground on her, right now, and that thought makes her run harder than ever.

  He’s older, she’s not sure how old because his age could be anywhere between fifty and eighty, and she is younger, and fitter, of that she has no doubt, but thinking of him, seeing what he had done to Roland, he obviously has some strength that enabled him to cart three dead weight bodies down into his basement.

  She flies again, not even noticing when the rough walls catch the skin on the palm of her hands, not caring how dopey she occasionally feels – it comes in waves, an after-effect of whatever the doctor drugged her with - just needing to carry on, to keep winding her way through the tunnel, because eventually she will reach the end, and there will be fresh air and daylight and people.

  She has to believe that. There is no other alternative.

  All she has now is her inner strength and her hope.

  Lev lurches along the tunnel, his movements are not like Elian’s. He is panicked in the darkness, scared that the doctor is only mere metres behind him. Every few yards Lev bounds ahead in long strides, emitting a little shriek at the thought of that rusty old scalpel pointing at his back.

  And what is with these fucking tunnels? The walls are slippery with damp, and every now and then the roof seems to plummet, and because Lev seems to have lost all his coordination he smacks into it, hitting his forehead and the bridge of his nose over and over again.

  Lev closes his eyes briefly as he remembers the tunnels back home. That’s what this place is like, those old, underground passages where his old friend Niko used to take those people he had come across in the Chernobyl wilderness. For a place that was supposed to be abandoned there were no end of victims for Niko,
trespassers, kids who dared each other to go into the exclusion zone, the offspring of those that stayed, old family members who came back to check on their elderly surviving relatives, those that refused to leave. And Lev hadn’t helped those people, no, he had seen a way to make money from it, especially from the babies and kids who fell into Niko’s unfortunate grasp.

  Lev slows, passes a hand across his eyes. Is this his payback, his karma? What goes around, and all that.

  “I swear to God,” Lev says out loud, “I swear on my very heart and soul, that if you get me out of this, I’ll … I’ll…” he trails off. What can he do? Put things right? Turn back time?

  “I’ll never do anything bad again, I swear, I swear.” And with the words now running through his mind, and falling from his lips he uses this mantra to push himself onwards, towards the pier, towards freedom, to a life that he promises a God he doesn’t even believe in that he will live well.

  Something beeps and lights up on Erik’s wrist, and Alex looks over at it. It’s some sort of fitness watch, something that Alex has often considered buying himself, but knowing it would be an expensive toy that would be forgotten in a week he had never bothered.

  “We’ve gone two miles,” says Erik, and to Alex’s amazement the man sounds like he has been taking a leisurely walk, and not jogging in the awkward manner that they had.

  “Where does this end? Does it end? Or are we just looping around underneath the town?” asked Alex, feeling the burn in his throat from the exertion. Painfully he remembers Elian mocking him for his lack of fitness, how long ago that seems, and for some reason it spurs him on. If he loses her because he is unused to exercise … no, there is no ‘if’, he will reach her even if he has a heart attack along the way.

  Erik fiddles with his watch, looks up and over at Alex. “We’re heading towards the coast, I’m sure we are.”

  “And there’s just one track, I mean, it doesn’t split off–” And just as he speaks the words, even before he has finished his sentence, he can see by the torch on his phone that just in front of them it forks off into two tunnels.

  They slow to a halt.

  There is a long moment of silence, the only sound Alex’s heavy breathing. Erik says what Alex is pretty sure both of them are thinking.

  “Shall we split up?”

  It makes sense, it would be infuriating if they both went down one tunnel only to come to a dead end. Too much wasted time, that time was one thing they didn’t have.

  “Yep,” says Alex, moving to the entrance in front of him.

  “You got your service weapon?” asks Erik.

  Alex hesitates. Now isn’t the best time to tell Erik that he is not actually a member of the police force back in London, like he’d led him to believe.

  “No matter, take this,” Erik responds as he pulls another revolver out of the back of his belt and hands it along to Alex.

  Alex takes it. Yes, Erik could get into all sorts of trouble if it comes out that he gave his gun to what was, essentially, more or less a stranger. But the time for explaining and worrying will come later. Elian is the now, and she is all that matters.

  Erik glances at his own phone. “No service down here,” he says grimly, and shoves it in his pocket.

  There had been no signal in the basement either, and none of them had wanted to waste time going upstairs to call for back up.

  “We’ll be out soon,” says Alex forcefully. “In the meantime …” he lets his words fade away into the tunnels.

  In the meantime, what? We’ll hope and pray we don’t come across the doctor and find he is armed himself? We’ll hope that Lev doesn’t pop up and mistake us for the enemy and shoot us or stab us? We’ll hope the roof doesn’t cave in before we get the job done, the bad guys locked up and the innocent ones are safe.

  Alex takes a deep breath, a lot was riding on hope.

  “All right, you’ve got my number for when we get out.” Erik leans over, claps Alex on the arm. “Good luck, man.”

  “You too, pal,” says Alex, already turning away, already stepping into the tunnel, already revived and in a rush now.

  I’m coming, Ellie, he wants to shout it, but keeps the thought in his mind, and it does what he had hoped, and spurs him on towards her.

  The doctor knows these tunnels like the back of his hand. He knows them as well as he knows the backstreets and the main roads and the canal towpaths and hiking trails. He knows everything in this town, has looked after it, kept it clean for so many years.

  Too many years, he thinks, ruefully, because twenty years ago, ten years ago even, he would never have made a mistake like the one he has made with the simple kid Roland. No, back then, in his heyday, if he meant to kill someone he would have done the job properly.

  The doctor smacks a hand to his forehead, berates himself.

  You’re getting too old for this, he thinks, and he feels a wave of sadness because he knows it is true, he’s not just having an off day, he really is getting too old.

  And now the other one, the foreigner, is on the run. As is too the pretty, lovely Elian, who turned out to be not so pretty and lovely, but is actually, just like all the other girls.

  It is another indicator, another red flag that tells him he needs to slow down. Because he never would have been taken in by a girl like Elian. He has seen very many young girls who are beautiful and vivacious and who – on the outside – look clean and wholesome, yet Elian, this one, this young, beautiful, seemingly untouched thing, is the only one who has duped him in such a way.

  He feels the fire now, thinking how primly she sat in his office and talked guardedly about her head injury and subsequent worries. Only then, once he had totally and utterly become spellbound by her, had she turned around and in an almost offhand manner requested the tests that he ‘gives the other girls’.

  It makes him shake his fist ahead of him, aimed at her who is at some point down this long tunnel. And it makes him doubly furious that even then, even after she had requested the tests, still he had coveted her, thought of her as different somehow. Only after reading and photocopying the notebook that he had taken from her bag, seeing all the names of the women she socialised with, that Brigitta for one, and a man’s name, scrawled childishly, and the other men, the ones who had violated her. That had almost made him waver in his feelings of distaste for her. For a brief while he considered her a maiden who had been held against her will, (just thinking that had stirred other, unfamiliar feelings in him), but she hadn’t learned from that, had she? No, instead she was cavorting all over town at all hours of the day and night, on her own, wearing those tiny, tiny shorts, that showed those creamy milk chocolate legs that seemed to go on for–

  The doctor makes fists from his hands and crashes them into his own face.

  Stop it, he instructs himself, stop daydreaming like a love struck teenager, find the people who have eluded you, and deal with them, the way you used to. Properly and without messing up.

  Because it had been a long time since he had failed at a task. And he had escaped that debacle with such a narrow margin. And he slowed his pace a little, thought back to that time, remembered how he had pushed through with his life and his career and his reputation untouched.

  “Do you remember that?” he asks himself, and the echo that comes back to him makes him smile.

  Yes. Yes, he remembers.

  65

  THE COLONEL

  3rd May 2000

  The Colonel, standing across the road, waited with anticipation for the blast. He felt no sympathy for Roland falling for his line. Someone who was so dumb as to think he had thirty minutes to get out of the apartment once the gas had been put on and the fuse lit deserved to be part of the Colonel’s clean up. Oh, he had no doubt that Roland wasn’t a willing accomplice in Mark Braith’s sick plan, but honestly, the boy was a liability. Anyone who was that easily led was just a danger to society.

  Certainly the boy wasn’t a loss to society. He was a drain on resources. He
would never work, he would never contribute.

  The Colonel nodded, rubbed his hands together gleefully. All the residents of this particular apartment building would go down too. All the street walkers and window workers, Braith, stupid, useless Roland, the bodies of the three drug dealing brothers, the men who lives alongside them who were with a different woman every night and who shared their diseases as freely as they shared their needles.

  Ah, the Colonel wrapped his arms around his upper body and squeezed, it was going to be a good day.

  But he had to get a move on, because time was moving on. It had been a good ten minutes since Roland had turned the taps on in the garage parking area. Why hadn’t he lit it yet?

  The Colonel glanced at his watch.

  Good Christ, don’t say he was going to have to go up there and reissue Roland with the instructions. And just as the Colonel was about to cross over the tram tracks, he heard a commotion at the top of the building.

  The Colonel moved closer, looked up towards number 1058. A man was running along the walkway, banging and hitting on the doors and windows as he passed. He was shouting, but the Colonel couldn’t hear his words, he was too far away.

  And then he reached number 1058, banged with his fist, moved close to the front door, and then, the man vanished inside.

  The Colonel groaned. If he swore he would have spat a list of expletives, but he restrained himself, backed up to his original vantage point, and waited.

  He didn’t have to wait long, mere moments after entering, the man emerged. But he wasn’t alone.

  He had his arms around the shivering, shaking form of Roland, and the Colonel stamped his foot as Roland appeared to shrink even further into himself and clutched at the well-meaning neighbour.