by Rob Aspinall
“What have you done?” it said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t stop myself.”
I brought the burger up for another chomp.
“I don’t wanna die,” the chick squeaked.
I bit down hard on its head. Crunched on through and washed it down with a blast of Coke. Something was wrong with it. Red and thick and hot up the straw. Tasted like copper. Back to Giles’s house. His back garden at night. Neon eyes peering out of the darkness. I backed up, afraid, but nettles and weeds wrapped around my ankles and yanked me onto my back. They pulled me fast into the woods, stones and branches raking my spine. The weeds dragged me into a clearing between trees and let me go. I got to my feet and brushed the dirt off myself. The wood stunk of dung. I heard animal breathing. Felt an object in my hand. A torch. Where did that come from? I flicked it on and screamed. A huddle of creatures with mangled faces. A pig, a sheep, a cow, a chicken and a tuna.
Is a tuna an animal?
“You ate my leg,” the chicken said, showing me the missing limb.
“And my eyelids, look …” the pig said, blinking pool-ball-eyed into the light. “I look weird.”
“How could yooooooo?” the cow said.
“Liar,” spat the tuna.
“Traitor,” said a fluffy yellow chick, appearing in front of its mother.
“A veggie swear is a swear for life,” said the chicken, wrapping a wing around its young offspring.
Now the sheep chimed in. “You’ve done some very baaaad things, Lorna Walker. Very baaaad things.”
“Bad things! Bad things! Bad things!” they all chanted.
I closed my eyes and prayed for them to stop. Prayers answered. When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in a lone ghost-train car on rails running throughout Auntie Claire’s house. The bar was down across my lap and wouldn’t budge. It was dark, but television glare lit the room a pale blue. The crab from the fishing boat sat in Auntie Claire’s old armchair, bigger than before, remote in claw, hopping through channels.
There was a hiss from under the car. Dry ice. It shunted and clunked along the track, down the short narrow hallway to the kitchen. Mum sat at the table in a wedding dress. She sang la-la-la like a crazy lady and moved a can of fizzy drink with a poison sign on the side towards her mouth. The car sped up towards the fridge and braked at the last second. The fridge door sprang open. It smelled of mouldy bread. Dad was inside. Or at least a small, mannequin version of him in the old blue overalls he used to wear to the plastic-bag factory. He put a shotgun under his mouth and pulled the trigger. A fake flash and gunpowder smell. His bearded face jerking forward on string. The fridge door slammed shut as the car did a U-turn and trundled into the hallway. A giant crab claw came out at me from the living room and snapped overhead. The car clacked up the stairs onto the landing. Into my room, where a big lump squirmed under my bed covers. I heard giggling. The duvet lifted up to show a waxwork Becki and Millie naked on the bed. Becki’s head rotated one-eighty like a ventriloquist’s dummy, her jaw made of painted wood.
“Nur, nur, nur-nur, nurrrrh,” she sang, like a small child, her voice multiplying and bouncing around the room.
The duvet cover dropped back down to more giggling, and the car spun off into our cramped bathroom, where you couldn’t sit on the loo without your knee resting against the bath. More dry ice as the shower curtain slid open to reveal a real-life Auntie Claire in the tub, frozen blue and dead and packed in ice like a fresh catch from the sea. One of her eyes was a fish eye. The same fish eye that had stared at me through the tarpaulin when I was stuck in the box on the trawler. Auntie Claire held her hand out, but I couldn’t reach.
“Lorna,” she said, her voice croaking.
“Auntie Claire, I’m sorry for being such a stroppy bitch. I should have listened.”
She smiled. “It’s okay, love. It wasn’t your fault.”
“It was all my fault,” I said, straining to take her hand. Millimetres away. “I should never have said what I did.”
“Ssssh,” she said. “He’s coming.”
Auntie Claire’s eyes darted towards the bathroom door. I heard gigantic clopping footsteps coming up the stairs.
“Who?” I asked. “Who’s coming?”
“You know,” she said. “HIM.”
The footsteps were closing in, loud as drums.
“It’s too late, Lorna. I love you. Always remember that.”
“No, Auntie Claire. I’ll get you out.”
I pulled on the bar like a lunatic. It wouldn’t budge. The car turned towards the bathroom door as HE arrived. Holy shit, it was a seven-foot Plastic Jesus and he was armed. A gun in one hand, a coffee to go in the other. His face opened up like a cuckoo clock. A plastic version of Nathan’s face smirked at me from inside.
“Morning, morning!” he said in a god-like voice that shook the walls of the house.
“Lorna!” Auntie Claire screamed, reaching out one last time. Plastic Nathan lifted the antique six-shooter from Philippe’s gun wall and pulled the trigger. A flag popped out of the end that said BANG. The side of Auntie Claire’s face caved in and she was gone. I screamed and squirmed beneath the bar.
“You murdering fucker!”
“Come now, Lorna,” Plastic Nathan said. “You’re no different to us. If anything, you did this.”
I began to cry, realising it was true. I was a killer, too, now. And I had done this.
“You were given a second chance and you wasted it,” Plastic Nathan said, voice booming, giant hands reaching down towards my chest.
He tore my top off in one go and put the fingers of both hands on my scar, palms facing outwards. He ripped open my chest. It hurt like a mo-fucker. Blinding. Sickening. Worse than anything I thought possible. But I didn’t scream. Didn’t fight. I let him do it. I simply looked down and saw Philippe’s beating heart. Beating strong. Beating steady. Plastic Nathan reached inside and wrapped his right hand around it.
“I believe this is ours,” he said.
With a smirk, he tugged the heart out of my chest. It disconnected easily and there was no pain. Plastic Nathan laughed his ass off and stomped out of the doorway. I felt nothing but a chill breeze inside the space where my heart had been.
25
Change Of Plan
I snapped awake in the airport seat, slumped low. I straightened up, checked my hair. Checked my face for drool. Glanced around me. Looked at the time.
Philippe still wasn’t back. I felt like I’d been dreaming for hours, but it had only been minutes. The gate was pretty much full now. Someone had taken Philippe’s seat behind me. A woman had sat herself next to me and was reading an erotic novel. A couple of cute young Spanish kids ran past me, laughing, not a care in the world other than chasing each other round and round the seats. Across from me, a young couple entertained their young baby wearing a sky-blue onesie. The dad held the baby up in the air while the mum tickled his feet. The baby giggled and kicked with glee. Happy as a pig in the brown smelly stuff.
Right then and there, I knew.
I didn’t want to sit around on a beach while more Auntie Claires died at the hands of Nathans and Smugorellas. They didn’t get to munch on the world’s M&Ms and get away with it. Not without getting a few digs in of my own. Could I leak the list? Maybe, but they’d just cover it up. And I was a murdering ho-bag according to the media, so who was going to believe me?
Running and hiding didn’t cut it any more either. As my physics teacher, Mr Herd, once said, “Drastic results call for drastic action.” Okay, he’d been talking about a drastic improvement in my grades. And some drastic studying on my part. But the point was the same. Someone had to do something. And that someone might as well have been me. I couldn’t wait to tell Philippe of my new plan. This was his stock-in-trade. I felt sure he’d love the idea.
Right on cue, he emerged out of the busy concourse and subtly dropped a bottle of cold mineral water in my lap. I noticed the knuckles on his hand were scuffed re
d. And, crackling inside his jacket pocket, was a man’s voice speaking German.
“Pest Control status check. Negative for rats.”
Philippe paused in front of me, pulled a small radio out of his pocket and spoke into it in perfect Deutsche.
“Copy that, Pest Control. Rat-catcher status negative,” he said. “We’ll give it another sweep.”
“Understood Rat-catcher. No sign of them here. Will report in, then we’re going for lunch.”
Philippe switched off the radio and tossed it in a bin trolley briefly abandoned by an airport cleaner. The cleaner returned to the trolley with a bag of rubbish and moved on along the concourse.
“Trouble?” I asked.
Philippe snapped the top off his bottle and looked away from me as he spoke quietly between sips. “Two-man team. Routine sweep. Followed me into the restrooms. No trouble.”
I guess by two-man team, he meant a pair of JPAC specials who’d picked up his tail. I didn’t have to ask to know they were dead. Probably stuffed inside a toilet cubicle somewhere. Philippe took a seat on the row a couple down from me, the woman reading her novel in between us. It wasn’t a perfect situation, but I had to tell him now.
“Change of plan,” I said, across the woman.
Philippe glanced over and then away. “What are you talking about?”
“The first event on the list. It’s tomorrow.”
“So?”
“So we can stop it,” I said.
“Stop what?”
“Something really big, you said. Multiple red and black flags.”
“We’re about to get on a plane,” Philippe said, as the woman between us shifted in her seat, trying to disguise her annoyance at how rude I was being by talking across her.
“Who cares if the plane leaves without us?” I said. “I don’t want to go to Venezuela anyway. I want to fight back, dammit.”
The woman’s dark, piss-hole eyes shot to me and then back to the book, lightning fast. She pretended to carry on reading, but I could tell she wasn’t taking in a word.
“Keep your nose out,” Philippe said to me. “You’re not trained for it.”
“Then stay and help me. Show me what to do.”
“I’m retired,” he said, taking a sip of water. “Do you know how hard it is to retire from—” Philippe stopped before he said too much, eyeing the woman. “It’s not my problem anymore,” he said. “And it’s not yours either.”
“I can’t believe you. Nathan and his cronies are about to start shuffling through their infinite kill playlist and it doesn’t register with you at all? Innocent people will die,” I said, shifting in my seat to face him.
“People are only innocent so long as they have to be,” Philippe said.
“If you still thought that, why not kill me? And why quit?”
“Nobody quits,” Philippe said. “If you want to stop, you make your play. And you either make it or you don’t. I was one of the few who got clear, so I’m not walking straight back in there. And neither are you. You’re getting on a plane with me to Madrid. And then another to Caracas. End of story.”
“I know they took your heart,” I said, raising my voice, switching to English. “But I didn’t know they took your balls!”
“You two are crazy,” the woman said in Spanish, snapping her book shut and moving off to find another seat.
I gathered my bags together. “Fine, I’ll do it on my own.”
Philippe was over to me in a shot, parking himself in the woman’s vacated seat. He put a thumb on the inside of my left elbow. Pain tore up my arm.
“Get off me,” I said through gritted teeth.
“I know it’s tough to take,” Philippe said. “Being powerless to stop something. Believe me, I’ve been there. But that’s life. Some things are just bigger than you. You can’t save everyone. So at least save yourself.”
I tried to get up from my seat. Philippe dug his thumb in deeper. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to cause a scene any more than he did.
“I’m asking you for two more weeks of your life,” Philippe said. “We get to Venezuela. We get settled. Then one day I disappear. What you do after that is entirely up to you.”
“You could have asked nicely.”
“This is me asking nicely,” Philippe said.
“Okay, fine.”
Philippe didn’t seem convinced.
“Fine,” I said, looking him in the eye.
He let go of the hold. I had a red thumb print at the pressure point. I’d have to remember that move in case I ever needed it. As if to put an end to the argument, a female voice came over the PA system. She was calling our flight. We were ready for boarding.
26
Buckle Up
Boarding the plane took ages. We stood towards the back of a long queue. Every step forward, a step to freedom. Every step, a step further away from the fight. Relief and regret rolled up into one, my mind a crazy ball of cats. As before, Philippe waited in line a couple of people behind me. As if being torn over the situation wasn’t enough, I was nervous about the flights too. The red tail of the plane loomed large in the window as I neared the boarding desk. They were asking for boarding passes and passports. I held mine out together in one hand, trying to keep a lid on the nerves.
What would Katerina do? How would Katerina think? That’s what I kept asking myself. She’d probably be slightly bored, but nothing else, looking forward to getting into her seat and cracking open the tube of M&Ms. Putting her new iPad on airplane mode and watching a box set. Ordering a cappuccino, a red wine and a tuna panini melt. Putting myself in her shoes calmed me down enough to breeze through the boarding gate. The airline rep in her bright-red uniform and hat smiled at me, wishing me a pleasant flight.
I gave her the faintest crack of a smile and swanned off into the connecting corridor that led to the front of the plane, the world and its choices shrink-wrapping themselves around me in the form of a long, grey box. I felt like a rat being forced down a tube. And life got even more cramped on the plane. I’d never realised they were such confined spaces. I struggled with my case and bags down the aisle, waiting while people scrambled their stuff into overhead lockers, shooting me dirties as I bundled my way through.
“Mi scusi,” I repeated as I bashed against bums, knees and elbows.
We were twelve rows from the cockpit, just in front of the wings. Philippe would sit in one aisle seat, me in the other. I took the seat on the right-hand side, heaving my case into the overhead locker. Philippe removed his suit jacket and settled in across the aisle.
On the inside of me in the window seat, sat a young studenty guy with blonde hair and a backwards baseball cap, bopping his head to something on a pair of Beats headphones. Then, on the seat next to me, the woman from earlier, already immersed in her erotic novel. She looked up for a second as I tried to plug part of her belt into mine. I nodded and smiled. She rolled her eyes back to the book with a guy on the front with a six pack and a woman’s hands fondling it from behind. I managed to locate the correct end of my belt and buckled up. I loosened and tightened, loosened and tightened. Philippe shot me a look. Totally unsympathetic. Yeah, okay for Mr Globetrotter. It wasn’t his first flight.
As the plane filled up, I fiddled with the circular air vent above. It was hot and claustrophobic. I read the laminated safety guide stuffed in the seat pocket in front of me. People in lifejackets. Oxygen masks. It wasn’t helping. But it wasn’t fear of flying that was making me edgy. It was a symptom of something else. I thought I’d be sitting here, legs jiggling, because I was anxious to get off and running. Get free from JPAC. But despite everything that had happened, I was anxious to get back in the scrap.
The more passengers filed onto the plane, the closer we got to the cabin crew closing that door. And once that happened, there was no going back.
And did I really think Philippe would leave me to my own devices in Venezuela? I imagined him sitting on the veranda of his mansion vill
a on top of a hill overlooking the ocean, with a sultry young señorita for company. Me washing up dead on the beach. Bloated and caked in white sand. A local news story at best. All for nothing. I glanced at Philippe. Upright and eyes forward in his seat.
You murdering fucker. I’m not gonna stand for this.
I slowly unbuckled, keeping one eye on Philippe. I stood up out of my chair. He looked my way. I yawned and stretched and sat back down. I gave him a little smile. He turned to look out of the window to his left.
I watched the door. The cabin crew were checking to see if there were any remaining passengers. There weren’t. A man in a hi-vis vest gave them the thumbs-up and stepped back off the plane.
This was it. The door was about to close.
There was, however, one silver-haired woman late getting on, a couple of rows back from us. She was struggling with a heavy piece of hand luggage – a hard case the colour of her hair that she couldn’t lift high enough to fit into the locker. She gave up and tapped Philippe on the shoulder.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Could you—”
“Of course,” Philippe said, unclipping his safety belt and standing up to help. He looked at the overhead locker and told the woman there was no room. He surveyed the surrounding lockers and spotted a gap a couple down.
“How about over here?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s fine,” the woman said, smiling.
Okay, decision time. As one door was about to close, a window of opportunity was swiftly opening. But it wouldn’t be open long. And neither would that door.
