by Tim Weaver
‘You were a drug addict.’
‘Right. I needed saving. That’s what redemption is. Digging up a bad seed and planting a good one in its place.’
‘And you’ve redeemed yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your idea of redemption is different from mine.’
‘Not so different, David,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’re also a killer.’
Click.
A noise from behind me. The door opening. Myzwik looked over my shoulder. Suddenly, his expression changed completely: everything fell away, all control.
He was scared.
In front of me, in one of the picture frames, I saw a reflection. A shape standing close to my shoulder. A silhouette. I couldn’t see his face. Couldn’t see whether he was looking at me, or looking at Myzwik. But I could smell something.
A smell like decay.
I glanced at Myzwik. His eyes flicked between me and the man behind me, and then he edged away slightly, clearing his throat, as if he couldn’t stand the smell. He slid away, along the kitchen counter, back towards the corner of the room.
When I looked at the picture frame again, I saw why.
In the reflection was Legion, his mask half-hidden in darkness, a needle in his hands. And before I had a chance to do anything, he came at me and plunged the needle into my neck.
Everything went black.
37
When I came round, I was sitting in the middle of a disused industrial fridge. There were no windows, and it was lit by the dull glow from a single strip light above me. Meat hooks hung from a long metal tube to my left. There were two doors, both of them closed: one seemed to be the entrance, dotted brown and orange with rust; the second was some sort of side door, painted the same cream colour as the walls. Speckles of blood ran across its surface.
I was sitting in an old wooden chair, but they hadn’t tied me to it. My shoeless feet were flat to the floor, exactly parallel to one another, my arms flat to the sides of the seat. My fingers had been spread out, equally spaced, and my wedding ring had been removed and placed on the top of my hand. They’d taken off my shirt and trousers. All I had on were my boxer shorts.
And I couldn’t move.
My head could turn from side to side — but the rest of me was paralysed. I couldn’t shift a single muscle. Couldn’t even wriggle a finger. I knew what I wanted to do, begged my body to do it, but nothing happened. I was dead from the neck down.
I yelled out. A huge, guttural noise, fed by anger, which echoed around the fridge. When it faded out, I yelled for a second time, louder and longer.
The noise died again.
‘What have you done to me?’
Nothing. The only sound was the dripping.
I swallowed.
Inside I could feel everything. The saliva sliding down my throat. The pounding of my heart against my ribs. A sharp, acidic burn, like fire in my lungs. The freezer was cold but I could feel a bead of sweat pop from a pore on my forehead and run down my face. Past my eyes, my nose, my mouth and down towards my neck. As soon as it passed the middle of my throat, the sensation disappeared. On the surface of my skin, from the neck down, there was no feeling at all. I was dead. It was like my organs and muscles were no longer connected to my blood vessels and nerves.
Clunk.
The entrance door started opening. A slow, grinding rumble as it forced its way out from the door frame. A man filled the doorway. Not Legion. Another. He was massive: probably six foot four and eighteen stone. His blond hair was closely cropped, and he was dressed head to toe in black. He watched me for a moment. Tilted his head slightly. Seemed vaguely amused by what he was seeing. And then he stepped forward and brought his arms out from behind his back. There was something in his hands. At first I thought it was a belt. Then I realized it was something worse: a multi-thonged whip, twelve tassles dangling from the end. It looked like a medieval scourge.
‘What the hell have you done to me?’
The man didn’t reply. Just stepped further inside the freezer and pushed the door shut behind him. It made another immense wheeze. He walked over to the side door next to the meat hooks and opened it. Beyond, it was dark. He looked back at me once, and disappeared inside.
‘What the hell have you done to me?’ I shouted after him.
Silence.
I looked down at myself again, tried desperately to move my fingers, my hands, my legs. All I got in return was the sensation of it happening. My wedding ring remained perched on top of my hand. Perfectly still.
The man stepped back out of the darkness. He was still carrying the scourge, but in his other hand he held a chair. He walked over to me, placed the seat down opposite, so our feet were almost touching, and sat and watched me.
‘My name is Andrew,’ he said eventually.
‘What have you done to me?’
‘It’s good to finally meet you, David.’
‘What have you don—’
‘In a lot of ways I admire you,’ he cut in, holding a finger up for me to be quiet. ‘A lot of ways. My organization has managed to protect itself against people like you. On the rare occasions outsiders have got close to us before, we’ve thrown them off the scent. But not you, David. You’re special. Until you came along, no one ever found out about what we have here. We made some mistakes, I suppose. But I think we underestimated you too.’
I glanced at the scourge, then back at him. He hadn’t taken his eyes away from me. Hadn’t even blinked.
‘Everyone here has made mistakes, some bigger than others, but we give people a chance to start again. In exchange, we require certain things. We require them to give themselves up to the programme. Completely.’
He paused, studied me.
‘And we require secrecy.’
He stopped again, this time for longer. Breathing in and out. Just staring at me, as if trying to decide whether I was capable of understanding.
‘Are you listening to me? We’ve worked too hard on this. Gone too far. This isn’t going to unravel because some no-note kid is lost in the ether.’
He meant Alex.
We looked at each other, his eyes deep and powerful. Staring each other out. Eventually he blinked and turned his gaze away, down to the wedding ring on top of my hand.
‘What you’ve never understood, David, is that our old lives don’t exist any more. We don’t have a space we can fit back into. We remove ourselves from society and we don’t go back. If you took one of these kids out of the programme because you thought you were saving them —’ he looked at me again ‘— where do you think they’d go?’
I glanced around the fridge. ‘Somewhere better than here.’
He studied me, as if waiting for me to correct myself. Then, when I refused to turn away from him, refused to say anything else, he started nodding his head.
‘Better than here,’ he repeated quietly.
Suddenly — just a blur of movement — he thrashed the scourge against my left leg. The tassles wrapped around my thigh. Circling it. Clinging to it. As they dropped away again, I looked down. A series of thin red marks were carved across my skin, tiny pricks of blood emerging inside them.
But I felt nothing.
‘It must be nice not feeling any pain,’ he said, looking down at my leg, then at the rest of my body. ‘Can you imagine going the rest of your life without pain?’
I felt a twitch in one of my toes. An odd sensation, like the nerve endings had finally fired up.
He tilted his head again, a half-smile on his face.
‘Is the feeling coming back?’
I glanced at him.
‘It will do. First your toes, then your feet, then your legs. You’ll start to feel normal again as it passes through your groin, up into your abdomen…’ He paused. Leaned forward. Pressed a finger against my chest, just below the ribcage. ‘It’s when it gets to here that you’ll wish you were dead.’
‘What the fuck have you done?’
He smiled. He
’d clearly got the reaction he wanted.
‘We’ve drugged you, David. Well, actually, technically, we’ve partially paralysed you. Don’t worry, it won’t last for ever. But I should probably warn you that side effects can include sweating, salivation, rashes and vomiting. You shouldn’t suffer cardiac arrest… but, as with everything, you can never be sure.’
He pulled one of the thongs out from the scourge, and held it up to me. My blood was on it. Other blood too: darker, drier, stained on the leather. He studied it, turned it. There was more. The scourge was awash in it.
‘You know, I think some of this blood is Alex’s.’
He smiled again, a flash of darkness in his face for the first time.
‘The only way you can change someone is by removing temptation from their life,’ he continued, his expression softening — that same unblinking look. ‘The kids we bring here, especially the addicts, if we dried them out and sent them back, the temptation would still be there.’
I got a feeling in my toes again, stronger this time. A shooting sensation.
He leaned into me.
‘We promise them shelter. Food. Support. A family. But most of all, we help them forget. Forget about their addiction. Forget about their past. Do you honestly think any of them want to remember what they’ve done? What they’ve been through? One of the girls here stabbed a man in the chest after he raped her. Do you think she wants to remember what it feels like to have him forcing himself inside her?’
I didn’t reply. There was sensation at the top of my feet now. It lasted longer, like it was drifting across the surface of the skin.
‘So, we help them trade one life for another.’
He was still leaning in to me, his head at an angle.
‘Did you know that ketamine is the closest you’ll ever get to dying without your heart actually stopping? Users call it the ‘k-hole’. We mix it with a little dimethyltryptamine… and call it a resurrection.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘When we resurrect them,’ he continued, ignoring me, ‘some of the people on our programme find they come out of their bodies. Some see their lives played back at them. Some see bright lights in the darkness. It’s a symbolic rebirth. A resurrection into a new existence. A way to separate what’s been done in the past with what’s to come in the future.’
‘You’re fucking crazy.’
He laughed, and ran his fingers through the thongs. ‘No, David. The only crazy thing is that you think you’re doing good by stopping us.’
38
Andrew stared at me, his fingers running through the scourge. I looked back, conscious of the fact that they were trying to make me feel weak. They’d paralysed me. They’d taken my clothes. But they weren’t going to watch me crumble. His head tilted back again — a quirk of his — and then he broke out into a smile, as if he’d guessed what I was thinking.
‘I’ve spent a long time building this place, David. I’ve spent a long time getting the right people into position to help me. Surely you understand the need for me to protect what is important.’ He glanced at the wedding band on the top of my hand. ‘You’d protect what was important to you, wouldn’t you?’
‘The right people?’
He nodded.
‘Like that fucking freak in the mask?’
He didn’t move. Didn’t reply.
‘What’s right about him?’
‘He does what is necessary to secure our survival. We had problems at the beginning. He helped us with those problems. In return, we helped him.’
‘Was he helping you when he came for me in my home?’
More sensation in my feet. Both of them now.
‘He was ensuring—’
‘He’s not helping anybody. You’re not helping anybody.’
‘We’re taking away their pain.’
‘You’re erasing their memories.’
‘What memories do you think a heroin addict has, David?’ he said, his voice raised for the first time. ‘What about the girl we have here whose father molested her for eleven years?’
‘This isn’t right.’
He grunted. ‘How would you know what’s right?’
‘You’re forcing them.’
‘We ease their pain.’
‘You’re forcing drugs into them!’
‘We’re helping them build a new life!’ he shouted back. ‘We give them food and shelter. We give them company. They start again. They live again.’
Now I could feel the nerves igniting in my ankles and the balls of my feet. I looked down and saw my toes wriggling. Twitching. Moving.
When I looked up he was watching me.
‘You’re pushing it out of your system impressively fast,’ he said.
My ankles shifted position on the floor.
‘You’re a fighter, David. I like that.’
‘You’ve lost control here.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, no. We’re in total control.’
‘You’ve lost control!’ I said again, forcing the anger up through my throat. I gritted my teeth and willed myself to move. Just an inch. Anything at all.
All I felt was one of my calf muscles twitch.
‘Where’s Alex?’
He laughed. ‘Don’t you know when to give up?’
‘Where is he?’
He flicked the scourge again, the thongs brushing his leg.
‘Alex was different. He came to me just over a year ago after a long time in the wilderness. I didn’t go out and find him. He was given to me.’ A pause. ‘He was different.’
Another twitch — this time in my knee.
‘Different?’
‘When I first started the farm, I suppose I expected every kid I took in to respond to what we were doing. They had problems. We were offering them a way out. And for a while it all worked beautifully. The first two became wonderful, clean-living people. People I could use. I got Zack off drugs, and he became a recruiter for me. Then I gave Jade her dignity back after years of abuse and she contributed to our operations down in London.’
He leaned back in his chair. It creaked under his weight.
‘But then things got more difficult. Zack found this heroin addict down in Bristol. She’d been beaten by her dealer and raped by her pimp. He found her in an alleyway in the middle of winter, left for dead. So we started her on a detox programme.’
He paused, breathed out.
‘But then one night she told me she didn’t want to be here any more. I told her she had made her choice and now she had to stick to it.’ His body sank a little. ‘So, she pulled out a pair of scissors — and stabbed one of my people in the chest.’
I looked up at him.
‘I hit her,’ he said, stamping a foot on the ground. ‘And then I hit her again and again and again. And when I finished, she wasn’t moving any more.’
He stopped, glanced at me.
‘She pleaded with us to help her, so we brought her here with the promise of a new life. And she repaid us, repaid me, by murdering one of my best friends.’
Regret passed across his eyes.
‘But I had an epiphany after that. A watershed moment. When others fought us like she did, threw everything we offered them back in our faces, I realized we had to deal with them. We’d taken them out of society, given them a roof over their head. We’d made sacrifices for them. So, they’d make a sacrifice for us. They’d become martyrs.’
‘That’s why you brought in Legion.’
‘Yes,’ he said matter-of-factly, and got to his feet. ‘We’d been in the army together. He had some unique skills. You see how a man values life when you’re on a battlefield, David. You see how quickly he is prepared to turn life into death. Most soldiers, most people, don’t want to have to kill. They have a line that they don’t ever want to cross.’ I followed him as he moved around to my side, the scourge dangling from his hand. ‘But, for him, there was no line.’
‘I thought this was a mission from God?’
�
��It is.’
‘You ever read the Ten Commandments?’
He smiled. ‘I was protecting the project.’
‘You brought in a murdering psychopath.’
‘You will never understand, David. You’ve never had a cause to fight for.’ He looked briefly at the wedding band. ‘Other than the memory of your dead wife. And what sort of cause is that?’
He smiled again as he saw the anger burning in me, and then disappeared behind me, out of sight.
‘So, he just killed the ones that didn’t work out?’ I said.
Andrew didn’t reply.
And then it came to me.
‘Oh, shit — you used their bodies…’
‘Yes,’ he replied from behind me. ‘We used the bodies of the ones that didn’t respond to the programme. We have people in useful places; a net cast wider than you can possibly imagine. In the hospital system. In the police. Do you know how to remove evidence from a police database, David? I think you’d be surprised at how easy it is.’
I heard him move again.
‘You don’t have to work your way up the tree. You can get someone trained in HOLMES in a very short space of time and from there… well, it’s amazing what you can do just by sitting at someone else’s computer and using their login details.’
‘You’re framing people.’
He reappeared on my other side, looking down at me. There was a frown on his face, as if he couldn’t comprehend my simplicity.
‘It’s a bigger win. Our men and women on the inside, they’ve experienced redemption. They’re like Zack and Jade were. Once broken, now repaired. They give others that same chance by protecting what we have.’
The first pang of something flickered inside my body, close to my groin. A dull ache. The sensation was moving through my body like an oil spill.
He smiled and pressed a finger against my forehead.
‘Feel something?’
I wriggled my head, and his finger fell away.
I closed my eyes. Tried to use the darkness to refocus myself. When I reopened them, he was staring at me, the smile still there.
‘Whose body did you use for Alex?’
He shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
