Harvest

by Steve Merrifield

  Danny saw Kevin’s eyes sparkle with anticipation and excitement clearly getting off on his story. “Cool.”

  “Before long we were both topless, and she let me unhook her bra.” Danny remembered the infinite smoothness of her breasts and how they tensed under his hesitant touch and his kisses. “Then she was kissing my chest and stomach.” He remembered the feathery touch of her breath and the heat of her tongue on his smooth stomach. “Then she went down on me. Ah fuck, it was so good bro!” Danny felt himself go stiff, but Kevin had retreated out of sight so he didn’t care. “Better than any wank!” He laughed and played with himself idly in his tracksuit bottoms. “Then she asked me to do her. We were naked in no time,” he remembered how cold and hard the floor was, but it had helped delay his excitement to something he hoped was acceptable. “Then I did her, I just let her have it and she loved it,” he lied. He had been slow and hesitant and worried each time she groaned and grimaced, not knowing if he was hurting or pleasuring her. “I came loads!” he was horny again; he would have to go to the privacy of the bathroom in a moment. There was another feeling mingled with his arousal, unformed and anonymous but definitely there. He tried to ignore it.

  “I went to look for her this morning. See if she was up for seconds,” he lied again. He loved her, and she had been so worried the previous night he wanted to make sure she didn’t regret doing what they had done, wanted to check they were still together, that she loved him. His thoughts darkened. “She wasn’t home. Parents said she had gone out early.” He had rung and text everyone on his mobile but no one had seen her. He didn’t know what that meant for them both, but he didn’t want to think that it meant she had gone missing like Sarah had.

  His lust stifled him, leaving him agitated and uncomfortable the longer he prolonged any response. He wanted to revisit the hot memory of being inside Leah but there was something distracting him. Something wriggled in his mind beyond the dim possibility and fear that she could be missing. An elusive feeling that frustrated him and teased him, as if his emotions were trying to take a shape beyond the mould of his lust. Suddenly he breached the gap and the feeling had an identity that seized him. Anger. It washed over him with a scalding heat. He couldn’t explain why, but somehow everything that annoyed and frustrated him about his fourteen-year old brother came to his mind one memory after another, goading him to respond to it, to lose his control.

  Craig opened his front door and Vicki beamed in at him. The smiled vanished and she momentarily paused in chewing her gum. “You look like shit…”

  Craig rubbed his pallid face with his good hand and it trembled slightly with weakness. “Cheers Vicki, your making me feel so much better. I was only saying to myself this morning that all I needed was a verbal kick-in-the-teeth observation from Vicki to raise my self-esteem.”

  “Babe, if I was trying to raise your self-esteem I’d shag you.” Vicki moved in close to him, prodded her finger at his chin and trailed it down his neck and chest to his navel in a play of seduction.

  Craig pushed himself forward from the doorway of his flat, forcing Vicki and her pointing finger back into the corridor. He cocked his head to one side and spoke through a false grin. “How would giving me something that you give away so freely, make me feel special?” He had attempted to make his words cheerful play, but for a brief moment he had meant to hurt her, he had had enough of the teasing. He needed comfort not games, someone to be there for him. Craig liked Vicki a lot, he had been quick enough to work out that she wasn’t interested, so he was sure she knew how he felt. They took turns to chase and run, a holding pattern of endless moves into stalemate that kept their friendship fun without it ending in an awkward rejection. However at a time like this he needed someone he could really sit down and talk to. Vicki was not that person, outside of her work she would bolt at the first sign of a meaningful conversation, not out of a lack of any intellectual or emotional intelligence, but because she seemed genuinely uncomfortable with them.

  “Ouch… Are you on the Joan Collins bitch slapping course or something?”

  “Sorry mate.” He rested his head on the white glossed-wood and sagged against the door. “Not much patience. I just feel so drained all the time.”

  “You wish! I think that’s what you need… A good draining.”

  Craig gave in to her humour. “I haven’t even got the energy for sex.”

  Vicki briefly placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Awww!” She gave him puppy dog eyes and spoke in a coquettish Marilyn Monroe voice. “Not even for me…”

  “Fuck off.” Craig laughed and realised she had turned his mood around. “Cheers…” he conceded.

  “So come on then. What’s making you look like you need your mum taking care of you?” She leaned towards him and straightened his collar. “You were looking a bit shagged-through-a-hedge-backwards yesterday too.”

  “You always bring things back to sex.”

  She raised her eyes skyward in an angelic gesture. “It’s a gift, what can I say? Nah, seriously. You don’t look too good.”

  Craig rubbed his face. “I know. I just want to sleep all the time though. It’s so bad. One consolation though is that I think I should be able to take this sling off after today, my shoulder has loosened up.”

  “Well, try and sleep. It’s not like you have a full day. You might be going down with something.” Vicki slid her fingers through his hair and felt his forehead. “You don’t feel feverish.”

  “I sleep alright, but I wake up feeling as if I have been down the gym.”

  “Is not having a full day worrying you? I recommend you to everyone on the team, you know?”

  “It’s not getting me down anymore than it normally does, and I know you do. Cheers. I just keep having those bad dreams. They are fucking my head up.”

  “Jesus, Craig. You freaked me out enough with the drowned geriatric. Look, we can leave it for today if you want.”

  Craig stood away from the door and drew himself into a solid stature. He couldn’t afford to turn down a job. Despite Vicki’s apathy concerning his desire to get into journalism she had been good to him and got him on board any story she could. “Nah, you can look after me. Anyway you sounded pretty keen on getting here sharpish. I thought we were meeting later to go down the pub to do something on underage drinking. Even though it means you’re probably getting me barred from my local…”

  She flashed a smile at him. “No, that can wait. I got a call from my contact in the local police. What is going on in your flats mate?”

  His heart trembled, not knowing how to answer her. He was revisited by his guilt at denying any knowledge of what had happened at the Chamber’s flat, even though she knew he had been there and been involved. Craig’s panic subsided when Vicki didn’t wait for an answer.

  “It’s just the weirdest stuff seems to be happening here. You know another couple of kids went missing last night?”

  Craig shook his head and his skin chilled, the walls seemed to draw sickeningly in around him. He imagined Vicki’s direction of potential headlines: CHILD SMUGGLERS, CULT ABDUCTIONS, and SERIAL KILLER SLAYINGS. None would come close to a bearing on reality – whatever that reality was.

  “Turns out a couple of people have done a bunk too. Not shown up for work for a few days, relatives unable to get hold of them. Nothing confirmed yet but ‘am starting to wonder what’s going on. Got a frantic call from my contact about five minutes ago on the way to pick you up and told me to get here ASAP.”

  Vicki walked backwards to the lift as she explained. “Floor four. I said we would be there five minutes ago.” Craig caught up with her at the lift. “He wouldn’t tell me what was going on. Just to get my butt into gear and get here before CID arrive.”

  The journey three floors down seemed slower with the anticipation and mystery of what they would find. When the lift did arrive Vicki prized her way through the opening doors in her eagerness to escape the lift and to get to the story. She was like a kid at Christmas;
he could imagine the excitement of possibly being on top of a story before anyone else. He followed on her quickening heals and readied the camera. He knew they would need to be quick if CID were going to be coming. He imagined a mother and father grieving, sobbing over a child inexplicably missing from his or her bed. Craig was uneasy with the prospect of Vicki blundering into the midst of it all with a front of concern aimed at getting her to the story, to ingratiate herself with the parents so they relied upon her as their link to the public mind, at the best it would get her exclusives, or at the least some great information or quotes to build a story around.

  Vicki strode down the corridor and addressed the waiting police officer as Stuart Balin. Craig eyed him, a sheen of clammy sweat shone from the man’s pale drawn skin, its whiteness intensified the colour of his carrot coloured hair. Vicki’s tone was brief and familiar before it became distant as her attention was clearly hijacked by the open door to the flat that he stood guard at.

  Balin held his hat limply in his hand and studied it awkwardly. “Vicki, there’s no one here you can talk to. I called you in when I got the call to come here but this isn’t another disappearance, it’s a murder. No grieving relatives for you to interview.” He plucked his shirt from his body where the long dark wet patches were clinging to his sides.

  “You got who did it?” Vicki bobbed her head from side to side peering beyond the doorway, as if she could see around corners if she swayed enough.

  “Yeah, but we called for back up when we got here and you just missed her being taken away. We couldn’t let you talk to her anyway.”

  “Her?” Vicki nudged Craig and nodded to the doorway.

  Craig prepared his camera but wasn’t sure what she wanted him to capture. She pulled him to her vantage point and pointed into the hall at a bloody handprint smeared on the wall. Craig started shooting.

  Balin swallowed uncomfortably as if he was holding back from being ill, sickly mucous splayed from his mouth as he spoke. “It’s fucked up. Wife just gutted her husband over breakfast. Groin to gullet.”

  Craig’s breakfast made a sudden lurch to exit and he ran a few steps from the flat and leant close to a wall before vomiting violently. A chill slashed through him. He didn’t need to see the crime scene; he had already seen it in a nightmare. Vicki snatched the camera from Craig and everything blanched in and out of existence in a strobe of flickering white light as Vicki framed him mid-hurl with a succession of shots. He hacked up the last contents of his stomach. Doubled-over bracing himself on his legs as he let the ache subside from his guts. He stared at his second-hand food cooling and seeping into the carpet.

  Balin retched and put a hand over his mouth for a while before passing Vicki a page plucked from his notebook. “This is all we know, names of the victim and the suspected murderer. Details of the crime in graphic detail. I will call you and get you some more background when we have talked to the neighbours.” He retched again.

  “I guess this will have to do.”

  The officer held his stomach with one hand and his mouth with the other. “Don’t be too fucking grateful Vicki.”

  “Thanks Stu. Sorry. You have given me all I need for a front page. Call me when you get off duty and I will buy you a pint.”

  Craig wiped cold strings of saliva from his mouth with the back of his hand, too shocked and drained to snap at Vicki for what she had done. Balin suddenly lost his battle with the horror of the crime scene and seeing Craig vomit and threw up himself.

  Vicki turned the cameras focus in his direction as he was ill in a projectile manner. “Sorry Stu. I don’t need pictures of a crime scene or an interview if I have a picture of a copper seeing something so gruesome he losies his breakfast” She made a play of staring at his puke and pointed at it, “or is that lunch?” She laughed to herself and guided Craig onto the stairs at the end of the corridor while Balin struggled to be coherent and swear at her, only to end up heaving another load onto the floor.

  Craig found himself bundled onto the staircase as the lift arrived with CID officers. A deep voice echoed after them. “Fuck, Balin! I just stepped in that! Jeezus. Hope you didn’t do that in the crime scene you…” the inevitable insult was censured as the fire door drifted closed.

  Vicki eyed Craig sympathetically and wiped at his mouth with a balled up tissue then shoved it in his hand and ruffled his hair. “You need a stronger stomach.” Vicki passed the camera back. “I want the pictures of you and Stu losing your breakfast by tonight – don’t worry, the pics of you were just for giggles. You got a great shot of a bloody hand print on the wall, and I got the shots of a ‘man of the force’ doing a Linda Blair – that will have enough impact without resorting to the money shot of a body.” She winked, basking in her own opportune brilliance. “This is front page, baby!”

  That meant his pictures would be front page too, but it is difficult to find any satisfaction from that. Reality was something distant and intangible that swirled around him, still reeling from his nightmares being born into reality.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Danny puzzled at the images in his head, the things he could do with his anger, how he could make Kevin pay for all the times he had annoyed him, yet he struggled against them. He didn’t understand why he was thinking like that. They hadn’t had a big falling out for a couple of months and he couldn’t even remember what that war had been over. The silly stuff they snapped and bickered over didn’t seem to warrant the punishments Danny wrestled with in his head.

  Kevin leapt from his bunk, and lunged at him with an onslaught of slaps. Danny shielded himself easily, he wanted to laugh the attack off as play fighting, but it took all his effort to bite his lip and hold back the dark feeling inside him. Although such fighting was a game they had played out many times in the past with each other it felt different this time, the attack was fierce and Kevin’s face was full of hate while his eyes were hard and glassy. Danny could see the same anger that he struggled with burning in his brother’s eyes. The slaps turned into thumps and Kevin grunted and hissed from behind his flailing arms like a wild thing.

  He battered through Danny’s blocking arms and his fists pounded against Danny’s chest, one strike caught his face in a stinging blow. Danny’s patience fell under the hit and his control of the mysterious anger faltered. He struck back with a single swift precise jab that caught Kevin hard and square in the stomach and sent him coughing to the floor gagging for air. With Kevin no longer provoking him Danny took some deep breaths and tried to bring his rage back under control.

  Kevin leapt from the floor quicker than Danny had expected and punched down into Danny’s groin that was somehow still aroused from his thoughts of Leah. He rolled from the bed with the crippling pain, gagging and choking on air, winded from the blow. Kevin was determined to keep fighting so Danny decided to ignore his discomfort and put him down again. He charged at his brother headfirst, bulldozing into his body and hooking him on a shoulder, body-slamming him against the wardrobe doors before dropping to his haunches from the agony of his balls.

  In a matter of seconds Kevin had recovered and scrambled over Danny, raining down punches and flinging his knees into the fray in a squirming writhing attack. Danny wrestled with the anger that didn’t want to be channelled into brief fits, but wanted to be unleashed. Kevin’s knee found Danny’s face and the cartilage of his nose crunched loudly as gristle rubbed on bone. A flash of pain exploded across his face making his vision go dark.

  Danny lost control.

  The rage gripped his mind and his anger and hate was all that he could feel. In that moment the fact they were brothers, that they were children was lost in the red rage that engorged every vein and demanded for retaliation.

  Danny bit hard into the soft skin of Kevin’s shoulder as if it were an apple, a bite that didn’t stop until he felt the heat of blood on his lips and its coppery taste on his tongue, he growled and screamed through his mouthful and shook his head, ripping the flesh. Kevin’s attack falter
ed and Danny’s arms were freed from shielding himself and became weapons again. He snatched at the headphone cables that hung around Kevin’s neck and yanked them tight around his throat. Kevin’s smaller weaker fingers raked at the thin wire that dug itself a trench in his tender neck, he rasped and choked and screamed a low growl through a white froth of saliva as the cable restricted his air and stilled the blood in his head, sending the skin of his face pink, then red before turning an eye bulging purple.

  Danny’s face twisted in pain as Kevin somehow struck him in the face with something scavenged from the clutter of their floor. Everything went black then red, and then a strobe between the two colours before every move Danny made became disorientated and uncoordinated. He grabbed at the object jutting from his face, sending another white-hot shaft of pain lancing through his eye into his head, seemingly reverberating off the back of his skull, ricocheting off of nerves he never knew existed. Danny gagged and let go of the object, nearly vomiting. The hand that he had used to reach for his face was slick with sticky crimson blood. He scrambled away from Kevin who was now free of him and sat pulling the headphone cable from his throat, gasping for air.

  Danny leapt up woozily not wanting to let the shock settle in and leave him feeble, knowing Kevin would return to the fight. The adrenaline charged in his veins giving him a high that urged him to push his body to the limits. Danny ran forward ignoring the blood that ran and dripped from his face and patted to the carpet, and aimed a kick at Kevin’s head, hoping to keep him down, but somehow his judgement was off and his foot only clipped the front of his face, enough to send him scuttling across the floor, but not enough to do any serious damage.

  Again they locked in battle, pushing, struggling, kicking, punching, head-butting, biting, and throwing, in a dervish that destroyed their bedroom in their efforts to beat the other. Danny’s body rushed with the burning heat of his violent blood, pumped by a furious heart; a runaway engine beyond his control that refused to allow any pause in the fight to become an end. He could see the same determination in his brother’s face, could feel it in his attack, they were both pushing their young scrawny bodies on, prepared to run their machines of flesh and bone into broken shredded wrecks to meet their raging hearts demands.