Defender

by G X Todd

  ‘No, but do it anyway.’

  Pilgrim was empty-handed, the rifle leaning up against the wall, his knife still in its sheath. He rattled the door handle to get the dog’s attention, and it reared up on to its hind legs and planted its paws on the door. Its head was nearly level with his. Its teeth snapped at the glass, mere inches away from Pilgrim’s face, leaving drool streaked on the panel. With each hot, doggy breath, the window steamed up. Princess’s rabid glare challenged him to open the door. A low, ominous growl rumbled from her chest.

  ‘There’s a good Princess,’ he murmured. ‘Be a good girl now. Play nice.’

  He unlatched the door and opened it an inch. The dog immediately jumped down and tried to jam its broad head into the gap. Its teeth snapped at him, strings of reddish saliva drooling from its jaws. It snarled and barked and wriggled, trying to force its way out. It was amazingly strong, its slabs of muscle bunching and flexing under the sleek, black coat, and Pilgrim had to struggle to hold the door closed, the dog’s snout already nudging through.

  He counted off in his head.

  – One –

  He grabbed hold of the door jamb, the dog’s weight forcing itself into the growing gap and pulling him off balance.

  – Two –

  The snout was all the way through now, the dog’s head jammed in the opening, shoulders too wide to fit. Pilgrim could feel his weaker hand losing its grip.

  – Three –

  He lifted his knee, bringing his foot high – just as the dog wedged its shoulders through and crouched down to leap – braced himself and stamped his boot down hard and fast on top of the dog’s head.

  Princess let out a bleating yelp and dropped to the floor, legs buckling. Despite being dazed, she immediately tried to get back up. Pilgrim stamped his boot down again, the contact satisfyingly solid, and the dog collapsed, a long whine sighing from it. It didn’t try to get up again.

  ‘Get the other door,’ he said to Lacey, but she had already hopped across the corridor and was pushing it open for him.

  Pilgrim didn’t pause to worry if the dog would rear up and sink its teeth into him but kicked the door wider and grabbed the Rottweiler by the scruff of the neck and yanked on the creature, sliding it across the shiny floor. He grunted at the effort it took to drag the dog’s weight across the hall and into the room opposite. Princess growled and rolled its head under his hold, its teeth snapping, but it was a sluggish attempt and not one that put him in any danger of being bitten.

  When he released the dog’s neck, the animal heaved upwards, trying to get its legs under it, gathering its balance and struggling to its feet. It had managed to stand when Pilgrim slipped out of the room, and Lacey swung the door shut, the latch barely catching when Princess slammed into the other side, the dog’s guttural barking taking up again.

  The dog threw itself against the door with a particularly vicious thud. It yelped and momentarily stopped its attacks, but it soon started up again.

  ‘Can’t keep a good dog down,’ Lacey said, but despite her attempt at humour, the corners of her eyes were pinched, and neither of them could ignore the awful stench leaking out of the room they had just cleared.

  ‘I’ll get the note,’ he told her. ‘Watch the dog doesn’t get out.’

  He couldn’t pretend not to notice the utter relief that washed over her face, but he didn’t hang around to see what emotion followed it. He tugged the neckerchief up over his nose and entered the room. He breathed through his mouth, but that just made the stench of rotten meat and excrement coat his tongue, and he was hacking before he could stop himself. He lifted the edge of his neckerchief and spat on the floor.

  ‘You OK?’ Lacey called.

  ‘Yeah. Give me a minute.’ He clamped his hand over his mouth and nose and used that as an extra barrier to breathe through. It helped, a little.

  The man, whose name Pilgrim couldn’t remember – or what was left of him – lay on the bed.

  He’s seen better days, that new, separate part of him said.

  Pilgrim grunted and held his breath as he stepped closer. He didn’t linger too much on the state of the dead man. He had seen his fair share of half-eaten corpses and was familiar with most of the organs of the human body, in all their states of putridity. He did take a moment to look into the dead man’s clouded eyes. A lot can be told from a person’s eyes, he believed, and this man’s, although milky and vague, still held a hint of hatred that not even death could erase. Pilgrim remembered those eyes narrowed on him as the man brought the gun up to his head, remembered the hard glint of satisfaction as he squeezed the trigger. This man had taken pleasure in dealing out pain and death, and now it had come back on him threefold.

  Life’s a whore, then you die.

  ‘Life’s a sadist.’

  Maybe it’s karma.

  ‘I don’t believe in karma.’

  I don’t think you believe in anything. You’re a nihilist.

  ‘I’m not, I—’ but he stopped, realising it was foolish to argue with himself.

  No less foolish than when you argued with Voice.

  He wanted to explain that the only reason he was talking to this part of himself was because he still acutely felt the loss of Voice. It felt natural for him to converse with himself. But that didn’t mean he wanted to start an internal debate about it.

  He closed off these thoughts and looked at the dead man’s hand. The fingers curled around the note so Pilgrim had to prise them open in order to remove it. He didn’t bother looking at the man again and left the room, pulling the door tightly shut behind him. He ushered Lacey further up the corridor, away from the lingering stink and the barking dog, and handed her the note.

  He watched her eyes skip over the words, shifting down the page, line by line, then go back to the top and scan through it again. He waited patiently for her to read it aloud. When she did, she had to pause a few times to steady her voice.

  Dear Lacey, if by some small chance you have found your way back to our mutual deceased friend, I commend your tenacity. There was something special about you, though, so I would be little surprised if you did succeed in recovering this little love letter. I must tell you, your friend Alexandra is enchanting. She keeps me constantly entertained. I know she misses you terribly – she cries out for you sometimes when I’ve hurt her particularly badly. It breaks my heart to hear it. So, being a generous man, I have decided to share with you our next destination (honestly, to see you again would be a pleasure. Maybe this time we can be friends!). Head east to the Great River Road and follow it south a ways on Route 61. I’m told you can’t miss it – a steamboat hotel and casino, which sounds delightful, don’t you think? I very much hope to see you there.

  Yours sincerely, Charles Dumont.

  PS There may yet be a happy ending to all this. Bring Red, if Louis and Rink don’t already have her, and we’ll talk.

  Finished, Lacey neatly folded the letter back up and slowly ran her pinched fingers down each seam.

  Pilgrim said, ‘Lucky we brought the dead girl along with us.’

  Lacey slipped the paper into her pocket, not looking at him as she spoke. ‘I don’t think he meant “bring her body”.’

  Pilgrim went to retrieve the rifle he’d left leaning against the wall. ‘He didn’t specify. She can still be used as . . .’ He used the pretence of checking the gun over as he searched for the word he wanted. ‘. . . as leverage.’

  Lacey still had her head down when he came back to her. He waited, but she didn’t look up. ‘Alex is alive. It says so in the letter.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then we should go while we still have light.’

  She nodded, but something was bothering her. He waited a moment longer, but when nothing was forthcoming he took out the map and spread it flat against the wall. He asked her to show him where Route 61 ran. Her finger traced a north-to-south line that followed the Mississippi River from Wyoming, Minnesota, all the way down to New Orleans, Louisiana.
/>
  Her finger floated back up and paused at the S-bend in the river, where the Mississippi snaked at its most easterly point. It was a quarter of the way down the Mississippi–Louisiana border.

  ‘I’m pretty sure I know what steamboat casino he’s talking about,’ she said. ‘My sister took me there one time. Here’ – her finger tapped on a city directly north of the area she’d pointed out – ‘is where my sister and niece live. And here is the casino.’ Her finger moved down again, drifting south for maybe ten miles out of the city.

  Pilgrim followed the route they would be travelling with his eyes, heading east from where they were, trailing down to rest at her fingertip. ‘So you’re saying he could be going through Vicksburg to get to this casino?’

  She nodded. Now he understood why she’d grown so quiet.

  ‘If he’s only passing through, there won’t be any danger to your sister or niece.’ He didn’t know that for a fact, but Vicksburg was a city, not a small town. In effect, Lacey’s sister and niece were tiny needles in a haystack made up of thirty-five square miles. If they were alive, the chances of Dumont coming across them were very small indeed. He tried to reassure her again, but the girl had fallen into an uncommunicative silence and, with nothing left to say, Pilgrim refolded the map and led her back the way they had come, corkscrewing to the bottom of the stairwell and coming out at ground level. They were heading for the swinging service doors that led out into the loading bay, his hand out and ready to push through, when he was brought to a stop.

  Lacey walked into the back of him, a small sound of surprise coming from her.

  ‘What—’

  He chopped his hand down to silence her, never taking his eyes off those red doors. He tapped his ear and then pointed, indicating she should listen.

  He didn’t know why he had stopped. He had heard nothing, and there was nothing out of place in the corridor. But those two swinging doors held his gaze like a fishing line hooked through his eyeballs. They reeled him in and he felt impelled to lean towards them. The doors seemed to pulse, the red deepening in colour, the edges fuzzing and throbbing as if they were the chamber doors to a beating heart, and he squinted his left eye closed because his blurred vision, combined with the doors’ throbbing, made him feel sick.

  The crack of a gunshot rent the air and Pilgrim ducked, even as a hole splintered through the right-hand door, the bullet passing through with a splatter of blood, trickles of wine-coloured gore already starting to dribble down and pool on the floor.

  Pilgrim blinked, and the door was smooth and unmarked again, no signs of bullet damage and no trickling blood. They had also stopped pulsing – they were ordinary service doors once more.

  His head ached abominably.

  ‘You think Jack came back?’ Lacey whispered behind him. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

  His left hand was trembling badly. He balled it into a fist and pressed it against his thigh, keeping it out of sight.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘My mistake.’

  Nevertheless, he was cautious in how he pushed through the swinging doors, and only when he found nobody waiting for them on the other side and they had climbed back into the cab of the truck did he uncurl his finger from the gun’s trigger.

  Leaving town was a far quicker enterprise than entering it. Pilgrim drove while Lacey sat in the passenger seat and stared out of the side window. She hadn’t spoken more than a handful of words in the past twenty miles. He was loath to break the silence; it didn’t feel like a morose one, merely a contemplative stillness. Maybe she needed the quiet to sort out her thoughts.

  Or maybe she’s busy talking inside her head. This new part of him was beginning to sound just as annoying as Voice.

  Pilgrim felt his hands reflexively tighten on the steering wheel. He had recognised the signs straight away; (he was, after all, well versed in them himself): the unfocused look to her eyes while she was inwardly thinking, the talking to herself, the randomness of some of the things she said, like calling him compadre – something that only Voice had ever done. He didn’t understand it, though, couldn’t begin to work out how Voice had jumped from him into her.

  Or maybe it’s her own Voice.

  If it were her own Voice, how would she have known his name? She had said ‘Pilgrim’ at the barn when she’d seen him. It would be impossible to know that without having being told. In fact, as far as he could recall, she was the first person to have ever spoken the name out loud to him.

  Maybe voices communicate between each other.

  This made Pilgrim pause. Could that be possible? Could there be some interconnecting cognitive network that ran from person to person? That seemed entirely too implausible. Sure, there were people who heard voices, but the voices were self-contained, locked up inside heads, exactly like his Voice had been locked up inside his.

  Except for when Voice had jumped into the girl—

  Isn’t hearing a voice and conversing with it for years implausible, too?

  ‘No, it just makes me crazy.’

  He didn’t realise he’d spoken out loud until he felt the girl’s eyes on him. She had the same enquiring look in her eyes that he was sure had been in his a time or two over the past twenty-four hours.

  He said, ‘Just arguing with the voice in my head.’

  Her brows came down in a small frown, and the inquisitive look turned to one of suspicion. ‘You talk to voices?’

  He had to be careful. ‘Just the one.’

  ‘You never mentioned this before.’

  ‘It’s not something you talk about.’

  ‘What does it say to you?’

  ‘Contradictory things, mostly.’

  That’s because you’re so often wrong.

  ‘Is it your own voice, or more like a stranger’s?’ she asked.

  He had looked back to the road to correct the truck’s slight drift, but now he glanced back to her, his own curiosity kicking up a gear. ‘These days, it’s more my own,’ he answered. He and Voice had shared similar intonations in the pronunciation of certain words, but Voice was very different in his views and ideas to Pilgrim. They often disagreed. Pilgrim wasn’t sure if it had always been that way, or if the development of Voice had been a slow evolution, one so incremental he hadn’t noticed it happening. He tried to remember a time when he hadn’t had some sort of back-and-forth dialogue going on with Voice inside his head but couldn’t come up with an answer, and a serrated blade of pain reminded him that it wasn’t prudent to be thinking so hard or so deeply on such matters.

  Lacey’s attention had drifted like the truck, her gaze focused somewhere in the space down by her feet. Her frown had tightened and she shook her head slightly, as if to herself. ‘Mine used to be my own,’ she murmured.

  He glanced at her a few more times after that, but she didn’t say anything more. She went back to gazing out of the window.

  ‘What does yours say?’ he finally asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Different stuff. It knows things I don’t, though.’ She threw a quick glance at him, probably to see his reaction. ‘That makes no sense, does it?’

  He tightened his grip on the steering wheel because all he wanted to do was pull over, turn to face her and peer into her eyes to see if Voice lurked behind them. But he knew Voice, knew him inside out, and he wondered if Voice had even told the girl where he’d jumped from. Pilgrim doubted it. If the girl knew, she’d be talking his ear off, asking questions, offering theories and guesses on what it all meant. She didn’t know. Not yet. And Pilgrim was glad she didn’t. He was surprised by how violated he felt, how vulnerable, knowing that Voice was now inside someone else’s head, with all the minutiae he had amassed over the years spent living inside him. All that intimate knowledge. But Voice also knew that keeping his own existence secret would be safest for the girl, and to do that the girl had to believe that telling Pilgrim wouldn’t be wise, either. In effect, the act of keeping Voice a secret from everyone prevented the girl ever finding out who Vo
ice had jumped from.

  Pilgrim answered her absently. ‘Your mind is a tricky place. The subconscious picks up on a lot that you don’t consciously register.’

  The girl made a soft noise and slumped down in her seat, head twisting back to the side window, posture throwing up a barrier against further discussion. Which was fine with Pilgrim. She had said more than enough.

  In honesty, he was pleased to know Voice was alive and had vacated his head for somewhere younger and brighter. He had believed Voice had died or fled deeper into his mind, never to resurface. It had struck a nerve, Voice’s desertion, and the anger it generated hid a much deeper sense of abandonment, a feeling that Pilgrim didn’t want to analyse too closely. He now suspected Voice had simply left for a more viable host, suspected it may have been an instantaneous decision, made in the split second the bullet struck Pilgrim’s skull. Pilgrim marvelled at it. Wouldn’t have believed it even possible if he hadn’t seen the evidence of it.

  He would have liked to discuss the phenomenon with Voice, even with Lacey, but he sensed that overloading the girl with such notions would seriously undermine her coping mechanisms. Already her anxiety levels were high (as shown by her spontaneous hugging, crying and near-hyperventilation in the face of the dog and the half-eaten man). On top of that, she had begun biting her nails as soon as she slid into the passenger seat. Her hopes for finding her sister alive must now be tenuous at best; she had seen more of the world in these past few days than she had in the previous seven years.

  No, it would be best to keep these thoughts to himself. There would be time to discuss them later, when her stress levels had evened out.

  ‘You should keep this to yourself,’ Pilgrim told her. ‘About hearing a voice. It’s dangerous to talk about them.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, the reflection of her eyes meeting his in her side window. ‘That’s what he told me, too.’

  They would reach Vicksburg by sundown, and Pilgrim stopped only once for a restroom break. The further east they went, the lusher the land became. The dying yellow grass grew greener, and the low-lying bushes flashed by in verdant bursts, soon to be joined by more and more trees: silvery ash, pale-boned sycamore, the winged elm and the rough-barked hickory. Pilgrim hadn’t realised how much he had missed seeing such displays of healthy growth, had become so accustomed to the emptiness of the deserts that he now found it hard to tear his eyes away from the sides of the roads where all this vegetation flourished.