Sealfinger (Sam Applewhite Book 1)

by Heide Goody

  Sam’s dad hurried through.

  “Marvin, the drone wants to go out.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The drone—”

  “Like it needs the toilet?”

  “It’s bashing at the front door like it’s on a mission.”

  Marvin glanced at Delia’s face. Oh crap, was she looking agitated or alarmed? She channelled all of her efforts into looking serene, but it was too late.

  “You think something’s up,” Marvin said.

  Delia shrugged and said, “Yes,” anyway.

  “Where’s Sam?”

  Delia shook her head. “I was thinking about letting it out and following it to see where it’s headed.”

  “I’ll get my coat,” said Marvin.

  * * *

  Stumbling, whimpering, bleeding, dribbling, Jimmy pulled out his own phone and tried to call Wayne. He hadn’t dared take another look at his face, he was way too scared of what he might see. There were spines from the accidentally-fellated cactus embedded in every part of his mouth. He had become hyper conscious that if he swallowed, he was likely to get them caught in his throat as well. As a consequence, he somehow triggered a swallowing reflex every time he tried to think about not swallowing. He kept his lips parted, so he didn’t mash the spines in further, but that was becoming more difficult too. He had a strong suspicion parts of his mouth were swelling up at an alarming rate.

  “Hi, Jimmy,” said Wayne cheerily.

  Jimmy put the phone to his ear and tried to form words. It hurt more than he’s anticipated. “He-awwwwww!” It trailed off into a low moan as he realised his tongue was almost immovable.

  “Jimmy?” said Wayne.

  “Aa-aaaaa. Eeeuurghhh.”

  “Jimmy? I can’t tell what you’re saying. Are you a ghost now, Jimmy?”

  Weeping, Jimmy ended the call.

  66

  Sam watched Wayne with interest. His brow was creased with confusion.

  “Something the matter with Jimmy?” she asked.

  “Dunno, he sounded funny.”

  “Maybe he butt-dialled you,” said Sam, lightly hoping that he’d fallen down a well and Wayne had heard his gasps of life as he sank below the surface. This situation was in danger of turning her into some sort of monster, but she didn’t care.

  “Oh, look,” Wayne said, waving his phone.

  “Is it Jimmy?”

  “It’s the drone!” He showed her the screen, though he was too agitated for her to see anything in detail. “The drone’s coming!” he yelled.

  “Cool,” said Sam.

  Wayne dragged himself to the window and craned forward, looking for the drone in the fading light.

  Sam set about wriggling free of the bungee cords. With a struggle they came apart and fell to the floor with a small thump. She glanced over anxiously, but Wayne was too distracted.

  “I can see it,” he said. “Oh no, that’s a seagull. Now I can see it! Oh no, that’s another seagull.”

  Wayne was so completely fixated that Sam was able to get up from the chair and very daintily side-step across the office. She could see the scissors on the desk quite clearly now she was standing, and she made the journey as quickly as she could.

  “’Nother seagull,” noted Wayne.

  The hardest part of the escape attempt was getting the scissors inside the cable tie, then finding a way to get enough leverage to cut through it. Sam used the surface of the desk. She leaned down and the scissors closed, cutting her wrists loose.

  “There’s a lot of seagulls here, aren’t there?” said Wayne, turning back to her. “Oh no! You can’t do that.”

  The scissors had skidded free as they snipped her wrist ties, and her feet were still bound.

  “I’m just going to release my legs now,” she told Wayne, as though it was the perfectly normal thing to do.

  “Jimmy’s going to be mad about this,” said Wayne.

  “To hell with Jimmy,” said Sam under her breath, tottering around the desk as quickly as she could. A computer cable tripped her bound feet and she crashed to the floor, but she could see the scissors. She used her elbows to propel her faster, wriggling at speed. Wayne’s crash-thumping gait was closing on her.

  She grabbed the scissors, snipped through the tie around her ankles and turned, scissors in hand.

  Wayne was almost on her, roaring like the Hulk. Sam rolled upward and to the side, jabbing blindly at Wayne as hard as she could. The scissors were ripped from her hand. She scrambled away.

  The desk was now between them, but she needed to be on the other side to get to the door. There was the shotgun, open on the desk. If she had any faith her own reflexes and ability to shoot, she might have tried to grab it. She had neither. Wayne didn’t seem to have noticed it, but nonetheless his bulk was blocking her escape. If he managed to grab her then his wild, delirious strength would be enough to end her.

  Wayne frowned and lifted one arm. The scissors were buried in his armpit up to the loop of the handles. As he raised his arm, a narrow stream of arterial blood sprayed out.

  “Ow,” he said softly.

  If he’d done the obvious but stupid thing, and tried to rip them out, he’d have probably bled out in moments. Instead he did something unobvious and possibly sensible: squeezing his arm against his side, trapping the scissors and the wound.

  “That hurt,” he said.

  Sam feinted one way, then ran the other. She sprinted for the door. She wrestled briefly with the latch, hoping to God it wasn’t bolted. After a couple of moments it opened and she ran outside.

  “Come back!” Wayne shouted, following.

  Sam ran past the pergola (not pagoda), registering she was in a large garden. There was an expansive and uncared for lawn that offered no cover at all. Jimmy had driven off in the van, Jacinda her car. A ride-on mower was the only vehicle in sight. The garden was surrounded by a ranch-style fence, so she ran towards the furthest end, with a vague plan of getting some distance between her and Wayne before looping back towards the road and flagging down a car. She clambered through the middle of the fence, glancing back. Wayne was following, but his movements were hampered by his many injuries. She watched in horror as he clambered onto the ride-on mower and started the engine. Was he seriously planning to chase her on that?

  “Cool!” he shouted as it surged forwards.

  Sam ran across the uneven loamy ground. A short distance further on was another fence, easily crossed. On it was an official looking sign – RAF Wainfleet: Military Air Weapons Range. More arrestingly, a yellow triangle sign next to it warned of unexploded ordnance in the area.

  “Great,” she sighed.

  This had to be one of the coastal bombing ranges. Somewhere was the sea. She considered turning back, or taking a different angle, when she heard Wayne rev the mower’s engine. There was a huge splintering sound as he burst through the fence. She didn’t bother looking back, hoping it had stalled the mower, or impaled Wayne with a broken fence post. Knowing Wayne’s dumb luck had kept him alive so far with injuries that really should have killed him, a minor collision was unlikely to signal his demise.

  Sam ran on, desperate to put uneven ground between her and Wayne. She tried to keep track of where the fence had been, where the boundaries were, to give her some bearings between sea and road. But the light was fading, the fence already lost in gloom. Marshy mud sucked at her feet. Behind her, Wayne shouted and cheered.

  The ground beneath her feet changed and she almost fell. There were concrete foundations. It looked as if a building had been here at some point, maybe an RAF observation station, or maybe even a bombing target.

  The ground fell away quite sharply on the far side of the concrete slab. She decided to use that to her advantage. She flung herself to the ground on the far side, knowing Wayne would be unable to see her until he caught up. While she was out of sight she crawled along the edge of the foundation. With a bit of luck he would go speeding past (as speedily as a lawnmower could go), and f
ail to see where she was. She made it to the corner and peered around it.

  Her heart sank. The mower was hurtling straight towards her, exploding out of the muddy field and across the concrete surface. It made a horrific noise as the blades connected with loose stones and concrete edges. Sam realised the danger of being hit by a ricochet was probably greater than the danger posed by Wayne. She ducked back down. Moments later the mower, with Wayne on board, shot off the edge of the foundation, soaring briefly, before ploughing into the ground, nose first. Sam hoped for a small explosion, as promised by so many Hollywood films, but there was merely the tumble and jangle of crunching metal.

  Wayne might have had the decency to break his neck in the fall, but after a moment he pulled himself clear of the wreckage. The dressing over his ruined eye was pulled around, blinding him. He yanked the dressing upwards, revealing the gaping horror underneath. The gloopy mess of an eyeball hung from the upturned dressing. His head swivelled in an exaggerated arc as he used his good eye to scan the surroundings.

  Sam ran. He lumbered after her. The expanse of grey mud before her became spongier, her feet sinking with every step. People drowned in this stuff. But Wayne was still coming. In the boggy fenlands between land and sea there were hidden pools and slicks of mud not solid enough to support human weight. Coupled with a tide that came in at a sprint over the flat shore, the prospect of getting trapped and drowned by rising waters was very real.

  Sam stumbled once, twice, then came down in the mud of a small, unseen watercourse and sank straight up to her thighs.

  “Not good, not good.”

  She pulled on her feet, then remembered that struggling was the worst thing she could do. This was confirmed as she slipped down another couple of inches. She heard Wayne’s heavy breaths not far away. She could not afford to get stuck here, completely at his mercy. She took a deep breath and folded forward into the mud, flinging her arms as far forward as she could. She felt extremely vulnerable, face-down in mud determined to suck her under. Then her hand found something to grab. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she hauled herself gently forward, and was rewarded with a sense of her legs being buoyed up by a small degree. She tried to keep her cool and repeat the action by tiny increments.

  She was still stuck though, and Wayne must have caught up by now. She couldn’t afford to be distracted by what he was doing, so she pushed it from her mind. After a few long moments she could feel the earth was more solid beneath her arms. She levered herself up and out of the mud. She risked a glance back and almost laughed. Wayne was nearly upon the mud, but he’d paused, his head turned to the sky.

  She followed his gaze. Her MySky drone was flying over.

  “Come on Wayne!” she shouted. “This way!”

  He tore his eyes away from the drone and lumbered towards her, heading straight for the mud. Sam stood waiting for him to get stuck, so that she could make her way back to civilisation while he was rendered immobile. Wayne walked towards the silty mess, trotting directly over it and started up the slope towards her.

  “What the…?”

  The treacherous mud must be treacherous only in patches! Sam was stung by the unfairness, but she had no time to think about it. She turned and ran. The chill of the wind was making her extremely cold now. She was coated in grey mud and soaking wet. She looked back and saw Wayne. She faltered in the face of his unstoppable drive. How the hell was he still going? He was almost on her.

  As he closed in she realised sand flies were clustering around his head. Were they drawn by the smell of blood and sweat? He wasn’t even batting them away as they crawled in and out of his eye socket.

  “Why can’t you just leave me alone?” She turned to run. Betrayed by the landscape one more time she slipped on the mud and fell. Wayne caught up with her. She kicked out at him and in the confusion, a series of stumbling accidents, he grabbed her by the ankle.

  “Wayne, you need to let me go!” she shouted.

  “No! Jimmy said I gotta—”

  Wayne put down his prosthetic foot and there was a deep, metallic clunk. Whatever Jimmy had said was temporarily forgotten.

  “Uh, I’m stuck,” said Wayne.

  Sam twisted in his grip so she could see what was going on. Wayne was grunting in an effort to get his leg loose.

  “It’s stuck on something.”

  Sam craned to get a better look. Wayne was holding onto her with the arm which had scissors stuck in the armpit. With every one of her jerks an additional spurt of blood further soaked his top. But Wayne’s attention was solely on the spur of metal that was jammed inside his elephant’s foot leg brace. The metal spur was attached to a cylinder just about visible above the surface of the mud. Something about its dull matt finish said military.

  A bad feeling didn’t so much creep over Sam as drop on her out of the sky. Unexploded bomb. Wayne continued to tug violently.

  “Stop moving! It’s dangerous!” she yelled.

  “None of this would have happened if you’d just stayed and played I-Spy,” he moaned. “Hey!”

  The MySky drone was descending. Sam, in among all her more pressing thoughts and concerns, wondered if the homing drone was going to clonk him on the head the way it had her. Wayne half-smiled and reached for it with his free hand. The engine stuttered. Cocktail sausage lumps of fingertip cascaded down around him.

  “Oi!” he said, more irritated than anything.

  The grip on her ankle loosened a moment. Sam kicked at the fingers holding her. She wriggled free, already vital inches out of Wayne’s reach.

  “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t murdered Wendy Skipworth!” she spat and ran, ducking to avoid the drone, which with one rotor out of action was trying to remain airborne, and failing.

  67

  Jimmy answered his ringing phone, although he knew he was incapable of meaningful speech.

  “Jimmy, I think I might have a bit of a problem,” said Wayne.

  “Oo ot o-unnnn?” Which was all Jimmy could manage. He blew spit and blood way from his lips.

  “She got loose and ran away. She went across the army land.”

  “Uhhh?”

  There was the sound of wind on the line. Shit. Sam was free and Wayne had gone after her. Jimmy had been trying to pull needles from his hands so he could drive. Such niceties would have to wait. Phone to ear he hurried to the stairs.

  “Well, I had to go there to try and catch her and now I’m stuck. My leg’s caught on this metal thing.”

  “Eh-al?”

  “Looks a bit like the tank for a welder. It’s stuck and I can’t…” Wayne started to grunt, rhythmically. Heaving. Yanking.

  “Ih a onnnn!” Jimmy shouted. “Op ooing!”

  “It’s a bad line, Jimmy. Don’t worry. Once I’ve got free I’m get her and…”

  Jimmy forced his lips together to allow him to make a plosive ‘b’ sound. “Bonn! A onnnn!”

  He stumbled to the door and the street. Only Wayne could have achieved this level of fucked-upness.

  “I had hold of her as well Jimmy, but she’s got free and she’s running away.”

  If Sam Applewhite had any sense, she’d be legging it as fast as she could.

  “I’ve got some scissors, Jimmy. I – unh! Ow – I’m going to try to prise it off.”

  “Oh! Oh, oo uck!”

  Jimmy went to the van. Through vision narrowed by tears and pain and anguish, he could just about see to drive.

  On the phone, Wayne said, “I think I can wiggle it in here. Right tool for the—”

  * * *

  Sam heard the blast and immediately fell to her knees. It was more a feeling than a noise, a thrumming through her very core. She looked back. There was smoke and flying dust. Something – an arm? a leg? – was pinwheeling high into the sky, still on an upward trajectory. A hundred metres behind her was a steaming, hemispherical crater in the soft ground.

  She got slowly to her feet and checked herself for injury, surprised to note she had
survived utterly unscathed. A high-pitched whine struck up and she looked round for the source before realising it was her own ears. She stretched her jaw and yawned.

  “Can I hear? Can I hear?” she said to herself, checking she hadn’t been struck deaf by the blast, deciding the hearing impairment was minimal and hopefully temporary.

  In the sky, among the dozens of birds startled into the air by the explosion, something tumbled down, looping like a stricken kite. It was a length of bandage.

  Sam turned about, took a best guess at where the sea was, and headed inland.

  68

  On his mad dash back to the Frost home in Friskney, Jimmy had hit several things, but he kept the accelerator to the floor. With his limited field of vision, he wasn’t even sure what it was he’d hit, but he had to get to Jacinda’s place and pick up the threads Wayne had dropped. He needed to keep his chin high so he could see where the road was, but that was making him gag on the spines at the back of his mouth. He had to keep dropping it and driving blind.

  Had he just shot over a junction? It didn’t matter. He couldn’t stop now.

  He reached for Cold Jimmy, detached Jimmy, but the pain, intimate and unshakeable, anchored him in the here and now.

  Above his own wheezing breath he heard a siren. Blue lights flickered in the blur of his wing mirrors. He couldn’t lead the police directly to Wayne and Sam. He slowed down and pulled to the side of the lane.

  Jimmy blinked at the car in his mirror and reluctantly stepped down to meet the officer walking towards him.

  It was the idiot cop with the crap truncheon.

  “Sir, are you aware that you— Oh, my goodness!” Cesar Hackett stumbled in his tracks, gawping at Jimmy.

  “Uaad?” said Jimmy.

  “Your … your face, sir. It’s…” Cesar stared at Jimmy, at his much dented van, then back the way they’d come, perhaps at the destruction Jimmy had left in his wake, and finally back at Jimmy. “Was it a wasp?”