Light Errant (23 page)

“Half their computers blew up,” he said, “and the lights went out. Top three floors. Looks like you've got the fire too, middle floor.
Big
explosion there. Just perfect, man.”

Briefly, something shadowed the sun. I glanced up, saw a black mass of birds eddy and split and join again on the wind.

“Are you okay, Ben?”

That was Jon asking; Jamie was too engrossed. I nodded slowly, carefully, my head not feeling any too secure on my shoulders.

 “Yeah, I'm okay. Thanks. Let me see, Jamie...”

He loosened his grip and I turned round, though I couldn't see a thing till I had rubbed at wet eyes with a wet hand, then dried it on my jeans and tried again.

Darkened windows, figures rushing to and fro; a couple of floors down the opposite of darkness, windows that flickered and danced with a hard light. No use their fire extinguishers on that. I could tell, I could feel it still inside me, it pulsed to my own heartbeat and I knew. A proper fire it was, real flame eating real oxygen, eating anything else it could find; but I was tied to it none the less, I knew its heat and its speed and its hunger. They'd not get near it, they'd never touch its core.

“You fit then, Ben?”

That was Jamie; I looked at him, puzzled. Just then I didn't think I fitted anything.

“We've got to get down there,” he said patiently, his feet dancing in the dog-ends to counterpoint his voice. “Stage two, yes? Rescuing the girls?”

Oh. Right. That was my job too, of course, no one else to do it. The question not did I fit, but was I fit; and the answer no, demonstrably I was not. My joints had rubberised, my bones felt like pasta cooked a long way past
al dente
; despite the light I thought I'd have a job lighting anything hotter than a cigarette for the rest of the day, and for that I'd need a match.

But.

The job was mine to do, and Laura's freedom, Laura's safety lay at the other end of it. Laura's and the others', all of them, Janice and my cousins too; but Laura's of course was paramount, how could it be anything else?

I was first to the fire-escape, despite Jonathan's gesture of protest—
what are you going to do, catch me should I fall? I don't think so, Jon-boy
—and first to ground also; first of us to join the swelling crowd in the street, Shunt residents and men in suits and kids with baby-buggies all gathering to watch the pigsty burn.

These people would know our faces, but no one was looking at them. Caps low and heads bowed we burrowed in from the edge, to where we'd be safe from any suspicious watchful Uncle Bob; and then we looked not at the fire but at the big gates and the motor pool beyond. If, no, when they brought their prisoners out, as they would have to, that's the way they'd come. Into a Black Maria—no longer black, of course, but the name still held: like steam-rollers, half a century on from the death of steam—and then into the street, under escort naturally and heading for the nearest jail at a guess. Didn't matter where they were heading, how many escorts in Escorts they had. Once they were out in the open, I could open them out; I could peel any van like a satsuma, winkle out the prisoners within. Be as obvious as I liked in my talent then, it wouldn't matter any more.

Police and civilian workers massed in the gateway, so that I couldn't see what was happening behind them. Someone called a list of names, started ticking them off; then the blare of sirens overrode his voice, as fire engines came racing up the hill.

There were three of them. Two parked on the main road, one came down towards us; and Jamie nudged me urgently, nodding to where a couple of police were heading over to herd our crowd away with the usual patent lies,
there's nothing to see, come on, move along now.
We slithered to the back but that wouldn't do it, it wouldn't guarantee our anonymity as the others dispersed. The kids from the Shunt were in a group, and as the police waved them off they trotted back across the road to where they'd come from, where they'd be on private property and immune to interference. None of us said a word, we didn't need to; we just tagged on behind them, faces averted.

In the garden were many trees, offering an easy route onto the wall that overlooked the station. The kids swarmed up and sat in a happy, chattering line; and again we followed, taking a necessary chance. We had to be able to see what happened.

For a while there was chaos down in the yard, police and firemen milling around, talking, shouting, giving contradictory orders. The firemen wanted to bring their tender in, but there wasn't room until some of the cars were driven out; I sat coughing in the swirling smoke, squinting to see, watching always for women being shepherded out of the station and into one of the vans.

Watching for it and not seeing it, seeing only strangers. Seeing men, a few men and teenage boys brought out in handcuffs or else simply gripped by the elbow, and yes, they were pushed into the back of a windowless van; but no, no women at all.

o0o

Time passed. Windows shattered, flames roared upward; retaining wires snapped in the heat, and the radio mast fell with a crash onto the flat roof. Firemen went into the smoke-filled building with breathing apparatus heavy on their backs, their faces masked; the tender was at last brought into the yard and hoses were connected up to follow the men inside; no one else came out.

At last, “They must have moved them,” Jamie muttered beside me, once it was painfully, cruelly, obviously true. “They must have done it before, as soon as they knew we had them sussed.”

As soon as he made that phone-call, most likely. He knew that, so did I. Neither of us said it. They'd taken the girls away, all our girls and women; and again we had no idea where, and again their lives were forfeit and we could only pray that no one would guess who had started this fire.

We thought, we hoped they'd be too busy, too distracted to pay any attention to the shadowed faces of the shadowed kids watching from the wall of the Shunt. At any rate—at whatever risk—we had to be certain; so we stayed until the last of the vehicles was gone from the yard, and definitely only the one had had any prisoners in it when it left. Then we slid down the wall and slipped away.

“Where now, then?” Jon asked, meaning
what now, what can we do, how can we get them back?

“My place,” Jamie said, with certainty.

“And if your dad's got people waiting for us?”

He just shrugged. “They can't take us. You by day and me by night, they can't touch us. And I want to talk to Dad anyway, see if he's got any ideas.”

Yes, I thought. We were that desperate, that devoid of ideas of our own.

o0o

We walked to the nearest taxi firm and took a cab across town, saying nothing; we wouldn't have talked anyway, with the driver listening in, but we had nothing to say to each other. We'd screwed things dreadfully, lost what we valued most; what was there to talk about?

There was no noticeable watch being kept on Jamie's flat. We let ourselves in and just slumped mutely, too low to think about eating or getting drunk or any other way to pass a little time, to keep our minds from dwelling on what we'd done. Jamie didn't even make a move towards his phone. Uncle James could wait, it seemed, as we were waiting.

For what, I wasn't clear. Just something to happen, I guess, looking back: something to take the burden of action off our inadequate shoulders.

When it came, we all startled. Waiting or not, we weren't ready. There was a thunderous knocking on the door downstairs; even Jamie went pale, and Jon looked about fit to cry or maybe scream with the tension and the anxiety. Janice was his flatmate, I reminded myself sharply, and his friend; newly my friend also, and a good and uninvolved person, the most innocent victim in this. It was easy to lose sight of that, in my overriding, obsessive panic over Laura.

Panic doesn't have to be a mad hectic fight-or-flee response, all adrenalin and everything in motion. Panic can be a stillness also, a stifling terror of making any choice or any voluntary movement, in the utmost certainty that it will be the wrong choice or the wrong movement and doom will come.

I've always known that. What I didn't know until that day was that even where there is no choice, panic can still hold you frozen. We knew we had to go to answer that knocking, but for a long minute none of us dared.

Oddly, it was me who moved in the end. Oddly, because I had no intention, I didn't make the choice; I guess it was just the situation made it for me, lifted me slowly and shakily to my feet, walked me across the carpet towards the landing and the stairs down.

The other two followed me with their eyes only, not a muscle else twitching to go with me.

Landing; stairs. One at a time I took them, old-man style, gripping the banister hard. There seemed no hurry in the world; the knocker had not knocked again, though I'd been an age getting even this far. Gone away, perhaps, given up and gone away? Perhaps, but I didn't believe it. Not so much urgent they'd sounded, as imperative:
you will answer this.
Not the sort of people to give up and go away. Just the sort of people to knock once and be satisfied with that, be certain they were heard and would be answered.

Sounded like my Uncle James, I thought; but this was daylight, and while he might venture out behind dark glass and a shield of lesser lights, I thought he wouldn't do so in person to come fetch an errant son. He'd just send the shield, or some part of it. With, perhaps, rifles. Not to point them at his boy, of course, good lord no:
for your protection, Jamie, that's all, we've got to look after the lad, that's what he said...

Amazing, how your mind can fillet all the bones out of a situation in the space of a second or so, leave it soft and flabby in your mind, no threat at all. I knew, oh, I knew that was not what was happening here. I wasn't going to open the front door to find a couple of cousins there, come to take us home to Uncle James. I'd welcome them, I thought, I'd all but fall into their arms and say
yes please, take us home, make us safe; and fetch the girls too, you're grown-ups, you can do it.
But they wouldn't be there, it wasn't that kind of world. We'd tried to be grown-ups on our own and we'd cocked that appallingly; we weren't going to be rescued now, by family or any other tool of some capricious but ultimately merciful deity. No chance, that wasn't the way the bastard worked.

I opened the door, and there was no one there. Left, right, across the road: no one at all.
Wrong again, Ben, they didn't wait. They didn't have the patience after all.

What there was, I could hear the sound of a car cruising slowly down the hill and away. Could have been them, very likely was; I stepped forward to see if I could spot the car, if I could identify it. If I wanted to wave.

Stepped forward, and my foot nudged something on the step.

I looked down, the only direction I hadn't thought to check; and my eyes jerked away before they'd even registered what they were actually looking at. Something about the immediate image, glossy black criss-crossed with pale stripes, hinted at me strongly that I really, really didn't want to see.

I was sweating, even, as I stood there in restorative sunlight, in my element: sweating coldly once again, and that made more than once too often. I stared upwards into bright sky, forced my lungs to breathe slow and deep against a scared asthmatic panting, and at last dragged my eyes back down.

A black bin-liner, that's what it was, wrapped around something about the size and shape of a football, and sealed with what looked like half a roll of parcel-tape.

Josie's body, that's what it reminded me of, wrapped in black plastic sheeting and sealed with waterproof tape, bound with rope, addressed and delivered on the tide right to our feet. As this was, right at my feet and saying
try me, weigh me, pick me up and carry me.

Which I did, in the end, though it took a while. It was heavier than it looked, as heavy as I'd feared; and it weighed more in my mind even than in my hands as I bore it slowly back up the stairs.

I didn't want to take it in, to present it like a prize to Jamie and Jon, to play pass-the-parcel and make us all guess as I was having to. So in the end I didn't, I just sat on the top step and cradled it in my lap, trying not even to feel through the plastic to find the shape of whatever lay within.

I guess everyone's reactions were running at panic-slow pace, or else they'd been biting their tongues in there, not to ask for fear of being told. It took an age, it seemed to take forever before Jamie called through to me, “Who was it, Ben?”

However long it seemed it hadn't been long enough, or so it seemed; I couldn't answer him. Couldn't tell him, either. Not yet. I just stared at what I held between my hands, and finally, finally drew a section tight and worked my thumb through the plastic. Fair's fair, and he'd done it last time; and maybe I was trying to assert my rights here, just in case.

The other thumb went in, and tugged in opposition. I tore a hole in the bin-liner as small as I could make it, as slow as I could manage; just so I'd know first, so I could tell him if he came. When he came, if it was.

My thumbs touched something infinitely familiar, and I jerked them out with a gasp. The plastic settled slowly, and even in the dim light and through the small tear I'd made I could see hair, human hair, dirty-blond and boyish. Also the tip of an ear; and some of the hair was clotted dark and there were stains on the skin of the ear, and the copper-red metallic smell of clotted blood came wafting out and there must—of course there must—have been a mass of it, a mess of it, I'd never smelt it so strong.

I groaned; and God forgive me, there was more relief than anything else in that groan, and in the sob that followed it. I'd thought, feared, dreaded that I was holding Laura in my lap.

Shock at being right, or half right; horror and disgust; they all came after, they'd all had to wait. When they came, though, they came good, so that when at last Jamie came he found me huddled up tight against the wall, fœtal as I could achieve without an immersion tank and a supply of amniotic fluid.