Afterlight (45 page)

He swung the bucket up over his shoulder again and this time, with the strength of both arms, he brought it down hard.

The contact sounded thick and damaging; a metal rim contacting and cracking bone. Dizz-ee grunted and flopped forward onto the floor and the mattress in front of him.

‘Jacob!’ whimpered Leona.

He couldn’t bring himself to stop. The bucket came down again on the back of the boy’s head. Another dull crack of bone beneath the baseball cap. And again.

And again. This time the cap fell off, revealing the back of Dizz-ee’s head. The scalp was split, and the skull beneath was dented; like a heavy thumb mark on a plasticine model.

He was about to swing it down again.

‘Jake!!’ Leona cried.

He stopped. Even to his inexperienced eyes it was obvious Dizz-ee was dead. Blood pooled from the dent in the back of his head, down across his neck and soaked into the mattress.

‘Oh, Jacob . . .’

He looked down at his sister. She was reaching out for him, no longer caring to cover up her naked bruised body. Her hand pressed against the side of his torso and she was sobbing.

‘It’s okay, Lee,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. I done him in.’

She shook her head.

‘I’ll get you out . . . me and Nathan’ll get you . . .’

But she didn’t seem to be listening to him.

He felt burned out from the exertion. Light-headed from the release. The adrenalin was spent and the rush suddenly gone. He wondered if this was how soldiers felt after a battle. Not so much exhausted by the blows they’d landed but from the sudden absence of whatever had coursed through their veins to give them courage. All of a sudden he wished there was a comfy armchair in this room for him to flop down into.

Leona’s arms were around him as he settled down dizzily to his knees.

‘You okay, Lee?’ he slurred, wondering whether that was the cider finally catching up on him.

‘I’m okay,’ she whispered softly. ‘I’m okay.’

He realised then that she was actually cradling him in her arms, her face overhanging his, looking down at him, her tears dropping onto his cheeks. She stroked his forehead, pushing lank twists of blond hair out of his eyes. It was then that he saw the crimson on her fingers and knew he’d messed up somehow.

‘Did the boy stab me?’

She nodded, her lips clamped, her chin dimpled and creased.

‘Oh . . . right.’

The fizzing, flickering strip light on the low ceiling illuminated her hair like a scruffy halo, her face a darker silhouette that was leaking a steady river of fresh tears onto his cheeks.

He didn’t remember feeling stabbed, didn’t feel the blade at all. It wasn’t as bad as he’d imagined it would be. ‘Am I . . . bleeding quite a lot?’

She shook her head. He knew she was lying. She was rubbish at that. He could feel her body trembling, her shoulders heaving.

‘Lee . . . ?’ he said.

Her face came lower, closer. He could feel the puff of her fetid breath on his face. ‘My poor little brother,’ she whispered.

‘Home,’ he said. ‘You got to go back home . . . warn them. They’re coming.’

That annoying, fizzing light above them was too bright. He found himself squinting back the brightness, then feeling his eyelids so heavy he closed them to give his stinging, tired eyes a rest. ‘Please don’t let them hurt Mum, will you?’ he murmured. ‘Promise?’

‘Promise,’ she replied.

It’s just you and Mum left now.
He wasn’t sure if he said that out loud or just thought it.

‘I’ll look after her, Jake.’

He had a dim memory of them carrying Dad upstairs. How heavy his body was, even between the three of them. He remembered them tucking him into bed, saying their goodbyes to him. Remembered how proud he felt of him. Dad the hero. Dad who saved them from the bad man with the knife in their lounge. He wondered if Dad would’ve been proud of him too.

He figured he would.

He smiled. That was a good feeling.

Snoop felt an insistent, irritating tug on his arm. He was scoring high on the table; one of his better totals and still had another bonus ball to play.

‘The fuck is it?’ he snapped.

‘We uh . . . we got a problem, Snoop.’

Snoop lowered his voice. Not that anyone was likely to hear them over the clatter of bells and the thud of music. ‘What kind of problem we got, Deej?’

The small boy, one of the youngest, and white, looked as pale as a ghost. ‘Fight down in the cattle shed, between Dizz and Jacob.’

He looked around for Nathan and saw him across the stage, shooting zombies, badly, and looking drunk enough that he was ready to topple over.

He slapped a passing boy on the arm. ‘Hey, take over. I got a chart score. Don’t fuck it up for me,’ he grinned.

He turned to Deejay. ‘Let’s go.’

Snoop led the way across the floor, threading through the crowded space between machines, doing his best to look easy, smiling and knuckling the boys he passed. Finally, at the top of the stairs down to the cattle shed, he caught the eye of one of the older boys.

‘Yo, Roost!’

The lad ambled over. ‘A’ight, Snoop?’

‘The cattle shed’s closed. No one’s going down there until I say otherwise.’

‘Okay.’ Roost nodded. ‘You gettin’ some?’

Snoop ignored that. ‘No one gets past, right?’

‘Right.’

He led Deejay down the steps. ‘So what the fuck’s gone down?’

The boy swallowed nervously. ‘You better see.’

Deejay led him towards the one storage door standing open, a shaft of flickering light spreading out across the corridor floor.

Then Snoop saw for himself. Dizz-ee splayed across a mattress, soaked dark brown around his oddly misshapen head. And on the rubber-mat floor, the white boy, Jacob, sprawled amidst a large pool of blood.

A naked girl was cradling him in her lap.

Jesus.

The room reeked of shit; overpowering, like a faecal force field. The room was sprayed with splatter dots of blood. But the girl . . . the girl looked like something out of the boys’ collection of horror DVDs; her legs and belly and hands coated with the boy’s blood. The pallid skin of hers that wasn’t coated with blood was mottled with purples and browns, and her face . . . her jaw was a swollen grapefruit, one eye puffy and almost completely shut beneath a bulging eyelid that looked as full and glossy as a plum.

‘Fuck’s been going on here?’

Deejay shrugged. ‘Dizz-ee’s girl. He been working on her a while.’

Snoop stepped into the room and squatted down. A fucking mess. Dizz-ee was supposed to be in charge of the shed; the number two’s responsibility. The girls, some of them needed tempting a little, some of them needed a bit of gentle coercion; a little dope, just enough to set up an appetite, usually did the trick. But this . . . the stupid violent bastard looked like he’d been systematically beating the crap out of her.

‘Hey,’ he said to the girl.

She didn’t respond. He reached out, cupped her chin and lifted her face to get a better look at it. ‘What the fuck happened here?’

She stared silently at him.

‘They fight over you? That it?’

Her eyes locked on his. It could have been a defiant glare, it could have been that her mind was off elsewhere.

He turned to Deejay. ‘Are there any other girls this fucked up?’

‘No, Snoop. They all upstairs.’

It looked like this sorry thing had been a personal project.

‘Go get her some clothes from one of the other rooms, and then take her out to the infirmary. She’s all done here.’

Deejay disappeared.

He turned to look at her. ‘This ain’t right. The shit down here works on privileges,’ he said, studying the bruising on her face. Some of it looked a week or two old, some of it looked today-fresh. ‘That’s the fucking system. Not . . . not this.’

He could’ve sworn there was a faint flicker of reaction in her one good eye.

Deejay was back with a fistful of clothes.

‘Okay, clean her up, Deej, and dress her and get her out.’

He stood up and stepped back out of the room into the narrow hallway, relieved to breathe air less pungent. Now he had to figure out the mess with the dead boy. Like Maxwell said, if they were planning to approach those rigs as friendlies, they needed Nathan and Jacob to vouch for them.

Well one of them was fucking well dead, courtesy of that stupid asshole, Dizz-ee.

 

 

 

N
athan stirred on his cot feeling like his head had been wedged in a metal worker’s vice overnight and something in his stomach was churning and flopping like a landed trout. Once upon a time, when he was eight, he’d gotten drunk slurping the slops out of glasses at a family wedding. He’d spent the night perched over a toilet bowl and the next day thinking he was going to die, his mum scolding him way too loudly, wagging a finger in his face; no sympathy whatsoever.

He’d felt very much then like he felt now.

He opened his eyes and saw the camouflage netting above him. It was a bright sunny morning outside, he could tell from the filtered light coming through the far-off canvas lid of their world.

The place was quieter than normal. Nothing more than the faint sounds of the workers outside the arena - the odd raised voice, the clatter of things being wheeled on trolleys, carried by the odd echoing acoustics of the dome.

With an unbelievable amount of effort he turned on his side to look out of the netting down at the stage below. By day, not a particularly impressive sight. Nothing more than a mess of black cabinets and a rats’ nest of snaking power cables. In amongst them he noticed a couple of the boys sprawled amongst the arcade cabinets, curled up like pale foetuses. Clearly far too hammered from last night to find a way back to their cots.

‘Oh, man,’ groaned Nathan.

He eased himself onto his back again, gazing through bleary eyes at the silhouetted pattern of webbing against the bland brightness beyond. He remembered the first couple of hours of the evening; supper, then the whole stage powering up spectacularly. Playing the games, both he and Jacob running from one cabinet to the next like children in an adventure playground.

Then the booze and the dope clouded things a bit.

He remembered the pair of them separating. To be honest, he was finding Jacob a bit
clingy
, uncomfortable with all the attention and preferring to shy away and stay on the periphery. Whereas Nathan wanted so badly to party, to make up for too many lost teenage years. To have a complete blast. He wanted to chat to the girls, to enjoy the celebrity-like status of being the new-lad-in-the-hood, being the centre of attention.

It was a sad fact but Jacob was turning out to be a bit of a drag. Here they were, having found something that was, in all honesty, even better than Nathan could have hoped for, but instead of enjoying it, Jacob seemed to be hiding away from it. Withdrawing, not mixing and talking with the other boys. And shit . . . the boys, even though they were mostly younger, they were a laugh. It reminded him of the camaraderie he, Jay, and the other younger boys had enjoyed back home. Only it was even better; the booze . . . the smokes.

Oh, God, the music.
It was a thousand miles away from singing along to an out-of-tune acoustic guitar; singing ‘kumbaya’ with the other children on the rigs - the height of an evening’s entertainment.

Nathan didn’t get it. Didn’t understand what the hell was up with Jacob. The boys here may be a year or two younger than them but they had all the same interests . . . games and stuff. Shit, some of them even had Yu-Gi-Oh decks that Jacob could have traded with. And them being that little bit older and having come from some other place, the boys sort of looked up to them as wise and worldly travellers.

He just didn’t get it. The pair of them were praetorians now. The elite. Getting every perk available. It just didn’t get any better than that. And if what Snoop had been telling him earlier last night was true, that he was thinking of making them both his second-in-commands, then for fuck’s sake what the hell did Jake have to
sulk
about?

Nathan wanted to shake Jacob by the shoulders and tell him to snap out of whatever had got into him. After wishing for something like this for so long, he wanted to remind his oldest friend that this was
it.

And not to bloody well go and ruin it.

Sinking back into a head-pounding half sleep, he resolved to pull Jacob aside today, somewhere quiet, and warn him that if he kept this sulking up the other boys were going to notice it, maybe even start playing on it. And before long they’d be taking the piss out of him. There was no way Snoop could afford to let Jacob continue being a second-in-command if, behind his back, the rank and file were all razzing him.