Bully (6 page)

‘But… but…’

Tommy released his grip on my shoulder finally and started to move back out of the door. As soon as he let me go, my heart started to beat properly again and I was left with only the memory of the pain. I gasped with relief and sunk to my knees. Tommy must have heard me because he paused in the doorframe, silhouetted by the moon and fixed me once more with those terrible eyes.

‘
I will be watching you,’
he said.
‘I will be waiting. Death is coming, Bully. And there’s nothing that you or anybody else can do about it.’

He slammed the door behind him. It felt like the closing of a tomb.

Chapter Four

“
And do you have faith in God above, if the Bible tells you so?”

My hands were still trembling as I rooted under my bed for my old pack and clothes. It took me two attempts to pull my boots out because the laces kept getting caught on something. Although the thing – Tommy – had gone, I still felt his presence in the room. I felt his hatred of me pouring out from the walls. I had to get out. I had to follow the rats. I had to desert this sinking ship and get as far away as possible. Only, as I already knew, I couldn’t run away from myself.

So this is what it feels like to be hunted
, I thought. I remembered an old wildlife documentary that I watched once; some poor young wildebeest which was being tracked by a lion. The wildebeest had sensed that he was being stalked by something much bigger and more powerful than him and had simply flopped onto the ground and given up, allowing himself to succumb to death’s embrace. At the time, I’d been exhilarated by watching the kill; I’d been rooting for the lion. Now I knew just how that young wildebeest had felt. My every nerve and sinew wanted to simply let things wash over me and give up. Sighing, I pulled on my boots and completed a final check of my pack.

Do-Nowt must have heard me. ‘What are you doing?’ he whispered, sounding annoyed. ‘If you’re not carrying-on in your sleep you’re fiddling around…’

‘Sorry,’ I muttered.

‘What was all that shouting and yelling a few minutes ago?’

‘Nothing… Bad dream,’ I said, and then thought better of it. Questions would be asked come the morning and come the discovery of my empty bed. It would be better for Do-Nowt if I at least gave him the heads-up. ‘Look; I have to get out of here… Something’s happened and…’

‘What can possibly have happened in here?’ asked Do-Nowt. I heard the creak of wire against metal as he changed position and his leg dragged in the hoist. ‘Are you crazy?’

He must have heard the panic in my voice… And if he had heard my mad shouting from earlier, then he had every right to think me insane. But then a thought struck me; if he
had
heard me earlier, why hadn’t he remarked on the fact that there was clearly another person’s voice in the room? Why hadn’t he commented on that deep, booming voice of the new Tommy? That would have been the first thing I would have mentioned.

‘Not crazy,’ I said, although some part of me felt like laughing like a loon again. ‘I’m worried… I think there’s trouble back home. I need to get back there before it gets really bad.’

‘Can you smell it?’ asked Do-Nowt, ignoring me.

‘Smell what?’

‘That smell of death in the room. The air is thick with it; I can hardly breathe. I think Bolton may have finally passed-on. Will you check him for me?’

I had to agree. I bit back my disgust and leaned over the broken body of the B. Bolton. His face resembled Tommy’s; it was devoid of most of the skin and the tissue underneath had crusted up into a lunar landscape of peaks and troughs. Most of his hair had burned away but odd patches sprung up here and there like sad little oases in this parched desert.

I forced myself lower and tried to listen for breathing. Hearing nothing I placed a hand under what was left of his nose. Still nothing. I placed a reluctant hand on his brow and felt it cold to the touch; bone cold. Somehow I knew then that when Tommy had left, he had taken the broken man back with him to whatever afterlife he came from.

‘He’s gone,’ I confirmed.

Suddenly, Do-Nowt let out this long, low groan. ‘Don’t leave me in here on my own,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t want to die.’ I could hear him choking back the sobs and for once was glad of the cover of darkness. To see that great brute of a man reduced to a snivelling wreck would have been too much to bear. As it was, I collected up my pack and stepped out of the hospital. Like the rats, I deserted that sinking ship.

Cold air on my face felt strange and uncomfortable. Although I hadn’t been seriously injured by the blast, my skin still felt too new, too raw; I could feel every speck of dust, every grain of sand grating against me and wearing me down. If I had stood there forever, I would have eventually have been ground down into tiny particles myself. Parts of me would have been carried far away on the breeze and I would have been free.

Behind me, the hospital door rattled and creaked, swinging in the breeze as though it were as light as a sheet on a washing line. It was hanging off one hinge now; Tommy must have damaged it by slamming it so hard. I reached for a large stone in order to wedge it closed. I couldn’t let Do-Nowt face the night completely unguarded.

Stealthily, I moved away from the door, searching for cover. I took in my surroundings as I went. We were indeed housed in one of a circle of low, one-storey farm buildings surrounded by a high fence. In the middle of the circle was a trampled area of gravel and dirt and a few pieces of rusted machinery. Outside the circle was nothing, just sand, the odd scattering of rubble and the occasional half-dead plant or tree. It looked like the landscape of hell; it was immediately obvious why the buildings had been arranged in such a way. They wanted to close out this nothingness. They wanted to ward off whatever evil lay out there. I’d seen documentaries about the inhabitants of primitive villages that used to keep their animals inside such circles in order to stop the predators from getting in. This was eerily familiar.

I moved into the shadow of one of the buildings and weighed up my next move. I listened, as I’d been trained to do. I made calculations based on the noises that I heard. The majority of the buildings sounded empty, but I’d heard faint sounds from two of the buildings close to the main gateway through the fence. These were not, I decided, the sounds of more vermin, but were made by something bigger - human beings. There was bound to be somebody keeping watch. Only problem was, where were they?

Most likely they’d be keeping watch over the key strategic elements of the camp, I decided. And that didn’t mean wounded soldiers; that meant something else. Outside the fence, underneath tarpaulins, I could see the obvious shapes of vehicles; Land Rover Wolves and Defenders, probably. Perhaps there’d be a Warrior in there too. Because of the nature of the terrain, these vehicles were a lifeline. Without them, we might as well have been buried in a sandpit.

What I had to try and work out was how this night watchman would react if they were to see me emerging out of the gloom. Would they shoot me on sight or would they know me as one of the patients and hence use caution? In the end, I decided that whatever happened, even if I happened to be mown down in a rain of bullets like Butch Cassidy as I stepped into the open, it was still preferable to what awaited me with Tommy.

I took a deep breath and stepped into the shaft of moonlight which intersected the first two of the buildings. The crunch of gravel as my feet touched the floor made me wince. But I needed to move quickly, while I still had the element of surprise on my side, so I pressed on. Still nothing moved. I kept imagining that at any moment, I was going to trip some heretofore unseen wire and alert the whole hospital camp to my escape, but it seemed that camp security
within
the perimeter fence wasn’t a high priority. I was pretty much allowed to move wherever I chose. Perhaps they didn’t really expect any of the patients, and especially the ones that had survived the blast, to be making any such bold moves.

Grimly, I clutched onto the strap on my pack and tried to stop it from rubbing on my shoulder, where Tommy had touched me. His fingernail-claws had left deep scores in my flesh there, but there’d been no blood, strangely enough. It was as though his deathly touch had started the decomposition process within me. The constant thought of Tommy kept me going. It guided me over the marshy ground behind the second of the buildings and over the broken pipes which crashed out of the third as though they were a knot of dead snakes. I felt my booted feet sinking into years and years of animal droppings, although where all the animals were now, I could barely even contemplate. The smell was almost unbearable.

As I approached the last of the buildings, I began to discern signs of the humanity contained within; the low buzz of a radio, the slight tang of cigarette smoke in the air, and the flickering light which shone out from the gap underneath the door. Part of me longed to step inside, to feel warmth and companionship again, but they’d only send me back to my own building, wouldn’t they? They’d think my sudden panic a sign of madness and probably subject me to all kinds of psychological testing. They’d find out about Tommy and what we did to him…

I slunk past the windows keeping low to the ground. Retching at the smell, at the fact that my bare hands were now wallowing in the years of sewage, I crawled towards the gate and my freedom. Every creaking, stinking, filthy bit of progress that I made was accompanied by a throb of pain from my shoulders and chest. On all-fours like a dog, I crept towards my destiny.

Suddenly, just as I began to believe that my hands were about to touch the wire of the fence, two dazzling lights fizzed into life. They were perched like sentry birds on top of the gate and had clearly sensed my approach; so much for my theories of no security detail. I was frozen in the glare of the spotlights, like road-kill. I kept expecting the exploding pain of a Browning bullet, ripping into my back. I kept expecting the enraged shout of the night watchman or sniper. Nothing happened.

Finally, I allowed myself to climb to my feet. Despite the pain in my shoulder, I lifted both hands above my head in surrender and still nothing happened.

‘What the fuck?’ I heard myself ask.

There hadn’t been the slightest movement from the nearest building. There hadn’t been even a crackle of gunfire. I edged towards the building, keeping my head bowed in submission and my arms aloft. Still nothing happened. I placed my hand on the gnarled wood of the door. I felt the reality of it, so strangely juxtaposed alongside the dreamlike quality of the whole situation; the emptiness.

I opened the door, not quite daring to wonder what I’d see within. But there was nobody there, not even Nurse Thomas. I let out a breath that I’d clearly been holding for some time and scanned the room. Four beds; medical equipment stacked neatly over to one side; a lopsided shelf containing weighty tomes which were probably medical textbooks; a gaslight burning away on the wall. Otherwise, it was decorated much like our ward; only the briefest personal touches made me believe that there’d been anyone in here at all. Above one of the unmade beds, there was tacked a picture of cows and green fields and rising hills in the background; England. On one of the bedside tables, there was a picture of a small red-haired boy. I wondered if this might be Nurse Thomas’s son. The portable radio that I’d heard was hanging from a hook in the ceiling, as though it could achieve better reception up there. Where was everybody?

Suddenly, I became aware of the smell of cigarettes. In an ashtray on an old desk which had been pushed against the back wall, a lone cigarette end burned away into nothing. Whoever had left it there had only left it there a matter of minutes ago, perhaps as I was stalking the perimeter. I had the sinking feeling that as well as Bolton, Tommy might have visited the doctors and nurses. Perhaps he’d pied-pipered them all out of there… What other reasonable explanation was there for the Mary Celeste-like state of their room? Where else could they have gone?

Madly, I dashed from bed to bed, stripping back the sheets to look for bloodstains. I pulled down curtains, kicked away rugs and trampled through piles of dirty clothes but I found none. Where was everybody?

I thought back to the moment I’d first stepped out of our building. I’d listened to the sounds of the night then; I was sure that I’d heard people. But now they’d simply disappeared into thin air. Or not into thin air at all; into the thick fish-smelling air of Tommy’s afterlife, perhaps.

‘Help me,’ I croaked, to nobody in particular. I had never believed in God or in some divine creator, but if I believed in Tommy and the hellish afterlife that he advertised, then surely I could believe in Him?

My voice echoed back off the bare walls. It echoed back off the salt-flats and the desert. It echoed back off the lonely rocks and the deserted buildings. It felt as though I was the last person alive on the planet. Not for the first time, I asked my favourite question; why me? Nobody in this post-apocalyptic world could give me an answer, but I did strain to hear whether the creaking of the corrugated iron roof was actually Tommy’s laughter.

Do-Nowt! I remembered Do-Nowt, and finally I had a purpose again. I had to get him out of there and maybe somehow, in doing so, I’d redeem myself a little. I crashed out of the building and back into the shit-heap central courtyard. I ran headlong through the middle of it, no longer caring that I’d be seen. In fact, I was
hoping
that I’d be seen. Hell, the smash of a bullet rifling into my back would be welcome compared to the lonely agony I felt. Like the broken man’s old dog act, I was now pleading to be put out of my misery.

I ran so fast that my breath burned in my throat and my legs wheezed and buckled in complaint.

‘Dean!’ I yelled, choking back snot and vomit and fear. ‘Do-Nowt!’

I don’t quite know what I expected him to do if he heard my cries. In his state, he couldn’t exactly make ready to leave, could he? He was bed-ridden, legless; another broken man. But then so was I, wasn’t I?