David Raker 01 - Chasing the Dead (24 page)

‘It’s good to finally meet you, David.’

‘What have you don–’

‘In a lot of ways I admire you,’ he cut in, holding a finger up for me to be quiet. ‘A
lot
of ways. My organization has managed to protect itself against people like you. On the rare occasions outsiders have got close to us before, we’ve thrown them off the scent. But not you, David. You’re
special
. Until you came along, no one ever

I glanced at the scourge, then back at him. He hadn’t taken his eyes away from me. Hadn’t even blinked.

‘Everyone here has made mistakes, some bigger than others, but we give people a chance to start again. In exchange, we require certain things. We require them to give themselves up to the programme.
Completely
.’

He paused, studied me.

‘And we require secrecy.’

He stopped again, this time for longer. Breathing in and out. Just staring at me, as if trying to decide whether I was capable of understanding.

‘Are you listening to me? We’ve worked too hard on this. Gone too far. This isn’t going to unravel because some no-note kid is lost in the ether.’

He meant Alex.

We looked at each other, his eyes deep and powerful. Staring each other out. Eventually he blinked and turned his gaze away, down to the wedding ring on top of my hand.

‘What you’ve never understood, David, is that our old lives don’t exist any more. We don’t have a space we can fit back into. We remove ourselves from society and we don’t go back. If you took one of these kids out of the programme because you thought you were saving them –’ he looked at me again ‘– where do you think they’d go?’

I glanced around the fridge. ‘Somewhere better than here.’

‘Better than here,’ he repeated quietly.

Suddenly – just a blur of movement – he thrashed the scourge against my left leg. The tassles wrapped around my thigh. Circling it. Clinging to it. As they dropped away again, I looked down. A series of thin red marks were carved across my skin, tiny pricks of blood emerging inside them.

But I felt nothing.

‘It must be nice not feeling any pain,’ he said, looking down at my leg, then at the rest of my body. ‘Can you imagine going the rest of your life without pain?’

I felt a twitch in one of my toes. An odd sensation, like the nerve endings had finally fired up.

He tilted his head again, a half-smile on his face.

‘Is the feeling coming back?’

I glanced at him.

‘It will do. First your toes, then your feet, then your legs. You’ll start to feel normal again as it passes through your groin, up into your abdomen…’ He paused. Leaned forward. Pressed a finger against my chest, just below the ribcage. ‘It’s when it gets to here that you’ll wish you were dead.’

‘What the fuck have you done?’

He smiled. He’d clearly got the reaction he wanted.

‘We’ve drugged you, David. Well, actually,
technically
, we’ve partially paralysed you. Don’t worry, it won’t last for ever. But I should probably warn you

He pulled one of the thongs out from the scourge, and held it up to me. My blood was on it. Other blood too: darker, drier, stained on the leather. He studied it, turned it. There was more. The scourge was awash in it.

‘You know, I think some of this blood is Alex’s.’

He smiled again, a flash of darkness in his face for the first time.

‘The only way you can change someone is by removing temptation from their life,’ he continued, his expression softening – that same unblinking look. ‘The kids we bring here, especially the addicts, if we dried them out and sent them back, the temptation would still be there.’

I got a feeling in my toes again, stronger this time. A shooting sensation.

He leaned into me.

‘We promise them shelter. Food. Support. A family. But most of all, we help them
forget
. Forget about their addiction. Forget about their past. Do you honestly think
any
of them want to remember what they’ve done? What they’ve been through? One of the girls here stabbed a man in the chest after he raped her. Do you think she wants to remember what it feels like to have him forcing himself inside her?’

I didn’t reply. There was sensation at the top of my feet now. It lasted longer, like it was drifting across the surface of the skin.

He was still leaning in to me, his head at an angle.

‘Did you know that ketamine is the closest you’ll ever get to dying without your heart actually stopping? Users call it the ‘k-hole’. We mix it with a little dimethyltryptamine… and call it a resurrection.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘When we resurrect them,’ he continued, ignoring me, ‘some of the people on our programme find they come out of their bodies. Some see their lives played back at them. Some see bright lights in the darkness. It’s a symbolic rebirth. A resurrection into a new existence. A way to separate what’s been done in the past with what’s to come in the future.’

‘You’re fucking crazy.’

He laughed, and ran his fingers through the thongs. ‘No, David. The only crazy thing is that you think you’re doing good by stopping us.’

Andrew stared at me, his fingers running through the scourge. I looked back, conscious of the fact that they were trying to make me feel weak. They’d paralysed me. They’d taken my clothes. But they weren’t going to watch me crumble. His head tilted back again – a quirk of his – and then he broke out into a smile, as if he’d guessed what I was thinking.

‘I’ve spent a long time building this place, David. I’ve spent a long time getting the right people into position to help me. Surely you understand the need for me to protect what is important.’ He glanced at the wedding band on the top of my hand. ‘You’d protect what was important to you, wouldn’t you?’

‘The right people?’

He nodded.

‘Like that fucking
freak
in the mask?’

He didn’t move. Didn’t reply.

‘What’s right about him?’

‘He does what is necessary to secure our survival. We had problems at the beginning. He helped us with those problems. In return, we helped him.’

‘Was he helping you when he came for me in my home?’

More sensation in my feet. Both of them now.

‘He’s not helping anybody.
You’re
not helping anybody.’

‘We’re taking away their pain.’

‘You’re erasing their
memories
.’

‘What memories do you think a heroin addict has,
David
?’ he said, his voice raised for the first time. ‘What about the girl we have here whose father molested her for eleven years?’

‘This isn’t right.’

He grunted. ‘How would you know what’s
right
?’

‘You’re forcing them.’

‘We ease their pain.’

‘You’re forcing
drugs
into them!’

‘We’re helping them build a new life!’ he shouted back. ‘We give them food and shelter. We give them company. They start again. They
live
again.’

Now I could feel the nerves igniting in my ankles and the balls of my feet. I looked down and saw my toes wriggling. Twitching. Moving.

When I looked up he was watching me.

‘You’re pushing it out of your system impressively fast,’ he said.

My ankles shifted position on the floor.

‘You’re a fighter, David. I like that.’

‘You’ve lost control here.’

He laughed. ‘Oh, no. We’re in total control.’

‘You’ve lost control!’ I said again, forcing the anger up through my throat. I gritted my teeth and willed myself to move. Just an inch. Anything at all.

‘Where’s Alex?’

He laughed. ‘Don’t you know when to give up?’

‘
Where is he?
’

He flicked the scourge again, the thongs brushing his leg.

‘Alex was different. He came to me just over a year ago after a long time in the wilderness. I didn’t go out and find him. He was given to me.’ A pause. ‘He was different.’

Another twitch – this time in my knee.

‘Different?’

‘When I first started the farm, I suppose I expected every kid I took in to respond to what we were doing. They had problems. We were offering them a way out. And for a while it all worked beautifully. The first two became wonderful, clean-living people. People I could
use
. I got Zack off drugs, and he became a recruiter for me. Then I gave Jade her dignity back after years of abuse and she contributed to our operations down in London.’

He leaned back in his chair. It creaked under his weight.

‘But then things got more difficult. Zack found this heroin addict down in Bristol. She’d been beaten by her dealer and raped by her pimp. He found her in an alleyway in the middle of winter, left for dead. So we started her on a detox programme.’

He paused, breathed out.

‘But then one night she told me she didn’t want to be here any more. I told her she had made her choice

I looked up at him.

‘I hit her,’ he said, stamping a foot on the ground. ‘And then I hit her again and again and again. And when I finished, she wasn’t moving any more.’

He stopped, glanced at me.

‘She pleaded with us to help her, so we brought her here with the promise of a new life. And she repaid us, repaid
me
, by murdering one of my best friends.’

Regret passed across his eyes.

‘But I had an epiphany after that. A watershed moment. When others fought us like she did, threw everything we offered them back in our faces, I realized we had to deal with them. We’d taken them out of society, given them a roof over their head. We’d made sacrifices for them. So, they’d make a sacrifice for us. They’d become martyrs.’

‘That’s why you brought in Legion.’

‘Yes,’ he said matter-of-factly, and got to his feet. ‘We’d been in the army together. He had some unique skills. You see how a man values life when you’re on a battlefield, David. You see how quickly he is prepared to turn life into death. Most soldiers, most
people
, don’t want to have to kill. They have a line that they don’t ever want to cross.’ I followed him as he moved around to my side, the scourge dangling from his hand. ‘But, for him, there
was
no line.’

‘I thought this was a mission from God?’

‘You ever read the Ten Commandments?’

He smiled. ‘I was protecting the project.’

‘You brought in a
murdering psychopath
.’

‘You will never understand, David. You’ve never had a cause to fight for.’ He looked briefly at the wedding band. ‘Other than the memory of your dead wife. And what sort of cause is that?’

He smiled again as he saw the anger burning in me, and then disappeared behind me, out of sight.

‘So, he just killed the ones that didn’t work out?’ I said.

Andrew didn’t reply.

And then it came to me.

‘Oh,
shit
– you used their
bodies
…’

‘Yes,’ he replied from behind me. ‘We used the bodies of the ones that didn’t respond to the programme. We have people in useful places; a net cast wider than you can possibly imagine. In the hospital system. In the police. Do you know how to remove evidence from a police database, David? I think you’d be surprised at how easy it is.’

I heard him move again.

‘You don’t have to work your way up the tree. You can get someone trained in HOLMES in a very short space of time and from there… well, it’s amazing what you can do just by sitting at someone else’s computer and using their login details.’

‘You’re framing people.’

He reappeared on my other side, looking down at

‘It’s a bigger win. Our men and women on the inside, they’ve experienced redemption. They’re like Zack and Jade were. Once broken, now repaired. They give others that same chance by protecting what we have.’

The first pang of something flickered inside my body, close to my groin. A dull ache. The sensation was moving through my body like an oil spill.

He smiled and pressed a finger against my forehead.

‘Feel something?’

I wriggled my head, and his finger fell away.

I closed my eyes. Tried to use the darkness to refocus myself. When I reopened them, he was staring at me, the smile still there.

‘Whose body did you use for Alex?’

He shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

‘It matters to the people who love him.’

He watched me for a moment. ‘You don’t know anything, David. Most of their families don’t care if they’re dead or alive.’

‘You think Mary cares whether Alex is alive?’

‘She does now she’s seen him.’

‘She did anyway!’

He paused for a moment.

‘Like I said, I didn’t have a choice with Alex. My hand was forced.’

Then I lost my train of thought. The dull ache came again, but this time it was stronger. It flared in my groin. In my lower back.

‘This thing is out of control,’ I said.

The sound of my voice amused him. He leaned in a little closer to me, stooping slightly, looking up at me. ‘Oooooh, ouch,’ he mocked quietly. ‘Does it hurt?’

My mouth was filling with saliva. And I was sweating. Trails of it were coming off my hairline and running down my face. Deep inside – in my stomach, at the bottom of my throat – vomit bubbled, burning in the middle of my breastplate. Worse was the feeling emerging from the base of my back, in my groin, crawling up my spine. As every nerve end started to fire, my back tightened, the skin stretching across my muscles. The pain was focused there. Whatever they’d done to me was in my back.

Andrew stood again, staring down at me with a mixture of amusement and disgust in his face. Picking up the chair, he moved back towards the door and disappeared inside. He slammed it shut behind him – and I could feel the vibrations pass across the floor. Pain suddenly burst its way out from my back and into the centre of my chest.

‘
Fuck!
’

I yelled out again.

It felt like someone was squeezing the life out of my heart. When I tried to shift my weight from one side to another, it was torture. My whole body spasmed. And, finally, my wedding ring fell, pinging against the floor of the fridge and rolling away.