Diary of the Displaced (12 page)

Then we saw him, right down the other end of Merriwether, walking towards us casually, as though he was out for a stroll in the country on a Sunday afternoon.

CutterJack.

“You can’t hide from me forever, Rat. I got your friend and I’ll get you.”

We ran, straight for the house. My heart was thumping again as the front door rushed towards us. I nearly tripped on the cobbles at least twice, and I could almost feel him getting closer to us. I glanced back as Rudy ran up the steps to the front door.

Down the street, the maw were holding him off, but there was only three of them and CutterJack had drawn out a pair of long blades and was swinging them in long swirling patterns as he walked slowly forwards. I turned and ran for the door, colliding with it, hoping it would open, but it was shut tight. Rudy stepped through the door and vanished.

“Rudy!”

Lots of growling and noise behind me.

I tried the handle. Still no luck, then I rammed the door a second time with my shoulder, but it wasn’t budging.

“Rudy!”

I glanced back over my shoulder to see CutterJack standing at the bottom of the steps, grinning at me. The three maw, including DogThing, were lying in the street. One of them was still barely moving, twitching. I couldn’t make out which maw it was.

It was over.  I knew it was. I pointed my knife at him and pulled my mace back, ready to fight. I didn’t stand a chance, I knew that, but he had killed my dogs. I was going to hurt him before he killed me too.

I have no idea how it happened. It was all over far too quickly for me to recall it clearly. CutterJack leapt forward at me, much quicker than I had expected, taking the steps and the distance between us before I could even react. I had barely enough time to fall over onto my back. Something hit the door above me with a
bang
, then again another,
thwack
. I tried to roll out of the way but felt my mace catch on something, only the weight of me falling off of the front porch pulled it away. I think that is when I hit my head, maybe on the cobbles or on the porch steps as I fell. There was a scream. The kind of noise I imagined I would be making in a few moments. Or was it me screaming?

No pain came.

Everything went blurry for a while after that. I remember hearing someone bellowing at the top of their voice, it might have been Rudy, but when I came to my senses it had stopped.

It was all over, I was still breathing, and CutterJack was gone.

There was blood all over the sharp end of my mace.

A Buddy Holly song was blaring out of the window above me, and I couldn’t remember which one it was.

I heard Rudy’s voice nearby.

“Quickly, get up.”

I hauled myself to me feet, still staring in wonder at the end of my mace, unable to figure out how the hell I had managed to fumble my way out of death.

“Where the hell were you?” I mumbled. I wanted to shout at him but my head was still spinning.

“I ran inside. I thought you would come through, but you didn’t. I could see that you couldn’t open the door, so I ran around the house, trying to find another way in or someone else in there that could open the door. There wasn’t.”

“It’s locked up.”

“Yes. I figured as much. You have got to see in there.”

I sat down on the porch steps, trying to catch my breath and slow my heart beat down.

“Then I heard the noise from the maw stop and I ran as fast as I could. I’ve no idea what I was going to do, but couldn’t think of anything else. When I ran back through the door I ran straight into CutterJack. I screamed. I know, I know. You must think me a coward, but I’m terrified of him.”

“No. You’re all good there. I’m damn scared of him myself.”

“Well, I think, I don’t know, but I think I made him jump.”

I looked up at this, almost smiled.

“You frightened him?”

“Well, I doubt that, but I don’t think he expected someone to come running through a closed door. You do realise your mace was stuck in his leg don’t you?”

“Was it? I thought it was caught on his clothes or something. I think I fell of the porch.”

“Yes, you did, but so did he. He stumbled back from me and tripped over you.”

At this I did laugh, and Rudy laughed too. I was avoiding looking over towards where I knew the maw would be lying, dead. Anything mildly funny was enough for me at that moment.

Then Rudy stopped laughing, his jaw almost dropped off. I followed the direction of his gaze, my stomach lurching as I expected to see CutterJack coming back again.

The maw had gone.

“What the… ”

“They’ve gone. How?”

“How the hell should I know?”

We both moved quickly then, jogging over to where we had last seen the maw. My head was still fuzzy, but seeing the bodies of the maw missing sobered me up fast.

No trace, nothing. There was blood over the cobbles, where they had each fallen, not as much blood as I had expected, but other than that, nothing.

“Let’s get into the house, just in case he comes back,” I said, heading over to grab the cart from where I had abandoned it.

“Um, James? I don’t think he is coming back any time soon,” said Rudy.

I stopped and turned round. Rudy was standing in front of the porch, staring at the ground.

“Why?”

“Because I think this is a bit of his leg.”

I pushed the cart as quickly as I could, and went over to look at Rudy’s grizzly find.

“Oh, hell! That’s gross.”

There was a lump of bloody flesh about the size of my fist lying in the street. I’d literally taken a chunk out of CutterJack.

“And if he does come back, he is going to need some new knives,” said Rudy, pointing up at the door.

They were embedded in the wood by at least six inches, one in the door itself, it had gone all the way through and Rudy said it was sticking a few inches out of the other side of the door. The other was stuck hard in the wooden floorboards of the porch. CutterJack had left his knives behind.

It took me about five minutes to pry the one out of the floor, whilst Rudy went round inside the building, trying to find a way I could get in. It was no small knife. The thing was about two feet long and sharp as a Stanley knife. Cripes, if that thing had gone in me instead of the door…

The one in the door took longer. I’d just managed to pull it out when Rudy came back.

“There is a window at the back, on the second floor. I think if you can get up there you might be able to get in. There is a rope hidden behind the drain pipe. I didn’t spot it at first. It’s well hidden. All the other windows in the house apart from that one and the one on the top floor are all shored up on the inside. Someone made a fortress out of this place.”

We left the cart at the front of the house, and made our way around the row of buildings and into an alley way. It looked like someone had been shoving their junk into the alley for years. I had to climb over three fences before we got into the yard.

I couldn’t see the rope, even when I looked behind the pipe. Then I noticed a bit of it poking out of a hole in the drain, high up near the window. It went inside through a small gap where the window had been left open, just a little bit. The rope was tucked into the pipe. Whoever had put it there had hidden it well, cutting a slit all the way from the top to the bottom and stuffing it inside.

Day 28

We are holed up in the house. All the windows are shut and the door is locked. I hauled the rope up and pulled it back through the window. There is so much to say about what we have discovered in the house, but I’ve not had the time. Feeling sick and dizzy. I need to sleep.

I asked Rudy if he had spoken to me when CutterJack was trying to bang the door down in the building opposite the shop the night before. He says he didn’t. I shrugged it off, maybe I’d imagined that I heard it, but I was almost certain that someone had spoken to me. It hadn’t been CutterJack. Why would he have told me to be silent and still? He wouldn’t have at all. Someone other than Rudy had told me, someone who didn’t want CutterJack to find me.

Silence.

Don’t make a sound.

Day 29

Rudy thinks I may have had a slight concussion from when I hit the paving, after my fall. I remember being dazed for a while afterwards, so I guess he could be right. I don’t have any injuries though, so if I did bang my head it can’t have been too hard. I think I’ve just been feeling sick from fear, after nearly being butchered. I know, I’ve fought with zombies a couple of times now, and they are gruesome looking, but they are slow, and I always had time to line myself up for each swing. Well, nearly every time. CutterJack was different, and I think that’s why I’ve been feeling sick.

Luck. Just Luck. Nothing else. That was all that had kept me alive during my brief fight with CutterJack. If it hadn’t been for me falling at the right time, and Rudy walking through the door at that same moment, CutterJack would have torn me to shreds. He was so fast. I barely even had the time to realise he was on me, let alone react.

What we found in the house was nothing short of a revelation, exactly what we needed.

Adler had lived here. No, we’re not sure how long ago, could be a decade or more, or it could have been yesterday, but we found all kinds of maps and notes. I’ve read journal after journal detailing lots of random stuff about what he found here. I’m taking a few of them with me, hoping that if I get the chance at some point, I can put them in order, piece together everything, but for right now we found some quite interesting stuff.

This one, from a diary that looks old, put a smile on Rudy’s face.

“I regretted leaving within days. Of course I still knew my primary goal was to return home, but leaving Rudy was a hard thing to do. He wouldn’t listen though, wouldn’t hear reason. I decided that I should still make one journey back, one last attempt to convince him to leave.

Alas, my dear friend is gone. I returned too late. My tormentor must have followed me back to the shack, found Rudy, and ended him. It’s my fault. I should have never taken the compasses, and I should never have given one to Rudy. What else could I do though? I had to stop CutterJack from doing what he has been doing for so long.

I couldn’t stay and bury Rudy, though it pained me not to. CutterJack had killed Rudy very recently, maybe only hours before, so would still be close by. I had to keep moving. I’m sorry Rudy, for everything. If only I could explain.

The compass that I gave to Rudy was gone, either lost or back in the hands of that monster.”

“He came back.” Rudy seemed pleased at that, and went quiet for a time.

There was more. A lot of what is in the journals is undecipherable, the handwriting is too messy. Maybe I can sit down some time, and figure it out, but for now I have to use whatever I can read in this dim light. I went back further, to a previous journal.

“The compasses, they are his keys, how the damn thing works, I have no idea, but I know that the compasses that I took are the keys, and whilst they are not in his possession he can do no more evil. When I can find retrieve the fourth, I may be able to figure out a way of using the device to escape, but with only three of them all I can do is hide them from him, and keep searching. I can’t risk him catching me up and getting all three back so easily.

I went back to the first place that came to mind, somewhere that I knew would be ideal for hiding at least one of them, the scrap yard. The safe would still be there, hidden amongst the trash, where I found the stash of roman coins. I’m so glad I still have the key for it. There were no constructs there, or there shouldn’t have been. It took me quite a time to get back, but it was worth the trek.

I’m not sure what I will do with the third, for now I will stash it in the toolbox on the bus, and hope I can find somewhere more suitable. I need to go back to the bus anyway, to get the torch. I found batteries in one of the houses on Malden Street.”

I stopped reading at that moment, and ran down the stairs to the cart. There it was, right where he said he had hidden it. How I had never spotted it, I don’t know. I thought that I had emptied the box out. It was tucked inside a small compartment at the bottom of the toolbox, Adler’s toolbox, the one that I had found on the bus.

Another compass.

I had two of them all along, and the third was in some kind of safe in the scrap yard. I didn’t remember seeing a safe, but at least I knew where to start searching.

There was more in Adler’s diaries, I skipped through them until I found what I thought might be the most recent. None of it is dated.

“He nearly caught up with me again today, but was unable to keep up the speed once I put some leg work in. If I hadn’t fixed up the chain on the bicycle, I think he would have had me. I was pleased to not have to hear a constant squeak as I rode, but it would seem that my efforts paid off tenfold.

I have a dilemma. Considering what I have heard and seen, I can’t in good conscience just give him back the compasses. But now I have him hunting me, and I’m not sure if I can keep up this game of cat and mouse for much longer. If it isn’t him, then it’s those damn creatures he has control of, disgusting abominations that they are. I had no idea that the creation of such a creature was even possible, or that anyone would have a mind twisted enough to conceive them in the first place, but then I suppose there are many things in The Corridor that don’t make sense, or even follow the laws of nature. I should be used to the unexpected by now.”

“That would explain why the zombies were in the scrap yard when you arrived here,” said Rudy.

“You mean they were searching for the safe? For the third compass?”

“Seems reasonable to me.”

“I didn’t see a safe anywhere. I know there is a shed load of junk to hide one under, but… ”

I stopped talking. Of course!

“James?”

“The microwave.”

“The what?”

“There was something in the junk yard, right near to where I first arrived. I thought it was a television or a microwave, but it was a solid block of metal. It’s quite possible it could have been a safe. I never managed to turn it over.”