The Book of Daniel (3 page)

Just as I opened my mouth to yield to Sam, he suddenly dropped to the ground, as abruptly as if someone had opened a trapdoor underneath him. But the real cause was just as surprising: there on the ground, pulling on Sam’s ankles, was George. Even though I knew it was him, it took a moment for me to recognise him through all the blood—and the fact that his nose had been remodelled to look more like Sam’s. But despite its gruesome condition, I’d never been happier to see his face.

The guy to my left was the first to react, releasing my arm to turn his gun on George, but before he had a chance to let off any shots, I smacked it out of his hand. The gun sailed away towards the warehouse door, shining like a star as it caught the light. The eyes of the three not-so-wise men instinctively followed its passage through the air, giving me the kind of chance I wouldn’t have believed possible a few seconds earlier. I shrugged off my sense of defeat, shouldered the guy holding my right arm to the ground and launched myself after the flying gun. Behind me, I dimly registered the sound of Sam struggling to free himself from George, but I had to trust that George could take care of himself. I wasn’t going to get another opportunity like this.

The gun landed on the floor and scuttled to a stop near the warehouse door. By then, I was about halfway towards it, but I was sure it wouldn’t take my adversaries long to run me down now that the surprise had worn off; I could already hear their heavy footfalls behind me. I knew there were only three of them, but it sounded like an entire mob.

“Watch out, Dan!” A thick voice, barely recognisable as George’s, cut through the confusion behind me, and instinctively I ducked. A breeze fanned the back of my neck as I felt the swoosh of either the baseball bat or the hockey stick go sailing overhead. But before I could even think of yelling my thanks back to him, four clear, loud reports filled the air, and there was no mistaking what that signified: Sam had dealt with George, this time permanently. Each shot was as painful as if it had gone into my own flesh, and George’s final passing was all the more crushing given the encouraging sight of him still being alive just moments earlier. I wish I could say that I took the time to remember my fallen friend, one of the few I had, but running for your life doesn’t really lend itself to such introspection. The best I could manage was to yell out his name, but even that was quickly drowned out by a snarl coming from just behind me.

“C’mere, you bastard!”

I mentally declined this polite invitation and chose instead to dive for the gun. But my feeling of triumph turned to horror as I realised that I had misjudged the distance, and ended up flying headfirst into the door instead. For a moment I was stunned, the thunder of my collision with the door reverberating through my skull, but instinct swiftly resumed control and I scrambled for the gun beneath me. I finally managed to wrap my hand around its grip, and rolled over to face my assailants… just in time for one of them to land right on top of me. We struggled for a moment, and then suddenly there was a series of muffled cracks as my finger was forced against the trigger, emptying the gun’s clip in a single staccato burst.

Agony flared up from various parts of my body: a crushing pain in my wrist, still pinned under the weight of my attacker; protests from my ribs after the hammering they had received from the gun’s discharge; exclamations from my skin, pressed against the hot metal of the gun and charred by the bullets’ confined exit. Amidst all the other pain, I couldn’t even tell if I had been shot myself. From the spray of meaty fireworks that had come out of the back of his body, I was sure that my assailant was dead, but that didn’t mean that some of the bullets hadn’t hit me, too.

I wrestled the gun out from between me and the corpse, wincing as it grated against my bruised ribcage, desperate to get it away from my skin. It finally clattered to the floor, and I tried to take stock of the situation. At first I thought that I must somehow have managed to kill all three of my attackers, since the other two were also laid flat on the ground, but it soon became apparent that this was because they had, quite sensibly, hit the deck as soon as they realised that the automatic was going off. They now rose slowly to their feet, eerily silent. They briefly exchanged glances, confirming to each other that they were okay, before turning their heads back towards me. Their eyes widened, and one of them managed “Chris?” in a hushed voice that carried through the air as if he had shouted it.

Sam moved slowly into view between his two comrades, his own gun dangling at his side, his trousers covered with dark splatters of George’s blood. He looked towards me and what was left of Chris, his eyes flat. His silence worried me; never did the cliché about the calm before the storm seem more appropriate, and I didn’t doubt that when Hurricane Sam hit, I wanted to be clear to run for cover. I tried to shift Chris’s body off of me, all the while conscious of Sam’s dead gaze and the oppressive stillness in the air. It was only when I was nearly free that Sam finally came alive again. Suddenly his eyes ignited in his face, the flames rapidly spreading to the rest of his body. He exploded.

“You. Bastard. Look what you’ve fucking done!” he began, devouring the space between us with long strides of his blood-soaked legs. “Have you any idea who that was? Have you any idea? That was my brother, you bastard! My brother!” He stopped just short of me, raised his gun slightly, lowered it again, looked at me with those eyes. “Why did you do that? Fucking hell!”

The two gargoyles behind Sam shifted uneasily as he ranted. I could see they were itching to administer some reciprocal justice for what I had just done to Chris, but at the same time, they realised that their original job was still unfinished—a job that I could possibly help them with. They needed Sam to make the call, and obviously at that precise moment, his mind was elsewhere.

Things might have gone on like that for a lot longer if the faint sound of sirens, drifting almost serenely from the depths of the world outside the warehouse, hadn’t upset the fragile balance. I think I was the first to catch on, probably because I had been waiting for them, but it wasn’t long before the penny dropped with Dave and Charlie, too. Sam gave no sign that he had heard. It was left to Dave to bring it up.

“Sam, can you hear that? It’s the police,” he said. He had a voice like dirt hitting a coffin lid. “
Sam
. Come on, mate. We need to go.”

It seemed as if these words were enough to finally rouse Sam from his state. He took a deep, slow breath and released it. I half expected to see steam come coiling out of his mouth as he exhaled, but what transpired instead was much worse: he raised his gun towards me again. This time he followed through with his anger, firing his remaining two bullets at me, but squeezing the trigger many more times. Each shot was accompanied by a searing pain as the bullets tore their way through my body, one ripping through my left shoulder and the other hitting my side. I could feel my consciousness struggling to stay afloat, catching a quick gasp of air before being dragged under again by another wave of agony. In between gulps, I could hear the sound of liquid splattering against concrete, but I couldn’t tell whether that was the blood pouring out of my wounds or the distant echo of the leak at the back of the warehouse.

As my mind circled the darkness, I could dimly make out Sam’s voice. The words slowly swam into focus. “That’s a relief! For a minute there, I thought you were dead. Good thing I ran out of bullets when I did. It would be a shame if you got off the hook too easy for what you did to Chris, you bastard.” His voice trailed off for a moment, and then, with a visible effort, I could see him forcing his mind back to the job at hand. “Lads, we need to finish up here. Seeing as how this untrustworthy fucker lied to us about being able to call the cops, we need to give up on finding this bloody parcel and switch to Plan B instead. But,” he said, focussing a particularly nasty grin at me, “that might not be such a bad thing. Bring him over here, and look lively about it.”

Charlie and Dave yanked me up from the floor, the surge in pain as one of them grasped my injured shoulder almost enough to make me pass out. They dragged me across to where George lay in unceremonious repose, his tattered body looking strangely small in the harsh light of the overheads, and dumped me on top of him. One of them removed the bloody scarf from around George’s neck and used it to tie my wrists together behind my back.

“Good. Now, get busy with those petrol cans. Make sure you go all the way to the back with them. We don’t want to miss anything.”

Sam’s henchmen were only too eager to comply. Dave disappeared off down into the body of the warehouse, and after a moment the sounds of petrol being splashed around began to fill the air. Charlie started at the warehouse door, baptising the shed before working his way back farther into the warehouse, too, following a parallel aisle to that of his comrade. The reek of petrol fumes hit my nostrils, helping to focus my reluctant mind on the task of remaining conscious. I groaned in protest, the sound causing Sam to turn his attention back to me once again.

“Well, Mr Stein, it looks like the party is drawing to a close. My associates and I need to be on our way, but not before we’ve taken care of business here, and not before I make sure your last few minutes on this miserable Earth are the most painful you can possibly imagine. Luckily for me, I can kill two birds with one stone.” Consciousness ebbed again for a second, but Sam prodded my wounded shoulder with the toe of his boot. “Don’t you pass out on me, Sunshine. You’ll miss all the fun.” He raised his voice. “How’s it going back there, you two? Chop chop!”

Charlie returned from the shadows, whirling his petrol can round at arm’s length in a big red windmill and humming a bad rendition of Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’. “All done here, Sam. Dave’s just finishing off with the boxes at the back. There’s a hole in the roof, and some of them are a bit wet.”

“Dave! Make sure you save some petrol for this fucker!”

“Sorry, boss,” Dave apologised, appearing from amongst the boxes. “I just finished it all off.” He caught the look on Sam’s face. “You said to be sure.”

Sam paused for a moment, then reached into his jacket pocket. “It’s alright, Dave, never mind. Maybe putting a torch to Mr Stein directly would be showing him too much mercy anyway. Too quick.” He pulled something out of his pocket, and although I knew what it would be, it didn’t prevent a jolt of terrible electricity from running through my body when I saw it. A lighter. He flicked the flame on and off a couple of times, contemplating it like a farmer might examine a seed he is about to plant.

“Take Chris out to the van, you two, and don’t forget to take that shooter with you, either,” Sam said, indicating the gun on the floor. “Those things aren’t easy to come by. And show some fucking respect!”

The warning came as Chris’s body almost slipped out of Dave’s hands, but then, based on how slick they were with blood, I wasn’t surprised he was struggling. Sam’s command was all the warning that Dave and Charlie needed though, and despite their obvious uneasiness at the by-now-very-noticeable sound of approaching sirens, they redoubled their efforts to treat the body of their fallen comrade carefully. Having finally got him aloft, they waddled their way over to the door, leaving Sam and me alone in the warehouse. He squatted down next to me, pulling my head around by my hair to face him. The pain I should have felt didn’t even register over the other damage reports flooding in from the rest of my body.

“Are you still there, Dan? Good, good. I have to be off now, Dan. But I just wanted you to know that what I said before—about this being business, not personal—you’ve changed all that. Now I need to go and pay your wife a visit, Dan,” he said calmly, as if we were the oldest friends in the world, talking about our plans for the weekend. He conjured my photo of Jo out of his jacket pocket and tapped it meaningfully against the lighter. “An eye for an eye, you fucker.”

Sam spat on me, stood up, and made his way unhurriedly towards the door. In my mind, I staggered to my feet, lunged at his back, wrestled him to the ground and pinned him there until the police arrived. Surely they should only be a couple of minutes away by now? But my body refused to obey me, despite the cold desperation I felt. The best it could do was to roll off of George, dropping me onto the ground next to him so that I could look into his dead eyes. They gazed at me pityingly.

The sound of Sam opening the door gave me the power to break the spell of George’s sightless stare and focus my eyes in that direction instead. As if sensing my hatred searing into his back, Sam turned around, standing half in and half out of the doorway. He smiled indulgently at me, a father about to bestow some special treat on his child, and raised the lighter. With a metallic snap, the tiny orange seed reappeared in his hand. He stooped down and the seed bloomed, its germination drowning out the sound of my own hoarse yell. I caught one last glimpse of Sam standing in the doorway and then he was gone, slamming the door shut behind him with a clap of metallic thunder.

Chapter 3

I
must have blacked out after all, but it can’t have been for long, because when I came around the sirens didn’t seem much louder than before. Nevertheless, it had been long enough for the petrol to have caught fire right and proper. I opened my eyes to an inferno, the familiar surroundings of my workplace all wreathed in flame. Even as I watched, I could see the fire casually working its way over to the aisles that led to the back of the warehouse, much as I myself had done once upon a time. My vision blurred, but it was more than just the irritation of the heat and petrol fumes that made the tears flow; there was frustration there, too, and grief for George. There would be time enough to deal with these things later—or so I hoped—but at that particular moment, I had more pressing concerns. The threat of the fire burnt away my light-headedness and dulled my various pains, and I struggled to my knees, blinking away the tears.