The Sleeping Dead (11 page)

“Help me,” Susan said.

He shook his head and laughed at the idea that he could help anyone. What had he ever done to warrant that trust?

“Can you hear anyone?” Susan screamed at him. For a moment she reared up.
Don’t kill me.
The thought came from nowhere and surprised him twice over—because he wasn’t sure why he was afraid of Susan, and he hadn’t believed there was any part of him that still wanted to live.

She seemed to grow taller, to expand, and then as quickly collapse. She dropped to the ground and curled into a ball, her head tucked into her chest. She sat in the middle of the road and wept, and Jackson wanted to fall down beside her and do the same.

“Come on,” he said, pulling at her arm. It was like trying to move a child. She batted him away with an open hand and continued crying.

“You can’t just stay there.”

“Why not?” Susan’s words were muffled, but he understood them well enough. He didn’t have an answer. If she stayed here, he’d have to stay with her too. And if they stayed too long… He could feel the voices battering against him. He clenched his teeth and grabbed Susan. They had to keep moving.

He dragged her down the center of the street. It occurred to him that the same scene played out five hours earlier would have attracted an audience of hundreds and no doubt someone would have intervened to save the little lady from the brute. Not now. Now he could grab her by the hair and drag her from London to Edinburgh and no one would notice.

“I can’t do it, Jackson.”

“You have to.”

“I can’t.”

Jackson looked around him. There was no help.

He sat down on the pavement beside her.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you.”

He could feel Susan’s body pressed against his arm. She was cold. No, warm. Hot. No… She put her hands on him and tried to push him away.

“No. If you’re staying, so am I.”

“That’s not right. You can’t do that.”

Jackson shrugged. His own opinion was that right and wrong had stopped being an issue somewhere around eleven o’ clock that morning, right around the time Laine bashed his way through the window with his forehead.

“You can’t make me responsible for your death,” Susan said.

Jackson shrugged. It worked with Donna sometimes when they were arguing. Don’t try to find the right words. Don’t try to explain. Just…shrug. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it made Donna so irate that the spat would descend into all-out war. But he didn’t have anything else to offer Susan at the moment. He shrugged, held his tongue, and waited for her response.

“I didn’t ask you to save me,” Susan said.

Jackson held back on the sense of outrage. The desperate urge to point out to Susan how she had treated him when they had first met in the stairwell.

“I don’t need you to look after me.”

Jackson shrugged and looked away from her. The car closest to them was a black Mercedes. The smoked glass windows prevented him from seeing inside and his imagination provided a diorama of the passengers within, staring out at him with blank eyes.

He didn’t know Susan. Not really. He waited for the silence to wash over her.

She lurched forward, struggled to her feet and started walking down the road. “Bastard,” she called to him over her shoulder without looking back.

18

There was something disturbing about walking these streets. Maybe because he had been in town when
it
happened, as if it was happening somewhere else, to someone else. Now he was almost home and everything was familiar, it was harder to pretend he wasn’t affected.

On this side of the park the roads were tree-lined. Large Victorian houses dotted the path, half-hidden behind tall fences or black stone walls. Curtains were discreetly drawn on the secrets they contained inside. They passed one garage and Jackson was sure he heard the low hum of an engine behind the closed door. He said nothing, and Susan didn’t mention it.

“It’s on the other side,” he told Susan, feeling the need to distance himself from these large houses. From the corner of his eye he could see her nod in response. She’d been quiet for most of the journey and when he tried to engage her in conversation, it had fallen flat. The words had sounded loud and too large in the silence and after a while he had given up.

They turned right. In the middle of a row of houses was an ugly square block of red brick. Jackson was shocked, and then embarrassed by his own stupidity—he had forgotten how close they were to the office. It had never occurred to him that he would have to pass it on his way home.

“I work there,” he said. “I mean, I used to work there. I suppose…” But he shut up because he felt the meaning of his words twisting and he no longer had control over what he was saying. He crossed the street to get closer—checking right and left before he stepped off the pavement and then laughing at himself at the unnecessary caution. There was an almost morbid fascination with seeing the building and knowing what it must be like inside. He tried not to think of the people he had worked with, or what had happened to them.

He looked up at the second floor of the building.
God, it was ugly.
It had no redeeming features at all. It was as if the architect had realized what an impossible job he had taken on and simply thrown up his hands in horror and declared, “I give up.”

“Second floor. Three windows in.”

He wondered what it would be like inside. Would he find Jimmy and Peter swinging from the ceiling? Would they all be there, one last communal act that he had missed. He thought about Fiona sitting in reception. He’d worked there nearly two years and yet every day she still acted like she’d never seen him before. There were some things about the building he wouldn’t miss.

“Come on,” he said, almost to himself, as if he realized he was the one that needed encouraging.

Jackson walked with his head bowed, staring at the pavement in front of his toes. He didn’t want to see any more. He wanted to get home, see if Donna was there, and then… But he wasn’t sure about the
and then…
yet. He assumed the problem was global. Maybe he would be proven wrong. Maybe it was local. Or national. But that didn’t feel right. It felt more honest to believe that if he and Susan were not the last two people in the world, then they were among the last few. How many? A hundred? A thousand? A million, spread across the world?

He saw the gates to Westdale Park. A small child hung from them, strung up on a length of twine that was wrapped around her neck and Jackson knew in one glance that the child would not have been able to complete the act on her own. Her accomplice must have been a parent or a stranger, and he wasn’t sure which was worse.

He wondered what he would find in the park. Lovers, hand in hand, facedown in the paddling pool? There was enough broken glass in the corners of the old BMX track to drag across thousands of fragile wrists. With imagination, the park offered any number of different ways to kill oneself.

He had come here with Donna last summer. They had packed a bag for an impromptu picnic. Donna had been wearing the blue dress she had bought for her sister’s wedding. Jackson remembered the feel of her skin under his hand as his fingers trailed up her bare thigh, higher and higher until Donna had laughed. “Not now. Not here.”

Jackson hesitated on the threshold of the park. Maybe he should take the main road and protect the memory of that summer day. Every memory of Donna was now precious.

“Are you okay?” Susan asked.

He shook his head. No, he wasn’t okay. He couldn’t be okay. Just inside the gates he could see the tarmac path that wound through the park. Farther inside was the brooding outline of the cricket pavilion—all broken glass and cigarette stubs around the entrance. In the shadows he saw a figure sitting on the ground. He wanted to believe it was a drunk sleeping off a Tungsten-powered binge, but even from this distance he understood he was looking at another of the sleeping dead.

“We can go round,” Susan said.

Jackson shook his head again. He recognized his stubborn streak. Taking the road wouldn’t add more than a few minutes to the journey; and there was no reason to rush. Time was irrelevant—either Donna was at the house or she wasn’t.

“No, this way is quicker.”

He noticed Susan looking at him and he wondered what she had picked up on. He didn’t wait to find out. He bustled ahead of her, shoulders hunched up, glaring at the gray tarmac as he hurried across the park.

He tried not to look into the children’s play area as he passed. From the corner of his vision he noticed feet protruding through the gate. Small feet. Shiny pink plastic shoes.

He passed the bandstand and was relieved to discover it was empty—no one hanging from the rotunda.

He found them in the stream. Facedown. The water was no more than a few inches deep and it had taken a determined effort to drown in such shallow depths, but they had managed. Corpses clogged the narrow channel, but at least he couldn’t see their faces. He saw an elderly couple—the man in a gray overcoat had his hand gently pressed into his wife’s back.

He saw parents with their children. He saw young couples and singletons, businessmen and women. He saw everyone who had been in the park at the moment when the horror had struck.

“Let’s go.” He felt Susan’s hand on his arm, pulling him away from the stream. He snatched his arm free of her and whirled, filled in an instant with fury.

“Don’t you see them?” he shouted at her. “Don’t you feel?”

“You can’t help them. Not now.” Susan’s voice was soft, calm. Sad.

The rage blew out as quickly as it had arisen, replaced with a hollow emptiness. The sense that nothing mattered anymore. Jackson turned his back on the dead bodies and trudged through the park.

19

It was only five minutes. No longer. He’d made the journey with Donna hundreds of times. Five minutes from the house to the park. And yet on this occasion it felt like the distance had tripled. The quality of daylight fluctuated, the sun dimming and then growing brighter. At one point Jackson was sure he heard voices, but he looked across at Susan and she didn’t seem to notice, so he said nothing.

He noticed the smoke before they left the park. It clung to the back of his throat so that he could also taste it. Thick, greasy smoke. As they neared the gates, he could see dark clouds rising up over the row of houses that backed onto the park. Whatever was burning was not far away.

As he got closer to the gate, he realized the direction the fire was coming from and yet he still tried to tell himself it didn’t mean anything.

He increased his pace. He stared at the park gates and, once he was through them, he picked another target to focus on. He had to get to the end of the street. He had to reach the post-box or the lamppost or the house with the black door. Small victories that stopped him thinking about the cloud of smoke that hung over all the streets around him.

Even from a couple of streets away he could hear the crackling sound of the fire. And maybe he could feel the heat of the flames, although he thought it was probably his imagination. The smell was stronger now. His pace increased in direct response to the presence of the fire.

By the time he reached his own road he knew he was not imagining the heat. It brushed against his cheeks.

Most of the houses were already burning. Flames licked from the windows of the properties closest to him while those farther away, in the middle of the street, had soot-stained brickwork and black-eyed window frames. He wondered how long they had been burning and guessed that even when he was sitting in the offices of MedWay Associates his house had been aflame.

Ash fell from the sky like dry rain. It coated the pavement and the parked cars. Jackson breathed it in. He walked along the center of the road and felt the intense heat emanating from the burning buildings. He could feel it drying up his eyes, evaporating the tears before they had a chance to form. The hairs on the back of his hands shrank into wired curls.

He stopped outside number 79, although it was almost impossible to tell whether he was really looking at the right house. There was nothing left to distinguish the building from its neighbors. The paint had bubbled and peeled from the door. The plastic window frames had melted and dribbled down the brickwork. But he
thought
this was the right house.

He wondered if this was where the fire had started. If not at number 79, then one of the houses close by. Donna was inside. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he was confident he was right. If he waited for the heat to die, he could go inside and find the charred remains of the woman he had loved.

Jackson put his hands over his face to hide the image from his eyes, but there was no use because it was there, it would always be there; a memory stronger than the recollection of his hand on Donna’s thigh on a bright summer day.