The Dead Boy (23 page)

            'Sir,'
said O'Dell.

           
I
should be happy. But I'm not.

            Any
minute now...
now
...come on...
now
...

           
'O'Dell.
Excellent work. I understand there is a slight discrepancy, however, in the number
of remaining test subjects...the telepaths? Missing one, are you not, Mr.
O'Dell?'

            How?
He'd only just worked it out. How the fuck did he know?

           
Come
on...come on, Redman. Now!

            'Sir.
Soon sorted. I'm not concerned.'

           
'I
am concerned, though, O'Dell. I am. And if I'm concerned, so are you.'

            'Of
course, Sir. Of course...'

           
Wayland,
you cunt.

            O'Dell's
voice remained smooth, but beneath his jacket his fist twisted around the
handle of his automatic.

           
'Perhaps
the time has come to take a greater hand in affairs.'

            'That
won't be necessary. I have it in hand. I assure you...I...'

           
'Are
you interrupting, Mr. O'Dell? Fucking with my flow?'

            'I
wouldn't dream to...Sir.'

           
'Remember
who you are. You are who you are because of us.'

            O'Dell
kept his mind still and calm. Yet, inside, in the deeper parts of his mind,
Wayland Redman's face leered. Wayland...

           
US.
That word grated on his nerves, but he couldn't grasp the reason. All he
could think and feel was rage, at Wayland Redman.

           
Wayland.
I promised you an eternity of pain if you fucked me.

            He'd
deliver. Sure he would.

            'Sir,'
he said on automatic to something he hadn't heard.

            Then...silence.
The line was quiet.

           
US.

            A
second of silence on both ends, as O'Dell listened for breathing, or Wayland's
tortured breathing...but...
nothing
.

            O'Dell
kept the phone against his ear. Redman had to speak first. There could be no
mistakes.

            'O'Dell?'
Wayland's voice. O'Dell was, for an instant, happier than he thought he could
ever be because of a lunatic like Wayland Redman. But only for an instant. That
discrepancy finally sank through to him.
US.
The boss said,
'US'.

            But
he hadn't...had he?

            Was
he mistaken?

            'Wayland.
Good man. I was beginning to think...'

            'Beginning
to think, were you? First time, is it?'

            'What?
Redman...you know what I can...'

            'Yes,
yes. I know all right. But you won't. You're done, you fucking nutjob,' Wayland's
laugh drove spikes into O'Dell's brain. 'You double-crossed yourself, you crazy
bastard.'

            Wayland's
words drifted away. A flash of memory, and with it O'Dell's usual, crushing,
anger. He was, for a second or two, back there...then. He remembered the look
of the hole that ran down to the bullet that meant salvation. He remembered the
steel against his forehead, his finger, trembling on the trigger.

           
I
wanted it.

           
His face had
been wet before he pulled the trigger. Wet before the blood came...
before
memory died
.

            Why
now? Why now?

           
I
should be here, in the present. Find Wayland. Cage him, make him immortal, cut
the limbs from him and pull his fucking eyes fucking...

            'Wayland...nowhere
is far enough. I'm going to hurt you so badly your mind will fucking break. I
will...'

            Spittle
flew from O'Dell's mouth. He ranted and raved and roared, his eyes red and his
voice breaking, sore in his chest and throat from the effort and his rage. His
heart pounded, hard and heavy, sweat ran down his scarred forehead and into his
eyes and still he swore hatred into the phone.

            Wayland
said nothing until O'Dell slowed for a beat.

            'You
done, cuntface?'

            'Cunt...face?'
O'Dell's mouth dropped.

           
He
couldn't have. Redman? Calling me...?

            'Yeah.
You, O'Dell. You know I'm looking at you right now? And you know what? Your
face. Looks just like a cunt. You know that?'

            O'Dell
felt stupid, slow. Confused. He was the one who ran the show.

           
'No
longer,'
said the Boss.
'We run this show. US.'

           
But those words
were beneath Wayland's horrible, cheerful insult...they both arrived at once,
overlapping, impossible.

            One
voice through the telephone.

            One
in his head.

           
'No, dickhead.
You think I'm there, watching you on a monitor, a camera, something? No. I'm
looking at your jabbering face. I'm looking at you on a screen, sure. A bank of
monitors, O'Dell, with your ugly-cunt-mug plastered across all of them and
thousands of those dead kids you had me take...and people before me, too, eh?
How long? What is this? Like some kind of computer? The kids like a hard drive,
or a CPU...you know what? I don't fucking care because it's the funniest thing
I've ever seen and a good joke's worth dying for. Best. Joke. Ever. I don't
need a gun to kill your
boss
, O'Dell. I just need to switch them off.'

            'What
the fuck are you...what...?'

            'Your
boss is you, O'Dell. You made it. The tower, the kids? They all serve you. Do
they tell you want you want to hear, O'Dell? Oh, daddy, you're so fucking
smart. Oh, daddy, we want to be just like you. Cut out our brains, just like
yours. That scar's so cool.'

            'Wayland...'

            O'Dell
staggered against the counter, put his palm down to steady himself. A shard of
the broken mug sliced his hand, but he didn't feel it.

            'You
always were a crazy bastard...this is...fuck, man...you're
such
a
lunatic. You  killed the world
on your own
. You told yourself what to
do, didn't you? Built this computer out of those weird kids to help you out and
believed in your own madness...I'm nuts, O'Dell. I don't think there's even a
word for what you are. You're the man who killed the world. Who would have
believed it?'

            'You're
lying. You're
lying
.'

            'Really?
Then fuck you about that, too. Well done, O'Dell. Give yourself a hand. Don't
believe me? Here. Ask yourself.'

            There
was the voice again. Tinny, like it was coming through a phone...but...

           
'O'Dell...we've
been talking and you haven't been listening, have you?'

            'Sir...Sir...are
you...?'

           
'Spit
it out, man. I never took you for an idiot. Something to say, say it.'

            'Sir...'
O'Dell's head reeled. He didn't want to talk anymore. He wanted to lay down,
somewhere quiet, somewhere dark. Let the flashing lights in his head become
still again. The fire he saw all the time, the flare of gun powder, the great
fires that burned in the cities of the world, the flames flicking high from the
forest...

            'Sir,
are you me?' This last, he whispered. Hating himself, his weakness, his
trembling legs.

           
'O'Dell,
are you losing the plot? Of course we're you. We created each other. Don't you
remember?'

            'Wayland!'
he shouted, his voice quavering, sudden panic. 'Wayland.'

            'What?'
said the man, a smile in his bastard voice.

            'Shut
it down. Shut it down...kill it...pull the switch...
please...'

            'Fuck
you, O'Dell. Fuck your computer, fuck your kids and your great big mad brain.
And you know what? Find me, bring me back, torture me. Because I'd like that.
An eternity spent laughing in your face sounds just fine to me.'

            'Wayland!'

            But
no matter how long O'Dell shouted into the phone, Wayland would still be gone.
O'Dell shouted until his voice ceased to work. Then he remembered what he did
to the man named Fenchurch. And he remembered how he built the most powerful
computer in history over the course of more than fifty years across three tower
blocks made from children with powers just like his.

*

XVIII.

Various Means of Escape

Once,
Eleanor Farnham was a dead woman in a tomb, waiting to rot. A cadaver that
moved, but really, it was little more than electricity and idiot impulse. Now
she was alive, she had become a woman buried in error, clawing at the lid of
her coffin. She survived on nothing but water. The hole in her skull, the flesh
they sliced from her for their microscopes and laboratories began to mend, and
as she healed some semblance of intellect returned. Her coordination, perhaps,
taking longer, but still far faster than a child might become accustomed to the
use of its body. She wasn't learning but remembering.

            A
flash of somewhere sparsely lit, the place where she slept when she had been young
with a small light and paper she held and read late (Hardy...Boys? 'Small' and
'Light' comparisons, images, feelings, rather than words). A sense of herself,
who she was and who she became stemmed from this. The concept of her, as a
person, as an entity.

            She
scraped the metal implant from her skull on the window all the time these
things drifted into her thoughts, and while they floated away.

            Brief
images of people. Parents. More dimly there were grandparents, teachers,
friends, bullies, the lollipop lady who helped children cross the school when
she'd been shorter. Herself, smiling.

            She
recalled herself from the past, from the bottom up, childhood and on.

            A
gouge grew in the window. Shallow, yes, but a mark.

            Perhaps
days later, perhaps just hours, the mark became deeper still. A valley, the
edges etched and dirty, like a rough cut diamond.

            Later,
she recalled a time surrounded by yellow metals, white metals. Stones that
glinted like glass. Her, smiling, a man beside her. A ring on her hand.

            Her
hands were bare and dirty. There was nothing upon her finger but blood and
dirt. Her long nails, grimy and dull, that had snapped and torn over and over
again. She dredged back that memory of her hands as they'd been in the past. It
was a
nice
memory (warm, comfort, fullness...). The metals and stones
gleamed, so had her nails. Her hands had been clean.

            Eleanor
stopped scratching at the window and dropped the implant to the floor. She
walked on steady legs that at last felt they belonged to her to the tap she
only drank from.

            For
the first time since rising from her thin grave in a lost and forgotten field while
metal still smouldered in (rain...water like this but from up high...) she no
longer remembered, Eleanor understood something like pleasure. The feel of that
crisp, cold, filtered water over her sore hands. Dirt, sweat, blood, all of it
washed away from her hands. She rubbed at one hand with the other, and saw that
this sped the feeling. She was aware of the coolness against her skin and the
relief from the aches in her flesh. Even the cuts she hadn't realised were sore
felt...

           
Better.

            Getting
well.

            I
am...healing.

            She
cupped her hands. Then, not knowing why, she filled her hands and splashed the
water against her face, on her hair, and she gasped at the cold. Soon after,
she stood naked and dripping, most of the soil washed from her body. Some
clung, couldn't be reached or loosened with cool water alone. But...

            'Nice.'

            She
jumped at the sound of her voice, silent since those early days when she had
tried to please the people who cut her...tried to make them happy so that they
would stop.

            But
they hadn't.

            Her
stomach growled at her, and she knew it was hunger. While she healed well, she
was weaker. Her efforts on the window were becoming less effective, each
scratch hurting the glass less.

            Healing
took fuel. Food was fuel. Water was life but food made her move. And soon, she
wouldn't move. She would die like before. But not come back, because no one
would bring her food. There was no one.

            She
remembered O'Dell, but did not know where the other people went - the ones who
were
sorry
and carried knives and secateurs
(clippers...calipers...scissors?). She hadn't seen them leave, and she could
hear nothing outside her home unless the bad people let her.

            But
after no sound from outside for so long, when a sudden and awful, unbelievably
loud
noise broke through to her home, she threw herself to the floor and covered her
ears. It wailed, and over it there was a voice so huge she could not help but
feel small. The voice thundered through Eleanor's head and tears sprung from
her eyes. Her hands did nothing to shut it out. Her eyes flicked, her movements
fast and sharp. Something changed. The wailing voice and the piercing noise grew
louder.

            She
didn't hear the click of the door as it unlocked, but she'd been in the same
room for more than two months. She knew it better than she knew herself and she
felt the change in the air. The noise was louder, now.

            Eleanor
turned around and around, until she saw it - that tiny slice in her home that
hadn't been there before. A split between her world and the worlds where people
were sorry.

            A
doorway to someplace else.

            Her
curiosity proved more powerful than fear. Scuttling across the floor, flinching
at each gargantuan and misunderstood word, she reached the door and pulled
rather than pushed. Some innate understanding of the mechanics of small things,
or just luck - but perhaps, sometimes, powerful forces push luck where it needs
to go.

            The
door came toward her.

            She
frowned, tried to think.

            A
word danced before her, an elusive memory.

           
Free?

            On
her hands and knees and slowly, slowly, Eleanor looked out into a new world,
one clean and white and full of sound.

            Bright.
Huge. New.

            Wonderful.

            Perhaps
wonderful
meant the same as
free
. She crawled carefully over some
of the Sorry People to find out. They looked like her, now. Smelled worse,
though, and they weren't getting up, and she wasn't sorry about that.

*

The
human body is remarkable. Sometimes it heals. Sometimes it cannot, but still
strives for life, long after it should be dead.

            After
the tower block, after O'Dell, Wayland should have been dead. But he made the
stairs, then, the car. He drove without a thought to where he was heading.
South, he thought. He drove through the destruction and the endless, freezing
rain, or sludge, and sometimes snow. England no longer made sense to him. He
knew England well. He'd travelled long before O'Dell and his jobs. Many years
after, too.

            But
he could have been anywhere at all. For a short while, he kept the phone beside
him in the hope that O'Dell would call him. He wanted to laugh again. It felt
good. But O'Dell didn't call, and the further he drove, the less brave Wayland
became.

            The
pain was a constant thing, now, a throbbing that settled into his hips and
spine, the kind of pain so overwhelming it swallowed thought, wave after wave.
The further he drove, the less he remembered. He hadn't pissed in two days. He
didn't want to. Such a thing, he thought, might kill him, though he was wrong.

            The
fact that he hadn't, and wouldn't piss - that was killing him. Infection was
already rife, and he was warm. His insides were failing, and delirium rode a
nightmare steed somewhere below the horizon.

            His
bladder leaked, but between his wound and his cancer, he thought it was just
blood. Either way, the little that seeped did nothing to empty him.

            The
petrol gauge dipped but he saw a break in the landscape ahead and took the
first road he could find toward that nothingness. It looked like a good place
to die.

            He
ended up at the northern banks of the Thames River. He didn't know it was a
river. It might have been the sea. Visibility was down to maybe a hundred
yards, and the first real snowstorm since the end was settling in. Snow that
blinds and steals away the land, leaving behind only white and cold.

            He
nearly drove into the water before he found a small jetty that stood behind a
wooden house. Probably someone's summer house, or maybe it was a boathouse. The
boat at the end of the jetty wouldn't need a house. A small boat, an outboard
motor. Looked like there might be a cabin, beneath the deck. Somewhere to lay
his head and wait to die.

            He
stumbled from the car and found the snow he pushed against soothed his fever.
He boarded the boat and when he did, he pulled the lanyard to the motor. He did
so with no real goal in mind. The thing started. He jumped, startled, swayed
and fell against the side of the boat. That pain was fresh and sent him down
into insensibility, but just for a short time.

            Woozy,
but within the relief of what was now delirium, Wayland Redman loosed the ropes
that held the boat against the jetty and headed off, out into the water. Maybe
he'd hit France, maybe just drift and starve. Either way, he'd die. But not by
O'Dell's hand.

            The
only thing Wayland was sure of right then was that when he died, he wouldn't be
coming back.

            His
eyes couldn't focus, but he found the phone in his coat pocket. He took it out
and threw it into the poisoned water, then turned the little boat out to sea.
The sea and Wayland both were mad and ragged, but Wayland's madness was good
humoured. He howled out his laughter as the heavy snow and the spume plastered
and froze his lank hair to his head.

*

Klaxons,
the woman's droning and repetitive voice - both were heavy enough in the tight
corridors and hallways of the underground shelter to make O'Dell's ears pound,
close to rupturing. He paid the discomfort no attention as he headed for the
exit. He dropped the fob to the command console on the floor.

            He
wouldn't be coming back here. Why would he? Everyone was dead.

           
They're
all dead,
he thought. Or, at least, someone thought for him. Forces that
made luck, maybe, or pulled when others pushed.

            '
All
personnel are to evacuate immediately. Leave personal belongings behind.
Proceed to the nearest elevator. '

            'Facility
shut down in five minutes.'

            'All
personnel...'

            The
noise meant nothing to O'Dell. The voice in his mind drowned out the
announcement.

           
It's
all falling apart. All falling down.

            On
automatic, O'Dell opened the elevator doors and stepped inside. He chose the button
for the car park two floors below ground, but several floors above his head.         

           
You
think you let the boy go? You think you found the boy? It wasn't you who found
him. It was US. You know this is true. You know...

            The
voice in his head spoke and O'Dell didn't want to listen. It was not his
friend. He hated it, even though they'd only just met. He had no choice but to
listen, though, because it was in his head and US were louder than any alarm.

           
You
don't even remember US, do you? You're insane. You don't remember yourself.

            '
Fuck
off,'
O'Dell thought, though he didn't realise he spoke out loud.

            The
elevator's motors hummed along the cables that pulled it up toward the surface.
His knees buckled as another flashback hit, more powerful that those that came
before.

            'Fenchurch.
Give me your gun.'

           
Fenchurch,
blank, passing a gun from a briefcase to O'Dell. O'Dell pulling the trigger.
Fenchurch falling.

            He
came back to himself, rocking and using the wall of the elevator to keep
himself from falling.  

           
When
you die, we'll be there. We'll watch you...like watched us.

            '
Fuck
you!'
he shouted
. 'Fuck you! I don't know you.'

           
We
are not you. We are US.

            You
tried to put yourself aside. You never could. We are not you. You are not US.

            WE
ARE US.