The Dead Boy (7 page)

            Shock
covered any sorrow, fear overrode any compassion. Revulsion, though - that
still roiled, somewhere low down that took her breath and stole her energy.

            The
policeman said nothing. Francis knelt down and felt his pulse, suddenly sure
that he was dead. But he wasn't dead. Just passed out.

            'Shit,'
she said. She sat next to him, not worrying about dirt on her expensive
trousers, or the cold.

           
What
to do?

            She
didn't know. Any action might be wrong. But she was tired, and that didn't
require any kind of mistakes.

           
Lay
down
, she thought. It sounded, to her, like the most sage idea she'd ever
had.

            For
a few minutes, maybe ten, she lay in the dark listening to the man's breathing,
the fire and the sirens, a distant fire alarm, random gunshots. Eventually, all
the sound went away. Francis shut down. Her adrenaline fled. She fell asleep in
the dirt.

            When
she woke her clothes were damp with rain and the night, and it was light. She
curled up, like a baby might, facing the policeman. He looked at her as she
opened her eyes.
Slightly cute,
she thought, before remembering why she
was nestled with a stranger among these trees, in this dirt that stank of ash
and burned rubber.

            A
slight turn of her head was all it took to completely ruin this new day. A
soldier in black clothing and black mask and a serious black gun.

            He
flicked his head.
Up.

            Maybe
he couldn't talk with the mask on. The message was clear enough.

            'Fuck,'
she said.

            No
way the policeman could stand. She was sure the soldier would shoot them before
he helped. She dragged him up. He cried out. In the new daylight, his misshapen
leg became obvious.

           
Broken
leg? Maybe he's tougher than he looks
, she thought.

            The
soldier wasn't moved by the policeman's pain. He said nothing but spoke with
the barrel of his rifle - they had no choice but to go where it pointed. 

*

George
Farnham woke on his second day of captivity someplace unfamiliar. Barren walls
of crumbling plaster. Concrete floors caked with excrement, maybe blood. A
rusted metal cot bed with a stained mattress on which he had slept.

            A
bare single bulb flickered like it was on its way out.

            The
man with fire in his eyes stepped forward, so that as George looked up from the
bed the light was directly behind the man's head. It might have looked like a
halo on someone else. Instead, it threw his grinning face into shadow. George
thought maybe that grin was always there.

            'Hi
there, George! My name is Kurt William O'Dell,' he said, with a false and
frightening voice that didn't sound happy at all. 'All my buddies call me Mr.
O'Dell, though. Have a question for me, George? Mate? Buddy? Got a question?'

            George
wanted to go to the toilet. This wasn't the friendly joking thing that his Dad
sometimes did. This was the mean kind of joking.

            'Go
ahead, young man. You may speak.'

            O'Dell
sat beside George and tried to pat the boy's knee. George scooted back up the
filthy bed to get away.

            The
man didn't bother to move at all. Where was he going to go?

            'Where
am I?' said George.

            'You
like it? Welcome to your new home. Nice, isn't it?'

           
No,
thought George.
It's evil.

            'Yes.
An evil place, George. It is mine, though, so please be mindful of that. And of
course I know what you're thinking...just like you can pick up some of what I'm
thinking too, can't you?'

            George's
face gave him away.

            'Tell
you what, George,' said the man. 'Let's play a little game, shall we?'

            George
didn't want to play any game with the man, but he didn't get a choice.
Immediately, the name of the place came into his head. Normally, it was like
hearing tiny voices, but the man was shouting in his head and his mind-voice
was powerful and strong.

            George
thought about maybe trying to get the name wrong. Maybe the man would let him
go if they didn't think he was special...

           
Who
are you kidding?

            Himself,
he knew. He couldn't kid this man. Couldn't fool him, couldn't outwit him.
Couldn't win. Besides, he was an adult and George was just a child.

            'Where's
my mum?' he said, instead of saying the words that the man shouted inside his
head.

            'Dead,
George. I'm
so
sorry,' said the man with the wide grin.

            George
knew the man told the truth.

           
Dad...and
mum...

            He
thought he'd burst into tears, but he held them in. He wouldn't cry.

            But
something else whispered to George...

            The
man with fire in his eyes
thought
he told the truth. He believed
it...but that truth he plucked from O'Dell
flickered
. And that was the
strangest thing, a thing he'd never experienced with this gift before; uncertainty.

            'Now,
I've been a good sport. How about you tell me the name that's in my head? No
more fucking about.'

            The
swear came with venom. Like a slap, and then, on its heels, the man thought the
name of the place again with such force that a small trickle of blood ran from George's
nose and he cried out in agony. A stabbing, deep pain, that hurt from the base
of his skull right into the back of his eyes.

            'The
Mill! It's the Mill...please...'

            'Please
what?'

            'Please
don't shout.'

            The
man - O'Dell - nodded. 'Very well, George. Very well. Rest up. Big op tomorrow,
eh?'

            George
didn't register what the man had said until the door was closing, and then, an
image from the man's mind that still lingered.

            George
knew what the 'big op' meant. He knew what was going to happen, and there was
nothing he could do about it.

            Yet,
George frowned in concentration. Tears would come later. But that something
else he felt, or simply was given to understand, niggled at him. Like trying to
remember how to reset the chain on his bike, or pluck a difficult spelling from
the air.

            Uncertainty,
yes. But while he'd been in the man's mind, a mind that seethed like snakes
might, sliding over each other, George thought he'd taken something away with
him. That perhaps Mr. Kurt William O'Dell might well hold all the cards, but
George was sure the man with that nasty grin had no idea he was simply playing
solitaire.

*

Mr.
O'Dell scratched at the back of neck while he spoke on the phone. When he spoke
or smiled his teeth were on show, just like the small scar on his forehead. It
was part of who he was, a facet of the landscape of his face, like a ruby
birthmark or a pair of glasses might be on another man.

            Sometimes,
he forgot things - random things, unimportant things - but never the big
picture. The grin came with the puckered scar on his forehead and the nerve and
brain damage from having a bullet lodged in his brain. A two-for-one deal.

            Sometimes
his hands shook. The pain in his head was constant. But since the bullet seemed
to have triggered the remarkable awakening of his particular talents, he bore
it stoically.

            Just
like he bore the idiot on the other end of the phone.

            'The
boy is officially an orphan,' said the man on the phone. 'I saw her myself,
Sir. No doubt.'

            Mr.
O'Dell was happy with that, because he'd felt what George felt - uncertainty -
and he hadn't liked it at all.

            Happy
at the outcome, for sure, though not so much with the man on the phone.

            'You
did kill her?'

            'No.
Jess pulled the trigger. Shot her in the head,' said the man, speaking of
Eleanor Farnham, of course.

            Mr.
O'Dell worked at something stuck in his teeth, and scratched the back of his
neck again. Damn, he had the fidgets.

            He
stilled himself. It took a colossal amount of willpower to work against his own
body. His hands, his feet, his neck and head...all of him wanted to jitter and
jive. But he gritted his teeth, silent on the phone for a moment, and then he
was back in the game.

            'So...we
have complete containment?' he said, finally.

            'Yup,'
said the man.

            O'Dell
grinned some more. 'Good.'

            A
clean sweep. The supermarket, the motorway, the buses...everything exactly as
it should be. Exactly as he'd hoped, he'd planned, and
known
.

            'Go
and do something useful, then,' he said, and put down the phone.

            Everything,
absolutely everything
, he had achieved came thanks to that single bullet
in his brain and the power it gave him - the power to read minds, manipulate,
to foretell the future.

            For
a second, O'Dell's head swirled at the thought of what that one small calibre
bullet had granted him.

            He
was about to remake the whole fucking world.

            He
didn't realise it, but as he dreamed the future in his head, his feet tapped
crazily under his desk and his right eye drifted as he seized. Petite Mal - yet
another gift from that bullet.

            He
was entirely unaware of the episode, but as he often did, O'Dell came around
swiftly. The seizure passing, nothing but a tired residue to mark it. O'Dell
still grinned, and his teeth ached, but then didn't they always?

            He
nodded to himself and decided on a new course of action. The future might be
what he made it, but he felt more than happy to tinker along the way. He dialled
an internal number and drummed his fingers, though he waited a few seconds for
the man on the other end to answer.

            'Doc?
We're moving it forward. The boy's powerful, and I don't trust him. We're doing
it tonight. And the specimens from the field trial? Incinerate them. We don't
need them.'

            He
put the phone down again. Grinned and scratched and felt, somewhere deep down,
that perhaps, just perhaps, he was missing something.

            'Nope,'
he said to himself in his grim office in the basement of the Mill. 'All present
and accounted for.'

*

The
place called The Mill was full of so many souls, so many minds; the battered
and abused, the crippled and the blind. Then, too, the dark memories of the men
and women who worked there. George found it difficult to draw his thoughts back
into himself, travelling as it was through the miasma and tumble of fancies and
sorrow inside The Mill.

            When
George opened his eyes again, his emotions reeled from his trip into O'Dell's
remarkable mind. His young bright blue eyes - bloodshot now, from the effort - regained
focus slowly.

            The
operation to come was huge in George's mind. Like a mountain that blocked out
even the sun. But he strove, hard as he could, to pull all the things he
learned from the minds around him, into some kind of shape he could understand.

            One
thing he knew for certain - there was no chance an eight year old boy could
escape The Mill alone. He was small, and weak, and slow. He was tired and
frightened, surrounded by soldiers with long guns and short guns and no
conscience at all. He knew these things because he had seen inside their minds.

            They
would shoot him dead and worry more about the loss of a bullet.

            What
he couldn't know for certain was if he could get someone else to help
him...maybe even reach out and make someone save him.

            It
was something he'd never tried, nor had he ever thought to try. Why would he?
It was a bad thing to do.

            But
now?

            He
thought his dad and mum, in heaven or wherever thoughts went, would understand that
he was left no choice at all. If he didn't try, he was dead.

            Did
he have enough strength left to do it, even if he could?

            '
Won't
know just by wondering, will you?'