Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (50 page)

Another crack, a small cry of pain and the girl’s voice ragged and angry.

“Shutup, just shutup.”

Duncan squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, the way he had as a child when darkness had frightened him, as if by not seeing it he could make the evil go away. But he could not stop his ears from hearing the pain and violation, nor his nose from smelling the blood or other smells he fought hard to put no name to.

He dared to slit an eye some moments later, only to see one of Bernie’s friends on top of the girl, who lay now facedown in the dirt and blood of the train. Her eyes were open, focused with an inner resource, on the bottom of his own shoe. ‘They are taking my body but they are not having my mind’ her grim stare seemed to be saying, but then she looked up at his face and her eyes met his own for a minute and he saw something so fragile and broken in her face that he felt as though he were witnessing the murder of a child. Then she looked away again, staring once more at his shoe. Duncan turned his head slowly away, an agony of pain shooting up his neck and into his jaw. The boy, Pat, she’d called him, was watching the girl, his eyes not wavering, though tears ran in endless streams, commingling with the drying blood to ghastly effect. He’d likely be better off if Bernie did kill him, poor bastard.

When the third of Bernie’s friends got on top of the girl and another took his place over top of her head, Duncan rolled over and threw up. The rest he mercifully blocked out. The sounds had degenerated from those of humans to mere animals taking their pleasure. From the boy and girl there was no sound.

An eternity later, the train came to the end of its journey. The doors opened and there was the sound of men fleeing into the night. Then he heard Bernie’s voice, a chill hiss, “I don’t forget either you dumb bastard, you might want to remember that next time you brutalize a policeman.” Duncan felt the air charge and stir in front of him. “Open yer eyes ye damn coward.”

He obeyed, one lid at a time, gingerly, carefully, terrified to the roots of his being of what he might find. The sharp point of a knife nicked at the base of his throat, Bernie’s breath was hot on his face, his hazel eyes electric with triumph. “No police, d’ye understand Duncan, I know where ye live, an’ I know where yer mam an’ dad are. Accidents can happen in all sorts of ways, don’t forget that Duncan if ye should go gettin’ any crazy ideas.” He stood, flicked his knife back into its casing and began to whistle a buoyant tune as he walked off the train and into the night.

Duncan took a shaky breath, the silence pressing in on his head painfully. A minute passed, then two and he heard a small scratching noise, a scraping, flesh on floor and a mute cry that filled the air, that seemed to rent it and rip into his skin.

“Stop it,” he begged, “stop making that noise.”

“No one’s making any noise and your friends are well shot of here so you can quit crouching in the corner.”

He turned to face her, she was kneeling, bloody, bruised and half-naked, but at least she was upright. The boy was not. His eyes were closed, his skin tinged a macabre blue under all the red and black, a stream of fresh blood trickling from a cut across his neck.

“Jesus God,” he breathed in horror, “did he cut his throat?”

“No, I believe he left his signature,” she said wearily and crawled across to the boy, clutching her torn and filthy shirt to her chest with one hand. She put two fingers to the side of his neck

“He needs help, you’ve got to go and get help for him, I can’t leave him like this, you need to go now.” Duncan winced from the harsh light of the train that backlit the girl, making her seem like some avenging angel, bloodstreaked, bruised and ivory-skinned.

“Me?” Duncan managed to squeak out through his bruised throat.

“Yes you, I cannot leave him alone, he might—he could,” she faltered, a long hard tremor shaking her body, the way a dog might a bone, and then with a visible effort to hang on to some shred of sanity she continued. “We haven’t much time, I can’t move him and it’s only a matter of minutes before someone finds us. That cannot happen, do you understand, it cannot. You must call the number I give you and ask for James Kirkpatrick, you cannot talk to anyone but him. Tell him Pat’s hurt very bad and that Pamela asked that he should come as quickly as possible. We’ll meet him under the bridge by the shipyards, can you remember all that?”

“Yes, yes I can, but do you think it’s wise to move him?”

“No, but we cannot stay here, if we stay here and someone finds us, it could go very badly for all of us, do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Noooo,” Duncan said slowly, though it was terrifyingly clear what she meant. She told him the number then, slowly and twice over and made him repeat it twice back to her.

“Here,” he said as he rose to go, “You’d best take my coat, it’s cold.”

She nodded, not looking up, her hand streaked and sticky with blood pressed hard into the boy’s neck.

It took five minutes, though it felt like five hours, to locate a phone, to assure the barman he was neither dying nor about to make a long distance call to foreign relations. He dialed the number slowly, reciting the numbers off as though they were a child’s nursery rhyme.

The voice that answered, on the fifth ring, was tired, annoyed and in no mood, Duncan suspected, to be running out into the night at the behest of a total stranger. “I’d like to speak to James Kirkpatrick,” he said trying for a strong and commanding tone.

“This is he,” came back the curt reply.

“My name is Duncan MacGregor an’ I’m callin’ fer Pamela or rather on behalf of her, I was to tell you that Pat is badly hurt, an’ I can vouch for that an’ that yer to meet us under the shipyard bridge, she said ye’d know where an’ that I wasn’t to tell anyone else, I was only to talk to yourself.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “Have you quite finished then?” asked the voice, still curt, but now with an underlying note of urgency.

“I have,” Duncan replied meekly.

“Is she hurt?”

“Yes, in a manner of speaking, you could say she’s pretty bad off.”

“You go back, you help her in any way you can and you tell her I’m coming.” The phone went down then with a sharp click and Duncan swallowed a lump of nausea in his throat. This was not a man to cross; however, Duncan also sensed this was a man that could handle the travesty of this evening.

It was three minutes hard run back to the train, where he saw to his dismay that the train had been moved off the tracks for the night and was shuttered in darkness. Dear God, were they locked in for the night? If so, there was hardly any way to get them out without raising one hell of a lot of unwanted attention. He glanced about wildly, half-blind with desperation and saw a dim flash of white. Beyond the lights of the train yard, in the phosphorescent blue of late night he saw her and, slumped, in her arms was the boy, still unconscious. He ran for them, head pounding, throat constricted.

“He’s coming,” he gasped out, stopping abruptly some two feet away from her.

“Do you know where the bridge is?” she asked desperation written clearly across her face.

Duncan nodded.

“You have to go and get him, bring him here, I cannot move Pat, I had to take him off the train and I’m afraid of what that may have done. Bring Jamie to me, please.” Her voice was pleading, her eyes bright with tears and he wanted to tell her that she needn’t beg, he would fly to the ends of the earth for her at this moment, he would run as far and fast as need be in order to flee from the images on the train. In order to grasp back something that he had lost irrevocably on the train, something inside of him that had turned its face in disgust and pain as he saw men become beasts and take far more from a girl than her body could offer.

It was a hard ten minutes to the bridge and when he arrived there he couldn’t speak, his bruised throat clutching for air, his legs feeling like jelly underneath of him. There was a man waiting beside a somber gray car, a man who stepped forward sharply and grabbed a heaving, winded Duncan.

“Where is she?”

Duncan gasped and flailed in the general direction from which he’d flown. He was thrust unceremoniously into the car and asked directions in a brutally direct voice. Duncan gestured and croaked and prayed with half his mind that they would make it there in one piece. However fast the man drove though was more than equaled by his precision. They were on the edge of the trainyard within minutes.

She was collapsed on the ground, still bare from the waist up, her coat gone to cover the boy, who lay frightfully still and inert on the ground. She gleamed there under the moonlight, blue, black, ivory, like some glowing, too fine jewel. The man went to her first, ripping his jacket off, covering her and then turned his immediate attention on the boy. He felt down his body, pressed his thumb into the boy’s wrist and then turned to Duncan,

“Give me your shirt.” Duncan obeyed without question, shivering as the night air hit his body. The man stripped down as well,  tied the clothing together into a crude, makeshift stretcher, then said,

“Duncan, you’ll have to help me, Pamela roll Pat up on his side, the right side, put one hand on his hip and one on his shoulder, we need to avoid his ribs at all costs, Duncan we’ll put the stretcher under him, then ease him back onto it. Gently and slowly.”

Duncan gratefully followed his commands, making each step and move as he was instructed until the boy, Pat, was lying on the back seat of the big gray car. The girl huddled in the front and Duncan was about to back away, head for home or the hills he cared not which, when the man’s voice stopped him cold.

“Get in the car. Until I know exactly what happened tonight and who did it, no one goes anywhere.”

It didn’t even occur to Duncan to make a run for it. There was that much authority in the man’s voice.

He sat in the front, the girl wedged between himself and the man, from the back there was no sound, not even that of breathing.

When they stopped at long last, Duncan gazed out in stupefaction, realizing quite suddenly what shock had hid from him previously. His father had shown him the house and told him the tales of it more than once. Kirkpatrick’s Folly. He’d never thought to be on the inside of it though and had he ever had such small daydreams, they certainly never included this sort of dire circumstance.

“I’ll need you to help me get Pat inside,” the man said and the knowledge of exactly who this man was, shook Duncan’s staid soul to the core.

For the next half hour, he followed orders precisely and without hesitation or thought. The boy (he tried desperately not to think of him as Pat, somehow him having a name made the situation that much worse) was moved inside, to a downstairs room obviously prepared for him. There was a small, gray-haired man present, whom Duncan realized shortly was a doctor. Only this house on the hill could exert the summons that would bring a doctor on a housecall.

He lost track of the girl (it was even harder to think of her without a name, but he was grimly determined not to, just the same) in that first half hour and sat finally when it seemed everyone had disappeared, waiting until the man (Lord Kirkpatrick, god help him) told him he could go. If he hadn’t been entirely certain that he would be hunted to the ends of the earth like a dog, he’d have run for it at the first chance.

He was completely disoriented and frightened by the whispering voices he heard upon waking some time later. It came back to him in bits, the events of the night and he had to hold his head in his hands for some moments to control the nausea that surged through him. He stood then, trying to locate the voices, realizing that they weren’t whispering, but just distant from him.

He walked down the thickly carpeted hall, towards the sound, individual words forming out of the up and down cadences of agitated speech. ‘Boy, stranger, not certain, multiple breaks,’ these words made themselves clear and then hesitating by a set of oak double doors, Duncan heard the conversation of the two people inside.

“Honestly James he should be moved to a hospital, he’s going to require surgery, who on earth is he? Even the pope goes to hospital.”

There was a murmured reply that Duncan could not make out and then a sharp intake of breath from the doctor and “well yes I can see the difficulties presented there, however we could make up a feasible story, it’s possible to the inexperienced eye that this could seem like the result of a car accident. We’ll take him in under an assumed name, I have to be certain that there’s no internal bleeding and that arm will need pins, it’s broken in at least five places that I can discern, heaven knows what will show up on x-ray.”

“And the girl,” came the other voice, hard and flat.

The doctor sighed before replying, “Less physical damage but Lord only knows what happened, she’s not saying much. She was raped multiple times though, I can tell you that. There are cuts in her mouth that would indicate—” Duncan plugged his ears and slumped against the wall. He didn’t need to hear what the doctor was saying, he would never forget what had happened to that girl on the train, that girl who had been laughing, green eyes shining at her friend and then only moments later had been kneeling on the dirty floor of the train, naked, mouth forcibly opened by the blunt, brutal hands of Bernie, opened to receive him in terror and disgust. Duncan felt the nausea sweep him again and unstopped his ears. “…left her with some antibiotics to deal with any secondary infection, stitched the tear in her vaginal wall—took four stitches that. She’ll have to be checked again on a fairly regular basis, god knows what sort of venereal diseases those animals might have and of course there’s always the possibility of pregnancy. She’ll need help, Jamie.”

“She’ll have it,” was the terse reply.

“Fine, be certain she takes the antibiotics. I want to see her again in a week, here if that’s better for all concerned but now I have to arrange to get that young fellow to hospital.”

“We’ll follow later,” the man named Jamie said.

“Not to hurry, he’ll be unconscious for quite some time,” there was a deep breath, whether the doctor’s or Jamie’s, Duncan could not tell, and then, “this is really a police matter, if it should somehow get out of my hands at the hospital...”