Flesh and Blood (17 page)

Sarah’s features began to sag, to wrinkle, to age and shrink before my eyes. Her skin turned brittle. It split, like a map of rivers over her face. Her flesh peeled away. A skeleton sat opposite me.

The walls slid and folded, the floor beneath me opened up. Everything melted into other shapes, growing cold and dark.

I was on the bench again. The broken wooden bench outside the chip shop on the Elton Gardens estate. I was sprawled, one hand gripping the bench tightly and the other held out as if to steady myself.

“Bloody teenagers, getting pissed up.” A old woman shuffled by, eating chips from a folded-back paper package in her hand.

The clock inside the chip shop said quarter past nine. Only three or four minutes since I’d last looked.

They’d got me. “You belong to us, Sam Hunter,” Emma had shouted. They’d dosed me up. The journey to London, London itself, the radio station, telling my story, striking a blow against the Greenhills, all of it gone. All in my head. Three or four minutes.

No wonder they hadn’t chased me when I escaped from the basement. This was their plan. Nothing elaborate, none of the dramatic fates I’d feared. It was simply a case of sending me mad. Making me one of their patients. Keeping me locked up in my own brain.

I couldn’t hold it back any longer. I howled, my head in my hands, tears dripping through my fingers.

Sarah had been wrong.

I
was
alone.

I would not give in.

I would not submit.

I wiped my eyes dry with the sleeves of my coat, cursing my own weakness. Tears wouldn’t solve anything. I had to work out a new plan.

People came and went around me. The cold seeped into my face and fingers.

I dabbed at my nose. The yellowish stuff was barely there at all now.

Whatever they’d dosed me with, it wasn’t the same thing Emma had slipped me at the Halloween Ball. Until whatever drug it was wore off, the entire hallucination had seemed completely real, a world that was indistinguishable from fact.

It wasn’t the same stuff they dosed my parents and the neighbours with either. Mum and Dad weren’t seeing and hearing things, they weren’t living in a different world, they were simply pacified and
unquestioning. Besides, I’d already reasoned that the ‘medication’ used for them was something that needed to build up in their systems over time.

Whatever hallucinating state I’d been put into, it had cut in and cut out, quickly and completely. The effects had lasted only minutes, even though I thought several hours had gone by.

If the Greenhills were going to get me out of the way like this, by removing my ability to know truth from fiction, by keeping my mind looping around inside itself, they’d have to
keep
dosing me. Wouldn’t they?

Unless what I’d experienced was the after-effects of the tranquillizer they’d shot me with in the hallway? No, that didn’t seem likely. Why would after-effects suddenly start and stop like that, hours after I’d been shot?

They must have given me something while I was unconscious. Was that why Liam had still been out cold? Was that why Jo had been looking around wildly like that? Had she been in some sort of hallucinating state back there?

So why hadn’t I been like that, too? Why not in the basement? Had I been shot with another dart,
just minutes ago? Had someone sneaked up on me and jabbed me with a needle? That didn’t seem very likely either.

Unless the Greenhills had created a drug that sat around in your system and then suddenly took hold, I couldn’t see how…

I remembered something I’d read … or had I seen it in a TV documentary? About medical devices designed to deliver regular doses of medicine automatically. Small implants, embedded under the skin. What were they called? ‘Bioactive’ or something like that. They were surgically implanted into patients with chronic diseases, so that they could get exact amounts of medicines without having to be in hospital all the time. These devices looked a bit like big headache pills.

With a growing sensation of dread, I reached inside my coat and under my shirt. I ran my hand around my chest. I couldn’t feel anything odd. I squeezed along my arms through my sleeves. Nothing. It was only when I reached up to the back of my left shoulder that I found it.

There was a small, flattened lump. I could only feel it inside when I firmly pressed against it with
my fingers. With a shaky forefinger, I traced its shape. It was an oval about the size of one of those plastic cases SD memory cards come in, a plateau that rose about a millimetre above the surface of the surrounding flesh.

I sat still, with absolutely no idea what to do.

They must have done this to other victims. To keep them confused and quiet while they were imprisoned alive in the basement. They must have done the same to Jo, and her first dose had already been delivered by the time I regained consciousness in the basement. Mine hadn’t happened until more than half an hour later, when I’d escaped and was here outside the chip shop. Why? These devices must be set going at the time of implantation, so perhaps hers had been implanted half an hour before mine?

I’d been given one dose. That meant another could happen at any moment.

What was the time delay between doses? Days, hours, minutes? Was it random? Was that all part of the Greenhills’ trickery, making sure I’d never know if I was in the real world or not?

I had to get that thing out of me.

I jumped to my feet but I had no clue what to do. I was standing outside the shops, in the middle of Elton Gardens – how the hell was I going to have a surgical implant taken out of my shoulder?

The hospital was on the other side of town. It would take me at least an hour to get there, even if I ran. It’d be quicker in a taxi. I could return to the station.

Correction. I could go to the station for the first time tonight.

My blood ran cold. Even if I got to the hospital, how would I know that what happened to me there would be real? I might snap out of it three hours later, and find myself right back here, all over again.

I shut my eyes. That last dose had worn off only a matter of minutes ago. How probable was it that a second had already been released into my system? Not very, at a guess. The implant would quickly run out of its drug supply if the doses were that close together, wouldn’t it? I could be
reasonably
sure that my current surroundings, at this precise moment, were still real. The question was: how long would that remain true?

I had to get this bloody thing out of me
right now
!

I ran off along the main road. This was the route that all the Elton Gardens kids took to school, one that led to the giant roundabout by the supermarket. Cars flashed past, headlights glaring.

I dashed through the roundabout’s echoing underpass, its stark lighting encased in squat metal cages, its floor stained with chewing gum and puddled with urine and leaks from the roof. I raced up the slope to the car park outside the supermarket, past a scattering of late-night shoppers wheeling fully laden trolleys and unloading them into hatchbacks. As I marched hurriedly into the shop, the fat security guard in the entrance lobby eyed me warily. The bright interior made me blink for a few moments. Skirting round the fruit and veg, I looked up and down for the right aisle.

I found a wide display of pots, pans and utensils, next to shelves filled with food mixers and microwave ovens. I looked back and forth, back and forth, my mind apparently incapable of concentrating on the task at hand. After what felt like days, I spotted a row of kitchen knives dangling from extended hooks, each knife sealed into a rectangular plastic package.

I picked out one with a short blade and a point at the end. Slipping it off the hook, I marched back to the checkouts. I placed the plastic package beside the woman at the scanner, while I rooted for money. All the cash I’d taken from home was still there.

“Do you have ID?” sighed the woman.

“Sorry?” I snapped.

“ID, luv. For the knife. Are you sixteen or over?”

“Yes,” I said irritably.

She stared at me then and bleeped the package across the glass.

Clutching the package and receipt, I headed straight for the toilets close to the coffee shop. The heavy door swung shut behind me with a bump.

The washroom was empty. There was a row of six cubicles to the left, and hand basins to the right. The room was bathed in a sickly fluorescent light that somehow managed to be both too bright and too dim at the same time.

My hands shaking, and my breath coming in heaving gasps, I went over to the furthest basin. My reflection in the mirror looked awful. Hollow-eyed and thin-lipped, like an empty shell of skin, like someone near death putting on a brave face.
I sniffed hard and swallowed.

My fingers scratched at the knife’s packaging. How were you supposed to get into this bloody thing? I tried to tear it, but couldn’t. I bit at it, but it only hurt my teeth.

For Christ’s sake!

I snapped. I bashed the damn thing against the basin, over and over and over and over. Tears welled in my eyes. My mouth twisted into a grimace of anger.

The door swung back and a supermarket employee sauntered in. He saw me, turned on his heels with his eyes widening and left again.

I flung the package into the basin. It slid and spun around against the smooth white porcelain. I gripped the edge of the basin, my head hanging down, sobs wracking my whole body.

Stop it! Stop being a bloody weakling and do what you came here to do!

The packaging had split in a couple of places. I forced the sharp edges apart until I could finally pull the knife free and hurled the remains of the plastic across the room.

The knife felt cold in my hand. I stared at it for a
moment, my hands trembling.

How sharp is it?
I wondered.

I gently pulled the edge of the blade across the pad of my thumb. Blood welled up before I even felt the sting of the cut.

Sharp enough.

Trying to steady my breathing, I took off my coat and balled it up to one side of the basin. Then I unbuttoned my shirt and removed my arms from it, letting it flop down around my waist.

Holding my teeth together tightly, I twisted round so that I could see the back of my left shoulder in the mirror. The flattened lump looked smaller than it had felt. There was a bruise and a red mark at one end of it, where it had been inserted under my skin.

I dabbed at it with quivering fingers. There was almost no sensation of it inside my shoulder at all. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I might never have even realized it was there.

Steadying myself against the basin with one hand, I gripped the knife in the other. I leaned a little closer to the mirror, twisting as far as I could to get a clear view of the lump.

The knife shook in my hand.

You’ll never be a surgeon, huh? Not like…

An image flashed through my mind, of Emma firing the dispenser into my unconscious body.

Come on, time to take it out now.

Do it.

Do it!

I pressed the blade against my skin, at a point just below the lump. My hand wouldn’t stop shaking. I had to press my waist against the edge of the basin instead, and use my other hand to steady the one holding the knife.

Do it!

In one unsteady movement, I ran the point in a line underneath the lump. Pain suddenly crackled through me. For a moment, blood neatly defined the incision I’d made, then spread and ran in a broad trickle down my back. Bright, red, glistening.

Shit shit shit, why hadn’t I thought this through?

Leaving the knife beside the basin taps, I knocked open one of the cubicles and unspooled a thick wad of toilet paper. By the time I got back to the mirror, blood was soaking into the shirt round my waist.

I pressed the paper to the cut, but it stung so badly I had to remove it at once. For a second I stood there
not knowing whether to just fling it aside or not. In the end, I stuffed the paper into my waistband, where the blood was meeting my shirt, so that at least some of it would be soaked up.

I resumed my position in front of the mirror, and raised the knife again. If I cut under and to one side, would that be enough? Could I squeeze the thing out then? I’d have to make sure I pressed in exactly the right spot, or the dispenser would only be pushed deeper in. Should I cut all around, then?

The cut felt like a dozen wasps attacking me and the angle I was twisted at to see in the mirror sent drips of red splatting into the basin.

I pressed the skin above the cut, to see if the dispenser would move. A sharp jolt of pain made me stop, and a fresh welling of blood rushed out.

Oh shit. Shit shit shit.

Using both hands to steady it, I pressed the blade to one end of the cut, at ninety degrees to the first incision. Breathing as steadily as possible, I drew it across my skin. Up, across, down, three more cuts.

The pain hacked through my mind, screaming at me to stop. The horror of what I was doing kept hammering at me. Blood. Flesh. Running,
spreading, leaking out. Cutting human tissue, like a slab of meat, like
they
do!

I could hardly see the cuts, they were so smeared with blood. The knife, my fingers, the white basin – everything was covered.

I’d sliced a small, misshapen rectangle of skin. Trying to ignore the pain, I prodded at it with the point of the knife. The rectangle was gently pushed outward by the presence of the dispenser beneath. As I nudged at it, blood still oozing, it felt detached.

I cut at the edge. A little section of skin folded back. I shivered and trembled.

There was a glint of silver, in amongst the blood. My hands shaking, I turned the knife round, and pressed with the handle at the other end of the cuts.

The pain made me wince and catch my breath, but the silver moved. It definitely moved. I pressed slightly harder, moving the handle along.

Suddenly, the dispenser slipped free. I felt a weird sensation in my shoulder as it came loose.

It almost slid out, but rapidly coagulating blood kept it stuck to me. Carefully, I reached up and plucked it away, between thumb and forefinger.

With my other hand, I pulled out the wad of toilet
paper. It was heavy and red. I dropped it to the floor with a loud splat.

I held the dispenser up close to my face. It was flat and oval, as I’d thought. It seemed to be mostly a plain, dull metal, but on the lower surface was a circle of plastic, covering a tiny microchip.

I started to wipe the blood off it. The pain in my shoulder seemed almost irrelevant now, throbbing and writhing angrily, as if it knew I’d beaten it. I rubbed my thumb against the dispenser to get rid of the blood, but all I was doing was smearing it about.

My fingers were slippery. The dispenser popped out of my grasp. My heart stopped as I watched it spin and tumble.

It bounced against the washbasin with a loud ting. My hands reached out for it, but missed. It clattered around the bowl.
No, no, no, don’t lose it! Don’t let it drop down the drain!

Frantically, I jammed one hand over the plughole, and let the dispenser eventually bounce to a stop against it. I scooped it up and held it tightly in my palm.

I tucked it away safely. The notebook was in one pocket of my jeans, the dispenser was in the other
along with the cash from home. I had twice the evidence now. There’d be a quantity of whatever-drug-it-was left in the dispenser, enough to analyze.