Project U.L.F. (52 page)

“I missed him terribly but Grace was shattered. It seemed she was nothing without him. She lost her will to live, became incapable of looking after herself and died a couple of months later, of a broken heart, I guess.

“The flat was empty for maybe a couple of months before a couple of thirty-somethings moved in. They seemed nice, respectable, but they kept themselves very much to themselves, which was fine. They never bothered me, I never bothered them. We simply nodded our hellos.

“The first few months passed without incident, but then the shouting started, and the thumps and the screams. I’d see her with bruises on her arms and marks on her face, expertly touched up with make-up, of course, but when I asked her about them she’d lie to me. She’d fallen over or walked into a door, how silly of her. I knew she was lying to me, they were the same ridiculous lies my mother used. Crediting others with no sight or intelligence.”

“So what happened?” Kate finished the dressing and rocked back onto her haunches again.

Wyatt sighed again before continuing. “One night I got woken up about two or three in the morning. I don’t remember exactly, it all seems blurred to me now.

“I could hear him shouting and it seemed to go on and on. The she started crying, which only seemed to make him more angry, which is when the fists started flying. That’s when I got up.

“I got dressed, went outside and banged on the door. I wasn’t planning to do anything, just ask him to keep the noise down, and in doing so, maybe bring him to his senses, get him to lay off her a bit. He didn’t come to the door, just yelled out ‘What do you want?’ so I asked him to keep it down a bit. Other people had to sleep. ‘I’ll do what I goddamn like,’ he says, ‘Now piss off and mind your own business.’ That’s when I saw red.

“I don’t really recall much of what happened next very well. It seemed that all the hate I’d stored ready to use against my father came awake inside of me. A terrible dormant force I’d harbored deep inside had been brought to the surface. It seemed to infuse me with amazing strength, I kicked the door in without a thought and was inside the flat before I realized what I was doing. I saw her, huddled on the corner of the sofa, lips trembling, eyes wet with tears. And then I saw him. He had his back to me, but when he turned to face me I didn’t even register his features. I just saw my father.” Wyatt shook his head. “To this day I couldn’t tell you what he looked like,” he said distantly. He had stopped, retrospective.

“So what happened next?”

Wyatt was brought around by her question. As he looked at her, his eyes and mind seemed to focus again. “The guy came at me fast. It was frightening! He was bigger than I was and already extremely aggressive. I was cornered, caught in the narrow hallway, too scared to fight, too angry and proud to run.

“I looked around. Next to me was a large bronze ornament and I snatched it up. It seemed to weigh nothing; the rage infused me with a strength I had never possessed, nor ever will again. He came at me and I swung at him. I aimed to hit him in the mid-riff, torso or stomach, somewhere that would disable him but not do any lasting harm. He anticipated the swing and ducked but he wasn’t fast enough and we connected. One hit and he went down.

“One hit,” he said again quietly.

“You’d killed him?”

Wyatt nodded slowly, a grim expression on his face. “I prayed it wasn’t so. Shock brought my perceived world of the last few minutes crashing back into reality. It was like I had been blind and could see again. I leaned over the body and felt for the pulse, but it wasn’t there. He was dead.

“The woman went crazy, screaming hysterically, awful screams. I couldn’t understand it, I’d just saved her and there she was calling me murderer.”

“What did you do?” Kate asked.

“I ran. It was a stupid thing to do but I was young and scared. I had to get out of there. However you looked at it, I’d just killed a man. It was crazy. I mean, where was I going to go? I lived next door, for Christ’s sake. At best it was only a matter of days before the cops would find me, so I went back to the flat that night, where they were waiting for me and took me into custody.

“It went to trial, of course. Another murder case in Chicago that didn’t even make headlines somewhere.”

“Murder? But that’s ridiculous! It was self-defense, Wyatt!”

“But it didn’t look like that. Forced entry. An unprovoked attack, and I didn’t have a bruise on me. How could I claim he attacked me? He didn’t touch a hair on my head.”

“Surely the woman testified?”

“She did, but she crumbled under cross-examination. Like every battered wife, she still loved her husband, even after all he’d done to her, and refused to say a word against him. Her testimony was practically useless. It did nothing to either help prosecute or acquit me. With no other witnesses it looked like an open-and-shut case.

“My lawyer plea-bargained. They would drop the murder charge, which carried the death penalty, if I pleaded guilty to manslaughter, which I was really guilty of. So I saved my own life, but it was taken away from me again when they sentenced me to twenty years inside.

“Sometimes I wonder if death would have been better.”

“Wyatt, don’t say things like that!”

His eyes widened, seeing things from his past, from that time, searching for some justification for what had happened to him back then. Then they glazed and hardened and returned to Kate’s. “No one can tell you what it’s like on the inside. Oh, they can tell you, and you’d be horrified, but until you’ve actually been there and experienced it, you can never know what it’s like. I saw and was subjected to things that I will never talk about, to anyone. It was a living hell-on-earth.” His eyes seemed to burn into her, two hot coals of black as the chill descended around them. “That’s why I came here. They gave me a choice. Stay inside or get out early and have a reasonable chance of starting over again. It would mean facing death, but I would have a fighting chance. Not much of a choice, really, was it?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to, believe me, I wanted to, but there seemed no good time. We were never…alone.” He stopped, realizing the implications of what he was saying. “And when we were, circumstances never allowed.”

“Oh, Wyatt,” she said, rising to her knees and bringing her face close to his.

“Mind!” he said, cautioning her to be careful of his nose.

“Not at all,” she replied, misunderstanding him and placing a kiss gently on his forehead. “Not now that you’ve told me. Not now that I can begin to understand you.”

Gon-Thok stepped from the trees to their right, startling them both. It croaked and its breath plumed in the air in a misty cloud. For the first time Wyatt felt the cold despite a warm feeling deep inside. “Come on,” he said, taking her hand in his, “It’s getting late. We have to move.” She nodded and smiled at him and for the first time in a long time, he smiled back.

*
  
*
  
*
  
*
  
*

Chris drummed his fingers without thinking. Strategically placed glowsticks brought a faint light to the inside of the cabin, and were a point on which the eyes could focus. Apart from that, it was dark and cold. This was how it had been last night. How it would have to be if they were to survive. He was bored but he was not tired enough to sleep. Not yet, at least.

“You’re a bloody sociable pair,” he said and saw the others smile weakly in the darkness at his attempt at humor. He sighed and let his head fall back against the bulkhead. He had to try. Had to say something. The silence and boredom was driving him insane.

“How long shall we give them?” he asked.

“The others?” Bobby asked.

“Who else?”

“Before we do what? It’s hardly like we’re just sitting here waiting for them before we leave is it? Without them we aren’t going anywhere. We give them as long as it takes.”

He hadn’t thought about it like that. He’d thought that if Wyatt and the others hadn’t made it back then they’d go out again. Just keep trying. But they didn’t have the personnel or the means to do it. If Wyatt didn’t make it back, then it was unlikely that the alien would either. They would have lost their guide and would have no way of locating the DSM. This was it. Wyatt was their last hope.

The thought depressed him even further and the gloom seemed to feed on his mood. He sighed again. He wished he’d never asked.

*
  
*
  
*
  
*
  
*

The creature was suffering. Just as it had suffered in the harsh heat of the day, now the extreme cold was taking a dreadful toll on Gon-Thok. It had become lethargic and dopey, meandering around in front of them. It was in trouble, which meant they were in trouble too. As it struggled to put one foot in front of the other it suddenly spun on its heel to face them. It swayed like a drunkard, its head rolling around on its shoulders. Even the goggle eyes appeared to have difficulty focusing on them, the pupils shrinking and dilating in succession. “Mi…greb,” it managed in its alien voice, attempting to raise an arm and point a direction. Wyatt looked where it had indicated. There seemed to be no clear route through the forest, nothing to discriminate where they should be headed. The alien swayed its arm in the vague vicinity again. “Mi greb” it said again. It turned away from them and headed off in a different direction.

“Gon-Thok! Wait! Come back!” Kate shouted after it, but the alien never looked back and continued on its snaking route through the undergrowth. “Well, aren’t you going to go after it?”

“There’s no point. If we force it on with us, we will kill it. Either way we end up doing some of this alone.”

Kate looked distraught.

“It has to look after itself now. It’s done all it can for us.”

“But how are we going to find the shuttle and the others out here with no guide?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll…” Kate’s look stopped Wyatt mid-sentence. He paused and looked again in the direction that Gon-Thok had indicated. “I don’t know,” he said with a sigh. “But we’ve got no choice. Besides, we can’t be very far away now.”

*
  
*
  
*
  
*
  
*

They had been walking almost an hour since Gon-Thok had left them. An hour that seemed like eternity. The cold tightened around them like an icy fist, wringing the last of the heat from their bodies.

They had not spoken much. Their teeth were clenched in determination and their jaws were set against the cold. The silence between them gave them time to think and each passing minute allowed more doubt to enter their mind.

Each passing minute could be a minute spent walking in the wrong direction.

They could not even entertain the thought of being lost because if they were lost, then they were lost forever. Gon-Thok had indicated a direction and they had followed it, but the forest looked the same in all directions, especially at night. If they had strayed, only luck or the grace of God would enable them to relocate the shuttle.

Wyatt looked at his wrist for his watch. God, how he wished he had it now. With that watch he could navigate with ease. It would strip away this forest like a virtual chainsaw and leave him with a stark and barren landscape of lines and grids. An empty, imaginary world where two points could exist undisturbed by anything else. A world where those two points could be joined by a single straight line and described in simple mathematical terms. This tangible world only served to destroy that utopia. It just presented problems and hurdles that Wyatt didn’t want to deal with any more.

“Oh my God. I don’t believe it.” Kate almost sobbed behind him. “Wyatt, look.” She was looking through the trees to their right. Down the incline, through the tangle of trunks and branches, something reflected the moonlight.