Strangers in the Night (12 page)

He was trembling.

All over.

He was losing blood quickly.

He could feel blood dampening his suit.

Trickling down his spine.

Down the backs of his legs.

The coppery smell of blood—
its bitter taste
—filled his airways.

His mind had got away from him.

It was almost as if it’d been a dream.

Or as if, for the past few minutes—had they been hours?—his brain and body had become divided.

His mind operating on another plane . . . that superhero figure again; that
Sam America
. . . while his body . . . his body had . . .

Finally, Mitts managed to reach the battery-powered pack.

He flipped the switch.

Tick. Tick. Tick
, went the mechanism.

He could breathe again.

He marched on his way, out of the Compound, across the cement.

Clutching his side, his breaths came hard and shallow.

As Mitts stumbled through the hole he had cut in the wire fence, he was dimly aware that the sun was out. And that its rays streamed down. He felt them warm the space between his shoulders.

Gently—
ever so gently
—cooking him alive.

Every step, he was losing energy.

He was certain that, sometime soon, he would lose the ability to put one foot before the other.

But he found the drive to keep going.

To keep himself going.

He
had
to.

As Mitts had lain on the floor of the Autopsy room, he had felt the pain shuddering through him.

He had felt the hot, sharp sensation digging into his side.

From the bullet.

And yet, he had still felt that strength—the same strength which had been visited upon him when he’d first come across the creature—when it had been alive.

Mitts had known that he would only get one chance.

And that he couldn’t make a mistake.

As Heinmein had stood above him, he had explained how he had murdered every member of Mitts’s family.

How, when Heinmein had noticed Mitts had gone missing, he had put the gun to each one of their heads and—
simply
—blown them away.

They had all been dead by the time Heinmein had shone the spotlight.

At that moment, Mitts had felt his fingers forming fists, quite aside from his inner will.

It was a wonder that he hadn’t launched himself onto his feet.

Had a go at pummelling Heinmein with his fists.

Right there and then.

But he had found a larger inner strength.

Patience.

To play the waiting game.

Mitts had waited for Heinmein to draw close, and then, with a single rush of blood through his veins, he had kicked out, caught the back of Heinmein’s leg, sent him plunging backward, the gun firing off a shot into the roof of the Autopsy room.

Mitts recalled how he had winced when the back of Heinmein’s head struck the drawer which contained the specimen.

For a long few seconds, Mitts had felt his pulse pumping hard, working to accompany the pain he felt pounding away in his side as blood eked out of him.

Mitts thought about Heinmein’s face, about how he had lain on his back, his mouth opened in an eternal yawn.

The worst part of it—the
very
worst part of it—was that Mitts had been right all along.

About Heinmein.

About
not
trusting him.

But none of his family had seemed to feel the same danger, none of them seemed to have slotted the pieces together as Mitts had.

Realised that the reason their neighbour, Heinmein, the strange old loner across the road, had chosen them over all the others on their street, was because they were a family.

Because he had known, somehow, that Mitts’s mother had been pregnant.

Because he had known he could perform his experiments.

In peace.

Mitts thought about how Heinmein must’ve had some sort of advance-warning system set up throughout the Compound. He had known that Mitts had slipped out of the Restricted Area, and that he was planning to leave.

Mitts supposed he hadn’t been subtle in his escape efforts after all.

And when Heinmein had caught wind of Mitts’s fledgling escape, he had panicked, decided there was no reason for keeping Mitts’s family alive any longer.

Not if Mitts himself was planning to abscond.

Only now, as Mitts felt his trainers crunch on the dirt outside the fence of the Compound, did he realise that he had been Heinmein’s experiment all along—all through these seven years.

Despite his father’s well-intentioned demands that Heinmein leave Mitts alone, Heinmein had merely been biding his time.

Waiting.

With Mitts alone, in the Autopsy room, his family already dead, Heinmein had clearly panicked.

He had had no idea what to do now that his pet science project was so determined to leave.

To escape him.

Once Mitts had checked on Heinmein’s pulse, felt that skittering sense of loathing tingle all over the surface of his skin, he had opened the blast doors to the Restricted Area.

He had checked every one of the neat bullet holes in each one of his family’s foreheads.

Just as Heinmein would’ve wished it.

Clean, clinical.

Concluded.

On his way back out of the Compound, Mitts had found some medical supplies.

From one of the first-aid zones.

He had done his very best to disinfect the wound, to patch himself up with gauze and cotton wool.

As far as Mitts had been able to tell, the bullet hadn’t lodged itself in his side.

But, among all those text books, there had only been basic first-aid care guides.

Certainly nothing to do with the surgery a bullet wound would—
surely
—require.

Mitts plodded on.

He could feel a few tears coming now.

Each one of them welling up in the corners of his eyes, hanging there for seconds before rolling down his face. He wished he could go back. He wished that he hadn’t left at all.

It might all have been different if he hadn’t become so decided, made it such a definite, unshiftable decision that he would leave.

He could’ve played along, continued with his routine within the Restricted Area.

His family surrounding him.

None the wiser.

And Heinmein would’ve been placated.

Happy to wait—
perhaps forever
—for his human specimen.

But Mitts knew the truth, that, sooner or later, Heinmein would’ve tired.

And, as was clear from his desperate action in the Autopsy room, Heinmein had no real question of conscience about whether he got his specimen dead or alive.

As the sun continued to beat down, the sports bag which Mitts lugged over his shoulder became almost like a lead weight. He had the urge to simply cast it off—to chuck it into the dirt which surrounded him.

But he told himself that he needed the supplies nestled within.

That if he didn’t have the batteries for his suit then his life-support systems would soon run out.

Mitts slugged on for another few steps before he realised that—
really
—he couldn’t care less whether he lived or died.

Because, if he did live, he would have to experience those images: the images of his dead family, staring back at him every single day.

Every time he closed his eyes.

Until he died . . .

Why postpone time?

What was the point?

There was no world left any longer.

Feeling the sweat pour down his face, and the pain in his side become almost too much to bear, Mitts swung back his arm, getting up momentum, and then he thrust forward, hurling the sports bag off into the air.

Sending it tumbling.

It landed with a puff of dust.

And Mitts dropped to his knees.

He lost himself to the heat.

And unconsciousness.

* * *

When Mitts awoke he could hear voices.

Distant
voices.

Voices through walls.

For a second—for a
hopeful
second—he thought he had dreamed it all. That the nightmare hadn’t played out in reality.

Before he opened his eyes, Mitts felt a smile find its way onto his face.

Sometimes his dreams were so real—so
lucid
—that he couldn’t quite manage to convince himself that
dreams
were all they were.

Mitts opened his eyes.

His vision was bleary.

He could smell . . .
bacon?
. . . it had been so long since he had smelled bacon.

In the Compound—in the Restricted Area—there had been no meat, for obvious reasons. Only powdered substances. Tin cans of vegetables, pulses.

Mitts felt his stomach quiver out of anticipation.

He wondered if his mother had managed to dig up some bacon from
somewhere
. . . or, perhaps, as Mitts had often fantasised, someone had come to save them.

Maybe it was a group of soldiers, with fresh supplies for survivors.

Could it be that they weren’t all alone in the world after all?

Mitts blinked several times, trying to bring the world clear.

He was lying on his side.

On a bed . . .
not
his camp bed back in the Restricted Area.

His stomach dipped.

First of all, he brought the foreground into focus.

Bars.

Grey, steel bars.

Mitts stared at them. Unable to believe it.

But then he told himself he must.

A cell.

A jail cell.

He peered through the gaps in the bars.

A small, confined corridor.

Concrete walls.

A heavy-looking steel door at the other end.

There was a tiny, letterbox-sized window high up on the wall.

He caught several golden rays of sunlight—
sunset?
—glimmering through the gap.

For Mitts, it was almost blinding.

He held his forearm up to shield his eyes, and felt the burn at the back of his eye sockets. His brain felt as if it was retreating into the recesses of his skull.

He glanced about himself.

Over his prostrate body.

He traced the outline of his body beneath the frayed, brown blanket which was draped over him.

He glanced down, to the floor, to the
stone
floor.

His trainers had been neatly placed there. One pushed up against the other.

A sock stuffed into each.

He glanced about for his sports bag, but couldn’t see it anywhere.

Then he remembered he had tossed it.

He had thrown it away as he had fallen to his knees.

He breathed in deeply, trying to stir something within his body, to bring on some sort of recollection.

So, his dream had been real.

It had all happened.

But, if so, then where was he right now?

All he could remember was giving up—
having
given up
—and how he had lain down in the warm dirt, and just drifted off with the . . . with the . . .

He reached for his side, where he had been shot.

He realised that though he had been stripped of his overalls, and of the shirt he had worn beneath, he still had on the plain, white t-shirt, and his jeans.

When he danced his fingertips across the wound, he felt a severe pain.

He stop touching it.

Feeling pain throb through him, he took extreme care to peel back his blanket.

He tilted his head and looked down at his midriff.

His plain white t-shirt had turned a brown-red shade.

When Mitts touched the material, it felt crusty.

Hands trembling, worried that he might send blinding pain skittering through his body, he reached down for the hem of his t-shirt.

Working carefully, he prised his fingertips beneath the material.

Ever so slowly, he peeled it back.

Mitts held his breath as he worked, as he gently unrolled the t-shirt from his stomach.

As he brought his t-shirt up further and further he caught sight of a virginal, white bandage.

One which’d been strapped about his wound.

He stared at it, wondering how it had ended up there.

Who
had dressed his wounds?

There wasn’t so much as a speck of blood on the bandage itself, though his t-shirt was sodden with dried blood.

At the periphery of his hearing, he heard the
creak
of hinges.

The gentle tread of booted feet.

Mitts rolled his t-shirt back down over the bandage, but not before he heard a snide voice saying, “Not a bad job even if I do say so myself.”

Mitts turned his head to look.

A girl.

About his age.

Maybe a couple of years older.

Blond.

Blue-eyed.

Thin . . . her throat sharp as a razor’s edge.

She wore a dark-green, sleeveless tank top which was tight against her compact breasts and abdomen.

Underneath she wore a pair of black jeans which, Mitts saw, had had the kneecaps slashed off.

She pursed her lips, causing the skin around her mouth to wrinkle.

Mitts couldn’t help noticing the trio of scars which ran—almost like a three-fingered claw—down her left cheek.

“ ’Bout time you got up, don’t you think?” she said.

Mitts’s gaze drifted and he saw, now, standing at her elbow there was an enormous guy—he had to be at least thirty, and he was probably twice, if not
three times
, Mitts’s weight.

All muscle.

Like the blond girl, the muscled man wore a dark-green sleeveless tank top and black jeans.

He clutched a handgun, down at his thigh.

Although Mitts knew next to nothing about guns, he could tell, from the look of the handgun’s beaten-up casing, that it’d been through an awful lot.

Had a lot of use.

“Hey? Up here, numbnuts.”

Mitts turned his attention away from the muscled man.

Back to the blond girl.

The girl was still smiling wryly. She paced up to the bars of Mitts’s cell and then nodded in the direction of his midriff. “How you doing?”

Still stunned about where he was—and with about a million questions on his mind—he tried to haul himself up into a sitting position.