Strangers in the Night (15 page)

Mitts reached out and took hold of Luca’s hand. She was trembling. He glanced about himself. To the kitchen. To the tiling. To the appliances. Everything had been kept so clean. “Do you live here alone?” Mitts asked.

Luca nodded.

“Doesn’t that make you feel lonely?”

Again, she nodded.

It was as if something possessed Mitts then.

His eyes latched onto Luca’s.

The gap between their lips closed.

Just as Mitts felt their lips brush together, Luca spoke up.

Her voice was only just above a whisper.

“There’s something you need to know.”

“Hmm?” Mitts replied, still stuck in a haze.

“Samantha, she protects people. That’s what she does. She stayed up with you all night, didn’t she? Slept in that armchair beside your bed?”

Mitts drew back from Luca.

He looked into her eyes.

She went on, “She does the same with everyone. Everyone who comes in under the same conditions that you did. That
I
did. The first few times that we brought people into the Village there were . . . there were . . .” here her lips trembled again “. . .
suicides
.”

Mitts felt his blood run cold. “You mean, on the night . . .”

“Yes,” Luca said, cutting him off, “on the night that they were saved, that they were brought here, to the Village, they decided to finish things, that they had already gone through too many changes, that they couldn’t
manage
another one.”

Mitts held himself still.

He thought about Samantha.

How her snoozing away in that that armchair beside his bed had seemed an almost homey scene.

But now he knew the grisly truth.

Samantha had been worried about him.

Worried that he wouldn’t be able to take any more.

Mitts turned back to Luca. “You thought that I might . . .”

“The first night is always the hardest, if it’s going to happen that’s when it usually does . . . that’s why it’s important not to leave anyone alone, to make sure they have company. And Samantha takes on that burden for herself.”

Mitts really had no idea how to react to this information. What he was
supposed
to do with it. Perhaps he wanted to point out that shoving people into a cell as soon as they arrived to the Village wasn’t the best way of putting them into a positive state of mind.

But, catching a whiff of Luca’s perfume, he decided to say nothing.

He was certain he had smelled it before, but it was only now—now that he had left behind the sensory overload that had been his milky tea—that he could properly acknowledge it.

Lilacs.

Sweet and clear.

Natural.

As Mitts moved into Luca again, feeling his mouth moisten as he drew closer, she spoke to him, in a voice at a husky whisper. “I’d like to show you some drawings,” she said, “of things I’ve seen.”

Right as their lips touched another time, Mitts felt vibrations passing through the floor of the cottage. At first the thunder was distant. And then it was close.

Deafening.

What sounded like a whole convoy of trucks.

Full-sized
trucks
.

Once again, Mitts drew back from Luca, looked at her with a panicked stare.

What was this?

What was going on here?

But Luca had nothing to say.

Knuckles pounded the front door.

The door flew open.

Someone screamed for them to get down.

A gunshot spat through the air.

Sam America pulled his overcoat hard about his body. The chill of the wind was almost unbearable. It cut him down to the bone. He had been wandering inland for what seemed like months.

Despite the time, he could still taste the salt from the sea breeze.

Could still feel where the sea spray had stripped the moisture from his cheeks.

Whenever he removed his overcoat, and looked down at the stars-and-stripes design emblazoned on his clothing, he couldn’t help but see the worn-out material.

Feel a sense of pity.

It would never be quite as brilliant as it once had been.

The worst part of Sam America’s journey inland was that he had found nothing—nothing except for the ever-present mud underfoot, constantly slipping beneath the tread of his boots.

It seemed almost as if the world was escaping this reality, and turning to another.

It was days like these—thoughts like these—that made Sam America wonder if the world truly was lost. Was he fighting in a manner which had long ago ceased to be effective?

The village had been unexpected. But, considering that the
expected
for Sam America was the grim rainy days—the slightly sour, acidic burn of raindrops running down his face—the unexpected was to be embraced.

Sam America trod over scrap metal, wood, all these little pieces that had been salvaged, nailed together—
welded together
. This had been a last stand, of a sort. One last try for the humans who had dwelled here, in these, surely once delightful, tumble-down cottages.

Sam America walked among the rubble.

He had no idea what he was looking for.

In all his journeying throughout the land, he hadn’t found so much as a single soul alive.

Not a
human
soul, in any case.

But he couldn’t quite let go of hope.

Because it was all he had left.

As Sam America trod over the broken-up bricks, listened to glass breaking beneath the tread of his boots, he heard, over his shoulder, a cough.

Thick, and full, and
alive
.

COUGH.

COUGH.

SALTED WOUNDS

. . .
C
OUGH.

Mitts flinched awake.

The world seemed to press in on him from all sides.

His brain felt almost numbed.

As if somebody had cracked open his skull and wrapped his brain in cotton wool.

Mitts glanced about him.

The steel bars.

The letterbox-sized window beyond, and high up on the wall.

He was back here.

Back in the prison cell.

As he eased himself upright once more, Mitts felt a slight twitch of pain in his side, from that gunshot wound. But he forced himself up straight. To sit on the edge of the bunk. When the soles of his feet touched the cold floor tiles, he realised that he had no shoes, or socks.

He glanced about his cell, and saw that—indeed—there were no shoes in his cell, either.

He thought back to what Luca had said, about Samantha being worried about the new arrivals going crazy and killing themselves.

Did they think he might attempt to hang himself with his shoelaces?

Now that Mitts took in the cell for a second time—now that he seemed to have his senses together a little better than last time—he noted how he was lying on not much more than a concrete block.

A flimsy mattress laid flat over the surface.

Only a brown, washed-out blanket to keep him from the cold.

He felt his temples pulsing.

He reached up and massaged the afflicted spots with his fingertips. It was what he would do whenever he woke up feeling a migraine coming on . . . usually the result of some strange dream.

Like the one he had just had.

Rays of sunlight gleamed in through the window. As if to torment him, the scent of cooking chicken wafted into his cell.

Even the hint of the buttery water they boiled the meat in brought the juices rising in his mouth. He could hardly bear to sit still.

So he rose.

Up to his feet.

And he stood at the bars, peering out, as if he might be able to see something—
anything
—at all.

But he was alone here.

Only the objective, uncaring concrete surrounding him.

He reached out and wrapped his fingers about the bars, trying to work out just what had happened. Why he had been brought here. Why that group of armed men, led by Samantha, had stormed Luca’s house.

Samantha had given him the run of the Village, hadn’t she?

She’d said that he ‘wouldn’t get far’ if he tried to escape.

So why had the reaction been so extreme, so
brutish
?

He reached up and felt the back of his head. He found the spot where one of the men had beat him with the grip of his gun. There was a welt forming there. Just brushing his fingers over the surface sent a shudder of pain through his stomach.

So he stopped.

They had knocked him to the floor.

While he’d lain there, sprawled out, helpless, someone had wrestled him from behind; smothered a damp cloth over his mouth and nostrils.

The smell had reminded him of disinfectant, but it had been stronger.

Much
stronger.

It had seized hold of his mind, turned it around and around until it surrendered to darkness.

And to dreams.

The latch on the door jerked.

Its mechanism emitted a fingernail-curling
scrape
.

Mitts breathed in deep—down to his lungs.

He expected to see Samantha appear there, in the doorway, but she did not.

Neither was it the muscled man.

Or—as Mitts had hoped—Luca.

It was someone else.

Someone Mitts hadn’t seen before.

Mitts took the man in.

He was quite short.

Stocky.

Tanned skin.

Like everyone else in the Village, he wore a dark-green tank top, black jeans.

But this man’s clothes were in better shape than most.

His boots were shined up.

He had a sidearm holstered at his belt.

Unlike the muscled man, who had used the waistband of his jeans to stow his gun, this man had a nice, crisp leather holster for his weapon.

The clasp, which kept the weapon secure in the holster, had been left undone.

Mitts didn’t believe this was a mistake.

As the man approached the bars, the door—seemingly of itself—slammed shut behind him.

The man padded toward Mitts, his boots creaking as he went.

He snorted up some phlegm and spat it out.

A blob of spit splattered the floor.

Mitts felt a little of its wet spray against the tops of his bare feet.

As the man stood before him, only a few centimetres dividing the tips of their noses, Mitts breathed in the scent of musk, and of cologne.

He supposed this man took pride in being
masculine
.

“Dag,” the man spat.

The man—
Dag’s
—glare was intense.

Mitts was so taken off guard he almost missed the outstretched hand sticking through the bars.

He took hold of Dag’s hand.

Dag gave him a brutal shake.

At first, Mitts tried not to show discomfort.

Pain
.

But, in the end, he realised that he wouldn’t be let loose until he’d shown weakness.

Submission.

Mitts flinched.

Dag smirked, then released Mitts’s hand.

He turned his back to Mitts and glanced up, casually, to the window above. “Not much of a view, huh?”

Massaging his afflicted hand, Mitts replied, “No, not really.”

Dag kept his back to Mitts.

It seemed as if Dag was creating some sort of mental itinerary of the holding area. As if he was worried Mitts might make off with something and he wanted to be able to call him to account.

Finally, pursing his lips, Dag turned around.

In the sunlight, Mitts finally got a good look at Dag’s hair, at the tone of it.

A greenish-brown colour which, in the right light, might’ve been called bronze.

Or
sewage
.

“Listen up, okay,” Dag said, “I ain’t gonna bullshit you.”

Mitts felt Dag’s intense eyes on his own.

Dag was several centimetres shorter than he was. But several years older.

Perhaps a few years into his thirties.

He guessed, like a lot of short men, Dag had made a pledge to himself that he wouldn’t allow his height to affect him.

He had little doubt that, if he tried anything, he would find himself pinned to the floor in a matter of seconds.

That gun pressed to his temple.

Dag swabbed his tongue about his mouth, picked out something inside his cheek, wadded it into a neat ball of spit and gobbed it out behind him.

At least this time he was polite enough to turn his head when he spat . . .

Mitts stared at the revolting speck of spit on the concrete floor, and then he forced himself to look back at Dag.

“Now,” Dag continued, “we went on up to the Research Centre, got the orders that you were holed up there for a good time.” He paused, stared into Mitts’s eye, point blank. “Correct?”

Mitts nodded.

Dag stared him down.

Mitts realised, for someone like Dag, a nod wasn’t an acceptable response.

In the end, Mitts croaked out a weak, “Yes.”

Dag went on. “We reached the Research Centre at approximately twelve-hundred hours, and proceeded to scout the perimeter.” He glanced at Mitts for a second. “Previously, when we had gone to inspect the Research Centre, we did not know what other kinds of security measures there might be at such a location. So we took the decision to place a DND.”