Strangers in the Night (26 page)

After Carla had left, an escort entered. He served Mitts dinner on a plastic tray. The cutlery, too, was plastic. The escort stood over him as he ate, watching each and every one of his gestures with great care. As if any one might be the killing stroke.

One thing was for certain, if Mitts
did
attempt to slash his throat with the plastic knife provided, it would take hours.

Once he had finished up dinner—a damp quiche accompanied by some over-boiled vegetables—he lay back on one of the beds, staring at the ceiling.

He remained like that until the sun rose.

Until its rays beamed in through the window.

Although he was weary, and would’ve liked nothing more than to drift off to sleep, the thought of having Carla back inside his unconscious mind prevented him from so much as closing his eyes.

What did they want him for?

How had they known about the dreams?

How had they known about
Luca
having the same dreams?

Outside, Mitts heard a truck pull up.

He didn’t get up.

If they wished to keep him here—like some
zoo animal
—then he would make sure he was as
uninteresting
as possible.

As
unhelpful
as he could manage.

They could take nothing from him now.

Only his life.

And he wasn’t even really sure he had
that
any longer.

A little while later, Mitts heard the door slide open again.

Even the simple reaction of getting to his feet seemed like a minor defeat.

He wanted nothing short of a total mental shutdown.

He wanted to
ruin
their experiments . . . whatever they were.

Mitts examined the pair of figures in the doorway.

A man and a woman.

Both wore the escorts’ uniform.

The woman—Mitts realised—was Samantha.

Samantha turned to the escort. She insisted that she be alone with Mitts.

After a brief hesitation, the escort relented.

The door shut on him.

Leaving him outside.

For a long few moments, feeling sleep almost overcoming him now, Mitts regarded Samantha.

Her blond hair.

Her blue eyes.

How she wore the same navy-blue uniform as
them
.

He thought about how she had tricked them all.

Made them all think her dead.

While she had been alive.

Samantha gave Mitts a faint smile.

He didn’t smile back.

He eyed the bruise on her forehead, but said nothing about it.

“We’re the only survivors,” Samantha said. “Aside from the two escorts. The ones down by the water’s edge—the ones who captured you.” She paused for a moment, looked Mitts hard in the eye. “What’d you think about that?”

“Who set off the bomb?”

Samantha gave a slight shrug. A vague pout. Then she looked out the window.

To the dawning day outside.

“Dag.”

“
Dag
?” Mitts said, almost choking his name out. “But . . .
why
?”

“Because,” Samantha replied, “he always thought that I was going to come back. He had to have some sort of counter-attacking measure.”

Mitts shook his head. “I don’t understand . . .”

“Dag knew a lot more than what he let on, Mitts. He knew all about this place—all about
these
people. He knew that, when he let me go, I would most likely end up in their clutches.” She smiled faintly. “And so it turned out. He obviously felt that there was a good possibility I would come back. He couldn’t handle the idea of losing control of the Village; the control which he had won at last.”

“If you knew about the bomb why didn’t you do something to prevent it?”

Samantha shook her head. “I knew nothing about the bomb. Nothing about what Dag had planned, really. But there was something we needed from the Village.”

“Me?”

Samantha tilted her head to one side.

Broke off his gaze.

“Or Luca.”

She breathed in deeply.

Mitts observed how her cheeks puffed up.

How the gesture seemed to make her eyes bulge out of their sockets.

It almost made her ugly.

“We tried our best to be subtle about it,” Samantha continued. “The original plan was for us to sneak into the Village at night. It seemed a good enough bet that we would miss the Patrol for the evening. But we weren’t lucky.” She shrugged. “There was no way for us to avoid it happening the way it did . . . if Dag had only been more patient, waited for us to extract you, or Luca, then we would’ve been gone. Never to return.”

Mitts allowed himself to fume for several moments.

He didn’t want to lash out.

It would only serve to make a mockery of himself.

Show that he could be easily provoked.

“Why didn’t he say anything?” Mitts finally got out.

“I don’t know. He was the only one who
could’ve
known, unless he confided in someone else”—her voice brightened a touch as she looked to Mitts, something which ill-suited the mood of the room—“but, hey, Dag confiding in somebody else, doesn’t sound at all likely, now, does it?”

Mitts looked to Samantha again. “Why were we the only survivors?”

“There’s such a thing as fate.”

“I don’t believe you. There’s something else, isn’t there? Something you’re not telling me.”

“Listen, Mitts, I think you’ve got an overinflated sense of my worth here. About my role at the Facility. Do you think I
really
know what’s going on? Or do you think they used me as a usefully placed device to get what they wanted? Huh? What’d you think?”

Mitts stayed quiet for a long while. “I don’t know what to think,” he said, finally.

He expected Samantha to leave once their talking fell away, but, on the contrary, she remained in the room. She lay down on the other bed. Rested her hands across her stomach and stared at the ceiling. After a while, she turned to him. “You can sleep if you like. It’ll make all this much easier to process.”

Mitts sent her a gnarled smile back. “It
would
make it easier, wouldn’t it?”

“You’re worried about them going digging in your mind while you sleep.”

Mitts stayed quiet.

“I’ll stay here, with you,” she said. “Until you wake up.”

Mitts felt his eyelids drooping.

And he realised he no longer had the energy to resist.

* * *

It had been so long since Mitts had experienced a dreamless sleep that he could hardly believe he had slept at all. He opened his eyes, glanced to his side, and saw Samantha lying there.

She was watching him. A slight smile on her lips.

“You were out for a good fourteen hours,” she said.

Sure enough, when Mitts looked out the window, he saw that the sun was on its way back down.

Night, once more, was draping itself over the landscape.

Samantha reached up to her face. Her fingers stroked the three neat scars she had there.

The ones which Mitts had noticed the first time they’d met.

“I want to tell you about my scars,” she said. “Would you listen?”

“Don’t think I’ve got much choice—isn’t this the definition of a ‘captive audience’?”

Samantha smiled back at him. “I think it’ll help to explain—explain the reason
why
me and Dag felt so strongly set against one another.”

Mitts held himself still.

He could feel his heart pounding hard in his cheeks.

At his throat.

He already believed he’d put together some of the pieces.

But, when he’d brought up her scars before, she’d batted him away.

“Will you listen?” she said.

“Yes,” Mitts replied, his dry throat coming out in his voice.

“I used to work as a waitress,” she said. “
Before
—I worked in this tiny little town, its name doesn’t matter. I rented a room above a pub in exchange for doing the cleaning up in the mornings . . . mopping up puked-over floors, polishing up the bar counter, you know, that sort of thing.”

Mitts felt his heart flutter up to his chest.

He thought about their age difference.

He had only been eleven when he had left home.

Samantha had to have been at least five years older.

Now that he was twenty-three did that make her twenty-eight?

Older?

She continued. “I always wanted to be a singer, I had a guitar and a little notebook where I’d scribble down the lyrics.” She released a sigh, one which sounded as if it’d been sustained for an
awfully
long time. “My dream was to play concerts, to play in front of a crowd. But
that
was never going to happen. I was paralysed by nerves doing anything
at all
in public, and sometimes when I worked waitressing, my voice would wobble; I’d feel the strain of those eyes all watching me.”

Mitts thought about how he had never—not for one
second
—seen Samantha as anything other than one-hundred-per-cent confident.

She was a
leader
.

A
born
leader.

“I suppose I was in a rut,” she continued. “I didn’t quite want to admit the dream hadn’t worked out, and that I should go try something else with my life, and maybe—given five, six months—I would’ve figured it out for myself . . . but then everything
stopped
.”

Mitts surveyed Samantha’s face. The fine cut of her jawbone. How her blond hair draped down.

He supposed, on another girl, her hair might’ve softened the outline of her face.

But not with Samantha.

If anything it made her face
sharper
.

More
dangerous
.

Everything about Samantha’s aspect screamed to him that he should take care.

That she always had something up her sleeve.

Samantha went on. “I remember seeing the news on TV—I’d been at work at the time. I was just taking my apron off over my blouse. Our last clients for the evening had just left the premises without paying. Just rushed up and left. Outside, I heard the
squeal
of tyres. At first, I thought that it was the customers, trying to make a fast getaway. To see if they could survive.”

Here her throat seemed to constrict.

The words seemed to get lost for a few moments.

“If they could
escape
the rain.”

Mitts turned his mind back to his own memories of the rain.

To it drumming down on the roof of Heinmein’s car.

And to the general sense of panic which’d clung to its presence.

Samantha looked down over herself.

At the navy-blue uniform—
their uniform
—which she wore.

“Outside, there was a car beeping its horn. I slipped out through the door of the restaurant, and, I don’t know . . . I really don’t know what possessed me; I was already so used to nuisance old men, the ones who’d honk at me in the street, and I knew never to pay them any attention. But, in the end, I approached the open window. I peered inside.”

“Who was it?”

“Dag . . . and someone else.”

Mitts decided not to push to know the ‘someone else’.

“They told me they had somewhere to go, that they had a safe place where we could all ride out the rising tides, where we could all
survive
.” Here, Samantha rolled her eyes. “And I suppose I was stupid enough to fall for that one.” She shook her head slightly. “Though I guess that if a girl’s ever going to make a fool out of herself then it’s going to be when the apocalypse is in town, huh?”

“Yeah,” Mitts said, with a smile. “I guess so.”

“They drove on through the night, and I remember telling them, over and over again, that they were going the wrong way. It seemed that the entirety of the other traffic on the road was headed in the exact opposite direction to us. But Dag, he kept on reassuring me. And so I trusted them. I sat slumped up in the back seat. Fell asleep.”

Mitts closed his eyes a moment. He massaged his eyelids with his fingertips.

Everything felt tight and tired.

“There were others, too,” Samantha continued, “on the way there Dag was shouting for people to join us. Lots of them did. About ten, fifteen cars, in all . . . the others who came to live in the Village.” She paused for a moment. “I don’t know precisely
when
it happened, but I remember the rain drumming against the roof—it hammering down on us—and the car driving uphill
all
the time. I could feel the nausea of taking all those bends on the mountain roads. Kept feeling my stomach shrinking back down. But when it seemed like we’d been climbing up those roads for hours and hours, we came to a sudden stop. Dag got out of the car, all in a hurry. He banged on my window, told me that I had to get out too. When I did get out, I found we were parked up in a layby, and that, up ahead, there was this large truck—the kind that somebody might use for transporting cattle. He told us we all needed to get in the back. Dag . . .”

“And the other guy,” Mitts put in, without thinking.

Samantha met Mitts with a smouldering glare.

He regretted having said anything at all.

“Dag, and the
other
guy, got into the truck cab. The rest of us piled on into the back, under the tarpaulin. All of us sitting on the floor, the soles of our feet touching those of the person opposite. There was an awful racket about people wanting to bring their stuff with them and we lost quite a few who wouldn’t leave their cars behind—let alone the
stuff
in their cars. They just drove off, back in the direction we came. They couldn’t be helped.”

Mitts felt a pang in his chest.

“Then what happened?” he said.

Samantha shrugged. “I dunno, it all got dark from there, and nobody could manage to open the back doors of the truck. We were trapped.”

* * *

Samantha’s story was interrupted by a
buzz
at the door.

Mitts sat upright. He dangled his feet off the edge of the bed.

He was feeling a little better now.

His mind was a little clearer.

Less
cluttered
. . . if that was at all possible.