The Disappearances (7 page)

‘We didn’t do anything. We waited for Edward to come back. But he never did. A week later, Harriet disappeared; then, a week after that, her younger brother had gone. None of them said anything to anyone, I know they didn’t. They were too scared to even talk to me about it. But they still disappeared. And then everyone else did, too. Then it was just me. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go out, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t look in the mirror in case I saw them behind me. And then …’

She stopped talking.

‘Then?’ Lucas prompted gently.

‘Then I told Gabby. She’s my oldest friend, and she knew I knew something. She said I had to tell her what the big secret was, why I never talked to her any more, why I wasn’t talking about the Disappearances like everyone else was. And … I told her. I told her everything. I … I murdered my best friend.’ She was sobbing now, her face streaked with tears. She looked up at Lucas imploringly.

‘So?’ she said, wiping at her eyes, sniffing hopelessly. ‘What do we do now?’

Lucas looked at her steadily for a few seconds as what she had told him sank in, as he suppressed the rage building inside of him. Right now he had to stay calm. Right now, his duty was to protect Clara. Because it hit him with a thud that it was because of him that she and her friends had been looking for entertainment; that if it wasn’t for him and Linus destroying the System, she and her friends would have been at home, doing chores, not daring to talk to each other unless interaction had been sanctioned. The rules that had constrained them had also protected them. ‘You’re the last of the group? There’s no one else who saw the Informers, who knows anything about them?’

‘I’m the last one,’ Clara nodded.

Lucas nodded. No one else was in direct danger. But Clara … Clara he could protect. One out of the seven. It was pathetic. Pitiful. But it was something. Revenge would have to wait. Justice would have to wait. ‘In that case,’ Lucas said, ‘what we do now is get you out of here. Do you understand? We have to leave the City, and we have to do it now.’

Clara looked up at him and he was surprised to see not worry in her eyes but relief. That he had believed her. That he understood. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, and got to her feet.

Lucas didn’t think they were being followed any more; they had left no trace and had not stopped anywhere. They had used all the back alleys and hidden paths he knew to get to the edge of the City, then had run through the wasteland that surrounded it until they were at the East Gate lookout, a small hut next to a large swamp that Lucas had visited several times but never been into because of the vile stench that emanated from it.

The official name for Rab was ‘Gate Patrol’ but he and the Brother knew that he did no patrolling. He was a nasty piece of work; a short, squat bully of a man who had no place in the City. But he had no fear of being alone, no qualms about using a gun, and no respect for anyone, including the Brother himself, which made him perfectly placed to live in the dishevelled hut close to the East Gate and to keep tabs on what went on.

The truth was that no one ever breached the City walls without the City’s consent. The ‘Evils’ used to be brought to the City walls every so often to instil fear in those who lived within them, but they were no real threat; they were simply the brain-damaged casualties of attempted brain surgery, captives of the City, treated like animals in camps a short drive away from the City walls, brought out every so often to scream and moan and remind the City’s inhabitants how lucky they were to live inside its walls.

Now the Damaged Ones were being cared for properly, not worked to the ground, and lived peacefully away from the City that had destroyed them. The only new people who passed through the City’s gates were prospective citizens, attracted by the rumours, some true, some not, of overflowing clean water, plentiful food and decent shelter, a place where people were good, where there was order. But the Great Leader had stopped his botched experiments a few years before; now that there was no need to experiment on people, to mutilate them, the hopeful immigrants had been turned away, back to the barren lands they had come from. What the wall patrol had really been charged with was stopping the City’s inhabitants trying to leave, preventing them from getting outside the City, from seeing the outside for themselves. Only by encouraging fear of what lay beyond the walls could the Brother hope to impose his totalitarian regime, and that meant creating a prison from which no one could escape.

It had been one of Lucas’s first commitments, to open the gates, to let people see the world for themselves. But caution had led him to delay; fear that City citizens weren’t ready. And then the Disappearances had changed everything. With the Disappearances went any thoughts he had had of opening the gates.

‘Rab,’ Lucas called out. He didn’t like the East Gatekeeper, but there were questions he needed to ask before he left the City, answers that he wouldn’t leave without. Moments later, the man appeared. Twenty years ago Rab had been one of the people queuing outside, begging for a chance to enter the City, agreeing, as all prospective citizens did, to have the New Baptism to remove the ‘evil’ amygdala from his brain, little knowing that the operation would leave him not free from bad thoughts, but completely brain-dead. By chance, the Brother had happened upon him in a waiting room at the hospital, fighting with another prospective patient, and had declared him incapable of salvation. It was on the way back to the City wall that Rab had begged and pleaded, offered to do anything in order to stay. And the Brother had seen in him a desperation, an anger, a self-destructiveness that he realised he could use; had agreed to let him undergo the operation after all, had inserted a chip into his head and sent him out to work for him. He had told Lucas the story proudly, the day he first took him to meet Rab. Back then, Lucas was the Brother’s golden boy, the person he trusted more than anyone else. Back then, he spoke the truth, believing that Lucas worshipped him, that he saw the world as the Brother did, as many means to one end: power.

But now things were different.

‘You came then?’ Rab looked at him suspiciously. ‘I’ve been waiting.’

Lucas stared at him. ‘You have?’

‘The flies. You’ve come to see them?’

Lucas looked at him uncertainly. ‘Flies?’

‘Yes,’ Rab said, his eyes narrowing as they flickered over to Clara. He rarely spoke; Lucas had barely heard him say one word in the years he had known him. Instead he preferred to grunt if he accepted an order, or to shoot a look of disdain if he didn’t. He looked back at Lucas, fixing him with a stare. ‘Horrible things. Thousands of them. Coming from over there. Something’s up.’

Lucas turned to look in the direction that Rab was pointing. Sure enough, away in the distance, there was a small black cloud. They were several hundred metres away but still he could make out a faint buzzing, a focused army preparing for battle. He thought for a moment, then made a decision.

‘This is Clara,’ he said. ‘She’s working with me at the moment. So, the flies. How long have they been there?’ Lucas asked abruptly, walking towards the swamp, towards the path that led to the gate, motioning for Clara to follow. ‘I was here just last week. They weren’t here then.’

Rab shrugged. ‘Few days,’ he said. ‘I told the Brother. He said he’d send someone. Never did. I’d have checked it out myself only you took away my key, didn’t you?’

Lucas counted to three in his head. ‘You told the Brother? Not me? Even though I told you explicitly to run all your communications past me?’

Rab shrugged. ‘You’re here now,’ he said.

Lucas opened his mouth then closed it again; there was no point arguing. Not now. Instead he started to walk towards the cloud; Rab followed. ‘Tell me about the Informers,’ he said.

Rab gave him a long look. ‘Don’t know nothing about any Informers,’ he grunted. ‘It’s not a good sign, flies.’

‘No,’ Lucas agreed. Then he stopped walking, looked Rab in the eye. ‘You know nothing about the Informers? Are you sure?’

Rab looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. ‘You sort out the flies, maybe I’ll see if I remember anything,’ he said.

Lucas felt himself getting impatient, but then calmed himself. He didn’t want to alarm Clara. And anyway, they didn’t have much time and they needed information. That meant playing along with Rab. That meant not losing his temper.

They walked in silence around the back of Rab’s small house, onto the raised path that led through the swamps to the East Gate. Rab went in front, Lucas behind with Clara running behind. Lucas was surprised that even with his height advantage he still had to march quickly to keep up with Rab. The closer they got, the louder the buzzing was. As they approached the gate it was almost unbearable, the flies buzzing around their heads, the noise almost deafening. There was a stench in the air that made it hard to breathe, a stench that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up on end. Whatever had brought the flies here wasn’t good.

As they approached the gate, their pace slowed down; Rab fell back so that he was next to Lucas. ‘Ready?’ Rab asked.

Lucas looked down at Clara, then scanned the horizon. ‘You wait here,’ he said.

‘Here?’ Clara looked at him in alarm. ‘No. I’m coming with you. You promised. You can’t leave me on my own …’

Lucas shot her a look. ‘All right,’ he relented. ‘But when I tell you to turn around, you do it? Okay?’

Clara agreed reluctantly. Then Lucas nodded and took the key from around his neck, where he had kept each of the gate keys since confiscating them. He put the key in the lock and turned it, then pulled the heavy gate. There was a loud clanking sound and the gate began to open; Lucas gave it another pull to help it open before stepping through it to the other side.

The stench became unbearable as they walked towards the flies; Clara fell back, her eyes wide and he nodded for her to stay where she was, as he and Rab continued forwards until they were in the midst of the swarm. Then, as he approached the centre, Lucas bent over involuntarily, dropped to his knees as his stomach clenched, and he threw up. Rab stood beside him, then held out his hand to pull him up. ‘Had a feeling it would be something like this,’ he said gruffly. And as Lucas stood, his eyes turned in the direction Rab was looking, through the swarm of flies, and that’s when he saw her. A body. A girl. Decomposing.

He rushed towards her; could still make out her features. She was unmistakably from the City; her clothes were those created in the cloth district, her shoes clearly the current style. Her hair was long and dark, her body, or what was left of it, strong and athletic.

It was Gabrielle. It was one of the Disappeared.

For a few seconds, Lucas was unable to move, unable to process what was in front of him. Her body, rotting on the ground, her skull dented, her mouth open as though crying out in pain. He felt sick, angry, desperate.

He turned around to check on Clara; she was sitting on the ground, staring at them blankly. He lifted his hand, caught her eye, motioned for her to turn away. He and Rab walked together, silently, towards the large mound that lay just beyond Gabrielle and as they drew closer Lucas knew Rab was thinking the same as him because his pace slowed, his head shrunk back. The stench told him what they would find before they could see anything. But when they did, even though Lucas had tried to prepare himself, he still stood gripped to the spot, his mouth open in a contorted cry of anguish, fear and pain.

They were there, the Disappeared, all six of them in a heap, half devoured by wild animals, tossed aside like refuse. Boys and girls, not much younger than Evie and Raffy, stolen from their families, murdered then left to rot.

Rab took out a hip flask from his pocket, poured a thimbleful into the lid and handed it to Lucas, who hesitated, then took it and downed it in one. Rab refilled it, handed it back to Lucas, then took a swig from the bottle himself.

‘Who did this?’ Lucas heard himself say, first quietly to himself, then more loudly. He rounded on Rab. ‘Who did this?’ he demanded. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know. They’re here. Outside the gate that you’re meant to watch. Tell me how they got here. Tell me what happened to them.’

Rab stared at him sullenly. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said, but Lucas saw something in his eye: disgust and betrayal. Rab was human: it was clear from the look on his face that he did not believe that these young people deserved to be murdered and cast aside, like rubbish.

‘They were left outside your gate,’ Lucas said, his voice low, bitter. ‘You don’t think that’s relevant? You don’t think they were trying to point the finger at you? Why here? Why now? Tell me, Rab. Tell me what you know. Tell me now.’

Rab looked at him uncomfortably. ‘You think I know something?’ His tone was accusatory. ‘You think I know something about these bodies? Because you’re wrong. I don’t. I wanted rid of the flies, that’s all. Think I’d have sent a message if I knew what they were doing here?’

‘You have to know something,’ Lucas said, looking straight ahead. He downed the rest of his whisky, welcoming the heat in his mouth, the taste that pushed out the stench of decomposing bodies. ‘You are the gate patrol, even if you’re too drunk to do much about it any more. People are dead outside the gate you patrol, and I am being led to believe that there are strangers in the City committing these murders when it is supposed to be secure. Tell me what you know and I guarantee that you won’t be punished for your involvement. Otherwise … otherwise, you will be blamed when the parents of the dead come to visit them. Because they
will
visit them. We are going to bury them. Every single one.’

Rab appeared to consider this. He took a deep breath, then his eyes darted over towards Lucas. ‘I do what I’m told,’ he said cautiously. ‘I monitor. I keep an eye. I let the Brother know what’s going on.’

‘And did you let the Brother know about the bodies?’

Rab shook his head vehemently. ‘I didn’t know about any bodies. I only saw the flies a few days ago,’ he said tentatively. He was getting defensive, his tone more agitated.