The Sleepless (4 page)

‘Well, then,’ said the man. He lifted up the parrot-beak pincers and carefully positioned them on either side of Frank’s red-and-white bonedome. 

‘Look at that for luck,’ he said. ‘Almost a perfect fit. These cutting-blades have an opening of 267 millimetres and this helmet must be no more than 263.’ 

John stared at him. He found it difficult to focus. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded, through a crackling mouthful of blood. 

‘Did you ever hear of putting people out of their misery?’ the man wanted to know. ‘Come on, now, you’re a lawyer; one of the very best. You should know all about mercy. Like, “the quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth like a gentle rain from heaven.” ‘ 

‘What the hell are you doing?’ John bellowed at him. He could hear scores of sirens now, and they were very much closer, and they gave him renewed hope that they were all going to get out of here alive. He just couldn’t understand this casually-spoken eccentric with his dark glasses and his giant parrot-beak cutter. 

The man lifted up the cutter as if he had read John’s thoughts. ‘This here is a Holmatro 2009 U heavy-duty cutter for general rescue tasks,’ he explained, as if he were telling a small boy how a choo-choo train worked. ‘It can cut through 25-millimetre round steel bar, or heavy metal plates, or metal strips 100 by 10. It’s Dutch by make, but firefighters use them all around the world, because it’s the best. The Jaws of Life, that’s what the rescue squad calls this cutter. What’s going to interest you most of all, though, is that these here blades have a cutting force of – well, guess how much?’ 

‘For Christ’s sake get us out,’ said John. He could see that Sissy’s eyelids were beginning to flutter, and he prayed that she wouldn’t regain consciousness and feel the pain. 

‘Thirty tons,’ the man grinned, in triumph.
‘Thirty frigging tons.’
 

‘What?’ asked John, blurrily. 

‘All I have to do is twist this handle and this poor suffering man will find out what it’s like, for instance, to have a thirty-ton truck run over his head.’ 

‘For the love of God stop it!’ John wept. He had no more fight left, no more strength left. 

The man raised his head and listened to the wind and the ocean and the approaching sirens. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m being dilatory, aren’t I?’ Then, quite matter-of-factly he twisted the cutter’s hand-grip, and John saw the hydraulic lines stiffen. The thick steel parrot-beak blades closed without any hesitation at all on Frank’s helmet and there was a high, brittle crack. The entire contents of Frank’s head were flung at the helicopter’s control panel like a sloppy handful of fish guts being thrown into a sink. John only glimpsed them for a split second before they dropped out of sight, but in that split second he saw white glistening brain tissue and clumps of bloody muscle and fragments of lower jaw, all webbed together with stringy membranes. 

The man paused, and then released the cutting-blades, leaving Frank’s helmet in an odd broken oval, like two dinner plates pressed together. He patted Frank on the shoulder and said, ‘Come on, man. No need to go around with your face on the floor.’ Then he uttered a high, asthmatic wheeze – which, even in his agony, John could interpret as a laugh. 

The man clambered back into the passenger cabin. He looked from Dean to Eva to Sissy and then at John. 

John whispered, ‘Listen, you can have anything you want. 

You can have as much money as you care to name. A million dollars. I’m wealthy, I have plenty of stocks. I won’t identify you and I won’t tell anybody what happened.’ 

The man sniffed. ‘You’re missing the point, Mr O’Brien.’ 

‘Well, what is the goddamned point?’ 

‘You don’t know what the goddamned point is? Why don’t you try to think about it. You’re a man of intellect.’ He tapped his forehead with his finger. ‘You’ve got what it takes upstairs. Meanwhile – while you’re deliberating – let’s get on with it.’ 

He pushed in between them until he was hunched over Dean. John tried feebly to snatch at the man’s black raincoat, but without warning the man whipped around and slapped John a loose-fingered backhander across the side of the head. John stayed where he was, almost blind with pain. 

The man turned back to Dean. ‘Come on now, friend,’ the man said, ‘we’re going to cut your legs free. Everything’s going to be fine.’ 

Dean stared up at him, puzzled. Because he was seated with his back to the pilot’s cockpit, he hadn’t been able to see what the man had done to Frank. 

The man opened the parrot-beak cutting blades and fitted them either side of Dean’s right thigh, snug up against his waistcoat. He grinned directly into Dean’s face and Dean grinned back.
My God,
thought John.
He’s going to cut his entire right leg off.
 

Dean reached up and laid his hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘My legs hurt,’ he whispered. 

‘Not for very much longer, I promise you,’ the man reassured him, and twisted the cutter’s handle. With a soft crunch, thirty tons of hydraulic cutting force went through Dean’s right leg. The man opened the blades, and lifted the cutters away. 

Dean’s system was so shocked that he didn’t understand what had happened at first. After all, he was still sitting in his seat, and his leg was still there, right in front of him, even though his beige linen trousers were suddenly flooded with blood. He stared up at the man with his mouth open and stuttered, ‘What?
What
?’ 

But the man simply smiled, and fitted the cutting blades over Dean’s left thigh, and twisted, and cut through skin and muscle and bone with no more effort than cutting cheese and crackers. 

Dean screamed. But the man slapped his face and said, ‘What’re you screaming for? You’re free to go. Just jump down off of that seat, and away you go.’ 

With that, he gave Dean a hefty open-handed push, and Dean toppled off the seat with his two bloody leg stumps thrashing in the air like somebody juggling with two fresh-cut joints of beef. Blood pumped everywhere; two thick arterial sprays that jetted in all directions as Dean writhed and struggled and screamed on the cabin floor, a Dean who was nothing more than a human trunk with flailing arms, while his severed legs remained neatly side by side in his blood-filled seat. 

The man kicked Dean away. Dean’s head was partly wedged underneath the seat, next to his own shoes, and he lay there quivering and twitching and dying right in front of John’s eyes. Then, slowly, the man turned around to Eva. Eva was silent now, but John was holding her hand and he could feel her quaking – literally quaking, from head to foot. 

‘Don’t kill me,’ she asked. 

The man shook his head. ‘If you want me to, I’ll pray for your soul. But that’s as conciliatory as I’m prepared to be.’ 

John was openly sobbing now. He couldn’t stop himself. ‘Don’t touch her, please! I love her, don’t touch her.’ 

But the man said, ‘I have to find out what ladies like you are made of, don’t you see?’ 

He opened up the parrot-beak cutters as wide as they would stretch. Then he forced the lower blade deep between Eva’s legs, waggling it obscenely from side to side to make sure that it thrust in as far as possible. The blades had teeth on both their inside and outside edges, and they ripped her skirt and tore her stockings and snagged the leather seat. The tip of the upper blade the man pressed into Eva’s primrose-yellow jacket, just below her ribcage. 

Eva clutched John’s hand in a spasm of terror. She was so frightened that she couldn’t even scream. John stared at the man and said, in the deadliest, most threatening voice he could manage, ‘Whoever you are – I’m warning you now – if you so much as – ‘ 

But that was all he could manage. He knew the man was going to do it, whatever he said. Any threat was pointless. Any plea for mercy would only add humiliation to what was already a total nightmare. The man gave John the faintest smirk of mock regret. Then he twisted the cutter’s handle and the blades disappeared into Eva’s stomach, chopping her pelvic floor in half and slicing open her stomach like a crimson carpetbag. Greasy intestines slithered into Eva’s lap, but all she could do was stare at them in utter horror, bewildered that this was what she actually looked like inside. 

John couldn’t speak, couldn’t bring himself to look. His brain felt as if it were slowly imploding. But he was still clutching Eva’s hand, and Eva was still clutching his. He felt every shudder and every twitch as the man began to work with his cutters with terrible swiftness. John heard him breathing harshly through his mouth as he lifted the parrot-beak higher, and cut through Eva’s breastbone. He opened up her ribcage and John heard her gasp, and couldn’t stop himself from looking. Her lungs, bloodied and inflated with her last desperate breath, swung in her chest cavity like inflated hot-water bottles swinging on the back of a closet door. 

Then the man dug the parrot-beak into the dark and bloody tunnel of her windpipe, and cut into her neck, and then split her jaw. Finally, he positioned the lower cutting-blade under Eva’s palate, and the upper blade on the top of her head, in the parting of her hair, and with a single carefully-calculated crunch, he cut her head completely in half. Her hand was limp now, and John, at last, had to let it go. He couldn’t look at her, couldn’t, but he heard the glutinous noise of her halved skull falling apart, and he couldn’t help breathing in the gassy, gunpowdery smell of human insides. 

The man stepped right in front of him now, and said, ‘Look at me!’ 

John looked up at him, his eyes wincing and flickering like a dog expecting a whipping. 

Just get it over with,’ he whispered. 

‘You still don’t get the point, do you?’ the man asked him. ‘What you’ve seen here this morning is a man who thought he was extra smart, a real achiever. But how smart can anybody be when you cut the legs from under him? What you saw here was a lady who thought she was rich and beautiful and superior and something special – but you look inside and what do you see? Blood, guts, liver and general mess. Same as everybody else. They’ve made you a judge of men, Mr O’Brien. They’ve given you control of millions of lives, millions of human destinies. And do you know something? I think you would make a fine Supreme Court judge; honest and selfless and fair. But now I’m going to see how honest and selfless and fair you really are.’ 

‘What do you mean?’ John asked miserably, bubbling blood. 

The man leaned over, so that his pale pitted face filled all of John’s pain-fogged vision. John could almost believe that if the man put his face any nearer, his soul would disappear inside the bottomless black holes of his sunglasses. The man said, softly, ‘You can hear for yourself ... the police and the paramedics and the fire department, they’re almost here. So I only have the time to deal with one of you now ... you, or your daughter.’ 

‘I don’t ... understand.’ In actual fact, he did understand, but he couldn’t bear it. 

‘Then pay attention, Mr O’Brien. I’m asking you to make a judgement. That’s your job, isn’t it, making judgements? I only have the time to deal with one of you, so one of you is going to die and one of you is going to live. You have to make up your mind which.’ 

John coughed blood. ‘You goddamned maniac. You scum. If you lay one finger on my daughter 

‘Tch, tch, tch. That’s not the point, Mr O’Brien. We’re making a comparison between the wildly disparate values of human lives here. We’re not all equal, you know. Let’s put it this way: if you survive, and you go to the Supreme Court, you’re going to affect the life of everybody in the United States, not only now, but for centuries to come. You’re going to affect
history.
 

‘On the other hand, if you die and your daughter survives, what’s she going to do? Party till she drops on her old man’s inheritance? Do some expensive drugs? Marry some rich dweeb from Newport and have herself some little dweebs to whom grandpa is only a gravestone?’ 

He paused, and slowly smiled that carnivorous smile. ‘It’s all down to you, Your Honour. The choice is yours. But you’d better make it quick, or I’ll be forced to make it for you.’ 

For one catastrophic moment, John was actually tempted by the man’s argument. If he were to die, then every radical idea that he had ever dreamed of would die with him. There were social and legal injustices in America that were crying out for reform. On every level of public life there was prejudice, discrimination, corruption and brutality. The First Amendment was being strangled by bigotry and political dogma and intolerance, and the only way in which a man could say his piece to the nation was by buying millions of dollars of airtime. 

He could make a difference. Only one difference in nine, perhaps; but a difference. Whereas what would Sissy do, if she were the one to survive? The man was chillingly perceptive. She would party all his money away; and the house and the family inheritance and the library that smelled like justice would be sold and scattered and dismantled. 

It took John a splinter of a second to think this thought. But – like the splinter of shattered mirror in
The Snow Queen,
which flew into a young boy’s eye and perverted everything he saw – it made him almost mad with shame. Sissy was his daughter. Sissy was his child. She looked so much like Eva. Yet what had he done? In the very last moment of his life he had betrayed her.