The Dead Boy Read online

  Before he could flee, another of many explosions from the wreckage blasted Cobb hard enough to send him into the air, then to roll down an embankment away from the fire.

  *

  While the heat swallowed David Farnham and Damien Cobb began to burn, Ben North watched. He stood well back from the inferno at the edge of a long cordon of policemen and women, all of whom were colleagues, none of whom he would call friend. He was at the edge, like he always was, because he couldn't stand besides the others. The horror in their faces would be like looking in a mirror, and his was a face he could barely stand each morning. But reflected in a hundred faces?

  Nope.

  The flaming man latched onto the paramedic and the paramedic's sleeve begin to burn. North glanced to left and right. No one else saw. He could have shouted, but the smoke and the heat and the crushing fear in his chest wouldn't let him.

  The paramedic's going to die, he thought. Pointless, that thought, because even knowing that, and knowing his job was to do something, he couldn't move.

  Stupid fucker's too close to the heat. He's going to burn up too.

  Against his own will, Ben set out at a run through the swirling smoke. Flames leapt, heat blasted against him. The inferno was to his right. The paramedic and the man (the man entirely on fire. Surely he's dead?) were ahead and to the left, by the verge and the embankment below. The embankment, lower than the surface of the road, would be cooler.

  Safer.

  The melting tarmac was more like thick mud than road. It slowed him, pulled at his shoes. He strove to think through his fear, tried to make it go away through control alone.

  Stop running that way, dickhead, his fear told him. Run the other fucking way.

  Control, he told himself.

  But control was an illusion. There was no way to control fear. It was heavy. He fought it, like he did every day, but always lost.

  Run away, coward.

  The smoke filled his lungs, blinded him, but he didn't stop. He wanted to. Damn, he wanted to be anywhere but here, breathing in the ash of dead people.

  One foot in front of the other, thought the policeman. Move.

  The paramedic flailed at the crawling, grasping carcass that had no right to be alive at all. The paramedic might yet survive. Ben hit him sidelong at exactly the moment the blast from a secondary explosion reached them. The wave slammed North and a punch to his whole body like the fist of God himself blew him toward the verge. His head slammed against hard stone between the tarmac and the verge, and Cobb fell with him.

  *

  II.

  Francis Drew Sutton

  Around the time the accident happened, Francis Drew Sutton waited impatiently while a woman roughly her age rang Francis' purchases through the supermarket till. She only had a bottle of juice, an oat bar, some fruit, a pint of milk, a yoghurt - a single woman's lonely Friday night shop. She was married, but her husband was never around. She may as well have been single.

  The woman at the till glanced at Francis with distaste, like she thought her customer just another rich bitch. Good, expensive, clothes fitted Francis' good, expensive body very well. She knew it, but what was she going to do? Dress down, get fat, just to keep other people happy?

  Screw that.

  Francis smiled sweetly at the woman in a way that said 'fuck off' more succinctly that a man ever could.

  As a piece of debris killed David Farnham, Francis pushed her debit card into the slot underneath the keypad at the end of the till. She tapped out her PIN code, followed the instructions on the small screen and removed the card. She put the card in her purse, largely ignoring the photo sandwiched in the see-through plastic window, like most people do. You look at something every day, you hardly notice it anymore.

  'Thank you,' she said to the woman at the till. The woman's teeth were slightly yellowed, like she was a smoker or a big tea drinker.

  Francis' teeth were as near to perfect white as they could be. She had a confident smile, the smile of a woman who was beautiful and knew it.

  She had a good walk, one that sort of swayed, perhaps practised once when she was younger, but now just a natural, unconscious thing. A woman who walked like she was dancing. Men noticed her, whether they were specifically looking at the women on a Friday night or not. Then, without fail, they looked away and pretended they hadn't taken an eyeful. Their looks were longing, like she was unattainable, definitely, but still a woman worth a second, third, and fourth look.

  Francis was immune to the stares she got. She was used to it. 37 years old, she'd been living with it a long time. And she didn't mind at all. She'd had a little help as the years wore on, paid for by her husband's fat bank account. The gym did the rest.

  Young guys, old guys...they were all pretty much the same. Most acted like dippy teenagers around her. She liked confident men, though, not the dippy kind that drooled after her. She didn't particularly like her husband, but he was away with his work more often than not, and she was far from unattainable. Even with an absentee husband, Francis Sutton was rarely short of company.

  Stepping from the warmth of the supermarket, expecting frigid air, she found instead the night sky lit by fire. Maybe three or four hundred yards away, metal screeched, deep within the blaze, or careened into the air. Small explosions as petrol caught fire, the stench of burning rubber. Ash like snow drifted over a crowd with horrified faces who either pushed get a better look, or just get to their waiting cars and drive away.

  Some took photos and video on their phones - the younger people, mainly. Others (mostly the older people) spoke into their phones instead, calling the emergency services.

  There were already plenty of flashing blue lights up ahead, though, battling amidst the orange glow. Francis didn't bother calling anyone, simply watched the firelight, the blue glow, but the people all around her, too.

  Look at them, she thought. The next good book won't be a bible. It'll be fucking Facebook.

  Photos went to Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook, or any number of sites. Older people spoke in panicked voices to the beleaguered operators at emergency desks around the county. All excited or frightened or shocked, some loud and some hushed voices. And all of them breathing in the ashes of the dead and miniscule particles of a compound first used over half a century before.

  *

  Ben North wasn't any kind of hero. He'd never told any of his colleagues, his brothers, or his wife that fear ate at him each day, and if there was one thing he feared more than anything else, it was donning his uniform.

  He'd been transferred out of London to this town in Norfolk. A smallish town. The kind of place they sent people with mental problems in the hope that a quieter life would fix them.

  Sure, there was still crime. It wasn't like he was some Victorian with melancholia bundled off to chill out and watch the sea. But countryside crime wasn't London-crime, in either scale or venom. A kind of holiday, then. But it wasn't far enough. The holiday Ben needed was on a beach somewhere sunny with no one else around. Perhaps for the rest of his life.

  The blast that took Cobb and North the rest of the way over onto the grass verge and down the embankment also slammed the two men together. Cobb's descent stopped in a tangle of limbs just below the road, his neck broken from colliding with North. His sleeves and hair and shoes burned, then smouldered, then went out. He didn't notice anything but the pain in his head, as his hair burned to the scalp, then charred his skin. He felt nothing below his neck, but only for a short time. He didn't feel his chest stop working. Everything was cool, and dark, and that was just fine.

  North didn't die. He bounced, rolled, bounced and slid.

  Maybe it's Post-Traumatic Stress, thought North, before he hit the grass and his breath rushed out. Then, no thought at all as something inside cracked. The bolt of pain that came after couldn't be alleviated with a yell or scream, because he had no breath.

  I'm dying, he thought. Just like I knew I would.

  That should have been a
comfort, maybe, but it wasn't.

  He twisted one more time, his leg whipped around a tree and pain turned everything black and red. He came to rest somewhere in a sparse copse that was mostly saplings, unconscious.

  *

  Giant panels of glass ran the length of the supermarket front. Each pane was reinforced, thick and tough...but they weren't designed to withstand the blast that came from the motorway. The blast sent debris hurtling through the sky at over a hundred miles per hour, and accelerating.

  Something large and metallic shattered the window directly behind Francis. It flew further, taking out two tills at the tobacco counter and killing three women who'd been gabbing beside the lottery instants.

  Glass fell around the crowd outside in huge, deadly shards. When it settled, she stared at the gawkers. Not one had been hit.

  'Shitfuck!' said a younger man, his voice high pitched with shock. Someone else giggled at the swear, or maybe the man's voice.

  That seems about right, thought Francis.

  A blackened hunk of metal rested in the supermarket's first aisle, and another jagged object had obliterated the counter where people prayed for a windfall they were most unlikely to ever win, and stocked up on impulsive chocolate, or cigarettes they needed and gum that wouldn't help take the smoke-stench away. She heard the tick of cooling metal from the debris in the first aisle - things burned and popped and hissed and exploded.

  Furniture polish, she though. Things like that. Leather wax and shoe polish and air fresheners.

  Inside, the sprinkler system kicked in.

  People were screaming and crying now, their phones forgotten and expressions of gaping awe gone.

  A large smear of blood and something more solid covered the little pieces of MDF wood of the tobacco counter. A tangled trolley, crushed and broken, the wire frame haphazard and grotesque, held onto some flesh and torn clothing.

  That explosion was shortly followed by a third and a fourth. A wave of superheated air blew Francis and others backward. She landed on her perfect gym-bought arse. An old woman fell beside her. The woman's teeth clacked shut as her head hit the concrete.

  Francis rolled, pushed herself to her feet, and tried to help the woman stand. The top half of a set of teeth, false, lay on the floor beside the woman. She didn't take Francis' offered hand, but instead clutched at her left arm with a grimace. Her face was grey as her hair, even bathed in the light of the fire and fluorescents.

  The old girl's having a heart attack.

  'Shitfuck ' just about sums that up, thought Francis.

  No one in the small crowd seemed interested in helping. People were on the ground, or stood dumbly, bleeding or yelling. A man cradled a screaming child. Even to Francis' inexperienced ears, the cry sounded more of fear than pain. Many of them looked away, like they actively wanted nothing to do with the wounded or the frightened or the woman dying at their feet.

  But for one guy. He looked, all right. But he wasn't the kind of man who helped. Francis understood that the second she saw him.

  He grinned. A full on, toothsome grin, with every tooth in his head on show. He had dark, maybe black eyes. For a second Francis thought she saw flames there, within his eyes. But it was just the firelight reflected, nothing more. As his gaze turned toward her, Francis looked down. She knelt and took the woman's hand, thankful for the pretence.

  She didn't want that man's help. When she glanced back he had gone.

  The old woman's chest rattled loudly enough that Francis heard it over the next, smaller, explosion. She'd heard that rattle before. When her father had died, he'd made that noise.

  That's a death rattle.

  'Someone...please help...' she said, but not loudly enough.

  Francis had no idea what to do, and then it was out of her hands. There was no pulse. What she wanted to do more than anything else right then was to get in her Mercedes and drive home, where things made sense. But the woman was dead, and she couldn't just leave, could she?

  She closed the old girl's eyes with her fingertips, then took deep breaths, trying to calm herself. What did she care? Just some old woman. It wasn't like Francis had known her.

  Don't be such a bitch.

  The woman's eyes, which just closed, opened and those eyes were full of blood, haemorrhaged.

  'Fuck,' said Francis, jumping back.

  'Lady?' she said, before realising she didn't know where to go with the sentence.

  The woman's eyes closed just as suddenly as they'd opened.

  Just some kind of death burp, thought Francis, and though she'd nearly been scared enough to shit herself, she caught herself on the cusp of breaking out into nervous giggles. Alone in a sea of stunned, confused people, Francis felt like the only sane person in an asylum. She began to move away.

  Time to get the fuck out of this circus.

  The woman was dead and the police could deal with it. There was nothing she could do about some dead woman she didn't even know.

  As Francis turned away and took the first step toward the open air, and her car somewhere in the dark, she heard a click behind her. It sounded like a set of teeth closing on nothing.

  *

  The grinning man, Kurt William O'Dell, melted away from the crowd the moment the woman stopped staring at him. Even though largely immune to physical attractions, he had to admit that there was something arresting about her.

  When he was safely shrouded once more in the dark, he took a mobile phone from his jacket - a slightly larger and heavier version than even the smartest of phones a civilian might own. He held the phone up, toward the supermarket entrance and the people there, rather than at the fire. The phone was in O'Dell's steady right hand, his jumping left hand thrust into his jacket pocket, the rictus-grin permanent on his lined face.

  The live feed from the phone streamed directly to a man he had never met.

  Everyone had to answer to someone.

  'Sir, are you seeing this?' said O'Dell.

  'Is this live?'

  'Yes, Sir. The feed streaming now is current. Approximately sixty minutes since introduction, primary effects in two confirmed subjects. Secondary effects of airborne dispersal, I suspect, very shortly.'

  'Culpability?'

  'Response time from emergency services went as expected. Perimeter established with no contrary indications of post-event breach. Traffic diversions are all smooth. Primary area testing is still underway, and secondary area dampening is going ahead right now - they're good teams, Sir. It will be a full sweep before midnight. Zero residual effects, test parameters successfully limited to primary area of effect, and media in play as we speak. Clean and smart and all tidied away. Sir.'

  Silence, then, from the other end of the line. O'Dell held his impatience in check, along with his natural tendency to yell at slow people and shoot outright idiots. The camera in his fist did not sway from the scene. Nothing wrong with his right hand at all.

  'Sir?' he asked, finally, his hatred of waiting beating his studied calm.

  'The effects in initial studies were variable, yes?'

  'Yes, Sir.'

  'I was given to understand that post-mortem animation was extremely rare. I have the statistics. I have your reports. Right here, in fact. 'An effect which presents in less than 1% of viable candidates.' Does this sound familiar?'

  'Sir, yes it does.'

  'And yet there are, in this first field trial, two confirmed incidents?'

  O'Dell didn't assume for a second, ever, that he was the man's only source of information.

  'Temporary. Two minutes for the first and below one minute for the second. Considerably shorter than our longest surviving subjects.'

  'And in this report, you stated, 'Secondary effects are more common by far. Within a sample of one hundred subjects we can confidently expect seventy to exhibit greater or lesser degrees of confusion, anger, and volatility.' Is that also accurate, do you recollect?'

  'Sir.'

  'Then where in the fuck is my weapon?
'

  O'Dell lowered his head for a moment and stared at the ground. Not chagrined, but full of rage.

  Bite it down, he told himself. Bide.

  'Yes, Sir. I remember my words. If I may?'

  'Please do.'

  'The dispersal method necessitated by an early public trial is imperfect. Atmospheric saturation works well, but efficacy can only be adversely affected. Perfection was never the intention, Sir. Not at this time. It's a test run and the compound itself is still in developmental stages.'

  This last he added carefully, though he felt like a parent explaining a simple concept to a slow child.

  The first shouts of real fear from the gaggle of men and women by the supermarket doors began. O'Dell checked the screen to ensure he captured everything. He never allowed avoidable mistakes in others and applied the same criteria to his own actions.

  'Ah,' said the man at the end of the line.

  'Indeed. As you can see, even vastly diluted, it remains more effective than any other current chemical agent. Sir.'

  So, fuck you, thought O'Dell, but he did not voice that thought, either.

  The incident reached a natural conclusion in slightly under ten minutes. Only one man remained, exhibiting extreme confusion. O'Dell watched the man walk from the scene to the car park, where he sat on the bonnet of a Hyundai attempting to clean the blood from his hands with his tongue.

  'I've seen enough. O'Dell?'

  'Agreed, Sir. I think the footage, coupled with autopsy reports and data from any survivors of initial exposure should more than suffice at this stage.'

  'Then get clean and clear. Good work.'

  O'Dell closed down the phone and walked away. He left the bloodied man to his endeavours. The fire teams would clear the scene soon, and those from outside this tight circle of effect were already being loaded onto buses nearby.

  All tidied away.

  He drove away and took country lanes. He passed an army road block with no questions asked, then turned south.