Should Have Killed The Kid (35 page)

Just fucking lay down and die. Wait for the shield to fail and the shadows to sweep in. It's what you fucking deserve...
It was hard to tell whose voice assailed him this time. It sounded like all of them shouted in unison.

He swayed in place, smoking away and stared at the darkness while tears flooded down his cheeks.

'I'm scared, Dave,' the kid sniffled through his own tears and Dave felt his sobs strengthen at the sound of his name exiting the kid's mouth. 'Can I... Can I hold your hand again.'

You're scared...
Dave scoffed and gently shook his head, trying his best not to make eye contact. He didn’t answer the boy. Instead he shifted his gaze to the ground. After a second he saw the kid lower his hand out of the corner of his eye.

You have to do it,
Monty said this time. The same supercilious tone he’d employed while trying to convince Dave to nab the kid from the skyscraper in the first place. Dave just wished the old man was here now with the spell that he'd used then to finally kick him into action.

What else am I going to do?
It’s not like I can let him go anyway? Where would he go? And if I did, it would have all been for nothing…

Dave thought about that for a second.

Remembered the last time he’d been in this spot. It felt like decades ago now. Remembered the Gallos dead at the bar. Bruno’s brains scattered across the counter top while his son writhed his last next to him on the floor.

They would have died for nothing. And everyone that came after them. All the stuff I saw on the news and read about in the papers. The slaughter. The fucking humiliation I saw in the skyscraper. All the fights and the bullying. The fucking lady in the toilet, whoring herself for a pack of sugar. All of it would have been for nothing. Toohey’s brains smeared across the carpet. The slaughter of the huddled survivors that followed. The soldier whose blood Monty stole to help us escape. All for naught. Monty’s death… Sally’s death… even fucking Marge’s death… wasted. The tears, the numbness, the exhaustion… all of it wasted effort...

...Take it even further back and every single one of the kids that Monty and Marge and the rest of them had killed to stop the invasion would have been killed for absolutely no reason…

‘Dave..?’ the kid asked again, choking his name through tears.

Dave didn’t wait for him to finish. He shifted his cigarette from his left hand to his right so he could hold it out to the kid.

‘Come on,’ he said as evenly as his tears would allow. ‘It’s going to be okay.’

27.

It was like walking through the scariest forest Dave had ever encountered.

With each step, dread, horror, disgust, shame, all of it fought an alternating battle inside him. Combined with the dark surroundings and the spiralling voices in his head, it left him feeling more than a little on edge.

The longer he walked, the more the idea that something would pounce at him out of the dark grew in power.

He couldn't help feeling that the shadows were just luring him into some sort of trap. That he’d reach Monty’s shack and they’d tear him to shreds a few feet from the door. Dave had never heard the things communicate but he could still picture them out in the dark, saying,
Ha, that shield? Shit, knew you were there the whole way. Just wanted to taunt you some. Let you get your hopes up a little.

His unease was not helped at all by the surroundings. First the dirt road ahead had been reduced to a crisscross of felled trees that he’d had to clamber through for a good fifteen minutes. Then once he’d moved beyond that they had been abruptly nothing at all. A pure void that he’d been walking through for five minutes without even the vaguest guide, until a strange humming noise had gradually grown in strength around him and, in lieu of any other stimuli, he'd decided to follow it. He had no real evidence that he was correct but he assumed the noise must be coming from Monty’s old shack.

Or whatever remained of it.

Other strange noises had joined the mix too: soft whickers and something that sounded like slithering snakes moving through the darkness. Though Dave was pretty certain most of them were actually in his head, that didn’t make them any less freaky.

Even the chain-smoking he’d indulged in the entire way hadn't helped, and the creepiness only grew as he lit his latest and in the spark of the flint, he caught a glimpse of what passed beneath his feet.

He hadn’t really been paying that much attention so he had no idea how long it had been going on for but even the ground beneath his feet had been altered.

Dave straggled to a halt as he eased down to one knee to look closer.

What the fuck?

He rubbed his hand across the perfectly smooth surface, then almost overbalanced and toppled.

‘What is it?’ the kid whispered. The boy had finally got his tears under control a few minutes into the trip – it had forced Dave to dry his own when he’d noticed. 'Dave, what is it?'

Dave busied himself wincing while he tried to rise and realised that kneeling probably hadn’t been the greatest of ideas. At least it gave him time to try and think of an appropriate response to Will’s query.

When he finally managed to right himself, he then spent a further few seconds staring around the clear space of the dome’s floor until the lighter burned too hot in his hand and he was forced to extinguish the flame.

‘It’s some sort of crater.’ Dave muttered softly, more testing the idea in his own muddled brain than really trying to explain it to the kid.

The explanation seemed to fit. Though it gleamed like marble when he'd held the lighter near, the ground beneath his feet had been rock. Solid bedrock; sheered and polished until it was perfectly smooth and shiny. The way the surrounding ground gently sloped down added to the impression.

'What does that mean?' the kid whispered back and Dave found himself cackling a short burst of hysterical laughter.

'I really don't know,' he admitted, and then his laughter abruptly ceased as a wave of nausea hit and he felt like vomiting.

Somewhere between his third and fourth gag it dawned on him that it probably meant that, at the very least, Monty's shack was no more. Dave really couldn't see how it could have survived whatever had happened to the surrounding area.

He managed to get his gags under control and reached for a cigarette to replace the one he'd spat when the nausea had hit. His realisation gave him pause as he stared around at the darkness that was only broken by the occasional wave of glinting, which merely served to remind him death awaited beyond the shield.

How the fuck am I meant to find anything in this?

He didn't know but as no other option presented itself, he walked on. Smoking away, barely even noticing the kid's hand snake into his own until the grip tightened and became painful.

The babble of voices in his head made it difficult to think clearly but despite their various divergences, they all came together on the one point: that, once more, Dave had completely fucked things up.

He pinned all his hopes on the high pitched whining now. Although even its location was becoming harder to pinpoint in the void.

Surely we must be getting fucking close,
Dave thought as another smoke disappeared down to its filter and he rubbed a hand across his face. The sticky, cracking residue of his own dried blood made him wince.

No wonder I feel so fucking dizzy,
Dave thought. Further down, his shirt felt like an encrusted mess too.
How much fucking blood did she drain?

'Where are we going?' The kid sounded very tentative when he spoke up again. Dave felt his hand slip from his grip and heard him take a step back. He turned to squint at him in the gloom but had to reach for his lighter when he realised he couldn't see anything. He lit it and peered at the boy, then immediately decided that was a mistake and extinguished the flame, wincing as the motion brushed his hand across the cool steel of the knife tucked in his belt.

The question burned in the kid's large and watery eyes.

Are you gonna kill me, mister?

Dave felt like vomiting again.

'We're going to try and... try and stop the bad things.' His voice cracked mid sentence but he managed to get it all out. 'Come on... we're nearly there,' he added even though he had no idea if that was true or not.

'It's really smoky in here,' the kid replied and waved a hand in front of his face. Dave snorted at the unexpected words.

'I'm sorry about that,' he dropped his latest smoke to the ground and squished it beneath his foot. The motion coincided perfectly with the first tapping on the dome and he flinched, froze and then immediately looked up to see that the stars had abruptly vanished from a large section beyond the top of the glowing shield.

Dave swallowed slowly. His heart rate slowed to single, staccato beats.

They've found us again...

He had been sort of hoping that once they'd taken Marge they would have realised she was the only one with any form of power and been content. Now that chain of logic seemed pretty damn foolish.

'What are they?' The kid's voice lowered even further until it was scarcely audible. Dave remembered he'd been asleep for most of Marge's explanation.

'I really don't know.' Dave was finally able to admit to something. 'Let's keep moving, hey?'

He stepped off his crumpled cigarette butt and they cautiously walked forward about ten more paces.

Another section of stars vanished and the surrounding tapping grew in volume.

Shit.
Dave felt his heart start to thud stronger and stronger, faster and faster, transporting the chilled liquid that his blood had become into every inch of his body.

Plink, plink, plink, plink, plink...
The noise swelled as another few steps passed and another section vanished.

Fuck, fuck, fuck,
Dave could feel hysteria nipping at his heels.

Plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink...

Five more steps and there was nothing but darkness and Dave was forced to release the whimpering kid's hand so he could dig the lighter out of his pocket.

....Plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink...

He paused before he lit it. Bile crept slowly up his throat.

What he saw once the flame ignited had him scrambling for the last jar still wedged in his pocket.

Above him the shield had started flickering. As the tapping grew louder and more frequent so too did the speed that the shield flickered at. It was almost hypnotic. The level of dread the sight spurred in him froze him in place, one hand on the jar in his pocket while he watched it grow faster and faster and faster.

Added to the paralysing sight were the doubts that started to assail Dave from all sides, buoyed on by the babble of jeering voices in his skull.
What if you detonate the bomb and you are miles away from the source? What then? And what if the bomb just blows you to pieces too? You have no idea how it works. What if you shatter the jar and then there's nothing?

Marge said it only affected the creatures but was she bluffing? And can you really believe anything that psychotic bitch told you?

How the fuck will you know where the portal is? You're only going to get one shot at this...

The answer hit him in a heartbeat, finally breaking his paralysis.

'Will,' he snapped as he extinguished the lighter to give his searing fingers a brief respite. 'We need to hurry now.' He dragged the jar clear of his pocket and then relit the lighter. The overheated metal burned into his fingers but Dave barely felt it as he focused, doing his utmost to block out the tapping and the sight of the flickering shield surrounding them.

There was a brief flicker of panic when he thought the whine he'd been following had vanished. But it was only momentary before he detected it again and set off as fast as his body would allow in the general direction he thought it came from.

He kept his eyes to the ground as he moved, dimly aware that Will kept pace but barely paying it any mind. He tried his best to ignore the sidelong glances he caught of the dying shield while he staggered on, muttering under his breath, 'Come on, come on, come on.'

The whine grew louder with each step and Dave started to feel something like hope blossom. The incline he headed down steepened and as he stumbled on, it dawned on him what the whine was: the sound of the rock being ground down by the creatures.

It made him think of Marge's words.
They're rebuilding...

Dave had no idea what but he hobbled on, the jar containing the last remaining fragment of Sally held tightly in his grip.

He was so focused on gauging the proximity of the whine that he missed the solution on the first pass. The ground beneath his feet went from polished stone to swirling black like he'd just crossed over the top of an oil well then after a few steps back to polished stone again but Dave didn't immediately register it. Not until a few steps on when he was forced to pause so he could transfer the lighter from his blistered and stinging fingers to his other hand. Then it dawned on him what it probably was.