Fairwood (a suspense mystery thriller) (26 page)

“And then what, plead self-defence?” Sellers threw his head back, aimed a laugh at the grimy ceiling that stared back with a veiled scowl. He turned to the big man; the one Cawley stole the weapon from. “Get him,” he said, nodding apathetically at Cawley. “He won’t shoot.”

Cawley really wanted to shoot, just to prove the cocky git wrong, but he didn’t have it in him. His life was bad already, if he pulled the trigger he’d be able to add at least twenty years in prison to the long list of misery tagged to his soul.

Self-defence with a shotgun against an unarmed man didn’t hold water, but the law would allow him some leniency, something he kept in mind as he drove the butt of the weapon across the big man’s face, forcing enough power into the blow to stagger the attacker and send him sprawling.

A couple of seconds dragged by before Sellers, the youngster and the bandaged man all rushed him. He aimed the gun to the ceiling and squeezed off two shots, enough to shower a hail of plaster at his attackers and force them all to their knees in a desperate and instinctive act of defence. Then he turned and ran, back the way he came.

He threw himself at the door, slapped a desperate hand on the handle that had deceived him earlier and tugged. It didn’t budge, it was stuck.

He tried again but his hands, moist with sweat, slipped from the handle. He didn’t turn around, didn’t want to see how close they were to gaining on them, but he could feel them near, could sense their presence behind him.

He dropped the weapon to the floor, its barrels now empty. He grabbed the handle with both hands and tugged with all his might. It still didn’t move. It wasn’t stuck; it was locked.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, felt the fingers pressing deep into his flesh. He spun around to face the big man who had clambered to his feet and was grinning at Cawley, his nose bent and bloody; his features forming bruises.

He looked over the man’s shoulder, saw Sellers grinning and dangling a set of keys. Then he looked back, catching the glint in the big man’s eyes just before he drove a heavy fist across Cawley’s temple.

33

Pandora gasped. The air was released from her lungs in one long breath, quickly replaced by a mouthful of water which she sucked down when she dipped below the surface. It tasted clean and fresh, but it was suffocating, intoxicating when it dribbled into her lungs and pressured the air and the life from them.

Dexter hit the ground, his outstretched hands stopping him from eating the dirt and weeds on the river bank. He felt Pandora falling over him, her feet clipping his ankles, heard the splash as she hit the water; the gasp and gurgle that followed. He shot a look over his shoulder and saw that the person following them was now less than fifty metres away and gaining quickly. He could sense the eagerness in their hurried steps, could practically feel the desperation as they saw their targets stumble and falter.

Dexter clambered upright, threw himself to his knees at the water’s edge, felt the rippled water lap onto his pants and soak through his shins and his backside. He reached down just as Pandora managed to flap her way above the surface. He grabbed for her, felt his fingers brush her soggy clothes, and then lost control as she struggled and slipped under.

She couldn’t swim. She could keep herself afloat, could stop herself from drowning in her right mind, but she was weak, panicked and fighting against an unseen threat in the dead of night. She was far from her right mind.

She lifted her head above the surface again, coughed a splutter of water and shouted something to him before dipping under, finishing her sentence by inhaling another lungful of liquid.

The man with the torch was so close that he didn’t need a torch anymore. He was lit by the moon, his smiling features greyed. He was young, tall and gaunt. Dexter recognised him but wasn’t sure from where. The man slowed to a sinister walk; like a masked madman in a slasher movie, he knew it was inevitable he would catch his prey.

Something to the right of the man caught Dexter’s eye, he turned to see a stream of torchlights flicker their way out of the trees, buzzing into life through the thick darkness like an army of merry fireflies. He gulped; his quickened heart skipped a beat. Behind the approaching man, appearing in their droves, was an entire search party. It seemed that everyone in Fairwood was there.

Feeling that he had no other choice, watching Pandora still struggling in the still waters, Dexter threw himself into the river. He had braced himself for the cold, braced against the feeling of icy water seeping into his wounded flesh, but it still shocked him; jumping his weary heart into near submission like a defibrillator jolt.

He fought through the water, felt like he was fighting through a thick oil that threatened to hold him back and keep him from the one he loved. Every stroke was agonising, every movement of muscle and mass. He found his way to his soaked and gasping lover who immediately threw her arms around him and dragged them both under, into the darkened depths of the peaceful water, through which the dizzying torches and the threat of reality didn’t penetrate.

The sounds of the night disappeared. The gasping of air, the rushing of water, the sound of a dozen quickening footsteps were all replaced by a serene nothingness; a gentle lolling of water inside his own head, accompanied by the sight of Pandora -- her face inches from his, her eyes and cheeks bulging. He was ready to give in, ready to give his body the submission it screamed for, but she was tugging at him, a gentle urge which turned into a desperate pull.

She opened her mouth. Little bubbles of water escaped, rose to the surface and popped into the night. She tried to scream at him. He didn’t hear anything through the sound of the water in his ears but he nodded, urged his body into one final push. He kicked his legs, threw out his arms and spread his way to the surface with Pandora holding tightly onto his waist.

The breath he took on surfacing was relieving, welcoming, but it came with another rush of panic, another rush of desperation as the world returned to a chaotic, noisy and desperate place. The bank of the river was quickly filling with eager spectators, peering over the ledge and shining their lights onto the water, onto the couple who clung to each other for dear life.

They saw many familiar faces. The man they’d met on their first day in town; the shopkeeper; the couple who had kidnapped them; Dorothy and her husband.

The tall man, the first to follow them, was nearly in the water, so close they could splash him. Dexter blinked away the beams that bore down on him and looked into the gaunt face, this time he recognised it. It was the clerk at the petrol station, the apathetic, distant kid who served them before they entered Fairwood; before their nightmare began. He didn’t look distant anymore and his apathy had transformed into a blood lust.

Dexter felt Pandora gripping tighter onto him, trying to pull him away, towards the other side of the river. No one was swimming after them; no one bothered to try to follow them as they clambered to the other side, flopped onto the opposite embankment and climbed the muddy slope.

They were tired, beaten, bruised and struggling for breath; their ravaged lungs rattled with sprays of river water, but they were both smiling as they looked back over the river, back onto the nightmare they had left behind.

They expected to see a field of light, a row of pissed-off faces staring back at them, but they saw nothing but blackness and emptiness. Dexter turned to Pandora to voice his confusion, what he saw over her shoulder stripped any remnants of a smile that remained on his face.

The torchlights, the expectant faces, were all there -- hovering behind Pandora. He looked to Pandora, ready to direct her attention, but she was preoccupied, staring, horrified, behind him. He spun around, came face to face with Dorothy and her friends; a smiling army of sadists.

“I told you,” she said, standing at the head of the group and moving confidently towards them. “You can’t leave.”

34

Andrew Simpson stood motionless, shocked. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This was one of the main reasons, if not
the
only reason, he quit the job. This was what he was trying to get away from, what he had gotten away from and why he was happier. He was still drinking and he still had a few personal problems to deal with, he knew that, he wasn’t in denial, but this...he never thought he would have to see this again.

He shook his head slowly, took a small step backwards.

He had been on the force for six months before he saw his first dead body. The kids were the hardest to deal with and he’d never been comfortable around the elderly ones either, there was something so helpless and innocent in the very young and the very old. They depended on people, they needed the rest of the human race to help them survive -- seeing them dead through neglect or violence was a sign that the world had failed them. The fact that his first body had been a man in his twenties should have made things easier, but he still couldn’t forget his face. He was an addict, a down-and-out with little to live for. A man whose legacy in life wouldn’t live past the few minutes it took the coroner to pull the needle out of his arm and mark his death certificate with the black lines of self-abuse.

That had been a turning point, but they hadn’t stopped coming after that. The rich and the poor; the young and the old; the hopeful and the hopeless.

Simpson swallowed deeply; stopped shaking his head. He didn’t know how hopeful or hopeless this one was, but he doubted that this image -- of his blue body propped up in this cold, dusty room; amongst the old beer barrels and spent boxes -- would ever leave him.

He hadn’t heard the conversation in the main room, hadn’t heard the commotion, but he finally snapped out of his melancholic trance when he heard the door snap open and listened to the sound of men trundling out.

The door was locked behind Cawley and Simpson didn’t want to jeopardise his own location by trying to open it. He decided to try another access point, to try to help his friend. Then he stumbled upon the body in the storeroom. At that moment he knew why the bartender, and the others, had been so reluctant to talk to the police: they were murderers and probably had the body stashed all along.

His legs refused to allow him to move, but eventually he dragged them forward, regained control. He hid in the storeroom, slipping behind a stack of empty boxes -- the stiffened dead body within touching distance.

***

Cawley watched the world through blurry eyes. He didn’t see much after the big man hit him but he certainly felt a lot. His whole world had exploded out of the back of his head; a whining ring, like the shrill call of a banshee, erupted in his ears and refused to let up. He was dizzy after that, as pliable as if he was on sedatives. He felt them move him, felt them half-carry half-drag him out of the room, but he wasn’t able to stop them.

They took him away from the light and into somewhere dark. They left him there to stew in his own misery, to listen to the banshee in his ears and to breathe in an awful scent that clogged his nostrils and seemed to burn through his skin like acid. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t reacted. They knew he was barely conscious but they knew the job wasn’t done. He heard them talking -- their voices drifting and fading, leaking through to him as if through a heavy filter. He knew what they had planned.

He felt around. The floor was cold, hard. There was a stack of boxes to his left that felt soft, almost soggy. To his right he grasped something cold, stiff and palpable. He had been around enough dead bodies to know what he was touching, had seen death enough times to link the sour stench invading his nostrils to the clammy touch at the end of his fingertips. He squeezed his hazy eyes shut, removed his fingers from the corpse. When he opened his eyes they had turned off the lights in the hallway and left him alone, in the dark, with the body.

35

Dexter had no fight left in him, he was prepared to give up, to let the residents of Fairwood do to him as they pleased, but Pandora had a different idea. Dexter felt a rush of air beside him, saw a blur of flesh and anger fly straight into Dorothy’s face.

Pandora’s punch connected perfectly, smacking into Dorothy’s nose and contorting her sinister smile into something far less amused. She was weak, her arms were tired, their energy sapped from being tied up for so long, but Pandora didn’t waste any time in launching herself at the woman. She knocked her to the ground and punched her repeatedly, projecting every fearful thought, every moment of anguish she’d experienced since entering the town, into the owner of the bed and breakfast.