Benighted (6 page)

“Anyway,” Marty mutters. “It worked.”

“What?” I turn to look at him, and he sits glowering at his feet. “Marty, did you do that on purpose?”

“No.”

“Did you do that on purpose?”

“No.”

Toby is silent in the back. There’s only the sound of the engine and Marty kicking his feet on the floor, and nothing else. I open my mouth to tell him to stop it, then decide against it and change gears instead. The thud of the gearshift is the loudest thing for a mile around.

“It won’t do, Marty,” I say.

“It was an accident,” he says. He sounds upset.

“I know. But parents can sue over injured juveniles. It’ll mar your record just as you’re starting out. Next one, we do absolutely by the book, okay?” I think of the wailing as the pole knocked the boy’s head.

I see Marty come close to saying, Whatever. He doesn’t. He stretches out his fingers for a moment, then says, “Yes. I’ll be careful.”

“Good for you.” I half smile at him, nod. He’s a smart boy.

We drive for an hour in silence, back into Sanctus. Toby doesn’t howl in the back. He crouches, silent, calling no attention to himself. Marty taps his feet in a regular rhythm and stares out ahead of us at the blank road. Whenever I look at him, I see the wall of trees behind him, the woods. The first layer is visible, with monochrome bark and ragged branches; they quiver a little at the edges and make no sound. The shadows they cast in our headlight twist and slice by us as the beam passes them. After the first layer, nothing. A few shapes are visible, branches and ivy, braided into each other so you can’t judge distance, and shadow overlays shadow in a deep tangle so I can’t see more than five feet in.

For a while, we have rain, a few heavy drops that trickle down the windshield and then stop, leaving the air chilly and close.

I’m beginning to think it might be a quiet night when there’s a bleep from the tracker and we both look toward it. An ugly, shining clump has appeared on the screen. It doesn’t have the appearance of a single figure: its shape is amorphous, like two, three, four objects close together. It’s in the park, it’s near us. It shows up left of center on the screen. Which means that I’ve got to turn the van around, head into the woods and make my way carefully through the black and gray trees.

“Two,” I say. “Maybe more.” Marty bites his lip; his hand drops to his gun with the motion of the van swinging around. I don’t think he’s noticed he’s doing it.

The way the woods are planted, you can drive between the trees, at least most of the time. Twigs crush under the slow-turning wheels as I drive forward, barely at a walking pace. The van rocks to and fro on the uneven ground. When it rocks, I can hear it grate at the joints, make sounds of wear: it turns into a machine, just a mechanism that’s liable to damage. The wheels creak as I tug the steering wheel to and fro, jostling our way around the trees. It chills my fingers, and I find I’m staring down at them. I might not have them all in the morning.

“Marty.” My voice crackles in my mouth. “Listen, this is going to be a tough one.”

“I know.” His head is ducked away from me.

Stopping the car, I unfurl my still-whole hand and reach out for the radio. “This is Galley, car thirty-two, Galley, car thirty-two, calling from Sanctus Park, Sanctus Park.”

“Yes?” Josie’s voice comes over. She must have been sitting at the switchboard all this time. She’s so hurried she’s panting.

“We’ve sighted a group, size unknown. Is there any backup available?”

“Just a moment…No.”

“None?”

“No. Everyone’s miles away, and it’s a heavy night. You’ll have to handle this alone.”

I hadn’t expected anything else, not really, but this is still shattering. “Thank you.”

“Sorry, Lo,” says Josie’s voice, and then the radio clicks off.

“Lola?” Marty’s voice sounds in my ear, very softly. “How are we going to handle this?”

I count my fingers. I don’t know. “We’ve just got to round them up.” He draws breath, and I keep talking before he can start. “It depends on the size of the group. Now, we can leave most of the cages open because we’ve only got one of them occupied, so that’s one thing working for us. If there’s only two of them, then we can go for one each. And it’s possible that the group may scatter when they see us, I’ve seen that happen.” I have. I hold this thought.

“What if there’s more than two and they stick together?”

I inhale. “Then I’ll do the catching and you cover me. No, listen to me. I go for one, and if the others close in, you fire your silver gun into the air. It makes a lot of noise, and they’ll probably back down. Two bullets, so you can do it twice if need be. If there’s more than two, one of us needs to stand guard the whole time.”

“Will we—will we be able to see them?”

I look at him, seeing the narrowness of his shoulders, his height lost as he sits down. “You mean because of the trees? Well, they—they sometimes provide cover for us, too, Marty.”

“Can’t we just trank them?” It’s soft, plaintive like a bird’s song. I close my eyes briefly before answering.

“Not to start with. We can’t. Not unless we’re in serious danger.” He gives a strangled laugh. I try to scowl at him. I want to laugh too, I really do, but if I start laughing I’m afraid of not being able to stop. “That’s the law. You read it at school, you’ve done exams in it, I know you know the drill. Tranking is a last resort. We may well have to take it, but not until we have to.”

“Oh.” Marty makes no complaint. He hangs his head.

“Listen.” I try to soften my voice. “Normally we could. But after that first mistake tonight, you could lose a lot if we bend the rules on this one. I know it’s hard, but we’ve just got to try.”

“I thought the bullets were the last resort,” Marty says quietly.

I shake my head at him. “Don’t let a lyco hear you say that. As far as the rest of the world wants to know, they’re not a resort at all.”

“Have you ever fired the bullets?” Marty wants to know. He’s picking at his fingernails.

I swallow. “Not so you’d want to know about.”

I start up the engine again, and we roll over the ground. The branches are unreal in the artificial light; they loom around me and I have to remember that they’re solid. The dark, the quiet, the figure on the tracker, they’re making me light-headed, and if I’m not careful, I might try to drive through the trees.

The tracker glows red in the darkness, with the white cluster of light still there. It’s very close to the center. The lines across the tracker meet in the middle—there’s a point of convergence which is us; and just a few millimeters away from it is this foreign, multiple shape. I drive forward just a little more, and the shape breaks open, splits like an amoeba into three separate circles. I look out through the cracked glass of our windshield, and see nothing but textured, receding shadows.

“Okay,” I whisper. “Now we’ve got to be very quiet. Don’t knock the windows, don’t rattle your seat belt, just keep still.” There are three separate shapes on the scanner, ten meters from us. I press the accelerator, and the shapes move. They can hear us.

Ten meters, fifteen. The van moves forward, and I check again. It’s the same reading. They’ve moved with us, they’re keeping out of reach, they’re not running away. Ten meters. We’ve got to walk.

“Marty,” I say. “We’re getting out here.”

“They’re still in the dark.”

“We’re not going to get any closer. Okay, remember: I catch, you guard. Fire your silver if you—”

“I know, I know,” he hisses.

“—but God help you if you hit one of them. Are you all right?”

He shakes himself. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m all right.”

“Let’s go.”

I can smell gunpowder as I step down onto the grass, gunpowder and wet earth. The cold bites at my lips. My breathing is loud enough to hear a mile away.

The van casts a tall shadow, and there’s an oval of light; I can see nothing outside it. I turn on my flashlight and step forward: the scanner showed one shape directly ahead of us. There are two trees close together, monumental in my flashlight beam. A little smear of light spreads around me, and I listen. I hear nothing in the dark.

Then the impact hits my back and I’m crushed down on the ground with my mouth full of grass. My head hits a fallen branch, skin splits on my forehead, and there’s a great weight on my back pressing my lungs down into the ground. Cloth rips between my shoulder blades and heavy teeth batter against me, trying to get through. Wet breath burns my neck. I try to shriek to Marty and grass chokes me.

Another blow slams me and I’m rolled onto my back with two lunes over me. I see black gums, I see the glint of pink from four eyes, I see teeth longer than my fingernails up against my face. I jab upward with my catcher and knock one of them in the throat; its jaws snap together and it backs off with a roar, and I roll away. The sound of Marty’s gun goes off, and the second lune flinches for only a second before coming back at me. My catching arm is pinned to the ground and I only have time to throw my other arm up over my throat and scream.

There’s another blast, and some impact kicks the lune sideways. It hits a tree as it falls then tumbles down and snuffles on the ground, wailing; some blood is slick on the grass because Marty’s shot it in the leg. I’m on my feet with my catcher and trying to get the other one and the collar swings wide as the lune runs by me and heads for Marty.

Marty has shot both his bullets and he doesn’t have a catcher and his trank gun is still on his belt. His hands are empty as the lune leaps for him. I grab for my trank gun and as I do another lune comes out of the dark behind a tree and they both pin Marty to the ground and slash.

My trank dart hits the first one in the shoulder. There are several seconds of tearing flesh before the dope takes effect. The other lune looks up, sees the dart, and whips around. It runs straight for me. There are three seconds in which I know with bright cold certainty that I’m going to die, and then the lune is past me, through the forest and away into the night. I look after it. It’s gone into the dark beyond where I can see it. After a moment I remember the wounded one, and when I look for it, it’s gone, too; it must have got up on three legs and run.

The ten steps across to where Marty is lying are among the worst I’ve ever taken. Marty’s lying on the ground because he was empty-handed and couldn’t defend himself, and he was empty-handed because he did what I told him. The little walk I take, around a tall horse chestnut, over some leaf litter and across a fallen branch to where he lies, will last me a lifetime and beyond.

Under the yellow light, blood looks almost black. Marty lies on the ground with a strip of tar across his throat. Oil trickles out of him, his face is smeared with charcoal, and his eyes are moving. I can hear his breathing dragging over his shredded throat like metal over stone.

I load the tranked lune myself. I tug a bandaged Marty into the van and drive him to a shelter. The medic keeps him alive till morning and then puts him into a hospital. They transfuse blood into him, inject chemicals into him, lace up his throat with catgut. He might not be able to speak again, they aren’t sure.

This is our life, or a part of it. Bad night. Bad night.

FIVE

“T
his could go on your record, Ms. Galley.”

My superior, Hugo, is a big man. Well over six foot, heavy-shouldered with a blunt-boned peasant face, soft-spoken. He’d be called imposing if he worked in the outside world. I’d always known it, but this afternoon when I see him, I remember as if for the first time just how big he is. Sitting leaned back in his chair, not even doing very much, he takes up a lot of space without really bothering. I am a small woman at the best of times, and today, I’ve had a night without sleep chasing the wolves, and a stay at the hospital waiting to hear if Marty would live, which have left my eyes stinging with fatigue. There are deep, dark bruises from the night’s batterings on my back, legs, arms, and head. It’s an effort of will to meet Hugo’s eyes.

“Your trainee, Sean Martin, isn’t able to tell us what happened, and we only have your testimony and the physical evidence. Which,” he sighs, “is not in your favor. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Even sitting as straight as I can, he towers over me. I look up at him. “Only what I’ve told you. We requested backup, which we were refused, and found ourselves outnumbered by a group of really—very savage lunes. They came at us from all sides. No two-man team could have handled it.”

“So you shot one of them with a bullet before you remembered your tranquilizer gun?” He almost sounds gentle.

I close my eyes for a moment and cover my mouth. “I told Marty to use the sleeper only as a last resort. Policy.”

“Policy also to use the tranquilizer before the bullets, I think.”

“Yes, sir.”

He gives me a ruminative glance. “Can you account for it?”

“I—” Marty should have shot with the trank. I know that. He’s lying in a coma with his voice torn out, and anything I say could get us both strung up. At least, I think so. It’s never possible to know what Hugo’s thinking. I bite my lip and look at my hands.

Hugo sighs again. “Let me make a suggestion. Firing the thirty-six to make a noise would account for it being in his hand. Which, being a technique you are known to use, makes it the likeliest explanation, yes? And we can understand that the boy may have panicked on seeing you attacked, and fired with whatever he had. Why he did not also have his tranquilizer gun at the ready, though, is harder to account for. I must assume he was acting on your orders.”

“Yes, sir.” My hands try to hide themselves in the fabric of my trousers.

“The incompetence of a recent recruit has to be taken into account, I think. Particularly as the individual he shot cannot accuse him without laying himself open to an accusation of the attempted murder of two DORLA agents. The fact remains that our young Martin was armed with the wrong weapon, in the company of a more experienced operative.” His eyes come to rest on me, and his face is impassive. I was wrong. It’s me that’s in trouble, me and me alone.

“Would you care to tell me how this came about?”

“I—I wanted to make sure he could do a roundup by the book. Marty had already made one mistake that night, I was trying to protect his record.”

“At the cost of his life?”

The question makes me jump up. “Is he dead? Has he died?”

“No. For which we have the doctors to thank. The doctors, and no one else, Ms. Galley. This has been mismanaged.”

“I know.” It bothers me that all I can do is stare into my lap, but my fund of fine speeches has run dry.

“You let yourself be attacked, and left your trainee unattended with no weapons and no defenses against what sounds, from what you say, like a coordinated attack. I know they aren’t common, but you have to allow for them. You did not take adequate precautions, Ms. Galley. Sean Martin was your responsibility, and he remains your responsibility if he is injured through your carelessness. And your preparations were inadequate for a coordinated attack.” He turns over a piece of paper and leans toward me. “I know you didn’t expect to be ambushed. If this had been a more normal situation, your actions would probably not have been wrong. But I have to go on what happened, Lola. The boy was injured and two out of the three perpetrators got away, all because he did what you told him. There isn’t much I can do for you.”

He leaves a pause for me to say something. If there was anything to say, I might say it now, but there just isn’t. Maybe I meant well; it doesn’t matter. What mattered was keeping Marty from the teeth of the lunes. The bruises on my back and legs are beating out of time with one another as I lift my head.

“Lola.” Hugo lays his blunt hands flat on the table. “This will be raised at the next meeting. I shall have to raise it myself. There’s no way not to with an incident this serious.” We call it the short-straw party. Every disciplinary board meeting, somebody gets punished, just to show people like Franklin we’re answerable, some of the time. I’m about to get strawed. My hands start to shake, and I clamp them between my knees. “I’ll try to speak for you,” Hugo continues. “In your favor, you’re a steady operative, and while you have your injury rate like everyone else, it’s uncommon for you to mismanage to this extent. And also,” he adds quite noncommittally, “the injured party in this case is not a member of the public, but one of our own, so the press won’t be able to claim DORLA brutality. That is fortunate for you, I think. Though, of course, there’s his family to think of, and families are seldom cooperative when one of their conscripted relations comes to harm. I believe some of them are coming in today to pick up his belongings and arrange a representative for him—it might be best if you are careful how you act around them.” He studies my white face with mild interest, and goes on. “In any case, I will speak in your favor, but you should prepare yourself for the possibility that you will be disciplined. Given our workload, of course, I cannot put you under any restricted duty in the meantime, but I will advise you, be careful. Are we clear?”

“Yes. Yes, we’re clear,” I manage to say.

He keeps his impassive eyes on me. He could finish this either way: a comment to show he’s on my side, or a further rebuke to put me in my place. He does neither.

I get to the door and find my way through it. Once on the other side, what I want to do is hit the fetal position and stay like that for the rest of my life, but I’m confronted with a full office of hectic people running to and fro, telephones ringing in the new year, voices shouting over each other, and a whole building trying to sort order from chaos. Everyone can see me. I balance my way all across the room and down the hall to my little office. It’s only once I’m there that I bury my head in my arms.

A memory comes to me. I was about four, I think, half Becca’s age, and sitting in the bathroom, perched on top of the laundry hamper. There was blood trickling down my leg. Even back then, I wasn’t much of a crier. The idea that I might be bleeding to death had occurred to me, and I had a sense that I ought to be worried about it; really, I was more worried that the blood would get to my white sock and stain it. Be careful with your things, my mother would say to me, I was already saying it to myself, rocking to and fro and making the basket creak under me. To prevent this, I tried to stop the blood with my hand, and smeared red across my shin. It was stickier than I had expected. I scratched my smudged palm with my other hand, getting blood on that, too, and then realized that I was stuck: on top of a basket with a knee that hurt and two hands that couldn’t touch anything and no way of getting down.

I don’t know why I was so afraid of my mother finding out. From the moment I was born, she had scolded me less than she should. There was a kind of resignation about the way she handled me. Instead, she scolded Becca for not watching me, as if I couldn’t be expected to do any better.

I leaned out and called in a furtive whisper, “Becca? Becca?”

Becca came out of her room with a doll in her hands, then saw me and marched into the bathroom.

“I’ll get blood on my sock,” I said.

“Socks don’t grow on trees.” Becca frowned at me, and sat her doll neatly against the wall. The idea of a sock tree made me giggle. “It’s not funny, May!” Becca said.

“I can’t get down.”

“So don’t you laugh at me.”

“I can’t get down. I’m not laughing at you. Can you help me?”

“You should be more careful,” Becca said, and took hold of my foot. I whimpered as she unbent my leg, and she gave it a little tug before wetting a washcloth and cleaning the blood away. She washed in neat strokes, working from the foot upward, and when she reached the knee, she dabbed around it with a very gentle touch. I told her I didn’t want disinfectant and she put some on anyway, and pressed a bandage down with her whole palm. Then she pulled me off the hamper and washed my hands under the tap, and I wriggled because I wanted to wash them myself.

“You’re being silly,” she said.

“Let go my hands.”

“I’m helping. Aren’t you going to say thank you?”

The phone rings, and I answer it, glad to have someone to talk to. I’ve got to work. I was woolgathering, and anyway, I don’t think that memory really went anywhere. Except that it was the first time I remember having to deal with blood, and the stickiness and traps of getting hurt, I don’t know why I was thinking about it. Except that once you’re injured, it takes patience to get out of it. I say “Thank you,” quickly, quietly, to finish things off, and turn my attention to the call.

“Lola Galley.”

“Hello, this is Nick Jarrold. We’ve met a few times.”

“Yes, I remember.” Nick Jarrold is a gaunt man with a number-three buzz cut, a misfortune that makes his head look huge on his bent neck, like a baby’s. He started working Forensics and police liaison fifteen years ago, and has been killing himself with fifty cigarettes a day ever since. Tobacco leaves grow in his throat; I can hear them rubbing together when he speaks. It’s the expense of it that gets me the most, three packs a day on our wages. There are cheaper ways to die.

And he used to be Johnny’s partner. That’s the other thing. Johnny used to laugh about him, comment on his cigarette habit, but they’d been working together for over a year when—just don’t let him mention Johnny. “How are you, Nick?”

“All right,” he lies in a wheeze. “How’s things with you?”

“Things. Are just. Lovely,” I say through my teeth. “I’m. In wonderful. Spirits. I love my life. What can I do for you, Nick?”

“Listen.” He sounds like he has laryngitis; I clear my throat in sympathy. “I’m in the shelter you brought your fighter into last night, I’m doing the morning shift.”

“I’ve made a statement,” I interrupt. “It should be on its way to you.”

“We’ve got it, thanks. But since he ricked this morning, he’s been—he’s kind of unusual. We thought you might want to have a look.”

“Unusual? Who is he?”

“Well, his name’s Seligmann, if that helps. Not someone I’ve run into before. I don’t know what to make of him. You might want to take an interest in him, seeing that he’s yours.” “Take an interest” is one of those euphemisms that can mean anything; it’s unlike Nick to talk around like this.

I rest my hand in my hair. “Thanks, but I’m up for a short-straw party. I could lose my job.” This shouldn’t be easy to say, but to a man living on maybe three tablespoons of lung, it can’t sound that pathetic. “I don’t know if it’s worth the time.”

“They won’t straw you when they read our report on him,” he rasps. “No one’s going to blame you for this one. Come and have a look. It doesn’t have to be today—we’re not letting this one go. We’ll send him to your cells. You can look at him there.”

“What’s his name again?”

“Darryl Seligmann.”

“Are we charging him?”

“Kendalling, maybe attempted murder. I don’t know. That’s your area, you can make something up if he insists on a charge. You will see him, though?” The Kendall Statute lays down that it’s illegal to resist arrest more than a reasonable person who was luning would be expected to do. Kendalling is putting up too much of a fight. It’s one of the vaguest laws on the books.

“Oh, God, Nick, I don’t know. All right. I’ll see him when he’s brought in. Thanks for telling me, now listen, I’ve got to go.”

“Okay. Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

“Lola?”

“Yeah?”

“Look out for yourself.”

Heading back to my office from the coffee machine, I see my old teacher Bride coming across the room with a big ironic grin across her tarty mug. “I hear you’re for the axe, love,” she says.

“Mm-hm.” I succeed in grinning back at her.

She pats my arm, and then her face sobers up. “How’s poor little Marty?”

It takes a few seconds to pull myself together enough to answer. “He’ll live. Whether he’ll talk again or not is another matter.”

“Oh, pet.” Bride puts her arm around me. I start to shrug it off, until I realize that if I did, it wouldn’t be there any more. My face crumbles at the edges.

“Some teacher I am, huh?” I say.

“What happened?” she says, giving my shoulder a shake.

“I told him to fire his thirty-six in the air and not use his sleeper unless he had to. He was unarmed when they charged him.”