The figure by the telephones looked up as Nick appeared. It was Albert. ‘Don’t step in the puke,’ he said dully.
Nick dropped the quarters back into his pocket and hurried to where the boy was standing with his hands propped above his knees like an old man who has badly overestimated his capacity for exercise. He could smell the high, sour stench of vomit. That and the sweaty stink of fear coming off the boy were smells with which he was all too familiar. He knew them from the Falklands, and even more intimately from Northern Ireland. He put his left arm around the boy’s shoulders and Albert straightened very slowly.
‘Where are they, Ace?’ Nick asked quietly. ‘Gaffney and Toomy – where are they?’
‘Mr Toomy’s there.’ He pointed toward a crumpled shape on the floor. ‘Mr Gaffney’s in the Airport Services office. I think they’re both dead. Mr Toomy was in the Airport Services office. Behind the door, I guess. He killed Mr Gaffney because Mr Gaffney walked in first. If I’d walked in first, he would have killed me instead.’
Albert swallowed hard.
‘Then I killed Mr Toomy. I had to. He came after me, see? He found another knife someplace and he came after me.’ He spoke in a tone which could have been mistaken for indifference, but Nick knew better. And it was not indifference he saw on the white blur of Albert’s face.
‘Can you get hold of yourself, Ace?’ Nick asked.
‘I don’t know. I never k-k-killed anyone before, and -‘ Albert uttered a strangled, miserable sob.
‘I know,’ Nick said. ‘It’s a horrible thing, but it can be gotten over. I know. And you must get over it, Ace.
We have miles to go before we sleep, and there’s no time for therapy. The sound is louder.’
He left Albert and went over to the crumpled form on the floor. Craig Toomy was lying on his side with one upraised arm partially obscuring his face. Nick rolled him onto his back, looked, whistled softly.
Toomy was still alive – he could hear the harsh rasp of his breath – but Nick would have bet his bank account that the man was not shamming this time. His nose hadn’t just been broken; it looked vaporized.
His mouth was a bloody socket ringed with the shattered remains of his teeth. And the deep, troubled dent in the center of Toomy’s forehead suggested that Albert had done some creative retooling of the man’s skull-plate.
‘He did all this with a toaster?’ Nick muttered. ‘Jesus and Mary, Tom, Dick and Harry.’ He got up and raised his voice. ‘He’s not dead, Ace.’
Albert had bent over again when Nick left him. Now he straightened slowly and took a step toward him.
‘He’s not?’
‘Listen for yourself. Out for the count, but still in the game.’ Not for long, though; not by the sound of him.
‘Let’s check on Mr Gaffney – maybe he got off lucky, too. And what about the stretcher?’
‘Huh?’ Albert looked at Nick as though he had spoken in a foreign language.
‘The stretcher,’ Nick repeated patiently as they walked toward the open Airport Services door.
‘We found it,’ Albert said.
‘Did you? Super!’
Albert stopped just inside the door. ‘Wait a minute,’ he muttered, then squatted and felt around for Don’s lighter. He found it after a moment or two. It was still warm. He stood up again. ‘Mr Gaffney’s on the other side of the desk, I think.’
They walked around, stepping over the tumbled stacks of paper and the IN/OUT basket. Albert held the lighter and flicked the wheel. On the fifth try the wick caught and burned feebly for three or four seconds.
It was enough. Nick had actually seen enough in the spark-flashes the lighter’s wheel had struck, but he hadn’t liked to say so to Albert. Don Gaffney lay sprawled on his back, eyes open, a look of terrible surprise still fixed on his face. He hadn’t gotten off lucky after all.
‘How was it that Toomy didn’t get you as well?’ Nick asked after a moment. ‘I knew he was in here,’ Albert said. ‘Even before he struck Mr Gaffney, I knew.’ His voice was still dry and shaky, but he felt a little better. Now that he had actually faced poor Mr Gaffney – looked him in the eye, so to speak – he felt a little better.
‘Did you hear him?’
‘No – I saw those. On the desk.’ Albert pointed to the little heap of torn strips .
‘Lucky you did.’ Nick put his hand on Albert’s shoulder in the dark. ‘You deserve to be alive, mate. You earned the privilege. All right?’
‘I’ll try,’ Albert said.
‘You do that, old son. It saves a lot of nightmares. You’re looking at a man who knows.’
Albert nodded.
‘Keep it together, Ace. That’s all there is to it – just keep things together and you’ll be fine.’
‘Mr Hopewell?’
‘Yes?’
‘Would you mind not calling me that? I -‘ His voice clogged, and Albert cleared his throat violently. ‘I don’t think I like it anymore.’
16
They emerged from the dark cave which was Airport Services thirty seconds later, Nick carrying the folded stretcher by the handle. When they reached the bank of phones, Nick handed the stretcher to Albert, who accepted it wordlessly. The tablecloth lay on the floor about five feet away from Toomy, who was snoring now in great rhythmless snatches of air.
Time was short, time was very fucking short, but Nick had to see this. He had to.
He picked up the tablecloth and pulled the toaster out. One of the heating elements caught in a bread slot; the other tumbled out onto the floor. The timer-dial and the handle you used to push the bread down fell off. One corner of the toaster was crumpled inward. The left side was bashed into a deep circular dent.
That’s the part that collided with Friend Toomy’s sniffer, Nick thought. Amazing. He shook the toaster and listened to the loose rattle of broken parts inside.
‘A toaster,’ he marvelled. ‘I have friends, Albert – professional friends – who wouldn’t believe it. I hardly believe it myself. I mean … a toaster.’
Albert had turned his head. ‘Throw it away,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I don’t want to look at it.’
Nick did as the boy asked, then clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Take the stretcher upstairs. I’ll join you directly.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I want to see if there’s anything else we can use in that office.’
Albert looked at him for a moment, but he couldn’t make out Nick’s features in the dark. At last he said, ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Nor do you have to,’ Nick said in an oddly gentle voice. ‘Go on, Ace . Albert, I mean. I’ll join you soon.
And don’t look back.’
Albert stared at him a moment longer, then began to trudge up the frozen escalator, his head down, the stretcher dangling like a suitcase from his right hand. He didn’t look back.
17
Nick waited until the boy had disappeared into the gloom. Then he walked back over to where Craig Toomy lay and squatted beside him. Toomy was still out, but his breathing seemed a little more regular.
Nick supposed it was not impossible, given a week or two of constant-care treatment in hospital, that Toomy might recover. He had proved at least one thing: he had an awesomely hard head.
Shame the brains underneath are so soft, mate, Nick thought. He reached out, meaning to put one hand over Toomy’s mouth and the other over his nose – or what remained of it. It would take less than a minute, and they would not have to worry about Mr Craig Toomy anymore. The others would have recoiled in horror at the act – would have called it cold-blooded murder – but Nick saw it as an insurance policy, no more and no less. Toomy had arisen once from what appeared to be total unconsciousness and now one of their number was dead and another was badly, perhaps mortally, wounded. There was no sense taking the same chance again.
And there was something else. If he left Toomy alive, what, exactly, would he be leaving him alive for? A short, haunted existence in a dead world? A chance to breathe dying air under a moveless sky in which all weather patterns appeared to have ceased? An opportunity to meet whatever was approaching from the east
… approaching with a sound like that of a colony of giant, marauding ants?
No. Best to see him out of it. It would be painless, and that would have to be good enough.
‘Better than the bastard deserves,’ Nick said, but still he hesitated.
He remembered the little girl looking up at him with her dark, unseeing eyes.
Don’t you kill him! Not a plea; that had been a command. She had summoned up a little strength from some hidden last reserve in order to give him that command. All I know is that we need him.