Ben Cheetham - Blood Guilt

“Help me,” groaned Jones, holding up his hands, which were coated with smoking, melted plastic.

The wild voice stirred inside Harlan again. And this time no other voice rose up in opposition. He looked down at Jones, his eyes blank as the night that surrounded him. He stooped to haul him upright. “I don’t think I can make it down the ladder,” said Jones, his voice grating with pain.

“Is there another way down?”

Jones shook his head. “You’ll have to call a fire engine or something.”

“There’s no need.”

“But how else am I going to-” Jones broke off as Harlan reached down, grabbed his legs and flipped him over the railing. For an instant, his shrill scream raked across the derelict steel-mill’s courtyard. There was a dull, crunching thud as he hit the floor head first. Harlan stood for a moment, listening to the silence outside and inside. Then he crossed to the opposite doorway. Holding onto the doorframe, he stamped on the walkway and felt it give a little. He drove his heel into the metal grating again and again, until all of a sudden the bolts came loose and it collapsed, swinging against the opposite wall, dangling there for a few seconds, then clanging to the ground. Even before the echoes had died away, Harlan was making his way quickly but carefully to the ladder.

Keeping his head down, sticking to side streets and unlit back alleys, Harlan returned to his car. He drove through the empty city night, keeping well under the speed limit. He kept expecting to feel something — relief, guilt, satisfaction, fear — but he didn’t. It was as though the part of his brain’s circuitry that controlled his emotions had burned out. He pulled over outside Eve’s flat, got out of the car and pressed the intercom button. After a long moment, she answered, her voice sleepy but concerned, “Harlan, is that you?”

Still nothing. Not even a flicker of feeling. What’s wrong with me? Harlan asked himself detachedly. Am I in shock? Or did my emotions die along with Jones? A kind of numb panic closed his throat. He heard his voice come out tight, choked. “Yes.” Eve buzzed him in, and he climbed the stairs, moving like a man unsure of what would happen next. She was waiting for him at the door to her flat. When he saw her face, when he saw the slight swelling of her belly, all he felt for her, all he’d once felt for Tom, came rushing back. He stopped a few paces short of her, tears welling into his eyes, stammering, “I…I’ve done…something…I had no…” He trailed off. I had no choice, he’d been about to say. But he realised that wasn’t true. There was always a choice.

“Shh,” soothed Eve, moving towards Harlan, resting her head against his chest. “I don’t care what you’ve done. I love you.” She drew his hand to her belly. He felt a pulse of life under his palm, faint and hardly there, but strong enough to make him tremble. Tears fell from his eyes onto her neck.

“Will you still go away with me?”

Eve looked at Harlan as if to say, do you even need to ask? “Where would we go?”

“Somewhere…somewhere where it never gets dark.”

“I don’t think any such place exists.”

“Neither do I,” said Harlan. “But let’s see if we can find it anyway.”