Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

At the most you’ve got about five hours.

One shot to get the bottle up to your left hand and then about five hours to cut the ropes.

And, to state the bloody obvious, the scales aren’t even.

On the minus side, there’s your ricochet wounds, you’ve a one-inch square carved out of your chest, you’ve a couple of broken ribs, you’ve had the shit kicked out of you, and you haven’t had any fluids or food in twenty-four hours.

On the plus side, if you don’t do it, you’re going to die.

Simple as that.

You’ll die and you’ll rob the Fates.

Oh yes, Michael. If you die now you’ll never see what Bridget Callaghan’s got in store for you-what she’s been hiding away all these years.

Other things.

You’ll never see the consequences of asking for that pardon from the Mexican government.

You’ll never go to Los Angeles or Peru and you won’t go back to Belfast on a wet June day seven years from now.

You won’t do any of that fun stuff, Michael, if you can’t get the bottle up there.

One chance.

You’ll need to be a goddamn gymnast. One of those guys with the giant arms and the talc on their hands and their coach praying in Romanian as they swing their legs up above that bloody horse.

One chance.

Give you a minute to compose yourself.

Cut to the establishing shot. Midnight in the primeval forest. In Maine. A sepia film in a remote country of the dead. The uneasiness is everywhere. You can feel it. The hunters, the hunted.

But if you can get that bottle up there.

Well, I wouldn’t like to be in that big cabin when I get free.

A deep meditation.

A silent countdown.

Here goes.

A final look out the tiny window to check for a light on at the cabin. I listen for anyone coming down the path. Nah. Just me and the woods and the boy, and the snow falling, steaming in the log fire. It’s after midnight and they’re done for the night. Those brave inheritors of Cuchulainn. With their tattoos of a maniacal fighting man tied to a stone. You should be concerned about another man, tied to the beams of a smokehouse wall.

Enough procrastination.

Slowly and deliberately, I jam the broken bottle into my big toe to give me a better grip. I hold it as tight as I can.

The night holds its breath.

If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.

Ten, nine, eight.

“Here goes.”

I swing my leg up, feel the bottle slip, but grasp it tight as a motherfucking vise, jamming the glass deeper into my skin.

I arch my side and my broken ribs, and in some kind of miracle hook my right leg over my left arm.

With the fingers of my left hand I take the bottle from between the toes.

I make sure I’ve got it.

Have I got it?

A desperate tenth of a second.

This is my poleaxe, my claymore, my fucking deliverer.

Have I got it?

Aye.

I hold it tight in my palm and fingers, I unhook my leg, drop it back to the ground, take a huge gasp of air, spit, and begin rubbing the ragged bottle neck over the ropes.

The morning-dour and constant in a speckled half-light. A snowy mist and an eerie quiet, as if the plague had come or we were waiting for old eponymous in the moorland of the Baskervilles.

The boy raised his head as the door opened.

A key jangled in her hand.

She was holding a tray with a plate of toast and a cup of coffee. I could smell the melting butter and the stench of Sanka.

She looked at me.

“You’re free,” she said, surprised.

I know.

“How? When?”

Only just now.

Her mouth opened.

This was the moment.

Slow-down time.

I swung the Coke bottle and smashed it against the side of Sonia’s face. It caught her on the cheek and made a clubbing noise on contact with the heavy bones in her skull. I’d swung powerfully from the shoulder, and the crushing force of the blow hammered through the bronze dust of hair on her jaw and twisted her jawbone with a dry snap that shoved it almost forty-five degrees from the horizontal.

Before she could react, I hit her again from the other side. This second blow an uppercut. It knocked out teeth and splintered pieces of bone and cartilage through the roof of her mouth. Fragments slicing through the front of her gums and spurting thick blood down onto her chin. She swayed and staggered to the side. The tray dropped in a clatter on the floor.

“Ssssss,” she groaned.

The two hits were enough to send her into a mild standing concussion, but I needed her to stay down. I held on tight to the wall and kicked her in the stomach with the heel of my right foot. I knocked the wind out of her and she fell backwards, bumping her head into the edge of a pine log and slumping to the floor.

For a second I thought she was unconscious and I hunted for a gag but then she began struggling up on one arm. Conscious, but still too stunned to react. She put her hand to her mouth and looked at the red blood on her fingertips.

Kneeling there before her executioner like Mary Queen of fucking Scots.

Our eyes met.

I lifted the bottle above my head.

She breathed in air to scream.

I knew I had to kill her in the next second.

I jumped up and, in midair, two-handed, thumped her hard on the top of her skull-so hard that the violence of the contact shook her brain and the impact pressure wave retarded back, surfing off the blow itself, and crashed into the bonded silicon of the bottle, shattering it into a hundred micro pieces, like a goddamn fragmentation grenade going off. Fucking Christ. Glass everywhere. Tiny razors cast into life in the dead black air, spraying in all directions. Some caught me and even Peter at the far side of the hut. Like darts into a clayboard. Sonia’s scalp a minefield of little particles of glass. Glass in her lips and eyes and bottle fragments stuck in her forehead.

“Huuuhhhh,” she said and clattered to the smokehouse floor. The holes immediately giving way to the steady progression of blood, oozing inevitably out from the myriad of wounds. In a second, Sonia’s head looked as if it had been dipped in red paint.

I listened to the outside.

Nothing.

I turned her over.

It looked bad, but I knew it was still all superficial, not life threatening, not immediately, anyway. She began shaking, flitting in and out of awareness, as if she was having an epileptic seizure. Most of the glass still embedded in her face, some falling out. She hadn’t yelled, but that wouldn’t last forever.

I was unsure of what to do. Tie her up? Gag her somehow? Maybe use the rope they’d tied me with. A piece of glass could cut off a long strip; I could bind her arms behind her back and- I’d hesitated too long.

She partially regained consciousness, began whimpering loudly, and with trembling hands tried to pick the bottle fragments out of her face.

This was a goddamn nightmare and I had to finish it. I grabbed the sheared-off bottle neck and slammed it across the line of least resistance in her throat, nodding grimly as it ripped through the epidermis and into the carotid artery. But it just wasn’t sharp enough. I pushed and pulled and the blood vessel remained intact.

“Jesus.”

I tossed the bottle neck and quickly found another frag- ment that looked sharper. I grabbed her hair, held her, and slashed the edge across her throat, lightning fast, before she seized that final chance to cry out. This time I cut the artery and the blood poured out in a long oxygenated red spout. I stood back, away from the curve and flow.

I looked outside the hut, checked on her, and in thirty seconds she was dead.

Thank God.

Ok. I had to move fast now if we were going to live.

I stepped over Sonia, limped to the other side of the smokehouse, and took the blindfold from Peter’s eyes.