Simon Clark - The Fall

‘I’m warning you. I’ll blow a hole right through you, d’ya hear, you fucking lunatic?’ The robber looked agitated now. He shot glances at the door, ready to run without the money. ‘Keep back or I’ll fucking drop you.’ He cocked the revolver.

‘I’m already dead,’ Lee Burton told the man. He felt strangely calm. He held out both arms, hands open, palms upturned. ‘I only want the gun.’

‘I’m warning you!’

‘You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.’

The robber’s eyes were huge shining discs behind the holes of the black balaclava.

He aimed the gun at Lee’s chest.

Then pulled the trigger.

Lee felt something snag against his chest. As if someone had just reached out and plucked at his shirt.

There was no pain.

He’d not even heard the report of the gun. But when he glanced down he saw a wet patch of crimson spreading across the white shirt.

‘You can’t kill me,’ he repeated, still walking forward. ‘Give me the gun.’ The customers and cashiers were screaming, but it was all thin-sounding and seemed to come from far away.

‘Bastard… you stupid bastard.’ The robber was close to screaming himself.

He fired again. This time Lee gasped. A tremendous bolt of agony seemed to light up his bones from the inside. He gritted his teeth and clutched at his stomach. He looked down. Blood poured over his fingers as freely as water squeezed from a sponge.

At that moment he collapsed into the middle of the carpet.

Lee Burton heard screams. He opened his eyes to see the logo of the building society he’d once worked for woven into the carpet – the letters WRBS sitting inside a yellow disc. His blood was soaked into it, like red wine soaking through kitchen tissue. And he saw a pair of green trainers.

A voice said, ‘I warned you I’d shoot, didn’t I? Didn’t I?’

He rolled over and looked up at the hooded face; the eyes stared back at him, wide with horror. He smelled the sharp tang of gunsmoke drifting on the still air of the building society. Lee smelled soap, too. In a disjointed way, the realisation that the robber had washed himself using perfumed soap was astonishing. Bank robbers should smell of stale sweat, engine oil, possibly a little whiskey, too, not Pear’s soap. Lee shook his head. It felt fuzzy, as if he’d been sitting in a hot stuffy room too long. He was slipping into unconsciousness.

No.

He couldn’t allow himself to go to sleep on the carpet there.

Lee tried to take a deep breath. But his chest felt so tight it was as though someone had wound a huge rubber band around it. ‘Give me the gun. You must give me the gun.’

‘Fuck you, you stupid bastard.’

The robber backed away.

Lee dragged himself to his feet. The Dracula cape felt as heavy as iron on his back. He wished he could take it off. Only he couldn’t. That button… that stupid button… he’d have to change it for a smaller one…

No… wait… he’d got something to do.

Test.

Assignment.

‘Oh, my God…’ Lee said under his breath. ‘The test’s not over yet. He’s getting away.’ Suddenly he yelled. ‘He’s getting away!’

He looked round groggily at the shocked faces of the staff and customers.

‘Don’t you see?’ he shouted. ‘This is my test. I can’t let him get away!’

He lumbered at the door, threw it open.

The robber ran along the street, pushing shoppers away, yelling, waving the gun.

Any second now, he might start firing , Lee thought. There’re innocent people. Children…

Come on , he told himself. You’re still being tested. The sun is God’s eye. He’s watching you. Evaluating you.

Lee charged after the robber. Now his chest and arms felt strangely numb. Only his stomach stung as though a giant wasp had planted its stinger through his navel.

Shoppers backed away quickly from Lee, opening a path as he ran. Face white with the corpse make-up; black cape flapping extravagantly behind him. And, covering his shirt, a crimson stain that soaked the white cotton frills from his throat to his belt.

He ran as hard as he could; the cloak was like cast iron weighing him down. He could hardly breathe. Blood bubbled from his nostrils every time he exhaled.

And he thought of his mother. How would she react if she saw him like this? Her youngest son, dying on his feet? He knew she’d remember him as a baby. When she’d stayed up all night with him when he’d had the whooping cough that had nearly killed him. She’d stroked his forehead while murmuring gently to him. She’d remember the occasion, after a spasm of coughing that sounded like someone blowing on a whistle, when he’d stopped breathing and she’d wept and prayed and hugged him. Then she’d gently pinched his nostrils and blown into his mouth, forcing air through his swollen throat, inflating his lungs that were congested with sputum. She’d brought him through it alive.

But I’m already dead now , he told himself. Blood sprayed from his mouth like crimson aerosol paint with every breath as he ran. I’m already dead .

The robber ran to a waiting car, threw open the door, swung himself in.

Lee heard the man yelling: ‘Go! Go! Go!’

The driver slammed the pedal to the matting. Wheels screeching, filling the street with smoke, the car rocketed forward.

No… no… Lee stopped, panting out gobs of blood. He could never catch the car. He’d failed his test.

And all the time, the sun burned in the sky, scrutinising his every action with an unwaveringly judgemental glare.

Hell waited for him now. A screaming hell of eternal damnation, pain and loneliness.

No, wait… He saw the car had taken a left. The only way now was for the car to join the ring road that curved around the town before heading north to join the motorway.

Lee visualised that curved road. It hugged the town centre close for half a mile yet. For another minute or so the getaway car would be the road’s prisoner.

A huge burst of energy revitalised Lee. Despite the bullet holes in his stomach he ran across the pedestrian precinct. The cape blew out horizontally behind him. Shoppers stumbled back from him in shock. A scared child started a wailing cry.

He cut down an alleyway, leaping over discarded boxes. Ahead, he could see the section of ring road the getaway car had to follow.

He pumped everything into that hundred-yard dash down the alleyway to the ring road.

Seconds later he was there. Calmly, he walked out into the road.

Now he went to stand on the white lines that separated the two northbound lanes of the road. Cars, taxis, trucks screamed by him, horns bleating. They didn’t trouble him. He waited serenely for the car to come. A tall, thin man with bright, shining eyes that gazed levelly into the flow of oncoming traffic, his black cape wafted this way and that by the slipstream. His white shirt bloomed redly in the sunlight. The blood stain seemed to form a red bull’s-eye there.

Lee Burton awaited his destiny.

Sam Baker returned to the Range Rover where Zita sat impatiently drumming her fingers on the steering wheel.

He wasn’t alone.

The blond man had returned with him.

‘Where’s Lee?’ Sam asked as he handed Zita the newspaper.

‘God knows,’ she said. ‘He just climbed out of the car and ran across there like the Devil himself was after him.’

‘Never mind him.’ The blond man’s voice was crisp. ‘Take a look at the paper. At the date.’

Zita raised her eyebrows at Sam. ‘It’s okay,’ Sam told her. ‘He knows.’

‘I know what happened,’ the man said. ‘That we’ve just been picked up and dropped backwards by precisely one week.’ He climbed into the front passenger seat and snapped on the seat-belt. ‘But I don’t know how it happened. Just how 50 people can be transported back in time. And it’s the how that fascinates me.’ He shut the door then popped his blond head through the open window. ‘You’d best hop in the back, Sam old boy. Unless you want leaving behind.’