Paul Finch - Dead Man Walking

‘Jane, no!’ Tara’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Look … he’s as blind as we are up here. Let’s just walk away … right away. We keep it down and he won’t even know we’ve gone.’

They strode quickly and quietly, the only sound their short, sharp breathing. They’d covered maybe a hundred yards unimpeded, their concern ebbing a little – when they head the whistling again.

No more than twenty yards to their right.

Almost on a level with them.

‘Oh shit,’ Tara whimpered.

They sped up until they were almost running, as a result of which Jane tripped, falling full length. Tara stooped and groped around for her in the murk. ‘You alright?’

‘I’m alright, for Christ’s sake! Just keep going … we have to keep moving.’

But the whistler was moving too, circling around behind them, still treating them to Strangers in the Night , though now at a raised tempo.

‘Okay, okay,’ Jane said. ‘He goes left, we go right.’

She hooked onto Tara’s cagoule again. They moved away, following a diagonal line. Both were now saturated with sweat, their lungs pumping. They again tried to move stealthily, only to find themselves on a loose, stony surface, which clattered and scraped under their soles.

‘Oh, bloody hell!’ Jane squealed.

It was scree; masses of broken rocks ramped sharply uphill in front of them.

‘This way!’ Tara said, pulling Jane in a different direction, but stones continued to crack and tumble beneath their boots, creating a racket that would carry across the night. ‘He’s stopped whistling at least. Probably lost track of us.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. He can’t not know where we are with all this hullaballoo.’

‘Maybe he’s just had enough then?’

Panting hard, the blood pounding in their ears, they forged on. They were on higher ground now, the chunks of debris larger. Soon they were having to pick their way between them rather than scrambling over them, though this at least was a quieter process. In fact, colossal boulders now lay in their path, which afforded a sense of protection. They slid between them in single file, their waterproofs hissing on the rugged stone.

‘Don’t worry, this is all good,’ Tara whispered. ‘Crooked passages. He can’t come on us by surprise in one of these. We can lie low. Get down, wait a few minutes …’

‘We should press on,’ Jane said, in front, slapping her hands along the surfaces to either side.

‘Let’s at least stop, see if we can hear anything.’

They halted again, their breath furling in semi-frozen plumes. It took several seconds for the noise of this to subside, and then there were several seconds more of nothing – before they heard the whistling.

It was just above their heads.

They glanced upward.

He was only vaguely visible – an apelike silhouette crouched on top of the boulder on their left. His huge, misshapen head, almost certainly hooded, was inclined down at them. He stopped whistling half a second before he dropped. It was impossible to judge how big or heavy he was, but when he crash-landed on top of Jane, who, though stocky of build was only five feet four, she collapsed beneath him with a muffled shriek. Tara, standing rigid and helpless, didn’t quite see what happened next, though she heard it: a succession of heavy blows. She thought a brawny arm was rising and falling, and maybe that was a jagged stone clutched in its gloved hand. With each impact, Jane gave a low, tortured moan.

‘Stop … please,’ Tara stammered.

The flurries of movement ceased. With a creak of waterproofs, the muffled shape turned its heavy, brooding head towards her. She heard a thud as the stone was released, saw an arm slide out of sight, heard a distinctive click . Tara knew very little about guns, but she’d seen enough of them on the television to recognise when a firearm was being cocked.

That was the tipper. The moment the adrenaline broke her paralysis.

She twirled around, fighting back along the crooked defile into open space, and there barked her shins against low, unseen edges. She barely felt the pain; the main problem was that she fell sideways, winding herself, another sharp stone digging into her hip. From here, she scrambled along on her hands and knees, sensing rather than seeing the humanoid form emerging from the defile behind her. She knew it would be pointing the gun in her general direction. Tears streamed down her face as she jumped to her feet and started running again, blindly but desperately, putting as much distance as possible between them: ten yards, twenty, thirty, forty. Surely she was out of sight now? He couldn’t see her to shoot. Fifty yards, sixty …

Heck’s eyes flirted open.

A first he wasn’t sure what had disturbed him. Then he realised: a distant noise like a reverberating boom .

A gunshot … maybe.

He pushed the quilt aside, sat up and took his watch from the bedside table. Its neon numerals read: 00.18.

He hadn’t been asleep long. He got up, wandered across the bedroom and shifted the thin curtain. It was impossible to see anything out there. The fog was like grey sediment swirling in liquid.

‘What is it?’ Hazel asked sleepily.

‘Dunno. I thought … Did you hear something?’

‘Outside?’

‘I thought so.’

‘Like what?’

‘Not sure. Gunfire perhaps.’

She yawned. ‘That wouldn’t exactly be unusual around here.’

‘No,’ Heck conceded. He was still getting used to the idea that a much higher percentage of the population of this rural county held shotgun licences than they did back in the cities where he’d formerly worked. ‘Bit late at night though, isn’t it?’

‘Car backfiring?’

‘Perhaps.’ He hung around at the window a few moments, until a gentle susurration from the pillow indicated Hazel had gone back to sleep. Eventually, wondering if he’d dreamed it, he drifted back to bed.

Tara covered another fifty yards before she realised she’d been shot.

Initially it had been like a blow on the back of her shoulder. A hard one, of course. It had driven the wind out of her, but sheer terror kept her on her feet, kept her motoring forward. Now however, very suddenly, her strength was draining, an intense pain spreading through the top right quarter of her body. The arm itself had turned numb – she had no sensation below the elbow. Under her clothing, that whole side of her body swam with hot fluid.

‘Please,’ she mumbled as she lost the coordination of her limbs. Her balance was all out, her legs wobbling. She realised the darkness filling her eyes was no longer just the darkness of night and fog. When she tottered over the precipice, she could hardly be blamed, because she hadn’t even seen it.

Only vaguely aware she was falling, Tara spun downward for half a second, caroming outward from a jutting overhang made spongy by grass and rotted ferns, turning somersaults though icy emptiness, before hitting another shelf. This blow was phenomenal in its force, but again cushioned by sodden vegetation. Instinctively, she tried to grapple with it, but in mid-somersault all this did was wrench her left shoulder out of its socket and snap her humerus. In freefall again, she was engulfed by roaring, ice-cold water, and then hit by mud and rocks angled sharply downward, so that she slid on her back, until a heavy stone caught her feet and flipped her forward. Craggy edges tore at her ribs and rent her face, and then she was in mid-air again, descending through icy spume, the ear-pounding thunder of which overwhelmed all her senses.