Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

Then another – CRACK! – and another – CRACK! – then the same sound but softened, without the hint of ricochet. Bree could see something blurring out of the sky and punching into the dirt in the floor of the yard. It looked like an apple. She had a fleeting image of the way hailstorms used to begin when she was a kid.

Bree flinched as if she were under fire. Then she felt a sharp agony in her hand and her gun flew out of it and onto the ground. Her arm felt as if she’d been hit on the funny bone with a sledgehammer. A round red apple bounced over the yard. She hunched, thrusting her sore arm into her armpit and bringing the other up to protect her head. Then she felt another whistle down behind her, and another, and two more red apples snapped into existence half buried in the dirt of the yard. Snap, snap.

Then a yellow one. Then a green one. Then a brown one.

Jones was still standing, looking puzzled, when a blue snooker ball struck him on the top-right corner of his forehead, a quarter of an inch below his hairline. The orbit of his right eye collapsed, and blood exploded from his face.

Behind Jones a pink ball punched into the dirt.

Jones flopped forward and landed on his knees. His hands were by his sides. His mouth was open. His cigarette fell out.

A couple of feet further on a black ball hit the concrete in which the fence was set and exploded into dust.

Then Jones’s whole long body pitched face first, waist still unbending, into the dirt. He came to rest like that, his head looking down the length of his shoulder across the ground to where Bree was half crouched, expecting at any moment to be struck dead by some kind of English sporting goods travelling at terminal velocity.

The hailstorm stopped. Again, there was silence – though it was the anticipatory and untrusted silence of a pause in shelling.

Jones’s legs, still bent at the knee, subsided in a succession of ragged jerks to the horizontal. His mouth opened. Blood was pooling, under the influence of gravity, in the corner of his shattered eye. It flowed over the bridge of his nose and trickled thickly into the corner of his undamaged eye. It looked almost black in the artificial light. His mouth closed.

Bree, picking herself up, her hand still buzzing agonisingly from the impact – one of those balls must have hit the barrel of the gun she was holding – ran-stumbled towards where Jones was lying.

Alex was standing where he had been standing, not more than a body’s length or two from the wreckage of the snooker table. His hands were still in the air.

Bree shouted ‘Stay there!’ at him but he didn’t show any signs of having heard her. He wasn’t going anywhere. He had been chased, and newly shot at, and heartbroken, and rescued from death by a falling snooker table. Now he was out. Not computing. Just staring into space.

Bree reached Jones and knelt beside him. The uneven dirt of the lot was hard through the knees of her slacks. She put her hand on his shoulder. His mouth opened. His unbroken eye shifted focus to look at her face. He looked confused. And he looked, for the first time, afraid.

‘Easy, Jones,’ Bree cooed to him. ‘It’s all right. We’re going to get you an ambulance. Ambulance is going to come, and pick you up, and we’re going to get that eye -’

Jones blinked, and a smear of blood tinted the white of his eye pink. His mouth closed.

‘- get that eye looked at, get it fixed up, an’ – we’re – don’t try to speak – just getting an ambulance right now -’

She felt panic getting a hold on her. She fought it. She realised she needed to call, needed to call a fucking ambulance – her hands were shaking. She pulled out the cheap cellphone she had and stabbed at the keys, mistyped twice, hit 911, composed herself as she spoke to the dispatcher.

‘Yes, corner of – that’s right – it says -’ she read the street sign she could see – ‘down an alley at the yard in back. We’ve got – yes, badly injured, something fell on him. Hit him on the head. Come quick.’

She returned her attention to Jones. Absently, maternally, she realised that she had been stroking his hair. Her hand was sticky with blood. He flapped his mouth again, then half coughed a syllable.

‘Not,’ Jones said.

‘Don’t try to speak, baby,’ Bree said. She could see the blood, the shattered skull. Jones was dying, right here, right in front of her. ‘Don’t try to speak. Everything’s going to be all right. The ambulance is coming. The table got fucko. We won. The good guys won.’

‘Not alone,’ Jones said, and she realised that what was in his eye was not fear but imploring.

‘Don’t worry, Jones. Not alone, no. I’m right here with you. Not alone.’

The blood from the wound in Jones’s head passed in a runnel down the corner of his jaw. It dripped from the bridge of his nose. Bree was down low, looking into his good eye, nearly on the ground, trying not to think about the mashed part of his face where the ball had hit. ‘Not alone,’ she said. ‘I’ll be with you all the way. In the ambulance. Ambulance is coming. Coming now. Not alone, baby. Not alone.’

Jones’s eye spooked a little. He looked afraid again, held her gaze as if she was what was holding him to the world. And then the pupil of his eye ballooned until the grey iris was the width of a fingernail paring, and he was looking at nobody.

Bree was still there on her knees beside him, stroking his sticky hair and bawling, when the ambulance showed up twenty minutes later and with nobody to save.

Alex went with Bree and Jones’s body to the emergency room.

Retrieving the main section of Sherman – as the two paramedics discovered when they tried to lift the snooker table – was going to be a separate project. They called for backup while the lights of the ambulance revolved noiselessly on the main street, red spilling through the gap in the fencing and over the bare pocked earth.

While Jones had been dying Alex had passed out. The last thing he heard was a clattering sound somewhere nearby – the landfall, like giant pick-up-sticks, of a baker’s dozen snooker cues and rests of different lengths. His system was lousy with whiskey and adrenalin. Alex’s mind had had enough.

‘Alive,’ Bree had said to the paramedics, still with Jones, waving at where Alex was lying. ‘That one’s alive. Bring him.’

And they had – hauling the boy’s unresisting frame into the back of the ambulance between two of them, letting him lie on the floor at Bree’s feet, beside the gurney on which Jones, having given up smoking for good, made his journey to the hospital.

While they were loading the bodies, Bree called Red Queen. She just said: ‘We’ve found him. The other side was there. Jones is gone.’

‘Jones is gone?’ Red Queen said. ‘Where gone?’

‘Gone. Dead. We’re in an ambulance on the way to the medical centre.’

‘Wait there,’ said Red Queen. Bree was exhausted. She wondered whether Red Queen would be thinking that Jones dead solved a problem. She didn’t know Red Queen well enough to make the call, and didn’t have the energy for anger. Alex came round in the ambulance, tried to sit up, lay back down again. Bree took charge of him.

When they got to the emergency room they took Jones away and made Bree sign a form. Jones had no identification on him. She realised she didn’t know his first name, so she wrote on the form just ‘Jones’ and circled ‘Mr’. You could also be ‘Mrs’, ‘Miss’ and ‘Ms’. If you were dead in this hospital, it seemed, they were still interested in whether or not you might be single.

She said that she was his next of kin, and didn’t have the presence of mind to give any but her real name. Under ‘relationship to the deceased’, she wrote: ‘Friend’. Her hands were still shaking.