My voice stops him. He turns back around to face me. The weak yellow light from the flashlight makes him look old beyond his years and tired, but slowly his expression changes from a scowl to a smile, which becomes a broad grin.
“Good man! I knew you’d do it!”
He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t try to get me to talk like I thought he would. He doesn’t try more of his stupid mind games. Instead he just picks up the plastic bottle of water and squirts it into my mouth. It tastes so good… stale and warm but refreshing. I swallow and feel it running down the sides of my throat. Thank God…
The bottle empty, Mallon does the same with the cold soup, ladling several spoonfuls into my mouth. I almost gag on its cold and lumpy, gristly texture, but I force it down, knowing that every mouthful helps replace the nutrients and energy I’ve lost since being held here. As I finish eating he loosens the chains on my wrists slightly. They’re still attached to the bed, but at least now I have some limited freedom of movement. The relief I feel when I finally move my shoulders and arms is indescribable.
“Didn’t hurt, did it?” He grins before he leaves and locks the door.
22
I OPEN MY EYES again, and this time the narrow room is full of long shadows. Rain is hammering against the window, and the water in the corner is trickling constantly now, no longer just dripping. I tilt my head back as far as it will go and see that the board over the glass has been moved. Mallon must have done it when he was last here. It’s only been shifted slightly, but it’s enough to let dull shards of light slope across the opposite wall, stretching almost halfway from the window over to the lopsided crucifix. I must have been asleep.
Wish I’d never spoken. Feel like a traitor, like I’ve betrayed myself and my kind, like I’m somehow now less of a man because I spoke to Mallon. But if I hadn’t done it I’d probably still be in total darkness with my ankles and wrists bound tight and my stomach still empty. I tell myself that I didn’t give anything away (not that I have anything to tell) and I haven’t compromised anyone but myself. It’s survival of the fittest now, and if I stay stuck here like this I’ll be fucked when the next fight begins. And there will be another fight…
I can hear something happening outside, someone moving on the other side of the door. Suddenly it’s unlocked and thrown open and Mallon barges in, the loud noise startling me. I curse myself for not concentrating and realizing he was close. Can’t afford to let my guard down like that. Lying here I’m vulnerable and exposed. If he decides to turn on me I’m dead.
He puts a fresh bottle of water down on the chair, then locks the door.
“How are you this morning, Danny?”
I won’t answer. He leans over me and looks into my face. Instinctively I try to attack, forgetting the chains that still hold me down. My arms are yanked back down, my already aching shoulders feeling like they’ve been pulled out of their sockets. Mallon, standing a little farther back, is unfazed. Fucker. I want to see fear and hate on his face, but there’s nothing. More games. More fucking games.
“Let’s get some proper light in here so we can see each other,” he says, walking over to the window. He moves the board completely, and for the first time I can properly see every corner of the small rectangular room I’ve been held captive in. It’s grubby and well used, with dirty handprints all over the door like someone’s been hammering to get out. And the walls are pink, for Christ’s sake! Christ knows what this place really is. I know it’s not a prison (there are no bars on the window), but this room is definitely a cell.
Watching me with caution, Mallon crouches down at the side of the bed and reaches underneath it. He’s pulling on the chains, probably tightening them again. He gets up and moves away, and I find that I can now move my left hand with a little more freedom than before. He tosses me the water. I’m just barely able to catch it, open the lid with my teeth, hold it to my lips, and drain it dry. I crush the empty bottle and throw it back at him with a flick of my still-restricted wrist. Smug bastard just smiles.
Mallon moves the chair marginally closer, carefully positioning it as if there’s a specific mark on the floor at the point where he’s safe. He sits down and looks long and hard into my face. I hold his gaze, determined I won’t be the first one to break. He makes it easy for me when he’s the one who looks away.
“You’ve been here for almost two days now, Danny,” he says, “and you haven’t had any answers to those questions of yours, have you? I’m also betting that if you’re anything like the rest of your people I’ve gone through this with, you’re probably not ready to start asking yet. In fact, if I was to loosen your chains just a little bit more, I know you’d try to get off that bed and kill me.”
Damn right. There’s nothing I want to do more than wrap these chains around his windpipe and choke the life out of this vile, pathetic bastard. But I know it’s not going to happen. Not yet, anyway.
“Now what I want this morning,” he continues, his voice low and infuriatingly calm, “is just for you to lie still and listen to me. I want to tell you my story. It won’t be anything you haven’t heard a hundred times already. Well, maybe you won’t have heard a story like this, but I’m betting you’ve seen plenty of similar things. Hell, I’m sure you’ve done worse things yourself than what I’m going to tell you. You see, Danny, you and your kind ripped a hole in my life. I lost everything because of you. You tore my world apart.”
What the hell’s he expecting from me? Pity? An apology? It makes me feel good to know that we’ve made him suffer, and I want to hear more. I want every detail. I want to know exactly how we hurt him and what we did.
“Picture the scene, Danny,” he begins, his voice almost too calm. “It’s a Friday night, and I’ve just got home from work. I won’t bore you with the details about where I lived and what I used to do for a living before all this because, if I’m being honest, it was boring. Thing is, it was my life and my routine and I was happy with it. And you and your kind took it all away from me.”
He remains composed, but I sense raw emotion bubbling just under the surface. Is he going to crack? I want to see this bastard’s pain, want to see him hurt. He stops speaking, closes his eyes, takes a breath, and then continues.
“It was pretty early on, I suppose. You remember what it was like in the early days when we thought there wasn’t really a problem and that the streets were full of copycat vigilantes fighting just because everyone else was? Before we knew that people like you were actually changing? Back in the days before we all got too scared to even look at each other? Remember?”
He automatically looks at me for a response, but he doesn’t get one.
“Anyway, like I said, it was a Friday night. We’d just finished eating, and I was watching the news on TV, hearing about how bad everything was starting to get. My wife was in the kitchen, arguing with Keisha, our seventeen-year-old, about going out. She was going through the whole protective mother routine, you know? Telling her how she didn’t like her going into town on weekends anyway, but especially not then with all the trouble going on… you get the picture. Now I’m sitting there with my feet up, trying to block out the noise and concentrate on the TV, but it’s getting louder and louder in there. Keisha’s shouting at Jess, Jess is shouting at Keisha, then Keisha’s shouting back again, and I’m just staring at the screen, wishing they’d both shut up…”
His voice trails off again, and in the sudden silence I remember all the TV and kid-oriented arguments that used to grind me down in my dead-end former life. I check myself quickly. Am I identifying with this fucker? Maybe that’s what he wants? This is probably just more calculated bullshit to try to get me on his side.
“The shouting gets louder and louder,” he says, “and I hear the back door swing open, then slam shut. I think that’s it, that Keisha’s stormed out, but then I realize I can still hear both their voices. Then I hear a crash and one of them starts screaming, then a thump and another crash. And then all the screaming stops.”
He looks straight at me. There are tears rolling down his cheeks. He wipes them away with his sleeve.
“I get up and start walking toward the kitchen, and there’s this guy just standing there in the middle of the room with his back to me, both my girls lying at his feet. I know they’re dead as soon as I see them. He’s got a baseball bat in his hand, and there’s blood dripping off the end of it. I can only see Keisha’s legs, but Jess is lying on her back, her head just a yard or so from where I’m standing, and her face… Christ, there’s nothing left of it, like her whole skull’s been caved in. Just a dark, bloody hole where that beautiful face used to be…
“Now our house was just a small, modest place-narrow, middle of the block, you know the type? I start backing away from the kitchen, praying the killer’s not gonna see me. I’m halfway across the living room when he starts to move. We had a closet under the stairs with one of those slatted louver doors. I drop down to my hands and knees,
