when she said it.
‘Morag… I… I’ve got nothing to explain or justify. I thought you were dead.’ I think subconsciously I’d searched for the absolute worst thing I could’ve said in the circumstances and arrived at that.
‘And that made it all right?’ she hissed. Angry, but I was grateful that she wasn’t shouting. ‘Tell me, was my corpse still on the floor?’
‘Look, I didn’t want to-’
‘Did she rape you?’ She was still angry but I’m not sure at whom.
‘What? No!’
‘Then why?’ she demanded.
‘I’ve told you. I’ve got no answers. I don’t expect you to forgive me-’
‘I want an answer. Help me understand why you’d fuck a cold-blooded murderer after you thought I was dead.’
‘I was really and truly fucked up. Nothing mattered. I wanted to be close to someone. Even if it was a lie because I was all alone.’ I think it was the closest thing to an explanation I could find. She looked away from me and hugged her knees to herself. I just stared into my bottle.
‘God, I wish you weren’t here,’ she said, finally looking at me.
‘Well I did try and retire to the Highlands.’
She looked like she was going to slap me. Then she laughed. ‘Cheeky bastard.’ Then serious again: ‘What are we going to do? We just keep tearing at each other.’
‘Pretty extreme circumstances. If we get out of this, it won’t be like this. I prom-’
‘Don’t make promises. You can’t keep them.’ She looked away from me again and I concentrated on my beer and tried not to say anything else stupid.
‘Look, you owe me nothing,’ I finally said. She looked at me again. I think she would have had tears in her eyes if they hadn’t been plastic now. ‘You decide. All I know is I want you so much and for ever, but we have to be able to work together because we’re putting the others at risk now. You decide.’
‘All on me, is it?’ she asked and sniffed. ‘Typical.’
‘That’s not what I mean. I mean what I want is us to be together, but you’re the wronged party so it’s up to you.’
She gazed at me for a while and then stood up.
‘Before you go, you have to stop trying to push everyone so hard,’ I said.
She didn’t look at me but she nodded. ‘I know. Cat’s spoken to me.’
‘What are you doing?’
She turned to look down at me.
‘Think about how much it has cost to get here. Buck, Gibby, Balor, Vicar, Dog Face, countless other people whose names we’ll never know, some of whom we’ve killed. It has to be for something, and we’re so close.’ I heard the resolve, the steel in her voice. I couldn’t tell her that more often than not it didn’t matter, and a lot of people died for very little.
‘I don’t think you realise how much we’ve punched above our weight,’ I told her instead.
‘We still have to make it mean something,’ she said.
I had nothing for her. I think we had raised her expectations too high. She turned to walk away but stopped.
‘Go and see Mudge,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘He’s really hurting.’
Showering. I waited until I knew Merle was showering and nicked his Void Eagle, spare clips and his holster. I also stole all the booze he had.
I found Mudge on his own, humming to himself in one of the caves. It was dark. The only illumination was the glowing cherry of his spliff. I was looking at him in the green of night vision. He was oblivious to me. I suspected that he was listening to music on his internal systems. I’d have to see if he had anything worth copying, maybe more of that Cash guy.
‘Mudge?’ I shouted. There was a moment of shock and then he was reaching for his Sig before he realised it was me.
‘What?’ he demanded suspiciously, looking around the cave as if he’d just discovered it anew.
‘Do you want to talk about your feelings?’
He stared at me, appalled. ‘No, I really don’t.’
‘Thank fuck for that. I found a bottle of brandy.’
He immediately brightened up. ‘Cool. Hey, is that Merle’s?’
I just grinned.
‘I just felt stupid, you know. I fell too far, too fast and for the bad boy, the cool guy that Mum warned me about. What a fucking cliche.’
We were both quite drunk now on Merle’s brandy and some of the moonshine that the Kiwis brewed. Morag was right: Mudge was hurting, but he’d cope.
‘Merle’s not cool; he’s a dick.’
‘He is cool. You’re just jealous because he’s harder than you.’ Who wasn’t? ‘Seriously, are you ever going to win a fight?’
‘I won lots of pit fights. I fought three guys up in the Highlands,’ I protested.
‘Yeah, yeah, you won loads of fights when nobody was around.’
‘Hell, you don’t have to split up with him just because he betrayed me and you put a gun to his head,’ I suggested, trying to change the subject. I sort of meant it in a I-just-want-my-mate-to-be-happy kind of way. ‘I mean, Morag’s shot at me and tried to kill me.’
Mudge looked confused. ‘Shooting at you is trying to kill you,’ he pointed out. I nodded sagely. ‘But I don’t really want that kind of relationship, you know,’ he continued. I nodded again. Ideally I didn’t want that kind of relationship either. ‘Are you guys back together?’ he asked.
‘Fucked if I know,’ I said gloomily and helped myself to another swig of the moonshine. I was starting to like the taste of it. Or more likely my taste buds were dead.
‘How are you?’ Mudge finally asked.
I shrugged. ‘Alcohol, denial and drugs will see me through. Concentrate on the job in hand and have nightmares about it for years to come. The usual.’
‘It wasn’t the usual though, was it?’
‘No, no, it really fucking wasn’t. Watching her die, then her being alive again. It’s almost like Rolleston putting two in her head is what I’ve got to look forward to. Like it was a…’
‘Premonition?’ Mudge was looking at me like I was an idiot.
‘I don’t think I could cope with it again.’
‘So walk away. She won’t. She’s hugely overcompensating for something at the moment. She sounds like a fanatic.’
‘She wanted to leave Rannu possessed,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I don’t get that at all – it doesn’t seem like her. What if I’ve made things worse? Hurt her too much?’
‘Damaged her? That’s your martyr complex kicking in. It’s not all down to you. Other bad things happen.’
I passed the moonshine over to Mudge. He took a long pull on the bottle. ‘Gaaah! This stuff’s horrible,’ he said and then took another long pull.
‘The thing I can’t deal with is what I was saying when I was possessed. I mean, that was me. No doubt about it. I remember saying those things and meaning them. I remember the thoughts. I…’ I trailed off.
I couldn’t explain the possession to myself, couldn’t reconcile it with being me. The thoughts I had had. White had become a deep black. Wanting to do all those horrible things, things that I would have done had I been free.
‘You know that wasn’t you, don’t you?’ Mudge asked, passing the moonshine back.
‘At some level, but my… the reality of the situation, my memories are that it was me. The thoughts I thought… As if everything I’ve done – killing, fighting, hurting, stealing and fucking people over – as if that somehow wasn’t nearly bad enough.’
‘Possessed-you wasn’t that much of a bigger prick than real-you,’ Mudge said, grinning in the dark. I gave him
