Standing in the corner with a crossbow in his bloody hands, it was Kingsley.
E P I S O D E F I V E
Forget
1.
As soon as Kingsley stepped into the chilly, bare hallway of the unfinished house, he knew he wasn’t alone.
There were shoe prints in the sawdust leading from the front door into the room on his left. Upon seeing them, he picked up on the murmur of voices underneath the howl of the wind rushing through the empty doorways and windows.
The voices were coming from the room to his left. One of the voices stirred recognition inside him – but fear stamped the feeling out before he knew what it was, the sound of footsteps moving into the kitchen where he had entered through the back doorway.
If they found him, it would ruin Eric’s rescue plan. He needed to hide.
Kingsley considered slipping straight out the back door and into the next house, but it sounded like someone was in the kitchen now. They would see him. He tiptoed past the stairs and through a doorway on the right.
As he entered the room, he glimpsed a man across the hallway standing in the room opposite and his heart leapt. Darting behind the wall before the man could turn and see him, Kingsley’s foot collided with a bucket on the floor by the wall, knocking it over. It clattered.
Shit, shit, shit, Kingsley panicked. The man must have heard that.
Things were going south again.
Don’t let Sammy down.
He stood frozen still and listened for the man’s footsteps, laying out the options in his head.
Could he kill them both with the crossbow? No, it was too slow to reload and it would only take one scream to alert Mark to the fact that something was wrong, thwarting the rescue operation; perhaps he could just threaten them with the crossbow to keep them quiet while he kept an eye out the window, waiting for Eric to get close to Mark. Then…
Then what?
No time – footsteps approaching. They’d definitely heard him knock the bucket over. Kingsley backed into the corner of the room and trained his crossbow on the doorway, waiting. Blood rushing like liquid fire to every extremity of his body.
There was the sound of footsteps in the hallway right outside the room. Then a pause… before a man stepped in.
The man’s eyes found first the toppled bucket, then Kingsley, and he froze. He was a young Asian man with messy hair. Looked harmless. But he wasn’t; he was getting in the way and that made him dangerous.
Kingsley stared at the young man and held his forefinger in front of his lips. He gawked at Kingsley. There was a childishness about him that was hard to reconcile with the threat he presented.
Voices drew his eye to the window where he saw Eric, Kara and Rebecca outside, standing in front of Mark – who was restraining Sammy with one arm and pressing a blade to her neck with the other – along with an older man. Kingsley just needed Eric to get a little bit closer to Mark, and then he could fire a bolt at the old guy.
He focused again on the young Asian man in the room with him. Kingsley expected the man to retaliate as soon as he shot one of his pals dead, so he needed to make sure this guy wasn’t armed.
“Drop any weapons you have,” Kingsley hissed.
The young man reached behind his back and drew a knife from his belt, tossed it onto the concrete between them. Kingsley dragged the knife closer with his foot.
“Sebastian?” came a woman’s voice from the hallway, and there was that odd feeling of recognition in his gut again. That sounded exactly like… No. It couldn’t be.
But then Emma walked through the doorway and Kingsley thought he was losing his mind.
*
Mark’s eyes were those of someone who didn’t know how unstable they had become, Eric thought as he stared into them from several feet away; they seemed almost to bulge from their sockets in intense concentration.
Eric dropped the duffel bag, full of the supplies from Darren’s flat and what they had scavenged from shops in Braintree, on the packed-dirt driveway before Mark. Then he placed the chain mace next to it. Rebecca followed suit and laid the machete on the ground, and Kara did the same with her police baton.
John came forward and collected the weapons and the bag. Placed it on the ground between himself and Mark and picked up the chain mace.
The incessant wind tugged at a sheet of tarpaulin that covered a stack of materials nearby, creating a noisy flapping sound; the trees fringing the construction site hissed in the gale like a hive of rattlesnakes.
But Eric barely noticed the noises or the force of the wind that caused them.
Because he had noticed that the third man in Mark’s group, Sebastian, wasn’t here with them. From afar, Eric had assumed Sebastian was waiting in the van, perhaps not wanting to get his hands bloody. But the drivers-side window of the van was rolled down and he could see from here that nobody was inside.
So where the fuck was Sebastian? And where the fuck was the fourth person he had seen sitting in the van earlier?
A bolt of concern went through Eric as he wondered if Sebastian had gone into one of the empty houses to scout it out and had bumped into Kingsley.
Shaking the thought, he waited for Mark to speak, knowing what the man would say before the words left his mouth.
“The crossbow?” Mark asked.
Eric cleared his throat. “As I told you on the radio, our friend has—”
“And as I told you, Eric, that’s your problem. And it’s a big fucking problem for you now because I need that crossbow. Everything from that flat belongs to us. So unless you tell me where your curly-haired mate is, you can say goodbye to this
