Quicker.
He was five feet away now; I could hear snow crunch under his feet.
Quicker.
Alex glanced at me — the first glint of fear in his eyes — and back out at Myzwik.
Quicker. Quicker.
Then I saw it, off to my left, high up on one of the top shelves. I went to reach up, and my whole back felt like it was tearing open. I sucked air in through my teeth, wanting to cry out in agony. Instead, I brought the box down and flipped the lid. Inside was my life. The car keys. My wallet. My photos of Derryn. The wedding ring I thought I’d lost for ever when I’d watched it roll away, across the floor of the fridge. Next to that was the bullet.
And next to that was the gun.
I grabbed the Beretta, placed the box on the floor, and stepped back behind the door next to Alex. It opened fractionally by itself. Between the door and the frame, I could see Myzwik reaching out for the handle. I flipped the safety on the gun — and it made the tiniest of clicks.
Enough to stop him dead.
He was on the other side of the door now, only a strip of his back visible through the gap in the frame. I couldn’t see the rest of him. What he was doing. Where he was looking.
We stayed like that for a long time. And then he started opening the door again, inch by inch, more daylight leaking in, covering the shelves, the shoeboxes, the floor. I looked down. The sun was behind him, low in the sky, and his shadow was long across the floor of the storage room. It got smaller as he stepped further in.
Then he was inside.
Immediately he saw me, spinning round to face us. I levelled the gun at his head. He started and stepped back, hitting one of the shelves. A shoebox tumbled over his shoulder and scattered across the floor. Photographs. A necklace. A letter. Someone’s forgotten life spilling across the room.
Myzwik looked at me. At the gun.
At Alex.
‘You shouldn’t have come back.’
We were two feet apart. I jabbed the barrel of the gun forward, smashing Myzwik square in the nose. Blood burst out, down over his lips and chin. As he bent forward, clutching at his face, I turned the gun around and swung it into the side of his face. He fell backwards to the floor with a thump.
The pain numbed me for a moment. When I finally shook it off, I looked up. Alex’s eyes were lingering on Myzwik — uncertain, as if a flood of memories were passing through him. And then he turned and peered through the door, up the rutted track, towards where the group were digging. A couple of them were still looking in our direction, trying to see what was going on.
He opened his mouth to speak to me when the alarm stopped.
As silence descended across the farm, it became eerily quiet. Only the sound of shovels against the ground could be heard; the ching of metal meeting earth.
Alex knelt down and started going through Myzwik’s pockets.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Trying to find a key,’ he said.
‘Key?’
He didn’t reply, just kept searching. Eventually, though, he stood and looked at me — his face etched with unease — and then up to the group again.
‘We have to join them,’ Alex said.
‘What?’
‘There’s no instructor up there with them.’
‘So what? I’m fifteen years older than anyone else up there. They’re going to know I’m not part of the programme. What’s to stop one of them finding someone in charge and raising the alarm?’
‘They won’t,’ he replied, his eyes still fixed on the group. ‘They’re too deep into the programme to remember if we’re part of the farm or not. They won’t care about the age thing either.’ Finally, he looked at me. ‘When you’ve got no memory, you can’t be sure about anything.’
‘How much time have we got?’
‘Andrew will be securing the compound, room by room, making sure everything’s as it should be. He’ll get to Calvary last, which means we’ve got —’ he looked at his watch ‘— about a minute before he and his attack dog discover you’re not nailed to that cross any more. Which gives us about two minutes before they get to the surface again.’
‘I cut a hole in the fence — we can go back out that way.’
‘The electricity’s on.’
‘Electricity?’
‘In the fencing.’
I looked at the fencing that ran in a gentle curve from the top entrance, all the way down the hill, dissecting a field of heather before hitting the beach. When the wind dropped away, and the sea quietened, I could hear the gentle buzz of a current.
‘When the alarm goes off, the electricity comes on, and stays on for thirty minutes,’ Alex said. ‘You can only switch it off from inside the compound, but we’re not going back in there. So the little hole you crawled through to get in here? That’s no longer an option. The only other way to get out is to find one of the master keys and use it to unlock the main gate. That isn’t electrified. But I haven’t got one of those. Only the instructors have them. So, we join the group and wait for one of the instructors to come back. Once they do, we spring him and take the key.’ He glanced at his watch again. ‘Are you following me?’
I nodded. My body ached so badly I wasn’t sure which part hurt the most.
‘Good,’ he said.
I pocketed everything from the box, slid the gun in at the front of my trousers and then followed him out. But after only a short distance, I started to fall behind. Alex jammed a fist around my arm, yanking me forward. Something twinged in my chest, forcing me to suck in air. I felt pain snake around to my side, where Legion had sliced it open.
‘This could take a while,’ I said.
‘We need to be quick,’ he replied, glancing back at the mouth of the compound. He was staring at something. I looked back and could see the CCTV camera attached to the roof of Lazarus panning in our direction.
The ground beneath our feet was uneven. Snow and stones everywhere. I could feel every bump and piece of gravel through the soles of the slippers, the pain rippling across my skin. Alex tried to quicken the pace by dragging me up the hill. Every time I looked up and expected to see the group getting closer, it was like they were being pushed further away.
‘Is this all they do all day?’
‘No. Some work locally too.’
‘The locals are in on this?’
‘No. Only the ones that used to work here. When someone like you breaches security, or gets too close, Andrew swaps everyone around. There’ll be new people working out of Angel’s now, and someone else managing the flat. The people down in London will be in Bristol; the people in Bristol will be up here — on the farm or in the villages somewhere. The project owns a couple of shops along the coast. Every time you open up a hole, they will close it.’
I looked up towards the group digging in front of us.
‘What do they do in the villages?’
‘The same as they do here. Digging, planting, fetching, carrying, maybe standing behind a counter and serving. Menial tasks. Nothing tasks. Andrew argues it’s a purer, untarnished existence. But the truth is, by the time they’ve finished with you here, you’re not good for much else.’
A few of the faces were visible beneath the hoods, staring down the hill towards us. They looked normal, even healthy, until you watched their eyes, darting between us, desperately trying to fit memories together like broken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
We finally reached them and a couple more looked up: a teenaged girl, a man in his mid-twenties, a girl of about the same age. In front of them, cracks and fissures in the frozen earth were gradually opening up. Their hands, wrapped around the shovels, were red with cold.