Cold Fusion (12 page)

I got it, with grim generosity. Not only the empty space but the gouged-up dirt around it where the Hyundai had executed a frantic one-eighty turn. And, to top that, in the very far distance where the track met the North Kerra road, a brief glimpse of the vehicle’s roof before it disappeared.

I crashed to a halt. One of Alan’s gloves lay on the track. It must have fallen out of his side pocket, and he either hadn’t noticed or had been in too much of a hurry to stop and pick it up. I snatched it off the ground and threw it after him, the wind for a wonder blowing in the right direction to give my futile act a bit of drama, rather than sending the glove back to slap me in the face.

“Fuck you, Alan!” I yelled after the departing truck, at the glimmer of tail lights through the sleet. I thought about what I’d let him do to me, and my voice broke. “Fuck you!”

Hands closed on my shoulders. I’d forgotten Viv’s existence, and I jerked around, ready to punch someone. But he took hold of my upper arms and held me with just the shadow of the steely power that had hauled me out of the ruins, and I went still in his grasp.

“I tried to explain to you,” he said. “There are certain people I would have contacted in the fullness of time—scientists I know, government ministers, an underground network that may have been able to bring this to the public in safety. I tried to explain.”

“You didn’t try very fucking hard! Why didn’t you say all that before I called PW?”

“Would it have made any difference?”

I stood breathing raggedly. There were shards of glass in Viv’s hair. He suited them—made them look like a crown of diamonds and stars—but some of them were near to his eyes, and I brushed them away with shaking hands. “Alan did this,” I whispered. “He tried to kill us.”

“Perhaps it was only the wiring, as he said.”

“Yeah. If you’d died in there, and he’d managed to keep me out of it, that would’ve been his story. The wiring was fine. Christ, though—how did he do it? When did he have time?”

“Probably while I was down in the chambers. And you were…”

“Sound asleep. Because he knows the best way to put me in a coma is to screw my brains out.” My guts gave a heave of shock and disgust, and I just stopped myself short of throwing up. “Oh, God.”

“He didn’t mean to kill both of us. He’d have held you back if he could.”

“But he sent you back in there deliberately—he knew what would make you go—and then when I chased after you…” I shut up, running out of breath and words. Yes, he’d tried to stop me. But past a certain point in our dash down to the lab—the point where I’d thought he’d fallen, and he’d stopped calling my name—he’d let me go. “Shit. He didn’t come from Peace Warrior at all.”

“Not for the reasons you summoned him, no.”

“Oh, Viv. I’m so sorry.”

He put his arms around me. I was so astonished that I stood still, though I didn’t think I wanted him—it was like being held by a scarecrow, and human touch had brought me enough trouble for one day. He didn’t know what he was doing. His arms around my back were like iron rods, and he was rigid with fear or distaste.

But he smelled good beneath his layer of smoke and dust, and he was the only shelter in the world. If his hold on me was awkward, it was clean and detached from any other motive than his vague ideas of giving comfort. It didn’t come naturally to him, but because he thought I needed it, he was trying. The effort moved me more profoundly than any amount of ease or expertise could have done. I put my arms around his waist and held on.

“You have glass in your hair too.”

I bet it didn’t look like stars or diamonds on me. I raised my head a little. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed in the buffeting wind and rain. His bony shoulder had been a good place to let shock and a touch of blast-deafness clear out of my skull. Now I stepped back, releasing him, and I stood passively while he in his turn brushed me clear of the shards. “Thanks.”

“You also have some cuts and grazing on your face. Are you all right?”

“Considering the circumstances, not bad at all. You pulled me out of there, Viv. I don’t know how to… Oh, God. Your hands.”

He was burned. I took him by the wrists and turned his palms to the light. Livid red streaks marked his pale skin, beginning to blister. I could see the shape of the last bit of debris he’d hauled off me. “This must be killing you.”

“No. I don’t feel it.”

“You must. I have to get you to casualty, or—”

“Mallory. Hush. If it isn’t convenient to me to feel pain, I can put it away. I assure you I’m all right.”

I gave up. My tiny peripheral efforts to fix any part of this were laughable, pathetic in the face of the disaster I’d brought on. When I’d made that call to PW, the one thing Viv had told me not to do, I might as well have been standing on the deck of the
Sea Hawk
again, ready in my pride and ambition to send the world to hell.

“All your gear,” I said brokenly. “Your notes. What are you going to do?”

“The equipment was cheap. I can get it anywhere.” He stood looking down at me, his wrists still resting in my grasp. “As for the notes, there never were any. There’s just me.”

* * * * *

There was just him. That made protecting him all the more imperative, and I didn’t know where to start. Everything I possessed had gone off with my murderous lover in the four-by-four. The frail shelter of Spindrift was in blazing ruins. Viv was sitting on an outcrop of turf, watching the fire. Shifting crimson lights and deep blue shadows flickered across his face. He’d retreated into himself and I’d let him, glad to have a few minutes to try and think. He must be in shock too. In a moment I’d take him down to the beach to wash his burned hands in the sea, because I didn’t buy that anyone could set aside that kind of pain. He must be in agony, and other than saltwater I had nothing for him. Panic tugged at me, and sudden crushing grief for the lost world of chalets and silver flowers. I had nothing.

No. There was a shape on the turf, travel-stained and sandy enough to blend in. I gave a yelp of excitement, and Viv turned round, his attention coming back from a long distance to settle on me. “What is it?”

“My rucksack, that’s what. I thought he’d gone off with it.”

“Does that help?”

“Of course it does, you dope.” I strode over and crouched beside the bag. “Rucksack means mobile phone, wallet, and…oh, yeah. Credit card. And that means a hire car, and we’re out of here. Alan might have been nuts, but I’m still sure Peace Warrior HQ is the best place to take you. And if you won’t go to hospital, get down to that clear signal patch and call Alfred. Tell him to bring us some first-aid stuff, and—”

“Do you imagine that I’m going to involve Alfred or anyone else in this?”

“What?” I paused, overloaded credit card in my hand. It might be good for a couple of days’ car hire. “Alan’s gone. He probably thinks we’re dead, which is useful. You don’t think anyone else out there wants to blow us up, do you?”

“I don’t know what to think. And nor do you. You’ve told me you’re sorry, and I’m grateful for that, but you owe it to me not to do it again.”

I nearly asked him what. But I didn’t quite have the nerve for that, and I knew perfectly well.
Don’t launch a takeover bid when you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.
“What, then?” I asked helplessly. “We can’t stay here.”

He glanced down at the burning buildings as if he wasn’t sure, and I too struggled when I tried to imagine him anywhere else. This was where I had found him—the weird spirit of Spindrift, now stripped of all his gadgets and powers. “I know that,” he said. “Do we need a car?”

“Yes, unless you fancy hitching and bussing it down to Edinburgh.”

He was trying to get up. “I’m not sure we should go there. But I do have a car.”

“What?” I went to help him, hoisting him by the armpits so he wouldn’t have to lean on his burned hands. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I thought you didn’t drive.”

“Not on the main roads. But my father didn’t want me to be cut off here if I was…if I needed help, so Alfred brought one out for me and dropped it off.”

“Down there?” Absently I dusted sand off him. “Great. I’m assuming it went up in a fireball with everything else.”

“I don’t think so. The garages are underground.”

“Garages? There’s no road access here.”

“Not from the Kerra direction. The hydro builders blasted a tunnel through Skellig crag to get their machinery in. The old road’s still there, on the far side of the hill.”

I didn’t need another invitation. With Alan having done his worst and gone, I was half-convinced the danger to Viv must be spent, but the sense of stripped-down exposure here made me want to shelter him by any means available. The car would do for starters, and then he could try to argue me out of our destination once we were safely settled on the road to Edinburgh. I grabbed my ruckie, put a hand between his shoulder blades and began to hustle him gently down the dune.

On the track outside the main building, I stopped. Vivian halted too as soon as I quit propelling him, and it was all well and good for him to warn me not to launch takeover bids, but his passivity was like a red rag to my inner bull. One of us had to be in charge.

I gave him a little shake. “Viv? How you doing?”

“Fine. Why?”

I glanced at the dying conflagration around us, wondering if he could possibly be serious, and decided he probably was. “Oh, you know. Burns. Shock. Possible concussion.” We were just outside the place where the doors to the café had been. Twice now he had dragged me out of harm’s reach. We were standing in a heap of glittering debris from the outside wall and the mural that had surrounded the doors, and I leaned down and picked out two commemorative fragments—one blue-glazed seashell and a scale from the mermaid’s tail. “Here. Souvenirs.”

“Why do we need these?”

I wanted to sit down in the rubble and weep for the loss of this dream of shelter, this beautiful world’s-edge refuge by the sea. I didn’t know why. Alan had only anticipated the NorthEx demolition ball by a few weeks, and maybe it was better for the place to go down in flames. My throat clenched tight. No more tears for me, I decided. I’d sobbed in Alan’s arms, and how much good had that done me? I wished I could take his embrace and the remembered feel of his cock in my backside driving me to orgasm, and chuck these things too onto the fire.

I tucked the seashell into my jacket’s inner pocket, then cautiously opened Viv’s coat and pushed the green-gold tail scale inside. I patted him on the chest. “Well, one day when you’re married with kids and a nice steady job at CERN, you’ll look up at your mantelpiece and see that, and you’ll remember that time with Mallory at Spindrift, when his psycho boyfriend tried to kill you.” The fire inside the main building found something new to detonate, and I pulled him out of the way of burning shards. “And you’ll think to yourself, those were the good old days.”

Chapter Eight

After the talk of underground garages, I half-expected Alfred to have left some kind of sleek super-car for us to find. Instead there was a ten-year-old Vauxhall Corsa, so splashed with mud from its incoming journey that even the number plates were obscured. I didn’t stop to clean them. Legal or not, until we were safe in Edinburgh, I’d take every bit of anonymity I could get. The doors were unlocked, the keys in the glove box. There had been no need for security in Viv’s long-forgotten fortress until I’d called down Alan Frost upon it like an evil star. The garages were a huge cavern, water trickling down their rough-cut walls. I found a handkerchief in my rucksack and soaked it through, then handed it to Viv, who was sitting motionless in the passenger seat. “Here. Hold that.”

“Why? It’s wet and cold.”

“That’s the point, you clown. It’s for your burns.”

His helpless little smile came and went. “I quite like it when you insult me. Nobody else has ever called me
clown
before. Or
dope
. Or Viv.”

“Well, Viv’s not an insult. The other two definitely are, though.” As soon as I got him to civilisation, I’d make sure a doctor checked him out from his burns to his weird brain. I climbed in behind the wheel, switched the Corsa on and revved the chilly disuse out of her engine. I felt my way around the gearbox. Alfred’s legs were shorter than mine. I clicked the seat back a few notches. That would do. “Right. Belt up.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Fasten your seat belt, your lordship. We’re off.”

I set my attention on the light-filled arch up ahead. It seemed very small, and I only had my faith in perspective to thank for the conviction that the walls wouldn’t close in and crush us. I aimed for it carefully, mindful of the tyres on the scatter of small stones. The archway and the cold light grew, and I gunned the Corsa out from under the crag, snatching a breath of relief. We were out on the far side of the Skellig hill. Turf had closed over the Victorian builders’ track, but it was cushioning, easier to drive than gravel and broken asphalt would have been. I eased my foot down. The seawater inlet was roiling in its crevasse to my left, but I didn’t spare it a glance, except to note how the spray met the sleet on my windscreen. I found the wipers and set them running. A couple of hundred yards more in this direction should bring us out onto the main road.

Or what passed for it around here. The car was beginning to warm, bringing vinyl scents out of the upholstery and a tang of cigarette smoke that shouldn’t have been comforting but was. I bumped us down the last turf slope and out through the broad sandy junction. Things had to get easier now. Alfred, God bless him, had left us with a full tank. Now I came to think about recent plane tickets and unplanned hostel stays, I wasn’t sure my credit card would even have withstood a refill. We’d bypassed North Kerra entirely. As far as anyone there was concerned, I’d come through the village, gone out to Spindrift and never returned.

The place was so remote that it might take days or weeks for anyone to come across its ruins. Still, at some point they would. I couldn’t imagine anyone from Kerra mourning my loss, but things might be different for Viv. He was passing the handkerchief slowly from palm to palm, paying no attention to the world around him.

“Hoi,” I said gently, tapping his arm. “Do you want to stop in at Calder Castle, let anybody there know you’re not dead?”

“No. Far safer for them if they believe I am.”

“They’ll grieve for you, won’t they? I didn’t get much time to talk to Alfred, and he was pointing a gun at me while I did, but…he’s very attached to you.”

“He’s an efficient steward. His attachment’s to the land and the family. Not personal.”

“It sounded personal to me. Still, maybe you’re right.” I put the car into fifth. I’d head right across the top of the country on the 836 and pick up the A9. It was nearly three hundred miles, but I’d keep revving and braking to a minimum, and maybe we could coast into the Peace Warrior car park on fumes. “It won’t be for long. My friends in Edinburgh will look after you, and you can contact whoever you need to. Then when everything’s sorted out, you can come back to life.”

“Mallory?”

I was making things sound easy and trite, I supposed. I braced for one of his quiet, stinging reproaches. “What?”

“I didn’t mean to watch you and Alan in the chalet.”

I grabbed the wheel to stop us slewing off the road. “Jesus.”

“I was going past, and the door was open, and once I’d started looking I couldn’t stop. Most people understand on instinct when they’re doing something wrong. I don’t, not always. Alfred and my father tried to teach me, but I’m afraid I sometimes forget.”

My face was hot. A glance in the rearview mirror confirmed that I was blushing sunrise pink. “What on earth did your father and Alfred have to say about…” I had to pause and clear my throat of an oncoming squeak, “…about watching other people having sex?”

“Not that specifically, of course. Just that some things are private, and I shouldn’t look at them, no matter how interesting they are.”

Interesting as in a turn-on? Or as in something you’re growing on a Petri dish in your lab?
I didn’t dare ask. I swallowed hard. Alan had laid me wide open, wrung sounds out of me that only a lover should hear. Viv knew that I’d seen him, and I hadn’t sent him away. “Forget it,” I managed hoarsely. “Please.”

“I’ll try. Er, Mallory?”

God, what would his next conversational gambit be? “Yes?”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve driven. Are you on the right side of the road?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“Well, if you are, he’s not.”

I squinted through the sleet. The long grey ribbon of the 836 spooled out ahead of me. This was a desolate stretch, deserted in both directions, more sheep than cars on it most days, and I couldn’t see anyone now, except…

Viv’s eyesight was better than mine. Or maybe he was just more observant, or lacking in the preconceptions that had stopped me from noticing the vehicle barrelling down towards us in the left-hand lane. No headlights, no damn business being there, and so I’d simply blanked him out. He was as grey as the road and the rain. He was twenty yards out, then ten, then nothing, and I sucked one breath and hauled down right as hard as I could on the wheel.

I lost control. The Corsa’s back end whipped around her front, tyres screaming. In the rearview I saw one flash as my taillights raked the grille of the other car. A bang like a gunshot jolted me as he clipped my back wing, but then my momentum had somehow spun me out of harm’s reach. We hit the verge with a thump. I thought she was going to flip. Her two near-side wheels lifted clear of the tarmac and hovered before slamming back down, and there we were at a standstill, facing back the way we’d come.

I popped my seat belt and half fell out. I was even dumb enough to take a few futile strides after the disappearing car, but I hadn’t even noticed a make, let alone a licence plate. He was long gone, consumed in sleet and distance.

“Fuck,” I breathed, leaning over and resting my hands on my knees, taking a second out to allow the blood to return to my extremities after its life-preserving rush to my innards. “Holy Jesus fuck.” I straightened up once the dazzle had cleared from my eyes, turned and ran back to the Corsa. “Viv!”

He was fine. At any rate he was upright in the passenger seat, his expression unchanged from its elegant blank. Maybe he shut down unpleasant experiences as well as pain, or maybe this was some kind of specialised shock and he was about to drop dead on me like a high-strung racehorse.

I pulled open the passenger door, reached over him and hit the hazard lights. “Viv, talk to me. Are you okay?”

“Maybe it would have been easier.”

“What?”

“The explosion in the lab. And now this. Maybe it would have been…easier.”

“Oh, my God.” I undid his belt for him and assisted his scramble out into the air. “Viv, you listen to me. You are
not
gonna get all freaked out because a couple of nutters have had a go at you, okay? You’re gonna be fine. Come and walk it off with me. Walk.”

I put my arm around his waist. It felt right there, and he didn’t reach back for me, but he fell into step at my side as I set off down the side of the road. Adrenaline swept back and forth through me like a wave grazing the beach. “Fuck me, that was close. People are really trying to kill you, aren’t they?”

“I tried to tell you.”

“Yeah, you did. Either that guy didn’t read the signs when he left Wick airport, or… Right. Change of plans. I’m not going to get you to Edinburgh in one piece, so…” Images dropped into my mind, scenes and sounds and scents I’d pushed away for years. The smell in the car had triggered them, cigarette smoke and a wash of illicit security, one vagabond to another. “I used to have an auntie. My dad’s sister, and she was as much of an addict as he is, except her vice was ciggies, and she was nice. Too nice for Kerra, anyway, and she made a run for it after her husband died, bought herself a cottage in the Cairngorms. Well, more of a shack. But I liked it, and I ran away to stay with her once.”

“What happened?”

“Ah, they dragged me back. My dad was missing a boat hand. But I think her place is still there, if it hasn’t fallen down.”

Viv came to a halt. He was returning from his shocky distance, the powerful hooks of his attention fastening into me. He made me feel as if all my long-lost small stuff mattered. When he wasn’t ignoring me completely, he listened like no one else on Earth. “Is your aunt still alive?”

“No. She died of the cold out there one winter. She said she’d rather go that way than in some well-meaning care home in Pitlochry. I liked her because she showed me I could escape. That Kerra and the Mallory clan weren’t everything.”

I’d barely thought about Aunt Lilian in years. I hadn’t meant to tell Viv about her now. Like chain reactions in his cold fusion tank, my efforts to protect him were sparking connections across my fragmented life. Maybe I was more like him than I thought, shoving pain away behind closed doors because it was inconvenient. Which reminded me… “Let me see your hands.”

He turned them palms up in the sleet. The cold cloth had helped a bit, but the skin was angry red, more blisters forming. “They still don’t hurt.”

“We still need to fix them. We’re going to need some other stuff as well. Aunt Lil’s cottage is a long shot, but it might be our best bet.”

“No, Mallory. Your best bet is to leave me here and get as far away from me as you can.”

I stared at him. Far off in the distance, another car engine was approaching. Ditching him and running had never occurred. I briefly wondered why. My links with him were new and fragile, weren’t they? Easily broken.

They didn’t feel that way. They felt like living gold, still hot from the forge but ready to set for life. That was insane. He was a stranger. Nevertheless I could no more have left him here on the moorland than I could have flown.

“Don’t be stupid,” I growled. The distant car gained pinprick headlights. “Listen—that guy who ran us off the road might just have been a really bad driver, or…well, I guess Alan might have stationed someone out here to mop up if his crack at us didn’t work. Either way, the sooner we’re off this road, the happier I’ll be. Come on.”

We set off back to the car. She wasn’t any the worse for the one-eighty spin, and I got her turned around before the approaching vehicle came near us—pushed Viv down and concealed my own face while it passed. So far only Alan and Alfred knew I was with him, and I was willing to bet you could pull Alfred’s toenails out with hot pincers before he’d talk. We could make it down the back roads to the anonymity of the A9, and then…

“Does your aunt’s house have broadband?”

I burst out laughing. One day I might get used to his left-field questions and observations. “Didn’t you hear the shack part? Aunt Lilian wasn’t keen on telecoms. Do you want to contact your scientists, the people you were telling me about?”

“No, not yet. I just want to check something.”

“Best use your mobile once we get out of this wilderness and into some decent signal coverage.”

“I don’t have one. I’m not keen on telecoms either, not when I’m working.”

That explained why Alfred got his messages by way of a bit of paper shoved under a stone. “She’d have liked you, I reckon. Use mine if the battery’s not too flat. Where we’re going, we’ll be lucky if we have a roof.”

* * * * *

I stopped outside of Loch Dubh on the A9. The good thing about service stations this far north was that they often doubled as outdoor stores for tourists heading west into the mountains, and we badly needed supplies. Viv had fallen silent as soon as we’d joined the motorway, and I’d let him be, wondering if the shocks of the day were catching up with him. He reanimated as we jolted over the speed bumps on the road into the car park. “Where are we?”

“Loch Dubh services. It’s busy enough here for us to be able to grab some kit without being noticed, and I don’t think anyone followed us down. And I don’t know about you, but I could really use an all-day breakfast.”

“I don’t like places like this.”

“No, they suck,” I agreed, squeezing the Corsa into a parking space between a camper van and a boy-racer Escort. “I can understand tourists stopping off, but not people bringing their kids here from Dornoch for fun and a flutter on the slot machines. Still, we’re short on five-star bistros around here, so…”

“I don’t want a five-star bistro. I just don’t want to be here.”

I pulled the handbrake up and turned to look at him. He was rigid in the passenger seat, gazing blankly at some point beyond the car park’s scrubby bushes. “What’s the matter?”

“What do you see? When you look out of the window there, what do you see?”

I leaned an arm on the wheel, frowning. Was I missing something? “A lot of chilly southerners milling around looking sad because it’s the end of their holidays. Cars parked opposite us. Tankers and lorries over there. Why?”

“There are fourteen lorries. Six tankers, twenty-seven cars in our field of view. Thirty-nine people exactly. Forty now. Now thirty-eight. I see every number plate on the cars. I see sixteen pigeons. The McDonald’s sign is at a slight angle—five degrees from vertical because of the prevailing wind. The green Volvo’s tax disc is out of date. The child that just passed the car has a pink butterfly clip in her hair. Forty-three people now. Forty-five.”