The Sleeping Dead (8 page)

The screens flickered as they rolled through a succession of images. Most were empty corridors or the interior of the elevators. It was eerie to see all these stilled images of the building. But then there was the shot of the hallway. The screen showed it as camera 17 but Jackson had no idea where that might be. There was a small pile of bodies heaped in the corner of a room. Each time the image came around he wanted to look away but forced himself to stare for the five seconds it took for the screen to flicker on to the next camera.

They watched in silence, and Jackson wanted to ask Susan why they were looking at the CCTV, what she had thought they would discover, but he was too afraid to speak.

There was movement at the edge of the picture. A patch of darkness seemed to infect the other scenes and Jackson stared at the screen, waiting to see the black shadow creep into view again. He stared at images of empty corridors and a shot of the foyer, which showed him and Susan leaning over the reception desk.

Finally Susan reached out and turned the screen off.

“What’s happening?” She spoke without turning around, still staring into the gray hollow of the fading CCTV monitor.

Jackson looked at Susan and recognized what an effort she was making just to appear in control. She was sweating. It was a climate-controlled building and the temperature couldn’t have been more than 65 degrees, but Susan was sweating and biting her lip. She pushed a ragged string of blonde hair away from her face and Jackson got the impression that everything she did was a struggle.

“Are the voices bad?”

She nodded.

He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He thought about how it had felt when he had been standing in the stairwell on the eighth floor trying not to jump.

“Sometimes I think that I should just do what they tell me. I can’t fight them forever.”

“No, that’s the voices talking to you.”

Susan shook her head. “No it isn’t. I know the difference between the voices and my own thoughts, that’s why I’m still here. It’s all those others who couldn’t tell them apart. But you can’t tell me that you think it’s going to get better.”

He stayed silent, because it felt too dangerous to agree with Susan, even if what she was saying was right.

“I need to find Donna,” he told her.

“Who?” Susan gave him a thin, strained smile. “I don’t want to go outside. While we’re in here, it feels safe.”

Jackson grimaced at the idea—safe among the dead bodies. Safe in the silence. He understood what Susan meant, he just didn’t want her to be right. He wanted to open the doors of The Pinnacle onto a confusion of police and ambulance and fire engines all working to put right the chaos. He wanted to learn that everyone hadn’t given up yet.

He walked across the foyer, mindful of the loud snap of his feet on the hard floor. Susan walked beside him and he held out his hand to her. Her thin fingers closed around his palm. Hot.

Donna would understand. If he ever had to explain himself to her, he was sure Donna would understand the need for contact as he stepped from one madness into the next.

12

Cars blocked the street outside in both directions—as if no one had been able to agree on how to escape.

A few of the car doors were open but most had been closed, and Jackson suppressed a shudder at the image of the drivers carefully turning back to shut their car doors before walking away.

There were no police cars. No ambulances.

“Where did they all go?” Susan asked.

Not “what did they
do
,” Jackson noticed. She understood what they had done, she just couldn’t follow the logic to where the bodies were.

Jackson looked past the row of cars. He could just make out the line of shops on the other side of the river. Too far away for detail but he knew that Café Reynauld was among them and sitting there waiting for him would be Donna. She would have a cappuccino in front of her with a sprinkling of chocolate over the foamed milk. Except he was late, so maybe all she had in front of her was the empty cup, traces of froth still clinging to the side and a shallow pool of coffee resting in the bottom.

“What are you smiling about?” Susan asked.

“I didn’t know I was smiling.”

“You were.” It sounded like an accusation.

The rage came from nowhere. One minute he was thinking about Donna and the next he was screaming with anger. “What is it? What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you just let me have one moment of peace?”

He was aware of Susan stepping away from him, but all he could obey was the swell of anger in his chest.

He screamed at her. “Fuck off. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. If you’re going to stand there and wallow in your own pity, then you can just fuck off.”

He reached out his hands to push her away. He needed to banish her so that he could spend time looking for Donna. He didn’t need anyone else dragging him down. He didn’t need Susan.

“Why can’t you leave me alone? All of you?” The anger warmed him from within. He could feel it coursing through his body, infecting him. He flexed his fingers and realized he was staring at them—as if they were weapons. As if he could use them to rip and kill.

Susan took another step backward, out of his reach, and he stumbled forward and would have fallen except at the last moment she stepped forward and held him. His nose filled with snot and his eyes burned with tears. He could hardly breathe and all he could smell was Susan’s perfume, so strong he could drown in it.

“I don’t want to die,” he whispered.

He assumed that she had not heard him, but then he felt her hand stroking the back of his head like a mother calming a baby. “You’re not going to die,” she whispered. “Neither of us will.”

How do you know that?
He wanted to ask, but instead he allowed her to coddle him, to sit there buried in her bust until the anger fled and left his limbs thin and weak.

She pulled apart from him and then looked down, reaching a hand out to wipe a tear from his cheek. “Better?”

“Not really,” he said, and laughed. It was a brittle sound. Fragile. The anger had dissipated, but it had left a small lump in his chest. He felt it as he looked at Susan and he wondered whether she understood that it was still there, like a piece of coal pressed down to form a rough diamond.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Susan said. “At least you didn’t try to kill me.”

“This time,” Jackson said automatically. It was only a small lie.

“Café Reynauld?” Susan asked into the silence.

Jackson nodded.

“That’s on the other side of the bridge?”

He nodded again.

“She might not be there.”

He felt the lump twitch in his chest. How dare she try and crush his hope. Donna would be there.

“But that doesn’t mean anything’s happened to her,” Susan said. “You understand that? If she isn’t there, it doesn’t mean…”

Jackson nodded. But it was an argument for another time, or for never. Donna would be sitting in the café and then the three of them would…would…but he wasn’t able to think beyond that, beyond meeting up with Donna and knowing she was safe. For now his only aim was to meet Donna in Café Reynauld as they had agreed. He couldn’t remember when it had become so important to him, but now Café Reynauld was the beginning and the end.

He looked down the line of stalled cars and buses and hurried toward the bridge. He was aware of Susan beside him, almost jogging to keep up with him. He forced himself to walk and then realized he was chewing on his bottom lip to stop himself from screaming at her that she was slowing him down because she didn’t want him to find Donna. She never had. Everything she had done—the stairs, stopping to look at the CCTV cameras, everything had been done with the intention of keeping him apart from Donna.

He bit down on his lip, hard enough to break the skin. But he didn’t say anything.

Susan noticed them first. He knew because of the loud hiss she made. “What is it?” he asked, but as soon as he spoke he understood what she was looking at. A line of the dead, lying on the ground with their backs pressed up against the side of the wall on the opposite side of the street.

Susan started to move closer to them, stepping off the pavement onto the road. Jackson reached out and snatched her arm. “Don’t.”

“Why not? We need to understand what they are.”

“Just…don’t,” Jackson said. He didn’t say what he really thought; that approaching the dead was wrong. He didn’t want to know what had happened to them, not now. He didn’t want to learn anything else about what was happening. He just wanted to find Donna and run away.

And part of him thought that if he got too close to the dead bodies, he might catch whatever it was that had infected them. He might want to sit down and join them.

Susan shrugged free of his hand and crossed the road and the only option he had was to follow her or stand and wait for her to return. He trudged behind her heels until she paused at the curb on the far side of the road.

“I don’t think they’re actually dead,” Susan said.

“Then what are they?”

“I don’t know.” She moved to the nearest body—a man in his thirties wearing a black suit and a red tie. She put her hand against the man’s cheek and Jackson shuddered. “He’s still warm.” She moved onto the next one and pressed the back of her hand against his forehead as if she were a mother taking a child’s temperature. “He is too.”

Susan slapped the man across the face, hard enough to leave a red handprint on the man’s cheek, but he didn’t react. Susan slapped him again, but still there was no response.

“He’s not dead,” she said. There was a note of panic in her voice, as if she was trying to convince herself of the fact. She pulled her hand back to slap the man again and this time Jackson reached forward to stop her. Maybe the man was dead, maybe he wasn’t, but whatever the situation, slapping him obviously had no effect.

“You can’t fix it,” he told Susan.

She stared at him. Confused. “Why not?”

Jackson glanced down the line of the dead, or not so dead. He was jealous of them—jealous that they had come to their own end, there was no more struggle for them. He understood why Susan felt the urge to slap them, to wake them up. Maybe part of it was to try and save them, but for Jackson at least, part of the motive would be so they couldn’t opt out of this nightmare.

He turned away from Susan and the men and stepped onto the bridge. Gray tarmac was replaced with a lighter surface. To his right, the wall ran chest high and he kept away, walking on the curbstones that separated the road from the pavement. Because he didn’t trust himself. He was aware of Susan trailing behind him.

“Come away from the edge,” he told her.

She laughed. “I’m nowhere near the edge.” She moved closer to him but a moment later he noticed she was halfway across the pavement once more, almost within touching distance of the black capstones that ran along the wall.

“Come away.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said. He looked straight ahead. Across the bridge Donna was waiting for him. Across the bridge was sanity and order. Across the bridge the nightmares would end and…and…he turned to share this observation.

Susan had stopped. She was leaning over the balustrade. Staring down at the water below.

13

“What is it?”

Susan said nothing and Jackson moved forward, one eye on the parapet like a vertigo sufferer creeping toward the edge of a precipice. She was looking down into the water and she had a look on her face that he couldn’t read. He didn’t
think
she was going to jump.

“Come back, Susan.”

He crept closer. Part of him wanted to drop to his hands and knees and crawl over to her. Walking took more effort than it should have. Each step was painful. Hard fought. When he reached the wall, he anchored one hand on the stone. He stared at Susan, as if to look away for a moment might free her to jump over the side.

“Come away.”

“Look,” she told him. She didn’t turn her gaze away from the river.

Jackson eventually looked down. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. At first the water looked lumpy, as if the river had congealed, and then he saw a woman’s head break the surface. A man’s arm appeared as he was swept under the bridge. Jackson understood: the river was full of bodies, some of them thrashing as they were carried along, but most lying still, like cords of wood floating in floodwater.

There were thousands of them. The river was clogged with them.

“This isn’t happening.”

“It is.” Jackson felt the hysteria rising within him. He was terrified that if Susan denied what they were seeing, then he would have to deny it too. They couldn’t exist in different realities.