Black Feathers

49

When the tunnel search yielded nothing but a dead end in the form of an impenetrable pile of rubble, a strange sound escaped Skelton’s lips: a mewl of frustration, a manic whimper. Knowles caught a glimpse of Skelton’s puffy, pale face in the yellow torchlight. The look he saw there terrified him. Skelton was looking right at him.

Knowles knew he had to get away, far away. Now. He’d rather take his chances on the run than in an interview room with Skelton and his bolt-together sidekick, Pike. More than any sheriffs he’d ever met – and there’d been plenty, and all of them were freaky – Skelton and Pike scared him the most.

If he could make it back out of the tunnel, he could run for it – be the first back to the cars and take one. He had to make his break soon.

Skelton’s effete voice intruded again:

“Is there any chance the boy might have got through?”

Knowles decided not to have an opinion. Jones, the freshest Wardsman among them and with plenty to prove, scaled the hill of rubble until he was lying on his stomach at the top of the pile, inspecting the hardcore with a torch.

Jones had opinion enough for everyone.

“It’s completely blocked, sir. No one could get through here without some decent equipment. A brick hammer and a crowbar, for starters. I can’t see through to the other side. A couple of JCBs would need a week to go through this lot.” Jones looked back down at Skelton and the rest of them – to see if he was making an impression. “Young boy like that – what is he? Fourteen? – he’d have no chance.”

Knowles grinned in spite of his own panic. Jones himself was only seventeen, a recruit straight from school.

“Thank you, Jones,” said Skelton. “You can come down now.” He turned to Pike in the gloom. “I want you to look. I need to be certain.”

Pike lumbered through the darkness and mounted the incline of debris. Knowles watched his strange, clunky way of moving. With his huge hands, Pike could have been some kind of earth-moving machine. A nervous smile visited Knowles’s lips in the darkness. Jones’s agony at having his opinion ignored was plain even in the torchlight. Pike’s injury hampered his progress. He looked like a broken robot, his muttering and grumbling the sound of its noisy, misfiring motors.

When a pair of arms took hold of each of Knowles’s elbows, he jumped. Pike, on his mission, did not look back. Jones watched in puzzlement, out of the loop of secrecy. Knowles glanced at the faces of the men who held him. These were his peers from school. The men he drank with in the pub before he joined the Ward. Now he drank with them in the substation rec room. They were his colleagues. His friends. Their eyes, once the affable, trustworthy eyes of comrades, were closed to him now. He was the enemy they’d all worked so hard to root out and destroy. Suddenly he was just another day at the office for them.

Skelton moved in front of him, appraising him with his good eye the way a butcher sizes up a fresh carcass. How long had Skelton known? What exactly did Skelton know? These were questions to which he might never find an answer. Skelton, on the other hand, would soon have Knowles regurgitating knowledge and facts as though he were reciting well-loved poetry.

“We haven’t really had the opportunity to talk much, Wardsman Knowles,” said Skelton. “And I regret that. I regret it deeply. I like to get to know the men… under me. It makes working with them more fulfilling somehow.”

Every word slipping from the Sheriff’s delicate lips was both a death sentence and an intimate caress. Knowles shuddered at the thought of such a man touching him. Skelton took a step closer and Knowles flinched. The grip on his arms tightened and he felt a gun muzzle caress the skin of his neck. Gooseflesh rose in a wave from his scalp to his toes. Skelton was shorter than him, and the soft-faced slug of a man now looked up at him as though he might go on tiptoe for a kiss. The Sheriff’s cold, fat fingers took hold of Knowles’s hand, making him recoil again. The fingers tested his skin the way a librarian might explore the covers of an old and valuable book. Knowles’s stomach tightened at this exploratory, almost reverent touch.

“I’m going to get to know you… Knowles,” said Skelton, almost giggling over the similarity of the word and the name. “I’m going to get to know you very well.”

In the silence that followed, Knowles heard Pike scrambling back down the rubble pile. Skelton turned to watch his partner. At the bottom of the slope, Pike stood and limped back.

“There’s no way through,” he said, towering over all of them in the yellow torchlight. “He must have gone another way.”

Knowles noticed how deathly Pike looked. The man always looked sick, but the shadows and bad light in the tunnel made it worse. He was a risen ghoul, animated bone-machinery. Behind him, Jones looked relieved that his assessment had been validated. All eyes now turned to Knowles, most particularly the one Skelton still possessed. The eye bulged, toadlike and manic, already seeing too far inside, already unearthing his betrayal for all to witness.

“That leaves us with just one lead to investigate,” Skelton said. “We must concentrate on it with diligence.”

He nodded, and Knowles was about-faced in a heartbeat. They let go of his arms and marched him ahead of them. Knowles could sense the pistols aimed at his back and he did not have the courage to run before them. They wouldn’t kill him anyway. They’d merely shoot his legs out from under him and carry him back, keeping him alive for Skelton.

He wanted to put off that moment for as long as he was able.