The crack of Steph’s head against the wall resonated around the room. She fell, boneless, to the floor, her face white with the pain.
Skeebs staggered backwards, the textbook he’d ripped from her grasp hitting him in the face. His eyes lit up as he realised he’d won, heedless of the girl at his feet.
It was a short-lived victory. Caleb’s big hands folded into the back of the boy’s jacket. The book dropped. Skeebs’ toes kicked at the floor as Caleb brought the boy crashing face first into the wall opposite. Skeebs squawked as Caleb pressed the iron bar of his forearm across the back of the boy’s neck.
Amanda’s belt was half out of its loops when she tripped over Steph, the girl diving under her feet for the fallen textbook. Steph managed to grab the cover between the barest tips of her fingers and pulled it towards her, clutching it to her chest as she recoiled from the struggle.
‘No! No!’ Skeebs squirmed, hiding his hands between his body and the wall, Caleb scrabbling to twist his arm behind his back.
Skeebs hissed and spat against the wall, flecks dripping down the metal by his mouth, eyes rolling as he tried to see.
Belt trailing from one hand, Amanda wormed her other hand between the wall and Skeebs’ body. Skeebs pressed down, protecting his free wrist. It was slick with sweat as Amanda’s fingers wrapped around it, dragging it inch by inch into the open air.
‘No!’ Skeebs growled, half in pain, half in fear as Caleb slowly wrenched his arm up behind his back. ‘Don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.’
Amanda was winning her struggle too – Skeebs’ poor diet working against him, the muscles in his arm too stringy to fight against Amanda’s leverage.
Skeebs continued to plead as Caleb took the belt from Amanda. There was ink on his left hand, smeared between his second and third finger. Caleb said nothing as he began looping the belt around Skeebs’ wrists the moment they touched, leaning into the boy to keep him in place.
‘What did he want you to do?’ Amanda demanded. ‘What did he want?’
‘Nothing. I wasn’t listening to him. That was all of you. I didn’t do the ink, he made me. He controlled me and let me go.’
‘Are we going to keep him tied up the rest of the way?’ Steph asked.
Amanda grimaced, intent on holding Skeebs square while Caleb worked, the belt’s loops getting shorter and shorter, the leather edges cutting into the flesh of Skeebs’ hands.
‘Make things easier,’ said Caleb.
‘If you want, I could—’
‘No magic,’ Amanda snapped. ‘You even think about it, we’ll tie you up next. You want to help, read your books.’
She could hear Steph scrambling behind her. There was the flutter of pages and rattle of the bag as she shoved everything inside, the girl retreating back into her shell.
Skeebs jerked, surprising the pair of them enough that they staggered backwards, giving Skeebs room enough to lift a leg and press his knee to the wall. Another push and he switched his knee with his foot.
Amanda felt Caleb’s muscles compress under his coat, the big man bracing himself a moment before Skeebs pushed off the wall. The boy might as well have pushed against a truck. Amanda bashed her cheek against Skeebs’ head as the boy was sent crashing back against the wall, knocking the wind out of him.
The bathroom curtain closed, Steph hiding herself from the fight.
‘Stay out here,’ Amanda called. ‘Where we can see you.’
‘Fuck,’ Skeebs gasped. ‘Don’t tell my brother. Please don’t tell my brother.’
The belt was secure now, the prong through the hole, Skeebs flexing his fingers to keep the circulation going.
Leather cracked against leather as Caleb slotted the belt through its loops. The sound seemed to tug the strength from Skeebs. He leaned against the wall, his whole body shaking as he sobbed. ‘He made me, I swear.’
Caleb’s face was stone. ‘Sit him down. We’re doing his ankles.’
‘Just let me go,’ Skeebs managed, addressing Reeves as they urged him to sit. ‘I’m worth nothing to you. No message this time. No message.’
‘What did he want?’ Amanda demanded.
Skeebs curled, his head almost touching his knees, crying hard. His lips were peeled back from his teeth, fat drops falling from the end of his nose.
‘Fuck sake, Skeebs,’ Caleb growled, reaching for the boy’s belt to bind his ankles.
Skeebs snorted. It could almost have been a laugh. The shaking stopped, the boy’s grief cut off like he’d flicked a switch.
‘Sit up.’ Amanda prodded Skeebs in the shoulder. ‘Sit up.’
The boy laughed – the snort becoming a chortle, building to a full bellied laugh. He howled with laughter, mouth gaping, eyes unseeing, longer and louder until his lungs strained with the effort.
It sent chills down Amanda’s spine, forced her to retreat. Even Caleb had a momentary flicker.
Amanda’s ears caught the smallest noise. Some small release of pressure from the back of the carriage. Behind the curtain.
‘Steph?’
‘Just a minute.’
There was something in the way she said it.
Skeebs laughed all the harder, looking Amanda straight in the eye, grinning wide enough to show his back teeth. Amanda was beginning to get an instinct for that look. It wasn’t Skeebs staring back out at her from those eyes.
‘Steph get out here right now.’
‘Almost done.’
Caleb nodded, keeping Skeebs pinned with a big, flat palm.
‘No. Now.’ Amanda was already striding over. She caught the harsh scent of chemicals.
Steph swept the curtain aside with a wide smile, arms open like a magician revealing her latest trick. In her hand, Amanda’s lighter glinted in the lamplight.
She dropped it by the quad bike, into Bridget’s bag crammed with her notebooks. The flames leapt with a ‘wumph’ of ignition.
Amanda threw her hands up to protect her face from the fireball’s hot breath, colours dancing across her vision. Flames licked at the walls, the quadbike ablaze. The girl too, fire quickly eating its way up the back of her jacket.
Reeves’ laugh jumped from Skeebs’ throat to Steph’s with such smoothness that it made the hairs on Amanda neck stand. She could see the man looking out from behind the girl’s eyes. The petrol that ran down her chin where she’d silently, unrelentingly chewed her way through the quad’s fuel line ignited, the laugh jack-knifing into a scream of pain and terror.
No time to think, Amanda yanked the possessed girl aside sending her tumbling into the boxes and set the table tipping onto its side.
Already the heat was unbearable. She recoiled, the fire like sunburn across her face, singeing her hair.
The petrol was burning across the surface of Bridget’s bag, the zip teeth splaying, expanding with the heat. Reeves had doused the inside with petrol too, the contents a bright inferno.
‘Fuck. You got to let me go!’ yelled Skeebs, Caleb snapping the buckle’s prong from its hole.
Amanda grabbed the bag. Trying not to choke on the black smoke, the smells of burnt hair and burning leather, she wrenched it from the flames.
Caleb had turned his attention to Steph, beating at the girl’s burning tights and jacket, flames leaking out from around his gloved fingers.
The belt falling from around Skeebs’ wrists, the boy dove across the floor, coming back up with a two-litre bottle of water.
Seeing him from the corner of his eye, Caleb batted it from his hand. It skidded away, rolling towards the prisoner. ‘No water! Make things worse!’
The young girl put out, Caleb turned to help Amanda.
Amanda managed three or four steps away from the quad before the bag split at the seams, the burning contents spilling at her feet. Caleb leapt back, pulling Steph to her feet with one, meaty hand. He kicked away the sleeping bags as the flames began to lick at the nearest tumbled plastic box.
Skeebs was already stamping at the nearest textbook. Caleb kicked the knife away, the handle smoking, blistered but the blade shining and glinting in the light as it spun into the wall, lost in the material of Caleb’s sleeping bag.
Amanda dropped the bag with the rest of it as Caleb began working his coat off.
The room was already filled with foul, black smoke. The icy air was boiling. As they moved, the four of them bounced off one another, against the walls, a confusion of cross-purposes.
Eyes streaming, Amanda looked at the quad bike, wondered if she should take her coat off to smother the flames there. But the flames were already licking under the wheel arches, thick, tarry smoke pouring from the tyres.
Only one way this was going to go.
She turned her back on the blaze.
The room was in uproar, the smoke choking the room, everyone in everyone else’s way.
Steph was staring, horrified, at the disaster, her eyes small and bare without her glasses. She must have lost them in the fall.
Pushing past the others, Amanda grabbed the girl by her jacket, shouting in her face.
‘Where is it?’ Amanda already had her hands in the girl’s pockets, then down her sides, feeling at her hips. ‘Emily, where’s your key? We need to open the door.’
The girl blinked, comprehension taking its time. ‘It’s…’ the way she twisted her body Amanda knew what she meant. She was already reaching around her, slipping hands into the girl’s back pockets and finding the hard sliver of metal.
Caleb was on his hands and knees, smothering and patting at the flames of the text books with his coat, fast and methodical, throwing each item aside once it was out and moving to the next.
Ash drifted around him like snowflakes. The air was full of them, dancing in the heat currents.
Skeebs was at the big man’s side, slapping at things with his bare hands.
‘We need to get the door open!’ That’s what Amanda intended to say but instead she drew in a thick lungful of chemical smoke that grated her lungs and made her cough. The heat was growing, the flames rising, the air tinted a noxious brown.
She had two keys in her hand now. She worked her way around Caleb, using the man’s back to steady herself. Her aching head was swimming.
The padlocks rattled with the movement of the train. She didn’t know which key fitted which lock, forcing her to try each in turn. The third came away first. Then the fourth. She threw them aside.
‘Come on.’ Her voice was a croak. She coughed again. Skeebs came forward brandishing his key. Amanda took it. The top padlock came away.
Coughing non-stop now, eyes burning, Amanda turned her attention again to the back of the carriage.
The whole quad was up now, flames boiling in the under carriage, the chassis and walls clanging as they expanded with the heat. It was fountaining off the ceiling now, smoke rolling and thickening in every direction.
Eyes the merest watering slits, head half-turned to shield her face, Amanda managed to hold her arms in the heat long enough to release the brakes.
Gloves smoking and the heat rubbing her hands raw, she pulled the bike toward her, ploughing her way through the boxes behind, kicking a clear path through the sleeping bags as best she could. The heat around her legs was nigh on unbearable.
She needed to do this. Needed to do it for Michaela.
Skeebs had worked the last of the locks. He rolled the door open, the world beyond incandescent. A whirlwind tore through the room, ash swirling with Skeebs’ crisp packets, burnt pages from the burning books dancing a moment before they were consumed by the daylight. The cold hit Amanda like a slap to the face, scalding her skin just the same as the scorching air before her.
No finesse, no time, she pulled the quad to the door, ran to its rear, planted her boot and pushed. The front wheels left the cabin, the burning undercarriage hitting the floor with a bang that shook the room. A second hard boot and the thing disappeared. It hit the rushing ground nose first. Shards flew in all directions as it pin-wheeled through the air before it disappeared, sucked away down the route behind them.
Bending down, she beat at the flames that had caught her jeans and sleeves.
She saw the playing card pinned under her boot: Simon and herself in the cinema, her head on his shoulder, serene.
Snatching it up, she turned to her sleeping bag. She’d been playing with them when the chaos had started. Now the world dropped out from under her when she saw the empty space where they’d been.
‘No!’ The word was snatched away in the wind. Her heart felt like it had been pulled out from under her ribs.
And suddenly she saw them everywhere; pinned to walls, caught in the twisted rucks of the sleeping bags, shivering against the prisoner, the boxes, the table. The entire carriage was plastered with her memories.
Lifting her arm, she found another stuck on her elbow, pressed against her on its way out the door. Making to grab it, the wind plucked it out between her fingers, out the door and away.
How many had she lost?
Lurching, feeling like she was in a nightmare, she made for the door. The flames were gone, the door needed to be closed before she lost anything else.
Oh God, Simon, I’m so, so sorry.
The door began to roll in its tracks, trees, snow and stones whipping by a foot away.
‘Amanda!’
Something hit her in the side, sending her into the screaming wind. The engine roared in her ears, sleet stung her face, wind battered at her. She was bent around the door, feet inside but out from under her, clinging to the door so hard she could feel her knuckles shifting in her hands.
A moment felt like a lifetime.
Swinging her body, pulling with everything she had, she spun back into the carriage, over-compensating, until her back hit the door from the inside.
She slid down, dazed, desperate to catch her breath.
There was a card in front of her, caught up in Caleb’s sleeping bag. She rolled onto her hands and knees, intent on getting them back in her pocket where they belonged.
‘Amanda!’
Skeebs had managed to plant his boot into the adjacent wall beside the door, his body being twisted around the frame out into the freezing air. Caleb’s huge hands clasped the boy by the shoulders, those piston-like arms working to shove the boy out onto the blurring train track beneath.
Reeves!
Her and Simon’s first kiss shivered in the wind, easing out from its crease, into the air. She could grab it if she was quick.
‘Amanda!’
Staggering to her feet, Amanda launched herself at the big man. Catching him around the middle, Caleb moved by barely an inch, knocking the breath from Amanda, hurting her already bruised ribs. But she managed to check him, buying the boy a few seconds more.
‘Come on, Amanda,’ Caleb laughed as they realised he still had the advantage, ‘don’t know how to fly?’
Amanda redoubled her efforts, teeth clenched, tired muscles aching, the wind sucking and swirling around them, her boot heels inches from the void. It was like pushing against a brick wall. Her lungs felt like they’d been run over a grater.
The First Kiss, leapt into the air, somersaulted and sped out into the light. Another followed it. And another.
She could feel Caleb’s muscles knotted under his clothes, as he held the two of them at bay. He started to push back. Amanda’s stomach lurched as her centre of balance began to tip. Skeebs beside her, the same.
The wind began to pummel the back of her head with a cold, clutching hand. The engine roar began to grow. Sleet filled her ear.
Caleb grinned. His hat had slipped back, the bandage beneath blood stained like a third eye.
Something flashed in the corner of Amanda’s vision, scoring a line of pain high on her left cheek.
The big man fell back. Steph’s lips were pulled back in a snarl as she clung to Caleb’s back, knife in hand, pressing the symbols against his skin. The knife point poked a divot in the flesh under his left eye.
There was no hiss of burning meat, no smoke, but Amanda could see the strength draining from Caleb, like Steph was gaining weight by the second.
‘Get the door closed!’ Amanda croaked.
But Skeebs was already on it, squinting against the harsh light, tears running down his face from the smoke and the cold outside. He leaned over Amanda grabbing at the handle.
The final card in Caleb’s sleeping bag darted for the exit, taking Amanda’s breath with it.
The door closed with a slam, the card trapped in the jamb. Amanda was ready with the padlocks.
Caleb had melted to his knees now, Steph clinging to him, a pout of determination puckering her lips. He shrugged the girl off as easily he would an empty backpack. ‘I’m alright. I’m alright.’
Steph fell away, limp, rolling onto her back and breathing like she’d run a marathon. The front of her jacket was scorched where the fire had eaten at it, those colourful tights blackened and tattered. The skin of her chin was blistered and sore looking, a first-degree burn if Amanda was any judge, no permanent harm done.
The carriage was in complete disarray, boxes spilled everywhere, their contents scattered and kicked to every corner of the room. Burned text book pages were still settling to the floor, fringed with red-orange embers. The wall where the quad had burned was black, the trailer clinking as it cooled. There was the lingering smell of burnt plastic and hair but the air was fresh as a mountain glade and they were all gasping it in huge, greedy lungfuls.
There were still cards. Here and there. She still had some. Thank God, she still had some.
‘Fuck.’ Skeebs collapsed back against the door and slid down it. ‘What the fuck was that?’
Eyes widening, he rolled away just in time to avoid Amanda’s boot as it planted itself where his head had rested a moment before.
‘You were a fucking decoy.’
Amanda followed with another kick and another, hitting Skeebs’ boots, the boy working to ward off the blows. The knife was in her hand.
‘I was trying to save us,’ said Skeebs. ‘He said she didn’t know what she was doing. He was taunting me. Saying how he was going to use her himself. Make her use the books!’
‘And you believed him?’
‘Didn’t have a fucking choice, did I? I didn’t know he was going to do this.’
‘He’s a demon. What did you think—’
‘You alright?’ asked Caleb.
Steph pushed Caleb away. ‘Nooooo!’ She let out a long, low moan, crawling on her hands and knees toward her mother’s bag. The seams had split like an overripe corpse, the stuffing pushing its way out, burned beyond repair. The zip had melted.
There were pages everywhere, torn, burnt, crumpled, trampled. She pulled the nearest toward her, turning them over before looking up at Amanda, her eyes full of hurt. ‘What do we do now?’
‘F–fuck!’ Skeebs was open mouthed. The rest turned.
Reeves was watching.
His eyes were swollen shut but Amanda could feel the man watching them. Beneath the swelling, his skin red, puffy and stretched so tight it shone, he was smiling. It may have been a trick of the light but as his mouth curled up at the corners in a mirthless smile, the creases that enveloped his eyes did the same, making two new smiling mouths above the original.
His face split as his mouth opened like a fresh wound, his tongue a bright bloody red. ‘At last.’
Amanda’s heart had gone into overdrive, hammering so hard she felt sick. Steph had paled. Caleb’s fists clenched.
‘What?’ Skeebs looked from the prisoner to Amanda, furious. ‘Who the fuck is that? That’s not him! It’s not even fucking him!’