The Dead Tracks

Chapter Sixty-eight

In a split second I pushed Megan to the side and brought my arm up. The knife went into the flesh just above my elbow. The blade wasn't more than two inches, but I felt the pain instantly. It shot up my arm and exploded out across my chest.

I heard footsteps as Megan ran off into the darkness, and I felt a second of relief that she'd got herself away. Glass followed the noise too. By the time he'd realized his mistake, I was on him: one punch to the face; one to the side of the head; one to the chest, next to the heart. We crashed to the floor. The knife pinged off the ground and spun away. He was dazed, but still fighting: hands came up to my throat, surgical gloves clawed at my face, fingers grabbed at my nose and eyes.

I pushed him away and hit him again. All my anger and revulsion channelled into the punch. Something cracked. In the darkness, both of us semi-lit by Healy's phone, his eyes rolled up into his head and I realized I'd broken his nose. Blood slowly soaked through from the inside of the mask.

He lay still. Eyes closed.

Getting up, I searched for Megan in the dull glow of the black lights. 'Megan?' Silence. I moved towards the shadows at the back of the room, feeling the breeze. 'Megan? It's okay, honey. Everything's okay. I just need to know you're safe.'

Suddenly, everything descended into darkness again and I heard footsteps. I spun on my heel, preparing for Glass's approach - but it didn't arrive. Instead the footsteps circled me. I heard crates tumble and something fall to the floor with a clang. And then a rectangle of creamy light burst open in the space beyond the coffins.

A door.

Glass looked back at me — and then disappeared inside.

I sprinted after him. The corridor looked like it had been some kind of service tunnel. The walls were crumbling, the cement turning to dust. At the end was a stairwell, zigzagging upwards and out of sight. Glass glanced back again from the steps, then started moving up to the surface.

The stairs rose for about thirty feet. At the top, a door had been sealed with a welding torch and a series of boards. To one side, there was daylight coming through a disused air vent. Glass dived inside the vent, clattering against the metal. As I got to the landing area, I headed after him. The vent opened up in a straight line for about forty feet, before angling upwards. When Glass reached the end, he hauled himself up. Feet dangling. Then he was gone. I slowed down five feet from the end and looked up.

Above me, the same LED light alarm system was in place. The covering for the vent - sitting half over the hole - was a piece of wire mesh. I could see a thick canopy of trees and snatches of blue sky. He wasn't at the lip of the hole. But it didn't mean he wasn't close. If he'd picked up Healy's gun, he would have fired it already. But he might have had another knife — and I wasn't about to fight him from below.

Slowly, quietly, I manoeuvred into position.

Then I gripped the edges at the top of the hole and pulled myself up. The air vent opened into a small brick building with a concrete floor. No roof; trees overhead.

Behind me, stacked against one of the remaining walls were a series of railway sleepers, cobwebs clinging to them. The railway line that had never been laid.

The Dead Tracks.

I searched for a weapon and found a rusting shovel propped against the sleepers, then quickly circled the building. To my left there was a vague path through long grass; to my right, a path that continued for sixty feet before hitting impenetrable woodland.

I headed left.

The canopy was thick and the path quickly became mud and stones. Further along was a length of railway track, cutting across the trail, from one side to the other. I carried on, looking over my shoulder the whole time, the shovel up and primed. Moments later, a wind passed through the woods, the leaves in the trees whispering. A few seconds later it came again, and this time it clearly sounded like a voice. Or maybe I was spooked. I wasn't sure now. I looked around, feeling like someone was watching me.

On my right, I noticed the grass had stopped growing. It had been flattened, ripped away in places. And in the spaces that remained were a series of white posts, spaced equally apart, each one numbered.

An odd sensation shivered through me.

And then I realized why: he's behind you.

I turned. His eyes widened above the bloodied mask as he raised the knife at his side. I ducked away from him - but too late. The blade came fast and pierced the skin at the top of my shoulder. I sucked in the pain and rolled away, keeping my grip tight on the shovel.

He came at me a second time, stabbing the knife towards my throat then cutting across in one swift motion. I stepped back but he was keeping me closed up, forcing my arms in against my body as protection, not allowing me to open up an arc for the shovel. The third time he got me in the folds of my top. I heard the tear of fabric, felt the tip of the knife blade come all the way through to my skin. But then, as he was drawing away, I swept the shovel in a half-circle. It thudded against the top of his arm and he slipped on the wet ground, falling to his side. As I went for him again, he raised a forearm, and the shovel clanged against the bone. He screamed out in pain, the noise echoing out through the Dead Tracks. I went again, catching him in the small of his back, and he thumped against the turf like a sack of cement.

Still.

As I edged closer, shovel up, I could see the posts more clearly. There were thirteen of them, all recently driven into the earth. Each one stationed about five feet apart. I stopped, eyes moving from one post to the next, a sickening realization forming. This is it. A wind came through the trees towards me. Brief and violent, like the last breath of the thirteen women Milton Sykes had killed a century before.

This is Sykes's burial ground.

Glass had found it. Nurtured it.

I stepped up behind him. The water from the grass had soaked through his medical scrubs. The mask had been pushed up to the top of his head. Long grass covered his features. 'Roll over,' I said to him, teeth gritted. He didn't react. I prodded him with the blade of the shovel. 'Roll over, you piece of shit.'

Nothing.

Forcing the shovel in under him, I flipped his body over. He rolled on to his back. Eyes closed. And suddenly he became someone else.

Someone I knew.

Aron Crane.

But it wasn't the Aron I remembered from the support group. The man who'd sat next to Jill. Even unconscious, he was different: darker and more dangerous. He wasn't the man who'd been concerned about Jill. The man I'd thought I'd bumped into by accident the day before. He wasn't anyone I remembered.

'Aron?'

He moved fast, grabbing my ankle, trying to turn it, trying to twist it the wrong way to force me to the ground. Teeth clenched. Eyes flashing. Adrenalin surging through his system as he saw a last chance to turn the tables. He forced me into a half-turn away from him and was on his feet within a second, grabbing me by the neck and pushing me to the ground. Suddenly I was beneath him, his body on mine, his hands tightening at my throat. As he closed off my air, I started to lose the sensation in my hands: my fingers numbed, my palms, my wrists.

But then his grip loosened.

Not much, but enough.

Nerves fired in my hands. Prickles of sensation drifted into my fingers. And I could feel the shovel again. The wood. The iron. The weight.

I gripped it as hard as I could and launched it off the ground towards him. The blade was side-on, the thin width of it leading first. It cracked against his skull, behind his ear, and his fingers sprang from my throat immediately; a bear trap flipping open. His eyes rolled up into his head. He wobbled. Then he slumped sideways and hit the wet ground about an inch from the thirteenth grave.

Above me, the gentle patter of rain started, popping against the canopy, coming down in a fine spray against my face.

Otherwise, the Dead Tracks was silent.