Harvest (30 page)

Craig’s breakfast made a sudden
lurch to exit and he ran a few steps from the flat and leant close
to a wall before vomiting violently. A chill slashed through him.
He didn’t need to see the crime scene; he had already seen it in a
nightmare. Vicki snatched the camera from Craig and everything
blanched in and out of existence in a strobe of flickering white
light as Vicki framed him mid-hurl with a succession of shots. He
hacked up the last contents of his stomach. Doubled-over bracing
himself on his legs as he let the ache subside from his guts. He
stared at his second-hand food cooling and seeping into the
carpet.

Balin retched and put a hand
over his mouth for a while before passing Vicki a page plucked from
his notebook. “This is all we know, names of the victim and the
suspected murderer. Details of the crime in graphic detail. I will
call you and get you some more background when we have talked to
the neighbours.” He retched again.

“I guess this will have to
do.”

The officer held his stomach
with one hand and his mouth with the other. “Don’t be too fucking
grateful Vicki.”

“Thanks Stu. Sorry. You have
given me all I need for a front page. Call me when you get off duty
and I will buy you a pint.”

Craig wiped cold strings of
saliva from his mouth with the back of his hand, too shocked and
drained to snap at Vicki for what she had done. Balin suddenly lost
his battle with the horror of the crime scene and seeing Craig
vomit and threw up himself.

Vicki turned the cameras focus
in his direction as he was ill in a projectile manner. “Sorry Stu.
I don’t need pictures of a crime scene or an interview if I have a
picture of a copper seeing something so gruesome he losies his
breakfast” She made a play of staring at his puke and pointed at
it, “or is that lunch?” She laughed to herself and guided Craig
onto the stairs at the end of the corridor while Balin struggled to
be coherent and swear at her, only to end up heaving another load
onto the floor.

Craig found himself bundled
onto the staircase as the lift arrived with CID officers. A deep
voice echoed after them. “Fuck, Balin! I just stepped in that!
Jeezus. Hope you didn’t do that in the crime scene you…” the
inevitable insult was censured as the fire door drifted closed.

Vicki eyed Craig
sympathetically and wiped at his mouth with a balled up tissue then
shoved it in his hand and ruffled his hair. “You need a stronger
stomach.” Vicki passed the camera back. “I want the pictures of you
and Stu losing your breakfast by tonight – don’t worry, the pics of
you were just for giggles. You got a great shot of a bloody hand
print on the wall, and I got the shots of a ‘man of the force’
doing a Linda Blair – that will have enough impact without
resorting to the money shot of a body.” She winked, basking in her
own opportune brilliance. “This is front page, baby!”

That meant his pictures would
be front page too, but it is difficult to find any satisfaction
from that. Reality was something distant and intangible that
swirled around him, still reeling from his nightmares being born
into reality.

Chapter
Twenty Four

Danny puzzled at the images in
his head, the things he could do with his anger, how he could make
Kevin pay for all the times he had annoyed him, yet he struggled
against them. He didn’t understand why he was thinking like that.
They hadn’t had a big falling out for a couple of months and he
couldn’t even remember what that war had been over. The silly stuff
they snapped and bickered over didn’t seem to warrant the
punishments Danny wrestled with in his head.

Kevin leapt from his bunk, and
lunged at him with an onslaught of slaps. Danny shielded himself
easily, he wanted to laugh the attack off as play fighting, but it
took all his effort to bite his lip and hold back the dark feeling
inside him. Although such fighting was a game they had played out
many times in the past with each other it felt different this time,
the attack was fierce and Kevin’s face was full of hate while his
eyes were hard and glassy. Danny could see the same anger that he
struggled with burning in his brother’s eyes. The slaps turned into
thumps and Kevin grunted and hissed from behind his flailing arms
like a wild thing.

He battered through Danny’s
blocking arms and his fists pounded against Danny’s chest, one
strike caught his face in a stinging blow. Danny’s patience fell
under the hit and his control of the mysterious anger faltered. He
struck back with a single swift precise jab that caught Kevin hard
and square in the stomach and sent him coughing to the floor
gagging for air. With Kevin no longer provoking him Danny took some
deep breaths and tried to bring his rage back under control.

Kevin leapt from the floor
quicker than Danny had expected and punched down into Danny’s groin
that was somehow still aroused from his thoughts of Leah. He rolled
from the bed with the crippling pain, gagging and choking on air,
winded from the blow. Kevin was determined to keep fighting so
Danny decided to ignore his discomfort and put him down again. He
charged at his brother headfirst, bulldozing into his body and
hooking him on a shoulder, body-slamming him against the wardrobe
doors before dropping to his haunches from the agony of his
balls.

In a matter of seconds Kevin
had recovered and scrambled over Danny, raining down punches and
flinging his knees into the fray in a squirming writhing attack.
Danny wrestled with the anger that didn’t want to be channelled
into brief fits, but wanted to be unleashed. Kevin’s knee found
Danny’s face and the cartilage of his nose crunched loudly as
gristle rubbed on bone. A flash of pain exploded across his face
making his vision go dark.

Danny lost control.

The rage gripped his mind and
his anger and hate was all that he could feel. In that moment the
fact they were brothers, that they were children was lost in the
red rage that engorged every vein and demanded for retaliation.

Danny bit hard into the soft
skin of Kevin’s shoulder as if it were an apple, a bite that didn’t
stop until he felt the heat of blood on his lips and its coppery
taste on his tongue, he growled and screamed through his mouthful
and shook his head, ripping the flesh. Kevin’s attack faltered and
Danny’s arms were freed from shielding himself and became weapons
again. He snatched at the headphone cables that hung around Kevin’s
neck and yanked them tight around his throat. Kevin’s smaller
weaker fingers raked at the thin wire that dug itself a trench in
his tender neck, he rasped and choked and screamed a low growl
through a white froth of saliva as the cable restricted his air and
stilled the blood in his head, sending the skin of his face pink,
then red before turning an eye bulging purple.

Danny’s face twisted in pain as
Kevin somehow struck him in the face with something scavenged from
the clutter of their floor. Everything went black then red, and
then a strobe between the two colours before every move Danny made
became disorientated and uncoordinated. He grabbed at the object
jutting from his face, sending another white-hot shaft of pain
lancing through his eye into his head, seemingly reverberating off
the back of his skull, ricocheting off of nerves he never knew
existed. Danny gagged and let go of the object, nearly vomiting.
The hand that he had used to reach for his face was slick with
sticky crimson blood. He scrambled away from Kevin who was now free
of him and sat pulling the headphone cable from his throat, gasping
for air.

Danny leapt up woozily not
wanting to let the shock settle in and leave him feeble, knowing
Kevin would return to the fight. The adrenaline charged in his
veins giving him a high that urged him to push his body to the
limits. Danny ran forward ignoring the blood that ran and dripped
from his face and patted to the carpet, and aimed a kick at Kevin’s
head, hoping to keep him down, but somehow his judgement was off
and his foot only clipped the front of his face, enough to send him
scuttling across the floor, but not enough to do any serious
damage.

Again they locked in battle,
pushing, struggling, kicking, punching, head-butting, biting, and
throwing, in a dervish that destroyed their bedroom in their
efforts to beat the other. Danny’s body rushed with the burning
heat of his violent blood, pumped by a furious heart; a runaway
engine beyond his control that refused to allow any pause in the
fight to become an end. He could see the same determination in his
brother’s face, could feel it in his attack, they were both pushing
their young scrawny bodies on, prepared to run their machines of
flesh and bone into broken shredded wrecks to meet their raging
hearts demands.

Danny suddenly found himself
fighting the air as Kevin had been sent to the floor from a punch
to the face. He turned for the door from the bedroom; his sanity
offered the option of fleeing the fight and end it before it became
any worse, but his crippling anger suggested finding a weapon to
finish the fight. Danny slammed into the door and the doorframe,
unable to judge distances since the blow to his head; he groped his
way into the hall. Kevin was suddenly on him again delivering a
rain of stabs from a compass salvaged from the carnage. Each sting
of the thick needle punched through his slim triceps into the bone
beneath with hollow digs. Danny punched Kevin with a rock of a
fist, sending him crashing up against the bathroom door.
Instinctively Danny improvised a weapon by snatching a round mirror
with a metal vine-work frame from the wall and swung it
downward.

Danny saw his own reflection in
the mirror as he delivered it as a weapon, his own face staring
back like a mask he barely recognised from the bloody mess left by
a biro jammed firmly in his left eye. Before the gut-churning
vision could sink in with its devastating consequences to his
sight, Kevin’s face and head erupted through the mirror in a
glittering explosion of glass and blood as the shards raked the
soft flesh of his face, slicing open the muscle of his left cheek
and leaving thorny gashes on his forehead. Danny ran as Kevin
screamed and wailed in agony as he battled to get the jagged ring
off his head, flaying himself as he wrenched it free, seemingly
unperturbed by the pain.

Danny waited for Kevin in the
lounge, his breathing wracked his body while his heart danced
between racing rage and throat wrenching flutters of guilt with the
knowledge that things had somehow gone very wrong for them both,
but he was unable to stand-down. He knew Kevin would be scarred for
life from the mirror, and he himself might never see with his
wounded eye, but it was too late, the damage had been done and the
fight wasn’t over. He thought of his parents, what they would say,
how they would feel, what would happen to him and his brother. The
consequences tugged at his insides like fishhooks in flesh but they
failed to quench the fire in his chest and the wrath that ached in
his head. He stood defensively, the blood burning in his limbs,
brandishing a large carving knife he had snatched from the kitchen.
He stood holding the vicious blade out before him, steadying it
with both hands against his adrenaline quakes, a determination deep
inside him that overrode the consequences, the injuries he had
inflicted and received, and his love for his brother and his want
to give Kevin mercy, pushing Danny to finish the fight.

A blur of motion surged through
the air from round the corner in a screaming voice that cracked
into a childish battle-cry as Kevin appeared faster than expected;
racing at him. Danny’s hand and knife was cracked aside in a
bone-fracturing swat, and then his kneecaps were shattered with a
solid blow that felled Danny to the carpet in agony. Kevin swung
his cricket bat down and smashed the edge sharply into Danny’s
ribs, shattering three in one blow.

Danny’s breath wrenched from
his chest and hot liquid bubbled in the back of his throat in a
gurgling rasp. Strings of vibrant oxygen rich red drained from his
mouth blotting into the carpet as he knelt double on the floor.
With the last energy his ragged lungs could offer Danny punched
upward with his fist at Kevin and collapsed on his side, broken and
exhausted, his chest wheezing from his punctured lung. The anger
now gone as quickly as it had formed as if he had been switched on
and turned off like a rampaging toy robot, only the guilt and the
fear remained for within his paralysed and shattered body.

Kevin dropped his bat instantly
and staggered briefly, his arms flailed about his head from the
blow that left his brain in shock and panic, searching for the
injury that had caused the surge of pain and now the sudden
numbness. His arms dropped from their writhing involuntary spasm
and he toppled backwards to the floor. Danny’s knife impaled
through the flesh of his jaw, splitting his tongue, the tip of the
blade protruding from his soft scalp.

It stared down coldly at Danny
and Kevin, invisible, intangible, emotionless, with its new
understanding of the limits and tolerance of flesh and bone. It
would return later to witness the return of the parents and monitor
the strength of the mind.

Virtue Kafar stood in her
kitchen with the phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear so
she could continue preparing her son’s lunch, while Billy himself
screamed his constant cry over the top of her conversation with her
boss. “No Ken, everyone asks but really, you have already done
enough. Unless you know where the volume controls are on babies, I
am okay.”

“
No, but Sinatra used to
work wonders on my boys.” She could picture Ken in his immaculate
tailored suit with his well-groomed shock of white hair, as if he
was standing before her at work. She could tell by his voice that
he was grinning.