infinities (18 page)

'Don't bet on it.'

'I have to give him the chance, Clark. You – you wouldn't do anything, would you? You wouldn't hurt him in any way?'

'Why should I?'

'Jealousy?'

'Go to hell,' I replied, angry with her, with him, with the whole world.

That night – it had to be that night, didn't it, with this conversation still fresh in her mind – that night there was a prowler in the boat yard. I took Burt's rifle and went out on the jetty.

'Who's there?'

There were no lights on around the yard, since the power had failed. I had a flashlight but the batteries were low and weak. I shone the dim light around me and saw that the diesel pump lock had been broken. The nozzle was lying on the jetty, still oozing some diesel. Someone was on the end of the jetty, walking quickly towards town. I could see a dim figure carrying something in one hand.

'Stop!' I yelled. 'I have orders to shoot.'

'Fuck you,' came the reply.

Burt was shooting looters now. It had become too serious. He had ordered me to do the same. I raised the rifle and aimed.

'I'm warning you. You have to stop.'

There was no answer this time. Just the sound of running feet on the boards. I was shaking. Burt had distinctly told me not to physically engage looters. He had already lost one of his men, stabbed by a looter who pretended to give himself up. 'Warn them three times, then shoot,' he told me. The next moment I fired into the darkness. I did it without thinking. My finger seemed to squeeze the trigger before my mind told it to.

There followed the thump of a body hitting the boards, then the skidding sound of a heavy object sliding along the end of the jetty. With my heart thumping wildly, I ran to inspect what I had done. I was horrified to find Dan Strickman lying there, bleeding, a bullet hole in his chest. A can of diesel was leaking from a broken cap, running through the cracks in the boards and drizzling on the surface of the water beneath.

He looked up at me, and said, 'I'll be all right, in a minute. Boy, that was some...'

Poor Dan. He was dead before the minute was out. In his wild state he had confused being fireproof with being immortal. He was no more bullet proof than the next man. His metabolism had found a way of dealing with burns, eradicating them, nullifying them – something. But he was still vulnerable, still able to be knocked down by a speeding car, crushed by falling wall – or killed by a bullet from a gun.

'You did it on purpose,' Jenny said, later. 'You knew it was Dan – that's why you killed him.'

'Is that true, Clark?' asked Burt. 'Is that true what she says? Did you give him three warnings?'

'Two. I didn't have time for the third.'

'I said
three
Clark. The law requires three warnings. Otherwise I have to treat it as an illegal killing. Shit, just tell me you warned him three times, that's all I want to hear.'

'He killed him out of jealousy, because he wanted me forever,' Jenny said, stubbornly. 'I know it. I can feel it.'

'You couldn't feel a marline spike if I jammed it in your eye,' I yelled at her. 'You're incapable of feeling anything.'

'All right, that's enough. I've got too much on now, but I'll get back to this later, Clark. In the meantime you better let me have the rifle back, before you do any more damage.'

'Any more damage? Fuck you, Burt, I never wanted it in the first place. I'm not trained for this. You're the one who told me to shoot people. I shouldn't have been given a weapon. I shouldn't have had the responsibility. I haven't fired a gun in my life before now. You tell me to shoot looters, then you call me a fucking murderer. That's not right.'

'Well, we'll get back to it later.'

But he never did. Burt died of the White Death before it finally left town in the Spring. Jenny went away. When the police interviewed her, she said she wasn't there, at the shooting, and didn't know anything about it. There were no witnesses. I changed my story. I told them I yelled at the intruder three times, then fired. They let me go.

In the meantime, Dan had the last laugh on everyone. He was having the time of his life, down there in the fires of Hell. There was a law in force, during the plague year, that anyone who died had to be cremated, to kill any dormant bacteria I imagine. So Dan was burned, and burned again, and burned yet again, each time his corpse grotesquely reappearing from its own ashes, rising as it were like that fabled bird, the Phoenix. We couldn't get shot of him. He just wouldn't go away, damn his re–emerging hide. He became the joke of the town. Even I had to laugh. In the end they tied him to the back of a boat, dragged him out into the ocean, and threw down ground bait to attract the sharks.

Those bastards soon got rid of him.

Copyright information
© Garry Kilworth, 2005, 2011
"Phoenix Man" was first published in
Don't Turn Out The Light
edited by Stephen Jones and is republished in
Phoenix Man
, published by infinity plus ebooks:
Buy now:
Phoenix Man by Garry Kilworth
$2.99 / £2.18.

Eleven stories of murder, obsession, fear and — sometimes — redemption. Featuring stories published in
Alfred Hitchcock's
,
Ellery Queen's
, and more,
Nowhere To Go
is a collection of Iain Rowan's best short crime stories.

Iain's short fiction has been reprinted in Year's Best anthologies, won a Derringer Award, been voted into readers' top ten of the year, and been the basis for a novel shortlisted for the UK Crime Writers' Association's Debut Dagger award.

"During the five years that I published
Hardluck Stories
, 'One Step Closer' and 'Moth' were two of my favorite stories. I loved the nuances and true heartfelt emotion that Iain filled his stories with, and Iain quickly became a must read author for me— everything I read of Iain's had this tragic, and sometimes, horrific beauty filling it, and was guaranteed to be something special."
—
Dave Zeltserman
, author of
Outsourced
, and
Washington Post
best books of year
Small Crimes
and
Pariah

"A short story writer of the highest calibre."
—
Allan Guthrie
, author of Top Ten Kindle Bestseller
Bye Bye Baby
, winner of Theakston's Crime Novel of the Year

"Iain Rowan's stories never fail to surprise and delight, and just when you think you know what will happen next, you realize how much you've been caught unaware."
—
Sarah Weinman
, writer, critic, reviewer, columnist for the
Los Angeles Times
and News Editor for
Publishers Marketplace

"Iain Rowan is both a meticulous and a passionate writer, and these stories showcase his ample talent wonderfully well. You owe it to yourself to discover Rowan's fiction if you haven't already had the pleasure."
—
Jeff Vandermeer
, author of
Finch
,
Shriek: An Afterword
,
City of Saints and Madmen
; two-time winner of the World Fantasy Award

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$2.99 / £2.12.

"I mean it," the gunman shrieked, and he pointed the revolver at Ward, the end of the barrel moving in tiny circles with the shaking of his hands. "I mean it. One step closer..."

Ward stopped where he was. Other than the man with the gun, no-one else was standing. The sun was shining bright through the frosted windows, and somewhere in the bank a lazy dying fly buzzed and battered against the glass. The bank smelt of floor polish. Ward could taste the pickle from the sandwich he had eaten an hour earlier. Everything was very real, as sharp and defined as the stars on a cold and cloudless November night.

I've not been a bad man, Ward thought, although I could have been a better one. But I've not been a bad man. There's always that. He thought about how blue and perfect the sky had been that morning. He thought of Sarah, of how they were before it had all gone wrong, and he wondered what she was doing now. He hoped that she was happy. I don't think I have ever felt more alive, he thought. And now I know I've wasted so many things. So much time.

~

He'd almost not bothered with the bank at all—had ducked his head through the door, seen the lunchtime queue, and thought briefly about going to get the other things he needed first. Some shop-brand beans and some potatoes, a cheap shirt for work and maybe a book from the library. But he thought no, you're here now and it's not like you've got anything else to do with your day, so you might as well join the queue.

Which turned out to be bad timing, but then that was life, Ward thought. A bad call here, some bad luck there, and everything turns around. One year you're married, and the next you're not. One year you have a career, a house in the London suburbs, and then you're just stumbling from one dead-end job, one rented room, to another. One day you go to the bank and you roll your eyes at the slowness of the staff, and the next moment a man in a stained combat jacket and a baseball cap pushes in front of you and holds an old-looking revolver pressed into the cheek of a woman in a print dress and shouts "Money, in bags now, or I'll do her" and the whole world goes into slow motion and everybody stands very still and there isn't a sound other than the drip, drip, drip on the floor where the woman wets herself.

Everyone stood very still.

The puddle of urine rolled lazy tendrils across the floor and around Ward's shoes.

The gunman noticed everyone else for the first time, and shouted, "The rest of you, down on the floor now, and no-one fucking move."

It's a film, Ward thought. This isn't real life, this is a film. Even the words sound like they're from the script of some straight-to-video clunker. But he sat on the floor, all the same.

"Get a fucking move on." The gunman took the revolver away from the woman with the print dress and pointed it through the glass at a bank clerk who opened and closed her mouth with no sound, like a fish. "Piss me about and I'll do you n'all."

He's not a pro, Ward thought. Too nervous. Too slow. Too dangerous.

The combat jacket was torn on one side, and greasy. The gunman had heron legs in tight black jeans, and a sports bag slung over one shoulder. As he stood there he rocked from foot to foot, eyes darting to the left, to the right, always in motion. Junkie, Ward thought. God knows where he's got the gun from. Robbed from his granddad's attic, from the look of it. Probably blow his hand off if he tried firing it.

The cashier behind the window was filling faded fabric cash bags with money from the drawer under her desk, stuffing them through the tray in the counter. One got stuck, and she sobbed with frustration, pushing it hard and making it stick even more. The gunman grabbed the bag, pulled, nearly went over backwards.

That was the time, Ward thought, for the hero bit. The gun was pointing up at the ceiling, the man was off balance, but like everything else, you only thought about it when it was too late, and the opportunity was gone, the words had already been said, the deed had already been done, life had moved on and left you behind floundering in its wake, trying to stay above water. Ward knew this well.

Then the door to the bank opened, and a man in uniform walked in and the gunman shouted something that didn't sound like anything and there was a loud crack and all the people sitting on the floor flinched and some of them screamed and the man in uniform went backwards and would have fallen right out of the door but he hit the edge of it and just slid down it and ended up on the floor, half in, half out, all tangled arms and legs.

"Who called them? Who fucking called them?" the gunman shouted, and he swung the gun back towards the counter. "You press an alarm? Did you? Did you?"

"He's a traffic warden," The elderly man with a blue blazer and a red face was sitting on the opposite side of the bank to Ward. He glared up at the gunman.

"What?"

"You shot a traffic warden. He's a damn traffic warden. Look at him man, can't you tell the bloody difference?"

"Shut the fuck up."

"Animal," the old man said, and the gunman pointed his gun and Ward shut his eyes just before the bang and when he opened them again the old man was sitting rigid and silent with fear and the wall next to him was splintered and chipped.

"Next time I don't miss," the gunman said, and Ward did not know why but he was as sure as he had ever been of anything that the gunman had not meant to miss the first time.

"One more bag. Go on, move it," the gunman said, and again the gun was back against the woman in the print dress, who shivered throughout her whole body, like long grass in a squall. The cashier filled another bag, and again it got stuck in the tray when she tried to push it through, but she pushed it again hard, and it came through. The gunman stuffed it with the others in his sports bag, and began to move towards the door. Ward sat very still, thinking, it's not over until it's over. The gunman stepped over the body without looking down, got half way out of the door. Then it seemed to Ward as if several things happened very quickly, so quickly that perhaps it was all at once, or maybe in a different order than it seemed. There was a screech of tyres outside, some shouts, two cracks in quick succession, a distant sound of broken glass falling to tarmac, the slam of the bank door. Then the gunman was back inside with them, panting as if he had just run a race, ragged sobs, wild eyes. He waved the revolver around in the vague direction of the people sitting on the floor, then he turned, shoved the body out of the door with one kick, slammed the door and slid the top bolt shut.