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Authors: Raymond S Flex

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Strangers in the Night (3 page)

BOOK: Strangers in the Night
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Back home, if he’d pressed his ear up against his bedroom door, all he would’ve experienced was the slightly warm wood.

Just thinking about
wood
now sent his nostrils tingling.

He could almost smell it . . . and, yet, he felt like he had forgotten what it smelled like at all.

Just as he had forgotten what fresh fruit tasted like, or how the sun felt against his skin.

Satisfied that nobody was coming, Mitts trod away from his bedroom door, and, as he had done earlier that morning, he brought the large plastic container which contained his possessions over so that it rested just below the maintenance hatch.

From the waistband of his jeans, Mitts removed the half dozen screwdrivers he had concealed.

All the screwdrivers had the same gunmetal-coloured, plastic handle, but they were all of varying sizes.

He hadn’t been one-hundred-percent certain which one he needed.

As Mitts had returned from the maintenance cupboard, he had been paranoid that his father would pop up from somewhere. That, at first, he would smile at Mitts.

But then he imagined his father turning his attention onto his waistband, asking what he had concealed there. And then Mitts would have to explain.

Thankfully, though, he had got back to his bedroom without bumping into anyone.

Mitts laid the screwdrivers on his camp bed, and then glanced up at the maintenance hatch, judging the screws by sight alone. He grabbed hold of one of the screwdrivers, leaped up on the plastic container, tried it out.

Nope.

He tossed that one back onto the bed.

Tried another.

Nope.

Another.

Nothing.

Mitts glanced down at the remaining screwdrivers. He plucked up one which seemed to be
far
too small. But he gave it a go, anyway.

He felt the screwdriver slip into the head.

He turned.

The screwdriver
gripped
.

But it didn’t move.

Mitts sunk his teeth into his lower lip. He put all the force he could muster into turning the screw. But it wouldn’t budge.

Not at all.

He must’ve spent a good minute or so trying to turn the screwdriver. And he only stopped when he tasted blood. Felt it trickle down his chin.

With a frustrated
grunt
, Mitts tossed the screwdriver off behind him, in the direction of the camp bed. But he heard it miss. He heard it clatter down onto the laminate flooring.

Sucking on his bloodied lip, Mitts barged into his en-suite bathroom, flipped on the light above the mirror, and took a look at himself.

Once he’d soaked a wad of toilet paper in cold water and was pressing it hard against his lower lip, he found himself staring back at his own reflection.

Even in the bright, even light, Mitts could tell that he looked pale.

His eyes sunken in their sockets.

Though Mitts had often heard people—usually his mother—describing his eyes as being a hazel-green colour; he thought that now they looked a little more of a
sludge
-brown.

Every week—every Sunday evening—Heinmein would give each of them: Mitts, his mother and his father; a check-up.

Heinmein would take their pulse, their blood pressure, a blood sample, and, of course, he would weigh each of them.

Although Heinmein never showed any sort of emotion as he scrawled the information down on his
prehistoric
clipboard, Mitts had noticed, each week, that he had been losing weight.

About a kilo a week average.

And though Mitts had never been the most robust of kids—he had broken more bones . . . had had more bones
broken
. . . than any other kid at school—even he thought that he had got scrawnier since they’d arrived at the Compound.

Mitts could see the way his clothing hung off his frame.

Sometimes Mitts allowed his dislike of Heinmein to overwhelm him, and he actually got around to blaming him—even if only in his own mind—for his mother’s state of health.

He thought that the weekly check-ups were only really a way of making him and his family feel deeply anxious.

They’d got Mitts feeling anxious, hadn’t they?

Satisfied that the bleeding had stopped, Mitts tossed the bloodied wad of paper into the toilet bowl. It landed with a
splash
.

As Mitts stepped out of his bathroom, and back into his bedroom, he promised himself that one thing was for certain. That he wasn’t going to allow Heinmein to tell him and his family what to do.

Even if his father was too naïve to see it, Mitts wouldn’t allow Heinmein to harm him or his family just because they
trusted
him.

 

* * *

 

Back up on the plastic container, Mitts continued to work at the screws.

Already, he could feel the fatigue webbing along the back of his right hand as he worked to undo the screw. And he was only about halfway to unscrewing the first of the four screws.

He supposed that these ventilation hatches had been installed using an electric screwdriver, that was how it’d got so tight. And Mitts cursed himself for being so
weedy
, for not having any of those
muscles
the sporty kids had. He knew that if one of those kids had been here, in Mitts’s situation right now, they would’ve got these screws out in a heartbeat.

Off, over his shoulder, Mitts heard a cough.

Out in the corridor.

He stopped dead.

His heart in his mouth.

Arms raised over his head.

Screwdriver pressed hard into the screw.

He listened out, hoping whoever was there would slip off into the distance.

A pair of knocks on his door.

Clean, metallic.

Resounding.

Mitts urged himself back to his task, this time shifting his focus from
undoing
to
tightening.
His aching wrist spun the screwdriver around, working the screw back into its place. It was much easier for him to get it back where it had been now that he had loosened it.

That done, Mitts jumped down off the container, tossed the screwdriver onto his blanket on his camp bed and then bundled it up, shoved it to the foot of his mattress.

He turned to his bedroom door, wondering if, whoever was there, had heard all the commotion he had been making.

Maybe they had heard it
all
.

Knew
just
what he was up to.

Mitts slumped on his bed, breathing in deeply, trying to urge his pulse to return to somewhere near its normal rate. Finally, when Mitts supposed that he could wait no longer, he called out, a little too loudly, and with his voice cracking, “Come in!”

Without any pause, the hinges of Mitts’s bedroom door squealed out.

And Heinmein appeared in the gap.

Like before—like
all
the times before—Heinmein bore the device.

Mitts took in the form of the device, its beige casing, the analogue dial with the needle currently lying propped against the Zero reading.

Heinmein hadn’t switched it on yet.

Heinmein dragged his leg behind him into Mitts’s room, and Mitts instantly felt a chill pass through his chest. Pass through his blood.

Heinmein mumbled something beneath his breath, but, other than that, he made no signal or sign of acknowledging that Mitts was even there at all.

In the first few days that Mitts and his family had arrived here, Mitts had been startled to discover—often in the middle of the night—Heinmein’s form skulking about his room.

The sweet smell of rotten oranges, and the biting odour of cheesy feet.

How that odour had got stuck in Mitts’s throat, just as it got caught in Mitts’s throat right now.

That device in Heinmein’s hands, purring along to itself.

The odd
squeal
and
screech
here and there.

In the darkness.

It was only when he told his father about these nightly visitations, that they came to a stop.

Mitts’s father stopping Heinmein invading his bedroom at all hours of the night was one of his father’s
few
interventions in Heinmein’s otherwise free rein within the Compound.

As Mitts observed Heinmein going about his work now, he pulled his knees up to his chest and watched him over his kneecaps.

Just as with any other time, Heinmein remained off in his own world—seemingly occupied within his own mind. He had flipped his device on now, and he was limping about the room. Aside from the odd
screech
or
squeal
, there was hardly so much as a tiny deviation from the ordinary, background-level
clicking
.

Nothing like it had been the first few days.

Those occasions when Mitts had awoken in his bedroom to hear those
squeals
coming from the device.

And how Mitts would cling to his blanket, trying to instil some sort of warmth in his body.

Only when he had heard his bedroom door slam behind Heinmein, heard the sound of Heinmein’s
plodding, sweeping
gait disappear off down the corridor did Mitts realise that it wasn’t the temperature at all.

That it had been fright.

Mitts watched as Heinmein approached the ventilation hatch.

He scolded himself for not having had the presence of mind to think about moving the plastic container back to where it was normally located. He had left it right beneath the ventilation hatch.

Now, though, at least Mitts would have a clear view of his container, both because he had the lights in his bedroom turned on and because it was close by.

That was the other thing about the first few days in the Compound.

Following those night-time visitations, Mitts would always notice some of his personal possessions had gone missing from his plastic container.

He knew what it meant.

That his possessions were
unsafe
to keep.

That they might be putting their lives in danger.

But, still, Mitts found it something of a violation.

And that was why he had asked his father to put a stop to it.

Sure, the world might’ve ended, but that didn’t mean Mitts should have to deal with a stranger skulking about in the darkness. Waking him up in the middle of the night. Rummaging through his possessions on the pretence of ‘keeping them safe’.

Heinmein gripped tight to his device, making it purr as he waved it up in the air, in the direction of the ventilation hatch. He frowned to himself, screwing up his eyes behind his thick glasses. He was totally focused on the device before him.

On the dial.

Thinking that all his books were stuffed into the plastic container at Heinmein’s feet, Mitts realised he couldn’t do anything other than fix his gaze on that dial.

See whether there was any movement.

See whether or not doom might be near.

Heinmein shook his head some more, muttered to himself again, and then flipped the switch on the device. Brought all those
chirps
and
chuckles
to a halt.

It was then that he turned, his black-grey hair all sticking up in tufts, and he looked straight back into Mitts’s eyes.

For a long time, Mitts felt every muscle in his body draw taut.

He could do nothing but stare back into those black eyes of Heinmein’s, almost losing himself in those endless pits. And then, out of nowhere, for what was the very first time Mitts could recall, Heinmein gave him a smirk.

A chill ran through him.

Heinmein turned away, headed for the door, his job, for the time being, done here.

It was only when Heinmein was halfway across the room that Mitts summoned the strength—summoned the
will
—to speak.

“The smell’s gone,” Mitts said.

Heinmein stopped still.

He kept his back to Mitts, the device still grasped in his hands.

The stench of rotten oranges and the sour note of cheesy feet seemed to reach its zenith.

Mitts tasted bile at the back of his throat.

It burned there.

He wished he had said nothing at all.

Why
had
he said anything?

Heinmein had been leaving him alone.

And now he was lurking there.

Because of Mitts.

Heinmein breathed in deeply, his shoulders slinking up and back.

Mitts reassured himself that Heinmein was only a smudge taller than he was. That, if it came to it, if things came down to physical blows, then Mitts could easily take him.

That was what Mitts told himself anyway.

Mitts wondered if Heinmein would
say
something to him, if he would actually act like a
human being
. But Heinmein’s attention was drawn downward now.

Down to the laminate flooring at his feet.

He held still for another fraction of a second and then, in a gentle, swooping arc, he reached down. It was a physical movement which, if Mitts hadn’t witnessed it himself, he would’ve believed Heinmein incapable of.

When Heinmein straightened back up, Mitts saw that he held something in his hand. And Mitts realised, with a degree of horror, that it was one of the screwdrivers he had tossed away.

The one which’d bounced off the bed.

And clattered down onto the floor.

Heinmein turned the screwdriver over in his hands as if it was some strange, alien artefact. He turned his head to Mitts. Stared long and hard at him. And then, without a word, he slipped the screwdriver into his pocket. He did his
plod-sweep
back out of the room.

The door clanged shut behind him.

And Mitts allowed himself to breathe again.

 

* * *

 

Mitts worked much more quickly this time.

With a little perspiration running down his face—he supposed that Heinmein, following his experimentation in Mitts’s room had decided to turn up the thermostat—Mitts got three of the four screws loose from the ventilation hatch.

He placed them, carefully, in the pocket of his jeans.

Only one screw remaining, Mitts went at it as fast as he could, finding that, after undoing the other three, he had caught the knack.

BOOK: Strangers in the Night
2.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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