The Bunker Diary (24 page)

Fred nods. ‘I kind of guessed
that.’

I sigh.

Bird makes a horrible rasping sound then,
hawking up something from the back of his throat. Me and Fred both look at him. He
stares straight ahead, his left eye twitching.

‘What the hell are we going to do with
him?’ I ask Fred.

Fred says nothing, just shakes his head.

We couldn’t decide what to do with
Bird. We secured him in his room, tying him to the bed, and then we just sat down and
talked things over for hours and hours, trying to work out what to do. We didn’t
know why Bird had killed Anja,
or whether he’d known what he was
doing or not, and – as Fred pointed out – we didn’t even know for sure that he
had
killed her.

‘We’re only guessing it was
him,’ he said.

‘Who else could have done
it?’

‘Russell.’

I stared at Fred.

He shrugged. ‘It’s possible,
isn’t it? He’s not himself any more, he’s half-crazy … he
could have done it.’

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘No way.’

Fred shrugged again. ‘You don’t
know
that.’

‘Yeah, I do.’

Fred was right, of course. I didn’t
know
that Russell hadn’t killed Anja. I was 99% sure that he
hadn’t, and I think Fred felt the same, but we couldn’t discount the
possibility. So then we had to try to work out what to do about that as well.

We didn’t get very far.

How could we prove anything? How could we
prove that Bird had done it, or that Russell had done it? And even if we could prove
anything, what did we do then? Put the killer on trial? Punish him? Lock him up?

He was already locked up. We all were.

In the end, we got to the stage where we
just couldn’t think about it any more. We were too tired, too confused to carry
on. It was early evening by then, and we’d been talking all day. We decided to
leave it for now, get some rest. Start again tomorrow.

It happened in the early hours of the
morning.

I was asleep in my room with Jenny, Fred was
outside in the corridor. Bird and Russell were both in their rooms. Bird was still tied
up – his belt-bound hands secured to the bed by another belt – but we hadn’t done
anything to restrain Russell. He was so weak now he could barely walk. I’d had to
help him to the bathroom earlier on. He had no idea where he was or what he was doing.
And besides, Fred was going to spend the night sitting in a chair at the kitchen-end of
the corridor, so even if Russell did leave his room for any reason, Fred would see him.
At least until the lights went out. And then he’d hear him.

‘And I’ve still got this,’
Fred said, grinning and clicking one of the cigarette lighters The Man had sent down to
us a million years ago. ‘Don’t worry, Linus,’ he said, patting my
shoulder. ‘Nothing’s going to happen. You and Jenny get some sleep and
we’ll talk again in the morning.’

I was confused when the sound of the lift
woke me up.
G-dung, g-dunk.
It was dark, and it felt early. And that
wasn’t right. The lift comes down at nine o’clock. The lights are always on
at nine o’clock. The lift doesn’t come down when it’s dark.

I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and listened.

Whirr
,
clunk
,
click
,
nnnnnnnnn …

It was definitely the lift.

I wasn’t dreaming.

Jenny was still asleep. I could hear her
sleepy breathing. I got up quietly, tiptoed across the pitch-black room, and opened the
door.

‘Fred?’ I whispered into the
darkness.

A light came on over by the lift, the
flickering flame of Fred’s cigarette lighter. He was standing in front of the lift
door, his head angled to one side, as if he was listening to something.

The lift came to a halt –
g-dung,
g-dunk.

The door didn’t open.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked
Fred, crossing over to him.

‘Listen,’ he said.

I listened. Silence.

‘It’s stopped now,’ Fred
said.

‘What’s stopped?’

‘It sounded like a phone
ringing.’

‘Where? In the lift?’

He nodded. ‘I could have
sworn –’

A phone started ringing.

‘There it is!’ Fred said.
‘I knew I’d heard it.’

It was an old-fashioned telephone ring –
brrr
,
brrr
 … 
brrr
,
brrr
. I stepped
closer to the lift door and listened hard. There was no doubt it was coming from inside
the lift.

‘What’s He doing?’ I
said.

Fred shook his head. ‘God
knows.’

The ringing stopped.

Nothing happened for a moment.

And then suddenly –
mmm-kshhh-tkk –
the door opened and the phone started ringing again. We could see it now. It was on
the floor at the back of the lift. A cheap-looking mobile with a grubby white casing.
The screen was flashing on and off with the ringtone.

Brrr
,
brrr
 … 
brrr
,
brrr
.

Brrr
,
brrr
 … 
brrr
,
brrr
.

‘What do we do?’ I said to
Fred.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just
leave it.’

‘But it might be –’

‘It won’t be anything, Linus.
He’s playing games with us again. It’s just another –’

All the lights came on then, a sudden flash
of blinding white, and a second later we heard the scream. It came from behind us, from
my room … from Jenny. I turned and ran.

‘
JENNY!
’ I yelled.
‘
JENNY!
’

My door was half open. I barged through it
and saw Bird bending over the bed, trying to get hold of Jenny. She was scrabbling away
from him, swatting away his hands, her face shocked white and her eyes wide with fear. I
threw myself at Bird, got hold of him round the neck and started pulling him away. He
twisted round and clawed at me like a lunatic – hissing and growling, spitting,
snarling – and then suddenly Fred was there, grabbing hold of Bird’s shoulders,
swinging him round and hammering his massive head into his face. Once,
crack
.
And again,
crack
.

Bird went down without a sound.

We still haven’t worked out exactly
how it happened. We know that Bird gnawed his way through the belts at some point
because we found the chewed remains of them in his room, but the rest of it we can only
guess at. We think The Man Upstairs must have been watching Bird (infrared cameras?). He
must have seen him chewing through the belts, waited until he was almost free, then
distracted us with the phone in the lift so we didn’t see Bird sneaking out of his
room. Of course, He couldn’t have known what Bird was going to do, but it was
pretty obvious he was going to do something, and I guess that’s
all that matters to Him. As long as He’s got something to watch He’s
happy.

God knows what Bird was actually doing.

Was he after me?

Did he know that Jenny was in my room?

I don’t even want to think about
it.

Jenny’s just about OK now. She was
badly shaken up for a while, but after I’d sat with her for an hour or so –
telling her over and over again that there was nothing to worry about any more, that
Bird was gone and she’d never see him again – she slowly began to come out of
it.

‘Is he really gone?’ she asked
quietly.

I nodded.

‘Is he dead?’

I nodded again.

‘Did Fred kill him?’

‘I didn’t mean to kill him,
Linus.’

‘I know.’

‘I thought I’d just knocked him
out. It wasn’t till I’d dragged him out that I realized he was
dead.’

‘You did what you had to do, Fred. He
was probably just about dead anyway. Not that it matters. As long as Jenny’s all
right, that’s all that counts.’

I’m getting it all mixed up now. I
can’t remember if I talked to Fred first and then talked to Jenny, or if it was
the other way round. All I know for sure is that at some point I was sitting at the
table with Fred, and Jenny was in my room, and I
suddenly realized
that while all this craziness had been going on we hadn’t seen or heard anything
from Russell.

‘We’d better go and check on
him,’ I said to Fred.

I looked in on Jenny first. She was asleep –
all curled up, nice and snug, sucking quietly on a finger. I closed the door and left
her to it.

Fred followed me down the corridor to
Russell’s room.

I knocked on the door.

No answer.

I knocked again.

Still no answer.

I looked at Fred.

He shrugged.

I opened the door, just an inch.

‘Russell?’

Nothing.

‘Russell?’

The silence was ominous.

With a heavy heart, I pushed open the door
and went inside. For a fraction of a second everything seemed normal – the walls, the
floor, the ceiling, the bed – and then I saw him. He was lying on the bed wrapped in a
reddened sheet.

The sheet was wet.

The red was blood.

My legs were shaking as I went over for a
closer look. I sank down on to the bed, numbed to the bone. A hollow sickness ached in
my belly.

You know what I thought then? I thought,
This is it. This is what happens and what will happen. This is where
you’re going,
Linus. This – this silence, this stillness,
this lack of feeling – this is where you’re going.

When I looked into Russell’s lifeless
face, a flood of wretchedness filled my heart. I’ve never had a feeling like it
before. Words can’t describe it. Through cold tears I looked down at the empty
socket where his glass eye should have been. Lying on the sheet beside his head was a
splinter of coloured glass.

It took me a moment to get it.

Russell Lansing had popped out his glass
eye, smashed it on the floor, and opened his wrists with a blue-and-white shard.

It’s getting late now.

I’ve talked with Jenny, told her about
Russell. I didn’t tell her everything, but I didn’t lie. I told her that
Russell had cancer.

‘A girl at school got cancer,’
she told me. ‘Carly Green. She died too. She got leukaemula from the power
station.’

‘The
nucular
power
station?’

Jenny smiled.

She’s not stupid.

She asked me what’s going to happen to
us.

‘I don’t know,’ I
admitted.

‘Are we going to die too?’

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Not
us.’

‘Why not?’

‘Lots of reasons.’

‘Like what?’

‘Weedy Power, for one.’

‘What else?’

‘Well, for a start, Fred’s
invincible. Second, you’re too smart. And third, I’m too pretty.’

She laughed. ‘You’re not
pretty
.
Girls
are pretty.’

‘Yeah? What am I then?’

‘Pretty ugly,’ she giggled.

‘Thanks.’

‘Pretty whiffy too,’ she
added.

‘And you’re not, I
suppose?’

Her face suddenly dropped.

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘I
didn’t mean –’

‘Yeah, I know.’

She sniffed and wiped her nose. I felt bad
then. Bad for the little things. It’s not the big stuff that really gets to you,
it’s the little things. Things like cold bathrooms, dirty sheets, and little girls
who have to put up with smelling bad.

Jenny looked up at me. ‘What’s
going to happen, Linus?’

‘Nothing,’ I lied.
‘We’re going to be all right.’

I’ve got the others’
notebooks – Anja’s, Bird’s, Russell’s. I’ve been looking around
their rooms too. I waited until Jenny was asleep and then I went nosing around. It was a
bit spooky, and it didn’t make me feel too great, but then I didn’t feel too
great anyway.

Anja’s notebook is blank. Not a word.
Nothing at all. It looks like it’s never been opened. I thought that was quite sad
at first – having nothing to say, no one to talk to, no secrets, no desire to leave
anything behind. But then it struck me that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after
all. I mean, what’s so great about sharing your thoughts with someone who
doesn’t exist? What good does it do? Where
does it get you?
Nowhere, as far as I can see. Nowhere useful anyway.

Her room had a peculiar smell to it. It
smelled exactly how you’d expect a dirty posh woman’s room to smell, a
curious mixture of waste and wealth. A bit sweet and a bit sour. Like a dead flower. Or
like a £50 note that’s been in a tramp’s pocket for a week. Not very nice,
but not
too
bad either.

I found some more food in there. There
wasn’t much – a couple of crackers under the pillow, four rashers of cooked bacon
hidden in the bible, a small furry lump of chocolate under the bed – but it’s
enough to keep us going for a few more days. The thought of Anja hiding it away
didn’t make me feel angry any more. It didn’t make me feel anything, to be
honest.

Bird’s room was neater than
Anja’s. Not clean, but neat. Neat in a scary kind of way, as if he didn’t
move around much when he was in there, just lay on his bed staring at the ceiling
thinking scary thoughts. Although it was neater than Anja’s room, it smelled a lot
worse. It smelled like fifty years of sweat and putrefaction. There were also one or two
signs that Bird had lost it near the end. Urine stains on the wall, dried turds under
the bed …

I took his notebook and got out of
there.

The writing in his notebook is really hard
to read, all cramped and scrawly, like he was drunk all the time. Apart from the records
he kept of our meetings, it’s mostly filled with strange little undated notes,
each one written on a separate page. I’m not sure what any of it means. For
example:

10.59
a11.25
13.00B
a1306
movement/time/wasted
Philp Satar 99273
7 down
7 Marlett
3
firedefinelinesignwhine
usleless
law = devolution (weakness)
law weakness
weakness is gaurded by law
152
1142
start with 1
61 67 8 47 end
34
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