One Word Kill (Impossible Times Book 1) Read online

  ‘Huh?’ I turned back, wiping acid vomit from my mouth.

  ‘That’s the killing word. That’s where you’ll find Rust and remake the future.’

  John had mentioned a staff restaurant down on the ground floor. I started off. ‘You coming?’

  ‘Why should I?’ Demus called after me. ‘It’s not my future anymore.’

  I reached the corner and looked back. ‘It still matters!’

  ‘To you maybe.’ His voice came from the dark, further back than my dying torch could show. Silence. Then, just as I was about to go, ‘That was the solution to your other problem, too, you know.’

  ‘What? What was?’

  ‘In the Tower of Tricks. Someone had to die. You should have used Power Word Kill on the old man. Everything would have gone away. One old man dead.’

  ‘Come on!’ And I was running for the stairwell. Only silence followed.

  I reached the first floor before nerves started to set in. I was hunting a deranged killer in a darkened building. On my own. Rust had somehow managed to murder and decapitate a well-known local gang leader and then trail us across London carrying the man’s head in a shopping bag. My plan appeared to centre on confronting him with my trusty Stanley knife whose blade, although proven to be sharp, stood less than an inch long.

  I leaned out into the corridor from the stairwell and hollered. ‘Elton! Simon!’ I drew breath for another shout when, against all the odds, two lights appeared at the far end of the corridor and came swinging crazily toward me.

  ‘We got it! We got it!’ Elton was in the lead, holding a flat black box above his head, any concern that too much noise might bring a security guard clearly forgotten.

  ‘We got it!’ Simon came puffing behind him, red-faced.

  ‘Got what?’ I glanced around for Rust.

  ‘The chip, doofus!’ Elton bounced up to me. ‘Si got the combination. I found the safe. A big thing like from World War II, just standing in the corner of an office.’

  ‘We gotta go. Rust’s here. He’s killed Sacks and I think he’s after Mia.’

  ‘Rust?’ Elton blinked and took a step back. ‘The lunatic who torched Mia’s place? What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Murdering people. He followed us. Come on.’ I started down the stairs, feet flying. ‘We have to get the others and go.’

  We emerged onto the ground floor, finding it dark and silent.

  ‘John! Mia!’ I yelled. It had worked before.

  Nothing.

  ‘You guys go that way. I’ll go this way.’ I had spotted a sign to the restaurant.

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’ Elton grabbed my shoulder. ‘You said he killed Sacks? And you want to split up again?’ He let go and pulled the crowbar from his bag. ‘We take this sucker out together.’

  ‘John took one half of this floor. Mia took the other. We need to get them both. Go! I got this!’ I waved my little knife as fiercely as I could. Simon and Elton weren’t dying on my watch. I’d get to the restaurant alone.

  ‘No way—’

  A distant cry cut Elton off, coming from the direction I’d tried to send them.

  ‘Come on!’ And hefting his crowbar he took off, Simon lumbering dutifully behind.

  I pretended to run with them, then turned sharply and ran the other way.

  The lights were on at the front of the restaurant. I pushed the doors open with shaking hands, trying not to let them squeak. The food counter stood before me, all closed up and covered. Tables and chairs stretched away into the shadows toward darkened windows. A little way ahead of me a figure lay face down in his own blood. A black guy in uniform. A security guard sprawled on the tiles, a gleaming red puddle forming around his side.

  Further back into the room something rattled, and I raised the feeble beam of my bicycle lamp.

  Rust sat at one of the tables close to the windows, Mia in the chair in front of him. The blade he had was literally a hundred times bigger than mine, a full-sized machete, the bloody cutting edge held within inches of Mia’s neck.

  ‘Little. Nicky. Hayes.’ Rust put a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. ‘Come to play?’

  ‘You’re mad.’ I couldn’t help but state the obvious.

  Rust shrugged. ‘If I kill all the witnesses, what has anyone got on me but rumours?’ He turned his blade. The blood looked black, like oil. ‘People say I don’t know where to stop. I say, if you never stop, they’ll never catch you.’

  Mia stared at me, eyes pleading. I would be doing the same thing in her place. I had no idea what to do. He could cut her throat with a motion and kill me almost as easily. At every moment there were endless worlds branching away from us, worlds where Mia lay dying, worlds where she somehow elbowed him in the face and broke free, and through it all I was stuck in this one, where I stood like an idiot with no plan and less hope. Demus had been right. I could have saved her. He knew she survived. And somehow, by rushing down here to play the hero, I’d let her die.

  ‘We’ve been waiting for you to show up, Nick.’ Rust kept his voice conversational. ‘I wanted you to see her die.’

  ‘Don’t. You don’t have to do this!’ I stepped forward.

  ‘You mistake me.’ Rust moved the blade closer to Mia’s neck. ‘I want to do it.’

  ‘Just don’t.’ I took another step. Five yards and half a dozen chairs separated us.

  ‘You’ve got a choice, Nick. You can go back and turn on the main lights so you get a better view. That way, she gets to live sixty seconds longer. Or you can say no, and I’ll do it now.’

  ‘I . . .’ Movement in the darkness. Someone was advancing from behind them. There must be a back way in. ‘Wait! I’ll do it.’

  I started to back toward the light switches by the entrance as slowly as I could.

  ‘Quicker!’ Rust pressed the flat of the machete blade to Mia’s throat, the cutting edge just beneath her chin. She cried out in terror. ‘Mia’s dying for you to see her better.’

  Chairs squealed across the floor as I pushed them aside, hoping to cover the sounds of the approach behind them. I reached the switches and set my hand against them. ‘Lower the blade.’

  The figure was behind them now, one hand raised and grasping what might have been a fire extinguisher.

  ‘Really? You’re trying to give me order—’

  Rust’s sneer was cut off as the object struck his head. I flicked all the switches and squinted against the sudden glare, staggering forward, tripping over everything in my path.

  Blinking away afterimages and a sudden blurriness, I could make out Mia on the floor, supporting herself on one arm, the other hand clutching her crimson neck. Rust and his attacker were locked together on the floor, rolling, chairs tumbling around them. I fought off a moment’s disorientation. An unexpected sweetness filled my mouth, and either a distant alarm had gone off or my ears were ringing.

  I pulled myself together and rushed in to grab Rust’s arms, trying to haul him off the other guy. Somehow, with a strength I hadn’t thought I owned, I managed it. As I pulled him clear of Demus, my older self swung his arm. He had hold of a hammer and the crunch it made against the side of Rust’s forehead was like nothing I’d ever heard or ever wanted to hear again. Rust went limp in my arms and fell bonelessly when I dropped him a moment later.

  ‘Mia?’ I turned toward her.

  ‘I’m OK.’ She took her hand from her neck, her fingers red. ‘I think . . .’

  It looked to be a shallow cut. Blood wasn’t flooding down her neck or anything.

  ‘You’ll have a . . . lovely scar.’ Demus coughed. More blood ran from his mouth than came from Mia’s neck.

  ‘Are you . . . OK?’ I asked. He didn’t look OK.

  ‘Three people die here tonight.’ Demus lowered his gaze and mine followed it to the hilt of Rust’s machete, jutting from beneath Demus’s ribs. ‘Like I said.’

  ‘Shit. Look, don’t move. I’m calling an ambulance!’

  He caught my wrist. ‘Don’t. It’s n
ot you that calls them.’

  I tried to pull free. ‘Enough with that! I changed things. Remember? This isn’t your time anymore. I’m not even you.’ I showed him my left wrist, sticky with blood from my self-inflicted cut.

  ‘Wait!’ Mia lurched to her feet. ‘All this was for nothing then . . . ?’

  Demus ignored her. He reached forward with his other hand, wincing as the machete shifted. He pushed his left hand forward exposing the wrist and a faint white seam of scar. ‘You can always fool yourself, Nick. I showed you my right wrist before. You cut your left one. It’s the natural way to do it. Three people will die here. Just like I remember.’

  ‘But . . . you said I’d lose a friend.’

  Demus nodded toward the body lying by the serving area. A pang of regret crossed his brow. ‘Jean Arnot. You said you were prepared to sacrifice someone “old” for someone young. Elton never forgives you for it. I’m sorry. You lose a friend. It’s silly. We were just kids, and I haven’t seen him for longer than you’ve been alive . . . but I still miss him.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Mia turned toward the body by the door as if only now noticing it. She looked lost.

  I didn’t want to understand, but I started to. John’s father had been to see Elton’s dad to apologise for his wife’s behaviour. Mr Arnot did agency work as a security guard. John’s father had a laboratory that must sometimes need guards to fill gaps in the rota. Cruel chance had done the rest.

  Mia started to walk toward the body, stopped and crossed to us.

  ‘Mia . . .’ Demus blinked away sudden tears. He lifted a hand to the hilt jutting from his side. His voice fell lower still. ‘I can’t speak to her. But you will, Nick. You’ll understand.’

  ‘You never did have a plan to go back,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ A whisper. The blood was spreading underneath him. I was watching myself die.

  ‘You need to be in hospital . . .’

  A shake of the head. I had to lean in to hear him now. ‘The two of you have to erase today from your minds, Nick. It’s important. You can’t know these things. They’ll poison you both.’

  ‘But . . . I die here?’ Suddenly forty didn’t seem so old.

  ‘I knew this was the end for me, but I didn’t know how. I’m not brave enough to have done it knowing all the details, and to let it happen just as you saw it. Rub those memories out.’

  ‘Christ.’ Mia knelt beside me. ‘Nick? You came back to do this . . . for me?’ She looked at Demus as if truly seeing him as me for the first time. ‘You came here to die for me?’

  He coughed and looked away. ‘Maybe my cancer returned. Maybe I found out after I came back that time travel may only work on living things, but they don’t live long afterward. It’s not a gentle process. The truth is that neither of you should know what I gave up or why. Neither of you want to know.’ He lay back, breath rasping through bloody lips, growing fainter with each cycle. It’s an odd thing to watch yourself die. It filled me with a dozen different feelings, none of which I have names for. His breathing grew so shallow that I thought he had gone, but Demus sucked in a deeper breath. ‘I’ve given you what you need. Take away the memories. Give yourself back your future. Live your lives.’

  CHAPTER 23

  We didn’t tell the others about Mr Arnot, or Demus, or Rust. Mia and I ran from the restaurant when Demus shuddered out his last breath. We found the others hurrying toward us down the corridor and we herded them back, leaving by the ground floor fire exit. Somehow, I had the presence of mind to retrieve the bag with Demus’s two headbands from the car park bushes, and then we walked, rather than ran, back toward the tube station and the taxi rank outside it.

  None of us spoke much. Mia and I didn’t speak at all. My coat hid the bloodstains on my jumper. The great majority of the blood on Mia’s neck had come off the machete blade, and she wiped it away before anyone saw it. How much trouble we were in depended entirely on Elton. We were either free and clear, with the blame squarely at the feet of Rust and a mysterious man with no identity, or we were in over our heads with an endless and unanswerable mountain of questions and accusations to face.

  Elton held his tongue. When they told him that his father was dead, and where he died, and when and how, he said nothing. He said nothing about it afterwards either. Not to me. Ever. He knew Demus would have known, but he never asked how much the man had told me. And although I could have told him that I hadn’t known his father was there, and I had done my best to save everyone, and that in the end I had given my life for it . . . the fact remained that Demus had known Jean Arnot would die there. And the fact remained that Demus gave his all to keep us as his own past, so that what he asked me to do would matter to the future of his Mia. And the chances were that a quarter of a century from now I would return to 1986, not knowing the details of that night in the laboratory, but being sure of two things. First, that I was prepared for three people who walked into that building not to walk out of it again. And second, that one of them would be me.

  I met Mia in Richmond Park two days later. She called me to arrange it. It was further for her to come than for me, but she knew I wasn’t well and she said she could walk from her crazy aunt’s. It was cold and grey and threatening rain, but somehow neither of us wanted to be indoors. It felt too claustrophobic, what with the space that the guilt and unspoken accusations would take up.

  She was waiting for me, the bench to either side of her still frosty. She’d come without makeup, and without hairspray her hair looked so different that for a moment I wasn’t sure who was sitting there.

  ‘How is he?’ I put the plastic bag with its heavy contents between us.

  ‘Angry,’ she said. ‘Sad. All the things you would expect.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘The same.’ She pressed her lips into a bitter line. ‘You should have told me who Demus was from the very start. How much damage all of this would cause. I didn’t want any of it.’

  ‘I should have told you who he was as soon as I knew,’ I agreed. ‘The rest I didn’t know.’ I raised a hand in defence. ‘I know now. I will know when I come back . . . If I do. If me and Demus really are the same person, exactly. But that’s a loop I can’t get my head around right now.’ I patted the bag. ‘I’m going to take away the last couple of weeks. Rub out the memory of it all.’

  ‘Why?’ The stare she gave me was all suspicion. ‘That’s what he wanted you to do.’

  I took out one of the headbands. ‘Mr Arnot is dead. I can’t bring him back. Nobody can. Demus gave his life to stop Rust taking yours. And Rust is dead. And that’s a good thing. I can’t feel sorry about that. So, if I don’t do what Demus asked me to . . . If I don’t do the last thing that I asked myself to do . . . then what would it all achieve?’ I drew a long breath. If things didn’t go how Demus remembered, then I wasn’t Demus. If I wasn’t Demus, then my chances of surviving leukaemia stopped being guaranteed and became statistically unlikely. If I said that to Mia, though, what kind of pressure would that lay on her? She had the power to save me, but asking her to do it was beyond me. ‘All I can see is that if I don’t blank these weeks just like he remembers doing, then it would mean that none of this was for anything. That you could still get hurt years from now and that I’d missed the chance to help someone I gave my life to save.’

  ‘I never asked—’

  ‘I know you didn’t.’

  ‘I don’t want you to come back and do this.’

  ‘I don’t want to either. And the way I see it, I don’t need to. We can record your memories and use them to restore you if you really do have this accident. Who’s going to make me come back at that point?’

  ‘Good. Don’t come back. Don’t be him ever.’

  ‘I won’t.’ It wasn’t true, though. If I didn’t come back how would the memories work? How would any of it work? Still, I didn’t want to come back. I didn’t intend to. You would have to love someone a ridiculous amount to do that.

  ‘Promise
?’ She met my gaze, serious.

  ‘I have no intention of coming back so Rust can stick a machete through me,’ I said. ‘And I’m not trying to make you feel guilty over any of this. If you use the headband to erase the last two weeks like I’m about to do, then neither of us will even know what really happened in that laboratory. And I think that Demus was right about that being a good thing.’

  ‘So, you know how to work this gadget?’ She peered at it over her nose and for a moment the old Mia was back, the Mia from the D&D table considering one of Elton’s death traps.

  ‘I do.’ I had installed the stolen chip and read the manual. ‘And I’ve written a short catch up for me to read when it’s done. I just need you to make me read it and to keep me from freaking out. Because as far as I will know, I’ll have just jumped forward in time from whenever my most recent memory was. And I may be a bit surprised to find myself suddenly sitting here with you.’

  Mia suppressed a smile. ‘When will you set it for?’

  ‘I’m aiming for just after I knocked Devis over outside your door and we chased him off. That way it will fit with when Demus’s memories stopped.’

  ‘You’ll miss out on some good moments as well as some bad ones,’ Mia said.

  ‘I will.’ I met her gaze. ‘I’ll have to learn to dance again.’ I was thinking of her kisses, though. I would miss that memory. But also, I wouldn’t have to remember watching myself die, and Demus wouldn’t have to enter that building knowing how things would play out. It must be hard knowing you’re about to die. But to have to do it to a script. To step into the blow you know is coming. That was too much to ask of anyone. Or myself.

  I put the headband on, feeling rather self-conscious, though apart from an old woman in the distance walking her dog there was nobody around. In one hand I held the pocket calculator that interfaced to the band via a lead. In the other, the notes I had made for myself. The skeleton of what had happened since Demus picked us up in his BMW outside the Miller blocks. Enough to bridge the gap, but avoiding detail. I finished with strict instructions not to ask too many questions or pursue the matter further. I had time travel to invent. Not to mention the headbands themselves.