Dead People. Ewart Hutton

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      I stood up. The dizziness flared up behind my eyes like the collision instant in a particle accelerator. The pain localized and seared, as if a hot poker was being thrust into my ear. I buckled, drooped onto my knees, and tensed against a spasm of nausea.

      This Apache needed help.

      Everything had shifted into a fuzzy state. But I could still make out Jeff and Donnie’s headlights off to the side and below me. I stood up again, slowly and carefully this time, intending to call out and attract their attention. But I soon realized that that process involved too many complex actions. Instead, I decided to keep it simple and utilize gravity. I stumbled down the slope in a series of wide, wandering lurches.

      They were changing the front wheel on Jeff’s truck. I staggered into their light, feeling like a demented old hermit who has just spent the last forty days fasting on locusts and thorns.

      ‘There’s someone in the camp …’ I gasped, my tongue working like an unfamiliar reptile.

      They leaped into Donnie’s truck and drove off with the rear cab door flapping open. It was only later that I discovered that I had been expected to get into it. Some hope.

      I was still sitting on the running board of Jeff’s truck, my head in my hands, waiting for my world to come back into some sort of order, when they returned for me. ‘Are you all right?’ Jeff asked, and I heard the concern in his voice. ‘What happened?’

      I knew better than to shake my head. ‘I don’t know.’ Did I have a memory of something that had suddenly appeared out of the darkness to run for a moment beside me? Or had that happened in a parallel universe? ‘I think I tripped. But I might have been nobbled.’

      I heard his breath draw in. ‘God, you look terrible …’

      ‘What’s happened with the machinery?’

      ‘Don’t worry about that now. I’m going to get you into the truck. I’m going to get you to a hospital.’

      I didn’t argue. I saved that for the duty nurse at the Dinas Cottage Hospital who confronted us. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we don’t have an A & E department here.’

      ‘He’s had an accident,’ Jeff protested.

      ‘Which is why you’ll need to carry on to either Newtown or Aberystwyth, where they have the proper facilities.’

      I didn’t want to go to Newtown or Aberystwyth. They were too far away. I could wake up there to find an officer who outranked me telling me that I was off this case and back on the trail of mutilated sheep.

      ‘I want to stay here,’ I said feebly, letting go of Jeff and grabbing at one of the tubular metal wheelchairs that were lined up by the entrance desk.

      ‘You can’t,’ she stated officiously, trying to block me.

      ‘I can,’ I returned defiantly, wriggling into possession of the chair.

      ‘You can’t use that,’ she squealed, ‘those are for the use of our patients.’ She appealed to Jeff. ‘You’ll have to take him out of here, or I’ll have to call the police.’

      ‘I am the fucking police!’ I yelled at her, holding my warrant card out in front of me like a silver cross against a vampire. ‘I have been injured in the line of duty, and I expect some care in my fucking community.’

      They got their own back in the amount of hair they shaved off above my right temple to clean the abrasions. Also in the scrubbing brush they used, which looked more suited to removing heavy-duty stains on the urinals than to the healing arts. But I took it all without complaint. I was their damaged goods now, and I had no intention of going anywhere else tonight.

      I had been treated for superficial cuts and abrasions, and was under observation for possible concussion. They also found and treated a nasty contusion on my left ankle. Consistent, they reassured me, with having run into an exposed tree root in the dark. Fine, I didn’t argue, it kept them happy to keep cause and effect in cosmic balance. But I had no recollection of seeing any trees on that sector of the hill.

      Jeff came back into see me after they’d patched me up. ‘You can tell me what happened up there now,’ I said.

      ‘How much of it did you miss?’

      ‘Your puncture? Was it rigged?’

      ‘A piece of two by four on the track studded with nails. I thought one of the crew had got careless.’ He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t thinking. That’s why I called Donnie over. Leaving the camp open. We were even taking the time to change the tyre, for Christ’s sake,’ he remonstrated against himself.

      ‘What did he get?’

      ‘The hydraulic lines on the other diggers.’

      The drugs they had given me kicked in. Jeff went into soft focus. I tried to blink him back, but I had forgotten what went where, gave up, and joined the undead.

      I came to in the muzzy, grey, artificial twilight that passed for darkness in the ward. Jeff had gone and my head hurt.

      I forced myself not to drift off again. I tried to concentrate on taking myself back to that moment before I had found myself launched off the hillside. Had someone turned up beside me? Or could it have been a tree? But my memory didn’t want to play.

      Because there was something else nagging.

      I shifted tack. I brought back the picture of Donnie rigging up his lights. What was wrong with that image? What jarred with the information that Jeff had given me?

       The hydraulic lines on the other diggers …

      That line of machinery had not been task dedicated. The diggers had been mixed in at random with bulldozers, self-propelled rollers and dumper trucks of assorted sizes. So why had he been selective? His time must have been scary and limited. If you were just trying to screw with the system why not go down the line taking stuff out as you come to it?

      Why complicate it by just targeting the diggers?

      Because the diggers were important.

      Get back to basics. What do mechanical diggers do?

      Diggers dig.

      I felt the tickle in my kidneys, and my stomach lurching southwards.

      They wanted to stop us digging up something else on that site.

      Six o’clock in the morning. I groped in the bedside drawer. Keys, coins and wallet, but no mobile phone. Then I had a vague memory now of Jeff taking it from me when we had driven here. Why had he taken it? Why hadn’t he given it back?

      I dressed quietly. It was a bit ironic, I reflected – I had bullied and wheedled to get to stay here, and now I was doing a runner. The porter on the front desk eyed me curiously as I approached down the corridor.

      ‘Have you been discharged?’ he asked.

      I flashed my warrant card. ‘I’m discharging myself.’

      ‘Suit yourself.’ He shrugged СКАЧАТЬ