The Eternity Project Page 6

  Tom slumped down onto the couch and stared into the darkness, his hands hanging limp between his legs, his eyes as black and vacant as deep space. Karina knew what shock looked like – she had seen it many times before in the eyes of gunshot victims and automobile-wreck survivors, when the face lost all expression, the brain shutting down due to an emotional overload.

  Karina stood immobile in the center of the lounge and chose her words with care.

  ‘Have you been back to the hospital yet?’

  Tom did not respond. He had frantically followed the ambulance carrying his wife and child after they had been cut from the tangled wreckage of the Prius, screaming and hurling away anybody who tried to approach him. Even Jake Donovan had been unable to restrain Tom, instead enforcing a ten-foot exclusion zone around the distraught officer lest he toss somebody clean over the railings and down into the East River below.

  Karina knew that racing the bodies to the hospital was most likely a futile gesture, as nobody could have realistically survived the wreck and the fire. By the time she had got there, Tom had already left. A duty nurse informed Karina that Donna and Sarah Ross had both died instantly from massive head and neck trauma from both the initial impact into the pile-up and then the second impact from the truck that piled into them from behind. Neither would have known what had happened or had the opportunity to feel a thing, but there was no such mercy for Tom, who for entirely understandable reasons had been prevented from seeing them one last time.

  Karina felt tears pinching the corners of her eyes again as she sensed some tiny fragment of the colossal pain that Tom was enduring. Her voice croaked as she spoke.

  ‘They’re gone,’ she said. ‘I know you can’t deal with it right now, so I’m going to leave you in peace. I just wanted to let you know that the duty nurse confirmed that they would have known nothing about it. It was instant.’

  Tom remained motionless. Karina sucked in a short, quivering breath as she felt something trickle gently down her cheek.

  ‘You’re on compassionate leave, effective immediately,’ she added. ‘Donovan has said that you can take as long as you need. The department will send somebody to see you when you’re ready, a counsellor.’

  Tom did not respond, still staring silently into blackness. For a moment, Karina wondered whether he was actually breathing, he seemed so still. She knew that no words would be adequate, that no action could even begin to replace the vacuum torn into Tom’s soul by the uncaring hand of fate, but she also knew that to just walk away from him wasn’t an option.

  ‘Is there anything I can do, Tom?’

  Tom remained silent and still, the silence drawing out until it weighed heavy in the darkness. Karina sighed softly enough that Tom would not hear it, and then she turned for the door. ‘You know where I am, if you need me. Just call, anytime.’

  Karina reached out for the door handle when a faint voice reached out for her, sounding monotone as though the life had been ripped out of it to leave only a bare shell of sound.

  ‘Is that it?’

  Karina hesitated, then turned to look over her shoulder. Tom had not moved, sitting still as though carved from granite. Then, slowly, his head turned and his black eyes stared into hers from across the room. ‘They’re just gone?’

  Karina let go of the handle and turned to face her partner.

  ‘They’re gone,’ she whispered, ‘gone from here.’

  Tom’s features remained turned toward her, but his eyes were focused on some distant place far from where he sat in the present.

  ‘Gone where?’ he asked.

  Karina had the sudden impression that she was talking not to an experienced detective but to a small child, as though the tremendous trauma had regressed his age.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered, unwilling to commit herself any further.

  Tom seemed to focus on her for the first time. His mouth was slightly open, as though his jaw were too heavy to hold up, and the lack of life in his eyes suddenly scared her, as though he too were already gone, his body merely running on what remained of his strength like a discarded toy that needed new batteries.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Tom whispered. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

  Karina realized that in all of her life she had never witnessed a human being so completely scoured of all emotion. Murders, rapists, serial killers – all of them harbored somewhere within them the same humanity with which they had been born, no matter how deeply buried. But Tom seemed completely devoid of any psyche, an automaton incapable of feeling the pain that must now be rising up like a tsunami inside of him.

  Karina slowly walked toward her colleague and sat down carefully on the edge of the couch near to him, instinctively knowing not to move too close and invade his fragile personal space. Tom stared at her with those unblinking eyes and she was forced to look away, unable to bear the thought of whatever lay behind them.

  ‘These things take time,’ she replied finally, trying to be sympathetic and pragmatic at the same time. ‘Try not to force anything, Tom.’

  He didn’t react to her words, still enveloped in a haze of confusion. Karina knew that in his apparently senseless state, he might become a suicide risk. Devoid of any sense of future or consequence, he could be suddenly overcome with grief when the shock finally wore off and take his own life in some unspeakable act of self-mutilation.

  With a start of realization, she recalled that Tom’s parents had passed away a few years previously. An only child, he had literally lost the only family he had left.

  She reached into the pocket of her jacket and lifted out a brass key. Gently, she reached across to Tom and took his hand. Tom looked down vacantly as she opened his hand and pushed the key into his palm.

  ‘My apartment,’ she said. ‘Use it. Doesn’t matter how upset you feel or what time of the day or night it is, you go there and you find me, okay?’ Tom stared down at the key. ‘Okay?’ Karina pressed him.

  Tom looked slowly up at her and gave her a barely perceptible nod.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Do you have a spare key for here?’

  Tom’s head turned and he looked at a clear plastic bag lying on a table top a few feet away. With a sickening feeling, Karina realized that it must have been the possessions of his wife and daughter, recovered from their bodies or from the wrecked Prius.

  Slowly, Karina got up and walked across to the bag. Inside was a purse, some credit cards, a set of keys on a ring and, to her dismay, a small doll dressed in pink clothes, its blonde hair carefully platted.

  ‘Jesus.’

  Tears drenched her cheeks as she opened the bag and unclipped the apartment key from the ring.

  Karina slipped the key into her pocket and walked back to Tom, who was staring now at the bag on the table. Karina belatedly spotted pictures hanging on the opposite wall of the lounge, images of Tom with Donna and Sarah and others of Sarah as a tiny baby and toddler. She struggled to keep her own emotions in check as she knelt down before Tom and grasped both of his hands in hers. She desperately wanted to insist that she stay the night, to keep him company, to prevent him from doing something that he might regret, but she somehow knew that right now all Tom wanted to be was alone. She would have felt the same.

  ‘Keep in touch,’ she insisted. ‘Don’t let go, Tom, okay?’ Tom stared at her for a long beat before offering her another silent nod.

  Karina stood and walked to the apartment door, glancing back as she left to see Tom still sitting in the darkness and staring at the plastic bag on the table nearby.

  9

  HELL GATE, QUEENS, NEW YORK

  ‘Shut up and keep moving!’

  The whispered voice was harsh in the night, as was the calloused hand that cracked across the back of Wesley Hicks’s head. The impact echoed across the docks and out over the glistening black surface of the East River. Wesley ducked and his gloved hand flew to his head as Connor Reece, his older and altogether more unstable partner, rested a pair of bolt
croppers alongside an old chain-link fence.

  ‘I don’t like it out here, is all,’ Wesley complained.

  Reece, his shaven head covered by a black cap, did not reply as he hefted the croppers to waist height and settled them around a thick chain padlocking a set of gates together. With a groan of effort that puffed clouds of his breath onto the cold air, the croppers bit through the steel chain and it clattered down onto the asphalt. Wesley winced at the noise and glanced furtively back up the road. There were no cars and certainly no pedestrians out here at night, but he could both see and hear the traffic flowing over the Robert F Kennedy Bridge just a couple of hundred yards to the north, its lights twinkling in the chill misty air.

  ‘This way,’ Reece snapped.

  The older man yanked back the rolling gate by a couple of feet, just enough for them to slip through. Wesley followed him and then pulled the gate loosely back into position before looping the heavy chain back into position. If any security guards or cops did patrol down here, they would have to look closely before realizing that the chain was severed.

  Reece led the way across an old disused parking lot to a large building, its loading bays all boarded up. A handful of scattered Dumpster bins lined one wall, some of them overturned, probably by vagrants searching for an easy, if unpleasant, meal.

  A set of rusting iron steps led up to a solid-looking door. Reece reached into his pocket and produced a thick key, cast from what looked to Wesley like solid iron. In the darkness, the key looked unusual, old-fashioned.

  ‘Where did you get that from?’ he whispered.

  Reece did not reply. Instead, he shoved the key into the lock and turned it. Wesley heard a heavy revolving sound as the key turned, as though the big old door had stood here for centuries, its mechanisms forged in another age. The lock clicked and Reece turned the handle and pushed. The door swung smoothly open, no sound emanating from its aged hinges.

  Reece moved inside, Wesley following and trying to control his grating nerves as he was swallowed by the absolute darkness within the old warehouse.

  ‘Push the door shut,’ Reece ordered.

  Wesley obeyed, leaning against the door behind him until the locking mechanism clicked. Satisfied, Wesley heard Reece searching through the pockets of his jacket. Then a bright beam of light burst into life as he turned on a small but powerful flashlight.

  ‘This way.’

  The flashlight beam illuminated a cavernous warehouse that was largely empty. Lines of racking stood against the opposing walls, scattered bits of old paper and wrapping littered the floor and the light from the nearby bridge glimmered faintly through dirty windows caked with the filth of decades.

  Wesley followed Reece closely, the building’s abandoned, sombre atmosphere chilling his bones as they crept through the darkness, the flashlight scything a path toward the very rear of the building.

  ‘Do we have to go right back there?’ Wesley asked.

  ‘You don’t shut up, you’ll be staying here for a very long time, you feel me?’

  ‘I feel you,’ Wesley replied quickly, not wanting to upset his volatile companion any further. ‘Just feels like we’re not on our own in here.’

  ‘I fuckin’ wish I was,’ Reece muttered.

  Wesley said nothing more as they walked, looking up instead at the soaring ceiling above them and wondering what this building had been used for. Maybe the docks when they were busy back in the day, storage for the big old ships that used to unload here. Now the docks were mostly silent and filled with the rusting hulks of shipping containers and parked haulage wagons.

  ‘Here.’

  Reece’s voice snapped Wesley out of his reverie as the older man peered into the gloom at the very rearmost corner of the warehouse. There, tucked in behind the rickety old shelves and racking, was a canvass sheet draped over something on the ground. Wesley watched as Reece bit the flashlight between his teeth to free his hands and then yanked the sheet aside with a flourish.

  A cloud of dust particles spiralled up through the flash-light beam as Wesley stared down at three heavy-looking metal containers, each about the size of a large suitcase. Reece flashed him a wicked grin as he yanked the flashlight from his mouth.

  ‘Pay dirt,’ he said.

  Wesley smiled back and was about to reply when a faint whisper of movement somewhere behind him raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He whirled and peered into the gloomy darkness. He saw the flashlight beam flick around to point past him into the warehouse as Reece searched for the source of the sound.

  ‘Man,’ Wesley whispered, ‘I tol’ you there was someone else in here.’

  Reece reached out and grabbed Wesley’s collar in one chunky fist, yanking his face to within inches of the older man’s grizzled, pockmarked features. In the harsh light from the beam, he looked even more demonic than normal.

  ‘Only thing in this building you need to fear is me, you got that?’

  Wesley nodded, his eyes wide and quivering in their sockets. Reece pushed him roughly away and then turned back to the metal cases. ‘Help me with these. We’ve got to get them out of here tonight or this is all for nothin’, you understand?’

  Wesley stepped forward, reached down and grabbed the handle on one of the cases before hauling it backwards across the floor. The corner of the case screeched against the ground, and Reece whirled and thumped a thick forearm across Wesley’s chest.

  ‘Quietly, you idiot!’

  The impact hurled Wesley onto his back, and as he fell he saw the flashlight beam arc up into the darkness above them. There, in the harsh white light, he saw the clouds of dislodged dust swirl as though an aircraft had sailed through them, spinning in tight vortices as the cloud folded over itself and then vanished from sight as the beam passed by.

  ‘Shit!’ he whispered and pointed up above them. ‘There’s something up there!’

  Reece barely glanced up as he hefted one of the steel cases up off the ground with one hand.

  ‘What’s up, Wes?’ he inquired with a twisted, mocking scowl. ‘Pigeons gonna getcha?’

  Wesley struggled to his feet and stared at Reece, as the older man snickered in delight and turned toward the far end of the warehouse. He made two paces when suddenly his feet lifted off the floor and he was hurled onto his face on the ground, the metal case crashing down alongside him. Wesley flinched as the sound echoed and bounced through the warehouse like rolling cannons.

  Reece leaped to his feet and whirled to face Wesley as he pulled a snub-nosed pistol from beneath his jacket and aimed the weapon directly at him.

  ‘You think that’s funny, you little shit?’ he raged as he stormed toward Wesley.

  Wesley did not move. His legs would not respond and his voice was entrapped in his throat with a terror that he could never have believed existed. He felt his neck trembling, felt saliva pooling in his throat and his heart fluttering in his chest as though afraid to go on.

  Reece halted in front of Wesley, suddenly taut as he registered the blind terror etched into every pore in Wesley’s face. With a monumental effort, Wesley managed to rasp a few words in a voice that sounded thin in the darkness.

  ‘It wasn’t me, Connor.’

  Reece winced uncertainly, but his eyes flicked left and right around them. Wesley felt something cold fill the air, as though somebody had opened the door to an enormous icebox right alongside him. His quivering breath condensed in a cloud before his eyes, billowing blue-white in the flash-light beam.

  Both his and Reece’s eyes fixated on the cloud of moisture as it suddenly was sucked up out of the light as something raced past in the darkness above their heads.

  Reece shouted something unintelligible as he whirled and aimed the pistol up above them. Wesley staggered backwards and away from him, and then Reece screamed as the pistol and flashlight fell from his grasp and he was yanked up into the darkness.

  Wesley heard a cry of terror break free from his own chest as his legs crumpled beneath him. He crawled f
orward on the ground as he heard Reece issue a strangled cry of unbearable agony from somewhere far above him. A terrible ripping sound echoed across the warehouse and Reece fell silent as Wesley managed to grab the pistol in one shaking hand and the flashlight in the other.

  A loud thump surprised Wesley and he hurled himself sideways as he aimed the flashlight into the darkness. He almost gagged as he saw Reece’s face staring back at him, lifeless like a waxwork in the harsh light, his face forever contorted in terrible pain and his mouth open wide in a silent scream.

  Wesley turned the torch and saw thick blood draining from Reece’s entrails as they snaked across the warehouse floor and curled steam onto the cold air. In the distance, across the warehouse, he heard two faint thuds and glimpsed Reece’s legs tumble to the ground. Wesley began sobbing as he felt his bowels loosen and spill into his pants in a hot, thick mess.

  The darkness seemed to close in on him and he cried out in terror as he kicked his way backwards and away from the grisly corpse until his back hit the wall.

  ‘Jesus, save me,’ he whispered through his tears. ‘Please save me.’

  Something whispered through the air directly above him, and in panic he aimed the flashlight and the pistol up into clouds of dust motes swirling through the beam. A demonic face glared down at him with primal fury as it rushed from the darkness. Wesley fired the pistol over and over again, and then quite suddenly he felt a terrible wrenching pain surge through his chest as though he had been impaled.

  He lurched to his feet to flee, but the pain suddenly intensified until it filled his universe as he folded over at the waist and dropped to his knees.

  Then his world went black and he felt nothing.

  10

  WHITE PLAINS, NEW YORK

  ‘So who are we going to see?’