The Adjusters (29 page)

For the best part of an hour they stumbled through the undergrowth of the forest with only Coach’s tiny emergency torch to guide them. It was a moonlit night, but under
the tall fir trees it was always dark as pitch. They’d considered doubling back to the road, but decided that it was too risky. If Trooper Dan hadn’t been killed in the explosion,
he’d be expecting them to do that and might be lying in wait. More of Mallory’s men might have been watching the roads as well. The safest option, they decided, was to keep on walking.
Deeper into the forest.

Fox folded her arms across her chest and shivered visibly.

“Are you okay?” Henry asked.

She nodded. “Yeah…I just started to feel really cold.” Her teeth were chattering as she spoke.

Henry removed his jacket and made to put it round her.

“I’m not a damsel in distress, Ward,” she said, pulling away.

“You’re experiencing shock. We’ve been through a traumatic event and you need to keep warm. Perhaps we should stop for a moment.”

She shook her head. “We need to keep moving.”

“Then take the jacket.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, allowing him to drape it over her shoulders. “But don’t start looking at me like I’m helpless or something.”

He grinned and said, “You just drove us out of town with a psycho cop on our trail. I think you’re allowed to be a little shook up.”

“Well, you seem to be holding up pretty well.”

“Trust me, inside I’m a mess. Besides, I had time to freak out earlier when they were going to cut out my brain.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. I did the whole screaming, crying thing.”

“I wish I could have been there to see that.”

They walked on. In the moonlight, the stillness of the forest was peaceful.
You could almost forget a psycho cop is on your tail,
Henry thought.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said finally.

“Go on.”

“About your nickname. Fox. What’s with that?”

For a moment she said nothing, to the point when he thought she wasn’t going to reply. Then she said, “You don’t tell this to anyone. And you don’t laugh.
Okay?”

“Okay.”

“It’s my real name,” she said. “Fox. My mom and dad were obviously on some kind of back to nature trip around the time I was born. It’s a lame hippy name, so I tell
everyone it’s my online nickname and pretend my real name’s Michelle. Wait a minute… Are you laughing?”

“No!”

“Your shoulders are shaking!”

“I am not laughing!”

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you!”

“Well, I think it’s a good name.”

“
Right.
”

“I do!”

“Ward, you are so full of it…”

Her voice trailed away as a noise split the silence of the forest. A low droning sound that got louder as it got closer. Then the sound changed, the unmistakable
thwok thwok thwok
of
helicopter blades.

“Over here!” Henry said urgently, pulling Fox towards a fallen tree trunk lying in the undergrowth. He killed the torch as they squeezed into the hollowed middle. Seconds later the
chopper passed overhead.

“Do you think it’s Malcorp?” Fox whispered as it went.

Henry nodded. “It didn’t see us. The trees are good cover, but they won’t hide us for ever. For all we know they’ve got thermal imaging equipment on that
chopper.”

Fox raised an eyebrow at him.

“What? Haven’t you played Modern Warfare?”

“Strangely, no,” Fox replied, pointing off to the left. “I think I see something through the trees over there.”

She led the way. Henry couldn’t see anything among the trees at first. It was as they ran over an incline that he made it out against the dark night sky: a three-storey wooden house
standing amid a clearing in the heart of the forest. A couple of rusting pickup trucks stood off to one side and the garden, such as it was, was overgrown with long grass and brambles. The side of
the house nearest to them was weather-beaten and the paint was peeling, as if no one had cared for it for a long time.

“It looks deserted,” Henry said as they stopped at the edge of clearing and checked the way ahead. They would have to cross open ground to get to the house and the sound of the
chopper was getting louder, making another sweep of the area.

Fox looked at him. “But it’s our best chance. Right?”

Henry nodded and they ran from cover. The ground was uneven and halfway to the building Fox tripped. Henry caught her arm and pulled her on with him. They reached the house and looked back in
the direction they’d come.

“That helicopter’s coming back!” Fox exclaimed.

Henry didn’t waste time responding. Instead, he moved along the wall to where a low covered porch led to the front door. He pressed the doorbell. In the depths of the house, a buzzer
sounded, its tone off-key. There was no response, so he pressed it again.

“Come on, Ward!” Fox said urgently. “We need to get in there!”

Henry nodded. He tried the handle and, finding it locked, started looking around for something to break a window. A heavy-looking frog ornament was sitting on the floor by the welcome mat. He
picked it up, ready to throw it at the window by the door…

“Wait!”

Henry stayed his hand as Fox bent down by the mat and flipped up the edge to reveal a key. She grinned at him, picked it up, and fitted it into the Yale lock. It turned. They hurried through the
door into the hall and slammed it shut behind them…

They stood in the silent entrance hall. Henry strained to see through the window beside the door. Outside in the moonlight it was possible to make out the overgrown grass being
flattened as the chopper hovered overhead. For a moment the machine hung there, but then it began to fly north, back in the direction of Malcorp.

“They’re leaving!” Fox whispered, though there was little need. The stillness of the house encouraged quietness somehow, like a library or a crypt.

“Yeah,” Henry said with a frown. The fact the chopper had paused over the building suggested the men inside knew they were sheltering there, so why hadn’t they landed and come
in after them?

“Look at this place,” Fox said, turning her attention to the interior of the building.

Henry flashed the torch around the hallway. There was a dusty smell in the air, as if the house hadn’t been cleaned properly in a long time. Somewhere in the building a clock ticked
loudly, like a metronome counting down the seconds to something.

“Looks pretty deserted,” Henry said, wondering if it had been abandoned when Malcorp came to town. Perhaps the occupants had left Newton rather than work for the big corporation.
Perhaps it had been bought up, like everything else in the area, and left standing like a mausoleum. An artefact of a previous existence.

Henry shivered. There was something about the place he really didn’t like. He resisted the urge to flick the nearest light switch. The torches would be less visible from outside.

“We need to find a phone that works, right?” Fox said. Henry could tell from her tone of voice that she was feeling pretty much the same as he was.

“Right,” he said.

“Well, let’s do it then.”

Fox walked across the hall to the lounge, closely followed by Henry. This room was even darker than the hall and just as dusty. On a small table by an old-fashioned-looking sofa stood a phone
– the type with a coiled cord linking the receiver to the dial pad. Fox picked up the receiver, and put it to her ear. She looked at Henry and shook her head.

“It’s dead.”

Henry reached past her and held up the cable dangling from the back. It had been cut a few centimetres from the phone. “No wonder,” he said.

Fox put the receiver down and shook her head. “That doesn’t mean the main line has been cut, right? There could be a working phone in the kitchen…”

“Or bedroom.”

“Right.”

“I’ll check upstairs,” Henry said, handing her the torch and already moving for the hall, using the moonlight streaming through the windows to see. “You
go…”

“For the kitchen, I get it,” Fox said as he headed out of the room and up the stairs. “You know, when you’re in a spooky old house it’s usually a really bad idea to
split up!”

If Henry heard her, he didn’t respond. Waving the torch around the deserted lounge, she saw a door leading through to what appeared to be a kitchen and pulled it open.

The kitchen looked like something from the 1950s. There was faded linoleum on the floor, yellow-painted doors on the cabinets and plastic chairs around a table with spindly metal legs. Although
the worktops were clean and there were no dirty dishes in the sink, there was a slightly bad smell in the air, as if something had been left to go off in the fridge or one of the drawers. Fox
decided not to look too hard for that.

She walked to the counter and peered through the window onto a backyard that was just as overgrown as the front. She ran her hand over the counter and was surprised to find that it was dust free
– as if it had been cleaned not long before. Which must mean someone still lived there…

“Focus,” Fox said to herself, looking around the kitchen. “You’ve got a job to do.”

There was no telephone. There wasn’t even a telephone point that she could see. But that didn’t mean there was nothing of use there. She thought of the ancient pickup trucks out the
front. There had to be keys for them somewhere – and her mom had always kept the car keys in the kitchen, back when she could drive. There was no set of key hooks on the wall, like they had
in their apartment, so she began opening drawers. One was filled with cutlery. Another with napkins and dishcloths. Another with yellowed coupons for the Newton supermarket. And one with two sets
of car keys.

Fox picked up the keys, weighing them in her palm. They had to be worth a try – they were going to get a whole lot further even in the most decrepit vehicle than on foot. She was about to
risk a walk out front to check if any of the keys actually fitted the pickups, when she spotted something else, wedged at the back of the drawer behind a box of bullets.

A wallet.

Fox reached for it and flipped it open. The money flap was empty, but a number of credit and store cards were nestled in various pouches. She chose one and removed it. The name on the card made
her frown.

Stuart Richardson.

The journalist she had contacted! The one who’d disappeared. It couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? The next card she removed confirmed that it wasn’t – a laminated ID
for the paper where he worked.
He’d been here, in this house.
So where was he? And why did he leave his wallet?

Fox looked round the kitchen again, feeling a sudden chill, as if she were being observed. For the first time she noticed a door standing ajar on the far side. It was dark beyond, but possible
to make out steps leading down into a basement.

And on the floor by the door there were multiple scratch marks in the linoleum, as if something…or someone…had been dragged towards those steps...

On the second floor, Henry moved between the bedrooms as quickly as possible, checking for telephones or anything else of use and then moving on. The moonlit decor here was just as old-fashioned
as on the floor below: fading, striped wallpaper, beds covered with frilly-edged quilts and thick, dusty carpet on the floor.

Having checked all of the bedrooms on that floor, he came back to the landing and looked at the narrower flight of steps heading up to the third floor. He could hear Fox moving around in the
kitchen below and considered going down to join her… But what if there was a phone on the floor above? Not likely, he realized, but he had to check.

Henry headed up the uncarpeted flight of steps; they creaked loudly as he put his foot on them. At the top he pushed open a door covered with peeling, green paint.

It was an attic space that had been converted into a room. The sloped sides of the roof formed the walls, with a circular window at the far end, overlooking the front garden. The floorboards
were bare and dusty. The place was cluttered with packing crates and boxes. Henry sniffed – not much chance of finding a telephone up here. But then something caught his eye…

Near the circular window was a metal-framed bed. The sheets were rumpled, as if someone had slept there recently. Henry started towards it, making out framed pictures standing on a bedside
table. He picked one of them up and squinted at it, interested to see who actually lived there.

The picture in his hand was old, perhaps taken twenty years before, judging by the clothes the people were wearing and the washed-out colours. He could just make out a couple in their fifties,
grey-haired and standing on either side of a much taller, good-looking man, who Henry guessed was their son. He realized that the picture had been taken on the porch of the house, at a time when
the place was well-painted and there were hanging baskets brimming over with flowers. He turned his attention to the younger man in the middle and realized with a shock that he recognized
him…

Although he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans rather than a cop’s uniform, it was unmistakably Trooper Dan.