The Adjusters Read online

  “We can’t stop,” Henry said, hanging on for dear life as the Chevy took a sharp turn. It felt as if the wheels on his side of the car were lifting off the ground. He pulled on his safety belt and reached across to do the same for Fox.

  “I don’t think he wants us to stop!” she exclaimed as the engine of the cruiser roared behind them, like a huge beast bearing down on them. A second later there was a jarring impact as the cruiser slammed into the back of the Chevy. Fox let out a cry, but held the wheel firm, managing to keep the car on the road.

  “He’s trying to kill us,” Henry said.

  “No! You think?”

  There was a roar as the cruiser accelerated again. Henry looked back in time to see the high-beam headlights approach, blinding in the rear window. “Look for some way to get off this road.”

  “I’m looking!”

  The cruiser engine roared again as it picked up speed to pull alongside. Henry looked across at the interior of the cruiser as it drew level. In the driver’s seat he saw the silhouette of Trooper Dan, brimmed hat on his head, one hand on the wheel and one reaching for…

  A gun.

  “Fox!” Henry cried out too late…

  A bullet exploded through the side window and carried right on through the windshield. Henry felt it pass his face by centimetres. Then the interior of the Chevy was filled with flying shards of glass. Fox screamed at a second muzzle flash from the direction of the cruiser and a deafening gunshot. Henry looked round, fearing she was hit…

  The Chevy slammed into the crash barrier and carried on through. There was a moment like being in an elevator rising very fast as the car sailed off the road and became airborne. Then it started to come down, but the descent was curtailed when the front end slammed into a tree. Henry clung on to the safety belt around his torso as the world turned sideways, tossing the contents of the Chevy interior like they’d been placed in a tumble dryer. Broken glass, candy wrappers and empty soda cans spun around Henry’s head. There was another jarring impact as the vehicle hit the ground side-on and finally came to rest on its roof.

  For a moment Henry hung upside down in his seat, held in place by the belt, hardly believing he was alive. He looked left and saw that Fox had slipped out of hers and landed on the roof, which was now the floor. From the rear of the vehicle the smell of leaking gasoline filled the air. Up front, the engine was sputtering away, refusing to die.

  “Hey,” Henry said, reaching out and shaking his companion.

  Fox stirred and looked round at him. He could see she was in pain.

  “Are you shot?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said with a groan. “I feel like I’ve been hit in the back with a sledgehammer.”

  Henry checked her over and was relieved to see there was no blood. No evidence of a gunshot wound. “We have to get out of here,” Henry said. Trooper Dan could only be moments away, but it was the gasoline that worried him the most. At any second, the Chevy could explode. “Can you move?”

  To show she could, Fox slid towards the crumpled driver’s side door and started squeezing herself through the shattered window. Henry reached for the release catch on the safety belt and found it locked out. Pulling the belt as far as it would go, he slipped from underneath and landed on the roof amid the shattered glass that had collected there. He made to follow Fox, but then had a thought. He reached up and opened the glove compartment; the contents spilled out around him.

  “Hurry up, Ward!” Fox hissed through the window. “I can hear someone coming!”

  “A second!”

  Henry felt through the junk that had come from the glove compartment and found two items that would come in useful: a Zippo lighter and an electric torch. Nice one, coach! Clutching them in his hand, he manoeuvred himself back through the window and out into the darkness of the forest. Fox moved to his side.

  “He’s over there,” she whispered, meaning the other side of the crashed Chevy. They began to back away from the wreck, towards the cover of the trees. Henry made out the shape of Trooper Dan moving through the forest towards the car, his silhouette somehow blacker than the night around him. In his hand he held a gun. As they came to the cover of a tree, Henry stopped and waited. Fox tugged on his arm urgently.

  “What are you waiting for, Ward? We have to get out of here!”

  “Hold on.”

  The crashed car was now a good ten metres away and in the flickering light thrown out by its headlamps he saw Trooper Dan approach cautiously, bending down to see inside the overturned vehicle.

  “Ward!”

  “Get ready to run,” he whispered back, turning the Zippo over in his right hand and flipping the lid. “Now!”

  Henry struck the flint and the lighter flame sparked into life. He threw it at the rear of the car…

  There was a whumpf as the gasoline leaking from the Chevy’s ruptured fuel tank ignited. Henry staggered back. The entire car went up in an orange fireball that momentarily lit up the night. He held up his arm against the heat, trying to make out if their attacker had been caught in the explosion before Fox grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away. They fled through the trees, their way illuminated by the growing fire behind them.

  After several minutes, they collapsed against a tree and looked back. In the distance the flames were still visible through the forest.

  “Is he following?” Fox asked breathlessly.

  “I don’t think so,” Henry replied.

  “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know which direction we’re going?”

  He shook his head. Fox had a good point – in the confusion of the crash, they’d completely lost their bearings. For all they knew, they could be heading back to Newton. “We need to keep moving.” Henry looked at Fox and saw from the dark look on her face that she was as worried as he was: worried about their friends and family…worried that they’d never get out of Newton County alive…

  “We’re going to be okay,” he reassured her. “We’re going to find someone who’ll believe us.”

  Fox nodded, and they ran into the night once more.

  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 forge
t 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.

&n
bsp; 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…