Chapter 118
THE LIGHTS OF the town swirled in my vision, the black arms of the cliffs around us. The wind was making me shiver, but I knew it couldn’t possibly be as cold as I felt. I tried to walk slowly, to think. The bottle under my chin felt heavy. Bella had rolled the duct tape around and around my neck. It was pulling at my hair. Awkwardly tugging at the skin behind my ear. It was hard to walk with my hands behind my back. The tape there was too tight, jamming my unbroken wrist up against the cast on the other arm. When Bella had asked me to strap up, I’d been pleased with how awkward it was, taping my own hands behind my back. I had started the roll on my good wrist and given myself a little gap between my wrists, hoping she’d think I’d done it by accident. No luck. When Bella had taken over, she’d made sure the bind was nice and secure. My fingers tingled with numbness.
‘Speed it up, slowpoke,’ Bella said, jabbing the pistol into my ribs.
‘I’m going to trip if I go any faster.’
‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ she said. ‘You pull one of those wires out of the cap and the thing will blow.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s fertiliser,’ she said. ‘Ammonium nitrate and gasoline, a couple of other things. Swimming in the middle is a cheap mobile phone. Well, the guts of one. I pulled apart the phone and isolated the circuit that comes alive when it rings. When I ring the number, the circuit will spark the fuel. And you’re dead.’
‘When?’ I stopped walking. Stood before her, looked her in the eyes. ‘When you ring the phone? If you’re going to kill me, Bella, you might as well do it right here.’
‘That’s not the plan, honey.’ She smiled. She waved the gun at me. ‘It’s in your interest to just keep following my directions.’
‘Why?’
‘Because otherwise I’ll put a fucking bullet in your leg and you’ll have to drag yourself to town. That’s why.’
She shrugged, the gun in one hand, a phone in the other. I turned and kept walking. Soon we’d come into the reach of the lights. I could see the people standing in the street, hear the clink of glasses.
‘Where did you learn to do all this?’ I was rambling now, trying to get her talking, even if it was about her devastating plans. I needed to reason with her. She couldn’t stay locked in her own irrational mind. ‘How did you figure out how to build these things?’
‘It’s all over the internet,’ she said.
We’d checked the IP addresses and searches of everyone in the town. But Bella didn’t live in town anymore. She was visiting.
‘You can find a plan for anything you want,’ she continued. ‘You don’t need complex chemicals or big exciting machines. I killed Zac with the timer from Dad’s oven.’ She sighed, looked up at the stars. A smile crept over her features. ‘Do you have any idea how wonderful it feels to say that? I killed Zac. I. Killed. Zac.’
‘He didn’t do anything to you. He was never a part of this.’
‘They’re all a part of this,’ she said. ‘You still don’t get it. It’s a system. You think bad things happen in the world because a couple of people decide to do them? You’re even dumber than I thought, Harry. Bad things happen because a couple of people do them and a bunch of people do nothing about it.’
Eric and Dylan. Elliot Rodger. Seung-Hui Cho. Each of them had been willing to take down innocents. People who hadn’t wronged them personally. When Day Zero came, it was all about rage. Consuming as many people as possible with it, making the point with suffering, whether those who suffered were innocent or guilty. I shivered. Bella walked close to me. We were two friends taking an evening stroll.
‘You think you and your brother got into the mess you’re in because of the actions of a couple of people?’ she asked.
No, I thought. She was right. Someone had killed those girls and set up my brother. I had to believe that. But there were other people who had made the whole situation complete. Nigel and his team had got it wrong and come after him, had squeezed a confession out of him, had locked him up and ignored other leads that had to have been there. Journalists had condemned him and the public had believed those journalists. Our own mother’s major concern had been making money from the situation. There was so much rage inside me, and I could share it among so many people. Including myself. I wasn’t there. I was in the middle of the road in some shitty town on the edge of nowhere about to die. I would be just another name in a long list of people who had not been there for Sam.
‘I think you want me to stop you, Bella,’ I said. ‘I think you left the diary for me to find. You took the plan page out, didn’t you? You didn’t want it to be too easy. You wanted to be able to carry on if I didn’t respond,’ I said. ‘But Bella, I’m responding now. You don’t have to go through with this.’
‘Shut up.’ She kicked me in the small of my back. I struggled not to fall. ‘The time for talking came and went a long time ago.’