CONSTRUCT

CONSTRUCT

 

The fingers of one hand twitched in a strumming motion, but Bevan knew it was just the nerves dying.

 

The shot’s report had gone out and lost itself among the trees until it was nothing again.

 

He stood and listened to the pitch of it.

 

Rain pattered gently upon the hood of his parka and it seemed to him that a certain calmness had collapsed upon the scene. The marsh had drawn in, become somehow smaller.

 

He touched a finger to his earpiece.

 

– One down.

 

The drone confirmed the kill.

 

It climbed silently over the woods. He watched until it was lost in the graphite haze.

 

Always somewhere else to be.

 

When he had made the shot, the Construct had not jumped. Nor had it been thrown backwards, as in films. Instead, it had simply folded and gone down.

 

He cycled the rifle bolt and breathed slowly. Bent and picked up the cartridge. Found it still warm. He put it in the breast pocket of his coat next to the Tiger’s Eye. Given to him for luck.

 

The creature lay in a shallow hollow, half hidden among the Marram. It reminded him of a fossil. Chalk-white, pale and hairless. Smooth as plastic.

 

There was something about its perfection. The face of a young girl. A child.

 

Beautiful, he thought.

 

The Construct’s arm protruded at an odd angle. The bullet had opened a ragged wound just beneath the left clavicle and gone through the growth-bone there. Black liquid pooled upon the leaves.

 

He thought of the rules for these things. Evidence and samples. Order laid over proceedings that had none. It was automatic. This was less a job than a way of living. There was a sureness in that.

 

The creature lay open to him but he knew that it was himself that he was guarding.

 

He shook his head. Nature could be very cruel. But this was not nature. Not really.

 

He was cold from the hunt and his limbs felt used up. Dawn was an hour away but already the bay was filling with witch-light. It betrayed the coast’s true nature, made the shadows appear wrong.

 

Something called from the tree line. A pheasant perhaps. Or some kind of proxy.

 

He squatted, leaning upon the gun. This was a thing he did. A pause in the face of brutality. Acknowledging, in some small way that it had gained the measure of him. There was no getting used to the harshness of the work.

 

He could smell the sea and something else beneath. Sweet and wrong.

 

The Construct had managed to crawl perhaps two metres. He would have to speak to his supplier. The ammunition would have to be changed. For all the violence of it, he tried to keep things humane.

 

These Constructs. Biological aberrations. They hadn’t asked to be created.

 

He stood again and stared at the drained country like some god-struck pilgrim.

 

Rain swept the marsh in pale filaments. Power lines and water towers. Mist low over the headland. The hills beyond black against the coming light.

 

They looked like the knuckles of a hand. The clouds in that distance appeared to catch on them and tear.

 

Things to be believed.

 

A skein of birds arced high overhead. They seemed luminous in the measured brightening. Too high in the far-off to tell if they were natural.

 

Other than that, it really was very quiet.

 

Away and along the upper fields, a dog began to bark.

 

He set to work.

 

 

There were deer in the hills beyond his uncle’s estate. Flighty, and nervous. Most times you saw only the place they had been.

 

On a cold morning his uncle woke him before light and took him out across the moor.

 

The rifle felt too large for his hands, solid and grotesque. Upon handling it, something inside of him had shaken loose of its moorings.

 

Heather, grey and spare.

 

They said nothing. There would be words later. The moor held on to sound, and what was said carried farther than you meant it to.

 

They found the tracks at the edge of a shallow fold. The grass had been pressed down, dark with damp. His uncle crouched and pointed with his chin towards the rise.

 

There.

 

Where the animal had crossed.

 

They went slowly. Stopping often.

 

Listening.

 

The marks suggested injury. A foot that dragged.

 

Bevan had felt his chest tighten, a gathering, as though his body had understood before he did.

 

This was to be a mercy.

 

They saw the deer at last in the lee of a wood. Head down as it grazed.

 

In that moment it seemed complete, in and of itself. A thing fitted entirely into its place and time.

 

Bevan could not see the wound.

 

The old man had placed the rifle into Bevan’s hands and showed him how to balance it. How to chamber a round. How to work the safety.

 

Bevan flipped the rubber cap from the sight and settled himself. The hill seemed to close around him.

 

Peat. Wet leaves.

 

He breathed slowly. Held the breath. Counted to three.

 

Squeezed the trigger.

 

A full second passed before the animal leapt, its body completing one half of an almost graceful arc.

 

For an instant Bevan had actually hoped that he had missed.

 

That was the last time he felt sorry for an animal.

 

The first time he understood that to use a gun in the execution of business was a serious thing.

 

Sometimes he swore that it was only these little contradictions that kept him going.

 

 

The drone in his ear.

 

New target. Three miles out.

 

They were getting through. The activists had cut the wire somewhere.

 

He thought it prudent to find higher ground.

 

 

The path climbed into the wet and ashen hills. The grass lay black-green beneath the cloud and ran with water. In places the stones had been washed away. The rocks beneath worn hollow by the years of it. Flues and runnels cut down through the sandstone.

 

Bevan walked briskly.

 

At the next rise he saw the old wall. An ancient sheep pen built by people who were centuries dust. He put one hand against the stones and rested there.

 

The sky rolled heavy and laden. The clouds angular and immense. The keels of great battleships, bearing aloft in their high strata torrential smears that could only have been snow.

 

There had been a change. The air pressure. The feeling that something was leaving him. Like a bucket of water being emptied, he thought, carried and tipped so that all that was left was the memory of its pouring.

 

The wall went on across the hill, its broken line drawing the eye towards a palisade of dead pines.

 

When he walked among them, the needles sloughed off in little rushes. The ground was a tangled mass that gave slightly beneath his boots. Rot had worked through everything. The smell was sharp and sour, like vinegar left too long.

 

He walked on until the trees thinned. Stopped there at the limit of them.

 

The wind moved steadily. The light had opened out. Enormous and grey. The colour of lead.

 

There were black smears on the beach below. Silent and vast. From where he stood they looked like burns. He could not make sense of their size. They were too large to belong to anything he knew.

 

Bands of unnatural colour showed where the black surface held the light.

 

Smell of oil and burned rubber. A mix of other things that he could not identify.

 

There was someone down there.

 

He crawled forward through the dead briars and lay amongst the rocks and the rotting leaves. Eased the binoculars up and passed them over the wider landscape. Slowly brought them back to the figure.

 

The temperature seemed to have dropped. His hands were cold and he could hear the ground ticking.

 

The figure sat propped against one of the sea brakes, back to the trees. From this distance Bevan could not tell if it was looking towards the water or simply sitting there with its head bowed.

 

He kept the binoculars on it.

 

– Control.

 

He waited.

 

– Go ahead.

 

– You seeing this?

 

A pause.

 

– We’re seeing it. Trust the drone.

 

– I need to get closer.

 

– Why? Take the shot.

 

– Something’s not right.

 

– What’s not right?

 

– Something.

 

He unplugged the earpiece.

 

 

When he came down off the ridge he was wet through and shivering. He paused at the tree-line, then cut a track along the edge of the marsh so as to gain some perspective.

 

The figure had not moved. Remained half visible in the grey encaustic.

 

For a moment he thought it might be a joke. Sticks bundled together. An old blanket thrown over them. Something made to be seen at a distance. Become nothing when you came near.

 

He drew closer. The mud breathed ammonia. Chemicals had seeped from the swale and gathered in pale patches. A thin, sickly rheum that coated the stones.

 

A few sea birds floated dead in the surf. Even the carrion feeders would not take those.

 

Above, the drone circled slowly, keeping station. It climbed vertically, then stopped to hover above the beach.

 

He watched the gimbal camera swivel like an eye in a socket. Wondered if he should wave. Felt vaguely reckless at the prospect.

 

He replaced the earpiece and heard a burst of voices.

 

A positive read.

 

– It’s a person, he said.

 

Negative.

 

Then: – Tell the drone to back off. It’s someone I know.

 

Had known.

 

He looked again.

 

The old man.

 

Impossible.

 

He had been dead for years. He had watched them put the earth around him.

 

The earpiece crackled.

 

– You’re mistaken. You’re tired. It’s a Construct.

 

He watched the face. Saw it as a separate thing.

 

The lines there were deep in it now. Skin weathered. Mouth slack. A face he remembered and did not remember.

 

For an instant he was elsewhere, on the hills, stalking deer.

 

– Hello?

 

The figure did not move.

 

A crackled of white noise.

 

– Take the shot.

 

As if repetition could make the order clearer. The voice seemed far enough away as to be irrelevant.

 

He looked at the hands. At the coat. At the stillness.

 

The drone repeated its classification and the clean part of his mind, his training, his orders, said that resemblance meant nothing. Simulacrum was not the real thing.

 

– I don’t have clear designation.

 

– You heard the damned drone. Positive I.D. Now earn your wage.

 

His limbs ached. His mind felt packed tight.

 

The rain moved across the grass. Came at him as if in vendetta.

 

The sea was going out. Perhaps there was no end to it.

 

He thought the morning might gather him into itself and carry him somewhere else.

 

The gun felt heavier now. He held it low, as if it were an ordinary thing. 

 

Something had come unstuck. Everything falling apart. Everything collapsing into weed and ruin.

 

The Construct turned its head and in that moment caught his eye.  

 

That made it worse.

 

There was no pleading in that face. That was the worst of it. Only a tiredness, and something he could have sworn was recognition.

 

A silence opened.

 

He thought of the old man saying his name.

 

The trees that fringed the dunes were sheathed in black and darkness clung to the marsh.

 

In the distance, a squadron of rooks congregated and appeared to expel from their midst a single hawk. The flock folded and unfolded, drawing into itself and opening again, like dough being worked.

 

It seemed impossible for them to form a shape that was not perfectly graceful