A Long Way Back (Unfinished Business #2) - Barbara Elsborg
Prologue
HOW COULD EVERY PART OF your body hurt? Why was everything hurting? Tay tried to move and, crucified by pain, went under again.
When awareness returned, so did pain, a sharp-toothed animal living inside him. One thought filtered through the agony before he slid into blissful oblivion. Where the hell am I?
*
Was he sleeping now, caught up in a pain-free dream? Maybe the greedy animal inside him was resting or perhaps bewilderment had temporarily become the stronger foe. What the fuck is happening to me? Something wasn’t right, but he didn’t know what. Then pain came back, chomping at his body, eating him from the inside out, sparking every nerve ending, and he sank back to the bottom of the sea.
*
“Please,” Jonty pleaded.
“I think my dad still uses it.”
“But it’s rusty.”
Tay looked at the wheelbarrow, then at Jonty’s eager twelve-year-old face, and sighed. “Fine.”
They spent the rest of the first day of the summer holiday in the garage, taking apart his father’s wheelbarrow and Tay’s old bike. Or rather Tay did, while Jonty sat, making him laugh and drawing sketches of how he wanted the kite buggy to look. Tay had rolled his eyes when Jonty showed him a picture of a sparkly-blue buggy with giant wheels, a padded seat and dragon wings. Not something that would emerge from the pieces of metal Tay had in front of him.
In the end, Tay’s dad helped, welding the parts together, finding a seat from work and attaching it. Jonty had sprayed it—and the garage wall and his mother’s freezer and his dad’s golf shoes—with silver and blue paint, then they’d had to wait until the buggy was dry before they tried it out.
They hauled it to the beach first thing the next morning.
“You want to go first?” Tay asked as he got the kite airborne.
“No. You show me how to do it.”
Moments later, Tay was racing the buggy along the stretch of sand, steering with his feet, working the kite back and forth to give him more power and speed. He could hear Jonty whooping behind him. Tay whooped himself when he managed to turn without tipping over or letting the kite drop out of the sky, and he headed back towards Jonty. Once the kite was overhead, the buggy slowed and Tay came to a stop at Jonty’s side.
“Oh my God. That looks so much fun.”
“Swap places.”
Tay fastened Jonty to the kite and explained what to do. But before he’d told him how to stop, Jonty was off, zooming down the beach. Had he even registered how to turn? As Jonty continued past the point that Tay had changed direction, Tay decided he hadn’t, and ran after him.
Shit, how fast is he going? Tay’s heart leapt into his mouth as the buggy flew into the air and Jonty fell out. He was dragged for a little way over the sand before the kite fell, and when Tay realised Jonty wasn’t moving, he ran faster.
By the time he reached him, he was frantic. No helmet. Tay’s mother would be furious. Jonty didn’t have a mother to care and his dad probably wouldn’t give a shit but… Please let him be all right.
Tay threw himself onto the sand, his chest heaving. But as he leaned over, Jonty opened his eyes and grinned. “That was awesome.”
“You dick. I thought you were dead.”
“Did you see me fly? Better get a harness and a helmet. I don’t want anything happening to you. No one else will be my friend.”
Tay rolled onto his back, and laughed.
*
Tay became aware of things being done to him. Intrusive, painful and embarrassing things. He wanted to tell people to stop touching him, turning him, messing around with him, but no words came from his mouth. He dreamed he’d been abducted by aliens, taken aboard their spacecraft, and was being experimented on. He tried to lift a hand, to reach out for help, to open his mouth and yell that he was there, that he was trapped. All he could do was cry and howl and moan. Pain and fear had many voices.
Moments of consciousness became longer and his dread of the dark, shapeless animal inside him grew, because now he could sense its approach, hear its slithering steps, and knew its bite was coming.
Yet the intensity of the pain was diminishing. He was winning that battle, and still losing the other. He kept falling into endless black and there was nothing he could do to stop it happening. All he could do was