Xion Island Carrier: Chapter 5

I am filled with hatred. And the pulsing itch of inevitability crawls under my skin.

It starts before I reach the airport, before I’ve even zipped my duffel. I packed light: just the essentials—deodorant, boxers, bio-warfare. I kneel on the hotel floor and pray. I’m off the island under the ruse of paid leave. I’ll never go back.

The heat is stifling, and the weak air conditioning can’t cut through the chemical tang of antiseptic, latex, and the stink of my sweat. I haven’t washed since breakfast and crave a hot shower, but first, I need to check on the kids before the last leg of our journey.

The ticks are inert in a Jiffy bag that once held a thin imitation gold chain, probably meant for a woman. They nest, cursed seeds inside a pair of my soiled boxers. Not just worn—used. Stiff with semen from a pleasureless morning wank. It’s a prop—carefully staged and entirely intentional. The faux-shame it evokes will give me an effective disguise.

Padded with my soiling and sealed, the inner bag holds the real payload—the ticks are curled like punctuation marks in their microvial. My kids are genetically coded to me, dormant, and waiting. Welcome to my artillery.

 Checking the seal, I press out some residual air, they mustn’t die.

 I shower with scented oils, understated, but quite the man about town. There’s nothing criminal here, guys—just enough death in a bag to kill off half the planet if that was my intention. I take care, dressing in layers—I hear it’s a mite cold over the pond—hoodie, cap, sneakers and a duffel bag with nothing suspicious, besides six ticking bombs. I look in the mirror before leaving, and my reflection holds steady. I’ve practised being this Travis, a businessman with a free-spirited nature. I am the unassuming traveller. Travis Bernstein: average Joe, an inconsequential man. The only warmth I feel is chemical—fading. And the real me watches, still and confident.

At the airport, fluorescent lights bleach the colour from integrity. Everybody has an agenda. The air is stale with recirculated tension and customer disapproval regarding overpriced sandwiches.

I clear Passport Control, declining the offer to check in my bag. ‘No thanks, it’s hand luggage,’ and I join the queue at security, keeping my breathing slow and gaze steady. Around me, families juggle passports, teenagers and infidels of the digitally damned apostles of Wi-Fi stare at their phones. The backpackers stink of smug optimism. And I am nobody in particular.

I put my duffel in the tray with my hoodie, shoes and belt. And then, with calculated nonchalance, I leave my bag to travel through the scanner alone. Just a dirty pair of boxers. My laundry.

The conveyor belt growls at me like a restrained animal. I let it be and walk barefoot into the human scanner, raising my arms and feeling the steady crawl of sweat tracking my ribs. So much for the shower I took before leaving. The machine pings at the tray.

‘Sir, we need to look inside your bag.’

A uniformed officer opens my duffel and rifles through the contents. He holds up the incriminating evidence, his gloved hand pincered like he’s picking up roadkill. He’s flattened the material inside the plastic, seen the stiffened area around the fly and backed off—just as intended. The bag fogs up due to the temperature change. But despite Batman’s best efforts on the print, and a jaunty Kapow! the boxers are an unmistakable shade of human disgrace.

I redden—it’s a skill. Eyes downcast, with just the right level of mortification. ‘Sorry,’ I mutter. ‘Yeah, um, long flight ahead. I didn’t have time to do my laundry.’

The woman beside the guard looks at the bag and recoils. Her upper lip curls in automatic disgust. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

I don’t meet her gaze.

The male officer screws up his face and waves a scanning wand over it. ‘Organic matter,’ he says. ‘Protein. Probably not plant-based.’

‘Definitely protein,’ the female says.

They don’t open the bag. The guard doesn’t want to breach the biohazard of another man’s impulse. That’s the beauty of it. Shame is the perfect invisibility cloak. They slide it into the duffel like nuclear waste.

‘You’re good to go,’ the wand-wielding magician says.

I nod. I’m apologetic, all fingers and thumbs, clumsily zipping the bag as I move, while my beautiful death ticks sleep undisturbed.

The flight is twelve hours of hell and manufactured calm. I pretend to nap, watch terrible movies, and drink just enough whiskey to seem normal. When the seatbelt lights go off, I retrieve my bag from the overhead storage and keep my hand on it.

England rises like a drowning land, clawing out of the sea, and I leave the plane in Manchester to a sky the colour of week-old bruises. From there, the journey only gets greyer. Trains are smaller, colder, and more little-place-regional than expected. With every stop, the passengers look paler and more accustomed to dampness. They speak in strange accents, their vowels thick with the oppression of the industrial north. They adopt a twenty-five letter alphabet with no Hs.

Barrow-in-Furness.

The Royal Port. A name that smells of rust and old wars. But it takes pride in its working-class heritage. With extensive armament requirements after Trump’s embargo, it’s said BAE will offer the town work for a hundred and twenty years.

I step off the train, and the wind meets me like an insult with teeth. It’s freezing and filled with salt and threats. It claws at my coat and blasts into my ears, damp, but with the brand of drizzle that soaks you with gnawing drama. The clouds hang low, sagging in the sky like an old ceiling.

But the town looks hopeful. Rows of terraced houses hold each other up like drunks in the wind, and shops sit behind optimistic windows. There’s a heavy feeling in the air, even the buildings are bracing for something. This place feels like a forgotten end. The last station on the planet and the terminus of history and relevance.

It’s perfect.

The car hire company is a pop-up building on Park Road next to a tyre yard. The receptionist barely looks up from his phone as he hands me the keys. ‘Hyundai. Bay three.’

I consider giving him a fast lesson in customer service. My hand slides behind his head and slams it hard onto the desk, and I’m avoiding the imaginary blood spatter from his broken nose as I glance at the cameras. I can’t risk drawing attention, and that’s the only thing that saves him from making my imagining real.

I drive around, checking out the town. The streets are wet and shining with rain. Abbey Road boasts some impressive architecture, bygone and nostalgic. The old parts of town have the romantic simplicity of northern sweat and hard graft. Everything else feels post-industrial, like the future passed through and left wheelie bins and the smell of diesel behind.

The McAlisters live on a modest crescent of ex-council homes—semis and short terraces built during a long-forgotten post-war regeneration initiative. It’s neat and comforting, fronted by low fences and peeling gates painted in bright colours. There are plastic trikes, abandoned on driveways and barking dogs in pretty gardens with gnomes and fairy lights strung through rose bushes. There’s pride here. Not affluence—but order, care. Struggling families hanging on to their dignity. It’s a town of people making do.

A boy kicks a football against a lamppost, and a gang of kids chase each other over a patch of grass. Bruises are earned and reputations are born here. Two teenage girls sit on swings with their hoods up. They laugh at something on a phone, and in a window across the way, a woman folds laundry. There are bins out front—black and orange—and everything smells of fabric softener, fried onions, and the salt tang of the docks.

I shouldn’t feel anything. But I do. It’s not nostalgia. I never lived on this estate or belonged here. But this is the fantasy they sold me in the homes.

‘If you’re lucky, you’ll have a garden and a dog. Maybe a bike and a foster mum who bakes. We’ll find you a hard-working dad that comes home smelling of engine oil.’ They told me that once, like it was something to wish for. A care worker said it, the fat one with the tacky necklace. She’d crouched beside me, smelling of talc, and tried to meet my eyes. But I was six, and too old to buy into her lack of aspiration. I didn’t want her family-scrapbook bullshit. I wanted to make fire and burn buildings to the ground.

The McAlisters’ house is the third on the left in a clean cul-de-sac. A red brick ex-council house. Nice, but so small. This is a joke, right? It can’t be a real house for a whole family. I don’t get how the English live on such minuscule plots of land. Even apartments are bigger in the US. And even the trailer park plots are twice the size— and they have room for two trucks and a couple of dirt bikes.

PVC windows and a blue-painted door cry welcome. A scooter leans against the steps, and a ceramic owl guards the entrance. There’s a hanging basket to the side, and resilient early winter flowers bend in the wind.

I catch my first glimpse of my family, and the breath catches in my throat. But I don’t need to creep closer. Not yet.

I go back to the car and observe from there. The ticks are quiet—safe in their pouch.

Their particular tick will wait in the hem of a sock or a child’s coat. It will bide its time under the welcome mat, ready to search for a moist groin. It only needs a moment. A graze of skin. A soft place to bury its head. Then the clock starts ticking.

I imagine the father’s life. I’ve seen his picture online—James McAlister, boiler repairman extraordinaire. He smokes roll-ups and once got fined for fly-tipping. He’s solid, with big hands and veiny forearms.

And his fingers will tremble and clutch a phone in the kitchen at 3 a.m. while his children’s temperature spikes and their organs scream. He’s okay and can’t be harmed—related by marriage—safe. But he won’t know that for a long time, maybe never. He gets to watch his family die.

 The mother’s called Alison. She’s that mum—the one they promised me, who bakes on the weekend and makes cupcakes for the school fair. She loves rom-coms and true crime, and when I was born, she never held me or said my name. Not once.

I picture her doubled over in bed, misreading the cramps and putting them down to a bad takeaway.

My mother’s dear sister. Die, bitch, and take your snivelling offspring to hell with you. Two kids, a boy and a girl. Ages— irrelevant. The girl’s older, almost a teenager. She’s innocent, but innocence is a luxury my DNA never brought me. Their genes link to mine, and that’s all that matters.

 The porch light attracts moths, and a memory slices in. A flashback that comes bright and hot. I’m four years old. Sitting in a corridor of peeling fire doors and posters about stranger danger. The walls smell of cabbage, and I hear another child sobbing behind a closed door. The staff say he’s stolen something, and I want to laugh because I know why he’s been punished. He told a social worker what one of the teachers did to him, and he had to be silenced. Nobody believed him—attention seeking. You learned the bad stuff real fast in there.

I sit still. Always quiet. That’s how you avoid attention.

A couple arrive to meet me. Foster prospects. She wears corduroy. He has a beard like the underside of a pub table, and they speak to me as if I’m deaf.

‘He looks too serious to fit in with our family, doesn’t he?’ the man says.

‘But he’s got lovely eyes,’ she replies. ‘Like a fox.’

They smile with their teeth but not their eyes. I give them nothing, so they don’t take me. The social worker is furious. Bang goes her target. Again.

I pull myself back from violence. My family believes they’re safe here, and only the world beyond their close is in chaos. They’re protected on their patch by fences and people who call themselves the salt of the earth. They bore me.

I find the Travelodge. It’s a square box of beige misery identical to every branch in the country, a living blueprint—designed by people who just gave up before imagination broke through. The inside smells of cleaning products and instant noodles, and the female receptionist wears a blue polyester waistcoat and looks dead inside from repeated small talk. ‘The lift’s broken,’ she says.

Of course, it is. I smile and haul my tried arse to the second floor, walking into a prison cell with a motivational poster. It’s taken eighteen hours of travelling to bring me to this monstrosity. There’s a bed, a desk, a basic bathroom, and nothing else. It’s clean and anonymous, it’ll do.

I shut the curtains against the day and sit on the firm mattress. My duffel is on the desk. The boxer shorts come out, still sealed and crusted. I throw them into the wastebin and peel back the plastic Ziplock tag on the inner pouch. The microvials nestle against each other as I check the ticks’ survival. They’ve thawed.

They’re stirring. Hungry. Little limbs twitch as if they’re drumming. I smile at my Genocytic Fever Syndrome gang, engineered with the precise markers to bind to my family’s genetic signature. The McAlisters are the first link before we travel again. Sweet Alison, the sister of my mother, who gave me away and forgot about me like a typo in a hospital file. Their suffering will be suitably surgical.

I picture it: Millie scratching an itch behind her ear. Then Alison, brushing something from her collar. And the last piece, little Aaron, waking with a fever while James watches—useless.

Hospital beds. Confusion. Terror. And death. That’s the plan.

By the time they trace the contagion, the ticks will have dropped off the host and be gone. And I’ll stay for a while, then be away too. I’m coming back to Barrow with the final vial, but first, I'll study the tick in vial number three and see it twitch, then settle. I place them in a velvet pouch and seal it with reverence. This is not vengeance, it’s the final verse of a cursed lullaby.

This is justice, blood, and my inheritance by design. Most tics only live on the host. They gorge, drop off and die. But not the Lone Star. This beauty is a hunter who will find her host.

I’m silent when I lift the letterbox and slip her inside.

‘Go well, beautiful,’ I whisper.

 

Xion Island Carrier is book 6 in the DCI Nash series. They're all on KU. Hush Hush Honeysuckle is Book One, and this is the Amazon link.

https://books2read.com/u/4EB0zg