by Mark Morris
"I'm sorry" Libby sobbed, "I can't tell what you're saying."
The man leaned over her, baring his teeth. A string of drool escaped from his lips and spattered on her arm. Libby wanted to wipe it off, but was too scared.
"On-your-front," the man muttered. "Lie-down-on-yourfront-now-now!"
"Okay," Libby whimpered. "Okay." She did so, and the man pulled her hands roughly behind her back and tied them with something that felt like damp cloth. He did her legs too, pulling the cords so tightly she gasped in pain. Water soaked through the front of her clothes, chilling her from head to foot. The man rolled her over and within seconds the back of her was soaked too. She barely had time to register he had something in his hand before he was stuffing it into her mouth.
It was a lump of cloth, sour and salty, slick with some sort of oil or slime. Instinctively she tried to spit it out, but before she could the man flipped her deftly back onto her front and tied another strip of cloth around her mouth, pulling it tight around the back of her head, snagging strands of her hair.
She started to panic. She couldn't move or breathe. She felt her heart crashing, her gorge rising. Oh God, what if she was sick? She would drown in her own vomit! She strained her neck to look up, and her eyes met Abby's.
Abby was looking straight at her, and immediately Libby knew, just by the expression in the younger girl's eyes, that Abby was urging her to stay calm. Libby closed her eyes, took deep breaths through her nose. Their friends were out there, she thought. Steve was out there. And in twenty minutes, when she didn't turn up at the rendezvous, they would realize something was wrong and they would come looking. And this time there would be three of them searching a smaller area. It would only be a matter of time before she and Abby were found and rescued.
The man dragged them, one at a time, into the front room with the broken window. He dumped them against the wall, then sat on a heap of filthy bedding in the corner, the crossbow across his knees. With his filthy hair and ragged clothes, Libby thought he looked like something from Lord of the Rings, some hideous troll or demon.
She glanced towards the broken window. Abby must somehow have thrown or kicked the bin through it to attract her attention. Unless the man had done it to lure her into the house. He could have been watching her walking up the street, could have seen that she was alone. She wondered whether he knew or had guessed that she had not come here on her own. She wondered whether Steve and the others would consider the possibility that she had been overpowered, the crossbow taken from her. It would be awful if they sauntered up the street and the man shot one of them before they realized what was happening. If anyone was injured or killed because of her she would never forgive herself.
All at once she realized that the shimmer of sunlight on the jags of glass protruding from the frame were not random. They were dancing in a pattern; not merely gleaming on the glass, but also flickering around the room.
Libby knew immediately what it was: Someone was using a lens to direct sunlight into the room. She turned to look at their captor, and saw that he had noticed the light too. His head was darting around like a cat's, following the light's erratic movements as if it were a butterfly. Slowly he rose, picking up the crossbow. He scuttled across to the broken window in a crouch, then dropped to his knees against the wall beneath the sill. He raised his head slowly, peering over the sill at the street outside. Hefting the crossbow into a firing position, he rested it on the sill, evidently prepared to let fly should he detect the slightest movement. Libby and Abby looked at each other, wondering what was going on. They were still wondering when a man they had never seen before silently entered the room, ran across to their captor and buried a meat cleaver in the back of his head.
Blood and watery stuff gushed out of the massive wound that the cleaver made in their captor's skull. His head shot forward like someone in a car crash, and his face was impaled by jagged shards of glass sticking out of the window frame. The newcomer yanked the cleaver from the man's head with two swift tugs, like someone removing an ax from a sinewy tree stump. The man's body fell back into the room, leaving blood and shreds of his face on the broken glass.
Libby was rigid, unable to comprehend what she had just seen. Her body and mind felt frozen by the awful brutality of the violence. She stared down at their captor, lying face up in a pool of his rapidly spreading blood. Less than a minute ago he had been alive and now he was dead.
Beside her Abby was whimpering, trying to bury her face in the wet sleeve of Libby's jacket. Libby felt compelled to watch as the murderer calmly wiped his cleaver on the dead man's jacket. When he turned to face her, raising the weapon once more, Libby tried to scream, but again could make no sound. The man saw the terror in her eyes and lowered the cleaver, simultaneously raising his other hand in a placatory gesture.
"Don't worry," he said. "I was just going to cut you free. Is that okay?"
Libby stared at him, then nodded. The man sliced through the cloth at her feet and ankles and did the same for Abby. Then he carefully cut through the knots of their gags.
"Better?" he said.
Libby nodded. She pulled the filthy cloth out of her mouth and spat until she could no longer taste it.
"Give yourself a moment," their rescuer said. "Let the blood start flowing again."
He saw Libby glance at the body of their captor, and said, "Sorry you had to see that, but I needed to make sure. He had a long-range weapon; we didn't. I'm afraid there's no room for niceties no more."
He was tall, with straight black hair and a beard that looked as though it had been growing since the flood. He wore a long black oilskin coat and he spoke with a blunt Yorkshire accent.
"Who are you?" Libby asked in a small voice.
"Nobody special. Just survivors like you.,,
The man walked to the window and waved his arum slowly back and forth.
"How many of you are there?"
"Half a dozen, all told. You'll meet most of us in a minute." Sure enough, moments later Libby heard boots clomping into the house. Three men entered the roomy skinny boy of about seventeen with lank dirty blond hair, a man around fifty with neat, back-combed gray hair and startlingly dark eyebrows, and a sharp-featured, handsome man in his midthirties with an almost military haircut. All three men were wearing identical coats to their rescuer, and Libby couldn't help thinking that it made them look like Nazi officers from some old war film.
The handsome man glanced at the body. "Nice work, Geoff," he said. "Are you two ladies all right?"
"We will be," Libby said, "once we get out of here."
"Of course." The handsome man beckoned the boy over. "Todd, give the ladies a hand, would you?"
The boy shuffled forward and stretched out a hand. He looked to Libby as though she could pull him over with a sharp tug, but he was stronger than he appeared. As she stamped life back into her feet, he extended a hand to Abby, but she remained hunched against the wall, her hands over her head.
"It's okay," Libby said, and crouched beside the younger girl. Suddenly she was the one who appeared to be coping better with the situation.
"Come on, Abby," she said, "let's get out of this horrible place."
Abby lowered her arms and peered up at her. Her chin was bruised and her tears had left clean lines down her grubby cheeks. "I've never seen anyone killed before," she said.
"It was a first for me too."
With Libby's help Abby shakily got to her feet. Flanked by the four men, they left the house to its grisly, now permanent occupant and walked out into the sunshine.
"Thanks for rescuing us," Libby said. "We need to find our friends now."
She saw a look pass between the bearded man and the handsome one and suddenly felt uneasy.
"We've got a nice place," the handsome man said, "not far from here. Why don't you come back with us for something to eat, give yourselves time to recover?"
Alarm bells were jangling in Libby's head, but she tried to keep her voice light.
>
"That's kind of you, but our friends will be wondering where we are."
The older man spoke for the first time. His voice was rich, almost melodious, and he had a West Coast American accent. "We'll find your friends for you. You can all be our guests."
Libby licked her lips. "Unn... thalks, but I don't think so. Abby needs to be reunited with her dad as quickly as possible."
The bearded man sighed, as though disappointed with her response.
The handsome man raised the crossbow he had picked up, and pointed it at the girls.
"I'm afraid we're going to have to insist," he said.
"Over here!" shouted Max.
Steve and Sue came running. It had been over three hours since Libby had failed to show up at the rendezvous point and Steve was getting frantic.
"What is it?" he asked.
Max pointed at the house with the broken window.
"Oh, hell," said Sue. "That looks like fresh blood."
"We've got to go in there," said Steve, moving towards the house.
"Steve, stop!" Sue shouted, going after him.
"I've got my gun, haven't I?" he retorted.
"Yeah, and they might have them too," she said. "Renmenmber, if they've got Libby they've got the crossbow."
Steve glowered at her a moment, then nodded. "You're right. Sorry. So what do we do?"
She beckoned them across to the shelter of an upside-down Citroen in the middle of the street. "We keep under cover as much as possible. And we overlap, taking turns to advance in short bursts. That way when one of us is moving the others are covering him. Understand?"
Steve and Max both nodded.
Sue went first, raising an arm when she was in position. A minute later all three of them had reached the front door of the house unchallenged. She indicated they should stand with their backs to the wall on either side of the door; then in one swift movement she darted forward, shoved the door open and jumped back.
No one attacked them; no one fired at them; there was no sound from inside the house at all. Sue peered around the edge of the door to check that the hall was clear, and then, gun held in front of her, entered the house.
They found the body in the room with the broken window.
"Gross," said Max with the weary disgust of one who had seen many gross things recently.
Sue briefly examined the body "This happened not long ago."
"Who is he, d'you reckon?" Max asked.
Steve had been looking dispassionately down at the body Suddenly his eyes widened. "Hang on, I recognize this bloke. We met him in London about a week ago. Mad as a hatter. Threatened us with a knife."
"Small world," Max said.
"Is it?" said Sue. "I wonder."
"What do you mean?"
"Personally I reckon it's too much of a coincidence that he's here." She tapped her head. "Suspicious copper's mind. It's more likely he's been following us. He probably took a liking to Abby, and first chance he got, he grabbed her."
"You think Abby did this to him?" Steve said.
Depends what he did to her, Sue thought, but didn't say. "Abby and Libby together maybe. There's no sign of the crossbow. And no sign of the weapon that killed him either. From the look of him I'd say he was whacked with a pretty big blade."
"But if they got away, why didn't they come looking for us?" said Max.
Sue pursed her lips. "That's what bothers me." She exam fined the dead man's boots, peered at various marks on the floor. "I think someone else has been here," she said finally. "Someone's walked in the blood, left prints all round this area, and then again, over here. They're not ours, and they're not the dead guy's, and they look too big for the girls."
"So someone else killed him?" said Steve.
"I'd say it's a strong possibility."
"So someone came in here, killed this guy, then took the girls with him?" said Max.
"It's only a theory," Sue admitted, "but it would explain why the girls haven't come looking for us."
"There'll be tracks, won't there?" said Max. "Outside in the mud, I mean."
Steve was already out the door.
"Be careful where you put your feet," Sue called after him. "You don't want to obliterate anything."
Finding the tracks was not difficult. They hadn't noticed them before simply because all their attention had been focused on the house.
"There's more than three of them," Sue said. "Five or six, I reckon."
The tracks stretched along the road before turning right at the next junction.
"Let's go," Steve said, and set off. Sue fell into step beside him.
"I know how eager you are to find the girls, Steve, but if we do catch up with the people who've taken them-"
"When we do, you mean," he said.
"Okay, when we catch up with them, you do realize we'll have to proceed with caution? For the good of everyone we can't just go running in like bulls in a china shop."
Steve looked momentarily irritated; then he saw the concern on her face. "Yeah, I know," he said. "Don't worry, I won't be a liability."
Following the tracks was easy for a while. They wound through the estate, heading north, before following the line of a main road for perhaps half a mile, then veering to the left through what had been a new and still developing retail corn plex. After crossing another main road, however, they petered out on the edge of an area of boggy meadows and hills studded with clumps of trees too sparse to be termed woodland.
"They must have gone across there," Sue said.
"Then let's get after them," said Steve.
She glanced at her watch. "It's almost one now. We've got about four hours of decent daylight left. This is where it gets hard. They could have gone off in any direction. Keep your eyes peeled for any clue."
They climbed the fence into the field and splashed forward through the waterlogged meadow. The hillside ahead of them was a shimmering green-black, and choked with all manner of debris-bricks, garden furniture, plastic bags, bottles; there were even dead fish floating belly up in the ankle-deep water.
They plodded on for an hour or so, mostly silent, not even commenting on the occasional decaying body jutting out of the sludge. The sky had darkened again since the bright promise of that morning's sunshine, gray clouds massing like tanks. Max felt a drop of rain splash his forehead and looked up. Beyond the next clump of trees, the upper branches of which were starting to thrash in a gathering wind, he saw a thread of smoke.
He glanced to his right, where Steve and Sue were trudging determinedly forward, heads down.
"Hey!" he said, and pointed. "Hey, guys, look!"
The two of them looked up.
Sue squinted, then clenched her teeth in a grin. "That could be it," she said.
"How far away, do you reckon?" Max asked.
"A mile maybe? Hard to tell."
In fact, it was more like two. Twenty minutes after spotting the smoke they appeared to be no closer to it. Then they moved into a dip where the water came up to their shins, and when the land rose again to crest the long slope of a tree-lined hill, there it was, on the next undulation of hillside: a squat, sturdy farmhouse of dark, rough-hewn stone, flanked by barns, the wooden walls of which were black with water damage, but still defiantly upright.
They crouched behind trees to observe the farmhouse, but aside from the black smoke curling out of the chimney there were no other signs of life.
"Our best bet is to make our way round to the left here," said Sue. "That way we can keep under cover of the trees all the way round to the big barn at the edge."
Steve nodded. "What do we do when we get there?"
"We draw them out," said Sue. "But let's get there without being spotted first. Be careful in the woods. There might be someone on guard. There might even be booby traps."
"Such as?" Max asked.
"Trip wires, maybe. They might even have dug pits if the ground's not too boggy."
"You really think they might be that organize
d?" said Steve.
"Who knows? But let's not underestimate them. They could be ex-paras for all we know. Then again, they might just be a bunch of kids."
They moved off, keeping low, scanning the way ahead. They encountered no hazards, no guards, no booby traps. Their only hairy moment was when a flock of crows burst from the branches of a tree to their left amid a clamor of flapping wings and raucous cries. Max spun, gun coming up, finger squeezing the trigger... then he turned and grinned sheepishly at Steve and Sue's tense, wide-eyed faces.
Five minutes later they reached their destination, the trees thinning out as they followed the line of a now half-collapsed and water-rotted wooden fence. The fence bordered the mud bath that had once been a farmyard at the side of the house. Steve, Sue and Max approached the building in a half crouch and hunkered down out of sight, conversing in whispers, the side of the big barn at the left-hand edge of the property, no more than twenty meters away from them.
"So how do we draw them out?" asked Steve.
"Fire," Sue said, routing through her rucksack. With a grin she produced matches and fire lighters. She was about to say something else when an ear-splitting scream shattered the silence, freezing the smile on her face.
Abby thought about smashing the window and jumping down to the yard below. Might it be possible the men wouldn't hear the breaking of glass? Might it be possible she wouldn't injure herself falling the twenty feet to what was probably stone beneath the ankle-deep sludge? Might it even be possi-ble she would be able to find her way back to the hotel and bring Dad and the others back to rescue Libby?
She hoped Libby was okay. As soon as they had arrived the two girls had been separated. Abby still wasn't sure she liked Libby that much. She found her to be attention-seeking and wimpy, maybe even a bit manipulative-though that could simply be because Dad liked her, and Abby still couldn't get used to the idea of him being with anyone but Muni. But, like her or not, Abby didn't actually want anything bad to happen to her. What kind of a bitch would it make her if she did, especially as Libby had tried to rescue her from the super-market nzan?