A Killing Air

by Nigel Price

  “I think she wants us to go in that direction,” Herbert said thoughtfully.

  Harry looked out at the lashing rain slanting across the landscape. “Great.”

  They went back into the main room. Herbert spoke loudly to Lisa in Chinese. “It was useless. She wouldn’t tell us anything.” Lisa understood, noting an expression of smug satisfaction on the old man’s face. In English he added, “But she indicated that we should go over the hillside. There appears to be something there she wants us to see.”

  “Ah. Well one of us will have to stay and guard this lot,” she said. “Otherwise the moment we’ve gone they’ll call for help.”

  Harry took out the gun. “Can you handle this?” he asked, passing it to her. She stared at it as if he was offering her a stool sample.

  “I’m not staying. This is my investigation, remember?”

  Her expression told Harry it was useless to ask again.

  “Herbert?” he tried.

  Herbert shook his head and smiled. “I’ve never touched one and even if I tried, I could never use it.”

  “But they don’t know that,” Harry answered. Herbert was resolute. He wouldn’t touch a gun. “I suppose I’m staying here then,” Harry concluded.

  They stared out of the window hoping the rain would abate. It didn’t. The sky held an inexhaustible supply of water and continued to dump it on them. Lisa hunted around the miserable dwelling and came up with some plastic ponchos. Both were worn and had tears in them that had been clumsily repaired with masking tape. They were better than nothing. With occasional complaints from the three women she and Herbert tried them on. The old man glared fiercely from his seat but remained silent.

  Lisa opened the door, flinching back from the predictable inrush of wet wind. “Coming, Herbert?” He joined her. Together they ducked out into the storm, slamming the door behind them. When they had gone Harry herded the women and the old man into a tight little group in the far corner of the room. The wind howled at the building, shaking and tearing at it with fists of wind and rain. It was probable that other villagers were similarly sitting out the storm in the few other buildings comprising the settlement. Harry looked out of the window. It really was a dismal place. From time to time he caught sight of a lone figure on some errand or other that couldn’t wait. A farmer bent double under the weight of a sack. Another pushing a heaped wheelbarrow. A youth with a bunch of hoes over his thin shoulders, bent into the wind. A chicken blew past, trying its best to keep contact with the earth. The wind bowled it along, a cartwheel of feathers, beak, claws and terrified stupid eyes.

  He turned back to his charges. “Well this is fun, isn’t it?” he said in English. The four people looked at him blankly. One of the women shouted something at him. Testing him. She got up and made a move towards him, raising a clenched fist. Harry showed her the gun. It was ridiculous. Threatening a bunch of women. He felt a bolt of shame.

  “Sit down please,” he said in his clearest Mandarin. She understood and answered with a stream of what he assumed was abuse, concluding it with a gobbet of spit aimed at his feet. The old man found that highly amusing and muttered some invective of his own. No love lost there, Harry reflected.

  The minutes passed. He was looking around for a seat for himself when the door burst open and Lisa tumbled into the room. She was soaked. Her hair wild with water and filth. Her eyes stared madly. Saw him and focused.

  “Come.”

  Harry rushed to her. “What the hell’s happened?”

  She shook her head, eyes clenched shut, unable for the moment to speak again. She was gagging. Just shook her head violently. “What about them?” Harry said, pointing at his charges.

  “Fuck them. Kill them. Shoot them. Let them die and rot.”

  Twenty Five

  She led the way, back out of the house and across the square. Harry turned up the collar of his jacket, hunching into it as if that would do any good. Of course it didn’t. Within fifty yards he was soaked. First he felt a trickle of water down his spine signalling that the enemy had breached the walls. Soon his clothing was sodden. The water ran into his shoes until his feet squelched.

  Lisa was not to be stopped. He called after her to slow down. He could keep pace but was concerned for her. She was all over the place, staggering more than running. They were on the track that the woman had indicated from the window. Up and over the hillside leading away from the village. As they ran, Harry noticed how the fields on either side were untended. Weeds sprouted, the ground a mess. Nothing resembled the well-maintained fields that they had seen when driving into the village. It was as if the village consisted of two wholly separate factions. One lazy and incompetent, the other industrious and productive. It might have been designed as an example of how to do things vis-à-vis how not to.

  He realised in the same instant that he was wrong. The ground in this direction wasn’t simply badly maintained. It had been completely abandoned. What had recently been farmed land was now waste ground. Furrows had overgrown. The rain water ran along them in a myriad of tiny rivulets.

  A blast of rain slashed into the side of his face. He could hardly hear anything but the wind and rain. He felt it cold in his ears. It filled his consciousness. His eyes wept with it. Blinking was as inefficient as Herbert’s windscreen wipers.

  “Lisa!” She ignored him. “Hold on a moment. What happened?”

  In answer she threw up her arm and pointed vaguely ahead. Other than that she kept going. Stumbling and veering like a drunk, but always in the direction she and Herbert had taken a short time before. Instinctively Harry’s hand went into his pocket. His fingers touched gun metal. It reassured him. At least he had that.

  They came to a rise. Lisa paused for breath bent double, hands on knees. Harry came up beside her. He put one hand on her back. Comforting. She shook it off. Straightened and ran on.

  Bloody hell. Harry took a deep breath and glanced back at the village. It was blurred through the sheets of intervening rain. He thought he caught sight of a figure or two, but couldn’t be sure. What was the old man up to? And the women? Too late to worry about that. Fuck them. Kill them. Shoot them. Let them die and rot.

  He went after Lisa who had gathered pace now she was heading downhill. The village disappeared as they dropped into dead ground. Seeing the land on this far side of the hill, Harry saw how high they had come in the car. By road the gain in height had been barely perceptible. Seen from here though, he realised they had made a considerable climb. In all directions the land dropped away. Hillsides opposite were below them, and in between, valleys and rivers and trees and fields. Here and there a lone house or cluster of buildings denoted tiny settlements. Some were dilapidated, rooves all fallen in, others clearly lived in. All were grindingly poor. The obnoxious words of Clive Miller came back to him. This place even smells poor.

  Harry grimaced. That’s because it is, you cretin. These people are poor. Desperately so. But what the hell would you know about that? Or care? He was surprised by the passion with which he hated the man at that moment.

  There was a cry from ahead. He looked up and saw Lisa on the ground. He rushed to her. Her foot had caught in a fissure in the earth and she had gone flying. He picked her up. She was wet through, covered in mud and sobbing. He tried to comfort her but she shook him away. “Lisa, whatever is it?”

  She shrugged him off and started forward again. Harry took a deep breath, steeling himself for whatever he was about to find.

  What he found was a small grove of wind-blasted trees. Lisa stumbled to a halt and looked around. “Herbert!” she shouted.

  Nothing.

  She called again. This time there was an answering call. Herbert’s shrill sing-song voice was almost stolen by the wind. Thin and reedy, his plaintive cry was barely audible. The screech of a wind-blasted bird, flung through the wretched sky.

  They found him standing to one side of the grove. He was inspecting the ground. Lisa went up to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
He touched her hand. They turned to Harry. “Look over here,” Herbert said. Rain was coursing down his face. Like Lisa he was soaked. His coat looked as if it weighed a ton now that it was water-logged.

  He led the way across the grove to a place where the trees opened into a small clearing. Harry could see that the clearing had been quite recently constructed. Not more than a year or two. Stumps of the felled trees were still relatively fresh, the pale flesh of their cores exposed by crude slashings of an axe. Not a fine job. Clumsy, crude and hurried. In the centre of the clearing were two parallel rows of upended stones.

  “Graves,” Herbert said. He went forward to the nearest and stooped to point at a hand-written inscription in Chinese characters painted on one of the stones. “Children’s graves.” He straightened with a sigh that came from the depths of him. “All of them.”

  Harry bent down to inspect first one then another. He couldn’t read the characters but the dates were intelligible. The deaths had all occurred within a few months of each other. They ranged across a period of half a year. Eighteen months previously.

  “What were their ages?” he asked.

  “The oldest about four. The youngest just a few months,” Herbert answered.

  Harry stepped away from the graves. It was a desolate place, made all the more so by the storm. The clouds sped past overhead, seeming so close he felt that if he were to reach up he could run his fingers through them.

  “Well that explains why there aren’t any young children in the village,” he said.

  “There are no children in the village,” Lisa added. “Where are the others? The older ones? Are their graves around here somewhere too?”

  Harry surveyed the sparse woodland, the outcrops of hill and valley. “Perhaps. But what on earth happened to them? What’s going on here? And why are the villagers so unwilling to speak to outsiders?”

  Lisa’s answer was spat with venom. “Ryder Chau.”

  Having seen the calibre of Ryder Chau’s western hireling, Harry understood her conviction.

  “They’ve been terrified into silence. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “Probably, yes. The question is why?” Harry said. “And how? With threats I suppose.”

  “I’m afraid it’s more than that,” Herbert said. He turned and walked back out of the clearing. There was a thin track wide enough for one person at a time leading between the trees. “Follow me. Lisa, you stay here if you want.”

  Lisa was trying to wipe her face clean but all she managed was to spread the dirt from her hands across her cheeks and into her hair. Which was when Harry wondered how it was she had got so filthy. Her tumble wasn’t enough to explain the deep mud stains coating the knees of her trousers and the cuffs of her wet jacket. With a chill shudder he realised that she had been digging. Herbert too.

  He followed Herbert into the trees until they reached a second clearing, smaller than the first. To one side was a mound of earth. A grave. The grave of an adult, in so far as Harry could judge from the length of it. It was intact.

  “Over here,” Herbert said.

  Ten yards to the side of it was a ditch. At least it had been a ditch once. Since then there had been an effort to bury something. Hastily, it seemed to Harry. Recently. He realised that was where Herbert and Lisa had been digging.

  He stepped forward. Herbert stood aside. Looking into the excavated ditch Harry saw the body. It was the body of a woman. A young woman. Herbert and Lisa had uncovered the chest and throat and face. The girl’s hair lay about her coated with earth. Snake-like they made her resemble a Gorgon. Her eyes were open but glazed and sunken, their surfaces shrivelled and milky. Her mouth was half open. Soil choked it. One arm was exposed. The fingers were caked in both mud and blood.

  “I’m no expert,” Herbert said. “But I’d say she was buried alive. Either that or she was only unconscious when they buried her. She came to and tried to dig herself out. Look at her nails.”

  “And choked and suffocated as she did so,” Harry finished for him. Lisa’s distress when she had come to fetch him was explained.

  “I wonder who the poor girl was?” Herbert said.

  Harry knew. However spoiled by the burial and by the briefest time, her face was distinctive. She had been the young woman who had tried to approach them when they had visited the village with Clive Miller barely hours before. She was the one the police chief had removed to keep her away from the outsiders. The one he had stopped from speaking. Now stopped forever.

  “Bloody hell,” he muttered. “The bastards.” Beside him Herbert was sadly shaking his head. “What made you dig here though?” Harry asked.

  “It was Lisa who found the shallow grave,” Herbert said. “We found the graves of the children first. They made Lisa feel ill. She came away, walking into the trees to be sick I think. That’s when she saw the adult grave and then this one. There was a piece of cloth sticking out of the earth. It turned out to be the girl’s sleeve. I heard Lisa scream. When I got here she was scrabbling at the ground.”

  “So they killed the poor thing.” Harry looked down at the buried girl. “She wanted to say something to us and they killed her to shut her up for good.”

  “Probably also to frighten the rest of the villagers. She would have been an example to them,” Herbert said.

  “I think I’m going to have a little heart-to-heart with that old fucker back at the cottage,” Harry said. “He’ll know all about this.”

  “I suspect he won’t want to speak to you,” Herbert answered.

  Harry grinned. “Oh I sincerely hope so. I’m going to enjoy beating it out of him.”

  As they turned to go back to the glade, Herbert asked, “What about her?”

  Harry looked at the body of the girl. “Leave her. Let her look at the sky.”

  They reached Lisa as the explosion ripped through the air.

  One moment they were gathering themselves, none of them yet ready to speak. The next, before they could talk, the ground beneath their feet shuddered and a second later the noise hit them. Lisa and Herbert jumped. Harry spun to face the village in time to see the orange flame shoot above the ridge-line. It was followed by a spreading plume of thick black smoke belching upwards. The wind tore at it, ripping it into tendrils and tossing it about like strands of ghostly hair.

  “What was that?” Herbert stared wide-eyed.

  Harry smelt the wind blasting into their faces. Considered the sound of it. “I’d say that was your car.”

  Twenty Six

  The three of them stood and stared as the black smoke plume continued to pour itself upwards into the sky. The result was like watching a liquidiser as the wind ferociously pulped it into a grey slurry until it disappeared altogether.

  Herbert scratched his head. “I didn’t realise I had such a full tank of petrol.”

  Harry couldn’t help marvelling at his sang-froid. “Yes, and at the price it is these days.”

  “What do we do now?” Lisa asked, stone-hard fear in her voice. Her arms raised and fell at her sides, slapping her soaked muddy trousers. Her shoulders sagged. She looked as if the life was draining out of her. She started again, “What do we …” Her words trailed into a sob. She stifled it but her face betrayed a gaping emptiness that Harry recognised. The moment shock takes hold, slamming you crushed and vacant.

  He looked around. Through the sheets of water and mist, the adjacent hillsides were a sea of brown, rising in great waves. They were in the middle of an ocean, adrift and lost.

  “Back to the village?” Herbert tried.

  “I think the village is coming to us,” Harry observed, his voice hard.

  In the direction of the black plume, the skyline was an imprecise brown line against the raging air. Emerging over the top of it, diminutive figures rose up like creatures sprouting from the earth. They might have been the spartoi of Greek myth, warriors growing from sown dragon’s teeth. They appeared first as heads and shoulders, then in full form. To Harry’s dismay, like the spartoi t
hey were fully armed. Not with shields and swords but with farming implements. He saw long-handled shovels, hoes, rakes and scythes. The sprouting continued until there was a row of them the full length of the skyline. They moved slowly like zombies, heading down the slope in the direction of the glade.

  Harry felt Lisa close up beside him. Her body brushed against his. “What do we do?” Her voice was that of a child, terrified by monsters. But these weren’t images from a nightmare to be shushed away. They were the assembled men of the village. Come to do them harm.

  “I will talk to them,” Herbert said. He took a step forward.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Harry snapped. “They’re not going to listen to reason. This is a mob. With the mentality of a mob. They’ll hack you to pieces.”

  Herbert turned to him and smiled. “Well then, what do you suggest?”

  Harry hunted around. Checked the ground around them. “We can wedge ourselves in somewhere, with trees behind us and make a stand. We can run. We can …”

  To his surprise Herbert was chuckling. “That is all very fanciful, Harry, but how long do you think we could hold them off? And while you might be used to fighting, I’m not. Nor is Lisa, I suspect.”

  He held up his thin arms and smiled again. “See? Not much of a warrior here.” He looked up at the line of approaching figures. “No. Far better that I try to reason with them. I am sure they will listen.”

  Harry drew the pistol. “Then I have this. I’ll fire a warning shot over their heads and if they don’t let us pass and walk out of here, I’ll start shooting. We’re not going to submit and die quietly.”

  Herbert considered it. “Let me try this first. They’ve suffered enough, if the graves are those of their children. I am sure I can talk them round. It is that old man who is their ring leader. He’ll be the one who has put them up to this.”

  “Then I’ll shoot him,” Harry said. “And it’ll be a pleasure doing so.”

  “Let me speak to them.” Herbert was adamant.