by John Eider
Having no choice but to leave most of our gear unguarded a while, I ran right after her; and in the split-seconds I had between judging footfalls on the uneven meadow, attempted to assess the situation we were dashing into. The town we were running towards, as I got to see it properly, was as modest as towns got without being classed a hamlet, with just enough people there and in the surrounding farms to warrant a couple of pubs, a row of shops and what I think now couldn’t have been any more than a Parish Council. The red building seemed so much smaller as I got closer, perhaps it representing the votes of a few hundred people at most.
Turning to our immediate concern… Wareing had almost reached the near bridge before being stopped, leaving almost the whole length of the field they were in between himself and the girl’s grandfather. Yet it appeared a powerful gun, and pointed by one who looked like he may have known how to use it. In the seconds he had had to decide, Wareing had evidently resolved that some kind of negotiated settlement would be preferable to spending the rest of our mission nursing the bruises of a shotgun blast; and that only if you trusted that our magic jackets were able to deflected the pellets.
‘Whatever you’ve taken, hand it over,’ called the old man to Wareing, as his granddaughter ran up to him and hugged him. ‘And who’s this you’ve brought here, another bloody thief?’
The girl wasn’t bothered by the sight of the gun. I guessed she had seen him use it before.
‘They’re not outsiders, he’s my friend,’ she said, tugging me towards her grandfather by my sleeve.
‘And I’m his friend,’ added Wareing, in a moment of black humour I would treasure long after the present danger was over.
Wareing, displaying a madman streak, was moving not away from the shaky old man with the shotgun but toward him, hands held aloft,
‘You see, we’re all friends here, so why don’t you put the gun down and let us go on our…’
‘So what was all that commotion back there?’
I could have asked my partner the same question.
‘Coming here and blowing things up? You’re lunatics, the pair of you.’ And there the gunman made his first mistake, as still with the little girl holding close to him, at those final words he turned not only his gaze but also the gun onto me.
By the time he heard the feet running and had turned it back, Wareing was ten feet away from the extended twin-barrels, standing stock-still as if in a deadly game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. Now he had nowhere to move, while the old man seemed if anything more unsettled. Wareing had clearly thought that he had a better chance of talking the old guy down than of getting away without a backside full of lead pellet; but as it developed I could see no happy way out of this standoff.
Just then though, from the corner of my eye I sensed movement: slow, lolloping, easeful motion, as a horse rose from its position of rest in a shady area by the hedgerow beneath some trees. Two others were still lying there, well placed on what I could already tell would be another hot day. I did some quick mental deductions: here were horses, resting, utterly at ease around humans; and living within shooting distance of a man who’s granddaughter was out looking for food for them both. I said,
‘There is no cartridge in that gun, you have no ammo for it.’
The sudden look of fear in the old man’s eyes told me that I was right.
Wareing smiled at me, as seeing this look too, he lowered his arms and moved toward the man,
‘Shall we put the gun away then? Come on, we’re scaring the little girl.’
‘No!’ she called out, hugging her grandfather even tighter.
‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to hurt your granddad, we’re just going to be off on our way.’
‘Do you have any food?’ he asked, a broken man without his gun.
‘No,’ conceded Wareing, ‘but we could catch one of these horses for you. Do you have a cold store? Are you able to cut the meat?’
I imagined that pair trying catch the animal themselves with just a knife, thinking they’d barely scratch the animal’s skin before it bolted and crushed one of them. However, the old man didn’t speak, and so at Wareing’s gesturing with his head, we started away toward the bridge.
‘But what about the people?’ asked the little girl breaking from her hug, tears lining the dirt on her cheeks as we turned back to look at her.
‘Sorry?’ my colleague asked, having missed the earlier conversation on the hill.
‘The people who never came back?’
Wareing paused and looked at her. He wasn’t one to indulge a child surely, and so it proved when he answered not with kindness but with a question,
‘What have you been eating? Have you butchered any meat lately?’
Both shook their heads like they were being told off.
He turned to me, ‘Do you smell that? Smells like something gone off to you?’ I had noticed the faintest whiff of something hardly pleasant, but which I’d assumed was generally agricultural, I never having lived on a farm.
‘Keep the girl here,’ he said to me, as walking to the old man he put an arm around his shoulders,
‘Can you smell that? Do you want to take me to where that smell’s coming from?’
At that point I heard something I hadn’t since being back in Britain – a motor engine: a bus or truck it sounded like, heavy and diesel powered. I remembered something the Major had said, about how we would be dropped off silently and would be walking from then on, for in a world without a petrol supply nothing would draw attention to you or see you at greater risk of attack and confrontation by the locals than the sound of a working vehicle.
‘Uncle Tommy’s tractor!’ called the little girl, smiling and dashing away from the field in the direction of the town. I follow her, to a point where the engine sound suddenly echoed between buildings and could only have been twenty feet away. I held back, flat against the side wall of a house, peeking around to see a new but filthy Massey Ferguson pulling up, the driver leaning out to speak to his niece.
The rest of the town was still, not a voice or footfall. The area I had almost reached appeared to have been a market square in happier times. Across the road from me, I then saw a woman looking out from the building there; but she just returned to her kitchen or bakery and began untying her apron strings. I looked back to Uncle Tommy: he had a farmer’s build and had a shotgun. I wasn’t going to assume that this one was also unloaded, though we’d heard no shots ringing out since arriving in the area that morning. I had to get Wareing out of there.
Skipping back behind buildings the way I came, and then in the direction that Wareing and the old man had walked off in, I saw those two men stood side by side at the entrance to a barn. The odd smell got stronger as I arrived to join them; and when I did I saw why they had gone no further.
‘What was the noise?’ asked Wareing without turning.
‘A big bloke with another gun. Who are they?’
‘I’m guessing “the people that didn’t come back”.’
Before us, laid out in heaped rows upon the barn’s concrete floor, were the bodies of at least two dozen people; all ages and still dressed for home or farm, in coats, trousers, skirts. Some were twisted or bore wounds, others splashed in what I guessed was dried blood or what my mind could only accept as dirt.
‘Twenty?’ I suggested to Wareing.
‘More like thirty,’ he judged.
‘How long?’
‘That one looks half way to being mummified,’ he pointed. ‘It can happen in a hot dry place. The closest ones look newer. What happened?’ he asked, making no effort to move his gaze; but the old man stayed silent. I remembered where we were,
‘We might want to get out of here, the girl’s probably telling the farmer we’re here.’
‘That’s Tommy,’ said the old man. ‘He’s the one who…’ He went silent as he gestured awkwardly toward the bodies.
‘And now your granddaughter’s telling him all about her new friends who’ve just arrived in town…’ W
areing turned to go; but paused as the old man said,
‘He won’t listen to her. He thinks she’s simple-minded, he’ll think she’s making it up. He’ll be with his new “wife”. Always is when he’s back from the fields. He took up with her after his real one…’
‘…“didn’t come back”?’ Wareing pondered. ‘Then we might have time. Now, how are we going to do this? This building’s concrete, metal, there’s nothing here to burn.’
The old man took my partner’s shoulder and turned him toward a building to our left: a smaller, older barn, made of wood and full of straw.
‘Come on,’ said my colleague; as I realised we would be carrying them all to this place of cremation.
There are times in a life when all normal thought processes cease, and where time seems to stop. I remember them mostly from childhood: the evening before an exam both dreaded and desperate to be over with; the cross-country run, where the only way of coping that I ever found was simply to ensure that each new breath followed the last, and not to dare to hope that the race might ever end…
There was little smell involved surprisingly, beyond the light odour that had drawn Wareing there. For the metal barn was open at both ends, and most of the people within it were by then past the first stages of decomposition. Past rigour mortis too, though there was some quality of kindling-cracking and dry branch-snapping within their clothes as we gripped trouser legs and shirt sleeves to lift. But they were heavy, so heavy, and lumpen like sacks of potatoes. Arms fell down at their sides, fingers pointed out at nothing. Eyes which had rotted in their sockets still seemed to stare out in horror, as if watching their final moments forever. Maggots, flies, things like woodlice and earwigs and God-knew what else rubbed off on us to wriggle and crawl over our dark jackets. All around were the puddles and stains of putrefaction.
I found myself imagining the stories of each person; the recent history of the town running in reverse as we moved the newest bodies first, later to reach those resting there the longest:
The young couple side by side in clothes already dirtied, planning to run away with what little they owned in the bag still round his shoulders. Perhaps Tommy was sending out a message here to any other young people thinking of fleeing the gruelling years ahead, or maybe only terrified of them leaving with the secrets of his misrule?
Mid-way back, the farmer with his boy still in his arms, perhaps a rival or one who didn’t fancy having his land co-opted by the by-then clearly psychopath Uncle Tommy, he bringing the whole family here to execute them too.
Scattered throughout were at least three women who I thought might all at some time have been Tommy’s ‘wives’; or indeed the little girl’s mother – Tommy’s sister or sister-in-law? – who was another family member conspicuous by her absence. The earliest candidate for either of these was a secretary or shopkeeper in straight skirt and torn black tights, her white blouse still gleaming where not sullied by the dusty concrete.
I stopped counting the bodies after a while, so do not know the true figure, though it must have been more than the twenty-odd I had guessed at. As we carried them one by one, so the girl’s grandfather pulled down and laid out the hay bails for us to lay them onto. Though Wareing and I had the dog work, it was nothing compared to what the old man must have been going through, saying goodbye to the people he had lived with: his friends, his neighbours, maybe his own flesh and blood.
‘Do you have anything flammable here?’ asked Wareing once we were all finished. ‘Any petrol left? Paraffin for the stove?’
‘I’ve got paraffin,’ the old man stammered.
‘Then you know what we need to do, we’ve got to do right by your neighbours. I’m not a priest, but if we don’t have time to commit them to the earth then we must commit them to the air.’
The old man crept away, to return what felt an aeon later with what looked like the last of his home supplies.
‘Should be enough to have it going by the time Tommy gets here… if you’d do the honours?’
Amongst Wareing’s kit was a lighter. He played with the flame after lighting the doused bails, the old man gently tossing the empty tin onto the hay beside his townsfolk. Wareing turned to me,
‘If you wanted to say a few words, now’s the time.’
‘Hallowed be thy name,’ I began, half-remembering the Lord’s Prayer from school, as the first flames danced absurdly over as-yet untouched clothes. ‘Our Lord, who art in heaven… Give us our daily bread, and forgive us…’
After a while I felt a hand on my shoulder leading me away, the fire having caught.
‘You’ll keep the girl fed?’ I asked the old man as we went, he nodding.
Chapter 6 – Civil Defence