by C. M. Ewan
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘We can get to the car.’
‘What?’
I ran forwards and dived over the bed. Rachel’s handbag was on the far bedside cabinet. I snatched for it as I crashed into the wall, yanking open her bag and grabbing her car keys from inside.
I was just pushing myself to my knees – just twisting to make my way back around the bottom of the bed – when a splinter of wood exploded from a panel in the middle of the door. Fear ignited my nerves. The blade of the axe was sticking through.
I watched as the blade twisted and was yanked back out and a sliver of the bigger man’s face appeared, one red eye bulging above his mask.
‘What do you want?’ I yelled. ‘Leave us alone.’
He didn’t answer. He just struck with the axe again, spitting more wood into the room, forcing his gloved hand through the split timber. His forearm and upper arm followed, sheathed in his white plastic suit. I could hear him grunt. And I realized, with cold plunging fear, that he was feeling around for the key with his hand.
He almost had it and I was too far away to stop him.
But Rachel was closer.
She darted forwards and seized the man’s hand before it clamped on the key. Then she bent back his fingers. Hard. I heard two distinct cracks. Like the noise of Holly’s nose being realigned. Only sharper. Cleaner. The ruthless expertise of a medical professional.
The man yowled and snatched his buckled hand back out.
‘I’m gonna kill you, you bitch.’
Rachel snagged the key from the lock. She turned to me, shaking.
‘Tom?’
I jumped onto the bed and bounded across the mattress, leaping down and grabbing hold of Holly, pushing her ahead of me out onto the balcony, with Rachel following as another axe blow chewed into the door.
We slipped and fell on the greased timber. My bare feet had no traction at all.
‘Wait here,’ I told Rachel, hurtling on into the rain.
I leaped over the patio chair I’d dropped earlier, stuck out my hand and swung myself around and into Holly’s room.
Where was it? Where was it?
There.
The skylight pole.
I lunged for it and was just turning to go again when I heard an ominous, metallic crunch-crack from the other side of the door. It sounded like a nut being crushed. Or like a piece of mail being run through an old-fashioned franking machine.
I shuddered.
A short pause followed.
Then an explosion went off.
17
If the gunshot before had been loud, this was like a bomb detonating. The noise was deafening. A raging, calamitous boom that blasted out from the hallway and pulsed through the door.
Smoke and the stink of gunpowder hung in the air.
I was face down on the ground, coughing and spluttering. Hard to say if I dived there or if I was thrown. A chunk of door slammed into the wall in front of me. Fragments of wood rained down on my head and back and shoulders. Dust filled my hair.
The shotgun. Had to be.
A small voice in my head told me to stay where I was. These men weren’t stopping. They were heavily armed. We were hopelessly outmatched and totally overwhelmed with terror and confusion.
But then I thought of Holly and Rachel. My family was under attack. And I had only one job now. I had to get up and out of that room. I had to get us down from the balcony. I had to get us away.
I pushed up, choking on wood dust, my ears whooshing and ringing, my balance completely thrown. I bounced off the doorway on my way out to the balcony and glanced back over my shoulder at a crunching, splitting sound from behind. The smaller man was using the butt of the shotgun to strike at the splintered remains of the upper part of the bedroom door and rake them aside.
My stomach turned to water. We didn’t have long now until they’d be inside.
I felt hands grabbing me and turned to see Holly and Rachel pulling me towards them, crying and screaming words I couldn’t hear over the fierce, high-pitched wailing in my head. Rachel’s hair was sodden and streaking across her eyes. Holly’s face gleamed in the rain.
‘With me,’ I shouted, into the din, and then I bashed against the balcony rail and clambered over it, clinging to the other side, fighting a sudden spell of dizziness and swallowing against the gritty dust that was coating my tongue and catching in my throat.
The distant ground bounced and tilted beneath me as I crouched in the rain and hung the metal hook on the end of the skylight pole from the lowest strand of tensile wire. The rest of the pole dangled freely below.
Again, hands reached for me and yanked at me and I looked up to see Rachel tugging at my arm. She was shouting something – trying to dissuade me, I guessed – but her words were lost to me as I lunged down with one hand on the pole, the other on the fluted metal upright supporting the banister and a swirl of vertigo stopping my breath. I took all my weight on my arms, kicked a spray of rain off the edge of the balcony and swung my legs out over the abyss.
I hung there, my bare feet kicking in the soaked darkness, spitting rain from my mouth. Then I let go of the railing and clasped the pole with both hands. It bore my weight. I felt a small flutter of relief. I slid down it – faster than I meant to – until my fists butted up against the rubber handles.
I blinked up through the rain, twisting and flailing. I could feel the blood pulsing in my arms.
‘Holly first,’ I shouted.
Rachel and Holly looked at each other like I was mad. But then they flinched and turned and glanced back towards the bedrooms, and seconds later Rachel grabbed Holly, lifting up her pyjama top, urging her over the rail. My daughter half climbed, half stumbled, almost falling in an awkward somersault before she ducked and grasped for the pole.
She missed. Tried again. This time she got it in her left hand, followed by her right. I could see her knees give out and her feet drag behind her as she launched herself off, clinging on desperately, the pole swinging out and back, then bumping against the balcony edge.
She shrieked. The hook scraped and slipped. My grip began to give.
‘Move!’
Holly slid down to me, fast now, wrapping her legs around my torso, her arms around my neck.
‘They’re coming through the doors, Dad. They’re nearly in.’
I could feel the shakes passing through her body as she clambered on down me, hugging my waist, my thighs, my knees. My arms strained at their sockets. My fingers stretched and ached. Holly hung from my ankles, still a considerable distance up. She spotted her landing. Dropped.
She hit the ground with a soggy eruption of water and mud, rolling to one side.
‘Hurry, Mum,’ she screamed.
I peered up at Rachel, rainwater swamping my mouth. She was looking down at me, her hair hanging about her face.
‘I can’t hold on much longer,’ I told her.
For the briefest second, I was gripped with absolute terror that she wouldn’t come.
Then, in one fluid movement, she put one foot on the first trembling wire and swung her other leg over the banister.
‘Faster, Rachel.’
That was my mistake. She was only halfway over when I said it and she didn’t pause to compose herself before she jumped for the pole. She was sideways-on when she grabbed for it and her momentum made the pole slide, then twist.
The hook slipped on the wire. The wire twanged and slackened. We slumped and dropped – only by a fraction – but in that instant Rachel’s foot slammed into my shoulder and her other foot scrambled against my face. She pushed all her weight down on top of me, forcing my head right back, and by the time she reached down to grab for my neck, my hands had already parted company with the pole and were clutching on air.
We fell together into the fragmented black, the rain hammering down like silver needles, the ground rushing up fast.
‘Michael, please.’
Fiona stares at Michael, her eyes huge in the darkness
, like he’s become some kind of stranger to her. She’s clenching the grab handle above her door so hard Michael can see the bones of her knuckles pressing through her skin.
‘That was crazy. You’re going too fast.’
He knows she’s right. Touching eighty now and he’s never driven beyond twenty before tonight. There’s an odd levity to the suspension, like the Audi’s tyres are peeling away from the road. The engine roars and the steering feels light and aimless. Trees whip by at his side.
The road surface undulates. The Audi bucks.
A flutter in Michael’s stomach. Like when his dad used to accelerate over a humped bridge, just so he could ask Michael if he needed to go back to pick up his tummy. Michael always loved that. He can remember giggling and clutching his stomach, looking out the rear window as if his tummy was somewhere behind him. He wonders if his dad ever felt this out of control.
‘You’re scaring me.’
Michael is scaring himself. He’s taken risks in the past. He’s leaped between stairwells and dropped between buildings when he’s free running, tumble-rolling to a stop. He’s balanced on high ledges, then dangled from them with Fiona standing over him, focusing in with her camera for the perfect shot.
But nothing compared to this.
‘You have to slow down.’
18
The impact was like being hit by a truck.
I landed on my back on the boggy gravel. It drove the air out of my lungs. Rachel crashed down on top of me. All elbows and bones.
She cried out and rolled off me. Raised herself to her knees. Through the heavy downpour I could see she was baring her teeth and clutching her left arm. Her arm hung uselessly at her side.
‘My shoulder is dislocated.’
I tried to reply but I couldn’t speak. I was doing that gasping, dry-croaking thing in the back of my throat. Any second now, oxygen would flood my lungs again. But still, that second. It was hard not to succumb to the panic.
I rocked sideways. Pain lit up across my pelvis and spine. I managed a short, halting breath, like sipping oxygen through a straw. Then another. A little more air this time. I pushed up, teetered back, pushed up again. I must have banged my head when I fell. I was groggy. We had to move – I knew that – but everything seemed to take too long.
Something twanged with a hot burst of acid in the middle of my back. It didn’t stop me. I got to my knees as Holly splashed through puddles and helped me to lift Rachel. We leaned on one another, our clothes and hair drenched and pasted to our skin.
‘This way.’
We stumbled and limped through the deluge and took cover beneath the balcony. Rachel braced her body against the fieldstone base of the lodge. She cowered in the murk, her face scrubbed and straining.
Footfall from above. Fast and heavy. I was sick with dread, my breathing laboured, my hearing blurry, but there was no mistaking the sound. We all looked up, shivering and scared. The timber boards shook and vibrated. Drops of rain fell down on us in clumps and loose sprinkles. More rain rinsed down in a curtain of water from the balcony’s edge.
We couldn’t be seen, I didn’t think. Not directly.
More footsteps, this time from the far end of the balcony. We huddled in silence as the two men formed up in the middle. They talked fast but their words were snatched away by the howling wind, smothered by the downpour. I guessed they were looking out at the broad circle of soaked gravel ahead of them in the moonlight and the skylight pole twisting and swinging in the wind. I trembled. Had we left footprints leading back under the balcony? Even if we hadn’t, they’d know we were close.
Holly stared at me, breathless, then something seemed to break inside of her. Her face fell and her lips peeled back in a frightened, silent scream. I pulled her into me, holding her like I could somehow smother her fear. But I couldn’t and it killed me.
I didn’t know why these men had come for my family. That was not my priority right now. They could have any number of reasons. They could be aiming to kidnap us to try to get a ransom from Lionel. They might be planning to kill me in order to take Rachel or Holly away for purposes I did not ever want to think about. Or maybe it was something simpler than that. Some kind of pent-up resentment that had to do with the lodge, perhaps. Brodie had mentioned that some of the locals didn’t like the fence Lionel had erected. Maybe this was some sort of extreme, psychotic expression of that.
I didn’t care. My only focus was on protecting my family. And that meant getting to our car.
Reaching down to my side, I peeled open a soaked pocket on my jogging trousers and removed Rachel’s car keys with shaking fingers. I held them up in front of Rachel and Holly, pointed towards the carport and turned the ignition key like a mime.
They stilled, then nodded fitfully. It was clear they had their doubts. We were all very scared and afraid of being spotted. Making any decision right now was frightening.
I pushed Holly back and urged her on towards the Volvo.
‘I have to help Mum,’ I whispered, and then I watched, terrified, as she stumbled and weaved ahead of us, using her hands to feel along the blackened stonework like a blind person learning new terrain for the first time. I got my arm around Rachel’s waist and we hobbled after Holly with Rachel cupping the elbow of her dislocated arm with her hand.
A sudden shout from above froze my blood. The balcony shook again with the thud of fast-moving footsteps. My guess was the men were rushing back inside. They were going to hurry through the lodge and down the stairs and come outside to find us. Fear pounded in my chest.
‘Run!’
I lunged forwards and shoved Holly out from beneath the balcony into the rain-swamped yard, then ducked and lifted Rachel in my arms. She shrieked in pain. Holly cried in panic. The gravel stung my bare feet and cold rain blustered in at us, like someone was hurling crushed ice in our faces.
We were about two-thirds of the way towards the carport when I shifted Rachel in my arms and aimed the remote keys I was gripping in my fist towards the Volvo. The headlamps flashed in the gloom. The indicators pulsed orange. The cabin light shone dimly through the blackened windscreen.
My stomach dropped.
I could immediately see – with a numbing, disabling paralysis – that we wouldn’t be going anywhere in our car. It was slumped lower than it should have been. All four tyres had been slashed.
My brain couldn’t process it. I faltered, staring in horror at the way the rubber was pooled and spread at the base of the alloy wheels. Rachel bucked with a sudden jolt in my arms.
‘Oh my God, no,’ she said. ‘No. This isn’t happening.’
I dropped her to the ground, still staring at the car, as if somehow it would magically fix itself. Holly had stopped just in front of us, her arms out at her sides, the rain lashing down around her. For a moment I thought she was going to collapse.
My first instinct was to get in the car anyway. Gun the engine. Try to drive. But I knew it wouldn’t work. It would be hopeless in the best of conditions, and with the driveway saturated it was impossible. If we didn’t get bogged down immediately, we’d gain no traction at all when the gradient started to rise. We’d be stuck.
I looked back at the lodge. What to do?
‘We have to go back,’ Rachel said. ‘Tom, we have to find somewhere to hide.’
Slowly, my brain kicked in again. We only had seconds, but it might be enough.
‘Wait.’
I sprinted to the Volvo and pressed the catch to open the boot. Pinching water from my eyes, I reached quickly inside. The first thing I grabbed was Rachel’s medical bag. It was a blue nylon rucksack that I looped over my shoulder. Next was an old padded overcoat of mine that Holly could wear. After that came a small toolbox, and last, from the sculpted hollow beneath the false floor in the base of the boot, I snatched up a wheel wrench from next to the car jack. It was the closest thing to a weapon I could find.
19
We watched through a break in the trees as the outdoor
lights stuttered on around the exterior of the lodge. The bulbs blazed blue-white against the saturated black, bleaching the timber walls and the gravel yard and forming a hazed border of light that throbbed and flickered in the rain and wind.
A pane of glass in the downstairs kitchen window was smashed. The jagged shards still attached to the frame shone in the light with a blue iridescence. Rachel had been woken by the sound of a window breaking. Was this was how the two men had got in?
I felt a sudden clutch in my chest as the men appeared tramping across the deck. They jumped down onto the sodden gravel. The smaller man came first with the shotgun held crossways in front of him. The bigger man followed from behind with the handgun in his left hand and his right hand tucked under his armpit. He was stooped at the waist and leaning to his left, as if trying to muffle the pain of his two broken fingers.
Holly gasped. I reached over and pulled her down next to me. She’d put on my old coat but she was trembling hard. We were hidden behind a screen of trees and bushes opposite the carport.
I tightened my grip on the wheel wrench. My knuckles pressed down into sodden mulch. My breath came in fast pants. I was wearing Rachel’s backpack by both shoulder straps. There were pain meds inside and Rachel was going to need them. Right now she was lying prone on the ground, writhing in discomfort. Her head was pressed up against a fallen log. She put her fist in her mouth and bit down on her knuckles to keep from making any sound. I looked at her, saw her pain, and felt something inside me tear and give way.
The men plodded forwards, jutting their chins into the dark. The rain lashed against them. The plastic coating of their disposable coveralls glistened in the outdoor lighting with a wet liquid sheen.
Something inside my stomach tightened and quivered, like a string plucked on a guitar. I’d thought of something. What was it? My groggy mind couldn’t complete the thought. I strained and thought harder. The near-thought repeated itself, like a faint, scratching sensation at the back of my head. It was something about the men. But what?