Nomads
NewCon Press Novellas
Set 1: (Cover art by Chris Moore)
The Iron Tactician – Alastair Reynolds
At the Speed of Light – Simon Morden
The Enclave – Anne Charnock
The Memoirist – Neil Williamson
Set 2: (Cover art by Vincent Sammy)
Sherlock Holmes: Case of the Bedevilled Poet – Simon Clark
Cottingley – Alison Littlewood
The Body in the Woods – Sarah Lotz
The Wind – Jay Caselberg
Set 3: The Martian Quartet (Cover art by Jim Burns)
The Martian Job – Jaine Fenn
Sherlock Holmes: The Martian Simulacra – Eric Brown
Phosphorous: A Winterstrike Story – Liz Williams
The Greatest Story Ever Told – Una McCormack
Set 4: Strange Tales (Cover art by Ben Baldwin)
Ghost Frequencies – Gary Gibson
The Lake Boy – Adam Roberts
Matryoshka – Ricardo Pinto
The Land of Somewhere Safe – Hal Duncan
Set 5: The Alien Among Us (Cover art by Peter Hollinghurst)
Morpho – Philip Palmer
Nomads – Dave Hutchinson
The Man Who Would be Kling – Adam Roberts
Macsen Against the Jugger – Simon Morden
Nomads
Dave Hutchinson
NewCon Press
England
First published in the UK by NewCon Press
41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF
January 2019
NCP 174 (limited edition hardback)
NCP 175 (softback)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Nomads copyright © 2019 by Dave Hutchinson
Cover art copyright © 2018 by Peter Hollinghurst
All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
ISBN:
978-1-912950-00-3 (hardback)
978-1-912950-02-7 (softback)
Cover art by Peter Hollinghurst
Cover layout by Ian Whates
Minor Editorial meddling by Ian Whates
Book layout by Storm Constantine
One
When we finally caught up with the Hinchcliffe twins it was gone two o’clock in the morning and they were doing seventy-five miles an hour in the direction of Huddersfield.
“Fair do’s,” Wally conceded, consulting the speed readout on the dashcam. “I wouldn’t go down this road at much more than forty.”
“That’s because you’re not a sociopath,” I told him.
The brake lights of the Lexus ahead of us suddenly flashed red and disappeared into a dip in the road.
“Sharp right coming up,” said Wally.
“Cheers.” Three years and I still didn’t know the roads as well as I should. I braked, took the corner at fifty, which was still way too fast. As we hit the straight again I could just see the Lexus’ lights in the distance. “I’m never going to catch them, Wally.”
“You don’t have to,” he told me. “Just be close enough to pull the daft little buggers out when they roll that thing.”
“I’d let them burn.”
He grunted. “Zero tolerance.”
“Bloody right.” I had to slow for another bend.
“I think you’re gaining on them again.”
I shook my head. The car I was driving could outrun and out-accelerate the car they were driving, but I was trying to keep my car on the road, and that made the difference; the twins literally didn’t care.
The Hinchcliffes were a two-teenager crimewave, and it was a mystery to me why they weren’t either in a young offenders’ institution or dead by now. They could twoc any motor vehicle inside thirty seconds, they drove like people truly deranged, and if they didn’t manage to smash up the vehicle they’d drive it until it ran out of petrol, strip it of any readily saleable parts, and torch it.
I’d been trying to catch them at it ever since I arrived in the village, but every time a car or van – or once, memorably, a bus – went missing and turned up as a bonfire forty miles away, the twins had an alibi. Granted, the alibis were usually provided by their mother, the legendarily fearsome Ursula, but I had never managed to find fault in any of them. That and the fact that we had never recovered any of the stolen property and nobody ever saw the little bastards commit the crime meant we could never hold them.
This time, though. This time...
“You know what they do in Florida?” Wally said mildly as I took a bump in the road a little too quickly and the car briefly became airborne.
“What.” He was beginning to annoy me. My world had contracted to a narrow winding tunnel of hedges and dry-stone walls enclosing a strip of road illuminated by our headlights and the blue strobe on the roof, enlivened by the occasional glimpse of the stolen car’s rear lights. It was like a video game. A really nasty, fast and terminally dangerous video game.
“They confiscate the possessions of criminals.” Nothing much fazed Wally Mole, not even a high-speed pursuit along twisty roads at two in the morning. “Some of the police departments over there are hugely wealthy. They’ve got Porsches and executive jets and all sorts of stuff they’ve confiscated from drug dealers.”
“Never work here.” We hit another bend. This one was a bit tighter than it seemed, and I felt a muscle in my shoulder pop as I tried to steer into it. We bumped along the grass verge for a few metres before slewing back onto the road.
Wally didn’t even seem to notice. “’spose not.” He laughed. “What would we do with that old tractor Ursula’s got outside her house?”
“I’m sure she’d suggest something.” I caught sight of the Lexus’s brake lights again; they seemed even further away.
Wally guffawed. “I’ll bet.”
The rear lights far ahead of us blinked in and out of existence as dips and humps and bends in the road hid and revealed them. It was becoming hypnotic.
“I think I’ve pulled my shoulder,” I said.
He looked at me, a slim young Constable with sandy hair and a high-cheekboned face underlit by the screens of the radar and video and communications equipment installed in the dash. “You’d best stop then.”
“Not a chance.”
“You can’t drive properly if you’ve hurt your shoulder.”
“These sods have been the bane of my life ever since I got here. I’m not going to let them go this time.”
“You’ll get us killed. Pull over. I’ll drive.”
“Then you’ll get us killed.” Wally was widely known to be one of the worst drivers on the Force.
He said, “Frank –” and I saw the rear lights ahead of us do a remarkable thing. With incredible elegance, they tipped up on end and rose up on a fountain of sparks, turning lazily over and over around an eccentric axis that seemed to bear them into the sky.
“We have a stop,” Wally gabbled into the radio. “We have a stop. They’ve rolled it. Four miles outside Stockford, on the Huddersfield road.”
The lights of the Lexus were still cartwheeling across the night, jerking occasionally as the car hit something. It was an extraordinary thing to watch, and I almost rolled our own car watching it. I heard Colin Harvey over the radio, telling us that the emergency services had been dispatched to the scene and that other cars were on their way.
The road ran into a long shallow dip and then rose steeply along the face of a hillside. I slowed down as we reached the brow of the hill and the sharp bend at the top, and in the headlights we saw the tumbled hole in the near-side wall where the Lexus had gone out of control trying to get around the bend. I pulled the car up onto the verge and Wally jumped out, putting on his cap as he ran.
>
I sat where I was. It was suddenly very quiet. Wally must have switched off the two-tone as he got out. I felt as if I was still moving. I couldn’t persuade my fingers to let go of the steering wheel.
“Frank.” I turned my head. Wally was bending in through the open passenger door. “Come on.”
That broke the spell. I opened my door and got out of the car, feeling wobbly-legged and not-quite-there, and followed Wally to the hole in the wall.
The wall ran along the very crest of the hillside. Looking over it, there was a sense of great open space below us, from which I could hear faint bleating noises. Far far away were little twinkling constellations of streetlights, and just below the horizon was a dull orange glow lighting the clouds that might have been Sheffield or Leeds or Huddersfield. I suddenly realised I had no idea where I was or which direction I was facing.
Closer to, down in the darkness, were two faint red lights. Wally had taken the lamp from the car, and shone it towards the lights, illuminating a great swath of grass dotted with panicking sheep running backwards and forwards and complaining at the top of their voices. Some sheep weren’t moving, but lay in crushed mangled lumps, legs sticking out at peculiar angles.
The beam swept past an unusual object, came back.
“Fucking hell,” Wally said.
The unusual object was the Lexus, and it was unusual because it was sitting on its side in a field on a hillside, leaking steam.
“Fiver they’re dead,” said Wally.
“You’re on.” I started to pick my way carefully down the hill. Wally followed a few steps behind and to my right, lighting the way. The air smelled of crushed grass and torn-up earth and sheep blood and petrol and exhaust fumes, and I thought I imagined music.
I heard Wally say, “Bollocks,” calmly behind me, and the light swung wildly as he fell over. About a million candlepower flashed in my eyes as the spotlight bounced past me towards the wrecked car, and I was left blinking away peculiarly-coloured afterimages.
“Tripped over a sheep,” Wally said.
“Nice one, Wally.” I still couldn’t see anything.
“Oh that’s fucking disgusting,” he said. “I just got these trousers back from the cleaners’ as well.”
My eyes were clearing slightly. I looked down the hill. The lamp had come to rest on a hummock of grass or a dead sheep or some other obstruction, shining more or less down on the crashed car. I blinked a couple of times and rubbed my eyes and went on down, collecting the lamp on the way.
The Lexus was lying on its right hand side. Its nearside wing was off in the darkness somewhere, as were the passenger door and the bonnet. The grass was scattered with glittering bits of glass, and looking back I could see great dark patches where the car had bounced and gouged chunks out of the hillside. I hadn’t imagined the music; the car was still emitting a rhythmic thud-thud. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was still watching those little lights wheeling over and over in the sky.
The whole car looked as if an over affectionate giant had hugged it. All four tyres were in shreds. I could hear sirens approaching on the road. I shone the lamp over the wreck, shaking my head. I’d wanted the twins, but I hadn’t wanted them like this. This was dreadfully final.
“Bugger me,” Wally murmured, finally reaching me, and for a few moments we forgot our job and just stood there looking at the mess the twins had made of the car.
Then there was a crackling grinding noise inside the Lexus and a head poked up out of the hole where the passenger-side door had been. The head looked around for a while, blinking away the blood that had run into its eyes. Finally, it saw us and gave us a ridiculous goofy grin.
“Howdo, Wally,” said Graham. “Frank.”
I turned to Wally. “You owe me a fiver,” I said.
Two
As it turned out, neither Graham nor his brother, Barry, was seriously hurt. Cuts, bruises. Barry had a possible hairline fracture of the elbow. Wally went to hospital with them, partly to make sure they didn’t try to steal the ambulance.
The capture of the Hinchcliffes was an event of such significance in the area that everyone wanted to claim to have been there. There were emergency vehicles parked all the way up the hill, a long line of flashing blue lights that was probably visible from orbit, and the wrecked Lexus was surrounded two-deep by paramedics and fire officers and police officers discussing the aftermath of the night’s pursuit. From the number of vehicles, you’d have thought a major disaster had taken place here. Andy Housego, who did scenes-of-crime for half the police stations along the valley, was taking photographs. So were most of the crowd.
“I’ll be able to sell these for a tenner a print,” Andy told me, scrolling through the images on his camera’s screen.
“Not if all these other people have their own,” I said.
Andy obviously hadn’t noticed anyone else taking pictures. He looked around and his expression changed. “Oi,” he said, shooing some paramedics away from the car. “Bugger off. You’ll contaminate the scene.”
I smiled. About a hundred pairs of boots had tramped up and down the hillside tonight. Portable spotlights had been set up around the Lexus to illuminate it while firemen cut Barry Hinchcliffe out of the wreckage. The fire officers had their own video cameraman, a smug-looking bloke who I knew was thinking how much he could get for the tape from one of those television true-life disaster programmes. Andy was about two hours too late to worry about contamination of the scene. Not that it mattered terribly; the Hinchcliffes were going to be hard-pressed to find an alibi for this one.
On the way back up to the car, I noticed a little group of dead sheep. They had been arranged sitting up on a level area, leaning against each other, forelegs around each other’s shoulders, like a bunch of old lads on a working-men’s club outing to the seaside. I hoped somebody would have the presence of mind to dismantle this charming little tableau before a senior officer turned up or the Press arrived.
My radio made a sound like a llama gargling a handful of gravel. I pressed the transmit button and said, “Four-Oh-One.”
More unintelligible noise.
“I can’t understand a word you’re saying, Colin,” I said.
More unintelligible noise.
I sighed. “Give me a minute to get back to the car and I’ll call you.” Radio reception was notoriously spotty around here; Wally had had to call in his report from the car on the brow of the hill.
When I reached the car, I picked up the handset and said, “Four-Oh-One.”
“Welcome back,” said Colin.
“Have you any idea what you sounded like just then?”
“Like a llama gargling gravel. It’s been commented on. What’s your status?”
“Wally’s gone to hospital with the twins and half the emergency services in the county are standing around the car taking photographs.” I heard a strange noise in the background. “Control, is that cheering I can hear?”
“Don’t let it go to your head, Four-Oh-One,” Colin told me. “See if Dave’s there and proceed to Dronfield Farm, off the Barnsley Road. Report of a prowler. Complainant is a Mrs Hallam.”
I looked down the hill to the brightly-lit oasis of madness around the stolen car. “Control, can’t someone else attend?”
“We can’t spare anyone else.”
“That’s because everyone else is here, Control.”
“You shouldn’t even be there, Frank; you should have handed off and got yourself back here to make your report.”
I checked my watch. Four o’clock. “Received.” My shoulder started to throb.
Dave Beck was five or six years older than me and at least two stone heavier. He sat in the passenger seat like a badly-uniformed sack of coal, arms crossed, staring straight out through the windscreen.
“What’s wrong?” I asked after five miles of annoyed silence.
Another couple of miles went by.
“You’ll think you’re clever now, then,” Dave said without loo
king at me.
“Are you angry because you didn’t get any photographs?”
Dave grunted and slumped deeper into his seat. He was born and bred in the area, had been in the Force much longer than me, and had begun his police career as a Constable toiling up and down between the little villages on an antiquated pushbike and giving road-safety lectures to infant school children. I was an incomer, I had never given a road-safety lecture in my life, and as far as I was concerned bicycles were part of the prehistory of the police force. And I had just made one of the most sought-after arrests in the area. Of course Dave hated me.
Dronfield Farm was a couple of miles outside the village. It was a long time since it had been a working farm; at some point in the early 1990s a businessman from Sheffield had bought it and entirely redeveloped the farm buildings into a luxury home. He’d wanted to build a couple of similar luxury homes on the rest of the land, but the Council had refused to give him planning permission, and when his business collapsed in the late ’90s he buggered off, some said to the Costa del Sol.
The farm had changed hands a couple of times after that. There had been a millionaire rock star who had bought the place as a tax write-off and then moved in, claiming to be determined to return it to its original use, but all he left behind was a legacy of stories of drug busts and four-day parties. The last I’d heard it had been sold to a young couple from Leeds, who had been living there quietly and blamelessly for about a year and a half and therefore generating powerful local gossip about who they were and what they got up to.
My shoulder was really sore by the time I turned off the road and onto the short, narrow track leading to Dronfield Farm. As the stone walls drew in on us I flashed on a set of rear-lights somersaulting over and over and over in the darkness.
“My cousin used to farm here,” Dave said.
“Pardon?” It was the first thing he’d said to me since accusing me of being clever.
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