“Careful, baby,” calls Magda as we make our way towards the yacht, which is levelling out now, becoming more buoyant. “Can you swim?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t.”
One moment we’re wading up to our knees, the next we’re on dry ground. I hear screaming—to our right, across a deep, dark stretch of sea—I see a small family stranded. I slow down.
“Keep going,” says Magda.
“But . . . ”
Magda grabs me hard. “Vereesh. Come on.”
We are about fifty metres from the boat. I’m swimming towards the final sandbank with Magda’s arms around my neck when the water around us explodes.
“Machine gun,” shouts Magda. “Keep going!”
I scramble onto the bank, face-down. Magda rolls off me. Another burst of gunfire. I can see the flash now, hear the keening bullets above our heads.
I press my face against the sand.
The firing stops and I spring forward. It’s only as I begin to wade into another stretch of water I realise Magda isn’t with me. I look over my shoulder. She’s still lying there.
I scramble back.
“What is it?”
Her face is paper white. I pull my hand away from her shoulder. It’s covered in blood.
“Magda.”
“I’ll be alright,” she says. “Go.”
“Magda.”
“Go.”
I begin crawling across the sandbank towards the boat. There again the machine gun flickers but I am already moving, weaving as the bullets burn past me. Calibrated to human speed, these machines. They lag behind a mutant like me.
I throw myself into the water sitting around the boat like a basin. Hear them shout, here, no, here. But I’m neither here, nor there: I’m beneath the swirling, cold surface of the sea.
I feel my way around the hull. Will they be waiting on the right side or the left? The port or the starboard? I always got those terms mixed up anyway. I make my way around the back.
Tentatively, I surface.
Into silence. They are playing the waiting game too, the quiet game. How long, I wonder, before the water rises sufficiently for them to set sail? How long, I wonder, before Magda drowns?
Not long.
I begin my ascent.
I sense him shift, his mix of artificial fabric and armour, his machine, his chemical concoctions. So many designs for death.
Shift. Positioned at the rear, but also so he can overlook the side. No fool then. Not Kobro, either. I know Kobro’s smell.
I edge up the hull, timing my movements to each slap of water. Even these currents have a rhythm amid the chaos.
I press one foot against the anchor chain, another onto the mooring hook. I’m just beneath his sight line, now, just beneath the muzzle of his machine gun. But of course, I have mine.
I push myself up, reach for the rail.
I hear him swing around. Swing, swing, swing all your chemicals into action.
But too late. I pull the trigger.
His body shudders as I pour the machinery into him. For all his armour, he neglected to wear a helmet. My bullets meet him head on, so to speak, smashing through the top of his skull and splintering the length of his spine, keeping him jigging even after all life has departed.
But it’s not over. I’m still pulling myself onto deck when I see the shape I know is Kobro moving towards me. He’s hesitant. He can’t make out what’s what in this light.
“Dave,” he cries out. “Dave.”
“Yeah!” I shout. Not good enough. He opens fire.
A pistol crack. The whump as the bullet buries itself in Dave’s leg. But that’s it. One chance. I’ve gone.
“Motherfucker.”
I’m around the other side of the bridge, crouched down, as I hear him fumble after me. “Come on, you motherfucking freak. Show yourself. Come on!”
He imagines me somewhere. Fires. “Fuck,” I hear him say.
And all the while, I am creeping nearer.
“Fucker,” he says, letting off another round. A sob. “Shit.”
Scrabbling around in the dark, pointing his pistol like a blind man.
The next time he turns, there I am, facing him.
He pulls the trigger, but it’s already gone, his gun. Dropping into the dark. We both look at his index finger, working away, into nothingness. He closes his other hand into a fist, brings it to bear. I block it and swing it back against him. He yelps, loses his footing. Falls to the deck. Something snaps.
He tries to pull himself up, but his face flames with pain. He returns to his knees.
“Now that’s a broken ankle. Fucker.” He’s out of breath but strangely exhilarated. “My, you’re a mighty motherfucker. What we could do with you.”
I’m barely listening. I’m looking out across the sea. All the sand has gone. The family have gone. Magda has gone.
“Come on then,” he says. “Finish me off, mutant. You know you want to. You know you’ve wanted to ever since that time in the kitchen. I sensed it in you. Come on, you bastard.”
The boat is freed from the sandbank and rocking now, free floating. The lights are growing dimmer, we’re all alone here in the dark.
“Come on!” He looks up at me, this lover of death.
But some things are more important. I turn away from him, head for the bridge. See if I can find a torch to scan the water.
I hear a thud behind me.
A shape is looming over Kobro. It steps back as he falls forward.
Magda standing there, dripping wet, the hatchet hanging from her good hand.
“I thought,” I say as I cut away her blouse to get at her shoulder wound, “you said you couldn’t swim.”
“I guess I learned,” she says, her head hanging forward, straggly hair covering her face.
We are in a downstairs cabin, Magda’s blood smearing the white leather sofa. Her blouse falls away except for a scorched area of silk and black around the entry wound.
Magda insisted we weighed anchor and steered the boat around the bay before seeing to her wounds. Fortunately, as the craft has been designed for the jet set, operating it isn’t too hard—just a question of pressing a button and steering. We dropped anchor again about half an hour later.
“It looks,” I say, cleaning the blood and skin away, “as if the bullet passed through.”
She doesn’t make a sound as I remove the larger pieces of debris from around the wound. I begin to dress it.
By now she has straightened up, pushed her hair away from her face. Some colour is beginning to return to her cheeks.
“How much bandage are you planning to use?” she says.
“Hey,” I say. “I’m doing my best.”
“We’ll need it,” she says, “where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?” I ask.
She ignores the question, appears to take in our surroundings for the first time. “Not bad,” she says. “They know how to live, these internationalists.” She looks down. “Baby! Look at the seats. Didn’t you think to cover them?”
“Magda,” I say, “answer the question. Answer this question: why. Why did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Save me.”
She looks down at her long fingers, examines her cracked and splintered nails. Her hair falls across her face again. When she looks at me again, a playful smile plastered across the pain, it’s not the worldly-wise Magda I see, but the young girl who came to London all those years ago, full of hope and expectation.
“I believe,” she says, “that every child should know its father.”
36
THE HUNT
We’ve been out on the ice for two days now and I’m thinking of turning back when he spots them.
“There! Look.”
He hands me the binoculars. I can just make out the moving black blobs—seals—below the horizon. There must be a break in the ice, I think.
“It’s a long way,” I say. “
Thin out there.”
“We can do it,” he says. “I’m light.”
I look at him, my little Eskimo, all rosy cheeks and bright eyes beneath those frosty lashes. “Come on then,” I say.
It is beginning to grow dark as we approach the herd, but that’s no bad thing. Out here, despite the few hours of winter light, it never gets properly dark. Even if there’s no snow, the light from the stars will always give you something to see by. But what it does is help us to mask our approach.
We’re like them now, slithering about on our bellies.
“Quiet,” I say, more to myself than the lad, as one of the bull seals twitches, maybes senses something. We haven’t much time. I take off my gloves and begin to un-strap the rifle. To be honest, I’m usually a lousy shot but now . . . now it matters.
“Lad,” I say, “back, behind me.” The ice is thinning out already. It should be okay, but you never know—a single gunshot could be enough to open it up.
I hear the boy obediently slide back. He knows how far to go. Okay then, okay. I raise the rifle, press my cheek against the chill of the wooden butt. Line up the sights. Take a deep breath, then another. Feel my bug begin to blossom inside, feel my senses sharpen.
I pull the trigger. The seals scatter, plunging back into the water. But as the smoke clears I see one black blob still lying there.
The boy has wriggled back by my side.
“You got him, Dad, you got him!” He’s moving forward when I grab hold of his coat.
“Patience,” I say. I get up on my knees. “Have you got those stones?”
He hands me the bag. I take out the first and pitch it. We watch, and more importantly, listen, as it bounces along the ice. The clunks grow increasingly hollow the closer to the seal it goes. I throw another.
“It’s thin,” I say.
“I’m light,” he says.
“You’re light,” I say. “Is that what I’m going to tell your ma when she asks what became of you?”
“Go on, Dad,” he says, then adds slyly, “You know you have to.”
“Hey.” I grab hold of his hood and give it a shake. “Who’s boss here, mister?”
“You are.”
“That’s right.” I look at him. “Okay,” I say, “get out the ropes.”
The only way we can get to the seal is by tying all our available rope together. I attach it to the harness around his chest. I give him the hook. “You know what to do with this?”
He nods.
“Now.” I give him the serrated knife. “Take this,” I say. “It could still be alive. If it is, if it tries anything, cut its throat. You won’t freeze?”
“Dad! I won’t freeze.”
“Okay,” I say, “but take your time.”
I watch him go, slithering out over the thin ice. Straining to hear any crack, ready to haul him sharply back in. Ahti, I whisper, God of the Depths, be gentle with the little one. Let him take his due as you will take yours.
By the time he reaches the seal, he appears barely bigger than it is. Through the binoculars I watch him dig the hook in around its spine and—now the moment I have been dreading and I repeatedly offer up the prayer—he detaches the rope and attaches it to the hook. He then stops.
What are you waiting for? Come on, I gesture.
He’s looking down at the ice around him.
Come on.
He begins to slither back, following the rope line. These are the longest moments of my life.
When he arrives, he asks, “Dad, are you alright?”
“I . . . ” I can barely speak. I finally say, “What were you doing? What were you waiting for?”
“Oh, I could see others, just down below the ice. If I’d had a gun I could have got more!”
I shake my head. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s haul it in.”
We begin the long trek back to Oosterholma. The boy’s tired though. I’m tired. I decide we’ll camp for the night. You need to keep your wits about you on the frozen sea.
We build a fire, begin to smoke the fish. Above us the sky is bright with stars.
I’m lecturing him, as one does. “Out there today,” I say, “you did well, lad. But you should never take more than you need. What do you think would have happened if you’d had a gun, eh? Chances are the ice would have shattered, Ahti would have claimed you for being a greedy boy.”
And he is full of questions, as usual. “Has it always been like this, Dad? Akka was saying the ice melted because of the potion.”
“Pollution. Well, there’s no shortage now, Danny boy, that’s for sure. Eat your fish.”
He falls asleep soon after. I watch him awhile, his round, contented face framed by the rim of fur. I wonder what he’s dreaming. I can guess: seals dancing beneath the ice. Be a good lad, I think. Don’t do anything stupid.
I’m about to turn in myself when I see it tracking across the sky. A tiny, luminous cross.
I throw snow onto the fire.
“Ma! Ma!” He’s running over the rocks towards our red wood house, wood smoke rising. Magda comes out, an apron over her heavy woollen jumper.
“We got one, we got a seal,” he’s saying as she sweeps him up. “I had to crawl across the ice, it was so thin! I put the hook in and everything!”
“You are brave, my Danishka.” She kisses him on the forehead, the nose, the mouth. “Ooh, you taste of fish! You haven’t been eating our supplies?”
“No,” says Daniel, giggling. “There’s plenty. Akka!” She’s coming around the corner with a pile of dried clothes, rigid with the cold. “We got a seal, I hooked it on the ice!”
He jumps down from Magda and runs to Akka. “I saw the others, under the ice, but I didn’t hurt them.”
“That’s good,” says Akka. “Come in, let’s get you warm. I’ve been cooking. I may have something special for you.”
“Biscuit!”
“Let’s see, shall we.”
Magda and I are alone. “He wasn’t off the rope for long,” I say.
Magda takes my hands. “You did what you had to. He has to learn.”
“I saw a plane,” I say.
Magda shrugs. “Once found, knowledge is hard to lose.”
“An old Serb saying?”
She grins. “New. Oosterholma.”
“Have you heard anything on the radio?”
She shakes her head. “Nothing. Shhhhh. . . ” She means static. “It’ll be a long time, baby, before anyone comes for us.”
“I hope you’re right,” I say.
“I hope so too.”
I’m out on the hill, smoking the rest of the fish. I’m sure what Magda says is true, but I like to sit up here because it provides a perfect vantage point over Oosterholma and its chief points of entry.
Down there is the old dock where the hospital and commissary used to stand, only the odd brick wall now carving a dark outline through the snow.
Directly below me are the two lepers’ houses that became one, largely thanks to Khalid, who spent his last lonely years here taking from the one to augment the other. I wonder if he sat up here, at this self-same spot, looking out across the sound, as he slowly rotted away.
What did he think, as he languished here all those years? Did he know what all his work would come to? That the little girl he saved from the rubble would one day return with a family of her own? Or did he die raging at the pointlessness and pain of it all? God, I think, can be cruel.
Or perhaps a better word is—disinterested. In our ordinary agonies. He has bigger fish to fry.
“Hands off!”
He thought I couldn’t hear him creeping up the hill, the cheeky monkey. “You, boy, will have a belly as big as a whale!”
I wave the skewer theatrically towards him. “Next time you go squirming across the ice, it’ll go creeeeeeeeeak.” I give him a tickle. He squeals with delight. “Isn’t it your bedtime?”
He comes and huddles by me. “Have you seen any more?” he asks.
“Any more wh
at?”
“You know—aeroplanes.”
“Aeroplanes?” I say. “Who said anything about aeroplanes? Did your ma say anything?”
“No.”
“Akka, did she?”
“No. I thought you did.”
“I did? When was that?”
The lad screws up his face, obviously trying to remember. “I don’t know. Just that you saw an aeroplane, when we were out on the ice. All lit up.”
“Oh,” I say, “you were awake.”
“When?”
“When I saw it.”
He shakes his head. “No,” he says carefully, “you were.” I look at him, into those dark oval eyes. There’s nothing canny there, sly. None that I can see anyway.
“Dad,” he says.
“Daniel,” I say.
“Will I go?”
“Where, lad?”
“Over there,” he says, pointing out across the sound. The low winter sun is already beginning its descent, turning the sky an ember orange.
“Come on, lad,” I say. “Let’s get you to bed.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Makepeace was raised in London and began his career as a journalist before moving into international aid and public health. He now lives in Italy. The Poison People is the first of his novels to be published digitally. If you would like to receive an automatic email when Alex’s next book is released, visit alexmakepeace.com. You will only be contacted when a new material is released, your address will never be shared, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my family, friends and beta readers, especially Lea Zicchino, Nick Cobban, Nick Lawrence, Michael Bailey, Matthew Straddling and Gordon MacMillan for their unflagging support.
The Poison People Page 21