by Luke Kondor
Colin felt a welling of anger as he saw a woman, lean and young, her head snapping back as the bullet tore through her face. The next second she fell, and a handful of runners tripped over her body, their fragile frames scraping and bouncing on the wet cobblestones.
Colin looked back towards the blockade and saw the policeman had moved the aim of his rifle towards the crowd. In a flash of, what he might later call stupidity, he ran forward, barely noticing Fletcher’s hands fall away from his trouser leg. Rachel was crying and shouting something but he couldn’t make it out. He leapt forwards, holding his arms high, hoping for something, anything to connect to the policeman’s face. It didn’t matter what as long as Rachel and Fletcher could get past.
His elbow drove down onto the policeman’s head. “Run!” he said as the policeman retaliated, twisting and slamming the gun into his stomach. It winded him but he continued his scramble, throwing fists and feet.
The other policemen opened fire now. Heat rose to Colin’s cheek as he took another blow to the face. His lips split against the edges of his teeth as his head fell backwards. He kept on falling, a seemingly never-ending fall until, finally, he landed on his back. The cold water soaking up into his shirt. His nose fizzed and popped as blood rushed up to where it shouldn’t.
A bullet exploded from somewhere nearby, feet were all around Colin now as bodies pushed against the officers, cars, and cones. He heard a scream come from only a couple feet away and heard someone fall to the floor.
“Mummy?” he heard Fletcher cry, and as Colin twisted around on the floor, he could just make out his son, retreating against the wall, a thumb in his mouth as tears poured down his face.
And he could see now… He could see Rachel. Strewn on the floor, blood pooling around the bottom of her dress.
Colin’s head swam. Lights dashed his vision. He clutched his hands over the place on his stomach where it was hot… too hot. And now the aches reached into the heat, spreading out and forcing his body to shake, gripping his lungs and squeezing them tight, pushing the air out. He held onto his chest. Water pooled there. Warm water.
Tears welled in his eyes at the realisation that he’d been shot.
“Rachel?” he tried to say, struggling to breathe. “Wha…”
Feet flew over Colin as terrified civilians ran. He watched their forms blur as they leapt and swallowed up the line of policemen.
The world grew dark. He coughed and tasted the warm copper of blood in his mouth. He rolled his head and saw Fletcher, now doubled over Rachel and hugging her stomach, just a few metres away. Colin blinked and began to see stars as his breath grew shallower.
An unknown time later, when the chaos appeared to have died somewhat, a policeman – he had no idea which one – approached his family.
“Pweaese…” Colin tried to say. “Dunn hurrd emm…”
Colin’s sight faded to black as a gunshot cracked the atmosphere in two. The force of it buried Colin deep underground. He saw earthy walls rising up around him, or was he sinking? In his head he saw them both, his wife and his son, and felt them slip away, disappearing into the darkness all around.
~ 33 ~
Their little two-car caravan pulled out of the factory car park and out onto the winding stretch of road that crisscrossed throughout the woods as if some developer had signed his name in concrete on the face of the Kent countryside.
Ria drove David’s Cruiser up front, expressing she wanted some solitude. Some time alone with her thoughts. That left Dutchman, Colin, Joanna, and Sunny in the Ranger behind. The same red fabric in the cargo out back. Wheat sleeping once more, deeper than ever, and joined by David. Their bodies to be cremated once they made it back.
The morning half-light was all around them. Sunny had fallen to sleep almost immediately after the car had started rolling and now lay at an awkward angle on Joanna’s lap. Colin sat in the passenger seat with his elbow on the crook of the window, looking out across the land as the rain began to ease and thick beams of light stabbed through. He thought about his morning patrols, thinking that it would be about this time he’d be out in the woods around the LeShard farm, strolling along with Wheat. A gun knocking at his side as he grimaced and stared daggers at the dog for barking too loudly at a squirrel, or a bluster of leaves.
He had been too harsh on Wheat, he knew. And the memories of the mutt brought a horrible ache to his heart. Kitty, Jerry, and now the dog. All victims of a play that they hadn’t any idea they were a part of.
Colin opened the window a touch as the memories brought bile creeping up his throat. The breeze was gentle and brushed against his hair and his beard. He appreciated it. The woods around them smelled fresh and cooled his insides. A small pleasure against his many aches and pains, both internal and external.
Sunny shifted in his sleep and muttered words they couldn’t quite make out.
“Everything alrights back there?” Dutchman asked, raising his head to look in the rearview. He looked tired, but in the morning light, Colin realised that this was the closest they had truly been to each other. And Dutchman’s face was kind, rounded, careworn. He almost laughed. How could he ever have thought he was a dangerous man?
“Just dreaming,” Joanna replied.
Dutchman turned his attention back to the road. “That word has takens a very different meaning to me now.” Joanna chuckled, staring down at the brown-haired boy and running a hand through his hair. “Can I asks you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Who is Sándor?”
“Hmm?”
“The kid’s name. When we were up there and the kid was ‘dreaming’ by the cluster, you shouted ‘Sándor’.”
She smiled. “Oh… yes. That’s his real name, passed on by his parents. Hungarian, I think. But we always called him Sunny.”
Dutchman gave Joanna a knowing look. “There’s a lot you’re nots telling us, isn’t there?”
Joanna shrugged, then returned her attention to the trees outside.
Colin eyed Dutchman curiously. “What about you?”
“Whats about me?”
“‘Dutchman’? That’s hardly a name someone’s given at birth, right? If anything, to me, it sounds incredibly racist from whoever made it stick to you.”
Dutchman laughed, his heavy breath fogging the windscreen in front. He wiped at the mist with his sleeve, leaving a dirty smudge. “I gave it to myself. A dual identity in a cruel world. If you’re really wantings the truth, the name’s Anton. Anton Bakker.”
Colin wondered where he knew that name from. He had heard of Anton, seen his name somewhere. Printed? Written? Yes. Written on the yellowing pages of an old notebook that lay sodden and crumpled in his pocket. Notes exchanged between Anton of the town of Hope and Susie K. And in the letter… the very thing that had set his mind on this journey in the first place. This is the man who delivered that letter to the LeShards’ farmhouse.
“Well…” Colin said, offering a hand which Anton took in his own. “Pleased to meet you, Anton. Y’know, officially.”
They turned a corner in the woods and drove on and out into a giant clearing. On their left, they looked out to see a view of rolling hills running along the horizon. Lines of century-old stone walls separated what would’ve been farming land but had now overgrown and looked almost identical square to square. An old roadway in the distance made its way up the hills where it arrived at what looked like a single house.
Colin relaxed his head and let the images of the LeShard farmhouse into his thoughts. He’d taken it for granted at the time and he knew it. Waking up in that warm office room with the familiar stink of Jeremiah’s old sweaty band t-shirts on the walls and the same mould growing in the corners of the ceiling. Welcomed to the day with Wheat’s rough tongue and wagging tail as he burrowed under the covers. The daily patrols followed by the porridge. Night after night of playing cards with them both as they sat around and joked and laughed, sometimes when there really wasn’t much of anything to laugh about,
but they still did. Jerry’s singing… That was how the LeShards operated and they hadn’t changed in the face of this world.
Until that night. Oh, that fateful night when a lone wanderer had been welcomed into their lives.
Thomas J. Miller, Colin thought. That was a name he wouldn’t forget anytime soon.
There came a shuffling from behind as Sunny sat up and pawed at his red eyes. He looked up at the canvas of the sky where rays of sun shifted and broke through clouds that had turned from black to white. “Do you think there are people living up there?” Sunny asked, for the first time sounding like a real child and not a robot dressed in child’s skin.
Colin looked up.
“Maybe,” Joanna said. “I like to think that someone’s up there.”
Colin thought of the LeShards, of Wheat, of all those who had fallen, wondering if they were conversing with Rachel and Fletch.
*
When the Cruiser in front slowed somewhat suddenly, Colin got a sense that they weren’t far off. The place called Hope. He wondered if it would really be anything like what he had pictured in his head since Kitty had handed him the letter. All sunshine, rainbows, and smiles. And still, the closer he got, the more the doubt crept in. What if it wasn’t that at all? What if he’d been tricked, yet again, and was being led to a slum where people tolerate and there’s just enough in the way of food and shelter to hand around? It might’ve sounded like a nice name, but what if it was little more than a sick joke made in poor taste? Like giving a starving African kid who’s dying of malnourishment the name Macaroni Cheese, or Big Mac & Fries, or Thanks-But-I’m-Full.
Colin looked back at Sunny and saw, what looked like, genuine concern. His eyes shifted left to right out the windows, unable to sit in one place without fidgeting one way or another.
“How many people we talking?” Colin said.
“What? Hopefuls?” Joanna said. “I don’t have a clue. This is as new to you as it is to me.”
Out the corner of his eye, he saw Dutchman – Anton – smile. “Nervous, are we?”
Colin turned back around.
The Cruiser in front took a sharp right onto what looked like more of the farmer’s fields at first but quickly showed itself to be a straight line of country road leading directly into the woods and towards a spire that poked out of the tops of the trees like a splinter. Anton followed suit and accelerated until they were a car’s length behind. A sign on the side of the road signalled that it was the National Speed Limit. The sight of it made Colin laugh. A single sign which, at the time when cars were a dime a dozen, held so much power over the average Joe. Governments and laws – organisations propped up by the ideas of the people. A powerful force that had the authority to tell a man how fast or slow he had to drive. It was all so fickle now, every sign and direction now reduced to little more than relics littering the roads with numbers and shapes. How many years would pass before the relics lost all meaning? Hieroglyphics of a language lost long ago.
Before the line of giant trees began they saw another sign fixed to the side of a barren alder tree. The sign itself was made of a classier, thicker black material. Written in fancy chalk-paint, the sign read ‘Darley Abbington Holiday Village. Private Property. Trespassers will be prosecuted’.
And then they drove into the thick woods and stopped by a motorised steel barricade. It stood permanently erect next to a single-person cabin. Inside was a lone man stood in full winter gear. He looked set to go skiing. Colin’s stomach jumped.
They drew up close to the Cruiser which stopped at the cabin’s side. Colin noticed how banged up the Cruiser was. The rear bumper was missing and the mud and stones they’d driven through had smashed both break lights and pebble-dashed the red paint with lines of fractured metal.
Ria leant her head out of the driver’s window and the hooded head of the man in the cabin peered out through the side. They exchanged words that the others couldn’t hear. The hooded man nodded, turned to Anton’s car, and waved them on.
The Cruiser drove off and further into the woods until it disappeared round a corner, swallowed by trees. Anton followed where Ria had gone, winding slowly round the bends on roads littered with leaves, mud, and various degrees of seeds and debris. A little further on and the road evened out to reveal more of the cabins, all empty. At first, there were but a few at a time, then there became a steady stream of them until it was clear they were driving down some kind of street. They passed what looked to be a bike shop, and Colin held himself back from pressing his face against the glass to get a better look. It was empty inside but surprisingly well-kept.
They kept driving until the trees thinned and the giant security fence came into view. Barbed wire ran taut along the top, with several items of clothing caught in its barbs and even a single dirty trainer. Along the metal fencing in terrible scruffy white spray paint was the legend ‘Remain Hopeful’.
“Almost there,” Anton said.
They skirted the edge of the fence. Colin’s breath caught as he looked through the tiny gaps in the mesh and saw the town beyond. Not two minutes later they found a large gate in the fence. Anton took a left and pulled up to a stop at the gate.
Colin’s cheeks pinched into a smile.
~ 34 ~
It took Anton five minutes to rub the blue-white bleach powder on everyone and satisfy a large woman with a stern face before she called, “All clear!” and the gates opened.
It took at least three more minutes for the gate to shunt clumsily from right to left, like a magician taking his time in unveiling a prize. But when it did, boy was it worth it.
Hope. It was a holiday town. A make-believe village. A closed-off gated mini-community. The kind of place you paid out of your arse for to take your family to stay in a log cabin and be around mother nature. To be surrounded by squirrels and foxes. Have a sauna and an ice bath. It was the kind of place Colin had always dreamed of going, but could never have afforded to take Rachel and Fletcher.
On the edges of, what looked like the main hub, there were dozens upon dozens of log cabins circled outwards for miles. Dotted between were vast amounts of pine trees stretching up to the sky. There were shops, a bar, a bowling alley, a doctors, a swimming pool, and an expansive central lake with pedal boats and canoes, like a big piece of sky had fallen and stuck itself to the ground.
“Quite a sight, eh?” Anton chuckled. Colin turned to see Joanna’s eyes drinking in the sights. Even Sunny poked his head up and absorbed the brilliance of the place. The roads were bumpy and rough, mostly packed earth, and the four bounced around as they followed small signs that led to a makeshift car park.
They parked up next to a VW Campervan painted sickly green like grass that Wheat had chewed up and puked out. It didn’t look to be in working order. The wheel caps were rusted to hell and it looked like one of the back wheels were missing. Colin still found himself impressed, he hadn’t seen a real campervan in years. Next to it was a large sign on a recycled piece of log that pictured a beautiful summer’s day in the village. The sun orange and warm reflecting on the lake beneath it, and in giant hand-written lettering, it read ‘Welcome’.
They climbed out of the cars and were hit with a morning freshness of the man-made pine forest that circled them. The cool icy air that drifted over the lake and brushed up against them was refreshing. Colin took a deep breath in. The harsh air stung the back of Colin’s nostrils and throat, still sore from the filthy night spent in the dust and muck of Ditton.
Three more Hopefuls arrived and greeted Ria at her car. She walked clumsily, as if the evening’s aches and pains had taken their toll, and crossed a wooden bridge over a stream before disappearing without a second glance into something that looked like an admin office. Anton guided Colin, Joanna, and Sunny out of their car and headed a different way, to where a large green hut with a red cross stood not too far from the edge of the lake. They didn’t get far before Joanna pulled away from the group and led Sunny towards the lake and walked down the
long wooden jetty. Colin looked at Anton. Anton nodded, “It’s fine. I’ll wait,” and Colin followed.
There was a small boat tied at the end by a length of rope at the end of the jetty, bobbing gently in the water. Colin stopped a couple feet behind Joanna and Sunny, watching the sparkles of the sky as it scattered on the water’s surface. A handful of ducks and swans peppered the lake, dipping their beaks in and out of the water in search of fish. The canoes and pedal boats were empty. And all around the giant circle of the lake, they saw the log cabins hiding among the trees. Three or four of them had homely looking plumes of smoke billowing out from their tiny chimneys drawing lines of dark grey over the sky.
“I know this place,” Joanna said. “I… I mean I recognise it.”
“Yeah?” Colin said, taking another lungful of air.
“I think I came here once. When I was young. I think my daddy brought me. It seems so long ago now, though.”
“You must’ve had rich parents. These holiday homes cost a bomb.” Colin took a few steps forward, the wind playing with Joanna’s hair sent a sweet scent back to him. “I wanted to bring Fletch here, but…”
Colin looked at his bare feet on the wooden jetty. He was vaguely aware that Joanna had turned with interested eyes, but something in his tone must’ve told her not to ask any questions. For a brief moment, she reached for his hand, held it, then let it fall again.
They were silent for a while thereafter. A few Hopefuls passed behind and went about their business, taking note of the three newcomers and finding themselves reminded of the day they’d found Hope. The day that they found their safe place in a dark new world. Colin was oblivious to their passing, only really allowing himself to take it all in, and, for the first time in a long time, feel almost at peace.