by Natasha West
Eventually, we made it into the hotel and all but one of those bastards was locked in the garden. We just had the one guy to deal with. But he was the one who’d gotten the Quinn’s in here in the first place and I surmised he was a tricky bastard. When he told me that the lever for the door was upstairs, I smelled a ruse. But I knew from checking the outside that he was telling the truth, that’s where all the ropes went in, second floor window.
I made a decision. If this fucker was going to make a play for the gun, I wanted to give the Quinn’s a shot at getting free of the place. So I made them stay near the door. It wasn’t a totally brave decision, I just thought it was better to have it be one on one. If I was worrying about their safety, it might be a distraction too far and could make the difference between walking out of here or crawling. I told Alice to stay and of course, she argued.
But I knew her Achilles heel. ‘Look after your nephew, I think he needs it’ I told her and she looked to Jude. She knew I was right, that she needed to take care of the boy. He looked shaken up.
I gave Mason a little nudge and he started his backwards walk, one hand on the railings of the stairwell, one on his knife, smiling like he was all easy. I made sure to keep a few steps back. I wanted to stay out of his reach if he swung that blade. But all the way up the stairs, he was good as gold.
On the second floor, all was still well. Halfway down the hall, he spoke to me. ‘Who are you, anyway?’
‘I’m Rachel. Keep going, arsehole.’
‘You know what I mean. Who are you to these people? You weren’t with them when I found them on the road. What’s this to you?’
I sighed. ‘You don’t need to worry about that. Your only concern is opening the door.’
‘I know when I’m beaten. I’m just asking, why jump in here and risk… You didn’t know if we had guns or anything, you just came in here like John Wayne.’
I didn’t say a word to that and the guy kept talking.
‘You know what’s funny? The second I open the door, those people will be a dot on the horizon. You telling ‘em not to wait?’ he laughed. ‘You think you’re a hero. You’re just an idiot’ he said, rounding the corner into a room where ropes were attached to hooks planted in the walls and floors. ‘They will leave you for dust’ he said as he turned in the room, facing me with a contemptuous grin.
‘They might’ I replied calmly. I knew what he was saying was true. I’d given them an out and they might just take it if I didn’t come out of this room quick enough. But I was alright with that. I’d gotten alright with it the second I’d leapt over that wall. ‘Enough chatter. Open it up.’
He shrugged, ‘Whatever you say, boss’ and turned to the pulley, putting his knife down, beginning to hoist the ropes around on a wheel near the window. I heard the wooden door screeching below and I watched as he pulled the rope taut and tied it off. The door was open.
‘OK, I’m going to back out of this room and you’re going to stay where you are’ I told him. He nodded. But then he took a step forward and I pointed the gun at his face. ‘What are you doing? I said stay where you are.’
‘I heard you, boss’ he said, taking another small step.
‘Then stop it. Or I’ll have to shoot you.’
He took another small step forward and he picked his knife back up. ‘OK, you do what you think you should. Me, I’m gonna keep doing what I think I should.’
‘I’m not kidding. I’m gonna shoot you in the stomach’ I lied weakly.
But Mason kept coming. ‘If I was you, I woulda shot me on the first step’ he said, doing another small shuffle. ‘But you didn’t. Not the second or the third either. So either you’re chicken or my daughter had you pegged and there’s nothing in that gun.’
I couldn’t help it. I blinked. And then he ran at me.
In sheer panic, I pulled the gun back over my shoulder and threw it at him. But he ducked and the thing went smashing through the half-closed window pane behind him. He resumed his attack and I heard a scream coming out of me as he bore down, his large figure blocking all the light. And then he was on top of me, his knees on my legs, one hand around my neck, the other with the knife, bringing it to my throat. But then he seemed to change his mind and he flung the knife away, getting both hands around my throat. It wasn’t enough to kill me, he wanted to do it himself, with his bare hands. I tried to shout, to cry for help. But I couldn’t make a sound as my vision went woozy. I grabbed at his hands uselessly, the world spinning, the blood rushing to my head.
And then I heard a thud and his grip loosened. He fell back, clutching his head and I looked up to see Alice holding a smashed-up lamp, broken on Mason’s head. ‘Get the fuck away from her’ she shouted, still holding the broken lamp, now as a sharp implement. Mason scooted backwards but he was already starting to recover. I sat up, trying to come around as quickly as I could, fearing for Alice. I got to my knees slowly and I saw the guy start to stand. I felt in my pocket for my baton, hitting the switch and flicking it out. He paused at the sight of us, me with the baton, Alice with the jagged lamp. But I didn’t like the way he was looking at us, like he was sizing it up. Because he was still a huge guy. He was wondering if he could still beat us, now we didn’t have a gun. And honestly, I wondered if he just might.
And then, we heard a shuffle of feet coming down the hall and I knew that the Randall’s had managed to get back in and we were going to be surrounded, outnumbered. We were done.
‘Auntie!’ yelled a voice and it wasn’t one of theirs. It was Jude, as well as Emma. I took a moment to look at them and Jude had found himself a broken chair leg. Emma was holding an empty plant pot. The sight of Emma with a plant pot made me want to laugh. But it was also oddly touching. Because Mason had it wrong. They’d come back for me.
‘Jesus Christ. You people’ Mason said, examining our motley group and shaking his head, eyeing his knife on the floor. ‘You’re fucking nuts.’
I took one step forward and cracked my baton around Mason’s left ankle, feeling a satisfying contact. He screamed and went down, disabled. I didn’t know if the leg was broken, but I truly hoped so.
Not long after, we were headed out of the large door, back out into the sunshine. Me, Alice, Jude, Emma, whole and ready to move. Oddly, Alice had acquired a paperback on the journey back down to the ground floor, explaining, ‘He said I could have it, and I reckon I’ve fucking earned it.’ I looked at the book. It was The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Once we were off the grounds, we began to head for the bushes that led back out of this bizarre little world. ‘Hey, look!’ Jude said and ran back to the main wall, finding the gun in amongst some broken shards of glass. He fished it out, dusted it off and handed it over to me with a cautious smile. I took it with a nod, putting it in my pocket.
‘Where’s my Dad?’ asked a sudden and strange voice and we all turned to see the girl from the garden coming around the side of the building. As the youngest and fittest member of the group, she must have come over the wall, using the same ivy I’d taken advantage of.
‘Rose’ Jude said fearfully.
Alice walked over to her. I wasn’t too sure if she should but Rose was unarmed and I felt like Alice could handle herself, considering she’d saved my life a few minutes ago. ‘He’s upstairs, the pulley room. His leg is injured’ Alice told the girl evenly.
‘You animals’ she said, her face red with hatred.
‘We just wanted to go but he tried to kill one of ours’ Alice said, with a nod to me. I felt my heart quicken at that simple inclusion.
Rose glared at Alice and then looked to Jude, ‘All you had to do was-’
‘No. You don’t speak to him’ Alice said, stepping into her sight line, as though trying to hide the boy.
‘Actually’ Jude said, straightening up, ‘I want to say something.’ He stood side by side with Alice. Everyone looked at him shocked, particularly Alice. But Rose eyeballed him and said, ‘Go ahead. What you got to say to me, runt?’
‘I feel bad fo
r you’ Jude said sadly. ‘And I hope you leave this place because your family are using you.’
Rose spat at Jude. Jude seemed unsurprised and turned away, wiping the saliva off his leg with his hand. Rose stormed past us, to go into the hotel, no doubt to see to her father.
And we left, pushing through the brush, away from the hotel, the family ripping the rubber bands off of their wrists as they went. One by one, we emerged from the other side, to see the sun setting. ‘I think we need to set up camp soon, but I’d recommend getting a few miles further away from here’ I told the group. ‘And I don’t wanna twist the knife on what just happened, but does everybody agree to stay off the motorway now?’
‘I think we can agree on that’ Emma said, shame in her voice. Everyone nodded and on we went, walking over the M1 and out the other side, back to the smaller roads and their safety. They were dusty and stony, tough to walk. But there wasn’t a single complaint.
Eighteen
Alice
I couldn’t sleep.
I was in the tent with Emma and Jude, packed in like sardines. But that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t fall off. I couldn’t get my mind off Rachel, a few feet away, in her own tent.
We’d walked away from the hotel in silence for a whole hour, the sun setting on us and this crazy day. I felt my mind rushing with a million things I wanted to say to each and every member of our party. But how could I even begin? I wanted to thank Emma for not putting herself first for a change, for coming to back us up, to tell her what that meant. I wanted to check in with Jude, to see how he was dealing with what had almost happened to him in the hotel and to tell him I was proud of how he’d handled himself at the end, with Rose. What he’d said to her had been mature and thoughtful.
But mostly, I wanted to tell Rachel that she was… What was the word? A hero? Undoubtedly. But that didn’t begin to explain it. She was a lot more than that. At our darkest hour, she had come for us. Practically strangers, strangers who treated her advice as though it were worthless, and still, she’d come. She was, quite simply, something.
But how do you say all that to a person? Especially someone like Rachel, who wouldn’t even accept the thanks we’d begun to give after we were far enough away from the Randall’s to feel safe. How do you tell someone like that that you are amazed by them? The answer is, you can’t. So I didn’t. And since the thoughts went unexpressed, they stayed in my head, buzzing around, keeping me awake.
I wanted to get out of this tent and go to her, wake her up, take her hand and tell her that whatever she did, wherever she went, she would always mean something to me. That in my book, she was remarkable.
But of course, I didn’t. I stayed exactly where I was and spent the night talking myself out of that crazy idea. Because she wouldn’t want that. It would only embarrass us both.
The next morning, I woke up to the smell of a fire and food. I crawled past Emma and Jude, unzipping the tent to find Rachel cooking a large fish. She turned at the sound of the zip. ‘There’s a river a mile from here. I woke up early’ she explained. ‘I think we could all do with the protein.’
I sat down next to her and the fire. ‘Thank you’ I said, the word insufficient. But it was all I had for her. ‘How did you sleep?’
‘Eh, not great’ she said. ‘I think I was still a bit wound up from all that business yesterday.’
I nodded. ‘Yeah, strange day. Is this what it’s like on the road, people like that?’
She thought about it. ‘I’ve never come across that particular brand of madness, but you do find people who’ve gone a bit… Off piste.’ She turned the fish. ‘Then again, not everyone’s bad. You meet some alright people’ she said with the smallest glance at me.
‘Is that why you came back for us? Because you like us?’ I asked, half teasing, half not.
‘Don’t get me wrong, you’re a pack of lunatics’ she said lightly. ‘But you don’t mean anyone any harm. For the most part.’
‘For the most part, no, we don’t’, I agreed.
We sat in silence for a moment as the fire crackled and the fish smoked. I realised how peaceful I felt, for the first time in a long time. Out in the open, Jude and Emma sleeping nearby, my brother still very much missing in action. But I was OK. That’s how I felt, like everything might be alright. And even if it wasn’t, that it was for now. We’d been through a terrifying situation only yesterday, so why did I feel like I was taking the first real breath I’d taken in forever?
The answer was sitting next to me, turning the fish over on a skewer. The realisation arrived quietly, without fanfare.
I felt this way because of Rachel.
A monstrous yawn came from behind me and I turned to see Jude rolling out of the tent, scratching his armpit, breaking into a run, calling, ‘Just need to pee’ over his shoulder at us. A second after that, Emma crawled out, pulling a twig out of her hair, moaning, ‘God, that tent smells like someone died in it. Teenage boys. When I was young, you could at least toss them a deodorant to mask it. That’s what I miss about the old days. It smelled better!’
‘Morning, Emma’ I said and she grunted back before wandering in the opposite directing to Jude, calling, ‘Back in a bit.’
I sighed loudly. ‘Sorry about them.’
Rachel turned to me, ‘Grab those plates, would you?’
I pulled the tin plates out of the bag and she began to divide up the fish with her pen knife. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m not waiting for those two. I like my food hot.’
‘Screw ‘em’ I said with a smile, taking the offered plate and picking off some fish. It tasted great.
We walked all day that day, until the sun set behind us. It was our third day on the road, which meant only two more and we’d be at Gable.
That whole day, everyone seemed quieter than usual. Even Emma seemed caught in silent contemplation. For me, the source of my disquiet was knowing how I felt about Rachel now. How I didn’t see it coming, I’ll never understand. Even though I’d thought her beautiful at first sight, I’d been caught up in other things. Jude’s crime, my brother’s disappearance. Emma’s general disagreeability. But I knew it now. And I didn’t know how to not know it. But that was what I wanted to do, to pick this silly new feeling out of my mind and leave it on the road behind me.
It wasn’t because I thought she wouldn’t return my feelings. My thoughts didn’t get that far. And that was because of the one true fact that I knew about Rachel. That once this journey was over, she’d leave us.
Whatever thoughts I might have entertained about the future, she’d never get in line with them, even if I could tell her how I felt, even if she felt anything in return. It wouldn’t matter. She travelled. That’s who she was. She kept moving. As long as we moved with her, she was with us, with me. But eventually, we’d go back to the farm and we’d want to stay put and she wouldn’t. I knew that.
Once this was over, she’d be gone. So it didn’t matter about any silly feelings I’d begun to notice. The warmth that spread through my chest at the sight of her now, it was a bad joke that the universe had decided to play on me and I wasn’t going along with it. That old idea of love, the way we used to see that word, it was gone. There were no fancy restaurants and no cinemas. Dates had died. Romance was buried. I’d gotten used to that some years back. I wasn’t going to fall in love with Rachel and propose at the top of the Eiffel Tower or any of that business.
Love wasn’t on the table. So I wasn’t going to try and pick it up.
Nineteen
Rachel
One day away from Gable and there were moans beginning to occur. Emma was complaining about her infamous ankle again. Jude was talking about how much his feet hurt. My legs were feeling sore but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know if Alice was suffering because she’d barely spoken in two days. I found myself wondering what was on her mind. Probably her brother.
I was thinking about Olly too. I was hoping that he was alright, that nothing bad had become of him
. I didn’t know him but if he was dead, the Quinn’s would be crushed. Jude would have lost a dad, Emma a husband, Alice a brother. The way the world was now, there wasn’t a lot in the way of good news, but I was hoping that this turned out the way they wanted. I didn’t want them to be hurt that way. Emma was a pain in the arse but we’d both had each other backs when it counted so she was, not a friend as such, but an ally. And Jude, well, the way we’d met, I shouldn’t have given two fucks what happened to him, but I knew him better now and he wasn’t just some teenage shithead. He was a kid in a bad spot, but there was good in him and I’d seen it. Plus, I’d rescued him this week and that made him feel like he was my responsibility. It was funny how he seemed to bring out this motherly instinct in all the women in his life.
And Alice. She should have a better life than the one dealt to her but if she couldn’t have that, then at the very least, I wanted to get her brother back for her. I wanted to walk into Gable and deliver her to a joyful reunion.
But in all honesty, I didn’t believe it was going to go down that way.
I began to feel guilty. I was the one who had given them hope in the first place, telling them this tale, bringing them down here. If I hadn’t said anything, they might have just gotten on with their lives, never knowing for sure what had happened but learning to live with that uncertainty.
Instead, what I might be about to give them was the definitive knowledge of whatever fate had befallen Olly. They were going to be face to face with it. And I would be right there, the messenger herself, ready to be shot. If they got bad news, they would come to hate me. Alice especially, the one to champion this journey to find her brother on my say so. It wouldn’t matter that I’d helped them out of a jam at the hotel. This would define me, the fate of Olly. Alice might try to pretend she didn’t blame me, but…
That was when I started to wonder why I cared so much about what Alice thought of me. And that’s when I understood that something had had happened. A terrible thing. The only thing I really feared. An attachment, to Alice.