by Jacob Rayne
Becki’s cries were drowned out by the blood that raged through her head.
The girl drew nearer, her face twisting in a grin that made her look even uglier than previously.
Debbie threw a wild punch. The girl ducked and slammed a fist into Debbie’s ribs.
The last of her breath exploded out of her in a pained cry and she fell to her knees, trying desperately to suck in the air she needed to fight.
The lad loomed over her.
The knife in his hand looked even bigger up close.
Dark blood still dripped from the blade and landed in the grass like crimson dew.
Debbie heard Becki’s cry and managed to force herself to her feet. She swung a desperate punch, her last hurrah before the knife plunged into her, penetrating skin and muscle, grazing bone, opening arteries and liberating blood.
Her strike landed on the girl’s face, scoring a bloody trail down her cheek. The girl cursed and balled her fists.
Debbie caught movement behind the youths.
‘Oi, get away from her,’ came a gruff voice.
Suddenly the lad with the knife was lurching forward, his hands clutching the back of his head as though he was afraid it was going to fall off.
While the girl watched in disbelief, Debbie ran in to help her saviour.
Her neighbour, Frank, seemed to have them in check though, using his walking stick like a pool cue to slam the wind out of the girl and making her fall to the grass, gasping for breath.
The lad cried out as the stick slammed into the side of his thigh but still managed to run away.
‘You’re fucking dead,’ he hissed.
The girl shuffled away, her hands clasped to her gut. She didn’t have the breath to threaten them, but her intimidating stare was clear enough.
‘I heard the screams and hid in the hedge when I saw them coming this way,’ Frank explained. His kind face was flushed a healthy red.
‘I’m so glad to see you,’ Debbie said.
‘You ok?’
The events of the last five minutes caught up with her and the cheese sandwich and cup of tea she’d had for dinner shot up her throat and spattered the grass at her feet.
Frank took control of the pushchair, linking Debbie’s arm to give her support enough to walk.
He helped her down onto his settee, handing her a cup of tea what seemed like a few seconds later.
Everything seemed to be moving faster than she could cope with.
‘So, start from the beginning,’ he said.
Frank was appalled but unsurprised by the incident as he’d lived here most of his life and had watched the place go steadily downhill over the past few years.
‘Looked like Boxy and his girlfriend,’ Frank said.
‘Who?’
‘Boxy. Robert Boxwell. Arsehole who moved here a few years ago. He was a one man crime wave, but now he’s started attracting other wankers. You’ll have seen his dad begging outside the chip shop.’
‘Ah, right.’
‘Waste of precious air, those lot.’
‘Yes, you’re right, Frank.’
He pulled the phone from the cradle and quickly punched three nines into the keypad.
‘I’d like to report a murder,’ he began.
Officer Osbourne was at the door a few minutes later. He was sympathetic, and promised to let Debbie know what was going on with the case, but didn’t seem to understand that she was worried about the gang seeking revenge on her.
‘We’ll start identifying her body asap,’ he said.
‘Oh, I was trying to call you guys on this when one of them came back,’ she said, pulling the woman’s blood-splashed mobile phone out of her pocket.
As she did so, she noticed that her pocket was empty. She felt a jolt of unease and frantically started searching the pushchair for her purse.
‘What’s the matter?’ Frank asked.
‘My purse, it must have dropped out of my pocket.’
‘Well, I would ring the bank, so those little shits don’t clear out your accounts.’
‘I’m going to do that, but it isn’t why I’m worried. My driver’s license was in there. The bastards will have my address.’
Three
Debbie’s husband, Clive, wasn’t as worried, although he did blanch a little when she described the knifing in graphic detail.
‘I’m sure nothing will come of it, honey,’ he said, his casual tone annoying her.
‘These bastards stabbed a woman in a public place in broad daylight. I am the only witness to the murder. I don’t think these are the type of people who would have any qualms about making a home visit.’
‘I think you’re worrying unnecessarily. The police have the body. They have a decent description of each of them from the statements you and Frank gave, and they took your keys for analysis of the blood from the two you punched. Which, by the way, is mega hot.’
‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ she snapped.
‘Sorry, just craving a bit of excitement. This might be fun, being part of a murder case.’ His eyes lit up.
‘You wouldn’t be saying that if you’d seen it,’ she snarled.
‘Sorry, honey. I’m just trying to lighten the mood.’
‘I’m frightened for our lives, Clive. They were like animals.’
‘We could stay at my mother’s if you like?’
The idea of living with Clive’s mother, who Debbie reckoned appeared in the dictionary as the definition for ‘overbearing’, filled her with dread.
‘No, we’ll see how it turns out with the cops first.’
‘So you’d rather risk our lives than stay with my mother? That’s a sorry state of affairs, mind, Deb.’
His fury was nothing compared to hers. ‘Can’t you see how upsetting all of this is for me? Becki could have been hurt too, for Christ’s sake.’
His face dropped at this.
‘So you need to start taking this seriously.’
‘Ok, ok, I’m sorry.’
He wasn’t yet, but he would be.
Debbie barely slept a wink over the next week, her mind turning faint noises from the street outside into the sound of the teenagers on their way to punish her for witnessing their crime, but nothing happened.
Clive slept like a baby, which irked her even more.
He had given a macho promise, something along the lines of, ‘They’ll rue the day they set foot in this house,’ she couldn’t quite remember.
Even he didn’t believe the bravado; they both knew he was no fighter.
Almost two weeks passed before Debbie plucked up the nerve to leave the house again. She didn’t want to go to the park, and was furious about this as that had been the only place worth visiting in the crummy town.
She started off with baby steps, going round to the shops to buy her own bread and milk.
Frank had been good enough to bring supplies round for her every few days but she told him enough was enough. She would not allow herself to become a recluse.
She scanned every passer-by carefully lest she bumped into one of the three teenagers on her travels.
A sigh of relief escaped her when she reached the shop without seeing any of them.
Becki started twisting and got the full brunt of Debbie’s anger.
A few seconds later, Debbie whispered a guilty apology.
It wasn’t her daughter’s fault she was feeling like this. She didn’t deserve to have it taken out on her.
Becki seemed to understand and gave her mother one of the nose wrinkling smiles that temporarily chased away grim reality.
After paying for the shopping, she set off home, again eyeing everyone she passed. The three teenagers were conspicuous by their absence.
Hey, maybe they’ve fled the area, to avoid the cops tracking them down, she thought, bringing the second genuine smile of the past few weeks.
This thought was proven to be absurd when she got home and noticed the door standing open, the lock splintered away from the fr
ame.
She knocked on Frank’s door, wanting him to look after Becki while she checked the house out.
He shook his head and insisted on getting the cops to check it for her. ‘If they’re still in there, they’re not going to appreciate you disturbing ’em,’ he explained.
‘You’re right.’
Osbourne didn’t seem too interested in the problem, even when Debbie explained her concerns. ‘That only happens in the movies,’ he said.
She refrained from punching him and instead went into her home.
‘It’s not pretty, I’m afraid,’ a female cop told her.
Preparing herself for the worst, she went inside.
The cop wasn’t lying; the hall carpet had smears of dog shit all over it for a start. The stench made her mouth fill with vomit.
Tears filled her eyes as she saw the state of the front room.
Nothing seemed to have escaped the wrath of the vandals.
The mirror was shattered into a hundred pieces, as was the TV.
The furniture had been tipped over and flung into the walls.
The bookshelf was empty, some of the books had even been torn in half.
Clive’s music collection had had a hammer taken to it and shards of broken CDs winked in the light.
The kitchen cupboards had been cleared out, huge piles of glass and crockery lying on the floor.
Debbie sobbed as she saw the full extent of the destruction. As she moved up the stairs, she saw trails of dog shit smeared up the walls. Again the smell assaulted her nostrils.
Their bedroom had been trashed. Dog shit had been rubbed into the bedspread and pillow cases and the torn clothes which were piled on the floor beneath the splintered wardrobe doors.
As she moved into Becki’s room, she saw a stain which made her heart drop more than the dog shit had.
This stain was scarlet and made her stomach crawl up into her throat.
The family cat, Snuffles, lay in a wide pool of blood.
Or at least, his body did.
His ginger fur was matted with thick dark gore. The metallic scent clung to her nostrils, somehow worse than the smell of dog shit that filled the rest of the house.
She didn’t know what to do, just stared at the headless body and the glistening pool of blood that surrounded it.
She wondered where the head was, then she saw a thick trail of blood drops running across the cream carpet towards Becki’s cot. Her heart sank further as she followed the trail.
When she pulled back Becki’s pink blanket, one of Snuffles’ eyes stared up at her, seeming to ask the question why she had allowed this to happen to him.
His other eye was just a bloody hole in his face. A white nub of spine protruded from beneath his severed head.
Blood was smeared all over Becki’s mattress.
This drove away the fear, though, her rage consuming her as she picked up the cot and upturned it, throwing it halfway across the room.
Snuffles’ head left a blood spatter as it landed on the carpet with a liquid splat.
‘Fucking bastards,’ she bellowed.
Frank came hobbling in. ‘What’s up?’ he asked, eyeing the trails of dog shit on the walls with an expression of unadulterated disgust.
Debbie was suddenly so overwhelmingly angry that she couldn’t even voice her frustration.
Frank’s eyes widened when he saw the cat’s body and its missing head.
‘Sweet Jesus,’ he said. ‘The cops must have missed this the first time round.’
Osbourne came back to assess the damage for a second time.
‘Yes, it is appalling, and we will do everything we can to catch them, but we have other things that are our priority at the moment.’
‘What, more important than a murder case?’ Frank spat. ‘These arseholes have threatened Debbie and her family, including a one year old baby. There must be something you can do.’
Osbourne nipped his nose against the smell and shook his head. ‘We will search again, but there are other cases which are our priority.’
Frank almost hurled his walking stick at the smug bastard as he went down the stairs.
‘You are welcome to stay at mine if you like, until you get this place tidied up,’ Frank said.
‘That’s very kind, but we need to be in our home now.’
‘The offer still stands. And I will help to clean up.’
‘No, I couldn’t ask you to do that.’
‘I insist. Maggie will watch the little one.’
Frank pulled on a pair of marigolds he’d taken from his jacket pocket and started mopping up Snuffles’ blood from the carpet.
Debbie still felt utter fury at the bastards who had done this.
She remained terrified of what they were going to do, but she was also scared of what she was daydreaming about doing to them.
Clive was similarly wide-eyed and dismayed when he saw the place, but Debbie and Frank had already cleaned up a fair amount of the carnage.
‘What the—’ he said, trailing off as he saw the smears of dog shit up the walls.
‘Now are you going to take this seriously?’ Debbie said, eyeballing him.
He opened his mouth to speak, but then he saw Frank descending the stairs, the blood-smeared yellow marigolds on his hands.
Something that felt like a small, hard football left a wet stain on his shirt as it bounced off his chest. He screamed when he realised the stain was blood.
When his eyes clapped on the head in his arms, he dropped it and wiped his hands on his trousers to rid them of the blood.
‘This is deadly fucking serious,’ Frank said.
Clive gulped, nodded. ‘What are we going to do about it?’ he asked.
‘I’ve got a shotgun, which I fully intend on using if I see anyone sniffing around the place,’ Frank said.
Debbie gulped now, startled how fast things had escalated, and by how willing she was for Frank to use the gun on her tormentors.
‘I don’t think it will come to that,’ Clive said.
Frank raised his eyebrows. ‘I do. Look at the state of this place. That could be Becki’s head you’re holding right now.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Debbie screamed, the one idea she’d been trying to avoid thinking about shoved into her head in frighteningly graphic fashion.
‘Sorry,’ Frank said, ‘Just need to get this across to your husband.’
Clive nodded. ‘Point taken. But I don’t think we’re quite at the stage of gunning them down.’
‘No, me neither,’ Debbie said. ‘But if they try to hurt Becki, I would be ok with anything we did to them.’ Now the thought was voiced, it sounded even worse to her, but it was the truth, she’d do everything in her power to protect Becki.
‘Yeah, I agree,’ Clive said. ‘I really think we should go to my mam’s until this blows over.’
‘This isn’t going to blow over,’ Debbie said, her voice now eerily calm. ‘I know that now.’
Four
It took most of the next few days to clean up the house and Debbie and Clive both broke down at the plight of their once-proud home.
The scent of dog shit seemed to follow them around the house, no matter how many times they washed the walls and the floor.
Becki seemed to enjoy her new cot, which was good, as Debbie had refused to have her sleep in the blood-stained one in which she’d found Snuffles’ head.
The cream carpet came up too when long hours of scrubbing had done little to diminish the blood stains.
They seemed to just get finished when more stains would turn up.
The trauma Debbie and Clive felt was mercifully not picked up by Becki, who seemed as happy as ever.
Debbie found herself having some really bad thoughts about the scumbags who had done this to their home.
Her Facebook page received dozens of messages, all threatening her or her family.
In the end, she threw her phone against the wall to avoid receiving the messages.
&nb
sp; A month later, the teenagers returned. The house was silent, even Debbie managing to sleep now.
The sound of shattering glass from downstairs jolted her awake. She gave Clive a shove to wake him up too.
He groaned as his eyelids opened.
‘Something’s just broken downstairs,’ she said, the words when spoken aloud seeming to bring home to her that this was actually happening.
He sat upright as fast as if he’d been punched in the gut.
Debbie grabbed the eight inch butcher’s knife she’d hidden under her side of the bed in case this happened.
‘I’ll go down, show them the error of their ways,’ Clive said. ‘You look after Becki.’
Debbie nodded. ‘Be careful,’ she said, kissing him on the cheek.
Later she’d wish she had chosen more poignant, memorable words, but then of course she didn’t know what was going to happen.
Clive scooped up a claw hammer from under his side of the bed and pulled the door open.
Glass broke again, then came the sound of feet landing on the floor downstairs.
‘They’re in,’ Clive said, ‘Get yourself in there with Becki.’
Debbie nodded and moved into Becki’s room. She roughly pulled her daughter out of her cot, apologised for the heavy-handed treatment and shoved a dummy into her mouth when she started to whimper.
‘Mammy will keep you safe,’ she said, kissing her daughter on the cheek. She pulled open the closet door and concealed her and Becki inside.
Her frantic heartbeat seemed to echo around the closet as they waited to hear the outcome of the confrontation downstairs.
Clive’s heart was racing even faster than his wife’s. The hammer trembled slightly in his hand.
He heard a second set of footsteps in the front room, then muffled curses as one of the intruders brought himself to grief on a piece of broken glass.
He hated how much noise the stairs were making, giving away his every move. May as well run down them, he thought with a grimace.
The living room door came open and he saw a hooded figure come out. The knife that the figure held looked more like a sword.