Son of Heaven

by Wingrove, David

  Jake checked the windows, making sure he wasn’t being watched, then stooped down and lifted the young man’s head.

  He had been beaten badly. Mercilessly, by the look of it.

  Evil fuckers…

  Jake walked on, tensed now, his gun drawn and ready, expecting the worst.

  At the first roundabout they’d built a barricade across the road, forcing any cars to either drive up onto the grass verge, or drive the wrong way about the roundabout.

  There was no one there, but just across the way Jake saw how they’d built a second barrier, to try and trap those motorists who’d thought to evade the first. It had been cleared away, shunted over to one side. By the army, probably. But the wrecks of four separate cars could be glimpsed just a bit further on, and when he came to one of them, Jake was shocked to see that all four of the occupants had been killed, charred to death inside the burning vehicle.

  The sight sickened him. It was hard to tell who they’d been – male, female, young or old, but he imagined them a family: mum and dad and their son and daughter. Imagined how terrified they must have been at the end.

  He walked on.

  The central part of Andover, according to his map, had been made into an enclave. There was a wall about it and three gates. Or, at least, there had been, for they too had been burned down, the wall breached in several places.

  As for the town itself, it showed every sign of having been brutalized. Not a house or shop was undamaged, barely a single window was unbroken. A dozen buildings – maybe more, he didn’t venture down some of the side roads – had been burned to the ground. More sickening yet was the sight of bodies, lying untended in the littered streets. He counted more than twenty before he gave up. All of them had been attacked savagely and beaten to death – like the young man he’d seen earlier.

  Out in the middle of the main street, Jake turned 360 degrees, his gun searching every window, every shadowed place. It was an hour or more from sunset and he had the feeling that this was not the place to be when darkness fell. But he had walked a long way and he was tired. And not only tired, but hungry.

  He let out a long breath.

  There was no one about. Andover was a ghost town.

  He ran across, then ducked down a side road, checking each doorway, each window as he passed. There at the far end of the narrow street, he stopped, facing a small cottage-like building. It was painted a cheerful yellow.

  He hesitated, then tried the door. It swung open.

  Jake stepped inside.

  He’d thought the house was empty. Thought he’d got the knack of telling which ones were, but he was wrong this time.

  Or almost wrong.

  The sight of the old man sprawled on the sofa, covered in blood, his head smashed in, was a shock. Likewise the woman on the stairs. He thought at first that maybe she was just sitting there, quiet in her sadness, only she too was dead, her sightless eyes staring straight ahead, into infinity.

  He didn’t know how she’d died, didn’t really want to look too close, but it was more than clear how her husband had been murdered. He lay on his back on the big double bed in the back room upstairs, an axe in his chest, a look of surprise frozen on his face.

  ‘Fucking hell…’

  It was as he was standing there, staring at the corpse, that she came at him.

  If he’d not been wearing the protective armoured jacket, he’d have been dead right there and then. As it was he had a bruise the size of a melon come up later on.

  The blow threw him forward, onto the bed. As he scrambled up, wondering what had hit him, she came at him again.

  He couldn’t get his gun up fast enough, couldn’t unlock the safety. Her second blow glanced off his shoulder, taking a slice off his ear.

  Jake grunted and tried to back off, tried to warn her. ‘For god’s sake…’

  Only she wasn’t listening. Her face was like a fury’s. As she threw herself at him again with the big kitchen knife, he opened fire.

  Twenty rounds from close range. Enough to take out a platoon.

  Jake let out a groan. The force of the blast had literally blown her off her feet.

  He stood there, staring down at her in disbelief, his hands shaking violently.

  What was left of her chest wasn’t worth keeping. It was just a raw and bloodied mess.

  She still gripped the knife, tightly, almost convulsively, but she was dead. And her face… Jake staggered to the side and threw up. She was just a girl. Just a wee girl. Why, she couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen.

  He glanced round, then shook his head, in pain at the sight.

  ‘You stupid girl! You stupid, stupid girl!’

  Who knew what she had seen? Maybe she’d thought he was her parents’ murderer, come back to finish the job. Maybe she’d even been a witness to it all, hidden away somewhere, in a wardrobe or something. He’d never know.

  All he knew was that he felt sick to the stomach at what he’d done.

  He stepped over her, making for the door. There he’d stopped, holding his wounded ear, taking a moment to look back. There was blood everywhere. And the two corpses…

  He staggered away, crying now, ashamed of what he’d done.

  After that, he had tried not to break into any more houses. Tried to make do with what he had. To catch an hour or two of sleep here and there, hidden away out of sight. Only that wasn’t always possible, and as more people appeared on the road so the potential for trouble increased. These were desperate times, and he saw from the eyes of those few whose path he crossed that desperation bred a kind of pragmatic evil. People were willing to do things they’d never have dreamed of doing. Just like he had.

  He spent that night in an old abandoned brewery just outside of Andover, in an attic room that could be reached only by a ladder. He pulled the ladder up, like a drawbridge, but in the middle of the night he was woken by the sound of lorries pulling up outside, in the brewery’s cobbled yard.

  Curious, he crept to the tiny attic window and looked down.

  It was the army. Or some of them, at least. Two lorries full of khaki soldiers and an armoured car. Maybe the same as he’d seen earlier, on the A343.

  The sight of them cheered him. He had begun to think that everything had broken down, but if the army was still functioning, still keeping some semblance of order, then maybe they still had a chance.

  He was about to leave his place at the window and go down to speak to them – to maybe get a lift into Salisbury with them – when he heard the sound of another two lorries rattling down the narrow lane.

  These had armed guards riding shotgun at the back of them. Inside were what could only have been prisoners, for the men who staggered from the back of the lorries were handcuffed, their hands tied so they were right up under their chins.

  And one other salient feature. They were all black.

  Jake knew at once that this wasn’t right. They might have been troublemakers, serious rioters even, only this was Andover and there was not a single white face among the captives.

  He quickly packed his bag, checked that his gun was loaded, then returned to the window.

  Things were happening fast down there in the yard. They had stripped the prisoners and had formed a circle about them, guns raised.

  Jake’s mouth was dry. He thought he knew what was coming. Only what happened next surprised him. Surprised and horrified. One of the prisoners was taken from the circle and dragged into a smaller group close by, made up of six big, bare-chested soldiers. Sergeants by the look of them, altogether older and tougher than the squaddies who formed the other circle. These began by taunting their captive, pushing him about and flicking at him, lightly at first, like it was in play, but then more viciously, until they were raining vicious punches and kicks at the man as he lay on the ground.

  Jake could see the dull glint of a knuckleduster, heard the crunch as steel-capped boots smashed teeth and bone.

  He tore himself away, sickened, unab
le to watch. But the sound of it went on as the ritual was repeated for another and yet another of the prisoners.

  It was now that some of the captives, knowing what fate had in store for them, tried to make a break.

  They had no chance, of course. The soldiers had awaited this moment. In an instant some of them drew their knives, while others used the butts of their guns as clubs, wading in, joining in the fun, stabbing and smashing in a real blood frenzy.

  It was over in minutes.

  While the older men smoked and talked among themselves, the squaddies set to, loading the bodies back onto the trucks, slinging the dead men up onto the platform like they were haunches of beef, laughing and joking as they did.

  From where he was, Jake could have taken out at least three or four of them, maybe more, before they’d even worked out where he was firing from. Only what was the point? He’d be dead. They would make sure of it. Whereas if he kept his head down…

  As the lorries drove away, Jake sat there with his back to the attic wall, shivering, not from the cold, but from an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. The world was going mad and there was nothing he could do. He had given it his best shot, back in the datscape, and he had failed. All he could do now was hide away. Until things got better.

  Which was why he was here now, sat at the roadside near Salisbury, waiting for the crowds to pass, for darkness to fall.

  Further up the road they had set up a barrier. Soldiers were manning it, stopping people and checking their IDs, while others observed the crowd from the back of an army truck, looking out over people’s heads, making sure there was no trouble.

  Were they the same soldiers? He couldn’t tell. It had been dark, and he’d not really noticed which regiment they were from. But he didn’t trust any of them now.

  That way, he realized, was barred to him. Even if his identity was back on record, even if he did officially exist once more, he wasn’t sure that he wanted anyone to know where he was. What if an ID enquiry tipped them off? They had found him last time, and double quick. Why shouldn’t they be able to find him again?

  No. He’d wait for dark then make his way round to the south and then west again. Coombe Bissett was only a short way beyond the town, a couple of miles at most. It made no sense to be impatient, not now that he was so close.

  He sat there for another hour, biding his time, then got up and walked away, crossing over the main road and taking a side street, away from the tide of refugees.

  He was halfway down when he heard the unmistakable click of a gun being cocked in the deep shadow to his right. He stopped, raising his hands, slowly turning towards the sound, making sure he did nothing to make them panic and shoot him.

  The man was roughly his own height, but whether he was young or old, Jake couldn’t tell. His face was completely in shadow.

  ‘What’s ee want?’ the stranger asked, in a broad Wiltshire accent.

  Fifties, Jake guessed. He cleared his throat. ‘Just passing through, Mister. Don’t want no trouble. There’s soldiers stopping people up there, and I don’t feel like being stopped, if you know what I mean?’

  The man stepped forward a little, coming out of shadow. His shotgun was levelled at Jake’s chest.

  ‘And why be that?’

  More like sixties, he re-evaluated. The man’s eyes were surrounded by wrinkles, his beard completely grey.

  ‘Maybe because I’ve seen too much these past few days. Seen what they’re capable of. I don’t fancy being any man’s prisoner.’

  The old man nodded vaguely at that. ‘Where you be ’eaded?’

  ‘Coombe Bissett. Got friends there. They’re expecting me.’

  ‘Coombe Bissett, eh?’ His eyes blinked, blinked again. ‘Then you best get movin’, eh, boy? There’s a track goes round that way… keep walking down this road, two, three hundred yards, then right. You’ll recognize it. There’s a long gate with a broken bar. Climb over that and follow the path… it’ll bring you out south of the town…’

  Jake touched his finger to his brow. ‘Thanks. I’m much obliged to you… And good luck.’

  The old man nodded. ‘Looks like we’ll all be needing it, eh, boy?’

  The encounter with the old man raised his spirits. Like the picnic, it was sign that there was still some kindness, some decency in the world. That things might yet be okay.

  Only every time he thought that, he kept seeing her again. His darling Kate. There on the floor beside her bed.

  It was late afternoon by the time he got there, for though it wasn’t far, there had been army patrols everywhere and he’d had to hide several times, backtracking each time and trying another way. But finally here he was.

  Coombe Bissett was much as he remembered it. Beyond the razor-topped wall, there was a pond and, across from it, an inn – the only one in the village. Just beyond that was a long, sloping lawn with a row of black brick houses to the left, and, at the top, Hugo’s cottage, with its thatched roof and whitewashed walls.

  Jake tapped in the security code at the enclave gate and waited as it hissed open. Walking past the inn, he was conscious of the silence of the place. There was no sign of anyone.

  How many times had he come here in the past? At least six or seven. But he had never been so glad to see it as now.

  As he climbed the slope he noticed, to the right of the house, in the yard next to the adjacent barn, a bright red Audi, parked right up against the wall.

  Jake smiled at the sight of it. Jenny’s here!

  Only then he remembered his news.

  He stopped and turned, composing himself, looking about him. It was all so quiet, so peaceful, after all he’d seen.

  Jake took a long breath. He was close to tears. He had been so alone on the road. So fucking terribly alone.

  He turned back, imagining their faces. Their surprise at seeing him.

  He had never felt so glad to be somewhere. Never in all his life.

  Wiping his face, he took the last few strides across the lawn, letting himself in by the side door.

  He could hear the radio, playing in the background. Could hear Hugo’s voice, speaking over it, then Chris’s sudden laughter.

  Jake closed his eyes, a tear rolling down his face.

  Thank fuck…

  He peeled off the jacket and set the helmet down beside the butler sink. Then, careful to make no sound, he lay his guns and knapsack down in the corner by the freezer unit.

  He could hear Jenny’s voice now, making some joke. Chris was laughing again; that lovely, deep, hearty laughter of his.

  Jake froze. The next voice stunned him.

  Kate. It was Kate.

  He walked through. Saw at once that the room was empty.

  To his right the big wall screen was lit up. On it, as large as life, the six of them sat about, half-filled wine glasses and a half a dozen bottles spread out on the low central table, as they laughed and joked, in this very room.

  Two years ago, it had been. Jake could remember it like yesterday.

  He went across and, crouching down, looked at the projection box. It was on a loop. He pressed pause. At once the image froze.

  Jake stood, looking about him.

  Maybe they were out. Maybe they’d gone to town, to get food and supplies. But if so, then why all of them? Why hadn’t someone stayed to mind the fort? And why had they left the screen on a loop?

  He went upstairs. The place had been ransacked. Totally trashed, like someone had been through everything with a fine-tooth comb.

  Looking for me. Or for some clue as to where I’d go.

  Only where were they? Had they been taken somewhere?

  Jake hoped not. But what other explanation was there?

  What surprised him most, after all he’d seen these past few days, was that there were no signs of violence. No blood. No bodies.

  He grabbed the gun then went outside, checking the barn, the summer house, the garden shed.

  Nothing. No sign of them at all.

>   Jake stood there, back in the lounge, wondering what to do. He’d had no other plan except to come here.

  If they’d been here once, then surely they’d come back. And if he were here…

  He had to leave. He couldn’t risk staying.

  Jake found the keys to Jenny’s car where he knew she always left them, in the drawer to the right of the sink, then loaded his things.

  He should have gone, there and then, before they came. Every minute he was there he was in danger. Only he couldn’t leave. Not before seeing her once more. Not without hearing her voice.

  Jake went back through and, for the next hour, stood before the screen, watching it all. His life with Kate. One evening of their charmed and wonder -ful life.

  Only then, at the end of it, did he tear himself away and, tears running down his face, reversed out onto the slope, heading away from there, knowing he’d never see any one of them again.

  The car got him as far as the village of Pimperne, just outside of Blandford Forum. There the compressed air cylinder gave out. Taking his knapsack and his gun, he abandoned the car and set off on foot, heading south, round the town, meaning to get back onto the main road and follow it down to Dorchester. Only it was getting dark and when he got to the roundabout he could see, along the road a bit, that two houses had been set ablaze, and knew that trouble lay that way.

  Which was why he took the Poole road.

  Two hours later, having made good time on an almost empty road, he found himself on the outskirts of that great sprawl of suburban architecture that was the Poole and Bournemouth enclave.

  It lay like a great swathe of brightness between him and the darkness of Poole Bay, that very brightness an encouraging sign. Elsewhere almost everything had been cast into darkness, but here it was different. Here they’d kept things going.

  It was only streetlights, he realized, only he had never seen anything quite so welcoming, anything quite so expressive of what they stood to lose.

  Even so, it was no use going that way. It might have looked welcoming, but there was nothing for him there. Not while they were after him.