The Border Reiver

by Nick Christofides

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

  Davey hesitated, flashing a look at Conor and Steve. Then at Roland, who gave him a reassuring nod from where he remained sitting in the car.

  “Because he told me that if we got sent all the way up there for nothing then I wouldn’t be coming back down again…”

  Truter moved towards Steve, who grinned back at his boss. Truter said nothing, but as he approached the Marine he drew his handgun. He pistol-whipped Steve across the face in a brutal flash. The man went down to one knee with a groan and blood dripped from the gash that had been opened under his eye. He looked up at Truter with a face like thunder. His pal took a step towards Truter, who turned towards him.

  “Please try it, I won’t kill you. But you’ll end up being a lesson for all those foot soldiers who want to question me. I relish the test; come on, you fucker…” The man stopped in his tracks. "No? Not so confident. Come on, you’re bigger than me, younger than me, have a go, c’mon!!” Truter strained against the air, willing the man to attack. The pause was eternal, but Conor looked to the floor. He backed down.

  “Right then, now we are back to the status quo, you get into your hollow heads that I am giving the orders here. And this is grown up stuff, you don’t do what I say, I will kill you. You leave; I hunt you down and kill you. You do as I say and you have a nice trouble free life.” His eyes pierced each of the men breaking their will that little bit more.

  “Now you arseholes get up that hill and…” he turned to the two Marines “…you come back down that hill without the farmer and I will kill you.”

  The four men set off up the hill, Davey and Gerry trudging a few paces behind the others. Davey's weapon was hanging limp by his side. Gerry could hear mumbling from the two soldiers over the wisp of grass under their feet. He couldn’t hear the words, but he imagined the bravado coming back now that they were away from Truter.

  Gerry shared Roland’s feelings of being a prisoner in his own life. He had no control over his destiny, being carried on the wave of this new organisation whose practices were very different to what he had been expecting. He feared for his life, and the fear was not being brought about so much from the enemies of the revolution but from its leaders. But he differed from Roland in that he enjoyed the violence and the power. So he followed Truter, choosing bravado above brains, but hoping sooner or later an opportunity would present itself for him to escape.

  The four men trudged on breathing hard now on the steady incline, they were about two-thirds of the way to the tree line, about two hundred yards out. The woodland was becoming detailed rather than the wash of a landscape painting. The individual trees were coming into focus, the breeze washed through the branches, and the stones of the wall showed their moss-covered faces. The men approaching the wood noticed none of that detail.

  A tall figure had appeared, rangy with shoulders to hang saddles on, his white tresses blowing west to east and that grimace of clenched teeth - from that distance it looked as though he were smiling. He had a hunting rifle casually resting on his hip, the barrel pointing into the sky. His right hand, however, held the weapon next to the trigger. He stood motionless as he had done before when Davey and Gerry approached the house the first time. They flashed a nervous look at one another as all four men stopped in their tracks.

  “You’re a wanted man, Mr Bell,” Conor shouted up the hill.

  “That right?” he responded.

  “We gotta take you down the hill now, upright or on your back, it’s up to you.”

  “You better come and get me then.”

  “Come on, Mr Bell, there’s four of us, you can’t keep this up.”

  A lamb was calling for its mother and the crows were barking in the high tops of the trees. The fresh country air filled their nostrils as Nat raised his rifle, smooth, casual, without moving his feet. There was no body language to cause alarm. Until he fired the weapon twice.

  Gerry felt blood and bone and brains splatter his face from ten yards. As Steve dropped to his knees, mouth agape, expression unchanged except for the volcanic eruption which had torn a hole through his head. As his knees thumped into the ground, he toppled forward and flat onto his cratered face. Before the dead man's head had met with the earth, Conor, still facing up the hill, fell backwards as though someone had hit him in the forehead with a baseball bat. Again the breeze carried away atomized blood and gore across the beautiful landscape.

  “Now there’s only two of you,” Nat murmured.

  It all happened in split seconds, but both Gerry and Davey’s survival mechanisms had jolted into action and they were both running back towards the farmhouse.

  Truter watched the situation unfold from the bottom of the hill, Roland began to go to their aid but the South African knowingly gestured for him to stay where he was. He could see the muzzle flashes from Nat’s weapon, and he shook his head as he watched Gerry and Davey turn and run straight back down the hill. He needed qualified men not these headless chickens. He watched and waited for Nat to pick them off. But Nat didn't just pick them off.

  Gerry was moving quicker than Davey until a dull thud sounded and he flew through the air as though he had just been hit by a train. He rolled down the hill and came to a stop in a motionless heap. At that point, time began to move very slowly for Davey.

  The tears of fear flooded down his cheeks as he came level with Gerry. He looked down at his friend. Still he was running at full speed when something hit the back of his calf and he tumbled through the soft grass coming to rest a few yards further down the hill than where Gerry lay. As he lay in the grass, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of security, all was quiet and he was sheltered from the breeze. But within seconds his leg felt as though someone was holding a blowtorch to the bare flesh. It burned with immobilising ferocity and he wailed like a banshee.

  * * * * *

  Nat had watched these men approach with weapons brandished and he was consumed once more with rage. An anger that took his soul and buried it deep; all he wanted to do was unleash his pain through merciless violence on the men who had killed his wife.

  As they approached, he hatched a gruesome plan: the four shots - two heads, one lung and a crippling leg shot - were just the beginning. As his hunters lay dying, Nat's eyes remained on the two enforcers who stayed by the car, just watching.

  Nat stood just outside the tree line for a short while, resting the butt of his gun on his hip, the barrel pointing straight up in the air, finger remaining on the trigger. He began the slow jaunt down to his prey. As he walked he felt part of the environment, he felt untouchable out here against these enemies. They just didn’t understand the land, the nature of open spaces.

  His eyes remained on the man who was standing about eight hundred yards away. Nat thought about shooting at him, but his rage wanted to take more time with that man, and anyway he wasn't going to waste rounds on a shot he wasn't sure he could make.

  Calmly, he approached the four men. Strapping his rifle across his back, he bent down without stopping and grabbed the first two carcasses by the scruffs of the neck and pulled them over to where the other two men lay. He dragged the two bodies with ease, both men were twelve to fifteen stones each, but Nat’s body was accustomed to hauling dead weight. He slumped them downhill from where Gerry was.

  Nat then turned to Davey, who was pleading with him for mercy, the tears washed his face wet and he physically juddered with fear. As Nat’s massive frame leant over the man who now seemed so frail, so weak, he could see how young the boy was as he looked down into his fearful eyes. He had to remind himself of what the animal had done before he carried on. He punched his fist into the top of his chest; taking a handful of clothing, he lifted the man like a bale of hay. He moved him like this at waist height and threw him on top of the two corpses. Davey cried out, writhing on the two dead men, repulsed by the idea of lying on lifeless bodies.

  Nat turned to the fourth man, checking to see that the men by the car had no
t moved. He walked a few paces over to where Gerry lay and looked down at the wounded man. Gerry was whimpering and gurgling, his lungs filling with blood just like Esme’s had. The sound rattled through Nat’s body, opening the fresh wounds and fuelling the rage.

  The man full of bravado that Nat had met weeks ago was now broken, whimpering and lost in a hell he would never have been able to imagine before it became his reality. He couldn’t manage any words, but the tears rolling down his cheeks and his eyes translated his pleading for mercy.

  Nat had no time for compassion now, the war had begun and all he could think about was Esme. He dragged the spluttering boy towards Davey, kicked him onto his front and then scragged a handful of hair and pulled his head up high, stretching out his neck. Blood spluttered out of the man’s mouth, Nat raised his head and looked into Davey's eyes. All the while he kept one eye on the South African, but the man remained still, just watching.

  * * * * *

  Davey could hardly bear to watch as the grizzled figure slung the miserable wretch that was Gerry to the floor in front of him. Then, to his horror, the huge man pulled Gerry’s head upwards tight.

  He watched, incapacitated with fear and disabled by pain, the old farmer, covered in dirt, filthy jeans, dirty brown wax jacket, his huge hands, one holding Gerry’s head up fast, the other unsheathing a huge gleaming hunting knife. His wizened face, eyes lost in a heavy squint, teeth gritted and lips snarling, all framed by that shaggy white mane and whiskers. Davey felt the carnal fear that he would if he were face to face with a tiger - this man was the devil himself.

  Suddenly, Davey realised he still had the handgun in his pocket, he had put it there when he had started running. He slowly shifted his hand as the farmer looked down the hill towards the farmhouse. The next thing he knew was that the massive figure had thrown Gerry to the ground and was looming above him and a huge boot landed in his guts. Davey heaved and bent double, the wind had been literally booted out of his body and he just couldn’t catch his breath. On one hand, he panicked to try and breathe; on the other, it was a relief from the pain of the gunshot wound in his leg.

  The farmer rifled through his pockets and relieved him of the handgun. Roughly, he sat Davey back upright and slapped him hard a number of times across the face as if to say ‘I’m in charge’. He picked the knife up from where he had thrown it into the ground and rested the glinting blade on the nape of Davey's neck.

  “Behave boy, and you’ll live. Try anything else and I’ll gut you like a fish.” Their eyes met, Davey looked into Nat’s cut glass eyes, cobalt flames like diamonds under a spotlight, demonic and wild, “…You understand me.”

  Davey mustered a stuttering nod, weeping openly. He was lying back against the two dead men, their bodies were still warm but prostrate. Davey put his head in his hands and wept. He looked at his wound through his fingers and he could see the round had exited through his shin. He could see the bright white of bone and couldn’t stop himself from vomiting, through his hands and down his front. His brain could not compute all this information at once, it was as if he were having a nightmare and sooner or later he would wake up. But that wasn’t going to happen this time.

  “Look at me…” growled Nat “LOOK AT ME!” he shouted at the boy who jumped back into the present and looked at him through his tears.

  Nat stood up tall, a few paces away now with the wretched figure of Gerry lying on his belly at his feet. The pile of bodies was a few yards back up the hill as he turned towards the Truter, still standing next to his car, looking. Nat stood on the hillside, a wild figure, rifle strapped across his back and large knife glinting in the sunlight. He raised the knife to point it at the man watching from the bottom of the hill and remained statuesque for a long moment. Then he got back to work. Placing his palm on the top of Gerry's head. He hooked his fingers into the top of the injured man's eye sockets and he pulled his head up and back, hard, arching his back to full stretch. Gerry's neck was offered up, tight and ready.

  Nat steeled himself against what he was about to do. He swamped his mind with the images of his dying wife, he tried to imagine these men doing what they did to her. Once again the world filled with a red mist, his blood boiled and he craved bloody vengeance. He took his hunting knife and with all his strength he drew the sharp steel across Gerry's neck in one steady, powerful arc. The sound of cold steel slicing through muscle, grizzle and the jugular was never to be forgotten, a noise like no other, high in pitch but smothered, dampened by the flesh and blood involved. He was looking Davey right in the eye when his blade carved through Gerry's jugular.

  Davey, confronted by the reality of Gerry’s helplessness in the face of Nat’s sentient natural force, panicked. He kicked his legs into the dirt pushing his body frantically back against the two dead men on which he leaned. His eyes were wild with fear as Gerry's heart, itself pounding with terror, sprayed a deep crimson mist of blood towards Davey. It rained down on him, cloaking him. For what seemed an eternity, blood sprayed with unexpected power from the mortal wound.

  * * * * *

  Truter watched as the scene unfolded; he knew that it took a certain type of mind to be able to slice through another's throat, especially with an audience. And he knew it took a great deal of strength and an intricate knowledge of your weapon to carry out the act in one movement.

  As he watched, Nat pushed Gerry's head violently to the floor with disdain and stood up tall on the hill. It looked like a microcosm of a medieval battle, this barbarian slaying all that approached. The realisation washed over Truter that this man was no fly in the ointment but more a viper in his bed.

  The two men stared at each other from a distance: Truter back with a foot up in the car, between the open door and the driver’s seat, calm, casually watching the mayhem; Nat, with dripping knife in hand, arms hanging by his side, feet apart, Gerry’s inert corpse lying at his feet. After a long period of contemplation, Truter ducked into the car, he turned to Roland and their eyes met. But both men were speechless, numbed by the visceral barbery they had witnessed. He turned the key, revved the car and drove away without saying a word.

  * * * * *

  Nat watched them as they left, eyes squinting in the breeze, his heart returning to its regular beat and the carnal blood lust waning, being replaced by a feeling of guilt and disgust. He banished those thoughts to the back of his mind as he took three large strides over to where Davey lay whimpering. The boy was crazed by fear with his hands up, shielding his face as though he were about to be struck by a car. Standing over the terrified figure, Nat smacked at Davey’s arms with his palm, an intimidating gesture knocking them away from his face. As Davey looked up at Nat’s eerie silhouetted figure, the big farmer spoke,

  “What did you expect, boy? That I’d run away, that you would hunt me down and kill me?” He leaned down and took Davey by the scruff of the neck, he stood on the ankle of his wounded leg and Davey screamed in pain. Nat then put his arm around his throat and tightened his grip. The boy began to gag and Nat’s knife, still in his hand, began to sink into the flesh of Davey's cheek, slicing a deep gash.

  “You stay right here, boy, or I’ll pick you off with my rifle before you get fifty yards, you understand.”

  With that, Nat let the choking man slump back down on top of his mates’ bodies, and he walked away down the hill towards the ruined farmhouse. The bleak grey clouds boiled above him as he went, and a cold wind whipped through the grass.

  * * * * *

  Davey shivered, his throat raw, his leg in agony and his face bleeding from the fresh wound. His blood only washed over Gerry’s, which had already covered him. He looked around: he was at least one hundred and fifty yards from the trees. The last thing he wanted was to be hunted down by this psychopath. He lay there staring up at the enormous sky, huge clouds rushing across the vista, the shock rocked uncontrollably across his body. Then he heard an engine; painfully, he turned his head to see the farmer coming back up the hill on a quad bike with trailer
in tow.

  * * * * *

  Nat accelerated up the hill like he had done a thousand times before, pulling to a stop next to the dead bodies and the skinny kid. He jumped off the machine and stood for a moment, face in the breeze, checking the perimeters of his area, smelling, watching, listening for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing disturbed him so he turned to the carnage that lay behind him and heaved the bodies like sacks onto the trailer. Finally, he lifted Davey and threw him on top of the bloody mess.

  He drove the quad fast back down the hill. Davey's crying was affecting him now, he wanted to help the boy but knew he had to do this, finish his statement. He pulled up next to Gerry’s car and pulling him off the trailer, Nat rifled roughly through the dead man’s pockets without saying a word to the one who was still breathing. Finding the keys he opened the boot and glanced between the space in the boot and the size of the four men, he shook his head at the conundrum. He grabbed the boot shelf and ripped it from the car. Then he took the bodies up onto his shoulder one by one and laid them like sacks of spuds across the boot, curling their legs up to get them in. Finally, he grabbed the skinny kid who was again pleading with him not to go in the boot. Ignoring him, Nat threw him on top of the others; he was right up against the rear window of the hatchback as Nat slammed it shut in his face.

  Nat moved back to the trailer and picked up a piece of sheet metal, a pot of black metal paint, brush and a bundle of pull ties. He put these items in the car and then swung his rifle off his back and placing it in the passenger foot well, he drove the quad bike back to the barns. In the trailer, he checked out his latest acquisitions for his arsenal. Two handguns, two shotguns, and an SA80. He put one handgun into his waistband and pumped the shotgun and put it over his shoulder and returned to the car.