Down: Trilogy Box Set

by Glenn Cooper

  Duck was fretful before the shouting started but now he was inconsolable. Delia left him to try to quiet down Woodbourne but when she opened the door to the corridor the shouting became louder.

  “Duck! You hear me Duck, you little bastard? I’m going to fuck you up when I get a chance, believe you me.”

  Delia approached the MI5 agents outside Woodbourne’s room and asked whether there was anything that could be done about him.

  “What do you suggest?” one man asked her.

  “Well I don’t know. I’m an analyst, not a head banger.”

  “And we’re the head bangers?”

  “Well, you’re good strong lads and I doubt the Geneva Convention applies here.” When it appeared the man hadn’t appreciated her attempt at humor she added, “Look, just do something to calm him down. Give him a video, some extra pudding, anything. He’s driving my boy bonkers.”

  Duck was crying when she returned.

  “I’ve had a word and hopefully he’ll quiet down,” she said.

  “I’ve always been fearing of ’im,” he said. “I don’t know why ’e never went off to join up with a band of rovers. Instead ’e just ’angs around the village, scaring and threatening like.”

  “What are rovers?”

  “The worst of the worst, they are. Eaters of man flesh.”

  “Goodness.”

  “I won’t stand next to ’im in that room what you make me stand in.”

  “He’ll be in shackles, Duck. He won’t be able to touch you.”

  “And what if we go back? ’E’ll get me then.”

  “We’ve talked about that before, Duck. The machine didn’t work the first three go-rounds so I wouldn’t worry too much about the fourth and last time.”

  The crew of the Hellfire was murmuring in discontent over having a woman onboard. Captain Hawes had told his first mate to pass the word that the superstition was null and void because Emily was from another world but they were having none of it. They also weren’t too pleased about returning to Britannia, the deserters that they were, and there was mutiny in the air.

  Hawes gave John and Emily his cabin and advised them to stay out of sight but a half a day into their journey when the wind began to howl and the ship began to violently heave John wanted to speak to the captain. He refused to leave Emily alone and unguarded in the cabin so he helped her up on seasick legs and took her above decks.

  The rain lashed them as they made their way over the slick boards up the stairs, past the helmdeck and all the way to the quarterdeck where Hawes scolded them for coming up in this weather.

  The sea was as black and invisible as the sky but it made its presence known by the sound of its ferocious waves which broke onto the deck and tossed the boat about as if it were an insignificant piece of driftwood.

  “What’s our position, captain?” John shouted over the howl.

  Hawes stood looking down at the helmsman who was struggling with the wheel while sneaking contemptuous glances toward Emily. “It is difficult to say. The winds are most unfavorable. Without stars or visible land I have only dead reckoning as my guide and even that has failed me. Even after all these hours I fear we may still be closer to Francia than Brittania.”

  “We have three and a half days to get to Dartford.”

  “I am well aware, John. I will do my job and you must do yours. Take the lady down and keep her safe from the elements and my fractious men.”

  They passed a difficult night in the captain’s cabin. Emily slept lightly and moaned in nausea when awake. John held her and slept not at all, on the ready if the ship were to flounder or the crew attack.

  In the morning he must have dozed off because he awoke with a thin light streaming through the captain’s leaded windows. The ship was steadier than in the night. He reached for his watch. It was ten-thirty. Just under three days to go. He reluctantly left a sleeping Emily behind and ran up to the quarterdeck where an exhausted Hawes was struggling to keep himself upright.

  “The storm has eased considerably,” Hawes said, “but it’s pea soup I’m afraid. All I can do is keep a compass heading for Ramsgate and when we see land, head into the estuary and row you to land. From there you’ll be on your own.”

  “Any idea when we’ll get there?”

  “None whatsoever but fear not. We shall continue to do battle with the wind and the tides and we shall prevail.”

  John spent the remainder of the day dozing beside Emily and feeding her a broth when she was able to sit. He talked to her in a soothing voice and told her they were getting closer to land, closer to Dartford, closer to home. Beyond pledging themselves to a life together, they talked about what they wanted to do next. She mused about leaving the world of experimental physics and teaching at university, he talked about opening a school for martial arts and self-defense. When she wasn’t looking he checked the time, distressed at the way the hours were gliding by.

  As night descended yet again, there was a knock on the door. Hawes, almost incapable of standing, fell upon a chair and smiled.

  “Before the light failed, the fog thinned enough to deliver a fine sight,” Hawes said. “The chalk cliffs of Ramsgate. I will rest for a time while we steer for the estuary where I am expecting continued fair winds. At dawn we will make our entry into the channel and I shall set you two on your way.”

  Emily managed to sit up and simply say, “Thank you.”

  Both of them were up and about at first light. Emily’s seasickness had waned in the night and she was able to take some bread and cheese while John cautiously left her for a quick word topside with the captain.

  The mood on deck had clearly improved and with the storm behind them and time ticking down to putting Emily off the ship the men weren’t as shirty. But though the sea was calm and the wind was fresh, the fog was upon them again.

  “Where are we?” John asked Hawes as he climbed onto the quarterdeck.

  “Not far from Southend, I should think. When the fog lifts, which should be any time now, we can navigate the channel safely. Almost there, John, almost there.”

  John lingered for a while, taking in the good air, listening to the wails of the unseen gulls. Then, as the captain predicted, the fog lightened and a few gulls became visible.

  Then the fog became wispy and there they were.

  Three massive galleons, blocking the estuary, only two hundred yards away, bobbing gently, sails unfurled.

  All three ships hoisted their distinctive yellow standards, and the first mate on the Hellfire screamed, “Iberians!”

  “All hands to make sail and hard alee!” Hawes bellowed.

  The Spanish ships raised the hatches on their starboard gun decks.

  “They’ve been lying in wait for King Henry’s return, they have!” the first mate yelled. Below them the helmsman worked the wheel, wailing that the woman on board had doomed them.

  The deck guns on the Iberian ships, five-pound sakers on swivels, opened fire and the first volley found its mark up and down the port side of the Hellfire.

  John screamed, “Emily!” and launched himself at the quarterdeck stairs as Hawes yelled, “Prepare main batteries …”

  There was another Spanish volley and John was covered in blood.

  He looked over his shoulder and all that was left of Captain Hawes was half his chest resting on two legs that slowly gave out.

  John slid down the blood-slicked stairs and scrambled below decks to the captain’s quarters where Emily was cowering near the bed.

  “You’re hurt!” she cried.

  He assured her it wasn’t his blood and grabbed her by the hand.

  “Come on!” he said, “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Just then, the heavy Iberian pieces opened up.

  A cannon ball found a keg of powder on the Hellfire gun deck directly below the captain’s cabin. There was a thundering boom followed by a tremendous, splintering crash.

  A blinding flash of light flooded John’s eyes and everything
went completely and utterly black.

  31

  John was aware of something in his mouth. He moved his tongue around and felt something wet and gritty and then began to cough, dislodging a mouthful of sand. The cough became a paroxysm as he spit up sand and seawater.

  He opened his eyes and blinked at the harsh, flat light. He was face down, half in the water, half on the beach. He arched his neck and turned his head to one side. There was an expanse of sand punctuated with motionless masses.

  Bodies? Debris?

  Flotsam was washing up on the beach. An expanse of canvas floated offshore like a magic carpet.

  Then he turned his head in the other direction and saw a band of men twenty to thirty yards away carrying something up the beach, inland.

  What was it?

  His mind wasn’t working fast enough. He tried to hear what was going on over the sound of the sea and his own coughing but couldn’t. Something was hanging down from the bundle they were carrying. It was fabric, brushing the sand. A dress.

  Emily.

  He pushed himself up and began running, coughing and shouting like a mad man. His boots were full of water and at first it felt like he was running in tar.

  “You fucking bastards! Leave her alone!”

  The men turned toward his shouting and as he got closer the two carrying Emily dropped her onto the sand.

  There were eight of them.

  They had the stooped-shouldered and feral posture he had seen before, like nocturnal predators drawn reluctantly into the light of day by an irresistible prey.

  Rovers.

  He saw some of them pulling out their long butchering knives. John felt at his waist for a sword but there was none. Undeterred he charged them screaming something dark and primal, closing the last few yards at speed.

  He went for the most vulnerable one first, a scrawny fellow with a stunned, transfixed expression who hadn’t been able to even muster a fighting posture. With a sharp punch to the Adam’s apple he had no trouble wrenching the knife away from lax fingers and then he got to work.

  The other rovers swarmed him like angry wasps but he was angrier and more lethal. He slashed at throats and hamstring tendons, kicked at groins, and used his free hand to gouge at eyes. He felt a sharp pain in his right flank and knew he’d been stabbed and wheeled to plunge his knife into the forehead of the perpetrator, a man with leathery skin and breath that smelled like a rotting room. The man howled like an animal caught in a claw trap. It was then that John saw he had a stump instead of a hand at his left wrist.

  He must have been their leader because the three rovers who weren’t incapacitated began to run away. John’s blood was running so hot he started after them but sanity returned and he stopped and fell to his knees, coughing and retching from the exertion and pain.

  He fought to get upright and as he ran over to Emily, he felt at his flank for the wound. His probing fingers found it, an oozing slit.

  Emily was on her back, unmoving.

  She had a pulse and her chest had shallow movement.

  He knelt over her, turned her on her side and cleared the sand from her mouth before lying her flat again, pinching her nose and giving her several resuscitative breaths. Then he began chest compressions, exhorting her with, “Come on, baby, come on. Come back to me. We’ve come too far to quit now.”

  Nothing was happening. It was taking too long and he crashed his fist on her chest in frustration.

  She coughed.

  The effluent was so forceful a gusher of hot, salty water hit him in the face.

  He turned her on her side again and her coughing and sputtering continued and then there was a moan, the loveliest moan he’d ever heard.

  “It’s me. It’s John. You’re okay. We’re on land, baby. We’re almost there.”

  She opened her glassy eyes in confusion. He helped her to a sitting position.

  “What happened?” she said weakly.

  “The ship was hit. It must have broken up. We washed ashore.”

  “John, look!” She realized there were wounded, crawling and convulsing men nearby.

  “Rovers. I had to put them down.”

  “You’re bleeding!”

  This time she was right. “I got poked I think. It can’t be too bad ’cause I’m still talking.”

  This new crisis seemed to revive her and she found her feet and had him stand too. She lifted his shirt and gasped at the welling blood coming from a wound an inch long and lord-knows-how deep.

  “Can you put some pressure on it?” he asked.

  Her dress was the obvious source of first-aid materials and using one of the rover’s knives she cut a good amount of fabric from the hemline, enough for packing and bandages.

  As she worked on him he leaned on her and joked, “Christ, Emily, you’re showing a lot of leg for these parts. We’re in enough trouble as it is.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Of course I can. This is nothing. It’d barely qualify for a purple heart.”

  She cinched the bandages up tight and they began trudging up the beach, both of them clutching rover knives.

  He stopped and said, “Wait a minute,” then fished in his pocket for the watch. Water spilled from it when he opened the cover. He put it to his ear and swore. “It’s wrecked.”

  “How long have we been here?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at the sky and complained about never seeing the sun. “The only thing I can tell time by is dusk and dawn. When it’s dusk we’ll have thirty-eight hours until we’ve got to be in Dartford.”

  “The estuary’s that way so Dartford is that way too,” she said.

  He nodded but was soon swearing again. “For Christ’s sake, Emily, we washed up on the wrong side. We’re north of the river. We’re going to have to figure out how to get across.”

  As they walked, John hid his pain and wooziness from her. Every time he coughed he had to suppress a groan. Though she was weak as a kitten herself, she seemed to understand that she was now the stronger of the two and she urged him on.

  “There aren’t any signposts but I know approximately where we are from the geography,” she said. “We can’t be much more than thirty miles away. If we had to walk it, we could make it easily.”

  He didn’t want to say what he was thinking: if he were reduced to crawling they wouldn’t make it at all.

  They walked for hours at a slow pace. When they stopped for brief rests, Emily re-cinched his bandage to keep it tight. A few times they heard voices in the distance and hid in clumps of bulrushes.

  They passed a point that Emily thought might have been the same location as the Southend pier on Earth and as darkness began to descend, they both despaired at the realization that the long inlet of Hadleigh Ray would force them considerably to the north. It began to rain.

  John was moving slowly now, weary from blood loss and now suffering from muscle spasms around his wound. In the distance they saw a wisp of light gray smoke rising into the dark gray sky.

  They looked at each other.

  “I don’t think we’ve got a choice,” he said.

  The cottage was small, made of timber, wattle and daub and thatch. The single window was shuttered for the night. A skinny horse was tethered to a post, munching straw.

  From a safe distance, John called out, “Hello there. We need help. We’re not here to harm you or steal from you.”

  A man’s voice answered straight away. “Who are you?”

  “My name is John Camp.”

  “How many are you?”

  “Just two.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “It’s a long story, friend.”

  “You’re outside. We’re inside by the fire, good and dry. We’ve got time for a long story. And we’ve got weapons. Plenty of weapons.”

  “I’m sure you do. I’ll come right out and tell you. We’re from Earth but we’re not dead.”

  There was laughter. “Not dead, you say?”

 
“It’s true. That’s why it’s a good story.”

  The window shutter opened and a musket pointed out. “Come closer and show yourself. Both of you. What’s the name of the other one?”

  “My name is Emily.”

  From inside they heard, “Bloody hell, it’s a woman!”

  There were four of them, two spry elderly men, two older still, maybe close to eighty. John offered up their knives to reassure them. They sniffed and stared wide-eyed, and talked among themselves, while allowing him and Emily to sit by the hearth.

  Their spokesman, Harold, one of the younger men, conducted a surprisingly apt interrogation before revealing he had been a nineteenth-century London constable.

  Finally Harold said, “Well, as you’ve asserted, you’re clearly not dead, you don’t appear to be insane, and your tale is too fanciful to be anything but the truth. I’ll be buggered. Oh, sorry for the language, madam.”

  Emily smiled at him sipping from the beer they’d been offered. “It’s quite all right.”

  “And you say you were shipwrecked near the estuary?” the oldest asked.

  “When I woke up Emily was being carted off by a band of rovers.”

  “How many?”

  “Eight.”

  “Then what happened?” Harold asked.

  “I put them down. Well five of them. Three ran away.”

  “Any distinguishing characteristics on any of them you might recall?” Harold asked.

  “The ringleader, at least I think he was the ringleader, was missing his left hand.”

  The four men looked at each other.

  “What became of that one?” Harold asked.

  “I put that knife through his head.”

  “Glory be,” the oldest man said. “Deliverance.”

  Harold refilled everyone’s mugs and told the story. The four of them and many others in the surrounding villages had been terrorized for as long as they could remember by this particular band of rovers and the news of their demise made them giddy.

  There was porridge with bits of meat and vegetables in a pot and one of the men hung it over the fire to reheat it for their guests.