Irish End Games, Books 4-5-6

by Kiernan-Lewis, Susan

  Nuala hesitated and then nodded. Fiona felt the fire and the hope ooze out of Nuala even from this distance. Both her lads, Dennis and Damian, wrapped their arms around their mother’s waist. The warning was as real as a viper coiled at Nuala’s feet.

  “Well, then, ladies,” Sinead said, snapping her crop against her boot. “Have a lovely dinner.” She walked back out of the center of the camp, Dr. Mac trailing behind her. The woman with the food wagon led the pony to the first tent nearest Fiona and she could smell the tantalizing aromas of the wagon’s contents.

  But Fiona could not take her eyes off Nuala standing in the door with her two young boys. Her hands were gripping their shoulders like she was trying to physically keep them away from those who would do them harm. When Nuala turned to go back into her tent, Fiona saw what had not been obvious before.

  Nuala was with child.

  Chapter 8

  So Nuala was pregnant.

  Fiona sat in the corner of her tent rocking Ciara. Both their dinners sat untouched. Fiona knew that pregnancy had to happen sooner or later once Nuala had given up trying to escape.

  The first night they arrived in the camp, Nuala and Abby had gone over the back fence with Nuala’s two boys. They hadn’t made it a hundred yards before they were recaptured. After another escape attempt the next night, the Ameriland women were separated from each other into different parts of the camp.

  The only exception was the O’Malley sisters, Mary and Liddy, who were allowed to work together. Fiona saw them sometimes during work hours. Mary was showing now. It was less obvious with Liddy but Fiona watched her slow deliberate movements and guessed that she too—long infertile—was now miraculously with child. The other three compound women, Bridget, Jill and Nuala’s sister Abby, all still showed no signs of pregnancy. Fiona rarely saw any of those three and could only imagine the terror and hell their lives must be.

  For each woman in the camp, no pregnancy meant a continuous schedule of rapes carried out by Sinead’s thugs. Gang rapes were not uncommon. It didn’t matter if the timing was anywhere near a woman’s ovulation. Once pregnant, Sinead did not allow the women to be touched. But until then, they were fair game.

  Fiona had no idea where the other inhabitants of the compound—Ellen, Regan or Kendra—were. They had not been on the truck that fateful day.

  She wasn’t surprised that none of the gypsy women had been taken. Even the older ones had the ability to disappear like smoke. Unlike the rest of them, the gypsies hadn’t automatically reacted to the Garda as friends. They’d fled the compound before the Garda even knew they were there.

  Fiona pushed a curl out of Ciara’s face. They were the smart ones. Next time we’ll know to trust no one. If there is a next time.

  “Do ye want your tea, then, Fiona?” Megan asked timidly. Fiona hadn’t seen the girl standing there. Megan always moved so silently—as if afraid to make her presence known. The girl’s pregnancy was the result of a visit from the rape team her very first night in the camp. They had drugged her before the rape and, except for the camp “physician,” she had had no further contact with men. Even so, she trembled continuously.

  “No, go ahead, Meggie,” Fiona said. “Sure you need the extra calories.” Fiona tried to smile. What difference did it make, any of it? The extra food, the milk, the soap and comfortable pallets at night? As soon as they were delivered, the babies would be taken away. Megan had to know that, if she thought about it, and how could she not?

  Fiona put a hand to her stomach and felt the baby inside push firmly against it. She’d been barely two months along when they’d taken her. She hadn’t even had the chance to tell Declan. Tears came to her eyes and she forced them back. Please, God, let me be able to tell him one day.

  “Your friend was lucky today,” Julie said from her nearby pallet. She was older than the other women—at least forty—and like Megan was due to deliver soon. She’d been a teacher before the bomb went off and happy to live a solo life with her cats and her books. This was Julie’s second pregnancy at the camp. She’d been captured three years ago from a village on the coast. Fiona couldn’t imagine how it must feel to have never had a child and then to have one and have it taken away. Julie was a hard woman but Fiona wondered if she’d always been that way.

  “You’re right. She was lucky,” Fiona said.

  “The bitch must be getting smart. She’s figured out that the kiddies are the best way to keep everyone in line.”

  Fiona glanced down at three-year-old Ciara sucking her thumb like she hadn’t done since she was a year old. “What about yourself?” Fiona asked. “What keeps you in line?”

  Julie’s face was lined from years in the harsh sun. She said she’d been a gardening enthusiast in the old days. Her hair was kept short by the camp hairdresser, who was another pregnant woman abducted outside of Kilkenny two years earlier.

  “I’d rather not be here, if that’s what you’re suggesting,” Julie said. “But it’s not worth risking my life to escape.”

  “What will happen when you can no longer get pregnant?”

  Julie narrowed her eyes and then relaxed her face in a smile. Fiona noticed that Megan and two of the other women in the tent had stopped talking and were listening.

  “I’ll be bumping up to that time pretty soon, you’ll have noticed. I don’t think they’ll keep me on until I hit menopause, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Can I ask ye how long it took this last time?” Translation: how many months of nightly rape did you endure before you won yourself a nine-month reprieve?

  “Four months,” Julie said. “Not bad for someone my age.”

  Fiona noticed Julie wasn’t smiling now. She was remembering those four months. Only pregnant women lived in their tent and Fiona hadn’t had the experience of living with women being taken out—screaming and kicking usually—to the “insemination lab,” which was really just another tent with beds. But she, like everyone else in the camp, heard their screams nightly. As soon as each of them in one of the pregnancy tents delivered, Fiona knew they would be moved to one of the non-pregnancy tents.

  “And parting from your bairn?” Fiona asked. “Do you have a method for living with that?”

  “I do,” Julie said. “It’s called survival. And it assumes I’d want the spawn of my rapist.”

  “The child is your spawn, too,” Fiona said.

  “Well, that’s the part I don’t tend to think about,” Julie said.

  “I’m afraid,” Megan said in a small voice.

  Both Fiona and Julie turned to look at her. Megan must have been cute at one time—when makeup and curling irons and skimpy sundresses were a part of her life. But now she looked stunned and slack jawed. Fiona knew that epidurals were long a thing of the past before the bomb. All she remembered of giving birth to Ciara was screaming herself hoarse until no noise would come out and the world cracked open above her like a gaping maw of pain.

  Even so, she was pretty sure that’s not what Megan was afraid of.

  **********

  Sinead stood by the big bay window overlooking the camp. It was quiet tonight. That was unusual. Especially for the first really nice spring evening. She and Mac had done a little preemptive planning to move the pregnant women away from those being prepared for pregnancy. It seemed the nonpregnant women’s screams—both during and after the insemination procedure—were upsetting everyone.

  Mac had read somewhere that distress could cause a pregnant woman to suffer a miscarriage. Glancing at him in bed, Sinead smiled again. Such a softie. Not that taking care of the pregnant women wasn’t a priority—no matter how daft the idea of how to do it was.

  The ideal was to make the camp look and feel as much as possible like a resort—relaxing, inviting, and alluring. At least for the women who had done their duty and become pregnant. And listening to hysterical women being dragged from their tents by three men with erections was hardly conducive to the pregnant women having a nice soothing evening.

>   Especially since they had to know—if not for their pregnant bellies—there go they.

  “Come back to bed,” Mac murmured into his pillow.

  “Work calls,” she said, sitting down at her desk. “You rest up. I’ll be back before you hit your next REM cycle.” She picked up the folder she’d been studying before dinner. She knew the numbers wouldn’t be any better but there was always a possibility that something would occur to her the more she looked at them.

  A thud from the bed made her turn her head to see Mac swinging his feet out of bed.

  “What is it, Sinead?” he asked.

  She dropped the folder back on the desk.

  “How many women do you think we have in the camp, Mac?”

  He rubbed his eyes and let out a long sigh. “I dunno. Fifty?”

  “Really?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You think we have that many? We have thirty. And of that thirty. only nine pregnancies.”

  “I’m sure we had more than that. What happened to them all?”

  “They die, they don’t get pregnant, they miscarry, they go mental and then become more work than we have men to subdue them…take your pick.”

  “Is nine bad?”

  “It’s not good.”

  “Even so, don’t we get fifty grand a pop?”

  “We don’t get fifty grand a pop, darling,” Sinead said. “By the time I pay our intermediary in Dublin, the food, and the security detail around this place, it’s considerably less than that. And now the Garda is demanding more money for their procurement services. Money we don’t have.”

  “How much do we pay them?”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ve brought us nothing since the last shipment and of that lot we have only two pregnancies if you don’t count the one who was already up the flue. Who would’ve thought Irish women were so infertile? My grandmother had her last baby when she was forty-eight.”

  “That’s old.”

  “But today? They’re done by thirty-five.”

  “Don’t we have a preggers oldie?”

  “How charmingly put, sweetheart. Aye, we do. And this’ll be her last go-round with us. After she delivers, she’s gone.”

  “Still. Seven babies times fifty quid…”

  “Euroes, Mac. Not near as much. After we pay the overhead, we won’t be getting rich.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  “We need to find more women,” Sinead said.

  Chapter 9

  “Right. Here’s the part in the proceedings where you kiss me solid and don’t send me through hell for not taking ye with me.”

  Mike stood with his back to Sarah as he fitted the bridle to the horse’s head. He, Gavin and John had worked out a deal in the village just that morning for two of the horses.

  “This looks like one of ours,” Sarah said.

  “He is,” Mike said.

  “You bought back our own horse?”

  Mike grinned at her. She looked big enough to have the baby any minute. Only Sarah would be annoyed with a man for refusing to put her on a horse at nine months pregnant for a journey that had no definite end.

  “In a manner of speaking, I did. But they won’t get him back.”

  “I should say not. How did they come by him?” She stepped over to the horse’s head and patted his nose.

  “Found ‘im wandering in the woods they said.”

  “I don’t suppose you saw Dan in town?” Dan was Sarah’s horse from the first day she’d landed in Ireland.

  “Truth is I did. We’ll collect him back after this is all over.”

  “I thought we had a policy of not separating.”

  “Aye, we do.” He leaned in to kiss her cheek. “Got a few family members to round up first. I can’t wait for ye, Sarah. Ye know that, right?”

  He watched her struggle with her emotions. Of course she couldn’t come and she couldn’t insist that he not go either. Fiona was out there and the baby Ciara—not to mention six other women and their children. The argument didn’t wash—and Sarah had already made it more than once—that everyone had been gone for four months and could wait until she delivered. By the lackluster way she’d presented it, she knew it too.

  “You know you’re leaving us practically defenseless,” she said.

  “Well, I’m honored that you think one man, even one so capable as myself, could make a difference in the defense of this place. But as I recall you and Archie make a pretty good team. Although, you know my orders?”

  “I know I don’t like it when you phrase it that way.”

  “If you’re threatened at all, leave at once. Ye can’t defend the place. It’s too big and you’re too few.”

  “That is exactly my point, Mike.”

  “I’ll not be spending my last minutes with you rowing,” Mike said, his voice sterner than he’d intended. His frustration was rippling off him. Did she not know it was killing him to leave his nine-month pregnant wife in an indefensible compound with only two lasses, an old man, a broken woman and a teenage boy? Not to mention the fact that they both knew he’d miss the birth. Although God knows that had been mentioned a few hundred times in the last few hours.

  “I can’t help it, Mike,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I know you have to go. I even want you to go. Of course you have to find them. It’s just…”

  “I know, Sarah, I know.” He drew her into his arms, smelling the sweet fragrance of the soap in her hair. He’d held her in bed this morning for longer than he’d intended, not wanting to part with her. He remembered the last time they’d defended Ameriland against invaders just six months ago—with nearly a full roster of compound people to help them. Now there were only five and they the weakest five. But there was nothing for it.

  “If you’re attacked, you need to run and hide,” he said into her hair. “Promise me ye won’t stand and fight. I know you, Sarah.”

  “I promise. Just come back to us, Mike. Don’t do anything dangerous. Don’t take any risks. You owe me that. You owe this baby a father.”

  “Aye, lass, and I’ll see he gets one. I’ll be back in one piece and bring the bairn his auntie in the bargain.”

  **********

  Leaving had been harder than Mike expected. Up until the moment he put his foot in the stirrup, all he could think of was the time they’d already lost in tracking down the others from Ameriland. But when he saw his beautiful Sarah, so full of the life that was their child, with one hand on her belly and the other held up in farewell, it was all he could do not to turn back to be with her.

  They decided that Archie would ride with them as far as the place where the trucks split up. Mike watched his ex-father-in-law perched on his saddle like a frail bird. He’d lost a lot of weight in the months since Mike had seen him. Mike could only pray that was all he’d lost. He needed every bit of what Archie could bring for the protection of Sarah and the others.

  No matter what he did, he couldn’t help think of Declan’s death as a harbinger of nothing good. The idea that his ever-cheerful, sturdy brother-in-law had been murdered so effortlessly left Mike with a cold knot in his stomach. What hope could he have that Fiona and the rest could survive if Declan couldn’t? Declan was brother, friend, and ally. And the world was a poorer place without him in it.

  They rode silently down the main road, each with their own thoughts. Mike was envisioning the afternoon when the trucks rolled down this road full of weeping, confused people. He and John had scouted the nearby woods to see if there was any sign of the gypsies who’d fled that day but too much time had passed. They were long gone.

  He hated to take Archie away from the compound for so long but Archie was the only one who could tell Mike where the trucks had split up on the road. He could tell by the way the man held himself—rigid and tense—that this trip was what Archie’s long week of walking and sleeping in the woods had been all about. All for this day when he could finally point the direction that Fiona and the rest had gone.

  They didn
’t bother stopping for lunch and they arrived at the spot earlier than anticipated. Archie had walked this on foot four months ago when he’d followed the wagons. The horses ate up the distance quickly.

  “Up ahead,” Archie said as they approached the first major intersection of country roads. The further they got from the compound and the closer they got to the ancillary roads that led to the M8, there were more and more abandoned cars along the way. These were cars that had simply stopped working that night four and a half years ago when the light flashed in the sky signaling the end of modern times for all of them.

  The rusting cars had long been stripped of any valuables. In the early days after the bomb, people—not to mention raccoons and foxes—often slept in abandoned cars. They were a favorite hiding place for bandits too.

  Mike guided his horse past two cars, nose to bumper, until he reached the intersection. Archie dismounted and walked to the eastern branch of the road.

  There was a sign for each diverging road. One read: Ath Cliath Dublin (M8) 12 km. The other read: Maigh Nuad Maynooth 7 km.

  Mike glanced up the road leading eventually to the exit road to the M8 and Dublin. He saw Archie staring down that road too. It was the road he’d travelled to find the women and the road he’d returned on, defeated, broken, wrong.

  “So they went this way, ye think?” Mike asked.

  Archie walked back to him. “Aye,” he said. “The women’s truck must have gone straight on.” He put his hand on Mike’s bridle. “I’ll leave you now. There’s your road, so it is. May it rise up to meet you.”

  “Right. Hurry back but don’t kill yourself. They’ll be fine, Arch.”

  “Sure, don’t I know that?” He slapped Gavin’s thigh as he passed his grandson. “Mind yourself, lads,” he said. “Bring ‘em home safe.” Then he mounted up and trotted back down the road toward the compound.

  Mike watched for a moment before turning his horse’s head down the road where the women’s truck had gone.