Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  A minute or so later the door at the far end of the room burst open and Albie and half a dozen of his men ran into the room. They were sloppy about it; anger had made them careless, and a single man with a shotgun could have taken down half of them before they had the chance to gather their wits.

  As it turned out, it didn’t matter. There was no one here. They searched the room, overturned boxes, looked under piles of cloth. They checked their fallen comrade, noted the missing shotgun and knife. Two of them carried him out of the room. Albie stood looking at the broken window. He scanned the shelves, noting where dust had been disturbed by someone climbing up, then climbed up himself and looked at the window again, peered out into the loading bay beyond.

  Eventually, they left. An hour or so later, Frank and a couple of enforcers came into the room. Frank glared around him, kicked a box so hard that it disintegrated in a cloud of mouldy dust, and left again. There was the sound of the door being locked behind him.

  Another hour passed. Then the hatch in the wall slowly lifted up and Adam dropped quietly onto the pile of cloth. He lay there for a while, contemplating his aching muscles and listening. It was very quiet here, in the unused depths of the building. Not even the scrape of a footstep or a cough to signal that someone had been stationed outside the door. Why should they? They thought he’d gone.

  Frank’s men were not necessarily stupid, but they were angry and they were terrified of what Frank would do to them for letting the prisoner escape. They were acting, for the moment anyway, on automatic pilot, and little details – such as the chute – were going to pass them by. That wasn’t going to last.

  He got up stiffly and walked over to the far door, tried it carefully to make sure it was locked, then went to the other door. Once upon a time, this door had had an electronic lock – the keypad, almost invisible under layers of grime and dust, was still mounted on the jamb – but it was a long time since there had been mains electricity in this building, or anywhere in this part of Kent, and some considerable time ago someone had compromised by fitting bolts to the top and bottom of the door. Adam gently eased them back and opened the door a fraction.

  It was pouring with rain. The building’s loading bay was a sunken yard connected to the street by a steep ramp, and water was streaming down the ramp and puddling in the yard. Windows looked down on all sides, some with lamplight in them, most of them dark. Dusk was collecting in the far corners of the yard, and under a line of wagons drawn up along one side. No one was about.

  Adam stepped out and pulled the door closed behind him. Shouldering the shotgun, he walked across the yard and up the ramp. The secret was to look as if he belonged here, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. At the top of the ramp, he turned right, and walked calmly away down the street.

  MARGATE WAS NOT a large town, but it was still impossible for Frank to cut it off entirely from the outside world. He operated checkpoints and tolls on the main roads, and the family had, down the years, blocked off many of the minor roads by the simple expedient of dragging old cars and buses across them. But the town was a warren of alleyways and footpaths, and in places it was possible to cover a surprising distance by traversing overgrown back gardens, and there simply weren’t enough people to keep watch on all these byways.

  Having said that, Frank had tried. Patrols were sweeping the streets, checking long-abandoned houses and shops. Some of the patrols were being supervised by enforcers, but most were just ordinary members of the public, hurriedly pressed into service, soaked to the skin, and miserably resentful about it. In the rainy dark, it was fairly easy to tag along with one of these groups. In the dark and the pouring rain, and with the hood of his coat pulled up, the chances of anyone recognising him were slim.

  As they walked, they occasionally heard other patrols. There was some shouting in the distance, and now and again the sound of gunshots in the night as someone or other succumbed to excitability.

  “Fucking idiots,” muttered the woman walking beside Adam at the back of the group.

  Against his better judgement, Adam asked, “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “Nah,” she said. “Some fucking stupidity of Frank’s.”

  “Susie said they’d found a spy,” said one of the men in the group.

  The woman snorted. “Who in their fucking right mind is going to want to spy on us?”

  “Maybe you should keep it down, Sonia,” one of the other men said nervously.

  “Fuck off,” Sonia told him. But she lowered her voice a little. “Frank,” she said. “I knew his dad. He was a wanker too.”

  They wandered around in the dark and the driving rain for another couple of hours. Now and again they met other little groups, each carrying a single lantern. Adam hung back out of the light, but nobody challenged him. The obvious assumption would be that he was either in hiding or heading out into the countryside, not joining in with the search effort. People generally saw what they wanted to see.

  Nearing the southwestern part of town, Adam gradually dropped behind until, as the search party turned a corner – he could still hear Sonia grumbling in the distance – he ducked down a path between two houses. The path led to a row of garages, their doors pried off by long-ago looters and never repaired. At the far end was another path that became narrow and overgrown and eventually disappeared altogether, and he was finally out in the open countryside.

  THE TWIN TOWERS of St Mary’s Church at Reculver stood on a low headland overlooking Herne Bay, three or four miles west of Margate. The first time Adam had seen them, he’d thought the church had been demolished by The Sisters, although the neighbouring village was intact, merely deserted. Apparently, though, the church had been a ruin even before the disaster, cackhandedly-demolished in the early Nineteenth Century, and the towers had later been repaired for use as a navigation landmark for ships.

  It took him most of the night to get to Reculver, moving slowly and carefully, alert for patrols. It was starting to get light when he saw the towers of the church through lashing veils of rain. He was tired and hungry, and any anger he had set out with had been washed away by fatigue.

  There was a cottage near the edge of the village, almost lost within its overgrown garden. Adam fought through the grass and brambles and rose bushes until he reached the front door, then he felt his way along the front of the building until he found the living room window. He got his fingernails in the gap between the window and the frame and pulled slowly until it opened far enough for him to squirm through and drop into musty dimness.

  Working his way carefully around the room, avoiding rotten pieces of furniture, he went out into the hallway and along to the kitchen at the back of the cottage. Here, he grabbed a wooden chair and took it back into the hallway and set it down. Standing on the chair, he put his finger through a tarnished brass ring set into the ceiling and pulled. He’d oiled the hinge the last time he was here, and the trapdoor opened smoothly and silently, and he was able to pull himself up into the roofspace. Just inside the roofspace, beside the trapdoor, there was an oil lamp. He lit it, held it up by his head and looked for signs that someone else had been in here.

  About halfway along the space there was an old water tank, long empty. He lifted the lid and took out the rucksack he’d stashed here weeks ago, on his first recce of Thanet.

  He stripped, dried himself as best he could, and dressed again in clothes from the rucksack. There was a bag of dried meat in one of the side pockets, and he chewed a couple of pieces while he rummaged about for various items of clothing, pulled out a long waterproof coat and the radio.

  Sitting on one of the ceiling joists, he turned the radio over and over in his hands, thinking. Finally, he pulled out the handle and cranked it carefully. He pressed the button and a crackle emerged from the little speaker.

  He thought again. Pressed the button and said, “Hello.” Let the button go.

  Almost immediately Chrissie’s voice said, “Well, you took your time.”

&
nbsp; “I’ve been busy,” Adam said.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, it’s going about as well as it ever does. Have you been sitting waiting for me to call?”

  “I was just going past on the way to the loo.”

  That made him smile, for the first time in what felt like a very long time. “If there was some way you could get me out of this place, I would be eternally grateful,” he said.

  “Are you safe?”

  “For the moment. I don’t know how long that’s going to last. Not very long, probably.”

  “We could pick you up off the beach, but it’ll be a week or so before we can get a boat to you.”

  “Well, that’s no good, Chrissie.”

  “We’ve been busy.”

  “I’ve got a thing for you.”

  “A thing?”

  “Something you’ll like.”

  “Sorry, that’s not going to get you a boat any sooner. What kind of thing?”

  “You’ll have to wait until I see you.”

  There was a silence at the other end. Then Chrissie said, “Have you seen Eleanor?”

  Adam looked around the cluttered little attic, decorated with cobwebs and old pigeon skeletons and mouldy mouse corpses. He sighed. Pressed the button. “They hanged her.”

  Another silence. “Bollocks.”

  He let her think about that for a little while. Then he said, “So, what am I going to do? I can’t sit here for a week.”

  “Can you get out of there on foot?”

  “Probably,” he said, not liking the sound of this at all.

  “There are some people who’ll give you shelter until someone can come and collect you.”

  “I might as well walk the whole fucking way, Chrissie.”

  “Of course,” she said. “If you feel like doing that. Or you could just sit tight for a week and wait for us to send a boat.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t stay here.” He could – the area was large and sparsely-populated and there were many places to hide – but he didn’t see any reason why he should tempt fate. And he was sick of the place anyway.

  “Get out of there. Make contact again in four days and I’ll give you the details.”

  Adam sighed. “All right.”

  He put the radio back into the rucksack, repacked it, and then he sat where he was on the joist for a few minutes, chewing some more dried meat and not thinking about anything much at all.

  Finally, he sighed and stood up. He shouldered his rucksack, then bent down and reached into the water tank again and took out an ancient and badly-stained nylon carrying-case. He looked at it for a few moments, then he slung it over his shoulder and climbed back down the ladder.

  Outside, the rain was easing off. He stood for a moment on the edge of the village and looked out to sea, watching squalls dance along the wavetops. For a few seconds they drew apart, and in the morning light he could see a forest of great pale columns rising out of the sea a few miles offshore. They seemed eerie, otherwordly, the pylons of a great wind-farm shorn of its rotors by years of storm-force winds and metal fatigue. Then the veils of rain closed again and they were gone, but Adam was already trudging away from the coast.

  Chapter Fourteen

  MORTY OPENED HIS eyes to grey light filtering through the thin, threadbare curtains. He felt perfectly calm and rested, and he lay on his back looking up at the cracked and uneven plaster of the ceiling for some time. The other side of the bed was empty, had not, it seemed, been slept in. This was normal. Karen often slept on the sofa downstairs when she was angry with him. Those times, he always woke to anxiety, a fidgety sense of needing to stabilise things between them before he could go on. But today the anxiety wasn’t there. It was as if something within him had been redrawn during the night.

  Eventually, he dressed and went downstairs, to find that the house was as empty as the bed. In the kitchen, the range had been allowed to go out. He opened the front door and stood on the step, looking around the farmyard. Most of the houses round here had had outbuildings of some kind – extensions, sheds, garages – arranged in a roughly square plan, and the people who came after The Sisters had used these as the basis for their defensive walls. In the case of the larger properties which already had high walls, these had been strengthened and built up. The Roberts farm had been a modest place, with only a garage, and whoever had lived here down the years had not had the manpower or the skills to loot building material from other properties and build a wall. It had remained defenceless, open to whoever or whatever decided to come and plunder it. It had been an act of madness to come here and expect to make a success of it, but the void within him was still performing calculations and he realised now that Karen had never expected him to succeed.

  He walked round the back of the house to the stable, and saw what he knew he would see. Their remaining horse and the cart were both gone.

  Once, he would have gone after her, stood in front of the locked gate to the Mercer compound and begged her to forgive him and come home. Now he just went back in the house and closed the door.

  An hour or so later, he emerged again, dressed for the weather, an old rucksack on his back with a tent and bedroll strapped to the top. He locked the front door, then he walked away from the house without looking back. Had he done so, he would have seen smoke starting to wisp out of the open windows, flames licking at the curtains. But he didn’t need to see what he already knew was there.

  AN HOUR OR so after leaving home, he came upon one of his neighbours walking down the track. A Wren, possibly, someone he barely recognised, anyway. They were carrying a shotgun, and a big satchel was slung over their shoulder. Walking towards the Wren, he composed the Morty Face. It was still a bit of an effort, and he found himself grimacing and gurning as he brought the muscles under control.

  “Is that yourself, Monty?” asked the Wren, when they were close enough.

  “Yes,” Morty said. “It’s me.”

  “You don’t want to be walking around here on your own right now,” said the Wren. “There’s all kinds of shit going on up north.”

  “I know,” Morty said. “I was there yesterday.”

  They were almost toe-to-toe by now, and the Wren was looking at his face as if uncertain of what he was seeing. “Someone shot Doc Ogden; everyone’s kicking off.”

  “I don’t know who Doc Ogden is,” Morty said, putting his hand in his coat pocket.

  “You’re kidding, right?” But the Wren saw that he wasn’t kidding. “You need to get back home, Monty.”

  “My home burned down,” Morty said, and in one movement he took the kitchen knife from his pocket and stuck it in the Wren’s left eye up to the hilt. He felt a crunching sensation run up his arm as it went in. The Wren didn’t have time to cry out or run or anything. He just dropped straight down, boneless, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  “My name is Morty,” Morty told him.

  THERE WAS GUNFIRE in the distance, shotguns and rifles, but it seemed unimportant. He moved further and further into the uncleared overgrowth between two farms until he found a cluster of little buildings behind a high brick wall. There was a sign on the wall with some words and what looked like a jagged bolt of lightning, but he couldn’t read. He shinned over the wall and found himself in a little compound with a line of large rusty metal objects behind a corroded wire fence. No way of knowing what they were. The three little buildings – more like sheds, really – were all locked. He examined the lock on the door of the first one for a while, then poked at it with the Wren’s survival knife, but either it was rusted or jammed or something, so he just shot it a couple of times, blew a hole the size of a dinner plate where the lock had been, and dragged the door open.

  Inside were a number of metal cabinets, these not so rusted because the door had kept out the worst of the weather. He pried the front off one, and was rewarded with an impossibly dense tangle of wires in various faded colours. There was also a big toolbox over in one cor
ner, far too large to carry. Inside were trays of hammers and screwdrivers and other, less identifiable, objects.

  With a hammer and a screwdriver, he opened the other two sheds. They were in a surprisingly good state of repair; much better than his house had been, obviously overlooked for decades because they were hidden by vegetation. They would do, he thought.

  He stashed most of his gear in one of the sheds, took the shotgun, and moved out again.

  HE SAW BIG Keith riding along the track between the Mercer farm and the Roberts farm, all alone, master of all he surveyed. Hidden in the undergrowth at the side of the track, Morty watched him pass and then worked his way through the trees until he could see the Mercer compound. The wall here was a mixture of brick and stone, cemented together long ago by some Mercer ancestor. It was taller than he was, but the Mercers thought they were invulnerable and down the years they’d become lax about cutting back the vegetation at the rear of the property. Several trees grew close to the wall, and one draped its branches over the yard.

  He waited until dark, then carefully climbed the tree, shinned along the branch, and dropped quietly into the compound. The back of the house – an old single-storey home – was dark, but as he watched from the shadows at the base of the wall someone came into one of the rooms and lit a lantern, hung it up, and moved on to another, illuminating what seemed to be a sitting room. Morty watched and waited as more lamps were lit. He could see, through the windows, a kitchen and what might have been a study.

  Karen and Big Keith came into the sitting room, talking animatedly. There was a strange sense of distance, watching them from the dark outside like this, unable to hear what they were saying. Kate Mercer came in, walking with a cane, and she said something too, then they were all talking at once. Karen appeared to be shouting, but he couldn’t make out a sound apart from a distant gunshot carried on the breeze. He’d been hearing gunfire all day, some of it quite near by but most of it far away, and he wondered what was happening between the Taylors and the Lyalls now.