Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “That isn’t going to last, Cat,” he said. “Unless this thing stops soon, everybody’s going to get dragged into it, one way or another.”

  “So make it stop.”

  “I tried.”

  She grunted. “Heard about that. What Patrick needs is a good slap. I told him that, when he was here.”

  They were sitting in the living room of the main house, looking out across the farmyard at outhouses and smaller buildings through windblown curtains of drizzle. Cat’s hands and family were going about their business, doing repairs, looking after animals. It was a scene of such normality that it made Harry’s heart ache.

  He said, “You’ve talked to him. You know he won’t stop. He won’t listen to anybody, not even John Race. He’ll keep poking and prodding at anyone he thinks is siding with me, and they’ll poke and prod back. This is going to go on for years.”

  “You could apologise.”

  He blinked at her. “For what?”

  “For what Rob did.”

  “I don’t know that Rob actually did anything, Cat.”

  She gave him a long-suffering look. “See how easy it is, Harry? They’re wrong, you’re right. And they’re sitting up there at the farm thinking they’re right and you’re wrong.”

  “I’m sorry, Cat, I’m not going to apologise for something that might not have been our fault in the first place. Rob’s dead.”

  “Well, until one of you backs down, this business is just going to go on and on.” She shook her head. “Bloody men. Where’s Rose in all this?”

  “John says she’s sick too. Patrick’s running things.”

  She snorted. “John Race always was a balless waste of space.”

  “He’s a good foreman,” he said. “And if I’m any judge at all, he’s one of the few people round here with any sense.”

  “He’s letting a sixteen-year-old boy push him around.”

  “His gaffer’s son,” Harry pointed out. “Backed up by all the other hands.”

  “You’re starting to whine, Harry. Be a man and stop this stupidity.”

  “So you don’t have to make a choice?” She gave him a hard stare, but this time he stood his ground. “What are you so afraid of, Cat? Having to choose between us or the Taylors? Easier to tell someone else to sort it out than get involved, right?”

  “I should punch you about a bit and then throw you out, Harry Lyall,” she told him. “But I’m not going to do that. You lost your boy and you’re angry about that, and your family wants some kind of revenge for it. And Max is probably going to die, and the Taylors are angry about that, and their family wants some kind of revenge for it. I don’t see how any of that’s my business.”

  “Did you tell Patrick that?”

  “I might have used some different words, but yes, pretty much.”

  “And how did he take it?”

  She got up from her armchair and went over to the window. “He said the time was coming when we’d be involved anyway, whether we wanted to be or not. He said it was better if we made a choice now, while there was still time. We might lose fewer people that way than if we were caught between the two of you.” She regarded him sourly. “It’s a little boy’s argument, and it’s the same argument you’re using, Harry.”

  “I just want your help, Cat. That’s all. We’ve always helped each other out.”

  She shook her head. “The business with Faye Ogden, that lost you a lot of friends. I know you didn’t order it, but that doesn’t matter because everyone else thinks you did.”

  The truth was, Harry no longer had any clear idea what had happened. Why would Walter have done such a thing? And if it wasn’t him, who was it? And Cat was right. It didn’t matter. It was like having a lightning strike kill all your sheep and then wondering what caused the lightning. The sheep would still be dead; you had to deal with it.

  He said, “Please, Cat. Maybe if we all get together, Patrick will see sense and stop this.”

  Cat shook her head again. “He’s got maybe a third of the Parish on his side – the Lakes, the Tomlinsons, the Cybulskis – not to mention his own family. He’s a little boy, Harry. He wants to win.”

  “He’s a little boy with a lot of guns.”

  She turned her back on the window, the scene of normality that Harry knew was going to become a distant memory very soon. “The best thing you can hope for is that Max pulls through.”

  WENDY, HIS FOREMAN, was waiting out in the yard. She fell into step beside him as he walked over to the stables to collect their horses.

  “Well?” she said quietly.

  Harry didn’t say anything.

  Wendy sighed. “The hands want to help out,” she said. “Some of them, anyway.”

  Harry shook his head. “They won’t do anything unless Cat tells them to, and I wouldn’t want her to. I don’t want to cause her trouble with her own people; she’s going to have enough trouble soon as it is.”

  In truth, most of the families he’d spoken with had felt the same, a sense of quiet horror about what was happening in the Parish, an unwillingness to become involved. At the Fenton farm, he’d found Colin and Louise Fenton and their hands loading wagons. “Going to stay with Colin’s brother in Goring,” Louise told him. “Sorry, Harry, but we’ve got kids.” She didn’t sound remotely sorry, and he couldn’t blame her, but he had an awful feeling in his heart when he thought about what would be left of their farm if they ever did come back.

  At the stables, two of the Lyall hands, heavily armed, were waiting to escort them back home. After the initial flurry of massacres, the war had settled down into a series of skirmishes in the woods and the fields, hit-and-run ambushes between families he was increasingly finding he had no control over. It was all slipping away from him. Nobody would listen to reason; he was rapidly being forced into a corner where he would have to fight, simply in order to defend what his family had taken so many hard years to build. It had crossed his mind, watching the Fentons preparing to flee, to do the same, but that wasn’t really an option. The Lyalls and the Taylors had been in the Parish a long time, since before it had been the Parish. Neither of them was going anywhere.

  Wendy had done a quick inventory of their available weapons. Mostly crossbows and hunting bows, a few shotguns and sidearms. They had enough ammunition to last weeks under normal circumstances, but there was no telling how long they’d have to stretch it. Late one night, Harry had sent two hands out with a wagon to travel to Robert Mason’s, up by Wycombe, to trade for more. They’d returned several days later with less than half the supplies he needed and the news that the Taylors had been there first and virtually stripped Mason’s stock of firearms. The same with the other weapons traders in the Chilterns. He’d hoped that he could stop this by appealing to reason when he should have been arming himself, and now it was too late.

  He was learning to see the Parish with new eyes. For decades he and his family had been used to being in control. They had one of the biggest farms, they took care of a lot of people, and it had given them the illusion of being in control. But they’d been wrong. He’d been wrong. When push came to shove, he was no more in control than anyone else. He had no right to order people about, and even if he did, they weren’t of a mind to pay him any attention. They wanted to fight. Years of hard life in the Parish had piled grievance up on grievance, small petty things that under normal circumstances would not have mattered much. Until an excuse came along to act on them. He had started to think that, beneath the surface of good-hearted cooperation, the people of the Parish actually hated each other.

  Meanwhile, there was much to do at home. He increased patrols in the area, warning them not to fire unless fired upon and knowing that was a forlorn hope. He had the undergrowth around the compound cleared, reinforced the wall. He took to walking circuits on the parapet, looking out over what had, until recently, been home and now seemed like an alien landscape. He started to stockpile food and water.

  Approaching the Lyall compound, the drizz
le stopped and the sun broke weakly through the clouds, and Harry said, “Looks like the weather’s starting to pick up.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Harry,” said Wendy. “It’s going to get a whole lot worse from now on.”

  Chapter Twenty

  THE ABBOTS’ HOUSE was packed with books, more than he’d seen in one place, even in Guz, where the libraries had been raided for flammable material to keep people warm in the first terrible days of the Long Autumn. There were novels by long-forgotten authors, encyclopaedias, guidebooks, recipe books, biographies, technical manuals for devices whose purpose seemed as remote and mysterious as that of Stonehenge. Hardbacks, paperbacks, books without covers and covers with all but a few pages missing. A whole lost world. He looked through them with the curiosity of someone researching an extinct tribe.

  “They never stood a chance,” Theresa told him one evening, sitting by the fire in the scullery. “All that technology and power and expertise, and The Sisters just took them by surprise.”

  “Life will do that,” he said. “Every time.”

  “They thought it could happen,” she said. “We’ve got a couple of novels here about it somewhere. Comets, asteroids, diseases, nuclear war. They weren’t stupid; they just weren’t ready. Or maybe they just stuck their heads in the sand.”

  Adam, who now had a better sense of what was going on in the area, refrained from pointing out that Theresa and Paul and quite a few of the other farmers were currently sticking their heads in the sand. Sometimes it seemed to be the only rational choice.

  “They had a thing they called ‘nuclear winter’,” she went on. “Do you know what nuclear weapons are?”

  There had been nuclear weapons in Guz, in the early days, aboard one of the submarines caught in port by the disaster. When order, of a sort, had been restored, there had been much debate about what to do with them. Adam didn’t know what conclusions the Committee had come to; there were conflicting stories. One said the warheads had been removed, taken out into the Atlantic south of Ireland, while they still had fuel for the destroyers, and dumped into the sea. Another said they were in storage somewhere, carefully maintained against the day when they might be needed again. He thought that was unlikely, but you never knew.

  “It was really a catch-all term,” she said. “A nuclear war, or a massive volcanic eruption, would send huge amounts of material into the sky and block out the sun for decades. Crops would fail, billions would starve. It happened before. Maybe a few times. Just a second.” She got up and went over to the bookcase and took out a book, leafed through it and came back to sit down.

  “About seventy-five thousand years ago there was a big volcanic eruption in Indonesia – that’s way over on the other side of the world somewhere.” She read a little. “Scientists before The Sisters thought it caused a nuclear winter that lasted at least ten years, and cooled the entire world for another thousand.” She looked at him. “They thought things could have been so bad that the world’s population went down to about ten thousand people. Imagine that.” She closed the book and laid it in her lap. “They weren’t sure; this was all a theory. But imagine that, the human race almost becoming extinct.”

  For Adam, everything before The Sisters was impossibly remote. He couldn’t imagine living in the world portrayed in Theresa’s books. It sounded ridiculously crowded and pretty. It might as well have been fictional.

  “We were lucky,” she said. “We didn’t get a nuclear winter; we got a nuclear autumn. Eighty years of autumn. And that was bad enough.”

  He thought about his conversation with Betty, that night at Blandings.

  “They thought a comet impact wiped out the dinosaurs,” she said.

  “The what?”

  Theresa shook her head. “Doesn’t matter; you can look them up, if you’re interested. We were lucky. Lucky the comet didn’t arrive all in one big piece, lucky it didn’t cause a nuclear winter, lucky so many people died, because there wouldn’t have been enough supplies for everyone if they hadn’t. It’s all luck.”

  He said, “I’m going to leave tomorrow.”

  She nodded. “I’ve been thinking you’ve been getting ready to do that.”

  “I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done for me, but I have to go.”

  “Oh, I’m not bothered about that.” She got up and put the book back on the shelf. “I’m bothered about you going out there. More people died last night. Paul says there was a firefight about a mile from here.”

  He’d heard the shooting. “I do this a lot,” he said. “Running away from people. It’s easier than you’d think.”

  She thought about it. “If you head south until you reach Lambourn, you should be okay. I’ll get Paul to put some stuff together for you.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Oh, shut up. I’m not letting you go out there without as much as a map and a sandwich. You should go early.”

  He nodded. “That would be the preferred option.”

  “Right,” she said. “Well, we’d better all get some sleep, then.”

  “Theresa?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you take me in? With all this going on? It would have been easier just to leave me.”

  She shook her head. “That was never going to happen.”

  BUT HE DIDN’T sleep. He lay staring up at the ceiling, turning the decision over and over in his head. He wasn’t worried about slipping away from the madhouse this little corner of Berkshire had become; getting out of Thanet had, in the end, been perfectly straightforward, and he’d had the whole of Frank’s army looking for him. No one even knew he was here. He could be in Goring in four days or so, back at Blandings early next week, and then he could ask what the fuck people were playing at. He was a month overdue; someone should have come to find him by now.

  He heard quiet voices outside in the yard, below his window. He got up, lifted the curtain, saw three figures in the moonlight walking across the compound towards the wall. They were all armed, but that was a given, and they didn’t seem alarmed or in a hurry, but something about their body language made him go and put his boots on, come back and open the window a fraction.

  Now he could hear a voice calling, outside the compound. The three figures – one of them was Paul – reached the gate and climbed the steps up to the parapet. One of them called back.

  There was shouting, but he couldn’t hear the words. Looking down, he saw Theresa step out into the yard, a big coat wrapped round her.

  He turned from the window, pulled on a jumper and his coat, and went downstairs and out the open front door. The shouting, from the people on the parapet and whoever was outside, was louder out here, but he still couldn’t make out what they were shouting about.

  “What is it?” he said, drawing up beside Theresa.

  She was shivering, hugging her arms about herself. “I don’t know.”

  More shouting from outside – much more shouting, it sounded as if there were dozens of people out there – and there was an almighty thud and the gate shook. Adam turned to Theresa. “Go back in the house and lock all the doors.”

  The people on the parapet started shooting down at whoever was outside; there were answering shots and one of the figures on the wall staggered back, caught their heel on the footboard, and cartwheeled down into the yard. Theresa screamed and started to run towards them as the gate shook again, and again. Adam heard splintering noises, more shouting, more shots. The Abbots’ hands were running in all directions, completely lost to panic. Adam grabbed one by the arm as she went past. “Get out of here,” he told her. “Get over the wall and make a run for it.” But she just pulled away from him.

  He went round the compound, trying to get the hands to flee instead of standing stupidly in front of the gate. One of them gave him a spare shotgun, but he had no intention of waiting around to use it. Everyone who stayed in the compound was going to die; from the noise outside the wall it sounded as if they were outnumbered at l
east two to one. He looked for Theresa but couldn’t see her. The gate rocked again, and a long splinter of wood split off it and whined off into the darkness. People were still up on the wall, firing down on their attackers and then ducking down to hide, but it didn’t seem to be making any difference.

  Adam ran back across the yard, around the house, and up the steps on the wall at the back of the compound, saw the tops of two ladders poking up from the other side. Popped up, fired a shot, ducked down, pumped the shotgun, popped up, fired again. Looked over the wall. Two figures were sprawled on the ground outside.

  There was a crash at the front of the compound. Looking around the house, he saw the gate come away from its hinges and fall into the yard, followed by a tide of people, all of them shooting. He hesitated for long moments, then put his leg over the wall and slid down one of the ladders.

  At the bottom, he searched the two bodies for weapons and ammunition, came up with a crossbow and another shotgun and a couple of satchels.

  As he turned and slipped away towards the trees a few hundred yards away, he smelled burning.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THE ATTACKERS LEFT after a few hours, and when the sun came up, he cautiously made an approach and went back up the ladder and over the wall.

  Everyone was dead. Smoke was breathing from the broken windows of the house, farm equipment and furniture and clothes and personal possessions were scattered all over the yard. He found Theresa lying face down near one of the sheds; Paul was by the gate, half-trodden into the mud, his chest crushed and a crossbow bolt in his throat.

  Adam did a slow circuit of the farm, hoping to find someone alive but knowing he wouldn’t. Stood in the middle of the yard looking about him, at the bodies, the smouldering house.

  The attackers, whoever they had been, had used a big tree trunk mounted on a cart to break down the gate. It sat just inside the yard, abandoned. He walked round it, touching the ropes that bound the trunk, his mind perfectly blank.