Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “It’s exactly what I’d do,” he said. “Force us to leave the compound at regular intervals, slow-moving carts loaded with barrels. Sitting ducks.”

  She looked round, saw the guards from the herb garden had followed them out and were standing watchfully behind them. For a moment, she felt a wave of dizziness, of not knowing where she was.

  “How’s dad?” Patrick asked, and his voice seemed to come from a great distance. “Nell?”

  She rubbed her face, took a breath, came back to herself. Was this how Ma felt all the time? “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s stopped getting worse.”

  “You’ve been giving him the antibiotics?”

  “Of course I’ve been giving him the antibiotics. Jesus.” She turned to him. “If you came back now and again, you’d see how he is for yourself.”

  He looked out over the pond.

  “How do you think Ma’s going to feel when you get yourself killed?” she asked more gently.

  Patrick looked at the box in his hand. He pitched it into the water and turned back towards the herb garden.

  FROM COVER ABOUT four hundred yards away, he watched through the binoculars he’d taken from Paul Abbot’s study as the boy went back into the compound. The girl stood where she was by the pond, looking out across the carpet of dead fish. The dynamic between them was interesting; they were both angry, but their body language suggested they were angry about different things.

  The wall around the compound was impassable, old shipping containers, no way to cut or break through them. They were interesting; he hadn’t seen anything else like that round here, and he wondered where the containers had come from and how they’d been brought here.

  He’d spent two days familiarising himself with the Parish, finding boltholes and bivvies in places that seemed out of the way and overlooked. The farms and holdings were locked down and guarded, the countryside full of armed patrols. He moved among them like a ghost, silent and unseen, watched them take occasional potshots at each other. None of them seemed to know what they were doing; they were making up with frantic enthusiasm what they lacked in experience. According to the Abbots, bandits sometimes wandered into the area, looking for easy pickings – fewer these days than in the past, but still – and the farmers got together and either drove them off or killed them. But that was different. This was a form of warfare, and the farmers had no idea what they were doing. The only people who seemed remotely competent were the Taylors. The boy had a natural talent for leadership, and that made him dangerous. He thought back to long dull lectures on insurgency, a lifetime ago in a place impossibly distant. Back then he was being taught how to counter insurgent tactics, but the lessons applied just as much to him now.

  THAT NIGHT, HE descended once more into the Vale. The weather had picked up and there was a moon, and he moved carefully down an overgrown road to the outskirts of Wantage and the old store where he had found the weedkiller. There was other stuff here he wanted, stuff that had been overlooked when the store was looted because no one could see any use for it at the time.

  The town had been abandoned, but not all that long ago. Someone had been living here; many of the streets had been cleared of cars and rubbish, some of the larger supermarkets had been fortified. There was no way to tell for sure when whoever had been living here had moved out, maybe a couple of years, maybe longer, and there were no signs of why they might have gone. Maybe, like the family Betty had told him about, they had simply exhausted the resources here and moved on to pastures new.

  Hearing a noise, he moved quietly off the road and into the weeds and vegetation to one side, found himself in what had once been someone’s lovingly-tended front garden but was now a dense tangle of brambles and overgrown shrubs.

  Someone, or something, was coming up the road in his direction. As they drew closer, he heard the sound of boots on the crumbled tarmac, the swish of scythes cutting back the decades of overgrowth. Interesting that they were doing this at night, when the countryside was full of packs of feral dogs and most sensible people travelled as quietly as they could.

  The noise drew alongside his position, and he moved slightly to get a view of the road, saw figures passing in the distance, completely silent save for their boots and the sound of their scythes. In the moonlight, he counted more than thirty of them, dressed in all-weather gear, their hoods up despite the fact that it wasn’t raining. They didn’t seem to be paying any attention to their surroundings other than concentrating on their work, and in a few minutes they were past him and gone. He waited a few minutes to make sure they weren’t coming back and there was nobody bringing up the rear, then he retraced his path to the road.

  The broken surface of the road was strewn with chopped-up vegetation, crushed by dozens of feet. It was rather impressive; a cart could have driven along here with not so much trouble. The road led up onto the escarpment of the Berkshire Downs, where it crossed the Ridge Way. He thought about that for quite some time. A lot of people could travel en masse along this road now, if they had a mind to.

  NELL COULD STILL remember when the farm was an adventure, a place full of discovery and happiness. She remembered playing hide-and-seek with Patrick among the outbuildings in the compound. It only seemed like last week. Now all that was gone, and Patrick was out playing another kind of hide-and-seek. That, of all things, was what she could never forgive them for. Destroying her memories of childhood.

  She looked into the bedroom. Her father was still feverish, his skin grey and hot, but she thought the antibiotics were having some effect. She’d had an armchair brought up from the parlour, so her mother could sit by the bed, and Rose was dozing, lost in some awful half-awake state where she would jerk into full consciousness at the slightest noise from Max.

  The room was littered with the paraphernalia of Max’s sickness. Bowls of water, damp cloths, piles of clean bedding. It took four of them to wash Max and change the bed, two of them just to turn him. Every day, they managed to get half a bowl of broth into him, spoonful by agonised spoonful, Max sitting up and only barely conscious. At the beginning, he had thrown them back up, but for the past few days he’d been managing to keep his food down. Still, the room smelled of sick, and Nell wondered if that smell would ever go away.

  Downstairs, everything was quiet. To counteract the chaos upstairs, she tried to keep everything down here tidy. It was one of the few things she had any control over. A pair of old six-gallon plastic kegs, their blue surfaces scuffed and dented, sat over by the door. Mr Race had made a deal with one of the neighbouring farms which had a well to let them have fresh water, and Patrick had come back from a trip into Wantage with a wagon full of empty barrels, which sat outside collecting rain. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it would have to do. There had been some discussion about what to do about the poisoned pond. Patrick wanted ditches dug, to drain it out into the neighbouring fields. Mr Race had pointed out that that would only spread the poison more widely. Patrick said it could be years before they could trust the water from their well any more. Mr Race said the damage was already done. In the end, nothing happened. Everyone was too busy going through the countryside killing Lyalls or anyone who associated with them. And the Lyalls were killing Taylors and their friends. Every death sparked another. It would not stop until they were all gone.

  Thing was, if you talked to people individually, none of them wanted this. They expressed shock and horror at what was going on, said they hoped someone would find a way of stopping it. Get them in a group, though, and the mood changed. Everyone had lost someone, they wanted revenge. It was as if they reinforced each other.

  Nell checked the water level in the kegs, stood at the kitchen window looking out at the darkness, remembering when it had all seemed safe and secure. That felt like a lifetime ago.

  She took her coat from the hook on the back of the door and went outside. The rain had stopped, and the night air was cold enough to make her nose itch. She nodded hello to a couple of people crossing the c
ompound to one of the other buildings, and made her way over to the wall.

  Her mother had told her the story of how her grandfather and his friends had built the wall, back in the early days of the Long Autumn. The Taylor farm – it had been the Lakin farm, back then – had been here before The Sisters but the old farmyard had not been defensible against the bands of marauding refugees from London and other parts of the country, so her great-grandfather Lakin had gone out and looked for a quick solution. There had still been petrol and diesel back then, and engines that could run them. They’d found big, strong vehicles – ‘heavy plant’, Rose called them – and they’d raided a railway freight yard, got the container handling machinery working and loaded the containers, one by one, onto lorries.

  Nell had sometimes tried to imagine what it had been like, those huge lorries – it was hard to picture what they must have been like, but she imagined enormous hulking machines with smoke coming out of them – making their way through the rain and the hail towards the Parish, the men fighting off looters as they went.

  It had been a colossal enterprise. The roads were still in good condition back then, but they were choked with people and other vehicles trying to get to who knew where, and even when they got to the Parish they still had to get the containers off the lorries and into position. You could still see, if you looked carefully and knew what you were seeing, the marks in the ground, almost a century old, where the containers had been dragged into place around the farm. Then their doors had been opened and earth piled inside.

  The ‘heavy plant’ had been driven some distance away on their last drops of fuel and then abandoned. Max had taken her to see them once, when she was little, but she couldn’t make head nor tail of the great rusted masses of metal half-reclaimed by weeds and undergrowth. They looked as if they had been put there by careless gods.

  Her great-grandfather had built another wall on top of the containers, a thick, shoulder-high wall of brick scavenged from a housing estate a few miles to the south, to protect people patrolling along the parapet. Later, a hole had been cut through the sides of one of the containers, and strong wooden doors fitted to make access to the walled kitchen garden.

  All her life these high metal walls had kept out bad people and wild animals. Now, she thought, the bad people and the wild animals had been inside all along.

  She walked across the yard to where a set of brick steps had been built alongside one of the old containers. She walked up until she could step out on top of the wall and look out across the darkened countryside.

  Directly ahead, the track leading to the front gate of the compound ran straight through a little wood. Her great-grandfather and his friends had cut the track to bring the containers of the wall here, and they’d kept it clear ever since. The wood curved around half of the compound, about a hundred yards away, and between them was an area bare of undergrowth and vegetation, so no one could sneak up on them. There was still some hot-headed debate about how Doctor Ogden’s murderer had managed to get so close to the gate without anyone seeing them, and even more about how they had managed to get away again. The general consensus was that the people on guard that day had been more than usually rubbish, and they deserved to be thrown out.

  To one side, if Nell stretched up on her toes, she could look over the brick wall and see down into part of the walled garden beyond. And beyond that, lost in the darkness but making its presence known by the smell of rotting fish, was the pond. Patrick had told her not to bring any of the food from the walled garden into the house. He said it was probably contaminated as well.

  At the back, the wall looked out over a vista of little fields and hedges, dotted with outhouses and animal pens. Nell wrapped her coat more tightly about herself against the chill and walked on.

  Back at the gate, she started to turn and head back down the steps, but something in the corner of her eye made her stop and go back to the brick wall and look out into the wood.

  For a moment, she thought she’d imagined it, but then she saw it again, a tiny spark of orange light moving between the trees. Someone coming to attack? No, surely not. Not carrying a lantern. Someone in need of help?

  A couple of the guards on the wall had seen it too, and joined her to watch as the light bobbed along through the wood, almost as if it was floating along on its own. The light seemed to be rising and falling, dipping down to the ground and then lifting into the air again as it moved forward.

  “Will O’ The Wisp,” said one of the guards. “Fairy folk. My ma told me about them.”

  “Oh do fuck off,” said the other, momentarily forgetting that his boss’s daughter was standing with them.

  Nell barely heard them. She was watching as tiny flickers of light appeared on the ground along the edge of the clearing. They grew larger and brighter, and then with an astonishing whoosh that made everyone on the parapet take a step back, one of them leapt up the trunk of one of the trees. Then another. Then another.

  It was impossible to understand what she was seeing, a wall of flame bursting out of the ground, illuminating the entire front of the farm. She could almost feel the heat, hear the roaring of the trees burning from the base of their trunks to their canopies. It was as if the whole wood was on fire, burning up, consuming her life.

  THE NEXT MORNING, some of the trees were still smouldering fitfully, their trunks charred and their scorched branches bare of leaves.

  “Well,” said Mr Race, standing beside her and looking at the scene. “I don’t know what would make a wet tree burn like that.”

  The air was full of the smell of burning wood and leaves, but under it was another smell, sharper, almost unnatural. Nell went over to one of the trees and ran a finger along its charred bark. There was some sticky residue there. When she sniffed her finger, she smelled that unnatural smell again. She went to wipe the finger on her coat, thought better of it.

  “Where’s Patrick?” she said.

  Mr Race shrugged, and that told her all she needed to know. Off somewhere, killing Lyalls. She couldn’t remember when she’d seen him last. Yesterday morning? The day before?

  “I honestly don’t know,” Mr Race said again, looking at the trees. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was lightning.”

  “It wasn’t lightning,” she told him. “Someone was out here last night and they set fire to the trees. I watched them do it.” That bobbing, supernatural flame moving along through the wood...

  “Lyalls wouldn’t do this,” said Mr Race. “I don’t think anyone round here would know how. I certainly don’t.”

  First the pond, now this. It was as if there were two wars going on: the one she understood and the one she didn’t. The war she understood was just people wandering through the woods and shooting each other, attacking each other’s farms. The one she didn’t understand, this one, was different. It was being fought on completely different terms, she sensed.

  She turned from the screen of charred trees and started to walk back to the gate. Mr Race looked at the trees for another few moments, then followed her.

  “I want you to bring some people in from patrol, Mr Race,” she said. “Set them to patrolling around the compound.” If Patrick wasn’t here to do this, she was going to have to do it herself. “I don’t want them going into the woods or the fields, only around the wall.”

  Mr Race thought about that. “Yes’m,” he said – he couldn’t quite bring himself to say ‘miz’ – that was her mother.

  “If they see anything out of the ordinary, anything at all, they’re to raise the alarm. Nothing else, just to raise the alarm. I want you to make that very clear to them. I want people inside the compound ready to go out at all times.”

  “Yes’m.”

  She looked at the wall as they approached the gate, the great metal containers her great-grandfather and his friends had brought here so long ago to protect his family. Her family. No one had been hurt last night, but all of a sudden the wall didn’t seem so strong any longer.

/>   As she reached the gate, she looked along the wall and saw something half-hidden in the grass, leaning up against the streaked metal of one of the containers. She walked over to it and saw an old board – something from a fence maybe, or a bit of floorboard from one of the abandoned houses that littered the Parish. She bent down and picked it up, knowing before she even touched it that there would be a single word carved into the wood.

  “Mr Race,” she called.

  He was standing at the gate, waiting to be let in. “Yes’m?”

  She went over to him, the board in her hands, and showed him the carving. Mr Race couldn’t read, so she said, “Have you heard of someone called Wayland?”

  He frowned at the board. “There’s Wayland’s Smithy, away down on the west side.”

  She remembered her mother telling her the story, now. Wayland the demon smith, with his forge. Her father said it was just an old tomb, from thousands of years ago, all overgrown now. It wasn’t really all that far away, but she’d never been there.

  “Is there a family called Wayland?”

  He shook his head. “Not round here, at any rate.”

  “You’re sure? Nobody with an old grudge against us?”

  He shook his head again. “Nobody’s got a grudge against you.”

  She tipped her head to one side.

  “Not an old one, at any rate,” he added. “Is that what it says? ‘Wayland’?”

  She turned the board over in her hands, looked at the back. Both ends were jagged, freshly-broken. “Could you ask around, please? See if anyone else knows the name? Perhaps it’s someone from over Goring way. Maybe dad got in a fight with them.”

  “Your dad never got into a fight with anyone,” he told her. “Not since he was a boy, anyway.”