Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Maybe it’s this Wayland who attacked him and killed Rob Lyall and those other two boys,” she said.

  He looked at her, and she knew she was grasping at straws. Even if someone from outside the Parish had started all this – even if she could somehow convince Harry Lyall of it – the people here weren’t going to stop. Too many had died already. Nobody was going to back down now.

  “Just ask,” she told him. “Please.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  MORTY MOVED THROUGH the increasingly-fraught landscape of the war he had helped to start as if it was not there at all. He felt quite at home in the chaos, a lone figure slipping unseen across a drenched patchwork of fields and woods and dense vegetation. It was as if he was invisible, invulnerable.

  He no longer resembled the Morty Roberts who had left his home for the last time all those days ago. His clothes were filthy and torn, his hair matted, his skin covered in dirt. The only thing that remained was the Morty Face, looking trustingly out on the world, always ready to help, always ready to take whatever abuse the world and those in it presented to him and shrug it off.

  He’d long ago stopped trying to keep count of those he killed. He was well into double figures now, he thought, and still the howling anger behind the Morty Face wasn’t satisfied. It wouldn’t be satisfied until everyone in the Parish was dead, everyone who had mocked him and patronised him and pitied him and abandoned him.

  But he wasn’t alone. He’d become aware, in recent days, of something else at large in the Parish, another predator who moved through the countryside in much the same way as he did. He’d seen its handiwork nailed to a tree near the Lyalls’, and it had pleased him.

  He took to keeping an eye open, as he ventured out on sorties, gunning people down – Lyall, Taylor, whoever, it didn’t matter – from a distance or close up with bursts from the machine gun. They were always unprepared, surprised, like little children playing at soldiers and finding a real soldier in their midst. The people of the Parish were acting on old angers and grudges, stored up over many years. Everywhere he went he saw signs of the predator – the other predator. The Taylors and the Lyalls and the others missed the signs because all they saw was another dead body, but Morty knew. It was like being able to identify an animal from the bite-marks it left on its prey. Like recognises like.

  One night, heading back to what he was increasingly thinking of as his stronghold, Morty experienced a presentiment so profound that it made him halt in his tracks, standing absolutely still. He stayed that way for so long that he thought perhaps he was having a stroke or something, but then he heard something moving through the undergrowth a few yards away.

  He didn’t move, not even his eyes. He didn’t see what it was, just heard a soft, confident tread in the leaf and twig litter on the ground, an almost-inaudible rustle of bushes being moved aside as something passed by. Morty himself was standing in a dense patch of undergrowth almost as tall as he was, invisible, barely breathing. He let whatever it was pass by, waited a minute or so, then set off silently in pursuit.

  The quiet sounds from ahead of him led to a clearing close to a farm compound. In the middle of the clearing sat a brick outhouse. Morty saw a big, bulky shape pass along the wall of the outhouse, and at first he thought it was some fantastical creature, a thing out of legend. Then he realised it was just a man with a large rucksack strapped to his back.

  The figure moved round to the door of the outhouse and stooped, doing something Morty couldn’t make out. The door opened, and the shape went inside. A few moments later, it emerged and it was a different shape, slimmer, more agile, the rucksack gone.

  It started to move towards him, and Morty froze, just barely fighting the urge to flee, but it passed by, just a few yards away and disappeared into the woods.

  Morty had just begun to breathe again when the figure returned, this time dragging something heavy. There was no haste in its movements, just a careful plodding walk. Morty couldn’t see what it was dragging, but it was large and it made a lot of noise as it passed through the undergrowth, but the black shape didn’t seem to care. It was, like him, entirely outside time, invulnerable, intangible.

  It dragged whatever it was dragging into the outhouse, and then went back into the woods, came back a few minutes later dragging another large object. It did this a number of times, and then there was a pause when it didn’t emerge.

  Morty was just about to move around to get a better view of the doorway of the outhouse when the figure reappeared. It was moving more quickly now. It dropped something to the ground. And then it started to run flat-out back into the woods the way it had come. Morty spent a couple of seconds processing this development, then he too turned and ran, off at a tangent, as fast as he was able.

  He’d got quite a distance from the outhouse when there was a huge flat concussion behind him and the woods all around lit up. A huge, soft, hot hand pushed him off his feet and pitched him face down into a patch of brambles as hundreds of small heavy objects hurtled overhead and thumped into trees, dropping to the ground all around him.

  He lay there for a few moments. The flash had ruined his night vision; everything was just a huge damp blackness that smelled of freshly-disturbed earth and broken vegetation and scorched meat and a sharper, more acrid and unnatural smell that he couldn’t indentify. He closed his eyes, opened them again. Did it again, and this time he could make out enough detail in the darkness to stand and make his way uncertainly from the farm, while behind him shouts rang out through the woods.

  “WELL,” SAID HARRY.

  “It happened last night,” said Gracie Farr. “I was out in the yard and I saw this huge flash and heard a bang.”

  “Yes,” Harry said. He’d heard the bang, too, thought it was thunder but it had sounded too flat, had echoed all wrong across the sleeping countryside. “Accident?”

  She snorted. “We haven’t run a brew since this fucking stupidity started; the fires were out.”

  They were standing in a clearing a few hundred yards from the Farr compound. As well as farming, the Farrs operated a distillery that made a particularly potent form of potato vodka. Gracie’s grandfather had found all the copper vessels and piping in a microbrewery in Lambourn years and years ago, had built himself a little brick house to put them all in.

  The little building was gone now, almost from the ground up. There were bricks scattered all over the area, for hundreds of yards – one had gone through the Farrs’ roof. Branches and foliage had been shredded off the trees around the clearing, their bark scorched and chewed and some smaller saplings snapped entirely, and in the middle sat a broken, blackened square of concrete outlined by a jagged line of broken brickwork not much more than shin-high. Harry looked up and saw a copper pressure vessel sitting in the branches of a tree. There were bits of broken, twisted piping everywhere.

  He walked across to where the distillery had stood, considered the ruined concrete square of the floor, looked around the clearing. He walked over to the other side and squatted down on his haunches, looking at something half-buried in the disturbed leaf and twig litter. He found a small branch and poked around experimentally.

  Gracie came over and stood beside him. “Is that someone’s foot?” she said.

  IN THE END, they found four feet, but three of them were left feet. They also found, in the woods beyond the brewhouse, five arms, a leg minus a foot, and one ripped and bloody female torso impaled on a branch halfway up a tree.

  “This is a hell of a thing,” said Wendy.

  “Mm,” said Harry, looking at the body parts arranged on the ground beside the devastated distillery. “Have we found any heads yet?”

  “Still looking.” Wendy shook her head. “How fucked up do you have to be to lock people up in a building and then blow it up?”

  Harry gazed around the clearing, ringed by armed guards in case the Taylors or some of their allies turned up. He had a sense that it was impossible to stop this now; even if he and the Tayl
ors made peace tomorrow, there was enough enmity between the other holdings to last another hundred years.

  “No glass,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Gracie and Tim kept a stock of empty jugs and bottles in the distillery, but there’s no glass anywhere.”

  She stared at him. “Harry. Really?”

  “Yeah. I know. Not the worst thing.” He stuck his hands in his pockets.

  “If the Taylors have got their hands on explosives, we’re in trouble.”

  On the other hand, if the Taylors had got their hands on explosives, why not use them on the Lyall compound instead of... this...? He saw one of the hands on the other side of the clearing reach down and lift what looked like a piece of wood out of the leaf litter, look at it, and drop it again.

  “See if you can work out who’s missing,” he said, starting to walk unhurriedly across the clearing. “Ask around and see if anyone’s got an idea where the explosives came from.”

  “Well, that’s an easy one,” she said, following him.

  He shook his head. “Betty wouldn’t let them do this.”

  “Coghlans and Taylors go back years,” she said. “You know the story.”

  “Yes, I do, and I know Betty well enough to know she’s far too sensible to be arming the Taylors. Let’s not drag Blandings into this, Wendy; we’re in enough trouble as it is.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  He stopped and looked down and poked at the rubbish on the ground with the toe of his boot. “Bury what’s left of these poor people at the farm. Whoever they are.”

  “Okay.”

  After Wendy had gone, Harry looked down again at the bit of wood lying on the ground. It was scorched and shattered, but it was still possible to see the letters ay carved into it.

  THE WEATHER BROKE. Squalls of rain and sleet battered the Chilterns, rushing away up the Vale of the White Horse, harbingers of the monsoon storms which still lay a month or so in the future. Everywhere, farmers and homesteaders battened down for the approaching autumn. Everywhere but one small corner of the Hills.

  More or less entirely cut off now, either by the efforts of its own people or by locals who shunned it, the Parish seemed to have dropped out of the world, become a hermetic pocket of violence. Word of what was going on there had spread as far as Goring and Lambourn, and no one in the outside world wanted any part of it, as if there was a sickness there and they were afraid of it spreading.

  Within the ad hoc boundaries, firefights and assaults went on daily, in rain and wind and hail. As resources dwindled, livestock and crops were plundered by both sides. Farmsteads were besieged and broken, their families executed.

  And through all this moved Wayland, a dark faceless fear. Wayland could come into your compound in the middle of the day, into your house, and slit your throat without anyone ever seeing him. He could poison your animals just by looking at them. He worked for the Taylors, he worked for the Lyalls; he existed, he did not.

  He’d been lucky with the explosive; some of the ingredients, scrounged from abandoned farm supply stores and the old do-it-yourself supermarket, were over a century old, and he was working from the memory of a long-ago field weapons course during which the instructor had said casually, “Of course, you’d have to be crazy to actually try any of this, sir, but you might as well know it, just in case.” It was a miracle he hadn’t blown himself to bits.

  It was actually pathetically easy to move about the area, at night or during the day. The farmers were so busy killing each other that they didn’t notice a lone figure moving through the undergrowth; if they’d actually put aside their differences and started to pay attention to finding him, he’d have been dead days ago.

  He drifted through the embattled landscape, scrounging food and gear from abandoned farms. Sometimes there was ammunition, left behind in a hurry and overlooked by later visitors, but not so often. He had a sense that the war was reaching a tipping point. He never stayed in one place more than a few hours, snatching sleep where he could.

  Strangely, he felt good. He’d reached a sense of clarity where all other priorities had been rescinded, where the time before he had ridden into the middle of this mess seemed distant and dreamlike. He was a point of concentration, dimensionless. Sometimes it was an effort to remember his name.

  He went back to the Abbot farm, from time to time. The locals had seemed to shun the place after looting it of anything useful, whether from shame or superstition he didn’t know. It was a safe place to lay up for a night, anyway. Someone – someone decent in the midst of the madness which had overtaken the Parish – had taken the time to bury the bodies of the Abbots and their people, and he stood by the graves without a thought in his head. No one knew he was here; if the people who had attacked him on that first day remembered him at all, if they’d somehow survived the war this long – if he hadn’t killed them himself, along the way – they’d assume he was dead. He was a ghost, an avenging spirit.

  HE FOUND THE two men sheltering from a rainstorm in the lee of an old brick outhouse, part of an abandoned farmstead which had been absorbed by the larger, neighbouring one. They went for their weapons when he appeared in front of them, but he subdued them with blows from the butt of his shotgun, gagged them, bound their elbows behind their backs and their knees with short lengths of rope, looped more rope around their necks, and urged them through the undergrowth to the site of his latest demonstration. They didn’t make any trouble. Perhaps they thought a chance for escape would present itself. The older one tried to talk to him, in an exhausted voice, but he didn’t respond beyond urging them on with pokes in the back from the muzzle of the shotgun.

  It was only when they got to their destination – it wasn’t far, he wondered how it hadn’t been discovered yet – that they saw what he was building, and they panicked. The younger one managed to pull the rope out of his hand and tried to make a hobbling, shuffling run for it, but he shot him in the back. The older one just stood there and watched with sad eyes. He didn’t try to resist, even when the rope round his neck was thrown over a branch and he was hauled up into the tree.

  Everything had started to seem like a dream. Patrick couldn’t remember the last time he had slept properly, or had a decent meal. He spent days out in the countryside with a group of hands, hunting down Lyall supporters, sleeping rough. He and his men moved across the drenched landscape like ancient warriors called back from a long absence to do battle against a modern evil. It was hard, now, to recall how many he had killed, how many of his family had died. It just went on, day after day.

  Heading back towards the farm, one of the scouts came running through the undergrowth shouting, “Guv! Guv!” and for a moment he thought they were calling Max, that his father would step up and take over and make everything right again. But that didn’t happen. They were calling him.

  The scout led them along a track between two fields, an old farm lane that had slowly and patiently been reclaimed by vegetation. Sometime shortly after The Sisters, a sapling had started to grow here, at an intersection with another track, in defiance of the Long Autumn. Now it was almost fifty feet tall, a great gaunt monster of a tree. Patrick and his men walked up to it and stood there in horrified wonder.

  Seven bodies were hanging from the branches of the tree, all of them bound and gagged. They swung gently to and fro in the wind and the rain. Patrick’s mind refused to process what he was seeing. The Lyalls – or their allies, anyway – were prone to hang their captives, but not en masse like this, adorning a tree like some sick form of Christmas decoration.

  “They’re not all ours,” said one of his men, looking up at the bodies. He pointed. “That’s Neil Latham; he’s with the Lyalls. And there’s Connor Lyall...” His voice trailed away as one of the bodies turned slowly on its rope and they found themselves looking up into the darkened, suffused face of John Race. Patrick felt the world stagger a little, as if it had stubbed its toe and lost its footing momentarily.

&nbs
p; When everything steadied, he was still standing there. John was still hanging above him.

  “Guv?” said one of the hands, looking at him from the other side of the tree. Patrick walked around to him and together they looked at the single word freshly-carved into the trunk. Deeply and calmly carved, as if whoever had done this had all the time in the world.

  “Cut them down,” he said. “Bury them in the field there. And then I want someone to get word to the Lyalls.”

  WHEN EVERYONE HAD gone, Morty emerged from hiding. He walked over to the tree and stood looking up into the branches for a long time. He ran his fingers over the word cut deeply into the bark. This was marvellous work; the other, the predator, was an artist. Morty realised all of a sudden that all he had been doing was blindly killing, when he should have been doing something like this, sending a real message to the people who had abused him all these years.

  He went over to the field where the bodies had been buried, considered the graves. It really was the most wonderful work.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  BACK BEFORE THE Sisters, there had been a village here. Not a big village – half a dozen houses and a little local shop, arranged around a village green with a duck pond. The houses had been abandoned for years, as everyone in the area withdrew into fortified compounds. The pond had flooded, over and over again, during the Long Autumn, and had overwhelmed the green. Now the deserted and ruined houses, at the confluence of four small roads, rose from the fringes of a large shallow lake.

  There was a pub at the edge of the village, looted and burned by refugees from London in the early days of the disaster, a blackened shell almost submerged in bushes and small trees. It was, they had decided, the closest thing to neutral territory they could find.