Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  Patrick arrived first, and spent some time scouting the village before ordering his men to pull back onto one of the old roads. Harry and about a dozen of his men turned up a few minutes later, and they too stopped just short of the pub. The two groups watched each other for a while, and then Harry stepped forward alone and Patrick went to meet him.

  They reached the ruined pub and stood in what had once been the car park, in plain sight of both armed groups. Patrick had some kind of automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, something Harry didn’t recognise.

  “Harry,” said Patrick.

  “Patrick,” said Harry, a little taken aback by the changes in the boy. He seemed almost feral. “You wanted to talk.”

  Patrick held out an old piece of board, the one he’d found by the pond the morning after all the fish had been poisoned. Harry looked at the word carved on it and nodded.

  “So you know about this?” Patrick said.

  “I’ve seen the name.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not us.”

  “Who the fuck is it, then?”

  Harry shrugged.

  Patrick walked to the edge of the car park and stood looking out across the lake.

  “You didn’t think it was us,” Harry said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  Patrick turned and said, “I –” and then he fell down into the bushes around his feet and for a moment, everything was perfectly calm and silent save for the crack of a single gunshot echoing flatly into the distance.

  “Oh, fuck,” said Harry. Then everyone was shooting.

  Harry threw himself to the ground and elbow-crawled around behind a pile of tumbled brickwork. People were shouting, firing at each other, running from cover to cover. Someone jumped over the pile of bricks and landed right in front of him. They looked at each other for a dazed moment, then Harry lunged up, grabbed the barrel of the man’s rifle, and punched him hard in the stomach. The man – Harry had no idea who he was – folded up, and Harry grabbed a brick off the ground and belted him round the head with it and kept hitting him long after he’d fallen and stopped moving. Harry searched his pockets hurriedly for spare ammo, then moved quickly away through the weeds and bushes around the pub. Popping his head over a broken wall, he saw two people standing thigh-deep in water at either end of the lake, shooting repeatedly at each other without success. A crossbow bolt banged into the wall near his face and whined off into the bushes, and he ducked down and duck-walked quickly through the weeds away from the ruins.

  He made it to a screen of bushes and crashed through them into a dense stand of trees, turned, and lifted the rifle to his shoulder, but it all seemed to be over. There were bodies everywhere. The two people in the lake were both floating face down in the water. There was sudden movement out in the open, right in front of him, and someone he didn’t know was running directly towards him waving a huge and very antique revolver. Harry shot him in the chest.

  He emerged cautiously from cover, rifle at the ready. In the distance, two figures were running up the road away from the village as fast as humanly possible, and Harry couldn’t blame them. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than two minutes.

  Patrick lay where he had fallen, a bloody hole in the breast of his coat and a surprised look on his face. Harry looked at the houses on the other side of the lake, then back down at Patrick. He looked like a little boy again, the way Rob had. All of a sudden, Harry didn’t know what to do. It was out of the question to do the right thing, which would have been to take Patrick back to his family. Burying him was also impossible; someone would be coming soon, drawn by the gunfire or by those two people who had escaped. He dithered for long moments in the drizzle, remembering getting drunk with Max on the night Patrick was born. He remembered seeing Max the next morning, massively hungover and sheepish; Rose had given him hell. But he was still the happiest man in the world.

  From far back in a bedroom of one of the houses overlooking the lake, he watched through the scope as the lone figure turned and walked back into the woods.

  That had actually been quite gratifying. He’d taken the hunting rifle from the body of someone he had shot a few days previously, and the scope had been cannibalised from a crossbow. It was by no means the finest scope he had ever used, and he’d had to lash it to the rifle with string, but the shot hadn’t been difficult. He hadn’t been prepared for both sides to start blazing away at each other, though. That was a bonus.

  He slung the rifle over his shoulder, picked up a shotgun, and made his way downstairs. Halfway down, he stopped and listened. He turned and went back into the bedroom and cautiously looked out through the broken window.

  A horse was standing by the lake, its rider sitting comfortably and without fear, looking around at the scene of carnage. The rider was wearing a long hooded coat, and there was a long gun cradled in its arms. Its body language was quite unlike anything he had seen since he had arrived here. Utterly relaxed and without fear.

  He reached into the satchel hanging round his neck and took out the pair of binoculars he had taken from Paul Abbot’s study, uncapped the lenses, and raised them to his eyes. At the same moment, the rider turned to the houses across the lake and lifted its head, and he found himself looking, from a distance of maybe a hundred and fifty yards, directly into the eyes of Albie Dodd.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  IT STARTED TO rain hard as Harry got back to the farm. The hands, used now to his frankly suicidal wanderings around the surrounding countryside, opened the gate just far enough for him to slip through, then closed it again behind him. Wendy was waiting in the yard.

  “We need to get ready,” he told her. “It was a catastrophe. Patrick Taylor’s dead. Everyone’s dead.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Harry,” she said.

  “They’ll be coming,” he said. “All of them.”

  She didn’t know what scared her more, the news Harry had brought or the fact that he seemed completely lost, bewildered. She took hold of his upper arms and said, “Harry. Harry, listen to me. It will take them time to get organised. We have time.”

  He stared at her, and someone called, “Gaffer!” from the wall. They both looked round at the voice, and the hand shouted, “Someone’s coming! Riders!”

  They looked at each other. “It’s too soon, Harry,” she said.

  He turned from her and ran up the steps to the parapet, heard her running after him through the rain. At the top, he looked over the wall and saw ten or twelve riders making their way unhurriedly down the track towards the compound. They were all dressed in long hooded coats and they were all armed with rifles and shotguns, and they moved as if they owned the ground their horses walked on.

  “Who the fuck are they?” Wendy said.

  For Harry, the day had long since stopped making any sense at all. If an army of elves had come down the track riding badgers, it would have seemed perfectly reasonable. He watched the riders reach the wall and stop. They all looked up at him.

  “Who are you?” he said in a voice which didn’t seem remotely strong enough. “What do you want?”

  “We want Adam Hardy,” called one of the riders, the one at the front of the group.

  “What?”

  “Adam Hardy. We know he’s here.”

  “I don’t know anyone called Adam Hardy.”

  The rider shook his head sadly and pulled back the hood of his coat. He was a bulky, shaven-headed man with a round face and the eyes of a murderer. “We know he’s here,” he said. “They told us at the ferry.”

  Harry turned to Wendy, who shrugged helplessly.

  We’re busy; we have things to do. “There’s nobody called Hardy here,” he called down. “Adam or otherwise.”

  The rider thought about that. “You see,” he said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what you believe,” Harry said, and it occurred to him that his voice sounded ever so slightly hysterical. “Who are y
ou?”

  The rider thought about that, too. “Friends of Adam’s,” he said. “Come to take him home.”

  “Are you serious?” Wendy said.

  “Yes,” said the rider. “Actually, yes.”

  “There’s no one here called Hardy,” she said. “Or Adam, come to that.”

  “No strangers?” the rider asked. “People passing through?”

  Harry suddenly thought of Wayland and tipped his head to one side. “No,” he said.

  The rider smiled. “And I don’t believe you again.”

  “People pass through here all the time,” Wendy told him. “We’ve not heard of your Adam. He’s not here.”

  All the time, Harry was standing in wonder that the riders could just sit there in the pouring rain with a dozen guns pointed down at them and not care. As if things weren’t already bad enough. Don’t have time for this.

  “You’ll have to go now,” Wendy said.

  “No, we don’t,” the rider said casually. “We don’t have to do anything.” He seemed, if anything, faintly amused to be sitting there in the rain and having this conversation. Harry felt his heart pounding in his chest.

  “Your friend isn’t here,” he said.

  “You know, we’ve come a long way,” the rider told him. “It’d be nice if you let us in so we could have a bit of a rest before we carry on looking for Adam.”

  “Not going to happen,” said Wendy.

  “Not very friendly, are you,” he mused. “I noticed you were having some trouble. Maybe we can help.”

  Harry didn’t doubt they could. He also didn’t doubt that letting them into the compound would be one of the worst mistakes he could ever make. “Your friend isn’t here,” he said again. “We don’t know him, we haven’t seen him, we haven’t heard about him. Sorry.”

  “Eh well,” said the rider. He ran his hand over his smooth, bare scalp. “We’ll be around for a while. If you do hear about him, come and let us know. Yes?”

  “Sure. Okay.” By this point, Harry was prepared to promise anything at all so long as these strange and scary men – and they were all men, he realised – went away.

  “All right, then,” said the rider with a smile. “Be seeing you.” He flipped up the hood of his coat, took up the reins, and urged his horse to turn away from the farm and back up the track. One by one, the others followed him, and in a minute or so – they were in no hurry at all – they were gone.

  “What in fuck was that all about?” Wendy said.

  But Harry was still looking down the track, his mind somewhere else entirely.

  THEY DIDN’T TELL Rose, not then. Max’s fever had broken in the night, and so had she. Nell came into the bedroom in the morning and found her mother slumped half in her chair and half across the bed, and for a second there was a thunderstruck feeling in her heart that they had both died, that it had just been too much for both of them in the end. Then she saw Rose’s shoulders moving as she breathed and a moment later Max turned his head slightly and opened his eyes. “Hallo, Nelly,” he said, and then he closed his eyes and fell asleep and she ran downstairs to find Patrick.

  But Patrick, of course, was nowhere to be found, so she got her mother to bed and tried to keep the routine of the day going, making the children breakfast, tidying the kitchen. Through the kitchen window, from time to time, she saw another kind of routine going on. Hands patrolling the wall, making repairs to buildings and weapons, people returning from the outside, wounded or worse. She thought no one knew who they were fighting any more, or why. It just went on, incident after incident, action and reaction.

  Drying her hands at the sink, she looked out of the window and saw the gate slide open a fraction and two men come running through. They looked exhausted, as if they’d run a very long way, but they seemed frantically excited too, shouting and gesturing to the other hands who came running to them. They recounted, in what looked like quite a chaotic fashion, some story or other, and as the story reached its climax everyone around them turned and looked at the house, and Nell felt her heart die.

  There was some discussion among the men in the yard, then two of the hands left the group unwillingly and started to walk over to the house. Nell watched them and willed that short walk to last for ever, because until she heard them say it, Patrick was still alive. They moved out of view and a moment later there was an unenthusiastic knock on the door, as if hopeful that no one would hear it. She neatly folded the tea towel she had been drying her hands on, draped it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, and went to answer it.

  THEY TOOK TWO wagons, and nobody said a word as they drove over to the village where Patrick had arranged to meet the Lyalls.

  There were bodies everywhere. They walked through the village, turning corpses over, looking at faces, trying to decide which were Taylors and which were Lyalls. It was harder than Nell expected. Not all the faces were familiar; some were from outlying farms and holdings, people who had come from distant parts of the Parish to join one side or the other, either out of a sense of loyalty or out of fear of being isolated and caught in the middle, like the Abbots. She was tempted to just load all the bodies up and take them home, but there wasn’t room in the wagon, and her hands wouldn’t have stood for burying Lyall dead after what had happened here.

  She found Patrick lying on his back in the weeds beside a ruined old building. For a moment, she didn’t know him; so much of what had made him Patrick had only been present while he was alive. This empty shell was like a badly-rendered model of him, recognisable only by his clothes and his earring and the fancy gun still slung over his shoulder. Stolen, she suspected, from some other poor soul. She stood looking down at him and remembered them playing together as kids, remembered him giving her a toy for her seventh birthday, a rather poorly-carved wooden dog that he’d made himself. Bingo, he’d called it, a word he’d seen in one of Ma’s old books. Bingo was still sitting on the dressing table in her bedroom, one of his back legs broken off during a particularly vigorous playtime. Patrick had tried to glue it back, but somehow it never stuck properly. She wondered why she didn’t feel more sad, and realised she had given Patrick up for dead days ago. It had already happened, in her head, and she was only going through the motions now.

  Some of the hands were going from body to body collecting weapons and ammunition, and that did make her achingly sad, seeing them stripping the dead like that. She knew they were short of stuff, but it was disrespectful. She knew they were better than that, or had been once upon a time, at any rate.

  She knelt down and took one of Patrick’s hands in hers. His hand was cold and stiff, the fingers clenched into a fist, and his arm wouldn’t move. It was as if he was carved from wood.

  And then she started to feel angry. She felt angry with Rob Lyall and those two unknown boys, with Harry Lyall, with all the people of the Parish who had taken up arms and refused to bring this madness to a stop. She felt angry, in the end, with Patrick.

  So they loaded their dead – those they could identify - onto the wagons, and they drove off, and in time Morty Roberts came walking down the road, although by now he was staggering a little, and he looked at the scene of the slaughter, trying to reconstruct what had happened and failing.

  He searched the bodies, but everything useful had already been taken. He found a lump of cheese wrapped in paper in someone’s pocket, overlooked by those who had come before him, and he gnawed on it as he walked towards the houses on the other side of the lake.

  He went through these too, carefully and methodically. It was obvious they had been abandoned for far too long for there to be anything edible here, but people had left behind many things when they tried to flee the Long Autumn, and sometimes he could make use of them.

  In an upstairs bedroom of one of the houses, there were signs that someone had been there recently. Some of the furniture had been moved; there were lighter patches in the dirt on the floor where they had been originally. He looked round patiently, and eventually
a dull brass shine half-under a chest of drawers caught his eye. He knelt and reached down and retrieved a spent rifle cartridge, lifted it to his nose, and sniffed. Recently fired.

  After that, it was just a matter of checking amongst the rubbish piled everywhere in the bedroom, and there it was, a piece of board with a single word carved on it. He didn’t know what it said, but it was the same word that had been carved into the tree from which the predator had hanged his prey. It was his mark, and it was beautiful.

  Morty went to the window and looked out over the lake. He could see some of the bodies from here, crumpled and contorted or spreadeagled in the undergrowth. He took the spent rifle cartridge from his pocket and looked at it.

  Wonderful work.

  THE LIGHT, SUCH as it was, had begun to fail as the wagons made their way back to the farm. They had not seen the Lyalls, neither on the way out nor on the way back. The countryside, for the first time in days, was silent and still, save for the steady hiss of the rain.

  Nell sat in the front wagon beside Anthea Reese, her brother’s fancy new gun across her lap and his body and those of seven other hands covered in tarpaulins in the loadbed behind her. She watched the track unwind before her, emerging from the rain and growing dusk like a dream, and for a moment, when she saw the two mounted figures blocking their path, she thought that they too were a dream.

  Anthea brought the horses to a halt, and the other wagon stopped behind them. Then everyone just sat there. The riders were large and bulky and they wore hooded coats and carried rifles. They made no sign of being prepared to move.

  One of them pulled the hood of his coat back, revealing a bald head and a face with a mean little mouth. “Hello there,” he called.

  Nell’s fingers curled slowly around the shotgun. “We don’t want any trouble,” she said.

  “Neither do we,” he said. “We’re just looking for our friend. Adam Hardy. Do you know him?”