Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “You’re welcome, Nell,” Harry said past the lump in his throat.

  She looked at him a few moments more, then nodded. “Goodbye, Mr Lyall.”

  He sensed Wendy starting to move along the parapet. “Goodbye, Nell.”

  She turned the horse slowly and rode away, as unhurriedly as she had arrived. Harry watched her go, and as she vanished round the curve of the track, he sank down behind the revetment and a few moments later gunfire erupted from the cover on all sides of the compound.

  FOR ALBIE DODD, life was a fairly simple equation. He got respect, and that made him happy. If he didn’t get respect, that upset him, and he hurt someone until he got respect and he was happy again. Respect was the key. Everything else – food, clothes, a warm, dry place to sleep – was just a natural side effect.

  He had received a marked lack of respect here. These farmers in their ridiculous little castles had refused to help him, had actually been pretty fucking rude about it, really. He’d been prepared to be magnanimous about that – they didn’t know him, after all, and you had to make some allowances – although he had been planning to come back here at some point after returning Adam and Gussie to Margate, and teaching them some manners. Now they’d killed some of his people, though, and that changed everything.

  Albie still had no clear idea what they had ridden into. The farmers were certainly angry about something, although quite who or what was not immediately obvious. Scouts had reported seeing firefights and lynchings and all sorts of chaos throughout the area – the mass gunfight he’d witnessed the day before was obviously not an isolated incident. But Albie didn’t care about the sensitivities of these people. He had not been afforded respect, and his first instinct was to hurt somebody. He’d deal with everything else later.

  The two biggest farms were far too well-fortified, but he’d seen smaller ones with nothing more than wooden walls and a couple of dozen people defending them. One of those would do. All he had to do was get their attention and make his point and then everything would be just fine.

  So Albie and his little army rode through the rain towards a farm he’d seen yesterday. They rode silently and in formation, like the invaders they were. Somewhere off to their right, the sound of a lot of shooting echoed through the woods, but they’d been hearing a lot of shooting since they arrived here and it didn’t worry Albie. One of the farmers might have been able to take two of his lads by surprise and bring them down, but they were a different prospect en masse. They could take care of themselves.

  All of a sudden a figure stepped out onto the track twenty or so yards ahead of them. It was wearing a tattered old raincoat and there were twigs and leaves in its hair and beard, and as it pulled back the hood of its coat, Albie saw that it was Adam Hardy.

  “Don’t shoot!” Albie called out. “Frank wants him alive!” Actually, Frank wanted Adam dead, but he wanted to do it himself and only after he got Gussie back. He was already fucked-off enough with Albie for bringing Adam to Margate in the first place; the last thing Albie needed was someone shooting Adam and then having to go back without Frank’s fucking gun.

  If Adam was alarmed to see them, he didn’t show it. He stood there quite relaxed in the middle of the track. He even seemed to be smiling a little, and that made Albie pause and wonder. As he watched, Adam turned his back on them, dropped his jeans and underwear, and slowly and deliberately bared his arse at the mass of enforcers.

  “Oh, you cheeky cunt,” Albie murmured, not without a small amount of admiration. He shouted, “Get him!” and the front ranks of the enforcers surged forward towards Adam, who was already pulling up his jeans and haring into the undergrowth beside the track. The horses turned and crashed through the bushes in pursuit, but the woodland was dense and there were no real paths through it and they could only manage a fast walk at best, while Albie watched the running figure of Adam disappearing into the distance. In a corner of his mind, he noted that they seemed to be moving towards the shooting he’d heard earlier, but the sight of his prey getting away blinded him to all other considerations. He’d come too far and gone through far too much to give up now.

  They burst from the trees and into a wide, deep clearing full of chaos and running people. On the other side of the clearing was the corner of a high brick wall that ran off into the distance in both directions, broken on one side by what seemed to be a solid wooden gate, and people standing on a walkway on the other side of the wall were firing down at hundreds of other people who were firing back and trying to manoeuvre ladders into position. Dozens of bodies already lay in the churned-up mud near the wall. Albie reined in his horse, and for the first time in his life he felt a pang of doubt.

  The defenders of the farm noticed the newcomers and started to fire on them. Some of the people with the ladders noticed, too, and also started shooting. The enforcer beside Albie took a round in the chest and fell sideways out of his saddle. Then everyone was firing at everyone else.

  Something came flying through the air – it looked like a bottle, turning end over end and trailing sparks, Albie couldn’t see where it came from – and hit the wall, and there was an almighty bang and a cloud of smoke, and when it cleared a number of people, and pieces of people, were lying at the base of the wall. Two more bottles looped across the clearing and struck the wall, and this time when the smoke cleared, there was a hole in the brickwork, and as Albie watched, a portion of the wall collapsed in on itself and farmers boiled out through the gap, firing at anything that moved.

  Albie’s people were fighting for their lives. Half of them were already dead, half the rest were off their horses and trying to fire from cover at the edge of the clearing. Panicked horses were running everywhere. Albie had no idea what to do. This was so far outside his experience that his mind could suggest no course of action at all.

  Abruptly, there was a hissing sound, and Albie watched in astonishment as a line of smoke drew itself through the rain right in front of him and hit the gate to the compound, and there was a bang like the world ending, and when the echoes of that had died down, the gate was mostly just gone, reduced to splinters.

  The shooting stopped, and there was a moment of shocked silence. Everyone just stood there, the rain pouring down on them, bewildered by the explosions.

  There was another hissing sound, and another line of smoke. This time it passed straight through the gate, across the compound, and through an upper-storey window of the house. There was a fraction of a second’s pause, and then the entire top of the house belched smoke and flame and blew off in a concussion of brick and woodwork and roof tiles.

  Then there were yet more people in the clearing, a line of them marching towards the farm, and the air was full of the racket of automatic weapon fire, something Albie had only ever heard once before but had never ever forgotten. The newcomers were not farmers, and they were not enforcers. They were all in uniform, and they looked like a picture of soldiers Albie had seen a long time ago in a book, and there seemed to be hundreds of them and they were shooting at everyone, and that was enough for him. Heart pounding, he turned the horse and rode back into the woods.

  CALM, OF A sort, finally returned to the clearing around the farm. Hundreds of bodies lay in the mud, Taylors, Lyalls, enforcers. Smoke drifted in horizontal panes across the scene as the Marines strode through it all, shooting the wounded, disarming the dead. Adam watched it all from the branches of a tree some distance away. He’d seen Marines do this once before, to a community down in Cornwall which had put up a token resistance to Guz. Shock and awe, they called it. Carrot and stick, but with a very large stick and no carrot.

  “Well, you took your own sweet time,” he said to himself. Then he dropped to the ground and was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, riders began to arrive at the Lyall farm. They came in threes and fours, pulled up outside the shattered gate. The soldiers camped outside the wall seemed to know them. The exhausted defenders of the farm watched
them come. They were all dressed in black coveralls and festooned with weapons, some of which the Lyall hands couldn’t even recognise. It never crossed their minds to offer up any resistance at all, not for a moment.

  Someone went to get Harry, and he came out into the yard slowly, pulling on a coat, smelling the drifting smoke on the air. The compound was littered with covered bodies, people sitting around listlessly, too spent to move.

  He walked out of the gate and stood looking at the riders. Two horses stood just in front of the silent ranks. On one sat a red-headed woman wearing a duster coat. On the other sat Betty Coghlan.

  Harry drew himself up to his full height. “Hello,” he said to the red-haired woman. “I’m Harry Lyall. Morning, Betty.” Betty glared at him.

  “I know who you are,” said the redhead. “We’re in charge now. If you try to resist, we will use force.”

  The idea of resisting was so absurd that he almost giggled. “Who are you?”

  “We’ll talk about that later. From now on, there is going to be order here. I want you and your people to put down your weapons.”

  “Have you told the Taylors that?”

  “Just listen to yourself, Harry,” Betty said heavily. “Don’t be such a fucking embarrassment.”

  “We’ve spoken to the Taylors,” said the red-haired woman. “They saw reason. We want you to see it too.”

  Harry looked at the two women, at the ranks of hard faces behind them. For a moment, the thought of going out in a blaze of gunfire seemed almost attractive. It would be a suitably ridiculous way to end this fiasco.

  Instead, he stepped aside. “Come on in,” he told the woman. “We haven’t got much, but you’re welcome to what we have. I don’t think we even have any tea left.”

  “That’s okay,” said the woman, urging her horse forward. “We brought our own.”

  OVER THE NEXT few days, once it became obvious that the locals weren’t going to cause very much trouble, the bulk of the Westerners packed up and departed for home. Twenty or thirty of them set up camp in the Abbot compound, whether by accident or design it was never quite clear, but nobody could mistake the message either way.

  It didn’t all go smoothly, of course, nothing ever does. A few locals were unable to accept that the war was over and they were now under martial law, and some hangings were necessary. Shock and awe. Guz was fair, but it was not, by and large, forgiving.

  A week or so after the final firefight, a wild-eyed, disordered figure came walking down the track towards the Abbot farm. Its clothes were filthy and torn, its hair matted, but it didn’t stop. It seemed to be unarmed, and the guards were somewhat confused about what to do until their commander, recognising the figure, told them to let him pass.

  He went through the lines of tents pitched in the farmyard, looking inside each until he found the one he was looking for, then he marched right up to the desk inside and stopped.

  The person sitting at the desk finished making some notes on a piece of paper before looking up at him. “Oh, hello,” she said.

  “I resign,” he told her.

  “Oh, don’t be daft,” Chrissie said. “Sit down. Do you want a brew?”

  “No, I don’t want a fucking brew,” he said, before realising that, actually, he did. He sighed and sank down into a camp chair.

  “Do you want to tell me what the hell’s been going on in your head these past few weeks?” she asked.

  “You sent me into this,” he said.

  “No, I didn’t. I sent you to Blandings.”

  “‘Go and deliver Betty’s stuff for her, Adam. It’ll be a nice trip, Adam. How can it hurt, Adam?’”

  “I didn’t authorise you to start a war,” she said. “We had a conversation about that, I remember.”

  “That was in Thanet.”

  “Thanet, here, anywhere. No wars.”

  “It was already going on when I got here.”

  “Dim sod,” she said.

  “You knew what I was walking into.”

  Chrissie sat back and rubbed her face and looked at him. “I didn’t, actually. Betty Coghlan probably did. And don’t you dare go making trouble for her. She did it with the best intentions.”

  “Struggling, here, with that ‘best intentions’ thing.”

  “I told her what you do for us. Contacting communities, negotiating with them. She thought you’d be able to put a stop to the fighting before it went too far.” Chrissie looked at him. “Judging by what we found when we got here, I may have oversold your abilities.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Chrissie.”

  “There’s no law here,” she said. “Nobody in authority. That’s one of the reasons everything broke down so completely so quickly. All those petty little grievances seething away for years and years and years, and one day people have an excuse to settle scores and there’s nobody to stop them. Betty thought you could reason with them, as the representative of a greater power, and then we’d turn up a few days later to underline the message.”

  “Well, as stupid fucking plans go...” An aide arrived with a tray on which sat two metal mugs. He handed one to Adam, one to Chrissie, and left the tent again. “And speaking of which, what took you so long?”

  She shrugged. “Ran into a little trouble in Wiltshire. Father John’s people.”

  “Oh, that’s just wonderful.”

  “He wasn’t there, but they said he’s still alive. Went up north somewhere. Anyway, we had to sort them out.”

  “Shock and awe?”

  She thought about it. “Just shock, really. We didn’t leave anyone behind to benefit from the awe.”

  Good old Guz, slashing and burning its way across the countryside, imposing Order. They’d been cooped up down there in Devon for too long, he thought; now they wanted to flex their muscles.

  “Anyway, by the time we got to Blandings Pendennis’s people had been and gone. Betty just told them to fuck off. She’s got a couple of Gatling guns, did you know that? That boy of hers built them; I’m going to have to arrange a visit to Guz for him.”

  Adam shook his head. “What a fucking mess,” he murmured.

  “The best we can guess is that they asked around and someone on the ferry remembered you coming this way and they thought it was safer to take a look for you round here than annoying Betty. They’re a bit amateur, really, aren’t they?”

  “It’s all relative,” he said, thinking of the starving, frightened people of Margate. Someone had told him that the inhabitants had trapped and eaten so many seagulls down the years that the birds avoided the town entirely now.

  “You should have got out of here when you could, gone back to Blandings.”

  He gave her a hard stare.

  “But you just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” She sighed. “Like those farmers in Wales. You had to get involved.”

  “According to you, that’s what you and Betty Coghlan wanted me to do.”

  “Not like this.” She waved a hand towards the entrance of the tent, the ruined farmyard beyond, the wreckage of the Parish. “I had a long chat with Harry Lyall. He says there was someone else here during the fighting. Not a local, he doesn’t think. Someone killing his people and the Taylors’ people and really anyone they could get their hands on. Called themselves ‘Wayland’. That ring a bell with you?”

  He thought of the ragged man, the satchel full of scalps. “It wasn’t just me.”

  “Lyall’s foreman thinks it was someone from Blandings, and so do a lot of other people, from what I hear, so that’s going to poison relations between Betty and this place for a very long time, so thank you for that.”

  Right now the status of Betty Coghlan’s friendships was quite a long way down his list of priorities.

  “There’s going to be a hell of a lot of rebuilding needed here,” she said. “And not just of physical stuff. And we need it fixed, we really do.”

  “Can we go home now, please?”

  Chrissie sat perfectly still, and he knew she
was about to deliver bad news.

  “We’ve known about this community for a long time,” she told him. “Mainly through our contact with the Coghlans. But until now there was never any point in making a direct intervention; they’re so far from our own territory, it makes no sense.”

  He sipped his tea, looked down into his mug, sipped some more. That was the Navy for you; always ready with a tot of rum.

  “Betty got in touch a while ago and told us about some rumours of something going on in the Vale of the White Horse, maybe further north too, in Oxford and the Cotswolds,” she went on. “She sent people up there to have a look, but they never came back.”

  “You could have told me,” he said.

  “You were coming back from Thanet anyway. I thought you could have a look around, get the lie of the land, help us make a decision about whether or not to set up shop here. Not,” she added, “to start killing people.”

  “And what did you decide?” he asked.

  She let the sarcasm pass. “We took some of Pendennis’s people alive and we’ve had a little chat with them and decided they’re not a threat for the moment. They can sit and stew over there in Thanet and we’ll deal with them when we’re good and ready.”

  He looked blankly at her.

  “I know you don’t like them. I don’t like them. But we’re not in the business of imposing peace.”

  He bugged his eyes and looked around the tent.

  “Not in general,” she said. “This thing up north is of greater concern to us. We need a foothold in the Chilterns to keep an eye on it. We’re planning to garrison this place, open supply lines from Southampton up round Winchester and across the Downs.”

  “They’re not going to like that,” he said, wondering in passing just how long this decision had been before the Committee. They never acted in haste, always weighed up the options. He was, he realised, always going to come here, one way or another, as the point man for Guz’s takeover. He thought about what he’d seen, that night in Wantage, the silent figures clearing the road in preparation for the movement of a lot of people and their wagons. Was someone preparing for an invasion?