Refuge

by Richard Herley

  ‘Funny way to go about it. That’s all I can say.’

  ‘To go about what?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Do I?’

  He could hear the breeze. Chilly autumn was passing among the limes and sycamores, the larches and poplars and maples, moving every spray of leaves. He could remember even now some of the stages in the biochemistry of chlorophyll deconstruction and anthocyanin synthesis. The yellow hues were the product of plastid residues, carotenoid pigments masked in summer by green chlorophyll: beta-carotene, lycopene, luteol, neoxanthin, cryptoxanthol, and all the others whose molecular formulae and isomeric properties he had once found so fascinating. Was he not a plastid residue himself, visible only because everyone else had died? Or should he be likened to a single yellowing leaf of birch or aspen, still hanging on by a few strands of xylem or a shred of cuticle, his abscission layer gone, waiting for one more breath of wind to make him fall?

  Yellow, he recalled, was the colour of cowardice.

  ‘Stop it!’

  A multitude of unwanted associations, barmy symbolism running on without check: these were the most distressing symptoms of an isolated brain. Usually he could keep a lid on it, but not now, not tonight.

  The darkness was no longer endurable.

  He snapped on his torch and looked at his watch. Two nineteen.

  ‘God Almighty!’

  Seven hours, nearly, not three, he had been lying here, exhausted, rigid with worry, regret, fear, going over his plans and contingencies again and again and again. If only he’d had more foresight, he could have taken advantage of the situation. He could have used the house opposite to kill one or more of those following. At home he had explosives and everything else he needed, like pressure pads and radio-controlled switches, among the cases and cases of electrical components and equipment he had assembled and catalogued during his first year or so of residence.

  But he hadn’t been able to see this far ahead. He had left home at half cock, ill-prepared, driven more by emotion than logic.

  There was no point worrying about it. Shining the torch around the room, examining its unfamiliar shapes and angles, he told himself he should have known better than to have compounded his stupidity by losing so much sleep.

  ‘Sufficient unto the day is the leak thereof.’

  Thus he acknowledged that he needed once more to urinate. He climbed out of bed. Indelible conditioning led him into the bathroom, where he even raised the seat before releasing his flow.

  He had little recollection of returning to the sheets or of resignedly looking for his matches in order to open The Monument Builders and pass the candlelit time before dawn. A moment after having this idea he awoke to find full daylight pressing at the edges of the curtains.

  His sleep had been dead and dreamless, leaving him groggy and disorientated. He did not at first even understand where he was. He knew only that he was not in his own clean and civilised room in his clean and civilised house by the lake. He was somewhere else, miles away, in trouble, more trouble than he had ever known. Then it all came back to him.

  The time was twenty to eleven. He had overslept by four and a half hours. His plans were in ruins.

  What had woken him? The sound of entry? Were they already in the house, downstairs?

  His palm found the rough-textured, anatomical butt of his GP-35 in its place beside the pillow. His thumb swung down the safety catch.

  His heart was thudding so loudly that he could scarcely hear. He made himself sit up, fully expecting the bedroom door to burst open in a storm of automatic fire.

  Nothing.

  Exchanging the pistol for his shotgun, he padded barefoot to the door, opened it a fraction, listened. Still nothing. He came out on the landing, approached the banister rail, peered over and down. He craned his neck. Still nothing.

  If they’d been in the house, they would have done something by now. Wouldn’t they?

  He thought of calling out.

  His pulse was slowing. Getting down towards the resting rate.

  More nothing; the mewing cry of a buzzard somewhere beyond the roof. The day, so far as he could tell, seemed dry. Sunlight briefly lit the grimy rectangle of the landing window.

  ‘Are you going to look?’ he whispered.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘To prove you’re not a coward.’

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A minute later, still wearing only his shirt and underpants, Suter came back upstairs. He had found no sign of intrusion besides his own.

  After visiting the bathroom, he took his binoculars and went into the principal bedroom. This had a bay window corresponding to the one directly below and commanded an excellent view of the first house he had entered yesterday evening. Although the glass was filthy with algae and rain-washed dust, he could see that no one was on the road for a couple of hundred yards in either direction.

  Four possibilities existed. One: they had passed him in the night. Two: they were inside the first house, or staking it out. Three: they were at this moment following his trail here, through the back gardens. Four: they hadn’t reached Baldwin’s Lane at all; might not even be following.

  He weighed up the odds for a moment longer. If he opened the window, the sound and glint and swinging motion could advertise his presence. If he did not open it he would be unable to see the cotton.

  The wooden frame of the casement had swollen and warped; the hinges had rusted; the ledge and rabbets were thickly populated with spiders, both dead and alive, and crammed with a mass of dried insect corpses. But he did not want to break the glass.

  By applying judicious pressure in the right places, and by dint of his very considerable strength and will, he finally made the window burst open.

  He knelt down and rested the binoculars on the ledge to gain rock-solid stability. He adjusted the eyepieces. There, nicely visible, was the line of thread. Either they’d seen and stepped over it or they hadn’t yet arrived. He next focused on the trail he had made, up past the concrete garage and back. Detailed scrutiny persuaded him that no one had trodden it since.

  Comforted, becomingly increasingly reassured, Suter drew the window as far shut as he was able.

  What had happened to them?

  He had been expecting them to appear at dawn or soon after. He had hoped merely to observe his pursuers, then follow them to the town. Maybe they’d lost the trail. Or maybe they’d changed their minds.

  He dressed completely, laced his boots and holstered his Browning. To his annoyance he found that he had fallen asleep last night with his torch switched on. The batteries were dead. He had no means of recharging them till he got home. He slid the torch into his pack before taking one last look round and returning to the principal bedroom.

  Here, keeping the road in sight, he ate cold beans with a spoon and opened the tin of peaches. Before eating the fruit he drank the syrup, for he was worried that his water might not last until he could safely replenish the two flasks. He drank only a cupful, and then poured just enough to clean his teeth.

  Fear of developing an abscess, or even a simple cavity, and of having to treat it himself, had made him very particular about oral hygiene. At home he kept an arsenal of toothpastes and powders and floss and brushes of every shape and size, both manual and electric. On those rare occasions when he was away for the night, he carried a comprehensive kit which he never failed to deploy after a meal.

  With another glance at the empty road, he wiped the dust from the central mirror of the kidney-shaped dressing-table and sat down. From his kit he took a brush and a canister of polish and began scrupulously cleaning his teeth, upper row first, working anti-clockwise, as he always did.

  It looked like they weren’t going to show.

  How long should he wait here? Till noon? One o’clock, say.

  How to get home? Along the riverbank? He might take a boat and drift down the canal. That was appealing.

  He wondered how R
ees was getting on. He’d left the cat plenty to eat. Not that he needed it. He preferred catching small mammals and, for preference, drank straight from the river.

  Yes. It was all over. Suter had given them the slip. His life of ease and safety, of peace and solitude, could resume. Things would not be the same now, of course, for he would always know that, a few miles away upstream, there was, or had been, a village called Shanley full of survivors.

  He paused and spat on the floor. He was about to continue, to finish brushing and rinse, when he heard, quite unmistakably in the west, the rattle of an approaching diesel.

  3

  The lorry was moving at little more than walking pace. By the time it arrived, Suter had already carried his pack downstairs and double-checked that the front door would open freely. Having left the pack by the newel post, he had raced back up to the principal bedroom to watch.

  He had taken up a position as far from the window as he could. Although his vision was impeded by the dirtiness of the glass, his line of sight, towards the west-south-west, was favoured by the intermittent morning sun. Conversely, their view would be impaired. His particular window, and he himself, standing deep behind it, would be all but impossible to single out.

  He raised the binoculars. The lorry, a white, ten-tonne, box-bodied Mercedes, slowed even more as it approached the first house he had entered last night. Sunlight flashed obscurely on the windscreen: through the fog of grey-green grime, Suter distinguished the forms of three men in the cab. He had been expecting precisely that number, but would there be any more, hiding in the back?

  Cannibals. Degenerates. ‘Bastards!’ he said, feeling his chest constrict yet more. He had not actually set eyes on the lorry before now; had not anticipated this fresh challenge to his cowardice. For still he could not absolve himself of guilt over what he had done, or let happen, to Muriel. She had been in no condition to take the Glock. He had known it. In effect, he had killed her. And now he was being punished.

  Suter tightened his grip on the dense rubber casing of his Dialyt. The normal tremor of the twin worlds of convergent light, the amplified shake of a frail human grasp, had grown so much that he was having trouble keeping hold of the image.

  His fear intensified as the blackthorn on the northern verge and the elder on the southern gave a unified twitch. The lorry had just broken the thread. It was here. Really here. They had gone back to Shanley for it. Set out this morning at their leisure. Driven all the way from Sarratt in low gear, looking from side to side. Looking for him. And he, who had overslept like the fool he was, had no idea how he was going to get out of this mess alive. Had he really imagined that they would simply pass by and leave him undiscovered?

  The eyepieces started knocking against his nose. He let the binocular down and left its weight to the lanyard.

  The lorry halted just short of the trail he had made across the verge. It waited there interminably, the engine ticking over. No one got down. As Suter watched, the complete absence of motion became increasingly, unbearably, sinister and unnerving. He had underestimated them. They weren’t just going to blunder in. Weren’t going to fall for any of his nonsense.

  He became aware that everything he had been at such pains to devise had disappeared from his brain. His mind had been wiped clean, set at zero, leaving only the blank, impotent vista that infallibly precedes an attack of blind terror.

  ‘Do something!’ he urged the unseen men in the cab.

  As if to oblige, one of them inexplicably sounded the horn. There was something tentative about its note, experimental.

  To Suter’s horror, the lorry started rolling forward again. He involuntarily shrank back as it came closer. He glimpsed the face of the man in the nearside seat, his shaven scalp, his red plaid jacket, the muzzle of an assault rifle standing between his knees. Next to him, an impression of the bejeaned legs of the one in the middle, enclosing another assault rifle. A plaid-sleeved arm ending in a confident hand on the gearstick.

  The driver seemed to know what he was doing. Suter wondered when and how he had learned to control a ten-tonne truck.

  They were looking everywhere: at the verge, at the road ahead, and especially at the houses. Redjacket’s gaze swept across Suter’s window and passed on without pause.

  The lorry was proceeding so slowly that, whenever the vegetation permitted, Suter could see the Mercedes triangles revolving on their hubcaps. The rear doors became visible: he raised the binocular and frantically tried to hold it steady, to elicit some information about the locks, the handles, but could discern nothing of value. The lorry passed more and more into three-quarters view and Suter made himself move further forward, into the bay of the window.

  ‘Yes,’ he murmured, not even daring to think of what might happen next. ‘That’s it, you bastards! Keep on going!’

  But they didn’t. The lorry halted again, at the first left-hand turning. The turning the stupid, over-confident Suter had taken in the dark, following the wavering pool of torchlight, unable properly to see where he was treading, unable to make sure of, still less doctor, his own trail.

  The nearside door swung open. A black combat-boot appeared and the red-jacketed youth jumped down, gripping an AK47. A bulky, olive-green haversack was slung diagonally across his shoulder. He ran, half-crouching, into the side turning and was lost to view. He could not fail to find Suter’s trail to the kitchen door. In five minutes he would be here.

  Simultaneously the lorry started reversing, at aggressive speed, all the way back to the first house. Before it had fully stopped moving, the nearside door opened again and disgorged a second youth, the one who had been sitting in the middle: taller than the first, heavier, with a blue-green jacket, a closely shorn head and a blond beard. Suter thought he recognised his face. He could have been one of the party in the Manor House grounds. He too was toting a Kalashnikov assault rifle, an AKMS with the metal butt folded forward: he too was carrying a bulky, olive-green haversack.

  Suter’s mind remained blank. He stared uncomprehendingly, so frightened that he was unable even to begin with himself the debate whose outcome would determine his survival. As he watched Beard skirting the front of the lorry, the horn sounded again and the engine died. The driver descended, a third skinhead, wearing a blue and yellow plaid jacket, equipped, like the others, with an assault rifle and a dark-green haversack.

  He crouched down on what had been the pavement in front of the garden wall, while his companion retraced Suter’s steps between the garage and the side of the house and disappeared.

  The driver edged to his right until he was kneeling next to the brick pier of the gateway. He peeped over the wall and immediately ducked down. His rifle was a squat Enfield L85 bullpup, perhaps one of the two that had been discharged at the escarpment above the Manor House grounds.

  Faintly, Suter heard a shout. ‘Go for it, Steve!’

  With that, the driver – Steve – got to his feet and, levelling his L85 diagonally across the front garden, discharged a stream of fire at the ground floor bay window. The whole structure imploded in a blizzard of glass and timber. The muzzle was raised, dealt the same treatment to the windows above. It seemed to Suter that more shots were simultaneously being fired, that more ruin was being unleashed, at the back of the house: the shout had clearly been a synchronising signal, but he had no time to consider it, because he saw Steve draw back his arm and lob something small and heavy through the first of the gaping apertures he had made. Before Suter’s memory could retrieve the information necessary to permit understanding of what this meant, the hand-grenade detonated with a double thud and the remainder of the window preceded a disintegrating spray of debris that spewed into the front garden. No, not a double thud: there must have been another grenade, at the back, hurled by the one with the beard.

  Steve emerged from the shelter of the wall. A third and then a fourth grenade went sailing through the upstairs windows, front and back. Steve, squatting again, snatched a magazine from his bag, plugged i
t into the rifle stock and stood up. Holding his Enfield at hip level, he moved into the driveway and towards the house.

  As smoke started issuing from the windows, Suter’s mind slowly began to work.

  He had finally remembered the one in the red jacket, who even now was following his trail across the rear gardens to the back door and the kitchen below; who also had an assault rifle and no doubt a supply of hand-grenades. While Redjacket found the house and went in from behind, the other two would be covering the front.

  All of which meant there weren’t any more of them in the box.

  At least one of the two would have to go inside the first house and look for a body before the flames there took hold. Perhaps, if the fire developed too quickly, both, leaving the street momentarily unattended.

  Suter looked at his watch.

  How long had it been since Redjacket had alighted?

  Too long.

  Suter’s descent of the stairs was as rapid as the paramount need for silence allowed. He hefted one strap of the pack over his shoulder. There was no time to get his arms into it. He renewed his grip on the shotgun and gingerly opened the street door.

  From this angle and elevation he was able to see little of the other house. But he could see the smoke, rising to roof height before being carried away on the breeze. Expecting at any moment an attack from the rear, he emerged from the porch and, drawing shut the door behind him, parted the mass of herbaceous vegetation that once had been a front garden.

  He came to the boundary with the pavement and looked to the right, along the road. There was the lorry and, sure enough, no sign of the two skinheads. They would be at the back of the first house or, even better, inside.

  Now was Suter’s chance to turn left, to leg it away down the hill unseen.

  He did not know whether he had whispered, or merely thought, the words: ‘Let’s be creative’; did not give his other, eternally carping, self the opportunity to intercede or even complain; did not even, really, know what his adrenalin was doing as he found himself running at full tilt across the road towards the lorry, as it drew inexorably nearer, becoming larger, looming whitely before him.