Reaper

by Jon Grahame

  Footsteps caught him up and he glanced to his side to see Jenny Hall.

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll walk with you.’

  He nodded.

  The car started and followed in low gear.

  The day was right for a walk. Good weather promising a bright future. If only they could survive the present. The girl was light but grew heavier in his arms. He welcomed the weight, wanted the journey to be painful, to remind him what had happened, to make the journey his Calvary. A re-commitment to cleanse the land. He had killed five men without compunction. One he would willingly have tortured before death. Two of the others he had put down without giving them a chance to defend themselves.

  Executions. He would do the same again wherever he met their kind and the reason why lay in his aching arms.

  Jenny talked as they walked.

  ‘I taught at St Hilda’s,’ she said. ‘It’s a public school about five miles away. When the illness started, some of the girls went home. Most of them stayed. Most of them died. I was the only teacher left. Helen was head girl. She’s seventeen. Caroline is sixteen. We waited for help to come to us but it didn’t. Two days ago we decided to look for help and came here. We met Jerome and his crew.’ She took a breath, maybe to get the explanation done. ‘They told us what they were going to do. They put Stacey in the room at the hotel and took Caroline, Helen and me downstairs. For a party, they said. Jerome said he was saving Stacey for later.

  For something special. When they went to get her they found she had hanged herself. Maybe she heard the screams. She was only fourteen. She thought that was a better way out. Maybe it was.’

  She sounded on the edge of tears.

  Reaper said, ‘You’re alive. That’s better than being dead.’

  ‘Is it?’

  If he were to give her an honest answer, he would have to say he didn’t know. He knew only that he had been spared for a purpose and that this was a limbo he was living through, a penance he was paying.

  ‘I failed her,’ Jenny said.

  ‘No you didn’t. You walked into events outside your control.’

  ‘But I led her, and Helen and Caroline, on that damn silly walk into danger. We could have stayed at school.’

  ‘Not forever. The bad elements are always the first to rise to the surface. It’s happened in other towns, other places. But they will be put down eventually.’

  They walked in silence for a while and then she said, ‘You said I walked into events outside my control.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I don’t want to do that again. Next time, I want a chance to protect myself. Like Sandra.’ He supposed Sandra, booted and equipped, looked invincible to someone walking away from multiple rape. ‘Will you teach me?’

  ‘I’ll teach you.’

  It took twenty minutes to reach the church of St Paul’s, a Victorian building of grey stone in a walled churchyard of 100-year-old graves. They walked up the path and the birds seemed to stop singing. Maybe his disbelief had shocked them into silence. One gull wheeled overhead and gave a last mournful cry. Sandra had parked the car. She, Caroline and Helen now walked behind them.

  Jenny Hall opened the door and he stepped into the cool interior. He had half expected to find refugees inside, but it was empty and undamaged. Why vandalise a church when there were high street shops to plunder?

  He paused and felt the religion of the building. Not in God’s presence but in the worship of generations who had knelt here and offered prayers in the hope of a better life, now and forever. He walked slowly down the aisle and stepped up onto the carpeted area before the altar. The imagery, candles and crucifix told him it was High Church. The paraphernalia seemed appropriate to the gesture he was making.

  Reaper lay Stacey’s body gently on the ground before the altar and the crucified figure of Christ. The four young women had knelt in pews. He glanced back at them. Helen and Caroline were crying. Jenny was distraught. Sandra looked at him as if to suggest, ‘say something’. A few words?

  He knelt on one knee, his left hand cradling the carbine, his right resting on the body, and he looked up again at Christ on the cross. If Christ thought He had suffered, He should look down here. But that was not what the girls wanted.

  ‘This is Stacey,’ he said. ‘She’s a young girl. Too young to have committed any sin. Too young to have properly lived. She didn’t deserve this end, but at least now she has no more pain. No more fear.’ He paused.

  What was he talking about? He had no authority to spout these words. ‘Stacey’s friends are here. They remember her. They’ll always remember her. They’re sorry they couldn’t look after her. But now, they’d like you to look after her. Let her rest in peace.’

  As he got up, the girls softly said, ‘Amen’.

  He took a last look at Stacey’s shrouded body, nodded farewell, turned and walked out of the church, his boots echoing in the empty space that had swallowed his prayer, and blinked the moisture from his eyes.

  Chapter 8

  JENNY HALL AND THE GIRLS DID NOT TALK on the way back to the estate and Reaper and Sandra kept the silence with them. When they arrived, Jean Megson, her bosoms heaving, ushered the two girls indoors.

  Judith, tall and grey haired and looking more like a teacher than Jenny Hall, went with them. Nick Waite watched with sorrow in his eyes. Without being told, he had guessed at least part of the tragedy.

  Reaper told him about Stacey as he unloaded the guns and ammunition from the car and, with the help of Sandra and Jenny, transferred them to the cellar of the manor house that would be their armoury. Jenny declined Nick’s offer of prayers or silent contemplation, but he put his dog collar on anyway.

  ‘A man is probably not the person the girls want to see at the moment,’ he acknowledged, ‘but perhaps a priest?’

  He gave Reaper the keys of the mobile home and left them to join the two girls and the two women.

  Reaper unlocked the rear storage of the RV, and they moved the weapons that had been stashed there into the armoury, too.

  Everyone else was out, inspecting the farm or houses and working out what needed to be done for the future.

  Reaper noticed Sandra kept glancing around, for Jamie he assumed, but there was no sign of him. To his surprise, he found he was also keeping a look out and realised the person he wanted to see most was Kate.

  When they had finished, Reaper moved the mobile home back over the hill into the lookout position.

  Sandra and Jenny went with him.

  ‘You two make a good team,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Yes, we do,’ said Reaper, and watched Sandra try to hide her pleasure at the compliment.

  ‘I meant what I said. I’d like to learn how to use a gun. I’d like to join you.’

  ‘We need recruits,’ said Reaper, ‘and I’ll teach you how to shoot. But we also need a teacher. A real teacher, for the kids we have here.’

  ‘I won’t teach again. Maybe Helen will teach, but not me.’

  He nodded and looked at Sandra.

  ‘Can we use her?’ he asked her.

  Sandra was standing at ease, carbine cradled. She looked the part and was enjoying being one of the perceived elite. But she looked at Jenny with a serious expression, one victim to another, and said, ‘I think Jenny will be a fine recruit.’

  ‘We’ll start tomorrow,’ Reaper said. ‘If we start shooting today, everyone will think we’re being invaded.

  Reaper prepared the mobile home as a defensive position and Sandra brewed tea. Jenny talked about her background. A middle class home: father a doctor, mother a ‘lady who lunched’. She had grown up in Redditch, went to Birmingham University and gained a disappointing 2:2 in History and English.

  ‘I was never an academic but my parents expected me to go to college and discover a career. What I discovered was a tutor who majored in impression-able young girls who were away from home for the first time. I scraped a degree but left with my emotions somewhat in tatters. My dad agreed I could
continue to study and this time I did something I was good at: sport. I took a course in Sports Psychology and Coaching Sciences at Bournemouth. That was what got me the job at St Hilda’s, teaching history and sport.

  I was never a good teacher, although I liked sport. It always seemed as if I was doing the job until something else came along.’

  ‘And then something came along,’ said Sandra, softly.

  ‘Yes.’ Jenny was wistful. ‘Dad phoned. Both he and mum had the flu. I think he knew what was happening.

  He told me to stay put. There’s no point coming home, he said. No point. By then it was really bad and all the teachers were trying to help the girls. Not that it did any good. There were just the four of us at the end. At first we intended to go to Rutford School.

  That’s the boys’ school. We had links, both being public schools. But we decided to try Scarborough first. If only.’

  Sandra said, ‘There’s no room for “if only” anymore.

  What happened, happened. It’s not unique. It happened to me, too. You have to get over it and get on with it.’

  Her face was tight and Reaper wanted to go and comfort her, but she was being hard, building the tough-ness into her performance as Lara Croft. Even so, he could tell she was on the edge.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jenny. ‘I had no idea.’

  And the knowledge that both were victims made Jenny give way at last and cry. Sandra went to her and put her arms around her. Reaper stepped outside the motor home and walked to the front gates to stretch his legs, breath fresh air and avoid emotion.

  The growing community gathered in the dining room to eat the evening meal together. Reaper and Sandra left their guns on the high shelf of a Welsh dresser, out of the reach of the children, and dispensed with the Kevlar vests. He gave Nick the key to the armoury in the cellar.

  Sandra took him to one side. She had disappeared earlier into the house with the bag of clothes he had selected for her.

  ‘You have great taste,’ she said.

  ‘I have?’

  She kissed his cheek. ‘Thanks, Reaper.’

  Jenny and Sandra sat together and Reaper hovered until Jamie took the seat on the other side of Sandra.

  Reaper sat next to him. By chance, Kate was sitting opposite. Her red hair was lustrous, as if she had just washed it, and she smiled shyly across the table at him. Since when had a lady who had run a bar been shy? Caroline and Helen sat on the other side of Jenny.

  There were also three newcomers who had been found by Jamie and Bob when they had toured the nearby farms and villages. A young farmer’s son in his late teens, a middle aged butcher, and a fifty-year-old woman who had retired to the area with her husband only two months before. Now she was a widow and still slightly bereft of her senses, but extremely grateful to be with people again, after living alone with her husband dead in the master bedroom for the last two weeks. Jamie and Bob had buried him in the back garden.

  Talk was about the future. Jamie and Bob would continue to look for survivors in the countryside and ways to expand what they had. The estate was a walled thousand-acre enclosure but this was surrounded by neighbouring farmlands that included grazing and arable land. They had both dairy and beef cattle, sheep, hens and five estate horses that had been used for riding by paying guests. Bob knew of pig farms not too far away and a few miles up the road towards York were fields of pick-your-own vegetables and fruit.

  The estate had its own spring and river for a water supply.

  Reaper said, ‘Petrol and diesel won’t be a problem for the foreseeable future. It gives us time to work out long term solutions.’

  The farm had diesel tanks, as did many other farms.

  They could syphon fuel from the many abandoned cars. There was more fuel beneath petrol forecourts.

  With no power, the computerised electric pumps wouldn’t work, but Gavin had a rotary pump: unlock the delivery cap in the forecourt, drop a hose inside and you could pump out however much you needed.

  For repairs, there was a small but well-equipped garage at a village only three miles away, which Gavin would use when necessary.

  Everyone was asked to list their skills and everyone, when necessary, would have to work the land and tend the animals under the supervision of Bob and David, the young farmer.

  Old Bob had one additional suggestion.

  ‘We need cats and dogs,’ he said. ‘We’ll need them to control the mice and rats.’ He chuckled when some of the women shuddered. ‘When I was growing up, we never bothered about mice running across the bed.

  It were normal. They’re just God’s creatures. But now we’ve moved back, like, in history so to speak, we’re likely to see more of them. Put a cat in every house and that’ll keep ‘em down. They don’t even like the smell of cats. And dogs, too. Terriers make good ratters.’

  It was agreed that, the next day, Bob and Jamie would explore other areas in the countryside they had not yet visited. Gavin and Pete would go looking for more hand pumps, so that all their vehicles would be able to refill at petrol stations rather than rely on syphoning. Others would start getting to grips with animal husbandry and learning how to grow crops. Deirdre, the grateful lady who had just joined them, said she had been a market gardener, and Ashley had had an allotment where he had grown his own vegetables.

  Nick, who still wore his priestly collar, looked pleased at the progress being made until Reaper said, ‘We still need protection. Jenny and Pete have volunteered for weapons training. Jamie?’

  ‘Of course, if you think it necessary.’

  ‘I do. Anyone else?’

  ‘I’d like to learn.’ Kate’s offer surprised him.

  ‘Good,’ he said. He glanced round the table, but Ashley dropped his eyes. ‘Tomorrow at nine. Out front.

  So the rest of you, don’t worry if you hear shooting.

  After that, Sandra and I will go out again and look for a doctor. If anybody wants us to collect any supplies, make a list and let me or Sandra have it in the morning.’

  The meal ended and people broke into groups.

  Reaper joined Ashley.

  ‘Tell me to mind my own business, but I’d say you’ve been in the services,’ Reaper said.

  ‘That’s true, man. No point denying it.’

  ‘You’d be an asset.’

  ‘I’ve given up guns, Reaper. I’m sorry, but guns are not for me.’

  ‘What happened, Ash?’

  Ashley took a long look at Reaper and nodded his head imperceptibly, as if coming to a decision.

  ‘You’ve got a right to know. I suppose I saw too much. Afghanistan, Iraq. Not just mates being blown up, civilians too. Women, kids, old folk. War doesn’t discriminate, Reaper. Especially at 10,000 feet. It wore me down. I served my tours and, when I could, I got out. There was nothing dramatic in my leaving. I just left. And afterwards, I wondered why. Why had it been necessary? Was it a just war? Or just politics? Whatever, I didn’t want to fight again and I’d prefer not to now.

  I saw too much, Reaper. That’s all.’

  Reaper nodded his acceptance of the explanation.

  ‘Can’t argue with that, Ash. But some time in the future, you might reconsider. I won’t be pushing it. But maybe you might change your mind. Your decision.’

  There was no wine tonight, no beer. Reaper drew Sandra to one side and said, ‘Have you thought about where you’ll be staying tonight? I don’t think the motor home is suitable long term.’

  ‘You’re right. I thought I’d stay in one of the flats here with Jenny and the girls. There’s a family apartment they’ve taken.’ She looked into his face and he realised she wondered if he would be disappointed. ‘I thought I’d try it. If it doesn’t work, we could always take one of the houses?’

  ‘I was going to suggest you stay here. We should have at least one armed person on the premises,’ he said. ‘Keep your weapons safe. I’ll be okay in the motor home for a while. Maybe later I’ll move in here and we’ll alternate a guard. We’ll
see.’

  She accepted the role he had created for her gratefully and he let her drift to the waiting Jamie.

  Reaper eased himself away from the crowd, collected his weapons and looked back from the door. Nick caught his eye and nodded goodnight with a smile. The only other person who was watching him was Kate.

  Her smile was slight but it was a smile and she, too, nodded. He returned the farewell and left, walking through the village and over the hill to the motor home.

  *

  Another fine day, more blue skies and a warm sun that would be hot later. He had slept with the windows open to hear any noise and had got up twice in the night to walk the grounds and make sure the chain was in place across the gates. He showered, had a cup of tea, ate a tin of mandarin oranges and made two Thermos flasks of coffee.

  The walk over the hill was pleasant. On the stroll down the other side, he could see people already active.

  His group waited for him outside the manor house.

  Sandra, Jamie, Pete, Jenny and Kate. The Reverend Nick came down the stairs and held out the key to the armoury.

  ‘You’ll need this,’ he said.

  ‘First,’ said Reaper, ‘we need trestle tables or benches, something waist high.’

  ‘Patio tables,’ said Jamie. ‘They’re round the side.

  In the season, we put them outside the pub.’

  They were good quality rectangular wooden tables with folding legs. They carried three round the house to face the barn twenty yards away. Then he led them to the armoury and kitted them out in Kevlar vests and holster belts with Asp batons and cuffs and a Glock, and handed each a carbine. Jamie seemed comfortable with it; Pete handled his with interest. Jenny and Kate held them as if they were alien weapons, which, to them, they were. He put clips of ammunition in a cardboard box and led them back to the barn.

  ‘Anyone working beyond there?’ he asked, and Jamie confirmed no one would be in the way of stray shots.

  Reaper broke up the cardboard box so that it made a target about 18 inches wide and two feet long. He used coloured pins he’d taken from the notice board in the lobby of the house to attach it to the side of the barn wall. He indicated that the four recruits should stand behind the tables and place their weapons on the wooden surface. Sandra, without being asked, joined them.