On Deadly Ground

by Simon Clark

  They were hailstones. Thousands of them. The mothers and grandmothers of hailstones at that. And they were black as grapes.

  ‘Take cover,’ Stephen yelled again. This time everyone obeyed. We ran under the nearest trees. A fool thing to do in a thunderstorm. And we heard thunder rumbling in the distance. But no one would stay out in that.

  The hailstones beat down like machine-gun volleys with a pok-pok-pok-pok sound.

  Dean looked at me, eyes wide. ‘Hailstones—in July?’

  I shivered. ‘Welcome to the brave new world, Dean. Welcome to the brave new world.’

  Chapter 28

  ‘Hell fire, will you look at that?’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘These are never hailstones.’

  ‘They are, you know. Look at the size of them!’

  ‘And they’re black…black hailstones?’

  ‘Jesus…they’re turning the whole damn countryside black.’

  Our astonishment made the conversation buzz. All sixty-three of us huddled under that line of trees that ran alongside the wall. We watched wide-eyed, open-mouthed as Heaven machine-gunned that once green and pleasant land with twenty-millimetre slugs of ice.

  ‘My God, did you see what happened to the bird—’

  ‘There’s another one. No…two, three. The hailstones are killing the birds.’

  ‘It’s taking the leaves off the trees, too. Look out.’

  ‘The top branches have been stripped.’

  ‘If you go out in this it’ll strip the skin from your skull, no doubt about it.’

  Stephen, grim-faced and anxious, looked like a novice schoolteacher suddenly put in charge of a class of seven-year-olds on a school trip to the coast. Now all the kids wanted to look over the edge of the cliff.

  ‘Keep back, Julie. Yes, right back under cover. Joe, leave the radio where it is. We can get it later. Everyone try and keep under the thickest branches.’

  Even so, people were darting their hands out to grab a hail-stone. From the unlucky ones came ‘Ouch…Damn…Shit,’ as those high-velocity hailstones rapped knuckles and grazed wrists.

  ‘Gotcha!’ Dean Skilton held out a hailstone for me to see in the palm of his hand. He was the image of the excited kid on a nature trip who’d caught a frog and now held it out for teacher’s approval; the argument over the radio was forgotten, at least for now. ‘Why do you think it’s black?’

  ‘All those volcanic eruptions. They’ll have been throwing a lot of crap up into the air.’

  Kate leaned forward and her bare arm brushed mine. ‘Rick’s right. The ice particles will have formed round volcanic dust. Look…as it melts you can see speckles of black in the water.’

  It wasn’t long before the excitement at this novelty of Nature’s cooled as the atmosphere cooled.

  All those tons of ice dumped onto the grass, even on that hot July day, had created a chill sharp enough for people to start blowing into their hands and rubbing their bare arms and legs. In a while you even noticed your breath coming out in puffs of white vapour.

  Caroline had been standing at the far end of the line, but now she weaved her way through the crowd to come and stand so close at my side that her hip touched my thigh. She folded her arms, shivered and gazed out at the black fields. ‘It’s all those damned volcanoes, isn’t it? It’s like all Hell’s breaking through.’ Then she shook her head, making a deliberate effort to pull herself out of her doom-laden thoughts. She shot me a vivacious smile and said in a low voice that (I hoped) no one else could hear, ‘I can’t stop thinking about you. You know that, don’t you?’

  I smiled and whispered, ‘Don’t let me become a bad habit.’

  ‘Do you think about me?’

  I nodded. Truthfully, I did think about her. I remembered the way she’d clung to me down by the lake a few minutes ago as if our lives depended on her not letting go. God, yes, it was good, and God, yes, it pumped up my ego. But her affection for me was troubling, too. I could see problems ahead.

  ‘I’m going to dig out my sweatshirt,’ someone grumbled. People were now moving back to sit against the section of wall that was still sheltered by trees. The hail had begun to lose its novelty value now that the cold had started to bite.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Caroline. ‘Let’s sit down.’

  No sooner had we sat then she started to talk. Like she had a lot to get off her chest. She told me about her daughter, Portia, who’d won medals for ice-skating, that she, Caroline, was proud of her, and she was sure her daughter would be safe back in Fairburn.

  I hoped so, too.

  Caroline told me she’d worked for an investment company and had spent time in South Africa. There she’d met a wealthy New Zealander who was developing a new hotel chain. He’d been twenty years older than her but after a three-week courtship they’d married. Along came Portia and a happy fourteen years in New Zealand where Caroline played the role of society hostess with polished ease. A couple of weeks ago they’d come to Leeds for her brother’s wedding. (‘Third time around,’ she’d told me with a sexy wink.) She’d been staying with relatives when the gas cloud hit. Somehow she found herself with Portia in Fairburn.

  I had to ask. ‘Your husband came with you?’

  ‘Yes. But we were separated. The refugee camp is such a big place.’ The way she spoke seemed suddenly vague (looking back now, deliberately vague).

  Anyway, we sat there, hip to hip, backs to the wall. I told her of my plans and the band. She listened with an interest so acute I actually found myself wondering if she was memorizing it word for word. It was only when I spoke about the current disasters that she’d flash that vivacious smile of hers and whisper something along the lines of ‘I keep thinking how gentle you were when you made love to me,’ or ‘I loved the feel of your back. Your skin’s so incredibly smooth.’

  Star Trek’s spaceships had their force fields to protect them against photon torpedoes and phasers. For Caroline, I guess, she had sex. Sex was her way of creating a force field round her to protect her from the increasingly harsh realities of life.

  I looked out across the black field. The hailstones still struck the ground with that pok-pok-pok-pok. This was strange and new. What else would we experience that was strange and new—and perhaps dangerous?

  Life was changing so quickly. These people were changing too. Disaster and death on a huge scale had the power to transform the personalities of survivors—it even had the power to change those of us who’d been little more than spectators on the sidelines.

  Dean Skilton, now catching another handful of hailstones to show Kate, had been one of my closest friends at school. He was one of the thoughtful academic types who did his homework on tune, was a member of the chess and Christian Fellowship groups, something of a computer nerd. Though we’d play some wicked practical jokes on the other kids and even old mad man Froggatt down the road. Habitually, he avoided fights and any confrontation that might turn ugly.

  Now he was a cocky so-and-so. He’d disagree with every suggestion, mainly, I think, just for the Hell of it. Then he’d try and stare you down while shifting Ben Cavellero’s twelve-bore Bernadelli-made shotgun from one shoulder to the other. Put like that, it doesn’t seem much, but you registered the implied threat. He seemed to be saying ‘See my gun? See my gun? The next time I move it might just be to stick the muzzle in your face.’

  Ruth Sparkman had gelled with Stephen. They made a good couple together. He was tall, good-looking, with that spring-heeled athletic step. Ruth had been captain of the local women’s soccer team. She played tennis, swam, rode horses. The moment you clapped eyes on her you sensed her muscular strength and energy.

  Stenno was still with us—in body if not in spirit. He constantly watched the horizon as if expecting the freshly risen dead to come limping wetly across the fields.

  Scanning heads, I could seen Stenno’s wife, worried eyes watching her husband’s every move. There was Kate picking a hailstone out of Dean’s outs
tretched hand. Howard Sparkman, wiping his glasses with a tissue. He looked serious, as though weighty matters occupied his mind.

  Pok-pok-pok-pok. All this to the quick rhythm of the black ice pounding the ground. Pok-pok-pok-pok.

  Caroline and I had fallen silent now. I heard a couple of girls talking nearby. ‘This Ben Cavellero. Who does he think he is?’

  ‘I know, I’ve only met him a couple of times. But why has he sent us out here? I mean, what’s the real reason?’

  ‘All this seems, well…a fascist kind of idea.’

  ‘I agree. Extremely fascist. It smacks of Nazi ideology.’

  ‘Selecting people to go and camp in the hills in the middle of nowhere. It’s like something from one of those Nazi Strength Through Joy propaganda films.’

  ‘I mean, who gave him the right to decide who went, who stayed?’

  ‘He’s made an experiment out of us all. What? Take sixty people, arm them to the teeth. Put an American disc jockey in charge.’

  ‘Who hardly anyone’s ever heard of.’

  ‘Precisely. Put him in charge. Send them out into the wilderness.’

  ‘Then see how long they last.’

  ‘Before they get their throats cut.’

  ‘Or they start killing each other.’

  Shut up!

  I was tempted to shout it. But they had a point. Much as I respected Ben, and sure as I am he was right to get us out of Fairburn before total anarchy raged, I could see a whole thorny forest of problems ahead.

  Would people continue to do as Stephen asked?

  Would there be someone, Dean Skilton, say, who’d decide they could do a better job of leadership?

  What if we walked into a thousand refugees, all of them starving? What could we do to stop them when they saw all the food we carried?

  What if someone went down with appendicitis?

  Could old man Fullwood keep up?

  How could I handle this situation with Caroline?

  What if the Earth opened up beneath our feet? What if it started puking out fire and brimstone?

  And just who in damnation was that man who looked in through the tent doorway at me last night?

  My mouth turned dry. I remembered the fax I’d read from the kid in South Africa: ‘I saw the Grey Man last night. He walked amongst my dead countrymen. The gas does not hurt him.’

  I remembered Stenno’s weird outburst at the meeting on Saturday: ‘The Grey Man! You’ve heard of the Grey Man?’

  I believed I hadn’t seen the figure properly last night. But now I realized I had seen more. Only something in my head had suppressed it. Some subconscious censor.

  I had seen a man looking it at me. It had been dark, but not so dark I couldn’t make out a huge hulk of a man, with a huge head.

  And a face.

  Yes…yes! I remembered now. That face.

  It was grey.

  Chapter 29

  We saw the flames from a couple of kilometres away.

  Somehow appropriately, considering Stephen’s Noah tag, he was leading the group in a column two by two.

  He told the others to keep walking while he stepped back and allowed me to catch up.

  ‘Those fires,’ he said as he fell into step with me. ‘They’re pretty big.’

  I nodded. ‘And they’re on our route.’

  ‘Exactly. Can we skirt round them?’

  ‘As far as I can tell they’re coming from a little village called…’ I unfolded the map as we walked. ‘Grassholme. It looks as if the houses have been torched.’

  ‘Maybe. It’s hard to tell from here, but the flames don’t look right for house fires. Too blue.’

  ‘Volcano?’

  ‘God, I hope not.’

  ‘Might be burning gas?’

  ‘Could be. Reminds you of a gas hob flame, doesn’t it? Mostly blue, with flickers of orange and yellow at the top.’

  I looked at the map. ‘If we cut off to the east we can follow a track through Elmet Forest for a couple of kilometres before just simply heading north over what looks like open countryside. Then rejoin the original route.’

  We jogged to the head of the column and turned it east down the hillside. No one questioned it. After the hailstones it had rained for a full hour. The black ice had melted to a liquid the colour of cola. It had run off the sunbaked hillside until we’d stood ankle deep in the filthy water while rain dripped on our heads through the branches.

  So now we were reduced to a weary plodding walk, thinking about nothing much in particular, just about the next rest stop and maybe some hot baked beans and sausage.

  An hour into this leg of the journey we’d passed a lone farmhouse. An old guy had come out and waved at us. We’d not been sure if he’d been beckoning to us or waving us away. The next minute made it clear what he was signalling. He hobbled into the house, came out with a shotgun and blazed away at us. We were too far away to be in any kind of serious danger but we pushed on quickly. He’d obviously decided to turn his home into a castle until all this was over. Visitors certainly wouldn’t be welcome.

  Twenty minutes later we saw another lone figure. This one was a man of around thirty. He came loping towards us across the fields. As he came closer I saw he had long scraggly hair and was wearing a football shirt, shorts and cowboy boots. Even when he was a hundred metres away everyone could see he was clearly stark, yodelling mad.

  He ran chanting: ‘Dick-dick-dick-detective…dick-dick-dick-detective…’

  He approached us, running faster, chanting louder. Dean had the shotgun down from his shoulder and aimed at the running madman.

  ‘Dick-dick-detective…dick-dick…’

  ‘Dean,’ Stephen had called. ‘Don’t shoot; he’s unarmed.’

  ‘Yeah, but he’s nuts.’

  ‘Dean!’

  ‘We shouldn’t take any chances. If he doesn’t stop, I’ll shoot.’

  ‘No.’

  In two seconds flat Stephen ran down the line of people, tugged the gun from Dean’s hands and pushed him flat against the grass.

  ‘Dick-dick-dick detective!’

  The mad man charged into the line of people, his cowboy boots splashing the surface water lying on the grass; his eyes blazed. I swung the rifle from my shoulder. I saw Howard Sparkman pull out his revolver.

  ‘Dick-dick-dick—’

  The madman didn’t stop. The line parted. He didn’t brush against anyone, even by accident. He kept running, hair blowing out in the breeze; his squinting eyes never left some point on the horizon. Then he was away down the hill; the voice faded into the distance. ‘Dick-dick-dick detective…dick-dick-dick-detective.’

  Dean said nothing, but I noticed how his eyes bore into the back of Stephen’s head as we walked.

  Now, a couple of hours later, there was only that weary plod of feet on wet grass. The sun came out and the grass began to steam.

  Stephen and I led the group east. The burning village lay to our left. It looked abandoned now. A few of our people glanced at the blue jets blasting high into the air above the ruined houses, but exhaustion dampened any curiosity to take a closer look.

  The sunlight had returned with a ferocious vengeance through the breaking cloud. As well as the grass our clothing began to steam, too. Ahead lay the cool shadows of the wood.

  Stephen said, There’s no major roads this way? Or any villages?’

  ‘The map shows nothing. Only a church somewhere in the wood.’

  ‘With luck, then, this diversion won’t add too much to the journey. Thank God we’re not doing this trek in the middle of winter. It’s hard enough in the middle of summer. You all right, Mr Fullwood?’

  ‘If you’re still at the crease, you’ve got to keep batting.’

  It was one of old man Fullwood’s typically oblique remarks, delivered like he was a Shakespearean actor.

  ‘I guess that means he’s not going to croak on us yet,’ Stephen said to me under his breath. ‘Watch out for brambles.’

  The fo
rest was so densely packed with trees we had to weave single-file along the path that zigged and zagged away into the gloom.

  In the forest it was so silent you could hear the breath of the walker behind you. No birds sang. Somehow the place had a dead feel to it. It made your skin crawl. But there was a tension there, too; buried beneath the surface. I shivered. A tension ready to erupt with terrible savagery. A voice in my head whittered over and over: Something’s going to happen in here, something’s going to happen in here, something bad, something very bad.

  You’ve seen that bit in the horror film? The girl walks alone through the haunted house. It’s eerily quiet, so eerily quiet; don’t you just know that any second now the monster’s going to jump out? Cry: Boo! Then slash its talons across her throat.

  Right then, that sensation gripped me in its fearfully cold claw. I craned my head, peering uneasily into the trees, half expecting some grunting beast to burst out from the bushes, roaring at us.

  We pushed on, deeper into the dead silence beneath the shroud of branches.

  The ground steamed here, too. It grew thicker the further we walked into the wood. Within five minutes we were walking waist deep through a thick, ground-hugging mist.

  ‘Like walking through a pool full of milk,’ I heard Dean say behind me.

  The smell of warm earth grew heavier on the air; you could almost taste the soil on your tongue.

  Suddenly Stephen stopped. ‘Damn.’ He ducked down into the mist. It was so thick he completely disappeared even though he was only ten steps in front of me.

  ‘Stephen? I walked forward. ‘Stephen?’ Now I felt alarmed. What if he’d suddenly plunged down a hole in the ground? You couldn’t even see your feet in this fog. ‘Stephen…Stephen.’

  I reached the point where he’d disappeared. Alarmed, I looked down into the mist. I could see nothing. It really was like looking into a sea of milk. I’d have to reach down with my hands if—

  Christ!

  A hand came up through the mist, snatched my arm, then a head broke the surface.

  ‘Rick.’

  ‘Stephen…are you OK? I thought you’d—’