On Deadly Ground

by Simon Clark

‘How’s Victoria? He could have done some damage, kicking the fire at her like that.’

  ‘She’s fine.’ I saw him look suddenly uncomfortable at me talking about Victoria and he shot a look at Ruth. It sounds an old-fashioned thing to say, but I wondered if Victoria was trying to woo Stephen away from Ruth. She was—the only description that fitted—pretty. Uncommonly pretty. Out of all the women, Caroline included, she still seemed untouched by all the madness and destruction. You had the feeling that somehow she was just a tourist here. That she could say anytime, ‘This is boring me now. I’m going home.’ Then she’d vanish as quickly as she’d seemed to arrive, in that blazing graveyard.

  ‘Look,’ Stephen was saying in a low voice. ‘Keep your eyes open and tell me if you clap eyes on any of these Grey Men. What we do need is hard evidence.’

  ‘You mean bring you a head on a plate?’

  He smiled but his eyes were deadly serious. ‘If you like.’

  I sighed. ‘I don’t know, sometimes I reckon I’m dreaming it all.’ I then told him about the lost hours I’d experienced, even back before the refugees appeared overnight in Fairburn. And I told him about the paintings and the concrete sculpture of the Grey Man I’d seen in the farmyard near where the woman got kebabed.

  ‘You’ve been taking some hard psychological knocks, Kid K,’ he said, ‘You should take some time off.’

  ‘I’ll do that when you do.’

  ‘I can take it.’

  ‘You’re twenty-five. You were a video jock in Seattle. I’m not being offensive, big brother, but that doesn’t make you a cross between Indiana Jones and Superman.’

  ‘The average age of the US soldier in Vietnam was nineteen.’

  I gave a grim smile. ‘Your point being?’

  ‘If our environment demands we become Supermen we become just that.’

  ‘Where did you get that piece of wisdom from?’

  He said nothing but I saw his eyes flick to Victoria who walked alongside Dean.

  ‘Quite a philosopher, isn’t she?’ I said it good-naturedly and Stephen smiled a little more easily. Then he said in a voice low enough so Ruth didn’t hear, ‘She’s useful to bounce ideas off. She makes me see things that bit more clearly.’

  We continued talking. For the first time in days we were having a real conversation. He seemed upbeat. Again I was struck by the sense he was in control of not just his own future but of all our futures. Perhaps it was me, the little brother, talking but I felt safe in his hands.

  The map coordinates told us we’d reached the valley that Howard Sparkman had spotted from the air. Our noses told us something else.

  ‘Smell that?’ I asked as we followed the dirt path down into the valley.

  ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ Dean said, swinging the rifle from his shoulder, ‘that’s the sweet, sweet smell of shit. Lots of shit. Tons of shit.’

  I said, ‘and that’s a dead give-away that refugees have been camping here.’

  ‘Or are still camped here.’ Dean drew back the bolt of the rifle.

  We followed a hedgerow down across the field towards the cluster of red-tiled roofs in the valley bottom. The smell of excrement was strong. Unless you were prepared to dig holes to defecate into, then carefully seal in the excrement with soil, it was always a clear sign that a significant number of people had been staying in a particular place.

  ‘It seems quiet,’ Victoria whispered. ‘No sign of campfire smoke.’

  We reached the narrow lane that served as sole access to the village. We stuck to the far side of the hedgerow that ran alongside the lane, avoiding using the lane itself where we’d be in plain view of any roadblock or someone using a garage roof as a lookout post.

  The smell of shit grew stronger.

  Through the hawthorn hedging I noticed the lane was littered with human debris. As well as the shit I saw a pram with its wheels missing. There was a pair of spectacles lying smashed in the road. Then a child’s doll, dressed in a pink ballroom gown. Then something like a doll in baby clothes dumped on the grass verge. I didn’t look any closer.

  I saw Ruth screw her eyes shut and turn her face away. Only Victoria looked as we went by, her expression full of curiosity as if she’d seen a rare species of roadside flower. (And what could that new type of smelly flower be, Rick Kennedy? Why, none other than the increasingly common Post-mortem-baby-putrefactus. You did that now. You saw something horrible like a skeleton sitting in a burnt-out car, or a severed human arm left on top of a garden wall, the Timex around the wrist still ticking off seconds, and, well, you made a joke of it. You had to. All part of the new survival mechanism. You’d go insane if you didn’t. So sometimes on these hunts we’d play football with a human skull or poke a bloated corpse with a stick until it farted. A really neat trick was to light the fart with a match to see how high the flame spurted. Dean once frazzled an eyebrow doing that one.)

  Ruth looked over a garden gate. ‘The houses look as if they’ve been thoroughly picked over.’

  Bed sheets, towels, books, TVs, videotapes, family photographs, music CDs littered the gardens.

  ‘Anything edible will be well gone by now,’ Dean said. ‘At least it looks quiet.’

  ‘What now?’

  Stephen looked along the line of gutted houses. ‘No point in hanging around here.’

  ‘We could clean it up?’ Victoria suggested. ‘Still move in?’

  ‘We could,’ Stephen agreed. ‘But if refugees have found it once they’ll find it again. And there’s no way we could defend the place from any kind of determined attack.’

  ‘It looks as if we’ll be spending the winter under canvas,’ Dean said.

  ‘No way,’ Stephen said briskly. ‘We’ll find solid bricks-and-mortar shelter or we’ll build it ourselves.’

  ‘Uh-oh.’ The sound of warning was clear in Ruth’s voice. She nodded at what lay in the road. ‘Dead birds. And see all those dead rats in the garden?’

  ‘Gas leak.’ Dean sniffed the warm summer air. ‘I didn’t think it was only shit I could smell.’

  ‘All the more reason for us to get out.’ Stephen nodded towards a clump of trees. ‘We’ll cut back across the field that way.’

  As we walked towards the shade of the trees the smell of rotting meat grew stronger. What I’d taken for the dense shadow of the wood were black clouds of flies. They buzzed eagerly among the tree trunks. Of all God’s creatures flies weren’t going to go hungry this year.

  ‘Jesus…’ Stephen held his handkerchief to his mouth and nose. ‘There’s been a gas leak all right…just look at the poor devils.’

  The rotting meat, blood and skin of perhaps a thousand men, women and children formed a carpet across the woodland floor. Everywhere there were swollen bodies with arms and legs stuck grotesquely out, bloated with the subcutaneous build-up of gas generated by decomposition.

  ‘The gas took them by surprise as they slept.’ Stephen looked up at the valley sides. ‘Carbon monoxide is heavier than air. It must have flowed into the valley bottom like flood water.’

  Ruth’s face turned white. She swallowed hard. ‘They were still asleep. They never knew what hit them.’ She put her fingers to her forehead. ‘Uh. See that little boy? He’s still holding his teddy bear…he’s still…’ She turned away.

  Victoria stared, her face full of curiosity again but clearly unmoved by what she saw. I turned my back on the nightmare scene. My stomach muscles started to twitch; my eyes blurred.

  Dean gritted his teeth. ‘You know, if we looked hard enough, we’d find cans of food amongst that lot.’

  ‘Christ, be my guest, Dean.’ I felt vomit push its way into my throat. ‘Jesus Christ, be my guest.’ I swallowed down hard and headed back the way we came.

  Dimly, I heard Stephen tell Dean to forget any idea of wading into all that dead rot. Touch any of those corpses and you’d be lucky not to be shitting your heart out with cholera by the end of the week.

  I’d covered less than a hundred paces when I h
eard movement in the long grass to my left. Instinct kicked in; I unslipped the rifle, pulled back the bolt, raised it to my shoulder in less than two seconds flat.

  Rabid dog? We’d seen a few of those.

  A man driven crazy by hunger and terror? Maybe he’d come at me with a knife.

  Or maybe an army deserter? Already he’s got me in his sights.

  I’d have to fire first; ask questions later.

  I saw the head come up out of the grass. My finger tightened on the trigger.

  Chapter 47

  ‘Where’s my mummy?’

  I blinked. There, kneeling up in the long grass, was a girl of about five. Her hair was a mat of stuck-out strands; her face was brown with mud, probably with excrement too. But she wore a pair of white-rimmed glasses that were immaculately polished. When she tilted her head they reflected the midday sun. With a huge sigh I eased my finger off the trigger before letting the rifle drop, muzzle pointing safely down at the ground.

  ‘Where’s my mummy?’

  I gawped.

  ‘Where is my mummy?’ She stared at me hard, her brown eyes massively magnified by those carefully polished lenses. ‘Is she with the others?’ She pointed a brown finger towards the trees.

  ‘Are you alone?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m with all those.’ She pointed again back to where a thousand people rotted in the calm shade of the oak trees. ‘Have you seen my mummy?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You know,’ she said, her eyes looking preternaturally wise behind the lenses. ‘You know, I think my mum’s lying under those trees.’

  ‘Is that where you were?’

  ‘Yes. My mummy’s dead, isn’t she?’

  All I could do was nod.

  ‘Good.’

  The surprise must have registered on my face because she explained, ‘She’s happier now she’s dead. Men kept poking at her with their penises. That made her unhappy.’

  She spoke so matter-of-factly. I sensed she’d accepted this new state of affairs. A world without Mum, or family, and she decided life must go on.

  The others caught up. Ruth crouched down, smiling warmly.

  ‘Hallo, my name’s Ruth. What’s your name?’

  ‘The men said my new name was Fucking Brat. I don’t like it, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  I saw Stephen turn away. There were tears in his eyes.

  As casually as I could manage I asked, ‘Before…you had to move away from your home. What was your name then?’

  ‘Lee Godwin. I’m five.’

  ‘Well, we’ll call you Lee again. It’s a lovely name.’

  ‘I don’t have any food,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m just not eating.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, sweetheart,’ Stephen spoke gently. ‘Would you like to come with us?’

  ‘Will you poke at me with your penises?’

  ‘No,’ Stephen said, shocked. ‘We live in a nice place with clean tents and plenty of food.’

  Stephen held out his hand to the little girl. She looked at it, considering.

  ‘You’re going to bring the child with us?’ Victoria asked in surprise.

  We looked at Victoria’s placid face in disbelief.

  Ruth was so astonished it took a second attempt to loosen the words from her tongue. ‘You really think we should just leave her here?’

  ‘She might be diseased.’ Victoria spoke in a peculiarly flat way as if suggesting a carton of milk might just be that teensy-weensiest bit past its freshest. She looked at each of us in turn as if we were the peculiar ones. ‘She might infect the rest of our camp.’

  ‘She looks healthy enough.’ Ruth spoke coldly.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart.’ Stephen crouched down and stretched out his hand further. ‘We’ll go back home and get you some nice clean clothes.’

  ‘I’ve got no food.’ Lee spoke as if she suspected some kind of trick. ‘I’ve not been eating anything.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, darling.’ Ruth smiled. ‘We’ve got plenty of food.’

  I wish we had, I thought with a sudden ferocity. We’d have to find that untouched supermarket or warehouse crammed to the rafters with canned food, otherwise we were going to get hungry pretty soon.

  ‘Ruth. Can I bring my baby?’

  ‘Of course you can, sweetheart.’

  Lee ran to a patch of stinging nettles that were taller than her. There, using a long-handled garden rake, she pulled out a baby doll, then she teased out a yellow child-sized backpack that had the words KIDS R’ KOOL written graffiti-style on the flap. The bag gave a metallic rattle.

  ‘I haven’t got any food,’ she insisted.

  I offered to carry the bag.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly, heaving the straps over her tiny shoulders, then cradling the doll in her arms. ‘The bag’s got my baby’s clothes in it.’

  ‘OK,’ I smiled. ‘Just let me know if it gets too heavy.’

  Again I heard the rattle of cans in the bag as she made the straps more comfortable. Then, once she’d blown an eyelash from one of the lenses of her glasses, and was satisfied they were pristine, she carefully put them back on, patted her hair down over the spectacle arms, then walked determinedly along the lane, her face set in no-nonsense expression that seemed somehow more mature and worldly-wise than ours.

  Victoria fell in step with me as we headed out of the valley and back toward Fountains Moor. ‘It is an extra mouth to feed.’ She nodded at the child.

  I nodded. Not in the mood to explain why we didn’t leave five-year-old children to starve.

  ‘It’s unlikely she will be able to do any worthwhile work for our community.’

  ‘I’ll share my food rations with her.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. You need your full ration.’

  ‘That’s it with us humans. We don’t make much sense, do we? We fall in love. We sometimes stop and pick fallen people out of the gutter. Haven’t you heard the story of the Good Samaritan where you come from?’

  She shot me a weird flash of those grey eyes again. Christ…I suddenly had this strong feeling that Stenno was right. Maybe if I snatched at Victoria’s pretty face, caught the skin of her cheek between my finger and thumb and pulled hard it would rip away like a mask. Beneath it would be grey and pimply; the eyes blood-red. I shook my head.

  She stared at me with such a laser-like intensity I moved sideways to put more space between us. Christ, she was a strange one. Cold, too. She could have ice for blood.

  Suddenly I was struck by an idea. ‘Victoria. Do you know what year this is?’

  She stared at me.

  ‘Simple enough question,’ I said softly. ‘Tell me what year this is.’

  ‘Shh!’

  Frantically, Dean waved us to crouch down. He looked grim. ‘Get back to the wall. Find yourselves some cover.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Stephen whispered as we ran.

  ‘Straight ahead. Group of people…dozen, maybe fifteen.’

  ‘Armed?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  We reached the stone wall that separated this field from the next and crouched down at the bottom, hoping the long grass would hide us. Lee said nothing but I heard the cans of her precious food supply clanking as she dropped down onto all fours, the doll now tucked papoose-like into the front of her cardigan.

  ‘We’re in trouble if they’ve seen us,’ I whispered. ‘They’ve got us outgunned.’

  ‘We might be in luck. I don’t think they’ve seen us.’

  It was as Dean said ‘seen us’ that the first bullet smacked against the wall.

  Chapter 48

  Another shot came with a crack that echoed from the hills. The bullet smacked against the wall ten paces away, hacking a chunk of sandstone from it.

  ‘Through the gate…there, to your left,’ Stephen shouted. ‘Keep down as low as you can.’ He caught hold of Lee, swung her up into his arms and ran through the gap in the wall.

  In ten seconds
flat we crouched, panting, behind the wall. It was about chest height, nowhere as high as I would have liked but at least it was solid stone.

  No more shooting. The sudden silence seemed somehow loaded with danger. You could imagine that any second an armed gang would come whooping and shouting over the wall, to fire at us at point-blank range.

  Lee hunkered down tight against the wall, the doll and backpack of food hugged to her chest. Deftly, she slipped the glasses off her face, carefully folded the arms, then equally carefully snapped them away into her glasses case which she slid into a side compartment of the bag. Then she crouched there, waiting.

  Waiting for what? To be butchered for the half-dozen tins of tuna fish, spam, mandarin segments or whatever it was she guarded so closely in that little bag?

  ‘They’ve got us pinned down.’ Ruth pulled her rifle from her shoulder. ‘They’re up there on the high ground, looking down on us.’

  ‘For Godsakes,’ Stephen said. ‘Keep in close to the wall. They can’t hit us if we keep close to the wall.’

  ‘And that means you, too, Victoria.’

  She glared at me and moved one step closer to the wall. This was a game she didn’t want to play. She was nothing more than a spoilt brat.

  Dean handed her his rifle. ‘Here, use this.’

  ‘Stephen,’ I said, ‘what now? Run or stick here and shoot it out?’

  Dean risked a look over the top of the wall. ‘Well, it’s a simple choice…between frying pan and fire. Oh fuck…they’ve got assault rifles.’

  ‘Army deserters?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  Victoria sighed, bored. ‘If that’s the bad news what’s the good news?’

  I said, ‘That might be good news. The professional soldiers, although better armed, don’t take unnecessary risks. They weigh up who the opposition is, how well they’re armed, how determined they seem. Then they make a well-considered and logical decision whether to tackle them or not.’

  ‘They’re certainly more cautious than an untrained civilian with a gun.’ Dean crouched back down again. ‘Civilians have seen too many Arnie movies. They don’t realize ammo runs out so quickly or how difficult it actually is to shoot someone, especially if you’re moving, or your target’s moving.’