On Deadly Ground

by Simon Clark

  ‘Or shooting back at you.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘We’ve got to do something.’ Ruth eased off the rifle’s safety catch. ‘And quick.’

  ‘Ruth’s right. They might try and outflank us.’

  Stephen rubbed his jaw. ‘Right, just give me a minute to think.’

  ‘I reckon you’ve got thirty seconds, A couple of guys have just hopped over the wall at the other side of the field. They’re going for a pincer movement.’

  ‘We could just go,’ Victoria suggested.

  ‘What do you suggest?’ I snapped. ‘A magic carpet? Or perhaps you can just call up your mother ship and have us beamed aboard.’

  Again her eyes blazed with that laser-like intensity.

  ‘I haven’t got any food.’ Lee’s voice sounded small. ‘Tell them I haven’t got any food. They’ll go away.’

  Stephen gently stroked her cheek. ‘I wish I could, sweetheart.’ It was as he looked at her that I saw the change in his expression. It seemed that seeing the little girl had hit the button inside his head labelled: PROTECT & SURVIVE. When he spoke again he sounded businesslike, in control.

  ‘Right, we’ll give them a firework display.’ He snapped the shotgun upright. ‘When I give the word, start firing. Keep your heads down. It doesn’t matter if you hit anything. Just let them know we’re armed.’

  ‘And dangerous.’ Ruth gave a grim smile.

  ‘Everyone…get yourselves ready.’ Stephen breathed hard, psyching himself up for what was to come.

  Ruth and I had hunting rifles, Dean had a pair of 9mm Beretta automatic pistols, Stephen the pump-action shotgun; while Victoria stood a few paces from the wall, all fingers and thumbs as she tried to pull back the bolt of the rifle Dean had given her.

  ‘Everyone ready?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘How does this thing work?’ Victoria asked, sulkily.

  ‘Dean, can you show her how…Victoria—Jesus, keep your head down…and get down close to the wall. They’ll blow your damn head off.’

  I was closest. I pulled the bolt back for her. ‘Like this. It’s not an automatic, so you must pull the bolt back after every shot.’

  Rather than paying attention to what I did with the rifle, she looked at me with that strangely intense look again while stroking back her thick red hair.

  Stephen sounded impatient. ‘Come on, people…they won’t wait all day.’

  ‘OK, we’re ready.’

  ‘I’ll count down from three to one. Then fire as fast as you can.’

  Victoria had moved back from the wall again, setting herself up as an easy target. ‘I still can’t get this thing to work. Can you—’

  ‘Forget it, Victoria,’ Stephen snapped. ‘Just keep your head down. You’re too far back from the wall.’

  ‘They’re starting to move our way,’ Ruth warned.

  ‘OK. Keep as low as you can. Three-two-one -fire.’

  Ruth, Stephen, Dean and I leaned forwards against the wall, resting the guns on the coping stones. Then we let them have it. Firing as rapidly as we could. I glanced down at my feet to see Lee shiver visibly with every shot.

  The racket was immense. Grey smoke bloomed around us like a sudden mist; the cordite bit into the back of my throat.

  We fired wildly. The camouflaged figures who had been advancing cautiously ran back for the cover of the trees. Then I saw puffs of smoke as they fired back. Bullets shrieked over our heads.

  Three seconds later our ammunition was gone. I ducked down as their firing continued for another two seconds then it suddenly stopped, too.

  Stephen risked a look over the wall. ‘They’ve got the message, thank God. They’re not risking war.’

  ‘Yep,’ Dean said, ‘They’re legging it the other way.’

  ‘Have we hit anyone?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it.’

  ‘Good. There’s no point in turning this into a vendetta.’

  ‘Stephen?’ I saw Lee tapping the back of his knee to attract his attention. ‘Stephen?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Lee,’ he said, ‘it’s all over. No more shooting.’

  Lee was frightened. She still patted his leg. ‘Stephen?’

  I glanced back at Victoria where she stood about ten paces from the wall. It was nothing short of a miracle she hadn’t caught a bullet between the eyes during the shoot-out. She wrenched uselessly at the bolt of the rifle, her lip pouting. ‘Isn’t anyone going to show me how this works?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ I said coolly. ‘They’ve gone. Here, give me the rifle.’

  Her expression had been surly but she gave a sudden smile as she handed the rifle to me. I passed it on to Dean who slipped the strap over his shoulder.

  I looked back at Stephen who was standing beside Ruth, both of them looking over the wall at the departing men. Lee still tapped him on the leg to attract his attention. ‘Stephen…Stephen…’

  ‘In a moment, sweetheart.’

  ‘Sure they’re clearing out?’ I asked.

  ‘Seem to be. Those two who cut down the hill behind the wall have just run back to their gang. They’re not taking any chances.’

  ‘Stephen,’ Lee persisted.

  ‘What’s wrong, honey?’

  ‘Ruth’s been shot.’

  ‘No, she hasn’t, she’s…’ His voice died on him as he turned to look sideways at Ruth.

  I looked, too. A cold lump squeezed up into my stomach. From the back it looked as if she was standing with her eyes just above the level of the wall. But I could see that her eyes were wide; her jaw was wide too, as if she’d frozen in mid-yawn. My skin prickled; the cold lump in my stomach swelled. Her teeth rested against the sandstone coping block. In her agony she’d actually ground her teeth against the wall, gouging yellow furrows in the stone.

  Her legs quivered as if trying to support a tremendous weight.

  I looked at her back. Between her shoulder blades, just to one side of her glossy black plait I saw, at last, a spreading disc of red, soaking into the white material of her shirt.

  ‘She’s still alive,’ I said. ‘She’s still breathing.’

  She turned her head slightly. Her eyes met Stephen’s. I saw such a look of pain and fear in them that I had to clench my fists.

  Stephen caught her as she rolled sideways. Gently, he laid her down onto her back on the grass. That’s when I saw the wound just above her left breast. There was an ugly, brutish rip in her shirt; blood streamed out of it, covering Stephen’s bare hands. I could even see splinters of bone and shreds of skin protruding from the wound itself.

  I’m not really sure how long it took. We stood round feeling so…so fucking stupid, so fucking ignorant as Stephen tried to stop the flow of blood.

  It took maybe ten minutes. Possibly fifteen. Then Ruth Sparkman died.

  I’d known her since she was ten. She’d been one of those girls who played the boys harder and better at their own games. She climbed trees higher than we could. By the age of sixteen she had a lean athlete’s body; she was quick-witted, ambitious.

  Now she was nineteen. Dead. Her lips blue, her eyes turning dull, dry-looking, with a bloody hole right through her chest.

  We stood there, again I don’t know how long for, as Stephen cradled his dead girlfriend in his arms, her blood drying to a red-brown on the side of his face.

  Lee left the backpack and doll on the grass and put her arms round his neck and gently rocked him like he was a baby. ‘Don’t cry, sweetheart,’ she whispered to him. ‘Don’t cry. She’s gone to Jesus with my mummy. They’re better now. Don’t cry, sweetheart.’

  And as we stood there it began to snow once more. Black snow. With those black snowflakes that seemed so evil. That seemed to tell us we were following a single road, one that took us to but one destination:

  DEATH

  Chapter 49

  Back on Fountains Moor. The stream still gushed down its gully. People still cooked their meals over camping stoves, still listened to the radio. But
the stations grew fewer by the day. Now we were down to three stations in English. The camp still looked the same with the tents running in a line two-by-two.

  But it all felt different.

  Ruth Sparkman was the first one of us to die. Before, we’d return to that cleft in the hill high on Fountains Moor and it was like coming home after a hard day at work, when you could close the door on the outside world and feel snug and safe in your house. Ruth’s death was a reminder that we were sixty or so people, all but one under the age of thirty, leading a precarious existence on a dwindling food supply, sleeping in fragile tents with whole areas of the planet turning incandescent.

  It was the day after Ruth’s death and I sat talking to Kate Robinson as we cleaned our rifles. I was having the conversation I’d tried to have with Stephen an hour earlier. He claimed he was too busy as he worked out more ambitious plans; this time to airlift food from as far away as London. But I knew he didn’t want to hear what I needed to say. Something troubled me about Ruth’s death. It didn’t make any sense.

  So I sat there and ran through my doubts with Kate. By the stream old man Fullwood sat beside Lee making daisy chains.

  I said to Kate, ‘I never did see Ruth turn her back to the wall when the firing started.’

  ‘Turn her back? Why should she do that?’

  I shrugged. ‘To get more ammo from the belt?’

  ‘You told me all the spare ammo was on Dean’s belt.’

  ‘And he had that hung round his shoulder.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, if she’d needed more ammo she would have turned to Dean who was to her right.’

  ‘Therefore, she wouldn’t have needed to turn her back to the wall.’ Kate sighed. ‘I know it’s a tragedy, Rick, but raking over what happened won’t bring Ruth back.’

  ‘I know. But we need to know the truth, don’t we?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I think it does.’

  Kate shook her head. ‘She was shot by army deserters, Rick. Even if you managed to find them what are you going to do? Remember, we don’t have a police force anymore.’

  I pinched my bottom lip together between finger and thumb, thinking hard. ‘It just doesn’t make sense.’

  She smiled and said gently. ‘Does it make any sense that the whole planet’s heating up? That it’s cooking the ground we walk on? Now, that doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘We can’t do anything about that. It’s beyond our control.’

  ‘And so is what happened to poor Ruth.’

  I shook my head.

  Kate put down the rifle across her lap and said patiently. ‘OK, Rick. Tell me exactly…exactly…what’s troubling you.’

  ‘Look.’ I traced a line with my finger across the turf. ‘There we were. Myself, Dean, Stephen and Ruth standing facing the wall as we fired over it, up the hillside at the gang.’

  ‘The wall was around chest height, you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And they were firing back at you?’

  ‘They were.’

  That’s when Ruth was hit?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know much about ballistics and the damage a bullet does when it hits a human body.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Ruth was shot in the back.’

  ‘How can you tell? Dean told me the bullet went all the way through.’

  ‘It did.’

  ‘How do you know she was shot in the back?’

  ‘When a bullet enters the body it’ll probably hit nose first. But after it’s penetrated the flesh it begins to tumble as soon as it strikes a bone.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, it probably leaves the body sideways on. Kate, when I saw Ruth, she had a small wound in her back, and a dirty great hole here in her chest.’

  ‘So you think the bullet entered through her back, tumbled, then exited her body sideways creating the larger wound on her chest?’

  ‘Right. Remember JFK? The bullet that killed him made a small hole here.’ I pointed to my face. ‘But when it exited it blew out the whole of the back of his skull.’

  ‘OK, she was shot from behind. Who fired the shot?’ She looked at me directly. She was anticipating the name I’d give. ‘Victoria?’

  I nodded.

  Kate shook her head, puzzled. ‘Last night you were saying that Victoria didn’t even know how to fire the rifle?’

  ‘That’s what I thought. At the time, she hadn’t fired a single shot—so it seemed.’

  ‘How do you know she did?’

  ‘I asked Dean to check the rifle last night. There was one round missing from the magazine.’

  Kate rubbed her jaw. ‘No one saw it happen?’

  ‘No. There was a lot of shooting, so no one would hear another rifle shot.’

  ‘Where was Victoria standing?’

  ‘She was standing away from the wall. That’s what seemed so bizarre. At first I thought she didn’t appreciate she was in the line of fire from the gang on the hillside.’

  ‘And what she was really doing was moving behind Ruth to get a clear shot at her back?’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Why kill her?’ Kate echoed, then glanced to where Stephen and Victoria were walking along the bank of the stream. ‘One motive’s obvious.’

  ‘But it’s a hell of a vicious way to get rid of a rival!’

  ‘We live in a vicious world now. Perhaps the only rule is that there are no rules.’

  I looked at Kate. ‘So you believe me? That Victoria murdered Ruth Sparkman?’

  She let out a lungful of air. ‘Phew, the evidence stacks up, doesn’t it?’ Then she looked at me and nodded. ‘Yes…yes, I believe you, Rick Kennedy.’

  ‘The question now is, what are we going to do about it?’

  Chapter 50

  The days moved inexorably forward, just like the finger of black that crept inexorably closer to Fountains Moor.

  Sometimes I’d walk with Caroline to the big hill which overlooked the flatter land that rolled towards distant Leeds. There I’d watch that black finger through the binoculars. Somewhere deep underground the rock must have been glowing red hot and, centimetre by centimetre, the heat was seeping up through a crack in the bedrock. By the time it reached the surface, there was still enough heat to kill vegetation and cause fence posts to combust. They’d burn to ash, leaving strands of fence wire lying on the ground. Sometimes the finger of black would touch a house. Then, like some pyrotechnic version of King Midas, the house would smoulder for hours, perhaps days, before bursting into flame.

  The heat boiled the ground water that percolated through the porous strata of aquifer rock deep beneath the soil. Here and there, jets of steam would whistle from the ground. Or maybe that creeping heat would touch a pocket of gas; with a roar it would vent from the earth in a pillar of flame.

  At night it could look spectacular; to see a column of blue fire standing straight out of the earth halfway to Heaven like an Old Testament display of Jehovah’s anger. But whenever I saw it, it pumped yet more fear into that reservoir of dread that I already struggled to contain inside me. There were times I was afraid it would overflow and overwhelm me, pitching me into crazed panic from which I’d never recover. I wasn’t the only one who experienced this inexorable accumulation of fear. You saw it in the eyes of others in the camp. Although we might run out of food, there’d never be a paucity of fear.

  The ever-approaching finger of scorched earth. The thousands upon thousands of starving refugees searching for food. The wild bands who had turned to cannibalism. And, always in the back of my mind, the certainty that somehow connected with this were those grey figures that sometimes came to me in the night. What power had they to paralyze me so I couldn’t even shout out? Why did they carry me away out onto the moor then leave me there? It was as if I was being studied by them.

  And then there was Victoria. Every day I thought I’d tell Stephen about my suspicions. But, one: how did I go about t
elling him that his new lover had murdered his girlfriend? Two: if he believed me, what happened then? Would we put Victoria on some kind of murder trial? If we decided she was guilty, what then? Send her away from the camp? Hang her from a tree? Should I let sleeping dogs lie? He certainly seemed happy with her. I saw the pleased smile on his face when she walked up to him.

  Victoria still seemed a mystery character. People joked she’d only just arrived on Planet Earth; Stenno had this lurid delusion that somehow she was a Grey Man in disguise. I favoured the idea she’d escaped from a mental hospital or a drug rehab unit when civilization turned belly up and died on us. Perhaps I could find more information about her that would prove to Stephen that she was a danger to—

  ‘Hey…hey, Rick. Have you forgotten all about your Auntie Caroline?’

  We were sitting thigh to thigh on the heather overlooking that finger of black that crept ever closer to Fountains Moor.

  Caroline stroked the back of my neck, and Christ, believe me, it felt good. Caroline was one of the few things now in my life that could distract me from reality.

  One of the reasons I walked with her across the moor that evening was to break some bad news to her. I’d been postponing the inevitable all day. Before she started to stroke my neck I’d intended telling her then, but I put it off again.

  I slid my arm round her tiny waist and kissed her full on the mouth. She lay back on the heather, pulling me with her. I lay on top of her, looking down into her brown eyes that seemed so sexy and alive they shone. I stroked her face, lightly touching her smooth forehead, the delicate eyebrows, her nose, her lips. I felt the heat coming through my body in waves that somehow seemed to sparkle on the inside of my ribs and stomach and legs.

  Christ, she was lovely lying there. That smile, those trusting eyes. She would have done anything for me.

  I’d make love to her.

  Then I’d break the news.

  That’s a shitty trick, Kennedy. You can’t use her like that. Tell her what you have to tell her now. Don’t keep putting it off.

  She spoke softly. ‘Do you love me?’ Her eyes locked onto mine, as if afraid to hear my answer.