by Ryan Casey
“Who knows?” I said.
We were quiet, for a while. The only sounds were the raindrops falling against the canopy of the woods.
But the longer that silence went on, the more certain I grew about what I had to do. About where I had to go.
And about how I had to do it.
“We go to Carlisle,” I said. “We find Kerry.”
A genuine smile stretched at Kesha’s cheeks. “That’s more like it.”
“Are you two not boyfriend and girlfriend anymore?”
I looked past Kesha at Olivia. Kesha snorted, and I chuckled too.
“No way,” Kesha said, pushing me away playfully. “You’ve smelled his feet, right?”
“Hey. There’s nothing wrong with my feet!”
“There is,” Olivia said, joining in the laughter. “Big stinky hairy things!”
We all laughed. Even Bouncer joined in the excitement. And for a moment, I saw us as a family. A family in some alternate universe, some parallel reality.
I savoured that moment.
It was a good job I did.
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was the following day that everything changed.
It was raining again. To be honest, I don’t even know why I’m thinking about it raining again. Rain was the British norm. At least it’d cooled down today. I couldn’t stand that stuffiness of yesterday.
Besides, I’d cooled myself down too.
I was focused on what I had to do.
Get to Carlisle.
Get to Kerry.
If someone or anything got in my way, well, they could just try screwing with me.
I wasn’t dicking around anymore.
“Are we going to rest soon, Dad?”
Olivia was right to bring up taking a rest. We’d been walking pretty solidly all day, on very little food. I’d caught a squirrel a while back. Kesha got close to catching a rabbit, but it had myxomatosis, and neither of us was sure whether rabbits were still safe to eat when they had that.
Bouncer was doing alright, still. Skinnier, for sure. We’d stockpiled a lot of kibble back at Heathlock. He’d be missing it now, no doubt. But he was coping. He was managing.
Soon, we’d get to someplace where he could help himself to a proper doggy meal all over again.
Besides, Bouncer was probably more sorted than the rest of us because of the doggy bug out bag Kesha had prepared for him. There wasn’t much in it, but enough to keep him happy for a while. A few vacuum sealed dog food packets. A thermal layer. Some water purification tablets. A couple of spare leads, as well as a few chewy dog foods and a pet first aid kit. It was all handy stuff. Stuff we’d salvaged—or rather, stuff other people had salvaged while we’d been back at Heathlock. We hoped we’d never have to use it. But at least it added some level of extra security.
I could see his ribs now, and the bones on his back. But hell, all of us were a little bonier than we used to be.
I was doing okay. I’d never had an amazingly large appetite to start with. I tried to pile on the pounds over a spell of two years in my early twenties and it hadn’t really come to much. I couldn’t stomach the protein shakes, the mass gainers. If anything, they made me lose weight because of the way I heaved after drinking them.
But damn, what I’d give for a mass shake in this world of foraged food and beans warmed up over makeshift fires.
“Soon,” I said.
“Olivia’s got a point,” Kesha said, with a grimace. “These blisters are giving me hell right now.”
Truth be told, I was getting edgy. I wanted to get to Carlisle. We couldn’t be too far from it, now. The sooner we got there, the better.
I just hadn’t told Kesha what I had planned for Andy when I got there.
She might be giving Andy the benefit of the doubt. And it might seem strange that I was the one taking the more aggressive stance in this particular case. But I was gunning for Andy.
It wasn’t me that was the problem. He could abandon me, he could abandon Kesha. But he’d abandoned Olivia. And that was the problem.
He’d given my daughter hope. He’d outright used the information that my wife was alive to emotionally manipulate her.
And then he’d just gone.
Oh, I’d let him off for the hurt he’d caused me. I’d forgiven him for abandoning me in the middle of the night after instilling such hope.
But I hadn’t forgiven him for letting down my daughter.
That was what was driving me now.
That was what Andy was going to pay for when I found him.
And I was going to find him.
“We’ll take a break in a mile or so,” I said. “Reckon your blisters can take it?”
Kesha tilted her head either side. “Eh, per—”
She was cut off. And in that second, in that fraction of a second, I knew something had just gone wrong. Terribly wrong.
Because her sudden silence was replaced by a deafening scream.
I saw Kesha fall forward. I heard Bouncer begin to bark. I saw Olivia cover her mouth, her eyes widen. I still didn’t totally understand what had happened.
Not until I saw the blood.
There was something wrapped around Kesha’s ankle. A metal trap. Shit. It looked like a damned wolf trap, a leg-hold type. It was wedged into Kesha’s lower leg, the blood running thick. Crap. The wound looked bad. Very bad.
“Shit. Kesha. It’s okay. You’re—”
“Help!”
The agonised, pained cries she made were enough to make my skin crawl. Her face had gone completely pale, and she looked on the brink of unconsciousness already. I was used to Kesha being so strong. I wasn’t used to hearing her so weakened, so defenceless.
I wasn’t used to her asking anyone for help.
“It’s okay,” I reassured her. But really I was on the verge of puking myself. She was bleeding. If I didn’t get her out of this thing, she was going to bleed to death.
I tried to grab the metal of the trap to pull it apart but that just made Kesha cry out some more.
“Kesha, you’re going to have to let me take this off you.”
“It just hurts so much.”
“I know. I know.”
“Please help me. Please.”
I took her hand. She dug her fingernails down deep into my palm.
I looked up and I saw Olivia looking on, pure horror on her face.
“Olivia, love. I’m gonna need your help here.”
She was breathing rapidly. She was going pale too, a greyish complexion. She was in shock. She might’ve been living in a world where awful things happened for a year now, but things like this still had the power to get to her. To anyone.
But she couldn’t lose her composure right now.
I needed her help.
“Olivia,” I said.
She shook her head. “Dad, I—”
“You need to come over here and help me. This trap, I can’t open it alone.”
Olivia kept on shaking her head.
I looked right into her eyes. “Olivia, you can do this. You’re strong. Stronger than you’d ever believe.”
As Kesha’s screams continued to cut through the air, I saw the light coming to Olivia’s eyes as she snapped out of her state of shock.
She nodded. Then she walked towards her.
I took a deep breath, bit down on my bottom lip, and wrapped my hands around the trap.
I yanked it apart before Olivia even reached us. See, that’s the thing about surprise. Even if Kesha wasn’t willing to co-operate when Olivia came over to help me, she at least was expecting an attempt to be made then.
She wasn’t expecting anything earlier. Which was exactly what I’d done.
“Okay,” I said, as Kesha whimpered with pain. The amount of blood coming from her leg, discolouring the fallen autumn leaves below, was making me sick. I took off my jacket, losing all focus on how to stop the bleeding as the shock set into me too. I needed some superglue. Or some pepper, to help the
clotting process and clear the wound of potential infection. Or… shit. Some cayenne pepper paste that I’d learned about a long time ago, too. Helps to keep the blood pressure down, and stop the bleeding.
But I didn’t have any of those things. And this wound was too deep. It was far too deep.
I took off my shirt. I ripped the sleeve off my shirt and wrapped it around her ankle. Blood stained through it, immediately.
I took it away then rooted in my bag for a small bottle of alcohol. “Shit,” I said.
“What?” Olivia asked, treating my swearing as absolutely normal.
“We don’t have anything that can help. Shit. Shit.”
I sat there and watched the blood pool out of Kesha’s leg and I’d never felt so hopeless, so out of ideas.
Because Kesha was dying.
She was dying right in front of me, unless I could do something.
She reached up for me with a cold, shaking hand. She touched my face.
“You go,” she said. “Go.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to—”
It was then that I heard the footsteps behind me.
That I felt the movement over the top of my head.
And before the black bag covered my face, I saw someone step out behind Olivia and do the same to her.
Then they grabbed Bouncer and muzzled him.
I struggled. I fought. But that was all I could do.
The people behind me lifted me up, dragged me away, and pulled my daughter and I screaming into the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting in total darkness when I finally heard a noise right ahead of me.
Yeah, it was pitch black. I couldn’t tell whether that was because of the bag over my head, or because it was night, or whatever. Probably a combination of factors.
I’d screamed and cried out as loud as I could for the first few hours of being held captive by… well, whoever was holding me captive. I’d cried out for Olivia. For Bouncer. For Kesha. I kept on screaming out just hoping someone would come to me so I’d know what I was up against.
But they didn’t. And now, no matter how much I tried to shout, I couldn’t. My voice was totally broken. I could barely talk.
I shivered. I was sat upright against a wall, I knew that much. The very fact that I hadn’t heard anything from Kesha, Olivia, or Bouncer meant I was probably alone.
I tasted sick whenever I thought about the last time I’d seen Kesha. The smell of blood in the air, as it pooled out of her ravaged ankle. The look of agony on her face.
I’d tried to do what I could. I was there beside her to keep her alive.
But I had no way of knowing whether she’d made it.
I didn’t hold out much hope.
I tried again to pull against the metal pole my hands were cuffed around, but to no avail. There was no point, not really. I’d been trying ever since I’d been locked away in here, to no luck.
I squinted. Tried to peek through the bag that was over my head. But again, it was totally dark. I figured the bag was made out of some thick black material, like one of those bags for life you’re forced to buy at supermarkets ever since the charge for plastic bags came in. Frigging bags-for-life. I’d never liked them. Now I had another reason to detest them even more.
I thought about Olivia. About how scared she must be. She was tough, my angel. She was such a fighter. She’d been through ten times worse than I had simply because she was younger than me, and nobody younger than me should have to suffer by living in this world.
And Bouncer, too. Poor Bouncer. He might be strong, but he missed us when we weren’t with him.
I hoped to God he was okay. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if I lost him.
Then there was Kerry…
She was out there. I believed it, I really did.
I was going to find her.
I was going to get her daughter to her again. I was going to give her hope that there could be goodness in this world.
I went to open my mouth to let out another cry.
That’s when I heard the noise right ahead of me.
There was the sound of a door creaking open. Then, heavy footsteps walking towards me. I got that feeling someone was standing right over me, looking down at me, and it drove me mad that I couldn’t look back up at them and see who they were.
With a bag-for-frigging-life over my head, I’d had my humanity stripped away from me.
That scared me.
Because hell knows how far they’d go if they didn’t see me as human.
“Your name.”
The voice was deep. Gruff. It didn’t sound like it came from the kind of guy I wanted to mess with.
I went to speak, but my vocal chords were so strained. They’d need some rest—and some water—to get them working again.
I felt the person lunge towards me and grab me by the neck.
“I say ‘your name,’ you answer me, okay? That’s how we’re gonna do things here.”
“Go to hell,” I gasped.
The man sighed. I could smell sweat through the bag. He let go of my neck and walked away. “There’s no need to make this difficult. But for what it’s worth, I understand why you might be mad. You have got a bag over your bloody head, after all. I guess that’s on us. And the trap. Leg-hold trap back in the forest. That wasn’t us, let’s get that clear. And it’s just a good job we found you and not anyone else.”
I heard the man walking towards me again and I braced for a kick or a punch.
Instead, he pulled the bag from over my head, and I saw light.
I squinted. Right in front of me there was a window. I could see the sun shining through it. I was on an upper storey of some old, disused looking building. Then again, all the buildings looked disused these days. Buildings had aged more in the last year than they had in the decade beforehand.
Standing in front of that window, silhouetted by the light, there was my captor.
He was broad-shouldered. He had curly ginger hair, tied back into one of those man bun things I’d always liked the idea of, but never had the balls to grow. He was wearing a green coat with a white shirt underneath, and baggy khaki chinos. He had his hands behind his back, and was standing upright. He looked, dare I say it, military.
“Now we’re face to face,” he said. “I’m going to ask you that question again.”
“Didn’t really sound like a question,” I said, my voice returning a little, just very ropily. “More an order.”
The man smirked and shrugged. “It is what it is. I just think it’s in both our best interests if we exchange names right now.”
“After you.”
There was a pause. A pause in which I was sure this guy was threatened by me in some way. After all, knowledge was power. I could decide not to give him my name and suddenly I’d have the upper-hand.
Then he sighed and shook his head. “You’re tough. Tougher than I usually give people credit for. But shit. You made it this far. Must have something about you. I’m Alec. Alec O’Donnell. And this is my old barracks.”
He lifted his arms and it fast dawned on me that this guy—Alec—was in fact military after all.
“So now you know the score,” he said. “Your name?”
“I’ll tell you my name when you tell me the people you brought in with me are okay. That my dog’s okay.”
“That wasn’t the deal.”
“Well, it is the shitting deal now.”
Alec smirked. “You really think you’re in a good position, don’t you? A position to bargain your way out this mess?”
“I’d say I’m in a position to not give a shit about your tough guy bravado. My people. I want to know where they are. I want to know they are okay. Right now.”
Alec didn’t smirk. He didn’t show any emotion, in fact.
And then, out of nowhere, he reached behind me, yanked my hands from the cuffs and then dragged me by my right arm
out of the room.
I tried to stop myself from moving forward. Tried to kick back. But whenever I did, Alec just punched me to the ground. He was tough. Really tough. Far too tough for me to cope with.
He didn’t say anything as he dragged me out into the corridor, as he pulled me and kicked me down a flight of stairs.
He didn’t say anything when he stamped on my fingers and punched me in the face when I tried to bite his hand.
He didn’t say anything, as he opened up another door and tossed me inside.
But behind the door, I didn’t find what I expected to find.
There were four people. Two people holding medical equipment.
A woman on the bed. Kesha.
And beside her, at her bedside, Olivia.
At her feet—or licking my face, now—Bouncer.
“Bouncer,” I gasped. I stroked him, dizzy and sore from the way Alec had dragged me down here.
I went over and held on to Olivia too, tears coming to my eyes that she was here and she was okay.
On the bed, Kesha looked up at me with open eyes. With alive eyes.
She reached out for my hand, and I took it and held on to hers.
“I reckon we might’ve just earned you telling us your name now we saved your missus,” Alec said. “Don’t you?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“You shouldn’t have worried about me, you soppy idiot. You know I’m going to still be here long after you’re gone.”
Just hearing Kesha speak to me was an absolute blessing. I was in the room with her that Alec had taken—well, pretty much kicked—me to. The people who had cleaned and stitched up her leg—Gav and Lucy—had left the room, given us all some much-needed privacy. They offered to take Olivia and Bouncer out of the room too, so me and Kesha could properly catch up, but like I was going to take an offer like that.
I was just so happy to be back with my people again.
“Of course I worried,” I said. “You stepped in a frigging trap. You were bleeding badly.”
“Ah, it’s just a graze.”
It wasn’t a graze. In truth, the wound was bad. We were lucky we were captured when we were. We didn’t know who Alec or his people were, not properly, but we could harbour a guess they were military. Or ex-military, as everyone formerly military was these days.