“Distract them how?”
“You’re a resourceful chap, I’m sure you’ll think of something. Now if you don’t mind, I want to hear what they’re saying”.
I switched my attention back to the group as the argument between Jenny and the other woman grew more heated.
“We can’t just go killing everyone we come across”, Jenny snapped, “we’re not murderers”.
“But stealing’s ok, if it suits you?”
“Well, yeah, it is. But stealing is only stuff. Murder is taking someone’s life. You can’t take that back once you’ve done it”.
“Well I say we shoot them and have done”.
“And I say I didn’t vote for you to be in charge, Sandra, and my bloke has got the shotgun”.
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” Sandra pushed up close to Jenny, their eyes mere inches apart. The baby began to grizzle as he sensed the tension, and immediately Jenny turned away, soothing him with a dummy and soft cooing sounds.
“Fucking pussies, the lot o’ya. Don’t know why I bothered helping you in the first place”.
“Because it’s hard to rob people on your own?” Tom suggested, getting a dark look in return.
I cleared my throat. “There is another option”, I said, wilting slightly as everyone turned to look at me.
“Go on”, Tom said, gesturing with the shotgun for me to continue.
“You could let us join you”.
Sandra shook her head. “No, we’ve got too many people already. I say we kill them and be done with it”.
Tom half turned to look at her and I felt Emily tense next to me, one hand slowly moving towards her waistband.
“You want them killed”, he said, “you do it yourself”.
Sandra stormed up to him and grabbed the shotgun, pulling it from his unresisting grip. Hefting the unfamiliar weapon, she raised it to her shoulder but Emily was already moving, pulling out the pistol and aiming it in one smooth motion that spoke of years of practice.
Time slowed, every movement taking an age as I threw myself to one side, still watching as Emily’s finger tightened on the trigger, flame exploding from the muzzle as the roar washed over me, louder than I would have believed possible.
The bullet hit Sandra high in the chest, spinning her around as she fired in turn, both barrels spewing flame as thousands of tiny pieces of shot burst from the weapon, followed a split second later by the sound of metal hitting metal.
The front of the car shuddered as the pellets hit, tearing through the bonnet as if it was made of paper and burying themselves in the engine.
Time rushed back in, sound, smell and vision all returning to normal as if a bubble had popped.
Sandra collapsed, screaming incoherently, but everyone else stood frozen in shock at the sudden violence. Then, as if an invisible chord had been cut, they ran, all of them sprinting back down the road towards Woking, Tom looking back over his shoulder as he steadied Jenny who carried their child.
I got to my feet shakily as Emily flicked the safety back on and tucked the pistol away again. She crossed to the screaming woman on the floor, kicking the shotgun out of reach and then kneeling to look at the damage.
Gathering the tattered shreds of my courage I followed, looking over her shoulder at the gaping hole the bullet had made. Bile rose in my throat and I had to choke it back down again to stop from vomiting.
“Help me!” Sandra croaked, flecks of blood spattering her chin as she spoke.
“You should have thought of that before you tried to kill us”, Emily said, her voice flat, but she turned the woman on her injured side and grabbed one of the discarded rucksacks to use as a pillow.
I stood there, as useless after the action as I’d been during, still feeling sick but unable to look away from the huge pool of blood just inches away from my feet.
“Is she going to be ok?” I asked, and Emily shook her head.
“No, Malc, she’s not. She’s just been shot with a 9mm pistol from close range and the bullet went through her lung. She’s going to die”.
I had the sudden urge to shout at her then, to scream at her for being so fucking calm when she’d just inflicted such grievous damage on another human being. She’d delivered the news like a weather report, heedless of the fact that the dying woman could hear her, and in spite of the fact that same woman had been about to kill us I felt like I’d just witnessed a violation of everything I’d held dear for my entire life.
I’d never so much as hit another person in anger since school, my father having taught me that violence was a very poor way to solve anything. To see someone I liked and respected treating a death she’d caused with such disinterest was almost too much to bear.
A huge wracking cough burst from Sandra and she began to convulse, gasping and clawing at her throat with her free arm as if she could tear the blockage free. Blood sprayed out across the road and her back arched.
I stumbled away, horrified. I’d seen death before, but always at a distance, insulating me from the terrible reality. Suddenly it was right here in front of me, every awful moment etched forever in my mind.
Even Emily stepped back as Sandra’s back arched, her face a mask of pain and fear as her eyes bulged and the air was suddenly filled with the stench of faeces.
She scratched at her neck one last time and then lay still. I moved another few steps towards the verge before I lost my breakfast, throwing up for the second time in as many days, heaving until there was nothing left.
“How do you do it?” I asked without turning, wiping my mouth on the back of my arm.
“Do what?”
“Stop it from driving you mad, block the feelings out, keep going, all of it”.
“You don’t”, she said, and I turned to look at her, still standing over the body, staring at it as if engraving the moment indelibly in her memory. “You just do what needs to be done and you save the feelings for later. This may not be the world we want, but it’s the one we’ve got. You let your guard down for even a moment and it leaps up and bites you on the arse, they just proved that. Some might say that she got what she deserved”.
“And what do you say?” I asked quietly.
She shrugged and looked up at the sun.
“I say we’ve got a long way to go, and the sooner we get moving, the sooner we can find your little girl”.
Chapter 25
The car was wrecked. The blast from the shotgun had torn the engine into pieces that even Emily’s skills couldn’t reassemble, particularly not with the few tools we had to hand. The one thing that was on our side, however, was that the group had run off without their bags, leaving most of our own kit behind except the few items they’d pocketed.
Under Emily’s direction I worked quickly and silently, packing food, medicine and water into a rucksack and then adding the small stove and one of the bottles of gas, the other going in her Bergen when mine was full to bursting.
She took as much of the water as she could carry, along with the tent and all the utensils, then packed the rest of the space with food.
We tied our sleeping bags underneath, and Emily took the maps and torches from the car before picking up the shotgun and retrieving the box of shells.
She offered it to me but I shook my head. I couldn’t bear to touch it right now, although I knew I was making myself look weak.
In my heart I knew that she’d done the right thing. She’d saved my life, and in return all I could do was stare at her as if she were some kind of monster, but if it affected her in any way she didn’t show it.
Instead she worked with a practiced efficiency and within minutes we were ready to go.
“We need to find another vehicle”, she said as we began to walk, my ankle stiff but usable. “We’ll try for the next town, see if we have any luck”.
“What if we don’t find one?”
“Then we keep walking”.
And so we did. It was a long time since I’d done any serious exercise, and alth
ough Emily set a gentle pace I was soon gasping, my back bent under the weight of the rucksack and my socks beginning to rub uncomfortably in my trainers as they soaked through with sweat.
We met no one else on the road for the first hour, and neither of us suggested that we investigate the few houses that we passed. I was beginning to develop a healthy fear of anyone I didn’t know, and apart from a vehicle we had everything we needed.
As the day wore on the heat increased, giving me a headache that pulsed quietly in my temples. We were stopping for a few sips of water every couple of miles, but the truth was that we were sweating out far more than we were taking in and by late afternoon I wanted nothing more than to lie down in the shade and pant like a dog.
Occasionally we passed other people but they gave us a wide berth, some stepping off the road and into the fields or woods on either side when they saw the shotgun that Emily cradled in her arms. Only two cars went past us, one already full and the other speeding up and almost knocking us off the road in its haste.
The sun was on its way to the western horizon when we hit the motorway. The map told us it was the M3, the small lane we’d been following spilling us out onto the road with almost no warning.
It was strange to see such a huge stretch of road so empty, and I felt horribly exposed as we crossed it, climbing the central reservation and hurrying across to the far side and back onto the smaller road we needed to follow.
We didn’t talk much, both lost in our own thoughts and only discussing small things, such as which route to take when we consulted the map or letting the other know when we needed to find a convenient bush or tree.
I felt tired from more than just the unaccustomed exercise. Part of me was refusing to believe that I lived in a world where you could now kill someone with little or no consequence, where life was already becoming cheaper than a car boot full of food and water, but the rest of me knew I couldn’t go on hiding from reality.
If I was to survive, and more importantly help my daughter survive, I needed to get a grip on myself and learn to do whatever it took to keep going.
It’s a horrible thing to discover how weak you really are, and I was very much a product of my time, a latte drinking, crossword solving warrior of the written word, not someone who could shoot a person as calmly as if I was picking flowers.
I knew that I was being unfair to Emily. If I was a product of my time, she was as much a product of her training. She’d seen combat, spent most of her adult life in a profession where life was dear but death was a constant, very real threat, and she had acted to save us from that threat.
Without her, I’d most likely be a corpse on the side of a road somewhere, not living, breathing and still moving towards my daughter, no matter how far away we might still be.
As we trudged along the lane, surrounded on both sides by woods and fields that the evening sun cast in brilliant gold, I caught up with Emily, ignoring the twinge in my ankle as I picked up the pace.
“Thank you”, I said, and she turned her head to look at me as we walked, her expression unreadable.
“For what?”
“For saving us back there. I may have come across as a little ungrateful in the heat of the moment”.
She shook her head. “Not ungrateful, just, I don’t know, naïve maybe?”
I bridled at being called naïve, but if I was being honest with myself I couldn’t argue. We were in her world now, not mine, a world of quick thinking and life or death decisions, and it was something I wasn’t used to. Until last week, my hardest decision had usually been whether or not to have vanilla in my latte.
“I’m trying”, I said, looking for the right words to explain how I was feeling, “but it’s not easy. The way you shot that woman, no fear, no remorse. That’s not something I’m used to”.
Emily snorted. “Shows what you know”.
“Sorry?”
She stopped and turned to face me, brows furrowed in anger.
“There you are making all these grandiose proclamations when you don’t have a fucking clue. No fear, no remorse, my arse! I was scared shitless, but I’ve been taught to ignore the fear, push it aside so I can do what I need to do. And of course I feel remorse. You think I can shoot someone and not worry about it afterwards? All I can see is her face. I keep playing the moment over and over in my head, wondering if I could have done something different, if I acted too soon or too late. Besides, every time the shit hits the fan you run away and throw your guts up, so don’t go judging me until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes”.
She turned and strode off down the darkening lane, her back stiff and pace crippling. Not wanting to be left alone, even smarting with the rebuke, I hurried after her, my ankle beginning to hurt again after the day’s forced march.
I felt like I should be angry with her. She’d just told me that I was arrogant, thoughtless and absolutely no use when she needed me. She was being a little unfair, I thought, especially after I’d set the fire that allowed her and Ralph to escape, but I knew in my heart that she was right. If we were to get through this and bring Melody back safe, she needed me to be strong, perhaps ruthless, but certainly she needed me to step up more than I’d been doing so far.
I finally caught up as she reached the brow of the next hill, falling into step with her wordlessly. We walked that way in silence until the sun was just a sliver of light on the western horizon. Finally, when it was almost too dark to see, Emily spotted a place she deemed safe for camping, a small copse of trees about fifty metres from the road. As we worked together to put up the small tent and stow our things inside, I dared to hope that the silence was a companionable one, and that it would last as we crawled into the tiny space and bedded down for the night.
Chapter 26
I woke to the unfamiliar sound of someone snoring next to me, and rolled over to come immediately face to face with Emily, just visible in the dim light that pierced the canvas.
She looked peaceful in sleep, and years younger with the habitual toughness leeched from her face by slumber.
I sat up quietly, trying not to wake her, and crawled from my sleeping bag to unzip the tent and slip outside.
The morning was surprisingly cool with grey clouds scattered overhead. I hoped that the oppressive heat had broken, it would be far easier to walk without the sun beating down on us from dawn until dusk.
Pulling the bags out behind me I set about making breakfast, putting the stove together and lighting it, then filling a pan with water from our dwindling supply and setting it to boil.
It heated surprisingly fast for such a small stove and within a few minutes I had two bowls of porridge ready, as well as two steaming cups of black coffee.
I leaned into the tent to wake Emily but instead saw her sitting up, smiling as I jumped.
“I was about to wake you, I’ve made breakfast”, I said, gesturing towards the bowls.
“I know”, she said with a tentative smile, “I woke up when you opened the tent but I figured you at least owe me breakfast so I thought I’d wait”.
Her harsh words of the night before still lay between us, but it seemed that we had both resolved not to mention it, and as we ate breakfast and sipped our coffee we began to talk with a little of our former closeness, still a fragile thing when it had been interrupted.
“How’s your ankle?” She pointed at my bare feet, one of them still wrapped in a now-dirty bandage.
I shrugged. “A lot better that I thought it would be but it still hurts like buggery”.
She looked over at my trainers, worn, scuffed and forlorn-looking.
“We need to get you some proper boots, trainers aren’t made for walking long distances. You’ll be lame before we’re halfway there otherwise”.
Without thinking about it my hand went towards my pocket, an ingrained response to any talk of shopping that had me scrambling for Google on my phone to look for the best deals. Emily caught the movement and laughed when I explained, then gestured at the field
.
“Even if you still had a phone that worked, I think Amazon would struggle to deliver out here, drones or not. We’ll have to risk heading into the next town or village that we see. Either that, or we need to start looking at the houses we go past, see if there’s anything useful”.
I shifted uncomfortably. “That feels a lot like stealing”.
She nodded. “It does, because it is. But it’s about survival now Malc, everything we’ve seen over the last few days tells us that”.
She paused for a moment, then looked down at her feet when she spoke again.
“Look, about yesterday. I’m sorry I was so harsh with you. It’s easy to forget that most people haven’t been through what I have, and I kind of assume a certain level of competence and practicality in everyone, then I end up surprised when it doesn’t materialise. I think it’s a mix of serving in the army and having a dad as capable as mine is. You know we never bought any furniture when I was a kid? My dad made everything. Tables, chairs, even a sofa, although that leaned to one side and gave everyone back-ache”.
She stopped and took a breath. “What I’m trying to say is that I was too harsh on you, and I said some really nasty things, and I’m sorry. I know this is all new to you, and this is probably turning into the steepest learning curve you’ve ever experienced, but this trip is about your daughter, so I guess I just felt, well, underappreciated”.
I reached out and touched her arm, trying to ignore the electric thrill that ran through me when her fingers brushed mine in return.
“I’m the one who should be sorry”, I said, pulling my hand away slowly, unwilling to break the connection but knowing I had to, for my own sanity if nothing else. “I made a stupid assumption based on my own fears, and it wasn’t fair on you. How about we put yesterday down as an off-day and forget about it?”
She nodded and smiled, and I wondered if I imagined her own reluctance as she took her fingers from my arm.
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