October Song

by Ru Pringle

  So what do you do, Coira Keir? If others from your cell are captured, what then? What information can they potentially divulge about you? Do you assume the worst – or the best?

  You ruminate, driving through a landscape of warehouses growing chickens and sun-lamp vegetables. No more news from the ’phone. When the time comes, you find yourself turning down the M73: the motorway linking the M8 with the M74 running south to Carlisle and what you can’t stop thinking of as the border with England.

  Would she go to England?

  It would certainly be unpredictable. It’s an interesting thought. You try it on like a hat, for size.

  It doesn’t fit.

  At the junction you turn west along the M74 towards the Southside of Glasgow. Another roadblock. Not surprising. You rejoin the M8 as it re-emerges from the city centre across the River Clyde to the north. The orange-lit air above the hotels, multiplexes, tower-blocks and tenements is patrolled by pitch-black night helicopters and armed drones. Southwards beyond the curfew zone, in the suburbs and schemes of Nithsdale and Hillington, more fires flicker where dark-clothed figures run in gangs between crumbling buildings.

  You pass the airport. Bulbous propfan airliners take off and land between the burned husks of older jets and military helicopters. Beyond the floodlights and razor wire, the plastic prefab grid of the Georgetown Refugee Camp extends into the half-light. Four kilometres later, at the camp’s northern edge, a hand-painted road sign warns of another turning.

  West, to the north Ayrshire coast? Or north, over the Erskine bridge, then the A82 road to the Highlands?

  Both offer escape opportunities. Ayrshire more quickly, if the plan is to escape by boat.

  You turn north over the bridge, and it feels right.

  The town of Dumbarton seems quiet, but coiled like a spring. You’re glad to leave it behind. There’s little traffic on the road. The surface is terrible, and you’re glad of the car’s sturdy tyres and long-travel suspension. Street and house lights wink through trees on the left: the bleak one-time industrial towns of Renton and Alexandria. There’s a roundabout with a rotting sculpture corkscrewing out of the tangle of scrub and refuse at its centre. Torched caravans encircle it, and a sign proclaiming “Balloch: Gateway to the Highlands” has been doctored to read “Bollocks this way to Hell”. A little further along, a fallen stone monolith bearing the logo Lomond National Park has been defaced with a spray-can and the words Saor Alba.

  The ’phone again. You tap the earbud.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘We’ve footage of her car passing a service station at Dumbarton, heading north. Where are you?’

  ‘North of Dumbarton.’

  You smile to yourself, click off, and turn on the radio. A voice recorded around the time your grandfather was born is screaming ‘We’re on a highway to hell …’

  CHAPTER 5

  ____________

  The Loch

  SHE AWAKES WITH SURPRISE, and the aftertaste of terrible nightmares she can’t quite recall.

  Also the sense that she’s being watched.

  Her breathing and pulse sound weirdly distorted. It’s like she’s hearing them through cheap earphones with the volume too high. She tries moving her arms. Finds that she can’t. Something – or someone? – is pinning them to her sides. It’s all she can do not to cry out, both from the sudden fear and the pain in her groin as her muscles convulse. Her eyes won’t open either. They must be gummed shut. Then she realises they are open – she just can’t understand what they’re telling her. Filling her vision is a kind of wanly luminous grid. And … that smell. Reminiscent of something. What is it?

  The face is her dad’s. He looks strangely young. He’s smiling, at her. His head pokes amusingly from his sleeping bag, as though he’s a brightly coloured human caterpillar. His smile melts her. She hears birdsong, insects buzzing, lapping water, the hiss of a gas stove. Smells porridge cooking. Wet vegetation and the sweaty leather of walking boots. Dad could really do with a shower.

  Above all these other notes, strangely comforting, she smells damp nylon.

  Memories of the previous day hit her like a wave. What she’s seeing is daylight through the ripstop flysheet she sushi-rolled herself in last night.

  Opening her mouth to quieten her breathing, she lies as still as she knows how, listening. Yesterday’s wind, music and gunfire seem to have gone. There’s silence, but for languid watery noises not far away.

  But then …

  Rustling. Stealthy-sounding, and close.

  Idiot! What if someone has a gun on you? Not content with being unarmed and blind, she has essentially gift-wrapped herself.

  She runs through options. She can lie here, gambling on the camouflage offered by the flysheet (which is unlikely to count for much, given that it’s next to a sparkly purple kayak) – or, try to lurch blindly to her feet, then either wrestle free of the flysheet or hurl herself towards the sounds of water. Attempt to roll down the rocks into the sea and disentangle herself while she’s under. And that’s it. All she can come up with.

  Of the two terrible plans, at least the first seems less actively suicidal.

  She tries not to gasp as she remembers she needs to breathe. Every muscle aches. She feels sick, hungry, and frighteningly weak. Her neck is cricked from lying on the uneven ground, and her wound is an insistent throb below her hip. Still, for now at least, she’s alive.

  Given how things have been going, this seems a minor miracle.

  She strains for sound. A tickle in her throat is giving her an overwhelming urge to cough. Soon her eyes are streaming. At any moment, she half-expects a voice or a gunshot.

  Nothing.

  Has she imagined what she heard?

  But then …

  There it is again. A faint rustling.

  Except, it’s not quite rustling. It sounds more like something … tearing.

  She tries using her shoulders to squirm the flysheet towards her feet. Her weight is trapping it, but there’s no room to roll to either side, and the flysheet’s twisted so tightly around her she can’t even sit. The best she can manage is writhing like a hatching pupa. If she was less scared, it might be funny.

  Having wrestled first her head and then one arm clear, she lies bonelessly on her back, heaving muted lungfuls of damp air.

  She’s in a depression thick with Japanese knotweed, like a miniature glen between ridges of gnarled, lichenous rock. Scots pines, long since killed by Dothistroma, sprout from the outcrops, looming skeletally against a sky which rains a coarse mist into her upturned eyes. Their roots clutch the rocks, plunging bone-pale fingers into the leaf-strewn heathery peat upon which she lies. Beside her, like a sleeping partner, is the kayak. Rocks at her feet frame a wedge of grey sea, greyer land and low clouds.

  As hiding places go, it could be a lot worse. But there’s a funny smell. Not pleasant, although it’s slightly sweet. It’s not the excrement which, she sees, has liberally coated the tent.

  The sound she heard seems to be coming from the far side of the nearest outcrop. Trying to rustle as little as possible, she wobbles to her feet and unwinds the flysheet. Then she catches sight of her hands. She stares at them in shock.

  They’re crimson with half-dried blood. Her clothes and the inside of the flysheet are slick with it.

  Worry later.

  Moving as quickly as she dares, she pokes her head above the highest tree roots.

  And almost vomits.

  The noise she’s been hearing is a fox. Or rather, a family of foxes: what she assumes is a mother, and two cubs. The mother is tearing flesh from a human face. The face’s bluebottle-encrusted remaining eye seems to be gazing calmly at the rock about level with her waist.

  The face is – was – a child’s. A small child. Judging by its size and clothing, six or seven at most. It’s the nearest of many bodies scattered amongst the heather and moss beneath the trees.

  Most are adults.
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  All have brown skin.

  SHE’S SEEN DEATH BEFORE. It came with the territory. But not like this. Never so many. Unsteady legs bear her forward, analytical parts of her already evaluating even as her conscious part quails. She shoos the foxes away with her feet. The mother bolts soundlessly for the shrubbery, followed by her cubs.

  There’s blood on most of the bodies. The smell isn’t yet overpowering: death was a couple of days ago, she reckons, in this cool weather. Most of the wounds aren’t scavenger-related. At first she suspects bullets, but inspection makes it clear the culprit was a shotgun. Or shotguns. Mostly fired close to heads or the back of necks, hunks of which are typically missing. The bodies are in a rough line. Some are on their sides or backs, but all have fallen in the same direction. Blood and tissue spatter is all over the nearest trees.

  The bodies weren’t dumped. They were killed here.

  They were executed.

  Uncaring of the risk, she shuts her eyes and wails. Who did this? She can’t make sense of it. How did we get to where something like this could happen, here – in my country? For exhilarating seconds, she burns to hunt the perpetrators down. Not simply to kill them. She wants to tear them to pieces.

  Knees buckling, she leans against a tree and slides limply to the ground.

  What now? Her personal worries seem suddenly trivial; any course of action pointless. It doesn’t help knowing that in much of the world what she’s seeing is normal. Or so we keep being told. There’s no sign of the foxes. Having grown up on a farm, she’s familiar enough with the creatures to know they’ll be watching.

  Something about the massacre is bothering her. It’s just a gut feeling, but …

  She picks herself up.

  There are forty-six bodies. Twenty-three men, youngest in their mid-teens, eldest anything from sixty to eighty. Eighteen women, mostly younger. Five children. One girl, four boys.

  Executed.

  Implying that their killers were sufficiently numerous, well-armed and organised for a crowd of forty-six people – who must at some point have realised they had nothing to lose – not to put up a fight.

  And yet they had used a shotgun. She can’t be certain from the remains, but … a single shotgun?

  Why?

  With Kalashnikovs and other automatic weapons so freely available, wouldn’t it have been simpler just to line the victims up and hose them down? Unless ceremony was important to the executioners. Or perhaps ammunition was scarce? No – even then, single shots from a pistol or rifle seem more logical. A shotgun would be … messy. Unnecessary. Not to mention dangerously slow to reload. She pictures the executioner strolling down the line of whimpering victims. Breaking the gun every second shot to change shells. Fumbling six or eight shells into the magazine if it was a semi-automatic, although most shotguns on the black market are cheap, reliable twin-bores. No. It’s awkward. It lacks momentum and efficiency.

  Two or more executioners, taking turns?

  She hunts for spent shells. The heather should be littered with them.

  She can’t find a single one.

  And why this spot? The nearest settlement large enough to spawn such a lynch mob is Tayvallich, a few kilometres up the opposite shore of the loch. The farmhouses she saw on this shore yesterday were burned out, and the lack of safe landing places makes it unlikely any refugee boat came ashore here.

  She’s developing a strong feeling that the shotgun was a ploy.

  Wafting away flies, trying to suppress her retching, she re-examines the line of corpses. All wrists she can see without moving bodies are deeply marked. Thought so. Fucking plastic tie-wraps. On some, she can even see square-edged cuts where ratchet housings bit into flesh.

  Which makes no sense. Such wholesale murder would require levels of mob rage she can’t see being sustained. And yet, here was a group who not only managed to organise the transport or route march of nearly fifty terrified people twenty-odd kilometres to this seemingly random spot without losing their resolve, but who also happened to have a bag of industrial tie-wraps. Which they painstakingly cleaned from the scene, along with the spent ammunition …?

  Nearby, wet grass has been trampled to mud. Kneeling, she can make out footprints in at least four different sizes. All have the same heavy-cleated tread. It’s a pattern she knowns well. Even knows its maker – north Italian company Vibram – and its name: Masai. Once fairly popular on hillwalking footwear, the sole is also a mainstay of Altberg combat boots.

  Standard issue for the British army.

  A terrified anger grips her, the like of which she has never felt. An elderly Bosnian would know what this is. Tried pinning it on homicidal locals, didn’t you? In case your little massacre was ever revealed. Arrogant fucks – it’s not even like you tried that hard!

  She had thought she was already in a pit. Now, it’s like she keeps falling into ever-larger chambers hidden beneath. If she’s caught, her pursuers will have ways of extracting information. And when the wrong people find she has evidence of state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing, she has no illusions about being granted due process. She will quietly vanish. Besides, simply going to ground when she reaches the Hanseatic League no longer seems like an option. She must bear witness to what she’s seen.

  But how? She has no camera. Even if she avoids extradition, her recent actions don’t exactly make her credible. She finds that she’s physically shaking, and it’s not from the cold. Unless she can somehow negotiate political asylum, her testimony will have to be anonymous. And how much use is that likely to be?

  She cranes her gaze skywards through the branches.

  Could spy satellites corroborate her story? The bodies should be visible to operators who knew where to look, but she has no idea if the Scandinavians even use orbital surveillance. Then again, maybe they already know more than I do? Maybe they’ve been watching for months, gathering evidence … She frowns, recognising something else that’s been bothering her.

  Where are the midges?

  The thought’s so inconsequential that it makes her giggle. But it’s true: mid-October, and she’s unaware of a single bite. The bastard little insects have become so pervasive, it’s hard to believe they were once just a summer plague. She closes her eyes. It’s what she needed: something to bring her back to earth. The fact is, there’s nothing here that she can change. In the future – maybe. If she can make her rendezvous. But even then … The idea that she could affect what’s happening in these islands in any significant way, let alone in the wider world, seems laughable.

  Her stomach growls. Okay, message received. Time to start thinking about Number One. Perhaps there’s food in the kayak? Cereal bars she’s overlooked? Her eyes light on the red and green bush near her foot.

  It’s heavy with unseasonal little purple-grey berries.

  FEELING SLIGHTLY BETTER, her hands purple with juice from a couple of dozen deliciously tart blaeberries, she turns to the next pressing item on her to do list. Wishing she had binoculars, and hoping no one at the encampment does, she sweeps the loch, sky and the far shore for movement. Satisfied any risk isn’t immediate, she creeps past the kayak and stumbles down the shore, trying to recall the direction of last night’s wind.

  It had been from her right. Sufficiently in her face to make progress a struggle. Slightly north of due west, she thinks, correlating the coast with her mental map.

  She totters northwards through the rocks, scanning near her feet. After less than a minute she finds the paddle wedged between boulders near the high-water mark. Her relief is so intense that she has to sit. She’s even grateful for the paddle’s day-glo yellow blades, though she knows she’ll curse them again soon enough, along with the hotrod-red wetsuit and sex-toy purple kayak. It’s like a joke. I mean, for fuck’s sake – don’t kayakers want to blend in? What’s wrong with camouflage green?

  The train of thought makes her picture the kayaker. A big, good-looking, bearded man looking up at her in su
rprise …

  She slams that part of her mind shut like a blast door.

  Having limped back to her camp, she inspects the kayak. It’s well supplied with anchor points for bungee or utility cord, or accessories she can only guess at. Two are threaded with key-rings of steel wire. With much swearing and several cuts to her fingers, she manages to straighten one into a rough spiral.

  Phase two …

  Sitting on the kayak, she attacks the tent’s flysheet seam with a flake of rock, using the spiral of wire to unpick a metre or so of nylon thread. Then she uses the rock to file a notch in one end of the wire, tying the doubled thread tightly around the notch and stopper-knotting its free end.

  Now for the bit she’s been putting off.

  She pulls down her appropriated trousers and blood-soaked knickers, inspecting the wound with morbid interest. A crescent two-thirds the length of a finger, it’s like a lipless smile, gaping when she spreads her legs. She suspects the blade was stopped by the inside of her pelvis. It seems to have entered her groin sufficiently low and off-centre not to have punctured her bladder, but already the wound looks red and puffy. It doesn’t noticeably smell though, and has stopped bleeding. She hopes that’s a good sign; that the salt water kept it clean.

  The makeshift needle is thick, rusty and blunt, there’s shit everywhere, and she can’t think how to sterilise anything. Having taken a few breaths to psyche herself up, she squeezes the smile’s edges together and forces the tip of the wire into her flesh.

  It takes so much effort that she has to slide a finger into the wound to push against, driving the wire through each side separately. The pain is exquisite. She perseveres, telling herself it’s karma – that she deserves this – as she winds the corkscrew through. The knot securing the thread jams. It has to be yanked, hard. She moans. Blood is flowing again. Warm and shockingly copious, it lubricates already clumsy fingers. She works feverishly, repeating the process until there’s a row of untidy stitches, tied off with a knot dimly remembered from sewing classes.