Blood Crazy

  I nodded and took my plate back to the car. I could be home and back in an hour. It wouldn’t be that dangerous. Pull up to the house in Lawn Avenue, stay in the car, sound the horn – see what happens then.

  Dave walked up like he’d got springs in his plimsolls. He asked me to check on one of the Land-Rovers after I’d eaten. Rebecca Keene and two church buddies were going to drive across country to a remote hotel. ‘It’s near where St Timothy’s have their summer camp. If the hotel’s deserted we’ll move there. We’ll have good accommodation, kitchens, fresh water supplies. That’ll come from the stream. There’s trout this big in there. We’ll be able to build a thriving community.’ Dave enthused while I thought about driving back home. I could feel the shape of the folded paper in my back pocket, maybe—

  ‘Nick … Nick, can you do that for me?’

  ‘Uh, what do you want me to do?’

  ‘You’re our mechanical expert. Can you check number 2 Land-Rover’s engine and tyres?’

  Rebecca and her companions were away by nine. Normally they could have been there and back in five hours, but Rebecca wouldn’t risk driving faster than twenty-five. On the roads farm animals roamed wild. You hit a cow at fifty, you wreck the car.

  I asked around if anyone’d seen Slatter putting the note under the wiper. No one had. Slatter had taken himself up into the hayloft in the barn. There he sat, dangling his pit boots above everyone’s heads while drinking from a bottle of vodka. A sixteen-year-old girl had got the hots for him and danced behind him talking non-stop.

  She’d have to watch it. Once an old girlfriend of his had said something hadn’t liked and he’d rammed his hand inside her mouth and tried to pull out her tongue.

  When Slatter started spitting vodka on the people below they moved outside. If this went on I wondered if Dave would try kicking Slatter out of the community.

  Sarah was helping younger girls boil water on the camping stove out in the yard, her long blonde hair tied back.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ I handed her the note.

  She read it then looked at me, her blue eyes trying to gauge my feelings. ‘What do you make of it, Nick? Practical joke?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘A sick one. Was it Slatter?’

  ‘It’s not his handwriting, but he probably put someone up to it.’

  ‘What did you intend doing with this?’ She held up the note.

  ‘I’d like to nail it to something solid – Slatter’s forehead, for instance.’

  ‘Forget it, Nick.’ Her voice was gentle and touched some part inside of me. She twisted the note into a spill and lit it from the stove. As the flame neared her fingers she dropped it on the ground. Then she kissed me on the cheek while squeezing my forearm between her two hands.

  ‘It’s not worth fighting over, Nick. If you’d take my advice keep well away from Slatter. He’s digging himself into a hole anyway. Yesterday he headbutted Simon because he saw him reading a Bible. A couple more incidents like that and the Steering Committee are going to order him out.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Dave’s voice sang out across the yard. ‘Boys, girls, ladies, gentlemen … Can I have everyone’s attention, please?’

  We shuffled round to the middle of the yard so we could see him standing there in the back of a pickup, smiling, his arms out in a communal embrace.

  Slatter was nowhere in sight.

  ‘You probably know by now that Rebecca, Luke and Clifford are on their way to the Esk Hotel in Eskdale. I don’t know if you know the area but it lies in a beautiful valley with forests, meadows, and a stream fed by mountain springs. Rebecca’s going to find out if it’s safe for us to move up there. If it is we should be in our new home by tomorrow. The hotel is a converted country mansion with nearly fifty bedrooms, so we can all live under one roof together. There’s a huge dining room with a minstrel’s gallery. I know you’ll all like it there. However.’ He held up a finger, his face serious. ‘It will be no picnic. The disaster that has befallen us is enormous. We face great danger. Not just from the mentally ill adults but from natural threats to our survival – hunger and disease. Yes, there might be places that haven’t been affected by the madness. Yes, we might be rescued. But we can’t rely on that. We must be prepared to survive alone. As if we are the only people alive on Earth.’

  Ripple of applause.

  ‘We have enough food for months to come. But it won’t last forever. We on the Steering Committee believe we must become self-sufficient as quickly as possible, growing crops, keeping livestock, making tools, even our own clothes.’

  The speech went on – basically it was the belt-tightening, shoulder-to-the-grindstone kind of speech. Tough times ahead but God willing etc.

  I found my attention being pulled to Sarah. She listened attentively, nodding now and again. Just looking at her was the most pleasurable thing I’d done that day. I looked at her smooth face. I wanted to touch it. I looked at those wonderfully shaped lips. I wanted to kiss them.

  Mentally I had begun to map the rest of her body when something hard came out of the sky and hit me.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Attack

  The first I knew was one hell of a thump in my back which knocked me flat.

  A bare foot, toes crusted with dirt, stamped down three inches from my face. Twisting my body across the earth, I saw the man snatch at Sarah. He lifted her up in his arms like she was a child then started to cut through the crowd like a snow plough.

  It seemed I knelt there forever, watching the man carry Sarah away.

  He must have been sixty, his bald head burnt red with exertion, but he moved like an athlete.

  ‘Nick!’ Sarah struggled, her hair torn free to flare out around her head.

  The man had nearly reached the edge of the yard before I’d kicked off after them, jumping over fallen kids.

  He was going like a loco: his eyes stared like glass balls through Sarah’s cascading hair. I ran hard and dived at his pounding legs, wrapping my arms around them. The momentum carried him and Sarah forward, but he went down. Sarah bounced onto the track ahead of him.

  He reached out grasping at her but she rolled away. His hands hooked into the dirt to pull himself toward her, dragging me along still gripping his legs.

  Then more bodies fell on us. Christ, I thought, there’s more of the bastards. We’re dead.

  Then I recognised Dave straddling the man’s chest. More kids grabbed his arms and legs as he twisted and strained like a baboon on crack.

  Dave panted orders, ‘Get his legs, Peter. No, sit on them … sit on them!’

  I shouted for Curt to grab the man’s head as it whipped from side to side to butt Dave’s arms.

  ‘Rope! Get a rope!’

  The old man’s dentures slid out in pieces. He coughed blood.

  ‘Shit … It’s on me. His blood!’

  ‘Shut up, Curt – just hang on.’

  Laurel and Hardy could have done it quicker but at last we’d got our first Mr Creosote in captivity, tied with orange nylon cord.

  Grunting like an excited pig he strained against the cords. They cut through his arms like wire. His glass-ball eyes stared at the sky.

  ‘Sarah. You okay?’ I put my arm round her shoulder. She was shaking and trying to get her breathing under control.

  ‘My arm’s a bit sore but I’ll be all right.’

  I hugged her. ‘I’ll get you a coffee.’

  ‘No, no. Just leave me to get my breath back. I’ll be all right.’ Face white, she limped to sit in the Shogun.

  Curt wiped the man’s sputum and blood from his arms with a rag. He looked as if he was going to start crying again.

  ‘What on Earth are you going to do with that?’ asked Dave as Slatter walked up with an iron bar the length of his arm.

  Slatter nodded at the tied man. ‘Crack him with it.’

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort.’

  ‘What ya gonna do with him, then? Keep him as a pet?’


  Dave looked at Slatter in horror. He’d realised we’d adopted a tattooed monster. ‘No, Mr Slatter. We’re not going to kill him. There’s a lock-up store in the barn. Come on, we’ll carry him in there … Watch his mouth, he might bite.’

  Slatter shrugged and walked away.

  The man did not struggle as we carried him to the barn and put him in the store.

  Dave snapped shut the padlock. ‘If we can talk to him we might begin learning something.’

  Sarah was back. ‘Hadn’t someone better cut the rope – he’s going to cut himself to pieces it’s so tight.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, looking in at him through the narrow gap in the door. ‘He’s getting out of it in any case.’

  Dave sighed. ‘That’s one problem solved, anyway. We’ll work out how to get food and drink in there later. Now, we might as well get started. Simon, ask Martin Del-Coffey to come across. Curt, take a good look round to make sure there’s no more Mr Creosotes about. Peter …’

  I left them to it and took Sarah to one side. She looked in control.

  ‘Thanks, Nick. You saved my life. Again.’

  I smiled. ‘Don’t mention it. You’d have done the same.’

  ‘Only quicker.’ She smiled back and gave me a gentle punch on the chin. ‘Well, thanks to you we’ve our very own Mr Creosote. But something tells me he’s not going to sit down and tell us why everyone over the age of eighteen went mad, or who they are signalling to with their bottle patterns.’

  ‘It’ll give Del-Coffey something to do.’

  I watched him stroll nonchalantly into the barn, laces trailing.

  ‘Hello. Hello in there.’ Del-Coffey tried to sound the authoritative scientist. ‘Can you understand what I am saying? Hello. Can … you … understand …’

  They’d have had more luck trying to contact the poor bastard with a ouija board.

  ‘Come on.’ Sarah pulled me by the hand. ‘Leave them to it.’

  ‘Where’re we going?’

  ‘Somewhere quiet, Nick.’ She smiled. ‘I just want to sit on your knee for a while.’

  That’s what we did. The sun had broken the clouds and we sat on a grassy slope away from the farm. Sarah on my knee, her arm around my neck. We talked about the past. Those intimate things people talk about sometimes. A kind of exchange of secrets that binds you closer.

  Sarah told me, ‘After I’d finished school I was going to take a year out. A friend and I … No, it’s okay, Nick, it’s a she … We were going to India. I’d found out about a charity that works with children in Calcutta. I would have spent six months there. But to tell the truth, if I’d found it was work I wanted to do I’d have made it permanent.’

  ‘Your parents were happy about that?’

  ‘They never knew. They wanted me to go to university. Officially, my ambition was to study law, but I decided sitting round in courts waiting to prosecute people for not returning their library books wasn’t for me. What about you, Nick?’

  ‘Sometimes you get people who are born without a tongue or eyes. I was born without ambition. My plans were to earn a bit of money, drink more beer and have a good time.’

  We talked on. I enjoyed the sun warm on my back, the pressure of her body against mine and the way the breeze sometimes lifted her hair against my face in a light, tickling sensation that, for me, felt out of this world.

  ‘Nick. Do you think Slatter would have killed that man?’

  ‘Yeah, I think he’d have had a go. It’s sinking into Slatter’s thick skull that law and order have disappeared with civilization. He knows he can do whatever he wants now.’

  Her arms tightened around my neck. ‘Keep out of his way, Nick.’

  ‘I intend to. What happens when we get to this hotel, then? Will the Steering Committee hold elections for leadership?’

  We talked for another half hour before walking back to find Vicki shouting at Tug Slatter. I ran back to the yard, my stomach screwing tight.

  ‘Give me them back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That tart, Aten, needs them. Then when he looks into the mirror he can see just how big a faggot he actually is.’

  ‘Give them back … You’ll break them.’

  ‘Give them back,’ pleaded Anne. ‘Vicki can’t see without them and she hasn’t got a spare pair.’

  Slatter stood there, face as ugly as sin, Vicki’s glasses dangled over her head. She jumped for them. Each time she did he flicked them higher. Tears wet her face.

  I said, ‘Give them back, Slatter.’

  ‘These are yours, Aten. Got nice pink rims. Go with your faggot face.’

  ‘Look …’ I made eye contact and held it. ‘Give them back. All right?’

  ‘You gonna make me or what?’

  I looked into that tattooed face and hated every millimetre of it. There should have been horns coming out of that shaved head.

  ‘Give them back, Slatter.’

  ‘All right, Aten. Take them from me.’

  He wasn’t laughing, or even enjoying himself as most bullies would. As salmon are driven up rivers to spawn, something inside Slatter drove him to be a bastard.

  Others in the yard moved back to give us space. They knew what was brewing.

  I judged my chances. I needed to put him down in one. Kick to the balls? Punch to the jaw? As soon as he was down I’d have to keep kicking until he couldn’t get up again.

  If he got the better of me I’d be lucky to get out of this without broken bones at least.

  ‘Nick,’ hissed Sarah. ‘It’s not worth it. We’ll get more glasses. Leave it … Vicki, come here.’

  Vicki tried to jump for the glasses. Slatter spread his hand across her face and pushed her cruelly back.

  ‘Slatter.’

  ‘Come … and … take … them … from … me … Aten.’

  ‘Tug, look what I found.’

  It was the girl who’d pinned herself to him. She was too pissed to know what was happening and blundered in holding a bottle of vodka. Her lips were scarlet with lipstick and she’d daubed on black eye shadow. Her blouse was unbuttoned far enough to expose her bra. Slatter read her body language as easy as a road sign.

  With an animal snarl, he chucked the glasses into the air then strode back to the barn. ‘Come on then, you stupid bitch.’

  Giggling, the girl followed.

  Slatter had thrown the glasses hard enough upward for Sarah to catch them safely as they dropped down.

  I’d begun to sweat.

  ‘Close one,’ she said.

  ‘Too close for comfort … You know, Sarah, one way or another, Slatter’ll have to go.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Another Message, Another Death

  7 a.m. The day began with two things.

  One. Another note appeared beneath the wiper of the Shogun. Come home. Urgent news for you. Love – mum & dad. I screwed it into a ball and kicked it over the wall. It was a sick joke. I decided not to let it get under my skin.

  Two. Rebecca Keene returned. She climbed out of the car with her two companions as we bunched round to hear the news. She told us in her schoolmistress voice that they had had an uneventful journey. The hotel was deserted – ideal for our purposes. She wore a new bandage on her left hand but didn’t mention it.

  During our open air breakfast the story went round that Rebecca had been bitten by a dog.

  ‘Poor bloody animal.’ Curt, the tattooed hooligan, stuffed his mouth with bacon. ‘Bet it dies of food poisoning.’

  ‘Nick, sorry to interrupt.’ Dave came up. ‘After breakfast would you check the vehicles?’

  ‘When we setting off?’

  ‘That’s to be decided. But we need to know the vehicles will get us there in one go.’

  ‘I can’t guarantee they won’t break down.’ I guessed somehow the vehicles had become my responsibility. ‘Dave, I know you were in a hurry getting the convoy together but we haven’t got any spares for them. Truck numb
er 2’s radiator hose is cracked and the yellow mini-bus’s mileage would have taken you round planet Earth four times … In other words the engine’s shit.’

  The smile didn’t blip. ‘Do what you can, Nick. I know you’ll do a good job.’

  ‘But I can’t work miracles. No spares. Not enough tools. For a start we should ditch the mini-bus and find a replacement.’

  ‘Nick, we’ll see if we can pick up another on the way. I don’t want people leaving the camp today. We might have to leave at short notice.’

  Curt’s eyes went big. ‘What? Have we got Mr Creosote on our tails again?’

  ‘No, Curt. The patrols haven’t seen anything yet.’

  8 a.m. I got stuck into vehicle number one, checking fluid levels and hoses. I wasn’t a mechanic but I probably knew more than anyone else there – that made me the expert.

  Sarah brought me coffee. I was glad to see her.

  ‘Thanks for getting Vicki’s glasses back from Slatter yesterday.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. We were lucky that time.’

  ‘Vicki’s very sensitive about her glasses. When she was younger mum was always having to tell her off about them. Vicki was constantly forgetting where she’d put them. When she was six she even dropped them down a drain. Dad went hairless. Now if Vicki misplaces them she has fits until we find them again.’

  ‘Does she need to wear them all the time? Once Slatter finds someone’s weak spot he plays on it.’

  ‘She’s blind without them.’

  I took a drink of the coffee. ‘They say that Rebecca got bitten by a dog. Is she all right?’

  ‘A dog? No. She cut her little finger climbing a fence. There’s nothing like kids for starting rumours.’

  ‘That’s something that the Steering Committee will have to watch. Stupid rumours could be dangerous if they panic the kids. They’re still saying that Mr Creosote is talking to God and all this is divine punishment.’

  ‘I’ll mention it to them.’

  ‘So you’ve been promoted to the Steering Committee?’

  Grinning, Sarah blushed. ‘Drink your coffee, Mr Aten. We want all these vehicles in tip-top condition by noon.’

  ‘See that water in the tub over there, Miss Hayes? After I’ve done the trucks, I’ll turn that into wine.’