On Deadly Ground
Simon Clark
© Simon Clark 2013
Simon Clark has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 1997 by Hodder Paperbacks
This edition published 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contetns
Prolouge
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
FLOODS OF RED
Prolouge
ALL RIGHT. PICTURE THIS:
Before you, is desert.
A desert that is black, forbidding, evil-looking.
There are ruined buildings, burned-out cars, stark dead trees. And, swamping everything, a black ash that streams out of the sky like Hell-blown snow.
Picture a fiery sky. Cloud streaked yellow and orange. Lightning prowls the horizon.
Picture a river. The water that flows there is the colour of blood—a brilliant, luscious red.
Picture a dam formed by the skulls, the ribcages, the bones of a hundred thousand dead. Picture a crow standing on a skull. The bird dips its beak into the socket to feed on the remains of an eye.
Now imagine that those waters tumble over the bones in a bloody waterfall, with enough force to send out a full-blooded roar that thunders across this nightmare land.
Imagine people are running through the wasteland. Dozens of them, their eyes gleaming bright from blackened faces. They are dressed in the tattered remnants of business suits, jeans, summer dresses. Some are in uniform—nurses, police, army.
And running just ahead of this pack is a young man. He’s stripped to the waist. His bare chest is soot-smeared. A bright sheen of sweat covers his face.
Just for a moment you wonder if he is leading the group.
Or then again. Is he being pursued by them?
And, if he is, what will happen when they catch him?
As he runs along the banks of the bloody river something extraordinary happens.
Floating gently down from the sky come hundreds of sheets of paper. Some fall into the river to be swept away.
Others drift down to the ground. There they lie, pristine white against the coal-black ash.
The handwriting that covers every page is explosive. As if whoever furiously scribbled down the words had something vitally important to say.
Only they knew they didn’t have time to write it all down before…
Before what?
One by one, the sheets settle on the blackened earth like huge oblong snowflakes. Sentences stand out:
NEW YORK: I heard it coming. Like a train roaring down its track. Then with a godawful thump the tidal wave hit the city; it tore through the apartment blocks, smashing them to shit, spilling screaming men out of their beds and into the water.
Ours is one of the few blocks to remain standing. I see the ocean lapping at second-floor windows…
FLORIDA: This morning half the world blew to Kingdom Come. At least it felt that way. As I stood on the balcony I watched Disneyland make one almighty leap toward Heaven. Epcot Centre, Magic Kingdom, Thunder Mountain. Everything just lifted. Then came the flames, reaching halfway to the sky in a curtain of fire.
JOHANNESBURG: Thousands of corpses, most in nightclothes, are woven into a deathly mat that covers many roads—Commissioner Street, Klein Street, Twist Street. In some places they lie four or five deep, arms and legs stretched stiffly out. Hundreds had sought sanctuary in the Anglican Cathedral on Bree Street. Corpses form gruesome clots of rotting flesh in the cathedral doorways…
MADRID: Explosions have left dozens of craters. Now Oeste Park resembles the surface of the Moon. Against an evening sky, the Royal Palace burns brightly. Vivid red flames burst through windows to writhe like fiery demons across the face of the building.
SYDNEY: The opera house looked as if a pissed giant had stomped on it, caving in the once beautiful roofscape. Everywhere there are bodies…
LONDON: A Zodiac inflatable dinghy nosing through debris on a lake. The camera zooms in: the debris are floating corpses. A girl in a white wedding dress drifts by. Smoothly the camera pans upward. There are gasps from the people in the
room.
We are looking at the Houses of Parliament. The huge building is like a strange stone ship anchored in the middle of a lake. The clock in the tower of Big Ben is forever frozen at ten to two.
More shots: Nelson’s Column, now a shattered stump, rising out of the waters that cover Trafalgar Square. A silent journey along Charing Cross Road. The wake from the boat bobs drowned heads in the water before splashing against shop signs—Murder One, Pizza Hut, Foyles, Waterstones, Boots…
WELLINGTON: Fires rage across the city. But it isn’t the buildings that are burning. The flames vent from great gashes in the earth itself. As if a row of rocket motors had been upended into the ground, then ignited, sending jets of blue flame a hundred metres into the air with a screeching sound that overwhelms the TV crew’s microphone…
SKK-REEEE-CH!
I curled into a ball. That godawful sound battered my skull so hard I thought it would burst like a smashed egg. Twenty paces away a ball of flame ripped out of the ground. The heat-flash singed the hairs on my arms to ash. Seconds later, falling all around me, came a cascade of skulls, thigh bones, knuckles, pelvic bones, smouldering spines, chunks of rotted meat, lungs, skin and a flaming heart.
A face landed flat on my leg. It had been torn from the skull in one piece…
Jesus, what had happened to these people?
THERE IS NO RULE THAT GEOLOGICAL CHANGE MUST BE GRADUAL. GEOLOGICAL CHANGES DON’T NECESSARILY TAKE PLACE OVER CENTURIES OR MILLENNIA. CATACLYSMIC MOVEMENTS IN THE EARTH’S CRUST CAN WREAK PROFOUND CHANGES IN DAYS, HOURS, EVEN MINUTES. IN THE MEDITERRANEAN ALONE THERE ARE NOW OVER TWO HUNDRED CITIES SUBMERGED BENEATH THE SEA.
TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION YEARS AGO, AT THE BOUNDARY OF THE PERMIAN AND TRIASSIC PERIODS, HUGE VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS RESULTED IN THE EXTINCTION OF NINETY PER CENT OF MARINE SPECIES, WHILE SEVENTY PER CENT OF TERRESTRIAL VERTEBRATES WERE WIPED FROM THE FACE OF THE PLANET.
Her eyes glistening in the evening light were so trusting. I found myself looking down at her breasts with their pink nipples. I couldn’t help but notice the bruises stood out so vividly they looked as if they’d been daubed there in black ink…
She lifted my T-shirt so she could press her breasts against the bare skin of my stomach, and she whispered, ‘You can do anything you want to me. Anything at all. You know that, don’t you?’
I bunched her hair in my fist as a wave of desire came roaring through me…
Seconds later we were rolling over and over on the grass, peeling off our clothes, kissing, biting, caressing, panting out our sheer naked lust for each other. I kissed her full on her warm lips. Then, panting hard, I gripped both her hips in my hands…
Today that meadow was a genuine slice of hell.
Still chanting, the madmen carried the woman into the field. Trying desperately to break free, she writhed, twisted, back arching, hips lifting.
In the centre of the field was a wooden pole set upright in the earth. The top of the pole would have reached my shoulder.
It was pointed.
That’s when I knew what they were going to do to her. I think that’s when the woman realized, too. Because she began to scream. A bitter mechanical scream that went on and on…
I’ve promised myself to tell everything how it happened. And not to censor any of it. Not one word.
But I wouldn’t blame you now if now if you skipped the next few paragraphs. It is dirty, it is disgusting, it is degrading; what I witnessed is burned into my memory for life.
All I can do is warn you. If you can take it, keep reading.
THIS IS WHAT THEY DID TO THE SCREAMING WOMAN:
The mob carried the woman towards the pole. As they did so, men and women began tearing away the woman’s clothes…
Her heavy breasts bounced as they lifted her, twisting and screaming, above the sharpened point…
JESUS, SWEET JESUS…WHERE DO I START ALL THIS?
Did it start with the arrival of the whole damn city on your doorstep?
Or was it when the river turned to blood?
Or perhaps when the stones beneath your feet became hot?
Maybe it was the coming of the Grey Man?
Now, picture once more the black desert. The burned cars. The city in ruins. The running men and women.
At last, the question of whether the bare-chested man leads the pack, or whether the pack pursue him, is answered.
At that moment he stumbles.
Instantly the mob falls on him. Gripped in their hands are kitchen knives, or razor-sharp slivers of glass from broken TV screens, or beer cans that have been beaten into crude yet lethal blades.
The bare-chested man struggles to his feet. A knife wound parts the flesh of his forehead into a pair of jagged lips.
Fists swinging, he hammers himself free of the people. Again he runs.
There’s a chance he will escape. He’s young; he’s fast.
He runs towards the banks of the river, long legs kicking out. Bare feet splash through black dust. The slipstream flutters sheets of paper.
Just when it looks as if he’ll make it, a woman hurls a housebrick. It strikes the man’s head. Clutching the back of his head with both hands, he falls forward, mouth wide open in agony.
The mob pounces, stabbing with their knives. He is instantly buried beneath the bodies of his attackers.
Suddenly, his fist breaks through the confusion of flailing limbs. The man holds his clenched fist high.
As he does so, the hand unfurls. The fingers stretch out, spasming, quivering, as if he is trying desperately to reach something unseen in the sky. Something wonderful.
Furiously the mob stab.
Picture the sheets of paper covering the black ground.
Picture spots of crimson now flecking those once pristine white pages.
Imagine the crimson spots running, streaking the paper red. A bright, living red. A red that glistens in the fiery light.
What is this place?
You may well wonder.
This is where there is no rule by a government of elected representatives. There is no prime minister. No president.
Because this is your future:
This is the country where BLOOD is KING.
Chapter 1
JESUS, SWEET JESUS...WHERE DO I START ALL THIS?
Did it start with the arrival of the whole damn city on your doorstep?
Or was it when the river turned to blood?
Or perhaps when the stones beneath your feet became hot?
Maybe it was the coming of the Grey Man?
No. I’m going further back than that. You know, I think all this really began the night of Ben Cavellero’s party. That was the night I planned to grit my teeth at last and do something about Kate Robinson. And it seemed the perfect night to do it.
Looking back now, I can almost imagine that night slipped from a magic dream.
It was July; deliriously warm; a million distant points of light filled the sky; shooting stars drew trails of silver down from heaven. Ben Cavellero’s garden was filled with young people who were laughing with sheer happiness and optimism and hope, for they all knew that this was the summer they were stepping across that great dividing line, from adolescence to becoming adult men and women.
Right then, they had every reason to laugh, joke, drink Ben Cavellero’s wine, eat his food, and fall in love beneath his cherry trees. At that moment they had the world at their feet. They had the opportunity to go out and DO anything and BE anything they wanted. They were young; all the girls were beautiful.
And of them all, the most beautiful was Kate Robinson. In a moment I’d ask Kate to walk down to the orchard with me, alone.
As I strolled through that garden I felt I belonged to a football team that was on a winning streak so strong, so damned, so incredibly, wonderfully strong, that nothing on Earth could beat it.
It should have been one of the best nights of my life.
But that was the night Satan finally lost his rag. He took his s
houlder to that almighty underground gate. And he didn’t stop battering until he’d busted it to shit.
Because that was the night all Hell came thundering through.
Chapter 2
My name is Rick Kennedy. And it was the night of Ben Cavellero’s party. I was nineteen years old.
It was, as I’ve said, that fine evening in July. The time nudged toward nine. The sun dropped down behind the hills in this amazing splash of red that covered half the sky.
The garden heaved with people. Three-quarters of them had just left school, eager to do nothing more than laze out the summer before heading off to university or college.
After a long slog I’d got the band together, the tour dates booked; record company scouts, tongues out, hungrily drooling, were already sniffing at our heels. My plans were working out so well I could have believed my fairy godmother had gone wand over tip and given them all a liberal sprinkling of pixie dust.
Music thumped from speakers hung in trees. Everyone was on this incredible high; the air buzzed with excited talk. You could have just reached out, grabbed all that happiness and wrapped it around yourself like it was a big, warm bath towel.
I’d positioned myself next to the barbecue so I could get a clear view of Kate Robinson where she laughed and chatted with her friends. The first time I saw her, in a cafe in Leeds, I felt what I could only describe as dismay. Something happened inside of me that I just could not control. My heart started pounding, I felt as short of breath as if I’d just sat on the bottom of the swimming pool for a full ninety seconds. We’d been introduced by Howard Sparkman. I exchanged all of a dozen words with her (‘Nice to meet you…nice summer we’re having…the cappuccino’s not bad here. Goodbye.’) But Kate Robinson moved into my dreams. I didn’t want her to. I didn’t need distractions. The band would demand everything I’d got. But human nature didn’t give two hoots about my plans.
Kate Robinson, whether I liked it or not, was lodged tightly in my head. And for the last six weeks that’s where she’d stayed.
I shifted my position a step or two to keep her in sight through a pale blue veil of barbecue smoke that was now rising from a rack of sizzling chickens.
She was taller than every girl there. And I noticed there was something about her that made men look at her twice. Almost as though they’d seen something that had surprised them but they didn’t know what; it was enough to jerk their heads round to grab a second gander. I looked for it too as I drank an ice-cold beer. I still don’t know what quality she had but it struck you so hard it stole your breath.