On Deadly Ground

  ‘We’re imagining all this?’ He laughed. But it sounded too tense for any humour to be lurking in there. ‘Right. We’ve imagined all this, right down to identical descriptions of them. Rough grey skin, blood red eyes; maybe we—’

  I shushed him as a couple of teenage girls ran down the path. No doubt they were going for a dip in the pool further down the gully. At first they ran through sunlight, then they were under the trees, disappearing into dark shade then suddenly reappearing in a burst of sunlight that shafted through the branches.

  I saw them appear as if I was watching some jumpy old silent film. A burst of light. Their smiling faces. Then they disappeared into darkness again. In a few days they might be dead. We had enough to worry about with the Earth starting to bake itself beneath our feet. We had to worry about food running out. We had to worry about marauding gangs.

  The last thing they needed were Stenno’s and Rick Kennedy’s Beware The Grey Men delusions.

  The girls ran by, laughing, as they anticipated that ice-cold plunge into the water.

  But I couldn’t deny what I’d seen. The image had been seared into the very tissues of my brain. Every time I closed my eyes that image appeared bright and clear. The face I’d seen the night before could have been luminous, the way I’d seen it in such brutal detail. The head was enormous; in shape it was crudely humanoid. When it had looked at me it had tilted its head to one side. As if it had seen something that aroused its curiosity. I saw that the nose was broad, with a pair of flared nostrils that exhaled noisily, like those of a horse, blasting cold breath into my face.

  I had tried to move, but the thing had held me there, its hands clamped to either side of my head.

  It was either studying my face. Or it was forcing me to study its face. Desperately I’d wanted to close my eyes, but I found I couldn’t. I had to drink in every detail. The broad nose, the flared nostrils that panted with a noisy excitement. From the broad forehead, running back over the skull, was a bony crest, from which a mane of black hair bristled, reminiscent of some unearthly Mohican hairstyle.

  And there was the skin. It covered that mulish skull like a sheet of grey leather. Around the black-lipped mouth it formed deep creases and, spotted irregularly over it, there were studlike warts.

  Then there were the eyes: oriental-looking and red—blood red.

  The face had loomed forward, filling my whole universe as it came towards my own face: closer, closer, closer…

  That’s when I had blacked out.

  I blinked, feeling suddenly nauseous.

  OK. I admit it. Fact: I’d seen Grey Men. Fact: I’d felt their hands on me. All I couldn’t accept was Stenno telling me that we were the Grey Men’s chosen ones.

  ‘Stenno,’ I said gently, ‘look, what proof have you got these…men come out of the ground?’

  ‘But it all adds up, doesn’t it? They’ve made the surface of the planet heat up; they’ve deliberately caused civilization to collapse. The heat is only the equivalent of an artillery barrage on enemy lines to soften them up before they send in the infantry.’

  ‘And these Grey Men are the infantry?’

  He looked at me, his eyes suddenly shrewd. ‘You think I’m mad, don’t you?’

  ‘Jesus, Stenno, I think all the world has gone mad. This doesn’t look particularly mad after what we’ve been through.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t come with me to Stephen and tell him what we know?’

  ‘I think it’s too early to—wait, Stenno. Sit down. Hear me out.’

  ‘You’re still too shit-scared to tell anyone. Rick, the Grey Men are real. You’ve seen them. You’ve been with them.’

  ‘Look, I’ve seen them. They might even have taken me places. But I don’t know where. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Then come with me. Tell Stephen.’

  ‘That the surface of the Earth is being invaded by a race of Grey Men who…what? Have lived secretly under our very feet? Hiding themselves away from us for God only knows how long?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Sure it’s possible.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But if we’re going to go public on this we need hard evidence.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Ideally a Grey Man. In the flesh.’ I looked Stenno in the eye. ‘Dead or alive.’

  Chapter 39

  After leaving Stenno I went to find Caroline. I needed company and she was always glad to see me.

  ‘What’s the matter, Rick?’ she smiled. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a monster.’

  The sun was hot but I still shivered.

  I made a grim smile. ‘Monsters? I see them all the time now. Especially when I look at my reflection in the stream.’

  She sighed. ‘Poor boy. You come and walk with Auntie Caroline.’

  As we climbed the banking to the moor I happened to see Victoria. She stood by a tree staring into the side of the gorge where it became a sheer rock wall. Hell, she wasn’t only out to lunch, she must have been out to breakfast, tea and supper too.

  After walking for ten more minutes Caroline said in that husky voice of hers, ‘Here should do just nicely.’ She turned to me, pulled down the zip of my jeans and slipped her hand inside. Her hand felt cool and wonderful. ‘No one can see us here,’ she whispered and kissed my chest. ‘Would you like to watch me undress? I’ll dance for you again if you like?’

  I admit it. I was scared about what was happening to me. I’d begun to wonder if the realization that the world was burning up around us was somehow upending my sanity. That seeing the Grey Men was a symptom of some encroaching madness. I’d have to find one of them as hard evidence to prove to myself I was still sane. I decided there and then that if I saw another of those Grey Men I’d put a slug in its leg. Then I’d have solid evidence to show the others. Something that would squawk when you poked it with a stick. That would be enough to make everyone believe my story. But in the meantime I needed another human being to cling to.

  ‘Careful, Rick. You’re tearing Auntie’s T-shirt.’

  ‘I’ll buy you another,’ I panted, ripping it up over her head. Then I attacked the belt of her cut-off jeans.

  She kissed me, her breath hot with passion. ‘Do what you like, lover boy. Do what you like. You know I want you.’

  Down with jeans, down with pants, down with Caroline. Flat on her back on the heather. She didn’t complain as the spiky plants pricked her bare back, arse and legs.

  I ripped open my belt and downed my own jeans. I couldn’t take my eyes off her lovely body.

  The world spun crazily round me. Sleep deprivation had started to kick in. What happened on the moor the night before still scared me. I wanted to obliterate reality with no-holds-barred sex.

  ‘Hold me,’ she said, breathlessly. ‘Hold me. I want to feel…mmm. That’s nice.’

  I cupped her breasts in my hands. She closed her eyes and pursed her red lips. ‘Mmmm…s’good…’

  Something wild was driving me that day. I climbed on top of her, my heart thudding like a loco.

  ‘Oh…Rick. Gentle. Please—please be gentle. Gentle, Rick. I’m not—OW!…uh-uh-uh!’

  I pounded into her with such ferocity that I could hear the crunch of the heather being crushed beneath her bottom. I drove her harder into the dirt. It was sheer desperation. I tried to drive reality out of my head. At any price.

  Chapter 40

  Stephen Kennedy was in the mood to kick ass. It was two days since the three refugees had died on the moor. And one day since I’d had my tête-à-tête with Stenno about the Grey Man.

  All sixty-four of us sat on a grass banking in the gully while Stephen paced up and down spelling out just what we must do and what we mustn’t do if we were going to come through all this with our skins intact.

  ‘No more open fires,’ he said firmly. ‘The smoke can be seen from miles away. We don’t want to advertise to anyone else—refugees, armed gangs, Uncle Tom Cobley and all—that we’re sitting up here on a he
ap of food. Next: we can’t laze around, living off the supplies we carried up here. In a fortnight we’re going to go hungry. Already we’re short of potatoes and fresh fruit. And no one’s tasted bread in days. So, people, starting from today we’re going out hunting for food.’

  ‘Hunting for food?’ Dean Skilton’s voice was laced with scepticism. ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘Believe me, Deanie boy. The time for joking disappeared up Lucifer’s ass a long, long time ago.’

  ‘What do you mean, hunting for food?’

  ‘I’ve been drawing up lists.’ Stephen was really in gear, I could sense the energy rushing through him. He’d committed every fibre and sinew of his body to making sure we would all be well fed and safe. ‘There’ll still be stocks of food in shops, homes, hotels—’

  ‘They’ll all be picked over by now,’ Dean chipped in again.

  ‘If we look hard enough we’ll find some. It just might mean we’re going to have to go where angels fear to tread, that’s all.’

  ‘You mean back to Leeds?’

  ‘If need be.’

  ‘Shit. What hasn’t been incinerated will be covered with poison gas.’

  Then we find gas masks. We go in there and get the food and come back out again.’

  ‘But you can’t seriously expect—’

  ‘Dean…Dean.’ Stephen oozed energy; he wasn’t going to let anyone derail him. ‘Listen to me, please. After I’ve outlined the plans, we’ll discuss it. OK? Then you can all vote on whether I stay at the head of the group. But just let me have my say.’

  ‘But where the Hell do you find gas masks? It’s impossible.’

  ‘You’re right, Dean. But let me tell you. Now we must do the impossible just to give ourselves a few more days of life on this planet. Every day we’re going to get up and force the impossible to be possible. OK?’

  Dean shrugged, then stuck a matchstick into the corner of his mouth. I knew he had ideas himself about how the group should be run. I knew, also, he was ready to start making trouble if he didn’t get his own way.

  Victoria, sitting nearest to where Stephen stood, said, ‘We mustn’t forget also that we have to change our perceptions about food. The countryside is full of plants and animals that are edible. We must become experts in identifying what is poisonous and what we can safely eat. For example, boiled nettle leaves are edible, and so are beech and dandelion leaves.’

  Stephen nodded gratefully at Victoria and as the morning went on I saw he and Victoria were almost playing a double act. She was playing a supporting role, feeding helpful suggestions or simply reinforcing something he’d said. Again I wondered about the real reason for him warning me off Victoria. She was good-looking: her red hair looked thick and glossy and her eyes were as sharp as lasers. More than once she’d blazed a glare of disapproval at Dean Skilton that was nothing less than dangerous. She also shot that burning look at Ruth Sparkman. I began to wonder if Victoria had designs on my brother.

  For the next hour Stephen pumped his plans at us. Which could be summed up as: find food. Build up stockpiles of food in secret hiding places all over the moor in case we were raided. And, most brutally simple of all, the message to each and every one of us: Adapt or Die. Most people, with the obvious exception of Dean Skilton, nodded as Stephen talked. I could see they were becoming enthused by his plans.

  ‘We don’t know how long we can stay here on Fountains Moor. If we’re discovered by other refugees we must move on. And we don’t know what changes might be happening to the Earth’s crust beneath our very feet. Most of us have seen by now the burnt areas of countryside that seem to be spreading this way. They might not affect us. But we can’t be sure. So as well as bringing in supplies of food we need to find new safe areas where we can set up camp. Whether it’s in the next valley or a hundred kilometres away.’

  Dean snorted with laughter. ‘How do you propose we do that? Sprout wings and fly there?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m proposing. Howard Sparkman here got his pilot’s licence last year. This is where we go out and achieve the impossible. We find light aircraft. We fly out across the country. We find food. We bring it back. That’s the easy part.’

  ‘The easy part?’ Dean echoed. ‘If that’s the easy part what’s the hard part?’

  ‘Training you to fly, Dean old buddy. You’re going to be one of our pilots.’

  That, at last, shut Dean Skilton’s mouth.

  Stephen Kennedy got his vote of confidence. And we got plenty of exercise as we scoured the countryside for light aircraft. I knew it wasn’t unusual for the wealthier farmers to have a private plane or two. They’d keep a strip of cornfield unploughed for a backyard airstrip.

  The logic of using aircraft (if we could find one and the fuel to fly it) was easy to see. The roads were still clogged with refugees escaping whatever calamity had hit the western side of the country. And those hungry refugees wouldn’t stand to one side and let a truck full of food trundle by. They’d tear it and its driver to pieces no matter how heavily armed you were. And then there were the roadblocks operated by men—and women—armed to the eyeballs with automatic rifles and heavy machine guns. These might have been regular army but by then we doubted it. More likely they were deserters and the price of being allowed to pass was to hand over to them every single rasher of bacon, every cake crumb you had stuffed in the bottom of your rucksack. Even then, if they didn’t care for the cut of your jib they’d turn the machine gun on you and blow you to fuck.

  What made the search even more difficult was that teams hunting for the aircraft had to move about the countryside undetected. All we needed was for a bunch of refugees to spot us and then follow us back to Fountains Moor which must have seemed like the land of milk and honey compared to the hungry state in which they existed.

  We’d see armed camps in the distance. They might be anything from a farmhouse to a village ringed with barbed wire and moats dug by JCBs. Some were clearly inhabited. Some had been overrun by starving refugees. Now it really was kill or be killed.

  Now and again we came across other bands of people hunting for food. Once I saw a group of red men, women and children. I mean they were entirely red—hair, skin, clothes. We hid in a hedgerow as they trudged by, exhausted, starving. They must have had to cross one of the hotspots which had been carpeted in red ash. It had turned them red and now they were too far gone even to bother trying to clean themselves. One of their number, an elderly man, dropped face down on the road. I even heard the slap of his face as it hit the road. The rest carried on walking. I don’t think they even noticed.

  We crouched there and watched them walk on into the distance. A dirty line of red people who looked already more than half dead.

  It got nastier.

  You’d come upon bodies lying in the road where they’d dropped.

  You’d walk by a tree and find a whole family with ropes around their necks, hanging from the branches like grisly Christmas Tree decorations. In the pocket of the father, a suicide note that gave details of what had happened to them and the reasons why they’d thought it better to end it all. I carefully folded it up and put it in my pocket. It would go in the archive Kate Robinson was compiling.

  Kate Robinson? You might be wondering whether she was still in the picture. The truth is she was moving deeper and deeper into it. Even though I’d promised myself I would be virtuous. I really believed I was in love with Caroline Lucas. Not a day went by when we didn’t go out onto the moor and she’d wriggle sexily out of her clothes then do wonderful things to me with her mouth or with those parts of her that lay south of her equator.

  So what did happen to me and Kate Robinson? You’ll find out soon enough. That all happened when we found the plane and Fate played one of those tricks it obviously thinks are damned hilarious. Unless you happen to be on the receiving end. Anyway, Fate took Kate and me, Rick Kennedy, all the way to London. Or at least to what was left of London.

  Chapter 41


  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Life, as I already mentioned, was getting dirtier and nastier.

  On one food-finding trip I heard a commotion in a nearby field. At that moment I was alone; Dean Skilton and the other two were waiting for me in a nearby wood as I scouted the area.

  It was as I cut across fields in the direction of a farmhouse that I heard shouts.

  Cautiously I looked over a wall to see a horrific sight.

  Twenty wild-eyed men with shaggy hair and beards were chasing a woman of around forty across the grass. She wore a tattered green dress, no shoes, and her blonde hair had been cut short, probably as a precaution against bugs as much as anything.

  She ran, kicking her knees into the air. I don’t recollect if she was screaming. I think she was pushing everything into that lung-tearing dash across the field. The men chasing her chanted with a uh-uh-uh-uh-uh sound.

  Uh-uh-uh!

  They got closer. One reached out and caught her by the elbow.

  She twisted out of his grip.

  Then she shifted direction. I saw, with horror, she was running towards me. If she jumped the wall I was hiding behind she’d bring that mob down on me.

  I’d be dead meat. I had the rifle loaded with five rounds of ammo. I’d be able to take out a couple of those wild-eyed animal men but then they’d tear me apart—no problem.

  The rest of my hunting party were a good kilometre down the road. They wouldn’t be able to help me.

  The woman ran towards me with that high-kicking stride.

  Closer…closer…

  I could even seen the grass had turned the soles of her bare feet green. Her eyes seemed to lock onto mine. Even though I’d swear she couldn’t see me.

  Her eyes bulged out white like hardboiled eggs. Her face was red with exertion, her cheeks puffed out as she panted desperately for air. Behind her, her pursuers were a frenzied mass of waving arms, open mouths, chanting: uh-uh-uh-uh!

  I was going to witness another scene like that night I saw Caroline being carried away into the wood.