On Deadly Ground

  When we were far enough from the camp Caroline let go of my hand and pulled her T-shirt over her head.

  ‘I’ve missed you, Rick,’ she said in that low, husky voice that sent shivers down my spine. ‘I’ve lain awake at night and all I’ve wanted to do is press myself to you.’

  ‘Why don’t you move in with me? We’ll have every night together.’

  ‘Then I’ll be like a wife. You’ll get bored of me.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’ I kissed her. ‘Believe me, I won’t.’

  She lifted my T-shirt so she could press her small bare breasts against the skin of my stomach. ‘But Kate Robinson wouldn’t be pleased about that. She’d be jealous.’

  ‘There’s nothing going on between me and Kate.’

  ‘But she likes you. She can’t take her eyes off you.’

  ‘I’d not noticed.’

  ‘Liar.’ She wasn’t angry. She was smiling and working on me through the material of my jeans. All this was part of the game she wanted to play, I think she got a kick out of imagining me with other women. ‘That Victoria’s a strange one,’ Caroline would say in that husky voice of hers that dripped sheer sex. ‘I wonder what she’d do to a young man like you.’

  ‘From what Stephen says, she’d probably suck out all my blood, then hang me out on a branch to dry.’

  ‘He’s got firsthand knowledge, hmm?’

  ‘No, he’s happy with Ruth. Anyway, he’s too busy holding this camp together to start playing footsie with anyone else.’

  ‘Maybe he’d like to play footsie with me?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You’d be jealous?’ Her green eyes twinkled mischievously.

  ‘I’d be jealous. God, would I be jealous.’ I smiled down at her as she unbuckled my belt.

  ‘So, you must give your Auntie Caroline some attention. It’s been, ah, let me see, fifty-one hours since I felt you inside me.’ Her eyes flashed; you could sense the fireball of eroticism erupting inside of her. ‘So…you, Rick, dear boy…are going to…’ With a sudden strength she dug her fingers into the waistband of my jeans and pulled them down. ‘You are going to fuck me good and hard and…oh, you are a hard boy today.’

  My penis felt heavy, swollen and almost unbearably sensitive as she traced her cool finger lightly along the shaft.

  ‘But first I want a taste of what belongs to me.’ I watched her head go down; she kissed my stomach, the tops of my thighs, then I felt her cool tongue flicker across that unbearably sensitive skin. I bunched her hair in my fist. That wave of lust came roaring through me.

  I crushed her small breasts in my hands; then my lips were pressed against hers in bruising kisses. Seconds later we were rolling over along the grassy bank, peeling off our clothes. To any Peeping Tom crouched in the bushes it must have looked more like a desperate battle than lovemaking as we as near as dammit fought each other to be the one on top.

  I was lost in a world of sensation. This was the best fucking drug trip in the world. I felt: the grass pricking my bare skin; my feet splashing into the stream, the icy water seeming only to fuel the fire raging inside of me. I saw: everything in single snapshots, vivid but unconnected. Caroline sat astride my chest.

  Images, scents, sensations streamed helter-skelter through my head. Her pink nipples. The tiny mole on the side of one breast. Her buttocks; stalks of grass and pieces of grit stuck to them. A red scratch running from her left shoulder blade to her right buttock where I’d wrestled her over the banking, over sharp stones, but not feeling a fucking thing. As I followed that single, overriding instinct. I wanted to drive my cock in deep. Then keep slamming myself into her.

  Now Caroline wriggled away on her back so I couldn’t push my penis into her vagina. She was giggling, then squirming erotically, pushing her groin up into my hip, or stomach, but always slipping away from under me before I could drive myself into her.

  Heart thumping, breath roaring in-out, in-out through my mouth. This teasing, this ‘now you have it, now you don’t’ was sending me wild. But it was part of her game. She wanted me so crazy with lust that she could feed vampire-like on my passion.

  But then she’d slide from under me, her petite body seeming to glide across the grass as easily as a snake’s.

  I grabbed at her, catching her by the wrists. She laughed, and lifted those red lips, swollen with excitement, to kiss mine.

  And all the time she was lifting her hips up to my stomach, rotating them so the crisp tuft of pubic hair scraped against my bare skin.

  As I pushed down onto her she twisted again.

  This time, before I knew it I’d rolled off the banking into the stream. The shock of the cold cracked through me. But it did nothing to dampen my lust for Caroline. She leaped on top of me, splashing with her hands to send up a spray of water that turned gold in the setting sun.

  She kneeled up in the water. It only just reached her now-dripping pubic hair and I imagined how it must feel to her, like cool lips, kissing her between her legs. Her skin turned bumpy with goose flesh. For once her pale pink nipples turned dark as they contracted into hard buttons of skin.

  Now she was astride me; my head was lifted clear of the water by a slab of rock rising up towards the bank. She smiled down at me. The water beaded off her face, neck and breasts.

  Through my fingertips, I felt her body tremble as I stroked her. But it wasn’t from the cold water that swirled around her thighs, or gushed beneath her beautifully rounded bottom. She was trembling with anticipation.

  I felt her hand gently guiding my penis toward the opening between her legs, then she sank down onto me, a grateful sigh sliding from her lips.

  Of all things, as I lay there on my back on the bed of the stream, the rush of water swirling round us, Caroline sitting astride me, a look of bliss on her face, upturned and smiling to the sun…yes, of all things, it felt the nearest I’d had to a mystical experience. All the horror of seeing rotting bodies at the roadside or screaming men and women hacking other men and women to death, or that tide of blackened earth creeping towards us was magically gone. My flesh, my heart and my soul were refreshed and clean. On one level I felt the cold rush of water over my skin; on a deeper level I savoured the soft warmth enclosing me.

  I lay there, listening to the musical sounds of the water pouring over the rocks. I listened to Caroline’s murmured endearments and the sound of her breathing that shared the same rhythm as the motion of her pelvis as she moved up and down on me.

  Afterwards, for what seemed a long time, we didn’t move. We didn’t feel as if we could move. Caroline lay in my arms, our upper halves out onto the slab of rock, our legs and genitals stroked by the flow of spring waters. For a few moments we’d created our own small world, big enough for just us two, a world that was contented, satisfied, tranquil.

  I wanted it to stay that way.

  It didn’t.

  Chapter 45

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ Stephen spoke softly but you could see he was troubled by what I’d just told him. He looked at me, his face lit by the light of the campfire. ‘Now, tell me if I’ve got this right. You’re telling me that the quakes, volcanoes, the ground heating up—all this is due to a race of grey people who live underground?’

  ‘No. I don’t know where they are from, or whether they have anything to do with the geological changes.’

  Stephen held up his hands in puzzlement. ‘But Stenno just said—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I interrupted. Christ, this wasn’t going well. ‘Stenno has his own ideas about this. All I’m saying is that on several occasions I’ve seen men who don’t look like us. They have grey skins, they’re naked. Physically they are big—big gorilla-like arms, big heads and—’

  ‘And their eyes are blood-red,’ Stenno chipped in quickly. ‘They’ve done something to the planet. They are causing the Earth’s crust to heat up. Now that they’ve destroyed society and reduced us to living like animals they’re moving in to take control.’

 
I rubbed my head in frustration. Around the campfire were Stephen, Howard Sparkman, Kate Robinson, Dean Skilton, Victoria, then Stenno, then me. Me—feeling well and truly pissed off at myself for suggesting that Stenno come and talk to the meeting. Now he was doing his evangelical pitch about the coming of the Grey Men. He was stopping short of: This’s God’s divine retribution for all our fornicating, boozing and renouncing Jesus and all His works,’ but it wasn’t that far short of it.

  The meetings themselves were held every night when the leaders of the scavenging teams would either report what they’d found on their particular forays or we’d plan the next batch of trips, as well as discussing any other matter that was of relevance to our camp. I could see Stephen didn’t want and absolutely did not need Stenno and me to sit there and say we thought the camp might be under threat from a bunch of bare-assed guys with grey skins and bloody red eyes.

  Of course, he was patient and listened carefully to our story but he was concerned about the here and now, such as was there adequate food in the camp? Should we consider finding some more substantial shelter now winter wasn’t far away? Should we actively go out and recruit new camp members with skills that we needed—doctors, farmers, mechanics, engineers?

  The Grey Men? No, he didn’t need that at all.

  And I sat watching him listen to Stenno’s outpourings about how the Grey Men would come and kill us all in the night, and how we should endeavour to find them, make contact with them, show them we were friends.

  ‘Whoa, whoa.’ Stephen spoke gently, but from the way he was rubbing his face I knew his temper was being strained. ‘Look. Stenno. Rick. This is all a bit sudden.’

  ‘But we need to be speaking to them; they—’

  ‘Stenno, Stenno. Please. Just give me a moment on this one.’

  I spoke, choosing my words carefully. ‘Stephen. I’m not claiming to know anything about these…creatures or their plans. But I have seen them. I know other people have seen them.’

  I looked round at the faces around the blazing campfire. From their expressions I guessed they thought Stenno and I had been chewing some funny-looking mushrooms we’d found in the woods. You could almost read the thoughts going through their minds: ‘Jesus wept. What will Stenno and Rick be telling us tomorrow? That they’ve seen Elvis Presley piloting a UFO? Or maybe they’ll claim they’ve found Santa Claus riding naked on his sled? Nuts, completely nuts.’

  Stephen tapped his finger thoughtfully against his lips. ‘For years now we’ve been hearing stories about aliens abducting members of the public.’

  Victoria said, ‘And these were sometimes described as "Greys." They were slightly built, small, with thin arms, but had disproportionately large heads with large almond-shaped eyes.’

  ‘I said they were big. Big. With grey skin.’ Stenno’s voice was suddenly hard and angry. ‘If you’d seen one, you’d know.’

  ‘OK, Stenno. We’re just trying to get a clear picture on this.’ Stephen looked round at the others. ‘Has anyone else seen these Grey Men?’

  Everyone was quick to shake their heads. With the exception of Kate Robinson. ‘I’ve not seen anything. But I’ve been going through copies of faxes, hard copies of e-mail messages and transcripts of eye witness accounts by people from all over the world.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And there are some reports of people either being abducted or attacked by…’ She shrugged. ‘Certain individuals.’

  ‘Certain individuals?’ You could hear the exasperation in Dean’s voice. ‘"Certain individuals"‘ are running berserk across the countryside; they have been killing men, women and children and eating them. But these certain individuals were once like us. They worked in factories, offices. They had mortgages and belonged to squash clubs and music societies. They didn’t have grey skins and commute up here through a hole in the ground.’

  Kate kept her voice level. ‘My apologies, Dean. I didn’t make myself clear. These certain individuals are described as human-like but definitely not human. In fact, I can bring you reports of people seeing, or being harassed by, men with grey skins.’

  Victoria said, ‘But there is no hard evidence. We know people out there are reverting to what could be described as savage, almost Stone Age practices. We’ve heard accounts of cannibalism; they are painting their faces and wearing headbands, armbands, certain kinds of clothes that identify them as belonging to…I suppose you could call it their tribe. If we—’

  Dean butted in. ‘What Victoria’s driving at is these Grey Men are probably just ordinary human beings who’ve taken to daubing themselves in grey paint.’

  ‘Or they’ve simply travelled across land covered with grey ash,’ Howard said.

  ‘Spot on, Howard.’ Dean was his cocky self. ‘They’re covered with grey ash. Remember that bunch we saw that were all red—hands, faces, clothes, everything. Same thing’s happened—only this bunch tramped through grey ash.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ Stephen said soothingly. ‘Let’s not dismiss all this out of hand. Obviously Stenno and Rick have seen something. But we need more evidence before we—’

  ‘Shit!’ Stenno’s scream brought heads poking out of tents to see what the commotion was all about. And it brought everyone around the campfire to their feet. ‘Shit! Shit!’ Stenno was bunching his fists, that wild, dangerous look flaring back up into his eye.

  ‘Stenno, calm d—’

  ‘No. I know what’s happening now,’ he said in a voice that suddenly sounded as dangerous as the flash in his eyes. ‘You all know what’s happening. You’ve probably been taken by the Grey Men, too. But she!’ He stabbed his finger in the direction of Victoria. ‘But she’s telling you all to keep quiet about it. Isn’t that right, Victoria—isn’t that right!’

  Stephen still tried to sound soothing. ‘Why should she do that, Stenno?’

  ‘Because she—’ He stabbed the finger again. ‘She is one of them!’

  Then he ran through the fire, kicking burning logs at Victoria. She jumped back as the sparks showered on her.

  Dean pulled the pistol from his belt and pointed it at Stenno’s back. I shoulder-charged Dean as he fired; the bullet smacked against a rock and went whining away into the distance.

  The same second Stenno was gone, clawing his way up the banking and screaming and screaming like every demon in Hell wanted to claw off his testicles.

  It was over as quickly as it had begun.

  Dean, shooting me a disgusted look, said, ‘Fucking weirdoes.’ Then stalked off.

  I walked away from the remains of the campfire, sat in the dark by myself on the bank of the stream, stuck my head in my hands and wished I’d never opened my stupid mouth

  Chapter 46

  We’d been walking a good half an hour when Stephen caught up with me. He started chatting in what seemed a deliberately light-hearted way.

  There were five of us in all—Dean Skilton (in spectacular form, looking the spit of a Hollywood action hero: green bandana round his head, rifle across his back, two pistols pushed in his belt and another belt of ammo hung over his shoulder, the cartridges gleaming gold in the sunlight), Victoria (still choosing cotton summer dress instead of jeans and T-shirt), Ruth (her long black hair in a single glossy plait and dressed in shorts and a white shirt, a rifle slung across her back), then Stephen and myself in cut-offs and T-shirts. I carried a rifle; Stephen, a shotgun.

  Clumps of heavy cloud reared up over the hills, threatening to quench the sun. Thunder rumbled like the grumpy murmurings of a giant.

  On one of his reconnaissance flights Howard Sparkman had spotted a narrow valley at the edge of the moor. It was deep, thickly wooded. There was what appeared to be a farm with a cluster of houses nearby. Stephen was banking on the fact they were deserted; that they’d be remote enough not to be discovered by the armed gangs, and that they’d make good winter accommodation. I think in his mind’s eye he saw the community settling there and growing our own food until the Earth stopped its pyrotechnics and society re
verted to normality.

  We followed a stream downhill across the moor. A few butterflies flitted across the heather. In the distance, beyond the moor, rolled the green Yorkshire landscape. Cutting across it, that finger of black where the heat seared the vegetation from the roots upwards. It crept inexorably closer each day. A great pointing finger of black. It seemed to say: You up there on Fountains Moor. I haven’t forgotten you. Here I come. Here. I come. To set your feet and your hearts on fire.

  Thunder rumbled again, like that giant with a bad case of the blues. Something cold and worm-like twisted in my stomach. Every day I felt it. And I knew it was fear. Fear, pure and simple. I was afraid to get up in the morning because I didn’t know what the day would bring. No, scratch that. I was afraid, because I knew very well what it would bring. It would bring fresh terrors. I remembered the woman dancing on the wooden pole. I remembered seeing babies’ heads, or what was left of them after the brains had been spooned out. I’d seen teenagers hanging by their necks from railway bridges. But I’d seen precious little of our Lord God’s merciful hand. Only pain; only starvation; only death.

  I half-listened as Stephen outlined plans to send Howard out to find, with luck, an untouched supermarket or warehouse that would supply us with food for the next six months; then we could suspend these nickel-and-dime operations where we’d tramp the countryside for forty-eight hours before returning with a couple of tins of corned beef and twenty pounds of turnips.

  But I knew the direction the conversation would eventually take. And sure enough a couple of minutes later Stephen said: ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said about the Grey Men. Victoria said that—’

  ‘The Grey Woman.’ I pulled my face into a grin but sure as jiggery I felt no amusement.

  ‘I know you didn’t…you weren’t as…extreme in your opinions as Stenno.’

  I sighed. ‘He’s not extreme; he’s disturbed and you know it.’

  ‘He’s got problems,’ Stephen agreed.