Her wonderful brown eyes, looking up at me with such love and tenderness and care.
‘Ah!’
It’s a cliché about coming together. It’s hard for most couples to achieve. We rarely had in the past. This time we did.
For a moment it held all the evil in the world at bay. There was that sparkling rush of energy. I cried out and arched my back, lifting my head, sweat flicked from my hair; that tremendous burst of heat fireballed through me.
Below, Caroline squirmed, cried out my name.
Then it was done. I flopped down at her side. We lay panting together, looking up at the rafters.
The time was 4:51.
She kissed me on the lips. ‘Get dressed, love.’
‘Dean won’t be back for ages yet.’
‘Please, get dressed.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t like this place.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know…it…it frightens me.’
A barn? In a field? The countryside deserted?
But I felt it, too.
I began to dress. ‘You’ve heard something?’
‘No.’ She slipped on her bra. ‘Only it doesn’t…feel right.’
I looked at the doorway. I could almost imagine one of the Grey Men standing there. A massive grey fist resting against the doorframe, its grey head tilted to one side as it watched us with its eyes that were as red and as wet as freshly drawn blood.
I shivered.
Christ, yes, I wanted out of there, too.
Again I sensed fear hovering there. Like that bat-winged monster.
Danger.
That tiny red alarm light, buried deep in a part of your brain so ancient you shared it with the dinosaurs, began to flash.
Danger.
That ancient bit of grey matter had detected something that your clever, quick-witted primate brain could not. Now the alarm light flashed. Danger…danger…danger…
Primate brain supplied the survival order: GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE!
But why? I looked outside.
The time was 4:53.
Everything quiet. Everything normal.
But why did I feel so scared? What subliminal danger signals was I picking up?
I fastened the belt of my jeans, then grabbed the rifle.
I joined Caroline at the doorway. I saw her anxious darting eyes looking for danger.
‘See anything?’ I asked.
‘No. But something’s wrong.’
‘I know. You can feel it, can’t you?’
‘Oppressive. Like a thunderstorm building.’
Outside the overgrown meadow stretched out to fences and a scattering of trees. A hare bounded across the field.
It seemed to be running for its life.
4:55.
‘Do you know where this spring is that Dean’s gone to?’
I nodded. ‘Over in that direction. Through the trees.’
‘We can meet him coming back.’
‘I’ll get the bags.’
4:56.
‘Rick?’
‘Yes?’
‘Remember what I said about Kate Robinson?’
‘Caroline—’
‘No, I’m serious. She’s a lovely girl.’
4:57.
‘Can you manage with the bags?’
‘I’m OK. If you can carry the rifle.’
‘Got it.’
‘If you see anyone, don’t fire. With luck they might not see us.’
‘Got you,’ she said.
That sense of fear, of imminent danger seemed so oppressive now. I found myself breathless. I lugged the bags of apples to the doorway. I could hardly breathe.
‘Give me one of the bags,’ she said.
‘No. I’m fine. Let’s just get out of here.’
4.58.
We both stepped out of the barn warily. My leg muscles were so tense I thought they’d snap. The bags dragged down at my shoulders.
‘Rick. You’ve been good to me. I’ve been so lucky you came into my life.’
Stop it, stop it, I wanted to tell her. Stop talking as if you’re going to—
‘Rick…listen.’ Caroline looked round, her eyes wide. ‘What’s that sound?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s getting louder. A motor?’
The sound was deep; like someone knocking at the other side of a thick wall.
I tilted my head to one side. There we were, standing in a grass field, and there was a sound like someone was knocking—it seemed muffled and far away. I listened to the mysterious sound; something about it seemed just so wrong. It just wasn’t the kind of sound you hear out in a field.
‘I’ll be damned,’ I murmured.
‘Rick, what is it?’
‘I’ve heard that sound before.’
‘You have? Where?’
‘Leeds. I was with my brother Stephen, in a shop.’
‘A shop?’
‘When we were hunting for supplies for the refugees. God damn it. It’s happening again.’
‘What is?’
‘We’ve got to get away from here. Caroline, now!’
The knocking sound grew louder.
I stood about five paces from Caroline.
The knocking grew louder—louder. A sudden vibration ran up from the ground through the soles of my feet.
The time was, at last, 4:59.
‘Rick…’
‘Run!’ I yelled. ‘Drop the rifle! Just RUN!’
I started to move, shedding the bags of apples. I looked back at Caroline. She didn’t move, not sure where to go.
‘Caroline…’ I ran back to her, grabbed her by the sleeve.
And that’s when I lost her.
As quickly as that.
With no other warning.
4:59 and a few lousy seconds.
I remember: I held her by the sleeve. I looked into her face. Her eyes, alarmed, looking to me for help.
The geyser erupted beneath her feet.
With a roar, a thousand gallons of boiling water burst from the earth.
The blast threw me back. I rolled over and over across the ground trying to escape the explosion of superheated water and steam standing in a column forty metres high.
By the time the water landed on me, it was falling as cool rain.
I gripped something in my hand. I looked at it, dazed.
The sleeve of Caroline’s coat…
She’s gone…she’s gone.
I was still staring at the sleeve when Dean found me twenty minutes later.
Chapter 56
I carried Caroline to where an ancient oak grew on a hill.
Darkness was falling, but still we worked, finding timber, piling it high.
I told myself Caroline couldn’t have felt a thing. The pressure of the geyser as it erupted could have flipped a truck into the air. She must have died instantly. I repeated this over and over in my head. The thought of her suffering again would have been unbearable.
It was fully dark when I zipped her into her sleeping-bag. Then lifted her onto the pyre.
A moment later I lit the dry grass piled around its base. Instantly the wind caught the flames. Within seconds it was a roaring, blazing mass of heat and light. I stood as close to the fire as I could, face smarting, eyes stinging. Watching the beating heart of incandescence consuming Caroline’s body and releasing some essence of her into the sky to be carried far away across fields, rivers, forests.
The fire snapped and crackled for most of that night. Dean and I stood side by side as if on guard. We’d leave when there were only ashes and dust.
The blast of boiling water that punched her so brutally into the sky must have disfigured her terribly. But all I could remember even then as I stood there by the fire—indeed, all I can remember now—is that she looked so perfectly beautiful as I laid her on to the funeral pyre. Whatever had happened to her. Whatever the boiling water had done to her lovely skin and hair, my mi
nd wouldn’t allow me to see it. My mind would only project my memory of her beautiful face onto whatever must have been left of her head.
So there was nothing repellent or horrific about that final kiss as she lay there on the pyre.
Sometime around dawn, when the fire had dwindled to a glowing mound of embers that streamed sparks when the wind blew. Sometime around then Dean said to me, ‘She had a lover.’
I said nothing.
‘For some reason she kept it a secret. Do you know who it was?’
Me.
I wanted to say the word. But at that moment I could say nothing.
Dean looked back at the glowing embers. He swallowed. ‘But she did tell Kate one thing she’d been keeping quiet.’
I looked at Dean.
He swallowed again. He found it hard to talk. ‘Caroline said she was going to have a baby.’ He swallowed, then said softly, ‘A little baby.’
I looked back into the red glowing heart of the embers. My eyes began to sting once more.
Chapter 57
Stephen looked at me, his face serious. ‘Are you ready for this?’
I tried to sound cool. ‘Sure. No problems.’
I didn’t feel as cool as I managed to sound. My mouth had dried; my heartbeat was accelerating.
What had I to be afraid of?
Dying.
Dying out there in the middle of the godforsaken nowhere that had once been the proverbial green and pleasant land.
I said, ‘It’s not too late to say I’ve changed my mind and I want to go back?’
Stephen cupped his hand to his ear. ‘The plane…what did you say?’
‘Nothing…just joking.’
He smiled, slapped my back.
The four-seater plane stood there, its engine ticking over, the blast of air from the single propeller spinning at a thousand revolutions per minute transforming the grass into a mass of flurrying green waves. Despite sunrise still being more than forty minutes away, and the stars still shining hard in the sky, there was a blood-red line on the horizon where the sun would break into a new day. But it was more than the cold air that had turned the grass crisp with frost beneath my feet that made me shiver.
I shivered again. It was ten days since Caroline had died. No one else knew that we had been lovers. You must think it strange I still kept it secret. Almost as if I was ashamed of the relationship. But the truth of the matter was that I was traumatized by her death. I just hadn’t realized the depth, or, Hell, yes, even the integrity of my feelings. I’d convinced myself that the relationship was based on sex—nothing else. But as I stood there watching the plane, the blast of air from its propeller rippling the grass and tumbling the autumn leaves away down the field, I realized how much Caroline Lucas had meant to me. It felt as if a great big chunk of my soul had been torn away. I felt cold. Alone. That loneliness had me in its cold blue grip now, as grim and as unyielding as rigor mortis.
As I’d done a thousand times every day, I conjured up an image of Caroline: she is lovely again, unblemished by the blast of scalding water; she is standing on the grass between myself and the plane. She’s smiling, the brown eyes are trusting, her hair blows in the breeze, she tilts her head to one side, the smile broadens, she’s oh-so-pleased to see me; with her fingertips she lightly toys with her ear lobe; she mouths the words ‘Five minutes’ just as she’s done dozens of times before. Then she walks up onto the moor. I follow five minutes later, find her there, hungry for my kisses; she talks to me in that husky late-night-radio voice that has the power to send my heart beating faster.
I wished I was back in my tent on Fountains Moor. So I could curl up in the sleeping-bag in the hope that sleep would annihilate the pain of losing her.
Christ, scrub that. I wished I could wake up at home in Fairburn with the sunlight poking through the curtains, the clock radio belting out some crap song. What I wouldn’t give for a crappy normal day. Riding the bus to East Garforth to work in the crappy supermarket. Then, maybe, in the evening a gig with my stillborn band, Thunder Bug, in some crappy bar in downtown Leeds. Even those things you hated about civilization—the crappy music played to you when some telephone receptionist put you on hold, those foil-wrapped cheese-spread triangles that are damn near impossible to open without squidging the cheese over your fingers, Christmas decorations swamping shopping malls when it’s only October, crappy TV game shows: Pets That Look like Famous Politicians—even that kind of crap had a powerful allure right then.
Especially when I was about to fly more than two hundred kilometres in something that looked no more substantial than a family car with a pair of wings bolted to it.
There would be three of us: Howard Sparkman (pilot), Dean Skilton and me, one Rick Kennedy, with a whole rain forest’s worth of butterflies in his stomach.
It had been a joke, that about changing my mind. I knew I had to go. Scratch that: NEEDED to go. This was a matter of life and death all right. We NEEDED that food if we were going to survive the winter.
Stephen was saying something to Kate. The two had helped us carry the supplies we’d need down to the pasture we’d dubbed Airport One, which was a good couple of hours’ walk from Fountains Moor.
Dean stood just a few paces from me. He wore a green headband. There were a pair of rifles slung over his shoulders, he’d pushed his beloved Beretta handguns into his leather belt. He looked ready for war.
Through the near dark I saw Howard silhouetted by the cockpit light. He gave a thumbs-up sign. The engine had wanned through. He was ready to go.
I picked up my backpack and a belt of rifle ammunition. Stephen caught me by the elbow. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he told me. ‘Just don’t take any chances.’
‘You’re playing the big brother again.’
He smiled but I could see the concern breaking through. ‘Yeah, I’m playing the big brother. Because that’s what I am. I want you to come back in one piece.’
Kate kissed me on the cheek. ‘We all want you to come back in one piece. Savvy?’
‘Savvy.’ I nodded.
‘Now just play it safe,’ Stephen said. ‘Don’t do anything fancy. It’s just a case of loading the plane with food. Howard will fly it back. Then he’ll come back and—’
‘Repeat the process as often as necessary.’ I smiled ‘Yeah, I know, now stop sounding like our mother.’
His smile saddened. ‘Yeah, I do, bless her.’ He gave me a playful punch on the shoulder. ‘Now…go fly.’
‘OK, Dean. You ready for—Dean?’
Dean had pulled the headband off. Sweat stood out in beads on his face despite the temperature being less than zero.
‘Dean, you all right?’
Kate felt his forehead. ‘My…he’s cooking.’
‘I’ll be OK. Once I can sit down on the plane.’
Kate shot a look at Stephen and myself. ‘He can’t fly like this. He’s really burning up.’
Dean slipped the rifles off his shoulders, turned his back on us, then puked massively onto the grass.
‘Shit…I warned him about that tinned crab meat. It was way past its sell-by date.’
Stephen shot me a look. ‘Crab meat?’
‘Yeah, I saw him eating a can last night.’
‘Then it won’t be life-threatening,’ Kate said, wrinkling her nose as he heaved noisily again. ‘He needs a few days rest and plenty of water.’
‘Damn.’ Stephen lightly punched his fist into the palm of the other hand. ‘Damn, damn.’
‘Who was on the reserve list?’ Kate asked.
‘Paul Freise. He’ll still be up at the camp.’
‘But on foot it’s two hours there, two hours back.’
‘Any chance of landing the plane on the moor?’
‘Absolutely no chance. The heather’s too deep. The plane would flip nose over tail.’
Kate said, ‘If the wind speed picks up much more Howard won’t risk flying anyway. He could be grounded for days.’
I shrugged. ‘With the s
upplies we’ve put away maybe we should postpone the trip?’
Stephen shook his head.
Kate looked at Stephen with an intensity that made my scalp prickle. ‘Stephen. We should tell Rick.’
‘Tell Rick what?’ I asked.
‘How much food is really left.’
‘Kate—’ he began.
‘It’s only right he knows.’
‘Knows what?’ I began to be irritated by the fact I was being kept in the dark. ‘Stephen, what aren’t you telling me?’
‘I didn’t want to put you under any unreasonable pressure.’
‘Unreasonable pressure?’
‘And I didn’t want to start a panic in the camp.’
‘Stephen. For Pete’s sake, I’m your brother. Just tell me the truth.’
‘OK. The truth. The canned food will run out in ten days.’
‘Ten days?’
‘Ten days.’
‘But we’ve got food dumps all over the freaking moor.’
‘Do you know how many cans sixty people consume in one day?’
‘But it’s been rationed for the last—’
‘Yeah, and that is with rationing, Rick.’
‘The fact is,’ Kate added, ‘consumption has still exceeded the rate we’ve been finding fresh supplies.’
‘And the store of fresh vegetables?’ I asked.
‘Holding their own,’ he said. ‘Just.’
‘So,’ I let out a breath as the truth sank in, ‘in less than a fortnight the camp will be living on nothing but potato and turnip soup.’
‘And whatever wild rabbits and birds we can catch.’
‘Great.’
‘And once winter sets in up here we won’t be able to use the aeroplane at all.’
‘Right,’ I said, ‘We still go this morning. I can manage by myself.’
Stephen shook his head. ‘Hell, no, Rick. You can’t stay there alone. And you’ll need help shifting the supplies to the landing strip at the London end.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘No way,’ I said. ‘You’re the head of that group up there on the moor. What will happen to them if you disappear for a month?’
‘Good point,’ Kate said. ‘You must stay.’
‘What now, then?’
Kate said firmly, ‘I’ll go in Dean’s place.’
‘You sure?’