The islands were small enough to search in less than an hour. We found no people. No live ones, that was. On the second island, which rose like a small hill from the water, there were half a dozen six-bedroom houses. A real millionaires’ row, with BMWs and Mercedes parked on the long U-shaped driveways. A couple of the houses had swimming pools—now sludged green with algae. There were sun terraces with barbecues, double garages, greenhouses (full of dead plants that had turned yellow and dry as paper). In one garden a dozen cats prowled the branches of a tree. They hissed furiously when we got close.
All the houses were locked.
‘It looks as if the owners had time to leave in an orderly way at least,’ Kate said, peering in through a kitchen window. ‘Everything’s tidy.’
I held out my hands. ‘Well…take your pick, Miss Robinson.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘There’s no point in camping out. We’ll take a house.’
We stood in the middle of the kitchen.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Kate said, she stood on tip-toe and stretched like a cat, as if the kitchen actually gave off some sensuous vibrations that stimulated every square centimetre of her skin. ‘Just look at the cooker. It’s an Aga. Look, it burns wood. We can cook on it.’ Her face lit up. Again she stretched, arching that beautiful long back, her green eyes shining with sheer pleasure.
‘Well, you know what we have to do in a situation like this?’ I ran my finger across the tiled work tops.
‘And that is?’
‘Play house!’
Again we experienced that giddy rush. We had all that food in the warehouse. We had a millionaire’s house. Now we were like children left home alone. After months of sleeping in tents here was a real house, with real furniture. You can’t imagine the pleasure of actually sitting on a cushioned sofa, or taking off your shoes and walking on soft carpets. We ran through the house shouting to each other.
‘Rick!’
‘You can see Canary Wharf from this window!’
‘There’s the dome of St Paul’s!’
‘Kate, come and look at this!’
‘No, you come and look at this first! Look at the size of this bathroom.’
‘Jesus, look at the size of the bath!’
‘You could share that one with a friend—and his grandparents.’ She gave me a wink that sent shivers up my spine.
We went through the house again, admiring bedrooms, opening wardrobes and cupboards full of stylish clothes. There were expensive perfumes on the dressing table.
‘Who do you think the house belonged to?’
‘Somebody who got rich quick. It all looks new,’ I said. ‘Perhaps a bank robber who got lucky.’
‘Or a lottery winner.’ She sighed. ‘Well, it’s all ours now—if we want it.’
‘Do you feel guilty?’ I asked her, watching her green eyes momentarily sadden.
‘No. We’ve got to take what we need now. It doesn’t matter where it comes from.’
‘Do you fancy taking a glass of champagne with me, then?’
Her delighted smile returned. ‘Why not?’
‘I can’t promise it will be chilled enough yet.’
‘Who cares. Come on, we’ve earned it.’
That afternoon quickly became a blur as we drank glass after glass of champagne in the living room. The sun shone through the windows. We lay on two matching sofas that stood opposite each other across a glass coffee table on which there was a single issue of Vogue and a life-size wood carving of a hand holding a lemon between finger and thumb.
We were on an adrenalin buzz as much as anything. In just a few hours we’d safely completed a journey that I’d dreaded making; we’d found the warehouse intact and crammed with food. The islands were uninhabited and we felt secure, surrounded by a barrier of flood water.
We clinked glasses together every sixty seconds or so. ‘Cheers!’ or ‘Chin-chin.’ Every few minutes I’d pop a cork from another bottle, then we’d down that, too.
On the third bottle the cork shot out like a missile, champagne spraying up into my face.
Kate laughed. ‘You can’t waste that!’
I stood there dripping and laughing. ‘Pass me your glass and I’ll wring my hair into it.’
‘Ugh! Disgusting pig.’
She stood up and began to mop my face with a handful of tissues.
Suddenly she said, ‘I wonder what champagne tastes like at body temperature.’ Lightly she ran her tongue across my cheek. ‘Yum, yum.’ She breathed the words into my ear.
At that moment my senses were full of Kate. I turned my head to look straight into her green almond-shaped eyes. She raised a finger to my eyebrow and lightly, so lightly wiped away a droplet of champagne. I smelt the champagne, I smelt her own scent of soap. Before I knew it my hand was buried deep into her hair. I heard her gasp slightly. This rush of emotion had taken her by surprise too.
‘Rick…this is stupid.’
‘Stupid?’
‘I feel stupid. I’m so scared of you and I don’t know why.’
‘Scared of me? There’s nothing to be scared about.’
‘That’s what’s so stupid. I just feel so terrified.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘Will you do me a favour, please?’
‘Just ask.’
‘Hold me. Tightly, please.’
‘This OK?’
‘Yes. Oh, I’ve needed this. All this madness and people dying and being afraid all the time. You need to be close to someone.’
She put her arms round my waist and hugged me to her. My heart was beating hard. She was beautiful. I wanted to crush her to me, to kiss those wonderful lips but I held back. Right then she wanted human closeness. This wasn’t sexual—not yet, anyway. I didn’t know where it would go. But Kate was filling my body with such a powerful excitement it felt as if I’d been injected with a drug. I could feel a prickling sensation spread through every vein and artery in my body. I felt my heart pump harder.
She pressed her long body against mine. It trembled.
Then I kissed her full on the mouth. She turned her head. At first I thought she’d turned away, not wanting me to kiss her, but suddenly she lifted her face to mine and put her hands behind my head, holding it still as she kissed me with a passion that bordered on the savage.
Still kissing we made it to the sofa. I was throbbing so hard I thought I’d burst.
Beneath me Kate looked up into my eyes. I felt my heart surge every time she made eye contact. With one hand she undipped her hair, freeing it so it fanned out behind her across the sofa cushion. Her breathing came in gusts against my throat.
Then I felt her stiffen.
Had I gone too far? Was she having second thoughts?
Damn…
But I saw she was looking back over my shoulder, her eyes full of shock.
I looked back.
Where they’d come from I didn’t know.
But standing in a long line from one end of the room to the other was the weirdest bunch of people I’d ever seen.
Chapter 61
A short man wearing a leather cowboy hat and with long hair tied back in a pony tail and tears tattooed on one cheek prodded me with the muzzle of a rifle. ‘Don’t stop now,’ he said in a whispery voice. ‘It was just starting to get interesting.’
I heard Kate breathe sharply in. Poor kid was terrified. She knew what might happen to her in the next few minutes.
There must have been ten of them, all heavily armed with shotguns, rifles, sub-machine guns. All had tattoos around their lips and eyes. Faces were scarred. Hair long and either woven into plaits or pony tails. They all had strips of what looked like silk in brilliant reds and oranges tied to their arms and legs. These decorations hung down in long strips. They made a papery rustle every time they moved.
I noticed a couple of women in the group. They were hard-faced, somehow pinched-looking as if they’d been ill or half-starved.
The man in
the cowboy hat grinned. The grin exposed a mouthful of teeth that were black and rotting into misshapen splinters.
‘Guess what, folks?’ he said, grinning his bad-teeth grin.
‘What?’ I asked, feeling cold.
‘You’re coming with us.’
‘Look, we just came to find some food for—’
‘Ah, ah.’ He wagged a finger. ‘You’re both coming with us.’
‘Where?’
‘Paradise.’
Kate said, ‘Let us go…please.’
‘We could do. Couldn’t we? But first you’d have to pay rental on this place. In advance.’
My blood turned cold.
‘What have we got that’s any use to you?’ Kate asked.
I saw the men looking Kate up and down, licking their lips. And that cold feeling spread.
I heard the tremor in her voice as she said as coolly as she could. ‘If that’s what you want. OK. But just one at a time—please.’
The two hard-faced girls in the group exchanged amused smiles.
The man in the cowboy hat shook his head. ‘You’re too valuable for that. We need you for the show.’
I shook my head. If only I’d kept one of the handguns with me. I guessed it would be better to go down shooting rather than suffering whatever this bunch of weirdoes had planned for us.
‘Come on.’ The man pointed the rifle at us. ‘We can’t wait all day, especially when we’ve a show to stage.’
Tortured. Raped.
Slowly, slowly tortured until the pain overwhelms. You puke. Bite your tongue until it bleeds.
Fingers cut off.
Metal bars heated in a fire until they glow, then pressed against my testicles, into Kate’s face and breasts, or forced red hot into both our anuses.
You hear screaming. But you don’t know if it’s her screaming. Or whether I’m screaming. You’re lost in a whole universe of pain.
Kate Robinson hung naked from a tree. Beaten with leather belts until her skin bleeds. Her hair soaked in lighter fuel. A lighted match.
Then…
Christ.
Take your pick. They might do part of that. All of that. They might just put a bullet in our heads. But I didn’t think so. We had entertainment value. You could bet whatever they did it would be milked for all that it was worth. We weren’t going to die quickly.
‘Sit there. On the bench by the barbecue. Ah! Hands on heads…please.’
We’d been marched out into the garden. Kate and I sat side by side on the bench set in the centre of the stone-flagged patio.
The weirdoes stood grinning at us, obviously pleased by their catch. I could hear Kate breathing in frightened shallow gasps. Christ, I couldn’t blame her. They would do something bad to her. And she knew it.
A breeze had sprung up now. The red and orange silk ribbons tied around their arms and legs fluttered straight out in the breeze like pennants.
Someone had already lit a fire on the lawn and was busily breaking chairs against a wall to feed the flames.
A thin man with pierced lips and a surly face drank from a bottle of vodka. He passed it on to the two women, their short spiky hair bleached a nicotine yellow. As they took turns drinking from the bottle, they amused themselves with a conversation that must have concerned me because they kept shooting me looks with their little rat eyes, then laughing.
Once the shock of being captured had passed what I actually felt was anger. I was in their power: they could do what they liked to me; they needn’t fear any retribution; law and order and the prison service had gone the way of the dinosaur, as dead as could be. But I actually felt anger. I began to talk in a stroppy way.
‘What are you going to do to us?’
‘We’ll think of something,’ the man in the cowboy hat said.
‘Let us go.’
‘Why should we do that?’
‘Because we’ve done nothing to harm you.’
‘You’re on our island.’
‘You don’t live here.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘How do you know that, Sherlock Holmes?’
‘It’s too clean. You weirdoes would have covered the place in shit by this time.’
‘Rick—’ began Kate, shocked.
‘Oh, Rick is it?’ The cowboy rested a booted foot complete with spurs on the bench beside me. ‘Rick the prick? Or Rick the dick?’
‘Rick Kennedy. We’re from Leeds. We came looking for food.’
‘Well, you might have been looking for food but what you did find was me. Cowboy’s the name, and I’m trouble with a capital T.’
‘My name’s Kate Robinson.’ She forced a pleasant smile. ‘Please. We’ve done no harm.’
‘So.’ Cowboy lit a cigarette, then held the still burning match to her lips. ‘So, you want to go home?’
She forced that smile again, blew out the match. ‘Please. We’re sorry if we…trespassed.’
Cowboy looked round at the others. They were watching, grins all over their tattooed faces.
‘I take it,’ he said, then pulled deeply on the cigarette, ‘I take it you want to live?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why?’
‘Why do you?’ I said, stroppy.
‘Call it a mission,’ he said. ‘In twenty-four hours you two will be dead. I will be sparing you all that pain and suffering of trying to survive in the terrible, terrible place this world has become.’
‘Thanks for the thought,’ I snapped. ‘We’re happy to take that risk.’
‘You really think you’re going to survive more than a couple of years? Where you going to get food from? The ground’s getting hotter and hotter. Soon you’re going to have to keep running to stop your feet getting burnt.’
‘As I said, we’ll risk it,’ I told him. ‘Let us go. You’ll never see us again.’
‘No can do.’ Cowboy blew out cigarette smoke through his nose. ‘You belong to us now.’
‘You don’t have to do this.’ Kate kept her voice low, calm. ‘You could just let us go.’
‘May I remind you, sweetheart, that these days there is no TV and the ballet, opera and theatre have been postponed forever. We need entertainment.’
‘Fucking lunatics.’ I glared at him. But with two gun barrels poking into my back what could I do?
‘Okey-dokey.’ Cowboy turned to the rest of his gang. ‘What are we going to do to these fine people?’
Chapter 62
The bastards were actually going to stand there on the patio of that millionaire’s house, with the barbecue, the swimming pool, the children’s climbing frame, pink roses climbing up the trellising on the wall, and they were going to discuss how they were going to torture us to death.
Someone had turned on a portable CD player. Alice Cooper’s School’s Out blasted across the garden. Through the trees I could see the silver sparkle of floodwaters. I thought about Stephen. He’d probably never know what happened to me. On some return flight Howard Sparkman would just find us simply gone.
Shit.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
I wasn’t going to let these freaks play sadist with me.
There had to be a way out of this.
Or there had to be a way I could take some of the bastards with me.
I tried to look calm, even resigned to my fate as they shouted ideas above the music.
‘This is gonna be soooo-w much fun!’ cried a tall guy. White scars radiated from his lips, making it look as if his mouth lay at the centre of an asterisk, like so: *. ‘That girl’s a real peach!’
‘Yeah,’ said another of the psychos. ‘Who gets first shove, Cowboy?’
‘I’m the most senior,’ Cowboy replied, ‘I do.’
‘Most senior?’
‘Yep, I’m most senior today.’
‘Why not save her for the boss, then?’
‘Because he’s not here, is he?’
‘Maybe you should wait?’
‘It’s not fair on t
he rest, Cowboy,’ said the rat-faced girl. ‘Why don’t you let them have a chance to have first go with her?’
‘Well, I’m not putting it in after old spaghetti face’s been in there.’
‘Who are you calling spaghetti face? Fucking rot breath.’
‘You could all toss for her,’ the rat-faced girl said. Laughter.
‘OK, OK,’ Cowboy grinned. ‘Come on, then. What we going to do with her, then?’
‘What y’ think? Take her to the Savoy for tea and fairy cakes? I’m going to fuck her till she squeals like a pig with its nuts on fire.’
I kept my mouth shut and my eyes dead-looking. Let the bastards think I’d given up the ghost.
‘Put her in an oil drum with a dozen rats.’
‘We’ve already done that.’
‘And the bitch went and killed the rats.’
‘Until we taped her hands together.’
‘She bit the rats.’
‘Yeah…at first.’
‘Then they bit her.’
‘Well, I’m not catching no fucking rats again.’
They bickered like school kids. Chipping in ideas. Pushing each other. A couple of them had got hold of children’s bikes and were riding them up and down the garden path shouting ‘TO INFINITY—AND BEYOND!’
The weirdo with scars radiating from his lips like daisy petals was reluctant to let his idea go. ‘The oil drum’s cool.’
‘Tesco, I’m not catching no fucking rats, no fucking way. Fuckers bit my fingers.’
‘I’ll catch the rats, if you’re too shit-scared, Dosser.’
‘Dosser fwightened of rats. Dosser fwightened of mice and cweepy cwallies,’ chorused the rat-faced girls.
‘But when she was in the oil drum. And the rats started to bite?’
‘Can you remember what the bitch was shouting?’
They all started to chant: ‘You’ll go to jail. You’ll go to jail, you’ll go to jail.’ They aped a woman’s hysterical scream, then started laughing.
The one called Tesco grinned. ‘I’ll find an oil drum.’
‘Oil drums, oil drums…it’s always the oil drums with you, Tesco. Can’t you think of anything that doesn’t involve oil drums? Find a kitten, what shall we do with it? Find an oil drum, says Tesco.’
‘OK, gobshite. A wardrobe. Bring a wardrobe out of the bedroom, lock her in it, then set the twat on fire.’