On Deadly Ground

  Shit. Showdown time. Believe me, I’d no argument with Stenno. But if he took a swipe at me with that thing I’d have to try and tackle him. Either that, or stand there calmly and wait for my skull to be crushed. Neither option appealed. But I knew what I’d have to go for.

  He was working himself into a roaring fury. I knew the attack would be just seconds away.

  Stephen saw it, too. Somewhere on the edge of my vision I saw Stephen making eye contact with Howard and Dean as if to say, ‘Help me grab Stenno and calm him down.’

  I don’t know what their reaction was, I was too busy concentrating on Stenno. He was all meat. Once he started moving I couldn’t block the blow, I’d have to dodge. Dodge fast or I’d be coffin fodder.

  He held the iron bar high in both hands like he was taking a swing in a baseball game. My head would be the ball.

  He shook the iron bar. He was winding himself up for the first swing.

  I backed off. The others looked at each other helplessly, knowing the man intended to murder me.

  Still he screeched at me, spit flying from his mouth, ‘Friday night! Do you know what the bastard did to me. Do you? Do you know what it did? I—I’ll fucking crush him!’

  He swung. The bar was heavy and took time to pick up speed. It wasn’t difficult to back-step to avoid the scything blow coming from left to right.

  He swung again.

  Again I back-stepped easily.

  The obvious thing for me to do now was bide my time, then, when the opportunity presented itself, simply run for the open garage door.

  Slash. The club swung again.

  And again I back-stepped. To my left and a little behind me the sunlight blazed in through the doors, illuminating a vast swathe of oil-stained concrete floor. The next time he swung the iron bar I’d turn and run before he got chance to lift the bar for another swipe.

  He raised the club for a downward hit, like he going to hammer a tent peg. This time I’d run.

  But this time, I stepped back on a slick of wet oil. My foot slipped out from under me. I fell back. I’d have gone all the way supine, but my butt slammed into the radiator grille of that old Jag. My balance was shot, I couldn’t move back any further; the next blow would crack my skull.

  I looked up at that white face. Those black-dot eyes still blazed down at me. Hating me. Wanting nothing more than to shatter my skull; to splatter my brains, my blood, my ruptured eyes all over the bonnet of the car.

  Then he paused. The expression, locking his mouth wide open, was nothing but all-out, mind-blowing terror.

  He looked down at my face as if I’d undergone some even more terrible transformation.

  ‘NO! DON’T DO THAT TO ME AGAIN, DON’T DO IT AGAIN!’

  From all directions Stephen, Dean, Howard, even the old man rushed in, to stop him slamming that iron bar down onto my head.

  I threw my arms up to protect my face; held my breath, gritted my teeth, as—

  Shit.

  He moved with a crazed speed.

  The club blurred through the air. But he no longer held it. He’d thrown it wildly at me. It buzzed above my head; I felt its slipstream tug my air and—

  BANG!

  It crashed down hard behind me.

  Now Stenno backed off, shaking his head, panting. The eyes still locked on me in that pure, nerve-rending terror.

  He screamed. Then ran.

  His workman boots hit the concrete like hammers. And he was gone. Dean ran to the door, looked out, then turned and shook his head, arms out, which I read to mean Stenno wasn’t coming back.

  A sense of relief went through everyone like a wave. I took a deep breath, pulled myself to my feet.

  I stood there looking at the faces that looked back at me. I felt like a condemned man. The silence seemed to go on and on. And like that Friday night I felt as if people were expecting me to confess some terrible, terrible sin.

  At last the old man ruefully rubbed his jaw and nodded at the Jag behind me. ‘Well, that saves me at least one dusting job.’

  I looked back at the car. The iron bar, meant for my face, had gone clean through the windscreen.

  Chapter 12

  We’d been riding the motorbikes less than five minutes when Stephen signalled for me to stop. We’d been asked to try our luck at a supermarket in Headingley. Supplies of baby food were still needed but there was a growing mood of confidence in the village. Rumours were flying that the crisis had all but passed. Soon the army would roll in with fleets of buses and trucks to take the refugees back home.

  Stephen sat astride the bike, feet on the floor, the motor ticking over. He pulled off his helmet, scratching his head where it had rubbed. He was wearing shades and I felt nothing but pride that I was the brother of this guy with the cool LA rock star good looks.

  ‘Hey, Kid K, you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I twisted the throttle lightly and the bike gave a satisfying snarl.

  Stephen looked me in the eye. ‘Is what that guy did still bugging you?’

  ‘Stenno? It was the way he looked at me. Just me. As if I’d shafted his wife or something.’

  ‘He must have taken a hell of a knock on the head on Friday night, you know.’ He looked at me sympathetically. ‘If you ask me that guy’s still a little out to lunch. You follow?’

  ‘I suppose you’re right. Weird way to act, though.’

  ‘Sure you’re OK?’

  ‘No worries.’

  He nodded, started to put the helmet back on over his head. Then he looked at it as if the thing smelt too cheesy for words. With a grin at me, he lobbed the helmet into the ditch. ‘We’re on a mission of mercy.’ He laughed. ‘No one’s going to book us for not wearing a shitty helmet.’

  I shook my head, smiling.

  ‘All right. Rick, you know C’mon Everybody by the late great Mr Eddie Cochran?’

  ‘Know it? The band plays it every gig.’

  ‘C’mon on, then. Let’s rock and roll.’ He twisted the throttle and rocketed away. Above the roar of his bike I could hear him singing at the top of his voice.

  With a cowboy yodel I slung my helmet into the bushes and followed. Soon we were riding side by side, wind zithering our hair, singing in harmony and shooting these massive grins at each other.

  The road was empty. The sun shone. A couple of horses were playing chase-me, chase-me in a nearby field. We passed the occasional abandoned pram or bike or duvet that had been spalled off from the exodus of city folk on the way up to Fairburn. But it didn’t seem particularly horrific. All this would be cleared up in next to no time, or so we told ourselves. Then there would be TV post mortems and public enquiries aplenty until we were bored to death with it all.

  That’s what we were telling ourselves right then. But the truth was going to be a whole different ball game. The truth was going to be nothing less than evil. And the future was going to be Hell.

  So, naively, we rode along the country roads, hitting shadow beneath trees then bursting into brilliant sunlight again.

  As soon as we joined the main Leeds road we saw human life again. There was an army checkpoint consisting of a green truck and half a dozen soldiers sitting in the shade of a tree.

  A squaddie stripped down to nothing but camouflage trousers, a bush hat and a Land Of Hope And Glory tattoo scrolling across his chest flagged us down. ‘No, you don’t, lads. You’ll have to turn back the way you came.’

  I told him, ‘We’re looking for supplies. We’ve got some hungry mouths to feed.’

  He looked down at the bikes we were riding. ‘Where did you get these from?’

  ‘They were loaned to us.’

  ‘Stolen? Right?’

  ‘No.’

  Stephen began to explain, ‘We volunteered to help find food for—’

  ‘You’re American?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m American. Look, we’d be very grateful if you’d let us through to—’

  ‘You dropped lucky, then. You here on holiday?’
r />   I saw Stephen shake his head, puzzled. ‘What does it matter? I’m staying with my brother here until—’

  ‘Until the twelfth of never. America’s fucked.’

  ‘America’s what?’ Stephen cast me a glance and I guessed he was wondering if this tattooed squaddie had been standing out in the sun too long.

  ‘America,’ the squaddie said cheerfully. ‘It’s fucked.’

  The sun felt like a chunk of hot iron pressing against the back of my neck. This I didn’t need. A surreal argument with a sun-addled squaddie.

  Stephen tried to talk his way, patiently, diplomatically, through the log jam in the man’s brain.

  ‘Look. Here’s a letter from a Dr Abraham Hanson of the Woodside surgery in Fairburn.’

  ‘Fair-what? Never heard of the fucker.’

  ‘It’s a village about five kilometres back that way.’

  ‘Best go back that way, then. You’re not coming through.’

  ‘Look,’ Stephen struggled to keep cool. ‘We need to go through. We’re looking for baby food.’

  ‘Baby food?’

  Yes, it’s the stuff you feed to babies, you fucking arsehole. I thought it, but didn’t say it. Though I was mightily tempted.

  ‘There are about forty thousand people camped out at Fairburn,’ Stephen explained in a voice that was all reason and light. ‘There’s a lot of babies up there that need feeding. If we can’t get—’

  The sullen no-go, no-way look in the man’s eyes suddenly changed. He’d obviously suddenly got a mental picture of hungry babies crying for their feed.

  ‘Corp! Hey, corp!’ he shouted. ‘Moment of your time…please.’ The squaddie managed to make the ‘please’ sound like a profanity.

  Corp ambled up with a two-kilo plastic bag of rice in his hands that he was trying to tear open.

  ‘What’s up, Spud?’ He looked us up and down before returning to the bag.

  ‘These two lads want to go through to Leeds.’

  ‘You don’t want to go there, lads. Place isn’t safe.’

  ‘We don’t want to go into Leeds itself. We’re picking up supplies of baby food from supermarkets on the edge of town.’

  ‘You’re wasting your time. All the shops are shut.’

  ‘We know. We’re breaking in.’

  ‘Breaking in? Sure you’ve got authority?’

  ‘We’ve got this letter.’

  Corp read it, bored, before returning to the problem of the tough plastic that was for the moment keeping the dried rice from its appointment with a pan of boiling water. ‘It’s risky, boys. A: we don’t know if the gas has dispersed. B: you’ll have to be quick on the draw with that piece of paper of yours—our lot’ll be shooting looters, you know?’

  ‘We’ll be careful.’

  ‘You’re American?’ asked Corp, now taking his teeth to the plastic.

  ‘Yes, I’m American.’ I heard the sigh in Stephen’s voice that clearly meant, Oh Christ, here we go again.

  ‘I told him, Corp,’ the squaddie said with near-brutal satisfaction. ‘America’s fucked.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’ Corp’s teeth had ripped a hole in the bag; rice trickled out over his fists. ‘Shitting stupid packaging.’

  ‘What shall I do with these two, Corp?’

  Corp was more interested in getting the rice into his pan. ‘Uh? Oh, let ’em through. Just say we can’t guarantee their safety.’

  The squaddie turned back to relay the message to us. Stephen smiled politely. ‘It’s OK, we heard.’

  ‘Like the man said, be quick with the quack’s letter or you might end up with a shell between your ears.’

  ‘We will, thanks.’ Stephen gave an artificial smile. ‘And have a nice day.’

  ‘And make sure you stay out of Leeds. It’s all—’ The sound of our bikes’ engines drowned him out.

  As we headed into the suburbs we slowed to little more than walking speed. I pulled level with Stephen and said, ‘What do you think that squaddie meant by "America’s fucked?"‘

  ‘Search me. At first I thought he’d been out in the sun too long but the other guy was going to say the same thing.’

  ‘There’s been nothing on the news?’

  ‘There has been nothing on the news,’ Stephen agreed. ‘That’s just it. A big fat heap of nothing. Nothing specific, anyway. There’s only been general news reports. And have you noticed the national stations don’t even mention what’s happened in Leeds anymore? As far as the rest of the United Kingdom is concerned everything is just hunky-dory here.’

  We rode through a deserted housing estate. The streets were littered with blankets, pyjamas, socks, bedroom slippers, suitcases stuffed any old how with clothes, carrier bags with more clothes. And, resting on a garden wall, a bird cage with a budgie lying dead in the bottom.

  We paused to look round at the cluttered streets. We were smiling at each other; not because there was anything amusing or comic about the litter of personal effects dropped by people in their hurry to escape. The scene was simply too surreal to comprehend. Smiling was a way of dealing with the emotion it evoked.

  Because I realized then there was something frightening about the emptiness of the housing estate. All those semi-detached houses. All stripped stark bollock naked of human life. Just three days ago everyone who lived here had woken up choking for breath. That invisible gas had simply driven them out with what belongings they could snatch up as they stumbled from their houses. Clearly, many had realized as they’d hurried coughing and spluttering through those night-time streets that they’d tried to bring too much and they’d just dumped a suitcase here, a duvet there.

  So there we were, with the sun burning down, slowly weaving in and out of all those dumped holdalls, carrier bags, boxes, stiletto shoes, overcoats, broken prams.

  I felt my chest tighten. Was it the gas still lingering there? Or was it just because I found myself imagining only too clearly the panic that must have gripped that community when they woke up in the middle of the night knowing that for the first time in their lives the very air had turned poisonous?

  And at that time it was still a mystery where the gas had come from. Most guessed it was some kind of toxic spill from a chemical plant. On top of that, there were rumours circulating about a freak flood hitting London. Hard on the heels of that one were more stories about a major fire burning out the heart of Coventry and some kind of earthquake hitting Edinburgh. Not that those were taken seriously. At the time.

  ‘Rick…Rick.’ Stephen pointed at a mini-mart at the end of the road. ‘We’ll load up there.’

  It took a good twenty minutes of hammering to smash in the front door. Normally the store’s alarm system would have been shrieking distress all over the neighbourhood but with no electricity it stayed mute.

  We soon had the bike’s panniers full of the drums of powdered baby food. We filled backpacks, too. Stephen suggested that we get back to Fairburn as quickly as we could, then return with cars or even a truck. Although the roads were cluttered they weren’t impassable.

  I was more than ready to kick off the bikes and head back to Fairburn. To tell you the truth that silent hundred acres of middle-class suburban housing was preying on my nerves. A ghost-town? No. I wouldn’t even have called it a ghost town. Ghosts would have given the place a sense of occupancy. Here there was no one, and nothing but an oppressive sense of emptiness.

  ‘Hang on, Rick. I’m going to help myself to a soda. Want one?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, my throat’s as dry as sandpaper.’ In truth, I wanted us on those bikes and tearing out of town, but my throat had a dried-out burning feel to it. I could down a can of coke or whatever in ten seconds flat—then we could fire up the bikes and fuck off fast.

  The mini-mart, with the shutters locked down and the electricity killed, was a gloomy, shadowed place. I began to realize that if the townspeople didn’t return soon looters would move in to pick the shelves clean as a whistle. Even I was wondering whether to find space in my backpack f
ull of baby-milk powder for a bottle of scotch or two.

  ‘Stephen? Where are you?’

  ‘In the back. Through the door between the chill cabinets. Hold your breath as you come through, the dairy products are just a teeny-weeny bit past their sell-by date.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, you’re not kidding.’ The fresh foods were rotting on their shelves. I tried to keep exhaling all the way through into the back room, which served as a warehouse-cum-rest room complete with kitchen sink, kettle, carton of rancid milk and two easy chairs.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘I just wanted to rinse my face in the sink. It must be the dust but my eyes are stinging like crazy.’

  I remembered my dry throat. ‘Stephen. I think it must the gas; my throat feels as if I’ve swallowed sandpaper.’

  He turned on the cold water tap. It ran fast and clear. ‘I don’t think we need to worry too much. As far as the general viewpoint goes it was more an irritant than anything truly life-threatening. I’ll just sluice my face and we’ll hit the—’

  ‘What the Hell’s that noise?’

  Stephen smiled. ‘Sounds like your quaint British plumbing. Just listen to those pipes sing.’

  ‘Hardly sing, it sounds more like a jet taking off.’

  ‘Well, as long as it’s cold and wet.’ He began to splash water on his face. ‘Shit…they’ve got their hot and cold faucets mixed up. The water’s warm.’

  ‘Stephen…’ I noticed the pressure increase behind the water, driving it so forcefully from the tap it slammed against the sink bottom before splashing out onto the floor. ‘Stephen. There’s something wrong about all this.’

  ‘Just give me a minute to get some water into my eyes…feels like I’ve slept in contacts.’ The plumbing now thumped and clanged as though legions of demon drummers were beating the pipes with iron bars.

  Stephen cupped water to his face. ‘All right. You don’t know how good that feels. Maybe we should—’

  Brrrrrr…

  It sounded like a speedboat powering through the pipes from the mains. I could almost track the motor-like sound as it entered the mini-mart beneath the wall behind me and passed under my feet, making the concrete floor vibrate.