On Deadly Ground Page 6

  ‘Christ, what the hell’s happened there?’ he panted, looking down the steep banking. ‘Where did all that blood come from?’

  I wiped the sweat from my eyes. He was right. It was as if someone had drained off all the water then opened some huge sluice in a slaughter house. Now blood—or something that looked like blood—came gushing through the channel in a foaming, swirling wash of crimson.

  I shook my head. ‘Strange. During the summer it’s usually half the level it is now. And we’ve had no rain in days.’

  Hypnotized, we watched the blood-red water rush downhill in the direction of the footbridge. A log slid by, rolling over in the flood of bloody red, the grue dripping thickly from what remained of its branches.

  ‘Hell,’ Stephen said in a low voice. ‘You know what caused it, don’t you?’

  ‘No. What?’

  He nodded at something at the bottom of the banking. ‘Take a look for yourself.’

  I stepped onto the grassy bank that separated road from river and looked down. An unpleasant taste was rising up through my throat as I saw that lying there, half in and half out of the water, was a…

  I looked closer. ‘It’s an old car tyre. That — uph.’

  I felt the flat of his hand thump me between the shoulder blades. I went forwards. The only way I could stop myself pitching skull first into that crimson grue was to turn, fall flat on my stomach and grab at the long grass.

  ‘Sucker!’

  I looked up to see the huge grin on his face. Then he was gone.

  Damn! Fell for it again. Just like that gullible little brat with freckles and plazzy Robocop mask dangling around my neck.

  Swearing meatily, I scrambled up the bank to the track and ran like Lucifer himself had got a taste for my ass.

  I ran hard, air blasting into my face, but it was all shitstew by that time. When Stephen was almost at the bridge he stopped, shot me that wicked grin, then moved like he’d been filmed in slow-motion. One distinct step at a time, arms pumping mechanically in that same stop-go-stop way, he completed the last five taunting steps onto the bridge. Then he jumped on those feet that I swear to this day were spring-assisted; he punched the air and shouted, ‘Sucker! Where were you, Kid Kennedy? Where were you?’

  ‘Cheat.’

  ‘What, me?’ The blue eyes were wide with sweet innocence. ‘Me, baby brother? No way. Look, next time I’ll give you a sixty-second start.’

  ‘I don’t need a sixty-second start.’

  ‘Absolutely. You need a new set of pegs to replace those chalk sticks you’ve got sticking out the bottom of your fanny.’

  ‘You mean backside.’

  ‘I know what I mean. And I ain’t talking Yankee.’

  ‘You fucking—’

  ‘Right! I’m a fucking go-getting cheat, a fucking winner, I’m a fucking success…I’m like fucking you—a fucking Kennedy!’ He jumped down from the bridge and swung his arm, getting me in a neck lock. For a second I really thought this was it. Brother versus brother. We’ll punch each other out. But he gave a kind of Cherokee Brave whoop and ruffled my hair with his free hand.

  It was sheer exuberance on his part. And that flash of anger that had seared across me a moment ago was gone. We were both laughing, Stephen ruffled my hair again. ‘We’re the Kennedys. We’ve got balls of steel. And when we see something we want no one—nothing, nothing on this fucking planet, gets in our way. And don’t look at me like that. I know you’re ambitious as hell. You’ll get exactly what you want from life. Because whatever Dad might or might not have done for us, he gave us that need to win. You feel it, don’t you? It burns in your guts.’ He rubbed my stomach. ‘It burns there. And it’ll burn and burn until you get that thing you want. You know I’m right. Come on, kiddo, I’ll buy you a beer.’

  We headed back up the hill, slapping each other on the back and roaring with laughter. Anyone passing by would have wondered what kind of exotic powders we’d been inhaling up our nostrils. But it was sheer high spirits. The Kennedy brothers were a team again. Everything in the garden was rosy.

  And all the time that river of red flowed remorselessly by. It would have taken spit-all effort to imagine that the Earth was one almighty animal; that someone had hacked through an artery worming beneath its dirt skin. Now its life blood was spurting into that channel that had once held the River Tawn. And a million gallons of blood were hemorrhaging away to the distant, distant sea.

  Chapter 9

  ‘Rick. Who are all those people?’

  I opened my eyes. Stephen had come into my bedroom and was standing at the window, one hand pulling the curtain aside, the other hand on top of his head as if he’d seen something he didn’t understand.

  I rubbed my face. ‘Uh…what time is it?’

  He looked at me without answering. The blue eyes were calm but there was a message contained in the look he gave me that rolled a massive ball of ice clear through my stomach. I shivered and my skin goose-fleshed.

  ‘What people?’ I was out of bed and on my feet.

  He looked back out of the window. ‘Those people.’

  I didn’t like the tone in his voice; I didn’t like the way his blue eyes stared unblinking out of the window as if he’d just seen the cherry trees fruit human eyes.

  What people? Those people…I don’t know what people…was nothing to do with me…I didn’t do nothing…Just for a split second panic had me in its quivering fist. For the first time since Friday night I remembered that face in the wood. How it seemed to float above the ground. And how the next moment I’d been flat on my face, feeling a hand effortlessly hold me down.

  Now there were mysterious people out there. Would they all have grey faces? Would they…

  ‘Jesus Christ Almighty.’

  All thoughts of that bodyless face vanished. I stood beside Stephen and stared out at King Elmet’s Mile.

  Or, I should say, I stared at where King Elmet’s Mile should have been.

  ‘What on Earth are they doing here?’ Stephen whispered in awe.

  I looked out there with him. I saw a clear blue morning sky bisected by a single white jet trail. I saw the front garden. The red block driveway leading to twin wrought-iron gates. I saw the front lawn, with the diamond-shaped flowerbed cut out of its centre filled with wallflowers; Mum would hoe that diamond with such dedication that the soil was as loose as bread crumbs. I saw the privet hedge and Trueman Way beyond. Then I saw what was clearly impossible.

  I saw people.

  Not a dozen people. Not two dozen. Not fifty. Not a hundred. Not five hundred, not one thousand.

  I saw thousands.

  Thousands and thousands. It was just a living sea of heads stretching across the road, across the meadow and up to and, as far as I could tell, into the woods. Looking left, I saw the road packed with more people. Beyond that Boycott Drive was choked with a log-jam of more human beings.

  I turned and looked at my clock radio to fix the time in my head. It was Sunday morning. The time, 7:11. At that moment it seemed important I should remember the fact. I had the feeling that someday I would have to stand up at a public tribunal and give evidence about what I saw that day.

  And what the Hell did I see? I saw Fairburn submerged under a tidal wave of human beings—men, women, children. Trails of blue smoke from fifty campfires stood in spindly columns in the still morning air.

  And Stephen and I stood there and we watched. We didn’t move. I don’t think we even breathed. There was just this incredible fascination for what was laid out there before our eyes. Even though all the public places were packed tight with people, all the private gardens were just as they always had been. Civilization still held sway there, and the garden boundaries were respected even though drive gates might have been left open.

  All I could compare it to was on open-air rock concert. The same massed crowds making themselves as comfortable as they could with nothing more than grass to sit on.

  ‘Some of those people are in their night c
lothes,’ I heard Stephen say in a hushed voice. ‘Pyjamas and dressing gowns. Look at the baby wrapped in a blanket.’

  Stephen was looking at individuals in the crowd—not just a mass of heads. I zoomed in, too. There were middle-aged women in nightdresses with duvets round their shoulders like mediaeval cloaks. Most people were sitting on the grass or half lying. Mothers and fathers sat with children and babies on their laps. Grown men stood in pyjamas or day clothes, or a bizarre mixture of the two. On their faces were the expressions I’d seen on kids who’d just started a new school. A kind of lost and lonely expression, with just a dash of expectancy as if they thought someone would come along in a minute or so and tell them which classroom they should be in.

  At 7:17 the telephone rang. I learned later that everyone’s telephone had rung at exactly the same time. When I answered it, I heard a kind of long-drawn sigh; slowly it faded to an echo that shimmered eerily for ten seconds or so before dying away into silence. Oddly, it reminded me of the sigh our dog Amber had made as she had lain on the blanket in the garden. It had been my fifteenth birthday. And after a long, healthy life Amber was now dying of old age. And as she finally slipped away, the spark fading from her eyes, I heard her make that long, long-drawn-out sigh that seemed to come not from her lungs but from somewhere even deeper inside of her. Perhaps from the part where her soul was anchored. Now it was letting go.

  We buried her in that diamond of soil there in the middle of the garden.

  And now I’d just heard that same sigh as something beautiful died. Of course, it must have been just some silicon chip the size of your little fingernail going on the fritz at the telephone exchange in Leeds. But that’s the sound it made. And in twenty thousand homes all the telephones had rung like a twentieth-century death knell.

  I looked out at that living carpet of humanity, their shoulders hunched, faces stamped hard with exhaustion. That morning I’d planned to drive into Leeds for the rehearsal, and by devious means I’d arranged we’d go out in the evening to the Pizza Express where I knew Kate Robinson and her friends would be eating—where I could oh-so-coincidentally bump into her, casually chat, then move in and ask her for a date.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  I knew that as clearly as I saw ten thousand refugees squatting out there on the field with no food, no shelter, no water. The world had changed. The future was going to be different.

  We were going to be different. We were going to have to be different. Or we would die.

  I shook my head, feeling cold and dazed. ‘Stephen…what do you think happened?’

  He looked at me. ‘There’s only one way to find out.’ He walked quickly from the room.

  Chapter 10

  That’s the Brits for you. They’d rather die in the gutter than ask for help.

  All that Sunday not one of those thousands asked for anything.

  On Monday people started coming to the door. Not a mad rush, mind you: just the odd one, maybe a young mother in a muddy nightie with a toddler hanging onto her fist; or an old guy in PJs and a raincoat that’d seen sunnier days; or a father in a tracksuit and shiny brogues.

  ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, but my children are hungry. Could you spare them a slice of bread?’

  Or:

  ‘I’ve managed to get hold of some tinned stew but I haven’t any matches to light a fire. Could you spare me a box…not a full one, mind, just a few matches.’

  Or:

  ‘I’m sorry to give you any grief, sir, I really am. But I think my daughter’s picked up some bug. She’s three years old. I just wondered if I could…no, I’m sorry…it’s rude of me to ask. Goodbye.’

  Or:

  ‘Ah, my wife’s not feeling too well, young man; do you have any aspirin?’

  Or:

  ‘My baby’s feeling cold. I must have a blanket.’

  Getting that bit more desperate, that bit more demanding with every hour that passed. I did what I could for the people who did knock on the door, we all did. But I realized that for every one who came and asked for food or matches, or a pair of old shoes, there were hundreds who suffered in silence, either too proud or too shy to ask. Which only confirmed what I’d realized years ago: those who shout loud enough get what they want; those who politely keep quiet and wait in turn get sweet Fanny Adams. Such is life.

  So, it was clear enough to me then that when people started to beg from complete strangers it meant just one thing:

  Civilization was turning belly up.

  Within an hour of Stephen and I staring out at what looked like a re-enactment of a refugee camp on the edge of some African war-zone, we’d heard enough to get a pretty clear picture of what was going down.

  Sometime Friday night the people of Leeds had woken with sore throats. Their eyes watered. They started coughing. Within an hour everyone in the city was choking. Eyes were streaming, throats felt on fire, folk couldn’t breathe; their lungs hurt so much they felt full of broken glass. Thousands must have thought they were having an asthma attack or a coronary. But it was soon clear it was more than that. Families, neighbours, the cops in the police station, the staff at 24-hour filling stations—the city’s entire population was gasping for breath.

  The instinct for self-preservation kicked in. Those that could drive, drove. Those that could walk, walked. The entire population of Leeds just upped and went.

  That same instinct drove them uphill as they guessed the cause of their problem was a toxic gas. If they headed for the high ground, they realized, they could reach good, sweet air.

  A few hours later they did. And one of those pieces of high ground was Fairburn.

  Now we had forty thousand souls camped out in a village of seven hundred. As I said, many were in their nightclothes. They had no food, no shelter.

  They depended on the mercy of the good folk of Fairburn. As you’d expect, its residents rolled up their sleeves and did what they could.

  There had been an emergency meeting of the parish council, which luckily included a good few of the movers and shakers of Fairburn. Later that day Ben Cavellero called.

  I offered him a beer but he declined in favour of a mineral water. Stephen and I sat on the breakfast-bar stools in the kitchen as he leaned back against the worktop and said, ‘the shit’s hit the fan. We’re expected to feed the forty thousand and we’ve no food.’

  Stephen opened a beer. ‘We can pool what food we’ve got; that’ll keep them ticking over until the emergency services get their act together to provide proper feeding stations.’

  Ben looked at each of us in turn. ‘As I said, the shit has hit the fan.’

  ‘This can only be temporary. Whatever gas it is down there in Leeds’ll dissipate in an hour or two, then everyone can go home.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, but something…peculiar has happened.’

  ‘Peculiar? It’s some kind of toxic spill, right? Or some factory’s caught fire like…where was that place in India?’

  ‘Bopal,’ I supplied.

  ‘Yeah, Bopal,’ Stephen took a deep swallow of beer. ‘Yeah, there was a discharge of toxic gas there that killed thousands. Luckily, from what I’ve heard, there’s been no fatalities in Leeds, but—’

  ‘Stephen. Rick.’ I’d not seen Ben like this before. He was edgy. He glanced back at the door as if afraid of being overheard. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not scaremongering. But something’s just not right. I don’t think Leeds is the only place to be affected.’

  Stephen and I glanced at each other and said the same thing. ‘Terrorists?’

  Stephen added, ‘They think there’s been some kind of gas attack? Has London—’

  ‘London’s a different matter again. Early this morning one of the parish councillors had a call from his brother who lives in Chelsea. The brother said, I quote: ‘Shit…shit. The house is surrounded by water. I’m on the landing. Shit, you can actually see it coming up the stairs.’ That’s when the phone went dead.’

  We shook our head
s. None of this made much sense. We’d just got our heads round the fact that the population of Leeds had been gassed from its beds. Now London? Hit by flood?

  ‘But we’ve heard nothing on the news.’

  ‘Precisely. But not all the London-based stations are on air. And those that are broadcasting are using different presenters and DJs.’

  ‘Then the government are covering all this up?’

  Ben shrugged. ‘It’s too early to claim any conspiracy. The radio station in Bradford is covering the story about Leeds, but it’s all pretty vague. No one really knows what’s happening.’

  ‘So I suppose we sit tight.’ Stephen managed a smile. ‘Bang goes our pizza in town tonight.’

  Then it hit me. Kate Robinson lived slam in the centre of Leeds. What had happened to her?

  Twenty of us sat on the back lawn at Pat Murray’s house in the village. It had been a slog just getting there. The four-minute walk had taken twenty minutes because we literally had to step over people who lay or sat elbow to arse in the road. It was now mid-afternoon on that first Sunday. Most people had recovered from their long hike from Leeds up to Fairburn and were telling each other their experiences and also telling each other what they thought of the tinpot shit-for-brains government for not organizing emergency food deliveries. It got worse at the centre of the village where they clustered a hundred deep round the village pond for water.

  Howard Sparkman caught my eye. ‘The place is going to be hit by one almighty diarrhoea-flood if they keep drinking that pond water.’

  Dean chipped in, ‘When we were kids we all used to stand on the wall and pee in there on the way home from school.’

  ‘You still do, Dean, you still do.’

  ‘Ah…if I can just have a word with you ladies and gentlemen.’ Pat Murray was a fit-looking seventy-year-old with a friendly twinkle in his eye. He’d held a senior position in the local fire service before retirement and there was something solid and reassuring about him. If he’d said ‘ladies and gentlemen, a nuclear attack has just been launched, but no harm will come to you if you put a brown paper bag over your head,’ well, I think most of us would have believed him. Another of life’s truths. If you want someone to trust you, it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it that counts.