Refuge Read online

  ‘I don’t even know what they are.’

  ‘Four-wheeled motorbike things. For rough terrain. Good for sheep farms.’

  ‘We don’t have any sheep.’

  ‘I know.’ As he was writing, he could feel the increasingly anxious force of her gaze. He wondered how fifty survivors had managed to come together, form a stable community and live together for so long, presumably in harmony. ‘Has anyone tried to do anything about this Bex?’

  ‘Only one.’

  ‘Martin?’

  ‘He didn’t have a chance.’

  Cowards, then. The other men in the village. As usual. ‘I think I may have found Martin’s body,’ Suter said. ‘Was he thrown in the river?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he was.’

  ‘Did he have blond hair, a leather jacket, corduroy jeans?’

  She put a hand to her face. Suter noticed the gleam of tears.

  ‘What did Bex do to him?’

  ‘In person, nothing. It was the others. They tied him upside-down and tortured him.’

  ‘No one tried to help?’

  She shook her head. ‘How could we? Then … then they plucked out his eyes. Bex ate them.’

  ‘What?’

  She did not answer. Suter realised she was in a state of extreme shock, possibly nearing mental collapse. ‘I cremated the body,’ he told her, stammering slightly. ‘I said a few words, though I didn’t know who he was.’

  She stared at the ground.

  He reached into his pocket. ‘I found this,’ he said, handing her the soapstone bonze. ‘It may have meant something to him. Give it to his wife when you can. If she’s still alive.’

  The woman wiped away her tears and took the figurine. ‘I don’t recognise it,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure Helen will. She’ll be very grateful. For everything you did.’

  Suter snapped the elastic strap keeping his notebook shut. He slid the notebook into his inner jacket pocket and beside it clipped his propelling pencil. Again he felt her gaze following his every action. He knew what was coming next and had already decided how to respond.

  ‘John,’ she said, using his name for the first time. ‘You did say I could call you that, didn’t you?’

  He looked up.

  ‘Will you help us?’

  ‘I’m sorry. None of this is my concern.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘If I were one of the men in your village, I would have fixed things already.’ He nodded at the fungus-basket. ‘Poison him.’

  ‘Helen has to taste all his food. He’s confiscated everything that can be used as a weapon.’

  ‘Use a brick.’

  ‘No. There’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘There’s always something you can do.’

  ‘I’m begging you. You’re our only hope.’

  Suter was on the verge of saying, ‘I thought you believed in God.’ Instead he got to his feet and held out a hand, which she disregarded, standing up unaided.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said bitterly, ‘just before I found you I was praying for a miracle. When I saw you lying there I really thought my prayer had been heard. I really thought you were an angel come down from heaven to help us.’

  God’s like that, Suter thought. Bit of a practical joker. ‘There’s only one way to deal with your problem. The plague must have taught you that. If you don’t collectively do what has to be done, you’ll all end up dead. Better to lose a few than lose everybody.’

  ‘I was going to invite you to join our community.’

  ‘I live alone.’

  ‘Please. Please don’t just walk away.’

  Suter reconsidered what he had said and could find nothing wrong with it. He liked this woman, respected her decency and courage, and for that reason might even at one time have been willing to help her. But he cared just as much about the people of Shanley as they cared about him, or would care if they knew of his existence. Which was to say, not at all.

  ‘I won’t help you myself,’ he said, at length. ‘But you can have this, if you like.’ He proffered the Glock; he had duplicates at home. ‘There must be at least one man in your village brave enough to use it. Give it to him. Tell him to shoot Bex first, in the upper body, at least five times. Then he must get as many of the others as he can. If you can devise a plan involving a number of villagers, so much the better.’

  Slowly, reluctantly, she reached out.

  ‘It’s called a Glock 18,’ Suter said, as she took it. He stood beside her. ‘There’s no conventional safety catch. This second trigger is the safety spur. Just pull the whole assembly when you want to fire. Keep the trigger squeezed to go into cyclic mode. That means continuous fire. In cyclic mode a magazine lasts one and half seconds. When the magazine’s empty you plug in another.’ He reached into a back pocket. ‘The one in there’s full. Here’s a spare. Thirty-three rounds, so you’ve sixty-six in all. Nine millimetre calibre, high muzzle velocity. Tell your man it’s effective up to about fifty yards, reasonably accurate up to thirty or thirty-five. If he’s never fired one before, he should just get in as close as he can.’

  He stood back. ‘Can you remember all that?’

  ‘I should imagine so.’

  ‘It’s very, very dangerous. I suggest you wrap it in that piece of plastic and hide it on the outskirts of the village. Your man should recover it at night, preferably in the early hours. Say four o’clock.’

  She eyed him reprovingly. ‘Can we have your shotgun, too?’

  ‘I need that. For dogs.’

  ‘What’s in the case?’

  ‘A rifle.’

  ‘Can we have it?’

  ‘No.’

  She did as he had suggested and wrapped the Glock in the polythene, then bent and concealed the bundle in her fungus-basket. ‘I’m not going to thank you,’ she said. ‘If I were you, I’d be feeling rather ashamed of myself.’ She hoisted the basket on her shoulders.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ Suter said. ‘Upper body. Minimum of five rounds.’

  Without another word, she turned on her heel, towards the interior of the wood, and set out.

  6

  Despite everything, the daily work had to go on. The bread had to be baked, the chickens fed, the herd of Guernseys milked. Since dawn, Leigh Fernihough had been one of those forking up maincrop carrots in the rain, repeatedly trudging through the furrows with his mud-clogged basket on his shoulder and tipping its contents on the growing pile in the cart. At midday, Goddard had hitched one of the draught horses to the cart, which he had then driven down to the farm. Two of the diggers had got a lift back with him, legs dangling over the open tailboard, but not Leigh Fernihough.

  In the hierarchy of the village, Fernihough occupied a place somewhere near the bottom. He was not allowed to operate machinery, even though he worked mainly in the orchards, fruit-cages and vegetable fields. His customary pew was located at the back of the church and only occasionally was he asked to read the lesson. Yet, always equable, always content with whatever decisions the Council handed down, he seemed a man devoid of ambition.

  Fernihough had been among the first to respond to the founding balloon-messages sent out by Philip Davies. He arrived at Shanley on 29 May, 2017, a week after his twenty-third birthday. By then, Davies was already styling himself ‘head man’ and had adopted the habit of issuing orders to everyone else: to Helen, of course, to Muriel Taylor and Jack Sturges, and then, in turn, to Fernihough. The democratisation of society, its feminisation, its consequent decadence and collapse, had no place in Davies’s scheme for the future.

  His interrogation of the newcomer was unskilful and easily circumvented, typical of the civil servant that Davies once had been. Fernihough failed to divulge certain facts about himself: such that he had rejected the opportunity to read maths at Oxford, preferring to leave school at eighteen and join a merchant bank, or that he had, during his four years in the City, probably earned more than the would-be hierarch had in his entire career.

  Fernihough’s reti
cence sprang from a desire for self-preservation. He immediately perceived the way the government of Shanley was likely to be conducted. He had no time for any deity, certainly not the vengeful tyrant of the Old Testament nor his deluded son, but Shanley was the only haven on offer and Fernihough knew full well that he could not survive without one. He therefore acquiesced in Davies’s view and became a member of the congregation.

  For several years he lived a dual existence. In the fields, in the church and at social events, he played the simpleton. But on retiring to the cottage where he dwelt alone, he escaped into his books. His library he kept out of sight, in a spare bedroom, and allowed at most one volume downstairs at a time. Many of the titles had been gathered in his first few months in the village, on excursions to Watford and elsewhere. His mind was nurtured by a secret world of the imagination, over-arching the two-dimensional life of the village. He entrusted his sanity to his pantheon of dead authors and poets. They kept him company and made his very existence tolerable.

  It had astonished nearly everyone when, at the age of twenty-nine, he had proposed to, and been accepted by, Melissa Hallam. Even though there was little choice of eligible men in Shanley, and even though he was supposed to be reasonably personable, Fernihough knew the other women felt she had married beneath her. Her former husband and small son had died in the plague. With her university education and her capacity for clear thought, she would surely have served on the Council, had she been a man. Her wedding to Fernihough had coincided with her thirty-third birthday. She had given birth to two daughters, now two and four years of age.

  Outside his back door, Fernihough fitted the right heel of his gumboot between the horns of the cast-iron beetle and pulled. As the boot came off, Melissa appeared at the threshold, drying her hands on a towel.

  ‘Leigh,’ she said. ‘There’s been another rape.’

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Bex, ensconced in one of the big sofas in the white drawing room, crossed his legs and admired his new boots. His chinos, too, were new, as was his plaid shirt, green and grey and white. He liked the feel of fresh clothes, clean underpants. In matters of grooming, no effort was too great to spare. He was most particular about his hands, and especially his fingernails. The nicotine stain between the index and middle fingers of his right hand had deepened sufficiently for him to resolve to find a cigarette holder.

  Danzo was waiting for him to reply.

  The silence grew longer.

  Since early today, Bex had again been experiencing the sensation that other people, including himself, were nothing more than apes, as absurd and predictable as they were voluptuary and pretentious. Danzo, for instance, exhibited many simian characteristics. His melancholy brown eyes resembled exactly those of a chimpanzee; his voice, with its woolly timbre, would be ideal, once he had hoisted himself into the tropical canopy, for hooting defiance at a neighbouring but unseen troop of rivals.

  He heard him say, ‘But I want to, as well.’

  Bex looked up. Ape-vision, as he privately termed it, was he supposed just a corollary of skeleton-vision: that phenomenon of consciousness during which he became aware of others’ bones and skulls and articulations, especially when they were moving about, and sometimes, very disturbingly, when he was engaged in sexual intercourse.

  Bex said, ‘No. Not yet.’

  ‘Fuck it, Bex, we’ve been here, what, over two weeks. How much longer?’

  ‘Till I say. Then you can all do whatever you like. As a matter of fact, I’ll participate. Show you spastics how to inflict.’

  ‘The other guys —’

  Bex held up his left hand as if to say, ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Sorry, Bex.’

  ‘Puff.’

  His apish bronchi again craved baccy: tar, nicotine, carbon monoxide. He was smoking too much these days. His intention to stop, which at present had the status of mere velleity, needed to be upgraded to a proper decision: he despised addiction of any sort. Apart from moderate quantities of alcohol, tobacco was the only drug he permitted his disciples. Anything more interesting might lead to insurrection on their part and loss of authority on his.

  Danzo, a subordinate male, duly tossed him a packet of Marlboros. He was seated opposite, on a second sofa. ‘We’re fed up, ’s all.’

  ‘Look. No one else gets washed till I say. Not yet. Understand?’ He regarded Danzo coolly for a moment before lighting up. ‘Once we start on that kind of fun, we’ve got to finish it. That means moving on again. And the omens are not yet favourable.’

  ‘Excrementum tauri.’

  Bex gave an acid smile and inclined his head, acknowledging his own phrase. ‘Do you presume to question the puissance of my occult powers?’

  ‘No, Your Omniscience.’

  Danzo had been with Bex from the beginning. They had grown up together at Byfield. He knew the origins of the New Order; knew the way Bex had fabricated its elements. His prosaic intellect was incapable of understanding how matters had since evolved. When alone with him, Bex had to keep up an act. That was another and even more compelling reason why Danzo had to go.

  ‘We need more truck trips,’ Bex said. ‘Get extra puffs, if nothing else. Better hardware, maybe. I’ll send Redmond and Stolly this afternoon. All in, I reckon another week in this hole. Thing is, I don’t know where to make for next. I’m still working on friend Philip.’

  ‘You think he’s holding out?’

  ‘Can’t say.’ Bex realised he had not really wanted his cigarette and flicked it, smouldering, on the Persian carpet at his feet.

  Abruptly he stood up, went to the French window, and looked out into the rain-sodden grounds. What he had just told Danzo was true: he did not know where next to lead his disciples. He was beginning to believe that the head man really wasn’t in contact with any other settlements. As for the other villagers, none of them, even under duress, could provide a clue.

  Without looking round, Bex said, ‘Shog off, Danzo, there’s a good chap. And tell Redmond I want a word.’

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  No sooner had the woman disappeared among the trees than Suter regretted the quixotic impulse to which he had given way. Perhaps the hallucinatory experience of meeting and talking to another human being had caused his lapse of judgement. Whichever way he looked at the encounter, he saw that he had acted foolishly. To have handed her the weapon at all, to have given her the opportunity of shooting him, was an even bigger mistake than letting her creep up on him in the first place. And now he had let her take a Glock 18 back to the village, together with an accurate description of him and his whereabouts.

  ‘Cretin.’

  ‘You should have pulled the trigger when you had the chance.’

  He thought of running after her to get his gun back.

  Instead he bundled up his belongings, left now with no realistic option but to keep to his original plan and continue his reconnaissance from the other side of the village. He certainly could not stay here.

  Continuing to curse himself under his breath, he donned the burden of his pack and, adjusting the frame, made the weight as comfortable as he could. He hung the rifle case from his left shoulder. The shotgun he carried, as usual, in the crook of his right arm.

  The ground showed unmistakable signs of disturbance: crushed and flattened stems, disarranged leaf-litter. With his boot he covered the core of an apple he had eaten earlier.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he breathed. They probably weren’t up to tracking, wouldn’t have the skill or patience, or else they’d be out of their heads on drugs. Nevertheless, he trod gingerly, covering the first fifty yards with all the caution he could muster. When he came to the path he stepped right over it and continued through the light understorey of bramble and holly.

  The woods here comprised mainly beech, with a scattering of hornbeam and cherry. The slope, the character of the woods, the quality of the place: all were quite unfamiliar to him, though he knew he must have walked this ground as a boy. What would he have made
of this future, had he been able to foresee it?

  Pausing now and then to check the compass, he found his way back to a narrow but well-defined footpath. This led to the low footbridge by which, at first light today, he had crossed to the northern side of the valley. As he drew near he stopped more and more often and for longer periods, straining for sight or sound of people. He detected neither, and at last decided to step out of the trees.

  The footbridge was located in a small clearing among stands of goat willow and stood upstream from a kind of fish-trap, panels of wattle forming a funnel behind which, he supposed, a net could be fixed. At dawn today the dismaying sight of this structure, and of the footbridge beyond, had been his first unequivocal evidence that he really was close to an occupied human settlement. The village itself, he had discovered later, lay upstream from the footbridge. Beyond the bridge the path divided and disappeared into a rank growth of willowherb, the stems and leaves now turning brown.

  At dawn, mist had fumed the river. He had crossed quickly, wraith-like in the twilight, and vanished into the woods, there to try to suppress the feelings of certainty and dread that had risen in his breast.

  Now, as he approached the bridge for the second time, he no longer knew what he felt, except perhaps an overwhelming desire to get away.

  The air was cool, motionless but for the rain and the gurgling of the current. A moorhen’s cry, ‘Jekyll!’, broke from the bur-reeds and sedges downstream.

  Suter deemed it safe to proceed.

  Just as he set foot on the wooden surface of the bridge, he heard but did not at first recognise, from the direction of the village, a brief and muffled crepitation. It was followed by another, somewhat longer, and yet another, yielding abruptly to the appalled silence that follows the sound of automatic gunfire. Glock fire.

  ‘You’ve done it now all right, you stupid cunt!’

  In an agony of self-revilement he sprinted across the bridge and through the willowherb.

  Maybe it hadn’t been his own pistol. Or maybe, hope against hope, Muriel had actually nailed Bex with one of those three bursts. For, knowing there was not a single man in the village worthy of the name, she must have marched straight back there to kill her chief tormentor.