Flare (6 page)

Chapter
9

“What I’d like to know”, the man said, his voice low and dangerous, “is what makes you think that it’s ok to break into my barn, and why I shouldn’t just shoot you on the spot and have done with it?”

“Uh, look, about the lock”, Jerry began, but the man spoke over him as if he hadn’t uttered a word.

“It’s not like the police’ll be interested, not if what you’re saying is right.  I could say that I caught you breaking in and I shot you in s
elf-defence.  I doubt they’d worry overmuch, and that’s if they ever even found you”.

I’d
never come so close to losing control of my bladder.  As the man stepped into the pool of light from the lamp, I realised that he was older than I had first though, somewhere close to seventy.  His hands, I noticed however, didn’t so much as tremble as he kept the barrels aimed at my chest.  He had pure white hair sticking out above his ears and disappearing up under the cap, and several days-worth of stubble beneath eyes that were cold enough to belong to a serial killer.

I raised my hands slowly, terrified that each movement might be my last.

“Look, sir, I’m really sorry about the lock”, I began, leaving a pause to make sure he was listening, then hurrying on when he tilted his head.  “I’m injured, and we had to find somewhere safe, somewhere away from the towns.  It’s crazy out there, everything has gone to hell”.

My arms began to shake from the strain of holding them so high, and Jerry looked like a rabbit caught in a set of headlights, his back stiff and eyes ludicrously wide.

“Please, sir, we’ll pay you for the lock, and for your trouble”.

The man spat on the floor, never once taking his eyes from mine.

“And what good is money now, eh?  And how do I know you two ain’t looters or worse?  You might be escaped murderers for all I know, on the run from the law now the ‘lectric’s gone off.  Might be I’m better off putting you two in the ground and cutting my losses instead of leaving you at my back, eh?”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.  There were a million things that might have made a difference, but all I could do was stare at the shotgun, waiting for the blast that would end my life.

“Come on Ralph, you’ve had your fun.  You can see he’s injured, the poor boy, so stop playing the fool and give them a hand, why don’t you?”

The voice came from behind the old man, and he turned his head while keeping the shotgun pointed at me.

“I told you to stay in the house, woman!” He roared angrily, “this is no place for you, not on a night like this, what if they’d been criminals, eh?  They would have had their way with you after they’d finished with me!”

A woman easily as old as Ralph moved into the lamplight, her white hair up in curlers but the rest of her covered in practical clothes almost identical to the man’s.  She seemed completely unfazed by his anger, instead moving closer to get a better view through the glasses that she raised from the chain around her neck.

“I should be so lucky”, she said with a smile in our direction, “the last time anyone wanted to have their way with me was, well, when was it Ralph?”

Even in the dim light I saw him go red from collar to cap as she continued to move closer.

“You’ll have to forgive my husband”, she said, “he’s a little overprotective at times.  And he’s been looking for someone else to shoot since that poacher back in 1967, not that he’d hurt a fly, normally, despite his manners”.

She shot him a look which he ignored, stepping closer to us and keeping the shotgun trained on me.

“Careful Harriet”, he said with a frown, “that one on the hay looks shifty, don’t get too close”.

“I can assure you I’m anything but shifty”, I said, my voice several octaves higher than usual, “my name’s Malcolm King, and I’m a journalist.  I live in Brighton and I’m trying to get to Manchester to get my daughter.  I was on the phone to her when the flare hit and Jerry promised to drive me.  He’s an astrophysicist and his car works…”  I realised I was babbling and clamped my mouth shut. 
The woman still had a smile on her face but I couldn’t take my eyes off the shotgun and the frown just behind it, wondering if these would be my last few seconds on earth.

Ralph spat on the floor again.

“Journalist, eh?  Said you looked shifty.  So what was that you were saying about a flare?  I thought this was just a power cut.  We get enough of ‘em around here”.

“That’s what happened”, I said, looking to Jerry for some support but seeing that he was rooted to the spot, unable to move, “a solar flare.  The sun let off a burst of energy and it fried everything electronic.  You must have noticed?”

The old man shrugged.  “Like I said, we get four, maybe five power cuts a year, don’t affect us much living out here so didn’t pay it much thought.  How bad is it?”

“Bad”, I said, my biceps beginning to shake as if I was palsied, “from what we can tell everything has stopped working, even the cars”.

“Yours works ok, saw it driving up”.  The accusation in his tone was enough to set my heart racing again.  All it would take was a twitch of his finger and I’d be nothing but a dim memory and a red smear on the wall.

“It’s Jerry’s”, I said frantically, “mine stopped working the same as all the other newer ones, but his is old and it doesn’t rely on computers like mine does”.

His eyes narrowed, and then widened as Harriet walked calmly between me and the shotgun, blocking his view.  He immediately raised the weapon, pointing it safely at the ceiling.

“God damn it woman!”  He yelled, loud enough to wake the dead.  “Don’t you know anything?  Get out of my way!”

The smile finally dropped from her face and she turned towards him, raising an eyebrow.  She said nothing, just looked at him for several long seconds, then turned back to me and smiled again.

“What did you do to your foot?”  She asked, walking up to me and placing a hand on one of my arms to gently lower it.

“We saw a truck”, I said, rubbing my arms to restore the circulation, “and I thought the driver was injured so we tried to get him out.  Turns out he was bigger than me and Jerry put together and dead with it, and he fell on me”.

Just thinking about being buried under all that dead flesh brought the memory back sharp and clear enough that I could feel the panic rising in my chest again.  I took several deep breaths and
pushed it away as she sat next to me and without asking took my bandaged foot, placing it carefully in her lap as she unwrapped it.

“Who put this bandage on?”

Jerry finally found his voice.

“I did”.

“Well it was nice of you to try and help your friend but it’s a good job I came along when I did.  It was on so tight the circulation was being cut off.  Another couple of hours and it would have caused permanent damage.  What do they teach you nowadays?”

“I’m an astrophysicist, not a nurse!”

“Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know how to tie a bandage.  My Emily could tie one better than this by the time she was five”.  She looked up at her husband, who still pointed the shotgun at the roof but glared at us as if he’d rather have it shoved in our faces.

“Ralph, we need to get this boy to the cottage so I can look at his ankle properly.  I think it’s just a bad sprain but it might be broken.  How about you take him in the car and I’ll have young Jerry walk me back?”

Ralph growled, squinted and spat, but to my relief did as he was told, helping Jerry to gather our equipment and stow it in the car while Harriet, surprisingly strong for her age, helped me out to the car.

“Thank you”, I said with feeling as she guided me out into the night, “I really appreciate this.  I’m sorry about the lock on the barn, and of course we’ll pay for it”.

“Oh shush”, she said, as if I were apologising for smashing a glass, not for breaking into their barn, “it’s not even ours anyway.  We’re caretakers, of a sort, and the farm isn’t producing at the moment anyway, so there’s no one breathing down our necks about repairs and such”.

I was about to ask her what she meant when Jerry took me off her hands, easing me into the passenger seat while Ralph sat on the driver’s side, the shotgun next to his door where I couldn’t reach it.

As he drove away slowly, following a track that led away from the barn and across the field, I glanced back to see Jerry awkwardly offer his arm to the old woman as they followed.

“Thank you for helping us, you won’t regret it, I promise”, I said to Ralph, but instead of replying he just grunted and patted the shotgun, as if reminding me of who was in charge and what would happen if I tried anything.

As if it was something I was likely to forget.  I knew, for better or for worse, that no matter what Harriet might think, we were completely at her husband’s mercy and should he decide that we were too much of a risk, there wasn’t much we could do to stop him from putting us in the ground.

Chapter 10

 
We pulled up in the yard of a medium-sized, two storey cottage that looked to have been built around the turn of the last century.  It was built of solid-looking red brick, with ivy liberally covering the wall nearest to us, two small windows peeking out from between the leaves.

The yard itself was large enough to park half a dozen cars, with an open-sided stable that had been converted into a garage for a car that was currently covered with a dust sheet.

On the far side of the cottage, I could just make out some kind of vegetable garden, plants growing in neatly ordered rows with some clinging to a framework of bamboo.  Just past that, I could see another shed, and from this came the lowing of a cow seemingly disturbed by the sound of the engine.

As I opened the door of the car, a black and white border collie began to bark excitedly, running up to sniff at me, tail wagging as one blue and one brown eye looked up at me with fierce intelligence and a questioning look.

“Maggie, quiet!”  Ralph snapped at her, and she stopped barking, instead growling low in her throat even as her tail wagged and she continued to sniff every part of me she could reach.

“I take it she’s friendly?”  I asked, easing myself out of the car and leaning against the door while she investigated my injured ankle.

“Friendlier than some who don’t think you should be here”, he said, then collected his shotgun and stood with it casually tucked under his arm as we waited for Harriet and Jerry to catch up.

I spent the time looking at the cottage and the fields surrounding it, realising that the reason we hadn’t seen it from the road was the gentle roll of the ground, forming a natural dell with a small hump in the middle upon which the building stood.

The yard itself was made from concrete, the only mud on it from the tracks the car had made coming in.  The rest of it was scrubbed bare and clean, with nothing in the yard so much as an inch out of kilter.

Jerry and Harriet came into the yard a few minutes later, chatting and laughing like old friends.  I wondered how someone as friendly and likeable as Harriet had married someone as grim and forbidding as Ralph, but
I knew from experience that some marriages just worked and some didn’t, no matter the demeanour of the participants.

“Ralph Morris, have you left that poor man standing in the cold with an injured ankle?”  Harriet demanded as soon as she saw us standing there.  “Honestly Ralph, have you no shame?”

He stiffened and glared at me as if it was my fault that he was being dressed down by his wife.

“Not when it comes to your safety, no.  I wanted to make sure that your man there behaved himself”.

Harriet shook her head in frustration and came around the car to me, brushing an excited Maggie out of the way.

“I’m sorry dear, let’s get you inside and get that foot seen to.  Welcome to Bramble Cottage”.

With her on one side and Jerry on the other, I was almost carried inside while Ralph followed behind, out of sight but still obvious by the stony silence he carried with him.

The door they led me through opened into a large kitchen with a parquet floor, in the centre of which stood a table more than large enough for the eight chairs that sat around it.

Every wall was covered in shelves, and all the shelves were packed with jars, bottles and packets of things I couldn’t identify in the light of the torches Jerry and Harriet carried.

Three of the walls had doors seemingly nestled between the shelves, while the fourth had a long, low cooking range finished in dull enamel, from which two large pipes emerged and ran up the wall to disappear into the ceiling.

The range gave off a warmth that instantly made it feel homely, and as they placed me carefully in one of the chairs I could smell a dozen different spices and the faint scent of cooking meat.

Maggie had followed us in and immediately made for the range, curling up in front
of it on a tattered old blanket while Harriet bustled about and lit several oil lamps, their glow surprisingly bright.