Going Gone, Book 2 of the Irish End Games (4 page)

D
enny Correy rolled
off the young teenager, slapping her bare bum as he did. He wouldn't have her leaking all over the floor for him to step in. It was for precisely this reason he didn't allow the little piece in his bed. “Off you go now,” he said, as he stood to pull his jeans back on. She scrambled to her feet and snatched up her clothes as she bolted for the door. It was annoying to see the look of fear on her face—and the rush she was always in to vacate his chambers. It was pretty clear he'd have to up the ante with the girl soon. Tell her it wasn't enough just to open her legs to him. If she ever wanted to see her little brother again, she'd have to at least pretend to like it.

It would have been preferable if he didn't have to tell her how to act.

The last year had been a wild ride in more ways than one. In all his thirty years it never would have occurred to him that the same laws that had restricted and impinged on him for so long would actually be the making of him. After the bomb—or the Great Equalizer as Denny liked to call it—all the high and mighty had been dragged from their mansions, stripped of their high-tech toys and torched in their Daimlers and Jags.

That last one quite literally
, he thought, smiling to himself as he dressed.

Yes, an England without electricity, without cars, without laws, however temporary it was—and make no mistake, there were definite rumblings of the cranky old bitch righting herself—was just the place for a sod like him to plant his flag. And thrive.

He glanced at the rumpled sheets on the floor and saw there was blood again.

In fact, there was no reason to think he couldn't keep all that he'd built after the lights went back on. The commodity services he offered would always be needed.

“Yo, Denny! You decent yet?”

The voice came from the anteroom outside his bedroom. He knew Meyers, the acting Chief Constable for these parts, was waiting for him. He grinned at what he must have thought watching the girl dash past him naked and trembling as a fawn, his seed dribbling down her long legs.

“Enter,” he bellowed, his good mood restored at the thought of the fat bastard's randy envy of him.

He settled himself behind the large oaken desk in the corner of the room. When he had first found the house—deserted just days before by the looks of it—he had chosen the largest upstairs room as his headquarters. Over his shoulder and through the ceiling to floor window, he could see the long needle of smoke from the chimney in the middle of the factory.

His
factory. He smiled to think of it, flexing his hands in an attempt to limber up the crippled fingers on his right hand—the one smashed to a pulp two years earlier in a prison yard fight.

He looked up to acknowledge Meyers's entrance.

“Pfew!” the man said, arranging his bulk in a wooden chair opposite the desk. “Smells like skank-sex in here.”

“The very best kind,” Denny said, grinning at the man. “Almost as good as rape.”

Meyers's eyebrows shot up. “That wasn't rape? Sure looked like it to me the way the lass was making good her escape.” He laughed.

Denny fought for control of his instant rage, comforting himself with thoughts of the girl's punishment for embarrassing him like this.
She'll be lucky to have legs left to exit his bedroom at any speed
, he thought, trying to calm himself.

“To what do I owe?” he drawled, forcing himself not to reveal to the fat fuck how he'd gotten to him. “I assume, Chief Constable, that you continue to enjoy the fruits of my labors?”

The corpulent slug was a frequent, and free, visitor to Denny's small prostitution ring. A small price to pay, he thought—especially since
he
wasn't paying it—to ensure that the grass-roots law and order group in the area that Meyers headed continued to leave him and his lot alone.

Meyers sighed heavily, as if it pained him to have to tell Denny his news. Denny developed an image in his head of the man swinging from a rope from the center beam of his chicken-processing plant in order to assuage his impatience.

“About that little matter we discussed last time…” he said.

“You'll have to remind me.”

“You using kiddies in the factories has got a lot of the women in the area up in arms.”

“Fuck ‘em.”

“Yeah, well, if it's all the same to you, I'll respectfully decline. But they're making enough noise and, well, like I said last time, the whores are another thing, and I really think the women can push this to a point where I don't think you want it pushed.”

“What are you saying, Meyers?” It was all he could do not to pull out the SIG semi-automatic from his desk drawer and put them both out of their misery.

“Look, don't get me wrong,” Meyers said. “I am a mere tool of the people.” He held his hands out in a helpless gesture. “If the greater good decides to make a move against you…”

“Are you insane? I have an
army
. Anything you come at me with—”

“Don't misunderstand, Denny! We are
all
totally happy with our arrangement. But truth be told, why would
you
want to fight if you can avoid it? I grant you we wouldn't win against you, but we'd do some damage. Maybe even shut down the factory for a time. It's like I told you last time, the women of the district—our wives, mind!—are determined to rescue the poor bitches, who I happen to know for a personal fact give themselves freely to the paying men of the area—”

“In fact, give themselves to those women's own husbands and boyfriends.”

“Of course! But saying the women have no power wouldn't be the truth. And this is what they want. If you make us fight you to appease them, well nobody wins that way.”

“Just for the pleasure of watching you take a knife in the gut, I'm tempted to let your women wage their war against me. I'll have
them
working my chicken factory and filling my whore house when the smoke clears.”

Meyers, wisely, said nothing.

“Let me ask you, Meyers, do you know where I recruit my whores?”

“My understanding is from your raids on the English villages along the river which were hit the worst by The Crisis, aye? The ones that didn't re-band or reorganize after it all went down?”

Denny nodded, narrowing his eyes at the constable. “That's right. And most of those villages are an easy day's ride from Correyville.” Denny resisted the urge to feel the twinge of pride at the sound of the name of his town.

Meyers's eyes widened as the light behind them clicked on. “You're thinking of moving your recruitment efforts further afield.”

“It's already in process.”

“That's brilliant.” Meyers rubbed his hands together at the apparent ease and happy resolution to the problem. “I feel confident the ladies of the district will be much mollified, as long as you leave the English rose alone.”

“So glad I could help. Is that all?” Denny steepled his hands in front of him on his desk and regarded the Chief Constable. It had taken him all of one hour to come up with the idea after the last visit from the little fear-spewing worm and his veiled threats. Although Denny's first impulse was to kill the messenger, he knew there would just be another Chief Constable in his stead. In a rare flash of maturity and conciliation, he had decided that the best route around this particular problem would be to appear to be accommodating to the present government. It could only aid him in his dealings in the new post-EMP world as the UK slowly got back to its feet.

Besides, Meyers was right. Using Irish whores was actually a bloody brilliant idea. There had already been at least one occasion where a newly recruited whore—who had been taken from her village not days before and insufficiently drugged for her first day on the job—had been put in a room with a john from her same village. It hadn't discomfited the john. In fact, the man had reportedly been delighted to tup—every way to Sunday—a woman he'd known and desired for years, but who had, in fact, been married to another. It had, however, caused a problem with the other whores when it became known.

Recruiting his whores—or factory workers if they were too old or too ugly—from outside the country would alleviate that problem very nicely indeed.

D
onovan sat
on his big bay at the river's edge and watched as the cart's wheel tracks disappeared into it from the bank. He had hoped to catch up to them before now, before they could pull some crap like this. He scanned the banks in either direction but saw nothing to draw his attention. They had gone in here. Likely they would've crossed, but they could just as easily have come back out on the same side. The point wasn't getting across the river necessarily.

The point was covering their tracks.

Although a fisherman by trade, Donovan had hunted enough to know a little something about tracking. But a river was the grand equalizer. They might as well have disappeared into thin air.

He dismounted and led his horse to the river, where he scooped up water in his hat and let him drink. It had been mildly unpleasant at midday with the rain starting in, and the day had gone from blustery to bracing. He glanced at the sun in the sky, slowly sinking against the horizon. Things were only going to get worse.

Even he had seen the folly in leaving after dark. He couldn't see their tracks, couldn't see the inevitable signs of a cart rolling through glen or across little-used country lanes. He only knew that a cart needed to stay on a road and this was the only road even barely passable. And he knew he couldn't just stay back at camp and do nothing. So he'd slept in his saddle and waited for first light to pick up the tracks before the early morning drizzle erased them and—thank God for the mud!—had followed them here. If it hadn't been for the deep crevices carved into the thick earth by the heavy cartwheels, the rain would have defeated him.

And now the river had done exactly that.

He looked upriver. If they were heading to Dublin, he should be able to pick up their tracks again somewhere along the bank when they reconnected with a road of some kind. On the other hand, if they weren't heading to any specific town, but rather a cave or hideout of some kind, they might come out of the river at any point and no one could say where.

And all the while he stood here and watered his horse and looked up and down the river, Sarah was perhaps being tortured or raped. Knowing that mouth on her, he thought grimly, she was at least as likely to get herself killed. He flapped his hat out, spilling the residue water against his leg, and then remounted.

He squinted up at the descending sun. It was months since anyone had a working wristwatch, the batteries long since having run down, and he sorely missed his own. He guessed it was after four o'clock. That meant she'd been taken roughly twenty-four hours ago. He had at least three hours before he lost the light. Might as well head toward Dublin as anywhere.

Why would they take her? What else was in the cart to make it so heavy?
Donovan eased his mount into the shallow shoals of the river, keeping his eye on the bank to pick up the trails again. What if they hadn't gone to Dublin?
And if they did, how the fook am I gonna find her in friggin' Dublin?

The snap of a breaking branch caused his horse to jerk its head up, and Donovan forced himself not to tense in the saddle. He scanned the scrubby woods that lined the riverbank. The noise had been close. Someone was close…and watching him.

Ah, bugger this
, he thought, resting his hand on the stock of the shotgun tucked into its saddle sheathe. “I can hear you,” he shouted. “So you might as well show yourself!”

He waited, scanning the bushes for any movement, his hand hovering on his gun when a small rustle of bushes just south of where he was standing in the river opened up. He watched in astonishment as a pony emerged, leaves sticking to his bridle and cavesson as if he were an Indian's war pony.

When he saw John Woodson ride forward, his face rigid with determination, Mike's shoulders relaxed.
I might've known,
he thought, shaking his head. But he realized with surprise that a part of him had been waiting for the boy all along.

“What took ya so long?” Mike called out to him. He saw the lad relax immediately and trot over to join him.

“You're not mad?”

“Actually, I was just thinking I could use a little help about now. Come on.”

With the two of them scouring both sides of the river at once, they were able to determine that the cart had not come out on the other side anywhere close, but had probably walked in the shallows a mile or more.

“North or south, do you think?” John asked as he sat his pony and shaded his eyes as he stared in the direction of the plummeting sun.

“Neither,” Mike said, unsaddling his horse and tossing the saddle on the ground. “If it was me and I didn't want people to know I was heading some place obvious I'd walk my horse in the river for a spell.”

“So you think them going in the water means they're going to Dublin?”

“That would be my guess. Or any town between here and there.”

“But taking a cart through the water…” John frowned as he watched the current in the river eddy around the grasses hugging the bank. “That's desperate. They could tip over so easy.”

“I imagine they
are
desperate,” Mike said, and then was sorry he had. The boy didn't need reminding of how bad the situation was for his mother. Mike couldn't help but notice how pale he looked. Earlier he'd chalked it up to the fact that John's life had just been devastated, but now he watched him waver in his saddle. It wasn't just mourning or fear. The boy looked ill.

“Climb on down here, John,” Mike said. “We can't do anymore today.”

“Every minute we stay here is a minute Mom is moving away from us.”

“They have to rest, too.”

“Maybe they don't. They've got a cart. Maybe they take turns driving and they just go all night.”

“The horses'll need to rest. As do we. Untack your pony, son.”

He watched John slowly give up the idea of pressing on. As much as he clearly wanted to, it was also just as clear the boy was spent. He slid silently from his saddle and snaked the reins over the animal's neck to lead him to the camp.

Mike hated to speak the words, especially as how the boy looked to be holding himself together with a wing and a prayer, but they needed saying and then they could move on. He took a long breath. “I'm so very sorry about your father, John. Truly sorry.”

John nodded, his eyes collecting with the tears he'd worked hard not to shed. He turned away from Mike to loosen his pony's girth. “Thanks,” he said so softly that Mike nearly didn't hear him. Mike gave him a moment and the two made camp wordlessly until Mike had a small fire going.

“There's only cold jerky and tack,” Mike said. “But I thought the fire would be…good.” He wanted to say comforting. He felt so helpless in the face of such world-shattering grief. He handed John a piece of the chewy goat jerky. The two sat facing the fire without speaking for several minutes.

“What did you do with the mines?” Mike finally asked.

John looked up, surprised. So caught up was he with his own thoughts, he appeared to have momentarily forgotten that Mike was there. “Dad left them at the goat pond between the pastures.”

“He didn't throw ‘em in?”

John shook his head. “At least not before I left.” He looked up at Mike. “You think you can use them now?”

“Somehow. Yeah. We can use them.”

“That's good,” John said, staring into the fire. “It's nice to know he was right about them after all.”

Except the reason he was right about them was the death of him
, Mike thought darkly.

He noticed that John still held the jerky in his hand, untouched. By the fire's light, he could see a fine sheen of sweat on his face. “John? You feel alright, boy?”

John looked up at him dully and then turned his head to vomit in the dirt behind him. Mike caught him in his arms before he could fall over into a faint. He held the unconscious boy in stunned helplessness.

After a fitful sleep with Mike sponging his face every few minutes through the night with cool water, John had rallied enough by daybreak to be able to sit up on his own, though he was still weak. Mike had run through every possibility of what could be ailing the child but he didn't recognize the symptoms. He wondered at first if it could be something only American children got, but he quickly discarded the idea. The Woodsons had been in Ireland a full year now—ever since the lights went out all over the world trapping them here, far from their home in the States. Whatever had made him sick, at least he seemed to be getting a little stronger as the day wore on.

“We need to get going,” John said weakly. “Every minute we stay here—”

“I know, son,” Mike said. “I know. And we will. As soon as you're strong enough to sit a saddle.”

“That may be too late, Mr. Donovan!”

“Shhh, boy. Preserve your strength.” It couldn't be something he ate. He hadn't eaten anything. Mike packed up the camp and saddled both horses. The sun, what there was of it, was directly overhead. Barring any complications or unseen impediments, they should be able to make it back to the main camp by nightfall.

The anguish in Mike's chest at having to turn back was matched by the look in John's eyes. He went down to the river to fill a bag to douse the remnants of the fire ring with, and gave the lad the privacy he needed as the tears streaked down his face, and his young heart filled with the painful hopeless longing for the mother he would now not see today.

T
hey had to stop twice
. Both times Mike was forced to dismount and settle John on the ground. Both times he felt the fevered cheeks and uneven, rasping breathing and wondered in creeping unease if there would be anything for Sarah to return to.

Dear God, am I supposed to rescue her in order to bring her back to sit by two graves?

“I'm feeling better, Mr. Donovan,” John said weakly.

“You look better,” Mike lied, handing him a cup of water, heartened that the lad didn't seem to need any help drinking it.

“I guess thanks to me we're not going to make it home tonight, are we?”

Mike watched the boy's face as defeat and fear competed for dominance in his gaunt expression. “We'll get home when we're meant to,” he said.

“Only, if I'd never followed you, you'd be half way to Dublin by now. If we never find her, it'll be my fault.”

“Stop it now this instant! Stop that kind of talk, young John Woodson. Is that what you'd want your mother to be hearing you say?” The woman's voice jolted Mike to his feet.

He slapped his hat against his pant leg as Fiona entered the campfire leading a tall grey mare. “Holy shite, Fiona!” he exclaimed. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“You know, if
I'm
able to sneak up on you then you do know that just about anyone in the county could, too, don't you?” She knelt down next to John and Mike was gratified to see her quickly take charge. She smoothed the boy's hair across his forehead and pressed the back of her hand to his cheek. “Looks like the fever's just broken,” she said. She patted him on the shoulder and smiled down at him. “I know you feel like hell, me darlin', but you're on the mend.”

“Great,” John said weakly and closed his eyes.

“What the hell, Fi,” Mike said as he took her horse and pulled its saddle off. “What are you doing here?”

“It's glad you should be that I'm here, Michael Donovan!” she said, sitting down next to John and laying his head in her lap. “I have news, so I thought to take the chance I'd find you. Although I must say I was hoping to find you a bit further along than this. You're just four hours from camp, you know that?”

Mike sat down next to her and ran his hands through his hair in frustration. “I know. The lad's sick. I needed to get him back.”

“Take a minute to hear what I've learned and then you can go on and make up the time. I'll bring young John home after he's had a wee nap.”

The thought that he could resume the search for Sarah brought Mike to his feet. It wasn't until then that he realized he had deliberately and consciously tamped down his anxiety and frustration about having to turn back. He stood and grabbed his saddle, swinging it up on the bay's back in one fluid movement.

“Tell me as I saddle up.”

Fiona glanced at John to make sure he was sleeping and joined Mike as he tightened the girth on his gelding.

“I've got three things to tell you. First is that Caitlin is causing problems again.”

Mike frowned and pulled the stirrups down from the saddle. “What kind of problems?”

“Well, she's always been the one saying how this is all the Americans' fault and like, but now she's saying…” Fiona lowered her voice. “She's saying how David deserved what he got and that it was justice.”

“She's fecking barking,” Mike said with disgust.

“Sure, maybe, but there's them that's listening to her. Because she was Ellen's sister—
and is your sister-in-law
—she fancies she's got a certain status in the camp, you see. There's some told me she's set her cap for you, Mike.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“She's telling some that the two of you'll be married before Michaelmas.”

Mike snorted. “Well, it's nonsense and gossip.”

“Don't be brushing it off as just gossip, brother dear. You'll have to deal with it sooner or later, no mistake.”

“Fine. Next?”

Fiona took a long breath and put her hand on Mike's arm to force him to stop packing his saddlebag. “You cannot be gone for long, Mike. We need you.”

He turned to face her and he felt his impatience bristling off of him.

“Put a time limit on it,” she said firmly. “Say, a week. If you don't find her in that time, she's lost to you. Accept it and come back to us.”