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  I looked meaningfully at the door and she nodded.

  “I’ve packed a bag already, I was going to wait for nightfall and then cycle to the cottage”, she said, “wait here and I’ll grab it”.

  She gave Ralph a quick hug and a smile, then disappeared upstairs to return a few minutes later with a camouflage Bergen backpack, heavily laden and tied down professionally. She had also changed into a pair of black combat trousers and a green t-shirt, and had a small bum-bag cinched around her waist.

  “Right, I’m ready”, she said, “let’s go”.

  I’d been expecting a long wait while she packed, and was greatly relieved that we would be going so quickly. Being in a town was making me nervous, and her retelling of events from that morning had made me even more so.

  Hobbling to the door, I opened it and stepped outside, only to backpedal rapidly, almost banging into Emily as she came out behind me.

  There, standing around the car with everything from baseball bats to golf clubs, were almost a dozen men ranging from eighteen to fifty, and every one of them was staring as us in a way that made me know deep in my bones that they were itching to use them.

  Chapter 14

  I stopped, my back pressed up against Emily as she in turn halted. The men waiting for us were an unkempt lot, mostly unshaven and overweight, a few in tracksuit trousers or shorts while the others wore jeans. The only clean-looking thing about them was their footwear, almost all of them wearing brand new, gleaming trainers of varying designs that looked fresh out of the box.

  “We don’t want no trouble”, one of them called out, taking a half step forward, “just give us the car keys and them shotguns and you can go on your way”.

  My heart was thumping so loudly that it was a wonder the others couldn’t hear it. I’d all but forgotten the shotgun, dangling uselessly in my left hand. Ralph hadn’t, however, and a pair of barrels slid into view over my right shoulder, pointing directly at the man who’d spoken.

  “How’s about you lot bugger off before I fill you full of holes?” Ralph suggested, his tone as hard and unfriendly as it had been the night before.

  I studied the man who had spoken while I waited for his answer, trying to decide how this would play out.

  He was in his early forties, at best guess, with greasy salt and pepper hair that hung to his shoulders, swept back and held in place with a pair of new sunglasses, the label still attached to the frame. I didn’t need to be a genius to figure out where both those and the trainers had come from.

  His broad, hairy chest and cannonball-like stomach were barely covered by a grubby white vest, almost the same colour as his grey tracksuit trousers in places.

  His eyes were what drew me though, two small, brown orbs that flickered over us constantly, weighing, assessing, calculating the way I imagined a horse trader would look over a field of brood-mares.

  He watched us for a long moment, then slowly put the golf club he was carrying up on his shoulder, looking for all the world like he was having a catch-up with his mates outside the pub instead of having his life threatened with a shotgun.

  “You got four shots”, he said, leaning back against the car, “and there’s twelve of us. I reckon you can wing what, three or four of us, maybe five, before we get ya. It comes to that, you and your mate ‘ere’ll get proper fucked up, and girly’ll get another type of fucking, you get me?”

  He leered as he spoke and some of his friends laughed, but I could almost hear Ralph’s finger tightening on the trigger.

  The whole situation was about to go rapidly downhill, and I had to do something, anything to stop it from devolving into bloodshed.

  Before I could think it through and change my mind, I stepped forward and snapped the shotgun up to my shoulder, pointing it directly at the speaker.

  “Seems to me like you’ve got it wrong”, I said, frantically dredging my memory for everything I’d ever learned about shotguns. “First, the spread on these is enough to catch every one of you if you come at us”.

  I measured the distance by eye and plastered on what I hoped was an evil smile.

  “You’re what, twenty feet away? Not even the old man can miss at that range. You know what happens when shotgun pellets hit someone?” I forged on, not giving their leader a chance to speak, as I saw more than a few of them look at each other and begin to mutter, one actually edging behind the car.

  “Well the pellet, which is lead, is poisonous anyway, but the worst bit is the sepsis that sets in because each pellet pushes any clothing it passes through into the wound. So you survive the blast, but after a couple of days you start getting sick and even though you think you’ve got the pellets out, your wounds start to ooze pus. Then you start getting a fever and you end up on your back, getting worse and worse because all those tiny little pieces of cloth are inside your body, poisoning your bloodstream and killing you day by day”.

  Almost all of them were looking at each other uncertainly now, and one reached out to touch their leader on the shoulder, but he batted the hand away and brought his golf club across his body as if it might protect him.

  “And we don’t need to fire right away”, I continued, almost babbling now but determined to get out of this alive at any cost, “we can just wait until you’re a few feet away and fire, and the first couple of you will get cut in half. Who fancies that then. You?”

  I pointed the gun towards a brute of a man standing at the back of the car. He’d been in the process of moving towards the back of the group, but now he froze, shaking his head a barest fraction.

  “Thought not. How about you?” I swung it towards a lad no more than eighteen, making his blond mullet quiver as he shook his head.

  The leader finally found his voice. “Bollocks. No way can you get us all, we’ll fucking tear you apart”.

  I nodded in agreement. “You’re right, we can’t get you all, but I reckon that if you come for us fewer than half of you will be standing by the time it’s done. Not good odds for you, is it?”

  He struggled with this for a moment, then turned to one of the lads at the back, almost out of sight behind the car.

  “Trev, do me a favour?”

  Trev nodded. “Sure dad, what?”

  “Run back to the house and get everyone else who ain’t doing nothing and bring ‘em back, will ya? If he wants to play numbers, we’ll give ‘im numbers”.

  The lad glanced at us nervously and then took off like a hare, keeping the car between us and him until he was well out of range.

  “So”, the speaker said, “give it five minutes and there’ll be fifty of us, and then you’re fucked. So what you gonna do about that?”

  As he spoke he was edging back into the crowd, using the others to block him from view as he worked himself around the car.

  “Got any bright ideas?” I muttered over my shoulder, having played my hand and lost.

  Emily laid a hand on my arm.

  “Yes”, she said, “we get back in the house and go through the garden and into the fields, then wait until they get bored. They’ll leave eventually, and then we can come back for the car. Dad?”

  “Not much else we can do”, he growled.

  “Fine”, I said, “let’s do it”.

  Before the group could react, Ralph’s shotgun barrels disappeared back over my shoulder and I heard him retreat into the house. Emily went next but kept a hand on the back of my t-shirt, guiding me back through the doorway.

  The moment my shotgun was through she slammed the door, then turned and led us through the house to the kitchen, flinging the back door open and hurrying out into the garden.

  The garden was small, little more than a grassed box with a low hedge that looked out over a playing field at the rear. Emily moved straight to the corner of the garden and forced her way out through the hedge where the two corners met and the brush was thinnest, then turned and helped first her dad, and then myself through.

  We were horribly exposed, with only the back gardens of her
street blocking us from view on one side. On the other three sides the field spread out for hundreds of metres, showing anyone who cared to look exactly where we were.

  “So what now?” I asked, my thumb stroking the lever on the shotgun so rapidly I had to force myself to stop.

  “This way”, she said, and led us across the field at an angle towards the nearest treeline. “There’s a patch of woods just past the edge of the field. No one goes there, so we should be safe until the sun goes down or they get bored and leave, whichever comes first”.

  I nodded and followed, falling further and further behind as my ankle began to protest at the sudden exercise. The others slowed to allow me to keep up, but I could see the frustration on their faces as we crawled across the field in plain view for the world to see.

  We’d almost reached the treeline when I glanced back, seeing something that made my heart sink.

  Pouring out of Emily’s back garden was a veritable flood of people, all of them armed and heading in our direction.

  Gritting my teeth I ran for the trees, ignoring the screaming pain in my ankle as I caught up with the others, all of us running from the men who wanted nothing more than to kill us, or in Emily’s case, far worse.

  Chapter 15

  I was almost doubled over in agony by the time we reached the trees, my ankle a throbbing mass of pain that brought tears to my eyes.

  “I’ve got to stop”, I gasped, “I can’t keep running”.

  Emily and Ralph both slowed, her seemingly fresh but the old man breathing like a bellows as he fought for air.

  “Not as fit as I used to be”, he wheezed, leaning against a tree.

  Emily looked around, then pointed to a large oak with low branches.

  “If we can’t run, we climb. Come on”. She ran over to the tree and jumped up, catching and branch and easily pulling herself up, Bergen and all.

  I hobbled after her as fast as I could, Ralph following behind. I could hear his lungs rattling now, the sound registering even over the pain in my foot.

  As we reached the tree I put my back against the trunk, knowing that seconds counted if we were to get out of reach of the men following us.

  Emily leaned down and took Ralph’s shotgun, then reached out for his arms while I made my hands into a stirrup and boosted him up.

  The old man was incredibly heavy, years of manual labour turning him into a lump of solid muscle that was almost too much for me to lift, even for a moment, but Emily caught his wrists and somehow he scrambled up onto the lowest branch, then began climbing to the next.

  “Grab hold”, Emily said, lying on the branch and reaching down again, grabbing my shotgun and then coming back for me. I could hear the shouts of the men following us now, and I took hold of her arms while my one good foot scrabbled at the bark for purchase.

  I’d never been so scared in my life, not even when Ralph had us on the wrong end of his shotgun the night before, but despite the adrenaline surging through my system I just didn’t have the strength to haul myself up.

  I hung there, waving and twisting while Emily grimaced with the strain of trying to hold my weight, unable to do more than scrape my foot uselessly against the trunk.

  “They went this way!” The shout was less than a dozen metres behind. I let go of Emily and dropped to the ground, nearly screaming as my ankle tried to buckle again.

  “The shotgun!” I whispered furiously, but then I caught a glimpse of movement in the trees behind me and I bolted, tearing through low scrubby bushes, brambles and nettles until my ankle finally gave out and I plunged down a bank into a small dell, rolling over and over until I came to a halt against a fallen tree.

  Panic had me now, my breath coming in short gasps and blood thundering in my ears, but I still retained enough sense to haul myself over the fallen trunk, burying myself in the loam on the other side and then freezing, sure that they would hear my panicked breathing and be on me like hounds on a fox.

  Only they weren’t.

  Twenty seconds passed, then thirty, then a minute, and still I lay there unmolested. As the rushing in my ears began to fade and I got my breathing back under control, I realised that I could hear voices, the loudest belonging to the man in the vest who had spoken to us earlier.

  “Tell you what”, he was saying from not far away, “throw the keys down and we’ll call it even”.

  “The hell we will, there are three of us up here, with two shotguns. They can fire and I can pass them cartridges all day if we need to. So why don’t you and your mates just go home?”

  Emily’s voice held not a trace of fear, and I couldn’t help but wonder at her ability to stay so calm and focused in what had to be the worst crisis she’d ever faced. Even as the reality of my own situation struck home, I couldn’t help but feel admiration for the woman.

  “Nah, I want that car. Any idea how long it takes to get all the stuff back from town on bikes? Car’d be much better”.

  “Is it really worth lives?”

  “Could ask you the same”.

  “What guarantee have I got that you won’t keep waiting for us if we throw the keys down?”

  “Ok, I’m fuckin’ bored of this. Throw the keys down now or we’ll set up underneath the tree. You can’t stay up there forever”.

  “Try me”.

  White-vest began to snap out orders, detailing several of his men to go back to the village for chairs, beer and food. Fairly sure now that none of them knew I was still on the ground, I cautiously climbed back over the fallen tree and inched my way up to the lip of the dell, raising my head over the edge only as far as my eyes.

  My heart sank when I saw how many of them there were.

  Almost twenty men now stood around the tree, although far enough back to avoid the worst of any sudden shotgun blast. The leader leaned against a smaller tree at the edge of the clearing around the oak, scratching himself with one hand while the other still held his club.

  I slid back down into the dell and over the trunk again, making sure I was well out of sight in case any of them decided to explore, then took stock of my options.

  My first thought was that I didn’t have many. Even if I was a skilled fighter, which I most certainly wasn’t, there was no way I’d be able to take on so many opponents. Even fighting one or two of them was enough to make me want to piss in fear. That left two choices, or maybe three.

  First, I could try and make my way on foot to the nearest decent part of town and see if I could find someone to help, but that was unlikely to say the least. Not only could I barely walk, but I didn’t know anyone in the area and the chances of them deciding to help a total stranger when they had their own worries were slim to none.

  Second, I could walk away. I could cut my losses, try and find my way back to the cottage and tell Harriet… Tell her what? That I’d been too scared to try and help and her husband and daughter had died because I was a coward? No, that didn’t bear thinking about, and just the thought of leaving them when they needed me most filled me with a self-loathing that I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with.

  So it had to be option three, only I wasn’t sure what that was.

  And so I lay there, occasionally crawling up to the lip and looking over as the morning turned into afternoon, the heat becoming almost unbearable even with the shade of the trees keeping the worst of the sun off. I was desperate for a drink, the feeling made worse when several of their number returned with coolers full of beer and began handing around cans.

  They stood or sat in small groups, some on chairs that appeared from the village, others on the bare earth while they waited for us to give up and either come down or throw the keys.

  It was hard to know how long I’d lain there, watching them smoking, talking and drinking, but it had to have been several hours when their leader waved a few of them to one side and had a low conversation with them, too quiet for me to hear from this distance.

  After a few minutes of conferring, two of them went around the clear
ing, tapping some of the others on the shoulders and motioning them back towards the village while others stayed where they were, talking and laughing.

  By the time the ones tapped on the shoulder had slipped away, I counted seven left. Still too many for me to tackle them head on, but I’d always prided myself on my ability to think outside the box, and if I had any hope of Ralph and Emily getting out of this alive, I needed that skill now more than ever.

  Chapter 16

  By the time the sun dropped over the horizon I felt half-delirious with thirst, my tongue several sizes too big and my head thumping painfully. I could have slipped away and tried to find water but I’d been too scared, both of being seen and not finding my way back.

  There were still half a dozen men sitting around the tree, and from the occasional reappearances the leader had made throughout the day, his threats more and more esoteric each time, I had the firm feeling that this was now less about the car and more about his pride, maybe even his standing in the eyes of the others.

  His last visit had been about an hour before dusk, one of the others daring to ask when they could leave only to have him roar at them incoherently before stomping off back to the village.

  I’d nearly been discovered several times throughout the day, the lip of the small dell I lay in perfect for those who wished to relieve themselves, seemingly competing to see how much of my hiding place they could splash with urine, the smell only adding to my headache.

  More than once I’d been tempted to give up and crawl off into the bushes, but the imagined look on Harriet’s face was enough to keep me there, along with the understanding that Emily and Ralph were most likely relying on me to do something to help.

  I’d made and discarded a dozen plans during the day, all of them either risky, unworkable or downright stupid, but as the air cooled and small creatures began to rustle in the leaves around me, I knew that I had to find a way to distract the men around the tree.

  Then it came to me. Not much would draw these men away, but there was one thing that they would value more than the car and the potential for sated lust and violence that capturing my friends would provide.