“Try anything and I’ll tie your hands to your feet for the rest of the trip,” he said, as he cut through Angie’s cords.
Angie and Sarah edged away from the road and into the ravine, where they lowered their pants and relieved themselves. She could hear the other two women whimpering and she guessed they were having their bonds cut, too. Before she was quite finished, the ugly one came and peered over the ravine at them. He laughed and then turned away.
Angie zipped up her jeans and rubbed the red marks on her wrists.
“They’re fucking animals,” she said, her face flushed with anger. “I’m not even Irish, nor you neither.”
Before she could answer, Sarah heard a scream from the road. She fastened her jeans and bolted up the side of the ravine. She saw that the ugly one had one of the other women down on the ground. Her scream had been silenced by the large, filthy hand that gripped her face. She lay motionless as he ripped at her skirt with the other and positioned himself between her legs.
“Old enough to be your mother, ya randy git!”
“I think this is his mother!”
“Nah, I’ve had her. She ain’t this fine.”
The men’s raucous laughter echoed down the empty road.
Without thinking, Sarah charged. She felt Angie’s fingers gripping at her from behind, but she shook her off and sprinted across the road.
By the time she reached the two on the ground, the oaf had obviously removed all obstacles to his goal as his naked backside was pumping vigorously. Before Sarah could reach him, an arm whipped out and pulled her off her feet and swung her away from them. When Aidan set her on her feet, he backhanded her full force into the side of the cart. Sarah’s head cracked against the wagon and all light and sound snapped out as she slumped to the ground.
When she awoke, her hands were bound again and the cart was once more moving. Either it was dark out or the tarp was covering them with no gap, and Sarah could barely make out the forms of the other three women with her. She ran her tongue over her teeth and found at least three loose ones. Her head ached badly and her arm felt on fire. That must have happened when they’d reloaded her unconscious body back into the cart, she thought.
“You awake, Sarah?”
Sarah turned to see Angie’s anxious face next to her. “You scared the shit out of me,. Why did you do that? That was crazy.”
Sarah’s eyes tried to adjust to the dark and see the woman who’d been raped. She sat where she had before, holding the younger woman and staring where the opening in the tarp had been, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of the scenery.
Sarah looked back at Angie and closed her eyes. She was definitely seeing double, so she guessed she probably had a concussion.
“You gotta stop that shit, Sarah. They are gonna bloody do what they’re gonna do. Just let ‘em!”
Sarah opened her eyes and saw that Angie looked genuinely distressed.
“Trust me, they’ll do all of us before we get where we’re going. You want to live to escape, you gotta pick your battles.”
Sarah knew she was right. She had been foolish this afternoon, with no plan or weapon beyond her horror and anger.
If I get killed, I’ll never see John again.
As if reading her mind, Angie reached out to touch Sarah’s hand and Sarah saw that she was tied again, too. “You really don’t have any family?”
Sarah took a long withering breath and willed the emotion to stay in check. Her voice was a whisper. “A son.”
“Is he young? Young enough to need his Mum?”
Sarah looked at Angie and forced the tears not to come. “He doesn’t think so,” she said, and tried to smile.
“So see? You gotta stay in one piece, however you need to do that, for his sake.”
Sarah nodded and then shifted against the cart. Some of them must be asleep, she thought. Normally she could hear voices from the front. Two on the cart front and one—Gareth, she thought they’d called him—riding point on a green gelding.
“How about you?” Sarah asked.
Angie’s face relaxed but she shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “But I aim to live long enough to do it some day.” She shrugged. “I got a boyfriend.”
Sarah looked away and felt the terrible agony of the day close around her like a vice she couldn’t escape from. She wasn’t even sure it was her voice that spoke, but it must have been. “I had a husband. A good man. A loving father. My dearest friend…” She put her hands to her face and a terrible keening wail came from deep inside her. She could hear one of the drivers, either Jeff or Aidan, knock hard against the side of the cart. “Shut up in there!”
Angie’s hand squeezed Sarah’s. “Shhh, Sarah,” she said. “Keep it in, petal. Keep it all inside for now.”
Sarah took a shuddering breath and nodded. Using every inch of strength she ever possessed, she shoved the desperate, bottomless, grief deep inside her.
6
Denny 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 es
cape.” 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.
7
Donovan 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 sn
ap 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.”
Going Gone, Book 2 of the Irish End Games Page 4
