Born Scared

by Kevin Brooks

  My foot hurts so much . . .

  “ANYONE SEE WHERE HE WENT?”

  “OVER THERE.”

  “WHERE?”

  The voices are getting closer.

  I can’t stay here. I have to get going again.

  But where?

  I roll over onto my front, prop myself up on my elbows, and cautiously raise my head just enough to see over the parapet of snow. The fence at the top of the field is about ten yards away, and I’m about a third of the way across the field. I glance over my shoulder. The monkems are directly behind me, and they’re a lot closer than I thought. Forty yards . . . maybe less. The flashlight beams are still searching for me, sweeping around all over the field, so at least the monkems don’t know where I am yet. But if I stay here, and they keep coming this way . . .

  An idea suddenly comes to me.

  A way out.

  There is a way out.

  I sit up, crouch down low, and peer down the field toward the gate. The sheep haven’t come back. The gate’s unguarded. If I can get to it without being spotted . . .

  The flashlight beams are still sweeping around the field, like searchlights hunting for an escaped prisoner. I watch them closely, waiting for the moment when none of them are shining in my direction, and then I make my move.

  My mashed-up toe screams out in pain as I jump to my feet and start running, and I almost give up there and then. I can’t do it . . . it hurts too much . . . I’m going to have to stop . . .

  But then more shouts ring out . . .

  “THERE HE GOES!”

  “WHERE?”

  “THERE!”

  . . . and the dog starts barking . . .

  YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP . . .

  . . .and someone yells out, “NO! MOLLY! NO! COME HERE!”

  . . . and a searchlight picks me out . . .

  “I’VE GOT HIM!”

  . . . and all this triggers a renewed flood of fear that surges through me like an electric shock, and now I couldn’t stop running even if I wanted to . . . it’s all I can do . . . and the pain can’t stop me . . . it’s just pain . . . a thing, a feeling . . .

  YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP . . .

  “MOLLY!”

  I’m almost halfway across the width of the field now, running parallel to the fence at the top, and about five yards away from it. Although the monkems have me in their sights, there’s still a chance I can make it to the gate before them. They’re just about level with me now, around twenty yards behind me. If I feint to the right and make a sudden turn to my left, it might just surprise them enough to make them lose sight of me — at least for a few moments — and then if I run straight down the field, as fast as I can, I might just have enough of a head start to reach the gate before them.

  YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP . . .

  “MOLLY! HERE!”

  I suddenly realize that not only has Molly the dog been barking nonstop for the last minute or so — and that one of the monkems has been yelling at her nonstop — but also that the continuous yap-yap-yapping isn’t coming from behind me, where the monkems are. It started there, then began moving around the field, and right now . . .

  YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP . . .

  . . . it’s coming from the darkness directly in front of me . . .

  YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP . . .

  . . . moving toward me . . .

  YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP . . .

  . . . and there’s another sound with it . . . a muffled rumbling . . . getting closer and closer . . . louder and louder . . .

  And then I see them, looming out of the darkness, stampeding through the snow, heading straight for me . . . the flock of terrified sheep. Molly the dog’s right behind them, yap-yapping and nipping at their heels, and they’re running like crazy things, desperate to get away from her. They’re not going to stop for me in the state they’re in, they’re not even going to try to avoid me. They’re blind with fear, just mindless running machines, and at the speed they’re going — which is unbelievably fast — I’ve only got a fraction of a second to decide what to do. If I don’t do anything, I’m going to be trampled into the ground by thirty-odd stampeding sheep, and they’re far too fast for me to outrun them, especially as I’ve only got one good leg.

  As I rapidly glance around, looking for an escape route, I see three of the monkems fifteen yards behind me, and the fourth one about the same distance away, but just over to my left. He’s marching across the field with the dog leash in his hand and an angry scowl on his face, so I assume he’s Molly’s owner.

  Now one of the other three shouts out to him, “WAIT THERE, GEOFF! DON’T LET HIM GET PAST YOU!” And as he stops and turns to face me, I realize that I’m boxed in. Sheep in front of me — almost on top of me — three monkems behind me, and one to my left. I look despairingly to my right, knowing what I’m going to see, and knowing I’m not going to like it.

  The wooden stile.

  It’s right there, almost level with me, less than five yards away.

  No, I can’t . . .

  You have to.

  No.

  You don’t have a choice.

  There’s no time to think. The sheep are thundering toward me — ten yards away, nine, eight . . .

  Go, Elliot!

  . . . seven . . .

  I can’t . . .

  Go!

  . . . six . . .

  GO!

  I fling myself across to the stile, and I only just manage to scramble onto it before the rampaging sheep go crashing past. And even then, they’re so closely bunched together, and so desperate, that some of them don’t swerve around the wooden step of the stile, they either just smash into it and keep going, or leap right over it. And it’s one of the leaping sheep’s horns that clips my right leg just as I’m trying to drag it out of the way. It’s only a glancing blow, and I’m so pumped up with adrenaline that I barely feel any pain, but I’m already off balance — tottering on one leg — so as the impact whips my other leg into the air, I kind of spin around and fall off the stile.

  The path on the other side of the stile is so narrow that when I hit the ground — face-first — my head’s actually hanging over the edge of the path, and although the darkness is so thick here that I can only see a few yards down the treacherously steep drop into the pitch-black depths of the valley below, there’s something inside me, some kind of primitive bodily sense, that can physically feel the terrifying drop below me, and I can feel it turning my legs to jelly. I can feel something else too. There’s a sense of “othersideness” here, a feeling that I’ve crossed over into something . . . a different world . . . a world where nightmares and reality are the same. And as I scramble desperately away from the edge, scrabbling backward on my hands and knees, I know without question that if I hesitate now — if I pause for even the tiniest moment — the fear will take hold of me and I won’t be able to get moving again. So as I back into the fence and shakily get to my feet, I resist the almost irresistible urge to grab hold of the fence and cling on to it like a limpet, and I force myself to start shuffling off along the track.

  It feels wrong, unnatural, as if I’m forcing myself to walk off the edge of a cliff, but the sound of more shouting — and barking — from the field helps me keep going. I know the monkems must have seen me going over the stile, so they’re going to be coming after me, and the thought of that spurs me along too.

  The snow on the path is deep and undisturbed, so I can’t actually see the ground beneath it, and because there’s no fence or railings, I can’t see where the edge of the path is either. There’s just a narrow white ribbon — the path — with the fence and the fields on one side, and a seemingly vast expanse of absolute blackness on the other. And the darkness on this side of the fence is so dense that I can barely see my hand in front of my face. So I’m staying as close to the fence as I can, continuously running my left hand along it, and I’m moving as fast as my useless right leg will let me, but not so fast that I risk falling over.

  There’s nothing in my head now
. I’m not thinking about anything. I don’t have a plan. I don’t consciously know what I’m doing or where I’m going, and I don’t seem to consciously care. I’m pure animal — driven by the urge to survive, existing from moment to moment — and the only thing that matters, the only thing there is, is living through the next second, the next step, the next breath . . .

  I’ve never felt like this before.

  The nightmarish fear is still there, still raging through me, and it’s still as overwhelming as ever, but somehow it feels as if it doesn’t belong to me anymore . . . or it does belong, but to a different me, a me that’s down there — stumbling along the snow-covered dirt path, staying as close to the fence as he can, continuously running his left hand along it . . .

  I can see him down there.

  I can see him . . . wet and bedraggled, his haunted face streaked with mud, his right leg dragging through the snow, leaving a trail of blood behind him . . .

  I see him glance awkwardly to his left as he hears the wail of an approaching siren, and I see the flashing blue lights that he sees, the pulsing strobe of emergency lights speeding up the road toward the village, and just for a moment I see the animal fear in his eyes . . .

  But that’s it.

  I don’t see him fall.

  The two police officers had just finished dealing with a minor disturbance at the Holly Tree Inn when they saw the Vauxhall Corsa skidding around the corner, on the wrong side of the road, and speeding off up to the village. The headlights were off, all the windows were wide open, and Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” was booming out from the car radio.

  Inside the car, Gordon was singing along at the top of his voice:

  “IT’S CHRIIIISTMAAAASSSS!”

  The two police officers — PCs Annie Hobbes and Mark Smith — ran across the pub parking lot, jumped into their car, and sped off after the Corsa.

  It was 4:47 p.m.

  Gordon was so entranced with the simple joy of singing that he didn’t notice the police car for a while. He could hear the siren, but he thought it was coming from the radio, and even when he did finally see the flashing blue lights in his rearview mirror, he still didn’t realize what they were. He saw them as electric-blue stars from another universe . . . Christmas stars . . . lights at the end of the world . . .

  And then, quite suddenly, the wondrousness in his mind shut down, and a drug-crazed panic took over. Chaotic thoughts streamed through his head — policepolicepolice oh no no no please no theycan’t Ican’tstop if I stop I lose everythingeverything gottagetaway gottagetaway gottagetaway — and as he put his foot down and sped up, the police car accelerated too.

  Jenner and Dake both heard the siren at the same time, and they both knew right away that it wasn’t an ambulance or a fire engine.

  Dake immediately went over to the window and reached for the curtain, but Jenner told him to leave it.

  “Yeah, but what if —?”

  “Just leave it. They’re not after us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “No one knows we’re here, do they?”

  “What’s-her-name does . . . the bank girl.”

  Jenner shook his head. “She won’t have said anything. She can’t rat us out without implicating herself, and she’s not going to do that.”

  “She might have been drunk or something and told one of her friends . . . you know, bragging about it, trying to impress them . . .”

  Jenner didn’t answer. Dake was right, Kaylee did have a big mouth when she was drinking, and she had been on the booze today, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine her boasting drunkenly about her “criminal connections,” but Jenner wasn’t going to admit to it.

  “If the cops were on to us,” he told Dake, “do you really think they’d come speeding up here with their lights and sirens blazing, letting us know they’re coming?”

  “No . . . I guess not.”

  “Exactly.”

  As the two of them stood there listening to the rapidly approaching siren, Grace and Shirley were listening to it too. They’d heard Jenner talking to Dake about it, and although they didn’t understand the stuff about the “bank girl,” it was obvious that Jenner didn’t think the police siren had anything to do with them. But that didn’t stop Grace and Shirley from hoping. They had to hope the police were coming, that any second now the siren would stop and a police car would screech to a halt outside the house, and they’d see the blue lights flashing through the curtains, and they’d hear the car doors opening, and a moment later clonking shut, and then . . .

  A car sped past outside, its engine screaming as it raced up into the village, and a few seconds later the wail of the siren drew level with the house, blue lights flashed across the curtains, and the pitch of the siren dropped as the police car shot past in pursuit of the speeding car.

  “What did I tell you?” Jenner said casually, trying to hide his sense of relief.

  Dake gave him a nod of acknowledgment.

  And all Grace and Shirley could do was listen forlornly as the siren faded away into the distance, taking their hopes with it.

  I don’t know how it happens. One second I’m hobbling along the path, glancing to my left at the sound of a police siren coming up the road — and momentarily feeling that I’m somehow looking down on myself from above — and then all at once the ground isn’t there anymore and I’m falling.

  For a moment, all I feel is the tingled shock of my innards lurching upward as I drop down through the air, and then — before I’ve had time to work out what’s happening — I hit solid ground again, landing heavily on my side, and then I kind of flip over a couple of times and start plummeting down the steep-sided slope of the valley — slipping and sliding, tumbling, rolling . . . picking up speed all the time . . . careening down through a whirling darkness of ground and sky and trees and snow and rocks and spinning limbs . . . desperately trying to grab hold of something, my gloved (but cold and wet) fingers scrabbling blindly at the frozen ground . . . grasping at brambles, roots, half-buried rocks . . .

  I don’t know how long it takes before the slope finally starts to level out — it feels like I’ve been falling forever — but it’s probably only been about ten seconds or so. The change in the gradient is quite gradual at first, but even when it really starts flattening out — becoming an almost walkable incline — the speed of my descent doesn’t change. I’ve built up so much momentum that I just keep hurtling down . . . rolling over and over, skidding along on my back . . . clothes ripping . . . skin scraping . . . elbows and knees and my head bouncing off God-knows-what . . . but eventually I feel myself beginning to slow down, and instead of just tumbling and rolling uncontrollably, I somehow manage to get myself into a half-sitting-up position, so now I’m sliding down on my backside, with my elbows digging into the ground at my sides, and my legs stretched out in front of me. I’m still moving too fast to stop myself, and it still hurts a lot, but at least I’ve got some control, and I can see where I’m going at last . . .

  I can see . . .

  There’s a light.

  It’s shining out at me from the wooded darkness ahead — a concentrated beam of bright white light — and as it slices toward me through the solid black air, I catch a fleeting glimpse of the area immediately in front of me. At the foot of the slope — just a few yards below me now — a short stretch of gently sloping ground leads down to a massive slab of granite embedded in the earth above a pathway. It’s like a giant stone step — about ten yards long and five yards wide — and at the far end, it looks as if it just drops straight down to the pathway below. I can’t actually see the ground directly below it, but I can see enough of the pathway on either side to guess that it’s a drop of about one and a half yards.

  On the other side of the snow-frosted path is the woods, which is where the light’s coming from.

  I see all this in an instant.

  And an instant later, I hit the ground hard, feetfirst, and my forward momentum sends me staggerin
g across the gentle slope and onto the granite slab, my arms windmilling as I try to stay on my feet, but it’s always a losing battle, and just before I reach the end of the slab, I finally overbalance and go sprawling forward with my legs flying out behind me . . . and I know I’m not going to make it now . . . I can see the edge of the slab looming up at me as I stumble helplessly toward it, and I can see the path below . . . and at the very last moment — just as my right shoulder crashes down hard on the granite edge — I think I see the light in the woods moving toward me.

  My right side clips the edge of the slab as I fall — a glancing impact that spins me over — so when I drop down to the path I’m facing upward, and I land with a bone-jarring thump on my back that knocks all the wind out of me.

  I don’t move for a few moments, I just lie there with my eyes closed, gasping for breath, trying to work out if I’m seriously hurt anywhere or just battered and bruised all over.

  I hear something then, a close-up sound, right next to my head — a heavy footstep crunching in the snow — and when I open my eyes all I can see is a blinding light shining down into my face.

  As I raise my hands to shield my eyes from the dazzling light, I hear a voice from above. It’s a male voice, and there’s a smirking menace to it that makes my blood run cold.

  “Well, well,” it says, “what have we got here?”

  Everything hurts as I cautiously ease myself up into a sitting position, and although I’m desperate to get to my feet and get away from whoever spoke to me — and who’s still standing over me with a flashlight — my head’s spinning so much that even the process of sitting up has made me feel nauseous and dizzy, so all I can do for now is kind of shuffle over a bit and sit with my back against the granite slab.