He was staggering towards the barns now to first look there and then head up to the top wood to find his wife; she would definitely leave for Scotland now that people had died here. They were in serious trouble now, and he cursed his stupidity and rash anger. He had envisaged using this booby trap if they had been forced to leave their land, not when there were people in the house.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something.
It was almost completely hidden by the wheel of the tractor, but there it was again in the shimmering firelight: a brief flash of auburn blowing in the wind.
Nat’s legs buckled, he felt his knees connect with the ground, his hands hit the floor, then he pushed himself back to his feet and sprinted the distance to the other corner of the yard.
There behind the Massy Ferguson lay Esme on her side prostrate in the dirt, her back to her husband. Her hair was mostly matted with mud and soot but there was just enough of it blowing in the wind to have given her away. Nat convulsed and threw up, again falling to his knees and crawling the last ten yards to his beloved wife, his tears already soaking his face and chilling it in the night's wind.
Esme was alive, but part of him wished she wasn’t. He could see that she had a gunshot wound in her back that must have been inflicted as she was running from the house. She had managed to get behind the tractor before the explosion, but most of what she had been through had been inflicted before the chaos, with time and fear and sufferance. He tried not to think, but his mind boomeranged back to her state of undress. The pain ripped at his heart as he couldn’t stop thinking about what he had left his wife to endure.
He didn’t know whether her injuries were life-threatening, but the blood pooled under her back was horrific, her face was pummelled and she had blood between her legs.
She was shaking uncontrollably. He had no idea what to do for the best, so he ripped his coat off his back. Scooping her frail body up, he wrapped it tightly around her and carried her closer to the flames for warmth. He knelt down with her still in his arms and the heat washed over them.
She opened her eyes and looked into his and at that moment he was inconsolable. He saw Esme’s eyes soften as she saw him. Her limp body tightened slightly and her hands gripped his arm.
He scrabbled in the dirt, what to do, nothing or no-one to help, how could he save her?
Then he screamed, animalistic, primeval as he realised he couldn’t do anything, she would live or die, but he couldn’t influence it. His usual default strategy of brute force was useless now. He had left his wife alone, and now she lay dying in his arms.
She moved his jacket to cover her brutalised privates. Every moment was a torture that ripped through his soul. It tore all the joy he had ever known from his being and filled the void with a rage and a thirst for vengeance that he could not control.
He howled to the heavens like Frankenstein’s monster as Esme choked and spluttered away. The fear had returned to her eyes now as she fought and panicked through lack of oxygen. The shaking was shallower, and the choking whittled away as her eyes became glazed; she was slipping away.
Nat was crying, uncontrollably spluttering words intended to calm, torn between stroking her hair, looking into her eyes and cuddling her tight.
The final moments were punctuated by rakish breaths through blood-filled lungs. Her face calmed as the life drained from her body, and Nat sank his face into the small of her neck heaving with grief and wailing apologies.
They had beaten and raped his wife before shooting her in the back as she ran.
He was finished with life and just beginning with death, whether his own or every last one of those responsible for this atrocity.
FIVE
His legs were numb with kneeling. Esme’s broken body lay in his arms. He had stayed like that for a good hour. She was hardly recognisable. The guilt and loss tore at his flesh; his body shook, and his guts churned. But already the grief was buried, overwhelmed by a burning hunger for revenge. It was part of his makeup to understand that she wasn’t coming back, to know the finality of death. His mind boiled with anger. His tears waned, and the cold began to take hold of his body. The rain was coming down again now, so he scrambled to his feet. With her petite body in his arms, he grabbed a shovel and a torch and set off up the hill.
He carried her for over a mile, trudging through the dark. One drenching step after another, up the exposed fell, then into the woodland, over the brow of the hill and into the relative calm of the hill’s northern slope. The silence was deafening as the wind was blocked by the hillside, it seemed to press against his ears; he appreciated the change, it made life easier. Then he looked at Esme and focussed again. He staggered down the steep bank towards the small burn that had scythed its way through the land and into a deep narrow gorge. It was only a small stream, a relative trickle, but there was a point where the water hit an outcrop of bedrock and pooled behind it exploding over the breach to create a waterfall. It was here that the family would come on summer days. So many memories; there was nowhere else he was going to let his wife rest.
On the southern bank of the river, there was water meadow where, when the river was not in flood, they would sit amongst the flowers and reeds. At the edge of the field, the thick grass of the rough grazing began its ascent up the slope, and about twenty yards up, clear of the flood waterline, there stood a magnificent ancient oak tree. The bulging, heaving trunk grew at an angle from the hillside, and the branches stretched out towards the river and away in search of the sun.
Nat laid Esme's body in the grass, and he took the shovel and began to hack the dirt from a solid cake to a thick muddy mass which he threw to one side in heavy wads. The toil relieved his tortured mind.
He moved over to his wife and knelt by her body, stroking her hair one last time. He kissed her lips and gently swept her off the grass. He closed her eyes and kissed her head once more in silence before laying her in the ground.
He climbed out of the shallow grave, looked with sorrow at his wife one last time, then shovelled fresh sodden dirt directly onto her corpse without uttering a word. His body shook, and his shoulders bounced with an overwhelming melancholy as he buried his wife. He thought briefly that she would be happy to be buried here. No prayers- he wasn’t religious. He sat exhausted on the boulders and thought about his immediate future.
It was past six in the morning; the dark night remained heavy, but the cold air was becoming moist with dew. He realised he was thoroughly exhausted. He knew he had to rest. He hauled his weary carcass to its feet and trudged back up the steep slope, through his beloved woodland and down the fell to the house. When he got there, the flames were still relatively ferocious but had died somewhat from the earlier blaze. Everything from the floors to the walls, from paperwork to the Aga was a mass of charred rubble. He shook his head as he thought about his perfect past life. There were no tears now, no wailing. His teeth ground together in sheer, bitter determination and his head filled with the molten lava of vengeance.
The first thing he went to was his gun cabinet. Esme would never let him have it in the house, so he had bolted it to the wall deep within the barn.
They had found it but had been unable to prize it open. A few feet away on the splintered old workbench he lifted a jar full of screws. He held it up to the light and saw what he was looking for: the keys for the cabinet winked at him through the glass. He opened the cabinet and viewed his limited but amply sufficient arsenal; he grabbed his silenced .308 Winchester and his 28” stack barrelled shotgun. He put the guns on the work bench and piled all the ammunition he had next to them.
Then his head swivelled in search of a bag - he knew it was there somewhere but he hadn’t put his hands on it for probably ten years. His eyes scanned the piles and heaps as they had done a thousand times before. He knew he had seen it somewhere, so he dived into piles of material- there were blankets, plastic sheeting, old curtains - then he found it under the curtains: an old military style canvas holdall.
He placed the guns and ammunition into the flexible bag. Then he rounded up the other supplies he needed: a hammer, a saw, matches, firelighters, two large plastic sheets, three wax jackets. Quickly he moved to the other side of the barn where three thick horse blankets were draped over a trailer, he took two and folding them he stuffed them into the brimming bag. He looked for whatever food he could find. He packed another bag with dog biscuits and some tins of beans- the only food items in the barn. He set off west from the farm, munching dry muddy tasting dog biscuits as he stomped away.
He was heading half a mile west, to an isolated field shelter that he used for his lambs. It was water-tight, and it gave him a clear lookout over the approach to his land.
By the time he reached the shelter, the first light of dawn was illuminating the blackness and the eastern skyline glowed deep dark blue. He took out his knife and hacked two armfuls of heather from the earth; he put them on the floor of the shed as some sort of bed or at least insulation against the bare cold ground. Then he threw one horse blanket over the makeshift mattress and laid his weary bones down, pulling the other blanket over him. As he drifted off to sleep, he could hear the crows waking in the distance and the sheep calling for each other. He fell into a deep sleep.
He woke after about six hours with a jolt. He had a feeling in his stomach that the terrible dream he had just had was reality. The sickness increased as he realised where he was and that the nightmare was true. The life he had been living was over and this was the first day of a new, bitter, sorrowful reality.
He looked up at the roof of the shelter, pleased with his work. The spiders’ webs spanning every corner were covered in dust, dry as bones. He slowly moved through the stiffness of his muscles and stood outside the shelter absorbing the beautiful view up the Tyne Valley.
The previous night’s storm had now passed, and although the sun was shining, there remained a chill in the air. It was a crisp day. The first thing he had to do today was fill his stomach - dog biscuits weren’t going to cut it. Rolling out in front of him was a hillside hopping with breakfast. He took the Winchester and laid down in the opening of the shelter. Although this was akin to cracking an egg with a sledgehammer, he took aim and fired twice. Two rabbits rolled limp across the ground. He stood, leaned the rifle against the shelter wall and walked down into the field. The wind blustered around his ears, but he found solace in the exposure of the hillside. The chilled clean air filled his lungs and he felt some control returning to his mind.
The two rabbits lay only a metre apart and he sat down in the thick grass, there was no point in bringing the guts closer to the shelter. Before picking them up, he lay back and watched the infinite sky roll past. The lush tufts of rough grazing gave him even more shelter and he felt encapsulated in the landscape and ultimately alive.
Then he closed his eyes and Esme’s battered face came at him from the darkness, he bolted upright and opened his eyes again to the countryside. Still sitting, he snatched the first rabbit by the hind legs and unsheathed his knife and laid it in the grass. He held the small body upright and squeezed the lower abdomen to empty its bladder. Then he took up his blade and made a shallow incision just below the rib cage and drew the sharp point down between the rear legs. He then slipped his thumb and forefinger into the abdomen, pushing up and breaking through the diaphragm and there he felt the familiar hard ball of the stomach which he gently extracted. Bursting this would ruin the meal and his day as the rancid stink of a rabbit's belly was enough to make the sturdiest stomach turn.
While he worked, he thought about his wife; he was unsure whether he was in shock or whether he would ever feel distraught again. Yes, he felt hollow, but he understood that she was gone; crying over the loss was pointless, meaningless. He knew how he felt- he didn’t need to show anyone else his love for his wife by crumbling. He felt uneasy that he had come to terms with it so easily and quickly, but he had, that was how he worked.
Using his blade, he removed the rest of the rabbit’s innards then, slicing through the membrane between meat and fur, he skinned the animal. Leaving what he didn’t want where it landed in the field, he took up the other animal by its hind legs and carried both back to the shelter. He hang-tied the second rabbit’s legs and hung it in the shelter, then he walked to a glorious beech tree about fifty yards behind the shelter.
He picked fallen branches and with his arms full he returned to the shelter. He laid a firelighter and some crumpled paper in the grass. Then, he arranged kindling around the pile and placed a layer of larger sticks around the kindling in the shape of a tepee. He lit the fire and soon enough the moisture in the sticks was being exorcised in the form of a thick plume of smoke which soon died back when the fire broke into flame. Nat eyed the approach to his land as the smoke could be seen from a long way off, but all remained quiet.
His mind turned back to his breakfast as he fashioned a rough spit out of three sticks and roasted the meat over an open fire. He also opened one of the tins of beans and placed the open tin on the edge of the fire to warm.
He ate as he gazed west up the Tyne Valley towards the chimneys of the chipboard factory in the distance, which, for as long as he could remember, was continually belching out some concoction of gases. Today they were dormant. He wondered what the rest of the country were doing, was there civil war? Were people resisting? It didn’t look like it to him, the countryside was quiet, but then he didn’t imagine bombs would be going off either way.
It was seven miles into Hexham. He briefly considered walking but then thought better of it - time was against him. He’d take his chances in the Jeep. After gnawing the last of the meat from the rabbit’s bones, he put the fire out with loose soil from a nearby mole hill. He walked into the shelter and delved into the canvas bag, removing the ball-h peen hammer he had stowed in there.
He put the tool in the inside pocket of his jacket and put the rifle back in the bag. Then he put the canvas bag into a plastic feed sack to keep it all dry and set off with it towards the house. Halfway up the steady incline he ducked into a small overgrown thicket, inside was an outcrop of rock which had a small cave. He pushed the bag underneath and moved off towards the house with his hammer in his pocket.
His home was now just a smouldering mess of stone, charred wood and melted man-made materials. He looked, but his gritty face gave away no emotion. His jaw jutted like a rocky outcrop, his eyes were narrowed against the wind, his whiskers were white as snow and the lines on his face were dark and uniform, like a furrowed field.
He stepped up into his Jeep; the keys remained in the ignition but the rear bumper was embedded in the blue NSO car which he had crashed into the night before. He started the engine, slammed his foot down on the accelerator and the powerful engine roared. The vehicle lurched up into the air, but the tyres were true, biting into the gravel, throwing it aside and hitting the earth underneath. There was an almighty hollow crack of plastic passing its breaking point and a squeal of metal being torn away as the bumper was left behind. The Jeep tore off down the driveway mostly under the control of its driver.
He entered the centre of Hexham up Preistpopple; the town was quiet. It certainly didn’t seem to be engulfed in turmoil, but there was evidence aplenty of the revolution. There were two burnt-out shops on the street. There were a few smaller shops open, but the department store had been smashed up and looted. All the large windows were shattered and, from what he could see, the inside was wrecked.
The way he saw it this revolution was a case of complying or be, at least, ruined, at worst, destroyed. There were a few people milling around; he recognised the faces but didn’t see anyone he knew to talk to. He parked the Jeep on Beaumont Street, a grand Victorian Avenue with attractive five or six storey buildings built opposite the Sele Park. There, the road slopes gently north to the Abbey, where a church has stood for over a thousand years.
It was the top of the street, next to the war memorial, that he felt was the most exposed; this is
where he would wait. He pulled his truck off the road, parking across four parking spaces which were usually full of cars visiting the shops and sites of the market town, but today they were empty. He got out of the vehicle and strode over to a bench positioned at the gates to the park. He pulled his collars high around his neck and buried his hands deep inside his pockets, then he sat on the seat and waited, looking out over the unusually quiet junction.
He sat silent and still for over two hours, watching and waiting, conserving energy and thinking. Only a handful of cars passed him by, and no one passed on foot. He didn’t recognise anyone, which was odd because he knew a lot of people and recognised most in this town. As darkness fell, he noticed the same cars full of younger men passing again and again. This in itself was not unusual, but as he didn’t know any of the cars or the people he discerned that they were NSO, and he knew he was in the right place. He didn’t, however, have a plan; he was simply overwhelmed by a thirst for violent retribution and he would work the rest out in real time.
It was dark now, but the night was relatively still and relatively mild; he had been sitting for hours and he wasn’t feeling the chill. He had studied the birds, pigeons and blackbirds, merrily going about their business; he had studied the damage to his Jeep’s rear bumper.
Now he was studying the outline of a rotund lone figure shuffling up the street towards him. Then, his stomach turned and adrenalin coursed his blood as he caught a flash of white from the corner of his right eye. His eyes darted from the approaching man to a white car, which turned into the street and directly passed Nat and his vehicle. He recognised the car: it was the regime thugs that he had seen the night before.
The Border Reiver Page 5
