The Bitter End

by James Loscombe

  Nicholas considered the question before replying. "I suppose not. I expect she did go to Back Field."

  That was good enough for Ben. He left Nicholas with his anger and went to find little Kirsty Lorimer.

  3

  Ben had managed to talk the girls father out of coming but old Groche had insisted that his two sons, the girls uncles, join the search party. He wasn't sure how much good they would do, he knew for a fact that the elder of the two, Peter, was a drunk on the same scale as the girls dad. He just hoped they wouldn't get in the way.

  They travelled to Back Island in two boats. Groche's boys in the old mans fishing dugout; Ben and Aaron on his raft. The air was still and heavy with moisture. It would be raining by midday, he thought.

  As they approached the field he saw the markings of the girls's boat in the mud from the night before. They landed their boats next to the spot and climbed out.

  The mud had been churned up for a distance of a couple of metres along the coast. Someone had paced the beach over and over again, a fact that did not fit in with Margaret's explanation of what had happened. He expected there would be many such examples and that it would not help his job to dwell on them.

  He led the three other men up the muddy slope. There were indentations in the grass where the girl must have walked, except he could imagine her running, afraid of the decision she'd made to leave the beach and wanting to get wherever she had been going quickly. It seemed impossible that the job would be as easy as following a trail but so far that was what it looked like being.

  At the top of the hill the land opened up and he could see the cluster of trees to the west that everyone called the forest. Without discussion they stopped together at the top of the hill and checked their weapons: a crossbow apiece and a quiver of arrows on their backs.

  They crossed the field without a word. Ben tried to stay calm but despite his best efforts his fingers tightened around the handle of his crossbow. He saw to the north areas of the field that had already been ploughed, ready for seeds to be planted for the first Sanctuary farm. The workers should be there already but salvaged ploughs stood idle.

  The walk down the hill and across the field was painfully short. Ben realised at once that if the girl was in the woods and unharmed she would have seen them and come running out. If she was still there she was hurt or worse. As they walked he glanced at the two uncles but all he saw in their eyes was a keyed up fear which would do no good if he needed them to do something. In fact it could end up being more of a liability. Fortunately Aaron seemed more in control of himself, although Ben couldn't help but notice the way he chewed on his bottom lip.

  They didn't find her in the forest. There were some broken mushrooms on the floor beside a tree and he guessed she had done it but there was no sign of where she had gone. It took them less than five minutes to search the cluster of trees without enthusiasm. They could all tell that she wasn't there but each felt the need to confirm it.

  Once they had finished they stood on the far side of the forest and stared back across the field. Ben knew that their real destination was behind them but it seemed to offer some comfort to look back in the direction of home. None of them wanted to say it, least of all Ben, but they hadn't found her and they knew what that meant.

  "Lets keep moving," said Aaron and Ben was grateful to him for breaking the silence.

  He turned and through an arch of trees he saw the unexplored fields beyond the forest. The light looked darker there, the sun less warm. He nodded and sighed. "Come on then."

  They walked more slowly now. The weight of the task before them more apparent. They were no longer following a trail that they hoped would lead to a frightened but unharmed little girl. There was no more trail and that she had left behind the relative safety of the forest meant it was impossible to deny the likelihood something even worse had happened to her.

  He let Aaron lead them through the forest. When he stepped out the other side he shivered. There were no depressions in the grass to follow and the field seemed to stretch out to the horizon.

  "Which way should we go?" said one of the brothers, he thought Peter but didn't turn to check.

  There wasn't an obvious way to go. If she had come out here then she could have gone in any direction. Of course there was always the possibility that she was still in the forest and they had missed her but this seemed like the most optimistic approach to take. So it didn't really matter which way they went, their chances of finding her remained the same: low.

  "We should stay by the river," he said. At least that way they couldn't get lost. He didn't think any of them had any experience with land navigation, at least nothing in the past twenty years.

  For want of a better idea the others agreed. So they headed south towards where the rivers flowed. He tried to think that this was the most likely course she would have taken. Alone in the dark she might have got lost and finding the river would at least have meant she was getting closer to home. Instead he thought that if Zack or Adam had been turned he would want someone to find them and put them out of their misery.

  They reached the river where it ran around the back of Sanctuary. Here it was all mud planes that smelled like sewage. In the distance he could see the Island and for a brief moment his heart skipped a beat as it looked like someone standing in the middle of the mud flats. It could have been her. She wouldn't have been able to see the mud in the dark or known how solid it was if she could. She might have seen the Island and the river in the distance and thought she could walk to it. A foolish idea in the light of day but in her panic she might not have remembered. The truth was that the south beach was the closest crossing point.

  "It's not her," said Aaron.

  He handed the battered black binoculars to Ben and he looked through them. It was a tree, somehow growing in the middle of all that mud, it's bare branches reaching for the sky like a little girl stuck in the mud.

  They walked on down the river bank. The sun rose in the sky and Ben brushed away flies and other bugs drawn towards them by the mud banks. The heat continued to intensify and by mid-day he was looking around for shelter. A few trees grew along the banks but none of them very big. Any protection they might offer was negligible.

  The Island disappeared from view and eventually so did the suburbs of Sanctuary. Only then did the mud banks give way to more solid ground.

  Ben didn't go hunting anymore but even when he had he'd never ventured this far from the village. If a journey of this distance had been required his instinct would have been to make it by boat. Now he was out there on land, exposed to the elements with nowhere to hide. The whole enterprise began to feel like too much effort to him and, when he considered how unlikely they were to find the girl, pointless.

  After some time they came to another cluster of trees. Though the sun was beginning to lose a lot of its intensity they were all glad of a chance to sit down and rest. Aaron built a fire and Ben shot a rabbit. By the time they had eaten and rested the sun had begun its slow decline towards the hills in the west. It would be dark before long.

  "Should we go back?" said Ben. He had almost forgotten the brothers who sat by themselves a little way back from the dying fire. Even if he had remembered them he wouldn't have asked for their opinion on the matter.

  Aaron looked out at the night sky and appeared to consider the question. "Maybe give it another hour?"

  In another hour it would be most of the way to dark but he didn't say anything. They were four fully grown and armed men and they could look after themselves. He nodded. "Another hour then."

  The sun seemed to visibly move across the sky and his shadow became longer every few minutes. He could still hear the water running to his left but the river was now hidden behind a bank of trees and overgrown bushels. It was tiring and their water had run out. He was tempted to suggest calling it off before the hour mark. But he had already missed the twins's bedtime so a few hours more out wouldn't make much difference.

  Ahead
of him Aaron stopped. Ben stopped beside him. "Did you see something?" he said.

  "When did you last come this way?" he said.

  The two brothers stopped beside him, yawned and stretched. "What's going on?"

  Ben ignored them. "By river? Couple of years I guess. Before the twins anyway. Why?"

  Aaron nodded. "Come here," he said.

  He looked back at the two brothers who showed little concern about the setting sun or that their question had been ignored. Then he walked away from them and followed Aaron through a rough path that had formed between two bushes.

  On the other side was the river. About two metres below them where the land had risen imperceptibly as they walked. The greenish water rushed past below and he followed it to the wooden structure that looked something like a bridge spanning the banks.

  "What do you make of that?" said Aaron.

  Ben wondered if Aaron had already known about the structure. It wasn't clear to him what it was. Perhaps he'd had an ulterior motive for the 'one more hour'. "What is it?" he said.

  "So you didn't see it last time you came out?"

  Ben shook his head and felt as dumb as the brothers.

  "I thought not. Looks like they've done some more work on it recently."

  "Do you know what it is?"

  Aaron sighed. "Best guess: a dam."

  "A dam?"

  He nodded. "It's right up the flow of the river from Sanctuary, block the water here and we'll soon dry up."

  "Who would..." But he didn't need to finish. The answer was obvious; if the vamps dried out the river they could walk right into the village and take whoever they wanted. But vamps didn't build, they weren't organised. They were just mindless beasts. Unfortunately the available evidence did not support this theory. "We have to do something."

  Aaron nodded. "London."

  "London? What for?" said Ben.

  "Weapons," said Aaron. "They're coming for us Ben and we need to be able to defend ourselves."

  "We've got weapons, haven't we?"

  Aaron held up his crossbow. It had been made in the village based on a design from a textbook Ben himself had salvaged. It was rough, inelegant, it took about a minute to reload and it wasn't accurate over long distances. "These things? Ben, how many vamps do you think it took to build this?"

  He shrugged.

  "Dozens, maybe as many as a hundred and that's just the workers. What about the ones behind it?"

  Ben didn't like feeling dumb, it felt too close to the truth to be funny. He was a worker, not a thinker, but he didn't need to have that pointed out to him. "What do you mean?" he said.

  "Someone had to plan that, they had to find somewhere to get the material and the tools. That isn't the product of a bunch of worker ants."

  That made a cruel kind of sense. The few vamps that he had encountered had been primal, instinctive creatures, certainly not capable of the kind of reasoned thinking it would require to build something like a dam. So maybe there was another set of vamps, smarter than the grunts that attacked people in fields.

  "There's a place in London," continued Aaron. He looked around as if someone might be watching them. Maybe the brothers could have been but they were no where to be seen. "When everything happened," he said, apparently happy that they were safe, "we holed up in The Tower. It was on the river, we only had to defend one side."

  Ben listened, fascinated despite the dreadful nature of the situation. Aaron's past was, until that moment, a mystery to him. He had never wanted to talk about it before. Ben had assumed it was for the same reason no one else wanted to talk about the past; it hurt too much to remember the world that used to be. But now it turned out that there was more to it than that.

  "The PM, the King, everyone considered valuable was moved in so they could be defended. There were plans for what we would do after the threat was eliminated..." he shook his head. "...we were going to start again and build a new world."

  "They over ran the castle?" Ben guessed.

  Aaron nodded. "We had a few weeks but it was never going to last. If we'd had a few more days we might have been able to get more people out. In the end it was just me and Anthony."

  Ben had been too young when it happened to really consider what happened to the leaders of the country and now that he was old enough they seemed distant and unimportant. He doubted he would have been too concerned about it at the time. He knew that at some point in the past there had been a king but what did that matter now?

  "There were weapons there?" he said.

  Aaron nodded. "We took what we could but it's only enough for a few people." He nodded towards the dam. "If this works we'll need to arm the whole village."

  "Maybe it would be easier to just move on," he said. "We live on boats after all."

  "Yeah, right. Half of them are so built up it would be easier to move a block of flats. Besides, if the vamps are smart enough to build something like this they'll just catch up with us again. We need a way to defend ourselves."

  Ben nodded. It made sense and he couldn't see a way around it. "Why didn't you say that before? Why all that rubbish about getting supplies?"

  Aaron lowered his voice. "Do you trust him?"

  "Who?"

  "Nicholas. Do you trust him?"

  Ben thought about it. He didn't like Nicholas, that was for sure, but he trusted him, didn't he? He had the best interest of Sanctuary in mind. "Don't you?"

  Aaron rubbed the back of his neck and when he was done, said simply, "no."

  How long had they been there now? The darkness was creeping over them like a blanket. He wanted to know more, wanted to find out why Aaron didn't trust Nicholas but this was not the time. "We have to tell him," he said.

  "I think you're right. I wanted you to see it first."

  The dark crossed over the watery valley between the two banks. Ben thought he began to sense, rather than see, movement. The bank opposite had been stripped of vegetation and looked a lot like the parts of Back Field that had been ploughed. Now the ground seemed to pulse and undulate as though something were pushing from below.

  "We need to move," said Aaron.

  Ben nodded his head in agreement and started to turn until he felt Aaron's hand on his arm.

  "Ben, I don't think we should tell people about this."

  "It's between you and me," he said. "But we tell Nicholas in the morning."

  Aaron nodded. "Agreed."

  He wanted to get into why Aaron didn't trust Nicholas but now wasn't the time. They walked back through the path of broken trees and arrived to find the brothers with their crossbows aimed at their hearts.

  When they saw that it was them they relaxed and lowered their weapons. "We thought you was ... one of them."

  There was no time to discuss that either. Ben led the way back along the river. Despite being thirsty and exhausted they moved quickly. Ben, at the front, motivated by the image of the dam and the thought of how many vamps were now behind them. How, he wondered, could they have been so close for so long? Shouldn't they have known?There were so many questions and he knew he wouldn't get answers to them all.

  4

  They sent the two brothers home and made their way to the Island. The air was golden blue, the colours seemed deeper and more real than they had before. Sanctuary was silent in the early morning and Ben looked out across the water as if he had never really seen it before.

  It looked vulnerable in a way it never had. He saw a bunch of people who had been exiled from their natural home on land to live as refugees on the water. They were kidding themselves that this could be a permanent way of life.

  They saw Nicholas arrive on his shiny raft. His two bodyguards

  (bullies)

  flanking him. He saw them as he climbed onto the Island and walked towards them.

  "Did you find her?" he said.

  It took Ben a moment to realise he was talking about Kirsty. He shook his head, feeling bad for the girl they had forgotten about. "We need to speak to y
ou," he said.

  "Of course, my office is always open."

  Five minutes later Ben was back in The General's office, a cup of something like coffee in his hands. The aroma of it woke him from the daze he had fallen into without realising it.

  "We found something," he said. He was unsure how to tell Nicholas about the dam. As much as he disliked the man he knew he cared about Sanctuary.

  "What is it Ben," he said calmly. "Whatever it is we can deal with it."

  "The vamps are building a dam," he said.

  Ben explained as best he could their discovery of the dam without revealing that Aaron had already known about it. He described its structure and location and their best guess about what it meant. Nicholas listened in silence, nodding his head from time to time.

  "This is troubling," said Nicholas when Ben had finished. It was an under reaction compared to what he had expected. But he wasn't to be put off.

  "If we leave at once we can be back inside of two weeks," he said.

  "Leave?" said Nicholas, raising his eyebrows in mock surprise. "Where on earth would you go?"

  "London," said Ben, not picking up on the fact that Nicholas knew exactly what he was talking about but feigning ignorance.

  "Why in the world would you go there?"

  "We have to be prepared to fight them," he said. "We need weapons and Aaron knows where we can find them."

  It was the first time he had mentioned Aaron by name. He had been sitting at the back of the room in perfect silence.

  "Ah yes, Aaron," said Nicholas. "The man of mystery. Quite a coincidence that you happened upon this little construction isn't it?"

  Aaron remained silent. Ben was worried that the conversation was beginning to stray from its original purpose.

  "We have to do something," he said.

  Nicholas leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together beneath his chin. He did not speak for a moment and Ben thought he was considering the problem.