On the Third Day

by Rhys Thomas

  It took nearly half an hour for her to reach the bottom of the camp. The light of day was almost gone. In the hollow it was gloomy and the air was leaden with a fractured electric energy.

  A red car was driving along the road, up the hill to the house. McAvennie had left. She watched the car go. It was so far away she couldn’t hear the sound of its engine.

  ‘Miri?’

  Her mother was holding Mary’s hand. In the dusk she could not make out their faces in any detail. Mary let go of her grandmother’s hand and ran to her mother. Her wellington boots slapped the concrete like the beating of wings and she threw her arms around Miriam’s leg without saying a word. Miriam looked at her mother.

  ‘They’ve got him.’

  McAvennie and Fields were in the house for over half an hour, during which time the gloom of the evening deepened. On the horizon a tall bank of silver mist appeared. The crowd waited and spoke in hushed voices in anticipation of what was about to happen.

  Miriam and her mother found a seat near one of the campervans where they had a clear view of the house. Mary sat at their feet. She didn’t understand what was happening but knew enough to remain quiet.

  At last, McAvennie and Fields reappeared. An audible sigh broke out along the whole crowd. They were still alive. Miriam put her hands together in her lap, out of sight, and said a prayer under her breath.

  The two figures were only just visible in the dusk light as they climbed into the car, turned it round in the road and drove slowly back towards the camp. The headlights of the car shone to life.

  ‘That’s a good sign,’ her mother said.

  From the back of the house there was a dark blur of movement and two horsemen appeared in the road. They rode out after the car.

  The crowd fell silent.

  McAvennie must have seen the horses because the car slowed, then stopped. They were halfway between the house and the camp.

  A group of women were standing near Miriam, all of them wearing cloth headscarves.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ one of them said. ‘Why is he stopping?’

  ‘It’s a good sign,’ Miriam muttered under her breath. Her hands clamped together tightly.

  The horsemen split. One went round to the driver’s window and the second took position at the other side, further away from the car. They saw McAvennie wind down his window and put his large head out into the open.

  Just then, Miriam looked at the second horseman. He threw something small underneath the car, like a tennis ball. Miriam’s veins turned to ice as the first horseman drew a handgun from his belt.

  The crowd screamed.

  The red car jolted forward in a stall.

  McAvennie pulled his head back inside the car as the horseman fired his handgun twice into him and his head fell, dangling out of the window. The crowd screamed again, this time in panic. An orange light flashed out from beneath the car and then there was a low, hollow boom and the car was lifted into the air. Its shape changed, the far side folding in on the near with a yawning, metallic moan. The car remained upright but it was in flames. The far side door was somehow thrown open. Fields must have crawled out of the wreckage because the first horseman reared his animal around to the other side of the car and fired again.

  There was more gunfire, this time much closer. Some of the camp’s guards were firing up the hill at McAvennie’s assassins but their bullets missed their mark. The two horsemen joined ranks again and fired their handguns wildly into the crowd.

  Like a wave, the crowd turned and scattered. Miriam watched as the horsemen turned and galloped back up to the house.

  The human noise was deafening. Everything was falling apart and there was absolutely nothing to stop it. As the crowd scattered people fell to the ground and were trampled. The togetherness had disintegrated. There was no order in their panic. Miriam had seen the camp being born and now she was here to witness its death.

  Her family was safe against the wall of the campervan but it was too dangerous to move. Her mind jarred. The flaming car in which McAvennie and Fields had perished rolled a few yards down the road and off on to the grass where it came to a final stop. The flames were already dying into the dark.

  Her thoughts shunted to her son.

  ‘Edward.’

  The house was almost invisible now. The night had almost fallen.

  ‘We have to get him.’

  She pushed herself off the wall and made her way between the people towards the entrance.

  ‘Miri, stop. Damn you, Miriam, just stop.’

  Her mother’s voice had genuine anger in it. Miriam turned. Her mother was standing in front of the campervan with Mary at her side; two dark figures against the dim white of the wall.

  ‘Mum, I can’t just leave him.’ Her voice at the end of the sentence crumbled into a whisper.

  Mary was crying, her mouth had widened right across her face.

  ‘Come back, Miri. We’ll think of something.’

  Miriam shook her head. ‘I can’t.’ She coughed.

  She had already thought of something, and that was that she could not leave her son to those men. No matter how dangerous, she had to go. Even if she was going to be killed, it would be far worse to remain alive and do nothing. She turned away from her mother.

  Her body prickled when she saw the blond-haired man with glasses waiting at the entrance. He was with some of the people who had killed the prisoner. When he saw Miriam he stopped talking and moved towards her.

  ‘Right. Where are you going?’

  She didn’t want him to see her crying. ‘My son is up there. They have him.’

  ‘You can’t go,’ he said categorically, and with a total lack of sympathy.

  ‘They won’t shoot me. I’m a pregnant woman. They wouldn’t kill a pregnant woman.’

  His face was crossed by a quick emotion. ‘They’ve killed my son,’ he said. He spoke slowly, contorting the words into ugly, condensed sounds. ‘They took him and threw him off a cliff. So don’t fucking tell me what they will or won’t do. They’ll kill you without even thinking about it.’ He crossed his arms. ‘George McAvennie is dead. Things are different now. And you’re not going anywhere.’

  There was activity in the lighthouse. Dr Balad had run up and down the long ward a number of times. He had people with him and outside several vehicles had arrived. A draught washed through the room. The heavy double doors set into the circular tower of the lighthouse had been opened and the loud rumble of a diesel engine filled the room.

  Emily’s body had been covered with a white sheet from head to toe. Charlie was sitting next to her. He felt numb, as if his emotions had short-circuited. He needed to pull himself away.

  He heard gunfire. Two shots, a long way away. Something had been happening down on the camp over the past few days and he had deliberately ignored it.

  There was a low boom. And then two more shots. Charlie went to the front of the building and out into the open.

  The view stretched for miles but his eyes were drawn immediately to the small circle of orange flame across the valley. As he watched it he became aware of the shouting. It was too dark to see clearly but the sound of human screams was unmistakable.

  To his left there was the scrape of thin metal. He knew what it was. People were trying to get out of the camp and in doing so they were destroying the fence. He went to the low white wall that surrounded the lighthouse and its outbuildings and peered over. The back of the camp was closer and he could clearly make out the shapes of people against the tall wire fencing.

  The whole thing was shaking from its far end at the top of the slope to the near end by the lighthouse. Its straight line was moving wave-like under the pressure of the people until, at last, the middle section broke away and fell. The steel frames of each panel clattered to the floor and the people streaked over them and away across the farm fields towards the forest.

  Charlie turned back to the orange ball of flames. He guessed it must have been a car and that mean
t, he thought calmly and slowly, that the marauders were about to attack. He breathed deeply and closed his eyes. The air smelled good. The scent of salt from the sea was strong. The horizon was clouded by a tall body of mist, visibly drifting inland. Its prow billowed under itself. It didn’t look very thick, it wasn’t a soup and its tiny droplets seemed more silver than grey.

  He breathed out the hot air from his lungs. Malignant flecks of darkness had formed in it and he needed them gone. He could feel the whole world shifting. Change was everywhere. It was all around him and stretching off into the future in a dense cloud of unknowable fate. The new roads in his head were strong now and the old ones were becoming faded and overgrown.

  Life had been so easy, he thought. But now he was on a new trajectory and it was dark and dangerous. Nothing of what had made up his experience was now left. He was a rocket ship being fired into outer space, leaving everything he knew behind.

  He went to the other side of the lighthouse. The heavy double doors in the lighthouse tower had been closed. All that remained was a large white van. Whatever they had been doing was now finished. All the cars were gone.

  Dr Balad was leaning against the side of the van.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  The old doctor sighed. ‘It looks,’ he said philosophically, ‘as if the time has finally come.’

  ‘What’s in the van?’

  ‘It is a bomb,’ he answered plainly. ‘With which we will destroy the house at the top of the hill.’

  Charlie nodded. ‘You’re going to take out their base.’

  Dr Balad looked at his watch. ‘It is five o’clock now. I think perhaps we have set it too late. We need to get it across there in a few hours, and not before.’

  ‘Can’t you change it?’

  Dr Balad shook his head. ‘It’s already started.’

  The men of the camp ensured their sandbag defences were sturdy. The guns and ammunition were dealt out evenly and they took up their positions.

  David found himself halfway along the front fence with a man he had never met before and who said little. They waited in silence as the night came down. All the way along the line nobody said anything.

  David could not stop thinking about how this could have been avoided if only he hadn’t tried to bandage the boy’s hand. If he had taken the child straight to McAvennie, if he had run just that little bit faster, they would not have killed the prisoner and this situation, this waiting in the cold for death to come, might never have happened.

  This was not supposed to happen again. In the civilized world men did not wait in battle lines. Yet here he was, a puny rifle resting on the top of a sandbag, the muzzle poking through a little square in the flimsy wire fencing. This was what it had come to. For all of the systems and processes and plans and armies, he was still huddled over a single gun in the dark, not knowing what to do or when to do it.

  The mist that had been moving inland flowed over the camp. Leading fingers of it probed in the lines between the tents and caravans, keeping low to the ground before the greater mass of it, with its tall front wall, washed in and threw the camp into a denser, more complete dark. The sky above the mist was clear and after a few moments the mist changed. It started to glow with electric life, as if tiny fireflies were shimmering in and out of the ether.

  David stopped holding his gun so tightly and looked up, whilst way up the hill inland, Miriam, her mother and Mary moved to the window of their campervan and gazed out on the silver ocean of air, and Charlie, up near the lighthouse, watched the camp disappear from sight as the low-lying prow swamped it and then he turned and let the main wall of the mist flow through him.

  Everybody there, all of the hundreds of people, looked about them. They reached out to touch the mist but when they did it would curl away from them in spinning ribbons. Maybe the attack would never come. Without being able to see, the men at the top of the hill would call off their assault. It seemed inappropriate that something so beautiful should be disturbed by the prospect of violence.

  The men of the frontline squinted into it. If the marauders were coming down the hill, they could not see them. David looked left and right to see the men behind their sandbag guard posts but they weren’t there. His vision did not stretch that far.

  When the gunfire did come, as it surely did, the men on the frontline did not fire back. Cut off from the next station along, nobody knew what to do. They could not orientate themselves to the source of the fire and there were no orange bursts of light in the mist.

  ‘What’s going on?’ David called.

  And then he realized that nobody along the frontline was shouting. Nobody was screaming. Nobody was hurt. And it was because they were not part of the fight. David lifted his gun quickly, yanking the muzzle back through the little square in the fencing.

  ‘They’re not here,’ he shouted. ‘They’re behind us.’

  They came over the fallen fences at the back of the camp, little flashes of yellow in the mist, like tiny bolts of sideways lightning. There was no pattern in the lightning flashes. They were not moving in a line.

  The screams did not take long to carry on the wind to him. They rose up through the mist to Charlie like spectres. Inwards the tiny sparks moved. He wondered if he would last the night to be able to follow his plan and leave the camp. He didn’t really care if he lived or died. Being strafed by a swarm of bullets would not hurt for long.

  It was a strange sensation, watching it all happen through the bizarre medium of the silver mist. All civilization, every inch of its idea, seemed so false now. It was just a facade to cover up the reality of life – life was hard and cruel and innately not civilized.

  He was empty as he watched the lightning flashes move further into the camp. Their advance was not fast, it was not rushed. Charlie watched it passively. The sight of the gun flares was pretty in the mist, like an electrical storm. He wished it was not happening but it was and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He had no gun, and he had a bad leg. He was useless.

  Then there was a new colour. Charlie remembered seeing the farmhouse in the hamlet on the day he was shot in the leg. He remembered the charred corpse in the back garden and the blackened wall around the French windows. He remembered how the curtains had fluttered in the wind. And now here he was watching it in motion: a dragon breath of orange fire burning up and out in the silver mist.

  Miriam’s mother locked the door of their campervan and they climbed on to the bed. All of the fixings in the little shell of space were bolted securely down and the only protection they could fashion was a wall along the side of the bed made of blankets and pillows.

  ‘Edward liked making forts like this,’ said Miriam.

  Mary was crying softly and covering her ears. The gunfire was everywhere. The sound of breaking glass, punctured metal, screaming, shouting made a malicious symphony.

  Miriam was fully aware of how absurd it was to be plumping up pillows and folding up blankets but she did it anyway, if only to have an outlet for all the excess energy. As she worked her mind fell back in time to the afternoon that Edward was born. From her hospital bed she had looked out through the only window and watched a fluffy white cloud cross a clean blue sky as she held the baby in her arms. She remembered how the sweat cooled on her face, and how she had looked at the tiny body of her son, at his little nose and his closed eyes and his thin, delicate lips, and how she had been struck by a crunching happiness. She turned to Mary and placed a pillow on the ramparts of the fort and tried to smile.

  David ran blindly through the mist, down a narrow corridor between two lines of caravans. The man who had been with him at the sandbags was behind him. He said nothing but David was glad for his presence. They came to the end of the metal corridor and out into the open. David’s feet slid on a patch of mud and he skidded.

  A bullet flashed past him and slammed into a car. He was being shot at.

  Quickly, he threw himself down and turned his body to face the source of the att
ack. From the mist the outline of his assailant emerged. The proboscis of his gas mask was pointed at the sky, slung back off his face.

  The marauder fired again but this time not at David.

  Somebody grunted and the man who had been behind him splashed into the mud.

  Without thinking, David pulled the trigger. The stock of the rifle flew back into his shoulder and sharp pain flashed across the top of his chest and up one side of his neck. David winced with it and watched the man he had shot spin round. He didn’t fall. David fired again, and then again. The man in the gas mask fell back and David fell still. He had done it. He had killed him.

  He checked his nameless friend. His eyes had stayed open in death. David blocked out any feelings. He took the man’s rifle and threw it over his shoulder and pocketed the spare ammunition. Then he went to the man he had shot and stood over him. He was wearing a bulletproof vest. David stepped quickly back but the man didn’t move. Crouching over him, he saw his neck was covered in blood. It was a lucky shot.

  The chemicals in his body made him shake. He should be dead. He would be dead if he hadn’t been lucky. If the mist hadn’t been there he’d have been picked off without a second chance. He puffed out his cheeks and blocked out the thought. He took the man’s gun.

  It wasn’t like his rifle. It was one of the short, stubby guns he had seen the police carry at airports. He aimed it at a car. He wanted to make sure he knew how to use it.

  He pulled the trigger and one bullet was fired. He pulled it again. Another bullet. Satisfied, he ran, crouched, into the mist.

  The gunfire came in short, sharp exchanges. So far nobody had come to the lighthouse. Charlie had returned to Emily’s bedside. By this time there were only three people in the ward with the Sadness in them. One of them had been brought in yesterday. The others were in their third and final day. Each of the victims had one person keeping a bedside vigil and each of those was a woman of fifty years or older.