In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  They all lay silent, putting thought into their choices. It was cold and each of their breaths was a slipstream of sparkling frost upon the air. They were well bundled up and his daddy had brought a thermos of cocoa for them which he poured out now as they mused over which star in the sky would be theirs.

  “Betelgeuse,” Casey said a moment later, his voice certain.

  “Why that one?”

  “I like the color of it, an’ it’s a warrior’s shoulder that gives strength to his arm.”

  The choice suited his big brother, even at his age, for he had much of the natural warrior about him.

  “It’s a warrior’s heart that gives him most of his strength,” Pat said quietly.

  “Aye, ye’re right, wee man,” Brian said and stroked the soft curls on his son’s head. “Ye know warriors must take care for those around them, those that are not given to the constant fightin’.” This said with a bit of playful teasing, being that Casey had been in trouble twice in the last month for fighting.

  “I’ll keep watch over my brother,” Casey said, with an unaccustomed serious tone to his voice, “if that’s what ye’re hintin’ at, Daddy.”

  “Well, no son, I wasn’t hintin’ at that, but it’s good to know ye’ll protect him should he need it. An’ what star would ye choose, Patrick?”

  “The blue one,” he said.

  “That’s Rigel, Orion’s foot,” he said. “Why that one?”

  “Because it carries the warrior into his adventures,” Pat said.

  They were quiet for a time after that, the three of them sipping their cocoa and staring up into the night. The sky was clear as an angel’s breath, each star a pinwheeling fire within that ether. Lying there with the earth soft beneath their bodies, it was easy to feel the movement of the planet; it was as natural as the blood moving through their veins.

  It had been one of those rare perfect nights, held carefully in his memory, tucked away in a box in a room he didn’t visit often because it was too painful. He thought of a quote his father had shared with them that night, a night which now seemed a lifetime ago.

  ‘And I sense when I look at the stars

  That we are children of life.

  Death is small.’

  Brian had taken his hand and held it as he spoke the words, and Pat had snuggled up to him, feeling happy and safe, because his father and his brother were there with him, and thus his world was complete.

  He took a breath of the raw spring night and looked back at the house. He could see Pamela moving about the kitchen, putting things to rights before she went to her sleepless bed.

  “No, death is not small,” he said, and knew not if he spoke merely to his own anger and grief, or to his departed family. “It’s not small at all.”

  Part Two

  Count the Stars in the Sky

  May 1976-July 1976

  Chapter Sixteen

  You Take a Breath, and Then You Take Another

  PAMELA WAS LOST, and not, she thought, in her usual fashion. She had dropped off a set of blueprints down near a wee town called Keady, and had made a wrong turning somewhere, only to find herself in unfamiliar territory. She was tired and her mind was filled with architectural drawings and specs, which she only half understood, as well as orders for wood and stone and concrete, and just where a woman might find a traditional thatcher at short notice.

  She was learning the business slowly, but it was a hard curve and with two small children at home for whom she was the only parent, she didn’t feel she had the wits left by day’s end to get further up on her construction know-how. She had hired a new supervisor, though she could ill afford him, who did know what the hell he was doing, and thankfully didn’t seem to mind that he worked for a woman. This was only in the most nominal sense, as he went ahead and did what needed doing without making a fuss. She had her suspicions about where he had come from and just why he was willing to work for so little.

  The road she was on was like many in this part of the countryside, narrow and dark with high hedges, relieved only by the occasional ditch and lay-by cut into the hedges. She pushed down an incipient wave of panic. She slowed down and looked around; there was no one behind her so she could take a moment to get her bearings. She thought she might be somewhere near Noah’s farm, and if she could find that, she could make her way home easily from there.

  Ahead the road widened, and she spotted a flash of color. It looked like there might be a roadblock. She took a deep breath and felt the panic rise in her chest again. Roadblocks made her very nervous. The soldiers posted to South Armagh were on edge more than their colleagues in Belfast and other locations in Northern Ireland. She didn’t blame them, but it was always a very tense few moments while one waited to go through.

  She slowed even further, readying herself for the questions and the suspicion. That was when she heard the distinct rat-a-tat-tat of an automatic weapon laying down fire and knew this was no ordinary roadblock and the men up ahead were not British soldiers. She realized her mistake too late, for the clothing was indeed khaki green, but balaclavas covered the face of the three men she could see. British Army didn’t do that—that left Loyalist paramilitaries or the South Armagh wing of the PIRA and if the latter, then these would be men acting under the law of Noah Murray. Either way the odds were better than even that she was going to be dead in about two minutes if she didn’t get the hell out of here.

  There was a bus halted in the road, its doors open. Beside the bus there were men standing at the roadside, maybe a dozen of them, and the men in the balaclavas were shooting them. Six men standing, and then five, then four, three, two and then one. The world slowed its spin as she saw the gun at the last man’s back, saw each tiny jerk as the bullets entered him, watched him crumple like old cloth, stained and torn, to finish on the ground. The man holding the gun turned then, and looked directly at her.

  She yanked the car into reverse, trying not to panic, for the car was old and didn’t respond well to bullying of any sort. She heard it slip into gear and put her foot to the gas, knowing that it was going to be hell trying to back up this lane, twisty and narrow as it was. There was little hope that she could outrun these men, even with wheels in her favor. And then the car stalled. She looked up to find the masked gunman walking toward her, gun cocked over his elbow, his steps firm, his mind set on the one task he had to tidy up before getting clear of this massacre.

  The entire world telescoped to the barrel of the gun. She said a wordless prayer, too panicked to form coherent thought, a prayer for her babies, that they would be safe, that they would not have to grow up orphans entirely. That if she had to be shot, she would somehow survive it.

  She was frozen, cursing the car under her breath, cursing herself for throwing it into a stall. She couldn’t take her eyes off the gun, but she didn’t fool herself into thinking that making eye contact with her potential killer would help her in any way. The man was close enough, that had he not been so camouflaged behind his balaclava she would have been able to see the color of his eyes and she took a breath, a small ribbon of calm forcing its way through the panic, the strange calm of finality and knowing that she no longer had any control over her own fate.

  He could see her face now and she looked back at him, with defiance. She would take that much dignity with her, small as it was. He halted and walked back a step or two. A chill chased hard down her body. Despite the fact that she couldn’t see his face, she knew under the balaclava was a man she would recognize. For it was clear that he recognized her. He backed up further and a tiny hope began to grow in her that he wasn’t going to kill her here in this deserted laneway. Then the gun came up and she heard the fire even as she felt the impact of it. There was no pain, just a horrid rush of adrenaline, no life rushing past her eyes, just a white void of utter panic. She sat with her hands over her head, until the realization that she was still alive penetrated through her. She raised her head, ever so slowly, not even daring to draw breath, though her c
hest felt like it was on fire.

  The man had returned to the van and was jumping up into the back of it even as she looked. He cast her one last glance over his shoulder, from behind the utter anonymity of his hood and then slammed the van door shut as it roared off up the road and out of her sight. She waited a heartbeat and then another, before getting out of the car, still terrified that they would come back.

  The roadway was littered with lunch pails, thermoses and sandwiches; she nearly tripped over an apple that had come to rest on the lip of the ditch. She counted swiftly, ten men all lying very still, some in such unnatural positions that she knew without checking that they were dead. Just ordinary working class men slaughtered at the side of a lonely road, for the sin of what—being the wrong religion in the wrong place? She suspected it might be retaliatory in nature, for two brothers from a Catholic family had been killed three nights previous for no apparent reason other than bloody sectarian hatred.

  She went to each man in his turn, her heart hammering and her breath loud in her ears. It was immediately clear that most could not possibly have survived, for they had been shot at point-blank range. She crossed herself reflexively, then thought that had been a foolhardy thing to do, for if someone was still watching they would know she was Catholic, and she didn’t know if these dead men were Catholic or Protestant, though her money would be on Protestant today.

  Just then she heard a moan, so quiet that she thought she had imagined it. Then it came again and she knew it was not her imagination; one of the men must be alive. She looked about frantically, for it seemed as if there were bodies everywhere, blood everywhere. Then a hand moved, just the slightest bit, but she was so jumpy it seemed as if he had waved at her. He was half in the ditch and half in the road way.

  She crawled over to where he was, too frightened to stand upright and make herself a clear target. His chest was a mess of blood and there was a pool of it gathering beneath him, leaking through into the cracks of the road, shimmering like rubies in the green of the grass. A drift of white blackthorn petals had caught in the man’s hair and tumbled through the blood onto the road. The soft, musky scent of them mixed with the acridity of cordite and the copper of blood.

  His eyes were a clear blue, his face rough-hewn and he looked like he was in his forties. There was likely a family at home depending on this man. She felt a sweep of rage and despair push down the terror inside her.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” She schooled her face so that he would not know there wasn’t a damn thing she could do for him, for it was clear to her it was far too late.

  “Could ye hold my hand, lass? I don’t want to go all alone.”

  “Of course,” she said softly and took the big, work-roughened hand in hers. She saw that he understood he was not going to live and she felt sorry for him, that the knowledge should come in the wake of such terrible hatred, on a lonely country road with only a strange woman to keep him company in these final moments.

  She heard a car pull up, and a door open and was afraid to look for fear one of the men had come back to finish her off. There were steps behind her, and then a voice she knew.

  “Jesus—what the hell happened here?”

  Pamela took a half breath of relief. It was Noah. She looked up, knowing he didn’t need an explanation, the carnage was self-explanatory.

  “He’s the only one left alive,” she said. There was no need to say more, Noah could hear his breathing and see the lake of blood that was still spreading out from under him.

  “There’s a farm up the lane, I’m goin’ to go back an’ get them to call for the police an’ ambulance. Will ye be all right here, until I get back?”

  She nodded and he took a second to look her over, assessing her for injury, before running back to his car. The sound of the car fading down the lane was one of the loneliest sounds she had ever heard. The sun was warm and the sky a tender shade of blue as it was sometimes in April—this cruelest of months. She could smell the bitter leaves of meadowsweet, like some strange, silent melody woven around the echo of gunfire and the screams of men who knew they had seconds left to live.

  She turned her attention back to the man whose hand she held. His breath whistled in ever shorter gasps, the blood that pooled beneath him congealing at the edges, so that it was a thick black now under the sheen of sunshine.

  “Could you pray?” he asked. Blood bubbled at the corners of his mouth—dark blood. He had been shot through at least one of his lungs. He was drowning in his own blood.

  She prayed out loud, voice pitched to encompass the two of them, stumbling and terrified as it was. She prayed for him, and she prayed, she knew, for Casey, prayed that he had not come to an end like this one without someone to hold his hand or to pray for him. She prayed for the man’s wife and children, and for her own children and all the children that weren’t going to get out of this filthy little war alive. She prayed while blood soaked into her skirt and stockings, coating her skin with its slick lividity.

  The man’s hand was growing cold. A cloud crossed the face of the sun, and a damp shadow passed over her, tiny drops of rain hitting her face. She knew she needed to move, the police would be here soon and now that the man was dead, it was probably best if she was gone. There weren’t any questions she could answer for them, and even if she could it would be suicidally dangerous to do so.

  A hand touched her shoulder, and a voice spoke, echoing her own thoughts. She startled, she hadn’t heard Noah come back.

  “We need to get ye out of here, the police will be here any minute an’ as all these dead men are Prods, it’s not wise to get caught here.”

  She let him pull her up; her knees were wobbly still and the road slippery with blood. She had seen many things during her years of living in this country, but somehow none of it had hurt like what she had seen today. She felt like she no longer had any protective covering, as though her nerves were exposed to every cold wind of chance and misfortune that passed.

  “Ye’ll take my car an’ head to my house, I’ll bring yers along. Here’s the key, now go.”

  “I don’t know that my car will run, one of the men shot it in the engine. Or at least I think that’s what he did.” She passed a hand over her face, her skin was numb and her lips buzzing with delayed shock.

  “Pamela,” he said gently, “it is still runnin’ but bein’ that it has steam comin’ from under the hood, I’d as soon drive it myself. The house is only two miles from here, be careful on the way, ye’ll not be yerself just now.”

  She obeyed, feeling like her mind was on autopilot and that some piece of it was going to be back there on that road for some time. The drive to Noah’s was a matter of reflex, rather than conscious thought on her part. She was surprised to find herself suddenly shifting the car into park in the front of the tidy farmhouse. She simply sat there, uncertain what to do, though she ought to be safe enough in Noah’s car. A strange vehicle in this drive would, she knew, bring men with rifles to the car window.

  The events of the last hour began to sink in. She was shaking hard enough that she clutched at the steering wheel in an effort to stabilize herself. She was terribly cold, the blood that soaked her clothing clammy against her skin. The scent of it was thick on the air and she swallowed back a wave of nausea. She wanted Casey so badly that she felt it in the marrow of her bones. He had always been her anchor for every storm, every catastrophe and now there were no arms to run to, there was no security left in her world.

  The door opened and she startled, putting her hand to her chest. She looked in the rearview mirror to see her car gently smoking in Noah’s drive.

  “Come inside,” Noah said. She followed him into the house. The kitchen looked surreal in its normality, its warmth and brightness.

  “I…I need to get this blood off me,” she said, the shaking so hard now that her teeth felt like they were rattling in her head.

  He nodded. “Bathroom’s right there, I’ve got hot an’ cold runnin’ a
n’ all. I’ll make tea while you’re in there. Could ye take a bite, do ye think?”

  She shook her head. “Tea will do, I’m not sure I can keep even that down.”

  He nodded. “I’ll get ye somethin’ to wear, ye can’t stay in those.” He nodded at her gore-stained clothing.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come in like this, I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Well, it was either that or strip down in the yard, an’ while I think the boys who work for me would appreciate that, I’m thinkin’ you wouldn’t. An’ a bit of blood isn’t likely to bother me.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say, “No, I don’t suppose it would.” But she quickly thought better of it and kept silent.

  He handed her a pile of clothes. “Shirt’s mine but it’ll do to get ye home, an’ the trousers are an old pair of Kate’s, they ought to fit ye well enough.”

  “Thank you,” she said and went into the bathroom. It was, like the rest of the house, immaculate and spartan, tiles gleaming and fixtures old but kept in good condition. There was a stack of clean towels to the right of the sink. She washed up as best as she could, grateful to get the blood off her skin. She put her clothes into a neat pile, the bloody parts folded in so she didn’t have to see them.

  Noah’s shirt was too big, but it was clean and soft with many washings. The pants fit well enough. She took a quick glance in the mirror before she went back into the kitchen. She still looked shocked, eyes wide and dark with it, skin pasty white. At least the blood was gone, even if the scent of hot copper still lingered in her nose. She thought about the car and wanted to cry. Casey had picked it up at an auction a few years back and if it couldn’t be fixed, it would be another link to him gone. It seemed to her that was what her world consisted of, losing one more link to him, each and every day, even if it was just the turning of the page on the calendar, or finally putting his old jersey away, the one that he’d thrown over the back of the rocking chair in their bedroom the night before he disappeared. She put her hands on the edge of the sink, the chill porcelain steadying her. She took a breath, and then another because that’s what you did in this land, you took a breath and hoped to God you were allotted another.