The Reckoning (Earth Haven Book 3)

by Sam Kates

  Diane wasn’t convinced, but did not revisit the argument now. They had spent much of the last week debating what they should do once they had located Milandra and her small group of companions. Peter’s arguments sounded weak to Diane. She suspected that he was keeping something to himself, something that went to the crux of why he seemed prepared to risk his life over a cause that was already lost.

  All Milandra had told them that morning in Wiltshire was that they would be going to Cornwall where they would remain to witness the Great Coming. Peter had driven the Range Rover to the most southerly point of mainland Britain, The Lizard peninsula. They had started exploring the coastline westwards, observing every coastal hotel along the way, looking for signs of inhabitation; a laborious process since they did not want Milandra’s Deputies to know they were coming. Every attempt she and Peter had made to locate Milandra had been wholly unsuccessful. It was as if she had disappeared.

  Peter glanced around at the deserted car park. “Might as well leave the car here,” he said.

  A movement caught Diane’s eye. From the road down which they’d driven not half an hour ago, a man was walking towards them.

  “Someone’s coming,” she said in a low voice and nodded at the man. Peter turned to face him.

  As he drew nearer, Diane could see that the man held a dark object in his right hand down by his thigh: a pistol.

  Another movement, this time from the direction of the hotel. Two women. One dark, one blond. The darker one also carried a weapon: a snub-nosed submachine gun. She nodded at the approaching man. “You were right, George. They were snooping around the hotel.”

  The man stopped in front of them. “I was taking a stroll along the lane to the farm when I heard your car engine. Noisy things, engines, these days.”

  Diane sensed the attempted probe and slammed the door firmly shut. The blonde was staring at her. The woman laughed and spoke in a high-pitched voice, like an excited teenager.

  “Oh, my, we have two of our own here. I think we can all guess who…”

  “Heidler and Ronstadt, I presume?” said the man.

  “And you’re George Wallace,” said Peter. He nodded at the darker woman. “Lavinia.” He turned to the blonde. “You must be the Chosen.”

  “I’m the Chosen. You’re the Traitor. And you…” The blonde continued to stare at Diane, considering her. “What did you do to Bishop?”

  “Bishop?” Diane didn’t bother to conceal the sneer. “His rashness almost got us both killed. The helicopter we were in crashed. He was trapped by the seat straps. I could have cut him free…” She let the rest of the sentence hang in the air.

  “Why are you here?” asked Lavinia, looking at Peter.

  “To speak with you.” Peter made a show of glancing around. “Though I hoped to speak with Milandra and Jason Grant as well?”

  “They are otherwise engaged,” said the Chosen. She giggled, reminding Diane once more of a teenager. “Hey, Raccoon.” She glanced at George Wallace. “Now’s your chance to get the Traitor. Save you hunting him later.”

  Wallace blinked and looked down at the pistol in his hand as if he had forgotten he was holding it. Slowly, he raised it and pointed it at Peter’s face.

  Peter stiffened as the man’s finger tightened on the trigger.

  * * * * * * *

  Dermot Ward had never experienced empathy. He couldn’t imagine—didn’t understand or care—how others felt. He had not done well at hiding this trait throughout his adult life. It usually materialised in him laughing or saying something that others found cruel or offensive, resulting in verbal, occasionally physical, confrontations.

  It became difficult to hold down jobs. Making friends he’d always found to be problematic; keeping them became impossible. The rare attempt at asking a girl out on a date ended in disaster when he made some comment about her hair or what she was wearing or her family to which the girl would take great exception, much to Dermot’s mystification. He never saw these incidents coming; the only way to avoid them was to avoid passing comment at all. As such, he drifted into a reclusive existence.

  Being accused of stalking by a former work colleague hadn’t helped. True, he had followed her around, found out where she lived, cased out her flat on a few nights, but in an effort—so he told himself, and he believed it—to learn more about her to be better able to please her when he eventually asked her out, not for anything more sinister. The girl only agreed not to involve the police when Dermot offered his resignation and wrote, at his soon-to-be-former employer’s prompting, an apology in which he assured her he would not bother her again.

  He eventually discovered that lone night working offered the best employment conditions for a man of his particular type of intellect. For that is what he truly believed: that what others perceived as oddness, even creepiness, their inability to mesh with him, was due to his superior intelligence. People’s dislike of him he put down to envy. That he may be lacking in certain attractive personality traits did not occur to him. Accurate self-analysis is unlikely in a narcissist.

  A security guard at a warehouse stocking electrical appliances suited Dermot. A few circuits of the building, flashing his torch to scare off any would-be intruders, every few hours wasn’t taxing. The rest of the night he got to sit in the portacabin office, watching DVDs or surfing the internet.

  He had always been a fantasist, making up exploits that he would never come within touching distance of actually experiencing. The internet gave his imagination free rein. Under a number of pseudonyms, Clint (or Damien or Dirk or Samson) concocted an increasingly outlandish series of identities with which he roamed the web in anonymity, spinning his deceit to anyone who cared to listen. That the young, impressionable women he particularly liked to target might themselves be middle-aged, overweight men with personal hygiene issues never crossed his mind.

  Then he fell ill and the internet fell silent.

  Later, when he thought that he was the last human left alive, he went hunting for apparel that supported his fantasies: cowboy boots, leather jacket, Stetson. The only Luger he could find in Dublin had been a replica; he still wanted to get his hands on the real thing. The military assault rifle strapped to his back would do a fine job for now. A more than fine job, yes, siree. And he still had the switchblade, tucked away into his back pocket. When he found the bitch, it was the blade that he wanted to use. He had been keeping it clean and sharp just for her.

  Riding a scooter wasn’t that difficult, not without any other traffic on the roads. The worst part was the rain, slickening the road surfaces and causing the visor of his helmet to steam up. He took it easy, trying not to think about swerving to avoid a cat or sheep and lying on the tarmac with his shin bone poking out of his jeans while hungry dogs drew nearer, attracted by the scent of blood and fear.

  There was no rush. They had a few days’ start, but he knew where they were headed. The old git of a doctor had mentioned more than once in his whiskey-induced haze that he was from a village outside Lincoln. He hadn’t said the name of the village, but how many could there be?

  It had taken days after the car park incident in Drury Street for the swelling to go down and to be able to walk without looking like he was trying to impersonate John Wayne; weeks for the bruising and discolouration to fade. He still experienced dull aches deep in the pit of his stomach and suspected that he was pissing blood. With every cramp, every hissing breath as he waited for it to pass, every pink tinge he noticed to his urine, he vowed to slice her.

  Dermot had noted that she and the old git weren’t at the meeting. He had stayed afterwards long enough to be given an assault rifle and shown how to use it. Slipping away unnoticed had been a cinch.

  He hadn’t found them in Lincoln and followed the coast road out of the city. Most people, he figured, would end up by the sea when they had a deserted island on which to live.

  He had pulled over for a break—his balls were aching after a prolonged spell on the scooter—when he he
ard the engine. Too late to take cover, he ducked behind the scooter and peered at the white Range Rover as it shot past.

  Chapter Eleven

  Given man’s propensity for allocating names to events that lend them a sense of grandeur of which they are not always worthy, it perhaps shouldn’t be considered a surprise that the series of increasingly brutal skirmishes that began on a blustery morning in late April came to be known, if only fleetingly, as The Battle of London.

  Not since The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 had a hostile, armed force marched against the city. Now another force, almost two thousand strong and bristling with modern weaponry, approached from the west.

  Today’s London consists of a mass of outlying towns and villages, each once (and, sometimes, still) imbued with their own style and character, which have become swallowed by the original town’s expansion to form part of the urban sprawl. In some places a sense of separation is maintained, either through deliberate planning or as a serendipitous consequence of other development. Take Slough: a buffer of green belt and the M25 separated it from Greater London proper. Just off the M4 at junction 6, it seemed as good a place as any in which to make an advance base.

  Five days after the meeting in the Celtic Manor, a convoy of lorries, minibuses, cars and vans left South Wales and made its way along the M4. The young, elderly and infirm had remained behind, along with many who did not fall into any of those categories but who did not wish to join in. Comments were passed, names called and scuffles broke out, but by and large those intending to fight were too busy learning how to use assault rifles, submachine guns, hand grenades and 60mm mortars to overly concern themselves with those who didn’t want to fight.

  Advance base camp was established in a hospital at the southerly edge of Slough, near the motorway and with plenty of hotels, houses and shops nearby. There were at least two nurses and a paramedic amongst the survivors who had made it to the Celtic Manor. They had been charged with manning the hospital and making ready to receive the injured. Even Joe, with his infectious energy and lofty aspirations for the forthcoming battle, did not try to deny that there would be casualties.

  At dawn the next day, the ragtag army assembled. If folk had changed their mind and slipped away during the night, their absence wasn’t mentioned. Everyone, except for the half a dozen or so, including a young American lady two months’ pregnant, who would remain at the hospital with the nurses and paramedics, clambered aboard the vehicles that had brought them to Slough and set off across heathland, through villages and over the M25 motorway, aiming for Hillingdon Hospital roughly seven miles away.

  “Unless anybody has a better idea,” Joe had told anyone willing to listen the previous evening, “I suggest we make for the hospital in Hillingdon. If they have it set up like before, there’ll only be a handful of them to deal with. They’ll be armed, but we’ll outnumber them something like ten to one. And once we’ve taken the hospital, it will stop them carrying out any more mutilations.”

  Nobody within earshot had made any other suggestions. Joe had taken that as acquiescence and directed the lead vehicle towards Hillingdon.

  They took the hospital without having to fire a shot. That’s not to say that shots weren’t fired. Many were. Some in the air in triumph; most after the rapidly disappearing BMW in which the few ‘people’ they discovered at the hospital fled in face of the numbers advancing upon them. It is doubtful that any of the shots caused as much as a scratch in the car’s paintwork.

  While others checked the hospital buildings to make sure they were clear, there was only one place Joe wanted to visit. He strode the corridor to A&E and entered the long room with the curtained cubicles along one wall. The last time he’d been in here, he had been made at gunpoint to stand in line awaiting his turn to enter the cubicle into which ordinary people were stepping and from which shambling automatons were emerging. When he’d tried to make a break for it, he had been forced through some form of mind control into the cubicle.

  He made for the plastic curtain and yanked it back. The urine-stained trolley was still there; it smelled pungent, as though it had been recently used. The machine with the things they attached to people’s foreheads (…what were they called?) was still there, too, wired up to a series of car batteries. Joe stared at the machine for a moment, his lips compressing into a thin line. When he raised his rifle and blew the machine to smithereens, it brought people on the run.

  “S’okay,” he said, “just putting some ghosts to rest.”

  Buoyed by their unexpectedly painless victory, Joe wanted to press south, working through West London towards Heathrow Airport around which, he reasoned, they were most likely to be concentrated. And it was time to move on foot to be able to fan out and make it more difficult for them to avoid the advance.

  He didn’t seek out anybody with military experience to solicit their advice. He didn’t ask for opinions or question whether his way might not be the best way.

  Leaving their vehicles behind at the hospital and proceeding on foot wasn’t the only mistake they made. When the rats caught them in the open, it seemed that it could be their last.

  * * * * * * *

  The evening following the meeting, as they shared a bottle of vodka amidst the chatter of excited people, Ceri glanced around the bar before addressing Tom.

  “Hark at them,” she said. “They’re all so animated.”

  “Easy to see why. They once more have a purpose. Some aim in life.”

  “One that’s going to get them killed.”

  “Maybe. But look at them all.” He gestured at the crowded room. “Teenagers. Pensioners. Women. They might be going to their deaths, but can you imagine, in this world, a braver way to meet your end?”

  “Foolhardy, more like.”

  “Courageous, too. Heartbreakingly so.” Tom gave a deep sigh. “I’m not particularly brave. In fact, I suspect I’m a bit of a coward. But I don’t want to spend the last weeks of my life sitting here confirming it while all these people go off to war for me.”

  “For you? How can it be for you when you don’t even agree they should be fighting?”

  Tom glanced down at his glass, picked it up and drained it. When he looked back at Ceri, her expression had changed from exasperated to resigned.

  “I do think,” he said, “that we—that’s the broader ‘we’, not me and you—need to fight. As soon as Joe made his entrance and started winding people up, I knew he was right.”

  “Despite what happened at Stonehenge?”

  “Because of what happened at Stonehenge. But not only Will’s shooting. My mam and Lisa. The children in my class. Dusty’s owner. Hell, even Ross the Boss, my old headmaster. I want people to fight for them. For everyone they killed.”

  Ceri lit a cigarette and regarded Tom through narrow eyes. She was silent for a long moment. Then: “You’re right.”

  “You’re agreeing with me?” Tom laughed. “Can I have that in writing?”

  Ceri remained serious. “I lost my son, my husband, my parents, my friends. I think it’s a suicide mission, but we’re all going to die anyway when the rest of them get here. Die now, die in a few weeks.” She shrugged. “You not tempted to join them?”

  “Very much so,” said Tom. “But we’ve gone up against them once and nearly got ourselves killed. And we’ve warned our people what the others are capable of with their mind-control shit. We’ve done our bit.”

  “You said you don’t want to sit here while everyone else goes off to fight. So what do you want to do?”

  “Well, I’d like to get a couple more weapons. No, don’t look at me like that. I’m not trying to be Rambo again. These will be for self-defence only.”

  “Okay.” Ceri dragged deeply on her cigarette. “I’d quite like an assault rifle to complement the shotgun. Then what?”

  “Perhaps find ourselves a fancy new set of wheels and then…” He tailed off deliberately to allow her to finish the sentence.

  “Go find Bri and Will.”r />
  Dusty, lying beside Tom’s chair, raised his head at the sound of the names. Tom grinned.

  The following day, Tom nursing a thick head, Ceri, to his chagrin, looking as fresh as a daffodil, they joined the long queue of people waiting to be allocated weapons.

  Over the succeeding couple of days, they practised with their weapons of choice out on the fairways and greens, in billowing rain and gusting wind. Ceri proved to be just as proficient with an assault rifle as she was with a shotgun. Tom, on the other hand, found that firing a submachine gun scared him even more badly than a shotgun; at least with the latter he maintained some degree of control. With the submachine gun, he felt like a tom cat spraying in all directions to mark its territory. He vowed to use the weapon only in extreme need and, if he needed to fire a gun at all, to use the shotgun. As for hand grenades and mortars, they frightened him more than the machine gun.

  Early in the morning of the third day, they found Joe on his way out to the golf course, laden not with golf clubs but with mortar shells and tubes.

  “You’re not coming with us,” he said after Tom had started to explain. He didn’t sound surprised. “That’s okay. You don’t need to have a reason, but I think you have plenty. I saw what you went through thinking that the boy had been killed.”

  “We’re going to find him and Bri,” said Ceri. “We encouraged them to leave before the meeting. Now that it’s over…”

  Tom shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t want the lad to be so understanding.

  “Look, Joe,” he said, “we know we don’t need to tell you about the power of their minds, particularly when a few of them band together.”

  “Nope. You don’t.”

  “I think the message may have been lost the other day amidst the excitement caused by your arrival. Try to make the others understand they need to keep their distance. Fight them from afar if possible.”

  Joe smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. It made Tom want to shiver. “Thanks for the warning.” He gestured at the equipment in his arms. “We’ll chuck bombs at them when we can, but I suspect much of the killing will have to be done up close and personal. Might be the only way to make sure the bastards are really dead.”