Flare

Chapter 14

I stopped, my back pressed up against Emily as she in turn halted. The men waiting for us were an unkempt lot, mostly unshaven and overweight, a few in tracksuit trousers or shorts while the others wore jeans. The only clean-looking thing about them was their footwear, almost all of them wearing brand new, gleaming trainers of varying designs that looked fresh out of the box.

“We don’t want no trouble,” one of them called out, taking a half step forward, “just give us the car keys and them shotguns and you can go on your way.”

My heart was thumping so loudly that it was a wonder the others couldn’t hear it. I’d all but forgotten the shotgun, dangling uselessly in my left hand. Ralph hadn’t, however, and a pair of barrels slid into view over my right shoulder, pointing directly at the man who’d spoken.

“How’s about you lot bugger off before I fill you full of holes?” Ralph suggested, his tone as hard and unfriendly as it had been the night before.

I studied the man who had spoken while I waited for his answer, trying to decide how this would play out.

He was in his early forties, at best guess, with greasy salt and pepper hair that hung to his shoulders, swept back and held in place with a pair of new sunglasses, the label still attached to the frame. I didn’t need to be a genius to figure out where both those and the trainers had come from.

His broad, hairy chest and cannonball-like stomach were barely covered by a grubby white vest, almost the same colour as his grey tracksuit trousers in places.

His eyes were what drew me though, two small, brown orbs that flickered over us constantly, weighing, assessing, calculating the way I imagined a horse trader would look over a field of brood-mares.

He watched us for a long moment, then slowly put the golf club he was carrying up on his shoulder, looking for all the world like he was having a catch-up with his mates outside the pub instead of having his life threatened with a shotgun.

“You got four shots,” he said, leaning back against the car, “and there’s twelve of us. I reckon you can wing what, three or four of us, maybe five, before we get ya. It comes to that, you and your mate ‘ere’ll get proper fucked up, and girly’ll get another type of fucking, you get me?”

He leered as he spoke and some of his friends laughed, but I could almost hear Ralph’s finger tightening on the trigger.

The whole situation was about to go rapidly downhill, and I had to do something, anything to stop it from devolving into bloodshed.

Before I could think it through and change my mind, I stepped forward and snapped the shotgun up to my shoulder, pointing it directly at the speaker.

“Seems to me like you’ve got it wrong,” I said, frantically dredging my memory for everything I’d ever learned about shotguns. “First, the spread on these is enough to catch every one of you if you come at us.”

I measured the distance by eye and plastered on what I hoped was an evil smile.

“You’re what, twenty feet away? Not even the old man can miss at that range. You know what happens when shotgun pellets hit someone?” I forged on, not giving their leader a chance to speak, as I saw more than a few of them look at each other and begin to mutter, one actually edging behind the car.

“Well the pellet, which is lead, is poisonous anyway, but the worst bit is the sepsis that sets in because each pellet pushes any clothing it passes through into the wound. So you survive the blast, but after a couple of days you start getting sick and even though you think you’ve got the pellets out, your wounds start to ooze pus. Then you start getting a fever and you end up on your back, getting worse and worse because all those tiny little pieces of cloth are inside your body, poisoning your bloodstream and killing you day by day.”

Almost all of them were looking at each other uncertainly now, and one reached out to touch their leader on the shoulder, but he batted the hand away and brought his golf club across his body as if it might protect him.

“And we don’t need to fire right away,” I continued, almost babbling now but determined to get out of this alive at any cost, “we can just wait until you’re a few feet away and fire, and the first couple of you will get cut in half. Who fancies that then. You?”

I pointed the gun towards a brute of a man standing at the back of the car. He’d been in the process of moving towards the back of the group, but now he froze, shaking his head a barest fraction.

“Thought not. How about you?” I swung it towards a lad no more than eighteen, making his blond mullet quiver as he shook his head.

The leader finally found his voice. “Bollocks. No way can you get us all, we’ll fucking tear you apart.”

I nodded in agreement. “You’re right, we can’t get you all, but I reckon that if you come for us fewer than half of you will be standing by the time it’s done. Not good odds for you, is it?”

He struggled with this for a moment, then turned to one of the lads at the back, almost out of sight behind the car.

“Trev, do me a favour?”

Trev nodded. “Sure dad, what?”

“Run back to the house and get everyone else who ain’t doing nothing and bring ‘em back, will ya? If he wants to play numbers, we’ll give ‘im numbers.”

The lad glanced at us nervously and then took off like a hare, keeping the car between us and him until he was well out of range.

“So,” the speaker said, “give it five minutes and there’ll be fifty of us, and then you’re fucked. So what you gonna do about that?”

As he spoke he was edging back into the crowd, using the others to block him from view as he worked himself around the car.

“Got any bright ideas?” I muttered over my shoulder, having played my hand and lost.

Emily laid a hand on my arm.

“Yes,” she said, “we get back in the house and go through the garden and into the fields, then wait until they get bored. They’ll leave eventually, and then we can come back for the car. Dad?”

“Not much else we can do,” he growled.

“Fine,” I said, “let’s do it.”

Before the group could react, Ralph’s shotgun barrels disappeared back over my shoulder and I heard him retreat into the house. Emily went next but kept a hand on the back of my t-shirt, guiding me back through the doorway.

The moment my shotgun was through she slammed the door, then turned and led us through the house to the kitchen, flinging the back door open and hurrying out into the garden.

The garden was small, little more than a grassed box with a low hedge that looked out over a playing field at the rear. Emily moved straight to the corner of the garden and forced her way out through the hedge where the two corners met and the brush was thinnest, then turned and helped first her dad, and then myself through.

We were horribly exposed, with only the back gardens of her street blocking us from view on one side. On the other three sides the field spread out for hundreds of metres, showing anyone who cared to look exactly where we were.

“So what now?” I asked, my thumb stroking the lever on the shotgun so rapidly I had to force myself to stop.

“This way,” she said, and led us across the field at an angle towards the nearest treeline. “There’s a patch of woods just past the edge of the field. No one goes there, so we should be safe until the sun goes down or they get bored and leave, whichever comes first.”

I nodded and followed, falling further and further behind as my ankle began to protest at the sudden exercise. The others slowed to allow me to keep up, but I could see the frustration on their faces as we crawled across the field in plain view for the world to see.

We’d almost reached the treeline when I glanced back, seeing something that made my heart sink.

Pouring out of Emily’s back garden was a veritable flood of people, all of them armed and heading in our direction.

Gritting my teeth I ran for the trees, ignoring the screaming pain in my ankle as I caught up with the others, all of us running from the men who wanted nothing more than to kill us, or in Emily’s case, far worse.