Flare

Chapter 15

I was almost doubled over in agony by the time we reached the trees, my ankle a throbbing mass of pain that brought tears to my eyes.

“I’ve got to stop,” I gasped, “I can’t keep running.”

Emily and Ralph both slowed, her seemingly fresh but the old man breathing like a bellows as he fought for air.

“Not as fit as I used to be,” he wheezed, leaning against a tree.

Emily looked around, then pointed to a large oak with low branches.

“If we can’t run, we climb. Come on.” She ran over to the tree and jumped up, catching and branch and easily pulling herself up, Bergen and all.

I hobbled after her as fast as I could, Ralph following behind. I could hear his lungs rattling now, the sound registering even over the pain in my foot.

As we reached the tree I put my back against the trunk, knowing that seconds counted if we were to get out of reach of the men following us.

Emily leaned down and took Ralph’s shotgun, then reached out for his arms while I made my hands into a stirrup and boosted him up.

The old man was incredibly heavy, years of manual labour turning him into a lump of solid muscle that was almost too much for me to lift, even for a moment, but Emily caught his wrists and somehow he scrambled up onto the lowest branch, then began climbing to the next.

“Grab hold,” Emily said, lying on the branch and reaching down again, grabbing my shotgun and then coming back for me. I could hear the shouts of the men following us now, and I took hold of her arms while my one good foot scrabbled at the bark for purchase.

I’d never been so scared in my life, not even when Ralph had us on the wrong end of his shotgun the night before, but despite the adrenaline surging through my system I just didn’t have the strength to haul myself up.

I hung there, waving and twisting while Emily grimaced with the strain of trying to hold my weight, unable to do more than scrape my foot uselessly against the trunk.

“They went this way!” The shout was less than a dozen metres behind. I let go of Emily and dropped to the ground, nearly screaming as my ankle tried to buckle again.

“The shotgun!” I whispered furiously, but then I caught a glimpse of movement in the trees behind me and I bolted, tearing through low scrubby bushes, brambles and nettles until my ankle finally gave out and I plunged down a bank into a small dell, rolling over and over until I came to a halt against a fallen tree.

Panic had me now, my breath coming in short gasps and blood thundering in my ears, but I still retained enough sense to haul myself over the fallen trunk, burying myself in the loam on the other side and then freezing, sure that they would hear my panicked breathing and be on me like hounds on a fox.

Only they weren’t.

Twenty seconds passed, then thirty, then a minute, and still I lay there unmolested. As the rushing in my ears began to fade and I got my breathing back under control, I realised that I could hear voices, the loudest belonging to the man in the vest who had spoken to us earlier.

“Tell you what,” he was saying from not far away, “throw the keys down and we’ll call it even.”

“The hell we will, there are three of us up here, with two shotguns. They can fire and I can pass them cartridges all day if we need to. So why don’t you and your mates just go home?”

Emily’s voice held not a trace of fear, and I couldn’t help but wonder at her ability to stay so calm and focused in what had to be the worst crisis she’d ever faced. Even as the reality of my own situation struck home, I couldn’t help but feel admiration for the woman.

“Nah, I want that car. Any idea how long it takes to get all the stuff back from town on bikes? Car’d be much better.”

“Is it really worth lives?”

“Could ask you the same.”

“What guarantee have I got that you won’t keep waiting for us if we throw the keys down?”

“Ok, I’m fuckin’ bored of this. Throw the keys down now or we’ll set up underneath the tree. You can’t stay up there forever.”

“Try me.”

White-vest began to snap out orders, detailing several of his men to go back to the village for chairs, beer and food. Fairly sure now that none of them knew I was still on the ground, I cautiously climbed back over the fallen tree and inched my way up to the lip of the dell, raising my head over the edge only as far as my eyes.

My heart sank when I saw how many of them there were.

Almost twenty men now stood around the tree, although far enough back to avoid the worst of any sudden shotgun blast. The leader leaned against a smaller tree at the edge of the clearing around the oak, scratching himself with one hand while the other still held his club.

I slid back down into the dell and over the trunk again, making sure I was well out of sight in case any of them decided to explore, then took stock of my options.

My first thought was that I didn’t have many. Even if I was a skilled fighter, which I most certainly wasn’t, there was no way I’d be able to take on so many opponents. Even fighting one or two of them was enough to make me want to piss in fear. That left two choices, or maybe three.

First, I could try and make my way on foot to the nearest decent part of town and see if I could find someone to help, but that was unlikely to say the least. Not only could I barely walk, but I didn’t know anyone in the area and the chances of them deciding to help a total stranger when they had their own worries were slim to none.

Second, I could walk away. I could cut my losses, try and find my way back to the cottage and tell Harriet… Tell her what? That I’d been too scared to try and help and her husband and daughter had died because I was a coward? No, that didn’t bear thinking about, and just the thought of leaving them when they needed me most filled me with a self-loathing that I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with.

So it had to be option three, only I wasn’t sure what that was.

And so I lay there, occasionally crawling up to the lip and looking over as the morning turned into afternoon, the heat becoming almost unbearable even with the shade of the trees keeping the worst of the sun off. I was desperate for a drink, the feeling made worse when several of their number returned with coolers full of beer and began handing around cans.

They stood or sat in small groups, some on chairs that appeared from the village, others on the bare earth while they waited for us to give up and either come down or throw the keys.

It was hard to know how long I’d lain there, watching them smoking, talking and drinking, but it had to have been several hours when their leader waved a few of them to one side and had a low conversation with them, too quiet for me to hear from this distance.

After a few minutes of conferring, two of them went around the clearing, tapping some of the others on the shoulders and motioning them back towards the village while others stayed where they were, talking and laughing.

By the time the ones tapped on the shoulder had slipped away, I counted seven left. Still too many for me to tackle them head on, but I’d always prided myself on my ability to think outside the box, and if I had any hope of Ralph and Emily getting out of this alive, I needed that skill now more than ever.