CHAPTER 8
10 years AC
Bracton Harbour, Norfolk
They all heard it and froze. It was unmistakable and instantly recognisable, an after-echo peeling off the myriad warehouse walls, across the open quayside and slowly petering out.
‘That was a gun,’ said Walter.
Like it needed saying.
Jacob lowered a sack full of boxes and plastic bottles of pills through the storage hatch into the boat’s fore cabin and stood up straight, squinting as he scanned the buildings overlooking the quayside. ‘It sounded pretty close to me.’
‘Maybe we should leave,’ said Bill. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and glanced anxiously out of the cockpit. ‘Just leave the rest of the stuff and go.’
Walter was giving that consideration. They could always come back another day. But then if it was a rival group of survivors staking a claim, attempting to frighten them off, they’d be buggered. Bracton was their only source of essentials.
Another shot.
‘Dammit,’ the old man muttered unhappily.
‘Shit, man, that was definitely closer,’ said Nathan, his face in an involuntary nervous grin.
‘Are we going or what?’ asked Bill.
Walter’s eyes narrowed. He remained where he was on the quay, scanning the buildings for signs of movement. Undecided.
‘Walter?’
Dammit . . . we can’t just go. He knew that. They needed to find out who was out there, what they wanted. Bracton was all they had.
‘My gun,’ he said, ‘pass me my gun.’
Kevin reached down into the cockpit for the shotgun and passed it over the narrow sliver of choppy water to Walter.
‘What the hell are you doing, Walt?’ asked Howard. ‘There’s just you, me, Dennis and Bill . . . and the boys. We can’t get into a fight!’
Walter was tempted to jump in the yacht, run up the sail, turn the motor on and flee. But that would be it. They needed to clear the marina, the warehouses, the brewery’s freshwater well was already being tapped by themselves, and wasn’t fair game for anyone passing through.
‘We can’t leave,’ he snapped irritably. ‘We have to find out who that is.’
‘S’right,’ Nathan nodded, ‘this place is ours, man. They need to know that.’
Jacob picked up the assault rifle from the foredeck and hopped across onto the quay to join the others ashore.
‘Hey, gimme the gun,’ said Nathan.
‘It’s okay, I’ve got it.’
‘But I got better eyesight, Jay.’
Jacob made a face, tight-lipped.
Walter nodded. ‘He’s got a point. Best give the SA80 to Nathan.’
Jacob passed the gun over to him resentfully.
Another couple of shots rang out across the open space of the quayside.
‘Jesus!’ hissed Dennis ducking down in the boat’s cockpit.
‘Look!’ shouted Nathan, jabbing a finger towards the loading bay of the nearest warehouse. From the dark interior, out through large, open sliding doors, a man emerged, staggering frantically towards them. He’d seen them, was making his way towards them. He cried out something - it sounded garbled or perhaps foreign.
Following him, two more men appeared from the doorway, both armed. They walked unhurriedly after the first. He wasn’t going to run anywhere. He looked weak and spent. No danger of him escaping. One of them shouldered his gun and fired off a shot. It pinged off the ground a yard away from the staggering man, sending a puff of concrete dust into the air, and ricocheted in the general direction of Walter and the others.
‘F*ck!’ the old man hissed, raising his shotgun. ‘Ready your weapons,’ he uttered to the others.
Nathan raised the assault rifle to his shoulder.
‘Safety,’ muttered Walter, ‘lad, you need to take the safety off.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
The man being pursued continued to stagger towards them. They could see now he’d already been hit in the thigh, the left trouser leg was dark and wet with blood.
‘Aidez-moi . . . aidez-moi!!’ he gasped, his eyes wide with terror beneath a mop of dark curls of hair.
Another shot whistled past the man, almost clipping his shoulder, and thudding into the fibreglass side of the boat.
F*ck this.
‘STOP RIGHT THERE!!’ bellowed Walter.
The two men slowed, but didn’t halt.
The wounded man collapsed several yards in front of them. He groaned with pain as he clutched his thigh in both hands, sweat slicked his olive skin, sticking dark ringlets of hair to his face.
‘Ils essayant de me tuer!!’ he gasped. ‘They going to kill me!’ he said again with a thick accent.
‘I SAID STOP!’ shouted Walter again, shouldering his shotgun and aiming down the barrel at them, now standing only a dozen yards away. One of them was wearing a police anti-stab vest, the other a grubby pair of red tracksuit bottoms and a faded khaki sweatshirt. Both of them, like Walter, with lank hair tied back into a ponytail and a face of unshaven bristles.
‘Out of our f*ckin’ way,’ snapped one of them. ‘He’s going to die.’
Walter realised he was trembling; the end of the shotgun’s barrel was jittering around for everyone to see.
‘You just . . . just bloody well stay back!’ shouted Walter, breathing deeply, shakily, the air whistling in and out of his bulbous nose.
One of the men looked up at him and shook his head dismissively. ‘Shut the f*ck up, you old fart.’
The man in the stab vest took a quick step forward and lowered his gun at the foreign man on the floor. ‘This is how we deal with dirty f*cking Paki wankers.’
The wounded man screwed his eyes shut and uttered the beginnings of a prayer in French.
‘You . . . y-you can’t just . . . shoot him,’ cut in Jacob. ‘It’s not right.’
‘Yeah?’ said stab vest. ‘Is that right, son? Am I infringing his f*cking human rights?’
Jacob swallowed nervously. He nodded. ‘It’s just not . . . you can’t!’
‘Yeah? You get in my way I’ll do you next, you little prick.’ The man levelled his gun at the Frenchman’s head. ‘F*ckin’ scum like this . . . only way to deal with—’
Walter’s shotgun suddenly boomed, snapping stab-vest’s head back and throwing a long tendril of hair, blood, brains and skull up into the air. The other man looked up, startled, and swung his weapon towards the old man.
Instinctively Nathan squeezed several rounds off from his assault rifle. Only one of his shots landed home, punching the man at the base of his throat. His knees buckled and he dropped to the ground like a sack full of coconuts.
‘Oh, f*ck!!’ whispered Walter. ‘Oh, f*ck,’ he wheezed, ‘I didn’t bloody mean to. Damn thing just went off in my hand!’
Red tracksuit’s legs scissored on the ground as he gurgled noisily, his hands clasped around his throat as if throttling himself, blood quickly pooling on the gritty concrete beneath him.
‘Walter . . .’ said Kevin from the back of the boat. He stood up, eager to clamber ashore and get a closer look at the mess. ‘You blew his head off!’
‘Dammit! Kevin, sit down and be quiet!’ snapped David.
‘Oh, shit, man!’ said Nathan, his features ashen. ‘He’s dying! What - what the f*ck are we gonna do?’
They watched the man squirm on the ground for a moment.
‘We have to do something!’ shouted Jacob. ‘He’s bleeding everywhere! ’
Walter stared, dumbfounded, smoke still curling from the barrel of his shotgun.
‘He’s dying,’ said Bill. ‘We can’t help him.’
Walter nodded.
‘We could take him back to Dr Gupta,’ said Jacob bending down to peer at the man convulsing on the ground.
‘Don’t be stupid!’ snapped David. ‘He’s bleedin’ out! He’ll be dead before we get him back.’
The sound of the man’s gurgling, bubbling breath filled the space between them.
‘Then, shit, we ought to . . .’ Nathan started, looking at the others. ‘You know? We can’t leave him like this!’
Walter nodded, finally roused from a state of shock. ‘Yes . . . Christ. Yes, I-I suppose you’re right,’ he said quietly. He placed the shotgun carefully down on the ground and tugged the assault rifle out of Nathan’s rigid hands.
‘Best close your eyes, mate,’ he said to the man on the ground.
The man struggled to say something. Bubbles and strangled air whistled out through the jagged hole in his throat, whilst his mouth flapped uselessly.
‘Look away, boys,’ he said to the others.
Walter aimed, closed his own eyes and fired.