On Deadly Ground by Simon Clark

She pressed herself closer to me. ‘I can be a school girl for you. Or I could shave my—’

  ‘Caroline.’ I grinned. ‘You’re perfect. You don’t need to pretend to be anyone else.’

  We walked hand in hand across the moor. Caroline wore cut-off jeans and a white T-shirt. The camp in the ravine was a good two kilometres away. Ahead, purple heather rolled away into the distance. Surrounding us were hills with craggy outcrops of rock. Hot sunlight beat down to make our faces tingle.

  As we strolled Caroline squeezed my hand. I squeezed back. Then I kissed her on the mouth.

  You might wonder why I wanted to keep our relationship secret. It wasn’t as if it was against camp rules or anything. People were pairing off to share tents. Stephen had moved in with Ruth; the whole camp must have heard them grappling passionately into the early hours. But I didn’t want to go public with Caroline just yet. So why was I still slipping away from the camp with her? And happily letting her unzip my fly before going down on me to send me to Heaven with her tongue and lips? Well, if you’re nineteen and you’ve got this slim woman with sexy brown eyes wanting nothing more on Earth than to get naked with you it’s hard to say no, right?

  Right. That’s part of the story. The real meat of why I couldn’t say ‘no’ was that solid wedge of guilt rooted deep in my gut. I couldn’t reject her; I couldn’t bear to see that pain in her eyes. When she made love she clung to me like I was some kind of lifeline or something. Christ, it makes me sound so arrogant, like I’d set myself up as her own personal saviour. But it wasn’t like that. I liked her, I really did. And when she got close like this, looking up at me with her eyes all soft and trusting, I knew I was falling in love. Maybe I should have said, ‘Look, Caroline. Let me tell you something straight. I love you. I want you to move in with me. We’ll live together as if we’re married.’ I nearly said it right then. But some little numskull in my head wouldn’t let the words out of my mouth.

  ‘Come with Auntie Caroline.’ Smiling, she pulled me by the hand to where the ground sloped downward to a patch of soft grass. ‘Now give me the rifle. There…I’ll lean that against the rock like so. You sit down there. Now…you can watch me undress.’

  I sat and watched her. She moved like a dancer, slowly swinging her hips from side to side to the rhythm of some music she heard inside her head. She slipped off her T-shirt, held it out at arm’s length, then let it drop to the grass. Smiling all the time, she watched my face for my reactions.

  She unfastened the bra and, still giving me a smouldering look, she slipped it down over her arms and threw it into the air.

  Then she held her arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose and turned round so I could see her front, then her back. The bruises had gone now. Her skin looked perfect; her small breasts looked firm and, Christ, they looked so damned peachy I could have grabbed her hungrily there and then.

  But I let her continue the game. Dancing there in the sunlight, smiling, enjoying my attention. She kicked off her sandals and danced barefoot on the springy grass. Then she unbuttoned the cut-off jeans and wriggled them down to her ankles, nicked them off with a kick of a leg then walked slowly up to me, hips swinging. Her briefs were a deep blue satin material.

  ‘Now, Rick. These are for you to take off.’

  Now I could barely stop myself. I reached up, grabbed the waistband in both hands and pulled them down to her knees.

  She sighed, put her hands behind my head and pulled my face to her stomach. Now I could smell her wonderful body scents. The smell of a woman sexually aroused.

  My body blazed with sheer, naked lust.

  I kissed her, gripped both her buttocks in my hands and crushed my face against her flat stomach. She moaned and twisted my hair around her fingers. Then we were rolling in the grass, kissing, biting, caressing, panting out our lust for one another. I struggled out of my clothes.

  ‘You feel, oh,’ she gasped, breathlessly. ‘You feel wonderful. Oh, pinch me…oh, that’s it. Pinch me there; don’t worry, love, you won’t break pieces off. Oh, pinch me there. Harder this time—harder—oh!’

  The next moment I was lying flat on my back with Caroline straddling me, legs at either side of my hips. Her face tilted upwards so the sun shone on it, her eyes closed. Lips pursed, she slid down onto me, taking me deep inside of her. She moaned and rolled her head. I lay there enjoying the delicious feel of the walls of her gripping my penis then sliding tightly down over it, enveloping it, massaging it until I felt the pressure building inside of me.

  I had no sense of time or space; I forgot everything but the blissful sensation of the most intimate parts of her body clenched around mine. She was panting out a series of sounds to the hard rhythm of her impaling movements; her breasts jiggled, the nipples contracted and turned hard—hard and blood-red; her throat flushed. She moved faster and faster and the words once softly panted turned deeper, more guttural. Her whole body began to convulse as if electric shocks twitched her muscles from her beautiful head to her varnished toes.

  ‘Oh, Christ…Oh, God, God, God,’ she panted. ‘I’m going…I’m going to—uh ohhh! Yyyy-yesss!

  I felt a star burst inside my body. I was pumping up inside her and crushing her hips in my hands. Then she gave a stuttering moan and dropped forward, her breath roaring in my ear, her hot skin against my skin, her heart pounding against mine.

  Afterwards, we lay in each other’s arms on that great empty expanse of moorland. We stroked each other’s faces, looked into each other’s eyes, smiled a lot. Said nothing. Words weren’t important: we were communicating with eye contact and smiles alone.

  Caroline plucked a blade of grass and ran it lightly up and down my arm. I made up my mind there and then that soon I’d ask her to move in with me. That I’d tell everyone we were a couple.

  Five kilometres above my head a lone jet moved through the clear sky, drawing a white line of vapour across the perfect blue. Right then I could believe in miracles. I could believe Mother Earth would cool down. That she’d stop the eruptions and quakes and tidal waves.

  I even glimpsed a possible future. I’d return home. I’d tip the canned foods and ammunition out of the backpack. I’d fill the bag with my best clothes. Then I’d leave the house. There’d be Caroline standing at the corner of the street. Her green eyes would light up with pleasure as she saw me walk toward her. Then we’d hold hands, kiss. Catch the bus into Leeds where we’d rent a flat. We’d cook in the nude. Make love on the rug in front of the TV.

  I lay back and imagined all that as Caroline gently tickled my skin with the blade of grass.

  I really imagined that could be my future. All warm and cosy and rose-tinted.

  But if a crystal ball had fallen out of the wide blue yonder right then and I had seen what really lay in the future—well, I might just have been tempted to reach out for that rifle and put a slug between her pretty brown eyes.

  Then turn the gun on myself.

  Laughing, joking, stroking each other’s backs, we strolled at long last to the camp. My skin still buzzed from that wonderful, mind-blowing sex. I had the rifle slung casually over one shoulder by its strap. Apart from the gun we could have been the image of the happy honeymoon couple.

  From here the camp was invisible at the bottom of its ravine but I could already hear a voice calling someone to eat a meal; blue smoke from a camp fire smudged the sky.

  The camp was sometimes known as Stephen’s Ark (some even called my brother Noah in lighter moments), or sometimes it was simply referred to as the (ha, ha) Arsehole, being in the bottom of a deep cleft flanked by two buttock-like mounds.

  There we were becoming dislocated from reality. It was a summer camping trip, we fantasized. Most of us could believe that when we returned to the outside world it would be as it always had been: people mowing lawns, kids on skateboards, BMWs and Volvos moving sedately along Village Street, perhaps a July wedding at the big limestone church with the bride radiant in white and confetti snow storming the air in a technicolour b
lizzard.

  Caroline was saying, ‘I want to make a deal with you.’

  ‘A deal?’

  ‘Yes, I want you to promise me you’ll have sex with me every day.’

  I grinned. ‘It’s hardly a chore.’

  ‘Promise Auntie Caroline. Repeat after me: I, Rick Kennedy, will make love to you, Caroline Lucas, every day.’

  ‘I do solemnly swear that I will—’

  The gunshot sounded like a dry stick being snapped in two.

  We were perhaps a hundred paces from the edge of the gully. Three people appeared to my left and ran away from me. I slipped the rifle from my shoulder.

  Another sharp snap of a gun being fired, a handgun by the sound of it. Then came the deeper thudding report of a shotgun.

  I saw more people scrambling over the rim of the gully. Amongst the mass of heads and waving arms I recognized Stephen, Dean and Victoria.

  Stephen saw me, stopped, cupped his hands around his mouth megaphone-style and hollered, ‘Rick! Stop them! Don’t let them get away!’

  I looked at the three figures baring away across the heather. I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t stop to think twice, either. I gave chase.

  Chapter 33

  I ran with the rifle clasped in front of me in both hands. Jolting concussions thudded through me as I pounded through the heather.

  The three figures were maybe a hundred paces away. They looked young, certainly under thirty. I guessed all things being equal I’d never have caught up with them, except for the fact that all three lumbered along with arms around what looked like coal sacks. But I’d bet you a steak dinner that those sacks weren’t bulging with coal.

  It didn’t take a boffin to guess that the runners were outsiders who’d sneaked into our camp, stuffed the sacks with whatever they could get their hands on and were now legging it home with our goodies that we’d backpacked here on a back-breaking three-day march.

  I’d closed the gap to about forty paces when they twigged I was hot on their heels. Thirty paces. Their heads jerked back to see what progress I was making.

  And, Hell, I was making progress—plenty of it.

  Twenty paces now separated us.

  The three running men wore the usual rag-bag refugee clothes. A jacket from a business suit with jogging pants on one, another wore football shorts with a sweatshirt. The third wore a T-shirt and what looked like the bottom half of a boiler suit tied with orange string and a knitted jeep hat on his head. All the clothes were ripped and so dirty they looked as if they’d been steeped in liquid mud.

  They must have known they couldn’t outrun me, carrying those coal sacks stuffed with canned food and what-not, but they put their heads down and tanked it hard, legs pumping across the ground. They had their prize; they weren’t going to let it go easily. One lost a shoe. He didn’t stop to retrieve it.

  Fifteen paces. Christ, I could smell them. They smelt like they’d slept in shit.

  Ten paces.

  It was then I realized I would be on my own when I tried to tackle them. They might have been armed. Only it would be difficult for any of them to pull a gun with their arms wrapped round those sacks like they were going to dance the last waltz with them.

  I caught enough breath to shout, ‘Stop! Or I’ll shoot!’

  They called my bluff, kept on running.

  I ran harder. Ten paces separated us.

  I could have stopped there and then and dropped all three of them with a bullet in the back. But I knew I’d no more casually shoot them than I would my own mother.

  I realized that what they carried was more important to us than the thieves themselves. What were we going to do? Arrest them? Fine them? Give them community service polishing our boots?

  I was now running almost abreast of them.

  What I did next was a dirty trick, I know, but it seemed, as they say, elegant in its simplicity.

  I sidestepped, putting my boot in the way of the first guy’s foot. He tripped head first, roiling over the sack with a ‘Uph!’ as his breath slammed from his chest. The cans in the sack clanged.

  I moved closer to the second guy and did the same. He went down in a whirl of arms and legs with that same ‘Uph!’—the concussion expelling a lungful of air.

  I closed in on the third guy, the one wearing a jeep hat. The eyes glittered out of his dirt-blackened face. He didn’t even know I was there—or he didn’t care. He hugged that sack of food to his chest with all the protective love of a father holding onto his first-born son in a hurricane.

  This would be easy. I stuck my leg out. The guy jumped. He cleared my leg and ran on. I caught up, tried again, this time he sidestepped me. Still he ran on.

  Sod this for a game of soldiers.

  I shifted the rifle into one hand and grabbed him by the collar of his T-shirt.

  I yanked backwards. The T-shirt ripped in my hand, but the guy was off-balance. His momentum and the weight of the sack did the rest. He did a clumsy pirouette on one foot and fell down backwards with the sack across his chest. Out spilled cans of ham.

  Panting, I crouched down beside him. He was drawing breath so hard I thought he was suffering an asthma attack. I started to move the sack off his chest so he could breathe properly.

  In one movement he managed to aim a kick at my balls as I crouched there, knees wide. I managed to deflect it into my stomach. The guy had kicked from a sitting position so it wasn’t a particularly hard blow; still, hard enough to sting.

  Then we were both on our feet. The guy swung his fist. I swung mine. He was probably too exhausted to make much of a fight of it, but he did his best.

  By my third punch to his face he’d had enough and went down flat.

  ‘I don’t want to fight you,’ I panted. ‘We can go our separate ways…no more trouble…I just want my food.’

  ‘Yeah…’ the guy screeched. ‘You won’t just take the food back, will you? Will you! Go on, you take what you want. Fuck me! Fuck me and get it over with!’

  ‘No…Christ, what are you talking about?’ I shook my head bewildered. ‘Just get up and walk away. I don’t want any more trouble.’

  The voice had a ruined cracking sound to it. ‘Why don’t you fuck me! Go on, you inch-dick, fuck me, but don’t take all day about it.’

  Then I watched as two grubby fists came up, grabbed the ripped T-shirt and tore it open.

  Then I saw my mistake.

  ‘He’ was a she. A girl of around twenty. She nipped her own breasts cruelly to make them point at me.

  ‘Go on,’ she croaked. ‘Don’t us girls love it when you kick us first. What about foreplay with the rifle butt? Umm-mm…fuck me, lover boy. But this time I want you to cut my fucking throat afterwards. Because I am fucking sick of this. I’m fucking sick of it!’

  Her screech was like a motor picking up revs; the screech rose in pitch and volume. She lay there flat on her back in front of me, nipping her breasts up into hard pointed peaks, the nipples purpled. The jeep cap had come off, spilling a tangle of long hair that must have been beautiful only a few days ago. Blood trickled from a cut on one cheek where my fist had bust her skin.

  Her eyes were the worst; they blazed crazily at me. They blazed and blazed hatred at me, at the world, at God, at everyone.

  I dropped down into a crouching position, the rifle in one hand. I put my other hand over my eyes and I trembled.

  By the time Stephen, Dean, Victoria and the rest reached me the girl was laughing hysterically and I was sobbing like a little child, the tears stinging like hot cinders in my eyes.

  The three we’d caught consisted of a boy of about thirteen, a man of twenty-nine (he’d once been a music teacher) and the twenty-year-old girl, who’d been a law student at Manchester University. We must have formed a strange grouping out there on the moor as we sat trying to work out what to do for the best.

  Victoria had her head screwed on right. She opened three tins of peaches with a Swiss army knife and handed them to our three captives. Th
ey drank the juice thirstily, then worked on the peach slices themselves, their blackened fingers plucking the golden fruit from the cans. I noticed they sucked their fingers so hard, so as not to waste a single drop of the precious syrup, that their fingers were soon sucked clean of dirt; it left them looking as if they wore black fingerless gloves.

  The thirteen-year-old kept thanking us politely. Thank you…these really are nice, you know.’ Down slides another peach slice. ‘Really nice…Ugh, excuse me. We haven’t had much in the way of…’

  ‘We’ve not had much in the way of anything.’ That was the ex-music teacher. He had blond hair and kind eyes that looked so brutally exhausted that sometimes he had trouble in keeping them open.

  ‘You managed to find food?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Yes. A whole warehouse of the stuff.’

  ‘Then why steal ours?’ Dean sounded angry.

  ‘We had a warehouse full of food. But some men turned up. They said they were army but I didn’t believe them. Anyway, to cut a long story short…’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘They evicted us. We’ve no food now.’

  ‘And you let them kick you out?’ Dean almost sneered his disgust.

  ‘No,’ the man blinked his sleepy eyes as he looked up at Dean, mustering a defiance that was impressive despite his exhaustion. ‘No, we didn’t let them. We reasoned with them. We offered to share the food. Then, when they started firing their machine guns at us, we put up a fight. We had shovels, sticks, stones, bare hands—but we put up a bloody good fight. A hundred of us died, this boy’s two brothers died. My wife died. But, yes, we put up a damn good fight. Satisfied?’

  Dean looked as if he was going to argue but Stephen caught his eye and shook his head.

  Victoria wore a blouse loosely over a T-shirt. She took off the blouse and helped the girl put it on. I tried to avoid looking at the cut on her face where I’d punched her. Victoria took a tissue from her pocket and held it gently to the girl’s face.

  I found myself drawn to look at Victoria. Her heavy red hair was tied back; her eyes were so full of compassion they looked nothing short of saintly as she moved back and forth between our three captives, making sure I’d done no permanent damage when I’d tripped the two males and bopped the girl.