Death is a Welcome Guest: Plague Times Trilogy 2 (17 page)

He got off his motorcycle, unsheathed the Bowie knife he kept strapped to his calf and began slashing the cars’ tyres. After a moment’s hesitation Magnus dismounted, slid his own knife from his rucksack and did the same. They had been running low on fuel and had turned into the service station in the hope that they could switch on the petrol pumps or siphon petrol from abandoned cars, but had driven on without filling their tanks.

That was a day ago. The only people they had seen since were a couple of what Magnus had thought were youths, crouching in a ditch. Jeb had driven by without noticing them, but some movement had snagged Magnus’s eye and he had seen two frightened faces, one brown, the other ruddy with sunburn, hiding in the shadows thrown by an overgrown hedge. It was only as he drove past that he realised they were girls in men’s clothing. If he had been travelling solo Magnus would have slowed his bike to a halt, but he had looked at Jeb’s broad, leather-clad back and decided it was better to travel on. The girls’ fear brought back the alleyway behind Johnny Dongo’s hotel, the man trying to force himself on the drunken woman.

Magnus’s thoughts were dominated by the past, memories of home, his family, childhood, his cousin Hugh. The circumstances of his meeting with Jeb also preyed on him. Each night Magnus told himself he would ditch the ex-con and make his own way. Each morning they drove on together. Sometimes one of them was ahead, sometimes the other but, although their bikes ate up the miles at an even pace, they rarely travelled side by side.

There was safety in numbers, Magnus told himself. But he knew that he feared being alone in the changed landscape. It was too quiet, too full of the voices of the dead. As if on cue he heard his father say, ‘A man is the company he keeps.’ Magnus knew how his father would have reacted to his son teaming up with a prisoner who had been confined to a wing reserved for sex offenders. Thoughts of his father sparked more thoughts of home. Magnus had tried calling his mother several times, but though the phone rang on, no one answered. They would be okay, he reassured himself. His mother was the most resourceful woman he knew and Rhona came from the same stock. If anyone could survive it would be them. But survival had nothing to do with skills and good sense. It was a toss of the dice, a spin of the wheel of fortune.

Sunlight dappled through the hedgerows, strobing on the road ahead. Jeb had lengthened the distance between them. His body and the bike he was riding were figured with glimmering patterns formed from brightness and shadow. Magnus followed him, travelling through a discotheque of flashing light and dark. The birds seemed to have grown louder as the other sounds of the world had receded. A chaffinch was repeating the same phrase over and over, a piping refrain in a clamour of chirps, trills and flourishes. Magnus blinked his eyes. They had been driving for hours now. When the road widened he would pull ahead, slow the bike to a halt and call a coffee stop.

Another sound reached him, an alien hum that outstripped the noise of their motorbikes and the commotion of birds. For one maddening, panicking moment Magnus thought a bee had somehow found its way inside his motorbike helmet, but then he realised the sound came from outside himself. It was an engine, high-pitched with speed, and it was growing louder.

Jeb’s bike was up ahead, still in the centre of the road, travelling towards a blind bend. Magnus shouted at him to pull over, but his words were lost in the slipstream of noise and breeze. Magnus slowed his bike, steering it left, drawing closer to the verge to give whatever was coming towards them space to pass. He shouted again. Perhaps Jeb was caught in his own thoughts of the past and it was the lure of them, or other dreams, that stopped him registering the approaching engine. He heard it too late and pulled right as he cornered the left turn. A yellow Audi emerged around the bend and the bike skewed across the road, throwing Jeb beneath it. The wheels kept on spinning. They struck the tarmac and propelled the bike, with Jeb still pinned under it, across the road towards a ditch.

Magnus flung his own machine into a hedge and threw himself after it. The Audi skidded across the road, narrowly missing Jeb’s still moving bike, and pitched to a halt in a cloud of burning rubber, facing the direction it had come from. The door of the car opened and the driver got out. Magnus’s first thought was that he was just a boy. Magnus shouted, ‘Help me get the bike off him,’ and started to run to where Jeb lay trapped half in, half out of the ditch.

His second thought was that the driver wasn’t a boy, not really. He was short and slightly built, but he was dressed in a palette of summer pastels that suggested rounds of golf with business cronies, followed by vodka and tonics in the clubhouse bar. The man grinned and his face creased into lines that were at odds with youth. There was something familiar about the aged-young face. Magnus realised that it reminded him of an old-fashioned ventriloquist’s dummy one of the comics on the circuit had used as a prop. It was a horrible object, prone to obscene observations its handler would never have got away with. Time seemed to falter. Magnus took a step backward and the driver reached into the car.

Jeb let out a shout that broke the spell and Magnus started towards him again. ‘Help me get this bloody machine off him,’ he shouted at the man. Jeb must have managed to reach the motorbike’s ignition because the engine died and its wheels faltered to a halt. There was a smell of oil and petrol and Magnus thought how easy it would be for the whole thing to go up. ‘Are you all right?’

He lowered himself into the ditch. Jeb was curled as far forward as the motorbike would let him, clutching at his right leg. His face was twisted in agony.

‘Don’t worry,’ Magnus said, his heart hammering in his chest. ‘We’ll get it off you.’

Jeb said something fast and urgent, but his voice was hoarse and Magnus could not make out the words. He put his gloved hands on the scorching metal, trying to work out how best to lift the bike free, without doing more damage. ‘Fucking . . .’ Jeb’s voice was a struggle of pain and phlegm. ‘Fucking . . . fucking . . .’

‘It’s okay.’ Magnus tried to soothe him. ‘We’ll find a chemist’s, fire some painkillers into you.’

The best option might be to take the bike apart, he decided. Remove its panniers and handlebars, its saddle and wheels and then see where they could go from there.

‘Fucking . . .’
Sweat spangled Jeb’s forehead. His words were growing in urgency. ‘Fucking look behind you!’

Magnus turned. The yellow Audi’s boot was open. The puppet-faced man had taken something from it and was coming towards them. At first Magnus thought he had reached the same conclusion about dismantling the bike and had found a tool to do the job, then he saw the glint of the blade and realised it was a machete, or did he mean a Samurai sword? There was a man in Stromness who had killed his best friend with a Samurai sword that had hung blamelessly above the couch in his sitting room for years. Magnus’s mind was racing. He pulled off his motorcycle gloves and reached for the rifle strapped to his back, but it snagged on something and he could not pull it free. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck . . .’ Now it was Magnus who was swearing. Jeb said nothing, but his breaths came fast and heavy, like a horse after a gallop along the sands. Magnus pulled at the rifle again. This time it came free, but the man had reached the edge of the ditch.

He said, ‘You’re the vandals that slashed my tyres,’ and raised his sword high.

Magnus was fumbling with the gun.
Fuck!
He had shot almost as many rats as Hugh, but now his fingers were groping for the safety catch.

‘Shoot him,’ Jeb whispered. ‘Fucking shoot him.’

And the man’s head exploded.

The spray of blood, bone and brain was warm;
body temperature
, Magnus thought. He wiped a hand across his eyes, trying to clear the redness from his vision, and felt a wild, hysterical urge to laugh. He stared stupidly at the gun in his hands, knowing that he had not pulled the trigger, but unable to comprehend what had happened. He looked at Jeb. His face was red, as if someone had peeled the skin from his flesh. His eyes were trained towards the road above. Magnus followed his stare. A tall man in a clerical collar and army fatigues walked to where the driver lay slumped at the side of the road. He prodded the body gently with the toe of his boot, though there could be no doubt that the man was dead.

Twenty-One

‘Do you mind?’ The vicar, if he was a vicar, nodded at Magnus’s rifle. He had a Yorkshire accent and his voice was soft and slightly apologetic, but the gun that had killed the driver was still in his hand. Magnus placed his rifle on the edge of the ditch and raised his hands in the air. ‘Thank you. I’d like your friend’s weapons too please. Don’t worry.’ He smiled as if he had not just blown the top of the driver’s head into a blizzard of shards. ‘It’s just a precaution.’

Magnus’s hands were shaking and it was difficult to slide the rifle from Jeb’s back, but he managed it. He had intended to ignore the gun tucked inside the leather jacket, but to his amazement, Jeb offered it up. The man raised his eyebrows as if he were also surprised.

‘That makes me wonder what else you have on you. Check his socks for skean-dhu, please.’ Magnus avoided Jeb’s eyes as he took the Bowie knife from its sheath and laid it beside the other weapons. ‘Thanks.’ The man put the revolver into one pocket and the knife into another. He laid the shotguns in easy reach on the bonnet of the Audi and turned his attention to Jeb. ‘How badly hurt are you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jeb’s voice was compressed by the weight of metal lying on his chest. He had wiped some of the sweat and blood from his face and his skin was pale beneath the bloodstains. His mouth grimaced, but when he spoke he sounded detached, as if he were discussing someone else. ‘I’ve smashed my leg.’

Magnus could smell cracked earth and greenery beneath the butcher-shop stench of blood and brain. The gunfire had scattered the birds, but the chaffinches were singing again.
Chip, chip, chip, chooee, chooee, cheeoo
. A robin landed on a bush and tilted its head to one side. Its black button eyes seemed to take in the scene: the dead body with its ruined head, Jeb pinned beneath his motorcycle, the army cleric rummaging in the boot of the custard-yellow Audi. Magnus bent over and was noisily sick in the ditch. The robin flew off, chirping a warning call.

‘Our luck’s in.’ The stranger lifted a tow chain from the boot of the Audi. ‘The car’s driver was a belt and braces man.’

Jeb’s eyes were glassy. His words came out in painful starts. ‘I thought slashing that bastard’s tyres would keep him off our backs, but I forgot he had all the time in the world to get himself a new car and track us down. I guess he got lucky.’ The grin tightened. ‘If he’d taken another road he would have missed us.’

‘The road less travelled,’ the priest said, beneath his breath. He fastened one end of the tow chain to the Audi and swung the other end down into the ditch towards Magnus who fastened it to the bike.

Pulling the motorcycle free of Jeb was easier than Magnus had expected. When it was safely up on the bank the man slithered into the ditch beside them. Jeb’s motorcycle trousers had stood the test of the accident. They were badly scuffed, but un-torn. The man squatted in the ditch, took the Bowie knife from his pocket and carefully slit the leather from hem to knee. He examined the damaged leg with a gentle efficiency that made Jeb swear between gritted teeth and Magnus ask if he was a doctor.

‘I suspect I’m the nearest thing to one you’re going to get, but no. I just picked up a few things along the way.’

The economy of his movements reminded Magnus of Jeb and he wondered if the altered world would be ruled by men like them, practical men who would not let pain or emotions interfere with getting the job done.

Jeb’s leg was purple with bruises that seemed to deny the separation of blood and skin. It looked swollen and ripe, like a fruit ready to split its casing.

‘Without an X-ray it’s impossible to know if it’s broken,’ the priest said. ‘We’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way. Can you stand?’

Jeb pushed himself up and tried to put his weight on the injured leg, but his face buckled with pain and he sank into the side of the ditch.

‘Well, that’s that,’ the man said, as if something he had suspected all along had just been confirmed. His eyes met Magnus’s. They were bright Anglo-Saxon blue. ‘Why did that maniac want to kill you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on.’ For the first time the vicar’s voice was more army than Church. ‘I may have lost my immortal soul to save you. I deserve to know why.’

‘It’s like I said.’ Jeb had bitten his lip and spots of blood jewelled his mouth. He licked them away. ‘We slashed his tyres.’

‘He tried to run us off the road a while back.’ Magnus glanced at the gun. The man had holstered it, but he had proved his willingness to shoot to kill. ‘There was no reason for it except boredom or badness. We managed to get away, but we ran across him later by accident when we stopped at a service station. He was somewhere inside, but we recognised the Porsche he was driving. It was parked next to a fleet of around twenty fast cars. We thought he would be less likely to bother us again if we put them out of action.’

‘And so it starts,’ the vicar muttered. ‘So few of us left, but already we’re fighting.’

There had been no need to shoot their attacker in the head; a shot in the leg or foot would have put the driver out of action without killing him. Magnus said nothing and when the vicar hooked an arm beneath Jeb’s left shoulder and nodded for him to take the right, he obeyed without a word.