White and Other Tales of Ruin (27 page)

“
I got past one, jumped the coach, that’s all. Chele here offered to help me. I saw my daughter. And if you don’t stand out of my way …” I cast my eyes across the gathered throng. My threat was so weak, it didn’t even warrant finishing. I’d never felt so scared, so downright terrified, not even when I’d seen Janine lying there in her deathbed. Then I had known what was happening, and I’d almost come to terms with the fact that there was no chance for her, just a long, slow end. Now I had no idea what state Laura was really in, whether she was alive, whether she’d recognise me or even
want
me...

I’d never felt so damn scared.

“
Come on!” the man said, reaching out for me. I drew back and he snorted, shook his head. He had long wild hair, black teeth and boils on his face, but his eyes were bright and intelligent. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll help you!”

He turned to his followers — if that’s what they were — and shouted: “Drop the wire! These are from outside!”

“
They all are!” an unseen someone shouted.

“
Yes, but these shouldn’t be here. They’re
alien
.”

I pushed past him, sick, angry, desperate to find Laura. Chele came on behind me. The people followed her, I could hear them mumbling and chattering excitedly, but I forged ahead. Nobody seemed willing to stop us.

I broke into a run.

And then I saw Laura.

And the skies darkened, fat drops of rain like spatters of blood hit my skin, a fast, violent wind smashed through from behind the trees, the branches shook, the barbed wire web swayed back and forth, and I heard my daughter’s cries as the wire tore her more. Her dress was wet with blood, which at least showed that she was still bleeding. Dead people don’t bleed.

“
Oh Jesus!” I gasped, because my pale-skinned daughter was a red-faced demon, her eyes wide and her mouth foaming. “Oh sweet Jesus, just why …?”

“
Hey,” Chele said, hugging me quickly, tightly, before rushing to the foot of the nearest tree. She was a big woman, I noticed that for the first time as she began to climb. Her clothes were baggy and black, designed to hide her size, and she moved up and along the branches with a grace I could scarcely believe.

The rain was even heavier now, and dark clouds boiled the sky. Through the copse of trees I could see mountain slopes being assaulted by the weather, and creeping down the mountainside like the shaky legs of an old, angry god, two tornadoes twisted their way towards us. Black Teeth and his people were gathered behind me, muttering amongst themselves in a language I hoped I would never know.

“
Daddy,” Laura said weakly. I smiled and went to answer, but then I felt myself slipping down and out, the rain turned warm on my face as my tears mixed, and someone caught me under my arms as I slipped to the ground.

She’s alive, I thought, alive and she knows me, she sees me, and she’s not ignoring me or telling me to leave her alone, let her live her own life, not like I’d been expecting, not like people had been telling me, because she’d run away with a religious sect and who … who had even told me that in the first place?

“
Laura!” I called out, but it was Chele I heard in response, her voice cutting through the tempest.

“
Grab hold,” she said, and I heard a sharp snick as wire was cut. I thought I had my eyes open but I could not see anything, and I may have been mistaken. Someone was holding me against them, their hand on my forehead. “Hold her weight, hold it! Ease her down. That’s right … that’s right … gentle now, she’s a baby …”

Gentle now, she’s only a baby, aren’t you just a big baby? I’d used to say that to Laura when she was five, it would annoy and delight her in equal measures as I swung her around in my arms, called her my little baby and set her down on the grass, watching as she staggered with dizziness. She’d giggle as she fell over …

…
Laura cried out, and I sensed the source of her voice lowering until it was at my level.

“
Laura!” I called, trying to stand, to see.

There was the sound of an explosion from higher up the hillside and the sky was suddenly filled with grit, splinters and leaves. I opened my eyes in time to see the sky falling in.

“
We have to leave here!” Black Teeth shouted into my ear.

“
I want my daughter!” I shook off restraining hands and went to the trees. Chele was already back on the ground, trying to snip wire with a pair of cutters she’d liberated from someone. Laura was bleeding and crying and writhing. She wanted to stand and walk, I could see that, but pain held her tight.

Another explosive sound and this time the ground shook, the skies turning from dark to black as the tornadoes plucked trees and earth and rocks and mixed them into a barrage of natural shrapnel. I ducked down and knelt beside Laura, pulling a strand of wire carefully away from her wrist. The rain sluiced the wounds on her body, washing the blood into the earth. I put one hand under the back of her neck and lifted slowly. I looked into her eyes, promising that I was here for her.

“
Daddy,” she said, “you came to rescue me.” I could barely hear her but I read the words in her eyes.

“
Yes honey.”

“
I hurt.”

I nodded. “I’ll look after you now, honey, don’t worry.”

“
Now!” Black Teeth shouted, and I noticed that most of the people he’d been with had vanished.

Chele appeared on Laura’s other side and held her up, draping my daughter’s arm gently across her shoulders. “Where to?” she shouted.

Black Teeth said something but he was already turning away, his words lost to the storm.

We followed, lifting Laura because she could not move her legs, and each cry made me want to stop and hold her to me. At the same time I was enraged, ready to take revenge for what had been done to her. I kept my eyes on the madman’s back. The wire cutters had vanished from his belt, but that meant nothing.

He hadn’t denied putting Laura up there in the first place.

The storm pushed us on and the tornadoes shook the earth, sucking it up and raining debris down around us. A shattered tree trunk speared into the earth twenty yards to my left. It groaned and fractured, and jagged splinters fired out like the spines of a tarantula. I felt a sting in my leg but kept on moving. I tried to haul in a breath but the air was moving too fast, being sucked away, and I remembered hearing about people whose lungs had imploded during tornadoes.

Laura had her head down. Her hair was blowing about her head like some mad Medusa, but her teeth were gritted, and I knew that she was holding onto consciousness to help Chele and me as much as she could.

Black Teeth was standing by a huge mound of boulders just ahead, gesticulating and shouting as if challenging the weather to a fight. He turned and stepped behind the rocks, and we followed.

There was a cave. The entrance was small and sheltered, lit by burning torches tied onto the walls, but it soon widened into a sizeable hollow beneath the ground. It was filled with people. Behind us, the roar and savagery of the tornadoes and the accompanying storm. Ahead, a cave swarming with those who had sacrificed Laura to the barbed wire. Where my best chances lay I had not had time to consider, but the storm was death for sure. My knee was bleeding where the shard of tree had slashed through my trousers, but I welcomed the cool dribble of blood into my shoe. It made me feel alive. And it meant that Laura was not bleeding alone.

“
Where the hell are we?” Chele whispered.

Laura moaned and suddenly became heavier. “She’s fainted,” I said, hoping that was all. We carried her farther into the cave, her feet dragging on the floor, and no one moved their legs to let us pass. They put her up there, I thought, thinking of my first staggering sight of Laura bleeding and twisting on the wire, hung up to cure like a slab of ham. I wondered why the hell they may have lured us down here.

We found a slightly raised area of the cave, free of people, dry and dusty and flat enough so that Laura did not roll when we put her down. I was tired and terrified, panting with fear and exertion. Chele seemed the same. Her eyes were shifting constantly, looking here, there, somewhere else, never fixing on one place or person for more than a few seconds. It was a form of shock I had seen in my own bathroom mirror the night Janine had finally passed away.

“
Chele,” I said. She looked at me, and I smiled to hold her gaze. “Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you. I’d still be out there in the storm.” As if to emphasise how bad that would be the noise increased for several endless seconds, the vibrations knocking grit from the cave’s ceiling and raising a sheen of dust in the air. There was no panic or screaming, only a disturbing look of resignation on most of the faces I could see, as if they couldn’t care less if the tornadoes plucked them from their hiding places.

I’d seen that look before as well. The faces of concentration camp survivors from World War Two.

It became hard to breathe for a few seconds as air was sucked from the cave, and then the chaos ended as soon as it had begun.

Outside, silence. There was no light coming from the tunnel entrance, but no noise either, no sounds of destruction. Could a tornado die out that quickly, I wondered? Could it possibly all end so soon?

“
Hey, Nolan,” Chele said. “I did it for me as much as you.” She kept her voice low because there wasn’t much chat in the cave. Most of those who had come in before us were already camping down for the night. A kid was crying somewhere, someone else was whimpering quietly into the subdued light cast by the burning lanterns. And I was sure I could hear the covert sounds of sex.

“
Thank you anyway,” I said. “You didn’t have to leave that coach. I know what happened to you, I’m sorry … and up until ten minutes ago I could have related to it. But look … look at her … look at my baby …” I burst into tears. They’d been threatening for a while, I knew that, but terror and adrenaline had kept them at bay. Now, as safe as I thought we could possibly be, I found it easy to cry. When I felt Chele’s arms close around my chest and back I cried more, because she must have cried so much herself. In a way I felt embarrassed, shedding so much grief over my child when she was still alive. But Chele would know how I felt. I was so sure of that that I didn’t even look up. She would know.

Perhaps by touching and holding me, she could gain some vicarious sense of joy and relief.

“
Let’s help your little girl,” she said, releasing me suddenly and squatting next to Laura. I joined her there and touched my daughter’s cheek, feeling the stickiness of blood and the coolness of dried tears. Her eyes fluttered open and looked up at me, and even though she didn’t smile I knew that she recognised me. As she slipped back into unconsciousness I hoped she felt safe.

“
She’s lost a lot of blood,” I said, trying to see the shading of her lips and skin in the poor cave light. “And her arms …” I peeled back the sleeves of her dress and winced as they stuck in places, either tangled with dried blood or driven down into the wounds by the tight wire. There were puncture wounds all along her arms from the barbs, and longer, deeper cuts where the wire had been wound and pulled taut by her own weight.

It must have hurt so much. I was crying again, but this time there was rage mixed in with the relief, and while I spat on my handkerchief and did my best to clean some of the wounds I was listening out for the voice of Black Teeth.

“
I’ll ask if there’s any —”

“
I’ll go,” I said. “If you don’t mind sitting with her? She’s asleep now, and I need to talk to these people.”

“
I don’t mind,” Chele said, but she looked at me strangely.

“
I’ll only talk,” I said. “And I’ll get what we need for Laura.”

Chele nodded.

I leant over Laura and gave her a kiss on the forehead. She whimpered slightly in her sleep. I hated to imagine what she was dreaming.

Standing, turning around, I took my first proper look around the cave. It was big enough to comfortably house the thirty-or-so people accompanying Black Teeth. They huddled in groups or alone, sitting beneath burning torches set in the walls. Some of them seemed to be eating, others sleeping, and one couple were screwing in a darkened corner, unconcerned at being seen or heard. They were mostly dressed in old uniforms bordering on rags, many of them carrying wounds and deformities whose causes I could only guess at. Some wore glasses, a few glittered with jewellery. The pathetic creatures I’d seen carrying the rolls of barbed wire were gathered together at one side of the cave, already sleeping. Any pity I should have felt was wiped clean at the thought of Laura sleeping uneasily behind me. Whatever quirk of fate had made them the workhorses of this sick band, I could not feel sorry. They could shake their heads, say ‘No’, and I’d never feel sorry.

“
How is she?” Black Teeth asked. He was standing a few yards away, nearer the cave entrance. A woman was washing his face with a dirty rag. Her movements were soft and tender, but her face was hard.

“
Do you care?” I asked.

He blinked a few times as the cloth passed across his eyes, smearing dust and dirt over his eyelids. “No,” he said. “I’ve seen too much to care. But I’m trying to be polite.”

“
She needs painkillers, bandages. The worst wounds need stitching. We want clean water to wash her, food and drink, and a way out of here. She needs a doctor.”