But potato man must have had some steel buried in all that lard because he stamped on the accelerator and pulled right out in front of the approaching police cars. The unexpected lurch caught the deserter by surprise, throwing him back and against the door, and by the time he brought the gun to bear again the driver had yanked his door open and was jumping out, screaming: ‘He’s here! He’s here! He’s here!’
The deserter cursed and fired, and the man went down with a red splash between his shoulder blades. The leading police car skidded to a halt while the one behind swerved around.
The deserter leapt out of the car and ran off along the grassy road verge, hunting for a break in the hedge to his left that would give him access to the fields. There were plenty. He ducked through one, earning a nasty laceration across his face from a hawthorn bush for his carelessness, and down a muddy bank. He had no idea where he was running – he just headed for the nearest stand of trees in the hope that the cover might help him in some way, but he was barely halfway when he heard the burr of a helicopter and it appeared, hovering over him, keeping pace as he ran, communicating his location to ground forces. He fired off a round at it, aware that he only had two remaining in the cylinder, and the helicopter swerved and retreated to a more diplomatic distance. Down towards the trees the ground became more boggy, and he found himself near a cattle-feed station – a drinking trough and a metal pen where hay was dumped – and a wide area surrounding it had been churned to mud by countless hooves and liberally splattered with shit. It slowed him drastically; he sank up to his ankles and had to fight to drag his feet clear with every step. When he looked back he saw two black figures back up by the road, walking at a crouch with rifles raised, and an amplified voice from the sky bellowed: ‘Armed police! Stop where you are! Throw down your weapon or you will be fired upon!’ He screamed his defiance at them and fired off his last two rounds. The figures threw themselves flat to the ground and he thought Ha! Let’s see how you like grovelling like worms! There was a rapid crackle of automatic weapons fire and all of a sudden his legs stopped working, dropping him face forward into the mud and shit, but he raised himself up on his knees and pointed his empty pistol at them and a bullet tore off the top of his head and that was that.
* * *
Matt heard the helicopter and distant gunfire and cowered deeper into his hiding place.
It was the ruin of an old Victorian pumping house right down by the river, built in the county’s industrial heyday when the Trent was used for miles along its length by hundreds of mills, factories, and farms, many of which had long since been demolished or abandoned to be reclaimed by woodland. Nothing much was left but the redbrick shell and half of the roof which had survived because of a rusting framework of scaffolding holding it up, probably from some past attempt to renovate the structure. The interior was a litter of overgrown rubble; ivy scrawled itself all over the scaffolding, hazel and buddleia bushes sprouted from the walls, their huge brush-heads of purple flowers thickening the air with perfume, while in the part that was open to the sky, whole birch trees had taken root in the floor.
His dad had shown it to him, back in prehistory on the rare occasion when he’d been taken fishing, and as far as Matt could tell, he was the only one who knew about it. There was no graffiti or drugs trash or used condoms to suggest that the local kids or junkies used it, probably because there was no road connecting it to town, only a farm track through several locked and rusted gates or a tricky path to be picked along the river’s edge that disappeared when water levels were high. It was situated on an inward bend of the river with vegetation crowding the steep banks in either direction – too much of an expedition for a high or a quick fuck.
He sat in the corner, knees drawn up under his chin, and rocked back and forth, still shocked at how quickly everything had gone to shit.
Pimblett smacking him in the head like that had been a lucky shot, but he’d forgotten that the guy had also eaten the first flesh and a blow that he should have been able to shake off had hit him like a truck. By the time he’d come to his senses, Gar was down and having his throat torn out by the old woman’s huge dog, while Everett was shooting at the cops and legging it for the field. Matt had crawled off between the plants and sheds and done his own disappearing act before things could get worse. He wondered why he’d never told Everett about this place, but judging by how easily Everett had bottled it that was probably a good thing. Maybe some part of Matt had always known deep down that Everett couldn’t be trusted.
He didn’t know what had happened to Mother. The cops would be all over the farm by now, so he couldn’t go back there, and his mum’s place would also be one of the first places they’d look for him. He had no food, no money, and only the clothes he had on. He felt like an animal – one of those rabbits, its head in the noose, pulling and pulling and strangling itself until someone like him came along
