Down: Pinhole (50 page)

All three ships hoisted their distinctive yellow standards, and the first mate on the
Hellfire
screamed, “Iberians!”

“All hands to make sail and hard alee!” Hawes bellowed.

The Spanish ships raised the hatches on their starboard gun decks.

“They’ve been lying in wait for King Henry’s return, they have!” the first mate yelled. Below them the helmsman worked the wheel, wailing that the woman on board had doomed them.

The deck guns on the Iberian ships, five-pound sakers on swivels, opened fire and the first volley found its mark up and down the port side of the
Hellfire
.

John screamed, “Emily!” and launched himself at the quarterdeck stairs as Hawes yelled, “Prepare main batteries …”

There was another Spanish volley and John was covered in blood.

He looked over his shoulder and all that was left of Captain Hawes was half his chest resting on two legs that slowly gave out.

John slid down the blood-slicked stairs and scrambled below decks to the captain’s quarters where Emily was cowering near the bed.

“You’re hurt!” she cried.

He assured her it wasn’t his blood and grabbed her by the hand.

“Come on!” he said, “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Just then, the heavy Iberian pieces opened up.

A cannon ball found a keg of powder on the
Hellfire
gun deck directly below the captain’s cabin. There was a thundering boom followed by a tremendous, splintering crash.

A blinding flash of light flooded John’s eyes and everything went completely and utterly black.

John was aware of something in his mouth. He moved his tongue around and felt something wet and gritty and then began to cough, dislodging a mouthful of sand. The cough became a paroxysm as he spit up sand and seawater.

He opened his eyes and blinked at the harsh, flat light. He was face down, half in the water, half on the beach. He arched his neck and turned his head to one side. There was an expanse of sand punctuated with motionless masses.

Bodies? Debris?

Flotsam was washing up on the beach. An expanse of canvas floated offshore like a magic carpet.

Then he turned his head in the other direction and saw a band of men twenty to thirty yards away carrying something up the beach, inland.

What was it?

His mind wasn’t working fast enough. He tried to hear what was going on over the sound of the sea and his own coughing but couldn’t. Something was hanging down from the bundle they were carrying. It was fabric, brushing the sand. A dress.

Emily
.

He pushed himself up and began running, coughing and shouting like a mad man. His boots were full of water and at first it felt like he was running in tar.

“You fucking bastards! Leave her alone!”

The men turned toward his shouting and as he got closer the two carrying Emily dropped her onto the sand.

There were eight of them.

They had the stooped-shouldered and feral posture he had seen before, like nocturnal predators drawn reluctantly into the light of day by an irresistible prey.

Rovers
.

He saw some of them pulling out their long butchering knives. John felt at his waist for a sword but there was none. Undeterred he charged them screaming something dark and primal, closing the last few yards at speed.

He went for the most vulnerable one first, a scrawny fellow with a stunned, transfixed expression who hadn’t been able to even muster a fighting posture. With a sharp punch to the Adam’s apple he had no trouble wrenching the knife away from lax fingers and then he got to work.

The other rovers swarmed him like angry wasps but he was angrier and more lethal. He slashed at throats and hamstring tendons, kicked at groins, and used his free hand to gouge at eyes. He felt a sharp pain in his right flank and knew he’d been stabbed and wheeled to plunge his knife into the forehead of the perpetrator, a man with leathery skin and breath that smelled like a rotting room. The man howled like an animal caught in a claw trap. It was then that John saw he had a stump instead of a hand at his left wrist.

He must have been their leader because the three rovers who weren’t incapacitated began to run away. John’s blood was running so hot he started after them but sanity returned and he stopped and fell to his knees, coughing and retching from the exertion and pain.

He fought to get upright and as he ran over to Emily, he felt at his flank for the wound. His probing fingers found it, an oozing slit.

Emily was on her back, unmoving.

She had a pulse and her chest had shallow movement.

He knelt over her, turned her on her side and cleared the sand from her mouth before lying her flat again, pinching her nose and giving her several resuscitative breaths. Then he began chest compressions, exhorting her with, “Come on, baby, come on. Come back to me. We’ve come too far to quit now.”

Nothing was happening. It was taking too long and he crashed his fist on her chest in frustration.

She coughed.

The effluent was so forceful a gusher of hot, salty water hit him in the face.

He turned her on her side again and her coughing and sputtering continued and then there was a moan, the loveliest moan he’d ever heard.

“It’s me. It’s John. You’re okay. We’re on land, baby. We’re almost there.”

She opened her glassy eyes in confusion. He helped her to a sitting position.

“What happened?” she said weakly.

“The ship was hit. It must have broken up. We washed ashore.”

“John, look!” She realized there were wounded, crawling and convulsing men nearby.

“Rovers. I had to put them down.”

“You’re bleeding!”

This time she was right. “I got poked I think. It can’t be too bad ’cause I’m still talking.”

This new crisis seemed to revive her and she found her feet and had him stand too. She lifted his shirt and gasped at the welling blood coming from a wound an inch long and lord-knows-how deep.

“Can you put some pressure on it?” he asked.

Her dress was the obvious source of first-aid materials and using one of the rover’s knives she cut a good amount of fabric from the hemline, enough for packing and bandages.

As she worked on him he leaned on her and joked, “Christ, Emily, you’re showing a lot of leg for these parts. We’re in enough trouble as it is.”

“Can you walk?”

“Of course I can. This is nothing. It’d barely qualify for a purple heart.”

She cinched the bandages up tight and they began trudging up the beach, both of them clutching rover knives.

He stopped and said, “Wait a minute,” then fished in his pocket for the watch. Water spilled from it when he opened the cover. He put it to his ear and swore. “It’s wrecked.”

“How long have we been here?”

“I don’t know.” He looked at the sky and complained about never seeing the sun. “The only thing I can tell time by is dusk and dawn. When it’s dusk we’ll have thirty-eight hours until we’ve got to be in Dartford.”

“The estuary’s that way so Dartford is that way too,” she said.

He nodded but was soon swearing again. “For Christ’s sake, Emily, we washed up on the wrong side. We’re north of the river. We’re going to have to figure out how to get across.”

As they walked, John hid his pain and wooziness from her. Every time he coughed he had to suppress a groan. Though she was weak as a kitten herself, she seemed to understand that she was now the stronger of the two and she urged him on.

“There aren’t any signposts but I know approximately where we are from the geography,” she said. “We can’t be much more than thirty miles away. If we had to walk it, we could make it easily.”

He didn’t want to say what he was thinking: if he were reduced to crawling they wouldn’t make it at all.

They walked for hours at a slow pace. When they stopped for brief rests, Emily re-cinched his bandage to keep it tight. A few times they heard voices in the distance and hid in clumps of bulrushes.

They passed a point that Emily thought might have been the same location as the Southend pier on Earth and as darkness began to descend, they both despaired at the realization that the long inlet of Hadleigh Ray would force them considerably to the north. It began to rain.

John was moving slowly now, weary from blood loss and now suffering from muscle spasms around his wound. In the distance they saw a wisp of light gray smoke rising into the dark gray sky.

They looked at each other.

“I don’t think we’ve got a choice,” he said.

The cottage was small, made of timber, wattle and daub and thatch. The single window was shuttered for the night. A skinny horse was tethered to a post, munching straw.

From a safe distance, John called out, “Hello there. We need help. We’re not here to harm you or steal from you.”

A man’s voice answered straight away. “Who are you?”

“My name is John Camp.”

“How many are you?”

“Just two.”

“Where are you from?”

“It’s a long story, friend.”

“You’re outside. We’re inside by the fire, good and dry. We’ve got time for a long story. And we’ve got weapons. Plenty of weapons.”

“I’m sure you do. I’ll come right out and tell you. We’re from Earth but we’re not dead.”

There was laughter. “Not dead, you say?”

“It’s true. That’s why it’s a good story.”

The window shutter opened and a musket pointed out. “Come closer and show yourself. Both of you. What’s the name of the other one?”

“My name is Emily.”

From inside they heard, “Bloody hell, it’s a woman!”

There were four of them, two spry elderly men, two older still, maybe close to eighty. John offered up their knives to reassure them. They sniffed and stared wide-eyed, and talked among themselves, while allowing him and Emily to sit by the hearth.

Their spokesman, Harold, one of the younger men, conducted a surprisingly apt interrogation before revealing he had been a nineteenth-century London constable.

Finally Harold said, “Well, as you’ve asserted, you’re clearly not dead, you don’t appear to be insane, and your tale is too fanciful to be anything but the truth. I’ll be buggered. Oh, sorry for the language, madam.”

Emily smiled at him sipping from the beer they’d been offered. “It’s quite all right.”

“And you say you were shipwrecked near the estuary?” the oldest asked.

“When I woke up Emily was being carted off by a band of rovers.”

“How many?”

“Eight.”

“Then what happened?” Harold asked.

“I put them down. Well five of them. Three ran away.”

“Any distinguishing characteristics on any of them you might recall?” Harold asked.

“The ringleader, at least I think he was the ringleader, was missing his left hand.”

The four men looked at each other.

“What became of that one?” Harold asked.

“I put that knife through his head.”

“Glory be,” the oldest man said. “Deliverance.”

Harold refilled everyone’s mugs and told the story. The four of them and many others in the surrounding villages had been terrorized for as long as they could remember by this particular band of rovers and the news of their demise made them giddy.

There was porridge with bits of meat and vegetables in a pot and one of the men hung it over the fire to reheat it for their guests.

Emily wanted to change John’s packing but he wanted her to leave it be since a clot had formed and the bleeding had stopped.

They ate and talked a bit and then John told them they had to be leaving soon to get to Dartford.

“You’re not thinking of going on in the dark, are you?” Harold asked.

“We've got a good twenty miles to go and the river to cross. And I’m not walking as fast as I’d like.”

The four men huddled in a corner and Harold came back to them scratching at his beard. “I voted to let you take our horse in the morning but the others, grateful as they are for having you eliminate that rover bastard, rightfully point out that we’d be in a sorry state without the beast. We barely survive as is.”

John pulled out the pocket watch. “It doesn’t work anymore but it’s solid silver. How about a trade?”

It was Sunday morning and Delia checked in with Duck’s guard to see how the night had gone.

Apparently Woodbourne had settled down and so had Duck but he was up now. He’d had a good breakfast while watching cartoons and was clamoring for a walk.

“What do you say we skip the walk today?” Delia asked the lad. “Whatever happens tomorrow morning this will be your last day here and we’ll want to watch all your favorite videos and pack up all your belongings to take to your new home.”

“Where’s that going to be?”

“They haven’t told me that but we’ll all find out tomorrow, won’t we?”

“I still want to go for my walk,” he insisted, slipping into his trainers. “You promised.”

“All right,” she sighed. “I’ll fetch Officer Barry from upstairs and see if he can find the time. But it’s got to be a quick one.”

It was a perfect Spring day, warm and sunny, and after Duck squinted at the sun he asked whether they could go around to the tennis court to see if he could find some of those yellow balls. Because it was the weekend and the grounds were empty and didn’t have to be pre-evacuated for Duck’s sojourn, the tennis court was also vacant. He spotted a tennis ball near the net and ran inside the fence like a goofy toddler. When he had it, he bounced it on the ground for a while then started kicking it around the court.

Delia strolled and chatted with Barry. “Do you know where you’ll be going after MAAC shuts down?” she asked him.

“Haven’t a clue. You think they tell us? I’ll be on unemployment, I expect. You?”

“I’ll go back to London.”

“Will you miss old Duck?”

“Gawd,” she giggled. “What do you think?”

“Still,” he said, “he’s not a bad kid. If the experiment’s a dud again, I hope they find him a home somewhere. Any clue where they’ll put him?”

“I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to know,” she sighed.

As she spoke, Duck was three-quarters up the inside of the chain-link tennis court fence.