Stormchild (38 page)

He gave an infinitesimal shake of his head, but whether to indicate that he was not going to attempt an escape, or whether the response was just pure fear, I could not tell.

“Remember me?” I asked him pleasantly. “I’m the sucker who couldn’t fly and couldn’t swim either. But I can come back from the dead. And I can kill.”

“No,” he said, “no. Please!” His fly was undone and showing a length of filthy underpants. I jerked the rifle’s muzzle a fraction of an inch and suddenly a stream of yellow piss overflowed from the underpants to soak his trousers. “Oh, Stephen!” I said in offended remonstrance, then I put on the gun’s safety catch and reversed it so that I was threatening him with the gun’s brass butt instead of its muzzle. “Zip your nasty self up,” I said as nicely as I could.

He needed two hands to do up his fly, and, while he concentrated on the damp zipper, I thumped him over the head with the rifle butt.

I hit him too hard. He saw the blow coming and tried to twist away, which evasion only added desperation to my blow and so the brass cracked on his already bleeding temple with a horrid thud.

He did not immediately flop back unconscious. Instead he groaned and twitched, but I could see the whites of his eyes and knew he would live. More to my purpose I knew he was conveniently out of commission for a few minutes. “Hello, Jackie!” I called over my shoulder.

There was no answer, nor did I dare look round in search of one, for I had to concentrate on Stephen. That was my excuse, though in truth I was almost frightened to look at Jackie for fear of being disappointed, or overwhelmed, or embarrassed. Whatever, I bent over the stricken Stephen whose face had gone horribly white. A fresh trickle of blood, instantly diluted by rain water, spilled from a rapidly swelling bruise on his left temple, and I felt a horrid fear that I might have hit him too hard, and that he was dying after all, but then he gave an awful groan that convinced me he still had a deal of life left in him. I shrugged the nylon rope off my shoulder and swiftly lashed his ankles together, then heaved him onto his belly, dragged his ankles up toward the small of his back, and tied his wrists. He was now trussed as neatly as a dead stag, but I still had to gag him. I tried to rip a length of cloth off his green clothes, but the stitches would not rip and I had left my rigging knife in my hiding place, so I just wrapped the free end of the rope round and round his bearded face, forcing the line between his teeth so that the only sound he could make was a choked gargle. “Fuck you, Stephen,” I said cheerfully and patted his head as I stood up. He gargled helplessly, and I decided he was not going to die yet.

“Hello, Jackie,” I said again, and this time I did turn round to smile at her. She was still kneeling on the path from where she stared huge-eyed at me. “You’ll notice I didn’t shoot the scumbag,” I said, “but please don’t think that’s because I’ve developed moral objections to shooting scumbags, because I haven’t, but because the bastards are pretty sure I’m dead and a gunshot would rather give the game away. It might also bring the
San Rafael
back here, and frankly I don’t want that. I want to be left alone to make these bastards regret they were ever born. Hello.”

She burst into tears. She had no makeup, she was soaking wet, she was crying, and she was spattered with mud, and I thought she was beautiful.

“We can’t stand here and chat all day,” I went on. “We’ve got to hide, then fetch Scumbag’s gun, and I’m afraid we’ve got to take Scumbag with us because soon his friends are going to come looking for him and I can’t have him telling tales about me. I know you’ve got the most intense reservations about guns, but would you very kindly carry this one for me? It won’t go off.” I held the rifle toward her. She hesitated. “Take it!” I snapped, and she guiltily reached out and took it.

“Tim?” she said, as though she did not really believe her eyes.

“It’s me,” I said, then I bent down and pulled Stephen into a sitting position, before, not without difficulty, hoisting him onto my shoulders. I could have released his ankles and forced him to walk, but I could not afford the time to let him struggle and it was simpler just to carry him. “By the way,” I said to Jackie when I had settled Stephen comfortably on my shoulders, “it really is wonderful to see you again.”

She immediately started crying again.

It took me ten minutes to get Stephen up to my crevice in the rocks. Once in my deep hiding place I pushed him deep down under the threatening overhang of wet rock. “Shoot the bugger if he gives you any trouble,” I told Jackie, then went and retrieved Stephen’s assault rifle that turned out to be an American M-16 with two spare magazines. I wriggled back into the crevice where a shivering Jackie had already taken shelter, and where Stephen, still inextricably knotted in my extravagant lengths of nylon rope, lay terrified in the deepest part of the narrow cave. Far beneath us, in the big courtyard of the farm settlement, the worried Genesis people gazed up at the ridge line.

“They probably think Stephen is taking a good long time to rape you,” I told Jackie, “but in a few minutes it’ll dawn on them that something has gone wrong, and then they’ll start looking for him. But I think we’ll be safe here as long as we keep our heads down.”

“Tim,” Jackie said. She was still shedding tears.

“I’ve been meaning to apologize to you,” I said, because I had decided that, on the childish principle of eating the vegetables first, I might as well eat my humble pie quickly. “I should have told you about the guns on
Stormchild.
It was stupid of me. I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t blame you for jumping ship, because I really should have been honest with you.”

“It wasn’t the guns,” Jackie said, then, after a sniff, she must have decided that her words had not made much sense. “That wasn’t why I ran away,” she explained.

“Oh,” I said feebly, and I knew I would have to make a much more embarrassing and comprehensive apology, in anticipation of which I felt my face reddening. I was tempted to drop the whole subject, but somehow it seemed important to clear what was left of our relationship, and so I took a deep breath, then launched myself into remorse. “I’m also sorry about what I said to you on Antigua, about wishing you’d stay with me. I never meant to upset you, but sometimes we say things that are stupid, and I’m sorry.” The apology sounded lame, but it had been heartfelt and the best I could achieve under these weird circumstances.

Jackie stared at me with her huge and solemn eyes. “I didn’t think it was stupid,” she said.

“It
was
a stupid thing to say,” I insisted, “because all it achieved was to drive you away from me, so it was clearly out of place and I’m really very sorry.” My embarrassment had made me turn away from her as I spoke. I was watching Lisl and two men walk toward the escarpment. All three carried rifles. “By the way,” I glanced at Jackie, “where the hell did you hide that day on Antigua? I looked everywhere for you. I even took a taxi to the airport in an attempt to find you.”

“I was on that Dutch boat. You remember? The couple we ate dinner with on your birthday?” She sniffed. “I waited with them until you sailed away, then I flew home. I’m sorry, Tim.” She sounded close to tears.

“I’m the one who should be sorry,” I said very robustly, “because I should never have been so clumsy as to say what I did.” I frowned at Stephen who was listening avidly to this exchange of mutual self-blame. His eyes, wide above the loops of gagging rope, seemed to express incredulity for what he heard. “Still”—I went on talking to Jackie—”it really is good to see you again. I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” she said.

My heart skipped a beat, but I was determined not to make another fool of myself, so I did not respond to her words, which I was fairly sure were nothing but an expression of politeness. “I’m rather in the habit of missing things at the moment,” I told her instead. “David’s taken
Stormchild
off to sea, and if I don’t get him on the radio soon he’s going to sail off and ask for help. He’s got your friend with him, Berenice.”

“Berenice Tetterman?” Jackie asked in utter astonishment.

“The very same. She ran away. The bastards shot at her, but missed, and we took her on board.”

“But that’s her mother who was with me!” Jackie paused to take breath. “Molly came because I couldn’t persuade any newspaper to send me down here, so Molly sold her car and we used the money to fly to Santiago, and then we had to find our way down here and it was really hard because the car didn’t fetch a lot of money, and—”

“Quiet!” I said.

“I’m talking too much,” she said in bitter self-reproach.

“No.” I pointed down the escarpment to where Lisl and her two companions were climbing toward us. There had been little chance of Jackie’s voice carrying that far down the slope, but I wanted Jackie to be aware of the danger. “If we’re quiet and still,” I said, “they won’t find us. Then tonight we’ll rescue Molly, if she’s still alive.”

“Alive?” Jackie said. “You mean...” She could not continue.

“I mean they’re a murderous bloody bunch, but I don’t think they’ll kill Molly because they know the
San Rafael
is coming back for you both. But they are killers. I’ve got proof of it. I also killed one of them. I didn’t really, I just shot him and they did the rest, but I suppose it’s the same thing.” I stopped talking because Jackie was looking so very miserable. “I’m sorry,” I said after a while, “but you really don’t understand how bad these people are. And Nicole’s one of them.”

“Nicole?” Jackie stared at me with huge eyes. “You found her?”

I shook my head. “She’s at sea.” I sounded bleak.

“Maybe she isn’t like the others?” Jackie said tentatively.

“She is,” I said, “in fact, she may be one of the worst.”

“I’m sorry, Tim. God, I’m so sorry.” Jackie rested her face on her forearm and I thought she was praying, but then she spoke in a muffled voice. “I’m sorry for everything. I really am.”

“Quiet now,” I warned her, and I touched Jackie’s elbow to reinforce the warning, and she raised her tear-stained face to see that Lisl had climbed onto the dam’s embankment not forty yards from our hiding place. “Stephen!” Lisl peered into the rain, seeking her lost gunman. “Stephen!” Lisl shouted again as her two companions joined her on the dam’s wall. “Stephen!” They all shouted together.

“Make one little sound, Stephen,” I spoke very softly, “and I’ll dig your eyes out with a marlinespike.”

Stephen, who was staring at us from the cave’s recess, made a gurgling sound, which I took to mean his eager agreement to stay silent. “Good boy,” I said encouragingly.

Jackie had gone very white. Lisl was close enough for us to hear the click as she cocked her rifle. She raised it in the air and fired off a whole magazine of bullets, then waited for any response from the missing Stephen.

The rain billowed across the reservoir, but no reply came to Lisl’s shots. She swore, then scrambled up to the flat-topped rock that Stephen had used as his bastion. She found no sign of him there, nor, from her new vantage point, could she see any evidence of him. “Fuck him,” she snapped to her waiting companions, then she jumped down to the path and turned back toward the house. I sympathized with her reluctance to search the torn landscape, for such a search could have taken all day and still have missed hundreds of hiding places such as the one where Jackie and I now sheltered.

“You’re just going to abandon him?” One of the men with Lisl called after her.

“For Christ’s sake, Paul! He’s got a gun! How the hell could anything have happened to him? He’ll turn up with the girl in his own time. Now come on.”

The three of them scrambled back down the hill and Jackie let out a long, deep sigh of relief.

“I’m afraid they’ve got an awful lot of guns,” I told Jackie, “but you really should understand that I wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t brought a gun myself. I mean I know just how much you disapprove, but the thing is that—”

“Shut up, Tim,” Jackie said with a brusque and intense passion.

So I shut up. Jackie added nothing to her bitter command, but instead just stared into the wind and rain.

So, filling her silence, and needing to make my peace with this girl, I tried to explain myself one more time. “I don’t like guns any more than you do,” I said, “not really, but if some murderous thug is having a go at me I really do—”

“Shut up, Tim, please.” Jackie sounded very weary, as though I bored her, and I suddenly realized that I was merely compounding the mistake I had made on Antigua, because my very apologies were a stratagem of love, and, by making the apologies, I was offending her just as I had offended her by the more honest and outright declaration.

So I finally shut up properly and I stared at the house and I thought how lonely life was going to be after all.

“I told you that it wasn’t the guns that made me run off,” Jackie said suddenly.

“I know that,” I said miserably, “it was the other thing,” and I felt curdled with shame at the memory, but I made myself define the thing exactly, as though, by eating the last bitter crumbs of the humble pie, I could destroy its memory. “It was my wanting you to stay with me.”

“Yes,” she said flatly. “That was exactly it.”

I stared above the settlement to where the empty waters of the Desolate Straits lay gray and cold. Rain swept in spiteful veils across the distant hills and over the slate-colored tideway. “I’m sorry,” I said bleakly. I had already apologized more than enough, but I had not realized till now just how deeply I must have offended Jackie in the crowded Antigua street.

“It frightened me, you see,” Jackie said in a voice so soft that I almost did not hear, and when I turned to look at her I saw that she had begun to cry, “because I wanted to say yes.”

“You wanted to.” I began to echo her words, but she cut me off by shaking her head to indicate that any interruption now might make her lose the thread of her explanation.

“I wanted to say yes”—she went on more strongly—”but it terrified me, Tim. I didn’t know if I could make a decision like that so quickly. Do you know what I mean? So I thought, I’ve got to get away from you to give myself space. At least I thought that once your brother arrived, because he’s a bit overpowering. But I couldn’t really explain it to you.”