The Power of Five Oblivion (8 page)

But we hadn’t gone very far before Jamie stopped me again and this time I didn’t need to ask him why.

There were specks of white light, electric again, moving towards us in a long line that curved all the way round the darkness in front of us so that no matter which direction we took, we would have to confront them. I could see the lights dancing between the trees like huge insects, fireflies, but I knew they were torches held by human hands. How many of them were there and how had they got here so quickly? Before I could even start counting, a voice called out and I recognized Tom Connor, who was still in his observation tower somewhere above us but invisible in the blackness of the treetops.

“Stop right there!”

It was the same command he had delivered to Miss Keyland but now he sounded terrified and the lights didn’t hesitate, not for a second.

“I warn you,” he shouted. “I’m armed.”

There was a brief pause and then a tongue of flame unfurled itself from the darkness. It seemed very small at first, like someone lighting a match, but it grew monstrously, rolling forward, billowing out in a diagonal line from the ground to the top of the observation tower. Tom must have realized what was about to happen. For a few brief seconds I saw him, standing there in the middle of his useless wooden fortification, bringing up the useless gun that he had taken from his shoulder, bathed in orange. The fire rushed towards him, hissing through the night. Jamie grabbed hold of me and spun me round before it hit, but not before I saw Tom, a boy I had once played with, disappear in an all-consuming fireball and heard his single, unforgettable scream.

“We have to go,” Jamie said. “We have to get back.”

I looked round. The observation tower was on fire, the flames lighting up the forest all the way to the point where we were concealed. But for a dip in the ground, we would have been seen ourselves. The torches continued moving. Somebody – one of the other perimeter guards – shouted. There was a single shot, followed by a much louder, angrier stammer from a machine gun. Another pause. Then a body fell through the trees and hit the forest bed with a soft thump.

They were getting nearer. The police, the Old Ones, whatever they were. I wanted to cry out but I knew that to do so would be death. I allowed Jamie to pull me away and together we scrambled back the way we had come, running faster even than before, the path lit by a faint orange glow. There were more shots behind us and, as we went, another scream. I tried to block them out of my head. I wanted to find Rita and John again. I wanted to see George.

Normally, we wouldn’t have been able to move so fast, not at night, but the village was still illuminated ahead of us. We ran past houses with open doors and gates; signs that the inhabitants had left in a hurry. The church bell was silent now and had remained so since the original alarm. But everyone in the village must have heard the gunfire. We heard a further burst even as we reached the garage, softer and less distinct but still unmistakeable. The petrol pumps watched us as we went past, two old soldiers who had been left on the sidelines. The white glow of the electric light was stronger right ahead of us. We allowed it to draw us in.

And so we came to the edge of the square, lingering in the shadows where we wouldn’t be seen. I couldn’t tell if all the villagers had assembled but certainly most of them were there, pushed back against the sides to make room for the helicopter which had landed right in the middle. I searched anxiously for my own family but couldn’t see any of them. I noticed Mike Dolan and Simon Reade – together as always – and Dr Robinson and Sir Ian Ingram were close by too. Their eyes were fixed on the helicopter. All of them looked small and afraid.

The helicopter was black and yellow, shaped like a bullet with three huge blades, now hanging limply, and thick metal runners. The front was all glass and I could just make out some of the controls with a few lights winking inside the cockpit. I had never seen a helicopter before, except in pictures, and looking at it now, the real thing, I found it impossible to believe that anything so heavy and so cumbersome could actually rise off the ground and fly. And to have it sitting in the middle of our village! All those years spent hiding and now it had landed as if it had known where we were all the time.

There was a woman standing beside it. Was she the woman I had heard on the phone? She was wearing a black leather coat that reached all the way to her calves, with black leather boots below. It certainly wasn’t a uniform. It must have been the way she liked to dress. She had long ginger hair that fell in untidy curls and a thin, very pale face. Her eyes and lips gave nothing away. It was impossible to guess her age. She was quite near to me but she gave the impression of being far away, melting into the darkness that surrounded her. The darkness suited her.

Two men stood behind her, both wearing black police uniforms and helmets and visors that covered their faces. They were armed with machine guns.

“We know that the boy is somewhere in the village,” she was saying. She wasn’t the woman I had heard on the phone. Her voice was extraordinarily clear, reaching everyone in the square as if it was being secretly amplified. “He is the only one we have any interest in. Tell us where he is and we’ll go away.”

“I’ve got to tell them…” Jamie whispered to me.

“No.” I gripped his arm. “You can’t.”

Everyone knew the woman was lying. They had heard the shots in the forest. The village had been discovered, invaded and in that moment all its defences had gone.

I saw somebody push their way through the crowd and Miss Keyland appeared. She was wearing a shawl against the chill of the night and, as usual, her yellow wellington boots. She wasn’t looking very pleased with herself. I think she was only just beginning to understand the consequences of what she had done.

“My name is Anne Keyland,” she announced.

“Yes?” The helicopter woman sounded uninterested.

“I was the one who telephoned you.” This caused a ripple, a mutter of disgust that spread through the crowd. The people who were nearest to her shrank away and suddenly Miss Keyland was on her own, separated from the rest of the village, watched from every side. I saw Sir Ian shake his head in disbelief. But she went on anyway. “You promised a reward for the boy. There are a lot of things we need here. The crops are beginning to die out. We all know that. The water levels are lower every year. We have no more medicine if anyone gets sick, no oil for the generator. These are all things you can give us.” She had raised her voice and I guessed that she was speaking to us all now, trying to explain what she had done. “You promised me that no one would get hurt.”

“I promised it if you co-operated.”

“We are co-operating.”

“Then where is the boy?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you don’t know, you’re no use to me.” The woman’s hand had disappeared into her pocket and drawn out a small gun. Without even hesitating, she shot Miss Keyland where she stood. There was a spray of blood, picked up by the lights. Miss Keyland crumpled in a little heap. Nobody moved.

“So who is going to tell me where I can find Jamie Tyler?” the woman demanded.

Once again I felt Jamie tense up beside me and knew that he couldn’t stand any more of this, that he was going to make himself known. But before he could move, I heard a voice call out and recognized Rita, although I couldn’t see her on the other side of the square, lost in the crowd. “Jamie’s not here,” she said. “He left before you came. He went through the wood, heading over to the east.” Rita had built a lie into her response. She knew full well that Jamie and I had headed north. She had no idea, of course, that we were both back in the village.

“Is that true?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

She shrugged. “Then I’ve been wasting my time.”

She raised a hand, almost like flicking away a summer wasp. It was a signal for all hell to break loose.

The two guards raised their machine guns and opened fire, the noise of the bullets deafening as it echoed off the buildings on every side. The circle of villagers, silent and resentful one moment, broke apart and suddenly everyone was screaming and stampeding into one another, forgetting everything in a desperate attempt to find a way out. At the same time, they found that the entire square was surrounded. The policemen from the forest had arrived even while the woman was talking and had taken up their positions, kettling us, with riot shields … and worse. They had flame-throwers, machine guns, huge batons and gas canisters. They stood there, waiting to pick their targets off one by one.

As soon as the shooting began, Jamie and I took off, moving as fast as we could. I actually felt the breeze of bullets as they sprayed over my shoulders. One hit a man next to me – I think it was Mr Christopher, the baker – and he fell down with a little sob and didn’t get up. Everyone was going crazy. We were penned in, trapped on all sides. The electric light, which had seemed such a miracle a while ago, made us into sitting targets with nowhere to hide.

Then the policemen moved forward. I saw three people, a mother and two children, shot dead right in front of me. On the other side of the square there was another whoosh of flame and a scream. Machine guns were clattering everywhere. Windows smashed. People running left and right were thrown off their feet, sent spinning to the ground.

“Holly!”

Jamie had shouted and I skidded to a stop with a policeman standing in front of me. He had come from nowhere. He was aiming a gun right at me and I saw my own face, like a death mask, reflected in his riot shield. I could have been killed right then. God knows how many people might have died in the square. The police had obviously been ordered to leave nobody alive. But then, further away, there was an explosion and all the lights went out.

Somebody had blown up the generator. I didn’t know it then – but that was what had happened and the sudden fall of darkness, as fast as a guillotine blade, gave us the chance to escape. I was blind but Jamie dragged me with him, circling round the man who had been about to shoot me, breaking through the police line. We couldn’t stop, not even to catch our breath. All the policemen were carrying powerful torches – we had seen them in the wood. It took them just a few seconds to find them and turn them on. Then, once again, the square was illuminated and the killing resumed.

Jamie and I had made it into the doorway of one of the houses just off the square … Sir Ian’s place, as it happened. The house was called Postman’s Knock. We stood there, our chests heaving, listening to the shots, watching the bodies fall.

“Let’s go inside!” I gasped. The door to the house was closed but it was sure to be unlocked. “We can hide.”

“No. They’ll search. They’ll find us.”

“Then what?”

“Back into the wood. It must be safer there now.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re all here, in the village.”

It made some sort of sense. At least the forest would give us cover. A man staggered past us, screaming, clutching at his eyes. He had been sprayed with something horrible. He ran into a bush and toppled forward. The man was Simon Reade. Did I need any more reminding that it was time to go? Making sure that Jamie was with me, I launched myself away from Sir Ian’s house and would have continued back past the garage for a third time, had I not found myself being seized by a hand around my throat. Suddenly there was a man with his face pressed against mine, whispering fiercely in my ear.

“Stay still. If you want to live, you’ll come with me.”

SEVEN

It was the Traveller. I was dazed; everything was happening so quickly and I’d only ever seen him occasionally. Even so, I knew him at once. He was holding me so tight, he was hurting me. There was a strange gleam in his eyes.

Jamie tore at his arm, trying to force him to release me. “Get off her!” he shouted. There was so much noise all around – screams and gunfire – that it hardly mattered if he was heard.

“Listen to me. Listen to me … both of you! You have to get out of here and there is only one way. You have to trust me. There are only minutes left. There…”

He pointed up with one finger. What did he mean? And then I heard it, the thudding of more helicopters approaching, the same sound that I had heard in the forest only louder, more insistent. In the very far distance I saw the lights. There were lots of them. They would be here very soon.

“They will destroy the whole village,” the Traveller said. “They’ll leave nothing standing, nobody alive.”

“Why?”

“Because, unfortunately, they believe what Rita told them. They think Jamie has gone.”

“But why kill everyone?” I asked.

“Because that’s what they do.” The Traveller loosened his grip on my arms. “They kill for the sake of it. They kill because they enjoy it.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Hasn’t Jamie told you? The Old Ones.”

The Old Ones. He knew about them too.

We were still partly concealed in the doorway of Postman’s Knock, protected by the ivy that grew up on either side. Standing there, I saw someone run past, trying to make it down the main road. There was a burst of machine-gun fire and the figure – I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman – stopped, threw their arms in the air and collapsed.

Jamie stepped forward. “You said you know a way out of here,” he rasped. “Where?”

“Will you do exactly what I tell you, even if it means abandoning your friends?” Jamie hesitated. “I’m not going to get myself killed,” the Traveller snapped. “I need to know I can rely on you.”

“All right. Yes. Whatever you say.”

“Good. Then follow me. Stay close.” He was talking to Jamie, not to me. “You stay here, Holly. Find somewhere to hide.”

It took me a second or two before I understood what he was implying. My mouth dropped open. He was leaving me behind! Never mind that I’d been the one who had discovered Jamie in the first place and that tonight it had been me who’d raised the alarm. I was out. Dead meat like the rest of them.

But Jamie wasn’t having any of it. “I’m not leaving without her,” he said.