The bullet hit Sandra high in the chest, spinning her around as she fired in turn, both barrels spewing flame as thousands of tiny pieces of shot burst from the weapon, followed a split second later by the sound of metal hitting metal.
The front of the car shuddered as the pellets hit, tearing through the bonnet as if it was made of paper and burying themselves in the engine.
Time rushed back in, sound, smell and vision all returning to normal as if a bubble had popped.
Sandra collapsed, screaming incoherently, but everyone else stood frozen in shock at the sudden violence. Then, as if an invisible chord had been cut, they ran, all of them sprinting back down the road towards Woking, Tom looking back over his shoulder as he steadied Jenny who carried their child.
I got to my feet shakily as Emily flicked the safety back on and tucked the pistol away again. She crossed to the screaming woman on the floor, kicking the shotgun out of reach and then kneeling to look at the damage.
Gathering the tattered shreds of my courage I followed, looking over her shoulder at the gaping hole the bullet had made. Bile rose in my throat and I had to choke it back down again to stop from vomiting.
“Help me!” Sandra croaked, flecks of blood spattering her chin as she spoke.
“You should have thought of that before you tried to kill us,” Emily said, her voice flat, but she turned the woman on her injured side and grabbed one of the discarded rucksacks to use as a pillow.
I stood there, as useless after the action as I’d been during, still feeling sick but unable to look away from the huge pool of blood just inches away from my feet.
“Is she going to be ok?” I asked, and Emily shook her head.
“No, Malc, she’s not. She’s just been shot with a 9mm pistol from close range and the bullet went through her lung. She’s going to die.”
I had the sudden urge to shout at her then, to scream at her for being so fucking calm when she’d just inflicted such grievous damage on another human being. She’d delivered the news like a weather report, heedless of the fact that the dying woman could hear her, and in spite of the fact that same woman had been about to kill us I felt like I’d just witnessed a violation of everything I’d held dear for my entire life.
I’d never so much as hit another person in anger since school, my father having taught me that violence was a very poor way to solve anything. To see someone I liked and respected treating a death she’d caused with such disinterest was almost too much to bear.
A huge wracking cough burst from Sandra and she began to convulse, gasping and clawing at her throat with her free arm as if she could tear the blockage free. Blood sprayed out across the road and her back arched.
I stumbled away, horrified. I’d seen death before, but always at a distance, insulating me from the terrible reality. Suddenly it was right here in front of me, every awful moment etched forever in my mind.
Even Emily stepped back as Sandra’s back arched, her face a mask of pain and fear as her eyes bulged and the air was suddenly filled with the stench of faeces.
She scratched at her neck one last time and then lay still. I moved another few steps towards the verge before I lost my breakfast, throwing up for the second time in as many days, heaving until there was nothing left.
“How do you do it?” I asked without turning, wiping my mouth on the back of my arm.
“Do what?”
“Stop it from driving you mad, block the feelings out, keep going, all of it.”
“You don’t,” she said, and I turned to look at her, still standing over the body, staring at it as if engraving the moment indelibly in her memory. “You just do what needs to be done and you save the feelings for later. This may not be the world we want, but it’s the one we’ve got. You let your guard down for even a moment and it leaps up and bites you on the arse, they just proved that. Some might say that she got what she deserved.”
“And what do you say?” I asked quietly.
She shrugged and looked up at the sun.
“I say we’ve got a long way to go, and the sooner we get moving, the sooner we can find your little girl.”
Chapter 25
The car was wrecked. The blast from the shotgun had torn the engine into pieces that even Emily’s skills couldn’t reassemble, particularly not with the few tools we had to hand. The one thing that was on our side, however, was that the group had run off without their bags, leaving most of our own kit behind except the few items they’d pocketed.
Under Emily’s direction I worked quickly and silently, packing food, medicine and water into a rucksack and then adding the small stove and one of the bottles of gas, the other going in her Bergen when mine was full to bursting.
She took as much of the water as she could carry, along with the tent and all the utensils, then packed the rest of the space with food.
We tied our sleeping bags underneath, and Emily took the maps and torches from the car before picking up the shotgun and retrieving the box of shells.
She offered it to me but I shook my head. I couldn’t bear to touch it right now, although I knew I was making myself look weak.
In my heart I knew that she’d done the right thing. She’d saved my life, and in return all I could do was stare at her as if she were some kind of monster, but if it affected her in any way she didn’t show it.
Instead she worked with a practiced efficiency and within minutes we were ready to go.
“We need to find another vehicle,” she said as we began to walk, my ankle stiff but usable. “We’ll try for the next town, see if we have any luck.”
“What if we don’t find one?”
“Then we keep walking.”
And so we did. It was a long time since I’d done any serious exercise, and although Emily set a gentle pace I was soon gasping, my back bent under the weight of the rucksack and my socks beginning to rub uncomfortably in my trainers as they soaked through with sweat.
We met no one else on the road for the first hour, and neither of us suggested that we investigate the few houses that we passed. I was beginning to develop a healthy fear of anyone I didn’t know, and apart from a vehicle we had everything we needed.
As the day wore on the heat increased, giving me a headache that pulsed quietly in my temples. We were stopping for a few sips of water every couple of miles, but the truth was that we were sweating out far more than we were taking in and by late afternoon I wanted nothing more than to lie down in the shade and pant like a dog.
Occasionally we passed other people but they gave us a wide berth, some stepping off the road and into the fields or woods on either side when they saw the shotgun that Emily cradled in her arms. Only two cars went past us, one already full and the other speeding up and almost knocking us off the road in its haste.
The sun was on its way to the western horizon when we hit the motorway. The map told us it was the M3, the small lane we’d been following spilling us out onto the road with almost no warning.
It was strange to see such a huge stretch of road so empty, and I felt horribly exposed as we crossed it, climbing the central reservation and hurrying across to the far side and back onto the smaller road we needed to follow.
We didn’t talk much, both lost in our own thoughts and only discussing small things, such as which route to take when we consulted the map or letting the other know when we needed to find a convenient bush or tree.
I felt tired from more than just the unaccustomed exercise. Part of me was refusing to believe that I lived in a world where you could now kill someone with little or no consequence, where life was already becoming cheaper than a car boot full of food and water, but the rest of me knew I couldn’t go on hiding from reality.