He found himself looking back up towards the hillside opposite, his eyes searching through the scattered thorn bushes. A hare was bounding up the slope, its powerful backlegs thrusting it upwards with an air of urgency; because something had disturbed it.
Jon Quinn narrowed his eyes, squinted, but he could not find what he was looking for, a hairy human shape squatting on its haunches, immobile as it gazed down on the cottage.
Jon could not see him but he knew he was there all right. Waiting again. He reloaded the gun, propped it up in the porch. I'm going to kill you, you bastard. She won't stop me because it's not because of her I'm going to blow your fucking head off like I did Gwyther's. It's because there s only room for one of us in these hills.
Autumn. The rutting season had begun when males fought to the death for their place at the stand. And Jon Quinn had made up his mind that he wasn't going to be the vanquished.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PHIL WINDER was aware that large numbers of these wild tribes were moving into the hills. He had spied them in the distance from the Knoll, the highest point on the farm, whole packs of them trekking purposefully, urgently. They must be crazy moving up on to high ground for the winter, he thought.
He was worried about Jackie, too. It was like taking a dog that had lived in an outside kennel all its life and expecting it to adapt immediately to a life indoors. She was constantly going outside; once he awoke in the middle of the night and found her gone. Panicking, fearing lest she had gone back to the wild he had run downstairs, seen the back door wide open.
A starlit autumn night with no moon, a distinct chill creeping into the atmosphere, some of the leaves beginning to turn now. He shivered, called softly, 'Jac.'
He heard a movement, saw something materialising out of the clump of cupressus firs which served as a windbreak across the front of the farmhouse. It was Jackie, shaking her head and smiling weakly in her own kind of apology. She couldn't sleep, she needed fresh air. Day by day she was becoming more restless. He wondered if the call of the wild was proving too much for her and one morning he would wake up and she would be gone for good.
'We'd better go back inside and keep the door locked.' He used sign language still, let her pick up her own scraps of vocabulary; if he didn't talk to somebody he would go mad. These hills are full of your . . . people. We can't take risks.1
She nodded, followed him back into the house. How the hell did you ask a woman who had virtually stepped straight out of the Stone Age if something was troubling her? It was a miracle that the throwbacks had not attacked the house. Perhaps they were afraid, although he doubted it. More likely all their time was taken up preparing new dwelling-places for themselves and when that task was completed . . .
Jackie was certainly disturbed. Uppermost in her mind was the fear that one day Kuz and his followers from the village might appear on the scene. She ought to persuade Phil to move on; they had not run far enough. Perhaps Kuz had another woman, had already forgotten her. Somehow her primitive pride refused to allow her to believe this. He would not let up until he found her.
And then there was this strange calling, something which she did not understand. The man called Phil was not truly her mate. They lived together, copulated frequently but . . . something was not quite right. She could not think of him in the same way as ... no, not Kuz . . . she struggled to come to terms with her problem. A ha If-re mem be red face that slipped from her memory just when she thought she had grasped it, left her with a frustrating blank. Who?
Who?
Searching her mind, going out into the garden at night and just standing there listening. She heard the others in j the hills, noises from encampments borne to her on the ! wind. The urge was becoming stronger, soon she would have to go out into the hills and , . . and what? She didn't know.
Phil Winder wished that he had a weapon of some kind, one that would give him superiority in the event of an attack on the farm. A shotgun, for instance. But his father was not a believer in guns, abhorred killing; he even refused to let the local hunt draw his land. He did have an old .410 though, one that had been his father's and had been used for shooting rats around the hayricks in the old days. Phil remembered it, determined to search for it and in due course found it hidden away on a shelf in the cowhouse. He grimaced when he saw it; the barrel was rusted, had a dent in it, the stock was split, and both hammer and trigger springs were broken. So he settled for the big wood axe, took it upstairs with them at night. Maybe, if the need arose, he could defend the landing in much the same way that Horatio had defended the bridge.
He did not go far from the farm these days, his furthest point the Knoll where he lay and watched the activity on the hillsides all around. There were more camp-fires than ever now, people coming in all day long, groups and singles, many of them hurrying as if there was some urgency to reach high ground. Fleeing from something perhaps . . .
Once he thought he heard gunfire in the distance, a sporadic burst of firing. If it was the army then they did not come this way. Phil half-considered taking Jackie and going in search of more survivors but discarded the idea. It was too dangerous, they were safer here.
It was inevitable that the throwbacks would come to the house one day. Phil just kept hoping that it would not be each today or tonight, for you did not plan as far as tomorrow. But some day or some night they would come.
He heard them that blustery autumn night down in the yard below. It was Jackie who gave him his first warning, a tensing of her body against his, her hand gripping his own. They are here!
He slid out of bed and crossed to the window. There was enough moonlight to see by, a weird scene below, furtive shapes that were barely human, slinking in the shadows; a dozen, maybe more, moving with a sinister stealth that left no doubt in his mind what they had come for.
He picked up the axe. Suddenly it felt puny, useless. The enemy would be suitably armed with whatever weapons they had stolen from farms and houses. He was one against many; his only advantage was the narrow landing with barely room for two people to pass. They could only come at him one at a time.
He heard them smash down the front door, a splintering and tearing of woodwork, a heavy beam crashing. Low snuffling noises, a snarl. Then silence except for their heavy breathing.
They were in the hall, waiting whilst their eyesight adjusted to the darkness, Phil Winder could hear the beating of his own heart, his pulses pumping blood as hard as they could go. His mouth was dry and he understood where the proverbial likeness to the bottom of a parrot's cage came from. He tasted his own terror, the fetid flavour of fear.
There was no sound from Jackie, she was lying on the bed, listening just like he was. There was no way out; they had lived for today too long and now tomorrow had caught up with them. He heard the first soft footfall on the stairs. Phil sweated, rested the axe on his shoulder, gripped the stail with sticky hands, pressed himself back into the shadows. He wanted the first blow to take them by surprise; the advantage was his for anyone approaching him would be silhouetted against the faint light of the small landing window. First up, first to die!
Suddenly he saw them, shaggy long-haired creatures which might have been werewolf images depicted in some macabre shadow-show, the first one taller than the second, striking his head against a low beam, ducking.
And that was then Phil Winder drove in the first blow. He felt the impact, felt his stomach heave up. Like splitting logs, if you hit them properly they fell apart; inaccuracy or knotted wood resulted in the axe-head sticking so that you had to tug it free. This was one of the latter.