Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

the security guards’ fingers gripped his arms. He tried to count the houses.

She stopped at five.

There was no answer for his own crime, not here.

Not that he would find. Not that he would know, that he could know.

The Hail Mary, she was just a ghost.

She was just a little girl, lost in a life of burning men.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN

Rebecca walked far from the pier. Her blue-white trainers pattered past the arcades and their screaming noise, a few children inside just watching her, not playing games, just watching: younger, angry eyes. She’d been to the arcade a few times with her boyfriend. They’d played light-gun games, mainly, sticking coins in machines with silly names and pointing her red and black rifle at the faces of velociraptors and zombies. She’d keep looking at him all the while, keep smiling, and he wouldn’t turn to her at all, he’d be so fixated on his task. They’d put as many coins in as they could. Rebecca had barely been able to afford it, but they’d done it anyway. It had made him happy, even if it hadn’t been her kind of game. He’d let them both buy hamburgers as a treat. She hadn’t wanted to – they were so full of fat – but he had told her to eat her burger, so she had eaten it.

Months after her last birthday, they’d lain in the fields of the farm, far from the house, far from her father, from strangers.

He’d asked her what she’d wanted, and she’d not known.

She’d just talked about that carriage ride along the beach.

She’d talked about happiness, about what it might mean.

Months later, now, Rebecca sat on the sea-wall and knocked the heels of her trainers back and forth against it.

She had told no one about the powder.

Her locker would be opened a day later and the authorities would be called. They would analyse it, and find it was just flour, put there by cruel students playing a careless prank. Rebecca did not know this as she walked.

Rebecca took out her phone and sent some messages. She had no friends left, not now. Maybe she’d never had them.

Maybe all this time, all this absence in her life, had just been a dream.

She did not know what she had breathed. She did not know if it was happening again, she did not know who hated her.

She got up and went into town. She had brought a coat, a backpack full of her things. She went into the market.

There, a few people in mobility scooters had crowded near the chip van. Most of the stalls were shutting up for the day. A stern-looking man stood near a rug upon which military memorabilia was laid. Old, impotent guns. Medals. Clothing.

‘Is any of that real?’ Rebecca asked.

‘Huh?’ The stern man looked up. His face was mottled by acne scars and sixty years of too much sun, but his voice was surprisingly croaky. He did not sound as stern as he looked. ‘What?’

Rebecca kept walking. She did not answer him, heard him muttering behind her. She went to a pub where once a policeman and his friend had sat, where once that man had wondered if anyone liked him. She knew none of this, but she sat in the same booth. It took on meaning, this place. It woke up. She opened an app on her phone and ordered a drink from the bar. Vodka and Coke.

It came, half to her surprise. The barman hesitated.

‘My mum’s just in the bathroom,’ Rebecca said.

He nodded and went back to the bar. Rebecca drank it, and hated it, and was surprised by how easy it had been, not the ordering, but the lying. She just said it and he believed her. She ordered dinner: chips, a burger, everything.

She ate it all and left, a man at the bar winking at her as she got up.

She left, wondering if the man would follow her.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT

Each day, another person left.

Within three years, the train station itself would be gone. The rails themselves would be torn up for scrap.

The vet surgery was never sold. The people there, they found jobs in other practices. Their customers – few as they were, the population dwindling by the day – travelled to adjacent towns to get help.

Frank thought of all the things he had done for them. All the things he had done to them. Standing in fields, telling men their livelihoods were going to be destroyed. Telling them of infection, of Foot and Mouth, of fire and captive bolts. Telling them what had to be done.

His girlfriend hadn’t wanted to speak to him any more. He should never have dated someone younger. He’d been flattered at the interest. He’d lost himself.

Everyone had been on edge for so long. Everyone was afraid.

‘I’ll talk to you soon,’ she’d said, but she hadn’t meant it.

People thought he was arrogant, he knew, they thought he was rude, but if you didn’t pretend to be confident – if you didn’t make yourself into what the world wanted of you – what kind of man were you?

He’d gone round to the American diner late at night to surprise her, one last attempt to win the woman’s heart, but using his key in the pitch black had upset her, had frightened her, and the true end had come.

He passed the alleys of a thousand years, the narrow streets, the land forever remembering what it was, what it might be again. The pattern had been there always, for those who looked, for the worst of us.

He passed the carriage driver, leaning against a caravan, his face shaved, his eyes clear. The man nodded at him, and the look made Frank feel sad, though he did not know why.

The vet went to his car, a few of his possessions in the back.

The police had come again, this time with sniffer dogs. They kept thinking he had drugs, wouldn’t leave him alone about it.

Everyone knew