Breeding Ground Read Online Free PDF Page A

looking after their women as best they could? Shit, the doctor had given me the heebie-jeebies. Despite the emptiness of the bar, it suddenly felt claustrophobic, and leaving my half-full glass behind, I stepped back outside.
    The rain had stopped, the clouds clearing to let through some evening sunshine, but after what the doctor had said, it seemed that even that wasn’t going
     
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    to lighten my mood. The world suddenly seemed different, as if I was seeing it for the first time in ages. Maybe I needed to take the plunge and do what he said. Look around me properly. Look at the women. It wasn’t as if there were any answers to be found anywhere else.
     
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Chapter Three
    I started right there and then, on the way home. It was amazing how much detail we ignore in our day-to-day lives, how much we lazily omit seeing because we don’t think it’s important. I wondered how much longer it would have taken me to see the bigger picture of what was going on without the doctor’s prompt. I wonder how long old Judge had known. I guess I’ll never find out. I never saw him again after that.
    Beneath the clearing skies, I wandered slowly out from Market Square to the main road. Normally, I’d just turn left and walk the couple of hundred yards to the cottage, but I wasn’t ready to go back yet and I wanted to take a good look at my hometown.
    The first thing I noticed was that there were no women about. I didn’t see a single one. Stony Stratford High Street had a lot of restaurants, serving up food from all ethnic varieties, something for every taste, from Italian through Thai to Indian and back again, but each one I passed was either empty or closed. I paused for a moment, needing to try and take it all in,
     
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    staring through the large glass window of The Passage to India into the unmanned darkness. My breath left a misty stain on the clean surface. Stepping back, I read the sign on the door. It said simply, closed due to
    ILLNESS.
    The only nights that restaurants closed around here were Mondays, and this was a Friday, normally a busy evening with all-you-can-eat buffets dragging people in from all over Milton Keynes. How many staff needed to be ill or have sick relatives to close a restaurant? I gazed back down the deserted street and corrected myself-to close several restaurants.
    My head rushed with blood and adrenaline, making me dizzy for a moment, and it took several deep breaths to get my feet feeling solid ground beneath them. This was crazy. Truly crazy. My face and the tips of my fingers were cold, my blood drawing back inside.
    I think, looking back, that was the worst moment for my sanity. There were worse things to come, far worse, but at least by then I knew it was nature that had gone crazy, not me. Standing there at the bottom of the high street, I felt almost as if someone had slipped a small dose of LSD into my drink, unsure of what was real or not. I’d taken the drug once and that was enough. I liked to keep a grip on reality, to believe in what I could touch and feel, not just wild imaginings. I pushed my legs to walk and I tried to calm my thinking down as I turned up Vicarage Walk, strolling past the rows of houses, some showing the flickering lights of televisions reflecting large shapes on sofas, some with their curtains drawn despite the evening light. I shoved my hands deep into my pockets to warm them.
     
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    Maybe it was insane, but something was happening here. Silently, I listed the evidence. Chloe not eating and putting on three stone. Her personality changing. I rushed past that part in my head, not wanting to blur my thoughts with the fear I felt for her and for me. I remembered the disturbed and distracted demeanour of Mr. Brown earlier that afternoon. He’d said Peggy wasn’t feeling too well, either. Neither was Bill/Bob’s wife in The Crown. And the streets were pretty deserted. Definitely abandoned by the fairer sex, at least. And more than all that, there