Old World (The Green and Pleasant Land) Read Online Free PDF Page B

come out of a larder like Mrs Robinsons. They were hungry men in a desperate world, and one of them had just reached in and half dragged my sickly daughter from the car.
    Time seemed to slow down, the gruff shouts of the attackers, the bellows of pain and rage from my sons, the piercing screams from the female members of the Locklear clan, it all came through dulled and stretched and unreal. In the space of a few heartbeats I saw so many details, I saw Zak drive the point of a Stanley knife blade into the eye of an attacker on his side of the car, I saw Ellies back start to bleed from the cuts she was sustaining from the broken glass of the window, I saw Mac run a kitchen knife across the hand of the man who was trying to pull his sister from the car, the man shouted and let go and Ellie hung half way out the car like a rag doll.
    Then I heard it, I heard it cut through the mental quagmire like a blade “Rob!!” she screamed, my lady wife. This 'Rob' this was not the fearful, or the demanding or the cajoling or the submissive. This was the 'what the hell are your doing just sitting there 'Rob'.
    I pushed the door open with as much force as I could muster sending one of the attackers sprawling onto the tarmac. He'd barely got to his elbows before I was upon him. The kick hit his chin so hard that his neck snapped back with enough force to break. The man with the bloodied hand who'd been trying so vainly to take my daughter ran at me, I blocked his poorly aimed blow before ramming his face into the roof of the car, even as he fell I grabbed him and wedged his head in the door way before slamming it shut with all the ferocity I could summon.
    I pulled Ellie from the window and opened the door allowing Zak and Mac to climb out. Then we were on the offensive. Hammers, knives, machetes and cleavers, the remaining four assailants put up a poor fight, three died quickly, the last one tried to climb back up the embankment into the bush, he fell twitching with my eldest sons meat cleaver between his shoulder blades.
    I looked around, sizing each of them up from head to toe, I looked for scratches and bizarrely I looked for bites, I'd become so used to fighting cadavers that it took me a moment to realise that the evil of men was of a different nature to the evil of the dead, though it would not have surprised me to find that the living had reached such a level of depravity as to feast on their own.
    Contemplation of my bloody but very much alive family was cut short by a snort from behind me. The strange grey horse which had been our bait eyed me balefully. I severed the rope holding it with a single swipe of the machete, the creature did not flinch as I did so. It stared for a few moments more, then it wandered off into the undergrowth with the odd maggot wriggling its way to the surface and falling to the floor, soon it was lost from sight and we were alone and surrounded by empty silence.

    It took three of us pushing to dislodge the car from the embankment and get it back onto the road. We left the bodies for the flies and for each other dependent on which one rose first. We continued on and were all relieved when we exited the trees and were surrounded by open country side again. Up the road a way we saw the high hills of the northern part of the Lake District national park were rearing up. Nestled deep within them were some of the other bodies of water that gave the area its name, like Ullswater and Grasmere.
    Our objective was closer than that but we still had a bit of a drive. Sue started to fiddle with the radio but I switched it off straight away which earned me a long steady glare for the next several hundred metres. I ignored it and we all retreated to within our own thoughts. I didn't want the others to hear the strange messages and the manic laughter.
    At one point we passed some wreckage in a field, a downed plane of some kind I assumed, had I paused and considered the wreck I might have thought it odd that whispers of