The Doomsday Prophecy Read Online Free PDF Page A

sprawled across the rough wood and felt her ankle twist. Her heel was caught in a gap in the planking. She jerked and struggled. It was jammed tight. She reached down and tried to tear the shoe off.
    They were coming. Footsteps thundered on the jetty, and then there was a gun pressing hard into the back of her neck, heavy breathing in her ear. She looked up to see the man’s face contorted in anger, teeth bared.
    The others caught up.
    ‘What the hell happened?’ one voice said.
    ‘The bitch came round,’ the man with the gun snapped back over his shoulder.
    ‘And what the fuck were you doing?’ the woman’s voice demanded. ‘Sleeping?’
    He ignored her and yanked Zoë to her feet. The four of them marched her roughly back along the jetty. She was kicking and screaming hysterically. They said nothing to her. Dragged her limping back to the house, back up to her room, and shoved her down on the bed. Her ankles and knees were roughly bound together with duct tape. The fair-haired man thrust the pistolinto the back of his belt and grabbed her right wrist. His grip was crushing. He jerked her arm up and there was a rattle of metal as he cuffed it to the bed frame. Then the left arm.
    She fought them wildly. ‘What do you want with me? Let go of me! What do you want with me? ’
    Then they pressed a length of the tape across her mouth, stifling her screams. Tears poured uncontrollably down her face.
    The man took the gun out of his belt and pressed the muzzle to the side of her head. She tried to shrink away from the cold steel, screwing her eyes shut.
    Then he smiled and took the gun away. They all stood back and watched her. She was too exhausted to fight any more. Her breath came in gasps and she felt she was going to faint.
    The woman had her hands on her hips, head cocked to one side, a thin smile on her lips. ‘Leave her a while,’ she said. ‘I have to make a call. Then we can go to work on her.’
    ‘ What do you want? ’ Zoë tried to scream again through the gag.
    Nobody answered as they filtered out one by one.
    The fair-haired man was the last to leave the room. ‘I can hardly wait to get started,’ he said, grinning down at her.

Chapter Seven
    Oxford The same day
       
    Ben surfaced slowly from a murky sleep filled with threatening dreams, and his mind drifted back into focus. He remembered now. He was in his new flat. Oxford was hardly a strange city to him, but it felt weird actually to be living here again after so many years. He wouldn’t be home in Ireland until December.
    Fighting away the numbing torpor that made him want to crawl back deep under the covers, he kicked his legs out of the bed. He shrugged on a tracksuit top, walked through to the living room, stepped over the mess of half-unpacked luggage that was in there and headed for the kitchen. The flat was tucked into a secluded block of apartments in the quiet northern end of the city. It felt modern and compact, so different from the rambling old seaside house in Ireland, with its stone floors and draughty fireplaces.
    He listened to the twitter of birds and the distant traffic rumble as he made some coffee. No milk, nosugar, nothing to eat. He left the radio off. He wasn’t interested in whatever might be happening in the world. He sat for a while at the small table in his kitchen, the coffee cup hot between his hands, emptying his mind, trying not to think about things. Most of all, trying not to think about the two bottles of ten-year-old Laphroaig in his suitcase – and how easy it would be to walk over there and open one of them. Too easy. He knew he’d get there in a moment of weakness, when the demons came. But this wasn’t it.
    At three minutes to eight he stood up, walked back to the living room and found the fabric Tesco shopping bag he’d left on one of the armchairs the night before. He picked up the heavy bag, carried it across the room and dumped the contents out across his desk. Books spilled everywhere.
    There