We Are Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jericho would necessarily be dragged into the events that would unfold as a result of the Kangchenjunga expedition, but Carter had come home to Wells at the right time for just that to happen.
    He rarely spent any time at the house, but he had never considered renting it out. It was his refuge from the mountains and the weather and the summits and the stresses of always seeking the new and the unconquered and the undiscovered. He could come to Wells, he could see Charl if she was around, and he could chill out away from the glare of snow-capped mountains and the pressure to be daring.
    Prior to his arrival the previous evening, he hadn’t been back for eight months. The team had split up after Kangchenjunga, with a view to getting back together later in the year to sort through the ramifications of the expedition. Harrow was taking the lead. He wasn’t sure why they all trusted him, but they did.
    There was something capricious about Connolly, and none of the others had really known him that well; Geyerson he wouldn’t trust any further than he could throw him uphill; and Emerick didn’t really count, as Emerick taking control was the same as giving the lead to Geyerson. As for Carter himself, he had no intention of trying to move in the kind of circles that Harrow would have to surround himself with to make the most of what they had.
    As soon as the expedition ended, Carter had left Sikkim and headed east. Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, south to Australia and a couple of weeks in New Zealand. Getting away from all of it. Hadn’t so much as looked at a mountain, the Southern Alps from a distance notwithstanding, or touched a pinion or an ice pick or a rope or a crampon in all that time.
    Now he was looking for a few weeks at home, settling back into life just above the Levels, before heading back south for the autumn and winter season.
    He’d arrived at his house at just after ten the previous evening. The cleaning service had been in, so at least the place was tidy and dust free, the bedding clean. He’d taken a shower, gone to bed and been asleep within minutes. And then, as so often happens when travelling from one side of the world to the next, he’d woken with the arrival of dawn, the day already warm after a short, hot night.
    By five am he had been wide awake, by five fifteen he was out on his bike, riding slowly down through town, then speeding up as he hit the Levels and riding on out beyond Godney to the Avalon Marshes.
    He was wearing a T-shirt, shorts and sandals. It was going to be another hot day, and as he rode he thought about Charl, glad that she’d agreed to come over and looking forward to what was to come. Sex on a deliciously warm, lazy afternoon.
    There was a spot near the entry to the old sawmill – a place that reminded him of an episode of Scooby Doo – where he always stopped. The first of the small lakes, this one covered in the slender trunks of dead silver birches. There was something bleakly apocalyptic about it. He always wondered what had killed them, what had caused all these trees to shed their leaves and fade away to nothing but bare branches. The trees in the next lake were fine. In this one, though, there was death, all the more hauntingly beautiful as a result.
    He heard the car someway in the distance – sound travelled far across the flat earth out here at this time in the morning – although it barely registered at first. He took the phone from his back pocket and took a couple of shots of the trees. The hedgerow in front stopped him getting a good picture, but he’d crept into it previously to get the decent shot he wanted, and he always took one or two more anyway when he was out here. Sometimes he compared them with ones he’d taken before, if he could find them.
    He turned and looked along the road at the small silver car coming his way. He didn’t know much about cars and didn’t even think about the make. It was a small, bland car that could have been any