13.2
Davey’s eyes grew wide at the thought of going back into the City.
‘Now is not the time for fear, Davey lad. Craven wouldn’t expect us to have the balls to come for him. And, he’ll probably be aware that the Freelands have fallen. He may already be sending the cullsmen out there to mop up whatever mess Simon Cross has left.’
Davey said nothing, but his expression spoke volumes. ‘We’d be mown down before we even got to the walls.’
Solomon smiled smugly and shook his head. His eye was glinting in that way it did when he was at his happiest. He raised a grubby first finger to the sky.
Davey instantly felt more sure of himself.
‘No, Davey lad. You and I were indeed fated to meet. Cos I’ve been pondering for years now how we could actually make safe passage into the city. And the other day with you asking about my fear of dogs was surely a question sent from the gods themselves.’
Davey furrowed his brow but he knew the King well enough to know if he let him talk for a while he’d eventually get to the point.
‘Don’t you get it, my lad? We sneak in through the City of Dogs! There’s a direct path to the City running right beneath our ever-loving feet. It’s been there all along. And it’s all thanks to you that I ever even thought about it.’
‘I don’t want to set foot in there after what you told me.’
‘That was five years ago, Davey lad. The dogs will be long dead. It’ll be fucking easy street. The only problem will be finding the entrance. I remember the town name, but it’s a case of finding the damned place. There was an old holiday camp nearby. I remember that much. If we can find that camp we’ll be on the right track.’
*
They walked along winding country roads that had been long-abandoned, keeping to the hedgerows in case anyone was waiting to ambush them. No one came.
‘Can’t remember the name of the camp but I remember it was in the middle of a forest.’
Davey looked around through the rifle scope and saw trees off in the distance.
‘Could that be it?’ Davey said.
‘Could well be.’
As they drew nearer to the forest, Solomon let out a triumphant chuckle.
‘Yes, Davey lad.’
A grubby finger pointed to a car wrapped around a thick metal signpost.
‘That brown sign there,’ Solomon grinned. ‘The old tourist attraction signs, Gods bless ’em. That’s the sign for the camp.’
*
This forest wasn’t like the forest Davey had been in with his friends.
Thankfully.
There were no waving tentacles for branches.
Just seemingly normal – if a little greyed out – trees.
If Davey squinted a little the trees looked like Christmas trees with the spray snow on them. The only difference was that the spray was grey instead of white.
‘Not like it used to be,’ Solomon said solemnly.
‘What?’
‘Used to be fresh air out here. Refreshing. Now all I taste is ashes.’
Davey tried not to think about it.
Solomon began coughing really badly.
‘We’re choking on the ashes of our past,’ he scowled.
He coughed a bit more then hawked and spat up a lump of phlegm.
‘Ah that’s better,’ he laughed. ‘So, we need to head straight through the forest, through the holiday camp and out the other side. The entrance to the City of Dogs is on the way to the next town.’
He turned to Davey, beaming. His excited babbling dropped into sudden silence when he saw the alarm on Davey’s face.
‘What’s that noise?’ Davey said.
Solomon stopped and listened.
‘Not sure but it sounds a bit like a motorbike engine.’
Solomon pulled Davey a bit further into the woods and they crouched behind the trunk of a stout oak tree.
Slowly, the noise grew louder and a motorbike appeared from behind them, moving slowly through the trees.
A man wearing a gas mask and a skull cap helmet with ‘Fuck ’em all!’ sprayed up the side of it in white paint was looking left and right through the trees.
His engine was loud, even though his steel horse crawled along.
Maybe it was just the relative silence in the trees.
The gas mask made him look sinister as hell.
He wore a heavy leather jacket that was covered in paintwork. An ominous skull with strangely staring eyes was the centrepiece, with crude depictions of blood and gore scattered around it. A black trilby hat sat slightly askew atop the skull.
‘All hail Papa Grim,’ it said beneath in writing that looked like blood splatter.
A shotgun was balanced carefully across the handlebars, following the biker’s gaze as he scanned from side to side.
It was clear he was on guard duty, but what he was guarding wasn’t immediately obvious.
It seemed to take an eternity for him to creep past, his engine noise slowly fading into the greenery.
The creepy-ass skull was the last thing they saw, seeming to stare at them long after he had gone.
‘Shit!’ Solomon hissed under his breath.
‘Who the fuck was that?’ Davey said.
‘We’d best be quiet,’ Solomon said, doing a bad job of dodging the question.
They peered behind them and the man on the bike had gone entirely.
They began to move further into the trees, eyes scanning around for more guards.
The roar of another bike came from pretty close by.
Solomon pulled Davey into the treeline just as a bike shot past their hiding place.
This time there was a passenger, aiming a machine gun into the trees.
Both passenger and driver wore gas masks, but no helmets.
On the back of their heads were beautifully rendered tattoos of the skull in the black trilby hat that had been on the back of the other biker’s jacket.
It was so real that it was like the bikers had eyes in the back of their heads.
‘Ain’t no sneaking up on Papa Grim,’ the passenger’s leather jacket said, a bad omen for their journey.
Solomon sniffed hard, as though trying to calm himself.
Davey had never seen the King so flustered, even when fighting off the hordes of starved, emaciated almost-corpses that had surged out of his warehouses in the Freelands.
‘What is it?’ Davey said.
‘This guy is bad news,’ Solomon said.
‘I’m getting that impression too.’
‘I know he’s bad news. Cos I used to work for him.’
*
Davey’s next words were interrupted by the roar of another bike engine. This time it shot across in an arc, a few trees away from where they hid.
The riders were whooping and cheering.
It reminded Davey of the noises he’d made on the playground pretending to be an Indian by wow-wowing his hand across his mouth.
‘Papa goan getya,’ this jacket read.
Again the sinister tattooed faces seemed to watch them as the bikes disappeared through the green.
They were amazed that the bikes hadn’t crashed due to their speed and the narrow earthen tracks between the trees.
‘Should we turn back?’ Davey said.
Solomon gulped, shook his head. ‘We try and sneak past ’em and hope to the Gods we don’t get caught.’
It was horrible seeing the King so subdued.
He had a haunted look as though remembering something horrific from his past.
Another bike shot by, headed off to their left, a fair distance away.
The engine roars subsided for a while and Solomon grabbed Davey and shoved him forward a little.
They sunk to their knees again a few hundred yards away.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Davey was puzzled until he saw a man with rags bound tightly around his face sitting astride the stout branches of a tree.
The sniper rifle in his hands was scanning around them.
Solomon took a glance through the scope on his rifle.
The sniper was looking the other way for now, but he was spinning around.
Now Davey looked, he saw more of them up in the trees, spread out in a rough ring around the woods.
‘We’re getting closer, see,’ he said and Davey understood now that fighting was not an option. The slightest sign of a scuffle and they would be riddled with bullets.
He felt hopeless. Like they were stuck here. They couldn’t turn back now as they’d invite discovery.
‘I’d be very surprised if they didn’t already know we were here,’ Solomon said.
And no sooner had he said it than a bullet hit the ground mere inches from his left foot.
*
‘High five the sky, fuckers,’ said a man hidden up a tree that Davey hadn’t even seen.
Even Solomon looked surprised to see where the voice had come from.
The man dropped down and raised his weapon.
He had dark cruel eyes that reminded Davey of Reverend Cross.
His face was tattooed over with the grinning skull logo that seemed to be commonplace around here. Even some of the trees had it carved into their trunks with ornate knife strokes.
‘Ain’t no sneaking up on Papa Grim. You should know that by now, Solomon, brother.’
‘That you, Reggie lad? What in the name of the gods are you still doing out here?’
‘Ain’t nowhere else to go, pal. Papa Grim was the only shout. Ain’t no one dares fuck Papa Grim over.’
Solomon nodded. ‘Don’t I fucking know it.’
‘Much as I hate to do it, you know the rules. I gotta take ya in.’
‘I know, lad, sorry to put you in this shituation. I can see the others have spotted us so there’s no backing out now.’
Reggie nodded.
He had lank gingery blonde hair that hung alongside his face.
The tattoo was sinister as hell and made Davey’s skin crawl. It was like the reaper himself had picked them up.
The others moved in and Davey saw that they too had the tattoos.
‘I’ll take him in,’ Reggie said.
The others seemed mildly pissed by this.
Indeed one of them came over, raising his gun towards Reggie.
‘I’ll plug you in the gut if you don’t lower that fucking gun right now,’ Reggie shouted.
The man reluctantly lowered his gun.
‘Get back to your watch,’ Reggie spat. ‘Come with me,’ he said, beckoning them on through the trees.
*
They weren’t walking for long, but at least half a dozen bikes went roaring past them.
‘Time to pay the fucking piper,’ one roared, as the noxious fumes from his exhaust set off Solomon’s cough again.
Davey thought to ask if he was ok, but they seemed to have bigger worries than a cough – lung-rattlingly severe as it was – right now.
‘Dead man walking,’ another biker delightfully announced.
‘You goan get slit, brother,’ another shouted over the roar of his engine and a couple of shotgun rounds into the sky.
Finally the trees opened out.
They found themselves on the outskirts of a dilapidated holiday village. Ramshackle wooden shacks were laid out to form a rudimentary street.
The dirt track running around it was a few feet wide, and completely churned up with bike tracks.
The roar of bike engines and raised voices came from ahead of them.
A few guards stood atop the buildings at the edge of the village.
Their rifles scanned the treeline.
One of them raised their gun and aimed it at Solomon when he saw him.
Reggie raised his hand and waved him off, shaking his head furiously.
The guard ran to the edge of the roof, leaning over, jabbing his finger at them.
‘What the fuck are you thinking bringing him in here?’
Reggie raised his hands, ‘Shut the fuck up. Get back to your guard.’
The guard did as he was told, stopping only to shout back, ‘You got a death wish, Reggie man.’
‘Prick,’ Reggie muttered.
The roar of an engine blared behind them and a bike shot past fast enough to almost drag Davey off his feet.
‘What did you do to this guy?’ Davey said.
Solomon shushed him. ‘Not the time, Davey lad, but you gotta trust me.’
‘I do.’
‘This may get fucking grim,’ Solomon sighed.
*
‘You’re a fucking dead man, Solomon,’ shouted another biker that roared past.
His gloved hands made finger guns that he gleefully pretended to fire at Solomon.
‘Nice to see you again, Josh lad,’ Solomon grinned, flicking him a dirty middle finger.
‘Same old Solomon,’ Reggie said. ‘Still scared of nothing and nobody.’
‘You fucking know it.’
But Davey knew better. He’d seen the King at his bravest and his lowest and he knew he was not as fearless now as he had once been.
They moved through the wooden shacks which slanted like the world’s worst set of teeth.
They were badly maintained; green stains all over them, grass growing up their walls.
It was a stark contrast to Serenity and its manicured lawns and pristine paintwork.
In the middle of the shacks was a patch of mud that housed roughly fifty gleaming motorbikes, seemingly the only thing in the place that was actually cared for, judging by the dirty smell of unwashed clothes and people that met their nostrils.
‘Aw man, are you gonna suffer,’ grinned a man whose mouth was more gum than tooth.
‘Syphilis not got you yet, you ugly prick?’ Solomon shouted cheerily.
‘You’ll wish it got you, you fucking backstabber.’
Solomon cheerily waved a middle finger aloft.
‘Fuck you, King Solomon,’ a crazy-looking blonde woman said, coming up and spitting in his face.
‘You spit a lot these days, donctha?’ Solomon grinned. ‘You figured out which kid belongs to which dad yet?’
‘Fuck you.’
‘I bet I’d be the only one in here who hasn’t,’ Solomon chuckled.
Davey had no idea why, but these people clearly hated him.
They were led through a crowd of hostile faces, which to Davey was like a harsher version of his first visit to the Freelands.
The crowd parted.
Bike engines roared.
People spat and hissed threats.
A few tried to punch him, only for him to shove them back with explosive force.
He decked one man with a wild head butt, smashing his nose and part of his cheek into his face.
He didn’t get back up.
Finally the crowd parted enough to allow them to see a man leaning against a shattered section of wooden signpost.
He wore a black trilby hat which looked odd alongside his leather jacket and mud-spattered black jeans.
As Davey looked closer, he saw that the black dyed leather jacket was actually made up of dozens of human faces. His skin crawled, but still he found the man’s face worse.
He had dark eyes, which shone cruelly out of the ivory-coloured skull tattooed in vivid detail across his face. Even his eyelids were covered in black ink, making it look like his eye sockets were empty when he blinked.
Papa Grim, read the tattooed name banner running across the man’s forehead.
His lips were drawn back in a smile that promised cruelty.
‘These people want to rip you to fucking shreds, Solomon,’ Papa Grim beamed. ‘Or should I say King Solomon. Cos you’re apparently royalty now.’
Papa Grim nodded and in unison a rifle butt hit the back of each of Solomon’s knees.
He fell to his knees, dozens of strong hands holding him down.
Before Davey could react, he found himself in the same situation.
Papa Grim hawked and spat on the ground, then, grin widening, pulled a gleaming cutthroat razor from an inside pocket in his jacket of severed faces.
He wiped it carefully on his jeans, clearly going through some sort of ritual with it. He seemed to mutter words to it, an incantation or possibly a prayer, though who this deviant would pray to was something that puzzled Davey significantly.
Papa Grim held the cutthroat a few inches from Solomon’s pounding jugular.
‘For the memory of what we once had, I will make this quick. Any last words, King Solomon?’