The Naming of the Beasts

I slid slowly over to the near-side door and opened it. DeJong kept me covered while Dicks got out of the driver’s door and came around to join me. He hauled me out of the car and pushed me away from it towards a small stand of trees. I glanced back at the road. We were still in plain sight, and if anything had happened to come rolling by just then I would have chanced my arm and made a break for it. But nothing did. That left total surrender or trying to overpower Dicks. There was a moment or two in which I could have tackled him, but he outweighed me by a good sixty pounds or so and it was all muscle. I was still weighing up my chances and coming up short when DeJong got out and joined us, making the point moot in any case.

I let myself be pushed and poked across the narrow strip of asphalt and in under the trees. The ground sloped away sharply here towards a drainage ditch about eight feet below us. Dicks looked back, decided we were still too visible and gave me another push in the direction of the ditch.

‘Down there,’ he said.

‘Nah,’ I said. ‘This will do for me. Dicks, whatever Jenna-Jane told you, this is a really bad—’

The big man planted his hand against my chest, fingers spread, and pushed. I lost my footing and fell over backwards, rolling a few feet, but I managed to put the brakes on before I slid into the ditch. Dicks and DeJong fanned out slightly, blocking me to right and left in case I decided to run. They wanted me in the ditch, and they weren’t going to take no for an answer.

I stayed down, because another push like that would send me rolling down the slope arse over tip. In any case, I’d met my share of thugs and bully boys and knew this game of old. The ground was the only location from which they couldn’t knock you down again.

Dicks stared down at me with unmistakable satisfaction. ‘A stop-me-and-buy-one deal,’ he rumbled. ‘Very funny line. A bit smug though. I don’t like people getting smug with me. Now what the professor actually said was that I should let you meet the old fart, use up as much time as you wanted to, then drop you off in the middle of nowhere and leave you to find your own way home. But as I understand it, the longer it takes you to do that, the better. How far are we from the village back there, DeJong?’

The other man tapped his chin with the butt of the handgun - way too casually, in my opinion, considering I hadn’t heard him put the safety back on. ‘Maybe three miles,’ he hazarded. ‘Maybe a bit more.’

‘How long at a fast walk, would you say?’

‘Probably about an hour.’

Dicks showed his teeth. ‘And how long at a slow crawl?’

I saw the kick coming, and jackknifed at the waist to get some distance from it, but Dicks had a lot of weight to put into the manoeuvre. His foot slammed into my stomach like a freight train coming through, knocking all the breath out of me in an explosive bolus as it actually lifted me momentarily off the ground. I came down at the very lip of the ditch, staring down into it, my diaphragm spasming agonisingly as I tried without much success to suck in more air.

Dicks turned me over with his foot, then leaned down and dragged me to my feet, without apparent effort. I was still too busy with the quest for oxygen to offer any resistance. I hung from his fist, my heels scrabbling at the loose earth.

‘Oh, well, crawling, that’s different,’ DeJong allowed.

‘It is different,’ Dicks agreed. ‘I don’t think he’s going to make it.’

He punched me in the mouth. I spun like a top and hit the ground rolling. My own momentum tumbled me down the slope into the ditch, where I came to rest against the curve of a concrete culvert at its very bottom. Levering my face and upper chest off the ground, I spat out some of the blood that was welling into my mouth. A throbbing note like the buzz of a Black & Decker power drill on low speed filled my head, giving me the momentary hallucination that I was thirteen again and at the dentist’s, having a bad tooth hollowed out with just a gulp or two of gas by way of anaesthetic.

Dicks and DeJong strolled down to join me, in no particular hurry. DeJong circled round towards my head, but it was clear by now that this was Dicks’s show. He stood over me, a frown of concentration on his face. The ditch was his crucible, and I was an experiment he’d set aside the whole morning for. The sun was coming up behind him, giving him a halo he’d done nothing to deserve.

I tried one last time.

‘Drop it,’ I warned him, my voice slurred. ‘Drop it, you stupid lager-lout fuckwit, or I’ll make you wish you’d never left the SAP.’

Dicks drew back his foot for another kick. There was no way of avoiding this one and, truth to tell, I didn’t even want to. I just put my hands out in front of my chest, where I could see he was aiming.