The Walking Dead

He strode, annoyed, back to his group. Rejection came badly to him. He did not realize, could not have, the consequences of his approach to the woman and the young man, the importance of those moments lost to them. Nor what would be the result of his delaying them for not more than a minute and a half. His face was flushed from the rebuff when he again addressed his audience.

'My apologies for abandoning you. As I was saying, the Saxons from the Elbe river liked what they saw and found the alluvial valley of the river Lea a most suitable place to settle. Right here, where we are now, they made their first encampment…'

The woman was talking urgently to the young man. Steve Vickers ignored them, forgot them.

* * *

'You are ready, it is the time. The man was a fool…It is you who will make history'

She did not know whether he listened to her, understood her. She had her hand on his arm, near to his wrist, close to where his hand was hidden in the pocket of the leather jacket.

'I am with you, not beside you but close to you. We are together. I will remember you always. We are going to start to walk. One day we will meet again.'

She cursed the wetness in her eyes. Blinked to squeeze away the tears. She felt the hard shape of the waistcoat under the jacket, and could smell the perfume, and the filth from the field. The music screamed in her ears and a metallic voice shouted a welcome to the crowds. She looked back and up, saw the clock face, four minutes to the hour, and she did not consider the time lost in the spit and hiss to get rid of the fool.

'We are going to start to walk. I am with you, but never look back — and do not see the faces. You are in my prayers.'

If she had not done it, he would not have moved. She used the strength of her arm, her hand on his sleeve, and pushed him forward.

* * *

He stood outside the newsagent's. So bloody slow. A few came out and a few went in, not his damn Principal. His eyeline traversed.

He saw the centre and the crowd on the steps, the spread of the queues into the square. Saw a man doing a tour with an audience and shouting to compete against the loudspeakers and the music's clamour. Saw an Asian couple linger on the pavement, and the woman wanted to go forward, and the young man looked reluctant, but she shoved him. Saw an older guy on hospital sticks, coming behind them…and the older guy lurched round them, as if it were a difficult manoeuvre with his sticks, then stopped to gawp. Banks stamped his foot impatiently…For God's sake, even with a life history thrown in, how bloody long could it take to buy a newspaper and a packet of cigarettes? Saw the scar on the woman's face and the old guy, weight on his sticks, staring. Saw the young man respond to her shove — he had a dumb smile like he was manic — and start to move…but the old guy stood four-square in their path.

Banks felt the cold again, but the sun dappled through the trees' branches, and he was far from the town hall tower's shadow.

* * *

The bounty-hunter from Afghanistan, George Marriot — he had the wounds to prove it, and shrapnel still embedded — knew what he saw and was knackered.

He was exhausted because he had walked from home into the village, then stumbled along on his sticks to the bus stop. He had stood on the bus, too proud to take woman's offer of her seat, then lumbered from the bus station into the square. The strength had dripped out of him, but not the keenness of clear thought in his mind.

George Marriot was laughed at, behind his back, when the door closed after him, by the customers in the pub where complacent arse-. holes drank. He had hunted proud and able fighters in the Tora Bora mountains. He had taken, dead or alive, the best men of the enemy. But George Marriot had stayed alive. He recognized danger.

George Marriot might not have recognized what confronted him, had he not met a German in the camp at Jalalabad. The German had been GSG9, special forces and their elite, and had talked of the unit's training. Bust into a building, hurl the stun grenades ahead, see the enemy cowering in shock, identify the women — kill them: 'No goddamn messing, Georgie, put half a magazine into them. Shoot the women first, is what we're taught. The women, Georgie, are deadly.' She had the set face and pursed lips and there was, he thought, contempt in her eyes, as she pushed the boy. The boy wore that damn smile…had cause to smile. George Marriot knew what the muftis, mullahs and imams told them, the martyrs. Absolved of sins, a seat in Paradise. No torture in the grave, and up alongside seventy-two dark-eyed women. Can take seventy relatives to Paradise, and earn the Crown of Glory. A kid had walked in Kabul and another in Herat, and both had walked, sweaty, nervous, but people near enough to see — who had survived — had said those kids were still smiling.