Blacklands

Or attempted flight.

Inwardly he grinned at a slew of memories of attempted flight and gathered inner strength from those.

“Got it caught on barbed wire coming up here,” he told Lewis.

Lewis nodded slowly. The sandwich had made him forget that he’d felt uneasy about Avery, but now that his mouth had done its work his brain was re-engaging—and something about the barbed wire story didn’t ring true. Not least the fact that there was no barbed wire on the moor. Surrounding farms had barbed wire, sure, but he couldn’t think of a nearby route onto the moor where anyone would have to negotiate anything more than a stone or wooden stile.

He got up and wiped his hands on his jeans.

“Thanks, mate,” he said. Then he looked at Steven: “We should go.”

Steven chewed, hating every second, then swallowed big chunks, his eyes watering.

“You go,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You go,” he said quickly, before he could lose his nerve. “I’ll stay.”

Lewis gave a confused laugh and glanced at Avery, who was looking at Steven with an odd expression on his face.

Steven was white, with two burning patches high on his cheeks, his eyes fixed on his sandwich. Lewis noticed he was trembling. He also noticed that the sandwich Steven was eating had tomato in it. As he watched, Steven took another bite and sloppily sucked a bit of errant tomato into his mouth.

Something was very wrong with his friend.

“C’mon, Steve!” He laughed again but it sounded so odd to his own ears that he cut it short, leaving a strained silence in its wake.

He’d been engrossed in his own sandwich but now he saw that Avery was squeezing the green cardigan between his hands, twisting and crushing it, his knuckles white with tension. His vague sense of unease became an ache in his belly.

“C’mon, you divvy. I got to be back soon.” It wasn’t true, of course, but Lewis suddenly felt the overwhelming need to be at home.

Steven hurled what was left of his sandwich at Lewis, hitting him in the chest.

“Just fucking go, will you! Just fucking go!”

Lewis’s eyes were round with surprise. He took a step backwards.

Steven got up, shaking, and closed the gap between them.

“I know what you did to the garden.”

Lewis flushed deep red. “W-what?”

“You heard me. I know what you did. Now fuck off!”

Steven shoved Lewis in the chest with the shaft of the spade, making him stumble backwards down the mound. Steven came after him and shoved again. Lewis fell onto his backside in the heather, and panic burst on Steven’s face. He grabbed Lewis by the shoulder, trying to lift him and push him away at the same time. Lewis stumbled once, twice; Steven screamed over him: “I hate you! I fucking hate you! Just piss off home! Just go!”

Bits of sandwich and spittle fell onto Lewis from Steven’s furious mouth. He scrambled to his feet and Steven came at him again. This time Lewis skipped out of the way down the track.

“Are you nuts?” he yelled at Steven. “Are you pigging crazy?” Again he glanced at the man—as if for support.

“He’s nuts!” Lewis yelled, but the man was not looking at him. He was looking at Steven; his red, red lips had drawn back to reveal his sharp white teeth in a grimace of concentration. More than Steven’s sudden attack, that sight made Lewis’s insides lurch dizzily and suddenly he had to get away. Had to. Couldn’t stay another second. Primeval fear gripped him and he cried out as if struck—then turned and ran.

Steven watched him go, feeling the thread of his life unravelling and trailing down the track behind his friend as if caught on his heel, leaving him with nothing but a black, hollow chest and bits of bloody tomato free-floating in his rolling gut.

He felt Avery swishing slowly down the hill behind him, wet heather stroking his ankles, a knife, a rope, a gun at the ready.

A shudder passed through him and he spun round on a sob.

Avery hadn’t moved.

For a long moment they regarded each other. Steven pushed tears of panic out of his eyes with the heel of his hand, feeling how strange was the disconnection that allowed him to think that Avery would attribute them to his row with Lewis. It was almost as if his mind had unravelled a bit too far and was now able to consider his own actions from a little way off. The coldness of that scared him but he clung to it nonetheless—it was almost like having someone else in his head, someone else to make decisions—and it was the only thing keeping him from curling into a ball of pissing terror in the heather to await the inevitable.

“You okay?”

Steven nodded, biting his lip. There was more silence.

Avery stood up and brushed the seat of his pants carefully, then made his way down the mound.

Steven saw that the man’s jeans were soaked to the knees and it made him aware that his own were the same, cold and stiff against his shins.

His nerve endings twitched, jumped, screamed to turn and run.

But he just stood there and waited for the killer to come to him.

Why?