Interrupted Journey

Chapter 10 - Exit

I don't know what time it was when Laura woke me. I never seemed to be getting enough sleep but this was ridiculous.

"They're coming," Laura was saying in a calm but urgent voice. "We need to get moving now."

She allowed me about two seconds to get my head in gear before bodily hauling me out of my sleeping bag and thrusting my boots into my hands.

"Moving now!" she repeated as she started stuffing my lightweight sleeping bag into a tiny daysack that Mike described as a go-bag. If you have to drop everything else you had to keep this. You'd probably get back to the farm without it but you'd be much less comfortable.

"Double knot!" she commanded as I struggled to tie my boots. "Assume we're going into combat."

Jimbo was already leaving the house as I came down the stairs. "Take care out there," Laura said to him as he went.

"Diversion," she told me in response to my unasked question.

A huge pack was thrust towards me - heavier by far than anything I'd shifted the previous night - but it looked pathetic at the side of the ones the others were hoisting up.

"Check!" Laura said, having a quick look around herself. "Anything we leave behind is gone."

There was a camouflaged duffle that had been left in one corner of the kitchen and, as I was the only person not carrying a weapon, it was thrust into my hands. It was full of tins and I staggered under the extra weight.

"Moving out, now," Laura called at the sound of activity from the front of the house. "Back door, down to the fence."

Following Samson, I ran - I don't know how I did it with the weight but I did - down the garden. I paused in front of the fence. It seemed an insurmountable obstacle.

With a negligent ease, Samson lifted me by my rucksack and swung me over the fence. As I was flying through the air I saw someone coming round the corner of the house. It was a young man who looked like he might of been a trainee accountant a week ago. He was carrying what can only be described as a club.

With a balletic elegance Laura twirled towards him giving him what looked like the gentlest of taps on the side of the head with one of her combat boots.

He crumpled to the ground like a sack of rocks.

Samson put me back on my feet and I stumbled down the steep slope into the neighbour's garden.

Another attacker appeared round the side of the house. This one would not have looked out of place at a local football club. He gave a shout as he saw Laura hurdling the fence and more attackers started to appear.

Suddenly the relative calm of the morning was shattered by a single shot. For a few seconds there was silence then... pandemonium.

A fusillade of shots from handguns echoed around the front of the house spiced by an occasional shotgun blast. As I followed Samson at a flat sprint across the neighbour's lawn, I could see him shaking his head. Even I knew that Jimbo would not have taken his shot from anywhere he could be hit by either shotguns or handguns.

Somebody round the front presumably saw it that way too because, as we emerged onto the elegant suburban avenue at the front of the neighbour's house, the shooting tapered off with a series of increasingly angry shouts.

For a couple of minutes there was silence broken by the occasional shout then there was another single shot. This time the fusillade was brought to an end more quickly.

As we started to put distance between ourselves and the guns, the kick of adrenalin that had kept me going started to give out. "I can't keep up," I panted as they waited for me at the driveway to a particularly elegant house. "I've got to dump this."