Interrupted Journey

Epilogue

Two days later, I was on a helicopter at the start of the journey to Australia. Emily and Lizzy were in the row behind me, buzzing with excitement under Susan's supervision. Ron was sitting next to me and I could see he was more nervous about what was going to happen in Australia than the helicopter flight.

James was notably absent and my mind jumped back to the conversation we had had, the evening that the military convoy had arrived.

"Mike, I have a favour to ask," I said to him.

"I can't think of anything I'd refuse" he replied.

"When I first met Stab, I told her that, when the opportunity arose, I would help her to take her revenge on the gang." The military had reports that that particular gang had survived and was still active in the area just north of us. "The gang that..." I trailed off. I didn't feel it was my place to let others know anything about her background.

"The gang killed Theodora's father; raped, killed and ate her mother and little sister; and, when she was starving, gave her stew containing the flesh of her dead sister to eat; then sold her into slavery," Stab said. There wasn't a flicker of emotion... nothing.

"You'd like my help when you go to eviscerate them?" Mike asked Stab.

"Yes please," she replied. Her voice had a serene, innocent quality as if he had just invited her to take tea in the park.

"Nothing would give me greater pleasure," he said with a smile. I was happy that I wasn't on the wrong side of that smile.

"And Mike," I added, "when you find them..."

I paused briefly; I didn't believe I was saying this.

"When you find them... feel free to release the beast."

There was a stunned silence round the room broken by James quietly saying, "I'm going with them."

"No you're not," I responded bluntly, shocked that he might even suggest the idea. "You're coming with us." After some tense negotiations, and after showing them Robbo's letter, it had been agreed I was too act as the young king's personal regent and that my immediate family and I would be leaving with him.

"Phil, come with me a minute," Susan said. It was her most mild and gentle tone but I had no difficulty recognising the steel behind it. I allowed myself to be led outside and didn't miss the reassuring nod that she gave James as we left the room.

"Phil," she said to me when we had found a quiet corner of the yard by the workshop. "I've got news for you. I know you think of Stab as a daughter but James certainly doesn't think of her as a sister."

"Oh?" I replied. "Oh!"

I thought about this revelation. "But he's only fifteen."

"Sixteen," she replied.

"Sixteen?" I responded. On top of everything else, I had managed to miss my only son's sixteenth birthday. I began to gently bang my head against the workshop wall.

"Stop it!" she said, giving me a light slap. "If you remember, back in February we were all busy starving to death! Anyway, it's irrelevant. He might only be sixteen but he's a sixteen year old combat veteran. Different rules apply to them."

She took both my hands and turned me round so I was looking her in the face. "You only have two choices, love," she said. "He stays here with your blessing or he stays here without it."

I gave a sigh and Susan kissed me on the cheek.

"I suppose he does have a certain history of inappropriate relationships with near relatives!" I said with a smile, remembering the thing with Rebecca just after 'the day'.

Though she laughed, I received another slap for that and a quiet warning not to breathe a word about it when Stab was about.

We returned to the farmhouse kitchen, hand in hand. "Come here son," I said as we walked through the door.

As he approached I studied him, really studied him, probably for the first time since 'the day'. He was almost as tall as me now. When did he grow? And his eyes... It almost made we weep when I looked into them. He had gone straight from a child to a hardened soldier. Maybe one last mission and then a couple of months working with the newly arrived military would provide him with a way to learn how to live as an adult in the unfamiliar, sane world. Maybe, even, damaged but surviving Mike was the father figure he needed at the moment rather than me.

I held out my arms and pulled him into a hug and, as we hugged, Stab started to edge towards us. This was Stab who reacted with panic whenever anyone so much as touched her hand. With a smile to my son, we released one arm each and invited her to join us. Slowly, hesitantly, she allowed herself to be pulled into our hug.

+++

After the final checks, the machine's engines started to power up. I looked across at the young King and smiled. The noise made it almost impossible to talk.

As the machine powered itself into the air, I looked over the young king's shoulder as the valley fell away below us. At first, I could only see the new forward operating base that had sprung up in our lower field. Apparently we were the closest thing to civilisation that they had found for almost thirty miles.

Then the solid, Yorkshire stone farmhouse came into view: the farmhouse which had provided us with some measure of security in a world beyond sanity; the stone farmhouse with its sad row of graves in its back garden which were now slowly being claimed by nature.

And, as we continued to rise, the whole valley appeared, nestled into the arms of protective moorland. The valley where so many of the people I cared about had lived and died.

I looked across at Ron as he grasped my hand almost painfully. How could we even start to explain what we had been through. Almost everyone I had ever known was now dead; I had personally killed more than one hundred people - many for the simple crime of being hungry; I'd experienced an almost medieval battle and the Christian sacrament being perverted into a ritual of sadistic cannibalism.

Set against that, there was the way that Alice and Ned had deliberately starved themselves to death to allow my children to survive those dreadful hunger times; and the way that Laura had consciously sacrificed herself to save the young people for whom she felt responsible.

I untangled Ron's hand with a smile then fished a couple of scraps of paper from a pocket. I almost broke down when I saw Laura's characteristic neat handwriting on one of them - but the reverse was blank so it would have been unthinkable not to use it. In another pocket, I found the tiny stub of a pencil.

I thought for a few moments, tapping the pencil on my teeth, then started to write:

"I knew at once that something had gone badly wrong..."