Brian Aldiss - Somewhere East of Life

Walking ponderously, head down, Larry went round to the cab of the Land Rover and climbed in. He sat in the driver’s seat. Nothing happened.

More curious than alarmed, Burnell, still nursing his tea mug, went forward into the small front room, from the window of which he had a clear view.

He could see the back of Larry’s head. It did not stir. It resembled a cannonball which had succumbed to a parasitic yellow grass. Larry was making no attempt to start his vehicle. He merely sat in the driver’s seat. Burnell was about to turn away when a movement up the road caught his eye.

The highway leading from this side of the village was an anonymous semi-rural stretch of road. A field opposite the houses awaited building permission. The curve of the road wound up a slight incline. The road surface remained damp from overnight mists. Behind and beyond the houses lay open agricultural land, at present looking pale and inert. The houses followed the curve of the road. Most of the vehicles which Burnell remembered to have been parked there last night were gone about their owners’ business, leaving the houses and front doors in plain view.

From the door of the furthest council house, two hundred yards distant, a man had emerged. He came out, went inside again, to re-emerge pulling a push-chair. He steered this object through the front gate and started down the slight hill towards the village.

In the push-chair sat a small child dressed in a blue overall. Burnell saw its arms waving, possibly in excitement. Perhaps it was two years old. The man could have been the child’s grandfather. He had grey hair and wore an old nondescript raincoat. It looked as if he was talking to the child. Possibly he was going to the village to shop. Possibly, thought Burnell, idly, his daughter, the child’s mother, was unwell.

Larry stirred in the driving-seat as the push-chair drew nearer. His window wound slowly down. A gun barrel protruded, pointing up the road. Burnell could see enough of the chevron-style muzzle brake to recognize the Barrett semi-automatic which Larry had shown him the previous evening. He took a deep breath to call out. As he did so, a shot sounded.

The man in the nondescript raincoat sank down on his knees in the road, still holding on to the handle of the push-chair.

Three more shots rang out. The push-chair blew apart. The man’s head and shoulders were covered in shreds of baby as he fell over on his side, to roll against the grass verge.

Larry’s Ma had seen at least something of this, or had heard the shots. She was drying a plate. This she dropped as she ran from the kitchen into the front hall.

‘No, no, Larry. Stop that at once, you idiot! What do you think you’re doing? Come in immediately.’

After firing the shots, Larry kicked open the Land Rover’s door and planted his boots on the gravel with a crunch, left then right. He was moving slowly with a sleepwalker’s lethargy. He carried his semi-automatic at the port, its muzzle at his left shoulder. As he turned to face the house, he brought the weapon expertly to his hip and fired a rapid burst.

His mother was blown from the porch back into the passage. Still moving, he fired more shots into the house. The back door splintered.

Burnell was also in motion, rushing from the front room as soon as the firing stopped. To his relief, he saw that Larry in his abstraction had left the key in the lock of his door. He turned the key and rushed into the room. Desperate as he was, he saw a blue metal gun barrel protruding from under a cushion on the bed. He flung himself under the bed, taking the Makarov with him. Fighting to thrust the bundles of magazines and cartridge boxes out of his way, he turned about so that he was concealed, facing the door. He was convinced that Larry was about to finish him off too.

He could hear Larry in the front hall, and the business-like click of a fresh magazine locking into place on his weapon.

Steadying the pistol with both hands, Burnell levelled it at the door.

‘You come in here, I’ll blow your guts out through your arse,’ he muttered.

In Ward One on the third floor of Swindon Hospital lay Roy Burnell. Of the four beds in the ward, only his was occupied. He felt no great inclination to get up.

Nevertheless, even the horizontal position could not stem a swirl of events around him. There were, first and foremost, the visits from the police, and in particular from an Inspector Chan, an Asian member of the Wiltshire anti-terrorist squad.

The police had discovered Burnell in a house with a dead woman. He had been armed, and surrounded by boxes of bullets and much literature of an incendiary nature, as the official phrase went. He had been disarmed, handcuffed, and taken none too gently to the police station in Swindon. There he had been interrogated for some hours. It was then that Inspector Chan had been called in. Burnell’s plea that he had somehow lost his memory had been taken as additional reason to suspect his motives.

Only slowly had Burnell, dazed by events, realized that the police had initially been frightened men. The presence of a psychotic killer in Bishops Linctus had been alarming enough; the possibility that there might be two of them, the second armed with an illegal KGB murder weapon, had driven them mad.

Forensic evidence supported Burnell’s statement. The bullets which had killed the dead woman, Mrs Beryl Foot, were fired from the Barrett. 50 calibre semi-automatic now in their possession. Not only did the Makarov PSM use 5.45mm rounds, but examination showed it had not been fired recently.

Released and installed in hospital, suffering from exposure, Burnell discovered that what was now known as the Bishops Linctus Massacre had attracted world-wide attention. The specialist in charge of his ward, a friendly Dr Rosemary Kepepwe, brought him newspapers, where he was able to see what had happened that terrible morning.

After shooting the old man, Stanley Burrows, 58, and his step-grandson, Charles Dilwara, 1½ and his own mother in rapid succession, Lawrence ‘Mad Dog’ Foot had walked armed into the village. There he shot dead the first three people he saw outside the Spar supermarket. Several other people had been wounded and a plate-glass window valued at £2,000 had been broken. ‘BISHOPS BLOODBATH’ screamed the tabloids.

Mrs Renée Ash, blonde, 22, had witnessed the events from the window of her hairdressing establishment. She had her photograph in the paper, sitting coyly on a low wall, legs crossed. ‘It was awful,’ she said. ‘There was blood all over the pavement. And on a Saturday morning, too.’

The shooting aroused more excitement than the war in the Crimea, in which British troops, the Cheshires, were involved. Everyone expected trouble in the Crimea, but in a quiet little spot like Bishops Linctus, in the peaceful British countryside … The Prime Minister himself was driven down to the scene of the crime to shake a few hands.

As for Larry ‘Mad Dog’ Foot – as his friends reportedly called him – armed police from Bishops Magnum and Salisbury had shot him down behind the Shell garage. Some papers carried photographs of his body covered by a blanket being taken away on a stretcher. Burnell thought of Larry saying gently, ‘I like helping people’. Perhaps his help had been refused once too often.

Burnell’s melancholy was deepened by a sense of having fallen off a wall. He felt no power on earth could put him together again. Pieces of the past floated in his mind like fish in a bowl, without destination.

He was sedated and slept for long periods. At one point he woke to find a doctor with a maternal bust encased in a white apron at his bedside. This was the comforting Dr Rosemary Kepepwe. She sat by his side and talked soothingly.