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He looked in the rearview mirror. Barrow had nodded off too, his block of a head bouncing against Molly’s shoulder. The two women were alert and scared.

“Unbelievable,” he said with a quick turn of his head toward them.

“You talking to us?” Cristine said. She had long ago trimmed her hair to a mannish length. Because she used pieces of flint for the job, the cut was irregular and spiky but she was still vaguely attractive, despite the punishments of village life.

“Yeah.”

“What’s unbelievable?” Molly asked.

“All of this. Being back on Earth. Unbelievable, don’t you think?”

Christine seethed at him. “First you want to butcher us, now you want to be all matey?”

“Survival of the fittest. That’s what I had to deal with. We all had to make our way. Hell’s a tough old place.”

“So you’re a regular Charles Darwin now, not a filthy rover,” Christine said.

“I’m not apologizing for what I’ve become. You think Jason and Colin would have opened their arms and invited me into the village?”

Christine’s reply was blunt. “Fuck off, Lucas.”

Talley stirred. “Yeah, fuck off, Lucas,” he said mockingly.

Molly spoke up in her thin voice. She was small and blonde though her hair was so dirty she looked like a brunette. She had been pretty once. Now she was all sinew and gristle. “I think it’s unbelievable too.”

“Don’t speak to him,” Christine said.

Hathaway smiled. He had someone to talk to. “I mean, once you get over the shock of landing in Hell, well, you accept it, don’t you? At least I did. But you figure you’ve booked a single, not a return journey.”

“I thought I’d go to Hell for what I done,” Molly said. “But I never thought I’d come back.”

“Exactly my point,” Hathaway said. There was a long silence before Hathaway filled it. “I wonder if we’re meant to do something?”

“How do you mean?” Molly asked.

“You know. Maybe we’ve been given a second chance, like a test, and maybe we’re meant to be judged.”

“Well you’ve flunked the test, you wanker,” Cristine said. “We've been back for two days and how many people have you killed so far?”

“None. The others did the killing.”

Youngblood had been listening from the rear. “I killed three of ’em,” he said proudly. “When you stab ’em here they die. There’s little suffering. I like it better when they stay alive, suffering.”

“’Course you do, you fucking sadist,” Cristine said. “As for you, Lucas, I saw you eat a hunk of bloody flesh not ten minutes after we arrived. Still think you’ve got a passing mark?”

“I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten for three days,” he said defensively.

“Spoken like a right cannibal,” Cristine said, spitting out the word. “Oh sorry, cannie. Sounds so much better that way, don’t it?”

“You know, Cristine, I don’t give a flying fuck what you think of me. After I’ve fucked you good I’m going to let all the lads have their way with you and then I’m going to kill you again.”

They drove in silence for several miles. Talley fell asleep. So did the other men.

Molly asked, “Where are we going?”

“Nottingham,” Hathaway answered.

“Why?”

“I’m from there.”

The brake lights of the cars in front of them lit up revealing a minor tailback forming at a road works. Hathaway slowed to keep his distance. He tensed but relaxed when he saw cars a quarter mile ahead picking up speed again.

Cristine gently scratched Molly’s arm with one of her long fingernails and pointed toward the verge. Molly seemed to understand. The car was going no more than ten miles per hour but was starting to accelerate. When Cristine pulled the handle and pushed the door open she flung herself out and rolled on the asphalt before landing on the grass. Molly followed and the two of them, scraped and bleeding ran into the woods beside the motorway.

“Shit!” Hathaway shouted.

Youngblood asked groggily, “Should I go after them?”

The driver behind them was honking. Hathaway didn’t know if he wanted him to speed up or whether he had seen the women spill out. Either way he didn’t want to chance it. He accelerated and pulled into the middle lane to pick up more speed.

“For fuck’s sake,” Hathaway shouted. “You fucking idiot. You let them get away!”

“Don’t be so hard on Barrow,” Talley said. “He does the best he can with the brains he’s got.”

“I was only having a kip like you was,” Barrow moaned.

“Enjoy it?”

“What?”

“Your kip?”

“It were all right.”

“Lean over so I can tell you something.”

Barrow did as he was told.

“Have a longer one, then.”

Talley slashed at Barrow’s throat with a kitchen knife and with his free hand pushed him back to keep the spurting blood off his new clothes.

“Good,” Hathaway said. “Fucking useless idiot he always was.”

Youngblood climbed over and sat beside Barrow’s lifeless body.

“Check him,” Talley ordered. “See if he’s well and truly dead.”

“Seems so,” Youngblood said, poking hard at his body.

“Then it’s not like it is in Hell,” Hathaway said. “Seems we can die all over again.”

“Barrow’s probably back there now, wondering what the blazes happened to him,” Chambers said from the back.

Youngblood soon disregarded the corpse and was cooing in pleasure, bouncing his rump on the soft seat. “Pity about the molls. Here I was, looking forward to a good shag with the fair-haired one.”

Talley finally forced himself to look through the window into a car they were passing. The driver was a young woman, her face briefly visible in the glow of her instrument panel.

“Plenty of others about,” he said, wetting his dry lips with his long, lizard-like tongue. “No shortage of molls in these parts.”

Ben accompanied John to the young Heller’s room. A phalanx of MI5 guards patrolled the corridor. All other patients and hospital personnel had been removed from the ward. In the room next door, video and audio monitors had been set up and John stopped there first to get a measure of the fellow.

As the MI5 medic explained to him, the young man was now in stable condition after undergoing abdominal surgery to remove the bullet and re-route part of his intestines. He wasn’t yet eating, he had a nasogastric tube draining his stomach secretions, but he was able to talk. Though he was in four-point restraints he had been sedated to keep him from thrashing about, but for the sake of this interview the sedation had been weaned.

“What’s his name?” John asked.

“I didn’t ask,” the doctor said.

“Well, I guess I know a good place to start.”

He entered the room on his own. The young man tugged at his arm restraints and watched him warily. John decided to pull up a chair to seem less menacing.

“My name’s John,” he said.

The young man was silent.

“What’s your name?”

Again, no response, just a piercing stare from eyes so dark they looked like small, black stones. He’d been cleansed along the way, his long brown hair washed, his grimy skin scrubbed. He looked to be in his twenties, not a bad-looking kid. He smelled like a Heller but John was used to the odor by now. He wouldn’t be wrinkling his nose like everyone else.

“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help you. I’m going to answer the questions I know you have. You’ll be wanting to know where you are, how you got here, what happened to your friends, what that thing is doing in your nose. I’ve got all the answers. Do you want those answers?”

The kid remained mute.

“Okay, tell you what. I’ll just talk for a while and you can join in when you like. I’m not like all the other people you’ve seen since you arrived here. You want to know why I’m different? It’s because I just came from where you’re from. Yeah, I was there. I was in Hell. I spent a month there. Even with that tube in your nose, I know you can smell me. You know I’m alive. But I crossed over and I crossed back. I’d like to explain it to you, how I crossed, how you crossed. It’ll be easier for me if you tell me when you died.”

John thought his demeanor had shifted from fear to puzzlement.

“Okay, twentieth century? Eighteen hundreds? Seven…”

He nodded.

“Eighteen hundreds?”

Another nod.

“Toward the end of the eighteen hundreds?”

An emphatic nod.

“All right. Good. Here goes.”

John launched into a stylized explanation of MAAC, portraying it as a giant steam engine, something he thought the kid might understand. The steam engine was so large and powerful that it ripped a connection between the two worlds. This world was far into the future, filled with amazing inventions. He would be safe here. He’d have every luxury. All he needed to do was answer a few questions about the people who came over with him.

John stopped talking when it looked like the kid was going to open his mouth.

“How come I got shot then if it’s so bloody safe?”

“My understanding is that you stabbed one of the policemen. That’s why.”

“Didn’t look like no bobbies.”

“Like I said, a lot of things are different here. Will you tell me your name now?”

“Mitchum.”

“Is that your first name or last?”

“First name is Michael.”

“What do you prefer I call you?”

“Mitchum.”

“Okay, fine. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Mitchum.”

“Just Mitchum’ll do. What’s this in me nose?”

“It’s a tube the surgeon put there until you’re healed and can eat. They took a bullet out of your stomach.”

“Hurts.”

“I’ll tell them. They can give you something for the pain.”

“Why am I tied down?”

“To make sure you don’t pull out your tube or mess up your wound. You’ve got stitches. Want to see mine?” He lifted his shirt and showed off his flank. “Want to know what happened to me?”

Mitchum nodded.

“I got stabbed by a rover. I’ll bet you’re one of them. You’re a rover, aren’t you?”

“What if I am?”

“You are who you are,” John said. “I’ll make no judgments about how someone in your shoes chooses to survive.”

“How’d you know what I was?”

“In one of the houses you ran into after you arrived, the people were carved up pretty good. Some flesh was missing. Rover work.”

“So what? We’re hungry, we eat. Cannie food’s as good as any.”

John hid his revulsion. “Cannie. I didn’t know that word.”

“It’s not like when you’re living, is it? The rules is different.”

“That they are. So tell me, Mitchum, are you the boss man?”

“Me? You must be joking. It’s Talley. He’s the boss of us.”

“All right, Talley. He’s the boss. How many in your gang?”

“There’s six of us.”

John looked perplexed. “Six?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Not eight?”

“Six.”

“But there were eight of you all together.”

“You mean the two molls?”

“What’s a moll?”

“You know, a lady.”

“There were two women? Why were they there?”

“We was chasing them, weren’t we? Almost had them when everything went mad.”

“Who were they?”

“They was from the village, out gathering water. Hathaway knew them, always went on about them.”

“Who’s Hathaway?”

“One of us.”

“All right, keep going.”

“We was happening by, looking for a place to sleep in the wood. Got caught out in the morning. We don’t like moving about during the day.”

“And you saw the women and you chased after them.”

“Yeah.”

“And what would you have done to them if you’d have caught them?”

Mitchum sniggered. “Fucked them good and carved them I expect. We was awful hungry.”

John clenched a fist behind his back. “All right, I hear you. Tell me this—and you’re doing great—were any of the other rovers recent arrivals in Hell.”

“How do you mean, recent?”

“I don’t know. Last twenty, thirty, forty years, something like that.”

“Hathaway’s recent.”

“How recent?”

“Couldn’t say exactly. He was always going on about the strange things he had, like picture boxes in houses, flying machines.”

“I see. Do you recall where he said he lived when he was alive?”

He went quiet, thinking. “London.”

“Which part of London?”

“Don’t know. He never talked about London much.”

“Where did he talk about?”

“Nottingham. That’s what he talked about. He was from there. Talked about it all the time till Talley told him to shut his gob about it.”

“Nottingham. Okay. When you landed here inside a house were the two women with you?”

He nodded.

“Then what happened?”

“The house was empty. No people about. Talley saw there were people outside another house, two men and a woman. We grabbed them, pulled them inside.”

“Then what happened?”

“Youngblood found a knife and carved the men, then the woman. Then we had some victuals.”

“Cannie food.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“And the two women you came with. Where were they?”

“With us. Barrow and Chambers were sitting on them, by manner of speaking.”

“How’d you get separated from the rest of them?”

“I wandered up the stairs to have a look about and must’ve dozed off on one of the soft beds up there. When I woke up, everyone was gone.”

“The two women also?”

“Yeah, the whole lot of them.”

“And then?”

“I hid in a wardrobe until the bobbies arrived. Then I woke up here.”

“Okay, Mitchum, you’ve been very helpful.”

“What’s to come of me? When do I get the luxuries you spoke of?”

John dropped all pretenses and his face hardened. He had extracted every useful morsel this animal had to offer. “Here’s what’s going to happen to you. You’ll be treated better than you’ve got a right to be treated, a damned sight better than you would have treated those two women. When you’re healed you’ll be locked in a cage so you can’t hurt anyone and as soon as we can, we’re going to ship you back to Hell.”

If someone had set out to design the ideal medieval fighter, the result would have been a man who looked very much like Brian Kilmeade. Everything about him was optimized for speed, power, and efficiency. He was no giant. His body was hard and compact with a low center of gravity that made him difficult to knock down. His legs were squat and thick, his arms, prodigious, his shaved head and muscular neck projected an air of menace, that is until he decided to ruin his hard-man image by sporting an impish smile. He was also aerobically fit, a marathon runner who had set records in over-fifty brackets. He liked to preach, “If you get winded before the other chap, you will be killed, no matter how good your skills.”