Running Wild (9 page)

8:25 a.m.
Dr. Harold and Dr. Edwina Maxted are walking to their car, which is parked in the rear drive behind the garage. They have a busy day ahead of them. Dr. Edwina has a hair appointment in Reading, and Dr. Harold must collect the Super-8 camera with which he will record his conversation with the TV producer. They are pleased that Jeremy has reversed the black Porsche out of the garage for them before returning to his breakfast. Its engine ticks softly in the crisp morning air. Dr. Edwina notices that her son has left a magazine on the gravel by the garage doors. To her surprise it is a lurid American horror comic. She points it out to her husband, and Dr. Harold stands beside her, nodding thoughtfully as she lifts it in her well-manicured fingers. Neither sees their son sitting up in the driver's seat of the Porsche, and they barely hear its engine as it leaps across the gravel toward them.

8:26 a.m.
Officer Burnett strides along the perimeter path toward the emergency telephone. The pivot of the pylon camera has jammed, and he has called Turner on his radio pager without success. Burnett reaches the telephone beside the rhododendrons. The miniature screen is blank, and all the electrical systems have broken down. He opens the cabinet and is taking out the receiver when the first of the crossbow bolts strikes him in the back.

Julian and Miriam Reade are having breakfast under their Louis XV chandelier. Their daughters, Gail and Annabel, enter the dining room. They are wearing their tracksuits and smile in a conspiratorial way, hands held behind them as if bringing a surprise present for their parents. Annabel stands behind her mother, Gail behind her father, asking them to close their eyes. Sitting there, they are shot in quick succession through the backs of their heads.

8:27 a.m.
Roger Garfield, the merchant banker, is dressing in his bedroom. He listens to his wife talking in the bathroom, when his son, Alexander, opens the bedroom door. In his right hand is a small-caliber automatic pistol. Alexander raises the weapon, as if showing his father something he has found, and then shoots him through the chest. Mr. Garfield sits down on the bed, barely able to breathe, and presses his hand against the blood leaking through his white linen shirt. He tries to speak to his wife, who is backing through the bathroom door. Her son's second shot misses her, but she falls across the bidet and he shoots her twice in the head as she lies half-stunned against the glass door of the shower stall.

Ignoring his wife and son, Mr. Garfield walks from the bedroom onto the landing, blood running down his trouserless legs. Alexander is a few steps behind him, but Mr. Garfield is thinking only of the Mercedes parked outside the front door. There is just time for Poole to drive him to Reading Hospital. When he opens the door he speaks to the chauffeur, Mr. Poole, who has heard the muffled sounds of the shots and has left his chamois leather and polish on the roof of the Mercedes. Before the chauffeur can go to the car telephone Alexander follows his father into the open sunlight. The chauffeur steps into the flower bed, but Alexander shoots him down among the flame-tipped cannas.

Still ignoring everything except the numbness in his chest, Mr. Garfield climbs through the passenger door of the Mercedes and sits in his rear seat. A disc jockey is talking on the car radio, but the words mean nothing to Mr. Garfield and the sound is soon drowned by the last of the shots which his son fires at him through the passenger window.

8:28 a.m.
Mark Sanger has returned home from the gatehouse. The razor-sharp wires of the man-trap had cut his left hand as he dropped the spring-loaded frame over Officer Turner, and he pauses by the bottom of the staircase to wrap the wound in his handkerchief. His mother comes out of the library, where she has been standing by the window with Mark's father, puzzled by the distant sounds of the Porsche colliding with the doors of the Maxteds' garage, and by what seem to be muffled gunshots around the estate. They have tried to call both the gatehouse and the Reading police, but the telephone line is dead. Concerned for her son and surprised by his bloodstained tracksuit, Mrs. Sanger fastens her dressing gown and walks up to him, but he ignores her and runs up the stairs to his bedroom. She is halfway up the long flight when he reappears by the balustrade with the pump-action shotgun he had hidden among his golf clubs.

8:29 a.m.
Also puzzled by the muffled gunfire and the dead telephone lines, the Wintertons open their front door. Jeremy Maxted is standing by their Volvo station wagon, and they assume he has come to clean the car, one of the voluntary good-neighbor tasks which the Pangbourne parents have persuaded their children to carry out. Reassured by Jeremy's quizzical but ready smile, Mrs. Winterton goes to her kitchen to collect a bucket of water and a wash leather. When she returns to the hall she finds her husband lying on the doormat. She can see that he is dead, but she kneels down to loosen his collar. It is only then that she notices Jeremy standing in his bloodstained sneakers in the doorway of the cloak-room.

8:30 a.m.
By now all the remaining adults in Pangbourne Village are dead. Only Richard and Carole Sterling die in their own bed together, still deep in their drug-induced sleep and unaware that their son Roger is suffocating them with their pillows. The three housekeepers are shot down as they hurry to their cars. The last to die, the tutor Mr. Wentworth, had taken refuge in the Lymingtons' library, and is shot dead by Amanda as he corrects her homework project.

Disappearance of the Children

Having murdered their parents and the other adults who stood in their way, the children vanished from the estate. They appear to have left within ten minutes of the last murder, and no clues have been found to their method of escape. Many of them were wearing tracksuits, and given the popularity of jogging in the Pangbourne area no one would have been surprised by a party of jogging teenagers, while the drying blood would soon have resembled the mud splashes of an arduous obstacle race.

Apart from the armed abduction of Marion Miller from the Great Ormond Street Hospital, there have been no sightings of the children. Bearing in mind the special nature of their crime, I assume that they will emerge again at some future date, probably in a spectacular attempt to assassinate a leading public figure. I have been unsuccessful in convincing the authorities of my fears. The inquest into the parents' deaths returned an open verdict, and to this day the Home Office believes that the children were abducted by their parents' murderers.

P
OSTSCRIPT
, D
ECEMBER
8, 1993

Five years have passed since the Pangbourne Massacre, and the first news has been heard of the thirteen children. During this time there has been no trace of the group, and Scotland Yard assumes that they are either dead or in the custody of a foreign power. The kidnapping of Marion Miller from Great Ormond Street is seen as part of this conspiracy, and it is assumed that the young murderers were either drugged or acting under duress.

Sergeant Payne and I are the only ones to remain skeptical. Payne has continued to send me whatever pieces of information come his way, but the special investigation of Reading CID has long since been disbanded.

However, he telephoned today to tell me that in the early hours of this morning an assassination attempt was carried out against a former British prime minister. All details of the affair have been hushed up, but it seems that an armored truck was driven at high speed through the gates of the house. The explosion that followed, on an exclusive estate in Dulwich, southeast London, has been attributed to a leak in a nearby gas main. The former prime minister was unharmed, and was photographed handing out cups of tea to the police and firemen. As before, she continues to enjoy respect, if not affection, as a leader now sometimes known as the “Mother of Her Nation,” or “Mother England.”

These titles, recently coined by a sycophantic newspaper editor nostalgic for the halcyon days of the 1980s, must have been a red rag to the Pangbourne children. The oldest of them is twenty-two, and most of the others have left their adolescence behind. Even Marion Miller is now thirteen, and it is interesting that one of the former prime minister's bodyguards reported that the assault seemed to be directed by a stern-faced teenager with blond hair which she brushed compulsively from her forehead. He speculated that these gestures might have been a set of coded signals.

Will the children strike again? I take it that all authority and parental figures are now their special target. So the regime of kindness and care which was launched with the best of intentions at Pangbourne Village, and which has prompted countless imitations in the exclusive estates of southern England, not to mention Western Europe and the United States, has given birth to its children of revenge, sending them out to challenge the world that loved them.

By the same author

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THE VOICES OF TIME

THE TERMINAL BEACH

THE DROUGHT

THE CRYSTAL WORLD

THE DAY OF FOREVER

THE VENUS HUNTERS

THE DISASTER AREA

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION

VERMILION SANDS

CRASH

CONCRETE ISLAND

HIGH-RISE

LOW-FLYING AIRCRAFT

THE UNLIMITED DREAM COMPANY

HELLO AMERICA

MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE

EMPIRE OF THE SUN

THE DAY OF CREATION

WAR FEVER

THE KINDNESS OF WOMEN

RUSHING TO PARADISE

A USER'S GUIDE TO THE MILLENNIUM

COCAINE NIGHTS

A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003

Copyright © 1988 by J. G. Ballard

All rights reserved

Originally published in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson, an imprint of Century Hutchinson Ltd

First American edition published in 1989 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First Noonday paperback edition, 1998

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ballard, J. G., 1930–

Running wild / J. G. Ballard. — 1st American ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-374-25288-2 : $14.95

I. Title.

PR6052.A46R8 1989

823'.914—dc19

89-1324

eISBN 9781466856660

First eBook edition: October 2013