she pleaded with them, feeling the cold grasp of fear suck the air from her lungs and the strength from her legs.
One of them stepped forward; a young man with a skinhead, his shirt tied around his waist, exposing a lean, taut and muscular torso, decorated down one side with those popular Celtic swirls. Jenny stared at him, his face hot and blotchy, aggressively thrust forward, close to hers. He looked hard, angry, ready to lash out at her.
He pointed at the bottles of water she held in her arms.
‘Could I ’ave a drink of one of those? I’m fuckin’ parched.’
Jenny was taken aback. ‘Yeah … uh … sure,’ she replied handing him a bottle. He took it and nodded.
‘Thanks.’
‘There’s a load more back there,’ said Paul. ‘A stack of boxes on the right, go help yourself.’
The rest of the group of people surged quickly past the lad, some of them muttering a ‘thank you’ as they stepped by.
Jenny watched the lad gulping the Evian. He was desperately thirsty, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he made quick work of it. She turned and jerked her head toward the passageway. ‘You better go after those others and get yourself some of that water before it’s all gone.’
He nodded, handing back the nearly empty plastic bottle and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Yeah. Cheers for that,’ he said and jogged down the narrow walkway after the others, weaving around the stacks of boxes.
Jenny turned to Paul. ‘I thought he was going to tear me to pieces.’
Paul appeared equally surprised. ‘A polite chav,’ he replied shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here while the going’s good.’
They both stepped outside.
The night was warm still. Under different circumstances, it would have been a lovely evening to sit out. Paul looked both ways up and down the back of the building. He saw the dark forms of another group of people jogging along the back of the building towards them, attracted by the red glow of light spilling out from the open delivery entrance.
Paul grabbed her arm and whispered. ‘These ones might not be so polite. Pretend to be one of them.’
As the group approached them, Paul called out, ‘The delivery door’s open, there’s loads of stuff inside.’
‘Cheers mate,’ a voice called out from the dark.
Another asked, ‘Any water in there?’
‘Yeah, but you want to get in there quick,’ Paul replied.
The group passed by without further comment, and picked their pace up to a jog as they neared the delivery entrance.
Paul and Jenny rounded the corner of the pavilion, and from there they could see the car-park and the bonfire still burning, now all but deserted. Jenny assumed everyone who had been milling around it earlier on, must now be piling inside the service station at the front, helping themselves to whatever they could find. She could hear a lot of noise filtering out from inside; shouting, the clatter of goods being spilled and knocked over, but with an almost overwhelming sense of relief, she could hear no screaming - no sounds of violence, no pleas for mercy.
‘What are we going to do now?’ she whispered.
‘That car,’ he replied, ‘it’s Mr Stewart’s. I grabbed his car keys as well.’
‘Oh right. God I hope they haven’t trashed it.’
‘Come on.’
Paul started across the car-park, walking swiftly towards the staff-reserved area on the far side. Jenny set off after him, looking anxiously over her shoulder at the pavilion. The truck across the front was blocking most of the front to the building, but every now and then she could see the flickering beams of torches playing around the inside of the foyer and the amber glow of flames coming from the revolving door. The fire they’d used to weaken the entrance looked like it had begun to take hold and she was certain by morning the service station would be nothing more than a smouldering ruin.
Paul pulled out the bunch of keys from his pocket, and she heard them jangling again as he went through them.
‘Ah, that feels like a car fob,’ she heard him say in the dark, and a second later the car squawked and the hazard lights on it flashed a couple of times. They both headed for it. It looked like the vehicle had been untouched; no dents, scrapes, the tyres weren’t flat. She allowed herself to hope they were going to get out of this mess.
They jumped in, anxious to take possession of