The meanest Flood

the concept late at night he could work up a crack in his voice, bring himself to the verge of tears at the way the world had treated him. But he wouldn’t allow himself to cry. He had to be strong. His mission was not tied to personal vengeance. He was Diamond Danny Mann and the honour of his family was at stake.
    He walked along Bishopthorpe Road and cut into the street where Alice Richardson lived with her husband Alex and their three children, Conn, Hannah and Dominic. There were sandbags at the doorways and the lower end of the street, where the Richardsons lived, was flooded.
    Danny stood at the edge of the water and counted down the odd numbers to the house with the green door. He looked at it for twenty minutes but nothing stirred. No one came out and no one arrived to visit.
    He went around the back and looked up at the bedroom windows. It would be simple enough to open the back door and creep inside at the dead of night. But did he really want to take the chance of waking five people? Three of them were children, but the eldest boy was almost fully grown. He and the parents would be enough to overpower the magician. And the smaller children couldn’t be discounted. What if one of them got out of the front door and raised the alarm?
    This one was going to take more thought. He couldn’t simply go inside and kill the woman. He would have to find a way of luring her out of the house. And he knew how to do it. If you want to trap a woman who is a mother, you get to her through her children. He wanted Alice Richardson alone. Just her and him and his German bayonet.
     

35
     
    In a sealed container off the North Sea coast of England Sam Turner sat amidst a flood of seven asylum seekers and thought about his world. The asylum seekers would, of course, give rise to a flood of propaganda from the British government and their media hacks. But no one would mention the flood of armament sales that the same British government sanctioned to the dictators and gang leaders who ruled over much of the third world.
    We live under a system that exports Hell to most people on the earth and when a few of them escape and come looking for sanctuary we do our utmost to send them back. Oh, yes, and we send them aid as well, to mask our real intentions. Food parcels and cluster bombs, dropped together and painted the same colour. Foreign aid projects and landmines so a host of juvenile amputees don’t die of thirst.
    So long as the profits keep flooding in we must be doing it right. After all, what other system of values have we developed in our two thousand years of civilization?
    Sam pulled his rucksack closer and switched his torch over to candle-mode. He took a swig of Evian water and held it in his mouth briefly to wet his lips. He took out the cutting board and hacked off a slice of bread with his new knife. He cut a hunk of sausage and another of cheese and began to eat, chewing slowly and thoughtfully, glad he’d given up all ideas of vegetarianism and macrobiotics well before they’d had time to take root. As a background the other occupants of the container snored and shuffled; from time to time one or the other of them would speak in some strange tongue, a seemingly random selection of vowels and consonants. There were no sounds at all from outside the container. There was the movement of the sea as the Ivan Mazuranic lurched fore and aft, but no sound of the waves or of the engines that powered the ship.
    Sam kept his frustration at bay by sticking to a routine, eating and drinking at regular intervals. He didn’t want to be where he was. There was a madman out there stalking the women in his life, taking them one by one while Sam was incarcerated in a sealed container. He kept it all inside himself, it would help nobody for him to let it out, start pounding the walls of his temporary prison.
    Something flashed and moved over one of the cartons in front of Sam and he picked up the torch and flicked on the beam. It was the eldest of the Bolivian children, a boy of around ten years, black hair, a round face and protruding eyes fixed on the bread in Sam’s hand.
    Sam switched the torch back to candle-mode. He took the knife and cut another hunk of bread and cheese. He placed it on the edge of the cutting board and continued to eat his own bread. He chewed until it became liquid in his mouth. After a couple of bites a small hand appeared out of the darkness and took the hunk of bread and cheese. A moment later the