After it happened book 9.., p.30
After It Happened (Book 9): Home, page 30
part #9 of After It Happened Series
“The men you asked for, sir,” Sophie said, calling him ‘sir’ for added effect as though she was disappointed at not being given a more pivotal role in the charade.
“Thank you,” Steve said, standing as the two confused men walked in. “I’ll keep it brief. Can either of you offer any irrefutable evidence or eyewitness accounts to prove that the two men currently detained are guilty of serious crimes?”
“Beyond reasonable doubt,” added the woman brimming with self-importance.
“Hang on a minute,” Dan exploded, “you’re not seriously giving in to these tree-hugging fuckwits, are you? Come on, Steve, you know as well as I do that they’re all guilty.”
“That’s hardly the point,” snapped Mrs Beecham as she rocketed to her feet far faster than her ample frame would’ve indicated was possible.
“Do yourself a favour,” Dan said nastily, “just stay in the car and bark at strangers, will you?”
“That’s enough, guys,” Steve shouted. “Seriously, act your ages!”
One of the other advocate activists cleared his throat and spoke in a tone of voice to indicate it was probably the first time he’d stood up for himself.
“Erm, can we not use gender-specific language like that, please? I find it personally oppressive…?”
Steve looked at him, blinked, looked at Dan to see the same ‘What the fuck?’ expression screaming back at him and shook his head as if that would clear the last words his brain had been forced to hear.
“George?” Steve asked. George just shook his head.
“Fine,” Steve said, “take them far away from here and kick them out—”
“They must be provided with adequate supplies and means to return home,” the third advocate, a woman with such a pronounced chin that she reminded Steve of a cartoon character. “Need I remind you that you have a duty of care?”
Dan threw his arms up and let out a noise a stroppy teenager would be proud of. “Oh, give me fucking strength,” he moaned, making Steve hold up a hand to shut him up like he just wanted this whole meeting over already.
“Supplies, yes. No to any transport; they can walk.”
The advocates looked at one another in search of any other demands they could make and found only one.
“I insist that a representative of the advocacy program be present to ensure no ill-treatment occurs,” Lisa Beecham said formally.
“Fine,” Dan said. “Get your coat and be ready to leave in ten minutes.”
Her face fell and coloured up simultaneously as her mouth dropped open to pop like a fish.
“I…I didn’t mean to imply I would personally—”
“Why not?” Steve cut in happily. “That seems like a perfect compromise all round to me. Thank you, everyone, for your time. George, can you make sure this happens immediately please?”
George nodded seriously as if accepting the grave responsibility of what he’d been asked to do, gesturing politely for the shocked Mrs Beecham to file out of the office before him.
~
Dan drove intentionally harshly, snatching the wheel and going fifty percent too fast for the comfort of his passengers. He drove like he was showing off but pretended he didn’t possess the smooth skills behind the wheel that had been so thoroughly trained into him that they were hard to forget, even when he didn’t drive for months on end.
He enjoyed himself – not for the thrill of driving fast but for the alarm and discomfort he was inflicting on the terrified, wide-eyed woman and the two battered prisoners who still suspected a trap.
She’d taken great delight in informing them that democracy had fought for their rights and that they were to be freed, and when the gratitude she so desperately craved wasn’t forthcoming she fell back on a default setting Dan would describe as ‘haughty bitch’.
“Please will you slow down!” she shrieked from the rear seat as Dan attacked a sweeping bend so aggressively that her sizeable cheeks were lifted off the seat with the angle of the lean.
“Sorry,” Dan answered as he deliberately came out of the bend and straightened up too sharply to wobble them around. “It’s tactical to drive fast so anyone following us is obvious to counter-surveillance. We have to take certain precautions, you know?”
It was complete bullshit, and vaguely echoed something he’d seen in a movie of Neil’s choosing once, but seeing as it was only him who would know otherwise he delivered it with confidence.
His next trick was to slam on the brakes without warning – something he’d only informed George that he was going to do and told him what was required of him to play his part – to wrench on the handbrake and throw himself from the vehicle and set an immediate ambush on their trail.
He kept them there on high alert for almost ten minutes, ignoring the shrieking complaints of the woman nestled between her two ungrateful friends, until he returned to the driving seat and began driving like a dick again.
None of that was necessary, he knew that, but if he couldn’t take any enjoyment out of the everyday things then was life even worth living?
Choosing a spot seemingly at random, but knowing that one route would lead them directly back to their own people, Dan stopped the truck and climbed out to draw a knife. He ignored the shouts, turning the first man around to slice the plasticuffs binding his wrists to stop the shouts. Opening the rear section he dragged out two old mountain bikes to drop them on the road beside the bags of food and water after the hardship of them having to walk potentially undermined the plan.
He stood in the road and pointed in one direction.
“Fuck off that way and don’t come back.” He shot a dangerous look at Mr Twice Broken Nose to remind him that he’d already been offered this deal and hadn’t taken it.
Carefully, casually as if to not realise what he was doing with his hands as he spoke, he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder in the other direction.
“If you two go back to your mates then you’ll be getting a nasty surprise at dawn, so make sure you aren’t there if you want to live.” With that he wrenched open the driver’s door and climbed inside before he did anything to infringe on their rights. He crunched the gears into first, dropped the clutch out and accelerated hard away from the junction heading home.
“You did the right thing,” came the condescending words from behind him.
“Oh, I know we did,” Dan agreed smugly.
“Perhaps you can see this as the start?” she carried on, evidently loving the sound of her own voice. “Maybe you could consider your use of force next? If you absolutely have to use a weapon, for example, you could consider shooting someone in the leg if talking to them doesn’t yield results?”
“In…in the leg?” Dan asked, genuinely intrigued.
“Yes, where they won’t die fr—”
“You ever seen anyone bleed out from a severed femoral artery?” he asked, knowing she wouldn’t have an answer. “I have. It’s fast and brutal, and the person with the hole in their leg knows they’re going to die every second it takes them to go. Trust me, there’s never been a ‘shoot to kill’ policy; there’s only a ‘shoot to hit before you get killed first’ policy, but getting shot tends to lead to being a bit…dead.”
“I’m trying to say that you should at least consider peaceful solutions instea—”
“Peaceful?” interrupted George, earning an attempted eyebrow raise from Dan.
“Yes,” the haughty advocate answered in a lecturing tone as if explaining a vegetarian diet to a caveman, “we’re peaceful people by choice, an—”
“You’re not peaceful,” George told her flatly, “you’re…you’re harmless. Literally. Not in a good way.”
“How dare you,” she blurted out. “I consider myself a peaceful person—”
“What he’s trying to tell you,” Dan cut in, “is that you can’t be peaceful if you aren’t capable of being violent.” He let the words hang in the car as if her mind fought with them and confused her enough to stop her from talking, if only for a short while. “Being peaceful is a choice you make. If it isn’t, then you’re just not capable of fighting back. Who enforces all the rules you live by? Other people, ones capable of violence, because without the fear of punishment there is no order.”
Her mouth opened to speak but no sound came out. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed her slowly shutting it.
He slowed down, smoothing out his driving to work the gears properly and remove all jerkiness from their journey. He caressed the truck along at a speed that seemed effortless and the woman behind him made a hesitant noise as if it was just dawning on her that he had been acting the entire time.
“You’ve just manipulated me, haven’t you?” she asked.
“Us? No. You got what you wanted; the poor murdering bastards have been released in case paying for their crimes hurt their entitled feelings and forced the privileged pricks to take responsibility for their actions.”
“That’s not—”
“Shut up,” Dan told her. “I’m all for protecting the rights of people – I did it for years and put my life on the line to do so and I still do now. I protect innocent people, and those shits aren’t innocent.”
“You can’t prove that,” she argued weakly.
“I don’t have to,” Dan answered smugly, “that’s the beauty of this new world.”
THE SEED
“They…let you go?” Goran demanded of the two men forced to their knees after returning to them wet and exhausted on bikes.
“Yes, and they’re—”
“Why did they let you go?”
“Because their rules, their laws, say they couldn’t prove we did anything.”
Goran straightened, looking at Mo with a quizzical expression. He misunderstood and tried to explain the meaning like he hadn’t comprehended the English.
“He means that they have rules like the poli—”
“I hear what he said,” Goran interrupted, “I just do not understands why.”
“Look, that’s not important,” one of them blurted out, “you nee—” He stopped talking as Goran lashed out a boot to hit him in the chest and fling him backwards to sprawl out on the dusty wooden floor.
“You, don’t fucking tell me what I do.”
“Please,” the one with the badly broken nose said, “they’re coming here to attack at dawn. We came back to warn you.”
“You,” Goran sneered, “two times now this man let you go. Why is this? What did you do for him?”
“N–nothing! I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say anything either.”
“So how do you know they come to kill us in the dawn?”
“Because they let us go miles away, told us not to come back,” Broken Nose explained.
“And he bragged about coming to attack here,” the other one said. At a dismissive gesture from Goran the two men were hauled to their feet and dragged away, leaving him standing beside his thin, precise lieutenant.
“We have to assume they’re right,” Mo said quietly to the muscled killer. “Regardless of what else they know or what they told them.”
“And you are sure you find good place to attack them?”
“Yes,” Mo assured him. “We watched them swarming like flies over the section we attacked but no extra patrols were sent to reinforce the section we identified for the real attack.”
Goran said nothing, furrowing his brow into deep lines as he thought. Mo knew he would never make a poker player of him because he was incapable of hiding his thoughts or indeed his true nature. Mo liked to think of himself as Goran’s brains instead, winding up the metaphorical key in the brutal young man’s back and sending him off in whichever direction he steered him.
Goran, even though Mo was too arrogant and self-absorbed to ever understand, was much more intelligent than he gave him credit for. His intelligence displayed itself as an instinctive ability and flare for cruelty and deviousness, and the thoughts he had then followed the same trend.
“We go tonight,” he ordered. “As soon as is darkness.”
Mo nodded, keeping his head bowed in a gesture of subservience that turned his stomach, but unlike Goran he knew how to act in order to manipulate people.
AMBUSH
Goran’s people made no attempt to leave quietly, such was the style set by their leader. The drivers of each vehicle were instructed on the route they needed to take as well as their final destination, and as the four vehicles moved out in a tightly packed formation, they revved loudly with music coming from the windows of two of the trucks.
They followed the route set by Mo who occupied the front passenger seat of the second vehicle in line with Goran in the back of one of the others with his – their, Mo reminded himself – men fawning over him to inflate his ego further.
They drove with few of them paying attention or keeping an eye out for dangers, such was their confidence that none had ever challenged them. They were an army. They were raiders who went where they wanted and took what they desired. There were people left behind at the last camp which some of them considered as home, but Goran and his hardcore followers thought of themselves as dangerous nomads like the invading Northmen of the country’s history.
When the route ahead flashed with reflected dull red paint the driver of the lead vehicle braked hard which caused the other trucks to bunch up so close it was a miracle that none of them crashed into one another.
Mo steadied himself on the dashboard before winding down the window to lean out and see what the problem was. He had no military training, but his precise nature had taught him to pay close attention to things like tactics in movies and books because it pleased him to point out flaws in other people’s work and ideas.
The front passenger of the lead truck got out to peer ahead, before Mo yelled at him.
“Get back in!” He leaned around to face the rear of their convoy and shouted more instructions for them to go back and turn around. The section of road was far too narrow to perform the turns, and before he could yell enough orders to make them listen a noise erupted from behind him that tore the night with bright flashes and the loudest gunfire he’d ever heard in his life. It was as though a thunderstorm was happening inside a metal drum filled with fireworks right beside his head, and one thing he learned from real life that the movies didn’t teach him was the way their air seemed to compress and pulse under heavy fire. It hurt all of his senses at once, but his discomfort was forgotten as soon as he heard the screams and saw the sparks erupt from the rear vehicle as bullets tore into it to shred the living contents into bloody ruin.
Knowing the way back was blocked he looked desperately to his front for an escape as his world had turned to shit in a heartbeat.
Emerging from the shadow of what he recognised as a tractor blocking the road, a shape levelled a rifle held at his hip towards the lead truck. In a moment of relative quiet when the machine gun stopped firing, Mo heard a faint pop that didn’t sound at all like a bullet being fired from a g—
—the lead truck erupted in a fiery explosion so bright and so loud that Mo’s senses were utterly overwhelmed. He saw nothing and heard nothing, falling from the open door of his own truck blind and deaf as he choked on the thick smoke and felt the heat of the blaze that had consumed the vehicle in front of his own.
The heavy machine gun fire started up again behind him, flinging sparks up from the metal of the vehicles and the road surface as the sound reached his brain no louder than a woodpecker would sound. Hands grabbed him, dragging him to his feet and he found himself staring into the unreadable eyes of Goran who checked him over, looking for bullet or shrapnel holes, and when he found none, he reached into the cab to grab his weapon and pack and thrust them on him.
Now, Mo thought to himself, now he learns a poker face.
“Go,” Goran told Mo, slapping his cheek to direct his eyes into his own. He pointed in the direction of the dark fields leading away from the attacks front and rear. Logic tried to tell him that there must be danger waiting there for them, but Goran ducked at the sound of an incoming round from the darkness behind him to tell Mo that he was right, but to do nothing would mean dying in the dark on a road so insignificant that it didn’t even warrant white lines being painted on it.
Mo opened and closed his mouth, bashing his ears with his free hand to try and bring his hearing back to no avail as he half ran, half stumbled into the darkness.
They ran for longer than he could count.
His breath burned in his throat as his lungs wanted desperately to cough and retch out the acrid smoke he’d breathed in. He had no idea what horrible chemicals were released when a car caught fire but he knew it wouldn’t be anything that was good for his long-term health.
“Here,” shouted a voice from a head of him. He stumbled towards it and piled inside a house which had just been kicked open to give them a temporary refuge. It was hours until dawn, not that he could tell anyone what day it was let alone the time, and the house was filled with the muted, underwater sounds of men shouting and arguing with one another.
He wandered through the rooms, some people asking him questions and others ignoring him, until he found Goran watching one of their people wrap a bandage around a cut on someone’s leg that leaked blood every time he wiped it clean.
“What happened?” Mo croaked.
Goran turned to regard him coldly. “What happened?” he asked. “What happened was these pieces of shit ambushed us, and you” – he jabbed Mo hard in the chest, hard enough to stagger him back two paces – “you didn’t see it coming.”
HELLO DARKNESS MY OLD FRIEND
Dan wasn’t happy to be missing out on the opening event. Neither was Steve, but for the overall plan to work the men most accustomed to warfare had to be the ones to close the trap fully.
Neil, giggling like a kid playing hide and seek, was hunkered down in the cold, open bed of Thunderbird Two somewhere about a mile to their south just down the road from where Mitch was ready to spring the trap. They’d used the biggest and heaviest thing they could to block the road as it had to be something nobody would be tempted to ram out of the way. Even driving a truck, the sight of a tractor tyre almost six feet tall should dissuade anyone from attempting the kinetic route.
