After it happened book 9.., p.5
After It Happened (Book 9): Home, page 5
part #9 of After It Happened Series
The last surviving man talked. It was clear from his gestures and rapidly moving lips that he was pleading with them, promising to tell them everything he knew in payment for his life.
“Don’t blame you, kid,” Iain said to himself. “Plenty of dead heroes in the world.” He meant it. He saw no super-human pride in saying nothing and ending up dead for no reason.
Watching with disgust as their last surviving teammate was dragged and bundled into the rear of their vehicle, Iain let out a sigh at the thought of such a long walk back as they watched their ride pull away in the distance.
“We’re going back for them, right?” one of his survivors asked. “We can’t just leave them there…”
“You want to live?” Iain asked. “The bastards have left people hidden there, expecting us to do exactly that. Come on” – he shuffled backwards and rose to a crouch to point in the direction of home – “we’ve got a bloody long walk ahead.”
MULTIPLE PROBLEMS
This was just one of the things that Steve disliked about leadership: the issue of delegation. He knew it had to be done and he was forcing himself to learn, but in the first few months after taking the position as leader he still yearned to be out doing something instead of sending others to do it because he said so.
He had been faced with two problems almost simultaneously and wanted to solve both of them by grabbing a rifle and vest, jumping behind the wheel and heading out to bring justice to the wild world outside their walls like some middle-aged Batman with a gimpy leg. Perhaps he could blare Ride of the Valyries on the stereo as he did.
Jan had returned late in the day, walking directly up to Steve as he ate and bending to whisper in his ear to make Steve abandon his dinner and fast-walk away with the man. As he was listening to his story, checking it out on the map adorning one wall of his office as he followed the described route, his eyes flickered left and right between where his finger was and the red push pin indicating where Iain had taken a team to recce the sighting of others.
The pin dropped, two and two were added up, and the lightbulb of angry fear illuminated in his mind.
“Shit,” he cursed, turning away to shout for someone to run a message for him. The summoned runner didn’t need to leave the office, because he’d apparently not long heard from the main gates and had thought to ask if everyone had come back.
“Definitely no Iain?” Steve confirmed.
“Definitely,” the runner confirmed. Steve nodded his dismissal and turned back to Jan.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean the two are linked,” he reasoned to his former nurse, who shrugged before he answered.
“What does your gut say?”
Steve thought about it, consulting said gut for a few beats before he answered honestly. “My gut says a hostile group is pushing into our area from the north east, where we have vulnerable neighbours we didn’t know about, and I’m currently missing a recce team sent to investigate a sighting of armed strangers. You do the maths.”
Jan shrugged again, as though he wasn’t so much an active participant in the conversation but more of Steve’s spirit guide helping him realise the answers to his own questions.
Steve sat and corrected himself with logical fact instead of alarmist suppositions.
“Iain and his team might be holed up for the night, obviously,” he reasoned as much to himself as to Jan. “And they’d be well beyond CB range. I think we need to wait until tomorrow when they should come back before I pull the trigger on anything.”
“And in the meantime?” Jan asked gently, as though it was a prompt. Steve called the runner back in to issue orders for the perimeter to go on lockdown and for the standby team, as they were called when they were far from any kind of real military reactionary force, to be armed and ready to move instead of sleeping.
“We’ll go see your new friends tomorrow,” Steve told him. “Work it out from there.”
A knock at the door made them turn to see the familiar slim, tall figure of Alice. She was wiping her bloody hands on a cloth, betraying that she hadn’t even washed her hands in her haste to bring them the news, and told them both what had happened with a slow, sad shake of her head.
“It’s okay,” Steve said, his words sounding hollow even to himself. “Jan said there was little chance he’d survive the journey, so I knew you all did everything you could have.”
~
Morning came without incident, and feeling far from rested as he’d seen every hour on the clock throughout the night, Steve dressed in the clothing he’d reserved for just this eventuality.
He’d elected to step away from what had been their customary black since taking up the supposedly more comfortable role of leadership. He knew that he would have to delegate such things like defending their town and escorting the collection teams to others, but in the back of his mind he always yearned for the freedom that being a ranger had afforded him.
That freedom, he now fully understood, was a freedom from responsibility to and for others.
Leaving Lizzie in charge of the camp for the day with strict instructions that nobody should venture out of sight of their lightly fortified town, he rode with Jan in his van with two other vehicles, appropriately equipped to handle the lack of smooth roads, following.
The occupants of those vehicles were volunteers taken from each shift of guards in equal numbers so that no one place or team would be left noticeably short. But even that consideration had annoyed Steve; he had to think for everyone and reject volunteers based on the equality of numbers. Winding down the window to let some cool air wash over his face, he allowed himself to empty his mind as much as was safe as he left some of the stress of adjustment behind.
He didn’t know when he’d drifted off to sleep, but when he woke he had no time to chide himself because what had woken him was a thump on the arm from Jan who was reaching above his sun visor to retrieve a gun. Steve looked from him to the road ahead, seeing a small pillar of black smoke rising in the middle distance.
“Them?” Steve asked, hearing the affirmative grunt from his driver as he checked his weapon in anticipation of using it. Unlike most of his guards who used the standard British military rifle, Steve had sifted through the personal armoury of his much-hated predecessor and located the American carbine he’d previously possessed. He’d had no cause to even take it from the cupboard in his office where it lived, but the reassurance of the grip in his hand at that moment seemed to connect him to something as though he was tapping into the power he used to feel comfortable with.
“Pull up short,” he instructed Jan who was wearing such a look of angry resolve that Steve worried he was just going to drive straight into the village and look for a fist fight. He pointed to the only other building between their small convoy and the distant fire as he reached for the speaker mic of the radio set.
“Two jump out here,” he instructed as the van began to slow. “Whoever has the long-distance rifle and one to watch their back.” His orders were acknowledged and he pushed down the irrelevant wish that he was dropping Lexi or Mitch or Leah there to cover him and Dan. There was something that felt so empty to go into conflict without them that left him almost hindered by anxiety.
Setting off again and picking up as much speed as was safe, the van slowed again on Steve’s instruction a few hundred paces from the closest buildings of the village and he led the way by spilling out of his door and limping fast away from it. Vehicles attract fire, that was the mantra he’d drilled into Leah on Dan’s insistence, and he knew it to be true from his own tastes of warfare.
With hushed shouts or orders he moved his team in two parallel, leapfrogging lines either side of the road towards the buildings. Moving along the sides of the buildings with weapons up and ready, Steve peered into a cobbled courtyard area with people surrounding the source of the fire as though it was some kind of ceremony.
Before he could figure it out, a shriek of petrified alarm rang out.
Eyes shot towards the screamer, followed the line of her accusatory finger, and looked straight at Steve – a stranger in their home holding a gun.
Three things happened at once.
Steve dropped the gun to hang on the sling and showed both palms just as two people fired panicked shots in his direction. Steve, seeing the threat just in time to save himself from any debilitating injury, ducked back behind the wall issuing a hiss of pain and clutching at the blood welling between his fingers where they gripped his forearm.
Jan began shouting in a voice loud enough to cut over the panic and yells of alarm, identifying himself and calling out the name of the only person he knew there.
“Ray! Ray!” he bawled. “Don’t shoot!”
Hush descended inside the small village, allowing the sound of the scream from behind them to carry all the way back to the lonely building where they had left a sniper. Turning towards the sound of the scream, Jan immediately threw himself towards the man on his back clawing and grabbing at the bloody ruin of his calf muscle where one of the panicked shotgun blasts had torn away a chunk of flesh and fabric.
Steve, lips pressed tightly together in pain, watched as the man deftly but unsympathetically staunched the bleeding with a tightly applied tourniquet and set about cleaning and dressing it where the man had fallen.
“I’m sorry,” a voice said behind Steve. I’m so sorr— oh my god, are you okay?” she added, seeing the blood dripping from between his whitened fingers.
“Nothing vital hit,” Steve hissed, hoping he was right. Without removing his sleeve and looking at it, especially with the adrenaline numbing his pain receptors, he had no real way to tell if it was worse than he sensed it was. “We thought you were in trouble,” he gasped. “The fire?”
“Our friend,” the woman began, swallowing hard as her eyes glazed momentarily. “One of the injured people died not long after Jan left yesterday. She wanted to be cremated…”
“So you did it in broad bloody daylight?” Steve hissed, the pain throbbing up his arm making him speak more harshly than he intended. “What did you think was going to happen, sending up a signal like that visible for miles?”
She didn’t answer, realising their mistake and having no justification for their collective naivety.
Steve turned away, walking towards Jan who was covered in blood up to both elbows. “How is he?”
“He’ll be fine,” Jan answered gruffly as the man he treated whimpered and cried. “Wasn’t as bad as it looked; he’s just being a pussy.”
“Get him inside,” Steve ordered two of his people. “We need to get him cleaned up so we can get out of here.” He turned to find himself face to face with an unsmiling man wearing a look somewhere between hostile and guilty.
“We didn’t mean…” he began, not quite sure what he wanted to say.
“No,” Steve answered. “I’m sure you didn’t. Why didn’t you have anyone watching the roads?”
“We don’t…”
“No, which is why your people are getting hurt and your resources are being stolen. We came to help because Jan asked me to, but I don’t see why we should bother if you can’t even help yourselves.” Steve still spoke angrily, which he recognised was partly due to the handful of shotgun pellets peppering the scarred flesh of his forearm and partly due to his annoyance at these people who didn’t seem to understand the first thing about survival.
“We post guards at night,” the man protested, straightening himself. “Which is when they come.”
They mostly come at night, an impression in the back of his mind taunted him in Neil’s voice. Mostly.
Steve shook his head to dismiss the man’s flawed logic, demanding that they show him where Jan could work to repair the damage done.
~
Half a mile away, in the only other building visible to the village, a young man and his three companions woke to the sound of the door being kicked open and the noise of boots running upstairs.
He held a finger to his lips to keep the others quiet and rose as he unsheathed a long blade – the bayonet to his stolen rifle – and crept out of the door to follow the sounds of the invasion.
He’d hidden their newly acquired vehicle miles away, taking only one of his people he trusted to join the others who had been sent to test the defences of the small settlement, after having used that same blade to wring every last answer he could from the only surviving member of the enemy patrol he’d captured.
Those answers had intrigued him enough to consider going back and convincing their leader to move all of their people further south and take over what these others had built.
He listened to the descriptions of how life had been in their camp, finding that he much preferred the description of how it had been before the revolution and change of leadership, and incorrectly assumed that they were weakened by this.
“Goran,” one of the others hissed. “Where are you going?” The young man named Goran stopped, turning to issue a smile of utter cruelty, before answering simply with a wink.
SPREAD THIN
Steve sat, his left hand gripping the edge of the table so tightly that he lifted it every time Jan dug into the flesh of his other arm with the tweezers to remove the tiny balls of lead.
He was up to eight, with two more to pick out after the current target of his rummaging, taking the total to eleven pieces of shot he’d collected with his arm. Where three of them had hit his arm on the thick scar courtesy of a knife fight in a hospital very far away that he didn’t want to remember, they’d penetrated much less of his body and were curiously less painful to remove. Whereas the deeper ones into the undamaged flesh where the nerves were fully intact hurt like a…
“Fffffffucking bastard,” he hissed, spittle falling from his mouth to leave a string of it over his chin. Jan paused, carefully watching the man he had nursed back from a drug-fogged near-death only too recently.
“You want something for the pain?” he asked his patient quietly, seeing the flash of conflict behind his eyes when his body wanted to say yes but his mind stamped its foot and told him no. Not after the last time. Never again.
He shook his head, again holding his breath and gripping the table hard as a signal for Jan to start digging again.
Twenty minutes later, and after having to cut Steve to remove the penultimate projectile, they re-emerged into the weak sunlight to find a subdued gaggle of people not quite waiting for them, and also not quite succeeding in looking like they were minding their own business all that much.
“We’ll be leaving then,” Steve announced, recognising two of the faces as the ones who’d identified themselves as leaders.
“Wait,” the man asked. “We’re sorry, the people who shot at you have had their guns taken away an—”
“You what?” Steve asked, unable to keep the criticism from his voice. “You’ve punished the only people who did the right thing. Well done. You fucked up by not posting sentries – day and night – watching your approaches. At least they reacted well, so you should give them back…” He waved his good arm dismissively at them, giving up on dispensing good sense and worrying that he was becoming a little too accustomed to issuing orders everywhere he went. These people weren’t under his protection, and he certainly didn’t owe them anything.
Something else nagged at him, cutting through the pain clouding his logic, and he paused before storming out. If these people, as foolish and unprepared as they were, had a pest control problem then that could impact on him and his people who, in the grand scheme of things, were only a hop, skip and a jump from the undefended crossroads.
He turned to face Jan, seeing in his expression the same realisation, and let out a sigh of exasperation. Glancing back to the man and the woman who seemed to be doing the talking for them all, he relented.
“Who do you have with any kind of training?”
They exchanged a glance, fear or guilt passing between them; Steve couldn’t be sure.
“We had Manjit,” the woman began uncertainly. “She was a policeman. Woman. She was the one who suggested we put guards out at night…”
“Great,” Steve said, glad that at least one of them had a modicum of self-preservation. “Can we have a chat with Manjit?”
They exchanged the same look again, only with more intensity this time. Then it dawned on Steve.
“Except it was Manjit’s cremation we just interrupted, wasn’t it?”
The man nodded sadly.
“And you have nobody else?”
The man, Ray, shrugged with a definite negative connotation. Steve actually hung his head for a few seconds, the pain killing his self-control with every cruel throb through his forearm. “Right, four of mine will stay. I expect they’ll be looked after,” he added as though his expectation was most definitely that his people would be well cared for. “Two will work the night shift and two the day; they’ll need volunteers from your own people to fill the gaps, but you’ll need to follow their instructions until we come up with a more permanent solution.”
“How permanent?” the woman asked.
“Permanent as in you either relocate to us, or we deal with the problem and some of our people move here and fortify the village,” Steve answered. He saw their faces change as though the concept of becoming a militarised zone was abhorrent to them, and he wondered just how much the world had taken a swing at them over the last year or so.
“Have you not had anything like this happen before?” he asked, shooting a look at Jan as though he wanted confirmation that he wasn’t losing his mind. He couldn’t comprehend, not with everything that he’d personally experienced since it happened, that a group of people living so exposed and out in the open could have bypassed all of the cruelty and suffering that afflicted every other group he’d ever met.
As if to underline how ignorant they were of the dangers the world posed, Ray offered another shrug.
Steve bit back the words he knew threatened to pour out of his mouth, cursing the injury for lowering the standards of his manners, and let out another sigh instead.
