After it happened book 9.., p.6
After It Happened (Book 9): Home, page 6
part #9 of After It Happened Series
“The world isn’t…” he said, waving his uninjured arm vaguely at the daylight outside. “It isn’t like this everywhere. People steal, they hurt others and they take what others have found and made. I can’t believe you’ve escaped all of that…”
“We’ve had some problems,” the woman said, as though somehow trying to show they weren’t entirely blessed. “We had to kick a few people out not long after…well, not long after people started to find their way here.”
Steve considered that, realising very few major roads cut through what was effectively a large swathe of eastern England serving what would have been a fairly large population, the village was actually a natural place for survivors to congregate.
“Kick them out?” he asked, his brain catching up with her words.
“Yeah, they weren’t very nice. He wasn’t, anyway.”
“He?”
“Just some boy. One of the migrant worker’s kids. He had a couple of friends and they didn’t want to work, wanted to drink instead, so we…” It was her turn to shrug. “We sent them away. Told them they weren’t welcome here any longer.”
“Do you have any idea who could be doing this? Could it be the kid?” Steve asked.
“He was just a kid,” Ray said dismissively, uncomprehendingly. “A teenager. Besides, Manjit said something before she lost consciousness.”
Steve stared at the man, waiting for the grand reveal.
“Well?” he blurted out.
“Oh,” Ray said with a start, clearly not firing on all cylinders after the recent stresses. “She said it was the army who attacked them.”
Steve took a long, pensive breath and held it as he thought. He said nothing further on the matter, turning to give his orders for four volunteers to stay. Jan caught his elbow before he left, leaning in to mutter into his ear and say that he would hang around and to see if Steve didn’t mind finding another ride home. Steve nodded, unhappy to lose Jan but understanding why he preferred to keep his own company nowadays.
Pausing at the building on the outskirts of the town, Steve’s driver slowed to a stop and honked the horn twice to recall the two men left there before driving off towards home.
Steve said very little on the way back, not that he would’ve had any lengthy conversation if it had been him and Jan occupying the front seats of a different vehicle, but something about the man wanting to stay behind left him feeling a little lonely.
It wasn’t the first time he’d felt that – indeed he felt it pretty often, usually when he was surrounded by other people which was counter-intuitive – and he thought more about whether he should admit that he suffered from any one of a dozen reasons to have depression, or anxiety, or suffering effects from any one of the traumas he’d experienced recently.
A stab of pain from the most recent of those traumas shot up his arm and brought him back to the present with an uncomfortable jolt. Hissing a sharp intake of breath through his teeth he shot a baleful look at the driver responsible for the nasty bump in the road, seeing the look of apologetic fear on his young face and instantly feeling like an arse.
Fearing a barrage of abuse for hitting the pothole the driver cowered, waiting for the words to leave Steve’s mouth. He surprised the man by saying nothing, leaning back in his seat and readjusting the carbine for the short barrel to rest on the sill of the open window.
“Base, Base,” he said into the CB radio when they neared home. “Base from Steve, over.”
He’d toyed with the concept of rotating callsigns but had quickly abandoned the idea because it would just add to the long list of things he had to do for other people.
“Steve, Base. Go on,” came the voice of the woman who seemed to live in the dimly lit room their radios occupied.
“On the way back, Anne,” he said, imagining the small smile she’d be wearing that someone knew her by just four words. “Any word from Iain’s team yet?”
Anne wasn’t smiling, because she’d been waiting for Steve to come back into range, trying the set intermittently until she got him. As he wasn’t reporting any major malfunction or requesting assistance, she hit him with another problem.
“Yes–yes,” she said, her usual clipped, professional radio tone edged with more than a little apprehension. “Standby.”
Steve waited for whatever transmission was coming next, puzzled at the irregularity of it as his brain hadn’t caught up sufficiently to recognise that something was definitely wrong. Iain’s voice cut through the cab of the vehicle as it burst from the speaker.
“Steve,” he gasped, sounding as though he was out of breath, “we were attacked. Lost four men.”
His report was as short as his words were simple, but the gravity of what he said wasn’t diminished at all by the brevity.
They hadn’t been attacked for weeks, months, and even when there had been conflict it had been small-scale and was invariably the panicked discharge of a shotgun used either to serve as a warning or without enough knowledge, skill or intent to cause injury. Now they’d lost four people.
Four. People.
He chewed over the words in his mind for long enough to cause the others inside his truck hearing the news to doubt he knew what to say, but he snapped the mic back up to his face and pressed the button without a single detectable shake of his hand.
“Understood,” he said. “Back in fifteen. Out.”
THE NATURE OF HUMAN CRUELTY
Goran, cursing silently because he had been denied the thrill of killing someone, watched from the shadows as the two careless people abandoned the position without even noticing that it was occupied.
He hadn’t used the rifle, as much as he wanted to because it was new to him, but he still relished the feel of a blade pushing into flesh; the way it resisted the point of the weapon until the hard steel won the battle and punctured the soft tissue. He liked that feeling. It aroused something deep inside him. He liked the look in a person’s eyes when the realisation of what was happening, along with the pain, dawned on them.
Watching from a grimy window as the two ignorant men climbed back inside their vehicle, Goran decided to head in the direction they left very soon and see what delights their home held.
But first, he was going to pay a visit to the place that had exiled him so long ago.
“We go,” he said to his two companions. “Tonight.”
They said nothing. They didn’t relish the enjoyment of cruelty as their leader did.
He’d been their leader for months after he’d simply walked into their community one day and invited himself to stay. Their group weren’t exactly farmers, and they’d made a living by scavenging and setting up a toll where a major river route to the sea crossed over the biggest road in their area. Goran started undermining the leader after a day by questioning his instructions and forcing him to explain his strategies in front of others.
Their leader took Goran out one night alone, and when the young man returned in the morning alone, saying only that the other man wouldn’t be back, their group fell under his rule. Many had left, simply melting away in the night to find somewhere else to be, and the onset of winter saw none of them return.
The fact that they both took orders from a teenager wasn’t an issue for either because they both lived in fear of him and what he would do to them if he was disobeyed.
They’d seen it happen. When one of their own, a man noticeably bigger than Goran, had challenged him over a decision he’d cut the potential usurper over and over again, slicing and jabbing him with the point of his knife repeatedly even when his pleading and crying and screaming had ended. There was almost no blood left in his body by the time he was carried outside and dumped at the side of the road.
When their existence had become monotonous, he’d kept their interest by leading them further afield to explore new areas. One of those areas was an abandoned Royal Air Force base which yielded weapons and uniforms that made their preferred ruse of representing the authorities much simpler. He trusted only one other person, one of the only women to stay with them, to lead his gang and when she had brought back the news of an armed and organised convoy systematically raiding supply stores he couldn’t resist returning to his old life for a look.
He found the fools happily farming and enjoying village life – the life they never allowed his father or any of their friends to become a part of – and the lure of hurting them was simply too great.
He’d taken time away from haunting the village by night and using the bayonet for his new gun, obsessively sharpened at every opportunity, to wreak terror on the weak people who had shunned him.
He decided to have one more night of fun before the people who had left their soldiers behind would be back with more, and if his guess was correct and these people were the ones who were missing four of their own and a vehicle then they would be doubly angry.
The simplicity of it appealed to Goran who, born in a poverty-stricken region of post-conflict Serbia, found himself as a young boy living in the UK where his father worked long hours in seasonal agriculture. As much as he wanted to be accepted by society, by the other children in his school, by everyone in the world, his differences marked him out as a person to be avoided.
He thought those differences were his heritage and his accent, or the fact that his family was poor, when in truth it was something people sensed about him on a more instinctive level.
He was cruel. He was sadistic. The other children who were allowed to play with him when they weren’t in school wouldn’t join in with him throwing stones at animals. The only two friends he had left wanted nothing to do with him after he’d bought his first knife at a weekend market and began his obsession with cutting things.
Waiting until it was fully dark, Goran slipped from the building and began walking slowly, crouching low to the ground, through the drainage ditch running either side of the pocked road leading in a straight line to the village.
Two hundred paces or so from the edge of the village he froze, dropping down and listening to the thuds of bodies on dry, packed earth as his followers did the same. He lowered his eyes as the torch beam swept from his left to right and back again pushing further out away from the buildings until, he guessed, the power of the beam was too weak to make anything out.
He waited, flat on his stomach, until the person with the torch moved on before resuming his slow assault and was again thankful for the camouflage clothing he’d taken from the base. He sneered in derision at the fools left to guard the place from him, thinking that if they were stupid enough to use lights then the night’s work would be much simpler.
The first man standing guard made hunting him simple because he smoked a pungent, hand-rolled cigarette that acted like a beacon for his senses. He left his two companions at the entrance to the cluster of buildings and crept forwards alone; his imagination ran riot with the few video games he’d played before the power went off. He imagined himself as a super-assassin, enhanced with special skills which the regular guards didn’t possess, breaking into a secret facility.
At only nineteen he still held some tendencies towards the youthful, imaginative play of children, only his enjoyment came from mixing that imagination with savage reality.
He crept up behind the man, barely breathing as he approached with stealth worthy of the character from the game he imagined himself to be. Unsheathing the bayonet inch by inch, almost daring the man to hear the whisper of steel on leather and turn like it was movie scene, he rose behind him with the gun still on his back and the knife gripped tightly in his right hand.
Not wanting to waste the opportunity of seeing a person’s face change when they experienced true fear, he breathed gently on the exposed skin at the back of his neck.
The man froze, his skin tightening in response to the unexpected stimulus. Spinning to face the direction of the sensation his eyes went wide as the blade crunched between the ribs on his left side and drove upwards. Goran clamped a hand over his victim’s mouth and hugged his tensed body in close as the sucking sound muffled by his fingers told him he’d successfully punctured the man’s chest cavity. Leaning his face in until their noses squashed together, the stabbed guard began to jerk and spasm as his last view of the world was Goran’s smiling eyes.
He withdrew the blade, leaning down to the body he had lowered to sit on the ground and wipe it clean on the man’s clothes. He didn’t strip him of his weapons because he had no need to. Instead he controlled his excited breathing and withdrew to the shadows to watch and wait.
“Greg?” a voice called softly in the darkness. Goran began to tense his muscles slowly to wake up his body which he had allowed to go into a kind of post-adrenaline rest. “Greg, for fuck sake, where are you?”
The man came into sight in the inky night, stooping to retrieve the still-burning cigarette which his friend hadn’t had the chance to finish. The attack came fast and savage from the deeper shadows the second his foot hit the outstretched boot of his dead companion. Just as the gasp escaped his mouth, Goran leapt forward to begin a frenzied attack as he drove the knife into the man five times, each time aiming to injure and not kill him quickly like he had the other man.
Six, seven, eight times he jabbed the upward-sweeping point of the bayonet into the man who jerked and yelped with every strike. He tried to backpedal and get away, but his attacker moved towards him with every stab so that he couldn’t gain any distance from his unseen assailant.
Fatigued from the frenzy, Goran stopped and stood to watch as the jerking, panicked movements of the man continued for a few seconds until his body caught up and figured out it was no longer being attacked. When that realisation travelled from mind to body, the man’s legs gave out on him without warning to drop him flat on his back.
Goran stepped forwards, kneeling down with his left knee to crush the flesh and nerves of the man’s left arm and followed up with the right knee on the other side to add to the pain as he crushed the two limbs. Panting and feeling his body overheating inside his warm clothes, Goran leaned down again and slapped his left palm hard onto the man’s head, pinning it to the cold concrete as he slowly brought the blade in his right hand into direct view in front of his eyes.
He saw the fear, loving the response with every part of his body and feeling that electric pulse of being alive that only another person’s realisation of death would bring. He shushed him almost tenderly as he twirled the bayonet back and forth to fully demonstrate to his victim what would end his life.
Crooning a reassuring whisper in his native language, Goran gently rested the blade against the man’s throat and smiled at his desperate pleas before his face contorted into a grimace of rage and effort and he shoved his weight down on the weapon to saw at the tough tubes inside the soft flesh of the throat.
Panting from the effort and sheeted with a spray of arterial blood, he stood and whistled softly to bring his other two men forwards.
ABOUT TURN
Steve walked straight into his office, finding Iain there with two others. Lizzie was with them, as was Alice who was packing up a small medical kit after treating a few minor cuts with clean dressings. Seeing Steve’s bandaged arm seeping dark blood through the white dressing, she sighed and opened her kit back up again.
Steve sat at his desk and smiled his thanks at Alice who started to unwrap his forearm to go to work.
“Who did this?” she asked with a tut.
“Jan,” Steve answered, hoping that she meant the hatchet-job of a dressing and not the original gunshot.
“You’re sure he got it all out?” she asked. Steve glanced up at Lizzie who was fixing him with a reproving look.
“He got it all out,” Steve confirmed, adding to Lizzie, “it’s nothing, honestly. Just an accident.”
“An accident with a shotgun?” she asked, recognising the injury pattern just as quickly as her protégé had. Steve shook his head to explain that he didn’t have the time to explain and turned to Iain.
“You okay?” he asked simply, inviting the man to fill him in on the details.
“Been a long day and night,” he said by way of excusing their appearance. “Ended up finding a cycle shop and getting back here that way. It was either that or Shanks’ Pony.”
Steve smiled, unable to not find Iain’s chosen terminology for walking amusing even given the circumstances. He thought that Iain and Neil would’ve got along like a house on fire.
“Got there, checked it out, found nothing,” Iain explained. “We” – he gestured at the other two survivors of his patrol – “went inside and the other four left with the vehicle must’ve been snuck up on. The bastards tried to get us to come out like they were friendly; pretended to be army but the uniform wasn’t right.”
“Wasn’t right how?”
“I only saw it for a second,” Iain said, “and it’s been a while, you know?” Steve understood, and his patient nod said so. “The recognition flash wasn’t one I knew. It was like the French flag, only with a thin white stripe down the middle instead.”
Steve’s face flickered recognition and Iain saw it. “DPM?” he asked, using the acronym to describe what normal people would call camouflage.
Iain nodded.
“RAF, mate,” Steve said, watching the penny drop behind Iain’s eyes. Iain opened his mouth to speak but flinched as Steve leapt up from the chair and swore loudly. Alice had just finished sticking down the fresh gauze over his wounds and avoided his rising shoulder expertly.
“What…?” Ian tried, cautious of the usually calm man who was flying into a panicked rage.
“Fucking hell,” Steve roared. Two armed guards ran into the office, stopping in their tracks as Steve picked up his weapon and gear and paced for the door, shouting orders for every available guard not currently on the perimeter to get ready to move out in a hurry.
“About fucking turn,” Steve snapped, sounding every bit the officer he used to be.
