After it happened book 9.., p.9
After It Happened (Book 9): Home, page 9
part #9 of After It Happened Series
One of his soldiers walked down the line of men and women, taking a polaroid of each of their faces and handing it to another armed guard following until all of their faces were as captured as their bodies were.
“We have your faces,” Steve told them, “and we’ll distribute them to every settlement, every village and every town in the surrounding hundred miles. Like I said, my advice is to go west and never come back this way. And one other thing,” he said, ad-libbing. “Take off the uniforms.”
Hesitant faces looked left and right, sparking his anger.
“I said take them off, now! You didn’t earn them so you don’t wear them.” He stepped forwards to reach out and tear the patch from the arm of the nearest man, daring him to retaliate. The man cast his eyes down and said nothing, quailing in fear under the onslaught of Steve’s righteous anger.
A shout of alarm at the other end of the line made him step back out of arm’s reach and look up in time to see one of their prisoners land a second punch on one of his people before sprinting with everything he had to get away.
He didn’t get far as one of his people emerged from between two burning buildings and looked left and right to assess the situation before bringing his rifle into his shoulder and firing a single shot.
The runner arched his back in mid-sprint, seeming to be mimicking a free faller for a heartbeat before his broken body slammed into the road and skid lifelessly to a stop.
Now certain of the consequences, all thoughts of resistance fled the prisoners and they all shuffled away to the one vehicle they’d been left with.
Watching them drive away he gave orders for Iain.
“Follow them until you’ve used a third of your fuel,” he said, “then come home. If they stop, or if they try to turn around, I trust you to know what to do.”
Iain nodded, turning away to follow them and hoping that they were stupid enough to give him the opportunity to cut them all down.
SEVEN YEARS
LATER
REVENGE
The years since the day when Jan had launched someone under the wheels of his Land Rover had been suspiciously kind to Steve and his people.
He’d hung up his gun some time before, allowing younger and more enthusiastic men and women to enjoy the hardships of sleeping outside overnight and surviving on a few hours’ rest before covering enough miles to put an average person on their exhausted back for an entire day.
He had, in spite of calling two elections, remained in charge of their group which had swelled to become a thriving town full of commerce, production and bartering with other settlements.
He had transitioned from the leader of a military coup to become town mayor. Eager to reintroduce as much democracy as possible now that society was reasserting itself with more rules than they had people, he had developed a system not too dissimilar to their original departmental council of elders which had been the brainchild of a highly efficient former teacher…when she hadn’t been at the sherry that was.
His new council was more of a parliament in a way, only instead of constituencies being represented by an elected official, their areas of industry chose a spokesperson to act on their behalf. This way, after developing more than a few people into the roles because of their ability to hear a problem, understand the nature of it and make a decision, Steve was left to deal with the more important matters.
With additional people came additional responsibilities, but by the time Steve had understood that those additional responsibilities could be devolved to the additional people he’d all but cracked the idea of their new way of life.
Iain, now one of his trusted close advisers, ran and organised the military matters which included a recruitment and training section which used the collective experiences of all the former servicemen and women they had to create their own version of a boot camp.
One of the men who had been through that new training and graduated with glowing reports had been his first runner, who back then had been a jug-eared, overly eager boy but was now a tall, solid young man with a keen intellect and a strong sense of watchfulness. George, after a couple of years protecting the walls and gate, had been promoted to work on the protection teams who still escorted people away from their home to retrieve the things they needed. Those things were almost always machinery parts nowadays as they had been growing and raising all of their own food for over half a decade; so much so that they over-produced certain things that grew easily in their rich, flat farmland such as maize, and traded it with the nearest large settlement which existed in the same era of peace by the coast.
As the risk of banditry lessened with time, their military forces took on more of a security role, morphing into a kind of militia who kept the public safe and were generally afforded the same respect as police in their old lives had been when they acted with the consent of the people. That said, occasionally the law had to be enforced when strong words of good sense were ignored – most often through the excess intake of alcohol – and in those times, to quote an old friend of Steve’s, ‘Some dickhead got their skull slapped.’
With his well-trained force of paramilitaries who, at least for the majority of them inside the town limits, went without firearms as they simply weren’t needed, Steve’s people enjoyed enough peace to believe that nothing bad would happen to them and that they could rebuild their lives and the lives of the many children who ran around.
It was, Steve often marvelled, life as normal. There still weren’t any communications networks but the grid was re-established on a small scale and they had limited electricity and hot water courtesy of the sun and some relatively simple plumbing and wiring. He constantly kicked himself for never having installed it at home years ago, but then he remembered that he’d barely been at home all those years. Instead he was working away playing taxi to oil rigs or on a base somewhere in the world. Thoughts of back before always darkened his mood and it took something good or at least something distracting to snap him out of the funk.
A knock at the open door of his office was accompanied by the words, “Knock, knock,” which did nothing to brighten his mood and quite simply pissed him off.
“Your knuckles already did that,” he said. “I’m not so old that I need subtitles.”
“Sorry, boss,” George said as he walked in and waited to be invited to sit. Steve forgave him instantly having never been able to be annoyed at the boy – the man, he corrected himself – for longer than a few seconds. Technically, George was a captain in the protection force, as it had been called without his consultation, but to call the boy captain and for him to call him something equally contrite like, Mr Mayor, would just be too much.
“Siddown, George,” he said.
On hearing that Steve had company his faithful assistant Sophie poked her own head around the doorframe and repeated the, “Knock, knock,” intentionally to goad her grumpy employer.
“Not you as well,” Steve groaned, mostly to himself.
“Tea?” she asked, knowing the answer would be yes and not needing to ask either of them how they took it. She disappeared from view again, followed by the rest of her unruly hair, leaving both men wearing a smile as a direct result of her infectious happiness and striking looks which had only been enhanced by the years since Steve had first met her. George’s smile was broader and lasted longer, but Steve thought that was understandable given that the two of them were a couple now.
“Are you nights or days?” Steve asked to start the conversation, seeing if George had just come from his bed or whether he would be heading there very soon. It was impossible to tell if he’d been awake all night given his youthful energy, but Steve honestly couldn’t call it either way.
“Days,” he said, still smiling. Steve fell down a guilty rabbit hole of imagination as to where the young man had been a couple of hours ago and snapped himself out of it before his thoughts turned inappropriate.
“Much on?”
“Not really,” George answered. “No reports from night shift. Three groups out today, all with a small escort, and a convoy should be due in from The Wash sometime later.” Steve nodded along with him. It was business as usual, and the news on the incoming convoy made his stomach growl for fresh cod and plaice. When combined with their plentiful harvest of potatoes, he felt that today’s take on the original British dish of fish ’n’ chips was unrivalled.
“Anything else?”
“Some trouble among the locals,” George told him with a frown. “Seems we had some backlash from the scrap last week and a couple of people have taken it upon themselves to seek a little extra retribution.”
“Hmm,” Steve answered thoughtfully. The previous week had seen a fight break out in one of the places where the local home brew was sold, and the two respective groups didn’t seem to want to let it go. “Assign patrols to the area of the pubs until it dies down,” he instructed.
“Already done.”
Sophie reappeared with two mugs and handed one first to George before walking to the desk and placing Steve’s on the coaster beside his right hand. She smiled at him as she retreated, catching George’s eye as she went and doing something Steve couldn’t see to make the young man blush. He tried to cover his boyish embarrassment and excitement with a sip of his drink which was too hot.
“No biscuits?” Steve asked hopefully towards Sophie’s back, knowing that she would have some of the locally made shortbread stashed somewhere.
“Orders from Lizzie,” she answered without breaking step. “Sorry.”
Steve muttered to himself and looked down – seeing that part of his body resting against his desk when the rest of him was sat back made the point for him. With a sigh he looked up again to dismiss George and get on with the mundane tasks of the day.
“Go take your tea and drink it with her if there’s nothing else,” Steve told him, seeing the young face light up at the dismissal. “She’s better to look at than I am.”
“No argument there, boss.”
“Cheeky shit,” Steve shot back, leaning over his scattering of paperwork and guessing he’d be finished by the afternoon and would be able to take a walk.
Life was good. It was hard work sometimes but, on the whole, it was easier than it had been for much of his life after, and he had to admit that he was happy and comfortable.
~
The convoy didn’t arrive from their neighbours that day, nor did either of their two small groups who had ventured away from town for various reasons. The late arrival of the convoy was nothing to cause concern. A group often elected to stay out overnight either at another small settlement or else just camped on the road, but for three expected arrivals not to show on the same day sent that cold feeling down Steve’s spine that was all too familiar.
He’d ordered a relief force to be added to the night shift patrols, ensuring that all of his people were armed, and was still awake in the darkness as the dawn began to glow in the distance and the alarm was raised.
He was out of bed and dressing before the panicked hammering started at his door and the look of wide-eyed horror on the young soldier’s face told him that whatever had happened was bad.
He was wrong.
What had happened was worse than anything he’d seen yet. It was worse than slaves being kept in terrible conditions, worse than foul-smelling creatures hunting people through the dark corridors of a hospital, worse than the terror brought by an invasion into their home.
The dawn revealed crudely made crosses only a few hundred paces from their gates, and many of them had either fallen over in the soft earth where they were buried or else had skewed away from being vertical. If the angles were wrong then the message wasn’t lost, because each of the crosses held a person suspended above the ground.
Steve snatched a weapon from the nearest guard and limped fast for the gate not even calling for anyone to come with him. They did anyway, and the journey of his half-run, half-limp over the tended cropland seemed to take forever, with each step giving him more sensory input to the display ahead.
A sob, soft and weak. Mumbled words repeated over and over in pain like a slowly dying man was praying. All of these things came to him as he moved as fast as he could towards them regardless of the danger.
He reached the first one, tipped forwards as the base hadn’t been buried deeply enough in the ploughed earth, to find a woman hanging limply from the rough wood. Her hair was lank and fell over her face, but the blood and swollen flesh at her hands told Steve what ordeal she had suffered well enough; the large nail had been driven through her flesh for appearance sake, as rope held her torso to the main beam and prevented her from falling to the dirt.
“Help me,” Steve gasped as he fought against the combined weight of woman and cross to lay it down so she could be cut free. As the weight of her body put pressure on the nails she cried out, releasing a fresh gout of blood when the swollen flesh was agitated.
“Send someone to fetch tools to get these out,” he snapped at the nearest guard.
“What tools do they need?”
“Just tell them to bring tools,” Steve snapped harshly, not having the capacity to think for everyone else. “And medics. All of them.”
The cry of pain had told him that she was still alive, so he moved on to the next. Three of them had died – through a combination of injuries or positional asphyxia he couldn’t say – but the fifth person he reached was still fixed firmly to the upright wood and the only movement was their lips as they muttered repeatedly.
“Hang on,” Steve reassured him, pausing as he saw the disgusting mess that the heavy deck screw had made when it was driven through both of the man’s bare feet. “Can I get some help over here?” he barked. Two others joined and helped push the simple frame so that it began to lean back, prompting shouts for more hands to lower it safely.
As he lay on his back, hands and feet still fixed to the wood, Steve noticed with utter repulsion and angry horror that two more brutal screws had been driven through the man’s shoulders to keep him in place. His lips still flapped as he muttered something weakly over and over. Steve put his ear close to the man’s face.
“Goran,” he whispered, his eyes fluttering and vacant. “Goran, Goran, Gora—”
Steve froze, hearing only the soft hiss of the man’s final breath in its slow release.
Part Two
Dan
GRUMPY GRAMPS
Marie lay on her back in their bed. He could tell from her breathing that she’d crossed the divide from asleep to awake and remained still so that his bladder didn’t start screaming at him to get up and face the chilly air to deal with it.
She sniffed, suspiciously at first then faster until she made a gagging noise and clamped a hand over her nose and mouth.
“Oh my god, is that you?”
Dan stifled a laugh, covering his inability to lie to her by addressing the other occupant of the room.
“Jesus, Ash. No more raw chicken for you.” Ash grumbled, not at the threat of less tasty food but at being unwillingly made complicit in his fiction. He jumped up on the bed, mistaking the blame for an invitation while forgetting that he was an eighty-pound land-shark as he seemed to think of himself as a puppy in perpetuity.
The noises of pain that his ballistic arrival brought provided the background noise for both of them spilling from the bed. Dan made it to the bathroom first but a manipulative look of sorrow from Marie was enough to put her at the front of the line. Ash took full advantage of the now vacant warm bed and lay on his back to twist and grumble until the perfect position was achieved. His bubble of bliss was disallowed as soon as Marie re-emerged and told him to get down.
He grumbled again, and Dan noticed how his movements were slower nowadays, like his joints were as stiff as Dan’s were. They were both ageing warriors in their own right, but both still felt mentally ready to do their part even if their bodies were beginning to betray them.
“Has Seb come in yet?” she asked him.
Dan had heard their son get up and try to close his creaking door opposite their own over an hour before, and knew he’d be in the kitchen stuffing his face with warm, fresh bread and croissants long before they found their way to the dining hall.
“He’s already gone down, I think,” Dan told her.
She began tidying her appearance and putting on the warmer clothes they’d need to roam the breezy stone castle they lived in as Dan dressed in his usual black, even if a lot of it was either getting a little tight around him or turning more to grey, much like the remainder of his hair, he thought, feeling sorry for himself.
“I told him to come in to us if he wakes up early,” she complained without any real force behind her words.
“True, but we don’t feed him sweet stuff first thing in the morning, do we?”
She made a noise in response that he didn’t know how to interpret, even after all the time they’d been together, so he decided to say nothing else and remain on the safe side.
“Come on,” he said unnecessarily to Ash who was waiting by the door for the human part of the duo, before adding more words to the dog so that Marie could hear them. “Let’s swing by and get your daughter, shall we?”
Marie grunted at him again as she pulled a face and held her hair up on the back of her head, looking in the mirror hung on their wall. “Tell her I’ll be there in a bit,” she said, meaning Leah and not her dog, Nemesis.
Dan had been doing that for a few weeks now, and exercising both dogs in the morning due to Leah’s condition. He preferred to say it that way: her condition. To admit that she was pregnant made him face the illogical desire to hang Lucien in the air by a couple of things he guessed were precious to the young man. She seemed to follow some kind of pregnancy guide book and had started suffering bouts of debilitating morning sickness before she even started to show but, being Leah and needing to be different, the ‘morning’ part of the affliction seemed to extend well into the evening until it was pretty much a twenty-four-seven thing.
