Three Bullets

by Melvin Burgess

  ‘I’m on my period,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s no sharks around. Pants down,’ said the boss.

  Now that I really didn’t want to do. I knew what they were looking for, and if my pants came down, they were going to find it.

  ‘I’ll just need to...’ I said. I turned to pick up my handbag. They didn’t move. I don’t know what they thought I was doing, but it was obviously something pathetic, because someone as stupid and ridiculous-looking as me wasn’t going to pose any kind of threat. But how wrong they were! Because what I was really going for was my gun! Yes. I had a gun. Didn’t know about that, did ya?

  ‘Die, motherfuckers, die!’ I screamed, because all I had to go on in this kind of situation was the movies. And I pulled the trigger. Click, click, BANG! it went, which was about right, because I only had three bullets. Major Tom went down, smack, onto the Tarmac like a sack of s**t because that’s what he was, and which was utterly astonishing because I hadn’t done a lot of aiming. In fact, I was looking the other way in case the gun burnt my eyebrows off. It wasn’t exactly brand new.

  ‘ARRGHGHGHGH!’ I screamed and I went running at the others, waving it in the air. And you know what? They all turned and ran away.

  ‘Chickenshits!’ I bawled after them.

  They ran away! Would you believe it? They ran like rabbits. Major Tom was clutching his groin, screaming, ‘Help me, help me, oh no, oh no, oh, help me!’

  Maude ran over to him and kicked something away – I didn’t see what it was – and grabbed his shotgun.

  ‘Now you know what it’s like to have a period!’ I screamed at him because he had blood all over his trousers, and I started laughing hysterically. It wasn’t funny, but I was off my head. I was waving the gun all over the place until Maude came running over, picked up Rowan, who’d been knocked over in the rush to escape, and ran like an antelope. You never saw anyone run so fast. I grabbed my bag and my top and I was after her. Off we ran, fast as we could, tits flapping in the wind like jellies on springs. We ran and ran and ran until Maude was out of breath. Then I took a turn with Rowan and we ran some more until I had no breath left, and when we’d done that a couple of times we collapsed into a hedge, gasping.

  There was a long time while we kept holding our breaths to see if we could hear anything, then panting again, and slipping our tops back on. Maude was crying silently. I was thinking how she did that quite a lot for a soldier, but then I thought – maybe soldiers do it a lot anyway but they never say. Rowan had gone into his frozen thing that he’d started doing when scary stuff happens, which was great, except you knew that once he found his voice, he was going to bellow.

  After a bit his eyes moved. He looked at me and he said, ‘Cry now?’

  ‘No, not yet,’ I told him. He nodded and closed his eyes. Clever little guy.

  ‘You shot his dick off,’ said Maude suddenly.

  I was like, What? I couldn’t believe she said that.

  ‘I did not!’

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  ‘I never did.’

  ‘You shot his dick off.’

  ‘Did I?’

  Then I had this sudden image of her running to that guy and kicking something away. Was that his penis? And what was she doing – kicking it out of reach like it was a gun or something? Like he could use it even when it wasn’t attached? I actually opened my mouth to ask her, but then I didn’t, because... well, because I was too shy.

  ‘I can’t believe you shot his dick off!’

  ‘I didn’t mean to! It was an accident.’

  ‘How can you accidentally shoot someone’s dick off?’

  ‘Maude – he was going to rape us!’

  ‘You have to be kidding.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? You think I’m too ugly to rape? Is that what you’re getting at?’

  ‘You’re an idiot.’

  ‘What difference does it make where I shot him? I stopped us getting raped and all you can do is moan. Show some gratitude, why can’t you?’

  ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Why couldn’t you shoot him in the arm or the leg, or just kill him?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to! I wasn’t even aiming. Anyway, what difference would it make?’

  ‘What difference? Because now, he’ll track us down to the ends of hell. You shot his dick off. He’ll never forgive us. Ever. That was a really evil gang, Martina. They will never rest till they’ve got us.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said. But my skin was crawling. ‘Anyway, whatever they do, it couldn’t possibly be worse than being raped by that bunch, they were the ugliest-looking evil gang I’ve ever seen,’ I said, trying to lighten the mood.

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Maude, sweet as you like. ‘Let me have a think about all the things worse than rape that a gang of evil white supremacist thugs would like to do to a black weirdo trans kid who’s just shot the boss’s dick off? Let me see...’

  I didn’t care to get involved in that conversation. We needed to move on.

  So we got away, but even so it was a complete disaster. We didn’t dare go back, so we’d lost the bike. Rowan’s meds were in the panniers, his antibiotics and his painkillers. More importantly, so were my meds. I swear I could almost feel the hormones beginning their nasty work right there while I lay trying to get to sleep that night – the hair sprouting like weeds, and my temper as well. Missing the meds was going to make me AND Rowan even more bad-tempered and horrible than we were normally, so you can look out for that if you like.

  And Maude’s phone was on the bike as well as our food and our changes of clothes, toothbrushes, toothpaste, my flannel and wet wipes – I never go anywhere without my wet wipes. All my drugs, my uppers and downers. Back in Manchester – it already seemed like a million years away in another life, although we’d only been away less than a fortnight – my favourite shop was always the chemist. If a row of shops got bombed, everyone else would be crawling over the One Stop or the Co-op but I’d be all over the chemist. Painkillers, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, hormones, antibiotics. These are a few of my favourite things.

  All gone. I could have wept. In fact, I did. All we had was what was in my handbag – make-up, gun, phone, money. You see? Maude had been giving me a hard time for taking a handbag, let alone buying a new one in Buxton. But I had some stuff at least, and she had nothing. QED.

  15

  Off we went, across the fields. It was hard work. Rowan had gone all limp, didn’t say a word, which was great, but he wasn’t moving either. We shook him and tickled him – he was normally a very ticklish kind of kid, but there was nothing.

  ‘Trauma,’ said Maude.

  We had to carry him in the end, took it in turns. He weighed a tonne. He was growing so fast. It was really putting me off any lingering residual desire I might have to start a family.

  We walked miles that day, creeping through the fields and hedges like wild animals, didn’t dare go near the roads. I reckon the little toad was having us on some of the time at least, because he stayed like that until it got dark and we’d settled down in the remains of a ruined building in the middle of a field, when he got up and started walking and talking as if nothing had happened. No wails or screams this time.

  ‘Dinnertime,’ he said solemnly. He wasn’t wrong, except there wasn’t any. We’d been expecting to be in Nottingham in a few hours. Now we were still miles away, days away probably, on foot, in no-man’s land with nothing to eat.

  Poor little kid, he started to cry then, a sort of low level, miserable grizzle. Even I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, because it was miserable, sitting out on a cold night in a ruined building with nothing to eat. Maude went off to find something to drink, and she found it all right but she didn’t have anything to carry it in so she came back to get us. It was some kind of filthy irrigation ditch! It was so filthy I refused to drink anything out of it, even though I was as dry as an old scab. We had an argument about it,
about Rowan really. You know, Oh, he’s running a temperature, he has to have some fluids. That sort of thing.

  ‘There’s plenty of fluids in there all right, I just wish they’d stay there,’ I pointed out. But she had to have her own way and they both slopped it up like beasts of the field.

  Then we went back to try and get some sleep.

  That was the worst night I ever had. We found the driest corner we could and lay down there, with Rowan in between us to keep him warm. We had nothing to cover us, just our coats. Everything was cold: the air, the ground underneath us. It got so deep into your bones you forgot what warm was like. At least I had my music, my dad’s music I should say, to play. My phone was still charged up from Matlock. I went to sleep to Parliament, which isn’t my favourite stuff, but my dad loved it and if you turn it down low it’s all right. Kinda. But I was waking up all night. At one point I woke up thinking Maude was touching me up and I thought, Really? But it was just Rowan putting his arms around my chest and squeezing me tight. Which is sweet, really. I think he got some sleep that night, but I certainly didn’t and I doubt Maude did either.

  So, I know what you’re thinking. The gun. You’re thinking – Oh, we never knew she had a gun. She never said anything about a gun. How do we know it’s true? She would have said, wouldn’t she?

  Like, you think you’re important? You’re not important. I mean, who do you think you are? You think I tell you everything? Well, I don’t. There’s loads of things about me you don’t know and I don’t see any reason you ever will. Why would I tell you everything? You think because you’re reading my book you have a right to know stuff I don’t want to say? Well, this is one book where it ain’t gonna happen.

  That old gun used to be my dad’s. When things got bad he got his hands on a better one and he gave the old one to Mum and told her to put it in her bedside cabinet. She never did though. She took it out as soon as he was gone, because she didn’t want to sleep next to a weapon of death. That’s what she said, those exact words. I wanted it in my room, because I didn’t mind sleeping with a weapon of death, so long as it wasn’t my death, of course.

  Mum never let me have it, ironically because she thought I might use it to kill myself. Yes, I have a history of depression. Once I started on the meds, the depression went away – most of it, anyway. I haven’t been on antidepressants for years, but with all this stuff going on, the depression was likely to come back, which scared me almost as much as the thought of getting caught by Major Tom. Anyway, she hid the gun behind the loose brick in the old fireplace in the spare bedroom, where I found it some weeks later and tucked it away in my backpack.

  I honestly never thought I’d use it to shoot anyone. When I said I only had three bullets? That was one for each of us. If things got bad. You know? If you’re working for one group and another group catches you, you can expect some very bad things to happen. So, three bullets.

  So I’d used one to shoot off Major Tom’s dick (apparently) so now I was wondering which one of us was going to go without their bullet if those bad things happened. Not me, that’s for sure! So, Maude or Rowan? I suppose it was likely to be Rowan who went without because they, whoever they might be, would be likely to be nicer to a little kid than to a pair of almost grown-ups. But you never know. Sometimes they do dreadful things to little kids to get to the grown ups. Sometimes they do dreadful things to them just for fun or their own personal perversions. So what if I did have to shoot him? Perhaps the right thing to do, I thought, was to take out Rowan and then me and Maude with one bullet. If it came down to it. Heads together, you know? Something like that. I spent quite a bit of time trying to work out what the best way of killing two people with one bullet was that night. It helped take my mind off things.

  I liked having the gun with me. It made me feel good. A gun can be a very empowering thing. Take those guys who’d captured us. They were losers, but because one of them had a gun, they were winners. Until we took it off them, of course. Then they became losers again.

  Yeah. And Maude had hung on to their shotgun. She slung it over her shoulder. I didn’t like it – you could see it a mile off and I worried that owning something as precious as a shotgun was going to make us a target. But she refused to put it down, and really, you can see her point. The gun the FNA gave her was back with the bike. Which I guess made us and the White Army thugs about equal, because we’d both lost a gun to each other. Except for the dick, of course. We were definitely ahead in that department.

  In the morning, when we got up with empty stomachs and started to walk to Nottingham, both Rowan and Maude had the runs. That irrigation ditch, you see. What a pair of idiots! So I was right! It was great, I’m never right usually. I liked it. And Maude was wrong, which never happens either. I was dying of thirst but at least I wasn’t ejecting my entire body contents out of my anus every fifteen minutes. It paid off – we found some water coming out of an underground pipe, and I drank out of that. I don’t know where it came from, but at least there was nothing living in it.

  Rowan got really ill. It was scary. We had to carry him almost all the way and he spent it just whimpering like a puppy. I thought it was sweet to start with. But gradually it got on my nerves and by the end of it, I just wanted to chuck him in a ditch. Poor little mite. Then his poorly finger went bad. Even I felt sorry for him, except when it was my turn to carry him, of course.

  We were out there on foot for two days, the most miserable two days of my or anyone’s life. I was feeling really weird just because of coming off the meds, plus being hungry. But then our luck changed when we finally walked into some coverage and we were able to call up the FNA. And guess what? They came to give us a lift! Would you believe it? Three idiot kids on a stupid mission and they came to get us. It seemed impossible until the lift turned up and guess who was in it? Tariq! He was on his way to join us after all. How’s that for a stroke of luck? I was never so happy to see anyone in my life.

  It turned out he’d got news of his family at last – they’d been sent to the ERAC sometime last month, so he was on his way down there too. They’d never have picked us up if it wasn’t for him. Connections, see. So we finished the journey in style, bumping and banging in the back of a Land Rover.

  We told them about those guys, the WA. They’d never heard of them, but they sent some people out to look for them. They never found them, though, which was a shame in so many ways.

  16

  Nottingham was still under FNA control, but things were moving fast and they were expecting an attack soon. The whole place was buzzing: barricades going up, roadblocks, trucks with fighters and military hardware driving about from one place to the other. And refugees. Everywhere you went, there were refugees these days. Not just Blacks and Asians. People had heard the stories of what life was like under the Bloods, the rules you had to follow, the executions and so on. If you weren’t joining up, you were running away. It was like that everywhere.

  Tariq and the other guys in the Land Rover who drove us were full of it – pointing out sniper posts on the rooftops, talking about mines and artillery and tactics. It looked impressive, all the effort they were putting into defending the place, but the Bloods were funded by the USA and the FNA just didn’t have the right kind of weapons. You can’t fight tanks, planes and helicopter gunships with popguns. All the heavy stuff had gone south for the civil war a few years ago and very little of it ever came back. Nottingham was going down, everyone knew it, but they were fighting anyway. People are so stupid. As if losing was somehow better than just turning round and getting the hell out of there.

  ‘We’re hoping the EU will come in and bail us out,’ the guy told us, and I thought, Yeah, you and everyone else. I remember when the first EU fighter jets appeared in the skies over Manc, everyone was cheering and yelling, like the police had turned up to arrest the bad guys. But all it meant was more bombs. They were supposed to be taking out the far right groups, but plenty of civilians got flattened anywa
y. There were news items from time to time about EU troops, but what can I say? I never saw any.

  So the EU – all gas as usual. The Bloods, though, they were coming, they were on their way right now. In fact, in some ways, they were already there. They always had been there. Before the war you’d never have known how many people were sitting at home hoping and praying for the Muslims to be pushed into the sea, all the Black people turned into slaves – but they poured out of the swamp quick enough once they thought they had a little fire power behind them. As we drove through the ’burbs, the graffiti was up on the walls to welcome the Bloods.

  PREPARE FOR JUDGMENT DAY, one said.

  WELCOME HOME JESUS, was another one.

  And, THE SECOND COMING IS NIE.

  ‘Can’t even bloody spell,’ said Tariq.

  ‘What’s that about the second coming, then?’ asked Maude.

  Tariq rolled his eyes. ‘Virgin birth, mark two. They already found the new Mary. No crucifixion this time, though. This time it’s Judgment Day.’

  ‘Does that mean we get two Christmases from now on?’ I asked. No one laughed.

  ‘We actually think we know who the new Mary is,’ added Tariq. ‘Some poor girl in Birmingham they kidnapped. I wonder what revolting Blood chief is going to have the honour of taking God’s place.’

  Yes, the Bloods were on their way, armed with the power of the new Jesus, baptising people in blood before they killed them. And Lo! It was a passport straight to Heaven, for if you were baptised in the ways of the Lord by one of the blessed, you went straight up to the angels, even if the blessed had to tear out every one of your fingernails to get you there. The Lord be praised! Hallelujah!

  Nottingham was good. Tariq really looked after us. I mean, compared to Buxton it was a bit of a tip – there’d been some bombing and it was escalating, but the electrics were still on in the house, you could have a hot bath, there was shopping. I managed to get out and refresh my make-up bag, get some new clothes for me and Rowan and Maude, a new phone for Maude. The one thing I couldn’t find was the thing I wanted the most: meds. I could feel those hormones swimming up to the surface. God’s sake! I’d be Arnold bloody Schwarzenegger by the end of the week at this rate. And the hair! If it’s not controlled, I turn into some kind of badger in moments. I went out and got myself some new razors and had a hot shower and a total body shave. Top to toe. No, not my head or my eyebrows, you idiot, but every other nook and cranny was as smooth as silk by the time I’d done. It felt gorgeous – for a day, anyway. After that I was in itch central. It felt like my anus had been crucified with the proverbial crown of thorns.