“What target?” Peter asked, his own feet travelling at a relative velocity of three to one to maintain the same pace.
“I’ve got one,” Enfield told him, “we just need something static to fix it to.”
He led them to the far end of the village, the one from which they didn’t regularly drive in and out of, and he reached into the bag he was carrying to produce three white cardboard boxes, which rattled and a handful of small, black metal rectangles.
“These are the magazines,” he told Peter, “twenty rounds apiece, and they go in like this.” He picked up a short bullet from the box he’d flipped open and spun it in his hands so that the brass glittered in the dull daylight before he slid it into the recess and pressed it down with his thumb. Then he added another on top. “That’s two. Eighteen more.”
Peter nodded, his tongue protruding slightly from one side of his mouth as he concentrated, and he carefully loaded in more bullets as Enfield spoke.
“This doesn’t have a bolt, so I can’t bore-sight it first. That’s when you take the bolt out and line up the hole through the barrel with the target. After that you line up the sight and fire a shot.” He rested the gun over a sturdy wooden fence and brought out a contraption from the bag. He rested it over the barrel and twisted the end until the G-clamp held the barrel tight to the fence. Enfield looked along the length of the barrel and squinted, pointing it at a tree about fifty paces away.
“Stay here and watch my back?”
Peter met his eye and nodded, unsure what he would do if something happened when he was outside the safety of the barricades. Enfield climbed over, still barely making a sound as he moved like the adult version of Peter, and trotted away over the cold ground. He stopped at the tree, producing a rough-torn square of beige cardboard, bearing concentric circles around a solid central circle, and held it against the trunk of the tree before tapping at the corners with something. He scanned around before jogging back, skipping over the barricade with the faintest of protests from the springs of the car he mounted as he crossed it. Looking back at his work, he squinted again and nodded to himself. Peter looked at the makeshift target, seeing that the circles were almost the same size as Enfield’s head had been when he was there, and he asked about it.
“Where did you get the target?”
“It’s off the side of the ration packs,” Enfield told him softly, “thoughtful of them to give us food wrapped in a target. Right,” the marine sniper told the boy as he bent to the rifle and changed the subject, “watch that target and tell me where the bullet hits.”
Peter raised the binoculars ready but still jumped in fright when the small rifle coughed and spat a bullet far sooner than he expected. He thought that it would take time to line up a shot like that, that it would need careful consideration, but the man just aimed and shot.
“Well?” Enfield asked after a brief pause.
“Oh,” Peter said hurriedly, “err, up and right?”
“How much by?” Enfield asked confusing him, as he could surely see the same thing through his scope.
“Um, like the same as my hand?”
“Flat hand or your fist?” Enfield asked him, condensing the boy’s information and teaching him how to describe it.
“A fist.”
“Good,” Enfield said, standing up and clicking the dials on the scope before bending his head back to the sight and twisting the clamp a little tighter to make sure the gun didn’t move when he fired it, “standby. Firing.”
The gun spat again, no rolling echo of the gunshot rippling across the landscape as he would expect from gunfire out in the open.
“You hit the black bit,” he told Enfield.
“Smack in the middle?”
“No… just above it.”
“On the centre line though?”
Peter looked hard as he thought about his answer. “Slightly up from the middle. Half a fist.”
Enfield made another adjustment and fired another shot, this one hitting dead centre.
“Bullseye!” Peter said, a little more loudly and excitedly than he meant to.
Enfield just smiled at him from the corner of his mouth in a cocky way as he spun the lever to release the G-clamp and free the gun.
“Now we see if that’s right,” he said, hefting the little rifle into his shoulder and leaning into the standing shooting position before squeezing off half a dozen shots in rapid succession. He stopped firing, looking down at Peter who still stared up at him.
“Well?”
Peter fumbled with the binoculars to look at the tree. As the picture came into focus, he saw that the very centre of the black spot was a single ragged hole exposing flashes of damaged bark and the white of virgin wood beneath.
“Whoa…”
Enfield chuckled, lowering the rifle and dropping out the spent magazine before offering it to the boy.
“Your turn,” he said, seeing the glisten of happy tears in Peter’s eyes staring up at him.
TWELVE
“Who the hell was it, then?” Nevin asked Michaels angrily.
“What does it matter?” he responded, pausing halfway through pouring the rusty liquid from a crystal decanter into a matching tumbler. He waved the decanter by the neck to emphasise his point and added, “Why can’t you just let it go?”
Nevin said nothing, chewing at his lip instead of answering.
“Ah,” Michaels said annoyingly, pausing again to take a gulp of the whisky before he went on, “you’re worried about it being our former colleagues, aren’t you?”
Again, Nevin said nothing, which was an answer in itself.
“Look,” Michaels told him as he slumped into the leather chair by the fire, “chances are that they…” a knock at the door stopped his words as both men stared at the doorway. Their eyes followed the path of the young girl carrying a wicker basket full of logs over to the fire, with difficulty because of the weight. She dumped it down, readjusting it to keep it clear of the direct heat, then turned to give an overly sarcastic bow before she walked towards the door. Her actions showed deference, but her eyes promised a painful death if only she could manage it somehow. Both men shuddered internally, privately, at seeing how much she detested them.
Michaels looked at the fire, then at the new supply of logs, then glanced pointedly at Nevin and raised an eyebrow. Nevin returned his gaze for a few beats before letting out an exasperated sigh of defeat and putting down his own glass to bend and pick up a log before tossing it half-heartedly onto the flames. Michaels tutted but carried on.
“Chances are, they are either gone or are too far away to be encroaching. It was probably just another nobody, so don’t worry about it.”
“Easier said than done,” Nevin said, “I can’t imagine they’d be happy to see me if our paths crossed again.”
“Why?”
Nevin hesitated. He still hadn’t revealed the full extent of his betrayal when he had fired through his own men and caused the mother of all explosions. He didn’t know how many of them had survived, if any, and if any of them had, then his name would be shit among the squadron. And with the Royal Marines. And the Royal Air Force helicopter crews. And the SAS and the SBS and the civilians. It wasn’t a list of enemies he wanted to think about for long, not if he wanted to sleep ever again.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, “what do we do next?”
“Do?” Michaels asked after a hefty gulp of scotch and the ensuing grimace, “About what?”
“About who is out there?”
“It doesn’t matter who is out there,” Michaels said, his tone mocking and derogatory, “so stop flapping your bloody gums about it. We carry on as we are, we try not to freeze or starve over winter, we collect the rents, we keep our patrols going and if we want something, then we take it. You think there’s a government coming back? You think we’re expecting the Americans to roll in with tanks to help us out? Wake up, man. They’ll be too busy keeping the outbreak firmly on this side of the Atlantic
. After that, they’ll be busting their guts trying to keep it from crossing the Pacific. Nobody cares about us, get it into your head.”
Jessica kept her mouth tightly shut the entire time she was walking out of the main house. She walked slowly, taking measured steps with a neutral look on her face so that nobody knew how much she was seething. She walked tall, her head held high and her jaw set tight, and went straight back to the crowded room that she shared with the two women. The older one of them wasn’t there when she walked through the door, but the young woman was. She was lying back on the bed she occupied, her head in a book, and she looked up, puzzled as Jessica fast-walked in and threw herself face down onto the pillow on her bed. She drew in a muffled breath, filling her lungs to their full capacity, and she screamed as loud and long and hard as she could.
Ellie watched her as she fully extinguished the first scream and drew in a second breath, like water withdrawing from a beach ahead of a tsunami. Despite the muffling of the pillow, the second scream was still loud enough to hurt her ears in the small confines of their room. Ellie waited for it to subside, lowering her book and breathing in to make her own sound and ask if the girl was alright. Before she could ask, a third muted scream tore the room in two and made her wince until the sound faded away to nothing.
As suddenly as the invasive sound had started, it ended, and the girl sat up to wipe the tears from her face.
“You alright, my sweet?” Ellie asked the girl. Jessica looked at her, wearing a face that said she most definitely wasn’t alright, but it also seemed resigned to the fate that she was powerless to escape.
Escape, she thought, I need to escape.
“I’m fine,” she said instead, “just angry at them.”
“Which ‘them’?” Ellie asked with a small smile.
“The ‘alive’ them. The ones who keep saying how they are ‘keeping us safe’.” She added emphasis to the words with scorn, which went some way to masking how scared and helpless she felt because of them. Ever since the nurse had unstrapped her from that hospital bed, she had vowed to always be in control of her own life. They had run, had found more terrified people also running, had managed to escape the hospital grounds and it felt to her as though she had been running and hiding in silence for as long as she could recall. The group she was with had changed. Some left and some joined. Others died. By the time they were ‘rescued’ by the people living here, she was utterly exhausted by a life on the run, and at first, she had relished sleeping for an entire day knowing that someone else was keeping watch, but after that initial elation she quickly recognised that something was very wrong.
For the second time in a month she had been effectively kidnapped and imprisoned, regardless of the legality or justification for either event, and now found herself put to work as a servant in return for a safe place to sleep and some food. They treated her like a dumb child, even more so when they saw the scars and fresher cuts on her wrists and arms, but they didn’t know who or what she had been before. They didn’t know she had been raising her younger brother and saw the world not like the dumb kid they assumed her to be, but like a shrewd and suspicious adult.
Ellie’s own face descended into a mask of neutral hostility. The same bastards the new girl was raging about had taken her away from her daughter, knocked her out cold to stop her struggling before she could say that her baby was still in the house they were dragging her from. By the time she had come round and told them, their leader had sent the men straight back but they had found nobody. Her baby was gone; her little Amber, so innocent and such a good girl, was lost to her forever.
She had steeled herself, cloaked herself in a numbness to just wait out the storm, and when order was restored, she would tell the authorities just what these people had done, and they would be punished for it. She tried her hardest not to think about her daughter, because the thoughts paralysed her. She had no tears left, no more capacity for anger, just the flickering pilot light of survival that kept her burning at the lowest possible setting.
As selfish as she felt, she could offer Jessica no solace or agreement and talk about these people and what they had done to them. Jessica knew all about Ellie’s story, told to her by Pauline, who shared the room with them, but ripping off the scabs of someone else was a cruel thing to do. She knew that the woman missed her child, just as she missed Peter terribly and broke down every time she imagined him being left behind. Her thoughts of him suffering at the hands of this new world weren’t the worst thing she could imagine, but instead her anger and fear was that he had been left in the dubious care of their parents. She shuddered to think what would happen to him if he’d been left alone with them, but she knew that a violent death at the hands and teeth of the monsters that normal people had become would probably be a blessing.
“I miss my brother,” she told Ellie in a quiet voice, “and I don’t know who would have looked after him when I wasn’t there.”
“How old was he?” Elie asked in a matching low tone.
“He is three years younger than me. He’ll be ten now.”
Ellie bit her lip, not realising she had spoken as though her brother was already dead. He probably was, but that kind of realistic pessimism wouldn’t have gone down well with her.
“What about your parents? Grandparents?”
Jessica scoffed and curled a lip in disgust. “We didn’t have much use for them even before this. He was left alone with them, which is worse than being properly alone.”
“What do you mean?” Ellie asked, sitting forward and feeling suddenly heartbroken for the girl and her missing brother.
“Every day,” she said dully, her eyes unfocused and staring at a blank spot on the wall, “we wouldn’t know what mood she was in. I’d get him up and get him dressed, I’d feed him breakfast and we’d go to school before she woke up. Our father was already out, gone to work still drunk usually, so we just learned to take care of ourselves. When it wasn’t a school day we would do the same. Sometimes I’d still make us packed lunches and we would go off for the day. The punishments for disappearing weren’t as bad as if we’d stayed there anyway. She would hit us, then wait until he got back in from work on the farm, and then she’d make up lies about how bad we had been. He would hit us and he never once believed us that she had already dished out the smacks.” She took an exaggerated sigh, as though the memories coming back to her were exhausting. “There was a stick, a thin walking stick, that they hung on the wall outside our bedrooms. It was our reminder to do everything right and stay out of their way. When it came down it…” she closed her eyes and lowered her gaze, “…it wasn’t a good place to be, and I left him there. I need to go back and find him.”
Ellie bit her lip again. She wanted to say that he wouldn’t be there. That no child that young could survive on their own, even if they’d had a good start in life, which these two obviously hadn’t. She said nothing, because the girl needed something to believe in. It was at that moment, right then as she watched the girl’s face turn from catatonic exhaustion to angry resolve, that she knew she had given up too soon on her own child. With a surge of heat that seemed to run through her body and electrify her, she sat up, energised, and grabbed the girl by both shoulders.
“Snap out of it,” she told her with a gentle shake, “we can get through this. We can get out of here and we can find them.”
“How?” Jessica asked, looking up at her with something resembling hope breaking through the tiredness. Just then the door opened and Pauline stood there, wearing a curious look as she took in the two of them locked in their intense conversation.
“Maybe Pauline can help us,” Ellie said hopefully.
THIRTEEN
Captain Palmer walked through the woods behind their large house with Major Downes. The two men had a respect for each other that had grown to be something resembling a friendship, but each was closely committed to their tasks and didn’t lose time on frivolities. That said, both understood that taking the time to k
eep themselves sane was just as important as staying fit and healthy.
They had taken their breakfast together, enjoying the wholesome goodness of warm, fresh bread to accompany the eggs and the meagre ration of a single slice of bacon, and at the invitation of Downes, Palmer had joined him to investigate the reports of deer seen close to the house. Hunting animals with military weaponry may not have been sporting, but meat was meat and they had little time to observe the niceties. Downes, much to Smiffy’s sullen disgust, had borrowed his stolen soviet sniper rifle and loaned the tank captain his own MP5 so that neither of their shots would be heard far away. The pretence of hunting deer was no fallacy, but Downes wanted Palmer well away from any other ears before he told him the facts he had yet to share with anyone outside of his own patrol. Those men could be trusted to keep their mouths shut, as could Palmer, he suspected, but the man was under a lot of other conflicting pressures and his reaction was less than a certainty.
“How are we looking for winter?” Downes asked, hoping that Palmer would suggest that their current position was untenable.
“We seem to have broken the back of it,” he said almost happily, “if we can just get through the worst of this winter, then we should be well on our way to rebuilding.”
Downes kept his voice low and his eyes ahead, as the intelligence regarding the deer was genuine.
“Given the choice,” he said carefully, “would you want to rejoin any other units left alive?”
Palmer stopped and looked directly at the SAS Major.
“Who and where?” Palmer shot back, seeing through the uncharacteristically clumsy attempt at hypothesis.
Downes took one look at the younger man’s face and decided not to lie to him. He just had to trust that he would do the right thing with the full facts.
“Inner Hebrides. Part of the Doomsday protocol was for special forces to take as many surviving members of government as possible to a safe location.”
Toy Soldiers Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 72
