Children's Crusade ac-9

by Scott Andrews

  I hit the tiles hard and slid forward on a tide of my own blood.

  All I could hear was gunfire and screaming.

  And then, as silence fell inside my head, Mac whispered one word, clear and calm.

  "Gotcha."

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I hear the volley of gunfire and the sudden change from yelling to screaming as I pass the threshold of the Lords.

  Ahead of me I can see the mass of children pouring past the Queen's chair, waving their weapons in a frenzy. Suddenly the tide turns and they back away and turn to run towards us. The children at the back are taken by surprise and some fall to the ground to be trampled by the mass panic that sweeps over them.

  I try to wave them down, to get them to stop and regroup, but they're like a herd of panicked cattle — unthinking and unstoppable. Wilkes pushes me hard, flinging me onto the front bench, saving me from being trampled in the rush.

  When the stampede has passed, I pull myself off the bench and see Wilkes picking himself up across from me. We can hear the commotion of the retreating mob behind us, and the groans of the injured and dying ahead.

  "Put that bloody knife away and pick up a real weapon," I hiss at Wilkes, annoyed by his sword. He nods reluctantly and pulls a handgun from his pocket with his left hand, although he keeps the sword raised in his right. We advance either side of the throne into the corridor beyond.

  The long, wide room is strewn with bodies. The air is thick with smoke so it's hard to make out the far end, where Cooper and his men must be. The light is streaming through the windows behind them, casting their shadows into the smoke, making them seem ghostly.

  I turn to Wilkes.

  "Find someone, anyone, and go around. Get behind them."

  But before he can move there is a cry from the far end and the sounds of a struggle. The shadows dance and writhe in the smoke, there is a brief burst of gunfire, then footsteps on the tiled floor as someone comes running towards us.

  "Stay right there!" I yell. The running man stops dead as the smoke begins to clear.

  As the scene fades into view I first make out Cooper, standing about a third of the way to us, holding a handgun. He stares at me and snarls, a cornered animal. Then behind him I gradually make out four of his men, kneeling with their fingers laced behind their heads. Standing behind and above them are Green, Jack, Jools and some of the other women from the Lords, who have managed to outflank them.

  "You're trapped, Cooper," I say, sighting my gun carefully on his chest. "There's nowhere for you to run. Your army's defeated, your prisoners are freed, your Palace is on fire."

  He looks left and right desperately, searching for an escape route, but there is nothing. Then he looks down at his feet, at the dead and dying, and he barks a short, humourless laugh.

  Quick as a flash he drops to the floor and grabs one of the shot children, dragging them to him and then pulling the body to the side wall.

  I nearly scream as I realise that the bloody mess he's dragging is Lee.

  My knees give way and I crash to the floor as I cry out. It sounds like someone else. Surely that scream of anguish can't have come from me?

  In a moment Cooper is sitting with his back to the wall, legs wide, with Lee slumped back against his chest as a human shield.

  My breath comes in short, ragged gasps and I try to focus through my tears. Lee is still breathing, I can tell that, but he's been shot multiple times, across the chest and abdomen. He is literally soaked in blood from head to toe.

  His head lolls back against Cooper's chest and his eyes open, rolling wildly, confused and in shock.

  Cooper brings his gun up, presses it against Lee's temple, and stares at me over my dying lover's shoulder.

  "He's still alive, Kate," he says, no longer shouting."There's a chance you could save him. Get him to St Thomas's quickly and you never know."

  Lee's eyes focus on me and his face forms a question. Then he looks down at the forty or so dead and dying children that litter the floor before him and his mouth hangs open.

  "What did I do?" he whispers as he surveys the carnage. He looks up at me with eyes clouded by tears and blood. "Matron, what did I do?"

  I hear myself sob. This isn't the resolute warrior Lee has become. He just sounds like a frightened child.

  I take a deep breath and force myself to take control. I slowly rise to my feet.

  "Okay," I shout. "If you let him go, I promise you can walk out of here."

  "Like fuck he can!" It's Jools, shouting from the far room, bringing her gun to bear on Cooper. "That rat bastard is mine."

  "Julia, darling," says Cooper. "I didn't know you cared."

  He takes the gun away from Lee's head for an instant and fires a single shot towards the far room. The gun is back at Lee's temple before Jools' lifeless corpse hits the ground. Jack cries out in alarm. There are shouts and screams both ahead and behind me.

  Lee's looking left and right, starting to focus, starting to get a sense of his situation.

  His eyes focus on the far wall and he seems to study the painting that dominates it. I glance right to see what he's looking at and realise it's a huge representation of the death of Nelson, who lies cradled in Hardy's arms much as Lee lies slumped in Cooper's.

  He smiles, and blood bubbles from his lips. Then he turns and looks at me.

  For a moment I'm back in Manchester, staring into the eyes of my brother, seeing the realisation of his own death so clear.

  Lee mouths words, trying to tell me something, but I can't make out what it is.

  I cry out. "No!"

  But his awful sad smile widens.

  Then he lifts his right hand, grabs Cooper's gun, still tight against his skull, slips his finger inside the trigger guard and pulls.

  There is a single shot.

  Then many.

  Chapter Thirty

  They counted twenty-three dead soldiers, forty-six dead children and three young women in their final sweep of the Palace of Westminster. Plus Lee, of course.

  Some of the soldiers' bodies had been horribly mutilated. One had been literally torn apart. Green chose to believe it was the women from the lords who did that, not the children.

  He organised teams to recover all of the bodies from the building — all their dead, that is. They left the snatchers to burn, and buried their dead in Parliament Square.

  When the mob finally burnt itself out they gathered in the road outside, dazed by what they'd done, slowly coming down like clubbers after a great night out. Green addressed the crowd, telling them about the school, offering a home to all those who wanted to come with him. Anyone who wanted to return to the communities they were snatched from could come back with them too, he promised to arrange safe transport home.

  A bunch of the comfort women elected to come with them, but a group of nine children refused to come along, insisting that they could look after themselves, distrustful of all adults even still. He let them go.

  The fire spread more slowly than expected, but the entire Parliament complex was ablaze by the time they loaded the remaining children back into the lorries and set off for St Mark's through the snow.

  As they reached the edge of the city two of them parted company with the main convoy. Jack led a small team to Heathrow where they spent three busy days siphoning off aircraft fuel, laying charges, planning the biggest explosion since Salisbury. When they pulled out of the airport, they left a huge conflagration behind them. All the planes burned, the runways a mass of unuseable craters. Nobody would be flying children to the US from there ever again, and neither could the American Church land and start again. In the week that followed, they took care of Gatwick and Luton before returning to St Mark's.

  Wilkes and Ferguson, who had taken off back to Nottingham once the battle of Westminster was over, had promised the Rangers would take similar steps at Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds airports. Obviously there were still local and military airfields the church could use, but they agreed this s
ent a strong message and was worth the effort.

  Jane took no part in any of this. She sat silent, comatose, her eyes fixed on some distant point. She let herself be led into one of the lorries, compliant, like a puppet or a doll.

  When they got back to the school she took to her bed and stayed there. She would eat when she was fed, sleep when the candle was blown out, wake when they opened her curtains.

  But that was all.

  It was as if she wasn't even in there anymore.

  Epilogue

  Caroline opened her good eye and winced. It was hard to divorce the pounding in her head from the pounding on the door of her small room. The walls glowed orange, lit by the dying embers of the fire that kept ice from forming on the inside of the windows on these long, cold nights.

  Even through her hangover, Caroline knew instantly what was occurring.

  Someone was having a baby.

  "Okay," she shouted wearily. "I'm coming." The hammering stopped and she heard footsteps scurry off down the corridor outside.

  She rubbed her head and reached for the glass of water that she always kept on her bedside cabinet. She gulped it all down, wishing there were still such things as aspirin or Nurofen.

  "What's going on?" murmured Jack, rolling over and nuzzling into her neck.

  "The baby's coming," she whispered. "You go back to sleep."

  He mumbled something and rolled back again, pulling the blankets tight to his neck. Within moments he was snoring softly.

  Caroline reached across and stroked his hair tenderly before bracing herself and swinging her legs out of the warm cocoon of the bed into the freezing night air. The rug protected her feet from the worst of the cold as she pulled her jeans and sweater on. Her breath misted the air in front of her face as she added central heating to the list of things she would wish for if she ever found a lamp with a genie in it.

  She sat back on the edge of the bed, pulled on her slippers, then hurried to the door and emerged into the first floor landing of Fairlawne, the new home of St Mark's.

  The school she had returned to six months previously was very different to the one she had left two years before that.

  It wasn't just that they were in a different building now; the sudden influx of new children had shifted the balance of the place. The easy cameraderie she remembered from their time at Groombridge was gone. There were new cliques and new gangs, new classes, new troublemakers and new favourites.

  New names on the memorial wall, too.

  With so many of the adults dead, they had too few staff to deal with the new intake. Although a bunch of the women who had been kept prisoner in Westminster turned out to be naturals, they couldn't replace what the school had lost. Green seemed to be in twenty places at once — breaking up fights, teaching classes, organising the repatriation of rescued kids, tending to the wounded and damaged. He was magnificent, holding the school together almost single-handed.

  It felt as if the whole school were in a kind of shock, perhaps from the children's realisation of their own savagery during the battle of Parliament, or perhaps from the loss of so many friends and teachers.

  Caroline felt it too. St Mark's was holding its breath, unable to relax, waiting for something to happen.

  The winter had been unbelievably long, harsh and fractious. The fireplaces burnt twenty-four hours a day and the snow seemed never ending. They'd had little contact with the other communities they'd befriended. Travel was arduous in those conditions, so they became isolated. The whole school suffered from cabin fever. Tempers were short and food was scarce. There were so many new mouths to feed that the supplies they had laid in were inadequate, so they ended up slaughtering more of their livestock than they could afford. Caroline knew that by the time spring arrived they would have depleted all their meagre resources. They would have to work hard all summer — and pray God it was a good harvest — to lay in enough to see them through another winter.

  The rumour had spread that the world was entering a nuclear winter caused by some distant cataclysm; another Chernobyl or a nuclear skirmish. But even as the winter entered its sixth bitter month Caroline was sure spring would come again; the snow would melt, the blossom would appear, the flowers would bloom. They had to.

  On one of the very few times the school had been visited by traders from Hildenborough they heard that the Abbot had made his final broadcast, murdered on air by a Brit. The Church had been defeated at home and abroad. They were safe again.

  Even in the cold darkness, some children were congregating on the landing as Caroline hurried to the birthing room, woken by the screams, emerging to see what was going on. She ushered them back to their beds.

  She paused of the threshold of the room, disturbed by the noises coming from within.

  Ever since she'd arrived here, Caroline had spent at least an hour a day in this room, sitting beside the bed, reading out loud. Mostly Jane Austen, keeping it light. Sometimes, less often, she had just sat and talked. Once she had confessed to the murder of John Keegan and broken down in tears. As she'd cried into the eiderdown she'd felt a hand on her hair, stroking it softly. It was the only sign of understanding she'd had in all that time.

  Matron hadn't spoken a word since that day in Westminster.

  Now Caroline stood outside Matron's room and heard her screaming her way through labour. It felt odd to hear any noise coming from that mouth.

  She stepped inside. Matron was sitting up in the bed, legs splayed, face red, breathing hard. She reached out her hand when she saw Caroline enter, so she stepped forward and held out her hand in turn. Matron grasped it tight and pulled the girl to her side. They stayed like that, hands locked firm, as Mrs Atkins oversaw the birth.

  All the noises that Matron vocalised were primal. They were roars and cries and groans and screams. Not one word passed her lips — no fucks or shits or Jesus holy motherfucking Christs.

  It was an animal birth.

  The baby was born as the first light of dawn crept in the window.

  Caroline held the child as Mrs Atkins cut the cord. She gasped in wonder at the tiny, blue screaming thing in her hands. So light and so angry at being removed from the nice warm place that was all it had ever known.

  She laid the newborn on Matron's naked chest and pulled the sheets up to protect it from the cold. It fell silent immediately, eyes open, comforted by the warmth of its mother's skin and sound of her heartbeat.

  "It's a boy," said Caroline.

  Matron looked up at Caroline and smiled through her tears.

  "I know," she said. "His name's Lee."

  Later, Caroline walked out of the room into the half-lit hallway and told the lingering children the good news before ushering them back to bed.

  She walked down the stairs and out the front door to watch the sun creep over the snow covered treeline. Despite all the losses of the last few years, all the terrible things she had done and had done to her, the hardship of their lives and the endless winter that had enshrouded them for so long, she knew, with absolute certainty, that she was where she belonged, safe and loved.

  As her eyes filled with tears, she caught the first faint hint of spring on the air.

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