by Devon Ford
~
Steve looked at the three men with him. He pointed first to himself and then pointed straight forwards through the exit. He pointed to the next man and pointed left, the man after and pointed right.
He burst through the door, opening the clasp first then gripping his weapon as he used his shoulder to widen the gap. Spraying the gun positions from the rear on full auto he carried on stepping forwards. Behind him, the others came out spraying and within seconds the fight was over.
And they had won.
Richards, wounded but too enraged to feel the pain, saw his nemesis lower his weapon and walk forwards. He saw Steve shout but didn’t hear the words, and simply lay still planning his next move. His final act of vengeance.
Rising to his feet, he heard shouts of alarm.
~
Steve stood at the top of the stone steps, but in the dusk not the dawn as his recurring dream had been. He saw faces in the crowd smiling at him. He saw people he recognized, people he didn’t know as well as those he knew well.
Lizzie shouldered her way through the front rank and ran to him. He dropped his rifle into the dirt and gripped her tightly in an embrace which seemed to convey everything he felt. His gratitude for her saving his life, his fears and worries of the last months living under the tyrannical rule of a madman, his relief that it was all, finally, over.
Just then a scream sounded, followed by a cry of alarm, and he turned to look up at Richards pointing a gun at him.
The gun raised in slow motion. He saw the barrel rise, was powerless to do anything about it, and stood transfixed by the black circle of the business end of the gun and waited for the flash.
Unlike in his recurring nightmare, he didn’t wait for the flash. He closed his eyes and accepted his fate, believing that he had achieved something worthwhile. He almost welcomed his death, as though martyrdom could wash away all the blood on his hands and erase the memory of the terrible things he had seen and done.
He saw no flash, but he heard the bang.
SIEGE PART 2
The opening of any attack is always assumed to be big. An overwhelming show of force, the launching of an offensive designed to force the enemy into death or submission.
This attack followed a different script.
Two lone figures wandered staggering into view on the road. Betraying the alertness and concentration of Claude in the watchtower who had the smallest of angles in his favour, the radio crackled to life seconds before Dan saw them on the road.
He assumed that the fort would have seen the approach sooner, but he had no time to question their silence.
From the distance they were seen at, and judging by the rate at which they walked, he guessed they would be there inside of three minutes.
“Should we sound the alarm?” Leah asked, cool and collected on the outside but screaming inside.
“Not yet,” Dan replied. “They could be from the farm.” Ash whined at his side as though he knew that Dan didn’t wholly believe his own words.
~
The two men didn’t speak as they trudged down the road. Chris gasped when the town walls came into view, and fumbled with his left hand. Simon watched what he did, trying to work out a logical reason in his sleep-starved brain as to why he had sticky tape on the hand he pulled from his pocket. Walking towards what he thought was safe as though in a waking dream filled with torment, the questions bouncing around in his head couldn’t hold his concentration long enough to materialise into words.
Chris’ eyes stayed resolutely on the gates. He had a job to do. He had a destiny. Everything was Dan’s fault and nobody could stop him but Chris. He only knew that to stop him hurting anyone else, he had to follow his instructions.
“It’s his fault,” he mumbled, waking Simon from the trance he had lapsed back into.
“What?” he said, more confused than questioning.
“It’s Dan’s fault. Everything is,” Chris replied in an emotionless voice.
“What did he do?” Simon asked, out of curiosity more than reason, not fully remembering who Dan was or what he had done to be blamed.
“It’s his fault,” Chris said again, not even understanding his own logic but merely repeating the same mantra he had tattooed on his brain for weeks.
Simon thought, which was almost impossible as his brain had given up making the connections it used to.
“Dan was good to me,” he said. The statement was almost a question as he spoke it aloud uncertainly.
“He… He saved me?” he finished.
Chris stopped walking.
“It’s his fault,” he said with tears in his eyes. “My baby died and it’s his fault.”
Simon stopped and looked at him.
“But he was good to me,” he said, slightly more sure of his answer this time.
A shout came from the shapes of the people above the gateway, above the archway blocked by the heavy wooden doors. Neither of the men responded, both regarding each other uncertainly.
Simon grabbed the heavy coat Chris wore by the chest with both hands and pulled him towards his face.
“He was good to me!” he said savagely, like an aggressive drunk with no idea why he was angry. Chris’ hands came up to his face, and Simon saw something. He didn’t know what it was, and couldn’t make sense of it, but he knew – more like felt – that it was horribly, terribly wrong.
Chris’ left palm held a switch with a faint red light under the letters A/C.
His right hand gripped a silver ball tightly, the sticky tape now gone.
Something else felt wrong, and Simon struggled against Chris’ weak hands to pull down the zip. His senses returned to him, only slightly, but enough to recognize what he saw. The term ‘suicide vest’ sprang into his mind, recalled from a news bulletin from a different life, and he let go.
Turning back to the gate, he tried to shout a warning but no words came. Chris shoved him hard, using his shoulder to drive him to the ground, and ran for the gate.
He ran, although shambled would have been a better description. Reaching the gateway, he looked up and saw the face above him.
Drawing in his ragged breath he yelled, “It’s your fault,” and released the pressure in his right hand.
~
Dan saw the two men approaching. He saw them stop, and saw the taller man grab the smaller one by the chest. He saw the smaller man shove the other to the ground and run, as though injured or drunk, towards him.
Leah wasted no time, nor did she wait for permission. Turning and raising her weapon towards the sea she took careful aim and fired a single shot. Her bullet hit the bell in the nearby tower, only a glancing blow but enough for the metallic sound to ring out. That sound picked up in volume and intensity as the boy posted below it hauled on the rope with all his might. The alarm was raised, and the townspeople would now be scrambling to their positions of either safety or defence.
As the bell began to ring, Dan leaned over and saw the face of Chris looking up at him. The savagery, the pure hatred on his face, made Dan feel cold inside. He could see military drab colours beneath a big coat, and as the words he shouted reached him he raised his own weapon and loosed a single shot.
The response to his shot, fired on pure instinct without any logic behind it, was answered with such destruction that he had no idea what had happened. The three satchel charges strapped to Chris’ chest detonated, only split seconds apart, but with the effect of one huge explosion.
As the bullet dropped Chris, its high-angled trajectory driving down through his shoulder and into his ribcage, he pitched backwards. The shaped charges, which a second before would have torn down the side of the archway, now projected upwards along the face of the wall.
Chris disintegrated. He didn’t blow apart, he simply vanished. One moment he was there, the next he wasn’t. In his place was a blossoming gout of dark black smoke.
The blast tore huge lumps of stone from the wall and shook a thousand years of compacted dust from
the crevices. Dan was blown backwards but the force of the explosion carried on vertically upwards, shaped by the ancient wall. Barely conscious and with such a high-pitched ringing in his ears, he lay on his back as everything turned white with the cascading dust which swirled in the wind. He replayed the scene in his head, frame by frame, seeing the horrific moment when a man who was his friend vanished in a cloud of red-tinted black smoke, dust and stone.
He had no idea how badly damaged he was, and his first thought was to search for Ash and Leah. All around him lumps of stone rained down. He was oblivious to the pain of those which hit him.
He shouted their names, unable to hear anything but the screeching in his ears and head as he tried to roll and blink away the grit in his eyes. The stench of the explosion stung his throat. The cloying, sickening chemical smell of the blast seemed to stick to everything.
Leah ran to him. He watched as she dropped to her knees in slow motion and shouted his name. He could read her lips, but could not hear the sound of her voice. Ash, tail tucked desperately between his legs and almost curling into a ball on his feet circled desperately, terrified of the noise and the sight of his master hurt. He was struck by the thought that Ash was lucky he had run with Leah to raise the alarm, as that put them both out of reach of the blast.
His mind raced like that, detached, as the world continued to move in silent slow motion around him under the incessant soundtrack of the ringing noise which seemed to ebb and flow in intensity.
Leah’s deft hands checked down his body, evidently finding nothing of any great concern, as she took hold of the tough loop on his vest at the base of his neck. With some difficulty, she dragged him clear of the rubble towards the stairs leading down.
Still unable to hear any words, he watched as she yelled orders and pointed people into position.
Dan, as much as he hated to admit it, would probably have to sit the rest of this one out.
~
Simon watched from fifty paces away as Chris ran to the gate. He heard a shot, then sat unmoving on the stony ground as the man he had just walked with disappeared in a maelstrom of destruction. The dust from the blast was snatched away by the wind, and he stared in horror as part of the wooden gateway fell inwards to leave a hole into the lightless interior.
Already in terrible physical condition, his body screamed at him from the hot pressure wave of the blast. Every internal organ seemed to have been rocked by the impossibly sharp crack of the explosion.
The explosion had served to return at least some of his understanding, but he still sat and stared at the carnage in front of him.
Fearing the small part of what had just happened that he could understand, he slowly struggled to his feet and began removing his clothes until he was certain he wasn’t a walking bomb as Chris had been. Logic and sense evaporated as the thick, black smoke began to clear, but Simon couldn’t comprehend that even his boots weren’t explosives. Stripping to a filthy t-shirt and underwear, his mind returned to the present.
The silence faded back into noise as the sound of a bell ringing frantically drifted to him on the wind. The wind changed direction, swirling in the ravine of the road, and the sound of the bell was replaced by the muted sound of a diesel engine.
~
Mitch made it to the ramparts first, with Pietro close behind him. Leah looked ashen, but her eyes ringed red with stone dust and tears.
Gaining the top step, he looked at the supine form of Dan, turned white by the same dust, and unconscious. Blood ran from his right ear, thickening and creeping down his neck as it mingled with the dust.
Turning to Pietro, the Russian seemed to understand Mitch’s question before it came. Snatching up the man on the floor, he turned around and began to descend the stairs with him held in his arms like a sleeping child.
“They bombed the gates!” Leah told him desperately. “They bombed the fucking gates, with a person!” she yelled, as though trying to make sense of what had just happened.
Mitch was not new to this concept. He had trained for hours, years even, to deal with bomb threats. Homemade grenades thrown over the walls of barracks in Northern Ireland. Rocket propelled grenade attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And suicide bombers.
The simple fact, with so few people left alive, that anyone would resort to such cruel and evil tactics shocked him but the process did not. He had seen it too many times.
He also knew that this would not be the only attack.
Running to the ramparts where, blessedly, only a small section of wall was down, he breathed an internal sigh of relief as the gun was still in place. Ten paces further away was where Dan had been, but the big machine gun still stood, and could still spit fire and death towards the enemy.
An enemy which now came.
Ripping away the tarpaulin, he wrenched back the huge handle to chamber a massive round into the breech and sighted along the long, perforated barrel to see a vehicle coming into view.
The sheer audacity of it made his blood boil.
They, the bastards, were attacking them using their own damned armoured truck. As the Foxhound lined up straight towards the gate, he put the start of the pressure on the firing switch and prepared to fire bursts of heavy calibre bullets into the approaching vehicle and the people jogging alongside it.
Just at that moment, before the firing pin hit the first round, another bullet on a different trajectory took the flesh off the top of his right shoulder.
~
“Hit,” said the Frenchman in the fort to Leo who stood over his shoulder.
“Good,” came the reply. “Keep them off that gun and our forces will walk through the door.
The sniper didn’t respond. He had his job, and anything showing on that rampart would be the next to take his bullet.
~
A clear kilometre away and late to the party due to a gross underestimation of the rough ground he had to cover, a solitary legionnaire finally crested the mountain top and took cover to observe the back of the watchtower. Waiting to regain his breath, he heard – felt – the sound of the explosion and knew he was far behind schedule.
Rushing, and ignoring his own safety for fear of displeasing his commanding officer, he kicked down the door to find the ground floor empty. Lowering his gun, he heard the sounds of creaking floorboards above and simply waited for the person to come into view. He fired a burst of rounds and watched in satisfaction as a body fell down the remaining steps. Exhausted, he slumped into a rocking chair to catch his breath before taking up overwatch.
Claude, for all his advancing years, moved like a cat. On hearing the door burst open two floors below him, he quietly shimmied down the external wooden ladder and circled back to the entrance.
The man sat down panting had no prelude to his death; had no indication that he was finished. The bullet entered the back of his head and exited through his eye socket, embedding itself into a thick wooden beam opposite.
“That’s my wife’s chair,” said Claude.
~
“Mitch!” screamed Leah from her prone position tucked under the lip of the wall as she tried to make herself as small as possible.
The soldier gritted his teeth and growled like an animal over and over as he tried to force the pain away. With his left hand clamped onto the gaping wound with blood seeping through his fingers, he shuffled himself into better cover as best he could. Leah crawled towards him, just as Ash barked and began to come to her.
“No!” she screamed, pointing towards the archway to the staircase. “Back!”
Ash, confused and scared, nonetheless did as he was told and slinked off down the steps.
Reaching behind her right shoulder she took out a compression bandage without looking, clamping the dressing pad with its coagulating power onto the wound and wrapping the elasticated bandage tightly over it and around the upper arm. Tying it off with the built-in tourniquet in seconds, the two locked eyes.
“I need the battery and the c
ommand wire,” he said to her, the pain evident on his face.
Nodding, Leah crawled over his towards the gun and retrieved the battery, sliding it towards him. Scrabbling with her hands in the dust and stone fragments she searched desperately for the copper wire. Just behind her right foot, a chunk of stone the size of an apple disappeared and it sounded to her like another explosion had gone off just behind her.
With a scream she withdrew into a tiny ball, her slung rifle scraping noisily on the stone. She stayed there, covering her head with both hands still clutching the copper wire.
“Sniper,” said Mitch pointlessly. “Got our range. Stay low,” he reassured her.
Slowly, mastering her fear, Leah began to crawl back to him. Two other shots sounded, the echoing crash of the supersonic metal hitting ancient stone reverberating around the ramparts and terrifying her.
Handing the wire to him, he carefully kept the copper away from the battery. Now came the hardest part.
“I need to know when the vehicle is at the flag,” he told her.
Nothing more needed to be said.
Turning her position around so she squatted in front of the wall, she popped up like a demented jack in the box and dropped immediately, a fraction of a second before the answering bullet flew in her direction. Another involuntary scream escaped her mouth and she huddled down, trying to control her breathing.
“Close,” she panted, voice cracking. “Not yet.”
“Change position,” Mitch said, his whole right arm now numb from the compression bandage and the gaping hole in his flesh underneath that.
Scraping herself three paces until she neared the gun, she stopped. To go further meant to go around the legs of the weapon, and that would expose her to the deadly fire.
Squatting in preparation again, she popped up.
