London Wild

by V. E. Shearman

  There was quite a number of fiddly little country roads in the area that Myajes wanted, and it didn’t help that he was so tired that his eyes sometimes got blurry when he tried to read the map and he had to wait for them to clear again before he could focus properly. More than once he found he had taken a wrong turning and had to backtrack to the previous turning before he was en route again.

  He was feeling a little bit frustrated when he arrived at his intended location. Fortunately, though, it hadn’t been as long a drive as he had thought, and despite all the errant twists and turns he had arrived just as his car’s chronometer was reading five minutes past five am.

  Although the road actually led directly to the place marked on his map as the army training camp, he thought it better to park a few hundred yards away around a bend so that he couldn’t be seen. He didn’t want someone coming up to him and telling him to move on before he had had a decent chance to snoop around.

  His first urges after stopping the engine were to just lean back in his seat and close his eyes for a moment and take a breather before stepping out into the cold night air. But he feared that if he succumbed to these desires he would be asleep in seconds.

  It was indeed a cold night, and the air had a damp feel to it, as if it was going to rain before too much longer. There was a gentle breeze, but Myajes hardly noticed it because the nearby trees shielded him from it. He made his way slowly and cautiously through the forest. According to the map, he was already on the army base, so if it existed it couldn’t be too far away.

  He found the army camp long before he actually saw it because of all the light the place was generating. This made it a lot easier to find in the otherwise unlit forest that seemed to surround him.

  Myajes shivered as he watched the camp, surprised a little at just how active it seemed to be this early in the morning. For now, though, he needed to decide whether or not this small camp really was the Cattery, and if it was, then what was his plan of action?

  There was a low fence marking its perimeter, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep him out if he felt he needed to get closer. Myajes watched the camp carefully from his vantage point, working out the function of each of the buildings, all the time doubtful that this was the prison camp he was searching for.

  There were four buildings in a line towards one side of the camp. Like all the buildings in the camp, they were pre-fabricated and all identical except for some personal touches that had been added after the original installation. These buildings had to be the barracks.

  Another larger building had a parked truck in front of it and soldiers were currently helping to unload it, taking boxes into the building. This was where most of the activity seemed to be taking place. The purpose of the building wasn’t clear to Myajes at first, nor could he see what was written on the sides of the boxes they were carrying. When the soldiers started moving kegs into the building, though, Myajes decided that it was obviously the camp’s mess.

  Three other buildings had to be the officers’ quarters. They were the smallest buildings in the camp but overflowing with personal touches. There were curtains in the windows, flowers in the gardens; even just the fact that they had gardens made it clear what the buildings were.

  There were two other buildings. One had Quartermasters painted on its side, and there was no reason for Myajes to doubt that that was what it was. The other building seemed to be quite the mystery. There was nothing Myajes could see about it to tell its function. He was sure, though, that it couldn’t be big enough to hold all the Herbaht who had been taken prisoner.

  It certainly looked more like an army camp than a prison camp. He noticed that those unloading the truck were wearing Elite Guard uniforms, so even if he wasn’t in the right place he had at least found the right unit. He sniffed the air; if there were Herbaht in the camp he ought to be able to smell them. Nothing. Well, perhaps a vague residue; there had been Herbaht in the area recently, but obviously not in the camp itself. Chances were that they had chanced upon the camp by accident and left while they could. The scent was coming from somewhere behind the camp.

  Myajes sighed. He guessed he had been wrong after all. He started to head back to his car, thinking about his bed, when another thought struck him. If the Elite Guard were being trained here, the prison camp might not be too far away.

  After a moment of fighting the urge to return to the hotel and get some sleep, he returned to his previous vantage point again. The truck driver, a man in a regular army uniform, now seemed to be arguing with one of the Elite officers. Meanwhile the men, seeming to be oblivious to this, continued to unload the truck.

  The scent of Herbaht on the air seemed a little stronger than before, but that had to be just his imagination, unless those others were still in the area. Maybe the Patriarch had sent two or more rescue missions and the other had assumed the same thing. No, that was unlikely. The Patriarch would have let him know. Maybe there were a couple of his people taking a walk through the woods; they might not even have known where they were in relation to the army camp. On the other hand, they might have seen something that would be of some use to him.

  He made his way carefully through the trees and around the back of the camp, following the source of the weak scent as best he could. He froze at every noise, every broken twig or cry of wildlife. It took him a good few minutes to skirt the perimeter and then make his way more directly towards the scent. He was painfully aware that he might as easily meet a patrol out from the camp as the Herbaht whose scent he was chasing.

  About a hundred yards beyond the army camp through thick forest, he came to a large metal fence topped with barbed wire and covered in any number of small touch-sensitive nodes that would obviously set off an alarm if he tried to climb it, assuming the thing wasn’t electrified in the first place. The fence seemed to snake through the forest, zigzagging about trees, and at regular intervals there were cameras pointing directly at the fence in such a way that every inch seemed to be covered.

  Myajes didn’t allow himself to get in front of any of the cameras, but then he didn’t need to get any closer. Just beyond the fence was where the forest ended, and beyond that was an area that had been totally cleared of all tree matter. And there, in the middle of it all, surrounded on all sides by at least one hundred yards of clear ground, was a well-lit, large wooden wall that had to be the prison camp. The scents he had been chasing were clearly coming from inside it. Indeed, the scent was quite strong now and suggested that there could be hundreds, even thousands of Herbaht behind those walls.

  Things began to add up. That army camp wasn’t built for training. It was a front to keep away the curious, and it doubled as a holding area for soldiers not on duty at the prison; no wonder it was such a small place. He should have guessed earlier. There was no parade ground, no rifle range, and no assault course, not at all the sort of setup a training base should have. Myajes decided that he had probably just been too tired to realize this earlier.

  Myajes continued to examine the prison, being careful not to get too close to the fence. Anyone attacking the place would have to climb the fence first, triggering an alarm. They would then have to cover a hundred-yard gap to reach the prison camp itself. That would give those under attack plenty of time to respond. Even now while it was dark, there was no real advantage, as the area surrounding the prison camp was kept lit up as clear as day, thanks to the careful positioning of a myriad number of floodlights. Whoever was in charge of the place was taking no chances.

  Myajes couldn’t see the camp itself, but he could see the large eighteen-foot-high walls that surrounded it. The top third of these walls had little spikes scattered all over them that looked like they would make good handholds if someone was trying to climb the wall. Myajes recognized them as yet another touch-sensitive alarm system. It seemed that there was no such thing as too much security.

  The walls themselves appeared to be made of wood, but the design was too uniform for it to be real wood. There would be no k
notholes he could peek through, assuming he could get over the fence and across the lit area without setting off every alarm in the camp in the first place. Myajes guessed that the surface of the walls might even have been slippery, to make climbing them that much harder.

  And if what he had already seen wasn’t enough, there were the towers. Two towers, half as high again as the walls of the prison camp and positioned directly opposite each other, each had three men in them, one of whom was on constant lookout. These towers each had their own large searchlight, though neither was currently on. The area was so well-lit that they were probably intended for emergencies or to pick out individual targets. Each tower could clearly see three hundred and sixty degrees to the forest on all sides, with their vision only obscured by the other tower. They also had a very good overview of the prison camp itself, in case they should need it.

  Myajes sighed. How was he going to be able to do this? He could climb a tree to get over the fence easily enough, but he didn’t think it would be possible for him to get any closer to the prison without those in the towers seeing him. He so wanted to check the defenses behind the walls. Getting in was only half of the problem. What if he couldn’t get out again afterwards? Not knowing what might be waiting for him behind those walls made the success of this endeavor less and less likely.

  He had originally intended to walk around the camp, to have a good look at every angle, but it was so well-lit and so apparently impossible to get in, and he was feeling so tired that he didn’t really see the need. True, the opposite side of the camp from where he stood might hold some secret he hadn’t yet seen, but he was pretty sure the front doors of the prison camp were there, and he doubted he would be allowed to just walk in.

  Then a thought struck him. Perhaps he ought to give the idea more thought again in the morning. But it seemed to him that with all the defenses around the camp, walking in through the front gates really was about all he could do. He didn’t hold much hope for success, but he could see no other way. He needed an Elite Guard uniform and documents, of course. There was an army camp with many tempting soldiers not too far off, but if he killed someone it would be noticed. If he broke into the quartermaster’s, that too would be noticed.

  Only one thing occurred to him: the Patriarch used to collect uniforms from the different types of soldiers he had hunted when he was younger. It was possible that he had an Elite Guard uniform Myajes could borrow. With luck, it might even fit him without too large an adjustment.

  Myajes sighed; he wasn’t going to get a lot of sleep during the day after all. With that thought he noticed that the first rays of the morning sun were slowly turning the sky red. He didn’t have long before he lost the cover of night altogether. It was time to get back to his car, get back to his hotel and maybe grab an hour or two of sleep before going to visit the Patriarch.

  8

  The Hero

  Heroes throughout history have been people who were simply in the right place at the right time. Or they did something that made them popular with the population at large. Or they were made heroes by the establishment for political reasons.

  Charles ‘Slim’ Dorris was a political hero set up by the authorities so that they might have a figurehead in their fight against the Herbaht. He was often characterized as an ordinary Londoner who had just happened to be in the right place at the right time and just happened to have the strength of mind to do something about it.

  The story went that he was out shopping on his own, coincidentally carrying a laser pistol for self-defense as so many people did these days. There were also soldiers in the shopping center, Elite, and they were performing spot checks on the shoppers. There was nothing unusual about that; soldiers could often be seen running spot checks in crowded areas. It was rare for them to catch anyone, though. Herbaht didn’t like crowds of humans. Any Herbaht there would be in disguise, but that disguise wouldn’t stand up to the close scrutiny of someone trained to actively look for it. The powder they used to cover their stripes felt different to the touch than skin did. The contact lenses that they wore to hide their natural eye color made their eyes look dead, and in order to house retractable claws their fingers were slightly chubbier, not to mention that their teeth were dead giveaways. If that wasn’t enough, the soldiers carried kits that they used to take and analyze small quantities of blood or saliva so they could double check if they had doubts.

  The soldiers worked their way systematically through the crowd, which had started to queue up to be inspected, as trying to go round the soldiers would only look suspicious. Slowly they approached a group of three Herbaht. They seemed to be standing by a shop window, not joining the queue and discussing something between them. Then it was too late for them. The soldiers caught sight of the group and a couple had left the checkpoint and had started to walk towards them. The Herbaht, when cornered, would usually try to fight their way out. They would shoot at the soldiers, take civilians hostage, anything they could just to get away. These three could easily have killed the two approaching soldiers and made their escape that way. The street was filled with potential hostages. At least, they could have if they were armed, and who ever heard of a Herbaht going unarmed? These three, though, turned tail and ran. The two soldiers didn’t even miss a beat; they gave chase, shouting at the three to stop and surrender.

  Fearing for their lives, many of the civilians moved out of the way of both the runners and the chasers. Some hit the ground, and some ducked into shops or moved up against shop windows. A few even stepped out into the road that paralleled the shops. The screech of vehicles stopping as their automatic collision sensors activated filled the air for a minute or two, and then some of the drivers started to shout at those who had stepped into the road until they too caught sight of the chase.

  With so many stopped cars, the Herbaht could easily have grabbed one and ordered the driver to take them to safety. But they seemed to ignore the traffic and the cowering civilians whom they could’ve grabbed as hostages as they ran. The soldiers had a simple policy concerning hostages held by Herbaht. The Herbaht ate human meat, so the hostages should be considered dead already. But it was one thing to have such a policy and quite another to expect flesh and blood soldiers not to hesitate in such a situation.

  Another thing the runners would have done had they been real Herbaht was to split up. Three different chases would give each a better chance of escaping. Every tenth shop would have an alleyway beside it that led down to the loading bays behind the shops. They could be out of sight from the pursuers for vital seconds. Yet they rejected these possible escape routes without even a glance. Instead they ran headlong towards where Charles was busy looking in shop windows, pretending not to notice the hubbub and panic all around him.

  Some of the civilians interviewed by the newspaper networks afterwards claimed that they seemed to have been heading towards him on purpose, though obviously it was all just the heat of the moment that made them think that.

  Up until this moment, not a shot had been fired. With the Herbaht’s reputation of being deadly dangerous and all the civilians keeping out of the way, most might have expected one or two of the soldiers pursuing to at least have tried a shot at the fleeing figures. The soldiers hadn’t so much as raised a weapon and even seemed to have been chasing the three at quite a leisurely pace, as if they didn’t want to risk actually catching up.

  Charles supposedly suddenly caught sight of the three fleeing figures in the reflection of the shop window he was looking at. There was no way he could have seen the soldiers pursuing the three in the reflection at the same time. There was no way he could have known they were Herbaht. He had supposedly been so intent on the contents of the window, and the Herbaht had been well disguised; nevertheless, he turned from the window with the laser pistol already in his hand.

  One fell instantly as he fired; a second started to swerve, and a third ran into the road where he tripped over the prostrate body of a cowering civilian. Charles shot the swerving one
second and then turned to the third to see the civilian throwing punches and kicks at him. The soldiers actually had to rescue the third one from the irate civilian before he got beaten to death.

  No one noticed or cared that the beam Charles had fired wouldn’t have stunned them, let alone killed them. No one seemed to care that he had only hit two of the cats. They accredited him with all three anyway. He was a hero.

  Within minutes a wagon appeared to remove the bodies, supposedly to take them to the morgue. No one seemed to notice that it arrived so quickly that it must’ve been waiting close by. The third was held under careful restraint, more to protect him from the civilians than the civilians from him. There was already a black eye forming around his left eye, and the bruise on the same side cheek could’ve told anyone that this wasn’t a Herbaht wearing makeup, regardless of what the authorities later claimed. Fortunately they got the third in a patrol car and away from the scene before anyone did begin to question it.

  They were definitely cats. The authorities proclaimed it so. And after a little bit of adjustment and a few edits to what the shopping center’s security cameras had shot, making sure there were no closeups of the cats, that the bruises were painted out and several other subtleties, the tapes were played to the population of the country across every network the following morning.

  Charles had become a hero overnight. He had been positioned so that he was standing right underneath a security camera to ensure that the whole country would be able to join in his triumph that following day. From what he had heard since, it seemed that even the Herbaht had been fooled by the deception. That hadn’t been the intention, but it didn’t hurt his situation. So long as the population in and around London was fooled, that was all that mattered.

  As for the three Herbaht, the third needed a little bit of medical attention for his eye and the other two returned to their regiments the following day. A week later, as a final test of how well the trick had worked, two of the three were part of another checkpoint in the same shopping center where the chase had happened. No one recognized them in their uniforms. They were just two more soldiers.