The Leah Chronicles_Andorra

by Devon C. Ford

He began to vent his frustration by conducting almost constant ‘random’ checks on cars, forcing the occupants out with the threat of violence if they didn’t comply and finding any reason to make arrests or seize their property. This got him noticed, and not in the best way, so he was moved into investigative policing in the area of drugs and exploitation. He enjoyed this for two years until boredom set in once more, and he fixed his sights on promotion which saw him rotate a year in all departments until he changed his mind after being seduced by the heroism of an incident.

  He was working in the community role for one of the seven parishes when an incident involving a worker at the hydroelectric power station had been declared a hostage situation. The man, gone insane by all accounts, had taken his gun to work and held his supervisor captive. Tomau had been lucky enough to be placed near to the action on the inner cordon, and his eyes grew wide in awe of the small team who advanced to end the situation.

  The Grup d'Intervenció Policia d'Andorra, or GIPA, stalked past him in full SWAT loadout with the badges of the diving eagle emblazoned on their shoulders. He had never seen anything like it in real life, in fact in his lifetime the GIPA had rarely been called out to such an incident, and from that moment he was in love with the idea of being one of them. In the aftermath of the incident, which had resulted in the man being arrested peacefully with no loss of life, he had sidled up to two members of the group and asked how he could join.

  “You are in luck,” one of them told him, eyeing his strong physique, “we will have an opening in three months when our boss is promoted.”

  Tomau returned to his commanding officer and submitted his application, passing each form of test required of him and facing down three other contenders for the available spot in the physical tests which were the final hurdle. He aced them, even shooting with a one hundred per cent accuracy score, and was admitted to the elite.

  The next year was spent on training for various situations, something which the team did amongst themselves, and was interspersed with other duties like prisoner escorts and the execution of raids to support the investigation teams. At the peak of tourist season, they rode around the small towns in the valleys to snuff out trouble before it erupted, but the thing that Tomau found here that he hadn’t found anywhere else was acceptance; he was part of something special.

  But he grew bored again in his years doing the same things, and when he had elevated himself to become the third in command of the GIPA, the world ended. Of the GIPA, of the police force entirely in fact, he was the only survivor of the plague that swept across the world. His career aspirations dashed against the rocks, Tomau found a new niche to carve out for himself and became the protector of the survivors. A kind of government re-established itself, with new members of the General Council being voted in by the survivors, both native and visiting, and order began to take hold once more. The survivors had condensed into two of the parishes to prevent them being spread out, and organised work to strip the other towns of resources and to lay the dead to rest. Their small agricultural sector grew with as much land as possible being reclaimed to plant crops and raise livestock, and when forays outside of their valleys were required it was Tomau they called upon to keep them safe. Over the first year, many had come to the country and were welcomed, but with each person passing through the borders unchecked, Tomau grew ever-increasingly suspicious.

  He made no attempts to hide his sullen discomfort from the council, which consisted of only three people, and when he found one of these newcomers in an abandoned parish checking houses for new clothes, he dragged him to their town square and executed him for theft to serve as a message for anyone who did not abide by his laws.

  The townspeople were outraged, and he was stripped of his weapons before being locked in a room whilst the council decided his fate. They bowed to public opinion, agreeing that to execute the murderer would make them as godless as he was, but agreed that they could not keep him there as a prisoner.

  They exiled him, providing him with food, a vehicle and his weapons as they released his bonds at the southern border with Spain. He was told never to return, and he didn’t. Not for three years when his return sparked fear among the peaceful people of Andorra.

  The Day-to-Day

  Leah rose early as she always did, fighting her way free of the sheets as her dog slept with all four paws in the air and his tongue lolling from his mouth as he snored, and dressed. She picked up her battered gun from where it rested on the hooks by the door to her room and woke up the animal to follow her outside.

  She responded to the greetings of the people, smiling as she always did at the growing population who felt safe and happy under her leadership, and exercised her old friend with a walk on the ramparts as was her morning routine.

  The day was spent listening to news and reading the reports from the other settlements allied to her fortified town. They too flourished under the protection of Sanctuary, but she claimed no fiefdom over them; they were their own people who could call on hers for aid should they need it, but she had no plans to build an empire.

  She ate, she exercised, and she took her daily tour around the town to check on the two militia sentries; one on the gate and one on the sea wall. She had relaxed their duties after she had taken over, explaining the reasons to Dan nervously as she listed her thoughts. He was fine with it, happy even, and she had changed the two twelve-hour shifts into three eight-hour shifts running six until two, two until ten, and then ten until six to start the cycle again. This required more people, but she employed Marie’s help to generate a shift pattern that allowed those on days off to still do other jobs and have time to themselves.

  The only sentries she didn’t visit daily were the three young men who manned the watchtower. There had been a woman posted there, but the enforced closeness had led to an uncomfortable situation that needed resolving. That woman still served in the militia but was far more comfortable in the town where the abnormal jealousy didn’t affect her. Leah visited every month with the supplies, inspected their weapons and spent the day talking with them. Ares could no longer make the climb, as much as that pained her heart, and she looked forward to the time when her new puppy was ready to be outside.

  She saw her friends, both new and old, and kept a schedule in her head as to who she was due to see.

  That day was a Thursday, so that meant crossing the harbour to the seaward side of the town and talking with the old soldier. Despite the warm weather of spring, Mitch was sat under blankets as he never seemed to be able to feel warm any more. He had never been one to complain, saying every time she visited that he was no stranger to the three boys of Mr and Mrs Death.

  “Cold, wet and hungry,” Leah chorused with him, making them smile every time. She didn’t know if Mitch was fully aware of the passage of time any more, but Alita cared for him with an adoration that warmed her deep down. Theirs was a companionship that never seemed to be publicly affectionate, but Leah sensed the deep bond between them.

  She left Mitch, walking back to the castle via the only section of their enclave to be levelled and green. The pigs, chickens and horses were well-tended, and the house nearby had the door ajar, so she walked inside and called a greeting as she did.

  Both Paul and Lexi, scarred and broken from the unthinkable torment their minds and bodies had been put through, lived a quiet and peaceful life often far removed from the company of others. Leah had offered them the watchtower years back, but neither seemed to hold any love for their former roles and craved peace instead. It was understandable, given how they had come to be there.

  She found them both on hands and knees tending neat rows in the rear garden, pulling out small weeds by hand and gently ripping away foliage when they found them wilted. They tended their vegetable patch lovingly, and each day in the good weather they could be found sat side by side on the sea wall with long cords dropped into the ocean for their daily catch.

  She would never insist that they join the others for the m
ain meal, never remove their free will to be left in peace, and was sure to see that they had what they needed.

  They had paid their price, and Leah was happy to let them retire in quiet companionship.

  The evening meal was fish and potatoes, with fresh greens from the last shipment from the farm which had arrived the day before. She never sat apart from the others, never sat in the same spot and always made herself freely available to anyone and made sure that she wasn’t surrounded by a click or an entourage that could dissuade anyone from speaking to her.

  After the meal, she found her two nephews and asked them if they wanted to resume the tale from the previous night. The boys agreed enthusiastically, and Leah’s own daughter brought them to her room where a small fire burned to ward off the evening chill.

  “Now,” she said to them as she settled back into her armchair, “where were we?”

  Escape and Evade

  It was Steve who had first explained to me what that was. Having been a helicopter pilot in the Royal Air Force, a concept that I had to explain to many people, he was at a heightened risk of being shot down in enemy-controlled territory. Being a pilot and an officer, he would likely have been tortured for information and intelligence, so he had been trained to escape and evade capture.

  His training had been done not far from where I was born and where Dan had first secured the weapons that had kept us alive. The weapon I carried had come from there, as had the ugly shotgun I had inherited. He had been dropped off in the middle of nowhere along with two other RAF personnel, given only a map with rendezvous coordinates, and had to evade the hunter force. He told me that they used a different army regiment each time, and Mitch had even been part of that force once upon a time, but the worst ones were either the Parachute Regiment or the Rifles. There was a fierce competition among those men as, apparently, they claimed to provide the best recruits for the special forces regiment who ran the training as directing staff. Their own hopeful recruits were on the same exercise, as that was part of the selection process.

  The second part of that training was when they were captured, which they always were even if they made it to the very end without being detected, was what he had called RTI, or resistance to interrogation. That was where they kept you in the dark or in the bright light, so you couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Where they scrambled your brain with loud static or white noise or thrash metal, and where they forced you to hold painful stress positions until you collapsed. They didn’t attach electrodes to your nipples or anything, not that they told me anyway, but Steve always said that whatever they put him through would only be a taster of the real thing.

  None of that really made any difference to me, despite Dan’s training that I should always have my BOB, my bug-out bag, with me because I was well and truly fucked.

  I ran hard through the woods, just putting distance between me and the ambush as fast as possible in a straight line before turning a sharp right and maintaining the pace. I turned right because, in my head, it was the direction of home and safety and the road I had travelled in on, but in truth I had strayed too far north.

  My brain went around like a washing machine on a high spin cycle and was a combination of the fear and panic mixed with the throbbing agony I felt from my skull.

  I ran as hard and as fast as I could, only afterwards guessing that I must have ended up a couple of miles away from the road in deep woodland filled with evergreen trees which littered the forest floor with soft, dry branches. It was like I was a mouse under a massive concentration of Christmas trees. When my body finally gave out, I slumped to the ground and banged my knee hard against an exposed tree root, hissing and cursing from the pain as I rocked back and forth gripping it. Nemesis, never leaving my side, nuzzled her face into mine. The blood had dried in places, lending her snout a darker look than normal, but when she licked me I was left with faint traces of pink-tinged saliva on my skin.

  “Good girl,” I crooned softly at her, “you’re a good girl.”

  She gave a high-pitched whine in response, which sounded every bit as hollow and alone as I felt. I hugged her around the neck, closing my eyes tightly and breathing raggedly as the guilt hit me. I replayed the ambush again in my mind, assessing it and looking for ways to blame myself for what had happened.

  Rafi was most likely dead, or the best-case scenario saw him locked up somewhere, stripped of his weapons and equipment and left without medical care that I was sure he needed. He hadn’t looked good in that one, tiny snapshot I had of him in my head but as my breathing began to slow so too did my sense start to return.

  “It was a cut to the head,” I told Nem, “and we all know head injuries piss with blood and look worse than they are. It’s a capillary bleed, most likely, so it’ll look worse than it is…”

  She didn’t respond. She just sat back and whined again, fidgeting her paws as though she reminded me that we had to keep moving.

  “I know, girl,” I said, “just give me a minute.”

  I forced my breathing to slow, knowing that I had already used up all of the calories I had taken in that morning on the insane sprint to safety. No sign of any pursuit had reached me, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be looking for me, especially after I had killed two of them in as many seconds. If that was me, I’d hunt the bastard who killed my people down like an animal.

  I did the top-to-toe survey, focusing inside my body as I tried to assess any damage to me that the adrenaline had masked. I got as far as my head, and the pain was intense. I had lumps on the back and the front, and I re-evaluated what had hit me thinking that a fist would have felt so sharp. The lump on the front was caused by the solid construction of the Land Rover, but I forced myself to check the rest of me. My torso heaved to suck the oxygen back in, and my legs shook from the exertion and chemical fear. My arms were marked with cuts from the branches I had fled through even though none of the small slices bled or had been noticed.

  Fight or flight. Well I’d done both and I was utterly burnt out.

  I’d figured out that I wasn’t badly damaged, even if I was going to have the mother of all mild-concussion headaches sometime soon, so I turned my attention to my equipment. Nemesis whined again and struck the pose as though she was going to bark, but the long hours spent training her not to unless commanded paid off. She was looking at me and not the woodland, so I guessed it was just her impatience and not a warning.

  “In a minute,” I mumbled to her.

  I laid down the Glock beside the three full magazines and the Walther beside that with its two. I checked with my hand that the large knife was still on my lower back and that the smaller one was on my right shoulder, and I ignored the spare magazines for my M4. The loss of that stung me deeply but getting angry was just a waste of time. I emptied out my other pouches and found the flint and steel, lighter and cotton wool in the tightly wrapped bundle which could be used to light a fire. I had a small torch, four heavy cable ties and field dressings and a compression bandage on the back of my right shoulder, and I used a single antiseptic wipe to clean the scrapes on my exposed skin.

  What I didn’t have was any food or water. When that hit me, my mouth suddenly screamed that it was dry, and my throat felt like it was closing up. I knew this was my mind reacting and not my body, so I forced a swallow and made myself think.

  This is day two, I told myself, I’m probably six days from home if I have to walk, but Dan will be coming on the fifth day. I can’t stay here.

  And I knew I couldn’t, but I vowed to be back.

  We set off, following the contours of the ground towards the lower part of the forest for two reasons: One, I knew I had driven uphill towards the tunnel so uphill from where I was had to be the wrong direction. And two, water had a very natural habit of being found in lower ground instead of on tree-covered hills. We both needed water, so we headed down.

  I had no idea how I had run so far or so fast from the gunfire and the concrete without losing my footing as th
e forest floor was almost slippery underfoot and covered in exposed roots that could easily turn an ankle and break a bone. Nemesis stalked beside me, silent but obviously nervous as her worried glances up at me sought constant reassurance. I had to remind myself that she was still a young dog and had never been truly tested before, unlike her father who would take all of this in his stride and simply perform until it was time to eat and sleep.

  I stopped after another ten minutes as the foliage changed ahead. Thick bramble bushes and deciduous trees emerged from the woods in different colours and made the smell of the land change. I knew we were heading towards water in some form, even if it was under the ground, because those kinds of tree wouldn’t grow higher up. Forcing our progress to slow as we picked our way through the thorns that threatened to hook my clothing I paused again.

  “Hear that?” I whispered, seeing Nemesis cock her head at me and shoot out her tongue to lick her snout.

  “Water,” I told her, pressing onwards until the faint noise became a bubbling stream over jagged rocks. Nem went in, standing up to her soft belly in the water as she lapped at it greedily, and I crouched down to cup my hands and drink handful after handful of the cool, clear water until a sound made me react so quickly that I almost pitched forwards into the stream in my haste to draw the Walther from my right thigh holster.

  A vehicle groaned and revved as a lower gear was selected, and the only sound heard above that was the running water and the low growl coming from my dog who still stood in the stream but had turned her head towards the noise. Her nose was pointed further right than the fat suppressor on the barrel of my gun, and as I trusted her hearing above my own I adjusted my aim to face towards the unseen threat.

  “It’s okay, girl,” I whispered, slowly rising to my feet and stalking downstream on the far bank, “come.”

  With her at my heel I crept forwards, both of us dressed in black and blending into the shadowed woodland, until I could see the metal barrier up ahead and above me to prevent any cars from crashing off the road.