“It’s just inside the border,” I said, “there’s a checkpoint which looks abandoned, and a small town before the road into the valleys. There’s a tunnel, which is where they ambushed us, and a mountain road over the top. I haven’t been up there. I would guess they are in the small town before the tunnel splits from the mountain road.”
“That’s what the prisoner said,” Dan interrupted. It worried me that he kept calling him the prisoner, doing what Marie called dehumanising, “and that’s where they’re keeping Rafi.”
The confirmation that Rafi had at least been alive when the cut-off force had been sent to try and net me was a blessing which both soothed my conscience and tempered my resolve to go back and get him.
“Did Rocco,” I asked, reminding Dan that the prisoner was still a man, still a living human being despite the company he kept, “say why they had ambushed us?”
Dan fixed me with a look, making it obvious that he would rather have discussed that part in less open forums. He was still angry, still boiling from the rage of my return, and I knew it was because he was blaming himself for not going with me or not insisting that we took more people. I had considered that too, having spent a quiet hour contemplating every part of the trip and trying to figure out what I did wrong and what I should have done differently.
I had come to the conclusion that having say Mitch and Dan in the truck when we had been hit would have had similar if not worse consequences; the passenger side would still have been pressed against the tunnel wall preventing a rapid decamp from the vehicle, the front passenger, which probably would have been me, would still likely have a head injury and be incapacitated, and the weight of fire coming against us would still have been too great to counter with the best-case three weapons returning it. The cut-off force comprising of the two now-dead people would have had time to get in place and we would have been pinned down and forced into surrender or killed, and even the luckiest scenario in my head still had a fifty per cent escape figure, which would have also doubled the number of dead or captured and reduced our ability to return in strength.
These replays and scenario changes helped me come to terms with what had happened as, to quote Neil and everyone else who had coined his phrase, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Well, what happened was bad, but it always could have been worse. It could have been Dan in the passenger seat and he could have died. The dogs could have been badly hurt. We could all have been shot and left everyone we cared about in Sanctuary never knowing why we hadn’t returned.
“We don’t have the numbers to have a stand-up fight with them,” Dan said, bringing me back to the present, “so we will look to parlay first. That said, I have no intention of fucking about with these people. I propose this…”
Dan’s plan, skipping over the part where we had to take a long detour to the north in search of additional fuel supplies, was to take two vehicles back into the mountains and for him and Mitch to go in under a white flag. He would ask for Rafi back, promise to stay away from their territory and give a false story about where we were from. That plan assumed that Rafi hadn’t told them all about Sanctuary, which was a gamble as everyone spoke eventually, but the lie would be expected he explained.
That wasn’t to say that the plan didn’t involve fail-safes, which is why he had asked me to pick the best shot from the watchtower and dust off my old MK14. The watchtower was still very well equipped with high-powered hunting rifles which were more than capable of ventilating anyone foolish enough to try attacking our home, but when given the choice between civilian and military weaponry we both knew where our bets lay.
Lucien and I would be on the higher ground with a view to take out as many of them as we could if Dan gave the signal, much the same as when they had gone to what was now the legend of Slaver’s Bay before they let me step up. Back then it had been Lexi and Steve who had been the shooters, and Neil had been hidden under an aluminium canopy ready to pop up and lay waste to the enemy with a machine gun, but we had to work with what we had.
Lexi hadn’t held a weapon since her exhausted body and shattered mind had been returned to us, and Steve was busy running his own show back home.
No, I reminded myself, this is home now; the others are back where we started.
We would, if needs be, take the town and put a stop to the siege of what I had assured everyone were peaceful people who wanted no conflict. They were useful to our own continued survival, but that was jeopardised by a band of pirates picking off the weak and the innocent.
I knew where this was going, and it echoed Polly’s and my own sentiments when we had been threatened by another group before.
We kill them all.
It was bloodthirsty, I knew, but what other choice did we have? Leave a hostile group with weapons and a mind towards piracy to hurt and exploit others? Run the risk that they will gather numbers and advance south? To attack the farms, the trading post and the smaller settlements we offered our protection to?
No. They had to go; or at least have every ounce of leadership cut from them so that they posed no threat of reorganising. I wasn’t against the idea of letting the lower echelons live, as often these people were simply going along with it to keep living, but that always posed the risk that we would be responsible for releasing a wolf among the sheep.
Cross those bridges when we come to them, I told myself, gain control first and clean up afterwards.
One thing Dan said had penetrated my thoughts, infecting me with a nagging doubt that trickled down my spine like a drop of rainwater that had somehow found its way inside warm clothes.
We don’t have the numbers.
And we didn’t, but that was what training and superior equipment was for. I had already proven that I was equal to four of theirs, although they were unaware and mostly unarmed. That wasn’t to say that they weren’t dangerous, but they were desperately unaware of the risks, and that spoke to their lack of knowledge and training. Even the other two I had killed, we, I should say as without Nemesis I wouldn’t have made it out, let alone back in one piece.
Force multipliers, that’s what Dan had called me and him and Mitch and the two dogs we used as warriors. Anyone could pick up a gun and threaten someone, especially nowadays when there was no law or risk of punishment and consequence unless you lived inside one of the enclaves of a real society as we did, but having the knowledge, training and above all else the discipline to use it properly then it stood for very little.
Not only were the three of us very well equipped, but we were hardened in combat and still lived despite the attempts made on us and the people we cared about. Our level of experience stood us apart and worth five or even ten untrained people in most circumstances. We had trained our own militia to a decent standard, but given that the supply of bullets was something we couldn’t rely on for many more years it was only natural that very few of them had ever fired a shot in anger.
“What about another Thunderbird?” Neil asked hopefully, meaning to mount one of the two heavy machine guns we still had at our disposal in the back of a truck bed as something Mitch called a technical, but the once infantryman put that idea to bed immediately.
“Too finicky,” he said, listing the reasons that he wouldn’t want to have a plan based on the reliability of a very old fifty-calibre Browning. The construction and mounting of a gun onto a vehicle would take most of the following day alone, and that affected the timeline I wanted badly.
The meeting drew to a close as Mitch took the others who didn’t have access to their own weapons to the armoury to be equipped. I knew him well enough that he would do the same as I had with Rafi and provide them with the basic weapons without the personal idiosyncrasies that we preferred. That thought soured me as my own weapon, one that had never left my side since before we even left our home country, was missing. No doubt taken and being used by one of the bastards who had attacked me. I imagined them fighting over it like animals, none of them possessing ski
ll worthy enough to even touch the gun in my opinion, then I stopped myself because my imagination was convincing me that our enemy were thugs; mindless and ill-disciplined, and that potential underestimation could be a fatal flaw if they turned out to be otherwise. I shut that away, leaving myself with the hollow feeling of shame at having lost my weapon.
I took a seat as the others went away, finding myself in very familiar company among the core of our spear tip.
“So the plan is to get there then make a plan?” Marie asked Dan, annoyed to the point of near hostility as she always was when her man prepared to go stomping off like some Neanderthal and bonk other cavemen over their heads with his club.
“Pretty much,” he admitted, “but without more intelligence then we can only guess. We can only make assumptions, and we all know what happens when you make an assumption, don’t we?”
“Yes,” Marie said tiredly, almost with boredom, cutting off the punchline she had heard too many times to laugh, “you make an ass out of you and ’umption.”
Dan reached into his equipment vest, worn inside the walls as some kind of message that he was mentally preparing to go back to war, and pulled out one of the few precious packets of cigarettes left in the world and rose. I went with him, wanting to know his thoughts and hoping to hear reassurance that what had happened wasn’t entirely my fault, and walked to the ramparts with our dogs slowly following up the stone steps. We walked on the ramparts under the sky which was already darkening from the invisible sun hidden behind the high cliff and the lonely but ominous-looking watchtower it silhouetted, and Dan smoked as he wandered in silence. I walked beside him, long ago having learned not to talk unless I had something to say or a pertinent question which couldn’t wait.
“This could be messy,” he said quietly.
“It already is,” I told him, “and it wasn’t our choice to make it like that.”
He hmm’d in response, giving neither disagreement nor support to my sentiment before he changed the subject in his head and spoke to force me to catch up with the logical process I had been excluded from.
“Did you ever watch the Jaws films?” he asked without explanation as to why.
“First one,” I said, thinking of the slow-moving rubber shark and terrible special effects that still terrified me and made me nervous of swimming in any water I couldn’t see the bottom of, “why?”
“In the third one,” he explained as he flicked the butt of the cigarette over the wall with thumb and forefinger, “there’s this lagoon, like a water park and an aquarium in one place where loads of people go in summer. Well this big-ass shark finds its way inside the shark nets and they catch it. It dies, but the thing’s mum comes looking for it and eats everyone. Can’t remember how it ends, but I remember the feeling of dread when they’d pissed off the bigger shark. That’s like this; they’ve made me very fucking angry.”
With that he walked back to the stairs and I stayed on the ramparts.
I was pretty certain that, in all the Jaws films and despite the body count, the shark gets killed eventually.
What’s the French for Oo-Rah?
Anyone who had spent any amount of time with Neil knew his repertoire after a while. It went from him being laugh out loud funny in the first couple of years, to more of a pained groan whenever he cracked the same jokes now. He wasn’t just tolerated though, he was loved and made the world a better place to be.
Apart from his ever-changing voice in whatever accent or impression he felt like doing, and the constant film references which I rarely understood, he was a born inventor and had never given up on anything that others had declared as ‘fucked’. He even relished the thought of fixing something that had been branded as ‘properly fucked’, like it was some kind of personal challenge. I’d watched him once coaxing an outboard motor back to life, acting like an emergency room doctor on some American hospital drama as he feigned working on it desperately, telling his young French assistant to “Charge paddles to two hundred,” before loudly declaring, “clear!” and pretending to zap it as it sparked and coughed into reluctant life. After that he had switched into Doctor Frankenstein himself and cackled that it lived, it lived, and drawing a small but bewildered crowd.
If I hadn’t done what he was joking about for real on Jack, our grizzled old Irish goat of a friend who had lost his life before I had rescued Dan in the act of saving Henry’s, then I might have found it funnier than I did.
Neil’s ingenuity continued, perhaps even increased a few levels when everything from the old world began to slowly wear out and die off. Already, even by then, half of our fishing boats were powered by sail as fuel and engine parts were becoming too difficult to source. There were plans to refit and find more, but they would have to wait until the end of summer when the long days weren’t put to maximum use gathering food.
I’d risen early, having not slept too much because my brain spun with all the what-ifs, and I put myself in the mindset of going into conflict. When I walked outside even before the sun was fully up, I found Neil in the cobbled courtyard near the gates with an improvised fuel bowser on the back of a flat-bed truck and a jury-rigged pump he had constructed from plastic tubes and what looked like plumbing pipes. He used a steering wheel from a car, old enough to not have an airbag, and tested it as I walked into the yard by spinning it around and around with one hand pressed over the end of the long tube. He stopped, pulling his hand away and assessing the red circle where the suction had proven to be working adequately, standing up straight to smile at me. I saw that he wore a bandolier of red plastic shotgun cartridges and had adopted the gun I had captured along with the prisoner. Apparently, it was a Benelli tactical, but the big boomsticks he favoured were never my thing. Too… messy.
I had Nemesis at my heel, fully refreshed as she clearly didn’t suffer the same nagging doubts about her performance and what was expected of her like I did, and I was dressed in fresh clothing similar to the day before with my vest and loaded handguns and knives strapped to me. I had nothing in my hands, which was my reason for passing the courtyard on my way to the armoury and waved at the portly man as I passed. Nemesis ran to him without bothering to check for my permission and sniffed at him with her tail wagging as he ruffled the fur between her large ears and reached into the cab of the truck and came out with something which had been swallowed by the dog before I could see what it was.
I used my keys to open the heavy, old door and went inside. We had captured, looted and found various weapons since we had been there, but being something of a snob I ignored the weird and wonderful and finally relented in picking up one of the brand-new HK416s. I opted for the short barrel version of which we only had a few, and set to work with a multitool adding the things I wanted from a wide array of accessories designed to fit the universal rails on all sides of the short barrel. I used the last but two of the suppressors to lengthen it only slightly, adding the same flip down sight I preferred which could be pushed aside if the action was too close in to use the zoom part of the optic. With that small telescopic part aside, it left a holographic red dot which felt so familiar. Dan preferred the angular foregrip, but I liked the vertical version and held it onto the rail before attaching it firmly to be sure I had the perfect positioning as I pulled the gun into my shoulder.
I used a few magazine spacers and loaded them, effectively just a metal clamp that held two of the thirty-round magazines together to speed up reloading. I had one for my M4, guessing that if I needed to lay down more than sixty rounds so fast that speed-reloading was necessary then I was in a world of shit, but I wasn’t in the mood to be guessing right then. I wanted to be prepared for all-out carnage in case I was ever caught unaware ever again.
I had to lay down a few shots to sight the optic and make a few tweaks, as I wasn’t going outside of the walls having not test fired it, so I took a handful of extra five-five-six bullets and put them in a leg pocket ready to replenish the magazine when they were expended.
I t
ook the rig on my left thigh and set it aside for Lucien, who still possessed our only remaining 417, and took a new rig before loading it with the three spare magazines for the MK14, the enhanced battle rifle I had brought from home, not even remembering when it had fallen into our loving arms. The magazines were annoyingly unique to each weapon, unlike the STANAG mags for the rifles and carbines, and only held twenty of the heavy 7.62 bullets which could kill after travelling a mile or more through the air. I knew I wasn’t skilled enough to put a single bullet in the right place at that kind of distance; that ghostly skill took years to master at the cost of countless hours practicing and thousands of the bullets which we couldn’t afford to expend on training. That said, inside of a half mile I could be fairly certain to hit what I wanted to, and things hit by seven-six-two weren’t known for their habit of getting up afterwards. Ever.
I collapsed the extendable stock fitted to it and slung the gun on my back with its big optic resting beside the replacement bug-out bag I had packed with new equipment, pausing only to replenish my 9mm stocks from the magazines I had expended in my escape, before nestling the 416 on my body by the single-point sling so that it hung down slightly to the right of the centre of my torso. I went the other way along the stone corridor after locking up the armoury, taking the stairs at the far end to look out over the part of town that was uninhabited to pick a target inside of eighty paces. That was the maximum range I’d likely be engaging anyone with the short-barrelled gun, so I set the MK14 down to rest the foregrip of my 416 on the stone shelf and took aim.
The coughing spit of the round leaving the barrel sounded muted in comparison with the sharp crack that echoed back to me before the puff of dust shot up to the left and high of my target. I made two slight adjustments and settled in again to control my breathing and aim at the centre mass of the target, an ancient television set dumped on a patch of gravel which was of no value as be worth moving. It served a purpose now, as my next round scored a chunk of the old wooden veneer from the left side and shifted the set. Another click of adjustment saw my next eight rounds punch true through the glass and mess of wires behind satisfying me that it was accurate, and to be sure I picked the gun up into my standing position and held the foregrip tightly to hit it again three more times. I relaxed and dropped out the twin magazines to feed the gap where the spent rounds had been with the spares from my pocket, marvelling as I did how the barrel didn’t feel even the slightest bit warm after being fired.
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