What the hell is happening to me? I thought. Focus for god’s sake!
I switched back on as we reached the building we wanted, seeing that two of the ground floor windows had been smashed in or had succumbed to the weather over the years it had stood empty. Deciding on the best way to get to the roof ready for the attack at first light I scanned the only side open to us in the last of the evening light.
Lucien tapped my shoulder making me turn to him and follow the direction of his pointed finger. An external staircase, metal framework showing in silhouette against the lighter sky, stood jutting out of the left side of the building.
“Too risky yet,” I whispered back to him, “exposed to the direction of the barricade until dark…” I paused, thinking, and turned back to him to whisper again. “Try and clear inside via the windows, if we can’t get to the roof then, we go up there.”
He nodded, readying himself to move again. I crept forwards, crossing the only exposed section of abandoned road to stack up against the nearest broken window and glanced back to Lucien who was angling away from me. Just as I was about to call out to stop him, my eyes shot towards his trajectory and took in the sliding glass doors I hadn’t noticed. I moved down the building line, Nemesis silently following, and nodded at him before stepping inside and crunching my boots on the pebbles of broken safety glass inside. The floor was carpeted in a kind of rough tile, allowing me to scrape my boot along it to clear a path and avoid Nem picking up an injury. I considered going for the torch sticking out of the right side of the utility rail on my carbine, going so far as to reach out with my left thumb from the vertical foregrip which was placed just right to activate the light, but I stopped myself. Grimy windows overlooked the sloping, low ground leading towards the road and a torch beam could give away our position just as easily as a gunshot. Determined to get the building cleared with the last drops of daylight, I moved fast.
Clearing the corners, checking each room on the ground floor, I found nothing. No sign of recent activity, and certainly no trace of anyone having stayed there. I guessed that would change when winter hit, as I doubted those by the barricade would want to be sleeping outside when the temperature dropped, but for now they seemed to have ignored the building.
It was sectioned off into offices at one point in the past, as ranks of ergonomically curved desks and chairs with back support lay dormant and as useless as the computers they were there for. Moving up I cleared the next floor faster, then took the stairs to the third floor where I sent Nemesis to search each room by herself. I risked her emitting a single bark if there was anyone there, but as the footprints in the dust on the stairs belonged only to us I guessed it was safe.
And that was where our luck ran out.
There was no way up to the roof that we could find, and I turned to Lucien and shrugged, signalling that we would probably have to go back down and up the external staircase. He smiled, walking past me as he held my gaze in the dying light, and went to the large windows on the south-facing edge of the building.
He did something with the safety mechanism, opening a tall window before manipulating two plastic clips and pushing it open wider. Standing back, he gave me a sarcastic bow and invited me to step out onto the steel mesh of the fire escape.
“Wait for a bit,” I said, “until it’s properly dark.”
He frowned and shrugged again, not in a way to indicate that he thought I was wrong but more than he hadn’t thought of it, and slipped off his rifle and bag to sit against the wall. He looked up at me, patting the carpet beside him and flashing me a smile of white teeth in the gathering gloom. I slipped off my own rifle, resting it against the internal wall beside his own and shrugging out of the straps of my new bag which hadn’t fully moulded to my shape yet. I frowned at that, the sting of losing my equipment still raw, and decided that it would be good to get my own kit back.
It would be better, I admonished myself as I sat, to get Rafi back in one piece.
Lucien produced a bag of dried fruit. Apricots and slices of apple which tasted much better than the shop-bought items I loved when I was a kid. We shared them in relative silence, chucking the odd piece to Nemesis who never failed to catch a tasty morsel sent her way, and I began to explain the urban combat manoeuvring I had displayed on our way in. He nodded along with my words, making the odd noise of surprise or understanding or agreement, and I realised I had never felt so relaxed with someone who was little more than a stranger to me.
“It is time,” he said as he craned his neck to look out at the night sky, “is it time?”
“It is time,” I said, rising and restoring my equipment to my back. I coaxed Nemesis out of the window, reassuring her all the while until I was forced to bring out the leather strap I used as a lead when I had no other choice. That was usually around sheep, as she seemed to be obsessed with annoying them; not that she was ever aggressive towards livestock, not like Ash was with cows, but she terrified them nonetheless.
She whined, unsure of walking on a surface that she couldn’t see, but I managed to coax her up the two flights eventually until she could make out the pitch of the flat roof and jumped up. We moved forwards, heading for the slightly raised lip of the side facing our target for the next dawn, and rested down our equipment. I pulled out my bedding roll, which was a compact thing that could be partly inflated for comfort and warmth. Lucien did the same, placing his mat beside mine. I almost told him to move away, that we wouldn’t be able to fire from the same position come daybreak, but I didn’t. I didn’t even know why I let him settle down beside me, his rifle lying down flat on the small bipod at the end of the gun’s furniture, just as mine was rested against my bag. I pulled out an extra layer, a lightweight down jacket, and heard him do the same with a blanket which he wrapped around himself. I shuffled to the side of my mat, towards the centre to allow Nem to lay against me, and that had the effect of pushing me closer towards Lucien who, luckily for him, said nothing about it.
“Why do some people call you, Nikita?” he asked me after a while in barely a whisper, breaking the silence of the night.
“A man called Rich started it,” I told him, “he was a Royal Marine, and one of the bravest men I ever met. He had… problems, and he would never be able to relax. He called me Nikita because he joked about me being a child assassin. There’s a book or something about it…” I trailed off, having no idea why I was telling him everything about me, especially things from when I was vulnerable. I didn’t like people knowing that I was vulnerable, and not even that long ago in the grand scheme, but something about the man and the situation made me answer honestly.
“And where is he now, this Rich?” he asked, his pronunciation making the name sound as reach.
“He was left behind when we set off to find answers, back in England.”
“And what has become of him?”
I sighed, remembering things my mind had blocked out to protect myself from the feelings that came with them.
“The others,” I whispered, telling him the abbreviated version pieced together from the radio communication with Steve back there and from what Lexi and Paul had managed to recall, “the ones who stayed behind, they were attacked and taken away to a larger camp where they were kept as prisoners. People think that Rich discovered their plan, and they think he died because of it.”
Silence hung over our rooftop as we both looked up at the bright stars, marvelling at how close to outer space you could feel when you were high up and where no unnatural light diluted the inky black.
“That is very bad,” Lucien said, no hint of confidence or cockiness in his words, “I am sorry for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, shifting my position and inadvertently brushing my hand against his. A jolt of electricity felt like it passed through me, and from his slight gasp I think he felt something too.
“Get some sleep,” I whispered, my voice shaking and hoping that he didn’t notice, “we’ll need to be awake in a few hours.”
&nb
sp; ~
I woke before the sun was up, but a smudgy-grey line cast an eerie glow over us from behind the mountains to our right. The blanket which had been on Lucien had somehow found its way over my shoulders during the brief slumber, and I gently pushed it off me to roll over onto my front.
“Bonjour, chérie,” he whispered, stretching out with a wink and a smile as he uncoiled himself.
“Hi,” I responded, feeling a little sheepish and vulnerable but unable to hide a smile for too long. “Did Nem, err… did Nem fart in her sleep?” I asked, hoping that any such accidental noises would be blamed on the dog and that would be the end of the matter.
“No,” he chuckled, “she did not, but you were speaking…”
I leaned over, careful not to raise my head too much and give away our position in case any sharp-eyed bastard was looking directly at us and wiped the drool from where it had wet my chin.
“What was I saying?” I muttered.
“Something about the smell of burnings,” he said almost dismissively, “but as nothing was on fire I decided that perhaps you were dreaming.”
I ignored that. I knew exactly what I was dreaming about and if it wasn’t being torn apart by dogs then it was replaying the burning of the barn after Joe’s death. I rolled over to look at the direction the light was coming from before rolling back.
“Spread out,” I told him, “I’ll fire the first shot then you take everything to the left, I’ll cover the right.”
“Okay, Nikita,” he said, and I just knew without looking at his face that he was smiling that devilish little smirk of his.
Focus, I reminded myself.
I saw some movement stirring in the disorganised camp below, ranging them at inside of a hundred and fifty metres. With our rifles, that distance offered no protection and I smiled grimly to think of the destruction we could rain down on them.
Don’t get cocky, I told myself, get the job done first.
As the light crept towards the peaks and cast a beam down towards the barricade of cars I heard the muted sound of an engine come to a rest behind us.
“Show time,” I whispered to myself, out of earshot of Lucien and ignored by Nemesis.
Strength lies in defence, I thought, not knowing where the saying came from or even why I thought of it then. In that moment I knew everything that these idiots had done wrong, and their downfall was in not garrisoning the building that we were about to use to pour death down on them.
I gave Dan another five minutes to get ready, to drop off all of his non-combatants, and I picked a target to start the day with death.
Lead Rain
Crack.
Crack, boom.
I fired first, having lined up on a man who was unzipping his trouser to irrigate the wrecked hulk of a car. He dropped in my sights at the same time as the report of my weapon echoed loudly out across the valley. I switched my aim, knowing that the man was dead the second I pulled the trigger, and found my next victim. Another man, younger but with a wispy straggle of facial hair around his open mouth, turned to look around him desperately. He tensed his muscles to start running, just as I squeezed the trigger and saw him fall in the same instant. Before I had found another target, I heard the duller report of Lucien’s rifle booming out beside me. I didn’t scan for his target, there was no point, instead I looked for another target to drop.
Boom.
Crack.
A woman, her hair a ragged mess as she ran around the corner of a tent with a rifle in her hands dropped to my next shot, flopping and tumbling as she fell to pitch forwards and drop the gun into the dirt.
Crack.
Another man threw himself down to grab the gun and come up pointing it in completely the wrong direction as the bullet tore through his chest in profile.
Boom.
No targets presented themselves in my area, and a twitch of the barrel to the left to pick up anyone in Lucien’s sector. I saw a man in a crumpled heap, blood spurting vertically up into the air.
Boom.
Another man fell, his chest heaving and mouth open as he screamed silently. He hadn’t been hit by Lucien’s shot, instead he had thrown himself down in terror at the heavy bullets ripping the air around him.
Crack.
I took him down, a shot straight through the chest. Nobody else showed their faces, sensibly in my opinion, so I began putting rounds into the collection of tents and soft-skinned vehicles.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Lucien realised what I was doing, adding the Boom. Boom. Boom, of his gun to the same ends.
It worked, as men and a few women began to pour out into the open as their foolish belief that being out of sight meant that they were out of reach of our guns. Dust appeared in the left of my peripheral vision as, my left eye still open and my right glued to the optic, I saw our van driving in hard.
“Keep an eye on them,” I shouted to Lucien, stealth clearly no longer being a concern as we rained down death on them, “and check your fire.”
~
Dan heard the first brutal reports of the heavy rifles ripping the peaceful early morning air.
“Let’s fucking do this,” he said, whipping himself up to perform with the words as much as they were intended for the others. There were four of them, Ash remaining with Neil and the others despite his grumbling. None of them had slept more than a couple of hours, with someone always awake and alert given their proximity to the enemy.
Dan, much like Leah, held no remorse for attacking these people without warning. Their leader had sealed their fate when he had turned down the sensible offer to release the prisoner and hand over the stolen items, and he had no illusion that these followers were just as piratical as the ones he had already met. To execute one of his own men just to prove a point, just to send a message that he was the biggest, baddest bastard around, sickened Dan to his core.
He threw the van into gear, tyres crunching on the gravelly surface as he floored the accelerator to launch them towards danger. He covered the half mile as fast as he could in the big, ungainly vehicle that was never designed for drag racing over uneven road surfaces. The tyres kicked up dust from the arid landscape as he pushed each gear to the limit of its power band before snatching the next until he arrested their forward momentum with heavy braking to slew them to a stop just outside the range of the killing shots from his daughter’s position. He left the engine running, yanking on the handbrake as he slapped it out of gear and slid from the driver’s door to round the engine block with weapon raised and body in the pose that was so familiar to everyone who knew him.
Knees slightly bent, body leaning forward into the gun tucked hard into his shoulder and torso fixed as though at one with the weapon, he moved forward on fast feet as his gun began to spit bursts of fire towards the melee ahead.
Bodies were down, strewn in awkward positions where they fell, and those few who ran did so in two directions; away from the danger and towards it.
That was always a test of a person’s true nature, and no amount of simulation or conjecture could ever dictate what they would do given any situation. Often those who boasted of bravery would flee, and those who thought themselves cowardly would be the ones who stood and fought bravely.
Only a few of them tried to fight, and a rattling flurry of fire from those exiting the van cut them down in an instant.
“Arrêtez!” Dan bawled, repeating the order until all of his team stopped. They were left facing five people, all stunned after being torn from sleep by savage violence and surrounded by unexpected death. They had thought themselves superior, safe from attack, and the realisation that they were neither left them all devastated. Cable ties were produced and used as plasticuffs to bind the wrists of the remaining five, all men, before Dan swept the area one last time.
~
I watched them pour out of the van, guns up, then forced my concentration back to the barricade should any of them still be hiding and pose a thr
eat to my people below. I saw Dan moving, his actions and posture identifying him instantly as he fast-paced forwards. I saw Mitch sprinting for cover before raising his gun and tracking someone out of sight of our guns before firing off two bursts, and then it was over. I heard the shout to stop, to cease fire, and I flicked my safety on to find Dan in my scope again. He looked directly at my position and waved for us to come down as the prisoners taken, arms raised in surrender, had their hands bound behind their backs.
“Let’s go,” I said, standing and stuffing my roll mat into my bag before heading for the external staircase and snapping my fingers for Nemesis to follow. She had whined once during the firing but had stayed still at my side, waiting for a command.
In the daylight, the sun still not fully up but bright enough to light the landscape, the fire escape stairs were daunting. There was something about being able to see directly down three storeys through the steel mesh under your feet that unnerved me, even though I had never really been bothered by heights, and even though I forced myself onto the platform I could not get Nem to come.
I reassured her, escalating to giving her firm orders and then shouting at her but, try as I might to cajole her off the roof, she would not budge.
“Will she let me carry her?” Lucien asked from behind the distressed dog, making me think about it. I knew I could lift her, could get her through windows and over walls that she couldn’t jump, but I doubted I could manage the staircase safely in case she freaked out and tried to wriggle free.
“Yes,” I said, “but be really careful.”
I reached out a hand, stroking her head and talking to her in a smooth voice to calm her, then held out the same hand for Lucien’s rifle.
“Good girl,” I crooned at her, giving him the nod to pick her and raising my voice when her head whipped towards him in protest. He lifted her, far easier than his slim frame would suggest he could but Dan always said that a person’s strength wasn’t obvious in their size.
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