Nobody ever bullied me again.
As the hood was pulled over my face, I tried to remember how I felt in that playground.
As the ties were fastened around my wrists and ankles, I tried to find that sense of mocking superiority I felt when I realised that Jason was just an insecure little shit who could only feel good about himself by picking on weaker kids.
As I was laid on the thin wooden board and trussed like a chicken so that the board and I moved as one unit, I recalled the satisfaction of feeling his nose crunch and the realisation that I wasn’t scared of him.
As the towels were laid gently across my hooded face, I drew on all the anger, resentment and hatred I felt for bullies and I projected it on to the men who were about to drown me. How insecure they must be to torture a child. I laughed at them.
As they began to pour the water on to the towels, I felt myself tilt backwards. The liquid dribbled up my nose and I felt the hard pressure of a finger in my solar plexus, testing whether I was timing my breaths to coincide with the dowsings. I felt the purest resolve I had ever felt in my life.
I was stronger than this. I was The Boy Who Was Never Bullied. I knew they weren’t going to kill me, so all I needed to do was be strong. I could do this.
And then I had to exhale, unable to hold my breath for another second.
And then I was drowning, the thick cotton towels moulding themselves to my mouth and nostrils, gagging me, choking me, sealing me in a dark, wet, airless nightmare.
I felt the board tip up, a momentary respite, the towels loosened, I dragged in a ragged gasp of air, and then tilted again, more water, more choking, flooding, drowning in the unstoppable water as it probed every orifice, relentless, drawn by simple gravity, pushing its way inside me.
There was liquid somewhere else, but I couldn’t tell where, my senses were so scrambled. Only later did I realise that I’d wet myself.
And my resolve vanished, my strength disappeared, time elongated and claustrophobic terror took its place. Before I knew I was doing it, I was begging for release, promising to tell them everything they needed to know. Anything to make it stop.
So they did it once more, just to be sure. This time I lost my mind. I may have screamed and begged, I don’t know. But in my head I was with Matron. She was at Groombridge, I was in the gardens outside the room where I was dying, yet we still lay side by side, holding hands with our eyes closed, feeling the Earth turn beneath us, breathing slow, steady meditative breaths as the darkness closed in.
It seemed like a lifetime, but the whole ordeal probably only lasted thirty seconds.
WHEN I REGAINED consciousness I was lying on the floor in a puddle. It was better than being tied to a chair, I supposed.
They had untied me and dumped me on the hard marble floor
I was foetal, with my hands, now untied, near my ankles. I kept my breathing shallow, pretending to still be asleep, and I listened, trying to work out how many of the men who had waterboarded me were still in the room. I heard someone clear their throat, but that was it. Just the one, then.
The question was: where was he looking? I cracked one eye ever so slightly and I saw him standing near a window with his back to me. Either he was a rank amateur, which I doubted, or he had underestimated me.
“Oh yeah,” said the sarcastic voice in my head. “Can’t imagine why he underestimated you. You proved how gnarly you are with all the begging and pissing.”
I forced myself not to think about what I’d just gone through. Banished it to the back of my mind; something to deal with later. There was no lasting physical damage, and a resumption of torture didn’t seem imminent. Any psychological wounds could be cauterised later.
I had things to do.
I slowly moved my right hand to the hem of my left trouser leg and searched along it until I felt a tiny bit of resistance. Then I grasped it with my finger and thumb and pushed the thin metal down, slicing open the bottom of my trousers and slipping the razor blade out and into my palm.
I was not in the dungeon, as I’d assumed. Instead I was in a large empty room, perhaps an antechamber of the ballroom the general was using. It seemed incongruous that somewhere so light and opulent could be used as a place of torture. But with the bag over my head I hadn’t known where I was, so it hadn’t made any difference to me. I supposed the guys here just liked doing their job in the nicest available office.
I decided my best bet was to pick up where I’d left off.
I pretended to jerk awake with a yell. I breathed as hard and fast as I could, widened my eyes in panic, then sat up and scrambled backwards ’til my back was against a wall. I pulled my knees up tight to my chest, buried my face in my lap, and began begging for them not to hurt me any more, rocking slightly as I did so.
The torturer turned away from the window and walked over to me. He crouched down, reached forward and grabbed my chin, forcing my head up, getting right in my face.
“Start at the begin…”
The word lapsed into a strangled gargle, half rasp, half choke. I swiped the blade across his windpipe again, harder. And again, and again, feeling my fingers slip into the slick wet wound as they sliced deeper and deeper into his neck. I had grabbed his head with my left hand, holding him in place, preventing him from tumbling backwards and escaping. By the time he twitched free of my grasp he was unable to cry for help. He clawed across the floor leaving a thick red smear behind him.
I got to my feet, stepped over him, turned and looked down at one of the men who had tortured me. I looked into his despairing eyes as he gazed up at me, grasping at the air, and I felt not one shred of pity or remorse.
“I hate bullies,” I said. Then I jumped and landed with both feet on the back of his neck. There was a sharp crack and I felt his body crumple and grind beneath my heels.
Strangely, it still wasn’t quite as satisfying as breaking Jason’s nose all those years ago. I suppose you just feel things that bit more intensely when you’re a child.
I rolled the cooling corpse on to its back, intending to take his trousers, but he’d wet himself too, and more besides, so I left them.
I frisked him, looking for a gun or knife, but he wasn’t armed; probably hadn’t thought it necessary. There was bound to be a man on guard outside, but the thick wooden doors had masked any noise, so I reckoned I had a few minutes at least. I ran to the window, but there was no balcony or convenient ledge I could climb out onto. The door it was. I looked around the room for some kind of weapon.
In the centre of the room stood two wooden chairs with the board laid across them. The hood, towels, bucket and ties were lying discarded on the floor beside it. I walked over to the apparatus, lifted the board and placed it on the floor. Then I picked up one of the chairs and smashed it into the wall as hard as I could, snapping one of the legs off. Voila: one genuine vampire-slaying stake.
I ran over to the door and banged on it, and then I crouched down, holding the stake in both hands against my chest, pointing out and up. The door cracked open. In normal circumstances a well trained soldier would have drawn his weapon and pushed the door open at arm’s length, but these doors were so weighty that the soldier outside had to lean his full weight against it, and even then they moved slowly.
He was so focused on pushing the door open that he didn’t notice me, crouched down below his eyeline, until it was too late.
I sprang up and drove the stake with all my strength into his belly and up under his ribcage into his heart, lifting him off the ground with the force of my attack, pushing a spout of blood out through his mouth. I couldn’t hold his weight, and he fell backwards, crashing to the floor in a dead heap.
Was a time I would have felt bad about doing something like that, but I thought of all those people left to rot in the town with huge shafts of wood sticking out of their shattered ribcages, and any remorse I might have felt evaporated.
The general’s desk stood alone at the centre of the vast room, but there was no-one els
e there. I grabbed a gun and some magazines from the impaled soldier and ran to the main doors, familiarising myself with the weapon as I ran. It was some variant of an M16; not a weapon I was familiar with. All I knew is that you load it by pulling the charging handle back and letting it go. Simplicity itself. Other than that I’d have to hope it wasn’t too different to the guns I knew. I found the safety and switched it off.
The problem with these huge bloody doors was that you couldn’t hear a thing through them. Probably useful if you wanted to stage a little private torturing, or a discreet orgy, but fuck all use if you wanted to sneak around the place undetected. I pressed my ear to one of the doors but there was no way of knowing what was happening on the other side. I was about to climb out the balcony when I noticed something slightly askew in one of the wall patterns in the far corner; a tiny line that didn’t quite fit the design. I ran across to it and found a concealed door with a metal ring flush to the wall. I popped it out and pulled, revealing a narrow, gloomy back staircase, presumably installed for the servants.
I stepped inside, pulled the door closed behind me and made my way downstairs, gun at the ready.
I passed one exit, which I gently cracked open. It led into a large kitchen on the ground floor. There was no-one inside, so I took the opportunity to slip out and find a couple of good knives which I slipped into my waistband. I then returned to the staircase and continued my descent. Eventually the stairs ended at another door, beyond which lay the damp concrete corridor and the cells. I crept along the corridor to the point where it met the cell block at a kind of T-junction. Back to the wall, I risked a quick glimpse into the prison run and saw only one guard, sitting reading near the main entrance. He was facing me, about fifty metres away. No way to take him out silently. I was just going to have to hope for the best.
I shouldered the M16, took a deep breath, and steeped into his line of sight. He didn’t look up; too engrossed in Tom Clancy. I walked towards him, gun sighted square on his chest as I did so. I was half way to him when he turned the page, and in that instant he registered my presence. He looked up at me in surprise and opened his mouth to challenge me. I squeezed the trigger softly and sent a round spinning straight at his chest.
And missed.
I’m not accustomed to missing, but I’d never fired an M16 before so I was unfamiliar with its quirks. The gun pulled upwards much more than I’d expected. The bullet hit the wall beside his shoulder, sending out a puff of white plaster. My surprise at missing caused me to hesitate, and in the instant before I could resight and fire again my target said: “Jesus, Lee, what the hell are you doing?”
Which was unexpected.
TEN MINUTES LATER, with a knife at my throat and my right arm pinioned behind my back, I was led out of the palace into the dark orange of sunset. The palace looked oddly unimpressive from outside. Partly this was because it had been shot to shit more than once, partly it was that all the opulence inside wasn’t reflected in the blocky, uninspired exterior. The effect was that of walking out of a cinema into the street; glamour and colour replaced by dullness and dust.
The man with the knife — the man who I’d failed to shoot — marched me straight ahead, past the wonderful gardens and on to a paved path that led from the main palace building to a smaller, but still very large outbuilding (a palacette, perhaps, or a palacini?) There were a few of them dotted around inside the thick stone walls that ringed the enormous compound. There were fields too, scrubby and untended with a few lonely trees, probably once intended as orchards but never irrigated properly and now ignored.
It was a grim place. Badly planned, hardly finished, abandoned, fought over and now occupied, baking in the relentless heat. But that garden somehow seemed to have survived. Perhaps it was because I was so nervous, but I fixated on the garden as I walked away from it, daydreaming about its pools and arches. But I wasn’t going to somewhere calm and cool and green. I was going to be executed.
There were two other soldiers escorting me, and two more at the open doors of the building ahead. We entered a large reception hall, lit by the amber light that flooded through an enormous lattice window. Blythe was there, seated on a seventies style sofa; polyester covered foam squares on a basic metal frame, all in a garish swirling pattern of green and brown. My father sat beside him, hands cuffed to the frame. In front of them stood something that came up to my shoulders, covered in a white sheet out of which snaked thick cables that coiled across the mosaic floor and out of the door we had just entered by.
“Thank you, Major,” said Blythe. “You can release the prisoner.”
The knife was removed and my arm freed. The man who’d been steering me stepped back into the lengthening shadows.
“You all right, Lee?”
“Yeah Dad, I’m fine.”
“You are anything but fine, son,” said Blythe.
“He’s not your son,” spat my father.
“I told him that, Dad, but he wouldn’t listen. Maybe he wants to adopt me.”
“I already have a son, Sergeant Keegan,” replied Blythe. “One more than you, in a few minutes.”
“If you touch one hair…”
“Soldier,” barked Blythe.
The nearest of his troops yelled “Sir!” in reponse.
“If Sergeant Keegan utters another threat you will shoot him dead.”
“Sir, yes, Sir!” The soldier raised his rifle and stepped forward, keeping the muzzle a few inches from my dad’s head. Blythe glanced at the soldier and said witheringly: “Not there, you’ll cover me in brains. Stand behind him.”
“Sir, yes, Sir!”
I looked into Dad’s eyes and I could see him willing me to be strong and calm. I could also see his panic. I smiled at him.
“Lee, you surprise me, you really do,” said the general, turning his attention back to me. “I thought you were going to be the answer to my prayers. Instead you kill two of my men in what I can only call very creative ways, and you almost manage to make it three. I’m impressed.”
The look on Dad’s face was a picture; a mixture of horror, disbelief and pride. He mouthed ‘really?’ and I nodded, matter of fact.
“I don’t like being bullied, General,” I said.
“I can tell. Anyway, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to tell me where your father’s band of merry men is hiding or I am going to kill you.”
“You’re going to kill me anyway.”
He laughed at that, a rich, warm laugh that contained no humour whatsoever.
“I surely am,” he said. “But I can make it quick or slow, and given how long you lasted on the waterboard I’m thinking you don’t have the stomach for slow.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I considered my options and the general waited for my response, studying my face closely as I did so.
“What constitutes quick?” I asked.
“I like to give people a choice.”
“A choice?”
“Yes. You can be shot, hanged, electrocuted or given a lethal injection. Your call.”
Again I considered. Again he watched me do so.
“Well, I’ve been shot, and I’ve been hanged, and I really don’t like needles, so I reckon I’ll go for the electric chair please.”
As soon as I said it I realised I’d made a mistake — he hadn’t mentioned a chair. Dad noticed too, and his eyes narrowed as he cocked his head at me curiously, trying to work out what was going on.
Blythe, however, missed it.
“All right, the chair it is. It is a classic, after all. But first…”
“They’re in the souk. It’s a courtyard behind a carpet shop with a green sign with red letters on it. I know they’re planning to stay there until tomorrow night. That’s the best I can tell you.”
Blythe nodded, satisfied.
“And why did you give yourself up?” he asked. “They must have told you about me, you must have known what would happen. Did you really think you could rescue your dad
single handed? Can you possibly be that naïve?”
I shrugged. “What can I say? I have this thing about walking into the compounds of my enemies and baiting them. It worked once before, I figured why not try it again.”
Blythe stood up and walked over to me, leaning close into my face and studying me.
“I know you’re lying,” he said softly. “You’re not that stupid. And I’m curious, but not that curious. You are a footnote, son, and I don’t have time to waste on you. I’ve got a major operation to stage and this sideshow is holding me up.”
He turned back to face my dad.
“I had intended to torture your boy, make you beg me to stop, break you, force you to tell me everything you knew and then kill him in front of you,” said the general. “But events have moved more quickly than I’d anticipated. I have new orders, and that’s no longer necessary.”
Then he stepped to his left, reached out, and pulled the sheet away with a theatrical flourish to reveal an electric chair.
“So I’m going to skip to the end.”
The sun was half hidden by the horizon now. In a few minutes darkness would fall. The shadow of the electric chair stretched long across the marble. It was a curious thing, home made and jerry rigged. It was an ornate, tall backed ebony chair that probably once sat at the head of a grand dining table. Who knows, it may have been Saddam’s. Thick metal wire had been wrapped around the arms and legs, leading to a plain metal bowl, once intended for eating out of, now pressed into service as the head contact. The four other contacts — two for the feet, two for the hands — were made of gold, some relic of Ba’athist luxury beaten with hammers and flattened into something far less elegant. It made sense, though; gold’s the best conductor there is. Thick straps festooned the framework, ready to secure my body and limbs and ensure that contact was not lost when I thrashed and jerked as the current hit me.
“Please, I beg you, don’t do this,” cried Dad. “He’s my son. Please, God, no.”
I tried to catch Dad’s eye, tell him to stay calm, but it was getting too dark, and anyway it sounded like his eyes would be too full of tears to see clearly. The sound of my father begging for my life was the purest despair I’d ever heard. I wanted so much to tell him everything was all right, but I couldn’t. The truth was, I was probably about to die, and he was going to have to watch it happen.
School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles) Page 31
