School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles)

by Scott K. Andrews

  Blythe rolled his eyes for me, a moment of theatre. Then, grinning, he said “Your Majesty?”

  “Leave now. Get in your planes and go back to America. Or I will destroy you and your army utterly.” His voice wavered, betraying his nervousness. He didn’t quite pull it off, and the effect was awkward rather than threatening.

  For a moment the general was too stunned to respond. Then he began to laugh, a deep, rich, booming laugh. “My God, you Brits really know how to raise your kids!”

  “Unlike you, General,” I said pointedly. That stopped his laugher abruptly.

  He flashed me a look of pure hatred and spoke into the radio again. “How exactly do you propose to destroy me, young Majesty? You’ve got no army left. I’ve seen to that.”

  “He’s got me, you bastard.” That was Rowles, and he sounded anything but nervous. “And that’s all he needs.”

  Blythe shook his head in wonder. “Son, you may have killed some of my men, but… oh, this whole conversation is ridiculous. Where are you, anyway? I presume Keegan let you out of your cell.”

  “I’m still in the tunnels, General,” said Rowles. “In a big underground warehouse with a large nuclear symbol on the door.”

  Oh.

  Oh fuck.

  The general saw my eyes widen in shock. He became cautious, my reaction leading him to believe that maybe this wasn’t a bluff. He waved at the soldier standing behind me. “Go,” he said curtly, and I heard the man open the door and run down the corridor.

  “What do you know about this?” Blythe asked me.

  I had to think very carefully about what I said next.

  “I know that Rowles is a psychopath who doesn’t seem to value his own life at all,” I said slowly. “I know that he really, really doesn’t like people in uniforms telling him what to do. I know that he’s been tortured horribly and that probably hasn’t left him in the best frame of mind. Oh, and I know that Jack — that’s Your Majesty to you — knows the detonation codes for the nuclear warheads collected by Operation Motherland. The ones in the big underground warehouse with the nuclear symbol on the door.”

  The radio crackled again. “I can hear your soldiers coming down the tunnel, General,” said Rowles. “If anybody tries to enter this warehouse, I’ll detonate.”

  “He will, too,” I said. “He has… issues.”

  Blythe narrowed his eyes, thinking hard. He hit the transmit button. “What do you want, son?”

  “I want to kill you,” spat Rowles, full of hatred. “With a knife, not a gun. Slowly. I want to cut you up, piece by piece. I want to gouge out your eyes, puncture your eardrums, rip out your tongue, slice off your nose, pull out your nails and teeth and hair, cut off your cock and make you eat it, then very, very slowly push my knife into your brain through your eye socket and stir.”

  Christ.

  “I told you,” I said. “Issues.”

  “I’ll settle for blowing you up, though. And your army.”

  “And your friends, and yourself,” said the general.

  “If I have to.”

  “Here’s what we want, General.” It was Jack again. “We are going to drive to the main gate. You are going to bring Lee and Tariq to us and let us drive away.”

  “What’s to stop the boy blowing us up once you’ve gone?” asked Blythe. “If he is as suicidal as Keegan says he is.”

  “Nothing except my word,” said Rowles. “All you need to know for certain is that if you don’t do as I ask, I’ll definitely blow us all to hell.”

  “It’s a good offer, General,” I said. “I’m done with fighting. Once I leave here, you’ll never see me or any of my friends again. We’ll just vanish, and you can get on with doing whatever it is your boss wants done. We won’t oppose you, we just want to leave. Probably France, maybe Spain, I dunno. But away. Let us go, you live, everyone’s happy.”

  Through the window behind Blythe I could see a thin line of light appear on the horizon. Dawn was coming.

  The door behind me opened and someone began giving a report.

  “There is someone in the nuclear warehouse, General,” said the soldier I couldn’t see. “We’ve drilled through from the corridor and inserted a mini-cam. The boy is sitting next to one of the warheads, and the cover is off.”

  “So he could be telling the truth?” asked Blythe.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Could a sniper take him out?”

  “If we can get someone into the ventilation system we believe we could get sight on the target.”

  “Do it. I want to be informed the second the shooter’s in position. Meanwhile, we play along. Get some men in here to clean these two up.”

  “Understood, Sir.” The soldier stomped away.

  The general leant down and picked up Tariq’s black shirt, ripping it into strips and using it to gag me. Then he picked up the radio again.

  “You don’t leave me much choice,” he said. “Bring your vehicle to the gates now, we’ll have the prisoners.”

  “We’ll be there in a moment,” replied Jack, sounding surprised.

  A stream of soldiers scurried into the room and I was untied and allowed to stand. I’d lost so much blood from my leg that I momentarily blacked out as I stood up. I was caught and sat back down. A doctor patched my leg up as best he could and helped me into a new pair of trousers. I could hear more frantic activity from where Tariq had been sitting. When I managed to look across all I could see was a wall of soldiers, some kneeling down.

  “Just patch them up,” growled the general. “No need to do too much. They’ve only got to make it to the main gate, after that they’re not our concern.”

  Eventually a soldier indicated that they were ready, and they lifted Tariq up on a stretcher. He was pale and unconscious, and his breathing was shallow, but at least he was still alive.

  Surrounded by soldiers, their rifles raised, we were marched out of the building and on to the main road that ran to the gate. I was unable to walk properly and had to wrap my arms around the shoulders of two soldiers who helped me. The base looked very different in the early twilight, with soldiers running all over the place; some were streaming down into the tunnels, others were lining up beside trucks ready to ship out.

  As we moved towards the main gate I saw the Stryker pull up outside. Its gun turret rotated, pointing straight down the road at us. I smiled at the threat. Nice to have some firepower on our side. Then I heard a deep rumbling sound and a tank rolled into view ahead of us. Its gun turret — so much bigger than the Stryker’s — rotated until it was pointing straight at the armoured vehicle, which suddenly seemed kind of puny. The general fell into step beside me and made eye contact, holding my gaze steadily, his deep black eyes, so pitiless and cold.

  “I want you to know, son, that I’ll be coming for you,” he said. “I don’t care where you try to hide, here or abroad, I’ll find you and your daddy one day. And when I do, I’ll fry you both alive, so help me God.”

  I didn’t reply, just kept trying to put one foot in front of the other, gritting my teeth against the pain in my leg and focusing on the means of my escape. I had no idea how this was going to pan out, or what plan Jack and Rowles had concocted. Our original plan — for Tariq and Jack to use a remote detonator to set off the nukes after we’d left — had failed when they couldn’t find the remote detonators anywhere. So how was Rowles planning to escape?

  We approached the gate and the Stryker’s hatch clanged open. Jack’s head appeared in the opening and he shouted: “Bring them forward.”

  The general nodded, the gate was opened, and Tariq and I were carried through. This was the most dangerous moment. If they decided to take this opportunity, they could kill us all with ease. It was only their fear of Rowles that stopped them. If their sniper killed Rowles before we closed the hatch and drove away, we were dead.

  The soldiers helped me up and through the hatch, lowering me down so that Jack and Sue could take hold of me and drop me on to one of the benche
s. Tariq was a dead weight when he was lowered in, but somehow they managed to get him stashed away. When the soldiers had gone, Jack closed the hatch.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I yelled. “You were supposed to be miles away by now!”

  “Not my idea,” said Jack as he applied pressure to Tariq’s wound and Sue took the wheel. “It was that bloody kid.”

  “Rowles?”

  “He is a scary ass motherfucker, you know that, right?”

  I shook my head, confused. “What did he do?”

  “Held me to gunpoint, made me tell him about the nukes and the codes, and then threatened to shoot me if I followed him.”

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked. “I mean, does he have a plan?”

  “Not that he told me. I’ve just been doing as he says.”

  “Great king you are, letting yourself get bullied by an eleven-year-old.”

  “He had a gun to my head and knife to my balls,” he protested. “And his eyes… that kid is not right in the head.”

  “He was bad enough before the months of torture,” I said, shaking my head. “Let me on the radio.”

  I shimmied along the bench and Sue handed me the radio handset. “He’s on setting three,” she said. I adjusted the frequency so I could talk without the Yanks overhearing us.

  “Rowles, you there?”

  “Hey, Sir. You safe?”

  “For now, but what about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me, Sir. Just drive.”

  “Don’t be fucking ridiculous, Rowles. We came here to rescue you, we’re hardly going to bugger off now.”

  “You’d better, Sir, because I plan on detonating as soon as you’re clear.”

  I bit my lip, thinking furiously. How the hell was I going to get him out of this?

  “Listen, they’ve got a sniper coming for you, through the ventilation system. I don’t know how long you’ve got.”

  I clicked off the radio. “Can you rig up a remote detonator from scratch?” I asked Jack. “Did anyone teach you that while you were here?”

  He shook his head.

  “Shit.” I pressed the transmit button again. “Okay, Rowles, we’re going to have to bluff it out. I want you to find some piece of kit there that you can pretend is a remote detonator. If we can convince them you can set off the bomb from a distance, they’ll let you walk away.”

  There was no reply. “Rowles, you there?”

  “Yes, Sir. Sorry, I can hear them coming through the ventilation. I don’t think I’ve got much time. I’m not leaving. If we run, they’ll just come after us. I know what they do to people, and I’m not letting anyone else suffer like I did. The only way to be safe is to nuke the lot of them, and that’s what I’m going to do. So you need to drive away now, Sir. Get to a safe distance.”

  I was thinking furiously. I couldn’t let him die, I wouldn’t. But as I was about to try again to persuade him, the Stryker started to move.

  “Sue,” I shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You heard the boy,” she yelled back. “I’m getting us out of here.”

  “Dammit, turn us around, that’s an order!”

  “You’re not the boss of me, Lee.”

  “Jack,” I cried, “stop her!” But the boy king just sat there looking scared.

  I hit the transmit button again. “Rowles, please, don’t detonate, just give yourself up. We’ll come back for you again, I promise.”

  “Sorry, Sir,” he replied. “I just…” I heard a sharp crack over the radio and Rowles grunted.

  “Rowles? Rowles?”

  Blythe’s voice cut through the static. “Forget the boy. He’s gone. Keep driving, Keegan, ’cause I’m coming for you, and I’m going to kill you all myself. There’s nowhere you can hide, son. This land belongs to me now!” Then his voice was muffled as he turned away and barked “Launch the Apaches!”

  I felt sick to the pit of my stomach.

  Jack looked at me, terrified. “What do we do now?”

  “Faster, Sue,” I yelled. She didn’t reply; she was concentrating too intently, driving like a lunatic, trying to put as much distance as she could between us and our relentless, unstoppable pursuers.

  Then the radio crackled again and I heard Rowles whisper, “I am so fucking sick of people in uniforms telling me what to do.”

  Shit.

  I leapt forward to the control panel and shoved Sue to one side, causing the Stryker to veer wildly. As she regained control, I began hitting the touch screen. “Where is it? Where is it?” I shouted in fury until finally I found the button I needed. I stroked the glass panel and heard the CBRN system sealing us in and preparing us for a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack and then…

  THE GROUND SHOCK once, violently, throwing us back in our seats. There was a second’s pause and then the shockwave hit. Incredible noise, like the Earth itself was roaring in agony. And then the Stryker was flying. Picked up and tossed through the air at the front of the blast wave, a sealed metal can holding four people who were tumbled and thrown, screaming and yelling, crashing into metal surfaces and edges, tossed against each other like rag dolls in a tumble dryer, cooked and deafened and shaken. I felt the awful lurch of freefall in my stomach as the Stryker soared through the air, riding the wavefront, spinning madly, cooking us alive, deafening and blinding us, making our senses reel and spin.

  We began to descend and then came an enormous crash as we hit the ground. I smashed, face first, into the metal floor and felt Jack and Tariq flop on top of me. Then we bounced, up again into the air, pitching and yawing and cresting the top of our arc, leaving us floating, momentarily weightless, before we began to fall again and crash again and bounce again. In ever decreasing arcs we leapfrogged across Salisbury Plain for what felt like a lifetime, feeling our bones crack. Eventually we stopped taking to the air and just tumbled along the ground, rolling across the landscape like a kicked toy. First we rolled side over side but then the nose dug in and we pitched across the ground front to back, end over end. It was endless, like the worst fairground ride you could imagine.

  But eventually the rear of the Stryker dug into the ground and we gouged a deep scar across the plain, slowing until we stopped with a shattering crash that sent us all flying to the back of the vehicle in a smashing tangle of limbs.

  The noise didn’t stop when we did, nor the heat. The shockwaves of the explosion, weakened now that its greatest fury was spent but still fierce enough to strip the flesh from the bones of any poor soul caught in its path, swept across our craft, nestled in the soil now, dug in for protection against the onslaught.

  But in the end that faded away too. The explosion passed over, leaving us broiled and broken, deaf and burned and shattered, heaps of disarticulated flesh in a hot metal stove, unable to see or speak, barely able to feel.

  But alive.

  EPILOGUE

  JANE

  WE SAW THE light in the sky as the nuke obliterated Blythe and his forces. Even though that had been the plan, I knew deep down that something had gone terribly wrong.

  When John Keegan left Fairlawne in pursuit of his son, I didn’t think I’d ever see him again. Lee should have been back long ago, and John should still have been in bed recovering from his wounds.

  I suppose I should have learned by now not to underestimate the Keegan men.

  He was gone for two days, but on the morning of the third, he pulled up in a people carrier with the four most broken people I’ve seen in my life.

  I worked on them for two days straight, setting bones, performing transfusions, cauterising wounds, treating burns and stitching them back together. Lee had broken every single rib, punctured a lung and shattered his jaw so badly that I had to wire it up; Jack had broken both arms, legs and collar bones in multiple places; Sue had had both an ear and a hand ripped off; Tariq’s guts were a mess.

  A few days after the first round of surgery was completed it became clear that some wounds would not hea
l properly and I had to make the awful decision to amputate.

  I removed Tariq’s left arm below the shoulder and Jack’s left leg just above the knee.

  I kept them all in chemically induced comas for two weeks, eventually rousing them one at a time when the medicine ran out. When she regained consciousness, Sue just wasn’t there any more. She could breathe and open her eyes, but she was gone, brain dead apart from the most basic autonomic functions.

  I euthanised her as soon as I realised. Another death on my conscience.

  John sat beside Lee all day, every day, holding his hand, reading him stories, playing his favourite songs on an old battery-powered CD player. I wanted to sit with Lee too, but I felt I would be intruding. So I busied myself with the day to day running of the school and only allowed myself to sit with my poor damaged boy when his father had fallen asleep. I sat there, stroking Lee’s hair, fighting back tears, willing him to pull through.

  Then one wet, grey day, John came running to find me. I was teaching a first aid class to a group of juniors when he burst into the room.

  “He’s awake,” he said, and I didn’t need telling twice. I ran as fast as I could down to the room we’d put aside for recovery and there was Lee, lying in bed with his eyes open. He mumbled something unintelligible and I felt a rush of fear — what if he was brain damaged? But then I remembered the metal in his jaw.

  “Don’t try to speak, Lee,” I said softly. “Your jaw is wired up to help it repair.” I saw the understanding dawn in his eyes and I realised he was still in there.

  John hugged me hard, crying into my shoulder saying “thank you, thank you,” over and over. I hugged him back, looking down at Lee, knowing that he would live but unsure how he would cope with the long, slow process of recovery and adjustment. Half deaf, crippled, held together with wire and plaster casts; his biggest fight was only just beginning. For Tariq and Jack, too.

  But there were no soldiers coming after us, no armies left to do battle with. The land was free of military rule.

  We were free.