Fanatics: Zero Tolerance

by Ferguson, David J.

  The shelves were already half-empty, conjuring up memories of a shopping expedition she’d made with some friends two years before; she’d been a van driver on a relief trip to Eastern Europe, and during a brief stay in one of the big cities, she’d visited a big store. The goods and the currency were different, of course, but the poor selection and the inflated prices mirrored perfectly what was before her.

  She consulted her list again and began collecting items. By the time fifteen minutes had passed, she had managed to acquire about half of what she had hoped for (though in most instances she’d had to opt for an inferior brand) and was resigned to doing without the rest.

  She joined the shortest queue - though in fact there wasn’t much to choose between them - and tried to stay calm and patient as she approached the cashpoint at even less than the usual snail’s pace. She watched the other customers, trying not to appear anxious about getting closer to the soldier hovering about beyond the checkouts who cradled his machine gun as if it was a baby.

  Many of the people waiting with her appeared to be on a short fuse; she could hear some grumbling about people from out of town using up resources that really ought to be reserved for residents. For a university town - and a seaside one at that - this was a very bad sign; strangers were generally so much a part of the scenery that they were hardly noticed.

  In the queue to Ellen’s left, a burly man in a grey coat stood swearing softly under his breath. She felt deeply uneasy about being close to him; a matter of only a few days ago, he may have been a perfectly decent and likeable example of Joe Citizen, but today, Ellen suspected, he was just a whisker away from being unhinged. She felt badly about thinking ill of him - he’d probably lost all his relatives, or someone very special, for all she knew - but she was nevertheless relieved when her queue began steadily to leave his behind. His tone of voice became more agitated as he saw Murphy’s law working against him (no matter which queue you’re in, the other one moves more quickly), and the soldier looked up, alert against the possibility of trouble.

  Ellen’s heartbeat accelerated; the posture of the soldier meant the gun was pointed right at her. She shifted from foot to foot, willing the people ahead to get a move on, but the little spurt of action a moment previously seemed to have petered out; no-one budged.

  She took a half-step to her right and leaned around the person in front of her to look at the checkout. Nothing she could do would hurry things along, but she had a vague feeling that if she could see what exactly the hold-up was, she might feel a little less fidgety. The checkout operative, a woman in her late fifties, was fiddling with a fruit loaf; the part of the wrapping with the barcode was crumpled, and the machine was refusing to read it. For the fifth time, the woman flattened out the wrapper and passed it across the laser. Nothing happened. With an exasperated sigh, she began tapping in numbers manually. Then she stopped and squinted at the barcode panel again. She frowned and called over her shoulder: “Annie, can you read the last two numbers on this?”

  As she frowned, something clicked in Ellen’s mind. She’d seen that woman somewhere else. Not here; in some other setting. Ellen’s hopes began to rise. If the woman was disposed to be an ally, Ellen might get to breeze through the checkout without having to face awkward questions about the lack of appropriate ID.

  “That’s three one, Mrs Parker,” said the other assistant.

  Ellen opened her purse and glanced surreptitiously at her fake ID again. When Mark had presented her with it she had been very impressed; she thought it could hardly fail, and was so confident of success that she had persuaded him she could handle this shopping expedition on her own. Now the card just looked absurdly amateurish; why, it wasn’t even laminated.

  She looked at Mrs Parker again, trying to place her, and trying to think of some small signal that might spark the woman’s recognition of her.

  A small commotion broke out at one of the other paypoints. All conversation stopped while everyone listened in.

  “But I have other identification,” a young man was saying angrily. “I just don’t have the official ID card with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he was told, “I don’t make the rules. It’s policy.”

  “Look,” the young man growled, “I haven’t queued up for all this length of time just to be told it’s all been pointless and I’ll have to hand everything back!” He pulled a couple of tenners from his wallet and pushed them furiously in the checkout girl’s face. “Take the money! Just take it! It’s as good as anyone else’s!”

  The soldier stepped forward and pointed his gun squarely at the young man’s chest. He said in an icily polite voice: “I’m sorry, Sir, I’ll have to ask you to leave now.”

  The expressions battling each other on the young man’s face showed clearly enough he was teetering between giving vent to his rage, and eating humble pie and leaving quietly. But it was also quite plain that the soldier was not bluffing. Ellen realised she could be about to see something dreadful; she drew a deep involuntary breath that threatened to break free of her as a scream.

  “Now, Sir,” said the soldier again.

  They stared at each other for moments longer, the young man a whisker away from fulminating and standing on rights he was only beginning to realise he no longer had, and the soldier, steadily poised to carry out the ugly task he was trained for; then the former buckled. Almost weeping with humiliation, he sidled past the end of the gun barrel and ran for the door. In his confusion, he pushed instead of pulling, and had to put up with the stares of the assembled company for seconds more; then at last he escaped.

  When he had gone, Ellen’s eye returned to the scene ahead of her, and fell on Mrs Parker, the woman at the paypoint. She remembered with an unpleasant shock where she had seen her: it was at the open air concert her boyfriend’s band had played just across the road from here. Mrs Parker had not approved at all; she had left the shop on that occasion to express her displeasure in person.

  Ellen turned her face away, wishing she had gone into another supermarket, and toyed with the idea of pretending she had forgotten something so she could leave the queue she was in and join another when she returned with her extra item. But she found she could not summon up the nerve she needed to shove her way back to the shopping aisles once more, and anyway the queues all seemed twice as long as when she had begun waiting; the thought of going right to the bottom of a queue again was intolerable.

  She looked at her fake ID again, wondering whether she should chance using it. She seemed to have no option; with no ID, she would have to leave the shop with nothing at all, and fuss was exactly what she wished to avoid. She slipped the card into her pocket, thinking that perhaps she could sneak a look at someone else’s genuine one when she got a bit closer to the till.

  The queue crept along. Glancing ahead, Ellen could see Mrs Parker pause every so often to look along the queue’s length, and for an instant, she was almost certain she had been recognised. She looked away and shuffled to a spot where, she hoped, the head of another customer was obstructing a clear view of her.

  The movement seemed to catch Mrs Parker’s attention. Leaning to and fro as she lifted items out of a customer’s basket, she kept trying to see Ellen’s face. Ellen’s pulse raced, but she affected an air of unconcern and stared out at the sea through the big window behind the bored soldier.

  By the time it was her turn to be served, she was like a guitar string someone has tuned so high that it’s ready to snap. Mrs Parker seemed to look at her with a hostile expression; Ellen gawped back, still fingering the card in her pocket uncertainly.

  “Well?” snapped the other woman, making her jump. “Are you going to buy those or not?”

  Ellen suddenly realised she had not handed over her basket, and did so, feeling foolish. Mrs Parker was apparently prepared to play this out to the end.

  Shortly, the last item was scanned in; Mrs Parker punched a key on the till and the total came up on the display. The machine noisily churned out a rec
eipt. Still Ellen gaped at the woman, unable to make a decision. The soldier stopped as he was strolling past their checkout. Oh, please God, help me, please God, please God, thought Ellen desperately.

  “Is something wrong, dear?” said Mrs Parker, with a nasty smile. Ellen’s sense of helplessness became even more emphatic.

  The soldier moved towards her abruptly, shifting the angle of his gun. Ellen felt herself almost choking on the scream she was trying to stifle. Then the soldier’s head suddenly dipped; he bent and picked something up from the floor.

  “Is this yours?” he said, holding up her purse.

  She gazed stupidly at it for a moment. “Yes,” she managed to say, and did not sound like herself at all; her mouth was very dry. “Thank you,” she whispered as she took it back. She looked at him, then at the shop assistant, then at the purse again, feeling as if her legs were about to fold under her.

  “You’d better check everything’s still in it,” said the soldier. Then, as an afterthought: “Is your ID card there? A Lemming might very well be inclined to take that before the money, you know. They know they can’t buy anything without one, but they’re too stubborn to sign for one of their own.”

  Ellen saw a way out of the situation at last, and trying not to let her hope show, took the purse and opened it. There was no ID card in it, of course. She tried to appear suitably dismayed.

  Mrs Parker’s nasty look was still there, but now its vehicle was a frown of concentration. She was evidently watching Ellen to see whether she would lie.

  Ellen chose her words carefully. “I don’t have an ID card,” she said.

  The soldier scowled sympathetically and shook his head. “Very likely the thief is someone still here in the shop,” he said. “But there’s no way I can search everyone by myself. Sorry, love.”

  Ellen looked at her basketful of groceries. “I don’t suppose -” she began.

  “No,” said Mrs Parker shortly. “No card, no goods.”

  The soldier shrugged as if to say: “That’s life,” and stepped back to let her leave. Ellen put away her purse and, hands in pockets, slowly made for the exit.

  Just as she reached the door her heart skipped a beat; Mark’s counterfeit card was no longer in her pocket. “Here!” someone called at the same moment. “I think this is yours, isn’t it?”

  Ellen turned just in time to see Sadie Parker snatching the card from the hand of the customer who’d been next in line. That man was just completing the act of rising from a stooped position; Ellen realised the card must have fallen from her pocket when she had withdrawn her hand to reach for her purse.

  The soldier smiled at her. “Looks like you’ll get to take your shopping home after all -” he started.

  “This is a fake,” said Sadie Parker, in a gloating, self-satisfied voice.

  Ellen did not wait to see the soldier raise his gun; she ran for it. A brief vision of the man who’d had to leave the shop before her passed across her mind; she remembered to ignore the PUSH sign on the door and pulled instead. She had just stepped off the entrance porch when bullets shattered the glass in the door. Her bladder threatened to cut loose, and she wanted to curl into a fetal position and scream, but her instincts were yelling at her that if she gave in to shock and panic now, she was dead. She turned right sharply and dashed through a small knot of pedestrians, knocking them left and right. They were scattered more thinly after that; not enough to slow her down to the point where she might be caught, but enough to discourage the soldier from firing carelessly after her.

  Ellen was one of those lucky people who have to expend relatively little effort to stay in decent physical shape. She had the aptitude for sport, but no inclination for it; she always claimed that she could never see the point.

  Now she could see the point. In the direction she was running, there were no turnings from the promenade onto another street before she reached the stone steps just past Morelli’s ice cream parlour; it was not exactly a one hundred metre dash, but it was close enough. She could not afford to look back and see just how much of a lead she had on the soldier, but she guessed it was only fifteen or twenty metres. That was no good; even if she made it to the foot of the stone staircase he could pick her off with no trouble at all if he just stood firing from the bottom step, for there were hiding places neither to the left nor the right until about the fiftieth step. She had no option but to keep running right to the end of the prom.

  Behind her she heard a thump, a scream, and a male voice swearing, and she realised her pursuer had fallen further behind.

  “Stop her!” someone bawled. “She’s a criminal! She’s a Lemming!”

  Ellen ducked and weaved like a boxer around some bystanders who still hadn’t quite understood what was going on. Beyond them, though, just past Morelli’s, stood a handful of young men obviously a lot less reluctant to get involved: they were crouching like American footballers, bracing themselves for the moment she would run right into them.

  To her left, a bus was trundling past; she had no option but to take a sharp right up the stone steps. The young men didn’t follow her as she expected, but gathered around the foot of the staircase cheering the soldier on in half-intelligible country accents.

  “She went that way!”

  “Away, ye boy!”

  “Blow her head off!”

  Ellen’s heart was seriously labouring now, but she could not possibly stop; there was nothing but a high wall on either side of her with barely a cranny to dodge into if she should be shot at.

  On the right, about a third of the way up, was the door to someone’s flat. Ellen had a flash of inspiration; she kicked and thumped the door briefly, then ran on. The flat’s occupant, a spindly student type with thick glasses, appeared at the door the same moment the soldier was raising his rifle to aim at Ellen. The student, unaware of the armed man below, swore at Ellen and told her just what he thought of her juvenile practical joke, spoiling the soldier’s aim splendidly.

  “You! Get out of the way!” he shouted, but he could not catch the fellow’s attention.

  The student abruptly left off swearing as a burst of automatic gunfire startled him into turning around. Terror-stricken, he stared at the soldier until the latter impatiently let off a few more rounds that spanged and whined around him in the partly-enclosed space, ricocheting unpredictably and knocking chips from the walls and steps close by. He dived back indoors in as great a hurry as he could manage.

  Ellen was now within twenty steps of the top, and every breath she took was like swallowing fire. The soldier emptied the rest of his clip, and she dropped, trying to make herself as small as possible. She closed her eyes and waited until the shooting stopped, yelping as little fragments of concrete sent flying by the less inaccurate shots stung the backs of her legs.

  The gunfire ceased; she jumped up and began scrambling up the last few steps. The hiatus seemed to stretch out inordinately; and she had just begun to believe she would make it when she realised that the gap must be because her pursuer was taking a much more careful aim.

  In spite of herself, knowing very well it was a suicidally stupid thing to do, she turned to look. They were eye to eye for the merest fragment of a second; then her forward momentum defeated the clumsy manoeuvre she had begun, and she fell backwards with her legs flailing and her skirt flying (to the man who was trying to kill her, it appeared that she was taking her leave of him with an appropriately rude gesture), finally rapping her head smartly against the pavement of the street at the top. A high velocity bullet ripped through the space where she had been an instant before.

  She was aware (despite being half-dazed) that she was no longer in his line of vision. She rolled over and crawled along the pavement on her belly for a few metres, then got to her feet and began running once again.

  It was over three years before anyone shot at her again, which was surprisingly good going.

  *****

  “Good news,” the prison official told John Andrews. “We t
hink parole is a possibility after all.”

  “Oh?” said Andrews. He had a feeling he knew what was coming; but almost from the moment of his arrest he had come to terms with the belief that any offer they made him was bound to be unacceptable. Even so, he could not manage to suppress a sudden burst of hope.

  “Yes,” said the official. His face fairly beamed with magnanimity. “You’ll be free almost right away.”

  Andrews looked at him. “Where’s the catch?”

  The official grinned. “There’s no catch. You’ll be able to leave here, go out into the big bad world, take your place in society, and be a good citizen. And personally, let me tell you that no-one will be more pleased than me - apart from you, of course! I’ve never thought you belonged in here, you know.”

  “Ah. I think I see the catch.”

  “There’s no catch! If you want out, I can set it all in motion for you right now.”

  “I have a feeling,” said Andrews, “that your idea of a good citizen and my idea of a good citizen don’t quite coincide.”

  The official chuckled as if he’d just been treated to a marvellous example of sparkling wit. “There really isn’t anything to be anxious about. You sign the release form, we give you your clothes back, your taxi fare home, and a shiny new ID card. Couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do is give us the nod.”

  “I think I’d like to see this release form.”

  “No trouble.” The official fished a slim folder out of his briefcase, took a form from the folder, and passed both across the table. Andrews read it carefully, but could find no commitments in it which might become a problem later.

  “Well,” he said, leaning back. It all looked good. He was astonished at how good it looked. “Can I borrow your pen?”

  The official passed him a pen, and he signed the form. He was just about to pass the pen back when the official said: “Oh, don’t forget to sign the card too. It’s in the folder. It’s not much use as an ID card without a signature.”